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A
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B
It's Monday, April 27, 2026. From Peachfish Productions, it's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca. In his impromptu black tie press conference after a near assassination attempt, President Trump was asked, do we just have to live with this state of violence? And his answer was yes, yes, we do. On many of the Sunday shows this weekend, panelists were asked a version of the same question. They offered the answer you're supposed to give we shouldn't have to. It is true, political violence does seem to have become a part of doing business, but it should not be normal. It should not be normalized. And that is something we should not lose sight of. And ultimately, it is incumbent upon public leaders to set the right tone. I thought the president did that in his press conference last night. I think it's important for others to follow suit. But ultimately we should not say that, hey, we're used to this. It's America. It's happened before. Somebody has to draw the line. And we've seen this too many times now. Just many, too many times. That was Lonnie Chan on Meet the Press. The panelists are wrong and Trump is right. It might be better and more comforting had Trump not chosen this as the one time to tell us the truth. But there you have it. No one is out there who can draw a line. There is no entity that can do that. There are forces of passions, guns, media hatreds, enmities too powerful for someone in our fractured society to draw the line. There are too many popular voices constantly stoking the rage and excusing the antisocial, allowing for the criminal and the violent. Steve Bannon talks of The FBI director's head on a pike. Tucker Carlson, civil war. Tim Pool says civil war and we have to escalate. After Trump's indictments, Hassan Piker says Hamas was right. America deserved 9 11. Luigi Mangione committed understandable murder given his victim's quote, social murder. These aren't fringe figures. These are the most popular figures there is right now. A concerted effort to make some of them even more popular. They are definitely, if you don't believe me, if you're saying those guys, yeah, they're definitely the most popular figure among the would be shooters demographic. The 31 year old at the Hilton, the 20 year old in Butler, Pennsylvania. We shouldn't have to live with these as our most listened to pundits, but here we are. We shouldn't have to live in a media ecosystem that selects for wild radical sentiment over the sensible, but we do. So I can try to do my job and you could do yours as a media consumer. Thank goodness law enforcement and the Secret Service in Washington did theirs. And by the way, a part of their job is an honest assessment of their soft spots and breaches, which the gunman wrote about in his manifesto. And the media should do its job too. This attempted attempt, which is what it was, certainly newsworthy. But is it that much more so than the one that took place alongside Trump's golf course? Or is it that one took place in a room full of journalists and the other was miles away? Yeah, sure, that was newsworthy too. Quick, name that gunman. Okay, it was Wesley Routh. I don't want to, you know, give him any more attention. But the point is it was covered some. It did not become what I predict this will and already has. It is infuriating, of course, that these events keep taking place. And it's also infuriating that the real problem of gun murder has really no chance of being addressed, in part because the typical gun murder is almost never discussed. High profile, atypical gun crimes and attempted gun crimes get all the discussion. I understand. How could we look away? I'm just saying it's infuriating. But what we really should be doing is to consciously try to be less infuriated about everything. At every point in this chain, someone should do something about that. I think I'm the only one that I know can do something for me. So that's what I will try to do. On the show today, more on the attempt, including Trump's percentage plays and various cruise decor on cnn. But first, to the other great democracy in this hemisphere, Brazil where Lula da Silva is once again president. Having defeated their own right wing election, denying strongman Richard Lapper is out with a book titled the man, the Myth and the Dream of Latin America. And Richard Lapper is here to discuss it. You can make the case, and I will now that Lulu da Silva is the most consequential individual in this hemisphere in the last quarter century. Now, I know your mind goes to Donald Trump and that's a bit of recency bias. And of course, Trump has over two terms helmed the largest and most powerful country in the hemisphere. But the second largest in population and size is Brazil. And my case rests on the term of governance. The importance of de Silva when he was out of governance, and by the way, let's call him Lula, as almost everyone does, and the fact that he has taken the average Brazilian from a place of impoverishment to a place of wealth, let's just say less impoverishment in a way that no American maybe could, just because the average American started off so wealthy to begin with. He is the subject of a new book by someone who knows him well and has been writing about him and covering him for many years. Former writer for the Financial Times, Richard Lapper is out with a new book called Lula the Man, the Myth and the Dream of Latin America. Richard, welcome to the gist.
