How to Reset the Course of a Nation, with Rachel Maddow

After the so-called "blue tsunami," we turn to the MS NOW anchor, fresh off NFL RedZone-ing the midterms, with a new book in tow. The former three-sport athlete sits down with Pablo to wash up the election — from Vivek's mansion and memes to trans-sports panic — and look ahead at accountability for Trump, billionaires and the DOJ. • Order "Department of Fate" https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/721029/department-of-fate-by-rachel-maddow/ • Join the MS Now Membership https://www.ms.now/membership PREVIOUSLY ON PTFO: • The Unforced Errors of Vivek Ramaswamy https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/NmFlNDBlMGU3MTAyMjIxNTE3ZmMxOTA3 • We Polled 1,417 Americans About Sports, Politics and Everything in Between https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/NmFkZmRmNzhkNDgzNTRlNDg0MjI3ZGJj Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out, brought to you by Apple Card. I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 0:13Pablo Torre?

  Right after this. This episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out is brought to you by McDonald's. The Quarter Pounder with Cheese with Medium Fries and a Drink is now $8. And look, I've chased down a lot of strange stories, but nothing quite like what's inside a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. It is 100% fresh beef, cooked right when you order it, with no artificial flavors, colors, fillers, or preservatives in the beef. The onions are hand-topped by someone who knows the perfect amount by memory, two slices of cheese and a star, and two pickles side by side. So every bite gets both. And every time one's ordered, a cowbell sound rings in the kitchen. That's the grill master's cue to put a fresh patty on the grill. My move?

• 0:57Pablo Torre?

  QPC, fries and a drink, after a long day of recording. That is my happy place. The Quarter Pounder with Cheese with Fries and a Drink, now $8 for a limited time only, only at McDonald's. For a limited time only. Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska, and California. And for delivery, fresh beef not available in Alaska and Hawaii. Offer not valid for delivery. This episode is brought to you by Apollo.io. A lot of the stories on this show start the same way. Something that looks pretty simple turns out to be a mess once you look under the hood. Well, it's no different in the sales world. Your team has a tool for finding prospects, a different tool for reaching out to them,

• 1:40Pablo Torre?

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• 2:26Pablo Torre?

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• 3:17Pablo Torre?

  I'm really excited to talk to you about all this stuff.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Of all the people who I'm going to talk to about the election and the book and everything, you are the person that everybody in my life is very, very nervous and excited about. You're the, um, you're the big star in the Rachel Maddow verse.

• 3:33Pablo Torre?

  Oh, sure. Well, we do have a couple of surprises for, for you, Rachel, I hope.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  What?

• 3:39Pablo Torre?

  You didn't foresee me wanting to begin this conversation by talking about Vivek Ramaswamy? I do want to start there for a second, though, and thank you again for being here.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 3:48Pablo Torre?

  And what a delight for me. To recap, what you got the call in a very, very, I would say, like, almost NFL red zone-adjacent manner on Tuesday.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  We have a big election alert for you. This is a governor's race, very closely watched for all sorts of reasons. In the Ohio governor's race, the Associated Press Wow. has called it. Democrat Amy Acton has defeated Republican Vivek Ramaswamy to become the next governor of Ohio.

• 4:18Pablo Torre?

  You got the call Vivek Ramaswamy losing to Amy Acton by 52.31% to 44.38%. And I don't know if there was more bipartisan delight around any single outcome than that one? And I wonder if it felt that way to you?

• 4:36Speaker 01

  I think that Amy Acton is a very good candidate for governor. I think that she is, uh, she communicates in a way that is, like, moves people, and is also really real and authentic, and she conveys real information. I thought, like, her, you know, her acceptance speech, you probably saw it.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  Ohio has chosen unity and decency

• 4:59Speaker 02

  over division and hate.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  She's talking about, you know, a win for decency and looking out for each other, and it's just, just a fundamentally decent person. It's a big deal for Democrats to win Ohio, which they thought was right. All of that is true. All of that absolutely pales against how people felt about seeing Vivek Ramaswamy lose this race in this way, and to be punished by the voters of Ohio so resoundingly for having been so morally repulsive. He was never even allowed to compete. He didn't get anywhere near her. And again, red state Ohio, right? What used to be red state Ohio. And he's been more, he's been running for governor since, since he ran for president.

• 5:47Pablo Torre?

  Look, we've, we've investigated Vivek on this show. People know the lore. You know, I was his classmate in college, which means that I have a particular psychosis, I guess, around this. And a particular delight around this. The U.S. Tennis Association has no records of him being a nationally-ranked junior tennis player. But, but my favorite detail about Vivek is one that I haven't even mentioned yet, which is, I don't know if you know this. So last November, this is according to The Rooster, the blog which broke the story of the ad against Amy Acton and using her mom by Vivek. November 2025, The Rooster reported that Vivek Ramaswamy agreed in principle to buy a $15 million mansion less than 1,000 feet away from the official Ohio governor's residence.

• 6:32Pablo Torre?

  So if you're wondering, Rachel, what does his property look like?

• 6:35Speaker 01

  He wanted to live on the on-ramp.

• 6:37Pablo Torre?

  He wanted to perhaps just be able to occupy the nicer building that he could also have access to while becoming the governor a year later. And this property has a maze, a Japanese garden, a dozen lawn sculptures, 16th-century French urns, a tennis court, naturally, according to the Columbus Dispatch. Surely, this $15 million agreement in principle will not become a thing, a podcaster I went to school with laughs about, on November 6th. That's what we're dealing with.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Did you say a maze?

• 7:10Pablo Torre?

