This Pod Save America episode covers Donald Trump's reaction to Republicans' midterm losses and what his final two years in office may look like. The hosts discuss Stephen Miller's appointment as White House chief of staff, the administration's threats against Democratic investigators, and whether JD Vance can position himself as an anti-establishment presidential candidate.
They also examine the Nvidia scandal involving CEO Jensen Huang and an alleged Chinese spy, Scott Colom's Mississippi Senate win, and the debate over whether Chuck Schumer should remain Democratic leader. Listeners will hear the hosts' arguments on each, with opinions attributed to the speakers.
In this episode Dan Pfeiffer, John Favreau
This transcript of the Pod Save America episode on Trump's midterm fallout was made with HappyScribe's Google Meet transcription technology.
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Welcome to "Pod Save America." I'm John Favreau.
I'm Dan Pfeiffer.
On today's show, we're going to talk about how Donald Trump is handling his ass kicking. Stephen Miller is the new White House chief of staff. Jim Jordan is House Minority Leader. JD Vance's cunning plan to pretend he wasn't part of any of this. The administration's exposure to the Jensen Huang scandal. Scott Calom officially winning the Senate race in Mississippi. And Democrats trying really hard to ruin the good vibes. But let's start with how Trump and his Republican Party are reacting to being on the losing end of one of the biggest electoral landslides in half a century.
Do you know that we're I think we're hitting 14 points in the PAC, brother?
Yeah, it was like 13.9 last I checked.
Yeah, I saw Dave Wasserman just say we're heading to 14. So our typically introspective president has been doing some soul-searching, but has so far come up short, despite telling Ross Douthat on last Sunday's "60 Minutes" that he thinks he can still get into heaven without ever forgiving his enemies. So he needs to look a little harder at that Bible. Trump also said he could, quote, "very easily go six months without insulting Democrats" if that's what it took to get a deal on immigration.
First thing Thursday morning, he posted in all capital letters, "The Democrats are corrupt and evil." So I guess it depends on when you start the clock on those six months.
Zero days till last.
Since that day, yeah. He then continued to show that he's turned over a new leaf by accusing Democrats of cheating in the election, threatening to investigate blue states, complaining that the six Democratic senators who told troops to refuse illegal orders haven't been prosecuted yet. And just to show he's bipartisan, blamed the loss on Senate Republicans' refusal to get rid of the filibuster and pass the SAVE Act. But Trump also has been self-reflective about his own role in Tuesday's fiasco. Let's listen.
Every time I ran, we won. When I didn't run, it seems to be difficult. It's sort of interesting. I think my level of popularity maybe is higher now than it was. I'm not sure, but maybe it feels to me that it would be higher, other than what happened at the midterms.
Other than that, yes.
Look, I just suffered the biggest defeat in 50 years, but it feels like I am pretty popular.
I mean, Mrs. Lincoln did say it was a great play.
So now that we know for certain that this 80-year-old dog will not be learning any new tricks, how do you see Trump's last two years playing out? What can we expect from our lame, adult duck of a president?
I think there was a world in which Trump sunset, I mean that in every sense of the word, quietly on his presidency. And just kind of not that he could ever fade in the background, but he just really focused on his true passions of home renovation and self-enrichment and just kind of did that and spent less time trying to remake the federal government, prosecute his enemies, implement some sort of agenda, deport everyone you could possibly deport. And it seems like he's chosen the latter path, where he's going to, in his own haphazard, ill-conceived, incompetent way, continue to just double and triple down on all the things that got him into this mess.
He was never going to be self-reflective in any way possible. He's not had a moment of introspection in his entire adult or, frankly, child life. But the extent to which he is just totally blowing past what happened, that he has apparently convinced himself, I guess, that it's not his fault he lost. It certainly wasn't a reflection on him. All the polls were wrong. Democrats, who he also calls incompetent and stupid, were somehow able to steal enough votes for a 14-point national popular vote margin and to win states like Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia by such large margins that even if no Democrat had voted on election day, we still would have won.
And so I think we're just going to end up with a lot of what we've had before just done more erratically and more incompetently than before.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think he's ever going to there was ever any hope that he was going to turn over some new leaf.
But he could get lazy, right?
Right. And I still think two years is a lifetime, unfortunately, with Donald Trump as president. And this is the first chapter of the final or the opening of the final chapter. So there's a lot of game left to play, just to mix up all the metaphors now.
The fourth quarter.
Yeah, okay. It's the beginning of the fourth quarter. So he could still get lazy and just do his corruption and host his HGTV renovation project. Right now, I think what we're seeing is he's finally processing all of the horrible coverage about his landslide defeat, and it's making him mad. And also, as we're going to talk about, with his new White House chief of staff, Stephen Miller, in his ear all the time, I'm sure Miller is spinning him up in all the right ways for Miller's purposes to make Donald Trump very angry about everything.
Now, how long does that last? Who knows? Do I want any kind of national or global crisis during these two years with him at the helm? Certainly not. Certainly not. That definitely worries me. But I do think right now we're dealing with the aftermath of his reaction to the election that was delayed a little bit because he probably hadn't fully internalized what happened.
I do just want to say, before you move on to the fraction police, that it's the fourth quarter if you count all eight years.
That's true.
Just to be clear.
Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. I do like that he is still calling for he's still a supporter of getting rid of the filibuster. He's still mad that Thune didn't get rid of the filibuster. And I think the Democrat and I know you agree with me. We were talking about this. I think the Democrats should show that they are willing to work with this president. They should give bipartisanship a try, and they shouldn't just be so partisan, and they should just extend an olive branch to Trump and say, "We're going to go with you on this filibuster thing, and we're going to get rid of the filibuster, just like you've been asking John Thune and Republicans for the last couple of years.
We're here to deliver for you, Mr. President."
There are lots of ways to do this, but I think if and when Democrats have a governing trifecta in 2029, it can be their farewell present to Trump. His gold watch on the way out the door, Senate Majority Leader, whoever is the Senate Majority Leader at the time - we'll get to that later - can say, "Mr. President, thank you for your service. I will do what John Thune would not, and I will eliminate the filibuster."
I just think that's unity, Dan. That's how the city.
