Fast Politics with Molly Jong-FastThe Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson skewers Trump's courtroom behavior. Politico’s Rachael Bade talks about the chaos in the Republican caucus. CNN Climate reporter Bill Weir examines his new book 'Life as We Know It (Can Be): Stories of People, Climate, and Hope in a Changing World.
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds.
And Trump VP contender Christy Nomes says there should be no rape or incest exceptions for abortion. We have such a great show for you today. Politico's Rachel Bade stops by talking about the chaos and the Republican Caucus. Then we'll talk to CNN climate reporter Bill Weir about his new book, Life as We Know It can be stories of people, climate and hope in a changing world. But first we have the host of the Enemy's List, the Wiki Project's own Rick Wilson.
Welcome back.
It's Monday and Mondays are for Rick Wilson.
They are for Rick Wilson. And therefore the great and true love that we share of mocking a certain lumbering orange criminal who spends much more of his time in courtrooms than any normal person would desire.
This criminal trial has shown how bad politics' pundent brain is. Okay, like the people who are sitting in a criminal trial would help him.
There were a lot, Lolly, there were a lot of people were like Trump's base will love this for him. Yes, that's right, because his base is completely disconnected from human reality, the idea that we're going to have weeks and weeks and months and months of this and it's not going to hurt him. Look, I get the natural desire not to get twenty sixteen Again.
Twenty sixteen did not happen because Trump was prosecuted for crimes he did.
Oh no, he got away with shit, and he got away with stuff in sixteen that these days no one would even consider the idea of ignoring it, even in you know, the both sides sections of the media. This is a guy who clearly is not in the position he was in even a few weeks ago. And part of it is because and I have this theory of the case, there are two big things going on, one of which is the court stuff, the other of which is he can't pretend anymore that he's some sort of like financial genius. His penny stock is cratering, he's out of money, he's broke every which way. The whole illusion of Trump right now has finally like faced up to the reality of his shitty life. And it's bad. He's in a bad place right now.
Rip I did say last week, you're teflon until you're not right. You get away with it until you don't.
You were immune from all consequence until the moment consequence comes and shows up. As they say in It's Unlooped Form.
One of the things that is like so clear about when you look at Trump and you look at sort of his behavior pattern is there is no other person politician, Democrat, Republican for whom this works right, and it works Trump probably because he was very, very famous and people didn't really know his political background, so he was like a rorshack. He could be left, he could be right, he could be this, he could be that nobody knows because he was a TV star. But this is something different, right, This is something where it's like, all of a sudden, we know him. We've seen his voting record, we've seen his governing record, we know this guy.
Right, there's no more illusion of Trump. There's no more there's no more imaginary version of Trump where they get to say, oh, well, you know, the grown ups around him will make sure that things will be so different this time. No amage that no one's ever buying that that cannot be sold to any rational person. No one accepts that that construction any further because we have seen him, we do know what he is, we do know what he does. And the behavior in court in the first week I think was very telling, the whining, the immaturity, the oh, I'm so cold, you know, all this crap, and is in the case of a couple of days of unhappiness in court. And we're not talking like weeks and months. We're talking about he's losing his mind after a couple days in the courtroom. I think we are watching Trump quietly decompensating at the moment, and it's going to get I think, quite a bit worse in the coming days and weeks, because Trump is pushing the judge's limits And while the judge I think has been very slow to react in some ways to Trump. There's no unlimited scenario where Trump gets to keep threatening jurors. There's no unlimited scenario where he gets to fart, fall asleep, skunky people act like an a hole in court every single day. None of that's a real scenario. And eventually every judge in a case is going to say, I get the celebrity status of this guy. But they also are going to say, but that celebrity status doesn't mean we have two systems of the law. This is a man who has over and over again proven he will threaten, intimidate, he will browbeat, he will attempt to suborn people. And I think Mershawn is actually kind of of the BS already and within the within the first week, the guy is tired of the play acting and the Trump Show and all the and all the garbage.
I think that's absolutely right. And I also think that what you see is like he is really trying to make sure that it's done right. Like he kicked someone off the jury pool for having lied about having a very minor criminal charge for pulling down posters conservative posters, right. I mean, he realizes this is going to get appealed a million times and be scrutinized, and so oh.
Of course he wants this case to be as bulletproof as he can. Yeah, that speaks well of him. That is what you want in a judge, what you want in a trial. You want a clean case that isn't going to get overturned, that isn't going to get thrown out, and that doesn't have some sort of like mechanical or structural defect in it that lets a guy like Donald Trump walk free again again.
Donald Trump will obviously want free you. Nope, he's not going to jail for those. Very unlikely he'll go to jail for this. But what's relevant and what is important is will he be held accountable? And that is the two hundred million dollar question, right it is.
I still have my deep skepticism of you know, any system that lets Trump stay in the courtroom every day and do this stuff. I have some skepticism that it's going to work in that way. I do think he has a kind of horrible power to get to people, whether it's Jesse Waters getting a lot of whatever information, or whether it's these rumors about all the usual Trump people, like posting the names of jurors on telegram and discord all this sort of behavior. I do think at some point the judge will be obligated, in order to maintain the sanity in the courtroom and in order to maintain a trial that isn't decided by Trump being able to intimidate or browbeat jurors. At some point I think he's gonna have to at least put Trump in his in a cell in the Metropolitan Correction Center for a couple of hours and say, cool the hell off, and the tweeting and the using the phone in the court room and all that stuff. It's just a long running behavioral pattern that I can't see how a judge tolerates that over the length of this trial.
