The Bulwark Podcast
Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz: Trying To Break the Whole Thing
Tue, 28 Jan 2025
The directives putting a pause on federal grants and the firing of career DOJ prosecutors is about trying to make the entirety of the federal government the tool of the man occupying the presidency. And it's all illegal and unconstitutional. Meanwhile, Trump is exactly the kind of broken sociopath who can dominate the war for attention—the defining resource of our time. Plus, a rundown on DeepSeek, the new Chinese AI model, and why Bitcoin fans aren't more angry about the worthless, scammy Trump and Melania coins. Chris Hayes and Alex Kantrowitz join Tim Miller. show notes Chris's new book, “The Siren's Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource." Undercover video of Russ Vought on Project 2025, from August 2024 Alex's "Big Technology" on Substack Alex's "Big Technology" podcast
Chapter 1: What are the implications of the DeepSeek AI development?
But first, I get to turn the mic around on somebody you might know, you might have heard of it that he wrote about in his book that he's, he's kind of a big deal. He's kind of a minor celebrity that gets noticed in the airports. Now, his name is Chris Hayes. He's on MSNBC. And he's got a new book out the sirens call how attention became the world's most endangered resource. How you doing, man?
Chapter 2: How does Chris Hayes feel about being in the public eye?
I'm great, man. How are you? I'm doing well. You're dealing with the gaze of strangers.
Okay. I'm dealing with the gaze of strangers. I'm pretty used to it by now, but it'll mess you up a little bit in the beginning. Actually, the press tour is weird. Like, I don't... I think when I was younger, I liked it more. I don't love being the object of press. Hmm. You know? Probably because there's like a control issue. Yeah, right.
Like, when it's your show, you control it, whereas with... It's other people that are controlling it, which is... The reason that a lot of powerful people don't like...
journalism like fundamentally right you don't have if you're a powerful person you're used to people like deferring to you and being very differential and and having control over them and like that's just not the way journalism works like it's like it's interesting that you can see all this rage by all these powerful people about against journalists and fundamentally it's because the power dynamics of journalism are intentionally not in the hands of the most powerful people
They like attention and control. You know, they like to be lavished, praised, praised to be lavished on them.
That's exactly right. That's exactly right.
In exactly the manner which they wish for it to be lavished on them. Okay. Yeah. You have some interesting insights about things that I dealt with in therapy, about the difference between attention and recognition. So we're going to do deep thinking, but unfortunately we have to do news too. There was some news last night, the Office of Management and Budget.
This seems where all the problems are going to be coming from in the next administration. Yeah. Put out a memo ending all grant making. They put a stop work order on all grants. This includes USAID and others. Among potentially the things affected by this is the program that helps women, infants, and children that need food, the WIC program. Thoughts?
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Chapter 3: What are the recent changes in federal funding policies?
There's a few different tracks in which they're operating on, but one of them is, and we started to see this last week with people finding out that their National Institutes of Health grant panels were being canceled. clinical trials being canceled, like, oh, skin cancer drug.
They are trying to break the whole thing because they want to refashion it such that the entirety of the federal government is an object tool of the one person who occupies the presidency and nothing else. There are a bunch of statutory requirements in place that
are geared towards the presidency serving the public interest, and they want to turn it into a 19th century urban machine with nuclear weapons.
Like that's the goal here. I was going back even further than that. I was thinking like spoil system.
Yeah, right. I mean, yes, the spoil system is an example. But now the other thing about this OMB thing that's nuts to me is it's also as with a bunch of other stuff we could talk about. It's, I think, flatly illegal. They have this theory, which they have said that despite the fact that the founders were very clear about who has the power of the purse. and put that in Article I to Congress.
And who was that that has the power of the purse? Is that the Trump family organization? That's Barron.
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Chapter 4: How is the DOJ being affected by political changes?
Barron has... Yeah, the founders gave Barron the power of the purse. Okay.
All right, good.
