Trump's Shocking Cuts to Air Safety and Nuke Inspection
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You come to the New Yorker Radio Hour for conversations that go deeper with people you really want to hear from, whether it's Bruce Springsteen or Questlove or Olivia Rodrigo, Liz Cheney, or the godfather of artificial intelligence, Jeffrey Hinton, or some of my extraordinarily well-informed colleagues at The New Yorker. So join us every week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.

So,

So on today's show, Trump and the White House spent the weekend promoting a quote attributed to Napoleon that, quote, he who saves his country does not violate any law and then set about proving they believe it by indiscriminately firing thousands of workers, including hundreds of people who oversee our nuclear weapons and handle air safety for the FAA. We'll talk about all that and why I'm never flying again. I feel the same way, man. I don't have any of your flying anxiety, but how many plane crashes do we have to watch on TV?

I mean, we were prepping for this while one happened. Another one from a Delta flight from Minneapolis to Toronto. How does it get upside down? I don't know. I guess there's bad winds, but I don't know. We'll talk about why the FAA is being hollered out at this moment. We'll also talk about how Donald Trump now essentially owns the Democratic mayor of New York City thanks to a corrupt deal that led even Trump-appointed conservative prosecutors to resign from the Department of Justice. Then, Tommy talks to Stephen A. Smith.

the legendary sports commentator turned political pundit, now one of the Democratic Party's top critics about what he thinks the party needs and why he hasn't completely ruled out running for president. That's right. Is that right? That's right. I mean, for those who don't watch sports or ESPN or listen to Sports Talk Radio, like Stephen A is a legend in the game.

of winning arguments and shouting down opponents in the most entertaining way possible. And there's been all this chatter about him potentially running for office is sort of like the reason I wanted to reach out. But also he's a guy who understands the digital world.

economy and attention and how to get it and drive a narrative and keep it better than almost anyone. And so look, listeners, there's going to be a lot of criticism of the democratic party. Some I agreed with lots. I didn't, you will repeatedly think, why isn't Tommy interrupting him and pushing back on this? And to you, I say two things. One,

Stephen A. is legendarily difficult to interrupt. There's bodies littered across ESPN of people who have tried. And two, that's not what I wanted to do. Sometimes it's good to hear criticisms that are wrong, but a widely held perspective. And not everything he said was wrong. Even if it makes you mad, it's good to hear where people are coming from and what they're mad at the Democratic Party about. And you can learn something. You can't Daniel Dale everyone. Okay.

throughout the interview. You know? Otherwise, people aren't going to get much. It's a long interview, too. Also, it's impossible to interrupt him. I went on his podcast before the election, and that was slightly different because he had to ask me some questions because he was hosting the podcast. But it was the full...

Stephen A. treatment and it was just... I'll tell everybody this was everything I wanted and more out of the Stephen A. experience. I felt like I got yelled at for 30 minutes in a good way. Yeah. And about 10 words in and that was all I wanted. Perfect. I can't wait to listen. We are recording this Monday afternoon on President's Day, soon to be known as President Trump Day, probably. I'm shocked he hasn't renamed it. That's funny but real.

Our dear leader has sent a U.S. delegation to Saudi Arabia to begin negotiations with Russia to end Putin's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, which over the last three years has led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians, the kidnapping by Russia of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children, and a global alliance led by the U.S. and Europe to isolate and deter Putin from expanding the war and potentially using nuclear weapons, both of which Russia has expressed interest in doing at some point during the conflict.

ending this war is of course a worthy goal to pursue we all want that but what's scaring the shit out of Europe and Ukraine is that Trump has so far excluded them from the negotiations with Putin and hinted that wittingly or not he may give the murderous dictator most of what he wants meanwhile

French President Emmanuel Macron called a last-minute meeting of European leaders in Paris to talk about how to handle all this. I guess they'll just be watching Twitter for updates like us. Yeah. Is that about right? Tell me, what did I miss there? How big of a deal is this and why are Europe and Ukraine so freaked out right now? Doing it in Saudi Arabia is a nice touch. It's kind of like an autocratic human centipede. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Hopefully you don't know what I mean. There was a lot of activity on Ukraine last week. It started, it kicked off when Trump called Putin for 90 minutes and they set up this series of peace talks between the US and Russia on the future of Ukraine. Not a part of those talks is Ukraine or the Ukrainians or Zelensky. Zelensky got a call after the Putin call where Trump informed him that this was going down. More of an FYI. Yeah. So, hey man, heads up.

up. 20% of your territory is being occupied by the Russians. We're going to figure out who gets it. This is the first time a US president has spoken to Putin since the war began. Since the invasion. Basically, this effectively ended three years of trying to isolate the Russians from

by the West, basically, this call. And the Europeans are also not invited to these talks, which again is nuts because the EU and its member states have given something like $145 billion worth of support to Ukraine over the past few years. And they're obviously more threatened by a Russian military operation than we are because we have an ocean in between. So it was really messy. And then on top of that, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense slash America's designate if there's ever a case race to decide the future. Yeah.

But not to get home. Not good at flip cup, though. Surprisingly bad. You and I can take them. But so, Hegseth announced at a meeting in Brussels, a NATO meeting, that it was unrealistic for Ukraine to join NATO or get back all the territory it lost since 2014, which is like...

may be true and a fair thing for like an analyst to say, but everyone was like, hey man, you're part of the team now negotiating with Putin and you just gave him massive concessions before these talks even started. And then he walked it back and then they kind of walked back the walk back. So it was just like amateur hour left and right from Hegseth. And then Trump said he potentially supports readmitting Russia to the G7? Yeah, G8. We're G8-ing it up. G8 it up.

He said many people on both sides were to blame for the war in Ukraine. Just a callback. Never says. Callback to the first term. Yeah, never says Russia invaded. I also thought it was amazing that I'm sure you guys talked about this.

I don't know when it happened, though. No, it all happened after we recorded. It happened. Okay. How about the fact that Trump is going around being like, okay, okay, I know that I'm, it seems like I'm going to give Russia what they want, but hey, Zelensky, if you give me half of your minerals, maybe.

Maybe I'll give you more of what you want. There's a deal to be done there. Yeah, I forget who handed this sort of proposal to Zelensky, but it basically said Ukraine gives the United States half of its deposits of rare earth minerals in exchange for nothing. There was no security guarantee. There was

Nothing. He was like, what do I do with this? He's really focused on these rare earth minerals. I noticed that too. Again, like a feudal lord. He wants them from Canada. He wants them from Greenland, Canada, Ukraine. Well, you know what they're very important for is electric vehicle batteries. And I wonder who might be talking about that in his ear. I thought we hated electric vehicles now. I thought we were able to drive our gas customers. No, they're cool. Okay, so why should Americans care?

about all of this right now? Well, I mean, as you mentioned the topic, hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians have been killed or wounded or missing because of the war. The war led to inflation, energy prices skyrocketed across Europe and all those impacts rippled out across Europe and destabilized all these governments. And Biden gave all this direct support to Ukraine

rally the world behind Ukraine, and now Trump is just selling Ukraine out and selling Europe out. And so there's this enormous fear that division within NATO, weakness within NATO will lead Putin to

do more to go into a NATO country like Poland. I mean, think of the Danish intelligence services recently said that if Putin perceives NATO as weak, Russia could launch another large scale war in Europe in as few as five years. And the whole point of NATO is to deter these things. So this is like a seismic shift in US foreign policy. I saw in the Financial Times too that some of the Europeans think that Trump

wants to potentially remove U.S. troops from places in Eastern Europe and some of the Baltic nations. I think what happened was Hegseth went to Brussels, then he went to the Munich Security Conference, whatever, some mouth breather thing that Rhodes would attend or did attend. And probably has. And I think he suggested in some of those meetings that they might pull tens of thousands of U.S. troops out of Europe. Yeah.

