11/25/24: AOC Trump Voters, Bernie War On Dems, Trump Betrays MAGA, Bibi Cornered By ICC & MORE!
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Hey guys, Sagar and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election, and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you, please go to BreakingPoints.com, become a member today, and you'll get access to our

full shows, unedited, ad-free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. - We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at breakingpoints.com. - Good morning, everyone. Happy Thanksgiving week. - Hey. - Crystal, grateful for you. - Oh, thanks. Hey, ma'am. - Thank you. - Always a fun time with you here at the desk. - Well, you know, it's a blast, and we should probably try to beat our record today, maybe go to like four or five hours.

Be real. I don't know if I have that in me. I'm still recovering from seeing Wicked this weekend. That's right. You saw Wicked at 9 in the morning. Many hours in front of the movie screen, but it was great. Good. Yes. I'm glad to hear it. Big fan. I am excited about the show today, though, because we have some exclusive reporting. We actually sent out producer Griffin, who's going to join us in studio, to talk to some of those AOC Trump voters. Mm-hmm.

and get them in their words as to why they made the choice to vote for Donald Trump and then down ballot vote for AOC. JL partners helped us identify them. So I think you guys are going to find this really interesting. I certainly found it really interesting. We'll bring that to you exclusively. We also have a bunch of updates on the Trump transition. His cabinet actually now full, complete.

Not to say there aren't other slots he's got to fill that aren't cabinet level, but he has, you know, at a very rapid clip, put out his nominees here. So we'll bring you some of the most interesting choices, including Attorney General nominee now Pam Bondi, who was the Attorney General of

Florida. That was to fill in for Matt Gaetz, who had to withdraw his nomination. Emily covered that for us last week. Also, another really interesting one, the woman that they chose for Department of Labor. So she is a very rare person, which is a pro-union Republican. She was one of the only Republicans in the House that supported the PRO Act, so a bit of a surprise there.

tell you what that means potentially for the future with labor and unions and a bit of a conservative like business friendly meltdown on that side of the aisle with regard to that pick. We also have some updates for you with regard to last week we brought you the news that the ICC has now issued arrest warrants for Bibi Netanyahu, Yoav Galan, and a leader of Hamas.

We're taking a look at which countries are actually going to abide by international law and would arrest Bibi or saying publicly they would arrest Bibi if he were to be on their soil. So significant development there. Meanwhile, Elon apparently thinking about buying MSNBC. The memes are flying, Emily. Yes, and many of them are flying from his keyboard. Indeed. Yeah, they range from...

genuinely funny to very disturbing. True. Very true. As memes do. As memes do. And I'm also taking a look at MSNBC. You know, I really think even if the network continues in some sort of like hobbled form going forward, which it likely is going to,

The role that it has served in terms of the Democratic Party, it's over. I mean, they the combination of Trump winning and then Joe Amica bending the knee down at Mar-a-Lago has completely nuked that channel. And so, you know, what comes afterwards? You know, will it be is that a good thing? Is it a bad thing? I'll get into all of that in my monologue. I've obviously got a lot of thoughts on this one. I'm not.

I'm not surprised to learn that you have more thoughts on this, Crystal, and I'm very excited to hear them. Yes, indeed. All right, let's go ahead and get to, we'll bring Griffin in and reset, and then we will bring you that video of AOC Trump voters and why they made the choices that they did. So as I was just saying, we have Griffin here in studio with us to help break down these conversations that you had with people who actually voted for AOC and Trump. We had a number of women who we were able to speak with, so set up a little bit for us what you asked them and what your general takeaways and vibes were. Okay.

Yeah, without giving too much of a spoiler, it was interesting because for Trump, the reasons were all pretty much the same. It was immigration, it was wars, and it was the economy. With AOC, it seemed to be more of her personality, her charisma, and kind of like her celebrity star status, but also just this feeling that they felt like she was real, that she was real and that she actually cared.