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C
Thank you very much for having me on. And I, you know, I couldn't agree more with your summing up.
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B
Yeah, so you wrote, you, you've written a couple books on Brazil and the last was really good on Bolsonaro, Beef B and Bullets. Good title. I did. Well, I will admit. I read the reviews and I heard you do a couple of interviews about it. I haven't read the book, but I have read this book and it really strikes me that Lula, perhaps we take him for granted, but his impact on the life of an average Brazilian is monumental. So let's just start there because we could start with biography. We will definitely get to the current politics. But if I was just a Brazilian who was living in the country, maybe a median Brazilian, the year before Lula first got elected to now, how might my life have changed?
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C
I would, I would kind of roll it back slightly further than that, Mike. I mean, I think, I think that life change for Brazilians in the 19, in the mid-1990s when they began under the government of Fernando Enrique Cardozo, Lula's predecessor, with whom he had a very complicated political relationship. He was both a friend and a political antagonist. And things began to change. When Cardozo's real plan conquered hyperinflation, it brought much greater stability to Brazil. So Lulich first came into office in January 2003. He'd won the election in October 2002. He embraced many of the economic policies that had been developed by Cardozo. And that really lent a tremendous air of stability to Brazil. And it did so at a time when Luna was quite lucky because China was coming into the international market. It joined the World trade organization in 2001. And there was a tremendous economic boom for Brazil throughout Lula's period in office. And Lula during his first eight years, used that economic dividend extremely sensibly. You know, they used it to. He didn't take too many risks by overspending, which many of his Latin American peers thinking people like Hugo Chavez or Nestor Kirchner, they wasted a lot of that boom. Lula was very smart and they focused on maintaining stability, attracting investment, which they did in very large amounts during the 2000s, and gradually through a big booming consumerism, really bringing prosperity in a way. It was a period, in some ways, I think, quite like, you know, the sort of post war boom in Europe in the 1950s and 60s when, you know, working class people were suddenly able to buy TVs and fridges and things like that.
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B
And it was unclear. I think the world markets were quite nervous just about how the former fiery labor unionist, how sensible he might be as a steward of that economy. Correct.
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C
I think they were. They were extremely nervous. I said, you know, Lula's. Lula's been one of his. One of the sort of central things about Lula is his desire for economic stability. But he parted a little bit from that script in the late 1980s and 1990s for reasons that we can go into. And in 1994, Lula was against the real plan, which this counter inflationary plan. And he was against it again in 1988 when he ran for a third election and again was defeated. And it was only really in 2001 when the Lula and his party began to realize that they had to change course if they were going to win. And he embraced economic stability at this point.
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B
Yeah. So in retrospect, this just seems wise and calculating, but even in your book, you call it a rightward turn.
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C
And.
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B
And what were the risks at the time? Selling out his ideals, his people, his base. He was perhaps just committed to an economic philosophy that made it very hard for him to embrace this plan. Just talk me through if this was more of a cold Calculating political decision, or this was more of an awakening to economic reality.
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C
If you look at Lula's life as a whole, as I did them writing the book, I think there are three things that kind of constitute a kind of political DNA, if you like his concern for social improvement and, you know, reducing poverty based on his own life experiences, really, as a young man, a young boy and a young man. Secondly, his pragmatism, which is rooted in his experience as a trade union leader. And thirdly, his commitment to economic stability. I think he's by nature quite a conservative figure in some ways. Now, the problem is that to win office in Brazil, Lula formed a party. That party, the Workers party, formed in 1980 by Lula, is a very divided party in many ways. It has the pragmatism of the trade union movement as a constituent element, but it's also got some very radical left wing figures in it, many of whom who cut their teeth in the radical Catholic movements of the 60s and 70s, what was then known as liberation theology. This was a big movement, Mike, and it had a lot of influence and importance. And among those groups were many people who'd taken up arms against the military government and being defeated. But although they'd been defeated and they were now entering a kind of constitutional, a peaceful approach to change, they maintained many of their Marxist views. And so within the Workers Party, Lula's party, there's always a tension between a pragmatism and a much more harder left. Anti Americanism, anti capitalism in some ways. So fast forward to your question to the 1980s and 90s. Lula and the PT compete electorally with quite a radical program. They're defeated three times. Lula loses the election in 89, in 94 and 98. And they realize that if they carry on with the same approach, as the world begins to change, they're going to lose again. And so some people on the left would accuse him of selling out his ideals and principles. Other people, myself included, would say it was simply a recognition of reality.
