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- [00:01]
Chuck Todd
Right now the Home Depot has spring deals under $20. So what are you working on? If you're planning on cooking out this season, head to the Home Depot so you can fire up the grill with deals on charcoal. Right now, get two 16 pound bags of Kingsford Charcoal for only $17.88. Was $19.98. Don't miss spring deals under $20 now through May 7th at the home Depot. Subject to availability valid on select items only.
- [00:30]
Mike Pesca
The gist is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. It's Tuesday, May 6, 2025. From Peach Fish Productions, it's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca. Headline Washington Post. Pope Francis final gifts to the children of Gaza. His Popemobile. That'll do it. That'll solve the problem. Now, as you know, Gaza has been experiencing a tremendous amount of not just war but privation since March 2nd. Israel shut all crossings to Gaza, preventing all food from getting in. There are supplies they have basically dwindled according to the UN's World Food Program and UNRA. So enter the Pope Mobile. You can't eat it. Actually, don't enter the Pope Mobile. All sides acknowledge this is more of a, oh, let us say, aspirational gift. We know the time is not right for the Pope Mobile to get in there and fix things in Gaza. Maybe for Hamas to steal the Pope Mobile. Hope it's narrow enough for the tunnels. You know, during some of the negotiations between Hamas and the Israelis, there are big sticking points. Will you return the body? Should we shut down the Philadelphia corridor? And also, who gets custody of the Pope Mobile? The new Pope, whoever he is, might get a little mad at this gift you gave away. The Popemobile. How am I supposed to get anywhere? Uber. But in all seriousness, this Popemobile, and there are many, many a pop mobile. This one's essentially a Mitsubishi, which is combined a little bit with a golf cart and has some plexiglass in the front so that the Pope doesn't get or didn't get shot. That might not be enough for IDF munitions in Gaza. Now, the Pope Mobile, Actually, this Popemobile, they're like Air Force ones or the Dread Pirate Roberts. They take on the personality of whoever in them at the time. But this Popemobile was given to our Pope by Mahmoud Abbas when he visited the West bank in 2014. Is Fatah playing the long game, trying to finally get some material into Gaza? I think not. This is, as I said, a very nice gesture. This Popemobile is meant to be used for medical supplies for the children of Gaza. Wonderful gesture. And that really is all it is, a gesture all sides acknowledge. There is no chance this popemobile is getting in there anytime soon. Lovely but symbolic. But you know, the pope was a symbolic guy. He'd make a hand gesture and the crowd would go crazy. And why not the people of Gaza? The children of Gaza deserve to live and deserve hope. And you would hope. It would take more than a pope to point this out on the show today. King me. No, oligarch me. But first, Chuck Todd is back and he will be talking about how hard it is to be balanced, but also to give the audience that which is fair. He'll talk about the pros and cons of Trump's deny all mistakes ever orientation. And also a little bit about all the times that MSNBC gave NBC a headache. Chuck Todd of the Chuck Todd cast. Up next, foreign we're back with Chuck Todd. He's host of the Chuck Todd cast. I mean, who else could do that job? And yesterday Chuck said that he thought Donald Trump was ill served by the idea that you should never ever admit mistake. But I want to push back on that a little bit. I'm not talking about in terms of what's the right thing to do or even if the goal is something close to good governance or effective policy. Even as you define it. I think there is something to be said, a very amoral thing to be said for never ever admitting mistake. First of all, you're right, it probably hurts him a little bit in the polls, but it also does decrease the cognitive load when you're not ever having to question yourself. What's the strategy in this case? Right.
- [05:01]
Chuck Todd
Just imagine living that way.
- [05:03]
Mike Pesca
That that's not, I couldn't because I'm not a sociopath. But yeah. But I do think on the biggest one ever, never admitting defeat, never admitting you're wrong. If he had conceded the election, he wouldn't have been president today. That was fundamental. Fundamental to him not being the guy who lost, who the Republicans move on to. Fundamental to being a rallying cry and a cause. And yeah. I mean, I don't think it's a good thing, but I think it's a true thing.
- [05:32]
Chuck Todd
Well, it, it, it is. Again, it deepens the foxhole. I, I absolutely agree with that. Right. That there are people that are going, man, this guy. Well, all right. I'm sticking by him because he never. He's never gonna throw me overboard on this issue. But, you know, there was different ways. He could have denied the def. Denied the election, but accepted the defeat. He could have just simply blamed Covid. Like, I, you know, if it wasn't for this, I would have won. If it wasn't for that, and he could have still accepted. He goes, I know under the rules that this was run, I lost. Right. There were ways, I think, he could have articulated it within the boundaries of reasonable democracy. I was sort of. And only the Canadians will behave this way. But Stephen Harper. I retweeted something yesterday that I saw. I saw Stephen Harper sort of congratulate. He's a former Conservative Party Prime Minister of Canada, mostly the prime minister during the Bush presidency, and he bled in a little bit to. To the Obama presidency, and he congratulated Mark Carney, and he congratulated Pierre Pulavet. And he's like, let's hope we can move forward. And you're just like, wow, that statesmanship. I don't know if America even wants or cares about that anymore, but it's nice to see that Canadians still seem to appreciate it.
