All those CEOs cartwheeled down to Mar-a-Lago and then dutifully lined up at Trump's inauguration because they were fed up with social justice warriors and labor having more power—even if their bottom lines were never harmed in the process. Now, they want their next adrenaline rush and more government money without any pesky regulations hampering their highfalutin space-exploration dreams. But they may just pine for those DEI training sessions after the coming populist economic backlash. Stephanie Ruhle joins Tim Miller.
Chapter 1: What is the main focus of the podcast?
Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It is Wednesday. We're in the third day of Donald Trump's second presidency. There's only like 1,300 or 1,400 or so days to go, so no big deal. I'm excited to be here. First time we get to turn the tables. Stephanie Ruhl, host of the 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhl on MSNBC. She's a senior business correspondent with NBC News.
She was formerly an anchor for Bloomberg and a managing director at Deutsche Bank. What's going on, Steph?
Hey, just here covering the administration.
Are you excited about this? Do you have four years of 11 p.m. commentary on Donald Trump's antics in you mentally?
Yes. And for everybody who's like, oh, I can't do this. Check yourself.
Me.
Every day, you and I have the opportunity, whether it's on a podcast, whether it's on a television show, to talk to the American people and not be against him or for him, but just cover this, right? We are living in the age of misinformation, and we can sit here and bitch and moan about how we're flooded with lies, which we are, or we could realize we have these platforms. Let's do our part.
Let's cover them.
Is this cope? Do you really feel this way?
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Chapter 2: How do CEOs feel about social justice initiatives?
At NBC, there was a period of time in the last five years when Cesar Conde took over and he put an initiative in. He put an initiative about diversity hires. Lots of people were excited about it. And lots of people under the hood weren't. And so part of what we're hearing from Zuckerberg, right? Zuckerberg is taking it really far. And Marc Andreessen is taking it really far.
But lots of businesses would say, man, in the last five years, the pressure we were under to stand up and speak out and give money or take action on social justice stuff, we don't want to do it anymore. We want to focus on our customers, our shareholders, and our employees.
And while we want to be sure our mission aligns with our employees, it doesn't need to be like where you work doesn't have to align with all of your politics. And so, again, I'm certainly not defending Zuckerberg or corporate America.
You're teasing him, really.
Yes. But there is a lot of space. There are a lot of business leaders that are saying, I'm done ruling by committee. I'm the boss. I'm going to get to decide. Right. But yes, Zuckerberg being the face, the voice of this is just so bananas now that he's a Dave Portnoy lookalike. I mean, I heard him on that podcast referring to food as fuel.
And this is my last Zuckerberg point for everyone going, when did he change? What happened? He didn't change. Go watch the social network. Yeah. Facebook wasn't the first company he started. He had another website. And you remember what they did? They rated hot girls.
That super nerd at Harvard was holed up in his room, uninvited to even the dorm mixer, and he created a website to rate how hot girls were. How did he rate it? In terms of the level of girls that will reject me? So my point is just he didn't suddenly make an alpha male change. He's been this bro all along. He's finally just trying to manifest it.
We haven't seen Priscilla, I noticed.
Yes, we did.
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Chapter 3: What is the connection between Trump and corporate America?
He has not gone through any conflicts of interest vetting. He doesn't have to get confirmed because he's like, oh, I'm just volunteering. This ain't volunteering. This will make him exponentially wealthier and more powerful.
More than that, it also is going to allow him to go after his foes. And you're already seeing this publicly. He does it on Twitter, trolling people. But there was an announcement, I guess, yesterday that Trump was trying to take credit for the investment that OpenAI – and Sam Altman is going to do now. It was like one of these stupid PR gambits. Tim Cook did this for Trump last time.
They're like, hey, we're going to build a new plant, and you can get the credit, sir. So Altman was trying to do that, and Musk is tweeting, Altman doesn't have the money. They don't have the money because he's got a rivalry with him. So he's undermining Trump, and then he's going to have access to the data and information inside the White House. I mean, it's an unprecedented situation.
unprecedented. Sam Altman and Elon Musk have been foes, have been rivals for years. So I actually think two things. I think that Donald Trump doing this big AI announcement with Oracle, Microsoft, Sam Altman was also a way for Trump to
to kind of put Elon Musk on notice, but to say to everybody out there, who's been saying for weeks, Trump's the real president or their co-presidents Trump, Trump saying, no, no, no, no, no. Elon, you're not my only tech boyfriend. There's only one boss in town and I'm the daddy.
So on one hand, Trump said to Elon, you can back off, but Elon's not wrong in saying they don't have the money because Elon, These artificial intelligence companies, these guys were working with the Biden administration, right? Biden could have done this, could have announced it, right?
But what Trump did was take off all the AI regulations that Biden was putting in place with his executive order and rushing to make the announcement. So to me, it just sort of encapsulated both presidents, Democrats who are so overly careful Right. Right. Lena Khan style. Like, you know, I want to I'm going to stand in the way because I'm so overly careful.
Or Trump, who's like, who cares if we have the money? Let's just announce it. But I will say this. Democrats, when they do things that they believe are good, do a better job of talking about it. Right. Lena Kahn did many, many things where she was trying to protect the American consumer and they got absolutely no credit for it. Right.
Show me one voter out there who said they are really trying to protect me. They're trying to make sure that that we don't end up with monopolies and conglomerates that control pricing. Instead, the whole business community was like, I effing hate Lena Kahn. She stands in the way of business. This administration is anti-business. And the Biden administration needs to do – okay, ready?
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Chapter 4: Are CEOs really under pressure from progressive movements?
