Krystal and Rachel: Nancy Pelosi’s Inequality Commission Is A Joke

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[Music]
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speaker pelosi with a big announcement
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about her major commitment to fighting
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inequality because that’s something she
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definitely really really cares about
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rachel
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um here’s the announcement she’s
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creating a committee
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a select committee in fact on economic
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inequality
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you see there her official press release
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on the website and this was actually
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something that really jumped down as you
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at you as like part of a normal
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system that is employed here in
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washington to make people
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feel like things are happening and make
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activists feel like they’re really
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engaged in the process but really it’s a
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way of sort of stiff-arming their
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demands and concerns
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yeah it’s all theater here in washington
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but this one in particular is something
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i call the hamster wheel
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right it’s designed to put her most
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activist members the members most likely
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to cause her problems on this issue
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she’s gonna put them on this commission
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they are going to run on this hamster
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wheel and feel like they’re doing
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something really important
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when in reality they’re just being kept
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uh busy away from the house floor the
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only place that actually matters for
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actual change on anything
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they’re gonna be running on the hamster
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wheel of this commission which will
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eventually put out a report that no one
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will read and it will accomplish nothing
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avoid these things like the plague if
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you are someone who cares about change
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and i say this to conservative activists
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i say it out let me say here to
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progressive activists
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don’t do this yeah well i mean it
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reminds me very much
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of the biden sanders task forces
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that you know was the only thing
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that bernie managed to extract from joe
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biden before exiting the race that you
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knew from the jump like
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it didn’t matter who you put on those
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committees it didn’t matter how good the
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recommendations were that were coming
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out of them
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like here we are days away from the
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biden administration and i’m not hearing
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anything about the recommendations that
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came out of the task forces
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whatsoever what pelosi says in this
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press release she says we’re creating
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the select committee
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to be a resource to the congress to make
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policy related
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to economic fairness access to education
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workforce development
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working with the committees of
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jurisdiction the select committee will
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study and recommend
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proposals to make our economy work for
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everyone powering american economic
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growth
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while ensuring that no one is left out
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or left behind in the 21st century
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economy
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all fancy way of saying like like you
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said
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they’re gonna study it they’re gonna put
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on a report and that’ll be the end of
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that so basically your point is here
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when you see these committees purporting
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to be about
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fighting inequality or fighting into
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whatever it is left or right
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what they’re really doing is putting up
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a roadblock putting up like
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a sort of obstacle course to jump
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through rather than actually taking
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issue on that issue
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this commission has two goals the first
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is to make pelosi look like she’s doing
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something and the second
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is to distract you know the act the
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members who actually want to do
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something
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from taking any meaningful action and
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this goes back to something we talked
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about earlier in the week which is
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look the only thing that matters in the
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house is action on the house floor
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progressive activists can learn a lot
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from the freedom caucus who presented
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themselves as a political power block
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by really only focusing on action on the
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house floor they could deliver a block
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of votes or they could withhold them
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and that is where their power came from
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was hanging together on these issues
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they didn’t get distracted
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by commissions they didn’t get
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distracted by other promises because
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this is just one
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tool political leaderships have to
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distract you know their problem members
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my favorite one is the and we’ll vote on
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that at some point or hey
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this bureaucrat will call you or hey can
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we just talk about it on the house floor
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the only thing that matters at the end
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of the day is voting
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and the more you can pressure and push
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action on that front
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the more effective you’re going to be
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because as we’ve learned from this whole
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2000 check
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2 000 check debacle the thing that they
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hate most is going on the record for
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anything because it’s a very
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very powerful tool and can be used
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against them or for them
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uh in any number of ways and your point
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is so well taken
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that progressives really fall prey to
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these types of tactics like they really
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feel like when they get put on the task
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force they
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because there’s this like idealism there
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of like they’re really listening to my
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concerns and they really mean it and
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these are my friends how many times we
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hear bernie sanders they’re like joe my
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friend joe biden you’re like
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ugh um so it reminds me of
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you know the forced to vote debate
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that’s have it happening on the left
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right now because on the one hand you
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have a faction of people who are saying
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we need a vote on this key issue that is
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important to us that’s important to the
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country in the middle of pandemic
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medicare for all like let’s take a vote
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and put everybody on their record
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and what you’re hearing from at least
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some in the progressive wing of the
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party here in dc is like
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let’s not do the voting that voting
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doesn’t really matter that much any
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we’re working behind the scenes to get
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on key
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leadership posts and committees etc etc
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and all of that is ultimately just a way
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to sort of
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make them feel like they’re being heard
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make them feel like they have some
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sway and influence and power within the
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system but ultimately to
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crush them and keep them quiet and keep
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them from causing trouble
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everyone wants to feel like they’re a
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cool kid right that’s how this town runs
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and these positions you know these
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acceptance on these commissions
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everything always feels like oh i’m
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getting invited to the table
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you have to be comfortable not being
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invited to the table because it’s the
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only way you’re actually going to be
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able to force
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you know that kind of political action
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on the floor which is the
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again i’m going to be a broken record on
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this but the only thing that matters at
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the end of the day
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is what you do on the floor it’s voting
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so so true rachel
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rachel thank you so much for being with
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us all week it’s been phenomenal having
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you here
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um always you have such incredible
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insight so thank you so much for that
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and happy new year to you my friend
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happy new year to you as well
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and to all of you risers thanks for
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having me sagar will be back next week
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to talk about aliens i know there’s a
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lot to say
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yeah there’s an alien update we missed
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an epstein update this week as well
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without sauger here so we have been
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falling down on the job a little bit
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but don’t worry friends because sagar
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will be back next week with all of those
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important stories and more
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we’re going to kick off the new year
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with friends of the show chuck rocha
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kyle kalinski brown and joy gray and so
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many more ben smith is going to join us
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to talk about what biden can expect from
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the media versus what trump got from the
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media
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remember to hit that subscribe button so
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you don’t miss any of our videos also
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don’t forget to like and share as well
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happy new years guys appreciate you all
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so much
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you made it you survived 2020 on to
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what’s next
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enjoy everybody

