America's corporate titans seem pretty happy about Donald Trump's election—even pitching in to his inaugural bash—and it's no big mystery why: he's promising yet again to slash their taxes. Meanwhile, in his TIME Person of the Year interview, Trump admits that he may not be able lower grocery prices after all. Oh, well! Jon and Dan dive into all the latest, including FBI Director Christopher Wray's resignation, Biden’s historic pardons, Nancy Mace's latest theatrics, and why Democrats are suddenly cozying up to Elon Musk. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [email protected] and include the name of the podcast.
Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's show, everyone seems to be doing the Trump dance. As FBI Director Christopher Wray goes down without a fight, Democrats start flattering Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg sponsors the inauguration.
Trump, meanwhile, admits he might not be able to bring down prices after all during his big-time Man of the Year interview, an honor he celebrated at the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday by telling Wall Street he'd cut their taxes. Welcome to your populist realignment, Dan. But first, we have some actual good news. No, stop. It's real. I'm not a joke.
It's December 2024, right?
It is. Okay.
All right. Cool. Cool. It's been a while.
The White House announced on Thursday that President Biden made history by granting clemency to nearly 1,500 people and pardoning 39 others. The largest single day clemency action in modern history. The 1,500 number is people who had largely been living out lengthy sentences in home confinement because of the pandemic. and already had been reintegrated in their communities.
Those sentences were commuted. The 39 pardons went mostly to people convicted of nonviolent drug offenses when they were younger and who have since turned their lives around. What do you think of the move? Pretty good, huh? Love it.
It's great. I saw that this morning when I woke up way too early as usual, and it was great news. And it's sort of what we've been waiting for. Every time you have a transition from the president of one party to the president of the next, the outgoing president furiously spends that last two months trying to –
get as much Tennessee as we can, fireproof their accomplishments, use the powers they have, and pardons is a big part of it. And it had felt for the last couple of weeks like that was not happening. I'm sure it was happening internally because they didn't just come up with these pardons yesterday, like they've been working on this for a long time.
But it was good to see sort of that outgoing use of power in a way that was consistent with the president's values and protecting people from a dangerous thing that's going to happen when Trump takes over.
In the statement, Whitehouse also said that there would be further action in the days to come. The Office of the Pardon Attorney, part of the Justice Department, has received nearly 12,000 requests for clemency during Mr. Biden's term. In 2022 and 2023, he pardoned anyone in federal prison for marijuana possession.
He can also and has been urged to pardon or commute sentences of others convicted of nonviolent drug offenses who were in federal prison. Some people have urged him to commute sentences for the 40 people who were on death row in federal prison and reduce those sentences to life without parole so that they don't get the death penalty.
So altogether, he has issued, I think, 26 individual pardons and 135 commutations. So what do you think? What do you think is going to be next? What do you think should be next?
I hope it's the 40 death row inmates. Joe Biden, this has kind of been lost history, but Joe Biden was the first modern president elected who was an opponent of the death penalty. The upside of his Catholicism.
I say that because he was obviously not as pro-choice as he is now throughout most of his life, largely due to him being raised a Catholic.
Obviously, there are only 40 inmates on death row in federal penitentiaries. There's huge numbers of them in state prisons, but it would send a powerful signal to do that on his way out the door. So I certainly hope that that is something that is on the list of things they're actively considering over the last month here.
And it seems like from all kinds of reporting now, since last time we talked about it, that he's still considering preemptive blanket pardons for some folks on Trump's enemies list. And Trump has now talked about the January 6th committee, talked about Jack Smith. So I guess we'll wait and see if he does that. Did you see that Benny Thompson said he'd take one? I did see Benny Tompkins.
He'll take one. You know what? Which I respect. All these people playing coy, you know, Adam Schiff being like, oh, I don't think it's a good idea. Yeah, Adam Schiff's going to take it if you get it.
Don't give me a pardon. That's me winking for those listening to it on their phones.
I mean, not to dwell on this again, but it crossed my mind since we were talking about pardons and commutations today. Why do you think he didn't wait to do the Hunter pardon until after a move like this? We talked about this on a Tuesday show and Tommy mentioned that he wanted to do the Hunter pardon before Hunter was sentenced.
Though I guess I understand that, though, you could also make an argument that after Hunter was sentenced, perhaps commuting the sentence altogether would have been received better. Our old pal Anita Dunn, who's one of the was one of the closest aides to Joe Biden for not just his presidency, but like much of his career.
She said recently at a New York Times deal book event when she was asked about the Hunter Biden pardon that. I don't agree with the way it was done. I don't agree with the timing. And I don't agree, frankly, with the attack on our judicial system.
The argument is one I think that many observers are concerned about, a president who ran to restore the rule of law, who has upheld the rule of law, who has really defended the rule of law, kind of saying, well, maybe not right now.
I thought a lot about how and why the White House did it this way. And I think it's pretty simple. We know all the people who work in the White House. They are very smart. They know exactly how shooting out the Hunter Biden pardon on its own before you pardon anyone else on a Sunday night at the end of Thanksgiving weekend is going to, before you jet off to Angola, is going to look.
Which is why I think most of them weren't involved.
Well, I mean, he called the White House and said, this is what we're doing.
That's what I'm saying. No, I mean, most of the very smart White House staff that we knew did not know until it was happening.
They didn't know he had made the decision to do it, but I'm sure there's a conversation on rollout, right? And the president came back from Thanksgiving with his family where they had a family meeting about this. Hunter was at that meeting. Hunter is staring down the barrel of going to prison. soon. And the president makes a decision. He calls back and says, I've made this decision.
And then they have a choice. Do they just do it right away before it leaks or do they allow it to leak out there that he is thinking about it and then face a bunch of pressure? And so this is not how anyone would design. I think it's just, it's a very, this is how the process worked. And it takes a long time to get 1300 commutations and pardons together.
