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, it may be 98 degrees in Washington, D.C. today, but apparently it’s pumpkin spice latte season. I feel like it gets earlier and earlier every year.
Gibbs Léger: Yes, and I rebuke this, because it’s literally going to be—I think they’re saying it’s going to be 100 degrees today. There is no pumpkin spice latte needing to be had right now. I am ready for fall. I’m a fall girly. I love fall spices. I love the fall colors. I love the fall clothes, but it’s summer so no PSL, sorry.
Seeberger: With you 100 percent.
Gibbs Léger: Like I said, it’s not quite fall yet, but Monday is Labor Day, and I heard you had a really relevant discussion this week.
Seeberger: I did. I spoke with Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. We talked about the importance of labor organizing as we get ready to celebrate Labor Day. We also talked about MAGA extremist attacks on public education and how to address the root causes behind teacher shortages.
Gibbs Léger: Well, I’m excited to hear it. Her speech at the [Democratic National Convention] was really great, and she is such a powerhouse. But first we’ve got to get to some news.
Seeberger: We do. And speaking of the DNC, it’s really set a groundwork for what’s going to happen throughout the course of the next 60-some odd days as we barrel toward Election Day in November. Several polls have come out since the DNC showing that Vice President [Kamala] Harris has got about a roughly four-point advantage over Donald Trump, according to an average of polls on FiveThirtyEight, and those several battleground state polls showed that that race is even closer in those states.
We’re seeing that Vice President Harris has really expanded the map, put states that were favoring Donald Trump previously—like Arizona, or Georgia, or Nevada, or North Carolina—has put them into really fierce competition. She’s actually, according to FiveThirtyEight, ahead in every single one of those states except for Georgia, by just a small margin.
So, we’re really seeing that this race has changed dramatically over the course of the last six weeks. The polls also show that she’s erased Trump’s advantage among independent voters, which is going to be really crucial over the course of the rest of the election and will play a huge role in some of those states that I previously talked about.
Harris is also continuing to see a surge of support among women, young voters, people of color. And that’s why she’s been able to put these states in the Sunbelt region of America into play. It’s because they have a disproportionate margin of those voters. So, we’re really seeing a transformation in the polls, but we’re also seeing that translate into a transformation in voter registration, which is really exciting.
Tom Bonier from Target Smart—recently, I saw him tweet out earlier this week some new voter registration data, which showed that women voters, Black women voters in particular, have seen registration rates that are like 175 percent higher than they were last year.
Gibbs Léger: Wow. That’s remarkable.
Seeberger: Yeah, it’s amazing. It’s super exciting. And so it’s clear that this energy that we’re seeing embodied at the DNC, embodied at the rallies, reflected in the polling, is also starting to translate into real hard voter data registration. So, really, really exciting.
The polls are also showing that the favorability rating of the candidates on the two tickets are diverging quite dramatically. We see Vice President Harris and Gov. [Tim] Walz have either neutral to positive favorability ratings, while Donald Trump and JD Vance are going down, down, down. The more that the American people are seeing of them, the less that they like them. And Harris and Walz are really generating an excitement that’s engaging more Americans in this election.
We saw last week, the DNC actually had about 15 percent more viewers than tuned in for the RNC just a few weeks prior. So that’s a really big deal. And it’s a testament to people being interested and excited and enthusiastic about the case that Democrats are putting before the country.
Gibbs Léger: It really is, Colin. Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz clearly have a message that is resonating with the American people. They’re out there talking about how they’re going to grow the middle class by lowering costs, supporting workers who are bargaining for better wages, and taking on corporations who are cheating or price gouging consumers.
And I think they’re doing an excellent job of laying out the stakes in this election, too. In her acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination, Vice President Harris called Trump an unserious man—which made me kiki—but noted that the consequences of putting him back in the White House would be serious. And she’s absolutely right.
And speaking of unserious, how does a candidate for president pull what Trump has pulled this week about a prospective debate? If you haven’t heard, he nearly pulled out of debating Vice President Harris for more than 24 hours. I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if he does this a few more times before they’re slated to debate on September 10.
Seeberger: You know that’s right.