- [06:50]
Mike Pesca
What, did he congratulate Pole Levet on losing his seat?
- [06:52]
Chuck Todd
No, he congratulated him on the highest performance of the Conservative party in 40. Whatever it was. That's true. He did have a theory. You know, they did better than they had before. And.
- [07:04]
Mike Pesca
Yeah.
- [07:04]
Chuck Todd
And frankly, you know, the Liberal Party needs to be careful here. They won. It's like, don't pull a Joe Biden and think your victory is some sort of reaffirmation of your philosophy and ideology. Right. That was the. Clearly now, in hindsight, the biggest mistake, you know, Biden. Biden understood that he was running in order to sort of, sort of settle the country down. And then he won and decided, oh, no, I'm fdr, let's go. And he's like, nope, don't read your. Don't read the mandate the wrong way, buddy.
- [07:40]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. Although I really have questions. But you have greater insight when we say Biden thought this even early on in the presidency. How much was Biden doing the thinking and making the strategy versus the people around Biden? So I'll ask you that question. Did you have. And I'm a little unclear about Wade. And you were. You were still doing.
- [08:00]
Chuck Todd
I did Meet the Press through. Through. Essentially through the midterms of 22. Yeah, yeah.
- [08:06]
Mike Pesca
And you were still hosting an MSNBC show.
- [08:09]
Chuck Todd
At that time.
- [08:09]
Mike Pesca
Okay, so you're very plugged in. Did you have more intimations that this was much worse than they were letting on?
- [08:16]
Chuck Todd
So it all depends on, you know, and I shared one anecdote of a few months back or, you know, it's about a year ago at this point, I remember a cabinet secretary that I was having an off the record with who asked me at the end of 22. This was at the end of 22. And at that point I was still in the camp of, yeah, I, I don't, you know, I assumed he wasn't going to do it, but I understood why. You have to behave like you are until you're not. Right.
- [08:43]
Mike Pesca
It's run again.
- [08:44]
Chuck Todd
Right. In order to make sure you're not a lame duck too soon, you still want to try to get a few things done. So I actually just assumed it was a bit strategic. And when this cabinet secretary asked me, well, do you think he can go? And then I asked this cabinet secretary, well, what are your interactions? And they're like, well, I don't have many interactions. Right. Obviously, in hindsight, that's probably more of a red flag than a yellow flag. At the time, it's pretty clear to me that there were people around President Biden who were both pushing him in a direction ideologically that he never would have gone on his own and second, that were trying to protect, protect him to the point they, the reason so many media sources never had firsthand knowledge is they didn't let him be with people who might tell you that, you know, so that would, But I'm going back. That's the one in hindsight now, huge clue. Right. That person also, you know, was very frustrated by the West Wing staff who this, who this person believed prevented him from doing his job.
- [09:50]
Mike Pesca
I also think from that time, Operation Bubble Wrap, if you want to call it that, was seen a few ways by the media. And how it should have been seen was, to quote the subtitle of Alex Thomas and Jake Tapper's new book, A Cover Up. But how many in the media played it as you aren't giving us our facetime with him that we deserve. And yeah, in the abstract for the public and secondly, bad strategy.
- [10:17]
Chuck Todd
Right.
- [10:18]
Mike Pesca
So I think maybe if, I don't know how it would change if the driving force of many in the media weren't that the count. The who is. The who is the Towson State professor keeps the counts of how many press availabilities they have. Kumar. I think, yeah, it was primarily, we need More facetime with the guy as opposed to you're pulling one over on the American people. Though I don't know how it would look.
