Harry Litman [00:00:06]: Welcome to Talking Feds, a roundtable that brings together prominent former federal officials and special guests for a dynamic discussion of the most important political and legal topics of the day. I'm Harry Litman. The virus has roared back to dominate national life even as large pockets of the country and some of its leaders continue to act as if the worst is behind us. The numbers are beyond grim. New case reports have set all time records no fewer than 11 times in the past month. We record the day after the old record was shattered by more than 10 percent with 75000 new cases. The U.S. now has had over three and a half million cases and one hundred thirty five thousand deaths, with both rates trending sharply upward. There's essentially no good news. President Trump tried again this week to claim we have just about the lowest mortality rate.
Harry Litman [00:01:04]: In fact, it's the seventh highest, and that's about the best we can say. The red blue politics of the virus also ensnared the policies around school reopenings in the fall. President Trump rebuffed draft CDC guidance for reopenings as too tough and expensive. His view, said the White House, is that schools must open in the fall and the science should not stand in the way of this. New footage of the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis in May showed him visibly distraught and not aggressive toward the officers. Democratic leaders, however, signaled that the political will to pass comprehensive police reform legislation had ebbed and might depend on a flip of the Senate in November. Senate Republicans, meanwhile, began to push a set of broad legal protections for businesses and schools to sharply limit lawsuits for people who contract the virus.
Harry Litman [00:01:57]: So it was a week of deep political rifts over life and death issues. And to break it all down. We have a terrific panel with two new guests to Talking Feds and one returning one first. Max Boot, a columnist for The Washington Post and so my former colleague. He is also the Jean J. Kirkpatrick, senior fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a global affairs analyst for CNN. He's authored six books, most recently The Corrosion of Conservatism, and advised the presidential campaigns of Marco Rubio, Mitt Romney and John McCain. Max, thanks very much for coming.
Max Boot [00:02:33]: Thanks for having me.
Harry Litman [00:02:34]: Zerlina Maxwell. Zerlina is a writer and MSNBC political analyst and Sirius XM senior director of Progressive Programing. Previously, she was a field organizer for the Obama campaign and worked as the director of Progressive Media for the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign. Her first book, The End of White Politics: How to Heal Our Liberal Divide, was published just two weeks ago on July 7th. Zerlina, thanks for coming.
Zerlina Maxwell [00:03:04]: Thank you so much for having me.
Harry Litman [00:03:05]: Finally, we are really pleased to welcome back to Talking Feds, Congressman Joaquin Castro. Congressman Castro is currently in his fourth term representing Texas's 20th Congressional District. He serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, as well as the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the House Education and Labor Committee. He was the 2013 co-president for the House Freshmen Democrats and chaired a 2016 national presidential campaign, namely that of his twin Julian. He is simultaneously involved in a long list of community service projects in San Antonio. Notably, he founded SA reads, the city's largest literacy campaign and book drive that has distributed over 200,000 books to more than 150 schools and shelters across the city. Congressman Castro, thank you so much for joining us again on talking feds.
Joaquin Castro [00:04:04]: Thanks for having me.
Harry Litman [00:04:06]: All right. Let's start with the surging numbers for the virus, which seem dumbfounding and we barely absorb them when they're swamped by a new set. It seems only about a month ago, I think it was only about a month ago that numbers in the 40,000 daily seem to already head spinning. Now we're nearly twice that. I guess the place to start is this. Are we at square one here? Is there, in fact, any progress that's been manmade or it's almost as though we've been thrown back to February.
Max Boot [00:04:37]: Well, I'll jump in. I mean, I'm sitting here in New York and clearly a lot of progress has been made in New York because in April, New York was the center of the Coronavirus, not just in the United States, but also around the world. And right now, we are way, way, way off the pace being set by states such as Florida, Texas, Arizona and others. You know, I think the New York experience shows that as bad as it gets, you can still beat it. And I think we haven't exactly beaten it, but we certainly beaten it down to manageable proportions now where we can start to reopen some of New York City and do so in a safe and responsible manner. But it's been really shocking for me to see what's been happening in the rest of the country, that as we've been getting better here in New York and throughout much of the Northeast, the Sunbelt has been getting so much worse. And it's just staggering to me that people in the Sunbelt, especially these Republican governors in states such as Florida, Georgia, Texas and Arizona, seem to have learned absolutely nothing from the experience of New York. They seem to have utterly ignored what scientists like Dr. Fauci and so many others have been saying. They have not mandated mass. They were late in their lockdowns and too fast in lifting those lockdowns. This is just a catastrophe. And I have to say it was it's still worse than in New York in terms of total number of deaths that it is anywhere else in the country. But unfortunately, it feels like the rest of the country starting to catch up. And there's just no excuse for this, because back in April, when New York was getting pummeled, the disease was still relatively new. There was not enough testing. We didn't know very much about it. And so we were kind of on the front lines. But now we know a lot more about it. We know what we need to do. We need to test. We need to trace. We need to quarantine. But we're not doing any of that. And above all, we just need to wear masks. That's the simplest, dumbest thing we could possibly do. But it's also, in many ways the most effective, because it really does stop the spread of the disease. Here in New York people are wearing masks, but from what I see in a lot of the country, there is a significant minority who are not.
