Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
Speaker 1: where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
Speaker 1: today's best minds, and Galaine Maxwell has been moved to
Speaker 1: a minimum security prison camp in Texas.
Speaker 2: We have such a great jow for you today.
Speaker 1: Politico's Zach Stanton stops by to talk about Donald Trump's
Speaker 1: job number crisis. Then we'll talk to Tulane's Brian Edwards
Speaker 1: about the American Century.
Speaker 3: But first we have the news, Mollie, mister Epstein, his
Speaker 3: files have many reductions and whose name do you think
Speaker 3: they reducted in them?
Speaker 2: Donald Trump?
Speaker 1: So here's Jason Leopold, who's a really good reporter and
Speaker 1: who is sort of the master of FOYA.
Speaker 2: FOYA is the Freedom of Information Act.
Speaker 1: If you feel out forms the right way, you can
Speaker 1: get these FOYA files sent to you because you have
Speaker 1: this freedom of information until Trump takes it away, which
Speaker 1: seems inevitable at this point. Jason is a journalist at Bloomberg.
Speaker 1: Now he foiled some of the files around the Ebstein
Speaker 1: files because I don't think he was able to get that.
Speaker 1: But while we have labored to provide the public with
Speaker 1: maximum information regarding Epstein in the statement read, it is
Speaker 1: a determination of the Department and justin that no further
Speaker 1: disclosure would be warranted. So the FBI has redacted Donald
Speaker 1: Trump's name, along with the names of other prominent public figures,
Speaker 1: from references in the Epstein files. Three people familiar with
Speaker 1: the matter told Bloomberg's Jason Leopold, so internal directives instructed
Speaker 1: a thousand FBI agents to flag any mention of Trump
Speaker 1: during a March review of the roughly one hundred thousand
Speaker 1: pages of records. People familiar with the process told Bloomberg, So,
Speaker 1: think about this.
Speaker 2: So you'll have.
Speaker 1: People in the FBI telling a journalist that people sat
Speaker 1: down with a hundred thousand pages of records, and I'm
Speaker 1: sure there was more than that, because we know there
Speaker 1: were videos, there were photographs, and went through and looked
Speaker 1: for the name of Donald Trump to redact it. Redacting
Speaker 1: is when you take when you blacken a name so
Speaker 1: that people can't see it.
Speaker 2: It's meant to protect the privacy.
Speaker 1: You know, a lot of the victims might have their
Speaker 1: names were redacted, or to protect national security. I wonder
Speaker 1: what national security redacting Donald Trump's name from the Epstein
Speaker 1: files protects.
Speaker 2: This is just a crazy story.
Speaker 1: FBI agents were directed to search all documents associated with
Speaker 1: the Epstein case and determine which could be released. This
Speaker 1: is just such a crazy story. FBI personnel were said
Speaker 1: to have identified numerous references to Trump and other high
Speaker 1: profile people, with the names then redacted by feuer officers
Speaker 1: because they were private citizens at the time.
Speaker 2: Okay, so redacting names. It's just so suspicious, right, So.
Speaker 4: It feels like a pedophile cabal cover up. I feel
Speaker 4: like I'm cue not all of a sudden, yes, it's crazy.
Speaker 1: Well, it's just like if you were trying to cover
Speaker 1: something up, this would be the way to do it.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: This is also one of those things though that we
Speaker 4: all assumed would happen, but you can't say it out
Speaker 4: loud till it actually happens.
Speaker 5: We're all like, this is the next step.
Speaker 2: So this is the next step. Here we are, and
Speaker 2: there we go.
Speaker 5: Let's talk about some other nice, nice fuckery.
Speaker 4: I mean, I feel like this whole intro is just
Speaker 4: a big, long moment of fuckery, because these judges got
Speaker 4: together to talk about the horrors they've experienced since ruling
Speaker 4: against Trump, and you know, it was so disheartening to
Speaker 4: read this because we have to discuss it. But also
Speaker 4: when we discuss this, it also makes me feel like, well,
Speaker 4: now judges are going to hear how bad their lives
Speaker 4: are going to be if they rule against them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, but we have to talk about it
Speaker 1: because it's really important. So these judges are facing just
Speaker 1: their lives are becoming nightmares. And you know, there's a
Speaker 1: reason why these Republicans are such cowards, right that they're
Speaker 1: just letting Trump do whatever they want because they're scared,
Speaker 1: and so are judges, and so are all of us.
Speaker 2: Were all scared. It's really scary. That's what it is.
Speaker 1: Man. That's where we are in America right now. Federal
Speaker 1: judges worry. The judiciary is at stake. I'm aware. US
Speaker 1: District Judge John McConnell, who blocked Trump's federal aid freeze
Speaker 1: earlier this year, said his court has received four or
Speaker 1: five hundred file threatening voicemails. We're going to come for him,
Speaker 1: said one voicemail. You know what, motherfucker, your ass is
Speaker 1: going to be in prison. I mean, look, Trump encouraged this.
Speaker 1: This is not surprising. They receive these pizza deliveries their
Speaker 1: home address, indicating they've been docked. Sometimes they put in
Speaker 1: the last the pizza gets sent to them by the
Speaker 1: name of poor district Judge Esther Sallas's son who was
Speaker 1: killed in twenty twenty. This guy, Robert Lasnik said he
Speaker 1: was sent pizza's est has been amazing going on television.
Speaker 1: I was on Nicole's show with her. I mean, these
Speaker 1: people are putting their lives on the line to protect
Speaker 1: our democracy, to protect.
Speaker 2: The rule of law.
Speaker 1: And you know, then we have all these billionaires who
Speaker 1: who are too scared to even say anything.
Speaker 2: So here we are.
Speaker 4: So another really stupid news, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
Speaker 4: is going to shut down, which is going to mean
Speaker 4: very big things for PBS and NPR and also Donald
Speaker 4: Trump's jobs numbers.
Speaker 5: Wait, this is a lot of people who are going
Speaker 5: to be out a point.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Despite the efforts of Americans who called, voted, and petitioned
Speaker 1: Congress to preserve federal funding, we are now facing the
Speaker 1: difficult reality of closing our operations, so public broadcasting. I
Speaker 1: think there'll be some public broadcasting that'll still exist. By
Speaker 1: the way, it is one point one billion dollars in
Speaker 1: federal funding. This is like how much it's going to cost.