That's what the voters want.
That's what the voters want. That's how people come together. And I don't understand who would stand in the way of that.
Just John Thune.
Just John Thune and some of these Republicans. But I think we get a lot of Democrats on board for this. So we could do a ceremony. Nothing to sign for Trump, but I don't know.
But you could. Yeah, I guess nothing to sign for him. But you could just rip up a page of the Senate rules and hand it to him. He could cut it with giant scissors like a ribbon.
I love the idea. So it does seem like the real president will be Stephen Miller, the new White House chief of staff. This is the man who calls the Opposition Party in our democracy a domestic extremist organization and says that American children born to immigrants are causing civilizational suicide in our country here. So that's our new White House chief of staff. Axios reports that top of Stephen's agenda is winning back young men, especially the young men of color who helped elect Trump in 2024.
Because what young man doesn't look at Stephen Miller and think, "When I'm 41, I hope I look like a shriveled dick with herpes"?
You know, I was waiting for that sentence to come to an end, and it took a turn I did not expect.
That is sort of what he looks like for he looks good for 41.
Yeah.
41. Anyway, that's the role model. That's young men across America, whether they're bros, gay, straight, black, white, Latino, Asian, whoever they are. They're just looking at Stephen Miller like, "That's the guy I want to be. That's my role model."
The voice of a generation.
The voice of a generation.
That generation is 1940s Germans, but that's fine.
So if someone asked me to come up with the list of the top five people who caused Republicans the midterms, Stephen Miller would certainly be on it, almost to the top of the list. I was saying this before the election. So to me, it seems like making him chief of staff is a signal that Trump and the White House just do not care about politics anymore. He doesn't care how unpopular he is. He's just going to pretend he's very popular. He's not on the ballot anymore. He just doesn't give a shit. And nor does Stephen Miller give a shit about politics because he has power, and he wants to use that power to do all the things that Stephen Miller's always dreamed of doing, most of them around immigration, but I'm sure crushing his enemies and going after them with prosecutions is part of that as well.
But what do you think about the new Stephen Miller era in the Trump White House?
I don't think it is that they don't care about politics. And don't get me wrong. I don't think Donald Trump's going to lose sleep over any Senate or House Republicans who lose their seats after he's out of office. I think the thing is that Donald Trump and Stephen Miller do not understand politics. And in their demented, funhouse mirror view of the world, the problem isn't Trump. The problem is the people, in their minds, Susie Wiles, who wouldn't let Trump be Trump. Stephen Miller is the most dangerous, most annoying adviser in any meeting. You and I have been in these meetings with the first who comes in and goes, "You just got to let the boss be the boss," right?
The problem isn't too much Trump. The problem is not enough Trump. We need more of that. And so they're doubling Trump down. And I think Trump and Miller are convinced that that is good politics. They are wrong, absolutely wrong. And you were 100% right that Stephen Miller, with the possible exception of Pete Hegseth for convincing Trump to go to war in Iran, is the person most responsible because he won I mean, we could go down the list, but the way he handled immigration, the massed ICE raids, the lying and gaslighting about American citizens and others killed by ICE, sending people to torture prisons, all of those things took what was Trump's best issue and made it an issue on which they could not gain a single bit of advantage in the election.
Also instrumental in the tariffs, which didn't help with the economic concerns that people had in the election. I think for the Democrats, there's two things they got to do with Miller. Number one is just use their power in Congress to stop him from the damage that he wants to cause. And they'll be able to do some of that, but certainly not all of it, unfortunately, because we don't have the presidency. But also, from a political perspective, he's got to be the face of the Trump administration now. He is the future of MAGA at just 41 years old.
He is the president. JD Vance, who we'll talk about too, who's going to run for president, JD Vance is on video saying that Stephen Miller is his best friend in the White House, his best friend. He's pals with Marco Rubio too. And I think there's just few administration figures, probably more unpopular than Stephen Miller. And to the extent that he's not incredibly unpopular, it's because people still don't know who he is. So I'm all for making Stephen Miller as famous as possible.
Just so people understand, the White House chief of staff is the second most powerful person in government.
Yep.
They're more powerful than the vice president, for sure. They're more powerful than any cabinet secretary. They control what information gets to the president. They control what decisions the president makes. They can pick up the phone and get anything changed in government. And so this is not just a figurehead position for a guy who gets a nice office. It is one person who will have the full capacity to turn the federal government into a weapon for their cause.
Yes. Yeah. It is bad news for all of the damage that he will cause. But like I said, I think the silver lining is it is incredibly bad politics. He will make bad political decisions. And just him as the chief of staff is going to be incredibly unpopular, I think.
Yeah. So it is bad and dangerous for the country, probably ends up hurting Republicans politically at the same time.
Yes, as they're heading into 2028. We already have an early indicator of how the Miller regime will operate. White House counsel Will Scharf is threatening to investigate Democrats who may investigate the White House. He sent a letter this week to incoming House Oversight Chairman Robert Garcia that specifically cites, among other things, Garcia's joke at Cricket Con about how, quote, "pettiness is a thing when it comes to investigating Trump's corruption." Love to be a footnote on the White House enemies list.
Next year, we got to make the main body of the letter.
Glad we're on the radar. That warms my heart. What did you make of Scharf's letter?
Absurd, embarrassing, and stupid.
Has no legal force.
It has no legal force. It's basically just it is a threat. He's just trying to throw a shot across the ballot. Democrats to somehow think that will prevent them from doing their job. The Constitution is incredibly clear about the speech and debate cause, about what role Congress has. The things they're saying are not actual law. And they're just saying, "We don't like what you're doing, and so we're going to then use the taxpayer fund and resources of the federal government to investigate you." To no end, we're not going to win in court cases.
If they want to make an argument that Democrats are overstepping their constitutional authorities when arguing in court against certain subpoenas or document requests, they can do that. They'll probably lose that too. But this idea that the Democrats have committed a crime or a danger of committing a crime by doing their oversight is absurd.
Talk about overreach. They have overreached by doing this. Now, Democrats, I think, are on stronger political footing to do these investigations because the White House, before they even opened a single investigation, threatened to prosecute them, threatened to investigate them criminally. And we were just talking about Trump complaining that the seditious six, the six senators who they tried to prosecute merely because they spoke their mind and fucking recorded a video telling soldiers that they don't have to follow illegal orders.