And that's going to really be the big question is like how long can Trump behave badly?
Yeah?
No, I think it is a key question. But I will also say this, I think there's a part where Trump maybe slightly overplaying it, this whole idea of my people love me no matter what, and yeah, his people do love him, but there's a point where it's like, Okay, stop being a whining bitch. Stop being by acting like this is the worst punishment anyone in history has ever received, because it is not by any stretch of the imagination. And as Trump continues to you know, I'm being persecute and it's the deep state. Joe Biden's here personally running the trial. The whining is just like it's not even on Trump's brand. He's whiny, but he's not a whiner, if that makes any sense. But right now he's just like sniveling all the time.
And the thing that I have always argued with a number of like other pundits about in twenty sixteen, he really did run on like they weren't necessarily true, but he had promises, and those promises were like, I'm going to bring back your cold jobs, something he couldn't do.
Yeah, I'm going to restore the economy. I'm going to make great trade deals with Jina, you know all that stuff.
Yeah, there were promises in there, right, And like as much as I really did respect HRC, you know, it was like I'm with her and he's with us, right, Like, you could see that there was a little bit smarter messaging going on on his side. I mean, they were lies, but they were smart, you know, it was smartly done lies.
I think that there was a degree to which America was kind of to believe some of Trump's bs in sixteen, and it was we had had this long period of time where they had a black guy in charge. They didn't like it. A lot of Americans, Republican and Democrat, were very unhappy, feeling like from two thousand and eight on the middle class was getting fed. And they weren't wrong, by the way, in some real meaningful ways, but it's stacked and its stacked, and Trump was sort of the perfect avatar at the perfect moment for that attack. Now I don't think he is that guy anymore. Even if you make the argument that the economy is of, you know, a hellscape, which I don't I disagree with. Even if you make that argument, you know, the thing we used to see before I stopped believing in focus groups back in sixteen, before I decided that they were all just lies we used to see in focus groups. He's a businessman. He's going to run the country like a business. We need a businessman who knows how to manage. And what's the lesson they learned. They learned that that was the biggest lie of all, that the Apprentice was a TV show. Trump can't manage a waffle house. That Trump doesn't have the ability to manage his own emotions for twenty minutes, to say nothing of a country.
He cannot manage a waffle house.
That reset of people's perceptions of who Trump is, what he can actually accomplish us, what they thought he could accomplish. That is, there's a big delta there now and a lot of people still voting for him are the resentment types. You know, I just want to punish those lib hard educated people. I don't like them. Blah blah blah.
Can we talk about something a little personal. Sure you had a parent who was very trumpy.
Yeah, we're getting past that a bit. Yeah, it's gotten a lot better. It's not perfect, but I think I've come to the conclusion. And the fever can break, And in some weird ways, the fever breaks best after they've bought into like the craziest part of it, in a way, after they've bought into like it's all about the conspiracy of the cannibal pedophiles. Once once you take that apart, the whole thing starts to fall apart. Once you take a part the Hillary Clinton was secretly there by George Soros to take over the world and make us all eat bugs and become Muslims or whatever lunatic fringe thing there was. Once part of that breaks, and once part of that breaks at the most absurd point, it does become I think easier to say, Okay, well, the whole thing was a lot, you know that, right. All the artifacts of this insanity were always lies. None of it was real. I'm starting to see that a little bit more. And look, everybody has pride, and they get in a position, even if it's an irrational one. They have pride about their position, and it's hard to unclinch that fist. But he's making it harder now for even his most fervent supporters to pretend he's something he's not. They may still support it, and they may still love him, but it's harder and harder for them to pretend that he's not just Donald Trump, that he's not just that guy. We know who he is, we know what he is. We know he's not this super negotiator. We know he's not a business genius. We know he's not a particularly smart guy. All those things are sort of increasingly obvious to people, and it's harder to hold the lie in the same place in your head and your heart that you might have if it was just purely the partisan okay, yes or no. People are realizing also that Joe Biden is not. He has not plunged us into communism. Oddly enough, you know that idea of Biden will We'll all be eating bugs with Joe Biden not so much.
That's the thing about like picking someone like Biden is that he's not very liberal. So what is good is that you can reach out to, you know, the never Trump Republican or really the very there's a huge part of this country that's just the middle.
This country still has a lot of much more moderate Democrats than our friends on the coasts like to sometimes admit to themselves. A North Carolina Democrat outside of a city is basically like a moderate Republican in New York. But it's hard for them to admit that to themselves sometimes. And I get it, just like it's hard for Republicans to admit to themselves that not everybody in the country believes that that Donald Trump is here to save us from Klaus Schwab in the New World Order or whatever the hell is in their fantasy bubble.
I mean, if Biden wins, which he may or he may not, we don't know. It's two hundred days out. You know, he certainly is running a very disciplined campaign that does not involve being a criminal defendant.
Indeed, indeed, and you know, not being a criminal defendant. It's hard to say this in English sometimes, but it really is, you know, a political advantage to not be a criminal defendant.
