The Death of Norms (with Robert Costa)
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Hey, pull up a chair. It's Hacks on Tap with David Axelrod and Mike Murphy. We've gotten a lot of people elected with those teletown halls. We get on, we have 25, 30,000 people just in a congressional area. They win easy. It works for Elvis, the Beatles.

And it doesn't work for anyone else, but it works for Trump. Well, hackaroos, welcome to, I think it's day eight of the Trumpferno. I'm here in Washington, D.C., your correspondent on an important mission for EVs, watching the quiet streets as an eerie calm has descended over the city. Well...

all hell breaks loose in the bureaucracy to help us unwrangle it because the other guy escaped to Bolivia. He's given up here is the one and only third hack, Mr. John Heilman. And we have a guest who is a fountain of wisdom and a good friend of the show. Uh, Heilman, you should introduce our, our Sherpa. I believe it's a font of wisdom, not a fountain. He's not a fountain. He's a font. He's a fountain. He's three 60. He's everything. He's on the channel. It's Robert Costa who, uh,

is with us. Bob, how are you doing? Good. You know, I actually saw Fountains of Wayne in concert years ago. Of course you did. Of course you did. He's also the chief musicologist here for the Hex on Stamp Media Empire. At some point, he was a member of Fountains of Wayne back when he was like 11 years old. Bob, I want to ask you, the only reason we played that Trump clip is because I just think it's so funny

the version of Washington that Mike just described. It doesn't sound like Beatlemania there, but maybe, I don't know. It's just hilarious to hear Trump, you know, the teleconferencing only works for the Beatles, Elvis, and me. Who would you compare him more to, Elvis or the Beatles? I mean, he has a certain kind of command of a movement right now. So Elvis was kind of a cultural figure, but

did his thing in Vegas and

didn't really command a movement, though he had a cultural appeal. I think Trump has cultural appeal to a lot of his supporters. But what I think what strikes me now as a reporter in Washington is that there's this movement around Trump and the Republican Party. Who knows if it lasts two years, four years, decades to come. Vice President Vance was giving a speech today, Tuesday in Miami, telling the Republicans he's looking ahead 10, 20 years of making Trumpism a thing. So in the way the Beatles have lasted for decades, it's kind of this

spine of pop music in this country in many respects. Trump's trying to at least become this movement politician for a long time. It's so different than 2017 when you felt it might have been a spasm as a political movement, but now they're trying to entrench it. So you're saying that Murphy's hanging out with the EV crowd, which isn't the appropriate Beatlemania crowd. He needs to get out more, is what you're saying. We're Elvis people, the king. But Trump does have a suspicious mind.

I'll put that in the Elvis column. But I do agree with Robert about that. And it is a moment. We have a Trump-Sami going on here, not just in the party where everybody's falling in the line whether they want to or not, but that's kind of an old story now on steroids because more than ever, because they feel kind of the power of it.

You also have a flurry, and Johnny, I don't know how we want to crack these, but let's just say they've been busy beavering away in Trump world on a lot of these executive orders and commands from the central hive.

to dramatically reshape a lot of policy to the extent they can get away with it. There's some optics to all this. But it's been nonstop. I mean, we brought Colombia to its knees, by the way, with a tariff threat. We're threatening tariffs to anybody. I joked on Twitter that with the big panic over the new breakthrough Chinese AI platform, Donald Trump today announced a 35% tariff on thinking because, you know, we're going to show them.

So how do you decode all this? It's clearly a flurry. Yes. I mean, look, we're one week. We're now, as we sit here, one weekend. And and, you know, I think that one of the central things to try to do in this, there's just so much going on that you can't you don't have the bandwidth to deal with all of it. And the challenge always with Trump is distinguishing signal from noise. Like what's you know, what are the things that he's done? What's wheat from chaff? You know, what's the the real the kind of real the things that we're going to care about?

weeks, months, years from now. And I, you know, and Costa, I want you to check my biases on this, but

You know, the immigration stuff is one bucket and seems like it's very, it's super important. It's super important to Trump politically because it was one of his headline issues and he's, and they're doing a lot of stuff in that area that is consequential to humans out there in the world. Some of it may or may not be constitutional, but there's like, there's on the ground what the ICE agents are doing out in America matters. And it also matters politically to Trump because it was so much, he was made it very clear. He was going to, this was going to be one of his first priorities. It's clearly been one of his first priorities. So I think we should talk about that.

And then the second thing, you know, there's, there's, there's been this, the flurry of executive orders, Mike, as you said, some of them are really governance by gesture. Some of them are, are a consequence. We should dig into the DEI thing and whatever. But I, I, just because when we last did this together a week ago, it was still several hours before, before Donald Trump went in and issued his pardons of, I guess I did it with Axe last week when, before Trump had gone and pardoned all the,

the blanket pardon of nearly 1600, uh, insurrectionists. Um, some of them, um, violent, uh, offenders, um, and some of them admitted, uh, in some cases, uh,

seditious conspirators. So, and the question about that is, does it have any political impact or not? I don't believe that most Americans voted for that. I don't think that's what, that's what people voted for. They voted for other things. The millions of Americans in support of Trump, many of them supported him despite that, or they just put that to the side. But the, the, the just to dispense with that piece of business,

Costa, do you think that Trump ever plays any price for that? Because it's hard to believe that there's anything like a majority of Americans who are for pardoning violent offenders who beat the shit out of cops. I think you got to step back, John, because, you know, I think back to when I started out as a reporter back in 2009, I remember going to pick up your book Game Change at the bookstore and Obama was ascended as president.

And the Democratic Party really since then until now has always felt like it had some grasp on power. And I think when we look at what Trump's doing on executive orders, it's not just about whether it's popular or not, whether he can get away with it or not.

Trump and his allies have spent four years in the wilderness not wasting time. And I think what is the feeling I get in all I spent all of last week walking around the Capitol talking to members of both parties is that so many people in Washington are stunned right now, Republicans, but especially Democrats, about Trump's ease of using power and the inability of Democrats to kind of grab

that Trump is not the Trump of the Trump who was sitting in a trial in 2024, hobbled legally and politically. He's not the Trump besieged with impeachment inquiries in 2018 and 2019. This

This is someone who now has people around him who are doing his bidding, and they're doing it with such confidence, such belief that they're not going to face pushback from their own party, even as they deal with confirmations on Capitol Hill. They're not going to even face pushback from much of the American people. We haven't really seen anything like this since I've been a professional reporter. It's beyond swagger. It's a deep-seated confidence in governing that

that he can do what he wants and on immigration in particular. I mean, the specter of mass deportations hung over the 2024 campaign for months as this thing that would galvanize the country, create marches in the streets. When I talk to Trump people, sources close to Trump inside the White House, in Congress, they say to me, where are the marches with the pink hats? Where are the marches in the streets about the deportations?

