Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Are you all exhausted? You must be. Like you, we all have kids, though. So it's hard. Like, is it Trump? Is it kids? Like, what is it? Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher. President Trump has been on a media tour for the past week, talking up his first hundred days in office. I say talking them up, but he and his Republican acolytes are basically the only ones doing that.
Trump's approval rates are in the toilet. On average, he's polling at about 43 percent. Compare that to the first 100-day rating for all U.S. presidents dating back to Reagan. Trump is tied for last place with himself.
Unfortunately, the reason is that he has spent the time unleashing chaos on the country. He signed an unprecedented slew of executive actions, immediately triggering multiple lawsuits. He sent Elon Musk and his Doge boys to run roughshod through government agencies, ousting nearly a quarter of a million government workers. He's launched a global trade war that has thrown the economy into a spiral. And he said he doesn't know if he really needs to uphold the Constitution. Also, nobody gets a doll.
It's been a lot. Republicans have been sitting mostly on the sidelines while Democrats have been wringing their hands but unable to do much. Dems are also not polling well. So what does this mean for the next hundred days? Will we see rollbacks or more full steam ahead? And what will the fallout be? My guests today are three Washington insiders who collectively have decades of experience reporting on national politics and the White House.
Carol Lennig is an investigative reporter at The Washington Post. She's written three bestselling books, including two she co-authored about the first Trump presidency. And she's currently working on a book about Trump and the DOJ, which is coming out this fall. Ashley Parker is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Previously, Ashley spent eight years at The Washington Post, where she covered Trump's first presidency. She and her colleagues Michael Scherer and Jeff Goldberg had a face-to-face interview with Trump in April after a very strange phone call.
And finally, Ben Terrace, Washington correspondent for New York Magazine. He is also a former feature reporter covering national politics for The Washington Post. And he just came out with a very long, pretty scathing story about Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, who has been one of the few Democrat centrists who seem to be ready to reach across the aisle. These three are all really clued into what's happening behind the scenes in Washington. So this should be very interesting. Stay with us.
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In every company, there's a whole system of decision makers, challenges, and strategies, shaping the future of business at every level. That's why we're running a special three-part Decoder Thursday series, looking at how some of the biggest companies in the world are adapting, innovating, and rethinking their playbooks. We're asking enterprise leaders about some of the toughest questions they're facing today.
revealing the tensions, risks, and breakthroughs happening behind closed doors. Check out Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. This special series from The Verge is presented by Adobe Express. Ashley, Carol, Ben, thanks for coming on on. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks for having us.
It'll be fun. Okay, well, we'll see. We've got a lot to talk about all the chaos in D.C. over the past few months with Trump 2.0, obviously, Elon and Doge, how things are impacting agencies like the DOJ and others, and what's going on in Congress, Washington writ large, I guess. Let's just start with over the weekend, because the activity levels are high, although some people feel it's distraction. Some people think it's just activity without productivity.
So three things happened over the weekend. President Trump said he wants to put 100% tariff on all movies produced in foreign lands because, quote, the movie industry in America is dying a very fast death and it's a national security threat. He also directed the Bureau of Prisons to rebuild and reopen Alcatraz to serve as a, quote, symbol of law, order and justice.
And he also told NBC's Kristen Welker in a wide-ranging interview on Meet the Press that he didn't know one of the things he said, I think the most notable, that he didn't know if every person in the U.S. deserves due process. And when asked if he had to uphold the Constitution, he said, I don't know. So I'd love each of you, starting with Carol, then Ashley, then Ben, to talk about sort of what is happening here with all this activity.
Well, you have a president who's really, in comparison to the first presidency, who's really unbound and unchained and has had, I have to say, an amazing...
batting average in the success of getting what he wants done by buffaloing it through. The things you mentioned, Cara, I think are so important because even though ultimately they're flimsy to us, right? Alcatraz may reopen. They're ultimately pretty small, but they're emblematic of
A president who once used to bring up these ideas in the White House and Oval Office aides would shoot him down quietly. And now he is just saying it, doing it, and he rightfully feels that he's going to be able to succeed in, you know, a third to two thirds of things that he tries, even though some of them are patently illegal. Okay. Ashley?
Yeah, Carol's exactly right in the sense that in the first term of Trump, he was surrounded by people who, when he tried to do things, either would try to distract him the way you would a toddler, right, and just hope that he would forget about it, who would literally steal pieces of paper, as has been reported, off of his desk to make sure he didn't –
Sign things by people who would tell him, here's why you can't do this, because it's against the law or because there will be too much political blowback. And this time around, you know, we have a detail in our cover story in The Atlantic that says a lot of people around him have this unofficial rule where if Trump says something twice, they do it.