I can't believe that anyone has with a straight face told us and not even a nauseam that somehow being a criminal defendant would help Trump is just so completely brainworms. But he's running a very disciplined campaign and he really is like there's a lot of dotting the eye. And I was struck by that this week when the Kennedys went to Pennsylvania with Biden and gave really good I mean, I was surprised that really they gave really good speeches. I mean, you know, only one of them is a career politician. You know, all of RFK junior siblings basically said they're voting for Biden and they disavow him. Not even basically, they said we're voting for Biden, and.
They were aggressively direct about their belief that their cousin brother, et cetera is a crank and that his presence in the race will advantage Donald Trump. And I think the more you point out to the soft Democratic voters and some of these younger voters who are the people that don't want Biden or Trump, that picking RFK Junior is not selecting some shiny, young, interesting, moderate candidate. He's a nut. He's a weapons grade kook. Across the board. When they see that inverse validation of the family saying no, he's poisoned, run run away. I think that is going to help the president significant.
It's kind of meaningful whether you're having your siblings being like, this guy sucks.
Right, This guy is a nightmare fuel who will elect Donald Trump? Even if in the world that somehow Joe Biden and Donald Trump were both killed by a meteor the thought of that guy being president should still scare the hell out of people because he's insane.
Yeah, Rick Wilson, thank.
You, Yes, thank you very much.
Spring is here and I bet you are trying to look fashionable, So why not pick up some fashionable all new Fast Politics merchandise. We just opened a news store with all new designs just for you. Get t shirts, hoodies, hats, and toe bags. To grab some head to fastpolitics dot com.
Rachel Bead is a senior Washington correspondent and call op of Playbook and author of Unchecked, The Untold Story Beyond Congress's Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump.
Welcome back to Fast Politics. My one of my favorite congressional people. I mean, you are more than that, but you are especially that I always think of Rachel Baid.
Thank you, Molly. I hope I number one on your list? Hello, now you are number one?
Are you kidding me? You're absolutely no question when everyone else close your ears. So I want to talk to you because I was like, we got to get Rachel baid in here, because it's so interesting what's happening right now in Congress, and because there's so much else, there's so many other stories like happening in the Trump trial, et cetera. We're not getting the pure, unadulterated craziness of what's happening right now in Congress.
So can you give.
Us where we are, where we're going? What happened this week? A little bit?
Well, sure, Bally, I mean the big headline of the week was the Speaker Johnson finally, after months and months and months of refusing to put this White House Born Assistant supplemental on the House floor, he finally caved and did it. And what exactly is this legislation? It is money for Ukraine in their war against Putin, it's assistance for Israel, assistance for Taiwan. And he ended up adding a few sort of like not super conservative provisions, but a couple of changes to what the White House wanted to do in an effort to sort of appease Republicans, and he tried to do that because a lot of Republicans don't support your green funding anymore. So that's why Johnson has sort of been sitting on his hands on this. But above all of this, and above the sort of headline of Johnson is finally going to.
Allow the House to pass this bill.
Is this notion that we could see a second historic ouster of a speaker.
I mean, last fall, Kevin.
McCarthy was ousted, first speaker in American history to get the boot. And now Marjorie Taylor Green, the mega Republican from Georgia, she's teamed up with you know, now two other Republicans to say Johnson, because he is working with Democrats to pass this massively important bill for national security, because he's working in a bipartisan manner, they're going to try to oust him. And you know, it started with Marjorie Thomas Massey, who is a sort of libertarian esque Republican from Kentucky joined her and actually point blank told Johnson in a closed door meeting, you will not be speaker long.
You need to step aside. You need to resign.
On Friday, we saw another Republican, Paul Gosar, come out and support their movement, and I actually caught up with Massi personally in the hallway for about fifteen minutes about his plan.
Here.
He tells me that more Republicans are going to be coming out calling on Johnson to either resign or threatening to force him out sometime in the future. So the big sort of headline I guess for the world is that this bill is got filing out a pass. Ukraine's going to get their money in their ward against Putin. But here in Washington, we are all obsessed with this sort of like Republican infighting, Republicans eating each other. But there again, and the fact that we might see another speaker, Alston.
There were a lot of like interesting mac and nations behind the scenes too. I'm hoping you could talk about the Fart Committee art.
Yes, I really want to make a sound effect right now, but I will not do that for the benefit of your early listeners.
That's very that's very good, thank you. That's how we roll here.
I met with my mouth, not with other places.
But anyway, this is actually a story my colleague Olivia Beavers broke yesterday. This is a group of Conservatives who think Johnson he's negotiating so much with Democrats that they don't trust that he and other members of House leadership aren't going to try to enact revenge on them for refusing to sort of fall in line on this foreign assistance package. So this group of Republican Conservatives who are worried about losing committee assignments, worried about being sent on the floor somebody bringing up something last minute, they sort of adopted this we're going to guard the floor mentality, where they're going to watch what's going on and make sure.
Nothing sort of slips past them.
Usually lawmakers know when something like this is going to come up, like by unanimous consent, meaning like somebody will stand and say, look, I moved to censure so and so lawmakers know somebody in jets and then there's a roll call vote in a fuller debate. Well, conservatives are now worried that the leadership is going to try to punish them without getting any notice, so they're guarding the floor. Yes, the acronym of this group is called FART or Action Response Team.
There you go.
It would have been so easy to have called a kart, which would have then not been nearly as embarrassing, like the Congressional Action Response Team, you know what I.