What Trump's doing now is 10 times, if not more, aggressive than it was in 2017, 2018. But they feel like they have soft ground more than they ever have before. And that shapes what they're doing more than any dip in the economy, more than any dip in the opinion polls. They feel like they have two years of runway. Now, they may overdo it, but that's the belief they have.

Well, it's the death of norms. You know, they in before there were some establishment types who are around inside. Well, you can't do that. No way. Won't pass on the hill. That'll kill you. All the old rules of gravity. And Trump went to some Swiss clinic and got his shame nerve removed years ago.

So now he's literally just flooring it, and he's got an enabling staff of people who have the wish list. Now, how good they're going to be at running government and when there's some pushback legally on some of this stuff, we will see. But right now, the governor is off the machine. It's running at flank speed. The Democrats are all staring into the mirror, trying to figure out what to do. Everybody in the non-Trump world is demoralized because, oh, my God, four more years, but

So he's using that moment just to try everything he can. Now, you know, my political argument is,

He he's tickling third rail stuff. He's not really doing, you know what he needs to do economically. He's these tariffs could be a disaster that would hurt him with the voters, but on the symbolic stuff that his world, or at least a big chunk of it cares about now, while he got elected, but they, they applaud alone, you know, the DEI war going after prosecutors at DOJ who were part of the investigative, all the, all the kinds of grievance stuff that doesn't really break through the average voter. Um,

He's running wild and he's going to get away with a bunch of it. Mike, do you think that, as I said, I don't, I just, I'm only doing this because I want to try, we want to try to kind of break these things down and look at them at least in some buckets here. And I, again, Bob's overview is 100% right. I was going to add to your list, Bob, but this is not the Donald Trump of, it's not even the Donald Trump of January, February, 2017, when he had enough brio that he fired Jim Comey

which was a ballsy thing to do, had a lot of confidence that he could fire an FBI director and face no consequences, but he still didn't really understand how government worked or have really anybody around him understood how government worked. Now he has those things and all of that planning, uh,

all that work directly on project 2025 and on, on just all the think tanking of like what they would do. They're now doing it, you know, and, and we all, a lot of us said this is, he's, you know, he's promising what he's going to do. He's going to go and do it. And they're doing it with great, with great confidence, especially an enormous degree of confidence for someone who won,

Did win a majority and did win an impressive victory in sense of gaining across the country, but still won less than 50 percent of the vote. The kind of a performance in the past that presidents would walk in and go, hey, I got to build some bipartisan bridges here, not for Trump. But, Mike, my question for you just comes back to this, right, because it's part of a pattern. There is what you would call.

And Trump promised this too. These are all things he promised. But the bucket of vindication, the bucket of retribution, the retribution bucket, right? That bucket includes the pardoning of all the January 6th convicts. That party also includes the purge of the DOJ. That party includes now investigations that he wants to launch into anybody who investigated January 6th. Just on the politics of it,

As we are hacks here on tap. I mean, I'm as morally outraged about the January 6th parties and that could be about anything I've ever seen in my time. I've covered politics. I think it's just one of the most outrageous, morally depraved things I've ever seen. But on the politics of it, does Trump ever pay a price for that? Do Republicans ever pay a price for that, for going along with it?

I think they do. But go ahead, Bob. I disagree because I think they might. Well, I just think your phrase is an important one to harp on for a second. You use the phrase moral outrage. I know. I said I find it as morally depraved as anything I've ever seen. But here's what I'm trying to figure out as a journalist.

Everywhere I go in the country, especially in the final months of the 2024 campaign, I detect two things, the death of ideology and the death of outrage as political factors. Whereas people are not debating ideology anymore. It's not big government versus small government. It's grievance versus grievance, establishment versus perceived anti-establishment. And outrage is like a

button that doesn't work on a machine anymore. I don't understand why that is, but I detect it in almost every state I go to. Well, this is why I asked it. This is why I asked it as a question, Bob. I didn't have to say anything you could really disagree with. I find it morally depraved. When you hear the story of Michael Fanone,

And just play that story out. And then talk about pardoning the person who went to D.C. intending to tase cops, tased that cop, pleaded guilty, and spent a year in prison. I find the pardoning of that person morally depraved. I find the lack of outrage about it equally baffling as you do. But my question to Mike was, do Republicans ever pay a price for that, for pardoning someone who did that to Michael Fanone?

That specific thing they're going to get away with, the January stuff. I agree with Bob. It's kind of like, you know, the warnings we've always got about antiviral or antibiotic medicine. You take them long enough, they don't work anymore. So the outrage thing is broken. The country has been numbed. That said, I think Trump is under a really cruel shot clock that reflects the laws of gravity of politics, a rare but powerful normalcy in all this.

which is one in two years is highly likely he'll lose the house. If you look at the historical patterns with such a narrow lead, maybe it'll be the first time I would bet against it.

