Biden’s Final Warning
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Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. Dan Pfeiffer right here in Los Angeles.

This is where everyone wants to be this time of year, right? That is true. Welcome to our beautiful city. On today's show, we're going to talk about the Gaza ceasefire deal that Biden and Trump are both taking credit for and whether it will actually hold. We'll get into the Senate confirmation hearings for Trump's impeccably qualified cabinet picks, especially Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi. There's also a last minute scramble to save TikTok before the ban goes into effect this weekend. And later, I talked to Ben Wickler about his candidacy for DNC chair.

But first, this is officially our last show of the Biden administration. And on Wednesday night, the president delivered his farewell address from the Oval Office. The speech is a tradition for outgoing presidents, and so is including some kind of warning to the country. Biden certainly did that in his address. Let's listen. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence. And we've seen it before, more than a century ago.

But the American people stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trusts. I'm equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well. Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact checking.

The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. Joe Biden, come on offline. I was pleasantly surprised that Biden chose to focus on economic inequality, wealth concentration, took one last parting shot at our new tech oligarchs. What do you think about that choice?

I loved it. I had two thoughts. First was great. And second was, what took you so long? I think if Biden had talked like this more, I'm not saying it would have changed the political outcome of this race, but this has been a problem for a very long time. And that sort of populist rhetoric was a big part of his campaign when he ran and then became largely absent in his presidency. I mean, these speeches and I this morning, because I hate myself, I watched a

The Carter speech, the George H.W. speech, the Trump speech, the George W. Bush speech, the Obama speech. You really do hate yourself. I did it on 2x speed. And they're all...

Most of them are incredibly boring, the speeches. And most of them, they follow a very specific pattern of thanking the American people for giving them the privilege to be president, thanking their staff members. Even Trump thanked Mike Pence in his video. I forgot that. Did Trump skip a farewell? He released a video. Oh, right, right, right. But when you watch it on YouTube, it looks just like the other ones because he's standing in the East Wing doing it.

And then they talk about the terrible situation they inherited. They tout their accomplishments. And then they end by saying, this is where Trump did not do this, that they are going to return to the only job greater than president. Citizen. And so Biden doing something like Eisenhower did in his speech, which I did not watch, and Obama did in his to do something a little more interesting, that it actually acknowledges what's happening in the country. I mean, the George W. Bush speech is...

just like on another planet. Like you would never know that the economy was an absolute freefall. He spent like 22 words on the economy. I mean, that was talking about people who left office with a poor approval rating. 31%. Yeah. That's like middle of financial crisis after a bailout plus after years of the Iraq war. And Katrina and everything else. But I think it was important that Biden acknowledged something that's happening in the country and did deliver a warning that is going to feel very

prescient when three days after you're listening to this podcast, Donald Trump is putting his hand on the Bible to take the oath of office, surrounded by Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, the head of TikTok, the billionaire class. Yeah.

You forgot Elon. Of course. Elon will be holding the Bible. The three richest men in the world will be on the dais at the inauguration, like sitting there with members of Congress and the cabinet and the other presidents, just the three richest people in the fucking world. And I think there is something for Democrats here in a message going forward.

I would not use the term oligarch. I would not talk about busting the trusts or the robber barons. Did you see Brian Stelter had tweeted that one of the top search terms after Biden's speech was, what is an oligarch? Yeah, exactly. I did not see that, but I'm not surprised. Which is like, like...

On a positive note, people were tuning in. Less positive, didn't know what all it was. If people have to Google the primary part of your message, it's probably a change. I mean, it's fine for Biden is speaking to history here. He's not trying to persuade voters per se in this moment. So that's a fine choice for him to use.

But like Donald Trump is putting more than a dozen billionaires in his government, in his cabinet, on the Doge commission, in his white house. And I think the idea that Republican Donald Trump Republicans have a government of buy-in for the ultra wealthy in this country is a message that Democrats should latch onto. And Biden helps set the stage for that. Yeah. I think, I think that the, I mean, it's a farewell address. So you can only do so much in a farewell address when you have a bunch of other territory to cover. But I do think that there is a,

there's a roadmap there for Democrats. And Biden was even able to say, we're not trying to punish rich people. We're trying to make sure that they pay their fair share and that they don't control everything. I mean, that seems like a message that people would be receptive to. What'd you think about the speech overall? I thought it was good. It was in the vein of the other speeches that I watched this morning. It followed that pattern perfectly.

You know, I think that on one level, it's like you want Biden to wrestle with what has come, the consequences, some of the decisions he made, just the scary prospect that all Americans are facing by what's about to come with Donald Trump.

That, I think, is sort of an impossible ask in that speech. Well, in that speech, right? Obama did something very different than everyone else. He gave a much longer speech. He went to Chicago, didn't in a crowd. He viewed his message. He did all the other things. He was glad to be citizen. He touted his accomplishments. He talked about what he inherited, but also tried to give people hope that if you do the work of politics, you could bounce back from this.

That was not really in the cards for Biden. It wasn't for anyone else who's ever done this. I think for Biden, it was a good speech, right? You know, we can critique some of the more flowery language that may not have landed. But once again, people are going to read this in the future, right? As opposed to watch it in the moment. Someday soon.

I will have some constructive criticism for all Democratic politicians and staffers about speech writing and speech giving. In what? I mean, one, you haven't been holding back on that. And it's that you have a are you announcing a book like what? No, I'm just watching Biden's speech again. And the reason I'm saying this is this is not a specific critique of Biden.

But it's something that has been bothering me for the last several years and thinking about how we are now in a pretty awful situation, the Democratic Party. And there's a lot that the Democratic Party has to fix. And I do not think if everyone in the Democratic Party started suddenly giving great speeches that all our problems would be solved at all. But...

As you know, because you have written books about this, the way we communicate with each other has changed dramatically. The way we consume what politicians say has changed dramatically over the last decade even. And the way that politicians speak has not changed.

Just you talking about how, yeah, well, that, you know, typical speeches, farewell addresses have followed this pattern. It's like, you're right. They have. But Donald Trump is supposed to be president for the second time. The country made its worst person president twice now. And so maybe, maybe it's time for some out of the box thinking.

on the way that we communicate. And maybe the like stayed sort of sweep of history, speaking like we're trying to get into the history books and not like we're trying to communicate with people. Maybe that style of speaking is something that we should get rid of or something we should maybe think twice about. And again, this is not just a Joe Biden thing. This is a most democratic politicians thing.

And I think if you cannot communicate effectively and capture people's attention, we are in a war for attention, for people's attention against figures like Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who are so shameless that they will basically say or do anything to get people's attention, to get people to notice them. So that's what we're competing against. And we're

And we're competing against them with a bunch of Democratic politicians who still speak like they're press releases. Well, I mean, yes. I would actually argue that we should almost entirely stop giving speeches. I'm having dead service about that. But I think that, yes, in the way that you're defining speeches, I think that we need to – like, Democratic politicians need to over-communicate, like need to communicate more. I think that –

that for good or for ill, and I think it's probably for ill, Americans got used to during the first Trump term, their president being in their face all the time. A lot of people didn't like Donald Trump being in their face, but enough did that they... I think they felt like that in the Obama era too. That what? That Obama was around. He was omnipresent in your life. He was. In your culture, in your media. But even then...

You remember times when the public and the pundits were like, we haven't heard from Barack Obama yet. Don't get me fucking started. As the guy who went to write shit? Yeah, me neither. But even then, and Barack Obama was out there a lot, and it still wasn't enough. But the idea that we...

We're just going to keep doing the same thing, speaking the same way, using the same cliches, using the same poll-tested lines, using the same phrase. We know that a message of sort of a harder-edged populism, talking about the tech oligarch, it's a good message. But the way it comes out, and I actually think Biden, I think that the writing around the, aside from the use of the word oligarch, the writing around that was strong. And it didn't sound like...

Like, if I hear fucking bottom-up, middle-out one more time, I'm going to throw my phone out the window because I don't think anyone knows what that means. But you're sick of writing it so many times during the Obama re-election campaign? I did not write that during the bottom-up. Middle-out versus top-down? You wrote that a lot. Yeah. Not bottom-up. Middle-out... First of all, middle-out doesn't make sense. Bottom-up makes sense. Top-down makes sense. Neither of them are very creative, but they at least make sense. Middle-out doesn't make any sense. Well, you know what got you? What?

312 electoral votes or whatever it was. No, we're going to go back and look at the speeches afterwards. Anyway, anyway, but that brings up a good point because I, and I'm not saying this is like a, Oh, Barack Obama. If Barack Obama came back today and gave all the same speeches that he gave when he was president, when he was running for office, I don't think that would fit the moment either.