Speaker 1: I mean slightly more than how much It's going to
Speaker 1: cost to fix up Donald Trump's new plane. Yeah, just
Speaker 1: a fucking rounding error. But the point is not that
Speaker 1: it's about money. The point is that it's about control.
Speaker 5: So m it's silencing reporting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and silencing reporting.
Speaker 1: So hard to think of something worse than this, But
Speaker 1: here we are, ladies and gentlemen.
Speaker 2: Just a complete fucking shit show.
Speaker 5: Somali.
Speaker 4: We now have a report from Yale Budget Lab about
Speaker 4: Trump's tariffs, which I'm We've starting to become convinced shouldn't
Speaker 4: call teriffs, we should call his robbing of the American
Speaker 4: people to give to the rich. It's going to cost
Speaker 4: us all at least twenty four hundred dollars a year
Speaker 4: for the average home.
Speaker 1: Yeah, congratulations to all of us. Trump's tariffs are terrible,
Speaker 1: They're inflationary, their attacks on the consumer. It will cost
Speaker 1: twenty four hundred dollars per household the tariff rates combined
Speaker 1: with surprisingly weak jobs report for Friday morning, it's the
Speaker 1: latest that American household space and much more deep difficult.
Speaker 1: We went from the envy of the world to very
Speaker 1: much not just complete disaster.
Speaker 4: Personally, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, though,
Speaker 4: I livid at the Democratic establishment for not messaging this more.
Speaker 1: Here's the thing, if you want to like get in
Speaker 1: the weeds here, we have no mainstream media anymore. So
Speaker 1: you have a group of people who are Democratic electeds
Speaker 1: who are now tasked with transmitting what's happening. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm happy to blame them for a lot of stuff,
Speaker 1: because there's been mistakes have been made again and again
Speaker 1: and again on multiple levels, in multiple different ways. But
Speaker 1: I'm just not I don't you know, it's like an
Speaker 1: impossible situation. I don't know how you make up for
Speaker 1: the shortfall of people now getting their news from Charlie Kirk.
Speaker 1: I don't know how you do that.
Speaker 4: I think that's going on podcasts and making tiktoks about it.
Speaker 4: I mean, I think Zoron is the ouprint is that
Speaker 4: he has an issue that he thinks is important, he
Speaker 4: makes an engaging video on it, and that's how information
Speaker 4: is delivered.
Speaker 2: Now It's not quite so simple, but yes.
Speaker 1: Zach Stanton is the deputy editor of Playbook and a
Speaker 1: contributor to Political Magazine.
Speaker 2: Zack Stanton, welcome my pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1: Luckily we have waited until after the Friday news dump
Speaker 1: to go through all of the sewage I think we
Speaker 1: start with Trump didn't like the jobs reports, so he
Speaker 1: fired the statistician.
Speaker 6: Yes, he has fired the person in charge of jobs
Speaker 6: numbers at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, entirely because the
Speaker 6: jobs numbers were downgraded for previous months and they came
Speaker 6: in much weaker than expected for July. They always come
Speaker 6: out the first Friday of every month, we get the
Speaker 6: previous month's numbers.
Speaker 7: He didn't like the numbers.
Speaker 6: He had advanced notice of them, and so despite his
Speaker 6: claim that he just now found out about this, he
Speaker 6: had some advance warning. It's of a piece of certainly
Speaker 6: an ongoing politicization of the civil service, and of more
Speaker 6: broadly a sort of a purge that is taking place
Speaker 6: across pretty much everything that the federal government has its
Speaker 6: tendrils on, ranging from the Smithsonian, where we saw this
Speaker 6: week the sort of censoring of the impeachment exhibit. He
Speaker 6: didn't like it exactly. He didn't like it. Where this ends,
Speaker 6: it's hard to know. But it's also bizarre to me,
Speaker 6: just on a pure messaging or narrative level, in that
Speaker 6: you know, with the job numbers, and with recent economic moves,
Speaker 6: he had had sort of a good negative news cycle
Speaker 6: for Jerome Powell for the first time, and he immediately
Speaker 6: steps on it by doing something like this.
Speaker 1: Yes, I mean, the only thing Trump can do at
Speaker 1: this moment is bring the conversation back to Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaker 1: I think that is his only smart play I wanted
Speaker 1: to talk about. Her name is Erica mcer as, a
Speaker 1: Commissioner on Labor and Statistics MCAR. She was voted bipartisan,
Speaker 1: voting eighty six yes, is including Vice President Jade Events.
Speaker 6: Including Vice President Jadie Vance. But you know, it's it's
Speaker 6: in keeping with pretty much what we've seen from Vance,
Speaker 6: but also more broadly senate Republicans ever since Trump has
Speaker 6: re emerged as the center of the national conversation that
Speaker 6: really any ideological preferences that people have, or any sort
Speaker 6: of independent views of their own all gets subsumed by Trump.
Speaker 6: That he is sort of the yes or no, up
Speaker 6: or down question that defines our politics, or at least
Speaker 6: defines what it means to be a Republican. We've seen
Speaker 6: that this week, not only with things like this, but
Speaker 6: you know, we're now seeing like Republican Senate candidates do
Speaker 6: pro tiff ads, which is kind of a stunning development
Speaker 6: that I wouldn't have expected, you know, a year ago,
Speaker 6: at this time.
Speaker 7: Necessarily, it's just simply.
Speaker 6: A matter of whether or not Donald Trump is in
Speaker 6: favor of something, and that becomes sort of a litmus test,
Speaker 6: and all else flows from it.
Speaker 1: So he can fire the head of the Bureau of
Speaker 1: Labor Statistics. I'm going to get really nerdy with you
Speaker 1: here for a minute, because I was reading about the
Speaker 1: Bureau of Labor and Statistics. And as much as Trump
Speaker 1: is wrong to fire people who displease him, the reason
Speaker 1: why a lot of times these numbers are revised is
Speaker 1: because they don't get necessarily accurate measure And what needs
Speaker 1: to happen is people need to respond to surveys in
Speaker 1: order to get surveyed information, and so in fact, the
Speaker 1: surveys are getting a little bit less accurate because people
Speaker 1: do not trust the.
Speaker 2: Government as much.
Speaker 1: So as much as Trump is absolutely, are all numbers woke?
Speaker 1: Maybe yes, it does speak to a larger problem with
Speaker 1: trust and institutions and trust in the federal government.
Speaker 7: Absolutely.
