Welcome to Open Tabs

Welcome to Pod Save America: Open Tabs. The idea for this newsletter is to give you a weekly look into how we think about putting the show together, what’s coming in the Friday episode, and the stories gnawing at us as we wait to get into the studio. I’m Reid Cherlin, and I oversee editorial for PSA. I decided to call this thing Open Tabs because by the time we get to mid-week, my computer is on the verge of crashing from all the stories and news clips and analysis pieces I have open to discuss with our hosts and producers.

You’re getting this issue because you’re a What a Day subscriber, but if reading this isn’t how you want to spend your Thursday mornings, we get it. You can opt out at any time by going to your Substack subscriptions page. I won’t be hurt. Also, if you have ideas for improvements or specific things you’d like to see, please let rip in the comments. Having said all that, brace yourself, because it’s time to face the news.

State of Play: “Domestic Terrorism”

I was in the middle of teeing up the latest with Donald Trump’s Venezuela crusade as our top story when the news broke on Wednesday that a federal agent had shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis, a woman we now know to be 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good. If you’re the kind of person who reads a newsletter like this, you already know the facts. I assume that most of you, like me, have watched and rewatched the videos, yelling at your screen as Good bleeds out and the armed men stand around, doing nothing.

It’s hard to make our show on a day like this. Not just because we’re all shocked, but because talking about it can feel so pointless when the images speak for themselves. What I try to remind myself is that the images, and the specific tragedy of Renee Good’s killing, are only part of the story. The rest of the story is the people who wanted this kind of thing to happen: principally Trump, who immediately lied to the country about it, and also Kristi Noem, who stood at a podium in a novelty cowboy hat and, without a hint of irony, called Good a “domestic terrorist.” Tim Walz was right when he said this shooting represents “the consequences of governance designed to generate fear, headlines, and conflict. It’s governing by reality TV.”

We all knew something like this was coming. The question now is what we do about it. Grim as it is, I’m looking forward to diving into that discussion.

What We’re Watching

For tomorrow’s show, we have Jon and Dan in the saddle as usual. We tape the Friday show at 3pm PT / 6pm ET on Thursday, which means there’s still plenty of time for our news priorities to change between now and then. Either way, we’re scheduled to interview both Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, about the latest from Minneapolis, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani, about a big new deal on universal childcare. The caveat when we book highly newsy guests like these is that they sometimes have to cancel. Assuming that doesn’t happen, look for clips on our socials and our YouTube channel later today. The full interviews will run in tomorrow’s show. As for the news blocks that precede them, we’ll start, of course, with Minnesota. Here’s what else we’re looking at.

Wild Western Hemisphere

Safe to say that when we started planning the launch of this newsletter back in the fall, I didn’t envision regime change in Venezuela and the acquisition of Greenland as a possible lead story, but this is the world Trump wants us to live in. The news here is moving on two semi-related fronts.

Venezuela

First, there’s Donald Trump appointing himself the executor of Venezuela’s oil exports.

• In a Truth Social post on Tuesday he announced that Venezuela would be turning over up to 50 million barrels of oil for us to sell, “and that money will be controlled by me.” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said yesterday the U.S. will control Venezuelan oil sales “indefinitely.” In a lengthy interview with The New York Times published this morning, Trump suggested that the United States would be acting as Venezuela’s government for “much longer” than a year. What does any of this actually mean? We’ll do our best to figure it out.

• Meanwhile, in a kind of complementary enforcement action, American ships are now tracking down and seizing tankers alleged to be part of a “shadow fleet” of vessels that move oil for countries under sanction, including Venezuela, even if they happen to be empty.

• These seizures are the kind of important-but-technical news that we often leave to Tommy and Ben at Pod Save the World, but I think we should at least try to get a handle on it for our audience. Our first editorial meeting is an hour, and we’ll see if Jon and Dan put up a fight.

Greenland

The second piece of this picture is the potential acquisition of Greenland, purportedly for national security reasons, but also, clearly, because it would make Trump feel good.

• The Greenland idea has been kicking around since the “annex Canada” days of 2025, mostly as a way to troll the establishment. Thanks to the success (in the short term, at least) of the Venezuela operation, what once was a talking point is now an actual policy priority.
  

• The latest is that Stephen Miller is suggesting that we could basically just walk in and take Greenland, Marco Rubio is saying we might buy it, and Denmark, which controls it, says any such thing would mean the end of NATO. At least three Republican Senators agree.
  

• Trump, for his part, posted yesterday that NATO isn’t such a great thing anyway and probably “wouldn’t be there for us if we really needed them,” going on to assert, in his usual vague and garbled way, that American military might is all that matters in the world.

Republicans Really Do Have a Plan for Health Care, Part 1,000

The expiration of the Obamacare subsidies has been out of the news ever since the invasion of Venezuela (still really crazy to type that!), but that may be about to change.

• The House is on the verge of passing a clean three-year extension after moderate Republicans broke ranks and signed on to Democrats’ discharge petition. You might think the Senate would just take up the bill and save Republicans a massive political headache in an election year. But that would be too simple. There aren’t enough GOP votes to pass a clean extension, so a bipartisan group is working on a two-year version with income caps and a minimum premium payment. Even that isn’t guaranteed to pass.
  

• Trump, meanwhile, seems to be uncharacteristically clear-eyed about the potential problems here. “Health care, it’s never been our issue; It should be our issue,” he told a gathering of House Republicans on Tuesday. He cast the stakes in personal terms: “If we don’t win the midterms, it’s just going to be—I mean, they’ll find a reason to impeach me. I’ll get impeached.”

Open Tabs

My browser windows are always littered with articles I keep meaning to finish, or, in some cases, start. Here are this week’s top three:

• The New Yorker: Why Video Podcasts Multiplied Beyond the Man Cave. This piece from tech columnist Kyle Chayka is a tough look in the mirror for those of us in the business of taping each other talking into microphones and then flooding the internet with clips of the experience. Do we need to be thinking about this more carefully?
  

• The Washington Post: Trump announces U.S. will leave dozens of international organizations. It’s not a mom being gunned down in the street, but Trump’s steady unraveling of the international order still gives me a pit in my stomach. Apparently we’re leaving the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Global Forum on Migration and Development, and 64 other coordinating bodies that I’m still too squeamish to read about.
  

• The Atlantic: The Front-Runner: California’s Gavin Newsom would rather be wrong than weak. True or false: your friends keep asking you what you think of Newsom as a 2028 contender. Make up your mind already, and I’ll do the same.

Final Note: A Smaller Slice

A Wall Street Journal piece this week headlined “America Is Falling Out of Love With Pizza” threw me into a slight panic. “Pizza is disrupted right now,” says Ravi Thanawala, CFO of Papa John’s, just one of the chains the story says are grappling with hard times. Given my own personal diet, I had no idea this was, or could ever be, the case.

The TLDR is that with delivery apps, everyone in need of emergency dinner now has many more choices, and pizza as a cuisine category is down to sixth place, from second place in the 1990s. It’s not all bad, though: the pain being felt here seems to be mostly in the large and mid-sized chain-pizza market, not your treasured local spot. We can do better than Domino’s, and we should. Also: one in ten Americans still eat a slice on any given day. Which makes me feel way less alone.