And that process was ongoing and not yet finished when he made this decision at Thanksgiving. So there's no plan that had it this way. It's just like, this is how life unfolded. And this was a family issue. And one thing you always read in the reporting is on family stuff, no one argues Biden calls the shots. And that's how this was.
And I mean, I won't criticize it all over again. I already did. I will say that these pardons and commutations, they do make me feel better about the whole thing. Yeah, of course. I also think that if he, like I said, issues, you know, these preemptive pardons and blanket pardons and
and makes them about sort of protecting people from political vengeance and retribution by Donald Trump, and the Hunter pardon sort of fits into that bucket, then I feel even better, even though I'm disappointed that he lied to us. All right. Elsewhere in the justice system, there is less reason for celebration.
I've got that happiness out of the way. Let's get into the shit now.
FBI Director Chris Wray announced Wednesday that he would step down at some point before Trump's inauguration on January 20th, paving the way for Trump hatchet man Kash Patel to take over as head of the world's premier investigative agency.
Wray said in his statement, quote, In my view, this is the best way to avoid dragging the bureau deeper into the fray while reinforcing the values and principles that are so important to how we do our work. A lot of folks aren't happy, to say the least.
Jonathan Shade at The Atlantic in a piece called A Scandalous Resignation sums it up this way, quote, The president-elect had been facing the unpleasant task of firing a lifelong Republican whom he had selected himself, inviting the national media to raise ugly questions about his oft-confessed desire to turn the federal criminal justice apparatus into a weapon of political vengeance.
Instead, Wray, like so many Republicans who couldn't stomach Trump's demands, decided to go gentle into that good night. Nobody except Ray will remember where they were when Christopher Ray resigned. Ouch. I mean, you can sympathize with Ray not wanting to just sit around and wait for Trump to fire him, but I don't know. What do you think? Was this the right move? Abso-fucking-lutely not.
The position of FBI director is one of the most powerful in this country. You have an army of investigators and law enforcement officers who work for you. It is so powerful that unlike the Department of Defense, the director of the CIA, Congress gave the FBI director 10-year non-consecutive terms.
So you can't amass too much power, and you are insulated from the influence of individual presidents and members of Congress. And Donald Trump, for the second time now, is firing an FBI director. And in this case, he is doing it, and he wants to install a loyalist who has published an actual list of the enemies who he wants to prosecute. And that should be a big, giant deal.
And it's not going to be because Chris Wray just slouched off into retirement. And so instead, you have to pick the alternative scenario where – Joe Biden leaves, Donald Trump is sworn in, he walks in the White House, and then he fires the FBI director, who has years left on his term that was confirmed by the Senate, to replace him with Kash Patel. But because Ray resigned...
When he is trying to appoint Kash Patel, it's just going to seem like he's filling any other cabinet – empty cabinet vacancy like all the rest of them. And it just – you can't – this is – it is a big deal what he is doing with the FBI and Chris Wray made it seem like a lot less big deal. So he did not uphold any of those values and principles that he talked about.
He actually undermined them by giving in to Trump. Pure cowardice in my opinion. Pure cowardice.
I think I agree, just for the sake of argument. Oh, let's hear it. No, I guess, what benefit to... the country, or politically, for those who oppose Trump, would have come from Ray waiting, getting fired, and then Kash Patel gets the job anyway, just a little bit later than he would have.
And Donald Trump gets a couple days worth of very critical stories and commentary by all of us for firing the FBI director.
In the end, if Kash Patel is going to be the FBI director in either way, it's not going to make a huge difference to the Benny Thompson's, Adam Schiff's, Anthony Fauci's of the world who are going to be investigated. But it is a chance to grab the nation's attention for just a moment to show how dangerous this is. Because as we're going to talk about on this podcast –
We all ran around for a year and a half saying that Donald Trump was an existential threat to democracy. One of the reasons he was an existential threat to democracy is because every fucking morning before breakfast, he announced on True Social that he was going to investigate all of his political opponents, which we said was fascist and authoritarian and dangerous.
And now he's doing that exact thing. And so many people... Chris Wray included, are sort of like, eh, maybe not that big a deal. And so if it is as big a deal as we think it is, and I imagine Chris Wray probably thinks it is, then you have to at least try to tell that story.
And it makes it harder to tell that story if you're just going to hand the keys of the FBI to Kash Patel as opposed to making Donald Trump take them from you and do it. Like, this is what Preet did as U.S. Attorney in New York. He made Trump fire him. And that was a big deal. And firing the FBI director is a huge deal. And it should get that attention. And it won't because of Chris Wray.
My first reaction was like sort of the way he left, like less about I'm quitting, you're firing me and the difference between that and more about like Chris Ray, I think, has an obligation, whether he does it after he leaves or now or if he had waited and got fired. But he has an obligation, I think, to let people know that he did a good job and
And the reason he's being fired is because he carried out his duties to investigate the president of the United States for stealing classified information. And that's why they went to Mar-a-Lago. And he, by the way, retrieved.
classified information that the president had stole the ex-president at that point had stolen and refused to give back and obstructed justice like I do think that a little bit a defense of the bureau and the bureau's actions over the last several years and just making sure people know that they played it pretty fucking straight
Over the last several years, after he was appointed by Donald Trump and is a Republican himself, I do think he has an obligation just for the public to know that. And if people don't care, then they're free not to care. But might as well tell that story. I'm sure we'll get to read it in a book coming out in October 2025. Maybe he can do a press conference with Jim Comey.
I'll send him an invite link to Substack, see if he can get started early.
Also, I think there, and JVL made this point in his newsletter today at the Bulwark, that people who oppose Trump, or at least the people who want to defend our democratic institutions, anything they do to sort of delay... Trump and his minions from doing what they want to do is a good thing.
And so Kash Patel getting in earlier than he would have if we had to go through Chris Wray getting fired, you know, it would have been nice. Any delay tactics here are probably helpful. So that's... I have not heard a really good argument for... for Chris Wray doing it the way he did, but maybe he'll speak up soon.