Second, that is going to be felt by the House Republicans who, you know, in the House, when you don't have the majority, you're powerless. So that panic will begin. They already kind of know it. Second, Trump won more than anything, hit the ejector seat on Joe Biden, the economy, all that stuff. Things were better under Trump, even if we didn't like him. So the normal thing that Trump ignores at his peril, I believe, is

is abandoning, like, what are the five smart things I can do to get the economy cranking and deliver people real wages and all this stuff that ultimately motivate. Instead, he's doing grievances. He's wasting time on these sidebar things that fluff his core group that he'll always have, but he'll have those if he loses. And so I think he is paying a price. And if he really indulges himself...

the tariffs are capable of reversing the economic situation and putting him in the same vice Biden was in or worse. So I think the clown car thing will cost the Republicans over time because they need to be really, really good to survive. But in the short term, he's feeding candy to hyperactive kids who are going to run around and be very happy for a while. Right. But Bob, I would, I would say one other thing, which is that

When I travel around America, I detect a lot of outrage and a lot of outrage among Trump supporters. But it's outrage over things like DEI and outrage. It's not like they're not the outrage button. Trump pushes the outrage button every day to his great political benefit. It's not like people aren't outraged. There's still plenty of people, even though there aren't marches in the streets, there's still plenty of people outraged by Trump. And there's still plenty of people outraged or at least at least surprised.

speaking the words of outrage, feelings, the feelings of outrage, maybe not, but who knows what determines some people's votes, but there's plenty of outrage on the right outrage over a ostensibly a porous border outrage over, you know, all the various perfidies that Trump accuses Democrats of. So it's not, it's just, it's a certain kind of outrage that hasn't become, that isn't at the center of our politics. And, and I guess my question that goes into the, that kind of widens this out is,

whether it's the firing of the IGs or the firing of the DOJ lifers, whether he can actually get away with that or not is another question, the civil servants of the DOJ.

I assume you think that among the voters who matter, which is to say the ones who determine elections, the ones who are swing voters, so to speak, that those things just sound like Washington to them. That to the base, I'm asking you whether you agree with this, the MAGA base is going to love some of that stuff. Trump is exercising whatever personal demons he has about those things. He wants that vengeance.

But that normal voters are they're focused on immigration. They're focused on the economy. But like the like the notion of a Saturday Night Massacre of the I.G.'s is not an issue that's going to like have a lot of traction in the real lives of real people. And that's the that's what Republicans are banking on. That's why when I was at the Senate and I pulled aside some senators, Republicans privately, they're not hearing about the I.G.'s. They're not hearing about Trump's use of executive power.

So they feel like they're just going to give him tons of room to do what he wants to do. And if he really the the the window for Trump to operate is so wide now.

And they feel like it's good politics across the board. But they all have vision about 40 feet in front of them. You know, they're all short-termers. That's why Washington gyrates so much. Trump ought to study the fires in Los Angeles. Karen Bass, the popular mayor, is now on life support. And one of the things that has cut the most after a growing feeling of incompetence in city government is we have a boneyard with 90 ambulances and fire engines in it.

You have $600,000 fire engines missing $5,000 parts that can't roll because they cut the maintenance two years ago in the budget. Nobody cared. Now everybody cares. So what is seen is stuff that, oh, more Washington now can have teeth down the road if government starts to fail.

whatever that failure is. And then it, then it boomerangs tremendously. Don't know if it'll happen, but there is a risk in writing your history with clownish stuff that people yawn at. If you can't deliver the goods down the road. All right, let's stop for a minute and listen to a word from one of our fine sponsors. Hey everyone, John Heilman here. I just moved, uh,

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For 50% off your first order, plus free shipping forever, and make sure you use promo code HACKS so they know we sent you. So I got to say, I was a little surprised. My general view about Abez, the same as yours, Costa, and yours, Mike, about you couldn't go high enough on a scale of one to a million about how supine Republicans will be in front of Trump right now, and that every indication of that has been borne out so far.

However, we saw some murmurs, very, very slight murmurs of not resistance but of objection from people like Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton over the weekend to some things Trump has done. There have been some Republicans who came out and said they didn't like the J6 pardons, particularly the ones of violent felons.

And then you had Cotton and some other Republicans who were really quite bullshit about Trump deciding to revoke the security details for John Bolton and Mike Pompeo and some others who are under direct threat. Both of whom had an active Iranian assassination plan aimed at them. Yes, both of whom currently have them. According to Tom Cotton, still are being, have hits out on them right now.

Were you surprised at all that those – that this is – were you surprised at all by those voices speaking out against Trump in any instance? And were you surprised that that was the issue that they chose to focus on, especially Cotton? Cotton's such a hawk. He's a traditional –

He's a traditional Republican on foreign policy. And I spoke to John Bolton, the former ambassador and national security advisor, about what is it like to have your security detail revoked? He said he got a call when he was sleeping that it's over and that he has to have private security now. But again, they don't sense much outrage in the party. Yes, Tom Cotton has voiced concern.

But no one's raising this as an issue where they're somehow going to have a break with the Trump presidency. And for a hawk like Senator Cotton, it's difficult because Trump holds all the political capital in the party. So even if Senator Cotton speaks out, he's not going on the Sunday shows or giving speeches countering President Trump. He can make a comment in the hallway to reporters. He can go on TV, maybe on a Fox hit and talk about it. But it doesn't have the impact

that someone of his political persona had back in the first term because the lines of power in the party were a lot more scattered then, whereas all the power seems to be concentrated now at the White House. You just wonder, to my earlier point, if, God forbid, some Iranian thug takes a shot at Pompeo two weeks from today.

does that start to change things as people look backwards at all this? That's what I'm obsessed with. He's running a narrative that won't hold up well to future failure, but in real time, you're right. He's got his hand on the steering wheel. I think the ultimate test will be the nominations. Will they stop somebody? Will they stop an RFK Jr.? Will they stop a Tulsi? Now that Mitch McConnell has joined the opposition, you know, Hegseth, who I think is massively incompetent for that job,

but it's not the threat some of these others like Akash Patel could be, you know, that was squeaked through. And the Senate also institutionally, and both you guys, but maybe Bob first, what do you, will they assert their independence? The House is more of a rubber stamp, even though that narrow margin can make it tough in a big, big bill to try to get everything done at once. But the Senate has a history of saying we have the right to be ornery.

Are they really going to chuck that? I think there's too much ambition on the Senate side that I can detect to get tax reform done. You know, the business community is still very tight with a lot of these Republican senators. They have a lot of impetus and motivation to get taxes done, to get it part of a reconciliation bill. Maybe that includes border legislation, also includes energy legislation, whether it's one bill or two through reconciliation. I mean, they want to get that done for their own reasons.

for their reelection in 2026 or 2028 or beyond. And biting Trump in the first 100 days isn't seen as a winner if they're trying to really get all that legislation done. And they don't see any political upside because they see Democrats like John Fetterman from Pennsylvania, the senator, going down to Mar-a-Lago, espousing some willingness to vote for Trump nominees. So it's not...

