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 Donald Trump says Ukraine President Zelenski
Speaker 1: has a four percent approval rating when it is in
Speaker 1: fact over fifty percent. We have such a great show
Speaker 1: for you today. Media Matters, Angelo Kirasne stops by to
Speaker 1: talk about the missed opportunities when it comes to communicating
Speaker 1: and fighting back against Trump's agenda. Then we'll talk to
Speaker 1: Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse about how the Senate can
Speaker 1: fight back against DOJE and Trump's many aggressions.
Speaker 2: But first the news, SAMII. Another one of that crystal
Speaker 2: ball we had called actually Reading Project twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2: Another one of the prophecies has come true, Unified Executive theory.
Speaker 1: I know, I'm shocked that everything Trump said he was
Speaker 1: going to do he's doing.
Speaker 3: Just shocked by the way.
Speaker 1: I want to point out vote did say during the
Speaker 1: election that he wouldn't actually do this stuff that he
Speaker 1: said he was going to do. So I think the
Speaker 1: big question is when they see him doing the stuff
Speaker 1: that he said he was going to do, will they rebel?
Speaker 1: And we don't know the president's new executive order will
Speaker 1: give him control over independent agencies. FYI, none of this
Speaker 1: is how it's supposed to work, testing a once fringe
Speaker 1: legal theory.
Speaker 3: Lawsuits are sure to follow.
Speaker 1: But again, remember this isn't about succeeding one hundred percent.
Speaker 1: This is about succeeding twenty percent. This is about succeeding
Speaker 1: ten percent. This is about changing the paradigm. This is
Speaker 1: about moving the needle. The sweeping order, which claims to
Speaker 1: promote presidential supervision and control of the executive branch, which
Speaker 1: is not how any of this is supposed to work,
Speaker 1: would affect independent agencies like the Federal Election Committee, the
Speaker 1: Federal Communications Committee, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Securities
Speaker 1: and Exchange Commission. So this would mean he would cont
Speaker 1: what's on the air, how the dollar works, trade security
Speaker 1: is the now. I mean, this would be a lot
Speaker 1: more power. The order appears to be designed to test
Speaker 1: a once fringe legal theory dubbed the unitary executive theory. Again,
Speaker 1: the goal here is to get this the Supreme Court
Speaker 1: and have them sign off on it. It reflects the
Speaker 1: growing influence of Trump's budget chief, and we've talked about
Speaker 1: him a lot Russ Vatt, who has basically said that
Speaker 1: the president should be the boss and the Congress should
Speaker 1: basically just be a group of attractive people and not
Speaker 1: have the power of the purse. The order is going
Speaker 1: to be swiftly met by a lot of legal challenges.
Speaker 1: But remember we have a very conservative Supreme Court. Three
Speaker 1: of the members were installed by Donald Trump. These regulatory
Speaker 1: agencies currently exercise substantial executive authority without sufficient accountability to
Speaker 1: the president. These are the ideas in this executive order.
Speaker 1: It's bad, hopefully will get struck down. It's very scary,
Speaker 1: and again this is what we talked about. The order
Speaker 1: proceeds to outline how Vaught, the Director of the US
Speaker 1: Management and Budget, would supervise agencies in establishing performance standards
Speaker 1: and management objectives. So the idea here is that Russ
Speaker 1: Vaught and Donald Trump will run all of the other agencies.
Speaker 1: This is completely insane and not how any of this
Speaker 1: is supposed to work.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I'm provided back to August of twenty twenty
Speaker 2: four when Russ Fought was caught on a camera saying
Speaker 2: that when Trump said he has no ties to Project
Speaker 2: twenty five, it was a lie. Yeah, there we go. So,
Speaker 2: since we're one of the more crude podcasts out there,
Speaker 2: agree and titling, this next section does shit because the
Speaker 2: facts they're putting out our bunch of kin to talk shit.
Speaker 2: We have a wholey of total bullshit that they've been doing.
Speaker 1: Elon Musk, Department of Government Efficiency claim to be saving
Speaker 1: eight billion dollars on termin eight contracts this week. But
Speaker 1: you will be shocked to know that these poly maths,
Speaker 1: what they meant.
Speaker 3: Was eight million dollars. Reading is fundamental.
Speaker 2: Team polymath The math part be jumbo shrip.
Speaker 1: Yes, the error represents about fifteen percent of the total
Speaker 1: fifty five billion dollars that Doge has claimed it has
Speaker 1: made to date. Look, this is so insane. The inconsistency
Speaker 1: is in addition to the slew of contracts listed as
Speaker 1: having US savings of zero, Doge's accounting has called it
Speaker 1: into question, as Musk keeps claiming he has saved Americans
Speaker 1: tens of billions more. By the way, I just want
Speaker 1: to point out two things about Doge. One is that
Speaker 1: he's the richest man in the world. He could just
Speaker 1: pay for all this stuff himself if he wanted. He
Speaker 1: could end world hunger, right, He could make every public
Speaker 1: school in America incredible. He could do all that stuff,
Speaker 1: but instead he wants to save taxpayers money. Why does
Speaker 1: he want to save taxpayers money. Why because he wants
Speaker 1: to cut taxes for him in his round.
Speaker 2: I have some news for you. It seems like they've
Speaker 2: also done some other fuzzy math with this one hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty year olds who are collecting Social Security.
Speaker 1: I know, shockingly, this was a great thing when I
Speaker 1: saw him doing it, because it was like, I thought,
Speaker 1: that can't possibly be right, and I thought, well, maybe
Speaker 1: it's right.
Speaker 3: You know, he's Elon Musk, He's very smart. He's wrong.
Speaker 1: So he claims that he's found rampant fraud in the
Speaker 1: Social Security administration. You'll remember he said that in the
Speaker 1: oval with Donald Trump.
Speaker 3: There is no one.
Speaker 1: Hundred and fifty year old collecting Social Security benefits.
Speaker 3: It's just so crazy. The programmer.
Speaker 1: Elon claimed the one hundred and fifty number was evidence
Speaker 1: of fraud. But it's actually a weird quirk of the
Speaker 1: Social Securities benefit system, which is written in Cobalt, which
Speaker 1: is a six year old programming language, which grids the
Speaker 1: Social Security database, and it just doesn't so one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty is actually like ninety six right or a
Speaker 1: little bit less. So this is like the big question
Speaker 1: with Elon is he lying or is he just making
Speaker 1: a mistake.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I think it's that Jesse Waters quote that they know
Speaker 2: that once their shit ecosystem of media circles that the
Speaker 2: correction will be quieter than what they said.
Speaker 3: Right, So it doesn't matter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So Trump just endorsed sweeping Medicaid cuts even though
Speaker 2: he said he wouldn't do that on the campaign trail.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm shocked.
