“Pod Save America” ’s Jon Lovett on Trump: “The Threat of Jail Time Sharpens the Mind”
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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. After Donald Trump won in 2016, stunned Democrats found ways to cope. Some marched, some donated, some screamed into their pillows. John Lovett launched a new podcast, and more than a podcast, a media empire.

Now, Lovett had been in politics for a long time. He worked on John Kerry's campaign when he was just out of college, and then he went on to write speeches for Hillary Clinton, and finally, in the White House, for Barack Obama. Lovett then got together with some of his former Obama administration friends, John Favreau and Tommy Vitor, to launch Crooked Media. Crooked Media is an unabashedly partisan effort to counteract powerful conservative outlets like Fox.

Crooked Media's flagship show is Pod Save America, which has been a huge success in a pretty crowded field. And now two elections later, Donald Trump is once again on the ballot and ahead in a lot of polls. So I called up John Lovett to talk about what we learned last time and why America still needs saving. John, welcome. And I'm thrilled to be with you. I listen to you guys all the time.

And I want to get into how Pod Save America came about and the thinking behind it, but I got to get right to the big question, the Biden campaign. The latest damage was a report about the classified documents case, and the special counsel said,

said, okay, Joe Biden's not going to be charged with a crime, but it included the unfortunate phrase about a, quote, well-meaning elderly man with poor memory and other potshots at Biden's mental state. So what's going to save the campaign, John? What's going to rescue it? Yeah, they've been... I have the answer. I know, that's why I'm calling you. So it's good that I'm here with it. Here's... Yeah, look, I think...

Unlike Joe Biden's opponent, they could not bring charges against Joe Biden after an exhaustive 15-month investigation. And because we live in hell, this is a disaster for Joe Biden. This has led to not the first, not the second, not the third, some numbered freakout about this Joe Biden liability. And it's a freakout I have on my own. And I recommend people do it mostly on their own.

Frequently. Here's where my head is at. What are we going to say about this election, assuming Joe Biden and Donald Trump are both the candidates on the ballot in November of 2024? And you do and I do, no? I do. You do. Let's assume. Let's assume that is the case. And by the way, one of the reasons I do with regard to Joe Biden in the wake of this report, even as it led to another round of what would happen if Joe Biden didn't run, is Joe Biden's political stance

worldview is in part shaped by, I think, a valid sense that one of his jobs as the leader of the Democratic Party and the anti-Trump movement is to not confuse big and important political shifts with the vagaries of the news cycle. So there's two stories I think we will tell about this moment. One would be

This anti-Trump coalition that formed in the wake of Trump's victory that has led to Democrats outperforming in 2018, 2020, 2022, 2023, that it may be dissatisfied, it may be frustrated, it may be angry, but it is fundamentally responsible.

And that responsible coalition will reemerge and make sure that this country is protected by a Trump term. Now, that's one story. The other story is we will look back on this moment and say the system was blinking red. What voters felt was obvious. They were shouting it from the rooftops. The fact that age was an insurmountable liability. That's where we're at.

How deep runs the analogy between 2016, but her emails, but her emails and 2024, but his, I don't know.

I don't think this is as much a situation where you could say the media is unfairly drawing attention to Joe Biden's age, in part because this is not a conclusion people are reaching through a kind of like mediated...

They're seeing videos and they're saying he seems old and frail. Now, I think that there's a very good argument to be made that by all accounts behind the scenes, Joe Biden is up to the task. He is able he is you know, there was just a report, I think, today or yesterday in Axios kind of doing a play by play about a meeting on the border. And what you see is a person maybe he's too angry in that meeting, but he was in command. He gets pissed off with some frequency. Yeah. Yeah.

But when you watch him on the stump, especially because I think getting older has exacerbated a lifelong stutter, he was at times ornery and not exactly tactful when he was a younger man, that some of these things are exacerbated. And then Trump in the reverse, right? He is more energetic. I think the threat of federal jail time, it sharpens the mind. Yeah.

But by all accounts, it's emotionally, psychologically, and mentally not up to the job. John, as somebody who's been inside campaigns, inside administrations, and now very much inside the media world, how would you rate Joe Biden's election campaign so far? What's he doing wrong? What are they doing right? Maybe not the best podcasting, but I am in a place of just sort of, I have no fucking idea. I just feel a little bit lost in part because...