It's not great political terrain to start wandering around when Trump's even drawing the interest and intrigue of Democrats, if you're a Republican. So here's the thing, you know, you've seen now, I mean, Hegseth barely gets through. Again, I will state my view again, which is that I thought from the very beginning, including Matt Gaetz, that they would all be approved because that's how high I think the supineness level of the Republican Party is in the Senate.

But Higgs has barely made it through. Needed J.D. Vance's vote to get through, which just points to the narrowness of the margin. You just need four of them, and that's it. And four is not many, as was demonstrated there. They got three. They needed four. You have conservative publications now coming out against Tulsi Gabbard in the case of National Review. The whole of the Murdoch empire has now placed a hit on the RFK Jr. nomination, both in the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal. They brought the hammer down on RFK Jr.,

And there's now a DOJ whistleblower who's come out and claiming that Kash Patel violated some protocols that put people's lives in danger. There's questions about whether or not he's a serial fabricator. Again, none of these things are about my views here about some of them and how dangerous they are. My question is just purely a vote counting question. And I ask it to Bob because you actually spend a lot of time up there. As you said, you spend a lot of time talking to members of the Senate.

Given how close they came to taking down Hegseth, are you really of the view that none of those three, given some of the mounting... There's been mounting opposition as we get closer to these nominations, that none of those four of those three will get to the place where there's four votes against them and rank them in the likelihood of...

most certain you are that they'll get through versus the one who that's the most in jeopardy? I think the most in jeopardy, based on my report, is Tulsi Gabbard by far. And the second most in jeopardy is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., though he has more of a variable because some Democrats like him. Right. And he could actually win over Senator Bernie Sanders or John Fetterman. So Gabbard, though,

the McConnells of the world, maybe not the cottons, but there's going to be a real hard... Gabbard's the toughest, and my sources close to President Trump acknowledge that privately. Right. There's going to be some hard questions for her about what she's... about her meetings with Assad, her meetings with... with... with...

with a other, with other Syria, with a Syrian cleric, with a Syrian cleric who, who, who advocated for mass terrorism events. I mean, she has done some pretty, some pretty sketchy shit. The upside is her speeches sound a lot better than the original Russian, but,

But no, the whole national security world... The original Farsi. I think you hit the original Farsi. Well, she's fluent in any evil empire language. And she's unqualified in that. There are a lot of institutional reasons why it's trouble. I mean, CIA will never share any information if she's DNI. But I agree with Bob. What I kind of wonder is, if they do it, if they stop her...

Will they be emboldened a little bit because they survived that, which I think they will. Like Gates, who the Senate growled at, went away. Trump did not go nuts. Right. But let's put it this way. He's going to get a lot of them. I think he's going to get Kash Patel. I think he's going to get Kash Patel, too. And I think RFK is kind of on the border, and I think Tulsi is probably going to get got.

but we're C, you know, we're C. And it's interesting to what, in the question, Bob, to your, to your reporting from the Trump administration, I, I hear the same things, which is that they, is that Trump himself recognized that Tulsi might not get through. And God knows Trump on some level, Trump really cares until he doesn't care anymore. And then he just goes, okay, well, whatever it's over. It's like, he was perfectly happy to cut Matt Gates loose and he'll move on to the next, to the next one. But do you think that that makes him, if, if Tulsi were to go down,

Would he just sort of basically move on like I just suggested he did with Gates or not that he would dig in on her. If she goes down, she goes down. But does he then...

basically increase his threats of potential political retribution to Republicans in the Senate saying like, okay, you guys got your one scalp here, you know, now like back everybody else. Is that basically a, does it go in Mike's direction where they become emboldened or does it go in the opposite direction where they're like, we can't really afford to take out more than one of Trump's nominees. This was the one we got and we're going to move along now and everybody else gets rubber stamped.

Well, that's going to depend on the context. I mean, the way President Trump, I'm told, talks about this behind the scenes is that he's not emotionally attached to these nominees, but he's watching to see how people affect his own standing in Washington. And for example, Kash Patel, because Pam Bondi is set pretty much as attorney general, you have a lot more comfort in the Senate GOP about what the DOJ and FBI would look like, even if Kash Patel is head of the FBI.

And with Tulsi Gabbard, Trump wants it to tell, it's a tell of who's going to really break with him on some of this stuff. But,

he has a lot of people who are willing to serve at that role i mean you look at john ratcliffe getting at the cia it was very easy rubio so there's a lot of other people who could do that role but right for trump it's a good exercise i'm told to to kind of get out there and nominate some of the favorites of his own coalition and if people break with it they they will have a price to pay not necessarily with trump i mean he may rally against him in a primary race or something like that but

But Trump's someone who, as he told me years ago, he likes fights. He likes fights. So the fight can be a reveal for him as much as it is a failure. So let's get back to the two big issues here, economy and immigration. Trump, this week, I mean, the news this week about Trump

the Chinese AI initiative and what happened in the market, what happened in NVIDIA, what happened to the tech sector. There's been something of a bounce back today, but it's still been pretty brutal and it's raised some pretty fundamental questions about U.S. leadership in artificial intelligence, which is obviously the central fact of our lives for many decades to come. Trump at his address last night said,

talked about slapping tariffs on the semiconductor business. And I know, Mike, you're obsessed with tariffs. And so let's just listen to what Donald Trump had to say about tariffs. I'm obsessed with American economic survival. I know. No, no, I know. I'm with you. I think tariffs are a disaster. You and I don't disagree on this. I'm just saying you always bring it up as a potential thing that could be a stumbling block for him and could undo the whole economic agenda. Here's, I think, a good illustration of why.

In particular, in the very near future, we're going to be placing tariffs on foreign production of computer chips, semiconductors, and pharmaceuticals to return production of these essential goods to the United States of America. They left us and they went to Taiwan, where -- which is about 98 percent of the chip business, by the way.

