Transcript:
Daniella Gibbs Léger: Hey everyone. Welcome back to “The Tent,” your place for politics, policy, and progress. I’m Daniella Gibbs Léger.
Colin Seeberger: And I’m Colin Seeberger. Daniella, what did you think of the NFL draft?
Gibbs Léger: I was actually pleased, Colin.
Seeberger: You sure the Giants didn’t screw it up again?
Gibbs Léger: I am sure. In fact, they were the only team to receive an A ranking from The New York Times. They actually did a good job. I am shocked. I’m as shocked as anybody else to say this. So we’ll see. It is a rebuilding year, to be clear. But we got some really necessary pieces, so I’m ready for them to beat the Cowboys.
Seeberger: Rebuilding for us all, to be clear.
Gibbs Léger: Fair enough.
Gibbs Léger: Like I said, as long as we beat the Cowboys, we’ll be good.
But speaking of losing, Donald Trump just hit 100 days in office, Colin. And his administration has been a hot mess.
Seeberger: Yes. Keep putting up the L right here, right?
Gibbs Léger: Exactly. I heard you got to talk about it this week with one of my favorite podcasters.
Seeberger: I did. I spoke with Molly Jong-Fast, host of the “Fast Politics” podcast. We chatted about the Trump administration’s abductions of legal residents, including American citizens; why Trump’s poll numbers are plummeting; and the path forward for the Democratic Party moving forward.
Gibbs Léger: Well I can’t wait to listen. But first, we have to get to some news.
Seeberger: We certainly do.
Gibbs Léger: Yes, because over the past week, the American people’s frustrations with the Trump administration really seems to have hit a boiling point. And recent polls make it clear: Americans don’t want to live in a country where people can be abducted and disappeared to foreign gulags.
Gibbs Léger: Imagine that.
Gibbs Léger: They also don’t want American children with Stage 4 cancer to be snatched and sent to countries like Honduras without access to their medications either. It’s infuriating and unconscionable and all the ugly words, and I really just can’t believe that this is happening here.
And Americans aren’t having it. In a New York Times/Sienna poll conducted last week, Trump’s handling of immigration appeared underwater. Just 31 percent of respondents approved of how he handled the Kilmar Abrego case. A recent CNN poll showed similar results, finding Trump’s approval has dropped 6 points from just a month ago. ABC News and The Washington Post found the same thing, as did CBS and UGOV. On immigration, Trump’s approvals have tanked.
And all of these polls were conducted before we learned the administration has been deporting children who are U.S. citizens and denying them their due process. In a case involving the deportation of a 2-year-old citizen from Louisiana to Honduras, a conservative, Trump-appointed judge declared the deportation illegal and unconstitutional, saying he had a strong suspicion the federal government deported the child without any, quote, “meaningful process.”
Seeberger: Look, Daniella, it is really hard for me to be shocked by anything that this administration does, but a 4-year-old with cancer? It’s truly beyond the pale. It’s so depraved and really an escalation of this administration’s dangerous deportation policies. And because there’s no due process, they keep making mistakes.
Seeberger: Right? They keep going to court and saying, “Oh, we erred on that. We erred on this.” And, “Oh, there’s nothing we can do about it.”
I also have to fact-check this bogus claim coming from people like Tom Homan, who is the president’s “border czar.” He had the audacity this week to say it was a good thing that American citizens who are children are being snatched up and sent off to Honduras without any due process, because they weren’t separated from their families.
The administration has tried to suggest that these families were able to make these decisions themselves, but the lawyer for one of the children who was shipped out of this country has come out and said that that was not the case. The mothers were actually denied the chance to transfer custody of their children before they were shipped to a foreign country. The cruelty just doesn’t do the story justice.
And of course, this is on top of, like you said, the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case. We all remember from a few weeks ago, he’s the Maryland man who was snatched up off the streets and shipped off to a foreign gulag in El Salvador without any due process. According to El Salvador’s so-called justice minister, if you can even call him that, the only way out of El Salvador for these deportees is in a coffin. Those are his words.
Seeberger: Yeah. It sends a chill down my spine, thinking about—that there’s at least 250 people residing in the United States who were disappeared to this prison without any due process. And that places like this are where Donald Trump wants to send, quote, unquote, “homegrowns” next. Those are his words. He made them in the Oval Office, Daniella.
