As divisions emerge within MAGA, questions about leadership, loyalty, and identity reveal a movement increasingly defined by strain, uncertainty, and the limits of personal authority.
By Tamara Keith
Senior Political Correspondent
NPR
By Domenico Montanaro
Senior Political Editor/Correspondent, Washington Desk
NPR
By Elena Moore
Reporter, Washington Desk
NPR
TAMARA KEITH, HOST:
Hey there, it’s the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I’m Tamara Keith. I cover politics.
ELENA MOORE, BYLINE: I’m Elena Moore. I also cover politics.
DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: And I’m Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
KEITH: And a happy Friday to you and yours. On today’s show, we want to look at political divisions, specifically how the broad coalition that President Trump assembled to win reelection is starting to fray. It comes, too, as the president is seeing his approval rating continue to fall. Elena, this week you’ve been reporting on some pretty strong pushback from people who used to be some of the loudest, most vocal supporters of President Trump. Media figures like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly are mad about the president’s handling of the war in Iran. So what are you seeing there?
MOORE: Yeah. These are people, obviously, that you might have first seen on Fox News or network television of some sort, and they’ve gone from TV stars to podcast stars in recent years, and just, you know, very overtly partisan figures. They campaigned with President Trump in 2024. Tucker Carlson spoke at the RNC, the Republican National Convention. And they’ve started to break with Trump over the war over the last few weeks and criticize the actual act of going to war. There’s been a lot of discourse about U.S.-Israel relations. But the difference right now in this week was the direct attention that they put on President Trump. There was no beating around the bush. They were mad and frustrated at him.
KEITH: And a lot of this stems from a couple of really stunning social media posts.
MOORE: Right, right.
KEITH: One on Easter Sunday that said, open the expletive strait. Then there was another one where he threatened to completely wipe out Iranian civilization.
MOORE: Right. He said a, quote, “whole civilization will die tonight,” end quote. So, yeah, Megyn Kelly, in her podcast after that tweet, before the ceasefire was announced on Tuesday, said this on her show.
(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, “THE MEGYN KELLY SHOW”)
MEGYN KELLY: This is completely irresponsible and disgusting. I wish he would stop doing this. Like, he can’t negotiate without doing this. What does that say about him?
MOORE: And, you know, Tucker Carlson, a day earlier on his show, really picked apart Trump’s comments about the threat to bomb civilian infrastructure if there wasn’t a deal, that Easter Sunday Truth Social post. And he called the words vile. So, yeah, some really, really strong language coming from people that really were his high-profile MAGA celebrity cheerleaders.
KEITH: And I think there’s also something of a vibe shift, which you kind of mentioned, which is that the criticism is not just towards the thing. It is also now towards the person, going after Donald Trump himself and not just, oh, he’s getting bad advice or whatever they would have said before.
MOORE: Oh, there’s no denying that it’s, like, these people are mad at him, which is really different. I mean, and some people even took it further, people, again, that you would long associate with the MAGA movement, people like Candace Owens, another podcaster, Turning Point USA alum, or Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former congresswoman from Georgia. These are people who posted online after Trump’s tweet about threatening to destroy Iran. They called for the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment, which would remove the president from office.
Again, these are people who were some of his biggest supporters. And so, yeah, it’s just a handful of folks, but this isn’t just some tepid subtext, I’m not sure. This is overtly people disagreeing with him. And we should say, Tuesday, obviously, we found out there was going to be a two-week ceasefire. We have since heard some of these figures tamp down their criticism again, directly of the president, and go back to that just, like, criticism of the war. But those comments are what they are, and these people know how to make a viral moment.
MONTANARO: Well, I mean, this was a president who promised to fix prices and stay out of wars. And there are two types of people when it comes to how they vote in politics. You’re either kind of on board with a person or personality, or you want somebody to enact the kinds of things you want to see done in the world. And there’s always obviously some crossover and mixing between those two things. But when your high-profile influencer types like Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson, who are on the conservative side, former Fox News hosts, they are people who follow this every day and who I think believed in a certain kind of direction that Trump was taking the country, not necessarily how Trump puts it, that he is MAGA.