Speaker 1: I am shocked that Donald Trump is doing all the
Speaker 1: stuff he said he would do.
Speaker 3: I'm just shocked. Who could have seen this?
Speaker 1: So basically, there are these budgets that are coming and
Speaker 1: in order to cut taxes so that Trump's enormous tax
Speaker 1: cut doesn't expire, they're going to have to cut Medicare.
Speaker 3: They're going to have to cut Medicaid. He just said.
Speaker 1: Basically, Trump said, the House and the Senator are doing
Speaker 1: a spectacular all Caps job before together as one unified,
Speaker 1: unbeatable team All Caps. Now that's actually not true because
Speaker 1: this setate has two bills. The House has one bill.
Speaker 1: It's been back and forth, but either way. This bill
Speaker 1: will cut two trillion dollars the budget, including eight hundred
Speaker 1: and eighty billion dollar cut to critical health programs, in
Speaker 1: order to pay for a tax cut for rich people.
Speaker 1: You'll be shocked to hear that this is all a
Speaker 1: big scam to pay for tax cuts for rich people.
Speaker 1: Congratulations all of us, and.
Speaker 3: We knew it was coming.
Speaker 1: Angelo Kiasone is the CEO of Media Matters.
Speaker 3: Welcome back to Fast Politics. Angelo, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: I was just saying before this, I didn't even want
Speaker 1: to miss a minute of you talking about what's going on,
Speaker 1: because I just feel like there is so much going
Speaker 1: on and it's funny. You and I did so many
Speaker 1: podcasts this summer about like Project twenty twenty five and
Speaker 1: what it would look like if he won, and what
Speaker 1: it would mean to dismantle the federal government. And I
Speaker 1: remember thinking to myself, twenty one, Okay, he's going to
Speaker 1: dismantle the federal government.
Speaker 3: I wonder how that's going to affect my life.
Speaker 1: Like you know, I don't get disability checks, I don't
Speaker 1: get Social Security, but I do benefit from many many
Speaker 1: things the federal government does. It is super interesting to
Speaker 1: watch the way that they have done this, So talk
Speaker 1: to me about what it looks like.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'll just talk about with the personal and expand
Speaker 4: out because I said I went through a similar thing, right,
Speaker 4: which is obviously you care about other people, and that's
Speaker 4: a big point of it. But I think democrats and
Speaker 4: sometimes liberals feel bad about being selfish, and I think
Speaker 4: that's important. We should be a little selfish, like we
Speaker 4: should understand the stakes for ourselves and encourage others to
Speaker 4: do that.
Speaker 1: And we should be able to message that because I
Speaker 1: think that one of the problems is there's a group
Speaker 1: of people who think, well, this will just affect poor people,
Speaker 1: which in itself is upsetting, but this is larger than that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And so for me the moment, it was really early,
Speaker 4: in the first couple of days, I think about how
Speaker 4: it affects me. My family has really really really high
Speaker 4: pink credic cancer rates, like extremely high, way off the charts.
Speaker 4: It's a very very high likely that I, either Io
Speaker 4: or my sister are going to get pank credit cancer.
Speaker 4: So I pay very close attention, weirdly to the paint
Speaker 4: credit cancer community. And I obviously thought, although they got
Speaker 4: to cut all the funding and that's going to be
Speaker 4: terrible and it's going to slow things down. But there
Speaker 4: was a really specific moment the first couple of days
Speaker 4: of DOGE, after they started freezing all those payments and grants.
Speaker 4: There was a doctor who had been working on a
Speaker 4: big study for pank credit cancer. He was on an
Speaker 4: airplane on his way to California to do the final
Speaker 4: pro former meeting before his grant goes through for a
Speaker 4: really new treatment for stage through pank cretic cancer. On
Speaker 4: the plane that cancer the meeting, I mean, it was done.
Speaker 4: It was just to check off the box thing before
Speaker 4: the money gets released and he gets to complete the
Speaker 4: study on the sort of this next phase of his treatment,
Speaker 4: and the whole thing got shut down. And that was
Speaker 4: the moment where I'm like, oh my god, this is like,
Speaker 4: you know, that's almost.
Speaker 5: Invisible, but I could.
Speaker 4: I felt it, I saw it, and I think that's
Speaker 4: something we should all do. And the reason why I
Speaker 4: say that is because when you think about it at scale,
Speaker 4: the enormity is too much to understand. It's like trying
Speaker 4: to have a conversation about the universe. You know, a
Speaker 4: million billion sons stolar.
Speaker 5: Systems, Like what that's so big?
Speaker 4: I don't know, and it's so it's hard, and I
Speaker 4: think people need to do need to think about it
Speaker 4: from that perspective, which is how is it going to
Speaker 4: affect me? And not just so they can get upset,
Speaker 4: But I think some of them actually needs to know
Speaker 4: so they can prepare. But I also think that's how
Speaker 4: they see that they have skin in the game and
Speaker 4: that there are some stakes here that requires some engagement now.
Speaker 4: And the reason and I'm again I'm not a cockyde
Speaker 4: optimist about everything, but we should not lose sight of
Speaker 4: the fact that they have a very very very slim
Speaker 4: majority in the House some four votes, only four people
Speaker 4: like Leader jeffries Or I don't make it a habit
Speaker 4: of sort of like ripping on Democrats because I get
Speaker 4: that that's kind of an easy thing to do. And yeah,
Speaker 4: you know, it's like all right, but you know, he
Speaker 4: made it this comment last speak where he said, what
Speaker 4: do you want? What do you want me to do?
Speaker 4: I have we have no leverage? What No, Actually, you
Speaker 4: do have leverage. That's the whole point. You have to
Speaker 4: find the leverage in tweak it. There's plenty of it,
Speaker 4: and one of the leverages is their small margin and
Speaker 4: that to me, was so frustrating because the leverage, in
Speaker 4: part is getting people to understand and connect those dots.
Speaker 4: And the last thing I'll say on this, and I
Speaker 4: really am troubled by it, is that, you know, there
Speaker 4: was this thing with Democrats and the media to a
Speaker 4: degree over and over and over again during Trump's first
Speaker 4: term and then again in the interregnum period where they said, Okay, well,
Speaker 4: mother's going to take him down, you know, and now
Speaker 4: this special prosecutor is going to take him down.
Speaker 3: And somebody's going to come and rescue us from this.
Speaker 4: Yes, and now it's the course. All the courts are
Speaker 4: going to do it. You know, they're going to make
Speaker 4: sure no, you need to do it. The media is
Speaker 4: not the opposition party. The Democrats of the opposition party,
Speaker 4: and they need to act that way, and right now
Speaker 4: they're not. And that's the part that I think people
Speaker 4: are generally frustrated about it.
