Always Test Your Hopium

Jon Favreau (0:21)

Welcome to Pod Save America, I'm Jon Favreau.

Dan Pfeiffer (0:22)

I'm Dan Pfeiffer.

Jon Favreau (0:23)

All right, Dan, on today's show, we're going to talk about the brand new time Siena polls that the polling gods have blessed and cursed us with. Whether we think the overall political environment for Dems is too good to be true, Republican candidates finally running away from Trump and the latest development in one of the many wars Trump is losing, this one against the media.

Then you'll all hear Tommy's conversation with activist and former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who was in the studio yesterday.

Dan Pfeiffer (0:51)

Very cool.

Jon Favreau (0:52)

I know. And you're in the studio today, which is great.

Dan Pfeiffer (0:56)

Also cool. Not as cool, but cool.

Jon Favreau (0:57)

Because right after this, we're getting on a plane and we're going to Austin for the Texas Tribune Festival.

Dan Pfeiffer (1:02)

Very cool.

Jon Favreau (1:03)

There'll be a live show there Friday night. It's Friday night? Yeah, today's Thursday.

Dan Pfeiffer (1:07)

It'll be in your feeds on Sunday, will it not?

Colin Kaepernick (1:09)

It will. It will.

Jon Favreau (1:10)

It will. Thank you, Dan. All right. Let's start with Donald Trump's plan to make his Chinese communist pal, Xi Jinping, feel right at home during his visit to America. A crackdown on journalists who report news that Trump doesn't like. On Thursday morning, Trump-appointed judge Timothy Kelly ordered the White House to restore the press access Trump tried to revoke for CNN, MSNOW, and Politico, at least while the lawsuit plays out. Judge Kelly said the outlets would probably succeed with their claims and was not swayed by the administration's argument that the ban was really about protecting national security. Probably didn't help that the White House made their case by citing a Politico story. The source for which turned out to be, according to Oliver Darcy at Status, JD Vance.

JD Vance risking national security by leaking to Politico with an administration approved background briefing.

Dan Pfeiffer (2:02)

That's how you get away with it.

Jon Favreau (2:03)

That's how you get away with it. By late Thursday morning after initially getting turned away again, even after the judge's ruling, reporters from the offending outlets were finally back in the briefing room. Still some confusion about when and whether network pool coverage will resume. That's contingent on the White House allowing CNN to participate.

First Amendment principles aside, since the White House is putting them aside, why not us? As a former White House Communications Director, how much do you think access to the building matters these days?

Dan Pfeiffer (2:33)

I don't want to put them totally aside because it is just worth, just we just should say that it is absolutely essential that the federal government cannot bar members of the media from accessing government property based on what they report.

Jon Favreau (2:50)

It's a cut and dry case.

Dan Pfeiffer (2:52)

If that was having it in the other country, the State Department would send out a warning about how democracy was falling in that country. It is a blaring red light.

Jon Favreau (3:00)

Now, to be sure, according to previous court rulings, the White House could decide, we're not having any press at all in the White House. We're just not granting access to anyone. Once you open it up to some press, you got to open it up to everyone fairly.

Dan Pfeiffer (3:16)

Now, in terms of how much it matters in the day-to-day capacity of the press to scrutinize Trump, it matters. Having the right people in the room who can ask questions of the White House president if we ever have press briefings again matters.

I think the decision to kick the wire reporters out of the pool is much more consequential in terms of actual scrutiny of the president and the capacity to hold them accountable than barring individual reporters, as wrong as that is, because it's those pool reporters who are in the room in intimate settings with the president who are able to ask him questions directly, even when he doesn't want to take those questions. But it's also, you know, they kicked the reporters out of the Pentagon, there's still been a ton of great reporting about, about the war in Iran, about a bunch of, you know, corruption and problems in the DOD. And like the reporters that we know who do the hardest reporting on Trump, like Maggie Haven, Jonathan Swapnir, Times, they're not hanging out in the White House, right? They're not, they're doing that. In some cases, not even from Washington, DC., sometimes they're in New York or wherever they are using the phone. So you can still hold him accountable. He's not going to escape it, but it is quite bad.