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B
Right. And there are parallels, of course, to what's going on in other democracies, Third way politics. Tony Blair positioning himself as new labor. Bill Clinton redefining the Democratic Party as something other than the party of FDR and labor. Now the question is, and then Lulu does it in Brazil. The question is, is the starting place of where his party was. It's folly to liken it to. I'll take the Democratic Party in the United States. The Democratic Party in the United States was never as left as Lula's party was in Brazil. So therefore the moderation, it's all very relative. And all Lula was doing was actually being pretty left, if we want to use blunt terms, just not, as three elections in the recent history of Brazil show, radically left. Is that what was going on? Or did Lula see things maybe similar to Blair and Clinton and wanted to play a triangulation game to appeal to the electorate?
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C
So, I mean, it's quite a complex set of questions here, because the third road, in which. Which Blair and Clinton in a way represent this meeting of social democracy and neoliberalism, if you like, in Brazil, is represented by Lula's opponent, Fernando Enrique Cardozo. And although some people in the Workers Party, which is the main. There's two poles in Brazilian politics through the 1990s, the 2010s and the early 2000s. The early 2000s and 2010s for 25 years. Two poles. One poll is a kind of. Is Blairism, Clintonism represented by Cardozo and his party, and the other is a kind of slightly harder leftism represented by Lula's party. And within that, within Lula's party, some people are quite, you know, friendly towards the ideas of Clinton and Blair. It's not a. It's a very odd. It falls in a very odd way, Brazilian politics. It's not. It's. It's quite sui generis, I think.
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B
Yeah. But I most interested in. In Brazil, we have mostly a success story. And in the world, in macroeconomics, I think probably we can't have, you know, massive versions of the Celtic Tiger or something like that. Huge, huge countries don't have those sort of massive swings. But Lulu was a very good steward of the economy. We'll get into his gelling and where he is now, he. He obviously didn't go down the road of the Chevistas, of Evo Morales, of the temptation to engage in a fiery and often Marxist or neo Marxist rhetoric. I'm trying to figure out why. Did he see something? Did he say, I can get the crowd on their feet if I say that, but if I pursue their policies, my sense of economics is telling me that this will be bad for the country. It was. It just, you know, his own personal comportment. What give me your insight as to why he didn't become a Chavista?
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C
Yeah, I think there are a couple of important points to make here. One is, you know, whenever you interview Lula, he always talks in this kind of homespun way about the economy. You know, talks about the importance of the lessons he learned from his mother, Donna Lindu, who used to husband their resources very, very carefully. You know, when Lou, as a young man going out to work for the first time, still living at home, he and his brothers always used to give their money, their earnings to his mother, who would hand out their pocket money. I mean, she was always insisting that other people were worst off. She was kind of really, really careful, I think. And I think that had a bit of influence in a way, and he always emphasizes it. And the other thing, of course, is that as a trade unionist, he was very, very aware of the need to make even small gains were better than no gains at all. So right from the beginning, he's always opposed to people who are saying, we want to join the union and transform the system. He's saying, look, I want to get better conditions, better terms and conditions for my members. And in the, in the 19, late 60s, early 70s, when he's working as a union official, his area is to work on, you know, social benefits and pension benefits for his members. It's really dull, you know, stuff, right? Not, not, not dramatic stuff at all. Lula builds his popularity because he's effective at doing that. And he's, you know, he's, he's not at that stage remotely interested in radical political change. And so I think there is this pragmatism and caution that's kind of been part of his political approach.