Like we just have to update the way we communicate. We have to do it in a more organic way, authentic way, conversational. It's just the style, the style of political speaking. And honestly, for a lot of Republicans not named Donald Trump, they have the same problem. You know, it's not just a Democratic Party problem, but it's just you're not reaching people this way. I was judging this in the context of. For sure.

Joe Biden, right, who is not going to, has proven, of course, his presidency, cannot be the person to radically change how Democrats communicate. Yes. And I was judging it. I also think like this, this speech is something for the president to do on their way out. It is, every president has done it, at least in modern era.

It is valedictory. It's a chance to put your, you have, usually if you're on your way out, in most cases, there are some exceptions, really just Reagan, right? Where you are leaving ascendant, you have served two terms and you're being succeeded by someone in your own party. Most times you are dealing, you've been served a shit sandwich. You lost, you're leaving incredibly unpopular, your successor lost, and it's just your chance to just go out and say something

without anyone yelling at you while you do it. And then Biden did that. And I thought it under judged under that he did a good job. Like he. Look, my expectation was that he was going to go do his, like, I'm the guy who did X, Y, and Z and did all of his accomplishments. And that's it. And the fact that he took the time to do a warning to the country and talk about that, I think that was, that surpassed my expectations. And so again, this was not a critique of

Joe Biden specifically. It's a critique of democratic speech giving, which is a problem that goes beyond Joe Biden now that he's off the scene. Once again, just to state my take that I think we should get rid of 99% of speeches. Yeah, I mean, I'm good. So since this is our last time talking about Joe Biden for a while, how are you thinking about his legacy and how his presidency will be remembered? Yeah, I mean, as I've talked about in the show before,

I'm from Delaware. Other than the four years of Trump's first administration, Joe Biden has been my senator, vice president, and president my entire life. I don't know a time when Joe Biden wasn't representing me in office. You and I, we worked with him. He is incredibly decent to me personally, very supportive of my career. He was always so proud. There was another Delawarean in those meetings in the White House always. And I will always be grateful to him for that. His legacy is obviously very, very complicated.

He did a lot of really good things. And most important on that list is he came out of retirement in 2020 to run and defeat Donald Trump. And I'm not sure there's another person who was running who would have accomplished that for us. And, but because that was the center, and he said, that's why he came out. It's because of Charlottesville and the healing soul of the nation and all of that. And then when he got in, he did a lot of really, really good, important things. Absolutely.

It's not as historic as the Biden talking points would tell you when they were, you know, his where his allies compared to FDR and LBJ. That is not the case. A lot of those things are also at risk of Trump. And that's why the legacy is unwritten, because we don't, you know, will the climate suspending that is so important that if we actually that we may look back decades from now, incredibly grateful to Biden for doing it, will that survive?

Will the infrastructures, will those bridges actually be built? You know, we don't know that. And that was, that's true for every president when they leave. That was true for Obama. Would the Affordable Care Act survive? But the ultimate thing here is, is that his legacy is clouded because he was unwilling to listen to the American people who were telling him in the loudest voice possible not to run for reelection. And he stuck it out and insisted that he was right and everyone else was wrong.

to the point where he ended up having to drop out of the race with 100 some days to go, making it almost impossible for a Democrat to win this election. Now, the Democratic Party is now in the worst political spot it's been in decades. Donald Trump, who Joe Biden came out of retirement to kick out of office, is now back stronger, more popular than ever before.

And it's all of the, that is not Joe Biden's fault. It's not his fault that we have inflation. He actually, I think he handled inflation as well as anyone could in this situation. It's not his fault that he was, he has bad luck to be president during the, the, a great global anti-incumbent wave, but on the one thing he could control, which was whether he should run for reelection, he made the wrong decision and the country reaped the consequences of that. Yeah. I mean, I think he is a tragic figure.

in that this is a man who persevered as a public servant through unimaginable loss until he finally achieves his lifelong dream of becoming president at almost 80 years old, an age where he was too old to do the part of the job that has become maybe one of the most important parts of the job, which is communicating effectively with the American people. And he was always a mediocre communicator,

you know, throughout most of his life. And then when, by the time he got to be president, he, his age made it even worse. And it's difficult because, you know, back to all of our conversations about like how Kamala could have separated herself from Biden during the campaign. Aside from Gaza, which we're about to talk about, I don't have a lot of critiques of Biden's

like, legislator or policy decisions during his presidency. In fact, he did just a lot of things that I very much support. I'm very grateful to him for doing that. But,

to my point about speeches and stuff, this job in this information age is a performance, it is about communicating, and it's about telling people a story, and it's about breaking through the noise, and it's about commanding people's attention. And Joe Biden, because of his long experience in Washington, was very good at building coalitions and knowing how Congress works, and that showed in his presidency.

But the storytelling part of the job and the communication part of the job, it was never his strongest suit. And by the time he got there, he was, you know, he was slowed down by age. And then, like you said, couldn't see that it was time for him to step aside. You know, so that's and it's like he is the guy who saved the country from Donald Trump and the same guy who made it possible for Trump to return.

And that is just, I mean, talk about tragic figure right there. You know, like he's got that achievement and then he has to live with the, and we all have to live with the other part. So it's tough. But like you said, there are, you know, largest infrastructure bills since Eisenhower, trillion dollars in spending.

You know, unfortunately, all the projects, a lot of the projects haven't been completed yet. But hopefully years from now, we'll look back at roads, highways, bridges, everything else. And so that was like what Eisenhower did. Biden did that, too. Same thing with climate. If it's not overturned, $35 insulin and lower prescription drugs for seniors.

Ended the war in Afghanistan, even though it was a chaotic withdrawal. Got us out of the pandemic. Got us out of the pandemic. Better than any other country in the world. Well, and that's the other tragedy, though, too, is that he led us out of the pandemic, but he wasn't able to help us overcome it.

all of the economic, political, cultural, even psychological consequences that came from the pandemic, inflation, crime, migration, growing distrust of institutions, all of those problems that were there before the pandemic, but the pandemic accelerated. And I don't think any, I don't know if any president in his position could have helped us overcome that. But

we are very much dealing with the lingering effects of the pandemic. And that was an unfortunate place for him to be in. And again, not his fault. I mean, presidents usually lose re-election for reasons that have little to do with how they communicate, how they campaign, or even really how they govern. It's the environment around them. It's what failed Carter. It was why George H.W. Bush lost. And I think that's largely true for Biden, except for the one thing he could control.

which was whether he ran for reelection or not. And he made the wrong, a tragically wrong decision there. Yeah. But it was a, like I said, it was a good speech last night. And there's a lot of good things he did for the country that I hope survive the next administration. And, you know, grateful that Joe Biden has given this country 50 plus years of public service. Because we could be, had Biden not done this, we could be sitting, likely, had he not run in 2020, likely,

Right now, we'd be talking about the end of eight years of Trump. I mean, that doesn't sound so bad. Well, I mean, wait till J.D. Vance is sworn in. If we were all still here. J.D. Vance is sworn in on Monday.

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Okay, so Biden opened his farewell address by talking about the ceasefire deal that was reached this week between Israel and Hamas that would lead to the release of 33 hostages in the first phase, hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, and allow for more humanitarian relief in Gaza 15 months after the war began. Israel's cabinet will vote to ratify the deal, the first phase of which is set to start on Sunday, though there were reportedly some last-minute hiccups on Thursday. And since you may be wondering, why are John and Dan talking about foreign policy? Fear not.

Our pal Tommy is here to set us straight. Hey guys. Hi Tommy. Good to be here on Thursday. Yeah, welcome to the Thursday pod. Dan, you want to riff on the Friday pod? You want to riff on the Warren Gosling? I have a series of follow-ups for you, so let me hear what you got. That's fun. Tommy, aside from what I just said, what else should we know about the deal and how it came together?

Well, yeah, I think you make an important point at the top, which is that the Israeli government has not voted on the deal yet. And a far right member of the Netanyahu coalition just announced he might remove himself from the government. So things are pretty precarious. Tony Blinken said it should start being implemented on Sunday. That would be good news, but let's hope it's right. But I think...