Zerlina Maxwell [00:06:34]: I don't get a second everything that Max, that ironically, I am quarantined with my dad, who is a microbiologist who studies coronaviruses. He taught a unit on coronaviruses right before quarantine at Norfolk State University. So I'm here in Virginia, thankfully, with a governor who is a doctor and has listened to the scientists so far. But to Max's point about the masks, that is definitely one of the more concerning parts about what's happening right now, because I always sort of felt the SunBelt would get hit hard, not just because of the partisan nature of the governors and their response. But also because of the hospital infrastructure and the ability of the health to be taken care of at the scale that was going to be necessary, especially after watching what happened in New York. And so what I'm most concerned about in this particular moment is how much time it's going to take us all collectively to come to a place where we understand that we are only as healthy as the least healthy person who walks into the same room, and that we have to have the perspective that we are putting masks on to protect others and also ourselves. That until we all comply with what the scientists are saying, this is just going to continue to get worse. And without a federal policy at the top, that's setting the guidelines for everyone based on the science this is going to spiral out of control. This is still very much the first wave. The ripple out of New York into other parts of the country and a reopening spike. And so I think as I sit here, I'm just very afraid for what the future holds.
Harry Litman [00:08:10]: You guys both bring up the mask. We had a really vivid illustration of the politics of the mask this week when the mayor of Atlanta has been a pretty strong leader on the national scene. Keisha Bottoms imposed stringent mask requirements for Atlanta and was slapped with a lawsuit from the governor, Governor Brian Kemp, who's been among the most stringent advocates for loosening things up. So even saying to her, you have to listen to me and go looser. What is it about something so basic as a mask that falls prey to political red blue divide?
Joaquin Castro [00:08:48]: I was flying back from Texas to Washington, I think, sometime in May, and this was after President Trump started politicizing the use of masks. And I said that I felt like some people were starting to not wear masks at that point as a political statement. And it turns out that that is happening all over the country now. That there is a real group of people who are loyal to the president, who follow the president, who are trying to make a political statement by not wearing a mask. Now, I think some of that would have happened anyway on its own. In fact, if you look at some of the history of the so-called Spanish flu 100 years ago, there were people that didn't want to wear a mask. But I do think that it was exacerbated by a president who politicized the use of the masks. And I was actually a few weeks ago having a conversation with Matt Gaetz from Florida, the Republican from Florida, as we were waiting to go vote. And I asked him because some of the Republicans were wearing masks and some weren't. And I said, well, you know, how do you figure out who's going to wear masks and stuff and why aren't some people wearing a mask? And he said that he thought that some of the folks-- not him, he was that he actually had a mask on at the time--but he said he thought some of them felt like wearing the mask was muzzling them. And they didn't want to be muzzled. So that's kind of the Republican voice about part of the protest.
Harry Litman [00:10:05]: Is that what is it? It is that? Is it a sign of weakness somehow? If you really have that kind of good American can do spirit, you won't rely on a mask? It just doesn't make sense as a logical matter that it would map this way onto red blue issues.
Zerlina Maxwell [00:10:21]: There is a couple of thoughts I have. Donald Trump has performed a very specific type of masculinity since he came on to the public scene. But certainly as president, he's sort of a macho guy. And everything about him and how he projects toughness is sort of all about like, I don't need a mask. I'm a real man kind of thing.
Harry Litman [00:10:41]: Real men don't wear masks.