  Perhaps the, the coup de grace on the reporting is that his realtor, reportedly, is Tina Huested.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Huested's wife, Senator Huested's wife.

• 7:22Pablo Torre?

  Wife of John Huested, who I guess is now, we've found the one person who can consensually enjoy his ass.

• 7:31Pablo Torre?

  There's a lot of ass appreciation in the story of the Ohio gubernatorial collapse.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  I actually think the ass talk, forgive me, the ass talk about John Huested. I think it kind of helped him. Like, I think that, yes, Sherrod Brown beat him by, I think, five points, but I think probably Sherrod Brown would have beat him by more points had the Republican Party wholesale not turned its eyes to the shape of his rump.

• 8:14Pablo Torre?

  It occurred to me that, like, last election, we almost anthropologically go out, as I'm speaking about people in the press, we go out and talk to, uh, you know, the Rust Belt.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  God, yeah.

• 8:27Pablo Torre?

  And now I feel like the anthropologists must come to you.

• 8:32Pablo Torre?

  You're studying Rachel Maddow. Please explain your people.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Let's go find a childless, pot-bellied lesbian in Western-- it has to be Western Massachusetts.

• 8:46Pablo Torre?

  Correct.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Yes. The subject may be fishing at the time that we're looking for this person.

• 8:52Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, this is a David Attenborough documentary now.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Check at the EV charging stations at the local Whole Foods.

• 8:59Pablo Torre?

  So actually, I do want to clarify, and one of the things I do need to bring up to you is that you were an athlete.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, in a galaxy far, far away, Paulo. I mean, it's, yeah, look at me. Come on.

• 9:13Pablo Torre?

  Well, I am looking at you, and I'm also looking at her.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 9:21Pablo Torre?

  Could you please describe for those not watching on YouTube who you are looking at?

• 9:24Speaker 01

  Can I give you alt text?

• 9:26Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 9:28Pablo Torre?

  Woke3 demands alt text.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  Let's just start with the fact that there is a pink backdrop and there are pearls and pearl earrings. There is still a black shirt, which is in keeping with where we are today. But yeah, that's my high school graduation photo, and I had long blonde hair.

• 9:46Pablo Torre?

  What sports did you play?

• 9:47Speaker 01

  My main sport was volleyball, but I was volleyball, basketball, and swimming. And I started off, actually, as a little kid, playing soccer too, but I had to decide between basketball and soccer and went with basketball. My claim to fame in basketball is that I believe, I believe in memories fuzzy when you're as old as I am, but I believe I fouled out of every single game I ever played.

• 10:07Pablo Torre?

  Were you a physical or a clumsy player?

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. Exactly. You nailed it. The most important thing about me, both in soccer and in basketball, is that I'm very slow. And so I'm big, I'm tall, and I have big limbs, and I look like I could be like, bestride the pitch or bestride the court, but then I start moving. It's like, what's wrong with that child? And so I would try to make up for that just with my elbows. And so lots of, lots of getting thrown out of games. I was pretty good at volleyball, in part because you don't, unless you're really, really good at volleyball, you don't have to move large distances. It's more of a small, small distance, quick response kind of thing.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  And I was very tall, and so I went, I was like middle blocker or right side hitter. And I, you know, part of, part of what was being good in high school level volleyball was just being in the way of other people trying to do things. And it turns out that's my skill.

• 11:10Pablo Torre?

  The mental image, again, for those just listening, like, you looked like the prom queen.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  I know. Why are we talking about high school? It makes still, I'm like, I can feel the hives rising in me.

• 11:20Pablo Torre?

  I was gonna say, your palpable discomfort.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  I dislike myself in high school so much. I only, like, we could talk of middle school too, if you want to go real self-loathing. But yeah, I was, I did, I was a three-sport varsity athlete.

• 11:34Pablo Torre?

  How much did your athletic career help you when you were calling? How many hours of live television on Tuesday?

• 11:40Speaker 01

  The athletic career helped not a bit. I mean, one of the things that has more defined, like, my physical being as an adult is that I have the spine of a 115-year-old. Like, I can't, even like during the course of this interview, I will get shorter just sitting in this chair. I'm a complete physical wreck. But there's also, there's definitely an adrenaline thing that kicks in for these nights, for these long nights covering election results. I mean, like, the first hour, you're really thinking very carefully about who you're gonna book and what the structure is and where the breaks come and what the plot is and what we have to tease ahead. And then after you get through the first hour, you're essentially just running.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  You're just running the whole time. It's like the dinner rush if you wait tables, you know, you just don't think, you just, whatever strategy you had is gone, you just go.

• 12:30Pablo Torre?

  At what point in the course of you hosting this thing, did you start noticing, like, the memes on the internet?

• 12:38Speaker 01

  I actually don't even think I've seen them yet. I don't think I've seen them to this day. Do you have some, you have, you have a folder full of memes?

• 12:47Pablo Torre?

  Passing a folder full of memes--

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Alt text.

• 12:49Pablo Torre?

  --to Rachel. These are some of the tweets that are, I think, representative. Perhaps what you could not see from the desk that I was seeing at home.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  We're putting clavicular on estrogen. Yeah.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  Mark Zuckerberg gotta change his whole look again. Very good. We are going to deep fry RFK Jr. in beef tallow at a tailgate for the Washington vaccines.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  And then for a last one from you. Tonight, the couch [BLEEP] you. Yes, God bless you. My favorite one that I have seen was effective, I'm gonna paraphrase it, but was like, the Pope votes in one election, and look what happens. That was like my Catholic lib meme of the day.

• 13:36Pablo Torre?

