First Look with The Post's Jonathan Capehart, Cat Zakrzewski, Jim Geraghty and Jennifer Rubin
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including important safety information about risk for thyroid C-cell tumors at www.vitaminshop.com slash GLP-1 weight loss. You're listening to a podcast from Washington Post Live, bringing the newsroom to you live. Welcome to First Look, Washington Post Live's one-stop shop for news and analysis. I'm Jonathan Capehart, associate editor at The Washington Post.

Separately, President-elect Donald Trump and first buddy Elon Musk caused a ruckus on the world stage. Trump with his musings on Greenland and other things. Musk with his meddling in EU politics, right down to interviewing the leader of Germany's far-right AFD party on X yesterday. Joining me now to discuss the implications of all this, Kat Zekreski, national technology reporter for The Washington Post. Kat, welcome to First Look.

Thank you so much for having me on the show, Jonathan. Sure thing. So earlier this week, you wrote a piece with the headline, Elon Musk Goes Global With His Playbook For Political Influence. Tell us about this playbook he's employing and if it seems to be working.

So what we saw over the last year was that Elon Musk became very involved in U.S. politics with his support of Donald Trump and using the megaphone that he's developed on his social network, X, to put forth his policy ideas.

And what we've seen since the start of the new year is that Elon Musk is increasingly doing this in other countries. He's been heavily weighing in on British politics in recent weeks, making unproven claims about the current prime minister there. He's also hosted the leader of the German AFD for a conversation on Twitter spaces. And we've seen him even throw his support behind the populist leader,

in Canada. And so taken all together, this is just a showing that he's seen success in integrating himself in politics in the United States. And now he's trying to do that in other countries with other populist leaders.

I mentioned Germany. You mentioned Germany. They're having snap elections, which are scheduled February 23rd. The European Commission has said it will examine Musk's interference in European politics, given the enormous power of his social media platform X, which has 211 million users. I'm just wondering, Kat, what is -- what's motivating Elon Musk here getting involved in all these countries? Is it his business interests, ideology,

Or what? I think it's a combination of factors. Obviously, when you look at a company like SpaceX, governments are SpaceX's biggest clients. And so it makes sense that he would want to have strong relationships with leaders around the world in order to move forward with his goals of expanding the commercial space industry.

At the same time, too, we've seen him shift more and more to the right with his own ideology. And so he seems to be, you know, grabbing on to other parties around the world that share some of those views. And, you know, just in general, I think he is a person who has seen how much power and influence he can have in the United States. And so why not try to replicate that in other countries if you're the world's richest man?

Right. You're the world's richest man who's getting close to becoming a trillionaire. But let's talk about Musk's proximity to President-elect Donald Trump, who will actually be sworn in exactly 10 days from now. How might Musk's relationship with Trump complicate America's relationships with some of its closest allies?

So I think there's going to be a real challenge here if world leaders look at Musk as a surrogate for the Trump administration. You know, Musk acts on his own. He says things on X without running them by.

foreign policy advisors or the National Security Council. And so, you know, we've seen in instances already because Musk is such a singular presence at Mar-a-Lago, he's gone almost everywhere with the president-elect since Election Day. Other world leaders are treating him like almost a member or a surrogate for Trump in some of these conversations. We saw that in the interview yesterday with the leader of the AFD. And so,

If you look at that, that can cause a lot of problems if what Musk is saying online is different from what the Trump administration's position is. And we already see Donald Trump struggling with how to toe that line. He was asked if he had any concerns about the comments that Musk was making on foreign policy during the news conference earlier this week. And he kind of dodged the question. He said he didn't know much about what

he was saying about the leaders and sort of seemed to distance himself from those comments. Well, let's stop it.

Let's talk about Donald Trump's own comments at his press conference. And that is where he talked about he didn't rule out the potential use of force to take Greenland from Denmark, or his comments on the Panama Canal, the vow to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. Also talking about using economic force to make Canada

the 51st state and saying that it's a matter of national security. I bring all of this up because you've reported that Trump's team says his comments are part of a broader plan. What exactly is that plan?

