Partly because of the courts and partly because the White House keeps stepping on rakes or trying to break everything, the Dems who were too chill about Trump pre- and post-election have fully moved into 'threat to the Republic' mode. Meanwhile, angry bureaucrats, particularly at the FBI, are digging in. But don't be sanguine because the administration is still trying to take a wrecking ball to the civil service— anything that goes wrong that involves the government though (like that measles outbreak in Texas) they're going to own from here on out. Plus, Trump's dirty energy policy, the challenge of getting his tax cuts through Congress, and Kanye goes all in on Hitler. Ezra Klein joins Tim on the weekend pod. show notes Ezra's forthcoming book with Derek Thompson, "Abundance" Ezra's show on YouTube Measles Outbreak Mounts Among Children in One of Texas’ Least Vaccinated Counties Tim's playlist
Chapter 1: Who are the guests and hosts in this episode?
Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back opinion columnist at the New York Times and host of the Ezra Klein Show, which is a podcast, but also available on YouTube. He's also the co-author of the forthcoming book, Abundance, with the Atlantic's Derek Thompson, who I like better than Ezra. That's out next month.
We'll be talking about that, you know, I don't know, in March or something. We got some other news. How you doing, Ezra?
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.
Yeah, I don't know. There's something about your new facial hair also that is, I think, hurting your likability quotient a little bit. It feels like it's a dark Ezra era. Have you looked at the era we're in? You think this is time for light Ezra? That's a fair point. It's a fair point. All right.
The last time you were on the pod, we were in the period between the Biden debate debacle and him actually stepping aside. You said something then that created a little stir. It was this. You said, I've had top Democrats say to me basically something like, I don't know why all these Democrats who think Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy are acting the way they are.
You went on to say that essentially those top Democrats said to you that a lot of them were doing kayfabe. They didn't really believe that he was the existential threat that many of them were saying. I think the revealed behavior in the intervening seven months has borne out that. But I'm wondering how you think those folks are feeling about that gamble now.
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.
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.
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?
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Chapter 2: What led Democrats to change their perception of Trump?
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.
I mean, there was an NOAA official I saw this morning that said, we're just going to, he said, their strategy is we're just going to do it and dare somebody to stop us. And by the time they stop us, we'll have destroyed, they'll have destroyed it.
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.
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.
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.
Yuval Levin, who's an American Enterprise Institute guy, conservative, very, very thoughtful.
I mean, very, very thoughtful, but been feeding high-level center-right cope to people about how the institutions will hold for a while now. Obviously, it would be Yuval. Yuval has not been on the alarmist side of things for a decade.
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.
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...
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Chapter 3: How are Trump's policies impacting the federal government?
Right.
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.
It was Chuck Grassley, who was like... 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 very much. Thank you.
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