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Elon Gets DOGE'd
01:12:30
As Tesla's losses mount, Elon Musk promises to step away from his work at DOGE and focus on his flailing car company. Trump and his top advisers flip-flop on China tariffs, even as Trump steers more cash into his own pocket by raffling off White House access to the top investors in his memecoin. Exclusive new polling shows Trump's weaknesses on immigration, even as the administration continues its crackdown and the courts push back. Jon and Dan discuss if Elon is gone for good or merely taking a sabbatical, whether DOGE will hold any sway without him, and how a high-profile exit from CBS's 60 Minutes is a troubling sign for media everywhere. Then, Jon and Dan sit down with Amanda Litman, the co-founder of Run For Something, to talk about her new book for Crooked Media Reads, When We’re in Charge, a brilliant guide for young people looking to get into leadership positions.
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- [00:00]
Jon Favreau
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- [00:22]
Dan Pfeiffer
Not a care in the world.
- [00:23]
Jon Favreau
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- [01:13]
Dan Pfeiffer
Race the rudders. Race the sails. Race the sails.
- [01:17]
Jon Favreau
Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching. Over.
- [01:20]
Dan Pfeiffer
Roger. Wait. Is that an enterprise sales solution?
- [01:25]
Jon Favreau
Reach sales professionals, not professional sailors.
- [01:28]
Dan Pfeiffer
With LinkedIn ads, you can target the.
- [01:31]
Jon Favreau
Right people by industry, job title and more. We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign. Get started today at LinkedIn.com results terms and conditions app. Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau.
- [02:06]
Dan Pfeiffer
I'm Dan Pfeiffer.
- [02:07]
Jon Favreau
Here we are in D.C. back home. Yeah, Dan's delivering the big speech at the correspondence center. And you're the comedian, Right.
- [02:15]
Dan Pfeiffer
And you're here for a bill signing in the Oval Office, right?
- [02:17]
Jon Favreau
I'm here. I'm here for the eo. Yeah, it's really exciting. No, we're just in town for a couple days just to catch up with some people and I don't know, what do you think of D.C. since we have. I haven't been here in a year. Seems more ominous, but maybe that's just my own.
- [02:32]
Dan Pfeiffer
I think that's in your head.
- [02:33]
Jon Favreau
It is in my head.
- [02:33]
Dan Pfeiffer
You could walk around and not know the democracy is collapsing around you. Like the Lincoln Memorial still standing.
- [02:39]
Jon Favreau
For now.
- [02:39]
Dan Pfeiffer
For now.
- [02:40]
Jon Favreau
For now. We haven't left yet. All right, on today's show, we're gonna talk about Elon Musk, who is leaving the White House to spend more time with his ailing car company. We'll talk about what it means for his quest to break all the government services Americans rely on. We'll also talk about Donald Trump's quest to make America poorer with his big dumb trade war and his quest to make himself richer with a new crypto scheme to literally sell dinners with Trump and White House tours to people who buy his meme coin. Shocking, but not really. We've also got our hands on some exclusive new polling that lines up with a lot of other recent polls that show just how unpopular Trump's illegal deportations are with the public. And then our good friend Amanda Lippman, the co founder of Run for Something, comes by to talk about her new book for Crooked Media reads When we're in Charge, which is a fantastic guide for young people looking to get into leadership positions. But first, let's talk about the Art of the Deal, which hopefully all of you have read by now.
- [03:32]
Dan Pfeiffer
It's required reading in America.
- [03:33]
Jon Favreau
It's required reading. Here's how it works. You win an election based largely on the perception that you'll lower prices and keep the economy growing. Upon taking office, you start a massive trade war with the entire world that panics the markets, sends investors fleeing from the United States, and threatens to plunge the economy into recession. Then you pause some of the tariffs, raise them on China, promise to make a bunch of deals, make no deals, and for good measure, threaten to fire the Fed chair, who you appointed. If any of that sounds confusing, here's a sampling of what it was like to follow the Trump administration's statements on the economy. Just this week on Jerome Powell, you said that the termination of Jerome Powell.
- [04:14]
Amanda Lippman
Cannot come fast enough.
- [04:15]
Jon Favreau
He says he won't leave even if.
- [04:17]
Amanda Lippman
You ask him to.
- [04:18]
Dan Pfeiffer
Oh, he'll leave if I ask him to.
- [04:20]
Amanda Lippman
He'll be out of there. No, I have no intention to fire.
- [04:22]
Dan Pfeiffer
According to this source in the room, what the treasury secretary said was, no one thinks the current status quo is.
- [04:28]
Jon Favreau
Sustainable at 145 and 125% in terms.
- [04:32]
Dan Pfeiffer
Of the relationship with tariffs with China.
- [04:35]
Jon Favreau
Let me be clear. There will be no unilateral reduction in tariffs against China. The president has made it clear China needs to make a deal with the.
- [04:42]
Dan Pfeiffer
United States of America not going to.
- [04:44]
Amanda Lippman
Say, oh, I'm going to play hardball with China.
- [04:46]
Jon Favreau
I'm going to play hardball with you, President Xi.
- [04:48]
Amanda Lippman
No, no, we're going to be very nice. They're going to be very nice.
- [04:52]
Jon Favreau
You got all that, Dan? One last kicker from this morning. A top Chinese official said there had been no talks and that the US Must cancel all of its tariffs if it wants a deal. He quoted a Chinese proverb. The person who tied the bell must untie it. Nice. Do you think Trump's going to untie the bell? And what do you make of all the back and forth? I think they. Trump was asked again right before we were recording about the Chinese official who made those comments, and he was like, well, there was a meeting this morning, and then maybe I'll reveal who it was at some point, but there's a meeting. So I think it's. It's fake news. The fake news. The story about the fake news. The fake news.
- [05:27]
Dan Pfeiffer
Got it, got it, got it, got it. I have some questions about the Chinese proverb.
- [05:31]
Jon Favreau
Yeah. How do you tie a bell?
- [05:32]
Dan Pfeiffer
Yeah, well, you can't. Well, I thought it was gonna be the person who rings the bells unring the bell, but you can't unring a bell, which is the whole point of the original saying.
- [05:40]
Jon Favreau
I think they got to work on that. I think we should jack up the tariffs a little more just for that problem.
- [05:43]
Dan Pfeiffer
It's also possible things have gotten lost in translation here. I mean, this is insanity. But it also should be completely expected. This is what happens when you put in the White House a erratic older man who hasn't had a new idea since Cheers was on the air. And then he surrounds himself with a bunch of yahoos who view their only job is to make the mad King happy. And so you end up with this pure chaos. And it is like there is no coherent policy. There is no coherent ideology behind the policy. There is no consistency between, on a minute to minute basis, like, we're recording this on Thursday afternoon, East coast time. By the time people listen to this on Friday morning, it's very possible and perhaps probable that there will be an entirely new position on terrorists with China by the time you listen to this.
- [06:35]
Jon Favreau
It's a good bet. I mean, there's always been this axiom that the only real constraint on Trump is that he won't do anything that tanks the markets. But from Liberation Day onward, at least that hasn't been true. What do we know, if anything, about why he may ultimately back down?
- [06:53]
Dan Pfeiffer
Well, he. He is Responding to the markets. Right. And he has been since the beginning here when the he put the first tariffs on Canada, Mexico market tanked, he took them off. Then he put new tariffs on Canada and Mexico market tanked. They announced a bunch of exceptions and basically made them hollow shells himself. Then he puts a global. Then he does the reciprocal tariffs on everyone. Market tanks takes those off, moves it down to 10% but keeps them on China Market tanks takes them off or at least talks about taking them off to make the market go up. Talks about firing Jerome Powell market tanks says he's not going to fire Jerome Powell market gains again. And so he is responding to it. The problem is he does not. I mean, it's going to shock him, but he doesn't get it. He doesn't get that every time he takes the market and then changes his position, he's making the next time he changes his position less helpful. The stock market will come back. The stock market always comes back. But every time he's inserting more uncertainty into the economy, which is going to depress everything. Right. We got reports this morning that new home sales are at their lowest level since 2022, coming right out of the pandemic. And this is all happening because no one, not a major corporation, not a small business, not a family, can make any decisions. They have no idea what's happening. Are things about things that we all need about to be exponentially more expensive in a few weeks or not? We don't know. Are we going to be in a recession or not? We don't know. Is Jerome Powell going to be in charge of monetary policy or will it be someone from Fox Business? We don't know. And because of that, it is doing real damage to the economy that is cannot simply be undone by another truth contradicting what Caroline Levitt said earlier that day.