Despite orders from the far-right Supreme Court to bring Abrego Garcia back to the United States, he’s still not been returned. In fact, Donald Trump said just yesterday in an interview with ABC News that he’s not going to bring him back to the country.
As of this recording on Wednesday, CNN reported that Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, was allegedly in touch with El Salvador’s president about Abrego Garcia, but we’ve got to take everything from this White House with a grain of salt, right?
TL;DR: I hope Chief Justice [John] Roberts’ TV was working last night because it sure seems like there are a lot of people at the White House who have been ignoring his court orders.
Gibbs Léger: It sure does, Colin. It remains to be seen what he will do about this. And these stories are really hard to hear, especially the ones that involve children, but they’re so very necessary for us to share. We need to shine a light on this administration’s abusive policies and practices.
But it’s not just this administration, Colin. It’s also the Republican majorities in Congress, who return to Washington this week and have started markups of their component pieces of this reconciliation package in House committees. And it’s becoming more and more clear that they are not fighting for you.
Seeberger: No. They’re fighting among themselves.
Gibbs Léger: That is very true. But what they’re doing instead is they’re trying to pass tax cuts for billionaires.
Gibbs Léger: Stop me if you’ve heard this story before.
Seeberger: Tale as old as time.
Gibbs Léger: Seriously. And to pay for it, they’ve passed a budget resolution that requires slashing programs that deliver basic needs, like health care and nutrition, including as much as $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid and $230 billion to SNAP [the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program]. If they follow through with these plans, it would be the largest cut to health care and food assistance in American history.
Gibbs Léger: This bill would mean millions of Americans will lose their health care coverage, and tens of thousands could die. And let’s be clear: This GOP bill would represent the largest redistribution of wealth from the working class to the rich in American history.
And President Trump’s campaign pollster, Tony Fabrizio, recently surveyed Americans to gauge their support for these Medicaid cuts. He found that a majority of 2024 Trump voters and two-thirds of swing voters opposed it. He also found that nearly half of all Americans have some connection to Medicaid, whether they’re currently or previously enrolled in a program or have family members who are enrolled. And a separate, recent internal GOP polling memo found that U.S. voters oppose spending cuts to Medicaid as well. This seems very, very unpopular, Colin.
Seeberger: It sure does, Daniella, and I don’t think that’s going to change for Republicans anytime soon. Because according to an analysis from our friends at the Center for American Progress, this bill will actually increase health insurance marketplace premiums by thousands of dollars each year.
Proposals to end the current federal funding guarantee for Medicaid expansion could actually force states to end up shutting down their programs, including in 12 states that have laws that would require such a wind down of those programs. And that would eliminate Medicaid for millions of people.
But again, it’s not just people on Medicaid. The analysis from our friends at CAP showed that failing to extend the enhanced premium tax credits, as well as ending these Medicaid expansion programs, could lead to a massive premium spike in 2026 and lead to nearly 4 million people being left uninsured by 2027.
Just to break it down a little bit, right, it’s important to understand how this would actually play out for real families. So a family of four with an annual income of $129,000 who live in Alaska and are represented by Congressman Nick Begich (R), they actually would have to pay $29,000 more a year for their annual premiums.
Seeberger: That’s right. We’re talking over a quarter of their income for health insurance. A single, middle-income parent of a child in the New York City suburbs who earns $85,000 a year and are represented by Congressman Nick LaLota (R), Congressman Mike Lawler (R)—their constituents would have to pay north of $10,000 more a year if these policies ended up going into effect.
And it doesn’t end there. Republicans are trying to create so-called work reporting requirements for people to access Medicaid, despite the fact that we have real world examples. You look at states like Arkansas where they’ve put these policies into effect, and it actually shows that 40 percent of the people on the program end up actually losing their coverage.
Make no mistake: This is nothing more than a political stunt designed to create more paperwork, kick people off their health care, in order to take those dollars and give them to the top 0.1 percent of people in this country. A $278,000 tax cut is what the Tax Policy Center found.
Seeberger: It is outrageous. How about Republicans start trying to improve health care for once, instead of ripping it away from people who need it most?