And so this seems like the broader danger beyond just the danger for Ukraine, right? Which is just signing some kind of settlement where they lose some of their territory and they don't have, they don't get the security guarantees from the United States so that Putin could just reinvade. But that now Eastern Europe, now Putin thinks, okay, well, I got my way here and Donald Trump's a pushover and is just going to give me what we want.

what I want, either a pushover or a fellow autocrat. Right. Right. And then starts menacing Eastern Europe. And then we're off to the races. Yeah. There's sort of two really bad. Look, this war is awful. I'd love it to be over. I'd love for Putin to take his troops and go home. But it's going to require sacrifices from both sides, I think.

to get to a peace deal. And some of the things Hegsatz was saying are true. I mean, basically the Bush administration in 2008 set up this construct where they kind of floated Ukraine for NATO membership, but they didn't get into NATO, which left them very vulnerable for the worst case scenario. And I agree, it is unlikely that Ukraine will be a part of NATO and it is unlikely that Ukraine will get Crimea back. But I think the worst case outcome here is a negotiation where Putin keeps a lot of territory,

Ukraine is forced to basically demilitarize and gets no security guarantees. And Putin uses this period of time to reconstitute his forces and then just roll tanks into Kiev. And then after that, maybe he rolls tanks into Poland or somewhere, you know, a Balkan country. And then, you know, there is like a hot war happening in Europe between the Russians and NATO and NATO is weakened. And like that is the long term nightmare.

Good times. Yes, good times. Well, we should also dig into JD Vance's speech at the Munich Security Conference, which is a big part of what has freaked out Europe over the last week.

So instead of talking about America's commitment to European security and a free Ukraine, he said that the real threat to the continent isn't Russia or China. It's that Europe's leaders aren't welcoming enough to extremist parties like Germany's AFD and aren't sufficiently committed to free speech. A statement made without a hint of irony from an administration that has banned the Associated Press from covering the White House for refusing to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America a

So stupid to even say that. And is currently investigating media outlets for coverage that makes Trump mad. Here's some of Vance's speech. The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia. It's not China. It's not any other external actor. And what I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe...

from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America. I look to Brussels, where EU commissars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest the moment they spot what they've judged to be "hateful content." And I really do believe that allowing our citizens to speak their mind will make them stronger still, which of course brings us back to Munich,

where the organizers of this very conference have banned lawmakers representing populist parties on both the left and the right from participating in these conversations. If you're running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you. Nor, for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump. A stirring defense of freedom from J.D. Vance. Putting the eunuch in Munich. Thanks, J.D.

What was your reaction to the speech and what do you think Vance was trying to do there? - I have three thoughts. The first, big picture, I think JD is cut out of all the big boy meetings. And he saw Pete Hexeth go over to Brussels and screw up these Ukraine negotiations and then get slapped around 'cause Trump didn't like the coverage.

because he looked like a bad negotiator. Everyone's like, oh, art of the deal guy. He just gave up all these things to Putin. So J.D. decided, I'm not touching the hot stove. I'm not going to talk about the hot war that's happening in Korean that matters. I'm going to talk about social media and free speech. I'm going to go to my safe space. Exactly. Which is whining about mean people on social media, which is what he actually, it seems like that's what his job is because he's just posting all the time. He's attacking the most random people on social media all day long.

Yeah, he's just a professional poster and he's mad about it and he wants to go talk to the entire world about it. But seriously, can you imagine like the White House comms meeting where you're like, yes, let's send the vice president to this Munich security conference, first overseas trip, huge deal, and then not talk about the single biggest issue facing Europe.

I mean, it will seem like there's two different parts to the speech and what we just heard in the clip. The first is he is very upset about the content moderation laws that the EU has passed and adopted. Right. Though I think he is overstating the case of what the enforcement mechanisms are. And look, they are much stricter, certainly than anything we have in the United States because we don't have anything. What's going great over here with no rules. Right. No rules. Right. But the like the

The EU will define sort of hateful speech, a speech that is inciting violence or hate in sort of an immediate sense. Like that is the definition that they've done. And so what they can do is find social media platforms and demand that social media platforms take down the free speech. But what he laid out there was like, you know, they're going from house to house and you're not allowed to say anything bad. Yeah, right. Jack booted Facebook thugs. Yes, they are complaining about kind of routine censorship.

And remember, this was kind of Mark Zuckerberg's thing that he cried about in his Joe Rogan interview is he wants the American president to be a champion for American companies and just let us do whatever we want. Then there's this question of this Romanian election where there were two rounds. The first round went off. They figured out there was all this Russian interference. So they canceled the second round, which is a more controversial thing. But again, talking about that, let's J.D. say Russian interference in elections. What a ridiculous thing to care about. You know, you know, likes that.

And then I know hypocrisy is irrelevant now, but J.D. Vance didn't have anything to say about Viktor Orban, their buddy, who is the dictator leading Hungary, who's like swallowed up all independent media. Also, all their complaints about free speech are such fucking bullshit. Like they they're sitting here in the United States banning the Associated Press.

Elon Musk was tweeting today that 60 Minutes deserves a long prison sentence. What? Yes. I guess the whole show. Every episode? Leslie Stahl? Leslie Stahl. She's a treasure. All of them are going to jail. Even the dead ones?

I guess not. It's just like, it's such fucking bullshit. They do not give a shit about free speech. Speech they don't like. Well, there's another like Germany specific piece to this. Just allow me to geek out for a second. Germany's got an election on the 23rd. So in like a week.

They're going to elect representatives to the Bundestag, their parliament, and then they'll choose the next chancellor. The most likely outcome is that the CDU wins the most votes. That's Angela Merkel's party, the conservative party, and that they go into a coalition with the social Democrats, and that'll be what happens.

But right now, the AFD, the far right party, is at like 20 or 22 percent. And that is scary because most Germans are repulsed and terrified by the AFD because they are viewed as dangerously close to being neo-Nazis. They they members of the AFD downplay the Holocaust. They kind of wink and nod and like accidentally air quotes use Nazi slogans. German intelligence has said some factions of the AFD are actually extremist groups.

And because of Germany's history with the Holocaust and World War II, and I'm sure everyone's familiar with that, they take this stuff very seriously. And all the other major political parties have ruled out working with the AFD. And in his speech, J.D. Vance said, quote, there's no room for firewalls. And that's referencing specifically the firewall that these other political parties have between themselves and the AFD. And he also, J.D. Vance also met with

the leader of the AFD while in Germany. And this comes after Elon Musk has been propping them up on Twitter over and over again and doing like Twitter spaces stuff. So like this, this meddling, it might've backfired, but they are openly boosting this far right. Some would say neo-Nazi party in Germany. What, what is like,

Is there an explanation for this you can think of that is not J.D. Vance thinks it's cool to align ourselves with a far, far right German party that is like the successor to the Nazi party? It's like anti-Muslim, anti-refugee, immigration, fringy, fringy stuff. I think J.D. Vance is smart enough to know this is wrong and pretty dangerous. But this is the program and he's going with it. Before we move on...

Your thoughts on the whole AP Gulf of America debacle? Because this has become a whole thing now here. But it seems like some press is pushing back. I saw the White House Correspondents Association has put out a couple statements. Were they strongly worded? They were strongly. Very strongly. I did read them and I thought about in the first Trump term, some of the statements from the WHCA were like pretty just terrible, I would say. Like pretty limp statements.

And this one was strongly worded, but I don't know. I don't know how the Associated Press gets back on Air Force One, gets back in the White House briefing room. They had to turn in their credentials. And this is all because they refused to call Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of America, even though they are a global news organization and American.

No one fucking owns the Gulf of Mexico. It's an international water. So other countries are calling it the Gulf of Mexico. Yeah, it's a big body of water. Why are we talking about this? Yeah. Shout out Eugene Daniels and the Correspondents Association. This is not an easy one. I mean, no. Well, initially, this seemed stupid and childish. And I kind of thought the Trump people would like be dicks for a couple of days and then let it go. But then Axios had this report this morning where

Some White House staffer I'd never heard of, like unloaded the clip of anger, things they're mad about in the AP style book. And it was like truly Orwellian. And it just read to me like a literally unconstitutional assault on free speech. I know the Constitution singles out justice.

no law written by Congress shall abridge free speech, but that has been applied to the executive branch as well. And you're right. There's been a lot of strongly worded, high-minded statements, but no one's doing anything. And it made me think about in 2009, when we were in the White House, the Treasury Department offered up a series of interviews with this guy, Ken Feinberg. Was he like the Paysar? Yeah, he was the Paysar. He was the Paysar. And Fox News was left out.