So that was really interesting. It was a range of voters. There was some people who were high information, like they've been tracking it for about a year, and some people who kind of made their decision within like the last day or two. But yeah, the range of answers, as we'll see in just a second, were pretty similar from the majority of the voters. All right, well, let's go ahead and take a listen to what they had to say. Why did you vote for both Trump and AOC in 2024? Because America needs

a role model. And I think Donald Trump is a role model. The border, you know, the people coming to U.S. illegally, the murders, everything, all the crimes are increasing. The Democrats really haven't done anything for us that actually made the situation worse in New York. So I thought this time around, let's just give Trump, you know, a chance.

maybe, you know, he can make things better. He's very business-minded, and I also feel that being that he has these connections with other leaders, it can, like, you know, prevent war from happening in the future. When Trump first came, those four years...

It was, you know, ups and downs, but it was nowhere. Like, you know, it was no war. We didn't have any fight with other countries. How does AOC fit into that picture? She's like that sister that will always defend you. So...

fight, chill, scream till a bloody pulp if she had to. You know, she's truly a fighter. Is there a little bit of like a New York realness that they both share? Is that what I'm hearing? Oh, yeah, definitely. So much that they could be like brother and sister almost. I like that they're very outspoken. They really have, I think, no filter. If you look at Joe Biden, there are a lot of things probably he wouldn't understand about our generation or the future generation. And also...

Donald Trump as well. He's aged two. So we need someone above and beyond like more new generation and would understand more. I just voted for her honestly, because the other people I didn't know about and her I just always hear about. It's like crazy. So I thought, you know, she's a familiar name. Let me just vote for her. My mother would like vote for her. So I was like, okay, that's, that's great. That's enough. Listen to your mom. Could

Could you compare Kamala and AOC for me? What is the difference between the two of them? I just feel that Kamala has a position as a vice president already. And I don't feel like she did much in the position that she held for the last four years. I feel like she used entertainers for promotion. And I didn't like that at all. She doesn't bring anything to the table. Even if she was a first woman president, she doesn't know what she's doing.

and she's going to, you know, not give us a bad name, but it's just, we're going to go from bad to worse because I feel like our country is doing so bad now. AOC really tells you what she's going to do rather than come on the words. She's just more broad. If you're going to change the world, if you're going to run for president,

Start now. You have the president, your vice president. Now you can start now. Tell us what you're going to do. How do you feel about the war in Gaza? How do you feel that the U.S. and what how they've handled it? And did that affect your vote at all? In a big way? Yes. We just don't want any war and we don't want innocent lives to be killed anymore.

without any reason. It's crazy what's going on there, and we need to fix it. It needs to stop. And I think Donald Trump will be able to maneuver it. I hope he does. New York has so many issues here with high rent and working all the time. Like, it's like you care about it, but you have so many other major important things going on in your life that just come before that. And it's just sad to say. Do you think that Trump is anti-war? I'm not sure.

I don't think President Trump wants to make war with anyone. If Trump was in office during that time, we wouldn't... A lot of things that are going on with the migrants, the war, I just don't believe a lot of these things would be going on. If Trump had been president, I really don't think it would have gotten this far. Would you vote for AOC for president as a Democrat? Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I would give it a chance. I mean, I don't say that women are not equal to men, but I think she might need to work on her education of world news, like her way to communicate about it and the policies and everything. She will be good, maybe. If Trump were to use...

like the military, let's say, to use the army to start deporting people from cities? Is that something that you would support? I would definitely support that because I think that would be the only way to get the deportation process started. We're talking about criminals. We're talking about mobs. You know, a lot of gang members. And, I mean, who else would be able to do that but the military? I think it's really a case-by-case basis. I feel like a lot of them just come here and get away with things. I don't think the police is doing what they should right now.

I really don't think they care. According to Trump, we will no longer have any more presidents after him. Does that worry you? No, not at all. We need to get rid of, like, Congress, the legislation, the laws. Like, everything just needs to be rewired and re, you know,

We thought out. Let's just start this whole thing over again. So interesting. So Tashina there at the end is like burn it all down. Let's start it all over. Get rid of all the Congress. Like, just let him do whatever he wants to do. No more presidents. We don't have to work anymore after that then. That sounds good. No more elections. No, nothing else to cover. So can all retire. Shut it down. Yeah. There was so much that was interesting about that, though. I mean, surface level.

