Ep 1010: WHCD WTF?

Episode 1010 dissects the White House Correspondents' Dinner disaster, where Trump used his own celebration of press freedom to attack the journalists in the room with vile personal insults. Driftglass and Blue Gal replay a decade-old clip from their own archives—recorded the week Trump effectively won the 2016 nomination—to prove that Liberals saw this coming while the legacy media obsessed over Hillary's emails. The episode argues the real scandal isn't Trump's cruelty, which was never a mystery, but a media class that keeps getting blindsided by exactly what it refuses to honestly examine. It's about pattern recognition, receipts a decade old, and why nothing about the GOP or its media enablers has gotten better—only worse.

Link for this episode:  Status. https://www.status.news/ 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_08 0:00

You can listen to the professional left wherever you get your podcasts on NetRuth Radio or at our website, proleftpod.com, where you can also contribute to this podcast. There's a PayPal button at our website, or you can mail us a letter and/or a contribution at P.O. Box 9133, Springfield, Illinois, 62791.

SPEAKER_04 0:19

This is the podcast for July 28th, 2026. It's not safe for work.

SPEAKER_08 0:25

Recorded live from the Cornfield Resistance, where we are now 12 hours tornado free. It's the professional left with drift glass and bluegill.

SPEAKER_04 0:39

And we're fine. We're fine. We at our house are fine.

SPEAKER_08 0:43

We had a slight, slight uh cloud burst and 170% humidity.

SPEAKER_04 0:49

Oh yeah. It's unreal. We are in a sauna, a literal sauna of corn sweat.

SPEAKER_08 0:54

I I flew a uh paper plane down the street, just a folded-up paper plane. It went for a thousand miles and then burst into flames.

SPEAKER_04 1:01

It's you know, that's authentic.

SPEAKER_08 1:05

Real hot.

SPEAKER_04 1:07

Uh and and since the big news this weekend was the absolute shit show that was the White House correspondence dinner starring Donald Trump.

SPEAKER_08 1:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:17

Um against our better instincts, we feel ob obliged in some ways to talk about it a little bit.

SPEAKER_08 1:23

But Gowns by Edith Head. That's the other part of any show. Uh, but you know, we're gonna cover it in our own inimitable way. Uh if you want to hear people play Trump's racist and misogynist and homophobic jokes, and watch him try to improv and watch him bomb completely, uh, and then listen to people react to it afterwards, because you've got to react to that. React in you know, big yellow font. There are a lot of podcasts for you to choose from, but this is not one of them.

SPEAKER_04 1:52

Because the real story here isn't simply that Trump is a racist, misogynist, and homophobic slob who has millions of supporters. The real story is how completely broken the media is. The people who sponsored this event gave Trump the stage and the microphone, and then had the effrontery, to be surprised, that Trump was exactly who we all knew he was in 2020.

SPEAKER_08 2:22

Well, 2016.

SPEAKER_04 2:24

Well, either way, but but but certainly by now. This is from the great Mark Elias of the Democracy Docket on Blue Sky. Quote Normally I would write about last night's shameful display of the legacy media vetting Donald Trump, but with only 101 days until the elections, they are a lost cause. The legacy media is reconsidering the White House correspondence dinner because Trump insulted them. What they don't get is that they insulted their viewers and readers by attending in the first place. Unquote.

SPEAKER_08 3:01

Amen to that. Uh this is from the website's status, which is paywall, and we do want to respect that. So we're just gonna read you uh a fair use snippet from it and put the link in our. It's very good. It's very, very good. And we'll put the link in our notes. Quote, the White House correspondent's disgrace. The WHCA sought to reconvene his annual dinner in celebration of press freedom. Instead it handed Donald Trump a platform to attack the very journalists the organization exists and to represent. The evening's veneer of civility quickly ended as Trump, the Correspondent Association's guest of honor, delivered a keynote address lace with vile invective, using the stage to attack the journalists gathered in the room and his political enemies alike. Over the course of more than an hour, Trump offered a meandering and cringe-worthy speech that devolved into a barrage of personal insults and crude attacks, stripping away any pretense that the evening would serve as a celebration of the First Amendment. This is the largest gathering of people with Trump derangement syndrome, he told the room. Trump went on to repeatedly assault a sale, I'm sorry, assail the fake news media, mocked the failing New York Times, derided CNN's Caitlin Collins with vulgar personal attacks, slammed the Wall Street Journal's Josh Dossey, resurrected old insults for Gavin Newsom, Elizabeth Warren, and Chris Christie. He called our governor Jamie Pritzker a quote fat pig, unquote, demanded Representative Elon Omar get out of our country, trashed Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, and Stephen Colbert as terrible and sick people, and told the journalists gathered, When I'm gone, you're all gone about going broke. Your business model is going to be finished, unquote.

SPEAKER_04 4:42

Since we are who we are, remembering stuff is a big part of what we do. So today we're going to read up a very long clip. And I forgive us for doing this, but really. This is deep inside the professional left archives, episode 335 from a decade ago, May 5th, 2016. The subject is Donald Trump, Joe Scarborough, and the White House Correspondents Dinner. And inside that podcast, we did a callback to an even more ancient moment, ten years earlier than that, 2006, when Stephen Colbert took the podium at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

SPEAKER_08 5:30

So take it away, us from ten years ago.

SPEAKER_04 5:38

Well, since it's been such a crazy week, I thought we would take it one step at a time. Again, these crazy weeks, we probably are better off doing them chronologically.

SPEAKER_08 5:48

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 5:48

And uh we recorded and published a podcast last Friday, so starting with Saturday, it was the White House Correspondence Dinner.

SPEAKER_08 5:56

Again, boring too much. Nothing happened.

SPEAKER_04 5:59

Nothing happened. No, actually, what I found interesting is it was the 10th anniversary 1-0 of Stephen Colbert's amazing set the standard, iconic White House Correspondence Dinner. The speech that totally changed the White House Correspondence Dinner from a Beltway institution to a celebrity festooned, nationally televised, you know, no one was ever going to miss what happened at this thing ever again after Colbert. Which Colbert never got a laugh or got very No, it was really the the room was not welcoming to his shtick, which but the internet was.

SPEAKER_08 6:44

That was the point. He pants basically the entire Bush administration and the Washington Press Corps and the whole concept of this horrible, incestuous event in front of all of them on live television, in front of millions of people.

SPEAKER_04 6:58

And so did Larry Wilmore. I mean, that's he really held up the standard uh that Stephen Colbert had set. And uh I thought the speech was great. I mean, I I don't know, uh some people panned it and said that he his timing was off and he left off some jokes and so forth.

SPEAKER_08 7:17

It was a stand-up routine, and some of it worked really well and some of it didn't, for my money. But as an act of subversive art, yeah, it succeeded admirably. And what it was trying to do, what it was trying to do was say certain things to people sitting in that room that they did not want to hear, that you will never hear anyone ever say on television.