Mean, like Conservatives Action respond Yes, yes.
Clearly nobody understands how acronyms work. But then there was also moment where conservatives got to put a lot of like really wild amendment in there. Can you talk about that?
Yeah?
I mean so Johnson said, since he unveiled his version of this Foreign Assistance bill, he has said that he was going to open it up to amendment. And what that means is like there are going to be amendments where conservatives are going to say, I want to strip all the funding out of Ukraine. I'm offering amendment to take all that money out. You know, in theory, Democrats, if they wanted to, could try to put up an amendment, say to require conditions on assistance for Israel, which is obviously becoming very popular in a Democratic party. But those conditions are not in this Foreign Assistant's package. So part of just sort of him being able to turn to his conservatives and say, look, I gave you a chance to amend the bill. That's sort of what this is to try to at least modify or mollify some of the anger and sort of tamp down, you know, those sentiments. The problem is he's not giving them everything they want because he can't. A lot of these conservatives want to add what's known as HR two. It's this massively far right border crackdown that will never in any way clear the Senate slash make it to the White House. Biden would be toilt even if it did. But they want to amend it the bill to attach that album is if you do that, the foreign Assistance package dies. And you know, Johnson, to his credit here kept that in mind throughout.
All of this.
I mean, he met with a lot of these conservatives. He was getting tremendous pressure to sort of load it up with these partisan, toxic provisions that of course the right really wants.
But then if.
They get added, you can say bye bye to any Ukraine assistant. So ultimately he kept you know, the top priority, top priority in his mind, which is getting this Ukraine money and money to Israel passed. And so he told them, no, we're not going to allow those amendments. The bill is expected to clear, it's going to pass.
Yeah, so this will mean finally money for Ukraine, money for Taiwan, and money for Israel.
Al Right, yeah, I mean, if you think about it, it's been more than six months. I'm trying to remember when the Way House first asked for this money to come through. The Senate didn't take it up till around a little after the new year. But yeah, I mean we have gone back and forth. It has been such a zig zagging pattern here. And remember back when the White House asked for this money, Johnson, Speaker Johnson himself was the one who said, look, I need the border addressed before we passed the supplemental bill that sent Republicans and Democrats in the Senate down this sort of negotiating rabbit hole for months, coming up with this bipartisan border deal, which was quite historic and you know, had it actually passed, might have actually done something, you know, for the situation at border. But then Johnson himself, getting pressure from Trump not to give Democrats a border solution, killed what he initially demanded. And now he's basically done what the White House has wanted all along, which has passed this Foreign Assistance bill that includes a couple of other provisions that he wanted, but mostly it's what the White House wanted. So it's a big victory for them.
So let's talk about this. It's what the White House wanted. It means that Ukin will be able to continue fighting this war. I'm curious now this leaves Johnson. One of the things somebody said to me. A friend of mine said, well, Congressional Aid has said that the Democrats are prepared to save Johnson. And then a member of Congress who I was texting was said, actually, Johnson doesn't want to be saved. Tell me what you think.
I mean, he doesn't want to be saved.
And the reason is because even if Democrats do save him, which all my Democratic sources I've talked to have told me they.
Will, they will do it.
And I know that the Democratic leadership right now is sort of they're not weighing in on this. But I think they're not weighing in on this because they don't want to make Johnson's life.
Harder, right, which is what it would do.
Yeah, I mean, it's just it's this notion of you know, if Democrats are the ones who prop him up as speaker, you're going to see a whole bunch of conservatives, not just the three right now calling for him to go, but a bunch more saying he cannot be speaker. And the reason is because you know, if he's got to rely on Democrats to keep the gavel, there's going to be a mutiny. I don't know how fast it's going to happen, but like I even talk to leadership Republicans who'll back Johnson, and they are saying, even on the record, like this is not a tenable situation. So if the people Marjor Taylor Green's of the world try to oust Johnson, Democrats step in and save him, which I think, you know, there's a good chance that this actually happens. It's only a temporary solution because then you're going to have Marjor Taylor Green maybe on a daily basis, a weekly basis, a regular basis, filing motions to vaking, and every time they happen, the base is going to put pressure on Republican lawmakers to go against Johnson because they're going to start calling him a Democratic speaker, and it's just going to become this huge distraction in an election year when Republicans aimed to be united and Trump frankly doesn't want to talk about this so it's just it's not something he doesn't want Dems to save him. It's just a question does he resign before that happens, or you know, how does he sort of play this?
How does this go? Yeah, and it's such an interesting situation because here you have this really like slim majority, the Ozambic Republican majority, right yeah, I like, and just getting smaller, and it's yours. It is an election year, like we keep forget, or at least I keep I mean I don't because it feels like, you know, every day is a year. There's a lot happening in an election year, when historically, usually you know, a well function in Congress would try not to have drama during an election year. Is that fair?
Two points actually there, The first one being the fact that Congress is like a big story right now. I mean, usually in a presidential election year, all the reporters on Capitol Hills sort of lead their beats, they go to campaign trail, Congress sort of fads into the background. It's like a non story. That is not the case because of the Republican infighting. They just keep bringing it up, I mean, threats to Alice Johnson. Johnson responding like, is Johnson up put this bill on the floor. He put the bill on the floor. So what does this mean for his you know, his time as Speaker. So there's a lot of coverage and like a lot of significant legislation being passed right now, and it's you know, supplementally born assistance package that we talked about.
