Dan Pfeiffer
Appearances
Pod Save America
The State Of the Union Is ... Long
He did nothing, no short-term relief for anyone right now. Inflation costs are...
Pod Save America
The State Of the Union Is ... Long
inflation concerns are going up you know there's a uh our friend peter hanby has something in his puck newsletter tonight about polling of gen z men and trump's approval rating on inflation has dropped 14 points in a month people are souring on the economy on which is what they care about it's what the people who put him in office people who will decide the midterms care about and he did not bother to talk about it for more than two minutes he basically handed away to the whole thing and i think that is a massive strategic plunder
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
Because it kind of speaks to the mentality of the administration. And you just can't ignore the main thing that got you elected.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
Yeah, you could – with Trump, it's always he can give his rally-esque speech or he can give a more formal joint address. In this case, he decided to do both.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
Yeah, it absolutely is deeply politically dangerous for him because it gets at the – like when inflation went with Biden, you could talk about all these other things that were – but he has decided to make a specific policy decision that he has talked about. He says it's his favorite word in the English language, to make your costs higher. And will he stick with it? That's an open question.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
He does not. He tends to run at the first sign of distress. So we'll see what happens here. He did stick the Chinese tariffs in his first term, stuck with them the whole way. But they were more targeted than this. They were more targeted. And then he had to spend all of the money and then some that could be from the tariffs.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
I mean, as you know, as you guys know as speechwriters, the amount of time spent on an issue in the State of the Union is, in the administration's eyes, directly proportionate to how much we care about it. And so by that definition, his top foreign policy priority is... Getting Greenland.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
In a normal presidency, I would have taken that the absence of talking about... Because Trump would normally tout his role in getting that ceasefire as evidence that they think it's falling apart. But who the really fuck knows here?
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
And just... hold on to your seat here, but what if he actually used the speech to send a message about what he wanted, right? Because that is the one takeaway from the entire speech is at no point is he using the speech to try to accomplish anything. Right. I think he sent a pretty powerful message to the Danes. To the Danes.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
I mean, I guess it is noteworthy that if he does not pass a tax cut bill, taxes will go up on nearly every American. And that's a very challenging thing to do.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
It is a must-do. It is an absolute must-do. And I would also say embedded in that exact bill is the bill to lift the debt limit. So he has to – if he does not pass this bill, we're going to default and everyone's going to get a tax increase. And he has Congress before him. He has a massively divided Republican Party.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
They're divided on both the policy, the spending measures to pay for this, and the legislative process to accomplish it. He used none of this speech with all of them there to try to rally them to any sort of cause. He talked a little bit about the tax cut, but they have no plan to solve this problem, and he cannot be bothered to try to get into the minutiae of trying to pass a bill.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
Yes. I just you would typically use that moment to at least express urgency to be able to get your shit together.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
In that moment. And you're right. Like maybe the old there is no solution here that does not involve a large swath of the Republicans voting for something they swore they would never vote for one way or the other. Right. For paid for cut Medicaid, don't cut Medicaid.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
But even when they get to that, there's still a massive delta between the money going out and the money coming in.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
It's an interesting thing because – It is a format optimized for the free television time. Right. Because you are – the networks carry it. They all carry it. And so more people will see Alyssa Slotkin's speech than any speech given by a Democrat this year by a factor of 10, 15, 20, more maybe. In full-on television. In full-on television. Right.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
But if you were trying to monitor and communicate, you would not give a 10-minute two-camera response. You would – to a 10 minute podcast interview or whatever, or like a conversation.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
But you know what? Here's the thing I'd say about that.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
So there's a big dilemma here, which is without fail, the best testing messages, the ones that show up as most persuasive— feel incredibly small ball compared to what's happening here. And not that cutting Medicaid is small ball, because that is a devastating thing for so many people, but it just feels like we're on the brink of authoritarianism in this country.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
And it feels like we're just using the same message we used against Mitt Romney in 2012. Doesn't seem like the right feel here, but the... Polling is crystal clear. The one piece of advice that I would give to Democrats, and I've been wrestling with this myself for the last couple weeks here, is there is no election tomorrow, the next day. Yes.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
There are elections in November, but they are state elections. Mm-hmm. we do not have to respond to how people think about Donald Trump right now. We have to make how people think about Donald Trump be different by November of 2026. Right.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
And that, I think, is, I think that implores us to step away from the quote-unquote best testing message right now and do a little bit more what I think Chris Murphy is doing, which is to be a little more sort of just sort of authentically ranting about the dangers that are happening.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
And like, this is this is the fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans is Democrats find out where we're voters are. And then we try to meet them there. And Republicans try to get the voters to where they want them to be. And I think we have to, we have to just think a little bigger here, play a bigger game than we have been playing.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
I'm shocked that many of them weren't invited as the guests of Republicans tonight.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
I think the like one way that I think also helps square the circle is to start talking about the corruption. I'm not saying we should use the word kleptocracy to describe this because that is a ridiculous term to use. But that is the story here. Put it on the shelf next to oligarch, yeah. Right. We have a bunch of oligarchs running this country.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
We have the world's richest man running through things. And the value of corruption as a message is, one, it's true. Two, it allows us, if we could get our heads out of our asses, to become a reformed party again. Because we're not trying to defend the status quo. We're trying to reform it in a way that actually helps people instead of just burning the fucking thing down. And that at least is...
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
Curry favor with them before January 6th next time. I think there are a couple of points here. One is... If you watch the video, there's something really fascistic about the whole thing, the way Trump, when he starts protesting, points at the door. And then J.D. Vance starts pointing, and then you see Mike Johnson sort of point at the Sergeant of Arms to tell them to go get Al Green.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
There's a point where Lissa Slotkin sort of moved around, which is, is it crazy change that is chaotic and hurts people, or is it real change that can actually help people?
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
That's actually a really smart way to think about that, which is use that free 10 minutes of national television time and attention you get to try to win one battle, not try to win the entire war, which is an impossible task given to any person in any party.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
I think there are parts of it. Like, the Social Security thing is very important to point out. Right. Because you're just going to have conversations with people like that's the sort of thing that people would be like, you're like, Elon Musk is a fucking nutjob.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
Well, yeah, but I heard that they were paying off, you know, a million 150 year old Social Security, like having the facts to that is a helpful pushback.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
Yeah, that's... I mean, these are always worth noting, polls of people who actually watch the speech, which almost always skews to the party of the person giving the speech.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
Like, it is a... deeply like we're in the united states capital here moments later trump will say he ended government censorship as he removes him from it i know he was this is why mark zuckerberg so excited about him it's just like they plan for this moment they plan to use taxpayer-funded law enforcement to remove dissenting voices from the capital
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
I will have no patience for people complaining about the etiquette of it.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
Other censured members include Marjorie Taylor Greene. Right.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
No, he was just like, get her out. Yeah. It just. not to go all Daniel Dale on this, but Al Green's right. There is no mandate for Medicaid cuts. And what Trump said about his mandate was fucking absurd.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
Donald Trump's popular vote margin is smaller than every popular vote winner since Al Gore in 2000. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 by more than Donald Trump did in 2024.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
I mean, ultimately, all of these battles over government spending is about specifics and who can get the more evocative examples. And, like, probably, even though it's mostly bullshit, this was one of the more effective parts of the speech for Trump.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
He's got to go up there and list a bunch of programs that most Americans would be concerned in the unfair context in which Trump delivered it, be concerned about their taxpayers going to that. Then we stand up with our... much smaller, teeny tiny megaphone, and we talk about all the cuts that are coming from Doge.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
Well, not our fault signs, but we have been winning politically the battle over Doge because the focus has been on cutting the people in charge of protecting nuclear plants, the FAA air traffic controls, and the Head Start, Department of Education, those sorts of things. And that's the battle we're going to be in for the next year on these budget things.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
There's a specific question of blaming Joe Biden for the price of the current spike in egg prices. Right.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
No, but I think people, as we know, people are not particularly interested in the cost of inflation. They're just mainly interested in blaming the person in charge when it happens. But the bigger issue here for me is inflation is the number one issue in the CBS poll. 80% of people think it should be a top priority for Joe Biden. Sorry, God damn it.
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The State Of the Union Is ... Long
80% of people, like Joe Biden, I should do these things this late at night. 80% of people think that inflation should be a top priority for Donald Trump. 29% of people think it is a top priority. He spent two minutes on inflation. He said nothing about lowering the cost of housing, groceries, day-to-day costs.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
Picking seniority over the ability to deliver a message – is exactly how we've gotten this mess to begin with. It's how we end up with the gerontocracy of leading the Democratic Party that cannot communicate clearly or in any sort of modern way that it reaches the actual voters who decide elections.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
Look, someone, a very experienced Capitol Hill person once described to me the politics of leadership elections in the House as akin to how decisions are made in high school student government elections, where it's all about – cliques and friendships and relationships, and there's no collective interest at play here. And I think that's part of what happened here.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
Obviously, when they first came into Congress, there was a lot of tension between AOC and members of the quote-unquote squad and other members of Congress. I think that there are people who do value seniority because at a time when 90-some percent of incumbents get reelected all the time, you can rise to power simply by staying alive.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
I mean, just if you just say you're a lot of people will have not and will have not had a competitive election since their first primary and are not going to have another one for the foreseeable future. And so they can one day become the ranking member or the chair of something simply by exercising and eating well.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
It's like I said, seniority is essentially a participation trophy for members of Congress, right? You just have to be there and you eventually get something. I think... There is value in experience, particularly leading substantive committees in the majority, someone who knows what they are doing. Do I really care if the chair of the ag committee is an amazing communicator or not? Not really.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
No one's ever going to see that person on camera. You would have to go searching for that person. There is one role. that where communications matters the most, two roles, I guess, where communication matters the most in Congress. And it is on the Judiciary Committee and the Oversight Committee. And so let's use our brains and try to think strategically about who we should put in those positions.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
I'm sure there are members who are mad, who are friends with Elliot Engel or other people who have lost primaries, who are mad at AOC and other people who support the primary shelter. I'm sure that's the high school lunchroom politics at play here. But the idea that somehow she is a problem for vulnerable Democrats is insane.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
You think the NRCC is going to just forget she's a member of Congress and not run ads against her? It is true that Jerry Connolly is unlikely to show up in any ads against vulnerable members of Congress. That's because no one's going to know who he is. He will never get attention.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
It is almost impossible for a member of Congress to get sufficient attention to actually be heard by voters who decide elections. There is a list of one member of Congress... in the Democratic caucus who meets that test. And it is AOC.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
The best job for someone who can actually get attention is to be the ranking member on the oversight committee when these fucking MAGA goons are using this committee to try to do things like gin up charges against Liz Cheney. And AOC, she is good at what she says is good. She has a good message.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
But what is even more important than that, because there are a lot of members who are pretty good messengers, what distinguishes her from other people is she can actually get attention. She understands how to communicate in a modern way. The fact that Republicans hate her and are triggered by her is a plus.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
Because it means that there will be conflict around the things she says, which means they will get more coverage. I know. We are just making a decision to not be heard. And that is exactly how we got into this mess. Politics is a war for attention. AOC can get attention. She has proven that when she has attention, she can deliver a more compelling message than most people in the party.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
But she's going to be denied that for a series of very dumb, self-defeating reasons.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
My understanding and my understanding equates to my having read Punchbowl this morning is that Democrats actually did a pretty good job of getting a bunch of concessions from Johnson in this bill. Johnson understood that he was going to need a bunch of Democrats to vote for this to get it passed, and he's given them a bunch of things.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
If we wanted to play good but probably kind of hackish politics right now, we would make a giant issue of the fact that there is a pay increase for members of Congress in this bill, the first one in 15 years.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
And that is deeply unpopular. And I am willing to bet that this was a – I'm just guessing here, so don't hold me to this, but I'm guessing that this was sort of a bargain struck between all the leaders. Because remember, this is the thing every member wants. No one wants to say it. And when members run for leadership, they often say they will support a pay raise.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
And substantively, we should actually pay members of Congress more. But if you wanted to find an issue that would galvanize people against the Republican Party, the pay increase would be one of them, even if it is not the most substantively responsible thing we would do.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
I would just add one more thing to that. People will look at that salary and be like, that's a lot more than the median American makes.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
That is absolutely true. But you also have to have two homes in this situation. You have to maintain a residence in your district, and you have to have a place to sleep in Washington State, which is why some people actually sleep in their office, but that's probably not particularly viable, particularly for people with families.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
But I was going to say going forward. So let's get through the – if this bill, as I understand it – pretty good for Democrats, then we should do what we can, get across the finish line, take the wins we got in here. And then next year, we should be, Hakeem Devery should hold all his votes until he gets what he wants.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
At least for the first few months, it's going to be a one-seat majority, most likely. presuming that Trump's nominees get confirmed and head to that and leave the House. So until those special elections happen, he will have a one-seat majority. And so use all that leverage possible to get as much as we possibly can.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
Are you about to call for a shutdown? Are you going to shut down the government?
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
This is an important distinction you're making. I was answering that question in the context of government funding.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
So let's take these things. This is a relatively and surprisingly interesting conversation about congressional strategy. I'm just trying my best. I'm trying my best. So let's do the government funding first. Now, the way this is going to play out, there's obviously going to be some House versions of the bill.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
The Democrats are going to be terrible because they're going to have to keep going further to the right to get – every person from Barry Loudermilk, who I discovered existed yesterday to, you know.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
Yes, it's an amazing name. But what eventually will come back is a bill that got at least seven Senate Democratic votes. And so in that case – and that is probably a Thune-Schumer negotiation to get something that gets a sufficient – a large number of senators that then comes back to the House.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
And then that is something that is probably – unless something has gone horribly wrong in the Senate, it's something that we would probably be OK with or as OK as we could possibly be in comparison to a shutdown when the Republicans control all the levers of power. Now on the tax bill, this is incredibly important. No Democrat – should vote for the tax bill. Certainly coming out of the House.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
Absolutely. We should say none. Not a single one. Now, there may be one person who breaks, but we have to treat this like Harry Reid treated Social Security privatization in 2005, which I know is an incredible- You write it.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
Yours. It's on you. We're not going to be there. We're not there. We're not negotiating everything. You go do it. And let's see if they can actually get it done. But we do not give them anything for this. And this is incredibly important because we want to shine a light on the fact that Donald Trump ran to cut costs.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
And one of his first acts is going to be cut taxes for the richest people in America.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
Just sorry to harp on to keep talking about this because I am shockingly interested in it, but we cannot consider keeping the government open a give to us.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
With the debt ceiling, keeping the government open, that is not a give to us because we care about people's lives. That is a give to them because they run Washington.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
I mean, in fairness to full disclosure here, I talked to the organizers of this effort several times over the last couple of months. I think this is incredibly important. Good job. All I did was read the things, the very good work they did.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
Incredibly seriously. This is exactly how it happens. You get a pretext for an investigation run by a bunch of political cronies who will do what the authoritarian wants. We see this happen all over the world. And Trump told us it was going to happen. He appointed the people who would follow through on the things he told us he was going to do. And now they are doing it. It's incredibly dangerous.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
And I just – primarily as someone who has complained loudly about abuses of the fundraising system by democratic organizations and particularly scam packs, which there are a lot on our side. This is very important.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
The problem always is there's a collective action problem where the DNC – like even if the DNC or the presidential nominee or the individual senators were responsible in how they use their lists, everyone else isn't, right? And the most donors don't – They're not counting. Hakeem Jeffries has only emailed me three times, but something called Turnout Pack has texted me 7,000 fucking times.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
No matter how many times I hit stop, it never works. It's just the Democrats. It's all the Democrats. And ActBlue is the one place where you can actually have levers to pull to affect all of this. And so this is all very good stuff. We should do it. It's just – it's so sketchy when you get like Barack Obama has spoken and it's like a quote from Barack Obama.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
Like it makes you think that Obama or Michelle Obama or Joe Biden or Kamala Harris has endorsed this PAC, whatever it is you've never heard of or people you've never heard of and you've never seen them expend money in any way, shape or form. And so – This is a very challenging problem. This is a set of reforms that can make things better.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
It doesn't mean that we're going to stop getting annoying texts, but we may get fewer of them, and the ones we get may be better aligned with actual organizations that are doing the work we want it done.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
I don't want to depress you, but they do these things because they test them rigorously, and they work. Right? They are A-B testing.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
No one is thinking – because all these campaigns only care about their list through Election Day, so they will burn it to the ground. Yes. And all they care about is their list. They don't think about the fact that the people on their list are on 700 other lists. And so when you're burning your list to the ground, you're affecting all of your other Senate colleagues or the DSCC or whoever else.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
And these are good questions that we should ask the DNC. Not that the DNC is in charge of all of this, but they do have some influence here. We can talk to them about how they're thinking about this as part of the DNC chair race coming up.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
It feels like we're on the cusp of something very dangerous, and most people are unwilling to reckon with just how dangerous it is.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
Once again, I think he nails it. The suing of Ann Selzer in the Des Moines Register is stupid. Even the most MAGA judge, I think, is going to struggle to find the harm that Donald Trump suffered from a bad poll in a state that he eventually won by more than he won in 2020 and 2016. That is pure idiocy. It's so dumb.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
It's almost a cause for relief about how he's going to proceed down this path because he's clearly easily distracted. But I think it's important to understand – and you guys talked about this, I thought, very well as it relates to the ABC news settlement – is you have two problems with media outlets that Donald Trump is exploiting here.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
One is, like ABC, most of them are run by much larger corporations that have many interests before the government. Particularly in these – whether it's Comcast owning NBC or Paramount owning CBS or Jeff Bezos owning The Washington Post.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
The news business is such a minor part and often a money loser for these larger entities that they are not going to take on water on the businesses they care about to get on Donald Trump's wrong side to defend. If ABC News was on its own, an independent company, it would have fought that case to the very end.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
But because Disney has a million items of business before the government, they don't want to be in a fight with Donald Trump for the next year. For a part of the business, it is so small that Bob Iger suggested selling it at a loss a few years ago. And then the other media companies don't have the resources to fight these lawsuits. It is amusing that he's suing Ansel.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
He's also suing the Des Moines Register. A struggling newspaper that's part of a struggling newspaper chain that does not have the resources to do that in any way, shape, or form. And it used to be, there used to be an old saying that was, you never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel. You never pick a fight with the press because they will beat you in the end.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
But the press itself can barely afford to buy ink by the barrel right now. Many of these newspapers or local television stations or other outlets could be bankrupted by just the idea of fighting an absurd lawsuit against Trump.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
are you as excited as i am dan john i was just so worried that i was my takes were just gonna be stuck in the fridge for weeks and i had to get them out before they started to smell i know well you don't put them on social media as much anymore so i know i should but because you're smart because you're smart i watch what happens to you on social media and it's an object lesson you're a walking scared straight for your own podcast offline canary in the coal mine um okay
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
Yeah. And just another point on why this was a business decision for ABC is the way they structured the settlement. It's a tax write-off because it's a contribution to Trump's future foundation. Which, just notable, ABC News is giving $15 million to fund a monument to the most anti-press president in American history. But they get to write the taxes off, so that's cool.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
I think you cannot walk away from such an important fight. You absolutely cannot do that. And because walking away from that fight, even if you can't win it, even if you have limited levers to pull as Democrats do here, sometimes in politics, oftentimes in politics, fighting and losing is better than not fighting at all. And I would put this in that category.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
I think there are three parts of what Democrats would do here. The first is we have to do everything we can with the limited power we have to fight Trump, vote against his nominees, use legislative tactics that we have to try to expose them to longer debates or a longer process or more investigation or whatever it is. And use our bully pulpit, as small as it may be.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
Second, we have to focus on how we get more power. And that is to realize that the most important thing that Democrats can do over the next two years here is take back the House in 2026. That is a very doable thing. So take back the House in 2026, focus on state legislator in the governor's races in 2025.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
But wherever we can get power, we have to get power because that allows us to create additional bulwarks against Trump's offenses here, but also sends a message to other Republicans about the dangers of Trump if the voters are rejecting it at the ballot box. And the third thing we have to do is we have to not just be against Trump. We have to be for stuff.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
That's the one thing that got lost in the last resistance is that we opposed everything Trump did. We thought our best strategy, and it was a successful strategy in the moment, was to shine all the spotlight on Trump, let him show the public why he was unfit and dangerous, and then reap the rewards.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
That was sufficient to win the House and the Senate and sneak through a very, very close White House victory in the middle of a pandemic. But it's clearly not enough to... win again. It's not enough to actually build a governing majority in this country. And so we have to have an agenda. And it is within that agenda that we must demonstrate that we are not defenders of the status quo.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
That must be an agenda that is populist in broadly defined, populist economically, but also populist in the sense that in the classic term of we are reformers of government. Right. We are looking to get to deal with corporate influence, money and politics, concentrated wealth. And if we can do all of those things, we have a shot here.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
Nancy Pelosi. Oh, man. Reportedly, Nancy Pelosi was lobbying for Jerry Connolly, a longtime ally of hers, in part because he is an ally of Pelosi, but also because I think she believes in the seniority system, which I'm sure we'll talk about. And it's one of the most bananas decisions I've ever seen in my life. It's just such a misunderstanding of what matters in politics.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
I feel it every day. I just see the press releases come out of this White House and I think, best of the fucking best.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
With that bone structure? He's a Hegseth guy, this guy.
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When you read it all, something that was like... So when you look at the... There's a great episode of Strict, scrutiny, about some of these orders that you should listen to, but what jumped out at me and what they... talked about as well, is they're calling it DEI. It's obviously going much further than that. People have talked about that.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
It's going deep into just the rules that have been in place since Lyndon Johnson to protect basic civil rights. It's going after civil rights rules.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
But what really jumped out is the ways in which it is empowering government agencies to, and by the way, private citizens, to go after private companies that may have DEI policies. Because if you're going to become a federal contractor, you have to assent to certain statements in these EOs that could make you liable. And it's going to make a lot of these companies afraid
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
that their diversity policies run afoul of this. They're a government contractor. A private citizen can claim this is an abuse of the federal contracting system, which they're legally allowed to do. And it's another example of trying to kind of... It's a part of an ideological trend, right?
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
It has to do with the same as like the don't say gay bill in Florida, which is you empower private citizens to be a watchdog. And you basically... try to intimidate private individuals, private companies for fear of being sued and dragged into court. The bounty law in Texas, there's just other examples of this and they're implementing that now in these federal contracting rules.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
Well, they hated that. They hated that California lesbian fire chief until she started making fun of Mayor Bass. And then they were like, we're back in. We're back in. The lesbian fire chief said something we agree with. So everybody chill out.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
Yeah. First of all, when I saw WASPs, I was like, they've banned teaching about WASPs? I thought those weren't minorities. I thought this is America. You can't teach about Tommy. Finally, Tommy's hit hard.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
Talking about catching strays. But over and over again, you see these executive orders are political documents. They are not written to govern. So they put out this... overreaching rule and nobody really knows exactly how to implement it. They're afraid of getting on the wrong side and getting drawn into Trump's evil eye. You see the this rule about nobody at the NIH being allowed to communicate.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
Like, does that mean we can't pay our bills? Does that mean we have to stop research? Like, no, no, no, no, no. And it's all kind of now. Is it intended to make people feel intimidated? Unsure. Is it just incompetence? It doesn't really matter. It shows a lack of care. It's a fecklessness.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
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I saw a doctor talking about this on social media and I found it really like heartbreaking, which he said, you know, if you have a member of your family who has a very serious illness that they may not survive and you're at the doctor's office and you're saying you have to try something, you have to try something, isn't there anything you can do?
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
And there's like the anything you can do, the last-ditch thing you can try are the kinds of research that happen at the National Institutes of Health. And Trump doesn't care about that. These people don't care about that. They just want to destroy these institutions. Even the trans ban, I remember when the first trans ban for military service went out.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
And at the time, it just talks about how much things have changed. Everyone was outraged, in part because it was done so haphazardly. It was just issued. It wasn't clear how it was going to be implemented. It wasn't sure what it would mean for current service members. You look at this document that they've put out, And it's still not clear what they're talking about. Right.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
Because they say, oh, the military will no longer for readiness. You can't have people who are in transition. And oh, by the way, you can't use the pronouns of your choice. But what about service members who transition long ago and have been serving their country with distinction this entire time? Right. And is it because they were using the wrong pronouns?
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
What if they use the pronouns that you demand for them? Are they allowed to stay? How does this get implemented? They don't care. They don't care what this does because they don't care about service. They don't care about these basic values. And so they throw us all they throw these soldiers to the wolves because they don't they're they're ideologically inconvenient.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
Yeah, I... It's so frustrating, right? Because you see that clip and you're like, well, let's break it down, right? Let's explain all the ways that this is wrong, right? All the ways in which actually Joe Biden delivered on a lot of his promises.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
And Donald Trump is going to, and has all, Donald Trump failed in his first term on virtually every promise that he made other than cutting taxes for the richest people. That Joe Biden had more deportations while he was president than Donald Trump had while he was president, right? There's a lot of ways to break it down. What was interesting to me about the clip is like,
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
You see like a kind of conventional wisdom kind of taking hold in real time. And you see like this kind of this, like Bill Maher says, exactly. And the whole audience applauds. I've tried to think like if Kamala Harris had won, like what is the list of big executive orders she could have signed in the first day that would have had like rapturous applause? Like she's fucking doing it.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
She's delivering on what she said she's going to do. It's happening. It's happening. And like that's not to say that like that part of that is just the failures of incumbency, right?
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
Yeah, fixed it. No fires. But the reason I bring that up is only to say, yes, it is different when you're trying to run to replace someone in your own party versus replace someone in the opposite party.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
But I think back to 2006, and I remember all the Democrats campaigning for the House, and they had their checklist of the things that they were going to do if they won and the things that were going to stop it. They did the anti-corruption measures, raising the minimum wage. There's a whole list. of simple to understand policies and like forget. Yes. Look, we asked we have asked and answered.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
We paid in blood for Joe Biden giving up the bully pulpit. Like, yes. Now we're talking about all these Democrats kind of overthinking. How are we going to respond to this? Let's get out the abacus and like move the move, move the move the beads around to figure out the perfect response.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
And I can't possibly start speaking until I know exactly what my overall vision is for the future of the country. And it's like, is that the lesson you draw from the last four years? Get the fuck out there. Get out there. Start responding. Tell the truth. How about that? Like, you're asked about what you think about the January 6th pardons? Tell us what you think of them.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
You're worried about what's happening at the National Institutes of Health. Tell us what you're thinking about it. You don't leave the field and build some playbook for how to respond and defeat Donald Trump. You get out there and you start doing it. You see what works. You see what doesn't. Like that whole piece was just a bunch of people kind of trying to like
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
we're going to crack the code finally at long last. Oh, the political piece. Yeah, the political piece was just all about how we're going to crack this fucking code. And it's like, guys, everybody's applauding Stephen A. Smith for this rant of basically easy-to-refute nonsense.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
Trans issues keep coming up and then people are like, it's 1% of the population. It's 1% of the population. Yeah. Yeah. It's a tiny group of people that are scared to go to the bathroom at the airport. And Republicans have made trans issues the center of our politics. But I will say, John made the point, well, it's based on something she said in 2019. But I do think it's more than that.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
And it is a larger credibility issue. If Democrats had more credibility broadly with the American people on the big issues, the economy, on the cost of living, on on education, on healthcare, whatever it is, if Democrats had earned credibility, if they were seen as fighters, as champions, for the people we need to be fighters and champions for, there would be more space to say, and you know what?
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
We may not agree on trans issues, you may not be where I'm at yet, but I'm gonna fight for trans people every goddamn day.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
And I want to just, and I think like sometimes we, you know, let's do what we say people should do, which is like, we're like, let's explain why that's bad, right? Like we say that all the time. Oh, you sound like you're reading from a message document. You sound like a reading from a message box. Like, why is that so bad?
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
Well, it's because if people don't believe you when you are talking about the economy or issues they really care about, because you sound like you're reading from a script, you sound like you sound like a normal politician. They're not going to come along with you when you disagree. They're not going to trust you when you see things a different way.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
There's an insurrectionist that was already arrested on gun charges before we recorded today. Jokes aside, there was one killed in an incident with police resisting arrest. These are dangerous people. Forget politics. Forget ideology. Donald Trump released 1,600 people, many of whom are very dangerous, and they're out there being arrested and causing mayhem right now.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
Yeah, I think the problem, though, is it's like really what you're saying is not. So therefore, our strategy should be to look for opportunities to show emotion.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
Just fucking do it. Well, right. What we want is somebody who sees this happening unfolding. It is like, fuck, I got to get out there.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
You know what? Let's get. Hey, get a get a couple of Capitol Police officers stand behind me because it's so outrageous. I'm furious.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
It was... A warm tuna. That's where we're at. That's the bright spot. The bright spot is hot kitchen tuna. Well, it was just such a badly made tuna sandwich.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
Siren. Pod Save America endorsement. Add the siren in post. First of all, I also was like, Just based on our conversation, I also just think all three of them had very smart things to say in the conversations that you had with them on Ponce de America. In particular, I thought Faz talking about what it means for the Democratic Party to look like it's fighting for people.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
and was very smart and like regardless of who's the DNC chair I think that is really important and kind of goes and it actually fits a lot with what Ben was talking about as well and what we've been talking about that it's not just about the right words or the right message it's about picking the right fights it's about breaking through and figuring out how to do that in this messy and noisy environment but like
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
We talked about this a long time, that if we could duplicate Ben Wickler and put him in all 50 states, we'd be much better for it. And I think we've felt this personally just over the years of going to Wisconsin, that Wisconsin was this warning.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
about this omen for what could happen in the country when a group of radicalized Republicans try to do unpopular things and strip away Democratic accountability for it. And as he said in your interview, that they've been kind of on the edge of a cliff this entire time.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
But what's been exciting, having gone to Wisconsin, starting when we first did the show all these years later, is watching them slowly build this operation and figure out how to respond to that kind of a threat and do it in a way that's successful. And there are so many lessons from what Ben has done in Wisconsin that are valuable nationally. Yeah.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
Nerd shit from Tommy. oh, they're going to capitalize it. This was Trump at his best. No, like when I saw it over, when I saw it unfolding, when I saw the folding, what my honest first thought was, it was like, this couldn't have been scripted better for Trump if Trump hadn't paid this guy in Trump coins.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
Because trade wars, tariffs, a lot of what Trump is promising. It's much easier to promise as a candidate because in reality, there are terrible, terrible tradeoffs. And by the way, there are also terrible tradeoffs in having a capricious American president like upending our reputation as a stable and safe
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
ally like there is incredible value for americans day to day and having a president that is seen as a reliable partner because yes it may mean there are times we have to compromise and give with your partners but you're a trading partner they can count on you're a country they can count on uh but he doesn't give a about any of that so he gets this incredible easy win right like obviously like you know i saw people on social media be like and you know our coffee is going to be more expensive but like
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
This is bullying. You can bully a small country because they need us more than we need them. He knew that from the jump. This guy caves. It's just another great news cycle for Donald Trump.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
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Have you ever seen the movie Marathon Man? No. In the movie, Marathon Man, an evil Nazi dentist kidnaps Dustin Hoffman to demand answers. And the movie is chilling and terrifying because Dustin Hoffman actually genuinely does not have the answers. He thinks he's part of this plot, but he's not. And that's what I thought about. That's what happened to Canada?
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
Visit simplisafe.com slash crooked to claim 50% off a new system with a professional monitoring plan and your first month free. That's simplisafe.com slash crooked. There's no safe like SimpliSafe.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
My like serious reaction to all this is like, yeah, it's probably be good if the Canadians knew what we wanted. It would also be good if America knew what we wanted as well, because the question I have around what Trump has promised to do, we'll talk about it later.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
Like there's a lot of places where Trump has hit the ground and just sort of like putting in place big policy changes, but actually hasn't really done that on tariffs. He's promising an announcement on tariffs as soon as February 1, and he's threatening big tariffs on China, on Mexico,
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
And then you dig into it and it's like, well, you want to support American car manufacturing. One problem with that is a lot of parts that are involved in manufacturing cars in America come from Canada and come from Mexico. How will that impact our ability to make cars in the United States? There are very real implications and the details really matter and we don't have
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
It's also given to what, right? Like this is just like tariff, taking off tariffs that aren't in place.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
And then I just long term. My question through all of this is how bad do the impacts of what Trump is doing on America have to be to overcome the advantages he has in how news is distributed and received? Right. And how much his team will be on his side to argue that either things aren't happening or they're not his fault or whatever it may be.
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Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
And beyond tariffs, right? Everyone's like, how's this going to help the price of eggs? They're killing tens of millions of chickens now. There's a genuine bird flu crisis unfolding that is going to affect prices. And Donald Trump is president. He owns these things.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
Well, fortunately for us, John, we have polling that shows that 57% of Americans oppose Donald Trump using coercion, either military or economic, to seize the Panama Canal back. So Trump and Lovett on the wrong side of that one. Similar numbers on Greenland. American people are not interested in Greenland or the Panama Canal.
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Well ... he's back.
I would just say, Tommy, this is the entire plot line of Special Ops Lioness Season 2. And it doesn't end well for anyone. What is that?
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
I mean, much of the immigration stuff is real. Like there are really horrible stories you're hearing right now from people who had appointments with CBP, people who are seeking asylum, had appointments for 1 p.m. today who had them canceled at 12.01. The app that the Biden administration set up so that people could set up their appointments, they shut that down at 12.01 today.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
The birthright citizenship is potentially fake, but maybe not. Like, I mean, most legal scholars believe you cannot. The Constitution is pretty clear on this and you cannot declare it. But the Trump administration can start thinking about it in that way. And up until it gets goes through the court system, people can be affected by it.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
A lot of this stuff is all, as you point out, it's like Trump creates this fake reality, and then he creates a series of fake solutions to solve the fake problems from the fake reality, like the electric vehicle mandate. Just declaring that government will stop censorship, will stop censoring things, all of that is really fake. But the immigration ones, I think, are quite real.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think this is going to be the thing that defines his presidency, but he played put us. We can talk about the national security concerns. We can talk about the dangers of TikTok. But from pure politics, he played it exactly right. And I think I do think the Democrats fumble.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
I mean, it's really not that complicated that if you are, we're doing pure politics here, that if you're going to take something of tremendous value from six and 10 voters under 30, and then you never talk about why that should happen from the moment you pass the law in the dark of night until the day it disappears. Like no one ever made the case for it.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
You know, Biden could have tried to make a public show as Trump did in the first administration of trying to facilitate a deal. Yeah. It's like they all passed this thing. They passed it without really thinking about it. They didn't sell it. They didn't make a case for it. And Trump understood right away. I mean, for entirely cynical, ridiculous reasons, we understood the politics of it.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
Because at the time, a lot of these Democrats voted for it, and Republicans too, because your choice was anger the youths or look soft on China. And they defaulted to what was always theoretically better politics, being tough on China. Yeah. And there's just a real difference between taking something that matters a lot to a group of people. Like you and I use this example with you on Friday.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
For voters of a certain age, taking away TikTok is like taking away cable TV from us in our 20s. Like it just disappears one day. And that is – taking something away from someone is always going to be worse politics than generically being tough or soft on another country in a way that doesn't really affect people. And so, I mean, from a political perspective, Trump did very well here.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
This is – he got a – probably the most expensive free ad in American history to have a push notification to 170 million Americans first begging you to save the app and then crediting you for saving it all within a 12-hour period. It's like –
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
I mean, it's just the whole thing was so surreal, right? As you pointed out in your opening, you have Donald Trump standing in the Capitol, the building that four years ago he incited a mob to try to assault. He delivers this speech, which in some ways feels like you say it feels like State of the Union because he's in the Capitol.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
You're doing the Pornhub case? Yeah, boy, we have very different TikTok algorithms because that's not the message I got.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
It also felt like a State of the Union in the sense that it was a laundry list of policy ideas sort of woven together in a very incoherent fashion. And you take the words, if you just read the, like the transcript of the speech, it reads like the words of a fascist dictator, but delivered with the energy and cadence of a middle manager at a sales conference, like just very low energy energy.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
And we would soon learn why, because then he would go give a second speech moments later where he just did the full shtick, all the things he wanted to say, did the whole Trump routine. This was the speech for the aides who told him to be disciplined, I guess. But, you know, not a great speech.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
It's in a row of declining influence. That's exactly right. The Republican governors were in the overflow.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
I really want 10 years from now someone to have to explain what the sentence, the hawk-tuification of the Trump presidency means.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
Well, I mean, there has been one of his brothers has been a target for a long time, and it's been a target from Trump, a target of the Republicans, a target of the Republican Congress. So I think if you're doing that, I guess you're doing the whole family to make next year's Thanksgiving less awkward.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
The preemptive pardon's fine, right? I mean, I think it's weird he didn't do Jack Smith. I know why he didn't do Merrick Garland. Maybe he shouldn't have prosecuted Biden's son.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
Yeah, that's very true. I think the people who got it know like there are names out there, I think, with them.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
I mean, just it's the other thing is like they released him at like 1158, like as his final act. was to release Leonard Pelletier from prison to pardon Jerry Lundgren, who was a Kentucky politician who was in prison for campaign finance violations, and his whole family. Doing it in the sort of dark of night like that just makes it seem worse. Just do it all.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
And it's the same thing with the Hunter Biden pardon. It's just like, do them and defend them. Make the case for them.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
It was very typical. It's like enough to please the groups who have been pushing very hard for the White House to do this, but not enough to actually... go all the way. Like let's say he had ordered the archivist to do it. The archivist had printed a bunch of new constitutions with more amendments before you go out the door.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
One, those would be worth a lot of money when it's eventually struck down. That'd be cool.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
I did, and it's exactly – you described it right. It is the director's cut. It's just – I mean, it's just like sometimes I can never stop looking at these things from the perspective of a communications staffer. But you do this whole speech. This is your message. You have – I mean, it's poorly written, but someone did write it.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
And you have it out there, and you've decided these are the things you're going to do. And then he just – Calls Nancy Pelosi a criminal and talks about and calls Liz Cheney a crying psychopath minutes after your speech is over. It's just it's like a truly wild choice.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
I'll do a few. And then for all of them, subscribe. But in all seriousness, I think there are just a few things I would, you know, I've is there are going to be, after today, 1,460 more days of the Trump presidency. And we've got to get through all of them. And we've got to try to get through them with our faculties intact. And so just a couple of things that I've been thinking about is, one,
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
Yes, Trump won a really big victory. As he pointed out in his inaugural address, he won all the swing states. The country did move to the right. He did win the popular vote. But he also only won the presidency by about 100,000 votes in three states. And that's just worth keeping in mind, not to tell ourselves some story about how we don't have to make huge changes to the Democratic Party.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
We absolutely do. But just that victory is much closer than it appears right at this moment. Just keep that in mind. Second, and I think this is a lesson we've all learned from the Trump years now, is we don't have to follow him down every rabbit hole. He wants our attention 24-7. He wants to just flood the zone with shit all the time. And our attention is our greatest resource.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
And we can decide when we give it to Trump. We don't have to give it to him all the time. We can just depict between the things that actually matter, where he's making a real impact, and the things that just so much annoy us and distract us. And so I think it's a very important thing. It's not something I'm going to try to do with the newsletter.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
I think it's something we can do this podcast is try to help people separate the signal from the noise, understand what matters. I think the most important thing is we're all angry. We are anxious. We are worried. And the best thing to do, and that's always been true ever since Trump was first elected, is to channel that into action.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
And people should go to Vote Save America to figure out ways to do that. But just I want to keep people like a North Star for this, which is Right now, the Republicans have one of the narrowest House majorities in history. You have a bunch of Republicans who are existing in very, very purple districts.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
The voting patterns in the Trump era suggests we have a phenomenal chance to take the House back. And if we take the House back, Donald Trump will never pass another law that does not have Hakeem Jeffries OK. we will have the ability to investigate Donald Trump. We investigate the ability to hold hearings, to issue subpoenas, and we can do that.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
And that is of just, we have to get through these two years focused in working on taking the house back. And if we do that, Trump will still be president. He can still do really bad things, but we will have so much more power and ability to limit what he does, limit the damage he does and expose him for who he is.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
That is his point. That's exactly what he said. Legitimate shock that the rich and powerful could be affected by something like this.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
Maybe she was guilty of a crime. Just to be clear, not just like morally guilty. He called it a criminal offense.
Pod Save America
A Lawless Trump and Aimless Dems
Joining us today is House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Leader Jeffries, welcome to Pod Save America. Great to be with you. Okay, I want to start, as you can imagine, with the budget vote that happened this Friday. House Democrats almost unanimously voted against the bill. A handful of Senate Democrats, including Leader Schumer, voted for the bill. This was obvious.
Pod Save America
A Lawless Trump and Aimless Dems
It seemed to be, at least from the press conference you got your leadership gave afterwards, to be a point of contention between the House and the Senate. I understand that you, according to some reports, that you and Senator Schumer met in Brooklyn yesterday. Is that report correct? And what can you tell us about the status of the relationship and the conversation you guys had?
Pod Save America
A Lawless Trump and Aimless Dems
I don't want to keep looking backwards and I don't want to harple things that have happened, but I think it's somewhat instructive for the fights to come. Heading into that budget fight, did you and Senator Schumer have a plan about how this was going to go and he changed the plan or was there not an agreement headed into the vote?
Pod Save America
A Lawless Trump and Aimless Dems
Now, six months from now, you're going to be right back in the same situation. I assume, and you correct me if I'm wrong, that ideally you would use that period of time to get to some sort of permanent spending agreement that you could agree to, Senator Schumer could agree to, everyone would agree to.
Pod Save America
A Lawless Trump and Aimless Dems
Now, the history, as you know better than I, of the House Republicans coming to a budget agreement is not great. How are you sort of thinking about the coming budget fight and how you're preparing for that?
Pod Save America
A Lawless Trump and Aimless Dems
period, full stop. So ultimately, because of the process, the state of the power in Congress and the process the Republicans are going to use, Democrats don't have the votes and so to stop the tax scam, whatever you want to call it, the effort to cut Medicaid to pay for these tax cuts.
Pod Save America
A Lawless Trump and Aimless Dems
I take it that your plan here is just to raise public awareness to the point that it becomes politically toxic for the Republicans?
Pod Save America
A Lawless Trump and Aimless Dems
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I sort of met in the view that if you can make it unpopular, you can make it so that enough of the Republicans who may be in these purple districts or the handful of them are in the districts that Kamala Harris won would not vote for it because the margins are so narrow. So it was sort of both at the same time.
Pod Save America
A Lawless Trump and Aimless Dems
One of the ways in which you're trying to stop it is to raise awareness so people understand the political consequences of voting for it. I want to shift gears here for a second. Yeah. Over the weekend, the Trump administration appears to have defied at least one and maybe two court orders involving their mass deportation efforts.
Pod Save America
A Lawless Trump and Aimless Dems
This has sort of been the nightmare scenario that, you know, where the Trump administration starts just telling courts, we don't care what you have to say, telling judges we don't care what you have to say. This is what sort of when we talk about what a constitutional crisis could look like under this president, it would be something like this. What's your reaction to what's happening?
Pod Save America
A Lawless Trump and Aimless Dems
And how dire do you think the situation is right now?
Pod Save America
A Lawless Trump and Aimless Dems
You guys were kind enough to invite me to your house retreat in Virginia last week, both in the program you guys put together, the folks you invited, the conversations I had with your members.
Pod Save America
A Lawless Trump and Aimless Dems
It seems like you guys were really trying, and I've been to a bunch of these over the years, but it seems like you were really trying to legitimately wrestle with some of the lessons of 2024, how politics have changed, how media has changed. Can you just tell me a little bit about what that process is like and what you guys have learned thus far?
Pod Save America
A Lawless Trump and Aimless Dems
Leader Jeffrey, thank you so much for joining us and good luck out there. Hope to talk to you again soon. Too much.
Pod Save America
Rachel Maddow on Surviving Trump 2.0
Well, I don't know if it benefited. I don't know where it is. I don't know much about it other than I launched it. I heard it was very successful. I haven't checked it. Where is it today?
Pod Save America
Rachel Maddow on Surviving Trump 2.0
Several billion? That's peanuts for these guys.
Pod Save America
Rachel Maddow on Surviving Trump 2.0
This was a political hoax. And you know what? Those people, and I'm not saying in every single case, but there was a lot of patriotism with those people.
Pod Save America
Rachel Maddow on Surviving Trump 2.0
FEMA is going to be a whole big discussion very shortly because I'd rather see the states take care of their own problem.
Pod Save America
Rachel Maddow on Surviving Trump 2.0
I won youth by 36 points. Now, maybe that's because I went on TikTok. I don't know.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
I saw that Susan Collins has been texting him, which is cool.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
Probably Elon, right? He's all memes. He's a meme lord. That's true. I also think the cabinet has been blowing up Trump and Susie Wiles because it's hard to run an apartment when you have a bunch of unaccountable people running through it just cutting things and seizing your payment systems and putting your building up for sale. Yeah. They're trying to sell the headquarters of these departments.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
Where are the people going to work? This is one thing I've been struck by. Trump's order that everyone has to go back to the office and also we're going to sell the office? What's going to happen?
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
So many questions. How do we know they accidentally revealed a CIA black site? Why is there a CIA black site in Northern Virginia? I would say I texted that on our group chat with Ben and Tommy and no one responded. Fucking crickets for those guys.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
Doesn't seem that way. I would say that. I mean, you are just playing with absolute political fire to be in a situation where people may not get their social security benefits on time, where their disability claims are not being processed, where they can't get anyone on the phone. This is where the rubber hits the road. You see the same thing with the VA. People aren't getting veterans benefits.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
Medicaid checks aren't coming out. Hospitals are not getting paid for services rendered. This is very real stuff, and this is where it affects people's lives, and the politics of it are devastating.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
This is probably where there is some divide between Trump and the Project 2025 architects, including people like Elon Musk, which is Trump, he doesn't care about any of this shit. He wants to root out people who are not on his side. He wants to get rid of the quote unquote deep state, at least until they got to him earlier this morning. And so he's very on board with, let's go through the FBI.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
Let's get out all the people who work for Jack Smith. Let's go through the CIA and get all the people who leaked about me and my perfect phone call or about Putin or whatever else. What the other people want to do is they just want to break government. They just want to break it because they don't believe in it. And it's going to be really, really, really hard to fix.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
Like you're going to have to hire – how are you going to hire more people? Like just imagine – I was thinking about this last night. Imagine you're the next Democratic president three years from now and you come in and you want to fix all the things that Trump broke. How are you going to get all of that done? How are you going to hire a bunch of people? How are you going to reopen offices, right?
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
It's just the – it's not – it will not be a turnkey. Usually – When you switch administrations, there is a sort of a turnkey element of it. You get rid of all the old executive orders, you put new people in, you put new executive orders in, and the wheels of government can start moving in your ideological direction here.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
That is not going to be available to the next president because the wheels of government are being smashed by a bunch of people who hate government.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
I do. I do think it did. Because if there's one thing Trump cares about, it's how rich people feel about him. And here are all of his Wall Street buddies, his newfound tech friends, all losing tens of millions of dollars in the market over a three-day period. And so I think he reacted to that. And frankly, Trump probably also lost a lot of money himself. I'm sure he has money in the
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
People go into government for many reasons. One is public service. Many of them, particularly like the scientists, the doctors, they could make a lot more money doing something else, working elsewhere. But they choose this out of public service, but also because a government job is an incredibly stable, up until now, had been an incredibly stable job with very good benefits. You had job security.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
Now that does not exist anymore. In a world where we're just flipping back and forth between a Democrat and a MAGA Republican every four years, you're not going to go back into government for a long-term career because four years from now, Donald Trump Jr. could be there, or J.D. Vance, or whoever else, and you could lose your job all over again.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
Yeah, that probably is part of it. It's hard to imagine that Trump's giving public comments based on the advice of a lawyer to try to have a better legal strategy. That seems somewhat unlikely and out of character.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
Have you even heard Susie Wiles' name since the election was over?
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
Well, it's not really the same disciplined operation as the campaign.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
Like, yes, technically, they're in a more legally precarious position if Doge is doing it. And that's not always true. These federal workers do have some protections. You do still need cause and reasons to do it.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
So it's not – maybe they would slightly improve their chances by switching it. But I think this is more about the cabinet secretaries being like, we just took these jobs. We have no control. Throw these nuts running through our department doing everything. And they complained to Trump. And they're the last person in Trump's ear before this meeting. So he made these comments.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
He may feel differently after talking to Elon on the phone tonight. Who knows?
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
Yeah. In several polls, if you test Trump's ideas or proposals or executive actions he's taken, the most unpopular is pardoning January 6th rioters. Right around that same neighborhood, abolishing the Department of Education. This is a Republican idea that has been going back decades. It is so unpopular that it sunk the Republican House majority in the 90s.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
Various meme coins. I think he probably has some stocks and bonds too. And so yeah, I think that this is – he reacts to it. He takes the Dow very seriously. He used it as a measure of economic success in his first term. He did once tweet a long time ago that if the Dow – any president who has the Dow drop 1,000 points over two days should be impeached. I'm sure he still stands by that opinion.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
It was so unpopular in the 96th presidential election that by the time we got to the year 2000, Republicans were running on expanding the Department of Education. That was the entire no child left behind policy of George W. Bush. It is a truly like those are the politics. The politics are terrible. It's an insane thing to lean into. Also, not something you can do with executive order. Right.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
I mean, we thought that about a lot of things and lo and behold, some folks at USAID may have something to say about it.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
Yeah, the wind is coming out of the sails on this very quickly. People, Democratic activists, are going to be super pissed about this. And I understand that reaction for sure. This is a – as we talked about with Senator Schiff, this is a singular point of leverage we have. And to let it pass by seems – you can understand why people would be mad about that.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
Now, the question – and I've been very torn about this question. You and I have kind of gone back and forth over the course of the podcast on this.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
Yep. And the question that you would have for people on the – pro-shutdown side. And ultimately, we're not really shutting it down. It's really going to be, can the Republicans get 218 votes to pass? Then the ball will be in the Senate's court, but they have to do that first. And I imagine that no Democrat is going to vote for that continuing resolution in the House. I hope so.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
And so just make the Republicans get the number on their own and see if they can fall under their own weight. But if you're on the...
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
I don't even want to say pro-shutdown side, but if you're on the side who wants the fight here, my question for you would be, what would be your public rationale for why you're opposing a clean, year-long continuing of funding for the government at levels agreed to when President Biden was president?
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
But so yeah, I think this is – he blinked because the market responded in a way that he did not anticipate, which suggests he really didn't prepare very well for this because it was pretty obvious what was going to happen.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
And what do you think you could get out of that fight that would be a substantive victory as opposed to just waving the white flag after some period of time?
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
The test here is can Mike Johnson get a clean, continued resolution out of the House? Yes. And if not, if they were to add in what they call anomalies, which are specific provisions, specific cuts or policy changes within the CR that implemented the doge cuts, the Democrats would have to fight that. You cannot vote to implement the doge cuts.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
But absent that, I think the question is much more challenging. And just the one piece of advice I have for Democrats is decide what you're going to do now and do not raise expectations of something different.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
No, the Senate's obviously not going along with what the House does. They have different priorities. They feel differently about the Medicaid cuts. They think a lot of the trillion dollars in cuts is ridiculous. There's several senators have said that, that that's a true impossibility. And so how does this end, I guess, is the question.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
One way, and I've been thinking about this, because the budget resolution itself is not a legally binding document. It's a pretty fake thing. And you can amend it. You can pass a superseding one that just all it is is a is permission to pass something without a filibuster in the Senate. Like that's what it is. And so it can say almost anything and they're, they are not bound by this version of it.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
The easiest things Republicans could do, like the, they have to pass something. If they don't pass anything, then the debt will, the debt ceiling will expire. And every, nearly every American will get a tax increase at the end of the year.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
And so the position of greatest fallback or maybe of least resistance is just a short-term, short three- or four-year extension of the Trump tax cuts as is, which is what happened to the Bush tax cuts in 2010, I believe, 2010. Yeah. And so you could see that. Everyone lives to fight another day, and the Republicans could probably do that relatively easily with Trump's help.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
Companies with business abroad? Like, I don't know, the guy who owns a couple of golf clubs in Scotland?
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
Which is the immigration is the bait to get them to go along.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
For the crazies. Because they care about cutting the government, but they care a lot about some pretty nasty immigration policy.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
God, I fucking hope there's a third option. It's all so stupid. The whole thing is so dumb. Every part of it.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
We talked about this in the pod we did right after the quote unquote State of the Union. And I find it really hard to care about what Al Green did. Like, is it going to win us an election? No. Is it going to lose this election? No. Is it a big victory for Trump? No. Is anyone going to remember this some years down the road? No.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
And so I don't really understand why 10 Democrats felt the need to vote for this. Like if they're going to somehow avoid getting anti-Al Green ads in 14 months, like what do they think is going to happen?
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
No, that was a State of the Union. No, it was not. It was not even a fake State of the Union. It was just a straight-up joint address 15 years ago.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
The world has changed, Jim Hines. The world has changed.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
It's what Kevin McCarthy wanted to do to Trump for January 6th. as an example.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
Yeah, the ringleader was speaking at the time. That's what he interrupted. The guy who incited the riot and the people who had tried to give it. Like, just the only thing I'd say about this is no one is better at turning a five minute moment to a five day story than Democrats.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
We had everyone. Everyone's like, oh, it happened. What is my reaction to it? Like, I'm uncomfortable with it. And that's an OK thing to be is to be uncomfortable with it. But then their first reaction is to dial up someone from Politico and Axios and complain about it. And then we're going to have the censor vote.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
And so instead of making what I think would be a fair-minded political argument that the economy is teetering, prices are up, the world's in chaos, and what is the House doing? They're spending their time censoring the guy with the cane. Like, what are we doing? We just, 10 of us had to vote for it. So now.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
Yeah, maybe. I mean, this was terrible press for him. Every local paper, local newscast was like, how this is going to affect prices for X, right? I saw a headline here in the Bay Area about how the tariffs are going to make Bay Area housing cost even more. And so I'm sure you saw that across the board. But bad news doesn't really make it to this White House. Yeah. So who knows?
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
I think those people think Democrats are sleeper cells, like Trump double agents. If you think the strategy has helped Trump, you may think it's working. Any takeaways from the poll? I don't think I needed a poll to tell me that people weren't happy with the Democratic Party. I did not need that. I knew that any conversation with any person who cares about politics will tell you that.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
Any moment on social media will tell you that. There are some useful things in the poll beyond that. They poll test Trump's – a lot of his actions and policies. They – even more valuable, they tested a bunch of messages that would be most effective in drawing contrast with Trump. The content of those will not surprise you. Number one, protecting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
Number two is about the economic chaos we just talked about. Number three is about veterans' benefits and Medicaid. It's like we know what those messages are, but it's useful to reinforce that – even with all the insanity and everything that's going on, the most persuasive things are still the most persuasive things we thought they should, that we imagine they would be.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
I think – I just want to stipulate there are no easy answers here. There is no silver bullet. There is nothing that some Democrat or some group of Democrats can do that's going to stop Elon Musk. And expectations are completely out of whack. And I understand people are scared and frustrated and they're looking to their party to – offer a solution. We just don't have the power.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
Democrats don't have the power to actually stop them. So you hear a lot of people saying like, where's the message? Why don't we have a message? And the message could be better. It could be better delivered. It could be delivered more effectively, whatever else. But even if we had the most perfect message, we're not solving the problem that most people want solved.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
And we do have to play at least some version of the long game here, which is we have one moment Doesn't come for about a year and a half. But when that moment comes, we have a chance to actually make a huge difference in Trump's ability to destroy this country. And that's to win back the House and maybe the Senate.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
And the process between now and then is about making Trump more unpopular and informing the country about what he is doing. And I think the real dilemma here is – and we can talk about this for hours and we are on a very tight 90-minute timeframe that people will find out very shortly – is that – We know what the most persuasive things to say are.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
But they are responding to the repercussions of this, even if those repercussions were so obviously foreseeable to anyone who paid a lick of attention.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
We just don't currently know how to make people hear those things. And that there is a real gap between the things that persuade people and the things that generate the engagement and drive the conversation sufficient people to hear it. And the best advice that I have is we all have to be loud. And so we can talk at all about what congressional Democrats can do.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
I'm more interested in what all of us can do, what everyone listening can do, which is go to town halls, go to protests, call your member of Congress, talk to all your family and friends, use those messages I just talked about, share the news, talk about the chaos, point out the economics, just be out there. Because we all have agency here. And if we're just waiting around for Hakeem Jeffries or
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer or Chris Murphy or someone to save the day, they can't do that for us. We're going to have to do it ourselves. And it's not going to happen overnight. But over the course of time, between now and November 2026, we can put ourselves in a position to win the House, win the Senate, and really dramatically curtail Trump's ability to damage this country.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
No. Ro Khanna and Tim Walz have said they're going to go to districts.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
I knew it was two people. There's been a lot of reporting about what some of the people who are presumed to want to run for president, like Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer, and Wes Moore, others might be doing. This is a great use of their time is to go do it. The one thing I would add in there is it doesn't have to be a competitive district.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
House elections rise and fall in the national political environment. So if you don't happen to be near one of those California or New York districts that are competitive, do it in any district. The walled garden of local news and politics doesn't exist anymore.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
And so just if there is a thousand stories about angry town halls from all over across the country, that is going to affect the people in vulnerable districts too.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
It's not possible. And if you want me just as an intellectual exercise to try, the argument would be madman theory, that he seems so crazy that people will do what he wants because anything is on the table. Right. It's like, keep him on their toes.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
Well, as I like to say, Pod Save America is for the nerds. Polar Coaster is for the super nerds. So we went deep into the question of why Donald Trump is becoming less popular. Why his approval ratings are down. Why people are souring on his economy. We also got into some Bravo talk for people maybe into that. But mostly we were deep in the crosshairs.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
Excellent. Bravo Talk is coming. Dan and Caroline are going to talk about the Paige-Craig breakup. Be prepared.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
God, that is such a good transition. Thank you so much for bringing that up. I appreciate it. Yes, we do have a deal for Pod Save America listeners and really only Pod Save America listeners for at least the first 100 days of the Trump administration if we make it that far. This month on MessageBox, one of the things I'm very focused on is what I think what we just talked about, which is
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
The most important thing Democrats can do is make Donald Trump less popular. So I have a series of posts that go into strategies, tactics, messages about what elected Democrats, the DNC, whatever else can do, but mainly what all of us can do, the right things we can say in our conversations with our friends and family about Donald Trump that could drive down his approval numbers.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
And so if that is of interest to you, I would refer you to the world's most cringeworthy website, cricketer.com slash yeswedan. If you go there, you can sign up for MessageBox. And you will get your first month free. This special offer will be around for either for a while or until my dignity takes over and I can't take it anymore. We have to bring down the website.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
I get a I go into our cabinet to get a coffee mug. And I see that mug and I just wonder where, how did we get here?
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
Yeah, it's I mean, the madman theory is that you were pretending to be a madman to keep your opponents on their toes. If you're an actual madman, it doesn't work quite as well because you don't have any defined objectives. You don't have a strategy. You're just being an imbecile.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
Right. Chaos and corruption. That's exactly right. I mean, for businesses, they want a good economy. They don't want a bad economy. What they really don't want is a chaotic, uncertain economy because you can't make any decisions. They really have to have some confidence.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
Even if the economic outlook is not good, they want to have confidence in that outlook 6, 12, 24, 36 months in advance to make decisions about whether you're going to open more stores, hire more people, build a factory, launch a new product. And if you can't have any sense of what's going to happen,
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
because there's a guy in the White House who's just capriciously making decisions left and right for no foreseeable reason, then they're going to hoard cash to try to wait out the uncertainty and the chaos for a better time for investment. And that's going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy that's going to hurt the economy because it's going to mean less economic growth.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
No, I don't think they're going to lie their way out of this one, right? The one thing that people fully understand is the economy. And for all of Trump's messaging skills, the size of his megaphone, all of that, he cannot bend reality to his whims. maybe for his most ardent fans, but not for the middle of the electorate.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
And you're already seeing the softest Trump voters, the new Trump voters, the men under 40 who came to him. Navigator research uses a measure of people who voted for Trump but don't strongly approve of him. All of those people are souring on the economy and they're souring on Trump because of what they're seeing. And you're right. This is directly attributable to him.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
And it is a message that Democrats should latch onto because people are going to see what's happening. And we do have to tell a story about why it's happening. And the fact that Trump is chaotic and erratic is a story that is quite believable to people because it – It fits with what they see. To anyone with eyes, ears. They know it.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
And I think you see this lesson in the 2020 election too, which is people will put up with a lot of Trump's chaos because they think there are positives to it in a sclerotic broken system. But when that chaos starts impacting their lives, then they turn on him. And we are at the point where it is infecting people's lives.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
Yeah, where we had strong growth, low unemployment numbers and high prices. And guess what happened? People weren't happy about the economy. There is a – like Jason's right. I mean the idea of taking government spending out of GDP as a way to make GDP look better is just – you have to be an idiot to think that. Like that's just not how it works.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
You're taking things that drive growth out of a growth measure and think it's going to give you more growth is foolish. But I think there is a downstream consequence to even talking about this, which is if this speaks to the business uncertainty, the economic uncertainty that's coming from this administration, is these are the numbers that people make decisions on.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
And if there are reasons to believe that people are fucking with those numbers, it's going to cause even more uncertainty.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
Because if that number comes in and it's better than people thought, but they don't trust it because these people have been openly talking about playing with the numbers, then businesses are not going to bank on that number as a reason to be more optimistic and therefore invest more.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
But if you don't fire them, Elon will fire them. Right.
Pod Save America
The DOGE Who Caught the Car
I mean, let's see what really happens here. Like Elon is not someone who takes no for an answer. Let's just see if there is an actual change or if this is just sort of window dressing.
Pod Save America
Trump Heals Grieving Nation
I think Pete handled it exactly right, which is we do. Trump wants a big fight about DEI. That's the fight he wants to have. We don't have to take the bait on that, right? We don't have to get down. We don't have to fight on his chosen territory every time. We just have to always remind ourselves that Trump is in charge of everything. He owns it all.
Pod Save America
Trump Heals Grieving Nation
And in this plane crash, he's the person responsible for the FAA whose air traffic controllers were giving direction to the airplane. He was in charge of the military whose helicopter was involved in the accident. He's in charge of the National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating it.
Pod Save America
Trump Heals Grieving Nation
And after the end of this investigation, if they find out that there were insufficient number of air traffic controllers, as is very possible, that the few air traffic controllers we have were deployed incorrectly, Donald Trump's the person for fixing that problem. He ran promising to fix all of our problems, to put us in a golden age, and he did not do that.
Pod Save America
Trump Heals Grieving Nation
And we should hold him accountable for that. I'm not saying that voters are going to blame him on his 9th or 10th day. for a plane crash that happens on a swash. I don't think they hold presidents responsible for crashing planes, but they do hold presidents accountable for how they address the crisis itself and how they solve the problems that led to that crisis, right?
Pod Save America
Trump Heals Grieving Nation
The voters did not blame George W. Bush for the hurricane hitting New Orleans. They blamed him for the fact that we weren't prepared for it and how poorly we responded to it. And the way that he is responsible, we have to hold him accountable for what happens from this point forward.
Pod Save America
Trump Heals Grieving Nation
Well, Congress did it. And why do they do it? Because they want to land at DCA instead of Dulles when they come in for work.
Pod Save America
Trump Heals Grieving Nation
We're going to get to the freeze and the hiring thing in a second, but just on this point, there's a shortage of air traffic controllers. You know what's going to make it harder to get more air traffic controllers? Cutting federal spending, making it higher to hire people, and then just shitting on the federal government so much that no one wants to work there.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
How are you going to get enough people, qualified people, who can do the job in the pipeline? Because as this FAA official pointed out, it's hard to become an air traffic controller. You need people of certain training and qualifications. And so you need a very big funnel to get them in.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
And you're not going to get enough people, qualified people, to do the job if you don't have the money to recruit them, you don't have the money to pay them, and you make working in the federal government seem like it sucks.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
Look, John, everyone has their thing. And I would say that OMB mail-ins have never been my thing, but I am also not here to kink-shame people.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
I am not kink-shaming anyone, especially the Senate minority leader. So live your life, Chuck Schumer, whatever floats your boat.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
RIP to all of those beat sweetener pieces written by all those White House reporters about what an amazing job Susie Wiles would do now she'd make all the trains run on time. Look, to be fair here, it is true that this version of the Trump White House is better run than the first version. But that doesn't mean it's well run.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
The fact that some minion in the Office of Management and Budget, which currently does not have a director, can put out a memo that vaguely shuts down trillions of dollars of federal funding in a moment without running it by anyone is one of the most... evocative examples of incompetence I've ever seen in my life.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
And then the fact that they put this memo out, it's not even like this was a bad idea. This was like a well-executed bad idea. The memo was so vague, no one had any idea what it meant. It really shut the spigot off and caused mass chaos across the country. One memo written by, once again,
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
An OMB nerd, which is what we always call them when we work with them, like a nerd deep in the OMB, sends out this memo, shuts down Medicaid funding, housing vouchers, everything, total disaster. Then the White House, instead of just being like, throw the OMB minion under the bus, all defends this. Stephen Miller, who did not sign off on it, went on CNN to defend it.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
And they defended it up until the moment a judge took it away and Trump got upset about the bad press coverage and they rescinded the memo.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
I mean, that's fine. They work for the king, so maybe that's less surprising. The person who is more surprising and alarming in this is Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House. The power of the purse is their singular power. It is the greatest check and balance they have over the functioning of the executive branch. It's how they dictate policy. have influence on what happens?
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
And Trump was like, no. And he's like, okay, more please, sir. I mean, it's just absolutely embarrassing.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
I mean, basically, I think Reid Epstein got a window into a lot of the conversations that are happening in the Democratic Party right now. There has been, particularly in at least the first week of the Trump presidency, a tremendous amount of frustration at how elected Democrats more generally, but congressional Democrats in particular, have acted. I have ranted, I believe, on this podcast and in
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
Multiple other forums on the internet about Democrats voting for Trump nominees, like to what end? Like, what do you think the upside of that is? Why would you want to put your name? Like, do you really want to have endorsed Sean Duffy? Is that really what you want?
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
No one knows who that is. Or the billionaire hedge fund manager who's going to help implement the Trump tariffs. What's the upside? What's the argument for it? Some of it is unfair in the sense that there's nothing Chuck Schumer and the Senate Democrats could do to stop any of these appointments from happening. No Senate Democrat voted for Pete Hegseth, right?
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
No Democrat's been the 50th vote for one of these people. Like, that has not happened. They've just voted – like, I don't understand the votes, but they've been in places where there were enough Republicans that put them over the top, so it didn't really matter. I mean, they have very limited legislative authority to stop stuff, but there is just this frustration that –
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
There's just been too much silence and too much equivocation from Democrats in their messaging where it's like we just can't figure out the right way to talk about Trump because before it seemed easy to us because we felt like we had all the political high ground because even if we lost the presidency in 2016, we had the majority of voters were anti-Trump.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
Now, the polarity voters pick Trump and we're just like – everything is on one hand, we disagree with Trump. On the other hand, we also agree the borders should be secure, right? It's just there's like all this equivocation. In the response to the federal funding freeze, Democrats did better, right? They got louder. They spoke more strongly. They spoke with one voice.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
Now, I don't think we should break our arm patting ourselves on the back over it because – but I think you should get credit. It was better than it had been to date. Yeah. And I think if there's a lesson to take from it,
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
It is that the things that Democrats were saying about the federal funding freeze was not our typical like pay on to institutions that sort of sounds like something on the cutting room floor from Hamilton. But instead, we just talked about like how people were getting hurt, right? This program in my district can't get money. These people can't pay their rent.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
This Head Start program is closed and parents don't ever take their kids because of this. Like it's just like – Very simple, granular, real-world impacts on real humans. And I think there is a lesson in that going forward, that with more of that and less of the stemwinders about democracy.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
This is a really important point because I think one thing that's held Democrats back is we're waiting for the message. We don't know what it is. We haven't analyzed all of the results yet. We haven't done a bunch of exit polls or focus groups with first-time Trump voters or whatever else.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
I mean, they're supposed to come in like six weeks, so I hope not. But it's just – The election shook Democrats to their core. Like what we thought worked did not work in any way, shape, or form and blew up in our face. And so they're waiting for the right thing to say.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
But if there is one lesson of the Trump era is that volume and frequency is much more important than precision when it comes to messaging. You just get out there and start talking. By the way, because that's the game he's playing. It is. Just talk all the time. Because if you're talking all the time, it increases the number of chances that someone will actually hear what you're saying.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
And if you happen to fuck up and say the wrong thing... If you're out there five minutes later, you're going to pay less of a price for it. This is one of the things that really hurt Kamala Harris was she was out there so much less than Trump. So when she did make a mistake like she did on The View, it haunted her in ways. Trump was out there saying crazy shit on a podcast three times a day.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
But because he was doing it, there was always a new thing coming after it. There was less political consequences for doing it.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
For even as nuts as Trump was in 2017, that he was still abiding sort of by a... what is now an anachronistic model of political communications where you try to stage manage stuff, right? We're going to have like, this is the story of the day. If we do X, we can't do Y later because it'll ruin our headlines about our EOs. It's like, nope, just do it all. It's always happening. It's never ending.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
There is no news cycle. And Democrats could learn some lessons that like, we obviously have a huge megaphone disparity here. Like we don't have, we have a very small handful of politicians who can get real attention, but, It's great if we can all speak with one voice because that will help about one thing. But that's not going to happen every time. So just get out there.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
Most of them are bullshit in the traditional sense of the president having the authority to implement what he said he is going to do. Not just what you mentioned here. Across the board, most of these... Executive orders – they're not even really executive orders. They're really presidential memorandums. They're just – they're missives, right? They are press releases with signatures.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
He doesn't have the authority to do the things he's saying. There is no legal precedent for him. Some are very clearly in violation of the Constitution. I mean, we'll hopefully be struck down, but who knows. But there is not a ton of actual legal power in it. But I think that really undersells the danger here.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
So let's take the example of the ones in education trying to deal with, quote unquote, critical race theory or forcing patriotic education. The federal government has almost no role in what local schools teach. Even if they were to use federal funding to try to put policies in place, that's very limited. 90% of school funding comes from state and local communities.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
Even in the states where they have actually passed laws putting some of the stuff into place, studies have shown that they've had very little impact. In many cases, they have not been as impactful as the conservative legislators would think because teachers still – there's not someone in the school telling teachers what to do. But –
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
There is a chilling effect of these sternly worded but very vague missives declaring that things are now illegal or not allowed, or if you do them, there will be retribution. For example, Michigan State University this week canceled their Lunar New Year celebration because they thought, according to reporting in the Lansing Journal, that it might violate anti-DEI policies.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
It's because they're confused. They don't know. Here's this thing. We have no idea what it actually means. Are we going to get ourselves in trouble? Are we going to face political blowback? Could there be a big fight over this? Could there be retribution from the government?
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
And even if you – I'm sure that if the general counsel of the university looked at it and was like, obviously, we would win this fight. You don't want the fight. You can't afford the fight financially, time-wise. And so you're going to see people making a lot of decisions to avoid getting on the wrong side of Trump on some of these things.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
And I think about here in California, like up where I live, the public schools every fall do Ruby Bridges Day to celebrate Ruby Bridges and to teach about segregation and desegregation in the schools. And everyone, if you can, is to walk to school that day like Ruby Bridges did.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
I don't think this would happen here, but you could see in another part of the country people wondering whether that was too woke to have. Is Black History Month going to be too woke? People are going to trim some of that stuff back because they're worried about violating, angering a federal government. Even the federal government has no statutory authority to enforce these policies on you.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
That we would hold migrants in one of the most notorious prisons in the world, right? Something that has been at Guantanamo Bay has been a recruiting tool for terrorists for 20 years now. And I assume would be run by the military because Guantanamo is a military base. So you would have a military-run prison camp for migrants who came to America.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
I know Tom Homan said this is the worst of the worst, which-
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
I mean, this is something that Tommy and Ben can talk about much better than I could, at It's not like the US reputation is doing fucking great right now. I mean, with Donald Trump as our president, both what is our role and what is happening. Gaza has been deeply damaging to our reputation around the world.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
But the idea that we're going to house migrants in a prison camp is – like I said, a notorious prison camp is going to be deeply, deeply damaging to our reputation around the world.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
Are there any particular American citizens that you've been worried about over the recent years of being sent to Guantanamo Bay? No. I mean, I just, I mean, the thing is, it has been a running joke for nearly a decade among about us, about being sent to Guantanamo, about, you know, various people who have been, Trump has been sent to Guantanamo and they're building it now.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
It's going to be interesting. Like you would feel like you're going to need money to build a lot of money to build the largest prison under American control at a military base. I presume you probably have to appropriate money for that. Maybe they can find it in the couch cushions the way they found money for the wall. But there will likely be a big congressional debate about this.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
I have no idea whether they are technically authorized to do it, but I imagine this is quite serious. As you point out, this is exactly what Elon Musk did at Twitter. He has installed some of his closest allies, people who helped him with all of the layoffs at Twitter, at the Office of Personnel Management, which is an obscure but incredibly powerful agency which staffs the government.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
I imagine that there probably is some sort of authority that allows you to – because these people are choosing – By doing this, they were not firing them, right? This is a way to get around civil service protections, right? You are not firing them. You are giving them the opportunity to leave.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
Now, Judd Legum in his newsletter of popular information has pointed out, he's read the actual missive that the OPM posted on their website. And it's not actually a buyout. A buyout is you take the money for the next nine months and you stop working tomorrow.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
What they are saying is basically you leave in September and your job duties will change, but you're not free of working. You might still work. There's a lot of gray area into what would happen. You'd be free of some in-person responsibilities, but it is incorrect in Judd's view. And he makes a very compelling case that this is a buyout.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
It's actually just a way to get people to forcible resignation or encourage resignation.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
I think the reason why we should take this very seriously, regardless of the specific powers they may have, is this is the full conservative project of decades now, which is to hollow out the federal government so we can do less stuff.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
Then on the things it continues to do, it does them less well, which makes the public more dissatisfied with government, which causes them to elect more anti-government politicians who then hollow out the government some more, rinse, repeat.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
And the end goal of this is not just, though, that the government's doing less in health care and education, is what these hardcore conservatives, who are not just Trump types, these are Paul Ryan people, is they're going after Social Security and Medicare. What they do not want is the federal government to be giving people healthcare, and retirement security. And those are sacrosanct programs.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
Trump voters love them. The only way you ever get to be able to take those down is to reduce people's faith in government to such an extent that they're unwilling to trust it with their healthcare and their retirement security. And so this is what this project is.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
You make it so that everything else is hated. They can do nothing else well that people are willing to say, put my retirement in the stock market, right? Or privatize my Medicare to insurance companies.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
That seems like... I mean, if we just got a Fox weekend host as our Secretary of Defense, everything's on the table here. I don't know what's going to happen here. I think there was one... Yes, Democrats focus a lot on vaccines. That is the most... RFK Jr. 's Achilles heel politically with the public. That is the part of him that they are most skeptical of that they do not like.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
We have to begin with just pointing out and saying out loud just how absolutely disgusting and cynical what Trump did is, right? There are upwards of 70 families who are dealing with loss, who are trying to find out what happened. There are communities across this country and the world who have lost community members because of this. It is a traumatic event.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
But I thought some of the smartest questioning came from Michael Bennett in the first day in the finance committee, Michael Bennett, the senator from Colorado. He did this the right way. He did a lightning round, basically, with RFK Jr. He asked him. He read him quotes, and he read them in context and said, did you say this or did you not say this?
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
And it was some of the things we've heard about vaccines, about various conspiracy theories. But the last one he asked was, basically, do you believe a pro-abortion access comment of his? And the reason why that was smart is that's how you defeat RFK Jr. The only way to actually defeat him.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
There are ways to score political points with the public, but to actually defeat him, you need to get a Republican. You need to get four Republicans to vote against him. And one area of concern, and this is a weird thing to say, Mike Pence's political organization is running ads attacking or trying to get Republicans to oppose RFK Jr.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
because he has been in favor of abortion access prior to becoming Trump's buddy here. So that is a smart way to do it. Was he getting it confirmed? Probably.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
But I thought that at least showed a savvy way to try to actually get some Republican votes or make it more uncomfortable for Republicans to do it with their constituents, which is going to matter more than making them uncomfortable than just getting more Democrats who are already opposed and riled up.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
Yeah, but it's not good if he gets confirmed. I was just trying to find a bright spot for Democrats trying to keep him from getting confirmed.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
I mean, he's theoretically potentially the fourth. Because we know there's three possibles in Murkowski, Collins, and McConnell. Although not that I have any evidence that particularly McConnell is going to do the right thing.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
thing for the entire nation to deal with when we have a plane crash like this. And instead of consoling people, instead of trying to comfort people, what Trump did as he does with every tragedy is immediately try to exploit it for his own gain. And
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
That was quite the turn that I was not expecting. Yeah. What was the point he was trying to make, even up until that point?
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
It seems that way. I mean, all the reporting has been he has really assuaged a lot of the very obvious concerns about him with Republicans.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
Where there's not a chance that either of us are ever seeking.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
People mix our voices up all the time, so I'd just say that was Tommy.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
Seems like that's happening. I mean, the fact that whenever you're doing the list of people who are possible no votes, Tom Tillis would be on that list because he is a senator who has to run for re-election, has had moments of sanity in his brief career, but he introduced Kash Patel, so it seems like we're not going to get him.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
I know this is going to happen all the time over the next four years, but I do think we have to continue to call it out when he does it, even if it is only maybe for our benefit. There is something dangerous about allowing this to just become the normal way in which we do things.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
Actually, John, you know what the most fucked up thing is, is the person in the most jeopardy may actually be his nominee for secretary of labor because she once endorsed the PRO Act. Oh, God. She was the person.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
Yeah, so there are a lot of Democrats who didn't endorse the PRO Act. Right, yeah, exactly. So she's in the most danger. I'm not entirely sure of the strategy of focusing most of our ire on Tulsi Gabbard on the Edward Snowden traitor thing. I don't... I don't get that either. I don't get that either.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
I mean, obviously, it's the Intel Committee. This is like they're very closely aligned with the Intel community, who obviously have very strong feelings about what Edward Snowden did to them. But just from a public perspective, or even trying to peel off Republicans, it seems...
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
I'd be curious to know what the reasoning was, because there were smart people who were making that case, and I was surprised by it.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
She did. She made it through committee on party line vote last week.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
We'll see if we can take down the pro-labor labor secretary.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
Just reading some rote pablum that your speechwriters wrote for you that you clearly did not care about before launching into this absurd, unfounded attack – That is not sufficient, right? And it should be called out for. And I do think we – you say he got the debate because we are all talking about it.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
We as a select group of people of which we are a part of, the rest of the country did tune in for this, right? The plane crash is something that people – gets people who do not pay attention to the news to pay attention to the news. It is when historically CNN's ratings go way up during a plane crash because people – They fly. They think about flying. It is a big deal.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
And so people who saw Trump do that today, I'm not convinced that this is some giant political winner for him to see him doing that hours after the plane crash. And so, yes, there will be a big debate about DI, and we can talk about how Democrats should talk about the plane crash and that going forward. But in the moment, what he did was repellent, and I think a lot of people will find it that way.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
It is. Two thoughts on this. One, obviously Trump, without any evidence, as reporters, I think, did a very good job of calling out, blaming this on diversity. It's obviously a lie that this is DEI's fault. Trump doesn't know that. No one knows that. And it's not how the world works.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
But it's also the most true thing that Trump and Republicans ever say, because what they truly believe is that what makes America weaker is diversity. That everything that is different from what they view as inherent American culture, white male Christian culture, makes us weaker. It is probably the most true thing. I think this was Charlie Kirk who tweeted this.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
I would say I apologize, but I don't, if it was someone else, but was if you want to go back to the 50s, you have to get rid of the 60s, or you have to undo the 60s. And that is what this is all about.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
This idea that in their mind, they truly believe that any effort that seeks to add diverse points of view, diverse backgrounds to an institution, which means that it is less white, less male, is therefore a weaker institution. That is what they truly believe.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
And that is the stuff that people don't like about Trump, right? When they are tuning in and he is acting like a clown, when he is clearly unable to meet the moment, when he is background noise to low gas prices and cheaper milk, he's fine. When he is in your face, when you want information and he is making about himself, that is what causes people to take a step back to not like about it.
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Trump Heals Grieving Nation
I mean, that was it was a press conference of two reality stars, one cable host and a former CNN pundit all together to lead our government.
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Trump 2.0's Biggest Scandal Yet
You can even see some of the congressional Republicans I saw a clip – I think there's some CNN of a bunch of congressional Republicans. They've all decided that their statement is going to be a mistake was made. Like they're going to do the thing the White House would not do, just admit the mistake and then say, but it's not that big a deal. We're moving on. And so I –
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Trump 2.0's Biggest Scandal Yet
Yes, they don't fear accountability. There's no shame here, right? There's no sense of responsibility that you might have done something really bad that could have endangered the lives of American troops. I don't give a shit about that. I agree with that. But the way the White House is acting – maybe they're scared of Trump firing one of them or whatever else, but they are acting –
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Trump 2.0's Biggest Scandal Yet
desperate here in the way they're in the way they're because you could just be like you do what marjorie taylor green just like tell the reporters go back to their country and move on and that's not what they're doing they're like spinning ridiculous conspiracy theories and ridiculous excuses and making ridiculous arguments to try to somehow come out on top on this
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Trump 2.0's Biggest Scandal Yet
I'm not sure if you're aware of this, John, but I'm not in the prediction business. Yeah, I know. But let me make the case, because I do believe that this is the potential here. I'm not going to make a... There have been so many people who have said, this is the thing that's going to undo Trump. So I am not saying that here. But...
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Trump 2.0's Biggest Scandal Yet
The reason why Trump has been more successful substantively and politically in his second term than his first term was that he has the – his administration thus far has the patina of competency and success that his first did not. His first one was a clown show from the very beginning, just stumbled out of the gates. And here they came out with full force.
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Trump 2.0's Biggest Scandal Yet
Now, obviously, there's a lot of really terrible things that have happened. They made a lot of mistakes. But it's just been this show of aggressive action. And the way it's been covered and discussed is they are running roughshod over everyone. Democrats, universities, democracy, everyone else. And they are just doing it. Is it perfect? No, but they are the aggressor.
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Trump 2.0's Biggest Scandal Yet
And here in this situation, they look really stupid. And they look really stupid in a way that's very relatable to people. This is a thing people understand, adding the wrong person to a group chat. And it's not that people- When you're about to bomb the Houthis. Yes, yes. We understand adding people to the wrong group chat.
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Trump 2.0's Biggest Scandal Yet
Yes, who among us has not done that? The most comparable thing here, as everyone has pointed out, is Hillary Clinton's emails. Hillary Clinton's emails were quite damaging politically, but not because voters cared passionately about email protocol or which server her stuff is.
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Trump 2.0's Biggest Scandal Yet
They cared because it confirmed a suspicion that they had about her, an unfair suspicion in my view, but a suspicion that she was crooked and trying to hide things, right? It fit with the long-running – Republican narrative for her as corrupt. Because like, why do you need to do things on private email? Like, what are you hiding? And it went to the question of her honesty.
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Trump 2.0's Biggest Scandal Yet
In this case, it goes to a fundamental thing that people worry about with Trump. That he's in over his head, right? That he is incompetent. He's a clown. He's surrounded by a bunch of clowns. He's got the weekend anchor from Fox News running the Pentagon. He's got a Fox pundit as the attorney general. You know, he's got the... It's just all over the place, right?
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Trump 2.0's Biggest Scandal Yet
That it's just... Like, if you lose the narrative of competence, that undermines your strength. And strength is all that Trump has ever had. And that's the difference between being... Above 50 in the high 40s is where he has been in some polling, although there's been some drops recently, and being back where he was before in the low 40s, in the high 30s.
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Trump 2.0's Biggest Scandal Yet
And so you can see a world where this is a thing. There's always one thing that fundamentally ends the honeymoon and shifts the perception of the president. For Biden, that was what happened in Afghanistan. Afghanistan. And this has the potential, the potential to do real damage to Trump. It's not going to end his presidency.
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Trump 2.0's Biggest Scandal Yet
It's not going to make everyone take off their MAGA hats and send them back. But it shifts the narrative from Trump the winner to Trump the clown. And that is helpful to Democrats on a whole host of issues.
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Trump 2.0's Biggest Scandal Yet
Right. It changes the context. Like if Elon Musk stood up in the cabinet meeting next week and said he accidentally canceled an Ebola prevention program in the middle of an Ebola outbreak, it would be treated differently than it was treated then. Now it confirms a broader suspicion. And that's when things start to hurt.
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Trump 2.0's Biggest Scandal Yet
It's sort of an amazing political choice. Substantively, every expert looks at it and says, it's not going to do any of the things that Trump says it's going to do. He doesn't understand tariffs. He can't explain them. Or he lies about them, or both. But I guess the way I think about it politically is... Prices are high. People are pissed about prices being high.
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Trump 2.0's Biggest Scandal Yet
They elected Trump to fix those prices. And the only time that he talks about the economy in any way, shape, or form is to do a high-profile announcement to raise the cost of American goods. It's insane. And tariffs in particular are sort of like designed in a lab to get a lot of very granular attention about how those prices can be raised. Right.
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Trump 2.0's Biggest Scandal Yet
It's like you just went through the price of a car is going to go up this much. You're going to have like we saw this with the last when he did the Mexico and Canada tariffs that briefly existed a few weeks ago, like local news goes out and they interview the car dealers in your town. People like local influencers post on social media about how prices are going to go up.
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Trump 2.0's Biggest Scandal Yet
It's very specific, and it gets a lot of attention. When we think about things that are dragging down Trump's approval rating, maybe one day it'll be Signalgate and the sort of impressions of incompetence that come with it, but it's that they elected Trump for a reason, and he's doing the opposite of that thing. It's not just that he's not focused enough on lowering prices.
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And they can't keep them in place. Like, it's the chaos that comes with it, right? It's like, we're going to, we announce the tariffs in the morning, we take them off in the afternoon, then we announce new ones the next day, then we take those off. And this is sort of a smaller thing. And the stock market is a, not a good, barometer of the merits of economic policy in a lot of ways, right?
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I remember how frustrated we would be when we get a good jobs number in the Obama administration where the stock market would go down because wages went up. Yeah, right. And the same thing in the Biden administration where you get a good jobs number where the stock market would go down because it meant that it may take the Fed longer to lower interest rates.
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But there is something about the fact that every time Trump talks about his signature economic policy, the market drops and that that is constantly covered in the news that way. He was asked about it at his press avail. He- sort of deny knowledge of it, which I'm pretty skeptical he's not paying close attention to the stock market.
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It's just like that just adds to the negative energy around this policy, right? It's bad substantively, it's bad politically, and it is going to hurt him. And there's no question in my mind about that.
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His honeymoon started lower than anyone else's and it's ending sooner.
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Trump 2.0's Biggest Scandal Yet
Democrats should. There is like a wisdom of the crowds argument for pointing out that Trump is more unpopular than conventional wisdom suggests he is.
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And then look, if you're having trouble appealing to people, what better solution than to bring Mr. Charisma, JD Vance along as well.
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Trump 2.0's Biggest Scandal Yet
As the saying goes, March may come in like a lion and go out like a lamb, but your home security should always be steady and reliable. That's how February was. February came in like a lion. It was a month early this year. That's true. Because it got warmer towards the end of February here in Los Angeles.
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I don't really understand what's happening here. I just like even if you wanted Greenland, which I'm not really sure how you get it, like that's still not clear.
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I just don't understand how the Greenland small group PC chat came up with the idea to send Usha Vance. If your goal is to take over Greenland, at what part What part does Usha Vance in a dog sled race play in that?
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That's the editor of the New Yorker for those of you. He's the guy who edits the magazine sitting on a lot of your bedside tables that you haven't read.
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We trust SimpliSafe to keep our homes safe 24-7. Right, John? You bet we do. I set up a SimpliSafe system. You customize it on the website, and then it comes to your home. You set it up. You can have them help you set it up, but you really don't need to. You can do it yourself in a matter of minutes. And then it's just completely reliable. Highly recommend it. Best part?
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What's the meeting in Usha Vance's office? We need our first thing, our first big public event. What's it going to be? Thank you.
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Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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Trump 2.0's Biggest Scandal Yet
I mean, he said a lot of words. But taken together, those words mean nothing. Like it's just some people may have done it or they didn't do it or someone called the app and they accidentally ended up in it. It's pretty clear he does not understand how Signal or basically the internet works. This is a guy who, according to at least one report I read, started texting last year.
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That's when he took up the very sophisticated communications technology known as texting.
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Trump 2.0's Biggest Scandal Yet
Everything's computer. Everything's computer. It has to be said that the idea that the information shared by Pete Higgseth was not classified is absurd. It's absolutely absurd. The details around when an attack is going to start by the minute which planes are being used, which weapons are being used is the most sensitive information the government has. Just like, think about it this way.
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Let's say that Jeff Goldberg, he's in this chat. He gets that information from Hexath and he says, I have a huge story now. So he calls the Pentagon and says, in between when he gets that text and when the planes are set to take off in that couple hour period, he says, I am going to publish this on the Atlantic website right now because this is a real story.
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It's hard to fathom why it's not. It is one of the biggest, most important stories in the modern history of this country. One of the fundamental things that separates democracy from dictatorship is due process for everyone, not just citizens, not just the innocent, for every single person is you're gonna have some due process that the government cannot decide on their own Who goes to prison?
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Who stays here? They have to present the evidence to a judge. They have to prove that the person that they are trying to deport is the person they say did the things that he or she did, met the qualifications for deportation, were actually here illegally, were actually undocumented. That is gone. That is not happening.
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And we are sending people to a foreign prison, infamous for torture and starvation. And what happens next? There is no answer to that. How these people, if they've sent the wrong people, which from plenty of reporting, it seems like they have sent many of the wrong people. How do those people come back? How do they get out of that prison? How do they get sent back?
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Even if they were here illegally, but they are not El Salvadorian gang members, how do they get sent back to the right place? We already know that this administration does not believe that... Judges' orders apply outside of America. That was the entire reason why they kept that plane going.
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So what happens when a judge says that this person has to come back to be presented, like I think, what do you call that, a habeas hearing? Are they going to bring him back or are they just going to leave him in the El Salvadorian prison?
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The Pentagon would beg him not to do it and their argument would be that it would put the lives of US troops in danger. And so this idea that it's not classified or not sensitive is insane. It's an insane thing to say. And it's just not credible by any stretch of the imagination. And you are seeing – like Trump is usually pretty supported by like the group of former special forces podcasters.
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This sort of bespeaks both how sort of cowed Democrats are by the election results, particularly on immigration and border security issues, but also speaks about what is fundamentally wrong with our approach to messaging and politics, frankly, in the last eight years or so. Which is, like everyone has read, we talked about last week, the David Shull Report.
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And it says what everyone cares about is inflation, cost of eggs, Medicaid cuts, tax cuts, and that is 100% true. I guarantee you that's true. You have a first group of any group of voters, Democrats, Republicans, independent, new Trump voters, Gen Z, whatever else, they're going to tell you that's what people care about and the best message.
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But if you start with what people care about now and you are not willing to look at what you care about and convincing other people to care about it, you are doomed to fail. It just feels ridiculous. We've read the David Shore thing. We've talked about it. I agree with him on a lot of things. I agree with what our campaign ads in June of 2026 should say. But right now,
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If you're talking about the price of eggs, when people, potentially American citizens, are being deported, when people are being snatched off the street, as we'll talk about, for things they wrote in this college newspaper, And all you talk about is the price of eggs and not the crumbling of democracy. What are we standing for? Who are we fighting for? It has to be our job.
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If Trump wants to make this an authoritarian country, we're not going to stop him by beating him in the next election on an inflation message. Because none of the stuff that's really bad that's happening right now is happening in Congress.
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There's a whole media environment of former special forces types sort of embodied by Sean Ryan, the guy whose podcast Trump went on during the campaign. And a lot of these guys are on – TikTok and Instagram today saying the idea that this information is not classified is impossible to fathom for anyone who has been in these sorts of attacks. Impossible to fathom.
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She wrote it with, I think, 34 other students. And the point of the op-ed, which is critical of Israel's conduct at war in Gaza, is they are mad at Tufts University for not taking the recommendations of the student union, basically, which had a vote and called for a bunch of things, including divestment, university divesting from Israeli-related financial interests. But that's it.
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It reads like, honestly, any college op-ed you've ever read. It's not pro-Hamas. It's not calling for violence or vandalism or damage. It's just calling the university to live up to the principles that the students believe it has and to be kicked out of the country for that. Right?
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It is a widely held belief, constitutional belief, that everyone in this country, citizens or not, has freedom of speech rights.
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And we're now – like after cancel culture, freedom of speech, we've ended government censorship. We are now kicking people out of the country for signing their name to an op-ed in a college newspaper. This is not someone who by any means organized violent protests or vandalism. Simply put their name on a piece of paper and they do this because they want to send a message.
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And it's not just a message to – People who are protesting the war in Gaza. It's not just a message to foreign college students. It's not just a message to people here who are immigrants, documented or otherwise. It's a message to everyone who wants to criticize the Trump government.
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Yes, that expression. And also just it is somewhat funny or scary or whatever that let's say that someone had just gotten that information and they were like one of our adversaries and they're trying to figure out where the attack is coming from. The name of the group chat has the target in it. It's not a mystery. It's not like they think the plane's taking off in Kansas, right?
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They're going to be able to figure it out pretty quickly.
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And just, this is obviously, it just is, it's not enough of a coincidence in the world that the one time they use signal on a sensitive information happens to be the one time they invite Jeff Goldberg.
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Like what? But like at no point I ever were like, huh? First time you ever done this on signal or how does this thing work? They all were just seem totally, seem totally normal to be on signal to have this conversation, which speaks to the larger problem here.
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Even Laura Ingraham is like, uh, what? I don't understand what he's saying there. Is he saying that he put Jeff Goldberg's number under someone else's initials, JG, who he was going to invite to the group chat?
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Did that happen? Two years ago, when Merrick Earl was attorney general, he appointed a special counsel to investigate Joe Biden, his boss, for the misuse of information.
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So let's separate the White House reaction from the broader MAGA world. The White House reaction, not just Trump, but the way the entire Trump administration is handling this, Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, everyone else, is they're teaching a masterclass in how to fuck up a communications crisis. It is – like this is such an obvious mistake. Like you can't discuss sensitive war plans on a group chat.
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You can't discuss them, as you pointed out, when you're in Russia like Steve Witkoff was. And you really can't deal with Jeff Goldberg. So there's no justification for it. And any normal administration, any normal person would say, we messed up. We learned our lesson. We're going to do everything we possibly can to make sure it doesn't happen again. End of story.
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And if they did that and like promised to like do this inspector general investigation is going to look at it. We're going to look into the use of signal across the government. This story would be over. But they can't do that. To say you were wrong is a sign of weakness and disloyalty in Trump's world. And so no one does it. So instead, they're just like making up insane things, right?
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As you said, making up conspiracy theories about how Jeff Goldberg got into their phone, like hoaxes, gaslighting, the White House, the White House communication, litigating the difference between a war plan and an attack plan. Right. And then on top of that, like this is when you want to know what happens when you appoint Fox News pundits to run your government.
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You get what Pam Bondi and Pete Hegseth did there. Right. Bringing up the bleach bit as if she is guest hosting on The Five this week. Like, what are we doing?
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I agree with that. Obviously, I agree with your assessment of the reality of the world. They're acting scared. Like there's flailing happening here. And it's because the White House is handling this poorly. So then all the congressional Republicans are doing – look like idiots trying to like parrot these talking points.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
I would just note that my bag is packed on the couch in your office, and the second we finish recording this, I'm going to leave the studio and go get on an airplane to fly home.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Well, look, right here, I'm really leaning into the definition of the word brink.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
The funny thing is, is I knew this from the beginning. And I'm not even in charge of Doge. Because you just read the words in the article. It's very clear the Verizon is the new system.
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It's a coincidence. It's hard to imagine how that happened.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Yes. I think Elon Musk is Donald Trump's political Achilles heel.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
We've seen this in polling and in focus groups that Peter Hammy wrote about in Puck News the other day. Voters, they don't trust Elon Musk. I think he's a tool. That's what one of them said.
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That Trump voter had a point. But they don't trust him. They don't like him running around unilaterally slashing government. They don't like the idea of the world's richest man rooting through government. They think he is filled with conflicts of interest. They don't think he's doing a particularly good job in that Washington Post poll.
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Only 34% of people approved of how Elon Musk was doing his job in government. And so we should talk about it all the time in this conflict of interest there. And I think this is really important. Because this is something I will flesh out. I've mentioned this once before, but I will one day flesh this out as an actual written argument.
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But my belief is that the narrative the Democrats should tell about the Trump administration is one of chaos and corruption. And nothing embodies that more than Elon Musk and Doge. This is incredibly chaotic.
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I talked about it in the last Trump election.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Yeah, that's true. I mean, we've done this podcast, or a version of this podcast, for three consecutive presidential elections, and Donald Trump's been in all of them. So chaos and corruption keep coming up. I don't know why.
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I know we're going to talk about it.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
And the parties have to respond by tomorrow with briefs to the Supreme Court.
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I mean, this is the test, right? This is the ultimate test of the system, is the idea of the Supreme Court or the judicial branch as a co-equal branch of government is really just a theoretical concept that exists only through the acquiescence of the executive branch. Yeah. Because the people who enforce court orders work for the executive branch. Yeah. And so this is the test.
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And there's real speculation that John Roberts is going to try as hard as he can to avoid testing this proposition in a way that would have Trump violate with impunity an order from the court, as J.D. Vance has encouraged him to do. Right.
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Because once that happens, the idea of judicial review, the findings in the main Supreme Court case that you learned in the first day of all con law classes, Marbury v. Madison, falls apart. Because once you say, do this or else, and they say no, and there's no or else, the whole system collapses. And so this is like a very serious situation.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
You can really see John Roberts, who's tried really hard to ruin the court slowly to sort of avoid an epic confrontation. That is going to be to Trump's benefit as these cases proceed through the process. And I will say, for being totally fair, and I don't know why we have to be, but Trump has said he would follow court orders.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Is Kash Patel coming to get them?
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
This is a real precipice of something very different in American life that we are standing on right now.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
I'm sure everyone remembers the one time we did that segment.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
On his podcast, Ezra Klein once described American democracy as a series of norms in a trench coat. Which really is being, the trench coat is open and there are only norms there.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Yeah. I mean, related to this is there is another story about how Trump's team has told the the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, the NRCC, as it's known, that they were only going to support candidates who are who pledge their loyalty to Trump.
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It's a first. It's a critical but largely meaningless step.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Should we do a little explainer on this? Sure.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
So just so people understand, what Trump is trying to do here is he and the Republicans want to pass this bill without fear of a Democratic filibuster. So the only way to prevent a filibuster on a piece of legislation, because the filibuster still exists for legislation. Thank you, Joe Manchin. Here's the cinema. But actually, right now, maybe. Thank you, Joe Manchin.
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I would be happier if we had passed a whole bunch of other bills like voting rights and other things, and the filibuster is still stupid, but is to use the budget reconciliation process, which is a process that was set up understanding that you have to pass a budget and deal with budgetary matters, and you can't do that with a filibuster. So this is basically like a filibuster free card.
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Step one of that is pass a budget resolution. In many years, when you're not trying to use budget reconciliation, Congress never passes a budget.
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Because you don't really need it. It doesn't matter. Particularly if the party is in control of Congress and the other side is different than the president. It's a fake thing. But here it actually matters. All it is is the ticket to ride on the budget reconciliation process. The budget reconciliation process, you only need 50 votes, but everything in it must relate to taxes and spending.
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Yes, because there are some there's something called the bird rule named after Robert Bird, which dictates what is allowed in the budget resolution process. When there is a question, the Senate parliamentarian rules on that. Now, it is worth noting that the. presiding officer of the Senate can ignore the parliamentarian.
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And some of us may have made a case that they should have done that back then. But lo and behold, we don't have voting rights. But at least the parliamentarian's integrity is intact. So that's the process that has begun.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
And now the Republicans, both the House and the Senate, separately, theoretically, have to write a gigantic tax bill and a giant spending cuts bill that they have to pass before the debt ceiling runs out sometime in late July or August.
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Either adds up mathematically or legislatively. Exactly.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Well, there's got to be a version to lift the debt limit before we default on the full-fledged credit of the United States. And look, Trump was able to get this through last time, fully unpaid for. Like they did not do cuts to pay for it. Will he be able to do that again? He obviously had a much larger house majority, relatively larger house majority, not a huge house majority.
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It's really incredibly complicated. The Medicaid math, and just so people know, Medicaid provides healthcare and nursing home care for like 72 million Americans, including children. And they've talked about all kinds of things. One of the things that the Republicans are batting around is
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One of the ways in which a lot of people have access to affordable health care is through a provision in the Affordable Care Act called Medicaid expansion, where the government covers 90% of the Medicaid match for state Medicaid funds if they expand health care. They may try to cut that back, which would kick a whole bunch of people off health care.
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Well, that's one thing they're definitely going to do.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
The only way this passes is a whole bunch of people have to vote for a bill that they said they would never vote for. Yes. They either have to vote for a tax cut that massively increases the deficit.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
But without any sort of significant spending reductions or changes to programs like Medicaid, or they have to slash Medicaid in a way in which they all said they would not do. Yes. And Donald Trump, it's worth just noting Donald Trump in 2016 campaign said he would not touch Medicaid. And then he pushed like hell to pass a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act that drastically slashed Medicaid.
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You're probably not going to get more than you already got. Exactly, right. Because you've had this tax cut since 2017.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Just, you... It would be a hard to go into a lab to craft a policy more unpopular than cutting health care for Americans to pay for a tax cut for billionaires.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Well, we did this. We tested it and it was very unpopular. It showed up in a shitload of 2018 House midterm ads.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Which probably won't happen.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
It's a fucking... No one's passed a fucking appropriations bill in a long time.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
We've been talking about this in many forums, personally, you and I, for a few days now.
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Just turn this whole thing into a reality show. So they do them multiple times. That's right. I'm always like, did we talk about this on the pod?
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
I do not think the Democrats can vote for a bill that does not do something to stop what Elon Musk and Trump are doing. What they're doing is dangerous and, frankly, unconstitutional, and they cannot allow it to happen. Now, there are some ways in which, I think, to go about this that would be smart. Senate Democrats should really say and insist that the House goes first.
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They should not negotiate. And I think that if Mitch McConnell was still there, he would make the House go first because he does not want to pass a bill. that he sends to the House and the House then rejects. He needs the House to collapse in a heap of their own failure, which they often do.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
And then what he does is he gets together with Schumer, passes a bill that has some sort of bipartisan agreement, sends it to the House, sends all of his members home and says, pass it or be responsible for shutting down the government. So the House goes first. That really simplifies things because Democrats aren't the ones shutting down the government.
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Either Mike Johnson and the House Republicans can keep it open or they can't. And so leave it on them. That's one. Two, I think in the way in which we talk about this, it has to be about the specific things that Elon Musk and Donald Trump have done that have hurt people, right? Food safety, cancer research, the FAA, having competent air traffic controllers.
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It cannot be about the power of the purse or congressional prerogatives. And I've already seen some members of Congress and a political story on this today talking about that. Cannot be about that is that we have to be protecting people from cuts that are hurting them like that. That is absolutely essential. And look, there is risk in a shutdown politically, like a shutdown is going.
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We are not the one shutting down the government. Republicans are shutting it down because they cannot pass a bill in the House. They are too incompetent to do it.
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Previous shutdowns have always happened, other than previous shutdowns have happened when the government is divided and the part in the House, usually Republicans in the House, refuse to bring up a bill to keep it open. Right. Or they pass something they know the president won't sign. Republicans control all the levers of government. If they can't keep this thing open, that's on them.
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And there is political risk in this. Like shutdowns are bad. People get hurt in them. We don't we do not want this to happen. But also we do not we cannot save the Republicans from themselves here. Yeah, because it's the one point of leverage we have. And there is political risk in it. There absolutely always is.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
But I think the greater political risk in the long term for Democrats here would be to walk away from a fight when the party absolutely must demonstrate strength, must find a point of conflict where we can demonstrate to the American people, we can grab their attention and demonstrate to the American people what it is we stand for and who we're fighting for.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
And if we walk away from that, we're not going to get another opportunity.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
There has been this real dissonance at times between Democratic rhetoric and Democratic actions. We talk about the existential threat of Donald Trump. We talk about the deeply damaging things he is doing or could do. But our response exists in the frame of normal politics.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
And if this is as dangerous as we believe it is, and I think Senate and House Democrats believe it is as they say it is, then you have to be willing to engage in more politically risky maneuvers to try to do something to stop it.
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This is a very sad day for the Washington Post. The Washington Post is, while it's been struggling financially in recent years, is one of the most important media institutions in the country. It is famed as a media institution that will cover anyone and everything without fear or favor. They will stand up to incredibly powerful forces in this country. They took down a president.
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They published the Pentagon Papers.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Yes. But now, at least the opinion section of that paper is nothing more than an organ for the billionaire with multiple interests in front of the federal government that owns the paper.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
And- So this is a problem for The Post. It's deeply demoralizing and unfair to the very good journalists at The Post who do very good reporting. They deserve much better than this because this has caused people to cancel their subscriptions. It has caused people to not trust the work they are doing.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
And I think it also is, and this is the broader point, it is just another signal about the dangers of corporate owned media, right? The 21st century was a period of media consolidation. Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, Comcast bought NBC, the Walt Disney Corporation bought ABC News, the CNN is owned by Warner Discovery.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
And for a long time, even as those were good purchases because the business of journalism was so good that they were profit engines for these companies. And they were good for the brand because they also owned these valuable news brands that meant a lot. In recent years, and because of that, these corporations abided by the traditional firewall between the business and news side.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
They did not get involved in interfering. Over the course of time, the financial value of these journalistic organizations within these larger conglomerates came down. They're now, they still make money, but they're declining assets.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
In fact, in some cases they're drags on the stock price because people know that these networks are in inexorable decline because of changes in how people consume media. And now the firewalls are starting to come down because they know they believe that Donald Trump will hold the larger corporation and its interests over the coverage of the news entity. And so we see this in the- With good reason.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Yes, they're not wrong for thinking that, right?
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
And canceled a, or at least tried to, I can't remember the full details, but tried to cancel a Pentagon contract with Amazon. Yep. Jeff Bezos has Amazon contracts and Blue Origin, a space company, depends on federal funding. And all of them worry about regulatory scrutiny in a vengeful way from the Trump administration.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Right, and that's what they wanted. Many of them want to merge with other companies. They want to buy companies and they know that Trump will Trump's FCC or FTC or whoever else is involved in it will hold him in. So there are some examples here, right? The Disney Corporation has been in the crosshairs of Republicans for a couple of years now.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
They settle a pretty specious lawsuit involving George Stephanopoulos for a $15 million donation to the Trump library. Trump has an even more specious lawsuit against 60 Minutes involving the editing of a Kamala Harris interview. The Paramount Corporation, which owns CBS News, has been bought by Skydance, a production company owned by Trump's buddy, Larry Ellison's son, David.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
That is going to need approval from the FCC. And so what is Sherry Redstone, the owner of Paramount, want to do? She wants to settle that lawsuit, that absurd lawsuit in order to stay on Trump's good side. And so the point here is that media is changing. The era of corporate media has come to an end because the firewalls are coming down. And so you mentioned the Eric Wemple thing, right?
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
I think the question of whether we mahad or not depends on how you define the word healthy. Yeah. Because if you define it in its traditional sense, then no, we are not headed towards healthy. We're headed in the opposite direction.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Eric Wemple actually, as I understand, is a columnist for the Post. So he's on the opinion side. Right. But the story the Post ran about this was basically the press release from Jeff Bezos. It doesn't say, there's a furor inside the Post. In a different era, the story would be about the reaction within the Post.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
And the Post did not do it. And so what do we think is going to happen Let's say the Post were to stumble on, the example I used in my message box, let's say the Post were to stumble on a scoop akin to the Access Hollywood tapes or when the New York Times got Trump's tax returns. Are they going to publish that?
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Obviously, if Jeff Bezos stopped the publication, there'd be mass resignation at the post and it'd be the end of it. We would all know that, but... That's the future.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
And there's so much to say here, but just on the Ebola thing, just an example of what an absolute chaotic clusterfuck the Trump administration is in Uganda, where they have been dealing with this Ebola outbreak. They were in need of more protective gear because there had been one patient who had gone to six different facilities or six different clinics.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
And my argument, and I think, and this is obviously self-serving for a whole host of reasons, but it's also why we do these jobs and why we're in this business as opposed to something else, is the future of media is not corporate, it's independent. It means entities will be smaller because the economics have changed. And they're going to be more transparent about their biases, right?
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Some of it will be like purely traditional objective journalism. Some of it will be, you know, what we're doing here at Crooked Media Pods in America or what I'm writing on the message box. But that is the future. And like, as I said to people, if you want a better media ecosystem, you got to build it yourself. I mean, you have to support these entities.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Yeah. And the economics are very hard. Some of it's nonprofit, like ProPublica. Some of it is smaller stuff, like what our friend Jessica Yellen's doing at News That Noise.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
But there's just, it's just, it's a world and you just, there is this inherent and irreconcilable tension between a media entity who views its job as trying to hold the powerful accountable, being owned by a large corporation with multiple business interests before the powerful.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
And so they needed gear there to protect the workers there. We could not access the gear because it was in a WHO warehouse. And because you are not allowed to speak to WHO, this is according to a report in the New York Times, you're not allowed to speak to WHO within the Trump administration. So it just sat there.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
We're going to make it a fucking tradition.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
This is a really just great engagement tool.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
There's a Trump-Gaza casino.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
And they had protective gear that we had paid for. So then they had to do a contract to get more productive years. So we're not saving money. We're not doing anything right. We're just making things worse.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Being Trump shares a lot of memes that somehow make it to him. I don't know how they get there. And sometimes I feel like we're a little like overly pedantic about it. We're like, oh, how can the president of the United States do this? And it's like, you know what? Everyone can relax a little bit. The president of the United States is already a ridiculous human being.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
This is low on the list of concerns. But this is one that is particularly offensive. Yeah. And just because it just shows such disregard for the people in Gaza, the people who have family in Gaza. Yep. You know, it just it is it's so callous and so cool to think that that's funny with what is going on there is just like it just shows the fact that there is no soul there.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
It's like just a bottomless hole.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
And put a casino there. It's fucking dark, man.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
That we're selling American citizenship for the price of $5 million. Yeah, that's right.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
We've come a long way from the principles of the Statue of Liberty right here. Yeah.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
It's so ridiculous that it's almost hard to believe. Like, you're probably too young for this is where our age difference comes in. But have you ever seen the HBO sketch comedy show Mr. Show with Bob McGurk and David Cross? Yeah. This is almost like word for word what a Mr. Show skit would be because they used to really make fun of like really bad infomercials on TV all the time.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
This is what it sounds like. You like green cards. Try a gold card.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
You mean for people like Andrew Tate?
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Real put it will push come to shove is when Romania wants them back for their trial. And what happens then? Yeah.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Nothing you can do about it.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Yeah. Just send him to Alabama. Like, I don't.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Many of the principals of schoolhouse rock and operative now.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
I just can't believe people would really be into the selling of American citizenship to the highest bidder.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
The House History Committee Rickrolled America.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Why were the Epstein files classified?
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
It's truly insane. You have to be both dumb and lacking in even a single iota of empathy within your body to run the government like this.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Yeah, that's what they think is there.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
It's exactly it is part of which is why the guy was at the White House.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
That can work with a segment of people who are looking for reasons to stick with Donald Trump.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Well, I mean, just Republican based voters. Right. Right. If you like Donald Trump.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
The Pizzagate is off. But just this idea that Donald Trump is failing because someone inside the government is preventing him from succeeding, which is how a lot of Republicans justified Trump's colossal failures in his first term.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
But that's not going to work for everyone.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
There is no competence and caring. And you make the point that the conventional wisdom is people don't care about foreign aid. It's always top of the list. You ask people, where should we save money in the government? They always say foreign aid. If you ask them anything else, they want to keep the military. Many people do. Never touch their security, Medicare.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Let's just follow the story closely.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Just one other thing on this because I can't let it go is part of the problem for the press here is they have a boy who cried wolf problem, which if you screen that the president not having a formal press conference or not doing enough rope-lying Q&As is an abridgment of freedom of speech, then people are going to take you less seriously when there is an actual threat to press freedom, which is what happened to this president.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
There's been too much confusion between the First Amendment and access. Yes. And when you get mad about it, when you paint access or transparency as assault on freedom of speech, then you're setting yourself up for when the actual threat to freedom of speech comes to be taken less seriously.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Certainly don't touch education funding, whatever else it is. But I think, one, you can and should make the case here for what is happening. Because it's not about whether you should spend that money or not. You can make a case for why you should spend it, why it's good for our security, particularly when it comes to something like Ebola prevention. We help prevent...
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
pandemics and epidemics in other countries, so they don't come here. Yes. It's exactly what we are doing. And if you don't control them at the root of the cause of the pandemic, then it spreads everywhere. Then an epidemic becomes a pandemic, and we are back to right where we were before. But also, the NIH stuff is particularly notable.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Okay, I give a few pieces of advice. The first is when I was the communications director on the transition, which meant one of my jobs was to try to figure out how to set up the White House communications office. And so they handed me a binder on my first day, which had the org charts. For every White House communications and press office from Jimmy Carter until George W. Bush.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
And the thing that is so fucking alarming is the Carter and the Bush ones are almost exactly the same. Yeah. Thank you. And you know what? Frankly, it's changed some, but not that much. Not much. Not much.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
And so I would tell every person, if you're about to start your presidential campaign, your Senate campaign, your Senate office job, whatever it is, take the org chart you have and light that thing on fucking fire.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Because what it is is that all we're doing is we're building on a view of communications that uses the traditional legacy media as the primary vehicle for delivering our message. So we have to get it. If you keep just tinkering around the edges, you're always going to keep doing the same thing.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
It's why legacy media brands keep failing because they keep trying to become digital by just appending on to the old print infrastructure, whatever it is. So that's one. Ditch that. You got to doge that org chart.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
I need a dozen guys under the age of 22 who didn't go to the prom. Get big balls to get to. Big balls will help you. There you go. The second thing is we have to think about communications as message delivery.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
right? It's all content generation or message generation in our heads. Like, what's the event we do? What's the interview we do? What's the social media posts we do? The real question is the one we should build all of our infrastructure on is how do you get the piece of information that you want to put out in front of the people that you need to see it?
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
It used to be that you would just put it out in the press and they would organically consume it in some way, shape, or form. It doesn't work that way anymore. So you have to have an actual plan to do it. And you have to build up an infrastructure that allows it. That includes both like very aggressive influencer work, organic social stuff.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
And actually the thing that I'm most passionate about is empowering your supporters to be your messengers, right? To actually carry your message. And the next thing, and I said it, Jen's saying it, but it's so important is, and everyone says politics is downstream of culture. And that is true. But the thing that I think in terms of communications is, if you are a politician, right?
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Find the thing outside of politics that you are passionate about and can talk about authentically and go talk about that thing all the time. Yeah. Like I still am so struck by the Kamala Harris interview on Call Her Daddy and it was all policy. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you know, the Trump interview, obviously the Call Her Daddy was like 30 minutes and the Trump Rogan interview was three hours.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
In every funding fight in history between Republicans and Democrats, Republicans are trying to cut funding. The place where they always lose the public is on Food safety, drug safety, research in diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's. And that is what's happening here.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
But the part of the Trump Rogan interview that worked for him was when he was just talking about UFC.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Like a guy who – like a UFC fan, right? And like for some segment of his audience that's – his persuadable universe, that's a big deal. If it's sports, go talk about sports all the time. If it's pop culture, talk about pop culture. If you – go talk about what was on White Lotus or which Bravo shows you like or which music you like, right? Yeah.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
And because that is a way to connect with people outside of politics. Obama did this all the time.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Right. And he could do all this. He could talk about sports. He could talk about movies. But find ways to do that so that you can connect with people on something other than policy. Because if you have that human connection first, then they're going to be more willing to listen to what you have to say about the other stuff.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Yeah. One final piece of advice, John, that's very important. This is so fun. Is it you and I have been podcasting for three presidential elections now? Oh, my God. And I would say the record of people who've been on our podcast is 1-0, and the record of people who did not go on our podcast is 0-2.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Just something to think about.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
And particularly if you look at the disease research, I think we talked about this a couple weeks ago, there have been major breakthroughs in Alzheimer's research. There's real momentum there. Just this week, there was an announcement about real progress with a treatment for pancreatic cancer using mRNA vaccine technology.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
There's huge momentum here, and all that's going to stop in its tracks if we back away from this, which is exactly what Elon and Trump are doing.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Yeah, it seems that way. Let's stipulate that government can and should be made more efficient, more cost effective. That there's possible that there are places where there are too many people doing not the right things. Like that is absolutely 100% true. But what Elon Musk and Donald Trump are trying to do here is not fix government.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
They're not trying to reform it, not trying to make it more efficient. They're trying to break it. to absolutely destroy the idea of a federal government whose job it is to help people, to protect people, to keep them secure and safe. They do not believe in that and they're trying to destroy it. And what that means is, and they have made a bet here, right, because of their actions,
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
We are less safe, less secure, we're at greater risk of plane crashes, disease epidemics, pollution in our air and water, foodborne pathogens, dangerous drugs, all those things are there. The point here is that Donald Trump is responsible for everything. Everything that happens from this point forward. He broke government. There will be consequences for that, right?
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
That could be a plane crash, something as serious and dramatic as a plane crash. It could be very not unrelated to this measles epidemic that is taking place in Texas, where we now have a, we've fired a lot of the people in charge of managing those things. And we have, as the HHS secretary, a vaccine skeptic. And a president, frankly, who was a vaccine skeptic to some degree.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
there are consequences of these actions. They have to be held accountable for these actions. And that is, like I said, that can be as serious as the things I mentioned. Also, when you try to run the Social Security Administration with half the staff, payments are going to be missed. Right. They keep talking about how they're going to they're cracking down on fraud.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
You want one way to have there be more fraud to cut staff at the Social Security Administration or the IRS or those other places. And this is I just I just cannot obsess enough is that every single thing the Republicans held Joe Biden responsible for a million things that were nowhere near him. Right.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
Remember when everyone was supposed to be mad at Joe Biden because you couldn't find a turkey on Thanksgiving because of supply chain shortages that you were going to go to Target and there'd be no Christmas presents or holiday presents for anyone. And we have to hold Trump to a same standard. But we actually have a basis in fact for that. He promised stability. He promised security.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
He's doing everything to create the opposite of that. And he has to be held accountable.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
And he also doesn't run Tesla and SpaceX like he runs Twitter. Right. Because there are stakes, nothing like federal government stakes. Yes, you may have to delay a launch, but you could also have an explosion, right? Yes. If there is a problem with Tesla cars and the self-driving software, that obviously is complicated. But Twitter is the example everyone keeps using.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
And it's like, who gives a flying fuck if Twitter goes down for a minute? Right. And you know what? It's so low stakes. It's like the sixth most important social media platform in this country. LinkedIn is 10 times more important than Twitter. And it is worse.
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Will Elon Find the Epstein Files Before It's Too Late?
You were sending a video of a near miss as I was boarding my plane.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
As you mentioned, they're not passing this bill, right? Congress is not going to act on this. To put that in some perspective about how hard it is to... to shut down the Department of Education. Ronald Reagan ran on it. It was a big part of his campaign platform. After winning more than 500 electoral votes in 1984, he couldn't get any traction on it.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
So it has not become any more popular since then. The Economist YouGov ran this interesting poll where they asked people about the Department of Education, do you want to expand it, keep it the same, reduce it, or eliminate it? The plurality was expanded at 39%. The combined keep it the same and expand it was over 60, and only 17% of people wanted to eliminate it.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
There is absolutely no appetite for this anywhere. What it is is it's just – this is sort of like the birthright citizenship thing. EO he did, he can say, promise is made, promise is kept, and he did this, and then it goes nowhere. But it does sort of create the predicate for Musk and Doge to go in there and eliminate it even further.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
Maybe the building will still stand and there will still be an office that Linda McMahon will have the opportunity to go to periodically, but the core functions, absent some judicial intervention, are going to be gutted and it's going to have devastating effects.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
It's like, to what end? Is it they want a real estate transaction to sell the building? Right.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
It's also stupid. This is a way to check off something that was on the wish list long before Project 2025. It was a big part of Project 2025. Newt Gingrich ran on this in the 90s with the Contract for America. This has been a Republican pipe dream, and this is a way to get a chance to say they did it.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
Even if they're not accomplishing the specific goal because they do need Congress for it, they can accomplish the goal in spirit, which is to gut public education in this country.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
I very much think so. In fact, if you're a Messagebox subscriber, you have in your inbox right now a full messaging guide on this. If you are not a Messagebox subscriber, you're lost, I guess. Well, then I don't know what you've been doing. So I go through a whole bunch of the polling on a bunch of the message guidance.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
But let me give the short version of how I think Democrats should talk about this, which is Elon Musk and Donald Trump are shutting down the Department of Education and gutting public education to pay for tax cuts for billionaires.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
The result of this is going to be teachers are laid off, more kids in the classroom, dilapidated schools, and huge cut to special education funding, all to pay for tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy like Elon Musk and Donald Trump. That is how you talk about it. It is not about cutting individual funding streams. It is important to say –
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Trump Comes for the Judges
like why they're doing it, what is going to happen, be specific on what's going to happen and who it benefits.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
There's just a context for eliminating the Department of Education that does not exist for USAID, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or the Institute of PEDAs we'll talk about in a minute. People have been talking about this for a very long time. This country probably has been trying to do it for a long time. Voters keep rejecting it time and time again.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
And now Trump is doing it unilaterally at the behest of the world's richest man in order to pay for tax cuts for billionaires. And so this is a – Huge opportunity for Democrats. It is one of the things that has the best chance of breaking through in the flood of all the terribleness that's happening.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
I mean, it's clearly punitive. It's clearly not based on any sort of substance or reality. And I think we have to view it in the context of the larger conservative project to systematically and strategically take out any institution that they view as an opposition to right-wing thinking in this country. It's why they spent so much time to try to take down unions, passing right-to-work laws.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
It is why they have gone after the media, which they view, incorrectly in my view, but view as an ally of liberals and Democrats. In part because they are fact-checking and calling out the hypocrisy of what's on the right. And universities, they've always believed to be a breeding ground of liberal thought. And so they are trying to destroy them.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
They are trying to cowl them into acting a certain way. And they are trying to gut their funding. And it is part of a bigger project. And we have to view it in that context, I think.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
I mean, this is the end result of what they're doing. I thought what was notable in that story was that they wrote that academia was caught flat-footed. I was like, oh, the one time the famously nimble academia was asleep at the wheel. I mean, there is a longer term challenge. There is more appetite for what Trump is doing here.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
And it's not just because of the protests around Gaza and the controversy of how a lot of universities handle that and what some of the presidents said before Congress. Pew – this was in the New York Times – Pew tracks how people feel about the impact of various institutions on American society, and they ask people about universities.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
In 2012, only 21% of Americans thought that universities had a negative impact on our society, and by last year, it was up to 45%. That's not just Trump and Republicans. That is the high cost of college. It is student debt crushing people and this idea that – people have been told on this idea that the best pathway to success is a four-year college education.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
But you're going to leave there with so much debt that it is going to crush you financially. And universities have done a very bad job of both in the short term around Trump and the time before that of – one, dealing with the sort of indefensible rise in tuition, but in sort of explaining the role they play.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
And because they are these nonprofit institutions, some of whom, like the most famous ones, who have billions of dollars in endowment, but then take taxpayer money. And what we have not explained, and they have not explained, and maybe people before Trump did not explain well, is that these universities are the laboratories for America, right? They're
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Trump Comes for the Judges
are the ones doing the research that is helping us build new technologies, discover new medicines, figure out how to fight disease. And the universities haven't made that case, and people supporting that sort of R&D funding have not made that case.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
You can't turn this stuff back. There was a report right before Trump took office about how close we were coming to a vaccine to deal with colorectal cancer. I thought it was pancreatic, wasn't it?
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Trump Comes for the Judges
Well, we can leave all of this at that. but anyway, there was, there was multiple, but like we're on the cusp of something incredibly important. Like they're all the progress it's made on Alzheimer's research. All of that stops and it doesn't start again. And the law.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
So that's the, as you pointed out, like that is the progress on very specific things that have tremendous benefit to people in the world. is going to stop, and it's not going to happen.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
And then there is sort of the economic impact in the United States, where these universities, like in this story, they talk about how they may have to stop teaching biochemistry at universities because the labs are funded by research grants. And if the research grants are not there, the labs are not there, and then they won't teach that.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
And so the next generation of scientists, researchers, doctors, technologists, all of that is not going to happen because of this idiotic, short-sighted effort from the Trump administration. And fixing this is not- And for nothing, for nothing.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
It is deeply depressing because so much in between administrations can be turned back on, right? There's tremendous damage in the four years, but you come back in, you can put in new policies, sign a new executive order, pass a new law. The things that Trump is doing, both to universities and the federal government itself, are not things that can be fixed in one four-year term.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
Like, can the next Democratic president bring in a bunch of incredibly talented people? political appointees to tackle these problems? Absolutely. And I suspect that will happen. There will be a mobilization of the best and the brightest to come in and do that. But what about the people who keep the government running all the time, the ones who have these jobs in part because of job security?
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Trump Comes for the Judges
They could do other things, but they're in it for public service and they're in it because there's a stability in government employment with good benefits and You know what the pay structure is. You can be there a long time. And if that security will no longer exist, having those people there is going to be deeply damaging.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
I don't know what we would have done when we arrived in the White House if there hadn't been a whole bunch of people who'd been there for the last three presidencies who had been making everything work, who knew things, who had institutional knowledge. I mean, it is deeply concerning.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
I mean, good job, John Roberts. Not a sentence we say very often on this podcast. Yeah. The fact of the statement is very notable, right? And I will say that the statement was like there was a lot of sort of like criticism online that he never mentioned Trump's name. But then when I actually went and read it, it's actually a lot less mealy-mouthed than I assumed.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
It is Donald Trump waging war on his own voters. The people who are going to be affected most are the people in the rural parts of the country where they are not near a Social Security office, and probably the nearest one just got on that list of 50 that's going to get closed, and it's going to make it impossible for people to get their benefits.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
There was a report today that there was a two-hour wait time for calls right now and a one-month waiting period for appointments in an office that may close sometime soon. It is truly insane. And these are the kind of things that have real political impact.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
Congressman Mike Lawler, the Republican, today put out a statement attacking, criticizing Trump and Musk for trying to close the Hudson Valley Social Security office. So I think you're going to see that from a lot of people because this is where it matters, this idea that you're going to make it impossible for people to access their benefits.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
You're going to make older folks have to verify their identity online as opposed to be able to call or I mean, is truly, is deeply damaging and I think is going to hurt politically too.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
Go. I mean, this is old school, but go to press conferences outside the social security offices on that list. Yeah. That's a good idea. Invite some influencers. We'll make it new age communications, but go stand in front of them. Take a vertical video of yourself in front of one, but go to a social security office.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
And John Roberts is pretty mealy-mouthed in a lot of ways. And so to his credit here – and I think the statement probably speaks to what we're going to see from John Roberts over the course of the next few years here, which is trying to walk this fine line between – defending the independence of the judiciary and preserving his legacy.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
I mean, just it's truly perfect. A bunch of tech flunkies arranging an armed invasion of the Institute of Peace. I mean, it's just – I mean, they don't have – probably don't have the authority to shut the thing down. Like that is – it is not, as you said, not a part of the executive branch per se, created by Congress.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
And like this sort of like brute force activity taking on the deep state, ooh, we bullied the Institute of Peace guys. It's like bravado. It's just – it's like there's – like that is – that will get you plaudits in MAGA Trump world. And so you can just – you'll see more –
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Trump Comes for the Judges
of this absurdity like they seem so tough the way they got the cops to help them get into the Institute of Peace and as opposed to just doing it like I guess another way I think about this is there is a right way and a wrong way to do these things even if you disagree even no matter what you feel about the value of the Institute of Peace
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Trump Comes for the Judges
He has overseen the greatest drop in trust in the Supreme Court in its history during his period of time as Chief Justice, while not going so far as to poke the bear to the point where Trump will outright defy in order or even begin to radicalize people against the Supreme Court.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
There's a way to go about it, but Elon Musk and Doge will not and cannot do it the right way, which constantly keeps hurting their efforts to do the thing that we disagree with because they keep getting stopped in court and it keeps being messier and dumber than it needs to be. But this is just like the extreme example of that.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
Yeah, to make everything so uncomfortable that people will just leave.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
We are so far past right now what even... some of the most hyperbolic arguments about what Trump would do. We are right there.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
I've been thinking a lot about, there are a million reasons for this. I think we, as a society, like political stakeholders, the media, just average everybody, people lack the vocabulary and the imagination to talk about what's happening here because it's not something that we ever thought would happen in this country. And so we just don't know how to do it.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
Because if Republicans stop liking the Supreme Court, no one's going to like the Supreme Court because they already turned off a whole bunch of Democrats with everything they've done, but most notably the Dobbs decision.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
And almost every other country in the world has faced this down at some point, or they've gone through it, where they've had an authoritarian regime, or they've been a dictatorship, and they've come out of that with so much reform. That's never happened here. It's never been a fear here since the very beginning. And so we just, we can't... We can't comprehend it.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
I'm not complaining about the New York Times headlines here, but as an example, when Trump gave that insane speech at the Department of Justice, where he goes to the Department of Justice, a place where presidents almost never go and gives a speech, calling out his enemies while surrounded by his self-appointed law enforcement hacks.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
And it was like Trump gives unusually fiery speech at the apartment dresser or something like that. Just like we can't – no one knows how to talk about it. But there is a media environment change here too. Think about what it felt like in 2018 when people became aware that Trump was putting kids in cages in detention centers. Yeah. And the outrage, it dominated the conversation.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
I mean, I was on a book tour at the time. I lost all my interviews, right? Because that's all I didn't want to talk about for good reason, right? That was the right choice. They became the dominant national story.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
Well, that's the response, right? That's another point is that there was- There was a way in which the quote-unquote resistance was involved in attention-getting tactics that did drive some of these things, which is not happening now to the same extent. But just think about everything you said about what's happening in El Salvador.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
If that had happened in a 2017, 2018 media environment, it would be a dominant conversation. But nothing can be a dominant conversation right now in the same way. And that's not just because Trump is a more effective flood-the-zone strategy now. It's because just the world has changed so much and people are living in these algorithmically designed bubbles.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
The power and reach and influence of the people who could drive the conversation on a mass scale just does not – is just – massively diminished from where it was years ago. And this is how this happens, right? This is exactly how it happens, is that people aren't paying enough attention.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
And the people who are opposing it are not drawing enough attention or grabbing people by the lapels to make them pay attention. And we are headed someplace very dangerous.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
Yeah, your your news consumption is not correlated with your exposure to high prices. Your news consumption is correlated with whether you know about what's happening in El Salvador or shutting down the Department of Education or any of the other 12 terrible things we're going to talk about on this pod and future pods.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
But whether you can follow no news, you still have to go to the store and buy eggs, gas, food. You have to pay your rent, your mortgage, etc. And that's always been true, right? Like even before we entered this fucked up era, the one issue that you cannot make go away is the economy, whether that's layoffs, high unemployment, or inflation.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
It feels like there's a real chance those robots are going to turn on people, and I don't want them in my house.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
Buy some stock. The Commerce Secretary telling people to buy an individual stock. Like everyone else has to specifically put like in like lead their tweets about it. This is not financial advice, right? And here he is, an official of the federal government who is theoretically an expert in the economy, just pitching the stock of the president's biggest donor.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
One, don't light Teslas on fire. Don't light anything on fire. Arson is bad. Arson is bad. Two, I don't know.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
Arson is bad. Two, arsonists should go to jail, although I'm not sure this is technically domestic terrorism. And three, there is a bigger thing here, and you see it in the comment, you see it on Trump selling Teslas in the White House lawn, is that the world's richest man spent $300 million to get this president elected. Now he has basically bought a government, right?
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Trump Comes for the Judges
Where you have the Congress secretary pitching his stock, the president is pitching his cars, and the Attorney General of the United States, the chief law enforcement officer, going before the cameras to threaten the people who are protesting Tesla. at his dealerships specifically. She's not doing that for other things. She specifically she like he has his own government to do his bidding.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
And Republicans are trusted more on Social Security than Democrats. Yes. Oh, thank you. All right. Where do you want to start? So we can get into the details here, and I would encourage everyone to read the whole study. I will stipulate at the beginning here that this report has some controversy in Democratic circles. There are people who disagree with some of the conclusions from it.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
This is one report, right? We're going to get other reports. I think David's a pretty smart guy and he's been pretty pressing on a lot of things, but we're looking at one report here. My takeaway from this is it adds some granular detail to what we've been talking about since the election.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
But one way to think about these results is that everything that we thought was going to happen after Trump was elected in 2016 to politics, right, to the Republican coalition, to everything, the exact opposite happened.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
It just – the idea was that Trump was this – came in with this racist rhetoric and he was doing all this horrible immigration stuff and he was going to forever cost the Republicans votes with Latinos and black voters. Instead, he made gains there. And in fact, now race – politics has actually become less racially polarized with Donald Trump as president where –
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Trump Comes for the Judges
Black and Latino voters who identify as moderate or conservative are now voting for Republicans at levels similar to white moderates and conservatives, right? Young voters, like the belief was that Donald Trump was going to radicalize all these young voters to be Democrats. The view was that in 2017, people who were young voters then were the most progressive generation in history.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
Now, by some measures, you could argue that Gen Z is the most – driven mostly by young men, but not entirely, that Gen Z is the most conservative generation. And this is one stat here that we have to just germinate on. A 75-year-old white man was more likely to support Kamala Harris than an 18-year-old white man. That's the exact opposite of what everyone thought after Trump won in 2016.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
That can make a little bit difference in the battleground states when you look at precincts in Queens. And the Bronx and some of the other ones where we saw a huge Trump swing. This is one of the reasons that the Republican advantage in electoral college diminished this time because Trump was making these gains in immigrant communities in blue states.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
Yeah. I would say the immigrant chart was the one that really stuck out to me because that, once again, just runs counter to the exact opposite of what you would think. Here is someone who ran on building a wall to keep immigrants out, who signed a Muslim ban to keep immigrants out, who put kids in cages, and then ran on mass deportation in his next presidential campaign, and he won immigrants.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
And we have to really dig in to why that is and where it is we failed to be able to make a case to those voters.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
Yeah, I think Elon, maybe some of these members of Congress, there is a collection of people with broken brains who spend too much time online, have time reading books who don't know it. But Stephen Miller was tweeting about this. Those people do know. And I think the goal here is pretty clear. It is to set the stage to till the ground for the moment when Trump wants to defy a court order.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
So when you look at that chart that runs issue salience with issue trust, Obviously, it's devastating for Democrats. But when you look at that, you sort of are saying, how do we win power back? And so you have – there are two potential paths there. One is you can look at the issues that voters already care about that they don't trust us on. And we can try to win trust back there.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
And we should definitely do that. That is our medium and long-term strategy. But in the short term – The strategy is to erode trust in the Republicans and Trump on those issues, right? And you're seeing that already on inflation in the economy. And so we have to keep doing that. And there is a seesaw effect to politics where if one side goes down, the other side goes up.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
So that will help us there. But the other strategy that you have to think about is you have to, is can you take the issues where we are trusted and make them more front of mind and selling it? Like you're never going to get, as we were mentioning before, you're never going to make inflation not top of mind to voters, right?
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Trump Comes for the Judges
The economy will always, people's personal financial situation will always top. But immigration is an issue that Trump made front of mind, right? He made it front of mind even before the border crisis. He created the idea that in people's minds, completely fabricated, that we were living in a wave of migrant and immigrant crime. And Democrats are defeatist on this sometimes.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
And so we sort of say, we don't have the power, the gumption, the megaphone, the messengers to take an issue that people trust us on and make it a top issue. Some of that is true. Some of that's a reality of our messaging situation. But the thing I look at is that healthcare dot. You say there's our opportunity right there. And there's two opportunities right in front of us.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
One, Republicans in Congress do not act. Premiums are going to go up for millions of Americans because the additional funding and tax credits that went in place during the pandemic are going to expire this year. And so Trump Republicans are going to raise people's premiums. And the second one is Medicaid. Medicaid is health care for many Americans. It pays for so much of health care. What is it?
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Trump Comes for the Judges
Something like 40% of births in America are paid for by Medicaid, and the Republicans want to gut that. And so here's a chance where there is an issue that voters care about, where we have a huge trust advantage on, and we have two opportunities to drive that message home this year. And raising trust, these things, they don't operate independently of each other.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
Because he has not done that yet. He has said he's not going to do it. And he does not have the public on his side, right? There is a Washington Post Ipsos poll that shows that 84% of voters, including strong majorities of Republicans, believe that if a court declares something the Trump administration is doing is illegal, that Trump must abide by that order. Only 11% think he should defy it.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
And so if you want to get to the point where you can actually do that, you have to do what they did to the media, do what they're doing in the universities. You have to destroy trust in that institution. And this is the beginning part of that process.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
It is just truly astounding that they've taken all of the checks and balances out of the system, right? You don't need to go to a judge to get a warrant to go in the house. And the person you get in the house, you do not have to present to a judge before you send them out of the country.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
And if the Trump administration can be so fucking stupid as to accidentally cancel an Ebola prevention program – Do we really think they're not going to make some mistakes on the people they're deporting? And we're already hearing stories of these.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
There are people waking up in an El Salvadorian mega prison that is famous for how horrible the conditions are, infamous for how horrible the conditions are, who – We're not members of these gangs, right, who should not have been subject to this because the point is you stop in front of a judge and a judge helps verify that this is the person that the Trump administration says it is.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
And then if they are a member of this gang or if there's another reason why they should be deported, then they're deported. But now this is just – I mean it is fully and totally authoritarian. It runs against everything that our system was set up for.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
The guy loves to buy a politician. And giving federally regulated campaign contributions is a pretty inefficient way for Elon Musk to flex his muscle because he can only give the same amount as people like you and I or anyone else out there. But it just creates this incentive structure for more people to act like morons and support these impeachments. Yeah, exactly.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
So you're going to get more people that because they want the money, they want the support, they want the attention that comes from being associated with Elon. And that is one thing Elon Musk is very good about doing. It is leveraging his money for attention to influence. And this is another way in which he's doing that.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
Yeah, so if you live in Wisconsin, this is an absolutely essential race because the balance of the Supreme Court is once again in question. You may remember not that long ago – we talked about this show a lot. There was a race to – a couple years ago, Janet Proosiewicz, who I think you guys even campaigned with in Wisconsin. We did. won an election, gave the liberals a majority.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
These are technically nonpartisan races, but the parties have lined up behind the candidates, Democrats behind Susan Crawford and Elon Musk and Republicans behind Brad Schimel. And when the liberals have the majority now, we're able to undo one of the nation's most unfair gerrymandering systems and make it so that we have more free and fair elections.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
Because Wisconsin, as we all know, is the quintessential battleground state, but Republicans were dominating the legislature in the congressional delegation because of that. And going forward, the Wisconsin Supreme Court will hear cases on things like abortion, personal freedom, civil rights.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
And if you think about this from the perspective of people who aren't in Wisconsin, many of the big cases that are about how the 2026 and 2028 elections are going to be conducted will come before that court. So you're either going to have a majority of people who abide by the rule of law or a Supreme Court majority that is bought and paid for by Elon Musk.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
And just even beyond that for everyone else is this is the first major election in a battleground state since Trump won. Elon Musk is on the ballot here. He has spent $10 million. The Democrats and the Crawford campaign have made Elon Musk a centerpiece of it.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
Brad Schimel has not committed to recusing himself of any cases involving Elon Musk come up before the court, even though Elon Musk has spent already $10 million to elect him.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
And if you want to send a message to Elon Musk and to every Republican in the country about how toxic it is to be associated with what Elon Musk is doing, the best way to do that right now, the best way to inflict some measure of political accountability on Elon Musk and Donald Trump is to win this election in Wisconsin on April 1st.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
That is not Norcal, California. That is Norco, California.
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Trump Comes for the Judges
It's about an hour and a half from- I was like, stay on your side of the grapevine, okay?
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
The fact that he pulled that off, did he... I just can't even imagine how that even happened. Like, Donald Trump has never sat for an hour without saying something interesting before. Elon Musk has never sat for an hour without saying something controversial or angry. I mean, just truly mind-numbingly boring and stupid. As for the relationship, maybe they like each other. Maybe they do.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
It seems like... Who am I to say? I don't want to play psychologist here, but... Donald Trump's not exactly known for hiding his feelings. He can barely look at J.D. Vance when they're in a room together. It's clear he cannot stomach Mike Pence at all. I thought he was just a huge goober. Or his wife. Or his wife. Or his own wife, too. That's what I'm saying.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
Sorry, I'm forgetting Mike Pence's wife. I thought you meant Karen Pence, yeah.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
It's, I mean, maybe they do. It is, I mean, Elon Musk is one of the few people in the world who Trump needs more than they need Trump. He spent a quarter billion dollars to get him elected. He is this cudgel for Trump as he tries to implement his policy because Musk keeps saying he'll fund primaries against people who don't vote for his nominees.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
That clearly was quite effective since earlier on Thursday, we confirmed Kash Patel as FBI director. So anything goes. And Elon Musk controls his favorite social media platform. And so I don't know if they really like each other or not, but Trump is not. He is more forgiving of Musk or more willing to tolerate him than he is anyone else.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
It's interesting because, like you point out, they're very, very similar people. And usually two people who are exactly the same, particularly powerful people, butt heads immediately. Because you can see... in the other person what you subconsciously don't like about yourself. But that doesn't seem to be the case here.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
And I think maybe with Trump, it is he respects two things more than anything else. Money and attention or fame. And Elon Musk has more of both than any other person on the planet.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
He's the only... That is why... I agree with you that they genuinely like each other, but even if they didn't, it's one of the reasons why Trump is... I do not think a divorce is coming is because... If they're the only person on the planet that Trump would probably be worried to get into a online spat with would be Musk. He controls Twitter. He gets more attention. He is better at it.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
No one else has a megaphone as big as Trump's, with the possible exception of Elon Musk.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
We can't communicate our own economic policies to our voters with $2 billion of advertising money. I don't think we're going to be able to tweet our way into splitting up Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
I'm so glad you segued that Message Box because if you were listening to this on Friday morning, in your inboxes right now is my take on this very question. No thank you to the Washington Post for trying to get in front of me here, but... There are two points here. One is Trump definitely had a honeymoon. He was more power at the outset of this presidency than at any point previously.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
But it's the lamest honeymoon in history. His net approval rating when he was elected or when he was sworn in was 43 points lower than Barack Obama's. He was even about 15 points lower than Joe Biden. At the same point, he is the only modern president with lower approval ratings at the outset of the presidency than Donald Trump in 2025. Is Donald Trump in 2017? Yeah.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
And but having said that, the direction of the polls is very clear. He is now back. He's back to mid 40s, which was in most of these polls, which is where he was. That's sort of his sort of his the high end of his range for much of his first term. And there are three reasons for this. And they're pretty clear in the polling. One issue pointed out is the economy.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
His economic approval rating in the Reuters poll has dropped to 39. It has dropped significantly over the last month. You saw this in the CBS poll that two-thirds of voters thought he wasn't focused enough on lowering prices. The second reason is people don't like his agenda. You have majorities in the Washington Post poll who do not agree with what he's been doing. And that makes complete sense.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
He ran on lowering prices and securing the border. But all of the news is about slashing government, weaponization, cozying up to Putin, all of these things. And it's like, presidents get in trouble when they campaign on one agenda and govern on another. And he campaigned as it was bullshit, but he campaigned as a populist, who wanted to fight for the working class.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
He is governing as a government slashing, Medicaid cutting, austerity agenda. That's not what people voted for in that asserting him. And the last thing is that Elon Musk is dragging him down in some ways. And one of the more interesting things, like Elon Musk's favorability ratings are fine, you know, 44.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
It's not great, but he's actually more popular than just about every politician who's not named Barack Obama right now and Donald Trump. But the better question to ask is, do you approve of the job he's doing? Because the favorability rating includes, do you like him? Seems highly unlikely.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
But also all the Tesla, SpaceX, everything he's accomplished for the world and the planet, which some of it is quite good. When you ask, do you approve of how he's doing his job in government? Only 34% of people in the Washington Post approve of him.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
Yeah, and you see that in like 26% in that Washington Post poll approve of Elon Musk shutting down federal agencies in 52% of posts. You have six in 10 people who think, who are concerned about Elon Musk and the Doge team having access to sensitive personal information.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
Elon Musk is a political, he is helping Trump accomplish his agenda, but he is hurting him politically in how he's doing it because the agenda he's accomplishing is unpopular. It's not what people voted for. It's not what they want.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
And just as a point, and this is a – if we continue on the right trend, this could go down as one of the great political miscalculations in history is let's say Donald Trump had put Russell Vogt in charge of Doge. Yeah.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
No one would know. But because they put a person who gets more attention than almost anyone else on the planet in charge of implementing the unpopular agenda, people know about the unpopular agenda. Elon Musk is a figure. And this is sort of how the media environment works.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
If you have people who are controversial, who you talk about, and then you get engagement, you create this incentive structure for more and more people to talk about it. No one is getting more TikTok views or X reposts or whatever you call them or skeets or whatever else talking about Russell Vogt. or Kevin Hassett, the NEC director, anything like that.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
But if you put a huge, giant, famous celebrity who loves attention in charge of doing things that you probably wish people did not know, you're probably going to suffer politically from that down the line.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
I think you have to do it in the right way. The reason you have to do it is we can't get attention for our message. We have to go where there is attention. We can't make attention. We have to go get it. And it is with Elon. Democrats have been attacking Donald Trump for a decade now. That is not in and of itself new zine. Interesting. If you attack Elon Musk, you're going to get more attention.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
I do think it's important to weave it into a larger narrative. And just simply calling Elon Musk a dick, although it was quite funny when Robert Garcia did that, that's not exactly what we have to do here.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
We have to make Elon Musk be a data point in a larger story, not just about Trump, because barring a dramatic change to the Constitution, he's not running again, but about the Republican Party that's going along with it. this, right?
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
About the corruption, about the influence of the world's richest man rooting around in our government, affecting agencies that are investigating his or regulating his companies. It has to be part of a larger story about corruption because the polls show that people are very concerned about the influence of corporations, billionaires, and Elon Musk specifically.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
I mean, I would just want to focus on the NIH one for a second. I saw a post on social media about this, which is the most impactful and innovative research on Alzheimer's is coming from NIH. And they've made real progress with therapeutic drugs in recent years and could be close to some sort of treatment or cure. And the way it was described was basically cutting funding for the NIH right now
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
is like taking away your kid's bike the day the training wheels come off just after someone told you that they had the possibility of entering the Olympics. Ugh. Right? It's just like we're close to doing something, and you were gutting it. And all of these things do matter, and they do break through to people because they're basically finding something that every person in America cares about.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
Everyone cares about different things. And then cutting it and affecting it. And why are they doing this? Nada, I can't possibly fathom. You just have a bunch of people who know nothing about government.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
who don't seem to care about people who view government as the enemy, trying to just meet some number of fired employees, budget cuts, without really thinking in any holistic way about how you actually help people. Because they don't think government should help people. That's not what they believe. And we have seen this to a lesser degree when George W. Bush was president.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
And he put a bunch of hacks in at FEMA, and Katrina happened. And this is like... We are in dangerous territory here. This is what happens when people who hate government are in charge of government.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
I mean, it's a politically insane thing to do. And you're right. How they get it done. I mean, the most likely scenario is they just pass the whole thing. One way in which they could do it is they just pass it with no pay-fors. You can do some things on how they do the CBO scoring, the commercial budget office scoring to make it seem less added to the deficit.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
And you can make it nine years instead of 10 years so you can know the budget. There's all this nerdy stuff you can do. It's still – unpaid for. It's all gimmick bullshit. But can they get House Freedom Caucus members who are demanding trillions of dollars in cuts to go for that?
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
Well, he got them last time, right? He did get them to do... This is exactly what... This is how things played out in Uh, 2017 when they pass their tax cut. Now it's a much narrower majority. Now, now you can lose by the time this happens, three people probably. Um, but it is, it's fat. It's fascinating that they are taking on this sort of, it's an, it's truly insane thing to do.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
And it's even more insane. Now that the Republican party is branding itself as this multiracial working class coalition that you're going to kick most, a lot of your coalition off healthcare. It's actually probably, it is by the numbers, uh, Way worse politics than repealing Obamacare. Way worse. It's more people for more things in more parts of the country.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
It seems like it's probably great politics. It seems like Trump is going to love it because he loves sending checks to people. In his somewhat simplistic brain, just giving people money means that they'll support you. So I think he would like it. I think there are some real challenges to doing it. One almost certainly would increase inflation. So that's one.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
That's that you're overheating the economy. So that's one. Two, Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House today, said that it was – essentially said it was a non-starter for him because his caucus wants to – it's more spending, right? He wants to take those savings.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
Well, you remember this is what George W. Bush did in the 2001 tax cut. He sent people checks.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
Yeah, I was doing the Andrew Weissman interview immediately before we recorded and I learned about his appearance not long ago. So cool. Let's do this.
Pod Save America
Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
What the fuck is happening? This is probably – I don't know who the right person to direct this question is. But there's obviously some weird right-wing conspiracy theory about this. You know what? I'll dig into it before next pod. I will get the answers.
Pod Save America
Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
Here to talk about all of the chaos happening in the Department of Justice and the potential collapse of our whole system of law and order is friend of the pod, Andrew Weissman, a former federal prosecutor, MSNBC legal contributor, and host of the excellent podcast, Maine Justice from MSNBC. Andrew, welcome back to the pod.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
That's right. That's really the running theme of all of our podcasts this last month here. Arts as well. All right, Andrew, let's start with the shakeups at the Department of Justice. This week, Trump ordered the firing of all the Biden-era U.S. attorneys, saying the department is too politicized. This has caused quite an outcry and levels of concern from people out there. Is this normal?
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
If I remember this correctly, when Obama came in in 2009, and he did the same thing as other previous presidents have done, he did leave in place the Bush-appointed North Carolina US attorney, because that US attorney was in the midst of investigating Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, and he didn't want to seem like he was interfering with that.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
Are there any open cases or investigations here that could be affected by these firings?
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
Well, that's a great segue into the Eric Adepts case. I listened to your whole podcast on this on Main Justice, which was fabulous. And we could have a whole podcast conversation about it. But could you at least give the short version to our listeners what happened here and why this was such an unusual decision and process from the Department of Justice? Yeah.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
As I do whenever I want to understand what's happening in the world, I listen to Pod Save the World so I can have Tommy and Ben explain it to me. And this obviously felt like a big deal in the moment. It seems crazy and insane.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
But I think Ben and Tommy would put it in a perspective that I did not fully comprehend at the beginning of this, which is this is not just the shift between Biden's foreign policy and Trump's foreign policy. This is the abandonment of the entire bipartisan principles that have undergirded US foreign policies since World War II.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
There was a hearing in this case this week, as you pointed out, that the deputy attorney general had to make the argument himself because it appears like no one else would do it. What recourse does the judge have here? Could the judge deny the motion to dismiss? And if that were to happen, who would prosecute the case?
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
We have decided that we are no longer a leader in the forces of democracy, that we are going to side with autocracy. And that is deeply alarming. It is incredibly scary. You have the President of the United States Not just siding with Putin, but calling Zelensky an unelected dictator.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
If such a factual hearing took place, could the judge demand those notes? Yes. Presuming they haven't found the bottom of a paper shredder somewhere in main justice?
Pod Save America
Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
Last question on this. I'm sort of obsessed with it, so I've gone a long time on it. But could a local prosecutor, maybe Alvin Bragg, take up this case?
Pod Save America
Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
And then no one in the administration would be willing to say that Putin, not exactly known for free and fair elections, to call him for what he is. It is truly insane through the looking glass stuff. And it has huge consequences for the United States' role in the world going forward.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
Could he get access to... I can't remember what happened in that case, whether the U.S. Attorney's Office shared the evidence that they had gained with Alvin Bragg, but here I imagine the Pam Bondi term addresses would not do that for Bragg this time around.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
On a separate topic, the interim US attorney of Washington DC has been suggesting that he's going to investigate and probe people who make threats. He sent a letter to Senator Schumer about a comment Senator Schumer made four years ago about Supreme Court justices. There's been some contact with Congressman Robert Garcia's office. Just what is your reaction to this?
Pod Save America
Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
I know weaponization is a real term that doesn't mean anything anymore after Trump's in charge, but the sort of weaponization of a U.S. attorney's office.
Pod Save America
Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
You've mentioned Daniel Sassoon and these members of the public integrity section who have resigned. And resigning is a principal thing, but also maybe the other way of thinking about it is the principal people keep leaving the department at a time when it really needs principled people. You're a longtime veteran of the Department of Justice. What do you think they should be doing?
Pod Save America
Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
What's the right thing to do here? What's the best way? Is there a way to protect the rule of law from within the department in the situation they're in?
Pod Save America
Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
I listen, I listen. I, uh, I, I'm more into sleep hygiene than you. So I listened to it, uh, earlier in the day, but was thinking about it all throughout the rest of the day.
Pod Save America
Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
That's right. They're busy. Theoretically. He's been very busy, clearly. Last question for you. These are obviously very dangerous, scary times for lots of people. As you point out, Trump and Ed Martin and Emil Boevings are weaponizing the Department of Justice. Things are going to get a lot scarier. Kash Patel was confirmed on Thursday to be FBI director.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
There have been explicit threats made to you. Steve Bannon suggests that you should go to prison for a long time. How are you processing that? What is your reaction to it? How are you thinking about the personal risk for yourself?
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
I'm not here. I'm not here to give you advice, but if I were to give you advice, it's just like, cause I know what your sleep habits are. It's, I would just, I'd pick a time right before dinner and say, I'm not gonna listen to any more political podcast, even once done by two of my best friends. Like,
Pod Save America
Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
Andrew Weissman, thank you so much for joining us. It's always great to talk to you.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
I mean, what has held the world order together is that you had the strongest military in the world, the United States, on the side of democracy, which puts you on the opposite side of the Soviet Union, then Russia, then China. And if the United States leaves that, then the entire balance collapses.
Pod Save America
Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
individual European nations, Europe together, NATO without the United States, cannot muster the response and certainly does not pose enough of a threat to cause Putin or China or Iran or someone else not to fulfill their ambitions.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
Well, it's also just the fact that the United States is now on the side of the pro-Russian far right parties within European countries like Germany.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
We won't even invite you to the negotiations about your own country. What kind of a fucking deal is that?
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
It seems like we're heading that direction. In all seriousness, there is a reason that the world order exists as it does. There's a reason there are organizations like NATO. There are reasons that there are alliances. It's that this shit is much harder than Donald Trump thinks it is. Even the United States is –
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
safer more secure stronger when we are working with other people and even in just this deal that trump is trying to i mean just you couldn't fucking script this with putin in saudi arabia without ukraine about ukraine is how is that going to be implemented without europe right who the united states already said they're not going to provide security so who is going to do that
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
Trump is going to at some point need these countries for things. They are major U.S. trading partners. They are our allies. We are involved in security agreements and intelligence sharing agreements with them all over the world. And so there is – Trump wants to head in one direction, but there is a reality to – foreign policy in a complicated, interconnected world that is going to make it hard.
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Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
It doesn't mean it can't happen, but it does put challenges into this absurd premise. I do just want to say that it is not a coincidence that so many rich tech people have adopted this pro-Russian stance In recent months and years, Russia is right that that is a very large market that US companies could be doing business in.
Pod Save America
Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
And that is causing a lot of people to throw aside what they care about to hopefully make a little bit more money.
Pod Save America
Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
That seems familiar. I can't put my finger on it, but it seems like we've been running into that recently.
Pod Save America
Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?
I would say it is a phenomenal achievement that Sean Hannity could host an hour-long interview with two of the world's most famous and controversial people, people famous for saying interesting, crazy, insane things, and have that interview make no news. You said not much news. No news. It was... ungodly boring. It was like watching wallpaper dry on the wall. It was so boring.
Pod Save America
The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Man, you were deep in your mentions. You could pull off off memory a Chris Busey take.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Do we think this person really thought this or they were just going for a game?
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
John, I don't want to fast forward ahead to the resolution part of this, but I have some ideas for you.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
I was just like, are we really doing this? The replies to that tweet were actually encouraging about the future of the internet.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Me too, I paid no attention to it. I mentally muted the whole thing for a week. I did too.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
That's because we did worse with women, John. That's right. That's right.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
I just think it's worth remembering that after the debate, Joe Biden was behind the whole time. He was behind to Trump basically from the summer of 2023 onward. By the time the debate was over, Joe Biden had a 3% chance of winning the election, which And the idea here was we could not go into election with a dangerous authoritarian who had a 97% chance of winning.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
So we had to look for another option. And that option was Kamala Harris, who probably went into it with a 45% chance of winning. And she was not able to get that last 5%. But there's two questions. There is the could Joe Biden have served four more years? I think the indication is pretty clearly no. And is could Joe Biden win the election? And by the time the debate was over, it was obviously no.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Highly unlikely that he would do so. And there is one last moment to try to make a change to give us a chance to win. He, in the end, weeks later than we had hoped, but did step aside. Kamala Harris ran a very good campaign, not a perfect one, but gave her a shot to win an election in a very, very tough situation. And that's sort of where we that's where we were.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
And and I will say to all not the blue and non people from the discourse section, but most people like there was a could be a good faith disagreement on Joe Biden's electoral chances. Or Kamala Harris' electoral chances. But in the end, most people came together to try to get her elected and worked pretty hard at it.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
There was a lot of reminding people that they tried to kill Joe Biden by not making Trump get a COVID test in 2020. COVID test, yeah. That's right. That was bad. Yeah, they did.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
I think that there has been a lot of criticism in the Democratic Party and on this podcast about Joe Biden's absence from the scene. It is time to make a bug a feature. And let's let Donald Trump own this shutdown. This is between Mike Johnson, Donald Trump, Elon Musk. Have to figure this out amongst themselves. Let them do it. And if they don't, this is on them.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Oh, interesting. Do you know who the ranking member on the committee is?
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
That's great. What if they do one with the insurrectionists? We are the world style. Like a rap battle.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
It feels like in hindsight, one lesson here is that if your political opponent comes up with a dangerous conspiracy theory that incites people on a major issue in the election, you don't turn it into a catchy song and then have all of your influencers share it on TikTok for hours at a time.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Just saying, like, it's just, it's a way of thinking about things going forward. I, like, want to listen to it. It's really catchy.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Do you think Crooked could put up a $100,000 reward? Oh, that's a good idea.
Pod Save America
The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
So Taylor Swift, dogs and cats. Jesse Waters. Is there another option? I forget. Vaccine and vaccines.
Pod Save America
The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
I'm still flummoxed by the fact that Lovett was in a college version of Chimera Club. That's not right.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
I mean, the problem always is we don't really have any scale for making these judgments. So it's really, let's just pick one.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
This is bullshit, Tommy. The judges, they're fucking you here.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
You know what I would do if I were you? I would sue them. I'm looking at you, Sal.
Pod Save America
The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
The prevailing narrative that the conviction won't really matter is, I think, pretty disconnected from both what the polls actually say and the reality of an election that is likely to be this close. I stand by that 1,000%. He would have won by 10 if he hadn't been competitive.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Yeah, that's good. And the polls are a snapshot in time, so do better next time, Elijah.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
But even still, the argument we always made it would come down to 100,000 votes. It came down to 237,000 votes. That's right. That's true. That's true.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Well, he was good. I mean, he was. No, he was good at the State of the Union. He was good. He was fine. Like he was not, it was not the historic speech. It was treated by some people, but it was good.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
It was at least evidence. It was evidence of energy and coherence.
Pod Save America
The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
I think we're going to collectively sue you for such bad takes.
Pod Save America
The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
I mean, let the audience pick. Yeah. You got to pick best in show.
Pod Save America
The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Also, here's one thing I can tell you. Our worst take is not winning the Pundi of the year, no matter what it is.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Come on. You are misreading John there. More public appearances like this. Like that. And the next one was not like that. It was an epic fucking disaster.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
I mean, it's Alan Lichtman. I think it's Alan Lichtman. Yes.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
I can't believe you have gone back to back years of doing none of your resolutions. Don't forget the volunteering one of last year.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
The thing I really want to work on this year is regaining some semblance of my attention span.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Did you do that, Dan? I would say no. No, I did not.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
I did not do the things I wanted to do to regain my attention span. I doubled down. I think two weeks after I gave this resolution, I set up push notifications for that account that retweets all of Trump's truth socials, which was a sign that I wasn't going to make it this year.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Oftentimes, I'll just open up my phone on a Friday night before bed and was like, man, what was John thinking at 930 to jump on this third rail?
Pod Save America
The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Post-election, you're just in it. And it's funny to listen, to be in a group chat with you where you're texting your anger about something and see how long you've held yourself back before you start tweeting about it.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
So two things. One, I am going to make another run at my attention span. And the thing I've started doing since election, which has caused me to miss many of John's best Twitter fights, is to put my phone away before I put my kids to bed and not look at it for the rest of the night.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
So no longer two-screening, like watching TV or something like that. So that's one. Whether I will manage to continue doing that, open question, but I want to do that. The second thing, and it's related to Tommy's path towards mindfulness, is... It's not even a joke. I'm being serious here. It was the path towards mindfulness. The winding path.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Both mindfulness and attention span is I want to take up yoga in 2025. I started doing it some this year.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
You know what's funny? I debated whether I would do this one publicly, and then I was like, Levin has been basically doing a one-man pitch for Pilates for weeks now, so this is a safe space. I do yoga, too. I do yoga, too.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Do you go to group classes? Yeah. I've been doing hot vinyasa yoga. Nice. But I want to do it regularly. I do it every once in a while now, but I want to do it.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
A Cassandra, if you will. The best part about that take, or the worst part, I guess, is the way in which Bill Ackman speaks so confidently about something he does not understand at all. It's like if I decided to just expound on astrophysics on this podcast.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Is what it's called. I can't wait for five years from now when we're doing this exact podcast to look back on our response. The worst pun take will be our take about this in our incoming president-elect, Nikki Haley.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
My task is to remind people because it was so long ago that you were on Survivor at one point.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
You're still in the intro because I turned on the TV.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
Donald Trump, who Joe Biden came out of retirement to kick out of office, is now back stronger, more popular than ever before. And all of that is not Joe Biden's fault. It's not his fault that we have inflation. I actually think he handled inflation as well as anyone could in this situation. It's not his fault that he was bad luck to be president during a great global anti-incumbent wave.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
But on the one thing he could control, which was whether he should run for re-election, he made the wrong decision and the country reaped the consequences of that.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
I mean, presidents usually lose reelection for reasons that have little to do with how they communicate, how they campaign, or even really how they govern. It's the environment around them. It's what failed Carter. It was why George H.W. Bush lost. And I think that's largely true for Biden, except for the one thing he could control, which was whether he ran for reelection or not.
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Biden’s Final Warning
Because we could be had Biden not done this, we could be sitting likely had he not run in 2020, likely right now we'd be talking about the end of eight years of Trump.
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Biden’s Final Warning
Well, I mean, wait till J.D. Vance is sworn in. If we were all still here. J.D. Vance is sworn in on Monday.
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Biden’s Final Warning
Tell me, why do you, I mean, the closest historical analogy to this from American political perspective is the Iran hostage situation where they waited until Carter left for Reagan to negotiate the release. He'd obviously been back channeling a little bit during the election. Why do you think Trump was willing to do this now as opposed to just take full credit five days from now?
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
Because John and I both decided to just have a disquisition on communication in the modern age.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
What Joe Biden can do for you. It's the ask, not disease. It's the Kennedy cosplay that plagued the Democratic Party for four decades.
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Biden’s Final Warning
And now there's Obama cosplay. And now there's Obama cosplay.
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Biden’s Final Warning
I loved it. I had two thoughts. First was great. And second was, what took you so long? I think if Biden had talked like this more, I'm not saying it would have changed the political outcome of this race, but this has been a problem for a very long time. And that sort of populist rhetoric was a big part of his campaign when he ran and then became largely absent in his presidency.
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Biden’s Final Warning
Did you think you used that correctly? Because I'm not so sure. I don't think I did.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
I can hear the hearings 48 years from now. It's like, he's just a podcaster. He runs a mid-sized media company. How could he manage 3 million people, including the world's greatest army?
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
I mean, these speeches, and I, this morning, because I hate myself, I watched the Carter speech, the George H.W. speech, the Trump speech, the George W. Bush speech, the Obama speech.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
So all of these yahoos are getting confirmed, right? It seems like that. I think if there's one yahoo who may not get confirmed, and I really want to put the emphasis on May, it's Tulsi Gabbard. I think we have to see what happens in that hearing. We have to see what's going on there.
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Biden’s Final Warning
If you were going to have to place a wager, you would place a wager on a Republican being confirmed by the Senate. But you really should put the Hegseth confirmation hearings in a time capsule to try to explain this moment in American political history to future generations.
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Biden’s Final Warning
I mean, here you have the Senate Armed Service Committee is like the most august of Senate committees. There's often bipartisanship. Of all the Senate committees, they're the most willing to buck a president, even of their own party, mainly because they are sort of in the thrall of the Pentagon. Mm-hmm.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
So here you have this committee of all committees, just in the Republican majority of that committee, just greasing the skids to confirm a cable news weekend host who has a range of reported personal conduct issues, including drinking on the job. to head the Pentagon. It is absolutely insane.
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Biden’s Final Warning
But even, let's just say, let's even, let's say he's never had a drink in his life. None of them all like just lived a perfect life. He's still woefully unqualified for this position.
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Biden’s Final Warning
On the weekend edition of the president's favorite TV program.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
Up until this moment in his media career, his biggest job was to show up quickly if Steve Doocy got the flu. Like that.
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Biden’s Final Warning
I did it on 2x speed. And they're all... Most of them are incredibly boring, the speeches. And most of them, they follow a very specific pattern of thanking the American people for giving them the privilege to be president, thanking their staff members. Even Trump thanked Mike Pence in his video.
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Biden’s Final Warning
Steve Doocy's understudy. And it's just, it's like so much about like polarization and negative partisanship because if you, Joni Ernst. At least it's not a dangerous time for the world. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing that is so fucking galling about this is you have all these Republicans who all throughout the campaign talk about how dangerous the world is. Our enemies are on the march.
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Biden’s Final Warning
You just cannot believe all these things about how serious the threats are and also believe that Pete Hegseth, the Fox News weekend anchor who's never managed an organization of more than 100 people with a laundry list of personal conduct concerns, should be the Secretary of Defense.
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Biden’s Final Warning
military. I think Cain's line of questioning was about his infidelity over the course of his life. The questions around the sexual assault allegation against him are 100% relevant to this because sexual assault in the military is a huge problem.
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Biden’s Final Warning
So the question is how the Democrats do, I guess. And I think, one, I think these hearings are sort of ridiculous now.
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Biden’s Final Warning
They don't. I mean, this is a sad, depressing thing to say, but like so much else in politics right now, they only serve for the bread and circus-like entertainment for highly engaged political junkies who made up their minds months ago.
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Biden’s Final Warning
Well, it's not, it's, I don't know that they're, yes, it would be a big, if the fate of the nomination was actually in play here, then yes, they would be a bigger deal. I'm not sure people would pay any more attention.
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Biden’s Final Warning
They would have, like right now it's like low stakes gladiator combat just for people to see Democrats beat up Pete Hegseth, Republicans beat up Democrats for beating up Pete Hegseth and doesn't serve a huge purpose. The one critique I think I would make of the Democrats in this, and I used to work for the Senate leadership. I know how hard it is to manage these things.
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Biden’s Final Warning
Senators have very strong views on the questions they should ask, and it's not like you can whiteboard this out in Chuck Schumer's office and everyone's going to do the right thing. That's not going to happen. But they're still thinking about this in a more traditional hearing where if you can just trip up the nominee to say one wrong thing, you could flip votes.
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Biden’s Final Warning
And that's just not how it works in this Republican Party. So the better use of time is to use your questioning to try to elicit or to focus on one specific narrative. Right. And I think that got lost a little bit. It's hard because it's like Democrats have some time. You do your thing. And then a Republican just, you know, goes on about it like Mark Wayne Mullen about drunk senators for a while.
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Biden’s Final Warning
Then you come back. But if you're on a different topic, it's very hard to lay out a coherent thread. So I think maybe simplifying or shortening the topic areas of concern would be something that I would recommend in some of these hearings going forward like RFK Jr.,
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Biden’s Final Warning
He released a video. Oh, right, right, right. But it looks, when you watch it on YouTube, it looks just like the other ones because he's standing in the East Wing doing it. And then they talk about the terrible situation they inherited. They tout their accomplishments.
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Biden’s Final Warning
I mean, she's only going to get like three more votes than he did. Right.
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Biden’s Final Warning
Didn't hear that. Missed that. I'm sure we're going to be able to find footage of her at a rally where he said that.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
And then they end by saying, this is where Trump did not do this, that they are going to return to the only job greater than president. Citizen. And so Biden doing something like Eisenhower did in his speech, which I did not watch, and Obama did in his to do something a little more interesting, that it actually acknowledges what's happening in the country. I mean, the George W. Bush speech is...
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Biden’s Final Warning
Well, I would just say that I am going to check the price of eggs, bacon, gas, groceries, and median rent in this country at 12.01 on Monday.
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Biden’s Final Warning
He owns it. I mean, that's one of the questions that was asked in the Scott Besson hearing was, do you believe that Donald Trump is as responsible for prices as Joe Biden was? He obviously didn't answer that question, but that is a central question to our political strategy going forward.
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Biden’s Final Warning
I think he is going to try as hard as he can to succeed here. He understands the politics here. He understood it very deftly in the 2024 campaign when he, after the law was passed, he came out and opposed it. And he wants to be the person who saved TikTok for the 60% of voters under 30 who use TikTok.
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Biden’s Final Warning
For the 170 million Americans who use TikTok on a monthly basis. And the TikTok ban is quite many of whom voted for him. The TikTok ban is quite unpopular. It was when when the law passed, it was 50 percent support. The TikTok ban is down to less than a third of Americans. It's 10 percent of TikTok users support it. Yeah. Which is a, you know, as I said, six and 10 voters under 30 who use it.
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Biden’s Final Warning
just like on another planet. Like you would never know that the economy was an absolute freefall. He spent like 22 words on the economy.
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Biden’s Final Warning
The politics here are terrible for Democrats. Even though this was a bipartisan bill, even though it's very important to note Donald Trump tried to shut down the app himself when he was president. The way it has played out over the last year or however it's been is Joe Biden wants to shut down TikTok and Donald Trump wants to save it. And that I don't think.
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Biden’s Final Warning
You know, we're on TikTok, like we we look at it, but we like most people, particularly people in politics, particularly the senators and congresspeople about this do not understand what this means. Shutting down TikTok for a lot of younger Americans would be like when we were younger, a president decided that cable TV was going to disappear on a random Sunday. It's how they get their sports.
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Biden’s Final Warning
It's how they get their news. It's how they stay in touch with their friends. It is how they follow. It's their entertainment.
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Biden’s Final Warning
Well, you know what also doesn't get great information? Cable news. So it's like cable TV doesn't either. And it's just it is a much bigger deal than I think a lot of people in politics think about because most people in politics don't actually use TikTok. And the end in the passing of it, the Democrats and Republicans involved did just an absolutely miserable job of justifying the ban.
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Biden’s Final Warning
You can't say, it's really, really bad. Trust us, but we can't tell you why. No one trusts you. And so if we're in a situation where Donald Trump saves it, it's going to be to his political benefit, no doubt.
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Biden’s Final Warning
I mean, I am willing to believe that TikTok is as dangerous as everyone says it is, even if they won't tell us why. Like that, knowing what we know about governments and what China, the sort of things China does, that makes sense to me. But you really should have solved this problem five years ago.
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Biden’s Final Warning
And Katrina and everything else. But I think it was important that Biden acknowledged something that's happening in the country and did deliver a warning that is going to feel very prescient when three days after you listen to this podcast, Donald Trump is putting his hand on the Bible to take the oath of office, surrounded by Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, the head of TikTok, the billionaire class.
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Biden’s Final Warning
Like waiting until you had 170 million Americans on the app and had them using it for much of their social media existence and then deciding to take it away was just asinine. And here's where we are.
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Biden’s Final Warning
But you're going to play whack-a-mole with Chinese apps for the rest of time. Yep. It's like everyone's leaving technology to go to less secure Chinese apps to use. And so we're going to come back around next year. We're going to ban Red Note and Lemonade or whatever it is. And then they're going to go to another app. We're just going to do it until the end of time.
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Biden’s Final Warning
I mean, the only real solution here is to sell TikTok to U.S. operations and open it back up again. That's the only... And it does seem like... And it could be sold to Elon Musk.
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Biden’s Final Warning
What is going to make you lose it more? Elon Musk buying TikTok or yet another Democratic politician giving a speech about the construction of the Statue of Liberty?
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Biden’s Final Warning
And I think there is something for Democrats here in a message going forward. I would not use the term oligarch. I would not talk about busting the trusts or the robber barons.
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Biden’s Final Warning
If people have to Google the primary part of your message, it's probably a change. I mean, it's fine for Biden is speaking to history here. He's not trying to persuade voters per se in this moment. So that's a fine choice for him to use. But like Donald Trump is putting more than a dozen billionaires in his government, in his cabinet, on the Doge Commission, in his White House.
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Biden’s Final Warning
And I think the idea that Republican Donald Trump Republicans have a government of buy in for the ultra wealthy in this country is a message that Democrats should latch on to. And Biden helps set the stage for that.
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Biden’s Final Warning
I thought it was it was good. Like it was in the vein of the other speeches that I was that I that I watched this morning. It followed that pattern. You know, I think that on one level, it's like you want Biden to wrestle with what has come, the consequence of some of the decisions he made, the just the scary prospect that all Americans are facing by what's about to come with Donald Trump.
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Biden’s Final Warning
That, I think, is sort of an impossible ask. Well, in that speech, right? Obama did something very different than everyone else. He gave a much longer speech. He went to Chicago, didn't in a crowd. He viewed his message. He did all the other things. He was glad to be citizen. He touted his accomplishments.
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Biden’s Final Warning
He talked about what he inherited, but also tried to give people hope that if you do the work of politics, you could bounce back from this. That was not really in the cards for Biden. It wasn't for anyone else who's ever done this. I think for Biden, it was a good speech. We can critique some of the more flowery language that may not have landed.
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Biden’s Final Warning
But once again, people are going to read this in the future as opposed to watch it in the moment.
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Biden’s Final Warning
One, you haven't been holding back on that. Are you announcing a book? No.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
Well, I mean, yes, I would actually argue that we should almost entirely stop giving speeches. I'm dead serious about that.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
That Obama was around. He was omnipresent in your life. He was. In your culture, in your media. But even then...
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Biden’s Final Warning
But you're sick of writing it so many times during the Obama reelection campaign.
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Biden’s Final Warning
Well, you know what got you? 312 electoral votes or whatever it was.
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Biden’s Final Warning
I was judging this in the context of- For sure. Joe Biden, right, who is not going to, has proven, of course, as president, he's not going to be the person to radically change how Democrats communicate. Yes. And I was judging it. I also think, like, this speech is something for the president to do on their way out. It is, every president has done it, at least in modern era. It is valedictory.
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Biden’s Final Warning
It's a chance to Usually, if you're on your way out, in most cases, there are some exceptions, really just Reagan, where you are leaving ascendant. You have served two terms, and you're being succeeded by someone in your own party. Most times, you've been served a shit sandwich. You lost. You're leaving incredibly unpopular.
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Biden’s Final Warning
Your successor lost, and it's just your chance to just go out and say something without anyone yelling at you while you do it. And then Biden did that, and judged under that, he did a good job.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
Once again, just state my take that I think we should get rid of 99% of speeches.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
Yeah, I mean, as I've talked about in the show before, I'm from Delaware. Other than the four years of Trump's first administration, Joe Biden has been my senator, vice president, and president my entire life. I don't know a time when Joe Biden wasn't representing me in office. You and I, we worked with him. He is incredibly decent to me personally, very supportive of my career.
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Biden’s Final Warning
He was always so proud. There was another Delawarean in those meetings in the White House always. And I'm always be grateful to him for that. His legacy is obviously very, very complicated. he did a lot of really good things. And most important on that list is he came out of retirement in 2020 to run and defeat Donald Trump.
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Biden’s Final Warning
And I'm not sure there's another person who was running who would have accomplished that for us. But because that was the center, and he said that's why he came out. It's because of Charlottesville and the healing soul of the nation and all of that. And then when he got in, he did a lot of really, really good important things. Absolutely.
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Biden’s Final Warning
It's not as historic as the Biden talking points would tell you where his allies compare him to FDR and LBJ. That is not the case. A lot of those things are also at risk of Trump.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
And that's why the legacy is unwritten because we don't, will the climate suspending that is so important that if we actually, that we may look back decades from now, incredibly grateful to Biden for doing it, will that survive? Will the infrastructure, will those bridges actually be built? You know, we don't know that. And that's true for every president when they leave. That was true for Obama.
Pod Save America
Biden’s Final Warning
Would the Affordable Care Act survive? But the ultimate thing here is, is that his legacy is clouded because he was unwilling to listen to the American people who were telling him in the loudest voice possible not to run for reelection.
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Biden’s Final Warning
And he stuck it out and insisted that he was right and everyone else was wrong to the point where he ended up having to drop out of the race with a hundred some days to go, making it almost impossible for a Democrat to win this election. Now, the Democratic Party is now in the worst political spot it's been in in decades.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
Yeah, we're not going to support health care. Like we are in the process of negotiating a budget agreement for the year. Like that is the point here. What to try to do is you want to negotiate a budget agreement for the year. And while we're doing that, we're not just going to cut Head Start community health centers for fun. Like we're not going to agree to that.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
That is not a way to have a negotiation over the budget. And if you want to increase military spending by $12 billion, traditionally, over the last 15 years here of budget negotiations, we have increased and decreased defense and non-defense spending at the same time. So they're breaking that.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
And so I think you just say we all we are asking for is to keep everything working, keep the lights on, keep everything working the way it has been working right now. We are not going to support.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
Yeah. I mean, we're not even we're not even asking for anything.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
I would say that that Schumer is probably taking one for the team here. Right, he has enough members who want, who do not want this fight. For political reasons, substantive reasons, whatever that is, fear. The fears you have about a shutdown exist whether it's over a clean CR and I can't believe it. Correct. A clean funding bill or this. They exist, they're the same.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
I worked in the White House when we had the shutdown, and everyone has to decide what's an essential worker and what's an inessential worker. And the essential workers stay and work for no money, and everyone else goes home. And so you can just see they're just picking through the people they trust, their people, the Project 2025 people. So there is a substantive risk in all of this, but
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
If you're not going to fight now, if you're going to – because this really is waving the white flag. I could argue the vote on a clean funding bill, round or flat. Like I would have leaned towards having the fight. This – you are – This is easier. You're getting punked here. I think you're really getting punked in a way that doesn't bode well for any future negotiations or future votes.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
And it's going to inflame – and rightfully so, I think –
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
the sentiment within the party that our leadership is not up to this moment, because I just if it and then we keep having this experience where everyone gets up and says Trump is this incredible, the existential threat to what is happening, what he to Elon Musk are doing are unprecedented, it's authoritarian, it's unconstitutional, it's potentially illegal, blah, blah, blah.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
And if you believe that if you believe that this threat is extraordinary, you have to be willing to take extraordinary measures yourself. And this is one of the rare moments we have to do that.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
No, probably not. I think if it shuts down on Friday and you open up on Monday, that's probably worse.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
Like last time. Part of this is just an unwillingness to wrestle with impending tough decisions. This has been coming for a while. We've at least known since the weekend what this bill looked like. I think everyone in the Senate was closing their eyes and hoping that Mike Johnson wouldn't get the vote so it wouldn't be their fault.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
But we could really use a little game planning here about what could possibly happen. And the fact that we're at this point and they were just having a meeting about it today, I think it's tough. This is a tough pill for a lot of people to swallow.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
Not great. It seems that way. Now, you know who it's not going great for? The rest of us, for the American people. Yeah. It is, I guess, somewhat comforting that public opinion has turned so quickly on him. The people get what's happening. When he was president the first time, his economic approval was always higher than his job approval.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
During the campaign, his economic approval was always higher than his personal favorability. Now, his economic approval is, in some cases, below his job approval. People get what's happening. In the Reuters poll, he is at a minus 12 on the economy, minus 17 on foreign trade and minus 25 on inflation in terms of net approval. Like people get it, they see what's happening and it's,
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
The public, it's the markets, it's business leaders. Like you see, you know, like David Solomon, who is the CEO of Goldman Sachs, like went on Fox and tried to like send a message to, he tried not to piss off Trump in his interview. But Goldman Sachs is cutting their forecasts. And all these earnings calls, these Wall Street analysts are all saying they are cutting their economic projections.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
And they cite every single time the reason is the policies of this president.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
And it's not just that he is launching tariffs. It's that he's launching and then unlaunching tariffs on an hourly basis.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
Well, it's not a strategy. There's no strategy here. One, the manufacturing sector grew under Joe Biden, right? He is not like digging us out of some hole, right? It grew just about as much under Biden as it did under Trump before. The...
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
If he had an actual strategy that you would put tariffs on and keep them, you wouldn't put them on, take them off, add this exemption, add this exemption, and all of a sudden get pissed off at someone. So now you want to put 200% tariffs on wine and champagne, which I'm sure is gonna be super popular. But also if you cared about manufacturing,
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
You would not go to before the entire nation at your State of the Union and declare that you want to repeal the CHIPS Act, which is supposed to specifically designed to spur semiconductor manufacturing in the United States. You wouldn't be trying to gut all the funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, which is trying to spur
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
manufacturing in this country for solar panels, batteries, other green technologies and materials. He's doing the exact opposite of what I say. He may believe this. He also believes he won the election in 2020. So who the fuck cares what he believes? But it is nonsensical. Steve Leisman is right. It is, it's insanity. There is no actual plan. There are no guardrails. His advisors have no say.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
You have Scott Bessett, who is theoretically a smart person. He was a very successful Wall Street guy. He is up there trying to defend this insanity. Howard Lutnick, who might be a loon, doesn't seem to know what he's doing. Might. Yeah, my benefit of the doubt here, John, I don't know him personally. And they it's just the president has a no idea. He doesn't understand policy at all.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
And he has clearly has some sort of fleeting relationship with reality. And he's just unilaterally making policy with no guidance and no pushback from anyone. And this is this is what everyone said was going to happen. I mean, he's going to hurt the economy is doing it.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
For no gain for no gain for no gain. It the thing here is, is that it would be one thing if he like there is a world of us. You put all these tariffs on you, keep them on. You then pump money into the U.S. manufacturing sector to build up U.S. manufacturing. But that's not what he's doing.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
One day he's doing things that would theoretically bring manufacturing back here by putting these tariffs on. What business in the world would say, there were these tariffs on for 36 hours. This seems like a stable place to move my factory to. And then just on top of the insanity of this whole thing, he's so mad about our trade relationships with Canada and Mexico.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
Let's not forget who negotiated the existing on the books trade deals with Canada and Mexico. It was Donald Trump the last time he was president with the USCMA or whatever it is, the U.S.-Canada-Mexico agreement that he said was the greatest trade agreement of all time. Biden didn't change it. Nothing changed. It's his own deal.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
Donald Trump wants to put on a national sales tax on products imported from various parts of the world. Food, auto parts, energy, whatever it is.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
Well, all those business people, all those Wall Street guys who, you know, all the tech guys who coddled up to Trump, they believed one of two things. One, he would never actually do it. It was just a negotiating tactic. Right. Or if he did actually do it and the markets reacted negatively, he would back off. And instead, he has doubled and tripled and quadrupled down.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
And he's made it even worse because he puts them all in takes on. So he's created this massive uncertainty in chaos that is that is what is it's the instability more than the strategy that is damaging the markets right now.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
Only a movie that came out in the early 80s, I think.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
I got cars to move off this White House lot. I just cannot emphasize this enough. At a time in which prices are rising and the stock market is sinking, Donald Trump's response to the pain the American people are feeling is to write a personal check to the world's richest man. It is insanity. We like to look at the data and the polls. I don't need polling data for that. That does not go down well.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
Yes, these Republicans would be quite upset when they discover that they bought all these Teslas in solidarity with Elon, only to find you can't charge them anywhere in middle America because we took out all the funding for the charging stations.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
Donald Trump ran... And the Republicans ran millions of dollars of ads attacking electric vehicles in Michigan in this last election. And now he's selling them on the White House lawn. But wait, Dan, there's more.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
Well, the good news is, since you don't know, I can say virtually anything. You can? You can, no. But I will try to do this as accurately as I possibly can with my sleep-addled brain. But Binance is one of the world's largest crypto exchanges. It was founded in China. But now, according to Binance, it exists nowhere.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
It has no location, which is not sketchy at all. It just exists in the ether, which is definitely not a way to avoid local laws and taxes.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
It was founded by a guy named Shiping Zhao, who goes by the name CZ in crypto circles. And he's a big, he's a very big personality in crypto circles. And as you mentioned, in 2023, Binance pled guilty to violating money laundering laws. They paid a $4.3 billion fine, one of the largest corporate fines ever paid. What they did was help facilitate
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
money transfers to sanctioned organizations like Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Hamas. And reportedly... Hamas, you say? Hamas? I say Hamas.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
Apparently, there's a two-tiered system of justice, as Trump used to say.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
And CZ spent several months in jail for crimes related to this. As part of this, Binance reportedly instructed some of these users to hide their location when they did the money transfers to hide it from authorities. And during the campaign, according to these reports, officials from Binance went to
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
Trump officials, Trump family, Trump allies to begin a conversation about a possible business venture at the same time that CZ was seeking a pardon for his crimes and Binance is trying to get back into the US market. And what this business venture would mean is sort of an open question. It could be a investment from the Trump family into Binance. They could take a stake in the company.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
It could mean some sort of partnership or joint venture between World Liberty Finance, which is Trump's crypto company that did his meme coins, and Binance. And then, in a potentially even more alarming situation, according to Bloomberg, the report is that they could create what is called a stablecoin. A stablecoin is a... is cryptocurrency that is pegged to real reserve assets, right?
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
It seems like it's going to be averted. If it is, if Chuck Schumer is voting for cloture, that is a sign that there are at least six other Democrats, Schumer, Fetterman, six others who will vote to allow the Republicans to pass this bill.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
Where theoretically you have the money to back it up. So the price stays stable. So unlike like Bitcoin or Ethereum or these meme coins, you're not like buying and selling it like a financial instrument to make money on the spread. It's so you can transfer money. It's legitimate currency. Now there are real questions for some of these stable coins as about whether that the actual backup
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
Assets exist. That could be U.S. dollars, could be gold. It could be other crypto assets. But essentially what you would be creating is Trump bucks here.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
It'd be an actual Trump currency that that the Trump family would control and could be sent to people with not just without paying bank fees, which one of the arguments before stable coins and a decentralized financial system, but also without people knowing how it's being spent. And there are a lot of – there's legislation moving through the Senate on this.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
There's a lot of concern from people like Elizabeth Warren about the idea about these stablecoins that non-financial institutions could control them, therefore not be subject to some of the regulations that would be in place in a normal presidency. And so this is just one of the most brazen – bits of corruption you could possibly imagine.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
As you said in your intro, you have the president's family doing business with people guilty of money laundering while the head of said money laundering company is seeking a pardon from the president.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
We call him Marco Rubio's boss, Steve Witkoff. So it's worth noting, however, that Steve Wyckoff's representatives denied that he had any involvement in this and CZ himself went on Twitter to offer a denial as well.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
Well... I was trying to remember the name of the guy who was the White House ethics officer who got fired. Oh. Remember what I'm talking about?
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
He may be huge on Blue Sky right now. I don't know.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
But either way, what is at stake here is when Kellyanne Conway got in trouble for violations of the Hatch Act, that wasn't just the White House Ethics Office. That is the Office of Special Counsel, which is theoretically a quasi-independent agency within the government that enforces the Hatch Act.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
Trump fired Hampton Dellinger, the head of the Office of Special Counsel, as part of his deep state purge. And so currently there is no person Who would be administering these rules and enforcing them? So it is like it is the purge 24-7, 365 in the Trump administration.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
I just want to push back on one thing. The pushbacks from the right has been this picture of Biden in an electric Jeep on the White House lawn.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
But here's the difference. The founder of Jeep did not spend $300 million to elect Joe Biden and did not just promise another $100 million in donations to his political organizations. These are entirely different deals and it is an absurd bit of what that was.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
If Jeff Zients had given $300 million to get him elected. Right. Again, yeah, there's no comparison. You can't even come up with some sort of reasonable example because there is no thing like this. Nothing like this. People are going to care. And you do see this in polling. As you know, I'm obsessed with corruption as a key part of the Democratic message.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
If you watch the polling, the number of people concerned about corruption keeps going up and up and up. And for good reason.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
I would say it did not seem to carry the weight I had hoped when I wrote it. Smash that subscribe button, Chuck Schumer.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
He flew to Michigan over the weekend. He's in Orange County on a Tuesday.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
They did that before I arrived. But I was there for the celebration. Good, good. So it's not your fault. I would say that this is going to be a wild pod because I woke up in Virginia this morning and did our morning call in California, so I am quite tired.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
No views that I'm sharing on 2028. I mean, it would be honestly, truly idiotic to have a view about 2028 right now. And really- I think I've said this on this podcast before. I say it to everyone who brings up 2028.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
At this point in 2005, when we were still licking our wounds from losing to George W. Bush, despite the Iraq, despite the fact that he invaded the wrong country after 9-11, everyone thought we needed a moderate- white guy, preferably a governor like Mark Warner. That was the flavor du jour. And then a few years later, we nominated Barack Hussein Obama from the South Side of Chicago.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
via indonesia and hawaii so we don't no one knows what we actually need right now and so pretending like you know what footer's gonna want 20 28 is insane some of us know we needed that and we're glad that we lured you away from evan by to help us out well you didn't just lure me away from evan by you ran evan by out of the race uh so for which everyone is forever grateful um i wonder how but i think the thing is he's a senator from indiana uh
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
Anyway, either way, not important. But I think we should put Pete's decision is not a 2028 decision. He had to announce if he was going to seek these seats now because other candidates are getting in the race. It's forming. It would be time to. to begin forming a campaign, to begin getting petition signatures, to get on the ballot.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
And so, yes, the logical conclusion is if he's not running for something in 2026, he's running for something in 2020. And that may be true, but that is a, I put that in the Katie Porter, Kamala Harris may run for governor category. The other thing I'd say is whether you're running for president in 2028 or not,
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
and this is the thing I took from Lovett's experience with Bernie Sanders, is people are hungry for someone to get out there and fight, to speak with authenticity and passion about what is happening in this country, to speak to people's fears and their hopes. And so all the people who may wanna run for president, Don't do presidential. Like, just go get out there.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
Go to go to those Republican districts and do town halls. Do just the people who think they want to run for president but are being silent right now, I think, are missing a moment. I think it's a huge mistake.
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Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
Use that just to help your presidential presidential candidacy, but to use the interest in your potential presidential candidacy to help the larger cause of pushing back against Trump and Musk.
Pod Save America
Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
That is a painful thing for you to say. OK, I just want to talk about the politics because that is what I would stipulate that there are people who have legitimate substantive concerns about the impact of a shutdown and fears that if you're engaged in shutdown negotiations with a party that wants to destroy government. They may not open it again.
Pod Save America
Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
Or that Elon Musk can do a lot of damage while the government is shut down. I think that's a legitimate substantive concern. But there are people who are worried about the politics here. And I think they're wrong to be worried about the politics. There is this narrative that the party that, quote unquote, shuts the government down. And I don't think that's what Democrats would be doing here.
Pod Save America
Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
But the people who... Don't vote for the funding bill. Take the blame. And that's based on the fact that in the 90s, when Bill Clinton's presidency was struggling, Newt Gingrich shut the government down over a big budget fight. And Clinton won that fight substantively and politically and put himself on the path to an easy reelection.
Pod Save America
Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
In 2013, Republicans shut the government down when Obama was president. After the end of that shutdown, the Republicans had the Republican Party at its lowest favorability rating in modern history at that point.
Pod Save America
Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
But what I think – and then when Trump – we forget this, but Trump shut the government down for – the longest government shutdown in history was Trump's fault, and it was over funding for the wall, which was something that while his base loves, most of the country thinks it's kind of ridiculous and not important. And so what the point here is – and Trump took blame then too.
Pod Save America
Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
His numbers went down over the course of that shutdown. I think people are reading this the wrong way because in all three examples I gave – Newt Gingrich and the Republicans in the 90s, Republicans in 2013, and Trump. They all shut the government down over incredibly unpopular things. You can't get more unpopular. Gingrich wanted to cut Medicare.
Pod Save America
Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
Ted Cruz in the Freedom Caucus, who engineered the Obama-era shutdown, wanted to defund the Affordable Care Act and kick millions of people with pre-existing conditions off their healthcare coverage. The wall's not popular. And so I think what we have to look at is what happens if you pick a shutdown fight over something popular? And Democrats would have a laundry list of popular options.
Pod Save America
Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
Social security cuts, veterans, cuts to VA healthcare, cuts to food safety and cancer research. Like a whole bunch of things that we like we have the high side of the political argument on issues. And we could we could I think Democrats could win that fight if we tried.
Pod Save America
Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
The other part is even if you don't win the fight in the short term, these things flush through the system so much faster than we think. Yeah. Right. Yes. The Republicans were at their lowest level in November of 2013, but then they won the Senate and expanded their House majority in November of 2014. And so this idea that this would somehow damage our our damage, our chances in the midterms.
Pod Save America
Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
Is sort of, I think, sort of absurd. And so you people should be. I think it's a political fight. Democrats could win. It would not guarantee you'd win it. Absolutely. But there are no guarantees in life. And just being afraid of the politics, I think, is taking the it's an oversimplistic reading of what's happened. And I think it's kind of taking the coward's way out of this fight.
Pod Save America
Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
The government shut down on a Friday and I think it reopened again on a Monday.
Pod Save America
Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
I think like we, you and I, Pod Save America, people who follow politics, the Democratic Party have been having this conversation for a couple of weeks now. And it feels like it's been the same conversation, but it hasn't caught up to changes in the facts on the ground.
Pod Save America
Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
Like when we had Schiff, Senators Schiff and Merkley and Wyden on our live stream before Trump's State of the Union Joint Address thing, What we were talking about is would you vote for a clean funding bill, six month funding bill that would just keep the government open at the same levels that were agreed to when Joe Biden was president? That is a much tougher vote for the reasons you laid out.
Pod Save America
Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
That is not this bill. This is really important. This bill increases fundings for the military by twelve billion dollars. It gives, depending on how you read the language, gives Trump's more authority on how to spend that money unilaterally. It increases funding for Trump's mass deportation plan. And this is very important.
Pod Save America
Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
It has a $1.2 billion cut in what is called non-defense discretionary spending. What that means is spending that is not military spending, defense spending, or Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. So what that means is- A lot of healthcare, housing. Head Start, community health centers, education, food safety, cancer research, that's just being cut. Just we're just going to cut that.
Pod Save America
Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
What that's essentially doing is codifying what Elon Musk and Doge have been doing right there. And then it just just for shits and giggles, it takes a billion dollars from D.C. 's budget for no reason, which is going to force D.C. to possibly have to fire teachers, police officers and firefighters. And then on top of that, it takes away Congress's ability to reject Trump's tariffs.
Pod Save America
Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
Congress can call a vote on tariffs. That power is taken away in this bill. And so Republicans, Democrats did not shut the government down here. They would not be shutting the government down. Republicans need a bill that can get 60 votes. They never talked to Democrats about what it would take to get seven Democratic votes for this bill. They never talked to a single Democrat about it.
Pod Save America
Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
And so even if you wanna just like the, another way to think about this is like, We should just fight for a clean new CR. Right. That's what you want. Just like we will. So we would support keeping the government open. But we're not going to give do favors to Trump and Elon Musk in this for no reason. We get nothing for it. We have like just giving away all of our leverage.
Pod Save America
Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
And I think that is a huge mistake. And it just it is rolling over in this moment. Like we don't. Like, I think in a clean CR, it's kind of hard to figure out what the way out is. There is a way out here. And if you just said you just go to Thune and say clean CR, you're not get clean CR. It could be six months, 30 days. Like we want 30 days. You want six months. Let's make it three months. Right.
Pod Save America
Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
Whatever. Something like that. Just we will keep it. We want to keep the government. But we're not going to just we're not going to vote for a big cut in. Programs like Head Start and community health centers were not going to do that. And I think that's a very defensible position to take, substantively and politically.
Pod Save America
Trump's All Pain, No Gain Economy
And I'm very disappointed that it appears at this recording at 3.15 Pacific time on Thursday that that's not the direction the Democratic caucus will go.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
The cable news covered it the whole time, just went live for this whole thing. It led the network news that night. Now, no one should really give a lot of shits about what leads the network news these days or goes live on cable. But more importantly, it became like a moment online. It was a thing that broke through. It became this topic of conversation.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
It was immediately memefied, and there were all these memes going around about – Well, you know, with Elon, with his kid around on his shoulders as he's answering the questions. And I'm not sure to the extent of the public consumed any of it. And they're probably at most just like glancing by it or seeing moments on TikTok or Instagram or whatever else.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
It is just sort of like this political outsider who's such an outsider. He's dressed like a weirdo in the old office with his kid on his shoulders. defending his efforts to cut government and get rid of waste. And that's not in itself totally bad.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
I just think as we look at all these things, it's just another reminder that in this day and age, the quantity of attention is more important than the quality. And this was a massive quantity of attention.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
The way I think to read that poll is that Elon is actually a drag on what would be an otherwise more popular effort.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
Because if you can only get to 50 on the idea of getting rid of bloat and waste in government because Elon's name's attached, it's because if you send the world's richest man into government who has billions of dollars in government contracts to manage federal spending, that seems pretty sketchy to just about any person.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
And so there is a secondary debate about how much we focus on Elon, how much we focus on Trump. I think there's real advantage in focusing on Elon. And I've been sort of playing with a little, not a message per se, right?
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
Not a slogan, but like a framework to think about how to describe what's happening in the Trump administration, particularly as it relates to Doge, because there is, how you talk about this does matter somewhat, but is to focus, is to center the, like the two themes of the Trump presidency to date are chaos and corruption.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
And I think if you – the way to get into the Doge stuff is, yes, talk about all the vital programs that are being – and be specific about what they are. But it's also just pure fucking chaos, right? There's a story. I think it was in The Times about this school that's been – has this federal grant to get new school buses.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
They've made four of the five payments, but they didn't withdraw the fifth payment before Trump was sworn in, and now they can't get the school bus.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
You know, just a very close friend of mine who works in education, just doing consulting for school districts, a bunch of her, you know, these are like long-term grants. So they've been working with these school districts on like teacher accreditation and teacher training for years, just all gone two days ago. Just in the middle of the program, right?
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
Just like they're working through, like you're halfway through. It's one thing to stop new money from going out the door, right? Or looking at not, I don't mean like the fifth of the seven payments, but to say, here are the new grant applications that have come in since Trump was president. Or it is time to renew the grant.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
And then you can, the voters voted for you, you can put within all legal frameworks, your ideological framework on what kind of Grant should get approved. But to stop things in the middle, right? I mean, you guys talked a lot about what's happening to the folks in USAID who just – but just it's pure chaos. It's wrecking chaos in people's lives.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
And then the fact that you have on top of that the world's richest man doing it while he is cutting agencies that are – regulating his businesses. I know. That is what everyone hates about politics, right? It is the cynicism that drove many of them to vote for Trump, and it can be the rightfully well-earned cynicism about government, in this case, that causes them to go the other direction.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
It's reflexive partisanship, right? This is the same impulse that caused, in 2017, Democrats to become huge fans of the New York Times has caused us to become huge fans of USAID. It's like Trump's against it. It must be good. Yeah.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
And I would say, actually, in the long run for the world, one half of America's two parties becoming full-throated advocates for humanitarian assistance is more valuable than subsidizing wordle acquisitions at the New York Times. Yeah.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
I didn't even plan that. That just came naturally to me. I don't know why.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
Several of Elon's kids, yes. There was this funny line in one of the stories. It was like, Modi had this, you know, obviously all of his staff. And it said, Elon was only accompanied by this woman who's a longtime lieutenant and the mother of three of his children. So I was like, that's who came?
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
He was like, yeah, I assume he wants to do business. I would really like some real reporting, especially if it came from those Wordle people I just unfairly attacked, but about how the meeting came to be. When you look at the picture, that is the classic State Department setup for a bilateral meeting. I know.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
If the Secretary of State is traveling abroad or even like a lower government official is traveling abroad as an official representative of something, it's always that, right? It's the flags, the chairs, the handshake. And so was that set up? Who booked that? Who talked to Modi? Who in the White House signed off on it? I mean, this is small pennies, but...
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
I assume that's all State Department stuff that was put together for that meeting, right? Like, just how did that happen?
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
And just the fact that Trump just acknowledged in that Q&A that Elon was doing this because he wants to do business in India, which he definitely does, and that Trump had no problem with Elon using his special government employee status to get meetings with foreign leaders in places where he wanted to do business.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
Like, that gets to the, like, we just did the chaos part of the equation I wanted to get to. This is the corruption part.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
You know, it's like these people that use those people who pay like a ton of money to go to Duke basketball, basketball program, like grown, grown adults and like put on the uniform and they run out through Cameron and they go to a practice with coach K back in the day. And it's like, this is the same thing.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
Like he spent a quarter of a billion dollars of his own money and he gets to play pretend president with some actual real authorities for as long as he wants.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
I mean, it's kind of an awkward thing to say. Oh, was it a wordle? No, no, no. Too many letters for wordle. I have heard it, but I certainly couldn't spell it. And I'm not sure I could maybe win a multiple choice question on what it means. But kudos to Brendan Carr for using it.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
It is very scary. It is quite scary. This is in all of the major Supreme Court cases on free speech over the years, the ultimate time when the reasons they ultimately put real limits on what the government can do, whether it's on New York Times versus Sullivan,
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
whether it's on the Online Decency Act, whether it's stuff that was done in the anti-communist push at points in our history, is because government action has a chilling effect on free speech. And that's exactly what's happening with the San Francisco radio station. Because the government has unlimited power and unlimited money.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
So if you're a local radio station, a local newspaper, an individual reporter who just has their own newsletter or whatever else, you have to think very carefully about what you say and what you do. Because if you become one of the targets of one of these attacks, you don't have the resources to fight back. You will be bankrupted in this process.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
And then on the other end, you have this with the threat about DEI from Brendan Carr, you know, Invidious or not, is you have all of these businesses, these large corporate entities of which journalism is usually a money-losing part of it, or it's at least not a part of their revenue future. And they are making decisions about the larger company that's affecting the journalism of the entity there.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
There is this whole thing about whether Paramount, which has a merger before the FCC, is going to settle this ridiculous lawsuit for 60 Minutes just as a way to ensure that they can get their merger greenlit by the FCC. Yeah. It's like it's – and then – sorry, the other thing I say is just like that is very, very real.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
I'm always torn – like it is insane that the White House is so petty that they're not going to let the AP in because they won't give Trump's fake name to something real. And it's like – is that – it's sort of like we – the way – and sometimes the press – overstates or overreacts to smaller things and claims it's in a free speech.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
Like the way people treated a Barack Obama, not doing enough press conferences was, uh, or do not take enough questions on the rope line as it, as you know, the end of the, the end of the free press, um, you know, or when Jim Acosta lost his white house badge briefly, but these things like doing, trying to bully the AP has an impact on what others will do. And I think it's, it is quite concerning.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
Yeah, this is like a longer conversation about the differences between press access and press freedom. Yeah. Right? And I think Caroline Leavitt, the Trump press secretary, said the AP doesn't have a right to cover these events. Right? Because ultimately, what the freedom of the press is about is the government cannot stop you from printing what you want to print. Right.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
But democracy suffers when there is not press access. Right. Right, there is less transparency. There's less scrutiny. And we've already saw this in the Pentagon, where it's not that Pete Hegseth is keeping out mainstream press, but he has kicked the mainstream press out of their offices and allowed a bunch of ideological allies to come in and sit and cover those places.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
And that's just, it's all like you, this is the same thing, the point you made earlier is this is what happens in authoritarian regimes. Like it is slowly over time, the very tired metaphor, the frog getting boiled, but the water is boiling and you can see it happening.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
It is a huge political problem for Trump and the Republicans. This is the exact rhythm of Republican governance since Reagan. Run on reducing the deficit and government being too large, getting an office and then having to actually make the cuts and having the public turn on you very quickly for doing so, getting booted out, getting Democrats in office, rinse, repeat.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
And for Trump, this is particularly dangerous because unlike all those other Republicans, he didn't run on any of this. That was one thing Elon kept saying in the – in the weird press, white Oval Office presser was the public voted for this, public voted for this. The public did not vote for this. This is not what Trump ran on. He did not run on cutting spending.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
He ran as Pat Buchanan and he's now governing like Paul Ryan. Like this is exactly, this is, he has lost touch with what, he's not a populist anymore. This is not a populist agenda. This is very improper stuff. And let's just take Medicaid for instance. Navigator Research had a poll out in late January 81% of voters oppose cuts to Medicaid. 75% of Republicans oppose cuts to Medicaid.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
This is incredibly unpopular stuff. And then you get to all the other spending cuts, right? You're looking at $800 billion in cuts to Medicaid. That is cuts to health care, cuts to nursing home. It cuts to children's health care. That is a huge deal that will be felt by a huge swath of the population. And then after that, even if they did that, then they have to cut –
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
Billions and billions and billions more from all the stuff that Elon, what Elon's doing is small potatoes compared to this, right? You're going to have to slash food safety, slash medical research, slash public education, slash emergency response to natural disasters, all of those things. We've seen this happen every single time.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
And they want to eliminate the Department of Education, something Donald Trump just reiterated he wanted to do. And that is so unpopular. Huge majorities oppose it. And we've seen this before. After Newt Gingrich took power in 1994, the Republicans had the majority. They tried to eliminate the Department of Education. They got in a huge fight with Bill Clinton about it.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
Bill Clinton won that fight. The Republicans lost it so bad that when George W. Bush ran for president in 2000, he ran on increasing education funding. This is such politically toxic stuff. And this is where Trump's honeymoon ends. Because right now he's out there, he's just signing the things he wants, saying the things he wants to do.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
But now if he wants to actually do something, he has to get in the fucking muck with Congress to do this stuff. And it's incredibly unpopular. And as we know also painfully well, once you start doing difficult legislative stuff with Congress, you'll lose the post-election sheen and you start looking pretty weak and pretty much like a typical politician.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
Yeah. So let's just – so I guess there's two separate questions. I'll take the second one first, which is can they pass this? Yeah, they absolutely can. It's not going to be easy. It would be incredibly messy. And it may end up where the Senate has to go first. And then the Republicans are put in this position to just like eat it or have Trump's agenda fail.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
And I think that that's probably more likely. I mean the House Republicans have not passed some sort of consequential budget measure without Democratic help in – Other than sort of the fake debt ceiling thing that McCarthy did, I think that might be the only one in like a decade. Like they always need Democrats because they cannot agree on this stuff. But push comes to shove. We should like –
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
It's very possible that they will put aside anything they possibly care about to help Trump. So we should assume that. So it's like, how do you win the fight? And you're 100% right. This is not the media environment in which Democrats had previously succeeded in these fights at all. Because there's one thing the press loves. It's like stories about cuts. What's going to go away?
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
Yeah, it seems great. It seems like things are going exactly as planned. I mean, it is noted that Trump went at the convention to declare that the inflation crisis would end immediately. Inflation has gone up. He is doing things to raise prices.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
What are the specifics? Let's interview the people who are going to lose their program. And particularly in a world, especially when Bill Clinton did this, where with a very robust regional press, it is death for Republicans. They're doing local stand-ups outside the nursing home that's going to close without Medicaid funding, right? That kills them. None of that exists anymore.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
And so we're going to have to be deft and strategic and loud in a way in which our party has been unable to do so. At any point in recent history, so that is hard, but we have the political high side and we have the better story to tell, so it is possible to do it. The most important thing here is to – there are two important things, message-wise.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
One, be very specific about what is being cut, right? Even though Medicaid actually has a quite popular brand, don't just say Medicaid. Talk about specifically what Medicaid funds, right? Children's health care, nursing homes, right? Prescription drugs, all of that. Be specific. When you get to the other cuts, be incredibly specific about what they are, right?
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
There's a lot of language guidance we can get to when these cuts actually happen about how to talk about education cuts and things like that. But to connect, why are they doing these cuts? Yeah. to pay for tax cuts for huge corporations and rich people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
And that's even before we get into the potential impacts of his mass deportation plan, what a giant tax cut that overwhelmingly benefits corporations and the wealthy would do. And I think it is just worth – we're living this in truly insane time. We're going to talk about a lot of the really insane, dangerous, and dumb things that are happening over the course of this podcast.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
It is – Lovett made this point on Twitter, but on the day we find out that inflation is going up, Donald Trump appoints himself programming opera program director. So it's like –
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
Trump is the chairman of the board, and Rick Grinnell, as of the last time I looked at the internet, was the interim director.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
I wouldn't say I'm tracking the story as closely as, I don't know, the Medicaid cuts or Elon Musk, but at one point, he was the interim director. I think Lee Greenwood's on the board.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
The whole point of the Kennedy Center board was to raise money for the Kennedy Center. The chair of the board was David Rubenstein, the incredibly wealthy private equity hedge fund guy who owns – Sir Richie owns a copy of the Constitution, I think. So when you get rid of him, like is Donald Trump going to raise that money and give that money?
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
Well, I think because he never went to Kennedy Center honors when he was president, I think. Because I think he would know he would be made fun of by everyone because it's all the comedians. And so this is just, wait, if he can't be invited to the club, he's going to just buy the clubhouse.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
But it's also possible that politics really hasn't changed that much and Donald Trump simply won the presidency because – People were really mad at the incumbent administration because prices were too high. And now Donald Trump is the incumbent administration and people are still mad the prices are too high.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
Now Mitch McConnell doesn't have the authority and power in Congress to hook up all their lobbying clients. They've dropped him like a dirty sock. Embarrassing. Totally embarrassing.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
I learned about this directly from you this morning at our production meeting, and I laughed so hard that it hurt my gut.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
And instead of trying to address that, as he promised he would do, he is doing things that would actually exacerbate the crisis. And so we will find out soon enough whether political gravity is a thing that still exists.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
It is, like, this is obviously Freedom Fries type stuff. But if you ever just want to... just have an interesting experience. Find a much younger person and try to explain to them the time in American history 20 years ago when we renamed all of our French fries Freedom Fries because France would not follow us into a really stupid and losing war.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
Well, then actually, if you hear that story, then everything that's happened since probably makes a lot more sense to you.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
We are recording this before the Trump-Modi press conference, and I've been wondering whether there's a chance Trump's going to announce in there he's going to start calling India, Indiana.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
The other thing about this that is... notable is because inflation went back up again, the Fed is now less likely and highly unlikely to cut interest rates again, which we often treat interest rates and inflation as two separate but related things when they're actually for the voter the same thing. If interest rates stay up, credit cards are more expensive. Buying cars is more expensive.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
Getting a home loan is more expensive. Your costs are more expensive. You're locked into your homes. And so Trump, maybe he will just fire the Fed chair against the law. He will bully him into lowering interest rates.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
But in a world in which he is not demonstrating to the Fed that he is trying to bring down inflation, he is going to make his own situation worse because they are going to feel like Trump is an untrustworthy partner in this or an unreliable partner and are therefore going to keep interest rates high for a much longer period of time.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
Yeah, I mean, it is deeply alarming that we have an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist at the head of our healthcare system and a You know, someone who has played footsie with Bashar al-Assad and Putin and has also embraced all kinds of conspiracy theories in charge of our intelligence agencies.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
That is a just like if you had told people six months ago that that's how this was going to end, people would have laughed at you. People would have treated it as, you know, liberal MSNBC positive America hysteria to suggest such crazy things. And look, I just I think as it relates to the Republican Party. And this is particularly true of the Gabbard confirmation, but also true of the RFK Jr.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
one as well, is that the fact that every Republican except Mitch McConnell voted for these folks is proof that the Republican Party as an independent entity is dead. It is now just a vehicle for Trump's whims and desires. They have no independent policy positions, right? They just confirmed someone who spent most of their life being pro-choice to be in charge of the health care system.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
They just confirmed someone who is the closest person to Russia in the United States Congress when they were there to be the head of the intelligence agencies. And this is different than when it was before. If you remember in 2017, the Republican House and Senate passed a bill to keep Trump from taking sanctions off of Russia.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
When, during the Biden administration, when a bunch of Trump's allies, at the behest of Trump, wanted to get rid of funding for Ukraine, it was the Republican Senate who stopped them. And now it's just like, we will do whatever they want.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
And even on foreign policy, the one place they had held the line over the years, and it's just like, this is the end of the party as an actual entity that will survive Trump. And they gave it all up. For nothing more than avoiding a primary challenge in the next election. Because that's how you know that's what this is about. Because Mitch McConnell is almost certainly retiring now.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
And so he's the only one who feels like he can vote his conscience without suffering the repercussions because he's immune from them.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
Not a single one of them. Like maybe like Tommy Tuberville believes this bullshit. But if you gave truth serum to the Republican Senate caucus overwhelmingly, they would say it was fucking insane to confirm Tulsi Gabbard for this job. that it was ridiculously irresponsible to confirm RFK Jr. for this job. They all believe that, but they won't do it.
Pod Save America
Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
And I think this is really interesting about Trump's brand of politics is normally, If you don't need the votes, and they weren't going to need every single Republican this time, you let people take a walk on a tough vote. Particularly someone like Susan Collins, who is in a blue state. Give her a chance. They don't need her vote to confirm either of these people.
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Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
Let her vote the other way so she can show her brand of independence or whatever else. But Trump does not do that. He makes you – everything is a loyalty test, right? You have to walk across the hot coals for him even at your own peril. And you do it because he is so vengeful. He's so petty that you don't even know what he could do. He and his allies could unleash upon you if you vote.
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Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
And like that says just how sort of perverted the political incentive structure has become under Trump.
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Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
I have so many questions about the press conference. So many questions. How did it happen? Why was he there? Why was his child there? Why was he dressed like that? Why was he wearing a hat?
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Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
Would you know because he replied to your tweet this morning?
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Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
Congratulations on reaching this boss level of clout you now have. And can't wait for Cash Patel to come crashing through the media doors now.
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Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
The key, if you're a mole, the key to not getting whacked is keeping your head in the hole. So there you go.
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Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
Look, I think the whole thing was ridiculous. It was strange. It was... Internally long and incredibly awkward. Yes. I mean, it is in many ways just sort of like a metaphor for what the Trump presidency has been. Trump is just sitting there quietly while Elon Musk holds court and sort of runs the government.
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Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
No, he was he was also trapped because he was sitting down. Right. So he really was in this terrible position where he could not get up from where he was without, I guess, I mean, just it was very, it was like a strange thing. For people like you and I, we watched the whole thing. It seems like it should be a disaster for everyone involved. Elon seemed strange and weird and incorrect.
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Is Elon a Drag on Trump?
And Trump, look, Trump is being basically told to shush his mouth by a small child. All kinds of weird things are happening. And it's like, ah, what a clown show. But it's worth just stepping back and recognizing that this does fit within Trump's strategy the first few weeks, which is just grab all the attention all the time. And this dominated attention.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
We'll get to that. Less regulation, just fucking pay-to-play left and right. And they are chomping at the bit. A lot of these are tech companies, like there's probably something to do with Meta, who have felt like they could not acquire other companies under Lena Kahn's FTC because of Biden's very good antitrust policies.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
So the corporations, they're going to be Donald Trump's friend because Donald Trump's going to do what they want. And they know if you're friends with Donald Trump, he is like an old school corrupt politician. If you're friends with him, he will hook you up with some government contracts, some other stuff.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
It's great. I saw that this morning when I woke up way too early as usual, and it was great news. And it's sort of what we've been waiting for. Every time you have a transition from the president of one party to the president of the next, the outgoing president furiously spends that last two months trying to –
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
Then you have Democrats who are trying to figure out how to deal with Elon Musk as a public figure. Someone who is quite popular with a group of voters that we lost, namely young men. And in understanding that he is a world-famous, very successful business person. And he has taken on a task. And I think that they are – and I think Ro Khanna in particular is probably pretty smart about this.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
And he has a relationship with Elon from – long time in California. But I mean, he was a Commerce Department appointee in the Obama administration when Elon was hoovering down solar tax credits for Tesla. But huge fan of the Recovery Act that Elon Musk. I think the way we navigate the Doge Commission requires some deftness because what they want to do at the service level is quite popular.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
Get rid of waste and fraud and abuse in government. Everyone agrees with that. And so you want to be in the situation where you're agreeing to work with them, and then when they come back with all their Social Security cuts and their elimination of the Department of Education, then you hammer them. So I think that's the appropriate way there.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
I don't know what – I can't speak to what John Fetterman is doing. I don't really understand the – going on true social, that is fine.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
Offering – suggesting Trump get a pardon, that seems primarily like trolling. I don't really get that, but – And then I think there's this other thing that I think we all have to remind ourselves as we think about the next four years. We are never running against Donald Trump again.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
He is not our opponent. The first four years of Trump was about every single day trying to increase the likelihood that we could beat him in the 2020 election. And we succeeded. Not as well as we would like, but we did succeed because he's back. But this time we have a different set of tasks.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
So we don't necessarily have to – if we agree with Trump on something that is popular, it is okay to agree with him and then take that issue off the table. We don't have to oppose him on every single thing if it is an area of potential agreement. We also don't have to chase him down every rabbit hole. Our task is not to beat Trump.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
It is to rebuild our brand and then separate the new Trump coalition from the Republican Party that comes after Trump. And so we have to think with that mentality. And that does mean it's just a very different approach than resistance 1.0.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
get as much Tennessee as we can, fireproof their accomplishments, use the powers they have, and pardons is a big part of it. And it had felt for the last couple of weeks like that was not happening. I'm sure it was happening internally because they didn't just come up with these pardons yesterday, like they've been working on this for a long time.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
And also, it's like, do you think Democrats are kissing his ass?
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
There is a moment when you lose an election, everyone loses their fucking mind for like 90 days. And they do dumb shit, right? They overreact. Mark Zuckerberg. That's different.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
Like, obviously, the thing that Mark Zuckerberg cares about most in the world is power and money. But if there was anything else he cared about, it was immigration reform. He started the group Forward.US. He has given money to this. He's talked about it. And now he just gave a million dollars to someone who was on TV over the weekend talking about deporting millions of people from this country.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
But it was good to see sort of that outgoing use of power in a way that was consistent with the president's values and protecting people from a dangerous thing that's going to happen when Trump takes over.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
It's just – really, I want to just emphasize this point. Everyone loses their fucking mind when they lose an election. It's like a period of time. Go back and look what all the Republicans did after Obama won re-election. John Boehner went out the next day and said, Obamacare is the law of the land. And then Sean Hannity endorsed immigration reform.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
They lose their minds and the Democrats are – we, they, we, everyone is reeling and making a bunch of dumb decisions. And these manifest themselves in some of the examples you just gave.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
Isn't that what happened when they did this exact same thing in 2017 and cut the- Yeah, no.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
And they hired lots of people. No, no, wait, wait. CEO bonuses and stock buybacks. That's right.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
She did mention, you said the operative word here was she hit him on it a few times. And there were a lot of ads on it. There wasn't the most, the ad that future for the super PAC spent the most money on was on this very topic. It was called the buddy ad. And it had,
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
a guy watching an iPad of Trump saying to the donors at Mar-a-Lago, you're rich as hell and I'm going to cut your taxes, and then went on to say what Kamala Harris was going to do to raise taxes on billionaires. But it was never a centerpiece of the campaign. It never was a defining issue. We can never make it stick.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
And that, I think, has more to do with the short runway the Harris campaign had, maybe – Just the dominance of inflation as an issue, that it didn't stick. I do not take the fact that Trump won as evidence that all of a sudden tax cuts for corporations are popular. Far from it. And I think this is our best bet to really begin to make some cracks in the Trump coalition.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
People elected Trump to lower their costs. And so our message is pretty clear. Trump is not lowering your costs. He's lower. He's cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations, the very companies who are making billions of dollars by jacking up prices on your groceries and your gas. He's going to give them a tax cut and you're not going to get, and he's not trying to help you.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
He's trying to help them. And then there's a second element of this, which I think is important, which is we have to make this all seem like as it is giant fucking corruption, right? You have him promising it to his donors. You have a bunch of billionaires who are going to benefit from these working in the government. You have Trump himself working in it.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
You have companies giving a million dollars the inauguration who are going to get huge benefits. We have to show that this is the exact corruption that Trump said he was going to fix, and now he is not fixing it. He's exacerbating it to help the rich at your expense. And then the last piece of this is, how is this all going to get paid for in the end? It's
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
Elon Musk and Vivek are going to want to pay for it by cutting Social Security, Medicare and getting rid of the Affordable Care Act. Is that what we're going to do? And so I think those are sort of the three steps there.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
One simple way to do that is to juxtapose the tax rates of these corporations with the tax rates of people. That Walmart's going to pay a lower tax rate than people who work at Walmart or shop at Walmart. And I know I could already hear our fucking econ policy buddies saying it's totally unfair to compare individual and corporate tax rates, but I do not care.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
Go on another podcast and complain about that, all right?
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
The people who decided this election for Trump did not send him to Washington to cut taxes for corporations. They're going to be fucking shocked. That's one of the first things he does.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
I hope it's the 40 death row inmates. Joe Biden, this has kind of been lost history, but Joe Biden was the first modern president elected who was an opponent of the death penalty. The upside of his Catholicism.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
Like one of the things – we can do 17 podcasts and we will do 17 podcasts on the corporate tax fight – on the larger tax fight coming up. But one thing Democrats can do is you pick an income level by which you agree to extend them. But anything below X, you're going to extend. And then you make the – which is what eventually happened with Obama and the Bush tax cuts.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
And then the fight becomes about anything above that number. And so like we'd say we'd pass it tomorrow that everyone who makes under $300,000 a year – I'm just picking a number out of the sky – uh, that there are those taxable extended, but anything above that, that they're fighting over that. And so you got to isolate the fight for the very, very wealthy in the corporations.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
That's the juxtaposition right there, right? Which is he's not going to lower your costs, but he's going to lower the taxes for the wealthy and the corporations. That's sort of where you sit there. It's not a wow moment for people who took like, two semesters of econ, but it is, it runs, but we should make absolute hay of it because it's what he promised.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
He promised he would lower costs and we have to hammer him when costs do not go down. They will continue to go up. They always do. And we like make that point, make them own it. Right.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
I don't know what the answer... Yeah, we should have plans. Sure, we should absolutely have plans. But we need a... We need a simple idea that would also probably anger the econ nerds, but that... Like, I think it's something that we... We don't understand the power of symbolism in our ideas, and we're more focused on the substance.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
It's like, yes, we're going to have a 12-point plan, and it's going to do all these things. It's just like Trump building the wall in Guinea, Mexico to pay for it. The voters know that that was an absurd thing, but it sent a signal about them. The wealth tax was an example of an idea that is – tells a story about who you are more than the specifics of the policy.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
Obviously, there are only 40 inmates on death row in federal penitentiaries. There's huge numbers of them in state prisons, but it would send a powerful signal to do that on his way out the door. So I certainly hope that that is something that is on the list of things they're actively considering over the last month here.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
And so I think we need some things like that. I mean, Kamala Harris is enforcing the law against companies that price gouge, which I know she sort of backed away from for parts of the campaign was one of those things, right? Where it's like, it's not going to pass your Brookings test over. Is there going to solve all the problems, blah, blah, blah.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
But it sent a signal that about who she is and what she would fight for. And I think we need to sort of think in some big picture, less white papery ideas on how to do this.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
I think there is a chance that people think Elon is so rich that he doesn't care about money. They sort of feel that way about Trump in some ways. But I think that – I don't think we should accept that premise of that argument. And – I believe that our best argument against Trump and Republicans is corruption. It's all corrupt.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
This is so fucking corrupt that the richest man in the world spent over $100 million to get Donald Trump – $200 million to get Trump elected and is now going to get billions of dollars in tax cuts and gets to pick the people who regulate his companies. Like tell that story.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
And you can go down the line with all of Trump's appointees, the people who are in and out of government, David Sachs who invests in all kinds of companies being the AI and crypto czar. All of these things that tell that, like, this really is, you know, I don't know if you listen to Rom, Emmanuel on Ezra's podcast. I'm almost at the end.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
It's been out for weeks. You're just doing it. I think you told me you were starting.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
I've been doing a lot of stuff. Yeah. You're just like, I can only take Rom in seven-minute doses at a time, so it's going to take me.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
I'm like, oh, man, we're here now? You're about three minutes away from a Obama reference that's going to feel equally dated to a lot of people listening to this podcast. Cool, cool, cool. Great. But Rom used the term that the Oval Office is eBay. Now, that is not the term I would use.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
Right. That is the image. He might have given that line in 1998. But the image that we want to do, that we want to sell is that these people are all fucking corrupt. that they are all making money hand over fist at your expense. You've got all these rich people in there doing it. They're getting tax cuts for themselves. They're picking the regulators.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
They're getting away with stuff you could never get away with. And if we can tell that story vividly, I think we really do have a chance to reverse the politics on a lot of this.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
Well, I mean, that's where the prices matter, right?
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
The corruption message is going to matter more. Just like people turn against the wealthy, like in Occupy Wall Street, they turn against the poor and people on government assistance in times of economic strife.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
And if the prices really don't go down and people continue to be angry and sad about the economy, they're going to have much less tolerance for these guys fucking throwing parties for themselves in the Oval Office with just light and money on fire. Yeah.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
Do you remember in the primary when Trump would go to rallies and he would be like, every time I bring up the trans issue, you guys all applaud. So I keep bringing it up, right? Like he was sort of mystified by the power of it. So I think it is something that he has followed. Unlike immigration, this is not an issue that has been a long cause of his.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
He just is sort of following the applause in the room. I think it's fucking gross to say, oh, it doesn't matter. Oh, it's not a big issue after you mentioned it. all the fucking time on the campaign trail in the most, in the grossest, most bigoted way possible. Um, I generally think he also was probably surprised to be reminded that he said that about bathrooms in 20. Yeah.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
16 or whatever he said that. And so he's just now trying to square all the circles in his little head that I was right then I'm right now. And then they gave him an obvious out by the way they asked the question about the Sarah McBride statement. So we could just, uh, push it, push them both aside and I really, not really have to answer.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
Don't give me a pardon. That's me winking for those listening to it on their phones.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
I think, and this goes to one of the lessons of how trans issues played out in the campaign, which is you have to engage. You can't ignore them. And you have to engage by going bigger. Because when you get to the bigger issues of human rights and civil rights and treating people with tolerance, we have the high side of the argument, both morally, obviously, but also politically.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
And when Republicans are able to narrow focus it around sports teams, bathrooms, taxpayer-funded surgeries, and the infamous ad, then... they often win that. And so we should absolutely take it on. It would be so demoralizing to people in our party if Senate Democrats were unwilling to use the filibuster to stand up to protect us. So we absolutely cannot do it.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
And then just – I 100% agree with that. I do – maybe this is naive on my part, but I do believe that Senate Democrats would fight – would stop this. The other thing is what Donald Trump says on trans issues is also not that important because what you have to really watch is what's going to happen in his administration. Yes. With Project 2025, which basically compared being trans to pornography.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
Yes. And just a series of very dangerous policies are likely to be implemented, whether Trump wants to have the issue or have the conversation or not. And we're going to have to fight every single one of those that we can politically at the ballot box, legally, etc.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
This is one of the things there aren't a lot of benefits to be a minority. One of them is that you can just do the right thing sometime.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
That is a common technique for injury is the old handshake switcheroo.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
I would just say, look, I, as a person who waits for the facts, I will, I anxiously await the security footage to be released probably directly to Benny Johnson or Tucker Carlson or someone like that.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
that Nancy Mace has a long history of stunts to get attention. And so this would not be out of line.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
No, I did not. I read that whole interview, top to bottom, and at no point... Me too.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
And at no point was... When I read that, I was like, you know what? I know why magazines have fallen down. Yeah.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
We are basically just an AI bot reading these and telling you the best parts. But I read that whole interview, and at no point was I like, man, he's kind of got a point there. That did not happen. It's particularly not in this part. I'm trying to figure out what the 72 days were.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
Yeah. The thing, it's now the second time I think that he has said that immigration was a bigger issue than the economy. And I just think that is something to keep in mind because his actions suggest he does not understand why he was elected. And it had a lot more to do with inflation than with immigration. Immigration was a big issue. I'm not going to take that.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
I'm not going to suggest it wasn't. But particularly for a lot of the voters who picked him over Kamala Harris or who moved to him who would vote for Biden in 20, inflation was their top issue. And if you focus on things other than inflation, you will pay a price for that before too long.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
I think the Democrats became the party to some voters of out of touch extremism. And that is a process that began long before Kamala Harris was the nominee. It was exacerbated by probably our – a lot of the parties sticking with Joe Biden for a long time. It was exacerbated by – the trans ad we talked about exacerbated by Kamala Harris saying on The View that she couldn't think of any place to –
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
I thought a lot about how and why the White House did it this way. And I think it's pretty simple. We know all the people who work in the White House. They are very smart. They know exactly how shooting out the Hunter Biden pardon on its own before you pardon anyone else on a Sunday night at the end of Thanksgiving weekend is going to, before you jet off to Angola, is going to look.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
Nothing would come to mind in terms of where she would differ from Biden. But it also has been going on since COVID, where we have been sort of relentlessly defined out of the mainstream as a party. And that doesn't mean that people are fully on board with Trump or think he is the party of common sense.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
But I think we seemed a little less in touch with working class people that may a lot less in touch with working class people. And that's why he won.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
Well, I mean, he called the White House and said, this is what we're doing.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
They didn't know he had made the decision to do it, but I'm sure there's a conversation on rollout, right? And the president came back from Thanksgiving with his family where they had a family meeting about this. Hunter was at that meeting. Hunter is staring down the barrel of going to prison. soon. And the president makes a decision. He calls back and says, I've made this decision.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
And then they have a choice. Do they just do it right away before it leaks or do they allow it to leak out there that he is thinking about it and then face a bunch of pressure? And so this is not how anyone would design. I think it's just, it's a very, this is how the process worked. And it takes a long time to get 1300 commutations and pardons together.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
And that process was ongoing and not yet finished when he made this decision at Thanksgiving. So there's no plan that had it this way. It's just like, this is how life unfolded. And this was a family issue. And one thing you always read in the reporting is on family stuff, no one argues Biden calls the shots. And that's how this was.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
I've got that happiness out of the way. Let's get into the shit now.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
The position of FBI director is one of the most powerful in this country. You have an army of investigators and law enforcement officers who work for you. It is so powerful that unlike the Department of Defense, the director of the CIA, Congress gave the FBI director 10-year non-consecutive terms.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
So you can't amass too much power, and you are insulated from the influence of individual presidents and members of Congress. And Donald Trump, for the second time now, is firing an FBI director. And in this case, he is doing it, and he wants to install a loyalist who has published an actual list of the enemies who he wants to prosecute. And that should be a big, giant deal.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
And it's not going to be because Chris Wray just slouched off into retirement. And so instead, you have to pick the alternative scenario where – Joe Biden leaves, Donald Trump is sworn in, he walks in the White House, and then he fires the FBI director, who has years left on his term that was confirmed by the Senate, to replace him with Kash Patel. But because Ray resigned...
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
When he is trying to appoint Kash Patel, it's just going to seem like he's filling any other cabinet – empty cabinet vacancy like all the rest of them. And it just – you can't – this is – it is a big deal what he is doing with the FBI and Chris Wray made it seem like a lot less big deal. So he did not uphold any of those values and principles that he talked about.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
He actually undermined them by giving in to Trump. Pure cowardice in my opinion. Pure cowardice.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
In the end, if Kash Patel is going to be the FBI director in either way, it's not going to make a huge difference to the Benny Thompson's, Adam Schiff's, Anthony Fauci's of the world who are going to be investigated. But it is a chance to grab the nation's attention for just a moment to show how dangerous this is. Because as we're going to talk about on this podcast –
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
We all ran around for a year and a half saying that Donald Trump was an existential threat to democracy. One of the reasons he was an existential threat to democracy is because every fucking morning before breakfast, he announced on True Social that he was going to investigate all of his political opponents, which we said was fascist and authoritarian and dangerous.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
And now he's doing that exact thing. And so many people... Chris Wray included, are sort of like, eh, maybe not that big a deal. And so if it is as big a deal as we think it is, and I imagine Chris Wray probably thinks it is, then you have to at least try to tell that story.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
And it makes it harder to tell that story if you're just going to hand the keys of the FBI to Kash Patel as opposed to making Donald Trump take them from you and do it. Like, this is what Preet did as U.S. Attorney in New York. He made Trump fire him. And that was a big deal. And firing the FBI director is a huge deal. And it should get that attention. And it won't because of Chris Wray.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
I'll send him an invite link to Substack, see if he can get started early.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
So let's probably try to separate this out into a couple of groups.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
There are corporations which are staring down the prospect of an all-you-can-eat buffet of corporate greed under Donald Trump.
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Trump's Art of the Fold
Because China seems like the more stable superpower right now? Well, we put a 10% tariff on all of their products. You know who did put a 10% tariff on all of them? China. So it was like we were pushing people into the arms of China. It's the exact opposite. The rationale are all conflicting, and they don't make a lot of sense. You can't say, this is all about a manufacturing renaissance.
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Trump's Art of the Fold
We're also going to gut the CHIPS Act, which is entirely designed to build a manufacturing industry here in America. But then every part of it just does the opposite of what they say it's going to do. It is truly one of the stupidest things that any person, let alone president, has ever done. It's so disconnected from what they think it's supposed to do.
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Trump's Art of the Fold
Yeah. I mean, Kevin, who gives a shit what Kevin Hassett said? Like, do you think Trump's like, well, can't we can't we can't undermine Kevin Hassett's credibility? That would be wrong. We need this guy. So yeah, they can say they're going to keep him on and then just take him off at some point. But Trump's reality here is tied to prices.
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Trump's Art of the Fold
And as long as he is jacking up everyone's prices, he's going to pay a price. The medium term consequence of this are baked in. Even if he takes them all off tomorrow, he has already done real damage to the medium-term economic growth in this country, to job creation, to investment, to GDP, all of that. I don't think you're going to get a lot of that back.
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Trump's Art of the Fold
Will the stock market bounce back maybe slowly over time? Sure. But all these people are supposed to build all these factories here. That's not going to happen now. No one's going to do that.
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Trump's Art of the Fold
I would say the reality is very easy for everyone to see. The best messages... are the true and obvious ones. And this one could not be more true and obvious. And this is a thing that the tariffs, the insanity of the tariffs, the market crash has broken through to people in a way that nothing else has broken through thus far in the Trump administration, in Trump 2.0.
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I mean, more than 60% of the country is invested in the market in some way, almost entirely in retirement accounts, but it's north of 60%. And so people are tracking it. Crashes in the stock market are similar to gas prices in the sense that the stock ticker is on the TV. It blares across everywhere.
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Almost any news site you go to, it's on the front page, particularly when there's a market crash, you see it go up and down. So it's like even if you're not in the market, you're getting a lot of sirens going off about the economy being in trouble.
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Yeah. Yeah. I mean, even if the market was doing great, the price increases are the much bigger political problem for him. I think the macro political problem for Trump and the way that why this is important for Democrats to hammer this is the entire reason that Trump is acceptable to a certain segment of voters is his belief that
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It's a false belief, but it's born of the fact that he's a wealthy businessman, that he played a fake businessman on a reality TV show for a decade, and then oversaw an economy that people have very fond memories of. Now, he really did nothing to make that economy good. He just managed to not mess up Barack Obama's economy.
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But because of that, people believe that he – and even some Democrats believe he is a competent manager of the economy. Is he corrupt? Yes. Is he a clown in a lot of ways? Yes. Did he spark a violent insurrection? Is he a convicted criminal? All those things, yes. But on the issue I care about most, he has his shit together. He knows what he's doing.
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And there is nothing that has happened over the last few weeks here that suggests he has any idea what he's doing. And I think he really has.
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eroded the fundamental core of his political identity to voters, the reason why they support him despite everything else, not the MAGA hat base, but just like the rest of the country, like that last 14%, 15% of people who don't love Trump but voted for him, those people are waking up to the idea that he is not what they thought he is. And that is tremendous.
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And that's why we've seen his approval rating sink precipitously over the last month here.
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I think this is a very important point is that Democrats should be – like congressional Democrats, elected Democrats, just people out in the streets should be pressuring Republicans to take back the tariff power from Trump. And I know that that is not going to happen. Jake Sherman of Punchbowl has tweeted 1,000 times now that there's no way that the House is going to do that.
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And even if you could get together 60 senators, you're not going to get to a veto-proof majority. That doesn't matter. We need people to know that this is a choice Republicans are making, that they are on board with these price increases, and they're so feckless and so lame that they are going to go along with it.
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And these members are going to be under real political pressure in their states as these prices go up. Right. It's the farmer. It's the farm states who are going to be suffering mightily from not being able to export to China. It's going to be every person who is trying to buy electronics from China, just across the people trying to buy new cars, all of that.
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And we want to make sure that you're exactly right. Donald Trump is not on the ballot in 2026, but all these Republicans are, and they should pay a price for this.
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I mean, it really it's just like as we think about the politics, it really is as if. It's the equivalent of George W. Bush walking into Lehman Brothers and just collapsing the whole thing himself, right? And then bragging about it. And then bragging about it, yes.
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I don't know. I don't even know. Who's to be offended by that? I don't even know.
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Yeah, I mean, I think it – I mean, we should be – very clear that globalization and trade has hurt lots of people in this country, right? And that is particularly true in Gretchen Whitmer's state of Michigan, right? Which we've seen as manufacturing based in the auto industry suffered greatly from trade deals. And so she is responding to this idea that not everyone benefits from trade, right?
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And tariffs have been in the past a useful way to push back. I think the problem here is we're overcomplicating the simple. And when you talk about it in this way where you say – like as you said, she criticized – she took Trump to task on it. Like she was not – this is not a suggestion that Gretchen Whitmer was mealy-mouthed about this at all. She was not.
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But I think when you – the way a lot of Democrats have done it to say like Trump is doing it wrong, but tariffs are a useful tool. He's just using the tool wrong. It suggests that there is some sort of – it like almost buys the premise of Trump's argument.
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And I think it's just the better argument here is that he is a chaotic clown stumbling about the world stage hurting American families by raising prices for no reason. And the better – I think the way to do it is let's take the tariff power away from the president. Right. And so we I think we can be we're going to negotiate, you know, tough and fair trade deals.
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We're going to push back against countries who try to do it. But this is not the way to do it. Right. And I think just I just feel like you're wedded to this old way of thinking, I think. And it just it dilutes the message.
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And I think Gretchen Whitmer, who may be president of the United States one day, can still use tariffs if she sees fit in the appropriate way a few years from now when she's president without having even if she doesn't mention them now. You know what I mean?
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Let's hear your policy problem because that's why people tune in this podcast.
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Yeah, I mean, that's going to be more. It's a more problematic analogy than your rebel Lehman Brothers. I'll tell you that. True, true. But so I'd say a couple of things to that. One is I don't think what the Democrats who are mentioning there that tariffs could be useful or I don't think what they're trying to do is make some sort of common cause with Trump voters or understand.
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Like, I don't think that's what's happening. I think what's happening is that there remains large constituency of the Democratic Party who believe that tariffs are a useful tool. And that includes, among others, organized labor.
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And that there may be times, for instance, on steel and aluminum and other things where you can raise the price of imports to the point that it will push people to using domestic steel. But my issue here is not about the policy utility of tariffs. It's just like, let's have a simpler, clearer message. And it's the message that you have here.
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I just don't – I think people online are a little too – Josh Barrow has a very long, very smart op-ed in the New York Times today about this point exactly. He takes it to a policy direction, which is this is a reason the Democrats could have – we can use the fact that Trump is acting this way and has shown the failure of protectionism to become –
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you know, more like develop a message that is more forward looking on trade. I think the fear, I think the fear that some people have is that we're going to make the classic mistake of Donald Trump is, is now tough on trade. So we're going to become the biggest defenders of globalism and free trade possible, right? Oh, you attack the New York times.
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I will subscribe to New York times fucking twice, right? Oh, you're going to attack institutions? I am going to read the Declaration of Independence to my children online every day, right? And so you'd see this world where there is a nuanced position between every single thing that Donald Trump has said about trade is wrong and that global trade is great.
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And I think there are people trying to find, maybe inartfully, trying to find the right place in the middle there.
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They're technically millennial. It's cusp. It's cusp. Calm down, everybody. They remember 9-11.
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Watching it live was fucking wild. This is possibly the most authoritarian, scariest thing that Trump has done. Right. Not to just reiterate what you said, but he signed two executive orders targeting individual Americans by name and directed the government to investigate them for the crime of criticizing the regime.
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A crime punishable by death. Right. Right. And that has like, and I'm not sure why this is not a bigger deal. Obviously, there's been a lot happening this week. So I understand that there's limited bandwidth. But this is like, and maybe people are like, well, you know, I think probably if you're talking to like reporters about this, maybe other Democrats are not talking about it.
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They would say, well, no one's investigated them yet. They still may. It doesn't seem like there's a lot of – there isn't a lot – in this version of Trump, there's not a lot of let him talk and then we'll just let it fade away. It's like he talks and people do what he says. Yeah.
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But even if they never charge him with crimes, the entire goal here is to make it – to scare the living daylights out of anyone who wants to criticize Trump. The administration to essentially to penalize you for free speech, which is fucking ironic given the free speech warriors who surround this president and what he talked about in the campaign.
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But like individual Americans by name, he signed a piece of paper directing the Department of Justice to investigate an American for the crime of criticizing the president.
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They're probably doing that anyway, honestly. But I mean, think about this. You're Miles Taylor and you're trying to get a lawyer. A firm is going to have to have a meeting to decide if they can take on Miles Taylor or Chris Krebs as clients. Because if they're not already on Trump's hit list, they will be on Trump's hit list for that.
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And all of a sudden, they're not allowed in federal buildings anymore. And they have to cut some terrible deal or become part of this lawsuit. I mean, this is really bad shit.
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Like we have two problems here. One, three problems, I guess. One problem is that this happened in the middle of a global financial crisis spurred on by the idiocy of a president. So that is going to suck up a lot of oxygen. So I understand that.
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The second thing is that a lot of people are not going to want to get involved here because they don't want to have their name on an executive order or their law firm banned from federal government buildings or their university have their funds impounded until they can agree to some sort of deal. And so people are afraid to speak out, which is the whole fucking point to begin with.
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The other thing is that Democrats have not – not enough Democrats feel emboldened enough to speak out about this stuff. And I think part of that is not that they're afraid of speaking out about Trump. They're not – like I don't think that at all. But I think that they – There is a real belief that the best way to beat Trump is to talk about the economy. And therefore, that's what you should do.
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And that's what they're doing this week. I ultimately think that that is a mistake. I have a lot to say about that, maybe in a different forum. But I think that is part of the problem, is that no one has an incentive to speak up here. And when no one speaks up, more bad things happen.
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Maybe she was. Someone get Gretchen Whitmer in those TikTok stories.
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Yeah, I mean, I feel like obviously never going to the Oval Office with Trump. Like, that's just a general rule. But you can just see how you're in the White House with the president. I'm doing this event. Come on in here. She obviously didn't. I... We'll go to my grave believing she obviously would not have gone if she'd known what it was about.
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I don't think she would even know it was a press event. He just like brought her in the Oval. Yeah.
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You were, yeah. It's a big deal. It's an Illinois thing too.
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You see that in the crowds, right? The crowds that were showing up for Bernie and AOC, for instance. Yes. You've seen that in the crowds that showed up for Chris Murphy and Maxwell Frost when they did their town halls recently. Or the event you guys did with Ro Khanna, right? There is a value in speaking out.
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I don't know enough of the circumstances to know what was actually possible for Gretchen Whitmer. But your point about... A tendency to respond to an extraordinary moment with ordinary politics, which is which is my main criticism of Schumer and what he did on the budget bill stands for the party for much of the party right now.
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Well, there have been a lot of catastrophically bad ideas that have not yet fallen under the weight of their own stupidity in this administration. Good point. Look, people showed up. They made their voices heard. That is the only tool in our toolbox right now to push back. right? The Congress is not going to do it. Republicans in Congress certainly aren't going to do it.
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Democrats don't have the power to do it. The courts, and we'll get to this in a minute, can do it, but there are limits to what they will do here. The business community is not going to step up. The tech companies are not going to step up. Universities are cutting deals with Trump. Law firms are cutting deals with Trump.
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The only way to actually push back on what Trump is doing to stop him from doing the worst things is for people to take to the streets and make their voices heard in ways big and small. And that's what happened last weekend. And we have to keep doing that. Like, is that the exact reason why these changes were made? Maybe, maybe not. We don't know.
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But the fact that people, this is a thing that Trump did that everyone yelled about and they yelled about it and they called and they showed up and they had to back down is proof that we can actually, with political pressure, make a difference here.
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It's very good news. And I really hope the government facilitates his return.
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And that even if the more even more alarming thing that even if they know they sent the wrong person, they don't have to bring that person back.
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I was just thinking that we are probably weeks away from an executive order that ties access to federal education funding to making Art of the Deal required for summer reading. Yeah. I'm sure every world leader is going to get it.
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I have two thoughts on this. One, it's just that like what happened there should embolden so many people in this country to speak up on behalf of the people who are being treated this way. And it also just makes me so furious at the refusal of Democrats, including Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in their campaigns, to talk about Trump's mass deportation plans.
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Because if you can talk about what it – like not just recent arrivals or criminals or all of that, but understand that there are people who are embedded in this community, children who know no country other than this one, being put in handcuffs and being sent somewhere and deported, like that you can rally the country around that and we just – We wave the white flag on that.
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Yes, it's probably Howard Locknick. Howard Locknick is right now just licking envelopes and sticking in copies of Art of the Deal to send all over the world. I mean, look, what happened here is this immediate sense of relief on the first day that Trump is actually not going to drive the car completely off the cliff.
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And then a lot of institutional players saw the opportunity to buy low, buy the dip, if you will, on some things, and the markets bounced back. But then everyone woke up and realized we were still fucked, that the three countries that still had large tariffs on them, Canada, Mexico, and China, make up more than 40% of US imports.
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Tell us about it. Carol and I talked about how the tariffs and the reaction to the tariffs is just utterly devastating Trump's numbers and could presage the collapse of his presidency. The episode was so compelling that within two hours of its release, Trump paused the tariffs. Just saying. That's what did it. It wasn't the bond market. It was Polar Coaster.
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I mean, Polar Coaster might have affected the bond market, too. It really punches above its weight.
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that most of the things that we care a lot about, car parts, computers, electronics, smartphones, are all coming from these countries, toys. And it's going to be massively destabilizing. And then we discovered that the Trump administration couldn't even figure out what the exact right tariff was on China. And it wasn't 125, as they said.
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Joining us now to discuss RFK Jr., the cuts to the country's health agencies, and the government's response to the measles outbreak is Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon, a bestselling author, and the former assistant administrator for global health at USAID in the Biden administration. Welcome to Pod Save America. Delighted to be here.
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I want to start with the measles outbreak in Texas, which has taken the lives of at least two children. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was down in Texas recently to meet with the family of one of the children who passed away. How do you assess the government's response to the outbreak so far? Are they doing the right things?
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It's actually 145, because they put so many tariffs on and taken so many tariffs off, they forgot they still had the 20% fentanyl tariff on China. Yeah. And so it just – like we're still in a very, very bad place.
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Are there things that someone who was maybe not a vaccine skeptic, his HHS secretary, would be doing? What do you think?
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And what do you attribute the response to? Do they not take it as seriously or is this just a government that is not set up to actually deal with a crisis and have the right people in place?
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Trump's Art of the Fold
There's a cap analysis out today which shows that actually under this tariff regime we're currently in right now with the increased tariffs on China, American families are going to pay more on average, $4,600 per family than they would under the global tariffs that Trump – reciprocal tariffs that Trump had in place on Monday morning.
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As you mentioned, RFK Jr. did say that the MMR vaccine was the most effective way to prevent measles. But in an interview on CBS and other places, he seems he can't help himself from raising some concerns about the safety of vaccines in general. Can you just talk a little bit about what he is getting wrong and what the science actually says about the safety of these vaccines?
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I mean, along those lines, you know, I think one of the biggest stories of RFK Jr. 's tenure at HHS thus far has been the ouster of Dr. Peter Marks, who headed vaccine regulation. You know, in his resignation letter, Marks wrote that it had become clear that truth and transparency were not desired by the secretary and that all they wanted was confirmation of misinformation and lies.
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Can you just talk a little bit about what his ouster means and, like, what it could mean? And you mentioned the COVID vaccine that was – where approval is delayed, what it can mean for like, I assume the FDA has to approve a flu vaccine later this year, I guess, assume a COVID booster at some point.
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Like, what does this mean for just the day to day work that the FDA has to do to get vaccines out into the world?
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That seems like a perfect place to end it. Dr. Wandi, thank you so much for joining us. Glad to be here. Thanks.
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Trump's Art of the Fold
Kevin Hassett is a particular moron. He is just on TV all the time. He has no fucking clue what he's talking about. He's got a shit-eating green the whole time he's doing it. I mean, he actually makes Howard Lutnick look like an effective spokesperson. And that's saying a lot.
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He has just thrown the whole global economy into turmoil for nothing. And companies who have factories overseas, whether it's in China or elsewhere, are nervous to place orders because there's a long lag time.
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So if you want to decide how many iPhones or certain types of Nike sneakers or whatever else you want to have available in the holiday season, you're making those decisions now, but you have no idea what they're going to cost. then, right? You probably wouldn't make as many iPhones if you thought they were going to cost 145% of what they cost already, right? Or the same thing with shoot.
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What he has done, and we can get into all the politics of this, but for the markets, for world leaders, for business people who have to make decisions about hiring and investment and new products is... He can't be trusted.
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It's like we have a true lunatic surrounded by morons in the White House and now you cannot – like the fundamental idea of any sort of stability in American government economic policy has been forever eroded and cannot come back without Trump as president. Even if these things don't come out, he just puts a tariff on, takes it off. Could he add another one?
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Like a normal person who was – it's hard to imagine a normal person dumb enough to have gotten themselves in this situation, but who backed off at the 90-day mark, like right here, and put in the place a 90-day pause. The natural assumption would be there's no way they're doing this again in 90 days. But could you really say that with Trump? Of course not.
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There's no path out other than getting rid of all the tariffs and lowering costs. What people are going to pay attention to is not the fucking press conference to announce the deal with Madagascar to lower the price of vanilla. What they're going to notice is when they go to the store and everything that was cheaper a month ago is more expensive now.
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Like, that is why Donald Trump is president, was prices went up. And so it is just truly insane. Like, I can't just overstate this enough, that a president who was elected to strengthen the economy and lower prices has decided to crash the economy to increase prices. It is the exact opposite of what he was elected to do. I joked about this in my newsletter.
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I said it'd be like if George W. Bush, after 9-11, his first response was to give Bin Laden the Medal of Freedom. Like, what are we doing?
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Is that you think that's what they think? But I mean, but also you have Howard Lutnick out there talking about how robots are going to replace all the workers.
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So you like, yes, maybe you are on shoring our supply chain. I guess, but it's not like there's going to be this renaissance of blue-collar jobs in a world of automation. But also some of the things are not built in factories. I saw Chris Hayes posted this, but it's like, are we going to build a banana factory here? Like the tree factory because of the lumber? It makes no fucking sense.
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And there are things that we just don't grow or make in America. Like are we going to – like we don't make shoes in America. We make very few shoes in America. We're all of a sudden going to – we're going to build an entire shoe industry here?
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
I mean, obviously, he is a very flawed individual, but Governor Cuomo did this very well at the beginning of the pandemic. Governor Newsom also was doing daily briefings that were sort of required. We would stream online to know what was happening in the early days. I mean, even the Trump administration had Fauci and those folks out. Then Trump joined and really kind of shat the bed.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
But you're exactly right. And people may listen to this and say, like, truly, who gives a shit about a dispute over the California – the Los Angeles city fire budget and who gives a shit about the smelt and Trump's bullshit? But the reason why it matters –
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
is we have to make real decisions about how we're going to deal with problems like these over the long term to make sure that the next fire is not as bad, to deal with whatever the next thing that happens from climate change is. And you can't do that if you're fixing a bunch of bullshit that's not right. You actually have to have a real conversation, right?
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
You're not going to solve the problem by – running the water past the smelter in the Central Valley. You're going to be better prepared the next time because you have better equipment, more water prepositioned. You have better tankers, more water pressure. That's the conversation to have, not this other stuff.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
And when Trump sends us down these fucking rabbit holes, it gets so much harder to get back to the actual issues that matter to help us be better prepared the next time.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
I mean, you could hear that in Gavin Newsom's answer in the clip we played earlier on the podcast. Yes. Where he is tempering his... He clearly is outraged and morally offended and infuriated by what Trump said. But he's not going to say anything about it, in part because this is not the moment to do that, but also because he knows that his state may not get help if he further angers Trump.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
And that is a totally fucked up and scary situation for the country that your politics are gonna determine whether you get help, right? It's just very, very scary.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
Well, I mean, I could talk about this for days. I mean, I sort of wrote a book about it.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
But the problem we have is the distribution mechanism for credible information has been absolutely corrupted. Where the point in the 2010s that you're referring to is when media companies decided that their primary distribution method was not going to be people coming to their website. It was going to be social media platforms delivering it to people's apps.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
So instead of waking up every morning going to New York Times.com, Washington Post.com, LA Times.com, you just open up Twitter or Facebook and you've got news. And there were moments when that worked great. There was all kinds of misinformation. You remember shootings would spread in the first minutes.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
People were accused of things who were totally innocent because they looked like the perpetrator or whatever else. But it was better than where we were before. And what happened is Twitter and Facebook and Meta primarily just decided that they were no longer gonna prioritize giving you credible information. In fact, in Twitter's case, they're gonna give you the exact opposite of that.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
That they're going to basically, if you think of sort of the internet and social media as a highway, Musk puts all the merchants of misinformation, the people most likely to spread this info and lie and politicize things, puts them in the HOV lane and it just clogs everything up and you can't see what's happening. This is the problem, right? This is central to what happened in the election.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
It's central to democracy. It's central to everything else. And this is the thing I think about all the time as it relates to like Crooked or what I'm trying to do with my Substack newsletter is how do we get people good information from credible sources to help them understand what is going on. How do you fight back against the confusion that is being sown by Trump and his allies?
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
And that's essential because that's where they thrive, right? They thrive in the confusion. They thrive in the chaos. And they don't want you to know what's actually happening.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
Because if people focus on the fact that this fire was in part because of climate change, maybe we do something about climate change, and it wouldn't be a great idea to have a president and a Congress or a bunch of climate change deniers.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
And so that is the thing, which is the thing that's like, how can progressives, how can people like us solve the media distribution problem to get people information they need? Not just in a crisis, but like in a day-to-day basis. Like how many times, you and I are literally, and I hate saying this, we are professional news consumers. That is what we do.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
How many times do we get on the morning call for this podcast and we're like, anyone know what Trump's doing this week? And we're like Googling. It's like fucking impossible to find out. There's no or there's like 17 times of the Biden press conference and you just can't figure it out. And this has gotten worse over the last several years.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
Since 2020, the undergirding of American media and social media has basically collapsed. The world wide web, if you think about it, barely exists. Even when you talk about local news sites, I was going through all these local news sites today, trying to find information for this podcast. I'm clicking all these links.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
It's like they're crashing your browser with a number of digital ads that are popping up at all times. It's impossible to even read what's happening.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
Let me re go back and rephrase what I said before. I said, how should progressives try to address this problem? It's better. The better way to say it is how should people in the pro-democracy movement try to do this, right? It's not ideological.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
It's if you believe we need it, people need access to actual information on what's happening to be able to make more informed choices about their lives and their political choices. Then we have to find a way to get them accurate information like that. And that is a, that is the challenge.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
It's so scary. You know, in 2019, I heard this, there were fires everywhere where I live in the East Bay of California. And I heard this really, really loud, incredibly loud sound. I looked out the window and it was a low flying, huge plane to drop water on a fire that had just sparked up nearby.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
And I looked out my window and my new neighbors, because we just moved into our house a few months ago, were throwing everything they had into their car and driving away. It ended up being they contained the fire very, very quickly, but I grabbed Kyla, who was one back then, and departed.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
What do you think? Well, he should be sentenced because he committed these crimes and he was convicted by a jury of his peers. And so whatever that sentence is, I think it's absurd that there might just sort of Give him no punishment at all just because he won an election?
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
I don't know that you want to just for – I don't think sentencing the incoming president of the United States to prison is complicated, I guess I would say. But like give him a fine, right? Make him do community service. Like that would be cool. Like put on an orange vest and go pick up some trash. I don't know. But you should do that.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
As for the report, I would say that that is probably the saddest consolation prize in recent history. It's like – We were on the cusp of Donald Trump of a huge high profile trial where all the evidence was laid out, which could have ended in Donald Trump being convicted for conspiracy to violently overthrow the government.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
Instead, we're going to get a report with no power released days before the Biden administration ends. Now, I agree with you that the voters have voted. It seems unlikely it's going to have a huge political impact.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
I don't think it's going to change its poll numbers. I don't think it's going to help us win the midterms. I don't think it'll help us in the Virginia gubernatorial election coming up. So it's going to, I, the political impact in the short term is very limited. I do think it's important to, for the rule of law, for democracy, for history, right?
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
Well, let's try to separate ourselves briefly. Just let's go against time and briefly separate ourselves from short-term political needs. I'm playing devil's advocate to myself, Dan. Yes. Okay. Look, the reason why I think it matters and it should be released is
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
It's so incredibly scary, and we'll get to this, but it's so hard to know what the right decision to make for your family is when you're on the border of an evacuation. You haven't been told to evacuate, but you don't know if you're going to be next to be told to evacuate.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
Autocrats like Trump, they come in and one of the first things they do is try to erase all the evidence of the crimes they committed to get into power. And so you can imagine what's going to happen to the evidence with Pam Bondi and Kash Patel to the reports.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
Or they'll put out something else that will be dishonest or they will cherry pick pieces of evidence that are sitting in the FBI somewhere to proclaim his innocence. And so that report should be put out. And I think it matters for history because there has been this clip of Ben Shapiro circulating in the last few days, sort of around the January 6th anniversary.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
It's a clip of Ben Shapiro right after January 6th. And he is – despondent. He says this is a terrible thing that's happened in the country, one of the worst things that ever happened in the country, the worst thing that happened to America since 9-11. And that's how everyone felt in the moment, even Ben Shapiro.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
And then we all, not you and I, but the country writ large, lost our minds and we stopped caring about it. But I would like to believe that one day, if we can make it this far, in history, people will look back at that and think about it like Ben Shapiro and so many others talked about it in that moment. And so putting out the report, I think, is important to that.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
I think historians will look back at it and will truly... Imagine trying to teach a history class 50 years from now to explain that the outgoing president refused to give up power and incited a violent mob to attack the United States Congress as they were trying to certify his opponent as the next president of the United States.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
Then you have to explain the whole part about how he got elected four years later. Is that hard?
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
That's a tough one. I think we'll look back on that as... Like a very dark moment in this history. And this is a part of that evidence. And we should put that out before Trump and his goons can do something to try to hide that evidence, destroy that evidence, or put out a bunch of bullshit to confuse the story.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
Well, I would say the caveat to all what I'm about to say is I was on the dishwasher this morning listening to Pod Save the World, as I do. And I'm listening to talk all this stuff. I'm learning about Sudan, everything. And I just hear Ben. And I'm not really paying a ton of close attention. And I hear Ben just say he takes the Greenland thing very seriously.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
He says it like three times, very seriously. And Ben's not an alarmist. Because my take before listening to Ben was, who cares? And I sort of think that should be up until the moment when Donald Trump either starts talking about sending troops to Panama or raiding the Social Security trust fund for a $50 billion to buy Greenland or whatever Greenland costs.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
I don't know what the going rate of Greenland is in inflation these days. It's not cheap, Dan. Land is very expensive. Housing is expensive. Especially if you're going to buy a whole new country, that's expensive. I think this is the example of the sort of MAGA marginalia bullshit we used to follow Trump down the rabbit hole all the time that we should avoid now.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
Because until he actually does something here, it's not worth focusing on.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
I will come on this podcast and apologize if Trump launches a surprise invasion of Greenland.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
We need more. We need to bring back Freedom Fries politics right here.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
We could go New London, Connecticut. We could go a long way here.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
It's like, you can't not talk about this. He's the president of the United States. He has the biggest megaphone of anyone not named Elon Musk in the world. And so he's going to do it. But how we, like the way, here's how not to talk about it. Like getting all... high dudgeon about the rule, about our ally. What message does this send to our allies at this time?
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
The way, I think you've got to take all of this stuff that this insanity of Trump's talk about and put it in the bucket of
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
For the voters that decided this election for Trump, the ones who were skeptical of him, who switched from Biden to Trump or came out to Trump for the first time, what they heard from him is he is going to come to Washington and be laser focused on lowering costs for me and my family. And all the stuff that Trump does that doesn't achieve that goal, we should hold that against him.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
How is picking a fight with Panama or trying to spend taxpayer dollars to buy Greenland or getting a pissing match with Canada, how is that lowering the cost of gas and groceries and housing for you? Just put it all in that bucket. That's the frame as opposed to – you can't –
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
I don't know if you listen to all of Pod Save the World, but I guess we got to the part about the upcoming Canadian election. Doesn't seem great. It's like they're flirting with a very Trump like fellow right now.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
Now you're making me more worried about this than I was before, so thank you for that. I'm telling... Yeah, no, this is... I can see it. I can see it all. The question is, like, how do you get to actual implementation of this plan? Like, I understand the politics from Trump's perspective of trying... This is how he views politics, right? His... Like, his... Like resting state is dictator cosplay.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
And so standing astride the world stage and demand – using – threatening military force and economic sanctions for territorial acquisition, like that is how he views the world. And like that persona has benefited him politically, right? That strength benefited him particularly compared to Biden when he was running against Biden. How does he get to implementation of this plan?
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
How does he actually get Greenland or the Panama Canal or Canada? He may put tariffs on Canada. I don't think the net result of that is going to be Canada just folding up tent and saying, come to America. But you can take something seriously but be strategic in how you respond to it. I guess maybe the way you'd say it.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
Do you think that's how they usually greet each other? I think that's how George W. Bush greets most people. Just a little belly tap? His general persona in every interaction is either right before or right after a keg stand at a fraternity house. He also, there's another clip going around of him smacking- We're lucky it was that high up then. Yeah, we're lucky.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
There's also a clip of him smacking Dan Quayle with a program. Really? Yes. Playfully smacking him. So I think it's just – he's always tailgating at a Texas A&M game at all times. Not what you want during a war after 9-11, but –
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
Obama's demeanor during that conversation was my demeanor when I get on an airplane with that. And I forget to put my AirPods in before I sit down and you just, you sit next to that guy and he's talking to you and you're trying to be polite. I know. And I do, but also give, but also give the signal that I would like to stop this conversation as soon as humanly possible.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
And you could, Obama was doing everything he could to be polite and not encourage Trump to keep talking. This is my take.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
There are those lip readers on TikTok who there's been a bunch of them from the Golden Globes. So I imagine we'll be seeing that from here if it was possible. If there was a camera angle that allows you to see their lips.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
To our point, how will we ever get this information?
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
They're going to be sitting next to each other at events like this for a long time.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
I'm embarrassed to say that I do, John. You do? I do. So let's try to fact check these, if you will. But let's start with FEMA because that's the simpler one. It is true that earlier this year, the disaster relief fund at FEMA, which sends out money in situations like this, was depleted. It was depleted not because of whatever the Green News scam is.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
It was depleted because of Hurricane Helene and other natural disasters. However, that fund is not at zero. It is at $27 billion right now because Congress passed and Joe Biden signed a bill in December to do exactly that. Now, it may be that $27 billion is not going to be enough for what we are dealing with in California.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
But the reason it's at $27 billion and not something more is because Republicans in Congress cut Joe Biden's request. He asked for $40 billion, and they cut him down to $27 billion. correct. Now onto Smeltgate.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
What Trump is referring to is the historic debates we have in California about how much water to move from Northern California, where you get water from the Bay, the Delta, the Snow Belt from the mountains up near Tahoe, and how much to send primarily to the Central Valley for farmers.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
If you ever drive from Northern California to Southern California, you will go past the whole part of the country where every farm has a sign yelling at Gavin Newsom asking for more water. The Trump administration and Gavin Newsom had a dispute about how to manage the water. Joe Biden, this is I think is what triggered Trump.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
The Biden administration just put in fact a new plan which deals with one of the issues around this is the smelt, which is a fish, and salmon, which are endangered and threatened species. And so this has been a debate for a long time. Now, what's important about this is it has zero to do with the fires in Southern California.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
Southern California, and LA in particular, do not get their water from Northern California. They get it from two aqueducts east of LA. One, the Colorado River one on the Arizona-California border, and the Owens Valley Aqueduct east of LA. California, there have been reports, and this is all sparked by reports, that some fire hydrants were not having water come out of them during the fire.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
That has nothing to do with a shortage of water in Southern California. The reservoirs in Southern California are at or above their historic levels right now. The reason why some fire hydrants were not putting water out was the tremendous strain on the system from fighting all of these huge fires at the same time.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
For example, in the Palisades fire, prior to the fire, there were three one-million-gallon tanks of water that were positioned for this. which should have taken care of any normal fire. They needed three times that to get there. And so they could not refill the tanks fast enough to meet the need. And that's problem.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
So there's a larger question about updates to the system, updates in the infrastructure to make it more prepared for these sorts of things. But it has absolutely zero to do with where Gavin Newsom is sending water in California.
Pod Save America
As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
I mean, look, it is- I can't believe we said to do that.