Gibbs Léger: Well wouldn’t that be nice?
Seeberger: It sure would.
Gibbs Léger: It would indeed. Well, that’s all the time we have for today. If there’s anything else you’d like us to cover on the pod, hit us up on Twitter, Bluesky, Instagram, and Threads @TheTentPod. That’s @TheTentPod.
Seeberger: And stick around for my interview with Molly Jong-Fast in just a beat.
Seeberger: Molly Jong-Fast is a journalist, political analyst, former editor, and host of iHeart Media’s “Fast Politics” podcast. Her work has been featured in The Atlantic, The Bulwark, Playboy, Glamour, and Vogue. Molly is a contributing writer at Vanity Fair and a political analyst on MSNBC. Before entering the world of politics after the 2016 election, she wrote novels like The Social Climber’s Handbook and Normal Girl.
Molly Jong-Fast, thanks so much for joining us on “The Tent.”
Molly Jong-Fast: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Seeberger: So we’re talking on a big week. I am, of course, referencing the fact that we are 100 days into Donald Trump’s second term—even though, if you ask me, it feels like it’s been 100 weeks.
Right now, he has the lowest approval rating of any president in over eight decades, according to some recent polls. But I want to know what you think: How are things going? How would you grade Trump’s performance since he was inaugurated on January 20?
Jong-Fast: So here’s what I would say about Trump: Trump is doing exactly what he said he would do.
It’s real promises made, promises kept kind of thing, right? He is enacting the Project 2025 agenda—wildly unpopular, but what he said he would do, then he said he wouldn’t do it, but then he said he would do it. He is shrinking the federal government. He is firing federal employees. He’s shrinking all sorts of really important services that the government does, everything from flight safety to food safety and all of the machinations in between.
This is the brainchild of conservative think tanks like The Heritage Foundation. I think that is part of what’s happening. I think part of what’s happening is because it’s Donald Trump, it’s very chaotic. But Donald Trump is at best an autocrat, and he wants to be the boss, and he’s sort of created a world where he’s trying to take as much presidential power as he can and trying to consolidate it, which—part of Project 2025, part of what we always knew an autocrat would do if he wanted to get into power. Here we are.
And none of this is a surprise to me. What I would say—here are the things that, if we were going to go through, that are a surprise to me.
Seeberger: Give me the report card. Here we go.
Jong-Fast: The incredible cowardice of billionaires. The incredible cowardice of law firms, who know that the deals they’re making with Donald Trump are, in fact, illegal. These two groups have made themselves captured institutions. And just like in Russia, just like in an autocratic state, they are now captured institutions. And they are, in fact, just toys of Donald Trump. They have given up what little—and to watch [Jeff] Bezos just ruin himself in this way—and I want to talk about the tariffs—it just is incredible.
And I think, and again—I’m going to stop talking in two seconds—but I think how we got here is that we have not had to be brave in American life since McCarthy, since Eugene McCarthy jailed my grandfather Howard Fast during the House [Committee] on Un-American Activities—another bad Republican. We have not had to be brave as a culture, and so it is a muscle that has atrophied for many of us.
Seeberger: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s why there was a recent New York Times poll that came out this past weekend that actually showed that roughly 60 percent of Americans say that Donald Trump’s first 100 days of his second term has been scary.
Jong-Fast: The word is chaotic, yeah.
Jong-Fast: They don’t like it. They’re mad that their Congress won’t push back more. I mean, this is one of the few really clear times when the people are correct and the government on the Republican side, but also on the Democratic side, are completely wrong.
The people are like, “Represent us. We don’t like this. We want to stay being a democracy.” And Democrats are like, “We don’t want to elevate young people.” And Republicans are like, “This is what Trump wants us to do, so we have to do it because we’re scared of mean tweets.”
Seeberger: Well, you know, that obviously has not just huge ramifications for us here at home, it also has huge ramifications for folks across the globe.
In a major reversal of political fortunes on Monday, Canada elected Mark Carney, and the Liberal Party maintained its control of government, which is a huge sea change in Canadian politics that really has been a response to some of the threats that Donald Trump has made not just to Canada’s economy through his tariff policies, but also Canadian sovereignty and this ability to really show that you can stand up to the bully.