Zerlina Maxwell [00:10:42]: Yeah. Real men don't wear masks. And, you know, a virus doesn't care about that. So it's sort of funny when I see it. And also really, I think it feeds this narrative that caring about other people is a sign of weakness. And I don't know if this is because I'm reading Mary Trump's book or I'm sort of in that headspace. But, as a clinical psychologist, I think she articulates in the book an interesting perspective on how weakness in the Trump family and how he was raised by his parents is just not tolerated in their household. You can't be sad. You can't show compassion. You can't show weakness. And so that's who is the president. And he is projecting that onto his supporters. Now, it's complicated because you have a lot of supporters who are women who are out without masks, getting very angry at people who ask them to put masks on.
Harry Litman [00:11:28]: Yeah, we have these videos of them screaming at people and then shouting Trump 2020.
Zerlina Maxwell [00:11:32]: Yeah, it's a phenomenon. So it's not just men who are like this male Trump supporters, I should say. But I do think that's one aspect of it. The other aspect of it is simply that I think we are in the moment where only the diehard believers, and that's a small group of people, right? Sometimes we may overstate the amount of people that are really willing to go into a rally without a mask. And so one of the things we saw in Tulsa, which I thought was important for everyone to see of the individual Trump supporters surrounded by empty blue seats because the empty blue seats represent everyone else. The empty blue seats are the rest of us, the ones who do care about other people. The ones who do put on masks to protect our fellow neighbors and Americans and other people who we come into contact with and our family members and our households. I think it's a complicated thing. And I think Mary Trump's book made me think a little bit differently about Donald Trump. I think part of the mistake we make sometimes is trying to figure out the political motive for some of his behaviors when it's a more gut level than that. It's not a strategy. It's just who he is. He has demonstrated time and again that he is someone that lacks compassion. In a way that's why this is not partisan, because there's plenty of Republicans who have compassion and care for other people.
Max Boot [00:12:45]: I would echo a lot of what Zerlina said. I was really struck by a poll that came out just in the last few days where 78 percent of Democrats say they wear a mask all the time and they leave their home, but only 45 percent of Republicans. That's a pretty stark difference, and that's actually an increase in Republican numbers from where it was a month or two ago. And I think a lot of it does have to do with President Trump. And, as Zerlina said, his notions of weakness and masculinity and all this other stuff. But also a lot of it is just that he's been in denial about the Coronavirus since day one. I mean, he was saying it's just a few people. It'll go away like a miracle. It'll be gone by April. It's not a big deal. And so if everybody is wearing a mask, that is an admission in his mind that it is a big deal, that it's a sign of his failure. And so therefore, he doesn't want to wear a mask and a lot of his followers don't want to wear a mask. And I think the larger picture is that this is really a trend that long predates Trump, which is this Republican war on science, war on expertize and I think have always been there. But Trump has really brought them front and center because you have this kind of crazy, irrational anti-science conspiracy monger who is the president of the United States. And so he is legitimating and spreading those views in a way that right now it's just the worst possible time. I mean, it's bad enough in normal times right now, those beliefs are literally killing people. I think that is a huge part of the reason why more than 130,000 Americans are already dead and more are going to die compared to vastly smaller number of people in countries like South Korea and Germany, where they have greater scientific literacy, greater respect for expert opinion, and have been able to deal with this pandemic much more effectively than we have.
Harry Litman [00:14:21]: Max, you've been extremely tough on him this week. Many of the deaths are directly attributable, to quote you, to the epic failure of leadership by a president who infamously proclaimed, I don't take responsibility at all. And you otherwise said the worst president ever keeps getting worse. And it is kind of a fool's errand, I think, to try to psychoanalyze him. But Zerlina, I think what you say about Mary Trump, there's really a lot there. Because, look, he has on occasion seem to be--he did eventually, for example, put on a mask. Yet here, I think in the poll that Max talked about, we have over 50 percent of the American people saying they strongly disapprove the biggest choice they were given of his handling of the pandemic. He's getting clobbered. His presidency may really be slipping from his grasp, right? If it goes this way and he is to lose the history books will say it's because of how he handled the virus. And yet he just keeps doubling down and doubling down. And it doesn't look as if there's anybody even in his circle who can just take him in and slap him around and say, what are you doing? Forget about compassion just in terms of your own political prospects. You are committing suicide.