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B
Yes, that, that is clear. But also importantly, it worked. So the timing was good. I mean, it generally worked is the best we could say. And maybe during his tenure, will you tell me from your perch at the ft, did it seem to work? Maybe more than we recognize in retrospect. When he leaves office the first time, his assessment. Well, you tell me, what was the world's assessment of his tenure?
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C
I think it kind of worked. In the 2000s, between 2003 and 2011, Lulu could only run for two terms. And I think he made quite a big mistake by designating Dilma Yousaf to be a successor. Castilma, although she's a, you know, a very serious and intelligent person, she's not a, she's not a particularly adept politician. And Lula said that he thought she would learn politics when she came into government because she, she'd learned so much else. But she was very ill adept at managing the deal making that's essential in Brazilian politics because of the nature of the political system. This is what led Brazil into tremendous difficulty from 2013. Really. It was Dilma's strategy And her mismanagement of that, I think. I think that contributed to the severity of the corruption crisis in Brazil with what's called as the car wash scandal. And it led to her impeachment in 2016, and eventually it led in 2018 to Ludler's imprisonment.
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B
So he was caught up in that scandal. How legitimate was it? I know that obviously in politics you want to politicize your opponents failures, but were they corrupt? And was. Were jail terms the correct sentence?
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C
The problem about the corruption issue in Brazil is not just about Lula. It's about the whole political system. Brazil, for various reasons, adopted a very dysfunctional political model. It has enormous electoral districts, entire states. It has a system of open list representation whereby candidates for the Congress are competing not just with their opponents and other parties, but with members of their own party. They have to. Because the electoral districts are so large, the costs of campaigning are huge. And this means. And because the open list system, it gives more power to individual congressmen than to the parties.
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B
So is the biggest problem for Brazil autocracy slash fascism internally? Is it where it is on the world stage? Is it being in the shadow of the United States? Is it something specific to Brazil or what all countries face these populist movements that are quite angry and frenzied, yet don't have a lot of direction or something else?
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C
Well, I mean, if we. We could dig quite deep into the roots of this problem in Brazil, I think it, you know, a lot of. A lot of it does stem from Brazil. Brazil's got a very different history to the other Latin American countries. You know, when Bolivar liberated, you know, Colombia and Venezuela wasn't Colombia and Venezuela. You know, he had an idea of establishing a huge country in Latin America, just one country like the United States, which was inspired by. And these independent republics just fell apart in warring. And so that's why we have, you know, how many countries in Latin America. What happened in Brazil was quite different. I mean, Brazil, you know, 27 states, you know, it stayed together. You know, Brazil had a monarchy in the 19th century which worked as a kind of, you know, as a national, As a. As a cemented a kind of national identity. It also had slavery around which people, in a sense, united in a, you know, slightly horrible way. But I mean, there you, you know, you have this kind of bizarre, reactionary foundation of Brazil when it became a republic in 1889. It's got these. It's a big integrated country with these rather reactionary, the monarchy and slavery, key institutions, right? And then it. Modernizes but it's, you know, the Portuguese Empire moved from Portugal to Brazil, right? That's why you had the king there. I mean, it's, this is, I think, a lot of it. We need to go back to that to see why it's possible. Brazil's got so many economic advantages. You know, this incredible agricultural sector that's one of the most, if not the most productive in the world. You know, the world's farm, it's, you know, so productive in terms of virtually every agricultural crop you can think of. And yet it has an incredibly green energy base. 75% is hydroelectric. They've got so many things going for them and yet it remains a bit of an enigma in a way that it's not made more of this resource base.
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B
Richard Lapper, for 25 years wrote for the Financial Times. He was the Latin American editor there and he is out with a new book drawing on his deep base of knowledge called Lula the Man, the Myth and a Dream of Latin America. Thank you so much, Richard.
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C
Thanks, Mike. Pleasure.
