Can Dems Put Woke to Bed?

**Jon Favreau** (0:20)
Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau.

**Jon Lovett** (0:22)
I'm Jon Lovett.

**Jon Favreau** (0:23)
Tommy's off today. On today's show, the White House tries again to limit the number of vaccines for kids based on unproven conspiracies about autism. Todd Blanche officially becomes the Attorney General thanks to the Republican Senate. AOC says Woke 1 was crazy as Wisconsin and Minnesota Democrats head to the polls. Jesse Watters does not want to talk about women's sports, and Hunter Biden sits down with Tucker Carlson.
Then Montana House candidate Sam Forstag, a former smoke jumper, stops by the studio to talk to Lovett about his candidacy and the politics of his state.

**Jon Lovett** (0:55)
He's really interesting. I really recommend listening to that conversation. This is a person who decided to run for office. He literally is jumping out of planes to put out wildfires and then spending the rest of his year organizing and doing union work, and he's just a really interesting person.

**Jon Favreau** (1:13)
A firefighter. My kids would love this. Yeah, he's cool. Big into firefighters right now.

**Jon Lovett** (1:18)
Well, they're gonna listen. I think a lot of our listeners are gonna be big into firefighters after this conversation.

**Jon Favreau** (1:26)
Proud of that? Excellent.

**Jon Lovett** (1:27)
All right.

**Jon Favreau** (1:28)
All right. But first, let's check in on how the president's war in the Middle East is going. NPR. Here's a headline from NPR. Haunted by Hoover, Trump searches for an endgame in Iran.
CNN decided to go with, Trump has a Carter style Iran problem, as the economy drags before the midterms. We got a Hoover, we got a Carter.

**Dan Pfeiffer** (1:49)
What else? It's more Carter.

**Jon Favreau** (1:50)
Nixon for the trifecta.

**Jon Lovett** (1:51)
Yeah, no, he's definitely doing Nixon. Nixon at the Department of Justice, Carter in the Middle East, Hoover on the bread lines. I mean, he's really, it is really all of them.
And in fairness, the comparison to Carter is even more apt than that because the Strait of Hormuz is a hostage.

**Jon Favreau** (2:08)
That's the context for lots of reporting over the weekend that the president is desperately looking for a way to accept defeat in Iran. After the regime made it clear, they're not giving up control of the Strait of Hormuz. Trump is also weighing dropping his demand for a nuclear deal.
It told Axios that he is quote, low-keying it with Iran and only semi-negotiating at this point. And then on Monday responded to Iran's demand for reparations by demanding reparations from Iran. Take that.

**Jon Lovett** (2:37)
A lot of neocons losing their semis.
Sorry. Tommy's not here.

**Jon Favreau** (2:44)
They were never semis. What are you talking about? Meanwhile, The Guardian reports that the Iranian regime is intentionally dragging the war out so that Trump loses the midterms, probably because they're watching clips just like this.

**SPEAKER_6** (2:56)
You said in June that this was, quote, the strongest job market in your lifetime. By what metric?

**SPEAKER_5** (3:01)
The bottom line is that if you look at the overall economy, then things are really, really booming.

**SPEAKER_6** (3:06)
Trump administration has only added 548,000 net jobs so far, which is considered very slow growth. It's growth, but very slow.
Two million jobs were created in the last 18 months of Biden's presidency. Are you really arguing that your numbers are better than that?

**SPEAKER_5** (3:23)
Well, I disagree with your number. We'll have to follow up on email.

**SPEAKER_6** (3:26)
I know you don't negotiate with the Iranians, but you do talk about the economy, and you said your bullish is going to be a heck of a lot of traffic moving through every single day.

**Dan Pfeiffer** (3:34)
There is traffic moving. Right, like if there was traffic moving, it would have been.

**SPEAKER_6** (3:37)
How do voters feel about the president's work on jobs?

**SPEAKER_7** (3:39)
You know, these are the types of numbers that will make a lot of Republican members of Congress lose their jobs come November. You can see it right here. I mean, just look at this trend line. Trump's not approving on jobs. He is now 22 points underwater, swimming with the fishes.

**Jon Lovett** (3:56)
Swimming with the fishes.

**Jon Lovett** (3:58)
That was like, what kind of code switching was Harry doing at the end there? It's like extra New York.

**Jon Favreau** (4:04)
How does old Donnie wriggle his way out of this one, Lovett?

**Jon Lovett** (4:07)
From the beginning, they hadn't said they were going for unconditional surrender, that they were going to prevent Iran from being able to project power in the Middle East, that they were going to fundamentally reorder the power in this critical part of the world. What he had done, not unlike what he had done when he had a midnight hammer in the past or killed Soleimani, like done a series of strikes and then claimed that the nuclear program was set back in a way Barack Obama could have never dreamed through his deal.