The Odd Years Podcast

President Trump's signature legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, is crawling its way through Congress. Having passed the House by a single vote, the so-called BBB is in the Senate where various Republican factions - the fiscal hawks, the centrists, the populists - are divided over how to resolve their many competing priorities over the national debt, Medicaid, and tax cuts to name a few.

What's driving these ideological differences among Senate and House Republicans? What role has Trump played and will he play in continuing to lobby Congress? And will the BBB move fast enough to be on President Trumps desk by July fourth? (Spoiler alert: it will not.)

Amy put all these questions to Leigh Ann Caldwell, chief Washington correspondent for Puck.

A quick note: we recorded this conversation on Wednesday, June 4th, as the Elon Musk and President Trump breakup was beginning, but before it burst into the full view. And it appears the falling out has been driven, at least in part, over Musk's opposition to the Big Beautiful Bill. But as Amy has said, she doesn't believe this changes the calculus for Congressional Republicans.

You can watch part of the conversation our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@thecookpoliticalreport

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When we booked this episode with Pod Save America co-host Dan Pfeiffer several weeks back, our plan was to talk about the Democrats and their strategy and messaging around Trump - something Dan's been writing about for his Substack, Message Box.

Should Democrats just focus on the economy? Should they raise alarm bells over deportations? How loudly and strongly should they push back against Trump?

And we do discuss that, but as it turned out, there was a lot more to talk about with Dan. For one, as a former Obama senior adviser, Amy wanted to ask his thoughts on the new reporting coming out about Joe Biden's health and how his inner circle worked to conceal it.

In addition to that, we received an important report from the data firm Catalist about 2024 voters, shedding more light on why Kamala Harris lost and Donald Trump won. As a fellow data nerd, I knew Dan would be ready to dive into it.

We recorded this on Wednesday, May 21st.

You can watch our entire conversation on our YouTube channel.

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Rahm Emanuel has held many titles: Congressman from Illinois, DCCC Chairman, Chief of Staff to Barack Obama, Mayor of Chicago, and Ambassador to Japan under President Biden.

These days, he doesn't have an official position at the moment. But that's not stopping him from giving some very pointed advice to Democrats on every possible platform: cable TV, political shows, podcasts, late night TV, and different political conferences.

So how does Rahm Emanuel think Democrats should be responding to Trump 2.0? How does the party recover from 2024 and prepare for 2028? What does a successful midterm strategy look like in 2026? And given his own, let's say, active media schedule, what are his own plans for the future?

He came on to talk to Amy about all that.

We recorded this conversation on Wednesday, May 14th.

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You may know our guest today, Josh Holmes, as one of the hosts of the popular political podcast, Ruthless.

For those of you who don't know, Ruthless is to the conservative media sphere as Pod Save America is to the liberal media ecosystem.

But long before he started his podcasting gig, Amy knew Josh as a Republican political operative.

He was chief of staff to Mitch McConnell and ran his 2014 re-election campaign. He also had a stint at the National Republican Senate Committee.

He now runs the public affairs firm, Cavalry, and he's still actively giving advice to Republican candidates.

Josh's two roles as a member of the new media and a seasoned Republican political hand gives him unique perspective into our current political era.

This conversation spans a similar gamut from what advice he'd give to down ballot Republicans for the upcoming midterms to his thoughts on the Trump tariff endgame. Josh also talks about how candidates can best navigate the new media landscape.

We recorded this conversation on Wednesday, May 7th.

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We are 100 days into the second Trump administration and there's no better person to help us understand what voters are making of these first months of Trump 2.0 than Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson.

Kristen is a founding partner of Echelon Insights, an opinion research and analytics firm. She's a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and an on air political contributor at CNN.

Quick disclaimer: we taped this conversation on Thursday, April 24th, before the flurry of 100 day polls were released this past weekend. That's why you won't hear us asking her about these polls.

But the reason we wanted to have Kristen on in the first place was that we didn't want to get caught up in the immediate set of data. We wanted Kristen to do what she does best which is to filter the signal from the noise, present a 30,000 view of the political environment rather than focusing on the minutiae or just small movements in data. What we like about Kristen so much is that she's able to to toggle seamlessly between reading cross tabs but also probing voters in focus groups and really listening to what they are saying or not saying, and then explaining it to regular people in a way that is approachable but not condescending.

That's why we were especially excited to talk with her about a presidency as complicated and unprecedented as Trump's.

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