JD Vance GRILLED By Republicans At VICIOUS Town Hall

Episode Overview

• With two weeks to go until Election Day ("less than three Zachariahs"), hosts Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor analyze a chaotic week in the Trump White House, which included firing the U.S. Ambassador to Greece over a corruption scandal, firing White House Press Secretary Katie Zachariah after 5 days, canceling a live-streamed execution, violating a judge's orders by cutting down trees to renovate a public golf course, and switching sides again in the Russia-Ukraine war.
• The hosts break down mounting administration scandals and foreign policy blunders, from a $6 million Kennedy Center dispute involving Alina Habba, Ric Grenell, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, to Donald Trump lifting Russian diesel sanctions and undermining Ukrainian defenses ahead of winter.
• The episode examines key midterm Senate battles in Michigan (Abdul El-Sayed vs. Mike Rogers) and Maine (Troy Jackson vs. Susan Collins), alongside Vice President JD Vance's CBS News town hall in Michigan, where he attempted to distance himself from administration failures in the 7-month-old Iran war while positioning himself for 2028.
• Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti joins the podcast to discuss her congressional campaign in Pennsylvania's 8th District (which Trump won by more than 8 points in 2024), explaining how an anti-corruption and affordability platform—targeting congressional stock trading, corporate data centers, and broken promises over the Epstein files—can win back working-class and former Trump voters.

Key Concepts

• White House Message Discipline vs. Chaotic Reality: While attempting to deliver an affordability message, Trump went on a tangent about having yellow cushions specially made at 4 inches high instead of 0.5 inches (a half an inch), following a New York Times headline about him spending weeks talking about men's physical appearances. Meanwhile, Trump pleaded on Truth Social on Monday for supporters to watch his event on RSBN instead of Fox News (claiming Fox devotes too much time to Democrats and being politically correct) and posted today that New Mexico should immediately change its name to "New America" to raise home values and incomes.
• The Mechanics of Trump's Russia Pivot: On Friday night, Trump signed an executive order pulling back tariffs and sanctions placed on Russia under a bipartisan law named after Lindsey Graham that Trump had signed weeks earlier. On Saturday, Trump posted on Truth Social that he doesn't want to drive Russia away from the bargaining table, blaming the Ukraine war (rather than his war in Iran) for high gas prices and noting Russia hasn't done much to help Iran so far. However, Trump's recent Russian diesel deal sent roughly $4 million American dollars to Russia for no current market supply; the full deal of 1.8 million tons (300,000, then 500,000, then 1 million over October, November, and December) equals just 3.5 days of global supply.
• Sabotaging Ukrainian Defenses Before Winter: Trump announced an energy ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine that was news to everyone involved, tilted toward Russia, and immediately violated by Russia. Concurrently, reports indicate Pete Hegseth is holding up Patriot missile interceptors, and the administration throttled Ukraine's Starshield internet access (the DoD contract side of Starlink) so Ukrainian interceptor drones could not operate fast enough to stop Russian drones (Vietor adds there have been questions about intelligence around incoming ballistic missiles getting cut off, hedging, "I'm not sure the veracity of that one..."). After Russians blew up a Ukrainian bus station, experts told Vietor that Russia plans to cut off heat and electricity to major cities like Kyiv through the winter to force civilians to flee into Europe ahead of major 2027 elections, adding to the roughly 9 million Ukrainians already displaced (3 million internally, 6 million in Europe).
