The presenting sponsor of positive America is hypocritic, hiring can be difficult, but if you're a company that's currently trying to hire, you face new difficulties from safely reopening your doors to finding the right person for specialized role. Housing wire could relate.

They needed to hire an ambitious reporter to cover news stories in the US mortgage and housing markets so they turn to zip recruiter zip recruiter. Smart matching technology finds people with the right experience for your job.

In fact, four out of five employers who post on ZIP recruiter get a quality candidate within the first day.

And that's how housing wire found Alexandra RHOA. Alexandra never imagined she could get a reporter job in the midst of covid-19 hiring was frozen and the idea of looking for a job was discouraging. So she created a profile on Zip Recruiter. Zip recruiter matched Alexandra to housing wires reporter job because her degree and writing skills were a great fit for the role. Husband Wife received her application only four hours after they posted the job, and a few weeks later Alexandra started her dream career.

Zip recruiter helped Alexandra find the right job in the health housing wire. Find the right person for their role.

Fast see how ZIP recruiter can help you hire. Try it now for free at zip recruiter dotcom slash crooked that zip recruiter dotcom slash crooked.

Welcome to Positive America, I'm John Fabri. I'm John Lovett. I'm Tommy Vietor. On today's Pot, we'll talk about how Donald Trump celebrated the Fourth of July with a racist speech at Mount Rushmore, how Joe Biden is responding, what can be done about the record number of new covid cases? And we'll check in on the most competitive Senate races ahead of November 1st. Love it. How is the show this weekend?

Great episode. Emily Heller back for the fourth. Hari Kondabolu came by. You know, he has that film. The problem with Apu, but he talks about all of this sort of Hollywood reckoning around who portrays cartoon characters, diversity, Hank, Hackie, stand up. It was a good conversation, Dr. Andrew Moyen on what's happening in terms of covid coming back or never having left his great upset. That's it. That's great. Also great. What a day is.

Back after a much deserved break, Akeelah and getting arrested and ready to guide you through all the harrowing and hopeful news of the day.

So if you haven't already subscribe to what a day wherever you get your podcasts, if you haven't subscribed yet, I don't know. You're missing a lot. I don't know. I don't know what you're doing out there. But you want 15, 20 minutes of news delivered by two of the most wonderful people, Akela and get in, you know, check it out. Everyone's everyone's listening. So go for it.

It's a great dog. Walking length is a great dog walking or any kind of walk. You know, also, I did not even realize until I saw this in the prep that there's a brand new wind of change bonus episode out today. Check it out. Exclusive to Spotify. Patrick talks to Joanna Stingray, the daughter of an anti-communist who smuggled music in and out of the Soviet Union. There's an international love triangle, high fashion and an explosive ending.

How about that guy's great names?

I'm going to change the Joanna Stingray episode. Could have been an entire series in and of itself. I highly recommend it.

I'm excited for this. All right. Let's get to the news. I'm not sure why I chose to punish myself by watching Donald Trump's speech at Mount Rushmore on Friday night. But there I was watching watching Fox. It really made me long for the times when he doesn't use a prompter, which is saying a lot.

So the speech actually began somewhat normal. Here's here's a clip as we meet here tonight.

There is a growing danger that threatens every blessing. Our ancestors fought so hard for struggled, they bled to secure, so what could he be talking about?

Is it the pandemic that's killed one hundred and twenty five thousand Americans? Is a double digit unemployment? Is it police brutality, systemic racism? Let's find out.

Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children.

Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders to face our most sacred memorials and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.

So that's it, guys. That's the growing danger. He went on to talk about canceled culture as well.

Love, since since you were a presidential speechwriter in your past life. I'm going to go to you for analysis of the speech itself. Why not? What do you think?

What do you think?

You know, there's been this debate for a long time as to like, oh, you know, when are we going to call Trump a fascist? Is he a fascist? Is the too far to call him a fascist. How far down the fascism line of reasoning do you have to be before it's OK to use the term? And I don't really care about that debate in this context just because whatever Donald Trump's authoritarian leanings may be, sort of like improv authoritarianism, all rooted in his own ego and all the rest.

What is clear is that his speechwriters are definitely natural fascistic thinkers like that is where they go when people like Steven Miller plus Santamonica fascists try to write a speech. They try to. Do big soring sweeping language because an impression of the kind of thing they think they're supposed to do in these jobs, these are not talented people. These are not particularly bright people.

These are the dregs of Republican politics, ideologues and just some of the worst human beings to ever walk through that building. And when they try to do patriotism, when they tried to do sweeping, what comes out is just sort of proto fascistic garbage, because nationalism is just patriotism for assholes. But even putting aside the terribleness of the words themselves, what is so striking about this is Donald Trump's brand of white nationalism and fomenting of division and chaos and hatred.

It is a luxury for a better time. It is the kind of TV based riling up of people. If they weren't in a state of crisis, if we weren't in the midst of a pandemic, if there wasn't actual genuine need for actual genuine leadership.

And so I do think it would be more frightening if Donald Trump's polling was better if if he were in a better position politically. But because he is in such a bad way and because the words are falling, I think, on deaf ears and he is in the process of losing the country, it just comes off as this disgraceful display for the for the the last vestiges of his supporters. Tell me, what did you think I am, unfortunately, both of us for or texting during the speech, so I know that you watched it as well.

Yeah, I mean, that's a sad commentary on my life, but that's a different question. I mean, so the content was a moral abomination that was racist. It was divisive.

But I also just think it's so divorced from the reality of people who are trapped in their homes because of the pandemic or out of work.

It's also completely discordant. I mean, holidays are supposed to be fun. You guys have written remarks for presidents about like Christmas, Thanksgiving, July 4th. And usually presidents try to lift people up or make it in some way joyful. This was none of that. And the delivery on these teleprompter speeches is usually so bad and monotone that it's hard for me not to get caught up in that. And frustrated by that, I do try to check myself in these moments because obviously I don't like Trump as listeners might know, but authoritarianism can work.

And I wonder if there's a method to the madness.