Gibbs Léger: Exactly. And this debate is scheduled to be on ABC. He doesn’t care about helping Americans make informed decisions at the ballot box based on the candidate’s stances on issues. He doesn’t want people to clearly understand his policy positions, because his radical vision for the country on issues from abortion to education is wildly out of step with the majority of Americans. He’s worried the cracks will show on live television.
The vice president, however, remains committed to actually having a debate. I mean, look, it’s no wonder that Donald only does interviews with conservative propaganda outlets like Newsmax and OAN.
Seeberger: Oh, don’t forget the MyPillow guy, Daniella.
Gibbs Léger: Oh my goodness. How could I forget the MyPillow guy? I try to forget the MyPillow guy. He only wants to go where he can control the narrative. He calls into programs whenever he can to presumably read from notes throughout his interviews, and he lashes out at real journalistic outlets like ABC, which he called “ABC fake news” this week in response to them hosting a debate.
Can I just say that as far as insults go, zero out of 10 for that one. No stars.
Seeberger: Yeah, it’s lame. It’s tired, and it’s just weird, Daniella.
Gibbs Léger: Yes, it’s weird.
Seeberger: If you need more evidence of how dangerous and out of touch Trump’s ideas are, you need to look no further than his tax policies—the ones he’s enacted in the past or the ones he’s talking about enacting in the future if he were to win.
New analysis from our colleagues at the Center for American Progress Action Fund shows that Trump’s tax legislation signed in December 2017 significantly reduced federal revenues, because it cut taxes overwhelmingly for the richest Americans. Federal revenues are way below the levels that were projected before the enactment of the 2017 [Tax Cuts and Jobs Act] legislation.
These tax cuts finished the job that President George W. Bush started, namely breaking our tax system by giving handouts to the wealthy in the form of tax breaks. This is not how it’s supposed to be. When unemployment is below 5 percent, federal revenues should be much higher than what we’re seeing right now, which is 19 percent. That would have been unheard of before President Bush took office.
Federal revenues are important. They’re the dollars that the federal government uses to fix roads and bridges, provide benefits for veterans who bravely served our country, and help seniors retire with dignity. Yet Donald Trump is willing to sacrifice all of that so he can hand out more tax cuts to his rich friends.
Gibbs Léger: Yeah, it’s a really harrowing analysis, especially when you look at what he plans to do if he’s elected to a second term. Our colleagues at the Center for American Progress also analyzed Project 2025’s tax plans, which align closely with Trump’s radical vision. Project 2025 aims to raise taxes on low- and middle-income households to, yet again, finance deeper tax cuts for the wealthy and large corporations. Surprise, surprise!
Seeberger: Mm-hmm.
Gibbs Léger: The plan also aims to replace all individual and corporate income taxes with a consumption tax in the long term. This could take the form of a value added tax well above 45 percent—I repeat, 45 percent—which would produce an enormous one-time burst of inflation and raise prices.
So, here’s the bottom line: These plans overwhelmingly shift the tax burden on some middle-class Americans, period. They would result in an average $5,900 tax increase annually for the middle 20 percent of households, and an average $2 million tax cut for the top 0.1 percent.
Seeberger: $2 million?
Gibbs Léger: Yeah, $2 million. For the people who need it the least.
Seeberger: Because why, exactly?
Gibbs Léger: Yeah, because those are his friends. There’s no reason we shouldn’t believe that Donald Trump will enact this harmful tax. He’s already given massive tax breaks to the wealthy in the past, at the expense of a good chunk of our federal revenues, as we mentioned.
And many of the people who drafted these new plans are his former staff. Trump has already proposed, on record, a haphazard tariff plan that would raise costs for a typical family by $3,900 a year on average. His approach to taxes has already been designed to do one thing and one thing only: shift burdens onto lower- and middle-class Americans so he can give big tax breaks to his billionaire buddies.
Seeberger: Yeah, I mean, I’m no economist, but I did the math on that one and you’re 1,000 percent right about that, Daniella.
Gibbs Léger: Well, that is all the time that we have for today. If there’s anything else you’d like us to cover on the pod, hit us up on Twitter, Instagram, or Threads @TheTentPod. That’s @TheTentPod.
Seeberger: And stick around for my interview with Randi Weingarten in just a beat.
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Randi Weingarten is the president of the American Federation of Teachers. Before that, she served as president of the United Federation of Teachers, AFT Local 2 in New York City, and worked as counsel to prior UFT presidents. She got her start in education teaching history at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn.
