Trump's Rambling Speech
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It's Wednesday, March 5th. I'm Jane Koston, and this is Waterday, the show that did not expect President Donald Trump to become Bizarro Oprah. Scholarships, secret service badges, wildlife refuges. It's all happening.

On today's show, we're talking about President Trump's first speech to the American people. And the speech was, well, it was a speech. The longest joint session speech in history, and you felt every single minute of it, with lots of capital letters. It was a speech in which Trump emphasized that contrary to what you, me, Texas Democratic Representative Al Green, or millions of people think, everything is actually awesome. Super awesome, except for Democrats, who are mean.

I look at the Democrats in front of me and I realize there is absolutely nothing I can say to make them happy or to make them stand or smile or applaud. Nothing I can do. It was a campaign speech, which is weird because the campaign is over. It's been over, but not for Donald Trump, who felt the need to bring up former President Joe Biden, Stacey Abrams and the nation of Lesotho. He

He brought up Biden a whole lot, actually, in the context of the economy, which he described as being way, way worse than I seem to remember, and immigration. India and our friends in the Democrat Party kept saying we needed new legislation. We must have legislation to secure the border. But it turned out that all we really needed was a new president. Ew.

But we did learn some fascinating, brand new, super fun things. Like that apparently trans kids are one of our biggest threats. A thing I absolutely do not believe for a goddamn second. We learned who really runs the Department of Government Efficiency. And despite what you may have heard from attorneys at the Department of Justice, it's who you think. Goj. Perhaps you've heard of it. Perhaps. Which is headed by Elon Musk, who is in the gallery tonight. Have fun in court explaining that, guys.

We learned that Democrats should support Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. because he has the last name Kennedy. And that we're super serious about cleaning up the environment, which is why we've handed the Environmental Protection Agency over to chemical lobbyists while cutting hundreds of jobs from the department. Our goal is to get toxins out of our environment, poisons out of our food supply, and keep our children healthy and strong.

But remember, everything is awesome. So awesome. Mars trip level awesome. We're going to lead humanity into space and plant the American flag on the planet Mars and even far beyond. To debrief Trump's address, joining me is Pod Save America's John Lovett. John, welcome back to WOD. Thanks for having me. So, Lovett. Yes.

There were a lot of horrible things said tonight. So many lies, so much scapegoating. What, in your opinion, was the most egregious part of Trump's remarks tonight? I think what is most egregious is what he views as being worth time in the speech. It tells you a lot about what he cares about, right? Like there's more time spent on, uh,

vilifying trans people than there was on Medicaid. Medicaid wasn't mentioned. The only person that mentioned Medicaid was Al Green, the congressman who protested. But I would say, like, if you're just going to pick out one kind of lie, because it was so brazen and so long-lasting, it was the extended...

Social Security section in which he goes through in detail of all these brackets of ages of people that are receiving Social Security when basically just he's saying oh these hundred year olds and 200 year olds and 150 year olds are receiving Social Security benefits we got to send Pam Bondi out there to find these these criminals that are taking this money but this has been debunked they're just this is not true it's not happening that was pretty egregious the effort to paint

trans teens, if you look at the studies, right, like there are so few people getting gender affirming care as teenagers, even fewer of them are getting any kind of gender affirming care. Like it's such a fleetingly small group of people. I think it's part of a constellation of issues that they use to kind of show that they're tribunes for the working people or for normal people, whatever that means to them to a surprising degree, because about all the vilification that we've seen, like

Americans are largely supportive of trans people, but they think they have like an 80, 20, 70, 30 issue on athletes and on parents having a right to know. Right. So that's what the focus of the speech ends up being on. It's just awful. And like,

There's so many places where issues that are being raised are traps. Right. But then sometimes it's like, I don't care. I just want to jump in the trap for a little bit. Yeah. No. And it's also like, I don't care how it polls. I'm not, I don't care. But an issue that actually doesn't poll that great, tariffs. Right. Trump said that people would feel the pain a bit on tariffs, which was a hilarious thing for Republicans. And I'm starting to see that argument being made of like, oh, we have to suffer a little bit. I'm like-

Seems like a you problem, but he definitely didn't linger on that topic, even though it's the news of the day. Considering it's going to wreak havoc on American consumers, do you think he glossed over it because it's not flashy enough to talk about? Or is he kind of nervous about how people feel about it? Because he loves tariffs. He thinks the word is beautiful.