SPEAKER_04 7:37

In the Beltway Media. In the Beltway.

SPEAKER_08 7:39

Even though it's the truest things you can imagine, it's stuff we talk about on this podcast every week.

SPEAKER_04 7:43

Yeah, and and the one that keeps getting mentioned over and over again is the Morning Joe. Yep.

SPEAKER_02 7:48

And whenever I turn on the TV, I see Trump's family campaigning for him, you know, gushing all over him. Or as it's also known as Morning Joe. Have you seen Morning Joe? Oh, come on, guys. Seriously. No, you know it's true. Guys, Morning Joe has their head so far up Trump's ass, they bumped into Chris Christie.

SPEAKER_04 8:08

You know that's true. Chris Matthews had to take a drink so as not to laugh.

SPEAKER_05 8:13

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 8:13

But nobody at that table at the MSNBC table was laughing at that.

SPEAKER_05 8:17

No.

SPEAKER_04 8:18

And, you know, it just goes to show you that how much power Joe Scarborough has at that network.

SPEAKER_02 8:24

Uh MSNBC. MSNBC here tonight? Yeah? Which uh actually now stands for missing a significant number of black correspondents.

SPEAKER_08 8:32

It's like there's so many missing black people that it's run by Boca Haram. It's like which is a pretty ferocious thing to say. Yes, but it also happens to be true. It's true. MSNBC is in the middle of decapitating its network. Not in the middle of it, it's done. Getting rid of liberal voices and packing the house with either muzzled liberals who will go only so far and once they hit that invisible fence go no further, or Joe Scarborough.

SPEAKER_04 9:00

Yep. And I wanted to let's I I don't I don't want to jump all over the place, but since we're talking about Joe Scarborough, let's talk about what happened today this morning. Um, first of all, uh it only took four days for Joe Scarborough to have Donald Trump phone it in again. And and granted it was the morning after the Indiana primary, you would want to have the winner of that primary on your show if you could. Sure. But allowing Donald Trump to phone in interviews from his golden toilet, as I have put on Twitter. If you need a an image of that in your mind, you can go to my Twitter stream because I photoshopped it.

SPEAKER_08 9:40

Game of Thrones, baby. Game of Thrones.

SPEAKER_04 9:42

Game of Golden Toilet Thrones.

SPEAKER_08 9:47

Excuse me, just a second. I had to squeeze out a Christie, but I'm okay. All right. What were we talking about?

SPEAKER_04 9:57

And and there's no way to honestly interview someone who's on the phone. No. You don't, you cannot do follow-up questions well. You can't figure out what whether they're, you know, picking their teeth or scratching their ear while they're talking to you. It doesn't matter. And it is such a privileged thing that Scarborough and other networks have given Trump and given no one else. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 10:21

And you can wind that back a couple more steps. There's no honest way for Joe Scarborough to conduct an interview with someone he's giddy about.

SPEAKER_04 10:29

Yeah, that he depends upon for donations to his charities. Yeah. And for his ratings. And for his ratings. And for his ratings. Let's not forget that. All right. So then that this morning, uh Rob Reiner was on.

SPEAKER_08 10:42

Yes, he was.

SPEAKER_04 10:43

And Rob Reiner, I I don't know why Rob Reiner was on, because I only watched the clip.

SPEAKER_08 10:48

Um he has a movie coming out. Okay. And he's, you know, he's Sollywood.

SPEAKER_04 10:52

He's a director. He's a director, yeah. So uh what what I think we really have to tell the whole story because it is so Go for it, baby.

SPEAKER_08 11:01

Go for it.

SPEAKER_04 11:02

That Willie Geist was sitting next to Mark Helprin, first of all. Just picture that in your mind. The two of them sitting side by side, Joe and Mika are there, and here is Willie Geist and Mark Helprin, you know, consuming air. And Willie is doing the questioning and saying, How do you explain?

SPEAKER_06 11:22

As much as we like to think that the entire country watches the show every morning, we dictate how people vote.

SPEAKER_07 11:27

A lot of people do watch the show, but it is kind of a news show of record. It is. It is.

SPEAKER_06 11:33

That is true. But how do you explain the millions and millions of people who do not watch this show who actually like what they hear from Donald Trump and aren't taking messages and orders from us in the media, but they listen to what he says for themselves and vote for him? How do you explain that?

SPEAKER_08 11:46

Now, this is an example of how fat, slow pitches across the plate are deliberately whiffed by the typical beltway wax work centrist douchebags who are on the air. Because a question like that is the kind of one that you would get a mouthful of argle bargle about both sides from everyone else. Yep. This is also an example of how if you put any honest liberal across from any TV centrist or conservatives, they can knock it the fuck out of the park easily. This is why, again, for the most part, liberals are never allowed anywhere near Willie Geist or Mark Alperin or Joe Scarborough. Exactly. Because and resume.

SPEAKER_04 12:31

Well, and the re and as you say, an honest liberal, a drift glass or a blue gallon being delivered that softball would say, Well, you know, the reason is you have uh Donald Trump talking to you from his toilet yesterday morning and last week and the week before that and the week before that, and he is given unfiltered access to people and given the uh cachet of your show and to to spout off whatever he wants to say unquestioned. So that's why.

SPEAKER_07 12:59

So what what Rob Reiner said in one sentence was there there are a lot of people who are racist. Oh my god. Did you just say that? I'm not saying no, you just said that. Well, that's true.

SPEAKER_04 13:14

And the pearl clutching immediately happened. You didn't really say that. And Mika actually put her hands to her cheeks. Yeah, I'm like, oh my gosh, how can you say that? And and uh it was as if there was all of a sudden Bob the Builder, a hundred Bob the Builders around Rob Reiner with hammers, pushing him back into a box that says it's not all Republicans, it's not all conservatives, it's only a few, it's only the dirty few, and they're bad examples of Republicans, and they aren't our party, and both sides, both sides, and and Bernie Sanders people are racist too, and on it and just it was the entire tool bag of media bullshit about let's here's a subject we're definitely not going to talk about.

SPEAKER_08 14:05

So let's exactly build a wall around it as fast as possible.

SPEAKER_04 14:09

Fast as possible, and all of them were doing it.

SPEAKER_07 14:11

And I'm telling you, Rob Reiner pushed right right back and said, if you're a candidate and you've been one, right, and you're standing there, and there are people in your rally who are KKK members, members of the Aryan nation, uh white supremacists. If I were you, I would say, you know, I don't really want that support. That's hate speech. That's hate mongering. I don't want that support. I don't see Donald Trump saying I don't want that support. He's saying fine. I don't know who David Duke maybe he is a value. We were partially critical of that as well. But there is that's to answer Willie's question. There's a stream of racism there, but they're not all racist. No, they're not all racist. They're not all racist, but there is a stream there.

SPEAKER_04 14:56

I was so proud of him because he brought Joe Scarborough into the picture.