There's just a lot of uncertainty in this deal currently and a lot of it could fall apart before we get to the end of phase three like you outlined phase one which is six weeks and is the part that is the most fleshed out with this gradual release of prisoners of hostages I should say and then the Israelis should could release over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners the Israeli troops pull back from population centers Palestinians get to go home and then age gets surged into the strip but

But phases two and three have not been finalized yet. Those start getting negotiated, I think, on the 16th day of phase one. So phase two is likely to include the return of all hostages by Hamas in exchange for more prisoners and the full withdrawal of Israeli troops. And then the third phase is reconstruction. But again,

Joe Biden views this as a deal that will permanently end the war. I don't know that Netanyahu thinks of it in the same way. Throughout this negotiation, he has tried to reserve the right to restart fighting at the time of his choosing and right wing lawmakers that are part of his government coalition want that to happen. So a lot is up in the air right now.

You said that a minister has said that he might remove himself from the coalition. Does that screw with the deal? Like, do they need everyone? How does that work? I think Netanyahu should have the votes to get it through a security cabinet and the full cabinet. But I just don't know right now. It's sort of in flux. Is that who has to approve it as the cabinet? Yeah, there's two different votes. I think there's a security cabinet vote and then a full sort of government cabinet vote. So you mentioned Biden. He's taking credit for the deal.

Trump is also taking credit for the deal. I've read reporting that suggests both deserve some credit. What do you think? So in a lot of the reporting on the deal, you'll see these background quotes from Israeli or Arab diplomats saying this deal only got over the finish line because of Trump. Now, obviously, that is a very self-serving quote. If you're a Netanyahu official or someone sitting in Qatar or Egypt because you want to curry favor with the incoming administration, not the outgoing administration.

But I do think Trump deserves some credit here. A lot of this basic framework of this deal, the three phases, the sequencing, et cetera, that was on the table eight months ago. And this time in these last couple of days, it seems like Trump through his, you know, Steve Witkoff, his new emissary, was able to apply or willing to apply pressure on Netanyahu's in ways that Biden was not able.

And I also think that if Trump had said, "Bibi, stick it to Biden, don't give him a deal. Let's not do this until I'm officially president," that's would have happened. So that part, I think Trump really does deserve some credit for. That said,

Biden's team negotiated this whole plan. And that's not a small thing because it's the phasing and the sequencing for how the hostages get released and where Israeli troops withdraw from and when. It's complicated stuff. And getting Hamas and Netanyahu on the same page on anything is going to be complicated. So Biden's team, they did the diplomatic spade work. I

I think he also deserves credit for bringing Donald Trump into the talks. You know, like Biden could have said, I'm going to try to like go it alone these last few weeks. I want 100% credit for this. But he didn't do that. He, I think reportedly in that Oval Office meeting with Trump said to him, let's do this together. Let's try to get this done. And that along with pressure from Trump has seems to have made the difference. It's also just worth pointing out that like,

Like when Biden introduced this deal in May of last year to now, a lot has changed. Like Hamas has decimated, Hezbollah has decapitated, Iran is weakened. And then on top of Trump putting pressure on the Israelis to do this deal, there's also just the reality that

Netanyahu can say to the far right, hey, I know you hate this ceasefire, but Donald Trump's going to give us anything we want going forward. I was going to ask from Netanyahu's perspective, like, why would he be more persuaded by Trump than Biden?

I mean, I just think like he knows he has four years of dealing with this guy and Trump's out there tweeting there will be hell to pay, apparently by both sides. And so he knows that, like, I think he knows he was not in the best graces with Trump when he

did the, committed the mortal sin of congratulating Joe Biden for winning the election in 2020. It took a while to crawl back from that, um, being in the doghouse. And so I think Netanyahu was like, look, he can say to his right wing members of his coalition, look, we'll give him this one. If I decide to restart the war, Donald's not going to stop me. And if we want to annex the West bank, I was going to say, is that a, that's on the table now. Um,

because, you know, a lot of Trump's biggest supporters, like Miriam Adelson, who gave him tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars for his campaigns, want the West Bank to be annexed in the next few years. So he just knows he's on better footing with Trump. Tell me, why do you... I mean, the closest historical analogy to this from an American political perspective is the Iran hostage situation where they waited until Carter left for Reagan to negotiate the release. He'd obviously been back-channeling a little bit during the election. Yeah.

Why do you think Trump was willing to do this now as opposed to just take full credit five days from now? I know it's weird, right? Like in a way he kind of split the difference because they're announcing it now. But I think the release, if it starts on Sunday, right, that's kind of timed along with the change of power. So it's, but I assumed he would do the same thing, which is just wait, try to draw the Jimmy Carter comparison directly.

I would also imagine that Trump doesn't feel like Joe Biden is looming largest president right now. No.

No, I mean, it's not like he's stealing his spotlight a lot. No, that's right. And, you know, he is Trump has been dispatching his many friends and surrogates to the Middle East and to all sorts of countries to have conversations about work that should be getting done by the current president. So, yeah, he doesn't mind stepping on him. Does this make you look back at Biden's record in Gaza and decisions in Gaza any differently?

It makes me feel frustrated that more pressure wasn't brought to bear on the Israelis earlier. There are people who are smart, who I respect, who will argue with me that that never would have mattered, but I don't agree. Yeah. It seems like it could have tried, you know? Yeah. All right. Thank you. Good to see you. Good to see you, Tommy. Dan, you want to riff a little? I think I did my riffing. Come on, man. You want to do a tight five on Biden's farewell address? Yeah. Tommy? Nagorno-Karabakh? What else? Tech oligarchs?

They're bad. Don't like them. Tech oligarchs, bad. What do we think about the wobbly Statue of Liberty as an analogy, as a runner? You know, we didn't get to that, Dan. Because John and I both decided to just have a disquisition on communication in the modern age. Yes. And I wanted to make this point, though, that...

So Biden opened the speech with this story about the Statue of Liberty. He came back and closed with that as well. I know that John Meacham has helped with Biden's speeches. It felt very Meacham-coded, the Statue of Liberty, open and close. But it also reminded me of Reagan's farewell address. Reagan's farewell address is famous for the story at the end with one of the boat people from Vietnam who says like –

waves at an American sailor and says, freedom man or something. It's actually a beautiful story at the end of Reagan's farewell address. And it seemed so much like that, that it's like sometimes when you're, and this is part of my point, when you're writing speeches only for history, and so therefore you look at older speeches from other presidents, the trap is, and we fell into the trap as well in the Obama White House at times, the trap is that you write in a way that sounds like

an older speech and a president that's like a historic president because you heard... Ask not. Yes, exactly. What Joe Biden can do for you. It is the ask, it's the ask not disease. It's the Kennedy cosplay that plagued the Democratic Party for four decades. And you know what? Everyone who goes to Pondahawk in Normandy...

They do the same thing because Reagan gave it. There's a lot of Reagan cosplay and Kennedy cosplay. And now there's Obama cosplay. And now there's Obama cosplay. I was going to say, yeah, somewhere outside of a wet market in DC, someone picked up a pangolin and it evolved and morphed into an Obama cosplay. Yeah.

Is it too soon for fucking... For wet market jokes? For a COVID joke? Fine. Okay. You can cut that if you want. Thanks, Tommy. See ya. Two quick housekeeping notes. Our friends at Vote Save America and Cricket Ideas have set up a disaster relief fund to benefit those impacted by the horrific wildfires here in LA. Super easy for you to make one donation that's split among incredible charities doing...

Really important work for our neighbors and first responders. We have raised almost $200,000 for these great groups so far, thanks to you. And you can learn more and make a tax-deductible donation at votesaveamerica.com slash relief. Also, check out the latest episode of Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams.

You might have heard MAGA leaders blaming diversity, equity, and inclusion for the wildfires and basically for everything else lately. This isn't new. Many companies are also rolling back DEI programs as the new Trump administration approaches. Stacey and NYU law professor Kenji Yoshino tackle the myths, legal arguments, and share why DEI isn't the problem, it's the solution. Tune into this episode now on the Assembly Required feed.

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All right. The Senate has been busy this week holding confirmation hearings for Trump's cabinet picks. Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth had his on Tuesday. Attorney General nominee Pam Bondi went on Wednesday, as did Secretary of State nominee Lil Marco Rubio. John Ratcliffe for CIA director. Former Real World star Sean Duffy for transportation secretary. Oil industry CEO Chris Wright for energy. Project 2025 author Russell Vogt for budget director. Billionaire hedge fund manager Scott Besant for treasury.

and so many more. But the main events this week were the Hegseth and Bondi hearings. Here are some highlights and lowlights. Admittedly, this nomination is unconventional. The nominee is unconventional, just like that New York developer who rode down the escalator in 2015 to announce his candidacy for president.

That may be what makes Mr. Hegseth an excellent choice. Have you been involved in discussions about using the active duty military inside the United States? Senator, I am not yet the secretary of defense. If confirmed, I would be party to any number of conversations. But you haven't been in any of these conversations. Which I would not reveal what I have discussed with the president of the United States. Are you aware of any factual basis to investigate Liz Cheney? Yes or no?