But I like I don't know. I don't think there's a strategy here. But there a recent Quinnipiac poll that found 52 percent of voters support removing Confederate statues from public spaces. And that was a 19 point swing since August of twenty seventeen. They were about evenly split on renaming military bases. There are other polls that show the issue in a worse place, a slightly underwater.

But all the polling I've seen have shown the numbers consistently moving towards support for taking down Confederate monuments in frustration with, you know, naming anything after traitors. And so I think sometimes Democrats and pundits, we obsessively read the news and watch Twitter and cable, and we missed the big story in this case. I think it's the exact opposite. I think Fox News coverage in right wing outlets are distorting Trump's view of what people actually care about. If you watch the pre show on the for the big Fourth of July speech on Fox News, there was no discussion of the coronavirus.

It was all media grievance. It's all Tucker Carlson and Hannity focused on the culture war and Jonathan Swan. It actually did a little side by side of things. Tucker Carlson has said compared to Trump's speech, and it's nearly identical. So just like mainlining Fox News, Trump's aides told The New York Times they think some people are lying to pollsters about their support for the protests. I think that's a bad bet. You're also seeing background quotes from Trump's staff who want him to move on from the racially divisive topics that he prefers to talk about.

So I just I can't see a scenario where that speech helped him politically in any way, shape or form.

Look, I'm not a pollster, I just I find it hard to believe that the election might turn on statues of dead people like it just it is talk about missing the mark.

Like, to me, it just seemed like a really pathetic sort of display. Like they clearly decided that Tulsa was bad because the president went off prompter the whole time and just like did his usual crazy routine. He's talking about the ramp for 15 minutes and all that.

So they try to get him on prompter. This is like not just something that like Trump decided to tweet. This is a strategy of the campaign right now, a broader strategy. Trump is reportedly upset with Jared Kushner for pushing him to talk about issues like criminal justice reform and policing reform.

Trump and his advisers think that statue's is a winning issue, which is why he also announced during the speech that he's signing an executive order to create a, quote, national guardian of American heroes that will include statues of historically significant Americans.

Like I just I mean, like you said, even in the best of times. Right. And in in twenty eighteen in the midterms before we had a pandemic or a terrible recession, you guys will remember he made the last month the campaign about this immigrant caravan. It did not work then. Right. He always needs an imaginary enemy. So he made about the care in twenty eighteen. It didn't really work. Now we are in the midst of a pandemic.

You see polls everywhere showing people are more afraid of the pandemic.

As the days go on and the infections rise, people are worried about their jobs. People are very concerned about systemic racism and police brutality. Trump is not on the right side of that issue with the majority of the public either.

So these are all the concerns facing the American people. And he's going to go up there and talk about the issues. Even if you say that like he's he's he's not with the American people on Confederate statues, most Americans want Confederate statues down.

So then the campaign, even if then they say like, well, it's about Washington and Jefferson and other statues like these issues are just not fucking driving people's vote choice in the midst of a national crisis. It seems so crazy to me.

It's also, you know, there are sort of two things that I thought were interesting about this over the weekend and then today. One is that there was this Gallup poll that came out that showed Donald Trump is now losing independents. He's at thirty three percent. Obviously, he's in single digit with Democrats, but he retains 91 percent approval amongst Republicans. Right. That capture continues, which is better than George W. Bush did when he lost the country. And an extreme difference between independents and Democrats saying what Republicans say.

So there's this conversation going on just amongst Republicans in which he feels this strength.

At the same time, Trump is now threatened to veto a big defense bill over sucking statues. Right rights, a big giant defense bill with a raise for four service members and includes Elizabeth Warren's amendment around renaming Confederate bases that are currently named after Confederate generals and traitors. And he's threatened to veto it. And what you've seen now is a bunch of Republicans in Congress basically ignore it under the presumption that that veto may be overturned, that they'll be able to pass this thing with a veto proof majority.

So, I mean, compare it to twenty eighteen. Donald Trump starts fomenting about the caravan, about the caravan. He has a bunch of willing participants in that.

That's that's not really what's happening now. Yeah. I mean, threatening to veto a seven hundred and forty billion dollar with a B defense funding bill because Elizabeth Warren wants to change the name of ten military bases from Confederate traitors to something else, I think is the perfect anecdote that speaks to how divorced from reality their political strategy is.

And and lest you think that they were trying to, you know, sort of narrowly slice this issue and make it about, you know, people trying to pull down a statue of Lincoln or Washington as opposed to Confederates know this morning he's tweeting his rage about the Washington Redskins potentially changing their name or he's attacking Bubba Wallace, a NASCAR driver who found a noose in the in the stall where he was working out of. And he's attacking him in calling it a hoax and saying that in the flag decision has caused the lowest ratings ever in NASCAR.

The flag decision there was about banning the Confederate flag from NASCAR event. So he is he is going for the maximalist racist portion of this debate and he's doing it on purpose. Yeah, it's not even working for sort of the other Republicans who are following this strategy to trying to make Democrats out to be like antifa lovers, and that's partly because of the who the opponent is, who Trump's opponent is.

Joe Biden. There's this interesting Twitter exchange over the weekend where Ted Cruz tweets Dem support the riots, the vandals, the anarchists and AOC, quote, tweets them and says, yes. That is precisely why the party nominated Joe Biden as very funny.

Yeah, but I thought that sort of encapsulated the entire party's problem, like heading into this November with the strategy of the Democrats are standing with the radical left and all they care about is mobs and burning things down. And statues like it just doesn't comport with the reality of how most voters either view the Democratic Party or view the issues that are sort of driving the conversation.

Yeah, Biden can't be grandpa hiding in the basement and antifa. He can't be both. You have to really make a choice there. Yep.

Well, let's let's talk about Joe Biden's message, which he's been delivering in a series of new ads that focus on his biography and his positive vision. Here's one of them that just started airing called Taught Me.

It's the values we pass around the kitchen table that we remember all our lives, the values that Joe Biden has fought for all his life. He learned around his own family's kitchen table. His parents taught him about the dignity of work. But when you're knocked down, you get back up. That success means looking at your child and realizing they turned out better than you. These are the values that built this country. They help us push for progress and bring us hope in the darkest moments.