And all the other outlets came together and they said, we're going to boycott this interview unless you include Fox. So we included Fox. That like kind of action is what's necessary. Like, and they, they, that was for, that was complaints about a single interview, a treasury aid. Yeah. One, one interview. Not like, like we could, we didn't try to kick Fox out of the white house. Right. And it was a huge story. Robert Gibbs, the white house press secretary at the time was getting hammered about it. Yeah.

reporters are doing tons of stories about it. And there's been coverage of this and, you know, Jake Tapper, who like was hammered us hard at the time was incredibly sanctimonious about it. Uh, I've seen him do some, you know, commentaries and things on his shows. I'm not seeing that from any other people. Yeah. I just, I say that with, as a compliment to Jake, by the way, like you stood up for like the principal there in, in a strong way. I, it's a tricky one, right? Because the,

First, I thought, okay, maybe they should all just boycott the White House and ban together and start reporting. It's like, you don't want that. And cat turds, the pool reporter. Exactly. Yeah, there's already enough of cat turd types in there. So you don't want that. But I'm wondering what else you do. What you could do is next time you're in the Oval or next time you're at the White House briefing room, just pepper the...

Carolyn Leavitt or Trump when you see them with questions about this and like don't stop, don't move off the topic until they do something. Like just make it a bigger deal. It's really hard. The reporters, when they would take up issues like this with us, knew we cared. And we cared about what they thought and they knew the Democrats cared about what these reporters said about how we were treating them. Trump views them as a foil. They want this fight. They love going after the media. So it is hard. But like there's got to be some sort of collective action that leads to...

a reduction in coverage somehow, like something Trump doesn't like. And I don't know what it looks like, but they got to find it. I mean, I think it is indicative of a collective action problem in dealing with Trump, like writ large in this term, right? It's for the press. It's for Democrats. It's for like business people standing up. Like no one wants to get out there ahead of everyone and potentially put themselves at risk, you know?

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All right, back here in the United States, Trump celebrated President's Day weekend, a holiday dedicated to a man who believed America should never have a king and another who saved the union by declaring that it's OK to break the law as long as you think you're doing it to save the country. This is the quote attributed to Napoleon that I mentioned earlier, which was not only posted by Trump, but by the official White House account. Just in case they just in case we weren't sure if they really meant it.

Of course, actions speak louder than words, and there were plenty of those too last weekend. Trump and Elon continued to carry out legally dubious mass firings of nonpolitical federal workers charged with frivolous jobs like keeping our nuclear weapons secure and making sure it's safe for us to fly. And in case you find it troubling that two brain-rotted billionaires are destroying the government we pay for...

Take it up with Fox and Friends' Brian Kilmeade. Why does the media have such a hard time believing that two powerful, successful, handsome men could work together with one objective? It's happened before, and America accepted it. Remember, for example, lethal weapon? Four separate times. Mel Gibson, Danny Glover. Watch. This is not the biggest problem here at all, but does Brian Kilmeade think that Trump and Elon are hot? How do you wake up?

And look at yourself in the mirror and then go to work and be like, I gotta do, I gotta read this today. It's just the lethal weapon. Like our, our, our guy, Jesse Waters, he says the absurd thing with like enough of a wink that, you know, he knows he's full of shit, but enough of his audience takes it literally that he can like,

He doesn't pull it off, but like, Kill Me did not pull that off. Nope. That was just like, is this guy to get hit in the head with a hammer before this part? Like, what happened here? What is he talking about? No, it's just regime media. That's what it is now. Did you see all the Twitter sleuths who found that Elon is a big Napoleon fan and has tweeted about it all the time? Oh, I did see that. I think that's where this came from.

I mean, it's fucking nuts. They're trolling, right? They want us to react. They want us to freak out. But we should. Well, and it's also... We don't want Napoleon. Again, if... Watch what he does, not what he says. If he wasn't acting in that manner, it would be one thing. It would be a troll. But he's trying to break the law. Now, look. I will say on all the Doge stuff and all the cases that are going through the courts right now, the Justice Department, the Trump Justice Department, is...

in their filings basically saying like yeah we're going to follow the rules we're going to follow the laws here whatever the court decides that's great so they are they are so far abiding by the law in their filings i think this shit hits the fan when um you know a supreme court ruling comes down that trump doesn't like and then we'll then we'll see if he still uh abides by the napoleon quote that he's stealing let's talk about the firings

Maybe you think these workers are just paper pushing bureaucrats or lefty political hacks or just people who weren't needed or doing a good job. Nope. They fired hundreds of workers at the Federal Aviation Administration over the weekend, the FAA, including people responsible for radar, landing,

And navigational aid maintenance. That's according to the AP. Trump and Elon have also fired more than 5,000 employees at our health agencies, according to Forbes, including people who run Medicare, Medicaid, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. More than 3,000 people at the Forest Service and Politico reports that, quote, fire safety projects are already frozen and being canceled all over the West.

And maybe the most telling news, Trump and Elon fired about 300 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the assembly, storage and testing of our nuclear weapons. About 30 percent of the layoffs were at the Pantex plant in Texas, which is where warheads are actually assembled.

That's the bad part. That's the bad part. Yeah, you don't want that part. You want to keep eyes on warheads. You want someone to be watching the warheads for sure. So this happened on Thursday evening and a lot of the workers didn't even know they'd been fired until they showed up at work the next morning and couldn't get in.

But here's the worst part. There's actually a worse part. The guy who brought a new comb to work on it after hours. No, he can't get back in. So once the absolute fucking morons in charge of our government realized that maybe they shouldn't have fired the people who oversee our nukes, the Trump folks tried to rehire them. But according to NBC, quote, struggled to find them because they didn't have their new contact information.

And they had completely deleted all of their email accounts and information. That's so crazy. What are we doing? I mean, I'm no pollster, but I have a feeling that the voter support for a more efficient government doesn't extend to the mass firing of the people in charge of our nukes and our air travel. But I don't know. What do you think? Yeah. I mean.

These are not people working on silly sounding USAID projects overseas. The NNSA, that's a serious organization. I mean, also firing FAA officials in the wake of all of these plane crashes just seem nuts. And it does feel like Trump is kind of playing with fire here. And the question is,

Do these stories get to people before something bad happens, right? Is this Delta crash in Toronto going to change the TikTok algorithm so that the Chinese think we all want to be fed FAA news and maybe people will hear about this and be like, what are you doing? Or does something really bad have to happen? I hope it's not the latter. I mean, we need to...

everyone's always wondering like, what can I do? What can I do? Tell people these stories. Like I, you know, I feel like Twitter is now just like pissing in the ocean posting on Twitter because it's like a right wing hellscape, but there's still journalists there. So I keep doing it. And I started like posting some of this on Instagram and,

Oh, look at you. Which I'm just like, any platform that's there, like go fucking tell all your friends about this. Because it's not, first of all, I mean like the press is already struggling for some of the reasons we just mentioned and just larger financial structural reasons that we've talked about for years. And also, even if they

weren't struggling with all that. There's just so much of this happening. Like you can miss the news for half a day and suddenly realize that, oh yeah, the nuclear weapons people were fired. And also FAA people are fighting. Oh, there was another plane crash. Like it just is happening so fast and there's so much of it that I think it's really hard to keep up with. I agree. But- Can I give you my really pessimistic version of how this would go? Sure. And one that makes me scared is there's a worst case scenario, something catastrophic happens. And then there's the-

The thing I worry about is government services just get shittier and shittier and shittier. And in some cases, it's small. Like you go to a national park and the bathroom is disgusting because they fired all the people who maintained it. And then there's really, really, really bad things, but won't be like national news like

a veteran will call the VA suicide hotline and it won't be sufficiently staffed. That happened. Right. Or like the bird flu explodes and we're not monitoring it. But my fear is people have such little faith in government that it might fold into those preexisting feelings and

Angers at the government that Trump kind of exploited in the first place rather than lead them to think, oh, actually, this guy's making it worse. Let's course correct. That's my my pessimistic fear. So my pessimistic fear, if you mind, is that I think when when when government services that people count on break down, they will want to blame someone.