Zerlina Maxwell [00:15:32]: I think that's probably why he ended up putting the mask on. He definitely had to see, you know, the latest polling that has him double digits down in all of the states that matter. And he fired his campaign manager, promoted Bill Stepien this week. He clearly doesn't think that things are going well. Another thing somebody said, and I want to cite them because I think it was a good point. It was Mayor Rahm Emanuel on this week. I was in a segment the other day and he said his commutation of Roger Stone is also perhaps an indication that he understands that his prospects are not so good in this moment. And so he was sort of getting that out of the way because he may not have an opportunity later. And whatever political damage, it may be worth it to do it now. And so I do think that there are signs that he is becoming more aware that he has failed. But I don't know that there's anybody that can tell him so because it doesn't--I mean, there hasn't been anybody at this point in there who is willing to stand up to him. And now we're actually in the big crisis that we all, I think, from the beginning of this feared. We sort of come to the precipice of a couple of wars and there are other emergencies. But this is once in a generation type of emergency with the worst person in charge. The damage has been done in such a significant way. I think the trauma of this moment on the country, we haven't really grieved. I don't know what the repercussions of that are going to be. The children are out of school. I don't know what the repercussions of that are going to be long term. The damage has been done.
Joaquin Castro [00:16:59]: And you know what's interesting is that this could have gone very differently politically for the president. And he was gonna have a tough reelection before this. But if he and or his administration had found a way to be levelheaded, to handle things in an orderly way, to marshal a competent response, I think there's a good chance the American people would have rallied behind the president. And behind the administration. And there would have been a feeling like we're all in this together in a positive way for the president rather than we're all in this together and people feel like we're on a sinking ship because you've got such a bad leader at the helm. And what has made it doubly worse is you have these governors like Greg Abbott in Texas and DeSantis in Florida, in Deucy in Arizona, who have followed Donald Trump's lead. In Texas, for example Greg Abbott followed this see no evil, hear no evil approach. I think some of these governors purposely slow walk the testing because they didn't want to be the face of the problem, the way New York was on the news on CNN every day for a month. And in Texas, they were slow to taest, slow to trace the infection, slow to treat people. And now you see what's happened. COVID-19, is surging and it seems in Texas that we're setting a new record for deaths each day, sadly, infections and so forth. And it's tough to see what political decisions are going to be made by leaders in states like Texas. What political decisions they're willing to make because they're so scared of the right wing of their party.
Harry Litman [00:18:24]: Ask Jeff Sessions right?
Joaquin Castro [00:18:25]: Yeah, that's exactly right. There are these figures in these different states who are trying to pull their governors to the right. And so the governors are unwilling to make tough decisions or cede control to the local governments to make the tough decisions that are actually going to drive this pandemic away. So it's hard for me at this point to see what decisions they're going to make that are actually going to end this thing. And that's a very scary thought. But unfortunately, with some of these leaders, I think that's where we are.
Max Boot [00:18:53]: It's shocking to me how even at this late date, when it's obvious what a catastrophe is unfolding in the SunBelt, these governors are still making decisions that are going to make it worse. Like, for example, you mentioned, Governor Kemp in Georgia actually trying to prevent the city of Atlanta and other municipalities from mandating masks. I mean, that is crazy suicidal policymaking. Or Governor DeSantis in Florida saying that all the schools have to open, even though every single day almost Florida is setting a new record and is now the global epicenter of this disease. And then if you open schools in that kind of environment, the odds are it will probably result in super spreading of the disease.
Harry Litman [00:19:31]: That really seems right to me. And if there's a method to their madness, part of it, they're cowed by Trump, part of it they don't want to be, as you say, the poster child on the news. But I think all of them were rolling the dice and gambling. And now it's an increasingly remote odds on some kind of economic recovery. I think, to go to the congressman's point that was Trump's hope. And the irony or really the tragedy is that their fecklessness with respect to getting the virus under control is going to be disastrous economically, right?
Zerlina Maxwell [00:20:04]: There is parts of the economy that are open. The question we're asking ourselves is how to send the people back in unsafe conditions. So if you're saying we're go to reopen everything. Well, how are the workers in the restaurant going to be safe? Because that's really what matters, not the customer who wants to eat the meal or the person getting the haircut. I care about the person giving the haircut and their safety because that that fundamentally is how you can have an open and robust economy unless you have safety for the people who are working in it. I don't know if whatever stock market spike you're going for is worth it in the end.
Harry Litman [00:20:38]: You know, the success stories have all have this theme in common, right. Rhode Island, Gina Raimondo and Michigan, Gretchen, when they actually listen to the scientists, one of the illustrative trends of just this week is the trashing-- can you believe it?--of Fauci. That savage op-ed and the general distancing from the administration. A couple of you have mentioned that specific really killer issue that I think everyone's starting to feel now. I, as a parent have that, oh, my God, it's almost fall feeling. The reopening of schools becomes, I think, quite a not just political flash point, but really a lifestyle one. So we have the same dynamic Vice President Pants who first said we were going to get guidance. Then he pulled the plug. The president said that the document of guidance from the CDC was very expensive and too rough. And his White House spokesman said, you know, we have to open the schools and we can't let the science get in the way. It looks like we're starting to have a kind of a national square off in red blue terms. Again, on this basic question of when are the schools going to open even?