And we want them to come back. And we don't want to give them billions of dollars like this ridiculous program that Biden has. Give everybody billions of dollars. They already have billions of dollars. Mike, I'll just say, having known some people, having covered Silicon Valley myself for a period of time,

There is no one at this week of all weeks looking at the threat of China on AI. There is no one in the software, computer, hardware business, anybody who does anything with technology who looks and says the solution to our problem in this giant competitive war with China over AI is tariffs on semiconductors. No, no, it's incredibly stupid. So our policy has been, one, Biden, with bipartisan support, and it was one of his best, in my view, accomplishments, said,

uh, put a lot of money into building fabs fabrication plants, which take a decade to build and cost a lot here in the U S we control the key technology for semiconductor making equipment. And we frozen the Chinese out of that. That's why these clever Chinese engineers said, well, if we're going to be behind on high tech chips, cause we can't get the chip making equipment, uh,

from Europe and the U.S., but America has most of the patents wrapped up. We got to figure out how to do it with less chips and Shazam. So they figured it out. We'll see. The idea of cracking down on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp.,

which is the dominant maker of the super, that most of the chips come from Taiwan and also from South Korea, two vital allies. Some national defense people call it the Silicon insurance policy against the Chinese move on Taiwan because the world economy would grind to a halt if those chips stop. The American economy would grind to a halt if those chips stopped here or the South Korean memory chip. So that Trump doesn't understand it takes nearly a decade to

to build a chip manufacturing plant, and we're building them now. So the idea that you try to go cold turkey on this, cut Taiwan loose so the Chinese can walk, I mean, on every level, this is the Trump problem. He's cunning and clever, but he's massively uninformed.

He has no knowledge. He has intelligence without knowledge. And, you know, we have this open mic night presidency where he's running wild. Like what happens politically if we go put a 50 percent tax on one of our best NATO allies, Denmark, because we want we want Greenland because Trump saw it on a map and figured out it's as big as Texas, bigger, actually. What you know, there will be repercussions for all this stuff. I mean, everybody there's kind of this shrug.

But but we're playing with huge economic fire here. But yeah, but the shrug is partly based on the past and precedent here, Mike, because since he's taken office, Trump's threatened at least six, seven countries with tariffs. And when he announced 25 percent tariffs on Colombia, he had Colombia's president, you know, immediately kind of capitulate. And now Trump, the White House said that the tariffs will be held in reserve in

This is such a tactic Trump has used, going back to the book, The Art of the Deal, take an extreme position to shake people from the negotiating position. And so I think the problem with the tariff discussion, especially in the press, is that it's seen as this blanket economic proposal, like a piece of good faith legislation, when it's really a negotiating tactic as much as an economic tactic.

And Trump is using threats of tariffs to spur his base to kind of get galvanized on a certain issue like this. And, I mean, we've all interviewed, I mean, Trump, John and I, going back years, the two things his father always talked about were trade and immigration, but really more trade and immigration.

And I just think we're going to constantly see – we've seen threats of tariffs in just the first few days here. China, Mexico, Canada, Denmark. And for the White House, it seems like it's working because everyone perceives it in a logical way. Yeah, but let's game it out. I agree with all that. It's Trump doing his bluff thing. But I've done a lot of work in Canadian politics.

The biggest applause line, if you're a Canadian candidate on the stump, is, after all, we settled the tougher half of North America. They're going to tell him to screw off because it's an imperative in Canadian politics not to take this stuff. And the Europeans are going to tell him to screw off. So he does his kabuki theater, which works with Columbia, and he can probably shake down Uruguay, too. But when you get to the high stakes, people are going to say, no, you orange weirdo. The answer is no.

Then what happens? Now he looks weak, his greatest fear. Does he really do the tariffs? It quickly escalates. And the European and the Canadian politics make it impossible for them to bend the knee to a soprano shakedown from this guy. So, you know, he's lighting fuses here that I'm not sure he's thought all the way through. On top of that, these chip tariffs are going to raise the cost of Doritos.

And Frito-Lay, like the chips, it's going to like to go buy a bag of chips is going to cost you. Costa doesn't even laugh at my jokes anymore. He just like sits there and looks at me in a grim way. When Trump, I swear when Trump thinks about chip tariffs, he's thinking about potato chips. But here's the thing. I think Democrats have been so far totally ham-handed about

about trying to jam this. The price of eggs is at historic highs and you said you were going to bring down the price of eggs. I think right as of right now, they've been ham handed about it. It's been ridiculous. They've tried to wedge it into everything. It needs time. It needs some time. And I think, I actually think some of the calls for like Democrats don't seem to know what they're doing. I'm like,

Guys, like the first couple months of the new administration, the other party, especially when you have no lever of government, you don't control the House, you don't control the Senate, you don't control the White House. Like who's supposed to be, you know, there is no center of gravity for the Democratic Party right now. I think any party in this situation would be in the wilderness and eventually we'll get towards the midterms and things will change. But I do ask this question to both of you, and maybe I'm just a captive of old thinking, but...

Well, you know, I can remember back in 1992 when Bill Clinton ran for president and the economy stupid was the core of his campaign. And when he got into office, although he often failed at doing this, at least he iterated, he enunciated the notion that we are going to focus like a laser beam on the economy. That was the phrase of the of the hour in 1993.

And right now, there's no focus in the Trump administration. There's a lot of activity, and action conveys something powerful politically to voters. But there's not a focus on...

One of the two issues. Yeah, that's my point. All this talk about tariffs. Right. But there's not a focus on the economy. And we all agree. We all agree that the inflation concerns are an important part of why Trump got elected. So what happens if prices just stay stubbornly high? What happens if the tariffs drive prices up further? It's not a focus that's traditional, but he's obsessed with tariffs. I mean, you saw him in a speech just a few days ago talk about getting rid of the income tax and replacing it with tariffs.

And I think what's hard for us to process. There's no way that's going to bring down prices. That's that's one thing. I'm not making the case. It is. Yeah, but yeah, but it's what Trump believes. That's the point. And I'm with Bob. But it's not only what we Trump believes, but like protectionist politics has revolutionized this country right now. When I was in Pennsylvania in twenty twenty four, one of the reasons Dave McCormick won is not because of his appealing personality or his positions on this or this issue.

The Bobby Casey voter in Pennsylvania was as protectionist as Trump over the years. And there's an inability of the Democrats to recognize that so many of the core industrial union voters are uber protectionists. They want tariffs. They want tariffs as weapons and Trump speaking their language. And the idea that Trump's not lowering the egg price to maybe a suburban voter who thinks through that prism, that's correct.

But the working voter to me is the core swing voter in this country now, not the suburban voter who thinks about grocery prices. It's the working voter who thinks their job is literally stolen by China and the only solution is terror. But where I'm going on this is I think Trump thinks terrorists will work.