Thanks for clearing that up. Some listeners might not be constitutional scholars. In Madison Federalist 45, he says, there shall be a tall son, and he shall... No, they're very clear about the power of the purse. It's like we all learned this, you know, day one of constitutional structure, that they're the appropriators. All of this stuff has been appropriated duly by Congress and passed.
Their position is the president has ultimate veto over every cent that gets spent. It's
But that's what their contention is. And I think they'll probably have some friendly courts as to that effect. And we've seen some of this. It's interesting.
The first time around, there was a lot more wink and nod, like cutesiness. For instance, the Muslim ban. Yeah. It was always the case that a... Ban based on religion was flatly unconstitutional. So when it came time to do a Muslim ban, they had this sort of like plausible fig leaf and they like threw in North Korea.
Remember, they like threw in North Korea and Venezuela, I think, because there's like, oh, it's not a Muslim ban. It's like these countries that we have some reason to be fearful of. Yeah. This time around, they are doing things flatly constitutional legal in a flatly unconstitutional legal manner with no fig leaf. They are firing the IGs. They are firing career people at DOJ. That's illegal.
They can't do it. They are... stopping grants, they're freezing cancer research because they think courts will say it's fine.
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Chapter 5: What are the consequences of removing career DOJ officials?
Yeah, it's interesting. I guess maybe I should have had your wife on for this question, but it's always kind of the inverse of the other conservative, like big legal win actually during the Biden years, which was the Chevron case, right? Which was like essentially like they were arguing that the agencies didn't have carte blanche to interpret ambiguous laws, right?
Like they didn't want the EPA going rogue and doing things that they didn't, that weren't specifically prescribed by Congress. But they're saying that the EPA can stop doing things that were specifically prescribed by Congress.
Yes, because their position, the way these two things are sort of different sides of the same coin is that the only person with any power is the president and everything flows from him. And therefore, any part of the administrative state or the executive that doesn't do exactly what his whims are moment to moment is illegitimate.
That takes us to the other news item that I wanted to cover. The acting attorney general moved on Monday to fire several Justice Department officials who worked on the federal criminal investigations into Donald Trump.
In termination letters sent to more than a dozen officials, again, the acting attorney general wrote that he did not believe they, quote, could be trusted to faithfully implement the president's agenda. because of their significant role in prosecuting the president. Is that the job of career Justice Department officials, to faithfully implement the president's agenda?
That seems like a change in their scope. That's a change.
Again, I mean, what they've done in the Department of Justice, as my favorite dog on the internet, Southpaw, said, would be a scandal, an administration-consuming scandal. Like, there's a bunch of stuff they've done already. For instance, dropping cases hasn't happened in the post-Watergate era that Active cases just get dropped on day one, the way that they've dropped cases against Jan 6 folks.
Yeah. For example, the Hunter Biden case was not dropped. Not only was it not dropped, they got a little special little universe to keep going.
They gave it a bonus unit.
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Chapter 6: How does the attention age influence political strategies?
They're like public corruption people.
Right. So, you know, again, you would think that if you did genuinely care. about holding criminals to account in law and order, then you could at least have gone through the resume pile of these people and said, okay, well, we'll keep a couple of you. All right.
The very first night we were together on the night Donald Trump, the great and good American people bestowed upon him a second presidency. You were coming off the set. I was going on for the late night shift. I don't know why I agreed to that. And we were chatting for a second. Is that election night? Election night, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's right. I did see you in the handoff. Yeah.
And I was very... The only thing I was thinking about is don't be on one of those YouTube reels. Yeah. That was my only obligation that night. It was challenging. But during our brief handoff exchange, I was like, what do you think?
you just said on the set and we just followed up on it, that like the interesting thing about this, there's a lot of bad, but like the interesting thing is like at that moment, like we didn't really know, right? Like might he just like have decided that he got his get out of jail free card.