And again, we said, well, why twice? And, you know, a top advisor said, well, he does say some pretty crazy shit. But the difference is the first time he says it, they say, OK, he said it once. We're thinking about it. And the second time, whether it's taking over the board of the Kennedy Center and appointing himself chair or potentially ignoring due process, they simply find a way, if at all possible, to do it. And the other difference I see is that this time around, Trump is
Trump has learned that a lot of these democratic norms are sort of
societal niceties, but there's nothing to prevent him from utterly, you know, as Carol said, buffaloing through them. And he has shown a willingness to sort of charge through any possible norm he thinks he can. Ben? Yeah, I mean, I think his batting average may take a hit on some of these things. If he has a good batting average now, Alcatraz, for example, might, you know, lower that batting average. The idea that it could become a supermax prison again, the
place where Sean Connery could, you know, take over in The Rock or whatever. I feel like the odds of that are pretty low. But so much of what he's doing does feel like the first time around, even though it is Trump 2.0 is different in a lot of ways. The idea of it being an attention economy that he controls, I think, is a big deal, right? If he's talking about things that get us talking, that get the people of America talking, then
about what he's up to. I mean, other things can be done under the radar that we're not even aware of right now because we're talking about Alcatraz. And so I think that, you know, he just feels like he's winning if people are talking about him. And I think a lot of the people around him probably feel that way too because it allows them to do whatever it is they want to do without as much attention on it. So talk about that idea of distraction versus meaningful stuff like that because a lot of it is sort of the daily grievance of the day or the daily shock of the day. What...
it's not exactly shock and awe, but it's sort of this look over here, kind of a jazz hands thing. Carol, you said this idea of distraction isn't an effective technique this time?
I actually think he doesn't think he's trying to distract us. I don't think he thinks he's offering up his jazz hands, although I think that's a nice metaphor. Donald Trump is like, hey, I got a good idea. And the other day I was able to do it, even though the Supreme Court said I have to bring this guy back or facilitate bringing back Kilmar Albrego Garcia. You know, so maybe I can open Alcatraz. Totally agree with Ben on the batting average, by the way. I don't think Trump's
mode right now is distraction. He's like, wow, my flood the zone thing worked really well. A series of federal courts have been unable to bring me to heel. Some of the most powerful and, to be honest, well-moneyed institutions in our country, law firms in New York and D.C.,
fold it before the cards were even dealt and said, how much money do you want in pro bono for your causes that you care about, Donald Trump? That's a real dagger in the jugular of
not just law firms, but our legal system. But his team is very aware of the shock and awe element. Not always, but, you know, take day one. It was explained to me that they said, look, we knew we were going to do a bunch of executive orders on immigration on day one. And if we had just done those and left it at that, all of the stories, all of the media narrative would have been
We're such horrible people. We're racist. We're separating families. But we did the immigration EOs. And then this person said, and bam, then we did the J6 pardons. And on top of that, he gave his traditional inaugural address. He gave basically a second inaugural address at the congressional luncheon. He then held a big inauguration rally where he signed executive orders on stage. He then repaired to the Oval Office where he took more than 100 questions from the press.
And then, by the way, he and Melania, her designer clothes that people wanted to spotlight, went out to the inaugural balls, and their attitude was like, screw you. You have to choose which one of these you want to cover because you can't do it all. And they said that was very deliberate and the result of weeks of meticulous planning. That said, it is very easy to plan day one shock and awe when you have the entire transition to build up to it. Some of the shock and awe fire hoseness we're seeing now is
is perhaps a bit more arbitrary and a result of a president who wants to do things and is doing them. Ben? Also, he has, I mean, you know, this is a topic that's close to home for everybody here, but there's kind of a hollowed out media environment right now. And so if there were, you know, 10 times as many journalists and as many journalism institutions that are covering Trump, there might be an ability to kind of cover all these things. But if he's going to do
you know, 500 executive orders and each one of them deserves coverage. There's just not enough space. There's not enough people to really cover it. And a lot of stuff can slip through. I mean, it was described to me once as like,
if somebody shoots a bunch of rockets at the United States and only one of them is a nuke, but a thousand of them are coming at you, you kind of have to go and start shooting them all down, hoping that you're going to get the nuke and maybe the big thing comes through. And so if, if they fire a thousand different executive orders or policy proposals out there, you know, it's unclear which of the big ones are going to get through. That's a really good point. So, so far, um,
It's been 100 days. It feels like seven years at this point. I'd say they're superlatives, whether you're a supporter or a critic. In the Washington Post op-ed, Vice President J.D. Vance wrote, President Donald Trump has accomplished more in his first 100 days than most administrations accomplished in four years. The New York Times editorial board wrote that Trump's first 100 days had done more damage to American democracy than anything else.
since the demise of Reconstruction. I'd love each of you to do your assessment of is it success or demise or both? Carol, start. It's definitely both. You know, I mean...
I said, and Ashley knows this because we covered him together the first time around, but I used to say, you know, what's going to be the most shocking thing that happens when we were in 1.0? And every day the bar would rise and rise of what was the most shocking, right? I used to say as well then that it was just objectively true that he was attacking democracy and
Well, now he is successfully pulling out the pillars under the peer of democracy, right? When you have got, I mean, not to harp on Albrecht Garcia and the law firms, but when you have said to federal judges, you know, so sorry, won't be able to do that, can't comply, can't answer your question. And when you say to law firms,
"We got a shakedown process right here and this is what you're going to need to pay in order for me not to punish you." When you're able to successfully do that, you are gutting a key part of an adversarial justice system, legal system. From my perspective, huge success and it is objective fact that there's damage. But you could talk more intelligently and someone else
Certainly more intelligently than me about the damage to our economy, which just from a personal standpoint, wow, stunning damage. And then, you know, the thing that John Kelly and Rex Tillerson— Previous Trump administration officials. Yes.
Secretary of Defense Mattis, these people tried to convince Trump over and over again that there is a reason we have allies in Europe. That's the other amazing damage. Europe is just like, okay, give up. You're not with us anymore. We can't trust you. That loss of that alliance matters.