Senator, that's a hypothetical and I'm not going to answer that. No, no. How many senators have showed up drunk to vote at night? Have any of you guys asked them to step down and resign for their job? And don't tell me you haven't seen it because I know you have. And then how many senators do you know have got a divorce before cheating on their wives?

Did you ask them to step down? Yeah, you know, showing up for a vote drunk. It's, you know, commanding the greatest army in the world and the nuclear triad. Yeah.

Could use a nuclear triad without Tommy in the room. Someone's going to be like, he doesn't actually command the nuclear. Yeah. Did you think you used that correctly? Cause I'm not so sure. I don't think I did. No. But you know what? No one's asking me to be secretary of defense. Not yet. Not yet. An unconventional choice. Pete Hegseth. You know who else would be an unconventional choice? Someone I just meet on the street outside the studio. I'm not going to make them secretary of defense. I can hear the hearings 48 years from now. And it's like,

He's just a podcaster. He runs a mid-sized media company. How could he manage 3 million people, including the world's greatest army? It's just unbelievable. So all of these yahoos are getting confirmed, right?

It seems like that. I think if there's one Yahoo who may not get confirmed, and I really want to put the emphasis on May, it's Tulsi Gabbard. I think we have to see what happens in that hearing. We have to see what's going on there. But I really think- I read somewhere that she's been changing minds among Republican senators. I mean, if you were going to have to place a wager, you would place a wager on a Republican being confirmed by the Senate.

But you really should put the Hegseth confirmation hearings in a time capsule to try to explain this moment in American political history to future generations. Yeah. I mean, here you have the Senate Armed Service Committee is like the most august of Senate committees. There's often bipartisanship. Of all the Senate committees, they're the most willing to buck a president, even of their own party, mainly because they are sort of in the thrall of the Pentagon. So here you have this committee of all committees

just in the Republican majority of that committee, just greasing the skids to confirm a cable news weekend host who has a range of reported personal conduct issues, including drinking on the job, to head the Pentagon.

It is absolutely insane. No one's asking tough questions. In the drinking on the job allegations, this is from like, like last I saw 10 sources talk to NBC or Fox employees who were saying that they were concerned about Hegseth being drunk in the morning.

But even, let's just say, let's even, let's say he's never had a drink in his life. None of them all like just lived a perfect life. He's still woefully unqualified for this position. Yeah. And yes, he served in the military, but he didn't, he's not getting nominated for this. He didn't get nominated for this because he served in the military. He got nominated for this because he was on TV.

on the President-elect's favorite TV program. On the weekend edition of the President's favorite TV program. It doesn't matter if it's week or weekend. He's watching the whole time. You think Donald Trump's missing Saturday and Sunday Fox and Friends? Up until this moment in his media career,

His biggest job was to show up quickly if Steve Doocy got the flu. Steve Doocy's under... We should just refer to him as Steve Doocy's understudy. Steve Doocy's understudy. And it's just so much about polarization and negative partisanship. Because if you... Joni Ernst. At least it's not a dangerous time for the world. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing that is so...

fucking galling about this is you have all these Republicans who all throughout the campaign talk about how dangerous the world is. Our enemies are on the march. China, Iran, or surely ever before. And it's not all bullshit, by the way. It's like you've got...

China, Russia, North Korea, Iran all cooperating more than they have. It's a very dangerous time in the world. And it's like we've been competing with China. It's pretty scary out there. And we're sending Pete Hegseth. You just cannot believe all these things about how serious the threats are and also believe that Pete Hegseth, the Fox News weekend anchor who's never managed an organization of more than 100 people,

with a laundry list of personal conduct concerns should be the Secretary of Defense. It's absolutely absurd. Which also, by the way, is the Democrats on the committee, like I thought we played, that was Alyssa Slotkin that you heard in the middle there. That was the highlight of our highlight and low light reel. The rest were low lights. But I thought she did a fantastic job and she talked about, you know, whether he would follow in order to shoot

protesters, American citizens in the leg as Donald Trump tried to ask his last secretary of defense to do, Mark Esper, around the George Floyd protests. So she had a great line of questioning. It was sober. It was calm. It was, you know, but like,

Getting into the questioning of him about the affairs and Tim Cain's asking him about adultery. And I'm like, honestly, that's not my biggest problem with Pete Hegseth. My biggest problem with Pete Hegseth is he's not qualified to run the U.S. military. I think Cain's line of questioning was about his infidelity over the course of his life. The questions around...

hit the sexual assault allegation against him are 100 percent really different relevant to this um because sexual assault military is a huge problem and it's like assault is a problem anywhere and so the question is how the democrats do i guess yeah and i think one i think these hearings are sort of ridiculous now yeah i don't know that they matter much they don't i mean this is it's like this is a sad depressing thing to say but like so much else in politics right now

They only serve for the bread and circus like entertainment for highly engaged political junkies who made up their minds months ago. Now, I do think that's only because of the the way the votes are in the Senate right now. If Democrats had held the Senate and we had 51 seats.

I think these hearings would be a bigger deal, right? Well, it's not. I don't know that they're... Yes, it would be a big... If the fate of the nomination was actually in play here, then yes, they would be a bigger deal. I'm not sure people would pay any more attention. They would have... Like right now, it's like low stakes gladiator combat just for people to see Democrats beat up Pete Hegseth, Republicans beat up Democrats for beating up Pete Hegseth, and it doesn't serve a huge purpose. The one critique I think I would make of the Democrats in this, and like...

I used to work for the Senate leadership. I know how hard it is to manage these things. Senators have very strong views on the questions they should ask. And it's not like you can whiteboard this out in Chuck Schumer's office and everyone's going to do the right thing. That's not going to happen. But they're still thinking about this in a more traditional hearing where if you can just trip up the nominee to say one wrong thing, you could flip votes. And that's just not how it works with this Republican Party. So the better use of time is to use your questioning to try to elicit

Or to focus on one specific narrative. Right. And I think that got lost a little bit. And it's hard because it's like Democrats have some time. You do your thing. And then a Republican just goes on about it like Mark Wayne Mullen about drunk senators for a while. Then you come back. But if you're on a different topic, it's very hard to lay out a coherent thread. So I think maybe simplifying or shortening the topic areas of concern would be something that I would recommend in some of these hearings going forward like RFK Jr.,

Again, I don't think it works for everything, but a good rule of thumb is the line of questioning or the message or whatever it may be should have something to do with the person's potential effects on people's lives.

Going forward, so much, you notice, I mean, it's like, this is why the talking about how dangerous the world is and whether he is the person equipped to lead the United States military in a very dangerous world. That's something that would at least if someone was paying attention, someone was forced to watch like us, we get them thinking, oof, this is kind of scary. Do I want this guy in charge of the military? Because it might affect me.

And I don't know that we've quite gotten there yet. I think same thing with the Pam Bondi hearings. By the way, it's bizarre that Pam Bondi is now like, she's going to be a slam dunk because Matt Gaetz, who is the only one who's gone down. And that's because the bipartisan House Ethics Committee concluded that he paid for sex with an underage woman.

That's the only reason he went down. I mean, she's only going to get like three more votes than he did. Right. Yeah, I know. But so now Pam Bondi seems great, even though she was like they were asking her about being a registered foreign agent for the government of Qatar. Yeah.

She was she still wouldn't say that Biden was legitimately elected. She just said that he is the president. She, you know, hinted that there's fraud in Pennsylvania in 2020. Just crazy shit for an attorney general to say wouldn't promise fraud.

to not prosecute Liz Cheney or Jack Smith. She said she's not familiar with Donald Trump saying that the January 6th rioters are hostages or patriots. She wasn't familiar. Didn't hear that. Missed that. I'm sure we're going to be able to find footage of her at a rally where he said that. And like she does all this and all the Republicans are like, yep, she's in. Slam dunk. Great. All of them. I mean, just this is how it is. Like it is.

Total fealty. But I do think even pressing her on the big lie stuff and you believe the elections, it's like, okay, you're going to say, hey, you believed that Donald Trump won the election. She's going to say, no, I didn't. Or she's going to not answer the question. And then we're going to go back and forth. What are we getting out of it now? I don't even know. Yeah, that's...

