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. Donald Trump has rescinded almost all of
Speaker 1: Joe Biden's executive orders. We have such a great show
Speaker 1: for you today, Samophoores, Dave Weigel stops by to talk
Speaker 1: about what is going on in American politics, Donald Trump
Speaker 1: and his inauguration. Then we'll talk to Faiz Shakir about
Speaker 1: his run to head the Democratic National Committee. But first
Speaker 1: the news.
Speaker 2: So Mali yesterday, so much happened.
Speaker 3: We basically have to just pick up where we left
Speaker 3: off and start talking about some more of the things
Speaker 3: that are.
Speaker 2: Unfolding before us.
Speaker 3: The first of which I will shock you is changes
Speaker 3: to DII and I don't mean Don Eric and Evanka.
Speaker 1: Nobody has never thought it was Don Eric and Evanka.
Speaker 2: So what are you talking about? That's what it.
Speaker 1: Is, Donald Trump. I can't believe you anyway. That's like
Speaker 1: the worst dad joke ever, Donald Trump.
Speaker 2: That's why I did it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, has declared war on DEI. Now again, this is
Speaker 1: all this Christopher Rufo stuff about fighting against diversity, fighting
Speaker 1: against inclusion, fighting against equity. Think about how insane. It
Speaker 1: is that somehow, this affluent white guy who has been
Speaker 1: born into money is trying to make things more fair
Speaker 1: by taking away one of the little bits of things
Speaker 1: that we have in this country. To try and protect
Speaker 1: people of color anyway and people who are from diverse backgrounds,
Speaker 1: he has put all ordered all all US government staff
Speaker 1: working on DEI to be put on immediate paid administrative leave.
Speaker 1: So that means people who are like working on DEI
Speaker 1: in the army, that means people who are tangentially related
Speaker 1: to DEI. In an executive order issued on Tuesday, Trump
Speaker 1: called for an end to dangerous, demeaning and immoral programs.
Speaker 1: I mean, George Orwell would be so jealous of the
Speaker 1: kind of double speak that Donald Trump engages in on
Speaker 1: the regular and since re taking office on Monday, the
Speaker 1: President has acted swiftly to use his executive orders to
Speaker 1: target diversity, equity, and inclusion. Because that's just the kind
Speaker 1: of guy.
Speaker 2: He is.
Speaker 3: Great stuff, really really happy all this is happening.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh yeah, hitting it on all for cylinders. Yes, continue,
Speaker 1: let's turn that around.
Speaker 3: So yesterday, at the Washington National Cathedral, the episcopal Bishop
Speaker 3: Reverend Maryann bud gave a speech that let's say it
Speaker 3: means JD Viz, Donald Trump, Malania and nushevit's uncomfortable. What
Speaker 3: I would say is the snowflakes seemed very triggered.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they really did. I just want to point this out.
Speaker 1: What made them uncomfortable was her saying, you have felt
Speaker 1: the presidential hand of a loving god, the name of
Speaker 1: our God. I ask you to have mercy. This is
Speaker 1: literally what she's saying that's getting him so upset. I'm
Speaker 1: asking you to have mercy on the people in our
Speaker 1: country who are scared.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: This okay, I'm asking you to have mercy on the
Speaker 1: people in our country who are scared.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: This is the thing that got them so upset. I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: but really, that's the thing that got everyone mad.
Speaker 3: Molly, you're missing something. What the president said. She was
Speaker 3: in nasty in tone, in not compelling or smart. You
Speaker 3: know that thing offends him.
Speaker 1: What offends him?
Speaker 3: Wouldn't people say things in nasty tones and are not
Speaker 3: compelling or smart, right?
Speaker 1: Not compelling or smart. Yes, he does not like it
Speaker 1: when people have a nasty tone. Even though the sixty
Speaker 1: five year old is the first woman to serve as
Speaker 1: the spiritual leader of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington. She
Speaker 1: led the diocese since two thousand and eleven. She worked
Speaker 1: in the Episcopal Church in Minneapolis. She's an alumni of
Speaker 1: the University of Rochester. She's quite smart, She's not particularly
Speaker 1: partisan anyway, She's going to end up in Gimo. God
Speaker 1: bless you, Bishop Bud, and take some hair products with
Speaker 1: you to Cuba.
Speaker 2: Oh boy.
Speaker 3: Well, speaking of going to foreign countries, Trump has authorized
Speaker 3: ICE to target courthouses, schools, and churches.
Speaker 1: So he had talked about this during the campaign. Here's
Speaker 1: the problem with cruelty is that it doesn't play well
Speaker 1: on television. So Trump has a problem. Now he has
Speaker 1: a base that wants him to be cruel, a base
Speaker 1: that he has promised he will be cruel too, right,
Speaker 1: and then everyone in America now has a all most
Speaker 1: not obviously everyone, but a lot of people have phones,
Speaker 1: and a lot of those phones have cameras, and a
Speaker 1: lot of those phones take video. So we're going to
Speaker 1: see so many videos of children being pulled out of schools,
Speaker 1: of crying mothers being pulled out of hospitals and churches.
Speaker 1: You tell me if the reality television president enjoys the
Speaker 1: programming of people being pulled out of schools, hospitals, and churches.
Speaker 1: I think that this is going to be incredibly hard
Speaker 1: to square, especially when he has these new corporate overlords.
Speaker 3: I am right there with you speaking of other things
Speaker 3: that I don't think are going to go as well
Speaker 3: as they planned. And really we already have evidence of
Speaker 3: that on day two of the presidency. DOGE is shaping
Speaker 3: up to be not so hot ah Doge.
Speaker 1: DOGE is not without its problems. So here we are
Speaker 1: in doge Land. It's a group that is focused on
Speaker 1: government efficiency and also making a meme a government office.
Speaker 2: Well a meme coin.
Speaker 1: It's also it's both a meme and a coin and
Speaker 1: a meme coin. Congratulations ladies and gentlemen. DOUGE is run
Speaker 1: by the first Budy one, Elon Mush. And what's pretty
Speaker 1: interesting about DOGE is that it is so efficient it's
Speaker 1: already gotten rid of its COHD Viveke Ramaswami. Now the
Speaker 1: stories of why a Veke left are still coming to
Speaker 1: the foreground, but it was not without its problems. Correct.
Speaker 3: What it seems really is is people always forget that
Speaker 3: egos in a room only have finite space and the
Speaker 3: room was not big enough for everyone's egos.
Speaker 1: Yes, let me tell you what else is going on here.
Speaker 1: So first we have the Veke is gone, he's back
Speaker 1: in Ohio. He's going to run for governor in two years.
Speaker 1: But this is sort of how they're spinning it. But
Speaker 1: now Elon is the boss, and he seems to have already.
Speaker 1: The reporting is that he has a White House email
Speaker 1: address already, which is pretty exciting for the first Budy.