  One of the sort of like issues that I also just was tracking, have been tracking for years on this show and elsewhere, is one that ended up not, it turns out, winning the election for a lot of these right-leaning sports figures who ran for office, like former NFL kicker Jay Feely. And that's the trans athlete.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:59Pablo Torre?

  And I'm wondering how that issue feels to you as it was, as many have said, an 80/20 winner for the Republican Party. And simultaneously, the thing that did not work as Jay Feely lost to, by the way, the Democrat, who was his team doctor on the New York Jets.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  I did not know that.

• 14:17Pablo Torre?

  In one of the just more small-town, yeah, election cycles, it turns out.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  The trans athletes thing, I mean, there's a lot of actual very serious elements of it. And number one is just seeing this national, insistent, now years-long political project to scapegoat and vilify and try to direct violence and hate towards a tiny, disfavored minority, which is trans people. Like, that is something that has profound, profound impact on some of our fellow Americans.

• 14:51Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  And it is repulsive, and it is politically as transparent as any other exercise like this has been in any other, from any other authoritarian movement in politics in any country in the last century and a half. Absolutely true. And politically, it is a fantasy to invent a fake problem, to invent something that has literally no contact with the real lives of 99.99999% of Americans and say, this is the problem that the American government must be reorganized to prioritize and to solve, to never solve for you so we can continue to run on it forever,

• 15:39Speaker 01

  is pitiful, a sign of profound political weakness, and something that I think has now been exposed as the fantasist BS cop-out that it is. And so, yeah, I think the hard thing and the responsible thing is to keep both of those things in mind, the profound unseriousness of this as a political tactic and the profound, dangerous, life-threatening harm this is causing to real Americans who are trans Americans.

• 16:09Pablo Torre?

  It is startling to see, we did a poll with YouGov and the bulwark that we commissioned, trying to figure out, what does a bipartisan sample of Americans think about this stuff? And this is ahead of the election, obviously, but a combined 15% of Americans thought that more than 5% of NCAA athletes identify as trans.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 16:28Pablo Torre?

  And we called the NCAA, and we said, hey, how many trans athletes are competing in women's sports, or at all? And the NCAA told us, there are effectively zero. They can't find them.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 16:40Pablo Torre?

  It was less than 10, and that was what Charlie Baker, the president of the NCAA, said a couple of years ago. Now it's zero. I do think the human cost of this is what is lost as I try at every turn to like make this also something that we can laugh at.

• 16:57Pablo Torre?

  And so that tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny population of people who just want to like, be bad at sports like everyone else, like Rachel Maddow arguably, apparently was.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:07Pablo Torre?

  The fact that they become the cudgel that gives a party credibility so that they can do everything else that's truly unpopular.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:20Pablo Torre?

  It's so redeeming that America didn't fall for it this time.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  Although the, when there were trans-related ballot measures on the ballot in multiple states this week in this, in this incredible blue wave election, a lot of them still passed. And not everywhere, but a lot of them did. And I'm glad that you're talking about this the way you are because it, again, you've got to think both of these things at the same time. This is the equivalent, I mean, if the Republican Party were out there saying, you know, the real problem is that we're all getting bludgeoned because it rains microwaves every day. Like, microwave ovens are falling from the sky and crushing us all and putting holes in our roofs, and that's what we need, and it's just a thing that's not happening that they've invented. You would wonder like, A, why do they think they can get away with saying this crazy thing that's not happening?

• 18:09Speaker 01

  But B, why do they want to be in office? They're talking about a problem that isn't a real thing. So the real thing that want, that they want to work on, that they want to effectuate, change about when they get an option, when they get an office, has to be something different. That's the one thing that we'd wonder. But in this case, because it is about real human beings, I mean, the thing that we've learned over generations, in multiple countries, in multiple eras, about scapegoating disfavored minorities is not only to pay attention to what it does to their lives, but also what it does to the rest of us. If you are taught to believe that some disfavored minority is the cause of everything that's wrong in your culture, everything that is not attainable within your economy,

• 18:54Speaker 01

  every right that you believe is yours that you can't grasp, then not only is that disfavored minority being targeted and subjected to violence and subjected to all the things you were just talking about, but we're taught to look at each other and to try to suss that out, to try to find that quality in our fellow citizens so that we can misdirect toward them all of our grievance. And trying to get us to see some of our fellow citizens as subhuman is trying to get us to erase our own moral core so that we can do horrible things.

• 19:29Pablo Torre?

  The other, of course, like tack that got pressure-tested was what if we accuse everybody on the other side who is brown with a foreign name of being a jihadist?

• 19:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:41Pablo Torre?

  Of course, we're here in New York City. What Zora Mamdani has done here as a mayor, leave it to the side, even though that's metrically, just by the evidence, a rousing success, safety and otherwise.

• 19:54Pablo Torre?

  The rhetorical framework of how he has talked about politics as that figure who gets, has been, you know-

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Demonized.

• 20:01Pablo Torre?

  Demonized, truly, almost literally, just like, he's a demon. I don't know if it was this clear to you, but it seemed to me that was, there was a playbook there for a lot of national politicians that seemed to work. His approach to how to respond to this stuff. And Abdul Al Sayed, not, they're not the same person. Anyone who's watched them long enough knows, they have very different sort of characters in some meaningful ways, but it just seemed like the attempt to make this the Islamophobic election-

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:34Pablo Torre?

  Didn't quite work.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  When people use ham-handed tactics against you, one option is to defend against them earnestly, and the other one is to point and laugh at those ham-handed tactics and to refuse to play their game, refuse to let them frame either your character or the discussion around you. And that's what I think Mamdani did with such elegance in, in his, his campaign, culminating in his, you know, triumphant ascendance to be Donald Trump's most favorite son.