What do you think that this means both for Trump and for liberals here in the United States?
Jong-Fast: It means that Donald Trump is so unpopular he is losing elections into other countries, right? I mean, that’s what it means.
Jong-Fast: One of the reasons why the conservatives lost was because the conservative candidate could not get far enough away from Donald Trump.
Jong-Fast: He could not detach himself from Donald Trump without alienating a significant part of his base. And that is going to be the story of the midterms, right? We’re going to see Republicans—so I want to talk about today.
Today, we saw that our economy—we’re actually in a recession. We are in a contraction. These economic numbers are shocking, and they have almost entirely Donald Trump to blame for them. He decides to do tariffs, now the economy is shrinking. Period. Paragraph.
Seeberger: And this is an economy that was growing.
Jong-Fast: Envy of the world.
Seeberger: Yeah, growing.
Jong-Fast: It was the envy of the world. Yeah.
Seeberger: All throughout 2024. And in the matter of just a few months, Trump’s tariff policies ended up actually driving a record trade deficit for the United States. And, we know, like you said, this was the first quarter of contraction that we’ve seen in the economy, and we know that that was before the April 2 “Liberation Day” tariffs were announced. And those have only caused more pain as they’ve gone into effect.
And as you know, I think companies, supply chains, and whatnot wind down, consumers are going to be seeing potentially empty shelves, higher prices as there’s just less supply. And so we’re really kind of staring down—he’s entering this second quarter in the next 100 days already weakened, and now he’s potentially facing an even more precarious backdrop to what could be on the horizon here.
Jong-Fast: Let me tell you one thing.
Jong-Fast: I just want to tell you. A lot of these podcasts get listened to by industry insiders, by comms directors, by that crew.
Jong-Fast: You guys, it is malpractice not to push harder against this. First of all, it’s autocracy, so it’s bad. OK? It’s undermining our democratic system. But it’s also just not popular.
Jong-Fast: People don’t like it. They don’t want this. They don’t like Trump. They don’t like the way that he is pushing through guardrails. They don’t like him threatening federal judges.
Like, this is the moment, Democrats. This is the moment. And I think it’s important to remember there were times during the Biden administration, and I want—you know what, can we do two seconds on Biden?
Jong-Fast: Will that be really annoying?
Seeberger: That is totally fine.
Jong-Fast: I interview people all day and I never get to talk, so I’m always trying to get people—but I just want to say: Biden becomes president. He enacts really excellent, powerful legislation. But because he’s Biden, and because his team is anxious and nervous and worried, pretty much they do almost no media for two years. The media grows to hate them. Hate them.
Donald Trump over the last week has done—I mean, all he does is interviews, as far as I can tell, and golf. He’s on ABC. He did Time magazine. He did this, he did that. The guy is a word salad. You can barely transcribe a sentence. It is breathtaking. But it doesn’t matter, because he is working the phones.
Jong-Fast: So I just want to say, if you are a Democrat, look at how much he does. I mean, this is not a compliment. He’s a complete autocrat. He can barely put together a sentence, but he’s out there.
Seeberger: Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I think we’ve seen some recent examples of some Democrats out there, like Pete Buttigieg, going into spaces that may not be as friendly as a traditional news outlet but are reaching a really important audience that wants to hear real conversation about the major national policy debates that we’re having right now in this moment.
Seeberger: And I think that’s why people responded really well to that interview. But it’s also, I think, a testament to: If you engage those audiences, they can be moved.
And speaking of moving them, one of the things that we have seen in some of the polling that’s come out is that Trump has lost major ground with young people in this country. They’re now pretty much just as anti-Trump as they were pro-Biden in 2020.
Seeberger: What happened to the major conservative shifts that were reported after November? Do you think that there were anti-incumbency plays happening behind the scenes?
Jong-Fast: I think about this all the time. I literally think about this all the time. Because I watched it happen in real time and I was like, “What am I watching here?” Right? Donald Trump going on every podcast—the “Boys,” the Joe Rogan, he’s selling sneakers, he’s selling Bitcoin. This is the thing about Trump, which, for whatever reason, most politicians don’t do: Trump is very good at telling people he’ll give them things. And people want things.