- [08:42]
Jon Favreau
Yeah, the first reaction from the White House when it started was like, oh, who cares about the markets? And that's just Wall street. And we're focused on Main Street. And what they missed about that, aside from the fact that most Americans have at least some money in the stock market most of their retirement, that the market is just responding to how they believe the economy is going to fare. And the economic damage has already begun and we haven't even seen the worst of it yet. Even if the trade war stops tomorrow, by the way, some of this is priced in because. But I do think that he met with this week the CEOs of Target and Walmart and Home Depot and they reportedly told him that we are a couple weeks away from empty shelves. Not just higher prices. They said that too. But empty shelves because there'll be such a supply chain issue, which is what we dealt with during the pandemic for reasons that weren't just some idiot's trade war and IMF. They had originally predicted the inflation rate. The US was supposed to be 1.9% this year. They've upped that prediction to 3%. There are truck plants in Maryland and Pennsylvania already laying off hundreds of workers because orders aren't coming in due to a lack of certainty. Manufacturers are already reducing headcount. Remember this whole thing, one of the rationales, one of the many, is that we're bringing manufacturing back to the United States, but it's actually making things more expensive. And manufacturing is going to leave the United States or at least lay off workers.
- [10:03]
Dan Pfeiffer
Yes. Because they get the parts from other countries.
- [10:07]
Jon Favreau
Yeah.
- [10:07]
Dan Pfeiffer
I mean, there's even. It's like it's affecting small businesses. It's like there is a small business that my wife uses to buy name tags for, like, the small name tags for, like, kids, clothes and lunchboxes, stuff like that. They went out of business because the tariffs. They sent an email out to everyone saying that they couldn't afford it because the tariffs. Because I assume they get the products from China.
- [10:25]
Jon Favreau
The other challenge I don't think they've really thought through is, is, you know, doing a full trade war with the Chinese. Chinese government. They've been authoritarian government for a long time, and. And so they can basically force their people to accept much more pain than maybe Americans are willing to accept. And so they can. I don't know that China's gonna be. I mean, from that. From that wonderful proverb we heard, I don't know that China's gonna be backing down anytime soon because Trump looks like an idiot. It's causing Trump political pain. And I think they can. Like, obviously China doesn't wanna be in this trade war, but I think that they can probably last longer than Trump thinks they can.
- [11:06]
Dan Pfeiffer
Of course they absolutely can. There's no political pressure. She's not Worrying about the YouGov daily tracking poll and how it's gonna impact the generic ballot. That's not a concern of his. So he doesn't have that problem. But there's a world where a normal, competent president with a coherent economic and foreign policy would be marshaling the world to unite against China in this trade war. You would be working with the eu, but also other Asian countries. But instead, Trump has pissed off the entire world and now these countries are gonna be in a position where they're gonna be incentivized to cut specific deals with China.
- [11:42]
Jon Favreau
Well, and already there's reports that Japan is saying they don't wanna be part of any deal that screws over China because that's a market for them. China has reached out to the EU and has said, let's form an alliance against the United States, just as they.
- [11:57]
Dan Pfeiffer
Put it on the whiteboard. Unfucking real.
- [12:01]
Jon Favreau
And again, this is like he could climb down from this whole thing tomorrow and pretend it's a big victory and say they're talking about how they're weeks and weeks and maybe months away from actual deals, but maybe there's a memorandum of understanding they can have with India about the contours of a deal. So they're gonna, like, they could take something and say, oh, big victory, Trump wins already. Economic damage. And I think it's gonna be very hard to put this back in the box even if he stops tomorrow. Yeah, we're also, we're seeing a lot of new polling now on how Americans are looking at all this. I think you guys talked about that this week on Polar Coaster.
- [12:34]
Dan Pfeiffer
Yep. I spoke with Molly Murphy, who is one of the smartest Democratic pollsters. She polled for the Harris campaign, but also for Alyssa Slotkin, Josh Stein and a whole bunch of other candidates. And we talked about state of politics, public opinion, but also about the polling. We have a clip.
- [12:50]
Amanda Lippman
We just did a poll. We do polling with the Wall Street Journal and we looked at the tariff policies. We looked at how people think it will affect economy and their costs. And a majority of Americans oppose the tariffs. 75% think it will cause their own costs to go up. And as you said, they voted for him to bring costs down. The nuance here with Trump is that when he messages this, he messages short term gain. It's odd that he gets away in some ways with being honest with people by saying short term pain, long term gain. We've got some big problems. And so there's about a third of Americans who are sitting in this. Maybe we're going to take on some short term pain. If we see things get better, it will be worth it. But I think we all know that this isn't going to result in lower costs for people. It is not going to turn out that way. And those will be the fissures. And that's really the imperative for Democrats to really take on and not let him get away with the messaging that he's currently putting out there.
- [13:45]
Dan Pfeiffer
Let me Expound upon what Molly said there, which is they had three groups of voters. There's a groups who are all paying. Right. And that's mostly Democrats, people who don't like Trump. There is a group of people who are no pain. It's not going to hurt a short term, it's not going to hurt us long term. Right.
- [13:59]
Jon Favreau
Enjoy.
- [14:00]
Dan Pfeiffer
Great. Tariffs are great and that's Trump's base. And the middle is some pain, but some long term gain. A lot of these folks are independents, some of them are soft Republicans, but that's the group that Democrats are going to have to focus on when the medium and long term gain does not happen.
- [14:17]
Jon Favreau
Yeah, short term pain, long term decline, long term global economic collapse. And look, I think that people, people may say, let's give them some time, weeks, months, it's understandable. And we're almost 100 days in if you're a Trump fan. Right. But I don't think people have the patience that they even tell pollsters they have because none of us have patience anymore. Mostly because of our screens and media and the way the world works. So I don't think in like a couple of weeks, if the shelves are empty at fucking Target, people are going to be like, well, this short term pain, I just, I know something better is right around the corner.
- [14:49]
Dan Pfeiffer
Well, people are against the tariffs and they're suffering almost no consequences of them yet.
- [14:53]
Jon Favreau
Right. A lot of times if you run.
- [14:55]
Dan Pfeiffer
A business, you're dealing with this, but as a consumer, you're not yet paying higher prices in most cases and the shelves are not yet empty. We're not facing supply chain. So when that happens, it is truly stunning. It takes actual effort to both crash the economy and raise prices. Normally you raise prices because the economy is running too hot. That's when inflation comes. And so he's put us in a position where we're going to be potentially in a recession and we're going to have inflation. That is like really impressive stuff from.
- [15:26]
Jon Favreau
The guy and just completely 1000% self inflicted. He could have just come into office and not done any of this and the economy would be just chugging along. Great. Right.
- [15:37]
Dan Pfeiffer
That is largely what he did in his first term. Like his major economic accomplishment was not fucking up Barack Obama's economy. Yes, he just did. They passed his tax cut. It didn't do really do anything other than enrich shareholders.
- [15:49]
Jon Favreau
Yeah, he did. One accomplishment was adding to the deficit.
- [15:52]
Dan Pfeiffer
Yes, he definitely added to the deficit. But in that period from 2017 to before COVID kicked in, basically just Kind of chugged along. It was the same economy and didn't do. He didn't try to mess with it this time. He tried to mess with it. And we're all paying the price. Literally.
- [16:14]
Jon Favreau
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- [17:17]
Dan Pfeiffer
Yeah, you got to just clean house.
- [17:18]
Jon Favreau
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- [17:49]
Dan Pfeiffer
Race the rudders. Raise the sails. Race the sails.
- [17:53]
Jon Favreau
Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching. Over.
- [17:56]
Dan Pfeiffer
Roger. Wait. Is that an enterprise sales solution?
- [18:00]
Jon Favreau
Reach sales professionals, not professional sailors.
- [18:04]
Dan Pfeiffer
With LinkedIn ads, you can target the.
- [18:06]
Jon Favreau
Right people by industry, job title and more. We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign. Get started today at LinkedIn.com results. Terms and conditions apply. One person who's not concerned about the impact of Donald Trump's trade war on their personal finances. Donald Trump, who's very busy abusing his office to make himself richer. That's right, Dan. It's time for another corrupt date. You think that's gonna stick? I don't know.
- [18:36]
Dan Pfeiffer
I mean, it really will be up to us to make it stick. Like, we would just have to do it a lot, then it'll be there working. We're in charge, sort of.