- [10:42]
Chuck Todd
I mean, you know, look, I, I get, I get. This is one case where I want to defend the general reputation of the media. Although I get sick and tired of the phrase the media. What does that mean? The country clearly knew he was too old to be president because we all asked the country whether he was too old to be president. And if the media was part of the COVID up, then why did I write a poll question for NBC News that asked whether he was too old to be president? Right. Like you wouldn't even be asking those questions if you were doing what the right wing manual sort of media narrative, the attempted or media narrative that they were trying to paint. Now the problem with, quote, the media these days is you have some people. And I'll just. Look, I'm not trying to pick on him. Joe Scarborough, he's a former, he's basically a political pundit. Right. And he was sort of a chief defender of Joe Biden. And they, you know, in the same way Fox and Friends was sort of the home, the home morning show for Donald Trump. Morning Joe. Right. We find this out all the time. It's all Joe Biden cared about. What were they saying about me on Morning Joe? So he played up that relationship. So Joe got access to him. Nobody else got access to him, but Joe got access to him. And I do think he ended up probably playing and playing an outsized role of. Because you would, you would. I think there were plenty of reporters. I mean, I certainly was somebody that probably gave more attention to Dean Phillips than many simply because I thought this was a real issue. You know, I thought Dean Phillips was going to be, you know, not Bobby Kennedy, but that Dean Phillips was going to be McCarthy, Eugene McCarthy here. Right. And sort of open the door like, see, the emperor doesn't have any clothes here. And ultimately, who shut all this down? It's the Democratic Party. I just think the, the media is, you know, we can sit here and say, you know, the, maybe the White House press corps should have done a better job hammering the press secretary every day about how come the Biden isn't on this and how come he's not doing this and how come he's not doing that. And you could sit here and say maybe that. But ultimately it's Nancy Pelosi, it's Chuck Schumer, it's Kamala Harris, it's Jill Biden, it's Ron Klain. It's Jeff, it's everybody around him. Right. And the inability to. Anybody else asking what's in the best interest of the country and of the party. And apparently nobody was asking those questions.
- [13:00]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, but Dean Phillips, Gene Phillips, you know. Yeah. Heir to a gelato fortune. But when the media, much of the media, the most prominent media that Democrats are watching. MSNBC employs Jen Psaki and employs Sandra.
- [13:18]
Chuck Todd
I get it. It created a protective bubble.
- [13:19]
Mike Pesca
And Joe Biden, who? And Joe Morning. Morning Joe. Yeah. So that's not the best way to actually reflect reality back to view.
- [13:32]
Chuck Todd
I get it. And so the only, my only pushback is then be specific. I'm tired of the broad brush, everybody. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Okay, yeah, we know what was doing it. Right. It was pundits protecting their access to the White House. Hard stop. Okay, yes, there was a, there was a, those folks, for whatever reason, you know, went out of their way to, to, to, to protect the Biden narrative there. But again, the real culprits are the people who are supposed to be our sources on all these things, who were constantly reassuring us behind the scenes. No, no, no, no. It's better than you think. I mean, I think when I remember Jeffrey Katzenberg just, oh, no, he's going to be great at the debates. He's already debated this guy a couple of times. He knows what he's doing. He's out there telling, this is an off the record settings. And you're like, really? Okay. I mean, so to me, the COVID up is the people closest to him. In the Democratic Party, yes, you could say there were members who were essentially Democrats first who happened to be employed by media companies. But I just sort of, this, I mean, this is the slippery slope of what's happened to the press corps. Right. There's so many pundits who become members of the media and stay there that, that you, you can't expect the, the, the consumers to be able to disaggregate the two.
- [14:55]
Mike Pesca
When you were at NBC, did the, the tenor and just the fact of the personnel at MSNBC give you and your NBC colleagues a headache?
- [15:05]
Chuck Todd
Always. I mean, it cost me bookings all the time, you know, and I always thought it was not fair. I mean, you know, it was an excuse. So I didn't accept. You know, I wasn't angry at my MSNBC colleagues. You know, to me it was like, you know what, you know, they're doing this, you know, what we do, our audience is different than their audience. But, you know, the peacock was the peacock for a lot of people. And it didn't matter, right. If it showed up in the same place, then it, then it all must be the same thing. So of course it created headaches. I mean, there was one senator who just refused to deal with any NBC reporter on Capitol Hill simply because she was angry at something Brian Williams said about her on. It was, you know, on his 11:00pm show. And it's like it was on MSNBC at 11:00 at night. It's like literally punishing all of ABC News because Jimmy Kimmel said something offensive.
- [15:59]
Mike Pesca
You know, if you start having to watch what Bob Costas is saying on segments on.
- [16:04]
Chuck Todd
And by the way. And unfortunately, this did bleed into that, right. And there would be tension. NBC Sports then would be less helpful in promoting NBC news programs because they didn't want to, they didn't want to look. You know, they didn't want to alienate their conservative football fans. So it create. The tension it created at a lot of these media companies was, was, was quite a bit.