Randi Weingarten, thanks so much for joining us on “The Tent.”
Randi Weingarten: I am so glad to be with you. Thank you for having me.
Seeberger: Of course. Nobody better to talk to this week because Labor Day is on Monday. I wanted to start by hearing from you about what’s the significance of Labor Day for your members, the teachers that you work with, and American workers writ large? In honor of the holiday, can you talk about your experience as a teacher and kind of how you got into organizing work?
Weingarten: So, May Day is close to the end of the school year. Labor Day is close to the beginning of the school year. In fact, many folks are back into schools the week or two before Labor Day. And then you have places like New York City, where I taught, which is traditionally the day after Labor Day.
So for my members, it is both a celebration of collective bargaining and labor and workers’ rights, but it’s also completely jittery because it’s the start of the new year—completely a sense of both aspiration and anxiety. But it’s also so much of a hope for a new year. And Labor Day is about a hope for a new future.
And so I often tease and laugh when people say Labor Day is about the sales, because for teachers who take so much money out of their own pockets, Labor Day is about the sales, but it’s also about how we celebrate and conceive of what work looks like today and tomorrow, but, as important, about what we do as labor to actually create the better life and the brighter future that our families and our communities need.
Seeberger: You talked about that better future. There’s a real need to improve working conditions for teachers in this country. And in response to the nationwide teacher shortage, we’ve seen some states are trying to put forward real haphazard “solutions” like reducing qualifications for teachers.
Can you talk about the root causes behind the shortage, and how reducing qualifications won’t actually address fixing those problems, and what policymakers should be doing instead?
Weingarten: So, do you have about 24 hours? Or is this two minutes?
Seeberger: We’ll probably err on the side of the latter.
Weingarten: OK. And the reason I say that is because there’s—in the two-minute version, think about this: Would we ever in a million years when somebody in our family was going through some really intense surgery, basically say, “Oh, by the way, this surgeon doesn’t need qualifications”?
Seeberger: Yeah.
Weingarten: “We’ll just teach on-the-job training.” People would say, “No, of course not.” If it was an airline pilot, would we ever in a million years say, “Oh, the apprentice can just come in and hasn’t had very much flight lessons.” People would say, “No, of course not.” The level at which society, on a macro basis, doesn’t think that teachers need qualifications and skills is at the root of the shortage.
On a micro basis, every parent understands when a teacher has a skill and knowledge to be able to lure out of a child that child’s confidence, that child’s sense of self. That requires skills. It requires skills of pedagogy. It requires skills of, like [psychologist Jean] Piaget used to say, of understanding well-being and child development. Classroom management requires a lot of skills.
I mean, how many of us have had to actually manage 30 adults? Could you imagine managing 30 children or 24 children? So, because we’ve all gone to school—and frankly, our teachers make it look easy—we don’t really, truly understand the skills that are required to be a great teacher. And so, at the root of the shortage is that misconception.
And the other root of the shortage is something that’s actually really good about America but both bad about America, which is that there are very few other things we do in America to create broad-based opportunity, but public education. But because we don’t have the muscle of saying, “OK, it’s not just the concept of public education. It’s what it actually means to provide a great public education,” we don’t actually pay for what we need to pay for, for all children.
So these two things, the sense that we make it easy or we make it look easy so people don’t understand it, really is skill-based. And the second is that we say we want to provide it to everyone, but we don’t actually fund it for everyone.
So then what happens is teachers are paid these days about 20 to 25 percent less than what they could get for the same skills and knowledge in the marketplace. And that’s, that’s too big of a gap. Teachers go into teaching because they want to make a difference in the lives of kids. I would never want to take that away. That is an amazing, amazing, piece of who teachers are.
But they don’t go in to be Mother Teresa. They actually have to provide for their own families. And it should be a decently paid middle-class job. Nobody expects to be rich, but we need to increase the pay so that people can actually have the lives that their families need.
And then the other piece is that this notion of, teacher working conditions are actually students’ learning conditions. So, if you don’t have what we fight for—during COVID, for example, we fought to actually be able to breathe in schools, to be able to deal with having a respiratory illness, and not have to wear—look, if we had less masks, and more testing, and better ventilation systems, it would have been a lot easier. Office buildings have that. Why don’t we have that in schools?