Speaker 6: And the irony of it, of course, is that people
Speaker 6: will trust numbers even less now if they don't have
Speaker 6: any reason to believe that they're independently, verifiable or based
Speaker 6: in reality. It all just gets stuck in this general
Speaker 6: mud of seeming like it's all politics. And I think
Speaker 6: that's one of the challenges here, is that there are
Speaker 6: certain voters who are just cynical about it all and
Speaker 6: think that all politicians lie and don't necessarily differentiate between
Speaker 6: little eyes and consequential ones. And so it's difficult to
Speaker 6: know whether or not this is going to resonate with
Speaker 6: voters in the way that it should. But it's hard
Speaker 6: to imagine too many voters getting that worked up about
Speaker 6: the Bureau of Labor statistics. But it's like a canary
Speaker 6: in the coal mine in some sense.
Speaker 1: Well, and also, if you want to lower inflation, which
Speaker 1: it's not entirely clear that Donald Trump wants to lower inflation,
Speaker 1: but if you do want to make things cheaper, which
Speaker 1: if you were to say Donald Trump had been given
Speaker 1: a mandate in any way, shape or form, it would
Speaker 1: be to make things cheaper. Yes, you would want your
Speaker 1: government to be trusted, you would want your debt to
Speaker 1: be good, you would want your currency to be the
Speaker 1: standard and not to experience dollar flight, which seems like
Speaker 1: he's just at every point setting himself up for a
Speaker 1: world in which the dollar stops being the reserve currency
Speaker 1: and our debt becomes so expensive to service. He just
Speaker 1: feels right now like we are on the sort of
Speaker 1: edge of catastrophe.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you know in a way that that's how it's
Speaker 6: held for a while now. But it does feel, you know, certainly,
Speaker 6: with the economy in particular, that we're on some sort
Speaker 6: of precipice of no longer being you know, the big
Speaker 6: dog on the block.
Speaker 7: I guess you know that we're.
Speaker 6: No longer the ones that are sort of running the show,
Speaker 6: and that with the dollar getting weaker, which Trump sees
Speaker 6: is in many ways a good thing because it can
Speaker 6: boost exports. But between that and the size of the
Speaker 6: federal debt, there are any number of fronts on which
Speaker 6: it just feels like we're being squeezed and it's hard
Speaker 6: to know how to get out of that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know, and it's a real question. So
Speaker 1: let's talk about the political calculus. The house has been
Speaker 1: sent home by Mike Johnson a few days early.
Speaker 2: That was last week's drama. The Gang of Five has
Speaker 2: this plan. The rule is it called the rule of five,
Speaker 2: the Game of four five whatever.
Speaker 1: We're not into accuracy here, the Rule of five, the
Speaker 1: Gang of four, that crew they are going to release
Speaker 1: the Epstein files discuss.
Speaker 6: Well, you know, it's again it's hard to know how
Speaker 6: this exactly plays out.
Speaker 7: There is a reality that I.
Speaker 6: Think every Republican is facing right now, which is that
Speaker 6: back home in their districts for all of August, the
Speaker 6: House doesn't come back till September. Second, I think it
Speaker 6: is and between economic news, which is its own thing
Speaker 6: where they're not going to differentiate themselves from Trump and Epstein,
Speaker 6: which is now set to really dominate the conversation for
Speaker 6: the next couple of weeks because it has this strange
Speaker 6: lasting power in a way that very few stories have
Speaker 6: been able to break through and sort of remain center
Speaker 6: stage in the Trump era. You have this pressure that
Speaker 6: they're facing. It's not necessarily something we for Playbook talk
Speaker 6: to a Republican strategist who said that it's not necessarily
Speaker 6: that it's the thing that most voters will care about,
Speaker 6: but it is the thing that the loudest voters will
Speaker 6: care about. And so when you go to a town
Speaker 6: hall Forum or something like that. It is the type
Speaker 6: of thing they're going to be pressed on, you know,
Speaker 6: they're going to look for opportunities here to show some
Speaker 6: if not independence, then some responsiveness to what voters want.
Speaker 6: And the thing with this issue, compared to so many
Speaker 6: other criticisms of Donald Trump, is that Epstein Files is
Speaker 6: like really easy to understand. It's like it's very digestible
Speaker 6: in a way that like, if I'm talking about the
Speaker 6: Bureau of Labor Statistics firing, I have to explain it,
Speaker 6: like there's so much backstory there, whereas Epstein is like easy,
Speaker 6: you know, it's just a snap of the fingers. You
Speaker 6: can understand what's at stake and what the moving parts are.
Speaker 6: And so I think it resonates with folks. So we'll
Speaker 6: see how that actually comes through to fruition.
Speaker 8: The Ploomberg story about the foyer, where Jason Leopold sees
Speaker 8: that they have had all of these people in the
Speaker 8: FBI redact Trump's name from the files.
Speaker 2: That feels like another two days on the story.
Speaker 6: Yeah, these things just sort of snowball with this story
Speaker 6: in particular, it's just sort of this smoke that stays
Speaker 6: in the air and it's like you have a smoky
Speaker 6: room with a fan, but the fan doesn't suck the
Speaker 6: air out, it just circulates. And that's kind of what
Speaker 6: they're stuck in. And you know the thing with Trump
Speaker 6: is that he's thrown so many things against the wall
Speaker 6: here to try and see what will stick, to try
Speaker 6: and change the conversation in some way, and maybe the
Speaker 6: conversation will change and people will talk about the Bureau
Speaker 6: of Labor statistics are something else, terriffs, but none of
Speaker 6: it seems to really be erasing this from people's consciousness.
Speaker 1: My favorite part was said, the White House says this
Speaker 1: story is.
Speaker 2: Over, and I was like, I know you want the
Speaker 2: story to be over, but you don't get to say it.
Speaker 1: And it's like it is an interesting moment because Trump
Speaker 1: has been so good at bifurcating reality and creating a
Speaker 1: base that trusts him more than they trust anything else,
Speaker 1: right their own families. But there's something about this story
Speaker 1: that gets to the core. I have this theory that
Speaker 1: Trump is a coastal elitist, the way that I am right,
Speaker 1: but I'm much poorer than he is. The point here
Speaker 1: is he's a coastal elitist. Right always grew up with
Speaker 1: wealth power, friends with all of the Jeffrey Epstein people, right,
Speaker 1: the fanciest people, the people who is now his administration
Speaker 1: is trying to you know, academics, literati, you know, the
Speaker 1: members of the mainstream media, the people who he is
Speaker 1: now targeting.