One factor that seems to be making the Wray news tougher to swallow is that it's not just Wray. Obviously, you and Melissa talked about Wednesday. Jack Smith also made the decision to resign rather than get fired. And in general, it seems like a lot of big players, corporations, media outlets, even some elected Democrats, are employing a kinder, gentler approach to Trump's second term so far.
Here's an incomplete accounting from just the last few days. Meta gave a million dollars to Trump's inauguration after Mark Zuckerberg had dinner with Trump. Amazon giving a million dollars, too. Thanks, Jeff Bezos.
The CEO of Time, the magazine which just named Trump person of the year, accompanied him to the New York Stock Exchange and started clapping and chanting USA, USA when Trump rang the bell. The fuck? Democratic Senator John Fetterman joined Truth Social and said that not only was the Hunter Biden pardon correct, but that Trump deserves a pardon, too, for his conviction in the Manhattan case.
And other Democrats like Congressman Richie Torres and Senator Richard Blumenthal have been praising Elon Musk, with Blumenthal calling him the tech industry's, quote, champion of free speech. Rokana has said he's been trading texts with Elon and called him an extraordinary entrepreneur. They said he also was clear with him where he disagreed. Fetterman compared Elon to Tony Stark. So...
A lot of cliches you could reach for here. If you can't beat them, join them. Discretion is the better part of valor. Better to be at the table than on the menu. What do you think is going on here? And obviously, all of the different people I just mentioned there, they could all have different motivations. There could be different degrees of kissing Donald Trump's ass and Elon Musk's ass.
But what do you think is going on here?
So let's probably try to separate this out into a couple of groups.
Yeah.
There are corporations which are staring down the prospect of an all-you-can-eat buffet of corporate greed under Donald Trump.
Less taxes, which we'll get to. We're getting to that.
We'll get to that. Less regulation, just fucking pay-to-play left and right. And they are chomping at the bit. A lot of these are tech companies, like there's probably something to do with Meta, who have felt like they could not acquire other companies under Lena Kahn's FTC because of Biden's very good antitrust policies.
So the corporations, they're going to be Donald Trump's friend because Donald Trump's going to do what they want. And they know if you're friends with Donald Trump, he is like an old school corrupt politician. If you're friends with him, he will hook you up with some government contracts, some other stuff.
Then you have Democrats who are trying to figure out how to deal with Elon Musk as a public figure. Someone who is quite popular with a group of voters that we lost, namely young men. And in understanding that he is a world-famous, very successful business person. And he has taken on a task. And I think that they are – and I think Ro Khanna in particular is probably pretty smart about this.
And he has a relationship with Elon from – long time in California. But I mean, he was a Commerce Department appointee in the Obama administration when Elon was hoovering down solar tax credits for Tesla. But huge fan of the Recovery Act that Elon Musk. I think the way we navigate the Doge Commission requires some deftness because what they want to do at the service level is quite popular.
Get rid of waste and fraud and abuse in government. Everyone agrees with that. And so you want to be in the situation where you're agreeing to work with them, and then when they come back with all their Social Security cuts and their elimination of the Department of Education, then you hammer them. So I think that's the appropriate way there.
I don't know what – I can't speak to what John Fetterman is doing. I don't really understand the – going on true social, that is fine.
Gavin Newsom did that a long time ago. That doesn't bother me.
Offering – suggesting Trump get a pardon, that seems primarily like trolling. I don't really get that, but – And then I think there's this other thing that I think we all have to remind ourselves as we think about the next four years. We are never running against Donald Trump again.
Yeah.
He is not our opponent. The first four years of Trump was about every single day trying to increase the likelihood that we could beat him in the 2020 election. And we succeeded. Not as well as we would like, but we did succeed because he's back. But this time we have a different set of tasks.
So we don't necessarily have to – if we agree with Trump on something that is popular, it is okay to agree with him and then take that issue off the table. We don't have to oppose him on every single thing if it is an area of potential agreement. We also don't have to chase him down every rabbit hole. Our task is not to beat Trump.
It is to rebuild our brand and then separate the new Trump coalition from the Republican Party that comes after Trump. And so we have to think with that mentality. And that does mean it's just a very different approach than resistance 1.0.
My critique is with none of that, and I don't think that what you just said is necessarily reflective of what any of these fucking characters are doing or saying right now. I think Ro is my exception to this. Right. Ro is the exception, but I even think that
You don't need to call Elon Musk anything nice at all to be willing to play ball with the Doge thing and putting out a list of reforms that you want. I mean, I was saying this, but I think the Democrats should put out their own list before Elon and Vivek have their own list.
And make it about the corporate subsidies we want to get rid of, the tax breaks we want to get rid of, other waste and abuse that we're comfortable getting rid of. Like, let's do our own thing. And then when they don't agree to it, then we can hit them over it, right? Like, let's be constructive on policy and governing when we agree. And let's be really tough on...
on policy and governing when we disagree. But like, we don't have to say nice fucking things about these people. We don't have to kiss Trump. We don't have to, we shouldn't, we shouldn't chase Trump down every rabbit hole for sure. We also don't need to fucking kiss his ass.
And also, it's like, do you think Democrats are kissing his ass?
No, no, no, not Trump. Elon Musk stuff. Dick Blumenthal? What the fuck are you saying? That's crazy. I don't understand that. He's a champion of free speech? He's not a champion of free speech.
There is a moment when you lose an election, everyone loses their fucking mind for like 90 days. And they do dumb shit, right? They overreact. Mark Zuckerberg. That's different.
There are few humans more full of shit than Mark Zuckerberg for all of the values he professed that Facebook had and that his company has and all this bullshit. It's like Donald Trump attempted a coup. He attempted a coup. He incited a violent insurrection. All these people. How many companies after January 6th were like, never again. We're not going to donate to.