Speaker 1: The media is not the opposition party. They are meant
Speaker 1: to be narrating what's happening. Democrats are the opposition party,
Speaker 1: and they cannot be passive. I want to go back
Speaker 1: to what you're saying before. The grants are still not unfrozen,
Speaker 1: so even though the courts have said they must be unfrozen,
Speaker 1: they are still not unfrozen, and some are unfrozen, and
Speaker 1: drips and drabs are coming out. The chaos is in
Speaker 1: fact the point.
Speaker 4: Yes, And what happens is because these are really big attractions.
Speaker 4: You know, thousands of employees here, you know, sixty billion
Speaker 4: dollars in grants there. You know, these things get lost
Speaker 4: and it's it is hard to understand. But it's also
Speaker 4: for things that are very important. And what I am
Speaker 4: concerned about so far is that these are really sympathetic things.
Speaker 4: They're not controversial things.
Speaker 3: These are not the truth is on their side.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: People want cancer research.
Speaker 5: That's right.
Speaker 4: There are hospitals right now, you know, and children's hospitals
Speaker 4: in particular got hit really hard by these freezes.
Speaker 3: Children's cancer hospitals.
Speaker 5: That's right.
Speaker 4: Like there's sick kids. And I don't understand why we're
Speaker 4: not seeing that, and we're not seeing that because why, well,
Speaker 4: no one's doing anything asymmetrical to be there. You know,
Speaker 4: some Democratic senators are having a coffee clotch in their
Speaker 4: office every few days and saying, you know, and they
Speaker 4: talked to some person as a podcast and that they
Speaker 4: think they're doing new media. Go there, make the media. No,
Speaker 4: maybe the first time you go, they won't follow you.
Speaker 4: That's okay, go again.
Speaker 1: The attitude that Democrats have and again is that they
Speaker 1: should get the same level of coverage as Trump, which
Speaker 1: in itself is self defeating.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: One of the reasons why Trump gets so much coverage
Speaker 1: is two reasons. One is because he knows how to
Speaker 1: play the media, and two is because he participates with media.
Speaker 1: He's always leaking, he's always planning, he's always talking to people.
Speaker 1: So I was talking to someone from the Biden White
Speaker 1: House and I sent him the thing about the Hannity
Speaker 1: interview last night, and I said, you know, if Biden
Speaker 1: had been doing this the entire time, you guys would
Speaker 1: not be in the shit show you are.
Speaker 4: And he said, yeah, that's.
Speaker 1: A good idea. I'm trying to get them to go
Speaker 1: on podcasts. No, go on everything. Don't go on podcasts,
Speaker 1: go on everything all the time. The Hannity interview I'm
Speaker 1: talking about is yesterday Elon the first Buddy or perhaps
Speaker 1: the real President and Donald Trump did an interview where
Speaker 1: they both were like, no, he's so great, No, he
Speaker 1: is so great. They did they sat down with their
Speaker 1: friend John Hannity and did you know whatever an hour
Speaker 1: of PR and their people were like, everything is great.
Speaker 4: By the way, I just want to.
Speaker 3: Point out just I'm actually very animated about this.
Speaker 1: That Republicans are trying to figure out how to pass
Speaker 1: these budget amendments and new budget, but Elon is just
Speaker 1: quietly like shiving the federal government. So he's fired all
Speaker 1: these people. He has no congressional approval to do that.
Speaker 1: And in the end, did they get rehired or does
Speaker 1: it not matter or I mean, talk me through that.
Speaker 4: I mean, this was always part of the strategy. And
Speaker 4: this is why I think it is very fair to
Speaker 4: be frustrated with the Democrats, because they were very transparent
Speaker 4: about the plan here, which was to do so much
Speaker 4: so fast, so that it was overwhelming, and that even
Speaker 4: if a few things either get reinstated by force because
Speaker 4: of some legal thing or because they mess up and
Speaker 4: they have to rehire the people, which is a part
Speaker 4: and part of.
Speaker 3: Right like with the nukes.
Speaker 4: Yes, yeah, you'll still get the majority of what you wanted.
Speaker 4: And so the thing that I remind everyone about is
Speaker 4: that this is only phase one. All these determinations right
Speaker 4: now which feel very overwhelming, and they're gutting every so
Speaker 4: many parts of government, making them not functional or totally
Speaker 4: hollowing them out. This is only phase one and probationary employees,
Speaker 4: I think there's a misnomer. I think the media has
Speaker 4: done a very bad job and Democrats have also done
Speaker 4: a very bad job here. Probationary employees are not just
Speaker 4: new hires. It's also people that have been there that
Speaker 4: got recently promoted or transferred to a different department, meaning
Speaker 4: experienced people, people that get rewarded. They also getting pushed out.
Speaker 4: The second wave will be all the schedule lef termination,
Speaker 4: So once they're done with the probationary ones, then they'll
Speaker 4: go through and reclassify another thirty to fifty thousand key
Speaker 4: positions as political and then terminate them. And those are combined.
Speaker 4: Is a substantial sort of impact. And that doesn't even
Speaker 4: get into the other effects, which are grants and contracts
Speaker 4: and the chaos that will ensue, and the downstream effects
Speaker 4: of course on the economy and on individuals, on individual communities.
Speaker 5: And this is.
Speaker 4: Where I think it's important. Where the urgency comes from,
Speaker 4: and the reason why there's urgency now is that it's
Speaker 4: not just a cheap political trick. Oh, this is this
Speaker 4: is the way to get to him, you know, Hey, okay, yeah,
Speaker 4: this will help. This has political benefits, I suppose. But
Speaker 4: it's more important than that is that if Democrats are
Speaker 4: not able to successfully explain and connect the dots between
Speaker 4: the harms that people are experiencing and the actions that
Speaker 4: the administration are taking. If they're not able to do
Speaker 4: that now once it reaches a fever pitch, because of
Speaker 4: the narrative dominance that Donald Trump has and the administration has,
Speaker 4: and their willingness to lie, all they're going to basically
Speaker 4: do is take all of that anger and frustration that
Speaker 4: exists out there and flip it around. They're going to say, well,
Speaker 4: we didn't need to do any of those things. That
Speaker 4: was just malicious implementation. That was just Democrats and the
Speaker 4: deep state and the media sort of doing this to
Speaker 4: hurt you. So you need to give us more power
Speaker 4: so that we can fix it. And so they need
Speaker 4: to do this urgently so that they actually don't end
Speaker 4: up giving this sort of runaway administration more influence and
Speaker 4: more power when a lot of the harms of the
Speaker 4: of their actions even you know, start to materialize.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: No, And I also think it's like even more than that,
Speaker 1: why are we here?
Speaker 3: These things are not popular?