We don't know what the ramifications are going to be of that, but that's enormous damage. How much has Five Eyes told us about terror plots that are aimed our way that we may not know about anymore before they happen?
So two things. I think, you know, if it's positive or negative, some of this is a Rorschach test, right? He's certainly like the, I would argue, the most consequential president of the 21st century. And people can decide for themselves if those consequences are
are positive or negative damage or success. But, you know, when Carol mentioned sort of the end of these traditional Western alliances with Europe, one thing I am struck by, and it doesn't just apply to NATO and the Europeans, but is first-term Trump...
Everybody, the Europeans, the tech billionaires, et cetera, the law firms, the media organizations, they treated it, correctly or incorrectly, as an aberration. That he had won. It was kind of a fluke. Hillary was a bad candidate. I went on Biden's first trip with him. And Biden sort of went around to Europe and said, America is back. Right.
And people thought Trump would be this blip in this aberration that would be in the rearview mirror. And now, even though despite what Trump says, he currently cannot run for a third term, there is a sense among, again, our European allies. But just look, I mean, Carrie, you know this better than anyone, the way these, you know, tech oligarchs have caved, there is a sense that
that Trump is here to stay. And people are making calculations based on that, not just Trump, but that Trumpism. And there is no sense that the United States, for instance, with NATO or traditional alliances, can be counted on to return to what you would have traditionally thought was the role the United States played in the world, whether it's
a third Trump term, you know, some sort of Trump MAGA successor, a very populist Democrat. And everyone in the United States and elsewhere are making their calculations based on that, which is
totally different than first term. That's a good point. Ben? I also think that it's really hard to know what's going to count as a success and what's going to count as a failure at this moment, and that sometimes great successes can lead to the biggest failures, right? If Trump feels emboldened to start sending people, you know, out of this country into prisons without due process, and it feels like a success to him in the moment because he's
It's what he thinks his base wants him to do. It's also possible that America looks at it and says, this is too much. This is unconstitutional. We can't tolerate this. And it could become his undoing, right? We just don't know. And so 100 days is important for a lot of reasons, but...
For me, it's just too early to be able to say what seems like he's being successful doing and what's going to end up, you know, hurting him in the long run. That's a fair point. So, Ashley, you and your colleague, Michael Scherer, and your boss, Atlantic's editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, interviewed Trump in the Oval Office. Before that, you guys actually got him on the phone.
Here's what he said. Let's play it. Talk.
Talk a little bit about this interview. How do you think Trump's saving the world mentality is playing out so far in the administration? Because that seemed like one of the more truthful things he seemed to think. I don't think it's true, but he seemed to believe it. I mean, we agreed that that quote was incredibly telling. We put it on the cover, that quote from him. Yeah.
And I think it's revealing in ways he may not have intended. I mean, I'm struck by the first part of, you know, running the country and surviving because that's really what it was. It was survival. And we sort of realized in post the 2020 election, post J6, he's in the political wilderness. He ultimately comes back and our takeaway from that was,
was that all of these would-be vampire slayers, and by that I mean the Democrats, certainly the media critics, the court cases, you could argue, you know, the felony charges, his Republican primary rivals, the Republicans trying to stop him, the Neber Trumpers, everything.
In failing to drive a stake directly through his heart, they only made him stronger. And so he comes back to office feeling emboldened, feeling more confident, feeling that he can bend reality and existence to his will, understanding that he can, you know, shatter these democratic norms. So that's the first part of the quote. I think the second part, he talks about running the world. I sort of view that more as foreshadowing.
forcing the world to react to him. I think we described it as like, you know, a DJ in a booth adjusting tariffs like knobs. And, you know, the crowd goes one way and then the music changes and the crowd goes another, you know. And the world is certainly reacting to him. And same with NATO and same with the Europeans and same with these countries who are figuring out, you know, if they want to take in deportees.
But I don't know that he is running it so much as forcing everyone to scramble to his whims. So, Carol, you co-wrote two books about Trump's first stint in office, A Very Stable Genius and I Alone Can Fix It, two of his favorite things. You're working on another one about Trump and the DOJ specifically. No spoilers, but how does that, what we've been seeing align with what you saw the first time and where does it differ? Yeah, fair.
You know, writing about the Justice Department in this book is really about writing about the rule of law and like how Trump tried to manipulate essentially the Department of Justice to his political and personal goals the first time around. Sometimes he was successful. Many times he was not because Bill Barr, of all people, I know he has a lot of critics.
on the left and in the middle. But Bill Barr, of all people, said, no, we're not doing that. I'm not investigating so-and-so because you don't like them and consider them a political enemy. You know, every other day, Trump was calling Barr and asking him to investigate Comey, to indict Andrew McCabe, who was a deputy FBI director, the first person to authorize
an FBI investigation into Donald Trump personally, into whether or not he was obstructing the Russia probe criminally. And, you know, the second part of the book is like, what happened with that investigation under Joe Biden? And then finally now,
To answer your question about comparing, what we're watching is Trump's incredible success at accomplishing exactly what he wanted to do the first time around and was barred from. So, Ben, I'm going to switch to the people that should, another group that should stop him is Congress, right? And you spent most of your time in Trump's first term reporting on Capitol Hill. This is a very different Congress full of Republican loyalists.