Late last week, Meta announces that they are going to not show people political content in their feeds. Now, you could say, well, maybe that's good, right? Because there'll be fewer conspiracy theorists spouting political nonsense in people's feeds. But then at the same time,

Will that mean, you know, the feed that shares the New Yorker stories or the Times stories or Crooked Media stories are less likely by osmosis to get in front of less informed people? What I see is a media environment in which it is harder and harder to get information in front of people. Joe Biden starts this campaign at the beginning of 2024. Most people on the whole do not know that he capped insulin costs, passed the CHIPS bill, passed an infrastructure bill, passed a gun bill, passed a climate bill.

The vast majority of people do not know about Joe Biden's accomplishments. So when they say to a pollster that this is not someone they view as being up to the job, they're not coming at that from a basis of understanding how he performed in the job so far. What are we going to ask of the Joe Biden campaign? All right. And what does it have to do as the kind of last line of defense against this sort of fascistic, authoritarian Trump second term?

And then where is it that we are asking of the campaign to take on the job of making up for a fundamentally broken information system? I think what we're asking is that Joe Biden be a much more present, energetic explainer of his own case.

Yes. Well, I would say, here's what I think. What is the campaign going to do over the next year to make sure more people understand what he did and that people understand the choice, right? Now, there's been a lot of sort of discourse, hand-wringing, like, where is that campaign? It's been slow to get started. Smart people say that's true. Other smart people disagree with it. What do you say? Now it is 2024. I think now's the time. I think we have the State of the Union coming up. That is an opportunity. Now-

You think Joe Biden would go on with you guys? He has before. I think he will again. I think he should. I think over the last couple of years, what we have seen is that one of the reasons Democrats have overperformed in special elections is because there is a very engaged, politically aware coalition of

of nerds and they listen, you know? And these are the people, they're already voting for Joe Biden. You know, a lot of our audience is already voting for Joe Biden, but these are the people that need to not just do, not just understand why they need to vote for Joe Biden, but feel in their bones that they understand why this is worth voting

Not just voting, but giving up their weekends, knocking on doors for, donating for, volunteering for, and feel as though they are armed with a persuasive and a story that they can share with their friends and family in a passionate way. You talked about a broken information system. Part of that anxiety has got to be about who you're speaking to and who you can't reach. Yeah. Who are you reaching and who are you not reaching, and what do you do about it? Obviously, we talk about being a polarized country, but...

just as important a divide is the divide between hyper-engaged people that are paying attention to politics and people who don't. The difference in how they think and talk about politics between someone who knows who John Thune is and someone who doesn't know who John Thune is is extraordinary. And if you are engaged...

What you're feeling is kind of an onslaught of political and nonpolitical content. You're seeing tons of news, tons of stories, tons of information. If you're not, you're encountering politics by accident much less than you used to.

And I do really worry about that big group of people who aren't seeking out the news because the ways in which the news would have come to them are slowly vanishing, right? Local papers are dying. People are cutting the cord and not watching the local news. Even their algorithms are sharing less information. And so...

What is more likely to reach somebody who isn't paying daily attention to politics? Who is a Democrat? What is a what is a voice from the left they're going to see? And what is a voice from the right they're going to see? It is more likely that they are going to see Marjorie Taylor Greene or a story about Lauren Boebert given a handy at Beetlejuice than they are about Chris Murphy and Langford working on a bipartisan border deal.

And there and if you're someone on the right, are you more likely to encounter by happenstance a smart column about about Joe Biden and what he's achieved? Are you more likely to see video of a college professor saying that October 7th was not just justified, but good?

Right. What what what is politics going to seem like to you? It's going to seem ugly. It's going to seem cynical. It's going to seem pointless. And that is going to reaffirm their preconceived notion about why they're not paying attention in the first place. I think we have a pretty good idea what you and and your colleagues on Pod Save America think about right wing media. I think it's pretty, pretty clear. And it's often hilarious and and entertaining.

What also comes out of listening to Pod Save America is a certain wised-up skepticism about what people would call the mainstream media or liberal media and...

and a real, well, just very skeptical about lots of individuals and institutions that come under that umbrella. Break that down for me a little bit and how you came to that view while being a speechwriter, while working in the White House, while working on political campaigns. That's a very particular angle of vision. What were you seeing and why did it cause you such distress that lasts to this day? Well, I...