Saagar Enjeti: How The Elites RIGGED Supreme Court Politics To Cover Their Corporate Scam

Saagar Enjeti discusses the political fallout from the open vacancy on the Supreme Court following the death of RGB.

The Real Donald Trump Is a Character on TV

Understand that, and you’ll understand what he’s doing in the White House.

On Sept. 1, with a Category 5 hurricane off the Atlantic coast, an angry wind was issuing from the direction of President Trump’s Twitter account. The apparent emergency: Debra Messing, the co-star of “Will & Grace,” had tweeted that “the public has a right to know” who is attending a Beverly Hills fund-raiser for Mr. Trump’s re-election.

“I have not forgotten that when it was announced that I was going to do The Apprentice, and when it then became a big hit, Helping NBC’s failed lineup greatly, @DebraMessing came up to me at an Upfront & profusely thanked me, even calling me ‘Sir,’ ” wrote the 45th president of the United States.

It was a classic Trumpian ragetweet: aggrieved over a minor slight, possibly prompted by a Fox News segment, unverifiable — he has a long history of questionable tales involving someone calling him “Sir” — and nostalgic for his primetime-TV heyday. (By Thursday he was lashing Ms. Messing again, as Hurricane Dorian was lashing the Carolinas.)

This is a futile effort. Try to understand Donald Trump as a person with psychology and strategy and motivation, and you will inevitably spiral into confusion and covfefe. The key is to remember that Donald Trump is not a person. He’s a TV character.

I mean, O.K., there is an actual person named Donald John Trump, with a human body and a childhood and formative experiences that theoretically a biographer or therapist might usefully delve into someday. (We can only speculate about the latter; Mr. Trump has boasted on Twitter of never having seen a psychiatrist, preferring the therapeutic effects of “hit[ting] ‘sleazebags’ back.”)

But that Donald Trump is of limited significance to America and the world. The “Donald Trump” who got elected president, who has strutted and fretted across the small screen since the 1980s, is a decades-long media performance. To understand him, you need to approach him less like a psychologist and more like a TV critic.