The reasons match a lot of what you see in the polls, like, oh, immigration was important. Oh, inflation in the economy was important. But there was so much texture there that was really different. And the other thing that came across to me in watching these voters, and like you said, some were more like high information, more tuned in, and some were less engaged in the day-to-day news cycle, which nothing wrong with that. But in both respects with Trump and AOC, what they really have in common more than anything else is star power.

- Yeah, New York realness. - They've got huge name ID, huge star power. So you had the one woman saying, "I just hear about AOC all the time." So I feel like she must be doing something because I hear her name a lot. And I do think that speaks to one of the things that's been absent

from the Democratic autopsies that are going on is like Trump is a celebrity and controversy has served him. And the fact that he's in his name is in front of you and in the news all the time. And AOC is also this sort of controversial celebrity. And in a certain sense, that really serves both of them and is probably the model for politicians that both parties need to follow going forward.

100%. And not only that they were like celebrities, but that they were real and they were fighters for the things that I kept hearing over and over again. Not only that there was like a star status to them. What they were fighting for wasn't that important. It was just like, I feel like they're going to get in there and they're going to do something. And oftentimes I would ask them like, well, you know, I know AOC and Trump have fight for very different things. They have very different opinions on things like immigration, but they didn't really care because they knew that both these people were passionate and they fought for what they believed in. Mm-hmm.

which they just didn't get a sense from people like Kamala and other Democrats. And it seems like they almost just respect that more, even if it's like not, even if they disagree on a certain issue. Yeah, that's important. And also what they believe in fundamentally in the minds of Democrats

especially casual voters who don't spend their days thinking about this, is helping the country. And to the point that you brought up, that can be very different things. But if they believe that you have their best interests at heart, then they just sort of have to put the trust in the candidate that they ultimately go with. They're not super partisan or ideological. So I thought that was really helpful, Griffin. I wanted to get your take on immigration because this is not exactly a very white district to

And that mattered a lot to these voters, contra the media narrative about how it would be turning many, many people off. And, you know, Donald Trump would be dead on arrival, especially with nonwhite voters because of the immigration issue. In New York City, you're a New Yorker that did not

at all turn out to be the case. What did you hear? Yeah, it was really interesting because it seems very almost localized of an issue. You know, I live in like central Brooklyn and, you know, we don't really hear a lot about the immigration issue, but where AOC's District 14 is, it's a little bit of the northern top of Queens and then a large part of the Bronx.

And up there, it just really seems like the immigration issue has affected them a lot more. And I was really curious after talking to all of them, because all of them would bring it up as like their number one thing, that their streets didn't feel safe anymore. They talked a lot about 57th Street, which I guess is a big intake center for immigrants. So I did some research, and in the last three years, almost a quarter million immigrants have come through New York City. Currently, right now, as of August, I think- In the last three years.

In the last three years, about a quarter million. But currently right now, as of August, there's about 64,000 in the city being housed in like hotels, intake centers. They even have like an old airplane runway where they have some of them. And Mayor Eric Adams has been trying to do a lot. Another fighter. Yeah, another fighter. Another New York real one. Another patriot. Yeah.

But you know, Eric Adams has been doing all sorts of things across the broad. Like Eric Adams, he recently traveled to Latin America to hand out flyers about how expensive New York is, so you shouldn't come. And so he's trying all sorts of strategies. Is that where Istanbul is? Yes, absolutely.

Yeah, some geography lessons. But they also, what I found out recently is they have this new rule for sheltering where you can only stay in the hotels now for 30 to 60 days and then you have to apply to be able to stay in or you get kind of dished to the street.

And I think that's where we're seeing a lot of these women, these voters, noticing a lot more people on the streets now because they're not in the hotels anymore. Because after that 30 days, they're now in a tent on the sidewalk somewhere. But it's a more visible sort of disorder. And they're linking basically anything to those immigrants, any crime, any gang activity. They're kind of just immediately linking that to the immigrants' lives.