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B
And now the spiel. Of course we have to live with the state of affairs that is around us as a country with lots of guns and lots of violence and lots of talk of violence. What does it mean to say we don't have to live with this state of affairs? Where do we live then? Inside a fairy tale or inside the uk, Right, Or Japan? Actual societies. But that would put us in an alternate reality, across the currents of history and sentiment that define America. Colin Allen, the 31 year old Caltech graduate who attempted to assault the White House Correspondents Dinner, will forever be known for one act that when you think about it, parallels his life. So Colin Allen lived a life where he went to the best school and was engaged in teaching and dedicated himself to being productive and helping others and doing something that was useful to the world. Just as with this action, he was for many days on end, careful, methodical, quite smart. He acquired his weapons legally years ago. He trained, he took a train east to transport the weapons so he wouldn't get detected. He checked into the very hotel he knew the President and his cabinet would be appearing at. He did that days ahead of time. So this is a planner who used his intellect to try to achieve his goal. And then at the last minute, what did he do? He bum rushed a secure area and didn't come close to getting inside. What was the plan? If it was simply death by cop, why go through all this hard work and forethought if he meant to use his reconnaissance and efforts how was that the way to effectuate an actual assassination? I think I'll go in this case with President Trump's description of the guy whack job. But an interesting level of intellect informing that climactic stupidity. President Trump attracts assassins. He and his black tie press briefing seemed to revel in that a little bit, saying they only shoot at the impactful presidents. I guess Ford and Garfield accepted and that is true. Then the President started to lay some stats on us race car drivers.
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C
I think it's very dangerous.
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B
So if you take 1% and then
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C
take about 10% of 1% just to break it down very easily, they die so much less than 1%, 10% of 1%.
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B
But if you take presidents, it's 5.8% and about 8% are shot at. So nobody told me this was such a dangerous profession.
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C
If Marco would have told me, maybe I wouldn't have run.
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B
Maybe I wouldn't would have said, I'll take a pass.
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C
No, it's a dangerous profession, but I don't view it that way. Look, I'm here to do a job as part of the job. It is a dangerous. I can't imagine that there's any profession that's more dangerous.
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B
So a little exaggerated. Four of our 45 presidents were actually assassinated. So it's less than 10%, but a more accurate percentage than when he tried to weigh in on the drug price decrease. Trump seems much less bothered by the attempts on his life than some TV commentators who weren't even in the room at the time. Here was se cup that night on cnn.
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A
What we just watched is so upsetting. I'm in studio and I'm shaking watching this and I can't imagine what Erica Kirk is going through again. And I think it's important to remember that the people in that room, we know some, so many of them, they're also human. And I imagine that while they want to show up for press freedom and we don't know what the motive of this shooter was, I imagine some of them are also really scared and traumatized. And I think viewers who are watching some of this footage will be scared and traumatized by it. It's really upsetting and I feel so exhausted by how much violence we have to cover. Violence against journalists, violence against politicians. I just can't imagine continuing on with this night. I understand the importance of standing up there and standing against these threats of violence, but this is very real and we are human. Journalists are human too. And I would really understand if for security reasons and also, also Just compassion, human reasons. This night didn't continue as planned.
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B
So, look, I hadn't expected to see that or hear that during live coverage. And a case can be made that she is giving voice to a prevalent opinion, one that hadn't occurred to me. I reacted by thinking that I want my analysis and news people to hold it together a little more on tv. But if you want to point out that I'm excessively unfeeling. Okay, fine. Fair critique. I will note that Essie Cupp delivered those remarks with several tissues balled up in front of her. She had been crying, apparently, but why not toss the tissues off screen? She knows what she's doing. She's been on TV for years. I don't think this was an oversight. I think it was by design to make her point. Van Latham was there next to her. He's the TMZ veteran who now works for the Ringer and issues his opinions on social issues. He followed up with a short rant. He was soon replaced not to return to the panel. And after everyone's out of harm's way. This country is sick.
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A
Sick.