SPEAKER_08 15:02

Right. This is this is a Joe Scarborough tactic, which is let my minions bash my guest, and while I sit back and smirk, and if I need to step in, I will. But I I just, you know, I'm taking a break.

SPEAKER_04 15:14

But Rob Reiner wouldn't let him do that. Rob Reiner said, You have been a politician, you have spoken before audiences, and I can well imagine that if you stood up before an audience and saw a bunch of Klansmen and skinheads and Nazis in your audience, you would say, I don't want to be represented by these people. I don't want their support. Donald Trump doesn't do that. And and that's when Joe Scarborough basically surrendered and said, he's got to move away from that. Isn't it just a little bit late for him to move away from that? He's not gonna move away from that. And that's what what Rob Reiner says. He said, he's not gonna move away from that. Why would he do that? That's who he who has brought him to power.

SPEAKER_05 15:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 15:58

And and also that's who Donald Trump is. Donald Trump likes that kind of thinking. He does. So yeah.

SPEAKER_08 16:05

It's like Carl Paladino, you know, horseporn aficionado and and local thug and gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino. You know, wrap your head around Carl Palladino, head of the Department of Homeland Security. Wrap your head around Joe Arpayo as the United States Attorney General.

SPEAKER_04 16:22

Give them a fancy suit and a high-rise Manhattan office and a million-dollar base from which to grow your business, and you've got Donald Trump. So exactly.

SPEAKER_08 16:32

Yeah. And and these are and there's an absolute uh symbiotic, creepy, incestuous relationship between Joe Scarborough and his television show and the needs and desires and political ambitions of Donald Trump, and always has been, right from the very beginning. It's been very clear, it's been very open. Everyone at MSNBC is smart enough, because they're all smarter than Rutabegas, to know that that's what goes on in the morning at their network. They are just obliged by contract not to talk about it, even though it's horrifying.

SPEAKER_04 17:03

That's what I thought was ironic about the whole thing is I went back and just Googled at the and just searched at the MSNBC.com website for Trump racist.

SPEAKER_05 17:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 17:15

Those two words. And I found an entire segment, recent segment within the past two weeks from a Chris Hayes show where he is interviewing people talking about white supremacy within Donald Trump's campaign. Then I went and looked again, and there is an entire segment where uh Lawrence O'Donnell is uh using his time, his last word moment at the end of his show to talk about how goddamn dangerous Donald Trump is because he is a frontman for racism in America.

SPEAKER_05 17:45

Yes, he is.

SPEAKER_04 17:45

And he just went and he went full blown for four minutes, over four minutes, about how we have to stop this guy. This was in 2011. Uh-huh. Not new, not recent, not talking about Carl Paladin. This was 2011. We have to stop Donald Trump because he's a racist, a front man for American racism. Then uh I found an article on msnbc.com again talking about racism within Donald Trump's uh mindset and how he has always been uh within New York City, you know, on the white man's side, right? That that's been his MO. And I said, this is the media that Rob Reiner consumes. Right. He understands MSMBs.

SPEAKER_05 18:30

Exactly. He understands the media.

SPEAKER_04 18:32

But he made the mistake, and well, I don't think it was a mistake, I think it was conscious, but he made the quote unquote mistake of repeating what he heard at MSNBC nighttime on Morning Joe. Which you're not watching which you don't do. There's a wall and you don't cut there is a wall, right? There's a 12-foot high wall between Morning Joe and the rest of MSNBC.

SPEAKER_08 18:53

Well, there's a vast wasteland in the middle of the day where it's basically a camera pointed at whatever podium Donald show up at CNN. And then in the evenings, and and let's let's give um uh Joy Reed a shout-out.

SPEAKER_04 19:06

Yeah. One of the smartest people on television. Which is nice.

SPEAKER_08 19:12

It's absolutely great, and that's a wonderful thing, but um I'm glad of that. I also do not believe for one minute that MSNBC is not Fox Light, it's not a shithole being run by Roger Ailes Jr. practically. And it would, it's being run by men who would sell their own grandmothers on Eatsy in a second if they thought it would boost their ratings.

SPEAKER_05 19:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 19:31

So you know, great. They fired Melissa Harris Perry, they got shit for it, said, What do we do? What do we do? Shit, shit, shit. Gotta give gotta give a spot to somebody. Okay, Joy Reach. We'll give her a show. And they'll then they'll shut the liberals up. That that's the the object, and uh, and she'll I'm I assume she'll do great with it. I hope she has plenty of latitude. Uh I think she has a lot of integrity. I don't want to see fewer uh African American liberals on television, even if she has to work at a you know whorehouse like that. Um, you know, you're the piano player in the parlor, right? And you're a really good piano player, and I appreciate your music. But I'm not gonna pretend that the structure that you play in is anything other than a criminal enterprise designed to get Donald Trump elected and ratings.

SPEAKER_05 20:15

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_08 20:15

So and it's really disturbing to me that I have to make that distinction between what one talented person is doing on a major television network and what the rest of that corporation is doing to my democracy. And I don't like splitting my brain that way. It hurts my little head because I'm liberal. I can't entertain more than one part at a time. So but but Rob Reiner did the Lord's work today.

SPEAKER_04 20:37

He did.

SPEAKER_08 20:38

He he beat him down. And but here's the thing the the end of the story is tomorrow Joe Scarborough will go right back to having a job for life.

SPEAKER_04 20:44

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_08 20:45

Nothing will change. Um, it will be forgotten, it'll be swallowed up by the great dumb media, it will never be spoken of again at MSNBC. Yeah, right, right. And liberals will pass it around like a dirty postcard, like we do. We'll remember, because our job is to remember these things. But it will not affect anything, and it will not change anything, and no one in the executive suites at MSNBC is gonna lose a minute's sleep over it. Because you know what? It was great TV.

SPEAKER_05 21:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 21:08

It was great, ooh, it was conflict. Urrrr dinosaurs fighting, uh, and tomorrow, you know, we'll do a cooking show and be cool.

SPEAKER_04 21:14

Well, and everyone, every employee of the network towed the party line at that moment. So it it didn't hurt anybody. Uh let's back up again. Let's back up. We're going to pretend that the Indiana primary hasn't happened yet.

SPEAKER_08 21:28

Okay. Let's all pretend put on our put on our yesterday caps.

SPEAKER_04 21:34

And Ted Cruz uh as candidate had quite a little uh meltdown on election day of um I as I said on the most popular tweet I wrote all week, um, we've reached that moment that we reach in every campaign where Lee Harvey Oswald is trending on Twitter.

SPEAKER_05 21:52

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 21:52

This was weird. And I mean this is a weird season anyway, but this was weird.

SPEAKER_01 21:58

Today is voting day here in the Indiana. The President of the United States has a bully pulpit unlike anybody else. The President of the United States affects our culture. And ask the people of Indiana: think about the next five years if this man were to become president. Think about the next five years. The boasting, the pathological lying, the picking up the National Enquirer and accusing people of killing JFK. The bullying. Think about your kids coming back and emulating this.