Because he's in many ways an economic moron. If he'd taken his inheritance and put it in an index fund, he'd be a lot richer. Most of his economic adventures have been fiascos. But let's say he believes it, and his voters do, because tariffs are popular. Poll them all the time. And he does it. It's not a bluff. It's not a complicated three-dimensional chess. And we have a tariff war. That will mean a huge spike in unemployment. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, and unemployment. Both. Everything. And that pain will be felt just in time for the midterm elections. We'll see. I mean, of course, everyone's playing with fire when you start doing protectionist trade policies. Right, exactly. Oh, it'll be bad for everybody, the Canadians and Europeans, too. This is why the Republicans in the Senate, when they read the Wall Street Journal editorial page, they're still not freaking out that the business community is unhappy because they believe they're going to be able to satiate the business Republicans and the business Democrats

with taxes within the next six to nine months, with sweeping tax cuts, preserving the Trump tax cuts, going even further. And so the tariffs will be on the margins and they think that will propel growth. Now, maybe that's a bad bet, but that's their bet. Time to pay the meter, but we will be right back. Now, let's hear from our sponsor.

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Let's talk about immigration a little bit, because obviously that has been the most high profile thing that Trump has done in the first week, including, you know, all of these. I guess Kristi Noem was live tweeting an ICE raid literally today in New York. Last night, again, Donald Trump spoke of immigration and made a pop culture analogy that's even a little bit more current, a little bit more current, not exactly current.

but a little bit more current than the Beatles and Elvis. How would you like to be the pilot of a plane? You got two pilots up there and you got 300 people sitting in a plane. Every one of them, either a murderer, a drug lord, a kingpin of some kind, the head of the mob or a gang member. And you're flying that plane. It's not going to end well. Do you ever see the movie Con Air?

That's what, yeah, except here's the difference. The people in Con Air were actors. They weren't nearly as tough as these guys. So I don't, and there's a new Wahlberg movie coming out with a similar premise. By the way, Con Air made 1997 almost 20 years ago. Talk about making you feel old. Con Air is a nearly 20-year-old movie. But I don't follow his argument here. It is basically that we don't want planes full of criminals to crash.

Mike, are you really asking me to try to follow Donald Trump's quote? Quotes around argument. President Trump loves movies. How many times have we heard him reference Silence of the Lambs? Yeah. Now he's referencing it. And Con Air is almost 30 years old. I'm sorry. You're right. 30 years old. My math is bad. Trump doesn't know economics. I don't know math. You're right. Almost 30 years old, Bob. Thank you for that. Just give me your sense, Bob, of... You raised this before. You said...

We are not seeing it's again, it's only a weekend. So let's everybody keep some perspective. But the question of, of mass deportation, what the, what the backlash to that would be, what the resistance to it would be. You said, you know, people on the Hill were saying, you know, they're not seeing people with the pink hats or the equivalent thereof. We're not, we're not yet seen yet seen the backlash to what they're doing on anything like on the kind of backlash that was, that was that we saw when they did child separation in the first Trump term.

Just talk about what you think, like really the question is, how far will Trump go? Well, and how far will the machinery allow him to go and what they can actually do beyond the optics stuff. And when I say yes, that's part of it is how far will he go in terms of what's doable? How far will he go in terms of what's, I mean, practicable, actually executable? And then how far will the political environment allow him to go? There is, I think, some...

You know, there's some number of mass of immigrants. If you did mass deportation where the scene, the amount of, of, of diversion of law enforcement resources, it would take years. It would be,

something unlike the country's ever seen before. And there would be scenes, Mike, you pointed this out before of, of horrible shit that would happen that would cause people to go, wait, this is not, I don't want this, but that's might be very far away. And I don't know the answer to the question. So Bob, how far do you think Trump would like to go? So you want to deport a million people, 6 million people, 10 million people, the numbers get higher than that. If you were, if you, on some of his estimates that he's given have been higher than that. Well, you don't need to take my word for it. Tom Holman,

is on television every single night saying his phrase is wide in the aperture to extend the scope of migrants they're going to deport to the millions as soon as possible. And he keeps saying every night on TV to the country's face, if you are in this country illegally, you are a criminal and you will go. And so I think your question, John, is a very good one about the political environment. I've tried to

do this in my coverage at CBS, but sometimes it's difficult to articulate this. Before 2024, the last presidential election we had was in the beginning of COVID.

The number one thing I detect in the political environment that you referenced is that Trump not only wants to go to the extreme or go as far as he can to enact his agenda and his vision for the country, nationalism, populism, restrictive immigration policies, but you still see at the same time the country, because of the pandemic, in my reporting, is so much more open to what they perceive as anti-establishment, anti-federal policies, that it's given Trump this opportunity

opening I haven't seen in my lifetime professionally for an executive to take sweeping action with very little concern of the political blowback because the Trump White House detects this country

is still, in a sense, recovering from the pandemic. The feeling of isolation, anger about being in their homes, anger about how the schools were handled. And it scrambled how people perceive the federal government, longstanding institutions, political norms. And we still haven't really come to grips with that as a country, that we've changed

in a fundamental way in many different States and how people perceive politics, perceive the presidency and perceive Trump. And perceive immigrants. I would say also crucial. Yeah. I think that's all true. You just wonder about the stamina of it. The two things that, you know, it's like in any lynching, the second lynching loses half the crowd once they get it out. So he'll optically declare a lot of, you know, victory here, but,

I don't know how long it'll sustain once we've had a bunch of people thrown into school buses. The other problem is, how do you scale it up? I mean, I live in LA County, 10 million people. There are undocumented aliens there.

Kind of hard to find. I guess you'd be able to find a bunch of them on construction sites trying to rebuild L.A. That'll be popular, sweeping up every contractor. Trump says use the military. Well, the military is over 40% of color. So I want to see if Sergeant Ramirez really wants to be hustling little old ladies who are here illegally in L.A. in the back of a Humvee. So anyway, my view is they will make a lot of noise early.

And the stamina for this will wane and the ability to scale it up mechanically will wane. And some poor God help us, it happens, but let's hope it doesn't. Some seven-year-old asthma kid is going to die in the back of a truck or something. And then America can turn on a dime after the pandemic.