• Pay-to-Play Corruption and the Kennedy Center Feud: A corruption scandal involving 2 Trump advisors erupted when former Trump lawyer and former U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Alina Habba claimed her husband arranged a business deal supposed to include a nearly $6 million donation to the Kennedy Center that never arrived, accusing former director Ric Grenell of diverting the funds (publicly, only about $270,000 was granted). Wire transfers showed the money came from the Finance Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo to a Texas defense company connected to Habba's husband, Turhan Mildon—a 29-year-old (or possibly 25-year-old; Vietor hedges, "We don't really know his real age... So I have no idea what's happening here") Turkish billionaire in the Venezuelan cement and shrimp businesses with ties to the Maduro regime (including an advisor swapped by the Biden administration whom the DOJ accused of "profiting from starving of Venezuelans"), whose first marriage connected him to Turkish President Erdogan and the DRC President (where he has construction and mining interests), followed by an engagement to a top Venezuelan military official's daughter. Axios reported on an alleged text from Grenell promising Mildon access to Trump, White House staffers, and "VIP events"; Grenell denies sending it because "Kennedy Centre" was spelled "T-R-E" instead of "T-E-R" despite showing his contact photo. While Trump wished them luck in their "feud" and told former Staff Secretary Will Scharf to investigate, Lovett notes that "we can't know because all these people are fucking liars... we don't really know if this money was ever exchanged," illustrating how presidential immunity invites systemic corruption.
• The 5-Day Tenure of Katie Zachariah: Fired over her inability to read out loud after 5 days, 1 briefing, and 2 interviews (offered the job Friday, briefed Tuesday), Press Secretary Katie Zachariah's downfall followed a 6-minute-and-45-second Sean Hannity interview. Politico reported that Chief of Staff Susie Wiles allegedly helped set up the interview, with 2 White House sources calling it "a sanctioned hit," while another report claimed Zachariah booked it herself (Lovett hedges, "Yeah, I don't know," and Vietor calls it a "two things can be true" situation). An insider told Vietor that Zachariah didn't realize Trump's public comment advising her to "think about something else" meant she was fired until she was interrupted during a Wall Street Journal interview and told JD Vance needed to see her (though Vietor hedges, "What wasn't clear is if JD Vance was handed the dagger by Trump and was like, 'Finish it.' That's the part I couldn't tell").
• Manufacturing Nativist Narratives Abroad and at Home: On Monday morning, Trump posted on Truth Social that "migrants have taken over France" and demanded closed borders, echoing past JD Vance comments that Western liberals imported the third world into France, that America has "a bit of a Somali problem," and that Ilhan Omar would be living in a "craphole." In reality, French protests began in Paris suburb high schools where students returned after a heatwave summer to classrooms with no furniture, no air conditioning, sometimes no power, and staffing shortages, before public sector unions joined over the 2027 budget, drawing 500,000 to 800,000 people to the streets. While Vietor hedges that "it's not clear why the protests got out of control..." and whether U.S. voters care ("Who am I? Maybe I'm totally wrong"), a 15-year-old had his hand blown off by a cop's stun grenade, and the unrest precedes France's 2027 presidential elections, where far-right candidate Marine Le Pen leads and could face far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon in a runoff.
• Right-Wing Traps and Coalition Stakes in Senate Races: In Michigan, Trump and Mike Rogers are attempting to tie Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood using a 14-year-old tweet from El-Sayed's half-sister stating their birth mother reminisced about being active with the group as a college student in the early 1970s—over 10 years before El-Sayed was born, and he didn't grow up living with either of them. Semafor (Max Tani) reported that CBS News chief Bari Weiss is pushing reporters to establish a concrete link between El-Sayed and the group (with staffers saying her ideas come from right-wing tweets, and chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford getting in trouble for tweeting about his town hall). At a Saturday town hall, El-Sayed was confronted by "Tommy"—a former Josh Hawley staffer turned Republican operative whose father worked for Bobby Jindal—resulting in an exchange that both sides clipped and distributed.Addressing an op-ed by a former Michigan Democratic Party chair urging voters to leave the Senate ballot blank because El-Sayed speaks with precision on policy but lacks specificity in addressing Jewish community concerns, Lovett hedges on El-Sayed's past rhetoric and whether skeptics can be won over ("I'm going from memory... I just—I don't know..."), but argues that refusing to vote in a critical Senate race is an unacceptable privilege. Meanwhile, in Maine's Senate debate, after a protester yelled that AI data centers destroy the climate and poison water, Susan Collins claimed it was one of Troy Jackson's supporters, prompting Jackson to reply, "Oh, shut up. I did not. I didn't—I don't even know that kid," following Collins' prior comment to Politico that she wouldn't bring up that the mother of Jackson's two children is his second cousin.