That’s a learning condition. An asthmatic student understands why ventilation is important. A teacher understands why ventilation is important. And then if you’re wearing masks on top of it, ventilation was really important. And how many of our buildings are still not air conditioned or are freezing in the winter and hot as hell in the summer?
And the last thing I’ll say is, think about things like labs, lower class sizes—all of these things that are children’s learning conditions and teachers’ working conditions. So no surprise that teachers take out somewhere between $500 and $1,000 a year for books and supplies for our kids.
Our union has actually just given out our 10 millionth book to kids. The last two years, we’ve given out over 2 million books, a million books a year. We take the money to buy these books out of dues. We do this with First Book, but that’s because kids don’t have libraries at home, and we don’t have classroom libraries. So we have tried to do some of this work to actually spark the love of learning and the love of reading.
Seeberger: You touched on a lot of the preexisting challenges facing our education system. Unfortunately, we’ve also got these novel and imminent threats to our children and educators. And those are really living and breathing in—I’m sure what you’re familiar with—Project 2025, where we see far-right extremists laying out plans to eliminate the Department of Education, ultimately end the Title I program, eliminate Head Start, right?
Can you talk about how these institutions actually help support the education of our kids? And what does it look like to completely do away with them instead of actually helping make the system even better?
Weingarten: Thank you for that question. Because what Project 2025 is, is it’s the culture wars on steroids. It’s like every single bit of the culture wars that the extremist right wing has wanted, as well as people that don’t want to pay taxes for other people’s children have wanted, it’s all in Project 2025. They use the bureaucrat-ese so people wouldn’t actually know what they meant.
So for example, when they say, “eliminate the Department of Education,” so people who don’t know what the Department of Education does say, “OK, it’s a bureaucracy.” No, they’re saying eliminate what the Department of Education does.
So, let’s just take what I just said about we want to help all kids. How did we get to a Department of Education? It really started, frankly—even though the department came about a few years later—it started as part of HEW, Health and Welfare. And it started with [former President Lyndon] Johnson’s war on poverty.
What did Johnson do? Lyndon Johnson was a teacher before he was president of the United States of America. There are a couple of other jobs in the middle, too. But as a teacher, he was a teacher in Texas. And what he saw was his kids walk to school without shoes. They needed education, but they were so bereft because of the poverty, they needed to have something that could level the playing field.
That’s what Title I is. It’s leveling the playing field so that the federal government is giving funding for tutoring, for paraprofessionals, for other kinds of things. So kids who are really poor, we try to level the playing field so that they can have the opportunity that middle class or rich kids have.
Frankly, if you need glasses and you can’t see a board, then you’re going to have a problem in school learning.
If you don’t have enough food at home and you’re hungry as a child, you’re going to have a problem learning. If you have a toothache and that tooth is really, really hurting, you’re going to have a problem learning. If you don’t have a set of clean clothes, you’re not going to want to go to school.
So, this notion of how we level the playing field, that’s what Title I is. Then, even in some ways, even more shocking than getting rid of Title I—to me, getting rid of Title I is pretty shocking, because I taught in a Title I high school. I had to scavenge for chalk sometimes in the high school in which I taught. I often gave my kids books to read, because they didn’t have books at home.
What about kids with special needs? What about kids who are neurodivergent? IDEA, the Individuals with Disabilities Act—they want to take that away. So all the things that are about leveling the playing field. And then what about when a kid faces bullying or discrimination? What the Department of Education also does is make sure that somebody is calling balls and strikes, so that those kids are not back in the basement again.
What about a kid who—take the right wing who looks at and sees anti-Semitism all over? What about fighting anti-Semitism? What about fighting anti-Muslim hate? What about fighting racism? That’s what the Department of Education does.
And I’ll give one more thing. We have all these programs to try to say first generation, second generation of kids who want to go to college, we say, “Go to college, go to college, go to college.” What about those kids who go into teaching, go into nursing, go into the Army, are supposed to have public service loan forgiveness? They want to get rid of that, too. They want to get rid of anything that levels the playing field, that cancels student debt, that levels the playing field so that poor kids have the opportunities of rich kids and middle-class kids.