And Marco Rubio is going to sail right through. Yeah, I mean, that's like Marco Rubio. But he's like a legitimate... Like, a Republican wins and a Republican gets their cabinet. Marco Rubio is a perfectly legitimate... Senators usually get confirmed. Yes, exactly. Also, by the way, I said this to you earlier, but I was looking at the resumes of all these people because...

knowing that all the cabinet picks are getting in, you don't pay as much attention to it. But like Chris Wright, this guy's going to be the energy secretary, literal oil industry CEO. It's on the nose. Like it's very, it's very clear. The treasury secretary is a billionaire hedge fund manager.

Just nothing. Pure populism. Champion of the working class. I was going to say, yeah, they're a workers' party now, the Republicans. Oil executives and hedge fund billionaires in the cabinet. All right. We'll see. Let's see. They've got it covered. They're going to fix the country. That's what they promised. I mean,

They are selfless patriots who could be making even more money than they already have, but they have decided to take a leave to help fix the country. So I am eager to see what results they can come up with. Well, I would just say that I am going to check the price of eggs, bacon, gas, groceries, and median rent in this country at 12.01 on Monday. We should do like an update every couple of weeks. 100%. He owns it. That's one of the questions that was asked in the Scott Besson hearing was, do you believe that

Donald Trump is as responsible for prices as Joe Biden was. He obviously didn't answer that question, but that is a central question to our political strategy going forward. For sure. All right. Before we get to my interview with Ben Wickler, we got to talk about TikTok.

which is set to be banned in the U S unless the Chinese owned video sharing app is sold to an American owner by January 19th, which is the Sunday. We are recording this Thursday afternoon. By the time you hear this on Friday, it's also possible the Supreme court may have handed down their decision. Uh, it does not seem like the Supreme court's going to save tech talk from the oral arguments. We've talked about this before, but we shall see, uh, the ban, which passed last year with a huge bipartisan majority does allow a 90 day extension, uh,

if there's a potential sale. Biden administration says they're not going to delay the ban because they don't think they can because they don't see a potential sale. But the incoming Trump administration says they intend to find a way to extend the deadline and get that deal.

This is according to Trump National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, who said, quote, It's been a great platform for Trump and his campaign to get his America first message out. But at the same time, Trump and conservatives don't want the Chinese communists getting their passwords, getting their data and being able to overly influence the American people. Again, horses out of the barn on that one.

What do you think? Will Donald Trump protect the right of every American to have Chinese spyware on their phone? I think he is going to try as hard as he can to succeed here. He understands the politics here. He understood it very deftly in the 2024 campaign when he, after the law was passed, he came out and opposed it. And he wants to be the person who saved TikTok for the 60% of voters under 30 who use TikTok. Yeah. For the 170 million Americans who use TikTok on a monthly basis.

And the TikTok ban is quite... Many of whom voted for him. The TikTok ban is quite unpopular. When the law passed, it was 50% support of the TikTok ban. It's down to less than a third of Americans. It's 10% of TikTok users support it. Yeah. Which is, as I said, 6 in 10 voters under 30 who use it. The politics here are...

Terrible for Democrats. Even though this was a bipartisan bill, even though it's very important to note Donald Trump tried to shut down the app himself when he was president, the way it has played out over the last year or however it's been is Joe Biden wants to shut down TikTok and Donald Trump wants to save it. And that, I don't think, you know, we're on TikTok, like we look at it, but we, like most people, particularly people in politics, particularly the senators and congresspeople about this do not understand what this means.

Shutting down TikTok for a lot of younger Americans would be like when we were younger, a president decided that cable TV was going to disappear on a random Sunday.

It's how they get their sports. It's how they get their news. It's how they stay in touch with their friends. It is how people they follow. It's their entertainment. It's how they get completely wrong information about the world around them. Well, you know what also doesn't get great information? Cable news. So it's like cable TV doesn't either. And it's just, it is a much bigger deal than I think a lot of people in politics think about because most people in politics don't actually use TikTok. And in the passing of it, the

the Democrats and Republicans involved did just an absolutely miserable job of justifying the ban. Oh, for sure. You can't. I said this at the time. You can't say it's really, really bad. Trust us, but we can't tell you why no one trusts you. And so if we're in a situation where Donald Trump saves, it is going to be to his political benefit. No doubt.

You got to hand it to Xi Jinping. Yeah, you do. And the Chinese Communist Party, because if this is an op, they fucking nailed it. They created an app that has completely addicted young Americans. And when you try to take away something that someone's addicted to, they're going to be pretty fucking pissed.

And that's what they're doing now. And without a reason that, like you said, makes sense to people. And now what's happening is a lot of young people are like going over to, what is it? Red Note? Yes. Which is like... That's a little on the nose, if you will. Yeah.

It's like the servers are in China. It's like run by the party. It's not just influence, you know? And they're over there. And then now you're starting to see people be like, oh, you know, what's wrong with the Chinese government anyway? Like, it seems like things are going pretty well over there. And food is cheaper than it is here in America. I mean, it's just wild. Tiananmen Square, eh.

Was that real? I don't know if that was real. Are we sure that wasn't those weren't paid actors? Like, that's the kind of shit that we're getting now. I mean, I am willing to believe that TikTok is as dangerous as everyone says it is, even if they won't tell us why. Like that, knowing what we know about governments and what China, the sort of things China does, that makes sense to me.

but you really should have solved this problem five years ago. Yeah. Like waiting until you had 170 million Americans on the app and had them using it for much of their social media existence and then decided to take it away was just asinine. And here's where we are. And the saddest irony is

It's too hard to communicate to people how dangerous that might be because of the information environment that has given rise to TikTok. And the TikTok has been healthy. I mean, it would be fucking hilarious if it weren't so scary. I agree. I totally agree in the politics. You're 100% right in the politics. It's like if you're in the government and you're genuinely concerned about this.

I don't know what else you do at this point, but say, yeah, of course we want to ban this. But you're going to play whack-a-mole with Chinese apps for the rest of time. Yep. Everyone's leaving tech to go to less secure Chinese apps to use. And so we're going to have to come back around next year. We're going to ban Red Note and Lemonade or whatever it is. And then they're going to go to another app. We're just going to do it until the end of time. And the only real solution here is to ban

sell TikTok's US operations and open it back up again. That's the only... And it does seem like... And it could be sold to Elon Musk. That's been floated. Yeah, I know. I know. Well, it does seem like the Trump administration is saying...

I thought they might just say, you know, they could have Pam Bondi, Attorney General Pam Bondi could save TikTok by just not enforcing the ban. Now, that only lasts as long as the Trump administration lasts. I kind of expected that they might do that. The fact that they are, Michael Waltz there on Fox and Friends, again, a show that gives us defense secretary, said that they think that they're going to get a deal. Like, it does feel like they're going to try to, but again,

even if they get a deal, if the Chinese government doesn't allow for a deal, even though they would make, even though ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, would make a fuckload of money, if they still say no,

Should tell us something. Oh, yeah, for sure. Should tell us something about how the Chinese government, the authoritarian government in Beijing, sees TikTok. If they're like, no, no, no, all this money? No, no, we're not selling. Why? Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. No, it's not great. The whole situation is not great. It's not great. It's not great at all. Well, good luck. Good luck, Donald Trump and the Trump administration. Hope you find a deal. If Elon Musk fucking buys TikTok, I'm going to lose it.

We can't. We can't have Elon. What is going to make you lose it more? Elon Musk buying TikTok or yet another Democratic politician giving a speech about the construction of the Statue of Liberty? It's been a long week for you. Elon buying TikTok is just a distraction because they want to stop our bottom-up, middle-out strategy. Yeah, it's going to be a long four years, Dan.

But maybe our next guest will lead us into the future. Oh, fucking professional. What a segue. Professional. When we come back, our pal and a candidate for Democratic National Committee chair, Ben Wickler.

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Joining us today, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, who is currently running for chair of the Democratic National Committee, Ben Wickler. Welcome back to Pod Save America, pal. John, it's great to be back. So as a Democrat, I feel grateful and excited that you're running for DNC chair. As a friend, I'm concerned because it is a thankless job that makes you a punching bag for things that aren't necessarily your fault. You and I haven't talked about this yet, but what was your decision-making process that led you to run?

So the night of the election, I felt like a punch in the gut because I had felt the energy all over Wisconsin. I thought we were going to win in Wisconsin, which was my obsession. And then we lost. And I remember that night feeling like maybe none of this has had any impact. Maybe this is all for nothing.

And then the next day, I got up and started digging through the numbers. And what I saw was that while Democratic turnout had gone down in most states, including all our neighboring states like Minnesota, over the course of the election, it went up in Wisconsin. We actually had the highest turnout in the country. And because of that, Tammy Baldwin won re-election. We flipped 14 state legislative seats. You know, Trump...