I think Trump and Elon and the doge bags and all the rest of them have become very skilled at just blaming Democrats. Right. And even though Democrats don't control everything, there's always some deep state puppet somewhere that they haven't gotten rid of that they can blame. There's always a Democratic governor somewhere or a Democratic mayor or a Democrat. Or Joe Biden. Or Joe Biden. Right. That they can blame. So they will bad things will happen. And I worry that they will continue to blame whoever they can, who's not them.

Because I think there will be anger when a lot of this stuff happens. And look, there's already stories about federal workers, which Trump and Elon and everyone assume are all like big libs. And there's some who, you know, because federal workers aren't just in D.C., they're in every state in the country. And there's like this one guy from Kentucky who like posted on Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever. It was like, I voted for Trump three times and I just had a great performance report. I've been at this agency forever. I'm trying to help people out. And

I can't believe that this president that I trusted would just fire me for no apparent reason. That's the thing is like, there's no, it's not like these people are getting notices that are like, Hey, we have decided to reduce the federal government and we have decided to get rid of parts of different agencies that we don't need. And so in 30 days, we won't, you won't be needed anymore. And here's severance. And then it gives the agency time to make sure, Oh, was that person providing critical services? If so, we got to have someone else cover that. And no, no, it's like,

middle of the night. One woman said that, um,

She's pregnant, six months pregnant, and she was one month away from leaving her probationary period. By the way, all these firings were probationary employees. And what that means is if you've only been a federal employee for a year, you don't have the same civil service protections that others have. So they went after the probationary employees first. That's 10 percent of the federal workforce. Now, you might think, OK, well, that's just someone who's new anyway. So maybe they have a big job. Some of the probationary employees are.

are probationary because they move from another job within the federal government. So some of these people are extremely senior and have been there a long time, but just because they move. But of course, Trump and Elon, they don't know any of that, right? So this woman is six months pregnant and was one month away from having civil service protections. And at 1230 in the morning, she was just alerted that she wouldn't be working at the FAA anymore, where she was helping protect our safety.

Doge first, ask questions later. They also, they talk about government employees like they're subhuman. Yes. And it's really. Russ Vogt said in that video that he wants to make them feel traumatized when they come to work. And that is what they're doing. Like they did this. It is not about fucking government efficiency. And I'm like, I am done doing the throat clearing at the beginning. That's like, we all want an efficient government. And that's what people want. Because it's not that.

Like I know the White House has a clip of us, you know, the profoundly misleading, misleading clip of us talking about government efficiency and that they didn't include the part where we were saying that this is not legal and unconstitutional. No, I just everyone just pause and think about what it means long term when you make every U.S. government job miserable.

and no one wants to do it and they hate working there. You're going to get bad people to provide crucial services. And we're just losing decades, centuries of expertise and experience in complicated matters. And it's just to say it's all bureaucracy and efficiency and dozing is so stupid and simple.

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A couple more examples before we move on because it's just making me so angry. They laid off energy department staff who handled homeowners' electricity bills so there's no one to take the money that keeps people's lights on. The FDA, a lot of food, you like your food inspected for safety? Well, a lot of cuts at the FDA.

Women are being turned away from domestic violence shelters in West Virginia because they're all full and they've had to close those down because the funding freeze that was supposed to be unfrozen in practice really wasn't unfrozen. All but two employees in one state who headed up an agriculture program that was assisting poor rural communities. These are all Trump voters that are getting cut now.

And then the reason you know that it's not about government efficiency or like making government smarter or whatever, the IRS cuts. And we're going to talk more about the IRS in a second. But Joe Biden hired all these extra IRS agents because all these rich tax cheats were getting away with not paying their taxes. And the IRS didn't have enough staff to do it. So they did it. They started collecting billions more in revenue from rich people who were trying to cheat on their taxes. And so

They are laying all these people off, right? The amount of money it costs to hire the IRS agents is paid for five times over by the revenue they're collecting from the rich tax cheats. So it's not, it has nothing to do with efficiency. In addition to the mass firings, the dogebags also keep trying to gain access to government systems and databases so sensitive that only a small number of career civil servants have ever been allowed to handle them.

We saw this play out at Treasury. Now it's playing out at the IRS, where Gavin Kleiger, who is the Doge guy who's retweeted white nationalist Nick Fuentes, is apparently about to get access to a system called the Integrated Data Retrieval System, or IDRS, which includes all of our tax returns and bank account information.

It is so sensitive that even IRS commissioners, the people who run the IRS, haven't been able to access the IDRS. It's apparently this initiative, which is being laid out in a memorandum of understanding that isn't finalized yet, rests with just two people, a Doge employee, which appears to be Cliger, and an IRS employee.

what is the administration saying is the justification for this? I mean, they're saying waste, fraud, and abuse have been deeply entrenched in our broken system for far too long. It takes direct access to the system to identify and fix it. So does this mean that this one dude is going to be like,

inspector of the entire country's tax information and go through all our personal stuff and compare it to other records and I guess somehow find waste fraud and abuse that they will then highlight. And I'm sure a very fair, honest way. Is that what's happening here? Because what, what is one person going to do with all this access? I mean, and again, I,

Just like the Justice Department, we've talked about Kash Patel, the FBI, the Justice Department. One way they can get revenge on people they don't like is, of course, you know, criminal investigations. And the IRS is how I do it. IRS is another big one. Right. And it has been used in the past in our country to go after people. So now we're giving this random fucking guy who likes Nick Fuentes access to all of our bank information and our private tax returns.

We just know Elon Musk has just been tweeting lie after lie, misleading information. He's pretending like, you know, the Doge people are finding all sorts of line items and government spending that seems silly when it's all just been sitting on a public website. Yes. They're just mining public data and using it to further their Doge agenda, which is not about transparency or efficiency. It's about just destroying the U.S. government.

Democrats are trying to make noise about this. Congressman Jimmy Gomez, who sits on Ways and Means, called it a five alarm warning. Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden wrote a sternly worded letter to the acting IRS commissioner about it.

How do you feel about this? Like, are the tweets and letters enough? I appreciate them. I'm glad that they are fighting. But like, doesn't it? And I know I have said the Democrats have limited power. We do. That's just the reality of the situation right now. But it does feel like we should be making more noise. Yeah, I don't know what the tactic is, but I do think this area is eye-catching and scary. I mean, personal tax information. Why does this goober need to have that? Why is this little, you know...

white nationalist loving Doge employee need to know my bank account and routing number. I think that's very scary. I think it's also, you know, you can tell a broader story about firing all these IRS people that are just there to audit the richest people in the country and make them pay their taxes. So I'd really lean into this one because I think it will land in a way that I wish this weren't the case, but like talking about USAID cuts just does not. Yeah. And also-

I mean, we've said this and we've seen this throughout history. When there's a government shutdown and government services are cut off, people get mad. And it's always true that the party in control of the White House that shuts down the party responsible for the shutdown ends up getting blamed by the public.

and stories about the national parks and food safety and all this other stuff like that resonates with people. And I do think lifting up the stories of both the workers and the services that are cut and the benefits that could be cut and the safety and security that's being put in jeopardy, like that should be like the top,

top priority for Democrats. And they should be telling the stories everywhere they can, on every medium they can, on every show they can. Go on Fox, go on anywhere, like, you know, hold events with some of the people who've been affected by the cuts in services, some of the people who've lost their jobs. People are losing their jobs in the federal government who, and the excuse is you've had poor performance. And they're like, what do you mean I had poor performance? This is my first day on the job. And you just cut it. And then some people had

excellent performance reports and they've been told that they have poor... I mean, like, there's just no rhyme or reason to any of this. They're just making it up. They're just firing people. Remember when it was a national story that the Obama administration suspended White House tours during a big budget fight? Like, you can make people care about this stuff. Yeah, I just think that they...