SPEAKER_04 22:30

Donald Trump taunting lying Ted Cruz with a story from the National Enquirer about his dad handing out pamphlets with Lee Harvey Oswald. Yeah. And that, you know, after an exhausting campaign and being up 14 hours a day on your feet trying to get people to vote for you in Indiana for two weeks, nonstop, seven days a week, to have someone say, and by the way, your dad hung out with the assassin of JFK. You know, that and and this is going to be taken seriously by the media because Donald Trump said it at that. And you're you're down six points to this asshole. I mean, I I can see why Ted Cruz melted down. I can I understand it. But he scorched the earth at that moment.

SPEAKER_05 23:20

He did.

SPEAKER_04 23:21

And it was, he's a liar. He brags about VD being his Vietnam. I mean, it went on and on for moment after moment after moment. And the thing was on Twitter and on my email blew up, and it's like, everybody turn on your TV now. It was one of those moments of we all you all have to see this live because it's real and it's going down.

SPEAKER_08 23:43

Well, and and you know, Chamberlain, the story goes, Neville Chamberlain, the reason that Hitler scheduled the uh armistice talks at a place where there was no smoking is he knew Chamberlain had to have a cigarette.

SPEAKER_05 23:55

Oh.

SPEAKER_08 23:55

And it drove him nuts. He was like, finally he was like, whatever, man.

SPEAKER_05 23:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 23:59

You need to smoke. Donald Trump understands how deals, not how deals are done in in terms of you and I would understand, going to uh a financial advisor or going to the bank or doing a mortgage. He understands how sort of deals are struck among dinosaurs, and he needed to put Ted Cruz down. He needed to knock him out in Indiana. And then he doesn't have to worry about anything anymore because he's out of the race. So what do you do when your opponent is exhausted and afraid and is looking at his poll numbers and seeing he's gonna lose, probably lose big, and he's bet everything on this, and he's out there, you know, his wife is looking at him like every every step he takes is awful.

SPEAKER_05 24:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 24:43

Everything he does makes him look creepy and terrifying, and that he frightens children, and his wife thinks he's a fucking weirdo. So how do you how do you put and he's exhausted? So what do you do? You know, his dad probably was involved in the Kennedy assassination. Boom!

unknown 24:58

You know?

SPEAKER_08 24:59

It's just out of left field. It's just some fucking lunatic punch out of left field, which a calmer, more well-rested, less desperate candidate would have shrugged off.

SPEAKER_05 25:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 25:10

You know, what do you want? Donald Trump's a liar. He lies all the time, he's lying about this. Let's talk about my trade policy. No, it he launched, and on the day of the election, if he scorched Earth a week before, maybe it makes a difference.

SPEAKER_05 25:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 25:23

But he he went ballistic long after, you know, the the missiles were in the air. There's no way to, you know, the Indiana was already out voting when he went on television and started screaming and raving about all these true things about Donald Trump and all these true things about Fox News. Yeah. You know, let's not forget that that part of Ted Cruz's rant was the people at Fox News, Roger Ayles and Rupert Murdoch at Fox News, have decided that Donald Trump's going to be president, and the media's against me. Well, the media's not against you. You're just a creepy, awful person. Uh, but and you deserve to lose because you're a creepy, awful person. But you're right. Fox News is in the tank for Donald Trump. Because they have to be. Yeah. Because he's the fascist that they could think they can control, and you're the one they think they can't. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 26:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 26:10

It's as simple as that. But this is this is your party, man. Surprise, surprise.

SPEAKER_04 26:14

I think that's the question then that becomes the theme of our show, the core of our show for the rest, which is this is your party, or is it?

SPEAKER_05 26:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 26:22

You know, because this is now, because everyone has left, Trump has left everyone in the dust. Kasich pulled out, which to me was a surprise. If you're the last man standing against Trump, why not give it a shot? But I I assume he ran out of money. Um anyway, the idea that now Trump is the only one left of the 17 people running for president. Yep. And no one saw this coming. No one saw that this was going to be that he was for real. No one in the Republican establishment or mainstream media.

SPEAKER_08 26:53

Someone else said the liberal blogosphere.

SPEAKER_04 26:55

Well, liberal blogosphere took him seriously, but a lot of people didn't. And I frankly, I agreed with Lawrence O'Donnell for a long time and said, you know, when he has to release his tax returns, when he has to really go up against reality in terms of who he is, and people people are going to reject that. And I underestimated how angry Republicans are. Republican-based primary voters are at their party. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_08 27:22

And how little they care about reality anymore. They really don't give a shit about the air they breathe, the water they drink, or the or whether the sun rises and sets in the east.

SPEAKER_04 27:33

Yep.

SPEAKER_08 27:33

It doesn't matter to them. The reality, they just divorced it.

SPEAKER_04 27:36

Right. And and they've divorced it for two reasons, I think. One is they've been fed a diet of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and Grudge for 30 years. And so reality, what's that? You know, they tastes bad. Right. It's it's everyone is a rhino unless they agree 100% with me.

SPEAKER_08 27:55

Right. And number two, if I may, yeah. They would have to admit liberals are right.

SPEAKER_04 27:59

Yes.

SPEAKER_08 27:59

And they'd rather die than do that. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 28:02

So well, and I and I think too, um, the economy for the Republican base is terrible. It is. As it is for the rest of us. So you're willing to vote for anything to change that. And and really, we have to give Donald Trump credit for one thing, which is he is the only one of those 18 or 17 people running for president who stood up and said to blue-collar unemployed America, you have a right to an economic future, and I'm going to fight for that for you. Now it's bullshit. Right. He's not going to reopen the goddamn coal mines. That is just a lie.

SPEAKER_05 28:37

No.

SPEAKER_04 28:38

Any more than he's going to rebuild his bankrupt companies and hire back all of the uh hotel cleaners that got laid off when he lost his Taj Mahal casino. He's not, you know, the economy uh the reason those coal mines are closing is their product isn't desirable anymore. Right. And the product that can be brought to market is being done by machines. Right. So uh automation has done as much to fire coal miners as uh clean air legislation. So um and the price of coal is higher now than the price of solar, if you can believe that. Right. So there's really uh uh an economic problem that will not be solved by reopening coal mines. That's not going to happen. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_08 29:28

There is no future in it. There literally is no future in digging coal out of the ground and burning it for fuel. Right. You can do it for a while.

SPEAKER_04 29:36

It's not just because it's environmental. And that's I think you know, coal miners want to blame Obama and his clean air initiatives and so forth for their plight, because that's easy to understand, and not blame the coal mines, which are being automated and which are expensive to run. And so it it just Trump's not going to do that. And that promise was just the biggest lie of the week in my book.

SPEAKER_08 30:00

But but once again, the there is a party that has worked rather hard, especially on the manufacturing sector, about which I know a great deal, to retrain workers, get them moving towards jobs that are not exportable, that will stay here. There's a gap. There is a long-standing gap in the jobs that are available and the training that's out there. It's not the there's the training gap is overrated. But Barack Obama started his candidacy in 2006, 2007, um, going to a high school that a group I'm familiar with helped open.