• 21:08Pablo Torre?

  Which is just continually hilarious to me.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  It's just amazing. I mean, Trump gets like hearts in his eyes when he sees him.

• 21:15Pablo Torre?

  It's John Houstead's ass and Zora Mamdani's smile.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  You are building Donald Trump's dream date. And then there's the dud, JD. But then, but the way that, like, look at Al Sayed's victory speech.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  JD. Habibi. There is this delicious irony in the fact that you're constitutionally obligated to swear me in in January.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  When he called JD Vance Habibi, I just, I lost it. I mean, the refusal to accede to their framing is a political flex that, again, if done elegantly and if done with good cheer and confidence, is, I think, I just think it's politically bulletproof. I think it's, I think it's, it's the way.

• 22:15Pablo Torre?

  JD Vance in his postmortem, again, not to make Twitter a central document here, but he has the whole thing about how he has consulted all these pollsters and the smartest people he knows on the right are saying that there are four bullet points. One, end the war. Two, focus on cost of living slash inflation. Three, put America first. Four, change our relationship to Israel. When you read that post, this is after, by the way, he tried to take credit for the lower crime here in New York, by the way. When you read his postmortem, what did, what did you think as actually a political analysis?

• 22:51Speaker 01

  It sounds like JD Vance might have been listening to Democratic politicians who are running for high office this year and winning. I mean, do the list again.

• 22:59Pablo Torre?

  Yeah. End the war.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  End the war.

• 23:02Pablo Torre?

  Focus on cost of living slash inflation.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Affordability.

• 23:05Pablo Torre?

  Put America first.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  America first, whatever that means.

• 23:08Pablo Torre?

  Change our relationship to Israel.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:11Pablo Torre?

  To translate it to like, what, what have, what have the Democrats been saying that he is now trying to like ape? What if you actually prioritize the interest of Americans?

• 23:20Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. I mean, contrast that with Donald Trump's diagnosis of what went wrong for the Republican Party. And even setting aside the like, had I been on the ballot and everything, his first political diagnostic after the election results were in was that Greg Abbott would have won in Texas had he not been such a rhino. Meaning, had he not been such a Republican in name only, meaning if only Greg Abbott had seemed more Republican, then the Democrats definitely would not have won Texas. My favorite piece of analysis thus far, it was actually in a journalistic piece from CBS News under, under Barry Weiss. I literally laughed out loud when I read this yesterday.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  And they're just like, reporting what the White House is telling them about the election results. And I quote, "Some White House aides have predicted that some of the blame for Republican midterm losses will be trained on Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of US Central Command, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Kane, who both played big roles in guidance on the Iran War."

• 24:27Pablo Torre?

  Two guys that everybody definitely knows. You know, Brad.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Brad Cooper and Dan Kane, that's who did it. That's who, everything else actually is fine. Pete, Pete, can you fire some? I mean, the idea that that's the problem, or that they could, or that they could literally try to blame the active-duty US military as the reason Gina Inahosa beat Greg Abbott. I mean, forgive me for agreeing with Ron DeSantis, but I think the approaching an extinction level event feels, feels right when you look at that kind of analysis.

• 25:04Pablo Torre?

  But speaking of meatball Ron for a second, this was like a bit of a, I mean, to borrow the terminology of baseball, a bit of a, like a meatball of a pitch. It's like, and, and Thomas Massey was ahead of this and got also defenestrated.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:20Pablo Torre?

  But Ron DeSantis, I give him extraordinarily little credit, but nonetheless, he can plausibly be the guy saying, "Yeah, of course."

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:32Pablo Torre?

  When you're looking ahead, "Yeah, of course." You know, them not realizing that he would have the ability to say that, I don't know, this sets that movement back to what?

• 25:42Speaker 01

  I mean, DeSantis did lose a bunch of Republican members of Congress. And the redistricting effort in Florida was as much of a splat there as it was for anybody else. And Ron DeSantis still has, I mean, I don't know if he's gonna run for president or if he's gonna try to like assume the mantle in the Republican Party, but he still has what I think of as the Jared Kushner problem, which is that on, on paper, when you hear about Ron DeSantis, or when you see things written down that Ron DeSantis has done, you sort of get this sense in your mind of, of who he might be as a political figure. Same thing with Jared Kushner in his first term. I continue to think this is one of the most crystalline moments of the first Donald Trump

• 26:27Speaker 01

  term, which is that Donald Trump has appointed his son-in-law to be the Minister of Everything. And he's in charge of the Middle East, and he's in charge of COVID, and he's in charge of the economy, and he's, wow, he's really the power behind the throne. Jared must be the brain of the operation. Maybe Jared is the heavyweight here. And then Jared, for the first time, walks up to do a White House press conference, and nobody's ever heard him speak before. And he steps up to the microphone, and everybody's like, this is the guy, this is the brain, this is the heavyweight. And he steps up to the mic and he goes, "Hi, I'm Jared."

• 26:56Speaker 04

  Together, we will unleash the creativity of the private sector to provide citizen services in a way that has never happened before.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Like, there's that same problem with Ron DeSantis. You get to him in the flesh, and it's the guy eating the pudding with the fingers. And, you know, "Hey, I'm Ron DeSantis."

• 27:16Speaker 05

  But let's just be clear about what happened last night. This is close to an extinction level event for Republicans in many parts of the country as we have seen probably in the last 100 years.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  There is a corporeal problem with some of these guys who might otherwise reasonably step up and take the mantle of Republican politics in a way that's just never gonna work.