Joaquin Castro [00:21:43]: My sense is that most parents are not going to send their kids back to school. I say that as a parent of four year old and a six year old and honestly, even if I wanted to send my kids physically back to school, I don't think my wife would let me. You've got so many people that are fearful of having all those kids and not just kids, but the teachers, the cafeteria workers, the administrators, everybody in that setting. And the fact that people could be passing the coronavirus among each other. And I think most people are gonna sit it out. And so in Texas, for example, you have a lot of school districts, they just delayed the start of the school year, three weeks. At this point, they're saying you should still be able to send your kids physically to school, but you can also go online only, at least for the first semester. Part of the challenge with that. I mean, there's a lot of challenges with that for parents. People that have to leave their house to work and now they don't know what are they going to do with their kids. That's been a problem for a few months for a lot of people. But also the fact that our school system was not set up for effective distance learning in this way, especially for young kids. Maybe once you get the high school and so forth. But it's been a real challenge.
Harry Litman [00:22:50]: You know, I have high school kids. I can vouch it doesn't work and it doesn't look good there either.
Joaquin Castro [00:22:57]: Well, it's just been very tough all around.
Max Boot [00:22:59]: It's like one bad option after another. And I say that as somebody who has one stepson going into a new middle school, one stepson going into a new high school and a son who's supposed to start college at the University of Miami, which is now in the middle of a hot zone in the United States. And as a family, we're dealing with these issues and there's just no good option here because we don't want to keep kids at home. It's bad for them. It's we don't want it. Nobody wants it. This is a terrible way to spend an academic year, especially when you're entering a new school. You need to make new friends. You need to get acclimated. You can't do that via distance learning. But then the issue is, is it going to be safe to send them to school? And the schools and universities we're dealing with are basically telling us, yes, we think we have adequate safeguards in place. But the question they can't answer, and I've asked this repeatedly of high school principals and provost at the University of Miami and others as what happens when the kids go back to school and, you know, there's going to be infections. You know that you're going to be seeing COVID spreading, especially in a dorm environment. Are we going to send the kids to these schools that reopened get them back like a week later, because COVID is spreading and they're going to shut down? Or they're going to keep going, even if there are cases and nobody seems to really have any idea about this.
Zerlina Maxwell [00:24:13]: I don't get the sense that a lot of parents are going to put their kids in harm's way. I do fear and I have a high level of anxiety around the choices that parent. Well, it's not a real choice to decide. Do I go out and work this job that will provide for my child, you know, to be able to feed my child? And how is my child or who's going to watch my child in that situation? But if the schools open, I can put them in school. But you're knowing the risks. So it's like you're choosing between not being able to take care of your family and potentially putting your child into a dangerous situation. And that just feels like you're giving parents no good options. I just feel like this is the perfect storm of terrible things. And the fall in particular is going to be in the middle of what all the scientists have predicted is going to be a second wave, not a spike, but a wave that is mixed in with flu season. Once that begins to happen in late August, according to many of the predictions. I just don't see any scenario in which you can open a school and have a shared campus with cafeteria workers and administrators and teachers who all then also live out in the community with the rest of us. There's another topic I wanted to mention that's not directly related, but it's one that isn't brought up as much, and that is prisons, because even in my own family, I've had five extended family members die of COVID and one family member who unfortunately passed away. He worked in a prison. We should care fundamentally about the people who are in prisons and those who are incarcerated because of their humanity, of course. But I think a lot of people would probably be persuaded to care about that as well if you told them that the people who work in prisons, the vendors who bring the food to prisons, they go to the grocery store with you.
Harry Litman [00:25:56]: That all sounds right to me. And to Max's point, it's not simply that they're not providing guidance. They're actually have to date suppressed guidance. You have a CDC document that people in the education community have praised and it's just been smothered for really no good reason, except, again, it doesn't give the bottom line prognosis that Trump and Pence want to provide. And we're talking about something that the CDC document itself identifies as the single biggest risk for a really new raging out of control in the so-called second wave that doing this, talking about, which is a foregone conclusion. It happens in every virus. And here's another forgone conclusion. If we're talking about this like adults, it's just going to happen whenever schools reopen that a student, they won't just get sick. They'll be students who die. And we can think about that in sort of public policy terms and take that as a sort of risk that just has to be taken aboard. But it's going to be a complete crisis for whenever it happens and will we sort of spasmodically then contract and open up, etc.? There's just no sense of stability or certainty. All right.