Jong-Fast: So he went to Nevada, and he said, “We’re going to do no taxes on tips.”
Jong-Fast: Do you know the chances that you could do that? Zero. Nobody’s doing no tax on tips. We’re barely eking by here. And you couldn’t even do it, right, because then everything would be a tip. And people were like, “OK, I’d like no tax on tips.”
And remember, because Joe Biden had been almost silent for four years, people didn’t even know if he was running again. In fact, there were Google searches on Election Day: “Is Joe Biden still in the race?” Right?
Jong-Fast: So I think young people were like, “OK.”
I mean, first of all, COVID-19 school closures. Now, I actually think the medical professionals who were doing it didn’t know, wanted to save lives, thought this was the best play. So I am not one of those people who is like, “They did the wrong thing,” because I think they did the best they could at that moment. Science is complicated. There’s a lot of movement. We don’t know what we don’t know.
These kids who had the school closures—and I know because I have all these children—it was hard for them. It was really hard.
Jong-Fast: It set them back socially. It set them back emotionally. It set them back academically. And they got angry. And so what you see with this Generation Alpha is that there actually is a divide between people who are young and have been affected by COVID-19, and people who are older and have been affected by Trump’s first term. So there really is a divide.
Now that said, I actually think what happened with Trump and why he is a genius at getting elected and his political instincts are just very, very good, was that he went on all of the places. So you would be watching YouTube, if you are a 18-year-old boy, and you would see him on. And you would think, “This guy, he seems good.” Who even knows who the other guy is, right?
And he is selling hats, and he is selling sneakers, and he is saying things. There’s a MAGA who is a rapper. There’s a MAGA who is a fighter. You are watching the fights. You’re seeing your MAGA guy fight. I mean, what he did was this Andrew Breitbart thing of culture being downstream of politics.
Jong-Fast: He did the culture and not the politics. And the reason that someone like AOC [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)] is popular is because she has cultural relevance. And this is not—none of this is about policy. Biden had really good policy. Nobody cared, because they couldn’t tell. Policy is just very hard to message, whereas culture is very easy to message.
So what I think happened here was that Trump was able to culturally connect with a lot of young people, this young Gen. Alpha generation. They voted for him or they liked him. But then ultimately the Republican Party, the play is tax cuts for very rich people, taking away social services, stripping the government—and nobody wants that. That’s not popular. I mean, that’s sort of how Trump has been—the only people who want that are very rich people.
Seeberger: You know, Molly, you brought up an interesting point, and that is, policy really is not driving a lot of our politics. That said, I think one thing that may have surprised some people—in particular, maybe some Democrats in the consultant class—is seeing Americans respond to maybe something that sounds esoteric or doesn’t sound tangible in people’s everyday lives, but this issue of due process,
Seeberger: We have seen a sea change in Donald Trump’s approval on immigration, which was up 20-plus points. And now some recent polls have shown that it has fallen underwater as this administration has proceeded with literally abducting people off the streets, including deporting people to countries they’ve never been in who are U.S. citizen children.
And I’m curious if you can talk a little bit about why we should be sounding the alarm about the lack of due process here, why you think some of these things that may seem a bit academic may actually be breaking through with people.
Jong-Fast: Yeah. So this is a really important point, I think. There’s a real problem right now in the Democratic Party of people saying, “Voters don’t like this, voters don’t like that.” OK? It’s like, “No, no, no, no, no, no.”
Seeberger: Yeah. Or this isn’t an issue, right? Some of that.
Jong-Fast: They’re telling us what they want, right?
Jong-Fast: They’re telling us they don’t like—by the way, this whole idea that they—Democrats don’t like people being kidnapped in the middle of the night. Nobody likes that. That is bad.
Jong-Fast: That is not what we do in this country. So the fact that you have Democratic leadership being like, “We don’t want to talk about that.” No, no, no—you must talk about this.
And this is, again, another place where Democrats are being too smart for their own good. People don’t like it, because it’s crazy and scary. So deal with it because they want you to. I mean, I talk to people all day long, and they say to me, “What I like about you is that you explain things in a way that doesn’t freak us out, and also just are a little bit more accessible in a way.”