Speaker 1: He also has a lot of clearance and information, and
Speaker 1: there are people who suspect that maybe he has more
Speaker 1: clearance and information than he should. But he's spending his time,
Speaker 1: as we would hope, still on Twitter, because really where
Speaker 1: else should he be but Twitter? And the good news
Speaker 1: is on Twitter. He is fighting about open Ai because
Speaker 1: Elon Musk doesn't get along so well with the open
Speaker 1: Ai crew. So shortly after President Donald Trump announced a
Speaker 1: massive AI infrastructure investment from the White House, by the way,
Speaker 1: with soft Bank. You'll remember in season one of the
Speaker 1: Trump Presidency, Donald Trump also did a big thing about
Speaker 1: something he was going to do with soft Bank. Soft
Speaker 1: Bank definitely loves Donald Trump, so they don't actually have
Speaker 1: any money. Musk wrote on his social media platform formally
Speaker 1: known as Twitter. SoftBank has well under ten billion dollars secured.
Speaker 1: I have that on good authority. Aitherway, Elon could just
Speaker 1: write a check tomorrow. But okay, Trump said the investment
Speaker 1: will create a new company called Stargate to grow artificial
Speaker 1: intelligence infrastructure in the United States. The leaders of SoftBank,
Speaker 1: Open Ai, and Oracle, which is also owned by a
Speaker 1: Donald Trump Megadnor Larry Ellison, stood alongside Trump during the announcement.
Speaker 1: The company's will invest one hundred billion in the project
Speaker 1: to start. Okay, Elon Musk writes in a tweet, they
Speaker 1: don't actually have any money, and then he follows up,
Speaker 1: SoftBank has well under ten billion secured. I have that
Speaker 1: on good authority. Now. Sam Altman, who is the guy
Speaker 1: who runs open Ai and is also got very good,
Speaker 1: funny hair like Justin Bieber, wrote a tweet wrong, as
Speaker 1: you surely know want to come. Is it the first
Speaker 1: site already underway? Question Mark, this is great for the country.
Speaker 1: I realize what is great for the country isn't always
Speaker 1: optimal for your companies. But in your new role, I
Speaker 1: hope you'll mostly put America first. And there you have it.
Speaker 1: News being made in real time by tech billionaires communicating
Speaker 1: to each other on their platform. Makes the cuckles of
Speaker 1: my heart war. Dave Weigel is a reporter at Semaphore.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to Fast Politics.
Speaker 4: Dave, Hey, you going to be back. Thank you?
Speaker 1: Tell me where you are right now and what's going on.
Speaker 4: Oh, I am in the capital right now, Gus. There's
Speaker 4: some echo. That's the reason why. And I've been talking
Speaker 4: to people about various Trump executive orders from their perspective,
Speaker 4: obviously no one in Congress is and make it an amazing
Speaker 4: position to Gallon's these things, but trying to cover the
Speaker 4: implications of what Trump is doing with his pen.
Speaker 1: So you're just sort of in post executive order.
Speaker 4: Hayes, No, not a Hayes, just trying to reford on
Speaker 4: what's happening a lot.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about what There were almost one hundred
Speaker 1: on Monday, is that correct?
Speaker 4: Close to one hundred, Well, actually so seventy eight that
Speaker 4: were just about undoing various Biden executive orders. That wasn't
Speaker 4: the conclusion of that. There have been series of orders
Speaker 4: since then, the undo what Biden did, what the previous
Speaker 4: presidents did on some of the different priorities. Like getting
Speaker 4: ready to be the.
Speaker 1: E and then tell me what the other ones were.
Speaker 1: There were some that were trying to rewrite the constitution.
Speaker 4: I think you're referring to the.
Speaker 1: Fourteenth Amendment one, the birthright citizenship.
Speaker 4: That's a good one to focus on because this is
Speaker 4: the difference between the first Trump term and the second.
Speaker 4: Trump talk about doing that for a long time in
Speaker 4: the first term. I think really two years of that
Speaker 4: term elapsed after he talked about it, but now were
Speaker 4: actually acted. And then the idea behind the second term
Speaker 4: was He's going to come in with a great idea
Speaker 4: what to do. This would have happened, I think Eddie
Speaker 4: one in twenty twenty. There are a lot of these
Speaker 4: orders that are also picking up balls that were dropped
Speaker 4: the end of his sort of term. There were new staffers,
Speaker 4: more i would say, more magas staffers, people who were
Speaker 4: more idy allegedly aligned with him, because you know the
Speaker 4: basic story, there were all these Republican veterans who weren't
Speaker 4: on board of the agenda, and by the end of
Speaker 4: the term and certainly after the election, and tons that
Speaker 4: were on board with the agenda. Their old life is
Speaker 4: his agenda. So you pick out a lot of that,
Speaker 4: and that this furk relationship measure. It could have been
Speaker 4: done at any time, but he didn't have a six
Speaker 4: to three conservative majority on the Supreme Court really until
Speaker 4: his final weeks as president, and this being done immediately
Speaker 4: tease it up. Have already been challenging fort by different
Speaker 4: immigrant rights organizations. This fesed up some sort of legal showdown,
Speaker 4: and the worst case scenario is that if a president
Speaker 4: that upholds the old president. There are many good, if
Speaker 4: you're Trump, scenarios where they allow some changes because he
Speaker 4: shot the moon on this and redefined perfeatesist ship is
Speaker 4: something that would not, for example, belonged to Kamala Yris
Speaker 4: because she was born in America that needed her. Both
Speaker 4: parents at the time were full time naturalized citizens and
Speaker 4: not natural born citizens. You can imagine the court saying, well,
Speaker 4: that's fine, but we agree that if you're just born
Speaker 4: in the country, two people have no legal status whatsoever.
Speaker 4: That is how you didn't get in to the court.
Speaker 4: You ask for a lot, they'd give you anything that
Speaker 4: would still be in advance from their perspective on what
Speaker 4: they were used to.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's funny because it feels like the immunity decision
Speaker 1: Trump versus United States, where Trump went in just you
Speaker 1: know and said I'm a king and they were like,
Speaker 1: they were like sure, that was a great example. And
Speaker 1: even like when Trump went to the Supreme Court and
Speaker 1: said he shouldn't be sentenced, that was another situation where
Speaker 1: Trump made a case that was well beyond the range
Speaker 1: of normal and it worked for him.
Speaker 4: Yes, and that's you're running through a lot of democratic
Speaker 4: responses and their Republican confidence to what's happening. Had always
Speaker 4: accused of overstepping his bounds, and we wait until the
Speaker 4: court says that he isn't and he has better luck
Speaker 4: with ports than George Joe Biden, norm Barack Obama did.
Speaker 4: This is in the first term. It played point out
Speaker 4: a lot of people getting angry about extra constitutional sounding
Speaker 4: things that Trump was doing. We're in talking about the
Speaker 4: nine O decisions. They're reversing different Obama orders. He tried
Speaker 4: to spend Dakota basically even more migrants and didn't work.
Speaker 4: That's the idea here is you have, for the first
Speaker 4: time in Conservatives memory, a six to three majority in
Speaker 4: the court. Even if you look at what they're trying
Speaker 4: to do with LGBT rights, they had a the last time,
Speaker 4: as we decided in point age twenty five to four
Speaker 4: conservative majority at three one, and so that you know
Speaker 4: the boss Stock decision. Would that be reversed completely or
Speaker 4: would they as happened a lot with abortion adjusts the precedent,
Speaker 4: you know, casey doesn't no return row, but it limits it.