• JD Vance's 2028 Positioning vs. Iran War Accountability: With the Trump administration's approval rating around 36%, JD Vance used a CBS News town hall in Michigan to project relatable empathy—bonding with an audience member whose children are 3 months old (born July 11th) and 21 months old by noting his baby Alex was born July 19th, 8 days apart—and claiming he feel uneasy about officials getting rich off public trust while asserting he has seen "not a single shred of evidence" of Trump's corruption. However, Vance brushed off criticism of the 7-month-old Iran war (where the U.S. sent 50,000 troops) and claimed ignorance when questioned by the husband of Nicole Amor, one of 6 soldiers killed at a Kuwait base on March 1st, despite wide reporting that the Army ignored warnings to move the base, lacked drone air defenses, had soldiers working in a thin-roofed trailer, lacked sufficient medical support, and was tracked by Iran.
• Connecting Anti-Corruption to Cost of Living in PA-08: Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti—who previously worked for the Obama Treasury Department and Pennsylvania Auditor General—entered local politics on the Scranton School Board in 2017 (bringing in then-AG Josh Shapiro after an audit exposed a CFO writing hundreds of thousands of dollars in false checks to a mechanic buddy) and won a 2019 special mayoral election with 37% of the vote as an Independent after the prior mayor was indicted in July 2019 for hiding $5,000 bribery bags in his ceiling and the local Democratic party (despite a 2.5-to-1 registration advantage) picked a replacement behind closed doors and sued in September 2019 to kick her off the ballot. Having her daughter Sloane 2 weeks before taking office in January 2020 and winning re-election in 2021 and 2025, Cognetti inherited a nearly bankrupt city with $184 million in legal liability and over 7 years achieved 3 S&P upgrades from junk credit to A-minus, cut city debt in half (50%), invested over $5 million in police technology, and added 5 police officers. She now contrasts her record with Republican incumbent Rep. Rob Bresnahan (who ousted 12-year incumbent Matt Cartwright in 2024), showing how corruption raises costs for families while 9,000 people across 5 Northeastern Pennsylvania counties have already lost healthcare due to recent cuts (though she caveats regarding Medicaid, "Not that there isn't fraud there, I'm sure there's a little fraud here and there...").
• Sponsor and Event Disclosures: The hosts promote Crooked Media's upcoming post-election event, "Crooked Con" (crookedcon.com), and disclose episode sponsors including presenting sponsor SimpliSafe Home Security (simplisafe.com/crooked, with Favreau noting Crooked Media's CEO recently got a system), long-term partner BetterHelp (betterhelp.com/psa), Tommy John (tommyjohn.com, code CROOKED, which Favreau states he has worn "forever"), Hims (hims.com/crooked), Bilt (joinbilt.com/crooked), and Article (article.com/crooked, with Vietor noting Crooked Media has "a ton of stuff from Article here at our office").

Quotes

• At 0:02:15 - "That stone is so beautiful. See the cushions? Those beautiful yellow cushions? They're supposed to be a half an inch high. I said, how about four inches? Don't they feel nice? They don't make them in four inches. I had them specially made four inches for everybody." - Donald Trump going off-script during what was supposed to be an economic speech about affordability.
• At 0:04:30 - "Zelenskyy doesn't know what he's talking about. Zelenskyy is a man that should have had this war settled a long time ago. If he would have listened to me, he would have made a much better deal a long time ago, and he'd have a million people living from his side. And to be honest, I don't think—I think that it's time for somebody else to negotiate on behalf of Ukraine. We've given a lot to Ukraine. They've given nothing to us." - Donald Trump attacking the Ukrainian president while pulling back Russian sanctions.