Yet the reason that they weren't prosecuted is because they couldn't even get a fucking grand jury indictment for any of those. They already tried, and they couldn't do it. So I think Democrats have rightly laughed this letter off, as they should. And of course, the White House is going to try to use the DOJ and do whatever they can to try to investigate and slow them down. And that's annoying, certainly, for all of those Democrats on the committee, but it's not going to do anything.
Yeah. The whole thing is dumb.
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Much like the White House, House Republicans are also signaling a fresh start by replacing Mike Johnson with Jim Jordan, who they picked over Steve Scalise to be minority leader. The Senate kept John Thune despite some grumbling in the caucus and conservative media. Thune responded by asking his critics what they would have done differently, and then nobody ran against him. So he's still leader. Josh Hawley, to his credit, did come up with something for Republicans to do. He has invited people to the Capitol on December 15th to pray and fast for an hour.
This podcast, I guess, is us fasting for an hour.
I understand praying for an hour. I don't really understand fasting for you're just going to a room that doesn't have food.
An hour is not a fast. An hour is like.
For some people, it is.
It is.
I suppose.
It's so funny.
Really into what Josh Hawley's impact on American politics too.
Yes.
It's like a grand pronouncement about nothing.
It's like we care so deeply about this, we will do it for 60 minutes and not a minute longer.
So what political problem could you possibly have where the answer is Jim Jordan?
Just like the Miller hire, this is just an example of them doubling and tripling down on the things that got him in this mess.
If you think about it from the perspective of forget even put Trump aside. Put aside all these Republicans who remain in the ballot. Now, in the House, they're all theoretically in safe districts because there is not a single House Republican in a district that Trump won by less than nine points left.
Wow. Yeah.
It's an amazing statistic. But there are a lot of people who thought they were safe after the 2006 wave. Then the much larger 2008 wave came, and they lost there too. And if you want to rebuild a majority, you have to improve your political standing with or regain the majority. You have to improve your political standing with the public. And the biggest problem is not that they would ever do this, but their biggest problem is they ran on a pledge to do a bunch of things to make people's lives easier, and they did none of those things. One could, theoretically, different people, but people could decide, you know what?
We're going to do a couple of things to deliver for people. We'll work with Democrats. And Jim Jordan is the exact opposite of that approach. He believes his job in Congress is to just yell louder with his short sleeves rolled up in a hearing.
I will say, if you're let's pretend. Let's imagine there's a Republican in the House who wants to follow that path. Maybe we can the way to turn this around is to do a few things with Democrats and try to turn a new page on the Trump era. To be fair, you're not going to start that new era with Donald Trump as president. So I don't know anyone who's going to put their hand up and say, yeah, I'm going to be the I'm going to be the new Republican leader of the House. It feels like they Jim Jordan versus Steve Scalise is just like House Republicans giving up.
You know what? It's two more years of Trump. We have to deal with him. He's there. We're here. Let's just fucking wallow in our loserness.
Yes. I agree that to an extent. I think that Steve Scalise, who does suck I don't want to suggest he doesn't suck, but he at least is someone who has legislative experience passing bills or at least counting votes for bills and has worked with the other parties in the past. Not just getting things done, but just the day-to-day of making the Capitol run on time.
Yeah.
Jim Jordan is just a Fox News personality with a congressional vote.
Yeah, it's going to be interesting when he has to start whipping votes and counting votes.
Yeah.
Not like he's going to win many, but.
Yeah. I mean, he's just like it doesn't really they're not trying to solve a problem, I guess, is to your point. They're just going to continue. They're going to wallow in what they're doing because they don't know another path and don't know how to get to another path if they were to try.
And they probably think if they're going to be investigated or Democrats are going to do a lot of investigations, then Jim Jordan is the guy you want on Fox and on TV and on right-wing media just yelling and screaming about Democrats being monsters. He's like good at that.
Yeah. Good for him.
Striving to emerge unscathed from this disarray, Vice President JD Vance, as we've discussed, the VP soft launched his presidential campaign with a 600-word tweet blaming the Republican wipeout mainly on the Iran war. His boss, the guy who started said war, did have one edit for the VP. Let's watch.
As JD Vance's comments about Iran questioning some of those decisions, has that impacted your relationship at all?
No, not at all. But a lot of people didn't like his comments, but not me. He was right, other than one thing. He should have made one other statement, one statement that I think is very important. If you had it to do again, would you do it again? The answer is yes.
Woof. Would I love to hear JD Vance's answer to that question. When is a reporter going to ask him?
How has that not happened yet?
Maybe he hasn't appeared before the press. Has he? I don't know.
Who knows?
It's the most obvious. I mean, it's going to happen.
And he has to answer yes.
I can't wait.
It's so good.
He's going to have to answer yes, right?
If he wants to continue showing up at the White House. It's worth remembering, once again, Donald Trump tried to murder his last vice president.
Trump said Thursday, after all that, that the war is no longer part of JD's portfolio because we, quote, don't need a deal with Iran. Let's see. We're recording this on November 12th. You're hearing it on the 13th, I believe on the 9th, he said. We're close to a deal. They want a deal. Now, we don't need a deal with Iran. And so he's put JD Vance on the corruption beat, I guess, rooting it out, not doing it.
Yeah.
Some of that as well.
Trump, the doing corruption is Trump's job.
Yes.
The rooting out corruption from the other side, fake corruption, is JD Vance's job.
So Vance is probably thrilled with being off the Iran war beat since his people leaked a playbook that the vice president, quote, sees an opening in the post-election blame game. Republican hawks are attacking him for opposing the war. Democrats promise retribution. And he's planning to use both to prove he's the anti-establishment voice in Washington. Hilarious. Vance's rivals for the nomination, they don't seem to agree. There have been a bunch of stories about how other potential candidates like Ron DeSantis and even Josh Hawley of the one-hour fasting fame appear to be emboldened trying out campaign messages of their own.