But number two.
So I have heard from Trump's inner circle that they were mad at murder Tayler Green when she first started talking about this.
And the reason is what you just said.
They know this is going to hurt him and it's going to be a destruction and you know it could spill over onto his campaign. So, like, I guess I'm curious to see if Trump actually steps out more to protect Johnson's job. I think it was pretty telling that he did this press conference with Speaker Johnson about a week ago, where Johnson came down to mar A Lago and they talked about you know, quote election integrity, they talked about another of issues, but the Foreign President clearly said I stand with the Speaker. But since then, he's been asked, does that mean white blank that you don't want Johnson to be ousted? And he says he said We'll see what happens, right, We'll see what happens. I also was talking to Thomas Messi, one of the Republicans, trying to ask him about this on Friday, and Nassy told me, like his understanding is that Trump is not going to weigh in and publicly say leave the speaker alone, that he's gonna sort of just set back and let them do the rebels sort of do what they need to do, which by the way, is a different read than I got from the Trump inner circle. But it just stands to show that, like the message about what Trump wants is not necessarily being sent to the people who perhaps need to hear it in terms of getting them to stand down. So that's one thing I'm going to be watching really closely over the next few days, because you.
Know, obviously Trump's very influential with these guys.
Yeah, and I think it's really interesting, like there just isn't a clear plan. None of this is a plan. There is no three dimensional chests. I Mean, what I think is interesting too, is that you see Marjorie Taylor Green has benefited so much from this perverse incentive structure of being. You know, where you act out and you get rewarded with small dollar donations, that it would be hard to put the genie back on the bottle.
Now, I totally agree with you.
I've talked to some Republicans who have told me that they think this whole thing is a bluff that you know, Marjorie and Tom MASSI were sort of putting this thread out there to try to get Johnson to walk you know, the Ukraine land.
Back, but I don't.
It's hard for me to see, given how pointed they are and how like they've been on TV. They're talking to reporters and new interviews, like, it's hard for me to see them sort of walking this back. It feels like they're going to have to do this at some point. I did try to get Messy to give me more information about when exactly they're going to pull the trigger on this, and he told me that basically, the rebels are of the mind right now that they're going to give Johnson time. What they want to do is call he said, like a wrench. We're going to ratchet up the pressure on him by slowly building the number of Republicans who publicly come out and say he needs to step aside or I'm going to join in the motion to vacate, and Massey basically said, look, we hope that by we get to the time we get to about a dozen Republicans coming out and saying that that Johnson will quote, you know, see the writing on the wall, and we'll pull a John Bayner two point zero and step aside. And what I mean by that is when the motion to vacate was filed against John Bayner when he was speaker several years ago, Bayer basically decided to resign. He said, I'm not going to put the conference through that, and I'm going to leave. And so that's what Massey is hoping Johnson does. Johnson said he's not resigning. So it's a bit of a game of chicken right now to see who cave's first. But notably, Massey did not tell me when exactly they want him to step aside by Like I said, you know, if he doesn't do it, my next Wednesday or you gotta file the motion, what about next Friday? Like he wouldn't go there, which is interesting to me. So maybe they do blink. Maybe the Conservatives do blink and never actually do this. I don't know's it'll be interesting to watch.
It is also true though, that they're not great options for the Conservatives, right. For example, I'm not convinced that Steve Scalise would give them more of what they want.
Yeah, Conservatives met on Thursday night to discuss that in particular. Okay, so what's the succession plan here? If we get Johnson out? And you know a lot of people think Sclice would be the most likely to take over. He got the most boats.
Him and Tom Emers, right.
Yes, yeah, Tom Emmer and a lot of people think the same members who tried to get the gabble last time around, we'll try again. Jim Jordan, Tom Emmer, Steve Gleise and Splice got like the most votes out of.
All those guys.
So conservatives don't super love Steve gleae either. So like you got to ask, like, if it's not Johnson, who's it going to be? And so there are some conservatives who are upset with Johnson, but who will not join this movement because of that issue. I will say one other sort of bit of news that's first discussing is that like every Republican I talked to, from conservative to moderate to sort of more traditional Republican is telling me on background that Johnson and will not lead next year.
They think that he's just and he.
Sort of fell on his sword for this foreignersistence package to pass bipartisan government spending bills, and that after the election, even if Republicans keep the House, which they probably will not, that he's probably going to be booted and the rest are looking for another leader. So just a question of like when is that going to happen.
It's just wild. I was really am glad you came and just talked us through it. Really appreciate you. And before we started recording, I did say that I really like the playbook. I know I'm not supposed to plug other people's podcasts on your podcast, but I really like the Playbook podcast. I listen to it all the time and there's a lot of really interesting inside baseball stuff.
Well, thank you, Molly. I appreciate that it's a short listen. Yes, doesn't compete with you, doesn't compete.
With you, Okay, best politics is king.
Very well done, Thank you, Rachel. I hope you'll come back.
I will. Thanks Tonni.
Bill Weird is a climate reporter at CNN and author of Life as We Know It Can Be Stories of people, climate and hope in a changing world.
Welcome too fast politic spell.
Molly, so great to be with you.
I am so excited to have you here. I think of you as the CNN climate guy.