- [18:44]
Jon Favreau
If you have any questions or complaints, just direct them to John Levitt. On Wednesday, a website hyping the Trump meme coin announced that Trump would host an exclusive dinner for the 220 people who own the most Tokens to be held at a Trump Club in Virginia, followed by a private tour of the White House for the top 25 investors. This caused the coins price to jump 60%, which is money in Trump's pocket because his family's company owns a majority of the coins. The website announcing all this, gettrumpmemes.com fuck. Says it has a leaderboard going for the people who've bought the most so far. You have to register to see it, which I have not had the time to do yet. But the copy says the competition is fierce. Own Trump or watch from the sidelines. Josh Dossey at the Wall Street Journal reported that even White House aides were surprised by the promotion. And you've got some of the most corrupt goobers in the world in the White House, and they're like, I don't know about that. Are you in or are you on the sidelines?
- [19:41]
Dan Pfeiffer
I could not be further on the sidelines.
- [19:45]
Jon Favreau
I guess you're not gonna own Trump.
- [19:48]
Dan Pfeiffer
Not in a financial sense, no.
- [19:50]
Jon Favreau
So I know that there's like, a lot of people aren't familiar with how meme coins work. I was one of them until, like, I don't know, a couple months ago last year. It does seem like this is a case, though, of, like, blatant corruption that's not too hard to explain and should make people, most voters, pretty pissed.
- [20:08]
Dan Pfeiffer
Yeah. You do not need to understand what a meme coin is to understand that this is Trump selling access to the White House, pure and simple and to himself. Right. It's access to. Right. Access to the President. So whoever spends the most money to put money is. It's legal, quasi legalized bribery. Whoever spends the most money will get to get to the President to bend his ear for whatever their chosen policy goal is, or more likely, pardon that they would like. And it's Just. I want to just explain this a little bit, which is Trump makes money here in two ways. One, he makes money. His. His company and his family make money off the sale of every coin. So every one of these people who is buying one of these coins, we meet Trump is paying him when they do it, and then they are inflating the worth of each individual coin. Trump's family owns a ton of them, so his net worth goes up. And so whenever he does the rug pull and sell some of his coins, he will make a whole bunch more money because of this. You could not. This is just how gross this is, is. If this was a campaign fundraiser, it would be illegal. You could not do this in the White House. You could not invite. Ask people to give money for the specific purpose of getting a White House tour or a meeting with the President of the White House. You can.
- [21:21]
Jon Favreau
That's.
- [21:21]
Dan Pfeiffer
And that money doesn't go to him, and you are not allowed to. And that would be. Have transparency about who did it. Obviously, there's transparency here because there's a fucking leaderboard. Although it's not. I haven't seen the leaderboard, but I don't think it's giving name, occupation, and state like the FEC does. So there's transparency. If it was campaign financing, and none of that money could theoretically go to the President himself. He can't spend it on his own stuff. This is going directly into his bank account. We have people auctioning off time with the President in the White House to make him richer. It is the most corrupt thing that any President, Richard Nixon included, has ever done, hands down. It's not even close.
- [22:00]
Jon Favreau
I was just thinking about this, and we should ask one of our strict scrutiny pals, but the Supreme Court decision about how the President is immune from criminal prosecution for acts that could be construed as within his official duties as President. Feels like this is outside of that. I don't know how you. I don't know how you can make. Because I think that one of the. One of the examples people brought up was like, oh, could you just bribe the President for a pardon? And you could say, well, the pardon power is his power as President. But this is like, there's. How is any of this related to any official act of the President?
- [22:41]
Dan Pfeiffer
I mean, it's obviously not. It's clearly not.
- [22:44]
Jon Favreau
I think he could be prosecuted for this.
- [22:46]
Dan Pfeiffer
I would love to see the legal brief making the case that this is somehow adjacent to crypto policy, something the President is in charge of.
- [22:52]
Jon Favreau
Yeah, me. David Tack is Going to get to work on that one. Yeah. This is bad. This is one that I think people.
- [22:57]
Dan Pfeiffer
Should talk about and everyone should know about this, because it is.
- [23:00]
Jon Favreau
Especially as they. You go to Target, the shelves are empty, you just lost your job at the, at the manufacturing plant because they had to lay people off because all the uncertainty. And then you turn on the news and the Trump meme coin just jumped 60% because he's walking around the White House with the top investors just absolutely, absolutely wild. I don't know. That seems like you could make something out of that. All right, speaking of rich assholes, the richest and the biggest made some news this week. Elon Musk, the shit posting sperm super donor who Trump brought in to wreck the federal government, will be stepping away from his duties here in Washington, which is, which is really why we're here for the Illinois party. We were invited.
- [23:38]
Dan Pfeiffer
That's right. I mean, you and he do have an online relationship.
- [23:41]
Jon Favreau
We do, yeah. So it's good to, just to see him in person. Just heartbreaking. Heartbreaking that he's leaving such a loss. We learned this on Tuesday after the news broke that Tesla's net income for the first quarter fell 71% and revenue dropped 9% from the same period last year. Is that, is that good?
- [23:59]
Dan Pfeiffer
I'm not a business guy, but seems like no.
- [24:01]
Jon Favreau
Elon made an appearance on the company's earnings call to offer his best guess as to why that might be. And what happens now? Let's listen. As people know, there's been some blowback for the time that I've been spending in government with the Department of Government Efficiency, or doge. But the large slug of work necessary to get the Doge team in place and working in the government to get the financial house in order is mostly done. Next month, May, my time allocation to DOGE will drop significantly. I'll have to continue doing it for, I think, the remainder of the President's term, just to make sure that the waste and fraud that we stop does not come roaring back. Trump was then asked about this in the Oval Office on Wednesday night. Here's what he said. Can't speak more highly about any individual.
- [24:56]
Amanda Lippman
He's an incredible guy.
- [24:58]
Dan Pfeiffer
He's a brilliant guy.
- [24:59]
Amanda Lippman
He's a wonderful person.
- [25:01]
Dan Pfeiffer
I've seen him with his family.
- [25:03]
Jon Favreau
I've seen him with a lot of his children.
- [25:04]
Amanda Lippman
He's got a lot of children.
- [25:06]
Dan Pfeiffer
And he was a tremendous help both.
- [25:08]
Jon Favreau
In the campaign and in what he's done with Doge.
- [25:13]
Amanda Lippman
I also know that he was treated very unfairly. By the, I guess he caught the public, by some of the public, not.
- [25:20]
Jon Favreau
By all of it.
- [25:21]
Amanda Lippman
He makes an incredible car, makes everything he does is good. But they took it out on Tesla and I just thought it was so unfair.
- [25:30]
Jon Favreau
Poor Tesla. Tesla, Tesla. Note the past tense there. He was a tremendous help. We also learned that Elon and Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary apparently got into a shouting match recently outside the Oval about who would run the irs. Because Scott Besant wanted a competent, experienced professional to run the irs and Elon wanted the random quote unquote whistleblower that yelled something about Hunter Biden and some scandal that I can barely remember at this point, who was just some like mid level flunky. He wanted him to run the irs. So they fought about that outside the Oval. At one point, Elon called Besant a Soros agent. So welcome, welcome to the club. Scott, first of all, how much of Tesla's problems, sorry, Tesla's problems are attributable to the blowback that Trump was talking about and what other factors were in play. In other words, did we, the woke mob, just score a big win?
- [26:26]
Dan Pfeiffer
Yes, the big win for the woke mob. Tesla probably has four problems. The first is the guy who runs the company has been doing everything but run the company for a while now, usually a problem. Two, it's hard to know how much the political blowback impacted sales, but just common sense is the customer base for Tesla is generally, maybe they should rewrite Tesla, they could use a brand refresh. Is generally well to do. Climate conscious liberals, people who probably aren't super into buying cars from a company run by a guy tweeting about replacement theory at 3 in the morning.
- [27:08]
Jon Favreau
Yeah, these are the people who crawled across glass to vote for Susan Crawford in Wisconsin.
- [27:13]
Dan Pfeiffer
Yes, exactly, exactly. Three is the tariffs. They mentioned this in the call. It's hard to know exactly how much that is going to affect them shortly in the near term here. But they get a lot of their parts from overseas. And the last thing is there's more competition in the EV market. There are just more companies making better cars. And so if you have a choice between two pretty good EVs of similar price, are you really, really going to pick the one from Elon Musk? Maybe not.
- [27:38]
Jon Favreau
Well, and I think especially orders for Tesla from Europe were way down.
- [27:43]
Dan Pfeiffer
Yeah, this is true both at home and abroad.
- [27:44]
Jon Favreau
Europeans, you think we're, we're mad at Elon. They're pretty mad because he goes over there and he's like, hey, what about the Nazis? Did not really Say that, but that was a shorthand for one of his many speeches over there in Europe. What do you make of Elon's departure? On the one hand, it was kind of expected. He was designated a special government employee, which you can only be for a certain amount of time. But if you're longer than that, then it triggers like, you know, disclosure, disclosure, ethics stuff, all the stuff that Elon would want to avoid. So we knew he was going to leave at some point. But, you know, on the other hand, Trump's cabinet and most Americans have really come to dislike Elon. So what do you think?
- [28:27]
Dan Pfeiffer
It's weird. And the American people and Pete Hegseth can agree on something. I think it's a pretty big deal. First, I think it's worth saying, is he really leaving?
- [28:36]
Jon Favreau
Like, yeah.
- [28:37]
Dan Pfeiffer
When companies have a very bad quarter, they tend to want to announce something on the earnings call that suggests they have a plan to fix the problem. And so Elon saying he's returning, he's getting out of government, coming back, solves the political backlash problem and the problem of the absentee landlord at Tesla. And so that is a reason to give, to minimize the market fallout right after the earnings call. And it actually, I think in this case did a little bit solve some of those problems. So is he really leaving? It's not a super honest guy. I don't know. But if he is leaving, I do think this is the functional end of Doge. He. I mean, who else is going to have the power to actually do the things he's doing, Right, to bully Cabinet so poorly. Yeah, do it absolutely poorly. Like, everything he's doing is, it's incompetent, but it is severe. And it's very hard to get severe cuts in Washington. And he's able to do those in the worst way possible, don't get me wrong, because he is more powerful both with more powerful globally and more influential with Trump than anyone who serves in his Cabinet. But if there's someone else running Doge, like, what flunky is going to be able to end run Scott Besant to Donald Trump? No one.
- [29:52]
Jon Favreau
We should also take a look at a Doge report card here. Elon, he originally set out to, he said he could get, he could find $2 trillion in savings. 2 trillion. Then he cut that down to 1 trillion. Now, you know what, they've saved about 95 billion. So much less than what he wanted.
- [30:13]
Dan Pfeiffer
And that's not even counting the savings that are being held up in court, correct? Yes.
- [30:17]
Jon Favreau
Right. So what did you get for $95 billion in savings. Does that go into the taxpayers saving a lot of money, getting a lot of rebates? No. That means about over 200,000 people lost their jobs from federal government, including cancer researchers, veterans, jobs, food inspectors, tax collectors, which is probably going to undo the savings, because now a bunch of rich people are going to get to cheat on their taxes and not pay them to the federal government. So chaos around the Social Security Administration, which then they had to pull back. Bunch of people died all around the world thanks to the him putting USAID in the wood chipper, which he bragged about. Nick Kristof was tweeting about how he tweeted at Elon this week about how there's a boy in Africa who was born with HIV, was kept alive by medicine that cost 12 cents a day. He's dead now. And you can, you know, look, there's reports of this all over the world. People have already died because of this. More people will die because of medicine that we took away and food that we took away that cost pennies a day. Pennies a day. So this was. This is Elon Musk's Doge legacy. Pretty good, huh?
- [31:25]
Dan Pfeiffer
Yeah, not great.
- [31:26]
Jon Favreau
Did you see Steve Bannon was out with a statement on this?
- [31:28]
Dan Pfeiffer
Oh, no. What'd he say?
- [31:30]
Jon Favreau
Elon Musk should be required to submit a certified inventory of all the fraud and waste he found while in government. And there should be full disclosure of any non governmental entities to have obtained sensitive federal data through Doge. Oh, sounds like a Democratic member of Congress.
- [31:44]
Dan Pfeiffer
That's right.
- [31:45]
Jon Favreau
Steve Bannon. Yeah, I agree. I agree with Steve Bannon.
- [31:49]
Dan Pfeiffer
All right, clip that.
- [31:49]
Jon Favreau
Elijah. Let's get a certified inventory of all the fraud and waste, because it's also supposed to be the most transparent administration in history.
- [31:57]
Dan Pfeiffer
Yes, of course.
- [31:58]
Jon Favreau
And they put everything on the Doge website only. Except when they don't. So good job at Doge. Elon.
- [32:03]
Dan Pfeiffer
We really need a do like an Elon in Memoria. Doge in Memoriam.
- [32:07]
Jon Favreau
That's a good idea.
- [32:08]
Dan Pfeiffer
Damn it.
- [32:09]
Jon Favreau
Why, that would be good. Let's do a.
- [32:11]
Dan Pfeiffer
Anyone do content around here.
- [32:16]
Jon Favreau
Is just posting over here.
- [32:17]
Dan Pfeiffer
That's right.
- [32:26]
Jon Favreau
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- [33:33]
Dan Pfeiffer
Race the sails. Race the sails.
- [33:36]
Jon Favreau
Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching.
- [33:38]
Dan Pfeiffer
Over Roger, wait, is that an enterprise sales solution?
- [33:43]
Jon Favreau
Reach sales professionals, not professional sailors.
- [33:47]
Dan Pfeiffer
With LinkedIn ads, you can target the.
- [33:49]
Jon Favreau
Right people by industry, job title and more. We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign. Get started today at LinkedIn.com results terms and conditions apply. Let's talk about deportations. There's been more churn in the courts on this. On Tuesday, U.S. district Court Judge Paula Zinnis slammed the DOJ over what she called a, quote, willful and intentional refusal to comply with her order to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia and accuse the government of dishonesty and obstruction. Then on Wednesday, in a totally separate case, a Trump appointed judge, Stephanie Gallagher, ordered the return of another wrongly deported man. This time it was a Venezuelan asylum seeker whose removal violated a court settlement, another unlawful deportation. Gallagher cited the Abrego Garcia case in her ruling and called the government's actions, quote, a breach of a contract. But Trump's not just losing in the courts, he's also losing in the court of public opinion. Multiple polls now have Trump underwater on immigration, which was his best issue, including the latest Fox News poll that Trump was bitching about on Truth Social. This morning, a YouGov poll found American support bringing Abrego Garcia back by nearly 2 to 1 margin. And only 27% buy into Trump's claim that he's Ms. 13, a claim that the administration still hasn't even tried to prove in court. And we were just given right here at Pod. Save America, Dan. We were just given an exclusive new poll from the Democratic research firm Tavern Research, which surveyed a huge sample of nearly 13,000 voters over the last few days. A couple of things that they found the Abrego Garcia case has certainly broke through to most voters. Voters disapprove of how Trump is handling it by a 14 point margin. Only 25% of voters believe Trump is following the law. Only 25% believe that it's okay for him to defy the court's orders, getting down to 25%. Usually he's got like 35, 40 with almost anything he does. So down to 25%. And the most effective messages when talking about the case have to do with Trump defying the courts and in doing so, putting the due process rights of all Americans at risk. Those were the most effective message. What do you make of those numbers?
- [36:06]
Dan Pfeiffer
Encouraging as an American? Yeah, Just that there are, like, Democrats, we talked about this last week, but Democrats are sort of taught to be afraid of immigration and that here we have not just the moral high ground, but the political high ground. And that we. And that Democrats should make the arguments against these illegal deportations with confidence. You should need a poll to talk about these things, but if you do, you now have the polling to give to stiffen your spine a bit.
- [36:31]
Jon Favreau
Yeah. I also think it's a good lesson in how polling should be used because usually there's this argument like, should we follow the polls, should we not follow the polls? And as you know, polling is just another useful tool to use, depending on how you use it. Right. And it is still true, probably, that most Americans want a secure border and, you know, want people who are criminals deported. And there's a limit to how many, even asylum seekers people want to take in, because they saw over the last couple years that a lot of asylum seekers were sort of stretching public services in cities all across the country. And those views, I don't think haven't changed. But that is entirely separate from also believing that we should send people to a gulag or we should deport people without due process or any of the stuff that he's doing. And there's a nuance there that I think sometimes the intraparty fighting among Democrats doesn't really get, at least online, obviously, but that, like, two things can be true at once. And just because immigration is a good issue for Trump doesn't mean that no matter what he does around immigration, it's going to be popular.
- [37:41]
Dan Pfeiffer
Yeah, it's. We, we all lost our mind on the politics of immigration from, like, 2022 until now.
- [37:49]
Jon Favreau
Yeah, really, like 2016 on.
- [37:52]
Dan Pfeiffer
No, I think in the, during the Trump era, all we had to do in the Trump 1.0, all we had to do was point out that what Trump was doing was bad and cruel and stupid and counterproductive and we actually quite effective that like I was looking at the polling today, Trump was underwater on immigration for almost every single day of his first term. Yes, just this idea I guess.