How do you create opportunity? How do you create that kind of promise of America if you don’t do that for our children? So that’s what Project 2025 is. And then on top of it, they say, “And if there’s money going into education, we just want it to go to vouchers. We’re going to start the public schools, and we’re going to give it to vouchers.”
And who gets the vouchers these days? We know this from the program in Arizona, we know it from the program in other states. Rich kids—meaning parents who are wealthy, who send their kids to private schools already—those are the people who are actually taking the vouchers.
Because what are these private schools doing? They’re hiking their tuition so only the people who were there already are getting it. So on education, we need more money. We need more labs. We need more internet. We need more stuff so that kids can actually learn the technology that is facing us.
We need more experiential learning. We need more classroom libraries. We need more afterschool activities. We need more music. We need more art. So they’re saying get rid of all that, put it into vouchers, and don’t help the kids who actually have special needs.
Seeberger: Of course, that is a core feature of Project 2025, but it’s not the only attack that we’re seeing from MAGA extremists who really have made clear their plans to make things like book banning or censoring curriculum a key federal priority in policymaking.
Can you talk about what those sorts of attacks—how those actually play out and affect teachers, as well as the quality of education that our kids get, and what that really means for our broader democracy?
Weingarten: Thank you for that question. So up until now, what I’ve been talking about is basic financing. Like, what it actually costs to educate children, and what it actually costs for us to have the best and the brightest teachers to make a decision that they’re going to go into teaching as opposed to go into something else. And so there’s a bunch of funding issues. But these issues are even more venal than the funding issues, because what both Project 2025 does, but also people like [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis and others, [Texas Gov. Greg] Abbott, is they try and create fear instead of hope.
So all of these things—the book banning, the censoring of history, the telling teachers that they shouldn’t have contracts or that they should always be scared about what’s going to happen—all of this basically breaks the bond between teachers and kids and teachers and families. It says you should be fearful about this, as opposed to we should actually have a community.
So think about it this way. Take the law in New Hampshire that we went to court on. We got it reversed on the lower level. The New Hampshire school education department has appealed it. Fear was the feature. It wasn’t just an ad hoc consequence. It’s the feature. It’s the point. The vagueness is the point. Because they always want teachers to be on edge about, “Well, can I answer that question of kids or am I going to get in trouble? Am I going to get on a list? If a kid has a problem, can I respond to it? Can I create the humanity that we need? Can I create the critical thinking?”
Think about what happened during McCarthyism, and then take that up to now. If somebody said in McCarthyism, “I’m teaching about communism. I’m not teaching communism. I’m not proselytizing.” But don’t you think kids, when you keep on talking about Russia, Russia, Russia, don’t you think kids need to know what you’re talking about?
If you’re talking about issues right now, like what happened on January 6, don’t you think kids need to know what that was about? If you don’t talk about critical thinking, if you don’t talk about honest history, if you don’t talk about the slavery and the effects of slavery and what happened in Jim Crow, how do kids actually have a sense of how to understand history and how to understand knowledge?
So, the book bans, the censoring of history—it is intended to keep teachers in compliance instead of meeting the needs of kids, and it is limiting the knowledge that kids have from school. And then on top of that, they get all of this, shall I say, disinformation and misinformation from other sources that then they don’t know how to navigate through. So it creates the disinformation. It creates the indoctrination that they accuse us of, but that they are really doing.
Seeberger: I’m curious, you represent a union, right? You are very concerned with the safe working conditions of your members. One of the ideas that we have heard Donald Trump talk a lot about over the course of the past year, year and a half or so is actually stripping federal funding from schools that require students or educators to get vaccinated against communicable diseases. I’m talking about things like measles, right?
Can you talk about your concerns with plans like this and what you think the practical impact would be if he got elected and actually tried to pursue?
Weingarten: The arc of history has actually bent towards more knowledge and more justice and understanding of what hurts us, and how you try to prevent that. So I talked, for example, about COVID and about respiratory issues like asthma. What has happened is there is always a little seed of truth in virtually everything others advocate for. And I think what happened here was people didn’t know, including us, how to deal with COVID.
It’s not just that we had a pandemic. But we had a very bad zig-zaggy response to it. A lot of it was not anybody’s fault. But we really should learn from how to do a better response to pandemics. And if we say that kids are priorities, they should be priorities. Which means we should have opened schools.