Harry Litman [00:27:10] It's time for our sidebar feature that for new listeners to Talking Feds, we take a moment to explain some of the terms and relationships that are foundational to events in the news. And today's sidebar concerns a topic that's figured large in the Trump administration, most recently with the publication of John Bolton's book, namely classified material. What is it? What restrictions can the government put on its dissemination? And to tell us we're very lucky to have Sandra Bernhard, who pretty much everyone knows, but she got her big break in 1983 in King of Comedy when I was around and got her coffee and drove her places. But since then, our careers diverged a bit as I became a lawyer and she became a world famous comedian, actress and musician, well known for her work on Roseanne, 28 times on David Letterman. And some fantastic one woman shows like Without You, I'm Nothing. Sandra Bernhard will tell us now about the restrictions on classified information.
Sandra Bernhard [00:28:09]: What are the restrictions on and penalties for leaking classified material? In the United States, classified information is information that a federal government agency has designated for limited or restricted dissemination because of its potential to harm national security or foreign relations classification law exists and statutes and agency regulations. But the classification system has since the 1940s been primarily a product of executive orders. President Obama's 2009 executive order 13506, which revoked and replaced prior classification orders, provides the current classification framework. The order sets out three levels of sensitivity top secret, secret and confidential. This division is based on the expected degree of damage to national security than an unauthorized access would pose. Many government employees and contractors need access to classified information to do their jobs. Government agencies grant them security clearances to allow for such access. For example, someone who holds a top secret clearance may lawfully access information designated top secret, secret and confidential. The government has different ways to enforce the prohibition against restricted dissemination of classified material, depending on the seriousness of the breach. At the least serious, it can impose disciplinary action or revoke the security clearances of employees who mishandled classified information. Next, several studies impose civil fines or other penalties for mishandling or leaking classified information at the most serious. There are criminal penalties for people, whether or not they are government employees, who collects leaked classified information intentionally to harm national security interests. For example, promoting the success of military enemies. The most notable among them is the broad reaching 1917 Espionage Act. Prosecutors used the Espionage Act to charge both Edward Snowden and Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and several counts in Chelsea Manning's court martial charge sheet incorporation the Act. Other criminal information security laws include the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which imposes up to a 15 year prison term for the intentional leaking of information identifying a covert agent. That was the law that prosecutors used for the investigation of the leaking of former CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity, which led to the conviction of vice presidential aide Lewis Scooter Libby for lying to investigators and obstruction of justice. For Talking Feds, I'm Sandra Bernhard.
Harry Litman [00:30:52] Thanks very much to Sandy Bernhard for her illuminating explanation of classified materials. You can listen to Sandy every week Thursdays is at one o'clock on her Sirius XM show. Sandy Land.
Harry Litman [00:31:07]: All right. We still have time for one more topic. And I wanted to take a few minutes to assess where we are with the focus on possible national reforms to police practices in the wake of the George Floyd killing and other high profile incidents involving police and unarmed citizens. We saw new video this week of the Floyd episode which showed him distraught and kind of panic stricken, not aggressive. But there's a sense, I would say overall or this is what I wanted to ask that maybe has the moment for real reform, which seemed timely a couple months ago, has it waned? And is it something that we're unlikely now to see in the current Congress?
Zerlina Maxwell [00:31:51]: I don't think that we're going to see it in this particular Congress. I just think that you don't have the makeup of the senators who are in good faith coming to the table with serious proposals. I mean, I think that it was a moment of substantial progress that the killing of an unarmed black man led to legislative action immediately. That is a sign of significant progress. But until we have the makeup of Congress that is willing to pass that, I don't think that anything's going to happen. Unfortunately, it's unfortunate.
Joaquin Castro [00:32:20]: You know, I read reports not too long ago that the social activism and the protests that we saw after the nation collectively witnessed the murder of George Floyds, that those protests were the largest marches, protests I think we've had in the nation's history, at least since the 1960s. And you think about all of the changes that the activism of the 1960s brought in terms of civil rights, voting rights, fair housing and so many other things. And to think that the United States Senate would not even take up the George Floyd justice and policing to me is amazing. I hope that they still will during this term of Congress. But I have to believe that that energy and the passion for change is going to carry over into the ballot box in November, and that if we don't see change in this congressional term, that we're going to see change next term, because a lot of the people that are holding up progress will no longer be in Congress.