Today, people are hurting, scared and angry. But to heal this kind of suffering doesn't take brute force, it takes empathy and understanding, a belief in dignity, resilience and the American dream. That's what Joe Biden's family taught him all those years ago. And it's why he'll fight as hard for your family as he does for his own. Tell me, what do you think the Biden folks are trying to do with that ad, and and do you think they accomplished it?

I mean, I think that there's been a lot of polling that shown us that people don't really know that much about Joe Biden. It can be hard to believe when you're obsessed about politics like we are. But I think there's a lot of people that know him as Obama's vice president. They don't even know the story that we all used to know of him is like middle class Joe from Scranton, the guy who is in the Senate forever. So they're doing some basic foundational education that I think is is valuable and important.

There's another ad that talks about being the father of a young man deployed to the military that talks about his son, Beau. I think, you know, sort of understanding that piece of Biden's biography helps you understand, for example, his outrage about the Russia bounty story and how it can be driven by that experience.

So I think that's probably sort of phase one of telling Joe Biden's story. I think that phase two is likely to focus more on how Biden managed the Recovery Act and hopefully have some sort of details about his plan to help pull the country out of the depths of the recession if he's elected president.

But I think laying down this stuff early is important. And so I was glad to see that they put out these spots. It would you think they're great ads? I watch them, they work on me. I am. I am. I was receptive to them. I will say dignity, empathy, resilience. I felt you can see them on the PowerPoint that led to the creation of the ad, which I respect. I mean, it's just pretty direct, like dignity, empathy, resilience.

These are words that are kind of great to describe what Joe Biden's trying to project about his campaign in opposition to Donald Trump, who obviously lacks empathy. I don't believe he has seen dignity in quite some time, would know it if he met it and. Donald Trump has not been obviously projecting resilience and how he has managed this crisis so clearly like they are trying it is actually a really difficult task. I mean, obviously, Trump has been hurting himself a lot, but it's a difficult task to think through the complexities about how you message your campaign in this moment as it is a unique moment.

There's not a lot of callers you can draw, right? You can look at the financial crisis in 2008, for example. You can look at other moments of crisis in our history. But, you know, a massive economic crisis, a period of of protest and tumult, this health crisis.

So it creates a set of challenges. And I think they're navigating that really well. I just I like that. Yeah.

It's interesting, those those words that you point out, dignity, dignity, empathy, resilience. Like there's another universe where they can be parodied as sort of political cliches.

They work and are meaningful because they sort of meet the moment that we're in. And, you know, I think the best kind of ad in the best kind of message will both set forth your own positive vision, but then have an implicit contrast or even an explicit contrast with your opponent. And, you know, we just talked about how Trump and the biggest one of the biggest problems with his speeches lately and his, like, obsession with the statue issue is that it completely misses the moment and misses the reality that most people are living in right now.

And I think what Biden's doing is he's not just doing bio ads about like, here's how I grew up and hears everything about my past.

Like halfway through that ad, he starts talking about how today people are angry and they're afraid and they're scared and, you know, and they're hurting.

And so he sort of acknowledges both the fear and the anger and the pain that's out there right now and then says we can sort of move to a better place as a country.

And it's only striking because you get none of that from Donald Trump, from the guy who was the United States.

And we're just not I mean, like, you know, we're used to president, especially incumbent presidents during crises, whether it's Barack Obama or George Bush, someone we didn't agree with at all, at least trying to win re-election by saying, we're going to move this, we're going to keep fighting and move this country to a better place.

You just don't even get any of that from Donald Trump right now. Yeah. You know, one other just about the mess. You know, there was another ad that was that felt actually more like a like a beer commercial. But the beer was Joe Biden with this music. And like, obviously, that ad takes a president. That is an ad not aimed at Twitter leftists and not and certainly not Twitter liberals like myself. But but I appreciated it.

And what you see also in this ad is like these are nonideological, right? These are not ads about policy at all. And I was thinking about, you know, Roberta Kaplan, who's one of the lawyers who fought for marriage equality all the way to the Supreme Court. You know, she talks about dignity as the conservative word for equality. And so you just feel in this ad like an appeal to independents, appeal to people. They're trying to peel away from those sort of soft Trump voters or nonvoters in the past.

Yeah, and in the Trump version of that type of strategy had me worried for a while. For a while we were reading about how they were opening offices in African-American communities and doing outreach in places that Republicans usually pass over. His Super Bowl ad was touting bipartisan issues like criminal justice reform. Now it is all monuments all the time. I mean, it is I don't think it's hard to explain to people that it's weird to release an executive order that threatens to put people in jail for a decade if you deface a monument while essentially disbanding the coronavirus task force.

Like, I think people can kind of get that. Yeah, look, obviously, we're not fans of Trump here on positive of America, but there is a version of this campaign and a message from Trump that I think would scare me a lot more than what he's doing right now, because he could try to make it a more sort of unifying approach and try to win back independents and swing voters. But as of now, he just isn't trying at all.

Poverty in America is brought to you by Article John, its article article, please give please give personal anecdotes about the items you received and what you love about article.

Well, let's talk about what we all got at cricket, cricket, media.

We great chairs. Great chairs, these wonderful yellow chairs that really spruce up the joint, give a lot of people places to sit. That's what a chair does. There's also a couple of couches, I believe there's a bookcase, a beautiful dress in there, too. You know, we love article. It's a it's affordable. It's you know, they they deliver it on time. The pieces are wonderful. I don't know what else to say.

It looks expensive. What do you guys think? It does look expensive, but it's not. Article combines the curation of a boutique furniture store with the comfort and simplicity of shopping online. As the weather heats up in the days, get longer articles here to make your dream patio a reality with weather resistant dining sits, loungers and sofas, article selection of outdoor furniture makes it easy to create your patio oasis in time for the summer season. Who doesn't want to have a nice backyard?

But we spend so much of our time to have some nice patio furniture from articled. It's affordable. Looks beautiful.