Speaker 1: Cutting cancer treatment for children, cutting the NIH, cutting the FDA,
Speaker 1: cutting air travel for ten hours this weekend. They had
Speaker 1: fired the people in charge of the nukes, Like this
Speaker 1: is stuff, and you know, like somebody was like more
Speaker 1: eggs less plane crashes, and that is honestly, that's better
Speaker 1: messaging than Donald Trump is Captain Chaos. I mean, that is,
Speaker 1: oh my god, your eggs less plane crash. We should
Speaker 1: not have just fired the people at the CDC who
Speaker 1: study infectious diseases, Like we just had a pandemic and
Speaker 1: some of the hostility towards the pandemic, which again I
Speaker 1: understand they didn't like it, but stopping knowing about other
Speaker 1: pandemics will not prevent another pandemic. Like I feel like
Speaker 1: there's a fundamental sort of misunderstanding of how the world
Speaker 1: works here. And even like one of the things you
Speaker 1: see when you're on X is like a lot of
Speaker 1: magas and probably some of those people are bots, but
Speaker 1: some of those people are real who are like celebrating
Speaker 1: cutting the federal government, and it's like, why are you
Speaker 1: celebrating waiting longer for a passport. Why are you celebrating
Speaker 1: making sure that the FDA has less inspections. Why are you,
Speaker 1: like explain to us what there is to celebrate there.
Speaker 1: This is for tax cuts for very rich people, and
Speaker 1: I think that they don't understand why the federal government
Speaker 1: is being cut like that.
Speaker 4: That's right. And a couple of things here, because well,
Speaker 4: this has always been a hobby horse of the writer,
Speaker 4: is that you try to, you know, dismantle government as
Speaker 4: much as possible. And we shouldn't confuse what's happening now
Speaker 4: with sort of like the standard right wing Oh, we
Speaker 4: just need to hollow out governments so we can actually
Speaker 4: privatize those functions. I mean, that was honestly the dirty
Speaker 4: secret of Republicans fifteen years ago, is they wanted to
Speaker 4: hollow out governments that they could privatize the functions and
Speaker 4: fleece it more. Which I'm not celebrating, but it's like
Speaker 4: they still wanted to do most of the things. They
Speaker 4: just wanted to screw everybody in the process and get
Speaker 4: their friends richer. What's happening right now is not just
Speaker 4: a transformation of government. It's that it's using the instruments
Speaker 4: of government to have a massive cultural change, and that
Speaker 4: everything else comes downstream from that. And so how we
Speaker 4: got here is basically a country that has been pickled
Speaker 4: in right wing misinformation and rage for three decades. You
Speaker 4: do that and you build a pretty rotten core that
Speaker 4: can spread rot spreads. And you know, the weird thing
Speaker 4: is in all of this, and you talked about the
Speaker 4: unpopularity of some of these policies, and it's true, most
Speaker 4: of these things are deeply unpopular. It's not what Americans
Speaker 4: actually want. And the other thing, too, is that there's
Speaker 4: a lot of cruelty, you know, almost as you know
Speaker 4: it in the celebration, and that's been a feature and
Speaker 4: a shift of the fever swamps in recent years is
Speaker 4: the bloodthirst. And you know, there's a reason why Trump
Speaker 4: announced his camp his reelection campaign in Wago, Texas, which
Speaker 4: it's a symbol of anti government attacks.
Speaker 3: I just want to.
Speaker 1: Add that there have been historically a lot of Republicans
Speaker 1: have done this. All of this rhymes maybe it rhymes
Speaker 1: with Jim Crow, maybe it rhymes with McCarthy maybe, but
Speaker 1: it all rhymes like America has. I mean, one of
Speaker 1: the I think the biggest mistakes in twenty seventeen that
Speaker 1: the narration of trumpsm did was they were saying, like,
Speaker 1: this is not who we.
Speaker 3: Are, Like this is absolutely who we are.
Speaker 5: That's right.
Speaker 4: We had to grapple with that reality.
Speaker 5: There's there's a lot of people that are like that.
Speaker 4: And the one thing that is clear is that, aside
Speaker 4: from people not understanding this connective tissue because again the
Speaker 4: news media and the mediat larger are telling the story,
Speaker 4: but you need to have characters in it, and Democrats
Speaker 4: are a key part.
Speaker 5: Of that and they're not helping you that.
Speaker 4: The on part here, which is more visceral, is you know,
Speaker 4: there is something before I even before I think we
Speaker 4: get into the policy stuff, which is an important part
Speaker 4: of it, that there is something unsettling right now about
Speaker 4: what's happening. Even if you are sort of leaning conservative,
Speaker 4: watching sort of some of these figures, you know, Steven
Speaker 4: Miller screaming, the way that Musk and Trump are always together,
Speaker 4: the types of the things they're doing, there's something off
Speaker 4: about it then uncomfortable. Even if you don't really know
Speaker 4: anything about politics, you can have a visceral reaction to that.
Speaker 4: You know, if if you were in a room and
Speaker 4: you had to sit at a table, you know, with
Speaker 4: your lunch tray. You know, you probably choose to sit
Speaker 4: at a table that had nobody at it, then one
Speaker 4: that had Musk and Stephen Miller. You know, if you
Speaker 4: if you were in you know who they were right,
Speaker 4: because there's something off and I think a lot of
Speaker 4: people really feel that, and we shouldn't discount.
Speaker 5: The significance of that.
Speaker 4: There's a reason why people like that, and you know,
Speaker 4: are are having away at Musk as well. Part of
Speaker 4: it is self interest, but a lot of it is
Speaker 4: that it's true they are There is something off here,
Speaker 4: and I do think people can pick up on that,
Speaker 4: and we should not shy away from reminding people that,
Speaker 4: because I think it's important to get in the circle
Speaker 4: and say, wait before I tell you why you need
Speaker 4: to oppose this, but can we just agree that there's
Speaker 4: something uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: And one of the best moments in the twenty twenty
Speaker 1: four cycle, which of course the consultant class shut down
Speaker 1: right away, was when Tim Walls said that these guys
Speaker 1: are weird.
Speaker 4: That's right, And the reason why it resonated so well
Speaker 4: was not because of something specific about Tim Walls. It's
Speaker 4: that it resonated because people felt it. And this has
Speaker 4: been my critique of a lot of the communications broadly
Speaker 4: is that you can talk to people in one of
Speaker 4: three ways. You could talk to people's head, their heart,
Speaker 4: or their gut. And the majority of conservative thinking and
Speaker 4: right wing sort of nonsense is to people's guts. And
Speaker 4: that gets into your point about this is who we are.
Speaker 4: They tap into that really deep core and give people
Speaker 4: a permission structure to behave in ways that maybe they
Speaker 4: feel very request about. That's why you sort of see
Speaker 4: this burst of energy from so many of these just
Speaker 4: reprehensible figures. But Democrats on balance don't really talk to
Speaker 4: people's gut. And I do think that when they said
Speaker 4: the weird thing, you know the consultant, people thought, oh,
Speaker 4: it's because he said a cute insult, so like, you know,
Speaker 4: we should do captain chaos because of prec no right.