Speaker 4: Death by Falcon cuts to a lot of these civil
Speaker 4: rights law that Democrats, well, I guess the whole country
Speaker 4: it was relying on by the end. But what can
Speaker 4: you attack for one angle? And how it really can
Speaker 4: you attack it? That's a lot out of this.
Speaker 1: Herey here, yeah, where are you right now? Are you
Speaker 1: in the house.
Speaker 4: I'm in the house. I'm gonna hallway with some noise
Speaker 4: behind me, although not nembers of Congress or anything.
Speaker 1: But I was watching on c SPAN today. I'm contractually
Speaker 1: obligated to mention c SPAN. I'm just kidding, I'm not,
Speaker 1: but I love c SPAN because it's so good. I
Speaker 1: was watching this c SPAN the hearing today where they
Speaker 1: were talking about this fourteenth Amendment and the range of
Speaker 1: excuses that Republicans were offering for the reasons why they
Speaker 1: wanted to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment were pretty wild.
Speaker 4: I measure, I understand the question was what was wild?
Speaker 1: The question is that we're seeing in the House right now,
Speaker 1: they're hearings about immigration, and they are sort of in
Speaker 1: this discourse is coming up this Trump executive order, which
Speaker 1: is basically to repeal the fourteenth Amendment or to cut it.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that I'm struck by when
Speaker 1: I listened to these backbenchers and even frontbenchers try trying
Speaker 1: to sell this idea. I mean, obviously the American people
Speaker 1: are not watching c SPAN, but they're not unified on
Speaker 1: a message more than just let's try this.
Speaker 4: That's true. You have to just think of these things
Speaker 4: happening on different tracks. This executive order, period before bills
Speaker 4: have been passed, is about testing these limits. The Fourteenth Amendment,
Speaker 4: Birth ray Citizenship Order is a great example of that.
Speaker 4: And Republicans don't need to They'll say this because the
Speaker 4: leg had a lot of questions about various decisions Trump
Speaker 4: made already on Vinguary six on refugees, and they said
Speaker 4: they don't second guess them, and what about democrats. I
Speaker 4: was almost doing that by accident and saying the responsible
Speaker 4: a lot of the immigration orders, Well, what about what
Speaker 4: Obama did with DOCA DOC is something that was held
Speaker 4: up in courts, surprising people. What would happen to another
Speaker 4: challenge in that which is actually a question Democrats have
Speaker 4: to ask themselves if they want to litigate any change
Speaker 4: in Trump with making as we speak, like, what happens
Speaker 4: when you kick this precedent of actually the you can
Speaker 4: let migrants stand in the country and definitely with this court,
Speaker 4: they don't know yet, they're not optimistic.
Speaker 1: So let me ask you a question as we're sort
Speaker 1: of in this talk to me about what's happening with DOGE.
Speaker 1: Government agency is so efficient it's already lost its co had.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the fight that happened behind the scenes between Elon
Speaker 4: and the ak Ramaswami fatly sits maybe a big word
Speaker 4: for it, though it did end with evapcating out of
Speaker 4: this thing, was over whether this should be an agency
Speaker 4: folded into the White House with somebody who's not an
Speaker 4: employee the government running it, or something else that would
Speaker 4: be under different different restrictions. Elon won, and so the
Speaker 4: question that Democrats are asking there, even as they cooperate
Speaker 4: with elements of the DOGE idea, is okay, there are
Speaker 4: actually rules for what a committee needs to do, if
Speaker 4: it's put into place and it has the power to
Speaker 4: recommend change, is you need to at least what is discussed.
Speaker 4: You need to have some transparency. They're not doing any
Speaker 4: of that. That's where it is right now. And in
Speaker 4: the Congress, Rodens have a Doge shoxus that they've invitvated
Speaker 4: Democrats to join. It exists, it hasn't proposed anything. There
Speaker 4: really isn't anything yet rolling out that is a cut
Speaker 4: or recision in government spending that Republicans are ready to pass.
Speaker 4: If you were watching the Capital One parade rally that
Speaker 4: Trump signs orders at, he was handed the one about
Speaker 4: getting rid of anything related to the Green New Deal,
Speaker 4: and the man Hammerton said, this will stay the trillion dollars.
Speaker 4: It won't. You won't do that at all. And that
Speaker 4: made me wonder if some of the idea here is
Speaker 4: to announce giant savings, get some headlines about it, and
Speaker 4: not actually fast though okay, would probably not be that
Speaker 4: popular in the bond markets, but that's what you that's
Speaker 4: what you're getting right now. It's no specific changes ideas
Speaker 4: about how things could be cut. You saw this with
Speaker 4: Doge and early Base one of their ideas was you
Speaker 4: can cut lots of at least for spending once you
Speaker 4: get rid of this interest on the debt and everyone
Speaker 4: can looked at bad said yes, but you need to
Speaker 4: cut things so that you don't get you But that's
Speaker 4: why we've maay the interest on it.
Speaker 1: Right, And this is really where I wanted to go to.
Speaker 1: Can you explain to me? The DOGE has members of
Speaker 1: Congress MTG who you may remember as being completely a
Speaker 1: person who exists to be on cable news. She is
Speaker 1: in this committee right.
Speaker 4: Even the committee. The committee is separate from the So
Speaker 4: there's a House sorry i should say a House caucus,
Speaker 4: and then there is the DOGE agency and their separate entities.
Speaker 4: Not neither has actually proposed anything yet. The House one
Speaker 4: is just it is really unclear what it's going to do.
Speaker 4: Because it's a month ago. Republicans were set really burring
Speaker 4: spending cuts and saying we're waiting for the AGD on
Speaker 4: theseulvesful willing thought, and that's still the position. It's it's
Speaker 4: really up up in the air. It's strong I'd say
Speaker 4: less of ten than a month ago, because it's already
Speaker 4: not new and the story of it more is is
Speaker 4: this going to do anything rather than this is going
Speaker 4: to pick all our problems?
Speaker 1: Right, So that is actually a radical departure because Elon
Speaker 1: said it would save two trillion dollars, right, and then
Speaker 1: he sort of backed off.
Speaker 4: That's a fair way to push it. Yeah, But so
Speaker 4: it exists, it has a full time staff that's going
Speaker 4: to littlebanks. It actually the way and now is kind
Speaker 4: of a They took a pre existing government agency inside
Speaker 4: the White House and they renamed it DOJE. There have always,
Speaker 4: not always, but really since Bill Clinton and these efforts
Speaker 4: to look at waste potential ways to reduce government spending.
Speaker 4: It's just a version of that. The actual things cut
Speaker 4: so far that are worth looking at are the orders
Speaker 4: that are shutting down DEI programs inside the federal government
Speaker 4: at every level. However, they're not shut down yet right now,
Speaker 4: they're paying DEI employees to not work and then ideally
Speaker 4: shutting things down.
Speaker 1: That's a really good point talk to me about the
Speaker 1: sort of big structural changes from Trump one point zero
Speaker 1: to Trump two point zero. So we talked about this
Speaker 1: idea that the Republicans are really on bortant now, and
Speaker 1: we had a vank and Jared in one point zero.