But it's a sanctuary city, right? So that's where people, if people are on the streets, right. So if people are on the streets, they remain on the streets. Unless there's like housing to your point that steps in all of that, which seems to also be frustrating the voters. Yeah. And then to the military deportations part, which I wanted to ask them about, you know, because that seemed to be a

just a big kind of national talking point about will Trump use the army to bring people in? And the core thing to them was they weren't really scared of that because they were really sick and tired of it. And it seemed to me that it was pinned on that they found the NYPD to be incompetent and unable to handle these issues, which I kind of don't blame them. I mean, as a New Yorker, you see these cops on the subways, they're mainly going after like ticket fare people and on their TikToks, you know? So-

It was funny because that's something that you would never from a top line analysis, you would never get the texture of that. Like, oh, they're like anti-police. And that's why they're like, I guess you got to bring in the military. And it is true if you pull institutions, one of the institutions that has the highest level of trust in the country remains military.

So I, that logic is really interesting and not something that you would sort of guess from the outside, but does, you know, from their perspective makes some sense. You know, the reality of what that might actually look like may create a different impression. Right. But coming in, that's not a non-starter for them whatsoever. The other thing that was, uh,

really noteworthy and that did not turn up as much in the, you know, the surveys about why people voted the way they did is that all of these women seemed concerned about war. They seemed concerned about Gaza in particular. The one woman who I'm blanking on her name, I know when she you first asked the question, she said, like, basically, peace. That's what I'm most interested in.

I believe that was Nazia, yes. Nazia, yeah. And she was the most informed. She'd been really paying attention to almost all the politics for about a year, so she was the most informed. But all of the women were aware of this. None of them were like, what's Gaza or what's going on there? Like-

Everyone clearly has been seeing some glimpse of what's happening and not liking it. Yeah. And so if you're, you know, the Democratic Party, Kamala Harris, trying to position yourself as this moral authority, that really undercuts it. And whether or not it's true that this wouldn't have happened under Trump, clearly his talking points had broken through with these voters, whether it was ascribing all crime to immigrants when, you know, the stats will tell you that undocumented immigrants actually commit far

far fewer crimes than native born Americans. But that talking point had landed and connected and was, you know, was, was being repeated. And the talking point about, Hey, if Trump was there, I don't think we would have had all these wars that also had clearly landed with them. And it was funny to me when you, you asked them, like, do you think that Trump is anti-war? And the one who was like, I don't know, but you know, maybe it would be different to that point. Like

These women, some of them were like, oh, Trump's a role model and stuff. But they were also very clear-eyed about who Trump is and the likelihood of him fixing all these problems. Essentially, how they saw it was,

They knew Kamala was like a known quantity and they knew she wasn't gonna do anything to fix these problems. They weren't sure if Trump was really gonna fix these problems, but they knew Kamala wasn't. So they're like, well, let's just roll the dice again. Which is funny because like Trump has been president before. You'd think he'd be more of a known quantity, but to them still, he was the dice roll gamble of maybe something different, but none of them were sure.

I want to ask about that because for many people voting is seen as like a civic duty. You do it even if you're ambivalent about the candidates. What sense did you get of why actually some of these women chose to vote? I mean, we saw that her name was Margaret with her baby that she was hanging out with while you were doing the interview. Isn't it

I mean, people are, these are busy people. Everyone is busy. They have an option to not vote if they're ambivalent. That's something that's like totally understandable and common. Like if you don't think either of the candidates is great, you just set out the election. It sounds like even with some of this ambivalence, these mixed feelings about Donald Trump, I

actually went out and voted anyway. - Yeah, they were just desperate, I think for-- - Change. - Just change in a large sense on a few different issues. We didn't have a ton of sound bites in this footage about the economy because I could sense that sometimes people feel a little

uncomfortable talking about the economy, whether it's kind of a morass of an issue to kind of have the right words to describe it. But people just felt like things just like weren't working for them. Things were getting more expensive. And three of them, I believe, were actually mothers. And I did ask them all about the child tax credit under Biden that they all received. And they spoke of that really fondly. And they but at the same time,

They were, you know, they're Republican voters. They didn't want handouts. They just wanted things to be more fair. Yeah. Yeah. You hear that a lot. You got a little taste in there. You asked, OK, would you vote for AOC for president? Yeah. Is that something you'd be open to? And one of the women had this response that was like, well, I'm not saying women aren't equal to men, but, you know, maybe she needs to do a little more work.

Were there any comments that they made about Kamala Harris and her gender? Was that important to them? Was that a positive? Was it a negative? Did not, you know, was it indifferent? What was your sense? So there was a lot of talk about misogyny, but I don't feel like any of them were misogynist, but they viewed the foreign policy and working with other foreign leaders and them being misogynistic to women.