I think that there's a cynicism in political news coverage. And that basically is treating what happens in Washington the way an Attenborough treats watching animals on the Serengeti. You know, observing from afar, providing explanations and contests for other humans watching these animals battle. And...

What we felt when we started Cricket Media was that there was too much media that treated people like cynical observers and not enough that treated them as frustrated participants. Give me an epitome of the first part. What would be, whether it's in the Times or the Post or the New York or network television or cable TV, what's the epitome of the kind of thing that was driving you crazy? In 2010,

nine or 10, President Obama went to the Correspondents' Dinner and we made a series of fake headlines. And one of the headlines was something like, and they were historic, fake historical headlines. And one of them was something like, Lincoln saves union, but can he save house majority? I don't know if you can see, there's a little portion there. He's lost the Southern white vote. And that was a specific moment where

Barack Obama is president in the midst of a financial crisis. He is presented with no good options, only bad options. He's trying to prevent a deeper panic. And I don't even remember at this point what political or legislative victory this followed. Maybe it was the Recovery Act. But there was a story that followed it that said something like, President Obama passes this bill.

where's the bounce, right? Oh, if he did something so good, why isn't it showing up in the polls? There is plenty of room for political analysis that said, did this policy work? What did people think about this? What are people's perceptions? But that has swamped coverage of the thing itself. And I'm not saying there isn't space for the icing, but there's gotta be cake underneath the icing that gives people a broader sense of what's happening in the country. And so even right now, we have story after story about why people find policy

Why people believe Joe Biden is ineffective, but very little coverage that explains to people what Joe Biden did in his first term to be effective. Now, that is the lot of the Biden campaign to overcome. Isn't there an alternate interpretation of that is that it's provided over and over again. It's just that it doesn't penetrate the way you want it to.

A hundred percent. Yeah, absolutely. And I do think a lot of media criticism. I am, I, I, I am certainly not, um, how many times we had the argument about against horse race coverage? Of course. You know what though? Sometimes boring and hackneyed arguments are still true. They're just, we're just fucking sick of them. You know, like some, that's part of the problem. Sometimes journalism is desperate to find something new to say, but you know what? Then sometimes the truth is boring and still worth being said and,

All of that is the case. I do sometimes think, and I think I do this, that my problem is not supply, it is demand. I think sometimes that's a broader problem. We visit on the media our criticisms that we really would rather level against people, but it feels...

or negative or unhelpful or ugly to say, oh, people don't care. People aren't paying attention. You could tell them a million times they wouldn't notice. And you see this, by the way, you see this in political coverage, which is, oh, people have no idea what Biden achieved. It's very rare that a story says something like, and therefore we're deeply frustrated with the American voter for not doing a better job of being informed. There's no equity in that. There's no money to be made in saying that.

And so we put the criticism on the media. We put it on the campaigns. Even the phrase sometimes used, the low information voter reeks of a suspicious elitism.

For sure. Yeah. For sure. And you remember the Trump moment where he bellowed from the podium. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated. Information efficient voters. What did Trump understand about the media that others did not and take advantage of it? He understood this conversation instinctively.

There's something I always think about with Donald Trump, and it was from Mad Men. There's this guy, Pete Campbell, and he's a hustler and he's ambitious and he's kind of unctuous and nobody likes him, but he works hard, he fights. And then there's this smooth talking other guy that seems to get all the gigs and he can't understand it. And finally, his boss says to him, look, Pete, you make the clients feel as if their needs are met. But Cosgrove, he makes the client feel as if they have no needs.

And I've never seen a better encapsulation of the difference between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. Ron DeSantis is desperate to prove he meets your needs. But Donald Trump gets up there and they don't have any needs anymore. And when he says, oh, back in the day, we used to bat these people around or, you know, these NATO countries, they're not going to get a free ride anymore. It sends a message that.

that he's on their side no matter what, that he's going to say whatever he feels he needs to say and that they can trust him when they don't see him because he's their guy. Even if they know that he doesn't mean it, even if they know that this is going too far, that it's a signal that he cares about what they think and not what anybody else thinks. John Lovett is a former White House aide and the co-host of Pod Save America. We'll continue in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Ramnick, and I've been speaking today with John Lovett. Lovett is a veteran of democratic politics and a former speechwriter for Barack Obama. He's also one of the co-hosts of the liberal podcast Pod Save America, alongside Jon Favreau, Dan Pfeiffer, and Tommy Vitor. The New York Times called them the voices in blue America's head.