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if it's the tone. I don't know if it's the style, but like they really just got to be out there and be louder. Be louder. Maybe like the protest and attempt to enter the USAID building was, I think, a good idea. Maybe run it back at the IRS. Yeah. Just do the execution a little better. Yeah. It's time to get a little creative, I think.

All right. One more purge we should talk about. This one happening at the Department of Justice. So obviously they were trying to purge DOJ prosecutors who were involved in some way in the January 6th prosecutions. But now we got a whole nother scandal here. Just got kicked up a notch thanks to the case against New York Mayor Eric Adams.

As you all probably know, last fall, Adams was charged with taking millions of dollars in bribes and illegal campaign donations from the Turkish government in exchange for allowing a Manhattan skyscraper to open without a fire inspection. Trump said at the time that he thought Adams was getting a raw deal because of his views on immigration. Adams then attended the inauguration and met with Trump.

On Monday of last week, Emile Bove, the acting deputy attorney general, who you may remember as Trump's defense attorney in the Hush Money case, ordered federal prosecutors in Manhattan to drop Adams' case based on the argument that his bribery trial would interfere with his efforts to help carry out Trump's mass deportations in New York.

The prosecutors refused, and on Wednesday, the acting U.S. attorney at SDNY, a Trump appointee who clerked for Antonin Scalia, resigned. A number of her colleagues then resigned as well, including the lead prosecutor on the case, who wrote in his resignation letter that the move was an illegal effort to influence Adams and, quote, I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool or enough of a coward to file your motion, but it was never going to be me.

On Friday night, Bovey gathered the attorneys from DOJ's Public Integrity Unit and gave them one hour to figure out who would sign the dismissal motion or that they would all be fired. Eventually, one senior attorney agreed to do it to spare his colleagues. A few hours before we recorded, four of Adams' remaining staffers resigned in protest, and

And in case the quid pro quo between the Trump administration and Adams wasn't clear, here's a clip of border czar Tom Homan on Fox & Friends sitting next to Adams in a joint interview. If he doesn't come through, I'll be back in New York City and we won't be sitting on the couch. I'll be in his office up his butt saying, where the hell is the agreement we came to? What a fucking embarrassment. When pressed about this, Homan said he and Adams were talking cop to cop and that the press was making too much of it.

What do you think? Would you say it's good for democracy that the president of the United States essentially owns the mayor of our largest city? It's a real bold move to shake down the DOJ public integrity unit, you know? I mean, that, yeah. It's real. Chef's kiss. I should have mentioned that in the prompt, but it was, there's two sets of resignations here. There's one at SDNY, the Southern District of New York. And-

the woman who was running SDNY, she was a Trump appointee. She had just risen to the ranks, to the top of the ranks at SDNY. Again, clerked for Scalia, Federalist Society member. So this isn't some like liberal squish. And the fact that she finally gets this, a dream job, what I can only assume is a dream job, and then resigns because it's this bad. Yeah, I think everyone saw this play coming, this pardon coming. Because Eric Adams started kissing Trump's ass, flew down to Mar-a-Lago, just made a fool of himself.

But the way this was structured so that Trump can essentially rescind the pardon if Adams gets out of line is brazen even for Trump, I think. Yeah, well, and it's not – so it's not even technically a pardon, right? It's like it's dismissed without prejudice. They could have gone with the pardon or dismissed with prejudice, meaning they couldn't refile the charges. But obviously the reason they don't want to do that is because if Adams doesn't do what Trump says, they will charge him again. They'll go back.

So now Trump owns the mayor of the largest city in the country. You can say parrot my talking points or you're going to jail because it sounds like Eric Adams, the DOJ, the U.S. Attorney's Office, they have him dead to rights. Yep. You know, they'd spell out some of the their feelings on the evidence in these resignation letters.

And I do think it's worth emphasizing, no one is defending this. Right. Right? No. You have all these conservatives at the U.S. Attorney's Office, at DOJ. These conservatives

These resignations for these people could be career ending. You know, this is like the pinnacle of achievement for them. Like being the U.S. attorney in some of these New York offices is a huge deal. You see huge cases, you try huge cases and they're walking away from it. And on top of that, I mean, four New York City deputy mayors are resigning that like in the short term, that is going to severely impact their

the management of the biggest city in the country. And there's eight total deputy mayors. Four of them are now gone. And this is coming after a wave of disruption and resignations and dysfunction during the investigation of Adams. So it is really, it's like a disaster for New York City, like one on top of the other. Also, and I...

You would think that the resignation of those four deputies to Adams would put more pressure on Governor Kathy Hochul, who, by the way, has the authority to remove Eric Adams. And the fact that she hasn't yet is baffling to me. Me too. I mean, it feels like it's going to happen, right? Every Democrat's kind of lined up saying she should. And you get all these resignations. Right.

I will say, though, when we were just talking about collective action problems and people being afraid to step up, like Danielle Sassoon, who was the prosecutor that was running SDNY that resigned, and then Hagan Scotton. Hagan Scotton. I mean, if that name doesn't sound like a conservative to you, this guy was graduated top of his class. Harvard Law is a one to bronze stars in Iraq.

and clerked for not just Roberts, but Kavanaugh. Solid. Yeah. That's the guy who said, like, you'll find a fool, you know, you'll eventually find someone who's enough of a fool or a coward to file your motion, but it's never going to be me. Like, those two stepping up is... I'd like to see a little more of that from some people, you know, who are Republicans in Congress who just aren't doing anything or basically, like, they...

Ezra Klein had a great column over the weekend. He called them NPCs, non-player characters, the whole Congress. Republicans have just decided like, no, we're not going to do anything. They are NPCs. Yeah. I mean, Bill Cassidy put out a statement about Tulsi Gabbard's nomination, why he was voting for her. They basically said, Donald Trump nominated her. Thus, I will vote for her. Just giving up his power. But yeah, this is an area where I agree with you. I'd like to see Republicans doing more, but I think Democrats do have some power here. Like Hochul should...

remove Adams. Yeah. Hopefully that happens. In the near term, that might mean that Andrew Cuomo is back in our lives and that's, you know, tough from another perspective. Someone else, right? It's a big city. You guys don't have more people in New York to run for office? There's a scenario here where this is such an overreach that it weakens Trump. And I think Democrats in New York have to help us get to that point. Well, you heard, I mean, Trump's like, I don't know anything about this. And then Beauvais was trying to walk back the initial, he was like, this isn't a quid pro quo. It's like the original memo says that

that, oh, he can't stand trial because then he can't help enforce President Trump's immigration policies. I mean, it's like, of course it's a fucking quid pro quo. It's nonsense. It's an obvious quid pro quo. Can I read you a headline that you might like? Jan 6th rioters argue pardons apply to charges including murder plot, child porn. Defendants argue that Trump pardons should absolve them of additional crimes some discovered during investigations of the Capitol riot. That's right. That's right. Donald Trump has let

out of jail people who've tried to commit homicide, who were plotted to commit homicide. He had a kill list. And sexual predators. Child sexual predators. One of these guys had a literal kill list. Coming to a community near you, thanks to Donald Trump. Yeah. Because he wanted to pardon his Jan 6 buddies. And we got, you know, people who, you know, getting caught up with a lot of child porn and plotting murders. Those are the kinds of people that Donald Trump is releasing into your communities. MAGA. MAGA.

All right. When we get back from the break, you're going to hear Tommy's interview with Stephen A. Smith about why he thinks we're all so wrong and whether he's going to run for president himself. Two quick things before we do that. If you're an offline fan, heads up.

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My guest today is a commentator at ESPN, the host of The Stephen A. Smith Show, and arguably the greatest sports debater of all time, Stephen A. Smith.