So from Trump and his advisor's position, this is all in the name of national security and in the US efforts to curb the influence of China and Russia on the global stage. He's been saying in news conferences and comments to reporters that he's concerned about the presence of

Russia and China in the trade routes surrounding Greenland. He's also raised concerns about the influence that China has over the Panama Canal. And so he says that in order for the US to maintain its dominance on the world stage and its own national security interests, it needs to have control over these lands. And these are really staggering comments, obviously, to make about

key allies, and in the case of Canada, neighbors of the United States.

One more question for you, Kat, before I have to let you go. We've seen fissures in Trump's coalition between the tech community, Silicon Valley, and the MAGA faithful centered around immigration and specifically the H-1B visa program. That's the program that allows foreigners with technical skills to work in the United States for up to 60 years. Is this a permanent fissure or can there be reconciliation between the two?

So I think this is perhaps a preview of some of the fights we may see to come in the coming administration. Even if they can come to a resolution on the H-1B issue, and we have seen Donald Trump align himself with the tech leaders and come out supporting H-1Bs,

You have a moment where you have this group of elite tech officials in a party that has run on a populist message about protecting the interests of America workers at home. And so there will be a number of places, whether that's immigration or trade or foreign policy, where we could see those ideologies clash in the coming months and years.

Oh, you know what, Kat? There was one more question I forgot to ask you as a follow-up to the Canada-Panama Canal question, a Greenland question. And that is, how seriously are foreign leaders taking these threats that Trump is making?

I think we're seeing foreign leaders become increasingly nervous about the threats that Donald Trump is making, especially on the point of economic coercion. He's talking more and more about potential tariffs against Denmark, which could have a major impact on their economy and also consumers here at home who might like products like Ozempic or Legos that originate from there.

I'm sure by mentioning Ozempic, you have sent shutters through lots of people. Kat Zekreski, Washington Post's national technology reporter, thank you very much for coming to First Look. Have a good weekend. Thank you for having me. Time for the opinions roundtable. So let's go to the opinion side of the Washington Post, where we will find Washington Post columnists Jim Garrity and Jennifer Rubin. Jen, Jim, welcome back to First Look.

Welcome. Nice to be here and happy new year.

- Jonathan, it's good to be with you. And hopefully we'll keep it clean this time. Hopefully, you know. - I knew you were gonna go there. I just knew you were gonna go there. Let's start with some news that broke just before we came on. The December unemployment rate, the jobs numbers came out. Unemployment ticked down 4.1%, but the big news, 256,000 jobs created in December, a big number, another upward trend.

going out of 2024. Jen, just your immediate thoughts on this. Gosh, if the public only knew what a great economy we had, maybe Kamala Harris would have gotten elected. This is the tragedy, I think, of the Biden administration in the time we're in, which is

He has led, really, a remarkable recovery. If you look around the world, Russia, China, Europe, all of these countries, their economies are really in a bad way. And we are soaring ahead, 16.6 million jobs. Inflation is now below

the Fed target rate, and whether you look at manufacturing or chip plants, chip investment, the economy really is going into a full drive. Of course, inflation hurt

the incumbent party a lot. But frankly, I think the overall picture of the economy was not something that was well communicated to the average voter. And it is one of the few times where the economy is very, very strong and the incumbent party is punished for it.

And Jen, that reminds me, you wrote a column recently that points out that Bidenomics worked, and your column criticizes the media for failing to account for its successes. I mean, yeah, the Biden administration can be knocked around for its messaging, but talk more about how the media is at fault here, too.

There is a negative news bias that permeates all media. It's not news to say, "Everything is great today, getting better."

because that's not, frankly, very attractive for eyeballs and clicks. And I've documented throughout the four years of the administration the excessive negativity and the unwillingness to recognize accomplishments when they came along. What's so striking is now that the election is over, there's a whole spate of articles, Financial Times, New York Times, The Economist, you name it, basically saying,

Biden is handing off a really strong economy to Donald Trump. Well, it was really strong a month ago and two months ago.