I have some really great outdoor article chairs and a table that I love. And there you go. Huge fan articles, team of designers focuses on beautifully crafted pieces, quality materials and durable construction. They are dedicated to a modern aesthetic of mid century Scandinavian industrial and bohemian designs. Fair prices, exclamation point. It's like a Trump tweet. You save up to 30 percent over traditional retail prices. Article is able to keep their prices low by cutting out the middleman and selling directly to, you know, showrooms.

No salespeople, no retail markups. Fast, affordable shipping is available across the USA and Canada is free on orders over nine hundred ninety nine dollars. All in stock items are delivered in two weeks or less. Right now, articles offering our listeners fifty dollars off your first purchase of one hundred dollars or more. Go to article dot com slash cricket and the discount will be automatically apply to check out this article. Dot com slash cricket so you get fifty dollars off your first purchase.

One hundred dollars or more positive America is brought to you by tax base.

Change is constant, but these days it feels like there's something new to grapple with every day.

It sure does talk space.

We may all be adjusting to this new normal, but it's still stressful. It's important to talk about it and to seek support.

I'm not adjusted to it. Every day is a struggle. Every single day talks face.

Online therapy is here to give you that support because we all need it right now. Match with a licensed therapist from the convenience of your device.

No matter where you are, reach out to your therapist 24/7 from phone or computer and you'll hear back five days a week, one month on talk space cause about the same amount as a single in-person therapy session. But with talk space, you can send unlimited messages to your therapist and they'll engage with you at least five days a week. That means you never have to wait to share what's on your mind. The bottom line is that we all need to talk sometimes and talk.

Space wants to give the support we deserve at a price we can afford. As a listener of God Save America, you can get one hundred dollars off your first month on talk space to match with your perfect therapist. Go to talk space dotcom or download the app.

Make sure to use the code crooked to get one hundred dollars off your first month and show your support for the show.

That's crooked and talk space dotcom.

So let's talk about how both candidates are handling the most important issue of the campaign, the coronavirus pandemic. There's a there's a new Washington Post story about this today, talks about how Biden advisers are, quote, using the stumbling response and renewed surge in cases as a way to paint Trump as uninformed, incapable of empathy, like you said, Leavitt, and only concerned about his own political standing. Then it talks about how Trump's advisers have also come to believe the pandemic could decide the election and are looking to reframe the president's response by sending health officials to swing states, quote, even as the president himself largely seeks to avoid that topic because he views it as a political loser.

Trump's weekend events had no social distancing or mask requirements.

And in his Fourth of July remarks, he said that ninety nine percent of covid-19 cases are, quote, totally harmless like so.

Is Trump's covid strategy just herd immunity now? Is that is that what it's come down to?

I don't think he has a strategy. I think his strategy is to try to talk about other things and distract us by talking about other things. I mean, if we were like taking your question literally here, right. Like herd immunity would mean like 60 or 70 percent of the country got coronavirus, which would mean millions of people were dead. So I don't think that's actually what I mean. I think he just wants to talk about literally anything else.

And look, you know, his response to the pandemic has been the most egregiously bad. I do think you're seeing government officials at all levels fail to figure out how to message this crisis right now, like even in Los Angeles where we acted earlier, took a whole bunch of draconian steps. It does feel like this thing is getting out of control and the message has gone back to everybody. Just stay at home again. And I think that's very hard to sell to people in this moment where they just sacrifice months of their lives.

They feel like things are getting worse and it's not opening back up.

So I don't know what Trump's coronavirus strategy is. I mean, saying ninety nine percent of cases are totally harmless is completely crazy. It is not accurate in any way and is likely to lead to many more people to go out and live their lives like they did beforehand and catch this thing and infect their parents and their grandparents and their friends.

So it's all just it's a mess. I don't even know what to make of it. I don't know how to interpret it. Love it, they said that the in the story, the campaign's goal is now to convince Americans they can live with this and the White House hopes that Americans will grow numb to the escalating death toll.

Yeah, it's it's beyond what are we supposed to say? You know what I'm supposed to say. It's so awful. You know, there's all these stories in the past couple of days about whether we should be doing something called pool testing. I didn't know anything about pool testing. I don't know if you know about pool testing. The doctors and love believe it was talking about it. And pool testing is basically when you don't have enough tests, basically you mix the blood together, test a bunch of blood.

If any of it comes back positive, then you test the individual samples and it's a way to make the tests go further. OK, two things. One, we have now, we are still unable to test enough people. We still don't have the capacity to test. We're still fighting that backlog. But to that only works if there aren't enough cases in the population that every time you test ten samples, it doesn't come back positive. Right. That we have now gone to the point where some of the mitigation efforts to not mitigate the coronavirus but mitigate our lack of preparedness are not able to work because the disease is spreading so far out of control.

We are six months into this and I remember like a month or two ago, we were talking about the failures that took place in February and March.

And I remember the three of us were just like, we are still failing right now. We're failing right now and it's ongoing. We're still doing that. We are still in the midst of this epic failure. And, you know. The confusion around what we should do right, like Tommy pointed out, like the lack of leadership, the in and out, what should be open, what shouldn't be open, the lack of leadership on masks, the lack of direction for what we as individuals should do when we did our part and stayed home and tried to mitigate the risk for the country, only to discover that in the months we did that, no preparations took place.

Nothing happened to make life easier. Everybody is starting to make risk assessments. Everybody is starting to say, fuck it, I want to do something. I want to find a group of people to hang out with. I need a life. I need something outside of this. So like the country is breaking, right? It's the failure of leadership. It's the failure of Republican governors across the country. But it's also just our collective exhaustion with this after six months.

And and that's it. You know, we're just we're out of no one has a great outcome for this. No one has a great thing to tell anybody. We're just fucking trapped. Yeah.

I mean, Nate Silver tweeted this and said this over the weekend on one of the Sunday shows. But the best thing Trump could do to improve his re-election chances is mandate masks, which is sort of like a bit of an oversimplification.

But I didn't think it was an interesting comment because, like, obviously we can all agree Trump's response continues to be fucking awful and that it sort of ignores the very real sickness that that's out there and like the rising death toll and case count and all that.