- [38:12]
Jon Favreau
I think, I'm sorry. I think the reaction, the reaction from Democrats in the 2020 primary to the prior four years was an example of misreading, misreading publications what the anger about Trump on immigration was all about.
- [38:26]
Dan Pfeiffer
Yes, 100%. But for a long time we had a very good message on immigration which was border security, keep people safe, have a path to citizenship for people who have been here a long time, are part of the community, have them go to the back of the line, pay back taxes, whatever. Like there was a, there was a method that tested for that.
- [38:45]
Jon Favreau
To this day are you saying we're a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws? Just Barack Obama's message.
- [38:51]
Dan Pfeiffer
Well, I mean that that position still to this day gets majority support. And when we constrain the image only to the way in which Trump wants to talk about it. Like I think what we did wrong and I think it's still keeping people from do for a lot of people from talking about this in the right way is we really accepted Trump's premise like he created this is something the right Trump and the right wing media did very successfully, which is they created this image of an. They took legitimate issues around chaos at the border of migrants coming here seeking asylum and turned it into an invasion by MS.13 in trend Aragua. They turned it into this idea that there was this wave of crime from migrants and undocumented immigrants, that you were unsafe for them because of this. And that wasn't actually the case. But we accepted that premise in our messaging.
- [39:42]
Jon Favreau
Right.
- [39:42]
Dan Pfeiffer
We were like we said last week, we're trying to out tough Trump on the border as opposed to talking about how you do it. And he is suffering this. And if I was in the White House and if I was in the White House where you first armed. It's really a hard thing to imagine. But if I were these numbers would scare the shit out of me. Right. Like you have a two pronged reason why you're president, the economy and immigration and you're now underwater on both and we haven't even hit the 100 day mark.
- [40:03]
Jon Favreau
I think it's also a lesson for Democrats that like if you pick fights about issues where first of all you think it's wrong and it's urgent to speak out, but also you sort of sense that what the politician is doing, what Trump is doing, is unpopular. Like, you can have these issues break through, right? Like there could have been when he sent Abrego Garcia to Salvador, El Salvador, to this president when he deported us, we could have said, okay, you know what? Since he's so strong on immigration, we just shouldn't talk about this. But if we didn't talk about it, if Democrats all decided not to talk about this and not to make a big deal of it, then he probably still would be very popular in immigration because most people in the country wouldn't know that it happened. Yes, we have agency here, and the same thing happened. We just talked about Doge, right at the beginning of Doge, it was like, well, we gotta be careful. Because a lot of Democrats and Republicans and independents, most Americans, they do want government to be more efficient, and that's what he's doing. So maybe we should just be quiet. And it's like, okay, yeah, that's true. If Elon Musk was actually going in there and making government more efficient and actually saving money on things that were wasteful, he wasn't doing that. So we should talk about it. And I just think that, like, Trump is not as strong as people think he is, and he still has a lot of power, and he's still very dangerous, but the country right now is not particularly happy with him. And his approval rating continues to fall. I think in the Pew poll this week, it was at 40, and that's probably an outlier. It's probably around 44, 45. But it's still. His approval rating is at a lower point right now than almost any president at this point in their first term in recent memory other than him. And it's about to cross that line.
- [41:48]
Dan Pfeiffer
He's about to cross the line. I think in the average, he is almost seven points underwater right now. And he's been dropping a point a week for a while now.
- [41:57]
Jon Favreau
And this is not to say, okay, he's getting more unpopular. Everyone can just be like, relax and just wait for the next election. And where it's thermostatic public opinion, and everything's gonna be fine. It's to say that, like, we don't need to be afraid or we shouldn't be afraid because the more we fight, the more unpopular he gets. And so, like, you know, courage is contagious here. You should go speak out. You should go keep fighting. Because when we do, other people in the country who aren't paying attention realize, like, yeah, this is bad. I don't like this. Which brings us to our last topic before we get to our conversation with Amanda. On Tuesday, the longtime executive producer of 60 Minutes, Bill Owens, announced that he's stepping down, saying he can't run the show independently anymore. This comes, of course, after Trump called again for CBS to lose its broadcast license over some recent segments on 60 Minutes and after he filed a $20 billion lawsuit against CBS for the way the show edited its interview with Kamala Harris. And CBS News parent company Paramount, which is trying to close a major merger, is talking about settling. How big of a deal do you think this is?
- [42:59]
Dan Pfeiffer
If I was writing a book, which I am not about the.
- [43:03]
Jon Favreau
You can announce it here if you want.
- [43:04]
Dan Pfeiffer
I mean, you do have a publishing arm, so maybe we should talk. No. If I was writing a book about the death of the traditional objective media that dominated the 20th century in the first part of the 21st century, the lead anecdote would be what just happened with Billowitz at 60 Minutes. 60 Minutes is the flagship news show in America known, like, so known for tough accountability journalism that if you worked at a company or a government agency and a 60 Minutes producer called you, you wet your pants, like, it meant you were in big trouble. And the fact that now even 60 minutes is being brought to heel by its corporate overlords means the entire model of big media owned by big corporations cannot function. There is an inherent and irreconcilable tension between companies with business before the federal government owning media companies, trying to hold that federal government accountable. This is the end of an era where we are right now.
- [44:08]
Jon Favreau
And again, it's like, I mean, Sherry Redstone, who runs the Paramount, trying to close a merger. So maybe it's just all about money for her. Maybe she just wants a deal. But I think it is for other media companies that can, for other people in media, for these colleges, for the law firms. People should fight because I think that all of the people that have capitulated so far are going to look. They're not gonna be like, oh, that was smart. They got away early. It's gonna look bad. And again, just we were talking about the polling. Like some of these media companies, if you ask people, oh, should the government be able to sue media companies into oblivion or threaten them or pull their licenses because they said things that our ruler, Donald Trump doesn't care for, that's not fucking popular. No one's gonna think that's a good idea.
- [45:03]
Dan Pfeiffer
Yeah, there was very explicit polling on colleges and museums. That is, shows that what Donald Trump Using federal funding as leverage is quite a popular even with Republicans. But what is going on here is just, it's important to understand that there was a time in which CBS was a huge part of the revenue at Paramount, CBS News in particular. That is not true anymore. Right. CNN is like which is owned by Warner Brothers Discovery, which is a company that by all reporting very much wants to either merge with another company or buy another company. In all cases would need approval from the fcc. And so they are not willing to take on water for something that is even if it still makes money now they know is in secular decline and is never coming back. And so the thing about like I don't think you'll be able to convince these major companies who to fight back, like Sherry Redstone or some of these other companies, like even Disney gave in on the George Stephanopoulos defamation suit. Like the way you fight back here is you support independent media.
- [46:09]
Jon Favreau
Yes.
- [46:10]
Dan Pfeiffer
Right. And that is that can be ideological, partisan media, like what we have here, pro democracy media, like what we have here at Crooked Media. It could be like ProPublica and nonprofit independent media, but the future of media is going to look very different than it did before and it's going to be much, it's going to be smaller but independent from these big companies.
- [46:27]
Jon Favreau
Yeah, I think that's right. All right. So as you heard, a new episode of Polar Coaster just dropped. Don't miss out on this exclusive series available only to friends of the Pod. You can head to cricket.com friends and sign up today or subscribe directly through our Apple Podcast feed. If you subscribe by the end of April, you'll get a 30 day free trial. When we come back, we will talk to the founder of Run for Something and the author of the new book when we're in Charge, Amanda Lippman. Pod Save America is brought to you by Aura Frames. The number one thing your mom wants from you is to call her. This Mother's Day, you can give her a call and give her an Aura Digital picture frame. Every frame comes packaged in a premium gift box with no price tag. It only takes about two minutes to set up a frame using the Aura app, add unlimited photos and videos and invite as many people as you want to a frame. There are absolutely no hidden fees or subscriptions. Upload videos up to 30 seconds long and your favorite live iPhone photos will play right on the frame. The embedded speaker can play audio on demand. You have complete control over who has access to your frame, and the Aura app lets you share photos more securely. Than with email, which many other digital frames require. If I had not already given my mom an Aura frame for Christmas, I'd be doing it for Mother's Day. I'm sort of annoyed that this idea is off the table, but you should get one. They are great. My parents love their Aura frame. We are constantly uploading pictures of the kids to the frame at any time of day. It's very easy. Just you have an app on your phone, put the picture in and boom, it's on their frame. It's a great, great gift. Aura Frames was named the best digital photo frame by Wirecutter and featured in 495 gift guides last year. So the next time you need to call your mom, you can also send her a new pic of you from that trip you're telling her all about, right from your phone. Aura has a great deal for Mother's Day. For a limited time, listeners can save on the perfect gift by visiting auraframes.com to get $35 off plus free shipping on their bestselling Carver mat frame. That's a U R A frames.com promo code. Crooked. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply.