It's interesting that the tilting at there may be some disturbance, but we'll be okay. First of all, it's an incredibly glib way to describe what could be like a recession, what could be like a sudden increase in the cost of the daily necessities of life that will make life much, much worse for a lot of people, not billionaires, not Elon, not him, not the people that can afford to take the shock. But a lot of people can't afford a sudden price shock. Also, I don't

Like he's constantly talking about how brief it's going to be. And I, like, I genuinely don't understand what is supposed to happen briefly. Like it takes a long time to build a factory. It takes a long time to increase our ability to produce whatever it is you're tariffing from these other countries. Like you're going to make a steel plant, you're making oil refinery. Like these are things that take a long time. So are these tariffs just going to sit there for years, making life more expensive while we slowly build up capacity? Yeah.

The president also congratulated himself on his handling of Ukraine, saying that he received a supplicant letter from President Zelensky basically saying Ukraine was ready to bend over backwards and sign the minerals deal. How do these developments put their bonkers meeting into perspective? I don't know whether that meeting was a setup or not, whether it was Zelensky taking the bait or not.

But in the morning, signing this kind of deal with Ukraine, becoming more economically entwined in Ukraine in some way, whether or not there was a security guarantee, was seen as the right thing to do. And then there's a fit of pique, and now all of a sudden we're cutting off aid. And now all of a sudden Zelensky's saying he wants some kind of a deal and wants to sign –

what he had already said he would sign. All these guys, these like America first guys that kind of rationalize and intellectualize what Trump does are like, we can't have an emotional foreign policy. We can't have a foreign policy based on Namby Pamby values and the international order. We got to be realist. We got to do what is best for America. We got to always think about what is in our interest as a country. That is the only thing that matters. If you are a realist, if you are making decisions based on hard nose logic, no argument or tiff

should change the long-term security interests of the United States. Ukraine wasn't a different kind of ally in the morning than it was in the afternoon. The interest of Europe and how they aligned with ours versus Russia versus China didn't change because Zelensky called him JD instead of Mr. Vice President. And so like, what are we fucking doing here? We'll get to more of our conversation with John Lovett in a moment. But if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads.

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Let's get back to our conversation with Pod Save America's John Lovett. So something that struck me, like Trump at his core, if he has one, is an entertainer or wants to be an entertainer.

And tonight seemed especially rife with like glitzy bullshit. There was like salesmanship at handing out college acceptances and renaming a nature refuge. Clearly his favorite part of the speech. What did you make of that? Does he want to be weirdo Oprah? So yeah, he loves being Oprah in these parts of the speech. So the part where that kid gets into West Point and the part where he made that little boy a Secret Service agent...

It worked on me. It's bullshit. It's exploitative. It worked on me. I thought it just did. But then he starts to turn it into how we've got RFK Jr. And he's going to look into toxins and he's going to look into autism in this sort of conspiratorial way. And then, of course, like the moment is ruined by the fact that this kid's being exploited and being led to this ridiculous agenda. Then you have this really dark moment where basically naming this

federal nature reserve after the victim of a brutal murder, all to kind of

gin up anti-immigrant fervor because it was a crime committed by an undocumented immigrant. And like that was sort of that's what a lot of the people in the room were there to represent. Right. You had a volleyball player who had a run in with a trans athlete in some way, had some sort of injury or I don't totally know the story. And that's why we've got to stop the trans athletes. And we have victims of crime from undocumented immigrants and like kind of all the different kind of

Trump villains and like the Trump enemies kind of that's what the showmanship part of the speech was about. I think Democrats were stuck in, to me, an unwinnable position tonight. Some Democrats held up signs saying like Musk steals, say veterans, they were using their phones. Some didn't go. Women lawmakers wore pink. A lot of people just left early. Does any of this matter? And was there any way for Democrats to win this night? Like, should everyone have left Al Green style? Because here's something I was thinking about, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts. Like,

There is the base that's like, we want people to fight back. We want toughness. We want something like that. And then I just keep thinking about swing voters or people who don't pay any attention. Yeah. Who are like, why are they being so divisive? We want to see people working together. And I don't know.