The frustration is melted off a little after weeks of this. So a lot of the Trump stuff to me is not going to run the table. Now he can, will it sustain? That's the question. It's a very good question. And I think, you know, even the notion of someone dying in the back of a truck of asthma is

isn't really as bad as it could get. I mean, we saw worse, you know, the, I remember those tapes, I think it was ProPublica who had those tapes of, of, you know, when during child separation that shocked a lot of people to listen to the cries of children and so on. And, and, and I agree, but Bob, I, I, I agree with you. And I think,

you know, through the long lens of history, one of the big questions that we face right now is whether or not, you know, a thing that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and a lot of Democrats have clung to as being so foundational to the country that it was a winning political argument, which is in the end, we are a nation of immigrants. And I'm not sure that there's, I think that there is out there in the country, a lot of people who are like,

You know, we have been a nation of immigrants, but I don't necessarily want to be. I think it's gone too far. And there's not like a swelling of pride among some voters about that. The appeal of that phrase is not a thing that they have. Obviously, Mike, they...

They mismanaged immigration a million ways in the Biden administration. There was an urgency at the border. They took way too long to address it. All of that's obviously true. But more deeply, there is this question of, like, why do we need to still be a nation of immigrants? That question. Yeah, but the nation of immigrants was the subhead. The real headline for the Democrats has been identity.

That's all the DEI stuff. And that has a lot of power. So, you know, the Democrats have been perceived as a party that cares more about DEI than they do about competence and running everything, than they do about supporting cops. You know, it's DEI thing has been a real, it's identity thing, which is the mainspring of it all, has defined them.

And it's a problem. And because what happened is all this democratic groupism made working class white people decide we need a group, too. And they found a leader in Trump. I have a few suggestions for them. And it's a damn big group on immigration. I think it's important to remember that this. Yes. When you hear we're a nation of immigrants.

from Democrats and some traditional Republicans. I always think about Senator Bernie Sanders. I mean, when he began his political career in Burlington and then gets elected to the House and the Senate, he was in lockstep with the AFL-CIO. Yeah, totally. Who opposed, Labor opposed more migration. They thought it would hurt wages. They took this position for decades. Eventually around 2000, they start supporting a path to citizenships.

for those who are undocumented. And you have the Democrats slowly move around 2007 and the 2013 talks toward having this kind of legalization path. But the

But the roots of labor in this country are very much restrictive on immigration. And that fraction is still there. I mean, that's never been totally healed on the Democratic side. And it's one of the prices that you pay if you're in favor of a relatively liberal immigration regime. You pay a price if you can't couple that with actually controlling the border. Because if the border seems out of control, the argument, which is, hey, wait a minute,

Like the system is broken and the Bannon argument of, you know, we can talk about immigration at some point in the future. Once we've taken care of everyone who's already here becomes a lot more appealing to people when they look up and see what they believe is an out of control border. I don't think the border is as out is nearly as out of control today as it was three or four years ago. But Democrats have not done a great job of demonstrating to people that that they care about that, that they care about a controlled border that has real controls at it.

I've solved this, but somehow the world has not beaten the path to my door. I want to admit undocumented skilled tradespeople and the H-1Bs, and I want to deport Instagram and TikTok influencers. Because I'd rather have less of that and more carpentry. Murphy for president. You want to do the mailbag, Mike? I got it all figured out. Okay, gentlemen, we will be back in a minute, but we have to pay a few bills.

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quince.com q u i n c e like the fruit quince.com slash hacks to get free shipping and 365 day returns quince.com slash hacks i love my quince cashmere you will too we should probably play the music because we need to get to the mailbag oh yeah let's go listener mailbag

By the way, the Hacks on Tap singers, all undocumented. Okay, so if you have a question for the Hacks...

All you have to do is email us at hacksontap at gmail.com, hacksontap at gmail.com, or you can use your thingamabob, your magic smartphone made in Taiwan, to record a voice memo and send it to us. We'll play it on the air. Or you can even call our off-track betting line slash Cook County Democratic Party Registration Center.

at 773-389-4471. I'll repeat it because who can remember that? 773-389-4471. Leave a short message, use your name, and don't go on forever. That's our job. Well, we got two of them. We got two voicemails to play here. And rather than dicking around with like who's going to answer what, I'm just going to say, I'm going to be for playing voicemail number one and having you answer it because it goes directly to Canada.

And I know you're just boasting of your Canadian expertise. Let's just hit voicemail number one. It's voicemail from a gentleman whose name is, I think, is it Peter? Is that the voicemail number one? Patrick. Patrick. Patrick, voicemail number one. Let's hear from Patrick. He has a question right for Mike Murphy. Hello, Hacks. This is Patrick from Chicago. I listen when I'm not stuffing ballot boxes. Murphy, you are welcome. My question is this.

Is it possible that President Trump has not thought through this annex Canada thing very well? These folks love affordable health care and hate guns. So they probably would be a blue state with the same population as California. This means 45 to 50 more electoral votes for the Democrats. Oops. Thanks, guys. Keep up the good work.

Mike, is it possible that Donald Trump hasn't thought something through fully? Is it possible? I think he's the atomic clock of not thinking things through. He is an instinctual politician. And Patrick, you've got to figure it out. By the way, I'll share my favorite Canadian joke. How do you get 47 drunk Canadians out of a swimming pool? Hey, guys, will you please get out of the pool? All right. A salute to Canada. Yes. Now, you know, there has been in Canadian politics, there has been talk about

In some of the provinces in the West, like Alberta, which is kind of the Canadian Texas, about maybe joining the U.S. because they don't feel as connected. But in Ontario, the beating heart of Canada and the so-called Atlantic provinces, and of course Quebec, which is a whole other planet, it's totally laughed at. But if it were to happen...

Yes, you would double California with two thirds of what comes in and one third would be kind of moderate Republicans. So I think this is the kind of thinking that led us to the invade Denmark to seize Greenland fantasy. And he has not thought it out. I'm still for that, by the way. Let's play the next voicemail. I'll take this question. This is from Peter. The first one from Patrick. We got another voicemail from Peter and I'm going to weigh in on this.

It's Peter from LA. I'm so tired of the mantle of mainstream media.