Jong-Fast: So here’s the question, OK? And this is the thing that just we keep going on and on about this stupid—so the idea is can they focus on the tariffs, which are absolute disaster. Crashing the economy for seemingly no reason. And, also, the government disappearing grad students for what they wrote in their student paper? Yes. Yes, you can do both, OK?
And the idea that you think it’s a binary is ridiculous. So the voters want you to say it’s not OK to disappear grad students. The Supreme Court—the conservative, conservative Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade, the law of the land for half a century—they have said 9-0 that no matter what your immigration status is, you are entitled to due process.
This is insane. So the idea that Democrats—you have to walk and chew gum. You must walk and chew gum. That is the only answer. You have to peacefully push back against these antidemocratic impulses that the administration is doing, and, also, you must explain the tariffs in a way that is clear. Because the economy is not crashing because of Biden.
And if Democrats don’t message on that, Trump will.
Seeberger: For sure, for sure. I mean, I think what you’re getting to is Democrats want their leaders to put on the body armor and get on the battlefield and fight, right?
Jong-Fast: Yes. And by the way, if they’re tired, they can leave. And I want to just go back for a second. This election, Democrats said, “This is an existential election about democracy and the rule of law.” OK, so Democrats lost this election, but the truth still remains that this is about do we have a democracy or do we not have a democracy?
And that means if you are going to be a member of Congress, and you are not up for the fight, then you should not be on leadership, and you should probably not be in it. If you are not ready—and again, I go back to Gov. [JB] Pritzker (D-IL). This is not left versus center left. This is fight versus cave. Are you team fight, or are you team cave? And if you’re team cave, you probably should not be in elected office right now.
Seeberger: Yeah, I mean, I’m curious, you brought up Gov. Pritzker, who had this really powerful speech this past weekend in New Hampshire. Are there other Democrats who are stepping up, who are fighting, that are really giving you some hope in this most dark and scary moment for our country? And not just fighting Donald Trump, but are really providing some direction for where this country should be moving when we turn the page on Donald Trump, which, God willing, will be after 2028.
Jong-Fast: Pritzker. I love Pritzker. I would say we’ve seen a lot of good stuff. I love Pritzker. I’ve been happy with AOC and Bernie [Sanders (D-VT)]. And by the way, with AOC and Bernie, they were the only people doing this, right? [Sen.] Chris Murphy (D-CT). This is not ideological. This is just either you are out there or you’re not out there, right? And I think that’s right.
So there are people who criticize AOC and Bernie for being on the more left side, but this is not about that. This is about offering people a choice. It’s either Trump or no one. If they don’t see someone, they don’t have an idea of what’s out there.
Seeberger: This was, I think, a really great conversation and inspiring for, I think, folks on the broad center left, right?
Seeberger: Like you said, this isn’t center versus left. This is fight or don’t fight. There is a group of leaders that they can look to to be out there on the battlefield fighting it out every day.
Jong-Fast: And I would just say one other thing, which is the reason that Democrats lost this last election—certainly there were a lot of reasons—but really the reason is because that left flank did not turn out for them. And they did not vote. And we saw this again and again. Because if Harris had had the numbers that Biden had had, she would’ve won.
So I’m not arguing about why they didn’t turn out. I’m just saying they didn’t. So there was a section of the party that was not offered anything. Now, you can continue to not offer those people anything, but you will continue to lose.
So the question is: Can you build a coalition that has the 70 percent in the middle and that 20 percent you desperately need in order to win elections? And that’s an existential question of our time.
Seeberger: Yep. Lot of work to do on the left, to be sure. Molly Jong-Fast, thank you so much for joining us on “The Tent.”
Seeberger: It’s great to chat with you.
Jong-Fast: Thank you. Thank you.
Seeberger: Sounds great. Thank you.
Gibbs Léger: Well, that’s going to do it for us this week, folks. Please go back and check out previous episodes. Before we go, Colin, we’ve got to talk about it. It’s started. It’s happening.
Seeberger: Oh my gosh. Oh, of course we’re talking about—
Gibbs Léger: Yes. “Cowboy Carter.”
Seeberger: —the launch of the Cowboy Carter Tour?