But that really was not uppermost in the minds of many people in the media. Part of that is that they tend to dwell on polls and public opinion. And the perception of the media was very negative, I guess, in part because the media reports it. Rather, the perception of the economy was very negative because that's the way the media reports it.

But I also think that inflation did eat away at people's really patience and sense of economic security. So a lot of things, I think, account for it. But if you look back and

I'm not, it's just John Jen Rubin saying that this has been fairly well documented. The gap between how the media portrayed the economy and how the economy performed was really quite striking.

Jim, you've been very quiet and patient through all this. So I would love to get your view on the economic outlook, but also any quibbles you might have with Jennifer Rubin's, I think, astute analysis.

Oh, so we're going with mass delusion. That's the explanation here that American people, they were doing great and they just didn't realize it and went into the polls brainwashed by Fox News or some other place and all that stuff. Okay. All right. Just good to know that that's the story and you're sticking to it, I suppose.

There was actually, I liked this study The Economist had done. They did write an article saying, hey, the economy's doing great a little bit before the election. And by the way, let's point out, Joe Biden was not shy about telling people, you've never had it so good. You're so lucky to have me. You know, look

Look at how terrific things are going. All of the problems I inherited, he kept insisting that inflation was 9% when he went took office. Not true, it was 2% when he took office. We were just coming out of the COVID pandemic. We weren't making stuff. So there wasn't any way to have a sudden increase in prices. When we did go on a spending spree in the first couple of years of this administration, you throw a whole lot more money into the economy on the level of trillions of dollars. Increase amount of money in the economy, don't increase the amount of goods. Lo and behold, you end up having inflation.

So the Economist study tried to say, all right, the Biden administration keeps pointing to low unemployment and saying, look, the economy is doing great. And the above kept saying, yes, but everything's more expensive at the grocery store. Everything's more expensive at the gas pumps. Why are you telling me how great things are?

Different people have different ideas of what constitutes the economy. The economists put together five different categories. One of them was indeed unemployment. One of them was indeed deficits, the size of the deficit compared to the GDP. Some of it was wage growth. Some of it was, they did like five different factors. And you got stock market performance was another one. And we should point out, stock market had a fantastic year over the past year.

It ended up with a very mixed bag. I believe out of like 37 wealthy countries, they basically looked at them and concluded that U.S. stock market performance was fourth in the world, right? So by that standard, yeah, it's great. If you had a 401k, you're probably feeling good about how things were going in 2024. Unemployment rate, it's been about flat. We got some good news today. I'm sure it's one of those things where right now Janet Yellen is kicking the waste paper basket and saying, oh, sure, now the economy looks terrific. Where was this back in summer and fall when we really could have used this?

But the economy is low by historical standards, creeped up a bit in the past year, but not something where you'd say, oh, we've got a giant crisis in job creation. But the really glaring number where we were at the bottom, near the bottom of those 37 countries was spending in relation to GDP. We've been on a spending spree over the last couple of years. And you'd think that would actually be improving the mood of the country, and it's not. And as we see when we have to make these giant quarterly payments on interest payments on the debt,

we're only creating greater problems down the road. Now, Donald Trump is not the guy who I'd pick to go on the, we'll see what comes out of the DOE, the Department of Government Efficiency. But look, all in all, this is a very mixed bag economy. And I don't think the Democratic Party should be going around saying, ah, we did, patting themselves on the back, talking about a great job they did. And it's just these, all these people got brainwashed when every time they went to the supermarket or gas station.