He also hosts the show Love It or Leave It, which is more of a pure comedy show about politics. We'll continue our conversation now. Jon Stewart is returning to television. Yeah, yeah. You are easily the funniest person on your show, and extremely funny. What power does humor have in a political circumstance? Yeah, so I think now...

What humor does more than anything else is it has the ability to pierce through, right? A very funny joke or a monologue or an argument, it can make it across the information spectrum.

Can Joe Biden pull off funny?

You know, we had a funny moment with Steve Doocy, right? Steve Doocy said, you have a problem with your memory? And I was like, yeah, it's so bad I called on you. That was pretty funny. That was pretty funny. Do I think Joe Biden has the timing that Barack Obama had when he did the Correspondents' Dinner? I do not. But I think he has his moments. I think he has his moments. How is it possible that after his losing in 2020, after January 6th, after the dozens and dozens of indictments and so on,

He's not leading the race in the Republican Party. He's crushed it in a way as if he were an incumbent sitting in the Oval Office. Yeah, I mean, it's worth going back to what Republicans were saying just after the insurrection. There was this fleeting moment where it seemed as though Republicans...

En masse, we're going to do what they were afraid to do before, which is all come together and say, we have to move on. John, that lasted less than a night. I know. And what a night. And what a night. Mitch McConnell's out there. They're all out there. One after another. Oh, my. It was happening. And then, you know, it was the end of the movie and...

All they had to do was just get in their car and drive away. And we're saying, drive, drive, drive. You can do it. You can do it. You can do it. And they just all went back in the fucking house. And what happened? Why? Because their voters are telling them. Their polls are telling them. Their constituencies are telling them what to do now. That's certainly a big part of it. It's also one thing that people have said. Yes, people are politically very afraid of turning on the base or drawing the evil eye from Donald Trump.

But there were also people that said, you know what? My voice isn't going to change anything. And if I get out there and say that Donald Trump is unfit, if I tell the truth about Donald Trump,

They're going to dox my family. They're going to come to my house. Political violence is already warping our politics. We've seen this over and over again. Republicans tell us that they are worried about what this base would do. Mitt Romney has security. It's not just about keeping their jobs. It's not about if I lose my job as a middling representative, I go home and I've got some dull job doing whatever.

No. Yes, I do think that that the worry that people will come after them is is is real. And then beyond that, it is a little bit a lack of political imagination. Right. These are this is what the polls say.

Therefore, I can't change it. Right. But a real, you know, real leaders understand that their job at times is to reflect back what their supporters are telling them. But at times it is to have built enough of a relationship with that group of people to change their minds or to push them. Right. But none of these people had the imagination to believe it was possible or that they could be successful in making that happen. And you know what? They might be right because all a bunch of people

So, you know, I don't know. Well, you had an interview with a member of that tribe. You had an interview with Chris Christie. Yeah. It was kind of hilarious. Look, this is a guy who was totally inside with Trump and wanted to be even more inside if he could have gotten there. And then he turned, he suddenly had a fit of conscience. So as a practical matter too, I'm not using this as a way to get out of answering, but I'm just saying also, as I make this decision,

I may decide come election day in November that it's more important for me to make a statement about how broken the two party system is and how bad these two candidates are by voting for a Joe Manchin, for instance, because.

It won't matter in my state anyway for the practical reason you just talked about. It's not a popular vote system. It's an electoral system, right? Yeah, well, I'm not. Obviously, your vote in New Jersey, it's a moral victory. But your vote matters insofar as that this moment requires me to do something I don't find particularly tasteful but is necessary to save the country. And I'm not telling you that I won't. I'm just telling you I'm not there yet. I mean, the only thing that I have decided firmly

is that I will not vote for Trump under any circumstances. How do you analyze a political creature like Chris Christie?