What's going on, man? How you doing? How's everything? It's good. Thank you so much for doing this. I'm a big fan, have been for a very long time. So this is exciting and fun for me. Let's just get right into it. There's been a lot of chatter about you potentially running for president in 2028. And you've had to kind of tell folks to pump the brakes a bit. If I could briefly sum up what I think your position is, it's that, you know, the process of running sucks.

You don't want to go through it. But if drafted to serve, you would be open to it. Is that fair? I think it's fair. I don't have any desire to do it. I have no desire to be a politician whatsoever. But if the country was in a bad place and you told me that somehow some way that I'm favored to win an election and be the president of the United States.

I don't think anybody could submit, would summarily dismiss that personally because we all live in this country and we all understand what comes with it. And as much of a headache as it would be, as stressful as it would be, as

As much of a compromise it could potentially be to my quality of life. Make no mistake about it. What kind of quality do we really have if the country sucks? If it's just in a very, very bad place with no reprieve in sight whatsoever. So, again, for me personally, with what I have going on in my life, with how happy I am.

With the fact that I'm more interested in remaining a pundit and a commentator rather than a politician, those things still stand. I'm very authentic in saying that. I have no desire to be a politician whatsoever.

But my God, if you came to me and said, listen, there is nobody else and America is clamoring for you, which I sincerely doubt would ever happen. But if that were to happen, would I give it strong consideration? I won't lie. Yes, I would. I would give it strong consideration. I love that you're talking about politics all the time now because you are a blunt, candid guy. You tell it how it is. And especially when it comes to the Democratic Party, because we're all trying to figure out

What happened? Why we lost to Trump a second time? Sometimes I think the Democrats, like myself, were too close to the issue. We overthink shit. We read too many polls and focus groups and miss the big picture. So big picture in your mind, like what is the simplest explanation for why Democrats lost? You forgot about you. You forgot about what got you here.

Black folks got you here. Hispanics got you here. The working class got you here. The most egregious thing that you could say about the Democratic Party right now is that the Republican Party seems to be more identifiable with the working class than the Democrats. Who would have ever thought in our wildest dreams that anybody would be able to get away with saying that? Remember, a lot of times—

People that are in the know, that are highly, highly knowledgeable about the intricacies that involve politics, they lean on that. They keep forgetting the voters don't know what they know. The voters live on perception. Whatever issue touches them is what touches them. And that decides who they're going to vote for or whether they'll vote at all. And a lot of people don't get that. I laugh when folks try to challenge me.

My knowledge of the intricacies of politics, I'm like, you're clearly not listening. I tell you all the time, I don't study it like that. I read the newspaper. I watch news. I'm a conscientious observer, but I'm not entrenched in it the way somebody that lives it every day would be. But I'm an American citizen and I'm a voter.

And I'm watching what's going on in the streets of America. And I'm telling you, certain things ain't going to work. When you looked at the Democratic Party, certainly there's probably policies that they pushed forth and battles that they have fought that would have benefited working class Americans. But that ain't what they were talking about.

They were talking about LGBTQ. They were talking about transgender rights specifically. They were acting as if there was no problem at the borders involving illegal immigration.

Nobody was believing that because if you travel, if you if you see footage of the streets of America, you're like, what's going on? It wasn't just Fox News. It was everybody. ABC, NBC, CBS. Everybody was talking about the border when it was crimes in the streets and people were being let out the same day that they were getting arrested.

Everybody was talking about that. When you had stores that were allowing three people in it at a time because they were afraid they were going to get robbed and the repercussions weren't severe enough. So there was a level of fearlessness that the lawless in our communities were, you know, that they possessed. People were afraid.

People were talking about that and the Democrats were talking about something else. And so when you look at it from that standpoint, you just said to the, you just say to yourself, they really, really forgot. They forgot what got them here. What made them so popular? What got Clinton in office? What got Barack Obama in office? Hell, to some degree, what got Jimmy Carter in office before Reagan arrived? They forgot all of these things. And to forget that,

Against Donald Trump, of all people, who's claiming elections are rigged, who's calling y'all crooks, who are saying that y'all are nasty, evil people, questioning how duplicitous you can be, how corrupt you can be, even while he's getting impeached, even while he's being convicted of felonies, all of this stuff. And y'all just ignored it.

Not you. I'm not talking about you, Tommy, but I'm just saying the Democratic Party. It just boggled the mind. It boggled the mind. It still does.

I feel like there's two parts to the criticism. Part of it I agree with, which is there were some issues like the border where it wasn't just Republicans talking about concerns. It was a broader set of voters and Democrats tried to be like, oh, that's a distraction. Actually, we should be talking about this thing. It didn't speak to those fears. I think Joe Biden got there late when he did what he supported this bipartisan bill in the Senate that got killed by Trump and then did a bunch of executive orders to try to shut down the border. But he got there late and people were pissed and it didn't change the perception. But the other half of this, I think, is that

Donald Trump captures attention and keeps it on himself in a way that no other president in history has.

for better, for worse. And I think this is where I wanted your advice because you're someone, you are incredible at crafting a narrative, making news, breaking through on social media. You've created your own like sports media empire at a time when people were like, oh, you can't leave ESPN or like do something on your own, right? Because it's all about the mothership. What advice do you have for Democrats about how to get heard and reach people in this digital age? Get Trump-like.

What I mean by that, Tom, is be your real, true, authentic self for better or worse. Can you genuinely tell me as a person who covers this stuff for a living that Trump surprises you? What? Think about how he acts. Think about the things that he says. And then he goes and he tries to do it.

For better or worse, he's letting you know, I don't care. I'm not a politician. I'm not a career politician. I don't... Listen, the man doesn't even want to be in the White House. Every chance he gets, he's at Mar-a-Lago. He doesn't even want to be there. Right. Okay? He wants to run the country from his resort, for crying out loud. He might want to use the Air Force One plane, okay, so he don't have to spend his own money with his gas and everything else. But he'd rather...

But that's about it. The man wants to be where he wants to be. He wants to do what he wants to do. He wants to show you every chance he gets that he is nothing like the career politicians. He is nothing like what you have witnessed for decades on Capitol Hill. He says Capitol Hill needs to be purged. What is he doing? He's trying to purge Capitol Hill. You understand? Meanwhile, we had Kamala Harris.

Miss Prim and proper tries to say the right things, listening to her party, talk to her about this is the way to go over the last one hundred and seven days to win an election, etc. And guess what? It wasn't resonating. You go on The View and The View says, is there anything, anything at all about Joe Biden?

That you would do differently, that you would change. And she looked into the cameras and said, I can't think of any. What? What? I mean, are you are you kidding me? I mean, you you can't do that because it's not just about your answer. It's about the believability factor. You see, even when Trump is lying, you believe that he believes that.

what he's saying and what he says he's going to do. Even if he's lying to himself, you sit up there, you look it up. Look, man, you can't just eradicate departments like that. You can't just violate civil liberties. Like you can't just sit up there and make your own rules and subvert the Constitution and try to get a third term in office, whatever. But who doubts he's going to try?

Who doubts that he's going to try to pull that off? Whatever it is that he says, there is an authenticity there.

That comes with it in terms of how it resonates to the American people who are salty and skeptical with vile feelings towards Capitol Hill. That's where the connection happens. Well, if you are somebody on the Democratic side and you feel that way, where's your vitriol?

Where's your disgust? Where's your aversion to the status quo and what you aim to do about it? That's what people want to see.

And you're right. I mean, his message is burn it all down. And he somehow gets a pass for having been in charge for four years when all the problems he's complaining about now still existed. But Democrats were boring. We're the NBA skills competition where Wemby's cheating while Trump is the USA Canada hockey game where there's three fights in 10 seconds and you can't look away. And like, I just I don't know how to compete with that. We don't have a leader who can compete with that. We don't have a party that can compete with that. We don't have a message. But tell why. But tell why.

You don't have, you can't compete with that and you don't have that. I'm not talking about you specifically, of course. I know, I know. About Democratic Party. You don't know that and you can't compete with that for the biggest reason of all. Because y'all are too busy trying to pick candidates for the American people instead of listening to the American people tell you who they want. The last Democrat that the American people told you they wanted was Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton, it's her turn. Bernie Sanders had momentum. It's Hillary's turn.