I will say we're going to find out that the economy was so great because in about two weeks, Donald Trump is going to tell us how great the economy is. It's the best ever. And mark my words, he is going to take credit for all of these. Let me just make a few points. First of all,

We went on a spending spree. Other countries did as well. When you break it down, the spending was a small part of inflation. We did have huge disruptions in the supply chain. We had shortages. And

Of course, the process of restarting the economy was tremendous. Now, we did wind up with inflation, but we also wound up with a job creating economy. The problem with these other economies is they don't create jobs. They don't create wealth and profits, something I think Jim and I both like as capitalists at heart. I would also say that while

the president spoke about his economy and the economic accomplishments, he didn't speak well about it. And what we found out during the election is he was speaking to a very narrow stratum of voters. And if you want to,

mock it, I guess you can. But frankly, Fox does brainwash its viewers. They tell them all kinds of things that aren't true. And we have a real problem with disinformation and the right wing media bubble. So I think that's a problem Democrats are going to have to wrestle with. They haven't done an effective job of counteracting that. But simply to say that, you know,

Trump is a truth teller or that the mainstream media didn't, I think, tip the scales by playing this kind of false equivalence game is just wrong.

Two things, Jim. It's dodgy. That's how I'm pronouncing this dogeman. It is absolutely dodgy. The other thing is, I take your point about being worried about spending and debt to GDP and all of that. But I'm just wondering, are you as worried about spending

with Donald Trump as president because he and the Republican Congress, they're about to push for renewal of those Trump tax cuts. Can we just admit that tax cuts are spending? Well, tax revenues have been a new record almost every single year. The problem is not that the U.S. government has a tax revenue problem. The problem is it's got a spending problem.

Yeah, wow. Wow, that's absolutely, we're running $2 trillion a year deficits and now all of a sudden, no, no, no, it's probably we don't have enough money coming in. Well, the money coming in at the highest level ever, what is the issue here? Now, some of this is entitlements and I'm not thrilled about the fact that ever since Trump has become in charge of the Republican Party, we can't do means testing. We can't do, we're not gonna touch Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security. None of it is touchable. Not even for young workers, not even for down the road. No, no, no, it's all gotta stay exactly the way it is.

And the idea that you know, the irony is every couple of years, every two years, we get told Republicans are going to cut Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security. Never happens. We kept getting warned about, oh, don't worry, this is going to happen. Trump has said we're not touching this. And lo and behold, the Republican Party has done a lot better. So there's a question of whether Republicans should try to keep dragging the American public, kicking and screaming towards a fiscal policy it does not want, or whether we should just hit the click. What is a 20-year

right after the end of this next term, sometime in the mid-2030s, Medicaid, Medicare, we start running out of money to pay hospitals. Nobody wants to do anything about that, but fine. Discretionary spending, first of all, I don't think the world's getting any safer, so I don't think you can really make any significant defense cuts.

And whenever you hear Republicans talk about this, they always like to go after foreign aid. Well, foreign aid is like, what, one-tenth of 1% of all federal spending? They'll lament Ukraine aid. All this stuff is surplus. All this stuff is stuff the military is not going to use anyway, that we're going to sell at any point. They keep finding, you know, I believe last time Trump was in office, he said he canceled subscriptions to newspapers, including The Washington Post.

And that saved, now, considering the rates of the Washington Post for all the subscribers listening, don't you feel like you're getting a fantastic deal as is? Is it really worth it to save that such a small amount? But that's Trump's idea of what deficit reduction is. I'm canceling newspaper scripture.

You know, if you want to pass $4 trillion in tax cuts or whatever it's going to cause, you really don't have any ground to stand on in terms of fiscal responsibility. You can say we're under, you know, we are overtaxed, but that's not true. We aren't paying for what we want.

If we want all those things, and I think Jim is absolutely honest, good for him, that people don't want entitlements cut, they don't want anything cut, then you have to pay for it. And the way you pay for it is through taxation. And the rich in our country have gotten really a very easy ride. Things like the 20% deduction, we have seen the effective tax rate of the very, very wealthy go down. Corporations are...

in many cases, paying very, very little tax. They threw a fit when there was a mandatory tax that Biden passed. But if we want all this stuff and no one in America is willing to say we don't want this stuff, then you have to pay for it. And that is taxes. And taking $4 trillion in tax revenue away means you're not fiscally responsible.