Speaker 4: People weren't responding to the insult. They were responding to
Speaker 4: the fact that it tapped into their core. They felt
Speaker 4: it too. And I think broadly, speaking to me, that's
Speaker 4: the important part is to connect with a whole bunch
Speaker 4: of people that I would connect with on just say hey,
Speaker 4: we at least gree there's something weird about this, right,
Speaker 4: uncomfortable and unsettling.
Speaker 5: It's uneasy.
Speaker 4: And then beyond that is to actually get people to
Speaker 4: think a little more selfishly about how this is going
Speaker 4: to affect them, and then to not similar inpotency, to
Speaker 4: recognize that there is such a very thin political margin
Speaker 4: and we should we should make some noise about it, right.
Speaker 1: I mean that is a thing too, like, well, we're cooked.
Speaker 1: There's nothing we can do, you know. And the truth
Speaker 1: is most of the country does not like this. A
Speaker 1: lot of the people who voted for Donald Trump didn't
Speaker 1: think he was going to do the stuff he said he.
Speaker 3: Was going to do.
Speaker 1: We know this because we'd talked to voters and you
Speaker 1: would say, you know, he's going to do this, and
Speaker 1: they'd say, oh, no, he's not going to do that.
Speaker 3: That would be terrible. So like he's doing that.
Speaker 1: He is doing the stuff that these voters, these trumpy voters,
Speaker 1: said he wasn't going to do because they thought it
Speaker 1: would be bad.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And that's you know, that's the point too, is
Speaker 4: that their coalition is you know, very volerable. You know,
Speaker 4: they they organized and built power on what used to
Speaker 4: be considered the fringes. What they pulled together is something
Speaker 4: that is deeply vulnerable, and being able to identify those
Speaker 4: betrayals and fracture points and fissures is significant. And I
Speaker 4: think on balance, liberals, Democrats, the media are doing a
Speaker 4: good job of like not making the right feel like, oh,
Speaker 4: they're owning us. I don't think we're stepping on any
Speaker 4: of the bear traps that we have in the past.
Speaker 4: But the leadership is frozen. That is a problem because
Speaker 4: I think there's this idea that maybe we'll wait it out,
Speaker 4: or there'll be a catalyzing moment or people will see it,
Speaker 4: and that is ridiculous.
Speaker 1: And I also think ultimately, like there is a bravery
Speaker 1: issue here, Like I understand that if you're a Democrat
Speaker 1: who ran for office forty years ago, you thought you'd
Speaker 1: be fighting against Bob Dole and not Donald Trump, right,
Speaker 1: you didn't think they're be like a group, you know,
Speaker 1: a group text filled with MAGA influencers tweeting out you
Speaker 1: know how to attack you. But here we are, man like,
Speaker 1: this is where we are. So if you don't want
Speaker 1: to fight for democratic values, I mean, I think of
Speaker 1: this as a very easy moment in American life, right,
Speaker 1: there's not a lot of nuance.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: There have been moments, especially in politics, where you had
Speaker 1: to take a real nuanced look, you've had to say
Speaker 1: things that maybe would make people upset. You'd had to.
Speaker 1: But this is not that there's no nuance here. It's
Speaker 1: just a question of being brave and a lot of
Speaker 1: these people are not up for it, which is fine,
Speaker 1: but then they need to go because this job, it's
Speaker 1: not the Supreme Court.
Speaker 5: A couple things on the bravery front.
Speaker 4: One, I totally agree, and I feel at firsthand, right,
Speaker 4: I mean, I'm under horrible and how from Musk and
Speaker 4: Twitter and all these threats from goverment officials and people
Speaker 4: that now have govermt officials that a few years ago
Speaker 4: are writing media figures and you have to have a
Speaker 4: stiff spine. I understand why others may feel the sensitivity there, because,
Speaker 4: in a weird way, while solid seems like a through
Speaker 4: line on the left, it's not true. Fear and vulnerability
Speaker 4: tend to make people on the left duck and cover.
Speaker 4: Why so many people ran away from the repro movement.
Speaker 4: We could go back twenty years ago and be like, look,
Speaker 4: we should even more than that when they started to
Speaker 4: target abortion providers that used to be inside hospitals so
Speaker 4: they can get the clinics to be standalone, so that
Speaker 4: then they could divide and conquer. Right, that should have
Speaker 4: been the moment. Like liberals have a tough time with
Speaker 4: this concept of solidarity when they're under pressure. It's just
Speaker 4: it's fear, and I appreciate that, but this is it.
Speaker 4: There is it is too as you know, it's a
Speaker 4: clear choice. And to that point about bravery and consideration,
Speaker 4: the part that I think is a little bit of
Speaker 4: a connective issues that I think it's just about thirty
Speaker 4: percent of the federal workforce is veterans.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and they're all getting fired.
Speaker 5: Yes.
Speaker 4: If we think about the types of people that you know,
Speaker 4: we always talk to me and they get the board
Speaker 4: airplanes early, right, and we always talk about them, and
Speaker 4: we thank them for their support, and we make all
Speaker 4: these cultural nons to them, right, And I think that
Speaker 4: at minimument democrats, if they don't feel like they should
Speaker 4: do it for themselves at least, I don't want to say,
Speaker 4: hide behind, but at least stand behind the thing that
Speaker 4: you're always popping up as an example of heroism and
Speaker 4: support and that should be an easy story for them
Speaker 4: to tell because so many veterans are being affected by
Speaker 4: this too. And I understand the fear, but you know,
Speaker 4: I mean, I do only have all these lines. We
Speaker 4: only think to fear is fear itself, Like we all
Speaker 4: have all these historical touchstones. None of this is new.
Speaker 4: It's literally history repeating itself. Just you're the cheat codes,
Speaker 4: and I feel like one of the cheat codes is
Speaker 4: not to succumbent to that fear.
Speaker 5: And also that a little bit.
Speaker 4: Of courage is extremely contagious and we need some of that.
Speaker 3: Yes, correct, I think that's exactly right. Thank you, Angela,
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 1: Sheldon white House is the junior senator from the state
Speaker 1: of Rhode Island. Welcome back to Fast Politics, Senator Sheldon
Speaker 1: white House.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much. I'm very glad to be on
Speaker 5: with you.
Speaker 3: Project twenty twenty five is here. It's real.
Speaker 1: Today Trump signed an executive order that's going to try
Speaker 1: to get to the Supreme Court, likely to test unitary
Speaker 1: executive theory.
Speaker 3: It's so annoying. But tell us where you are with us.