Speaker 2: Those are the people that he grew up with.
Speaker 1: So my question is is it that the base remembers
Speaker 1: that he is actually not one of them?
Speaker 2: That is there there's some little bit.
Speaker 1: Of this story that is like, oh, actually he's he's
Speaker 1: actually in the intelligence for lack of a better word,
Speaker 1: then you know, he is a member of the glitarati.
Speaker 1: He can't drain the swamp because he's in the swamp.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you know, I think that for some people, being
Speaker 6: of the swamp, for lack of a better way of
Speaker 6: putting it, is kind of an asset. Like, you know,
Speaker 6: there's this idea that he understands this world, which is
Speaker 6: why he's uniquely able to be immune to its charms
Speaker 6: or something like that, and so he's going to fight
Speaker 6: for us against them. And this is something that's been
Speaker 6: part of his brand for quite some time. You know,
Speaker 6: I remember years ago I read I came across a
Speaker 6: New York magazine story from I want to say two
Speaker 6: thousand and four, two thousand and five that was basically
Speaker 6: this giant feature piece in New York Magazine advocating for
Speaker 6: New York City to become its own nation. And you know,
Speaker 6: it's a little bit of a modest idea type approach,
Speaker 6: but the very tail end of the story of the
Speaker 6: article is suggesting, you know, that we will need someone
Speaker 6: who is able to speak New York Keys but also
Speaker 6: resonates with read America, how about Donald Trump? And it
Speaker 6: was like Trump was able to be seen as relatable
Speaker 6: to a lot of people and in a similar way,
Speaker 6: though it's very different and I'm not at all comparing
Speaker 6: them in a broad sense, but it's reminiscent of like
Speaker 6: Richard Nixon always having the sort of chip on his
Speaker 6: shoulder at like not being at the cool kids table.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 6: In Nixon's case, he tried to join this nice fraternity
Speaker 6: in college and was denied, and so he started his
Speaker 6: own competing fraternity that was called, I think was the
Speaker 6: Orthogonians or something like that, the idea being that they
Speaker 6: were all like right angles, they were all squares, and
Speaker 6: so he found that he was able to gain power
Speaker 6: and influence on campus by really playing to people's insecurities
Speaker 6: about being left out and not being in the inside crowd.
Speaker 6: And for Donald Trump, there's been sort of a similar
Speaker 6: dynamic in many ways where he is part of this
Speaker 6: crowd and really seeks its approval. But there's always part
Speaker 6: of him that's going to be, you know, the kid
Speaker 6: from Queens who is struggling to break through in Manhattan
Speaker 6: and trying to get the approval of those folks. And
Speaker 6: that's part of the reason why he's so solicitous, even
Speaker 6: as he hates The New York Times is very obsessed
Speaker 6: with you know, how they cover him all of us
Speaker 6: like validation. It's a very human thing for Donald Trump.
Speaker 6: It's something that is a through line that carries through
Speaker 6: decades of his public life.
Speaker 1: Talk to me about the redistricting. Besides Trump firing the
Speaker 1: head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the redistricting is
Speaker 1: a big deal. Talk me through what you think of
Speaker 1: it as a sort of play and does it work?
Speaker 1: And also, like you know, there's so many parts of
Speaker 1: this story like it's an anti democratic, it's this is that,
Speaker 1: But I also wonder and.
Speaker 2: I want you to talk us through it.
Speaker 1: Like people who turn out for Trump don't necessarily turn
Speaker 1: out for random R And so the idea that you're
Speaker 1: going to so if you if you redistrict all these
Speaker 1: seats in Texas to our plus one or our plus four.
Speaker 2: You know Trump won it by nine. So talk us
Speaker 2: through that exactly.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So in Texas, just for those who haven't heard about it,
Speaker 6: Texas is undergoing a redistricting at Trump's behest to create
Speaker 6: essentially five new Republican US House seats. This is in
Speaker 6: order to pad the overall nationwide US House majority that
Speaker 6: Republicans have, and it's doing so really against the wishes
Speaker 6: of a lot of Republican incumbents in Texas who are
Speaker 6: mindful of not wanting to imperil the advantage of their incumbency.
Speaker 6: And what I mean by that is that in order
Speaker 6: to create five new Republican districts, you need to dilute
Speaker 6: the number of Republicans in the existing districts. And so,
Speaker 6: in a wave election, if it works out well for Democrats,
Speaker 6: and it generally tends to be that midterms do work
Speaker 6: out well for the party that not in power, in
Speaker 6: a wave election, you potentially could have a good year
Speaker 6: for Democrats in a place like Texas. But you know,
Speaker 6: the Republican calculus, as you note, is really based on
Speaker 6: this idea that Trump voters are Republican voters, and I
Speaker 6: don't necessarily see evidence that that's entirely the case. You know,
Speaker 6: Democrats in recent cycles have performed exceptionally well in low
Speaker 6: turnout elections. This is true of special elections, it's true
Speaker 6: of midterms. You know, it's very different than it was
Speaker 6: decades ago, when Republicans were the ones that dominated in
Speaker 6: low turnout elections.
Speaker 7: Democrats do now.
Speaker 6: And so if you're looking at the midterms in twenty
Speaker 6: twenty six, and you're looking at, you know, an election
Speaker 6: where Trump is not going to be on the ballot,
Speaker 6: and so a lot of the low propensity voters are
Speaker 6: either not going to vote, or you know, there is
Speaker 6: this idea that a lot of voters have that Trump
Speaker 6: is like you know, has had all these different positions
Speaker 6: over the years, and so he's not doctrinaire, and so
Speaker 6: he's different, He's not like the other Republicans. You know,
Speaker 6: this is a way that some people think about it.
Speaker 6: Given all of that, you know, it's hard to know
Speaker 6: whether this calculus that they've made is it all going
Speaker 6: to work out for them? But what Texas is doing
Speaker 6: is sort of setting off this arms race for redistricting nationwide,
Speaker 6: where you have other red states also at Trump's behest
Speaker 6: Trump in the White House, pressuring them to try and
Speaker 6: do similar mid cycle redistricting, which is very unusual. You
Speaker 6: only have redistricting once every ten years in normal circumstance.
Speaker 6: But they're looking at doing it in Ohio where JD.