But it's also just really fucking shortsighted and stupid from a political perspective that the only way he could improve his chances, improve his re-election chances if he got the virus under control or at least did a better job.

And I think part of what we're seeing, as you guys were both saying, you know, with even local governments and state governments who took pretty strong restrictions like ours did in California early, still failing to get the virus under control is that policy is one part of public health response.

But communication is a huge part, communication and education. And there is just there's no consistent message from anywhere, partly because Donald Trump decided early on that the federal government was not going to run this response, that he was just going to leave it to states and localities.

And you can't have a patchwork response in a country like as big as ours.

Right. You can't just have 50 states running, each of them running their own coronavirus response and not having a central form of both responsibility in the federal government and a type of communication that everyone can tune into. Eric Garcetti and Gavin Newsom can give press conferences all day long. They're not reaching as many people as the United States would.

I mean, look, the responses may be different in different places, but if we were all operating from a set of guidelines and a set of kind of expectations on people at the mass guidance, you know, look, it was not a foregone conclusion that mass would become this political idea.

You could imagine the exact opposite of mass becoming a way that Trump could talk about how we get to open back up. He could take that on any moment. So much of this is simply him being unable to just admit or change or make a change. It's just a personal driven decision that costs hundreds of thousands of lives and pain.

You don't have many major rallies popping up in front of signs that say no shirt, no shoes, no service.

You know, like I do does drive me crazy the way the media is. And I don't mean to blame them for this, but often you see the press sort of eagerly fold into this argument that this is a politicized thing now that mass are political, when actually the data doesn't really show that it's a bunch of super intense extremists who have decided that, you know, mass swearings attack on their liberty or whatever. And and then there's on the left, like a bunch of people who, you know, retweeted a bunch of care and videos and people in supermarkets.

And I think most of the country is actually like, tell me what to do. Tell me how to stay safe. Tell me how to keep my friends and loved ones safe. I will do what you tell me. I just need some sort of clear guidance. And you're absolutely right, John. That starts with Trump. It starts at the top. The fact that he won't wear a mask, the fact that he won't advise people to do it is, I think, the single most damaging thing.

But we do need some consistency. We do need, like bite size, actionable guidance to help us guide our own lives. And I don't think that if some state or municipality tries to tell their their citizens that you need to lock down as hard as we did in March, again, that they're going to trust them.

And that's the really scary part. I totally agree with that, and I worry about that. I mean, in what is hopefully a Biden administration, hopefully Joe Biden wins. If he does, he is going to face sort of all of these challenges. And primarily, the number one challenge is to communicate to the American people about what we can do to control this pandemic in a way that is consistent and also maybe focused on harm and risk reduction. Right.

Like take these sensible steps and you're never going to totally eliminate the risk that you might contract this disease, but at least you can reduce harm as opposed to, like, swinging.

You know, I remember first we were told not to wear masks. Then we were told to wear masks. We all locked down really hard, much like, are we going to go back into a lockdown now? Like when are we just going to keep locking down and not locking down? And until we get a vaccine over and over again, like we've got to figure out, you know, is it safer outdoors? Should we tell people if you're going to see people do it outdoors, stay apart, as opposed to telling everyone no one ever see anyone ever.

Right. Like, there's got to be some, like you said to me, and some actionable steps that people can take that are consistent coming from our leaders.

And we're not getting that now. So we are in bad shape, guys. We're in bad shape.

It's the masks, masks, no big indoor events. Right. Like it's that so much of this.

But and then on top of that, like so there was so much like beachgoer shaming early on and I can't even remember if I participated in it.

I don't think I did because I was like, aren't they outside? Isn't this taken from an angle where you have no idea how close they are? Why are we close schools, Tommy? The fucking angles, right? Every fucking up. These are two men. Their umbrellas, umbrellas naturally create social distance.

Right. Especially if you're if you're taking it like lengthwise of a three mile long beach. Yes. Everybody looks pretty close. But yeah, you have this weird phenomenon where places are reopening bars and restaurants to early and then locking down in the draconian fashion on parks and trails and beaches. And it does seem like the data were were getting and learning from based on the protests show that mask usage outdoors really can help us be better. So why are we closing the beaches?

I don't get it. It's so frustrating. Literally, you know, to not make it all about Trump, like Eric Garcetti one day is like it's al fresco dining in L.A. and everyone's going to be outside now. And welcome to our you know, we're opening outdoor restaurants the next days tweeting, cancel all your plans. Stay right for don't leave your house.

And I'm just like this is it's hard for people to follow the mixed messaging. And again, like you said, time it goes back to an issue of trusting our leaders. You got to be consistent. And if you do change your mind because the facts change, that's OK. But you've got to be clear about why.

You know, it's also, you know, like all of these decisions about opening and closing were predicated on this being very short term thing. And now that it's clearly not going to be a very short term thing, we need a different risk assessment because so that it's sustainable, even if it's a little bit more risky, we need something long term and sustainable because this is our new normal.

For a while it has been, but it will continue. Totally agree.

That is the original sin of the messaging was bend the curve, bend the curve, and let's just not even talk about what comes after. And I think, like, if you paid attention, you knew that this thing was going to be around for a while.

The virus wasn't going to go away in the summer like everybody like Trump told us. Right. That there would be mitigation steps. But we need to really focus on the mitigation steps now because, I mean, the scary thing is we're not even talking about hard decisions. We're talking about whether restaurants will be open at 50 percent capacity, not whether parents won't be able to do their jobs because they're, you know, providing child care and teaching their kids all day as well, starting in September.

I mean, this is about to get so much harder.

Obviously, it's not just the absence of Trump's harm, but the presence of something different. Imagine a president who in June was saying something along the lines of we have three months to solve this together and get cases down enough so that our kids can go back to school. Let's all do this together for our children. We we all want the kids to go back. It's for the teachers, for our economy, for their futures, so that parents can go back to work.

Everything hinges on September. We have a new deadline, everybody. It's to get this down by September. Like there's just such a we can criticize Trump, but it's not just it's there's a whole host of things a real administration would be doing that's completely absent and the fact that we'll get to it. But like the fact that not only is Trump failing to provide that, but Republicans are failing to point out the mistakes, failing to point this out is just so this is not a Trump problem, right?