Let's talk about the hell that Los Angeles is going through right now. And what's adding to that hell is the misinformation that is being pumped out there. You have Trump blaming Governor Gavin Newsom for what's happened. You've got Elon Musk taking to his social media platform, blaming DEI initiatives.

on what's happening in Los Angeles. And then he wrote in response to a video that the Los Angeles fire chief

put out where she was discussing how she wants to diversify the department. Gee, horrors, opening up the department to people who are qualified and want to serve the public. But Jennifer, why are they doing this? Elon Musk is a private citizen, fine. He can do whatever he wants to do. But Donald Trump is a former president and president-elect.

I would love it for someone in that position to, pardon the analogy here, not fan the flames of disinformation here. First of all, let me just say, I spent most of my life in California. I have family and friends there. It is horrific. It is as close to the apocalypse as we are going to get on Earth.

And the tragedy, the human suffering, the loss is really incalculable. And here, as someone who's sometimes been very critical of mainstream media, I have to tip my hat to The Post, The New York Times, The LA Times for the coverage they've given. If you look at the pictures, if you read the coverage, read the interviews with people, you appreciate the depths of this horror. And I say that because I want to put that in the context of what Donald Trump says.

which is absolutely inhumane, evil, reflects his utter lack of compassion. He has no words of sympathy for anyone. He makes no effort to bolster or try to help local or state officials. Why does he do this? It's really two reasons. One, he's a narcissistic egomaniac.

And he feels the compulsion to run down everybody else because he makes himself feel good. And secondly, this is the result of climate change. There's a new study out, the Washington Post, or rather the LA Times quotes from it. And I will have a piece on Sunday in the Washington Post discussing this, that for decades, the climate change folks and the climate scientists have been explaining this. It's called the whiplash effect.

excessive rains, hurricane-like conditions, grow the vegetation there, and then excessive heat and increased winds because of excess heat create a fire cycle. And you go from drenching rains to burning fires. These fires are happening in January.

I lived in Los Angeles for 40 plus years. This never happened. It was always in the summer months because that's when it was hot. Well, now it's hot in January, February. So rather than take some interest in climate change, rather than acknowledge it's real, Donald Trump and his crew of anti-science crazies make up a bunch of lies. And

And they go off on all kinds of tangents. They've accused the mayor of cutting the fire department budget. That's not true. Politico and ABC, to their credit, explain that because of negotiations, they had to put the spending in a separate bill. And they actually wound up increasing the fire department spending by about $50 million.

They make up these lies because they don't want to take credit for and they don't want to acknowledge that climate change is real and that they need to be doing something about it. And the people in the fossil fuel industry who pay for a lot of these campaigns and do their lobbying don't want to talk about that. So it is a giant bait and switch game. And in the meantime,

I think, you know, it would behoove everyone on all sides of the aisle to do what the reporters covering this have done, and that is show some empathy, show some understanding for the people who are in the midst of this. It is an utter, utter disaster.

- Jim, why shouldn't the people of California, no matter their political persuasion, be concerned that once Donald Trump is back in office, that he reverts back to the way he performed and behaved when he was president the first go round, and that was to

do all sorts of things to withhold help, federal help to state jurisdictions, even elected officials with whom he disagrees.

But I'll jump into that. Yeah, Trump sounds ridiculous things. He always, you know, you have one point they had to show him the number of people who voted for him in these more redder parts of the California suburbs and say, look, this is why we should help these people. Yeah, that's appalling. But are we really treating the L.A. fires as a Donald Trump story?

We don't think there's anything else going on? No, no, no, no. Jim, Jim, Jim, Jim, just to be clear, I started this conversation by pointing out what Donald Trump and Elon Musk have been doing in the midst of people and their misery. That is why I'm bringing this up. Okay. I've written about this for three straight days over at that other place that I write.

You may remember Randy Newman singing, "I love LA." And he's got that lyric, those Santa Ana winds blowing hot from the north, right? So you have the Great Basin of the United States, mostly Utah and Nevada. That's elevated. Air gets there and it comes down through the mountains. In the process of descending from elevation, it gets a lot hotter. So yeah, you have intense winds from the north, and they're hot and they're dry, right?