- [16:27]
Mike Pesca
I take your analysis. The only thing that's bothering me is you said, you know, it's pundits trying to claim their access and that always happens, and we know that. But it's also the hiring decisions of NBC or MSNBC brass of hiring actual administration officials, which is not unprecedented. I mean, George Stephanopoulos is probably one of the most bankable guys in media and we know what his job is. Dana Perino down the line.
- [16:53]
Chuck Todd
But when all of these back to lbj, Bill Moyers. Right.
- [16:57]
Mike Pesca
When all of. Right. But when all of these former officials who you can't really expect honesty from or you can't expect a different opinion from, are hired, are given positions of prominence, then Rona McDaniel, maybe she shouldn't have been hired at all, is drummed out of there and very public, almost a ceremony. What do you expect from. I'm not talking about the media. What do you expect from that one media company? I think you've created a situation where you can never get. And maybe Chuck Todd, but you'd have to be breaking out, breaking away from the gravitational pull of this planet, which is essentially trying to make the argument that Joe Biden is as sharp and bright as he's.
- [17:40]
Chuck Todd
And here's the other problem, right? You have a. You have, you know, Fox, which loves to exploit. And this, they used to do this all the time, is that any time I looked like I was contradicting the MSNBC narrative, they tried to create, manufacture a story of tension, of which there was none, by the way. But it was, you know, there's plenty of, you know, to me this is a larger issue of, of the media business in general, which is audience capture. Right. And I have this whole rant and if you've been listening to me for a little bit since you were prepping for this, you know, this one. This goes back to the decision a CNN executive made in 1994 when they decided that the single most important news story for America was the celebrity double murder trial. And when that decision was made, that was a massive shift in how media companies treated their news divisions. Before that moment, news divisions didn't have to truly be profitable. They just didn't. Couldn't lose money. The minute CNN proved that, you know, that decision proved to some media executives the wrong lesson I think unfortunately they took away was, hey, news is profitable if you make it interesting. And you know, it's not lost on me that literally after the O.J. trial, NBC and Fox say, you know what, we should get into the 24 hour news business. Do you think they got into it because they thought, boy, there's more news to cover or they get into it because they saw how much money CNN meant.
- [19:09]
Mike Pesca
Right, right. Oh, these Clinton initiatives need more coverage. Exactly. Do you have. I've looked over the guest list. I've heard the guest list. Are you having trouble or. I'm sure trying to book a maga. Republicans.
- [19:22]
Chuck Todd
I just had Oren Cass on. I mean he'll be on next week.
- [19:26]
Mike Pesca
So most, most reasonable guy in the world.
- [19:28]
Chuck Todd
Yeah, no, yeah, I hear you. Look, I do. I'm not going to put on intentional gaslighters. That was my view also at Meet the Press. I want people from, you know, I want somebody who can honestly defend these policies and I think Oren Cass can honestly defend the, the, the, the philosophy behind this. Although ironically, I think even he admits this is not how he'd implement the strategy and.
- [19:53]
Mike Pesca
Right.
- [19:53]
Chuck Todd
In fact, I think he's fearful that, that he believes his idea could work but that if it's wrongly implemented, it won't ever be tried again. Right. Like it could stain the idea behind what he's trying to do for a generation. And I think he's right. Like, I think that that is possible, that it could, it could stain the idea. But that is my North Star. You know, I want to, I want people who I think are going to, going to be honest about. There's certain. You just. I'm not interested in helping somebody generate a fundraising email. And that was getting very tiresome when booking people, either for the MSNBC show or Meet the Press, you'd have people who wanted to come on and pick a fight so they could put out a fundraising email or do something. It was just, you know, it was. You're like, you know, I'm. I mean, I don't mean to sound Pollyannish. I'm trying to give my audience that. I thought I was making a compact with the best available person to explain what the hell was going on on that side of the aisle that week. Right. I'm trying to surface information. In fact, I always believed Sunday mornings is what I called sit down television, not. Not, you know, interrupted television. Right. If you're in the Today show, you've got to distract somebody from getting ready for work to watch a segment for five minutes. But Sunday morning TV was a choice, right? You were sitting down, cup of coffee, which also meant while you could make people uncomfortable, don't make them too uncomfortable or they'll stop watching. They're there to. They're there to ingest. All right? Not gag.
- [21:32]
Mike Pesca
Chuck Todd used to be the host of Meet the Press, and they said, if it's Sunday, it's Meet the Press. I always thought that was a confusion of cause and effect. But now we could say, if it's Monday, Wednesday, Friday it is, buddy. It's the Chuck Toddcast. Chuck, thanks a lot.
- [21:45]
Chuck Todd
Hey, this was. This was great. I thought I was. You're gonna give me a chance to do some what ifs with you on sports, but I guess I'll.