Speaker 1: But besides Elon structurally, how is it different.
Speaker 4: Because of the kinds of people being appointed to positions
Speaker 4: that were filled before by more experienced Republican hands. So
Speaker 4: you had in the last eight years a generation of
Speaker 4: Republicans either young people who had not worked in politics before,
Speaker 4: or sort of think tankers who wouldn't have been hired
Speaker 4: in the old review. I'm thinking stuff like the Quincy Institute,
Speaker 4: a kind of anti war think tank, who are now
Speaker 4: being invited into the administration. Before you would have had.
Speaker 1: Really those guys are being invited. That is shocking to
Speaker 1: me because they are very lefty in a way.
Speaker 4: Yeah, people who have worked with them and would have
Speaker 4: been persioned on growd up previously, but now they're allowed in.
Speaker 4: That is the wing of the movement that worked best
Speaker 4: with Trump. They don't put out a press release every
Speaker 4: single person that are in the federal government. We know it.
Speaker 4: One of the goals of the Trump campaign and of
Speaker 4: the outside Product twenty twenty five was, let's find a
Speaker 4: list of conservatives who are aligned with this agenda and
Speaker 4: won't undermine it. Let's find a list of people we
Speaker 4: can get rid of, you know, So one thing that
Speaker 4: was being done before the election, really no matter who
Speaker 4: one was being done was the Heritage Foundation filing four
Speaker 4: requests and trying to find emails from government employees job title,
Speaker 4: things like that that would be a flag for let's
Speaker 4: say Wokeness to give Berryer fork. Well, we're looking for
Speaker 4: every email that talks about, for example, burning people. If
Speaker 4: somebody used that, then we're going to find a way
Speaker 4: to get rid of them once Trump dakes over. There
Speaker 4: was a lot of that happening, but it's it is
Speaker 4: happening in I guess the absolute of slow motion. It's
Speaker 4: happening very quickly and without a bunch of press releases
Speaker 4: saying here's who we fired. I mean, that's frankly, that's
Speaker 4: a reporting jobs to talk to people and figure out
Speaker 4: who has been hired. That's a lot like the first
Speaker 4: term of the differences is not chaotic. You don't have
Speaker 4: to people leaking even these executive orders. It's not just
Speaker 4: that they were ready, but the strategy of the transition
Speaker 4: and before that the campaign was to not talk that
Speaker 4: much about the specific things that would be done unless
Speaker 4: they were super popular. So you talked a lot about
Speaker 4: getting rid of gender inclusive language in the federal Code,
Speaker 4: So you ran on that who's doing it? But there
Speaker 4: was so much fairer reporting on these strategies. Who was
Speaker 4: behind brod or twenty pay five? What was Russ the
Speaker 4: Vote saying on podcasts about what do you want to
Speaker 4: do all this? Actually, if you are watching some of
Speaker 4: the hearings, just being quoted back to the nominees, Hey,
Speaker 4: you said you said you'd do this, you said you'd
Speaker 4: ignore this law. They kind of stopped doing that during
Speaker 4: the last stretch of the election, and people who were
Speaker 4: wanted into a role because of the trauma campaign said
Speaker 4: in a disingenuous way, We're not going to hire anyone
Speaker 4: involved with this. They were, they always were. We Rough
Speaker 4: Vote literally was helping write these executive orders for Heritage's
Speaker 4: pretty well known, but it's one of those things that
Speaker 4: I wrote about.
Speaker 5: Well.
Speaker 4: Russ Vote was helping work on executive orders as part
Speaker 4: of the project, but they weren't releasing them because they
Speaker 4: saw it that putting all the plans out in the
Speaker 4: Project twenty twenty five book were unhelpful because the reporters could
Speaker 4: write about them, and even just right now as I'm
Speaker 4: writing on pieces of it, I'm going back to Project
Speaker 4: twenty five. It's on the website. I can see things,
Speaker 4: not word for word, but for example, I think I'm
Speaker 4: going to focused on it today rolling back lbj's Executive
Speaker 4: Order on affirmative Action, which so insane. Nixon changed it
Speaker 4: but didn't get rid of it, but a series who
Speaker 4: Arobic presidence left that in place. Well, that's in there too,
Speaker 4: one of the recommendations of Product twenty twenty five. So
Speaker 4: none of this was surprising. They just changed the emphasis.
Speaker 4: And you run a campaign based on what's going to
Speaker 4: get you elected, not how specific you can be about
Speaker 4: your agenda.
Speaker 1: Right, No, that's a very good point. It's not about
Speaker 1: being specific on your agenda. It's about getting elected. And
Speaker 1: that was what was smart about Trump. So I want
Speaker 1: to get back to this Quincy Institute because I'm like
Speaker 1: a little obsessed with it, because it was this think
Speaker 1: tag that started during the first actually think it grew
Speaker 1: during the first Trump admin and it was basically a
Speaker 1: sort of combination liberal libertarian effort to avoid foreign wars.
Speaker 4: Correct, it was, And I wouldn't overstate how many people
Speaker 4: are in the administration of this saying are people with
Speaker 4: connections to that being hired for foreign policy roles over
Speaker 4: people who are more pawkish on the record. The specific
Speaker 4: person is Michael Demino. He was the guy who'd been
Speaker 4: critical of the way he is. Reel responded to October seventh,
Speaker 4: and that's not a firing or offense to keeps you
Speaker 4: out of the door right now, because he's in line
Speaker 4: with the Trump agenda of not new. Too much effort
Speaker 4: has been Trump but through strength, like we're going to
Speaker 4: let Israel get away with a lot. We were going
Speaker 4: to keep giving them arms, but we're going to look
Speaker 4: tough so that they're rand it and try anything as
Speaker 4: opposed to we're going to try to rechain into regime
Speaker 4: by starting war work.
Speaker 2: The rant.
Speaker 1: Yeah, one of the things that I think is really interesting,
Speaker 1: and I'm hoping you could make it make sense, is
Speaker 1: that one of the hallmarks of Trump's governing is that
Speaker 1: it's erratic, not ideological, and largely dictated by the last
Speaker 1: person he spoke to Project twenty twenty five. I mean,
Speaker 1: we just did a big documentary on it in July,
Speaker 1: so we've spent a lot of time studying it and
Speaker 1: talking to academics about it, and it's largely a dismantling
Speaker 1: of the administrative state, including the federal government. Make it
Speaker 1: so small that you can drat it in a bathtub,
Speaker 1: show the people that it never worked to begin with. Okay,
Speaker 1: so how do you have and again this is the
Speaker 1: thing I keep asking, how do you have a tenth
Speaker 1: that's so big that these things run contrary to each other,
Speaker 1: don't they?
Speaker 4: I hadn't thought about that because that's the rug and
Speaker 4: party run by Trump. Nothing is contradictory if Trump says
Speaker 4: that he knew if he changed his mind on it.
Speaker 4: The spending piece of this is the really incoherent stuff,
Speaker 4: where there is an assumption and a promise that they're
Speaker 4: going to Trump Vivis in the first term, he's going
Speaker 4: to get rid of the debt somehow, and nothing they
Speaker 4: proposed would actually was the devonstat it's all tax pets.