And so that it would just be naturally harder for a female to be president and deal with all these men of the world, which, you know, isn't like maybe technically that false. Like, you know, I'm sure there's some misogynistic world leaders. They have kind of a clear-eyed view of the world. Of like, well, I'm not sexist, but sexism is a real thing that exists. So maybe, you know, we got to have a man in there so that he doesn't have to deal with that effectively.

Absolutely. I think a lot of Democratic primary voters are going to, this has been my prediction, is like they're never going to nominate a woman again for a similar reason of like, well, I'm not sexist, but I think the rest of the country is. It's like a self-fulfilling loop, right? Where if you believe it, then you feed into it as well. Yeah. But they also always talked about how Trump was so good with world leaders.

that world leaders just like to get along with him. And that was his secret sauce to stopping wars. And they all mentioned there just wasn't that many wars when Trump was around. And now there's a bunch of wars and the Democrats...

don't seem to be anywhere near stopping all of them. And there doesn't seem to be a clear reason to these voters why any of them are happening. They just think there's no reason, there's no reason. We don't understand why they're happening. - Yeah, interesting. - I know this is zeroing in on one part of New York that's not like a lot of the rest of the country, but in many ways it actually is like a lot of the rest of the country because if you look at that Washington Post map that we were covering all night here on election night, you saw movement towards Trump in many, many places. Now Trump still lost a lot of counties,

But there were big swings in places like New Jersey and places like New York. And there was also a lot of ticket splitting, even places like Florida, where the abortion referendum, it didn't hit the 60 percent threshold, but it got really close. It was like at 56 percent. So you had a lot of people voting for Donald Trump and voting for abortion to be in the Constitution of the state of Florida. That happened all

over the country. So I think, Griffin, it's just important to say that, yes, while a lot of the country looks at New York in particular as this sort of alien world, like it's Mars, this is something that happened with voters everywhere else. Absolutely, yeah. And none of these voters are white men. Three-quarters of these were mothers. They were all working-class women between their 30s and 40s.

And yeah, they just... None of the bros wanted to talk to you, Griffin? None of the bros. It's the mustache man. They're like, this guy's too powerful. I'll shave for the bros. Too alpha. But yeah, like these women were, you know, although some of them had some things that you might not agree with Trump about, whether he was a role model and stuff, they were just all very clear-eyed that...

you know, why not? We'll see what happens. Because right now things just aren't working for me. And I thought it was just so interesting when they talked about like Kamala versus AOC because they just felt like Kamala just didn't really stand for pretty much anything. They just were, they were open to thinking about her

and just seeing what she had to say, but they couldn't remember or think about what she was all about and the way they felt that way about AOC. And I think it's a testament to it's like, I think they could vote for a Democrat at some point. - Yeah. - And even if they didn't agree with all the same issues, 'cause it seemed to be a core thing of respect.

Like, I respect that you care about things, that you're passionate, that you're not hiding who you are. And those things seem to surmount, like, any of the individual issues because they all love AOC. Yeah. And that's been my thing is, like, I think that a lot of times liberals look at politics in the wrong way. Like, thinking that you can just go down and check list of, like, our issue set is more popular, if you poll it, than their issue set. When...

That sense of like this person's a fighter. This person stands for something. This person isn't just like pandering to me. They're going to get in there and they're going to mix things up. Those personality traits and that energy and that celebrity, frankly, I think is also really important is kind of the common thread that connects why you would vote for Donald Trump and then.

check the ballot for AOC. Great job with these, Griffin. They all loved Liz Cheney, though. Oh, well, I mean, that's a uniter across the board, right? Should have left that in the cut. Yeah.

Also, I love when you come to the show and for people who know producer Griffin, follow producer Griffin, he's doing sort of a Ron Burgundy look today. Watch out. You're going to start dating yourself with that reference. That's an old millennial reference. That's an elder millennial reference. But we don't often see you in a tie. And out of respect for Sagar, it was important for you to put the tie on. Yeah, we didn't want Sagar to be distressed.

while he's out trying to enjoy his honeymoon. So that was very kind of you, Griffin. Of course, absolutely. Anything for Sagar. I was worried he was a little too skinny. He was a little too RFK Jr., maybe. Yeah, well, we'll get his after-action report. Yep, absolutely. But yeah, and I'd really like to thank JLP Partners. They're polling. They've done a lot of great polling for us over the last year, and they did the hard work of finding all these people for us. And so definitely check out them in the video description for this video. Awesome. Thanks, Griffin.