There is this there's been this strain of like sort of phony bad faith libertarianism in Republican politics for a long time.

I will never get over the time when Greg Abbott, the current governor of Texas, told the people of Texas that he was sending the Texas National Guard to monitor a military exercise called Jade Helm that was going on in Texas because somehow he didn't trust Obama to not invade their state and take it over. Right.

Like now, Greg Abbott is getting fucking Gayed helmed by local Republican officials who say they won't enforce an ordinance to force them to wear masks. Right. So, like, they're all getting bitten by the same disease here that's existed in that party for a long time. And I have no idea how to fix that. I have no window into the thinking of these people. I guess I asserted it's bad faith, libertarianism. I hope that's the truth because the alternative is a sort of frightening belief in conspiracy theories.

But I don't know. I guess we're going to find out. Look, and that's what happened here in California, too, like, you know, there's plenty of county officials and sheriffs who told who told Newsom they weren't going to enforce the mask mandate. They're not going to do this kind of stuff. So you're sort of seeing that everywhere on a local level as well.

The other issue with the lack of trust is we're going to see in the fall, because right now we have a number of very promising vaccine candidates in their final phase of human trials, and there's going to be manufacturing going alongside of it. So, like, theoretically, we we could have by the end of this year, a vaccine that's that's getting ramped up and ready to use.

But there's going to be a lot of people who wonder if it's safe, it's going to be safe and effective, or is Donald Trump just telling us it's safe and effective because he wants to win re-election and thinks this is going to be a boon to him? And we shouldn't be in that position of having to wonder when it comes to something as important as a is a vaccine for this. Right. Because it could be perfectly safe and effective. But anything that comes out of the Trump administration now, you have to question which is a real fucking problem when we're talking about life and death in a pandemic here.

So. Parts of America is brought to you by policy genius. Look, there are some combinations that just work milk and cookies, peanut butter and jelly, a burger and fries. Now, policy genius has introduced another winning combination. An exclusive life insurance policy with affordable rates and a hassle free application, just like the same thing, is life insurance as delicious as a burger and fries?

Of course not.

Life insurance is made of paper, but this new policy makes getting life insurance so easy you'll actually enjoy it, motivate your audience.

Oh, I read the I read the action. I read this. I read the screen.

These guys you guys going, I gotta run to make sure pundits in the house are just. I'll be right back. Keep going. Well, that didn't fire you up.

Well, audience.

Positive is compares quotes from the top life insurance companies in one place, it takes just a few minutes to compare quotes from the top insurers to find your best price, you can save fifteen hundred dollars or more a year by using policy genius to compare life insurance policies. I think they also have pet insurance.

And this and this exclusive new policy makes things even easier. Now qualified applicants can complete their medical requirement over the phone.

So if you need life insurance but you don't know where to start, get started at policy genius dotcom. In minutes, you'll be able to compare quotes, find the right coverage and apply love. It's now wearing a mask. You'll get the right life insurance coverage and be the best then the best shopping experience. It's a winning combination policy genius. It's nice to get it right. Positive America is brought to you by frame bridge frame bridge makes it easier and more affordable than ever to frame your favorite things without ever leaving the house.

Spruce up your home office or send the perfect gift to a loved one. From art, prints and diplomas to the photos sitting on your phone, you can frame bridge just about anything. Here's a reminder of how it works.

Just go to framer's dotcom and upload your photo or they'll send you packaging to safely mail in your physical pieces.

Preview your item online and dozens of frame styles. Choose your favorite or get free recommendations from their talented designers. The experts at Cambridge will custom frame your item and deliver your finished piece directly to your door. Ready to hang instead of the hundreds you'd paid a framing store. Their prices started at thirty nine dollars.

An all shipping is free, plus our listeners will get fifteen percent off their first order at Cambridge Dotcom when they use our code crooked. I mean all three of us have used for Cambridge dotcom. We've all framed things. We got frame bridge pieces all over our homes in the office that we haven't seen in a bit.

Lots of Cambridge stuff there. I mean, it can't be easier and it also is just really well done.

So it's a very nice gift. Framing something nice for somebody. Great game shows a lot of thought went into it, which, you know. It's not always easy, especially now when we're looking at our walls more frequently than the point of it, right? I mean, walls have become much more important. I've seen these four walls in this office more than most people in my life over the last couple of months, say for sure.

And thankfully, there's a lot of beautiful frame bridge pieces hanging on them.

So get started today, frame your photos or send someone the perfect gift. Go to Freydberg Dotcom and use promo code cricket to save an additional 15 percent off your first order.

Just go to frame a picture of me on a couch. There he is, just me and Tommy on a couch. I think I have you can't see the.

Oh, guys, I'm looking at a picture of you right now in the office. It's the three of us and Dan at my wedding, just what I'm looking at. So not one of our classic neutze.

Classic nudes just go.

Those are not those are not in the office. Those are those are for the boudoir.

Just go to frame dotcom promo code, crooked freydberg dotcom promo code. Correct.

Well, let's talk about how all this is affecting the Senate races in 2020. If Joe Biden wins the presidency, Democrats will need a net gain of three seats to flip the Senate.

And the latest polls show Republican incumbents trailing Democratic challengers by wide margins in Arizona and Colorado and by smaller margins in North Carolina and Maine. Polls are also close in red states like Iowa, Georgia, Montana, even Kansas. This might be why some Senate Republicans are starting to put some distance between themselves and Donald Trump. As Levitt pointed out earlier, they were mostly unfazed by the president's threat to veto a defense bill that includes an amendment to rename military bases currently named for members of the Confederacy.

Some of them have also pivoted to wearing masks in public. What a sad pivot with Mitch McConnell and Marco Rubio openly advocating for them now. And then there's Iowa Senator Joni Ernst, who's a great example of someone who's trying to have it both ways in the very same interview where she disagreed with Trump's positions on the protests and Confederate statues. She also rejected the characterization of Trump's pandemic response as failed leadership and said, quote, I think the president is stepping forward.