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend that even some of Vance's allies are quietly telling him maybe he should sit this one out. Apparently, he got a text from a close friend who said, maybe you should sit this one out. I imagine the journal got that from the friend who got the text or sent the text.
Yeah, there's only two people.
Right.
Maybe it was through a group chat. We don't know that.
That's true.
I don't think he's invited to a lot of group chats, honestly.
What are your thoughts on JD Vance's gambit here that he's going to be the anti-establishment voice in Washington by being attacked by Mark Levin and Mark Tyson for not being hawkish enough on the war and by going after Democrats for trying to hold the administration accountable for corruption?
I kind of got the sense that JD Vance is fucked. There's really nowhere to go here. He did this big statement saying he blamed him the war, which now Trump is boxing him in to where he's going to have to agree with the original decision to go to war. Trump now doesn't want to end the war in any way, shape, or form. He just wants to live, which is the worst-case scenario of all for Republicans. It's just leave it in this current stasis for the foreseeable future where nothing's happening, nothing's getting better.
Traffic does not move through the straight in any real way, and gas prices continue to stay high. And that seems to be where he's put Vance. And Vance just looks weak. And there was a world in which this nomination was a coronation. He maybe might have one challenger, kind of like Al Gore had Bill Bradley, right? There is an anti-incumbent administration vibe. People line up behind it, but you still remain the overwhelming favorite. It looks, as we sit here today, and things could change, you could end up with several people who are formidable in the world of Republican politics, like Ted Cruz and Ron DeSantis, who run real challenges, splits the field in lots of ways.
And there's blood in the water here, to use what people have said. And it's going to make JD Vance's path to nomination much more treacherous. And even if he gets the nomination, he's going to be a much more damaged nominee coming out of it.
It's just so reading that spin in playbook this morning, I was like, I can't even believe that they were able to offer this up with a straight face. Who does he think that would run against him? Does he think the field would be a bunch of people criticizing him for being too much of a dove on Iran? Does he think he's running against Mark Tyson and Mark Levin? He's going to get a bunch of challengers who say that the war is terrible and that the war shouldn't have happened.
And then does he think he's going to get he's running against a bunch of Washington insiders who aren't going to go after Democrats for overstepping? Not make that argument. It's just the idea that he is going to depict himself as the anti-establishment, anti-war, populist crusader after spending the last four years by Donald Trump's side and not breaking with him once publicly is fucking hilarious.
I mean, I've said this before. JD Vance has run for office once in his life.
Underperformed.
Dramatically underperformed every other Republican on the ticket. He is not good at this. The only reason he is vice president is because he was able to swindle Donald Trump Jr., an easily swindleable human being. And that's it. And in his role as vice president, he has shown absolutely no political skill in any way, shape, or form. He is not deaf. He is not able to dance among the raindrops, which you have to be able to do in a situation like this. He just goes out there, lifts up his sleeve, and says, look at the cards I have up here, and then he makes the play.
It's so patently obvious to everyone.
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On Thursday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigned in disgrace from the company he founded. Nvidia's CFO will take over as interim CEO, and Donald Trump has already helpfully suggested the permanent job go to Tim Cook. I'm sure he wants that. We haven't had a chance to talk on this show about this insane story, but here's the part that matters. Nvidia makes the chips, the train, all the most powerful AI models. The US limits which ones can go to China.
Huang convinced Trump to ease those limits. Then the New York Times reported that Huang was having an affair with an executive named Alice Huang, no relation, who US intelligence believes was working as a spy for the Chinese government. She was also working at a company in Singapore called Megaspeed, which somehow, somehow managed to acquire billions of dollars' worth of Nvidia chips, which the US now suspects were potentially funneled to China in violation of US export controls.
Nvidia also appears to have put its thumb on the scale to squash an investigation into its actions by the Commerce Department, which has apparently been quite lax in its oversight of who gains access to Nvidia's chips.
Not Lutnick. Lutnick did that?
That's Howie Nutlick at the Commerce, the Commerce Secretary who's now in some trouble. Even worse, the Times reports that Marco Rubio warned Trump about his pal's affair with the alleged Chinese spy before Jensen Huang got on Air Force One for their trip to Beijing back in May. What does Trump have to say about all this? Well, he initially said he hadn't been briefed. Then he said he didn't really remember. Then he said, well, he believed Huang didn't know that she was suspected of spying, which seems to be a misunderstanding of how spying works.
Yes.
I didn't know I was sleeping with the spy. Yeah, no. That means she did it well. That means that's the honey pot. So many questions, massive implications for AI, national security, the entire economy. But let's start here. How big of a scandal do you think this is for the Trump administration?
This is one of the biggest, most important stories in the world right now. And if we weren't just coming off this giant midterm, it would be getting so much more attention than it currently is. This has, as you say, huge national security implications. It has real potential for corruption here because Huang is not just friends with Trump. And they are good friends, or at least to the extent Trump doesn't really have friends. They are regular acquaintances. Trump, they talk on the phone all the time. There is this obviously mortifying and cringing clip of Huang at the all-in conference where Trump calls them on the phone and she puts him on speakerphone for everyone else.
He is, as far as we know, a major financial supporter of all the president's various projects.
25 million for the ballroom.
Yep. I'm sure whatever library fund he's given, they have a financial relationship. And the president was aware of this, did nothing about it. His administration did nothing about it. And it has real implications for the world economy. Nvidia plays such a gigantic role in the ability for AI companies, not just the hyperscalers in the United States, but the open model ones in China. They need their chips.
Huang is like he is Nvidia, right? And he has this very complicated supply chain relationship in Asia to get all of the stuff built. It's really all based on his personal relationships. With him leaving, we don't really know what that's going to do. Everyone worries about AI being in a bubble. These are the kinds of things that could pop bubbles. Just tremendous implications there. And just the national security implication that there is an intelligence operation using a honeypot to get a friend of the president to convince the president to give China access to our chips, which is the one thing we always said that Trump, even Trump was saying we should not do because his argument for why we let AI cook, we don't need regulations to build every data center is because we're in this fierce competition with China for AI dominance.
And he gave China all the tools they had to keep up with us. Just like massive implications here.
Yeah. I mean, the only question here is, was the spying even necessary? Because it was in Huang's interest, financial interest, to sell the chips to China, even if this alleged spy wasn't a spy. There's a CNN story I just saw that some people in the intel community are like, was she actually a spy? Was she recruited by Beijing? We can't prove this yet. But either way, Huang has been making an argument that we should give the chips to China because his argument on this is, well, if we give our chips to China, then we control the supply to China.
And so then it's like US chips that are the Chinese are then dependent on US chips. And that's good because otherwise they would just create their own, I guess. And it's like a kind of a fucking weird argument. It never really made much sense to me.
Well, the only point that makes sense is he gets to sell them.
That's what I'm saying, right? It does make sense if you're Nvidia and you're just a chip seller, right? So again, did you need the spy to try to have Jensen Huang go around export controls and sell to a company in Singapore so that they could potentially divert those chips to China in violation of.
That's the part that so there's two elements to where how this three elements, I guess, to where the spying or whatever you want to say could be problematic here. One is just that US national security and secrets. You have a spy who spends a lot of time with someone who is talking and I assume texting with Trump all the time, right? So there are huge just sort of national security secrecy questions there. Then there is, did the spy convince Huang to convince Trump to do this? As you say, you may not have needed the spy because Huang always believed that.
But then the other thing in which we need a lot more information about is whether the Alice Huang, who just sort of had a very rapid rise from television reporter to head of a major chip buyer, which I mean, look, anything can happen in China.
Anything can happen.
That's right.
It's a land of opportunity.
That's right. And then that company becomes a cutout to illegally send chips to China and all sorts of potential protocols that would prevent that from happening are not followed both within Nvidia and the US government. And perhaps maybe because the head of Nvidia was having an affair with the person who was giving the chips to China.
Here's the other thing that's fucked about it. Every time someone is like, hey, maybe we should regulate artificial intelligence because the heads of these AI companies are telling us that it could escape human control, that it could kill us all. And those aren't like just random doomers online and AI safety researchers. That's like the people who are running these companies. And every time there's a call for regulation, they say, all the people who stand to make a lot of money from this pretend it's not about the money and say, well, actually, we just don't want we don't want China to win, right?
And if you're really serious about not wanting China to win the AI race for national security reasons, which I understand there are national security reasons for this, then certainly you shouldn't be on the side of selling a bunch of chips to China, advanced US chips to China, or just having a personal relationship with the chip maker who is sleeping with an alleged spy, right? Like I thought we were trying to do everything possible to make sure that China didn't win the race.
But of course, and I've covered this on offline too, like the worry has been for a while now that like this whole idea of like beating China to the punch and like is that China was going to steal the secrets of how to get to advanced AI anyway from us, that like one of the tools in their toolbox is espionage and that like whatever company here figures out how to develop advanced AI that like China's going to be able to figure it out too either on their own or by spying on us.
And so like the only real way to do this is to both regulate US companies here and to enter into serious talks and international diplomacy with China to make sure we all don't develop a fucking AI model that we lose control of.
Also, the people who make the argument that we can't regulate because it allows China to beat us are the same people who want to send the chips to China because they have a bunch of companies that are invested in that use the Chinese open source models as their basis for their work to compete with the hyperscalers, right? So everyone is conflicted here.
And by the way, that's the other danger out here. We haven't even talked about all the open source models. It's like you let chips get out all over the world in violation of export controls or they're based on someone spying or they're based on someone's financial interests or Howard fucking Nutlick is not paying attention. Now you've got all these open source models getting a bunch of chips and who knows who the fuck has those. Like you start realizing why some of these AI people are like, yeah, the world is ending because not the right administration to have in place while the AI race is at this stage.
Tell you that much. All right. Let's talk about the latest with Democrats who still aren't tired of winning. On Wednesday night, the Mississippi Senate race was officially called and Scott Column became the state's first black senator since Reconstruction. Take a listen to some of his victory speech.
There were times that I couldn't get donors to answer the phone. They did not believe a moment like this was possible. But I kept the faith. But I want to have a final word to every Mississippian. The ones that voted for me, the ones that didn't vote for me, and the ones that didn't vote. My commitment to you, each and every one of you, is that first, I'm going to treat your children like I want my children to be treated.
I'm going to treat your parents the way I want my parents to be treated.
It looks like Column will end up winning by a bit more than 5,000 votes or half a percentage point. Up in Alaska, Mary Paltola was ahead by 4,000 votes or about a point and a half on Thursday afternoon with 82% of the vote counted. Her team and all the data nerds we obsessively follow seem to think she may hit 50% and avoid the ranked choice vote tabulation altogether. She also now has more votes than both Dan Sullivan's combined, defanging that talking point. So looks like we're hitting 56, Dan. 56 Democratic senators.
On Mississippi, what do you think of Column's campaign and what it says about the path to a Democratic supermajority going forward?
I loved his campaign. There's a moment that I think embodies exactly why he won. So Trump came to Mississippi to do a rally as he was doing his tour around the country. In most cases, the Democrat will hold a press conference or put out a video and respond to it and attack back. And what Scott Column did is he went to the rally. He went to the line of people, of all of Trump's fans who were waiting to get into the rally. He introduced himself to them. He shook hands with them. He hugged them. And it was just this campaign of openness and generosity and a willingness to do things differently, to understand that if you just ran the same playbook that we use all the time in Democratic politics that can in good years deliver in even slightly Republican states, that will not work in Mississippi in any year.
And he built a campaign that was good enough and open enough and broad enough that when the wave came, he was ready to ride it into the Senate. And I think it is a model for how we should think about not just winning individual races, but long-term organizing in the states in the Deep South where you have this large population of black voters that have been disenfranchised, have not had their votes counted, have been purged from the rolls, even have lost seats in Congress in the last year, have checked out the process in some cases, very understandably so, to begin to engage with them, but also reach out to other people in the same way and to treat every Mississippian as the same, whether they're Republican or Democrat or black or white or old or young.
And I think it's a model. I really do.