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of the Democrats and how they abandoned working class voters. And he just recently sent out a campaign email that was not one of these normal, just like boilerplate fundraising pitches. This was clearly coming directly from him and continued that critique of the Democratic Party and also opened up some interesting possibilities

for what Senator Sanders may be doing with his time in the future. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. I'm going to read this in full, guys, so just bear with me so you get the full sense of it. He said, I won't do it in the Bernie voice. Do Brent of time. Not bad.

The American people understand that our economic and political systems are rigged. They know that the very rich get much richer while almost everyone else becomes poor. They know that we are moving rapidly into an oligarchic form of society. The Democrats ran a campaign protecting the status quo and tink

around the edges, Trump and the Republicans campaigned on change and on smashing the existing order. Not surprisingly, the Republicans won. Unfortunately, the quote, change that Republicans will bring about will make a bad situation worse and a society of gross inequality even more unequal, more unjust, and more

bigoted. Will the Democratic leadership learn the lessons of their defeat and create a party that stands with the working class and is prepared to take on the enormously powerful special interests that dominate our economy, our media, and our political life? Highly unlikely. They are much too wedded to the billionaires and corporate interests that fund their campaigns.

Given that reality, where do we go from here? That is a very serious question that needs a lot of discussion in the coming weeks and months. How do we expand our efforts to build a multiracial, multigenerational working class movement? How do we create a 50-state movement, not politics based on the Electoral College and battleground states?

How do we deal with Citizens United and the ability of billionaires to buy elections? How do we recruit more working class candidates for office at levels of government? Should we be supporting independent candidates who are prepared to take on both parties? How do we better support union organizing? How do we put together listening sessions?

around the country that intentionally seek input from people who did not vote for Democrats in the last election? How do we best use social media to build our movement and combat the lies and disinformation coming from the billionaire class and right-wing media? How do we build sustainable and long-term issue-based organizing structures that live beyond individual campaigns? These are some of the political questions that together we need to address.

And it is absolutely critical that you make your voice heard during this process, not meet us. That is the only way forward in solidarity. Bernie Sanders. So obviously, obviously, Emily, this caught a lot of attention because it is, you know, very critical of the Democratic Party says, like, are they going to get their act together?

probably not going to happen. Right. So where do we go from here? And, you know, one of the things he floats is, hey, do we support candidates? He doesn't name check Dan Osborne. We have to think that that's somewhere in mind who ran as an independent, but as a populist and came very close to winning in a Senate seat in Nebraska. How do we get more working class people in? And the theory that, you know, the possibility

Well, and what he is saying is what we heard the voters say in Griffin's segment, which is the big theme to take away from that is people voted for change.

They voted for change. They voted for change. And you don't tell people that you are a change agent effectively if you are Kamala Harris and you are defending the Biden administration's policies. Now, we can have a debate about whether Donald Trump is actually going to change Washington, but he convinces people that he is. That is his overarching message, that he is bringing fundamental change

not, as Bernie put it, tweaking around the edges or tinkering around the edges with different policies. It's not enough to talk about a child tax credit. You have to talk about why the system has created an environment where you need a child tax credit, where you need the government saying, oh, here, take a little bit more of your own damn money. Have a little bit more of it back.

for child care, have a little bit more of a back to pay for your babies. Like that is the problem with the Democratic Party right now, just assuming that's enough. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And, you know, I can harp on this, but I think Bernie is a model, a very unique model in American politics, not in global politics, but in American politics in particular, where I would love to know what those same ladies think.

would say if we asked them, like, what do you think about Bernie Sanders? Because I think even though he's stylistically very different from Trump, very different than AOC, also though a New York character. Yes. Interesting parallel there. But, you know, people had that same sense of him. This is a fighter. This is someone who is focused on me and my life and is going to go to war against the forces that are arrayed against America.

me and my family and are making life more difficult than they should be for me and for my kids to be able to find success. I mean, the immediate question that this raises is, okay, Bernie Sanders, 83 years old, like,

what does this mean? What is he planning? And, you know, people have floated like, is he going to launch a third party? Is that what this is leading to? I think that's probably very unlikely just given, you know, Bernie has been in politics for longer than either one of us has been alive by decades, right?