SPEAKER_04 30:39

Yeah, and it was a manufacturing.

SPEAKER_08 30:40

Manufacturing high school. It said more high schools should be doing this. The the Barack the Obama administration has been really consistent about worker retraining, about portable skills, about getting people jobs in the manufacturing sector, about light manufacturing, about advanced manufacturing, and it's not going to solve every problem. But it is a way and these are good jobs that can stay here and that can cause other jobs to be induced in the economy and do, and it has a pretty high multiplier effect. And yet, because he has a D after his name, it is impossible for these people to vote for him.

SPEAKER_04 31:16

And black skin.

SPEAKER_08 31:17

Can't do it. They cannot fucking do it. And that is suicidal. Unfortunately, these people are just gonna age out and die one day. Yeah. And their problems will die off with them. While they are here, they are making enormous amounts of mischief because they cannot get their fucking tiny heads wrapped around the fact that the Republican Party hates them and it's been fucking them over. And it has nothing to do with their gun ownership or their Bible or anything else. Those are the things they turn to when everything else fails. But it's failing because the trickle-down regonomics that they've voted for over and over and over again has screwed them. And they cannot admit it because then they become the chumps that liberals have always said they are. And again, they would rather die than do that. So they are just running that rope out to the very end, and they're gonna vote for the biggest, craziest, loudest, lionest scam artist, probably knowing on some level that he is all of those things. Because fuck you. America let me down. Guess what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna pull the pin on this grenade and roll it right out in the middle and boom, blow the whole fucking thing up. That's really why I think they're doing it. Yeah. They want to burn the system down. And who better to do it than Donald Trump? And I've got to say, looking back at this moment in history, the moment Trump effectively won the Republican nomination, the predictions and warnings from us and our fellow liberals had been spot on. And this was simply because we did what the legacy media refuses to do, still refuses to do, take an honest, clear-eyed look at the nature of the voting base the Republican Party has created for itself.

SPEAKER_04 32:58

Yep. We didn't let ourselves be blinded by the legacy media's both siders claptrap because, as bloggers, by 2016, we'd already spent over a decade deconstructing that big lie every day. And we certainly didn't fall for conservative media myths about the nobility and moral superiority of the average Republican voter because we live in the real world and we know real Republicans.

SPEAKER_08 33:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 33:22

And we've certainly seen them protesting Obama in a racist way. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_08 33:27

No, we yeah, we they're out they're here. We live in Trump country, boys and girls. Now, liberals did this by doing nothing more complicated or weird than looking at the racist garbage and conspiracy theories the base voraciously consumes as news by looking at how the base completely lost their goddamn minds over the election of Barack Obama, how the base had blindly supported George W. Bush's illegal war and then lashed out violently at anyone who questioned their dear leader W.

SPEAKER_04 33:57

And George W. Bush was a good Christian man, also.

SPEAKER_08 33:59

Just a good Christian man, and how dare you, a terrorist-loving America-hating scum who would question his wisdom.

SPEAKER_04 34:05

Exactly. Then liberals put on their thinking caps and thought real hard about who would this movement, built on grievance, conspiracy theories, and racial resentment really want in the White House? The answer was obvious. King of the berthers, Donald Trump.

SPEAKER_08 34:20

Duh. I mean, they built this party for him.

SPEAKER_04 34:24

Yep.

SPEAKER_08 34:25

And while we were doing that, you will remember the legacy media was busy shrieking about Hillary Clinton's emails. This is from Vox, December 7th, 2017. Quote, Hillary Clinton's emails got as much front page coverage in six days as policy did in 69 days. A stark finding from an analysis of New York Times coverage, unquote.

SPEAKER_04 34:46

And who can forget the title of Maureen Dowd's April 30th, 2016 column, quote, Donald the Dove, Hillary the Hawk.

SPEAKER_08 34:56

Yeah. Unquote. And nobody's ever lost their jobs over this shit. Because they never imagined Hillary Clinton could possibly lose.

SPEAKER_04 35:04

Yep. Even as the monster the Republican Party had created was snapping at their throats, our elite professional political media was still peddling this sort of surreal nonsense. This is from an original tweet, which Matthew Dowd has since deleted, along with all of his tweets from this era. At that time, Dowd had a huge platform as the chief political analyst at ABC News. And Matthew Dowd said this on Twitter. Either you care both about Trump being a sexual predator and Clinton emails, or you care about neither. But don't talk about one without the other. Unquote.

SPEAKER_08 35:45

A more perfect distillation of the both sides of the both sides nonsense.

SPEAKER_04 35:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 35:49

I've never heard. And I I used to write a lot about Matthew Dowd until he sort of sank from view. But you'll remember that Matthew Dowd at the time never let a day go by without condemning Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as equally awful and begging people to throw their vote away by disrupting the corrupt duopoly and voting for a third party candidate.

SPEAKER_04 36:10

And in all the time that has passed between then and now, Joe Scarborough hasn't changed one bit. He's only gotten worse.

SPEAKER_08 36:16

And the Republican Party, as you know, hasn't changed. It's only gotten a whole lot worse.

SPEAKER_04 36:20

The legacy media hasn't changed, it's only gotten worse.

SPEAKER_08 36:24

And that is the real story of the White House correspondence dinner.

SPEAKER_04 36:28

And this is where the pattern repeats. The same media failure that kept people from understanding Trump also keeps people from understanding the consequences of Trump's policies.

SPEAKER_08 36:40

Yeah. And if all we told you was that we were going to discuss a Republican scheme approved by the Republican Congress and signed off by Donald Trump that had brought about fear and suffering and death to millions of Americans, I would bet all the money in my pockets right now that you couldn't guess which policy we were talking about.

SPEAKER_04 37:00

Because so many of them do this.

SPEAKER_08 37:02

Yes, they all do this. And that should tell you something.

SPEAKER_04 37:05

Yeah, yeah. It could be this one from Common Dreams, quote, measles, salmonella, explosive diarrhea, public health crises erupt under JFK Jr.'s leadership, unquote.

SPEAKER_08 37:16

Or this from Michigan Public Radio, quote, Trump defends his tariffs during Michigan visit, even as businesses say they've been hurt, they've hurt the state, unquote.

SPEAKER_04 37:26

Or this one from the conversation, quote, 2.6 million Americans lost health insurance in 2025 after ACA subsidies expired, leading to real health consequences, unquote.

SPEAKER_08 37:39

Because too many Republican policies are built around the assumption that suffering imposed on vulnerable people is an acceptable price for ideological goals and tax advantages for the wealthy. Because what Adam Searer wrote in The Atlantic in 2018 is just the plain truth. The cruelty is the point.

SPEAKER_04 37:59

And I just I look back at these three. Let's look at these three White House correspondents. Colbert 2016, Larry Wilmore, which was Larry Wilmore and Barack Obama's last White House correspondence.