Yeah. And there were plenty of folks in the party, not enough, but plenty of folks in the party who have sort of realized the potential of Mississippi for a couple of years now. And also that there was a governor's race there that Brendan Presley only lost by three points not long ago. So it wasn't I mean, even though Trump won Mississippi by what, 23, 24 points, it wasn't totally crazy to imagine a Democrat winning statewide there when the governor's race was three points. And look, it's a great example of why you just don't look at the map and say that anything is off limits.
And you give people a chance and you invest everywhere and you play everywhere. And I mean, I was connected with Scott on email like last year and people were like, yeah, I think he's got a chance. And I remember our friend Patrick Gaspar, who was like very involved in the campaign, he had said that too. And you know like your instinct is like, well, we got a lot of important races and is this really going to are we really going to flip Mississippi and what we really got to focus on is like the swing states and the top tier races.
But like you know we had him on, he came in here and I was like, wow, that's pretty impressive. And like you don't want to just like completely you know believe that like it's going to happen no matter what. But like I don't know. I was like very same thing with Annie Andrews, right? I remember I was connected with Annie Andrews and was like, yeah, sure, come on, Pod Save America. And like a lot of people invested in that race and then a lot of people thought it was crazy. And I will say this is for all the factional fighting, there were people on the far left who were like, Mississippi, why Mississippi and not Angie Nixon? And they got mad about that.
And then there were like people in the center left who were like, why are we spending money on Mississippi when we should be spending more when we're struggling in Michigan and other races? And so it's like this is not like a factional thing either. This is just you've got to be able to play everywhere.
I think the important thing to recognize here, the reason to invest too is Scott Column won today because people invested in Brendan Presley two years ago and people invested in Mike Espey and his Senate race two years before that.
I remember, yeah.
Talarico and Gina Hinojosa won in part because of what Beto did in 2018 and every day since, right? Keisha Lance Bottoms benefits tremendously, not just from Osoff and Warnock and what they've done in years, but Stacey Abrams running in 2018 and 2022. And so when you run well-funded races with good candidates, even when you lose, you're building another step to get you closer to winning the next time around. And that is why you can't write off any district. It's why our friends that run for something are recruiting people to run everywhere so that when the waves hit, you have built an infrastructure, you have built a relationship with the community, and you have a bunch of candidates who can run and take advantage of times like this.
The other thing too is like I think back in the Obama era, we all got a little bit over our skis with demographics are destiny. Demographics are not destiny, obviously.
We did not. We did not. Barack Obama did not.
I mean, we as a country, right?
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
But there is a you can overcorrect too much in the other direction. And the reason people thought Mississippi was possible someday, it turns out now, is because they looked at the demographics there. They looked at the concentration of black voters in that state. I mean, this is what happened with Georgia. This is what happened with Texas. This is what happened with North Carolina.
South Carolina.
South Carolina. You start seeing states where there is a diverse population. There's a lot of black voters. White voters from the north are moving into the cities, which tends to college-educated white voters, black voters, Latino voters, Asian American voters, like younger voters. And so you start looking at states and that doesn't mean alone that the demographic mix and the demographic changes are going to make that state flip. But it's a signal that maybe if the demographic changes are happening in the state, it's a good time to invest and to start running people.
Even if, like you said, they lose the first couple of times you do it, like you start building up an organization and then eventually it flips.
I mean, that's what Stacey Abrams and Latasha Brown and everyone else did in Georgia. They looked at the state, they saw the potential, they invested, people ran, people lost. And eventually now every single statewide elected official in Georgia is a Democrat. In Texas, this is a great thing to say. Every single official except Ted Cruz is a Democrat. Every single statewide official. Like it can be done.
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I'm talking about the blame game this week over the failure of Republican Thomas Massie's impeachment resolution against Pete Hegseth. Here's what happened. On Tuesday, House Republicans called a vote to stop Massie's impeachment resolution from moving forward. It passed 211 to 204 with 203 Democrats plus Massie voting no. So they didn't get any other Republicans but Massie. 11 Democrats missed the vote.
If all 11 had been there and nothing else changed, the impeachment resolution would have stayed alive. Though even then, there still would have had to be another vote to actually impeach Hegseth, but it would have kept it alive. But seven Republicans also missed the vote. And since most of those seven were in DC and actually voted later, the Republican majority could have theoretically held the vote open to wait for those Republicans if the 11 Democrats had actually shown up, which would have given Republicans the votes they needed to kill the resolution.
Many of the Democrats who missed the vote later said they had been stuck in traffic, which is why they couldn't make it in time. Many of them apologized. And in case anyone needed one more reason why Hegseth is the most embarrassing defense secretary we've ever had, here's a video of him and his wife and staff getting yelled at for not observing a moment of silence at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on Veterans Day.
All visitors will maintain an atmosphere of silence and respect at all times.
Now, to Hegseth's credit, which I've never said.
And we'll never say again.
Right, yes. On Thursday, he invited that soldier who just gave them that warning and that video to the Pentagon and gave him a medal. Let's talk about the impeachment fail. Many people are very angry. Like I said, many of those Democrats who missed the vote have apologized. What is your take on the whole thing?
I think this is a Rorschach test for Democrats. If you think that Democrats, and particularly Democrats in leadership, and maybe Hakeem Jordis in particular, suck, then you see this and you get very mad immediately. And I think you laid out exactly what happened here, right? This is sort of a clusterfuck. It's not a clusterfuck entirely of the Democrats making. It is not unusual for members to be off Capitol Hill in the evening and wait to get called for a vote, and then they come back.
And were there not to be some massive traffic snarl, these members all would have made it back. That happens all the time. Is it a great idea to leave when you have such a super important vote? Probably not. But it is also tradition that they just keep the vote open until everyone arrives. And Republicans played a little bit of dirty pool here. And just as soon as they had the votes they needed, they gaveled it shut without anyone else, not allowing these members or the seven Republicans to come because they had the majority. In the end, there is the explanations.
Originally, it seemed like Jeffries and Katherine Clark, the whip, did not know exactly why people weren't there. Some of them were at the reception. Some others just weren't in town. I think Nancy Pelosi was at a Veterans Day ceremony in California that she goes to, has gone to every year. Others, I think, had a health issue. But it wasn't explained very easily. And so the internet spun up very fast. Here's the thing. As you point out, even if these members had showed up, they would hold that vote open until the Republicans got there and it would have failed.