Now, that does not mean that this fraying we’re seeing with these high-profile people is filtering down to the rank and file because most people in the rank and file in Trump’s base believe in Trump and they will continue to do so. And in fact, the people who are self-described, quote-unquote, “MAGA” in polling are higher in approving of the job Trump is doing, are higher in believing that the war in Iran was the right decision in the polling that we’ve looked at so far. So, you know, it’s complicated. I will say that this anecdotal, you know, irritation and anger that you might be hearing from some portions can be lagging indicator in the polling and not show up quite yet, but also lend itself to more of a softening among the base that may have the biggest ramifications in the midterm elections of a lot of the people in Trump’s base just simply not going to the polls.
MOORE: Right. ‘Cause at the end of the day, it’s an enthusiasm thing, right? I mean, I’ve been talking to voters out at different conservative events over the last month, and you hear them say, even if they don’t agree with the criticism, they’re like, oh, we know there’s a lot of fighting. Like, it’s a narrative. And I think it’s also important to note that people like Carlson and Kelly, first of all, these are not fringe corners of the internet. They host some of the biggest podcasts in the country, according…
KEITH: Not just the conservative country.
MOORE: Yes, yes. Like, the…
KEITH: No. The United States.
MOORE: And to put a finer point on it, you know, Edison Podcast Metrics has data that finds that each of them average a weekly reach of more than 1.6 million. They’re in the top 20 highest-reach podcasts as of Q4 data. So, like, this is programming that a lot of people are seeing. And put another point on it, the majority of the audiences for Carlson and Kelly are Republicans over 45. So, like, that’s Trump’s base. So Trump’s base is hearing it. Are they agreeing with it? TBD. But this is really permeating a large group.
KEITH: Which gets to the post that President Trump…
MOORE: Right.
KEITH: …Put up on Truth Social last night. He is going after Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens and Alex Jones. He says they’re nut jobs and troublemakers and low IQ. They’re stupid people. They know it, their families know it and everyone else knows it, too. And now you have the president going after the very people who helped make him.
MONTANARO: Well, but this week, you know, I will just say that it was another example of Trump getting the upper hand on a lot of these folks because Marjorie Taylor Greene is no longer a member of Congress.
KEITH: Right.
MONTANARO: And there was an election to fill her seat that, by the way, should be another ringing fire alarm for Republicans because even though the Republican who ran in this won the seat, they won by significantly less margin than Marjorie Taylor Greene won the seat in 2024, playing into, again, Democrats’ streak of double-digit overperformances. And, you know, that’s one more example of the problems that Republicans could have this fall with enthusiasm, but also an example of Trump himself really being the dominant figure in the party despite some of these major voices speaking out against him.
MOORE: I will say, though, you know, we’re giving anecdotes from election results and things in the media. But like we said at the beginning, this is a base that has historically been pro-Trump. Trump’s MAGA coalition is extremely strong, and I do think we’re going to see instances where Democrats do better than expected, and maybe that’s an adverse reaction to some of the infighting in the party. But at the same time, I do think there are a lot of Republicans that might be unhappy with Republicans, but that in no way, shape, or form, necessarily means they’re going to vote Democrat. You know, these are all factors in a larger kind of political firestorm right now. But we don’t know how much that could benefit Democrats or hurt Republicans. And I talked about this, like, broader media discourse with Republican strategist Ryan Williams. He was a longtime spokesman for Mitt Romney – worked in the George W. Bush White House. And he told me, you know, yeah, this criticism is there, but Trump has just a really, really strong base.
RYAN WILLIAMS: He’s been in tune with his base in a way that no other Republican president in my lifetime has been in tune with the base. I mean, he starts with a stronger hand to weather these storms when the criticism occurs.
KEITH: Yeah. I mean, it is the I am MAGA, and MAGA is me.
MOORE: Right.
MONTANARO: It benefits Democrats if people don’t show up at the polls…
MOORE: That’s true. That’s true.