I love it. The GOP strategy up until now has been to stick with Trump no matter what, because that's where the bases. Is that still the smartest strategy for these Republican senators?

Man, look, they don't have a lot of good options. You know, they don't. They don't. Right? I mean, there have been there's been some reporting that basically Republicans are sort of watching Trump and they're going to if things don't change by Labor Day, they'll start abandoning him in droves. Let's see if that happens. You know, it's they're damned if they do. Right. Embracing Trump right now is obviously not a winning strategy at a time when his approval rating is dropping.

But at the same time, when you decide to distance yourself from Donald Trump, you have to basically figure out how close you can get to the electric fence before he fucking zaps you, you know, and their collars, these Republicans, their collars are starting to buzz. You know, Jodi Jodi Ernst is criticizing Trump walking towards that electric fence.

She can't see it, but she knows it's there. And then she said he's stepping forward. He's stepping forward. The interesting thing about the question Jodi Ernst was asked if it was actually using her language about Ebola, right, like the Colins Ernst, a bunch of others, these they have these senators have these quotes about how Barack Obama's failed response to the Ebola outbreak was a sign of his his terrible leadership as president. And, you know, and then when Joni Ernst is confronted by the fact that she made that point, now that one hundred and thirty thousand, many more are dead from coronavirus, she has nothing to say because I think there's nothing she can say because, of course, she knows that Donald Trump is an abysmal failure on this issue, but she's afraid to say it.

Yeah, the Iowa Senate race is the most interesting and instructive example to me. I mean, Iowa has been trending conservative. I didn't really think that this race was going to be on the map. And Joni Ernst is certainly an example of someone for whom Donald Trump has made this a really brutal year to be running for the Senate. But like you said, love it. Like she's not a victim here. She was happy to attack Obama when two people died of Ebola and call it failed leadership.

And now her cowardice is on display because of crediting the coronavirus response. I do wonder, for someone like Joni Ernst, I mean, this threat to veto the NDAA, again, a seven hundred and forty billion dollar bill to fund the military is the kind of thing that's going to create a whole nother round of headaches and a whole other round of bad stories.

And I just don't think it's going to I don't think it's going to be good politics, period, for anyone to vote against supporting that bill. And so to the question of like, is it too late for them to jump ship? I think historically you can get away with changing your positions in an election. It's just something that voters are willing to to go along with.

But in this case, like love, it said like he is going to savage you and he's going to do it over and over again. And it's going to actually depress turnout among some of those base voters they need. So I do think I think the time look, there's a lifetime ahead of us between now in these Senate races happening, but I'm not sure.

That I know what I would do if I were these Senate candidates. I really don't. It's tough. I think, yeah, it is tough, I think that the time to burnish your reputation as an independent minded Republican senator has probably passed.

That's right, because I think, look, I think voters are not stupid. They get that the closer you get to an election, you know, if you you know, you change your mind here and they're like, look, Susan Collins is an example, right?

If Susan Collins has had played the last couple of years differently, if she had decided not to fucking vote for Brett Kavanaugh, if she had decided not to vote for the tax cut, which is incredibly unpopular, if she had decided to vote to impeach Donald Trump.

Right. You can see this world where, like Susan Susan Collins, like, maintains this this reputation for quasi independence. And Maine, which is another state that is sort of like drifted a little redder in recent years, decides, yeah, you know what? We're we're a purple state. We elected someone who was a pretty moderate Democrat in twenty eighteen to Congress, Jared Golden, and will return Susan Collins because she has this reputation for independence.

She doesn't have that reputation anymore because she decided to just like throw her lot in with Donald Trump. And you're right, the reason she did this is because what if there had been a primary challenge against Susan Collins from some Trumpy candidate on the right?

That's what they're worried about. But that's the calculation they made then and then. Now they're all going to pay for it because it's harder to run away from them now.

Yeah, it's interesting. There's there's you know, each of these states has a different make up than the country as a whole. And there's a little bit more of a path in some of these states for the Venn diagram of appeal to enough Republican voters and then appeal to enough of those independent voters to kind of build a winning coalition. That's actually why Donald Trump stands a better chance of winning the Electoral College than he does in the popular vote.

But one thing we're seeing in these polls is as independents, as Republicans stay firm with Trump and independents start sliding away from him, that overlapping little bit of of of of sweet spot on messaging gets smaller and smaller and smaller. I don't know how you appeal to the people that Donald Trump spoke to at Mount Rushmore while also appealing to the rest of the country. That finds that pretty repellent at this moment. It's a very difficult job to do. Yeah, I think that's right.

Look, the other interesting thing is I assume at some point he's going to pivot back to immigration.

We're going to have another round of caravan like stories or demagoguing of immigrants.

But last month, the number of migrants apprehended at the U.S. border was down 83 percent then may in twenty nineteen. So, like, there almost is no immigration happening right now. He's furloughed half the workforce.

It's like they're taking these draconian actions on some issues. The coronavirus is so bad in the U.S. the job market is so bad in the US, like all the boogeymen he usually looks to might be harder to find this time. I'm sure he'll try anyway, but it's just like I don't know what their their path looks like. Yeah, I mean, look, Martha McSally in Arizona is going to have to in order to win, is going to have to win votes of people who voted for Kyrsten Sinema in twenty eighteen.

Susan Collins is going to have to win votes of people who voted for Jared Golden in twenty eighteen. Thom Tillis in North Carolina is going to have to, you know, win votes of people who voted for some of the congressmen and sort of the North Carolina suburbs. Democratic congressman, North Carolina suburbs like these these Republican candidates in the Senate have no choice but to try to appeal to people who voted for Democrats in twenty eighteen and in some cases, in many cases in 2016, in a lot of these states that are sort of getting a little bit more purple or blue.

And that's a really hard thing to do when the guy at the head of the party is just like basically like you said, Tom, you're basing his entire campaign about protecting statues of dead people from vandalism.

You know, Donald, Donald Trump became president because he was trying to goose his apprentice numbers. Right now, he's running for re-election by appealing to the group of people that will make up the audience of some future Donald Trump TV network. Is it possible that he manages to win re-election by doing that? Of course it is, but that certainly doesn't help these Senate candidates who are not trying to build an audience for a future right wing nationalist TV platform. There's just there's no help for these senators coming from Donald Trump right now.