SPEAKER_08 38:13

Well Colbert 2006. Colbert 2006.

SPEAKER_04 38:16

Then then Larry in 2016. And today, 2026, with Donald Trump at the podium to, you know, losing his mind.

SPEAKER_08 38:29

Well, and and before the fun began, they announced these people, you know, they gave them their awards and their accolades, and they walked over and shook his hand.

SPEAKER_04 38:36

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_08 38:37

Which it just was I I can't think of any form of fiction other than Kafka that could cover this kind of bizarre, ludicrous, embarrassing, obscenely narcissistic display on both the side of both Trump and the media. And the media.

SPEAKER_04 38:53

Putting on tuxes and congratulating themselves, which is the theme of that dinner. Pat themselves on the back for being warriors for the First Amendment when they are nothing of the sort.

SPEAKER_08 39:05

No, and and it used to be they could get away with this because they would pretend they would assume we're all rubs that we don't know what goes on. And they're like that the dog, was it the dog and the hunter, or the dog and Bugs Bunny? You know, at five o'clock they check out and they're they're pals. Yeah. You know, once once the cameras stop rolling, they're all friends, they all go out to to drinks, they all hang out with each other, they all fuck each other, they all cheat on each other's wives, they go to each other's parties, they give each other uh give it money to each other's charities, and then when the cameras go on, they pretend to be you know uh the uh opponents. So fight, fight, fight. And we know better. We we see you, we've seen you for 20 years, more than 20 years. And we know that you all are just egotistical career, and we know because none of these assholes have lost their jobs.

SPEAKER_04 39:52

20 years on, it's a club, it's just a clubby club club. And and I was writing about this when uh John McCain and Hillary Clinton went to the same book party. Yeah, and it was Mark Halpron's The Way to Win. And Washingtonian magazine, you know, did this whole thing about all the celebrities, all the Washington celebrities at this party. And it is just so fake and incestuous and glad-handing and not about governing. It's about having power and money and that being an aphrodisiac. That's what it is.

SPEAKER_08 40:31

And and the people on the outside, all the liberals on the outside who wrote about this and talked about this and podcasts and blogs, warning the media what was happening to the Republican Party, and they just refused to fucking believe it. Because the Republicans they knew were their pals from the green room, and their pals from the bar, and their pals from whatever, you know, from the bed next to them in a lot of cases. Yes, right, right, right. And so this couldn't possibly be true. This is still play acting, we're still doing kabuki until Trump showed up and showed them how real it was, and they almost to a man and a woman folded, rolled over for him, and still do. And still does it.

SPEAKER_04 41:06

And and when Trump's gone, it's gonna be, oh, we're all going back to normal.

SPEAKER_08 41:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 41:11

Really? Democrats are gonna put up with this. We were called a cancer on the nation by a senior White House advisor, Stephen Miller, who created concentration camps in our country.

SPEAKER_08 41:25

Well, I I assume they'll do what they did with with um Abu Ghraib. They'll find some, you know, some lowly private or corporal, blame it on them, and then demand that everyone forget that you know that it was this was policy from the top. They'll find some scapegoat, they'll throw them under the bus, they'll send a few bad apples.

SPEAKER_04 41:44

Have we done anything about the separation of families and children from their parents? No. Oh no, we kept a database. Then it turned out no, they never did.

SPEAKER_08 41:55

No. Well, we we did do something about it. We we stopped keeping track of it.

SPEAKER_04 41:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 41:59

We just stopped pretending this is this is the Trump way. If you don't, like, as with military casualties, if you don't count a thing, it never happened.

SPEAKER_04 42:06

Jobs.

SPEAKER_08 42:08

Job numbers.

SPEAKER_04 42:09

There are no job numbers anymore.

SPEAKER_08 42:11

COVID 19. I mean, if we just keep all the people on the ship, then my numbers won't look so bad. And I I believe Fauci, I believe Mr. Fauci is now going to be testifying in front of Congress, and his diaries are like, I'm trying to fix this shit, and all Trump cares about are headlines and and and keeping his numbers up and and being approved of, and he's just lying his ass off. I think why we have the situation in hand, he goes right out and fucks it all up.

SPEAKER_04 42:36

Well, and Rand Paul wants to talk about lab leak.

SPEAKER_08 42:40

Right.

SPEAKER_04 42:40

You know, this is Rand Paul is gonna go after Fauci and put and his staff put Fauci diaries in hot pink scroll like cursive across the top of a page from typewritten notes of Fauci's to make it look like, you know, mean girls. It it's it's so pathetic. And Rand Paul is such a dweeb. Anyway, I'm I'm angry about a lot of things today. Let me just put it that way.

SPEAKER_08 43:12

Yeah. Um you don't even have to well you don't have to pick one, honey. You can be angry about a lot of things. But you know what?

SPEAKER_04 43:19

If I don't get in the car when you pick me up from work and I am so kind of my blood pressure is so high, not because I had a hard day at work, but because on the elevator ride down, I started thinking about Stephen Miller.

SPEAKER_03 43:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 43:33

And I just I have so so many thoughts of violence about that man that it scares me sometimes.

SPEAKER_08 43:41

Well, and and we could have gone on and on and on with specific policies that have destroyed lives, you know, destroying USAID, cancer uh research that's just gone forever because they decided to gut that. But all roads lead back to one source, which is Donald Trump and the Republican Party that nominated him and elected him. And approved of every one of his choices and let him get away with fucking murder, literally get away with killing people, and will and refuses to be held accountable, refuses to hold themselves accountable, and the the the legacy media that just keeps throwing these like this this you know what this reminds me of? This reminds me of um the mask of the red death. And when everyone's locked, there's a plague going on on the outside, Edgar Allan Poe's Mask of the Red Death, there's a plague going on on the outside, and all the pretty happy people have locked themselves in the fortress and are just gonna party away while while the rest of the country dies.

SPEAKER_04 44:35

Well, and they're all wondering am I gonna am I gonna get it? Am I gonna get it? Well, if I get it, and the and by the way, the plague is I'm gonna lose my job, I'm gonna lose my career in television, news, book industry, whatever. Yeah, and I may need a job at Newsmax. I may need a job if I'm lucky at Fox, therefore I can't burn any bridges. Right. I can't say that Fox is lying all the time. No, because what if I need a job? And by the way, there are some great people at Fox, Drift Glass. Great people, says Rachel. Yes.

SPEAKER_08 45:09

Says Rachel, said Rachel Maddow.

SPEAKER_04 45:11

Rachel Maddow.

SPEAKER_08 45:12

Rachel Maddow. No, there's some great people over doing some great journalism over there. There's not all of them. It's not all of them. And you know what? It is all of them. Because if you work it's a forehead, if you work for Sauron, if you work in Mordor, then it is part of your job. I don't care if you're the janitor there. That you're working for the team evil, and that makes you a bad person.