Republican turnout went up even more, and that's why we lost. But the work had made a giant difference. And Wisconsin actually was to the left of the national popular vote for the first time in a long time. And that led me to start thinking, what if we could do this everywhere? How big the stakes are for people

For working people across race and ethnicity all over the country who are about to get punched in the face by this administration, if we can build the kind of strength of a party that we built in Wisconsin across the country, then we can both contain the damage and also make this the beginning of something much better where we actually make this country work for everyone. And that sense of the impact that it can have is why I'm running for DNC chair.

Even though you've been one of the most frequent guests on Pod Save America, I feel like a lot of our audience might think you emerged on this earth fully formed as the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. Can you talk a little bit about what got you into politics in the first place and why?

So my godmother is a woman named Ada Deer. And when I was 11, she ran for Congress and became the first Native American woman to win a congressional primary. So that was volunteering on her race was my first experience in politics, like stuffing envelopes and putting up yard signs. And she had led the fight to restore her tribe's recognition by the federal government. It was terminated in the 50s and had passed a federal law to restore recognition and just was this kind of force of nature, incredible person.

So learning from her and from my parents, who are both like belatedly believe deeply in change, and then getting involved first as an organizer to fight for public school funding in Wisconsin and volunteering for Tammy Baldwin when I was in high school when she first ran for Congress, interning for Russ Feingold, seeing these people who were heroes to me who got involved and actually won fights.

It made me more idealistic the more I got involved as opposed to less, which is often how it happens in politics for people. And I got hooked. So I've always had three big things. One is actual electoral politics. The second is new media. So I wrote for The Onion when I was in high school and college, which started in Madison where I grew up. Yeah, I remember.

Worked at Air America Radio after college trying to build a – this might sound familiar – a progressive media ecosystem to combat the dominance of the right and shaping political narratives. And then the other is advocacy, which is what I was doing at MoveOn, which is both trying to win elections but also actually fighting on the issues that affect people's lives.

And what led me to run for chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and to move home to Wisconsin in 2018, I always wanted to raise my kid there, but it was the experience at MoveOn of Trump coming in and winning Wisconsin in 2016 in my state that had been rigged by the GOP for total control after Scott Walker came in with voter suppression, with gerrymandered rigged legislative maps, with union busting as a centerpiece of their strategy to shut down the voices of working people. The...

Seeing how that then played out in putting Trump in the White House and shredding the public education system in my state that I had grown up fighting for, I wanted to move home and try to change the direction of all that. And the only way to protect the fundamental things people rely on, like being able to get to a doctor when they get sick, is to win power in states across the country. That's where political power actually resides today.

And that's what led me to run for chair in my state because all of these fights are interconnected and we need a party strong enough to fight at all these levels. So I used to come on your show right when you launched as we were fighting back against ACA repeal. And the whole thing was like mobilizing people in their congressional districts and pushing U.S. senators and telling their stories and getting into the press and all this stuff. It's state by state by state. And I want to build that.

I'm running now for DNC chair because I want a national party that can build that kind of strength, both to limit the damage and also to build the trust from folks who want to see someone fighting for them, to build a party that earns that trust and helps elect Democrats at every level.

You mentioned the high turnout in Wisconsin this time around and how it's slightly left to the popular vote. I've seen some post-election analysis from some folks on the left that argues Harris lost because too many voters in the anti-Trump coalition stayed home. It seems like that's not what happened in the battleground states, certainly not what happened in Wisconsin. I know Harris got more votes than Biden in Wisconsin, but there were even more new Trump voters than anticipated. Yeah.

Given that, what does it tell you about why we lost and what we need to do going forward? So this is the first election of my lifetime in the last half century where Republican vote share went up in every state and D.C. The whole country moved a little bit towards the Republicans.

That involved a combination of more people voting who hadn't voted before and voting for Trump. There were people who crossed over in both directions, but there were more people who switched over to vote for Trump. And there were people who stayed home, who otherwise probably would have voted for Democrats. And there's a lot of different pieces of why that is, and we need a lot more data to get the full story. But one thing that jumps out really clearly is

is that the people who were hit hardest by prices going up and, and no one talks about this, by the pandemic era support falling away because Republicans shut down things like the childcare tax credit, the Democrats were fighting for those programs really made a difference in the lives of, of, of the middle-class and of the poor of working families across this country. Like incomes went up for a while. Child poverty was cut in half.

And then the support went away. And so people, you know, if you're getting $1,000 a month because you have two kids and you make $40,000 a year, that's a huge, huge deal for your family. And when that goes away, suddenly the floor is falling out at the same time as the price of keeping a roof over your head and filling your prescriptions and getting the food you need is going up.

So that's why the economy sucked for a ton of people because they had helped that disappeared and the cost of getting through the day rose. And those voters who had a lot of other things on their mind were the least likely to pay attention to political news. They were least likely to be tuning in to this show or to the MSNBCs of the world or reading a newspaper. And they didn't experience – they felt like things were getting worse when a certain party was in charge and they didn't show up to keep that party in power.

We saw the same thing happening everywhere in the world. The incumbent parties lost ground for the first time in more than a century in every wealthy democracy on planet Earth. But in the United States, it's particularly infuriating because Democrats actually were fighting for the exact things that folks needed. And Republicans stopped them. They blocked them and took them away. If we'd had a couple more Democratic votes in the Senate, we could have provided long-term support for folks.

And what is really clear to me is that we were not communicating to people to talk the talk, to show up and show that we're fighting for working people in their lives in places and ways that they actually heard and saw and felt. And that is an indictment on us for how we communicate and also shows the power of the right wing community.

you know, propaganda and organizing machine that they've been able to dominate this conversation and tell people your life sucks because of some, some them that Democrats are on the side of against you. And it's,

It is both Republicans trying to divide people based on their identities, but it's also a message about saying Democrats don't actually care about you, whoever you might be. And the way we beat that is not by abandoning parts of our coalition by people that deserve the same freedom and respect everyone gets. The way we defeat that is by showing that we are fighting for people and Republicans are the ones trying to rip them off and divide and distract them in order to pick their pockets.

So I want to dig into that. It seems like, you know, there's like three components to a message. There's what we say, there's how we say it, and then there's how we make sure people hear it. Put the last one aside for a second. And the first two, what we say and how we say it. I've been banging this drum since 2016. I know you have, too. A lot of Democratic strategists and organizers have. It seems pretty clear that the story we want to tell is the Democrats are on the side of working people and Republicans are for the rich.

And we know from talking to people that that works well. We know from polling. We know from focus groups. Everyone knows it. And yet it's really hard to get that message out.

And we are now in an era where the debates about culture and identity attract more attention than debates about economics and economic issues. Like maybe back in, you know, last time, last time we had an election based on a debate about economic issues was 2012, maybe, when we were able to do that. Unless you argue that that's actually part of what Trump was doing. And he was trying to reverse that and tell a story where Democrats are the party of the rich.

But that's true. But how do we is it any is it a problem with is it about being more creative in how we talk about economic issues? Is it the language Democrats are using? What do you think?

So it's everything, but I will put one particular circle around something, which is you have to actually have a fight. That means there have to be two sides of the fight, that attention follows conflict, that the, to me, 2018 was an election about healthcare and about Republicans trying to rip away people's healthcare in order to give tax cuts to the ultra rich and big insurance companies. And that was the voices at the, in the forefront of that fight were people whose healthcare was going to be ripped away by what Republicans were doing.

It was electrifying. And we organized across the country as it moved on. We helped to organize 23,000 protests with grassroots groups, with people with disabilities in the front of that fight whose lives were on the line, who put their bodies on the line in that fight. And Democrats made absolutely clear that there were four people being able to get health care when they needed it. And Republicans were against. Republicans started trying to copy our message. People could see who was fighting for them and who was trying to screw them over.

And we won. And in 2006, same thing, Social Security privatization. Republicans had this big plan that they were going to move Social Security into the stock market right before the financial crisis. Great idea, Republicans. And Democrats said, absolutely not, and went to bat. And the voices of people who were going to be directly affected were front and center of the race in the battle. And that was a huge part of how we won in 2006. Also, the fight against Republican corruption, which was endemic.