I'm sorry, that's perfectly fair. I think I'm going to change my business CODs to that.
And this book is called Life as We Know It, And then in parentheses can be talk to me about why you decided to write this book and sort of how you got here.
Well, first, Molly, I got to give props to your mom because I was a latch key sort of gypsy kid growing up, did a lot of reading, and my stepmother's copy of Fear of Flying taught me the birds and the bees at an impressionable age at least made it a lot more entertainment. So my literary influences are.
And maybe began there.
I always wanted to be an author, but too lazy and too busy, I guess to think about it until at the height of the pandemic in twenty twenty, I had been on the Climate Beak full time for about three or four years. Yeah, I guess four years, because I did the Wonder List. So for those I don't assume know me. But I was this sort of journeyman TV broadcaster at the different networks ABC for a while, but at CNN they gave me this the greatest green light in the history of TV news. I pitched a show called The Wonderlist, in which I get to travel to the wonders of the world and wonder what will be left of them for my daughter when she turns my age in the year twenty fifty and so I learned so much on that project. And then when she was sixteen years old, I did a pandemic world on Lockdown. I became a new old dad with my partner. Much to our delight and surprise, my partner got pregnant and brought our sun River into the world, which is a whole different perspective on parenting when they're sixteen years apart and I'm holding this little bundle looking out onto a dystopia. Basically, I was covering, you know, the protest after George Floyd's murder, and the pandemic was raging, and nobody knew what was happening politically, and so I started writing these sort of Earth Day letters to my newborn about the letters of apology. Sorry, we broke your sea in your sky, and you know, shortened the wings of the nightingale and all these other things. But I'm so glad you're here because we need all the help we can get.
And these letters.
Turned into end of a user's manual from my little boy to think about the planet we built for accident, for him, how to think about the basics that I took.
For granted, like air and water and.
Temperature and shelter and food and how we build and grow these things. They're hidden costs behind them, and I wanted to lay out sort of a clear eyed assessment of it's grim, it's going to get tough, but good thing you're tough. And here are some really, really inspiring folks I've met along the way who are trying to fix this, and they're trying to build us a better world. And life as we know it maybe over for better or worse, but life as we know it can be is full of potential and possibility. And there's so much of this glorious planet left to savor and save. And if we can just get our story straightened out about our relationship with each other and the natural world and all the great possibilities and hope. You know, doctor King didn't say I have a nightmare. They were living a nightmare. He said I have a dream. And it gave something people to work towards and struggle through to get to. And we don't have that conversation nearly enough in the climate space. All they were nearly enough. Climate conversations were at large. But the way we've talked about this story has been one of dread and fear and starving polar bears.
I love s polar bears.
But now the story is about future billionaires who are walking the streets right now in thermal battery companies or carbon capture companies and industries that you haven't heard of yet. It's that there are so many incredible ideas to just tweak and hack the comfortable lives we already have without noticing the loss and comfort, but our orders of magnitude better for life on Earth and create much health here, more resilient communities. And somehow I ended up with a book. Actually, I was actually supposed to turn this in two years ago, and it would have been a much darker book, honestly, because I was full time in the climate beat at that point, and it was just nothing but peer reviewed dread. But Joe Mansion changed his mind and the country passed the most ambitious sort of in more carrots than Stick's legislation. But it's still uncorked all of this energy, financially, intellectually innovation into figuring this out and reversing the damage right at the last moment.
And so when I.
Focus on those guys, the doers and dreamers, things got a lot more hopeful.
So do you feel actually more hopeful about the climate now?
I do, for and it's all relative, right, you know, before the Paris Agreements in twenty fifteen, we were on track for like ten degrees fahreneitam warmant, right, like literally making everything between the tropics unlivable and killing every reef and melting every glacier. In twenty twenty, that seems really bad, But so that was four to five degrees celsius of warmings where we were headed. By twenty twenty two, just as you know, renewables are hitting their stride and became super cheap or on track for two point seven degrees celsius. Still not great, Still losing a lot of reefs and a lot of mountain ice, and who knows about sea level rise, what that'll do, But it's a hell of a lot better than the hell we were headed towards. And right now we may be on track for two point four lower, you know. And these are things that the public were not noticing changes in energy streams.
And for most of human.
History we just burned whatever was cheap, you know, dung or whales or you know, sequoia redwoods. But now the two cheapest forms of energy Homo sapiens have ever created are sun and wind, sun plus battery storage and onshore wind. And that's why Texas leads the nation in renewable energy. A couple sundays ago, there was so much sudden wind in Texas electricity was free for six hours. And that reality, that economic reality, is strumping the ideology and the politics at that level. But of course, elections have consequences, and all of this sort of movement in the right direction could either be accelerated or stagnateated.
It depends on how things go in November.
If Trump winds were so profoundly fucked for a million different reasons. But I'm hoping you could talk a little bit about how I mean, two and a half degree still seems like too much.
It is too much.