Joe Biden captured momentum because Representative Clyburn got involved in South Carolina, saved his behind. But it's really, really his turn. OK, he has no business running for reelection, but everybody went for it knowing he was supposed to be transitioning. He's going to be 81 years of age.

Then you sit up there. He doesn't have a primary. Then he goes on the debate stage, embarrasses himself. Then y'all still let him take three damn weeks to walk away instead of getting the hell out there immediately. So you can see if there's somebody other than Kamala Harris who could be the Democratic nominee. Then she gets the nomination and everybody wants to act like she's the rock star. All of y'all wanted all along. Oh, my God. Let's throw up our hands and just to say, hey, she is the one. When you know good and damn well that wasn't the truth. Meanwhile.

Trump has been around since 2015. They had Christie. They had Kasich. They had, what is it, Fiorini, I believe her name is. Yep, probably Fiorini. Later on, you had DeSantis. You had Nikki Haley. You had Ramaswamy. You had all of these people. It didn't matter. We went through law and all this stuff. It didn't matter. They looked the public in the face and they said, we want him.

We don't care what y'all want and forced the Republican party to capitulate to the demands of their constituency. That's what they did. The Democrats somehow some way have gotten away with ignoring the constituency and compelling the constituency to capitulate to what they want as a party. And,

And that is the problem. And that's why I said it all needs to go. Some of those candidates need to go. The pundits, the strategists, they need to go. Whoever was involved with the latest election from a strategy standpoint, every one of them should be fired. Every one of them. We're cleaning house.

I would look. I think Joe Biden running for reelection was a catastrophic mistake. We will not recover from it for a long time. And I completely agree with you there. But I mean, I want your thoughts on this. Donald Trump is using sports in a really smart way politically. I think he went to college football games and UFC fights are in the campaign. He went to the Super Bowl. He did a loop around the track of the Daytona 500 in his limo over the weekend.

It feels like he's creating a bond with these audiences that Democrats don't have. How do you think Democrats can be a part of that conversation? I can't think of anyone who would go to a game, except for Barack Obama, going to NBA games because he genuinely loved the sport. But who else? This is why I'm a candidate. I don't want to be. And that's why I am one. Because you see, I wouldn't go to the Daytona 500, but I'd have been at the Super Bowl.

I'd have been at the hockey All-Star game. I'd have been at NBA All-Star weekend. I'd be at the World Series. I'd be at All-Star weekend for baseball. I'd be at a boxing match. I'd be at a UFC match, et cetera, et cetera. The point is you're a politician. You're supposed to be able to do what the people want you to do as a politician. See, this is just –

you're giving me damning evidence I didn't even think about. I didn't think about it. Until you brought it up, I'm going like this. Wait a minute. Aren't they politicians? Isn't it their job to recognize and notice

What their constituency finds appealing and catered to that. But let me tell you, if Obama went to the Super Bowl, Fox News would be like, how dare he? This cost $10 million. He put Secret Service there like, no, go after. No, that doesn't work. Here's why. You don't think so? Because Obama's not looking for their vote. He knows he's not getting it.

You're talking about the other side and the independents and the independents. Here's what the independents was, because I'm a registered independent. I'm not a Democrat. I'm a registered. I'll vote for Republican in a heartbeat. I might not have voted for Trump, but I'm not averse to all conservative policies. I have some conservative policies I support. I have a lot of liberal policies I support. But let's. Right. You don't like taxes. That's right. I don't like high taxes.

I don't like high taxes. I don't like open borders. I don't like open borders. I think that those kind of things affect the economy in a negative kind of way, no matter how we try to slice it. Look at Mayor Eric Adams in New York City complaining about the billions of dollars it cost him and what it's deprived him of in terms of what he has to contribute to the system in terms of homelessness and other issues that are permeating in the city of New York City because why? He had to spend money on the illegal immigration issue, it being a sanctuary city. So all of those things come into play.

The point that I'm trying to make is this. If you're around, if you're looking at somebody and you're saying to yourself, what is it going to take? How can we find that candidate? The first order of business is finding a candidate that recognizes the importance of appealing to not only his own constituency, but those who are undecided.

and playing to win. If you're a centrist, what you're saying is, I'm willing to compromise. I'm willing to walk across the aisle and work with people. I'm not interested in all of this chaos. If it has to get chaotic, so be it. But that's not the objective. That's not the goal. We're Americans. We can come together. We can work together. Don't look at black, white, Latino, Asian, whatever the case may be. Don't look at all of that stuff and think that that's a license for

to dismiss and alienate others just because they don't look nor feel like you do. You might have a shot at convincing them if you talk to them. You could go to them and talk to them about what their desires are, what they wish for their communities, what's the kind of thing that plagues their community and how we can alleviate those concerns. That's your responsibility. And see, to me, I'm sitting there again. I have no desire to be in politics. Zero. My life is pretty good. My life is pretty damn good. But guess what?

I'm looking at it and I'm saying, this isn't hard. This isn't hard. I'm talking about compared to the Democratic candidates that you have available. It's not hard. Look at their roster. Who do you like? You like Wes Moore, Josh Shapiro? You talked to them both recently, right? Like who's on your top five? Listen, I was very impressed with Josh Shapiro. Very impressed with him. And I love me some Wes Moore. No doubt about it. Right? And if there's anybody, but I would be concerned.

I think that one could easily argue Trump would never have been president if Barack Obama hadn't been president. Barack Obama's presidency caused a white backlash.

OK, because you had people in this country that didn't like his policies, didn't like him, was walking around crying about how he's trying to indoctrinate our children just because he was speaking to elementary school kids and stuff. This ridiculous stuff that people came up with. Right. Which is far beyond the pill. No excuse for. OK, but people were really feeling like their way of life was being compromised because, again, they didn't know everything that he was doing. They were going by what they were being told by the other side.

And then here comes Trump saying, we're going to purge this whole system. We're going to throw this all aside because these folks ain't strong enough, ain't good enough. Remember, Jeb Bush, low energy. Marco Rubio, small hands and all of this other stuff. Little Marco and stuff like that.

Or, you know, Carla Fiorini and, you know, she's this or that or Doug or Chris Christie and getting on him. We saw Kasich. I thought I was a huge fan of Kasich. But guess what? He wasn't resonating with the constituency out there. So they their side chose who their side chose. You don't get an opportunity to do that as Democrats because they pick who they want exposed instead of saying, OK,

Let's put everybody out there and see who the constituency gravitates towards. That's the problem. And that's the real reason why somebody like little old me is polling, which makes no damn sense whatsoever. It's embarrassing. It's embarrassing. It makes sense to me. I like it. I think it's good. It's embarrassing to the Democratic Party. It really is.

Listen, on one level, sure. But also, I think I'm with you. I think primaries are good. I think the rubber meets the road in primaries and that, you know, you could do polling all you want. But until you actually ask people to vote for someone, then you don't really know who they support. But let me talk about Trump's actions so far. I mean, I saw you say Elon Musk is a problem. Do you think he's Trump is overreaching? Is he doing things that might offend those moderates or are those moderates just not even hearing about the details? Of course he's overreaching.

Of course he's overreaching. But why is he overreaching? Because he has the license and the mandate to do so. Because you see on the left, you've got Democrats saying there's no mandate. He didn't receive 50 percent of the vote. Are you kidding me?