• 27:42Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I do think, I mean, again, what, what has Trump had his finger on the pulse on purely superficially? I guess he has a strong sense of like, who I would cast.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  Until they must be cast out.

• 28:01Pablo Torre?

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• 28:46Pablo Torre?

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• 29:31Pablo Torre?

  Head to dell.com/deals. That's dell.com/deals.

• 29:43Speaker 06

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• 31:14Pablo Torre?

  It is interesting when you assess vengeance as one possible political approach here. And I'm not gonna sort of put everything under the category of vengeance, but I want to just frame it at extremes. One is Robert Garcia saying lawyer up, you know, as the chair of the House Oversight Committee. And the other is the James Talarico slogan atop the Victory Days where it's, "Love thy neighbor."

• 31:42Speaker 03

  Because there is no love of God without love of neighbor.

• 31:49Pablo Torre?

  How do you assess that alleged choice? How do you assess the tension between lawyer up and love thy neighbor?

• 31:58Speaker 01

  I really don't think that they're at odds. I don't think that they're opposites. I think that Donald Trump's going to be president for another couple of years. And that means the Trump administration is going to be in place for another couple of years. And when it comes to love thy neighbor, one of the things that Democrats are going to need to try to assure is that neighbors are not getting absolutely ripped off by a ruling family that's picking up the US government by its ankles and shaking it till the change falls out. I think there has to be a strong message sent by the Democrats. And the Democrats with Robert Garcia's committee and Jamie Raskin's committee and others can do this. There needs to be a strong message sent

• 32:43Speaker 01

  that you can't get away with this stuff anymore. You can't keep doing this for another two years. And to the extent that you did get away with it for two years, that's now going to end and you're going to be held accountable. And so I think it's really important, really, really important, that Todd Blanch be impeached, for example. And not because there needs to be a spectacle of Todd Blanch being put in the stocks, but because of what Todd Blanch has done. Like, you can't have somebody pay a million dollars to go to a Mar-a-Lago dinner with Donald Trump and then less than three weeks later, her son gets a pardon. You can't have that. You can't have the parent company of crypto.com giving $5 million to MAGA, Inc.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  And then 25 days later, the Department of Justice intervenes in a federal lawsuit on behalf of crypto.com. You can't have, days before the election, the Justice Department filing absolutely frivolous, totally unfounded, not even procedurally sound, harassing investigations and lawsuits and legal filings against not only election officials, but candidates for election in that next office in direct contravention of Justice Department policies. You can't do those things. And so there needs to be a message, you can't get away with this. To the extent that you've done it already, you're going to pay for it. And with the Democrats in charge right now, with a mandate from the American people to clean this stuff up, you are going to be barred forever from public service.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  And we are going to do that by impeaching you. And it doesn't need to be a spectacle. It doesn't need to be revenge. It needs to be about making sure that we don't live in a kleptocracy anymore.

• 34:20Pablo Torre?

  It occurs to me, as you say all of that, that, yeah, that's what the trans athlete stuff was trying to distract from.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:26Pablo Torre?

  It's like, World Liberty Financial is over here, but what about the swimmer over there?

• 34:33Speaker 01

  The one swimmer a few years ago.

• 34:36Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  Trust us.

• 34:37Pablo Torre?

  When they tied for fifth. The point, the argument here is, can you show that corruption and affordability are actually interwoven via this political project that we're now, yeah, by mandate, asked as a country to reckon with? And I suppose the other issue here is, who becomes a subject of those investigations? And how do you prevent that from being politicized? I mean, we're here to also talk about your book, which is excellent, your new book, Department of Fate.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 35:12Pablo Torre?

  And so this is a topic that I want to understand historically in a second. But just from a present day perspective, there are more billionaires than ever, and yet not that many of them, such that the politics should bend towards them electorally. Where do you start when it comes to, you know, what Talarico has also said in his rhetoric, which has been very effective of like, this is top versus bottom.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  Well, look at the spending in Texas. I mean, I, when you're saying, like, when I made the call about various, like, when I made the Amy Acton call for the Ohio governor's race, when it came to making the Gina Inohosa call for governor in Texas, I kind of shouted it out in a way that makes it a totally unusable soundbite, because I think I was distorting on the mic. Gina Inohosa will be the next Democratic governor of the state of Texas. I'm saying it so loud so you can hear it over the crackling of the burning piles of hundreds of millions of dollars set alight by Elon Musk.

• 36:16Pablo Torre?

  What's the last accounting of it? How much money, approximately?

• 36:18Speaker 01

  I mean, he spent a half billion dollars, roughly, in the election. But at least, I mean, approaching, at least approaching $200 million just for the Ken Paxton race, just for the James Talarico Ken Paxton race, in which Ken Paxton lost by 12. And so I do think we're in a little bit of a flex period in terms of the politics of money in politics. Seeing Republican billionaires, right wing billionaires, you know, from Miriam Adelson to Jeff Yass, to Elon Musk, to all of, you know, Andreessen, all of these guys. To see all of this spending just like in no other midterm election we've ever seen before,

• 37:02Speaker 01

  and to see it all just curdle, to see it go nowhere, is very satisfying. But it also, it raises an interesting question as to whether that kind of takes the foot off the gas in terms of people trying to make sure that we get big money out of our politics. In normal elections, of which this was not one, having that much money on one side of any political fight will be determinative. And it just so happened that the political winds were blowing so hard in one direction here, it didn't matter. But does that mean that the pressure to try to fix the money in politics problem eases up? I hope not. I think practically it might.

