Robert Garcia: “Things Are Fucked Up”

Impolitic with John Heilemann

Audacy | Puck

News, Politics

4.8 • 4.2K Ratings

🗓️ 11 August 2025

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

John welcomes second-term Democratic congressman and former mayor of Long Beach, CA, Robert Garcia to talk about the imperative for his party to move away from “respectability politics” to combat the Trump 2.0 agenda. Garcia explains why the Texas redistricting fight transcends the particulars of the Lone Star State as a central part of Donald Trump’s plan not just to steal the 2026 midterm elections but to stay in office past 2028—and the Jefrey Epstein scandal, far from subsiding during the congressional recess, is only gathering steam. Garcia also waxes poetic about his love for Superman, what the character means to many gay Americans such as himself, and why, for all of David Corenswet’s swagger in the role on the big screen this summer, Christopher Reeve remains (now and forever) the gold standard Man of Steel. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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1:07.1	Aloha and namaste everyone and welcome to Impolitic with John Heilman, a puck and Odyssey Joint,
1:12.2	featuring lively in-depth conversations with the people who cruise the corridors of power in America,
1:16.6	sculpting, shaping the ebb and flow of our politics and our culture.
1:20.6	A couple weeks ago, you may recall, we had Bob Schrum,
1:24.5	one of the most storied Democratic strategists of the modern era on the show.
1:29.3	And in the course of our talk, Schrum heaped praise on a young Democratic congressman from
1:34.1	Long Beach, California for having played a key role in their party's aggressive and thus
1:39.2	far successful efforts to shine a spotlight, an unrelenting spotlight, on the Jeffrey Epstein story.
1:46.4	And not let Donald Trump escape the political briar patch that he himself had cultivated
1:51.6	on that topic and now was finding it incredibly hard to extricate himself from.
	...

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