He was born in 1946, at the same time that American broadcast TV was being born. He grew up with it. His father, Fred, had one of the first color TV sets in Jamaica Estates. In “The Art of the Deal” Donald Trump recalls his mother, Mary Anne, spending a day in front of the tube, enraptured by the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953. (“For Christ’s sake, Mary,” he remembers his father saying, “Enough is enough, turn it off. They’re all a bunch of con artists.”)

TV was his soul mate. It was like him. It was packed with the razzle-dazzle and action and violence that captivated him. He dreamed of going to Hollywood, then he shelved those dreams in favor of his father’s business and vowed, according to the book “TrumpNation” by Timothy O’Brien, to “put show business into real estate.”

As TV evolved from the homogeneous three-network mass medium of the mid-20th century to the polarized zillion-channel era of cable-news fisticuffs and reality shocker-tainment, he evolved with it. In the 1980s, he built a media profile as an insouciant, high-living apex predator. In 1990, he described his yacht and gilded buildings to Playboy as “Props for the show … The show is ‘Trump’ and it is sold-out performances everywhere.”

He syndicated that show to Oprah, Letterman, NBC, WrestleMania and Fox News. Everything he achieved, he achieved by using TV as a magnifying glass, to make himself appear bigger than he was.

He was able to do this because he thought like a TV camera. He knew what TV wanted, what stimulated its nerve endings. In his campaign rallies, he would tell The Washington Post, he knew just what to say “to keep the red light on”: that is, the light on a TV camera that showed that it was running, that you mattered. Bomb the [redacted] out of them! I’d like to punch him in the face! The red light radiated its approval. Cable news aired the rallies start to finish. For all practical purposes, he and the camera shared the same brain.

Even when he adopted social media, he used it like TV. First, he used it like a celebrity, to broadcast himself, his first tweet in 2009 promoting a “Late Show With David Letterman” appearance. Then he used it like an instigator, tweeting his birther conspiracies before he would talk about them on Fox News, road-testing his call for a border wall during the cable-news fueled Ebola and border panics of the 2014 midterms.

When he was a candidate, and especially when he was president, his tweets programmed TV and were amplified by it. On CNBC, a “BREAKING NEWS: TRUMP TWEET” graphic would spin out onscreen as soon as the words left his thumbs. He would watch Fox News, or Lou Dobbs, or CNN or “Morning Joe” or “Saturday Night Live” (“I don’t watch”), and get mad, and tweet. Then the tweets would become TV, and he would watch it, and tweet again.

If you want to understand what President Trump will do in any situation, then, it’s more helpful to ask: What would TV do? What does TV want?

It wants conflict. It wants excitement. If there is something that can blow up, it should blow up. It wants a fight. It wants more. It is always eating and never full.

Some presidential figure-outers, trying to understand the celebrity president through a template that they were already familiar with, have compared him with Ronald Reagan: a “master showman” cannily playing a “role.”

The comparison is understandable, but it’s wrong. Presidents Reagan and Trump were both entertainers who applied their acts to politics. But there’s a crucial difference between what “playing a character” means in the movies and what it means on reality TV.

Ronald Reagan was an actor. Actors need to believe deeply in the authenticity and interiority of people besides themselves — so deeply that they can subordinate their personalities to “people” who are merely lines on a script. Acting, Reagan told his biographer Lou Cannon, had taught him “to understand the feelings and motivations of others.”

Being a reality star, on the other hand, as Donald Trump was on “The Apprentice,” is also a kind of performance, but one that’s antithetical to movie acting. Playing a character on reality TV means being yourself, but bigger and louder.

Reality TV, writ broadly, goes back to Allen Funt’s “Candid Camera,” the PBS documentary “An American Family,” and MTV’s “The Real World.” But the first mass-market reality TV star was Richard Hatch, the winner of the first season of “Survivor” — produced by Mark Burnett, the eventual impresario of “The Apprentice”— in the summer of 2000.

Mr. Hatch won that first season in much the way that Mr. Trump would run his 2016 campaign. He realized that the only rules were that there were no rules. He lied and backstabbed and took advantage of loopholes, and he argued — with a telegenic brashness — that this made him smart. This was a crooked game in a crooked world, he argued to a final jury of players he’d betrayed and deceived. But, hey: At least he was open about it!