Also, it does not matter substantively in the end because Democrats can and will just bring this back up again when we're in charge in January and pass it by vote for.
Might be the biggest thing.
Yes. Yes, that is the most important thing is he is going to be impeached by the House. There will be an inquiry. Jeffries has said he's fully committed to it. There is obviously more than the majority of Democrats are going to be there for it. That is going to happen next year. It'll be one of the first things I imagine this Congress does. So.
And by the way, I don't think like does he have the do we have the two-thirds votes required in the Senate to actually remove Pete Hegseth from office?
That's the other thing.
Probably not. Like does that mean that the House shouldn't impeach him? No, I don't. But like I think in my here's how I'm looking at all of the situations like this in the next couple of years. Is there a situation where Democrats had the power to make people's lives better and did not use that power or misused the power or fucked up in some way that they didn't you know like and if that's the case, then I'm going to be really mad.
But if it is about like missing a vote that you know first of all, probably they would have lost anyway. Second of all, they can bring up again in January. Third of all, might not even lead to Pete Hegseth leaving office. Fourth of all, even if he did leave, might not stop the war that's actually costing us so much money and costing people money and putting people's lives in danger. So like we have to think about at least I'm thinking about everyone else can be as mad as they want and think however they want. What I'm thinking about is like what is the ultimate goal that we want to achieve?
How do we get the power to achieve that goal? And are we taking the right steps to use that power correctly to achieve that goal? And in my view, that goal should be improving people's lives and sort of delivering on the promises we made in this campaign and delivering on the challenges that people are so upset about, which is the cost of living.
Yeah. I mean, obviously, this is not the way you want to kick things off.
No. And again, you should like not go to a reception when you know you should have a vote. Like I get that.
Yeah. That is a totally fair thing. But in the end, if the end goal is to impeach Pete Hegseth, Pete Hegseth is going to be impeached.
Right.
And all these people who just ran will get a chance to do it. We're like cutting out all these new members if we did it right now. So we do it next year.
That's true. They all get to vote.
Everyone gets.
Yeah.
And it's very important we have fixed the scarlet eye to Pete Hegseth. I mean, and I mean that actually seriously. Like you are correct. It is highly unlikely that you're going to get 11 Republican senators to vote to remove him from office. But it is a thing that is very important for Democrats to show that we are trying to hold the Trump administration accountable for this war. And this is the most high-profile best way to do that, even if it does not necessarily result in a substantive change. There are other things we can do, like evolving funding that can result in a substantive change.
But like right now, this is the right thing to do. And I think it's important to do it.
One of the consequences of the impeachment screw-up was that it turned up the temperature on the conversations about whether the current Democratic leaders in Congress should keep their jobs once the new majority is sworn in. In the House, where this went down, it seems very unlikely that anyone will mount an open challenge to Hakeem Jeffries, especially since AOC and lots of other potential progressive challengers have already said they support him and will vote yes and no one else has challenged him. In the Senate, things are more complicated. Chris Van Hollen may challenge Schumer, though Schumer claims he already has the votes and is proceeding with planning for 2027.
Why don't we do this? What is the fairest argument for and against Schumer as leader? And how do you think this goes down?
I want to give the argument that the pro-Schumer side offers. And I think it's probably best and most catchily phrased by Ruben Gallego, who was at a press conference with Schumer and Kyrsten Gillibrand the other day, endorsing Schumer for leader. And he said, when the manager takes you to the World Series, you give them an extension. Schumer does not get credit for every part of this, but he did recruit when it was hard to recruit. Like not in the sad days of 2026, but in 2025, when Democrats were still slogging, he recruited Sharon Brown to run in Ohio.
Immediately puts that race on the map. Recruits Mary Paul Toller to run in Alaska. And Alaska is not in play without Mary Paul Toller. Recruits Roy Cooper to run in North Carolina. And now North Carolina, this is such a Democratic year that in hindsight, you could say, could some other statewide official or member of Congress won the seat? Maybe. But Roy Cooper was such a dominant force that he took the state off the map with a month to go, saving the Democrats tens of millions of dollars that they could redirect to Texas or Kansas or one of these other seats we picked up. He raised a gazillion dollars for the Senate, for both the DSCC and all the various super PACs so that we could compete in all these states.
He led the effort, right? They got us here. And he is taking credit for it. And I think legitimately gets credit for helping deliver this majority. And the answer is you deliver the majority, you should get to lead the majority would be his case. The argument against is that despite all of that, and I think even good faith opponents of Schumer can give him credit for what he delivered. The argument is twofold, that in this election, voters wanted change in general and generational change in particular.
You look at the candidates we elected, the number of senators under the age of 50 is doubling in the Democratic caucus now. They were looking for people like James Talarico, Annie Andrews, like Abdule, a very different set of senators. And the way it is a mistake to respond to that by putting the same faces, including 75-year-old Chuck Schumer, at the front of the line and make him the face of the party. Second to that, and this is the critique you get from inside the caucus, and this was articulated by Lissa Slotkin at a press conference she had with Bernie Sanders earlier this week, arguing against Schumer and saying that they were not supporting him, is that Schumer does not fully get or is not the best leader for a fight against a threat as dangerous as Trump.
Slotkin called it team fight versus team flight. Inside the Senate, there's wellness reporting about these group of senators. They call themselves the fight club who have been trying to push Schumer to stand up more, to be more aggressive, to use as much power as we have. They claim Schumer is not doing that. There is a related critique that he's just because he's older, he maybe doesn't understand modern politics in the way that some of the younger people do and certainly don't understand modern communication techniques. Schumer, like back in the day, was the premier Democrat in terms of communications.
Like he was the master of print and early television media. When new senators got elected, they made them go sit with Schumer and he would coach them on how to get press. He now refers to it as the social media, which I think is an indication that that's not his strength. And so that is the question is, should Schumer get a reward for what he delivered and be the leader for at least the next two years, which is when his seat is up in 2028? He has not announced he's running for reelection. He's also not announced he's not running for reelection.