It feels like they're all in, even if and there's been very little pushback, if any. Talk a little bit about this, because off the record, I don't even cover Capitol Hill. And any time I run into a Republican, they go out of their way to tell me.
They don't like him or they don't agree with him or something else. But in public, it's quite a different story. And in actual practice, really, which I think is the only thing that matters. Yeah, I mean, I think it's true that not everybody who pretends to love Donald Trump loves him as much as they claim to. But I also do think that now more than ever, there are true believers in Donald Trump. I mean, when I covered...
the first administration, it was almost like, it felt like all of them were kind of play acting. And you could, you know, it wasn't really hard to get somebody off the record or on background to kind of trash the president and, you know, wink, wink, this is what I actually feel. But you get it, you know, politics is politics. We got to play this game. That still exists for sure. Honestly, now there are more people in Washington who came to Washington and
born in this Donald Trump MAGA Republican identity kind of, you know, miasma. Like, this is their identity through and through. And so there are people who truly love him. And I think that is a big difference, right? So it means that when there are moments where controversial things are happening, you have both the bulwark of
who love him and Republicans who are too afraid to say that they don't love him. And that combination is really stronger even than just the Republicans who have to play act.
I did a profile for the Washington Post last year about this guy, Sergio Gore. This is not about Congress, but this is about the administration and how it's stocked. And Sergio Gore, speaking of DJs, is this kind of weird Republican figure who DJs MAGA parties. He officiated Matt Gaetz's wedding. He's very close with Don Trump Jr. And his job in this administration is to head up the office of personnel and
He led this team that would take 4,000 some odd people and stalk them into the government. And there were, you know, loyalty tests. And one of the things that he would ask people was like, where were you on January 8th? Where were you, you know, where are you on January 7th? Like not just January 6th, but the next day when a lot of people fled Donald Trump, if people were still with him,
Those people have a good chance in the government to get these jobs. And if they weren't, they have to at least explain why they weren't with them and how they found Jesus. And so the government through and through has stocked with people who have passed these kind of loyalty tests in Congress, in the House, in the Senate, in an administration. And that's sort of Trump's superpower right now. We'll be back in a minute.
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Okay. So speaking of loyalists, the top one is, of course, the world's richest man, Elon Musk, who I unfortunately have to talk about a lot. I'm getting a little tired of it. He's leaving for a little bit. So that's a good thing for Kara Swisher. But Elon Musk and Doge have obviously been a huge new factor in the early administration so far. I don't know what's going to be going forward. We'll talk about that in a second. But Ashley, you co-authored a piece about the Doge guys taking over an unprecedented blitz back in February, and you quoted Doge.
Speculated at Musk was creating a data lake for AI tools. I have said since...
the jump that this wasn't about cutting budgets. It was about a massive data grab. It's the only thing that made sense. And obviously from the numbers, they don't, they seem to be costing us money, not saving us money so far. So talk a little bit about that and his role, right? Before and going forward. I was going to say, we're at an interesting moment with Elon and Doge because, you know, it seems like Elon is sort of slowly on his way out or of waning influence. And,
And the question is, does Doge exist without Elon? And my thought is not really because Doge is kind of everything and nothing, right? Like they have this huge purview, but then they come in and they take credit for things that have nothing to do with them. And they upend things in a way that annoy, you know, sort of not necessarily the president, but just about everyone else around him. Right.
But, you know, part of this idea was that they could come in and sort of use data and technology and AI to streamline all of these government inefficiencies. And the truth is, anyone would tell you, Democrats included, the federal government is wildly inefficient. And there are potentially a lot of areas for improvement and streamlining, etc. But
The challenge is that Elon and just about every single person he brought in have no experience with the government whatsoever. Carol, one of it, what is about is also lawlessness of going in and just taking the chainsaw, all the visions of this is...
somewhat illegal what they've been doing and they've been facing enormous headwinds in courts and losing quite a bit. I think the purpose was for Trump being able to brag about cutting waste. How do you look at this tenure, which seems to be over? Maybe you don't think that's the case. I agree with Ashley in one way. I think it
It's a lot less powerful an institution. Institution's the wrong word. Entity, a parasite, without Elon sort of every other day in the Oval, you know, bringing out the chainsaw or wearing his tech support shirt, you know, to show who's holding up the flag there. I agree with you that the data...
seems to have been the primary goal. The other two were the good PR. So that PR was super successful in some echo chambers of America, but actually not really successful for taxpayers. The second goal was clearly to deploy the data for finding immigrants. You know, why are we going to go and get the Postal Inspection Service, get all their data, and make sure that we can find immigrants
the legal and illegal immigrants that we have records for? Why is it that we're going to go to Social Security Administration? Again, it was like, how do we utilize this material for our policy goals or the president's agenda and showing his campaign base that he's delivering and he's getting rid of these dangerous people that are stealing our jobs?