And we know there will be fights like that at this moment, but there actually has to be a big battle for people to be able to see it, especially to reach outside of the bubble. Just having a bill that has a bunch of great provisions that you talk about, it doesn't do it because Republicans never publicly message that they're against good ideas that Democrats have. They kill our good proposals in private and then they duke it out on the, you know, cultural fights that they want to bring attention to in the most public way possible, which, and then by the way, you know,

they don't believe half the stuff that they're, that they're saying they know it's all BS, but the, but, but the attacks that Republicans do are centrally to try to provoke fights that bring attention to their issues. And we need to fight on our issues to fight, for example, not just to protect social security, but to expand social security and, and to, you know, like to, to, to tax a higher income so we can expand the support that everybody gets in ways that put Republicans on defense and,

If we can do that kind of fight, it takes building a war room. It takes communicating clearly. I think using the language people use in their real life is really critical. But this is work that we've been doing year over year in Wisconsin. It takes on-the-ground organizing. We have the biggest on-the-ground organizing team. It takes communicating across a ton of different platforms. And it means going on offense on fights that actually –

People have an emotional, intense response to that they actually care about. And then they get involved in those fights as well. Because if we can message all we want, but if people aren't talking about it in their, you know, in Baron's chat in World of Warcraft, then we're probably not actually having the kind of fight that draws the country's attention and changes the conversation.

In terms of how we make sure people hear Democrats' message, you laid out three steps in a post a month ago, I think. Build up progressive media, obviously. Love to hear it. I'm biased on that one. Number two, more media appearances on shows that have conservative or conservative-leaning audience. And three, figure out how to reach people who aren't consuming political news or really any kind of news at all. You mentioned this earlier. To me, this is the most important one and I think maybe the most difficult. Yes.

What are your thoughts on how to reach people who just aren't paying attention to any of this bullshit?

So the biggest thing is to go to places where people are talking about other stuff and talk about other stuff as well as about politics. And that means, it doesn't mean video games. It means home makeovers, gigantic audience. People think about that all the time who have, are lucky enough to have homes that they can make over. Cooking, parenting, sports, beauty, fashion, like the whole world of culture, the world that people actually inhabit when they're not thinking about how they're going to vote is

The conversations that happen in those places are the things that are sort of cultures upstream from politics. The places where there's nonpolitical conversations take place shape the landscape in which political dramas play out. And this is something that I think Trump has a particular talent and knack for, but also people like Roger Ailes and a lot of other Republicans. They think about how to push narratives that affect the broader culture.

And as Democrats, I think we need an intentional cultural strategy. And some of that can happen and should happen at the party. Some of that should happen outside the party. But as a Democratic Party, we should be working to help get folks – to get Democratic candidates and elected officials and communicators and storytellers into places that shape the broader conversation across the country.

That means having dinners where people can meet each other, influencers can meet elected officials and learn about the things that they're working on. A lot of this stuff is a total black box to people that are outside of politics. And you actually have to demystify it and put a human face on things and build relationships so people make a phone call to see if something's true before they go out and say it. And that's work that has to happen before elections so you don't get to the final 107 days and have culture already swung away from you.

That's that work should start right now. And if I, you know, the DNC chair's election is February 1st. So I will be on day one, this very public commitment. We'll start an audit of every consulting contract that the democratic party has. And we will actually choose where to spend our money based on our values and the path to victory, not relationships or, you know, old, uh, political debts that someone incurred a long time ago. Um,

but the other thing that we'll start doing is building a battle plan in each state and a, a strategy around attention and communication that shifts where these conversations are taking place. It is, it's just, you know, we don't live in, in the nineties or the two thousands or the 2010. Like this is, this is now attention's fragmented into a million different places and,

Half the electorate doesn't watch TV and we need to look to where attention is going and then actually build relationships that are based on common values and shared interests and make sure that Democrats are talking about why their values as a –

As a hunter and sports person, lead them to want to make sure that we don't destroy the natural resources across the state of Wisconsin, to take one close to home example, across all the different dimensions. Because people care about a million things, but they have a common set of values that are fundamentally about the idea that everyone should have freedom and dignity and respect and be able to afford the basic things that everyone needs in life. That's universal stuff that touches just about everything that people do.

When you do that audit, if you do that audit, what are you looking for? Like, what is the, what kind of consultants, what kind of ad makers would you think are like, okay, that's good. The party needs that. I won't make you say which ones you want to get rid of, but what are you looking for from a positive angle? Well, we know that

We are losing ground with folks across race and ethnicity and across geography, across the country. And so we should be working with ad makers, with communicators, with pollsters and researchers that reflect the full diversity of our coalition that understand the communities that they're trying to work in.

We know that there's a huge generational problem and that if Democrats, you know, we did better with older voters and worse with younger voters, and we need to make sure we're working with younger folks and new voices and people who have familiarity across different new platforms. I also want to make sure we're actually looking at results and, you know, how we measure those results and what those results are.

There's not a lot of budget transparency within the DNC right now. And a commitment that I've made on my platform at benwickler.com slash platform is that we will both upgrade that transparency and bring DNC members in to build a policy around how we build those consultancies and contracts. And then to be able to raise money when there's not a Democratic president, this is, and a lot of people are skeptical, a lot of money was spent in the last election. We didn't win. This is not horseshoes. It doesn't count if you get close.

If we want to be able to earn people's trust, like they're not ATMs. People are going to invest when they know that money is going to be spent well. And so I want to basically be spending money at the DNC and

We'll have to raise and spend a lot in a way that we're very clearly doing all of that in a bit coming from our values and our path to victory. And that's a battle plan in each state across all the different kinds of fights that we need to fight. That's understanding how different races at different levels are interconnected. The Wisconsin has a state Supreme court election, April 1st. If,

Republicans win that. They re-gerrymander the state. If they re-gerrymander the state, they could rig our electoral system for the long term. Like North Carolina, we're in a fight to retain an election against a rogue Supreme Court because Republicans took it over in 2022. There's so many of these fights that are all part of this process.

vast maze about how you win the power to make change in people's lives. And we need to be working from a battle plan, not just cutting checks to states to say, good luck, here you go, but actually funding program that leads to winning so that we can make a change in people's lives, which is the entire point of this work. And that's the set of principles that I want to use to inform how we spend.

People have relationships, and I honor that. But it's not about who knows who. It should not be about who knows who and who owes someone a favor or who scratched someone's back. It should be about how we actually build a party strong enough to fight for the things that people need across this country that are going to be attacked by the Trump administration, how we communicate, how we show up, how we organize year-round on the ground everywhere in the country, as we've done in Wisconsin, and

as we need to do across the nation. That is the point of this work. And if we do it right, then we could win enormous amounts of elections and really make change over the next four years and beyond. What other changes do you want to make at the DNC? And what specifically would you do differently than Jamie Harrison has over the last four years? Well, I want to honor that when there's a Democratic presidency, some decisions aren't made by the DNC chair. A lot of decisions come out of folks at the White House. And

I think President Biden has done, has passed a lot of really critical legislation. I also think that the DNC has not engaged in this kind of fight up and down the ballot in the way that we have the opportunity to do. And I also think that the work to build the kind of communications strategy to do the nonpolitical work, the building up progressive media ecosystem and training and deploying communicators on conservative media is

there's a lot of work to do there as well. And you can see that in what happened in the election. And you can also see that in the way that if you talk to folks across the country, there's a ton of races where as a national party, we haven't leaned into the fight. And that's the thing I think we have the opportunity to change. I have great respect for Chair Harrison. And I think there's a

There's a lot of battles that simply have not been a core priority for the Democratic National Committee that we're going to be living with the consequences of that for a long time to come. And this is no shade on the people on the ground or the people who worked in the building. This is about having a strategy to be able to fight and win at all the different levels of the ballot, recognizing they're interconnected, and that –

The DNC is a part of an ecosystem with unions and the labor movement, with grassroots partners and allies, that we need to build a plan together to be able to fight and win in a way that's happened more on the governing side than has happened in the political and communication and organizing and campaign side. Would you be in favor of reinstating the ban on donations from corporate PACs and lobbyists?

So the core of that question is, do you think that the Democratic Party's agenda should be controlled by corporate PACs and lobbyists? And my answer to that is absolutely not. We should be fighting for working folks and we should be fighting to win at every level of the ballot. I also know that if you look across the country, the core thing that we need to do is fight

fight in a way that brings friends to our side and that will lead to various companies, I'm sure, investing in supporting Republicans as they're doing right now in a big way. And that there are states, there are different fights, there are places where the right has gone so far that the only way that

The business community winds up siding with moderates and Democrats against far-right Republicans. So I actually think that the way corporate money affects our politics is less affected by the DNC's ban or not ban. It's affected by the kinds of fights that we lead and the way that we fight back against people trying to rig the country. So I've...