Some of them said they were going to donate to Republicans after that. Not just Trump. Everyone who believes a big lie. And here's the, I would not have even been this annoyed over the fact that Zuckerberg sat down with Trump and had dinner. It's like, okay, you want to have dinner? He's the president of the United States. You run one of the biggest companies in the world. Like, fine.
Make peace, whatever. Donate a million dollars to inauguration when Meta has not donated money to any other inauguration? What? What? Now you're like in the Trump business. Now you're just giving him money. You're not just like not saying mean things about him or even saying nice things. You're giving him money. A million dollars. I mean, it just so fucking it's disgusting.
Like, obviously, the thing that Mark Zuckerberg cares about most in the world is power and money. But if there was anything else he cared about, it was immigration reform. He started the group Forward.US. He has given money to this. He's talked about it. And now he just gave a million dollars to someone who was on TV over the weekend talking about deporting millions of people from this country.
It is. It's outrageous. It's like, it's just, what is wrong with you? You have no self-respect? No self-respect. It's just gross. And also the Elon Musk thing, too. Tony Stark, he's successful. The thing that bothers me about that is, yes, Elon Musk is rich. He's worth $400 billion. $400 billion. Congratulations, I guess. But like, do we not remember?
It wasn't that long ago that he pushed a conspiracy online, said that he agreed with a conspiracy that Jewish communities push hatred against white people. Like just said so much truth. Yes, truth. When someone tweeted that.
The conspiracy that then led a bunch of advertisers to stop advertising on Twitter because it was the same conspiracy that led the Tree of Life shooter to massacre a bunch of people. And now we're going to be like, oh, yeah, but you know what? He's like Tony Stark. He's like a really smart guy. Really smart guy. Really successful guy. Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, really successful.
Again, it's just as easy to be like, Elon Musk wants to cut government. You don't have to say anything about him. I got a list of things for him to cut. And if he puts something on the table that's worth cutting, yeah, I'm right there with him. Like Bernie, he wants to cut defense spending. Yeah, I'm there for cutting defense spending too. I'll work with him on that.
You don't have to say nice things about him.
It's just – really, I want to just emphasize this point. Everyone loses their fucking mind when they lose an election. It's like a period of time. Go back and look what all the Republicans did after Obama won re-election. John Boehner went out the next day and said, Obamacare is the law of the land. And then Sean Hannity endorsed immigration reform.
They lose their minds and the Democrats are – we, they, we, everyone is reeling and making a bunch of dumb decisions. And these manifest themselves in some of the examples you just gave.
We do have one pretty good clue as to why the corporate types seem to be coming around so quickly. You mentioned this. It came at 9.30 a.m. Eastern Time on Thursday as Trump opened trading at the Stock Exchange. Let's listen.
We're cutting your taxes. We're going to cut them very substantially. We got them down to 21 percent from probably 42 or 44 percent, depending on where you are. And we got them down to 21. Everyone said that was a miracle. Now we're getting them down to 15. But only if you make your product here.
Now, I didn't see this footage, but was the audience of people he was saying that to at the New York Stock Exchange, was that a group of working class voters who were upset with high grocery prices? Is that who he was talking to? No, it was a collection of CEOs and stock traders. Oh, those are the taxes he wants to cut. Yes, yes. Those are the taxes he wants to cut.
So Trump lowered the corporate rate to 21% from 35% in the 2017 tax cuts. Now he wants to lower it to 15%. He says he wants to do it 15%. There's a new twist on it with like, if you invest in America, if you do business here, I don't know how that works. But in general, a 15% corporate tax rate
would give the largest 10 companies in America a $23 billion tax cut for 10 companies that reported more than $520 billion in profits. This was a cap analysis over the summer. Meta, his new pal Mark Zuckerberg, would get $1.4 billion just for Meta from Trump's plan. UnitedHealth, have you heard about UnitedHealth lately? No.
UnitedHealth would get $1.3 billion, a tax cut, and five largest grocery companies because obviously Trump was elected to lower prices for people. That's what he told us. But he does want to give the five largest grocery companies $1.7 billion in tax cuts These are five grocery companies that made $29 billion in profits as a bunch of people could not afford their groceries.
And now he wants to give them another $1.7 billion. You think they're going to use that $1.7 billion tax cut to lower the cost of food so people can buy their groceries? Probably, right?
Isn't that what happened when they did this exact same thing in 2017 and cut the- Yeah, no.
Yeah, they passed the savings onto their consumers and their employees.
And they hired lots of people. No, no, wait, wait. CEO bonuses and stock buybacks. That's right.
That's right. Yes, yes. So that is what Trump promised. Now, we knew this during the campaign. I think Kamala hit Trump on this a few times. The corporate tax cut obviously did not work, or at least it did not work well enough. What is your advice here to Democrats on how to make it stick in the next year in a way that we did not do as successfully as we could have during the campaign?
She did mention, you said the operative word here was she hit him on it a few times. And there were a lot of ads on it. There wasn't the most, the ad that future for the super PAC spent the most money on was on this very topic. It was called the buddy ad. And it had,
a guy watching an iPad of Trump saying to the donors at Mar-a-Lago, you're rich as hell and I'm going to cut your taxes, and then went on to say what Kamala Harris was going to do to raise taxes on billionaires. But it was never a centerpiece of the campaign. It never was a defining issue. We can never make it stick.
And that, I think, has more to do with the short runway the Harris campaign had, maybe – Just the dominance of inflation as an issue, that it didn't stick. I do not take the fact that Trump won as evidence that all of a sudden tax cuts for corporations are popular. Far from it. And I think this is our best bet to really begin to make some cracks in the Trump coalition.
People elected Trump to lower their costs. And so our message is pretty clear. Trump is not lowering your costs. He's lower. He's cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations, the very companies who are making billions of dollars by jacking up prices on your groceries and your gas. He's going to give them a tax cut and you're not going to get, and he's not trying to help you.