Like, where's my bag? Right. So I was just downstairs this morning and I was talking to the guy at the security guard at this hotel since I'm stuck at the Hotel California, Trump's inauguration week. I can never leave because I can't go home to New Orleans because of the snow.
I'm so sorry. You're in the greatest city in America. Maybe the world boohoo to you.
And so but I've made friends with my guy downstairs and he starts ranting to me about the tick tock thing and the nine dollar congestion fee. He comes in from upstate. He's like, I got to pay the nine bucks now. I'm an hourly worker. He's like, maybe Trump's going to fix that for me. Like he fixed the TikTok thing.
So this guy says to me, whatever you think about the congestion fee and the student loan bailout and the TikTok ban, because I'm on two of those three. I'm on the Democratic side of the actual policy. But you also have to think about how people interact with stuff and how it engages with their lives. And they're so bad at talking about it and thinking about gimmicks that actually help people.
And I think that you've seen this on all of this stuff. You mentioned this AI thing. They're doing some regulation to protect people, but they're not messaging about it, so they get no credit for it. But they do get backlashes.
among all the rich guys that like are now supporting donald trump because they want unregulated ai it's just time and again you find yourself in a political sour spot where you're trying to do the right thing but like not finding a way to talk about it that so that people realize you're helping them and like i just think that is fundamentally their biggest challenge
In TikTok, and this isn't on Democrats, it's on all of government that voted to ban it. In TikTok, they did not sufficiently explain to and convince the American people why TikTok is a national security risk. Because by and large, we have all basically, we're under the assumption we've given away our data. We've sold our personal information.
What's the difference whether it's China, Elon Musk, or Mark Zuckerberg? And we no longer trust our government or take their word for it. And so people love the TikTok. It's one of the only platforms that I would say, I don't use it actively, but that people would say gives them joy. And Democrats failed to say, we're doing this to protect you and here's why.
So I just think for all the good that they did, my gosh, they're terrible at messaging it. And part of it is being unbelievably careful about messaging. They become so hamstrung in making sure they cross every T and dot every I. Nobody believes a bullshit press release that's gone through seven lawyers. It's why Donald Trump ends up with the amount of support from young people.
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Chapter 6: What role does misinformation play in today's media?
Chapter 7: How do corporate leaders view the shift in power dynamics?
This is me editorializing and not done all the other stuff. They did it.
No, they were under a lot of pressure.
From who? Not Joe Biden. It wasn't like the Biden administration was breathing down their neck saying, you've got to do this, ESG.
Okay, I love you for saying this, because Joe Biden is not woke. I mean, if there's a criticism of Joe Biden, it's, is he definitely awake? This didn't come from the Biden administration, but there are definitely...
parts of the democratic party that are super progressive and demanding about their progressive goals and there's loads of advocacy groups right there are loads of groups out there that in the last five years you know they were making lists here are the companies that are giving to this group and here are the companies that aren't and they were hanging those lists and calling those ceos out and it was a headache but you're you bring up a good point it was not president biden himself
And it was also a little bit of a headache of their own making. This is what I'm saying. If you want to bring some masculine energy, Mr. CEOs, and I do notice we're worried that simultaneously saying DEI has become a problem and gone overboard, all of the oligarchs sitting right behind Donald Trump on stage are men, are white men, except for Sundar.
Yes.
So it's like, I guess we haven't fully, you know, achieved balance quite yet when it comes to gender. But it's like these guys that want to bring masculine energy, they could have just said, hey, activist group writing a press release about how my company doesn't have the appropriate number of whatever, you know, since I'm gay, I can just.
use gays as the example, like gay employees, like pound sand. Like we're trying to get money for our shareholders. We're doing the best we can. Like they could have had balls. Like why did they need Donald Trump winning to give them balls? I guess is my point.
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Chapter 8: What challenges do businesses face in a post-Trump era?
We have the vibe shift when it comes to, you know, whatever, DEI and cultural issues. Are these guys ready, your CEO buddies, your CEO sources? Are they ready for what's coming? Because I think what they're setting themselves up for is I think they're going to be wishing for the annoyance of DEI when it gets replaced with the annoyance of eat the rich.
Because populist economics is what's coming next. from the left. And I think these guys are going to be begging for the struggle sessions about diversity hiring when what they're getting is mass protests about economic inequality.
You are so right on this. And they have this belief that Donald Trump has a mandate. They have this belief that it was an overwhelming, sweeping win. It wasn't. Donald Trump won fair and square. What was it? 49 point, I don't know what, 8% of the vote. He got it. But he didn't get 75%. He didn't get 80%, right? They have the slimmest, slimmest majority right now.
And so, yeah, I think they're overplaying their hand. And remember, He is a Donald Duck lame president. He's got two years before the midterms. And we'll see what's about to happen. It's like they're forgetting that Occupy Wall Street took place. And we could see this massive Eat the Rich movement. We'll soon find out.
We will. Steph Ruhl, thanks for doing this. Thanks for having me. We're going to have a lot of reason for you to come back. It feels like the masters of the universe are back in vogue and back in power. And so we'll have much to talk about. So thanks so much.
They are. Well... Who knows? Maybe I'll be in New Orleans because the Washington Commanders could make it to the Super Bowl. We could do this podcast live.
I would love that. I keep waiting for somebody to invite me. So if Jaden makes it, I assume that you'll be giving me your plus one and I'll see you there in New Orleans.
I love that. I'm going to tell you, for the last four days, if somebody looks up my search engine, I think I've watched 90 videos of Jaden Daniels. I just love him.
We love it. Jay, it's been a Trump derangement syndrome and Jaden Daniels fanboy podcast this week because, you know, we need some light in our life. Steph Rule, thank you so much.
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