He won 49.8% of the vote. He had over 77 million people vote for him. He beat you by nearly 3 million votes if you're the Democratic Party. He beat you by nearly 3 million votes. Okay? He won every swing state. He went up in 50 different counties across the country. Didn't drop in any of them. And oh, by the way, the black vote, the Latino vote, and the young vote, he basically got an increase in that regard. You look at all of those different things. In a blue state like New York City,

That in 2016, I think it was Hillary, she got like 62% of the vote in New York City. It was like 53% for Biden. It was 37%.

in this particular situation for Trump. He got 37%. What are you talking about? You're listening to these people and you're saying, Trump, there's no mandate. No, he does have a mandate. And because he has that, he's pushing the envelope. And why is he pushing the envelope? Because he knows something that Democrats better pick up on. Democrats are strongest usually during the national election. During those midterms,

most of the time Republicans are seen as going to the polls more so than Democrats. If Trump can somehow some way win the midterms, he'll be able to do whatever the hell he wants because they'll get even more seats in the Senate and the House come midterm elections. He sees this. He knows exactly what he's doing. And he's pushing the envelope because he knows he has the Republicans scared shitless to go against him.

So as a result, do whatever I want to do right now. I think this is going to win me additional seats for the party in the midterms, which is why he was talking about Gavin Newsom the way that he was talking about Gavin Newsom, because for the first time in a while, they sense they can take California. They can they can shift. They can turn it into if not red, turn it into at least a purple state. You understand? Do something.

He's sensing all of this and he sees an opportunity and that's what's going on. So I'm not surprised by what he's doing at all. It's perfectly understandable. And most people in that position of power, if they have an agenda, they will go to whatever extent necessary to,

To do that, remember Barack Obama in I think it was 2012. He sat up there and said the American people, not just 28, 2008, 2012. So the American people have spoken. They elected us. And oh, by the way, we don't need Congress to get everything we want done. Barack Obama said that in 2012. How do I know that? Because Trump has sent his surrogates out.

to remind everybody what Obama said back in 2012. You're right. I mean, well, the reason he said that, though, look, you're making a lot of points I agree with. I actually think Democrats have done better more recently in the midterms. And I have confidence that we can because we're we're we're now the nerds that read the newspaper and we're highly informed and we knock on doors and we go out and we vote in midterms, whereas sort of the broader electorate that Trump brings in, which is why he kicks our ass in these presidential elections.

they're more sporadic voters. But to your point about the mandate, like, of course he has a mandate. He won the election. He won by a bigger margin than he did last time. Of course he has a mandate. I think that doesn't give you a mandate to do everything you want to do. Obama won in 2008 with 52.9% of the vote and 365 electoral votes and Republicans tried to block literally everything he did. So I do think there's space between, yes, Trump has a mandate and

But the suggestion you see sometimes that Democrats shouldn't be fighting back or that we're the problem for fighting back, that it's the wrong optics or messaging, if you know what I'm saying. Well, what I would say to you is that you're wrong. And the reason you're wrong is because never before has the Democratic Party been this damaged.

This is bad, bro. 2004 was bad. We got our asses handed to us by Bush. Lost seats in Congress. But listen, John Kerry wasn't that strong. You know what I mean? He didn't necessarily appeal that much. This was different because the reason why it's never been this bad, George W. Bush...

For whatever it is that you want to say, the Republicans didn't really have that much of a problem with him. And if you look at America at that particular moment, we might not want it to be in the war in Iraq. We might not want to be chasing around Osama bin Laden and all of that stuff. That might be true. But in the end, it wasn't like it is now. How it is now is there's a president that was convicted on 34 felony counts.

and impeached twice. Back in the day, this man wouldn't have even been allowed to run for office. How do we know that to be true? Let's take into account the whole hush money trial in New York. According to the courts and according to what we've seen, Donald Trump hooked up with a porn star. Donald Trump didn't want that get out before the election. So he paid some hush money to silence her. That's it. And he was scared.

For that to be found out. Think about that. That is what he was scared about before 2016. Now he gets convicted of 34 felony counts after being impeached twice. And he has no fear running for reelection in that short period of time. Look at how things have changed. It's not the same. It's the Democratic Party's got to wake up.

It has changed drastically. You know, somebody said to me, I joked around because I've been single all my life. And I said, look, man, I don't need to be running for no damn office. I've been single all my life. I've been doing some things in my lifetime. I don't need to do that. And somebody said to me, quote, please, after Donald Trump died,

Who cares? What did Al Sharpton just say? What did Al Sharpton just say about Andrew Cuomo running for the mayor's seat in New York? He said everything's changed because Donald Trump got reelected. He said the bar is so low, I don't even know if we can find it. The point that I'm trying to make to you is that you're dehumanizing

You're dealing with a different beast. You're dealing with a different time. This is not politics as usual. And let me tell the Democratic Party something else, because I hope you're not one of these people. I hope you're not one of those people out there wasting your time knocking on doors. I hope you're not doing that. Whoa, whoa. Yes, I am. Knocking on doors is good during midterm, Stephen A. No, no. Here's what I mean. Stop wasting your time.

I personally knocked on doors. It was great. I had good conversations. I got people to give me their ballots. We delivered them. Listen to what I'm saying to you. If they voted for you, they were going to vote for you anyway. If they didn't vote for you, they weren't going to vote for you anyway. That's what I'm saying. That's not true. I had conversations with people who were not going to vote unless I was there at their door getting them. I don't give a damn what they told you. I'm telling you right now, because the media...

And the platforms that we have available to us now, podcasting, YouTube shows, linear television, cable, streaming. There are too many outlets to watch that influence your thinking. Don't waste your time knocking on doors. Don't do it. Stop. Get out there. Make some content.

Well, listen, Stephen A., this was a lot of tough love for our audience who doesn't always hear it. I really appreciate this. It was also it was fun and entertaining and good to talk to you. And I think like we need to emulate some of this in Democratic Party. We need like you guys in sports radio talk about the GOAT debate, like MJ versus LeBron. We need our own version of that, like Lincoln, Washington, Obama, Reagan. Maybe you can help me workshop this. We get something fun. Make this interesting. Make this more accessible to people. But I'm very grateful you came on. Let me end it by saying this to you. Covering sports.

You can have great players, right? Why would the owner not be satisfied? Because they're always looking for somebody box office. Winning is one thing that's very, very important because obviously you win during the regular season, you win through the playoffs, you play more games, you generate more revenue because you have more games to play. But nothing beats somebody who's a box office attraction because folks walk through the turnstiles if for no other reason to see him.

And what I'm saying to you is I'm not talking about a bunch of manufactured audiences like you had at the DNC in Chicago. That's not what I'm talking about. OK, I'm talking about somebody.

That Obama was, for example, in 2008, where ultimately he elevated to rock star status, where no matter where he went or what he had to say, the camera was a magnet for him. And then obviously you got to follow through with the message and you got to follow through with practice. All of that's true. But you got to get somebody with sizzle. You got to get somebody that when they speak, they influence minds. They influence hearts.

And they get people to really, really think.

and spin their wheels. I'm talking about not people on the left because you got them. I'm talking about the independents. I'm talking about the centrists. You got to get somebody that can speak to that audience, that can go across the aisle and dare Republican constituency to bet against them because guess what? I'm better than the candidate that you have because I'm going to look out for you better than the candidate that you have because that's what Trump was telling a bunch of black folks, Hispanics, what do you have to lose and all of this other stuff. This is what Trump did. He was fearless with it.

Where are those Democrats? I don't see them around. That's why I'm a damn candidate, because of that. It's embarrassing. I want to make sure America understands this. I believe it is an utter embarrassment to the Democratic Party that I am a candidate in people's eyes for the presidency of the United States. It's an indictment against them, and they need to get their act.

together before somebody like me or somebody else takes it real seriously and says to hell with y'all because the roster that I'm seeing right now, y'all don't have anything. You don't have anything that's going to sizzle with the national audience. I love Wes Moore and I love Josh Shapiro. I think both of them got a chance. All right. But I need somebody that was national appeal and maybe it is one of them. I hope so.

I really do, because the Democratic Party is in a bad state right now. The whole damn thing needs to be purged. I'm dead serious. They need to go. Those strategists fire every damn one of them. Get rid of them. Get rid of them. They serve no purpose. Find somebody else. It's good. It's good. Tough love. We got to step up. Stephen A., thank you so much for doing the show. I really appreciate it. All right, man. Take care. That's our show for today. Thanks so much to Stephen A. for coming on. Dan and I will be back with a new show on Friday. Talk to everybody then.

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