He's trying to help them. And then there's a second element of this, which I think is important, which is we have to make this all seem like as it is giant fucking corruption, right? You have him promising it to his donors. You have a bunch of billionaires who are going to benefit from these working in the government. You have Trump himself working in it.
You have companies giving a million dollars the inauguration who are going to get huge benefits. We have to show that this is the exact corruption that Trump said he was going to fix, and now he is not fixing it. He's exacerbating it to help the rich at your expense. And then the last piece of this is, how is this all going to get paid for in the end? It's
Elon Musk and Vivek are going to want to pay for it by cutting Social Security, Medicare and getting rid of the Affordable Care Act. Is that what we're going to do? And so I think those are sort of the three steps there.
I totally agree with all that. I also think we've got to be able to make this real for people and tell stories about it that are not just sort of the typical, he's giving tax cuts to the rich and not you. That's the message, but we've got to sort of add some color to the message so that it breaks through. I think a fair...
A lot of critiques from the left about Kamala Harris and the campaign and all this. We've heard them all. We're not going to do it all here. I think one that is fair is I don't think she is someone who feels the populist anger. towards like companies that are price gouging and taking advantage of people and making record profits while people can barely get by.
Like she doesn't really feel that in her bones. At least that doesn't come across during the campaign. I realize it was a short campaign. And to be fair, you don't get that from a lot of Democrats. And I don't know which podcast I said this on, but I've been complaining about the glorification and the hero status awarded to Luigi Mangione.
But I also think there is a large space between that and... and saying, eh, whatever. Rich people are rich people. Healthcare companies make profits. That's what they do.
I do think that people should be going out, Democrats should be going out there every day talking about these companies that are going to get a huge fucking windfall for nothing who have been gouging consumers, raising prices in a country where people are really struggling to get by with their costs and tell a story about it every single day, make it the message over and over and over again.
And you've got to be creative and you've got to figure out ways to break through. And you can't just be saying the same fucking words over and over again that seem like they came from a poll that tested really well. Like you've got to really, you know, make it make it real for folks. And so that's what I'm kind of hoping Democrats do in this fight.
Like it's not enough to just do the same old, same old.
One simple way to do that is to juxtapose the tax rates of these corporations with the tax rates of people. That Walmart's going to pay a lower tax rate than people who work at Walmart or shop at Walmart. And I know I could already hear our fucking econ policy buddies saying it's totally unfair to compare individual and corporate tax rates, but I do not care.
Go on another podcast and complain about that, all right?
People think it's like, oh, it's the corporate money that's doing this and it's the donors that have captured the Democrats. It's like, no, it's like the fucking wonks. They're like, no, that's not the reason. We know. We know. We know all the reasons that corporate greed is not the only reason that people are struggling to get by. We know that.
But it is disgusting that people are getting tax breaks, CEOs, executives, shareholders, when so many people are struggling. And we're still dealing with high prices. It's crazy. But like it should feel crazy to the Democrats going out there and talking about it. And it should feel like it is a mission and that they are like offended on behalf of the American people by it.
And that's the kind of energy I think we need in this fight.
The people who decided this election for Trump did not send him to Washington to cut taxes for corporations. They're going to be fucking shocked. That's one of the first things he does.
Well, look, I've seen the polling on this, right? Like tax cuts for the 1% for billionaires, like they are less popular sometimes than corporate tax cuts because what they try to do when they talk about corporate tax cuts is say, well, it's a lot of small businesses and when you give them tax cuts then they create jobs and so
if corporations are doing well then they hire more people and then wages go up and like they do this whole fucking song and dance.
I really think you got to hammer the fact that like we're talking about some of the most profitable corporations in the country who last time they got this tax cut used it to enrich their executives and their shareholders and did not do anything about prices and did not hire more people and did not raise wages.
Like one of the things – we can do 17 podcasts and we will do 17 podcasts on the corporate tax fight – on the larger tax fight coming up. But one thing Democrats can do is you pick an income level by which you agree to extend them. But anything below X, you're going to extend. And then you make the – which is what eventually happened with Obama and the Bush tax cuts.
And then the fight becomes about anything above that number. And so like we'd say we'd pass it tomorrow that everyone who makes under $300,000 a year – I'm just picking a number out of the sky – uh, that there are those taxable extended, but anything above that, that they're fighting over that. And so you got to isolate the fight for the very, very wealthy in the corporations.
Yeah, I agree. Well, speaking of that, so part of the time person of the year routine is you sit down for a lengthy interview with the magazine, which Trump did at Mar-a-Lago in late November. It just was released on Thursday, so it's a little dated, but the interview is very long. Most of it wasn't very newsy, but a few notable things we hadn't heard before.
At one point, the reporters asked Trump, quote, if the prices of groceries don't come down, will your presidency be a failure? And his answer was, I don't think so. Look, they got them up. I'd like to bring them down. It's hard to bring things down once they're up. You know, it's very hard.
And then he goes on to talk about his solutions, which are just fixing the supply chain, which Joe Biden has been doing for the last four years and lowering energy costs, which is involves drilling more for oil that won't do anything to lower gas prices for years. if they start drilling now, because also we're producing more oil than any time in history. Kind of a wow moment there.
Trump's saying, I don't know if prices will actually go down. We find out on the day that he goes to the stock exchange and is like, but your taxes are going down, Wall Street.
That's the juxtaposition right there, right? Which is he's not going to lower your costs, but he's going to lower the taxes for the wealthy and the corporations. That's sort of where you sit there. It's not a wow moment for people who took like, two semesters of econ, but it is, it runs, but we should make absolute hay of it because it's what he promised.
He promised he would lower costs and we have to hammer him when costs do not go down. They will continue to go up. They always do. And we like make that point, make them own it. Right.