That data vacuuming is no doubt and that data mining is no doubt still continuing, whether Elon is minding the store at Tesla or not. And what we just don't know, and I'm not going to pretend that I do, we just don't know the ways in which that will be deployed as time goes on. And, you know, because there was a Starlink now associated with and installed somewhere in the White House.
chain of internet protocol, there's a way for it to all very carefully leave the building. But I think back to Ben's point of like some of the successes may end up being the greatest failures, right? Like everyone loves to hate faceless, nameless government bureaucrats, right? Then there's the effect that they're actual real people. And a lot of these agencies are housed out in the states and in communities. So there may be a little blowback when, you know,
People at the VA are fired or people who work for the National Park Service who live in your neighborhood lose their jobs. But I think the bigger thing is when you're gutting these agencies, you don't know what crises a government is going to encounter two, three, four years down the road. And when we turn around and there's a supply chain issue or there's a missing piece of HHS that is crucial for this particular new virus, you know, that by the time we realize, then it is potentially too late. Right.
I always initially called Elon a heat shield for the president. He's such a showman that that's where people, right, reporters would focus. The lack of pushback from Congress on Doge, at least none of the Republicans did, although lately they seem to have been more vocal about it. Democrats have some of them joined, but now are making fun of it.
from all polling, it looks like nobody likes Elon Musk and that it didn't particularly work well with the general populace. How are people in Congress looking at this now? Sure. I mean, Democrats, like all things, aren't quite sure how to deal with any of this, right? There's not like one unified theory about it. You see some members of Congress going out on an anti-oligarchy tour and then other members of Congress are like,
Why are we using the term oligarchy? Everybody has to Google that just to know what it means. And then it becomes a big fight about are we picking the right fights? And then the fights become all within the Democratic Party as opposed to against the people they actually want to fight about. So I think that Democrats have realized that Elon Musk is unpopular and that –
What he's up to is broadly unpopular, but they're not quite sure how to fight it. I mean, as Ashley pointed out, the kind of unnamed bureaucrat is not a particularly popular figure. And so when members of Congress go out and they fight for the federal workforce, I'm not sure that's particularly effective because a lot of people in the country are like, what's the federal workforce? A bunch of bureaucrats who sit around, you know, taking money off the taxpayer dime without doing any real work. What has the government done for me lately? Right? Right.
but trying to point out what can actually be done. I mean, the same thing happened with foreign aid. I mean, foreign aid is hugely important and not that expensive, but it's also a really hard thing to rally...
the American public around, right? You can't, it's a hard thing to say, let's go fight for USAID when not many people necessarily know exactly what it's doing. And they have this idea in their mind that 10% of the government funding goes to USAID when it's like this minuscule amount that actually goes there. So one of the pieces you just wrote was this huge piece in New York Magazine about Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, who was trying to be, it was a scathing piece. Fetterman clearly has other issues he's dealing with right now. A lot of it
that was most upsetting was about his personal issues. But,
But talk about – because he was one of the few Democrats who went down to Mar-a-Lago after the election. He was initially a fan of Elon Musk, and then he blasted him for trying to access IRS data. But talk about – he's been one of the players in this widening rift inside the Democratic Party. Yeah, he's sort of a maverick type, I guess is what he would want to refer to himself as. He is one of the people who said, stop using the term oligarchy. People have to Google it. So it's a good transition to him.
I think he basically sees himself as the Democrat willing to criticize his own party. The guy who's willing to go to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Donald Trump because he was elected, Donald Trump was elected. Donald Trump was elected in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania went for him. Pennsylvania also obviously went for John Fetterman. Fetterman feels like...
You know, if he represents this state when he shares voters with the president, the least he could do is go down and have a conversation with them. Isn't that a nice, simple idea of what democracy is supposed to be? I think a lot of people who voted for him feel like he's no longer exactly the person that they thought they were voting for. Sure, he's always been a maverick, he's always kind of stood out on his own on certain issues.
But it does feel like he's putting his finger in the eye of the Democratic Party more than people might have guessed. He still votes with Democrats most of the time. But his rhetoric, his language, and the way that he talks about his own party does feel like he is a major part of the rift and experiencing one himself. Yeah.
Ashley, would you talk a little bit about this? Because, you know, it's been mentioned Bernie Sanders and AOC have been on their fighting oligarchy tour. Michigan Senator Alyssa Slotkin, who co-authored bipartisan legislation with Fetterman, by the way, apparently doesn't like that term either. She's telling Democrats not to be weak and woke and to, quote, fucking retake the flag, which is an interesting way to say it.
Which of these visions is going to be successful? Because one of the things that's notable is as low as Donald Trump's polls are, and they're quite low, Democrats are lower. And this should be an opportunity for Democrats the way it has been, say, for the Canadian Liberal Party. First, Ashley, and then Carol. I think we don't know yet. Because we don't know yet because Democrats don't know yet. And part of that is natural when you lose an election cycle. There's always some sort of...
soul-searching, and often even that soul-searching is not what you think it will be. I mean, I'm old enough to remember Mitt Romney losing in the Republican autopsy about how the Republican Party had to be a kinder, gentler, more inclusive party that welcomed immigrants, and out of that came Donald Trump, right? So the soul-searching phase yields all types and surprises. But
But what I think we're seeing in very different ways are the seedlings of these different philosophies and discussions in the Democratic Party. You know, it's not just Fetterman. I think of Gavin Newsom, you know, starting his own podcast where he sort of has these MAGA folks on. You know, Pete Buttigieg has done a bit of that. One thing I find funny—
More as like a riff story than a real political answer is all these Democrats dropping F-bombs as if like that's simply all it takes. But I do think one thing... They are. I know. It's like the talking points went out, you know, and you can just see how uncomfortable some of them are with it. And the truth is Trump can't, you know, ask little Marco, right? Trump can't be replicated. Only Trump is Trump. But...