And he knows that in the realities of the American system, like there's a reason that he was able to run as an independent, but caucuses with Democrats and ultimately ran as a Democrat in the Democratic Party, because there are just so many barriers to an independent or third party movement, especially in the

post Ross Perot era being able to find any sort of significant success. I mean, if anyone could make it happen, it would be Bernie Sanders because he still does have that, you know, that base and that affection and that media and star power, et cetera, to command. I personally think it's unlikely that at this point in his life, he's going to go in that direction, but I am curious to see what he has in mind for his next deck. I can tell you, I saw him speak on

Gosh, what? Last week? Week before? I can't remember. Anyway, I saw him speak recently and he's still got it. Let me tell you. There is no like mental decline there going on. You know, he is 83 years old, but mentally he is still extremely sharp and extremely powerful. So this could be a really interesting development.

here. He should be threatening them with it, even if he's not serious. It's like Trump with tariffs. Like he should absolutely be threatening a third party because someone has to put the fear of God into the Democratic elite. And they will. I mean, it's the same thing that Republicans are dealing with in the MAGA age, whereas like Donald Trump, not so serious about draining the swamp on some issues, but like the Department of Justice

Oh, he's very serious about throwing a metaphorical grenade into the Department of Justice. And so what you see is this internal battle over people like Bernie Sanders, who are legitimately a threat to the Democratic Party establishment. Donald Trump, who's legitimately a threat to the Republican Party establishment. Even eight years into Trumpism in the Republican Party, it is still a tug of war between the establishment, like

RNC type elites that say they own this party and they'll give Trump a little here and there. They'll say nice things about him in public, but they're still going to battle for it. You know, they're, they're going to protect their people at the end of the day. So it's obviously not easy. And it's a decade plus long process if you really want to reform the party. Um, and who knows what happens to the Republican party after Trump, but, and who knows even under Trump, what happens to the Republican party this next time around, but it's,

He's right to make the threat because if you don't make the threat, they have no incentive to do anything as we're about to discuss with Bill Clinton's reaction. Yes, that is exactly right. And just before I get to that, I think, you know, on the one hand, one of the things that has always made it more difficult for a Bernie Sanders style like left populist movement to succeed is that it offers a direct threat.

to billionaire and oligarchic class interests. That's central to the vision and the ideology. Trumpism is less of a direct threat, and in fact, they did quite well under Trump in the first term, and I think felt very comfortable with him going into a second term. So when you have not only the Democratic establishment forces, but sort of like uniform capital class arrayed against you, that obviously creates a more challenging landscape. But on the other hand, Trump has...

Trump is a destroyer. This is one of the things I want to talk about in my monologue. And he has kind of destroyed a lot of the liberal institutions that served as a

a bulwark against a left populist movement. I mean, MSNBC is the primary case in point here. They were enforcers for establishment Democrats. And because liberals still had so much faith in these institutions, they were very powerful. So when they in 2020 said,

Joe Biden is the one and that's it. You have never seen the polls shift as rapidly as they did in favor of Joe Biden to coalesce behind him to defeat Bernie Sanders in that primary after it looked like Bernie was headed to a victory after Nevada. I mean, in 2016, obviously, they were all aligned behind Hillary Clinton. That was also extremely powerful. And that institutional trust with liberals has really been broken and degraded. And the institutions themselves have really been broken and degraded

So there just isn't as much there to block some other left movement. Now, do I think that that is what's likely to unfold and that the Democratic Party is likely to be taken over by some left populist movement or third party to arise or whatever? I don't think it's likely. But...

