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 among a Latino independence. Trump's approval
Speaker 1: rating has dropped from forty three percent in February.
Speaker 2: To twenty nine percent in May. I wonder what happened.
Speaker 2: We have such a great show for you today.
Speaker 1: The Washington Post own Dana Milbank stops by to talk
Speaker 1: to us about Republicans turning the tide against Trump's big,
Speaker 1: beautiful bill. Then we'll talk to Mark Dunkleman about his
Speaker 1: new book, Why Nothing Works, Who Killed Progress and how
Speaker 1: to bring it back?
Speaker 3: But first of the news, Somalie the girls are fighting Elon.
Speaker 3: He's tweeting at how bad Trump's signature bill is and
Speaker 3: saying it's a disgusting abomination.
Speaker 2: It was only a matter of time.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 1: I do want to point out he's not saying it's
Speaker 1: a disgusting abomination because he's against cut snap benefits for
Speaker 1: poor children. He's not saying it's a disgusting abomination because
Speaker 1: he is against this idea that a seven year old,
Speaker 1: that if you are the parent of a seven year old,
Speaker 1: you have to work eighty hours a week. Okay, that
Speaker 1: is not what This is the work requirements for Medicaid, right,
Speaker 1: you have to work to get emergency healthcare, even if
Speaker 1: you have a seven year old child.
Speaker 2: So I don't know who is going to do that childcare. There.
Speaker 2: He's not complaining that.
Speaker 1: You know, there will be several states in which twenty
Speaker 1: five percent of all children will be affected by these cuts. No,
Speaker 1: he's not talking about that. He's talking about the fact
Speaker 1: that it grows the deficit. You know why it grows
Speaker 1: the deficit? Can you guess why, Jesse Kennon?
Speaker 3: Because it's really stupid and cuts Texas for the rich.
Speaker 1: It does a couple of things. It's the purest distillation
Speaker 1: of MAGA. So it cuts taxes for the keeps this
Speaker 1: stupid tax cut from expiring. And then it does lots
Speaker 1: of crazy Trump stuff like no taxes on tips. How
Speaker 1: the fuck you even going to do that, man, No
Speaker 1: taxes on tips. Everything's going to become a tip. It's
Speaker 1: basically like they put someone in charge of everything who
Speaker 1: doesn't know how to do anything, and here we have
Speaker 1: a bill. The Congressional Budget Office, nonpartisan independent analysts have
Speaker 1: projected the Trump's bill, which extends the twenty seventeen tax
Speaker 1: cuts would add between two point three and five trillion
Speaker 1: dollars to the deficit in the next ten years. By
Speaker 1: the way, I want to point out the only people
Speaker 1: who are standing up to Trump or Elon mush the
Speaker 1: world's richest man who used to be a Trump megadonor
Speaker 1: and the very far right, you know, the Rand Paul crew.
Speaker 1: Those guys have complained, but everyone else in the Republican
Speaker 1: Party is going along with it.
Speaker 3: Somali Michael Temaski at The New Republic a bold idea
Speaker 3: that many of us Burnie bros. Have been very on
Speaker 3: board for for decades.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so it really yes, Yes, I know your pomatic
Speaker 1: to stick.
Speaker 2: It in there, right, Okay, so yes.
Speaker 1: Mike Tamaski points out what I think all of us
Speaker 1: really should be talking about, which is that this is actually,
Speaker 1: believe it or not, all they need to do is
Speaker 1: raise taxes on very very rich people, and that Republicans
Speaker 1: have brilliantly convinced people that somehow that is not the
Speaker 1: answer to the problem. The answer to the problem is
Speaker 1: raised taxes on very very rich people.
Speaker 2: Thank you, You're welcome.
Speaker 1: That's it. That it was a very smart article and
Speaker 1: He's right, and that's it.
Speaker 3: So I think that this is truly one of those
Speaker 3: things that we saw coming with Project twenty twenty five,
Speaker 3: and we're like, oh, this is going to be the
Speaker 3: whole areas part, which is federal employees must now write
Speaker 3: essays praising Trump's policies. I really really can't wait to
Speaker 3: see what happens when they go to get that from
Speaker 3: chat GPT and what it spits out.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: You know, many people are saying that this is all
Speaker 1: very stupid. Now, look, this is all this North Korea
Speaker 1: style stuff, right, like how you will talk about, dear leader.
Speaker 1: This is like the ideological stuff. And by the way,
Speaker 1: it's so much of it is from Project twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1: I'm glad you talked about this because you and I
Speaker 1: have done so much on Project twenty twenty five. This
Speaker 1: is this ideological purity stuff which comes from the Office
Speaker 1: of You know, remember with twenty twenty five, they the
Speaker 1: whole idea was to create a federal government that does
Speaker 1: Trump's bidding, that does the kind that ideologically aligns with
Speaker 1: trump Ism. And you know, this is what this is,
Speaker 1: the ideological alignment to a trump Ism.
Speaker 3: Yeah, my personal favorite because we have the questions is
Speaker 3: number three, how would you help as the president's executive
Speaker 3: orders and policy priorities of this role. I really can't
Speaker 3: wait to see how chat shept answers that I might
Speaker 3: type it after this and send it to the group chat.
Speaker 1: It reminds me so much of all of the other
Speaker 1: things that Elon tried to do. Remember the like five
Speaker 1: things you do in a day email and that went
Speaker 1: to like members is dependent on you know, people who
Speaker 1: work in national security tell us five things you do
Speaker 1: in a day. It's that same kind of idea that like,
Speaker 1: federal employees are somehow getting some kind of freebie from
Speaker 1: the federal government as opposed to they're just workers who
Speaker 1: could actually make more money in the private sector.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, totally well, speaking of government and competence, as
Speaker 3: we know, Republicans love to prove that government doesn't work
Speaker 3: by hiring well totally inept people for jobs. And one
Speaker 3: job we don't want topt people in is FEMA chief
Speaker 3: since those are very big problems that need very big
Speaker 3: answers with a lot of improvisation, and FEMA Administrator David
Speaker 3: Richardson said that he didn't know there was such thing
Speaker 3: as hurricane sees it twitch.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, oh, what are we doing your team? Look,
Speaker 1: they have put together an insane group.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: Look, you've elevated people who really only care about MAGA
Speaker 1: and nothing else, and you've put those people in jobs.