Speaker 4: It starts there, really, and I would say Democrats didn't
Speaker 4: do this last time. The last presidency that was trying
Speaker 4: to find savings was the allowing presidency limited birepublicans of
Speaker 4: what it could do. So, yeah, it's not simper coherence
Speaker 4: from ideologically, it is coherent with what Trump is asking for.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you, Dave.
Speaker 4: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: Beai Shakir is a senior advisor to Standard Or Bernie Sanders.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Fast Politics Fast.
Speaker 5: Thank you for having me. Mollie.
Speaker 1: I'm really excited to have you because I think so
Speaker 1: much about what went wrong again and again and again.
Speaker 1: I think of you as a person who also thinks
Speaker 1: a lot about what went wrong in twenty sixteen. Honestly
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty a little bit, because that should have
Speaker 1: been a bigger win, and in twenty twenty four. So
Speaker 1: that is my first question to you, what went wrong?
Speaker 5: Or we're having a disconnect sadly as Democrats with working
Speaker 5: class people. And in my view, there's a lot of
Speaker 5: things that work into that problem. One is that on
Speaker 5: the performance are just of politics. Politics is part performance
Speaker 5: are you know, you have to get out there and
Speaker 5: embrace the friction when you're particularly when you're governing. So
Speaker 5: if you have good policies being done, I think in
Speaker 5: the four years of Biden you have walk a picket line.
Speaker 5: You've got a lot of his agencies taken on crypto
Speaker 5: scams or Amazon scams, Amazon Google, you know, really hard fights,
Speaker 5: big Pharma. And yet if you look at that and
Speaker 5: then look over to the politics site, you know, the
Speaker 5: DNC or political operations, and you say, did did we
Speaker 5: talk about any of that? Did we embrace the friction
Speaker 5: when they were governing and fighting that fight? Did we
Speaker 5: have their backs? No? And the answer was no. It
Speaker 5: was almost like you lived in an alternative universe. So
Speaker 5: you can't fault working class people who aren't following politics
Speaker 5: all the time and behind the scenes and know everything
Speaker 5: that the FTC is doing or the SEC is doing.
Speaker 5: You've got to get out there and embrace and tell
Speaker 5: people to fight. Trump does it well, right, He's always
Speaker 5: telling you a story about some damn fight that he's in.
Speaker 5: Every day is a fight for him, right, And so
Speaker 5: he's engaging in fights with corporate America through tariffs and
Speaker 5: all these other stuff, and working class people feel like, hey,
Speaker 5: that guy, he doesn't care. He's ready to take anybody on.
Speaker 5: Whereas we're almost like intentionally trying to reduce the tension.
Speaker 5: Suggests that there aren't actually make your ideological problems here.
Speaker 5: They are there are the moll.
Speaker 1: It's funny because I think so much about Lena Kahan,
Speaker 1: who is sort of one of the great fighters of
Speaker 1: this century and someone who most people have no idea
Speaker 1: who she is. Can we talk about that?
Speaker 5: I am a huge fan obviously in a supporter, and
Speaker 5: I feel like she in just four years, thanks to
Speaker 5: President Biden putting her in that position, transformed the Federal
Speaker 5: Trade Commission from this backwater place to this zone of saying, hey, big,
Speaker 5: corporate American needs to be held accountable for price gouging us,
Speaker 5: for abusing us in all different kinds of ways. And
Speaker 5: she didn't think small, she thought big, and she said
Speaker 5: everything from Amazon to the pharmacy benefit managers too, you know,
Speaker 5: junk fees to non compete bands. I'm going after all
Speaker 5: of the corporate exploitation I see to unrig this economy.
Speaker 5: And that is one of my major frustrations when you say, hey,
Speaker 5: what my hat is off to somebody with integrity fighting
Speaker 5: for working class people. And then I want a political
Speaker 5: operation that tells people about that, that says, do you
Speaker 5: know what big fights that we have been engaged in
Speaker 5: on your behalf. She fought at Kroger Albertson's merger, which
Speaker 5: was about reducing you know, grocery prices for people and
Speaker 5: giving providing competition to the grocery space. And I'm sure to
Speaker 5: this day, most people have no idea, sadly that we
Speaker 5: were fighting to reduce grocery prices for them. You know,
Speaker 5: that's a killer.
Speaker 1: So one of the things that I'm struck by, and
Speaker 1: again this is a very controversial take, which is why
Speaker 1: everyone's going to get mad at me about it, but
Speaker 1: I'm to engage in that. One of the things I
Speaker 1: was stripped by when Biden won was how little they
Speaker 1: let him talk to the press. Now, obviously I have
Speaker 1: a horse in this race because I am the press,
Speaker 1: but also they didn't even let him do like, you know,
Speaker 1: his own tweets or his own Instagram story and even
Speaker 1: like we saw this again and again in Harris World,
Speaker 1: like they would do something that was pretty good and
Speaker 1: then the consultant class would shut it down. I'm wondering
Speaker 1: if you could talk a little bit about that. And
Speaker 1: also the one I'm going to make this an annoying
Speaker 1: question that goes on and on. But one of the
Speaker 1: other things I was struck by was like they were
Speaker 1: aggressively boring in the Biden White House in a way
Speaker 1: to try to keep the media at bay, which I
Speaker 1: understand the media didn't like them, but that made the
Speaker 1: media really hate them. And then when they had passed
Speaker 1: all this really good legislation, they couldn't get anyone to
Speaker 1: talk about it because they had been so aggressively boring
Speaker 1: or whatever it was with the mate. So can you
Speaker 1: talk to me about all of that?
Speaker 5: Biden in his own special way. I mean, we saw
Speaker 5: this when we campaigned against him. I was running Birdie's
Speaker 5: campaign and washed him as he was out there on
Speaker 5: the stunt.
Speaker 4: But he would say colorful.
Speaker 5: And interesting things, Moll. He would be you know, occasionally
Speaker 5: he would tell a person who was protesting, hey, go
Speaker 5: vote for the other guy to feel that way. And
Speaker 5: what I realized over a period of time is, man,
Speaker 5: that's his charm. He's in that way, a real working
Speaker 5: class person in the way he talks, and a lot
Speaker 5: of people feel that way. It's like he doesn't like it. Yeah,
Speaker 5: he's not in an ivory tower.
Speaker 4: He just says it real.
Speaker 5: And I remember early on in the administration, you know,
Speaker 5: he would say colorful things like about Elon Muss member, Hey,
Speaker 5: good luck going to the moon, buddy, Or he would
Speaker 5: say things about Facebook and Facebook kills people during COVID
Speaker 5: right when he's upset about misinformation and they clamp down
Speaker 5: on him because they were worried that when he says
Speaker 5: things that are in my view, authentically him, that they
Speaker 5: were going to cause quote unquote problems. And I'll tell
Speaker 5: you this, ma, I went in and had a you know,
Speaker 5: at one on one interview with him just recently as
Speaker 5: he was reaping up, and I asked him this question about, Hey,
Speaker 5: you know, mister president, you've never traded stocks in your life.