While shooting that first season, the show’s crew was rooting for Rudy Boesch, a 72-year-old former Navy SEAL and model of hard work and fair play. “The only outcome nobody wanted was Richard Hatch winning,” the host, Jeff Probst, would say later. It “would be a disaster.” After all, decades of TV cop shows had taught executives the iron rule that the viewers needed the good guy to win.

But they didn’t. “Survivor” was addictively entertaining, and audiences loved-to-hate the wryly devious Richard the way they did Tony Soprano and, before him, J.R. Ewing. More than 50 million people watched the first-season finale, and “Survivor” has been on the air nearly two decades.

From Richard Hatch, we got a steady stream of Real Housewives, Kardashians, nasty judges, dating-show contestants who “didn’t come here to make friends” and, of course, Donald Trump.

Reality TV has often gotten a raw deal from critics. (Full disclosure: I still watch “Survivor.”) Its audiences, often dismissed as dupes, are just as capable of watching with a critical eye as the fans of prestige cable dramas. But when you apply its mind-set — the law of the TV jungle — to public life, things get ugly.

In reality TV — at least competition reality shows like “The Apprentice” — you do not attempt to understand other people, except as obstacles or objects. To try to imagine what it is like to be a person other than yourself (what, in ordinary, off-camera life, we call “empathy”) is a liability. It’s a distraction that you have to tune out in order to project your fullest you.

Reality TV instead encourages “getting real.” On MTV’s progressive, diverse “Real World,” the phrase implied that people in the show were more authentic than characters on scripted TV — or even than real people in your own life, who were socially conditioned to “be polite.” But “getting real” would also resonate with a rising conservative notion: that political correctness kept people from saying what was really on their minds.

Being real is not the same thing as being honest. To be real is to be the most entertaining, provocative form of yourself. It is to say what you want, without caring whether your words are kind or responsible — or true — but only whether you want to say them. It is to foreground the parts of your personality (aggression, cockiness, prejudice) that will focus the red light on you, and unleash them like weapons.

Maybe the best definition of being real came from the former “Apprentice” contestant and White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman in her memoir, “Unhinged.” Mr. Trump, she said, encouraged people in his entourage to “exaggerate the unique part of themselves.” When you’re being real, there is no difference between impulse and strategy, because the “strategy” is to do what feels good.

This is why it misses a key point to ask, as Vanity Fair recently did after Mr. Trump’s assault on Representative Elijah E. Cummings and the city of Baltimore in July, “Is the president a racist, or does he just play one on TV?” In reality TV, if you are a racist — and reality TV has had many racists, like Katie Hopkins, the far-right British “Apprentice” star the president frequently retweets — then you are a racist and you play one on TV.

So if you actually want a glimpse into the mind of Donald J. Trump, don’t look for a White House tell-all or some secret childhood heartbreak. Go to the streaming service Tubi, where his 14 seasonsof “The Apprentice” recently became accessible to the public.

You can fast-forward past the team challenges and the stagey visits to Trump-branded properties. They’re useful in their own way, as a picture of how Mr. Burnett buttressed the future president’s Potemkin-zillionaire image. But the unadulterated, 200-proof Donald Trump is found in the boardroom segments, at the end of each episode, in which he “fires” one contestant.

In theory, the boardroom is where the best performers in the week’s challenges are rewarded and the screw-ups punished. In reality, the boardroom is a new game, the real game, a free-for-all in which contestants compete to throw one another under the bus and beg Mr. Trump for mercy.

There is no morality in the boardroom. There is no fair and unfair in the boardroom. There is only the individual, trying to impress Mr. Trump, to flatter Mr. Trump, to commune with his mind and anticipate his whims and fits of pique. Candidates are fired for

  • being too nice to their adversaries (weak), for
  • giving credit to their teammates, for
  • interrupting him.

The host’s decisions were often so mercurial, producers have said, that they would have to go back and edit the episodes to impose some appearance of logic on them.

What saves you in the boardroom? Fighting. Boardroom Trump loves to see people fight each other. He perks up at it like a cat hearing a can opener. He loves to watch people scrap for his favor (as they eventually would in his White House). He loves asking contestants to rat out their teammates and watching them squirm with conflict. The unity of the team gives way to disunity, which in the Trumpian worldview is the most productive state of being.