Speaker 5: I completely misjudged Doggie. Yes, I thought that was the
Speaker 5: place where the Trump's chief of staff had figured out
Speaker 5: to put these two eccentric billionaires like the Toddler pen
Speaker 5: where they could think deep thoughts about government reform, but
Speaker 5: they had no power whatsoever. They weren't decision makers of
Speaker 5: any kind. And then ramas Fani got the boot, and
Speaker 5: then Musk left alone, burst out of the doggy pen
Speaker 5: and started rampaging through the government. And you see, first
Speaker 5: of all, just massive destruction with no logic to it,
Speaker 5: just trying to break whatever stuff they can. You see
Speaker 5: a mad rush to try to stay ahead of the
Speaker 5: courts because what they're doing is illegal and they know it,
Speaker 5: so they're rushing forward. And you see, given the chech
Speaker 5: billionaires who were with Trump at the inauguration and favorite
Speaker 5: seating out of his own cabinet, given that they live
Speaker 5: off of data, that data is immensely valuable to them.
Speaker 5: It's the coin of their realm. The fact that their
Speaker 5: pal Elon Musk is rummaging his muskrats around in our
Speaker 5: data systems and potentially leaving tax data, healthcare data, social
Speaker 5: security data available to big data interests is an alarming,
Speaker 5: alarming prospect that has not at all been ruled out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't understand he won't even sort of give
Speaker 1: us an answer as to what he's doing in there.
Speaker 5: Right, Oh, I mean, it's all as vague as can be. Frankly,
Speaker 5: they won't even accurately describe who he works for and
Speaker 5: whether he's running the muskrats in the doggy pen, or
Speaker 5: like how that is all working. It's at this point
Speaker 5: just a huge destructive mess. If you remember the Cat
Speaker 5: in the Hat, Yeah, remember that book. Yes, and Thing one,
Speaker 5: Thing two come in and up the house. Musk and
Speaker 5: his little muskrats are like a whole fleet of Things
Speaker 5: one and Thing two is running about the government, destroying
Speaker 5: as much as they think they can get away with.
Speaker 5: I think with the theory that at some point the
Speaker 5: cat and the Hat drives in his machine and puts
Speaker 5: it all back together, or maybe they just leave.
Speaker 1: It wrecked, broken, because that supports Project twenty twenty five,
Speaker 1: the idea of dismantling the federal government.
Speaker 5: If you reduce the federal government, you make it less
Speaker 5: expensive and less helpful to people, and with less funds
Speaker 5: blowing through it, that opens up the all important space
Speaker 5: for tax cuts for millionaires right.
Speaker 1: And privatization of what little is left of the federal government.
Speaker 1: You serve with these people in the Senate, You've known
Speaker 1: them for a million years. Are you surprised that nobody
Speaker 1: has a spine to stand up to like a cash
Speaker 1: patal who will totally weaponize the department?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean it's obvious he has said, so why
Speaker 5: would you not believe him?
Speaker 3: He's working on him right now.
Speaker 1: He fired a couple of people while he's not even
Speaker 1: in there yet.
Speaker 5: Yeah. And the Attorney General Pambondi has already allowed the
Speaker 5: department to be weaponized to do, for instance, a fake
Speaker 5: grand jury investigation in order to be able to assert
Speaker 5: that Biden funding at the EPA is somehow potentially criminal
Speaker 5: or fraudulent, and you need to get a seizure order
Speaker 5: to prevent it from being distributed to the groups and
Speaker 5: the states to whom it's already been legally obligated. She's
Speaker 5: completely had her little sidekick Bovi's back on that, which
Speaker 5: has led to yet another career senior DOJ person doing
Speaker 5: a noisy exit and a resignation to protest the corruption. Yes,
Speaker 5: you're right, something has happened. There's been a general spinal
Speaker 5: evaporation among Republican senators.
Speaker 1: You have very few levers, right except screaming about what's
Speaker 1: happening and narrating it because otherwise, you know, there is
Speaker 1: no mainstream media anymore. There are very few options for anyone, right,
Speaker 1: and they're narrating this cutting medicaid. I mean you saw,
Speaker 1: I mean, you have seen their two bills. The Lindsey
Speaker 1: Graham budget is cuts medicaid. I mean, talk to me
Speaker 1: about the budget that they want to pass.
Speaker 3: By the way, So.
Speaker 1: They're passing a budget even though they are unconstitutionally shredding
Speaker 1: the federal government with just this guy wasn't elected.
Speaker 5: Yeah, what they're doing is the reconciliation process. It's not
Speaker 5: so much the budget. It goes through the Budget Committee,
Speaker 5: but what it is is a reconciliation bill. And what's
Speaker 5: important about reconciliation is that by law, it's the one
Speaker 5: thing that can go through the Senate with only fifty votes,
Speaker 5: the majority can drive it through. That's how we passed
Speaker 5: the Inflation and Reduction Act. We drove that through, and
Speaker 5: we did that to deal with climate change and to
Speaker 5: provide like a boost to the clean energy sector and
Speaker 5: make the transition that will keep the world safe. We
Speaker 5: weren't taking care of ourselves. Most of the jobs went
Speaker 5: to red states. We did it for a good purpose.
Speaker 5: They're coming in and they're doing it to slash and
Speaker 5: crash through the federal government in order to fund more
Speaker 5: tax cuts for billionaires who already pay preposterously low tax
Speaker 5: rates if they pay any taxes at all.
Speaker 1: You know, there's so many places in these bills where
Speaker 1: they're just cutting tax cuts or wealthy people cutting corporate taxes.
Speaker 1: None of this is popular, but for whatever reason, they're
Speaker 1: able to message it as popular.
Speaker 5: Well, at the moment, none of it is real. You know,
Speaker 5: at this age in the Senate budget process, all that's
Speaker 5: being voted out of the Budget Committee is an instruction
Speaker 5: to the actual authorized committees how much money they're supposed
Speaker 5: to either save or add. But there's no policy component.
Speaker 5: It's just numbers. You can deduce from those numbers what
Speaker 5: they're coming after. That's why people are talking about a
Speaker 5: forty percent cut to medicate. It's the deduction you draw
Speaker 5: from what they and their House colleagues are doing. But
Speaker 5: the real hit comes when the instructions to the committee
Speaker 5: are responded to by the committees and the actual legislative
Speaker 5: language comes back and an actual bill passes into law
Speaker 5: and it's there that you see for sure exactly how
Speaker 5: much they want to cut Medicaid, whether they're going to
Speaker 5: attack social security, you know what the actual array is
Speaker 5: of cuts that they're using to fund the billionaire x breaks.
Speaker 5: And that's where it really is going to get painful
Speaker 5: for Republicans who have huge Medicaid footprints in their states,
Speaker 5: for things like childbirth, for things like granny in the
Speaker 5: nursing home, for things like your cousin's opioid addiction, and
Speaker 5: if you're going to slash through that, it's really really painful.