Speaker 6: Vances is sort of inveighing on Republicans there to try
Speaker 6: and do something and potentially take out someone like a
Speaker 6: Marci Capito type in the Toledo area. They're talking about
Speaker 6: doing it in Florida, where Governor DeSantis is even talking
Speaker 6: about trying to pay for a census before twenty thirty.
Speaker 7: God love them and.
Speaker 6: The idea that you know there too they can maybe
Speaker 6: squeeze out a couple more Republican House seats. And meanwhile
Speaker 6: in California you have sort of this response that's happening
Speaker 6: from Governor Gavin Newsom who notes that there are still
Speaker 6: I think nine Republicans in the congressional delegation not for
Speaker 6: a law. Yeah, and so like there is an easy
Speaker 6: scenario in which you can draw these maps. But the
Speaker 6: problem that you have in California is a problem that
Speaker 6: you have in a lot of Blue states, which is
Speaker 6: that many Blue states have sort of unilaterally disarmed themselves
Speaker 6: in this fight by passing nonpartisan redistricting commissions, this idea
Speaker 6: being that district shouldn't be drawn by politicians, they should
Speaker 6: be drawn in a nonpartisan, in a fair way. And
Speaker 6: in California, voters enacted this years ago. And what Newson
Speaker 6: would have to do, and what he's talking about doing
Speaker 6: is going before voters this year and basically saying, yeah,
Speaker 6: doing this kind of he says, as a one time thing.
Speaker 6: But you know, once you open Pandora's box, you can't
Speaker 6: really close it again, and so it's hard to know.
Speaker 6: It just seems like this is a spiral that is
Speaker 6: hard to stop once it starts. Once one state redistricts
Speaker 6: another one who's going to follow a suit, and it
Speaker 6: just goes on and on.
Speaker 2: We're at a time but on the scale of how
Speaker 2: fucked we are.
Speaker 1: One being like a constitution, normal constitutional democracy, ten being
Speaker 1: uh huh, where do you think we are here?
Speaker 7: That's a good question.
Speaker 6: I mean, it would depend on the day and probably
Speaker 6: depend on how much sleep I've got.
Speaker 7: But you know, but maybe a six and a half.
Speaker 6: We'll go six six, six and a half is good.
Speaker 7: That's good.
Speaker 2: A solid six.
Speaker 1: Closing PBS got us to six and a half, I
Speaker 1: think exactly, Yes, Zack Stanton, will you please come back anytime?
Speaker 7: Happy to be here.
Speaker 1: Brian Edwards is the dean of the School of Liberal
Speaker 1: Arts at Too Late. Welcome to Fast Politics, Brian Edwards.
Speaker 9: It is so great to be here as someone who's
Speaker 9: been enjoying listening to your show for a long time.
Speaker 1: As we say, we do this with Pete Siegel from
Speaker 1: Wait Waite, you're a longtime listener, first time caller. I
Speaker 1: really wanted to talk to you about this idea of
Speaker 1: after the American century, like that there was a moment
Speaker 1: in nineteen forty one, after sort of right at the
Speaker 1: tail end of World War Two, when a mayor was
Speaker 1: we were the sort of the center of the.
Speaker 2: World, and perhaps we are not anymore.
Speaker 1: So this is an idea brought on by a book
Speaker 1: you've written a while ago that really did breakthrough from
Speaker 1: the academic world to the cultural world. So I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously those two things are the same, but talk to
Speaker 1: us about what that means.
Speaker 9: Well, the idea of the American century is really, as
Speaker 9: you said, influential in the second half or a little
Speaker 9: bit the last sixty years of the century. And the
Speaker 9: question of when it ends as interesting. Henry Luce Winter
Speaker 9: of nineteen forty one, months before Pearl Harbor, publishes this
Speaker 9: massively influential editorial in which he argues that although the
Speaker 9: United States wasn't yet in the war, we already were kind.
Speaker 7: Of in the war to a certain extent.
Speaker 9: It's a very interesting argument, and that really that the
Speaker 9: world was about to become a century ruled by America,
Speaker 9: American culture, and he lays out this idea of what
Speaker 9: we would come to call soft power, that the United
Speaker 9: States was going to be really the leader of a
Speaker 9: certain way of imagining the world that would follow World
Speaker 9: War Two. I mean, this is still when it comes out,
Speaker 9: not only is the war happening, but it's still a
Speaker 9: world dominated in many ways by British and French imperialism, colonialism.
Speaker 9: I mean, this idea that never said on the British Empire.
Speaker 9: That was still the world that we were living in,
Speaker 9: and the United States did not have whether or not geopolitically, it.
Speaker 7: Was in that moment of his sentence, it hadn't.
Speaker 9: We hadn't come to terms with ourselves as leaders in
Speaker 9: that way. So what I love about the argument, and
Speaker 9: what's so fascinating about it is he says in this
Speaker 9: long essay that things like American slang and music and
Speaker 9: culture would have a political purpose or have a political
Speaker 9: efficacy and make the world one that would be American.
Speaker 9: And of course he's right to a certain extent. I mean,
Speaker 9: and one of the really interesting things about US power
Speaker 9: post World War two is that as the colonial empires
Speaker 9: of Europe, of Britain and France in particular, start to
Speaker 9: fall apart in the wake of World War Two, the
Speaker 9: US doesn't take on the mantle in the same way,
Speaker 9: but we do nonetheless become the global superpower, and American
Speaker 9: culture is incredibly efficient in setting the stage for that.
Speaker 7: How long does that last? As a question does it end?
Speaker 7: And when would it end?
Speaker 9: That's really been on my mind for a really long time,
Speaker 9: and in part because I spent a lot of time
Speaker 9: outside the United States looking at HOW and talking to
Speaker 9: folks at HOW and studying how American popular culture, movies,
Speaker 9: digital culture, music culture, then social media culture, shopping malls,
Speaker 9: architecture cut starts to be copied around the.
Speaker 7: World in sometimes really surprising ways.
Speaker 2: So tell me when this period sort of starts and
Speaker 2: when it ends.
Speaker 7: I would say it starts during World War two. I
Speaker 7: mean I do.
Speaker 9: I'll follow Loose himself and say that his naming of
Speaker 9: the American Century is at a key moment because there's
Speaker 9: this internal debate politically about getting involved in the war.
Speaker 9: And if you look backwards. Even though, of course when
Speaker 9: when when Y two K was we thought and nicknaming
Speaker 9: the end of the twentieth century.