Do you give him credit? Absolutely. You do? I do give him credit. I do give him credit. And, like, I have serious disagreements with Chris Christie, and I pushed him on a lot of this stuff. I don't think we should just say, oh, because you abandoned Trump, therefore we forget what you did before. Same thing goes for Liz Cheney. But when people show political courage in the direction we have been urging them to show it, we, of course, ought to give them credit. That's fair. In his speech that he gave when he dropped out of the race, I thought he was more...

open and vulnerable about his feelings of having gone along with Donald Trump than he was even in the conversation I got to have with him. The way he talked about, it sticks with you. These decisions, they don't go away. They follow you. Very clear he carried that for a long time, that he made the wrong decision. But then he's on Meet the Press saying that right now he couldn't see himself voting for Joe Biden. And then I say, well, hold on a second.

You just went through this whole exercise where you clearly understand what a threat. So maybe you gave too much credit. Maybe so. You went through this whole exercise where you barnstormed across New Hampshire and the country talking about the threat Donald Trump poses. And it is clear by your behavior that you believe Donald Trump is a grave threat and are far more worried about Donald Trump than you are about Joe Biden.

And yet you can't bring yourself now to say that you would vote for Joe Biden over Donald Trump because of your legitimate criticisms. But this is going to be the choice. And I do hope that if that is the choice, he will say that he would vote for Joe Biden, even though right now he says he couldn't. I can't tell from listening to you guys all the time what you're going to predict after you turn the microphones off and you leave the room. In other words, how worried are you about November 6th?

And where do you think this is headed?

Look, I would say off mic the same thing I'll say on mic. I have no idea. The goal, right, the job of Democrats over the next year is to make Donald Trump's liabilities insurmountable and Joe Biden's liabilities surmountable. These are the candidates that faced off four years ago, and it was extremely close. They both go into 2024 with more liabilities than they had in 2020. Both. So, yeah, both. Now, will it be close? I don't know. Let's assume it is.

Because if it's not, then that doesn't really matter that much what we do. But let's assume it's going to be very close. What can we do to help Joe Biden overcome his liabilities and make sure that Donald Trump's liabilities are salient in their minds? Now, one of the challenges is that the criticism that Joe Biden is kind of older and ineffective, right? They're confronted with that in the present.

Donald Trump's threat is perspective, right? It is what he will do to democracy. It is what is what he will do to NATO, right? And so how do we make that feel real for people? How do we remind people of just how chaotic and dangerous Donald Trump when he was president and make sure they understand how much worse it would be in a second term? So that is the challenge. How does that play out? I wish I felt better about it.

I wish I felt better about it. But anyone who tells you they know one way or the other, I think is full of shit. And what's your role in it? What's Pod Save America's role in it? I think our job is, one, to talk about what is happening in a way that is honest and direct and practical. And to me, what that looks like is not avoiding or being afraid of this very conversation, while at the same time reminding people

that politics isn't really about how we feel. It's not about polling. It's really not even about Joe Biden and Donald Trump. It's about what we have agency to do in this process and what we don't.

And so that leads to the second part of what we have to do, which is activate a ton of people to do as much as they can, not just on the presidential, but in the Senate races, in the House races. There are abortion ballot initiatives in places like Florida. There are a ton of very important attorney generals races and other races that will determine who is in charge of our democracy, who's in charge of our electoral system. You have a secretary of state candidate who just sent a bunch of gay books on fire. I'd like to pull her aside and say, hey,

Can you just tell me other examples of where the person setting books on fire is the hero? Just tell me one example. When is a person setting the books on fire the hero in the story? Is this the first time? That's our job. And one thing that I take away from 2016 that I'm trying to remind myself all the time now is, I mean, if you're hearing this, if you're listening to Ponce of America, if you're reading the news daily, you are ahead of the game. You're paying attention. You understand the stakes in this election.

And therefore, how you feel kind of doesn't really matter that much, or at least it shouldn't.

Your job is to know, despite how you feel day to day, how worried you are, how hopeful you are, put that aside. Your job is to remind people who aren't paying as close attention, who may be angry, frustrated, complacent, what have you, about what they can do, right? Your feelings, put them aside. How can you help somebody who may have similar feelings or who may not be paying attention at all to make sure they understand their power? Because you already understand yours.

And to remind people that our concerns and anxieties that we feel in the run-up to November will be nothing compared to how we feel the day after the election is over. John, thanks so much. Thank you for having me. John Lovett is one of the hosts of Pod Save America, which they describe as a political podcast for people who aren't ready to give up or go insane. I'm David Remnick, and that's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, Kal Aliyah, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, and Louis Mitchell, with guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandra Decke. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherena Endowment Fund.