MONTANARO: …To vote for Republican. We know that midterm elections are about activism, and significantly fewer people show up in midterm elections than they do in, you know, presidential elections – you know, 30% or more. So who’s most enthusiastic and where the fraying isn’t happening is really important for which party will do well in the midterms. Now, again, it doesn’t mean, as Elena said, that these folks are going to go vote Democrat because there’s really binary choice in this country and Trump has made culture such a significant dividing line between the two parties that even if these folks feel like they’re irritated with Trump, they don’t like what he’s done, they’re certainly not going to culturally go and vote for the party that in their view is open borders and too pro-transgender rights ’cause that’s the message that they’re hearing on a daily basis, you know, in podcasts, like the ones we’re talking about and in conservative social media.
KEITH: And I think that where this leads all of us is President Trump isn’t going to be on the ballot in November. He’s never going to be on the ballot again.
MONTANARO: That’s the other problem that Republicans have is that they have problems turning out Trump’s base when Trump is not on the ballot. And given that Trump is in the White House, his approval rating is really low. The intensity of disapproval is very high against him and he’s toxic to independents and Latinos and other groups, and that puts them in a real, real bind.
MOORE: Well, also, I mean, Trump is in many ways a political, maybe not unifier, but he’s tied a lot of factions of the conservative movement together that may otherwise not be a group. And I think that this fight we’re seeing in some of the media spaces is emblematic of, yeah, that kind of looming challenge that Republicans are going to face, which is when they lose the guide that they all agree they like, what do they like that they all agree on? And I think I’ve kind of seen that when I’ve gone out and talked to people over the last month. You know, Trump created a fiercely ideological movement, and there are a lot of people, maybe who were – came up in that movement, who have fierce ideologies, and they’re trying to figure out where it goes.
I talked to this young man named Joseph Bolick (ph). He is 30, from Tyler, Texas. He served in the Marines and the Army. He voted for Trump all three times – 2016, 2020, 2024. But he told me that he no longer supports the president because of the war, because of how the administration has handled the Epstein files. And he was wearing an America First hat. And I asked him about that. And I said, do you think MAGA and America First are the same? Because I think that’s for a while something Trump really kind of tied together. And here’s what he told me.
JOSEPH BOLICK: I don’t think MAGA is America First. I think we try to be the police of the world. I think Trump’s kind of an egomaniac, and he just wants to have power and popularity and just be, like, some great visionary. And yeah, like, he forgot about – he forgot where he came from.
MOORE: He forgot where he came from.
MONTANARO: He’s probably feeling a bit on an island, and I think that part of that – part of what’s happening with the Iran war is it’s exposing a crack up within the Republican Party, a sort of fissure that was underneath the entire time, which is, are they hawks, or are they isolationists? Are they pro-free trade or are they pro-tariff? And that’s something that they haven’t had to wrestle with because of the fact that the culture stuff has been the glue that’s binded them together, and in 2028, that is going to be completely ripped open, and there’s going to be a huge conversation about the vision of where they take the party.
KEITH: All right. We are going to take a quick break. Elena, go grab a cup of coffee. We will see you for Can’t Let It Go.
MOORE: I can’t have any more coffee, Tam. I got to have more water.
KEITH: OK, hydrate.
MOORE: Thank you.
KEITH: Hydrate.
MOORE: Yes.
KEITH: Get ready. And when we come back, another sign of division in the Trump coalition – a split between MAHA and MAGA.
And we’re back, and NPR’s Will Stone is here. Hi, Will.
WILL STONE, BYLINE: Hey there.
KEITH: And now we’re going to talk about another fracture in the base that elected President Trump in 2024, the MAHA movement, or Make America Healthy Again. There is a bit of discomfort now between MAHA and MAGA. So remind us, what are the main concerns or objectives of the MAHA movement?
STONE: Yeah. So the MAHA, Make America Healthy Again, movement – right? – was born from this alliance between Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Trump. And, you know, it’s not just one thing. I would say there are kind of animating features, and that has to do with really just concerns about our health care system, our food system, disenchantment with Big Pharma, and, you know, worries about chronic diseases in the U.S. and contributions of toxins and all kinds of issues like that. So now within those kind of broad issues, you have different stakeholders, and they all have their own priorities, I would say, about what needs to happen, what is most important for the MAHA agenda.