He, he won, he's just going to golf and like the government will just do whatever it does and he won't really care. You know what I mean? And like, he'll just like want to hang out with rich people and, and want people to just call him sir and stuff. Or like, The other side of the spectrum is start immediately moving to create an urban estate here in America.
And it could be anywhere in between those things. I'm wondering now, two and a half months later, where you assess our trajectory is on that spectrum.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of attention in modern politics?
Oh, it's the worst case scenario. The worst for you? I mean, trending towards the worst. I mean, I think it's definitely more towards a frontal assault on the constitutional order to be remade in the form of a personalist Donald Trump authoritarian state.
Right. Okay, good. Well, between you and JBL, JBL's newsletter yesterday was talking about how we shouldn't limit our imaginations that we might be on a path towards Putinism. I'm summarizing it. It was very long, but it was kind of talking about how Putin wasn't Putin in 1998. And like, you didn't really know. I mean, I thought that was a little much even for me.
And I've got about the darkest sunglasses on that you could have. I don't know. I guess my one caveat to that is like, In some ways, it's just horrifying, right? Like you have the four richest people in the world, essentially, like hanging out around Donald Trump. Unlike the other hand, wouldn't I rather that than like Corey Lewandowski?
You know, and might there be some sort of check, like the fact that these like noxious people that we're about to get into next, the Mark and Dreesons of the world and the Zucks, like isn't the fact that they're calling him like a little bit of a check or no for you?
I don't think that figures one way or the other, because I think that's it's so transactional.
Yeah.
I don't think they have much power to check him or I don't even know how much desire they do. I think they want to get out what they get out. So much of that has to do with this very specific thing around tech and AI and like the end of the rainbow, basically.
When I say trending towards worst case, I think it's important to distinguish between what they're going to try to do and whether they'll succeed. But I think that the first week, to me, the pardon of everyone from Jan 6 was such an indicator that like... whole hog is kind of be the, the way to go.
I mean, the order they signed that he signed yesterday in which he kicked all trans folks out of the military, calling them dishonorable and liars.
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Chapter 8: How can public opinion influence governmental actions?
So I'm not saying they're going to be successful, but I think in terms of like what their ambitions are – and I'm saying they here because I do think to your point – Vote Miller. Exactly. Like Donald Trump didn't write that OMB order. Does Donald Trump care whether they freeze funding or not? Like –
That's a project that is in his orbit that animates his hatreds, but he doesn't have ideological projects like that. That's an ideological crusade by people who have sold him on it because they hate the same people.
That's a good observation. And I mean, look, I go back to the secret video about the rest vote that the I forget the organization did. Yeah, I'll shut them out in the show notes. But like, he gave away the game all right there. I mean, like the guy, I guess you got to hand it to him. Do you have to hand it to ISIS? I guess you got to hand it to rest vote.
Like he was like, I've spent the last four years basically writing all these executive orders that we've seen in the last week. Like it's essentially what he said, like they were prepared. They knew where the weak spots and the soft spots were, where they could challenge the courts. In some cases, they don't really care if there's a weak spot or soft spot.
But it has been just an organized and regimented effort to tear down anything in the government that they don't think serves them, which is basically everything.
You know, there was this cable that the German ambassador to the U.S. sent back to Germany. Did you see this? It was reported of like... And there was just something sort of chilling about it because we've read the American cables that are going back to D.C. in 31, 32, 33 from American ambassadors.
So here's a German ambassador basically saying he's going to try to undo and remake the constitutional order. This is the cable that he sends back to Berlin. And I think that – That's the project here. Again, I don't think Donald Trump could articulate in those terms.
But a new constitutional order that is around essentially a kind of personalist cult of personality around the president as the only figure with any authority in the constitutional order. Well, that's exciting. All right. Things are going great. Things are good. Life's good. But look, can I just say – Yeah, please. I don't think –
if people are listening to this and like getting bummed out, if I think public opinion matters a tremendous amount, I think like calling up representatives matters a huge amount, going to their offices, like calling your Senator, no Democrat should vote for Russ vote.
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