Fox has been the number one network for 22 years. Why can't they flip the switch? Fox is the mainstream media. It's the mainstream news. If the Democrats are going to be upstart and carrying the new mantle of resistance, they got to flip the switch on them. Okay. You guys do a great job. What can I say? I don't know if there was really a question there, except why can't they flip the switch? And look, he,

Peter is right that in a currently desiccated and forbidding cable news landscape, Fox is clearly dominant over both the network that I'm on, MSNBC, and over CNN.

And we can't even, we won't even start to talk about broadcast news, Bob Costa and the, of the much larger audiences, but, but also much more geriatric audiences that the people at, at the, at the broadcast networks tend to talk to. Here's the thing. The mainstream media is not any of these people. The mainstream media is Facebook. That is the mainstream media. It's not the New York times. It's not the Washington post. It's not any of the cable networks in terms of the audience that consumes news.

Facebook dwarfs all of them in terms of where people go to turn to get their information. And so I don't know. I think Democrats, if the main point of the question is why can't Democrats innovate and create a media echo chamber and ecosystem that competes with Fox News, it's a very good question.

And one of the problems, at least as far as I can see, if you look at both CNN and MSNBC who are called like liberal networks and they obviously have some liberal programming on them, but they are not as inclined to, uh, just look at the way that, that those two networks covered the Biden administration versus the way that the Fox news empire covers, uh, any Republican administration that's in office, especially the Trump one. And you'll see the difference between them, which is that, you know, um,

There's a resistance to propaganda in the mainstream media, a.k.a. what the right calls the liberal media, that keeps them from being willing to do what Fox News and some of the other even further right outlets will do. And I'm not sure that that's ever going to change. Similar business model, though, because MSNBC, where I used to work,

And I left on my own volition, and they were always very nice to me. And Fox run talk radio with pictures, a lot of opinion journalism. And don't think they don't run a clock on the audience to see who they're getting and why. I mean, they're both in business, and it's been a pretty good business, particularly for Fox.

CNN is kind of lost right now. But you're right. It's evolving to digital. By the way, here's a plug, Costa. My favorite digital platform for news, when I want to know what's going on, I go to the CBS News app for two reasons. One,

There's, there's, it's kind of a low budget set with people with coffee cuts, but they're, they're doing the straight up news and you can tune into big cities and watch the local news in Chicago, Detroit, LA. I love that. I love that app. CBS news on your phone. You get video feeds from around the country. So what used to be called, what used to be called CBSN, uh, now, uh, now, uh, rebranded, uh, well, let's get, we have one more question here from the mailbag. And I think it's, this one is, um,

is particularly well-suited to Bob Costa. So I'm just going to read it. It's not voicemail. It's from Tom, who asked the following question. Was Mitch McConnell's vote against Pete Hegseth just performative? Would he have voted no if his vote was really needed to get Hegseth confirmed? Would he have voted no if he was still the Senate Majority Leader? If Mitch was just sending a message, what is the message? I think when it comes to Senator McConnell and the Hegseth vote, I would encourage the writer to go read McConnell's

Tom, lengthy statement, McConnell issue, long statement. McConnell clearly is relishing being someone who's out of a leadership and can fully be who he is politically, a foreign policy hawk. He wanted better answers on military preparedness, on issues like China. He didn't feel like Hegseth got into enough of what he wanted to hear. And so he's really on his own

platform as a U.S. senator from Kentucky. I don't think he was sending a signal. I think he took a position that was very typical of McConnell, but he wasn't

burden by being in the leadership. And I think you're going to see him work with President Trump on a lot of stuff. You know, when it comes to judicial nominations, they did a lot in 2017 to 2021. They'll do a lot again, I'm sure. And McConnell has no reason to object to that. But when it comes to foreign policy, he's a little bit different than Senator Cotton. They're very similar. Cotton's very close to McConnell, personally and politically. But Cotton is a chair of

a committee chair and McConnell's not, he's not in the leadership. So McConnell can freelance and really be himself.

And McConnell takes that leadership position or he did really seriously. And by the way, good luck getting Mitch to vote for RFK Jr. Cause Mitch as a child was a polio survivor. Yeah. I was going to say that the platform that Mitch McConnell has now has a plaque at the base of it and it says YOLO. Um, and, uh, I will say about, I mean, they took him till at the age of 82 to finally become a YOLO Mitch, but, uh, we're in the YOLO Mitch phase of Mitch McConnell's career. Uh,

Bob, it's great to see you, man. Thank you for coming on the show today. Great to talk to you guys. And Bob, where do we follow you on Twitter? I know CBS News, you are an esteemed author of political books, but where else can people get the cost of wisdom, which I know I am addicted to? Turn, obviously, on X, Instagram from time to time, but I'm mostly focused on what Mike mentioned, CBS News 24-7 streaming, CBS Sunday Morning on broadcasts.

And from time to time on CBS Evening News, CBS Mornings, and Face the Nation. And, of course, Hacks on Tap. The only thing lower than this is shortwave. So thank you for finding time in your busy schedule to do fake radio with us. It was tremendous. Have you joined Blue Sky yet? I have not. Should I join it? I don't know. We'll see. I mean, I'm on it, but it's work to have two of them. I know.

Well, it's just like, I tried not to have two. I've gotten away from having two phones. It's changed my life to just have one. I just, I can only do some, I gotta, I'd rather make a call to you guys or sources and talk politics and post on yet another social media platform. But I, who knows? Probably have to join it at some point. I hate, I hate, I hate posting on those fucking apps. And I will say,

That you getting rid of that second phone that was real drag because it was always easier to reach you on the cost of that phone that it was on the main number. I always thought I got a special VIP access to Costa because I had the special phone number. Now it's like I'm just like the Hoyt Ploy like everyone else who's got the one number that we all have to call. No, now I'm the angry old coot calling in from Nebraska to complain about the newscast, you know.

uh all right bob we'll let you get back to the news of the world johnny great to see you mike everything everything clearing up out there in la you got your fingers are getting better it's tough the rebuild is going to be tough the politics are getting interesting and complicated uh and you know we could have another surge of wins but we're a lot better off than we were a week ago thanks to our incredible first responders but it has shaken the community and uh

it's going to be a chore. And, you know, we're already behind on what we ought to be doing in the rebuild. So stay tuned. Well, Godspeed. And as Dan Rather liked to say in one of the weirder periods of his career, courage. What's the frequency, John? All right. Take care. Catch you next week. See you guys. See you guys. See you guys.