Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Hitor. On today's show, we're going to talk about the awful shooting at the White House Correspondents' Dinner and the predictably idiotic discourse that's ensued. Republicans blaming Democrats, Trump trying to get Jimmy Kimmel fired, conspiracies about the whole thing being a setup.
We'll also check in on the stalemate in Iran, why talks have fallen apart and what the options are from here. Then Lovett talks to Katie Porter, who stopped by the studio, former member of Congress and one of the leading Democrats in the race for governor of California. Before we get to the news, two big announcements. Love it.
Love it or leave it is going to two days a week. There's too much news and we have to cover too quickly. So we're going to get more episodes out more quickly. And we're going to be shooting it in a studio with a live studio audience for the first time. We have a bunch of amazing guests lined up, including Melissa Etheridge, Ron Funches, Beck Bennett, Kyle Mooney, Ginger Midge, and more.
We're doing a show as part of the Netflix is a joke festival too. If you're in LA, come see our new studio at cricket.com slash events.
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Chapter 2: What is the latest on the stalemate with Iran?
And the less we make it about the specific political fights we were already having, I think the better.
One thing that has changed, I think, in assassination attempts and even violence like this that we've seen is since the advent of the internet and especially social media, you have seen a lot more of these people be radicalized online and someone ended up finding the shooter's
twitter account and then he moved over to blue sky so they found his blue sky account and it is just a bunch of crazy and in the difference between you know that shooter and anyone else is like tommy said he's probably had a mental break and there's easy access to guns Um, but yeah, political violence is always wrong.
And you, the idea that you are somehow a hero or you can solve any fucking problem with violence is crazy and, and it's counterproductive and it never works. And, um, it only makes more problems.
Chapter 3: How is Katie Porter addressing the issues in her gubernatorial campaign?
And anyone who thinks that political violence is somehow okay or justified, uh, if you know, the, the person that you're committing it against is more powerful or more evil or whatever, it's just, it's just wrong and it's stupid. Um, I was thinking about when it happened to the people.
I think this is one of those situations where the people outside of the Hilton, the Washington Hilton, probably knew that everything was okay more quickly than a lot of the people inside the Hilton. Part of that's because, and we've been there before, there's fucking no service in that ballroom. The Wi-Fi is always bad.
And I think if you were the president or one of the people who was rushed out, you probably knew that the shooter had been taken down and was okay. But if you were one of the 2,500 attendees there and you were under the table, that had to have been pretty fucking scary for a little while at least before you knew that the shooter was subdued. And so that was one of my first thoughts.
Plus, by the time the chicken came out, it had to be absolutely just room temperature. Starving. Cold chicken. Salad. That's true.
I think what Trump said to Norah O'Donnell in response was weird, but if someone tried to shoot me and then their words are read to me that I was a pedophile, rapist and a traitor, I'd be pretty pissed off too.
It's an interesting journalistic question of when you read a manifesto like that and why and to his face like that, if it's antagonistic on perfect, I'm not trying to like nitpick her, but yeah, I'd be pissed too.
Again, because it gets sort of put through the lens of politics and it is a different thing than a mass shooting. There's all these different motivations, but I do think the more we, see people that are being radicalized online. They have access to guns. They may have a mental break. They do see a lot of crazy shit on their phones and on their screens.
The more we think of this as kind of one big contagion that we're dealing with, and there's a lot of ways to deal with it. One of them is mental health. One of them is addressing where and how people are radicalizing. Another one of them is the guns.
But one lesson we've learned, whether it's in mass shootings or in suicide being contagious, it is that you have to be really careful how you share and talk about the motivations and the methods that these people use. And that is delicate, right? Because it is of journalistic value and that getting his responses of journalistic value.
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Chapter 4: What happened at the White House Correspondents Dinner?
So you can always have more security. The uncomfortable reality, I think, is that someone who's willing to die is always going to be able to do some really bad stuff. If this guy had done what he did 30 minutes earlier, I probably would have been a lot worse. But like, you know, ultimately, I think
the process worked the way it was supposed to largely yeah so people know what it's like there it's where they got him he was running towards probably the escalators that would have gone down one flight and then you would have had the doors into the ballroom because the dinner had started once it started those doors to the ballroom were closed and they were guarded so even if
the shooter had gotten past that security checkpoint and hadn't been shot there, would have gone downstairs, would have faced another several Secret Service agents, would have had to get through the doors at that point. There would have been others at Service.
So Trump's up on a raised stage, they can pull him backstage.
But in general, I think the Hilton is a bad location for this. And I think part of it is because the guests in the hotel should never have been able to get close to the ballroom if you're not part of the event. or the pre-dinner receptions, right? Like, a lot of other people could have been hurt, aside from the president, who was, I think, well-protected.
And it's like, like you said, Tommy, about the senior, all the senior officials in one place, like, what if someone had brought explosives, right? Like, I mean, I don't want to go into all the different things that could have gone wrong, but if you were a guest at the hotel,
even if you weren't that guy with those weapons, if you had like worse weapons or something, but you were still a guest, you could have probably done a lot more damage. I don't agree with that.
Like there's a lot that suddenly because this one crazy person ran at the door, there should be things to learn, but like maybe they have to do something different with guests, change the protocols in a certain way. But then all of a sudden this, this location is no longer possible for a dinner that's been happening there for four decades. Like the,
Well, Service said that. I mean, Service was saying to people on the record that like, or on background at least, that, you know, we now have a convention center in D.C. that is much easier to protect there. They can still hold the same number of people. They've never liked the Hilton. They said it's always an uphill challenge. You're always working against stuff. Right.