Speaker 7: I remember it.
Speaker 9: At the time, we probably had on our coffee tables,
Speaker 9: you know, these big books the American Century. President Clinton
Speaker 9: was referring to kind of, you know, the end of
Speaker 9: this century. We started to name it backwards one hundred years,
Speaker 9: but really it was the conditions for the American Century
Speaker 9: were post war, and you know, and what's interesting too,
Speaker 9: is how the Europeans, especially the French and Western Europeans,
Speaker 9: felt a bit of anxiety about the rise of American
Speaker 9: soft power.
Speaker 7: The French used to call it.
Speaker 9: In the fifties and sixties coca colin, coca colonization, Coca colonization.
Speaker 7: I guess this idea. I mean it's great.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 9: Then in Europe, you know, in the eighties and nineties
Speaker 9: when popular music was taking over the radios sum European countries.
Speaker 9: I think Spain it limited the number of American songs
Speaker 9: that even could be played per hour because the culture
Speaker 9: was so you know, charismatic. Of course, the second half
Speaker 9: of the twenty century really is a very dominant time.
Speaker 9: As Hollywood starts to you know, continue to grow, and
Speaker 9: movie theaters around the world are just filled with American cinema.
Speaker 9: The culture kind of pendulum shifts. Does it end, you know,
Speaker 9: with nine to eleven? And this is a question we
Speaker 9: can say, when does it end? I don't think it
Speaker 9: ends right.
Speaker 8: The soft power I want to talk about solf power.
Speaker 1: The soft power that has been has been given up
Speaker 1: by Marco Rubio and Trump and Trump two point zero.
Speaker 1: So what does it mean to give up soft power
Speaker 1: in a global sense?
Speaker 7: Well, what is soft power?
Speaker 9: Soft power is something that kind of operates on another wavelength,
Speaker 9: that's doing work for a nation without trying to do work.
Speaker 9: It's doing work for a nation without even being on
Speaker 9: this same side of the political hard so called hard power.
Speaker 9: You might have Hollywood films and Hollywood filmmakers at different
Speaker 9: moments a critical of military actions by the US and
Speaker 9: still be effective at making it possible for the United
Speaker 9: States to act in certain ways.
Speaker 7: I'll give you an example.
Speaker 9: You know, I was spending a lot of time in
Speaker 9: the first decade of this century writing a book, writing
Speaker 9: this book called After the American Century, and shuttling back
Speaker 9: and forth between Morocco, Egypt, Iran, and Lebanon. And at
Speaker 9: the time the movie Babbel was incredibly popular in the
Speaker 9: United States, and euraut To the director, was very critical
Speaker 9: of the so called War on Terror. But this film
Speaker 9: was just incredibly resisted, very strongly by folks in Muslim
Speaker 9: majority countries as being very hostile to them. So it
Speaker 9: didn't it doesn't even necessarily matter what the explicit politics
Speaker 9: of American culture makers might be to to kind of
Speaker 9: help pave the you know, pave the way for for
Speaker 9: hard power to operate, and so that could happen in
Speaker 9: a lot of places.
Speaker 7: I mean, and it's very abstract.
Speaker 1: I wonder if you could talk about this idea after history,
Speaker 1: because it strikes me and I really like Francis, but
Speaker 1: talk about calling balls and strikes a little early I
Speaker 1: wonder if you could sort of talk about it and
Speaker 1: sort of get us to where we are right now.
Speaker 9: Yeah, well, of course, you know the idea of the
Speaker 9: end of history that Francis Fukuyama proposes. You know, the
Speaker 9: nineteen nineties is a really interesting decade because it looks
Speaker 9: like for a moment, or for an extended moment of
Speaker 9: the nineties, that with the apparent fall of the Soviet Union,
Speaker 9: that we had won, that there was an economic and
Speaker 9: cultural system that won. And so there's a number of
Speaker 9: people who are claiming kind of victory and that what
Speaker 9: would come next. I mean, this is why the nineties
Speaker 9: are really interesting. Of course, you know, conflicts continue through
Speaker 9: the nineties. There was not the end of history, and
Speaker 9: what's really brewing, particularly in the part of the world
Speaker 9: that I was living in and spending a lot of
Speaker 9: time in North Africa, in the Middle East, there is
Speaker 9: a whole lot of reconfigurations happening between the end of
Speaker 9: the Iran Iraq War and nine to eleven. Really in
Speaker 9: nineties are a very fraught period obviously in the Balkans
Speaker 9: as well. So this calling you said, calling the calling
Speaker 9: the count a little bit too early for sure, as
Speaker 9: if the Cold War, the terms of engagement were between
Speaker 9: two economic systems, and we had won.
Speaker 7: Clearly was not the case. Something else was happening.
Speaker 9: But the other thing that's happening that I think is
Speaker 9: really important to thinking about soft power and really important
Speaker 9: to thinking about the.
Speaker 7: Present moment is the digital revolution.
Speaker 9: Because Henry Lewis, after all, was the was the head
Speaker 9: of Time magazine, head of Time Life, Right, he was
Speaker 9: really a publisher in what I would call the analog age.
Speaker 9: You know, we're reading his publications in Life magazine, Hollywood
Speaker 9: pictures are being carried around in canisters. The radio and
Speaker 9: television operated in a tremendously different way than they do today,
Speaker 9: needless to say. And it was an analog logic for
Speaker 9: how people would engage with American soft power, right. I
Speaker 9: call it like broadcasting logic of broadcasting. Remember the RCA
Speaker 9: Victor kind of logo, where there's this dog listening to
Speaker 9: a kind of the trub the ear of a record player.
Speaker 9: Like that was this idea that America would give culture
Speaker 9: and the rest of the world would listen and take
Speaker 9: it all in and not have anything to say about it.
Speaker 9: The digital revolution makes clear that that that's not the
Speaker 9: way culture operates. People can listen, they can talk back,
Speaker 9: they can engage back. Now, this is quite obvious to
Speaker 9: anybody now, because we're used to commenting, we're used to sharing,
Speaker 9: we're used to being all of us actors in making
Speaker 9: culture happen. And that's a tremendous difference that the twenty
Speaker 9: first century starts to bring in, and it therefore changes
Speaker 9: how soft power operates. People engage with American cultural products.
Speaker 9: The products themselves become things like Twitter and Facebook and
Speaker 9: eventually Instagram.