Being in Wisconsin where Republicans rigged our campaign finance law to – officially to shut out corporate money but it's actually to shut out union money and then raise money from billionaire owners of giant corporations to fund their campaigns through dark money and on the independent side. I think that a DNC ban is actually not an effective tool to winning the kinds of fights we need to win to be able to change our campaign finance laws nationally. Yeah.

I asked one of your opponents, Ken Martin, the same question too, and he gave me a similar answer and also...

was saying that, you know, there's some people that would be classified as corporate PACs and lobbyists that are actually, you know, people on our side that we'd like, not just corporations that we'd like, but actual like groups, right? Like progressive groups, unions, right? Like you just mentioned this too. I'm trying to figure out, I'm trying to like read between the lines here. Is it that we don't want to unilaterally disarm in the face of Republicans raising all this money? Or is it that we, there are going to be places with PACs

you know, or entities with PACs and lobbying arms that are good progressive causes that we'll want to take money from. What's going on there?

So it's one part not wanting to unilaterally disarm, but the amount of money that corporations give to the Democratic Party is actually not meaningful. And you could accept zero and it wouldn't change the total amount. The big picture is actually lots of the state-level races across the country and local races across the country where –

If you go down to state legislative races in red states, a lot of times it's only the business community members that think that the attacks on different communities are totally unacceptable and finally move to defense that actually are the only way that Democrats have to be able to do this work. Got it.

The DNC's policy, it's symbolic. And I think when Democrats running for office say, I'm going to take no corporate PAC contributions, that often is a really powerful way to state their values and be able to fight. As an institution, it's something that winds up making it difficult in particular circumstances. I think that the other big picture thing is that we should be very clear about is that Democrats should be fighting against big corporate interests that try to build monopolies and rip people off.

and in favor of bringing down costs for people and, you know, making our economy sustainable and supporting unions in a way that is crystal clear. And so, for example, I have said we will not accept any money from a company that's actively engaged in union busting. And being able to return a contribution from a company that is involved in union busting is a way to make a powerful statement in that moment in a way that, you know, not having the overall policy makes possible.

The fundamental thing I think in our politics at this moment is what fights we choose. And that goes to my theory of attention. It also goes to my theory of, you know,

you know, how we rally a coalition that, that represents our values. And it, you know, ultimately you're going to piss people off. We'll invest on the other side and come at you. And that's fine. You have to, you have to be ready to incur those kinds of fights. But it's the, the fights are actually at the center of this work. And my, my campaign slogan is unite, fight, win, which is, reflects that idea that you've, you unite around big fights that demonstrate your values, that you're for working people across race and ethnicity and, and,

in rural areas and suburbs and cities, the big, the big we in this country against the people who are trying to rig the system to rip everybody off. And if you can do that, you can actually build trust and build a grassroots fundraising infrastructure like we built in Wisconsin that can sustain the work.

Speaking of Ken Martin, your main competitor, we had him on the show and I said this to him too. I said, you know, I didn't really know you before this. You and Ben have, you know, I'm friends with Ben goes way back, but you guys have similar vibes. I like that. What's something you guys disagree about? How are your visions different? So our visions and what we're talking about, the campaign trail, there's not a huge amount of daylight. I think the big difference is in our record. And I have been working for the last six years in,

one of maybe the most hotly contested state in the country where Republicans throw a wall of money every dirty trick they can, a massive owned media infrastructure to propagandize people, just the most blistering and incendiary dark money attacks against our candidates.

And it's also a state that's been rigged by the GOP for permanent control. And in order to unrig our state, in order to over time to beat a 60-year curse where Democrats always lose the governor's race when there's a Democratic president, Governor Evers not only beat that and won reelection, he also expanded his vote share, unlike in all of our neighboring states where

in order to defeat the Republican attempt to get super majorities in our state legislature and then flip our state Supreme Court majority and then defeat an impeachment attempt and then finally get fair maps and flip 14 state legislative seats.

Well, in Minnesota, we lost the state legislative seat in this cycle, and now the legislature is in chaos. In order to do all that, we've had to build something that is just bigger and stronger and deeper, both in organizing and communication, powered by more fundraising than we've had in any state party in the country. And

our size of our staff is sometimes similar to that of the DNC. We've had more than 400 staff in the final stretch in both 2020 and 2024, which the DNC in those moments is a lot bigger. But I've been leading organizations that have deep, multilayered departments doing a huge array of work in partnership with unions and our allies and the front lines of the fight. And Minnesota's

Republicans fight there, but it's more of a blue state. It's the only state that's been blue since the 1970s in the country. And Democrats have won every statewide election there going back to 2006, before my fellow candidate was chair. And it's a different kind of fight that I think in Wisconsin we've built something that is a bigger, a closer model, an approximation of what I think we need to build across the country.

And I appreciate Ken Martin has been leading the State Chairs Association and he's fought within the DNC for state chairs relative to other parts of the DNC, but hasn't made the case to the public for why we need to go and build a party apparatus that has this kind of strength. And so there hasn't been more public support and fundraising and volunteering and energy for building the idea of what the Democratic Party should be about. And I feel like I've been able to do that

even from my one state in a way that I think we need to do for the national party going forward. And the last piece on the record is that when I was at MoveOn, I was working in partnership with Democrats in Congress, in the House and the Senate, with allies in grassroots groups all across the country on progressive media and going on conservative media and non-political media to change the conversation about a major national crisis where Trump was trying to rip away protections that everyone in this country relied on, and we won.

And we're going to have fights like that going forward. And I think having a DNC chair who has the both experience and track record and just orientation around that kind of giant battle is going to be something that we could benefit from as a national party. And I think I bring that uniquely in this race. That's my contrast is that kind of fight.

Last question. I'll let you go. I don't know if you noticed, but the vibes among Democrats are not great right now. A lot of anger, despair, fatalism. I've also noticed some like weird happy talk from a lot of Democratic politicians. It sounds like we just lost a normal election with normal stakes.

You just mentioned you've been a party chair in a state where for a while it seemed like extreme gerrymandering would lead to functionally the end of democracy in Wisconsin. Any lessons from that and how to inspire people to move from despair to action, which seems like what we need right now?

In Wisconsin, we've been skating along the edge of a cliff, and sometimes we've been pushed off that cliff and grabbed the branch as we fell by our hands and pulled ourselves up by our fingernails to avoid becoming permanently rigged, permanently red, even though most people do not want what Republicans are trying to do. And we're facing that exact crisis as a country right now. There's a real risk that Trump will smash to pieces things that families and working people and the poor and people across this country face.

urgently need and rely on, that they did not vote to get smashed, that they voted for change, they voted out of frustration, they voted for all kinds of reasons. But what they didn't do is vote to have the rug pulled out from underneath them. And they didn't vote to end democracy and to have a country that gets rigged by the people at the very top for their benefit at the expense of everyone else. And when you're in that kind of darkness,

tracing the path out of it, being able to see the glimmer of light at the end of that tunnel and knowing that if you do everything you can, everything in your power to take step after step after step, that there's a way out, to me is the essential thing that you have to do. You have to have a North Star to be able to continue that fight.

And my the core of what I want to do with it at the DNC is in every state to to draw what that path looks like, to communicate it out to our to our activists, to our volunteers, to our party members, to the candidates and campaigns to have a huge shared product of getting out of this darkness and building a country that works for everyone, where where we show that democracy can actually deliver on its promise to deliver a country that lifts everybody up.

We have to see that plan. We have to be able to touch and feel it. And then everyone needs to feel the experience of being part of that fight. This can't be something where we're cheering on some politician somewhere else for giving a great speech. We all need to see ourselves in our own role. And that collective action, that being part of something bigger than yourself, it is what sustains hope and can even allow moments of joy and relief. And even when you fall just short, if you know that there's gonna be a next step in that chapter, in that story that we build together, that is how you get through.

And that's not a set of feelings people associate with the Democratic Party necessarily. But I think that it has to be in this moment. And I'm...

I'm running for chair. And if you're a DNC member who's listening to this podcast right now, I'm asking for your vote for chair because I think that's what we can build together. And I think the country needs it. And I think the stakes are real. But I think that the path is there, even if it can be so dark that it's hard to discern. And if we take these steps, I think that we can make this the low point in an era that is looked back on as the birth of a new era of progress in this country.

Ben Wickler, I started by saying that as a Democrat, I'm excited and grateful that you're running. I was a little more nervous as your friend. But you know what? You seem like you're really into this. And now as a friend, I'm very happy that you're running as well. Thank you, as always, for joining Pod Save America. And good luck out there. Thanks so much, John. That's our show for today. Thank you, Ben, for joining. Everyone have a great weekend. And we'll be back with another show on Tuesday.

about the inauguration of Donald J. Trump.

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