• At 0:06:07 - "The administration was also messing with Ukraine's Starshield internet access—that's like Starlink, but it's the government contract side that goes through DoD. And what that did is they throttled the speed at which you could use Starlink, which means the interceptor drones that the Ukrainians use to take out Russian drones could not operate at the sufficient speeds they needed to, to work." - Tommy Vietor explaining how U.S. policy changes directly degraded Ukrainian air defenses.
• At 0:10:54 - "It was 300,000, then 500,000, then a million later. So 1.8 total is three and a half days of supply of the global supply. It does nothing." - Tommy Vietor breaking down the exact tonnage of the Russian diesel deal to show why lifting sanctions failed to lower U.S. fuel prices.
• At 0:16:17 - "This is what happens when corruption is tolerated, when the Supreme Court rules in such a way that the president views himself as above the law, when the president is corrupt and making money off of his office and invites all of this underneath, and it is a cancer, right? Like, corruption is one of the most dangerous things that can happen inside of a democracy..." - Jon Lovett analyzing the broader institutional danger of the Alina Habba and Ric Grenell Kennedy Center scandal.
• At 0:22:41 - "I was told by someone who spoke with her that when Trump went out to the sticks and repeated the conversation he had with her, when he was like, 'I told her, are you sure you want to do this? You should think about something else,' she didn't know that meant she had been fired." - Tommy Vietor sharing insider reporting on the chaotic firing of 5-day White House Press Secretary Katie Zachariah.
• At 0:37:08 - "I'm never going to tell you what faith you can or can't practice. I want to protect your right to practice your faith as you choose, as a Christian man. My question, though, is that it seems like you don't want to protect my right to practice as I choose." - Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed responding to a Republican operative questioning him at a town hall.
• At 0:44:54 - "It is a privilege to pretend the stakes aren't real. The stakes are real, they belong to us all. If you want to look away and pretend otherwise and feel pure and good about yourself, it is infuriating when someone on the far left does that, it is infuriating when a centrist does it. Grow the fuck up, face the stakes of what's happening in this country, and accept that you won't always agree and that you will have serious disagreements and problems with people in your coalition." - Jon Lovett responding to a former Michigan Democratic Party chair's op-ed advocating leaving the Senate ballot blank.
• At 0:54:37 - "So this is obviously one of Troy's supporters." / "Oh, shut up. I did not. I didn't—I don't even know that kid." - Senator Susan Collins and Democratic challenger Troy Jackson clashing during the Maine Senate debate after a protester interrupted over AI data centers.
• At 1:01:01 - "I've seen these media reports, and I have the same reaction I imagine a lot of people in this room have, which is it makes me uneasy when I read about my public officials potentially getting wealthy off of my public trust. And I'm telling you that while yes, D.C. is a corrupt town, Tony, you know this as well as anybody, Donald Trump, I have not seen a single shred of evidence that he participates or sanctions in that corruption." - Vice President JD Vance attempting to validate voter anger over corruption while absolving Trump during a CBS town hall.
• At 1:07:18 - "Nicole Amor was one of six soldiers killed at a base in Kuwait on March 1st. There were a ton of failures leading up to her death. The Army ignored warnings about moving the base to another site that was more secured. There were no air defenses at the base against drones. They were working out of a trailer with a thin metal roof. There was not enough medical support for the wounded." - Tommy Vietor detailing the military failures in the Iran war that JD Vance claimed not to know about when questioned by Amor's widower.
• At 1:14:56 - "When we came in, and you can imagine with a mayor that was extorting contractors, we were almost bankrupt. We had $184 million of legal liability hanging over us. We got to work. Since then, we've put in financial controls, we have put together the accounts that we need to for the legacy benefits that we have to pay. We've been upgraded three times by the S&P. We went from junk credit to A-minus, and we have cut our debt in half." - Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti explaining how anti-corruption reforms restored her city's finances.
• At 1:19:59 - "Seven days before he voted for a trillion-dollar cut in Medicaid, he sold almost $400,000 worth of Medicaid-related stocks and bonds. And seven days before Trump went into Iran the first time, he was buying up missile stocks, buying Lockheed. It's just remarkable when you put his voting record next to his stock trading record." - Paige Cognetti detailing the stock trades of her opponent, Rep. Rob Bresnahan.