A lot of people in Washington suspect these are the last two years for him. We don't know that. Or is the best way to take advantage of this moment we have to keep faith with the voters who put us in office, to prepare ourselves for the next election is to find a newer, fresher face to do it. Now, Chris Van Hollen, who I like a lot, is not exactly like he's in his mid-60s, I think.
Yeah. He's not the new fresh face.
It is sort of funny. Like people are like, we want generational change. We want generational change. Get rid of Hakeem Jeffries, who's 56, I think. And we also need to replace Schumer with someone nine years younger than him.
Well, that's why like in my mind, again, it comes down to who leading the Senate is more likely to get tangible results with the power that we have, which is much more than we had before, but still limited by the fact that we do not have the White House. And so I actually like I take Alyssa Slotkin's critique seriously in that, you know, are we going to get into a government funding showdown and Schumer is going to balk where maybe Chris Van Hollen or someone else would say and fight?
But then, and we you know we've been through this now so many fucking times on this podcast and so many different government funding fights. The real question is in those fights, is sticking and fighting going to change the Trump administration's mind in any way? Is Trump ever going to give on any of these funding fights? Or are we just going to keep the government closed for the next two years and he's never going to change his policy on anything, right? Because he doesn't feel political pressure. These are questions that sometimes I think go beyond the personality of the person leading the Senate Democrats, right?
No, I don't know. And I could be wrong on that. And maybe Van Hollen would stay and fight with Slotkin and the rest of them and Schumer wouldn't. And if they stay and fight, then Trump eventually backs down for the first time ever and we deliver real results to people. The reason I say this is because I have much more concern about who if we win the White House in 2028, who are the leaders of the Senate and the House in that scenario?
Yes.
Because I look back at us passing the Affordable Care Act and I don't think anyone could have done what Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid did.
Absolutely not. Absolutely not.
Like I think that they had some real fucking skill to help pass that legislation that a lot of other Democrats in Congress, I can't think of any who could have done that. And so I do think like if we were sitting in this position with a Democrat in the White House, I think I would be like screaming from the rooftops that Chuck Schumer should not be the leader. I don't care that he won all. I don't care that he delivered the wins. I don't think that the next two years in Congress matter as much to me who is leader because like I also think about it in terms of like who's the best messenger for the party. And like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are not the best messengers for the party.
The leaders have never been the best messengers.
And they've never.
Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid were not out front.
That's also true.
But also Geppard a little bit, but they still weren't the best messengers of the party.
But again, the next two years, the best messengers of the party are going to be the people who are running to be president of the United States. Like they're going to be the ones out there all the time carrying the message for the party, debating what the best message for the party is. They're going to get all the attention. So it doesn't worry me as much who the leaders are in these next two years. It worries me a lot who they are in the two years after that, which is partly why I think, I mean, if I was Schumer and I really wanted to lock the whole thing down, I'd be like, yeah, I'm going to be leader for the next two years, but then I'm announcing my retirement early and I'm out.
I think he thinks he probably doesn't have to do that to get it. I mean, it's important to recognize that the way like we're all very familiar with how speakers are elected because we went through all of this with the Republican speaker attempts in recent years and that the speaker of the House is an official government job where you need a majority of the House. And so you have to get almost all of your caucus to vote for you. It's a big deal. To become leader of the Senate is not a public vote. It happens at a lunch. And you just need half of the senators present during the vote.
So if everyone showed up, Schumer wins with, I think, 29 votes. And if speaker of the House is like winning a class president election, leader of the Senate is basically like being elected the president of your club. And it's so much more intimate. Like in the House, if you vote against the speaker, there's another 220 or 30 or 40 of you and you can kind of hide. Now you have to go look that person in the eye at lunch every single day, twice a week for the entire year. And it's awkward and it's just it's a very different thing, which is why there so rarely are challenges to existing leaders.
We may end up with one here. We may not. The other thing I just want to say one more thing about this, which is I worked for a Senate leader. The speaker has a lot of power. The Senate leader has a lot less power than the speaker. And even in these fights, the question, like the government funding fight, it's not just how strong the leader is. The leader could be stronger in every case. And I think Schumer totally messed up the first one that never happened. Second one, he held them together for a long time until he couldn't. But also especially in this last one, all it took was a couple of members to bail.
And once that happened, you can't it's not OBJ in the Robert Carroll books. You can't like.
You don't have a lot of power over the other one.
There's nothing you can do. And if you punish them, you can't really even really get away with that with your own caucus. Are they going to kick them off their committees or something like that? George Bush didn't invite Jim Jeffrens to a Teacher of the Year event at the White House and you switch parties and give the majority to the Democrats. So I mean, I think this is a really interesting conversation about the future of the party. And maybe, you know, as you said, Jeffries is almost certainly going to be speaker. And I think I honestly think the fact that he has everything from AOC to the Blue Dogs probably speaks well of his internal caucus leadership and how people think he's done.
Maybe we'll see him closest. Schumer is, you know, it's not anyone's first choice. That was very clear at Crockett Con. And we'll see where it goes from there. It may not be as consequential as people think it is, but it is important.
Yeah. All right, Dan, that is our show for today. Dan's going to be back on Sunday with a conversation with Pete Buttigieg. Exciting.
Right here from Denver at the What's Next conference.
Oof, can't wait for that. All right, have fun, Dan.
Bye, everyone.
Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Saul Rubin, McKenna Roberts, and Michael Goldsmith with Reid Sherland, Elijah Cohn, and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Matt DeGroat, Ben Hethcote, Jordan Kanter, Charlotte Landis, Kenny Moffett, Adam Lippert, Joseph Dutra, Desmond Taylor, Dan Farrow, David Toles, Mia Kelman, Ryan Young, and Naomi Single. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.
As Democrats debate who’s best to lead Congress in the next session, Donald Trump installs his most loyal aide as chief of staff and tries to cope with his dramatic midterms losses. Jon and Dan discuss the arguments for and against Chuck Schumer becoming Majority Leader, how Trump will spend his final two years in office with an enabling Stephen Miller by his side, and whether JD Vance can chameleon into an anti-establishment politician in order to win the GOP nomination for president. They also cover Scott Colom’s win in Mississippi and the shocking scandal that toppled Trump friend and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who had an affair with an alleged Chinese spy, and the massive global ramifications that may follow.
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