Speaker 7: And I remember being, you know, in.
Speaker 9: Egypt before the Talkerer uprisings, the Middle East uprisings two
Speaker 9: thousand and nine, twenty ten, twenty eleven, and talking to
Speaker 9: young Egyptians and they're like, how can we have a voice.
Speaker 9: This was right before everybody with a smartphone could have
Speaker 9: a voice. And in fact, the Middle East uprisings of
Speaker 9: that period were incredibly propelled by millions and millions of
Speaker 9: people now being able to communicate with each other in
Speaker 9: ways that they hadn't been able to before.
Speaker 7: So it's really important what.
Speaker 9: We think about soft power, and we think about Henry
Speaker 9: Loos and this idea of an American century to think
Speaker 9: about how culture moves through the world, how all of
Speaker 9: us engage with it. I mean, here we are in
Speaker 9: a podcast right forms that just didn't exist in this
Speaker 9: earlier moment, and it changes absolutely everything about politics. To me,
Speaker 9: that is incredibly important to talk about at this moment,
Speaker 9: especially because of the relationship of this presidency and this
Speaker 9: president with things like reality television, with social media being
Speaker 9: quite a genius at it actually being very able to
Speaker 9: use the prevailing technologies. You know, they use to say that,
Speaker 9: you know, when you look at every presidential campaign, you know,
Speaker 9: you decide who the winner is. I always have thought
Speaker 9: that whoever was able to best use the then prevailing
Speaker 9: entertainment technology, whether it was Kennedy against Nixon and the
Speaker 9: television debates, or those who could use the Internet at
Speaker 9: different moments, you know, would be the winner. And I
Speaker 9: think that to really understand how soft powered American hard
Speaker 9: power now are in tension with each other, you have
Speaker 9: to think about the president and the presidency in relationship
Speaker 9: to those media technologies, including reality television, which is in
Speaker 9: a lot of ways what we feel like we're watching
Speaker 9: even while we're watching global politics.
Speaker 7: That's not incidental in my opinion.
Speaker 2: Now we're just going to go into therapy.
Speaker 1: For me, one of the things that makes me really
Speaker 1: anxious is this sort of post truth society, This sort
Speaker 1: of idea that we are in America where there are
Speaker 1: two sets of facts.
Speaker 2: That our president is on Earth to a.
Speaker 1: Lot of his people on Earth too, some of us
Speaker 1: are on Earth one make me feel better about that
Speaker 1: we're in this bifurcated reality.
Speaker 2: There's an Earth one on Earth two.
Speaker 1: A certain percentage of Americans are occupying Earth too. We're
Speaker 1: in a country where truth is not universally agreed upon.
Speaker 9: Discuss well, I mean this idea of the filter bubble,
Speaker 9: I guess is what some people used to call it,
Speaker 9: That the media that we most of us get is
Speaker 9: curated for us by algorithms that we ourselves have something
Speaker 9: to do with creating, is of course, really worries for
Speaker 9: all of us who believe in having public discourse and
Speaker 9: having real and open conversation debate around the things that
Speaker 9: matter which our country are politics and so on, and
Speaker 9: so the idea that we can't find ways to bridge
Speaker 9: those gaps, whether it's made literal by like the idea
Speaker 9: of the political aisle, or in metaphor, I guess, by
Speaker 9: your idea of Earth one or Earth two, or this
Speaker 9: idea of the filter bubble, that we can't break through
Speaker 9: it that just like you know that that's really worrisome.
Speaker 9: I mean, I get really patriotic at this moment as
Speaker 9: I say, my kids think I'm the most patriotic member
Speaker 9: of our family, and I think, you know, I start
Speaker 9: going back to the founders of the United States that
Speaker 9: we need a civic discourse to have a successful democracy,
Speaker 9: and then bring it to the present with how is
Speaker 9: it that we engage with ideas and news and information.
Speaker 9: So your idea of Earth's too Yeah, that's really worrisome,
Speaker 9: this idea that we can't hear. I mean, I hope
Speaker 9: I'm not the only I know. Lots of us try
Speaker 9: to consume media from a lot of different perspectives. It's
Speaker 9: a great thought experiment. If someone listening doesn't do it themselves.
Speaker 9: Something that you care a lot about, go see how
Speaker 9: it's being reported in a completely different venue than than
Speaker 9: your own political persuasion, and it is.
Speaker 7: It's as if it's a different reality.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it does strike me that it seems like social
Speaker 1: media is growing, mainstream media is shrinking, reporting is suffering,
Speaker 1: AI is poised to go to zero, right, they will
Speaker 1: no longer link to reporting. They will just you know,
Speaker 1: your AI butler will go and get your facts. And
Speaker 1: maybe they're right and maybe they're wrong. I mean, doesn't
Speaker 1: this seem like we're heading towards a catastrophe?
Speaker 9: Well, where's my optimism in all that? I mean my optimism.
Speaker 9: I am optimistic in this sense. And by the way,
Speaker 9: sitting standing here in New Orleans in August, where it's
Speaker 9: an immensely hotter and more humid than wherever you are
Speaker 9: right now, is I can still be optimistic here. My
Speaker 9: optimism is that there are so many more avenues and
Speaker 9: venues for journalists and people with opinions and ideas to
Speaker 9: enter into the discourse that that in itself is a
Speaker 9: good thing.
Speaker 7: It's super risky.
Speaker 9: Because the algorithms are fed, you know, or tend to be,
Speaker 9: as much as we understand, fed by emotional responses and
Speaker 9: self perpetuating filter bubbles, as I said, and so we
Speaker 9: got to figure out ways to get outside of them.
Speaker 7: And AI the way you described it.
Speaker 9: You know, as as it curates and as it brings
Speaker 9: things together, seems to limit even further. So that's a
Speaker 9: pessimics experience. But my optimism is that there's more and
Speaker 9: more ways for folks to enter into the discourse. That's
Speaker 9: I do believe in the discourse. I know it's one
Speaker 9: of your favorite words.
Speaker 2: Do you think that's enough.
Speaker 7: We have to be active in our engagement with it.
Speaker 1: At least twenty five percent of the country, including much
Speaker 1: of the federal government, has a sort of fact free
Speaker 1: vision of what the future can be, right, and you
Speaker 1: have a percentage of the country that's completely disengaged right
Speaker 1: from any sense of what's happening. It just strikes me
Speaker 1: that it's an unsustainable pottern.