• 37:40Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, it also just seems like a true bipartisan coalition that's available. That like, this election was about a lot. And this was kind of the subtext, as you just put it. But it hasn't really, well, perhaps now it can be. It hasn't been foregrounded as like the, hey, those who remain, let's talk about how we can all agree that Citizens United.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  Might be a really important thing to tackle if we only have a few things to tackle.

• 38:09Pablo Torre?

  And I think that hierarchy of what do we tackle?

• 38:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:13Pablo Torre?

  Now that we have, again, this strange new coalition. It's like, how do you maintain it? Like, because the cynicism, of course, and I fall prey to this sometimes, is just that we're riding a pendulum. And they pushed it so far in one direction that we got it swung way back by the midterms. But there is the opportunity.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:35Pablo Torre?

  And that's what's exciting. And that's where the whole, like, rhetoric, look, I love every tweet that you read. I do. But if you're gonna also now be like, political strategist guy, or gal, you're thinking to yourself, yeah, like, we should be talking about that.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  I think the biggest difference between the two political parties in the United States right now is that Democrats have ideas about using the political process for policy purposes that are designed to make people's lives better. Like, Democrats have this idea that they should use the oversight function of Congress to oversee the federal government. And they should make policy that tries to make things cheaper for people and that gets people to have health insurance who don't have health insurance now, and to get people who have health insurance to not lose it. And there's, you know, and people who are overwhelmed by the repayment cost of their student loans should get help from the government to deal with their student loans. And farmers shouldn't be punished

• 39:38Speaker 01

  for international trade policies they have nothing to do with that they couldn't have known about when they decided what to plant this year. Like, it's very, like, practical, boring policy stuff.

• 39:48Pablo Torre?

  Classic nerd [BLEEP].

• 39:49Speaker 01

  Yes. And Republicans are like, how can we end Alzheimer's research? I know that transgenic and transgender are two different things, but I don't like mice either way. And so therefore, the National Institutes of Health needs to be dropped from a helicopter in Chile. Like, the Republican Party has a different kind of agenda. They really want to change the form of government. They want a monarchical, royalist, presidentialist form of government where the other two branches fade away. They want judges to be brow beaten into serving as political servants to the great leader. They don't want elections to be the grounds on which we move forward with different politicians or not.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  You know, regardless of the fact that they just lost an election in every conceivable way, it remains the gospel of the Republican Party that if Democrats win an election, it must have been cheating. I mean, it's just two different projects. And now that Democrats are going to be governing not only the legislative branch, but also state governments from coast to coast, the question is, can we return to government that is about nerd [BLEEP]? Can we return to government that's about policy?

• 41:04Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  And not just about warfare?

• 41:06Pablo Torre?

  What you said was something that, again, as of last week, could be dismissed as classic Rachel Maddow [BLEEP]. But now the anthropologist is looking at you through binoculars, being like, oh, my God, there's more of them. They're multiplying. What if this is not quite the pendulum, but they're trying to build a different device? The physics of this don't need to be the same.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  What if one of the ways the pendulum swings is people care about their country or they don't? People care about participating in the political process or they don't? I mean, to see the turnout numbers and to see the early turnout numbers and to see the turnout numbers among African American and Latino voters in particular, yes, everybody's looking at that in terms of what the outcome was of those votes. But to see that participation level go up is also a swing of the pendulum toward people believing that the democratic process is the means by which they can choose a different future. And part of the authoritarian project is to make you disbelieve that. And people reject.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  Verizon knows that holiday math can be complicated.

• 42:28Speaker 06

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• 42:39Speaker 02

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• 43:24Pablo Torre?

  Hey, it's Adam Grant, host of Ted's Rethinking Podcast. I'm an organizational psychologist. I study how people connect, collaborate, and find meaning. One thing I've learned is that we don't just connect by talking. We connect by doing things together, and movement is one of the simplest ways to get in sync. That's part of what I love about Peloton. Even when I'm exercising by myself on my Peloton Tread, I'm not necessarily alone. And when you're exercising on your own, you're not necessarily alone. You start recognizing familiar names on the leaderboard, seeing the same people show up for your favorite instructors, and sharing little moments of encouragement along the way. What starts as an individual workout can become a connection to something bigger. And now, the new Peloton Tread Flex makes it easier to bring that movement into your life.

• 44:08Pablo Torre?

  It's movable, foldable, and built for everything from a walk to a run. Explore the new Peloton Tread Flex at onpeloton.com.

• 44:25Pablo Torre?

  Which brings us to your book.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 44:27Pablo Torre?

  So, Department of Fate: The Promise, the Power, and the Collapse of America's Most Consequential Institution, aka the DOJ. We are the sports show that talks about the DOJ a lot. Turns out, we investigate NBA gambling scandals, which are born out of the Eastern District of New York. We do these investigations into Steve Ballmer and the Clippers.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Did we win Pulitzer Prizes for that?

• 44:49Pablo Torre?

  And by the way, we are grappling with what's the DOJ's interest in this, as they now have an interest in that, also out of the Eastern District. We've interviewed the teammates of Cash Patel's rec league hockey team, the Dons. Again, a little on the nose. Nonetheless, why and how is the big-picture arc of the DOJ something that you want people to understand?