- [21:51]
Mike Pesca
We can. How do you want.
- [21:52]
Chuck Todd
I'll have to. I'll have to do a home and away. I have to invite you in mine. And we can do that.
- [21:56]
Mike Pesca
All right. Thank you, Chuck. Good talking to you. Take care. And now the spiel. The Democratic Party has broken out into a vocabulary fight. I wish it had happened a few months ago over the word brat. But now the battle line is right there in the title of Bernie Sanders and AOC's fighting oligarchy tour. Which is better than Crookchella or Hunter Palooza as a title. I suppose Bernie Sanders likes hitting the oligarch, or as he says, oligarch theme, sometimes utilizing the adjectival form.
- [22:52]
Chuck Todd
We live in an oligarchic society in which billionaires dominate not only our politics and the information we consume from media.
- [23:02]
Mike Pesca
Oligarchy. Sort of like the Olive Garden. Alyssa Slotkin, senator from Michigan, says, let's not use that word. Oligarchy. Oligarchy. Let's bring it down to the people's Level. Let's talk about kings. No more kings. We're gonna do what the people say. You know, I thought I knew where this was all going. This was my analysis. Slotkin is a Midwesterner, and I'm gonna butcher the accent, but that's okay. She's the descendant of butchers. When a Midwesterner says oligarchy or oligarchy, you've got the a sound. So it comes out a little like oligarchy or oligarchy. Oligarchy. It's not that cool sounding. It's not using it as a cudgel, the garchy part of it. But when Bernie Sanders, as a New Yorker, says oligarchy, it does stick in the throat a little bit. It sounds kind of disgusting. An oligoc. He's gunking up the process. The oligarch. And these are the close cousins of what Bernie Sanders is always talking about, the millionaires and billionaires. And Bernie Sanders must be thinking, well, we're talking about billionaires. A king is a singular figure. It's not just Musk, it's Bezos. It's maybe the Koch brothers. Too many of them is to be a king also. It's not as if Bernie Sanders doesn't also go out of his way to blame kings. Bernie does talk about kings, but he clearly thinks in talking about oligarchs, that he's updating that sentiment.
- [24:39]
Chuck Todd
In modern times, we no longer have the divine right of kings. What we now have is an ideology being pushed by the oligarchs.
- [24:49]
Mike Pesca
When asked about Alissa Slotkin's critique, Sanders said, well, it's not as if I'm set in my ways and not open to valuable insight from a younger colleague. He did not say that at all. He said this.
- [25:00]
Chuck Todd
I think the American people are not quite as dumb as Ms. Slotkin thinks they are.
- [25:07]
Mike Pesca
But it turns out Bernie wasn't calling Alissa Slotkin's perception of all people dumb. He was just calling Alyssa Slotkin's father dumb. As we found out when Slotkin was asked about all of this.
- [25:19]
Chuck Todd
So my response is, I agree with everything he said, other than my dad didn't know what oligarchy meant. Like, he asked me what it was about. It's not that I disagree on the concepts or on the principles, and he's right. And that energy that he's bringing is great. It's just that we gotta, again, communicate to those folks who may not know what an oligarchy is like.
- [25:37]
Mike Pesca
My dad seems like a pretty good focus group of one. But I also think that, yeah, it's true. Words and messages, they are important. But this one word, this one debate, it's really not that important. I don't mean in the whole scope of things. I mean that the message is 99% as potent if you say kings or if you say oligarch. Oligarch, oligarch. Bernie isn't really going over too many people's heads. Oligarch, again, the cousin of millionaires and billionaires, the richer cousin, really. The three or four richest cousins. Slotkin would like the Democratic message to be more build up the middle class kind of common sense. And Sanders is more of a tear it down left populism. So there are elements of that in how each of them speaks. But really, oligarch versus kings, it's a fine gradation. And unlike some fights, which are really about what we believe and how we say it, this one has relatively small stakes. One final factor underlying all of this is that Slotkin's grandfather was, if not an oligarch, kind of a magnate. Hugo Slotkin was chairman of the board of John Morrell and Company, the third largest meatpacker in the country. And Hugo's father, which is to say Alyssa Slotkin's great grandfather, Samuel Slotkin was president of the High Grade Meat Company, the creator of the Ballpark Frank. You could call him the hot dog king of New York, I suppose. Or if you're Bernie Sanders, the hot dog oligarch. And that's it for Today's show. Lydia McMullen Laird produced it. Cory Warra is our ailing producer and will be back. And our reigning champion, Michelle Peska, CBSO of Peach Fish Productions. Astrid Green runs our socials and Leo Baum is our intern, Umparu G. Peru Duparu. And thanks for listening.