Speaker 5: Can you think of how crazy that is? They like
Speaker 5: for most people, they get rich in office, and you
Speaker 5: could have gotten early on so many stocks and you
Speaker 5: chose to not. Why And He's like, well, I just
Speaker 5: think it's wrong. And I don't believe that Congress should
Speaker 5: be trading stocks. Until that point, Molly, I don't believe
Speaker 5: they or the president had ever talk let him talk
Speaker 5: about this incredible record.
Speaker 1: Out of not And so, by the way, it's like
Speaker 1: crazy because it's one of the very few things that
Speaker 1: everyone agrees on totally.
Speaker 5: I will say, Molly, you know I had been urging
Speaker 5: behind the scenes constantly, Hey, they should go on talks
Speaker 5: about these things, talk about these things. And you know,
Speaker 5: I get there inundated with lots and lots of things.
Speaker 5: But man, I think they robbed all of us and
Speaker 5: him of the opportunity to see what is what was
Speaker 5: special and unique about his ability to communicate. And I
Speaker 5: think too often you know I Vie Ivory Tower, you know, elites.
Speaker 5: He doesn't talk like Obama, he doesn't talk like a
Speaker 5: lot of Buddha Jeedge or other kind of charismatic other
Speaker 5: kinds of politicians. But he has a charm of how
Speaker 5: he does speaking in and people trust in that way.
Speaker 5: And they just didn't let it go. I mean, not
Speaker 5: doing a Super Bowl interview is kind of crazy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, not doing a super Bowl interview, shutting it down.
Speaker 1: Even when the videos were good and people liked them,
Speaker 1: they stopped doing them. I mean at every point, I
Speaker 1: think about Tim Walls, who was he did really well,
Speaker 1: so then they stop letting him talk.
Speaker 5: And in this day and age, you know this better
Speaker 5: than most Molly that like now. Because of the media
Speaker 5: environment being what it is, you kind of have to
Speaker 5: be part entertainer. People expect of a leader that I
Speaker 5: know you, I need to hear from you. You need
Speaker 5: to tell me what you're doing, especially when you're in charge.
Speaker 5: You're not a candidate anymore.
Speaker 4: You're in charge.
Speaker 5: You got to tell me the story of what you're doing.
Speaker 5: So you know you mentioned like the IRA or the
Speaker 5: Inflation Reduction Act, that needs to be a story the
Speaker 5: whole way through, from front to end. Every day, you're
Speaker 5: telling everybody, here's the fights I'm engaging, here's my red lines,
Speaker 5: here's what I like, Here's what I don't like, And
Speaker 5: you're animating those such that when people are fighting back
Speaker 5: on you and they're saying, hey, sorry, no to childcare
Speaker 5: or no to community college, you're getting out there and
Speaker 5: you're telling people, this is what I want to do,
Speaker 5: and I got some opposition over here. That's how you build,
Speaker 5: you know, a grassroots movement for your vision.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So here we are in this situation where we
Speaker 1: have now this DNC race for the chairmanship. Explain to
Speaker 1: us what that's about and sort of what you see
Speaker 1: the job as and why Mary and Williamson is not
Speaker 1: going to get it.
Speaker 5: Well. I jumped in late here purposefully and intentionally because
Speaker 5: while there's all these decent people who are running, I've
Speaker 5: been heartened by the fact that there's more and more
Speaker 5: talk of being a working class party, and I'm like,
Speaker 5: that's I've been waiting my whole life here and so
Speaker 5: now our death of consensus. And I'm like, okay, so
Speaker 5: what's the big ideas? Give them to me. What are
Speaker 5: we going to do differently? And I'm like, ah, I'm
Speaker 5: feeling let down by this, So okay, I have some
Speaker 5: views though, let me jump in and offer them. And
Speaker 5: one of it, it just starts from a north star, particularly
Speaker 5: when you have you know, plutocracy and you know rich
Speaker 5: people who I think there are people get assessed the
Speaker 5: kind of a cultural decay. When you have so much
Speaker 5: powerful influence of money, it starts to make people either
Speaker 5: check out or get greedy or selfish in their own domains.
Speaker 5: My sense is going on and people looking for an
Speaker 5: integrity of giving me a fight that is about us,
Speaker 5: not about money. And in that way it has to
Speaker 5: be about some grassroots fission for the DNC that when
Speaker 5: you're a contributor, let's say, of the Democratic Party, what
Speaker 5: is asked of you? Is there anything more than just
Speaker 5: giving an online contribution? I think in this moment it
Speaker 5: has to be, especially going up against such power, our
Speaker 5: power has to be people, and so we have to
Speaker 5: give people a sense that we're in community with you,
Speaker 5: not just I don't just need your donation. When you're
Speaker 5: going on strike, with you, when you're organizing you know,
Speaker 5: your workplace. We're with you. When you're fighting your utility
Speaker 5: rate hikes. We're with you. When you're going after you
Speaker 5: get trying to get insurance coverage for your LA fire
Speaker 5: and that the introsions are stopping or fighting you. We're
Speaker 5: with you, like we're involved in these on the ground
Speaker 5: and bringing people into showing we stick our next out
Speaker 5: because our values are of economic justice, nature are aligned
Speaker 5: with them. And if we do that, if we open
Speaker 5: our doors and bring people into the Democratic Party, it's
Speaker 5: a pathway out of this with greater strength. I do
Speaker 5: think in this moment you also have to be your
Speaker 5: own kind of digital recorder, you know, an online news
Speaker 5: source of information, and are the channels like I've been
Speaker 5: building a more perfect union now for you know, it
Speaker 5: was my own media outlet and.
Speaker 1: They didn't realize that was you.
Speaker 5: Yes, so build it up over three years and you know,
Speaker 5: so what I think we have one point three million
Speaker 5: followers subscribers on YouTube. By comparison, Malia, how do you
Speaker 5: guessed how many does the DNC channel have? If we
Speaker 5: have one point three million, what do you think.
Speaker 1: This is going to make me upset, don't do that.
Speaker 4: Seventy eight thousand, I was.
Speaker 1: Talking about this one young congressman. He's not even that young.
Speaker 1: He's probably my age. He doesn't necessarily align politically with
Speaker 1: a lot of my beliefs, but he does an incredible
Speaker 1: job of just being out there. And I do think
Speaker 1: part of it is people want their politicians to do
Speaker 1: their own tweets, and they can tell when in someone
Speaker 1: else we think we are.
Speaker 5: I do feel like coming out of the cycle, we
Speaker 5: got to restore a sense of conviction around what we
Speaker 5: fight for. And I tend to believe, I honestly believe
Speaker 5: that people's ideologies are so over the map you cannot
Speaker 5: pigeonhole people's left right. That is like that antiquated and
Speaker 5: out out day. That is not the way to think
Speaker 5: that people. Trans issues and immigration and policing and economic
Speaker 5: justice issues. There're a kaleidoscope. But what I think people
Speaker 5: are hunting for is wherever you fall on this kaleidoscope,
Speaker 5: give me a sense of why you believe it, and
Speaker 5: tell me it honestly and sincerely, sincerely, And when you
Speaker 5: get criticized, I just want to hear you give me
Speaker 5: a good, strong defense, and I think that's one of
Speaker 5: the reasons why congressman are causing fortes and you know,
Speaker 5: Bernie Sanders. There's a sense of just conviction orientation and
Speaker 5: I want to bring bash to the party, just be
Speaker 5: honestly engaging these kinds of debates, right, And.
Speaker 1: I feel a Jasmine Crockett, Maxwell Frost. We're seeing people
Speaker 1: like that who are engaging, an even of Jared Moskowitz,
Speaker 1: who's out there fighting with represent James Comer, which I
Speaker 1: find very funny. I know that, you know, I don't
Speaker 1: know how much like public good is happening, but it's
Speaker 1: still hilarious. But I do think I mean that is
Speaker 1: when you see Trump getting into office. And this is
Speaker 1: in no way an endorsement of Donald Trump, I mean,
Speaker 1: my god, but like the fact that he's out there
Speaker 1: doing a lot of interviews and talking to people. And
Speaker 1: I also think part of it is at this point
Speaker 1: the mainstream media is so degraded. In twenty sixteen, we
Speaker 1: had a real fullsome at least something. Now we are
Speaker 1: in such a sort of partisan wasteland. But the other
Speaker 1: thing I wanted to ask you about, and this is
Speaker 1: actually something I just have been thinking it a lot.
Speaker 1: Is there was a whole discourse and you know about
Speaker 1: this because you've come from Sanders Land. There was a
Speaker 1: whole discourse about how the left needed its own Joe Rogan.
Speaker 1: It's one of the most annoying pieces of discourse, and
Speaker 1: I always respond to that the left has it. So
Speaker 1: I'm Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan who in twenty sixteen endorsed
Speaker 1: Bernie Sanders. So my big pet peeve now is that
Speaker 1: Democrats should always go into conservative spaces, even if the
Speaker 1: person offends them.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you're revealing my battle scars here, Molly, because when
Speaker 5: we you know, was in twenty twenty. Of course, we
Speaker 5: not only went on Joe Rogan and got a lot
Speaker 5: of heat from people for myself for even daring to
Speaker 5: go on there, but you know we're the first to
Speaker 5: go on Fox News. We held the town hall, you
Speaker 5: know with Fox at the time, people were very very
Speaker 5: upset about. My point was, listen, if you can gauge
Speaker 5: in politics, and I believe this sincerely that if you
Speaker 5: step into this arena, and not everyone needs to or should,
Speaker 5: but if you want to, the job is persuasion. The
Speaker 5: job is to go talk to people who aren't already
Speaker 5: with you and suggest to them that they should be
Speaker 5: with you. Otherwise you are a club, and there are
Speaker 5: good places to be a club. That's fine, you know,
Speaker 5: we like clubs and go meet and talk to people
Speaker 5: who are similarly of your kind. And that's fine. But
Speaker 5: that's not politics that I think. If you're doing politics,
Speaker 5: you have an obligation to reach out to people who
Speaker 5: aren't already with you, make your case, and also take
Speaker 5: the push back upon you, because that's where they see
Speaker 5: and feel like, oh, you're listening, or you care, or
Speaker 5: you are engaged with them.
Speaker 1: But it's also that Joe Rogan's voters are not watching CNN, right.
Speaker 5: I think that's largely true a lot of people, particularly
Speaker 5: younger folks, but it's across the board. I've checked out
Speaker 5: of politics because they find it so disgusting and unappealing.
Speaker 5: When I was talking about the decay of what we
Speaker 5: see because of wealth and income inequality, I think there's
Speaker 5: a sense that institutions are broken. You look at the
Speaker 5: DNC itself, there's a lack of faith and trust that
Speaker 5: even can the DNC do anything. And in a world
Speaker 5: particularly I think this is dangerous where we get to
Speaker 5: a place where there's a devolution of power such that. Okay,
Speaker 5: if the DNC isn't your a strong vehicle to fight
Speaker 5: for certain values in our society, one of two major
Speaker 5: political parties in America, then where does the power go. Well,
Speaker 5: it goes to super packs, it goes to places where
Speaker 5: power and money can better influence it. So when you
Speaker 5: have the devolution of power, you don't have institutional structures
Speaker 5: to fight for people, You're gonna have just splintering in
Speaker 5: which more powerful actors control more of society.
Speaker 1: Which is where we are now.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I feel like a lot of people are checking
Speaker 5: out to your point of Joe Rogan viewers, Right, it's
Speaker 5: a sense of I don't trust institutions because I haven't
Speaker 5: seen them operate with integrity. And I'm like, you're right,
Speaker 5: and we should fight on this plot. We should give
Speaker 5: people a sense of hope, especially if you're quote quote
Speaker 5: a democratic party. Democratic means of people.
Speaker 1: But as we look at sort of the post mortem
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty four, part of what happened was that,
Speaker 1: And again I think Liz Cheney has done a lot
Speaker 1: of good stuff, but that did not get the base excited.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you're going to look at a post
Speaker 1: mortem of what happened. The base did not turn out.
Speaker 1: There were people who didn't come out who came out
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty.
Speaker 5: My sense of this, Molly is that voters and in particularly
Speaker 5: hold the Democratic Party to a higher standard than they
Speaker 5: do the Republican Party. And the reason for that is
Speaker 5: our long historical linear of being the fighter for the
Speaker 5: common person and what they feel like, particularly in moments
Speaker 5: of great wealth and in polity that hey, listen, I
Speaker 5: know that the other side is out for greed and
Speaker 5: they're on bottom line and they're crime but led by
Speaker 5: a crime boss over there. However, I expect more of
Speaker 5: you to stick your next out and fight for us,
Speaker 5: and when you don't, the penalty on you is greater.
Speaker 5: And I think we just have to own that that
Speaker 5: is true of us and to say we can meet
Speaker 5: that bar. You know, we can meet that bar of
Speaker 5: say we will stick our next out, particularly when we're
Speaker 5: in a moment of an oligarchy, right.
Speaker 1: And I mean that is the big question now is
Speaker 1: what happens. So what do you think the sort of
Speaker 1: move is for Democrats? What should they be doing? Sort
Speaker 1: of what should the message be? I mean, because if
Speaker 1: you can't message against an oligarchy, right, I mean, it's
Speaker 1: all the roots of people in the front brow like
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 5: It also the sense that corporate power and your common
Speaker 5: belt is changing. It's the idea that Dewey defer our
Speaker 5: strategic vision and judgments people who are not of our
Speaker 5: working class orientation. They get upset about it, rightly, So
Speaker 5: they're like, hey, whoa. You know, it's fine if other
Speaker 5: people Liz Chaney and Mark Cuban whoever want to join
Speaker 5: you on your mission to fight for working class people,
Speaker 5: that's great. You know, that's politics of persuasion. But you
Speaker 5: can't change your mission to walk away from what is
Speaker 5: the core conviction. I think that's where you get back to.
Speaker 5: And I think at this moment where I do feel
Speaker 5: as you're saying about Rogan and other places that people
Speaker 5: are checking out in, Democrats are pretty upset about it.
Speaker 5: When I sense the anger, I'm like, that's okay, because
Speaker 5: that means they still care, right. The worst thing that
Speaker 5: could happen is that they just start to say, I
Speaker 5: don't care. Now we've got a bigger problem. If they're angry,
Speaker 5: it means that there's some emotions still attached to us
Speaker 5: because they're let down. We have to turn their heads.
Speaker 5: We have to say, hey, you're going to see us
Speaker 5: come out of this different and more aggressively in your
Speaker 5: camp on a fight. And I think in this moment particularly,
Speaker 5: we have the oligarchy running the United States. The hardest
Speaker 5: thing about the modern economy. Everyone knows it's raked, but
Speaker 5: they don't all always know how. And one of our
Speaker 5: jobs is to help unpack when Zuckerberg is going to
Speaker 5: do all this what he's hunting the affection of Donald Trump?
Speaker 4: Do you know what it is?
Speaker 5: Three months from now, he was supposed to go into
Speaker 5: trial because they're going to break up Facebook. Lena's going
Speaker 5: to do that over what's to happen Instagram, and now
Speaker 5: Donald Trump will have a choice to make. Does that
Speaker 5: case go forward in three months? Well, you know, Zuckerberg
Speaker 5: putting some money down to make a bet in a
Speaker 5: different way. We have that aation on us to go
Speaker 5: and explain here's what this billioni class is hunting for
Speaker 5: in terms of outcomes that are not good for you.
Speaker 5: That's what they expect of the Democratic Party right now.
Speaker 1: I mean that's where we are. I'm hoping you could
Speaker 1: sort of explain to us who you sort of think
Speaker 1: of as the leaders of the Democratic Party. It's a
Speaker 1: very annoying question because obviously there's no presidential nominee yet.
Speaker 1: But it's a question I get asked that I never
Speaker 1: really know the answer to, and I'm curious what you think.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I don't think there's an actual one. I mentioned
Speaker 5: to you that there's been more around wealth and income
Speaker 5: and equality. Bernie. Obviously that started to train a long
Speaker 5: time ago, but now I sense more people of conviction
Speaker 5: are talking about it, from you know, Chris Murphy obviously
Speaker 5: congress woman at Cause you a Quortez. Even Secretary Budaget
Speaker 5: has done some good work departner of Transportation going after
Speaker 5: Southwest and other major airlines holding them accountable. There's you know,
Speaker 5: if you look at the Blue Dog cocause even people
Speaker 5: like Marie Glucian Camperez and Jared Golden within the Democratic
Speaker 5: Party ten are very hungry to go after corporate accountability.
Speaker 5: I think that there's like an opportunity where because there's
Speaker 5: more alignment that I maybe some people sense and feel
Speaker 5: right now, there's a lot of alignment. There's just a
Speaker 5: hunger for who's going to step up and make the
Speaker 5: kind of moral conviction and the revealing case of who
Speaker 5: our democratic brand is, redefine it around this working class orientation.
Speaker 5: There's an opening there, right for people who want to
Speaker 5: do it, but I sense there's more interest in alignment
Speaker 5: behind the scenes of people who see the same things
Speaker 5: we see.
Speaker 1: Yeah. One of the things that I think happened when
Speaker 1: Democrats rejected Bernie, or the democratic establishment ejected Bernie, was
Speaker 1: that there was a certain kind of like we must
Speaker 1: sort of please our corporate overlords. Lena Khan was a
Speaker 1: real departure from that, and corporations hated her. She never
Speaker 1: got the kind of publicity so people didn't know really
Speaker 1: what she did. And by publicity I mean like put
Speaker 1: Lena Khan on Joe Rogan, right. I mean, that's the
Speaker 1: idea totally. But my question is, like, do you see
Speaker 1: a world where as we continue on here, these nominees
Speaker 1: were choices that were pushed, you know, in a certain direction.
Speaker 1: How can we just make it sort of a people
Speaker 1: first situation.
Speaker 5: Well, I do think some of these good and I'm
Speaker 5: glad you mentioned Leonab. I'm a huge fan and you
Speaker 5: know ro hitch Opra at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,
Speaker 5: Jennifer Bruso, who was at the National Labor Relations Board,
Speaker 5: even Garret Gensler was doing good things at the Security
Speaker 5: Exchange Commission. I could go down the list of really
Speaker 5: kind of people of integrity who were fighting some big
Speaker 5: fights against you know, powerful actors. They're coming out now,
Speaker 5: right and I think that part of my you know've
Speaker 5: reached out to Lena Rohea and other people like, hey,
Speaker 5: you're the moral conscious and the information conscience of a
Speaker 5: lot of people right now because they're hunting for what
Speaker 5: can you do about it? What's an alternative scenario and
Speaker 5: how we confront power, and what are the choices that
Speaker 5: are being made. It's going to be this great opportunity
Speaker 5: we educate a lot of folks who maybe didn't get
Speaker 5: it the first time around about the things that we
Speaker 5: were actually doing. And now Trump is gonna unlined, undo
Speaker 5: or go in a very different direction. So we'll have
Speaker 5: a second bite at that apple to do a lot
Speaker 5: of education and hopefully build the mandate of this direction.
Speaker 5: Because you know this, Molly, but that Lena obviously took
Speaker 5: some fire, not just from conservatives and big corporations, but
Speaker 5: also some large democratic donors and I worry about the
Speaker 5: watering down of this opportunity to fight for working class people.
Speaker 5: That's why I'm out there. I think that direction that
Speaker 5: Lena and a lot of the labor folks within the
Speaker 5: Biden mitiation were doing was the right one, and we
Speaker 5: just did exercised the politics appropriately. Well, we can fix that,
Speaker 5: you know. Let's get the politics done right to say,
Speaker 5: this is our orientation, this is what the vast majority
Speaker 5: of people in America care about. This is our historical
Speaker 5: roots and lineage of the Democratic Party.
Speaker 4: Let's get this right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you, thank you, thank you really really so
Speaker 1: good and I so appreciate you. Thank you. No, Jesse Cannon.
Speaker 3: So, Mai, we have to talk about our stupidest senator,
Speaker 3: mister Tommy Tuberville.
Speaker 2: Who is still going hard and beating Mark Wayne Mullen.
Speaker 1: At this Yeah, I was gonna say it was like
Speaker 1: Bernie Bernie Marino would like a worn Well.
Speaker 3: Bernie hasn't that as much time to get his sea legs.
Speaker 3: So mister Tuberville's off running and what he says here
Speaker 3: is trades kids should live in fear of their parents.
Speaker 3: After Bishop Bud's remarks to President Trump.
Speaker 1: Yesterday, yes so again. Bishop Bud is going to end
Speaker 1: up in get Mo for saying that Donald Trump should
Speaker 1: have compassion. I mean, really like we have, We're gone,
Speaker 1: We've gone really zero to sixty here. If I don't
Speaker 1: show up to tape tomorrow, you know where I am.
Speaker 1: You know, this is ridiculous. I mean the fact that
Speaker 1: these guys, I mean, Tuberville's whole shtick is just go
Speaker 1: is just that he needs to protect his you know,
Speaker 1: Trump at all costs. Okay, but you know it's really
Speaker 1: stupid and also stupid, and also because it is Tommy Tuberville,
Speaker 1: very very very stupid. That's it for this episode of
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Speaker 1: for listening.