- [48:34]
Dan Pfeiffer
Race the rudders. Race the sails. Race the sails.
- [48:38]
Jon Favreau
Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching. Over Look.
- [48:41]
Dan Pfeiffer
Roger. Wait, is that an enterprise sales solution?
- [48:46]
Jon Favreau
Reach sales professionals, not professional sailors.
- [48:49]
Dan Pfeiffer
With LinkedIn ads, you can target the.
- [48:51]
Jon Favreau
Right people by industry, job title, and more. We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign. Get started today@LinkedIn.com. results. Terms and conditions apply. Amanda Lipman, good to see you in person.
- [49:09]
Amanda Lippman
Nice to see you guys.
- [49:10]
Jon Favreau
Welcome back to the pod. Congrats on the new book.
- [49:13]
Amanda Lippman
Thank you.
- [49:13]
Jon Favreau
It's called when we're in the Next Generation's Guide to Leadership. We're also psyched you chose to do it with crooked media reads because we've all been big fans of yours for a long time.
- [49:22]
Amanda Lippman
I am so excited to talk about it and it feels so right for this moment.
- [49:26]
Jon Favreau
Yes, yes, it does. Well, so want to spend time on the book? Thought we could start by checking in on Run for Something, which is the organization you launched after the first Trump administration with the goal of recruiting, training, helping younger candidates run for down ballot races all over the country. I'll admit that I was worried that after all the despair and fear that accompanied Trump's second win, you guys would have a tougher time finding candidates to run. That hasn't happened.
- [49:56]
Amanda Lippman
No, and I will admit I shared that concern. But since Trump won in November, we have had 41,000 young people all across the country raise their hands to say they want to run. Our overall pipeline has exceeded 200,000. That means 20% of the people who have ever signed up with run for something to say they want to run for office have come to us in the last five months.
- [50:16]
Jon Favreau
And how does that compare to the first?
- [50:18]
Amanda Lippman
So in the first two years of Trump's first term, we had 30,000 people sign up.
- [50:22]
Jon Favreau
Wow.
- [50:22]
Amanda Lippman
So we've already exceeded that. It is more people than I ever could have imagined. Like, our goal for 2025 was 50,000. We're going to cross that in like a month.
- [50:30]
Jon Favreau
Are you seeing a different kind of person stepping up, different kind of candidate or. And where are they running?
- [50:35]
Amanda Lippman
So we are getting people from all 50 states. It's pretty commensurate with population. Little more women than men, about 70 to 75% under the age of 40. So it's mostly young people. And we are seeing people step up for a lot of the issues we've seen over the last eight years. Housing, you know, cost of housing, reproductive health, book bans, especially in the last few years. Opioids continues to be a big thing. We hear from people, but especially in the last five months, they are signing up and saying, if my leaders aren't going to fight for me, I am going to fight for me. And I think that in particular is a really exciting attitude. We're seeing new folks bring.
- [51:09]
Jon Favreau
That's awesome.
- [51:10]
Dan Pfeiffer
I saw that you were run for something that was hosting an informational session for fired formal federal workers. That's what I was going to say. Tell me a little bit about, like, what is going on there? Do you think those folks make good candidates and what is sparking their interest to run?
- [51:25]
Amanda Lippman
So we've seen hundreds of people sign up, coming specifically from conversations around former laid off federal workers or people who've had partners or friends or family, countless more beyond that. And I think these are folks who are already inclined towards public service. You know, they have been working in the federal government. Not a glamorous job all across the country. Because as you guys know, and as folks know, the federal government is not just a DC thing, it is everywhere. And I think for a lot of them, this is personal. They understand intimately how government works and affects people's lives. They're pissed at Trump and Elon Musk for firing them or firing their friend or their family. And they've often not been allowed to run for office before. Like in most places, there's some nuance Here, depending on the type of office you run and what your job is. But generally speaking, federal government employees have not been allowed to run for office before. There's been some ethics violation rules around that. They are now free too. And they've got a lot of time on their hands and they got a lot of rage and they're channeling it into doing something really meaningful with it. So I think they're going to be great candidates. If even a couple of them end up getting on the ballot in 2026, the stories that they'll be able to tell both about why they're mad and how they've committed to their community are gonna be really powerful.
- [52:34]
Dan Pfeiffer
Are these like former scientists, former all.
- [52:36]
Amanda Lippman
Across the board, park rangers, former scientists, former fellows doing like weather research, you know, former VA people, doctors and healthcare professionals who are working in the government, all kinds of experts who've really liked, done meaningful work and shown how government can make people's lives better, which most people don't get to hear their stories.
- [52:54]
Dan Pfeiffer
You know this, you touched on this. Your book is largely about this. But the debate about the generational divide in the Democratic Party has been brewing for a long time. It's obviously picked up pace since this election, since Biden's, the end of Biden's presidency. How do you think about that generational split? Is it, is it really age or is it style too? Right. We obviously have folks like Bernie Sanders who is much older but is very popular with young people and probably campaigns and talks about politics in a way that makes young people excited. So talk to me a little bit about that split and where you think it's going.
- [53:29]
Amanda Lippman
Obviously no generation is a monolith. We have seen older leaders like Senator Sanders rise to the occasion and really prove they can fight and communicate in this moment. That being said, I don't think it's a coincidence that many of the folks who have risen up, who have shown their backbone and who have proven they can communicate about that fight in this moment are some of the younger leaders. And I would say it is both age sort of, you know, millennials and Gen Z folks will give younger Gen X a little bit of credit here.
- [53:55]
Dan Pfeiffer
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
- [53:56]
Amanda Lippman
But it is also like people whose political awakening has been since Trump, like people who first got into politics post 2015, 2016, who have a very clear eyed understanding of who the Republican Party is, is not George W. Bush's Republican Party. It's not John McCain's, it's not Mitt Romney's, it is Trump's and they know who the opponent is and that these are not good faith partners in governance. And because they're comfortable online, like I like to joke, these are candidates and electeds who run their own Instagram accounts, which is pretty unusual. They understand how to express that in this moment.
- [54:32]
Dan Pfeiffer
How do you think this next generation of leaders should be responding to Trump 2.0? Like how do we end what you've called the bad Boomer leadership that's taken over the Democratic Party?
- [54:43]
Amanda Lippman
You know, I think it's a couple things. I think again, being clear eyed about who the Republican Party is and who they are not. I think being willing to like channel whatever it is they're really mad about and communicate it. You know, we, we have this moment in which authenticity or this perceived authenticity is so important for candidates and it is especially important for newer candidates who are trying to like prove themselves and build trust with voters. When we talk about like what messaging we should be on or like what fight should we take on? Pick the fight that makes you the maddest and talk about it. Because if you're talking about the thing that you aren't actually that riled up about, it's gonna come through and it's not gonna make connect with people. The other thing I would say is that especially in this moment, like being unafraid to have the conversation in as many places as possible, this is something I think people who are relatively new to public service and to politics can do a little bit better. Not exc. But can do a little bit better because they are normal people who just happen to have fallen into public service as opposed to people who've been in office for 20 or 30 years and like don't know what normal people talk about anymore. So I think that's one of the many distinctions.
- [55:56]
Jon Favreau
We haven't talked about this on the pod yet, but I'm sure you've heard about DNC Vice Chair David Hogg pledging $20 million to primary older Democrats in safe seats. What do you think of the strategy? Any risks?
- [56:10]
Amanda Lippman
Whether or not David, as a DNC leader is the right person to do this is sort of a separate question.
- [56:17]
Jon Favreau
That I think the DNC is trying to handle as we speak.
- [56:20]
Amanda Lippman
That seems like a them problem. I do think it is worth encouraging open primaries. Primaries are how we as a party decide what we believe parties are where candidates get a chance to prove their mettle in sort of safe territory, especially in all these safe blue districts. That's where we get our Democratic leaders from. Like it's Not a coincidence that much of the Democratic leadership is from New York, California and Illinois. Like, those are safe seats. So the people who can rise there tend to be both the cream of the crop ideally and can really ideally model what the party is standing for in this moment. I think if you're an incumbent who's doing a good job, you got a pretty high chance of winning a primary. Like, incumbents have something like a 95% reelection rate. If you are doing a good job of meeting your constituents where they are, you should have nothing to worry about. I think it's telling that some of these incumbents are a little spooked because they know they're not quite where their voters want them to be.