• 45:14Speaker 01

  I think the DOJ is a different kind of cat. I think that it is an institution that is just different than everything else in the US government and different than everything else in the country. I also think that I was really wrong about what was going to happen at DOJ under Donald Trump. At the end of the first term, we had, remember, Bill Barr was the Attorney General at that point, and we had like the Durham investigation, which was this terrible thing. We had US attorneys being pushed out or resigning over White House demands to bring specific prosecutions, like this botched effort to prosecute John Kerry and Obama's White House Counsel Gregory Craig.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  We had demands from President Trump for the prosecution of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and all this stuff. And before he ultimately bailed at the end, actually, in the 2020 election, we had Attorney General Barr bring the Justice Department on board toward trying to bolster Trump's false claims about election fraud. And because of that, I and a lot of other people very confidently predicted that in the second Trump term, the Justice Department would just be a nuclear weapon, that the Justice Department would be the most important story of Trump's first term, and that's the thing that he would supersize and turn into the instrument of his revenge.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  And instead, we have not seen that. The agency that they supersized is Department of Homeland Security and ICE and HSI and all of those guys. That's who's turned American streets into scenes that look like Civil War. That's who's shooting people in the street and running them down and everything. And instead, with the Justice Department, it's kind of turned into this joke. I mean, the US Attorney in DC is the one Fox News host who had a worse reputation than Pete Hegseth. Like, the less impressive Fox News host than Pete Hegseth got US Attorney for Washington DC. He put not one, but two different podcasters in charge of the FBI.

• 47:16Pablo Torre?

  You're talking about Janine Pirro, Dan Bongino, and Cash Patel, respectively?

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Yes. I mean, the Justice Department, rather than being supersized the way Homeland Security was, they lost literally thousands of headcount. They shut down the Public Integrity Section. They shut down the National Security Division. They shut down the Tax Division. They just ended it. And why is that? You would think that he would want to use the Justice Department as the biggest, most powerful weapon that he could, and instead, it's a mess and a clown car and a joke, and everything they do fails. And I think that's important. I think we should see the Justice Department now as dead. And I think, if you look back historically, we should recognize that what the Justice Department does more than any other institution, it sets the course of the nation. Sets the course of the nation for what's allowed politically.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  It sets the course of the nation economically, for who's allowed to have legal standing to conduct themselves in our economy. It sets the grounds of who counts as a first-class citizen and who doesn't. The Justice Department's really, really important, and it can be used for really, really good ends, like it was when it was founded just after the Civil War. It can also be used for terrible reasons when you want it to. But it's important right now that they've effectively killed it.

• 48:33Pablo Torre?

  It's such a joke when I investigate these stories, and part of the end game of any reporting process is the question of, well, what will the DOJ do about this? What will the feds do about this? And every answer you get as an analysis of the evidence has the giant footnote of, unless they hire the lawyer that can strike a deal with the DOJ and Donald Trump personally.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  Is there somebody involved in this case who can buy a million-dollar dinner ticket to Mar-a-Lago who will then unwire the entire case?

• 49:08Pablo Torre?

  I have had so many conversations with former federal prosecutors who've sat in that chair, and the whole thing is moot. The whole conversation is moot if that's the end game anyway. And so I say this just because what we're saying in this whole conversation is that there's the opportunity to be a country that really does nerdily care about the rule of law and the Constitution, the thing that people who once ran for office on the right would carry pocket-sized versions of little constitutions. And their approach to this has been of a piece with the whole general corruption [BLEEP], in which it's like, yeah, Keystone Cops.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:50Pablo Torre?

  And so, the question of why? Why did they do this? Is it because they wanted the ATM more than they wanted the weapon? How do you assess it?

• 50:01Speaker 01

  I think what's going on here is that you need a Justice Department to effectuate the rule of law and the protections of the Constitution. And when the Justice Department acts that way, it can be very, very righteous and very noble, and it has incredible power. But I also think equally that because that's the role of the Justice Department, if you want a dictatorship, if you want a kleptocracy, if you want an authoritarian, rule-by-fiat, steal-anything-you-want kind of country, you need to not have a Justice Department. It's just not handy in that kind of a government structure to have a building full of skilled lawyers. It's not.

• 50:41Pablo Torre?

  Who are just, by the way, watching.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 50:44Pablo Torre?

  Who are on email chains, who have access to computers. It's probably best if they all leave.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  Exactly, with subpoena power and the whole thing. And if, yes, it is great to try to turn a building full of lawyers into your personal law firm, which is the way that people shorthand what Trump has done to the Justice Department, to try to turn them into your weapons or whatever. But that's a sort of a ham-handed, small tool. Like, it's just as handy to have a masked, secret police force that will go raid Ilhan Omar's home or whatever it is. If you want an inward-facing, Praetorian Guard, secret police, paramilitary force that answers without accountability to the president, they have built that inside the Department of Homeland Security. They did not build that at the Justice Department. They instead have essentially decided to shut down the Justice Department,

• 51:34Speaker 01

  because if you want a rule-by-fiat, you can't have a government agency that runs well, that has, say, a Public Integrity Section, and have it be operating and running on all full cylinders while you are trying to rob the country blind. You just can't have it. And so, the Justice Department, I think, was, in a way that we don't appreciate, fundamentally broken. Like, I think it was stabbed in the heart in the first Trump term by Bill Barr, and the book sort of makes that case. And I think that it's effectively dead now. And I think we need to appreciate how important it is to the survival of the constitutional republic, and we need to rebuild, refound the Justice Department in a way that appreciates how important

• 52:19Speaker 01

  it is and that never allows it to be either killed off or corrupted again.

• 52:24Pablo Torre?

  You've mentioned Bill Barr a couple of times, and there's a section of your book which I greatly enjoyed, because it also has to do with sports. There is, I have it here.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  Oh, good.

• 52:33Pablo Torre?

  If you could just tell us the story of William Barr through the lens of his personal athletic career as a young person.