Speaker 5: For now, it's just a lot of happy talk and politics,
Speaker 5: but it's about to get really real and really ugly
Speaker 5: for them.
Speaker 1: So I want you to talk about impoundment because part
Speaker 1: of what's happening here. They are like about fifteen things
Speaker 1: happening at once. But one of the things is that
Speaker 1: Elon Musk, you know, he's firing ten of a workforce.
Speaker 1: He can't fire so probably and the courts have stopped
Speaker 1: him to some extent, or they will, but when it
Speaker 1: comes to impoundment, So for example, I'm thinking of these
Speaker 1: NIH funds.
Speaker 3: There are these NIH funds.
Speaker 1: Elon had this brilliant plan that he was going to
Speaker 1: cut the indirect expenditure to fifteen percent because he's never
Speaker 1: written a scientific grant.
Speaker 3: So why does he care. Let's just cut it to
Speaker 3: five percent. And now this money a court said that
Speaker 3: they had.
Speaker 1: To unfreeze it, but now the money is maybe still
Speaker 1: not being released.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so two things. First, they're going through what I
Speaker 5: call the fog bank exercise, in which nobody will actually
Speaker 5: say no to distributing the funds, because a hard no
Speaker 5: from a named official is something that you can attach
Speaker 5: a court order to and say, oh, okay, no, you're
Speaker 5: in violation because you said no. So instead of saying no,
Speaker 5: they've retreated behind a fog bank where they don't answer
Speaker 5: phone calls, don't answer emails, say that they don't know yet.
Speaker 5: It's all just confusion and no answer. But the guys
Speaker 5: from Moscow Central who are in all these agencies that
Speaker 5: are controlling this, are telling people the money does not
Speaker 5: go out, the money does not go out, and they're
Speaker 5: hiding in the fog bank from the judicial repercussion of
Speaker 5: breaking the law, which is what they're actually doing. But
Speaker 5: I think courts are going to catch onto that pretty quickly,
Speaker 5: and so we'll have to fight our way through the
Speaker 5: fog bank to impoundment. Impoundment. There's actually been a law
Speaker 5: passed on that saying you can't do it, and if
Speaker 5: you want to, you've got to come to Congress first
Speaker 5: with thirty days noticing here's what we intend to do
Speaker 5: with respect to the funds that Congress under its Article
Speaker 5: one Constitutional authority said, need to go here. They are
Speaker 5: going to do as much impoundment as they can. The
Speaker 5: President has said that he thinks the law is unconstitutional
Speaker 5: and that he has this right, never mind Article one
Speaker 5: of the Constitution. Russell Vote, who is the kind of
Speaker 5: crank who's in charge of the Office of Management and
Speaker 5: Budget and is making these decisions, and said, well, I
Speaker 5: think it's unconstitutional too, and by the way, I'm going
Speaker 5: to do with the President and my lawyer say is
Speaker 5: the right thing to do, which brings us to his lawyer,
Speaker 5: who is a character named Mark Paoletta, who has written
Speaker 5: in a tweet impound baby, impound And if you don't
Speaker 5: know who Mark Paoletta is, you might recognize the painting
Speaker 5: that was done of the billionaire Harlan Crowe. Oh Yes,
Speaker 5: with Justice Clarence Thomas and the court fixer Leonard Leo
Speaker 5: all sitting around of Harland Crowe's estate giving justice Thomas
Speaker 5: Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. The other guy in
Speaker 5: that painting is Mark Paoletto. So he's been like in
Speaker 5: this whole court capture scheme neck deep all along. Now
Speaker 5: he's switched over to the counsel to the Omb. So
Speaker 5: the fix is really in on the executive branch taking
Speaker 5: over the Article one function of it belongs to the
Speaker 5: people and to Congress.
Speaker 1: And Russ Vought I think it's important to mention here
Speaker 1: authored chapter of Project twenty twenty five.
Speaker 5: He's one of the prime authors of twenty twenty five,
Speaker 5: and he.
Speaker 1: Is a person who is pushing unitary executive theory. So
Speaker 1: I just wonder when we talk about this, the thing
Speaker 1: that keeps me up at night more than the cuts
Speaker 1: is the slashing and sort of giving up on that.
Speaker 1: This crew does not give a fuck about the constitution,
Speaker 1: clearly not.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so what what can you guys do?
Speaker 5: Well? Immediately, litigation matters. Although it takes a little bit
Speaker 5: of time compared to having Thing one, Thing two up
Speaker 5: to like Thing five hundred smashing and smashing all around
Speaker 5: the government. We are winning in essentially every single case
Speaker 5: that's brought before the courts because it is so obviously illegal.
Speaker 5: These are not close cases, it's really obvious. They're just
Speaker 5: racing ahead of how quickly a court can respond. Eventually
Speaker 5: the court process catches up. So that's one thing. The
Speaker 5: second is to keep public pressure on because at some
Speaker 5: point Republicans are going to have to grow a spine.
Speaker 5: They've learned a tragic lesson when they stood up, one
Speaker 5: by one and put their heads above the parapet to
Speaker 5: express concerns about these defective Trump nominees, that they got
Speaker 5: slaughtered by Trump's political hit men, that they got threatened
Speaker 5: by Musk with millions to be spent against them.
Speaker 1: Right, I mean Jony Earnst, remember Jony Earnst? Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: and tail us.
Speaker 5: Yeah. What I call the flying monkeys of the Maga
Speaker 5: right wing are the people who threatened anonymously on the
Speaker 5: Internet to kill your children and stuff. That whole thing
Speaker 5: falls in on you. And if you're the one person,
Speaker 5: every single one of them got down to one has caved.
Speaker 5: But let's say it's nine of them. Let's say it's
Speaker 5: ten of them, and they quietly go to their leader,
Speaker 5: John Thune and say you've got to tell the White
Speaker 5: House that this has to stop. We can't vote for this.
Speaker 5: They can't really torture ten of them that way. And
Speaker 5: at some point there's going to be a group resistance
Speaker 5: that forms, but it's going to form in response to
Speaker 5: public pressure in their states, which is why it's important
Speaker 5: to be talking about first how regular people are going
Speaker 5: to be hurt by things like slashing medicaid, and second
Speaker 5: behind essentially every curtain is a corrupt interest. The corruption
Speaker 5: just runs entirely through the whole operation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a really good point, and I think that
Speaker 1: when you say that, it's definitely true that this group
Speaker 1: can because there are people like I've seen Seasan Collins
Speaker 1: and Lisa Murkowski complaining about that all of this stuff
Speaker 1: that's frozen in their states. And I mean the irony
Speaker 1: with Murkowski is that Alaska is, you know, a hugely
Speaker 1: wealthy state that needs federal money but also makes you know,
Speaker 1: pays in so to see them getting screwed. I want
Speaker 1: you to talk for a minute about why Thune is
Speaker 1: actually not Mike Johnson.