 

And America loved boardroom Trump — for a while. He delivered his catchphrase in TV cameos and slapped it on a reissue of his 1980s Monopoly knockoff Trump: The Game. (“I’m back and you’re fired!”) But after the first season, the ratings dropped; by season four they were nearly half what they were in season one.

He reacted to his declining numbers by ratcheting up what worked before: becoming a louder, more extreme, more abrasive version of himself. He gets more insulting in the boardroom — “You hang out with losers and you become a loser”— and executes double and quadruple firings.

It’s a pattern that we see as he advances toward his re-election campaign, with an eye not on the Nielsen ratings but on the polls: The only solution for any given problem was a Trumpier Trump.

Did it work for “The Apprentice”? Yes and no. His show hung on to a loyal base through 14 seasons, including the increasingly farcical celebrity version. But it never dominated its competition again, losing out, despite his denials, to the likes of the sitcom “Mike & Molly.”

Donald Trump’s “Apprentice” boardroom closed for business on Feb. 16, 2015, precisely four months before he announced his successful campaign for president. And also, it never closed. It expanded. It broke the fourth wall. We live inside it now.

Now, Mr. Trump re-creates the boardroom’s helter-skelter atmosphere every time he opens his mouth or his Twitter app. In place of the essentially dead White House press briefing, he walks out to the lawn in the morning and reporters gaggle around him like “Apprentice” contestants awaiting the day’s task. He rails and complains and establishes the plot points for that day’s episode:

  • Greenland!
  • Jews!
  • “I am the chosen one!”

Then cable news spends morning to midnight happily masticating the fresh batch of outrages before memory-wiping itself to prepare for tomorrow’s episode. Maybe this sounds like a TV critic’s overextended metaphor, but it’s also the president’s: As The Times has reported, before taking office, he told aides to think of every day as “an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.”

Mr. Trump has been playing himself instinctually as a character since the 1980s; it’s allowed him to maintain a profile even through bankruptcies and humiliations. But it’s also why, on the rare occasions he’s had to publicly attempt a role contrary to his naturecalling for healing from a script after a mass shooting, for instance — he sounds as stagey and inauthentic as an unrehearsed amateur doing a sitcom cameo.

His character shorthand is “Donald Trump, Fighter Guy Who Wins.” Plop him in front of a camera with an infant orphaned in a mass murder, and he does not have it in his performer’s tool kit to do anything other than smile unnervingly and give a fat thumbs-up.

This is what was lost on commentators who kept hoping wanly that this State of the Union or that tragedy would be the moment he finally became “presidential.” It was lost on journalists who felt obligated to act as though every modulated speech from a teleprompter might, this time, be sincere.

The institution of the office is not changing Donald Trump, because he is already in the sway of another institution. He is governed not by the truisms of past politics but by the imperative of reality TV: never de-escalate and never turn the volume down.

This conveniently echoes the mantra he learned from his early mentor, Roy Cohn: Always attack and never apologize. He serves up one “most shocking episode ever” after another, mining uglier pieces of his core each time: progressing from profanity about Haiti and Africa in private to publicly telling four minority American congresswomen, only one of whom was born outside the United States, to “go back” to the countries they came from.

  • The taunting.
  • The insults.
  • The dog whistles.
  • The dog bullhorns.
  • The “Lock her up” and “Send her back.”

All of it follows reality-TV rules. Every season has to top the last. Every fight is necessary, be it against Ilhan Omar or Debra Messing. Every twist must be more shocking, every conflict more vicious, lest the red light grow bored and wink off. The only difference: Now there’s no Mark Burnett to impose retroactive logic on the chaos, only press secretaries, pundits and Mike Pence.

To ask whether any of this is “instinct” or “strategy” is a parlor game. If you think like a TV camera — if thinking in those reflexive microbursts of adrenaline and testosterone has served you your whole life — then the instinct is the strategy.

And to ask who the “real” Donald Trump is, is to ignore the obvious. You already know who Donald Trump is. All the evidence you need is right there on your screen. He’s half-man, half-TV, with a camera for an eye that is constantly focused on itself. The red light is pulsing, 24/7, and it does not appear to have an off switch.