• 52:45Speaker 01

  Back in his intramural football days at Columbia, an opponent had thrown sand in Bill Barr's face at the end of a play, momentarily blinding him and causing, quote, "searing pain," according to Bill Barr's own memoir. The behavior was unsportsmanlike and worthy of payback, but Barr's teammates had wisely held him back from retaliating in the moment and maybe inviting a costly penalty or even ending the game early. Barr explained to President Trump, quote, "As we played on, both teams kept a close watch on me and my antagonists to ensure we did not come to blows. By the time the game ended two hours later, the matter seemed forgotten, and both fraternities set out together on the walk back to campus.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  At that point, I walked over to my assailant and laid him out, stupefied on the pavement with a bloody nose. The moral of this parable," as Barr explained it to the famously hot-headed Donald Trump, "was that sometimes you had to control your emotions at least for a time and wait for the right moment to exact your revenge, lest you risk blowing the entire game. My way, the game was finished and justice was meted out in the end." The other obvious takeaway that Barr did not spell out was this: It's a lot easier to win a fight when your opponent is unaware that he's in one and has no chance to put his guard up. Sucker punches are the best punches.

• 54:07Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  A moral portrait.

• 54:10Pablo Torre?

  That tracks. Of Bill Barr. That tracks. That's a plausible scouting report, as Bill Barr himself wrote in his own book.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  He's bragging about this.

• 54:18Pablo Torre?

  That's the best part.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  The Justice Department is supposed to protect, supposed to effectuate the protections of the Constitution, protect all of us. We're all supposed to benefit from those protections, not only against other people in America who might try to define, who might try to encroach on those freedoms, but against the government trying to encroach on those freedoms. The Justice Department is supposed to protect us from all comers in terms of our constitutionally protected individual rights. But the Justice Department can instead join with the most powerful forces in the country, the ones who are trying to deprive other peoples of their, other people of their rights. And in so doing, they can become incredibly damaging,

• 55:01Speaker 01

  and they can set the course of the nation. It's just, the Justice Department has power that no other institution in the United States does. And we should, when we refound it, because we're going to need to, we need to refound it in a way that is cognizant of those powers and, and treats it specially in terms of how careful we are about, about installing its political leadership.

• 55:23Pablo Torre?

  Here we have the connectivity between corruption and affordability.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:28Pablo Torre?

  Here we have the very Venn diagram that maybe isn't this binary, but the same [BLEEP] thing.

• 55:35Speaker 01

  And the person who's been best, I think, able to articulate that heading into this mammoth election we just had is Jon Ossoff, right? So Jon Ossoff wins by, what did he win, by 17 or 18 points or something ridiculous?

• 55:47Pablo Torre?

  A zillion.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  He won by roughly a zillion points in Georgia. And the reason he went from the most vulnerable Senate Democrat, the most vulnerable senator standing for reelection in America, to the guy who won by nearly 20 points, I think, was because he's had an incredibly disciplined message saying, "They are robbing you blind, and that is why you are poor." Those things are connected. When the government serves the purpose of people who give the president millions of dollars, the government then is turned against your interests. And not only are things not getting better for you, but things will continually get worse for you as long as we are governed by kleptocrats.

• 56:31Pablo Torre?

  Right. It's not the undocumented immigrant. It's not the trans athlete. It's not the alleged jihadist that goes to school with your kid. It's perhaps the people with all the money.

• 56:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:43Pablo Torre?

  That might be a good.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  And when the government sides with them and against you, it is your obligation as a small d Democrat to stand up and throw those bums out of the government.

• 56:54Pablo Torre?

  Rachel Maddow, thank you so much for doing this.

• 56:56Speaker 01

  You're awesome. Thank you so much for having me here. I'm like, I just, I think you're great, and it's really nice that you asked me to be here.

• 57:03Pablo Torre?

  It's just a pleasure to talk to a three-sport athlete.

• 57:06Speaker 01

  I'm getting fouled out of this one, too.

• 57:09Pablo Torre?

  The elbows have been pointing.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 57:11Pablo Torre?

  The elbows have been pointing.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  Thanks, Pablo.

• 57:23Pablo Torre?

  Pablo Torre Finds Out is produced by Walter Averoma, Maxwell Carney, Ryan Cortez, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Lohman, Rob McCray, Laura Newcomb, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor, and Chris Tumelo. Studio engineering by RG Systems, sound design by Andrew Bersik, digital strategy by Bailey Carlin and Andrew Northern, theme song, as always, by John Bravo. And we'll talk to you next time.

• 57:58Speaker 02

  Verizon knows that holiday math can be complicated.

• 58:01Speaker 06

  Okay, let's see. We got the four kids, four gifts each, six teacher gifts? Uh huh. Wait, oh, what did we get in Sandy? In the dogs. Oh, can't forget the dogs.

• 58:12Speaker 02

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  Hey, it's Adam Grant, host of TED's Rethinking Podcast. I'm an organizational psychologist. I study how people connect, collaborate, and find meaning. One thing I've learned is that we don't just connect by talking. We connect by doing things together. And movement is one of the simplest ways to get in sync. That's part of what I love about Peloton. Even when I'm exercising by myself on my Peloton Tread, I'm not necessarily alone. And when you're exercising on your own, you're not necessarily alone. You start recognizing familiar names on the leaderboard, seeing the same people show up for your favorite instructors, and sharing little moments of encouragement along the way. What starts as an individual workout can become a connection to something bigger. And now, the new Peloton

• 59:40Speaker 06

  Tread Flex makes it easier to bring that movement into your life. It's movable, foldable, and built for everything from a walk to a run. Explore the new Peloton Tread Flex at onepeloton.com.