I mean, we said in April 2020, a month after the pandemic started, we need to open schools for kids and they need to be safe. But there wasn’t a general sense about what makes them safe and how to do this and how to actually help make sure that we have a welcoming and safe environment. That is part of the conditions that we need to do for kids and for the people who staff schools, teachers, paraprofessionals, bus drivers, whatnot.
Seeberger: Mm-hmm.
Weingarten: When I say there’s a seed of truth in the issues, so what ended up happening is a lot of us said, “Yeah, these vaccines will help reduce illness in schools. Let’s make sure that these vaccines, even though they’re new, they seem to be working. Let’s make sure that everybody gets vaccinated.” Just like we had programs for the vaccinations for measles, for mumps, for so many other childhood diseases. And you saw this firestorm saying, “You are doing something to our bodies.”
Now, what was the difference? These were new. But the difference is also the disinformation and the social media disinformation and the fact that any information that is out there could be used and weaponized. And the problem we have is, here you have the irony of Donald Trump. One of the only things I think he did well during his administration was rush these vaccines to get them out to market. But then he walks away from it because he has no morals to say that what they did was good.
And what we have right now is such disinformation about this, that we may actually take huge steps backwards in terms of the onslaught of child communicable diseases which we had long since thought we had ended. Polio, all sorts of other things.
So it’s scary, because how do you teach truth to people when people will say, “I don’t believe you.” Like they’ll say, “Robert Kennedy Jr. just said X or Y or Z. You’re not a doctor.” Well, he’s not a doctor either. But this notion that civics taught that there are certain things that we hold as inalienable rights, including that kids and teachers should be safe at schools, that there are some things we know from health care about how to create safety and how to create good health care—that all of this stuff is at risk.
So I think it’s not just the issue about vaccines. I think the root of the problem is that we’re a post-truth society, and this whole issue of who you trust actually means more than what the evidence is. And we have to create ways of creating unity and American patriotism again, and a sense that what unites us is more important than what divides us.
And frankly, that is part of what Kamala Harris and Tim Walz’s appeal are. Because they’re talking about, “Look, we may disagree on policy, but this notion of team humanity, this notion that we’re there for each other, this notion that we’re going to keep each other safe and we’re going to keep our neighborhoods welcome,” I think that is the root, frankly, of the issues around vaccines and the root of this issue around fear and this issue around hate.
Seeberger: Well, I think you got to a positive note there at the end of your answer, and we on “The Tent” like to end on a positive note when we can. So, we have just a couple of minutes left, but I wanted to talk about what are some things that you’re feeling hopeful about this Labor Day? Are there some recent victories or wins that you think are really making a difference in the lives of teachers and students?
Weingarten: I don’t think you can be a schoolteacher, I don’t think you can be a labor activist, if you don’t feel hopeful. I don’t think you can do the work that I do if you don’t see hope and light. Not Pollyanna-ish, but I see a future and see a country with a future. I feel hopeful about the excitement that Kamala Harris is bringing to this election, about the energy that Coach Walz is bringing to this election. I feel hopeful every single day we have a new school year and the hope and aspiration that brings, the future that that brings, the opportunity that that brings.
I feel hopeful that our union has actually organized 185 new units in the last two years, because people want that opportunity. People want that voice. People want what comes when you do things together, to work together, to march together, to create progress, which is possible for regular human beings, because we fight for a better life. We fight for a better life because of economic opportunity. We fight for a better life because of education opportunity. And we need people in office that are going to fight for regular folks.
So I feel hopeful because I see a change. I see us winning school board elections. I see us giving out books as other people ban books. I see kids saying, “I want to be a teacher.” I see kids going into different fields, graduating from high school, graduating from college, feeling like they can make it in America.
That’s what gives me hope. America gives me hope. When Kamala Harris talks about the promise of America, that gives me hope. When we see our future in front of us, not behind us, that gives me hope.
Seeberger: Randi Weingarten, I think that was the perfect note to end on. Thank you so much for joining us on “The Tent.”
Weingarten: Thank you.
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Gibbs Léger: Well, that’s going to do it for us. Thanks for listening. As always, please go back and check out previous episodes. Before we go, Colin, we are back to “Bachelorette.”
Seeberger: Back, baby.