KEITH: Let’s just explain that MAHA rose out of the candidacy of RFK Jr. when he was running in the Democratic primaries against Joe Biden. Then he dropped out and endorsed Trump, and the Trump campaign did a lot to try to court his supporters. Trump obviously won. Kennedy became Secretary of Health and Human Services, and the MAHA movement was officially part of the Trump coalition. So is MAHA happy with how things are going?
STONE: Well, it certainly depends who you ask.
KEITH: Big coalition, big problems.
STONE: Exactly. Now, their – you know, one wing of this MAHA movement is really focused on vaccines. And obviously, Kennedy has done a lot on that issue in the past year at HHS. But then there are others who are deeply concerned about priorities that they feel are being neglected or even that they’re being betrayed. Some folks are really worried about the pesticide issue, and just a broader sense that what’s happening maybe in other agencies, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency, really are counter – running counter to a lot of the stated goals when it comes to concerns about toxic chemicals in our food, in our air, in our water and the contributions of that to chronic diseases. So I’ve spoken to activists in the MAHA movement who are feeling like they need to see a lot more from the administration, and they’re not very happy with how things have gone at this point.
KEITH: Domenico, politicians often talk about having a big tent. Perhaps none was bigger than President Trump’s coalition, but was this tent too big?
MONTANARO: That could be one piece of it. I also think that when you have an alliance that’s, number one, not used to dealing with politics and figured out what its platform is, you’re going to have some problems because you’ve got a lot of people in, frankly, some fringe portions of the right and left who have joined together in this MAHA movement. I mean…
KEITH: The great horseshoe of politics and ideology.
MONTANARO: And that doesn’t usually lead to a lot of political success. Also when you think about President Trump himself, he’s not particularly interested in, you know, a healthy foods movement, you know? I mean…
KEITH: He does love his McDonald’s. His triumph was getting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to eat McDonald’s.
MONTANARO: I was just going to say that photo of Robert F. Kennedy on a plane with Donald Trump, eating McDonald’s, you could tell it’s kind of Trump almost trolling him, you know? He’s like, well, this is what it’s going to be. And, you know, he loves his Diet Coke, and there’s a huge split. MAHA people are not exactly thinking that’s the best thing that you should be drinking. So I don’t know that he’s, like, a lifer when it comes to MAHA and feeling like this is a really important thing. He knows that it’s an important thing politically because it did help him kind of get a segment of the population. But remember, I mean, RFK Jr. was not exactly polling. With a hugely high number, but he was attracting people who were not exactly, you know, wedded to either political party in many respects.
KEITH: Will, part of this schism is coming out in the fight over the country’s next surgeon general. Casey Means has been nominated for that role, and her nomination has been languishing. Can you tell us about her and how she fits into all of this?
STONE: Yeah. Casey Means is an influencer, wellness influencer. She’s an author, and the publication of her book, “Good Energy,” really kind of catapulted her into the wellness sphere. She wrote that with her brother, Calley Means, who is a close adviser to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. She does have medical training. She went to Stanford Medical School. And she was well on her way to becoming a surgeon but dropped out of her residency toward the end of that. She never completed that training. And that’s kind of one source of criticism about her qualifications to be surgeon general. But she ended up, you know, going into this other space around wellness and started a company called Levels, which sells consumers continuous glucose monitors so they can look at their blood sugar.
And Casey Means, first of all, wasn’t the – President Trump’s initial choice for surgeon general. He chose someone else. Then he announced Casey Means would be chosen instead. She was finally ready for her hearing at the end of last year, but she was pregnant at the time and went into labor just before the confirmation hearing. So that was delayed a number of months. And then just back in February, she finally had her Senate confirmation hearing. A rough road there. She had to really walk a very delicate tightrope, trying to answer concerns from senators like Bill Cassidy about, you know, her views on vaccines, while also trying not to kind of run afoul of the MAHA base.