Seeberger: Daniella, she just radiated.
Seeberger: Beautiful. I mean, the costumes, the choreography—I was glued to my phone all morning earlier this week and just looking at all the clips from LA.
Seeberger: It was amazing. My favorite, I think, was when her daughters joined her on stage. And I was just—
Gibbs Léger: It was so sweet.
Seeberger: —like, “Oh my gosh, you precious girls.”
Gibbs Léger: I know. And I love—she’s just so wonderful. And I love Blue starting out on the Renaissance tour—
Gibbs Léger: —a little stiff, shall we say? But she put in the work, and I could not believe how good she was.
Gibbs Léger: And little Rumi is so adorable. So full of life and clearly just excited to be there, right?
Seeberger: Yeah. I mean, had that young, angelic energy—
Seeberger: —that, I mean, you just can’t help but smile at, right?
Gibbs Léger: Exactly. There’s a part of me that’s like, I don’t want to watch too much, because I am going to see her when she comes to D.C.
Gibbs Léger: But I couldn’t help myself because of course it’s Beyoncé. It was so wonderful. So I’m really excited. I wonder if she’s going to bring any of her collaborators on tour with her in any of the stops because that would be pretty cool.
Seeberger: That would be very cool. I will be tuning in to see if we get—this is a little Eras Tour throwback here from the Swifties—of having lots of artists that she ends up collaborating with join her on stage. It’s going be a fun tour.
Gibbs Léger: It is, it is. So something that is decidedly uncool was—
Seeberger: Hit me, Daniella.
Gibbs Léger: —the Eagles.
Seeberger: Oh yeah, no, we can just stop there. Uncool, the Eagles, period.
Gibbs Léger: So yeah, they won the Super Bowl, blah, blah, blah. And as is usually the tradition, they go to the White House, meet the president, and do all this stuff. So Saquon Barkley—yes, former New York Giant, now Philadelphia Eagle—won a Super Bowl. Great. You feel like you need to go to the White House because he said, “I respect the office.”
Seeberger: The office of the presidency. Yes. Yes, the office.
Gibbs Léger: The office. OK. Does that mean you have to go to his country club the day before and kiki with him?
Seeberger: Kiki with him. Yeah.
Gibbs Léger: And play a round of golf and then hop a ride down to—Saquon, get all the way out of here with that mess.
Seeberger: Yes, there was lots of mess. I mean, it is also ridiculous to throw that out there when it’s like, this is the president that has literally desecrated—
Seeberger: —an entire third branch of our government and, I mean, has trampled over everything that this country stands for. And this is the kind of person who you’re like, “I’ve got to go kiss the ring”?
Seeberger: Respect for the office?
Seeberger: Get out of here.
Gibbs Léger: Listen, in a world of Saquons, be a Jalen Hurts, who had, quote, unquote, “scheduling conflicts.”
Gibbs Léger: Him, AJ Brown, and a good 15 other folks had something else come up, couldn’t make it. They’re my heroes. I mean, if I have to have heroes on the Eagles team—
Seeberger: There can be a few good eggs.
Gibbs Léger: They are. They’re a few good eggs.
My friend Constance is trying to get me to become an Eagles fan. I was like, “It will never happen, ever.”
Gibbs Léger: But I can acknowledge that Jalen Hurts and a few assorted other players are both lovely individuals and lovely to look at. OK, so.
Seeberger: And on that note.
Gibbs Léger: On that note, we’re out of here. Folks, it’s the peak of allergy season. I hope you’re not suffering like I am, because it stinks.
Gibbs Léger: But at least it’s getting warm out. So that said, y’all take care, and we’ll talk to you next week.
Gibbs Léger: “The Tent” is a podcast from the Center for American Progress Action Fund. It’s hosted by me, Daniella Gibbs Léger, and co-hosted by Colin Seeberger. Kelly McCoy is our supervising producer, Mishka Espey is our booking producer, and Muggs Leone is our digital producer. Jacob Jordan is our writer. Hai Phan, Olivia Mowry, and Toni Pandolfo are our video team.
Views expressed by guests of “The Tent” are their own, and interviews are not endorsements of a guest’s perspectives. You can find us on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts.