Transcript:
Colin Seeberger: Hey everyone. Welcome back to “The Tent,” your place for politics, policy, and progress. I’m Colin Seeberger.
Daniella Gibbs Léger: And I’m Daniella Gibbs Léger. Colin, did you watch the French Open?
Seeberger: I did not, but I did see that Coco Gauff did win the title. Very exciting.
Gibbs Léger: We’re very, very happy. I believe she’s the first American woman to win it in two decades, when Serena won it last.
Seeberger: That sounds right, yeah.
Gibbs Léger: Exactly. I’m just so happy for her. And it’s weird because she’s been playing for so long that I forget like how young she is—
Gibbs Léger: —and what an amazing career she has ahead of her.
Seeberger: I know. I can’t wait to watch what she does next. Wimbledon is right around the corner.
Gibbs Léger: It sure is. Breakfast at Wimbledon.
Gibbs Léger: That was a terrible accent.
Seeberger: Well earlier today, I hear that you had a really interesting chat with the newest senior fellow for economic policy at the Center for American Progress?
Gibbs Léger: That is right, Colin. I spoke with Jared Bernstein, the former chair of President Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors. And we had a frank talk about the impacts of Republicans’ reconciliation bill, from the deficit to health care to cuts to SNAP [the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program]. And here’s what he said this bill would do to this economy.
Jared Bernstein: They did give a few crumbs to people at the lower end. That’s often a talking point for Republicans who say, “This has something for everyone,” where they don’t tell you, “Well, it has a ton more for the group at the top.” This one is just true Robin Hood in reverse: They literally take from the poor to give more to the rich, and they do so with deep cuts to health coverage and nutritional support.
Seeberger: Gosh, that sounds like a really important conversation. But before we bring that to you, we have to get to some news.
Seeberger: Because Daniella?
Seeberger: Things are going crazy.
Gibbs Léger: Yes, they are.
Seeberger: We talked about Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s breakup last week, and you’ll never guess who was trying to change the page over the weekend.
Gibbs Léger: Gee, who might that be?
Seeberger: —and without consulting California’s governor, Gavin Newsom (D). This move was clearly designed to stoke tensions, provoke chaos. Also, he could exploit it for political points on Fox News.
Gibbs Léger: That’s exactly right. It’s disgusting, it’s gross because we’re talking about real people’s lives.
Gibbs Léger: He’s using civilians and soldiers as pawns in this game that he’s playing because he’s trying to shore up his terrible approval rating because he’s not doing a very good job of presidenting right now.
Gibbs Léger: And you know, Colin, it’s funny—I mean, not really funny because nothing about this is funny—but it’s funny because Trump’s own DHS [Department of Homeland Security] secretary, Kristi Noem, who was the former governor of South Dakota, had this to say about deploying the National Guard without state approval, and I quote: “Federalizing the National Guard would be a direct attack on state’s rights.”
Seeberger: You know, even a broken clock is right twice a day, huh?
Gibbs Léger: Yeah, exactly. This is the first time in 60 years that a president has deployed the National Guard to a state without their request, and it’s being done in direct opposition to California’s elected officials who, like you said, have the resources that they need to keep the public safe and arrest people who are violating the law.
So in short, Trump deployed the Guard not to solve a problem but to create one.
Seeberger: Yeah, and to make matters worse, after he deployed the National Guard, then he called in 700 Marines. There are now roughly 5,000 U.S. troops on the ground in Los Angeles. That’s more than double the amount of American and international forces that fought in some major battles in Afghanistan in 2002. They’re all sleeping on the floor of crowded warehouses so Donald Trump can pull off yet another political stunt.
I do have to make a point, Daniella: Trump wants to make this all about immigration, this, that, the next. You know what? Six months ago, there were not protests springing up all across southern California. There were not people who were living in fear of having their lives completely upended. But this is exactly what Donald Trump’s own actions are causing to happen. That’s what it’s all about with this guy: politics and favors—not actually helping Americans, not actually delivering on his campaign promises to lower costs.
Seeberger: Speaking of lowering costs, you know what’s not going to lower costs, Daniella? Trump’s crackdown on innocent migrant agriculture workers who are picking crops across the Central Valley in California, which the LA Times reported scaled up dramatically on Tuesday. They reported that ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents were actually hunting down workers who were picking blueberries in fields all across the Central Valley.
Gibbs Léger: Unbelievable.
Seeberger: Yeah, yeah. And while Trump says he’s going after violent criminals, what we’re seeing this week is that he is going after the workers who supply 40 percent of the crops in the United States. Good luck finding those blueberries on the shelves of your grocery store. Or if you can, how much more are they going to cost you?
Seeberger: You want to know who else isn’t helping Americans, Daniella? Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary, RFK [Robert F. Kennedy], Jr.
Seeberger: Yeah, he’s gone completely off the rails.
Gibbs Léger: You mean, moreso off the rails?
Seeberger: Correct. And here to talk about RFK, Jr. and his work to gut our nation’s public health is the wonderful Andrea Ducas, the vice president of Health Policy at the Center for American Progress. Andrea, it’s great to have you.
Andrea Ducas: Hi, great to be here.
Seeberger: Welcome back. So can you tell us about what’s happened in recent days with RFK? And some of our listeners may have heard some things have been happening with the CDC, or Center for Disease Control, Vaccine Advisory Panel.
Ducas: Yeah, happy to. So the CDC has an Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. This is called ACIP, which your listeners might have seen in the news. On Monday, Secretary—sorry, I still hate calling him secretary.
Seeberger: Yeah, I know. I know. It’s hard to believe.
Gibbs Léger: Just say “RFK Jr.” It’s fine.
Ducas: RFK Jr., on Monday, announced that he was unilaterally firing the entire advisory committee. Just fired ACIP. This is crazy. This is an advisory committee that’s been around for 60 years. They are the entities that actually guide vaccine policy. So when you think about how a vaccine goes from development to getting in someone’s arm, there’s a whole R&D process. The FDA [Food and Drug Administration] then approves the vaccine.
And then ACIP takes a look at the approval and all of the scientific research to make recommendations about who should get the vaccine, who should be the priority. And that undergirds some decision-making by insurers who decide, “You know what, ACIP recommends that this vaccine be given to kids. We’re going to make sure that we cover it without cost-sharing.”
When the Affordable Care Act was passed, one of the things that it did was set up a set of services that would be provided free of charge. So a lot of people now, when they go to the primary care doctor, pay nothing for their annual checkup. They pay nothing for any other vaccines. That’s because those are ACIP-recommended vaccines.
So this panel, the members of it are illustrious scientists. They go through extensive vetting processes to get onto this panel, for which they serve specific terms. The meetings are open to the public. It’s a very transparent process, everything that goes into ACIP recommendations.
And Secretary Kennedy—our anti-vaxxer in chief, who has basically spent his entire career trying to undermine vaccines—came onto the scene—after promising Sen. [Bill] Cassidy (R-LA) he would not touch ACIP—and just fired everyone.
So something that a lot of people don’t realize is now not only do we not have ACIP, we also don’t have a director of the CDC. We don’t even have an acting director of the CDC. So there is one person right now in charge of vaccine policy in this country, and it is RFK Jr.
Seeberger: Well, that’s terrifying.
Gibbs Léger: That’s exactly what I was going to say. That is absolutely terrifying.
Gibbs Léger: So along those lines of RFK and vaccines, so he revoked the CDC’s COVID-19 vaccine recommendation for children and pregnant women. And this comes on the heels of earlier moves by the FDA, also under his watch, that may result in health insurers ending coverage, like you mentioned, for COVID shots for healthy adults under 65.
So, I mean, why did he do this? Is it just because he is completely anti-vax? Like, is there any scientific reasoning behind any of this?
Seeberger: What’s the motivation?
Ducas: I mean, really, he is an anti-vax crusader. I mean, it’s hard. I try to be really pragmatic and rational. You give people the benefit of the doubt even when you’re on opposite sides of the political spectrum.
This man is a lunatic. He is an anti-vax evangelist. He has spent, I’m not even kidding, I mean, he spent the last 30 years of his career doing nothing but trying to undermine public confidence in vaccines. And now, it’s very ironic because now he’ll get up and say, “The public’s very skeptical. There’s been all this debate.” It’s debate that’s only had because he has been stoking it and fueling it. And the outfits that he has been on the board of and enriching himself at the expense of have been fueling it, too.
Ducas: On COVID-19 specifically, I mean, there’s always a conversation. Remember at the beginning of the pandemic? We all remember the beginning of the pandemic.
Ducas: When science was sort of happening in real time, and we were learning about who was at risk. And remember how hard it was to get a vaccine at the very beginning?
Gibbs Léger: Hunger Games, yes.
Ducas: Yeah, including Trump supporters that were chomping at the bit—and the president himself—to get these vaccines. We relied on science to determine who would get them first, who was at greater risk. We know that an older person with lots of comorbidities is going to be a higher risk than a 21-year-old healthy person with COVID-19. We also know that very young children and pregnant women are at really serious risk of bad outcomes. We know that. That’s in the science. And we know that a lot of people have underlying conditions.
I mean, I think there’s this image that, “Oh, healthy people will be fine.” Who is this average healthy person that has no health problems at all? They have no chronic disease. They have nothing, right?
So, no, this is all a personal goal of his that he’s had for quite a long time. And just today, as an example—or, no, it was yesterday; I just saw it today on Twitter—RFK put out this very, very, very long—twitter needs to go back to its character limits—very, very, very long tweet just saying, “All of these ACIP members had conflicts of interest. We went from however many vaccines in 1986, going to kids, to more than 60 now, and this is crazy, and none of them are looked at with placebo control.” I mean, it’s all complete nonsense, right?
And to think, this is what this person—“You know, in the 80s, we only had this many vaccines. Now we have this many more. That must be a problem.” Well things are developed, right? They’re invented. We learn more.
Gibbs Léger: We learn more.
Seeberger: We’re protecting more people.
Ducas: As he disclosed during his own confirmation hearing, he vaccinated his own children, right?
Ducas: I mean, it’s wild. I don’t know how you look at this move and everything leading up to it—which again, runs counter to every single thing he said to Sen. Cassidy, which we all knew was a lie anyway—but looking at this, I don’t know how to take away anything other than he wants to make it as hard as possible for anyone to receive vaccines, even routine vaccines.
Seeberger: It’s terrifying. I mean, I was really struck by your comments about how RFK Jr. has effectively consolidated unprecedented power by making these terminations. Also, coupled with the CDC vacancy. And yet, that is happening at the same time that he seems to be becoming more unmoored by facts and is getting bolder in the steps that he’s taking.
What do you think it all means for the American people’s health and the future of public health in the country?
Ducas: Yeah. I’m really, really worried. I mean, there’s not only this, but this is also happening against the backdrop of really dramatic cuts to our public health infrastructure, right?
Ducas: Billions of dollars of cuts to the National Institutes of Health, right? All of these grants that we’re doing long-term studies to try to find cures for diseases or develop a vaccine for HIV—all of that disrupted.
Ducas: Career scientists who’ve dedicated their scholarship to investing in America’s health and security not able to do their work anymore.
And on top of that, we have what’s going on in Congress, which would rip away people’s access to health insurance. I mean, I am very, very, very worried. I don’t know. Honestly, this is the first time in my career where it’s unclear to me how we get out of this, other than changing who’s in power. But I am worried about our ability to respond to the next pandemic, to just ongoing disease outbreaks—watching these measles outbreaks or whooping cough outbreaks. I am worried about next flu season and what might happen if we don’t have a viable flu vaccine. It’s really, really scary.
Gibbs Léger: Woof. Yeah. Well, here’s hoping that Congress can put on their grown-up pants and maybe provide a little bit of oversight. Andrea, thank you so much for joining us.
Ducas: Sorry to bring us way down.
Seeberger: Well I did hear that Sen. Susan Collins (R) of Maine did express profound concern over all of these terminations. So I’m sure somebody will get right on it.
Seeberger: OK. Yeah, not going to cross my fingers on that one.
Well that’s all the time we have for today. If there’s anything you’d like us to cover on the pod, hit us up on Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky, and Threads @TheTentPod. That’s @TheTentPod.
Gibbs Léger: And stick around for my interview with Jared Bernstein in just a beat.
Gibbs Léger: Jared Bernstein is a senior fellow for economic policy at the Center for American Progress.
Before that, he was chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisors. He previously served as a chief economist and economic advisor to then-Vice President Biden. Bernstein has also worked as a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and was a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
Jared, thank you so much for joining us on “The Tent.”
Bernstein: Well thanks so much for inviting me.
Gibbs Léger: So earlier this week, the Joint Committee on Taxation found that under Trump’s tax and budget bill, millionaires would get a bigger tax cut than the entire bottom half of earners combined. So tell our listeners, who was this bill really written to benefit? And what does it say about this administration’s economic policies?
Bernstein: Well I think the first part of that question is almost too straightforward to observe an answer, which is that it was just so clearly and obviously written to benefit the very wealthy—which, by the way, is a repeat of the tax cuts from Trump’s first term, the tax they call the TCJA, Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
A lot of those provisions expired for technical reasons—technically known as phony reasons—by which I mean they were trying to squeeze the budget into a set of rules so the deficit could look too large. But at the time, they fully expected to expand, extend these tax cuts—again, heavily skewed towards the top if they had the chance, and they’ve just had the chance.
So that’s the most obvious. That just jumps out at you. But it really is uniquely awful in this sense because historically—and I include TCJA one, the tax cuts in Trump one—they did give a few crumbs to people at the lower end.
Bernstein: That’s often a talking point for Republicans. They say, “This has something for everyone,” where they don’t tell you, “Well it has a ton more for the group at the top.”
This one is just true Robin Hood in reverse. They literally take from the poor to give more to the rich, and they do so with deep cuts to health coverage and nutritional support. So that’s the first blush there.
Gibbs Léger: Yeah. You know, if you look at the last few years, our economy has been growing, but now Republicans want to squander it all by exploding the deficit, as we just talked about, to the tune of $3 trillion over 10 years without a war, a recession, or some other emergency that necessitates that type of spending.
So how does that put us at risk when we eventually do face another real crisis?
Bernstein: Yeah, I will answer that. It’s an important question. But before that, let me add $2 trillion—let me see your $3 trillion and raise you two. Because—it’s interesting: We just talked about this phony scoring thing where you put in a bunch of temporary tax cuts to squeeze the budget into a process. It’s called reconciliation. We don’t have to get into the details, but it means you only need 50 votes in the Senate.
Well the way they did that, as I just said, was to pretend that these tax cuts would expire. They do the same thing here: They have a bunch of tax cuts that they claim will expire in a few years. If you disbelieve them, as you should, the cost goes from $3 to $5 trillion. So let’s call it $5 trillion.
Bernstein: Your question, therefore, is even more germane now. Why do this now? And I think that’s a great point. I mean, I think probably you and me and a lot of people at CAP and others on the progressive side would say, “If we’re investing in people, in education, in innovation, in health care, in things that will not just grow the economy but do so in a way that benefits people who’ve long been left behind, we’d be looking a lot more favorably at those investments.” We’d say, “There’s industrial policy where you invest in economic activity on your shores.”
That’s not this. This is a bunch of goodies for folks at the top end and a whole bunch of other nooks and crannies that are in that spirit. So you’re right: It squanders trillions of dollars on very much the wrong diagnosis. And when eventually there’s a recession out there, as your question intimated, we’re going to have much less fiscal space to offset a recession or a pandemic or whatever hits us because of the squandering. That’s your word, and I agree with it.
Gibbs Léger: So in order to pay for these tax cuts for the wealthy, Republicans’ reconciliation bill would dramatically cut Medicaid and SNAP. Those are basic needs programs that millions of families rely on to survive.
So what impact would that have on ordinary Americans, but also our broader economy?
Bernstein: Yeah, really important. I think oftentimes people like us get hung up in these trillions and deficits and share of GDP. We’ve got to talk about how this affects real people. And the measures you just mentioned are the best examples of that.
By the way, I do want to add I think it’s an adverb into what you said, which is, you said, “they pay for” with these cuts. They partially pay for. Quite partially. I mean, all the deficits that we’re talking about include these partial offsets. So yeah, we’re talking about perhaps 16 million people losing health coverage either through direct Medicare cuts or through the expiration of tax credits that help people pay for health coverage through the Affordable Care Act.
There are now estimates that suggest tens of thousands, perhaps a hundred thousand people over the budget window would actually die early because people without health coverage—it’s pretty intuitive—are more likely to have a shorter lifespan than they would otherwise.
So you’re talking about, literally, loss of life here. You’re certainly talking about nutritional shortfall. And when you take money away from a SNAP family, that’s fungible money. So that means that they have to come up with other money to meet their basic needs. To get very concrete, if we think about the impact on interest rates and mortgage rates and therefore monthly payments on housing debt, I saw an estimate today that the bill would kick that up by over a thousand dollars a year.
Bernstein: So those are concrete examples of what we’re talking about here.
Gibbs Léger: So I want to talk about the Inflation Reduction Act. It helped jumpstart America’s transition to a clean energy economy. We were finally starting to actually lead on clean energy manufacturing and adoption, but this bill would screech that progress to a halt.
So can you talk to our listeners a little bit about what passing this bill would mean for our ability to meet the growing demand for energy, period, and for all the jobs that are tied to that growth?
Bernstein: Yeah. A minute ago I said something like, “We’re focusing on the highly skewed tax cuts for the wealthy, but there’s all these other things hidden in the nooks and crannies.” This is one of them that I was thinking of. This is the dialing back of some of the measures under the Inflation Reduction Act, particularly credits to support clean energy, electric vehicles and the kind of production that, as you correctly noted, we saw really growing significantly towards the end of the Biden administration. The Inflation Reduction Act, just to be clear, is Biden-era legislation.
Interestingly, this part of the bill is still quite contentious. We should be clear to our listeners: This bill is not law yet. It hasn’t been legislated.
Bernstein: It is being squabbled about in the Senate right now by Senate Republicans with no Democratic input, no Democrat input.
It will then go back to the House, and they’ll have to reconcile and all that. But there are a bunch of Republicans who are saying, “Wait a second. There is literally a factory that’s broken ground in my backyard in my district, and my constituents are working there. Some of them are working there constructing the factories, others are ready to work there when the factory is built. And we’re not so sure we want to cut that stuff simply because Trump doesn’t like anything that has Biden’s fingerprints on it.”
So we’ll see where that goes. There’s also a question as to whether that’s, we call it
“Byrdable,” meaning whether that’s a legitimate cut in the context of this reconciliation progress. That’s all technical mumbo jumbo to see—watch the Senate to see where that piece goes.
Gibbs Léger: So, Jared, you are a seasoned economist. It means you’ve seen some things. And you’ve worked in several administrations, and you’ve seen a lot of economic policies tried. So what’s your take on where the broad center left needs to go from here, both in terms of economic policy but also in terms of the narrative that’s tied to that policy? The age-old question of, how do we win back the working class?
Bernstein: Well first of all, let me say that having seen a lot, I’ve seen a lot of budgets and worked on a lot of budgets when I was in the government. And it is not hyperbole and I’m by far not the only person to say this, that this is the worst budget I’ve ever seen. And I was watching budgets in the Reagan years.
Gibbs Léger: That’s why I was like, “You’ve seen some.”
Bernstein: That’s how seasoned/old I am. Yeah, as I said, it is beyond the pale to be essentially—and maybe this gets to your question a little bit—to look out on the firmament and declare, “The problem I see is that poor people have too much and rich people don’t have enough.” You’ve got to have a really strange mindset to evaluate this economy that way.
Because in fact—again, this gets to your question—we know that over recent decades, there are a lot of periods where growth has not accrued to a lot of the bakers of the pie, if you will, that a lot of people have worked to help increase this country’s economy, to help deliver services, to help provide health care, to help keep the economy percolating in all the different sectors, and they’ve not received fair compensation for their work. And lots of those people are in the working class, lost manufacturing jobs, weren’t able to find as good jobs.
So clearly we have to reach those folks. And I can only speak from an economic perspective; I’m an economist. There are many other ways in which we have to reach the people we’re talking about here. There’s political and immigration and lots of resentments of all sorts of things, rural, lots of different coalitions.
But from an economic perspective, these folks need to see and believe and have implemented—it can’t just be some policy wonk describing a policy—they have to see how this would become real in their lives. A set of policies that helps reconnect them to the economy’s growth, so they know that if GDP or productivity goes up, they’re getting their fair share.
And that has to do with the kind of health coverage we were just talking about—housing affordability; child care affordability; higher minimum wages; the ability to join a union if that’s what you want to do, to have a better chance of boosting your bargaining power and getting that fair shake; to have ample job opportunities with upward mobility, and not just in manufacturing but even more so in services where all the jobs are. That’s where so much of the job growth is. Eighty percent of our jobs are in services.
A lot of times, I think the person you envision when you say “working class” these days is some guy working in a factory, right? Wrong. I mean, or at least that’s part of it. You should envision a person, often a person of color, who works in services—perhaps a home health care worker who’s taking care of your grandma in a nursing area. That’s the person we also have to reach with the policy agenda I just went through.
Gibbs Léger: So this reconciliation bill could spell economic strife for millions of American families, and the past few months have been tough for a lot of Americans. So I know this is probably a hard question to answer, but I want to know what’s giving you hope at this moment? And what keeps you pressing forward?
Bernstein: It’s not that hard to answer because I really believe that resistance is not futile. I understand that the pressures of lawlessness—we’re talking on June 11—with what’s going on out in LA. So the pressures of lawlessness, of ignoring the rule of law, are getting stronger, not weaker. But most of the decisions that have gotten to the courts, the Trump administration has lost—and by a long shot.
The trade war—which is something we haven’t talked about, but which I pay a lot of attention to; we’ve been focused on the budget today—has consistently been pushed back by resistance from all kinds of sectors. I mean, that’s one of the most—I don’t know that we said this, the budget bill is immensely unpopular. Businesses are uncomfortable with its deficit impacts. I’m sure they love the tax cuts, but they’re uncomfortable with the deficit impacts. Consumers are nervous about the increased interest rates and mortgage rates I talked about. And of course, low-income people take a direct hit from the service cuts. The tariffs are even more unpopular. I mean, they get criticized in The Wall Street Journalas much as they do on MSNBC.
And so that unpopularity has two impacts: One is it does force some pressure on the administration, which is why they’ve rolled back some of the tariffs.
Bernstein: But it’s politically salient. And I’m not here to talk about politics. I don’t want to get out of my lane. But if you keep doing unpopular things, there’s a decent chance that will rebound against you. So this ain’t over.
Gibbs Léger: Well I think that is a great message of hope: for people to keep resisting and keep causing friction and keep speaking out about what you see happening out there. Jared Bernstein, I want to thank you so much for all that you do, and thank you for joining us on “The Tent.”
Bernstein: Thank you for inviting me, and I enjoyed the conversation.
Gibbs Léger: Well that’s going to do it for us, folks. Be sure to go back and check out previous episodes. Before we go, Colin, the Tonys, the best of the award shows.
Seeberger: Yes. So much fun.
Gibbs Léger: What a special weekend. So much fun. As you know, I’m a huge “Hamilton” fan.
Seeberger: Oh, happy 10 years.
Gibbs Léger: Oh my god. Hamil-ten. I just love that performance, and it just got me in all my feels again. It’s just—ugh, it was wonderful.
Seeberger: Always, always delivers. So Cynthia Erivo was hosting, and I thought she did a great job. I loved the interaction between her and one very special guest in the crowd, Oprah Winfrey.
Gibbs Léger: That was really funny.
Seeberger: Yeah. She was like, “You get a car,” in the back. Oh god, it was so good. The awardees—I was just thrilled for Sarah Snook. She had an incredible performance.
Seeberger: And Darren Chris from “Maybe Happy Ending.” Nicole Scherzinger going all the way from The Pussycat Dolls—
Gibbs Léger: Right? What an arc.
Seeberger: —yeah, to a Tony Award-winning best actress. There we go.
Gibbs Léger: Sure. It was really great. And as a theater kid, I just love the Tonys. Even though if I don’t get to see the shows because obviously I don’t live in New York and I don’t have an unlimited supply of money. But I love music so much, and I love the ability of people to perform live.
Gibbs Léger: Right? Listen, there’s some great people who are great performers, and I’m not taking anything away from that. But there is something about being able to run around stage, sing in five-part harmony, and just make it sound like you did this in a studio.
Seeberger: Eight times a week.
Gibbs Léger: Hello. So always will hold a very special place in my heart.
Seeberger: Totally. So I went to school for undergrad in New York, and I don’t know how, but my school was always handing out $10 tickets and stuff like that to shows. And, I mean, it was as cheap as going to the movie theater, which is wild. But it was such a gift and opportunity to be able to go see so much live theater. And I really, really miss it.
So I’ve been promising my daughter that—she’s obsessed with “Wicked,” as all of you know—
Seeberger: —but I’ve been promising her a New York trip. So we may have to get up there so she can go see “Wicked.”
Gibbs Léger: Oh, that would be fun. Speaking of “Wicked”—
Gibbs Léger: We finally got it.
Gibbs Léger: The trailer.
Seeberger: Which I have listened to probably now a thousand times at this point.
Seeberger: Because my daughter’s like, “I want the trailer. I want the trailer.”
Gibbs Léger: What is it with little kids and their accents? They speak like they’re from Brooklyn?
Gibbs Léger: I don’t understand. It’s universal.
Gibbs Léger: “Where’s the water?”
Gibbs Léger: Yeah. I’m so excited. I cannot wait to see this movie.
Seeberger: Looks so good. I am also, though, a little worried it may be a bit intense. The trailer did seem a little bit dark at times.
Seeberger: We’ll see how we take all this in.
Gibbs Léger: Yeah, you may not want to take her. I don’t know.
Seeberger: I may do a prescreen and see how it may all go down.
Gibbs Léger: Exactly. You’ll have to see it twice, how terrible.
Seeberger: Yes. Yeah. Sounds important.
Gibbs Léger: I love Jonathan Bailey. So I’m excited for the entire movie, but of course, I love him very much.
Seeberger: What’s not to love, right?
Gibbs Léger: Absolutely nothing. He is perfect. OK. On that note, y’all take care of yourselves. We’re about to get into summer, so if you’re in D.C., get ready to start complaining about the heat and humidity.
Gibbs Léger: It’s coming this week.
Seeberger: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s about to be bring-a-change-of-clothes-for-work season.
Gibbs Léger: Exactly. And always carry your water everywhere you go.
Gibbs Léger: All right, folks. We will 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.