When you have a dry season, which they've had for a while, and Jen is correct, they had a wet season. They actually had tons of water that they actually couldn't preserve. They haven't built enough reservoirs. Never mind the fact that they passed back in 2014, a state initiative designed supposed to build seven or eight reservoirs. None of them are built. They're expected to be finished in the 2030s. The thing's been tied up in red tape and environmental regulations for more than a decade.

That's one of the reasons by the, you know, that may not have been the factor in why the fire hydrants were coming dry. You've got municipal water systems that are designed to handle one house fire, one building fire at a time. When the entire neighborhood is on fire, you're going to lose water pressure.

But that having been said, LA should have a lot more water at its disposal than it does. What happened as of January 2nd, the National Weather Service was warning, we're going to have really intense Santa Ana winds and the vegetation is dry. Now, Los Angeles County does have programs to try to mitigate, go in there, clear out some of the brush. Unfortunately, 33 percent of the county is wild lands and 66 percent is relatively open lands.

One of the reasons we're seeing devastation, as I think the term apocalyptic really is appropriate,

We're on the East Coast. We're used to having big, broad, flat areas in which you have your main heart of your city and then it expands out. You look at L.A. County, you've got these very tall hills and mountains that are relatively undeveloped, or you've got a couple of small houses looking out over them. And they're covered in this dry vegetation. And you look at the reports from the National Park Service, you look at the reports from the National Forest Service, all of this scrub is about as perfect as you could ever possibly want as kindling to get stuff going.

So you combine that with the Santa Ana winds, which the National Weather Service was saying you're going to get gusts of 100 miles an hour.

Forest fires start, they send up embers, and you send the embers far and wide all across the area. As I said, 60% of the county is open spaces. There's a state forest, there's a national forest, a lot of parks out there. Large wide open spaces full of this kindling. This was a disaster waiting to happen. Now, the county does have mitigation programs for this, including, by the way, ironically, goat and sheeps. They put in them to chew out some of the...

U.S. Forest Service said we're not going to have any controlled burns back in October. They said this was basically doing this to make sure they had fire crews available for other fires. I think that decision is looking kind of questionable in light of all this. There was no state, local state or federal policy that could have prevented this forest fire.

But good policies can mitigate the effects of forest fires, and bad policies can exacerbate the effects of forest fires. What we've had here is a perfect storm based on conditions that have been building year after year, decade after decade. And I don't think it's, you know, this Trump, you know, and Elon Musk retweeting, who's the crazy conspiracy theorist? Alex Jones. Alex Jones, you know, nothing good comes from retweeting Alex Jones. I'm not going to, you know, even begin to try to defend that.

But policy decisions did play a factor in how bad these fires are. And regarding the DEI statement, look, I've not said anything critical about anybody of these firefighters. They're out there risking their necks, trying to save everybody else's lives and everybody else's houses. But there was that statement from the assistant chief who was asked, can I carry your husband out of this? Well, if I have to carry your husband, your husband's in a place he shouldn't have been.

That's not exactly a reassuring statement from somebody who's a firefighter. And I don't think it's unreasonable to expect every firefighter to be able to carry someone out of a dangerous situation. And, you know, there'll be fair questions asked about this. Again, I'm not going to give any grief to any L.A. firefighter right now. We've got a lot going on. You know, they got their hands full right now. But.

They do. And all firefighters must pass the same physical requirements. Chip just got through an entire explanation without once mentioning the policies surrounding climate change. Those are the policies we need to look at. It's not like we didn't have fires for 40 years in California. We didn't have catastrophes. We didn't have apocalypse.

apocalyptic fires every single year. And to say that we haven't increased the number of fires, we haven't increased the number of hurricanes, is to misinform the public. I know that the readers of the National Review don't like to hear it, but it is the truth. And I would behoove you to maybe share some of the data with them. The number of fires have increased somewhere between 30 and 60 percent over the last decade in California. The

the amount of rain has increased. Conditions have gotten worse because of global warming. You can't simply say that there are Santa Ana winds and we have fires. They had fires like that when I was a kid in California, once every maybe three or four years. Now you have them multiple times a year. Do you know how many fires are burning in the Los Angeles area? I don't