Gibbs Léger: We are so back.
Seeberger: It has been a while.
Gibbs Léger: It’s been a while.
Seeberger: Some things have happened.
Gibbs Léger: A lot has happened. A few things have moved, if you will. I need to talk about Jenn and Marcus, because I am not fully done with the second episode this week. I did not watch “The Men Tell All.”
But on Monday when she called Marcus last for the last rose, I was like, really? I’m not one who’s prone to conspiracies, but something tells me that the producers are like, “We need to create a little bit of drama, so why don’t you call Marcus last?” Because there is no way that that girl feels that Marcus is on the bottom of a list.
Their chemistry has been so evident from the very beginning. I mean, I was screaming at the TV. I was like, what are you doing? So that’s my conspiracy theory for you, Colin, is that the producers made her pick Marcus last. Because clearly, he is the front-runner.
Seeberger: OK, so this is really fascinating, because I will confess this has been a much harder season for me to keep up with between the Olympics and work and other things, but I did hop in and see hometown dates last week. And it’s funny because I didn’t think that Marcus was going to make it through. So maybe it’s just I’ve missed so much over the course of the season and I’m just trying to play catch up, but that kind of surprises me. But I will take your word for it, Daniella.
Gibbs Léger: OK. Thank you.
Seeberger: Now, we also have to talk about another leading lad, and that is Devin.
Gibbs Léger: Yes. Mr. Pete Davidson.
Seeberger: Mr. Pete Davidson lookalike. Yes. So Devin, I feel like, I don’t know if he’s pleading for his life or looking for sympathy or is just really in need of attention, whatever it is, and validation. But Devin just like, knock, knock, knock, strolls on over to her suite, and is like, “We need to talk.”
Which, you never want to hear that.
Gibbs Léger: Never.
Seeberger: If you’re the bachelor or the bachelorette, you never want to have a contestant come do that, especially not one of your close to finalists. And he’s like, “I just feel like I’m in this, but I’m not sure if you are, and I’m not sure I’m getting—like, I think you want to be with me, but I don’t know if you need to be.” It was very, very weird. And she’s like, “No you idiot, I love you.” And so, Devin, Devin, Devin.
Gibbs Léger: I understand that when you tell somebody you love them, as he did, I think maybe last week, and you don’t hear it back from them, you want to get some reassurance. I also would like to remind Devin that he signed up to be on “The Bachelorette.”
Seeberger: Ding, ding.
Gibbs Léger: Where at the end, she chooses between two people. And so like, why do all these people lose their minds at the end? Like, “Oh my God, blah, blah, blah.” This is the game that you were playing. Yes, it’s your heart, but it is a game. It is a reality show. And so why are they surprised when this happens at the end? Drives me bonkers.
Seeberger: Indeed. Other things that drive me bonkers—I know you didn’t get to watch “The Men Tell All,” but for those of us who did, Sam M. dared to show his face. And oh man, let me tell you, Jenn was having none of it. She went in and dragged him. It was like, you’re never going to find somebody if you don’t change your ways. And she just read him for filth. It was incredible.
Gibbs Léger: Oh, that sounds amazing. I will definitely have to watch that tonight because he is— ooh. If somebody deserves dragging on national television, it’s Sam M. So, we’ll see what happens next week, how it’s going to play out for her. Saying “I love you” to two guys usually doesn’t work out very well, but I don’t know.
Seeberger: I will say one thing, I do have to say I’m glad that they didn’t do the episode, “The Men Tell All,” and then the finale spread out over the course of three weeks. I’m glad that they’re kind of packing it in here, bringing it to a close, so we can all move forward. We’ve got football coming.
Gibbs Léger: Right.
Seeberger: There’s other things that we have to catch up on.
Gibbs Léger: “The Golden Bachelorette” is coming.
Seeberger: Also that!
Gibbs Léger: Yes, got to make room for that. I’ve got to clear the plate. All right, folks, that’s it for us this week. As always take care of yourselves, and we will talk to you next week.
“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. Erin Phillips is our lead producer, Kelly McCoy is our supervising producer, Mishka Espey is our booking producer, and Muggs Leone is our digital producer. Hai Phan, Matthew Gossage, Olivia Mowry, and Toni Pandolfo are our video team.
You can find us on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts.