Ezra Klein
Appearances
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And I don't wanna see things going either to where Doge is in terms of, I think there's a fundamental lawlessness to it, but I also don't like the aims of it. But I don't wanna see things where Democrats were, which is such unfathomably, which is such respect for process that they will put the process ahead of getting their own things done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
They will listen to any lawyer with any super intense interpretation of any law, and that'll turn them all the way back. What Doge has demonstrated is, Is it the room for movement inside the American government, inside the state, is much wider than anybody gave it credit for, both Republican and Democratic administrations? It may not be as wide.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
It probably isn't legally as wide as what Doge is trying to do. And that's why they're losing all these court cases. But it is wide. And you could also use Congress, right? You could pass statute to make it wider. And you should. There is no abundance agenda that works legally. If the Democratic Party is as rule bound and as process obsessed as it was in the last 10 years, it doesn't work flatly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Right. That is why so many of the stories we tell in the book are about process gone. Not just it's not process gone wrong because it's doing exactly what it was intended to do, but it is process that has become antagonistic to the promised outcomes. Right. And so I do hope there's a kind of, you know, thesis, right? All the institutions are great. Democrats are the defenders of government.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Antithesis, the government is a corrupt cesspool. It's a, you know, it's a ball of worms and it has to be destroyed and taken over by a benevolent or non-benevolent dictator. And synthesis, which is that... The government's process has made it not a functional state. It's non-responsive in many important ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
The only thing I would say is that I do think this sort of the left likes big government, the right likes small government oversimplifies. The left is pretty comfortable with an expansive government that is trying to correct for some of the imbalances of power and injustices and imbalances of luck I talked about earlier.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And it needs to be reformed at a quite fundamental level, but in a way that is lawful, in a way that is thoughtful, in a way that is running experiments and gathers information and then can make adjustments, in a way that is respectful of the human lives that it touches and affects.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
in a way that is not hostile to the goals of good government, but is more committed to them than it is committed to the process the government has erected and evolved over time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
The right is very comfortable with a very powerful police and surveillance and national security state. I always think about the sort of Georgia W. Bush era, although right now with ICE agents hassling all kinds of green card holders, you can think about this moment, too. But the right's view that on the one hand, the government is incompetent, and on the other hand, we could send our army back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
across oceans, invade Afghanistan and Iraq, and then rebuild these societies we don't understand into fully functioning liberal democracies that will be our allies, was an extraordinary level of trust in a very big government. I mean, that was expensive. That took manpower. That was, compared to, we're going to set up the Affordable Care Act in America, that took a lot more faith in the U.S.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
government being able to do something that was extraordinarily difficult. But the left has more confidence in the government of the Czech, and the right has more confidence in the government of the gun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
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Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
or getting AI to write the first draft of something, that's where all the intelligence happens in my view. I think one advantage I have over a lot of other podcast hosts who superficially do what I do, probably this is true for you, I'm sure this is true for you, I know, is that I really do do the reading.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
No summary is equivalent to me doing the reading and sitting there and making the associations myself and spending the time in the book and then sort of thinking about what it brought up in me. I write the first draft. ChatGPT cannot write the first draft of my book. The first draft is fucking hard to write.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And it's often hard because it's completely wrong, but not because it's narrowly wrong, right? ChatGPT will never tell you that the problem with what you're trying to do is that you're just trying to do the wrong thing. It'll never tell you if you tell it to write a first draft, that's the wrong direction for this draft. Some part of you has to know it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And often the problem is you just haven't done enough reporting, haven't done enough research. And ChatGPT can't tell you that either.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And my worry for my kids, my worry for society is creating technologies that make it incredibly alluring to automate the part of creation that is most difficult, most laborious, and most likely to lead to genuine insight and the sort of sharpening of your own mental acuity. I mean, we better fucking hope the AIs can autonomously make innovations because we're going to stop.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I really worry we're going to stop being able to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I'm just distinctly the quality of my thoughts. Even the same content. I don't read things anymore as much as I can on like a screen. I print everything out and I sit in a table and I read it. I can read it on my iPad. I can read it on my laptop. I print it all out because my attention is different.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I'm a less temperamentally honest person than Derek by a lot, actually. And I would usually give a pretty similar answer to this question that Derek gave, which is technological advancement, right? We live in an age of marvels. I guess I'll say from the realist perspective that we live in a more liquid moment than many.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
You know, if one of the advantages of the 90s of, you know, much of the life that I have grown up in is that much of the structure of technology of global governance was fairly stable. We could sort of like look at it and there were certain things. not certainties, but fairly reliable guardrails of what was and what wasn't going to happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And there were disruptions like 9-11 and the financial crisis. They weren't small, and slowly they broke that entire system. But I think one of the things people sort of miss, sort of feel about the way history has accelerated is that things have just all gotten faster and less predictable. And they really have, I think, gotten faster and less predictable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
We're in an age, it seems to me, more like the early 20th century, late 19th century than... than like the 1990s. And that means the possibilities range very widely, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
When you think about AI, when you think about biotech advances, when you think about energetic advances, when you think about the sort of shifting nature of global alliances, of the technological and political systems, we are in the most high variance period that I think has happened in a very, very, very long time. And that carries tremendous peril.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
things could go terribly and it carries tremendous possibility, right? What if AI is an incredible boon for humanity?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
What if we do invent and deploy the clean energy technologies that deliver energy abundance, not just a kind of answer to the worst of climate change, but genuine energy abundance, unlocking new things like mass desalination and, you know, like what if we do, like I'm an animal suffering person, I'm a vegetarian, I care a lot about animal suffering. What if we did figure out
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
cultivated meat, right? That we grow in breweries and on scaffolds, and we don't have to kill tens of billions of animals that we've raised in unimaginable suffering every single year, right? Like, you know, what if we do figure out how to make government better and more responsive, right? What if that thesis, antithesis, synthesis thing does work out? But it's not hope.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
It's like, that's a future you have to create, right? a future you have to call into being, a future you'll have to fight for.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
It isn't so much that I found myself hopeful about what America or the world would be like in 2030 or 2040, but I find that I believe in the possibility of enough remarkable outcomes that it makes the present really worth being engaged in and really worth trying to do your small part to bend the arc of the time. in the direction that you find more just.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
So on the right, it's pretty straightforward at the moment. And the right is composed differently than it was 10 years ago. But the right is run by Donald Trump and the people who have been given the nod of power by Donald Trump. So that is right now Elon Musk, but Elon Musk's power is coming from Donald Trump. That is, you know, maybe in some degrees, J.D.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Vance, maybe in some degrees, Russ Vout, maybe sometimes, you know, Homans over at DHS. The right beneath that, the Republicans in Congress are extraordinarily disempowered compared to in other administrations. They are sort of being told what to do, and they are doing what they are told. Republicans in Congress, Senate Republicans, they didn't want Pete Hegseth. They didn't want Kash Patel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
They didn't want Tulsi Gabbard. They didn't want RFK Jr. Nobody got elected to be a Republican in the Senate, hoping that they would confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a member of the Kennedys, a Democrat who was pro-choice and running as a Democrat two years ago for HHS. But Donald Trump told them to do it, and they did. So the right has developed a very, very top-down structure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And one of Trump's talents, one of the things that makes him a disruptive force in politics is his ability to upend the sort of coalitional structure, the interest group structure of They used to prevail. You know, the Koch brothers were the big enemy of the left, you know, 10, 15 years ago. The view was that in many ways they set the agenda of the right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
The Koch brother network is much less powerful under Donald Trump because he just disagrees with them and has disempowered them. Not to say none of their people or none of their groups are meaningful at all. They are. But you wouldn't put them at the forefront in the way that you might have at another time. Right. Right this second, we're using the left, but Democrats are in fundamental disarray.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
There is no leader. Democrats, Senate Democrats decided to vote for the continuing resolution avoiding a shutdown or a critical mass of them did. Hakeem Jeffries, the leader of the House Democrats, and Chuck Schumer, the leader of Senate Democrats, are in bitter disagreement over whether or not they should have done that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Democratic leadership isn't even united on the single biggest point of leverage they might have had. They disagree over whether or not it was even a point of leverage. Outside of them, the party has no leader, which is fairly normal after a pretty crushing defeat. But there isn't the next in line. So, you know, you go back, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And it was pretty clear that, you know, after Barack Obama, it was going to be Hillary Clinton. After Hillary Clinton, it was either going to be Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders had come in second in the primary. Joe Biden had been the vice president. You often have a presumptive next nominee who the party can look to for a kind of leadership.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Even after 2000, Al Gore was still giving big speeches. There was a question about Al Gore running again. There is no presumptive in the Democratic Party right now. You can't turn around and say, oh, it's going to be Pete Buttigieg. It's going to be Josh Shapiro. It's going to be Gretchen Whitmer. parties are given force, modern parties, which are quite weak by historical standards.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Modern parties tend to be given force by a centralizing personality. Donald Trump being a very strong example of that on the right, but Barack Obama was the person who held together the Democratic Party for a long time. In my lifetime, the Democratic Party has never been as internally fragmented and weak, leaderless, rudderless, as it is right now. Now, it won't stay that way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
There's a rhythm to these things. There'll be a midterm. They're probably going to pick up a bunch of seats in the midterm. If that means Hakeem Jeffries becomes speaker after the midterm, he's going to have a much louder voice because he's going to have power. It's going to be a harder road for Schumer to get back to the majority because of the Senate map.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And then we'll start having a primary on the left. And you'll begin to see voices emerge out of that. But right now, the Democratic Party, it doesn't have points of power. They're simply outside of, you know, at the national level. There is no Democrat who wields control over a branch of government, right? They don't have the Supreme Court. They don't have the House. They don't have the Senate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
They don't have the presidency. And they don't have a next in line. So you're looking at an organization without any of the people in a position to structure it. And the head of the DNC, the new head, Ken Martin, doesn't have power in that way. So... it's a, they're pretty fractured.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
You should have her on the show.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Have you invited her? Is that what you're saying? Yeah, yeah. We'll see what happens when people get closer to 2028. Sure. Maybe they'll begin taking that kind of risk. I hope so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I don't think it's so bad at generating them. I think that it turned out to be bad at generating them this year. Look, as you mentioned, back in February 2023, somebody came out and said, like, Biden can't run again. This isn't going to work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And my view, and that was really what that set of pieces was about, was about the argument that even though Biden was clearly going to win the primary, there was still time for Democrats to do something the parties had done in the past and have an open convention. Right. And you could structure the lead up to an open convention in a number of different ways, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
You could have something like a mini primary, but basically you'd have Democrats out in the media, out giving speeches, and their ultimate audience would be the delegates at the Democratic National Convention. And my hope was through that, you would find the person for this moment, right? The thing for Kamala Harris that was really difficult was she was for another moment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
She was picked by Joe Biden in 2020 amidst just a very different political equilibrium, a sense that you had a transitionary moment between two versions of the Democratic Party, maybe Joe Biden reaching a little bit back to the past. to these sort of lunch pail, you know, blue collar Democrats. Joe from Scranton was a big part of the Joe Biden appeal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
But also Biden never has a chance if he's not Barack Obama's vice president. And so you have this sort of weird set of historical factors like operating at the same time. There's a desire for stability and experience amidst the chaos of Donald Trump and the pandemic. There is Biden as Obama's vice president who nevertheless did not run in the election after Obama.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I think a lot of people look back at 2016 and think, you know what, if Biden had been the candidate, he would have beaten Trump and we would live in a different reality. And then Biden chose Harris as an effort to shore up his own, at least assumed weaknesses, right? He's a white man in the Democratic Party at a time when the Democratic Party is diversifying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And when the view of how you win elections is you put back together the Obama coalition. And the Obama coalition is young people. It's, you know, voters of color. And it's enough working class white voters and then college educated white voters. That's the Obama coalition. And so Biden picks Harris, you know, for different reasons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
My view at that time was I was sort of a Tammy Duckworth person and thought I should have picked Tammy Duckworth. But there are different people out there. And then the kind of moment that Harris was running in just sort of dissipates. First, she has a particular background from California where she's tough on crime. Her book is called Smart on Crime Prosecutor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
But she runs in the Democratic Party at a time when it's turned on that kind of politics. People want a lot from her personally, but they don't want a sort of prosecutorial – So she sort of abandons that and never, I think, really finds another political identity, certainly before she begins running in 2024, that works. But she's a talented debater. She's a very talented performer on the stump.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
But she doesn't really have a theory of politics and policy that she's identified with. But she's a way for Biden to signal that he understands that him being, you know, in 2020, a 78-year-old white guy, he understands the future is not him or at least not just him. And he's sort of trying to make a coalitional pick that speaks to his own, you know, potential weaknesses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I think by 2024, you have two problems, right? He only steps down. What is it, June? Yeah. Like they are weeks from the DNC. They don't have time anymore for an open convention. You now have the Biden administration is very unpopular for a number of reasons, but particularly inflation and cost of living. So now you have Kamala Harris running with a sort of anvil of being associated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I mean, it's a Biden-Harris administration. She doesn't really have a lane on cost of living. It's not something she's known for working on in the Senate. It's not something she has a bunch of great ideas about. not something she's great at talking about. It's probably not the candidate you would pick for a cost-of-living election. And she's had no time to build that out, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Maybe if she had been running in a primary for, you know, a year and a half, having to fend off Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg and whomever else, she either would have figured out how to do it, right? Primaries are periods of education and learning for the candidates too, or they would have found somebody else who could do it. But she doesn't get any of that, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
She's thrown into the game with three months to go. So, you know, they picked the candidate in 2020 who won. Whether you think Biden's inspiring or not, he was probably he was a reasonable pick for that moment. He should have never run for a second term. And he sort of implied to a lot of people that he wouldn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And then the handover to Harris was a very difficult handover to a candidate who didn't go through any kind of selection process for the moment in which he was running. We'll see what they do in 2028. But the consequences of what they did in 2024 have been severe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I don't think I know how you get AOC herself to do it. I would not pretend to know her offices or her particular views on this. I do think, though, that You can see different Democrats taking on different kinds of risks. Right now, we're sort of in the age of Gavin Newsom starting a podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I mean, Gavin Newsom is the governor of California, and he's spending some percentage of his time doing a podcast with Charlie Cook and Michael Savage and Steve Bannon. Gavin Newsom realizes that one lane for a Democrat is to be high risk and talking to virtually everybody. I think Pete Buttigieg, in a different way, is somebody who wants to take media risks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Now, I think he's going to my gut on him is he's going to hold his powder a little bit. So he'll probably want to do the Lex Frubin podcast, assuming he runs in twenty twenty eight in twenty twenty seven. Right. I think a lot of them are trying to figure out what is the lane for right now. And there's a lane for the next two years and there's a lane for the two years after that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And you're going to see a lot of people begin to blanket media in the two years after that. Now, it'd be interesting. I would be curious, too. Would Hakeem Jeffries come on to your show right now? That'd be interesting. I mean, would he do it for four hours? I don't know. The four-hour ask, the three- to four-hour ask, as somebody who also books politicians, is hard. I have trouble.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I like to book people for 90 minutes to two hours. And I tend to get negotiated down to, I try not to go under 75 or 65. But even as somebody, I think, well-regarded in that world, You know, it's very, very, very hard for me to get politicians to sit for two hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I just think they're used to something else, right? They are scheduled by schedulers, right? If you talk to them yourself, if you end up having a personal relationship with Wes Moore of Maryland, and he wants to do your show. He will tell his scheduler, I want three to four hours to do the show.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
But the scheduler is used to a world, the staff is used to a world where nobody gets three to four hours for the boss. Reporters don't, donors don't, policy staffers don't. So then when some interview comes in, And they say, hey, I want three to four hours. The answer is no, because culturally it's not done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
You need Donald Trump himself, Pete Buttigieg himself, AOC herself to say to their staff, no, no, no, we're making time for this. Because it's not how they make time for things normally. I don't know how much it is fear. I do think they're unused to it, but I suspect a lot of it is simply booking culture. Like I run into it too. They're not used to saying yes to three to four hours for anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
It's not that they don't have it. They have three to four hours if their kid is having a graduation, right? I mean, they're human beings. They can make time. But it would have to come in a way from them. My sense is this is part of the Rogan. It's very unclear because there are very differing stories on what happened in the Rogan-Harris negotiations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
But it does seem that time was one of the sticking points.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Well, we're barely like 50 minutes into a four hour. I have no more material, Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Well, that's a thing the left has to get over. Yeah, that's a very important cultural. They began to do a thing where spaces were verboten because it had platformed so-and-so. And I think that culture is changing. I think they realized that they abandoned huge, vast swaths of significant culture because they wouldn't go places anymore. it's crazy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Like you have to, the idea that you only go where people agree with you is genuine lunacy. I don't want to act as your booker here. And 20, you know, 2020 candidates are what they are and they each have their own press strategy. But I would say like, I'm doing this myself on my show. I like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I don't think the best people to get right now in the Democratic Party are the seven people who lead the polls. I'm looking for people who will think out loud. I just had Jake Auchincloss on. He's a not-that-well-known House member from Massachusetts. I just think he's a guy who thinks out loud. I am... Booking someone else right now like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I have two more people like that, frankly, who are neither of them. They're like the net. Like I could get like a bigger name. I'm more interested in people who are thinking like one reason I think Bernie Sanders always did everything is to him. The thing he was really doing was he had something to say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
The point of almost everything for Bernie Sanders is to be in a place where people can hear the thing he has to say. And a lot of politicians don't have that, right? The point of anything is what it does for them in the polls, what it does for them with the donors, how it repositions them. I'm interested right now at this moment, because it's not 2028. It's not 2027.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
There's no Democratic primary happening right now. The idea that you can pre-run the Democratic primary is stupid. We don't even know what the... We might be in World War III. We have no idea what, you know, we might have, you know, AGI. Like the things that the 2027 primary might be about, the kinds of scandals that might have erupted by them are totally different.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Whereas, you know, the reason I have people on is because they are saying something. They're a live mind in the moment that has a perspective on this that you want to hear. And so I would look for that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And I think a lot of people who are not, you know, there are people who are trying to protect something, protect a standing in the polls, protect a sort of coalitional set of allies they currently have. And then there are people who are, you know, trying to just be heard. Again, a lot of Bernie Sanders' culture, the way he does media, is now Bernie Sanders is Bernie Sanders. He didn't used to be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
He wasn't in 2015 even. Like when Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2015, it wasn't initially a big deal. It was like, oh, bummer, Elizabeth Warren didn't run for president. It was a feeling of most people on the left. And so Bernie Sanders was a guy who's been saying the same thing for decades, but in the wilderness and nobody was listening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And now he still has the instincts of somebody who understood that the most important thing was to find a place where people were listening, where they would let you talk and even better let you talk for a while. I think the candidate who's going to do well in 2028 is going to have an instinct like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
But even right now, I think the question is, one of my big questions as I'm booking for my show is just, I want someone who has a perspective on this moment, who feels like they have had a thought that is about right now and who we are right now and what the story of America is right now. I think what's really important is what Ezra said.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
There's also a reality, and I mean, the book is trying to enter into this reality. I think one thing you're saying is that people have coded you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And so Donald Trump is really excited to do it and maybe loving politicians or not. One thing that we think is that we're in a period of realignment. The last chapter of the book, we talk about an idea that is picked up from a historian named Gary Garstow, which is the idea of political orders.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And political orders are periods that have a sort of structure of consensus and a structure of a zone of conflict. But it's more or less agreed on by the two sides, even if only tacitly. So you have a New Deal order. New Deal order is founded by FDR. It is entrenched when Dwight Eisenhower accepts the New Deal as part of the U.S. proving that it can treat workers better than the Soviet Union.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
So those are sort of right there, the three ingredients typically of an order. You have a part of it starts it. A opposition party that accepts key premises, right? Dwight Eisenhower doesn't come in and say, we're going to roll back the whole New Deal. And it's often held in place by an external antagonist, in that case, the Soviet Union.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
You have then, in the 70s, stagflation, the Vietnam War, a series of problems that the New Deal order no longer seems able to handle. So you have the rise of what he calls the neoliberal order. And the neoliberal order is, if you're going to choose a founder, it's going to be Reagan on that one, right? It's much more about markets. It is very concerned with things like inflation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And it really is entrenched by Bill Clinton. You know, the era of big government is over. And partially, it's entrenched also by the fall of the Soviet Union, right? The fall of the Soviet Union is like this proof point that the sort of capitalists were right, that markets are the way of the future. Government does not know what it's doing. And that becomes like the governing set of assumptions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And so there are arguments about what the markets should be doing, right? You know, Obamacare is about creating sort of markets and health insurance, right? You can use markets for very progressive ends. We want to use markets for lots of progressive ends. But the neoliberal order basically collapses amidst a financial crisis and climate change and China.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And those are the three things that sort of Gerstle, but also separately, we think kill it, which is the neoliberal order does not have an answer to the financial crisis. And it botches, in many ways, the answer to the financial crisis, puts too little demand into the economy, lets a sort of recession linger and a very slow recovery linger for too long.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
It doesn't know what to say really about climate change. Markets have made a lot of people rich by doing a lot of things that are very, very damaging for the environment, very damaging for the future of the human race potentially. And you have the rise of China. And the neoliberal order said, you integrate China into the global economy. You bring them into the WTO. You trade with them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
You help them build their industrial base. You help them pull their people out of poverty, which that part is good. And they will become more like the West. They will liberalize. They will have a free press. The richer we make China, the more China is going to become like us. And that proves totally wrong, right? China becomes more authoritarian over time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
But it also sort of develops an industrial base. It becomes, as it does not become more like us, becomes dangerous, you know, at least in our view, right? You don't want to ever have a conflict with another country who you've outsourced your key industrial base to. And so you have to sort of follow that order. And then, again, here, things that would have been ridiculous
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
at one point in American politics and become possible. Bernie Sanders is one of them, right? The idea that you would have somebody, a self-described socialist running for president and coming anywhere near the Democratic nomination, that was unthinkable in 2004. And by 2016, it almost happened. And Donald Trump is another thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Donald Trump runs like headlong into the failures of neoliberalism in the Republican Party. He runs against trade. He runs against a sort of Paul Ryan, more open immigration. George W. Bush and John McCain were both very big on liberalizing immigration policy. He runs against the Iraq war and, you know, sort of foreign adventurism. And there's a sort of isolationist instinct that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
coexists very awkwardly now within a territorial expansionist instinct, but at least in 2016, it was more isolationist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And so Donald Trump and his sort of reimagining of the Republican Party as a right-wing populist, more like sort of some Christian Democratic parties in other countries, you know, up in that quadrant of socially conservative, economically populist, that becomes something that's possible. But nothing has found an equilibrium. Right. Nobody's agreed to the other side's premises.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
There are certain ones that people are agreeing on. Both the Republican and Democratic parties have very different view on China now. Right. Like Biden kept a lot of Trump's policies on China and actually strengthened them. And now Trump is building on that aggressively again. But in terms of the other things, there isn't agreement about what the next period in American politics should look like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And that's one reason I think it's very dangerous, both as a question of media strategy, but also as a question of politics, to code people, places, platforms too tightly. Republicans and Democrats aren't going to get along in Congress. That has to do with, I think, the incentives of Congress. My first book is called Why We're Polarized.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
It's about those almost hydraulic incentives for partisanship. But in terms of what is the meaning of my podcast, of Derek's, of yours, of Joe Rogan, of Theo Vaughn, of Call Her Daddy, of a million different places that are not well-coded. And that's, I think, very up for grabs. I mean, Elon Musk was an Obama era liberal in 2012.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I mean, I think his personal process of radicalization is not going to unwind itself. But a lot of the people who Democrats are like, all these billionaires are right wing now. No, people are just uncertain. I mean, some of them are a little bit afraid, but people are uncertain. They're moving back and forth. The sort of texture of it is unsettled. And it's going to take time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
These transitionary periods, I mean, they can go very badly, too. But they take time. And I think people who are clinging to old certainties about what tells you which side folks are on. My sense is a lot of people who are very open to MAGA in 2025 are going to feel very differently about it in 2028, depending on how they do. Right. If they do great, then they're going to entrench.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
But if they don't, then a lot of people became MAGA curious are not going to be MAGA curious anymore. But they're not going to want the last Democratic Party either. Right. I was making this point to someone the other day about why the Democratic Party's embrace of the Liz Cheney-style independent didn't work. Liz Cheney, of course, being Dick Cheney's daughter, a Republican.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
But what Liz Cheney, the Never Trumpers were, were a way of reaching out to who the Democratic Party thought the independents were. But the key thing about an independent to a political party is not that they don't like the other party. It's that they're an independent because they also don't like your party.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And so finding a bunch of people who are meant to be messengers to them about why they shouldn't like the other party, it's fine. But what you need to do is explain why they should like your party. You need to have some message. You need to accept some fault. You need to think about what it was about you that drove them away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
One of our deep views about politics right now, and not politics, policy, the texture of the economy of the country, is that the last period in American politics, in the economy, was about demand. The fundamental problem coming out of the financial crisis was demand. We had too little demand in the economy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Behind that too little demand in the economy was this other thing that was building up, which was a cost of living crisis. Housing was getting super expensive, healthcare, in certain ways, energy, but energy is more complicated in ways we can talk about, elder care, childcare, higher education, right? This is a point, my wife is a journalist at The Atlantic, Annie Lowry with Derek,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And she wrote this piece in 2020, early 2020, right before the pandemic that went very viral called The Affordability Crisis. And it sticks in my head because she's writing at a time when people were saying the economy's great. Everything's great. Like you looked at measures of consumer confidence in 2020, February of 2020. Terrific.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
She's like, so how come if the economy is so great, everybody I talk to is so upset? And she's like, look, like people are making more money than ever, but it's getting eaten up and eaten up and eaten up by these things they really need. They keep getting more expensive, even as consumer goods get cheaper. Then the pandemic hits. The problem becomes COVID. But then you have inflation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And inflation moves a problem of the economy, the fundamental problem everybody's paying attention to. From the demand side, how do we get more people at work? How do we get them to spend more money? To the supply side, we don't have enough, right? We have a constriction of semiconductors, of used cars, and then eventually everything, right? Everything is getting more expensive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And we do get, I mean, we'll see what happens with tariffs. We do get, you know, by 2024, the rate of inflation under control, but prices are still much higher. And now people are paying real attention to prices. And the affordability crisis, which, again, is a cost of living crisis, which had been growing for a very long time, is now at crisis levels. And it becomes the substance of politics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
People, you know, you had all these Democrats saying, I don't know what the problem is. Like, inflation has come down to whatever it was, three to four percent in 2024. And they're right about that. But one, the price level of everything remained high. But two, people were now like... The fuck is housing so expensive for? Like, I'm never going to be able to afford a home.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Like, my parents went to public university debt free. I could never do that. And what we've done is fail. I mean, Democrats in this case, Republicans haven't done that great on it either. But in blue states, Democrats have failed on cost of living.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
The reason California, Illinois, New York are losing hundreds of thousands of people to Florida, Texas, Arizona, Colorado, is that they've failed on cost of living. It is too expensive to live there. And the reason they failed on cost of living is supply. They did not make enough. They actually made it too hard in many cases to make enough of the things people needed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Some of those are straightforward, like we didn't let people build enough homes. Some of them are more like we've made it too expensive to build public infrastructure like high-speed rail or the Second Avenue subway. Some of it has to do, I think, in the long run with innovation and the relationship between Democrats and technology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
But one of our views is that there are other things in politics that will matter, too. But we are in a period where the cost of living, supply, affordability is the fundamental economic question. Donald Trump himself has said he won because of the price of groceries.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
He's got this very funny quote where he's like, nobody said, I don't have a Donald Trump impression, but he's like, nobody ever used the word groceries in politics before I did. Well, it'd be good if he then wasn't making it more expensive. But Democrats believe his weakness is cost of living. They're probably right, but they don't have a strength on it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And the key question our book is trying to refocus politics on is how do we make more of what we need? How does the government either organize itself or organize markets to create more of what we need? And how do we admit as liberals times when we've made it so the government makes it too hard to make more of what we need? I'll say one last thing in this pretty long answer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I thought one of the most important things that has come out recently is a piece in Foreign Affairs by Brian Deese, who's a former head of Joe Biden's National Economics Council. And Deese helped negotiate every major bill Biden passed. It's a very straightforward piece about what it is Democrats have not done to make it possible to build at the level of their goals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And he says things like, we should just remove federal funding from cities that have highly restrictive home zoning codes. He says we should have a goal for how much nuclear we build in the next 10 years. We should be trying to reach a goal of new nuclear capacity. It's a very, very important piece because Deese is right at the center of democratic policy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Instead of retrenching, he's like, OK, we didn't get there. What do we do now to make it possible to get to the place we promised you we can go?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Let's say two things on that. So one, we think there's a real tension between equality, redistribution, and constricting the supply of specifically housing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Housing and energy. I think, are the two most significant that we focus on in the book, right? Housing and clean energy. We don't have housing, we don't have enough clean energy. I would add things to that, public infrastructure. We don't really focus that much on education, but we could, and we could talk about that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Immigration is probably there for me too, and we talk about that a little bit in the book. And we do talk a lot about how to pull innovation forward from the future. But when you ask about sort of redistribution, I really think this is an important point because there's a great new paper by David Schleicher. And I'm so sorry because I'm forgetting his co-author. They're law professors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And they talk about the victory of gentry law. We used to have a law that was very dynamic when it came to property and land. It was very different than how things were in Britain. And over time, sort of back half of the 20th century, we moved American law to be much more for what they call the gentry. We moved it much more towards protecting those who currently have things, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And we do that through a million things, covenants and HOAs and all these sort of contracts who make people enter into so they can't even build on their own land. But one of the things that just happens...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
when you constrict the supply of housing is that people who got in when the getting was good, you know, I mean, it's a classic story in New York and LA and SF, you know, you bought a place in 1977 for $220,000 and now it's worth $2.7 million and maybe you'll pass it on to your kids or you sell it. But the working class families can't afford to live there anymore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
So that's not even a question of redistribution. Sometimes what you need in order to create the possibilities for opportunity and mobility is enough supply of the thing. At the same time, we don't think that redistribution is the problem here. I'm pro-redistribution. I'm pro-more redistribution than we currently do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
But to give one example of the way these can be great days to go together, Derek tells in the book at some great length the story of Operation Warp Speed. And here you have in the mRNA vaccines technology that was critically funded by public money, specifically DARPA at different points.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Then hastened, you know, after COVID, government through Operation Warp Speed under Donald Trump, you know, really tried to clear out regulatory cruft, move these things really fast. But the demand on the side of the public for having funded so much of this, for having made so much possible, was that when these vaccines hit, they were going to be free.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
maybe the most important medical advance of that entire era. And it wasn't going to be like Ozempic, say, where it's, you know, $15,000 for a year of doses, right? It wasn't going to be only available to the richest people at the beginning. We were going to try to give it to everybody, sorted by need to the best that we could, and it would be free.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Now, you're not going to do that with everything, right? There are places for the price signal to actually function and where it can function to then bring on more supply later. And, you know, there's all the econ 101 stuff that we all know. But There are a lot of places where redistribution and supply increases go hand in hand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Another good example I've done over the course of my career, a huge amount of work on health insurance reform and universal health care.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And let's say you got, you know, Bernie Sanders had become president in 2016 and had swept in a huge Democratic majority and they passed Bernie's single-payer-for-all plan, which was, by the way, much more expansive than any existing single-payer plan in the world, right? It covered much more than Canada's or the UK's or anybody else. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
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Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
You make a lot more money being a barber near Google than you do being a barber in rural Arkansas. And this is the ancient pathway to mobility. People who are poorer and work in the service sector, they move to richer areas where the productivity is higher and thus the sort of money spreads around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And if you look at American mobility and opportunity over the 20th century, about a third roughly on some calculations just comes from this people moving to richer areas. And if you look in like the last 20-ish years, 30-ish years, you see this extremely steady process of income convergence as people move towards richer areas begin to throw itself into reverse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Because it used to make sense for the janitor and the lawyer to move to New York City. But now it only makes sense for the lawyer, too, and the janitor leaves because you can't support yourself and your family and live in a home and have a reasonable commute being a janitor working in Manhattan. Now, obviously, some people do it, and it's often very tough, and they live very far.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
It's very hard in San Francisco. You can't look at cities as... Well, that's just where the rich people are. And that's a problem that many Democrats now have. I mean, Michael Bloomberg famously described New York City as a luxury good, and luxury goods cost luxury prices. And that's true in the sense that New York became a luxury good, but that's a problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Like, that is a terrible prominent inversion of what the city is. There's this famous advice, possibly apocryphally, from Horace Greeley, who's a kind of early American newspaper publisher and political candidate. But he says, like, go West, young man, go West, right? The opportunity is out in the West where the lands are open. It's never been true, including for him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
That guy moved from a rural area to New York City. And that's how he became famous. And he ran a newspaper and he ran against Ulysses S. Grant in a presidential election. Right. The cities are the frontier. The cities have always been the frontier, not of the land, but of the economy. Because the frontier of the economy is where ideas are produced.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And ideas, even now, even in the age of remote work, are produced in the big cities where people live together. And they compete with each other, and they cooperate with each other. And so if you gate the cities... If you make it impossible for someone making $50,000 with two kids to live in the city, then what you've done is you've actually closed the American frontier.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
You have forced them into lower productivity places. Their children are less likely to grow up around, you know, the sort of inventors in the cities. There's really amazing research from Raj Chetty and others basically showing that kids, no matter what they are, no matter what income class they're in, they are likelier to grow up innovating and patenting in the innovations of the place around them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Smart kids don't just grow up and innovate in anything. If they grew up in the Bay Area, they innovate in technology, as Steve Jobs did and Wozniak did, because they just lived around those people. And that is true in many, many, many different things. And so when you gate the cities, it's not, housing is almost too small of a thing for what we're talking about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
We're talking about if you can live next to economic opportunity. We are talking also about if you can put the people together who will create the next era of economic opportunity. You know, right now, the Bay Area is still in some ways drafting off the back when it was cheap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
A lot of the people we're talking about who have made amazing things here, they started in the Bay Area when you could afford to live there. It wasn't always like this. And it wasn't that long ago that it wasn't like this. And now, fine, you can go there if you have money or you have a great job offer from Google or Apple or whomever. But over time, you need the ferment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I have a personal interest in reading memoirs and noticing if the memoir is really a housing story. One of the ones I like about this, Moby, the electronic musician, his first memoir, which is great, it's a memoir of a certain era in New York. It's a housing story. He was just living next to a bunch of other musicians in cheap-ass housing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I just read Meet Me in the Bathroom by Lizzie Goodman, a sort of oral history of the aughts rock revival in New York City, a housing story. They could afford to live here, right? I've read a bunch of these in San Francisco, too, where people just like, they're functionally squatting. Right. Like the San Francisco ferment, its queerness, its openness and tolerance of new ideas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
It's sort of like it's home of the psychedelic counterculture that intermixed with the defense culture that created Silicon Valley. Right. You've read probably, is it Frederick Turner's from counterculture to cyberculture? That was a story of cheap housing. You need to allow people to be around each other, to mix each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
If only one type of person can afford to be there, it becomes a monocultural over time. And so it's not just housing. This is about the geography of economic innovation and opportunity. That's why it's so fucking important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Or by technology. We know how to build apartment buildings.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I want to add a wrinkle on regulation and deregulation. So we were talking about coding earlier. Who gets coded is right wing, who gets coded is left wing. Deregulation is a word that is highly coded as right wing. The right wing wants it to deregulate, right? They want the government to stop regulating the market. It's fine. In many cases, the government should deregulate parts of the market.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
In many cases, it should regulate parts of the market more. What we don't talk about enough is how much the government regulates the government and how badly it needs to deregulate the government.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
So I have many more left friends and they'll come to me or they'll critique me and they'll say, this all is fine, but what we really need in this country is public housing or it's been rebranded social housing. It's fine. Singapore, huge amount of social housing, right? They do a great job with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
One of the things we go into, and this book is a manifesto on some level, but something we really try to do is take you into the gritty, grimy, frustrating details of how policy plays out on the ground. What actually happens after a bill passes and why we get the outcomes we do. Because often it's like a bunch of decisions made after everybody stopped paying attention.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
So one of the things we pay some real attention to... is the kind of housing that people on the left all agree on is affordable housing through government grants. The government says, oh, we're not just going to have market rate developers coming in building more luxury condos for the children of the upper class.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
We're going to build affordable housing for people who should be in this city but otherwise couldn't pay enough to be here. California, I can give you two different examples, but let's look at Los Angeles. I'm from outside LA.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And they have something, I always forget if it's measure H or measure HHH, but California, LA voters pass a bond measure, about a billion dollars, a little bit more, I think it was, to build affordable housing. Six years later, when I'm writing about this, they have built a couple thousand units at an average cost of six to $700,000 a unit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
So it's like it's costing more to build housing under this affordable housing bond measure, which they have agreed to pay for, than it is to buy a home. Market rate in Denver. Denver's a nice place to live. So why? What had happened?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Well, it turns out that when you trigger the public money in various cities, these are city ordinances often, but not always, and you use these public grants and you cobble together the different grants you need to build an affordable housing complex, what you've done is layer onto yourself a huge number of rules that the market rate developers don't have to follow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
You're either using union labor or paying prevailing wage. You're building to higher green building codes. Oftentimes, by the way, to get through the kind of planning board meetings that Derek is talking about, you've made a bunch of concessions on the design. You know, is there going to be parking in it? You know, security, things like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
You have to often agree to who's going to be in the home. So you're getting, you know, there's a thing in the Measure H stuff where, well, they wanted it to not just be the taxpayer money. They also wanted nonprofit grants so the money would go further. So you're trying to get these other grants, but these grants are to house homeless veterans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
So now to open the thing, you need to find these homeless veterans. You need to go through extra disability accessibility reviews. And of course, we all want these things to be accessible, but they already had to comply with the American Disability Act. But now you're doing another Disability Act review in the city and they come in, they say, well...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
you know, your doors are a little bit not as wide as we think. So you got to make all your doors three inches wider before you can open up. And that adds time and that adds cost. You have these subcontractor rules, right? This is now I'm using an example from San Francisco, but you had a preference initially for minority-based subcontractors. That became illegal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
It became small businesses, but that meant it had a preference against the bigger contractors who are more efficient at building housing. In order to use public money, and then very much in order to build public housing directly, it ends up being more expensive and slower than market rate. And that is a choice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
We do not have to try to solve every problem in society through an individual housing project. Building affordable housing is hard enough. It's not impossible, but it's difficult to do. You do have to talk with the neighbors, right? It's never going to be trivial to build a 500-unit apartment building But instead, we layer on all these external and additional agenda items.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I call this everything bagel liberalism. Because, like, you know, you sprinkle just enough on the bagel and it's great. But if you saw everything everywhere all at once, you put everything on the everything bagel and it becomes a black hole from which nothing can escape. And so the need to deregulate government, right? I saw some of Elon Musk's marathon appearance on your show.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
We're starting small here. And maybe contrast them with the American right. Sure. So the thing I should say here is that you can define the left in different ways, right? I think the left has a couple of fundamental views. One is that life is unfair. We are born with different talents. We are born into different nations, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And he talks about high speed rail in California. And the thing he says there that it's functionally illegal to build high speed rail in California. I got a hundred disagreements with Elon Musk right now. That's not one of them. It's functionally illegal to build high speed rail in California. Like I went out, I toured the high speed rail. I've done a lot of reporting on that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
You can't build it affordably. You just can't on time. They have no way to get the money to build the rest of it. It's not going to happen. And it's not going to happen not because you can't build high-speed rail. Europe builds high-speed rail. Japan builds high-speed rail. China builds high-speed rail. And it's not because of the private market, like, we'll only build luxury high-speed rail.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
It's because we have so heavily regulated a public project that you can't finish it. And you definitely can't bring it in on time and affordably. And so... I really would like to uncode deregulation because, yeah, there's places where I would like to regulate more. I don't want you to be able to build a coal-fired power plant in America. I just don't want it to be possible. I think it's bad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
But I do want it to be possible to build high-speed rail and affordable housing, including through the public market. And one thing my friends on the left, I think, really underrate is how hard they've made it for the government to act. They believe in government, but if you believe in government, then you have to make it possible for government to complete projects.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
You have to make it possible for the people who work for government to apply their own genius and initiative. They have to have agency. I always say that we're sort of trapped right now between a party that wants government to fail and a party that won't make government work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And we are trying to push this idea that the thing we want is a capable government, a strong government, a government that when it promises it will do something, it actually does it and gets it done. And that requires not just deregulation of the private sector, though sometimes it does require that. It requires deregulation of the government itself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
The luck of being born into America is very different than the luck of being born into Venezuela. We are born into different families. We have luck operating as an omnipresence across our entire lives. And as such, the people for whom it works out well, we don't deserve all of that. We got lucky. I mean, we also worked hard and we also had talent and we also applied that talent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
the rules. We talk a lot about a book. I don't know if you've run into this one, but it's by Mansour Olson, who's sort of a founder of public interest economics, and it's called The Rise and Decline of Nations. This is like a very famous book. Libertarians love this book. And I love this book. It's not right about everything, but its fundamental question is, how come after World War II,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
did the completely destroyed, bombed-out countries of Germany and Japan, you would have thought they would be just screwed. Instead, they both become growth miracles. They both do much better than the UK, which, you know, was on the winning side of the war. Why? And Olson's argument is,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
is that affluent, stable societies over long periods of time develop something that is very difficult to develop and very important to develop, which is bargaining organizations, right? Collective action is hard. It is hard to form an organization. It is hard to make that organization persist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
But if you can do that in an atmosphere of stability, then over time, that organization will tend to entrench its power, right? Think about AARP or the Chamber of Commerce or or certain unions or, you know, the National Manufacturing Council, et cetera, the Business Roundtable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
You know, they're not that powerful when they start, but over a long period of time, they become really powerful and they start to pass laws and make themselves more powerful and so on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
But at a very fundamental level, that we are sitting here is unfair and that so many other people are... in conditions that are much worse, much more precarious, much more exploited is unfair. And one of the fundamental roles of government should not necessarily be to turn that unfairness into perfect equality, but to rectify that unfairness into a kind of universal dignity, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
There's a lot you can say about this insight, but my favorite part of Olson's book and one that I don't think people emphasize enough is this insight he has, which is that over time, countries will begin, every country has a kind of form of natural selection within it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And that form of natural selection will select for people with the skills to navigate, best navigate the kind of economy that country has. So if you're in China right now, and China's in its developmentalism phase, you really want to be in civil infrastructure, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
It is great to be a civil engineer in China, great to be working on semiconductors in China, great to be doing all this stuff in the physical world. But America, you know, as a kind of price of our affluence and our success, right? We've become a country, and this happens for a lot of countries, where negotiation is really important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And a country in which negotiation is really important is going to, over time, start developing a preference for lots of lawyers, people in finance, management consultants, because it is a society that requires continuous what he calls complex bargaining. And I think this actually explains a lot. Patrick Collison, we quote him, who's the CEO of Stripe, brilliant tech guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Here's his point that he made in an interview with Noah Smith, who's a blogger and economist. Where they were talking about high-speed rail, and sort of Patrick makes this point, he's like, it's just tough to be a high-speed rail engineer in America. You're going to have a much easier time working in the digital space. And so the digital space becomes a kind of frontier of last resort.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And so people want to build things, go into bits and bytes, not into atoms, right, to use the old kind of Peter Thiel cut. And I think there's something to that. It's not that lawyers are bad. Some of the people I love most in this world are lawyers, and many lawyers do amazing, amazing work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
But one reason we've selected for so many lawyers, and America has a lot of lawyers, is we became a society that needs a lot of lawyers because we are a society that is stable, affluent, and we've become very into bargaining. You know, Donald Trump is a real estate developer. That's a relational business.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
The way real estate development works in this country, the reason you don't have all that many huge firms building housing in many, many states simultaneously is it requires a lot of relationships in the individual city you're in. And so, you know, if you read, say, Maggie Haberman's great biography of Donald Trump, Confidence Man, which focuses a lot on his time as a real estate developer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
magnet in New York, you see Donald Trump doesn't build a ton of stuff in other states. He actually builds in other countries sometimes, or more to the point, he puts his name on things built in other countries. But really what he did was build here. And he built here through his relationships with the New York political system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And so over time, societies that make building and construction and creation something that is the output of negotiations rather than like very clear standards and rules where if you've done it, you can just do it. You get a lot of lawyers. You get a lot of management consultants. You get a lot of finance people because that's what society is selecting for.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
That's what you've made it possible to have agency and freedom in. That's what you need to do to do big things. This is coming from Nick Bagley, who's a University of Michigan law professor. But Between Walter Mondale and Tim Walz, there's not a single person on a Democratic presidential ticket who didn't go to law school, not one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Like the Democratic Party in particular is a party of lawyers and lawyers look at things from the legal perspective and the legal perspective is that government is legitimate by following process. And Bagley's point is that government attains legitimacy, at least in part, through outcomes. And when you prize process so high over outcomes, you think you're acting legitimately.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
But actually, it would have made you legitimate in the view of the people. Is it you built the thing you told them you were going to build? You made it possible to live affordably in the city. And so you have this sort of movement then over time to populous strongmen who say, I alone can fix it, because they've kind of given up on this procedural liberalism. Like, they didn't deliver for them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
So you keep telling them, you know, we're the ones who know how to run government and they don't see it. And eventually somebody else comes and says, I'm going to bust through the walls of this thing like the Kool-Aid man. And they win. So speaking of the Kool-Aid man. I see what you're about to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
So people can have lives of flourishing. So I'd say that's one thing. The left is fundamentally more skeptical of capitalism and particularly unchecked forms of capitalism than the right. I always think this is hard to talk about because what we call unchecked capitalism is nevertheless very much supported by government.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Sam Altman once said to me, he said, well, aren't you just a reinforcement learning system with energy running through it? Yeah. I'd like to think not, but maybe. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Wait, before you do the anti-case, can I offer a different steel man? Please. I think the steelman case for what Doge is, right, rather than what it pretended to be, is that The government is an interest. The bureaucracy, the deep state, the rules, the regulations. And it's not about efficiency. Never was. You wouldn't do this if it was about efficiency. That it's zero-based budgeting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
That you're breaking the thing. You're turning it on and off. You're firing massive parts of it. Because the only way to make change within it possible is to delete what currently exists. Whether it was efficient or not, you would never actually know that if you had it all come and present its case for efficiency or something, you'd never know. You'd get turned around, whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
So I think in a way you have both like markets are things that are enforced by government, whether they are, you know, how you set the rules of them is what ends up differing between the left and the right. But the left is tends to be more worried about the fact that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
that the only way, like the problem with the government is there is no actual competition. The Department of Education doesn't get out-competed by the, you know, the Agency of Education, which has started up, you know, three years ago or something. And because of that, the only way to make possible radical change is to bulldoze the thing that currently exists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And then once that is done, you can begin to rebuild. You can, you know, if you've fired half of the Department of Education, then you can start rehiring your people and they will actually do what you want. If you have shown that you can delete every regulation or just not follow it, then you can begin deciding which ones to actually follow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
If there is no Department of USAID and you've moved it back under state, then you can tell state what really to fund in terms of foreign aid, right? There's a theory here, I think, that was never about efficiency. It was about deletion. He's not trying to make things run a little bit better. He's not trying to lower the overhead cost of government. That the theory is that in the first term,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
The bureaucracy impeded Donald Trump. It didn't listen to him. Bureaucracy is supposed to be limbs of the president. The only way to make the federal government a neural link of Donald Trump himself is to destroy the federal government and then rebuild it as that thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
that you could get rich building coal-fired power plants, belching pollution into the air, and you could get rich laying down solar panels, and the market doesn't know the difference between the two. And so there's a set of goals about regulating the unchecked potential of capitalism that also relates to sort of exploitation of workers. There's very fundamental questions about
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Oh, I disagree with you that that wasn't the steel man. I mean, I think you have to listen to them to do the steel man, right? I don't think the steel man is imaginary. If you read the OMB regulation that froze funding— It said explicitly that the government has to reflect the will of the people as expressed through their choice of president.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
If you read anything Russ Vought has ever said, they have the unitary executive theory. I'm not saying it's right or wrong. If you asked me to do the non-Steelman, which I would love to do too, it is not my view that the Steelman case of this is to make the federal government fully responsive to Donald Trump.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
But the Steelman case for what they are doing, as expressed by them, and I think like a Steelman reflects like, I mean, I have talked to these people, right? Like I'm telling you what they tell me on some level. The Steelman cases, they believe, like as Derek said a minute ago,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
This has become non-democratically responsive, and the way it becomes democratically responsive is deeply responsive to the president. The president represents a different politics than Joe Biden's politics. And so if you have a state filled with liberal civil servants who don't want to do what he says, that is a violation of small-D democratic principles of how the government should be run.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I think if you don't like it, that's fine. But I do want to say, like, I actually think that is the steel man. He's not – they're not doing this for no reason. They have an intention here. And I think, you know, whether you like it or not sort of depends on whether or not you like –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Lex, AOC should definitely come on this show. Well, she has her own.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
How much people get paid, how much power they have. Again, the rectification of economic and other forms of power is very fundamental to the left. When you think about what the minimum wage is, I am a successful podcast host. When I go into a negotiation with the New York Times, I have a certain amount of market power in that negotiation because other firms want to hire me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
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Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
When you are a minimum wage worker, the reason we have a minimum wage is in part to rectify a power problem. A lot of workers do not have market power. They do not have a bunch of job opportunities. They are not working with firms. And by the way, without certain kinds of regulation, those firms would cartelize and make it so they can hold down wages anyway.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
So trying to rectify power imbalances is, I think, another thing folks on the left take more seriously. That would be a start of things that I think broadly unite the—maybe let's call it the intuitions— I want to say that's a podcast answer, not a book. I'm sure I left a million things out here, but I'll start there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I want to say, because I really want to emphasize that it has goals. The goals are clear on some level and they have to do with centralizing power. So let me take out something that's not Doge, because I think an important place where you see what the effort is. What is Congress for? Not just Democrats in Congress who are in theory right now the opposition party, but Republicans in Congress.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Congress is this aggregation of information from different places in the country who've chosen representatives to represent them in Washington, right? That's how the system works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
One of the things that has really cowed congressional Republicans, it is a huge, sun-like gravitational force now on Capitol Hill, is that Elon has made it known that any House or Senate Republican who defies Trump on a key vote, cabinet nominees, the CR, that kind of thing, He will dump 50 to 100 million dollars into a primary. It's no money at all for him. It's lethal for them. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
This is well known. He has said this personally to some of them. Right. It's been well reported. This is probably why Jody Ernst voted for Pete Hegseth. Well, what's achieved by this? I think it's like an interesting question because Republicans, in theory, are allied to Donald Trump. Right. He's the nominee of their party. They don't have like literally the same view of him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
But I think you might say from one perspective, there is a value in the system and there being checks and balances. There's a value in the system and the system having to absorb other kinds of information.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Now, we already don't have the checks and balances we once had or thought we would have in this country because we have nationalized political parties instead of, you know, branches of government that sort of compete, you know, with ambition, checking ambition. And I've done whole shows on this and we can talk about that if we want. But we do have political parties.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And political parties are themselves institutions that aggregate different kinds of information in order to try to come to some outcome that is a better outcome because more information has surfaced. I think Donald Trump would be in a stronger position for him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
If Senate Republicans could have done what they actually wanted to do and not confirm RFK Jr., not confirm Tulsi Gabbard, not confirm Pete Hegseth, not confirm Kash Patel and Don Magino, right? That's actually a huge amount of risk the Trump administration has taken on. If they had named a sort of normal figure to HHS and then there's a measles outbreak – well, measles outbreaks are tough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Like, that's a hard thing – If you name RFK Jr. and there's a huge measles outbreak, you're really going to get blamed for that because people are ready to blame you. If there is a domestic terror attack after you've put Kash Patel, who's quite unqualified, in charge of the FBI and they sort of launched a war internally against the FBI, which they see as a hotbed of anti-Trump sentiment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And the FBI in the sort of internal chaos misses some things and you have deaths on American soil. That's a huge amount of risk you've taken on. I mean, the guy they fired, Chris Wray, he was Trump's appointee. It wasn't some Democrat. Trump named him in his first term. But Elon, right, what he did here was he created a kind of death star of primary money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And he has said that, like, if you cross Trump in Congress, even as a Republican, you're done. Like, between Trump's control of attention and loyalty and my ability to outspend you, like, you're toast. I think what that reveals is that what he wants is for power to be centralized under Trump. We've been talking about through bureaucracy, but he also wants it to be true in Congress.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I am not a Donald Trump fan, but obviously other people are Donald Trump fans, right? Obviously, I think at this point, Elon Musk is a Donald Trump fan, but much of the country thinks this guy is great. And I think we should take what they are doing at word and deed. The point of Donald Trump is that Donald Trump is right about things. We should give him power and he should use that power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
My sense is you have some mixed feelings about him, but not everybody does. And this sort of very consistent application of authority across the people he's named. J.D. Vance, the difference between Mike Pence and J.D. Vance is J.D.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Vance said explicitly in the whole run up to the vice presidential sweepstakes that his view of what went wrong in the first administration is between the bureaucracy and the staff, too many people are trying to inhibit Donald Trump. and that what he would do is tell Trump that he's got to get rid of these generals and he's got to get people who will do what Trump actually said.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
The view of Trump's fans, the view of his allies, is that the first term didn't go well enough because they had too much opposition from Republicans in Congress who talked Trump into things they shouldn't have talked him into and too much opposition from the civil service and even from Trump's own staff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I think a very simple heuristic of why these terms are so different is that the most important member of the Trump family, Trump aside, in the first term was Jared Kushner and maybe Ivanka. And the most important member of the family in the second is Don Trump Jr., Right. Kushner brought in a bunch of inhibitors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
He brought in mainstream figures like Gary Cohn and, you know, Kushner represented other parts of society that, you know, were sort of mixed on Trump and they wanted him to do certain things and not others. And there was maybe a productive tension. McConnell, you know, was majority leader. He was more powerful than Thune is. Paul Ryan was speaker. He's more powerful than Mike Johnson is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
In the second term, you have Don Trump Jr., who brings in much more right-wing figures. They're accelerators, not inhibitors. Accelerationists, in many cases, explicitly. You have Elon Musk, who believes the likeliest problem is Trump doesn't go far enough fast enough. And you have a weak Republican Congress that is further cowed by Musk's money. The... It could be good or it could be bad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
But the Curtis Yarvin take that we need a more monarch-like figure is clearly being tested out. Like the view, just as you said about software engineering things, is that you often need a benevolent dictator. Now, I don't think Trump is benevolent. Other people do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
But the view that what is being attempted here is something much more centralized in its power, I think is actually a shared view of what's going on. It's like a consensus reality we have, not like an argument over reality we're having.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I think the important part of madman theory is that you're not actually a madman. You just got to convince people. Yes. Yes. Look, I am in agreement that we should talk to everybody. I don't know how many people followed the 2008 election closely who are watching this. There's a big fight in that election between Clinton and Obama about should you negotiate with your enemies?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And Obama's view is we should. We should talk to anybody. And Clinton's view was more nuanced than that, right? Certainly we shouldn't at this juncture. And during his presidency, Obama did a deal with Iran on the nuclear question. He negotiated with Cuba. He had very direct negotiations with Russia. He did it, importantly, unlike Donald Trump, without alienating all of our traditional allies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
One of the things that I think is important to say about Trump is that the difference between Trump and, say, Biden or Trump and Obama is not that Trump will negotiate with Putin and Obama wouldn't. It's that Trump is realigning our alliances. He doesn't really seem to want to negotiate with the Europeans, or at least he wants to do it from a more hostile position.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
He wants to make Canada the 51st state, not treat it as a longtime ally. The thing here is not that Trump is negotiating with our perceived enemies. These are his perceived allies, and he's turning our traditional allies into perceived enemies. So with him, I think it's important. Like, I am very much on the view of you talk to everybody.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And it was my view going back, you know, for some years that like that it was clear that the Biden administration needed to be pushing for negotiations over Ukraine. There was not going to be some end game here where Ukraine got all of its territory back. But, but, but, but. I don't think it is reasonable to look at what he is doing and say that is the norm that he has broken.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
The idea that we should have negotiations. I mean, many different presidents have done many surprising things. And he's rolled back a bunch of those things. You know, Republicans have been very unfriendly to the opening that began with Cuba.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And that was like a big deal in American foreign policy, something Obama did against very heavy criticism, something that cost him and cost Democrats in Florida and among Cuban voters in the following election. So I just don't think that that's that unusual thing with Trump.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I also just want to say with the tariffs, you sort of wanted to cut the tariffs off from Doge and cut the tariffs off from this broader agenda. And one reason I don't is that I think the way to understand tariffs... Look, you can be accomplishing many different things with tariffs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
One thing, which was a theory that you heard from some people around Trump and sort of fit what he said on the campaign trail, which was Trump's position on the campaign trail was that he was going to lay down 10 to 20 percent tariffs on all imported goods and 65 percent tariffs on imported goods from China. So I think that's a bad idea for a bunch of different reasons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
But what that is, is a stable change in the cost structure for all corporations and all trade. And then different players can make different investment decisions in the long term based on this new cost structure. What he's doing, as Derek said, and I've had these funny experiences where I'm literally doing a podcast with a tariffs expert, and I'll be talking about the auto parts problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And then my producer will be like, he just delayed the tariff on the auto parts. What he's doing with these tariffs that you move on and you move off and you negotiate over endlessly, and I've been told this again by people around him, is their view is that America had leverage it wasn't using. And tariffs in particular are a form of executive control.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Trade deals need to be negotiated and ratified with Congress. Trade deals are something you have to do with the rest of the system. But tariffs are something Trump can do unilaterally. And one thing Trump wants is control. That is the through line of virtually everything in his politics. Tariffs are a leverage-based form of foreign policy. They are America has the biggest economy in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
that anybody who's gonna get into a trade war with us is going to suffer worse than we will. And there's something where the president can use the tariffs because of authority granted by Congress some time ago for other purposes. He can use them with a huge amount of discretion. So you can use them on the one hand to say,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Well, I think that we've lost too much manufacturing and the dollar is undervalued in other places and so or overvalued rather. And so we want to use tariffs to make the cost structure differently so that people to locate more of the supply chains and the intermediate manufacturing in the United States.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
But you can also use a tariff to say Colombia has to take the people we're deporting and they have to take them in chains. And Donald Trump is doing both things. And the reason I think it's important to keep those in mind is that what Donald Trump wants, what connects a lot of different things, is that he wants leverage over things. I think it connects to Eric Adams.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And you were sitting here talking in New York City. Eric Adams is a Democratic mayor. Donald Trump is no truck with Eric Adams. He did not support Eric Adams. Eric Adams is not his natural ally. But what he had over Eric Adams, he realized, was a leverage that he could get the cases off of Eric Adams and then get Eric Adams in his pocket. So Donald Trump stepped in to save like the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
like the corrupt Democratic mayor of New York City, not because they have a deep ideological alliance, but because then Donald Trump would have power over New York City and its policy that he wouldn't otherwise have. The thing that connects Trump, Trump is a very old school politician. He's very relational. He's very 19th century. He's looking for the angle. He's very zero sum.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
He's looking for things to give him power. Doge is a way of getting power over the bureaucracy. Tariffs are a way of getting power over the international financial system and foreign policy and breaking sort of traditional alliances. Maybe in his mind, even getting Canada to become the 51st state, maybe getting Mexico to change its immigration policy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Trying to weaponize the Justice Department against Derek Adams is a way of getting power over a Democratic mayor. Some of what they're doing with grants and money is a way of getting power over sort of other institutions in American life. Again, you could think it's bad or you could think it's good, but it is coherent, right? I think it's bad, but it is coherent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
And the people who think it's good think it's good for Trump to have power. Again, with the Eric Adams thing, they were very explicit about this, right? They said that it is worthwhile for the president to negotiate over his policy objectives and to trade things to get his policy objectives more fully carried out. And so Eric Adams went from saying New York City would be a sanctuary city.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
They'd aggressively carry out deportations. You can think that kind of transactionalism is fine. I think in this case, given that it's about corruption, it wasn't. But the idea, Trump's idea, that the problem is that the president doesn't wield enough power here the way he does in Russia, the way he might in India, the way he might in China.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
Trump has spoken very openly of envying some of the powers these other people have. I think it's a consistent governing philosophy that needs to be taken as that, right? I think sometimes you describe one of the difficulties Trump poses is sometimes if you just describe what he's doing, I think quite neutrally, people say, oh, you're criticizing him. You're anti-Trump. But I...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I'm just describing what he's doing. You can think it's good or it's bad, but like the fact that he wants to irrigate power and find points of leverage and tariffs are one, what he's doing through Doge is another, what he did with the DOJ is another. It's all very consistent. The question is really then just whether or not you have, what your normative view is on Trump having that much power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
I know I'm jumping in again, but I'll do something quick and then pass it to you. I'm not... a huge fan of the experiment framing because amidst this experiment, people are, through USAID, as my colleague Nick Kristof has documented, and potentially further in other ways will die, lose homes, be scammed by things. So I feel like experimenting with the government at that level is very dangerous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
But assuming democracy survives, Democrats, if they're going to make the government work again, are going to have to become less rule-bound than they were. I have this line that the problem with the personality type of the right is it's autocratic now, and the problem with the personality type of the left is it's bureaucratic.
Pivot
Democrats Divided, Market Roller Coaster, and Southwest Airlines
there is an Orwellian-ness to this, but efficiency needs a goal, right? I mean, if you want a government that can be more efficiently taken over by Elon Musk's companies, and yeah, Doge is doing great. If you want a government that can more efficiently do things in service of the public and execute big public projects, I'm like, no, it's not doing great. Goals here really matter.
Pivot
Democrats Divided, Market Roller Coaster, and Southwest Airlines
And what they're doing is trying to build something that is more open to high levels of crony capitalism, right? It's a sort of an oligarchic takeover, right? I just want to fight that.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And I don't know, as we were both writing about this, it was just clear to me we were both going to write books. But also you and I, I think, share a... I think it feels more common at this exact moment. Maybe I'm wrong. But it felt less common to me then. Like a genuine interest in optimism, maybe? Yeah. but an openness to optimism definitely about technology.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
I don't know if you remember this, but I have a strong memory of this. I think this is probably before the supply-side progressivism piece, but I remember calling you, being like, hey, I'd like us to chat. And calling you in 2020 or 2021, I was on Mission Street or Valencia maybe in SF, just to talk about crypto and what you thought of it. He was like, what is the position I should hold on crypto?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Which seems like it has some modest use cases, but seems like a huge amount of energy around something that does not have an obvious way that it is improving anybody's lives. And the culture around it seems very grifty and scammy to me. But you were the person I called on it because I thought that...
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
you would have a sort of openness to the idea that it would be good, paired with a politics that would protect you from the idea that it either must be good or must be bad.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And so that was, I think, one of the reasons I thought there was enough affinity here when I sort of reached out to you on the broader book idea, because, you know, a lot of people are going to write, you know, over this period, there was no getting away from the fact that, That liberalism was going to have to face problems of supply, constraints of supply, right?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
That's what the YIMBYs already were. That's what, in halting ways, a climate movement was already doing. I mean, it's doing it in the ways it is more comfortable, right? Putting money to build things as opposed to releasing the things that make those things hard to build. But you could see that we would need to figure out how to build fast.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
There are a bunch of things here that I thought were just clearly going to be part of the agenda and or already were. But in terms of building a usable politics around it, yeah. You know, I thought that you had a orientation and like a bridge to technology and a sort of more positive corporate thinking than a lot of other people.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
You know, than a lot of other people I could have imagined covering it. And again, I think it's why your abundance essay hit as hard as it did. Because you could see the better future, not just the worst past or the disappointing present. And so to me, that was the bridge. At a certain point, I was like, it doesn't make sense, I didn't think, for us to be racing each other to this.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
But also, I felt that we would both bring things to the project together. that the other one wouldn't. I wasn't exactly sure what they were. You never know how a collaboration is going to work out before you do it. But I just sort of had a sense that we were temperamentally similar enough in the important ways and then different enough that it could be additive.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
I'd also say I found writing my first book super lonely. I did not like it. I like being in collaboration. All the great projects of my life from... You know, blogging in a weird way was like such a tight community in its early days.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And I want to say here for a moment, like, rest in peace to Kevin Drum, who passed away yesterday, Cal Pundit, who was one of the early wonkish bloggers and huge inspiration and, you know, even a mentor to me and to Iglesias and a lot of us who came up after him reflect the work Kevin was doing. So I'm sort of, I'm really saddened by his passing.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
But, but blogging was a real community effort, you know, and that was at the American Prospect and Wonkblog, like, you know, and I had this, you know, wonderful partnership for many years with Dylan Matthews and Sarah Cliff and Brad Plumer. And, you know, at my show with Roche Karma and my editor, Aaron Redica, I like doing things with other people, I think best in collaboration and communication.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
So it seemed like a cool thing to do to, to try to join forces with it. Yeah. I'm curious what that was like for you. I sort of called you and I'm like, hey, I got an idea. What was your thinking on it? So long as we're really doing the deep history here.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Well, as long as we're just doing intellectual history, I want to just call out... it's nice to be able to do this because I hope we are very generous with credit in the book. Like, this is not just our idea somehow by any means. And so, you know, in that, a couple of other people I just think were really, really important in this.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
There was the whole progress studies world, which was sort of started by Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison. Jason Crawford has been, you know, a big driver of, I think that was very, very influential in the book you were writing sort of before it morphed into our collaboration.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
The Niskanen Institute had an awesome paper that was very influential and was an essential part of my sort of first piece on this, that economic mistake piece called – I don't remember what the paper was called, but its idea was cost-push socialism, which was this idea that it wasn't just accidental that you often had –
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
very, very high prices for things that liberals wanted to subsidize, that it was the obvious outcome of subsidizing a good that you were at the same time choking off the supply of.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Yeah, and Steve Tellis, I think, is a big influence here. Really, really thoughtful, smart guy, political scientist who I've known a very, very long time. And then at that same, also at Niskanen, they've had a great state capacity project under Brink Lindsey, who wrote a book that was in part about, that was very much about abundance.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Jen Polka, whose book on Recoding America, that came out after and during the period we were working on this, but she's sort of affiliated with them now. So Niskanen has, I think, really been a very important intellectual hub of this kind of work. You know, and then there are a bunch of writers. It wasn't just the Yimby movement.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
There are a bunch of writers who are doing just extraordinarily great work on housing in particular, but in ways it generalized. So I think Matt Iglesias just is a genuinely unsung hero of just like forcing progressives to take this seriously for a decade, right? He had a Kindle single back when people used to do that called The Rent is Too Damn High.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And I mean, I don't remember what year that came out, but it was some time ago now. And he was just really, really pushed that. Jerusalem Dempsis, who is at Vox and is now at The Atlantic. And my partner, Annie Lowry, is also at The Atlantic. She has done – I mean, Covered Housing Forever, we are always talking about these things.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
But she had this idea that she published in 2020 about the affordability crisis. And she published this right before the pandemic hit. And it's like an idea I've never stopped thinking about. And now everybody uses a term, I think – And I'm her partner unfairly without crediting her. Like everybody talks about the affordability crisis, but it's her term. And the affordability crisis was this idea.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And again, people thought the economy was really good in 2020. So they weren't talking about its problems, but she writes this piece and says, look, if you look at the things that people really need to build a good life and a secure life, if you look at housing, if you look at education, if you look at elder care, if you look at childcare, if you look at medical care, uh,
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
There might be others I'm forgetting here. They're all skyrocketing price and have been for a long time. And so consumer goods are really cheap. Inflation looks very low. But if you are looking at these things that are essentials to like actual human beings, you can do without a flat screen television. It's really difficult to do without good medical care or a home.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
There's a huge problem building here. And then you have the pandemic hits. And so like that piece had gone very viral, but it sort of cuts the, I remember like it just like, I think that piece comes out in February of 2020. So it just cuts or maybe even early March. It cuts the conversation over that. But that had always like bounced around in my mind.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Then you have pandemic inflation, which focuses everybody on prices. And then the pandemic inflation recedes, but now they're really looking at prices and the affordability crisis prices don't, the affordability crisis prices don't recede, right? Because that's been this multi-decade building problem. And I think that's a really big part of this.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
For me, that was one of the things that clicked into place. Oh, the next era of politics is going to be different. Like we were focused on demand and insufficient demand for a really long time. I mean, that was a problem post, in some ways pre, but very much post financial crisis.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
But the affordability crisis is going to define the economic conversation in the post pandemic period, because it is a completely unsolved problem. Nobody even has a really good way to solve it right now. And we're going to have to think about it. And that's going to have to be supply oriented. So while we're doing just like this intellectual genealogy, and I'm sure I'm forgetting a
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
But I think it's worth saying all these people and many more had huge parts of the ideas that as we were trying to weave things together and think about them were really important.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Yeah, Noah's idea just is of, what is it called, checkism? Checkism, yeah. Where progressives only care about the number on the bill, right? Like, you know, whatever is a bigger number on the bill, a bigger number on the climate bill, like, that's better. But without actually following through to be like, how much did that money actually build us? This is great.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
I think it's a line sort of like, you know, like, numbers on legislation don't build things. Like, what actually matters is how much you built with it. I've always thought that's a really... not just like a useful concept, but a very true critique.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Ooh, that's a good question. Um, I ended up doing a lot more historical work than I thought I would be doing. So I ended up being very influenced by Paul Sabin's book, Public Citizens, which as long as we're, I actually, I'm so excited we're doing this show and just like can thank all these people.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
But Mark Dunkelman, who just has a new book out, it's very along the lines of ours called Why Nothing Works, and it's great. He had written this piece years ago about why it was so difficult to rebuild Penn Station, which sucks, right?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And I think that if I'm remembering it correctly, I think that piece turned me on to Paul Sabin's work in the book Public Citizen or Public Citizens, which was very much about the rise of Naderite progressivism, the rise of Rachel Carson, the rise in the back half of the 20th century of a progressivism that was actually about or liberalism actually about checking what the government could do.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
So there's New Deal liberalism that's about expanding what government can do. And then you have these people like Nader who emerge and say, no, no, no, no. Government is devastating us right now. It's not doing enough. What it's doing is bad for the environment. It's building heedlessly. It's captured by corporations. And a lot of those points were correct.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
But they build this architecture of legislation and process and regulations and a huge nonprofit movement that exists to sue government and exists to slow government down and exists to force more veto points into government.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And in doing that, in following that line of historical work, I think I began to understand something I had not understood about progressivism, which is how unbelievably insufficient progress The idea that the cleavage in this country is liberals think government is good and conservatives think government is bad really is. Like, that's just not how it works.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Conservatives often do think government is bad, except if it's national security government or the police state, in which case they think it's great. And, like, you can just pick up anybody you want and now, I guess on the date we're talking, throw them, have ICE throw them into a jail in Louisiana because you don't like the things they've said.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Concerns are very comfortable with a government, I think, of terrifying levels of surveillance and police state power. But liberals are very divided in their soul on government.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
There's a liberalism that wants big government and a liberalism that is terrified of government running over marginalized communities, doing the bidding of corporations, not being good enough to liberal constituencies like unions. And so trying to unearth
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
what was happening that we had chosen to hobble government in these ways, what had happened that this was so true in California, which was a state where you couldn't blame everything on Republicans.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
That was something I don't think I realized I'd be doing, you know, when it began, like I needed explanations for things that I could, I could see the thing was happening, but I didn't understand why it was happening. I'm curious what your answer to this is, though.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
How is it different than or what did you learn, I guess, that you were not expecting to learn or what did you go down a rabbit hole on that you found revelatory?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
I wonder how much we're just going to bore everybody with this, but we eventually had a theory of the book and how to write it. That each chapter should be doing three things simultaneously. It should be really good at walking you through a fundamental problem of supply that has been caused or could be fixed by policy. So chapter one is housing supply.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Chapter 2 is really built around high-speed rail and decarbonization. Chapter 3 is state capacity. Chapter 4 is about invention. And Chapter 5 is about implementation. So it should be doing something on that level. And you should really, you know, I hope if you read this book, you'll learn a lot about housing. You'll learn a lot about decarbonization.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
You'll learn a lot about how we build things in America and its legal system. You'll learn a lot about how China captured solar technology and the production of it from us and sort of took that over. You'll learn a lot in a great chapter Derek did about penicillin. Then it should be giving you a piece of the history here.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And then it should be giving you a sense of like one of the fundamental ways we have thought about doing things that doesn't work. And so chapter one is about housing. One, because I do sort of buy into the housing theory of everything, as it gets called, that housing is just fundamental.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
People need a place to live, but more than they need a place to live, or maybe not more, but alongside needing a place to live. if we are going to have a strong economy, we need to let people live in the economic engines of the economy. One of the things I was most proud of, I think on a book, like the joys of it, given that most of writing a book is absolutely miserable.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
One of the joys of it is when you come to a really new economic idea. I'm sorry, a new idea, a new epiphany. And I was really struggling with this question of, well, why should we, why do we care so much how many units we build in San Francisco? I mean, you can live in other places. Montana's not full of people.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And the sort of theory that I eventually, I think, cracked was that the big megacities are increasingly the engines of the American economy. And they are the frontiers, that the frontier of the, you know, we used to worry about the closing of the frontier because we thought it was like this expansive land America had that was the guarantor of our prosperity. But it was never the land.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
It's the ideas emerge in the land. In a modern economy, what matters is being on the frontier of ideas, being able to turn those ideas into technological or somehow commercial or service-oriented artifacts that you can then sell domestically and globally, right? That's how the economy actually works.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And then there are things that happen that are not high productivity sectors, but really benefit from being near them. Like you make more money as a barber working near the Googleplex than you make as a barber working in rural West Virginia. And this is just an absolutely ancient path to mobility and prosperity.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
A huge amount of the inequality we cut in the 20th century just came from people moving from poorer, more low-productivity areas to high-productivity areas. And then we sort of threw that into reverse. And now people leave those areas. I actually find this research so shocking. But people are leaving.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
working-class people are leaving the high-productivity areas to move to low-productivity or lower-productivity areas because it's just too expensive to live there. You know, there's Ganong and Shoa, whose work I quoted in the book. You know, they have this sort of thing about, like, the janitor and the lawyer.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And it used to make sense for a janitor to move to New York City, and it made sense for a lawyer to move to New York City. Both of them would make more money there. Now it still makes sense for the lawyer to move to New York City, but not the janitor, because a janitor can't afford a house, can't afford a place to live.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
So in gating the megacities by constraining the supply of housing such that they became inaffordable to live in, what we've done in addition to making them inaffordable is shut off a driver of opportunity. You in that chapter sort of quote some of the Raj Chetty research too that shows people tend to be more innovative living in innovative places. But interestingly,
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
They innovate in the exact same ways of the place they grew up in. If you're a kid, you're the son of somebody who works in a factory in Northern California. You're the son of an auto mechanic. You're more likely to patent in computer science because you grew up there. Whereas if you grew up in a place that was big in the defense industry, you'd be more likely to patent in the defense industry.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
This is really, really good, interesting research. And so we are shutting off, you know, the ways in which you used to have, you know, kids grow up in a kind of ecosystem of innovation and expertise and connections. And we have the research to know that really matters.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And so the fact that like, while I was working on this book, like I knew people who were firefighters who were driven out of living in San Francisco because the city they were protecting from burning down was unaffordable for them, right? That just fucking sucks. Like that's immoral in my view. And so, you know, housing is at the center of a lot.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
It actually really matters for innovation because cities are engines of innovation. Like almost all of the major AI research is happening within what, 50 square miles in America? 50 square miles. There's not one big AI firm, not one frontier level AI lab in New York, not one in Los Angeles, not one in Boston, not one in Miami, not one in Atlanta, nowhere, right?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
It's right where it is because of these eco, these agglomerations of talent and knowledge and know-how they are really hard to replicate elsewhere. You cannot just do it by force. You actually have to build the thing. And it's sort of a little bit random. And then once it's built, you have to let people be near it. And so housing to me was very, very central.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Because one, I think the Yankees were the best example of a supply-side liberal movement at that moment. And two, it just kind of affects everything else.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
But then three, you could see what I think was at the heart of a bunch of liberal pathology here, which was the fundamental skepticism of growth and the fundamental idea that had taken hold in California, among other places, that having more people move to your city was bad. it was gross. They were like locusts, right?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
I have these quotes from the San Francisco Chronicle in this period where they talk about people coming there. It's like the people already live there are treated like stewards of the land, the authentic voice of the Bay Area, of Marin, of San Francisco. And anybody who might want to come now is like a consumptive horde.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
I mean, these are not like the people writing the My Land column in the San Francisco Chronicle are not like indigenous to the region. Um...
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
So I don't know, that's a lot of answer, but that for me, it was like so much was bound up in housing and to sort of understand what had happened, you had to begin untangling it, not just as a supply and demand problem, but as an ideological problem, like as a way that liberalism began to think really incorrectly about the places it governed, about their function.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
You had Michael Bloomberg talking about like New York as a luxury good. It should not be a luxury good. It's not a penthouse. It's like an escalator.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And, you know, so we just really gotten something so wrong there that trying to untangle that, not just at the level of we need to build more houses, but how had we thought about this such that we had gotten into this situation in the first place felt really necessary.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
So I did over the past couple of years. My not as good as abundance language, but the best language I ever came up to describe what I was talking about here was a liberalism that builds, which people really like. But often in my own head, I thought of this as a liberalism of the details.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And what I had come to believe is sort of related to Noah Smith's Czechism concept was that even pretty policy-oriented liberals tended to turn off once the bill was passed. And they didn't dive into the details of what was happening after it. And they tended to be affectively hostile to say the view that, oh, these regulations are really unwise.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Or there's some reason we've ended up trying to build a $1.7 million public restroom in a small park in San Francisco. And so one of the things I started trying to do was really, really, really dig in. to what was happening in projects that I cared about.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
I got a email, I got connected to somebody who had helped in the construction of this affordable housing complex in San Francisco called Tehanan. At another point, I ended up looking into pretty deeply what was going on with something called Measure HHH in Los Angeles, which was a bond measure to build affordable housing.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
It was not built that like, you know, some number of years later at this point had built like a couple thousand units and they were costing about $700,000 per unit, right? These publicly subsidized affordable like housing units were costing as much as a full place would cost you in Denver. So something was wrong.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And I began like going to these places and talking to the people who were building the homes or building the complex or people consulted on the building of that kind of thing or the people in government who were working on it. And what I began to realize when I would say, okay, tell me how this got to $700,000.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Or in the case of Tahanen, which was built much cheaper and much faster, is done through modular construction, etc. Tell me how you avoided getting there. And what I basically began to hear a lot about was...
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
the layering on of standards expectations uh processes and additional goals so it sounded good to have a big preference in the san francisco contracting rules first for minority-owned contractors and then that was made illegal by the people of california so then it became for small and micro-sized contractors but that was shooting cost up because like one way you get um
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
if you are a very efficient contractor who's really good at building things, you're probably going to get more revenue. And in getting more revenue, you actually became someone disfavored by anything that was getting public money to build affordable housing in San Francisco, right? Like we actually were punishing publicly companies for being good at what they did.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
To say nothing of like, if there was like a national company that was really good at using modular construction on an offsite factory to build affordable housing cheaply, like we just, you just couldn't do that. Um, so they were able to get around a bunch of, you know, there were more things, right?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Like there was a mayor's disability commission, which these, uh, these projects were already ADA compliant, but the, the SF mayor also had their own sort of like disability agency that had to come in and do its own inspection and would come in and say, like at the end of a project, we don't think these doors are quite wide enough. You got to change all of them.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
That would cost however many hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and take another month and a half because you had to find this contractor who could do it and they were already overbooked. You just begin to hear story after story. I was talking to people who did this work in Los Angeles. Again, affordable housing publicly subsidized. This is the housing that liberals tell me they want.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
They don't want this market rate bullshit. They want affordable housing. Here, the people of LA, the taxpayers, they put the money into it. What have they done? Well, because they wanted to lower the amount of money that the taxpayers was paying, what they were trying to basically do is use the taxpayer money, the bond money, as a seed funding.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And if you could use it as seed funding, then it would be like, okay, cobble together other money from philanthropies, from public tax programs, right, that are there to do things like address veterans, homelessness, etc., to finish it. So, you know, in theory, you're stretching the amount of money that the taxpayers were offering. You were leveraging it.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
But when I talked to the comptroller, he was like, oh no, we've made a terrible mistake, right? The guy who was actually trying to figure out how to save the people money, and I have this quote in there from him, Ron Galperin, I think it was.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
But he basically says, look, like what they're doing, and I heard this from everybody, is that they're having to cobble together all these different funding sources, right? And each one has its own strictures, its own audit structure, but it also wants different things. Like this one is for veterans housing, for homeless veterans. So you need to find these homeless veterans, right?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
This one is for pregnant women who have been in abusive relationships or people with mental health issues. And all these come on their own timeframes. And, you know, you got to wait for the funders to make their decision and the timing costs money. And then you've, you know, missed something else. And so that costs you money.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And like the people you're going to contract with, they've moved on to another job. And it was all very well-meaning. The green building standards are very high for these affordable housing complexes. Somebody, Jasmine Tong, was telling me, who works on affordable housing, was telling me about situations where
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
She, you know, the planning commission made them or someone made them put in like really, really high level air filtration because like the affordable housing was near a freeway, which is on the one hand fine, but great. Like I want everybody to have really good air filtration, but it's much better than was normally required.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And the alternative was these people were living in a tent under the freeway. Right. We were really letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. And of course, there were like the NIMBYs coming out to things. But everything bagel liberalism was the idea. And it was coming.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
I'd watched the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, which at the center of that movie, there is like an everything bagel where you truly pile everything onto the bagel and it becomes a black hole from which nothing can escape.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And it began to feel like that to me, that, you know, we were piling so much on that these things just weren't getting done or they weren't getting built quickly enough or they weren't getting built at a level we could afford. And so we weren't solving the problem.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And then I'll try to wrap this up, but I saw it happening nationally because we had just passed the Chips and Science Act, which I was a very big supporter of. But that at its core is subsidies for semiconductor fabs in the U.S., And then I noticed that the notice of funding opportunity, it had all these things about like preferences for minority subcontractors.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And, you know, did you have child care on site? And what were you doing to increase the percentage of women in your construction workforce? I'm like, does the Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation really know how to change the percentage of women? in like construction, like if we want to do that, fine, but just pass a bill that addresses that directly.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And there were all these different things, right? You know, how are you going to, you know, how are you going to make this climate friendly? A bunch of good ideas. Like I supported them all individually, but we were making this project harder. And like me and like we were doing something that might fail entirely.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
The history of industrial policy is not a history of whenever you try it, it is successful. And so what I began to see was like liberalism had adopted this approach to implementing things that passed where it would pass a thing and say, we're addressing affordable housing.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And then like in all the meetings to turn that intention or proposition into action, it was larding them up with all these other goals that then was making the final thing fail or making it really late or making it really expensive. And of course people were losing faith, but also we just weren't solving the problems.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And like that was a culture, like that is what not was, is currently, it is still happening today. That is a bad culture, right? It is a culture where we are, like, not saying no to people in process, and then we are disappointed in the outcomes. And we need to be working backwards from the outcomes. Doing this stuff is hard. You need to be focused.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And I do think... Because they're cultural.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Before you ask your question, I want to get you to expand on something that you jumped quickly because I know you're driving the, you're the host on this one, but I want to get you to talk about this for a second because you drove a lot on things like the NIH and the slowdown in biomedical research, which one, a lot of people don't believe is happening, right?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Ben Wallace was in his mostly very kind New Yorker piece, but was like, look at this, we have these GLP-1s, like, you know, like, how much more biomedical advances do you need at the moment? But two, at this moment, you have Elon Musk and Doge and RFK Jr., you know, now in charge of the federal government and slicing through the NIH, the HHS, the CDC, right?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
They're putting critics in charge of these agencies. They're firing huge numbers of scientists. You know, How is how what is your critique of the way we are funding science or what is the book's critique, I guess, because I'm at least somewhat involved. And how is it different than theirs? Right. When you when you're seeing them do this.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And in fact, you like we end up quoting research from the guy they've eventually put in charge of the NIH. How is what you want? How's what we want different from what they are doing?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Remind me again what the original one was. When were we doing it?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Take it away. Yeah, like maybe May or June of that was when we were thinking, as I remember now. I think given what happened, that would have been a pretty tough news cycle to enter into. I think that the upside and the downside, I don't even want to call it upside and downside, it's just the reality of it hitting now. is you have two things that affect the way it's going to be received.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And not just the way it will be received. I will say for myself what I am trying to do with it. One is that the Democratic Party, which is a party I am first and foremost trying to influence because I think that I share more of their goals and so they might be open to more of my and our ideas, is at a real liquid moment. And it doesn't know what it needs to be next time.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
It has exhausted the fumes of Obamaism. Because that's really where we've been. Barack Obama represented a different tendency in politics. He created a different coalition. He had a really strong governing philosophy. And then after him, Joe Biden, Joe Biden would not have won in 2020 if he had not been Barack Obama's vice president. And now there were real differences in how Biden governed.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
I mean, he had a huge influx of people from the sort of Elizabeth Warren movement. They are much more attentive to, you know, monopoly and concentration power. They did a lot, frankly, that I think is pretty abundance-like and helped inspire us in the book around the Inflation Reduction Act and so on. But in terms of the story Joe Biden could tell.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
it was ultimately the exhaustion of the obama story right he was the sort of sort of the the final the final part of that and then kamala harris did not have time to come up with a new story right and she was in this strange bind between you know was she going to run as a champion of an unpopular administration or was she going to unconvincingly try to separate herself from an administration where she was the vice president right so
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
In the end, the loss has, I think, destroyed that period of the Democratic Party, right? It's done. It needs to figure something else out. And I think the, you know, and I think everybody understands that the thing it needs to figure out is going to have a lot to do with cost of living, because Donald Trump is not lowering the cost of living. And that was the dominant voting issue in 2024.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And Democrats want to, you know, run against Donald Trump. He's not brought down the price of eggs yet. They see that as his real vulnerability. But ultimately, to be a nationally dominant party, they're going to have to have genuinely... They need to rebuild credibility and cost of living. And so I think that's one way that our book enters into a live conversation there. Then you have Doge.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And Steve Tellis keeps needling us that Elon Musk and Doge are what he calls dark abundance. And the point is that... We are saying in many ways government is inefficient. I was listening to a clip on Search Engine, great podcast, from Elon Musk's eight-hour marathon interview with Lex Friedman where he says building high-speed rail in California is basically illegal. And he is not wrong.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
He is not wrong about that. Now, Musk is going in, and Doge is going in, and instead of reimagining what government can do, expanding government capabilities, making government work, he's just destroying the thing. Now, his defenders would tell you, oh, this is what he does. He turns things on and turns them back off, or turns them off and turns them back on to see what breaks.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
But this is not like running Twitter. And he is, when you fire a bunch of really talented people, which they are doing, you can't just turn that back on. they want ideological control of the government. And they have not, you know, I've heard other people say, oh, they're doing zero-based budgeting. That's not fucking zero-based budgeting. When you do zero-based budgeting,
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
and you try to start from zero and have things justify themselves, you have measures and metrics and goals upon which they can justify themselves. If anybody has offered that in the Trump administration to the people working at USAID in a real way, I have not heard it.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
In fact, like as Mark Rubio just canceled, I think it was 88% of the contracts, a bunch of the people who were supposed to justify them were told they had more time to do so. And the cancellation notice came before they were even given their opportunity to make the case for what they were doing. They are not trying to make government work better.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
They are trying to break government so it is a thing that they can control. But because they are attacking government inefficiency, at least in a rhetorical way, it sort of intersects with us. And my fear is is that the Democratic Party, the liberal movement, which had already become, in my view, way too pro-institutional, you know, as you like to point out, they don't,
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
They like all those yard signs like in this house, we believe in science. They don't actually mean science. They believe in scientific institutions. They believe in the institutions. Right. And when those institutions are not good for fundamental science, like they don't know, they don't care. They don't try to do anything about it.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
So I'm worried it will push Democrats into reflexive support of everything in government. I don't think I've ever been particularly naive about Doge. Some people I really like, I think, were more optimistic about it than they probably should have been. But there is a need for the thing Doge pretended to be, right? We actually do need efficient government.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
I think I say in the excerpt I published something like, we're sort of caught between a party that doesn't make government work and a party that wants government to fail. And I would like to create or be part of creating some third poll. I would like a liberalism that is absolutely rip shit if government is failing, but because it wants it to work and will make it work.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And frankly, I would like a conservative movement that maybe has different goals than I do, but actually wants a functional government, not just to retool it as a zone of corruption and ideological mastery. But You know, this is going to be a very different moment. Like, we're talking to a Democratic Party reforming itself.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
We're in, you know, we're watching people try to destroy much of the government that we are interested in, you know, facially using critiques that sound similar. It's both much more, in a way, possible for the ideas to take root, and it's much more dangerous for them.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Because, yeah, you could just get this rally around anything the government does affect that actually would not, in my view, be healthy. Like, I hear Gavin Newsom out there on his podcast, and I like that he's doing a podcast. I think it's good he's bringing on MAGA people. But the big news he's making is about, you know, whether you're going to have trans kids in sports, right?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Um, the problem for California, for Gavin Newsom to even run for president is housing. And California is not like you can look at Fred data. It does not have more private housing starts today, or at least in January than it did in January of 2015. That's what I want to hear him confront. Because he believes in more housing. What's gone wrong? Why has this been so hard?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
That's the thing where I want the liberalism to ask, why did it fail in governing? I think in some ways these cultural arguments are easier for it to have than to actually ask, why are so many people leaving California because the cost of living is so high after years now of democratic reform?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
rule and in an era where there's not one statewide elected republican like that's what i want to hear democrats confront and i worry that doge is going to give them a way to not confront it because you know if you're it's like easier to be the alternative to people just trying to thoughtlessly wreck and corrupt government than the alternative to yourself who has maybe not been you know running government in a way that is really what people are looking for
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
I do believe this. I mean, absolutely. My line on this is that the personality of the right is too autocratic and the personality of the left is too bureaucratic. And I think that has a lot of dynamics, including, by the way, Matt Iglesias has this line, the crank realignment, right? RFK Jr. used to be a Democrat. Now he and the people like him are Republicans.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
The Democrats used to have, like, big parts of it that were very skeptical of corporations, even of the government. I mean, when we're talking about this new left, the new left was skeptical of the government, right? And it was inside the party. And, you know, we're trying to unwind some things that it did. But that balance... between different tendencies, I think, was important.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And as the Republican Party has become the party for cranks, for skeptics, for people who believe in conspiracies, and has attracted both the left and right-wing variants of this, right, the QAnon people and the anti-GMO people, on the one hand, that's made the right way too skeptical of systems, institutions, structures.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
On the other hand, the left has become too rallied in defense of the professional classes, of the institutions they run. Now, I think the culture, the governing culture in which you really try so hard, at least domestically, not to disappoint your coalition is more new. I think that the move from the Obama to Biden eras was significant there.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
I think that the Obama people are much more willing to make decisions. Hard choices that made people in their own coalition angry, you know, obviously on foreign policy that happened a lot with Joe Biden, but I think he was himself a lot less engaged on domestic policy.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And that led to a kind of coalitional approach where you're always trying to keep, you know, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and AOC feeling happy with things. And right in the end, they were huge defenders of his when, you know, a lot of the party was trying to push him out. And obviously on the right, you needed to hold the moderates.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And so that sort of ended up in this highly consensus-oriented culture. And The other thing is that there is a level not just holding the coalition together, but of just believing in everybody's expertise and trusting it. You know, Jen Palka tells these stories of the way the lawyers will interpret statute more and more and more rigorously in order to defend against any possible lawsuits.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
On the other hand, you know, Musk and Trump routinely do things that are facially illegal and like, fuck it, sue me. You know, like, I'll take the lawsuit. Like, we'll fight that out in court. I'll see you there. I got great lawyers. And I don't love what they're doing.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
But if there's one lesson I would like Democrats to take from them and from Doge, it's that a lot of things, strictures, rules, you know, interagency, you know, working groups that they were treating as
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
solid are just norms like you can break a lot of that uh i don't want to see these mass idiotic firings but i do want to see civil service reform it is too hard to hire and fire in the civil service that was true four months ago and in a legal way it is true today and so yeah like i but i also want to see i think you solve the problems you know how to look for
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And I don't think this is just like a personality type. I mean, I know lots of very grumpy people in democratic governments. I think it actually came to be a view, a view around inclusiveness, a view around what makes a good meeting, a view in what kinds of approaches to governing had created problems in the past.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Adam Smith, who's a House member from Washington State, has been very eloquent on this point. And I think that view that approaching government this way, like really trying to say, well, what are the environmental justice groups saying? Like, we really need to listen to them. They represent something we wouldn't necessarily know otherwise.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And like, they need to be signed on to this if we're going to believe this is fair. That culture, like, it was not just a temperament, it was actually a response. It was a response to periods when, frankly, you did need more of that. And it overgrew itself. Like anything, the solutions of the past become the problems of the present, and now you need to swing the pendulum in the other direction.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And you need to swing it harder than I think the left has been comfortable with. And the way I know you need to swing it harder than they're comfortable with is we are not on pace to meet our decarbonization goals. And even in the big blue states that say they want to build more housing, we are not building significantly more housing. So we are not achieving our goals.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And that's where, in the end, what matters is being outcome-focused. There are a lot of ways to do process. And there are ways to do process that are very inclusive and do listen to things. And at some point, somebody has to say, does this actually fit the outcome we have promised people? And if it doesn't, then you have to start making hard choices and disappointing people.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And, like, that's what leadership is. And I think there are a lot of people, a lot of Democratic governors who want to lead. You can't tell me. Josh Shapiro has actually been very good on stuff like this. I think Wes Moore has been pretty good. I think Gretchen Whitmer has been pretty good. But you can't tell me these Democratic governors, like, they don't want to lead.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
I think in many ways they've been convinced that they shouldn't. Or they don't have the ability to overwhelm the interest groups in their own legislatures that are stopping them from passing some things. But I think that's changing, too. I don't think this is all a personality type that we need psychologists to unwind in the Democratic Party.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
I think it is also a set of ideas that they've been convinced of about what makes for good leadership. And they got overly convinced. And now we actually need a little bit of a return to strong leadership where somebody, some executive at the end of the day is there and says, I hear you. And the answer is no, because what we have promised is we're going to build these homes.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
We are going to lay down these transmission lines. We are going to build these windmills and site these solar panels. And these problems we are solving are so important that that we are going to accept these trade-offs. And that, to me, is the corrective we need, not to burn government down, but to make it deliver what it has promised.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And vice versa. This has been so fun, Derek. Thank you for doing this.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Ah, 2021. You know, even when I go back to that essay, you can... You have moments as a writer, I know you do, and where a bunch of things that have been bothering you for a long time cohere into one thing. You realize you've been thinking about one thing and not many. And so there are a couple things floating in my head over the 30 years before that.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
One is that I felt progressivism had developed a dysfunctional relationship with technology. And this had happened, in my view, after the 2016 election, when a lot of Democrats turned on social media and the billionaires who ran social media platforms as prime reasons that Donald Trump had won.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
But also, and I don't actually think this next part is wrong, prime reasons that the public commons were in. becoming filled with toxicity.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And because the leaders of social media platforms sort of represented tech, they had become synonymous with tech, and they were these, you know, mega and quite unaccountable billionaires, I felt that the left had, in its anger at these companies, begun sort of giving up on technology. But then at the same time, two other more positive things were happening. One was the YIMBY movement.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
which was the sort of emergence of a strain of, at least at that time, I would call it progressivism, centered in California where I was living, which was not just saying we should build more houses. I think this is actually a quite important distinction. And I would really recommend Connor Doherty's book, Golden Gates, which is just a fantastic history of the Yimby's. But
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
It was not just saying we should build more homes. It wasn't just like, here's a supply and demand curve. It was saying that was illiberal. that you were not a social justice-focused progressive.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
If you lived in a big economically important city like San Francisco or Palo Alto, and you were fighting the building of these homes, it had to be part of the self-definition of progressivism that we were making it possible for the working class to live in the cities that were the engines of American opportunity.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And I felt the YIMBYs were, and I am a YIMBY, the most exciting ideological faction to emerge in a very long time. And I was very involved in climate change policy reporting.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And it had become very clear to me that there was only one pathway, a very narrow, narrow pathway, which I don't actually think with Donald Trump we're all that likely to be on in the way I'd hoped, but at that point we were maybe on.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
By which, if we were going to avoid the worst of climate change, it was going to be because we had technologically accelerated solar, wind, and battery technology to the point that we can mass deploy it at a price point competitive with fossil fuels. And that might actually work. That a politics of sacrifice was going to fail.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
But a politics built on clean energy innovation and then rapid deployment might work. But we did not have, if you looked at how we built things in America, in blue states, the policies needed for rapid deployment. So we were going to need something like yimbiness for clean energy. And then the final thing, and then I'll shut up with this long thing, was I moved back to California.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
I'm a Californian. I lived in California from when I was born to when I left college to go to DC. I then lived in DC for 13, 14 years, 2005 roughly to 2018. And then I went back to California and And the state, in my view, just was not doing well.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And when I looked around at why it wasn't doing well, why it had become so unaffordable, why it had such a bad homelessness problem, why people were so upset, why so many people were leaving, right? California was and is losing people. It was really just clear we hadn't built enough. The things we had wanted to build, like high-speed rail, had not come to fruition.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
We did not have enough mass transit. There was no functional infrastructure. I shouldn't say functional. There is no good subway system in Los Angeles. It would be such an amazing city if it had a good mass transit system. But we weren't building enough homes. We weren't building enough clean energy to meet our clean energy goals.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
The California's problem was not its commitment to justice, but its commitment to expanding supply. And that was like the set of things like knocking around in my head that somehow cohered into that essay.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Well, a few things. So one, I also was, I was inspired and slightly dispirited by your piece because I read it and immediately was like, oh shit, he cracked it. Like he cracked the right way to think about this. which was this had to be a positive vision. My nature, but definitely my piece and my approach was critique. We are doing this thing wrong.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
And what I so admired about your piece and about your work broadly is that there was an optimism in it. There was, what if we did it right, right? In the same way that you said I flipped the yardstick on what to judge progressivism by, I think you flipped the yardstick on what was this about, right? It wasn't about what we did wrong. It was about what we could do right, the world we could have.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
I also remember that.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
Well, let me say something on healthcare. Cause as you know, it's like, that's my, that's where I come from, man. You were talking about the discourse generation on abundance. And one of the things I did not totally expect was for at least like some faction of like the Bernie left to see it as this big threat to them, which I don't think it is.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
But I want to sort of make this connection a little bit more explicit. Go back to health care. I used to cover the various single payer bills that would arise in different state legislatures and nationally, and all these different ideas for how to do universal health care. And there were ideas that were much more expansive, much more generous than what we ended up doing in the Affordable Care Act.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
One of the truly lethal weak points of all of these that would not come in when you would pull it the first time, like, does it sound good to you if Medicare gives everybody health insurance, but would come in immediately when people begin to debate it, was the fear of rationing.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
the fear of wait times, the fear of not being able to get what you wanted or what you needed, which happens in other countries, right? It is not a fake thing. And frankly, it happens in our country. I would always say that the way we ration care is by price. If you can't afford it, you don't get it. In other countries, they do waiting lines and different things.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
But imagine you did do Medicare for All. Imagine some future... They've got gets elected and wants to do something more like Medicare for all. If you gave the kind of highly expansive health insurance that Bernie Sanders's version of this envisions to every American, what you would have immediately is a supply crisis in medical care. We don't have enough doctors for that, not enough nurses.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
There are key areas where we don't have enough hospitals. You could very much have shortages of certain kinds of drugs. We just saw this with Ozempic in a certain way. You would need in order to do the kinds of things we want. to create the kind of equity and possibility and social insurance we want, you actually need the supply of the thing you're trying to give people.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
And so this connects, I think, in some ways to the left-wing agenda, but it also then connects, I think, to what you're talking about, the affordability crisis, a coined term by my lovely wife.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
One of my like potted models of politics right now is we had a long period in American politics where what defined economic politics were problems of demand, wages, how many jobs we had. I mean, jobs day, right? Jobs day today was a big deal for a long time and still is. But the fundamental issue we had was an economy for a very long time and running at low demand.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
So in early 2020, my wife Anne Lowry at The Atlantic, a colleague with Derek, writes this big piece about the affordability crisis. And her sort of point there, this is early in 2020, a month before COVID hits, at least to our shores in a big way. She says, look, like behind this economy, people think is good.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
If you look at the core things people need to build their life on, housing, child care, elder care, health care and education. it's all getting really expensive and has been for a very, very long time. It's eating up more and more and more of people's budgets, even as they're getting these wage increases.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
And you could sort of see this unusual divergence in the data between like an economy that looks good and people feel pretty good about as consumers, but they're really getting upset about this. And you can really see it beginning to stress their budgets. Then we go through the pandemic and then comes inflation. And when inflation is, it's like a saliency portal for prices.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
We go from all the attention on the economy being the demand side, wages and jobs, to all of it being on prices. And even as the price increases in consumer goods begin to slow down, what is then left is like everybody's been staring at prices for a long time. It's like, oh, shit, housing, health care, elder care, child care. This has all gone completely unaffordable.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
And energy has become a really big question in this, too, with Russia and decarbonization. And so I just think we're now in a period that the future is going to be defined on affordability. We are in a period where the big economic problem for a long time is going to be things people need the most of. We just don't have enough of them.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
And I think it is actually pretty intuitive to people that you make something cheaper by making more of it. And I think one reason it is good for Democrats to admit this is that there is a political power in admitting your own mistakes. There is something that is unlocked, controversy, controversy, interest, and to some degree, credibility. Democratic states are losing people, not for no reason.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
The reason hundreds of thousands of people are leaving California and Illinois and New York every single year for Texas and Florida and Arizona, we survey them. It's cost of living. We've made the places we govern too expensive. And that's because we have not created enough of the things that we need.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
And I think that requires not just a self-examination, but a message that says, we actually fucked up. Right. This didn't happen completely by accident, but we understand the way in which we fucked up and we have a plan to not do it again. And I don't think that what is energetic in that is like every individual housing idea.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
I think it is the generalized notion that the people came before me, whoever this imaginary politician is. They made some mistakes. We're in a different era now. And what I have is not the continuation of the last 30 years of liberal policies that you're already not happy about.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
What I have is something new that takes the best of that and then is alert to the things that you're upset about because in this last 30 years, things got worse for you in a bunch of real ways.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
I want to be a bit more of a bad cop on this, which is to say that everything Derek says is right. But also, there are a lot of ways antitrust harmonizes here and that If I were just trying to think about the nicest way to say this, my friends in the whole problem is oligarchy part of the party. And I believe a good part of our problems are oligarchy.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
It's time to work on the discourse.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
But there are certain kinds of problems they're then willing to see and certain kinds they're not as willing to see. So in housing, I find a lot of them get obsessed with this idea that private investors are buying up a bunch of rental housing. And this is an extremely small part of the market right now. And it's just not the main problem in housing.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
But because it is the villain they are comfortable having, it is where they want to put their focus. Kamala Harris had I was very excited when she brought out her big plan for for three million to build three million units of housing. But her plan never would have achieved anything like it.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
It did have a big thing about trying to do something about this private investor buying up housing issue, though. So you can really get, I think, taken off the track when you're very concerned with how policy codes. A thing I found really interesting in Zephyr's review was that, is it something good and small like zoning reform? And try doing zoning reform if you think it's small, right?
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
Or something bad like deregulation. Okay, interesting, right? Deregulation is a word that I think shuts liberals down a bit. And it shouldn't. A lot of what we're pointing out in the book is that the player that is often most regulated is not the market. It's the government itself.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
If you want to understand why the government can't build public housing effectively, I mean, in many ways, the federal government building public housing is now functionally illegal. It's been regulated out of possibility.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
If you want to know why we didn't build California high-speed rail, if you want to know why it's so expensive to build affordable housing in a lot of liberal jurisdictions when you trigger public money, it is because of the regulations we put on government.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
In the same way that deregulating the market can often allow corporations to do things they couldn't do before and move faster, you can decide in any given instance if that's good or bad, deregulating the government can do the same thing.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
We're inspired here not by some conservative legal theorist, but by Nick Bagley, who was Gretchen Whitmer's former lead counsel and has this great point about the procedural fetish among liberal lawyers, where he kind of makes this whole argument that
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
For some reason, liberals are always on the one hand defending against the Republicans' effort to wrap the government in paperwork and administrative procedure as a way of slowing it down. But they never realize that if they could unwrap it themselves, it could actually speed government up. So in general, I don't – like I'm quite left.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
What I'm trying to build here is a much more capable government. So I consider myself on the left edge of this American debate. But we are trying to be much more agnostic. The problems are different in different places and in different domains. But if you had done Bernie Sanders' Green New Deal with the old environmental laws, you simply couldn't have built it.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
You just cannot build fast enough for what he wanted to do unless you really restructure that. And so again, going back to the core question that we're trying to get people to focus on in the book, what do we not have enough of and how do we get more of it?
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
like to me what separates the left and the right are goals it's not just it's not means but i find that a lot of people in this debate they think they seem to think what separates the left and right is means right the right wants to deregulate the left wants to regulate but what i care about in regulation is whether or not it's achieving my goals or not if i'm regulating the market
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
in a way that harms my goals, like making it too hard for developers to build market rate or affordable housing, then that's bad, even though my answer there would be deregulation. And if I've regulated government in a way that doesn't make sense for the government to achieve my goals. But what matters is the goals.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
And too often, liberals are, I think, very symbolic in this and not outcomes oriented.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
All right, I'll give this a shot and then Derek can jump in where I failed. We're trying to get Democrats in this case, but it could be both parties, to ask a pretty simple question, which is what don't we have enough of and how do we get it? And that seems like too simple of a question on which to base much of a politics. And then you look around.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
And if you're in California, as we're in California right now, we don't have enough houses. And there are reasons for that. We don't have enough clean energy to meet our clean energy goals. And there are reasons for that. We don't have high speed rail. And there are reasons for that. And if you go to the national level, we didn't get that rural broadband we were promised.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
Thank you. Thank you.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
And there are reasons for that, even though $42 billion was passed in favor of it, or that nationwide network of electric vehicle chargers. And so at a pretty basic level, liberals should care that the government delivers the things it promises to you. Like that should be baseline. And if it doesn't, nobody should be more pissed than we are.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
And if we're not, then over time, the government is going to get a reputation for not delivering and people are going to turn to political movements that promise to make it deliver in another much darker fashion. So that's the sell here. Government should be about giving us more of the things we need to build our life on. It should be about making a future better than the past.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
Some of that better future is material abundance in different ways, energetic abundance, houses for 25-year-olds to live in that they can afford. And we've been failing at doing this. And so we've got to be able to work backwards from the failures and fix them.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
But that was weakness. I mean, I think we all see that now. Yeah, that was Barack Obama had the direct connection to his own coalition that allowed him to pretty easily say no to its internal members. Yes. And Biden and he believed on domestic policy didn't. Or at least felt he did. And I would say in a different way Hillary Clinton in 2016 did it.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
They were both trying to do what Obama was able to do directly. They were trying to do it in a mediated fashion, right? Do it through the groups, through the institutions, through the sort of coalitional work of party building. And both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden are party builders. They're both creatures of the party. They work coalitionally.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
That's fine, but not at a time when people fundamentally don't like your coalition. And it doesn't work if you then don't govern in a way that makes you popular. Look, I've been trying to say this to people recently because I think it helps get at something.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
why the Liz Cheney effort failed, but other things might succeed, which is that the salient fact about independence is not that they don't really like the other party, though that's true. It's that they don't really like your party. And the way Democrats tried to appeal to independence in 2024 was to try to bring in other people who didn't like the other party, right?
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
We, but also Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney, don't like Donald Trump. But actually, the problem was these people didn't like you and you needed to communicate to them on some of that. You understood why they didn't like you and you were going to make an effort to address it. When people have doubts about you, you have to like not just deepen their doubts about the other people.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
You have to actually allay allay their fears about you. And I think that's a place where we've had some failures here. And look, my view is this book, this argument, it critiques the Democratic Party from the left, from the right. It critiques just failure. And I think that's not actually that ideologically coded or different ones are maybe coded ideologically differently.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
But to what was said a minute ago, we actually do have a ton of examples of politicians who run with a somewhat arm's length relationship to the Democratic Party. And Bernie Sanders is unusual in that he's been doing it sort of from the left for a long time. But if you look at who overperformed in the House – in 2024, they're the House Democrats trying to reformat the Blue Dogs, right?
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
They're a sort of centristy, you know, it's your Jared Goldens, it's your MGPs, it's a bunch of them, right? And so we actually know this politics works pretty well. We have a lot of evidence of what works.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
And the politicians who are somewhat independent and criticizing Democratic Party, look, I don't like where John Fetterman has gone for a million different reasons, but he has become more popular, not less, in Pennsylvania.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
And like people don't like the parties and they have a sense like the most powerful special interest in this country, I think to a lot of Americans are not just like the rich people, but the parties themselves. Like the parties themselves are just collections of special interests.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
And if you can't show in some way, like send a costly signal that makes some people mad, that shows you are willing to say no to people on your side, then what they believe is you are completely corrupted by whatever that thing is that corrupts everybody else too. I do think we have to be honest about this. I'm much more a Democrat. But people think the parties themselves are zones of corruption.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
And the reason the politicians who run to their left and to their right often succeed better is that it is a way of showing independence from a kind of special interest that most Americans don't like, which is like the miasma of political dealmaking that are the two main political parties.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
Thank you so much, man. Thanks, man.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
I mean, do you think it would work?
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
I'll say a couple things on this because I think about it on a couple levels. Because there's one level on which there's a part of me that wants to say, not my job. And lie that I wasn't thinking about this while writing the book.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
It's a call to arms. So I think a couple of things. One, I would just say as a matter of experience, like you sort of don't know how things will play, how the material works. So they try it out on the crowd. And so we've been sort of working on this in the back room for a long time. Then it comes out and people actually, it is memetic. People do want to argue about it.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
And nothing I have ever done in all of my years of politics has been picked up as quickly by actual politicians. So clearly they see something in it. Both I think something substantive, right, which is a framework for confronting some mistakes liberals have made and also a framework for thinking in a different way about the future, but also something political.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
I think the other thing that I would say, though, in terms of what I think works in it politically, is first, I think liberals have found themselves in a dysfunctional relationship with the future. I think we have lost most of the people who are the big futuristic influencers. You're Elon Musk's, you're Marc Andreessen's. And it's not exactly that I want them back at the moment.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
I have some disagreements, it turns out, with them. But that question of what is your relationship to technology? What is your relationship to what is coming? Is it fundamentally optimistic? Are you telling people a story where they can imagine a life that is better for them in the future, rather than a life that is built around different kinds of sacrifices?
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
And I actually think this is a pretty profound, I don't think I've said this anywhere, I think there's a pretty profound difference that American liberalism, it is a transformation of American liberalism from, say, Obama to more or less the present. You know, the critique of Obamaism, as you know better than most, was it was teleological, right? You know, the arc of history bends towards justice.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
It was relentlessly optimistic. So, you know, the audacity of hope, right? All of it is about looking to a future that you, on a very fundamental level, believe is going to be profoundly better, morally better, economically better than the past. And a lot of the rhetoric is very abundance-esque. And I think that liberalism in the years since got into a rhetoric of sacrifice.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
Moral sacrifice because we are a nation built on sin and on stain. But also environmental and material sacrifice because climate change is a disaster. Deforestation is a disaster. Biodiversity is a disaster. So it wasn't always said explicitly, but I think liberalism had stopped having a theory of technology because it didn't like the technologists anymore.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
It was quite consumed with arguments, understandably so, about the deep injustices of the past. And I'm not saying they were not true or there, but it was a tough politics. And its environmental side, as things got worse, it had a lot of trouble. arguing what I think we should be able to argue, which is that the clean energy future should be fucking awesome.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
Not like our present, but a little bit worse and more solar, but amazing. We are doing miraculous things with this technology, electric vehicles made by whomever now, are better than what came before them in a million different respects, right? That is how Tesla became like a player in the market.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
There's a lot to be excited about, but you have to orient the resources of government around making that true.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
I say all that because one of the things we're trying to do with abundance, and it's why we started with this little sci-fi even yet for a couple of pages, is try to say that you win in politics when your vision of the future is both more exciting and more credible than the other people's vision of the future.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
And I think it's been a while since Democrats have offered that kind of future forwardness. I think if you look at Bill Clinton, he represented the future very much against H.W. Bush and Bob Dole, certainly. I think if you look at Obama, he represented the future against John McCain and then Mitt Romney, who sort of stepped out of the 1950s. And since that, it's been a little harder.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
I think you got to win the future back.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
It's a little harder this year for two reasons. One is that Donald Trump is a huge liar. And so he often says things that are untrue or he doesn't follow through on things that he's otherwise talked about, right? If you had believed Donald Trump in 2015 and 2016 when he said he was going to raise taxes on people like himself and give everybody great healthcare, like you would have been misled.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
Although I do think that the Republican agenda, the platform they authored, is actually worth reading and assuming is sort of his intuition about that set of things. And it does have a lot of explanatory value in my view. And then Harris was not the nominee until very, very recently. And so she has not written a campaign book.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
She has not gone through a policy process with her advisors releasing what her agenda for the country is. I do think it's actually useful to read her older books. And I just recently read Smart on Crime, her 2009 book, which is a very interesting way of thinking about who Harris was in California politics. Again, like not a great book, but very revealing about her. But it's hard.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
Donald Trump is somebody whose words you cannot trust. And Kamala Harris hasn't had as long to shape words in a coalitional process as candidates normally do. So in terms of what this election is about, that makes it a little bit harder.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
But because Donald Trump has been the leader of the Republican Party for some time now, and Kamala Harris is the vice president of the United States as we speak, you can get a much better idea than you could if both candidates were unknown quantities. But again, the thing to look at is... is what they have already said aloud.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
And to try to look at that in full, like not in the way a newspaper reports it or a cable news clip or a social media clip reports it, but like actually go watch the full speech, actually go read the full speech, actually go read the old book. You really get a lot out of it.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
For the most part, the people who ascend to the top of political parties and become their nominees broadly reflect what that political party has been trying to do, where it has power for some time. Donald Trump was genuinely an exception to this in 2016, to the extent anybody is. And still, for all that... He came into office. He tried to repeal Obamacare.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
He passed a bunch of tax cuts for rich people. He did a bunch of deregulation and loosened environmental standards. I mean, a lot of what he did was bog standard, like what Paul Ryan had wanted to do and what Mitch McConnell wanted to do before Donald Trump was on the scene. And that reflects something very real, which is presidents are leaders of coalitions and
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
And they have to pass legislation through Congress. And they can't even write the legislation. I mean, Congress has to write it and introduce it in a technical way. And then it gets amended there. And you got to, you know, get through the filibuster unless you're using the weird rules to get you around the filibuster.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
So to understand what they're going to do, it's like this mixture of what are they saying? And what is possible and supported by the balance of congressional power they're going to be facing? And those are knowable things. Now, again, this is pretty different than the question of who's going to win the election.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
It's different than looking for inspiration, which is, I think, another very reasonable thing people go looking for in American politics, different than looking for hope. Right. And so I think this is a tough balance.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
I think a lot about the 2020 Democratic primary where debate after debate after debate after debate began with like 15 to 25 minutes on whether or not the candidates supported Medicare for all and to the extent they did support Medicare for all. Did they really support abolishing all private health insurance the way Bernie Sanders did?
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
Or did they support abolishing only some private health insurance the way Kamala Harris did in what was considered a triangulating gaffe for her campaign? And this was, to anybody who knew what Congress looked like at that juncture... it was like what kind of castles they supported building on the moon, right?
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
It was completely clear that Congress was not going to abolish all private health insurance in any relevant scenario of the election. And I mean, it's fine to talk about that, you know, once or twice, because it reflects important things about, say, how Bernie Sanders understands the economy. I mean, he means it, and I deeply respect, you know, the way he was willing to bite the bullet on that.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
And it inspired many people. And, you know, over time, it might make something like that more likely. Right. There are all kinds of reasons that simply asking the question of what is politically possible right now is not the only question you want to ask. But there did emerge an unreality because they were acting as if Congress didn't exist. But Congress does exist.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
And so you have to you sort of have to match the rhetoric with the coalition. Welcome to political science class with Ezra Klein here.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
Yes. I mean, take the debate over Biden stepping aside. The most consequential thing that happened in that entire fight was that two days after Joe Biden send a letter to all congressional Democrats saying, I am running. I have the primary votes to be the nominee. This conversation is over. Thank you for airing your views. We are done talking about this. I am not dropping out.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
You are trying to defy the will of Democratic primary voters. Enough is enough. If you keep criticizing me, you're empowering Donald Trump because there is no other choice but me here. Nancy Pelosi... instead of leaking something anonymously, went on Morning Joe and said, we are all really looking forward to the president making this consequential decision he has before him.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
We will support whatever he decides on this question of whether or not he should run again for president. We understand that he probably wants to wait on this until after the NATO summit. I mean, it was...
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
The single most remarkable act of political genius I have ever seen, and we could talk about why, I mean, it was a completely nonlinear intervention into the debate, simply asserting that he had not made the decision he had. But what was crucial about it was that it happened in public.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
And if none of those people, starting with, I think it was Lloyd Doggett of Texas, a Democratic member of Congress, those people who were publicly saying things that Biden should step aside. If they had all done it privately, all those sort of leaks about, oh, Democratic members are very upset in private, none of it would have mattered. What mattered was public.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
What mattered was what happened in public. This is also true, by the way, for Donald Trump. Donald Trump says all kinds of things to people in private. Now, he's a little bit unusual because what he says in public often doesn't matter that much either. Right. But it is what happens in public that matters.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
All those Republicans in 2016 who would privately say Donald Trump should not be the nominee and then publicly say, well, of course I'm voting for Donald Trump as a nominee. It was a public thing that mattered. I'm not saying there are never instances where private things matter because, of course, there are. I am saying that...
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
I really advise people who want to follow the election, not just sanely, but predictively, that they actually watch and read the things that candidates say and do for their consumption in public. The reason candidate books are important is that the candidate is answering a genuinely important question, which is, given their entire life and all of their accomplishments,
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
How do they want the entire public to see them? Given this one opportunity to craft their entire story for public consumption, how do they do it? It doesn't mean it's the honest story. It doesn't mean it's one even they really believe. But that is such a consequential question to answer as a human being that it really matters.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
It wasn't about noticing it was a problem. Everybody knew it was a problem. It was about allowing yourself to know what you were noticing, if that makes sense. My private experience of this was basically all at once, and I happened to be at the White House on the day this happened. Biden had decided not to do the Super Bowl interview.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
He was not doing interviews in general, and definitely not hard interviews. He was running behind Donald Trump. So running behind in the election and then not doing the Super Bowl interview was just a completely wild political calculation, right?
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
Yes. So, you know, brands pay God knows how much for 30 seconds at the Super Bowl. The president, by custom and tradition, gets an interview that's like four to seven minutes, call it. So that is, you know, if brands pay five, 10 million for 30 seconds, you're dealing with something like $80, $90 million in free media. You're going to say no to that when you're behind? Right.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
And then the special counsel report comes out, Robert Herr's document, saying that Biden's memory is terrible. He comes off like a well-meaning but doddering old man. Biden gives a press conference where the point of the press conference is to rebut the report, and he's very angry about the report. And then when he answers a question from a reporter, which he just doesn't do that often—
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
He mixes up Egypt and Mexico, which isn't the biggest deal in the world, but said to me that even in these moments where he really has to perform, he's not able to reliably do it. He barely gave any press conferences that year. That conference had one role, which is to say my memory is fine. This report was a partisan hack job, and he managed to create the very problem he was looking to avoid.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
And so my view after that, I had sort of gone into that day around the Super Bowl thing being like, is he really up for this? And come out of it saying, he's not. He's not up for this. He's not able to reliably perform at the level you would need to do to campaign aggressively to make up a gap in the polls here. Okay.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
I don't think I was that unusual in saying that Biden probably shouldn't run again. I think that the thing that I added to the conversation was taking what were the alternatives seriously. Yeah. So... When I would talk to people in the Democratic Party, they would basically say, look, maybe we should have had a primary. Maybe it would be good if we had a primary.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
Then we would have sort of known how he runs. But it's over. There wasn't a primary, right, as Marianne Williamson and Dean Phillips. He's the nominee. There's nothing that can be done. And my view is that that wasn't true, right? Democrats have a convention. And if Biden could be persuaded to step aside, one of two things could happen.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
Either the nomination could be sort of given to Kamala Harris, the vice president, or there could be some kind of open process that would be then decided at the convention. Right. And the series of pieces I did were about fleshing that out, right? Both fleshing out my view that Kamala Harris was underrated as a political talent. I didn't know by how much.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
Turns out by a whole lot, it would be my current view. But that people should view Harris as a better bet than Joe Biden. And that even if they did not view Harris as a better bet than Biden, which at that point many in the party did not... an open convention process with this sort of contest leading up to it would reveal who in the party was a better bet than Biden.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
And I think in the sort of competition we've seen for the vice presidency, where you saw sort of Waltz and Shapiro and Buttigieg and to some degree Mark Kelly, Roy Cooper of North Carolina, Beshear of Kentucky, you saw there was actually a tremendous amount of political talent in the party. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gavin Newsom.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
If there had been an open process, that talent would have revealed itself. And so I was trying to say that February was not a time when people should have fatalism about this. That there wasn't now a primary process, but there still could be a party process. And the party had the power to persuade Joe Biden not to run.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
And if Joe Biden could be persuaded not to run, the party had a series of options it could decide between. And all of them were better than the thing it was currently barreling towards, which was a situation where Biden, for reasons of his age— had a collapse at a key moment or a series of key moments, which I think is more or less what happened at the debate.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
I don't know. That's the honest truth of it. I... It's funny, nobody's asked me that exactly. I felt after that 24-hour period... I had had a kind of internal cognitive reshuffling where I'd been sort of pushing away all this stuff about Biden's age, and then I wasn't. And the moment I wasn't, the internal experience was like, oh, no. Like, this is actually really bad.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
Donald Trump is going to win this election. Like, that was how I felt. And... My job is to say things I think are true in an analytically rigorous way and in a well-reported way, but to say things I think are true.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
And when I stopped pushing away what I thought was going to happen here, like, when I stopped ignoring, like, the videos going around of Joe Biden calling a world leader by a dead world leader's name. Yeah.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
Or Joe Biden having these moments where he'd sort of trail off in the middle of a sentence, when instead of saying to myself, Republicans are sending around all these, you know, badly edited videos saying Joe Biden's senile, and he's not senile, and I don't believe he's senile now...
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
But instead of asking that question, if I just like looked at the polling, OK, 60, 70, 80 percent of people, depending on the poll, say Joe Biden is too old to be an effective president. I knew that most Democrats had opposed him running for reelection in polling. And these videos are going around.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
He's getting murdered among young people in polling, right, because they're seeing all these videos of him looking ancient on TikTok. What's he going to do about this? Nothing is the answer. He cannot do anything about it because fundamentally it is not true in the way Republicans are saying it is true, but it is true in the way the voters already believe it is true.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
And having had an opportunity to rebut that, he's not taking it. He's either failing to rebut it or he's not even taking the opportunities to be seen in a way that would rebut it. There's a real problem here. Then he gave this sort of strong State of the Union and everybody's like, Ezra's an idiot. But I don't know what I thought would happen.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
It's not like I thought I would release a podcast into the world. And all of a sudden, Joe Biden would be the nominee anymore. What I thought I was doing when I really sat down to sort of map out those episodes was I understood my role as... Getting people used to the idea of alternatives because I thought there was going to come a point where they had to break glass and take one of them. Right.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
And so, again, the two alternatives to me were getting people over this idea that Kamala Harris is such a weak candidate, that she's a weaker candidate than a Joe Biden suffering from this level of age-related diminishment. Right. and getting people over the idea that an open convention was unthinkable if Harris wasn't, in your view, a strong enough candidate.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
And it's very hard, I think, now to overstate how pervasive the belief in Harris's weakness was inside the Democratic Party. That was the single biggest thing I faced when reporting this out, right? Everybody would say, fine, like what you're saying about Biden is true, but Harris is probably the other candidate if he steps aside and she cannot win. And the estimations of her were very, very low.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
I thought and argued back then that they were too low, but I didn't know how high they should really be. But to me, I thought people had to get used to the idea that there were other options because it seemed not 100%, but it seemed very plausible to me that at some point over the next three or four or five months,
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
before the convention, something was going to happen that was going to lead to Joe Biden being down five points in the polls and people realizing he was not going to make up that gap. And if it happened before the convention, they could do something about it.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
It was also, by the way, possible that something would happen where Biden just had to step aside for health-related reasons, and they should know what the options were in that case, too. But I sort of saw myself as socializing and thinking through how these different things might actually work. Why was Harris... seen the way she was in the party? Did that actually make sense?
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
And how did this thing that used to be very normal in American politics but wasn't normal anymore, an open convention, actually function? And then the Biden team scheduled the early debate, which whoever did that, I think, is accidentally an American hero. And that created the moment in time for the party to act.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
Yeah, and I guess the other thing that you'll hear in my thinking across this whole episode, which connects in a way I wouldn't have expected, is that the way I think about politics is in terms of institutions and coalitions, first and foremost. I am not candidate-centric in the way some people are.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
I have done a lot of work trying to get people over the idea that American politics is all about the president. The president is very important, but not the only actor in the system. And I think one place that I just really disagreed with people for an extremely long period here was I felt the Democratic Party was a stronger institution than they did.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
And by the way, that went for people who are the official Democrats, like the chair of the Democratic Party, for instance. And people would tell me all the time that the Democratic Party didn't have the capability to do something like this. We're in the age of hollow parties, not strong parties. After the debate, there was all this talk
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
about how, you know, this was a decision only Joe Biden and his family could and would make, right? This is for them, you know, nobody else has influence. And I thought that was crazy. The piece I did right after, which was another audio essay, the piece I did right after the debate was called, What is a Democratic Party For?,
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
And parties are informal networks in the way they're constructed in American political life, but they are still important. And they had all kinds of leverage. I mean, if Biden was losing support among members of Congress, that would be an important signal to him. If donors were fleeing him, then he wouldn't have the money to actually run the election in the way he wanted to.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
If media elites who he read or who other people read, right? Parties are informal structures of influence, of actual leverage. And I thought there was more... power in the Democratic Party, more institutional strength than a lot of people did.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
And I felt that because I had watched the Democratic Party over a series of elections make highly strategic decisions going back to when in 2020 it has a sort of overnight coalescence around Biden, where Pete Buttigieg, who was a candidate who won Iowa, Joe Biden didn't win Iowa, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropped out at the same time and endorsed Biden after South Carolina. And
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
In, you know, 2018, there had been very good candidate recruitment and selection in the Democratic Party, and they often had not gone with a candidate in a primary they wanted, right? They went with the candidate they thought could win. And I watched then a similar thing happen in 2020, and they did a really good job in 2022.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
And there's this idea like, oh, the Democratic Party can't possibly make hard decisions to choose its most competitive candidate. Yeah. I was like, who says it can't do that? It now had the governorships in Michigan, in Pennsylvania, in Wisconsin, in Arizona, in North Carolina. You're telling me this party can't make strategic decisions?
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
This party, when faced with a choice between doing the thing it needed to do to win an election against a MAGA candidate and falling completely apart, it was just going to fall completely apart? Why would you believe that? That was not what the party had been doing. But that was about thinking about politics institutionally, about seeing it not as, you know, just one person.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
The Republican Party is trickier. I mean, it does still have very coalitional dynamics, but it really is under the thumb of Donald Trump to the point that the co-chair of the RNC is Donald Trump's entirely unqualified daughter-in-law, Laura Trump. The Republican Party is just a personality cult, but the Democratic Party isn't that, and that's not who Joe Biden is or was.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
And so there's just, yeah, you could look at that, I thought, and see it had options, and if it decided to act, it could act. And it did. Yeah.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
Yeah, I only speak here for my personality type, which other people have other experiences with social media and being on there than I do. I don't think I would have written that piece if I was... a ongoing participant in online liberal social media. It's funny because I ended up joining Twitter or X or whatever again for like three-ish weeks, I think.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
At the height of, was Joe Biden going to step down? because there was a weird moment where sentiment was shifting in such a minute-to-minute way that I thought that was the place where that conversation, one of the places at least, where that conversation was actually playing out and people were being influenced.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
And then there are people like, ha, I see you've proven that X is really where the influence is, and I'm back off of it now. And yeah, my view was it was useful information to me in that couple of weeks, but I never would have done the initial pieces had I been on it.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
I don't think it would have been consciously, oh, I believe this and I can't say it. I don't think that's typically how human beings work. I mean, it is sometimes. But I do think what we allow ourselves to see...
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
has to do with what is good for us to see and i think there's a lot of psychological evidence in favor of this point and so the the sorts of arguments we find compelling i think there's almost an automatic self-protective device coming in from the the community um and you know we are very social creatures and we don't want to be at odds with our communities
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
I just want everybody to like me and for everything to be copacetic.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
Yeah, exactly. And so to think independently, I can't be connected to that many people.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
I think I got into politics in my own memory of it through this mixture of 9-11 happened when I was in high school And all of a sudden, politics seemed very important. It seemed like it cared about me, whether I cared about it. And my older brother was, is very into politics in Los Angeles and was, is a very big influence on me. And those two things together started pulling me in.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
First, I think there's a question is, is the thing you want actually to stay sane? Because it might not be. I don't think, look, I think that you could have a sane view on this election that would be, if anything, more telling by just reading the New York Times once a day. I think that would be plenty. It's plenty of election information.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
Add in Politico if you want or the Washington Post, and you're going to know plenty. And you'll know actually a lot of deep things that you won't get on Twitter. And you know things that are contrary to what people in your circle find interesting that you won't find on threads or whatever.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
But it's not going to be in a way like the most fun and exciting way to follow the election. I mean, there's a lot of memes happening right now and people are excited and there's, you know, weird intellectual currents. And so maybe you do want to plug into that. When I say I'm not on some of these things, it doesn't mean I'm not looking at them.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
And I'm probably looking at them right now more than I want to. And I know that doesn't make me a saner person. But it is interesting. And there are things that are happening there right now that are important. And so I do think it goes back to this question of, well, what do you want? I wouldn't pretend that.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
that you're being informed in the best possible way about American politics by checking in constantly, like, 42 times a day on the election. There's not that much information happening on any given day that is meaningful. And if you want to know more about American politics, you should actually be looking at, like, the coverage of house races and local media and, you know...
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
I'm not sure I initially got into it in terms of following elections, and I've never really thought of myself as somebody who's primarily in politics because I find the horse race interesting. But elections decide who has power. Power decides who can make policy, and policy is a thing that I am in this to follow and to hopefully influence. Yeah.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
Thinking a lot about the economy and reading the forecast reports from, you know, good economic forecasters because whether it was a recession in the fourth quarter is actually going to matter more than what the memes are saying today.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
But if, you know, if you just want to be plugged into the election, if you want that thing jacked into your vein because it's important and that just feels like where you got to be right now. I don't have a moral... Case against people doing that. I don't think elections, high stakes elections, are built for sanity. I think they actually are deranging.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
And one thing that is true is that you can have perfectly good information about them, but also miss the structure of feeling around them. if you don't allow yourself to become a little bit deranged.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
I think you can't understand, for instance, the role JD Vance is playing in this election and what is happening around him on the Republican ticket unless you jack yourself into an information feed that is deranging wild and, like, will make you a little bit of a worse person. But if you're not willing to do that, you are not going to understand what is happening there.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
Like, the way he's become a liability for Donald Trump... Like, if you don't know anything about J.D. Vance and couches, whether or not that is fair to J.D. Vance, you don't understand what has happened, which is that J.D. Vance has become a soft target that every faction in the Democratic Party and the sort of broad, sprawling, informal Democratic coalition smells blood around. Because...
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
He is like Donald Trump has chosen the most off-putting kid in school because that kid was the most sycophantic to Donald Trump himself to be his running mate.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
And in doing, Donald Trump has revealed something about himself, has opened up a vulnerability that wouldn't necessarily have been open otherwise because Donald Trump has reminded you of a certain weirdness because that is like the term that has emerged in him. that he could have covered up with a Doug Burgum, that he could have made less sailing with a Marco Rubio. But J.D.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
Vance is the kind of MAGA candidate who loses. And Trump has made himself into a little bit more of a loser than... by choosing Vance.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
He's reminded you that he likes this sort of weird online right subculture that's actually not the thing that he represents or comes out of, but is the thing that has taken shape behind him and beneath him, and that keeps blowing winnable elections for Republicans because these people come off as very strange because actually the culture they come out of is very, very strange.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
And you can't feel that in its full texture if you're not watching JD Vance get bullied out of American public life on X, which is, like, not a sentence I love saying.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
And so, you know, you got to care about the elections.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
I think the thing I am saying here is, because I don't exactly want to be the enabler for everybody to lose their minds, their search engine nation to completely throw out all their good information habits, is just that I think there is a kind of information happening right now on social media that is proving important. And you can choose to be in that information stream or not.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
You don't need it. Like, if you know how you're going to vote, you can tune the whole fucking thing out. And just go in and cast your ballot in November. You don't need to follow it. If you want to understand the thing that's happening, then you need to follow it, but you also need to recognize that it's partial. So, if you are on, like, liberal social media right now...
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
The structure of sentiment is telling you something real about the joy and enthusiasm and anger and confidence and ruthlessness that has suddenly emerged among Democrats. It was not there three months ago. in their grim death march to defeat.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
But it is not going to tell you very much about why Pennsylvania is a 49-49 state at the moment, you know, in some polls, and how, like, older white suburbanites in Pennsylvania will vote because they and not, you know, deranged meme makers are probably going to be the crucial, like, swing category in the election.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
So there's truth and there's untruth, there's what you're seeing and what's obscuring. It's all there at the same time.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
It goes back to, what are you trying to do here, right? Is what you're trying to do to just have election vibes 24-7? Because that's what we're talking about on some level. is what you're trying to do to have the most useful information about the election, you're probably getting more of that from more established news sources.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
No. What do they feel like to me? So I like romantic comedies. Uh-huh. And I always sort of wish the movie would stay in like the first 35 minutes where nothing has gone wrong and there are no stakes and everybody is bantering back and forth.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
Because, yes, eventually the couch memes will get talked about, but you're also going to hear about actual campaign strategy, and you're also going to hear about... who's targeting what how and fundraising and all these other things that really do matter, is what you want to do to be helpful. Like, then you might want to volunteer, you know, to phone bank for house races, right?
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
Where, you know, or actually, like, pay attention to local politics in your town where there's probably elections happening that you could really meaningfully influence. There's a concept that the political scientist Etan Hirsch has called political hobbyism. He's got this book called Politics is for Power.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
And he makes this distinction between hobbyists and people trying to actually affect things in politics. But he says it correctly, that a lot of us, we follow politics like it is a sport. And we are not following it with an eye towards influencing the outcome. We're not even really following it with an eye towards being informed in some accurate sense about
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
It's just our hobby, and we are connected to it in the way we connect to a lot of hobbies. I mean, people don't follow sports teams obsessively because it matters for the fate of the universe how the Knicks do. They follow it because, like, they love the Knicks. It's a hobby. And, like, a lot of people are political hobbyists, and that's also a totally fine thing to be.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
But if what you want to do is willpower, right, then you need to be sort of thinking more instrumentally about, you know, what is happening locally and is the thing you can do donate money or is the thing you can do to be out there knocking doors or, you know, doing phone banking that connects you to people in another state because you live in a very blue or very red state, right?
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
There are these very different pathways you walk there. depending on what your actual purpose here is. So I don't want to tell anybody that being fully jacked in to the political vibe machine, which is what social media is, isn't fun or isn't the way they want to do it. As you say, sometimes we take up bad habits on vacation.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
When you're in Vegas, you gamble, and maybe you don't want to be gambling all the time, but right now you're in Vegas. Then there's a question of do you want accurate information about things, and then you want to be thoughtful about what you're consuming and from which sources.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
And then there's a question of do you want to influence things, which is not about endlessly reading or consuming media, but about thinking about what resources you have to put out into the world, be they time, be they energy, be they whatever, money, and choosing where to target them. And those are all just very different roads to walk down.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
I find it always not that gentle. I mean, watching people's anxiety on screen makes me very anxious, which says a lot about me. And all of it accurate, like whatever you took from that is a correct vision of who I am. Elections are stressful to me. I remember I was in Iowa in 2008, and a very senior political reporter was at the bar. And he was saying to me, like, don't you just love this?
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
And I was like, no. Like, why would you love this? I mean, we need to have elections. It's an important way of running political decisions in a democracy. But I just want them to turn out well. I don't find the machinations of them fun. I don't enjoy covering them. Like, what I want to cover is the legislative process by which a universal child care bill – gets built and then passed into law.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
Like I like the positive some nature of policymaking, particularly when it is happening in a more sensible political system than we often inhabit. Elections are like a thing that you have to survive. So terrible things don't happen. And so good things do happen. And you do so knowing, like having the visceral felt knowledge that terrible things might happen.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
I mean, this is a hard question for me to answer because I cover elections professionally. I'm an electoral actor in a way. What do you mean when you say an electoral actor? I don't follow elections professionally. with the intention just of knowing about them. I am looking for stories. I am trying to understand what's going on in a way that gives me some predictive power over the election, right?
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
Has a sense of where things are going and what I think is happening. And So how I cover them depends a lot on what I'm doing.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
My coverage of this election has been very different than my coverage of other elections because I have been, you know, very involved in questions like whether Joe Biden should step aside and have been interviewing vice presidential candidates on my show and interviewing people there that I think would be, you know, useful voices.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
We had Tim Walz on and then he became the vice presidential pick for Kamala Harris. Presumably there was a direct relationship between those two things. But so the way I will fall in an election has to do with the work I'm trying to do, right? So I was, you know, following a lot about Tim Walz and Gretchen Whitmer in advance of having them on my show.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
Or I was doing a lot of reporting about the internal machinations and sentiment of the Democratic Party around the, you know, the pressure being applied in a kind of escalatory way to Joe Biden. And more recently, I've been trying to kind of keep in touch with the memetic sentiment around Kamala Harris, which to me has become an interesting and potent and independent force in the election.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
I've been thinking a lot about the weird internet subcultures JD Vance comes out of, and so I've been sort of tracking that in this election. But I try and do not always succeed to keep my consumption fairly purposeful. Like, I'm not reading a lot about campaign strategy in Arizona and Nevada, just because I am not the one right now covering campaign strategy in Arizona and Nevada.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
So, this gets, I think, to my core answer to today's search engine question, which is, you have to start by asking yourself a different question, which is, what is your purpose in following the election? Right. I remember you did an episode with Califas Sane about how to find new music. And he's like, well, why do you want new music? And I was, like, so shocked by that question.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
But I have the same question for people following elections, because I actually think it's often for people very... I think sometimes what they are doing is not what they think they're doing. So, for instance, people who you mentioned in your intro, refreshing Nate Silver's election model. Now, what that election model is supposed to do is give you a sense of uncertainty, right?
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
Nate Silver's model, when it tells you that Kamala Harris right now has a 52% shot of winning the election, which is what it said last I looked, What it's trying to tell you to do is leave that feeling incredibly uncertain. My experience is that the reason people refresh Nate's model is they want to feel certain.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
Like, they look at that, they're like, oh, 52% were, you know, if you like Kamala Harris, you're winning, right? 60%, they're definitely winning, right? This is why so many people were mad at Nate when, you know, he said that Hillary Clinton had a, you know, 70-ish percent chance of winning in 2016 and Trump won, right? But Nate was right about that.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
Trump won, and that was well within the range of possibility. So if what you want, right, if the actual emotional need you are trying to fulfill is, I want to feel better about this. I want to know who's going to win. People are often using the wrong tool. Like, I always describe the way people consume election models as, like, the way they use Q-tips.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
that it says on the package, please don't stick this in your ear. And I was like, no, I'm sticking this fucking thing in my ear immediately. And election models are supposed to be about uncertainty and people use them to create an emotional feeling of certainty. And so like, yeah, what do you actually want out of following the election? If you want to know who's going to win,
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
You should try to quiet that part of yourself and check back in in a couple months.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
Because you don't know right now. Too much is going to happen. If you want to know what they're arguing, I can give you good sources for that.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
Well, let's start on the arguments. And I will say this is a little bit of a tricky election at this juncture to do this well for two reasons. So my normal advice in this is that the sources people... diminish and dismiss like campaign books written by candidates and speeches given by candidates are much better than they are given credit for.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
I have never, not to this day, and I've read a lot of them, I have never read a campaign book which I think there is actually no more shat upon species of textual literature than the candidate-authored campaign book. I've never to this day read a campaign book that I did not benefit enormously from reading. Interesting.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
Because how... One bias we have in the press, and I think that people have reading the press, is the idea that secret knowledge, insider knowledge, the thing somebody said on the hot mic... is more valuable than the thing they said in the highly vetted speech they gave in public. And my belief is exactly the opposite. And I've watched this be true over and over and over again.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
It is what people say in public that matters. What they say in private matters a lot less.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
People, I don't want to say they lie more in private, although I do think that's actually true, but they shape themselves to their audience much more in private. Whereas a thing they say in public reflects coalitionally, in terms of their sense of the public, what they think they can actually do. Because what they're going to do is going to have to be coalitional.
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Is there a sane way to follow this election?
It's going to have to be in relationship with public opinion. Now, people change. You know, Barack Obama said he wasn't going to have an individual mandate when he was running for office in 2008, and then he ended up supporting one in office because that's what the sort of congressional Democratic coalition would support, and he got persuaded on it, and he ended up doing it.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
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The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
I think this is where it's very helpful to be grounded in both specific examples and specific policies. Because, yes, conceptually, all that is true. And then you just look around and you realize that the policies work very differently and the interest group constellations are very different in different places.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
And I mean, that is true for like, look, we build we they build transit much better, much cheaper, much faster in Spain, in France, everywhere. in Japan than we do. And the difference there is not that Spain, France and Japan don't have governments. It's not that they don't have unions. They have higher union density than we do.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
It's that they have a very different structure of how they do government. So a big thing I'm focusing on the book is the way we have begun to restrain government in this country through process and adversarial legalism, where you can just tie it up in lawsuits again and again and again and again.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
That was one way of trying to avoid tyranny, but what you created is a very ineffective form of government. So one thing I think worth just saying is that we can see this working very differently in different places. As I just mentioned, Colorado and California have quite different housing outcomes. even though they are both currently governed by Democrats and they both have have government.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
So I always think it's good to stay a little bit more grounded than that. But the other thing that I do think you're getting at is both parties, in my view, have a sort of scarcity side and abundant side inside of them. This cleavage that I'm trying to cut occurs on both sides, on the on the Democratic side, on the liberal side.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
I see is I see this is between, you know, you can call it different things, but the New Deal left and the new left left. So the New Deal left was very growth oriented, very building oriented. It created a lot of physical infrastructure, created highways because Dwight Eisenhower was sort of part of this political order. And it did things very fast.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
And in doing that, it created a counter reaction, not just sort of conservatism as we think about it with Ronald Reagan, but also the new left Ralph Nader and Rachel Carson. And, you know, this sort of raft of environmental legislation passed, by the way, under Richard Nixon, California Environmental Quality Act passed under Governor Ronald Reagan.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
So these things often were bipartisan in their times, but over time, they're not the right policy equilibrium for the next stage. On the right, though, you have the same issue. So you have a – I don't want to call it an abundance right, but a right that is more open to markets, more open to trying to create a lot of housing.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
And then you have a scarcity right, a populist right, which is currently the right in power. And you look at Donald Trump, you look at JD Vance, when they look at the housing problem, they don't propose a lot of ways to make supply bigger. On the campaign trail again and again, they use it as an argument for deporting immigrants.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
When they look at trade, they don't make a lot of ways for us to make more things more easily and trade them with the world. They're rapidly reducing the entire quantity of global trade using a completely insane tariff scheme. When they look at the government, you know, I think Doge is a good idea and somebody should try it.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
But they have been quite indiscriminate at hacking away at state capacity. So this is not a crew, in my view, that looks forward and sees a sort of world of more. They look at scarcities we currently have, things we don't have enough of, manufacturing capacity, et cetera, and then find a way to create a scarcity of something else.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
So my view is that the sort of supply side of both parties has a fight on its hands. And the fight is different and it plays out in different ways. But one of the things that should make us more optimistic rather than fatalistic about the inevitable pathway of government that sort of you're suggesting there
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
Is it if you look around at different countries, at our own country and at our own even federal government at different times, you realize that these are pendulums that swing back. These are manmade processes that can be unmade or reformed. And that should always give you a sense of hope.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
I have been extraordinary. I'll say two things about this. One is it just somebody just released a book on this. I've been extraordinarily pleased with how much the center of the Democratic establishment is engaging with this book quite, quite seriously. So I was on Gavin Newsom's podcast, governor of California. And he said, you know, he completely agrees with the book and it's all correct.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
And he's been he's been working on this. And it's very and it's very hard. And I take that point. But, you know, Cory Booker was shouting the book out in his 25 hour speech on the Senate floor.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
It was it was a lot of hours, but but nevertheless, he's read it, as have a bunch of others. So one thing I think is happening here is a bit of a permission structure for Democrats who actually have been worried about some of these issues for some time to begin speaking about it more loudly after parties get defeated in the way they did in 2024.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
It does create an openness to soul searching that would not have been there otherwise. At the same time, I don't agree with your characterization from a minute ago because much of the book is motivated. by things happening that predate the book in the Democratic Party already.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
So the Biden administration, compared to the first Trump administration, compared to the Obama administration, was quite committed to an atypically physical legacy. What it was trying to do was build things in the real world. Its major bills, the infrastructure bill, the Chips and Science Act, which is trying to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to the US.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
And of course, the Inflation Reduction Act are all about constructing things not in the regulatory state or in the tax code, as was true in sort of previous administrations, but out of cement and steel and cable and fiber.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
Now, the problem and what motivated at least some of the inquiry of the book for me is that our laws and our processes are not set up to build at that scale and at that level, at the speed that I think we need to do it, or frankly, that they thought we need to do it.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
Brian Deese, a former NEC director under Biden, the director of the National Economics Council, is a great piece in Foreign Affairs about how America needs to build faster and how that's central to the kinds of things Biden was trying to do but will not be achieved unless we change laws
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
So in my view, you've actually had, driven by housing scarcity and the need for decarbonization, a turn in the Democratic Party over the past five or 10 years towards building things, not just creating social insurance, not that there's anything in my view wrong with social insurance, but having begun to make that turn.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
they have begun to confront, as I've had to begun to confront covering it, how ill-suited the architecture of procedural liberalism is to achieving those goals. And so what's, I think the really difficult confrontation now is not whether this stuff is needed, but the confrontation that liberals are having
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
with the overhang of their own past legislative achievements, things that might have made sense at one time but are now not the right processes, not the right laws for the kinds of things that we are now trying to achieve and promising to achieve, and that it's in that space that a lot of the very, very difficult policy work and, frankly, coalitional confrontations are going to have to happen.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
I would say the great failure of the Biden administration was to be too coalitional and have too little, at least on domestic policy, strong executive leadership. And I think that has to do with Biden's particular issues and his age and where his focus was. And I think that has to do with the culture of the Democratic Party that had sort of evolved over a period of time.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
And now that's going to have to change. I think it's quite widely acknowledged that that was a problem. And look, I think if Donald Trump proves anything in American politics for all of his flaws, what he proves is that the coalitions and the cultures of the coalitions are malleable. Donald Trump has reshaped the Republican coalition, not by kicking everybody who is in it out.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
In part, it's persuasion. People have come to believe things they did not believe before, you know, It's a cottage industry on X to retweet old Mike Waltz or Marco Rubio tweets that seem to have a high level of contradiction to what they are now carrying out in the current administration. But look, Trump changed his party on immigration, on trade, on isolationism, on Europe, on Russia. Right.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
I am not saying that I want to see a Trump arise on the left. I don't. But it is a mistake to think that these things are too settled. Barack Obama changed the way the Democratic Party worked and functioned. And I think, frankly, a lot of the problem ended up being that Biden was the fumes of the Obama coalition, but he didn't have the control over it that Obama himself had.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
So he wasn't able to drive it and govern it in the way that one needed to. What's gonna come next is gonna have to be different. It's not trying to re-put together the old thing. The old thing has failed now. It's gonna be putting together the new thing. I'm not gonna sit here and tell you I know who can do it or how they're gonna do it.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
But I can tell you, as somebody who covers the Democratic Party quite closely, that this is a period of rebuilding and rethinking, and that that is much more possible on both sides than people ever seem to believe it is in the moment.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On
Thank you, Ben. I appreciate it.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2168 - TRADE WAR: Trump Declares Massive Car Tariffs
We have to issue the notice of funding opportunity within 180 days. That's step one. Step two is states who want to participate must submit a letter of intent. Step three, they can request up to $5 million in planning grants. Just planning. Just planning. Step four, the requests are reviewed, approved, and awarded by the NDIA.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2168 - TRADE WAR: Trump Declares Massive Car Tariffs
Three years later, all 56 applicants had passed through at least step five. States must submit a five-year action plan. Then the FCC must publish the broadband... data maps before NTIA allocates funds. So then the NTIA, step seven, has to use the FCC maps to make allocation decisions. It's hard even to talk about this, man. Step eight is states must submit an initial proposal. they apply for?
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2168 - TRADE WAR: Trump Declares Massive Car Tariffs
Step nine, NTIA must review and approve each state's, again, initial proposal. Oh my God. Step 10, states must publish their own map and allow internal challenges to their own map. This is the Biden administration's process for its own bill. They wanted this to happen. This is how liberal government works now. This is a bill
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2168 - TRADE WAR: Trump Declares Massive Car Tariffs
Passed by Democrats with a regulatory structure written by Democratic administration. Okay. Right. Step 11. The NTIA must review and improve the challenge results and the final map. Step 12. States must run a competitive sub-granting process. Oh my God. At step 12, after all this has been done. Step 13, states must submit a final proposal. All the proposals weren't enough to NTIA.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2168 - TRADE WAR: Trump Declares Massive Car Tariffs
So we've gone in the last couple of steps from 56, I had gone to this point, to 356. Step 14. Ah. The NTIA must review and approve the state's final proposal. And that is three of the 56 jurisdictions and states are there. In summary, colon, states are nearly at the finish line.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2168 - TRADE WAR: Trump Declares Massive Car Tariffs
And it says to stop their progress now or worse, to make them go backwards would be a stick in the spokes of the most promising broadband deployment plans we have ever seen. End scene.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
Yuval Levin, who's an American Enterprise Institute guy, conservative, very, very thoughtful.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
He is not alarmist. It is true. He is not alarmist. It is true. But I probably have a higher opinion of some of those arguments than you do. But one thing that he said that I thought was very smart, which is that there's a rhythm to presidencies, which is that at the beginning, they're very much in control of events.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
And they're unleashing all these executive orders, and they're unleashing all these plans, and they've been sitting in back rooms, and Russell, you know, is like twirling his mustache somewhere. He doesn't really have one, but you know what I mean. And so for a while, you're like, oh, man, it's them, it's them, it's them, it's them, it's them. And then...
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
pretty quickly, you know, within a couple months, usually, what happens is the world starts coming at them. Instead of choosing what they're focusing on, it gets chosen. So you can look at this in past presidencies. I mean, you know, you see with Joe Biden, this sort of after the Afghanistan withdrawal, I would say, basically they lose control.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
Inflation, Gaza, and not in this order, inflation, Ukraine, Gaza, and a number of other issues besides those. And begin to be things they're responding to, not a world they're controlling. Under Donald Trump, you saw something similar, particularly once we hit the pandemic, right? All of a sudden, the world was not as they had chosen it. The world was something that they were responding to.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
You know, Barack Obama was fighting with high unemployment. And, you know, there are all these things that happen in every administration. They are dramatically increasing the likelihood that something breaks or they break something, or in the future they don't have the people they need to respond to something. And that's not a USAID problem for them specifically.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
USAID, I think the reason they chose to try to destroy that one is that it's not, I mean, morally it is an abomination what they are doing. It is not mission critical for keeping things from breaking down for Americans, right? It does not have a domestic American constituency, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
But you imagine a bad public health situation happening in a denuded HHS under the leadership of a person people do not trust to lead a public health agency. And that might end up looking very bad. I'm not telling you that this is the way it will go. I am saying that I don't think there is a plan here. They are just running through the thing with a chainsaw.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
And there were quite a few of them who were willing to say, okay, this is a new world. This time, the American public voted for Donald Trump fair and square. We have to work with this. And there are plenty of them who are happy to work with Doge and were excited to work with Elon Musk, right? Democrats are not fully turned on him in that sort of interrenium between the campaign and inauguration.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
And there's a reason that usually you don't do that. It's fine if you bought Twitter and you don't care if Twitter goes down. That's the theory of action here. You're trying to break the thing enough that you can control it. What Elon Musk successfully did at Twitter was he broke the thing so he could actually control it. But he didn't make Twitter work better.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
What he made it was something that he could use as a vehicle and a venue for himself. Twitter itself works poorly. If you imagine that whole thing applied to the federal government –
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
Either you have a very low opinion of the federal government, which these guys obviously do, but since I don't have that low of an opinion of the federal government, when things break over the course of a couple of years, I think people are going to notice. You imagine something like the plane crash we saw, like the terrible, tragic plane crash from a few weeks ago happening in a year.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
when there's a lot more paper trail of how they fucked up the FAA. I don't know that that looks great for them. So that's not to say this is like great or you should be excited that he's doing this. It is to say I don't think it is like a genius plan that some Machiavellian omniscient mind at the Heritage Foundation cooked up.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
They are causing chaos not just for everybody, but ultimately for themselves.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
I probably don't agree with the word permanently, but otherwise I agree. That's depressing. All right. I'm sorry.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
People tune in for this, huh? They enjoy this? They enjoy this perspective on the world?
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
And everything Trump has done has been a giant middle finger to them personally, right? To make them look like idiots personally. And so, yeah, when I talk to some of those folks who I think if the Trump administration had come in with a slightly different strategy, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
So I was just doing a show that was partially about this. Have you guys talked about the weird story of Driscoll yet? The Driz? A little bit on the surface, but I'm very, I'm confused by it, to be honest. So Chris Wray, former Trump appointee running the FBI, resigns, even though his term was not up because Trump was going to fire him. So they need an acting director of the FBI.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
They appear to make a mistake on the website because they're a bunch of fools. And they put the wrong guy's name. this being Driscoll.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
And because it would be embarrassing to say we put the wrong guy's name as acting director of the FBI on the website, now Driscoll, who was not supposed to be the acting director of the FBI, is director, and they think to themselves, eh, it's only going to be a little while anyway. Okay, maybe I'm coming around to your position on the rakes. Then, because Driscoll is not a soulless careerist...
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
who they have chosen for this role, he goes to the FBI quite directly and says, we are in the fight of our lives. We are not going to let them destroy this agency. I'm paraphrasing the emails he sent out. And now it becomes like a sort of meme inside the FBI. And he's got, you know, sort of like he looks like he just walked out of a saloon. He's like an amazing looking guy.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
He will be fired, I expect. But one thing that's happened, Benjamin Wittes had, you always know things are bad when you're reading Lawfare again, right? The website, like that's when things are bad.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
If they had come in and they had wanted to aggressively reform USAID and aggressively reform civil service protections and do more in immigration and border security,
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
That's when you know threat level's orange.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
So he had a good piece about what's going on at the FBI. So they wanted to do this thing where they would have all the FBI agents self-report if they touched the January 6th investigation so they could do an effective purge. And there appears to be now mass insubordination to that. Like none of them, not none of them, but huge swaths of the FBI are refusing to fill out the forms.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
So they actually don't have that. There's also now a lawsuit about this gathering of information. They might purge the FBI. A lot of us were expecting the purge to have already happened. Week by week, it becomes harder for them to purge things because they are more attention is on them. There's like a loss of political capital. There aren't enough other things happening.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
And cash is going to have to do something. But Cash is going to purge parts of it. But there's a difference between knocking out 200 people and knocking out what we initially heard, which was 6,000 people. I'm not saying I know how it's going to go. But the FBI has become an interesting story because Driscoll became a very unexpectedly effective internal leader who stiffened a lot of spines there.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
And now people are digging in. And one thing they did here, I think... I mean, Democrats, I think the bureaucracy was pretty exhausted and ready to cooperate with Trump, too. Like, just people felt they lost, that the normal order of things was like, you accept the next administration. They went at everybody so hard, they rebuilt a resistance that had died.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
and government efficiency, if that had actually been what they wanted, if they wanted to get 70%, 60%, 50% of what they're looking for, there was a cohort of Democrats who had, you know, were at least willing to entertain the idea that he was just going to be a president and you could work with him where you could work with him and not where you could not. And now,
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
Like two weeks ago, I'd say the resistance is gone. Now I'd say, you know, you might want to give it a different name because it's a it's a harmed brand, but it's sort of coming back, particularly among the bureaucrats who are pissed. And at the FBI level, those are hard people, though. This is a point Wittes makes. These are actually a lot of hard people to replace.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
These are not entry level jobs. Right. You need counterterrorism expertise, et cetera. And again, to the point I was making before, you fire a bunch of the wrong people and there's a terrorist attack you don't catch. Right. And now you look really bad, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
So there's a theory that one thing that is stopping them from doing the FBI purge is among the few things that the Trump people take seriously in terms of functions the government does, they actually do believe that cross-national gangs threaten America.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
And the idea that you will do a night of the long knives and knock out thousands of FBI agents without knowing who you're taking out, and now you've turned the entire agency against you, That may not be great. So I'm not saying I know it's going to go. Kash Patel, of all the nominees, is the most frightening to me and the most revealing of what Trump really wants to do with some of these agencies.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
So if anybody thinks what I'm offering you here is like a sanguine perspective, I'm not. Like, in fact, I'm saying something very similar to what I think you were saying. They are breaking the thing. They are trying to break the thing. But the way they're doing it has created a kind of also internal counterforce where now people are trying to fight them.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
So they really would have to fire everybody now. And now there's already a court case about the data they're collecting. The whole thing is getting messier and messier and messier and messier by the day. And these aren't the smartest guys. In the philosophical version of speech acts, right? Speech we're trying to use to make things true.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
I think it is important for people to really say this a lot, that this is not being done well or going well. Because the worse people understand it's going, the more emboldened they are to keep fighting it. I really do think this...
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
resignation that so many people greeted trump with is a is a kind of submission in in advance but like the fbi like they fucking put the wrong guy in charge he became a hero for resisting them changing the internal culture of the fbi that they were targeting overnight and now they're gonna have a fight on their hands that they they had done this maybe competently from the beginning including by putting in charge somebody who's not does not look like such a hatchet man as kash patel does and
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
They could have accomplished the same end more quietly and competently, but they didn't. So now we're going to see what the fight is, and people should be paying a lot of attention to that fight.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
Trump has gone into a place where he is threatening, I think both in their view and objectively, the structure of American government itself. He is, I think, a somewhat weak president, but he is acting like a fairly strong king.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
You sit with a true tragic view of life.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
Well, I think that's true, although I do want to just say from my own perspective— I do not understand what I am saying here as giving people a nice bedtime story so they're not too afraid when they go to sleep. I think I am saying the true thing that is happening. They are trying to purge the FBI, but they are doing a shitty job of it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
They have created a lot of internal resistance now, and people should pay close attention to what's actually going on. They tried to take over the entire spending power, but they did a shitty job of it. Then they had to rescind their own OMB directive. And then a judge did an injunction anyway, just to make sure they couldn't keep going.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
They've gotten some access to the treasury payment system, but they did a shitty job of it. So then a judge stopped giving anybody else access. And also one of the two people they gave access to had to resign for being a racist, which to be such a racist in the Trump administration, you have to resign means you are pretty racist.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
So the energy policy is truly disastrous in my view. As somebody who cares a lot about decarbonization, renewable energy, what they've basically done is try to throw solar and wind permitting into chaos, but make it easier to permit and build fossil fuel, you know, and dirty infrastructure. So sometimes you would hear people criticize Democrats.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
It's like, it should be an all the above energy strategy. But Trump is not doing an all-of-the-above energy strategy. He's doing a dirty energy strategy. And solar was getting so cheap so fast that it's actually a huge contributor to the energy we're going to build. And now we're sort of in a race between the economics of solar and what they're trying to do to break that.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
Elon Musk, right, people I think forget this now, but in the first Trump administration, he joined up to serve on this advisory board. And he quit the board. when Trump withdrew America from the Paris Climate Treaty. This is how far Elon Musk has radicalized and changed his own politics.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
He has gone from quitting an advisory board in Trump 1 because withdrawing from Paris Climate Treaty, as he said then, was bad for the country and bad for the planet. They're withdrawing from it in Trump too, obviously, but they're also just trying to destroy the electric vehicle transition, solar energy, etc. And he's there helping to swing the hammer.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
It's just an incredibly disappointing heel turn. So that's meaningful. I am waiting to see what they come up with on spending and taxes. All of the reporting I am hearing and able to do is that in the meetings, they are not being able to get agreement. You know, see, my colleague rushed out that did a good podcast the other day with Steve Bannon.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
And one of the things Bannon said, which I thought was interesting and tracks what I'm seeing, is that he said, we are not, we being the right in this, are not united. He said, Congress, the Republicans, they fear Donald Trump. But there isn't a unity on what the agenda actually is. And every one of these things is going to be a huge fight that divides huge parts of the party.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
So there are parts of the Republicans, and you've been seeing this on recent spending bills, who think the debt is getting too high. And want to do something to cut it before they're going to, or at least they say before they will accept giant new things that increase it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
The thing you would obviously do to cut it because of where the money is, if you have to pay for a huge tax cut, is cut Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. That's where the money is and defense, right? Those are the things you could touch. I have said this for like decades. The federal government, from a budgetary perspective, is... is an insurance conglomerate with a large standing army.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
That is what we are. That is what we spend money on. Everything else is stuff between the couch cushions. And so they don't really politically want to cut any of those, but they're going to have to cut some of them to pay for some part of these tax cuts. Or they're going to run the tax cuts and they're going to see, can they pass out with a three vote margin in the House? And maybe they can't.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
And they also clearly probably cannot do a spending bill without Democratic support. But the Hakeem Jeffries line now is unless they undo things like the USAID closure, they're not getting any Democratic support. So the expectation, I will say, among House Democrats is we're headed for a shutdown in a couple of months, like a pretty big shutdown.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
And that's going to be the big collision over all this.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
Yes, I think they've changed their mind. That's what I'm saying. I've spoken to them. I've spoken to some of the people I was thinking about when I said that. And I am also watching people who are willing to work with Donald Trump when he won the election. They have moved from, we are willing to work with you, we're willing to work with Doge, we're willing to work with all these pieces.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
They would have to be able to get internal support for the continuing resolutions, which maybe they can. I don't think it's impossible. They hold every single member. It's just not how they've really been working up until now.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
And the tax cuts are going to be much harder because the tax cuts have a lot of policy decisions and people there care a lot about it. The Republicans are happy to give Trump all the power, but they're not happy to see their own constituencies gutted. I thought the very funny example of this is what did you see? a Republican in a high-profile way really stand up on recently.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
It was Chuck Grassley, who was like... Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
We think, you know, the party has erred, it's gone too far left, etc. They have moved into opposition and resistance mode. Whatever possible quanta of goodwill he had... if he wanted to build some bipartisan accomplishments, which I actually think he could have done, is gone. They have moved into he is a threat to the republic mode.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
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The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
They're between orange and red. It's funny, I taped a podcast this morning and we were joking about the threat level. I think people are at orange, high orange, burnt orange. Red is if and when he defies a court order.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
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The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
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The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
I'm all right. An amazing drive-by there in the intro. Thank you for that, Tim. Well, we love Derek. Derek is more likable. I don't actually think that's under debate.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
You're running an exploit hack on your own mind. And then your mind changes, and you end up where some of these people are. I don't know what all this is going to amount to, but in some ways, Trump in Charlottesville seems quaint. But again, I think...
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
When you've got Ye coming out and saying, great, Hitler's fantastic, I'm a Nazi now, I think you have to look at that and say, this probably isn't great for that side. You don't want that happening, right? Like, that's not what you want from the guy who's like, you know, very well known for your MAGA hat.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
Yeah, the future, right. So I think there's something brewing here that is, we'll see what form it takes. I mean, maybe we just enter into another dark era of state-sponsored racism. But you were saying earlier that there's no one like Don McGahn. There are none of these people who are holding him back in the first term. I had this essay before the election about Trump and disinhibition.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
And I was saying in that essay, it's also, by the way, true for Elon Musk. I liked that essay. I was saying in that essay that Trump's fundamental characteristic as a public figure, as a human mind, is disinhibition. He's disinhibited in a way just almost no other human beings are.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
And that is both behind some what makes him really compelling as an entertainer and a voice and what lets him do things other people wouldn't do and try strategies they wouldn't try. And it's what makes him dangerous. But in the first term, he governed in a very uneasy coalition with the traditional Republican Party.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
And one way of taking that, which the people around Trump is the way they understand it, is that held him back. And another way of taking it, which is more how I understand it, is that was a crucial balance of that administration.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
That when the Secretary of the Army, the Secretary of Defense, I'm sorry, Esper, said, no, we're not going to open fire on all these protesters in Washington, D.C., that was good for Donald Trump as opposed to bad for Donald Trump. When nobody followed up on the let's launch Patriot missiles into Mexico idea, that was good for Donald Trump, not bad for Donald Trump.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
And in this one, they've gotten rid of the, both in terms of Trump's administration, they've gotten rid of the brakes. They got rid of the external inhibitors. And in the movement broadly, there's no external inhibition. There's no sense of what you shouldn't say, no sense of what's too far away. Maybe it turns out that's great.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
My suspicion is that's actually super dangerous and in the long run doesn't wear well, particularly in a country where you just won 49.8% of the vote, not 68.9% of the vote. So, I don't know. It doesn't look to me like a great stable ground to build on.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
That's where I still, that's how I still feel. So there are two pieces to the argument. One is about an orientation of opposition that I was watching. I think I'm seeing less of it now, but I was watching many Democrats simply accept and treat as settled fact that he could do the things he was doing instead of treating the things he was doing as somewhere between a power grab and a crime.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
So when I say don't believe him, I'm not saying don't believe that he's actually locked people out of the USAID building. That's a fact of reality. That's the texture of the world we live in. I am saying don't treat that as done. Treat that as provisional. Treat that as an effort he is making to change the settled order.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
So that's one piece of it. I think one thing authoritarians do, I mean, any political system is in some ways a coordination and information game. And one thing authoritarians do that is maybe the most important thing is they get people to coordinate as if they are the authoritarian.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
And so if Donald Trump can walk in and upend the whole thing and we just report on it as, well, he did this and he did this and he did this and he did this, as opposed to approaching it as he is trying to do X. But that is going to be a fight, a contest. That's going to go to the courts. That's going to be a fight over a government shutdown. That's going to be a fight over a debt ceiling.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
That's going to be a fight in the midterms, et cetera. You want to keep this provisional, right? If everybody begins saying, well, it's done. He's got all these powers. I guess what you're saying. I think that is actually- No, I'm not saying that. I totally agree with that part of the argument. I think that is actually a kind of submission. So that's- Totally agree with that part of the argument.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
The second thing I'm saying there is there has been a tendency to treat what they are doing as some grand plan that is all working out great, right? This is a point that I'm making throughout the piece of overwhelm. One of their strategies is overwhelm what Steve Bannon has called at various points, muzzle velocity or flooding the zone with shit. You sort of run through what they're doing.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
They tried to upend birthright citizenship. That got stopped by the court immediately, and they have not challenged the court on that. They're going to appeal, I think, but they have stopped for the moment. They did the OMB spending freeze. The court immediately stopped that. They rescinded the freeze, and the court has still put a hold on what they're doing there.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
USAID, they actually have gutted that thing. So that's a place where I think the power is showing you can do quite a lot. You look at what they are doing around tariffs. That was the thing Trump swore he wanted to do most of all. As soon as the markets had a reaction, he accepted some very, very paltry concessions, if they were even concessions.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
from Mexico and Canada and backed off on the tariffs, at least for now. Mass deportations, which was another thing they said they were going to do. They're running deportations at roughly the pace they were at under Barack Obama. They are publicizing them very differently. They're in some ways doing them more cruelly.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
But the sense of what their level of willingness or capability is to deal with that real world friction seems lower to me. In the last couple days, we've seen a series of things get frozen. So they have frozen access, new access to the treasury payment system, a judge did.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
Two of Elon Musk's young lieutenants had it, then one turned out to be a huge racist, so a couple hours after the judicial decision, he resigned. So now one of them has it, and the judge has said it's read-only access, you cannot write into the source code, and the DOJ has accepted that. There was a lot of reporting they were going to try to close down the Department of Education.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
They've not done that, which I think is good. I could sort of keep going like this, but one of the things we are seeing to me is, yes, they are trying to do a lot, and they are doing a lot. They're putting people on administrative leave. Oh, by the way, they also froze the federal buyout that they're trying to do.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
And in the reporting of the federal buyout freeze, it turned out that of the 2.4 million civilian employees, only a couple tens of thousands have taken it at a not very different rate than you would normally see retirement. So it doesn't look like that buyout is going all that well for them.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
So my point is not that things Donald Trump is doing aren't meaningful, like they have completely, among other things, thrown all renewable energy permitting into complete chaos.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
But in terms of the efforts to assert dramatic powers they did not have otherwise that past presidents have not had and have not asserted, with the exception of USAID, which I think needs to be fought like hell and treated as provisional, they are getting stopped by the courts and stopping. They have pulled back on the tariffs. They are not doing nationwide mass deportations, at least as of yet.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
They frankly don't seem to me to have a huge stomach for political fight when it comes to the real world. And they're pretty fucked at the moment in Congress. So there's a huge amount of reporting going on in this. They're having a ton of trouble putting together a spending bill that can even get enough Republican support. They don't know what to do on assault deduction.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
They have no Democratic support in Congress. So one thing that would be stronger for them on a bunch of these issues is if they could actually get bills through that would make these changes more durable. But they're not even trying because they can't do it. So, look, I'm not telling people to be happy about what's going on. I am saying, watch what is happening.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
Watch where they are getting stopped. And I think looking at this as like a lot of chaos, they're throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks, is important because the more people treat this guy as some mastermind autocrat, Nobody is going to fight somebody who is invulnerable. But somebody who's invulnerable and keeps stepping on rakes, yeah, you will fight that guy. So that's my view.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
Well, they're a mixture of weak and strong, right, as any president is. They're legislatively weak, right? They're not willing to go through things in Congress.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
Do they even want to pass things through Congress? If you want huge, durable changes to the way things work in America, right, there's a reason other presidents are like, you know what would be awesome? Let's do it all through executive action, because there's a lot you just can't do through executive action. So I do think it's worth disaggregating pieces. I don't really want to be in the position—
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
Because my argument in that piece is that you should just try to look at him clearly, not you should ignore what is happening. Like, I'm trying to stiffen people's spines, not trying to get them to live in a fantasy land. Like you, I'm reporting on this stuff every day. But I think it's worth taking these pieces in turn.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
So, you know, the things that you mentioned there, will Donald Trump get his nominees through? He will. I don't know who in Washington who was a liberal pundit was telling you that we're not going to get them through, but it wasn't fucking me. So is he going to get his nominees through? He will. I don't see that as a... Like, I think it's bad. I think Kash Patel is a bad nominee.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
I think all these people are bad. But that doesn't surprise me or strike me as a huge overturning of the governmental order.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
I think he did lose Matt Gaetz, but that had not really occurred to me to count as, like, the bar here. I don't think modern presidents lose a lot of nominees. So then there's a question of the international alliances. I mean, yeah, like we elected Donald Trump and the president has a lot of power over that. I don't really buy that nobody that these countries will not come back into alliance.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
I've lived through that argument with George W. Bush and then the alliance is rebuilt during Barack Obama. Then I lived through that argument with Donald Trump one and then the the alliance is rebuilt with Joe Biden. The other nations are transactional, much like we are. And I think that the danger of the alliance system is right now as it is happening.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
If the next president is Pete Buttigieg or Josh Shapiro, I think that the UK is going to be perfectly happy to work with us again. But it's bad, right? I don't think it's good. I don't think pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord is good. I think all these things are very, very upsetting. The civil service is the big one here to me. Because, as you say, this is running a wrecking ball through it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
in a way that had, I think, not even been contemplated by past Republicans. And to some degree, they are showing they can do it because the courts move, particularly on things like firings, much more slowly than the firings happen. So, yes, you can come back and say, I was wrongly fired under civil service protections.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
But it is, unless there are some injunctions coming down the pike, which we have not seen on this particular issue, they're already going to be out of there. So what, they get back pay? Maybe they get reinstated? I don't see that as a remedy that's potent.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
That's their strategy. I am not convinced on multiple levels that this is a good strategy, including for the Heritage Foundation theory of the world. So this is one of the other arguments of that piece, which is the theory that they will overwhelm us is a way of also overwhelming themselves.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
I don't think they're feeling great about it. I think ultimately it will have proven to be a mistake of Trump's. I mean, you felt this. I feel like part of the job here is sensing the sort of structure, the emotional structure of American politics. And after Democrats lost in 2024... they were psychologically pretty shattered.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
They are not carefully running through this thing, thinking about who it is a good idea to lose and who it isn't. So this is going to be very bad for the country, right? But everything that goes wrong that government touches from here on out, they will own at a startling level. So that email, the buyout email, it went to all the VA primary care doctors.
The Bulwark Podcast
Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead
How many VA primary care doctors do they actually want to lose? Now, replicate that across the entire federal government. Every regulator, everybody who regulates poison in a stream, everybody who regulates financial industries, everybody who does things so that you don't get killed in a workplace accident. A lot goes wrong over the course of a couple years.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Signal Storm Grows Larger
One of the things you can see here is if you just look at 18-year-olds, 18-year-old women of color are the only of the four that actually, you know, voted that Harris won. Trump narrowly won, you know, non-white men.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Signal Storm Grows Larger
It is a real shift. This is the thing I am the most shocked by, I think, in the last four years, is that young people have gone from being the most progressive generation since the baby boomers, and maybe in some ways more so, to becoming potentially the most conservative.
The Charlie Kirk Show
What's Driving the Democrat Death Spiral?
So Democrats are getting destroyed now among young voters. That's right. I do think there was, even as the idea of the rising demographic, Democratic majority had become a little discredited in 2016 and 2020, I do think Democrats believed that these young voters were eventually going to save them. Right. That this was a last gasp of something. Right.
The Charlie Kirk Show
What's Driving the Democrat Death Spiral?
That if Donald Trump couldn't run these numbers up among seniors and you had millennials really coming into the voting power, Gen Z coming in, that was going to be the end of this Republican Party. Right. And that just completely false.
The Charlie Kirk Show
What's Driving the Democrat Death Spiral?
It might be the beginning of this Republican Party.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Will Dems Run On "The Gay Agenda" in 2028?
One of the things you can see here is if you just look at 18-year-olds, 18-year-old women of color are the only of the four that actually, you know, voted that Harris won. Trump narrowly won, you know, non-white men.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Will Dems Run On "The Gay Agenda" in 2028?
It is a real shift. This is the thing I am the most shocked by, I think, in the last four years is that young people have gone from being the most progressive generation since the baby boomers, and maybe in some ways more so, to becoming potentially the most conservative.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
Well, the Liberal Party of Canada, they've decided that it's easier to run against Donald Trump in the next election than to run against the Canadian conservative leader in the next election. So you've never seen a Canadian election like this before. All the Liberals are talking about is Trump. And by the way, Trudeau is gone now.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
But we've got Trudeau 2.0, a guy named Mark Carney, who is even worse. He was on the board of the World Economic Forum. He's got three passports. He's the ultimate globalist. He was the head of the state bank, the Federal Reserve. It's called the Bank of Canada. And then he went over to the UK and he headed the Bank of England. And while he was there...
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
He was friends with Elaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein's right-hand woman. So this guy is the worst. I don't even think he lives in Canada. His wife still lives in New York where she works. He was selected in a Kamala Harris-style fake primary where foreign nationals were allowed to vote and children as young as 14. So this guy was installed...
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
And he's going straight to the top of the Canadian political food chain. And he has decided that running against America, running on an anti-America platform, and obviously anti-Trump is his way to win. Trouble is, that's terrible for ordinary Canadians.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
Yeah, Trudeau, for nine years, he's been in so many scandals, people are sick of him. So he resigned and he said, I'm out of here as soon as the party chooses a successor to me. So they had an internal vote. But that internal vote is so fishy. 400,000 people registered to vote, but only 150,000 of those were qualified and certified and verified. So more than half of the votes were not qualified.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
What the heck was going on? And like I said, you didn't have to be a Canadian citizen to vote. And you didn't have to be a grown-up. So 14-year-olds and foreign citizens voted chose our new prime minister. And he goes straight to the top. It would be as if Kamala Harris became president, but at least she was on a ballot in 2020. This is so undemocratic. And he doesn't have a mandate
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
He's down in the polls and he knows that fighting with Trump will prick Canadians to come. He's playing Captain Canada. The trouble is when you fight with Trump over economics, you're going to get hurt. It's just a fact. America is 10 times bigger than us. And I'm really worried that there's what's called a moral hazard here, if you know what I mean.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
Donald Trump is used to negotiating with people who want a deal, and Trump is the one who's not afraid to walk away. That's how Trump did it in New York City when he was a real estate developer. But in this case, Trump is the one who wants a deal, but it's in the liberal party's interest not to get one. They want the fight, and believe it or not,
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
They want the economic damage that the fight will cause so they can blame Trump for our looming recession rather than their own economics. It's really the worst of times in Canadian politics. But more to the point, I hate the fact that we're fighting. It's like Batman and Robin are fighting. We're the junior partner. There's no doubt about it. But I think we've got a friendship and a respect.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
And like, I can't think of two countries that are better friends. And I'm worried that our liberal leaders are wrecking that just to win an election.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
I think so. And you're exactly right to say unintended consequence. I think Trump likes yanking people's chains like Justin Trudeau. And so many of us love to see it. But there was some collateral damage there. And so I thought, you know what, we need a plan. How do we put this in America first terms? Because Canadians know what we want.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
But that's not going to move the needle with President Trump. How can we rephrase this in a way that maybe the president will listen to? And here's my take at it. I'm obviously a Canadian citizen, but I've been a Trump supporter three elections in a row. We're the only Canadian media outlet that endorsed Trump three elections in a row. And we paid a price for that, by the way, under Trudeau.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
So here's my best effort. And Charlie, you tell me if I've got any holes in my argument, because I'm trying to work this out. Here's my theory. The biggest source of that trade deficit that President Trump talks about is because we sell a huge amount of crude oil to the United States, much more than we sell auto parts or agriculture.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
And that's because although America makes produce a lot of oil, it still consumes more than it produces and exports. So Canada fills the void. And so you're not going to get tariffs fixing that. A tariff is good to move a Honda factory from Mexico to the States because you didn't move the factory. But Canada's oil comes from the oil sands in Alberta. And you just can't move that.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
So a tariff is not going to move the oil to America. It's just going to make it more expensive for those U.S. refineries that buy it. But here's the thing. That oil, the Canadian oil sands, it's the third largest proven reserves in the world, just behind Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. And it's just sitting just north of Montana.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
And the premier of the province of Alberta, that's sort of like the Texas of Canada, she's so pro-America. She went down to President Trump's inauguration. I don't know if you know that. She's so positive and upbeat. She has not given in to the vendetta-style politics of Trudeau. She knows Americans are our best friends. And she told me, I met her when she was down there on the inauguration.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
She says she would love it if Alberta could double the amount of oil that's produced in the oil sands. And so here was my thinking. Instead of pushing away the oil sands, pull it close. Don't tariff it. Buy it all. 170 billion barrels of oil. Even if Alberta doubled the production, that's enough oil to take care of all of America's import needs for the next 50 years. It's a $13 trillion deal.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
I would think of it sort of like a real estate deal, but much more valuable than Greenland or Panama. And the thing is, Donald Trump negotiated the USMCA, which is a special side letter on oil. And it allows America to get preferential access to our oil. So what I would say, if I was trying to talk to my America First friends, I would say, don't push this oil away.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
China is already sniffing around. China is already trying to buy the oil sands. Don't let them in. Take the oil. Don't tariff it. It's practically yours anyways. What I mean by that is the companies that pump that oil, that steam it and produce it, they're either American-owned or they're Canadian with a lot of American investors. So it's sort of American on every side you look at it.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
The producers are American. The consumers are American refineries. Oh, Charlie, I forgot my favorite part. If you buy all your foreign oil from ethical oil in Canada instead of conflict oil from OPEC, you don't need to have the Fifth Fleet stationed in the Persian Gulf anymore. That's a $50 billion a year expense, let alone the risk of human life.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
They already signed it under Donald Trump in the USMCA. And the premier of Alberta said, I want to do it. She wants to double it. So keep the price low because it's American consumers. Replace your Venice. Don't buy any more oil from Venezuela. Stop funding those guys. Don't buy any more oil from OPEC. Stop funding them.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
If you want to have your military in the Middle East on your own reasons, fine. But at least you won't have to do it to patrol your oil tankers. Alberta wants to sell it. The oil producers are ready to rock. Remember that Keystone XL pipeline? Joe Biden killed it on day one of his presidency. President Trump says he wants to revive it.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
That pipeline alone would bring 800,000 barrels of oil a day, which would replace a huge swath of OPEC oil. So you know the old saying, don't get mad? Don't get me even get ahead. That's what I would say to America first people is get ahead. Don't be distracted by these liberals in Ottawa. By the way, they don't speak for all Canadians. What do you really want when you say you want a 51st state?
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
Do you really want 40 million people who in the electoral college probably tilt a little bit Democrat? Do you really want the French English bilingual? What you really want is you want to hug Canada close. Get the oil. Don't let China get it. Let's do trade. Don't let Trudeau and now Mark Carney knock you off your goal. Your goal... is prosperity and security.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
If you bring those oil sands close, you're doing both. And your question's a good one, Charlie. The answer is it's already, the deal is already there. The pipe, the Keystone XL is half built. The premier wants to do it. Stay yes to the oil sands. Don't be the, Trudeau and Carney hate the oil sands.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
Unfortunately, and here's why. Let's say someone's happily married. Let's say there's a happily married woman and a man comes up to her and says, hey, divorce him and marry me. Well, that's shocking. That's sort of an indecent proposal, as the old movie with Woody Harrelson put it.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
And so a lot of Canadians are saying, whoa, when you're saying join America, that's sort of asking me to break up my family. By the way, some other people who maybe were thinking of getting a divorce would say, yeah, I'd love to join the U.S. as a 51st state. My point is it started that whole serious debate in Canada over what I think was basically internet prickles.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
Trump is a master at that bombastic style. That's the Manhattan style. Canadians are a little bit more passive, maybe a little more thin-skinned, so I think that distracted like a million Canadians. And a million Canadians sort of took it personally. And I loved it because it was yanking Trudeau's chain. But Charlie, I'm going to agree with you.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
That probably cost the conservative leader of Canada 5% in the polls. And believe me, all of us want that conservative leader. His name is Pierre Polyev. He's great. He would be a great international partner, a bilateral partner for America. I think that Trump knew how to needle Trudeau, but it sort of had that unintended consequence, you know?
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
Well, the thing is, Alberta is the most pro-America place in Canada.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
Yeah, I think so. I think some ordinary people are excited about the idea of becoming American. I just don't know if that's likely to happen. I think the risk is if the liberals win again because people are confused. Some people are actually saying the Americans are going to invade. I mean, I don't think serious people think that that's what's happening.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
I think Trump is just having some rhetorical fun. But yeah, Charlie, it is true. I think some people are freaking out. But I think that doing a deal like this, there's one more thing it gives Donald Trump. Let me come back to the America First point of view. How did this whole trade war start?
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
You might remember in November, President Trump tweeted to Mexico and to Canada, get your borders under control before I become president. And instead of doing those two simple things, Trump said, fix the fentanyl issue and stop the illegal migrants. Canada should do that on our own. But instead of doing that, Trudeau wanted to fight.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
So if you actually did this deal of a century with Canada, it's a $13 trillion 50-year deal. But you know what President Trump could demand? He could say, if we're going to buy all this oil from you instead of from the Persian Gulf or Brazil or Mexico or whatever, then we want you to take some of that money and reinvest in your military.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
We want you to remove some of your tariffs on dairy and poultry and eggs. We want you to allow American banks to set up shop on Main Street Canada. We want these basic, you know, bilateral fairnesses. And by the way, Canadians would love that. We have terrible banks. We have the highest cell phone prices in the world. I would love it if American cell phone companies could compete up here.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
So if President Trump were to say to Canada, all right, we're going to do a deal for your oil. We're going to make you rich and we're going to make ourselves rich and we're going to get out of this Middle East oil business. But in return, you got to pump up your military. You got to get those F-35s. You got to patrol the North. You got to fix the border. You got to crack down on fentanyl.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
You got to get tougher with China. I think that's a deal that Trump could make. And that's a lasting deal. I think that's a bigger deal than Greenland. I think it's a bigger deal than Panama.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
I just sort of hope that if President Trump looked at it like some sort of a business deal or a real estate deal and thought, okay, how do I get all the benefit of the Canadian relationship without the downsides? I think that's the winner. And I think Canadians are a little thin-skinned on that 51st state thing. It would be like asking someone married, do you want to be my girlfriend?
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
I think that's what happened there. But that's a distraction. Let's put that aside. And thanks for having me on, Charlie, and help me promote the plan.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
The Charlie Kirk Show
California or Canada: What's Worse?
You need a better accountant because it's 13.3%.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Democrat Extinction Event
What's interesting is that this is happening in other countries as well. Obviously, different countries have different political systems, but I've seen similar patterns in Canada, in the UK, in Norway.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Democrat Extinction Event
You know, what I have here is we have the share of voters who get their news from TikTok, you know, by year. The share of voters who get their new—of young voters who get their news from TikTok more than quadrupled in the last four years. This is the biggest and probably fastest change in media consumption, you know, that has happened in my lifetime. And it was—
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Democrat Extinction Event
quite correlated with support change. Now, obviously, TikTok users are younger. They're less politically engaged. It's not surprising that we dropped among this group. You'd expect that from demographics.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Democrat Extinction Event
When you zoom in, particularly, to people who get their news from TikTok who don't care very much about politics, this is a group that's eight percentage points more Republican than they were four years ago, and that's a lot.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Democrat Extinction Event
One of the things you can see here is if you just look at 18-year-olds, 18-year-old women of color are the only of the four that actually, you know, voted that Harris won. Trump narrowly won, you know, non-white men.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Democrat Extinction Event
It is a real shift. This is the thing I am the most shocked by, I think, in the last four years, is that young people have gone from being the most progressive generation since the baby boomers, and maybe in some ways more so, to becoming potentially the most conservative generation
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Democrat Extinction Event
You know, I have to admit, I was I was one of those liberals four years ago, and it seems like I was wrong.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Democrat Extinction Event
On the bottom, we have age. And at the top, we have the gender gap and support between women and men and, you know, for support for Kamala Harris. And so what you can see is that, you know, for voters over 30, the gender gap was fairly stable at around 10 percent, which is roughly where it's been in American politics.
The Charlie Kirk Show
The Democrat Extinction Event
But what's crazy is if you look at people who are under the age of 30, the gender gap has exploded. If you look at 18 year olds, 18 year old men were 23 percentage points more likely to support, you know, Donald Trump than 18 year old women, which is just completely unprecedented in American politics. Is that abortion? I think it's too early to say exactly what the cause is.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
Das ist eine gute, tiefe Frage. Ja, es gibt eine Sentenz im ersten Kapitel des Buches, die klingt, als wäre es eine der offensichtlichsten Sentenzen, die jemals in einem Non-Fiction-Buch geschrieben worden ist. Wir sagen, um den Zukunft, den wir wollen, muss Amerika bauen und mehr davon inventieren, was wir brauchen.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
Wie in der Welt muss man ein ganzes Buch über die offensichtlichste Sentenz, die man jemals gehört hat, schreiben?
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
And the thing is, you wouldn't have to write a whole book about that sentence if you lived in a world of sanity. But we don't. We live in a world of the constitutional crises that you talked about. And we also live in a world that has affordability crises and housing crises. And a lot of these crises unfortunately are worst Ja.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
Sometimes I think Ich denke absolut, dass die Antwort ist, dass Kalifornien mehr wie Texas aussieht.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
Ich meine, manchmal, wenn das Problem ist, dass eine Stadt zu viele Regulierungen hat und zu viel Zonierung und zu viele Regeln, die in den Weg kommen, um die grundlegendste Technologie zu erzeugen, um Stücke aufzunehmen und einen Elevator hinzuzufügen, dann ja, du nimmst weg die schlechten Regeln, die in den Weg kommen, um Hausaufgaben hinzuzufügen, wo du nur mehr verdammte Häuser hinzufügen musst.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
Das bedeutet jedoch nicht, dass wir Texas-Republikaner sind. Und ich denke, es ist wichtig zu sagen, dass Donald Trump in einer seltsamen Weise auch nicht ist. Trump wurde in diesem Land wegen einer Affordabilitätskrise ausgewählt. Er wurde wegen der Inflation ausgewählt. Und das größte Teil der Inflation, das größte Teil von jedem Budget, ist das Wohnen.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
Trump könnte sich ausgewählt haben und gesagt haben, ich bin ein Texas-Republikaner und mein erstes Business-Order wird sein, um es einfacher zu bauen, Häuser in Amerika zu bauen. Was macht er stattdessen? Er schlägt einen Tarif auf. von Kanada und von Mexiko. Weißt du, was wirklich, wirklich schwer zu bauen ist? Wenn du kein Holz hast und auch kein Rohstoff. Es werden Häuser sein.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
Das Erste, was er tut, ist, es schwieriger zu bauen, das, was wir brauchen, um die Erhöhungskrise zu lösen. Donald Trump versteht nicht, wie man die Probleme löst, die ironisch zu seiner Wahl führten. Da müssen Demokraten aufstehen und sagen, wir werden einen Opposition-Movement bauen, der die Probleme der Menschen löst, indem man die Probleme der Menschen versteht. Wie viel... Sure.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
The thing about Operation Warp Speed is you have a program that by some accounts saved 10 to 20 million lives around the world by inventing and accelerating the distribution of mRNA vaccines. And yet nobody talks about it. I think the Democrats don't talk about it because it's kind of awkward to give credit to a program that was initiated under Donald Trump.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
But the weirdest thing of all is that Donald Trump doesn't talk about it. In fact, he's one of the biggest skeptics of mRNA science right now. So it really is bizarre. Like imagine if we landed a man on the moon and nobody talked about the Apollo program because it just wasn't something that either party could bring up.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
We saved even more lives with Operation Warp Speed than we saved with the Apollo program and no one talks about it. I think it's important to take really, really clear lessons from what Operation Warp Speed did. We set a very clear goal. We said in 10 months we're going to develop a therapy that saves people's lives. We're going to get it to everybody if they want it.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
And we're going to make the cost of this world-saving therapeutic, maybe the best medicine in the world, zero dollars and zero cents. We set a goal, we identified what the bottlenecks were going to be, we took away the bottlenecks that existed and we met the goal. Frankly, that's how government should work more often. We should have mayors and governors saying...
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
Das Buch ist um die Ergebnisse über Prozesse zu stellen. It's about setting a North Star with a big, bold, beautiful sci-fi vision in the first three pages of the book and saying, we can do this, but in order to do it, we have to get out of our own way.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
Ich sehe Leute im Kongress, im Senat und in den Gouverneuren, die diese Botschaft explizit aufnehmen. Ich meine, jemand fragte, ein Kollege von Ezra Klein aus der New York Times fragte, wo ist der Demokratische Projekt 2025? Und Richie Torres, Repräsentant von Richie Torres aus New York, hat einfach eine Fotografie von diesem Buch getweetet und ohne irgendwelche Worte.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
Er hat einfach gesagt, das ist meine Idee des Projekts 2025 für den Demokratischen Partei.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
We're happy to do the work of writing the book if people are going to be taking up the ideas. But people really are taking up the ideas and that's cool. I want to say one other thing. You talked about what's the value of a positive vision. I think it's a fair question. Politics is incredibly negative right now.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
But I really do think that there's a lot of voters that are starving for not just a negative identity for their party, but a positive identity. It's easy for Democrats to say right now why Donald Trump sucks. You can do that over and over and over again. You can do 10 hours of the constitutional crises that he's starting. You can make a television show about it.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
What's the positive vision? Alright, Donald Trump sucks. What are we going to place him with? What problems are we going to solve if we have power? The problem right now is that a lot of Democrats who actually have power in blue cities and blue states aren't doing anything with that power in terms of adding housing and clean energy. We want them to show Americans what will we do if we win.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
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The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
He didn't do any explaining of how to all work properly.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
One, I think they do care about it. And two, I think it's good politics for them. Because they didn't talk about it in terms you're talking about it here. True. They had a young woman up in the gallery talking. who I guess had been playing volleyball, and there was someone born male on the other team who had spiked the ball and injured her.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
So they're still very much on the trans kids in sports, which is in wokeness like their best wedge issue, but already one the Democrats have largely abandoned. I've thought about this a fair amount. As you know, my position is that it would be fighting the last war in a stupid way for Democrats to make wokeness or turning against wokeness.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
Donald Trump and his administration are going to engage in such unbridled cruelty. to trans children, to all kinds of people on the margins of society, that I think the politics of this are going to change. We're not going to call it wokeness next time. We're going to call it decency. But I am not for some huge reversal of the ethic on this.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
I don't know, though, that I totally agree with the thing you just said. Not in the sense that I don't think Trump – people always say Trump wants to bring back traditional hierarchies. And it's true in a way, but it's also – it's a much older traditional hierarchy than I think the one they mean. This is maybe the thing that I've had trouble articulating about it.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
Donald Trump doesn't want the America of the 1950s. His chief of staff is a woman. His secretary of homeland security is a woman. His attorney general is a woman. He's not against women admirals. What he cares about is loyalty. The hierarchy he wants is the hierarchy of the clan with the chief, the big man chief at the top. And what matters is the tribute you pay to the chief.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
And I actually don't really think Donald Trump cares if you're paying that tribute. I think he's perfectly happy to have you pay that tribute if you are white, if you are black, if you are a woman, if you are male. I am not saying he doesn't have retrograde views on all kinds of things. I'm not saying he's not a racist because I think at a core level he is.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
I thought it was incredibly shitty when he had this little crack about Lesotho. Who even knows where that is? Nobody knows where that is.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
And he's out there saying, it is an amazing golden age. Everything is wonderful.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
I mean, the guy just isn't a good person. And I'm not saying among some of the other people around him, like Elon Musk, who grew up in South Africa and seems to view the way South Africa changed and hit the end of apartheid and the role of Afrikaners in modern South African life is some sort of terrible mistake you need to keep from happening in America.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
So I'm not saying inside his movement there isn't a lot of that. But what Trump wants, he had this whole section of the speech where he talks about merit. And we're going to get the best people. And it's actually worth playing it.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
Think about that section of the speech, and then think about who he has named to his cabinet. RFK Jr. Tulsi Gabbard. This is not a cabinet built on merit. This is a cabinet built on loyalty and transaction to the chief. The hierarchy of this entire thing is about your relationship to Donald Trump. Kash Patel, of every person you could find in the country, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino—
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
And you have the Republican Party leaping to its feet, laughing at his every joke. J.D. Vance just radiating Dwight from the office energy up behind him, just chuckling at every dumb joke the boss makes. And then on the other side, you had the Democrats who clearly did not know how to act. They do not feel this moment is normal.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
Are your most meritorious picks to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation? Nobody buys that. They're your loyalists. That is the hierarchy he wants. It is just a hierarchy with him on top. I think he's quite flexible about who's on bottom so long as they are bringing him enough gifts.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
Well, I'm not here to argue that they are accepting of the expansion of rights and so I'm not aware that expansion of the moral circle has gotten. I've been obsessed on this show with this idea of what are the rules of this system, of this presidency, of this regime that are being expressed. That was sort of my first audio essay starting with the inauguration. I think Democrats want to create a
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
A simplified version of this that they are more comfortable with, but that keeps fouling them up. It would be easier for them if Donald Trump's view was just white people good and everybody else bad. And that was sort of the view Democrats had of him in 2017. And then in 2020 and in 2024, his coalition became much more multiracial.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
And that's been a real problem for Democrats even knowing how to talk about it because they want to say the thing they were saying about him in 2017. And yet they're losing the support of multiracial voters as they say that more and more loudly. Or another example, Donald Trump's hatred, apparent hatred, certainly his distaste, has of Mexican and Latin American immigrants seem to fit into this.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
And his tendency to bully Mexico seemed to fit into this. And maybe even China, too. But okay, he actually hates Canada, clearly, exactly as much or maybe more than Mexico. And it's not because Canada does not have enough white people for Donald Trump's taste. It's because Canada is disloyal. It's because Canada is a different regime.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
They feel, I think, accurately that Donald Trump has seized powers the executive is not supposed to have, powers that are in many cases illegal. I think he's had 20-some injunctions, freezes, et cetera, from the courts already. And so they go to the speech. They had discussed not going at all, but they thought that would be breaking the law. structure, an institution, a norm of American democracy.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
Trump has much more affinity, as best I can tell, for Xi than anybody who leads a government in Europe, aside from Viktor Orban. And I do think the rules expressed in this presidency... They're not more complex than we want to go back to the racial and gender hierarchies of the 1950s, but they are not actually that. They are rules about loyalty and ideological affinity.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
And they are rules about tribute. And what he has created is a way that you can be inside of his coalition. I think it'd be very hard to be trans and be inside of his coalition, but I don't think it's very hard to be Hispanic and be inside of his coalition. Many people are doing it, right? He is trying to save Eric Adams in New York.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
Eric Adams is a black Democrat, but as long as Eric Adams will pledge loyalty to Donald Trump, he can be put into Donald Trump's pocket and become an ally rather than an enemy. It is not that it is not an incredibly retrograde hierarchy, but it is more of a royal court, which I think is worse than it is 1950s or 1970s America.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
Now, there are people around him, you know, the Bronze Age pervert world of Republican or conservative or MAGA policy thinking. There are all kinds of – racists who attach themselves to Donald Trump, white supremacists, etc. It's a coalition that stretches at this point, and a lot is being pasted onto him. But his rules, I think, have to do with loyalty. So
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
Al Green, Representative Al Green, gets up, you know, shaking his cane and yelling at Trump until he gets ejected very early on. Some of the Democrats are waving these stupid little things that look like they're at an auction saying, you know, save Medicaid and, you know, Elon Musk is a fraud. And others were just sitting there on their hands.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
I think that Donald Trump and the people around him believe this. I think the simplest way to put this is they believe the culture of American politics has become weak, probably feminized, soft, restrained. I think the soaring denouement of the speech at the end really got at this. What did Trump ultimately say he is going to try to do here?
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
You do not hear George W. Bush say that the intention... of his democracy promotion around the world was that America would be the most dominant nation the world has ever seen nor was that the vision of Ronald Reagan at least not in the way it was spoken about they think we gave up the expansionist muscular violent frontier spirit that once made this country great.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
I do believe this is a way the meaning of Donald Trump has changed from his first term to his second. I do think in his first term, make America great, if you had to pick a year, you might say 59, 1959, right? When were we great? 1959, 1983, right? I could see something like that. I think now it's something like the late 1800s.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
I mean, you have a more studied historical perspective than I. When you listen to this, what do you think is the era in his head? When was—I think they believe there was a moment when the American spirit was great.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
They didn't know what to do because the rules don't work right now. They don't work on the right. They don't work on the left. There is a renegotiation happening, but not in the sense that the two parties are talking about it. About what kind of system are we in? What is okay to do within it?
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
I think what's interesting about it is it's a 19th century model in what is nevertheless a 21st century world. One of the more substantive parts of the speech was about Taiwan Semiconductor's investments in America.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
So I think a couple of things are interesting here. The CHIPS Act was a very, very bipartisan bill. And the major thing it does is it puts money into pulling in groups like the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation to build highly advanced semiconductor manufacturing facilities in America. And they've been working on this for years.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
They're working on it not only because of American subsidies, but also because they are afraid if China annexes Taiwan, that they're not going to have any production facilities anymore. And that'll be the end of that. But Trump's view that we don't have to give them money. We just want to give them tariffs.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
They will just come here because of the tariffs, because they want that access to our market. I think it's worth thinking about why that would or would not work. Yeah. The thing is, if you put tariffs on everything, the supply chains for advanced semiconductors, they're maybe the most complex supply chains on earth.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
How do you act if you think the other side has breached those boundaries, but you don't want to burn the entire thing to the ground because you're not sure what will be left if you do that? So I thought that was the first 15 minutes. We can get into what happened after that as he went on, as you described it to me, a Castro-esque stemwinder. Yeah. What did you make of it?
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
And there's things like these lithograph machines that are only made by this one Dutch company. But there's a million things. They are incredibly intricate and they're sourced from all over the world. Semiconductors are not a marvel of one machine. They are marvel of global supply chains and global talent.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
If locating in America means that every single intermediate or basic good you have to source from outside America is 10 to 15 to 25 to maybe 50% more expensive because it is getting tariffed sometimes multiple times. I've done a lot of writing on this. We've had shows on this. If you do tariffs...
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
You make it much more expensive to produce semiconductors in America than in Canada, than in the UK, than in South Korea. We lost the semiconductor industry because it became much more expensive to produce semiconductors in America than elsewhere. So there's a reason you're subsidizing. You're trying to build a new industry or an industry that is not new but one that we've lost.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
The reason you would do subsidies and not just tariffs, aside from the fact that tariffs are a tax your own people are paying, is that you want to make this the best place there is to build very advanced things. And building very advanced things in the 21st century requires working with global supply chains.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
It is not a thing that you can change, and it's definitely not a thing, even if you can change it, that you can change in one or two, even three or four years. They have a theory that And then there is this world that is just a different world than McKinley or Jackson had. And that was what was so striking to me about the day on which his speech happened.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
This was the day on which the world was acting back on America. Reality was imposing itself. Reality was imposing itself. You could see it in the markets. You could see it in things that different firms were saying about what they were or weren't going to do. You could see it in other countries beginning to add reciprocal tariffs onto us.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
And we're about to get this collision between this very old school mercantilist philosophy that whatever you think about it in the 19th century, the 19th century did not have the economic structure of 2025. So now they're applying that philosophy to this era. And I guess just hoping they could dominate the world into abiding by the way they would like to look at it.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
But I don't think it has that structure, no matter what you want it to have.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
Yeah, but let me say two things about this, because I think Kennedy does and does not represent that. And this goes back to our conversation about wokeness and hierarchies. What Kennedy fundamentally represents is not Donald Trump's embrace or rejection of any particular system of theories about public health. RFK Jr.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
You have more, well, historical perspective on this than I do.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
bent the knee to Donald Trump, endorsed him, brought in voters of value to Donald Trump, and now he gets payback. He has been given a Duke's Lance. Yes. And Donald Trump doesn't really care what he does with them. But I don't think you can look across the appointments and say Donald Trump has adopted this maha view of health. What does Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hate more than anything in the world?
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
Possibly not vaccines. It's seed oils. That dude hates seed oils. Who is the chief of staff at the Department of Ag under Donald Trump? A former seed oil lobbyist. Trump doesn't care, doesn't know, doesn't care. He supported Operation Warp Speed when he was president because it seemed like the thing to do.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
Then the politics shifted and the people who were paying him fealty were anti-vaccine, so he agreed to that. And now RFK Jr. is going to solve autism despite the fact that the guy is clinging to endless amounts of completely discredited research on autism. Now, it is true, I think, that there's an overall – an anti-system, but more I would say it's like a counter-revolutionary ethos.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
And what they are going to do is try to build their own system. They don't just hate the system. They want to own the thing. And they don't want to decentralize power. They want to centralize power, but under them. They don't want it to be the case that American policy is not tilted towards the rich. They just want to be controlling the tax cuts.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
So I always – I bristle a little bit, not when you say it because I've said it a million times. I do think for a lot of people, the split feels like pro-system, anti-system. But this is just a different set of elites in the system. I was talking about this with Martin Gury, that he has a sort of revolt of the public there. I was like, no, this is a revolt of elites.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
You cannot tell me that Marc Andreessen, the founder of the web browser and then the head of A16Z, one of the biggest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley and one of the biggest names in tech forever, and Elon Musk, the richest man in the world— who has built multiple companies on the back of federal subsidies, that these people are not part of the system. They are part of the system.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
They just want to take it for themselves. They don't like how much power went to people they did not control and they did not like. Now, I do think RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, the Maha thing has been significant for the Trump coalition, expanding it, changing it, reshaping it.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
The thing we're about to find out as, again, Trump's policies, his administration comes into contact with reality and things like potentially bird flu. And the measles outbreak in Texas. And the measles outbreak. He might in two years, in four years, make a lot of people yearn for the system. realize that there were things that were working that you relied on?
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
I have had, I think, everybody in my life who is not a Trump voter come to me and complain that the Democrats don't have a message. Why don't they have a message? Donald Trump is just lobbing softballs at them. Where's their message? And one thing I feel like I keep saying on this is it's not that they don't have a message. If you are actually listening to what
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
Brian Schatz and Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar and I could sort of go down, Cory Booker are saying, Chris Murphy, one of them is saying actually probably the exact thing you wish Democrats were saying. What Democrats don't have is attention. Nobody cares what they're saying. They cannot generate attention. Like you saw it last night. They don't get to go up to the podium.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
I mean, they had Alyssa Slotkin delivering a perfectly fine response at the end, but they don't get to give the State of the Union variant at the same time as Donald Trump does. They don't have it. They can hold up their little signs. They don't get to give an answer. It's not a debate. There is no traction right now for the opposition.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
There might be soon if in Congress Republicans can't pass the bills they want to pass. There might be soon because we are barreling towards what might be a government shutdown, though I kind of expect Republicans are going to pass a continuing resolution and delay that for a bit.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
But until Trump needs something from congressional Democrats, people are not going to pay very much attention to congressional Democrats because what they want from congressional Democrats is not a message. They want them to make this stop. That is what they actually want, is what liberals actually are saying. They want Democrats to do something that...
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
organized a society and makes a stop and elected Democrats don't have the power to do that. They can shut down the Senate, but then the Republicans could just vote to change the rules. And that would be the end of, you know, even that Democratic power in the Senate. Look, Donald Trump is not popular. He is less popular than Joe Biden was at this point in his presidency by a lot.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
He won the popular vote by less in 2024 than Hillary Clinton won it in 2016. And He doesn't need to be popular because he's won and he's not running for re-election probably given – unless they're able to change the constitution, which I doubt despite some mutterings to the contrary. This is not a political juggernaut. The problem is there's no leverage on them aside from in the courts.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
There's nothing they need anymore. At the moment. Donald Trump could have come in and tried to get bipartisan support on big spending cuts, on government reform. It was all possible to do. He didn't do it. That little riff he gave last night about how Democrats would never cheer for him.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
It came two sentences after he said that Joe Biden was the worst president in the history of the United States. He doesn't want them to cheer for him. He doesn't want to work with him. Ro Khanna wanted to work with Doge. A number of congressional Democrats said they would work with Doge. They never got the call because Doge does not want to work with them. Right now, the Democratic opposition...
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
elected opposition doesn't have leverage. And if there's anything that matters in the Trump era, it's leverage.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
And so, as you say, it's going to be civil society, and it's also going to be the world acting back upon Trump, people feeling effects, people being upset, not just about the price of eggs, but about measles outbreaks, about what's happened to their 401k, about the economy potentially falling into recession, about the sense of cruelty.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
And at some point, Republicans in Congress are going to start looking forward to an election and begin realizing they're going to get annihilated if they don't begin to create some distance, right? The fact that Republicans in the House are telling each other to stop doing town halls is very telling. Just amazing. Just amazing. So I wish I had like a good answer to this.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
I don't think there is a answer to this right now that is satisfying. I mean, it would be good if more people were out in the streets, I think. But aside from that, There is not a power center in American life that is built around liberal values and that can stop what this is. It is going to be the collision between what this is and reality itself that matters.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
Aaron, always a pleasure, even in dark times. This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Isaac Jones with Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Elias Iskwith, Kristen Lin, and Jack McCordick. We have original music by Pat McCusker.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
Audience strategy by Christina Samuliski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
I find myself thinking about how the word lie is overly blunt for the gradations we need here. There's different ways to lie and there are different kinds of lies. You brought up the lie about Social Security fraudulent payments. This has been fact-checked a lot.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
That's a kind of lie that I think has been a mainstay of Republican rhetoric about government for many decades, which is you take something that sounds weird. If you look at the coding in the Social Security files, you will see people at unusual levels of advanced age saying, who appear to be active in the system.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
And that has to do in a technical way with the way the software was coded a long time ago, and it's hard to update, but these people aren't actually getting money. But it puts you into the position of pedantically explaining the structure of the underlying social security database, which nobody wants to hear about. Let me think about what he was doing from the very beginning.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
So I have the speech in front of me, and it's four paragraphs in, right? So it's, you know, he first says, Speaker Johnson, Vice President Vance, thanks for being here. Then he says, you know, I was here six weeks ago. I proclaim the dawn of the golden age of America. I return to the chamber tonight is the next paragraph. Our momentum is back.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
And I thought it'd be good to just walk through some impressions of it with my revered editor, Aaron Redica. Aaron, welcome to the show.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
So in 2020, Joe Biden won six out of seven swing states and he won the popular vote by 4.5 points to Trump's 1.5. So multiples more. Everybody knows that was not a mandate that has not been seen in many decades. And then Trump goes on to talk about how all of a sudden we finally have most Americans believing the country is headed in the right direction rather than the wrong one.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
You can go to Real Clear Politics right now. They have a polling average of this question. And most Americans do not believe this in poll after poll after poll after poll. The point of these kinds of lies to me, which are so easy to check, is one to sort of overwhelm the system's faculties of truth. At a certain point, you give up, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. So it is Wednesday morning, March 5th. Last night, President Donald Trump gave his first address to a joint session of Congress in his second term. You don't call the State of the Union when it is this early in a term, but that's more or less what it was.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
This is what it means, as Steve Bannon said, to flood the zone with bullshit. You can check a couple of lies. If all you're doing is checking every sentence of a two-hour speech, you're going to bore your audience and yourself. These are more like what was happening when he made Sean Spicer go out in the first term and say the largest inauguration crowd ever.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
It is a way of cleaving reality into two and not, I think, actually into two separate realities. I think it is cleaving reality by loyalty. These lies are loyalty tests. And they're ways of getting people who accept them, J.D. Vance with his chuckling right behind him, further and further and further into the con. Because once you've given so much of yourself up...
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
Once you've traded little shred of dignity after little shred of dignity, once you've accepted these cruelties, these outrages, things you would not have thought you would accept a couple of years before, at a certain point, you're in too deep. You've gone too far.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
You've cut yourself off from old sources of support, from old versions of your own internal ethic and your own internal self-esteem and self-conception, and now really all you have is as a Republican politician or a staffer, is the success of Donald Trump, right? You've thrown so much money into this that it really better work out.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
And that's what I think this lying is, that it's really not about Donald Trump trying to give you a sense of the world. He knows perfectly well that people can see what is happening to the stock market. They don't think on that particular day, we're in a new golden age where everything is going great. What he is doing is breaking the system into those who are loyal to him and those who are not.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
And then those who are not can be sort of purged, at least if they're on the Republican side, one by one by one by one.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
I felt that the first 15 minutes of the speech were different than what came after. And in an alarming way. Okay. I don't quite know how to describe this, but I felt like you could feel something rupturing. And I think I described it as you could feel... The rules, the norms, you could feel that we had broken American politics already, and there was now nothing really governing action.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
I think this is the core question because it just doesn't. But it does tell you something about the contradictions that they have still not come anywhere near resolving. Because one thing about a speech like this, I happen to have a long day the other day, and I was flipping through HBO Max, or I guess it's now called Max. I was like, what am I going to watch? And the West Wing popped up.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
And so I was like, oh, that might be comfort food right now. Nice, like the mother bird who pre-chews a food and then gives it to you, right, for somebody into American politics. And the episode I happened to flip on was the one where they are dramatizing the making of the State of the Union. And they have this reporter. Yes. And this is completely random. Right.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
And I had not thought about this until this second making this connection.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
Well, you know, I only kept on for eight minutes or something because it felt so discordant to the moment. But the point I'm making about it is that as I'm trying to dramatize this, the reporter asking the unbelievably literal questions was. When does this all begin? Like, what are the stakes?
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
And the Rob Lowe character, oh, it begins six weeks ago, and we get memos from everybody inside and outside of the government, and we're trying to put it all together and make the budget work out. And that is what they did not do here, right? This was clearly not a memos from everybody, let's make our agenda add up system.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
So one thing that I would note is that the biggest problem that they're barreling towards is they cannot at any level understand make their economic promises net out. So what did he promise last night? He promised a huge tax cut. If I am reading the tea leaves of what he's saying right, I would call it between $4 and $6 trillion over 10 years.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
He's talking about no tax on tips, no tax on social security, right? It just keeps getting bigger. He's also promising a very large increase in defense spending, which speaking of Steve Bannon, Steve Bannon does not like. But not just defense spending in a normal sense, he promised the construction of a golden dome.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
If you want to make a modern anti-projectile and drone shield that is going to stretch not over the sliver of landmass occupied by the state of Israel, but over the mass of land occupied by the United States of America, I have not personally costed that out, but I promise you it is not cheap to do. So that's a huge increase in cost.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
The only thing they said about what they might cut, they sort of had this litany of things that sounded fraudulent and sounded weird when you said them like we're making transgender mice kind of thing. A bunch of this was bullshit, right? Like the social security section of that, even if it isn't BS. It's just small dollar amounts.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
It's $8 million here, $60 million there, a grant for $1.9 billion there. So there's no real money in it. You can see what the House Republicans are passing and the Senate Republicans in their budget reconciliation instructions. That includes instructions that given where in the appropriation structure it is telling the Republicans to cut is going to mean cutting hugely into Medicaid.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
But already a lot of Republicans are saying we shouldn't do that. They don't have agreement on a bunch of dimensions of the tax bill. The only thing they are saying they are doing that could raise money is tariffs. But in order to raise a significant amount of money through tariffs, you have to do two things.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
One is you would have to put on tariffs at a level we are not even talking about or considering right now. The ones we are considering are bad enough, but you would have to put on huge tariffs and you would have to keep them on. You can't use them as a negotiating structure because if you take the tariffs off, you don't get money from them.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
And so he's promised that they're going to balance the budget. It's not, I think, going to happen. You can't make all this work at all. And they're going to do this. I think this is really important in terms of things are going to drain energy from Donald Trump at a time when the economy is starting to blink red. So the tariffs are roiling markets. Consumer sentiment is down.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
And so I'd say that in a couple of different ways. One way had to do with Donald Trump and the Republicans. We will talk about the level of lying Trump did in that speech, the genuinely bald-faced lying, the way that speech came on the day when markets were in chaos.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
Mid-range inflation expectations are up. And if you just look at the survey data. Companies are saying, we just don't know how to invest right now because there's so much uncertainty, uncertainty about tariffs, uncertainty about the economy, uncertainty about tax policy. So we're just not going to make any decisions at the moment because in a year, we'll know better what the situation is.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
But that means from here to the next year, things get bad. The GDP forecasting from the Atlanta Fed has already begun signaling a recession is coming, which I don't know. I don't know how seriously to take that, but it's unusual. So I don't know. There was a lot of talk about all this.
The Ezra Klein Show
This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
But when I try to compare it to the problem they're facing economically, which is that the tariffs are freaking everybody out and they can't make any of their agenda work out, they didn't resolve that at all. And that is one of the things a speech is supposed to do. It's the president explaining how he's going to make it all work. He did a lot of trolling of the Democrats.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
There's also a theory of who the federal employees are. And I think implicitly here, they're imagining the federal employees are highly political. So you might imagine somebody who's in the civil service, but they work at the Department of Energy and they care very deeply about climate change. Or they're not needed.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
A view Elon Musk has had at different companies and certainly at Twitter was that there was just a lot of people doing jobs that didn't need to be done. But of course, Twitter broke a lot and is even now technically in many ways very degraded. Some things work very well. Other things don't work at all. I don't know that that theory matches much of the federal workforce.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
So to give a concrete example, a lot of people who work for the government are doctors. They are, among other things, VA doctors. Now, if a bunch of VA doctors, primary care VA doctors, who have no political role in the federal government at all, decide, you know what? These people don't value me. This is annoying.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
The world does not want to be endlessly pushed around by Donald Trump. Actions create reactions. So yeah, Trump has the power to impose tariffs, but he does not have the power to impose them without paying a price. And so far, at least, he does not seem to want to pay that price. Domestically, Elon Musk is trying to remake the federal government.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
I could do nothing until September and then get a job delivering primary care that is more lucrative elsewhere. Now, all of a sudden, you've knocked out, let's call it 15%. of the VA health system's primary care workforce. Is that good for the Trump administration, their perspective?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Do they have a view on how to replace those people with people they feel are more ideologically compatible or better or more excellent quickly? Or are you just causing long wait times at the VA that people are going to be mad at you about and maybe no one thing is that politically important, but mirrored across all the different things federal government does, I'm not sure that works out.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
I'm not sure they thought about VA primary care doctors taking the buyout at all.
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
I was going to say by fiat, but it's not even by anything as official as that.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
His people have pushed their way into the Treasury Department's payment systems, putting the longtime civil servant in charge of that system on leave when he wouldn't give a bunch of Musk's deputies access to a system that, and I really think it's important to understand this, a system that virtually nobody even in the Treasury Department has access to because it contains so much private data.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
This goes to something that I think has been paradoxical about the beginning of Trump's second term. As you said, they've had a lot more time to plan, and they did spend a lot more time planning. Things like the various policy efforts, including most famously Project 2025, do reflect a lot of people in think tanks and allied organizations coming up with theories of what you might do.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
One thing, though, that is really clear is that they do not want To do the hard work of legislating on these questions. So as you mentioned, there's a lot that is complex about the way we have constructed civil service rules. And it could use pretty profound reform.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And you might imagine Donald Trump and Elon Musk and some of these people coming in and trying to use the political capital they've built to pass a pretty broad reform. set of civil service reforms that allow for much more aggressive management of the civil service by the executive.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
You can justify that publicly in terms of promoting excellence and flexibility and agility and making sure the work of the American people gets done, even if what you actually want to do with it, at least partly, is use this new power to get rid of the woke deep state. But they didn't do any of that. So they actually don't have all the power they might need to do that.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And they have a very, very narrow margin in the House and there's a filibuster in the Senate. And so it'd be very hard for them to do something big legislatively. But that movement to executive authority, which looks very strong and overwhelming, it seems to me in some ways to be an admission of weakness, right? or at least of insufficient planning.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
They definitely did not walk out of the door with a well-formed public message and legislative proposal that would allow them to remake the federal bureaucracy from the ground up. Instead, you have this slapdash buyout effort and yelling at people and freezing money that you then rescind.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And they're also activating functionally a maximum of opposition, including from what I can tell inside the federal bureaucracy, where a lot of people who were kind of planning to leave now feel offended. And the more ideological among them are digging in their heels.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
because it presents such severe cybersecurity risks, and because something going wrong in it would throw government payments into complete chaos. And that's been far from their only move. The really splashy, aggressive thing they did over the past couple of days was that Musk's team announced that they were closing down USAID, the foreign aid agency created by Congress decades ago.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
In the Office of Management and Budget memo that froze the spending that later got rescinded, they give a number of justifications for what they're doing. But one of them struck me as interesting from a perspective of political theory of how our political system is supposed to work.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
The memo reads, career and political pointies in the executive branch have a duty to align federal spending and action with the will of the American people as expressed through presidential priorities. What do you think of that?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
They don't have the authority to close down USAID. And so I agree with Lauren de Jong Schulman, a former Office of Management and Budget official, who wrote that the way to talk about this is not to say something anodyne and settled, like they got passwords to the payment system or they closed down USAID.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
You know, I found myself thinking back to how many conversations I had over the Obama era particularly, but not only, with Tea Party and Freedom Caucus types in the House. And they would tell me that they were constitutional conservatives.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And that the real problem with Obama, with liberalism going back, as you just mentioned to Woodrow Wilson, was that it's given too much power to the president, that it has diminished the constitutionally mandated centrality of Congress. And now I'm watching some of these same people, certainly many people among the House Republicans, cheer on these moves from Donald Trump.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
I'm watching the head Republican appropriator say he thinks impoundment is a totally reasonable thing where the president sort of holds the money and decides whether or not he's going to spend it. And I find it truly impossible to reconcile their support of this presidency with With those views, which I at least took as sincere at the time they were being expressed.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
You were always much closer to this than I was to these people, to these arguments. You've written a book about the Constitution recently. How do you think about what you're seeing from people who I think in other contexts you've seen express themselves as constitutional conservatives very concerned with executive overreach?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
It's more like, quote, they illegally broke into a secure facility over a weekend, hijacked sensitive data on vulnerable people and U.S. businesses, destroyed property Americans paid for, cut off resources for sick and hungry families and fired Americans across the country. This is part of what I was saying in my Don't Believe Him essay over the weekend.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
You've written that our usual approach to the separation of powers leaves us imagining that there is a fungible commodity called power that the different branches of our government exercise. So the question is, who has more or less of it? So it's definitely what I see Trump doing right now. He is arrogating more power to the executive.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
It's also something I've watched, I think, at a smaller level, but nevertheless, Democratic presidents do. The argument you make is that that's the wrong way to look at it. So what's the right way?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Trump does not have many of the powers he's asserting he has. So when he or the people around him act lawlessly and unconstitutionally, those acts should be treated as what they are, something in between power grabs and crimes. All of it right now is provisional and needs to be treated as provisional, thought as provisional.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
But is how our system is meant to work a relevant concept given how different our system has evolved to be? I think it is fair to say. That the fundamental institutions of American political life now are not the branches, but the parties. And the reason the president acts the way you mentioned him acting is not that he's the head of the executive branch.
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
It's that he's the head of the party that controls the executive branch. And so he sets the priorities and the direction and everything.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
As much as we might want to lionize the structure of our government, believing it could ever work in the way it was intended to work, when we have these political parties that have fundamentally remade the structure such that the branches are subordinate to the parties, is a kind of folly.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
We have watched Trump back down on much already, from tariffs to spending freezes. And if the consequences become too painful, he'll back down on yet more. And so the consequences should be painful. What he is doing should be described clearly, and other parts of the political system should respond. And we're starting to see that happen. We're starting to see Democrats find their footing.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
One way I take Trump is as a reaction to a feeling of governmental sclerosis, right? When he wins, when he says, I alone can fix it. He is not just saying that he is the only answer, but he is saying that he is an answer to this thing that you have become disappointed in. I was looking at Tom Emmer, the Republican whip, his reaction to some of Trump's early moves here.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And again, you can imagine a political system where Republicans in Congress are furious at the amount of – Trump is pulling into his own domain. But he says, you're going to see things like this, and your first reaction is going to be, well, this isn't the way it's been done. You need to understand he, he being Trump, was elected to shake up the status quo.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And I do think when I try to take the arguments here, they're most generous. What I see is an argument that the system has become unresponsive. And so there is this tension between the wisdom of the slowdown and the coalition building that you describe.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Brian Schatz, the Democratic senator from Hawaii, put a blanket hold on all of Trump's State Department nominees until USAID is restored. That is something any senator can do, but they rarely do it because it is so disruptive. But Schatz is right to do it. Trump is fundamentally disrupting the functioning of the U.S. government.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And I don't know what I think I observe now over a number of presidencies with Trump in some ways being the most extreme response to it, which is as people become more and more frustrated by their inability to build those coalitions, they begin to turn to people who pose a much more fundamental challenge to the system itself and simply refuse to respect its boundaries, its limits, and the trade being offered.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
is bring me in, and yes, I'll break the system, but then I will make it respond to you.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
He is unilaterally attempting to undo the federal structure Congress has built. His disruptions should be met with disruption. And Schatz is right in another sense, too. He is treating Trump's effort to destroy USAID as a live fight, not something that has already happened, that is finished, that is done.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
You know many more Republican members of the House than I do. You know many Republican members of the Senate. One of the things that always I find strange about the people I know in both parties who serve in these offices is that on the one hand, you really do need to nurse a healthy ego that
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
and a healthy sense of your own potential consequence in American life and history to seek these offices and succeed in them. It's very, very hard to do it from a place of deep modesty. And on the other hand, these people get to these offices, and then they don't seem that interested in wielding the power they might have.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Again, I am struck by how much Republicans in the House don't seem to want much authority in this presidency. They seem to understand their role as blocking and tackling for Donald Trump, not being empowered by him and having somebody who will sign their bills.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
In the House, Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader, released a 10-point plan for how Democrats intend to oppose Trump.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
His dear colleague letter reads, most importantly, that, quote, "...I have made clear to House Republican leadership that any effort to steal taxpayer money from the American people, end Medicaid as we know it, or defund programs important to everyday Americans as contemplated by the illegal White House Office of Management and Budget Order must be choked off in the upcoming government funding bill, if not sooner."
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
I wonder how true you think this idea is. I think that at least Donald Trump is somewhat afraid of Congress. And I think he's afraid of Congress because he is somebody who performs the presidency first and foremost, performs kingship in a way first and foremost. And so executive orders are great. Threatening tariffs against Colombia, that's very potent and powerful. Right.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
But Congress is a morass, particularly when you have very narrow majorities. His biggest defeats in his first term were there. I mean, very famously losing on Obamacare appeal again and again, finally in that very dramatic moment when John McCain shuffles onto the floor and gives the thumbs down. And there's, I think, also a paradox for modern presidents working with Congress.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And Biden, who actually did get some quite big bills done and a number of bipartisan bills done, I think understood this quite well, which is that the more central the president is to to a bargaining effort or to a legislative effort, the less likely that effort is to be bipartisan. So Francis Lee, the political scientist, has done work showing this to be true, but I think it's also intuitive.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
The more a bill is going to make Joe Biden seem like a powerful, heroic figure, the less likely Republicans are to support it. The more a bill is going to make Donald Trump seem like the greatest president ever, the less likely Democrats are to support it. So a lot of what Biden did that was effective in getting things passed in Congress was actually being quite quiet.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Some of this might have been age, but whether it was all age or it was also strategy, it ended up being adaptive. He didn't put himself at the center of things, and so things like the chips and science bill got done, the infrastructure bill got done. I mean, he wasn't out there in an aggressive way making things about himself.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
In his second term, Barack Obama tried something very similar, having noticed this dynamic in his first. And for Trump, this is lethal.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
This is actually in tension with the way I think he thinks his presidency is supposed to look, that the process you're describing that could get him a bipartisan tax bill is a process where he is not out there seeming like he is in control of the tax bill and yelling at anybody and dominating anybody who won't vote for it.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
as strong and the desire to go and actually work successfully with Congress.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
What Jeffries is saying there when he invokes the upcoming funding bill is that so far, Republicans have not been able to pass spending bills without Democratic support. Absent that support, the government will shut down, and eventually the debt ceiling will be breached. And Jeffries intends to hold the Democrats against those spending bills until Trump's moves are reversed.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
There is a theory here, I think, among Trump's allies about what would make him successful in Congress. And maybe it goes a little bit to your point about vetoes earlier, but it's that he never loses. And so it's known that Elon Musk might fund primary challenges against members of Congress who vote against Trump's cabinet appointees. You're hearing similar things from other allies of RFK Jr.
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
now, right? If any Republican votes against RFK Jr., even though RFK Jr. is not maybe still a Republican, but certainly wasn't a year ago. that they will face incredible ire. There's a view that what they should do is terrify Congress into, Republicans in Congress in this case, into obeying Trump. And I really wonder how well this has been thought through.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Because Trump makes some bad decisions, and there is other wisdom that comes from other parts of the political system. And this idea that you're going to cow the rest of the party, which I think you could do. I think Trump is so strong in the party, you really could do it. I mean, maybe you get your budget reconciliation bill by just forcing it through over all these people. But
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
I think that some of what, maybe much of what, Trump is doing will prove eventually to be illegal. But courts work slowly. The way our political system is supposed to work is that the check is supposed to come from, first and foremost, Congress. It is Congress that controls spending, even though Trump is trying to take that power for himself. It is Congress that can impeach.
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
then you have opened up all the vulnerabilities that maybe all these members of Congress are trying to protect you from. I'm not sure it is a good idea for Donald Trump to have RFK Jr. as HHS secretary if bird flu jumps into human-to-human transmission. I'm not sure it is a good idea, given the fiscal situation the country is in, to have an unpaid-for tax bill.
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
My old colleague Matt Iglesias has been making this point that in many ways Joe Manchin probably saved Democrats from a much worse situation, that he was taking inflation very seriously much earlier than they were, and them spending trillions more dollars was— would probably have looked significantly worse, not significantly better.
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And there was actually information coming from where Joe Manchin, representing a very different constituency than most Democrats, did from what he was saying. And I'm not a fan of every view Joe Manchin has, but I do think there's validity to this view.
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
That you get information from the negotiations with Congress and the people representing different constituencies who are up in different elections are telling you things you actually need to hear. And I'm watching the Trump administration build a system to make sure it doesn't hear any of that.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Now, Democrats don't have much power in Congress now, but they do have the power to disrupt and obstruct. They have the power to focus attention, and so they will. Trump will have to pay a price for the power grab. How large a price does he want to pay? How large a price is he willing to pay? Last week, I spoke with Yuval Levin.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
You've written that American constitutionalism requires a distinctly Republican virtue and cannot do without it. What does that mean?
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
How much is the virtue dimension of this meaningful? And I ask this obviously about Donald Trump because he is a person of a distinctive character. You've written, there's no getting around the disgrace involved in bringing Donald Trump back to the White House. And I think there have been two understandings of him on this margin.
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
One is that it is unfortunate that Donald Trump often acts the way he does and speaks the way he does, ways that we would not be happy with if they were coming from a
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
I think over time, another view of him has come to dominate, that this is actually a kind of virtue, a throwback to older, more masculine virtues, that he's strong, that he's willing to be in conflict, that he never gives up, that he won't be muzzled, that he'll say things that even other people think are offensive.
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And as that has come to be the dominant view of him and as his success has been quite undeniable, you've seen much of his party begin to adopt his character, even when it's an awkward fit. I mean, this goes back to people like Ted Cruz who begin to sound more like Donald Trump. But J.D. Vance is a person who sounded very different a decade ago.
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Levin is a director of the Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies Program at the American Enterprise Institute. And he's the author of the book, American Covenant, How the Constitution Unified Our Nation and Could Again. Levin is conservative, but one of the smartest thinkers I know on how the government actually works.
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
A lot of the people around him begin to try on parts of his character for size. Now, I think people are looking for that in who they're going to appoint to different parts of the administrative state. How do you think about virtue and character here in not necessarily the grand moral order of things, though I care about that, but in the success of presidencies?
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
When I think back to, say, the Obama administration, Barack Obama is a person who likes to make decisions through decision. lengthy intellectual argument, hearing from both sides, a lot of evidence brought to bear. And so the administration begins to take on the character at sort of all levels. You learn how to appeal to the principal, even if you're not in meetings with them all that often.
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And so I wanted to know how he was seeing the early weeks of Trump's second term. And what struck me about our conversation was that on the one hand, he's more measured and calm about it than I am. And on the other hand, he's a lot less impressed by what Trump is actually getting done and how it's likely to work out for him in the long run than most Democrats I know.
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
You see the people above you who have learned that, you're mimicking them, you're trying to make arguments that are going to appeal to them. So the Obama administration over time develops this very intellectualized dynamic. It creates in some ways both an affection for and then a backlash to technocracy. Donald Trump is a very different thing that follows him. Biden is very coalitional.
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
It's become a big critique of his administration. I think it's accurate that particularly on domestic policy, they just didn't want anybody in their coalition to be upset. And so things were unfocused, not that well communicated. The hard choices weren't always made.
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
But they did keep a pretty big tent in the Democratic Party, ranging from Bernie Sanders on one end to Joe Manchin on the other, largely together. With Donald Trump, the way he makes decisions, the way people appeal to him is being out on television, you know, showing you can mix it up and be in the fight by showing that you're dominant and
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
I think that is going to permeate because the people who will get selected for aren't just of a certain character, but they adopt a certain approach to winning arguments and winning power. And it's the approach that Trump himself responds to, and that is a little bit erratic sometimes. It is about the person often much more than the point.
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
People in his own administration team don't know where he'll fall on issues constantly and are surprised where he ends up. And so it has a lot to do with who can sort of win him over. And he responds to things that are much more transactional. And there's a culture of any organization, culture of any corporation.
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And the culture, I think, ultimately reflects the way the person in charge of it makes their decisions. And even if you think Trump himself has a sort of guttural, mystical instinct that has served him very well, and a lot of people I know do think that, I think that's a strong claim to make about everybody who will serve under him.
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
So his was a very different perspective than I'd been hearing, but one that I think is very useful to hear and think through. As always, my email, EzraKleinShow at NYTimes.com.
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
You're a very measured person. This conversation, in a way that I think is helpful for this moment, has had a very measured tone. I would not say in the hours I've spent out of this recording room, I've been feeling all of that measured.
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And for all that we're talking about the ways that bad process or poor character or unclear incentives can hobble decision-making across administration, there is a play being made here, chaos and control. They're going to try to push things very hard at the Supreme Court. And we don't really know what they're going to try to do.
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
But some of the things we've seen, I think, have been very concerning. The January 6th pardons, including of people who were violent on January 6th, the removal of security from people like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Anthony Fauci, which I think is... Really profoundly grotesque, given that Donald Trump himself almost died by an assassin's bullet.
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Making it more likelier that people you don't like will die from an assassin's bullet is really quite a way to impose punishment and consequences. What would make you unmeasured? As they are trying, I believe they are trying to really change the system of government here. What would, if you saw it, really...
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
frighten you, make you think this is not just the normal surrealism of an early administration, but actually the emergence of something we've seen in other countries, which is some kind of breakthrough to another equilibrium?
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Do you take it as an intellectual current that you have to be in conversation with or in conflict with in conservatism? So J.D. Vance is a very, very smart person. I don't think anybody can deny that. He's had a very profound... I guess we'll call it in recent years.
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
So we're a solid few weeks into the second Trump administration. Tell me how you're interpreting what we've seen so far.
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And a couple years ago, he was on podcast saying that he would advise Donald Trump to say, as has been said before, the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it. Now, again, it's not clear they'll do that. But Vance is one of many on the right who seem to have moved into a view that the only way to save the republic is to take it back over.
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
I take this, I guess, seriously as an intellectual argument.
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
I think if you read the Claremont Review, if you're attuned to sort of currents in the new right, that this is an intellectual argument that is trying to challenge other visions of how our country should work, that things have gone so far, that they have gotten so distant from correctly reflecting, you know, the common man or who is put in the story as a common man, that extraordinary and emergency measures exist.
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
are warranted, that Donald Trump, for all his faults, is a kind of spirit summoned by the age when something out of the ordinary is demanded if we are to save what this republic once was. I'm sure you see this around you. I'm sure you see it in young people on the right. I'm curious how you have absorbed it as a
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
As an intellectual competitor to the things that you and others in your coalition have been saying for a long time, that now seem to many of these people to be too soft for the age we actually live in.
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But what did you think then when he said that he would advise Donald Trump to defy a Supreme Court order? I mean, that is a thing he said.
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What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?
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This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Elias Iskwith and Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Isaac Jones with Afim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu and Kristen Lin. We have original music by Pat McCusker, audience strategy by Christina Samuluski and Shannon Busta.
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The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.
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The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. Over the weekend, President Donald Trump announced 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada. The markets reacted with shock. We were really doing this? Didn't Trump's Wall Street backers tell us again and again this was all just a negotiating ploy? And then Mexico said that it would add 10,000 troops to the border.
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And Canada said it would appoint a fentanyl czar, and they noted efforts they were already making on the border. And Trump delayed the tariffs by a month in both cases. So how to read this? Did Trump back down in the face of market turmoil? Did he get what he wanted, even though what he got wasn't very much, was mostly things that Mexico and Canada were already doing?
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Say more about your sense that there is a real effort to show energy, to show competence. Trump people are all over the media right now saying, see, we told you we had it in hand this time, and we really did.
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Are we going to have this happen again in a month and maybe every month after that? I don't think anybody actually knows, very much including Donald Trump. What seems clear here is that Trump likes tariffs, but he dislikes political pain. He wants to be seen as in control. He wants the world bending to his will.
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Well, this goes to this question of how they view the government that they now run. You said a minute ago that they don't look at it as the first person. They look at it as something they act upon. I would go a little further than that. They look at it as the enemy. They look at it as the thing they have to conquer.
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And if you go through a lot of what they are trying to do, most notably the OMB freeze memo, which is also written in a very hostile tone to the government and to the bureaucracy, but you look at the fork in the road email sent out, mirroring an earlier email Elon Musk sent to, I believe it was Twitter employees then, what they are trying to do is,
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Is to effectuate a very, very large change in who is in the federal government because they believe the federal government is full of people who hate them and will not carry out their plans and their theory of what to do about it seeming built on how Elon Musk treated Twitter when he took it over.
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is to try to do a buyout, try to make people miserable, try to create a lot of chaos, and just drive everyone out and assume that a lot of those people are doing jobs that don't need to be done. They're waste, and you can keep running Twitter at a much smaller staff, and maybe you can do the same thing for the federal government.
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But also, you're creating vacancies that you can then fill with your people. They're giving loyalty tests to people. They're asking people they're trying to hire, when was your MAGA awakening moment? This isn't just acting upon the government. This is sort of viewing it as like the opposition is the government they run. And this is a set of strategies to either cow it or take it over.
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But the stock market plummeting does not make it look like the world is bending to his will. The stock market plummeting threatens his control. And so when other countries see that, their strategy is going to come clearer. The more Trump bullies other nations, the more they will band together in retaliation, and the more that will batter markets.
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You're somebody who thinks a lot about public administration. How are you seeing that side of it?
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So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
Birthright citizenship. Like, why are we even talking about this? What they have put back on the table is who is an American and who should be an American. Right. And you've seen different versions of this. You saw it with J.D. Vance and the way he was talking about Haitian immigrants during the campaign.
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These people are here legally, but he was describing the authority under which they are here as incorrectly decided, illegally offered. Right. They don't like legal immigration either. They shut down the border patrol application, which the Biden administration began. People were standing in line. Which had people standing in line.
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I mean, the videos of these people screaming and crying as this meeting that after they had jumped through all these hoops was now 20 minutes away from happening has just been canceled. Yeah. But these are the people who are doing it the right way, who are standing in line, who are giving the biometric data, right? What they want to do is raise as a fundamental question, who is an American?
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And even if you lose at the court... Maybe you still win partially in public opinion. If you can turn more and more people against the system as it exists, if you can call more and more people citizenship and the legitimacy of their belonging into question, I mean, that is a win for, I think, the spiritual core of Trumpism, which is that we have been invaded and America isn't America anymore.
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It is no longer great because we have let too many of these other people in here. And I will also say, you know, the birthright citizenship move, like that's the shock and awe part of this campaign. Behind it is a – I mean, they're doing a lot. One thing I do think you see is Trump is always a good marketer. I think he played his first day incredibly well.
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I think the signing of the executive orders in public, he didn't send all of them in public, but he had this rally and he was throwing the pens out to the crowd. I mean, it had everything but a t-shirt cannon. That'll be for the third Trump term. Right. A big part of everything right now is him persuading Trump
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his own people, the demoralized and dispirited Democratic opposition, and the rest of the world, that he is strong, that he is coming in with momentum, that they are doing a lot all at once, and that whether or not you see anything changing, that the vibe will be things are changing, which in some ways I think will be the opposite of how a lot of things felt under Joe Biden, where you had huge pieces of legislation happening, but it was so discordant
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with a sense of torpor in the administration, the kind of quiet, shuffling communications and image of the president, that the energy that was happening legislatively never translated to a spirit of energy. MAGA is not just about who's an American. It's about strength, and strength is something that America both shows on the world stage and
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And it wasn't just pardons. There was the refusal to enforce a ban on TikTok that Biden himself had signed into law, Biden's bill. And alongside that came this bizarre decision to announce that the Equal Rights Amendment was now ratified as Virginia had accepted it in 2020, becoming the 38th state to do so. But that wasn't true. It wasn't ratified.
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And also something that has to be embodied in its leader, right? Trump, within his own coalition, is understood as this somewhat mythic embodiment of the national spirit. And who knows what he does with that? I mean, my favorite line of his inauguration is, is him saying that he'll be partially judged in the wars that do not begin.
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The best possible thing that can happen with Donald Trump, in my view, is that it really embeds in his self-conception that he is a person who ends wars and through his own strength keeps more from starting. That would be great if we don't have crazy foreign adventures under Donald Trump. And in some ways, I think the Trump people, I mean, these are all EOs. We'll see even what stands.
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They're doing in many ways a lesson meets the eye because so much of this will not actually stand. And many of these executive orders are just messaging anyway. Bring down prices is not like that as an executive order that doesn't get you anywhere. But there is a sense of energy of, OK, somebody's back in control and doing something.
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I think a way to ask this question is why is Donald Trump's mind fastening on the question of Greenland, of the Panama Canal? It's because he believes in climate change. Right. I think there's a reason those things appeal to him in the way they do. And I don't actually think it's about shipping lanes anymore.
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And critical minerals are a lot of ways to think about shipping lanes and critical minerals. And I know a lot of people who think very seriously about them. And neither the Panama. Yes, I do. And neither the Panama Canal or Greenland are high up on their list of concerns. But if you were sitting down and saying, well, what are the best things we could do for American shipping? Right.
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And another part, Donald Trump is agreeing with the dock workers who are trying to fight automation and productivity improvements. Right. If you want to help American shipping, you can make our shipping much more efficient. You can come up with all these deals with other countries to give us more and more preferential access to different products.
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If you're worried about minerals, there are a million ways that we might want to go get minerals that are a lot easier than getting into a lot of negotiations with Greenland's indigenous population about whether or not they should become part of America and what it even means if we do.
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There's no guarantee that getting Greenland to vote to become part of America, even if you can do that, is going to make for an easy access to their natural resources. So what is fastening his mind on this? And it's, I think, that this fits with a certain self-perception he has developed and some of the people around him have developed of what America has lost.
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I mean, it's part of this whole shift of, Towards a much more masculine and aggressive energy in this version of Trumpism. I think you can look at MAGA, and this is an argument that James Pogue made in Very Good Peace for the Times, as a strange mixture right now of 19th century nativist American movements...
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And things that are looking towards being 22nd century, like interplanetary American imperium movements.
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Congress had set a deadline of 1982 for ratification. The opinion of Joe Biden's own Justice Department is that Virginia's late act is meaningless. The ERA is not ratified, whatever Biden said. And the Biden administration, they know it. Biden did not direct the archivist of the United States to add the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. And Xi quite reasonably did not.
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Yeah. So there's the question of renaming Denali Mount McKinley, which fine, but there's a sense of who cares. And there's a question of planting the American flag on Mars. And he's sort of trying to unite this both. It's a retrofuturist view, right? It's an America lost. This energy, this daring, this courage, this aggression, it's become a country of weenies and immigrants.
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America's become soft, right? That's the looking back. And then there are all these futurists, Mark Andreessen and Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and others around Donald Trump, and now many of them staffing inside the administration, who are also looking towards these questions of AI dominance, right? of interplanetary travel. And they have different views on immigration.
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I do think Donald Trump understands that attention is the new money. Attention is the fundamental substance of power in America as he conceives of, at least American politics. So here's what I think is happening here. I have been one of the people using the terms oligarchic for the structure that is emerging.
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And one criticism I've heard of that that I've been trying to think about and take seriously was, well, you weren't calling Bezos and Zuckerberg and them oligarchic when they were much more Biden or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama coded. Is oligarchic just the term you use when rich people support Republicans or support Trump?
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And so I've been trying to think about, you know, is this just motivated reasoning on my own part and the part of other liberals? And I don't think we are. So I didn't call the coalition of rich people around Trump oligarchs in 2017. There were rich people supported him, the Adelsons and so on, but it didn't strike me that there was a deal being made in which money would give them rulership.
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Like the actual word oligarchic, the archic part. It comes from the word that means to rule.
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And so first and foremost, what I would say has been most different, the thing that has most got me thinking about oligarchy is Elon Musk, who in putting his money – and his money is astonishing in its size – and his attentional power because he used that money to take control of X. Yes, the means of communication.
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He said the Constitution was changed. It lies now unchanged. All of this was a very strange substitution of press stunt for policy process. All of it felt like an effort to make the president in his final days seem more powerful and more consequential than he really was. And why did it wait until the final days? If it was so worth doing, then do it earlier and defend it.
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In putting that in service of Trump to a very large degree – And then being at the Trump rallies, he has become clearly the most influential other figure in the Trump administration. The deal has not just been that maybe Trump listens to him a bit on policy. It's that he becomes a kind of co-ruler. I'm not saying he's literally the co-president. Stephen Miller is still very important.
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But Musk has developed an influence. and a control that is very different. And so that relationship between the two of them, what Musk is able to buy with his support is a kind of power that is nothing like what Jeffrey Katzenberg or George Soros or George Clooney or any of these other people had, or even as far as I could tell, really wanted.
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Then there's this dimension in which there is a tit-for-tat that has emerged where if you anger Trump, He will at least discuss using the power of the government to really harm you. So a couple of months ago, he was talking about putting Mark Zuckerberg in jail. Right. He said that he should be in jail maybe for life. Jeff Bezos.
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Jeff Bezos clearly had some real problems with the Trump administration. Jeff Bezos has many interests that are before the Trump administration. But now if you turn, you will be so welcomed in. that you'll actually be there in that row at inauguration.
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So again, the sort of deal of if you put your resources at his disposal, if you move your policy in his direction, if you come out for him, you don't just get some good treatment. You get real power. You don't just get to be heard. You get to potentially be part of ruling, right? Mark Andreessen, who was another early tech guy, has just been incredibly influential in the transition.
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David Sachs, right? Like, I'm not saying that Democrats do not give ambassadorships and things to the people who support them, but this sort of entering into a coalitional government, right? with these tech billionaires feels very different. And obviously everything is a matter of degree, right? I mean, money was a problem four years ago. It was a problem eight years ago.
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And one thing that a little bit annoys me about Republicans saying, oh, you're complaining about this now. It's like, well, no, actually. Like most liberals, I've complained about money politics forever and have supported every bill that has come up to reduce its power. And Republicans have killed all those bills. So that's another piece of it. The TikTok thing is another piece of it.
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Somebody with a very big stake in TikTok is very rich, went to Trump. That seems to have been what led to Trump flipping on TikTok. And now TikTok and putting up these notices that, oh, President Trump is going to save us and we thank him and we're looking forward to working with him.
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Well, who's to say that then in the 2028 election or the 2026 election, when TikTok and behind it possibly the Chinese Communist Party are worried about Democrats getting power, that they think will be bad for TikTok or bad for China because now Donald Trump is in a more transactional relationship there, that they don't begin turning the dials. on what goes viral on TikToks.
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Yeah, maybe just pro-Trump content just does a little bit better. Like, I've talked to many people who know high-up people at TikTok. I've done some reporting here. I was writing about TikTok, I think, in 2022. And people will say, yeah, we don't have access, really, to this whole system. A lot of it is controlled from China. So the question of...
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can then, after entering into this partnership, you get both the ability to help rule in the Trump administration, but then the other side of it is you're going to use these attentional platforms to help consolidate the power of Donald Trump and MAGA. That's what feels different to me.
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Changing the Constitution under a controversial theory, it's not what you do on your way out the door. The Biden of 2020 would have done none of this. In key cases like the family pardons, he said he would not do this. And then he did it. This feels in its own way like Biden's submission to the new regime. The powers of the presidency are whatever the president can get away with.
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And I recognize that some of my friends on the right will say, well, that's what content moderation was or what it looked like to us when Donald Trump was banned by these different platforms for trying to foment mob violence on them. And I think it is different. I could understand the view that it isn't.
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But there was nothing like the role that Elon Musk is playing and in playing it has shown other billionaires that they can play being offered. And the final thing I'll say on this, because I know it's a long answer, but to me it's important, is that part of this reflects Donald Trump's own ideological flexibility. That the boundaries on what someone could ask
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of Joe Biden, of Kamala Harris, of Barack Obama, of George W. Bush were just narrower because they were part of ideologically programmatic parties. So this trade of power for attention, it feels potent and frightening to me. And the image of it, the visual of it at the inauguration with these other kind of power centers like the governor sitting in more seats is
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I think a lot of how to understand the Trump administration is visual, is aesthetic, is marketing. It's something that displays what it is in public. They really went to some lengths to display what they were in public. I think we should believe them.
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I do want to keep saying, though, because I think that Democrats keep maybe understandably, maybe it's even good politics. Want to jam this into the box of plutocrats. But what made it this set of people was not that they were billionaires because Sundar Pichai was there, right? Like the CEO of TikTok was there. What got them there was their control of attention.
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These are attentional billionaires. These are attentional oligarchs. I was saying this in my episode with Chris Hayes, but I think Democrats still think the fundamental substance of political power is money. And Republicans under Trump believe it is a tension. And I think they are closer to right. And so the alliances and deals they are trying to cut have more to do with attention.
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Yeah, look, I think, I mean, Bernie Sanders has been saying we're in an oligarchy for a long time. The idea that the rich have too much power in American politics has been true for a long time, but everything is a matter of degrees. And you break norms enough and you end up in something that becomes a difference in kind.
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Something separates the way Russia and its oligarchs work from the way America and its rich work. And I don't think it's just hypocrisy in America. I think that the deal between Putin and the oligarchs is different. And the amount of money that can be made out of that deal and the amount of power transferred in that deal is different.
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And one of the telling reports recently was that if China does have to sell TikTok, which until now, I shouldn't say China, I should say ByteDance, but they're not doing anything without the Chinese government's say so. Until now, they've said they won't. But then there was a report in Bloomberg that maybe they'd be open to selling it to Elon Musk.
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And that was very revealing because what better way to curry favor with both this administration, Donald Trump himself, but also the other most powerful person right now, who also, by the way, Musk himself, has huge amounts of commercial interest in China around Tesla and other things. So... This is how these systems work.
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And I'm not naive, I cover this professionally. I know that presidents have been testing the limits of their authority since the dawn of the Republic. But for a president whose core message was about the preservation of America's constitutional democracy, and not just that, but the informal norms and values that scaffold that system, for he to leave in this way was a profound message on its own.
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And I just don't think what was going on between Joe Biden and Jeffrey Katzenberg looked like this.
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I keep saying that we've entered a new regime, not just a new set of people in power, but a different way power is wielded, a different way American politics works. And this is one of the places you see it. That while maybe in some other system, in some other way, you might want to say every election is stolen and my people should go out into the streets with their guns and try to take it back.
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You don't because you understand this is an infinite game. You're trying to keep playing the game of American democracy. And if one side defects from that game, then it's very hard for the whole system to sustain. That is not the way Donald Trump has ever viewed it. When he loses elections, he says those elections are rigged.
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Going back, by the way, to the Iowa caucuses against Ted Cruz in 2016, which he lost and he said were rigged. And under the way Donald Trump sees it, he is the leader of an army. I think this is functionally accurate, that he incited his followers to try to take back power by force. They tried and they failed. And that was a battle lost, not a horrible day in which things got out of control.
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And when you lose a battle and your brave soldiers become prisoners of war to the other side. Hostages. Hostages, as he put it. When you lose a battle and your foot soldiers become hostages, if you then win the war, you free them. And not just free them, you honor them. That is the shift in perception here.
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There was a lot of talk that he wouldn't perhaps pardon those who had been convicted for acts of violence, but he pardoned them too.
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These are the new rules. I will say I am caught between a lot of frustration and anger at Joe Biden and a certain amount of understanding by Biden sort of shifting back and forth on how he wants to view this new world.
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Because if you do believe that the justice system will be completely politicized, that there is no norm that Trump and those around him will not break, then I somewhat understand why you want to pardon your family and a number of the people you think might be in the crosshairs. And
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I was particularly sympathetic, as I say at the top of this show, to Hunter Biden, who I think there was an unusual amount of right-wing vengeance was going to be focused on him. In some conceptual way, I wish that pardon hadn't happened. But speaking as a human being and as a father, I can understand where Biden's head was. But then to pardon, first, so many other people.
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Maybe the message was cynicism. Maybe it was arrogance. but maybe it was acceptance. It is clear that things are to be done differently now. The beginning of Donald Trump's second term certainly revealed a president who intends to govern based on what he can get away with.
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So just like pardons everywhere, and you're just hearing about pardons for weeks. And then to pardon so many members of your family and Anthony Fauci and Liz Cheney. Then it's in a way an acceptance of the new regime. It's saying we play by these rules too now. We pardon our people. They pardon their people. The pardon power is about making sure nobody can hurt your people.
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And I understand how in Biden's head, his administration's head, what they feel like they're doing is protecting their people from these new rules, but in another way that they were creating a kind of acceptance of them. And I'm not saying that that would change what Trump did personally. But in terms of the ability for Democrats to stand against it and fight it, I think it was harmful.
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And many top Democrats I've spoken to have said the same thing in private, if not in public. It is all, to me, frightening in terms of his pardons, in terms of how he lined up who was in the room. He is revealing everything. the new rules, not the new policies.
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The new policies are less different than what he promised during the campaign, less in the way of tariffs, less in the way of talking about taxes. It's the new rules that are more different, the new power structure that is more different. And to me, that was the message of the first day.
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And to me, that in a way, to go back to your first question, is what we're seeing Make America Great Again really means. To Make America Great Again means The Make America Great Again movement needs total power to remake this country and destroy those who oppose it. There is no commitment to the system. There's no commitment to elections.
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There's no commitment to something beyond what keeps MAGA in power. And Donald Trump was just delivering justice there. to those who had fought for him in a war, in a battle that lost. But now he was coming back. He is coming back as the hero who has won the war. And he is not going to forget those who fought for him. And he is not going to forget those who fought against him.
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By every account, including his own, Donald Trump experienced his near assassination as a divine touch. He was saved and he must have been saved for a purpose. And there are many people around him, including faith leaders, who have told him he was saved for a purpose.
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I did an audio essay before the election where I talked about the fundamental nature of Donald Trump, the fundamental feature of his psychology being this disinhibition. That behind his success is his willingness to do and say and act in ways that other people would not. And also beyond what makes him dangerous is his willingness to do things and say things and act in ways other people would not.
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Trump declared birthright citizenship invalid, unilaterally changing the clear language of the Constitution and daring the courts to stop him. He's giving TikTok a reprieve from the clean language of the law so he can save it. He is pardoning the January 6th rioters. He's renaming the Gulf of Mexico to be the Gulf of America, Denali to be Mount McKinley.
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That ranges from launching a meme coin under your own name the weekend of your inauguration all the way to possibly going to war for Greenland. And that was his psychology before that. Now you add to that this feeling of being chosen, of having persevered beyond all odds, of having been persecuted. They tried to put him in jail. They tried to kill him. This is how he understands it.
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And he was protected and he fought. And now not only did he win, but he has won with a cultural momentum and acceptance that a level of support and friendship from the most powerful people in society. People rejected him and laughed at him and looked down on him in 2017 that he never could have imagined. The hero's arc to live through that, what would that do to even a person who began as humble?
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What would that do to even a person who had the normal restraints on their behavior? What must it do to the kind of temperament that Donald Trump is?
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what will it do to his perception of risk well his advisors say that launching these missiles that sending this force that abandoning this alliance is a bad idea but is god not with him i am not now and i will never be one to say that i have some full understanding of donald trump's psychology
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But the particular context in which he takes office for the second time strikes me as very accelerationist for the kind of psychology we have seen him to have. To add to that a sense of historical destiny is, on the one hand, quite unnerving.
The Ezra Klein Show
So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
And also speaks, I think, to the great weakness and what might prove to be, if I had to guess, the fatal vulnerability of the Trump administration and his second term, which is that in many ways Donald Trump was saved in his first term by all the people who did not allow him to do things that he otherwise wanted to do, like shoot missiles into Mexico or unleash the National Guard to begin shooting on protesters en masse.
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So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
Now he is unleashed, and not just to make policy or make foreign policy decisions, but to enrich himself. And understanding a popular vote victory of a point and a half, where you end up with the smallest House majority since the Great Depression, where you lose half of the Senate races in battleground states—
The Ezra Klein Show
So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
and we're not a single governor's mansion changes hands as a kind of victory that is blessed by God for unsparing ambition and greatness. That's the kind of mismatch between public mood and presidential energy that can, I guess it could create greatness. It seems also like it can create catastrophe. So we'll see. Aaron, thank you very much. Thank you very much.
The Ezra Klein Show
So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
I was struck in Trump's inaugural address how almost everything mentioned was an executive action that he himself would take and the courts would decide to accept or reject. He talked little of laws he wanted to persuade Congress to pass. What interests Trump is what he can do alone.
The Ezra Klein Show
So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.
The Ezra Klein Show
So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
Watching Trump take the oath of office from the good seats were the CEOs of the major platforms that control America's attention. There was Elon Musk, the owner of X and Tesla. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the owner of the Washington Post. And a bit further back was Shu Chu, the CEO of TikTok.
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So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
For all of Donald Trump's talk of manufacturing jobs and auto plants and infrastructure, the CEOs of GM and GE and Ford and Caterpillar were not in that room. This wasn't just an assemblage of America's rich. It was our attentional oligarchy, the people control what we look at, assembled before Trump.
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So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
All this came just days after the Trump family launched a crypto coin in their own name, a meme coin. You can't spend it. This isn't a currency or a piece of decentralized financial infrastructure meant to offer services to the unbanked or commerce to the metaverse. It's just a way to invest in Trump's fortunes, to invest in Trump, to make him richer.
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So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
The meme coin shot to more than $70, and the Trump family and its partners seem to own about 80% of the coins, making their holdings worth notionally tens of billions of dollars. And then Melania Trump, she launched her own meme coin, which also shot up, although it seemed to harm the value of the Trump meme coin. This is all insane to even try to describe.
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So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
But her meme coin comes after she sold her biopic and another project, both of which she is the executive producer on, to Amazon for $40 million. The scale of the graft and the grift right now is astonishing, and it's all out in the open. It's not like politics was free of corruption in 2018 or 2022, but this is a new era of brazenness, of cashing in on power.
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So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
And who is going to stop Trump and his family? Who is going to tell them no? We talk about America's system of government as if it is a solid thing, bound by the Constitution and institutions, the way a belt cinches around a waist. But much of it is just a pile of norms in a trench coat. Knock the norms down and everything changes. I could imagine all this leading to backlash.
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So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
I don't think it's safe, I don't think it's good politics to rub America's face in oligarchy and corruption. I could also see it all leading to a consolidation of power as Trump and his allies unite to protect their power, to serve each other. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. This is how democracy has backslid in so many other countries. But we are entering a new era.
The Ezra Klein Show
So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
Power did not just pass from one president to another. It passed from one regime to another, one set of rules to another. And you can see it so clearly because the old regime ended even before the new one began. Joining me now to talk about the inauguration and what we are seeing as Trump begins his second presidential term is my editor, Aaron Redica. Aaron, welcome to the show.
The Ezra Klein Show
So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. I feel like I've been watching two different presidential transitions take place. There's been the official one with all of its pomp and its pageantry, the one we call the peaceful transition of power. I watched Vice President Kamala Harris preside over the certification of the election she lost.
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So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
I watched President Joe Biden welcome his successor, President Donald Trump, back to the White House. I watched every living former president assemble under the Capitol rotunda to honor Trump's second inauguration. What a difference to four years ago when a mob stormed the Capitol, when Trump sought to upend the election results and upon failing, did not attend Joe Biden's inauguration.
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So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
So I've been thinking about, let's imagine you make $75,000. You live in Columbus, Ohio. You have three kids. You've been frustrated by prices. Eggs are expensive. Gas. What problems of yours did he offer to solve at the inauguration? I was struck by how much what Make America Great Again seemed to mean.
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So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
was about renegotiating who is or can be an American under the proposed birthright citizenship executive order. Kamala Harris might not be a citizen. So there is a fight over what Joe Biden used to call the soul of America.
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Yes, it seems to be unconstitutional. But yes, this is their assertion that they will no longer respect birthright citizenship. They will direct the agencies that give you things like social security numbers to not give those numbers. From the beginning, the biggest thing they are doing is changing who gets to be, who is on some level, an American.
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So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
The longtime liberal view about Donald Trump and MAGA, that their fundamental question is about belonging, is proving true. And then there was a lot of other stuff in there. A lot of it related to Trump and his resentments personally, weaponization of the government, that kind of thing. There was a pardoning of the J6 rioters.
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So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
But in terms of actually solving the problems of normal people about your health care, about your prices, about your commute, you know, for all the talk that Trump at some point understood that he won on the price of groceries, there was not a lot here about the price of groceries.
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So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
There was some talk about increasing energy production, and I'm sure they will try. They were already at record levels. I guess it's worth asking, is there anything here that is different than what they thought eight years ago? right? We just went through a long inflationary period. People are upset about things like prices. Is there a new problem being solved?
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So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
Or he talks a lot about crime and safety. Even if you want to say that he's doing something on that by naming some of these cartels terrorist organizations and directing the U.S. government to put more enforcement against immigrants, most crimes are not committed by immigrants, right?
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So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
This was not the announcement that they're going to be sending to Congress a large new bill managing police forces. Look, I don't want to be faux naive here, right? Everybody knows that Donald Trump is not super detailed around most policies, but even the tariffs were absent, right?
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So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
They're going to create this external revenue service to have America study the question of what kinds of tariffs might make sense to put on. Make America Great Again is about who belongs. It is about excluding people who are currently in the definition of America. And it is about restoring to America a... masculine, dominant, backed-by-force sense of our destiny.
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So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
This transition, the official transition of presidential power, this transition has been orderly. But there has been this other transition happening too. A transition not of power, but of political system. A transition in the rules and expectations of power. I understood Joe Biden's pardon of Hunter Biden.
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So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
We will control the Panama Canal again. We will have Greenland and we'll begin adding to the American Imperium again. We will put our flag on Mars.
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So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
Although Roe eventually got done.
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So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think the central question to the Trump administration right now is what will this court that they built let them get away with? Or give them the power to do, right? This court that they built got rid of Roe, which many people thought was, if not impossible, very unlikely.
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So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
So the idea that the law that we understood to be settled in 1996 or 2006 or even 2016, it's not settled now. And there are things in the current system that I think reasonably offend people, right? The idea of birth tourism is reasonably offensive, right? That you pay to come here and you have a child here and that child is a citizen and that that is being advertised to you, right?
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So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
That is a way of getting around a loophole. And you hear them use this term like invasion, right? There's an understood in the law carve out for the question of invasion. And what the law and the Supreme Court texts are attempting to do there is to say, well, look, if during World War II, Germany had sent an invading force to the American homeland and we had eventually repelled them,
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Not every member of the German infantry or the German officer corps who had a child here during that period, if they had families here, like it'd be crazy to say they're all citizens. Like that would be an insane thing just because they're on the territory. So the idea is, can you say that the people coming here, legally or illegally, are an invasion and they're carved out? That's one question.
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So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
Then there's this question of the temporary residents, right? Someone who is here on a student visa, right? That's much more sympathetic, but you can also imagine them putting that up as something that maybe the court will strike that out, right?
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So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
They'll leave the – you can't come here as an undocumented immigrant and have a child, or you can't come here for birth tourism and have a child and expect to have citizenship, but you could be here on a student visa and expect to have citizenship. Right. And you can imagine a world in which what they believe might happen is that the courts might split the difference.
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So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
And so there is this question that I think they don't know the answer to, but so much of the early executive order's is about testing, which is, given this Supreme Court, how much power does this president have? They understand that their power in Congress is quite limited. The Republican House majority, a five-seat majority, is the smallest House majority since the Great Depression.
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So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
Hunter had become a particular fixation of the Trumpist right, and the idea that they would unleash their revenge on him individually seemed all too real. Joe Biden has already lost two children. Others may disagree. I had trouble begrudging him his refusal to potentially lose a third. But then came so many more pardons, culminating in pardons of Anthony Fauci and much of Biden's family.
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So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
Republicans have a 53-47 cut in the Senate that does not give them the ability to go over the filibuster. So it's gonna be difficult and frustrating to do legislation. And I don't think Donald Trump likes doing legislation anyway. So the question is, how much can he be king? What can he do himself?
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
Before we begin today, we're going to do another Ask Me Anything episode for subscribers quite soon. So you can write me at EzraKleinShow at NYTimes.com with your question. Please use the subject line AMA so we know to pull it into the big spreadsheet we choose from. There'll be a cutoff here so we can actually record.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
Yeah, I have a big concern. This is not an economic policy. This is a tool for corruption and patronage.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
So I want to think through this in a couple of specific cases. They're doing pretty broad tariffs, although only so far on specific countries. But so we import a lot of food from Mexico. We import avocados and raspberries and strawberries. So that's all going to get more expensive. We also import a lot of potash, which is a fertilizer functionally, a potassium solution, to grow food.
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Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
And we get 80% of that from Canada. So on the one hand, I guess you could say, well, we're going to tariff Mexican food. food imports because we want more of that to come from American farmers. But we're also going to raise the price of the thing American farmers need to grow food. And even if you weren't doing that, it takes time to plant new crops, right?
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Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
It takes time for those crops to produce fruit and produce vegetables. So it's not like we can substitute from Mexican avocados to American avocados in a month. That's right. Yeah, it just doesn't make any fucking sense.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
And so the stock market shot up when Trump won. As I write this Tuesday, March 11th, the Dow is lower today than it was on election day. Trump has vaporized trillions of dollars in stock market wealth.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
I keep hearing this point about car parts crossing the border many times. Can you give me an example of that and how the tariff stacks?
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
I live in New York City. It's the best part of living in New York City that I did not have to buy a car lately.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
He's done that by doing exactly what he said he would do on the campaign trail, laying down tariffs, injecting all kinds of uncertainty into the economy, trying to unwind the global financial system. Trump's advisors will tell you that Wall Street isn't Main Street, and they're right about that.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
I don't know, Kim, because I heard Donald Trump say that he spoke to the big three automakers and they were super thrilled.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
Okay, I want to put a pin in USMCA because I want to come back to that in a second. But what you just said, it'll make sense to make the car somewhere else. This seems like a way in which once you start laying down tariffs, there is no end to it.
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Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
Let's say that you are Ford and you have a auto plant in Dearborn, Michigan, and that auto plant has a lot of trade back and forth over the American border with Canadian and Mexican suppliers. So you now have this problem we were just talking about where things are going back and forth and getting tariffs placed on them. The steel you're importing has tariffs placed on it, etc.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
Now you're BMW and you have a plant in Germany. You have none of that problem. Your intermediate goods do not have their costs rising because of Donald Trump's tariffs. Now, obviously, at some point, somebody's going to point this out to Donald Trump. And so the clear thing to do from his perspective is going to be to impose tariffs on all European goods.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
But the fact that they, like every economic forecaster I know or read, is starting to talk about the possibility of a recession reveals an obvious truth. These tariffs aren't just a problem for Wall Street. They're a problem for Main Street, too. A hedge fund can go invest in foreign companies and do currency trades if America's economy begins to shake.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
or for that matter, Asian or anybody, automakers, because it would be an insane outcome of your policy to have tariffed people making cars in the U.S., but not people making cars in Europe or South Korea. But then you're just raising the price of cars relentlessly for American consumers.
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Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
Yeah, fair. I'm also... confused. So if you said, what were things that Donald Trump appeared proud of having done in his first term? You might say, well, he said that NAFTA was the worst trade deal ever signed by any country ever. And then he renegotiated it in the USMCA, which is United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. And when he signed that, he said it was a terrific deal for all of us.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
So the major trade deal Trump did in his first term, and he said at his speech the other night that his first term was great and an amazing four years for America, was this trade deal with Mexico and Canada, which then he bragged about being great. It has not been renegotiated since then to my knowledge.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
So now he's come into office and the first major tariff project is to impose huge tariffs on Canada and Mexico, which who had, he just, sorry, it's like I'm glitching out. He just negotiated a trade deal with that he said was great. And he's starting with them, not even ending with them. He is starting with them. I don't understand why. I don't see what's going on here.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
We will consider any questions that are sent by the end of the day on Tuesday, March 18th. From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. Wall Street was thrilled when Donald Trump won the 2024 election. And it was thrilled in part for a simple reason. It thought he was lying. Business leader after business leader said that President Trump wouldn't actually lay down his tariffs.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
A food supplier who imports much of their produce from Mexico and who relies on food American farmers grow using Canadian fertilizer cannot. The Trump team says the pain is gonna be worth it. This is like a period of detox. The tariffs are gonna bring manufacturing jobs back. They're gonna strengthen supply chains. We're gonna get good jobs.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
Okay, but if they do that, if this is what the tariffs are, they are these momentary bullying negotiating ploys, right? Then the other thing that Donald Trump and his allies keep saying about them, which is that they are going to lead to a massive insourcing of manufacturing facilities and lead to a lot of new revenue, cannot be true.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
Because the only ways that those things could be true – and his people do say that, and they will tell you that off the record, and he says that in public – the only way that could be true is if they were sustained and steady so that all of these companies that are running complex global supply chains –
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
come to the view that they're going to make five and 10 year investments on the assumption that this will remain true.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
And it will be better to assume the continuation of these tariffs than assume that they will go away because it's going to be much, much, much, much, much more expensive to, you know, move parts of your supply chain that are in Thailand and Denmark and Brazil into Missouri and Arkansas and Texas and, than to simply wait a year or wait a month until Trump changes his mind on the tariffs.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
You can have them be negotiating tools that you pick up in a month, or you can try to create a durable change in the structure of the U.S. economy and the sort of manufacturing chain. But you can't do both of those things.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
We're gonna convince other countries to give us better deals. Will they? Color me skeptical. It's not just that I think the theory here is wrong. I don't even think the theory they do have is being applied in any way that makes sense. I recorded this conversation on March 5th. Literally as we were talking, Trump exempted auto parts from his tariffs.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
So let's dig into it. You had a line in an opinion piece you did for The Times a few weeks ago. You wrote, a better way to think about tariffs is a key tool to achieve the core of Mr. Trump's economic agenda. He wants to shift the tax burden away from the well-off and toward the poor and middle class while consolidating his power. So explain that in some more detail.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
If they pass the tax cuts that they seem to be developing, and if Trump keeps layering tariffs down on the economy, and he keeps them, let's say, in this scenario, right? He doesn't just lift all the tariffs next week. How will that shift the tax burden?
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
He did that after saying the night before in his big speech that he had talked to the big three auto manufacturers and they were thrilled by what he was doing. Yeah, it turns out they weren't. And then right after we recorded, tariffs were delayed on goods covered under the United States-Mexico-Canada trade deal.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
So literally while we are talking, it is now being reported that the tariff on car goods from Mexico and Canada will be delayed by a month. Now, delay doesn't mean it will end. Maybe it's only going to wait until you can put it on Europe, too, so you don't have a distortion between the European and North American markets. But I think this gets to something else, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
which is there is a separate cost of uncertainty in the economy. I'll say something that has been surprising to me is that Donald Trump took office. He is promising huge tax cuts for rich people and corporations. He is promising deregulation across the economy. And what we're getting from that is a drop in consumer sentiment that We're getting an increase in inflation expectations.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
We're seeing the stock market losing all of its gains since when he came in, at least at the moment we are speaking. We're not seeing a lot of intense optimism from markets or corporate America. And one of the things I keep hearing is that he's just making things too uncertain. If you're thinking about, well, should I invest—
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
in X or Y or Z in America, or for that matter, somewhere else for a year from now or three years from now, well, maybe I'll just wait a little bit because it's very hard to know what's going to be under a tariff threat, what's not going to be under a tariff threat, where I should put the money.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
And that plus the amount of gutting of the federal workforce, which is a pretty significant amount of pushing people out of work. How do you think about the role that uncertainty is now playing as a force retarding economic growth?
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
A trade deal, by the way, that as we talk about here, Donald Trump had been the one to negotiate in his first term. Look, none of that was hard to predict, that it would be a problem to put tariffs on auto goods when we have highly integrated North America supply chains that our big three automakers rely on.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
I saw the Trump administration saying that they wanted to create a new measure of GDP that we would use that cuts out inflation. government spending and economic activity. What would be the rationale for that? And what did you think of it?
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Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
The fact that the Trump administration either didn't predict these problems in advance or wasn't willing to stand by its initial views on these problems, it doesn't make me confident that they've thought any of this through at any level of real detail. Certainly not well enough to compensate for the extraordinary risk they're inflicting on the economy.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
I sure as hell worry that when I watch them disbanding the statistical groups and coming up with alternative measures that we're about to get some monkeying around with them, particularly given that Donald Trump is an incredibly enthusiastic liar who lies about everything from his electoral victories to the nature of the economy at all times.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
The other thing, though, about that, which I just thought was strange, right? Let's take it— Neutral face value. As you know, this number already exists and you can already find it. But let's say they want to start highlighting it, publishing it. I guess that's fine. Except that it's weird because economic activity associated with government is still real activity.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
And so if you want to know what is happening in the economy... Whether or not the government is spending money and on what is meaningful. People actually really do get jobs from that. It really does create demand. If we were having a war and there was a lot of government spending on defense, I think it'd be really weird to try to measure GDP without that in it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
I worry sometimes that the first people that the Trumpist right fools are themselves. That If you are publishing a BS statistic that is trying to hide the places where you're damaging the economy, and you are persuading yourself of that number...
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
But the economy is still exactly as damaged and people are still exactly as upset because I think a lot of the anger comes from people being genuinely out of work and people seeing harm in their community. And it's not only that this government agency closed, but also there was a coffee shop near it that made coffee for those government workers and on and on and on down the line.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
It just seems that when you rob yourself of information, it makes it harder for you to make good decisions too.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
Kimberly Kossing is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. She's the author of the book Open, the Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital, and the former lead economist in the Treasury Department's Office of Tax Policy. And she's done great work modeling the possible costs and consequences of the tariffs Trump has proposed.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
It reminds me that in one of the various you should leave the government emails that Musk sent out to employees, they basically said, look, we want you to go to the private sector where you will be more productive and create real things. And so from one perspective, you might say it's very bad for government efficiency if we drive the best people out of the government.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
And I think from their perspective, which sees the government as waste, as obstruction, as nothing but red tape and wokeness and a nonprofit industrial complex and so on, it's not. Because it isn't that, you know, if what you're doing is selecting for the best people and driving them out of government, that means you're putting all these good people into the private sector and
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
And the private sector is where real productivity gains happen and where real things are made. And so I think if you take them seriously from their perspective, this is a feature, not a bug, that it should actually show up over time in increased GDP. I have spoken to people who work, let's call it adjacent to the federal government, and
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
And one thing they tell me is they're getting incredible applications. I mean, they're just getting really, really amazing people applying because these people don't want to work in the government now. And, you know, if Elon Musk is going to fire, you know, a third or half of the government, they better get out before all the jobs somebody like them could take are filled.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
So I want to have her on for a very straightforward conversation. What are these tariffs? How do they work? What might they do or not do? As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com. Kimberly Klaussing, welcome to the show.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
But it's a real hell of a gamble to say that you're not going to lose anything significant by driving excellent people out of the Department of Energy or the Census Bureau or the Department of Labor. I think it really does reflect a view that government does not create things that are of value.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
We've been sort of focused so far on the more narrow policies here, but there's a broader worldview at work. And that worldview is that over these decades, Thank you for having me. that this trade has been bad for America, not good. And that it's sort of been a plot of a globalized elite. And that Trump is coming in and reversing it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
And I think particularly as you've seen even Democrats sort of turn on some of the politics of free trade, you don't really have a counterweight in this argument. But years ago, you wrote a book called Open, which is sort of more making the case for this kind of system. So what is your answer to that, your answer to the view that actually we have been ripped off?
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
And yes, we got cheaper consumer goods, cheaper cars, but that came at the expense of good jobs, of manufacturing jobs, of robust supply chains, etc. And this is, yeah, maybe this will be painful. There will be a little disturbance, as Trump put it. But it's necessary because the equilibrium we ended up in was bad for America. And even if it's painful to change it, we need to.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
So let me just begin at the simplest possible level. What is a tariff?
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
How does it raise money? Where is that money collected and by whom?
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
I think it's a good place to end. Always our final question. What are three books you recommend to the audience?
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Roland Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Isaac Jones with Afim Shapiro and Amin Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Elias Iskwith, Christian Lin, and Jack McCordick. We have original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christina Samieluski and Shannon Busta.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Andy Roestraser. And special thanks to Pat McCusker.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
If the tariffs, the 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, the 10% added tariff on China holds, what does that cost to the average American family a year? But also, how much money does it raise?
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
I always hear a lot of different explanations of why we're doing tariffs and what they're supposed to achieve. And there are two that feel a little bit different to me. One is that it's going to raise us a lot of money, right? It is a tax we're placing on foreigners, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
And the other is that it will be this incredible lever we will use to make everybody make everything in America because we're a huge market and people don't want to pay the tariffs to access our market. But I guess, of course, if we're going to raise all this money through tariffs, then if everybody comes here, it doesn't work.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
How do you disentangle those two rationales that President Trump has been using?
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
Is the idea that you could layer significant tariffs on imports from all these other countries and radically increase the proportion of goods we make here in America true?
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
And they had a reasonable case. Trump in his first term was exquisitely sensitive to the stock market. He loved bragging about how high it was on his watch. And so the belief was that the market would be a check on Trump's behavior. He wasn't going to do anything that would actually harm it. He certainly wasn't going to do anything that would harm the real economy or drive up prices.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
This is a point my friend Matt Iglesias has made, but it's been ringing in my head, which is tariffs and this kind of protectionist, mercantilist, and I would say reality TVist economic policy has this bias towards tariffs. announcements you can see and then this cost of things you never hear about. So Apple comes and says, oh, Mr. Trump, we don't want to be tariffed by you.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
You're doing such a great job. We're going to locate more of our investment in the U.S. Please don't tariff our other goods. And maybe they both get a presidential pat on the back and they get some tariff exemptions and they locate a factory here. But then there are the companies that are small, do not have a line to the White House.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
cannot make a big announcement that Donald Trump will be part of. And they're just disadvantaged and can never grow. How do you think about that dynamic? Because terrorists are spectacular and they're clear. And then you get these like sort of like TikTok of announcements coming out of the White House of, look, see, they work. Look at this. Look at that. Look at the other thing.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
And then we, you know, there's obviously no presidential press release about the factories or goods that they ended up destroying.
The Ezra Klein Show
Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work
Say this about Donald Trump. He knew why he had won the election.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
How frightened are you by the national security implications of all this? Which is to say that the possibilities for surveillance states. So Sam Hammond, who's an economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, he had this piece months back called 95 Theses on AI. And one of them that I think about a lot is he makes this point that a lot of laws right now
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
if we had the capacity for perfect enforcement, would be constricting, like extraordinarily constricting, right? Laws are written knowing that human labor is scarce. And there's this question of what happens when the surveillance state gets really good? What happens when AI makes the police state a very different kind of thing than it is now? What happens when we have like
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
warfare of endless drones, right? I mean, the company Anduril has become like a big, you know, you hear about them a lot now. They have a relationship, I believe, with OpenAI. Palantir is in a relationship with Anthropic. We're about to see a real change in this in a way that I think is, from the national security side, frightening.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
And there I very much get why we don't want China way ahead of us. Like, I get that entirely. But just in terms of the capacities it gives our own government, right? How do you think about that?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
We don't know which country is going to get there first. We don't know what it will mean for war. We don't know what it'll mean for peace. And as much as there is so much else going on in the world to cover, I do think there's a good chance that when we look back on this era in human history, this will have been the thing that matters.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
I find this all makes me incredibly uncomfortable. And one of the reasons is that there is a, it's like we are summoning an ally, right? We are trying to build an alliance with another, like an almost interplanetary ally. And we are in a competition with China to make that alliance, but we don't understand the ally.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
and we don't understand what it will mean to let that ally into all of our systems and to all of our planning.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
As best I understand it, every company really working on this, every government really working on this believes that in the not too distant future, you are gonna have much better and faster and more dominant decision-making loops by being able to make much more of this autonomous to the AI, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
Once you get to the, what we're talking about is AGI, you wanna turn over a fair amount of your decision-making to it. So we are rushing towards that because we don't want the other guys to get there first without really understanding that. what that is or what that means.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
This will have been the event horizon, the thing that the world before it and the world after it were just different worlds. One of the people who reached out to me is Ben Buchanan, who was the former special advisor for artificial intelligence in the Biden White House. And I thought it'd kind of be interesting to bring on for a couple of reasons.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
It seems like a potentially historically dangerous thing that AI reached maturation at the exact moment that the US and China are in this like Thucydides trap style race for superpower dominance. That's a pretty dangerous set of incentives in which to be creating the next turn in intelligence on this planet.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
Is there anything to the concern that by treating China as such an antagonistic competitor on this, who we will do everything, including export controls on advanced technologies, to hold them back, that we have made them into a more intense competitor? I mean, there is a... I do not want to be naive about the Chinese system or the ideology of the CCP.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
Like, they want strength and dominance and to see the next era be a Chinese era. So maybe there's nothing you can do about this. But it is pretty damn antagonistic to try to choke off the chips for the central technology of the next era to the other biggest country.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
One is that this is not a guy working for an AI lab. So he's not being paid by the big AI labs to tell you this technology is coming. The second is that he was at the nerve center of what policy we have been making in recent years. And we have been doing things. And in particular, we've been doing things to try to stay ahead of China.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
But I don't think they do misunderstand us. I mean, maybe they see it differently, but I think you're being a little—look, I'm aware of how— politics in Washington works. I've talked to many people doing this. I've seen the turn towards a much more confrontational posture with China. I know that Jake Sullivan and President Biden wanted to call this strategic competition and not a new Cold War.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
And I get all that. I think it's true. And also, we have just talked about, and you did not argue the point, that our dominant view is we need to get to this technology before they do. I don't think they look at this like, oh, you know, like nobody would ever sell us a top technology. I think they understand what we're doing here.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
Well, you say that. What made DeepSeek such a shock, I think, to the American system was here is a system that appeared to be trained on much less compute for much less money that was competitive at a high level with our frontier systems. How did you understand what DeepSeek was and and what assumptions it required that we rethink or don't.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
And he's been at the center of that working on the national security side. And three, because there's now been a profound changeover in administrations. And the new administration between Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen and David Sachs and JD Vance has a lot of people with very, very, very strong views on AI. It's not something that they're going in without having thought about.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
One common argument I heard on the left, Lina Khan made this point actually in our pages, was that this proved our whole paradigm, right? of AI development was wrong. That we were seeing we did not need all this compute. We were seeing we did not need these giant mega companies. That this was showing a way towards like a decentralized, almost solar punk version of AI development.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
And that in a sense, the American system and imagination had been captured by like these three big companies. But what we're seeing from China was that that wasn't necessarily needed. We could do this on less energy, fewer chips, less footprint. Do you buy that?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
One thing that you see around the export controls, the AI firms want the export controls. The semiconductor firms don't. When DeepSeek rocked the U.S. stock market, it rocked it by making people question NVIDIA's long-term worth. And NVIDIA very much doesn't want these export controls.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
So you at the White House, where I'm sure at the center of a bunch of this lobbying back and forth, how do you think about this?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
No, but NVIDIA didn't think that. The stock market didn't think that.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
I'm not saying we shouldn't do the export controls, but I want you to take the strong version of the argument, not the weak one. I don't think NVIDIA's CEO is wrong that if we say NVIDIA cannot export its top chips to China, that that in some mechanical way in the long run reduces the market for NVIDIA's chips.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
So we're at this moment of a big transition in the policymakers, and they are probably going to be in power when a GEI or something like it hits the world. So what are they going to do? What kinds of decisions are going to need to be made?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
The Biden administration was also generally concerned with AI safety. I think it was influenced by people who care about AI safety. And that's created a kind of backlash from the accelerationist or what gets called the accelerationist side of this debate.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
So I want to play a clip for you from Mark Andreessen, who is obviously a very significant venture capitalist, a top Trump advisor, describing the conversations he had with the Biden administration on AI and how they sort of radicalized him in the other direction.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
I think the view that I understand him as arguing with, which is a view I've heard from people in the safety community, but it's not a view I necessarily heard from the Biden administration, was that you will need to regulate competition. the frontier models of the biggest labs when it gets efficiently powerful. And in order to do that, you will need there to be controls on those models.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
And what kinds of thinking do we need to start doing now to be prepared for something that virtually everybody who works in this area is trying to tell us as loudly as they possibly can is coming. As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com. Ben Buchanan, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
You just can't have the model weights and everything floating around so everybody can run this on their home laptop. I think that's the tension he's getting at.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
It gets at a bigger tension we'll talk about in a minute, but which is how much to regulate this incredibly powerful and fast-changing technology such that on the one hand, you're keeping it safe, but on the other hand, you're not overly slowing it down or making it impossible for smaller companies to comply with these new regulations as they're using more and more powerful systems.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
So we're talking here a bit about the sort of race dynamic and the safety dynamic. When you were getting those comments, not just on the open weight models, but also when you were talking to the heads of these labs and people were coming to you, what did they want? What would you say was like the consensus, to the extent there was one from AI world, of what they needed to...
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
get there quickly, and also because I know that many people in these labs are worried about what it would mean if these systems were unsafe. What was what you would describe as their consensus on safety?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
But that has become a pretty big question. If this is all as potent as we think it will be, And you end up having a bunch of the data centers containing all the model weights and everything else in a bunch of Middle Eastern petrostates. Speaking hypothetically.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
Speaking hypothetically, because they will give you huge amounts of energy access in return for just at least having some purchase on this AI world, which they don't have the internal engineering talent to be competitive in, but maybe can get some of it located there. And then there's some... Technology, right? Like there is something to this question.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
So you gave me a call after the end of the Biden administration, and I got a call from a lot of people in the Biden administration who wanted to tell me about all the great work they did. And you sort of seemed to want to warn people about what you now thought was coming. What's coming?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
There are warring cultures around how to prepare for AI. And I sort of mentioned AI safety and AI accelerationism. And J.D. Vance just went to the sort of big AI summit in Paris. And I'll play a clip of what he said.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
That's interesting because I don't know how to get this point of regulation right. I think the counter argument to Vice President Vance is nuclear. Mm-hmm. So nuclear power is a technology that both held extraordinary promise, maybe still does, and also you can really imagine every country wanting to be in the lead on.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
But the series of accidents, which most of them did not even have a particularly significant body count, were so frightening to people. Yeah. The technology got regulated to the point that certainly all of nuclear's advocates believe it has been largely strangled in the crib from what it could be.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
I'm saying that... Look, if these systems are going to get more powerful and they're going to be in charge of more things, things are both going to go wrong or they're going to go weird. It's not possible for it to be otherwise, right? To roll out something this new in a system as complex as human society. And so I think there's going to be this question of...
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
What are the regimes that make people feel comfortable moving forward from those kinds of moments?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
I think you are quite diplomatically understating, though, this. What's a genuine disagreement here? And what I would say Vance's speech was signaling was the arrival of a different culture in the government around AI. There has been an AI safety culture where, and he's making this point explicitly, that we have all these conferences about what could go wrong. And he is saying, stop it.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
Yes, maybe things could go wrong, but instead we should be focused on what could go right. And I would say, frankly, this is like the Trump musk, which I think is in some ways the right way to think about the administration. Their generalized view, if something goes wrong, we'll deal with the thing that went wrong afterwards.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
But what you don't want to do is move too slowly because you're worried about things going wrong. Better to break things and fix them than have moved too slowly in order not to break them.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
Before we get into what it would mean to get ready... What does it mean? Yeah. When you say extraordinarily capable systems, capable of what?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
Let me ask about the other side of this, because what I liked about Vance's speech is I think he's right that we don't talk enough about opportunities. But more than that, we are not preparing for opportunities. So if you imagine that AI will have the effects and possibilities that its backers and advocates hope...
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
One thing that that implies is that we're going to start having a much faster pace of the discovery or proposal of novel drug molecules, a very high promise. The idea here from people I've spoken to is that AI should be able to ingest an amount of information and build sort of modeling of diseases in the human body that could get us a much, much, much better drug discovery pipeline.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
If that were true, then you can ask this question, well, what's the choke point going to be? And our drug testing pipeline is incredibly cumbersome. It's very hard to get the animals you need for trials, very hard to get the human beings you need for trials, right? You can do a lot to make that faster, to prepare it for a lot more coming in. You could think about human challenge trials, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
There are all kinds of things like this. And this is true everywhere. in a lot of different domains, right? Education, et cetera. I think it's pretty clear that the choke points will become the difficulty of doing things in the real world. And I don't see society also preparing for that, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
We're not doing that much on the safety side, maybe because we don't know what we should do, but also on the opportunity side, this question of how could you actually make it possible to translate the benefits of this stuff very fast seems like a much richer conversation than I've seen anybody seriously having.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
I've been wandering around Washington, D.C. this week and talking to a lot of people involved in different ways in the Trump administration or advising the Trump administration, different people from different factions of what I think is the modern right. I've been surprised how many people understand
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
either what Trump and Musk and Doge are doing or at least what it will end up allowing as related to AI, including people I would not really expect to hear that from, not tech right people.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
But what they basically say is there is no way in which the federal government as constituted six months ago moves at the speed needed to take advantage of this technology, either to integrate it into the way the government works or for the government to take advantage of what it can do. That we are too cumbersome, endless interagency processes, too many rules, too many regulations.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
You have to go through too many people that if the whole point of AI is that it is this unfathomable acceleration of cognitive work. The government needs to be stripped down and rebuilt to take advantage of it. And like them, hate them, what they're doing is stripping the government down and rebuilding it.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
And maybe they don't even know what they're doing it for, but one thing it will allow is a kind of creative destruction that you can then begin to insert AI into at a more ground level. Do buy them.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
Is there something to the broader argument? And I will say I do buy not the argument about Doge, but sort of make the same point you just made. What I do buy is that I know how the federal government works pretty well. And it is too slow to modernize technology. It is too slow to work across agencies.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
It is too slow to radically change the way things are done and take advantage of things that can be productivity enhancing.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
So another major part of Vice President Vance's speech was signaling to the Europeans that that we are not going to sign on to complex multilateral negotiations and regulations that could slow us down, and that if they passed such regulations anyway, in a way that we believe is penalizing our AI companies, we would retaliate.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
How do you think about the differing position the new administration is moving into vis-a-vis Europe and its approach, its broad approach to tech regulation?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
One of the other things that Vance talked about and that you said you agreed with is making AI pro-worker. What does that mean?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
So I've sort of heard you beg off on this question a little bit by saying you're not a labor economist. I am not a labor economist. I will promise you the labor economists do not know what to do about AI.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
You were the top advisor for AI. Yeah. You were at the nerve center of the government's information about what is coming. If this is half as big as you seem to think it is, it's going to be the single most disruptive thing to hit labor markets forever. ever, given how compressed the time period in which it will arrive is, right? It took a long time to lay down electricity.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
Yeah, or key parts of cognitively demanding jobs, yeah. I will say, I am also pretty convinced we're on the cusp of this, so I'm not coming at this as a skeptic. but I still find it hard to mentally live in the world of it. So do I. So I used Deep Research recently, which is a new open AI product. It's sort of on their more pricey tiers.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
Well, I think it will be uneven, and that's, I think, what will be destabilizing about it, in part. If it were just even... then you might just come up with an even policy to do something about it. Sure. But precisely because it's not even, and it's not going to put, I don't think, 42% of the labor force out of work overnight. No.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
Let me give you an example of the kind of thing I'm worried about, and I've heard other people worry about. So, there are a lot of 19-year-olds in college right now studying marketing.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
There are a lot of marketing jobs... that AI, frankly, can do perfectly well right now. As we get better at knowing how to direct AI, I mean, one of the things that slow this down is simply firm adaptation. Yes. But the thing that will happen very quickly is you will have firms that are built around AI. It's going to be harder for the big firms to integrate it.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
But what you're going to have is new entrants who are built from the ground up with their organization is built around, you know, one person overseeing these like seven systems. And so you might just begin to see triple the unemployment among marketing graduates.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
I'm not convinced you'll see that in software engineers because I think AI is going to both, you know, take a lot of those jobs and also create a lot of those jobs because there's going to be so much more demand for software. But you can see it happening somewhere there. There's just a lot of jobs that are doing work behind a computer.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
And as companies absorb machines that can do work behind a computer for you, that will change their hiring. You must have heard somebody think about this. You guys must have talked about this.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
Most people I think have not used it, but it can build out something that's more like a scientific analytical brief in a matter of minutes. And I work with producers on the show. I hire incredibly talented people to do very demanding research work.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
I couldn't agree with you more. Like in a big way, Donald Trump is president today because we did a shitty job on this with China. The reason I'm pushing on this is that we have been talking about this, seeing this coming for a while. And I will say that as I look around, I do not see a lot of useful thinking here. And I grant that we don't know the shape of it.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
At the very least, I would like to see some ideas on the shelf for if the disruptions are severe, what we should think about doing. We are so addicted in this country to an economically useful tale that our success is in our own hands. makes it very hard for us to react with i think either compassion or realism
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
when workers are displaced for reasons that are not in their own hands because of global recessions or depressions, because of globalization. There are always some people like the agency, the creativity, and they become hyperproductive and, you know, look at them. Why aren't you them? But there are a lot- I'm definitely not- I know you're not saying that, but it's very hard.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
That's such an ingrained American way of looking at the economy that we have a lot of trouble doing, you know, we should do some retraining, right? Are all these people going to become nurses? Right. I mean, there are things I can't do. Like, how many plumbers do we need? I mean, more than we have, actually. But does everybody move into the trades?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
What were the intellectual thought exercises that all these smart people at the White House who believe this was coming? You know, what were you saying?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
And I asked it to do this report on the tensions between the Madisonian constitutional system and the sort of highly polarized nationalized parties we now have. And what it produced in a matter of minutes was, I would at least say, the median of what any of the teams I've worked with on this could produce within days.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
I guess I would say more than that. I have a discomfort with the quality of thinking right now, sort of across the board, but I will say on the Democratic side. Right. Because I have you here as a representative of the past administration. I have a lot of. disagreements with the Trump administration, to say the least.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
But I do understand the people who say, look, Elon Musk, David Sachs, Marc Andreessen, J.D. Vance, at the very highest levels of that administration are people who've spent a lot of time thinking about AI and have considered very unusual thoughts about it. And I think sometimes Democrats are a little bit institutionally constrained for thinking unusually. So I'm hearing a lot.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
I take your point on the export controls. I take your point on the exact orders, the AI Safety Institute. But to the extent Democrats are the party, want to be, imagine themselves to be the party of the working class, and to the extent we've been talking for years about the possibility of AI-driven displacements.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
Yeah, when things happen, you need Congress, but you also need thinking that becomes policies of Congress. So I guess I'm trying to push, like, was this not being talked about? There were no meetings. There were no, you guys didn't have Claude write up a brief of options?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
I will say this gets to something I find frustrating in the policy conversation about AI, which is you sit down with somebody and you start the conversation and they're like, the most transformative technology, perhaps in human history, is landing into human civilization in a two to three year timeframe. And you say, wow, that seems like a really big deal. What should we do?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
And then things get a little hazy. Now, maybe we just don't know. But what I've heard you kind of say a bunch of times is like, look, we have done very little to hold this technology back. Everything is voluntary. You know, the only thing we asked was a sharing of safety data. Now, in come the accelerationists. You know, Marc Andreessen has criticized you guys extremely straightforwardly.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
Is this policy debate about anything? Is it just the sentiment of the rhetoric, right? Like, if it's so fucking big... but nobody can quite explain what it is we need to do or talk about, except for maybe export chip controls. Like, are we just not thinking creatively enough? Is it just not time? Like, Match the kind of calm measure tone of the second half of this with where we started for me.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
I've talked to a number of people at firms that do high amounts of coding, and they tell me that, you know, by the end of the year, by the end of next year, they expect most code will not be written by human beings. I don't really see how this cannot have labor market impact.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
I'll say I had him on the show for that book. It's one of my favorite ever episodes. People should check it out. Ben Buchanan, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
There are a lot of arguments in America about AI. The one thing that seems not to get argued over, that seems almost universally agreed upon, and is the dominant, in my view, controlling priority in policy, is that we get to AGI, a term I've heard you don't like, before China does. Why?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. For the past couple of months, I've been having this strange experience where person after person, independent of each other from AI labs, from government has been coming to me and saying, it's really about to happen. We're really about to get to artificial general intelligence. And
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
What they mean is that they have believed for a long time that we are on a path to creating transformational artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence capable of doing basically anything a human being can do behind a computer, but better than most human beings can do it. And before they thought, you know, maybe take five or 10 years, 10 or 15 years.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
Paint the picture for me. You say there'd be great economic, national security, military risks if China got there first. Help me help the audience here imagine a world where China gets there first.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
My sense already has been that most people, most institutions are pretty hackable to a capable state actor. Not everything, but a lot of them. And now both the state actors are going to get better at hacking, and they're going to have much more capacity to do it in the sense that you can have many more AI hackers than you can human hackers.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
Are we just about to enter into a world where we are just much more digitally vulnerable as normal people? And I'm not just talking about people who the states might want to spy on, but you will get versions of these systems that just all kinds of bad actors will have. Do you worry it's about to get truly dystopic?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
But now they believe it's coming inside of two to three years inside Donald Trump's second term. And they believe it because of the products they're releasing right now. They believe because of what they're seeing inside the places they work. And I think they're right. If you've been telling yourself this isn't coming, I really think you need to question that. It's not Web3. It's not Vaporware.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
It gets very annoying if you don't. The flip of that is the question, which I know a lot of people worry about, which is the security of the AI labs themselves. It is very, very, very valuable for another state to get the latest open AI system. And, you know, the people at these companies, and I've talked to them about this, on the one hand, know this is a problem.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
And on the other hand, it's really annoying to work in a truly secure way.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
How do you feel about the vulnerability right now?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
There's a dimension of this that I find people bring up to me a lot, and it's interesting, is that processing of information. So compared to spy games between the Soviet Union and the United States, we all just have a lot more information. We have all the satellite data.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
We, I mean, obviously we will not eavesdrop on each other, but obviously we eavesdrop on each other and have all these kinds of things coming in. And I'm told by people who know this better than I do, that there's just a huge choke point of human beings. And they're currently fairly rudimentary programs analyzing that data.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
And that there's a view that what it would mean to have these truly intelligent systems that are able to inhale that and do pattern recognition is a much more significant change in the balance of power than people outside this understand.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
A lot of what we're talking about is already here right now. And I think we are on the cusp of an era in human history that is unlike any of the eras we have had before. And we're not prepared in part because it's not clear what it would mean to prepare. We don't know what this will look like, what it will feel like. We don't know how labor markets will respond.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Government Knows AGI is Coming
I think the first and second order consequences of that are also striking. One thing it implies is that in a world where you have strong AI, the incentive for spying goes up. Because if right now we are choked at the point of we are collecting more data than we can analyze, well, then each marginal piece of data we're collecting isn't that valuable.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
There's other issues here, too, though, that you see in some tributaries of the movement. I mean, RFK Jr. in some ways is an awkward fit in a Republican administration. But actually, in this movement, his concerns about microplastics and vaccines and the way that we have moved away from a natural way of living and what that is doing to our bodies. Fits.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
There's a, I'm a weightlifter, but there's a lionization of the aesthetics and I would say almost spiritual dimensions of weightlifting. There's a movement back to very much older visions of masculinity, a kind of Spartan aesthetic. You see it in people at its max, like Bronze Age pervert. But you also just see it in sub stacks that Marc Andreessen writes about.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
Talk to me a bit about this broader embrace of the past over the future or the present even.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
So you've been covering the new right for a while now. How would you describe the thing you've been covering? Is it a coalition? Is it a scene? What's the term for it?
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
Well, there's a disturbing amount I actually agree with David on here.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
It's the podcast age, man. All the answers are long from here on out.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
I've been thinking about this for some months and I've tried to draw it out in different conversations and I feel like I've mostly failed. So I'm going to try to do it again here. One intellectual difference between the left and the right that has felt very salient to me over the past couple of years is that the right is very interested in an old idea, something you used to read much more about.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
It's all over classical texts of human formation, of how do you flourish into a man or a woman, right? and pursue a certain sort of excellence. And the left is interested in something, some people connect it more to original sin, but it's a little bit about purging. It's about moving away from being what your base nature would make you. And becoming enlightened above it.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
It's a remaking of the self away from your impulses, away from implicit bias, implicit discrimination. There were very big podcasts on the left in this period, like Maintenance Phase, that are very hostile to most self-improvement cultures. And I've actually thought this is a much bigger division line in our politics.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
You look at what get called the bro podcast, you know, but that's a pretty big world, but they're very self-improvement focused. And the left is very therapeutic focused, right? You know, process out the emotions. Don't, you know, I don't feel like I have this completely nailed down, but in terms of the intellectual cultures, it is one of the ways they differ now most in my mind.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
I want to go at this other concept that has been dancing around the conversation, which is the regime. Talks about the regime. What is he talking about?
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
Well, let's go back a couple of years. It's 2022. Donald Trump is not yet officially running for president again. He'll announce very, very late towards the end of that year. GD Vance is certainly not the vice presidential candidate. And you're covering these people. You're going to their parties. You're, you know, outside having your smokes with them.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
Well, now it's changing, but I think this is an interesting question about it because as I understood this set of concepts, it was the idea that even compared to other periods in American life, that you now had a unity of culture across the commanding heights of society. American thought and policymaking.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
So the people who run the government and run the military believe the same thing as Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, who believe the same thing as the nonprofit heads, and everybody's sort of moving back and forth. Believe the same thing as the people in the media, and they're all talking to each other and going to Davos together. And... It's not exactly about money.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
There are plenty of rich right-wing billionaires, the Adelsons and so on, and multimillionaires. But it's about a sense of a... A loose coalition of institutions that can set the boundaries of acceptable thought.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
I think it's worth talking about this question of equity because it cuts in different ways here. You could imagine a worldview of the kind you're describing being extremely pro-regime, If you have made it to the top of Harvard or the top of the Ford Foundation or the top of government or the top of the military, you know, not all men are created equal.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
And here we have the ultimate outcomes of our meritocracy or our system of selection. And you have to accept that. This is not a world of people, though, who say Barack Obama represented the very best of us. And the problem is we did not give him sufficient fealty. This is a world of people very much contesting who is on top. I've had Patrick Deneen on the show.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
One of his big arguments is about replacing the elites with other elites. And so I think it's worth bringing in – some of these concepts are unusual for people, I think. This sort of other thing that is stewing. that I think is more connected to Donald Trump than a lot of the pieces we've been talking about.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
If I had asked you then what ideas bound them together, what would you have told me?
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
But people say Trump is a nationalist, but there's this related idea, traditionalism, which I think maybe does not mean what people think it means when they hear that, that Steve Bannon is very into. What is traditionalism?
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
A household name, if there ever was one. Yeah, exactly. Everybody loves weird Italian.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
The reason I'm bringing this up to just because you're right, getting into Ebola can be incredibly both complex and bizarre. I do really recommend this great book by a guy named Matthew Rose called A World After Liberalism, which if you would like to be introduced to more ideas like this, I think people should pick up.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
But the reason I'm bringing it up is that nationalism is, I think, an idea people think they know about. George W. Bush was was in many ways a very strong nationalist. And after 9-11, we had this period where everybody's wearing flag pins.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
What Steve Bannon, what a lot of the new right people seem to share, what I think Donald Trump intuitively represents, you could call it a more ethnic nationalism, but I think it's more of a mystic nationalism. And You know, they'll protest in part because blood and soil has very dark connotations. But they'll protest sometimes, I think, if you say it's a blood and soil nationalism.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
But you have people like J.D. Vance in his RNC speech get up and talk about how many generations of his family are buried in Kentucky. It is not, I think, just about becoming a citizen. They're not excited right now about the idea that you had H-1B visa holders who would have children and they become citizens. They're trying to stop that from happening. It's not about being a citizen.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
It is about being in some way a connected at a level they respect to the american homeland and spirit such that you will fight and die for it and that your your connection to it is not merely rational or opportunistic or instrumental like i mean you could correct what you think i'm saying that's wrong here but that's my best rendering of of it
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
But no, wait, wait, I want to stop this for a second. I'm not saying you're making this argument, but I don't agree that that's what was notable about what J.D. Vance was saying. And I had heard him say this first at the NatCon conference, which is a very sort of interesting ideological dimension of all this.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
But what he was saying was that because of that lineage of burial, that his relationship to America was very different. He talks about why people will fight and die for homeland. And there's a whole thing. I mean, you talk about it at points in this movement about, you know, who really fights for America, right? And I think Bannon has this line. It's like the elites don't fight.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
That's just not what they do. And it's a fundamental questioning. I mean, this is why it becomes politically controversial. It's a fundamental questioning of the allegiance of a naturalized immigrant or a second generation American. Which, by the way, a lot of immigrants and children of immigrants fight if you look at the numbers here.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
But there's an argument about who's a real American here and that something is coming through, being connected to the soil. That, you know, all these immigrants coming over the southern border, even if they all learn English, they don't have it. And so if you let a bunch of men, you're going to fundamentally change the character of the nation. And that's why I connect this to Trump.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
I think there's a lot of ideas we're talking about here that Trump does not give a damn about. But I do think he has a very intuitive sense that nations are connected to ethnicity, to, you know, length of time here, that his sense that you have a bunch of immigrants, you will change and corrupt the character of a nation.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
Like, he believes that, I think, very strongly without having all of Steve Bannon's architecture of complex theories about, you know, international bases and dollar exchange rates.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
And it's the line Vance uses a version of that in that speech.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
I want to go back to the question of what this fight is actually about. Because in a way, I think it's about Barack Obama. I don't think it's in any way an accident that Donald Trump arises. He's a main pusher of the birther smear, but that his movement and what powers him arises in response to Obama. Because there is this question of what Obama represents.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
I mean, is it the triumph of America that you can have this man, Barack Hussein Obama, with the complex international history he has, with the heritage he has? No. who rises up through every single level of the American meritocracy, dominates it, is elected president in a overturning, in many ways, of the most toxic and abhorrent way
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
elements of American history and its past, a kind of triumph of our idea over our actual history. And he's this brilliant guy and judicious and, you know, a million different things, right? Is this what we were going for? And then there's this whole part of the country that does not feel good about this at all.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
And that gets talked about as racism, and certainly some of it was, but there's also something else that I think they have to begin to describe why they don't like this. And I do think they come up in part, not just with this sort of heritage Americanism, but with this idea that What the meritocracy is getting you now are people who aren't the best in America.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
They want to take America too far from what it was. They want to take it over, right? This is actually a war for control. And the people J.D. Vance comes from and represents, they're being screwed in this war for control.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
Not because necessarily they're white or they're black, but because it's really a class war and equality has become a cudgel in the class war that the globalists are using to sort of beat you down.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
I mean, Obama, one of his great talents as both a politician and a thinker is he's very deeply a pluralist and he holds a lot of conflicting tendencies in America inside of himself and he balances them. And look, I think, you know, if Obama could have run for a third term against Donald Trump in 2016, I think he wins. So these things always happen.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
But to what you're saying a second ago, it's strange because I am quite far on the other side of this movement. There are things like the big tech stuff I'm sympathetic to. But in my idea of America, I'm deeply emotionally concerned.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
pro-immigrant, and not only for reasons of sympathy, but also I think that as a sort of a nationalist, I think immigrants are a tremendous and could be a yet more tremendous source of American strength. But I do think there's this difference endlessly between what presidents do and what their cultural meaning is.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
What Donald Trump did in office from 2017 to 2021 is very different than his cultural meaning. Some things connect. tariffs on China, but he means something much bigger than what was from a policy perspective, a fairly modest presidency. And Obama also means something very different. The way his meaning is taken up by the institutions and culture around him is as a kind of wave of power change.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
The meaning was interpreted differently. And communicated, you know, in Hillary Clinton's campaign, in cultural things like Hamilton, as this country is changing and the people who are going to be on top of the change. are in this mix of they've both won the meritocracy, but they have the culturally polite and right ideas. And ideally, they're not white. And ideally, they're not men.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
And, you know, it does become, I mean, a lot of things that happen are in these books and sub stacks and podcasts that we're all talking about and that I'm, of course, part of are, you know, it's intellectualization of a power struggle. And, you know, some of there's backlash. It is simply racism. And there's also backlash or response. And I think you see this in a bunch of places.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
I think you see it in sort of the gender dynamics right now. You're seeing the future is female. No, absolutely not. It's male again. Maybe it didn't need to be a power struggle in the same way that it was. But I don't think you can completely separate.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
There's what Obama did, even what Obama himself thinks, and then the culture of Obamaism, which was always actually, I think, quite different or at least somewhat different. And so it was different after him than his personal politics.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
One of the things that struck me reading your dispatches, and that has long struck me reading these people, is a really profound pessimism in this intellectual class about modernity. This sense that these people share that feels very much in a way like 70s leftists to me, that human beings are now living in a very inhuman way. Very much so. Spin out their critique of modernity.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
So I think this brings us back then to the story about Trump, because there is always a lot of debate and disagreement about what Donald Trump represents. And Donald Trump is not himself reading these sub stacks and participating in a lot of this discourse. And then he picks J.D. Vance. And many people, when he picked J.D.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
Vance, understood that as a signal that these ideas and this thinking are the future of MAGA. He had picked the MAGA ideologist, not in Doug Burgum, the business-friendly moderate, not in Marco Rubio, the compromise candidate between the different wings. He had picked the guy who read the substacks.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
And people took that as a signal that he was endorsing, as a future of MAGA, this set of ideas. Was that what you thought it meant that he picked J.D. Vance?
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
This feels like the emergence of this other strain that is in some ways like competing in the background and then flowers. And I feel like the key people here are Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Mm-hmm. And Teal is more connected to the parts of the movement you're talking about, a funder of parts of it, and much more of a fellow traveler inside of it.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
But then Musk comes in, and he clearly becomes the other pole. If J.D. Vance represents this more traditionalist new right, Musk represents—I mean, I'm not sure it's well-defined yet—
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
But between the money he has and the attention he controls and Trump's obvious affection and interest in him, all of a sudden, Vance, who seemed like the future of this, you know, you see Onion articles going around saying, you know, J.D. Vance begins to suspect there's another group chat, right? Begins to get pushed to the side, at least visually, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
There's the UFC fight that, you know, Musk is at and RFK Jr. is at. And where's J.D. Vance? Yeah. What is Musk to you? And how has he been greeted or understood by the people you talk to on The Snoo Wright?
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
And so I don't really... Of course, he doesn't know what that salute means.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
He's just very involved in nationalist adjacent parties worldwide and a bunch of debates about a German party that is under controversy. Right. I've been driven a little crazy by this because in a weird way, I have too much respect for Elon Musk and his intelligence to believe this is all totally coincidental. Even if you just believe it's a form of trolling, which I am open to, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
I'm not saying the guy's a neo-Nazi, but the idea that he is maybe trolling with signals of the very fight that he has chosen repeatedly to pick does not seem so far-fetched or condemnatory to me.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
He may not represent an ideological pole. I actually think that's correct in some key ways, at least to J.D. Vance, who is a more protean figure than some of the new right ideologists we've been talking about. But what he does create is, I think, two things, right? One is just an alternative pole of power. You know, if the idea was that J.D.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
Vance is going to be the person who is organized and knows how to hire staff and is going to be running policy as Donald Trump acts as a ceremonial king of his own administration, that's no longer the case or doesn't appear to be the case. And then the second, though, is that Musk starts the preference cascade, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
of rich CEOs and tech billionaires and attention oligarchs in particular moving towards Trump. And I guess this is where it does seem like there's a tension to me. You can say all you want that you don't like big tech modernity, but if your top advisor is the guy who runs, owns X, and is, as you say, quite Twitter-brained, doesn't seem like you're that against it.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
And if now Mark Zuckerberg is in one of the front rows of the inauguration, and so is Sundar Pichai, and so is Jeff Bezos, and the TikTok CEO is a couple rows back, I don't know, for a movement of intellectuals who a couple months ago seemed to think that they were the ones who are counter-regime and counter-establishment and hate what big tech has done to the world, this doesn't seem like the inaugural visual that
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
I take your point that... And ideologically, there's probably a lot of common ground between people like Vance and Musk. On the other hand, Steve Bannon, who is on the outside and it's never clear to me exactly how much influence he still wields. I think you would have a much better sense of that than I do.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
But he hates Musk, you know, gave this interview, said Musk is evil and he was going to put all of his energy into purging him from the movement. Yeah. And there is, I think, this question of does Donald Trump want to be the counterestablishment or does he want to be the establishment?
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
Is the problem that he had, separate from the sort of new right philosophers you talk about, is a problem he had with the establishment, the regime, the cathedral. Not that its ideas or it was bad for American life or human flourishing or the formation of human character. But that it was not on his side and it did not pay enough fealty.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
And as long as it's instrumentally backing him, he's fine with it and will flip from counterestablishment to establishment in an instant. And people like Andreessen and Musk, who I agree, like, they have lots of complex ideas about things. But I think it's very hard to say the richest man in the world and the best-known VC in the world are not the establishment and do not represent power.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
And so there is this – I don't know. It's not an irresolvable set of tensions. But there is a difference between being the Mos Eisley Cantina and being the Death Star.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
I think he tried to send him a message on Tree Social and accidentally posted it, if I remember this moment. It was sweet in a way.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
I think he feels like it's both the big AI data center energy project.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
Because you look at the Trump administration, we've talked a huge amount now about J.D. Vance, about Elon Musk, a little bit about Steve Bannon. But you look across it, Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary, kind of normal finance guy, used to work for George Soros, in fact. Pete Hegseth is Fox & Friends anchor that Donald Trump likes and feels aligned with.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
Susie Wiles is a very longtime Republican operative, is going to be the chief of staff. It's always, I think, a little bit tricky to tell... Are you watching a really new ideological impulse announce itself in American life get translated into policy? Or are you watching a kind of normal transition that is going to do things that are pretty normal within the context of American politics?
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
It's like Elon Musk has a lot of wild ideas. You'll see him say on Twitter. And then what is he actually directly involved in or responsible for? Well, in the executive order, Doge is about software modernization. And like that's a very different expression than the sort of more wild ideological impulses that that he's become associated with.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
Stargate is interesting and, you know, they're very much AI accelerationists around Donald Trump. But Stargate was happening before Donald Trump. I mean, this big set of investments was already underway. I mean, it didn't take Donald Trump's election for Microsoft and OpenAI to realize that they were interested in AI dominance.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
And so I think this is, you know, as we come to the close here, like my big question for you, you were covering all these people in 2022 and before. Do they matter?
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
One sense I have that maybe connects to that is that these ideological currents we're talking about are much stronger and more dominant at the 20-something-year-old staffer level than Than at the 50-year-old-something principal and cabinet secretary level. Yes. Is that fair? Yes. I mean— I mean, this seems to me to be what young Republicans are now.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
But you're still talking here about the bold-faced names. The thing I want to do is drill down a bit because, look, I've covered many administrations. And I guess to use Biden as an example here, you look at the Biden administration, and you look at the cabinet structure and principle level of the Biden administration, and here you have one of the oldest national Democrats still in public life.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
He's been around for the longest of any major figure in the Democratic Party. Beneath him, you have a lot of names you would recognize from the Obama administration. There's Brian Deese, you know, at the National Economics Council. There's Jake Sullivan as a national security advisor. And you could just kind of go down a list like that.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
So you might say, OK, this is going to look like average out Joe Biden and the Obama administration, and you can predict this administration. But at least economically, this looked like the Elizabeth Warren administration.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
And the reason that happened – I mean, in part, they had won some of the ideological fights inside the party, but the staffer level was very Warrenite and was coming more from that wing. And that's where the ideological trends were among 20-something and, to some degree, young 30-something ambitious, smart, democratic policy staffers.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
Now, people can debate whether or not that was good for the Biden administration. There were a lot of fights over that. But if you had just been looking at its top level, you would have completely misunderstood it because administrations are run by staff. And Washington is run by 20-something and 30-something-year-olds who can work 14-hour days.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
Ted Kaczynski, he's been on my mind recently because he seems to be popping up in a lot of places. So he was there in Luigi Mangione's Goodreads. He is, as you note, referenced quite often on the new right, famously by Blake Masters, a Senate candidate from Arizona who's a Peter Thiel protege. And it's worth noting, Masters lost. This is not necessarily coming out of this world yet.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
And so what ideological and policy world they're coming out of often matters even more than where the principles come from.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. Second terms are usually intellectually exhausted. And maybe if Trump had been reelected in 2020, that's how it would be. But he wasn't. And so between 2021 and 2025, the ferment driving MAGA's ideas deepened quite a bit. The nature of its coalition expanded quite a bit.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
I want to end close to where we started. We talked about how the new right has this deep concern about character formation, about how our people, our kids, our Americans, growing up in a world and in a culture that is going to correctly build the virtues that antiquity so correctly honored.
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A lot of people, I'm the kind of person who would say that's an odd fit with Donald Trump, who has certain virtues, but I think lacks others. But just more broadly for these kinds of concerns, concerns about the fertility rate, this sense that we have lost some fundamental humanness and things are breaking down. It's very hard to legislate any of that.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
When you talked about the despair that people like J.D. Vance and Blake Masters had sort of looking at modernity and looking at where we're going. What do they want to do about that despair now that they have power? Is that despair even amenable to the things that the kind of power they now have can do?
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
the most politically optimized way of talking about things. J.D. Vance underperformed in his Senate election in Ohio compared to other Republican candidates, compared to the Republican governor of Ohio, and Masters lost a quite winnable race in Arizona. But Masters recommended people read Kaczynski. He's coming back a little bit as a contrarian spirit of an age. Why?
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
How much does Trump himself care about this fight over ideas, these visions of the future? I'm not sure he does. But the people who are staffing his administration, both people at the top, but much more than that, the 20 and 30-somethings who actually do the work of presidencies, they do care. Ideas do matter. The intellectual cultures that form political parties, they matter.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
And there's a sort of return of – I think people are talking about it as expansionist, but I actually think in a cultural sense it's more this warrior masculinity, this kind of – The way they are fascinating on questions like the Panama Canal, Greenland, right? Men conquer.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
I think you understand what is happening and the things that they are getting interested in much better if you think about the idea of men conquer than if you think about critical minerals or shipping lanes. Yes. There are a lot of things we could do about critical minerals or shipping lanes. I'm a neoliberal technocrat. Yeah. I hear a lot about this stuff.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
I think that is a good place to end. Always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
This episode of The Ezra Klein Show was produced by Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Isaac Jones with Afim Shapiro and Amin Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Kristen Lin, and Jack McCordick.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
We have original music by Pat McCusker, audience strategy by Christina Samieluski, and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
I don't want to jump too far ahead in our story, but I think it would be strange to listen to that answer and then not ask this question. We just nearly turned off TikTok. Right. And the movement that saved TikTok... And that put TikTok's CEO in a prime seat at the inauguration was not the Democratic Party in the cathedral or the regime or whatever you might want to call it.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
It was Donald Trump, the icon of the new right, with J.D. Vance sitting not far from him. Has there been a mass howl over this?
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
James Pogue is a contributing writer at Times Opinion, and he's been covering the new right at Vanity Fair. And over the past few years, he has published piece after great piece on the MAGA intellectual scene and the various factions and ideas and people within it.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
Ooh, that's interesting. I'm going to think about whether I think that's true. That's an interesting point. And I'm not sure that the way the political system has absorbed that moment of TikTok shutting itself down. in order to generate outrage and then opening itself back up and saying, thank you, President Trump, is being taken as evidence of state capacity or state incapacity.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
I mean, the whole thing has looked very weak to me on behalf of the government. But there is a strange dynamic to these people, a strange tension in literally who they are to me. Which is, on the one hand, if you ask me, what is an interesting view they all seem to share?
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
It's that the mega-communication technologies upon which we now do our communicating and our thinking in public and our thinking together… are bad for us. And then if you said to me, what is another characteristic they all share? I would say, they are the most online politicians in America. And that goes for J.D.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
Vance, and it goes for Blake Masters, and it goes for a lot of these people that we're talking about. To the extent anything is forming, these people and their worldviews, it is a very unusual level of engagement with what I would call the replies And the comment threads on YouTube, right? It's a digging deeper into the online wormhole, which seems to be creating a sort of reflexive despair.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
And so I wanted to talk with him about the ideas that hold MAGA together, the factional fights that threaten to tear it apart, and whether any of this actually affects what President Donald Trump does or thinks. As always, my email is reclineshow at NYTimes.com. James Pogue, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
I can never even tell if the despair is projection by seeing what it's doing to themselves. They say, well, this definitely seems bad. But there is this kind of strange tension in this movement of this rejection and then complete actual literal embrace. Yeah. of tech modernity.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
The phrase is you can't dismantle the master's house with the master's tools, which I think is a useful Freudian slip there.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
Because soon enough, then Elon Musk buys the house and becomes your leader's best friend. Like, I mean, you're literally watching it play out in a way.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Yeah, this is research that is supposed to help us cease with ineffective treatment.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
And what does that suggest about where Donald Trump's term is going? One of the people who's been writing on Doge and thinking about it with the most clarity in my view is Santi Ruiz. He is at the Institute for Progress. He's the author of the Statecraft newsletter and the host of its podcast. He's somebody who thinks very deeply and often about how do you build a capable state.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
And over-treatment of disease. There's tons of stuff in the healthcare system we know that we are spending money on that... in the end, is not improving health. But it's very hard to know which things that we're spending money on don't improve health. My view is we don't do nearly enough of that, and we also don't enforce it enough.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
If I were running Doge, I would expand that, but also pass legislation forcing hospitals to abide by more of it. But they're not, as you're saying.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
I wanna talk about this idea of zeroing things out and bringing it back. So there's a quote famously that Elon Musk gives to Walter Isaacson in his biography and he says, if you're not adding things back in at least 10% of the time, you're clearly not deleting enough.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
And the point of that quote is that when Musk is running things, he cuts and his view is that if things don't then begin to break such that you realize you've cut too much, then you've cut too little, fine. One of the things about the companies Musk has been in is that the information loop, the feedback loop for that kind of thing is pretty fast and pretty clear.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
And it's an engineering feedback loop. And it's an engineering feedback loop, exactly. So SpaceX is trying to build rockets that go up into space and land and they're reusable. If the rocket blows up, you've done something wrong. Right. Tesla, if the car doesn't work, if the door falls off, if it needs to be recalled, there's apparently a new Cybertruck recall, you've done something wrong.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
You know, if customers don't like what you did, you've done something wrong. He's destroying, for instance, a bunch of data collection functions in the federal government. There's going to be no fast feedback loop on if that was a bad idea. Right now, they're cutting people from the IRS and the Social Security Administration.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
One of the things we are certain that's going to do is lead to fewer audits. And when you try to call somebody on the phone during tax season or if you're a senior and you're having trouble getting your Social Security payment, you're going to have four hours, three hours, two hours of waiting. It's going to be very hard to get customer service.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
I know people, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was a big target for them. You know, I've known people there who are working on financial scams. People are just going to get scammed who weren't going to get scammed before because there were some people out there protecting them and some people could have gone and reclaimed their money. But nothing's going to break.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Those people are just going to get scammed and ruined. There's just this porting over in a way that really worries me of a theory of cutting that that works when you have very fast feedback loops. But the government doesn't have very fast feedback loops and kind of can't because it is on some like very grand level, a long-term risk management enterprise.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
He's somebody to my right, so he has been much more open to the idea that what Doge is doing is well-constructed and well-thought-through, or at least was more open to it. Like everybody, he's trying to grapple with the reality of what it has really turned out to be. So I thought it'd be interesting to have him on the show to talk through it. As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
I guess steel man the argument for me, but then how do you think about the critique I'm making of that argument?
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
The first really big thing Doge does is decapitate USAID.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
But were they unfamiliar with the idea or did they not want to know and not care? Like on one level, I don't believe they didn't know or if they didn't, it's a kind of weaponized and chosen ignorance.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Like choosing to just say to yourself what I've seen on Twitter or what I've decided looks weird on the printout of funds going around as opposed to calling in the chief economist and head of the organization and and having a conversation with them. I just think this is where you get into this really tricky thing about what efficiency is doing here as a word. Sure.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Because you can ask, how can I make something more efficient? Or efficiency can be a smokescreen for a set of other projects. What do you think? Like, do you really believe what happened is they didn't know about this other debate or do they not want to? Ideologically, they don't like the idea of us spending money on aid to people who live in other countries.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Santi Ruiz, welcome to the show. Thanks, Ezra. Good to be here. So I'm obviously a liberal and I'm pretty upset about what Doge is doing, but steel man it. When liberals see Doge and Musk as like a pulsing source of evil and corruption, what are we missing or at least what arguments are we maybe not considering?
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
So USAID was – to me, it was very revealing because there was no feedback loop. This is money we are spending to prevent bad things from happening to people in other countries, poor people in other countries primarily. And they can't call up Elon Musk or their local member of Congress and get it turned back on.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
So this theory that what you're doing is deleting things and seeing then, oh, does something break, right? But you're not watching to see if something breaks. You're not doing a monitoring effort to see what happens to malnutrition in the horn of Africa. Yeah.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Well, they did hear from senators, right? Marco Rubio got yelled at and he said that he would save PEPFAR. And then as you mentioned, they sort of deleted it. I guess the thing I'm saying is I don't think they haven't, they claim to have a theory of responsiveness and they're not putting into play monitoring mechanisms.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
I guess maybe that there's an outcry, but like, I mean, people cried out, like a lot of people were mad about it, but they don't care. They exult in that. I mean, they have contempt for many of the globalists worrying about children in Africa. I guess that's where you get into this question again of – What is this all efficiency towards? And I think it's important to bring this idea in.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
There's a view that these are all liberal power centers. Yes. So when I was talking to a well-known right-wing activist, let's say, about USAID, his perception of it and what was going on here – he was thrilled – was, oh, they're destroying this power center. Yes. All the liberals are paying themselves off and the nonprofits and it's a feeder.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
And it was so interesting is maybe a light word for it. But I mean, I can tell you as a liberal, never for a second did I think to myself, oh, Well, one of the left's real advantage is the huge artillery of USAID grants that is like sending people to work on agricultural productivity in Ghana. Yeah.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
One of the ways I've been trying to think about Doge and a lot of the Trump administration's actions is if I put a rule into place, what rule would help me predict what they're doing?
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
If I put a rule into place saying, what would make government run more efficiently in the sense of taxpayer dollars would go further and government responsiveness would be improved? I don't think I could predict it based on that.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
If I said, what could I do that would destroy the power of nonprofits in America, progressively coded nonprofits, and agencies where the people in them are progressively coded? Yeah. I think I would get pretty close.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
This is something we are doing to compete with China, which they agree with.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
In my reporting around Doge, something that just comes up again and again is people saying, look, there is no master plan. There's no document we're all working off of. There's no single objective. It's not all pointed towards one thing. And we've been playing with different ideological objectives here, cutting spending and controlling the government and ideological purges.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
But I do think one thing that is a driving force of Doge is simply... Action, right? There's a huge bias towards action. And Trump himself has a big bias towards action, being able to show you are doing things, acting relentlessly. It's one of the very first things Trump said at the speech at the joint session of Congress.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
This administration likes the perception that they are moving with incredible force and speed. Steve Bannon's flooding the zone idea. And the assertion of power.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
One of the things you had in your piece on this was that you said you thought there was some legitimacy to was a tweet that took a scene from The Dark Knight where the Joker gets all this money from the criminal underworld and then having screwed them over, lights it on fire. And his point is that everything burns. Nobody has any leverage on him. He's not there for the money.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
He's not there to win anybody over. He's there to show that everything burns. And you said, yeah, there's an everything burns quality to this, a sense that they are showing that, certainly with things like USAID, that things that were considered sacred in Washington, processes that were considered sacred in Washington, civil service protections, etc., that part of the message—
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
is that they can do things that were far outside of the Overton window. And so the way that you might have predicted what a Republican administration would be capable of doing is gone. Like they're more powerful than you ever could have imagined.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
I want to go back to something you said at the beginning of that, this feeling that for the right, they're working with a symmetry here. The left did this to us. It spends in a way that's completely self-dealing and it just rewards its friends and punishes its enemies. And it bothers me because not only do I not think it's true, I think it's untrue in a very obvious way.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
So you look at what was the central legislative achievement of the Obama era? It's the Affordable Care Act. If you look at the Affordable Care Act fiscally, it is a tax on blue states and a transfer to red states simply because the states that did not have generous and expanded Medicaid programs were red states and red states are on average poorer than blue states.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
If you look at the Inflation Reduction Act and you look at where it is sending its money, It has sent a huge amount of its money to red states. If you look at where it is building clean energy, where it is placing advanced manufacturing, it's red states. Red states have disproportionately won out that money. They've won that out partially because it's easier to build there.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
And they've won it partially because this was actually a political theory of the Biden administration. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Reveal what will not probably be that surprising, but like this is my integrated theory of Doge and Vod and the Trump administration fully, which is that the right way to think about Doge is it's the Department of Government Control.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
There's versions of it that the Vought is trying to do in terms of impoundment and in terms of firing and traumatizing the civil service so there isn't a deep state that is trying to stand in Donald Trump's way. And then there's what Musk is doing, which is gaining source code level control over the plumbing, the machinery of government, the spending of it, the computers that run it.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
And if you have that, you have enormous power. If you combine impoundment and you combine, you're running this through deciding which payments go and don't go, then you've turned money into an incredible source of power and leverage. And you can use that ideologically, You could use that just to try to achieve policy goals. You could use that as a leverage over friends and enemies, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Donald Trump is a guy who loves leverage over friends and enemies. That's the whole play here. You're making the thing respond to Donald Trump because you're giving him control of the money. And you're doing that through the legal theory of impoundment and the actual grabbing control of the computers. Tell me how reasonable you think that is or poke your holes in it.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
I'm just very skeptical of this cutting the debt theory, not because we do need to cut the debt. We're spending more now on interest payments than we are on defense. But... Every person I know who is a budget obsessive, and I've been doing this work a long time, I know- You've been in the field. I know budget obsessives, man. You can't imagine the things I've heard. Every one of them says-
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
But Vance sort of said this too, that, I mean, he sent out this tweet basically saying that it is the courts overstepping their bounds. I mean, it depends how you understand, like, what is the proper role of the executive branch. But I think Vance has said stuff...
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
That implies very strong sympathy to the idea that for the courts to stop a bunch of this would be itself unconstitutional and the executive branch shouldn't abide by it. There is a large number of people around Trump who are arguing that these judges should be impeached when they rule against Trump, that this is a judicial coup has been the language we're hearing.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
This isn't a kind of, well, we should have checks and balances issue. It feels to me, and this is something I really worry about, it feels to me clear that they are preparing for a showdown with the courts.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
The question is what happens if they lose. Yeah. I did not think this at the beginning. I think it now that if they don't get a lot of what they want from Roberts, they are really going to try to get around that. And they're going to try to get around it on technicalities.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
But a decision was made by someone to not listen to the judge and turn the planes around and instead say, oh, no, you can't enforce a verbal order. These planes were over international waters. That was a provocation to the courts. A different administration just wouldn't have done that. They are attempting to assert a huge amount of power.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
And I guess the thing that makes me very skeptical that what they're trying to do is get a favorable SCOTUS ruling is that there's a way you would go about doing that. And you would be very carefully choosing cases, creating a conflict that generates a case that is favorable to you. You would want what the lawyers call model test case.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
And you would be acting in a way that is fairly respectful of the courts because you would be trying to politically hold them on your side. This thing where they are knocking through the glass left and right, where the test cases are really bad, where they are annoying the courts, where they are then sort of defying the courts and saying the judges should be impeached.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Unless you have a view that the right way to manage John Roberts politically is... is to try to cow him. I think that is basically how Donald Trump deals with everybody. So maybe that is his view. But in a world where what you're trying to do is get a favorable ruling in the Supreme Court because you are going to abide by that ruling, I don't think this is what you do with John Roberts.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
I don't think that you get his backup in this way that you're actually getting rebuked by him before you even get to the Supreme Court on your main cases. So that's an administration that looks to me like they are preparing for a shutdown. And ultimately, the unitary executive theory might need a showdown.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
we're going to have a higher debt in a year than today. That not only is this not going to significantly cut what we are spending money on, but that they have lit on fire their opportunity to do it. Because to shift the major streams of money, that's not Elon Musk running around with a sword. That is convincing Democrats and Republicans alike, or at least Republicans, that we should cut
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
I was saying earlier that I think a very important question to keep asking yourself, that I keep asking myself, is what goal, what value function would predict what they are doing fairly accurately. Because efficiency is not a helpful word. I think efficiency is a word that obscures things. Well, efficient towards what? Efficient towards following the law? That's something different, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
I think if you insert as the top goal here, maximizing Donald Trump's power you would get a fairly good – not the Republican Party's power, by the way, not conservatism. Donald Trump maximizing the control Donald Trump has, the authority Donald Trump has, creating the imperial president. I think you would be predicting things at a fairly high level of accuracy.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
And the problem with that, the scary thing about coming to that conclusion – is that imagine a world where it's 2027. Democrats have won a huge House victory in the midterms. So Hakeem Jeffries is a speaker. So now there's a lot of oversight happening. Donald Trump is at 39% in the polls, which seems very plausible to me, maybe lower.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
He's at this point a lame duck, though probably doesn't wanna be. And now you have a House that is not letting them do things. And you have a Supreme Court that maybe already has or is ruling that impoundment is unconstitutional. Does Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and Russ Vaught and on the outside at this point, Elon Musk, all say to themselves, well, it's a good try, everybody.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Like we fought the good fight and we lost. Or as like the final act of this, no, fuck you. I just, I don't see anything in here. that makes me think they will live within limits, particularly when the walls begin closing in. Right now, the walls haven't begun closing in, but even the little bit that they have, they've really reacted badly to.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
I read it exactly like this. The easiest way to understand the difference between the first and the second term is that in the first term, the most important member of the family who wasn't Donald Trump, but who brought a lot of people into the administration was Jared Kushner, like as thoroughly a mainstream figure as you could possibly find.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
The administration is full of people who saw part of their role as keeping Donald Trump caged. And in the second term, it's Donald Trump Jr., who is like a right-wing now accelerationist griper. Elon Musk has pushed Donald Trump to go further than Donald Trump would have gone without Elon Musk. Russ Vought wants to go further. J.D.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Vance's only chance of power is that it all works out for Donald Trump. And if you look at the staffing, it's very, very, I think, radical people. There's no people who are slow down. And you really see this, I think, with the reaction of the markets.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
In the first term, when the markets would crash or something would shake, not only would Donald Trump be like, oh, my God, like, well, we don't want the stock market to go down. But there are a lot of people around him, like Gary Cohn, who are creatures of the markets. Jared Kushner, I would say. Sure. Okay, like, you know, we want the economy to be good here.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
This time, when the markets began going down, clearly they are self-confident enough to say, we know better than the markets. You got to expect a little bit of short-term turbulence here. So I think this is a very different administration where you have a disinhibited president surrounded by disinhibitors.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Medicaid and Medicare spending. That's maybe increasing taxes. And at the same time they're doing this Doge stuff, they're planning a 4.5, maybe $5 trillion tax cut. So you can imagine a group of people obsessed with cutting the deficit. But you really do have to do that through Congress.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
I mean, it reminds me of Curtis Yarvin, whose influence I think can be overstated, but it's certainly somebody many people in the administration have read and found interesting, let's call it that. And he always says, look, what I'm looking for is an executive of the power level of FDR at the height of his powers. You know, that's my monarchy, right? It's FDR at the height of his powers.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
And I think he's, if you read him closely, I think he's, that's not quite true, but you know, he's has this idea that the whole thing should be more like a corporation. And I guess it gets to this question of efficiency again in a slightly weird way, which is that on some level, the U.S. government is supposed to be inefficient.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Whenever people say, well, we should run government like a business, well, a business doesn't have efficiency. multi-party competition, like separated across branches, right? Like a business is a very different kind of structure. It's got a board of directors, you know, it does have some internal checks potentially. Sure. But we built our system this way because we think there's value
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
not necessarily to inefficiency, I think that loads the deck, but, you know, information is getting sourced from places, right? The fact that the bureaucracies are full of people who are career civil servants, that's not just a protection against patronage. It's also, they know things. They know things because they're not switched out every four years.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Congress, which the Republicans have very much cowed, and Elon Musk has really reshaped with his threat to primary anybody, to pump money into a primary against anyone, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
who crosses Donald Trump, any Republican, even within parties, Congress is supposed to be a generator of information and friction because what Lisa Murkowski knows, what John Thune knows, what any sort of individual member knows, given they're representing a geography in a different place, is supposed to be absorbed into the machinery of government.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
And this idea that you would have it all just sort of coming down from Donald Trump rather than going up to Donald Trump It's a very different vision that pits efficiency against representativeness, against what I would call small-D democracy, this idea that the executive is not going to have perfect information.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
You probably, I mean, given what we've learned over time, have to do that through some amount of bipartisan action in Congress. It's very hard to do it while you are cutting taxes. I don't know, man. Convincing me is not bullshit.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
You asked me a version of this question earlier. And so now let me throw it back at you. So I'm not ending in quite such a dark vision of a future monarchy. Let's say we do have... The sort of backlash to this, let's say Democrats win in 2026 and then a Democrat wins in 2028. What should they learn from Doge if Democrats wanted to make the government more efficient?
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Where would you tell them to start? Do they? Is this a, I mean, this is the- Entertain the hypothetical.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Josh Shapiro wins, you know, and Josh Shapiro's run, I think he's a guy who's worked a lot on procurement reform in the state and permitting. And let's say they all get abundance pilled and- Totally, inshallah, yeah. And they come to you and they say, look, you've been working on this for a long time. You've been interviewing people about this for years. Yeah.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
You know, maybe they don't want to, but they're going to ask you.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Oswald is very telling that on CHIPS, which they really cared about, What they did was circumvent a huge amount of government procedure. Yeah. Right? They eventually then passed also a bill from Ted Cruz and Mark Kelly exempting chips from the National Environmental Policy Act. That's right.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
I thought it was very telling that, you know, well, if we're going to do this right, we certainly can't run it the way we run the rest of the government. Yeah. Like, what does that say about the way you run the rest of the government?
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
I think that's a good place to end. Then always our final question.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
It's a pretty limited my World War II experience. Yeah.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
I have to say you've really narrow targeted my interest in these three book recommendations. I think you sold me. Santi Ruiz, thank you very much. Ezra, it's a pleasure. Thank you. This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Roland Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker, and Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Isaac Jones with Afim Shapiro and Amin Sahota.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Elias Iskwith, Kristen Lin, and Jack McCordick. We have original music by Pat McCusker, audience strategy by Christina Samieluski, and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
And special thanks to Switch & Board Podcast Studio, Ryan Bourne, Rohan Gray, Don Moynihan, Quinn Slobodian, and Jen Palka.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
You have people who help you in the election, help you in the campaign, but you don't want them in the White House, so you give them a blue ribbon commission somewhere where you'll never hear from them again. Not how it worked out. The first person Doge purged was Vivek Ramaswamy. It became Elon Musk's operation.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Well, but what they, they keep talking about using Doge to send a check back to every American.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. When Doge was first announced, after Donald Trump won the election, I knew a lot of people who thought it was a way to get Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy out of the Trump administration's hair. It's an old tradition in Washington.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
I just, I always want to try to take people generously. If Donald Trump came in and Elon Musk and all these interviews as he kind of looks at and talks about how we might not have a country anymore, if we don't get the debt under control, they said, boy, We really want our tax cuts extended. And if it wasn't a fiscal emergency, we would extend them.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
But unfortunately, if we don't get the debt under control, we're not gonna have a country anymore. So we just can't, it's a real shame, but people like me, Elon Musk, the richest dude in the world are gonna have to pay higher taxes, but they don't, right? The whole thing is like the Department of Education and USAID and people working at the Social Security Administration
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
And that's just not where the money is. And so you are not Doge, but you are, I think, a very fair-minded analyst of this. And so if you are still taking this theory seriously at all, I would like to know why, given what they are actually doing.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
But in becoming Elon Musk's operation, it became central to how Donald Trump is trying to and actually remaking the federal government. But I got to tell you, I hate the name Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency. Not that it's not good branding, it is. But it obfuscates what's really happening here. Efficiency towards what? There is no such thing really as efficiency.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
So I want to pick up on that source code idea. So I was going through Elon Musk's recent interview with Ted Cruz, and there's a moment in it pretty early where Musk describes what he's doing differently, a little bit to Ted Cruz's awe.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
There's a genuine innovation here. He is doing this differently. What seems to me to separate Doge at some level is this sense that the power comes from control over the computers that send the money. If you control the computers, you control the money. And if you control the money, you control the power. And that genuinely does seem like something no one here has tried before.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Efficiency has to be in service of a goal. And you hear a lot of goals. Maybe it's here to make the government leaner, lower headcount. Maybe it's here to save money. Maybe it's here to make the government more responsive. What is it actually doing? What can we see after two months of its hack and slash operation through the federal government?
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
If you are trying to reshape the government, radically make it more efficient or make it into something else, this question of how you're learning about it, what is the informational input into your project, is really important. The fact that a computer tells you money is going here and it's going there, it's actually a very thin form of information.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
How is that money being used when it gets there? Like, what actually is the nature of that grant? Why was it started? Why did the people who started think it was a good idea? This concept that they're going in and just looking at things, and it's not even clear to me based on what, just deleting vast swaths of them.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?
Like, how do you think about that as a way of learning about government functions and
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
Before we begin today, a quick announcement. My book, Abundance, is coming out on March 18th. It is available for pre-order now. And we are also setting up the tour. So we have a little link today in the show description to the tour page. You can see if we're coming to a city near you, at least as of yet, there'll be more stops on this to be added and grab a ticket before they sell out.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
You could go to Rumble. You could go to Gab. You could go to Truth Social. The thing I want to push you on a little bit here, because I'm not saying there was no— I think your point, as I take it, is interesting, that—
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
Partially what you're seeing people like the Biden administration respond to is an effort to try to get control of an information space that they no longer know how to control and even no longer know how to operate in. But I am struck by seeing very, very aggressive movements from the Trump administration immediately to impose control on what, say, civil servants can say.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
So is that a dynamic of the left that you're describing, or is it just now in this era of information overload? Actually, both sides are fighting for control of it and whatever their professed values as soon as they get into power, the thing they really want to do is decide what the boundaries are and what you can say and how you can say it.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
He didn't vote in 2016 or 2020, but he voted for Trump in 2024, and he's become much more positive about Trump this time than the first time. He's a visiting scholar at Mercatus, and he writes for the Free Press and Discourse and City Journal, among others. I watched him come to the view that actually maybe Trump is building something more stable and
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
Well, tell me about your movement on this. So 2016, you don't vote. 2020, you don't vote. 2024, you vote for Donald Trump. What moved you towards him in that period? In large part, it was that.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
You also say something else that I have found a lot of people felt this time. I think it is underestimated how much the meaning of Donald Trump changed from 2016 to 2020 to 2024. And you write that Trump this time had become a kind of mythical figure, that he has been, quote, transformed into a living symbol of the progressive elite's abuse of power and contempt for the principle of equality.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
I've heard something like that from a lot of people, and particularly the mythic dimension of Trump.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
Tell me what you mean by that and how you felt that change in your own perspective.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
Maybe this revolt of the public is not merely negation, but that what Trump and Musk represent and are doing is actually the creation of a positive agenda that might endure. So I also thought his argument was worth hearing out. As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com. Martin Gurry, welcome to the show. Great to be here. So in 2014, you published this book, The Revolt of the Public.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
I think there are seasons to the way we understand the world. And I think certainly in the Obama era, we were in a season of... empirics, technocracy. And I don't just mean that in terms of literally the reports people produced and the way they argued. I also mean it in terms of the aesthetic.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
And this is a point my colleague Ross Douthat has made, but it's also something that I've been thinking about, that it has felt to me for some time like we're reentering
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
a slightly more mystic mythic yes turn of the wheel i think you see it in the popularity of catholicism right with its pomp and its circumstance and its strangeness of greek orthodoxy you know the return of astrology as a major force and something about trump ended up fitting that for a lot of people at least right i'm not saying that i have this particular interpretation of him but the degree to which you know i think even within his own movement
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
He is treated as – I've said this many times before – that he's almost like the Grand Ayatollah of national conservatism. That even the people who like him don't view him as this precise technical policy thinker. They view him as somebody with a kind of – intuitive, almost spiritual connection to the country that they see him leading, the people they see him representing.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
And then the revolving around him of all these other powerful figures like Musk and so on, it made him more like this. It wasn't just his show anymore. He became like this, you know, quasi-Debbie God-like or Pope-like figure presiding over a moment.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
Well, it's also cooperation versus dominance, I think. The promise of the Obama era, of Obama himself in a way, was you could cooperate your way to this future, right? You could talk your way, think your way through the conflicts. And Trump, and I think something I see people responding to, but I've been in D.C.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
this week talking to people sort of from different factions of the right, and something they all say is that America is strong and we stopped throwing around that strength. that we have the ability to shape events in our image and to our desires and to our interests, and we bound ourselves in ways that we didn't have to, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
We have this huge economy, but we didn't use things like tariffs to make others bend to our will. We let ourselves get taken advantage of by China. We don't do any territorial expansion anymore, right? Things in the 19th century, early 20th century are more common in terms of American policy have become like morally uncommon, not just a thing we don't do, but a thing we don't even consider doing.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
And Trump is a bringing back of this old spirit, a kind of more domineering frontier like you use your strength to reshape the world energy.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
Lay out the basic argument you were making about attention and media and publics.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
I think if you are a normie liberal, let's call it. the way you were experiencing Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Doge, broadly, the sort of Russell vote, the sort of war on what now gets called the administrative state is as this incredible assertion of powers, maybe even a constitutional crisis, right? They went in, they just destroyed USAID in a day, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
That wasn't something that people thought you could do. They fired huge numbers of federal workers saying it was for cause, even though it had nothing to do with their individual job performance, knocked out all these probationary workers, right? They've tried to break huge amounts of the federal government, reshape it to their will.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
The way that has been experienced by liberals is as an extraordinary assertion of control, of power that the executive is not supposed to have. The way you've described it, the way I've seen other people describe it, is as an act of breaking up control. Yeah. I'd like you to try to describe how it looks from that perspective, thinking about an audience who's experiencing it in the opposite way.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
So I understand the culture you're reacting to here. I see where you're coming from on that. But I do want to keep focus a little bit on the actual acts of the president here, because I'll note that I've asked you about. the dismantling USAID, which you've written columns on, the actions of Doge, which you've written pieces on, you sort of move to whether or not Facebook shadow banned you.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
I don't know if Facebook shadow banned you. They shouldn't have. But the actions of the administration have been, your guy from Cuba, have been the assertion of an extraordinary amount of executive control over the administrative state. Things that the, I can tell you the Biden administration did not think they were allowed to do, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
The Obama administration did not think they were allowed to do. The amount of stories I have heard about how difficult it is to work through the privacy regulations of the IRS in order to make social insurance programs be smoother. And in the end, they just weren't that smooth because, like, everybody was so concerned about privacy and you just couldn't get access to the systems.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
They just come in and they, like, bust their way to the systems. So, again, when you see them doing this and you see this not as the taking of control but the breaking of a controlling apparatus – Try to describe that perspective on it for someone who doesn't share it.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
I mean, you must know enough liberals to know that they are experiencing this era of Trump and Musk and Doge as like the dawning of authoritarianism. Like, how do you tell them to see it from the way you're seeing it?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
It's not clear that it's perfectly legal.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
That's not what I understand. In 1998, it was set up by, like, its current structure was created through Congress. I mean, it is USAID's statute, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
See, but I don't think that they're cutting back the government. I think they are trying to take control of it. I have heard this AI thing from a couple of people, and I follow it closely, and I am open to the idea that one thing Elon Musk wants to do is bring AI into the federal government. I am not super open to the idea that that's what Doge is doing.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
Now, for one thing, like with the word efficiency, it's always efficiency for what? AI for what? Every AI system has some kind of value function, some kind of prompt you have to be giving it. The question of the prompt is really then the important question. Like, yes, you could, in theory, unleash AI on the entire range of Treasury payment data. What are you trying to get it to find?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
If you're trying to get it to find fraud, fine. How is fraud defined? Like, what do you say is fraud? I don't even think really, to be honest with you, that's what you think they're doing. Like, you wrote a good piece, I think just not from my perspective, about why you thought it was good that they were getting rid of USAID. What was that argument about?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
So if you wanna come join us in person, come check that out. From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. Back in 2016, when Donald Trump won the first time, there was this book, it was self-published by a former CIA media analyst named Martin Gurry that became a kind of phenomenon in Silicon Valley. The book was called The Revolt of the Public.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
I haven't read Echo. I have seen these sort of like let's put all government on the blockchain kind of ideas before. And both I think they tend to reflect people who are not trying to follow where the government spends its money because actually we know quite a lot about that and people just don't like doing the spade work. But here's one argument.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
It's sort of an argument that I think you agree with, but I've heard it from other people. So let me try to state it as generously as I can, which is that the administrative state is a unelected fourth branch of government. That in this era of the revolt of the public, that it is not just – frustration about information. It is frustration about unresponsiveness. Government doesn't work.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
It doesn't do what you tell it to. You don't feel it in your life. And when you do feel it, it's often not felt in a good way. And particularly for the right, because the government is staffed by liberals, because liberals like the government better than the right does.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
You come in as an anti-government disruptor like Donald Trump was in 2017, and you find you're stymied left and right by these procedures, by these processes, by these bureaucrats, by these civil servants. And so what you're trying to do is like break this power center that stands between the people and the government they elect.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
And I think a thing that I am personally surprised by a little bit is how much the right has adopted this view that the executive – is the will of the people. And the idea is that you need to give Donald Trump this power because he is the accountable one and it should just do what he says in a pretty much unquestioned way. And that is responsiveness.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
You break the administrative state so these populist leaders getting elected atop public dissatisfaction can control it and make whatever it is they think the people want.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
I think this creates an interesting question about whether or not there is a – A corollary theory to yours, that it's not what we are living through repeatedly right now is not revolts of the public, but revolts of elites. Let me try to make this argument to you and see what you think. So you look at the public. It's moving by a couple points in each election. The movable public is narrow.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
But if you look at the elites... who are all on Twitter talking to each other or X or Facebook or whatever, they're swinging unbelievably far election to election, right? They get elected, you know, Joe Biden gets elected in a fairly narrow election by historical standards.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
And they come in certain, even though they have a 50-50 Senate majority, that what the public wants is an FDR-sized presidency. The Trump people are all talking to each other on X on Twitter, and they're in these intense communicational dynamics with each other. They have, I think, by any measure, a very narrow victory, and they believe that it's time to remake the entire state.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
What's really swinging here is not normies, right? What's really swinging here are elites. They're the ones most exposed to the communication dynamics you're describing because they are really intensely on these platforms talking to each other. Like nobody comes in and says, that was a pretty small win. We should kind of be careful here. There's no welfare reforms anymore, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
There's no child left behind. There's no big sops to the other side. It's all, we won by a bit and now the revolution.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
But I do think it's good talking about the public because I take your point about Tahrir Square. But here in America, what's amazing in some ways is the stability. We have not had an election decided by more than five points in the popular vote since 2008. And that was during a financial, like a once-in-a-generation financial crisis.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
We keep talking about the public, particularly after elections, as if it's been these overwhelming things. And the truth is, most people vote the way they did before.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
I mean, I wonder that too, or at least what the nature of being Republican and Democrat is. Yeah. I mean, it used to be very different, right? Democrats were the much more racist party in America for a very, very long time. I know.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
Things change. There's been this argument that the parties are in this weird transition. The Republican Party To be a Republican in good standing, you need to believe the institutions are fundamentally broken. That is what Trump represents. That's why RFK Jr.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
can fit in the coalition now, despite being a pro-choice Democrat a couple of years ago, because he fundamentally believes the institutions are corrupt, are broken, do not represent the people, et cetera. And that the Democratic Party, and I think it is in tension over this with itself, but certainly under Biden and Harris, was a very, very pro-system party.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
It's not really about liberal and conservative. The reason Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney were clearly in coalition with Kamala Harris while RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard were in coalition with Donald Trump is because what politics is fundamentally about is changing. And neither side has fully known how to express that change. It's still nascent.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
It's a transition from one kind of system and one kind of polarization to another.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
Yeah, I think that the movement for the Democrats to become the pro-institutions party, they have lost something pretty important. And I think that the really talented politicians could keep that in balance, like Obama. Yeah. And Biden, who is very much a creature of Washington and was just by the time he was governing too old to make a balancing act like this work, couldn't.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
And if you lose the mantle of reform, I think it's very hard to win in American politics.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
Here's what I worry about with Trump. I mean, among many things, I have many worries about Donald Trump. But one is that the ways humanizing it is through himself. And you were saying earlier this question of for what? What is at the end of all this breakage? What steady state are they trying to achieve? I found the Eric Adams thing extremely, extremely alarming and telling.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
Because here's a guy who is under investigation for what appear to be pretty clear acts of corruption. He's a Democratic mayor, right? He's not somebody who Donald Trump needs to be loyal to.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
And it seems like what they saw was the ability and frankly what Eric Adams saw was the possibility that if he would signal to Trump that he would pledge allegiance, he would be in Trump's pocket, Trump would take the heat off of him. When I look internationally, I see a sort of similar thing.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
You know, the countries that are willing to tell Trump he's great and show they're on his side, be that Russia or anybody else, they can get the deal. And if you're not willing to do that, you can't get the deal. The thing on the other side of this is patronage, is a personalist regime where what you do doesn't matter. What matters is who you pledge fealty to.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
So then if you don't think... That's what it is. It's not just personalism. It's not just a government that Trump and Musk can control for whatever purposes they want to control it. What's your positive vision of this?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
Like you sort of said that it's sort of what made me think it'd be interesting to have you on the show for this, that this was the first time you saw a revolt like this moving beyond negation. You saw it moving to some kind of positive agenda. Yeah.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
When you are feeling hopeful, what do you think they are trying to do and what do you think they might try to do with this system if they can grasp it in their fist?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
Providing what? Responsive to what? I mean, this is a group that is about to do cuts to food stamps or SNAP, as it's called now, cuts to Medicaid. This question of what is this leaner government providing and what is it not providing seems like a much more fundamental question. And then also there's this question of whether or not responsiveness is in the way you're talking about it.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
And in the way you want people to react to it is possible under the informational conditions you describe. So, like, as an example, they're doing pretty indiscriminate cuts across the government right now. I think the thing – you have to have a pretty low opinion of the government, and they do, but I don't, to think that's not going to end up with – problems emerging, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
They're cutting all kinds of employees, not really knowing where they're cutting from, cutting out probationary employees. Things are going to break. I think they might break at least. And then people are going to be upset about that breaking. This is why government reform is hard, as you know, as a bureaucrat. I mean, people wanted to modernize the IRS master file systems for decades.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
And the problem is they're very old and very easy to break. And if you break them, you break the entire tax filing system, right? And it's just a huge, intense mess. And so does the kind of failures of getting from here to there require the breakings, the glitches, the fights? mobilize too much of the public against you, create too much of these constant informational backlashes to do it.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
Like, what is the optimal strategy under informational revolt conditions?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
One thing that I took from your book, and it's held with me for a long time, is that you have to understand media and attention as a separate causal stream into politics. And I don't think we like to do that.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
I want to go back to a question sort of as we close that I asked you at the beginning, because I think this maybe puts a point on it. I'd asked you, are elites today worse than they were Do we think they're worse than they were or have modern conditions led to them? Us thinking they're worse than they are made them worse than they are.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
And when we were having that conversation, I was thinking about something Julian Assange wrote, who was the founder of Wikileaks. And he basically said that the point of Wikileaks was that if you can pull all the internal information out of the system, make it public, you make it impossible for large systems to function. Because they need to have the ability to communicate privately.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
They need to be able to speak in secrecy. His view is that WikiLeaks was actually a way of destroying the capacity of these bureaucracies to operate, and he thought they were bad, and that was a good thing. What I see Elon Musk doing right now is pulling in these informational databases and
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
and using things that either he is sometimes lying about or things that he is pulling out to make look bad, right? You know, we are funding a scientific research study that just sounds weird when you hear it, because frankly, a lot of them do, and a lot of important findings come out of weird research.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
Those conditions of informational transparency, many people make this argument that Congress has not been improved by the addition of C-SPAN cameras. hearings are not better because things can be clipped out of them, right? It just makes it harder for people to negotiate and deal.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
There's all kinds of things where, I don't know, like as an ideology, transparency and putting it all on the chain seems great and putting a camera on everything. You know, Barack Obama used to say that the negotiations over healthcare reform would all be on C-SPAN. They weren't. People got mad. But they would have been worse if they were all on C-SPAN. You can't negotiate everything in public.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
I'm curious how you think about that because this seems to me like – The informational world we're in creates a constant pressure for transparency. Transparency is typically either bad for the way systems work or is weaponized against systems by people who don't like the way they're working or what they're trying to do. The system gets worse, and so we demand more transparency.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
We like to think about politics as a relentlessly rational response to mostly material conditions, maybe cultural conditions, maybe the quality of elites, maybe the quality of governance, maybe inflation. And I understood what you were saying then. You can tell me if this is wrong.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
So... But it's also not better when they try to provide a show. I mean, I will just say this, that I think the move towards members of Congress who what they're trying to do is provide a show does not make hearings better. It incentivizes for grandstanders and performers and...
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
You made this point that we're now seeing the rise of these leaders who are genuinely comfortable in this information sphere, right? Donald Trump is native to Twitter. You called him the Beethoven of Twitter. Elon Musk liked Twitter so much he bought it and then renamed it X. And I think it's true for a lot of people in that administration. Some of them are very native to podcasting as well.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
You are sort of suggesting this is a good thing, right? One thing that I worry about is that I sometimes think these systems select for a very unusual personality type, a personality type that is absorptive of huge amounts of negative feedback and uses that as a kind of fuel. A personality type that can be very, what it wants is engagement. What it wants is attention.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
It doesn't have the reaction most normal human beings have to a lot of attention, which is like to shrink back from it a little bit, to be upset if people are upset with you. It's a little bit intentionally sociopathic. And so this idea that what we're going to get now and that this is positive is rule by people who are really, really well adapted to Twitter.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
I was hoping you would do a 30 years war metaphor.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
That there was, no, this other dynamic happening, which is that the nature of the information flow now, it just creates a constant pressure for distrust. That fractured media will always point out the problems in governance, creating very fast backlashes to whatever the status quo is. Such that the status quo is get overturned and overturned. The populist right comes in over the establishment.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
Then always your final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
Martin Gurry, thank you very much.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
This episode of The It's Your Clown Show is produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Isaac Jones with Afim Shapiro and Amin Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Elias Iskwith, and Kristen Lynn. We have original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christina Samieluski and Shannon Busta.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
then they become unpopular, the establishment comes back, that it's this endless ricocheting. But that's not necessarily just about material conditions. It's about the dynamics of information having a momentum of their own.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
It makes my heart beat faster.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
Here's a question that I think about a fair amount. Do you think the institutions of today, the elites of today across different domains, media, military, government, economics, business, do you think they're worse than they were? Or we have access to so much more contrary information and critique of them that we think they're worse than they were?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
Or does access to all that information make them worse than they were because they have less room to move and to act and to correct mistakes?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
Here's my revolt of the public informed model of the past decade or so in American politics. You have this almost hydraulic informational process by which high engagement movements, right, people or ideas that create a lot of energy rise. But You then have this counter process by which their opposite then begins to rise as soon as they gain power.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
So you have Barack Obama, who's followed by really his opposite in a striking way in Donald Trump. But then as Donald Trump rises in power, you get this counter vibe to Donald Trump. The resistance, Black Lives Matter, Me Too, wokeness, right? We now call it.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
I think Biden's complicated here because he's Barack Obama's vice president, but he's so not of this era that in some ways I think he's informationally almost a pause. But then Trumpism... comes roaring back with even more force. And what fascinates me about this period is not that it doesn't seem to be selecting for one thing.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
And what it did was describe these informational dynamics. It described the way that politics was changing because media was changing, because media and information got from scarce to abundant. And that had created constant recurrent crises for whoever was in power. The ability to control a narrative was gone.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
It is selecting almost endlessly for the strongest thing and then the opposite of the strongest thing. And it's this like crazy ricochet process. How much do you buy that explanation of what's been going on?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
One thing that you emphasized a lot in that, and you're pretty critical of Joe Biden, is that the form of the elite that he led, the Democratic Party in that era, became defined around what you call politics of control. What's the politics of control?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
I think you're wrong on this.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
And in this world of fractured media, there was always an incentive and always an ability to show what was wrong with whoever was ruling. And this was, Gurry argued, fundamentally unstable. It knew how to destroy. It did not know how to build. Gurry has in his own politics evolved.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
Well, let me pick up on something there because this feels to me like it is completely fundamental right now to the right's self-definition. J.D. Vance goes to the Munich conference, tells the Europeans they're doing too much to restrict speech and expression and political expression in their countries. And then I look at what people do. I look at, say, Elon Musk has made cis or cisgender.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
He has tagged that as hate speech on X. I'm watching the Trump administration tell all the agencies they have to go through and look for words that are now out of favor. Diversity and DEI and things like that. And it all has to be erased. They've ended up knocking out things they didn't mean to knock out because the word just happened to be there in another context.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics
So I kind of see this world of people who I think understand themselves as free expression warriors. And then as soon as they get into power... whether it's running X or running the government, they certainly seem to me to be on a campaign of censorship. What do you think I'm missing?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
It does a huge amount of political surveying and interpretation of data and testing of messaging. He works with campaigns and progressive groups. And so he has a sort of perspective from the inside there. But also over the years, I think he's just a very skilled interpreter of data. It's a very different skill, I should say.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
So that means that immigrants swung much, much, much more than the median of the electorate.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
So this gets to another way that I think the data has proven conventional wisdom from at least 2020 wrong. So 2020, you have an election that Joe Biden wins. He wins by less than the polling says he will win by. And one reason he wins by less than the polling says he'll win by is that Donald Trump does much better with Hispanic and Asian voters than he was expected to.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And I remember seeing pretty strong research afterwards and talking to people who study the Hispanic vote and who are saying, well, in 2020, the pandemic really scrambled what the election was about. So in 2016, the election was about immigration. In 2020, it was about the pandemic. It was about lockdowns. It was about the economy.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And so Hispanic voters who were driven off of Trump by his border talk in 2016 were more likely to vote for him in 2020. But that was weird, right? It was the pandemic in a way moderating Donald Trump's appeal, right? 2024, Trump runs, I would say, to the right of where he was on the border in 2016, right? We're talking mass deportations. We're talking more than a wall.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And Trump does better among immigrant groups than he really ever has before. So the Democratic belief that when the topic turned back to immigration, you would see some of that polarization around Trump return and that he would be harmed in immigrant communities did not occur.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And over years where he's been making some of these arguments, he's gotten a lot of things right before other people did, including that educational polarization was becoming the central fault line for American democracy. And frankly, not just American democracy, but other countries, too.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
So I do find this part of this chart shocking. I sometimes talk about narrative violations, and I think if we knew anything about Donald Trump eight years ago, it's that young people did not like him. And Republicans are maybe throwing away young people for generations in order to run up their margins among seniors. But if you look at this chart among white men, white men who were 75 years old
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Supported Kamala Harris. at a significantly higher rate than white men who are 20 years old. That's exactly right. That's a real shift.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
This chart in some ways convinced me to do this podcast.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And so when I saw Shore recently and he began walking me through some of his slides, some of the ways he was interpreting the 2024 election and trying to help people see what had happened, my first thought was this would be worth doing in public rather than this being a thing that Democrats are debating in back rooms with each other. What if we did this in public?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And voters over 75, it's even lower. That's right. It's a fairly low gender gap among older voters.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
The huge gender gap implies to me it's not just inflation. women pay high prices for eggs too.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
I feel like the story you're implying that you believe here is that this is polarization among young men and women driven by men who are in high school, who are young, who are online, practically online during COVID, as Me Too is cresting. As Jordan Peterson is a big figure, Andrew Tate is rising, you have what now gets called the Manosphere.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
But there is a sense the Democratic Party is becoming much more pro-women party and in some ways sort of anti-young men. And that that just had a huge effect on young men's political opinions.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Shor was kind enough to come on the show and present this for us. And so this episode is a bit of an experiment. He's walking me through this presentation, and I am interrogating it. It is worth watching if you can. This works in audio. You can listen to it. We describe these charts and graphs and tables.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
It seems plausible to me. That social media, online culture are splitting the media that young men and women get. Right. That if you are young and online and a 23-year-old man who is interested in UFC, you're being driven into a very intensely male online world. Whereas if you are 23 years old and female...
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
and you are interested in things that the youtube algorithm codes that way you are not entering that world you're actually entering the opposite world you're seeing bernie brown right you're seeing these other things right the capacity to be in highly gendered media worlds is really different in 2024 than it was in 2004 and that's true worldwide
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
So Democrats are getting destroyed now among young voters. I do think there was, even as the idea of the rising demographic Democratic majority had become a little discredited in 2016 and 2020, I do think Democrats believed that That these young voters were eventually going to save them. That this was a last gasp of something.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
That if Donald Trump couldn't run these numbers up among seniors and you had millennials really coming into the voting power, Gen Z coming in, that was going to be the end of this Republican Party. And that just completely false. It might be the beginning of this Republican Party.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
But in video, which you can see if you go to YouTube and search Ezra Klein Show and go to our channel, it has a different flavor. You can follow along visually, and I think it's worth trying to do so if you can. But I found this really, really helpful and it helped ground some of my thinking in the data. I don't necessarily have every conclusion David does, but I think it is a good place to begin.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
So I want to play Mike Donilon, who was chief strategist to Joe Biden, was recently at a forum. And he made an argument that I think you at least could read this chart as backing up, which is that Biden was more popular in 2020 than Harris was in 2024. Maybe the Biden-Harris switch was a mistake. Here's Donilon.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Yeah, it'd be even harder for Joe Biden to run away from Joe Biden, I guess. Yeah. Looking at this chart, it looks like there is a, by January, a plus 20 net disapproval. Maybe that was a little bit smaller in November, but it had been widening. I mean, you go back to beginning of 2023, it was narrower. People were really pissed at the Biden administration by the time we hit the election. Yeah.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
What I find notable here, I mean, yeah, cost of living was bigger than student debt. Fair. But you tested against immigration and border security, and the share of voters saying cost of living or inflation was more important was about 70%. That's right. You tested it against abortion. Their cost of living or inflation was more important to about 80% of voters.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Against environment and climate change, 84% of voters picked cost of living inflation. One thing that the Biden people always believed was that this election would be very heavily about democracy itself. I mean, this was something that I was told by top Biden strategists going way back. I don't see democracy on here, January 6th, the stability of the system. Did you test that too?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And there's then a lot that can follow from having this conversation. As always, my email, EzraKleinShow at NYTimes.com. David Shore, welcome to the show. Excited to be here. So what do you do and why should I trust the data you're about to show us here?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
There is an argument you hear from many Democrats. There was no problem here except for inflation. that in fact, if you compare democratic vote outcomes with incumbent parties in many other countries, Democrats did better than incumbent parties in other countries did. So you look at the conservatives in the UK, they had a much worse election result.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
You look at what happened to the ruling coalition in France, some ways like Democrats were doing fine. They had a fairly modest drop in support. And it's just a shame for them that inflation happened on their watch.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
That if Donald Trump had won the 2020 election, inflation would have happened on his watch, completely discrediting him and his administration, and that would have been the end of them. How do you distinguish between – there is a broad structural problem the Democratic Party is facing that needs to think about for 2028, and there's actually no problem here –
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
So this is for people listening along. This is a chart broken into quadrants. That's right. And the top right quadrant is issues that are very important and issues where Democrats are more trusted. And it's an untilled bit of farmland up there. That's right. So there's mental health, which voters don't rate that important, but they do trust Democrats quite a bit more.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
They rate it higher than they rate, though, climate change and the environment and abortion, which struck me as surprising. Their one bright spot is really health care. That's kind of it in terms of issues where it is quite important and they have a genuinely noticeable advantage.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
I just want to tick off some issues voters ranked as important that they trusted Republicans on and then ask you a question about it. So they thought cost of living, the economy, and inflation were very important, had a lot more trust in Republicans. They thought national security and foreign policy were important, trusted Republicans.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Taxes, government spending, government debt, trusted Republicans. Crime, immigration, trusted Republicans. Social security, trusted Republicans. That seems like a bad one for Democrats. A political division they thought was important. They trusted Republicans a bit more on that in this data.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
If I looked over time, right, if I looked at 2016 and I looked at 2020, would I see on all of these that Republicans had advantages and Democrats were just winning on health care? How much of this is something flipping around as an incumbent penalty and sort of reaction to conditions in the country at that moment?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And how much of it is a durable situation where Republicans have a trusted advantage where Democrats would have to – act in a spectacular way over time to change voters' impressions of them on that issue?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Tell me what's going on in this next slide, because I also, as I understand, this is really very connected to the work you do specifically. Right. So what are you doing here?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
A lot of liberals I know feel really burnt by survey data. There's a sense that nobody picks up the phone. How are you surveying these older people if you're doing it online? Putting aside the fact that you conducted a lot of surveys, why are you confident those surveys reflect reality?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
There is a view out there. I saw Jacobin had just done some research on this, which is a socialist publication that that at the beginning of the Harris campaign sprint, I mean, she was only the head of the Democratic ticket for three months, she was talking a lot about the economy. And that by the end, she was talking a lot about democracy.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
There was sort of phases of the Harris campaign, and the first one was more populist, and the last one was more institutional. From what you saw, was that true?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
But look, there is a difference between the Harris campaign was running the optimal David Shore strategy in late October of 2024 and they were not. The Harris campaign had access, Future Forward had access to all of this issue-by-issue polling. They had access to all this randomized ad testing.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Did they run a heavily economic campaign and it didn't work, or did they not run a heavily economic campaign at the end and it didn't work? Because, look, if they did the thing and it didn't work, then maybe it just didn't work. Did they not do it?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
But why, right? If they did that, and I heard this from different people, like, David Plouffe is a smart guy. I'm not asking you to critique David Plouffe. I can watch you getting physically uncomfortable as I harm your business here. But these people all wanted to win. They really did. Like every single one of them. And they had a lot of data. So I think this has been a thing on my mind.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
If they weren't running the optimal strategy, why? For instance, it's very easy to get media attention for anti-price gouging policies because there's a lot of controversy over them about whether or not they worked. But they did make people talk about whether or not you were going to do an anti-price gouging policy. This is a Donald Trump move constantly.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
announce a policy that probably doesn't work or is in some way outrageous or beyond the bounds of political possibility. Maybe it's not even all that popular when you poll, but you get people talking about you having a very strong view, right? You're going to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Everybody knows Mexico isn't going to pay for it, but you are talking about how Donald Trump hates immigration and it breaks through. It is not rocket science to get people to pay attention. If Bernie Sanders had been running in the campaign, people would have paid attention to his economic messaging because he does economic messaging that creates conflict.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
If it was really this big delta between the economic push and the institution's push, and the institution's push is what got made or at least got made more than one it should have, why? Why?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
I do think the campaign photo ops that we all remember at the end are telling, right? which is, it was an extraordinary visual, Harris at the Ellipse. And then there were the visuals of Donald Trump in a garbage truck and Donald Trump at McDonald's. And there was a ridiculousness to those visuals. I saw a lot of liberals making fun of them on various social media platforms.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
But there was something about which visuals are being chosen by the two candidates. I mean, of the two of them, only Kamala Harris had actually worked at a McDonald's. But she wasn't the one who ended up like putting on the apron and getting photographed at McDonald's. And there's a thing about what the candidates end up wanting to do that is meaningful, too.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And I do think there's a way in which I wonder if that explains part of what we ended up seeing.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
What really strikes me about this is that sometimes I read polls and the wording is pretty clearly there to make something sound better than the other thing.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Things could be going better in America, and what is needed is return to basic stability from whoever becomes president. And things in America are going poorly, and what is needed is a major change and a shock to the system from whoever becomes president. I would in some way say the second there is worded to turn people off a little bit. It sounds disruptive, crisis, a shock, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
It's not just major change. It is... Something beyond that. And it dominates. I guess I have a question about this, which is, on the one hand, we see lines like that outpolling the incremental change everywhere. On the other hand, if you look at the new split ticket ratings for who overperformed in the election, very moderate House Democrats did very well. Totally.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
There does seem to me to be a tension between two forms of political wisdom that they both have data behind them right now, which is that voters want huge, massive change. And like the optimum political strategy is Joe Manchin or Jared Golden or... or Ruben Gallego, Susan Collins, who are not people who promise unbelievably shocking change.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
They are moderates who kind of tack between the parties a little bit and try to represent a center that wants something a little bit less dramatic than either side is offering. How do you reconcile them?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
So people on an angry moderate. That's right. I think that's exactly right. I always think of temperament and ideology as being separate axes in American politics that we connect too much. So we think about people who are moderates often have the moderate temperament. What this is implying is what people want are moderate policies in a more revolutionary or certainly more upset way. temperament.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
We're pissed, but not ideologically extreme about it. It's like a funny chant, but... Yeah, no, I think that's right.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Back in 2016, I wrote a piece about Donald Trump that has one of these headlines that now people will sometimes screenshot and be mad at me about, but it's called something like Donald Trump is a perfect moderate. And the point of the piece was not that he's not extreme because I think he is extreme.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
But that the way his politics worked, practically on the campaign trail in things he said, was it was internally disorganized. So he'd be extremely far right on immigration, but compared to other Republicans, much more centrist on things like Medicare and Social Security. He would talk about giving health care to everybody, even though Republicans wouldn't like that.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
He talked about raising taxes on people like him, not how he governed. Right. But there's a lot of research that actual moderates like people in the electorate who are moderate, it's not that they have a in between the two parties view on everything. It's that they might believe in completely legalized weed on the one hand and mass deportations on the other.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
That they, it's like if you imagine positions as like being, they can be very liberal or very conservative, they average out to moderate as opposed to being consistently moderate.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Your eyebrows get excited when you do math terms. Yeah, no, I'm sorry. Yeah.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Well, it's also true that Joe Biden became more liberal, right? Like in terms of how he governed and in terms of what he ran on. So you're saying that in the 2020 election, you actually did see people say that they were ideologically closer to Biden than to Trump? Yes. And then over time, that eroded.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
I mean, people were living under the Biden-Harris administration, whatever they thought of it. The line Trump would sometimes deliver on Harris, which in many ways is unfair if you're a super politically engaged voter and you have a lot of thoughts about the powers of the vice presidency.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
But to most people, if you have all these great ideas, why don't you do them in the last four years while you're vice president, was a pretty strong argument.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
I want to note something as a dog that is not barking across this presentation. Yeah. If you look at punditry about the election, that if everybody agrees on anything, it's that the election was a huge verdict on wokeness. Famously, one of Trump's higher testing ads was this, Kamala Harris is for they, them, Donald Trump is for you. As you're sort of running through this,
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
I'm not saying you're saying, you know, DEI programs are popular, but I'm not seeing it emerge as a major explanation for 2024 here. I'm curious how you both think about it in the election and think about the role it is playing in the post-election narrative.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
So by the end of the election... Donald Trump is promising to save TikTok. One possible explanation then for TikTok users shifting towards Trump is that they like TikTok and they didn't want it to be taken away from them. Another, which people have worried about quite a bit, is that the company behind TikTok could very easily have been turning dials. You know, just softly, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
It's not that nothing that is liberal does well on TikTok. I've seen videos of me get posted there and do very well on TikTok. But... That it would not be hard to turn up the dial a little bit on issues that are tricky for Democrats. When you look at this data, do you think it is something about TikTok?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Do you think it is something about TikTok's audience just being young people who are seeing this movement? Or does it make you suspect dial turning?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
I always think it is good to remind people me and everybody who listens to the show that they are weird. And if their intuitions about politics were shared, politics would not look the way it does at all. If the voting population were Ezra Kleinjoe listeners and people they know, then elections end up very differently. So I take your point on survey data. So where do we begin?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
So I know that you're near democratic, both freak out and funding world. I hear a lot from Democrats about how to fix what they now call their media problem or, you know, sometimes you hear the TikTok problem. When you look at this, do you think this is something that an established political party and a bunch of donors could do something about? Or do you think this is a TikTok is a vibes machine?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Yeah. And basically, for reasons of inflation, for reasons of incumbency, for reasons of a censorious Democratic Party that people got tired of, the vibes are bad for Democrats in 2024. And vibes machines like TikTok, like some of the other social media things, they're going to be an amplifier of bad vibes forever. So it's not really a thing to do in the sense of strategy.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
What you're trying to do is be culturally, both in terms of the candidates you have and the actual things you say and believe, culturally a better product. And then the things that pick up good cultural products and amplify them are going to be friendlier to you.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
You've used the term bait a few times. Yeah. Right. They're going to try to bait us. Right. I think of a political party baiting you as dangling something in front of you that they know is going to make you mad, but it isn't that big of a deal. They're doing mass firings around critical functions. They're destroying USAID. They're arrogating a huge amount of executive power.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
The set of things that I find Democrats are really worried about at the moment, it's – on the one hand, I suspect they're not the things that the public cares about, wants to hear that much about, you know, making a podcaster the deputy director of the FBI. Right. But at the same time, they're not baiting. They're real. They're important.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Like, what is the point of a party that will not fight those? There's sometimes, I think, this thought of the party. There's just going to... I mean, James Carville's been saying Democrats should basically play dead for a while and wait until the Trump administration's unpopular actions destroy the Trump administration, but don't get in the way.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Or there's this version of a party that various things Hakeem Jeffries has said at different points have sounded like this to people. I think he's a little bit more complicated than this, but... you know, we're not going to run after all these things. We're going to focus on the price of eggs, price of goods.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
You can really lose your own base if you're not defending democracy when they care about democracy because you're waiting for an opportunity to attack prices. Am I getting what you're saying right? Is there a way of threading the needle? How do you think about that?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
But these are also pretty small things. Changes in Trump disapproval. If I'm reading what this chart is right, you know, if Democrats attack Trump for cutting Medicare and Social Security or wanting to cut Medicare and Social Security, that increases Trump disapproval by 2.5 points.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
If they attack him for letting Elon slash budgets hurting Americans and putting privacy at risk, that hurts him by 2.2 points. Going down, passing a one party power grab to cut government services without compromise. That's 2.1 points. These kind of all look the same and none of them are very big.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
I want to read two of these because I think something you just said is important. when we're talking about these old laws of politics. So here's the, these are all high polling, high testing messages, but this is the lowest one on the chart. So, Trump is working to repeal a law that lowers the cost of healthcare and prescription drug costs and caps insulin costs at 35 a month for seniors.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
By repealing this law, Trump will increase the cost of life-saving medicine for millions and create more financial strain when costs are already too high. So that increases Trump's disapproval by 1.9 points. I think... That is as, like, right down the middle a Democratic message as you could possibly imagine.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
That does not test as well as Trump is letting Elon Musk slash federal budgets with no oversight, checks, or balances. Musk gave $250 million to Trump's campaign, and now Trump is letting Musk reshape the government in ways that advance Musk's interests, even if they hurt working Americans by cutting the basics like Medicaid and public schools.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
I am actually surprised that the Elon Musk attack is outpolling The insulin attack. And it's interesting because I see this in Trump voters in my own life. Some of the ones I know, they're actually not happy with what's going on in the Trump administration. There's a lot they don't like. There's a lot going on, but too much. But Musk creeps them out.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Donald Trump is polling better than he was at this point in his first term. And, you know, the vibes have really shifted in a pro-Trump direction and look at how much he and Elon Musk are doing. And, you know, I've certainly talked to Republicans who have this feeling that Trump has unlocked a sort of political juggernaut here, that he has cracked the code of American politics.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
But you have this, this slide is titled Trump is Vulnerable. So why is he vulnerable?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
The thing I find most surprising here is you look at white voters, liberal, moderate, and conservative. and at least in this data from 2016 to 2024, there is a 0% swing in any of them. Because there are all these things that if you go back to the debates we're having about Donald Trump then, It is the return and resurgence of a coalition trying to protect white power in this country.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
There's this reality of the coalitional realignment you were talking about at the beginning, which is Democrats now have this higher information, higher engagement coalition. Those are the people who turn out in midterms disproportionately. If I were a moderate Republican right now, or a Republican in any way vulnerable, I know they're all afraid of Elon Musk and they're afraid of primaries and
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
How about the Senate? So you and I, I did a big piece on kind of debates about popularism a couple years ago. It involved a model that you had. And that model was predicting in 2022, but specifically 2024, Democratic Senate annihilation. Right. And Democrats are down a couple seats in the Senate. It's, what is it, 53-47? Right. It's not a good map for them in 2026.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And they did lose some seats that were really important to them, like Tester in Montana and Brown in Ohio. How do you see the Democratic Senate future?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And I wrote things about this. I think there's good reason to believe that. Even if that was part of the intention then, that does not appear in the results. Democrats lose modest amount of support among black voters in those years. They lose a huge amount of support among Hispanic voters and a kind of significant amount among Asian voters overall. Why do you think that is?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
What do you do about the reality of the Democratic Party? brand is toxic in most of the land area in the country, you always have to be careful at which conversation you're having. Is the conversation, can Democrats win in 2026 or 2028? And the answer there is yes. If the conversation is how do you get back to a place where you're putting states in play and
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
that Democrats have just kind of given up on. Mitch McConnell's retiring in Kentucky. There's a Democratic governor in Kentucky. It's not literally true that no Democrat can ever win there. I don't think anybody seriously thinks so, that a Democrat is going to win Mitch McConnell's seat. Because the Democratic brand nationally, which is different than its kind of state party brand, is pretty bad.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And people understand when they're voting for Senate, they're voting for the national brand. So you've been thinking about this for a long time. If you were trying to think about reversing these much deeper trends, these educational trends, if your whole point in life was to make Democrats competitive again in Florida, in Missouri, in Kansas, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Not the red estates, but states that they were competitive in a couple of years ago. What would you advise Democrats to do?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
I think that is a good place to end. Always our final question. What are three books you recommend to the audience?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
David Shore, thank you very much. Thank you. This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Isaac Jones with the famed Shapiro and Amin Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Elias Iskwith, and Kristen Lin.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
We have original music by Pat McCusker, audience strategy by Christina Simulowski, and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. I've been spending some time recently with top Democrats as they think about how to rebuild after the 2024 loss. And I'll say that in the 20-some years I've been covering politics, I have never heard them so confused. Confused about who they are, aside from the opposition to Donald Trump, but confused also about how and why they lost.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
The other thing that I find interesting here is the shift in voters who self-describe as conservative. There's no shift in white self-described conservative voters between 2016 and 2024. But Democrats are winning 85 percent of black conservatives in 2016, but only 77 percent in 2024. They're winning 75. 34% of conservative Hispanics in 2016. That falls by half to 17% in 2024.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
How could they have possibly lost this election to this person? But also, how is the Democratic Party weakening so much among groups whose strength, whose support it once took for granted? They're losing working class voters. They're seeing their margins among non-white voters erode and vanish. They're losing young voters. Something is wrong in the Democratic Party.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
They're winning 28% of conservative Asians in 2016. That falls to 20% in 2024. So it's always a little bit weird for somebody who is self-described conservative to be voting for Democrats who are quite a liberal party now. But what we're seeing among non-white voters is people voting more their ideology and less their ethnic group.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
It's interesting because I obviously get a lot of incoming from people who would like the New York Times to cover Donald Trump differently. And some of those arguments I agree with, some of them I don't, right? What I always think about with that, though, is that if your lever is New York Times headlines, you're not affecting the voters you are losing. The question Democrats are facing is,
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
when you look at how badly they lost less politically engaged voters. is how do you change the views of voters you don't really have a good way to reach?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And so I think it's important as this conversation begins to roll forward that it is grounded on a pretty real understanding of what happened in 2024. Someone whose analysis on this have come to respect over the years is David Shore. David Shore is the head of data science at Blue Earth Research, which is a big Democratic consulting firm.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Just that... This is why Democrats can't win. That's exactly right.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
So here's something that I've heard from a lot of Democrats and very good election analysts, which seems to be in some tension here. There is an argument that what happened to Democrats between 2020 and 2024 is their voters stayed home. And so what happened here was a shrinking of the electorate that disproportionately sliced off what Democrats for a while were calling the anti-MAGA coalition.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
How does that idea that Democrats didn't lose to Trump, they lost to the couch sit with you?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
So if you had forced them out to vote, they may have just voted for Donald Trump.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
How much is this just inflation? You are dealing with people who they're not paying a lot of attention to politics. They do pay attention and feel prices and the state of the country. You had a massive inflationary period and the pest and being pissed about inflation, move them against the incumbent party, which they held responsible in this country as in other countries for inflation.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Before we discuss this, I think it's worth talking about the next chart, too, because it's getting at the same question in a different way.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
What did people need to hear from you over these last few years that they didn't? What do they need to believe you will do if you get power? This conversation was recorded at the end of January, so you're not going to hear us discuss the latest Trump news. But it's also not the point here. The country needs a resistance, but it also needs an alternative.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
That's a good setup to talk a bit about TikTok. So you were one of the co-sponsors of the House TikTok bill, right? that passed the House overwhelmingly, that passed the Senate overwhelmingly, signed by Joe Biden, upheld 9-0 at the Supreme Court. And then a funny thing happened in that no one decided to enforce this bill that had passed through every level of U.S. government.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
Joe Biden decided not to enforce it, and then Donald Trump wants to make himself the savior of TikTok. What happened here from your perspective?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
So you said you think TikTok ultimately will be sold. One reason I asked you what you thought had happened here is that it seems to me that a lot of the support in Congress has dissipated. The excitement that led to the passage of that bill has not been matched by first howls among Democrats when Biden delayed it and then howls among Republicans when Trump decided to try to functionally upend it.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
You see polling showing that moving TikTok out of Chinese hands has gone from a majority proposition to a minority one. You saw TikTok using a strategy we've seen with Uber and others, you know, putting up a little poster on its system saying, you know, the politician is going to take this away from you. Go blame them. Go talk to them if you don't want to see that happen.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
So tell me about the political economy of this right now, because you seem pretty confident that this will ultimately go through. And I don't see that many champions of it.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com. Congressman Jake Alkencloss, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on, Ezra. So, after the election, a lot of Democrats have responded to Donald Trump's particular form of populism by offering what you call a Diet Coke version of it. Tell me about your Diet Coke theory of the Democratic Party.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
It has seemed so far that the, I guess, position of ByteDance, I think many people suspect the position of the CCP is they will not sell it. it has seemed that they would prefer to cause trouble with this. One of the things that worries me about this whole situation is you imagine a world where Trump and the Republicans save it. And this is a kind of deal.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
And if before the 2026 midterm election, TikTok began turning the dials such that content doesn't have to be pro-Trump content, but things that are difficult for Democrats, right? Issues that are difficult for Democrats just became 35% more viral and things that are good for Republicans did the same. It would be hard to look at TikTok and know anything had happened, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
We don't have any bird's eye view or God's eye view of what is happening on that platform. And so the ability to turn the attentional dials as a kind of in-kind contribution, given that the whole thing is a black box at its core, seems very real. I mean, in a very different way, this is true for Elon Musk's ex. It's true for all of these. Attention is a currency now.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
We have at least some rules and some ways of thinking about how money is moving around. We don't have anything on how attention is moving around.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
Let's hold here for a second. I know we're jumping around a bit, but I think this is important. I think the emergence of crypto, which is always looking for a use case, right? It's a technology endlessly looking for a use case as a new venue for political corruption has been really quite important.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
So before Trump issued the Trump coin and Melania issued the Melania coin, you had this world liberty coin, which Trump and his kids are part of. And the World Liberty Coin was meant more as a real coin. It was designed more in the way some of these crypto drops are designed, but it's quite punitive to users. So it didn't do that well initially.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
But it had terms of service in it or a structure where if it went above a certain level, it would trigger payouts to the Trump family. And this was public. And so a crypto magnet under U.S. investigation publicly went, bragged about, right, this has been reported in Bloomberg, right, you can go follow all of it, just pumped a bunch of money into it.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
So it triggered a multimillion-dollar payment to the Trump family. And by saying he did it publicly, of course, they knew that he did it publicly. And there was nothing illegal about it. It's an investment. But it's also very clear what was happening here. You cannot just move money into Donald Trump's pocket.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
But he has now created a series of vehicles where you can do something one step removed, right? There's the Trump technology company that now has a stock price listing. You could, to some degree, try to invest in that, but much more directly now. These coins and any further coins the Trump family puts forward has just created a way for people to back dump trucks of money into the Trump family.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
I mean, I remember in Trump's first term, you had this endless people staying in the Trump hotel to tell Trump they were lining his pocket a little bit. But it was only a little bit, right? A hotel room can only cost so much. This is a whole new magnitude and a whole new innovation.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
So here's, I think, the difficult political economy Trump has created for Democrats. Facebook, Amazon, TikTok, X, the social media companies generally. are more popular than the Democrats are. So you're standing up here and saying that Democrats should take these companies on more frontally, right? They should force the TikTok sale or force it to be shuttered if they won't sell it.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
You're talking about getting rid of or somehow reforming Section 230. So that means you're not only taking on now Donald Trump and the Republican Party, you're taking on all these technology companies which have their own levers of influence, their own constituencies.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
Tell me a bit about how you see that fight and why you think that fight, even if it is a good fight to have, why you think it is winnable given what we've just seen with TikTok and given just how much money and power and attention is tied up in this consortium we see emerging.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
So we were talking about the supply side a few minutes ago, and I got this book on abundance coming out. One of the things that I, in some ways, wanted to put in there, but it just felt too fuzzy, but I think you and I share a bit of an obsession on this, is that you should think about attention as a collective resource, as a public good.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
A crucial question in a democracy is the quality and quantity of attention the public can bring to civic and daily life. And one of the things that I see creeping around a bit of what you're saying here is The quality of American attention has been degraded. Yes. And it's a little bit tricky to talk about how would you try to increase the supply of attention.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
It is a thing, I've said this a million times on the show, as a parent, the thing I worry about the most. I think I have a good idea of how to teach my children to be good people. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, but I'm hoping so. I think I understand a lot of the things that parenting is supposed to carry. I am terrified.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
about how to teach them, how to help them have healthy attentional capacity in the world they're growing up in. And I've never really seen anybody come up with anything in public policy on this. I mean, we're beginning to have, I think, let's ban phones in schools, like God bless John Hyde on that. And many, many governors are coming around to that, Democratic and Republican.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
But so then you have this piece of your theory, which I'm a little skeptical of in terms of its workability, but I'd like to hear you make the case for it, which is this tax on attention. When you describe that, what are you describing? How would you do that?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
Are you saying that every website I visit... They're going to be paying a little bit of money based on how long I spent on the site. Are you saying that we are just going to add a tax onto the money they are making from advertising? Right. That would be a way to do it. What literally? Because attention isn't what you are taxing here, or the paying attention.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
You're taxing some kind of exchange somewhere. What is that exchange?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
So this is a world where Netflix is then going to be disclosing a calculation, right? to, I guess, the IRS, saying this was the total amount of time people spent binging or watching content on Netflix, and they'd pay a surcharge based on that amount of time.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
Look, I'm all for anything that will support actual local journalism. The difficulty you always have, I think, with any theory of how to do that from the government in an era as polarized as this one, when trust in the media is as polarized as it is, is how do you disperse that?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
How do you do it in a way where this isn't just read as a tax on things people like to fund like liberal journalists in localities? I mean, they don't even like Sesame Street, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
We've been talking here about a pretty novel approach to the tax code. We're about to get, you're about to get, a less novel one. We know there's going to be a very big budget reconciliation bill to extend and deepen Trump's tax cuts from the first term. How are you thinking about that?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
You say that Trump did what Democrats have long dreamed of, which is have a multiracial working class coalition. Democrats used to have a multiracial working class coalition. They won voters making less than 50,000 by significant margins. They won non-white voters by significant margins. That was their coalition, right? What is your explanation of what broke it?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
One thing I have seen in a lot of your thinking on the economy, and specifically a lot of your thinking about healthcare, is against middlemen. And a sense that the system has become so bureaucratized and filled with people skimming off of the top that there's actually quite a lot of waste to cut. I'm curious how that plays into this for you.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
So I agree with a ton of this. But let me... Let me get at the really unpopular part of this conversation. So no fan of private health insurance. And I spent the first 10, 15 years of my career covering health care as my main topic. And I remember at one point trying to work on this article, asking the question of what value do private health insurers offer in the American health care system?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
Can you actually back out something we are getting for all this money? And the piece kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger and more and more and more complicated. But I never could really find it. There was never a thing where I could say, well, if you didn't have the private health insurance, you would get worse outcomes, right? People are not getting worse outcomes on Medicare.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
There's a bunch of pieces of this. You look very perplexed by me saying this.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
So this I agree with. And this is where I was going to go with this, which is that the one thing that the health insurance industry actually does is, and is important, is the one thing everybody hates them for. Which is say no. Yes. You can deal with healthcare costs in a bunch of different ways. You could try to regulate prices at the government level, which is what most other countries do. Yes.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
It doesn't work very well. Well, it works somewhat and it doesn't work somewhat. People pay with time as opposed to money, though. You're always paying somehow. In some places and not in others. Not every place is bad waiting lines. But the most complicated thing, I think, in any discussion of health care is that people want to say the providers are all great, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
We talk about there aren't enough primary care physicians. And we like the providers. To a large extent, we like the hospitals. We like our doctors. We like surgeons. We have decided to not regulate the providers very aggressively, at least on the pricing side. Look, the reason we don't have more primary care physicians isn't some mystery.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
the government and the American Medical Association and the various trade groups that regulate medical education and doctors constrained the supply of doctors we could have more residency slots we just need to force them to open them up it's not that different from housing and a bunch of other things they make money from scarcity Agreed.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
Is that just the concentration we've seen? Or is that also the fact that health care is simply a different kind of good? And it's why so many different countries have settled on some kind of price regulation. So on the way out the door, the Biden administration put out a memorandum.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
saying, we think, although Medicaid and Medicare have thus far been banned from providing coverage for weight loss drugs, we believe that Ozempic, Wigovi, that class of GLP-1 drugs, is treating this disease of obesity. And it actually should be covered by Medicaid and Medicare. And I think that's great because these drugs are goddamn miracles. But
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
If they cover it, if Medicare and Medicaid, I mean, this was just rolling a grenade over the Trump administration. If they cover it, Medicare and Medicaid, at the price that is being charged for it in America, which is not the price that is being charged for it in other countries, it is going to bankrupt the system functionally overnight.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
The number of people who would qualify for it is, I don't know how many millions, but many millions. And we are paying 10 times for doses of this medication what other countries are. And that would be the end of any kind of budget that works in Medicare and Medicaid, which arguably we're already at for different reasons.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
So is that that we don't have enough granularity in negotiations, or is that that we actually do need to have the government come in and be the payer who can say, no, we're not going to pay this much for it? We absolutely need the government to come in.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
Like, there's nothing I would not do to make sure she had insulin.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
So I want to go back for a second to this point you've been making about concentration, because we have seen huge increases in concentration in health care generally. We've seen it in a lot of places in the economy.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
One of the, I think, most significant, whether you think it was good or bad, ideological changes we saw in the Biden administration was a move towards much more aggressive antitrust enforcement programs. And that's proven to be very controversial, controversial among certainly many people who used to give Democrats money and are now lined up on the right. It created some weird bedfellows. J.D.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
Vance used to say that Lena Kahn was his favorite member of the Biden administration, although that doesn't seem all that reflected to me in what we're seeing in the Trump administration. If somebody goes and looks you up on social media, they see a little tagline in your bio that you want an economy that works like Legos, not like monopoly. What do you mean by that?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
What is your experience in being a member of Congress, being part of the Democratic Party, of the power of these corporations? What sort of role do they play in the political system? Did we get here because they have too much power or is there another explanation?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
Have you been surprised by the size of the post-election vibe shift? You're this very close election, and then what has felt since it, like a almost seismic cultural change following. How do you understand the difference between those two things?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
But what gives them power over your institution? This is always a bit of a mystery. I think it's clear what gives Meta power. You're talking about small immigration reform groups or gun rights groups. Many of them, I mean, some have memberships, not that many anymore. These are not mass organization groups. So why does Congress care so much what they say?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
So, we're now a couple weeks into the Trump era. What, given what you were expecting, has surprised you?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
I don't disagree with that. But certainly to me, Democrats have felt surprised. They have felt overwhelmed. And he is overwhelming the system. I mean, every day there's something that should be a two-week, a three-week, a three-month news cycle happening. Now, maybe a lot of it doesn't end up mattering that much, right? The birthright citizenship move might just get thrown out in the courts.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
The impoundment does not seem constitutional, given what we know of how the spending power works. fury signifying future court cases, or are we seeing a more fundamental shift in how America is governed and how power is wielded? I think we're seeing a two-step process.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
I get it. I get the theory that you want to fight Trump on pocketbook issues. The pardons, the impoundment, where does that become a kind of willing yourself into a blindness and about the system itself being so fundamentally challenged?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
I think a lot of people don't follow the ins and outs of politics very much. We're not that aware of the Trump meme coin or to the extent that they heard anything about it. They heard about it for a day and then he took office and we were on to the next thing.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
The Trump administration strategy, and I mean, Steve Bannon said this in the first term, is to pump so much into the system that it overloads it, that people can't focus on any one thing.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
You have a line that you like to quote from Donald Trump's first vice president, which he used to say, which is, "'I'm a conservative, but I'm not angry about it.'" What's your version of that for Democrats? I'm a liberal, but I'm not condescending about it.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
And how do you change that? Because I think if I went Democrat by Democrat, I said, do you lecture people or do you listen to them? They would all say, I listen to them. If I said, should Democrats talk like, as James Carver used to put it, professors in the faculty lounge, or should they talk like real people? They all say, oh, you should talk like real people. I talk like a real person.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
So who is this? What is the tendency in the party that you're trying to combat with that?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Roland Hu. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Isaac Jones with Afim Shapiro and Amin Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Elias Iskwith, Christian Lin, and Jack McCordick.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
We have original music by Pat McCusker, audience strategy by Christina Samuelski, and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. After the election, I started asking congressional Democrats I talked to the same question, one after the other. If it had gone the other way, if they had won a trifecta, what would their first big bill have been? What was going to be their priority? In almost every case, they said they didn't know. It's a problem.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
Democrats are in the opposition now. That means fighting the worst of what Trump is doing. But it also means providing an alternative, creating another center of gravity in American politics. So one thing I'm going to do on the show this year is talk to Democrats who sound like they are trying to find their way to that alternative.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
I was reporting a couple years back on this housing, affordable housing complex in San Francisco called Tehanan. And it was the first of these NSF done as modular housing. And this was a really excellent build. And when I was talking to the people behind it, and they were thinking about doing a second, at least at that time, they said, we probably won't do modular again. I said, why?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
Said, that's probably the political fight we can't win twice. Which is to say that it's often the same problem, just in a different guise. I mean, there are interest groups that have made it very hard to do modular housing. I've called this at different times, things like everything bagel liberalism, but liberals have a lot of different goals piled into individual projects, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
Or piled into a housing policy. You want lot of good union jobs, you want high environmental standards, you want affordable housing, and you sort of like keep stacking them, that ends up being a problem. It's not just that we haven't embraced the technology, but we haven't embraced it for a reason. People have interests where they don't want to see that embraced.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
Democrats who sound like they are crafting an agenda alive to this moment, not just one carried over from the past. One Democrat I found interesting here is Jake Auchincloss, a congressman from Massachusetts.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
Feels to me like Democrats stopped talking about education because education splits their coalition. Education was controversial in their coalition when Barack Obama was pushing education reform when he had Arne Duncan as his education secretary. It was controversial under Bill Clinton.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
And the Democratic Party, I would say, from, you know, during the resistance to Trump and then under Joe Biden, it became more coalitional, more allergic to things, at least on domestic policy, that split its coalition. It did.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
Among the Democrats talking about the abundance agenda, and my book on abundance comes out next month, so I will admit to being particularly interested here, he's been really pretty substantive. It's not that I agree with every idea he offers here. I don't. But when I hear him, I hear someone wrestling with a question I pose to other Democrats. What is your alternative?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
When you just said you're an AI skeptic a minute ago and then moved into a very pro-AI case on education, I think that gets at attention in the Democratic Party, which is, I would say the Democratic Party used to be the much more pro-technology party. So you go back to Bill Clinton coming out of the Atari Democrats, the DLC Democrats. who seemed to have a lot of ideas about the information age.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
And behind him Al Gore, who wasn't incredibly, as much as he got mocked for saying he invented the internet, Gore was one of the most prescient politicians and elected officials of that entire era, way, way, way ahead of the curve on a lot of these questions.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
Barack Obama running against John McCain, running against Mitt Romney, also I think the information age candidate, the candidate with a lot more ties to Silicon Valley. And then I think starting the 2016 election, there's been a breakup between Democrats and big tech, which is fine, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
They became very disillusioned with disinformation and misinformation on Facebook, disillusioned with where a lot of the tech billionaires had moved and how they were acting. But it does seem to me that the skepticism of the companies has become a skepticism of technological solutions. And so now you see the big futurists like Andreessen and Musk have sort of lined up on the Republican side.
The Ezra Klein Show
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
I'm curious how you think about this culturally, because I think before you even think about policy, policy is downstream from party culture. And I don't get the sense running through the Democratic and liberal circles that I run through that people are just fundamentally comfortable with technology. I think they sort of understand it is downstream of big corporations and of tech bro culture. Yeah.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
I will say, I feel like it's always a bad sign when I'm reading Lawfare a lot.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
On the other hand, there's ways in which it feels to me like the Supreme Court that Trump has largely built, this particular majority, has given him extraordinary power, has made the idea that the president is bound by laws into something of a farce. The president has unrestricted pardon power, pretty much, and then they gave him immunity in his own official acts.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
So how do you understand the balance of the Supreme Court on the one hand, dramatically expanding the president's zone of immunity, and I would say impunity, and your confidence and confidence I hear from many other legal experts that they're not just going to buy into all of this as soon as it gets to them because it turns out they've been Trump sleeper agents the whole time.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
The federal judge blocking Elon Musk's Department of Government efficiency from accessing sensitive Treasury Department records. I'm recording this on Monday, February 10th. All of this is moving extraordinarily fast. By the time you hear it, some of it may have changed. These freezes are not the final word. There are pause on the administration's actions while those actions are being litigated.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
This is a big argument that I've been trying to make recently that part of the danger is believing one, that he has the powers he's asserting he has and believing two, that everything they're doing is a good idea. That if they convince everybody of that, then the success is a lot likelier. But I don't think it's true. I don't think they have these powers.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
And I don't think a lot of this stuff is going to work out for them in the long run. And one thing that I was thinking about while you were saying some of that, and that has become very core to my understanding of them so far, and it's early and their strategy might change is, They don't seem to me to have much appetite for backlash and friction. No.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
So when I look around at what's been going on, they've been getting stopped by courts and they seem to be stopping. Tariffs, which we understood to be the thing Donald Trump cared most about, he announced over a weekend on Canada and Mexico. There was a market reaction.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
And at least for now, he backed off those tariffs entirely, taking basically things Canada and Mexico either already were doing or would have happily done anyway, and pocketing those as, you know, the win. The OMB spending freeze that you were talking about, as soon as he began getting a lot of
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
And, you know, USAID does not really have a domestic constituency, aside from liberals who believe in it. But they don't really want difficult fights, at least not yet, which is also why they're not doing very much in Congress. They want to act like they have all this power, but I'm not sure they want to go through the upheaval it would take to actually claim it.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
So far, the Trump administration is largely abiding by the court orders. If they began simply saying the court's authority is illegitimate, that would throw American politics into a genuine constitutional crisis. Can the president simply ignore the courts? Can he decide for himself what his powers are? And what can or will the courts do if he tries? Over the weekend, Vice President J.D.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
And they don't even mean to stop paying everybody, but they stop paying bondholders and the whole thing goes into chaos because nobody knows how to fix it. Sometimes these systems are very complicated.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
So what the Trump administration really fears and hates is the federal bureaucracy. I mean, that is what Elon Musk has basically been tasked with, break the federal bureaucracy, buy them out, push them out, put them on leave, fire them. That's what they're trying to cow. That's what they're trying to control.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
They're also at the same time creating a lot of fury and resistance and anger from that bureaucracy, which even compared to the first term, I'm not sure a lot of these people were planning to be opponents to them. So how do you think about these opposing forces?
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
Vance suggested the administration might try just that, writing on X that, quote, "...judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power." That word legitimate is doing all the work in Vance's tweet. Who decides what the executive's legitimate power is? Typically, the courts. Vance is suggesting that it should be the president himself. That also seems to be Trump's view.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
A quite obscure subreddit that has become the center of the resistance now.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
We don't yet know what Vance is really doing here. We don't know if he's carrying out a broader strategy that is coordinated with the administration or just freelancing on Twitter. We don't know if he's signaling an imminent constitutional crisis or just trying to make himself look tough to the MAGA faithful or useful to Elon Musk.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
If you treat people as your enemy, they're going to believe you.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
I was struck in the reporting on the judge freezing that federal worker deferred pay buyout effort. The reporting revealed something I didn't know, which is that as they approached the deadline, only a few tens of thousands of federal employees had taken the offer. So the federal civilian workforce, it's around 2.4 million people. They weren't all eligible, but a lot of them were.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
A few tens of thousands taking the buyout offer when the administration is putting this level of pressure on people to leave did not strike me as revealing a successful effort to get people to leave.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
Is he trying to influence the Supreme Court's ultimate rulings by telegraphing that if they rule against Trump too often, that the Trump administration will defy them and try to show the limits of their power? Nice judicial review you got there. Shame if something should happen to it.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
I want to let you do a little bit more log rolling for your organization.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
So your colleague, Benjamin Wittes, had a piece about what is happening at the FBI. The Trump administration has really put the FBI in its crosshairs. It is pretty clearly trying to execute a purge. It is putting a hatchet man in Kash Patel in charge. And the FBI seems pretty unhappy about it.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
Tell me what is happening, to the best of your understanding, what the Trump administration has been trying to do at the FBI, and then what the sort of reaction is beginning to reveal itself as being.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
On Friday, I spoke with Quinta Jurecic, a senior editor at Lawfare and a fellow at the Brookings Institution, about the fight that it was already clear that Trump was bracing for with the courts. And more broadly, the ways in which his actions are creating reactions throughout the government and even throughout society. And then over the weekend, Vance sent that tweet.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
One number I heard was potentially 6,000 people.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
Well, you also do get then 6,000 open positions you can replace with people loyal to you. The idea that what they want here is competence is not obvious to me.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
I didn't really realize what had happened here. Can you explain what happened here? Because just like as a window into this is not all a masterfully executed and thought through plan. It's just an amazing little piece of it.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
And so I called Quinta back to see how it changed her thinking. You'll hear that at the end. As always, my email, EzraKleinShow at NYTimes.com. Quinta Jurassic, welcome to the show.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
Let me add a little bit of texture here. So from the reporting, the Trump team basically demanded that FBI agents self-report What they did in relationship to the January 6th investigations and sort of turn in information on themselves, sort of designed to test how loyal they are. And there's been mass refusal to do so. But I guess this brings up a question across the federal government right now.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
The understanding six months ago is that there are civil service protections and you have to fire people for cause. It's actually very hard. I would have told you a difficulty about managing things in the federal government is it is very, very, very, very, very cumbersome to fire people. It is so cumbersome. It's actually a problem.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
The Trump people have come in and are firing all sorts of people, right? An FBI agent is Working on the January 6th investigation because their superior told them to work on this active investigation was not derelict in their duty. They weren't not showing up to work. So firing them for that is in violation of all kinds of civil service protections. So what is the recourse?
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
So when you look at what Donald Trump has done in his executive actions in the first weeks of his presidency, what looks to you like it's merely aggressive? And what looks like it is actually illegal or a genuine change in the balance of powers?
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
All these people are getting fired. They seem to be leaving the building mostly. Right. So then what? What were all these protections for that all these other presidents were abiding by? Why did people think these were real if you can just do this? What are these lawsuits going to do?
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
But let's say the court cases come and you have a lot of these court cases succeed. What is the recourse? These people were fired. What, they get back pay? Do they get reinstated? Yeah.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
It reminds me a little bit of the way that corporations fire people who are organizing on behalf of unions and know that they might lose a case at the NLRB later. But they've done the damage in the meantime, right? If they have to pay the cost of doing business and they have to pay a fine and maybe when the person gets their job back, so it goes, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
But because they can fire people faster than the courts work, in terms of the immediate thing they were trying to do, which is break the back of the union, or in this case, break the back of the civil service, they're able to achieve a lot of their goals simply because of the mismatch in the rhythm.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
Because I haven't actually heard much from this mythical other branch lately. I mean, I know people have mentioned there's a Congress to me, but, you know, are you sure? Are you sure?
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
Susan Collins, as is often the case, is quite concerned.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
I think there's a lot in this. So two things. One is that I think it is a mistake that we still talk about Congress as an institution. Congress is two parties struggling over institutional power. But there's no unitary Congress. There's only the Republicans and the Democrats acting across Congress, across the presidency, to some degree across the judiciary.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
There's this term that I come across sometimes in other domains, which is evolutionary mismatch. So people talk about there being an evolutionary mismatch between our systems for regulating hunger and the hyper-processed food world where salt and fat and sugar are artificially juiced.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
that we inhabit, an evolutionary mismatch between the way we pay attention and now what things like the internet can offer in terms of super stimulating attentional objects. And there's just fundamentally an evolutionary mismatch between our system of government as it was constructed and designed and the emergence of a highly polarized two political parties system.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
All this talk that we used to have of ambition checking ambition, I mean, you go back to the federalist papers, and impeachment is the actual remedy for a lot of what we are discussing. The idea is that an executive will not do this because that executive would be impeached and removed from office by a Congress that is jealous of its own power and prerogatives before it is anything else.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
It's so quaint. It's so quaint. And the reality, I mean, and you got at this reality too, is simply that Republicans in Congress either want Donald Trump to have this power or at least they don't want to take this power away from him and face the consequences of a primary challenge by Elon Musk or, you know, Donald Trump raising up somebody against them.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
But we do at the center of our system is now a mismatch, a deformity. Yeah. where the system was supposed to have an answer to this. That answer was not primarily the courts. The answer is primarily Congress, and we know it doesn't work, and we know it hasn't worked for a very long time.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
We know the impeachment power isn't really a real power anymore because in a polarized political system, you're not going to get that level of support that impeachment requires. You know, passing veto-proof bills is barely a power anymore. And we just don't have an answer to it.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
And so, like, that to me, among the loopholes that Trump is exploiting or the realities of the era that Trump is exploiting, is that if this were 1970 and polarization was really low, we might be looking at something very different. But it's not 1970, right? We have modern political parties in a now antique political system put the two together and the system breaks.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
And we're just in the breakage right now. And Donald Trump is seeing how much he can break it.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
That raises the question of not a branch of government, but the public. And we've been talking about all this as if it is a competition that will only play out among institutional actors. But public opinion does matter. It matters to the president. It matters to Congress. It matters to the courts, even, in a way. Public protest matters. But from your perspective, how exactly does it matter?
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
Yes, we've begun to see protest activity. I do think the fury among Democrats is stiffening the spine of Democrats who are in Congress. And then you imagine a world where Trump just tells the courts to shove it. And I find myself thinking about the judicial reform protests that functionally paralyzed Israel from a few years ago.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
I mean, now we think of something different when we're thinking about Israel and its political issues. But prior to October 7th. Netanyahu had tried to defang the Supreme Court. And you had tens and hundreds of thousands of Israelis out in the streets night after night after night for months to save what they believe to be their democracy. And it was not a resolved issue.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
And then October 7th changed what politics in Israel were about. But it did stop what Netanyahu was doing. And so there's a question of sort of protest activity and there's a question of like actual civic uprising, not violent uprising, but a genuine unwillingness, you know, in what would become sort of a more coup scenario. Yeah. To say absolutely not. And that seems to matter.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
I mean, when you say, you know, will Republicans be responsive or responsive to what? There's a difference between responding to some phone calls and responding to something happening outside the Treasury Department and responding to a huge mass uprising because the system of government is being fundamentally altered. And I just, you know, the resistance became a little cringe. And that's fine.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
The aesthetics of resistance from 2017 don't need to be what it looks like.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
Cringe is good. Well, cringe is always something that was popular.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
I think that's fine, too. I always say that whenever somebody calls something cringe, you can probably assume the cringe thing is popular. Yeah. Cringe is only things that are so popular they now have an elite backlash of tastemakers. Like Lin-Manuel Miranda and Hamilton can only in any way be cringe because it's an absolute cultural phenomena.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
But the point is that I do think you will see escalating activity as Trump escalates or if he escalates. And it might look different. It might have a different flavor in some ways now than it did then. It might not be pussy hats. It might be whatever it might be. But I don't think it's meaningless. I don't think we're all just bystanders in this.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
The system does respond to pressure, as do the courts. And a world in which Trump's assertions of power are treated as something like settled fact, they're greeted with resignation, exhaustion, overwhelm, is very different than a world where they're greeted with fury, with a loud and an echoing no.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
I think we're beginning to move into the next phase of this Donald Trump term. Remember what Yuval Levin said in our episode last week. There's a rhythm to the presidency. Presidents begin their terms by unleashing their plans. For weeks and maybe months, the world is responding to them. They set the pace of events.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
He won the popular vote. I don't think this is telling. By less in 2024 than Hillary Clinton won it in 2016. And so in terms of the sort of post-election sense, there was an extraordinary groundswell of political change in the hearts of this country. But he won the votes by less than Hillary Clinton did in 2016.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
And I don't think we all thought Hillary Clinton was the harbinger of all politics to come in 2016. Exactly.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
We'll be right back. Before, it certainly seemed the administration to begin defying court orders openly, to say that the judiciary's response here is itself illegitimate, is itself the threat to the constitutional structure. So as Quinta did come back on the show, we spoke again on Monday, February 10th, to give us her sense of how things had evolved and where her level of alarm now rested.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
Well, when you say held up in court, what does that mean? So there is a lawsuit being formed and filed right now that's been reported on. And let's say it works its way through the courts and the court says, oh, you actually can't do this. You cannot unilaterally dissolve agencies created by Congress. What is the actual recourse? What does the court order them to do?
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
Thank you. So over the weekend, Vice President J.D. Vance tweeted, quote, judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power. That seemed like an escalation here. What did you make of it?
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
So one interpretation here, I think, is that what Vance is doing is threatening the court. He's trying to threaten them to push their ultimate rulings, thinking here of the Supreme Court, into at least some alignment with the powers the Trump administration is claiming. Because I think a way of reading this is he's saying, think twice about ruling against us.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
Because if you rule against us too much, we will simply say your rulings are illegitimate. And then we're going to find out if you can enforce them, particularly at a moment when we control Congress and Congress isn't going to back you up. And so it's a shot at Chief Justice John Roberts and some of the others on the court. Do you really want to cause a constitutional crisis here?
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
Do you want to give us 40 or 50 or 75 percent of what we're asking for?
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
So even as we were speaking, this situation is changing. There was just a federal judge who ruled that the Trump administration is in fact violating his order on the blanket spending freeze that they've been withholding funds from the NIH and the IRA. So the entire OMB spending freeze is in effect, but it does seem that they are being inconsistent in what they're paying.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
And so in that way, maybe they're already defying these orders. And I guess it really then creates this question, what power before things go to the Supreme Court do these judges have? Is it literally just that the administration has to decide to listen to them? Or I've heard people talk about holding some of the figures in the administration in contempt. Is there really nothing here?
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
Or as this escalates before it goes to the Supreme Court, what do you expect the recourses that get tried to be?
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
There does seem to be differences across the administration in how this is being responded to. And they're the parts that seem to be responding in a somewhat normal way, as if the machinery of government is just somebody pushes a button and continues to operate. And then there's this thing happening among, I would call it the conservative legal elite. elite class on Twitter.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
Vance is one of those, right? He's trained at Yale Law. But Mike Lee, who's a senator from Utah, who is, I think, one of the leading legal figures on the elected right, he wrote on X in response to the same ruling about the Treasury payment systems, quote, "...this has the feel of a coup, not a military coup, but a judicial one."
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
So at the same time that the administration largely seems to be complying with rulings, it does seem at its highest levels. There is an effort to build an ideological structure, argument, begin sending signals to others in the movement that they should prepare here, that they should understand this, treat this, what the judiciary is doing, as itself illegitimate.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
and get ready for this fight, which may not really start today, I think what you see happening here is early information and coordination movement to get ready for something like this a little bit down the road.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
I guess we're really about to find out if Twitter is real life for this particular administration.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
When we started talking the other day, we were joking a little bit about, you know, the threat level. And I think we said it was orange. After this weekend, where is it for you?
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
And always our final question, what are three books you would recommend to the audience?
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
But soon, because they have exhausted what they can do unilaterally, or because they begin facing events and actors they do not control, or because of the very things they have done begin creating uncontrollable backlash, they must begin responding to the world. Donald Trump's second term began at, remember Steve Bannon's term here, muzzle velocity.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
Well, let me hold on this question of whether we are in the world of an administration that is pushing authority or courting a constitutional crisis. So you brought up USAID and going through Congress. And in some ways, I think that's actually a complicated example because I don't think they could have gotten that through Congress. I think one thing they are dealing with right now is
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
is that they have such slim margins and have put no effort, let's say it lightly, to working with Democrats, so that they're going to look a lot weaker when they start having to pass bills. And they're already, the reporting is having a lot of trouble even just designing their spending bills to get enough Republican support.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
So I think they're quite worried about what happens when they need to start going through Congress. And that's why they're doing so much through executive action. But there are things they're doing through executive action that you could do just legally. What did you make of it?
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
All right. I want to try to take the most generous case for some of what they're doing or trying to do. When I talk to people from the first Trump term, The resistance they faced from the bureaucracy was very radicalizing for them.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
To them, it was this realization that the executive did not control the executive branch, even though the executive is the only person in that branch who is accountable to the voters. And we're talking about this usurping of congressional power and the power of the person and the alteration of the constitutional structure. But they say, well, look back on history.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
They acted and the world watched, its mouth agape. But actions create reactions and we're beginning to see them and to see how the Trump administration responds to those reactions. Trump delayed his tariffs after markets shuttered. So far, we are not seeing mass deportations.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
Presidents used to have the power to not spend all the money Congress has appropriated, which is called impoundment. They did have more power over the federal bureaucracy, right? Civil service protections come in at a certain moment in our history and then they get strengthened over time. And so what they say is what they're attempting is not unprecedented.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
They are trying to go back to something more like the power the executive used to have in the past because they believe that the administrative agencies have become an unelected fourth branch of government and out of the president's control and particularly out of a Republican president's control. How do you take that argument?
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
Well, I guess I would say he acts at the pleasure of Donald Trump. And the moment Donald Trump wants him out of there, he's gone. The point is centralized control back in the president.
The Ezra Klein Show
What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?
We're seeing immigration arrests running at roughly Obama era levels, but being marketed and conducted with a gleeful cruelty. And we are now seeing the courts respond.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
We're a year later, though, and two things have happened. One is Heitz's book has never left the bestseller list. That is rare. It has struck a chord. The other is that policy is moving in Heitz's direction.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
There's no moral order. I think it was you. I was listening to a conversation with you some years ago. And you said something like, it is just bad. For teenage girls to be endlessly posting pictures of themselves on the Internet for other people to rate right through.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And I I remember thinking that's so unbelievably fucking obvious. And so much not how we actually just talk about it, right? Because what you're making there was fundamentally immoral judgment. I know behind it, there's evidence. But I do find that within the conversation about social media and the way we're constructing childhood, there is this demand to bring the studies, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And I've said this before. I think if you could prove to me That it doesn't matter at all for anxiety at 16 or earnings at 23, whether or not kids spend 2.5 hours or three hours a day on TikTok. I think it would change my view of whether they should do that 0%. Okay. Because I just think it's a bad way to live. Mm-hmm. And it's a bad way to live for other reasons, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
I think it'll create, by nature, it creates self-obsession, right? By nature, it creates this management of the personal brand. And even if I couldn't find correlates there of bad outcomes, I have a view on what it means to be like a flourishing human being that should not include too much of that, right? That wants to keep that boxed up a little bit in the human psyche, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And this is where things feel like they ran aground to me in a lot of the debates. I feel like parenting and the culture parents come from now, unless you are in some form of church, basically, is incredibly insecure about making these judgments. That's right. I don't fully understand why. I don't think it is just a loss of trust thing. Yeah.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
I think it is some set of forces that I don't really understand. But I don't feel like it was like that as much when I was young. And it definitely wasn't like that as much in the past. That's right. And sort of separate almost from everything else, I think this is a huge failure in parenting culture. This just inability to say we have views on what is good or bad. That's right.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has signed one of the most restrictive social media laws in the country.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And they don't require 16 years of randomized controlled trials. They're just actually our views on virtue.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And you can, I think, see this spreading throughout society. The idea that this is just about the kids is wrong. I know you don't want to be political, and I know that the John Hyde agenda is being adopted in red and blue states alike, and we will talk about that.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
But you were saying earlier, look, liberals and conservatives have these different moral foundations, and conservatives care a lot more about the moral inputs. Mm-hmm. And maybe that was true. I look around, I don't see it.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
I'm not asking you to say whether Donald Trump is a moral or immoral person, but what I will say is that the Republican Party under him has become unconcerned with what was traditionally understood as vice in a very different way. So some of that is politeness and etiquette, but some of it is what should the policies be about sports gambling, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
There is a massive deregulation of sports gambling, which is consuming young men. Yes. Crypto is an adjacency of that, right? There's perfectly fine things about crypto, but what we are specifically permitting is crypto as a casino. I was somebody who was very supportive of marijuana legalization, and I think it's gone terribly.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Florida classrooms. All schools in the Buckeye State.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And it's gone terribly, I mean, among other things, because we have just allowed capitalism to get its hooks into it and create more and more and more potent products that are advertised everywhere online. I don't know if either side is particularly concerned with vice right now, but the right has embraced a lot of this too. And I think part of that is just a collapse, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
There is no one left who has political power in this society who feels confident making, I would say, judgments to go against the market, right? There was a market for sports gambling, so we're going to allow it. There's a market for crypto. I think about a lot of things in modernity, as capitalism is itself a kind of moral logic.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And it is a moral logic built on individual expression of wants in the moment. And it was counterbalanced by much more potent religious logics. And these two sort of forces held each other at a rough equilibrium for much of 20th century America. And at some point, the religious counter forces weakened so much That the system fell out of equilibrium.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And now the religious forces are just not very powerful at all. I'm not myself highly religious, but I do think that these were countervailing players and we just don't have them anymore. And like the evidence of that being a problem is actually all around us.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
We are seeing a genuine policy revolution happening in places governed by Republicans, governed by Democrats, in how we treat children in this era of social media. I feel a lot more confident as a parent. We're gonna figure this out by the time my kids are old enough for it to matter.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
I want to think about this, and I guess I'm going to make this next point a little bit to be provocative. I'm not sure how much I believe it. I understand argumentatively and politically why you want to just say, look, it's fine for adults to do basically anything they want, but kids, the children are our future. We got to do something very different there. Fine.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
I think in practice it doesn't work. Why's that? Because if you are going to allow something to be both highly morally and legally permissible the moment somebody is 18, or frankly, in a lot of your frameworks, 16, I'm not saying it is literally impossible that you will implement such a hardcore age verification system that it will be impossible to do beneath that.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
It's probably going to be pretty hard. Now, I think there are places where it works, right? But typically you want friction that is both moral and structural. It's a little bit more of a gradation throughout society. So what we have lost in a lot of places is friction. Yes. And there are things that you want to have some access to, but there'd be friction, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And then, of course, the truck of AI is about to T-bone whatever consensus we socially come to, which scares, to be quite honest, the hell out of me. So I wanted to have Haidt on the show to talk about it. He's a professor at New York University Stern School of Business.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
We had access to things like sports gambling, but you had to drive to Vegas, at least on the West Coast where I grew up. Taking away all the friction, making it available virtually everywhere and online has just then made it very, very, very dangerous to people because, you know, some percentage of people are going to develop a gambling problem. And we know that pretty well.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
What we have done, and I mean, this is the genius of capitalism. What it does is it seeks out how to make the thing more interesting, more potent, more seductive, more alluring. And that's really great until a certain point.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
At which point the friction between you and the thing becomes too low. And then it's very, very, very hard for the limited software of the human mind to regulate the wants, at least in some people. Yeah. And so there's something about the loss of friction.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And I suspect that, and again, this is partially moral frameworks, if we're going to be completely fine with it at 19, it's going to be very hard for it to not be too present at 17.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
He's also the author of The Righteous Mind, which I think is one of the best books on political psychology, as well as a bunch of other books. And he is also the author of the After Babel Substack, which is free, where he and some co-authors are continuing to prosecute the case and think through the research around social media. As always, my email, EzraKleinShow at NYTimes.com.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
So I will stop just trying to be provocative because I do believe you can do age verification. One reason I wanted to have you on right now is it feels like the world is tipping in this. Yeah. So run me through. Let's stay not in Australia, but in the U.S. I feel like every day I turn on the news and I see some other governor or mayor announcing no phones in schools.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Tell me the scope of this at the moment.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
has still the strongest religious culture because of the Church of Latter-day Saints. And they have by far the strongest regulations on social media around children. That's right. I mean, you sort of see the way those two things, that sort of moral framework and that willing to regulate what feels like a vice is happening there. That's right.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
John Haidt, welcome to the show. Ezra, it's great to be back with you. So I want to just begin with the big question.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Thank you. Thank you.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
You had one statistic in the book that I think I've actually read before, but every time I read it, it shocks me anew and maybe now because I have a five-year-old who just turned six, but that at five years old, the human brain is 90% of its adult size and it has more neurons than it will when you're an adult.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
I'm not sure it's healthy. I'm sure it's not healthy. And even in a smaller way, there are fewer newspapers now. There are fewer stable jobs in institutional media. In many ways, it's probably more likely that you can become an independent creator, certainly than it was like 20 years ago.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Is there a danger that the sort of way you want us to raise children is actually suffused in nostalgia for an economy, for a politics that no longer exists? It's not being deformed, it's being adapted.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Well, but the idea that it would be banned was not greeted with flowers and chocolates.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
This is one of the tricky things about success right now, because visible success is almost definitionally constantly present, which is very different than the kind of success of a tremendous physics researcher whose work you can't read because it's very complicated and they're not posting a lot of memes about it. Yeah.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Let's talk about AI. If you ask me, do I think that by the time my three and six-year-old are in middle school, we will have figured out the smartphones and social media in schools question, I think we will. We will. But AI. Right. And it goes, for me, back to friction. What AI is... is functionally the collapse of all friction between you and any desire that can be fulfilled on a computer.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
That's right. So relationships are the one I actually think about the most. I've said this many, many times before. I'm a believer in transformational artificial intelligence. I think it's coming very, very fast. If you ask me if I think we will see economic super growth anytime soon, I would say no.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
I think it is going to be more evident in its upheaval of relationships before it transforms our economy. Because our economy has all kinds of friction in it. It's very hard to rebuild firms around AI. But what about when you can have any kind of digital friend you want? Or for that matter, digital lover.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And that friend, that lover, there was a really good daily on this recently about AI sex bots. Yeah, I listened to that. That was great. The sound in that, though, was frightening to me. Because You got why the AI was a good partner.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
I don't remember exactly, but I do remember I spent a lot of time. I lived on a cul-de-sac in a suburb. And I do remember I spent a lot of time as part of just a roaming pack of kids who lived on my street. And we would be playing kickball on somebody's... garage door. And the other thing I remember about it that I feel like I see less of now is that it was highly age diverse. Exactly.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
More responsive than any man. And it is so much worse at doing that right now than it will be in two years. Yes, that's right. Like it is going to be so good. And it's going to endlessly adapt to what you want from it. That's right. And I think the friction of relationships between human beings is really, really important.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
It's good for me as a person that my wife just does not adapt herself into whatever I want her to say, right? It is part of being a healthy human being that other people... exists with friction to you. I was a very lonely kid. I did not have many friends. What if I'd had a lot of AI friends? And that began to pattern my expectations of other human beings.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And then when they did not fulfill them, then that was a frustration to me. And it made my AI community that much more alluring. This scares the hell out of me. I'm not saying that on a 20-year time frame we won't adapt, but on a 5 or 10, we don't even know how to think about it.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
As I alluded to, I was a pretty friendless kid. I had a lot of trouble socially. I would often have like one or two friends, but for a lot of my childhood, I alienated people. And I remember at one point, my mom saying she wanted to, this is kind of a sad story, but wanted to pay this nice older kid on the street to sort of watch me, but function to be my friend.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
I sort of had the embarrassment or the presence of mind to say no to that. Okay. I try to imagine, though... Mm-hmm. As I was like moving school to school to get away from bullying and was having that much trouble. My parents had no answers for me because they did not. Trying to keep that kid as that kid's parent from disappearing into the computer, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Disappearing into this world where, well, somebody will be, something will be his friend, something will be his companion. And of course, what's going to be the thin edge of the wedge, right? is AI tutors, right? Which are gonna be very effective.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And are gonna be positive too. It's not that this technology will have no good adaptations. Even now, I sometimes use ChatGP with my kids and we sit together and we make up stories and it illustrates them, which is like a really fun thing to do. It's great.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
It's all easy to sit here and say, well, I don't want my 13-year-old having a sex bot or an array of sex bots in their pocket, but it's not going to come in like that. Much in the way that the internet came in more benignly before it got jacked up to 11. It'll come in... For kids who are having a lot more trouble socially, but now there's somebody for them to talk to.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
For kids whose parents work multiple jobs, neurodivergent kids. And a lot of it will be good. It will be good for some kids. But the more adoption there is, and the more these companies... are already in the door and competing with each other then for your kid's attention, the more the sort of darker side of it will begin to flower. That's right. And that's what worries me here.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
It's all so new, but it's all so adaptable. I was talking with somebody who works at one of the big AI companies about this, and he was saying to me, oh, but the good thing about AI is that it's really flexible. You can tell it, you can give it whatever value prompt you want to give it, right? If you want to tell it to not just do whatever your kid want, right? You could do that.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And yeah, it's sort of always true that you could. But when I look at the way the markets actually work here, that eventually what's going to happen is we're going to give people what they want, not what we think they should want. And that's the part. I can imagine negotiating structures on this over a long period of time as we have with social media maybe. Yeah.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
But we're not going to understand it for a long period of time. That's right. We'll never catch up with it. And it's going to be evolving very rapidly during this period of time.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Yeah, that's right. It's like hard not to have a phone. It's by app. It's not even by the computer.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
The one thing I worry about with using the AI to draw everything my kid wants to draw is that does it reduce the interest in actually drawing?
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Let me ask you about another dimension of this, which I've found myself obsessing over recently. So you're a professor at a business school, and you're a professor at an elite school. And we were talking about instrumental education earlier, right? I think that it was a pretty reasonable expectation.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
I think parents would raise their kids and push them to study with the sort of expectation that, you know what, if they could get to the NYU Stern School of Business, they're probably going to be okay out there in the economy. And then you mentioned how good AI is getting at being an adjunct to your research. Yeah. And I already see that.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
You know, I've been playing around with deep research and I can already see how good that is getting at research and how quick it is. And it would change what I needed in terms of research. It feels like an event horizon to me. Yes, it does. Of what should my children be educated towards? Mm-hmm.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
In many ways, I would say it'll be much safer to be educated towards being an electrician than to be educated towards being, you know, a contract lawyer. And I doubt there has been a moment as a parent when what society, the economy will want or value or reward is. in people in 15 or 20 years has been as liquid. Yeah, that's right. How would you think about this?
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
I do feel like this is a connecting thread in a lot of your work, which is that human beings... need to develop as human beings, around other human beings, in little human societies. And that the more we, particularly in childhood, pull them away from that, the worse they will turn out in terms of
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
We didn't think about radically changing it. A few companies did. A few companies have radically changed childhood and we've accepted it.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Isaac Jones with Afim Shapiro and Amin Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Elias Iskwith, and Kristen Lynn.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
We have original music by Pat McCusker, audience strategy by Christina Samieluski, and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Something you mentioned about the 90s in the book is I am familiar with the statistic that parents today, despite working two jobs much more often than they did in the past, despite fathers being more involved, they both spend much more time with their kids than they did before.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
I haven't realized that that was not a sort of steady increase over the decades, that it's sharply an increase in the 90s. That's right.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. In March of last year, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published this book called The Anxious Generation, which caused, let's call it, a stir.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
No, he didn't. I want to get a tension in there with at least the culture of modern parenting. I think a lot of parents believe that the simplest way to ask, were you a good parent this week, is how much time you spent with your children. Quality time. Quality time. I feel that.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And you're saying here that's not true.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
So if you're tracking dynamics here, you have the 90s, we're getting more afraid of danger. You're having this deterioration in social trust, this deterioration in is the whole community parenting your kid? Right. And it's right about now. that you begin having an explosion in screen possibilities. Yeah, that's it. So I remember when I was younger, I remember Nickelodeon emerging. Okay. Right?
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Jonathan Haidt is telling a scary story that many parents are primed to believe. I always found the conversation over this book a little annoying because it got to me. at one of the difficulties we're having parenting, one of the difficulties we're having in society, which is this tendency to instrumentalize everything into social science.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Before then, there wasn't a TV channel that was programming for children at all times. Right, right. Before then, it's like there are cartoons sometimes. There was kids shows sometimes. Saturday mornings. That's right. All the time. Right.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And obviously from there, you get an explosion of cable channels, eventually the internet, eventually iPads and iPhones and video game consoles and all the rest of it. So talk about the sort of handoff.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
I got a Nintendo, the NES, not the Super Nintendo, the first mass-available console and mass-adopted. You could argue about the Atari or whatever, but the Nintendo Entertainment System. What year was that? I don't remember now, but I was young. You're talking about late 80s? Yeah, okay. Yeah.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
To me, that's a big dividing point because the things that Nickelodeon and the NES do is they make it possible to put something on the television at any second of the day that will entertain a child intensely.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
One of the reasons I felt myself like a little put off by the debate that emerged around your book with a sort of like endless back and forth on the identification strategy of, you know, was this really the cause of anxiety or a correlate of anxiety and what's going on in South Korea is it got at this feeling I keep having, which is that we have lost any kind of independent and I would positively say paternalistic idea of what we want human beings to be.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
And we have allowed it all to be dominated by metrics. So on the one hand, there is, are you getting good grades? If you're getting good grades, then you're fine. It's not really true.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
Unless I can show you on a chart the way something is bad, we have almost no language for saying it's bad. It is to me a collapse in our sense of what a good life is, what it means to flourish as a human being. And so I stayed a bit out of that debate because on the one hand, I couldn't settle it. And on the other hand, I didn't think I should come in and say it wasn't important.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
We definitely see it's not true now because we're watching kids, I mean, partially through grade inflation, get plenty of good grades, not get pregnant as teenagers, not do a bunch of drugs, and they're doing terribly. The other side of it, though, is that then there's this...
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
I would call it the logic of capitalism, the logic of the consumer economy, which is that if you enjoy doing it, if you want to do it, then we need to have a very high bar for a reason to stop you, right? Our view is that kids should not freebase crack all the time. We've decided that's not something we should let them do.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
But if they're playing mass and multiplayer online games all the time and they enjoy it and their grades are fine, what are you really going to say? Right. And somewhere in this, some texture is lost. Like I think that I associate more with classical education or something. But we're trying to develop certain facilities that are part of being a human being.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
I always think about attention as one of them. What kind of attention? We hear all this concern now that kids are graduated in high school. Even kids going to good colleges can't read a full book. Can't read a book. Can't watch a movie. But there's more than that. I think we care about if our children are nice or kind. We sort of have that.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
But there's a lot about all kinds of virtues that we've just lost the way to talk about and that we're not comfortable saying. I mean, I see it with parents all the time. You need some great reason to say the kid shouldn't be on the iPad. And maybe it's that you think their grades will be bad or their anxiety will be high.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
But you can't just say like nobody feels that comfortable saying it's just bad. I just don't want you looking at the screen all the time. I think it's bad. I think it's not the way to be a human being. That's right.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
So that's what I'd like you to talk a bit about. You have one chapter on this in the book. It's a little shorter. It's about spirituality. But your first book is all about moral frameworks. Mm-hmm. Connect these for me because I do, we lost paternalism. Like, I do think parenting lost an idea that it is confident about. Yeah. About what we are trying to raise people towards.
The Ezra Klein Show
There Is a Liberal Answer to Elon Musk
You are not the party of working families when the places you govern or places working families cannot afford to live. In the American political system, to lose people is to lose power. If these trends hold, the 2030 census will shift the Electoral College sharply to the right. The states that Kamala Harris won in 2024, they'll lose about 11 House seats and Electoral College votes.
The Ezra Klein Show
There Is a Liberal Answer to Elon Musk
The states that Trump won would gain them. So in that electoral college, a Democrat could win every single state Harris won in 2024 and also win Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and still lose the presidency. There is a policy failure haunting blue states. It has become too hard to build and too expensive to live in the places where Democrats govern. It's too hard to build homes.
The Ezra Klein Show
There Is a Liberal Answer to Elon Musk
It's too hard to build clean energy. It's too hard to build mass transit. The problem isn't technical. We know how to build apartment complexes. We know how to lay down solar panels and transmission lines. We know how to build trains. The problem is the rules and the laws and the political cultures that govern construction in many blue states.
The Ezra Klein Show
There Is a Liberal Answer to Elon Musk
The Second Avenue subway project in New York City, it was the most expensive subway project by kilometer the world has ever seen. Has New York dramatically reformed its policies to make the next one easier and cheaper? No, of course it hasn't. Did the decades of delay and the billions of cost overruns on Boston's Big Dig change how Massachusetts builds? Not really. California.
The Ezra Klein Show
There Is a Liberal Answer to Elon Musk
California is the worst housing problem in the country. In 2022, the state had 12% of the country's population. It had 30% of the country's homeless population, and it had 50%, 5-0, of its unsheltered homeless population. Has this unfathomable failure led to California building more homes than it was building a decade ago? No, it hasn't.
The Ezra Klein Show
There Is a Liberal Answer to Elon Musk
Our politics is split right now between a left that defends government even when it doesn't work and a right that wants to destroy government even when it does work. What we need is a political party that makes government work. Democrats could be that party. They should be that party. But it requires them to first confront what they have done to make government fail.
The Ezra Klein Show
There Is a Liberal Answer to Elon Musk
I could tell you a dozen stories. In the book I've just written, I do. But let me here tell you just one. In 1982, so more than 40 years ago, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill to study what it would take to build a high-speed rail system across the state. He liked what he saw, and so did California's voters.
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In 1996, California formed a high-speed rail authority to plan for construction. High-speed rail is not some futuristic technology like nuclear fusion or flying cars. Japan broke ground on high-speed rail back in 1959. You can ride on these trains elsewhere. I have ridden on these trains.
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In 2008, California's voters approved Prop 1A, which set aside $10 billion to begin construction on a high-speed rail line that would connect Los Angeles and San Francisco. It would run through the Central Valley. It would get there in under two hours and 40 minutes. And it would cost, they thought, $33.6 billion.
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California's high-speed rail authority estimated we'd be able to ride that train by the year 2020. And the news kept getting better for high-speed rail. In 2009, President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law. That had hundreds of billions of dollars to build the infrastructure of the future. And high-speed rail in particular had captured Obama's imagination.
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Obama wanted it to happen here. In California, where the voters had already begun planning and funding high-speed rail, was the obvious place. And the political stars had just kept aligning. In 2008, Arnold Schwarzenegger, a high-speed rail critic, was governor.
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But in 2011, high-speed rail's foremost champion returned when Jerry Brown won back the governor's mansion almost 30 years after he first left it. In his 2012 State of the State address, Brown marked high-speed rail as his signature infrastructure project.
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But it didn't happen. By 2018, it was brutally clear that nothing was going to be rideable by 2020. And the cost estimate, it wasn't $33 billion anymore. It had risen and risen and risen. By 2018, it was $76 billion. The next year, 2019, Gavin Newsom, who had served as Brown's lieutenant governor, succeeded him as governor.
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And in his first state of the state address, he said what everybody already knew, which was at high speed around California was failing.
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Today, California is trying to salvage something, anything from what has become a fiasco. It's now trying to build a line between the agricultural centers of Merced and Bakersfield. It's a line no one would have authorized if it had been the plan presented in the first place. The latest estimate is that line alone
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will cost $35 billion to complete, as much as the entire LA to SF line was estimated to cost in 2008. And this Merced to Bakersfield line, it won't begin carrying passengers until sometime between 2030 and 2033. I'm told now that finishing the LA to San Francisco line will cost $110 billion at least. California doesn't have anywhere near that kind of funding for high-speed rail.
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From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. Democrats have a problem that runs deeper than the 2024 election. They have a problem that runs deeper than Elon Musk's assault on the government. Look at the places they govern. Strongholds like New York and Illinois and where I'm from, California. They're losing people. In 2023, California saw a net loss of 268,000 residents.
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So they're building this line with no idea how they will ever finish it. What went so wrong here? In October of 2023, I went to Fresno, California, and I toured the miles of rail infrastructure that the California High-Speed Rail Authority has already built. What I heard as I walked that track with the engineers who have built it and the people overseeing it, it wasn't engineering problems.
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In New York, 179,000. Why are all these people leaving? In surveys, the dominant reason is simply this. The cost of living is too high. It's too expensive to buy a house. It's too expensive to get childcare. You have to live too far from your work. And so they're going to places where all of that is cheaper. Texas, Florida, Arizona. I know these families. These families are my friends.
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It was political problems. I stood on a patch of the 99 freeway that had been moved in order to clear the Hope for Trains path. Not far from there, there had been a mini storage facility. In folk imagination, eminent domain is a simple process by which the state simply tells you it wants your land, and it gives you some money, and it takes it from you.
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In reality, it took the High Speed Rail Authority four separate requests for possession and two and a half years of legal wrangling to get that little tiny spit of land. In this story, it repeated itself again and again and again everywhere we went. There are parts of the high-speed rail line that intersect with freight rail lines.
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But the freight rail lines, they're so busy in the holiday season that some impose a construction moratorium from October to December. So in those areas, construction just stops for months every year. Trains are cleaner than cars, but high-speed rail has had to clear every inch of its route through environmental reviews, with lawsuits lurking around every corner.
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The environmental review process began in 2012, and by 2024, 12 years later, it still wasn't done. Many Californians were confused that construction begun in the Central Valley, which was far less populated than the corridors near Los Angeles or San Francisco. Why did the authority begin construction there rather than near the megacities?
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One reason was that when California applied for federal money, the Obama administration wanted bids that would improve air quality in poor communities. And so the $3 billion the federal government offered, it wasn't really to build high-speed rail. It was to begin building high-speed rail in ways that addressed air pollution in specific communities.
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The Central Valley is poorer and more polluted than coastal California, so federal funding went there and so did the initial construction. But that made it less likely high-speed rail would generate the ridership, the political support, or the financial backing to ever actually finish. And that, of course, is bad for air pollution in Fresno and across the state.
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What has taken so long on high-speed rail is not hammering nails or pouring concrete. It's process. It's negotiating. Negotiating with courts, with funders, with business owners, with homeowners, with farm owners, with other parts of the government. Those negotiations cost time, which cost money.
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Those negotiations lead to changes in the route or the design or the construction, and that costs money and that costs time. Those negotiations are the product of decades of liberal policies meant to protect against government abuses. And they may do that, but they also prevent government from building quickly or affordably.
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In the time California spent failing to complete its 500-mile high-speed rail system, China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail. The Chinese government doesn't spend years debating with judges over whether it needs to move a storage facility. Its power leads to abuse and imperiousness. It also leads to trains.
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And look, I don't want America to become China, but I do want it to be able to build trains as China can, as Europe can, as Japan can. This is an awkward time to make this argument. Elon Musk and Doge are trying to raise the federal government to the ground.
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Musk has been a loud critic of California's high-speed rail project, calling it a fraud, saying we should just let him build his imaginary Hyperloop instead. But in reality, he's never offered a plan that would work to build anything better or cheaper than high-speed rail. His alternative, in truth, is nothing.
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And I refuse to accept that this is our choice, a Democratic Party that will not make government work and a Republican Party that wants to make government fail. What those two parties have created over decades is scarcity. Scarcity of homes, of good infrastructure, of clean energy, of public goods. But the difference between them is that the populist right loves scarcity.
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It is powered by scarcity. When there's not enough to go around, we look with suspicion on anyone who might take what we have. Look, Donald Trump could have run on more. He could have run on bringing Texas's housing policies to the nation. In Houston, there's no zoning code, so building is easy, and the average home sells for a bit over $300,000.
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Compare that to Los Angeles, where the average home now sells for over a million dollars. Or look at Austin, which has been a popular destination for many fleeing San Francisco's high housing costs. In November of 2024, San Francisco's metro area... And remember, it has a housing shortage. It authorized the building of 292 new housing structures. In Austin, they authorized 3,059.
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In the 2024 campaign, Trump and Vance ran on none of that. Instead, the housing crisis became a cudgel they used against immigrants.
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Trump could have run on the success Operation Warp Speed had in speeding up the COVID vaccines. Instead, he's slashing government funding for science and medical research and firing scientists. He could have run on making it easier to build energy of all kinds in America. Instead, he's trying to destroy the solar and wind industries.
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He could have run on making it easier for Americans to make things and to trade them with the world. Instead, he's trying to cut international trade, imposing tariffs and alienating partners. Elon Musk is rich because of SpaceX and Tesla, companies that are built on federal subsidies. But he's slashing what government can do rather than reimagining what it can do.
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I've lived with them in these places, and I've watched many of them move away from the place they love, the city they wanted to raise their children, because they could not afford to live there. You cannot be the party of working families when the places you govern or places working families cannot afford to live.
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The answer to a politics of scarcity is a politics of abundance, a politics that asks what it is that people really need and then organizes government and markets to make sure there is enough of it. That doesn't give you the childlessly simple divides that has so deformed our politics. Government is not simply good at all times. It is not simply bad at all times.
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Sometimes government has to get out of the way, like in housing. Sometimes it has to take a central role, like in creating markets or organizing resources for technologies that do not yet exist and that we need and that are too risky for markets to fund.
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There is going to be pressure over these next few years as Elon Musk and Donald Trump dismantle the federal government to see only the sins of the MAGA right. And don't get me wrong, the MAGA right is dangerous. A resistance is needed. But so, too, is an alternative.
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If liberals do not want Americans to turn to the false promises of strongmen, they need to offer them the fruits of effective government. In the long run, the way to sideline, to marginalize dangerous political movements like MAGA is to make liberalism actually deliver. But if Democrats are to become the party of abundance, they have to confront their own role in creating scarcity.
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In the last few decades, Democrats took a wrong turn. They became the party that believes in government, that defends government, not the party that forces government to work. Liberals spent a generation working at every level of government and society to make it harder to build recklessly.
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They got used to crafting coalitions and legislation that gave everyone a bit of what they wanted, even if it meant the final product was astonishingly expensive, or decades late, or perhaps never found its way to completion at all. Then they explained away government's failures. They excused their own selfishness, putting out yard signs saying, no human being is illegal. Kindness is everything.
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Even as they fought affordable housing nearby and pushed the working class out of the cities they ran. To unmake this machine will be painful, but it's necessary. If liberals don't make government work, zealots like Elon Musk are going to come in and burn it down.
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Don't Believe Him
The message wasn't in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The speed with which things were happening and changing. The sense that this is Trump's country now. It is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. that he is limitless. If Trump tells a state to stop spending money, then the money stops.
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Don't Believe Him
If he says that birthright citizenship is over, then it's over. Or so he wants you to think. In Trump's first term, people said, don't normalize him. In a second, though, the task, I think, is a little bit clearer. Don't believe him. Because Trump knows the power of marketing, the power of belief. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true.
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Don't Believe Him
He clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV. He remade himself as a winner after the 2020 election by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office, but Trump has never wanted to be president, not the way it's defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. What he's always wanted to be is king.
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Don't Believe Him
And his plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, if we believe he already has all that power, it becomes likelier that we'll let him govern as a king. We will then give him that power. Don't believe him. Trump has real powers, but they are the powers of the presidency, the powers Joe Biden had, the powers Barack Obama had.
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Don't Believe Him
The pardon power is vast and unrestricted, and so he could indeed pardon the January 6th rioters. Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch.
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Don't Believe Him
And so, yes, Trump could remove protection from Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Mark Milley and even Brian Hook, this largely unknown former State Department official who's under threat from Iran, who even donated time to Trump's transition team. All of this, it was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness. This from a man who nearly died by an assassin's bullet months ago.
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Don't Believe Him
As much as anything ever has been this to me, this was an x-ray of the smallness of Trump's soul. But it was an act that was within his official power. But the president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, his birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge, by a Reagan appointee, who told Trump's lawyers...
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Don't Believe Him
I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind. A judge froze Trump's spending freeze. He froze it even before it went into full effect. And shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the entire order, in part to avoid a court case that it seemed pretty clear they would lose.
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Don't Believe Him
What Bannon wanted, what the Trump administration wants, is to keep everything moving fast. Muzzle velocity, remember? If you're always consumed by the next outrage, you can't look closely at the last one. Then the impression of Trump's power remains and the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed. The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness. Don't believe him.
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Don't Believe Him
You can see this a few ways. Is Trump playing a part? Is he making a bet or is he triggering a crisis? Those, I think, are the options. And I'm not certain that even he knows the answer. Trump has always been an improviser. But if you take it as a bet, a calculation, then here is a bet he's making.
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Don't Believe Him
Maybe this Supreme Court, stocked with his appointees, gives him powers no peacetime president has ever possessed. Perhaps all this becomes legal now that he has asserted its legality. It's not impossible to imagine that bet paying off for him. But the odds are bad. So what if the bet fails? What if Trump's arrogations of power are soundly rejected by the courts?
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Don't Believe Him
Then comes the question of constitutional crisis. Does he just ignore the court's ruling? To do that would be to attempt a kind of coup. I wonder if they have the stomach for that. The withdrawal of the OMB order, to me, suggests they don't. Because bravado aside, Trump's political capital is thin.
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Don't Believe Him
Both in his first and his second terms, he entered office with approval ratings below that of any other president in the modern era. Gallup is Trump's approval rating at 47%. That is about 10 points beneath Joe Biden in January of 2021. There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders rather than submitting these very same directives as legislation had passed through Congress.
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Don't Believe Him
A more powerful executive could convince Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes or to reform the civil service to give him the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. And there's a good reason to do that. To write these changes into legislation would make them both more durable and would allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way. He would be reforming the entire system.
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Don't Believe Him
Even if Trump's real aim is just to bring the civil service to heel, even if all he really wants to do is rid the state of his opponents and turn it to his own ends, he would be better off arguing that he is simply trying to bring the high-performance management culture of Silicon Valley to the federal government. It's rule one of a power grab. He never wanted to look like a power grab.
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Don't Believe Him
But Republicans at the moment, they have only a three-seat edge in the House, smallest majority since the Great Depression. They have a 53-seat majority in the Senate. Trump is obviously doing nothing to reach out to Democrats. If Trump tried to pass this agenda's legislation, it would fail.
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Don't Believe Him
It would likely die in the House, and even if it didn't, it would certainly die before the filibuster in the Senate. And that would make Trump look weak. And Trump doesn't want to look weak. He remembers John McCain humiliating him in his first term by casting the deciding vote against Obamacare appeal. Congress is a place where you can lose.
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Don't Believe Him
That is a tension at the heart of Trump's whole strategy. Trump is acting like a king because he's too weak to govern like a president. He's trying to substitute perception for reality. He's doing that hoping that perception then becomes reality. But that can only happen if we believe him. This flurry of activity, it's meant to suggest the existence of a plan.
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Don't Believe Him
The Trump team wants it known that they're ready this time. They've been preparing, plotting, scheming. They will control events rather than be controlled by them, control institutions rather than be curbed by them. But the closer you look, even at this first two weeks, the less true it seems. They're scrambling and flailing already. They're leaking against each other in the press already.
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Don't Believe Him
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, go back and listen to what Steve Bannon told PBS's Frontline in 2019.
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Don't Believe Him
We learned that the OMB directive was drafted purportedly without the input or oversight of key Trump officials. It didn't go through the proper approval process, an administration official told the Washington Post. For that to be the process and product of such a sweeping signature initiative in the second week of a president's second term, it's embarrassing. But it's not just a spending freeze.
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Don't Believe Him
The Trump administration is waging an immediate war on the bureaucracy, trying to replace the deep state they believe hampered them in the first term. And a big part of this project seems to have been outsourced to Elon Musk, who's bringing the tactics he used at Twitter to the federal government.
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Don't Believe Him
He is longtime aides now at the Office of Personnel Management, and the email that got sent out to nearly all federal employees even reused the subject line of the email he sent out to Twitter employees after the acquisition. A fork in the road. It's a kind of bragging. Elon wants you, he wants everybody, to know it was him. The email offers millions of civil servants a backdoor buyout.
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Don't Believe Him
Agree to resign, and in theory at least, you can collect your paycheck and benefits until the end of September without doing any work. The Doge account on X described it this way. Take the vacation you always wanted, or just watch movies and chill while receiving your full government pay and benefits.
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Don't Believe Him
The Washington Post reported that the email blindsided many in the Trump administration who would normally have consulted on a notice like that. It blindsided many of the people who are going to have to run these agencies that are now going to be dotted by resignations. I suspect Musk thinks of the federal workforce as this huge mass of woke and largely useless ideologues.
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Don't Believe Him
For most federal workers, they have very little to do with politics. About 16% of them work in healthcare. These are nurses and doctors who work for the Veterans Affairs Department. How many of them does Musk want to lose? How many primary care doctors treating veterans is he hoping take a buyout? Twitter worked terribly after Musk's takeover.
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Don't Believe Him
It had these frequent outages and bugs, but its outages are not a national scandal. When VA health care degrades, it is a national scandal. To have launched this attack on the civil service so loudly and publicly and brazenly is to be assured of the blame if anything later goes wrong. What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos.
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Don't Believe Him
They don't have some secret reservoir of focus and attention. The rest of us do not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself, that it is in a sense a replacement for an actual strategy, for thinking and talking things through, for consultation, for planning things out. Don't believe them.
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Don't Believe Him
I had a conversation a couple months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive. And I asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. And what he said was that he would worry most if Trump went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular, that made his opposition weaker and more confused.
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Don't Believe Him
Muzzle velocity. Bannon's insight there is real. Focus is a fundamental substance of democracy. It is particularly the substance of opposition. People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media, be it mainstream media or social media. So if you overwhelm the media...
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Don't Believe Him
If he worked by stealth, if he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the state in the places where it was weakest, where people couldn't really see him doing it. But Trump didn't do any of that. Instead, it's got muzzle velocity.
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Don't Believe Him
And so the opposition to Trump, which seems so listless and absent after the election, now it's beginning to rouse itself. There's a subreddit for federal employees where one of the top posts reads, "'This non-buyout really seems to have backfired.
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Don't Believe Him
"'I'll be honest, before that email went out, "'I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell, "'but now I'm fired up to make these goons "'as frustrated as possible.'" As I write this, it's been upvoted more than 39,000 times, and civil servant after civil servant is echoing the initial sentiment. The people oppose you ideologically. They're going to fight you.
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Don't Believe Him
Offering them a buyout isn't very helpful at all. In Iowa this week, Democrats flipped a state Senate seat in a district that Trump had won easily in 2024. The attempted spending freeze gave Democrats their voice back as he zeroed in on protecting the popular programs Trump had imperiled. Trump isn't building support right now. He's losing it. He isn't fracturing his opposition.
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Don't Believe Him
He is finally uniting it. This is the weakness of the strategy that Bannon proposed and that Trump is following. It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting. You have to keep moving. You have to keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear to keep the media and the opposition overwhelmed. But then you overwhelm yourself.
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Don't Believe Him
They are flooding their own zone. I don't know that Trump sees his own fork in the road coming. He may believe that he has all the power he's claiming. That would be a mistake on his part. It would be a self-deception that could doom his presidency. But the real threat is if he convinces the rest of us to believe he has power he does not have.
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Don't Believe Him
if you give it too many places it needs to look all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next to the next, faster, faster, faster, no coherent opposition can really emerge. It is hard to even think coherently. Donald Trump's first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon's strategy like a script. The flood is a point. The overwhelm is a point.
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The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
In the long term, success is what makes you strong. It would be good right now, good for their party, good for the country, if Republicans displayed the values they once claimed to prize, a willingness to offend their own side, a mistrust of institutional authority, an eagerness to debate the questions that those in power do not wish to see debated. But we are seeing none of that.
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The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
We can be cowed by the in-group policing that we inflict on ourselves. and a little quick to take up whatever the cause of the moment is. But the real purpose of the MPC insult was self-congratulation. The right was full of live players. You could see it in their willingness to offend, their mistrust of institutions, their eagerness to debate what liberals would not even say out loud.
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The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
This is the NPC problem we actually face. A non-player Congress driven by Republicans who serve Trump's ambitions first. Congressional Republicans who have gone quiet. We are left relying on the courts. And yeah, that may work, but this is not the system working. It's a system failing.
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The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
This became part of the Trumpist right's self-definition. They were the nonconformists, the coalition that wasn't made of automatons. And that's what America needed. Live players. And here we are in 2025. And at this point, I'm willing to concede at least half the argument. American politics does have an NPC problem, possibly a lethal one. But it's not on the left.
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The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
I can make a generous case for a lot of what the Trump administration is on some level trying to do, or at least saying they're trying to do. There is something to the argument that the administrative state is too hard for the president to guide or even control. Government is too gummed up by process and protocol. It is too hard to hire and fire in the civil service.
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The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
Even if I agree with the goals of many DEI programs, and I do, many of them don't achieve those goals. Some of them make the problems they seek to fix worse. There hasn't been rigor at looking at which is which and getting rid of the bad ones. There is actually a good argument for auditing USAID.
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The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
We probably should convert more of what that agency spends to cash grants and direct public health support. And yes, how the government manages software procurement and bills and maintains digital services is hopelessly cumbersome. I was saying all this before the election too. All of it is well-known, including among liberals.
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The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
Many liberals have spent a lot of time trying to think about how to fix these problems. And so it is a genuine failure of Democrats that they did not put more energy into making the government faster and better and more responsive when they were in charge. How the hell did the Biden administration pass $42 billion for broadband in 2021 and have basically nothing to show for it by November of 2024?
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The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
How did they get $7.5 billion for electric vehicle chargers but only build a few hundred of them by the end of their term? Why is it all so slow? Democrats became champions of a government that often didn't work. And that's part of the reason Trump won. Not the only reason, not the biggest reason, it's not as important as the price of eggs.
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The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
But when people feel the government isn't working, the party promising change beats a party rallying in defense. When Elon Musk says that the election gave Republicans a mandate for reform, he's not totally wrong.
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The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
But look at how Musk justifies that mandate. The proof is that Republicans control the House and the Senate. So why not write some bills? Sure, Republican majorities are narrow, but bipartisanship here, it wasn't out of the question. Democrats were defeated and ready to deal. Their own voters wanted them to deal.
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The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
A January poll by CBS and YouGov found that 54% of Democrats wanted their congressional representatives to work with the Trump administration. It was only 46% of Democrats who wanted relentless opposition. One month later, February, only 35% of Democrats want cooperation, and now 65% want all-out opposition. That is a lot of political capital the Trump administration burnt in just one month.
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The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
And for what? I've covered Washington for decades now. There's gray in the spirit. If this was about policy— Trump and his team would have gone through Congress. They didn't wanna go line by line through USAID and figure out what worked and what didn't. They didn't wanna release a package of proposed spending cuts and debate them.
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The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
They didn't wanna think through new civil service regulations, balancing ethics and independence and responsiveness. What they wanted was power. What Donald Trump wanted was power. And so they're trying to remake our system of government, not our laws. And they've identified a weak point in the system. And now they're trying to drive a flaming cyber truck through it. That weak point is Congress.
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The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
And the reason the Trump administration might succeed in taking Congress's power is that they have turned congressional Republicans into NPCs. The vulnerability in the system here goes way back. In Federalist 51, James Madison set out the challenge he and his colleagues faced in writing the Constitution.
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The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
He said, in framing a government, which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this. You must first enable the government to control the governed. And the next place oblige it to control itself. So how does a government control itself?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
The founder's idea was that it controls itself through internal competition between independent branches, each of which wants to protect its own power. It was a competition between them that would keep the system balanced. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition, Madison wrote. But one branch was unquestionably designed to be stronger than the others. Congress controls the money.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
Congress has the power to declare war. Congress can overturn presidential vetoes. Congress can impeach federal judges, cabinet officers, and the president. Congress comes first in the Constitution. Why was Congress made so strong? Because Congress reflects a second, and in some ways the more important and enduring, form of fracture the Founders imagined.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
Our political system was designed to fracture power by place. Senators are elected by states. Until 1913, they were elected by state legislatures. The House is sliced up into geographically bound districts. And so every member of Congress represents a place, and every place is believed to have its own interests and culture and politics.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
That ultimately is what members of Congress are supposed to represent, the particular needs of a particular group of voters in a particular place. And so power would be fractured. It can never nationalize into just one force. The framers of the Constitution got a lot right, but they got a lot wrong, and one of the big things that got wrong was visible almost immediately.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. A few years back, the online right became enamored of a new epithet for liberals. NPC, short for non-player character. The term was lifted from video games, where an NPC refers to the computer-controlled characters that populate the game, while you, the live player, you make the actual decisions. NPCs don't have minds of their own.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
The Founders imagined a political system free of political parties. Within a few years, they had formed their own political parties. But for much of American history, their second assumption held. Geography kept American politics fractured. It kept power fractured because it kept America's political parties fractured.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
Yes, we've had Republicans and Democrats for a long time, but in the 20th century, that two-party system was really a four-party system. The Democrats were split between the liberals we know today and the Southern Dixiecrats, a sort of internal party whose primary goal was upholding segregation. The Republicans were split between conservatives as we know them today and Northern liberals.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
They don't have agency. They're automatons. They do as they're told. NBC quickly became a favor dismissal for all those liberals with their BLM and MeToo hashtags, their Ukrainian flag icons, their they-them pronouns and anti-racism reading groups. Liberals in this story, they thought what they were allowed to think. They said what they were allowed to say.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
It is astonishing from our vantage point to really wrap your mind around this, but it's true for much of the 20th century. To say you were a Republican or a Democrat didn't reveal whether you were a liberal or a conservative. In 1973, Senator Joe Biden opposed the Roe v. Wade decision.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
Around that same time, President Richard Nixon proposed a universal healthcare bill and created the Environmental Protection Agency. George Wallace started out in politics as a Democrat. Politics was different then. The parties were different then. Because parties that contained so many different places and ideologies could not act in lockstep. And so bipartisanship was common.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
The Civil Rights Act of 1964, yes, it was pushed by a Democratic president, but congressional Republicans were crucial to its passage. When Watergate began coming to light, Congress acted as a collective. Only four House Republicans voted against opening the impeachment inquiry into Nixon, and it was ultimately a delegation of congressional Republicans that persuaded Nixon to resign.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
And this independence wasn't just on impeachment. When Nixon was refusing to spend money that Congress had appropriated, a policy known as impoundment, Congress acted to protect its power. Republicans and Democrats alike. The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 passed the House with only six no votes. Only six. It passed the Senate without a single vote in opposition.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
Republicans and Democrats in Congress acted to protect their power. That was how the system was supposed to work. But that was then. Here in 2025, President Trump is impounding money that Congress has appropriated in clear defiance of that impoundment bill that passed nearly unanimously. He's trying to erase agencies that Congress created.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
And that means asserting the power to erase agencies that Congress created. And while the courts are standing in his way, Congress is doing nothing while Trump takes away their power. Congress is not fighting to stop the destruction of USAID, even though its current structure was created by a bill passed by a Republican House and Senate in 1998. It's astonishing.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
Republicans in Congress could demand that Trump cut them in. They won this election too. This is their job. It is their job to write these bills. Agreeing with Trump's policy aims need not mean agreeing with his power grab. The most powerful branch of government, the branch with the power to check the others, is supine. It is not that it can't act to protect its power.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
It's that it will not act to protect its power. This is a non-player Congress. Behind it is a collapse of the structure of government the founders envisioned and the nationalization of the two parties. I'm not going to rehearse the whole story of how the parties nationalized here. I spent a lot of time on the story. If you'd like to read about it, I wrote a whole book called Why We're Polarized.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
But it has been true for decades now. And the possibility that it would lead to something exactly like this happening has been feared for decades. Go back to 2006.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
Daryl Levinson and Richard Pildes published an article in the Harvard Law Review called Separation of Parties, Not Powers, in which they warned that, quote, "...the practical distinction between party-divided and party-unified government rivals in significance and often dominates the constitutional distinction between the branches."
The Ezra Klein Show
The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
And they said, it calls into question many of the foundational assumptions of separation of powers, law, and theory. Yeah, it sure does. If Democrats controlled Congress right now, Congress would be a check on Donald Trump. Since Republicans control it, it is not a check on Donald Trump.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
And what you're seeing there is that to speak of Congress as an institution with ambition and will is to mislead yourself. Congress is a power center. What matters is which party controls it and how that party acts. It is parties that now compete with each other, not branches. In 2005, President George W. Bush nominated his White House counsel, Harriet Myers, to the Supreme Court.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
You might have seen these memes if for your sins you're sufficiently online. Featureless gray faces, sometimes surrounded by liberal icons. Elon Musk loved posting them. Like any good insult, the NPC meme served a dual purpose. It contains a kernel of truth about its target. We liberals can be conformist. We can be too afraid to offend. We can be overly deferential to institutions.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
And she had to withdraw because the Republican-controlled Senate found her unqualified and ideologically unreliable. The fact that Bush wanted her on the court, that wasn't enough. Congressional Republicans had their own views. In 2009, President Barack Obama had nominated Tom Daschle to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, only to see Daschle withdraw.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
Daschle, the former majority leader of the U.S. Senate, was found to owe back taxes, and he thought his own nomination might fail to make it through a Senate filled with his former colleagues. But this Republican Party is no check on Trump. That's been the message of Trump's nominations. RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth. These were tests.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
Senate Republicans know these nominees are unqualified. You could see it in the hearings.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
Senate Republicans don't want to vote for these nominees. Not one of them got into politics to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who ran for president in 2023, two years ago, as a pro-choice Democrat, a secretary of health and human services. But Trump knows what he's doing. You force people into submission early, and soon it becomes a habit.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
Congressional Republicans have their reasons for bowing to him. Washington is aflame with talk of the primary challenges that Elon Musk will fund against any Republican who makes trouble for Trump. All of them fear that Trump will personally weigh in against them in a primary.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
What a unbelievably strange life, to rise as far as they have in politics, to wield as much power as they could, and to be as afraid as they are. The NPC critique got something right. There are real dangers to conformity. Political parties, even presidential administrations, are stronger when they can hear contrary voices.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours
Musk using his billions to scare congressional Republicans into supporting everything Trump does, yeah, it makes Trump look stronger now. It might make him and the country a whole lot weaker later if those same nominees fail and he is blamed for the disaster. Or if the treasury payment system breaks and he is blamed for the chaos. In the short term, having unanimity makes you look strong.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
One thing I am getting asked by a lot of people in my life is, should I buy the dip? And I know you don't offer investing advice, but I think the intuition is that, look, the stock market goes like down at times, up at times, but it always just kind of keeps its march upward over time. And, you know, how bad can this really get? It's just a kind of spat over tariffs. He's going to back off.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
Do you look at the market correction here and say, well, this is as bad as it can get? We're probably at the bottom of this? Or do you look at the history here and say, no, you have no idea how bad something like this can get?
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
As always, my email, EzraKleinShow at NYTimes.com. Paul Krugman, welcome back to the show. Hi, good to be on again. So let's just start with what Donald Trump actually announced on Liberation Day.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
So the Trump administration can see all this. They know markets are crashing. In his first term, Trump was considered to be very sensitive to market reaction. They know that various indicators of a future recession, forecasts and this and that, are beginning to blink more red. They are choosing to take on this pain. This is completely optional. Why do you think they think they are doing it?
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
Or if they is not the right unit here, why do you think Donald Trump thinks he is doing it? Okay.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
Okay, so what do you think he thinks they don't understand? What is, to him, the brilliance of his policy?
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
I know, too, there's a deep contradiction in the way it's been getting justified from two sides of the administration or maybe the Republican Party. So one, which you'll hear, is that this is about reindustrializing America. And to do that, if you believe tariffs could do that, which I don't really, but let's put that aside for a minute.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
If you believe they could do that, what you need is a highly stable tariff regime. And then there's another justification you're hearing. John Thune, the Senate majority leader, said something like this, which is that these are all a negotiating tool to get a better deal out of other countries. This is more of the sort of reciprocity argument.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
It's also the he lays down tariffs and you get something on fentanyl trafficking enforcement, get something on immigration. Right. But if these are all negotiating tools, then they're not a stable cost structure that companies can use to decide if they're going to reinvest in America.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
And then I guess there's this third one, which is that the tariffs are going to raise money so they can cut income taxes or pay for Donald Trump's tax cuts. And the Treasury secretary said the money would be used to get rid of the tax on tips.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
to get rid of taxes on social security so really this is a tax cut for the working class and again in that case then they have to stay on and be at a pretty high level if they're going to finance that so these are contradictory policies that require different tariff regimes but i'm seeing them sort of all invoked basically constantly
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
Is it possible in any tariff regime to do the reindustrialization of manufacturing that I think is the most emotionally resonant of their arguments? There are two levels to that. One is...
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
Well, that gets to, though, there are two things you might want to restore in manufacturing. One, which I think you hear a lot of in politics, is manufacturing jobs. You want to go back to the economy of 1965 or something. The other is that what you want to restore is manufacturing capacity. Right.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
My colleague, your former colleague, Tom Friedman, was just in China and was really astonished at the kind of campuses that Huawei is building, the speed with which phone companies are becoming car companies. And basically, everybody I know who goes to China or writes seriously about their manufacturing sector will now tell you that what they're doing is not just...
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
low-wage labor leading to cheap manufactured consumer goods, that they now have incredible levels of supply chain expertise that allow them to do things we maybe can't at a speed we certainly can't. And that in terms of the balance of geopolitical power is a very dangerous thing for us in the long run.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
And so very high costs are worth paying to rebuild that capacity, even if it's all automated, right? Because you do not want to be so dependent and for the world to be so dependent on Chinese manufacturing. What do you think of that argument? I mean,
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
Although those are exempted from the tariffs.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
So if one of the things you're trying to do is as a national security play, make our sort of supply chains more robust from China, it seems you wouldn't want to be tariffing our friends and allies in a way that pushes them to pull away from us and integrate more and move into sort of common economic defense with China.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
How does the tariff country by country seem to have been calculated?
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
I mean, this policy does look to me like what happens when nobody will tell the king no. Yeah. And worse than that may be that when the king begins to favor the people who he knows aren't suppressing the no. There are people in any room who you can kind of tell don't really agree with you and are trying to humor you.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
And then there's, you know, the intern, the mid-level person who you can tell is really into what you want to do and maybe you charge them with it. This just doesn't feel to me like a constructed policy. And it's hard because I think that like our tools are usually to try to track back the policy rationale. But there's too many policy rationales. None of them actually fit.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
It's a podcast. We put the little explicit tag up.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
And in Trump 1, it's Jared Kushner. And Kushner brings in very mainstream people. You're Gary Cohns, you know, is a Goldman Sachs president. You're H.R. McMasters. People who act as inhibitors of the very disinhibited Donald Trump. And in Trump 2, it's not Jared Kushner. It's Don Jr., who's been marinating in the fever swamps of MAGA in the interim years, who helped bring in people like J.D.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
Vance, who, you know, said, like, the real intention of Trump's second term was he will vet everybody to make sure there's nobody who's going to stand in his way. Elon Musk and Russ Vought are sort of out there trying to traumatize the federal bureaucracy, destroy any deep state resistance or, frankly, just any deep state capacity.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
And so you have people around Trump now who are accelerants, not inhibitors. And this is what you get when you get a bunch of people telling Trump, no, no, no, go further. You're right. You've always been right. You were saved from an assassin's bullet by God to make this country great again. Follow your instincts. Don't listen to the markets, the naysayers, the critics, the media.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
They don't know anything. Like, if we've learned anything, it's that your judgment is right.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
So behind all this, there's been a set of theories that have taken root that are not well expressed in the tariffs, but I think have become increasingly influential in Washington, in the media.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
You know, I hear talk of this Mar-a-Lago accord, and they have a lot to do with this idea of the dollar and whether or not having the dollar as a world's reserve currency has led to the deindustrialization of America. And so when I hear then people in the Trump administration begin to say, well, what we're doing here is a fundamental realignment of the global financial system.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
While it may all start with Donald Trump's intuitions, I think it's made a lot of them very ambitious. This idea that maybe they can be part of the next Bretton Woods, that there's something you can do here. Can you talk through, for people who are confused by it, what is the role of the dollar here?
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
How should we understand the relationship between the dollar being the world's reserve currency and America losing some of its manufacturing base, if there is one?
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
I guess you could say that. The implication of it is that you can understand why you might say a tariff on America is bad. That's locking up the goods that might flow into another country or a service that might flow into another country. But what they're saying is something subtly different, which is that if we have a trade deficit with anybody, that is bad.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
And it should be treated as evidence of market discrimination or at least something we want to fix. So this gets, as you like to say, wonkish. But what is a trade deficit? What is a trade balance? And Is it a bad thing when we have one with someone else?
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
Paul Krugman, thank you very much. Thank you. This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Roland Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Afim Shapiro and Amin Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Elias Iskwith, Kristen Lynn, and Jack McCordick. We've original music by Pat McCusker.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
Audience strategy by Christina Samieluski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
One of the things flying around social media has been that if you went and you asked the various leading AI programs, ChatGPT and Gemini and Claude, and you said, what's a pretty simple way to calculate tariffs on all other countries? It will offer you basically this calculation that you used. And I think that raises two questions, which is, one, did we just have –
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
A global economic crisis created by some Doge interns asking Chachi PT how to calculate tariffs. But two, if that's what these systems trained on the inhaled output, I guess, of all economists writing online say you should do, is there something to it? Is there some...
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
steel man case that this is a pretty straightforward, simple way to think about tariffs on other countries, that there is an argument for it. The liberals are missing, as we sort of point out, differences between, you know, words and policies here.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. So scale of one to 10, how liberated are you feeling? Because we just had Donald Trump's big day of liberation, where he announced a huge package of tariffs, larger by far than markets were expecting, which led markets to lose a lot of value in the hours right after. They were also more confusing than people were expecting.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
He had suggested in the campaign a flat tariff of 10 to 20% on all important goods, maybe something bigger on China. But this was very different, different numbers for basically every country. Then there was a column listing the tariffs that they had on us, and that column was simply wrong. So what is going on here? Why is Donald Trump absorbing this much economic pain?
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
How are markets responding and what do you take from their response? One thing that I have thought is when you listen to their justifications, they'll say things like, well, we're trying to rebuild American manufacturing. We've shipped American manufacturing overseas.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
And then I'll go look at an index of stocks that reflect American manufacturing companies, which I guess in theory are meant to benefit here. And they don't look like they're doing well to me. If you look at BYD, the big Chinese electric vehicle car company, they are way up since Trump's inauguration. They've gone from around $70 to around $96 per share. Tesla's way down.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
There's a lot of reasons for that. I'm not an efficient markets guy. I don't think markets absorb all information. But you would expect them, I think... if they believe this was going to grow the U.S. economy dramatically to favor some U.S. stocks that they thought were going to grow dramatically. I'm not seeing anything like it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
How should other countries respond? I mean, I've seen economists arguing they should do nothing because to place down further tariffs only hurts them as well. I've They should do specific forms of tariffing that, you know, hurt things that are important to the US, maybe Tesla.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
I've heard people say, no, they should go all out because you're trying to create a equilibrium where the US can't bully everyone. If these heads of state were coming to you and saying, you know, what should we do, Paul? What would you tell them?
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
Why is he risking domestic recession, a global recession, for this package of policies that almost every economist would tell you does not really make sense? I wanted to talk to my former colleague, Paul Krugman, about this. Paul is a Nobel Prize-winning economist with a focus in trade. He was a columnist here at the New York Times for 25 years, and he's been writing an excellent sub-stack called
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
How bad can this tit-for-tat get? How likely at this point do you think— A U.S. recession is how likely do you think a global recession is kicked off by this trade war?
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
I feel like you're going to remember this with some of the same anger that I remember it. But I remember in the years after the Great Recession, when Washington wanted to turn to austerity, when you still had high unemployment, and what you began hearing from the Republican Party.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
where he's been tearing into the theory behind this kind of tariff policy, but then also the very strange reality, the practical tariffs that have now been announced and trying to understand what led to this package instead of one of the packages that might have more cleanly accomplished the goals that Donald Trump and the people around him say they are seeking.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
And Lord, how many words I spilled trying to rebut this was, oh, the future deficits were creating so much economic uncertainty. The corporations couldn't possibly invest. And the way to unlock the economy again was to cut spending, you know, maybe for, you know, more of the centric side, raise taxes.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
And it was that certainty about future path of government fiscal policy that was needed for corporations to hire again. That turned out to be and was obviously at the time not true. But now you have that same party creating a level of such genuine uncertainty. I can't imagine being a company right now trying to decide where to place a factory or whether or not to make investments.
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
Nobody even believes these tariffs are going to be the same in a year, as best I can tell, as they are right now. So I don't know. There's this argument I think got a little bit discredited because it was used in such bad faith. And then all of a sudden, the same people who made it, in many cases—
The Ezra Klein Show
Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’
are at least accepting or promoting this tariff policy, which has created a genuinely unfathomable, to me, level of economic uncertainty.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
Are they just creating a piece of this? It could be lopped off in the courts or even just in public debate. Okay, the extreme position is that you don't want to have birthright citizenship for people here on student visas and H-1B visas, but the position then you're left with, which is the one they really care about, is you get rid of it for the children of unauthorized immigrants.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
Doesn't the existence of birth tourism... suggests there is something indefensibly broad in the way that the citizenship has been interpreted. I am as pro-immigrant as you, I think, can possibly be. And I think that's abusive of the rules.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
So let's dive into immigration first. Donald Trump signed about 10 executive orders on border security and immigration. When you look at them together, Dara, what do you see?
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
but obviously they don't want a narrow solution to the most egregious of the policy problems. What they want is a big debate about what it means to be a citizen. And Matt, I've been thinking about our long career in journalism, and you both probably remember covering immigration in the I don't know, I call this like the 2005 to 2015 period.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
And back then, it was much more common to talk about illegal immigrants. And then you get a lot of email from people in the immigration advocacy community and also just people and say, listen, that's a really dehumanizing way to talk about this. Can we say, you know, it's better to say undocumented immigrant, unauthorized immigrant. Sort of eventually made its way to yard signs, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
No human being is illegal. You can talk about illegal immigration, but not illegal immigrants. And behind this linguistic change, I think, really did come a change in the Democratic Party's affect towards illegal immigration.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
That illegal immigration, unauthorized immigrants, moved from a really big policy problem to solve, then during the Trump administration particularly, to a disadvantaged class to protect.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
And this feels to me like the argument that the Trump administration is at a very core level across both some of the enforcement and some of the birthright moves engaging, which is how should we feel about these people who are here illegally? Are they people we should view with sympathy and try to protect? Or are they an invasion horde of people?
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
Or at the very least, criminals who have abused our system and need to be treated the way we treat other criminals, which is with punitive measures.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
But this is the first time, I think, in our long association together— I've heard you suggest that the fact that a constitutional argument is risable will mean it will lose the court. It's just— I am pretty cynical about this, but you've always been more cynical than me.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
And I've never— Isn't that what people said about the individual mandate and the Medicaid expansion and Obamacare?
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
Well, is it the argument that they're an invasion, right, Dara?
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
How would you describe the argument they're trying to make? If you were to say what they think in this court they have helped build, you know, and Stephen Miller goes to bed at night and is optimistic about the morning. Yeah. what Supreme Court opinion he's hoping gets issued.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
So I want to move to the economy. When Donald Trump was running for president, one of his very strongest arguments was that everything got in very expensive under Joe Biden. He has himself said that the price of groceries was a very big part of why he won the election.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
When you look at what Trump said in his inauguration speech, when you look at the executive orders, when you look at what they've at least said they are doing, what agenda emerges for you on the cost of living?
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
Well, let's hold on the energy piece because he did do a lot on energy.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
And it's not crazy to say that increased energy production would be good for American growth and bring down prices. I think people forget this, but it took him months to leave the Paris Climate Accords in his first term. I mean, they moved much more slowly in their theory of what to do on climate and energy back then.
The Ezra Klein Show
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Elon Musk was very angry about it, yes. Elon Musk had some very different views back then. The theory now is you can increase domestic production. Domestic production of fossil fuels, which is what they're targeting, is currently at record levels. It has never been higher in American history. How much... headroom do they have here?
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
Yeah, if Elon Musk can depolarize electric vehicles and make it something not just that liberals in San Francisco want to do, but actually a status symbol for Texans too, and maybe get Donald Trump on board with it as a sort of symbol of like American ingenuity and dominance of one of the obvious industries of the future.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
And it's not like Trump is outlawing electric vehicles, but Elon Musk becoming the central conciliar to the Trump administration and his central, in theory, industrialist concern is the rapid adoption of electric vehicles. And Trump's main policy on electric vehicles is to roll back electricity. the regulations that were accelerating their adoption.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
I mean, I guess you give Elon Musk points for being principled on things that are not just his business interests, but it's a little bit disappointing as what the trade ended up being.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
I think that's right as like a political science theory, but actually maybe wrong about the factions. My understanding is
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
of musk right now is like you can imagine musk in his tesla guys not his international right-wing provocateur and and funder and and attention getter guys as having plausibly two theories right there's always the argument all he cares about is saving the world from climate change and getting to mars there's this other theory that what he wants is for tesla to be the biggest company in the world because that is where the bulk of his wealth is and and his power is and
The Ezra Klein Show
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Getting the subsidies for electric vehicles pulled back at the time that Ford and General Motors and these other players are accelerating into electric vehicles and maybe getting to a point where they could challenge Tesla for making good cars. Well, Tesla is a really big company.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
advantage they've been doing this for a long time they're way ahead of everybody else their marketing is way better people know them and so my sense of musk at least in part is that he's really let's call it chilled out on the climate change question much less worried about that than he once was although he still says he is worried about it and he got his like the support for electric vehicles is what made tesla into the company it is today but tesla is fine now and
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
And if there's no support for electric vehicles, then it is the other players, probably the legacy players trying to climb the electric vehicle ladder who are about to find the ladder falls down under them before they attain the sort of level of quality and production that Tesla did, again, under years and years and years of federal and state support.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
Although that's something we saw, Dara, which is that he did not come in on day one and impose a bunch of new tariffs.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
When you read this, Matt, does it look to you like mass deportation, which was promised and feared? Or does it look to you like what they're trying to do is create a climate of fear and, as Mitt Romney once put it, self-deportation?
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
We're studying the creation of an external revenue agency, which definitely sounds to me like the kind of thing you do when you don't want to put into play your big tariff proposal, right? We're creating a blue ribbon commission.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
I mean, that's the question I think I'm really asking here. Were the business guys correct? He doesn't want to do this. He's not going to do this. I thought it's been interesting that Bob Lighthizer, who was Trump's trade representative in the first term and is widely considered probably the most effective single member of the Trump administration in the first term, is not. anywhere there, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
You heard him talked about for treasury secretary, you heard him talked about for commerce, but he's in Florida somewhere at the moment, right? There's this New Yorker piece on him. You know, it's not that the people who are there are not pro-tariff. Many of them, the head of the Council of Economic Advisors has written positively on tariffs.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
Scott Besant, the treasury secretary, has talked about tariffs.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
No, I would go further than this. I think you're missing an option on that. So one of the things going on right now is there's been this announcement of Stargate, a consortium of companies working on AI who want to put in huge amounts of money into energy and AI data center infrastructure.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
And Stargate was going on and getting ready, and people were working on this before Donald Trump became president. Then he became president, and now they're like, thank you, Donald Trump. We couldn't do it without you, which in some technical sense is probably true. It's useful to have the help of the president, but it's not a Trump initiative.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
But then Elon Musk, who hates Sam Altman and is suing OpenAI for trying to turn itself into a for-profit – He tweeted something mean at Sam Altman. I don't remember exactly what. And then he and Altman got into a spat.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
So that was interesting. And then the next day, Sam Altman comes out and says, I really realize that I completely misjudged Donald Trump in the first term. I was thinking like an NPC, which is like right-wing internet meme for non-player character coming from video games, which is like a crazy thing to say about yourself, but whatever. And that Trump is going to be so great for America.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
And I've really turned around on this whole thing. And I'm sorry for... underestimating him before, but I am all in. I'm paraphrasing him. That's functionally what he says. Maybe that's how he feels. Maybe it's half how he feels, but it certainly looks like he's now trying to outmaneuver Musk, right? Trump is excited about Stargate. Musk is undermining Stargate.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
And now Altman comes in and says, God, Trump is so great.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
The point I want to make on all this, because it's amazing to talk about, I guess, and depressing, but is it something... I think there's another option between Trump is a patsy who will believe any level of flattery no matter how disingenuous, And Trump is a cynic who just enjoys the flattery, which is that Trump understands speech as a form of action and commitment.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
And that whether you believe it or not, when you go out and you say – I am pro-Trump and he is a genius, you have either subtly or aggressively shifted who you are in public, if you're Sam Altman or someone like that, in ways that then change how you have to act and who your allies are.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
And, you know, in the same way that making Sean Spicer say that the inauguration crowds were the biggest ever was a way of arguably—I mean, you see this a lot in authoritarian countries— Enforcing that loyalty test makes the people who have taken it more loyal because there are other options who become worse, right? Sam Altman is probably held in worse repute in the Democratic Party today.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
And to be fair, Democrats were already annoying him by sending him letters about why he was donating so much to the inauguration fund. But if you move Sam Altman out of the Democratic Party because you get him to say very nice things about Trump and that makes Democrats mad at him and then he gets mad at the Democrats –
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
Then you actually have increased his loyalty, whatever the real content of the flattery was, because to speak that way is to take an action. It's to reorient your alliances. And then your incentives change and they change in a pro-Trump way. I don't think Trump is a mastermind. Lots of strongman leaders have come to this theory independently. It's just a way human beings react.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
I mean, it's the way corporations work. You make people go out and whether or not they really agree with the new corporate policy, if they have to say they agree with it, then they sort of have to act more like they agree with it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
But only if you buy that. It only has an unpredictability effect if the business community actually acts like it's unpredictable. But I think they've all persuaded themselves, perhaps correctly, that it's not unpredictable, that you might have specific tariffs. And we've already been having tariffs back and forth with China for some time, including under Biden.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
So I think there is an expectation that you're going to have tariffs on China. Those might go up. That's probably somewhat priced in. But, you know, the business world is not acting like we're going to have 20 percent tariffs or 10 percent tariffs on everything. If it happens, then, yeah, that's going to be a hit.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
But in part because they're not preparing it, that's actually a hedge against it happening in a strange way. Like the worst hit you can persuade Donald Trump it will be to the stock market, the less likely he is to do it. Like you could really imagine a day where there's a big Wall Street Journal story and And it says, on Monday, the tariffs are happening.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
It's on. And then it's going to be a crash. And then there's a three and a half, you know, there's some significant drop in the Dow. And then all of a sudden, they're not happening on Monday, right? That's a thing I a little bit think is going on here. By acting like it's not happening, you're probably making it a little bit less likely that it happens.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
One of the other dogs that is barking a little bit more quietly than it was maybe a month ago, in between Donald Trump winning, and Donald Trump taking office. We heard a lot about DOGE, the Department of Governmental Efficiency. Sure did. Co-run by Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk. all over X and having big debates about H-1B visas and, you know, what spending to cut.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
And there was a big Wall Street Journal op-ed they did where they said that they were going to advise Doge at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform, regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions, and cost savings. Musk talked at times about cutting as much as $2 trillion from the federal government that said, you know, maybe you don't get quite there, but you cut a trillion dollars.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
Now we see the EO on Doge. Ramaswamy is out. And the executive order's mandate is, quote, modernizing federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity. What happened there?
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
It's not like you have to change it through legislation.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
One of the things that, as we sort of come to a close here, I have been trying to read the leaves on is what is Donald Trump's relationship with Congress and legislation about to be? Compared to every other presidency I have ever seen come in, this one has come in with nobody really talking about big bills they want to pass.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
And on everything we have spoken about, from energy to the economy to immigration to... to IT procurement in the federal workforce, right, and who you can fire and who you can't, all of that could be much more ambitiously reshaped through legislation. We know in the background that Mike Johnson, with his extremely narrow majority, is working on a tax bill.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
I think everybody expects a bill updating and expanding Trump's tax cuts and extending them to at least be proposed at some point. But they seem just really intent on what they can do individually.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
I'm curious how, Dara and then Matt, you all are reading what seems like a very executive-focused presidency, but in being executive-focused is giving up on a certain amount of ambition that you can only have if you are going to really work on a legislative agenda.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
I think that is a good place to end. Always our final question. What are three books you would recommend to the audience? And Dara, why don't we start with you?
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
Darlene Adeglesias, thank you very much.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
Do they, Dara, have a legislative agenda here? And one of the ways in which I mean that is you make the point that the self-deportation theory is that you can't work here and it's miserable to be here. But the theory of the longtime theory of how to make it hard to work here wasn't deportations. It was things like E-Verify.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. In 2017, when Trump came into the White House for the first time, on day one, he signed exactly one executive order. It was targeting the Affordable Care Act. In 2025, he signed 26 executive orders on day one, throwing pens into the roaring crowd. Some of these orders were really big, ending birthright citizenship.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
It was things like holding employers accountable for hiring undocumented or unauthorized immigrants. Mm-hmm. I have not heard them or Republicans talking that much about it, but I've been wondering if that's coming or they just don't want to work with Congress, so they're not going to try.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
There were big orders on energy. He signed orders about Doge and governmental efficiency, about the federal workforce. Some of them were more messaging bills. Some of them are big, but... They may not be big after the courts get done with them. So what has really changed here? What has all this flurry of policymaking and activity amounted to?
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
You used to hear about it all the time under Obama, under Bush. Like this was the theory. What happened to it?
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
But Matt, you seem, or they seem to have a much clearer pathway to, to working with Congress than they would have in the first term. You mentioned how one reason you had high levels of deportations under Obama was very strong cooperation between the federal government and the states.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
Under Trump, after Obama, you had this huge blue state backlash to immigration enforcement and you had sanctuary cities and so on. I mean, we're in New York City right now. I think Eric Adams would love nothing more than to cooperate with the Trump administration. But even among Democrats in Congress, even among the kinds of Democrats in Congress who were resistance Democrats in 2017, 2018.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
You saw the move to working with Lankford on the Murphy-Cinema-Lankford bill that then Kamala Harris ran on. That was a big shift right for Democrats. And now you've seen a bunch of Democrats sign on to the Lakin-Riley bill, which is a very sharp shift right for Democrats. So it seems to me that if the Trump administration wanted to kick off
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
a policy process with Congress that is trying to toughen enforcement on the employer side, it's a very different political alignment than it was in 2018.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
One of the difficulties of covering Donald Trump is it's always hard to know where to look first, where even to look at all. Back in the day, I used to do a policy podcast at Vox with Matt Iglesias, who is now the author of the excellent Substack newsletter, Slow Boring, and Dara Lind, who's now a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
Dara, the piece of this that people I think have heard the most about is the executive order on birthright citizenship. How did you read that?
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
You can think of the birthright citizenship debate as having two components. One, which I think everybody was expecting them to go after, was children born to people who are not here legally. And then there is this other question that they added into it, which is people who are here legally— They're here on a student visa. They're here on an H-1B visa.
The Ezra Klein Show
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Thought it'd be good to have a bit of a reunion with two of the people who follow the policies that Trump is working on most closely to get into the guts of what is actually changing and what as of yet really isn't. As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com. Darling, Matt Iglesias, welcome to the show. Good to be here. Good to be on. It's like old times. Yeah.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
Some people have called this a Kamala Harris provision. I know many people who were born in the United States this way. And this has not been nearly as contested, but they added that in too. Matt, how did you understand that?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
So before we begin today, we are doing more than a podcast these days. We have expanded into video and these episodes are being recorded. And it's a different experience, a different experience for me in creating it and recording it and having the conversation. And then genuinely, I think a different experience in watching it.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
There's another piece of that being restrained by norms. I think a pretty significant difference between Trump's first term and his second is the intensity of his fascination now with territorial expansion, making Canada the 51st state. making Gaza a province somehow of America, taking over Greenland.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
I think Trump believes and the people around him believe that the norms of the world turned against territorial expansion in a way that was bad for America. America in the 19th century expanded. Other countries did too. And we are powerful, and there are things we should want. That Canada should be the 51st state, or at least it should act like a vassal state of America.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
That if we want Greenland, we should have it. I think Trump really wants, fundamentally wants, the land mass of America to be larger when he leaves office than when he came in. How have you taken Trump's renewed interest in gaining territory?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Something is new here. The Trump doctrine that we've seen in the first month of this presidency is going to reshape the world much more fundamentally than Trump did in the four years of his first term. That's in part due to who is around him now. The end of being surrounded by the foreign policy establishment, and now it's J.D. Vance and Elon Musk.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
You mentioned Ukraine and Russia. We're talking in the week when all that is being negotiated. Today is Wednesday. How would you describe... what Trump's policy towards Ukraine now is?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
I wanted to have a bigger picture conversation about what this Trump doctrine is and the way it's going to reshape the world. So I'm joined today by Fareed Zakaria, the host of GPS on CNN, a Washington Post columnist, and the author of the bestselling book, Age of Revolutions. As always, my email, ezraklineshow at nytimes.com. Fareed Zakaria, welcome back to the show. Always a pleasure, Ezra.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Let me push on this. You know all this much better than I do. I don't think he thinks anything about Ukraine and Russia, whose claims are legitimate. I think he thinks Ukraine is worthless to the U.S. And somebody at some point persuaded him there are That there is value for the U.S., for Trump personally, for the U.S. economy and access to Russia, good relations with Russia.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
And that there is some part of him that genuinely doesn't understand why we give a shit about Ukraine as opposed to cutting a deal with Putin. And getting something out of that transaction.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
But in that way, is he picking up on something real? And I think you see this a bit with J.D. Vance's. J.D. Vance is going out of his way to alienate the European governments of the moment. Yeah. America is weighing in on behalf of the AFD in Germany.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Their view is that there are regimes that they have affinity with and that the proper nature of American alliance isn't some unchanging alliance between America and Europe because we're all, quote unquote, liberal democracies. Trump doesn't want us to be a liberal democracy. The proper nature is between regimes of affinity.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
And in that way, Putin sees the world more like Trump does than Keir Starmer in the UK. Erdogan sees the world more like Trump does than Justin Trudeau does. That the nature of the alliances they're seeking is a nature of...
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
regimes that are like them, regimes that could actually support, you know, have a genuine ideological affinity for who Trump is and what he wants and the world that he wants to see.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
So to the extent you feel you can define it, what's the Trump Doctrine?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
But that's, I think, where this is really going. And I think the way you see it is in Vance and Musk. In Trump's first term, Trump is surrounded, particularly on the national security and foreign policy side, by members of the traditional Republican establishment. Your H.R. McMasters, your Rex Tillerson's, Mike Pence as his vice president. And none of them want this move.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
This is not why John Kelly got into politics. And And so it doesn't really happen. What there is instead are these weird moments in interviews and elsewhere where Trump seems to talk about Putin with real affection in a way that he never talks about anybody in Europe that way.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Fast forward, you have Trump's second term in which he is surrounded by people who have been spending the intervening years building the ideology for what Trump intuitively was moving towards. And it's not a complete purge in the Republican Party, but what's left is too weak, even if the Senate Republicans don't love it in every instance.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
And so now you see this, like the war between autocracy as an ideological phenomenon and liberal democracy as an ideological phenomenon isn't now between America and Europe and these other countries. It's inside America, too. And now you really see it, right? These people who are more framework-oriented going there and actively weighing in, as Elon Musk did on behalf of the AFD in Germany, J.D.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
So you can find our YouTube page by searching Ezra Klein Show on YouTube, or we will have a link to it in the show description. From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. What is the Donald Trump doctrine? What is Donald Trump's foreign policy?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Vance going to the Munich conference and really telling the Europeans that the great security threat is the way they run their governments, not Russia, not climate change. It is the temperament and the policy of European liberalism.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
I do think there's a why not both to this, which is that As you were saying at the top of the show, it is very hard to say anything definitive about Donald Trump because he actually is flexible. And he starts in one place and ends in another. And he says we're going to annex Gaza and use it to build hotels, and I do want to talk about this in more detail.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
But he also seems perfectly happy with the situation where the Arab League steps up. He says he wants to stop huge tariffs on Canada and Mexico, but he also seems kind of happy if they just give him some concessions. And I think two things are happening at once. He takes deals. He doesn't want a lot of friction. He doesn't want markets to freak out. He doesn't want to be committing U.S.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
troops in places where they're not wanted, right? Trump has a real sense that the tolerance of the American people for pain and bad headlines is low. And on the other hand, there is an erosion to what he is doing, right? He is pushing and pushing and pushing and the rocks slowly give way. And so even as he's taking these deals, he's also alienating the Europeans.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Even as he's taking these deals, he's changing the way people think about America. Even as he's taking these deals, maybe he cuts the deal on minerals with Ukraine. He's also signaled to Moscow that he's open for a transaction. And so even if he doesn't go all the way in the first deal, I mean, we're a month into a second term, he's sending signals to every other player on the field saying,
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
to reimagine their strategies. And for some, that's going to mean reimagining their strategy to create countermeasures to the U.S. I think you're seeing that among the Europeans. For some, that is going to mean reimagining their strategies, their offerings, their positioning to come closer to the U.S., to give Trump a deal that he can sell here. I think that's for Putin, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
I think that's for potentially China, somewhat to my surprise, given Trump's historic feeling that China is going to destroy the American economy. And this game will be repeated again and again. By the end of it, by the end of turn after turn after turn of this, the entire system is in a very different place.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Not a place you could have gotten it into in one month, but a place you could definitely get it into in four years.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Let me take the other side of this. What are the chances that Trump is exactly what Europe needs right now? That Europe is a mess, that it has not invested nearly enough in its defense for decades, that it has been watching its productivity numbers functionally collapse, that in something J.D. Vance was saying, it is overregulated.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
And that is one reason it has almost no strong technology companies right now. that Europe was not getting stronger under Joe Biden's protective umbrella, that we've been watching actually Europe weaken. We have been encouraging a kind of dependence from it.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
And that here, I guess I'm sounding like the senior Republican you were talking to, but I've heard this and I don't think it's crazy, that you may not ideologically like why Donald Trump is doing this. But if the end result of it is a more independent Europe that spends more on defense and takes its own economic revitalization more seriously, that would be good for all parties.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
And that it is frankly unlikely that Putin, when he's trying to build better relations with America, is going to invade a bunch of other countries and embarrass Donald Trump. So... The Moscow problem is not that big of a problem in the near term. And a stronger Europe would be good for deterring that in the long run and was not going to happen under Joe Biden or Kamala Harris.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Because of us. It could only not be big enough because of us.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Among the places where I am surprised by what policy is looking like and what the rhetoric coming out of the administration is like is China. where, what were we told he was going to do and going to think? That he's going to come in and put a 65% tariff on all goods from China. Nothing like that is happening.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
He's been much more aggressive in some ways with threats of tariffs towards Europe and Canada and Mexico. He's now begun talking about some kind of big deal with China where they would just buy more of our stuff, which is sort of like a deal he struck in the first term, even though they didn't end up buying the stuff.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
But I would have told you that he actively wants a hostile relationship with China. And now he doesn't seem to actively want a hostile relationship with China. It was him who initially came up with, or at least people in his administration, with forcing the sell-off of TikTok. Now he's the savior of TikTok.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
How do you describe where the Trump administration seems to be or seems to be moving on China?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
How have you taken Trump's attitude towards Israel and Gaza, his proposals, his appointments. How would you describe it?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
The fear that the people I know who work on Middle East policy had about Donald Trump was that if he was elected, you would have an American president functionally supportive of Israeli annexation of the West Bank and possibly of Gaza. What they didn't expect was any desire on that same American president's behalf to personally annex Gaza, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Nobody saw, well, actually, no, Israel shouldn't take Gaza. America should take Gaza. What do you think that proposal is? Do you understand where it came from? Do you have a sense of how much he would actually risk to make it happen? Like, how have you read it?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Let me try to reflect what his people tell me, picking up on something you said. There is this, as people call it, rules-based international order. And the thing that Joe Biden says and Jake Sullivan says and Fareed Zakaria says is that America benefits from that order and benefits from being part of that order.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
In Joe Biden, you had the apex of the liberal international order believers. Joe Biden's whole career in the Senate was devoted to this quite significantly. He was known for his commitment to these alliances, known for his belief in a sort of muscular liberal internationalism.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
It was always notable the way when he was deciding whether or not to stay in the race, the thing that seemed to animate him in that period was NATO. And if not for me, who's going to protect NATO and the alliances? And they had this vision of American strength through the alliance system.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
And it led to a world, or it coexisted with a world, that by the end of his term felt to many people like it had fallen into disorder. You had Russia invading Ukraine. You had the war in Gaza. And you had a sense of American weakness. I mean, some of that was Joe Biden's inability to personally project strength, whatever he thought of the actual policies.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Now you've had Trump come in for a month, and the whole world is reshuffling in response to what he says. You have negotiations happening with Moscow. You have mineral deals being signed with Ukraine. You have in Gaza, all of a sudden, for the insanity, in my view, of Trump's actual proposal, I am hearing more serious proposals from Ukraine
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
The Arab countries that I was before, Yair Lapid, one of the opposition leaders in Israel, had a reasonable, I thought, proposal of wiping out Egyptian foreign debt in return for Egypt taking over rebuilding and governance of Gaza for a period of time. The sense that the world is responding to American strength.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
And there's long been a critique from the left that America, in fact, dominates that order and doesn't play by its rules. We break international law. We do the things we want to do and then use those rules on others when we don't like what they're doing. But the critique from Trump is that that's not true.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Did Democrats fumble this in their belief that a restrained America was a strong America that more did not need to be projected? Did they leave the opening for someone like Trump who said there's all this surplus power and the American public is going to respond to seeing someone come pick it up?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
That the sense that the world should respond to America, that we should be feared by our friends and our enemies alike, right? had been dismissed. I've heard this from people involved in the Middle East conflict. Nobody feared Joe Biden.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
And they seem to envy the political systems of countries that are in terrible shape. Right. Hungary, Russia, China, which is seeing its growth rates fall. They have a lot of envy of systems that you would not want to emulate.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
I want to push you to the strong examples here, the strong counter examples, which is to say that I had Jake Sullivan on the show. And we were talking about Ukraine and we were talking about Israel.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
And I would say the view that emerged from him is that it would be immoral to use American leverage to push our allies into negotiations in Ukraine to force Israel to have done really anything differently in Gaza. And that as soon as Trump came on the scene, It turned out people would listen. Like, the hostage deal got signed and Yahoo dropped some objections.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Like, they moved forward on some kind of ceasefire. You had negotiations not in the way I would like to see them had. Preconceding functionally everything to Moscow is, in my view, fundamentally immoral. But the level at which the Biden administration would not push its own allies— and did not act like it had leverage over someone like Zelensky was strange by the end.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
that of every country, America as the strongest is harmed the most by these restraints, by these rules, by these laws, because we have so much leverage we could be using. We could stop tariffs on anybody for any reason and get them to do what we want. We have the strongest military of all the militaries. Everybody wants to be on our side and everybody fears being on our bad side.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
The thing that I think I'm pushing towards here is not is Trumpism the right long-term strategy for the U.S., but assuming the system survives the next couple of years, which in the range of possibilities, I don't think is 100%. I don't think it's 100% domestically, and I don't think it's 100% internationally.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
I think there's a question of there being sort of thesis, antithesis, synthesis dynamics to where things probably need to go. I think that with Doge, where Democrats were accepting, I mean, I have a whole book on this coming out, but Democrats were accepting of huge levels of government proceduralism, obstruction, the inability of government to deliver or be responsive.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
They became defenders of government. Now you have a group heedlessly taking chainsaws, trying to actually wreck the thing in a way I consider... immoral and genuinely dangerous. But I think to find some stable equilibrium, Democrats are going to have to take some lessons from this, not just say we were right before, you guys shouldn't listen to us.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
In the way I think we now understand that center-left parties kind of in Europe and in America had adopted positions on immigration that were politically unstable. And they don't need to go all the way to where the far right is, but they can't be where they were if they're going to win power.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
And that what Trump is doing is systematically searching out the strength America has, the ways we can wield our weight and leverage, and untying our hands from behind our back.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Is there some ways in which lessons need to be learned here for there to be an effective center-left answer, or even just left answer, or liberal answer, to what this set of challenges represents? Is there some dissatisfaction with how the system is working, either from the American perspective or the international perspective, that needs to be integrated even if you find...
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
as many of us do, where Trump is going, immoral.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
How does the destruction of USAID fit into this? Because that got filed under Doge, I think it's been treated as less of a foreign policy move than it actually is.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
They seem to have successfully continued to keep the money pretty cut off in a lot of cases, even in places where, say, Marco Rubio seemed to want PEPFAR funding, which is funding for HIV-AIDS medication, particularly in Africa, turned on, and it seems to have not really turned back on. Is this foreign policy?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Is this just a kind of internal jihadism against what they see as the liberal nonprofit industrial complex? What is the import of what they've done to USAID? And what is, to the best you believe they have it, the rationale for it?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
I think it also gets to what is America first, right? And one of the things that I actually think it is, is a total devaluing of non-American lives. We were talking, you were saying a minute ago how USAID is being, Musk calls it, what was it, a ball of worms? It's like not a, no worms in the apple, just a ball of worms. So that's a horrible thing to say.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
You know, I know people who work in aid, like you do. Musk is a billionaire who juts around the world fathering children with Lord knows how many women. And tweeting, you know, sending missives on X 300 times a day. And these people who, you know, went to amazing schools go work on marginally improving economic growth by making the textile sector more efficient in Ghana. So just, it appalls me.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
But at least like the Americans who are working for USAID exist in the calculus, right? The administration hates them and wants to demonize them and wants them to go to the private sector where they'll be more productive. But the children who needed PEPFAR funding, the anti-retrovirals from PEPFAR, they don't exist in the conversation here at all. People drink dirtier water.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
And it's always, I think, a difficult thing from the perspective of a nation, right, which does have a preference for its own citizens. Like how should you think about an economic migrant whose, you know, any individual economic migrant's life would be much better off if they could come to the U.S. ?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
And for reasons of stability in the economy, you can't let everybody who would like to come to the U.S. in. Like, how do you value that? Right. It's a really hard question. And we don't have, I think, very good answers. And we tack forward and backward. How do you value people we save from dying of malnutrition? The answers have been complex, not always really debated, but somewhat.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
We value those lives somewhat. It's not how we think about Americans, but it's not nothing. And I kind of think one of the messages here is it's nothing. Like the value of foreign lives is nothing. The value of people in the West Bank whose land is going to be annexed is nothing. Our care about the Ukrainians is nothing.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
I think that's some of the message of it too, particularly domestically, that USAID was about spending American money on to not really serve our interests first and foremost.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
I think you're right to say that when we say it's really about our soft power, not truly telling the truth anymore, it's about expressing our values, which is that other lives matter, and particularly if there's cost-effective ways we can help them, we should. And the message here is they don't, and we shouldn't.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
And I would have been, look, I am somebody who believes you could have targeted a bunch of those dollars better. I would have moved a lot to public health, to cash transfers. You know, if you want to say we shouldn't be doing plays, fine. We can have that debate. Actually auditing USAID would have been fine with me. That's why I think the message was that they didn't do that.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
You could have audited from their perspective.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Yes, there's been a lot of bullshit here. But it is—I know a lot of people who work in foreign aid and a lot of people who work in making foreign aid more effective.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
And not only – and I don't even mean waste. I actually mean that from their perspective, I think it would be reasonable for a Republican administration to come in and say too much of this is cultural. I want this money spent differently. Fine. I've heard people say, well, what Doge is really doing is zero-based budgeting. We're just making everything re-justify itself.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Well, then you would have it re-justify itself based on some set of measures, right? Does it achieve this? Dollars per life saved, right? I know people who spend all their days trying to figure out how many dollars does it take to save a life here. And The not doing any of that, that to me was actually the message. They didn't want USAID audited.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Because actually a lot of things sound great if you audited USAID, even from any kind of humanitarian perspective they could come up with. PEPFAR is an amazing program. It was that the expression of values was the point there. And the expression of values of Trump and America First is that we are the only ones who count. It's why J.D.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Vance's riff that Christianity has this understanding of this intense partiality of favor, right? It's, you know, our family and our neighbors and our community and like out and out and out and out till you have basically no responsibility to the world.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Yes, when the Pope has to come in personally in his frail health before he ended up in the hospital for double pneumonia to say, no, wait, you just converted to Catholicism. And as the head Catholic, let me tell you, that's not how we think about it.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
know a more humble person might have rethought some things you've talked a lot about what it took to build the international system that that we can now take for granted or that we got to the point where we felt we could take it for granted and i think about when i read a lot of history what it took to get to the point that we actually thought lives of individual people around the world had some value they weren't just pawns that their destruction was meaningful
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Because I look at a lot of history and I don't think people put a very heavy value on life. You know, if you had to wipe a bunch of people out to get what you wanted, you did. The poor suffered what they must. And with Trump, I see a return to that moral framework, among other things. And you can make a lot of criticisms of Democrats, of Republicans, of George W. Bush, of Joe Biden, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Look at the destruction visited upon the Gazans in the past year. But there was at least some framework that existed that you could yell hypocrite. How dare you? Look at what you said before and what you're allowing now. And I think part of their foreign policy is a destruction of that framework entirely, where there's nothing you could say hypocrite of.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
They've been perfectly clear they don't care. I mean, that way it's very unchristian. It's very, very great powers of the 19th century. And if you're not somebody who's big enough to be written about in the history books, there's just not value to what you represent. Like you can just be used as a pawn or taken off the board if you just happen to be in the way.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
I think that's the place to end. So what was our final question then? What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Eli Sisquith. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Isaac Jones with Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Kristen Lin, and Jack McCordick.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
We have original music by Pat McCusker, audience strategy by Christina Samiluski, and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Let's talk about the tariffs for a minute. This is one of the places where the policy and practices just seemed incoherent to me. There were different goals that have been articulated for tariffs. One is you impose significant steady tariffs for a long period of time because you're trying to make manufacturers make different decisions about where to locate factories, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
You're trying to onshore supply chains. To do that, you have to have these corporations expecting tariffs for quite a while. And then you hope that they will respond to those tariffs by insourcing into America, right? Another is that we're going to use the tariffs to raise a lot of revenue. That too requires the imposition over a long period of time of significant tariffs.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Another is we're just going to bully small nations and just bully kind of anybody we might feel like bullying, right? The tariffs are an all-purpose tool to get other countries to do anything we want them to do. We've sort of been using them that way, but not for very significant concessions. We're on the cusp of maybe they're about to reintroduce him to Canada and Mexico.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
So we'll see where we are in a couple of weeks. But what are they doing, man?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
I think the place to begin to try to untangle what we've actually seen here is to listen to the way Donald Trump and Vice President Vance speak about our allies.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
This gets to, to me, one of the real obfuscations of the Trump presidency of MAGA as a movement. There are a lot of conversations right now that have a term in them. that is ill-defined, let's call it. Efficiency, right? What is the Department of Government efficiency about? What is efficiency? Efficiency of what towards what, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
Efficiency requires some other defined ends to be a coherent goal. But here too, what is America first? What would it mean for that to be successful? What are we looking at? Like the trade deficit is going to be the main output, right? Of our foreign policy, which, by the way, he's not consistent on in any way.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
He was talking the other day about building a renewed Keystone XL pipeline to Canada, which if we start importing a bunch of Canadian oil, that's going to increase the trade deficit with Canada. Is it manufacturing employment? Is that what we're supposed to be targeting here? If America first was working, it would be manufacturing employment. Is it GDP growth? I have never heard them.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
describe what this new era, this new golden age of American strength is, is in median wages for men? They don't, I think, they certainly have not articulated a coherent view of American power success. Is America stronger if AFD takes over Germany? Why? Like, what does AFD get us? I'm curious how you think about this. Maybe I'm being unfair. Maybe you think there's a better definition of it.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy
But there is a question, all this, of what they're trying to achieve. Do you feel like you know?
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
The Biden people are all very relational. For them to have missed what a relational snub like this could do to somebody with his ego, it's a mistake at the kind of politics that they were supposed to be so good at.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
There's a factor you haven't mentioned here, which is Twitter.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
And there's a lot going on in his use of Twitter. And obviously, he eventually buys Twitter. And we'll talk about that. But clearly, he becomes very influenced by by some quite radically right subcultures on Twitter. The part of Twitter he ends up falling into, whether he looks for it or just gets into it, I don't know what the chicken and the egg is here.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
But he doesn't become a normal Republican. He doesn't become, in some ways, a normal MAGA Republican. He's not like Steve Bannon or something.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
And so far, at least, Musk's patron, Donald Trump, seems to be on board.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
He falls into a sort of world of Twitter anons. Well, it started off with joking stuff.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
You know him so much better than I do. I don't know him very well at all. But I always felt when I left his presence a couple of times, I have been around it. And this was years ago before he was who he is now. I would tell people he was the smartest 15-year-old boy in the world. Yeah, that's a very good way to put it.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
And so he got really into the memes and this was always a real door into a dark right wing on that particular platform.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
So there's also reality that in a way that is unusual among people of his class, he's really good at social media, good at social media and the way young people are not in the way, you know, Barack Obama is right.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
Fair enough. But there is an official voice of social media, right? The voice Mark Zuckerberg used to have before he became an Elon Musk imitator online. Oh, so bad. The voice that, you know, you would get from Obama or Bill Gates. Yeah. And Musk isn't in that voice. He's constantly responding to small follower accounts.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
And he really does build up an attentional power that he didn't have before it. He begins to really trade in this coin of attention.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
He loves attention, but he uses it to drive meme coins. He begins, I think, to understand in a way other people don't because he's experimenting with it what you can turn attention into. Right. What set him apart from sort of the other people who superficially looked like him that made him temperamentally suited to doing that?
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
And as I've watched all this unfold, I've been wondering how Elon Musk has evolved in the way he has. How did he go from conventional Obama-era liberal worried about climate change and who wanted to go to Mars to right-wing conspiratorial meme lord working to elect the far right in Germany and shred the federal government in the United States?
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
I don't—just the way— Do you really have all these people in your life who are surprised that as a reporter in tech— Oh, my God.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
Also, it didn't make him. The car company was successful because the cars were good.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
I remember being at Code years ago, and you all had Musk on the stage. And he sort of talked through that he believed in the simulation hypothesis, which is a hypothesis that you should expect that a sufficiently advanced civilization will begin running simulations of the world. There will be more simulations and there will be base realities.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
And so by a simple matter of arithmetic, we are likelier to be living in a simulated world than the real world. And Musk said, you know, he bought this and thought there was a pretty low chance we were in base.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
Well, that's what I was going to get at. Not the simulation. I think people can make too much of whether or not that idea matters. But he has a mind, has always, I think, had a mind that is attracted to unusual ideas, that the things that most people believe are probably wrong. What you can and can't do, what is and isn't true.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
And, I mean, he has been proven right a number of times, you know, in very, very big, profound ways. You know, now he's the richest man in the world. I mean, he has the most attention in the world, right? From where you start to end up there, that's going to change your psychology.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
What led to this transition, this evolution for Elon Musk? And what actual strategies is he bringing to the government that he now seems to have quite a lot of control over? To talk about all this, I want to invite Kara Swisher on the show. Kara is one of the great tech reporters of the age.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
And one thing that then seems true, though, is that he doesn't just get attracted to unusual ideas, but he gets more conspiratorial as I watch him on Twitter. And I'm curious how you understand that dimension of him.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
It's an A very specific kind of conspiracy theory he gets into. So you have him, you know, he responds to someone who tweets that Jews, quote, have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them. And Musk replies, you have said the actual truth.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
In July of 2024, just before he came out in support of Trump, he accused Democrats of, quote, trying to import as many illegal voters as possible. And in this way, I think what is going on with him is a little bit distinct from a lot of the people who superficially have similar politics because I think he's really bought into a lot of great replacement theory.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
So Musk is South African. Peter Thiel spent much of his childhood in South Africa. David Sachs is South African. And there's a very distinctive experience there. to being somebody born in or who lived in South Africa during apartheid, and also then saw apartheid dismantled, saw South Africa change. I've never quite known myself how much weight to put on this interpretation, but it seems relevant.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
She's been covering Musk for many, many years, along with many of the other tech CEOs who become such key political figures now. She's, of course, a host of the great podcast On with Kara Swisher and Pivot, which she co-hosts with Scott Galloway. As always, my email, ezraklanshow at mytimes.com. Kara Swisher, welcome back to the show.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
That Teal, Musk, and Sachs, who are three of the most significant figures in the Silicon Valley embrace of Trump, have this very, very distinctive political experience of watching South Africa's white minority move from being in control of the country to a frightened minority in the country.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
So Musk goes and buys Twitter. It's a sort of unusual acquisition. He tries to get out of it while it's happening, but he does buy it. He does. And he comes in and he immediately does this huge cutting, just like slashing right through it. And people talk about this as headcount reduction. They talk about it as cutting waste. They talk about it as cutting bone. Sure.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
I think when you look back on it now, what it both was in reality and also, and you would know more about this than me, but what it becomes culturally in Silicon Valley is the reassertion of control. That's right. Of a CEO over an annoying and overly empowered.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
Talk a little bit about not exactly just what he did, but what the cultural effect of what he did was on his cohort. Yeah.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
Facebook having a Friday meeting where Mark Zuckerberg answers employee questions. I hear you. And they all create the internal chat software. Right. Right. Like Slack and everybody has a point where it allows employees to be speaking in a way that they can sort of organize that speech even without unions.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
This feels to me like part of the COVID era radicalization that happened to the Silicon Valley CEO class that, you know, something happened. happening during COVID, during the rise of various reckonings of Me Too, of Black Lives Matter. I really think it has a lot to do with the rise of Slack and Teams and things like that.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
I've never been here, but... You've been on my show before.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
I think it's a very underrated dimension of what changed the relationship between the bosses and their employees. It feels to me like a lot of the CEOs just hated their employees. And what radicalized them was that they had lost control of their companies and they wanted that control back. And that, as much as anything, feels to me like the theory Musk is importing now to the government.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
It's not – he's talked about cutting spending, cutting waste. What he's trying to get for Trump or for him is control.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
Yes, you have. I'm going to go back and show you receipts. You were like my second ever episode.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
One of the Rosetta Stones to me of the intellectual shift happening among this class was, I forgot now exactly when this was, but when Musk and Zuckerberg were talking about having a fight in a cage.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
And this has its own funny sub-themes where Zuckerberg is taking it all incredibly earnestly and Musk is clearly mocking him the whole time. Totally the whole time. And so there's like a whole dynamic where like they don't have the cage match, which Zuckerberg would win, but actually Musk wins because what he was doing was making fun of Mark Zuckerberg.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
Mastercast and interviewing from Kara Swisher, it was called.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
Yeah. But then there's a third here. So there's an Allen & Company conference, one of these big CEO tech conferences. And Andreessen is asked about it. And he ends up sending out his answer on his sub stack. And he basically says, I think it's great if they fight because we've lost all the masculine virtues of the Greeks. And if it was good enough for the Greeks, it's good enough for us.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
And one of the things happening, it seems to me in the right wing intellectual subculture, these guys are increasingly part of, but also among them is a sense that the world has feminized and that the masculine virtues of aggression, of combat, of conflict, of daring, of risk, of just making decisions and to hell with it.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
has been diminished and that the thing that is needed is some kind of correction, that modernity is going off the rails because we're becoming womanly and soft. And I guess this class of VCs and tech founders is going to show us our way back to it.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
Well, they intellectualized it is what I think becomes interesting here. Yes.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
How do you describe the role Elon Musk has been playing in the federal government in the first weeks of Donald Trump's second term?
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
That was the thing I was going to sort of get at with Zuckerberg, too. When I think back on that fight they were going to have, and Zuckerberg for a minute seemed to be positing himself as the Elon foil. You know, he challenged him to a fight. He was having threads. Elon had X. And now you see... Zuckerberg copying him. I mean, the way he engages on threads is the way Elon engages on Twitter.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
He probably drives him crazy. There is this deep way in which Musk seems to have reset the culture or at least been the signal that allowed a lot of the people who weren't quite ready to come out and say how they've been feeling themselves to move. He led a lot of the flood towards Trump of tech leaders.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
And, you know, now is like showing, oh, you can actually turn this into political power in a way that I think nobody quite realized you could do directly. I mean, Peter Thiel, I think, for better or worse, gets a lot of credit for Thank you.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
Thank you. Thank you. just recently happening in a year when pushed retirements have come through the FAA and, you know, Musk had already pushed the administrator of the FAA to be on leave or resign. You would get a lot more blame for that. But bad things happen all the time. The federal government is supposed to stop financial crises and on and on and on. They're coming with this
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
Acts to the government pushing indiscriminate resignations, reassigning people, pushing out very talented career staff. Anything that goes wrong, they are truly going to own.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
Opening reservoirs for no reason to fight fires that are gone.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
I think back to Twitter on the control question, because Musk buys Twitter. He breaks a lot of Twitter. He breaks the business of Twitter. Clearly, he's overpaying at $44 billion. And so I would have told you, you know, a year ago, 18 months ago, that didn't work out. But what he did actually do... is he made Twitter a channel for him personally. That's right.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
And he turned all of its attention and influence into something he could control. And I don't know if the power he's getting out of that or will get out of that is worth $44 billion. I don't think it's exactly the way to measure it, but I actually think it's worth more than that. I don't think it would be possible for Musk to play this role in both domestic and now international politics
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
If he didn't do that, we don't know how to value attention enough.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
Well, he was too. He tried to get out of it on the view that it was overvalued.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
I've said the same thing. I think that's the absolutely correct comparison. But that, I think, then brings us to the government, which is he may not know what he wants to build after, but what I think that at least the Twitter experience probably taught him is if you break it, you can control it. You can make it a vehicle for you, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
And if it's filled with the old people who were in it and they're unafraid and they have power and there are power centers, then you're opposed. I don't know if even he knows what he wants to do with the government, but...
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
The degree to which he wants everybody to see that it is him doing it, I thought it was so telling that in the email they sent out to federal employees trying to tell them you could get money and do nothing until September if you would just retire, that he gave it the same subject line as the email I sent out to Twitter employees during that buyout. He wanted everybody to know it was him, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
He wants to be the main character of the whole thing, as you said at the beginning.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
You know, there's this idea of the sin eater? No. In fantasy novels. I forget exactly where it comes from, but the character that consumes sin and then can be purged, right? You can purge that figure and then the sins are gone. It's a sort of sacrificial character. It's Jesus, I think. And in a way...
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
Musk I wonder a bit about that in terms of the pain of the administrative war that Trump and the people around him wanted to do I mean when I think about when this starts to go bad assuming this starts to go bad Musk taking so much credit for it all makes him so usefully sacrificial.
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What Elon Musk Wants
When the people are on Musk who are more careful and quiet, the Susie Wileses, the Russ Votes, the rest of them who are not against this agenda.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
Yeah, there's a lot of leaking already that we can't control Musk. Such that the moment he becomes more liability than asset, you can get rid of him. He's like, well, he went too far, right? Elon Musk got out of control. That wasn't us. I don't know that it happens. And, you know, he has leverage he can bring to a fight like that. But it doesn't seem impossible that it happens.
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What Elon Musk Wants
And you can see people setting up that escape route as we speak.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
How real do you think the affection between the two of them is?
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
I've been struck, though, to see Trump already trying to make clear that Elon is under his control. He said, quote, Elon can't do and won't do anything without our approval, and we'll give him the approval where appropriate. Where not appropriate, we won't. And then there's this endless leaking from inside the administration that nobody's actually in control of him.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
Trump is not paying attention to what he's doing. And I sort of think both things are actually true, that Trump could say no to him, but actually Trump doesn't care. And so the danger for both of them, in a strange way, is that... Musk, who is hyper empowered and has a very, very almost endless appetite for risk, takes a risk that blows up for all of them.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
I mean, you have to have a very, I'm not saying you do, but you have to have a very dim view of government to believe that if you get rid of this many talented people in it, that when bad things begin to happen in the world, and they happen constantly, I mean, there was a pandemic in his first term.
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What Elon Musk Wants
But Trump in his first term had this real interesting capacity to always seem like he was outside of the state that he, in theory, ran. He spoke as if He was up in the balcony jeering at the opera he was watching. And that always gave him the strange ability to separate himself from how a government that he didn't like worked. That was the whole political utility of the deep state.
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What Elon Musk Wants
But this, they've torched that. I mean, I know they might still try to claim it, but when you do this kind of bulldozer tactic, and it's this public... and you are absorbing all this risk and pushing these people out, then when things break and people go back and they look and they say, well, a bunch of the people here, they actually took the buyout. They took your fork in the road, Elon.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
I could be wrong. It could all work out great for them, but they are taking a lot of risk.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
I think Trump cares about pain, though. I mean, look at how quickly he backed off on his tariffs of Canada and Mexico when the markets began to move, right? You know, you can lose midterm elections really badly, and then all of a sudden the investigations are coming for you.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
I mean, I do think that's often the emotion that they are attempting to provoke. I want to ask you before we end a question about the broader Silicon Valley tech culture here. You've had this big, almost herd-like movement towards this, I forgot what you called it, a techno-authoritarian right.
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What Elon Musk Wants
And it's been so fast and so intense among the leaders, the sort of cultural leaders of Silicon Valley, the people with like the biggest social media accounts. And they're all at the Trump inauguration. Do you see a counterforce when you think of the cultural currents there? Yeah. Is it all just moving this direction? Are the employees moving this direction? Are the people coming up?
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What Elon Musk Wants
Like, what is the contrarian bet in terms of this intellectual culture, which, I mean, was very different 10 years ago than where it is now when everybody, you know, was pro-Obama.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
They were not pro-Biden. And they hated Donald Trump in 2016 with the exception of Teal. So it moves very fast. And so whenever it moves as fast and as far as it has now, it sort of makes me wonder where it's going to be in four years. I'm curious if you have a sense of who you're watching as signals of that. Yeah.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
I think that's a good place to end. As our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
So there's a story that Musk tells, a sort of dramatic story. It's him against the evildoers, but there's also mechanics, right? He has people, lieutenants fan out to key points. One thing we're seeing right now with what Musk is doing in the federal government is an identification of choke points
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Elias Iskwith and Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Isaac Jones with Afim Shapiro and Amin Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu and Kristen Lin. Weave original music by Pat McCusker.
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What Elon Musk Wants
Audience strategy by Christina Samuluski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
of information and money, the treasury payment system, the office of personnel management, which is a place where Musk has installed trusted aides, and they're using that as a way to fan out across the federal workforce.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
So tell me a bit beneath the story Musk tells, the grand narrative, when he takes things over and what he's brought from that to the federal government, what does he actually have the people under him do? What is the theory of action?
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. So at the beginning, Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency seemed to have ended up with a fairly narrow mandate. You can look at the Trump executive order creating it, and it says, the purpose is modernizing federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
In the last couple weeks, it's become clear that Musk's role is a whole lot larger than that.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
I want to zoom in on that breaking of rules because I think something Musk understands, Trump has understood in different ways, is that at high levels of society, the recourse for breaking a law, breaking a rule is legal. You don't get frog marched out typically. What happens is somebody sues you. They need to have standing. It works its way through the courts. You have lawyers as well.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
And it moves slowly. And so a lot of law following and rule following is just a norm, right? at that level, that you follow the laws and you follow the rules. If you don't, you can move much faster than the courts are likely to move, right? They can fire all these people, many of them potentially illegally, given civil service protections.
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What Elon Musk Wants
And what, they're going to sue over the course of six to nine months or four years and maybe get some back pay, right? Corporations do this against people organizing unions all the time. But as an insight that a lot of what has constrained other executive branches is is not actually a constraint because by the time the legal system catches up, you've already achieved what you want to achieve.
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What Elon Musk Wants
Although to be fair to him, it led to some amazing rockets.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
But this gets to, I think, the deeper question because there are all these tactics and strategies, but towards what? When he's blowing up rockets, he is trying to make rockets at work in a certain way. And eventually he did. And I think the world, frankly, is better off for him doing it.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
Tesla had many failures, but really did make better electric cars than anybody else made and help the electric vehicle transition happen. What does he want now, though? What is this all in service of? What is the vision, in your view, that he's trying to effectuate with all this power that he now wields in the government?
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
But I think this gets at what to me is one of the mysteries of Musk because of the ideas that he seems committed to have changed. You know, Peter Thiel, who is contemporary, they co-founded PayPal together, but Thiel has always been pretty far right. You go back to things he was writing at Stanford. Musk, you go back to, say, the Obama era, he's a kind of standard Obama-era liberal.
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What Elon Musk Wants
He has a series of companies that are solving problems that are important to Obama-era liberals. Those companies survive off of Obama-era policies from government contracts to electric vehicle subsidies.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
Right, loan guarantees. You know, Tesla's saved by an Obama loan guarantee.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
I mean, and even in 2017, he joins an advisory board for Trump, and then he gets back off of it when Trump pulls out of the Paris Climate Accords. So you have someone who is running public-private partnerships, working endlessly with the government, working on things like climate change. And within a very compressed matter of years— moves very, very far to the right.
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What Elon Musk Wants
So I agree that he wants power for his ideas, but it has always been a little bit mysterious to me what led to the striking radicalization in him.
The Ezra Klein Show
What Elon Musk Wants
I know a lot of people use ketamine. They don't tend to turn that far politically right.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
Here at the end of the year, I wanted to share one of my favorite episodes of the show that isn't about politics. It's about something that certainly I could do a better job of, which is rest. This is with the writer Judith Shulowitz. It's about the practice of Sabbath. We talked back in 2023, but it's one of those shows that has rung in my head far longer.
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Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
Tell me about this idea you bring forward, which is the social morality of time.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
That line has always felt true to me. It's always felt true about me. But I mostly ignored its trueness. There's stuff to do every day. Maybe what's changed recently is that I've gotten older. Maybe it's that I've had children or I'm seeing my own parents age. But I've had more trouble ignoring that trueness.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
You also have a very, very interesting section in the book where you talk about the way different structures of time act upon our own morality and what we're able to see. Can you tell me a bit about the Good Samaritan experiment?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
I find that study very somewhere in between moving and worrying. One, it certainly feels true in my own life, right? I'm not going to say when I am hurrying, the likelihood that I will stop and help somebody on the street is dramatically lower. When I'm hurrying, the likelihood that I will stop and help myself is dramatically lower. So true.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
I don't think the speed at which I live, at which I move through time, at which I see the people around me living and moving through time is a speed that any of us really want. I don't think the habits that I've cultivated here are really good ones. So I've become interested in what this old practice has to say about how I live and how we live today.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
You know, there's a deep sense of like the morality towards oneself that can begin to fail the faster time is going, you know, down to whether or not I'm going to the doctor to get things checked out, how I treat my family, etc., And at the same time, I don't think there's much argument that we have technologically begun to speed up our lives.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
And we create systems in which we are late or behind that can now pervade many more spaces than they could before. I'm often not caught up in my email life. With my children at the park, when that would not have been a relevant concept, you know, a couple decades ago, because there is no email. And when you're at the park, you can't be doing anything else.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
And it's part of what has attracted me to this idea of the Sabbath, this idea that what if you spent a full seventh of your life operating at a different speed of time? What would that do to you? What would that mean for you?
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Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
One thing that makes me think about is I love listening to music and unsurprisingly enjoy listening to podcasts. And I am virtually never moving anywhere alone that I do not have, not just earbuds or headphones on, but noise canceling earbuds or headphones on.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
And I recognize that I don't talk to people and they don't talk to me in the way that I would have at another time, in a way that I do on the occasions that I don't have those on. And that there is a loss there. It gets to something Heschel writes. And I mean, Heschel's writing, you know, before social media, before the internet.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
Heschel has this line, six days a week, we seek to dominate the world. On the seventh day, we try to dominate the self. It's amazing how much harder that is to do. But I can't shake the question of what if I did actually spend a full seventh of my life, which is what the Sabbath is supposed to be, living at a different speed. Who would I be if I knew more than how to work and not work?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
But it's one of these lines from his book that feels more of the moment than I suspect it did even when he wrote it, where he writes, the solution to mankind's most vexing problem will not be found in renouncing technical civilization, but in attaining some degree of independence on it. And I've always been really struck by that. I mean, I don't keep the Sabbath.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
I'm trying to figure out what that practice will look like for me. And I don't think it'll mean no electric lights. And on the other hand, I'm very attracted to the idea of trying to become more independent from the technological shell I have built around myself.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
Something you're getting at there, which I have both mixed feelings and mixed experience with, is the secularization of the Sabbath. The rise of digital Shabbats, right? People don't look at their phone on Saturdays. The rise of Sabbath is a metaphor, not so much a practice. I mean, largely the way I relate to it so far.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
So I'm not, this is not aimed at anybody, frankly, but me, but it's not a critique of anybody else. But I also, I'm curious what you think of them. How do you think about the Sabbath cleaved from holiness, cleaved from its religious roots?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
Who would I be if I knew actually how to rest? A metaphor we often use now for rest is recharging. I need to recharge. Like we're iPhones that need to be plugged in overnight so we can work again in the morning. And here too, Heschel has a critique of this. He knew it. He talked about it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
It's funny, that describes my experience here quite precisely. And I really struggle with this and it's something I want to make sure to talk about because I've tried a variety of secular versions of it and individual versions of it to get at your social point. None of them have stuck. And it's hard to get away from the idea that
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
when you kind of look directly at it, that what you're trying to do on the Sabbath, at least traditionally, is create a sense of holiness. And that's a tough word if you are at this point more secular. And it becomes very hard to find. There's often nowhere I feel less holy than in some of the temples I've been to.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
And you have a beautiful line on this where you write, it's weird to fill your mouth with words that have been drained of meaning. It's like wrapping your tongue around a fossil. So how do you think about that relationship then between a sense of holiness and the distance many of us feel from this thing we want, which is the experience of holiness?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
So you really enjoy the literary criticism portion of the service.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
He writes, man is not a beast of burden and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work. Oof. When I was young, I went to an Orthodox Hebrew school for a couple of years and I had friends who truly kept Shabbat.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
You have a really nice commentary on this, I thought, where you write about the bridge that that offers us. into this question of what makes time feel holy. And you write that holy time then is time that we ourselves make holy, time that we sanctify by means of ourselves. We have to commit ourselves to holy time before it will oblige us by turning holy. How do we sanctify the Sabbath?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
By wearing a special robe, said the rabbis, by beautifying ourselves in our homes. And that brings up another dimension of the Sabbath rules, which is not what you can't do on it, but what you're supposed to do before it and why. Can you talk a bit about that?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
I enjoyed going to their homes, but I didn't understand why they were giving up so much, all of these should nots, the refusal to use a car or to turn off a light or to fire up a video game. There was so much renunciation. And I still don't quite think those practices are right for me, but all I could see then was what was being pushed away.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
We've talked here a lot about the theory and beauty of the imagined Sabbath. And then you try. And nothing in practice has ever made me feel less whole or less able to relax than trying to add a bunch of cooking, cleaning, social organizing, et cetera, to a Friday night when I still have a work week and two kids. And so there's this interesting tension between I can see it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
I mean, I can read all this and I find it really beautiful. And then the actual question of, well, at least if you take the approach I've typically taken and try to jam it into a life not built for it, it doesn't work. It doesn't work. It's really true. And it really has this way of revealing also the tensions and lack of space in your own life. I carry around a lot more Sabbath guilt than I do.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
And now I've become a lot more interested in what was being created, what was worth creating. In her beautiful book, The Sabbath World, Judith Shulowitz looks very squarely at that question, what the Sabbath has tried to create and how that has worked throughout time, throughout cultures, throughout different religions, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
But it gets back to something we were talking about earlier. It's a lot of work to create rest. And I don't mean that glibly. I think there's something very deep there that it, I mean, it gets to, I mean, Heschel talking about rest as a discipline, but a lot has to be true to find the space of tranquility. And the thing that comes to mind here is that we're not taught to do that.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
We're taught more about rest as a negation of other things. But do you find it to be true?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
There's a Jewish Sabbath, Jewish Shabbat, but obviously it's a Christian practice. Now there are secular versions of the practice and many more. And she looks at how difficult, how antagonistic, how idealistic that act of creation is in the world in which we live.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
It makes me think of something that the technology writer Elam Tsikassas has written about. And he was writing about the context of metaverses. But he was making this point, based on a lot of the same thinkers you're talking about here, that it is easy to miss how much more of our space has now been invaded by commerce than was true 100 years ago, than was true 50 years ago.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
And what struck me reading her is how fundamentally counter-cultural the practice now is, how radical something so ancient now feels to me, and in a way, how urgent it feels. I mentioned in my end-of-the-year AMA that my big resolution for this year is to actually build some kind of consistent Sabbath practice.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
I order books to my Kindle in bed on my phone. I couldn't do that, right? I mean, I remember, I'm old enough to remember, if you wanted a book, you had to go to the library or the bookstore, like actually do it. So you then had to read what you already had at home. The internet makes commerce possible everywhere. We used to have the Sabbath laws, which I think would annoy me very much.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. This episode for me today has its roots way back. And so I'm going to take a moment in setting it up. When I was in college, a rabbi I knew, he gave me Abraham Joshua Heschel's book, The Sabbath. And I love that book. I've probably read it a dozen times since.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
But they did create space. And so it's not that we lost the laws, but phones and internet and technology has commercialized everything. I mean, it is always there. And it's one of the ways in which Sabbath seems to me now to be a more urgent kind of countercultural practice because there were things that space used to give us.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
You just weren't in a place where there was commerce, so there was no commerce. But now there is no place where there is no commerce. I mean, a mountaintop maybe. And so commerce is always possible and you're always in the mind of, oh, maybe I should just go grab that thing on Amazon. And so if you can't escape in space,
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
then the only possibility, if you think it is important, which I'm not 100% sure I do, but I suspect it is, to not have commerce be part of your life 24-7, then you can only escape in time. Both as an individual practice, but more as you're saying, traditionally as a legal practice, a social practice, Sabbath has been an escape in time from commerce and from capitalism.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
And if other people look down on you for doing it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
And so I asked Judith to come on the show and talk about her book, talk about these ideas for a bit. As always, my email is refineshow at nytimes.com. Judith Shulowitz, welcome to the show.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
How do you think about the times when some of these values conflict? So I had this lovely conversation with Susanna Heschel, Abraham Joshua Heschel's daughter, who's written a beautiful introduction to the current editions of that book. And she was making this point to me that part of what it means for people who truly keep the more orthodox Sabbath
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
that they live in walking distance of their synagogue is that it means a community lives in walking distance of itself, right? The Sabbath community is spatially forced together and that makes community easier. That is not how my community works. The people I love live further from me.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
If my sons are going to speak to their grandmothers on Saturday, it's going to require a phone or FaceTime or something. If we're going to see a bunch of our friends, it requires getting to them somehow. And there's the question of organizing that in a world where that's not how we organize. And one of the things that has actually often kept me from doing real digital Sabbath is
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
is the feeling that community is important. And in order for community and family to be available in the life I have built, a certain amount of digitalness is intrinsic. How do you think about tensions like that?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
I think most people who are familiar at all with the Jewish Sabbath know it mainly for all the Shaddats, all the things that people who keep it are prohibited from doing. But tell me about the should here. What are the Sabbath rules attempting to create?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
I got the sense reading your book that early adult Shabbats for you were quite lonely, that you were somewhat alone in that practice. And I get the sense that stopped being true to point. What kind of community did you find or build?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
Let me ask you from a different stage of life, which is, I think in a quite cliche way, a lot of this has been on my mind as I've become a father. But It's much harder to do with a four-year-old and a one-year-old because they're not into creating a tranquil, peaceful repose. And they're a little bit hard to order around and they don't sit through the dinner and so on.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
And it's really been puzzling to me because I've become most interested in the idea at the moment when it seems hardest to do. How did it work or how have you seen it work for young families? I mean, so much of Shabbat is about being able to have a, it seems to me, control of a space and time. And nothing is more inimical to that than little kids.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
I think that's a nice place to end. Always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
Thank you for listening to the show. As always, if you want to support us, you can give us a rating in whatever podcast app you're using or send the show to a friend. The Ezra Klein Show is produced by MFA Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, Roger Karma, and Kristen Lynn. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary March Locker, and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Pat McCusker.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
Tell me a bit about the threads connecting the things that are prohibited. Where do those prohibitions come from and what ties them together?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
So I want to note a couple levels there. The first level being the individual level, right? What am I supposed to be doing? What is the intention with which I'm supposed to be acting? And then all the way up to the social level, what are we all doing? And we're going to take all those pieces, but I want to focus for a few minutes here on the Torah, the origin of it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
Tell me a bit about the theology of the Sabbath.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
I want to pull in Abraham Joshua Heschel here who wrote this classic book, The Sabbath, many, many years ago now, decades ago. And I'm probably going to weave in and out of that book a bit because it's influenced me a lot. But he writes here that the word being used in the story is minuha.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
And he writes, minuha, which we usually render with rest, means here much more than withdrawal from labor and exertion. He goes on to say it's something closer to, quote, tranquility, serenity, peace, and repose. I want to get at the distinction between rest as defined by something you're not doing. Rest is I'm not working versus rest as a kind of state I'm achieving.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
And the reason it's mattered to me so much for so long is not just about the idea of the Sabbath. It's a critique of the way many of us, certainly me, live. A critique of the way our world has been designed. Heschel's argument is that the modern world is obsessed with questions of space.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
Let me not pretend my own motivations here are all that theological. One reason Heschel's book has meant so much to me and your book has meant so much to me and I've been struggling so much with this idea is is a sense I have of myself that I actually don't know how to rest. And that I can sometimes not work, but the things I tend to replace it with look a lot like work.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
You know, when you're somebody who likes to read and then you do a podcast based around books you read, your leisure becomes, I mean, you know, obviously it's a paradox of me even just doing this episode at all about the Sabbath, but... This gets to another Heschel quote. He writes, labor is a craft, but perfect rest is an art.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
And goes on to say, to attain a degree of excellence in art, one must accept its discipline. One must adjure slothfulness. So then it feels like rest is hard work in that description, but he's getting, how do you think about that?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
We spend our days trying to master the spaces in which we live, building in them, acquiring from them, traversing them. And what we spend to do that is the time that we have to live. He writes, quote, most of us seem to labor for the sake of things of space. As a result, we suffer from a deeply rooted dread of time and stand aghast when compelled to look into its face.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
You call Shabbat in your book a socially reinforced temporal structure. Tell me more about the two sides of that. Temporal reminds me of the Heschel argument that Shabbat is a cathedral in time. It is important to understand it, that it's about time, not space. But as you say, something your book really brings forward is that there is a deeply social dimension.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
So how does the time dimension and the social dimension come together?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Well, as long as we're just doing intellectual history, I want to just call out. It's nice to be able to do this because I hope we are very generous with this.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
credit in the book like this is not just our idea somehow by any means and so you know in that a couple other people i just think were really really important in this um there was the whole progress studies world which was sort of started by tyler cowan and and patrick collison um jason crawford has been you know a big uh driver of i think that was very very influential in the book you were writing sort of before it morphed into the our collaboration
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
The Niskanen Institute had an awesome paper that was very influential and was a central part of my sort of first piece on this, that economic mistake piece called – I don't remember what the paper was called, but its idea was cost-push socialism, which was this idea that it wasn't just accidental that you often had –
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
very, very high prices for things that liberals wanted to subsidize, that it was the obvious outcome of subsidizing a good that you were at the same time choking off the supply of.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Yeah, and Steve Tellis, I think, is a big influence here. Really, really thoughtful, smart guy, political scientist who I've known a very, very long time. And then at that same, also at Niskanen, they've had a great state capacity project under Brink Lindsey, who wrote a book that was in part about, that was very much about abundance.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Jen Polka, whose book on Recoding America, that came out after and during the period we were working on this, but she's sort of affiliated with them now. So Niskanen has, I think, really been a very important intellectual hub of this kind of work. You know, and then there are a bunch of writers. It wasn't just the Yimby movement.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
There are a bunch of writers who are doing just extraordinarily great work on housing in particular, but in ways it generalized. So I think Matt Iglesias just is a genuinely unsung hero of just like, forcing progressives to take this seriously for a decade, right? He had a Kindle single back when people used to do that called The Rent is Too Damn High.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And I mean, I don't remember what year that came out, but it's some time ago now. And he was just really, really pushed that. Jerusalem Dempsis, who is at Vox and is now at The Atlantic. And my partner, Annie Lowry, is also at The Atlantic. She has done – I mean, Covered Housing Forever, we are always talking about these things.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
But she had this idea that she published in 2020 about the affordability crisis. And she published this right before the pandemic hit. And it's like an idea I've never stopped thinking about. And now everybody uses a term, I think – And I'm her partner unfairly without crediting her. Like everybody talks about the affordability crisis, but it's her term. And the affordability crisis was this idea.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And again, people like the economy is really good in 2020. So they weren't talking about its problems, but she writes this piece and says, look, if you look at the things that people really need to build a good life and a secure life, if you look at housing, if you look at education, if you look at elder care, if you look at childcare, if you look at medical care, uh,
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
There might be others I'm forgetting here. They're all skyrocketing price and have been for a long time. And so consumer goods are really cheap. Inflation looks very low. But if you are looking at these things that are essentials to like actual human beings, you can do without a flat screen television. It's really difficult to do without good medical care or a home.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
There's a huge problem building here. And then you have the pandemic hits. And so like that piece had gone very viral, but it sort of cuts the, I remember like it just like, I think that piece comes out in February of 2020. So it just cuts or maybe even early March. It cuts the conversation over that. But that had always like bounced around in my mind.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Then you have pandemic inflation, which focuses everybody on prices. And then the pandemic inflation recedes, but now they're really looking at prices and the affordability crisis prices don't, the affordability crisis prices don't recede, right? Because that's been this multi-decade building problem. And I think that's a really big part of this.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
For me, that was one of the things that clicked into place. Oh, the next era of politics is going to be different. Like we were focused on demand and insufficient demand for a really long time. I mean, that was a problem post COVID. in some ways pre but very much post financial crisis.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
But the affordability crisis is going to define the economic conversation in the post pandemic period because it is a completely unsolved problem. Nobody even has a really good way to solve it right now. And we're going to have to think about it and it's going to have to be supply oriented.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
So while we're doing just like this intellectual genealogy, and I'm sure I'm forgetting a million people, but I think it's worth saying like, you know, all these people and many more, you know, had huge parts of the ideas that, you know, as we were sort of like trying to weave things together and think about them were really important.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Yeah, Noah's idea just is of – what is it called? Checkism?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Where progressives only care about the number on the bill, right? Like, you know, whatever is a bigger number on the bill, a bigger number on the climate bill, like, that's better. But without actually following through to be like, how much did that money actually build us? This is great. I think it's a line sort of like, you know –
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Like numbers on numbers on legislation don't build things like what actually matters is how much you built with it. I've always thought that's a really not just like a useful concept, but a very true critique.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Ooh, that's a good question. I ended up doing a lot more historical work than I thought I would be doing. So I ended up being very influenced by Paul Sabin's book, Public Citizens, which as long as we're... I actually, I'm so excited we're doing this show and just like can thank all these people.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
But Mark Dunkelman, who just has a new book out, it's very along the lines of ours called Why Nothing Works, and it's great. He had written this piece years ago about why it was so difficult to rebuild Penn Station, which sucks, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And I think that if I'm remembering it correctly, I think that piece turned me on to Paul Sabin's work in the book Public Citizen or Public Citizens, which was very much about the rise of Naderite progressivism, the rise of Rachel Carson, the rise in the back half of the 20th century of a progressivism that was actually about or liberalism actually about checking what the government could do.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
So there's New Deal liberalism that's about expanding what government can do. And then you have these people like Nader who emerge and say, no, no, no, no, no. Government is... devastating us right now. It's not doing enough. What it's doing is bad for the environment. It's building heedlessly. It's captured by corporations. And a lot of those points were correct.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
But they build this architecture of legislation and process and regulations and a huge nonprofit movement that exists to sue government and exists to slow government down and exists to force more veto points into government.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And in doing that, in following that line of historical work, I think I began to understand something I had not understood about progressivism, which is how unbelievably insufficient progress The idea that the cleavage in this country is liberals think government is good and conservatives think government is bad really is. Like, that's just not how it works.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Conservatives often do think government is bad, except if it's national security government or the police state, in which case they think it's great. And like, you can just pick up anybody you want. And now, I guess on the day we're talking, throw them, have ICE throw them into a jail in Louisiana because you don't like the things they've said.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Concerns are very comfortable with a government, I think, of terrifying levels of surveillance and police state power. But liberals are very divided in their soul on government.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
There's a liberalism that wants big government and a liberalism that is terrified of government running over marginalized communities, doing the bidding of corporations, not being good enough to liberal constituencies like unions. And so trying to unearth
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
what was happening that we had chosen to hobble government in these ways, what had happened that this was so true in California, which was a state where you couldn't blame everything on Republicans.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
That was something I don't think I realized I'd be doing, you know, when it began, like I needed explanations for things that I could, I could see the thing was happening, but I didn't understand why it was happening. I'm curious what your answer to this is, though.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
How is it different than or what did you learn, I guess, that you were not expecting to learn or what did you go down a rabbit hole on that you found revelatory?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
I wonder how much we're just going to bore everybody with this, but we eventually had a theory of the book and how to write it. That each chapter should be doing three things simultaneously. It should be really good at walking you through a fundamental problem of supply that has been caused or could be fixed by policy. So chapter one is housing supply.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Chapter two is really built around high-speed rail and decarbonization. Chapter three is state capacity. Chapter four is about invention. And chapter five is about implementation. So it should be doing something on that level. And you should really, you know, I hope if you read this book, you'll learn a lot about housing. You'll learn a lot about decarbonization.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
You'll learn a lot about how we build things in America and its legal system. You'll learn a lot about how China captured solar technology and the production of it from us and sort of took that over. You'll learn a lot in a great chapter Derek did about penicillin. And then it should be kind of giving you like a piece of the history here.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And then it should be giving you a sense of like one of the fundamental ways we have thought about doing things that doesn't work. And so chapter one is about housing. One, because I do sort of buy into the housing theory of everything, as it gets called, that housing is just fundamental.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
People need a place to live, but more than they need a place to live, or maybe not more, but alongside needing a place to live. If we are going to have a strong economy, we need to let people live in the economic engines of the economy. One of the things I was most proud of, I think, on a book like The Joys of It, given that most of writing a book is absolutely miserable.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
2021 um you know even when i go back to that essay you can you have moments as a writer i know you do and where a bunch of things that have been bothering you for a long time coherent to one thing you realize you've been thinking about one thing and not many and And so there are a couple of things floating in my head over the 30 years before that.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
One of the joys of it is when you come to a really new economic idea. I'm sorry, a new idea, a new epiphany. And I was really struggling with this question of, well, why do we care so much how many units we build in San Francisco? I mean, you can live in other places. Montana's not full of people. And the sort of theory that I eventually, I think, cracked was that
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
The big megacities are increasingly the engines of the American economy. And they are the frontiers, that the frontier of the, you know, we used to worry about the closing of the frontier because we thought it was like this expansive land America had that was the guarantor of our prosperity. But it was never the land. It's the ideas emerge in the land in a modern economy.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
What matters is being on the frontier of ideas, being able to turn those ideas into technological or somehow commercial or service oriented artifacts that you can then sell domestically and globally. Right. That's how the economy actually works. And then being, then there are things like, you know, that happen that are not high productivity sectors, but really benefit from being near them.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Like you make more money as a barber working near the Googleplex than you make as a barber working in rural West Virginia. And this is just an absolutely ancient path to mobility and prosperity. A huge amount of the inequality we cut in the 20th century just came from people moving from poorer, more low productivity areas to high productivity areas. And then we sort of threw that into reverse.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And now people leave those areas. I actually find this research so shocking. But people are leaving mobility. working class people are leaving the high productivity areas to move to low productivity or lower productivity areas because it's just too expensive to live there. You know, there's Ganong and Shoa whose work I quoted in the book.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
You know, they have this sort of thing about like the janitor and the lawyer. And it used to make sense for a janitor to move to New York City and it made sense for a lawyer to move to New York City. Both of them would make more money there. Now it still makes sense for the lawyer to move to New York City, but not the janitor because a janitor can't afford a house, can't afford a place to live.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
So in gating the megacities by making – by constraining the supply of housing such that they became unaffordable to live in, what we've done in addition to making them unaffordable is shut off a driver of opportunity. You in that chapter sort of quote some of the Raj Chetty research too that shows people tend to be more innovative living in innovative places. But interestingly –
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
They innovate in the exact same ways of the place they grew up in, right? You're much more likely to, you know, if you're a kid, you know, you're the son of like a, you know, somebody who works in a factory in Northern California. You're the son of an auto mechanic. You're more likely to patent in computer science because you grew up there.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Whereas if you grew up in a place that was like big in the defense industry, you'd be more likely to patent in the defense industry. Like this is really, really good, interesting research there. And so we are shutting off, you know, the ways in which you used to have, you know, kids grow up in a kind of ecosystem of innovation and expertise and connections.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And we have the research to know that really matters. And so the fact that, like, while I was working on this book, like, I knew people who were firefighters who were driven out of living in San Francisco because the city they were protecting from burning down was unaffordable for them. Right? That just fucking sucks. Like, that's immoral in my view. Yeah.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And so, you know, housing is at the center of a lot. It actually really matters for innovation because cities are engines of innovation. Like almost all of the major AI research is happening within what, 50 square miles in America? 50 square miles.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
There's not one big AI firm, not one frontier level AI lab in New York, not one in Los Angeles, not one in Boston, not one in Miami, not one in Atlanta, nowhere, right? It's right where it is because of these eco, these agglomerations of talent and knowledge and know-how they are really hard to replicate elsewhere. You cannot just do it by force. You actually have to build the thing.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And it's sort of a little bit random. And then once it's built, you have to let people be near it. And so housing to me was very, very central. Because one, I think the Yankees were the best example of a supply-side liberal movement at that moment. And two, it just kind of affects everything else.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
But then three, you could see what I think was at the heart of a bunch of liberal pathology here, which was the fundamental skepticism of growth and the fundamental idea that had taken hold in California, among other places, that having more people move to your city was bad. It was gross. They were like locusts, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
One is that I felt progressivism had developed a dysfunctional relationship with technology.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
I have these quotes from the San Francisco Chronicle in this period where they talk about people coming there. It's like the people already live there are treated like stewards of the land, the authentic voice of the Bay Area, of Marin, of San Francisco. And anybody who might want to come now is like a consumptive horde.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
I mean, these are not like the people writing the My Land column in the San Francisco Chronicle are not like indigenous to the region. So I don't know. That's a lot of answer. But that for me, it was like so much was bound up in housing.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And to sort of understand what had happened, you had to begin untangling it, not just as a supply and demand problem, but as an ideological problem, like as a way that liberalism began to think really incorrectly about the places it governed, about their function. You had Michael Bloomberg talking about like New York as a luxury good. It should not be a luxury good. It's not a penthouse.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And this had happened, in my view, after the 2016 election, when a lot of Democrats turned on social media and the billionaires who ran social media platforms as prime reasons that Donald Trump had won, but also, and I don't actually think this next part is wrong, prime reasons that the public commons were becoming filled with toxicity.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
So I did over the past couple of years. My not as good as abundance language, but the best language I ever came up to describe what I was talking about here was a liberalism that builds, which people really like. But often in my own head, I thought of this as a liberalism of the details.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And what I had come to believe is sort of related to Noah Smith's Czechism concept was that even pretty policy-oriented liberals tended to turn off once the bill was passed. And they didn't dive into the details of what was happening after it. And they tended to be...
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
or affectively hostile to say the view that, oh, these regulations are really unwise, or there's some reason we've ended up trying to build a $1.7 million public restroom in a small park in San Francisco. So one of the things I started trying to do was really, really, really dig in. to what was happening in projects that I cared about.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
I got a email, I got connected to somebody who had helped in the construction of this affordable housing complex in San Francisco called Tehanan. At another point, I ended up looking into pretty deeply what was going on with something called Measure HHH in Los Angeles, which was a bond measure to build affordable housing.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
It was not built that like, you know, some number of years later at this point had built like a couple thousand units and they were costing about $700,000 per unit, right? These publicly subsidized affordable like housing units were costing as much as a full place would cost you in Denver. So something was wrong. And I began...
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
like going to these places and talking to the people who were building the homes or building the complex or people consulted on the building of that kind of thing or the people in government who were working on it and what i began to realize when i would say okay tell me how this got to seven hundred thousand dollars or in the case of tahanan which was built um much cheaper and much faster is done through modular construction uh etc tell me how you avoided getting there
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And what I basically began to hear a lot about was the layering on of standards, expectations, processes, and additional goals. So it sounded good to have a big preference in the San Francisco contracting rules, first for minority-owned contractors, and then that was made illegal by the people of California. So then it became for small and micro-sized contractors.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And because the leaders of social media platforms sort of represented tech, they had become synonymous with tech, and they were these, you know, mega and quite unaccountable billionaires, I felt that the left had, in its anger at these companies, begun sort of giving up on technology. But then at the same time, two other more positive things were happening. One was the YIMBY movement.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
But that was shooting costs up because one way you get... If you are a very efficient contractor who's really good at building things, you're probably going to get more revenue. And in getting more revenue, you actually became someone disfavored by anything that was getting public money to build affordable housing in San Francisco, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Like we actually were punishing publicly companies for being good at what they did to say nothing of like, if there was like a national company that was really good at using modular construction on an offsite factory to build affordable housing cheaply, like we just, you just couldn't do that. Um, So they were able to get around a bunch of, you know, there were more things, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Like there was a mayor's disability commission, which these projects were already ADA compliant, but the SF mayor also had their own sort of like disability agency that had to come in and do its own inspection and would come in and say like at the end of a project, we don't think these doors are quite wide enough. You got to change all of them.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And like that would cost however many hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and take another month and a half because you had to find this contractor who could do it and they were already overbooked. And you just begin to hear story after story, right? I was talking to people who did this work in Los Angeles. Again, affordable housing publicly subsidized.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
This is the housing that liberals tell me they want, right? They don't want this market rate bullshit. They want affordable housing. So here, the people of LA, the taxpayers, they put the money into it. So what have they done?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Well, because they wanted to lower the amount of money that the taxpayers was paying, what they were trying to basically do is use the taxpayer money, the bond money, as a seed funding.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And if you could use it as seed funding, then it would be like, okay, cobble together other money from philanthropies, from public tax programs, right, that are there to do things like address veterans, homelessness, et cetera, to finish it. So, you know, in theory, you're stretching the amount of money that the taxpayers were offering. You were leveraging it.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
But when I talked to the comptroller, he was like, oh no, we've made a terrible mistake. The guy who was actually trying to figure out how to save the people money, and I have this quote in there from him, Ron Galperin, I think it was. But he basically says, look, what they're doing, and I heard this from everybody, is that they're having to cobble together all these different funding sources.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And each one has its own strictures, its own audit structure, but it also wants different things. Like this one is for veterans housing, for homeless veterans. So you need to find these homeless veterans, right? This one is for pregnant women who have been in abusive relationships or people with mental health issues. And all these come on their own timeframes.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And, you know, you got to wait for the funders to make their decision and the timing costs money. And then you've, you know, missed something else. And so that costs you money. And like the people you're going to contract with, they've moved on to another job. And it was all very well-meaning. You know, like the green building standards are very high for these affordable housing complexes.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Somebody, Jasmine Tong was telling me who works on affordable housing, was telling me about, you know, situations where She, you know, the planning commission made them or someone made them put in like really, really high level air filtration because like the affordable housing was near a freeway, which is on the one hand fine, but great.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Like I want everybody to have really good air filtration, but it's much better than was normally required. And the alternative was these people were living in a tent under the freeway.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
We were really letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. And of course, there were like the NIMBYs coming out to things. But everything bagel liberalism was the idea. And it was coming.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
I'd watched the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, which at the center of that movie, there is like an everything bagel where you truly pile everything onto the bagel and it becomes a black hole from which nothing can escape. Right.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And it began to feel like that to me, that, you know, we were piling so much on that these things just weren't getting done or they weren't getting built quickly enough or they weren't getting built at a level we could afford. And so we weren't solving the problem.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
which was the sort of emergence of a strain of, at least at that time, I would call it progressivism, centered in California where I was living, which was not just saying we should build more houses. I think this is actually a quite important distinction. And I would really recommend Connor Doherty's book, Golden Gates, which is just a fantastic history of the Yimby's. But
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And then I'll try to wrap this up, but I saw it happening nationally because we had just passed the Chips and Science Act, which I was a very big supporter of. But that at its core is subsidies for semiconductor fabs in the U.S., And then I noticed that the notice of funding opportunity, it had all these things about like preferences for minority subcontractors.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And, you know, did you have child care on site? And what were you doing to increase the percentage of women in your construction workforce? I'm like, does the Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation really know how to change the percentage of women?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
in like construction like if we want to do that fine but just pass a bill that addresses that directly and there were all these different things right you know how are you gonna you know how are you gonna make this climate friendly a bunch of good ideas like i supported them all individually but we were making this project harder and like me and like we were doing something that might fail entirely the history of industrial policy is not a history of whenever you try it it is successful
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And so what I began to see was like liberalism had adopted this approach to implementing things that passed where it would pass a thing and say, we're addressing affordable housing. And then like in all the meetings to turn that intention or proposition into action and
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
It was larding them up with all these other goals that then was making the final thing fail or making it really late or making it really expensive. And of course, people were losing faith. But also, we just weren't solving the problems. And like that was a culture like that is what not was is currently it is still happening. That is a bad culture, right? It is a culture where we are.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Before you ask your question, I want to get you to expand on something that you jumped quickly because I know you're driving the... You're the host on this one, but I want to get you to talk about this for a second because you drove a lot on things like the NIH and the slowdown in biomedical research, which one, a lot of people don't believe is happening, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
It was not just saying we should build more homes. It wasn't just like, here's the supply and demand curve. It was saying that was illiberal, that you were not a social justice focused progressive. If you lived in a big economically important city like, you know, San Francisco or Palo Alto, and you were fighting the building of these homes, it had to be part of the self-definition.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Ben Wallace was in his mostly very kind New Yorker piece, but was like... Look at this. We have these GLP-1s. How much more biomedical advances do you need at the moment? But two, at this moment, you have Elon Musk and Doge and RFK Jr. now in charge of the federal government and slicing through the NIH, the HHS, the CDC. They're putting critics in charge of these agencies.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
They're firing huge numbers of scientists. How is how what is your critique of the way we are funding science or what is the book's critique, I guess, because I'm at least somewhat involved. And how is it different than theirs? Right. When you when you're seeing them do this. And in fact, you like we end up quoting research from the guy they've eventually put in charge of the NIH.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
How is what you want? How's what we want different from what they are doing?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
of progressivism, that we were making it possible for the working class to live in the cities that were the engines of American opportunity. And I felt the Yimbys were, and I am a Yimby, the most exciting ideological faction to emerge in a very long time. And I was very involved in climate change policy reporting.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Remind me again what the original one was. When were we doing it?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Yeah, like maybe May or June of that was when we were thinking, as I remember now. I think given what happened, that would have been a pretty tough news cycle to enter into. I think that the upside and the downside, I don't even want to call it upside and downside, it's just the reality of it hitting now. is you have two things that affect the way it's going to be received.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And not just the way it will be received. I will say for myself what I am trying to do with it. One is that the Democratic Party, which is a party I am first and foremost trying to influence because I think that I share more of their goals and so they might be open to more of my and our ideas, is at a real liquid moment, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
and it doesn't know what it needs to be next time it has exhausted the fumes of obamaism because that's really where we've been barack obama represented a different tendency in politics he created a different coalition he had a really strong governing philosophy and then after him you know joe biden Joe Biden would not have won in 2020 if he had not been Barack Obama's vice president.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And now there were real differences in how Biden governed. I mean, he had a huge influx of people from the sort of Elizabeth Warren movement. They are much more attentive to, you know, monopoly and concentration power. They did a lot, frankly, that I think is pretty abundance-like and helped inspire us in the book around the Inflation Reduction Act and so on.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And it had become very clear to me that there was only one pathway, a very narrow, narrow pathway, which I don't actually think with Donald Trump we're all that likely to be on in the way I'd hoped. But at that point, we were maybe on. By which...
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
But in terms of the story Joe Biden could tell, it was ultimately the exhaustion of the Obama story, right? He was the sort of the final part of that. And then Kamala Harris did not have time to come up with a new story, right? And she was in this strange,
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
bind between, you know, was she going to run as a champion of an unpopular administration or was she going to unconvincingly try to separate herself from an administration where she was the vice president? Right. So in the end, the loss has, I think, destroyed that period of the Democratic Party. Right. It's done. It needs to figure something else out.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And I think the, you know, and I think everybody understands that the thing it needs to figure out is going to have a lot to do with cost of living because Donald Trump is not lowering the cost of living. And that was the dominant voting issue in 2024. The Democrats want to, you know, run against Donald Trump. He's not brought down the price of eggs yet. They see that as his real vulnerability.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
But ultimately, to be a nationally dominant party, they're going to have to have genuinely they need to rebuild credibility and cost of living. Right. And so I think that's one way that our book enters into a live conversation there. Then you have Doge. And, you know, Steve Tellis keeps needling us that Elon Musk and Doge are what he calls dark abundance. And the point is that...
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
We are saying in many ways government is inefficient. I was listening to a clip on Search Engine, great podcast, from Elon Musk's marathon interview with Lex Friedman, where he says, you know, building high speed rail in California is basically illegal. And he is not wrong. He is not wrong about that. Now, Musk is going in and Doge is going in.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And instead of, you know, reimagining what government can do, expanding government capabilities, making government work, he's just destroying the thing. Now, his defenders will tell you, oh, this is what he does. He turns things on and turns them back off or turns them off and turns them back on to see what breaks. But this is not like running Twitter.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And he is when you fire a bunch of really talented people, which they are doing, you can't just turn that back on. They want ideological control of the government. And they have not... I've heard other people say, oh, they're doing zero-based budgeting. That's not fucking zero-based budgeting. When you do zero-based budgeting...
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
If we were going to avoid the worst of climate change, it was going to be because we had technologically accelerated solar, wind, and battery technology to the point that we could mass deploy it at a price point competitive with fossil fuels. And that might actually work. That a politics of sacrifice was going to fail.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
and you try to start from zero and have things justify themselves, you have measures and metrics and goals upon which they can justify themselves. If anybody has offered that in the Trump administration to the people working at USAID in a real way, I have not heard it.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
In fact, like as Mark Rubio just canceled, I think it was 88% of the contracts, a bunch of the people who were supposed to justify them were told they had more time to do so. And the cancellation notice came before they were even given their opportunity to make the case for what they were doing. They are not trying to make government work better.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
They are trying to break government so it is a thing that they can control. But because they are attacking government inefficiency, at least in a rhetorical way, it sort of intersects with us. And my fear is, is that the Democratic Party, the liberal movement, which had already become, in my view, way too pro-institutional, you know, as you like to point out, they don't,
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
They like all those yard signs in this house. We believe in science. They don't actually mean science. They believe in scientific institutions. They believe in the institutions. Right. And when those institutions are not good for fundamental science, like they don't know, they don't care. They don't try to do anything about it.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
So I'm worried it will push Democrats into reflexive support of everything in government. I don't think I've ever been particularly naive about Doge. Some people I really like, I think, were more optimistic about it than they probably should have been. But there is a need for the thing Doge pretended to be, right? We actually do need efficient government.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
I think I say in the excerpt I published something like, we're sort of caught between a party that doesn't make government work and a party that wants government to fail. And I would like to create or be part of creating some third pole. I would like a liberalism that is absolutely rip shit if government is failing, but because it wants it to work and will make it work.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And frankly, I would like a conservative movement that maybe has different goals than I do, but actually wants a functional government, not just to retool it as a zone of corruption and ideological mastery. But You know, this is going to be a very different moment. Like we're talking to a Democratic Party reforming itself.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
We're in, you know, we're watching people try to destroy much of the government that we are interested in, you know, facially using critiques that sound similar. It's both much more, in a way, possible for the ideas to take root, and it's much more dangerous for them.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Because, yeah, you could just get this rally around anything the government does affect that actually would not, in my view, be healthy. Like, I hear Gavin Newsom out there on his podcast, and I like that he's doing a podcast. I think it's good he's bringing on MAGA people. But the big news he's making is about, you know, whether you're going to have trans kids in sports.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Um, the problem for California, for Gavin Newsom to even run for president is housing. And California is not like you can look at Fred data. It does not have more private housing starts today, or at least in January than it did in January of 2015. That's what I want to hear him confront. Because he believes in more housing. What's gone wrong? Why has this been so hard? Right.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
That's like the thing where I want the liberalism to ask, like, why did it fail in governing? Like, not just, you know, some I think in some ways, like these cultural arguments are easier for it to have than to actually ask, why are so many people leaving California? Because the cost of living is so high after years now of Democratic elections.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
But a politics built on clean energy innovation and then rapid deployment might work. But we did not have, if you looked at how we built things in America, in blue states, the policies needed for rapid deployment. So we were going to need something like yimbiness for clean energy. And then the final thing, and then I'll shut up with this long thing, was I had moved back to California.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
rule and in an era where there's not one statewide elected republican like that's what i want to hear democrats confront and i worry that doge is going to give them a way to not confront it because you know if you're it's like easier to be the alternative to people just trying to thoughtlessly wreck and corrupt government than the alternative to yourself who has maybe not been you know running government in a way that is really what people are looking for
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
I do believe this. I mean, absolutely. My line on this is that the personality of the right is too autocratic and the personality of the left is too bureaucratic. And I think that has a lot of dynamics, including, by the way, Matt Iglesias has this line, the crank realignment, right? RFK Jr. used to be a Democrat. Now he and the people like him are Republicans.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
The Democrats used to have, like, big parts of it that were very skeptical of corporations, even of the government. I mean, when we're talking about this new left, the new left was skeptical of the government, right? And it was inside the party. And, you know, we're trying to unwind some things that it did, but that balance... between different tendencies, I think, was important.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And as the Republican Party has become the party for cranks, for skeptics, for people who believe in conspiracies, and has attracted both the left and right-wing variants of this, right? The QAnon people and the anti-GMO people. On the one hand, that's made the right way too skeptical of systems, institutions, structures.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
I'm a Californian. I lived in California from when I was born to when I left college to go to DC. I then lived in DC for 13, 14 years, 2005 roughly to 2018. And then I went back to California. And the state, in my view, just was not doing well.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
On the other hand, the left has become too rallied in defense of the professional classes, of the institutions they run. Now, I think the...
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
culture the government the governing culture in which you really try so hard at least domestically not to disappoint your your coalition is is more new i think that the move from the obama to biden eras was significant there i think that the obama people were much more willing to make hard choices that made people in their own coalition angry um you know obviously on foreign policy that happened a lot with joe biden but i think he was himself a lot less engaged on domestic policy
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And that led to a kind of coalitional approach where you're always trying to keep Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and AOC feeling happy with things. And right in the end, they were huge defenders of his when a lot of the party was trying to push him out. And obviously on the right, you needed to hold the moderates. And so that sort of ended up in this highly consensus-oriented culture. And...
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
The other thing is that there is a level not just holding the coalition together, but of just believing in everybody's expertise and trusting it. You know, Jen Palka tells these stories of the way the lawyers will interpret statute more and more and more rigorously in order to defend against any possible lawsuits.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
On the other hand, you know, Musk and Trump routinely do things that are facially illegal and like, fuck it, sue me. You know, like, I'll take the lawsuit. Like, we'll fight that out in court. I'll see you there. I got great lawyers. And I don't love what they're doing.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
But if there's one lesson I would like Democrats to take from them and from Doge, it's that a lot of things, strictures, rules, you know, interagency, you know, working groups that they were treating as...
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
solid are just norms like you can break a lot of that uh i don't want to see these mass idiotic firings but i do want to see civil service reform it is too hard to hire and fire in the civil service that was true four months ago and in a legal way it is true today and so yeah like i but i also want to see i think you solve the problems you know how to look for
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And I don't think this is just like a personality type. I mean, I know lots of very grumpy people in democratic governments. I think it actually came to be a view, a view around inclusiveness, a view around what makes a good meeting, a view in what kinds of approaches to governing had created problems in the past.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Adam Smith, who's a House member from Washington State, has been very eloquent on this point. And I think that view that approaching government this way, like really trying to say, well, what are the environmental justice groups saying? Like, we really need to listen to them. They represent something we wouldn't necessarily know otherwise.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And like they need to be signed on to this if we're going to believe this is fair. That culture, like, it was not just a temperament, it was actually a response. It was a response to periods when, frankly, you did need more of that. And it overgrew itself. Like anything, the solutions of the past become the problems of the present, and now you need to swing the pendulum in the other direction.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And when I looked around at why it wasn't doing well, why did it become so unaffordable, why it had such a bad homelessness problem, why people were so upset, why so many people were leaving, right? California was and is losing people. It was really just clear we hadn't built enough. The things we had wanted to build, like high-speed rail, had not come to fruition.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And you need to swing it harder than I think the left has been comfortable with. And the way I know you need to swing it harder than they're comfortable with is we are not on pace to meet our decarbonization goals. And even in the big blue states that say they want to build more housing, we are not building significantly more housing. So we are not achieving our goals.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And that's where, in the end, what matters is being outcome focused. There are a lot of ways to do process. And there are ways to do process that are very inclusive and do listen to things. And at some point, somebody has to say, does this actually fit the outcome we have promised people? And if it doesn't, then you have to start making hard choices and disappointing people.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And, like, that's what leadership is. And I think there are a lot of people, a lot of Democratic governors who want to lead. You can't tell me. Josh Shapiro has actually been very good on stuff like this. I think Wes Moore has been pretty good. I think Gretchen Whitmer has been pretty good. But you can't tell me these Democratic governors, like, they don't want to lead.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
I think in many ways you've been convinced that they shouldn't. Or they don't have the ability to overwhelm the interest groups in their own legislatures that are stopping them from passing some things. But I think that's changing, too. I don't think this is all a personality type that we need psychologists to unwind in the Democratic Party.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
I think it is also a set of ideas that they've been convinced of about what makes for good leadership. And they got overly convinced. And now we actually need a little bit of a return to strong leadership where somebody, some executive at the end of the day is there and says, I hear you. And the answer is no, because what we have promised is we're going to build these homes.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
We are going to lay down these transmission lines. We are going to build these windmills and site these solar panels. And these problems we are solving are so important that that we're going to accept these trade-offs. And that, to me, is the corrective we need, not to burn government down, but to make it deliver what it has promised.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And vice versa. This has been so fun, Derek. Thank you for doing this.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
We did not have enough mass transit. There was no functional... I shouldn't say functional. There is no good subway system in Los Angeles. It would be such an amazing city if it had a good mass transit system. But we weren't building enough homes. We weren't building enough clean energy to meet our clean energy goals.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
The California's problem was not its commitment to justice, but its commitment to expanding supply. And that was like the set of... things like knocking around in my head that somehow cohered into that essay.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
But I did do this show with my co-author, Derek Thompson, on his great podcast, Plain English.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. So this week on Tuesday, March 18th, my book, Abundance, came out. I am excited about it. You've heard parts of it on the show. And I've been trying to restrain myself from completely overloading this feed with content about the book or its ideas.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And Derek took us through something that I really enjoyed and hadn't expected to do, which is an intellectual genealogy of the book, how this came to be, both in terms of he and I working together, he and I coming to these ideas, and all of the other different writers and forces and movements and researchers who helped inform it. I thought it was worth sharing with all of you, too. Thank you.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
Well, a few things. So one, I also was, I was inspired and slightly dispirited by your piece because I read it and immediately was like, oh shit, he cracked it. Like he cracked the right way to think about this, right? which was this had to be a positive vision. My nature, but definitely my piece and my approach was critique. We are doing this thing wrong.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And what I so admired about your piece and about your work broadly is that there was an optimism in it. There was, what if we did it right, right? In the same way that you said I flipped the yardstick on what to judge progressivism by, I think you flipped the yardstick on what was this about, right? It wasn't about what we did wrong. It was about what we could do right, the world we could have.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And I don't know, as we were both writing about this, it was just clear to me we were both going to write books. But also you and I, I think, share a, I think it feels more common at this exact moment. Maybe I'm wrong, but it felt less common to me then. Like a genuine interest in optimism, maybe. but an openness to optimism, definitely about technology.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
I don't know if you remember this, but I have a strong memory of this. I think this is probably before the supply-side progressivism piece, but I remember calling you, being like, hey, I'd like us to chat. And calling you like in like 2020 or 2021, I was on Mission Street or Valencia maybe in SF, just to talk about like crypto and what you thought of it.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
He's like, what is the position we like I should hold on crypto, which seems like it has some modest use cases, but seems like a huge amount of energy around something that does not have like an obvious way that it is improving anybody's lives. And the culture around it seems very grifty and scammy to me. But you are the person I called on it because I thought that you would have.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
a sort of openness to the idea that it would be good, paired with a politics that would protect you from the idea that it either must be good or must be bad.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
And so that was, I think, one of the reasons I thought there was enough affinity here when I sort of reached out to you on the broader book idea, because, you know, a lot of people are going to write, you know, over this period, there was no getting away from the fact that, That liberalism was going to have to face problems of supply, constraints of supply, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
That's what the YIMBYs already were. That's what, in halting ways, a climate movement was already doing. I mean, it's doing it in the ways it is more comfortable, right? Putting money to build things as opposed to releasing the things that make those things hard to build. But you could see that we would need to figure out how to build fast.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
There are a bunch of things here that I thought were just clearly going to be part of the agenda and or already were. But in terms of building a usable politics around it, yeah. You know, I thought that you had a orientation and like a bridge to technology and a sort of more positive corporate thinking than a lot of other people.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
You know, than a lot of other people I could have imagined covering it. And again, I think it's why your abundance essay hit as hard as it did. Because you could see the better future, not just the worst past or the disappointing present. And so to me, that was the bridge. At a certain point, I was like, it doesn't make sense, I didn't think, for us to be racing each other to this.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
But also, I felt that we would both bring things to the project together. that the other one wouldn't. I wasn't exactly sure what they were. You never know how a collaboration is going to work out before you do it. But I just sort of had a sense that we were temperamentally similar enough in the important ways and then different enough that it could be additive.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
I'd also say I found writing my first book super lonely. I did not like it. I like being in collaboration. All the great projects of my life from blogging in a weird way was such a
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
a tight community in its early days and i want to stay here for a moment like like rest in peace to kevin drumm cal pundit who was one of the early wonkish bloggers and huge inspiration and you know even a mentor to me and to iglesias and a lot of us who came up after him reflect the the work kevin was doing um so i'm sort of i'm really saddened by his passing
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
But blogging was a real community effort, you know, and that was at the American Prospect and Wonkblog, like, you know, and I had this, you know, wonderful partnership for many years with Dylan Matthews and Sarah Cliff and Brad Plumer and, you know, at my show with Roche Karma and my editor, Aaron Redica. I like doing things with other people. I think best in collaboration and communication.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Origins of Abundance
So it seemed like a cool thing to do to try to join forces with it. Yeah. I'm curious what that was like for you. Like I sort of called you and I'm like, hey, I got an idea. What was your thinking on it? So long as we're really doing the deep history here.
The Ezra Klein Show
Yes, Biden’s Green Future Can Still Happen Under Trump
Hey, it is Ezra. So I'm taking a bit of time off this month, and we're going to have a few friends of the show on to host guest episodes. Today's host is Robinson Meyer. Rob is a contributing writer for New York Times Opinion and the founding executive editor of HeatMap News, which is the go-to source for reporting on the decarbonization rollout. I'll let him take it from here.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And once he became part of the ticket, Tim Walz and behind them, Joe Biden, you know, before the changeover, they were just terrified of an interview going badly. Yes. And Trump and Vance. And I mean, they were all over the place, including in places very hostile to them. Yeah, and Vance had a ton of interviews that went badly. Yeah, but they were everywhere. Yeah.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Because they cared about the volume of attention and were completely fine with the energy that negative attention couldn't unlock.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
This one is, I think, the best one at understanding the value of attention today because it isn't just endangered. It is the world's most valuable resource. And the people who are on top of the world right now understand its value and understand how to wield it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I don't know how to insert into the discourse a strong enough point. That Joe Rogan is much better than Howard Stern was.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Like, nobody quite wants to admit this because now Howard Stern has become this lovable uncle who, you know, for liberals, who has Hillary Clinton on his show. And I think Kamala Harris went on his show. But I think Rogan is the inheritor of Stern, basically. And, you know, Rogan has become much more right-wing in the past couple of years.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
But compared to what Stern was, Rogan is just smarter and preferable.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
OK, but now I think we need to have like a moment of caution because there's a tendency right now because Donald Trump won the popular vote by like one point five percentage points, which is a terrible win. Like the American politics. Right. And yet there's just like no doubt that.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
that Trump and his broad cultural side have won some kind of cultural and attentional victory that is much bigger in its feeling than the actual electoral victory they won. So some of these things both feel true. I'm not sure this works as well in politics, but in terms of changing the culture, his win has changed the culture immediately in a way that I would not have foreseen and does not reflect
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Like if you just told somebody the election results, I don't think they would feel the vibe shift.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And if there is going to be a successful opposition to them, that opposition is going to need to understand its value and understand how to wield it. And right now it doesn't. As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com. Chris Hayes, welcome to the show. Really great to be here. So you've got a cable news show. You're an attention merchant. I am.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
You can frame this as a strategy. And clearly people who are not temperamentally suited to the strategy like Vance and Rubio and others have tried it on with varying degrees of fit at different times. But I think it's better to frame it in a way as a temperament. I mean, you write in the book, compliments roll off your back. Criticism stays with you for days.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
But it's not true for everybody, right? There's a certain personality type that is okay with that negative charge. A lot of people would not have been willing to absorb the personal polarization Musk has decided to absorb to become as significant as he is. Trump is very similar, right? I think most people take the trade of being thoughtful.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
fairly well of by a larger number of people, even if not thought that much of by them, you know, in general, rather than absolutely hated by half the country to be quite loved by the other half. And I think that's something in people. And I guess what I'm asking you is, does politics now select for a kind of attentional sociopath?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Or CNN. Yes, that's true. He's a guy who actually seeks out stuff to make him angry.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
What is different about the way attention felt and worked in the early 2000s when you were starting out, when I was starting out, and the way it feels and works for you now?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
We've been, I think, talking about attention mostly in terms of social media here. And I want to talk about another way that attentions and the way we think about stories like changed in this period, which is reality television, which is the other side of this that Trump comes out of.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
One thing that has felt true to me about Trump's second term, much more than the first, is it feels like reality television. It is all these secondary characters with their own subplots and their own arcs and what's going to happen with Pete Hegseth and over here is RFK Jr. and Musk. In the first term, Trump was the only character of the Trump administration.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Now he's playing a role that feels to me much more like the host. Sometimes he comes out and somebody actually is voted off the island. It's like, well, Matt Gaetz is gone now. Yeah. You know, or so-and-so has gotten people get fired or he settles like the big plot of that week. Right. He's going to side with Musk and Ramaswamy on H-1B visas. Right.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
You know, or he comes in to announce a new plot like Greenland. Right. He's not the only.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Yeah. He's not the only figure. He's the host, the decider, the something. Compared to other administrations, even compared to his first, this one is feeling programmed in a very different way. I mean, you're somebody who obviously has to follow the plots and report on them night after night in the eternal purgatory that you are in.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Not all of them, but the ones they pick. Those people like attention, exactly. You pick people on reality shows who like attention and are willing to absorb negative attention to be the star.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
But it's a way in which his sense of it seems to have changed. It was a well-remarked-on and reported dynamic of the appointments in the first term that he had a casting orientation to them, but it was visual. He wanted people who looked like a secretary of state, a general, a Federal Reserve chair. So you got people like Rex Tillerson and Jay Powell in Trump 1.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
He is building characters and selecting people who are good at going on podcasts, for instance, or being on TV in Trump 2.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
No, I think there's that, but, I mean, it's a different story, right? I mean, Pete Hexeth is a different kind of character. I mean, he's an underdog in the thing he's going into now. Than Jim Mattis, for sure. Right? He's, you know, it's more like a soldier who's going to take over and disrupt the thing. Look, I'm not saying it's all planned out.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I'm just saying that there has been a way this feels different.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I want to ask about the Democrats in relationship to this. And I guess one way to do it is that since the election, I mean, any room with six Democrats is a postmortem now, whether formally or informally. Personally, my favorite.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
There are parts of the postmortem that are divisive in the party, right? Did they, you know, move too far left or actually did they moderate too much? And what about Gaza? And the one that every room of this I'm in, everybody agrees on is, and it's always said the same way, is that Democrats have a media problem.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I'm curious what you think that means.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Would it have worked? I don't know. I believe Joe Biden in 67 wins reelection. That he can tell a story about his own record. If you want my counterfactual on this.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And I'll say. I kind of agree with that. Because this is arising with all the fury I felt about it all year. Going back a year, I talked to people, I will say, because of the way this conversation has happened, at the absolute highest level of the Biden administration. Yeah.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And one thing that they were not shy about saying when I was making these arguments before I even made them publicly about can this guy really run again is I would hear something like, look, Joe Biden can perform the presidency, but he can't perform the presidency was the way it got put to me. And they still thought it was okay to run him again. Yeah, you gotta do both.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Which shows an unbelievable devaluing at the highest levels of democratic politics of attention. So, okay, so that connects. They thought, like, it was okay. They could just make this argument, like, this guy can't perform it, but, you know, I mean, that's entertainment. This is a presidency. It's not about who's the best celebrity or who can go on Jimmy Kimmel, but...
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Something that has been on my mind is it, in a way, the fact that I keep hearing Democrats call this a media problem rather than, say, an attention problem reflects the issue that I think there's still an intuition. I mean, the media as a linguistic construct sounds like an institutional thing that people control.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
It's weird going in a lifetime from the problem of too little content to too much. I remember being a kid and I would read the cereal box. Absolutely. I would read anything around me. And there was never enough. There were all kinds of times in my life when I was caught without anything to read. Yeah. And now it never happens.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Like, one way you might solve your media problem is Chris Hayes decides who goes on the Chris Hayes all-in show on weeknights on MSNBC, and you get him to book you. Or a Joe Rogan of the left. A Joe Rogan of the left, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I think it reflects Democrats still thinking that media is something that broadcasters and gatekeepers control and the way to win it over is to win them over, as opposed to something that you attract, right? Media is something you get booked on. Attention is something you attract. Right. Liberal Joe Rogan discourse actually drives me like insane. Like I want to throw myself off of a bridge.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
You can't build Joe Rogan if you're a political person.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Because the whole point of what is meaningful about him is fundamentally he's not for people interested in politics. Yes. Like Democrats are obsessed with how New York Times exactly words its headlines about Donald Trump. Right. But Democrats win people who read New York Times headlines about Donald Trump. They lose people who don't read politics at all.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And you can't win them by being more and more political and be like, we're going to create a Joe Rogan, but with perfect politics who thinks everything Democrats do. Like the whole point is that you have to go and compete in nonpolitical spaces.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I do think a little bit. I've been thinking about this and I'm not sure I think what I'm about to say is right. But I think a bit that the media attention cut I'm making is. was actually there in who the two sides treated as celebrities. Because Democrats treated as celebrities... celebrities, Beyonce and Taylor Swift.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And there was this kind of mocking, like, well, look, they've got Kid Rock over there at the RNC. But the actual celebrities that Republicans were relying on were UFC influencers and random podcasters.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And I do think there was a way in which this election in a background fashion was testing this question of, well, actually, who are the celebrities today, or at least in a persuasive level, who are the celebrities? Yes. Because there were these very buttoned up celebrities where you would get one post from Taylor Swift or maybe Bad Bunny came in at the end.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And I'm not saying that stuff didn't help Democrats a bit. And again, you can overstate how much any of it mattered.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
But I do think there was a way of not seeing that in this world, like there are a bunch of people who are not named celebrities by the media, but they are influencers of massive power now because they're just like they're good at competing and getting attention and building direct relationships with their audience.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
There's so much of my life that would be better if I was caught without anything to read. But in my pocket is this portal to what is pretty close to everything ever written.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I don't care. I do think there's something to it, but I think there's one more link in the chain, which is that the issue is that the people who vote for Democrats... Like, to them, the mainstream media is influencers, right? Yes, exactly. It is the case that there are things Republicans can do in the media that are problems for them. Like, in certain ways, not be anti-immigrant enough. Yeah.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Right? You know, or say Donald Trump did not win the 2020 election. Yes, that's true. They have their own gaffes. They have their own gaffes. They're just different. And because the mainstream media for them is in the role of enemy, for the mainstream media to be mad at them doesn't matter. Like, that's already the storyline. Yes.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
So I was running these numbers because I was going to write a column about this, but I don't think I am now. So I'll say it to you instead, which is that by 2000, Fox News is fairly – it is a big enough force that one can take it seriously. Conservative talk radio is mature and is a big deal. So look at the seven elections since 2000, presidential elections.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Republicans win the popular vote in two. In the seven before, they win it in four. Yep. Now, we know that Fox News persuades people to go right. And we know that Fox News is watched by people. And yet we also know that Republicans are performing worse as Fox News and right-wing media become more powerful. And I always think the reason for that is that Fox News has made Republicans weirder.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Oh, yes. And, like, detached them from, you know, the center. I don't think Donald Trump is electorally optimal himself. And so there's this weird way where— You got to be very careful with this idea of like, I want this propaganda machine because the first person the propaganda machine is going to convince is you. That's exactly right.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
When I was a kid, I knew the manufacturer suggested retail price of every single car on the road by year. Like, I could tell you not just what a Camry cost, but what a 93 Camry cost. Right, because you must have had some book.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Yeah. Yeah. I think conservative media is like that but much more powerful for the right. It has given the right a very malformed view of the public. Oh, I agree with that. And enforces that view in a vicious way.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I think that this issue is somewhere where, as you say, people are conflicted. So if you can split the electorate or make the electorate think about the part where they side with the right, you know, sports teams, right? I think that's probably their best message. Right.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
But the issue, I think that, and I've said this a bunch, that one reason, I mean, just even just politically, I think Democrats should be thoughtful about not veering too far as what's about to come is cruelty. And people don't like cruelty. Well, most people don't like cruelty. Most people don't like cruelty. Some people like cruelty.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
When I think of the damage Twitter X did to Democrats, it came from 2020, not from 2024. It was this time when Democrats actually dominated Twitter. Yeah. And used it to do a lot of in-group policing and persuade themselves of a lot of electorally ruinous or unpopular ideas that then Republicans weaponized, you know, in 2024.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Like, the fact that Republicans now have X and, I guess, True Social and it's run by, you know, Musk and Trump... It's not obvious to me that it's a net benefit.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Transcend politics. And like, I... Well, to me, that's one of the ways, though, that this might not play out well for the right. Yes. That, for instance, a good possible example of this is that if the embrace of crypto culture leads to unwise levels of, I wouldn't call it deregulation, but because these things aren't regulated really now, but structures of regulation that are... shadowy.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
So you have huge amounts of risk pooling in weird places. You might have contagion in the financial sector because my Annie Lowry, my wife, wrote a great piece about this in The Atlantic. You might have contagion in the financial sector because financial firms begin reconstructing themselves as blockchain assets in order to go into lighter regulation.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And then you have something that somebody doesn't understand or the regulators don't understand blow up. And now you're blamed for it in the way that, you know, Bush and Republicans were in 08. There's no guarantee that that happens. It might not.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
So the political scientist Henry Farrell had this good piece on a Substack, an essay, about he was saying we misunderstand the problem of social media. And he had this analogy to porn. And he says that the way he's working off somebody else's argument about porn, but he says internet porn is tuned not towards people who watch it, but people who buy it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
What internet porn is trying to do is not get you to consume it for free, but to pay $9.95 a month or whatever. And the people who will do that have more extreme tastes. And so you have this ecosystem of pornography that is tilted to be more extreme because it's trying to get this actual conversion from
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
But it then creates this mass sense among the porn-watching public that tastes are more extreme, that everybody else is into things that are more extreme. It arguably changes people's tastes because you just get used to things. And in that way, pornography malforms the public. And his sort of argument is that social media is doing the same thing.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
It is making everybody think that everybody else's tastes politically are more extreme than they are. Are more insane than they are. Everybody else is obsessed with a UK gang rape scandal from more than 10 years ago.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
The effect is not just what it does to the public, but the way it warps particularly the understanding of politicians and media figures who are looking at social media as if it is the public.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Okay, so I think this actually brings up a good, very counter to this conversation question, which is maybe the optimal strategy if— your vision, your sense of the public, your politics, maybe your own moral faculties are so warped by competing for this volume of attention is to not play.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
So it is hard sometimes, I think, when you've lived through a tension and information changing as much as we have to take the long view. Yes. One thing I liked about your book a lot is it takes the long view. And I would say the core argument is that what is happening to a tension now is akin to what happened to human labor in the Industrial Revolution. Spin that out for me.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
So in 2020, Joe Biden is the least online and the least intentionally sophisticated or even interested of any of the Democrats running for president. And I don't think that is... To him winning. To why he won in 2020. Certainly won in the primary and possibly even won in the general because he had lots of problems as a candidate.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
He was, I think, too old to be running effectively even then, or at least very much on the edge. And he was diminished from what he once was. But his sense of the electorate had not been, like, driven mad. Malformed.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And so he didn't get on board with a bunch of dumb things. Other people were getting on board with... That's a great point. You know, we're kind of implying that, like, the right strategy here is an embrace in the way. Some kind of alternative, but still embrace, like, what we're seeing from Trump and Musk. Maybe it's the opposite.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And think about this for... You know, I... After Bush won in 2004...
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
That's true. But here's one of my big theories, and we'll know in four, eight years if I'm right. I think we are ready or very near ready. And I see it in the states and counties banning phones in schools and just like the discourse for true backlash. And I think that the next really successful Democrat, although it could be a Republican, is going to be oppositional to it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
In the way that when Barack Obama ran in 08, and I really think people forget this part of his appeal, he ran against cable news, against 24-hour news cycles, against political consultants. People didn't like the structure and feeling of political attention then there.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And I don't think there was anywhere near the level of disgust and concern and feeling that we were being corroded in our souls that there is now. And I think that at some point you are going to see a candidate come up who is going to weaponize this feeling, right? That they are going to run not against Meta as a big company that needs to be broken up.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
They're going to run against all of it. That like society and modernity and politics shouldn't feel like this. Right. And some of that will be banning phones in schools, right? It'll have a dimension that is policy. But some of it is going to be just absolutely radiating a disgust for what it is doing to us and to ourselves. I mean, your book has a lot of this in it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I think that political space is weirdly open, but it seems very clear to me somebody's going to grab it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
It's not somebody. Well, you can't drop out and run for president. It's not somebody who is withdrawing and wants to live on a lake. There are people like that, right? It's more like John Haidt. Yeah. Right. It's more like what he is channeling. I mean, but channeled into politics, which is an actual anger at it. Yeah. It is not supposed to feel this way. Right.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I don't think it's just going to be like we're going to get rid of tech talk, but it is going to be something about this culture and society has fallen.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I'm saying I've been obsessed with this for years. Well, you have for sure. Yes.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And the way it feels to be inside, like, the collective's mind. Yes. Even—I know a good number of Trump supporters. And they may like him, but they don't like how—not how he feels, but how all this feels. No. No one likes it. Right? Nobody likes it. No one likes it. And that— That is there, right? It's a thing that Obama was very good at working with.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
That is there in its modern version, I think, to derive energy from. Before any of that happens, though, he's going to be president again, you've probably heard. I'm just hearing this now. I'm sure you're thinking about this.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
How is your coverage of Trump in 2025 and his White House, knowing everything we know about the way attention works under his presidency, going to be different than it was in 2017? Yeah.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Let me ask you something about the negativity bias and the incentives it sets up. Obviously, the future of the Republican Party is not highly determined by what MSNBC hosts say about different Trump appointees. But there is something about a world where Marco Rubio gets no coverage for being a
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
who knows what kind of Secretary of State he'll be, but plausibly a more normal, thoughtful... Mark Rubio is a politician who works hard and, like, tries to think about ideas.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Yes. Compared to a Pete Hegseth or a RFK Jr. or Tulsi Gabbard, right? In this world where we say that there is value to attention... And we give all this attentional resource to the worst people, making them more valuable to Trump and squeezing out. Is there actually like a bad incentive system being set up by that?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Like, I've never known what to do with this thought, which I've had for a long time, because on the one hand, you can't just ignore the terrible things in government. That's a dereliction of what we're here to do. Right.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And on the other hand, if you believe that just giving things attention is to give them energy, to only cover the terrible things happening in government is to not empower like the Doug Burghams and Marco Rubios in the future. Like there feels like some tension here that the media has never known what to do with. I think that's interesting.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
All right, I have a lot of thoughts on this. One is that, I mean, you and I both know, there have been a million efforts in journalism to do solutions-based journalism. Yes, yes. Good news, good news journalism. And they don't work in part, not that they don't work at all.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
No, but they're, it's... And this is a, as you make the point of, you know, at the beginning of this conversation and often in your book, attention is a business. So when they don't work... your cable news show gets replaced, right? With somebody who will do doom. Yep.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
On the other hand, one of the things I really believe about the podcasting world, one thing that makes me very hopeful about it is these podcasts have built huge, unbelievably huge audiences, not being primarily about doom. Agreed. Right? They don't actually have a big negativity bias. They're very hopeful. They're futuristic. The obvious thing to say is the opposite of doom is hope, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
But I think the opposite of doom is curiosity, at least in this respect. I don't think it's utopia. I think it's something about curiosity, interest, beauty. Doom is a belief that we know how things are going to go. Mm-hmm. Comforting in its own way because of that. And mystery feels to me like an opposite of doom. Yeah, that's good.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And that there's a dimension here where I think what has gone wrong in a lot of this journalism is it feels hokey and cliche and it has, you know, it is actually too much the opposite of doom. Right. When the problem is like you want to be on another dimension entirely that like if the only question is things go good, things go bad, things go bad is more tension grabbing.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
If the question is things go bad or are there UFOs? Right. Things go bad or like this novelist speaks unbelievably beautiful because I see it in the ratings of this show. I can get very high downloads for Trump episodes and very high pretty over time downloads for a novelist who describes the world in a really beautiful way. I don't think the opposite of doom is hope or good things or utopia.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I think for this, for attention. It's curiosity. It's curiosity. It's interesting. It's like, oh, have you ever thought about it this way? Or isn't that weird? Yeah.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I think that is a good place to end. Always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
But go deeper. What do you mean by it's a market commodity extracted and sold? So what makes attention priceable and tradable now differently than it was before before? Or is that not the ground of the analogy? Like, go into the specifics of this.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Yeah. The form of that book is also the function because I feel like so much of what books about attention are about is how it homogenizes all of us. And that book, I love that book so much. It is a completely distinct product. Exactly. Completely distinct mind. Like no other human being would write that book.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Chris Hayes, your book is great. I recommend it to everybody. Thank you. Thank you. This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Isaac Jones with Afim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Elias Iskwith, and Kristen Lynn.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
We've original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christina Samuluski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
But there was also the separate question of how he wields and uses attention. And Trump, whatever else he is, he's a master at using and wielding attention. And I'd say he's a disciple, an ally in Musk now. Elon Musk, I think, is probably the most attentionally rich person in the world alongside Donald Trump.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. On Monday, Donald Trump is going to take the oath of office for the second time. During his first administration, there was a question of how he wields policy in the government, the question of how he wields and uses and raises money. We're used to talking about that with politicians.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Like it just wasn't like that before. One of the things happening in this era, the reason I think people are so interested in books about attention, concern about attention, is that the supply of attention is being changed and transformed by this process. It is being trained. My attention has been trained to want more than it used to want, to be more despairing when it can't get it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
But also, I mean, the internet in a way, with just a much higher level of sophistication, turned into a massive experimentation for what works intentionally. It's just this endless gain-of-function biolab. Yeah. I really think of a lot of social media as gain-of-function research for takes. If you tweak the take and tweak it and tweak it, at what point does it go viral?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
At what point does it go too viral and it destroys your career? It could escape the lab in a way. Yeah. But there's something about not, I think, just seeing attention as a commodity, but seeing it as something that is manipulable, shapeable, changeable, such that our collective attention as a resource is changing that feels important in this.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Watching a movie while staring at another screen.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
You talk in the book about attention now being the most valuable commodity, the most important commodity, the commodity that so many of the great modern businesses, among other things, are built on, like Google and Meta. And I still think we're realizing it was undervalued or maybe that its most important value isn't selling it off to advertisers.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
So I've been thinking a lot about Elon Musk, who emerges in your book as a slightly pathetic figure, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I think that Musk's attentional riches might be more important now than his financial riches. And so if you're going to think about politics in a way that is able to predict what happens in it, you have to look at and watch and think about how attention is being spent and wielded and amassed and controlled. And that's what this conversation is about.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Yeah, trying to fill this like howling void he has for attention. Yeah. Elon Musk overpaid for Twitter at $44 billion. It is not a business, as he has said himself, worth $44 billion.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
On the other hand, the amount of attention that he is capable of controlling and amassing and manipulating through Twitter cannot be traded directly for $44 billion, but it's clearly worth, I think, more than $44 billion. Multiples. Multiples of it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
So how do you think about this translation that we're seeing happen right now between attention as a financial commodity and attention as having more worth, frankly, than the money it would fetch on the open market?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I think attention is now to politics what people think money is to politics. I totally agree with that. Certainly at the high levels, right? There are places where money is very powerful, but it's usually where people are not looking. Yep. Money is very powerful when there's not much attention. But Donald Trump doesn't control Republican primaries with money. He controls them with attention.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And I keep having to write about Musk, and I keep saying he's the richest man in the world, but that's actually not what matters about him right now. It's just how he managed to get the attention and become the character and the wielder of all this attention. And that's a changeover. I think Trumpist Republicans have made and Democrats haven't.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
It's a curtain raiser on the attentional regime we're about to enter. My friend Chris Hayes is best known as the host of MSNBC's 8 p.m. show, All In. But he just wrote a great book called The Siren's Call, How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. I've read most of the books on attention out there.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Democrats are still thinking about money as a fundamental substance of politics. And the Trump Republican Party thinks about attention as a fundamental substance of politics.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I think this is right. I think there's another distinction between Democrats and Republicans here, which is that I think Democrats still believe that the type of attention you get is the most important thing. If your choices between a lot of negative attention and no attention, go for no attention.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And at least the Trump side of the Republican Party believes that the volume, the sum total of attention is the most important thing. And a lot of negative attention, not only fine, maybe great. Right. Because there's so much attentional energy and conflict. So you really see this like Kamala Harris.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
And I'm actually fairly comfortable having an argument about Bob Lighthizer's trade theories or Scott Besson's, you know, views about Bretton Woods or all these things where, you know, I mean, Stephen Moran, when he got an economics PhD at Harvard, that we all know how to theorize. But I don't think Donald Trump does think about it like that.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
And I think he cares more about tribute than he cares about trade flows. I think the way he works in the world is relational, not highly analytical.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
I think that if you look at how he treats different countries, he is interested in their affinity to him and what they will give him and the people around him, not a cold analysis of what is going to in the long term be strongest for the American industrial manufacturing base.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
And so I flip between these two interpretations of things, between on the one hand, trying to squint and discern the outline of a new framework and seeing a guy who I think just wants people to come and bring him presence and tell him he's great.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
And that Make America Great Again does not actually in the end have anything really to do with manufacturing bases, which I think is the output in theory of a lot of this, or the debt. Make America Great Again has to do with how Donald Trump feels. People are talking about him and the America he leads. And that in the end is going to decide what kinds of deals our allies, our adversaries make.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
get with us. And that is a cohesive framework. It's a framework that many clans have been run on, many countries have been run on. It's just not one that gets taught in either the orthodox or heterodox side of an economics PhD program.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
And she's always had, to me, a very interesting approach to this because she doesn't come at it just from the perspective of economics. She's a trained PhD anthropologist, which I think is training useful for understanding the Trump administration and geopolitics right now. As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com. Jillian Tett, welcome to the show.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
You mentioned cultural power and you mentioned the WWE. Tyler Cowen, the economist and commentator, he had a model of Donald Trump that I think about a lot. And he basically says something that I think you alluded to, which is that Trump believes that everything is downstream of cultural power. And so Tyler writes, okay, so how might you fix the culture of America?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
You want to tell everyone that America comes first, that America should be more masculine and less soft, that we need to build, that we should own the libs. He says you go on with more examples and details. But so imagine you started a political revolution and asked a simple question, does this policy change reinforce or overturn our basic cultural messages?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
Every time the policy or policy debate pushes culture in what you think is the right direction, just do it. Do it in the view that the cultural factors will, over some time horizon, surpass everything else. Simply pass or announce or promise such policies. Do not worry about any other constraints. You don't even have to do them. You don't even need them all to be legal.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
And so what Tyler is saying here is that Trump, and maybe some of the people around him, but specifically him, sort of operates on a very simple decision-making matrix, which Does the thing he is doing feel like America strong, America in charge? And if so, he does it. And sometimes he backs off a bit, but then he'll do it again.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
Because what he's really trying to do is implement a new cultural sense of America's strength, its character as embodied by him. What do you think of that?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
So I think it's good to start here. Give me the best account you can give of what Donald Trump's economics team thinks they are doing. What is the grand theory of the promised land on the other side of all this turbulence, disturbance, possibly even recession, as Donald Trump just said, that they are risking?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
What do you make of this tension between the broad-based tariffs that Trump ran on in the campaign, 10 or 20 percent on all imported goods, maybe 60 percent on China?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
And what we've actually seen, which is this episodic, now they're on, now they're off, now they're delayed, now there's an exemption, now the exemption is off, now the exemption is back on, world in which the tariffs are very – they're shimmering. And everybody understands that they're there to be negotiated over.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
In the first, you have the problem of there's more economic friction, but at least then all these corporations you want to have making long-term decisions to relocate factories in America, maybe they are, right? Because they're thinking about this as a permanent thing.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
In the second, you're able to negotiate more concessions, but there's too much uncertainty for anybody to be making these sorts of long-term investment decisions that your view of insourcing and your view of rebuilding the industrial base rely on. He sort of ran on the steady state tariffs. We seem to be in the world of inconsistent tariffs. How do you make sense of it?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
In the first term, I think Donald Trump tended to take a lot of input from the stock market, took a lot of input from markets in general. And the sense that the economic numbers were coming back good every day, every week, every month was important to him in the way he defined what made that first term successful, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
Right now, they're doing a lot of things that are roiling stock markets, that have led to rising inflation expectations, that led to a number of different banks increasing their probability of a recession, that have led to a drop in consumer sentiment and confidence. And I thought this would push them back a little bit. And I think initially it did. The tariffs got delayed.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
More recently, I've started hearing them say, well, we might just need to go through a period of pain. I've heard similar things from other economic policymakers around Trump. I've seen people argue that the economic policymakers around him think, listen, you might need to give the economy some tough medicine for a period of time in order to have the boom you want later.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
And so if we're going to do that, best do it now when we're far from the election, as opposed to later when we're closer to an election. How do you see it?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
How do the Wall Street people you talk to sound today compared to how they sounded on November 10th?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
So what I hear from them is America has a huge amount of excess power It has simply convinced itself to stop using. So it has been cutting bad deals. It has been weaker than it needs to be. And that ends now. And then I look at what we are actually doing and what's happening. And I'll give just one example.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
There is good modeling that the trade war we are starting with Canada will hurt Canada much more than it will hurt us. They are more dependent on us than we are on them. They are smaller than we are. So in a very rational agent model, you might say Canada's just going to take it. But of course they didn't. Canadians have pride. They have their own sense of national identity.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
And Trump has saved the liberals in Canada. They were about to get destroyed by a somewhat Trump-like figure in Canada. People were tired of Justin Trudeau. He's been very unpopular. He's been pushed to step aside. And the expectation was that Canadian conservatives were going to absolutely dominate Canada.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
Now, that election hasn't happened yet, but Mark Carney was just elected to be leader of the liberals. And we have seen since Trump has begun attacking Canada, threatening and then putting down these tariffs on Canada, since Trudeau has reemerged as an antagonist of Trump and a defender of Canadian pride, now the liberals have made a huge comeback in the Canadian polls.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
They have an expectation, I think, that other countries will accept this. But what if they are wrong?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
What is a mercantilist hegemonic mindset?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
This is where I think the question of what does it mean to put America first? What does make America great mean? What does America power based on really bites? Because it's just not the case that the entire Washington consensus before them that range from George W. Bush, who, of course, Billy Bob Thornton was based on and love actually, to Bill Clinton, to Barack Obama.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
they were all interested in American preeminence. And their view was that America was made stronger by being the dominant or strongest figure in these various global alliances and institutions. And that meant not using the full extent of our power
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
Because in the long run, if you use the full extent of our power to get better short-term deals or bully people you didn't like, eventually people would not want you to have that much power. They would leave these alliances. They would look for alternatives to balance you out. I mean, it's a very realist way of thinking about foreign policy.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
And so I guess the question this goes to is when they think about what it means to make America great... Do they underestimate forms of power that come through alliance and cooperation and systems? Forms of power that don't necessarily look like power. They look like restraint.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
But they are restraint in service of maintaining a system that other people want to be in and that we are the dominant player in.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
When you sit with people like Pete Navarro, do they talk about balancing this at all or do they just see an unending history of America being ripped off?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
And when you have done reporting on how other countries, and particularly small and medium-sized countries, countries that don't have the weight of a China, are then thinking about how to act in this era, what have you found?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
And China has been pretty steadfast in saying that they are willing to have any kind of war the U.S. would like to have. Their spokesperson sent out a message on X that was very escalatory in this perspective. And when I read it, I wondered if they didn't see this as signaling to the If you want someone to hide behind who will stand up to the U.S., you can work with us.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
I was curious how you read that.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
You've written a couple of times about this idea that has become circulating called the Mar-a-Lago Accords. What is this Mar-a-Lago Accord?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
When you look at Donald Trump in this and you think about the way that other countries begin to perceive him, you've talked about performative tribute as a way of thinking about what, say, the leader of Vietnam is attempting there. I sort of see that as cohesive all the way down. You know, he would love to have leverage over people like Eric Adams.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
He wants tribute from people in American politics. He responds very simply to praise and responds very simply to attack. I think you see many billionaires and tech leaders in the US realize, well, if he's going to be president again...
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
We have to play by these rhetorical rules, you know, and go to him and sort of, you know, go have dinner with him at Mar-a-Lago and, you know, say nice things about him in public. And if we're making investments, say we couldn't have done it without you, Mr. President. What does it mean to have so many players domestically, internationally performing tribute?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
What are the possible benefits of that in the sense of them trying to curry more favor? What are the costs of it?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
There's been a lot of attention recently to the stock market, but something you've argued in different columns is we should be paying particular attention to the bond market. Why and what are we seeing there?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
One thing all factions of Trump world seem to me to agree on is that the debt is a big vulnerability. It's too high in absolute terms. It's vulnerable for us to be so reliant on, say, China to be buying U.S. treasuries. What you'd want to do about that is straightforward mechanically how you cut deficits and then cut debt. And they all say they want to do it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
And I don't really see them coming up with any plans to make any sense to do it. I see them planning a four plus trillion dollar tax cut. I see Donald Trump talking about creating a Golden Dome over the entire United States, which would be a very, very costly missile and projectile defense shield. So that's a big increase in defense spending.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
They all seem to want to cut debt, but do they have a theory of this? It's in all their papers. Scott Besant will say it. Moran will say it. Like, do you see any realism from them on what it would take to balance out the promises for tax cuts, more defense spending, while also substantially changing the debt trajectory?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
And cut defense spending, according to Bannon.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
When I hear people say we're going to grow our way out of the debt, that's usually not a great sign.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
Or a sort of personal fantastical way of not having to make your own promises add up. It would be nice if we grew so fast that we grew away out of the debt. But that also does not really connect to we're going to put tariffs on all parts of the economy. We're going to have high levels of economic uncertainty. We're going to be slashing deep, deep, deep into government.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
For instance, we're not seeing growth expectations pick up right now. We're seeing them cut. So a theory that it's going to be three percentage point GDP growth year on year on year. I mean, it'd be nice, but that's magic math.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
Try to play that out for me. So we're talking about a world here. where the United States goes to China, it goes to hedge funds, it goes to allies, you know, anybody who buys U.S. treasuries and says, if you don't start buying longer duration and rolling over into longer duration treasuries, we are going to put tariffs on you or we won't include you in our defense umbrella, something like that.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
You brought up the idea of a detox period in the economy that will need to go through this economic pain caused by the tariffs, caused by the uncertainty. Maybe it'll be a recession. Maybe it'll be higher inflation. Maybe just higher prices. But obviously, the metaphor of the detox is that on the other side, you have broken your addiction to something. You are stronger. You are healthier.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
The pain was to reduce the toxin. Do you buy it? If we do this, if we have this recession, if they go through with all this, do you buy that there is something better for the economy on the other side? And if so, what is it?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
I think that's a good place to end. So as our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
So I'm also going to do something unusual here and ask you for a book recommendation. As somebody who has merged economics and anthropology, if you want to understand debt, patronage-based systems, tribute-based systems, this kind of performative tribute you're talking about. Is there a work of anthropology that comes to mind for you?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
Julian Tett, thank you very much.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Roland Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Isaac Jones with Avim Shapiro and Amin Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Elias Iskwith, Christian Lin, and Jack McCordick. We have original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christina Samieluski and Shannon Busta.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
You've heard the term sanewashing, right? The criticism that the New York Times gets that the way you report on things that Donald Trump says make them sound more sane than they really are. Sometimes as I've been hearing discussion of the Mar-a-Lago Accord emerge, I've been thinking about a sort of similar idea of theorywashing.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
that there is an effort to take things that are gestural, instinctual, contradictory in Donald Trump. And then these people come up behind him and say, oh, no, there was a theory to all this.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
I can't tell if the Mar-a-Lago Accord is a real thing that anybody around him is trying to do or an effort by some people around him and some people on Wall Street who have briefs they want to send to clients to try to say, no, there is a plan here. Don't be fooled by the chaos of putting on these tariffs, taking them off, putting them on, taking them off, getting in fights with Europe.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
No, we're really creating an effort to rebuild the alliance system. And I guess maybe one reason I would say I'm very skeptical of it is something that you got at the end there. This would require a lot of multilateral cooperation with other countries inclined to work with us.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
In the last week or two, we've begun hearing something pretty new out of the Trump administration, which is that they are prepared to push the economy into a period of pain, maybe even a period of recession, in order to achieve their economic goals. But what are those goals?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
They don't seem to me to be trying to cooperate with the other countries they would need to cooperate with to pull off a highly complex international financial reset.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. In his first term, Donald Trump was often criticized for taking the stock market too seriously, for conflating Wall Street and Main Street. Say what you will about his second term, but I don't think you can make the same criticism.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
You mentioned the paper by Stephen Moran, and Stephen Moran is now the chair of Donald Trump's Council of Economic Advisors, so I think a person worth taking seriously here. I've taken a look at that paper, and I think it's worth us discussing. How would you describe the argument that paper makes?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
In our episode earlier in the week, we looked at the tariff policy very specifically and tried to understand what are they trying to do? And I think the problem with trying to see it that way is that the tariffs don't make that much economic sense because what they are pursuing is not, I think, best understood as a narrowly economic policy. It is some mixture of economics, of power politics, of
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
So as I read that paper, you have Moran making the sort of big argument you're saying here, but also trying to say there is what he calls a narrow path to this world that is not economically ruinous in the middle of it. And the narrow path is that we put tariffs on countries. They do not retaliate.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
So then the currencies adjust in a way where the tariffed country ends up paying more because of what happened to their currency, and it doesn't really hurt us. Something, something, something, we get to the other side here. And in that something, something, something, because, well, why wouldn't these countries put retaliatory tariffs on us?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
Then you get into the defense side of it, which is we can withdraw our defense guarantees from them, or we can incentivize them to not retaliate because they want to be part of our defense umbrella. And so it's a way of sort of connecting the leverage of America's national security power with the leverage we want on economics. I think there's a lot that's strange about this.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
But I guess the first thing that's strange about it is that we're already seeing retaliatory tariffs. And he sort of suggests in there, you don't want to begin with your friends. You want to begin with your enemies. And we've begun with our friends. We've begun with Canada and Mexico.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
So to the extent that the only guy around Trump who has really tried to put down on paper what this whole play might look like—and even he said it was a very narrow path— I don't want to be too critical here, but it seems like a rough start.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
of maybe more traditional patronage. And it's not clear there is one framework here. Not clear, there is one way of understanding it. But some people are trying to figure out a framework. And so what does that look like? And how do you try to put all this together? My guest today is Jillian Tett. She's a economics columnist at the Financial Times and a member of their editorial board.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
play with that for a minute and try to pit the cultural anthropologist side of you against the economic reporter side of you. Because I hear what you're saying, that we've all grown up in this Keynesian, then neoliberal economic framework. There's now a challenger to that, and there's a tendency to understand that challenger as aberrant. Okay, that I think is true.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?
But the other way of thinking about this is that those of us who are trained to think about economics... through an economic lens are going to be very confused when someone comes along who doesn't.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
So as the year comes to a close, I wanted to dust off some episodes I think have some renewed relevance right now. If you've listened to the show for a while, you've probably heard me bring up some of the mid-century media theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, these people who were thinking about how TV and visual media would reshape politics and society.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
I want to use this as a way to weave into the other side of the book a little bit, which is, this is a book about the interaction between media and democracy. And you have a line in the book that has started really lodging in my head and changing how I think, where you write that, and your co-author, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
That it's, quote, it's better to think of democracy less as a government type and more as an open communicative culture. Tell me about that distinction you're making.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
We tend to think of liberal democracies, but that's only one possibility. You can have illiberal democracies. Democracies can vote themselves into fascism. Democracy doesn't guarantee you any particular outcome. And so what drives a democracy, what decides what it becomes or what it stays, is that open communicative culture.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
So tell me then if I have the structure of your argument right here. So democracy does not naturally lead to liberal democracy. It does not naturally lead to openness. It can become anything. And the way it becomes anything is through its communicative culture.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
The way people in a democracy end up making the decisions that lead them to make and unmake institutions, to elect and throw out different politicians, to choose the person who wants to take them towards fascism or the one who wants to take them towards liberalism. That's coming out of, at least at the beginning, the communicative culture.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
The way its members learn about the world, debate it, and ultimately persuade each other to change it or not change it. And communicative cultures are shaped by the technologies upon which they happen. Oral cultures are different than textual ones. Radio is different than TV. Twitter is different than TikTok or Facebook.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
It's coming out of the way people talk about ideas, the way they learn about ideas, the way they learn about politicians. And because communicative cultures change radically over time with different technologies and different mediums and different medias, in order to understand a democracy at any given moment, you actually have to pay a lot of attention to its technologies of communication.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
Do I sort of have you right so far?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
It reminds me of one of my favorite Postman quotes. So he writes, introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history, and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type and you do the same.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
introduce speed of light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution without a vote without polemics without guerrilla resistance here's ideology pure if not serene here is ideology without words and all the more powerful for their absence all that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
And I've always thought that last line there is really important. That one thing that makes it hard to question technology, hard to question the way our communication changes, is that we do, particularly in America, have this baseline view that technological change is always good. That to question it makes you a Luddite. You just don't know how to use it well enough.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
You're just not policing your feed well enough. If you don't want to watch so much TV, you just shouldn't. That it's all a consumer choice. If you're making bad choices, it's on you, an individual failing.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
But the argument here, if technology is ideology, and if changes in technology change our ideology, as Postman puts it, without even words and votes and polemics, then maybe it's not really individual failing. And there should be some space maybe that we don't seem to have for collective reflection as to whether technologies are changing us in the way we want them to.
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Political scientists spend a lot of time theorizing about democratic institutions and how elections work, but communicative institutions and the cultures and technologies by which we communicate, they get a lot less attention. And I guess I'm a member of the media, so I would think this, but I think it's a huge mistake.
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I think it's true that TV made a televisual likability very important for politicians. What I think is interesting about social media is I'm not sure it's done the same thing. I mean, very famously, Donald Trump was the most unpopular major party candidate in the history of polling. And it strikes me that a lot of the candidates who are very good on social media are
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I've become almost obsessed in recent years with Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, the great mid-20th century media ecologists. I honestly think you have to pick any two theorists to act as guides to our current moment. You could do a lot worse than them. And so I'm always looking for an excuse to talk about them and to talk with other people trying to apply them to our current political age.
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They are very liked by some, but very hated by others. So if TV made it so you had to be, the question was, do I like them? What do you think the question of social media is for politicians or for voters?
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I think one way in which this has all changed and changed in a way that the media still has not caught up to is that the question of sentiment has become secondary to the question of energy. And what I mean by that is that it's pretty good on television to be likable. Yeah. And it's pretty bad to be unlikable. And I think on social media, it's pretty good to be likable.
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And it's almost even better to be unlikable. Because what you need is both sides contributing energy to your candidacy or to your debate. You need controversy. Not to say controversy didn't matter at other points in American history. I don't believe that. But particularly with algorithms that prize engagement, you really need people to join the other side of the argument.
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Donald Trump, people hate Donald Trump, and that gives him a lot of attention. AOC, AOC drives the right crazy, and that gives her a lot of attention. And the politicians, in my view, who follow a strategy of just kind of being broadly acceptable, if Joe Biden had not been Barack Obama's vice president, he doesn't have a chance in the 2020 primary.
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But I think that's really messed up the media because I think we believe that as mediators, our real power is in if we cover someone or something positively or negatively. And we really don't know what to do with politicians and issues that are able to utilize our negative coverage just as much, maybe even more than our positive coverage.
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So I was thrilled to see this book hit my desk. Sean Illing is one of the authors. He is a PhD political theorist who switched careers and became a journalist, which has always given him, in my view, an interesting dual perspective. He is the interviews writer at Vox, and he sits in my old chair hosting the podcast Vox Conversations.
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And this election felt like, I mean, it was beyond, I think, what they would have predicted. There's Trump, of course, a reality TV star who runs his campaigns and in some ways his administrations like a reality TV show. Many of his picks come from the TV and entertainment world.
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One thing that has always worried me and continues to worry me as a member of the media is that our biggest blind spot in how American politics works, how the political system actually functions, is ourselves. And the reason for it is that the question we are comfortable asking about our work is
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As always, my email, if you want to have an open, communicative culture with me and the team here, is EzraKleinShow at NYTimes.com. Sean Elling, welcome to the show.
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is are we doing a good enough job covering American politics, reflecting American politics, being a mirror to American politics? And we are unbelievably uncomfortable with the obvious question, the inescapable question, how are we changing American politics? Even if you write the most neutral article in the world, the decision to write that article and not another article
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is an inescapably charged decision. It is a choice that could have been made any other number of ways. And by making it, you have exerted force on the political system. You've made it a little bit different. That choice laddered up over every content decision choice, whether it's a decision to do what everybody else is doing because that's safer to do something radically different.
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Like that is the sum total of our impact. And we don't really like trying to look at that sum total and then decide if that sum total is one we're comfortable with, if we should do it differently next year, if we followed good rules or bad rules. We sort of want to stay away from that question, but in a way that leaves us gaping whole in our model of how the political system actually works.
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I proposed in a piece I wrote years ago now, practically with somebody like Trump, who has understood so well that outrage is a shortcut to coverage. That if you just do something really outrageous, you can trust that you will then be able to dominate the news cycle and push everybody else out of it. I've wondered about the idea of what if
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The bar for Donald Trump to get covered was that he had to do something more outrageous for him, which is act like a normal politician and produce policy plans and say something worth covering, as opposed to acting like an insult comic dog. But it'd be very, very hard. to try to put that into play across the media. I mean, one, the media isn't a singular, we don't all coordinate.
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So you and I, I think, have come to share a fascination with Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, who are these mid-century media critics. And man, I really think that if you want to understand the modern era, you need to read them. So people may have heard McLuhan's famous line, the medium is the message. What does it mean?
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There isn't like some grand meeting of the editors where we decide how to cover things. And two, you know, we are dependent to some degree on audience and if everybody else, you know, if the other publications are covering what Donald Trump does and you're not, that, I mean, it might be plausible to figure out your way to a different audience, but it's playing the game on hard mode for sure.
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And so I've never come up with what I think the answer to it should be. I'm curious if you have a better one.
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But we really need one because I feel like every Republican figured this out from Trump. It's like the one thing they all learned from him is how to do this trick. Yeah. Like Ron DeSantis is going to run an entire campaign based on tricks like this. And there's no answer to it, really. And it isn't to say that you couldn't see this on the left, too, although it would probably look different. But
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You know, I think the Republican Party, they learned a lot less from Trump's policy, right? That he moderated on things like Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security. You know, he was critical of foreign adventurism. Whatever you think of how he governed, you know, he ran rhetorically more moderately on some traditional Republican issues like taxes and entitlements and foreign policy.
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And some have picked that up, but many more of them have simply picked up that... You can get a lot of coverage by being a jerk. And you need a lot of coverage to win.
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See, I think that underplays actually Trump's persuasive effect. I mean, maybe in both directions, but I think it's really easy to underplay the substance of what he represented at the very least. And he didn't code it in the way that appeals to policy wonks. I remember he only had seven or eight issues on his webpage, and they were pretty thin the way he described his policies back then.
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But nevertheless, I think he persuaded a lot of people, in part through the fights he picked, in part through who he went after, that he was going to represent them, right? That they didn't like immigration and nor did he. That they didn't like how this country was changing and nor did he. That they didn't like Democrats and nor did he, but also they didn't like George W. Bush and nor did he.
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That persuasion, I don't think, has to be high-minded. And one thing I think Trump understood is that part of the way you persuade people that you're on their side is you come to share their enemies and you expend capital, your own reputational capital. You're willing to get flayed in public
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as almost a show of commitment that if you'll absorb this kind of incoming fire to hold to your position, well, then surely you'll do that when you're actually president. Surely you won't betray them then. And I would argue that in many ways, Trump betrayed the people that he promised to represent.
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But I do think there's something here that actually Democrats and popularists and everybody else tend to miss, people who are too into policy communication, as I am. tend to miss, which is you have to convince people first and foremost that you're on their side before they're going to listen to almost anything else you tell them.
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And people judge whether you're on their side not by the white papers you put out, But by more fundamental positioning and temperament and, you know, choosing of enemies and picking of fights. It's why I've always said that the relevant question isn't what's popular that you're willing to say, but what is unpopular that you're willing to say.
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When Bernie Sanders would say that he would abolish private health insurance and he would take the hit for that. The people who believed in single payer believed that he really believed in it too. Like he wasn't going to just abandon this. Like being willing to say the unpopular thing is often how you convince people that you mean the popular thing.
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I don't ask this next question in the spirit of plausibility. I ask it descriptively. What does, for a democracy, a healthy communicative culture look like?
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How do you understand that tension where clearly today there is a wider range of expressible viewpoints in almost all areas of American life? I really don't believe that to be arguable. against any other time in which I've been alive or can look in American history.
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Clearly, many more people and many more kinds of people can be heard thanks to social media, thanks to the low cost of setting up a webpage or a podcast. And at the same time, people feel in polling that they have to be more careful with what they say. There's constant fears about cancel culture and, you know, a hostile speech environment.
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And this is obviously playing out in a lot of opinion pages and, you know, a lot of our politics about our communication. These two things feel to me like they are not separate, that they're somehow deeply intertwined. But I'm curious what you make of them, that simultaneity. of actual freedom and perceived and felt, I don't take away from it, felt unfreedom or fear.
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One suspicion I have is that the frustrations about how our political communication culture feels right now do reflect one of those lags that you all write about in the book, which is that we are working with very new communication technologies. The migration of so much of our political communication onto social media
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is something that didn't just happen in my lifetime, it happened in my adult lifetime. It's very, very, very fresh. And maybe we're just in the lag between when lots of us go there and when we learn how to tune out the worst voices, when people who are running institutions learn what to ignore, that the fact that people are yelling at you on Twitter doesn't mean you have to respond.
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Maybe this is all going to settle down and this will just be looked back on, you know, the sort of explosion of Trump and Bolsonaro's and Johnson's and, you know, politicians who were able to kind of unleash some of these darker energies. Maybe it'll just be looked on as another one of these periods where new technologies destabilized us and then, you we refound our footing.
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How likely do you find that versus a more structural deranging of our politics?
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To your point about McLuhan's point that it makes a whole world into a village... I don't know that our nervous systems are built to hold the whole world as a village. I find it to be a very uncomfortable position to be in as a media professional, right?
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Somebody who has devoted my life to the news in different ways, or at least media commentary nowadays, that I'm not sure I think people should be consuming as much news as we are offering them. And not that most people are reading all of it because they're not or listening or seeing all of it. But I think it should be way less actually for the normal healthy person.
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That there's a part of me that thinks the weekly news magazine had it right. The daily paper. It's one reason I actually love the daily as a show. It's like pop in once a day and you get something and then you get some headlines and you go about your day. And I just don't know that we're built for this. And I don't know that we are going to become built for it because we don't change that much.
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And this is a pretty new experiment. Now, maybe the only outcome of that... is that we become twitchier and more anxious and a little bit more depressed. And so this is simply one force among many, you know, pushing around the human psyche.
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I think sometimes when people hear you say, we may not be built for this, they think, you know, what you mean is we're all going to dissolve into dust if it doesn't stop. And I don't mean that. But it also doesn't mean that it's good.
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So I love that you brought in the Sesame Street thing there, as I said, because I think it's a really clear example. Postman got in a lot of trouble for this. He talks about it a lot. But his basic argument, as I've heard him make it, to build on what you said... is that people think Sesame Street teaches children to love learning, and what it teaches them is to love television. Yeah.
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I guess something that brings me to is towards the end of the book, you and your co-author write, there's really no answer here that doesn't have to do with media literacy, that doesn't have to do with how we educate the populace. I also think it's notable that Postman's great obsession was our education system, that that even more so than media is what he really took as his core project.
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And you're a little vague on what you think media literacy should look like. But you have a young kid, I have two. What do you think we should be teaching them about the communications world and culture they're growing up in and that they're going to be forming?
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Chris, you had people like Dana White and Hulk Hogan introducing Donald Trump on the final night of the Republican National Convention. So the episode I'm sharing today, which was taped in 2022, offers a framework for thinking about that TVification of politics. It's a conversation with my friend Sean Illing, the host of the Gray Area podcast and a co-author of the book, The Paradox of Democracy.
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I think that's basically right. It's also a good bridge to what's always our final question, which is to throw people back to an earlier medium and ask what are three books you would recommend to the audience?
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And he's obviously right about that. I mean, it maybe does both, but he's obviously right that Sesame Street is training wheels, television, and also how I've used it for my own child. And to bring this back to McLuhan, what I understand McLuhan is saying is that we really miss the way mediums change us. And I've come to think of this as focusing on their sameness rather than their differences.
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The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Annie Galvin and Roger Karma. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker, Kate Sinclair, and Roland Hugh. Mixing by Sonia Herrero and Carol Saburo and Isaac Jones. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristen Lin and Christina Samieluski.
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He's got this other quote that I think about a lot where he says, our conventional response to all media is, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the content of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.
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So do you want to talk a bit about that distinction between the content that we see on mediums and how they do change? It is different to, say, watch Fox News versus watching MSNBC, right? but that there's at the same time a commonality to what cable news is that McLuhan would say is the more important message of both of them?
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I do think he's right. And an easy way to put it is that he makes this argument that Various politicians who succeeded gloriously in the pre-television era can never have succeeded in the post-television era. Right. Abraham Lincoln is an example. He uses this melancholic, tall, not that attractive, slightly weird guy, prone to a lot of depression.
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His wife is quite ill in a bunch of different ways. He is not the kind of politician who succeeds in the post-TV universe. But a point you all make in the book is that it really isn't just about one medium versus another. You can get overly nostalgic about that. It's that mediums change us.
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Enjoy. From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. In their new book, The Paradox of Democracy, Zach Gershberg and Sean Illing make a simple but radical argument. They write, quote, it's better to think of democracy less as a government type and more as an open communicative culture. Their point there is that democracies can end up in many types of governments.
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And so in particular, the period of time when they are changing us is a dangerous time for democracies because they create a lot of disruption. Do you want to talk a bit about that recurrent history of... the introduction of a new medium destabilizing political systems?
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You're a journalist, you podcast, you write text articles, you do interviews, you write on Twitter. Let's be a little personal here. When you say mediums change us, how do you feel you're different in these different mediums?
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When I write, I tend to convince myself of what I think. There's an old Joe Didion line that writers love. I write to find out what I think. And I don't, believe it's true, at least not for me. I've noticed over time that writing tends for me to be about finding an answer, and I tend to become convinced by the answer I find.
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I've noticed that because as I've done more podcasting, I notice how much more when I'm podcasting, I don't seem to enter that mode. I sit much more in a space where many possible answers seem plausible to me, and I don't feel need to choose between them. Uncertainty and contradiction and paradox are are for whatever reason easier for me to hold in the podcast space.
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And Twitter, again, for better or worse, what I notice about it, what I notice happens to me the more I am on it and the better I get at it, is that it teaches me to think about the reaction, to think as if I am thinking for the collective.
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in a way that I have some more distance from who I'm writing for or speaking for, you know, when I'm writing a piece to go up at the New York Times or, you know, back in the day at Vox where you are, if I'm doing a podcast, you know, as we're doing this now, I am more distant from a concern about reaction, more sort of
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attentive to my own experience of creating the work than on Twitter or to some degree on Facebook or Instagram, where I'm much more jacked in to an expectation of what the reaction will be and both anticipating and fearing it, despite also knowing its deep ephemerality.
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But how can you make the decision at all? Because as good as your geopolitical advisory team might be. And they are excellent. I'm sure they're wonderful. I do this professionally. I'm pretty good at it. And I know the people involved. Right. And I can tell you that they cannot tell you what Donald Trump will do in 30 days. Yes. Or in 90 days.
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Because the only person who knows is him and he doesn't know. Right.
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Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
Has there been a signal, aside from wait and see, that in your experience companies are taking from the reorientation of American policy? I mean, there are investments you cannot pause forever. There are decisions you have to make. Companies make, as you said, decisions under uncertainty all of the time. And obviously Donald Trump has intuitions. People know what those are.
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In the decisions that do need to be made, have you seen a pattern on the way people are trying to plan for the uncertain policy equilibrium we are likely to be in to some degree for a while?
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Well, one of the reasons I am myself skeptical that the 90-day pause is as... clarity bringing of a policy move, as I think some are treating it, is that I remember the 30-day pause on Canada and Mexico. And there was a market reaction to the announcement of the 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico. Then he backed off and people said, oh, look, you know, old Donnie Trump, he's not going to do this.
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That guy cares about the stock market. And then in 30 days, he did. And then we had another reaction. And then it's been kind of escalating from there. And now there's a de-escalation. But nobody really knows what he wants from these other countries in the 90-day pause. There's been a bunch of reporting that people in other countries, you know, who would happily come and try to make a deal.
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Not exactly clear what we want from Vietnam, but maybe we could get it. But it has not been communicated to them. what Donald Trump wants. And there have been... Steve Moran gave the speech and he said, well, maybe you can help us with defense spending or maybe you can buy more of our things or you could just make a direct donation to the U.S. Treasury was one of the options.
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But he didn't pull that far back. He is still tariffing most of the world at 10%. He's tariffing China at 145%. And as for the tariffs he paused, well, that's a pause. It's a 90-day pause. What happens at the end of 90 days? What deal is Malaysia supposed to strike with us in the meantime? Who are they going to make that deal with? Nobody knows, not even, I suspect, Trump himself.
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But it's a little... One of the things that has been very, I think, tricky about this is... is there's one world where they're trying to achieve something very discreet. And there's another where Donald Trump likes tariffs because tariffs are leverage. And he's a person who works in leverage, wields leverage, who develops moments of anger at other countries, right?
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Maybe we come to a deal with Europe, but then Europe does something he doesn't like or France does something he doesn't like. And so this kind of shakiness can persist, right? One of my worries for the economy right now is that, you know, a 10% tariff and a higher one on China is bad, but there can be adjustments made to that.
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Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
But a world where lots and lots of companies are delaying investments over a long period of time, that's a secondary effect that will push a lot of investment we need or we're expecting in the present out into the future. And that does have an effect on jobs. It does have an effect on our industrial base. It does have an effect on lots of other things.
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And, I mean, that just seems very likely to be our world.
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Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
Has that changed? Is the theory of the case less befuddling now?
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Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
I think it's good for us to circle the Moran paper for a few minutes because something I see people on Wall Street doing is, A lot of you all are very smart people. And you're looking- You all. Look at this. I'm not on Wall Street. I'm a poor member of the media here, man. Okay. There is a search for a framework that makes sense.
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And Moran offered people the most sophisticated framework for something that might be Donald Trump's trade policy. But also Moran has said, he just gave a speech over the week, where he's asked about his very important paper. And he said, look, this paper is not important because I wrote it before I was in the administration. It's not exactly Donald Trump's trade theory.
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But I think what we can say right now are three things with certainty. First, we're entering an era of higher prices and unknown levels of supply chain upheaval. We're about to see a massive trade war with China. The global economy is complex. When you put this kind of pressure on that system, things that you were not expecting can break.
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So I guess what I'd ask here, because I've seen people really wanting to make this paper, the Rosetta Stone, how do you understand what it says? What is the remaking of the global financial order that it proposes? And then how well... Has the administration's policy decisions and movements tracked that paper's offerings?
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Do you feel that consensus was discredited? I do. Because I don't buy this connection between trade policy and And life expectancy as a one-to-one thing.
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Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
You served in the Obama administration. I don't remember Barack Obama talking about trade as an endlessly unfettered good thing. When he had that gaffe, when he talked about people in hollowed-out factory towns clinging to guns and religion, what he was talking about was hollowed-out factory towns, right? Even then, there was a lot of...
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concern over whether parts of the country were being terribly left behind.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
Into that vacuum steps Donald Trump, who believed this since, like, the 80s, 90s in Japan. Correct. Right? He came to these views that he's proposing now when the antagonist wasn't even China, it was Japan.
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Second, we are in an era of extended extraordinary economic uncertainty. No one really knows what any of these tariffs are gonna be in a year. Will Trump get peeved by what countries do or don't offer him in the next 90 days and return with yet more fury? Trump sees tariffs as ongoing leverage in every policy dispute. Is he really gonna give that up?
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Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
So give me both sides of that. What do you understand to be the benefits America gets from being the world's reserve currency? And what is the cost that is being argued at least that it carries?
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All right, so those are at least some of the gains. What's the downside? What's the downside?
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
I'm doing these two or three day turnarounds on these podcasts and the tariffs are often different by the time I release the episode. If I don't have enough policy certainty to plan a podcast, how are major companies supposed to plan long-term capital investments? Third, the king cannot hear no.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
Let me zoom in for a minute on the question of whether or not the dollar is driving the decline in manufacturing employment. It's probably true that the dollar's value has had some effect on that. But every estimate I find is that it's a fraction of the total. And this is more automation. It's more the move to services. It's more a bunch of different things.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
And it's probably not going to come back. So you can look at other countries. Germany has a very different trade policy than we do. They've existed in more of the world that I think Stephen Moran and Donald Trump seem to want us to exist in. And you also see manufacturing as a share of employment dropping there.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
There are a lot of arguments people make right now that China has probably hit peak manufacturing employment. I think Donald Trump is a nostalgic person. And I think that he wants an economy and he's baselined on economy of America in the 50s, the 60s, perhaps. And that he's trying in his own way to get us back there, but there's no there to go back to.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
And so one question I have for you is if you did everything that Stephen Moran wants to do and the dollar was no longer the world's reserve currency, although they say they wanted to maintain its role as a reserve currency, they're contradictory on that. But if it was no longer the world's reserve currency, if it devalued
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
Then what is your view of what that would buy us given the world we now live in of automation, of cheap global shipping, of artificial intelligence coming online, you know, very, very rapidly? Like, is the thing they're trying to achieve achievable with this mechanism?
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
One of the most appalling parts of his whole fiasco was watching Trump's advisors fawn over him after he buckled. Bill Ackman, the hedge funder, wrote on X, this was brilliantly executed by at real Donald Trump. Textbook art of the deal. You heard this again and again. Here's the White House press secretary.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
Backbone of the American economy. International podcast advertising.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
I think you want to be more, I think I am being intellectually generous, but realistic. I think there's a deep nostalgia for Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
The art of the deal. Only there's no deal. Trump struck no deal with anybody. And there was definitely no art. We learned the outer edge of Trump's pain tolerance, and so did the rest of the world. So there goes some of his leverage. We saw a slapdash policy fall apart within a week or so. But still, Trump's allies are declaring his genius. Not because they expect us to believe it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
but because they know he needs to hear it and he needs to hear them saying it in public aloud. It is part of the structure of humiliation that dictators demand of their servants. Authoritarianism is not just a mode of governance. It's a habit of communication. The king is always right, even when he is contradicting what he said a day before.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
Future influence in the court relies on being in his good graces and praise is the currency of that grace. Dictatorships are disastrous in part because they restrict the flow of information around the decision maker. The bond market was eventually information Trump could not ignore, that nobody could tell him to ignore.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
That'd be something like $1 trillion plus over 10 years, which is significantly less than the cost of the tax cut they're planning.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
But those who seek his favor and his ear are making sure he learns nothing from this episode. I suspect we are underestimating how thick the informational bubble around Trump now is, how little bad news actually reaches him, how rarely he ever hears serious criticism clearly delivered, how much the sycophants around him praise every utterance that comes out of his mouth.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
However they score the tax cut, the deficit in 2026, it will still require us to pay for it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
So I guess my question here is whether or not in all these efforts to reorder the global financial system, where Steve Bannon and Stephen Moran, for different reasons, will tell you that the U.S. is badly overextended by its role as a global reserve currency and its role as a global defense protectorate, that their theory is that if you unwound that role the U.S.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
is playing, you could solve or significantly ameliorate our debt problems? Do you buy that theory?
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
Well, let's go to that more fundamental debate, which is no theory quite stepped into the void that the previous theory of trade and the benefits it would bring to America and that it would liberalize China. Nothing really stepped into the void that that left. You said that the Biden administration made some points on French shoring. That didn't quite do it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
Now you have Donald Trump, and their theory is very aggressive, but I don't think it's working out great. I'm a little skeptical that their theory is going to be—the theory— Do you have a contender? I'm not saying it has to be yours specifically, but is there some vision out there? Is it like, what do you think this theory needs to consist of? What are we even trying to achieve in your view?
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
So no, I don't expect Trump to learn much from this episode. But what should the rest of us learn from it? My guest today is Peter Orszag, the CEO of Lazard, one of the world's largest asset management and global financial advisory firms. He was also the director of the Office of Management and Budget under Barack Obama.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
I mean, wasn't what they were doing turning down the dial a little bit on open trade with China, do more friend-shoring, use industrial policy to protect strategically important sectors like the Chips and Science Act to reinvest in semiconductor manufacturing...
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
Was it absent from the policy framework, though? I mean, like the semiconductor manufacturing is offering money to private semiconductor firms.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
I always find the business community is more sensitive than I would think it would be. Everyone's sensitive.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
That is fair. in human life. And I think presidents don't always realize how much they are doling out status.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
So when you've been talking to firms, when you're thinking about the next couple of years, I guess one question I have had is whether or not we are putting too much weight on trade for your first principle there. Which is to say, I'm a believer that effective commerce is very important.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
But something I have heard from a lot of people following this debate is that even if what you're trying to do is reshore manufacturing... Trade is probably not your most important tool. Tariffs are certainly not your most important tool.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
Matt Klein and Michael Pettis, who wrote the book Trade Wars or Class Wars and have been sort of significant figures in the rethinking of trade, both have said versions of this to us and or said it publicly. So I guess a different version of this is if what you want to do is have effective commerce, some of that in trade, some of that elsewhere, where would that lead you?
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
I mean, OK, let's say they put down the tariffs. Then they should focus on what? What other barriers exist to the world of American greatness that you think, you know, in Stephen Moran's paper or elsewhere they're describing?
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
So he served as a policymaker during financial crises and is a market and CEO whisperer in these last few months. What is he hearing? What is he seeing? As always, my email, EzraKleinShow at NYTimes.com. Peter Orszag, welcome to the show. Good to be with you. So we are speaking late afternoon on Wednesday the 9th.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
And so what would matter for that?
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
And then also, final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
But isn't it the case, I mean, you look at the biggest companies in the world that Europe has far fewer than they used to. They don't have many frontier technology companies anymore.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
productivity has raced forward in America. So it's specifically the technology sector.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
Peter Orszag, thank you very much.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker, and Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Isaac Jones with Amin Sahota and Efim Shapiro. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Marie Cassione, Roland Hu, Elias Iskwith, Marina King, Jan Kobel, and Kristen Lin.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
We've original music by Pat McCusker, audience strategy by Christina Samielewski, and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Andy Rostrosser, and special thanks to Matt Klein.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
This morning markets were in turmoil, then Donald Trump announced a 90-day pause on non-retaliating countries. Tell me as you were tracking the markets and as you were talking to the people at your bank, what you were seeing.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
That chaos, it should be said, was not simply the result of higher expected prices or supply chain disruptions. What markets hate is uncertainty. Financial crises are usually the result of some unexpected, uncontrollable shock that overwhelms the policymakers who are trying to maintain stability. In this case, Trump himself was a shock.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. Here's how the last week or so went. President Donald Trump unveiled a half-baked package of gigantic tariffs. So half-baked, one of them was a tariff on a group of islands inhabited by penguins. Those tariffs threw the markets into chaos.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
talked about them and talked about the, I think he called it queasiness. He said they were getting queasy. And that, I think, scared people. You can maybe explain why this is better than I can, but people are okay with the stock market going up and down. They're not okay with the bond market beginning to unravel.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
that that is taken with a different level of seriousness than the S&P market, the equities market, that's volatile. The treasury markets are not supposed to be volatile.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
He was announcing that he was himself trying to end this era of stability. He wanted a realignment of the global financial system. And he can't shift those tectonic plates without creating a few earthquakes. But man, what an earthquake. Trillions of dollars of wealth wiped out of the stock market by choice. The Trump people said, don't worry about it. That's Wall Street, not Main Street.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
So they backed off on this a little bit, but we're still in a place where the tariffs that are being proposed are pretty significant. So they're more or less what Donald Trump was promising during the campaign, a 10% tariff on imported goods. It's still a little bit unclear, and probably by the time this comes out, it might have clarified.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
But now the tariff on China looks to be, it's in the, you know, over 100% as we're speaking. There are some different tariff rates on a It seems that this is on the order of a 25-point tariff increase on average because the China one is so high, and that's the calculation I've been seeing around. This is being treated now, given how bad things were getting, as a walk back to a moderate position.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
But when I talk to people who were Trump supporters during the campaign— And this was a proposal. They promised me nothing like this would ever happen. There'd just be a negotiating ploy that he would come down from after he got some deals.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
So from your perspective as somebody talking with a lot of different companies who has a perspective on markets, what does it mean for these tariffs to go into effect? How does that change your estimation of future U.S. growth? How are you advising or would you advise companies to act given that there's been a lot of volatility here? What does this point mean for the economy?
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
There's one, the tariff rate. And if the tariff rates, if anybody believed they were stable, we could simply model that out. Okay, a 10% tariff here, a 60% tariff there. We could think about that like a tax policy. But then there's the uncertainty, right? Like you're saying here, you don't expect the China tariffs to be what they are today in a year or in two years.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
I think a lot of people don't even expect the bilateral tariffs on a bunch of different countries to be what they are today in a year or two years. So one of the things the Trump administration says they're trying to achieve is persuading companies to make investment decisions based on these tariffs, specifically to persuade them to invest in the U.S.,
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
But if companies don't trust that the tariff environment today is going to be the tariff environment in a year, and these are long-term capital expenditure decisions— it would seem that the obvious thing to do is to just wait.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next
All we care about is the American worker. But then the upheaval hit the bond markets. The market for U.S. treasuries began to shake. A bad sign because U.S. treasuries are the relentlessly reliable asset at the base of the global financial system. Crack that and the whole house can come down. And that seems to be what pulled Trump back from the brink.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
You described the importance of experience there as bringing a weight of judgment, maybe temperament, to administration decision-making. That struck me as different than how you described it in the book, which was more related to the way that experience tends to reflect judgment.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
other sources of power, ambitions that might stretch beyond any single administration, and has such a willingness and even a necessity to oppose things that are out of line. When you think of somebody like Christopher Wray, who was appointed by Trump to lead the FBI in his first term, Wray was sort of a bureaucrat, right? He had a lot of experience in Washington.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
Being known as somebody who corrupted the FBI would be bad for him. He had, you know, his own ideas about his legacy and so on. When you look at somebody like Kash Patel, that's very different. Patel would never run the FBI under any other president. And he has no future in politics that is outside of Donald Trump's favor or disfavor.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
And so there's this way in which the Raida Patel movement, again, both of them Donald Trump appointees, really seems to me to reflect the movement of Trump either wanting or feeling able to make loyalty and, you know, the willingness of somebody to serve as your personal political executioner paramount in one of the most important jobs in government.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
This gets to a concept you all use quite a bit and I found helpful, which is to think about the capacity of of the people around the leader, of the party around the leader, to oppose or curb the leader. What do you understand as the ingredients of capacity?
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
We think of that term as describing a change in who is in power, but I mean it in the sense of the political system itself, the way that power works. We're used to our politics revolving around what the political scientists call programmatic political parties. These are coalitions that are bound together by shared interests and goals.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
What, when you're coding your data set, are the things that you include in the model to estimate the capacity of a political party or an administration to act when it needs to act?
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
This struck me as an interesting place to think about the ways that Trump is similar to and different than some of these other figures mentioned in the book. He is, compared to other American presidents and has been, very unusually focused on and present in his party's nominating processes.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
The Trump primary in which these Republicans line up for Congress, for governor, for Senate, and as he has put it with J.D. Vance, kiss his ass, in order to receive his favor. You didn't see anything like that with Barack Obama, with Joe Biden, with George W. Bush. Trump really understands that if he is seen as the crucial mark of favor in the primary nominating process...
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
They feature agreements that supersede the desires of any particular leader. They have large collections of elites and staffers and functionaries who know how to work together across administrations and periods. And so they bind new administrations.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
then he has control over the individual in the party because they know that he can destroy them. He can simply back somebody else the next time there's a Republican primary for their seat. On the other hand, he doesn't do it through money. He does it through attention. and his own particular say-so.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
But Trump, it seems to me, uses attention in the way that other figures in your data set and research use money. I'm curious what you think of that.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
Money then brings up this way in which Trump's second term is shaping up to potentially be different than his first. So Donald Trump is rich, but he is not by the standards of being rich, all that rich, right? Maybe he was in his first term a billionaire in the low billions. People argued about what the true nature of his wealth was.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
But he wasn't rich in the way that Bill Gates is rich, that Mark Zuckerberg is rich, that Elon Musk is rich. And in his first term, really rich guys largely didn't like him that much. He didn't have a ton of support from America's CEO class. Again, not saying there was nobody in that world who supported him.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
He had help from the Adelsons and others, but there was actually a lot of friction between him and that world. And that's very different now, led by Elon Musk, the literal richest man in the world, also somebody who has a lot of power over attention, and has put both that money and that attention in Trump's service.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
And I think this brings up this question of what in American politics we have to talk about is corruption, which I think for Americans sounds like stealing or looting, but maybe looks or gets called in other systems patronage or transactionalism.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
If you had seen Kamala Harris win the election, there's no chance that she would have named a pro-life candidate to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Democrats are a pro-choice party. If Ron DeSantis had been the Republican nominee and he had won the election, you would also see a pro-life candidate lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
But I'm curious, somebody studied a lot of these systems, how you understand the ways that these trades, power for money, money for attention, are used not just to enrich, but to bind a coalition together.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
Republicans are a pro-life party, but Donald Trump won. And because RFK Jr. was useful to him, the fact that RFK Jr. is pro-choice did not stop him from making that nomination, and it may not stop Republicans from accepting it. The fact that they would even consider
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
One thing that has been on my mind is the degree to which we're watching the emergence of of the kind of oligarchic Praetorian guard that maybe you see in Russia or in a number of post-Soviet bloc countries, where there is an alliance between the very richest people in society, the leader, and they shift money and power back and forth, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
Again, I've watched as Musk is really putting himself in Trump's service with an explicitness you rarely see. It's not that Joe Biden didn't have rich supporters, but they weren't saying or suggesting they were going to fund a functionally unlimited super PAC that would challenge any Democrat who in any way deviated from what Joe Biden wanted.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
That choosing to act as an enforcer of the president with your money is something different. But I also recognize from the other side, it could sound like I am drawing a distinction without a difference between these two things. This is a kind of... liberal drawing of the lines around one thing and saying it's within the boundaries of institutions and another and saying it's not.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
So how do you tell the difference? What separates Putin's relationship with the oligarchs and the way he uses them from that of Joe Biden's relationship with richer people in American society?
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
a pro-choice candidate to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, that shows you how much control Donald Trump has over that party. It shows you that that party is working in a different way now. There is this other kind of political party. It's called a personalist party, a party subordinate to a person. It works less like the political parties we're used to and more like royal courts.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
When we're talking about corruption or this kind of favor trading, there is this relationship with the structure of policy. When policy is made in a flat and universal way, there's a tax code and it has tax brackets. There's not all that much to trade. When it becomes more discretionary, there becomes a lot to trade.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
And this has struck me as one of the dangers, or possibly from his perspective, the virtues of tariffs. Tariffs are discretionary. You put them on some things and not on others. I'm curious if that has been a feature of these regimes elsewhere and if that is something that you think might become central to the way Trump doles out favor and disfavor here.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
We've also seen this shift this time in the relationship Trump has with the wealthy and powerful in society, who I think we would have grouped in his first term as in a more tense relationship with him. So put aside the billionaires who very actively support Trump, like Elon Musk or Marc Andreessen, there's been this procession of CEOs trekking to Mar-a-Lago
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
Over the past couple of months, Mark Zuckerberg and Apple's Tim Cook and Sam Altman from OpenAI and just a real who's who of American business power. And this is another of these things which I think you could imagine looking at both ways. That if Kamala Harris had won and I had heard that she had calls with some business leaders, that wouldn't strike me as all that unusual.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
These parties have become more common worldwide in recent decades. They're nothing new. And when they emerge in democracies, they make backsliding into some form of hybrid authoritarianism a lot more likely. And that's what's different between Donald Trump's first and second terms. I've been saying this for months. You don't watch the man. Watch the institutions.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
And on the other hand, this thing where they are all flying to Trump's club to pay him their respects, which feels to me like what is actually happening, that there is an understanding that you need to be in favor with him. And that they're willing to make that transaction now in a way that they weren't in the first term. Same people, very, very different behavior.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
And different behavior that you're seeing in other places too, like Jeff Bezos killing the endorsement of Kamala Harris in the Washington Post. What do you make of that shift to the extent that you buy that there has been a shift here?
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
I found I really perked up when you said court politics. I'll tell you something about our prep process here. Please don't take offense to this. We all hate the term personalist politics. That's fine. It just doesn't feel like it describes anything, right? You know, I mean, so much of politics is personal. So many politicians emphasize who they are personally.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
I know it's a term of art and has a definition. We've talked about that definition. And so one thing we ended up doing is is spending a bunch of time as a team throwing around other things we could call this. We had godfather politics and boss politics and capo politics, and I had ChatGPT give me suggestions, and nothing quite worked. We abandoned the hunt.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
But court politics, that feels very descriptive of what we're seeing. And again, in this effort to make a structure that many people are treating as aberrant or seem strange, familiar... This feels like some of the conceptual bridge that has to be crossed, that on the one hand, this was all done very democratically. Donald Trump won the election. He won it in the traditional way.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
In his first term, he led a programmatic party. He existed in this uneasy coalition with a Republican party that was there before him, that expected to be there in similar form after him. But he's conquered that party now. He's remade it. Now, it's Donald Trump's party. Speaker Mike Johnson is there only with Donald Trump's support. It is Donald Trump who is a crucial voice in primary contests.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
He won it through winning the popular vote and the electoral college. And yet what it seems to be resulting in is something that doesn't look so much like the regimes we're used to in America, but court politics. So what does that term mean for you?
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
I think there's been some interesting paradoxes emerging or internal contradictions in the second Trump term. Things that you have to use a different framework to think about clearly. So here's one. When we think about a more autocratic ruler... winning an election in a democratic society, I think we think about a closing down. We imagine autocracies to be more closed.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
But there's been, certainly within the Republican Party, that Trump controls a widening. There's just no doubt in my mind that the ideological range in Trump's second term is much wider than in his first, right? If the first term featured something running roughly from Jared Kushner in the moderate centrist vein all the way over to Steve Bannon, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
Now you have something running from people like RFK Jr. in the crunchy, hippie, conspiratorial world all the way to the Silicon Valley right and reactionaries and futurists all the way to pretty traditional small government types over to more national conservatives like Stephen Miller.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
And what has seemed to me to make this possible, this strange openness that the Trump coalition has evolved towards. is that the whole thing relies on winning Trump's favor.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
And because Trump himself is not that ideologically interested on a lot of issues, he's more interested in loyalty and his transactions with the people he is in relationship with, that it has strangely dramatically widened the range of outcomes and possible servants he can have. Because the thing works like a court.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
If you can convince him it serves him or you'll serve him, he will agree to things that are pretty far outside where you would have expected. It was striking to see Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy seem to win over the holidays, this fight over high-skill immigration. Because if Trump is associated with anything, it is with anti-immigrationist sentiment.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
But Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk are able to offer much more to Trump than, you know, Laura Loomer and some of these more troglodytic supporters he has.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
And so there's a strange openness that I think can emerge when the only thing you need is the nod of the leader as opposed to working within the established framework of, as you called it, a programmatic or more ideological political party, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
It's Donald Trump's daughter-in-law who co-leads the Republican National Committee. Personals regimes, they revolve around transactions with the leader. That's why so many billionaires and elites are now dining at Mar-a-Lago. They understand what the terms on the table are. You win Trump's favor by being of use to him. And then maybe you prosper. You get power. You get money.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
A way I've changed my own views about what Trump's second term is going to look like is I think a year ago, I'm more bought into the idea there'd be more cohesive because they were vetting candidates this time and he had governed once before.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
And now I actually think it'll be in certain ways more fractious because the understanding of almost everybody at all levels of American society, that transactionalism is how you relate to Trump and he's not going away, has meant a lot more people are showing up to the court with gifts for the king. and trying to win his favor.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
And because his favor really matters, that's creating a lot of, and will create, I think, a lot of big conflicts. It has to be managed. It can become a toxic dynamic. What separates the leaders who manage that well from those who don't?
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
You oppose him, he's going to make you and your company and perhaps the people you love pay. And this, I think, is why you see companies like Meta making these incredibly obvious Trump-friendly changes, like ending third-party fact-checking and elevating Trump allies like UFC President Dana White to their board.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
So even as I'm saying there are dimensions of Trump's second term that have a distinctive openness to them compared even to other Republican administrations, I think that reflects that Everything depends on clearing the bar of loyalty. And if you don't clear the bar of loyalty, the consequences can be more ferocious.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
And something I've noted with some alarm is the way in which Trump and his allies are much more intent on cowing the media this time. So you're seeing defamation lawsuits brought. ABC settled one with Donald Trump. He brought another against the Des Moines Register simply for publishing a poll that showed him down in Iowa.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
I mean, that poll didn't—it ended up being wrong, as a lot of polls are wrong. But even if he can't win the suit, it costs money for the Des Moines Register to take that suit, right? Someone like Elon Musk can bring a lot of these suits. Peter Thiel, another Trump ally, basically destroyed Gawker.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
So there is a—you know, you really can use lawsuits if you're deep-pocketed to drain and even destroy media organizations and make them really think twice about how much— trouble they're willing to work with. And at the same time, now Trump has a much larger right-wing media ecosystem. He's got X through Elon Musk.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
He owns Truth Social, which is also something that he's able to profit from personally because it is a platform that is traded and there's money in it. How do you see the way that the Trump administration or the sort of Trump world is is coming after the media and trying to create a sort of structure of, you know, favor and consequences for its second term.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
One of the things that has been an interesting dynamic to me is a way that even though Trump World has a hatred for what we might call the mainstream media that Biden World did not, they're much more engaged with it in a lot of ways. And it strikes me as getting at this strange dynamic in which the media is an important character in the Trump story. It is his antagonist, his villain, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
The Democratic Party is too, the liberals are, but the media almost centrally. And so there's a real value to them to going into this place for combat because that's the whole story. And when they're treated with a hostile interview, that just goes to show and it's so unfair. Right. And at the same time, there is this sort of striking, you know, at times almost symbiotic feeling relationship.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
I mean, people often point out that Trump is often good for ratings. He is good for a subscription, certainly was in his first term.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
In personalist regimes, everything is a transaction with the leader. There are rules. There is a way things are done. What is already separating Trump's second term from his first is how many power centers in American business and politics are showing that they're willing to play by those rules, that they understand how things are going to be done now.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
Let's talk about that playbook. If you were to describe what the play is or what the example of the play is in another country that looks most like what we're seeing here, how would you boil that down?
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
My guest today is one of the leading scholars of these regimes, both in their democratic and authoritarian forms. Erica Franz is a political scientist at Michigan State University and a co-author of The Origins of Elected Strongmen, How Personalist Parties Destroy Democracy from Within. As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com. Erica Franz, welcome to the show.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
One of the things that you make a point of in your book is that we often look at all of this in Or that person was always going to become an authoritarian.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
And that one of the arguments about focusing on the institutional context, the party context that surrounds them is it helps you think about the conditions through which these changes might happen rather than only being able to see them after the fact. But here we are at the beginning of the second Trump era.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
And there is going to be this constant need to look at what is happening before us and deciding, does this reflect something dangerous or is this just, you know, a Trump administration? Are these CEOs going to Mar-a-Lago, just people doing their jobs on behalf of their companies and trying to get the ear of the president?
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
Or is a deeper transactionalism at the heights of American business and power emerging? What are you looking for? What, if you saw it or if it continues, would constitute an alarm bell to Erica Franz, scholar of this kind of thing? And what would reassure you?
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
Let's begin with some definitions. What is personalist politics?
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
What tends to typify successful or unsuccessful opposition parties when these attempts are being made? Do the ones that tend to block the attempt, do they focus on the abuses of power, the corruption, the authoritarianism or the attempted authoritarianism? Or do they focus on unpopular policies and bread and butter issues and, you know, making prices lower?
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
I do feel like there's this branching path of political choice that Democrats are trying to face right now as to whether to treat Trump as a kind of political emergency or to try to beat him the way you might have tried to beat Ron DeSantis.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
But he had a legislative majority when he took office in 2017 as well, and democracy survived. And this is something I hear a lot from people, that all this hair on fire, look, this guy was president before, and it was, you know, from their perspective, fine.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
So when you say it worries you, does it worry you because you feel the Republican Party and the legislative majority he has now are different than they were before? Or is it something else?
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
Disproportionate is a word doing some work there. So how do you decide what is disproportionate influence? I can imagine somebody saying President Barack Obama was a international global celebrity. He had a level of prestige and power and media capacity far beyond anybody else in the Democratic Party. Wasn't that personalist politics?
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
And then always our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Elias Iskwith. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Isaac Jones with Afim Shapiro and Amin Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Kristen Lin, and Jack McCordick. We have original music by Pat McCusker, audience strategy by Christina Simulowski, and Shannon Busta.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
Yeah, I do want to get into that. So what appealed to me about your book is that you are less focused on the individual leaders than the institutional structure around them.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
We need to see what is old in what feels new and strange. This can be a challenge with Donald Trump. He can appear as a hurricane of strangeness. It was a liberal rallying cry in his first term. Don't normalize him. Remember this is abnormal. And it's no less true, in a way, in his second term. An anti-vax conspiracy theorist for HHS secretary? That's abnormal.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. There's an old idea about the purpose of science fiction that I've always loved. It aims to create cognitive estrangement, to make the familiar seem unfamiliar so that it can be looked at anew. But sometimes the opposite is needed. Sometimes we need to make the unfamiliar into the familiar.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
And as I've been watching the Trump administration, his second administration, take shape, that's felt like an important distinction to me. In his first term, it felt like you had a traditionally Republican administration surrounding a somewhat non-traditionally Republican president. And in the second term, it really feels just like it is his, RFK Jr.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
and Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth, that Trump has his capacity to impose his choices on his party with very, very little sense of constraint or pushback. So can you talk a bit about where you see the dividing line between that party the leader controls and that party that can control the leader?
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
So one of the things I would like you to try to do in this conversation is make something that looks unusual familiar. Because I have seen a lot of people responding to the structure of the second Trump administration with some of these stranger appointments and the more unleashed way he's speaking and the billionaires flocking to Mar-a-Lago. I started thinking, oh, that's strange.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
That's peculiar. That's an odd appointment. That's worrying. And when I read your book, it all looked very familiar, that it looked like this is following a pattern we've seen elsewhere.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
So when you look at it, what looks like it is going exactly as you would expect if you're watching the Republican Party move from this programmatic party that cares a lot about tax cuts or cares a lot about a certain stance on foreign defense to to a personals party that cares a lot about the individual ambitions of Donald Trump?
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
A former Fox & Friends host for defense secretary? Abnormal. An underqualified hatchet man who has vowed to use the state to go after Trump's enemies to lead the FBI? The Senate would even consider that abnormal. Billionaire after billionaire trekking to the president-elect's private club in Florida to curry favor with him? Abnormal.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
So in the first Trump administration, you have this phenomenon of the resistance inside the administration. Sometimes it gets called the deep state, but it existed also at the top levels of the administration. It wasn't just deep in the bureaucracy.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
And it's because you had this division in the White House of people who really liked Trump and understood themselves as serving him and his presidency, and people who saw part of their job as restraining him. People like H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn. And arguably even at times, people like Jared Kushner, maybe not restraining, but pushing Trump in a more mainstream direction.
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
And now you have fewer of those. And it connects to one of the tells that you and your co-authors used to typify different parties, which is the political experience of the top appointees. Why first? And then how do you see what emerges if you look at the political experience of the appointees in Trump's first term and the second?
The Ezra Klein Show
Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’
And yet we also need to confront the reality that this is all normal. We have seen it all before. Sometimes here, but much more often elsewhere. Donald Trump is something old, not something new. We spend so much time talking about the rules he breaks. We don't spend much time detailing the rules he obeys. But the way I've been looking at this is that America is undergoing a regime change.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking DOGE Findings, Elon vs. Sen. Kelly, and Hillary's Hypocrisy, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, and Dan Turrentine | Ep. 1037
Watch. Step four has to review and approve and award, again, planning grants, not broadband grants, planning grants. Step eight is states must submit an initial proposal
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking DOGE Findings, Elon vs. Sen. Kelly, and Hillary's Hypocrisy, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, and Dan Turrentine | Ep. 1037
I assume, but then what was the five-year plan? And what the fuck did they apply for? What was their nofo? Like if the five-year- If the action plan isn't the initial proposal, then what's the five-year action plan? Forget NOFO, MOFO. Step 10, states must publish their own map and allow internal challenges to their own maps. Wait, who's challenging it within the state?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking DOGE Findings, Elon vs. Sen. Kelly, and Hillary's Hypocrisy, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, and Dan Turrentine | Ep. 1037
Well, you know, organized interest groups, environmental groups, like I don't know who specifically, but literally anybody. This is... I want to say something because it's very important I say this. This is the Biden administration's process for its own bill. They wanted this to happen. This is how liberal government works now.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Shocking DOGE Findings, Elon vs. Sen. Kelly, and Hillary's Hypocrisy, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, and Dan Turrentine | Ep. 1037
This is a bill passed by Democrats with a regulatory structure written by Democratic administration. Step 12. States must run a competitive sub-granting process.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
Oh, no, of course not. I didn't mean they had built it, John. Sorry, I was so confused you. Oh, dear God. They just got to the point where, in theory, they could get the money to build it.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
And I will say in the book, we try to get, not on this particular issue, but we get very specific on how these things work.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
I will neither laugh at this nor agree with it. Derek is a beautiful man. It was sometimes distracting for me in the writing of this book. And he is currently perfect in every way.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
Okay. Okay, the issue – action number one. This is all running through the NTIA, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which I know you're all big fans of. Sure. They've done fabulous work. Yes. So step one is the NTIA must issue NOFO, Notice of Funding Opportunity, within 180 days.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
I want to note, by the way, that within 180 days is already kind of something interesting here because you look at, say, the Works Progress Administration. WPA, what is that, the 30s? Yeah, the New Deal, right? And Harold Meyerson has a great piece on this back from the 2010s. And that was employing people by then. I mean, 180 days is, I could do some quick math here, it's about half a year.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
Yes. Medicare, when we passed Medicare in this country, it gave people Medicare cards one year later. So we're taking half a year here just to tell people that there is going to be an opportunity to apply for grants.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
This is my shit, man. This is like, I didn't expect we'd go here, but-
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
And I want to say, this is a big part of the book. We talk a lot about how hard it is to be a civil servant, right? We get incredibly talented people to come into the government. Absolutely. Then we make it incredibly hard for them to do their job. Absolutely.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
So I'm a huge fan of this book by Jen Polka called Recoding America, which it absolutely shows how the bodies are buried and how frustrating this is. But OK, so what I'm reading off of here is testimony that was offered by Sarah Morris, who was part of the Commerce Department. to Congress on March 4th, 2025. So everything I am telling you is valid post-Biden administration, right? March 4th, 2025.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
So, okay. So we have to issue the notice of funding opportunity within 180 days. That's step one. Step two, which all 56 applicants completed, is states who want to participate must submit a letter of intent. After they do that, they can submit a request for up to $5 million in planning grants.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
Then the NTIA, step four, has to review and approve and award, again, planning grants, not broadband grants, planning grants. And it's still at the NTIA.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
So the NOFO is being – the Notice of Funding Opportunity is being written. And in the book, I actually spent a lot of time on the Notice of Funding Opportunity for the Chips and Science Act because that's not a small thing. And I don't have the NOFO for this in front of me. But the Notice of Funding Opportunity – NOFO.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
For the grants that will go to semiconductor manufacturers to locate semiconductor fabs, as they're called in America. That NOFO was long. I read it. And it is just full of stuff. Sure. Look, I call this everything bagel liberalism, the tendency like an everything bagel, you put a little bit of stuff on the bagel and it's great. Delicious. And you put too much.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
And if you saw the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, it becomes a black hole from which nothing can escape. So notice of funding opportunities can make a project very complicated. When Chips and Science passed, I, a naive and idealistic policy reporter, thought, oh, good, we're going to give a bunch of semiconductor companies money to locate their plants here.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
Which is like a totally fine goal, but does the Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation know a lot about that? Or like, how are you gonna diversify your subcontractor chains? And there's a seven step process. And like one idea is maybe you can break deliveries into smaller subcategories. Like it's all this stuff. This is for your application. Yeah, this is for your application.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
There's a thing about showing your plans to put childcare on site in the factories, which again, I have children, childcare is great. But you're trying to do something really hard. We have lost semiconductor manufacturing to Taiwan, to South Korea, to at a lower level, China, and we are trying to get it back. And one reason we've lost it is we've made it very expensive to do here.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
And so now we're putting more than $30 billion to make it cheaper to do here. And in the nofo, to get people to apply for the $30-plus billion, we are putting in a bunch of things that are going to make it more expensive. And they're going to make it harder to do the thing. Eventually, that money did go out, I want to say. But we'll see how it works out.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
Yes, that is very true. I will say on the semiconductors, you don't have a lot of small semiconductor manufacturing. Right, in other areas. But in general, what you are saying is completely right. Okay, back to rural broadband. So the NOFO that comes out can have a lot of things in it that you wouldn't expect. It's going to try to achieve a lot of different goals. What are the workforce standards?
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
What are the equity standards? What are the subcontractor approaches?
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
Yes. This is what's going to have to be in your application. They are setting out a series. You might think that basically what they're setting out is here's how to persuade us you are going to be the best at building whatever we're trying to get you to build. Again, I don't have this nofo in front of me, so I don't want to say things that may not be true about it.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
But having read other reporting on this, my sense is all this stuff was in the NOFO. And I have a bunch of examples in the book. It's all in every liberal bill now, right? They pass bills.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
And then in the process where the different interest groups and players can come in and shape how the bills are turned into regulations and grants and so on, that's where it's much easier to say yes to all these other members of your coalition. And by the way, it's not like Republicans are great here. and so on.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
There is a lot of bad stuff that happens after a bill passes, in part because most of the system stops paying attention. When we're fighting about it in Congress, there are reporters, there are members of Congress. There's a lot going on. The regulatory process, which is very, very powerful and important, does not have that level of attention on it. It's more complicated. It's slower.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
It's annoying. There's less conflict.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
Yes. Yeah. And this goes to something that we talk about throughout the book because it affects housing and everything else. This happens at the local level. We have created, with all good intention, a lot of processes meant to expand the role of citizen voice. You know, regulatory notice and comment periods. are in theory something that anybody can show up to.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
But how many regulatory notice and comment periods have you shown up to? Possibly actually you specifically because of some of the work you've done. I actually have shown up to a few. You've shown up to a couple? But you're a special flower, right? Yes. A delight. These things get captured. Who knows when the planning meeting is happening? It's the people who have houses down the block
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
from the potential affordable housing complex, it's not the people who might benefit from living in that complex in the future. All right. So the NTIA must issue a NOFO within 180 days. States who want to participate must submit their letter of intent. Step three, they can request up to $5 million in planning grants. Just planning. Just planning.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
Step four, the requests are reviewed, approved, and awarded by the NTIA. How long is step four, just out of curiosity? I actually don't know. It's a great question. Okay.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
So that's step four. But this process we are talking about, which currently all 56 – three years later, all 56 applicants had passed through at least step five. It took at least – it took more than three years. So it's a long time. Oh, my God. States must submit a five-year action plan. So the states kind of go back, and they kind of think about how they're going to do this.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
And they don't just say, OK, thank you for the money. We're going to spend it, and you can see how it worked out later. We're like, here's our five-year action plan. Then the FCC must publish the broadband data maps before NTIA allocates funds. So this one is, I think, a little funny at least. So these maps, right?
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
This is supposed to show you where you don't have enough broadband, but it then says in parentheses, and states needed opportunities to challenge a map for accuracy. So having done the NOFO, the letters of intent, the request for planning grants, then the review, approval and awarding of the planning grants, then the five-year action plans.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
In between that, the federal government has to put forward a map saying where it thinks we need rural broadband subsidies. And then of course, the states need an opportunity to challenge the map for accuracy. And you can imagine this doesn't all happen in like a day. OK, so then the NTIA, step seven, has to use the FCC maps to make allocation decisions.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
Then, having already done their letter of intent, their request for planning grants, it's hard even to talk about this, man.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
Well, that literally is happening, by the way. By the time this could have gotten off the ground, Musk is taking it over for Starlink. Right. Okay. Step seven is NTIA must use the FCC maps that were already challenged for allocation decisions. Then having submitted all this, I think this one is actually quite amazing.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
Having submitted their five-year plans or letters of intent, step eight is states must submit an initial proposal. An initial proposal. to the NTIA.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
I assume, but then what was the five-year plan?
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
God. Like if the five-year action plan isn't the initial proposal, then what's the five-year action plan? Forget nofo, mofo.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
Step nine, NTIA must review and approve each state's, again, initial proposal. By my read, we have had at least two initial proposals here, but that's a different issue. Oh my God. Step 10, states must publish their own map and allow internal challenges to their own map. So the government has published a map. They have invited the states to challenge the map.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
Then states have submitted initial proposals and they then have to publish their own map and allow challenges. Wait, who's challenging it within the state? Well, you know, organized interest groups, environmental groups. Like, I don't know who specifically, but literally anybody. Oh, my God. I want to say something because it's very important I say this.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
This is the Biden administration's process for its own bill. They wanted this to happen. This is how liberal government works now. This is something they instituted. For their bill.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
So I just, it's so important to say this. This is not how Republicans handicapped a liberal bill. Oh, wow. This is a bill passed by Democrats with a regulatory structure written by Democratic administration. Okay. This, by the way, so the thing I'm looking at, it tells me as of March of 2025, how many of the players had gone through everything. So until what I just said,
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
States must publish their own map and allow challenges. Three years plus into this, all 56 had done that. But now you begin to see players falling out. Step 11, the NTIA must review and improve the challenge results and the final map. So the NTIA has put forward a map. The states have challenged that map. Then the states have put forward their maps, had other challenges.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
And now the NTIA must review and approve the challenges to the state maps. Okay. At this point, It's 47 of the 56. So we've just lost nine of the applicants.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
Yes. I mean, I can't say because I haven't looked at every regulation here, but yes, yes, yes, yes. You are confident. I feel confident.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
Ezra. By the way, this whole thing I'm looking at, this testimony, this is a member of the Commerce Department who is part of this coming to testify on March 4th, 2025 before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, their subcommittee on communications and technology, in a hearing called Fixing Biden's Broadband Blunder. Oh, my God. So this is somebody trying to defend what they're doing.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
to a Republican Congress is trying to take their money away. So I just want to note that because it gets interesting for them what gets said ultimately. Okay. So we've done step 11, NTIA must review and approve challenge results and final map. We've lost nine of the applicants at that point. Step 12, states must run a competitive sub-granting process.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
Yeah, none of that could have happened along the way here. We have now lost 17 more applicants. So now 30 of 56 have completed step 12. Step 13, states must submit a final proposal. All the proposals weren't enough to NTIA. Now that goes to three of 56. So we've gone in the last couple of steps from 56 had gone to this point to three of 56. Step 14. Ah.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
The NTIA must review and approve the state's final proposal. And that is three of the 56 jurisdictions and states are there. And then I will just tell you, John, because it will break your heart as it breaks mine, as this very, I am certain, hardworking and well-meaning public servant stares down a hostile Republican Congress. That is like peppering them with questions.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
The next line, which is in bold, says, in summary, colon, states are nearly at the finish line. And it says, to stop their progress now, or worse, to make them go backwards, would be a stick in the spokes of the most promising broadband deployment plans we have ever seen. And seen.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
I'm going to say to you, as you said to me about orthogonal, what's the PACT Act, John? Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You Washington types.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
Thank you. Thank you.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
AOC came out with a really big, ambitious public housing bill a couple of years ago. She's saying, look, the people who are all out there saying, the YIMBYs, et cetera, saying we don't have enough housing, they're right. But let's do a lot of it through public housing.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
And people don't know this, but one of the things we've regulated very heavily, and that's partially why some of these projects are so baroque, is we've regulated the government very heavily. When people talk about deregulation, they think of the market.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
For me, I have to think of the need to deregulate the government itself. But it was made functionally illegal for the federal government to build public housing. It really can't do it. But in order for it to build public housing well, you would have to make a lot of changes to how it builds all across the board. because it layers so many standards. I mean, look at that rural broadband process.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
You're not going to fix the housing problem. If that's what they came up with for rural broadband, just fucking imagine what a nationwide public housing project would look like.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
But other countries do it. Like Singapore, I think, what is it? 80% of people live in some kind of social housing there. There are countries that do a lot of this well. And one thing I think that the left, and for that matter, liberals, often just don't pay enough attention to is what stands in between them and their agenda that is not Republicans.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
Because they can really see when Republicans stand between them and their agenda. And Republicans often do. But one reason a bunch of this book is focused on governance failures in California, in New York, and places like that, is because these are places Republicans hold no power. So you can't say, oh, if only the mean Republicans would let us do it, we'd get it done.
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You're actually left looking in the mirror thinking, why haven't I made my own bed here? And if you want to do what AOC and Bernie Sanders want to do, If you want to do a green new deal of the size of their green new deals, we just flatly do not have the laws that will allow you to build that much green infrastructure. And we definitely – like nobody disagrees.
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Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
We definitely don't have the fucking laws that will let you lay down transmission lines across the country to get all that new clean energy you're generating to the places it needs to go. And if we don't have those laws, then your bill will fail. Right. One thing that liberals get very – and leftists get very stuck on is the price tag.
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Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
The economist Noah Smith calls this checkism where it's like we sort of judge how good or ambitious legislation is on how big the estimated price tag on it is. It's like we got $300 billion for green energy. I mean good, but that was bullshit compared to my $900 billion plan. Right, right.
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But money – like look, we've – like you could spend a lot of money on California high-speed rail and build nothing, right? Like money isn't – the end goal here. It's particularly when you're building things, built infrastructure, right? It's the number of people hooked up to rural broadband, et cetera.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
Our sort of provocation in the book, what we're telling all these stories for is not to come down on like one set of policy solutions, because honestly, the problem in transmission lines is different than the one in housing. The problem in housing is different than the one in kind of supply of healthcare, right? There's all these things here.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
but is to try to get people to ask a question much more regularly than we do, which is simply this. Like this is the whole book boiled down to one question. What do we need more of? And why is it so hard to get it? That's like the whole thing that we just don't ask well.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
I think some of the criticism that isn't as strong comes from a tendency that we all have to just group certain means into ideological buckets. Deregulation, that's a thing Republicans.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
That's a thing Democrats do. Critiquing government, Republicans do critiquing government. Thinking the private sector can solve some things, that's a thing Democrats do. But sometimes you need to flip it. A bunch of the things we're talking about here. I want to deregulate the government enough that it can build high-speed rail itself. So I am trying to make a much stronger government.
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And it just kind of scrambles people's ideological categories a bit. So I just did this podcast with Governor Newsom. And we were talking about high-speed rail, which he walked into office and it was already fucked. And he's the one who came in and said, we are going to shrink this from LA to SF, which we have no money and no capability to do, to Merced to Bakersfield.
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And you can critique him for not scrapping it because I'm not sure Merced to Bakersfield is worth doing. But I was talking with him because the book is very critical of California governance. And he was very, interestingly to me, positive on the critique. He's like, this is right. This is what's going wrong. But what he said is like, look, we cannot build under this level of lawsuit.
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He's like, high-speed rail is built- He put it in the litigation. That was- Well, that's a big part of it. One difference between the way we do government in America and the way they do it in Europe is we restrain government through litigation here. A huge amount of the bills passed by both the liberals and, I mean, they're sort of liberalish Republicans then too.
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A lot of the bills, the big environmental bills, are passed by Nixon, right? The EPA is created by Nixon. The National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, that's all Nixon stuff. But it's done with Democrats.
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Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
Let me say this one as clearly as I possibly can. Democrats have to be the party that owns government reform. Right. One thing is if they don't, then what you're going to get is something like Doge, which is the destruction of the government under the guise of reform. But two, the politics of reform, it is one of the most powerful streams of politics that exists in American life.
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I think you could just go back over recent elections. You can basically predict the winner just on who owns the politics of reform. So Obama runs as a good government reformer. I mean people forget this now about him. But like his big pitch was not post-racialism. It was – Yes, we can. The special interests and the lobbyists.
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They're dicing us up into red and blue and they're fooling us and they're fucking up our politics. We're going to get them out of here and we're going to have a government for you. Obama was very much a reformer. Trump, in his own way in 2016, he runs as a reformer. Drain the swamp is a reform line. And Hillary Clinton is very much like, she's been in Washington forever.
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She took all this money from Goldman Sachs, right? She embodies the opposite of reform. Status quo, establishment. Status quo. People always say status quo and change. And I think this is a place where Democrats often don't want to see part of what that implies because they're like, we're not the status quo. We have all these big projects, just as you're saying, John, to give people money.
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But status quo is also about this question of, will you change the way the thing works? So Trump runs as a reformer. In 2020, in a way, like during the pandemic, when the Trump administration is fucking up government left and right, I wouldn't really say Biden runs on an agenda of reform, but he does run on agenda of trying to make government work and believe science and things like that.
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And we were in a very unusual moment in 2020. And then in 2024, Harris has this very unusual problem of running as sort of the incumbent, but not the incumbent. She runs as the defender of the institutions. Yes. Not the reformer. That's right. And the politics of government reform, like Bill Clinton ran on government reform, right? Reinventing government. Al Gore on with David Letterman. Right.
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Talking about how expensive the ashtray at the Pentagon.
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Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
Yeah, right. So the politics of reform are very important. But also, it also reminds me of something else, like look, you live in a relatively high tax liberal state. I lived in California and then I now live in New York. I hear a lot of people complain about taxes, but what I don't primarily hear them say is just that my taxes are too high. It's that my taxes are too high and I get nothing.
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Okay, but I want to do the one uncomfortable thing here. Please. Because I want to say yes and. Are we improv? We're improv-ing this bad boy. All right. We're improv-ing. Bring it. Liberals are really comfortable when the government, when the enemy is big business. And it often is.
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Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
But in a lot of what we were talking about, that 14-stage rural broadband thing I just went through, that wasn't business. That's a good point. Well, I bring this up because we're actually pretty comfortable saying no in some cases, not as many as it would be ideal, to business. We have a politics of that. Well, we have a lot more trouble saying no to is ourselves, our allies.
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Oh man, I'm like beside myself thrilled, right? Look, you write a book and you spend years on it. And mostly you spend those years wishing you had not decided to write a book. That is the story of both of my books, right? I signed the book. At some point I'm like, oh no, I have to write this thing. And I spend a year being like, I had a good life. I didn't need to do this to myself.
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Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
Or if you're in a local government, right, a bunch of homeowners who never want the affordable housing. Our idealisms. Yeah. And sometimes our idealism, right?
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You can sort of imagine if I like unwound those no-fos and everything, how all the things that get in there, like the subcontractor diversity requirements and everything, for the people in the room, it's like, I mean, I don't want to say no to that. Like the people asking for that are good people. They're our friends. Like they're trying to do something good in the world.
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And, you know, all the things that are making all the building more expensive. Look, there's like a big – I report on this affordable housing project in San Francisco. And it has an interesting fight tucked inside of it. It has a lot of interesting fights in it. You should read the book.
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Yeah, instead of the double that it usually costs, which it still sounds like a lot. But it was finished for half the cost and half the time. Yeah. One of the big reasons is that they use modular housing construction, offsite factory built housing. First affordable housing to do that either in San Francisco or in, to my knowledge, California though.
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I want to fact check that, but I think that's right. Anyway, there's a big fight with the unions on that. But it's interesting because it's a fight in two directions. You have the construction trades who try like hell to kill that project. The only reason they can't kill it is it uses private sector money. But the factory that was doing the modular housing construction was unionized, right?
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So there was a union benefiting on the other side of this too. But you get into these sort of local political power fights, which are, you know, I know California politics really well, and it's really significant there. And it's not that you can't work with some of your allies. I tell at some length the story of Josh Shapiro rebuilding the I-95 bridge in 12 days as opposed to 12 to 24 months.
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10 years, yeah. And he does that with union labor. But those unions are working 24-7. And what he also does is put down an emergency declaration that wipes out all these other procurement and environmental review and contracting. The 14 steps. It takes away the Al-Anon 14 steps. It's actually a great counter example because here's something.
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So this tanker rolls over, catches on fire, and the bridge falls down. And this is like one of the major arteries of the Northeast Corridor. So it's a huge problem. And the first day Shapiro comes out, Governor Shapiro, and says, look, this is a huge disaster and people are going to need to be patient. This is very likely to take 12 or more months to reconstruct. But they wipe out all the rules.
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And what the Department of Transportation head does is he goes – and remember what all that stuff we just did with World Broadband. He goes that day and on the bridge nearby working on just normal maintenance projects that had already been in play are two different contractors. And he basically grabs one and says, you're the demolition guys now.
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And he grabs another and says, you're the rebuild guys. Oh, leadership. And the contractors are on the job at the end of the first day. And I talked to him. It's in the book. And I say, how long would that normally have taken? He said, under our normal process with the bids and the challenges to the bids and et cetera, it takes 12 to 24 months to do the build and contracting.
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Yeah, it's a lot of rumination. And then what you want is for that thing you put all this time and energy into to not just slip soundlessly beneath the waves. This is different, though. I've never – I mean, I have people write books on my show. I'm pretty familiar with the book publishing process.
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Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
We have begun, it is such a absolute fucking shame what we've done. We have made bureaucrat into this dirty word, but we've done it by making the job miserable. Because it's adversarial in many respects. It's not just adversarial. We don't give them any latitude. So Elon Musk wants to fire all the bureaucrats, right? Things are all lazy and unproductive.
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Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
I wanted before this and I want now to have genuine civil service reform. I want it to be easier to hire, easier to fire, easier to manage. I want them less bound by rules. I want to trust their discretion. No system of government works at some basic level. No system of anything. If you have so little trust in it that you won't allow people to make decisions. It just doesn't.
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This is a big part of Jen Palka's book. I have, again, a really pretty interesting interview that's in the book. This part's about LA public housing. So in LA, they pass this bond measure, more than a billion dollars to build public housing. And whatever it was, six years later when I'm writing, they built like I don't know, a couple thousand units. And many of them were like $700,000 per unit.
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And I was like, why? I ended up talking to a woman named Heidi Marston, who'd been running the homelessness services in LA. And she had quit and written this letter about why she was quitting. And she said something I think about a lot. She was like, I had a billion dollars. And if you had just allowed me to spend it, I could have really done something with it. It's fucking heartbreaking.
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I'll just give an example from this project. We passed this bond measure. What we do in the bond measure is we put in rule, regulation, whatever, but you're basically supposed to use the public taxpayer money to seed the project, not to build it, to seed it. Then you're supposed to cobble together five more sources of funding to build it. And the idea was that this is gonna save taxpayer money.
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We're gonna leverage taxpayer money, right? A great word from finance. What it ends up doing is making it really, really, really difficult to finance a project. And you're getting, I mean, it's affordable housing, right? So it's not like Blackstone is giving you the money.
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So you're like, here's a tax credit program to house homeless veterans, but then I need to like put in these particular things for homeless veterans and I need to find them. And here's another thing for survivors of domestic abuse and I get some money from that. And I was talking to people who work on affordable housing and they all said the same thing.
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And I talked to the LA comptroller, a guy at that time named Ron Galperin. What he said to me is like, look, you would think I'd be all in favor of this. I'm the person watching LA's money.
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Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
I think the way you know your book is doing well is a number of people who haven't read it who have developed a strong opinion on it. I don't get severance. Have you watched it? I have not watched it. What you're trying to create with the book is a discourse-generating object, right? Some set of people are reading the book. More will read the book, hopefully, over time.
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I am telling you this was absolutely insane because how much we slowed everything down as we were trying to show we were saving taxpayer money, we added that much cost just in what we were adding to the project. We made it not happen and we slowed it down and whatever. I want to say the core of this we were never doing. was trusting the civil servants. Right.
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Like giving them the room to run, giving them money and saying, you spend it. And we're not going to audit you 27 times and run you in front of a hearing and yell at you. We're going to treat you like you're good at what you fucking do. And we're going to let you do it. And if the public doesn't like how this is all being managed, they can vote the mayor out in the next election.
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And you know, Elon Musk is saying this right now. Right. He keeps saying this. He says at a certain point, waste is indistinguishable from fraud and competence is indistinguishable from fraud. It's a line he keeps using on the right. And I don't like it because I think it like totally misunderstands the problem and his solution is terrible.
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But his point on a certain level, that the way we are running the government has made the government incredibly wasteful. Right.
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Yeah, I'll say it even simpler. The measure of government is the people it helps, not the processes it follows.
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If you just really kept that in mind, if that was your only governing model and you just said to yourself, the only thing I wish liberals would learn from Musk is this kind of relentlessness of the middle, not lawlessness. And you're going to have to change a bunch of laws to do the kind of government you and I want to see happen.
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But this recognition that in the middle, you might make a lot of people upset. You're going to say no to a lot of people. It's going to be politically painful. And it's going to be worth it if you achieve the hard thing you're trying to achieve. The measure of government is outcomes, not process. And we treat government. And again, whole section on the book in this.
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Liberal legalism has evolved in a way. where it believes government is legitimate based on the processes it follows. It is legitimate and also, by the way, protected from adversarial lawsuit if it can show that at every point it checked every single box.
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And the point of government is not to check the boxes. It's to help the people.
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Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
But it has become a huge object of argumentation for people who haven't read the book. And in a weird way, I kind of think that's a big part of what books do. They're artifacts of the ground of conversation people already want to have. They're an excuse for people to begin thinking about something and debating something. The Anxious Generation by John Haidt, I think, was a version of that.
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There very much is. And I do want to say to be fair that Democrats do this too. If you look at things like Obama's immigration executive actions, if you look at things like the student loan actions, Democrats are actually pretty good at this move as well. You go and you find a sort of – Emergency power. Vaguely written word in a law, right?
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Like, yeah, we had something to deal with public health and now you're using it to change immigration law. Okay, but an interesting thing that I noticed while reporting our case studies here, and then I have this whole thing about Josh Shapiro and the I-95, and he uses an emergency declaration. This also happens around a recent disaster in Maryland with Wes Moore.
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Then I was talking with Gavin Newsom on his podcast. He's like, you talked about the I-95. What about the I-10? We did that in 10 days. It wasn't even 12 days. Oh, my God. We were talking. I was like, if you guys are all so proud of the outcomes you get – I mean, now they're doing rapid rebuilding under emergency declarations after the fires.
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If you guys are all so proud of what you can do under these emergency authorities that wipe away all of this process – You can get these things done fast and people like it. I mean this is like the fundamental basis on which a lot of Shapiro's like political renown is built. He's not known so much for policies as he is for getting things done fast, right? His whole line is get shit done.
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Well, then what does that say about the non-emergency procedures? When emergencies happen to me, I typically am not happy about them. I don't like it. I don't like it. I don't like what happens after it. I don't like what happens during it. I'm not saying they like the emergencies. They don't.
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But the amount I am hearing governors, and as you sort of say at the federal level too, you see this, brag about what they can do when something triggers the emergency rules. That's right. Should actually make people really rethink The non-emergency rules, because also the public likes seeing things done fast. They're impressed. Look at that. Government rebuilt this in 12 days. Right.
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Yes, I say that, yeah, I have a line like this in the book, that emergencies are not just crises that happen fast. They are also crises that happen slow. Climate change is an emergency. It's actually a much bigger deal than part of a bridge fell down. We are not treating it as one. Ezra Klein, fantastic. John, I've loved this.
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It wasn't like nobody had thought of maybe having all these phones in schools are bad before he wrote that, but it created a structured way to have that debate. And I think this has, to our delight, along with some other books, Mark Dunkelman's Why Nothing Works, Yoni Applebaum's Stuck, there's a kind of moment here that people are apprehending in different ways.
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I've accepted this in you.
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Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
I will. I will add you to our we're going to bomb Jon Stewart group chat. There you go. You'll be there. I love the thing. You'll be right there. Ezra, a pleasure.
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Thank you, man. Me too.
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Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
And yeah, I mean, to write a book that people care about in the year of our Lord 2025, like what a goddamn gift. A book? Book?
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It's always like hard to say when it really starts. The piece I write that I think kicks us off in a way is in 2021. And it's called The Economic Mistake The Left Is Finally Confronting. But I can also see a lot of early threads of it in some earlier pieces I write about California in the couple of years before that. I have a piece, I forget what that piece is called, but where I make this.
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This can be like when I said orthogonal to you on my podcast. But I make this point that I always really liked, which is that there's an old political science idea that gets talked about all the time, which like the political science version of it is that Americans are symbolically conservative and operationally liberal.
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And the version of it people know is the Tea Party person with a sign that said, keep the government's hands off my Medicare. And the idea is Americans often like in national politics talking like conservatives. They like the rhetoric of personal responsibility and freedom and so on. Bootstraps. Yeah. And then they want Medicare and Medicaid and spending on social insurance.
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And I had this realization for a bunch of different reasons. I was living in California where I'm also from. So I know that state very well and I love it and I'm talking to you from it. But that in a lot of California, the politics were symbolically liberal and operationally conservative. That you had all these yard signs. Kindness is everything. No human being is illegal. We believe in science.
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Hate has no home here. Hate has no home here. And it was all in yards zoned for single family housing where the working class had been driven out of the city, where at least in San Francisco, the black population for all the BLM stickers had been going down in census after census after census. And at the core of that was an unwillingness to let things change.
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The willingness to symbolically state your liberal values is very high, but the willingness to instantiate them in change that might mean something for you personally, not mean you tax some other rich guy, but for you personally was very, very limited.
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And so it was something I've been trying to work through around what was going on in California and then over the Biden administration as I began to think about what was going to be required to build all this green energy we were funding. you know, I began to see some resonances across these two projects. So yeah, you know, like early 2020s to now.
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Yes. I have this line in one of the pieces. I did this piece that is actually partially in the book about what it takes to build affordable housing in Los Angeles, right? The housing that all of us on the left in theory agree on. What do we do when we trigger that public money? And there's a line in there that's like, the politics of this are, when do we want affordable housing? Now.
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Where do we want it? Definitely somewhere else. I mean, not right here.
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I do. And I want to say very clearly, because I do think sometimes people get this piece of it wrong, not the only cornerstone. Sure. There's a lot in the liberal agenda that we're just not trying to edit here, right? My view is that liberals have a lot of good ideas, and I've covered many of them over the years.
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There's a funny... Reviews have a real quality of, we read the book not as a book is, but as we are. I'm sure I have done this as a reviewer, but there is – sometimes I'll read reviews and I know who's writing them. It's like this beautiful thing where it's like this book is great, great, great, great. Then right here, it diverges from my personal politics and that part isn't great at all.
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I have some real problems. So there's a lot in the liberal agenda that works and we get right. But I think there is a – look, man, it didn't work. Right? Right. There was a theory of the Biden administration, and that was a couple of things.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
But what were the Biden administrations, at least in terms of what it was able to pass, what were its major... What differentiated it, maybe is the best way to say this, than Obama?
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
Green energy and infrastructure. Sure. This was a building liberalism. Yes. Right? The main achievements of Obama, if you go down and list them, It's like you'll say the Affordable Care Act. You'll say the Dodd-Frank regulations. It'll be a bunch of things like that. And what's interesting about those is that they're all etched into regulation.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
They didn't require a lot to happen in the physical world, right? Bank capital requirements does not require the laying of a lot of transmission line. But Biden, it wasn't like that. Lunch Pail Joe, Scranton Joe, they had an agenda. I mean, they lost a lot of their care agenda because of Manchin. But they had then an agenda that was very much about building.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
Yeah. Liberals passed $7.5 billion for a nationwide network of electric vehicle chargers. We also get $42 billion, and this is a big thing they tout a lot, to do world broadband. There's a lot of parts of this country that are not hooked up to broadband.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
And in both cases, and these were passed early in the administration, particularly the rural broadband money, by the end of the administration, by the election, by the time I'm fact-checking the book, they just have not happened. And you look into why, and we did look into why. And what you get are these incredibly baroque internal processes.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
I'll focus on rural broadband for a minute here because that one was a good idea. Still a good idea. And they liked it. That was the one they went around, when they talked about the infrastructure bill, they were like, roads and rural broadband, right? And if you look into what happened, they created, not in the bill, but this is really important.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
We have this whole little schoolhouse rock song about how a bill becomes a law and it's sitting on the steps of the Congress. I'm not going to ask you to sing it, Ezra, if that's what- I'm so- I've been practicing. I have been practicing.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
We don't have the song about how the law becomes reality, how the law becomes a series of implementation rules, then a notice of funding opportunity, then there's a comment period, then there's a challenge period for the comments, then there's a series of court cases. And so for rural broadband, for instance, what you end up having is a 14 stage process.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
Like there's a period where the Commerce Department needs to draw up a map of which parts of the country don't have the right amount of broadband and then there's a challenge period on the map and da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da. Fifty-six states and jurisdictions try to apply for this money. Again, this passes at the end of 2021. They have time. By the end of 2024, three
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein
have gotten to the end of the process. They were trying. Three of these 56. Out of 56, yes.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
Because they did the same thing. Look, you go to the rural broadband effort, right? 2021, they pass a bipartisan infrastructure bill, say it's the biggest infrastructure bill in decades, which is not wrong.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
Yeah. And one of the big headline pieces of it is $42 billion for rural broadband. Yep. 2021, that passes. by the end of 2024, functionally nobody's hooked up to rural broadband. And me and Derek look into it and there is a 14 stage process. I mean, I'm sure California was going through it.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
A 14 stage process of they're creating a map and then the map can be challenged and there's these letters of intent and so on and so forth. And by the end of their administration of the 56 states and jurisdictions that were trying to apply for the money, three had made it through.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
Which putting aside the fact that that meant all these people didn't get broadband, it also meant that they couldn't run on that. Right, so much of the political theory of the Biden administration was that if you can show liberal democracy can deliver, you will pull people out of wanting these strong men who say they're gonna burn the whole thing down and give you something out of the ashes.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
And if you can't really, if the things don't move fast enough, if they don't get to the people fast enough, it's much harder for liberal democracy to make the case that it delivers. I want it to deliver. I like these policies. But the speed thing is a real problem.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
And I'll say one more thing, because I was talking, I did an event the other night with Jon Favreau, and we were talking about high-speed rail, but I was saying that the stimulus bill under Obama That had three big headline projects for reinvestment. It had high-speed rail, it had smart grid, and it had a nationwide system of interoperable health records. I remember those days. Yeah, 0 for 3.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
Yeah. At some point, we got to be upset about this, you know?
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
Look, I'm all for vision. My upset, the point of this book, is that I want the things to happen. I mean, we can talk about high-speed rail. We must talk about high-speed rail. But before we get there for a second, I mean, I do get the question around this book because it is very critical of how liberals have governed. Well, then why aren't you just a Republican, right?
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
If Texas is so good at housing. And the thing that I keep telling people is you've really confused means and ends here. Another thing that keeps coming up is like, you want deregulation. Isn't that a Republican thing? Well, not if I'm deregulating the government itself so it can deliver on the things you want. What's supposed to matter in politics
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
is not the means it's the ends right and what i sort of want what i'm trying to to push here is for liberals to get a little bit more means agnostic and more like ends obsessed there you go so the thing that i the place where i probably differ a little bit in in what you just said a second ago is that i don't want to give anybody credit for a vision that didn't happen
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
High-speed rail has, you have a great quote to me on this. I use it in the book. High-speed rail has undermined the public's faith in what can get done. It undermines the next high-speed rail, right? And the thing that I wanna see happen is a kind of reckoning inside the governing, I would call it a culture. It's not just laws.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
It's not just regulations, although it is all those things, but it is a culture of what happens when the Democrats who are setting this stuff up get in the room together and people start raising their hands and saying, what about this? And what about that? And how about the other thing? And instead of hear a no, everybody gets kind of a little bit.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
And it's not the only thing going on, but there is something wrong in a culture that so often fails to deliver what it promises. I mean, not just high speed rail, the big dig, the Second Avenue subway, right? These, you know, parts of them got done in the Second Avenue piece or the big dig eventually got done. But but too much, too expensive. You can't do enough if you're doing that.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
And it's not inevitable. Europe builds trains better than we do. They just do. And they have governments, I checked, and they have unions more than we do. So it's not just that- They have less lawyers than you point that out in the book. Well, that's an issue. I'd be very curious to hear. So this is a thing I think people don't know that I would love to hear your thoughts on that.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
We do government different in this country than they do in Europe. There's a qualitative difference between it, which is they run government through bureaucracies and we restrain government through courts. Yeah. which at the moment with Trump seems good in a bunch of ways. And there are ways in which it's good. And there are also ways in which it makes it hellacious.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
There are two major liberal movements that happened in the 20th century. The one we think about a lot is New Deal liberalism. That's the one where we build aggressively. It's a growth-oriented liberalism. It's a liberalism of material goods. And it's the liberalism that defines the left-right divide in our national narrative, right? Liberals believe in big, strong government.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
in the 60s 70s 80s you have real problems that have emerged from this new deal order we have built heedlessly recklessly intensely we are cutting highways all across the country many of them they're not all of them through marginalized communities but man the rich communities don't like it when a highway goes through either right and and they have a lot of the power that leads to this there is a a genuine
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
the spoiling of the environment. My colleague Derek likes to talk about the moment in Los Angeles, I think it's in the 40s or 50s, where people wake up and think there's been a chemical attack from Japanese, but it turned out that the city had launched its own chemical attack on itself.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
who signs the California Environmental Quality Act into law. Yeah, this CEQA issue that you and others and myself love to hate at times. It's worth taking, I think, a minute on CEQA. So Reagan signs a bill into law from Jake Ambinder's research. It doesn't even merit a full article in the LA Times.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
Nobody quite knows what they've done because initially CEQA, it just says, look, when the government does stuff, it's got to produce a report on what the likely consequences are. No big deal. And then there is a proposed development in Mammoth, which the great ski and snowboard town, which I've been to many, many times. Oh, you Southern Californians. Yeah, Mammoth.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
But there's a mixed-use development that's proposed there, sort of condos and some shopping at the bottom of them.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
and a bunch of rich mammothians i don't know what they call themselves uh file a lawsuit and they have a novel argument which is that this development can't go forward because it violates sequa and this gets rejected in the courts because what year roughly would this be uh i'd want to double check this but early 70s but i could be wrong on that so so Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
You were Lieutenant Governor then. I don't think you were mayor then.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
I don't even want to- I want to hold high speed oil for a second. I want to do one thing on Biden before we go high speed rail.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
This is a problem. I'm not saying it's all his fault. That's not my point here, right? He is inheriting a government, although you see in a very dark way with Musk and Doge that a lot that was taken as a binding constraint actually isn't. So I want to hold that because I think there are things as grotesque as what that crew is doing to the government.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
There's also things that need to be learned from what they're doing to the government. But it didn't. I really think it's important to hold this in mind for all of us because it's something I really did not understand. It did not used to take this long to deliver. Medicare. Medicare delivered Medicare cards a year after they passed that bill.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
It took the Affordable Care Act four years to begin delivering actual insurance to anybody. It took on the Inflation Reduction Act, which is doing the much smaller job of just beginning to negotiate prices on some drugs, three years to get that started. I mean, we built, I mean, these are the classic examples, but we built the Empire State Building in a year.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
How about that? Yeah, it's something we should thread into this conversation. I think people have forgotten that era of Gavin Newsom.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
The average environmental review takes four and a half years. And just a few years to go to get bridge. I agree. You know all this. The thing that I want to say about this, which is not Joe Biden's fault, but it is the fault of now, I think, a long period of Democrats beginning to get accustomed to this slowness. Yeah. This is not going to work politically. I agree with that.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
You are not going to hold the people you need to hold if your answer in every term is you can't feel what I did because the government takes too long. If it had to take too long, fine. But it doesn't actually, right? These are man-made- And it's not just government.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
Yeah, but they would build fast in a lot of cases if we let them build fast. I mean, they're not why we didn't get rural broadband done. That was not them. No, but that's just, you know, I agree. That's 50 state solutions and thousands and thousands of municipalities.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
The thing I'm pushing on a little bit here with using the example of Biden, not you, but I do think this is, I think that those of us who want to defend liberal democracy from an actual challenge to it, right? One of the things Trump is getting the most mileage out of And he says it himself all the time.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
I think it's why he likes what Elon Musk is doing for all the risk of it, is the sense of constant action. All of a sudden government, which normally you don't feel moving, you feel it moving, maybe badly. Maybe what you feel is the heat from it burning to the ground. but you feel movement. I agree with that. Right?
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
And populists have that, they have a politics of energy almost all of the time, right? This is something you see across countries. Right. And I think that Democrats need to begin to think about speed as a thing we are actually tracking and pursuing government. Love it. We have other things we need to pursue and track. Love it. Equity, right, justice, right?
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
There are a lot of things we need to think about and you need to make trade-offs between them. Yep. But speed is one we have just let slip. And it's not just like, because it's kind of sad that we let it slip. Jake Sullivan said about Biden, he said, elections are measured in four years and his presidency will be measured in decades. It won't, or his policy agenda will be judged in decades.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
So much of it is going to get get undone, including a lot of the transatlantic alliance that he worked so hard to rebuild that it won't. One reason that this book is politically important to me, you know my background as a policy reporter, and the stuff I like is the details of the policy, but one reason it's politically important to me is that Democrats have, I think,
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
got in a little bit of learned helplessness around not every little bit of how government moves slowly. People think about procurement reforms. You've done a lot on that. But in general, the sense that we just can't do what we once did. The way the government used to work, I was reading a great piece by Harold Meyerson, who's at the American Prospect, and he's a great California reporter too.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
And he wrote this piece. It was back during the stimulus debate under Obama. He sent it to me the other day. And he talks about the way the Works Progress Administration started up under FDR and the unfathomable speed at which they just cut through everything to put millions of people, the equivalent today of putting 10 million people to work in a matter of months, right?
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
If these emergency structures work better, then why is it not making the normal structure closer to them?
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
I mean, the reason the book is so rooted in California is that I am. I mean, so this book is co-authored with Derek Thompson from The Atlantic, and so we both have our own things we bring to it. But I grew up in Irvine, as you know. I went to the DC system, then I went to DC for 12 or 13, 14 years.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
And I spent a bunch of time in DC covering a political system where the problem was Republicans were bad oftentimes. The things that I wanted to see happen were not happening there because they were being blocked by the Republican party. And then in 2018, I moved back here. I moved back to Oakland and then to San Francisco. And I looked around And it just wasn't doing well. People were unhappy.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
You want to get the credit. That's one of the reasons I think the speed thing is actually so important. You want to shorten. Look, the policy feedback loops are broken because people don't know who did the policy. When you said a second, a couple of minutes ago, that these projects that can only exist because of your fast tracking, will not exist while you are in office, right?
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
That is a breakdown of the way the voters can maintain accountability, right? When they don't know who did what, it's actually a big problem. One thing that I think about with what you were just saying on the politics of it is that, and I see it very clearly in California, I'm sure it's true in other places, you can... You should tell me if this is facile.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
You can avoid short-term pain in a way that ultimately creates almost unsolvable long-term pain. And so, you know, you obviously used to be mayor of San Francisco. London Breed said a lot of the right things on Yimbyism and all the rest of it.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
But couldn't get it done. Yeah. And lost reelection. Not the only reason, but a big reason. People are furious about the homelessness problem there. And that's in large part a housing problem. It's not the only reason. But in large part, you make that point and you're spot on. In Oakland, they were called the mayor.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
In Los Angeles, I mean, there's a lot of reasons for what's going on there, but Caruso ran a much stronger campaign than people have expected at the beginning.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
Yeah, and so you have this sort of thing happening where there's almost, I think, I don't want to say a ceiling. We'll see what you do in a couple of years. I don't want to say a ceiling on where California politicians can go, but it is very hard to be successful when people are angry of our problems that maybe you didn't cause. Right. But you're also not willing to take the pain now to solve.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
People were leaving. I mean, you know this. You're a retail politician. You can sense people's anger. When they find out you have anything to do with politics, they tell you real quick. And we could see the housing crisis had metastasized into something that was genuinely now a crisis, not just homes are expensive. California high-speed rail has always lit me on fire. We'll get to that.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
Of course, I keep bringing it back defensively. I will say first, look, I love California. I have Redwoods tattooed on my shoulder. No joke. And leaving the state to go live in New York City was the right thing for a bunch of reasons, but a difficult personal choice for me because this is my soil. Yeah.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
So every, you know- You lived through a tough time though in San Francisco when you were writing this book. You know what?
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
Objectively. I love SF too. Yeah, objectively. You know, as I say, what is it? Criticism is an act of love. Yes, God bless you.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
Yeah, we'll get to that. And when I began to, and I was thinking about clean energy, where your, I mean, the goals that you have set for clean energy in this state are remarkable. And in order to achieve them here or nationally, because the Inflation Reduction Act is passing around this time too, that I was thinking about a lot of this, we have to build faster than we have ever built.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
A lot of love in this book, man. A lot of love in this book. But, and then this is, I think, always the great- Paradox of California. California is the frontier of the future. It always has been. And technologically, as you said, but also culture, right? You go to Northern California, we're inventing everybody's technology. You go to Southern, we're giving the whole world its culture, right?
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
It's a wild place. And to me, the reason the housing thing matters here, the reason I structure the housing chapter the way that I do with Derek is that you need to make it possible for people to be and prosper from that prosperity, right? It is good for people to be near the AI boom. I have friends, I mean, they fought fires in the city of San Francisco and couldn't afford to live there, right?
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
The point of California's riches is that they should be shared, not shared necessarily just through taxation and redistribution, but through the ability of people to go live in these super high productivity places, where as happened with like a young Steve Jobs and Wozniak, you sort of fall into this world where maybe if you have a genius for something, you have the connections to make it matter.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
You know, I have this sort of line in the book that in making these cities so expensive, we did the real gating. We really closed the frontier because the true frontier isn't land, it's ideas.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
Yeah, so I want to pull that. It's actually everything you say about California. And you know this, I'm not telling, I'm saying it for the audience that California, that makes it so important that like the working class families can be here and are not driven out.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
So high-speed rail. So when I went out and did the reporting on that, and I went up and down the track with the people building it and the people from the rail authority, and they told me a couple of things that have stuck in my head that I don't try to resolve in the book, but I'd be curious for your thoughts.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
So one was that the Merced Bakersfield leg, which is the leg that is currently being tried, I think they said they had something like line of sight, either had spent or had line of sight on something like, it was in the range of $11 to $15 billion.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
All right. And that the estimate on finishing, we said to Bakersfield, was $36 billion.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
and the laws don't really permit that. And so the thing that I began thinking a lot about was that there is something liberalism is good at and knows how to look for, which is where can we subsidize something that people need? But there's something liberalism is bad at because it doesn't know how to look for it, which is how do we create more?
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
So you're saying you think you have line of sight on the money with a delta of 6.5 billion? Roughly, yeah. Okay. And what a bunch of people working on it said is like, look, in the end, for this to really work, it needs to be LA to San Francisco. And that would cost $110 billion.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
And that'll be over the course of many, many years, right? But I think the big question people have about it, and you hear people asking this all the time, is that- You inherited this. Yes, you inherited this. It's not your fault. This was not my baby from 2008 or 1982. I'm not blaming Governor Newsom on this one. God bless. I'm just trying to get it back on track.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
But I think the question is, there is not a line of sight on that 36 to 110 billion, right? That doesn't exist. And that's a very hard thing.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
The big worry I heard from transportation types is that the ridership in those quarters, as fast growing as they may be, is not enough to throw off money. It's not even enough to handle that operating budget, very likely. And it's definitely not going to throw off money that's going to complete a $110 billion train.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
And that we're finishing something that in the end is going to be a monument to not being able to build the thing we wanted.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
How do we make it possible to build more of things people need? And not only are we not good at pursuing that, we don't even realize how often we are getting in the way of it, how often we are the problem.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
Are there reforms that can be made that would make the next pieces just easier? I mean, I was always interested that it wasn't exempted from CEQA in the first place. It's a pro-environmental project. I know.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
And just to say it, it was a requirement because the federal program wasn't just for high-speed rail. It was to start where you had air pollution for marginalized communities.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
Which is both like, I just want to say this because it's part of why I'm saying this in the book, is that that all sounds great. And there's, you can come up with reasons to start in Central Valley, but it's the part of the state that will generate the least political capital to keep going. Yeah. Because it has the least dense ridership. Right.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
Yeah, but what addresses air quality is the whole track.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
There is, I think, something bracing as a liberal about asking this question of why in the places where people who agree with me govern, you and I don't think have that different politics, aren't the outcomes what I want to see? Why can't I go say to the Texans or the Floridians, no, no, no, no. You just have to do our policies from California. And that's the thing I'm grappling with here.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
I mean, that ultimately will. This is just to me, it's an example. This one wasn't California's fault. This was the Obama administration, but it's an example of they should have given, I want to say what I think should have happened here. They should have given you. Yeah. whatever, three some billion dollars. That's what that grant was. And just said, use it for high-speed rail.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
It shouldn't have been a stacked series of ideas. It doesn't all need to be a triple axle. High-speed rail is hard enough, as you know better than I do.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
But the Obama administration, when they created those programs, right? Yeah.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
Like, I cover this professionally. And when I dig into what is happening after these bills pass, I'm like, oh my God, really? That is not democracy. That is, we've created things that were supposed to allow for participation and they are often very captured. Maybe they're captured by interests you like, that's fine. But that is not the thing.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
that the massive Californians who voted for Prop 1A knew they were getting. And even those of us covering the stimulus bill, we're not looking at the precise requirements in the notice of funding opportunity in the grant program.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
So there is this thing, I think, where a lot of this highly technocratic governance, which is very much a negotiation between different interests, is in this like King's Cup way being justified as democracy. That's not what democracy looks like. I'll use that chant here. Democracy is not shit and pun nobody knows about.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
And a lot of these three lever agencies- I'm close to Nicholas Bagley, the more liberal law professor making these rules.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
I have this joke that everybody knows a schoolhouse rock song of like how a bill becomes a law, but what they don't know is how a law becomes or does not become like a reality, right? Like the things that happen after actually much more complicated.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
But I want to say one thing about Elon Musk and Doge and this point I was just, I just referenced Nick Bagley, who is a great administrative law professor at U of Michigan. He was Gretchen Whitmer's, your gubernatorial colleagues, chief counsel. He wrote this piece that's very influential these days and very influential for me called The Procedural Fetish.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
And one of the things he says in that that I think is really wise is that the Democratic Party is very legalistic. It's got a lot of lawyers in it. Between Tim Walz was the first person on a Democratic ticket since Mondale to not go to law school. We're very legalistic.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
And lawyers and constitutional lawyers and administrative procedure lawyers, they grapple a lot with a very hard question, which is what makes government action legitimate? And the answer they often come to is procedure, right? It is following the procedure set out in the laws and the rules and the court orders, et cetera.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
It's not that there's nothing to that, but the point Bagley makes, which I think is the right counter or the way to think about the point Elon Musk is making, is that to most people, what makes government legitimate in a democracy is that they are getting what they think they voted for.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
When they vote for you and you say you're going to do X, Y, and Z, they got X, Y, and Z. And if they don't feel like they got that, they vote you out, right? They see you as illegitimate, a failure. And the problem with Musk and Doge, in addition to its lawless nature, is that its ends are terrible.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
And the people did not vote for, you know, not to be able to reach anybody at the Social Security Administration or the IRS ever again on the phone. Right. That wasn't part of the pitch. But it's, I think, really important that liberals have a little bit more of the sense, not the procedure is meaningless because it isn't. You need procedure.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
But what really connects government to people is outcomes, a lived experience of government acting in their life. You got it. And if you are letting endless levels of not just process, but process you have created. I mean, when we're talking about no foes and no fahs. And I mean, that is the work of men and women. God bless you. We are writing that shit down on the computer. Yeah.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
I know, yeah, this is gonna be a very high audience podcast. But when you do that, I think that that actually is a cultural change. The thing I respect about Elon Musk, there's a lot these days I don't like about the guy, but there is a relentlessness to the way he pursues his objectives.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
a real sense that in between here and the end he is seeking might be a lot of pain, might be a lot of disappointment, might be a lot of angry people. But if this is worth it, which on Tesla and SpaceX it was, and on destroying the federal government, in my view, it isn't, then this is worth it. And that I think has not been the culture of liberal governance.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
The culture of liberal governance has actually been to try to generate political support by giving things to interest groups in the middle of the process. Right? You pass the bill, then there's a regulatory thing. Nobody's really paying attention to that. And you do a bunch of payoffs there. And then the thing doesn't work as well, or it's slower, or it's more expensive.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
And then people think you don't do a great job. And like, that's actually undermining the legitimacy of government. Couldn't agree more.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
Let me flip this because to shadow box around the fact that you know more about California governance than I ever will in a thousand years of doing this would be ridiculous. Why is it easier to build homes in Texas and California?
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
The thing I'm getting at here, which I really would like your, the thing you just said, right, about localism, it's so important. And like, this is so much the conversation I'd love for us to have here because the texture that you have been grappling with of why do things that you want to have happen not happen is I think a really interesting thing to add to it.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
But when you're saying, well, you know, is this really a problem for liberals? It's easier to build in Texas and Florida than not just in California, but in California or New York. The cost of living crisis is worse in blue states. And a little bit of that is blue states are a place a lot of people want to live.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
But you should be able to in places where you're governing for the working class in theory. Keep the cost of living.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
So you identified all this, I think, pretty well as a problem for the state and for you. So when you gave a state of the state a couple of years back, I'm genuinely forgetting the number. What was the housing goal you set?
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
Why did the ADU effort work? And the single family housing or multifamily housing didn't. I mean, those were big bills and we YIMBYs greeted them with delight. But I would say everybody would say that, what was it, SB9? Yeah, SB9, SB6. The cities have made it so those don't actually, it doesn't build as much housing. That's it.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
Let me ask you something about the housing reforms as I flip the whole table of this podcast. It's a problem with having a podcast host on. So during the election, when Kamala Harris and then Barack Obama at the DNC, actually the other way around, Barack Obama, then Kamala Harris, were up there talking about the need to build 3 million new homes, right?
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
And really saddened like yimbies from the stage. I was thinking, man, that is a huge intellectual victory for a movement that didn't exist like 25 minutes ago. 100%. But then I started thinking and started running back through the data. I'm like, okay, how's it working out? And you look in San Francisco and housing starts aren't up. And you look in LA and they're not up.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
You look in California, not talking here about ADUs, but housing starts in January, 2025 or lower than in 2015. I began thinking to myself, oh shit. We actually have won an intellectual argument without winning the policy.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
So I began doing some reporting because I knew how many, I mean, not literally how many, but I knew there's been a pretty torrid pace with you and, you know, Scott Wiener and Buffy Wicks and a bunch of other housing.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
Yeah, passing big bills. And so I began calling developers in San Francisco and saying, what's going on here? Why don't I see a movement in how much you're building? What they all told me. was I didn't end up writing this piece.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
I just didn't have time, but I meant to for some time, was all these fast track bills required me to take on a bunch of new standards and requirements, prevailing wages and environmental standards and this and that, that made it more expensive for me to take the fast track than just do what I'm doing. It wouldn't pencil out for me to do it. Now look, I don't know if that's 100% true.
This is Gavin Newsom
And, This is Ezra Klein
I can see you. But if that's not it, why do you think all those bills didn't lead to that much more housing construction? Well, a lot of them have. I mean, we can talk about it.