SPEAKER_04 45:30

So yes, it does. Yep. Yep. Yep. Driftglass, we got a new new surround up, a quick one.

SPEAKER_08 45:36

That's right. Quickie Crick after you.

SPEAKER_04 45:38

Uh Driftglass wanted to tell this story, and I said the best person who told this story this week was Red Painter over at Crooks and Liars. That's right. My former colleague. So this that's who we're going to read from. Uh again, Crooks and Liars, fantastic source. And the source of several of the audios that we use every week in our show, and particularly the No Fair Remembering stuff one.

SPEAKER_05 45:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 45:59

That's where we got Rob Reiner from the show. Um, it is so nice to have archives of videos and audios. Oh. And Crooks and Liars keeps them going, keeps them stored on their on their servers. Uh, all right. This is from Red Painter at Crooks and Liars quote: the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to give its blessing to a completely crazy executive order to place major new restrictions on mail in ballots prior to the midterm elections. In a normal world, I would not be worried about the Supreme Court entertaining something so insane. But in 2026, with this insanely corrupt Supreme Court, it is absolutely realistic to predict that they will find some reason or no reason at all to side with Donald Trump. Heck, they may put out a one-sentence order. It is ordered with no signature at all. Unquote.

SPEAKER_08 47:02

From USA Today, not from crooks and liars, sorry about that. Quote, Trump demanded that the Senate cancel its August reassess. Never gonna happen. Yeah. Until Republicans pass the Save America Act or eliminate the filibuster. Republicans, however, lack the votes for either approach. Senate Majority Leader John Thune tried to explain math to this idiot. That's my my addenda.

SPEAKER_04 47:25

At least he should try to explain the U.S. Senate to this idiot. They don't give up their August recess.

SPEAKER_08 47:32

No. And let me take off my shoes and socks so I can count the numbers that will be necessary that we don't have to pass this shit. Uh said he'd support keeping senators in Washington if only someone could show him the picture of victory at the end, noting that Republicans have already repeatedly tried to advance the bill. Unquote. We talked about this on a previous episode. They've tacked it onto a whole bunch of shit, and it never works because everybody can see what he's doing. And nobody wants that stink on them after the midterms when Democrats get to do trials and hearings and demand testimony.

SPEAKER_04 48:08

And by the way, we all know Mitch McConnell, and we're going to come up to that actually. I'm going to read it right now. Uh, from CNN, quote, Mitch McConnell is not medically cleared to leave rehab or return to the Senate six weeks after falling at home, unquote. Mitch McConnell isn't at the Senate, but the emulation of his little pinky finger stopping legislation from going forward, I have a feeling Democrats are just tag teaming the pinky finger wiggle of Mitch McConnell. Oh no, we're not gonna, we're gonna filibuster that one. Oh no, we're gonna filibuster that. Oh, Lizzie, Lizzie Warren, you want to filibuster? Sure, let me put up a different finger for you.

SPEAKER_08 48:46

Yeah, I got a figure for you. Yeah. And for those of you newbies out there who think filibusters has something to do with Mr. Smith goes to Washington. No, it does not. A filibuster is not a uh person of high conscience standing up and reading the Bible and the Constitution for four straight days. That is not how it works anymore. It hasn't worked that way forever. There's the intention to filibuster, which is signaled by raising your finger. And that's it. Filibuster's over. You've killed whatever it is anyone's trying to do and it's not.

SPEAKER_04 49:12

And that's because we have we have uh ancient people in the Senate. And, you know, I've I've had people take take me to task this week. Well, you also mean Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, they're too old too, right? And it's like, yeah, I wrote about this 10 years ago. We need more retirements in the Senate, not less.

SPEAKER_05 49:31

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 49:31

And that is not a dig at the great, you know, sky ons of liberalism in the U.S. Senate. It is not that. It is we need a younger set of people and newer ideas. And we need the reason we don't have actual filibusters where you pull out the COTs and people talk for 12 hours or two days or whatever, is they're all too old to do that. The vast majority of them are not only too old to do that, they their entire careers and their entire day-to-day life is run by their staffs.

SPEAKER_05 50:02

Right.

SPEAKER_04 50:03

Because they are not functioning. And Mitch McConnell has not been functioning for well before the time that he was falling and hospitalized.

SPEAKER_08 50:13

Oh, yeah. When they used to freeze up in public and get words wrong and just wander off. Uh, yeah, a good staff can do almost anything, including covering up the fact that your boss is dead. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 50:23

So, you know, that's it's or in a nursing home, which happened to a house member in Texas. Right. A memory unit. Come on, people. I'm gonna say it again. I work in a medical center. If I have a doctor appointment, I have to use paid time off to go to that doctor appointment. They have it on their system that that's where I am. I check in on the system that I look at. I'm not allowed to look at my own record. I get fired for doing that. But my scene my manager can do that. My manager can look at my record and see I've checked in at a doctor's office. My primary care physician's office is about 45 steps from where I sit all day.

SPEAKER_08 51:03

Yeah, it's not a big mystery where you are.

SPEAKER_04 51:06

Not a big mystery. If the nurse wants to find me, they know where I am. But everyone I have to take potential vacation time to go to the doctor. What is going on with these Congress people that they get just get to disappear because they're ill? Because they're so sidebying the voters.

SPEAKER_08 51:25

Yeah, well, yeah, yeah. Um now comes uh my favorite statistic of the week. Um, this is from Politico quote 32 political, yes, politico. Uh 32% of Americans said Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act hurt their finances, while 8% said it helped them a lot. I guess we know who the 8% are. 49%, however, said they couldn't explain what the One Big Beautiful Bill Act does. Now, this is the my favorite part. 26% of Republican voters, uh Trump voters, nevertheless believed it delivered substantial tax breaks for the working class.

SPEAKER_04 52:03

For the working class, which is this is this is to me the story of why Democrats are going to win the midterms this year. Because that is the signature piece of legislation from this White House. Yes, Barack Obama had Obamacare, had ACA. Donald Trump has the one big beautiful bill act. Now, Driftglass, when we start getting flooded with campaign ads on television, yes, there's going to be ads about the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and what it actually did.

SPEAKER_08 52:38

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 52:38

Who's going to be putting those ads out, Driftglass?

SPEAKER_08 52:41

Oh, is it going to be Trump? Everybody's going to be doing that, blue gal. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 52:46

Not everybody.

SPEAKER_08 52:47

No. Well, everybody on one side of the aisle is going to be doing that.

SPEAKER_04 52:49

And which side of the aisle is that? It's going to be our side.

SPEAKER_08 52:52

It's going to be our and here's all the things that that bill gutted.

SPEAKER_04 52:56

Took away from you. Took away from you.

SPEAKER_08 52:59

To pay for tax cuts for people like Donald Trump.

SPEAKER_04 53:02

Trump's friends. Yep. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 53:04

And that's it's as simple as that.

SPEAKER_04 53:06

And your senator's friend. Your Republican senator voted for this. Your Republican congressman voted to take away health care. Your Republican congressman voted to take away clean air from you.