You know, we just had set another record. I live in the age of all I do is go on CNN and talk about broken records like I'm a broken record. And March we've yet another hottest month. Ever, every day from the last year has set a new record of you know that particular date in sea temperatures, the oceans are just boiling hot, and hurricane season predictions are off the charts. There's so much sort of baked in. This is a slow motion thing. We're paying for the sins of the fathers in many ways. But and so it sets up the greatest challenge human and you will ever face. It's like, how do we pull down literally gigatons of carbon from the sky that we've already put up there and pull it from the ocean. And you think about that vaguely, like, oh, I know COO two is a gas that can't see it or smell it. But imagine gigatons of any object. Brain cars full of them, guys in hard hats and boots moving them ships. That's how much carbon we need to pull out of the sky and lock underground back send carbon Godzilla back from whence it came, which is an exciting possibility if you think about it as a new industrial revolution and a way to gather around and really do this in a united front. It's also a scary proposition. It'll be resisted by the status quo.
People will have no interest in that.
But until that happens, until we get the parts per million of this planet cooking stuff in the atmosphere normalized, until we shut off the thing which is burping out of every natural gas well in the world, the temperatures are just going to keep going up. So we both have to adapt so that to the problems that are already happening hard in our cities. They're doing this piecemeal around the country. I kind of liken it to the five stages of grief. Elizabethkogle Ross was his genius who when she started practicing in Chicago in like the seventies, doctors didn't use the word terminal. They wouldn't tell terminal cancer patients that they were terminal.
And when she.
Started interviewing people and understanding how they were processing, going from denial to anger to bargaining to depression and acceptance and various stages and cycling in and out of hole. She created hospice care. Now doctors listen to their terminal patients for end of life decisions. I liken that to the climate crisis, Like you drive through this country, vast loss of denial in the Petro States for various reasons, bargaining in Charleston where they're building sea walls, in Miami where they're raising their streets, a lot of anger everywhere, a lot of depression everyone. But until you get to acceptance like this is a problem that we have to solve, and we can like aging, it can go well or it can go horribly. We have to tell that story and rally around those things. And this is why the longer we kick the can down the road, conversations about things like geoengineering, like putting a man made sunscreen a natural sunscreen in the sky to mimic the shading effect of a volcano just to buy us time because things are heating up way faster than even science predicted five years ago.
Does that strike you as strange that you know we are in the minority, the two of us and Jesse, and you know people watch CNN, right and MSNBC. We all reading the New York Times, like We all get that it's the carbon, it's you know that that's what's heating the atmosphere, and we're on a collision course with disaster. But America is a country of three hundred plus million people. Why is it so hard to put this together? I mean, I when I grew up, we had snowstorms. We lived on a totally different planet. Like, why is it taking so long for people to connect with what's happening.
A couple of things.
The conversation has been politicized for most of my life by a handful of people. You could sit on a couple of greyhound buses. Honestly, the folks who belong to the petroleum club in Houston, like the fact that people don't equate the wildfire smoke that we saw summer with the invisible you know, plat cooking pollution that gets emitted from every tail pipe and smokestack, and so very vested interests from the most powerful industries humanity has ever created don't want things to change from the way they are right now. So there's that messaging battle and all the attendant political allegiances.
That go with that.
The media, if you could, you know, in a movie situation and create an evil plot from some genius. Climate change is pretty good because it's slow motion, and the people you need to warn to sound the alarms loudest are the most reticent, mild mannered, non alarmist people in our society. Scientists earth scientists by nature don't want to come off as being too alarmist, and so the messaging both from the people who understand the story and the people who want to bury the story have really clouded it. But Molly, here's the thing I thought the way you did, and here are the words that gave me the most hope and writing in writing this book a term called pluralistic ignorance, which is you think you're in the minority, you're not so big. Study out of Yale, Boston College, a bunch of universities ask people in twenty twenty two Americans and both parties just guess how many fellow countrymen and women care about climate and meaningful action, and both Bocans and Democrats guessed between thirty three and forty percent. And the reality is it's between sixty six and eighty percent. A majority of Republicans are in favor of things like the Civilian Climate Core that just started taking applications.
I'm telling you, the Civilian Climate Core. This is where I lose all voters in my presidential campaign. I am sessed with a year of public service, with mandatory public service. So it's actually happening. Wow, it's really happening.
It's really happening. And the thing is that, you know, the Civilian Climate Corp. I have to be by nature as a journalist, anti non denominational on a lot of these policies. I don't have a dog in the fight on energy choices. But the idea that you could take the young people from Queens and al Passo and portly Love and put them together reviving mangroves if they love the outdoors, or learning how to install eat pumps if they're looking for another career, because it's about connection. It's about connecting with each other around nature, getting gen Z and theeds and fall in love with what is left of this beautiful planet and how much everything they have depends on her health.
What is nice about this mandatory year of service and the Climate Corps is it's actually both Democrats and Republicans hate it. So it is you and I and Mayor Pete.
You want to make it mandatory. I see, okay, that's.
Oh, I want to make it fuck because I have three teenagers, so I totally get why it's a great idea. It's much better if it's mandatory. Like basically, my idea is, this is why I'm crazy, is that everybody has to do it because it should be like you know, in Israel they make everyone do the army. Here they make everyone do a year of service. It doesn't I mean, obviously it shouldn't be the army. It should be like building heat pumps or you know, cleaning trash or doing whatever. But the truth is service is how we get out of ourselves. Service is how we we relate to others. I mean, loneliness is caused by isolation. You put every American kid who is you know, eighteen or seventeen, the year between seventeen and eighteen to work together, white, Black, Christian, Muslim, Jewish. I mean it's going to be amazing. I mean it will be a game changer.