No, because you can't count them. There's that many. So I think, yes, we should look at all the small little things. But the really big thing is climate change. And if we're going to be climate change deniers, then we're just consigning ourselves to apocalyptic conditions, not only in California, but in red states, too. So I want to close out by showing everyone this

A clip of this speech from President Carter. It's commonly known as the malaise speech. And I'm bringing this up, obviously, because the 39th president of the United States was laid to rest yesterday, big national funeral at the National Cathedral. But listen to this speech, and then we're going to talk about it real quickly on the other side, because we're already over time.

So I want to speak to you first tonight about a subject even more serious than energy or inflation. I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy. I do not mean our political and civil liberties. They will endure. And I do not refer to the outward strength of America, a nation that is at peace tonight everywhere in the world with unmatched economic power and military might, the threat

is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.

GEOFF BENNETT: Jennifer, Jim, past is prologue, it seems. Doesn't it seem like the -- that we are experiencing a crisis of confidence today? Real quickly, Jim, then Jen. JENNIFER LORENZ: Sure. That was kind of referred to as the malaise speech, even though we never use the word malaise. I actually -- Jonathan, I don't think I'd say the country is in a malaise state right now.

I think we're in a manic depressive state right now. I think if you're on the right side of the aisle, Trump's heading into office as 53 Republicans, narrow house majority. I think they're manic. I think they're feeling great. The country's never been higher. We're making America great again, again. And I think if you're on the left side of the aisle, you're very depressive right now, justifiably so, because you've spent the better part of really nine years

Trying to explain to Americans that this guy is a joker. This guy is not a responsible leader. He doesn't have empathy. He doesn't make good decisions. And the country just completely rejected your, you know, Kamala Harris went out there, won the debate at a very good convention, seemed to be doing everything, had $2 billion, made, you know, every resource imaginable.

and went 0 for 7 in the swing states. So I don't know what you can debate whether Trump won a mandate, but the Democrats won an anti-mandate. They want to rebuke. And I think that's going to put them in a, so yeah, they probably feel malaise right now pretty intensely. The key phrase in President Carter's speech is a crisis of confidence, Jen. And no matter if you voted for Vice President Harris or you voted for now President-elect Trump,

on both sides of the aisle, it does feel like there is a crisis of confidence in the country.

I think this way, Jonathan, I think we have a crisis of empathy, a crisis of truth, a crisis of unity, a crisis of a sense of shared purpose. And I fear all those things are going to get much, much worse in the years ahead. And I think people who do care about the truth, who do care about democracy, need to think long and hard about how they're going to do it. And they

and they need to think about the institutions that are capable of doing it. It's not gonna be done by government, it's gonna be done by we the people, by lots of different actors in this very diverse, very confusing, very tumultuous country.

But in addition to the crises that I referred to, I think we have tremendous empathy somewhere in the system. I think we have tremendous capability, courage. We are seeing it every day in Los Angeles. And so if our leaders have these various deficits and are inclined to frankly lie, demean, spread hate, spread dissension,

Then I think the rest of us simply have to try harder. And I would look to Los Angeles and the heroics and the really magnificent behavior of the people on the ground there. And once again, my heart goes out to all of them. I am still in many ways a California girl, and I am just heartbroken by the events this week.

Jennifer Rubin, Jim Garrity, thank you both very much for coming back to First Look. Have a good weekend. You too. Good to see you, Jonathan.

For more of these important conversations, sign up for a Washington Post subscription. Get a free trial by visiting WashingtonPost.com slash live. Again, that's WashingtonPost.com slash live. And one note before we go. I want to thank longtime producer of First Look, Pat Reap. Today is his last day at the Post. His hard work, wisdom, sense of humor, love of history, and knowledge of politics will be sorely missed.

I'm Jonathan Capehart. Thanks for watching Washington Post Live's First Look. Thanks for listening. For more information on our upcoming programs, go to WashingtonPostLive.com.

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