KEITH: There are fewer MAHA senators than there are doctors and others in the Senate who have more mainstream views. So that’s – that no doubt is a little challenging.
STONE: Certainly. And I just – you know, some of her exchanges, especially on vaccines, it was quite telling. I mean, she would not offer a full-throated endorsement of something like the measles vaccine. And she would basically just deflect and say, well, I think vaccines can be important, but, you know, these are things that people should be discussing with their doctor. And it’s a kind of problematic answer because after all, the surgeon general is the nation’s top doctor and they’re looked to for making broad recommendations. And so I think she just found herself in a tough spot there as she was facing questions from people like Bill Cassidy.
MONTANARO: Especially considering RFK Jr.’s confirmation hearing himself, where he really sidestepped the vaccine issue and tried to reassure Cassidy that he would not do anything to undermine, you know, vaccines in the country. The way that he’s been in practice, on the other hand, I think, has made someone like Cassidy much more doubtful of people who are in the MAHA world and whether or not he’s going to give a green light again to someone who he feels let him down in some respects. And, you know, I think that especially someone like Susan Collins, Republican from Maine – she’s in a tough reelection battle – she also pressed her on something like her past use of magic mushrooms. And, you know, these are the kinds of things when you’re talking about the surgeon general of the United States, a lot of the Republican senators who are in the middle want somebody who’s going to have a more moderate background, who’s going to give – make people have – you know, kind of encourage people to make the right decisions about their health, and I don’t know that they’re going to be all in on some things that they see as really unorthodox.
KEITH: You know, Will, for now, at least, the White House is standing behind Casey Means and her nomination. What happens if her nomination fails, like, in terms of how the MAHA movement would feel about it?
STONE: I think it would be a real blemish. I will say there are certain people in the MAHA movement who did have suspicion of Casey Means and felt, I think, that she wasn’t actually strong enough on the vaccine issue, meaning, you know, didn’t have enough concerns about vaccines. But there are many people who are still behind her. And when she’s talking about kind of the, I guess, bread-and-butter issues, although we probably need a different food group for the MAHA folks. You know, food quality and pesticides and toxins and our kind of sedentary lifestyle, she’s on great footing there – right? – and has kind of – is speaking her core message. But it gets hard when she’s also trying to speak to these other groups, especially when it comes to vaccines.
KEITH: So with all of this context, yesterday there was a meeting at the White House with a group of MAHA influencers brought into the White House to meet with staff and Secretary Kennedy. President Trump, according to the White House, stopped by the roundtable to speak with these MAHA activists and stakeholders, according to spokesman Kush Desai. He says, MAHA is a key base in the historic coalition that resoundingly reelected President Trump, and the administration regularly meets with the MAHA community to hear their concerns and advice. They did not respond to my question about whether this was an effort to shore up support in this community, but it was not opened up to the press. In the past, a roundtable-type event like that has been opened up to cameras. This one was not. Is it the case that the White House does have some work to do to keep this base – the MAHA part of the base happy?
STONE: I think so. And I’ve been doing some reporting recently on these issues related to kind of toxic chemicals and concerns about, you know, what’s happening with pesticides. And we saw this big announcement from the EPA, Lee Zeldin, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. just the other week on an action by EPA to look into microplastics in water and also pharmaceuticals in water. You know, they made a big, splashy kind of press deal on this and touted the headlines. But when you actually talk to folks who understand these regulations, this doesn’t really do much in terms of actual teeth. It’s not going to force regulation yet. And yet they’re really touting this as a huge, bold achievement. And so I think it, you know, remains to be seen whether they can take actions that will appease folks in the MAHA group who feel like their concerns around some of these issues are not being met.
KEITH: Domenico, we talked about this in the last segment – the fact that President Trump is not going to be on the ballot in the fall. If MAHA continues to have an uneasy feeling about the actions of the Trump administration, does that ring alarm bells for Republicans and, you know, their sort of tenuous grasp on the midterms?
MONTANARO: You don’t want to be the party in a midterm election that is dealing with multiple rifts on multiple different sort of segments of your base, right? I mean, there are only so many hours in the day that the White House can hold meetings to try to smooth things over. And if you’re thinking about Trump going on social media and waging a rhetorical war against Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly and then having to sit down with MAHA influencers to try to make sure that their – they’ll stay on board with the Republican Party while also trying to be the commander in chief for a war that’s actually going on, an actual war with Iran in trying to get the Strait of Hormuz open, it doesn’t really make for a really easy way to get everybody to be unified to go to the polls in the fall.
KEITH: All right. Well, we are going to take another quick break. Will Stone, thank you so much.
STONE: Thanks for having me.
KEITH: And when we come back, it’s time for Can’t Let It Go.
And we’re back, and so, too, is Elena Moore. Hello.
MOORE: Hi. Drank water.
KEITH: Good. I’m glad you’re hydrated. It is time for Can’t Let It Go, the part of the pod where we talk about the things from the week that we just can’t stop thinking about, politics or otherwise. Domenico, you go first.
MONTANARO: Well, I want to kind of – I was thinking about the Supreme Court because during the birthright citizenship case, it was kind of fun to be able to see the interactions between the justices again, and it started making me think about how they get along behind the scenes. And then I saw this story in USA Today about a little bit of shade that Sonia Sotomayor – Justice Sonia Sotomayor gave to Brett Kavanaugh, one of the other justices – conservative justice appointed by Trump. And Sonia Sotomayor’s one of the liberal justices who was appointed by Barack Obama. She was at a University of Kansas event, and there was a case in which ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was doing stops where they were pulling people over.
And, you know, a group pushed back against that, took it to the Supreme Court, saying that this was racial profiling. And Kavanaugh wrote the opinion, essentially saying that these are temporary stops, it’s not that big a deal and, like, let them continue on – that people only miss a little bit of time. This is what she had to say about him without naming him. She said, I had a colleague in that case who wrote, you know, these are only temporary stops. This is from a man whose parents were professionals and probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour. She added that those hours that they took away – nobody’s paying that person, and that makes a difference between a meal for him and his kids that night and maybe just cold supper. I mean, I don’t think they’re sharing any warm meals and – ’cause…
KEITH: Or any warmth of any kind.
MONTANARO: ‘Cause that – yeah, that’s some class, you know, disdain right there.
MOORE: I love a legal burn, you know, when the justices or, like, a lawyer gives a very eloquent burn.
MONTANARO: I just feel like it’s really interesting in our political time just how – like, I mean, how deep that kind of goes and feels because…
KEITH: Yeah.
MONTANARO: …You know, Justice Sotomayor grew up working class in the Bronx. Justice Kavanaugh did not. He grew up in Maryland, went to Georgetown Prep, which is an elite high school. And it feels, like, very indicative of the, you know, kind of left-wing split that you’re seeing, you know, the left-wing populist movement, where they’re feeling like, you know, people who’ve had privilege are running things. And I think there’s a lot of irritation on the bench, especially from the liberals and the minority, with a lot of what they’re seeing and their inability to stop what Trump is trying to push.
KEITH: We’re a long way away from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Justice Scalia going to the opera together.
MONTANARO: Yeah.
MOORE: Oh, yeah.
MONTANARO: No kidding.
MOORE: That’s a great point.
KEITH: All right. I’m going to go next. And what I can’t let go of is space. I had such a week.
MOORE: (Laughter).
KEITH: I was off for spring break, and the family and I went and saw “Project Hail Mary”…
MOORE: Oh.
KEITH: …With Ryan Gosling. It was a fun movie. It was like “E.T.” meets some other space movie. Loved it.
MOORE: Did you like that the way that they told the audience he was a nerd was that he had glasses?
KEITH: (Laughter).
MOORE: Because that’s the only reason I was like, oh, so Ryan Gosling is a physicist because he has glasses? I was like, yeah, right.
KEITH: Yeah.
MOORE: Keep going. Sorry.