This is a climate book, but I have a chapter in this book addressed to my teenage daughter about social media, and I'd say social media that how I became addicted to a Twitter? How I gave her Instagram at ten, like I regret that with every cell of my body, and how he interacts with her tears and the natural world was completely altered by that decision to do that right, And so the more we can get and we live in the golden age of self isolation and addiction and depression and these beautiful, you know, frictionless interfaces where I can order my dinner every night and not even look the guy who brings it to me in the eye. He can leave it outside the door. Or I cannot see a friend from high school for decades and think we're connected because I like the picture of his kids. That's not how we evolve a humans. I need to go hug. I need to hold that kid. I need to you know, the healthiest, happiest societies that I visited on the Wonder List, from blue zones in Greece to the islands in the South Pacific. It was places where if you if you don't show up at church or whatever, people knock on your door to check out. It's where you can hand your kid off to as many different parents in an emergency, maximum sleepover possibilities for your kids. And we were losing that and so as hard as it is in these election years. I you know what I'm the message I'm trying to impart is you gotta hold your scorn for the storytellers, but the story believers in your neighborhood level, you can connect with them over you shared love of that hiking trail or the park or the fish and hole and get past, you know, the partisanship in a way that you can't with anything else, you know, and and if we can do it with our families, with our neighbors, multi generational together in real life, in the world. Oh man, the Civil War we stopped maybe our own right.
I don't think most Americans want a civil war. I think most Americans want, you know, to look at their phones. But our launch are so convenient today. I mean, I think one hundred years ago you would have spent so much time doing And now you know, we write books and we do television shows and we you know, we get to do a lot of stuff that we might not otherwise do. Tell us just sort of one of the best places you went on the wonder List that really where you were like, wow.
Uh, you know what's interesting is I went to I was flipping through Twitter one day and I saw a list maybe Ian Brower put it up like a demographer or something. It was a list of the countries that lead the world in unwed mother and ice Iceland was at the top of the list. Two out of three babies born in Iceland their parents aren't married. And I'm like, I wonder what that's about, and that like inspired the episode, and I ended up doing stuff on whaling, you know, the Last of the whale hunters and geothermal energy. But what I found to answer a little quie was this is one of the most feminist societies on the planet where there is no real financial or moral incentive to get married. Women start families when they're ready. They have shared family leave, I think like sixteen months or something that you can split between parents, and so if a couple's together for ten years and they want to throw a party.
They'll get it. They'll get married for that reason.
But it's flipped on its head, and so I was sort of exploring that they still have problems as the same problems women around the world deal with sexism and misogyny and those sorts of things. But the history there the Vikings were actually a matriarchical society who held things together while the men were off pillaging. That really small sense of community and the way that they are connected with each other and their natural environment. Being sort of on this desolate island in the middle of the North Atlantic. They're leading the charge when it comes to clean energy ideas, and they take care of each other in ways that I find really inspiring.
So Iceland is one of my faves.
Thank you Bell, Thank you Molly.
No moment, oh fuck on, Rick Wilson.
Are you asking for a moment of fuckery, because I happen to have several. This week's moment of fuckery is the Fart the Floor Action Response Team, which is a group of House Conservatives now that Mike Johnson has decided, I want you to know how hard it is for me to have these words come out of my mouth to do the right thing on the foreign aid bills in the Ukraine. Legislation hasn't passed yet as we're recording this.
But by passover, well, yes, continue.
Look gonna it's gonna happen. In part because the fart. They lost their bet on Johnson. Their bet was he wanted to keep the speakership as much as Kevin McCarthy did, and that he wouldn't do anything to conceive upset large Marge and the rest of the crazies. And at some point Johnson did figure out. I don't know what moment in time it was, but at some point in the last seventy two to ninety six hours he decided that the intelligence community wasn't a group of deep state subversives lying to him, that Ukraine really is in desperate straits, and that if you really want world War three, let Russia win in Ukraine. That's how you get world War three. There's this still this caucus in the Senate and.
In the House.
JD. Vance is now leading the putin American boond in the Senate. He's become a guy who who like even David Sachs is to the point like, oh well he's up there. JD. You're too crazy, you know. Even the lunatics are like, wow, what happened to JD. Vance? But in the House, these like Freedom Caucus guys, they still believe they can exercise terror. They're failing, but it's really interesting to watch how broken they've made the whole house. People are quitting in droves. It's ugly. It's completely dysfunctional. Johnson may pass this, but he now basically governs at the grace of their Democrats, and I am fascinated to see how it turns out. And once again, I'm going to just say that no one in the Republican world should ever be allowed to do an acronym again after the name and organization the funt.
This details with my moment of fackory GOP.
Rep Jake Laturner says he won't run for reelection.
He is retiring. He is thirty six.
When you are thirty six, you tend not to retire, except if you are a Republican in Congress, And that, my friends, is our moment of fuckery.
Hey listen, if you're that young in the house and he had a safe seat, by the way, wasn't really a particularly bad seat. Leaving power and walking away at this age is so against the traditional feel of Washington. And maybe that's a bad thing or a good thing. I'm not going to argue that. But most of the time, if you're in a decent seat, you're going to stay there until you find either a better seat to run for or until you're so old they carry you out like Diane Feinstein.
Yeah, thank you, Rick Wilson.
You are welcome as always, have a great day.
That's it for this