To me, again, I just think at the end of the day, and this has always been true, but I think now in this era with social media is truer still is like the preeminent thing of whoever emerges, whatever philosophy, whatever attributes and policy positions. I just think that what Donald Trump showed us is that, among other things, we're going to have to do something about it.
authenticity is king. And any successful Democrat will need to be authentic. So if you say fuck, you have to mean fuck, essentially. Yes. Yes. If you say fuck, you have to be able to own that fuck, you know? And if you don't, that's fine, too. But then, like, have your more demure, prudish social online media presence that is authentic to you. Carol, care to comment on the fuckery? But
I was just thinking about a source who said to me, you know, he uses the F word a lot in the Oval. And I'm like, I'm aware. I'm familiar with that. To your question, you know, the midterms are going to lean towards the Democrats one way or another, how dramatically they help Democrats out.
will be based on something Ben and Ashley have referred to, which is the consequence. Like, are there going to be some planes that fly out of the sky and drop because we got rid of a bunch of air traffic controllers? Is there going to be another outbreak of measles that's going to spread across multiple states?
Are the tariffs going to eventually, instead of wiping out initially 20% of our economic value on the street, is it going to start to actually erode the value of the U.S. dollar, which is what got Trump to stop the tariffs? If any of those and any other iteration of those starts to happen, you can see people peeling away already in very small ways.
So retribution is a key word here. And we've already seen this. Trump has ordered investigations of Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs, two aides in his first room of criticizing. He's also ordered the DOJ to launch
into main Democratic fundraising platform, ActBlue. Talk a little bit about that. You know, I'm so glad you asked it, Cara, because I was thinking about in the second book that Phil Rucker and I wrote, we talked about the revenge tour. You know, Trump comes back from the impeachment and he's like, everybody's going to pay. And not only that,
Not everybody paid. You know, he tried his darndest to remove especially inspectors general who he blamed for, you know, this bizarre and potentially illegal phone call that he had with Vladimir Zelensky, Ukrainian president, in which he said, yeah, I don't care. Just just say you're investigating the Biden family. Well, it's not legal or appropriate for a U.S. citizen to ask a foreign government to investigate an American citizen. But that's what Trump asked for.
He wanted inspectors general who helped bring this to Congress and ultimately bring it to the public to pay. What's different now? He wiped out inspectors general upon arriving in office. SIA gone. So his revenge tour, just on that one little measurement, has been, you know,
Meaning oversight is eliminated.
How are you going to be protected? Because if you come to me, I promise you I'll project your confidentiality and we'll write a story about it. But your legal protection is so much stronger if you go to Congress or the inspector general at the same time or around the same time. So, Ashley, Trump launched the ActBlue investigation right after he told you that his desire for retribution was coming from others, not him. Right.
I'm guessing that did not surprise you. What do you make of this? What are you hearing from the administration? Are these investigations having a chilling effect? I mean, it was a fascinating moment in the interview. The thing that prompts the exchange is Jeff Goldberg sort of says, like, look...
You've returned to power, right? You've returned to power and you won all seven swing states and you won the popular vote and you are back here and you are more objectively powerful than ever. Again, Rorschach test, good or bad, but more like, why can't you just let the 2020 election go and move on? And A, Trump can't. But B, he says, look, there's two schools of people. There's the people who think, you know, I won and I should just focus on making the country great. And the second group that thinks I won and I should focus on making the country great, but I also...
I have to take revenge. I can't let this stuff happen. And Trump says, believe it or not, I'm in the first group. I just want to make America great. And Jeff says, you know what? I don't believe it. And then we literally are filing to get this story up and make it to press because the interview came together after it had closed. And we realized in real time he has just, again, sought revenge on Act Blue. I mean, Carol made it.
It points about what is so concerning in, for instance, the whistleblower government accountability community. But one thing I think of, you mentioned the Chris Krebs investigation. He was head of CISA and he said the election wasn't struggling. To me, that one stands out the most because Chris Krebs' crime...
Mm-hmm.
So, and? Implications? Well, I think when, I mean, I think it can get pretty dystopian pretty quickly if we have a president who is going to use the power of the presidency to punish people for the mere crime of acknowledging reality. We'll be back in a minute.
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I want to finish up talking about the next hundred days or the next couple hundred days for Doge cuts to actually go into effect. These executive orders do not cut it. Republicans in Congress need to codify them, put them in the budget. Trump came out with his budget proposal last week. White House officials called it a joint project with Doge, $1.7 trillion in total, over $1 trillion of which will go to defense. That would be a 13% increase, increases to DHS, border security, and $1 billion for
Mars exploration. I wonder who wants to go to Mars. And honestly, I think it would be money well spent to send them there myself. But on the other hand, $163 billion in cuts that would eliminate programs for education, health, housing, climate initiatives. It cuts the National Science Foundation budget in half, about 40% from the National Institutes of Health, eliminates funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, NPR, PBS, the National Endowment for the Arts, and
President Biden had that old saw, show me your budget and I'll show you what you value. All of you, what does this say and what would it mean for the country? Carol, why don't you start first and then Ashley and Ben. Someone just mentioned to me in passing, like half of the EPA budget is...
toast in the current federal budget. But what Trump doesn't do is spell out which programs, right? So what's going to happen to Congress? They're going to have to be the ones to decide? That seems to me intriguing because Trump then, what will he get? The great PR benefit. I halved the expenses at the EPA.