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Chapter 5: How are political reactions shaping the narrative around violence?
It's not his fucking event.
It's crazy.
Chapter 6: What challenges does California face under current leadership?
So it's like basically every... I was taking it from the other point, which is that like, yeah, so now every time the president does an event in D.C., the president's like, no, I just don't leave my house. You have to come to me because I have this. Also, the White House has been breached plenty of times, either by intruders who jump over the fence or by the Salahis in 2009.
Also, we live in a free society. Even when the Secret Service is talking about the Hilton Ballroom, the safest place the president could be is to never leave the White House again. But you do, and you do the best you can. You try to secure places.
You figure out compromises so that the president can go where he or she needs to go, host campaign events, do OTRs where they stop at random places because they don't think anybody knows. There's all kinds of steps and layers of security that are about the balance between the president being in a fortress and us being in a democracy.
No, the answer to the Hilton ballroom being kind of stalked by one fucking asshole is not that the president only hosts from this point on game night only at his house. Ridiculous.
Build your fucking ballroom if you want, man. Just do it legally.
That's all we're saying. Lindsey Graham's putting forward a bill to fund it with taxpayer dollars.
then unbelievable right like if you want to see him at the grinder party ran out of alcohol uh but it's another problem um but here's the thing that no one is like the ballroom problem is that he decided to bulldoze the east wing without going through any kind of process if you want to build your ballroom do it legally like go through the bribes grow through the prop go through the proper channels you know david fahrenholz the times just had a a piece today or a couple days ago that the
The Trump administration basically is building this thing with a secret no-bid contract after inflating its value by three times. And the government is paying also, not just fucking private donors. So there's a lot of problems that's not just like, oh, no one will let him build anything. It's like, we just don't want you to build it illegally.
Yeah, I don't want him to build it at all. But yeah, no, legally would be best.
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of Trump's response to the shooting?
Our first lady, Melania, is here. Look at Melania. So beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow. You know, Melania's birthday is on Sunday. That's right. She's planning to celebrate at home the same way she always does, looking out a window and whispering, what have I done?
So shortly after Melania posted, her husband jumped in, referring to the sketch as a, quote, call to violence. That was pretty clear. That's, quote, beyond the pale and demanding that Kimmel be fired. You guys think the Trump's latest attempt to fire Kimmel for a joke is going to work?
So the joke is that Melania doesn't like her husband and that he's quite old.
Yeah, Andrew Edgar at the Bulwark, he was like, the trophy wife who won't be crushed when her rich old husband kicks the bucket trope is older than dirt. And I was like, yeah, that's sort of what it was.
But I also think there's another line in there that is what really bothered her because there's a joke in there about Epstein introducing Melania to Trump. And it's like, man, you're taking another run at canceling Jimmy Kimmel. Like, dude, open the fucking Strait of Hormuz. You know what I mean? Like, what are you doing here?
Cancel hominy. Yeah. So Kimmel, just for more context, Kimmel did the fake speech because there was no comedian this year because Trump is scared of comedy or jokes about himself. So they had owes the mentalist. Yeah, the mentalist. Do whatever he was doing.
Big whiff.
Yeah, didn't call this shot on this one.
Well, he doesn't predict the future. He can read your mind in real time. He does tricks. That's not really on him.
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Chapter 8: What are the key points from the interview with Katie Porter?
He posts snuff videos of blowing up boats of fishermen. Fucking blew up a school in Iran has not even apologized or anything about that. I mean, it's just like the president and his party and the administration have done and continue to do awful, evil, monstrous things. And that has led to like countless deaths and sufferings. And we get to say that we also get to say.
that they should be removed from power through purely peaceful and legal means. You can say both those things. We have the right to say the first thing. We have an obligation to say the second thing. Both those things can live together.
Yeah. Fundamentally, political violence is wrong. And it's wrong because it doesn't just silence the person that they're trying to kill. It silences the entire society. It silences democracy. It is an authoritarian act. Even when people claim they're doing it for whatever their justifications may be, it's an authoritarian act. And by the same token,
The motivations of one shooter cannot be a way to silence the people who may share those views because it's not their fault that some random asshole on the internet decided to take a shot at the president. It's especially galling to have them claiming that the left is responsible for all of this rhetoric.
I remember when... This time around, I was like, I can't even take it seriously for a second because you people are so fucking phony after the Charlie Kirk thing, after everything you did since then. It's so phony.
I remember when Donald Trump was first running in 2016, I remember seeing this speech live, and he said, Hillary wants to essentially abolish the Second Amendment, and if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks, although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don't know, and because this was new, and we were young and naive, I remember being
so fucking gutted to see this person say that and see how many people apologized for it, said it wasn't what he meant, made all kinds of excuses for him. You can draw a straight line from that all the way to the insurrection. And I feel like we have We have been consistent. Political violence is abhorrent and wrong. It is wrong on the right. It is wrong on the left.
It is stupid when people think it is justified. It is embarrassing and wrong when people apologize for it or try to justify it or become anthropologists for it. And it is wrong when the president of the United States, especially, is someone who has encouraged political violence for years.
And the fact that there are a lot of Republicans who would like to point the finger at fucking Chris Murphy or whoever else for telling the truth about Donald Trump but can't look in their own house is part of why we got here.
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