how you work those two things together. I don't know if that's possible. I don't know how that works. I thank God I am not a political consultant. I would be a terrible one. But like, it seems like you are caught in a trap where if you do things that are like, yeah, the base is up. Well, the base would be up anyway. The base is going to be there for the midterms. But you need the people who were somehow convinced Trump was going to give them free IVF

or you need the people who were convinced that Trump, because he said he wasn't involved in Project 2025, he wasn't. Like, you need people who don't care about politics, but do see things on their phone. It's right. We just recorded Posse America and we were like, we're talking about this ourselves. And the way we kind of yo-yo on this, right? Like, you know, we come out of

Kamala's loss, we're like, it was too much about democracy. We need to focus on kitchen table issues. Then we see Donald Trump doing this and people are kind of like, but what about the price of eggs? It's like, wait, you're missing the moment. This is about authoritarianism. This is about democracy. And I think the way to me, you square that circle is we're not like the midterms are a long ways away. Donald Trump, barring things getting much, much worse is not going to be on the ballot again.

and things could get much, much worse. So what is our goal right now? And I, I like, it is true that in the run up to 2024, Kamala Harris did not have a lot of runway. And so she had to convince people based on where their heads were at right then. And at that moment, some share of voters were awake to the threat of authoritarianism. Some share of voters were into it. And then there were some share of the voters in the middle, right?

And I think the question for us is, okay, we have this group of people that understand the authoritarian menace. They want us to fight. But there's this other big group of people that we also need to reach, as you said, that just don't view this as anything other than normal politics and are concerned about kitchen table issues. And I think we have to think about doing two things at once, which is one, making sure we're speaking to those real needs, right? We need those people to view us as credible advocates.

but also thinking like, hey, let's change this, right? Like, what do we do now to wake up more people to this menace, right? Like, Donald Trump is rewarded for the fact that he can

berate an ally. He can side with our adversaries. He can vote with Putin at the UN. He can dispatch Elon Musk and illegally destroy federal agencies. And yeah, you may see some noise in the polls, but America's not suddenly awoken to the fascist menace, right? Things still feel as they did. Maybe the polls are ticking against them, but there's not some seismic shift. And

And I do think it's worth using this time to think about not how do we deal with the reality of the current politics of exactly what you're describing, but like, how do we change that? Right. How do we get more people to understand this as a menace? And what does that look like? Right. Like Al Green walking out, like if more Democrats had done it, like, by the way, snap poll came out. Most people thought that was divisive. Right. Most people watching didn't like that.

Is that okay? Maybe that's a good thing, right? Like, what if what we have to do right now to make people understand the threat is do things that people don't like for a beat, right? That maybe don't poll well, that maybe don't test well. And the problem is when you do that, you kind of leave the data behind, right? And then you become what? It's just about our feelings and our instincts. But the other part of it is, we've tried these poll-tested messages. We've tried...

offering people a normal alternative. It did not work. So like, I don't feel like I like just to be clear, like, I don't know what to do. I don't know what's right. But I just think we need to be open. Like we need to like widen the aperture a little bit about like what a good idea could be. John, as always, thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me. That was my conversation with Pod Save America's John Lovett.

Before we go, the Oscars were on Sunday, so you know Keep It hosts Louis and Ira are taking their gum out, throwing it at Georgina Chapman, and rushing to the mic for some hot takes. Plus, they're joined by the Prindle queen herself, Brenda Song. Catch their full recap of Hollywood's biggest night and an interview you don't want to miss on the Keep It feed or YouTube.

That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, vote for whomever makes future presidents send all this shit in an email, and tell your friends to listen.

And if you're into reading, and not just about how seriously presidents used to send their State of the Union or Joint Address to Congress as a written report before Woodrow Wilson, one of the worst people to ever live, resumed the big in-person State of the Union in 1913, like me, What Today is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Jane Koston, and as always, Woodrow Wilson was the problem.

Water Day is a production of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producers are Raven Yamamoto and Emily Fore. Our producer is Michelle Alloy. We had production help today from Johanna Case, Joseph Dutra, Greg Walters, and Julia Clare. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our executive producer is Adrienne Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gillyard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.