Speaker 1: A lot of them are not necessarily set up for
Speaker 1: those jobs. And then you find that they, you know,
Speaker 1: do things like they don't know about hurricane season.
Speaker 2: Maybe he was kidding, maybe he wasn't kidding.
Speaker 1: Whatever it is, it's not great. Dana Milbank is a
Speaker 1: columnist at The Washington Post and the author of Fools
Speaker 1: on the Hill, The Hoolians, Saboteurs, Conspiracy Theorists who burned
Speaker 1: down the House.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Fast Politics, Dana Milbank, Molly, to be back
Speaker 2: with you, Where do we start? Donald Trump mad at
Speaker 2: Michael Wolf.
Speaker 5: He's got a lot of people to be mad at now,
Speaker 5: and at top of the list is Elon Musk.
Speaker 1: But why is Michael Wolf occupying any segment of Donald
Speaker 1: Trump's brain?
Speaker 5: Well, I mean, this is a dangerous path to go
Speaker 5: down in terms of why it is anything at any
Speaker 5: given You know, why is the president point sharing some
Speaker 5: posts about Joe Biden being replaced by a robot? You know,
Speaker 5: it's whatever is under his skin at the moment. I mean,
Speaker 5: I think if we're looking in a global sense this week,
Speaker 5: I think since the Taco moment, since he kept you know,
Speaker 5: worried that he'd be seen as a chicken, he wants
Speaker 5: to be as bullying as possible to as many people
Speaker 5: as possible. So, you know, I guess that that would
Speaker 5: be my pop psychology as he has to look extra pugnacious.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about instead of pecho analyzing my man, let's
Speaker 1: talk about the the Senate, which is now So there's
Speaker 1: this House bill. It is a bill that has a
Speaker 1: lot of pork. I want to talk about the judicial
Speaker 1: stuff that's snuck into the bill.
Speaker 6: You know about this, right, you mean limiting the abilities.
Speaker 2: Yes, let's talk about that.
Speaker 1: So in the big beautiful bill, which is theoretically supposed
Speaker 1: to be a bill which keeps the tax cut going
Speaker 1: for very wealthy people and also does all sorts of
Speaker 1: cuts to snap and medicaid and work with rioments, it.
Speaker 2: Makes it harder to register and makes it harder to
Speaker 2: stay on in.
Speaker 1: All of that, and also grow somehow manages to grow
Speaker 1: the deficit, which is you know, this math is kind.
Speaker 5: Of incredible by for a trillion dollars.
Speaker 1: Right in that bill is this crazy little bit that
Speaker 1: limits the power of judges to sue the administration in
Speaker 1: the big beautiful bill. So can you just answer me this,
Speaker 1: because as Donald Trump is working on this, right, Trump's
Speaker 1: sweeping tax cut bill includes provision to weaken court powers.
Speaker 2: Right, So this big beautiful bill, and he's.
Speaker 1: Out there with Thoon trying to convince him to do it.
Speaker 1: But doesn't the Senate Parliamentarian still exist or does she
Speaker 1: only exist for Democrats exist.
Speaker 5: But has been overridden repeatedly. But you're right about the
Speaker 5: various things tucked in the inability to press contempt proceedings.
Speaker 5: I think it limits standing in any case when people
Speaker 5: are challenging the administration. Yeah, there's this provision restricting any
Speaker 5: state from interfering in any way with artificial intelligence, making
Speaker 5: any regulation.
Speaker 1: Right, regulation, God forbid anyone wants to regulate guys, go
Speaker 1: on anybody.
Speaker 5: And now you even have Marjorie Taylor Greens thing tarn it.
Speaker 5: I didn't know this was in it, and if they
Speaker 5: don't take it out, I'm going to oppose the bill.
Speaker 5: She's too late, too late, It's too late, Yes, there's
Speaker 5: all kinds of and I'm sure we're going to continue
Speaker 5: to find nasty things.
Speaker 6: All along the way.
Speaker 5: But you know, yes, all of those things are outrageous
Speaker 5: in their own right. But you know, I think the
Speaker 5: focus needs to be on six hundred billion dollars in cuts,
Speaker 5: although they're not calling in cuts to Medicaid and the.
Speaker 2: SNAP, they're just adjustments.
Speaker 5: Adjustments, So a lot of twenty nine year old men
Speaker 5: on their couch playing video games. Mike Johnson seems to think,
Speaker 5: But you know, the food stamps snap as they're called,
Speaker 5: and all of these clean energy credits which are actually
Speaker 5: benefiting people in Republican districts across the land. But you know,
Speaker 5: there's this massive transfer of wealth, literally taking from the
Speaker 5: poor and giving to the rich.
Speaker 6: Even Elon Musk is now out there saying.
Speaker 5: It is a disgusting abomination, not just any abomination, but
Speaker 5: a disgusting one.
Speaker 1: Well, so Elon Musk agrees with Rand Paul right that
Speaker 1: in fact, this is the horseshoe there right right. Elon Musk,
Speaker 1: he's criticizing this because he thinks cut more.
Speaker 6: Right, he thinks it's pork field.
Speaker 5: Of course, it is pork field in some ways, but
Speaker 5: it's also an extraordinary amount of cuts. I mean, the
Speaker 5: reason is so expensive. I mean it does have, you know,
Speaker 5: huge cuts to discretionary non defense spending, there's no question
Speaker 5: about that, but it has even larger tax increases. So
Speaker 5: that's why that's going on.
Speaker 6: But you know, Musk is not in the best position.