But who decided which things we're not going to do? Are we not going to check homes for lead poisoning for children anymore? Who decided that? Ashley?
So there was actually a time I was quite good at math. That time is no longer. But I'm just kind of obsessed with the idea that the math doesn't add up. When you talk about the number, the amount of cuts they're promising to do, the increases to the defense budget, and then the fact that Trump himself has made clear that he will not touch entitlements in any way, shape or form, like you just can't do it. And I think that will be where the rubber meets the road with this bill.
Ben? Yeah, I mean, I just think that, you know, when you have this number and you're making cuts and you get to, you know, put out a press release saying we made this many cuts, you know, maybe you get some credit for it. Maybe people, you know, love you for it or whatever. But just to echo what everyone's kind of saying here, there will be moments where those cuts affect people. I mean, you think about FEMA, right? Now we live in an era where...
There's more hurricanes than we've ever had, and weather is weirder than ever, and, you know, George W. Bush's entire presidency was kind of defined for a while by the inability to respond to Katrina. I mean, it just – it's scary to think about that –
We could be one event away from everyone being reminded, oh, this is why we put money into the government. And it's scary because people will have horrible things happen and there won't be a good response. And then, I don't know, I mean, the politics of that get very complicated because...
Then Republicans can say, look, the government can't even respond to these things, even if part of the reason why they're not responding well is because of the hollowing out of the government. And even if you're fighting over whose fault it was that the ambulance didn't arrive, like at the end of the day, the ambulance didn't arrive. And that's the problem. Absolutely. So I want to finish up with two more questions. I'd like to know what each of you or you each focus on different things, but what you think is the most important thing.
going forward. But before that, one of the trademark of Trump's first term was incredibly high turnover rate. You guys covered this really well of his senior level positions. So far, there's been less of that. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz finally got the boot, I guess, or he got a promotion, whatever they want to call it. This was connected to him
Adding your boss, Ashley Lennox, Editor-in-Chief Jeff Goldberg, to that signal group about the U.S. attack on Yemen. How do you characterize in the areas you cover why this is so stable in some ways? Or is it just a precursor for someone else to go Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem?
But if he's surrounded himself by loyalists, why move anybody? You know, in his mind, for example, Carol, Pam Bondi's doing a great job. Yeah. Pam Bondi, you know, is all over Fox News and viral TikToks and reels, reels for people my age, TikToks for my children, talking about how Donald Trump's the best president that's ever lived.
in his DOJ visit, which broke a lot of norms. She basically said, you're the boss, you're my boss. That lack of independence of these agencies to actually be able to sort of speak truth to him and give him counsel and tell him why this is probably not cool to investigate your enemies without a factual predicate, without any evidence that they actually engaged in a crime, that
That is the huge difference here. And by the way...
on the Hegseth piece, if I may, watching obviously this amazing Signalgate story, great scoop, definitely defined the news for some time. It is amazing to me that Waltz is the person that drew Trump's ire in that, because while he definitely added an inappropriate person to a discussion of classified national defense information, the person who put
secure national defense information on to the availability of this non-secure device, whether or not Jeff Goldberg was on it or not. The person who did that was Pete Hegseth. And then he did it again with his wife and his brother, struggling to see how they should have that national defense information under the Espionage Act, which Trump was indicted for in 2023.
You know, very similar fact pattern here. Yeah. Doesn't think it's a big deal, would be my guess. Doesn't think it's a big deal. Ashley, you've written about how the cabinet is cosplaying. This is a cabinet he seems to like. You don't see a lot of people leaving. You would imagine Hegseth would be pushed out for that.
Yeah, it was interesting. We asked him, our interview was kind of at this moment where there had been a lot of bad fact sets about Pete Hegseth. And when we asked, and Trump is not someone who sort of admits mistakes or culpability very easily, but sort of for him, it was revealing that he said, look, I had a talk with Pete. It was a positive talk, but I had a talk with Pete, and I think he's going to get his act together. It sort of reminded me of a parent trying to get a wayward child in line, which for Trump to say to, you know,
media outlet was striking. I think, you know, two things. I'm interested in the first 100 days of Trump felt incredibly different from the first term. And Signalgate was the first real moment that kind of reminded me of the clown car chaos of Trump 1.0. But it has not been the only one since. And so that's something I'm keeping an eye on, that dynamic. You could argue that
tariffs had a fact pattern that was very similar to Trump 1.0, Trump doing something that some of his advisors truly thought was a good idea that a lot of his advisors privately thought was a bad idea, the kind of behind-the-scenes lobbying, the lobbying through Fox News, and then the claiming that this was all the art of the deal and, you know, the brilliant negotiator all along, which it wasn't. I think what I said this week on Bill Maher, he's not playing 3D chess, he's just eating the pieces. Yeah, no, exactly. And...