Speaker 5: Well, first of all, he has a very different constituency
Speaker 5: in the Senate. They don't all have an election coming up.
Speaker 5: They're on a six year cycle. Some just got elected,
Speaker 5: some are never going to run again, so it's hard
Speaker 5: to frighten them with political retribution. And an individual senator
Speaker 5: has far more ways to foul things up in the
Speaker 5: Senate than an individual member of Congress does. So Congress
Speaker 5: is much much, much more tribal than the Senate. Granted,
Speaker 5: we've moved a lot towards being as tribal as the House,
Speaker 5: but the House is still more tribal. And even in
Speaker 5: that environment, they're still having trouble trying to figure out
Speaker 5: how they're going to do the budget stuff. But what
Speaker 5: Pone has is a lot of important individual senators who
Speaker 5: are chairs of important committees that he needs to get
Speaker 5: things out of. And if they really want to make
Speaker 5: life hard for him, they can do that. But I
Speaker 5: think his key role here is as a fairly calm,
Speaker 5: sober and respected member of the Senate. He's the person
Speaker 5: to whom they can come ten or twelve strong and
Speaker 5: say we want to be doing appropriations again. This guy
Speaker 5: can't go through and wreck everything. You can't keep sending
Speaker 5: us these patently disqualified and outrageous, badly behaved nominees and
Speaker 5: expect us to keep doing this or whatever the thing is.
Speaker 5: But clearly, if you're a one off and you put
Speaker 5: one head above the parapet, they come after you. But
Speaker 5: if you're ten or twelve, that's where I think John
Speaker 5: has a chance to be a break on the runaway
Speaker 5: doggie train.
Speaker 1: Have you talked at all, because it seems like there's
Speaker 1: something interesting happening with Mitch McConnell.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And that's strange. It's like, after all these years,
Speaker 5: he suddenly got a conscience.
Speaker 1: Well, and I also feel like, you know, he knows
Speaker 1: he only has two more years left in the Senate,
Speaker 1: and he knows that trump Ism will ultimately survive him.
Speaker 1: And you know, you guys don't do this job because
Speaker 1: it's so lucrative. You do it because it's about this
Speaker 1: larger governing zeitgeist or whatever. And so I wonder if
Speaker 1: you think there's something happening there.
Speaker 5: There clearly is. Some of these nominees just hit his
Speaker 5: gag reflex, which I didn't actually know he had, but
Speaker 5: they obviously did. And I think the test coming up
Speaker 5: is going to be Ukraine. Trump's flat out lies right
Speaker 5: now about Ukraine that match perfectly with Putin's flat out
Speaker 5: lies about Ukraine signal two things. One, Trump Russia was
Speaker 5: not a hoax. Trump Russia was real, always was real,
Speaker 5: still is real, and is going to continue to be real.
Speaker 5: But also it really annoys McConnell because McConnell was pretty
Speaker 5: sturdy on Ukraine. I just got back from the Munich
Speaker 5: Security Conference with a whole bunch of Republican centers, very strong,
Speaker 5: very supportive of Ukraine. So what's coming up on Ukraine
Speaker 5: is going to be the first real test of whether
Speaker 5: like ten or twelve can get together and say, hey,
Speaker 5: you're on the wrong side of this, and we're going
Speaker 5: to put some kind of a check on your ability
Speaker 5: to lie about what is going on, sell Ukraine down
Speaker 5: the river and rob it of its assets for the
Speaker 5: benefit of and putin JD.
Speaker 1: Vance really shocked that group in Munich with his talk.
Speaker 1: It was very much outside of the political norm you
Speaker 1: served with Vans in the Senate. He's obviously very smart,
Speaker 1: where he's written books, He's you know, was never Trump.
Speaker 3: But what do you sort of think is going on there?
Speaker 5: I think that particularly in the wake of Trump having
Speaker 5: said very bluntly that JD. Vans is not his successor
Speaker 5: there is a whole group of people around Trump who
Speaker 5: are desperately trying to suck up to him, suck up
Speaker 5: to the people around him who influence him. They're fighting
Speaker 5: for primacy. And in my view, that speech, which absolutely bombed,
Speaker 5: the only speech that got a colder reception ever was
Speaker 5: Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign minister, when he spoke there.
Speaker 5: He bombed like that because they weren't the audience. There
Speaker 5: was an audience of one, and that audience of one
Speaker 5: was Trump and trying to appeal to all of his
Speaker 5: eccentricities and sort of venalities. That's what I think was
Speaker 5: going on there. The problem is that in the real world,
Speaker 5: NATO matters, the Atlantic Alliance matters. Putin is actually a
Speaker 5: murderous and aggressive tyrant who actually is in another country,
Speaker 5: you know, bombing children's hospitals and slaughtering families. And to
Speaker 5: not deal with any of that, or deal with in
Speaker 5: the way that degrades all of that is really harmful.
Speaker 5: This isn't just fun and games any longer. This isn't
Speaker 5: just political posturing and sucking up. Real words have real consequences.
Speaker 5: Once your Vice President.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you, thank you, thank you. Senator White, house
Speaker 1: so important and interesting.
Speaker 5: Good to be with you. Remember, always look behind the
Speaker 5: curtain for the corruption. It's always going to be there
Speaker 5: no moment.
Speaker 3: Jesse Cannon by John Fast.
Speaker 2: So I was driving through to work this morning in
Speaker 2: Midtown Manhattan paid congestion pricing since I know I should.
Speaker 2: By the time I left Manhattan, I had seen that
Speaker 2: our King had saved us from congestion pricing.
Speaker 1: Yes, King, that is correct, Donald Trump, who then tweeted
Speaker 1: that King Donald would save us from congestion pricing. We
Speaker 1: have First, he's installed this puppet mayor, right who's not
Speaker 1: a real mayor and who basically serves at the pleasure
Speaker 1: of Tom Holman, the head of Ice, and now here
Speaker 1: we are that Trump is now going to make sure
Speaker 1: that congestion pricing.
Speaker 3: He has no jurisdiction over in New York City.
Speaker 1: I mean New York City's federalism for me, but not
Speaker 1: federalism for thee.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The thing I just keep thinking about, too, is
Speaker 2: that Eric Adams, at the time this recording, had not
Speaker 2: made a statement about it. Why is that money not
Speaker 2: allowed to no been in court all day?
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's also not allowed to do you think he's
Speaker 1: allowed to go against the guy's keeping him out of jail.
Speaker 5: No.
Speaker 2: No, I figured he'd make a statement and say this
Speaker 2: is base, this rules. I figured something was coming, but no,
Speaker 2: he's in court.
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Speaker 3: Thanks for listening.