Max Boot [00:33:16]: I think that's exactly right. And there's no question that there is a lot of obstacles right now with Trump and the Republican Party still in control of the White House and the Senate. But I think what's really interesting to me is the way the public has reacted to the killing of George Floyd and the demonstrations that followed, because it's really a sea change in public opinion with a majority of the country now embracing Black Lives Matters and calling for police reform, which was not the case even a few years ago. And in fact, there a fascinating interview that I would compare to everybody in New York magazine with the progressive data analyst David Shor, in which he makes the case, sifting through the data that it was really the overreaction of Trump and in particular, the attack on unarmed demonstrators in Lafayette Park, which has really turned public opinion much more heavily against the president than was the case even a few months ago. You're seeing it now, the numbers for Trump are just looking horrendous. Now, they may get a little bit tighter before we get to the election. But right now, for the last month or so, Trump has been more or less in freefall in the public opinion polls. And David Shor again traces it back to the way that Trump dealt with these protests. And what he was essentially trying to do, in my opinion, was to reprise the kind of fear mongering that George Wallace and to some extent Richard Nixon engaged in in 1968. And what we're seeing now is that that kind of fear mongering just is not working. Trump is trying to mobilize white fear and to suggest that his white supporters are going to be attacked. And, you know, Tucker Carlson and others are playing on these racist tropes. But it's really not resonating beyond the hardcore Trump base, which is maybe 25, 30 percent of the country. I think the rest of the country, including most white people, are saying no, their sympathies are actually on the side of the demonstrators. Their sympathy is on the side of Black Live. Matter. When you have Mitt Romney marching with Black Lives Matters I think that's a pretty significant change in public opinion. And Trump is on the wrong side of public opinion right now.
Harry Litman [00:35:11]: Yeah, once again, he called Black Lives Matter a symbol of hate. And you'd obviously playing out of the Nixon and even Wallace play block. And it is remarkable that he's found himself on the short end. So is it your sense, though, that that sea change in public opinion, in the immediate, convulsive aftermath in late May of the Floyd killing is something that will generally hold not to the percentage point, but do you think we've actually turned a corner in public opinion in this country?
Zerlina Maxwell [00:35:43]: I definitely think we've turned a corner. I mean, I think even just anecdotally in your social feed. The amount of suburban white women, moms, sisters, everywhere that I had never seen posts about black lives matter before. People posting about Black Lives Matter and really being upset and passionate about it. I think because we were in quarantine, people didn't have the same amount of distractions to keep them focused on something other than that video that had been going around. And a lot more people watched it than have watched previous videos like that. And I also think that the possibility of intergenerational dialog because everybody's quarantined together. One of the things I was thinking about as you were talking about, you know, the percentage of Trump's base that responds to his divisive rhetoric is racist rhetoric, his attacks on Black Lives Matter and protesters. I've been paying close attention to the idea that he's pushing right now in particularly in conservative media. They're starting to talk about a silent majority again. And one of the things I think that we miss when we debate whether or not there exists a silent majority, which I do not think there is, I don't I do not think there is a silent majority. I think there is a small minority of very vocal Trump supporters and some people who may not want to tell people they support Trump, but they end up voting for him when no one's looking. And that breaks out to an Electoral College win of seventy seven thousand votes. I do not think there is a silent majority of people who agree with Donald Trump. I believe the polling that says a majority have come to support Black Lives Matter and believe that there needs to be substantial reform. But I do think the narrative is starting to be built so that they can have an explanation if the numbers are closer than what the actual votes are. So because of the potential for foreign interference, I think we have to pay attention to them building the narrative that there may be a silent Trump supporter out there trying to take advantage of foreign interference, setting a narrative now for explaining that away if that is the case again and it's a very terrifying prospect.
Max Boot [00:37:42]: Yeah. I don't think I think it's actually more sinister than what Zerlina says, because, yes, on some level, all this stuff from Trump and Barr and others about so-called fraud with mail in ballots, of which there is really no evidence. All that stuff is in one sense, is kind of building an excuse, an alibi for Trump if he loses to say that he was cheated out of his victory. But really sinister part of it is if he refuses to recognize that he was defeated. I think that's a real possibility, especially if the election is close. So I think just for the sake of our democracy, we'd better have a landslide Biden victory, because if the election is at all close, if it's swings on one or two states, you could very well have a situation where Trump and Barr and others in the administration, basically backed up by the Republican Party, refused to recognize Joe Biden's victory. And try to throw out Biden ballots, say that there was fraud to all these kinds of things to try to game the system, to keep Trump in the White House. And I think that is kind of the worst-case scenario. But it's something we have to think about. And the best-case scenario is what Zerlina said is that Trump is building an alibi in the event that he loses.