And I think we need to come out with some plans of our own to lower costs for people and do so in a way that is achievable, real, that are paid for, that isn't just government spending money, but also regulating companies and making companies actually do well by their workers. I think that there's a good...
progressive populist agenda here that also, like, makes sense to most Americans that we should be pushing here. But I don't know. What do you think?
I don't know what the answer... Yeah, we should have plans. Sure, we should absolutely have plans. But we need a... We need a simple idea that would also probably anger the econ nerds, but that... Like, I think it's something that we... We don't understand the power of symbolism in our ideas, and we're more focused on the substance.
It's like, yes, we're going to have a 12-point plan, and it's going to do all these things. It's just like Trump building the wall in Guinea, Mexico to pay for it. The voters know that that was an absurd thing, but it sent a signal about them. The wealth tax was an example of an idea that is – tells a story about who you are more than the specifics of the policy.
And so I think we need some things like that. I mean, Kamala Harris is enforcing the law against companies that price gouge, which I know she sort of backed away from for parts of the campaign was one of those things, right? Where it's like, it's not going to pass your Brookings test over. Is there going to solve all the problems, blah, blah, blah.
But it sent a signal that about who she is and what she would fight for. And I think we need to sort of think in some big picture, less white papery ideas on how to do this.
Well, I think part of it is these ideas need to be paired with who we're holding accountable. Because I think that sometimes it's a positive agenda, which is great. But I think it feels more urgent and is more appealing to people when you also talk about how these big companies and CEOs and everyone are making money hand over fist and are more profitable than ever before.
and you're still struggling, and so we're going to help you, blah, blah, blah, and make sure that they're paying their fair share, blah, blah, blah, you know? Yeah, we need an enemy. Reporters asked Trump whether it's a conflict of interest to let Elon Musk oversee the budgets of agencies that could grant huge contracts to his businesses.
Trump said, I don't think so, and added, I think that Elon puts the country long before his company. I mean, he's in a lot of companies, but he really is, and I've seen it. Okay. You think this matters to people? Elon's getting to regulate his own businesses and some of his budget cuts might affect his biggest competitor, NASA?
I think there is a chance that people think Elon is so rich that he doesn't care about money. They sort of feel that way about Trump in some ways. But I think that – I don't think we should accept that premise of that argument. And – I believe that our best argument against Trump and Republicans is corruption. It's all corrupt.
This is so fucking corrupt that the richest man in the world spent over $100 million to get Donald Trump – $200 million to get Trump elected and is now going to get billions of dollars in tax cuts and gets to pick the people who regulate his companies. Like tell that story.
And you can go down the line with all of Trump's appointees, the people who are in and out of government, David Sachs who invests in all kinds of companies being the AI and crypto czar. All of these things that tell that, like, this really is, you know, I don't know if you listen to Rom, Emmanuel on Ezra's podcast. I'm almost at the end.
You're taking a small dose.
It's been out for weeks. You're just doing it. I think you told me you were starting.
I've been busy.
I've been doing a lot of stuff. Yeah. You're just like, I can only take Rom in seven-minute doses at a time, so it's going to take me.
Basically, yes.
Ten days to get through it.
I'm at the part where Rom is talking about the Bill Clinton 1992 New Hampshire. The hits I've taken are nothing like the hits your family's taken.
I'm like, oh, man, we're here now? You're about three minutes away from a Obama reference that's going to feel equally dated to a lot of people listening to this podcast. Cool, cool, cool. Great. But Rom used the term that the Oval Office is eBay. Now, that is not the term I would use.
Also, so wrong.
That's such a wrong. It's like a 90s term.
Yeah. The gala gave him that line.
Right. That is the image. He might have given that line in 1998. But the image that we want to do, that we want to sell is that these people are all fucking corrupt. that they are all making money hand over fist at your expense. You've got all these rich people in there doing it. They're getting tax cuts for themselves. They're picking the regulators.
They're getting away with stuff you could never get away with. And if we can tell that story vividly, I think we really do have a chance to reverse the politics on a lot of this.
I think there's something that we need to add to the corruption message because I think if you told most Americans that Trump and all of his goons in the White House are using it to enrich themselves, but also...
you're getting richer too, and your costs are going down, or you're getting a tax cut, or you're getting something, then people will be like, yeah, it's not great that they're doing that, but honestly, I kind of figured that was the case when we elected him. It almost goes back to the famous ad, Kamala's for they, them, and Donald Trump's for you.
We've got to make it seem, which is going to be the reality, that Donald Trump and Elon Musk and all these idiots, they're just there for themselves. They are just there to take care of themselves, their businesses, their people, and everyone else is getting screwed.
Like that's the corruption I think that really gets people pissed and not just the like, yeah, we're making a lot of money, but so are you. Everyone's making money. It's great.
Well, I mean, that's where the prices matter, right?
Yes.
The corruption message is going to matter more. Just like people turn against the wealthy, like in Occupy Wall Street, they turn against the poor and people on government assistance in times of economic strife.
And if the prices really don't go down and people continue to be angry and sad about the economy, they're going to have much less tolerance for these guys fucking throwing parties for themselves in the Oval Office with just light and money on fire. Yeah.
Okay, we're going to take a quick break. A couple things before we do that, though. You've heard us talk about Crooked's limited Empire City, the untold origin story of the NYPD. It's been getting some really amazing year-end reviews. If you haven't started it, now's a perfect time.
In just eight episodes, Empire City takes you back to the origins of the NYPD and completely reframes the way we think about policing today. You can listen to the series now wherever you get your podcasts, or you can binge all episodes ad-free on Wondery Plus and the Wondery app, or on Apple Podcasts.
Also, Tommy recently joined Brian Tyler Cohen on his show No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen to talk about Trump's cabinet picks, Democrats' path forward, and lots more. Plus, exciting update, No Lie is now an official partner of the Crooked Network. How great is that? That's exciting. Love BTC. I know, we love BTC.