Speaker 9: You know, as an educator, I see college students coming
Speaker 9: to us who want to break free of that, who
Speaker 9: are anxious about certainly anxious, and often have ideas about
Speaker 9: how we can break free of that and looking for
Speaker 9: other venues. And one thing that's true about the ways
Speaker 9: in which digital media intersects with culture is endlessly creative
Speaker 9: and finding new places for us in ways for us
Speaker 9: to engage. The rise of substack, the rise of podcasts,
Speaker 9: the rise of different ways that work outside of the
Speaker 9: kind of corporate media culture that could otherwise be very stifling.
Speaker 9: I mean, that's the interesting. Yeah, we're talking about now
Speaker 9: we're talking about the media. But that's the interesting tension
Speaker 9: as people who again young people.
Speaker 7: As an educator, I always.
Speaker 9: Say you have to be an optimist if you're an educator,
Speaker 9: because the folks who are in front of you always
Speaker 9: coming into college are coming next, are going to be
Speaker 9: the ones who are pretty soon going to be running
Speaker 9: the show.
Speaker 7: And they are right now.
Speaker 9: My sense for the last few years is really frustrated
Speaker 9: at what they've inherited. They've frustrated by cancel culture. They're
Speaker 9: certainly frustrated by political culture. And their creativity is something
Speaker 9: that we're trying to mold.
Speaker 7: Or help or facilitate.
Speaker 9: So that's the incredible novelty and creativity that we keep
Speaker 9: seeing in the realm of culture and in the realm
Speaker 9: of how journalism and discourse kind of intersect with it.
Speaker 9: But I mean, the other thing that we were talking
Speaker 9: about before around the American Century relates to that, right,
Speaker 9: because one of the things that the intersection of the
Speaker 9: American century logic, let's go back, like now get a
Speaker 9: little bit more contemporary, go back to post nine to
Speaker 9: eleven world when we get into this long war on terror, right,
Speaker 9: which also consumes our culture becomes our form of this
Speaker 9: twenty year war. That's also our form of entertainment and
Speaker 9: television dramas. And we're obsessed with this war against an emotion, right,
Speaker 9: a war named against an emotion, not named against an
Speaker 9: actual antagonist. It's everywhere, It's everywhere, and you can't find it.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 9: That's very existential for all of us for the last
Speaker 9: two decades, and really, in some ways COVID kind of
Speaker 9: distracts us from that and wipes out that sensation that
Speaker 9: was really prevailing. But during all that time, and of
Speaker 9: course American culture of soft power continues, it is still
Speaker 9: incredibly popular. I mean again, I've just been on four
Speaker 9: continents this summer. I've just been trapped doing a lot
Speaker 9: of travel, talking to a lot of folks in South America,
Speaker 9: Southeast Asia, Western Europe, Latin America and Singapore and so on.
Speaker 9: And you still see everywhere American culture is still very popular.
Speaker 9: It's not the only popular thing, but there's this disassociation
Speaker 9: of our politics with the popularity of our culture. American
Speaker 9: language that you know, English language, but really from American
Speaker 9: culture is of course more and more dominant around the world.
Speaker 7: But it doesn't work the way it did.
Speaker 9: Under Henry Lus's American Century model, you could love the
Speaker 9: culture and get very and hate the politics, will be
Speaker 9: resistant to the politics. And that wasn't how it was
Speaker 9: supposed to go. Under the American Century line. You're supposed
Speaker 9: to see in American music and Hollywood and jazz and
Speaker 9: abstract expressionism in the twentieth century, that this was a
Speaker 9: culture of freedom and everybody wanted freedom after it all.
Speaker 9: But now the thing that really is worrisome in a
Speaker 9: sense is that that is that equation is falling apart.
Speaker 7: Higher education is a part of the two.
Speaker 9: I mean, part of the soft power of the United
Speaker 9: States is that American higher educa educated is, you know,
Speaker 9: as a model that folks really admired around the world.
Speaker 9: Most of the great universities, by every ranking were located
Speaker 9: in the United States, I mean, you know, with some
Speaker 9: notable important exceptions, and even when people didn't aspire to
Speaker 9: come study in the United States, they were around the
Speaker 9: world copying the model, whether it was the seminar room,
Speaker 9: whether it was the idea of the campus, or the
Speaker 9: liberal arts. Kind of general curriculum was being sometimes with
Speaker 9: the help of American universities in the Middle East and
Speaker 9: the Gulf and around the world and other times just
Speaker 9: autonomously by different countries Like that was a model that
Speaker 9: people really really respected American science and science and technology
Speaker 9: the same thing.
Speaker 7: Right, We've been that kind of soft power too.
Speaker 2: Brian Edwards, thank you, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 7: Well, it's great chatting Litiamali. I really appreciate the chance
Speaker 7: a moment.
Speaker 4: Jesse Cannon Molly, do you report from Senator Richard Blumenthal
Speaker 4: of Connecticut has an interesting conclusion, which those wasted twenty
Speaker 4: one point seven billion in just six months.
Speaker 1: Fraud, waste and abuse, maybe not fraud, but certainly waste
Speaker 1: and absolute abuse.
Speaker 2: Elon mus Department of Government was.
Speaker 1: Expensive, but luckily he's a billionaire, so he could just
Speaker 1: give that money. Wasting government funds, making a series of mistake.
Speaker 1: You know, like half the country, half the federal government
Speaker 1: is being paid to not work at this moment, not
Speaker 1: quite half, but a lot of federal employees.
Speaker 2: They wasted twenty one billion dollars. Yeah, they suck.
Speaker 1: I mean you could have seen that when it was happening, right,
Speaker 1: the Deferbred resignation program where they paid all these people
Speaker 1: not to work fourteen point eight billion. Because all these
Speaker 1: people are not are being paid not to work, six
Speaker 1: point one billion spent on one hundred thousand plus workers
Speaker 1: placed an administrative leave pending separation. And then also you're
Speaker 1: going to eventually have to retrain the people you're going
Speaker 1: to have to rehire, and that's going to be a
Speaker 1: disaster too. I mean, this is so incredibly wait a ball,
Speaker 1: let's real talk. A lot of stupid crap has happened
Speaker 1: in the last six months, but this is the stupidest
Speaker 1: and the crappiest.
Speaker 2: Quote me.
Speaker 1: That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
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Speaker 2: Thanks for listening.