Harry Litman [00:38:44]: Congressman, any thoughts about whether we've have turned a corner here and what awaits if Trump does go down?
Joaquin Castro [00:38:51]: I think that what we saw with the George Floyd murder was so beyond interpretation that that's what has really moved people and opened their eyes. You know, if you think about the evolution of police brutality cases before technology provided cell phones so that everybody is walking around as a quick social documentarian and provided platforms like Twitter and Facebook to make things go viral or to distribute them to people quickly. Before that, in the 60s, 70s, 80s, so forth, obviously before there were a lot of police brutality complaints that were filed. And oftentimes those complaints went nowhere. And people in black and brown communities especially lost their lives. People got physically injured. People carried emotional and mental scars because of encounters with police for a long time. But it was treated as a matter of credibility. An esteemed police officer in society versus the word of somebody they were arresting or some, quote unquote, low life on the street that .hey came across and well, who are you going to believe? And then actually, I think what happened in 1991 was the Rodney King case gave us a glimpse of what was to come in the 2000s, which is almost by happenstance. The Rodney King beating was taped. And so there once you have something on video, there's no longer a question about whether something happened. Now, we moved into this era over a dispute of interpretation. I think that was the case in the Eric Garner video. Was Eric Garner so a threat, even though there were five police officers around him? Same thing with the Tamir Rice video. Were the police officers reasonable in believing that Tamir Rice had a real gun instead of a toy gun? I think what changed with George Floyd is that George Floyd was handcuffed on the ground the police officer had his knee on his neck. There were bystanders that were telling the officer that he was going to kill George Floyd. And that's exactly what he did. And I think that fundamentally changed things. And I do think that it will continue to change attitudes. But as I told when I spoke at a Black Lives Matter protest or march in San Antonio, I said, all of this energy and all of this passion has to turn into legislative change. At the end of the day, this has to be funneled into, of course, societal change and attitudinal change, but legal change as well. And I think it's going to happen.
Harry Litman [00:41:09]: All right. There's an end. I detect a consensus anyway that change is afoot, but not before January. All right. We are out of time. We have just a minute left for our final feature of five words or fewer, where we take a question from a listener and each of us has to answer in five words or fewer. And today's question from Grace Landi, who asks--speaking of doomsday scenarios--can Trump cancel the November election?
Zerlina Maxwell [00:41:36]: No, he can't.
Joaquin Castro [00:41:37]: Hell, no, he better not.
Harry Litman [00:41:40]: I think that was 5, totally. I was going to say not legally. Probably not illegal.
Harry Litman [00:41:49]: Thank you very much to Max, Zerlina and Congressman Castro and thank you very much, listeners, for tuning into Talking Feds. If you like what you've heard, please tell a friend to subscribe to us on Apple podcast or wherever they get their podcasts. And please take a moment to rate and review this podcast. You can follow us on Twitter @TalkingFedsPod to find out about future episodes and other feds related content. You can check us out on the Web TalkingFeds.Com, where we have full episode transcripts and you can look to see our latest offerings on Patreon. Where we post discussions and actual full episodes about special topics exclusively for supporters. There's really a lot of original special material there and you can just go and look at what it is before deciding whether you might like to join our sponsoring audience. Submit your questions to questions@talkingfeds.com, whether it's for five words or fewer or general questions about the inner workings of the legal system for our sidebar segments. Thanks for tuning in. And don't worry, as long as you need answers, the feds will keep talking.
Harry Litman [00:42:59]: Talking Feds is produced by Jennifer Bassett and Rebecca Lopatin, our editor is Justin Wright. David Lieberman and Rosie. Don Griffin are our contributing writers. Production assistance by Ayo Osobamiro and Sam Trachtenberg. And our consulting producer is Andrea Karla Michaels. Thanks very much to Sandy Bernhard for her illuminating explanation of classified materials and our gratitude, as always, to the amazing Philip Glass, who graciously lets us use his music. Talking Feds as a production of Delito, LLC. I'm Harry Litman. See you next time.