You can hear Tommy and Brian's conversation in all episodes wherever you get your podcasts. One of the exchanges that got the most attention was a question about trans rights and so-called bathroom bills. The reporters reminded Trump that he said in 2016 that trans people should be able to use whatever bathroom they want and asked whether he still felt that way. And Trump said, quote,
Reporters then brought up the House bill to ban Sarah McBride from women's bathrooms. But instead of asking whether he supported that bill, they asked whether he agreed with Sarah that we should focus on bigger issues. And he said yes. And then they asked about the anti-trans ad that the campaign ran, and he didn't take the bait there either. What did you think about his answers on this?
Do you remember in the primary when Trump would go to rallies and he would be like, every time I bring up the trans issue, you guys all applaud. So I keep bringing it up, right? Like he was sort of mystified by the power of it. So I think it is something that he has followed. Unlike immigration, this is not an issue that has been a long cause of his.
He just is sort of following the applause in the room. I think it's fucking gross to say, oh, it doesn't matter. Oh, it's not a big issue after you mentioned it. all the fucking time on the campaign trail in the most, in the grossest, most bigoted way possible. Um, I generally think he also was probably surprised to be reminded that he said that about bathrooms in 20. Yeah.
16 or whatever he said that. And so he's just now trying to square all the circles in his little head that I was right then I'm right now. And then they gave him an obvious out by the way they asked the question about the Sarah McBride statement. So we could just, uh, push it, push them both aside and I really, not really have to answer.
I will say, even if Donald Trump himself does not want to spend a lot of time focusing on trans rights and not a lot of time beating up on trans people like he did during the campaign, cynically, I do think this is an issue that's going to come to him and Democrats are going to have to still deal with. It's not just a, oh, we're going to argue about it past the campaign.
We're going to argue about it in the context of the campaign kind of thing. I spoke to a Rolling Stone reporter, Giles Holzman.
who wrote a really great piece that everyone should, and it's an important piece that everyone should read about how this is going to come up in Congress, which is that Republicans want to do a Hyde-like amendment that will withhold government funding from any healthcare provider that gets money from the federal government to make sure that they do not provide any gender-affirming care.
So just like now, the Hyde Amendment is, you know, federal money cannot go to any provider, any hospital that performs abortions. That's why a lot of hospitals do not perform abortions, why there are abortion clinics, because of the Hyde Amendment. And they want to do something like that for gender affirming care. And the question will be, like, do enough Democrats stand up and stop this?
And I think it could not just be done through reconciliation. I think you would need to overcome a filibuster in the Senate to actually get this done, because that's the same thing with the Hyde Amendment. You can't get rid of that through reconciliation either. So you can't just do 51 votes in a budget bill. So I think we would have votes to stop it.
But you could imagine the argument from Republicans. And then you can see what Trump will do, which would be, you know, well, no, taxpayers shouldn't fund gender affirming care. Taxpayers shouldn't do this. And what do you think? Like, how do you think Democrats respond to that? Because I think this is one where fuck the polls on this. Like we just that is you got to stand up for it.
And I think what we have to do is figure out a way to message it so that it is as popular as possible, even knowing that it may not be a majority position and that they might think that this is a wedge issue that that does that helps them politically.
I think, and this goes to one of the lessons of how trans issues played out in the campaign, which is you have to engage. You can't ignore them. And you have to engage by going bigger. Because when you get to the bigger issues of human rights and civil rights and treating people with tolerance, we have the high side of the argument, both morally, obviously, but also politically.
And when Republicans are able to narrow focus it around sports teams, bathrooms, taxpayer-funded surgeries, and the infamous ad, then... they often win that. And so we should absolutely take it on. It would be so demoralizing to people in our party if Senate Democrats were unwilling to use the filibuster to stand up to protect us. So we absolutely cannot do it.
And I will say, in the piece, Holzman was expressing the concern of a lot of activists and groups that maybe there's not enough Democrats to stand up on this. I do think the one silver lining of the Democratic caucus right now in the Senate, which is- It's quite safe. It's quite safe. I was going to say, we lost Manchin, we lost Sinema. We also lost the majority, but the people left-
Are like mainstream to progressive, you know, like we don't have a lot of centrists and center right folks in the caucus anymore. And so I do expect that the senators will say, yeah, but it's something but it's something that's coming and people should prepare for it so that they don't just it doesn't surprise everyone. And, you know.
And then just – I 100% agree with that. I do – maybe this is naive on my part, but I do believe that Senate Democrats would fight – would stop this. The other thing is what Donald Trump says on trans issues is also not that important because what you have to really watch is what's going to happen in his administration. Yes. With Project 2025, which basically compared being trans to pornography.
Yes. And just a series of very dangerous policies are likely to be implemented, whether Trump wants to have the issue or have the conversation or not. And we're going to have to fight every single one of those that we can politically at the ballot box, legally, etc.
Well, and this is an issue that's come up right now, even before Trump takes office, because the defense authorization bill, Mike Johnson slipped in a provision that says the children of service members are not allowed to get gender affirming care through the coverage that their parents get by being in the military. Most Democrats in the House revolted against this.
Obviously, we didn't have the votes because the Republicans controlled the House. So now that goes to the Senate. And, you know, I don't know what's going to happen there. But So this is the kind of these are the kind of things they're going to try to do. They're going to try to chip away at trans rights and gender affirming care bit by bit.
And then I think test Democrats to see if they stand up for it. And if they do, then say, oh, see, they're still obsessed with the trans issue. They lost on it and they're still obsessed with it. Like, that's what they're going to do.
This is one of the things there aren't a lot of benefits to be a minority. One of them is that you can just do the right thing sometime.
Yeah, that is correct. That is correct. Speaking of the House bathroom bill and its sponsor, Congresswoman Nancy Mace of South Carolina, Mace is now set on making sure everyone knows she's the real victim here. On Tuesday, she spoke at an event for foster care providers and alumni in one of the House office buildings. This is a wild story.