- [57:13]
Dan Pfeiffer
Yeah, I'm very torn about this. Like, I very much agree. Open primaries are good. We do. Like, we 100% need a new generation of leadership. And in a world in which most incumbents are going to win their election, then the only way they're just going to be there until they leave. Like, if you win, like, Adam Schiff can be senator from California for the rest of his life if he wants. That is going to be.
- [57:35]
Amanda Lippman
He could literally die in office, as previous senators in California have done.
- [57:38]
Dan Pfeiffer
I mean, there might be some past.
- [57:40]
Jon Favreau
Precedent there, but I guess leave on your own or in a coffin.
- [57:43]
Dan Pfeiffer
Yes.
- [57:46]
Amanda Lippman
Cool slogan for the United States.
- [57:47]
Dan Pfeiffer
Senate absent a primary, I guess is the question. But I guess one question I have is, and maybe things have changed recently, but in a lot of the conversations I've had with various groups and people trying to fund efforts since the election is it has been a tough environment to raise money. A lot of our donors are not necessarily the grassroots donors, but sort of the bigger folks who find larger, the larger progressive infrastructure are tapped out. They're frustrated, they're not getting money. And so just in a world where we need run for something, we need invisible, we need swing left, we need more progressive media, more content. Like, what do you think about $20 million to this effort?
- [58:26]
Amanda Lippman
I think it's a drop in the bucket compared to what we spend on a lot of federal races. I also think most of these primary candidates are going to be funded by grassroots donors. They're not going to get a lot of institutional money. And you know, I will say run for something's budget this year is only $7.5 million. And we're expecting to work with about 300 candidates in every state. There's an election. We've already won, I think 20 some odd races this year. There's a lot of ways that we could spend money in politics and there will always be more money, even when I wish there were different rules around it. So if your goal is to get new leaders in that particular space, that's certainly one way you could do it. I think my way is also really exciting.
- [59:04]
Dan Pfeiffer
Another option would be to donate to Run for Something. Yes, I'll say it for you.
- [59:08]
Amanda Lippman
Thank you. Runforsomething.net donate. You know, $5 goes a long way.
- [59:11]
Jon Favreau
I kind of think you just, we should all be consistent on it. If you're for, you know, primaries and competitive primaries. That's true for if you're worried about what the result may be. It's true if you want the result to be a different way. And I think we're probably stronger as a party, especially the Democracy Party, if we're, if we're allowing this to happen.
- [59:30]
Amanda Lippman
And it's really scary to trust voters. But like, if we're empowering candidates to run good campaigns, then we should. And I think that's like the key here is we should give candidates and this is what Run for Something does, is empower candidates to make the best possible argument to their voters and then let voters decide. Even if voters sometimes make decisions I wouldn't agree with that's voters call, which has happened recently.
- [59:51]
Jon Favreau
Let's talk about your wonderful book, which isn't just advice for young people running for office. It's for young people who are stepping into leadership roles or planning to step into leadership roles across business, nonprofits. What made you want to broaden the focus?
- [60:04]
Amanda Lippman
So I know politics. I've worked now with thousands of candidates running for office. I knew I didn't know enough about what leadership looked like outside of this space. So when I was going in to write the book, I put out a call to interview as many people from as many different kinds of spaces as I could. And I ended up having in depth conversations with more than 135 different leaders from a variety of sectors. I talked to faith leaders and doctors and teachers. I Talked to tech CEOs. I talked to the CEO of Snapchat, Evan Spiegel. I also talked to the editor in chief of Teen Vogue. I also talked to Maxwell Frost, member of Congress. And I heard so many themes echo across those conversations. You know, the, the partner in the law firm in Chicago had a slightly different take on the 80 year old partner who she had to like do notes in the dictaphone for, as opposed to the rabbi who said the person she replaced in Wisconsin had never taken a day off in 30 years behind the pulpit and she was like, I'm a mom of two kids. Like, I can't do that.
- [61:04]
Jon Favreau
Yeah.
- [61:05]
Amanda Lippman
But the themes were the same. And I think that to me was emblematic of the fact that, you know, across different sectors, across different spaces, really across the country, and even I talked to a few folks in Europe and in England, details were a little different there. They have better healthcare. The challenges that Next gen leaders, what I would collectively call next gen leaders, millennials and Gen Z are facing, are the same and that we didn't have a playbook on how to solve them. So that's what I tried to write, was the guide that honestly I wish I had had when I started Run for Something eight and a half years ago of like, how do you do this in a way that is better than every boss I've ever had before?
- [61:43]
Jon Favreau
I was going to say, how did your own experience with leadership roles at Run For Something and other places inspire what you wrote?
- [61:51]
Amanda Lippman
You know, when I started Run for something, I was 26, about to turn 27. I was single, having a good time. I had never run a company before, I'd never written a budget before. I'd managed people, I'd managed teams a few times. But I knew that if this was going to last, if I was going to build an organization that was sustainable and that would do this work for a long time because it was important that I thought this work needed a long Runway to succeed, that I built a team and ran my company in a way that reflected that. So that was everything from how we could provide the best possible health care to people, how we could pay people as well as possible, how we could have work life integration and work rest integration. Like I didn't want to work campaign hours for eight or ten years. Now, eight and a half years later, I have two kids, like a two and a half year old and a seven month old. I don't have the time to work 100 hour weeks anymore and I don't want to, but the work is still really important. So I write a ton in When We're In Charge about my experience creating this organization that functions a little differently than any other political organization, although some now have come our way, including things like a four day work week as really good health care, really good benefits, things like a sabbatical policy, but also, you know, transparency policies internally that allow us to really communicate with people in a way that brings them in and helps guide where we're going and the challenges that I faced, you know, when I went to take maternity leave with my first daughter. And I googled how do I take maternity leave as the boss, All I could find was how to ask your boss for maternity leave. Which one damning indictment of the United States, but two, you know, really telling of, like, what kind of resources there are for leaders who want to model the values we put into practice.
- [63:36]
Jon Favreau
You and I have talked about this before, since we've both had similar experiences here, but can you get into some of the challenges you faced being a millennial at the top of an organization with a lot of Gen zers?
- [63:48]
Amanda Lippman
It's so hard. And, you know, it wasn't just things that I faced. I heard this from all of the people I talked to, the similar kinds of demands for transparency, that in the same way you can Google something or get a Yelp review on something, we want that at work. We want to be able to get every answer we want whenever we want it. I heard this from folks about things that they wanted work to provide something that work is not the right space to hold. And I write about this in the book of Work cannot be your only source of identity, your only source of friendship, your only source of your physical or mental health, your well being. It is first and foremost an economic relationship. And ideally, as the leader, you are creating space where people have the time and resources to be full people outside of it. One of the challenges that basically every millennial and Gen Z leader I talked to named was that they're managing millennials and Gen Z. And that is both a blessing and a curse.
- [64:42]
Jon Favreau
Yes, yes. We could do a whole other episode on that. Love our genzies for me and my therapist. Love you all. Great lesson in the book, we don't dream of labor. Can you unpack that a little bit and how it applies to what we're all going through right now?
- [64:56]
Amanda Lippman
Okay, so the Internet says this is a James Baldwin quote, but I cannot find any proof of that. So make of that what you will. The full quote here is that I do not have a dream job because I do not dream of labor. I think that is so important, especially in this moment where we are looking to do so much more than our work, that your job just cannot be everything. And a nightmare is a kind of dream, too. Sometimes your dream job could actually be horrific. I think it is really on the shoulders of the person in charge of the leader. And I write on how to do this to make it clear that you should have a place at work where you can do your job job and know what success looks like. And that you don't have to be miserable every day doing it, but it also doesn't need to be the only place you find fulfillment. Yeah, it's hard.
- [65:46]
Jon Favreau
It's hard, especially in, in the business that we're all in, in politics.
- [65:50]
Amanda Lippman
Right.
- [65:50]
Jon Favreau
Because it is a mission and you do care, but you've got to separate it at some point.
- [65:54]
Amanda Lippman
I talked to a pastor who like really spoke to this Marshall Hatch in Chicago who told me, like, you know, I feel like my work is a calling, but also there could be lots of calls, there could be lots of different ringtones in this call. It can look different. And that doesn't mean that there's a wrong way to love your job, but it can also be really dangerous when you love your job so much that it eats you up and spits you out.
- [66:17]
Jon Favreau
You talked about being a working mom. Now what have you learned about rest? Not just for yourself, but as something leaders need to model for their teams.