Speaker 5: I mean, I guess he's now trying to distance himself
Speaker 5: as quickly as he can for this administration. But this
Speaker 5: is the guy who said he was going to cut
Speaker 5: two trillion dollars and they're due to be sending the
Speaker 5: actual recisions package of all the things he cut in
Speaker 5: that apparently it's nine billion dollars. So that's that's what
Speaker 5: all of this was about, and it wound up costing
Speaker 5: the government far more than that, just in terms of
Speaker 5: lost efficiency.
Speaker 2: They had to rehire all those people.
Speaker 1: Elon Musk played government and he learned quickly, but not
Speaker 1: as quickly as someone who actually would know what they
Speaker 1: were doing. And I do think to want watch Elon
Speaker 1: sort of percolate in real time. You know, he said
Speaker 1: we're going to cut trillions of dollars and then he
Speaker 1: gets in there. I mean, look, we don't really know
Speaker 1: what Elon was doing in there, right, I mean besides
Speaker 1: like copying all our data.
Speaker 5: Right and e merging everything on you know, all of
Speaker 5: our bank records, our tax records, our medical records and
Speaker 5: sharing them with his twenty something meter staffer.
Speaker 1: So no, who are ideologically very right wing, one of
Speaker 1: whom is called Big Roles.
Speaker 5: So no, we don't know what's happened, or maybe maybe
Speaker 5: we never we'll find out what's happened.
Speaker 6: The overall impact in terms.
Speaker 5: Of the federal budget and the deficits will be negligible
Speaker 5: from what he's done, mostly because it's all illegal. It
Speaker 5: was done without input from Congress. That's why they're turning around.
Speaker 5: They amount they're actually asking Congress to cut his poultry.
Speaker 5: But the impact is huge in terms of the human cost,
Speaker 5: not just in terms of the federal workers whose lives
Speaker 5: have been disrupted or the you know kids in Africa
Speaker 5: who can't get there aid to medicine now. But the
Speaker 5: Post is reporting today on a whole bunch of you know,
Speaker 5: other disruptions, including to social security, you know, things that
Speaker 5: are popping up in many ways. They made the bureaucracy
Speaker 5: worse than it was to start with.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, that's true. The usaid. I mean, look,
Speaker 1: you know it's that question of should the richest man
Speaker 1: in the world be cutting food and medicine for the
Speaker 1: poorest children in the world. I mean, you know that's
Speaker 1: the Bill Gates question, Like is that good? I mean,
Speaker 1: I think it's bad.
Speaker 6: You're really going out on a limb there.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, exactly, I think, But I don't understand, like
Speaker 1: how he didn't It didn't occur to him that people
Speaker 1: might not like him if he did stuff like this,
Speaker 1: Like did nobody say, like, maybe you shouldn't you know,
Speaker 1: there was a reason all those rich people gave money
Speaker 1: to charity during the Gilded Age? I mean, like the
Speaker 1: Rockefellers had gained this out. I mean, do you think
Speaker 1: nobody mentioned.
Speaker 5: That to him? See now we're psycho analyzing. Yeah, true,
Speaker 5: but maybe even harder than Grantrum. What was he thinking?
Speaker 5: He surely didn't calculate all the damage it would be
Speaker 5: it would do to his reputation.
Speaker 1: Seventy one percent that is the revenue drop. Right, since
Speaker 1: he's gotten involved, people no longer buy Tesla's basically right.
Speaker 6: And how does that?
Speaker 5: I mean, do you suppose people say, right now he's
Speaker 5: back at Tesla he's criticizing Donald Trump, all is forgotten, forgiven.
Speaker 5: I don't think so. I think that's done. I think
Speaker 5: he's killed his audience there now. He's certainly gotten a
Speaker 5: huge benefit in terms of SpaceX and starlink.
Speaker 1: And also investigations that are no longer going.
Speaker 5: Right, considerable benefits to that.
Speaker 2: So what else do you think?
Speaker 1: Like, so, we have this bill the Republicans wanted to
Speaker 1: get passed by July fourth. It will likely be the
Speaker 1: only piece of legislation Trump passes. I think that's a
Speaker 1: fair assessment.
Speaker 5: I think that's right when you certainly the only major
Speaker 5: piece of legislation. I mean, I think they've passed something
Speaker 5: protecting gas stoves or oh.
Speaker 1: Yes, that reminds me of Trump's first term, right, gas stoves,
Speaker 1: the Committee to weaponize the government.
Speaker 5: Right, But yeah, no, they've they've dumped everything into this
Speaker 5: one package. And man, I mean, you have to say
Speaker 5: they're going to have to enact something because they have
Speaker 5: no reason to exist if they're if they're unable to
Speaker 5: do that. But it's still very difficult to see how
Speaker 5: they thread the needle here. I mean, the way they
Speaker 5: got it done in the House is basically we're saying
Speaker 5: all right, well, the Senate's going to change it anyway, so.
Speaker 2: Just go for it.
Speaker 5: I'm not sure that's going to cut it, because you've
Speaker 5: got a lot of a couple of dozen Republican House
Speaker 5: members from Biden won districts or otherwise vulnerable Republicans who
Speaker 5: have now walked the plank on Medicaid cuts, on food
Speaker 5: stamp cuts, and on all these green energy credits. And
Speaker 5: it may well be for nothing because these things will
Speaker 5: be scaled back in a sense, so they didn't actually
Speaker 5: achieve the purpose of this, but the vote.
Speaker 6: Is still there.
Speaker 1: You've been covering Washington for a long time, you've been
Speaker 1: writing this column.
Speaker 6: I like how you point that out each time they talk.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean that you have some historical knowledge of
Speaker 1: the situation.
Speaker 2: You're young and spry.
Speaker 6: Nothing has prepared us for this moment, right.
Speaker 1: Yes, But I mean these people did have these jobs, certainly,
Speaker 1: not true for all of them, Like some of them
Speaker 1: could have probably had better jobs, but they chose these
Speaker 1: jobs because they love power, and yet they have given
Speaker 1: away almost all of their power to Donald Trump. So,
Speaker 1: like you know, Paul Ryan used to get up in
Speaker 1: the morning and say, like I am going to solve
Speaker 1: government waste. Right, Mike Johnson gets up in the morning
Speaker 1: and says, what I'm going to make Donald Trump happy?