KEITH: No, I mean, there was a lot of willing suspension of disbelief.
MOORE: Sure.
KEITH: But it was a lovely, fun film. And then the Artemis II mission. We watched the liftoff, and splashdown is tonight. And then I just happened, because my book club has – you know, every month, we have a different book in my book club – just happened during this past week to also read a book called “Atmosphere” by Taylor Jenkins Reid, which is all about female astronauts getting into the shuttle program. It’s fiction. It’s a love story. It’s very romantic. Anyway, I cried about space a lot this week (laughter).
MOORE: My sister did, too. My middle sister in New York City got so into the Artemis stuff. She’s been giving my family all these updates. She also got emotional when they first – when one of the astronauts named – you want to talk about it? Yeah.
KEITH: Oh, my God.
MOORE: (Laughter).
KEITH: Oh, my God. I was – I first heard it listening to All Things Considered and our friend Scott Detrow, and he played the clip of one of the astronauts on this mission. His wife had died of cancer a couple of years ago, and they saw some new craters on the moon that shined bright, and they wanted to name one of the craters after the astronaut’s late wife. When they called that down to Mission Control, I was like, oh, no, my mascara.
MOORE: Oh, my God.
KEITH: Elena, what can’t you let of?
MOORE: I’m going to end on a high note…
KEITH: Good.
MOORE: …And do a bit of a – kind of like an appreciation Can’t Let It Go. I don’t know if you guys do this, but I really can’t consume news when I’m not working. Like, I don’t really, like, listen to news shows besides in the morning or maybe on the way home. I’ve gotten so obsessed with Amy Poehler, the former “SNL” comedian – her show, “Good Hang.” It’s just such a, like, warm, fuzzy, great thing that always at the end, I leave being like, oh, I feel a little better. And, like, I’ll give you a few examples. They start every show – before she talks to the guests she’s going to have, and it’s usually a longtime comedian friend or someone she really loves and admires, she talks to someone the guest knows very well. And they talk well behind their back instead of, like, talking…
KEITH: (Laughter).
MOORE: …You know, badly behind your back. She ends the show by asking the last question. It kind of reminds me of Can’t Let It Go. She’s like, what are you reading, watching, listening to that makes you laugh? And even if it’s, like, I’m really into AI cat – this cat video…
KEITH: (Laughter).
MOORE: …They, like, will play it, and you’ll just hear them be like (laughter). And I feel like it’s a good lesson. So I’m like, we should, like, maybe end with – maybe we can tip our hat to them. But, like – I don’t know – what’s making you guys laugh?
KEITH: Aw.
MOORE: You know?
KEITH: What’s making me laugh is you’re not the first person to have this show as your Can’t Let It Go.
MOORE: Oh, really? I mean…
KEITH: Yep (laughter). It’s so great. Multiple people on our team can’t let go of it.
MONTANARO: So what’s making you laugh?
MOORE: Every night before bed, my boyfriend and I will show each other the, like, 10 Instagram videos that we’ve sent to each other throughout the day, and it’s become, like…
KEITH: Aw.
MOORE: …A nice little ritual. And he’s, like, a – he’s kind of a more reserved man, but he’s a sucker for cats. And so I’ll send him a video of, like, a fat cat, and he’ll just literally just laugh and laugh, and that makes me laugh.
KEITH: That’s great. Yeah.
MOORE: Domenico’s like, nothing makes me laugh.
MONTANARO: No, I just thought I’d give you the…
MOORE: Oh.
KEITH: Yeah, give you the last laugh.
MONTANARO: Ah.
MOORE: There you go.
(LAUGHTER)
KEITH: So bad. OK. That is all for today. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Our producers are Casey Morell and Bria Suggs. Our editor is Rachel Baye. Special thanks to Krishnadev Calamur and Kelsey Snell. I’m Tamara Keith. I cover politics.
MOORE: I’m Elena Moore. I also cover politics.
MONTANARO: And I’m Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
KEITH: And thank you for listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.
Originally published by NPR, 04.10.2026, republished with permission for educational, non-commercial purposes.
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