- [66:26]
Amanda Lippman
You know, so Run for Something has a four day work week, which is the only way I was able to write this book, run the organization. At the time I had a one year old and I was pregnant. I did that because we had Fridays. So all through 2024, I would spend Fridays not resting, but working on this in a way that was also really creatively fulfilling and gave me like a different kind of joy than my day job. I think a lot about what it means as the boss to model rest for my team. Like, we really do take Fridays off. We don't have emails, we don't have meetings when we're done with the day at around 5, 30, 6 o'clock, we log off on weekends. Yeah, like sometimes you might have to work on a weekend. Like any job. Sometimes you have to go to the event or like, you know, there's the emergency, whatever. But generally speaking, you can count on weekends to be your own. And I think about the way that the four day work week, the clear boundaries about our time have made me a better boss, a better leader, but also such a better parent and a better partner. Like, I am so much better at going into a full 48 hours of parenting after I got to spend Friday. Yeah, maybe doing some book stuff or some writing, but also going to yoga class, get my nails done, see a friend, lounge on the couch and watch Grey's Anatomy for three hours. Like, whatever it is, I'm a better parent and a better partner because of that.
- [67:41]
Dan Pfeiffer
Like in politics, right? The culture, it like, it is the worst version of like, quote, unquote, Hustle culture, right? Like, you were supposed to be working all the time. And if you're not working all the time, like in the way it's understood by so many people, if you're not working all the time, then either you're doing something wrong or you're not important enough to be working all the time. So everyone's trying to work all the time. How have you been able to run a political organization not on that sort of 247 treadmill that so much of politics and media seems to operate on?
- [68:09]
Amanda Lippman
You can be very discerning here. My mission is urgent and important. Not every task in service of that mission is urgent or important. And so being really thoughtful and rigorous about prioritization, about how we're spending time in meetings or together, knowing that like, yeah, the couple weeks before election day, you might have to work a little bit more. But you cannot do this work year in, year out if you are burning the candle at both ends. Like, you will hate yourself and you won't be as good at it. Like, I don't think anyone who's working 100 hour weeks is doing that because those hours, 60 to 100, are their best hours. Like, you're not getting your best stuff. I think it is so necessary for leaders to model those boundaries and also to staff in such a way that you don't have to ask that for people. Like, I reject the premise that you have to be working around the clock to be getting the most possible things done. Like efficacy and humane, compassionate leadership are not mutually exclusive.
- [69:11]
Jon Favreau
Yeah, last question. You talked to more than 100 young leaders for the book. Was there a moment or conversation that surprised you or changed how you thought about leadership?
- [69:23]
Amanda Lippman
Oh, that's such a good question. I was surprised at how many things I heard in common. I was surprised. And maybe not in retrospect. It's not surprising at all. How many people would tell me, I want to be myself in my role. I want to be authentic. I want to bring my real self, but like, not my full self, but my real self to work? Because I actually, I don't think work is the right place for my full self. I want to be this. And then I would ask them, great, do you think, like, you can be yourself with your team? And I memorably remember somebody like, oh, fuck, no, absolutely not. And I think that tension, like, that's the point of the book, is how do you navigate that tension? How do you perform yourself authentically while still not performing yourself at all? And like, how do you post on social Media when your team follows you there, and how do you be transparent? But also, if you open the books too much, people are going to see things they're actually not prepared or able to see. And how do you think about your career? Like, when the ladders that we have climbed no longer exist and the path that our parents or grandparents took has just been, like, blown up, how do you do that? Like, those tensions, Like, I hearing that from so many people. And in the last couple weeks, I've been going back to all the folks I talked to for the book to be like, hey, so excited this is coming out. Can't wait to send you a copy. And so many of them wrote back to me. Like, that conversation stuck with me. Like, no one had ever really asked, like, how. How does it feel to do this hard thing? And I'll say the final thing that really stuck with me and has been like, sort of my mantra for much of honestly, the last eight years was how many people would tell me, I feel like I am doing a hard thing. And it is, it is hard, not because I'm personally failing, but because, like, it is fundamentally a hard thing. Like, I am trying to push a rock up a mountain. And no matter how strong you are or how high the mountain is, it's going to be hard. And I, you know, we tell this to candidates when they're running for office. Running for office is hard no matter how good you are. Our job is to make it a little bit easier, like, around the logistics leading in this moment in a way that treats people right but also gets the job done is difficult. It is also like running for office. So worth it. It's so worth it, both for me and for you and for all of us as leaders, but also for the people you lead.
- [71:39]
Jon Favreau
I'm sure that's why one of the reasons that people appreciated the conversations with you and the questions so much, because just being asked, how are you feeling? How are you doing it? What does it mean to you? Like, you don't ever get that question.
- [71:53]
Amanda Lippman
Well, especially when you're in charge of folks, like, it's not their job to ask you that question. And like, your partner or your therapist has probably heard it all more than that. So I think it's really important to take a step back and really reflect, like, what kind of leader am I? Am I living up to the values I've laid out? Am I prepared to deal with the criticism that I will inevitably get? And am I doing this in a way that I can feel good about?
- [72:15]
Jon Favreau
Well, all the answers to all those questions when we're in charge. Right in the book. It comes out May 13. The book is when we're in the Next Generation's Guide to Leadership. It's a fantastic book. You can pre order it now@cricket.com books or anywhere you like to get books. Amanda Lippman, good seeing you.
- [72:31]
Amanda Lippman
Thanks for having me, guys.
- [72:32]
Dan Pfeiffer
Good to talk to you.
- [72:38]
Jon Favreau
That's our show for today. Before we go, there was one quick breaking news development that we got that we should.
- [72:44]
Dan Pfeiffer
Oh no. What happened?
- [72:46]
Jon Favreau
Well, we learned the full Chinese proverb, which we did. We did not apparently have no it is whoever ties the bell on the tiger's neck has to untie it.
- [72:58]
Dan Pfeiffer
Okay, I rescind everything I said. That makes complete sense that there's a reason that's a proverb. And it was dumb of me to even question something that was, I assume, thousands of years old.
- [73:08]
Jon Favreau
I mean, I could do a five minute thing on who the fuck is tying bells on tigers necks. But you know what? We're not going to do it. You know what?
- [73:13]
Dan Pfeiffer
If we keep talking, someone's going to tell us why that is. We have to do another correction. So let's get out of here fast.
- [73:18]
Jon Favreau
All right. Thanks to Amanda Lippman for joining us, everyone. Have a great weekend. We'll have a new show in your feeds on Tuesday.
- [73:23]
Dan Pfeiffer
Bye, everyone.
- [73:24]
Jon Favreau
If you want to listen to Pod Save America ad free or get access to our subscriber discord and exclusive podcasts, consider joining our Friends of the pod community@cricket.com friends or subscribe on Apple Podcasts directly from the Pod Save America feed. Also, be sure to follow Pod Save America on TikTok, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube for full episodes, bonus content and more. And before you hit that next button, you can help boost this episode by leaving us a review and by sharing it with friends and family. Pod Save America is a crooked media production. Our producers are David Toledo and Saul Rubin. Our associate producer is Farah Safari. Reed Churlin is our executive editor and Adrienne Hill is our executive producer. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Kanter is our sound engineer with audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Madeline Herringer is our head of news and programming. Matt De Groat is our head of production. Naomi Sengel is our executive assistant. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Hayley Jones, Ben Heathcote, Mia Kelman, Molly Lobel, Kiril Pelaviev and David Toles, our production staff is proudly unionized with the writers Guild of America EAS with leading networking and connectivity, advanced cybersecurity and expert partnership. Comcast Business helps turn today's enterprises into engines of modern business.
- [74:45]
Dan Pfeiffer
Powering the engine of modern business.
- [74:47]
Jon Favreau
Powering possibilities. Restrictions apply. And that's. Commercial break. Nice.
- [74:53]
Amanda Lippman
Ooh.
- [74:54]
Jon Favreau
Hear that?
- [74:54]
Dan Pfeiffer
My neck cracked.
- [74:55]
Amanda Lippman
So satisfying.
- [74:56]
Jon Favreau
Speaking of satisfying, I just used a Clorox toilet wand.
- [75:00]
Amanda Lippman
Ooh.
- [75:00]
Dan Pfeiffer
With the cleaner already in it.
- [75:02]
Jon Favreau
Yes. All in one. The brush just clicks on. Click. Then you swish, swish, swish.
- [75:08]
Dan Pfeiffer
Ah.
- [75:09]
Jon Favreau
And pops right off into the trash. Just click, swish, pop. Clorox. Clean feels good.
- [75:16]
Amanda Lippman
Clean feels good.
- [75:17]
Jon Favreau
Oh, we're back.
- [75:19]
Dan Pfeiffer
Use as directed.