Speaker 6: That seems to be what he's doing.
Speaker 5: Man, I guess we could go back through the you know,
Speaker 5: what has motivated these guys over the ages.
Speaker 6: I think it is sort of this.
Speaker 5: In this case, it's the worship of the man and
Speaker 5: the belief that he will do the right thing in
Speaker 5: the face of all kinds of evidence showing that he
Speaker 5: doesn't do the right thing.
Speaker 2: So I don't really worship him.
Speaker 5: Right, you were able to get the House Freedom Caucus,
Speaker 5: these are the these are the deficit hawks and all
Speaker 5: that you were able to get them to vote for
Speaker 5: a four trillion dollar increase in the debt ceiling and
Speaker 5: something just completely blows the lid off of anything resembling
Speaker 5: fiscal responsibility. And they said, well, we trust Donald Trump,
Speaker 5: and so it's not going to happen here, but there
Speaker 5: it's going to happen with the Doge package, and that's
Speaker 5: all going to work. And now we see that that
Speaker 5: was you know again, the nine billion dollars, that was nothing.
Speaker 5: And Musk has you know, walked away from any notion
Speaker 5: of you know, substantially cutting the federal government.
Speaker 6: So what motivates them is?
Speaker 5: You know, it's the question I tried to answer and
Speaker 5: writing in The Destructionists, you know, going all the way
Speaker 5: back to Nude Gingrich. I mean, obviously you can't have
Speaker 5: any daylight between you and Donald Trump if you're going
Speaker 5: to keep your political career.
Speaker 6: So what good is it doing you?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 5: I mean think about a guy like Tip Roy, who
Speaker 5: I think actually believes the stuff he says about federal
Speaker 5: spending and shrinking government and all that, and now he's
Speaker 5: just another piece of the machine that is expanding that
Speaker 5: federal government.
Speaker 6: So at some.
Speaker 5: Point it just became about power for its own sake,
Speaker 5: but impotence in terms of the actual policy.
Speaker 1: But I want to add something here, which is I
Speaker 1: think there's the same thing that there was before we're Republicans,
Speaker 1: certainly in the Senate, but I also think in the
Speaker 1: House that when they're alone, they're all like this.
Speaker 2: Guy, Oh my god. Like I don't think.
Speaker 1: They're like this guy, Yeah, this is great, Like I
Speaker 1: love a reality television host. We're all going to get reelected.
Speaker 1: This is going to be great. Like I think they
Speaker 1: still understand that. I mean, We've seen one thing. It's
Speaker 1: that Trump can't defy political gravity. But Terry Lake, right,
Speaker 1: Roy Moore, those people can't.
Speaker 5: Well, it's the perpetual story that all the people around
Speaker 5: Trump get destroyed by Trump. You know, must be the
Speaker 5: most recent example of that, and Trump just walks along
Speaker 5: as if unscathed, as if nothing had happened. Now, I
Speaker 5: think what you're describing is probably true of most in
Speaker 5: the Senate, most Republicans in the Senate. It's probably true
Speaker 5: of congressional leadership. It's not true of the three dozen
Speaker 5: or so in the House Freedom Caucus, the truly maga,
Speaker 5: the true believers, you know, who actually get up in
Speaker 5: the morning and really care about all right, well let's
Speaker 5: make sure there's no DEI and can't have any trans rise,
Speaker 5: you know, people who are actually fired up about you know,
Speaker 5: that kind of thing.
Speaker 6: So you know, it's a mixture of both of them.
Speaker 6: So how were they able to get what is it? Only?
Speaker 5: I think it was only one no vote, one courageous
Speaker 5: present vote from Andy as right, the head of the
Speaker 5: Freedom Caucus, and then two guys who apparently fell asleeve.
Speaker 6: In that was the sat move.
Speaker 5: They didn't vote for it, but they didn't vote against them,
Speaker 5: but that you know, that's all political fear. And you know,
Speaker 5: you see the way he's now, the way he's been
Speaker 5: going after Ran Paul, and heck, you know Rick Scott,
Speaker 5: and you know he is able to bludgeon them. It
Speaker 5: is a fair question to ask what these guys think
Speaker 5: they've gotten out of it. So, I mean, they get
Speaker 5: to wear the congressional pin on their lapel, and they
Speaker 5: have lots of people calling them sir and ma'am, and
Speaker 5: they get to go on Fox News. But the few
Speaker 5: who came into into government with the conservative principles of
Speaker 5: of free trade and limited government and individual liberties, well
Speaker 5: I don't think they're delivering much home to their constituents
Speaker 5: on that count.
Speaker 2: That is definitely true.
Speaker 1: I wonder if you could sort of talk about we
Speaker 1: have these governorships, We have a bunch of races happening
Speaker 1: on the local level in a bunch of different places.
Speaker 1: We have the trade war that is the you know
Speaker 1: has been postponed again.
Speaker 6: Right, Well, yes and no, but yeah.
Speaker 2: Yes and no. Right, So talk us through where we
Speaker 2: are with trade.
Speaker 5: The elections piece of that is important too. Where are
Speaker 5: we with trade? Well, it depends on when your listeners
Speaker 5: are listening, because that's going to change by the minute.
Speaker 5: One thing that hasn't changed is the sense of chaos,
Speaker 5: right so you know, whether it's the tariffs are one
Speaker 5: hundred and forty five percent against China or no, no,
Speaker 5: maybe they're down to fifty percent, or bit they're up
Speaker 5: to one hundred percent. You can't possibly know if you're
Speaker 5: running a business what the tariff regime is going to be.
Speaker 5: You do know that tariffs are overall higher, and you
Speaker 5: do know that everybody's afraid to invest. And now there's
Speaker 5: this added element of chaos with the courts. Will they
Speaker 5: be able to invalidate the whole thing or you know,
Speaker 5: now it appears the appeals court is going to be
Speaker 5: a trio of Trump appointed judges. Almost Okay, maybe he's
Speaker 5: back on with his tariffs. So the key there is
Speaker 5: not the level of tarifs, but just you know the
Speaker 5: level of chaos. And clearly China is putting the screws
Speaker 5: to Trump right now. So that's not going anywhere. We
Speaker 5: are going to be seeing that in terms of prices,
Speaker 5: which gets your initial question about the elections. Now, I
Speaker 5: just did a piece it's coming out this week on
Speaker 5: you know, I've just been watching all of this. Democrats suck,
Speaker 5: Democrats need to do this. The Democratic brand is toxic,
Speaker 5: the weak, the woke. I counted, you know, I just
Speaker 5: did an ex assert there were three five hundred and
Speaker 5: fifteen occurrences of Democrats need to just in the last month.
Speaker 5: And yeah, their brand sucks, but you know what else,
Speaker 5: The Republican brand sucks, like four or five points less
Speaker 5: than the Democratic brand sucks. And if you look at
Speaker 5: the generic ballot, you know, when you ask people, you
Speaker 5: know which part you're going to support in your local election,
Speaker 5: you know you're in New York district. Democrats are leading
Speaker 5: that they have been leading that consistently throughout the polls.
Speaker 5: I mean, even when you look at wacky poles like Rasmussen,
Speaker 5: I don't think we're looking at some you know, historic
Speaker 5: repudiation of Trump what we've seen so far, but you've
Speaker 5: certainly seen and the special elections we've had pretty much
Speaker 5: a clean sweep for Democrats, and they certainly look to
Speaker 5: be profiting from not doing anything other than not being
Speaker 5: Donald Trump. Which is why I think there's a lot
Speaker 5: of there's a lot of wasted time saying well, you
Speaker 5: know what should Democrats do this, that or the other thing.
Speaker 5: They're democrats. You can't organize them around any one particular principle,
Speaker 5: you know, until and unless you have a party leader,
Speaker 5: which isn't going to happen for a couple of years.
Speaker 5: The only thing they have to do is not be
Speaker 5: Donald Trump. And that does seem to be working for them.
Speaker 2: Thank you, thank you, thank you. Dana Milbank, Molly, pleasure
Speaker 2: as always to talk with you.
Speaker 1: Mark Dunkelman is the author of Why Nothing Works, Who
Speaker 1: Killed Progress and How to Bring It back?
Speaker 2: Welcome to Fast Politics.
Speaker 4: Mark, Thank you Groll to be here.
Speaker 1: So your book is called Why Nothing Works, and this
Speaker 1: is a topic we are very involved in right now,
Speaker 1: and it's sort of why the best efforts of government
Speaker 1: sometimes don't produce the results we want. So get me
Speaker 1: into how you got here and why you decided to
Speaker 1: write this book.
Speaker 4: So I was taking the train into New York a
Speaker 4: lot back, like a decade ago, and when you were
Speaker 4: at Brown, I was at Brown, I was living in Washington,
Speaker 4: I had clients in New York. I was like always
Speaker 4: on the train, always coming to Penn Station and always
Speaker 4: being like.
Speaker 2: So Amtrak got you here?
Speaker 4: Is what you're saying, Amtrak got me there, and I
Speaker 4: would end up at Penn Station, which is like was
Speaker 4: like it's a little bit of now, but like back then,
Speaker 4: like it was just like totally a rat pit, Like
Speaker 4: it was the grossest. I mean, people don't realize it's
Speaker 4: but Penn Station is like a second most heavily traffic
Speaker 4: transit hub in the world. Like more people go through
Speaker 4: Penn Station than go through La Guardia, Newark, and Kennedy
Speaker 4: combined on any given day. It is the city's front door.
Speaker 4: And that's because people are coming there from New Jersey,
Speaker 4: from Long Island, from Connecticut, from Washington for Boston. Like
Speaker 4: everyone's converging in this thing. And like I'm sitting there
Speaker 4: thinking to myself as I'm reading this old classic liberal
Speaker 4: book called The Powerbroker about Robert Moses who like destroyed
Speaker 4: the South Bronx by building the Cross Bronx Expressway. Why
Speaker 4: was he able to do like this crazy thing while
Speaker 4: everyone was screaming at him to stop. And then like
Speaker 4: decades later, like no one objects to a nicer Penn Station,
Speaker 4: but they can't get there. And so like that set
Speaker 4: me on this journey of like what happened to progressivism,
Speaker 4: that we can't get big things done anymore. And like
Speaker 4: I realized over the course of time, like we'd actually
Speaker 4: done it to ourselves. Like for all that we complained
Speaker 4: about the Republicans and the Conservatives, and we complained about
Speaker 4: Trump and Reagan and Bush and whatnot, like this is
Speaker 4: something that we did do ourselves, which means like one,
Speaker 4: like that's sort of embarrassing, but two, it means if
Speaker 4: we get it to ourselves, we can get ourselves out
Speaker 4: of it. But I don't think that most of us
Speaker 4: are even thinking of it that way.
Speaker 1: So the net neet here is regulation or something else.
Speaker 4: The net net is like we progressives used to be
Speaker 4: leave that, like we could solve the problems if we
Speaker 4: put power in the hands of big institutions, Like the
Speaker 4: whole Upper South didn't have electricity, so like we and
Speaker 4: like private utilities weren't going to extend wires to these
Speaker 4: poor farmers who were like living in the nineteenth century.
Speaker 4: So we as progressives during the Nobul era, created the
Speaker 4: Tennessee Valley Authority, and we hired federal workers and they
Speaker 4: built the wires and the power stations and all this stuff.
Speaker 4: They did these big things. They condemned whole tracks of
Speaker 4: land so they could build dams and reservoirs, and they
Speaker 4: reforested hillside did they did all this?
Speaker 1: This is like Lyndon Johnson Master the Senate stuff, right, Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're going full Robert Carrow and yes, podcast right.
Speaker 4: So we're going for Robert Carrow. And like back then,
Speaker 4: we empowered these big bureaucrats to do these big things.
Speaker 4: And then like people like Robert Carrow writing in the
Speaker 4: nineteen seventies, so a few decades later and like Ralph
Speaker 4: Nader and Rachel Carson and like all this stuff that's
Speaker 4: happening in the cities and seventies were like we're like whoa,
Speaker 4: Like these big powerful people that we've empowered to do
Speaker 4: these big things actually are bad, right, Like like Robert
Speaker 4: McNamara got us into the Vietnam War, right, Robert Moses,
Speaker 4: who the power brokers about, Like you know, built the
Speaker 4: Cross Bronx Expressway like the bureaucrats.
Speaker 1: And he hurt a lot of poor people. The thinking
Speaker 1: is that these moves towards progress hurt a lot of people,
Speaker 1: and so they need to be looked at differently. And
Speaker 1: looking at them differently then made democratic politicians afraid to
Speaker 1: do stuff.
Speaker 4: Well, it's not even they continue to say they wanted
Speaker 4: to do stuff, but they wanted to create procedures that
Speaker 4: meet it so that when they wanted to do stuff,
Speaker 4: like if it was going to hurt poor people, or
Speaker 4: it was gonna hurt like historic buildings, or it was
Speaker 4: gonna hurt the environment or an invagered species or uh,
Speaker 4: you know whatever, Like we created a zillion things that
Speaker 4: you had to check off before you could do anything big,
Speaker 4: and like that was all well intentioned and like frankly,
Speaker 4: like back then, like when like it was that like
Speaker 4: these like white men and like charcoal suits and fedoras
Speaker 4: were just like telling people to move out of your
Speaker 4: houses because we got to build a highway there, or
Speaker 4: we're going to do slum clearance, like whatever. It was
Speaker 4: like it was appropriate to like put more checks on
Speaker 4: these establishment figures. But now we put so many checks
Speaker 4: on them that like literally in many cases, you can't
Speaker 4: get obvious stuff done. And it makes voters enraged. It
Speaker 4: makes even progressives enraged. And when we are enraged and
Speaker 4: government isn't working, and the Democratic Party is the party
Speaker 4: of government and government doesn't work, it's not good for us.
Speaker 4: It's good for Trump and like this to me, like
Speaker 4: for all that we can complain about all the things
Speaker 4: that he's and like absolutely we should call them out
Speaker 4: and like we should fight back and whatnot. This is
Speaker 4: the sort of right.
Speaker 1: But this is a different issue than that. This is
Speaker 1: something that's separate. I'm very much subscribed to the idea
Speaker 1: that you can walk into you gum, you can deal
Speaker 1: with the Democratic parties problems. One of them, I think
Speaker 1: big mistakes of twenty sixteen was thinking that everything, that
Speaker 1: every problem was caused by Trump and not examining the
Speaker 1: world that got us there.
Speaker 4: I think that's exactly right. We've created a system that
Speaker 4: doesn't work like that, that's our doing in many cases.
Speaker 4: And like people may not like him, but like at
Speaker 4: least he says I'm going to blow up the system.
Speaker 4: And we too often get caught in this in the
Speaker 4: traff of being like no, no, no, the establishment works well.
Speaker 4: Like everyone's been to the DMV. Everyone's like realizes that,
Speaker 4: like we've got all this clean energy that we can harness,
Speaker 4: but we're not getting it because there's no transmission line.
Speaker 4: There's clean energy in Canada. Massachusetts wants to have clean
Speaker 4: energy message doesn't sit next to Canada, so you have
Speaker 4: to find some state that's allowing a transmission line through it.
Speaker 4: And basically all of them said no, so like we
Speaker 4: couldn't get the clean energy. Like that's frustrating to people.
Speaker 4: And it's super expensive, like the Second Avenue subway in
Speaker 4: New York because like the most expensive two miles of
Speaker 4: public Cranso ever built, Like like it's way more expensive
Speaker 4: here than it is in England, and England is more
Speaker 4: expensive than Spain, and Spain is more expensive than Turkey,
Speaker 4: and like we're just at the top of the food chain.
Speaker 4: And it's not because like concrete and steel are more
Speaker 4: expensive here though they may be a little bit, or
Speaker 4: the labor is more. It's because there's so uncertainly that
Speaker 4: there's so many, so many barriers you have to clear,
Speaker 4: and so much uncertainty in like are you actually going
Speaker 4: to get to do this project or whatever it is
Speaker 4: that like nothing works, and like people are just sitting
Speaker 4: there around and being like geez, Like the whole system
Speaker 4: seems broken and Democrats seem to be on the side
Speaker 4: of the system. That's lousy, right.
Speaker 1: I think the people who listen this podcasts to understand
Speaker 1: nuance and off. Yeah, to know that you can both
Speaker 1: see how Trump was elected and how this led to that,
Speaker 1: you know, without saying like you can't criticize this because
Speaker 1: it somehow will enable more trump Ism, when in fact,
Speaker 1: the lack of criticism of this is what God is
Speaker 1: to Trump is. So I wonder if you could explain
Speaker 1: to me sort of what you think the ways in
Speaker 1: which you could streamline this would be The question is
Speaker 1: really the streamlining things to make a world in which
Speaker 1: you can do these things you need to do.
Speaker 4: Yes, I see this as like a continuum, And at
Speaker 4: one end you have the Robert Moses and Robert McNamara
Speaker 4: folks who like are like, I'm going to do stuff.
Speaker 4: I don't give a damn what anyone says to me,
Speaker 4: Like I'm going to listen to no criticism, I'm going
Speaker 4: to broach no compromise. Right, That's one end. The other
Speaker 4: end is a system in which if anyone objects to
Speaker 4: anything like, the project goes down. And that's sort of
Speaker 4: what happened with with Station right, Like, there are lots
Speaker 4: of projects you can point to in this country where
Speaker 4: like someone doesn't want more housing near their house and
Speaker 4: they claim that, you know, like that's the only place
Speaker 4: where this kind of orchid grows. So like you can't
Speaker 4: write like it's too many, So like it is a
Speaker 4: middle ground between these two where everyone has a voice,
Speaker 4: Like everyone who has a is going to be affected
Speaker 4: by a project, is able to say to the person
Speaker 4: that is ultimately going to decide, like, here's my concern,
Speaker 4: and then that person or institution is given the responsibility
Speaker 4: of weighing all the stuff, like is it worth it
Speaker 4: to like endanger this species if we get this much
Speaker 4: more housing, or we're able to take this many cars
Speaker 4: off the street, or whatever it is. And we need
Speaker 4: to have some ability for someone to have some discretion
Speaker 4: to make a choice without it being like incredibly litigious
Speaker 4: and going to court and like end us processes.
Speaker 1: I want you to explain Penn Station, because for my
Speaker 1: own adification, I'm in and out of there all the time.
Speaker 1: What it looks like they did was build a whole
Speaker 1: other station under the post office and now you have
Speaker 1: to walk through the old Penn station to get to
Speaker 1: the new Penn station. Is that what happened? And is
Speaker 1: there was there some level of crazy that led to that.
Speaker 4: So the problem with Penn Station is that there are
Speaker 4: too many people who have skin in the game. There's Amtrak,
Speaker 4: which owns the old Penn station. There's Madison Square Garden,
Speaker 4: which it's above it. There's Bornado, which has like the
Speaker 4: which owns all the property around there and all the businesses.
Speaker 4: There's the community Board, there's the state, there's the Long
Speaker 4: Island Railroad, the Amtrak and the New Jersey Traider. Like
Speaker 4: everybody's got some like vested interest and so like, you're
Speaker 4: absolutely right. What they ended up doing was saying, there's
Speaker 4: no way we can move Madison Square Garden. We'd have
Speaker 4: to give too much money to the Dolans who own
Speaker 4: that property, and like where would they put the place?
Speaker 4: For the Knicks and the Rangers play like like, so
Speaker 4: what we're gonna do is we're gonna take this old
Speaker 4: underused post office across Eighth Avenue and turn that into
Speaker 4: a train hall. Even though the trains still basically stop
Speaker 4: under Mathis Square Garden. You end up having to walk back.
Speaker 4: So that's sort of bananas. But like now at least
Speaker 4: there is a nicer place to stay. And I will say,
Speaker 4: like pensation today is nicer than it was. Like, let's
Speaker 4: give Jenna Lieber and the MPT credit for that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, as someone who also just spends a ton of
Speaker 1: time on Amtrak and truly does despise spending seven hundred
Speaker 1: dollars for a train ticket, you know, some crazy amount
Speaker 1: of money. I bought a plane ticket for a fifth
Speaker 1: of that, So what the fuck is going on here?
Speaker 4: The trick of it here is that Amtrak is a
Speaker 4: federally owned corporation, and so Republicans are constantly saying, privatize at,
Speaker 4: privatize at, privatizet And then they say, but I'm a
Speaker 4: senator from Alabama, and I'm a Senator from Missouri, and
Speaker 4: I'm a senator from Indiana, and you must send trains
Speaker 4: to my state. I want my constitution to have it.
Speaker 4: So they're talking on it both sides of their mouth, right,
Speaker 4: Like the profitable part of Amtrak, he could very easily
Speaker 4: run a profitable railroad that goes between Washington, Philadelphia and
Speaker 4: New York Providence in Boston like that, Like that part
Speaker 4: of it makes sense that seven hundred dollars you're paying
Speaker 4: is going to subsidize this larger corporation that is running
Speaker 4: these wildly inefficient like nobody uses them trains to parts
Speaker 4: of the country just because members of the of Congress
Speaker 4: are demanded in exchange for their votes to give Amtrak
Speaker 4: a federal subsidy. So the whole thing is totally bananas.
Speaker 4: It's really quite angering. You're absolutely right, your train ticket
Speaker 4: from to Washington should not be that expensive, but a
Speaker 4: lot of that money is going to subsidize train service
Speaker 4: between Tennessee and Mississippi.
Speaker 1: So why, I mean, couldn't you just fucking privatize it.
Speaker 1: Why are democrats not being like, okay, let's privatize it.
Speaker 4: Well, because it was private until the nineteenth seventies and
Speaker 4: we were going to lose train service altogether. So the
Speaker 4: federal government came in and saved in the way that
Speaker 4: we think of like big tech today, like you know, Google, Amazon,
Speaker 4: like these huge corporations that like nobody could touch. That's
Speaker 4: what the railroads were at the beginning of the twentieth century,
Speaker 4: like the Pennsylvania Railroad, the New York Central Railroad, the
Speaker 4: Baltimore O Highlight. They were these huge, incredibly important corporations
Speaker 4: and they ran across the country and people hated them
Speaker 4: because they were so big, and like if they charged
Speaker 4: too much, there was something you could do because like
Speaker 4: only the New York Central Ranch of that town or
Speaker 4: whatever it was, right, right, they could raise prices on
Speaker 4: sending trade like they were big, scary was vand or
Speaker 4: built and like these guys in top hats and they
Speaker 4: sat like ornate boardrooms in Philadelphia and told everybody what
Speaker 4: they had to pay for stuff. Like in the same
Speaker 4: way that we, like most of your listeners are going
Speaker 4: to be angry about these big tech corporations. Is the
Speaker 4: same dynamic. But over the course of the twentieth century,
Speaker 4: we built roads and highways, we subsidized airlines, and like
Speaker 4: all these huge corporations were like reduced to nothing. So
Speaker 4: like the federal government came in and saved any railroad
Speaker 4: stuff at all, Like it was all going to go
Speaker 4: like right, they had enormous capital expenses because they had
Speaker 4: tracks all over the country, and the federal government came
Speaker 4: over and saved them. And that's the beginning of the
Speaker 4: Amtrak in like the seventies and eighties. And now we've
Speaker 4: got this strange Frankenstein monster which has a profitable service
Speaker 4: in the Northeast corridor in a couple of other places,
Speaker 4: and we're subsidizing it, and we're subsidizing ridiculous routes because
Speaker 4: that's what Washington demands mostly Republicans.
Speaker 2: So insane.
Speaker 1: All right, so give me your quick fixes for all
Speaker 1: the things that are making me irritated, because I'm now
Speaker 1: very irritated about this.
Speaker 4: Well, here's what I think. I think that for all
Speaker 4: the Trump talks about the deep state, the truth is
Speaker 4: that in most cases, the people who are the deep state,
Speaker 4: like the bureaucrats who are like trying to figure stuff
Speaker 4: out like they are, or they live scared, right, they
Speaker 4: are constantly afraid that they're going to get slapped down
Speaker 4: by the White House, or slapped down by Congress, or
Speaker 4: slept by by a lawsuit. They can't make decisions quickly.
Speaker 4: They can't take any risks, right. They know that if
Speaker 4: they want to do a big project and it's got
Speaker 4: some cost, that it's going to cost a there's going
Speaker 4: to be a corner of a national park that's going
Speaker 4: to be developed, or there's going to be some houses
Speaker 4: that have to be playing through eminent domain. Like everyone
Speaker 4: is running scared, so nothing works. I want to give
Speaker 4: government back the ability to make discretionary decisions in a
Speaker 4: pretty expeditious way where we accept that there are costs
Speaker 4: to progress, and we're going to accept those costs if
Speaker 4: they're good for working class people generally. Like that should
Speaker 4: be our brand, as Democrats should be. We're going to
Speaker 4: make the tough choices that are good for the working class,
Speaker 4: whereas the Republicans want to do things that are good
Speaker 4: for the very rich and they are not actually getting
Speaker 4: stuffed downe like those is going to turn out to
Speaker 4: make government less efficient, less useful. But we should be
Speaker 4: the ones that want to do government reform so that
Speaker 4: the bureaucracy finally works again like it did decades ago.
Speaker 1: I want you to give me one example of how
Speaker 1: I mean. This stuff is fascinating and I'm super interested
Speaker 1: in it, But give me one example of a way
Speaker 1: where we can do this.
Speaker 4: Okay, As I said earlier, there is clean water generated
Speaker 4: hydro power in Canada. In Quebec. They've got dams, they
Speaker 4: got lots of power. They would love to sell the
Speaker 4: United States and they'd like to get it to Massachusetts,
Speaker 4: which wants to buy it. Because if you buy enough
Speaker 4: power from Canada, you could basically do the equivalent of
Speaker 4: taking seven hundred thousand cars off the road, like all
Speaker 4: those tail pipe missions. So it's great. The problem is
Speaker 4: that in order to do that, you need to build
Speaker 4: a transmission line through Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York,
Speaker 4: and basically none of those states want to do it.
Speaker 4: Somebody needs to be able to say, listen, Maine, we're
Speaker 4: going to give you a good deal. We're going to
Speaker 4: pay you a bunch, you're going to get some of
Speaker 4: the clean energy for free. We're going to subsidize you know,
Speaker 4: nice better furnaces for poor people in Maine. But you
Speaker 4: have to allow this transmission line to go through.
Speaker 2: Why don't they want it?
Speaker 4: They believe that it's going to ruin a portion of
Speaker 4: the main Woods and there's going to be, you know,
Speaker 4: across the Appalachian Trial are going to be wires, and
Speaker 4: everybody along has some little objection and wants to get
Speaker 4: their little extra piece. There needs to be someone big,
Speaker 4: some big institution they can say listen, I hear you
Speaker 4: main Like, we're going to do what we can to
Speaker 4: make it so that when you're in this gorge or whatever,
Speaker 4: like your site line is not affected by a transmission
Speaker 4: wire or whatever it is. But we're going to do
Speaker 4: it like this has been going on in Maine. Since
Speaker 4: twenty sixteen. Charlie Baker cut this deal in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 4: It is now twenty twenty five. The line hasn't been built.
Speaker 4: We need a process by which everybody gets to have
Speaker 4: their say, but then someone is able to say, yes,
Speaker 4: we're going to build the line. And my book is
Speaker 4: just a whole series of stories like this about how
Speaker 4: well intentioned efforts to make it so that like a
Speaker 4: little town in Maine that doesn't want the transmission line
Speaker 4: has some say and like whether it goes near a
Speaker 4: school or not, or et cetera, et cetera, but that
Speaker 4: we've built so many checks into the system that like
Speaker 4: no one can make a decision, and then nothing gets
Speaker 4: done and then everyone's angry.
Speaker 1: I'm so depressed. This was very good and interesting. Thank
Speaker 1: you for coming on. I hope you'll come back.
Speaker 4: I would love to do it. This is a great show.
Speaker 4: I love your audience and I love you so thanks
Speaker 4: for having me on. No mormical Food.
Speaker 2: Jesse Cannon bi junk Fast.
Speaker 3: You know what we need more of medical journals. That's
Speaker 3: what the world needs. So RFK Junior. He's on the
Speaker 3: case and I can't wait to read the Maha World
Speaker 3: Report and Journal or the Maha Journal of Medicine, because
Speaker 3: he's going to make them.
Speaker 2: It's not going to be called Maha. It's going to
Speaker 2: be called ha ha.
Speaker 5: Okay, I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: Miss Yeah, it's going to be called ha ha and
Speaker 1: uh haha. None of us are going to be laughing.
Speaker 1: Very scary stuff. This guy should not be in charge
Speaker 1: of our medicine. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics.
Speaker 1: Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear
Speaker 1: the best minds and politics make sense of all this chaos.
Speaker 1: If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a
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Speaker 2: Thanks for listening.