Donald Trump is forever trying to win the Republican primary. This is the entire strategy and like it's just, you know, it was enough for him in 2016. It's not enough for him and it's not enough for it's probably not for him and it's not enough for many of these Senate candidates. And in in twenty twenty. And so, yeah, they're in a they're in a very tough spot.

If you want to help them lose, which you should, you can go to vote, save America Dotcom's get Mitsch. This is our Get Rich or die trying fund where your donation will be split between many of the Democratic challengers for the Republican Senate candidates in some of these very competitive states, like we said, many of which we didn't know would be that competitive. Who thought like Kansas, right? Georgia, Montana, you know, Georgia, two races in Georgia.

Even as though the picture does become worse for Republicans, it's worth pausing here to remember that it's still an uphill job. It's still hard to win the Senate, and we still have to do really, really well and win in a bunch of places. Like if Doug Jones can't hang on in Alabama, which is a really tough thing, you need one more seat. You start to need to look to places like Iowa and to look to places like Montana, Kansas.

So like, you know, we don't want to be rosy. We don't want to be sanguine about this. It's going to be really hard and we need to win a lot more than they do. We need to really kind of like clean up to win the Senate, that's all.

Yeah, no, I mean, I think that's a really important point because I think like Arizona, Colorado looking really good. Maine looking looking pretty OK if we win those three and you know, for some reason we don't win Alabama, which is possible because it's just a deep red state. Even though Doug Jones is fucking terrific and you should donate to him, then we need North Carolina.

Then we need Cal Cunningham to win in North Carolina, which is a state that hasn't gone to Democrats in a presidential year since 2008.

So that's not an easy race. And then fortunately, we have a couple of different paths to get there. Maybe we pull out a win. Steve Bullock wins in Montana, maybe we get one in Kansas, maybe one of the Georgia races, or maybe Teresa Greenfield in Iowa.

So we do have a lot of paths, but it is that sort of fourth seat, that final pick up that's going to be the tough one, even under the best circumstances.

All right, well, that's our show for today. We're gasless today. Yeah, we're guys I want to talk about two things before as OK, let's. No, no. In this fog, as long as we're in the outer, there's two things.

One, very sad about Marconi passing away one of the greatest composers in film history. You know the music. You've heard it a million times. You should just play it, do yourself a favor, throw on a Spotify Morricone playlist, entertain yourself, inspire self. It's terrific.

Second point I want to make, and this is not important at all, how dumb is Mt. Rushmore?

How fucking stupid is this is this is the clip, the clip, the answer. I'm sorry we blew up a mountain to carve four faces.

You know, I've always sort of I always sort of wondered about the choice of the for the choice of the former president. OK, you get Washington, Teddy Roosevelt, Andrew Jackson, luck.

And then it's like. They gave up halfway through the detritus from the explosions is still under the fucking faces, they never finished the goddamn thing. Donald Trump next to Mount Rushmore. Did it make me think, oh, my God, he doesn't belong on Mount Rushmore? It made me think, God, he reminds me of stupid Mount Rushmore.

The thing about Mt. Rushmore is I wonder how many people in the country know that Stone Mountain Park exists in Georgia, which is literally a gigantic monument carved into the side of the mountain that glorifies the Confederacy that I believe was open to the public on the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's assassination. It is an Obama nation.

Let's do it well designed by the same person. Let's direct some of that Pentagon budget towards blowing that thing the fuck up because there's no reason for it to exist. Tommy, cancel culture, shame on you, I would cancel that out in a heartbeat. Let's cancel that mountain. I support canceling that mountain. Yeah, let's cancel the mountain and look out for. And now this is okay.

I mean, let's get let's let's let's let's send our antifa troops there.

Let's have let's have Joe Biden direct a phalanx of antifa dynamiter or whatever you call them and have them blow up your blow up that fuckin Confederacy monument for that.

And then if they have any dynamite left, I think with a couple of key explosions, you could turn Andrew Jackson into Barack Obama.

You can actually get it done. I think, yeah, fine. You don't want and listen.

OK, OK, fine. We can do FDR, we can do FDR. But I, you know, just just think about it. Just think about this thing.

It just drives me so crazy about the Confederate monument. Debate is like Nathan Bedford Forrest. His statue went up in Tennessee in the Capitol in 1978, like disco was basically getting run out of nightclubs at that point.

This isn't some long history that people were proud of. These are monuments to white supremacists put up pretty recently.

And like, it's just it's so if you think of the history thing is so fucking history, go into a fucking museum, read about history online, get taught history. There's plenty of ways to teach history.

Our public, our public places are limited in nature. And what we choose to put there says something about what we are proud of.

And I'm an idiot, by the way. It's not Andrew Jackson, it's Thomas Jefferson. But I was going to say I gotcha.

I forgot he was on Mount Rushmore is still very stupid. And I'm actually fine with you. Really. Just pick one pick. Just honestly, you can redo the faces any way it like anywhere you'd like.

We should have a vote, so just send a plastic surgeon in there is what you're saying.

I always forget who's on Mount Rushmore. I never again. What a fucking stupid project. I don't think Trump could name them.

He was just there. I bet you.

I still think one of the great one of the great questions Trump could face is perform the Pledge of Allegiance right now.

It'd be a lot of mumbling. I'm into that. Let's get.

Yeah, well, you can slip that question to a first debate moderator, Tucker Carlson, see if that's right.

Yeah, well, Tucker Carlson riding in a Ferrari he bought with PP funds.

OK, all right. I think there is everything everyone has to say. That's all about bye, guys. We'll see you in a couple of days, but.

God Save America is a crooked media production, the executive producer is Michael Martinez, our assistant producers, Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick.

Kyle Segoline is our sound engineer, thanks to Tanya's commentator Katie Lang, Roman Papadimitriou, Caroline Reston and Elisa Gutierrez for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Konar Melkonian, Elfriede and Milo Kim, who film and upload these episodes as videos every week.