SPEAKER_08 53:22

And by the way, this was almost a perfect straight party line vote.

SPEAKER_04 53:27

Yep.

SPEAKER_08 53:27

I think there were three Republicans in the Senate who voted against it, but not because it was cruel, but because it didn't do horrible Republican things enough for to satisfy them. They had to bring in JD Vance to break the fucking tie on this thing. So next time someone talks about both sides do it, point out not a single Democrat supported any of this shit.

SPEAKER_05 53:49

Nope.

SPEAKER_08 53:49

Democrats closed the government down to try to stop this thing. And it didn't work because Republicans.

SPEAKER_04 53:56

And they had to stop it when they realized people weren't going to have snap during Thanksgiving.

SPEAKER_08 54:00

Right. They were shutting, they were going to do this.

SPEAKER_04 54:03

And they didn't have the votes. They were not going to win.

SPEAKER_08 54:06

No. But what they did was they they put up a fight, which is what we asked them to do, and they don't have magic powers.

SPEAKER_04 54:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 54:14

So they couldn't stop it. But they could stand in the way long enough to to attract attention to the fact that this is the only thing these assholes are passing. Yeah. The one bill they're passing.

SPEAKER_04 54:23

I realize we're melding both the big beautiful bill, which was July 4th, and the ACA subsidies, which was later. But it's the same thing. Democrats did not vote for this shit.

SPEAKER_08 54:34

Right.

SPEAKER_04 54:35

Uh all right. From NBC News, quote, a key grand jury witness, a key witness, drift glass, in a case against a former Olympic canoeist accused of tampering with the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, testified that the area was already damaged and would have required repairs regardless. Lawyers said in a court filing Monday, this case is is having a bad court thingy drifting.

SPEAKER_08 55:01

It's having a bad court thingy. I I mean, you and I were both married to lawyers at some point.

SPEAKER_04 55:05

Yes, we were. In law school. And he would say, Madam, that's ketchup. And if you're a lawyer, you know what that means. So yeah, this is not good.

SPEAKER_08 55:32

I have the only thing I remember are riparian and uh title rights tend to be uh very heavily weighted towards the West because that's where all water disputes are. And what the was it five exceptions to the hearsay rule are? I don't know.

SPEAKER_04 55:46

Well the hearsay rule, the madam, that's ketchup, is an exception to the hearsay rule.

SPEAKER_08 55:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 55:50

Yeah. But but I think on the ketchup, the idea is it is slippery. It is an understood that ketchup is slippery and you will fall.

unknown 55:58

Yes.

SPEAKER_08 55:59

Uh but the idea that this is this is just and all their cases are falling apart.

unknown 56:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 56:04

This one should never have made it to court because the witness who's gonna who's gonna put the finger at the guy and say, no, actually, it was fucked up before he got there. Yeah. Uh how did you not know that before the case started? How did you fire it?

SPEAKER_04 56:15

I had to bring the case to be so it could be on Newsmax or Fox or whatever. Just so Donald Trump would feel good.

SPEAKER_08 56:22

Yeah, so he can give me num nums and call me a good boy.

SPEAKER_04 56:25

And not fire me.

SPEAKER_08 56:26

Right.

SPEAKER_04 56:26

And not fire me. Yeah, it's your turn.

SPEAKER_08 56:29

From Fortune magazine, from Fortune magazine, quote, billionaires have already poured four hundred and thirty-three million dollars into the two oh two six midterms, and eighty percent of that money is going to Republicans.

SPEAKER_04 56:42

We need to tax it at a hundred percent.

SPEAKER_08 56:44

Yeah, tax.

SPEAKER_04 56:47

If you donate over a million dollars to a presidential campaign, it's taxed at a hundred percent.

SPEAKER_08 56:52

If you donate over a thousand dollars, three thousand dollars.

SPEAKER_04 56:55

Well, twenty three hundred is the limit right now. Yeah, that's reasonable. Everything else over the course of over the course of a campaign, twenty three hundred dollars. That's like giving a hundred dollars a month for two years. Okay. If you if you have that kind of money and you really want to support a candidate, okay. Over that, it's taxed at 100%.

SPEAKER_08 57:13

But you know what? Contributions to our podcast are not taxed at 100%.

SPEAKER_04 57:17

No, they are not. And this is the one place in America doing that, folks.

SPEAKER_08 57:21

This is the one place in America where where money is, in fact, speech. So do it. Do it.

SPEAKER_04 57:27

We do appreciate you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_08 57:28

We really do.

SPEAKER_04 57:28

Uh, all right. This is uh from Aaron Rupar on Blue Sky. We love him. Uh, quote, Trump takes issue with the Lindsey Graham eulogy while he's reading it. Virtually everyone liked Lindsay. Well, wait, not everybody. That but it sounds good, but I have to be honest, I have to veer from this for a second. And the head slap from his speech writers, like we wrote you a speech. Yes, just say something nice about the dead person.

SPEAKER_08 57:59

And nine seconds into it, he has to decide I'm gonna shit on the dead guy, I'm gonna make it all about me.

SPEAKER_04 58:05

Yeah, and if there isn't another yet another sign of uh borderline dementia person, if not total dementia person, yeah, yeah, just blurting out stuff about that.

SPEAKER_08 58:19

No more signs are necessary, by the way. No, exactly. Exactly.

SPEAKER_04 58:22

We're convinced. We're convinced. Hey, feel free to write to both of us at proleftpodcast at gmail.com. We love hearing from you. Be aware that if you write to us at any of our addresses, we reserve the right to read your email or U.S. Postal Service Go Postal Unions letter on the air, unless you say otherwise. Speaking of which, yeah, let me wiggle this actual piece of paper in front of the microphone.

SPEAKER_08 58:50

It's real paper, people, not from Sandsburg.

SPEAKER_04 58:52

It's printed on real paper and mailed to us. Uh, this is a letter we got this week. Greetings. As a former letter carrier and still a union member, I decided to send this through the United States Postal Service. And while, yay, and while I may use the left side of my brain more while listening to your podcast, I like to think I use the my right side too while putting together this modest donation to your cause. Both sides did it. Thanks for all you do, Frank in San Diego. Thank you, Frank. We so appreciate former letter carriers and still union members. Absolutely. You're very, very appreciated. Your thanks for your letter. And uh thank you to all of you for supporting our show, whether you send us a contribution via USPS or uh you support our show on Patreon or PayPal. We appreciate it so much. And all those details are at our website, prolefpod.com.

SPEAKER_08 59:57

Even if you're not a paying member of our little club here, you can share our show on social media. That helps us out a lot. And if you love this podcast, please get someone else to listen to it as well.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:06

Hey Driftglass, how are the internet kitties doing this week?

SPEAKER_08 1:00:09

Well, blow gal, the internet kitties think the White House correspondence dinner should be sent to a farm upstate to play with New Coke and Windows Vista.