• At 1:23:05 - "That's a fear I have is getting into office and having it be all about the president. The president is on his way out. He will be in his final two years. We need to hold him, his agency heads, and the members of Congress accountable, for sure... But we need to show that we're doing that in the name of busting corruption and getting our feet back under us, not really targeting one particular person. That is, to me, a recipe for a failed presidential bid for a Democrat in 2028." - Paige Cognetti outlining how Democrats should approach congressional oversight if they win the majority.
• At 1:31:41 - "He went on then to talk about the Epstein files. That is the number one reason that we learn when we talk to folks that people are shifting away from the decision that they made in 2024. There was a promise there to get justice for these survivors, and that promise has been broken. And it is even more so than the war, which was also a broken promise and also weighs heavily on people's minds." - Paige Cognetti revealing the top issue driving 2024 Trump voters in PA-08 to switch their support.

Takeaways

• Frame Congressional Oversight Around Cost of Living, Not Partisan Retribution: Rather than targeting Donald Trump as an individual during his final two years, frame oversight investigations around busting systemic corruption across agency heads and Congress so voters see accountability as a way to lower their cost of living and set up a successful 2028 platform.
• Contrast Voting Records Directly With Stock Trading Disclosures: Expose hypocritical incumbents by placing their legislative votes side-by-side with their financial disclosures—as Cognetti does with Rep. Rob Bresnahan, who wrote an October 2024 op-ed calling congressional stock trading "sickening," admitted on a conservative radio show (hosted by a convicted county commissioner who served 8 years for stealing taxpayer money and now has 10 hours of prime-time radio a week) that "I talk to my financial advisor about upcoming positions," and reported nearly 650 trades last year, including selling almost $400,000 in Medicaid stocks/bonds 7 days before voting for a $1 trillion Medicaid cut and buying Lockheed/missile stocks 7 days before the Iran war.
• Demonstrate Personal Financial Integrity in Office: Build trust with working-class constituents by adopting strict ethical guardrails—such as Cognetti's refusal to take campaign contributions from city vendors, city employees, or corporate PACs, turning down a mayoral pay raise, giving the mayoral car to police detectives, and refusing a city gas card.
• Propose Concrete Institutional Term Limits: Channel voter frustration with entrenched Washington power into specific structural reforms, such as Cognetti's proposal for 18-year term limits for the Senate, 18 years for the House of Representatives, and 18 years for the Supreme Court.
• Audit Government Spending Line-by-Line Instead of Slashing Safety Nets: Counter Republican efforts to gut healthcare programs like Medicaid under the guise of fighting waste by advocating for line-by-line contract audits and financial controls that eliminate actual pay-to-play graft without stripping coverage from constituents.
• Push Back Against Unchecked Corporate AI Data Center Deals: Challenge massive corporate developments—like the $25 billion Blackstone AI data center investment touted by Bresnahan, projects that would cover 14% of the land in Archbald, Pennsylvania with centers the size of 51 Walmarts, or companies offering $10,000 per household to pass zoning overlays—by standing with local communities against buyouts that overwhelm towns.
• Engage Regretful 2024 Trump Voters on Broken Transparency Promises: Reach out to defecting Trump voters (like Bill, a 3-time Trump voter who drove Cognetti in an Uber 5 years ago and now appears in her campaign ad) by highlighting broken administration promises, specifically calling out incumbents like Bresnahan for voting 3 times to block the release of the Epstein files.
• Reject Purity Politics in High-Stakes Coalition Elections: Whether coming from the far-left or centrist party officials, reject calls to leave ballots blank over intra-party disagreements; recognize the real-world stakes of Senate control and work to address community concerns constructively within the coalition.
• Vet Town Hall Questioners and Media Narratives for Partisan Operatives: Prepare campaigns and journalists to identify coordinated right-wing traps—such as Republican operatives posing as ordinary town hall attendees to generate viral clips—and scrutinize how social media narratives are laundered into mainstream news coverage.