So that's kind of something I'm keeping an eye out for as well. Ben? Yeah, I just think what's the lesson that Trump has learned from the last, you know, eight years? And Ashley and Michael covered it so well in their story of the Atlantic. It's basically just if you stick around forever, eventually you can outlast even the worst things. And so if nobody could cancel –
Donald Trump after he had been, you know, indicted on, you know, eight zillion crimes and he could come back and become president because he just outlasted
the people who are out to get him in his mind. Why can't that be the case for his cabinet as well? I mean, sure, there was a lot of attention on Signalgate and people are still talking about it today and they may talk about it forever. But also there's not a out... Repercussion. Yeah, there's no repercussion. There's not an outcry in the streets for him to be removed. Republicans aren't asking for it. Democrats are going to call for everybody to be removed.
In Trump's mind, I can just imagine him thinking, yeah, let's just, you know, why admit defeat and let's just keep going. Keep going. Carol, what would you say your most important thing you're focused in on? You know, there was a feature in his effort to get...
universities, law firms, other institutions that are supposed to be independent. DOJ is supposed to be independent. It's not the same, but it is supposed to be, you know, a city on a hill within our government. All this pressure on these institutions to bend to him and his will and his wishes, I want to see what the result of that is. I want to see how our country...
as sources have warned me, moves and migrates more towards a Russian mold than
than an American one. All right, so that leads into the last question, which I think works perfectly. Ashley wrote that there was gulag humor in Washington, speaking of Russia. Feels like gallows humor right now. Last week, the New York Times editorial put together a how-to guide for defeating the power grab. Each of you, finishing up, who or what do you think, if anything, will slow this down? Um...
And what is the role of journalists in doing this? And what is the role of politicians in doing it? Because it seems like mistake after mistake is made and they just keep, as Carol said, barreling through. Let's have Ben start and then Ashley and then Carol finish up. Yeah, I mean, as trite as it sounds, I think politics actually is a big part of this year. You know, if journalists keep calling it out, people keep seeing it, politicians keep talking about it.
You know, it's 100 days into the first term here. And so there's not going to be a lot of pushback, you know, against them that they feel. But as you get closer to a midterm election, every single member of Congress who's worried about their own skin might have a different way of thinking about things and talking about things and voting on things. As we get closer to 2028, as whoever is running, whether it's Trump for a third term, even though he says he won't, or somebody else, there's a possibility that they start realizing that this...
The outcry and the way that they're acting has repercussions that could negatively affect them. Everybody really just sees...
how it affects them personally in Washington. It's kind of pathetic, but I think that might end up being the only way that things change. Ashley? So I have two answers. One, which is a little bit of an unknown, but I think is the Supreme Court. It was interesting. In both of our conversations with the president for this story, we asked him, would you respect, would you abide by a Supreme Court ruling? And both times he was unequivocal, and he said yes. He said, you can't not listen to the Supreme Court. You have to listen to them.
That said, he also – it was revealing because he also has a belief that his justices – he would say my justices, so those he appointed – will ultimately at the end of the day when push comes to shove rule in his favor because that is what has happened historically. You know, he said, basically, I'm going to listen to the court. And he says, but I always win on appeal, right? I got immunity on appeal. So –
I think there's a world in which the Supreme Court can play an important role, but I also think we won't really know how he will actually react until they rule against him on something major. Which they have. Yes, but I think there are more major issues that will be coming up in the coming months. That's number one. And then two, kind of back to what Ben said, I just also think reality and vibes, right? I mean, Biden at the end of the day...
Lost on the economy in many ways. And it was vibes because as I covered and everyone covered, a lot of the quote unquote actual economic indicators were quite good. But the vibes that you were stuck in the house, if you were lucky enough to own a house in the first place, that you were stuck in the house you had bought because interest rates had gone up and now you couldn't afford to move.
That was a vibe. The fact that milk, eggs, gas, all of these things cost more money. Something I do now that a lot of people do is instead of just going to one grocery store, you get as much of the stuff as you can at the cheaper grocery store, and then you make a second trip just to get those items that that grocery store doesn't have, or if maybe the
The seafood is a little better somewhere more expensive. You might be willing to pay it. But that is a vibe thing. When you go grocery shopping, and Trump himself has started talking about, which is fascinating,
You know, a holiday season where kids don't maybe get as many gifts. The holiday seasons are a tough time for a lot of families that you plan for and you save for. And if it becomes an area where people feel like this economy isn't working for me, those are the things that have real political ramifications. It's the only thing I agree with him. No one deserves 30 dolls, but we have too many dolls at my house. But I don't agree with him. Carol, why don't you finish up?
We'll have to ask you later how many markers are in your house as well, how many colored pencils. You know, Trump got a visit from Bill Barr in March of 2020, in which Barr told him privately, I had this vibe with George H.W. Bush in 92. He was going to go down. He was going to lose. And I have that vibe about you now. I don't think Barr actually used the word vibe, but
But he said, I feel like you're going to lose this election if you don't do something differently. What was he losing the election over? People thought his response to COVID was insanely chaotic. And I think that the...
You ask the question, who changes this dynamic? Journalists do what they always do. We report unflinchingly, factually on what's happening in real time. But voters are the ones who are going to decide what happens here. And maybe that's in the midterms very soon. And they're going to decide it based on consequences. Does a crisis come down the pike?
Do expensive groceries push people to the edge? Do tariffs leave a bunch of retirees who supported Trump feeling like, well, I guess I can't actually pay my way and I'm going to have to rely on my children for a few more years because of these tariffs? You know, it's that kind of consequence slash crisis and whether or not that unfolds. Great. I really appreciate it. Thank you. How substantive. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.
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