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B
This country is sick. And everyone can continue to go on about like it's business as usual. We can do the pomp and circumstance, we can dress up and we can go to prom, and we can have all of these things that try to disorient us or take our focus off the fact that we are fundamentally sick right now as a country. So a presidential assassination attempt. And I realized, by the way, it wasn't quite that maybe a presumably intended assassination attempt. It's a troubling, troubling thing. Of course it is. And that is why Last year, the U.S. secret Service budget for protective operations. Not counterfeiting, just protecting political figures that cost us $1.2 billion as taxpayers. I, if you know me, know, always wonder about overreacting, though there is a good argument that if the president were to have been assassinated any of the times that someone tried it, it would be such a devastating effect on public life and politics and everything else. You basically pay anything to go back in time to prevent that. But there are overreactions out there. One is Trump's insistence that we need a White House ballroom. How does this event, where the press invites the president to its ceremony, how does that inform the need to a White House ballroom where he'd be inviting the press or not, and controlling who gets invited, which the press wouldn't agree to? The president doesn't host dignitaries at local Hiltons. He doesn't need it. When the President of France or King Charles comes in town. I mean, maybe there is a good argument for a White House ballroom. I'm open to it. There certainly is some bad arguments. Trump seems to make those. And then there is the argument about the need for gun control. I'm not calling this an overreaction. We do need gun control and we're not going to get it. Does this event prove that we need gun control? I don't know. To be fair, Japan has the most effective gun control of any free society in the world. Fewer than 10 gun murders a year. And Shinzo Abbey was gunned down a couple of years ago. The gun control argument is had during the times of the least typical gun crimes, assassination attempts and mass shootings with long guns, even though 95% of murders are with handguns. So I will say the controversial thing just because it's a platitude to say the other thing. We don't need a conversation on guns. We've had many conversations on guns. We know the contours of that conversation. We actually, we as Americans have fundamentally different opinions of what the law should be. We're at odds on what the law should be, not some outlier version of the law that probably wouldn't stop all but a handful of events. Maybe it is true. The gun control advocates say that 90 something percent support waiting periods or red flag laws. But the real gun control is no, you can't own a gun, or no, you presumably don't have a right to a gun, and the Supreme Court has said you do. And also the majority, or at least a very large and significantly powerful portion of Americans want a right to a gun. They don't want guns banned outright. And they don't think this way because of the NRA or because of some lies they were told. They use guns, they like guns, they identify with guns, they respect guns. The NRA has had some of its worst years in the last couple of years. Wayne Lapierre being ousted from leadership membership, going from five and a half million in 2018 to 3.8 million in 2023, according to some court filings. By the way, members of the board claim the real number is really closer to 3 million revenue in 2018, NRA taking in 412 million. In 2023, this was down to 176 million. It was up a little last year, the last year for which we have full numbers. But they did have to liquidate nearly 40 million from their investment portfolio, meaning the worst times for the NRA in many decades. Correlate to no movement on gun control. In fact, if you look at the Supreme Court movement away from gun control, it is not the nra. It is the will of the people. And one lone gunman who didn't actually get within shooting range of shooting range isn't going to move the needle or, per Van Latham's analysis, heal the country. What will? I'm going to say it. Nothing. This is our condition. It's chronic, it's costly, but it's manageable. Like a diabetic has to take insulin, like a kidney patient needs dialysis. We're never going to change as long as we are a democracy and this is our demos. We in fact have been worse off in the past. You might think I'm being negative or pessimistic. I say no. It's realistic. And right now the most destructive forces aren't the ones saying we can't have gun control or this event doesn't say much about the possibility of gun control. The most destructive forces aren't articulating any realistic positions like we're not going to have the gun control we want. We need to harden targets more. Those are realistic arguments. There are massive swaths of arguments that are saying right now, oh, this was all a hoax, this was a false flag. The real whack job isn't just the actual gunman, it's actually the millions of people saying there was no gunman. And let's face the fact that we're a country of washing guns and our only way out is to be guarded by better trained, more well funded people with their own, probably more sophisticated guns. Especially if you're lucky enough to enjoy the protection. It's not actually a good place to be, but it's actually where we are. And that's it for today's show. Cory o' er produced the gist. Kathleen Sykes runs the gist list. Tomorrow how to is going to be out. Jeff Craig edits that Benister is our booking producer and Michelle Pesca is the COO of Peach Fish Productions. Improve G Peru Duparu and thanks for listening.