A foster care advocate apparently came up to her after she spoke and said something about how trans kids need advocacy, too. What happened next is disputed, but a police report says that this person, quote, began to aggressively and in an exaggerated manner shake her arm up and down in a handshaking motion. The police report was filed by Nancy Mason, her staff, so this is their side of the story.
The advocate has pleaded not guilty to misdemeanor assault. Some of the people in the room say they didn't see anything out of the ordinary, just a handshake. regardless, Mace is now wearing her arm in a sling and making a big thing of it, publicly reassuring her many fans about her odds of survival and so on.
She went on Benny Johnson show sling in full effect to accuse trans people of having a mental illness. If I didn't have a medical degree, I don't know if I would be accusing other people of having a mental illness if I was Nancy Mace, but that's just me. What do you think's going on here? Is this just like, I mean, I guess reporters have requested the security footage.
So like, we're going to find out what the handshake was like at some point. And, you know, maybe Nancy Mace. Famous truth teller is just telling the truth about being assaulted with a violent handshake. Totally possible, Nancy Mace. But it's possible that it's also possible that maybe she was looking for attention. Who knows?
Nancy Mace looking for attention?
It's crazy. No, no, no. I am not accusing her of that. I just want you to know. I'm saying it is a possibility that that could be one of the outcomes. It is also possible that someone came up and asked her a question and violently assaulted her hand.
That is a common technique for injury is the old handshake switcheroo.
Yes. If I've seen it once, I've seen it a hundred times.
I would just say, look, I, as a person who waits for the facts, I will, I anxiously await the security footage to be released probably directly to Benny Johnson or Tucker Carlson or someone like that.
It'll be the January 6th footage that Mike Johnson has been sitting on.
that Nancy Mace has a long history of stunts to get attention. And so this would not be out of line.
One of her former staffers posted on Twitter, this is the same woman who told staff, myself included, during January 6th, that she wanted to get punched in the face by a rioter so she could get on TV and be the face of the anti-Trump movement. That's back when she wanted to be a part of the anti-Trump movement and was so mad at him for the riot on January 6th.
She wanted to get punched in the face. That story was first reported in the Washington Post, and that's now her former staffer confirming it on Twitter. So that's Nancy Mace. One last thing in the time interview before we go. They asked Trump all about his thoughts on his campaign strategy, the campaign in general, why he won, why Harris lost. He said his campaign was flawless.
He didn't take any days off in the last 72 days. He called it, he's got a name for it, he said. It's called the 72 Days of Fury. He said that he thinks the issue of immigration was a bigger factor in his victory than the economy and that he won because the Republican Party has become the party of common sense.
He also said Kamala Harris's worst mistakes were, one, taking the assignment because you have to know what you're good at, and two, not doing enough interviews. So that's his assessment. What do you think? Were we missing anything? Did you read that and think, maybe I was missing something there? Maybe he's got a point.
No, I did not. I read that whole interview, top to bottom, and at no point... Me too.
Boy, was that a long interview.
And at no point was... When I read that, I was like, you know what? I know why magazines have fallen down. Yeah.
Let me just tell... Everyone who's listening, we're doing it for you here. You do not have to go read this interview.
We are basically just an AI bot reading these and telling you the best parts. But I read that whole interview, and at no point was I like, man, he's kind of got a point there. That did not happen. It's particularly not in this part. I'm trying to figure out what the 72 days were.
Because Kamala Harris got in with 107.
Oh.
Maybe it was post-debate, maybe? Or post-DNC? Maybe. I don't know.
Or it's a fucking number.
Maybe he doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about because he just picked numbers out of the air. I'm going to go with that one.
Yeah. The thing, it's now the second time I think that he has said that immigration was a bigger issue than the economy. And I just think that is something to keep in mind because his actions suggest he does not understand why he was elected. And it had a lot more to do with inflation than with immigration. Immigration was a big issue. I'm not going to take that.
I'm not going to suggest it wasn't. But particularly for a lot of the voters who picked him over Kamala Harris or who moved to him who would vote for Biden in 20, inflation was their top issue. And if you focus on things other than inflation, you will pay a price for that before too long.
Yeah, I do. There's something to the people came to believe that the Republican Party was the party of common sense. I don't think they think that about the Republican Party necessarily, but they thought that somehow that Trump and what he was selling was a little more common sense. And I think it's hard to square, right, because you're like.
common sense he seemed fucking nuts and look in exit polls more voters said that he was more extreme than kamala harris so there's that but when he was saying common sense he was talking about the economy he was talking you know he's like people realize that they shouldn't be paying so much for groceries and people think and on immigration right like i do think people probably saw his view on
immigration as more common sense than where the Democrats were, even though I think I could make an argument that we're much more common sense on immigration, but I don't think that came through to people. We could spend a lot of pods and we will talking about why, but I do think there's probably some truth to that.
I think the Democrats became the party to some voters of out of touch extremism. And that is a process that began long before Kamala Harris was the nominee. It was exacerbated by probably our – a lot of the parties sticking with Joe Biden for a long time. It was exacerbated by – the trans ad we talked about exacerbated by Kamala Harris saying on The View that she couldn't think of any place to –
Nothing would come to mind in terms of where she would differ from Biden. But it also has been going on since COVID, where we have been sort of relentlessly defined out of the mainstream as a party. And that doesn't mean that people are fully on board with Trump or think he is the party of common sense.
But I think we seemed a little less in touch with working class people that may a lot less in touch with working class people. And that's why he won.
Yeah, I think it would be fair to say that people perceived us as no longer or less of a party of common sense than he was more. I don't think they did anything to help themselves.
No one was a party of common sense.
Right, yeah, but we seemed like less of a party of common sense than maybe we had in the past. And look, again, it's not all Democrats' fault, but we have control over what we say and how we act and how we approach politics, so something to keep in mind. All right, that's our show for today. Tommy Lovett and I will be back with a new show on Tuesday. Everyone have a great weekend.
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