There is a possibility that exists now that did not exist in the past. And I think that's what Bernie Sanders is sensing and seizing on as well, because those bulwark institutions within that protected the Democratic Party establishment have been dealt in a sense a devastating blow by their own malfeasance, their own failures,

to grapple with Trumpism and effectively defeat Trumpism, which was the central promise that they were offering. They weren't offering health care or wages or whatever. Their central promise was we are going to end the Trump era. They failed. And that has really been a devastating blow for their credibility and their institutional trust. So it is a totally new world with new possibilities out there than there was before. They failed and they failed even harder. I mean, this

was the same moment that everyone could recognize in 2016 and 2017. And Bernie Sanders recognized it then. And you have the former Secretary of State, this huge figure for decades in Democratic politics.

getting beat by the host of Celebrity Apprentice. He was hosting Celebrity Apprentice less than a year before. You know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, I guess just under two years before. But I mean, that is it. It should have been the wake up call. And instead they doubled down on Russia and bigotry and blaming voters. And so that's a this is there at another one of those crossroads. And, you know, Bill Clinton seems to be ready to go in one down one direction. Bill Clinton, of all people, by the way, who was the sounding the alarm in

in 2016 about them not leaning into class politics, about his own wife's campaign not leaning into class politics and getting their clock cleaned in certain areas that should have been problematic to them. And he's, you know, he's ready to... I thought this answer was kind of interesting. It was a little... When I listened to it, it was a little different than what I expected from him. So let's go ahead and play this exchange with Jonathan Capehart and former President Bill Clinton, and then we can react on the other side. In demonizing all...

establishments and all people who wear a tie like you and me to work and have a good education. We are breaking down the legitimacy of not only people who may be too sanctimonious and too set in their ways in the past, but also people who actually know things that are very important for us today and very important for our continued growth and prosperity

And harmony. So it is a little bit of a mask off moment there because Bill Clinton has always positioned himself as a populist, even as he embraced an ideology that was frankly very technocratic. Totally. And I mean, that's really is at the core of neoliberalism is an anti-populist sentiment of just hand it off to the technocrats and let us handle it.

And, you know, I do think it's important that you have people who are smart and knowledgeable and know what they're doing and, you know, done the research and all of those sorts of things. But, you know, here he really is aligning himself as he in reality did in his campaign and in his political time with the the sort of, you know, buttoned up credentialed elites. Yeah. There was another moment where Capehart asked him this question that I thought was fascinating.

kind of, I didn't think the question was really fair, the framing of it. He says to him, Bernie Sanders says the party wasn't progressive enough. Do you agree? And Bill Clinton first says like, no, I don't agree. And they did the CHIPS Act and the infrastructure bill. And this was in red areas. But what I think Bernie's talking about is corporate power. And on that, he basically says like, I think he's right. And so it was kind of interesting to me that Bill Clinton, in a sense, kind of corrected Capehart that like, well, his

critique, critique. And Bernie never says like the party wasn't progressive enough. He says the party abandoned the working class and did not, you know, fight against these oligarchic forces. And, you know, Bill Clinton is in his own way sort of like, well, there's a part of that I do actually agree with.

It's interesting because if you look at the policies of the Clinton administration, I mean, we talk about this all the time, what he ushered in was sort of the corporate era of the Democratic Party. Yes. And what I think is almost poetic about that is if you spend a lot of time around working class, blue collar people,

The point about the suit and the buttoned up thing is really fascinating because yes, like Sagar and I've talked about this before. Like it is the John Fetterman thing like irks me a lot because as much as I see him like kind of what he wears, like cosplaying is like a working class dude.

If you go to anybody in those communities, they'll be like, yeah, you damn well better wear a suit. You know what I mean? That's a sign of, that's what Bill Clinton is reacting to. He grew up with nothing, truly. And that was a sign of respect. It was a sign of, you made it. You should be proud of it.

about upward mobility, because that means you did something right, and it means you worked really hard, and you got to where you were, and you have respect for the position. And the assumption that you have to be walking around in a T-shirt to impress people in working class communities is insulting. - That's not what Donald Trump does. - Right, exactly, exactly. Mitt Romney would go to the Iowa State Fair with his rolled up Brooks Brothers shirts. It's disgusting.

And so Bill Clinton saying that is interesting to me because it gets to this point about I'm going to sound like we should have Ryan's Lennon book behind us. Clash traders where Bill Clinton comes from nothing, works really hard and becomes very successful, becomes the president of the United States and is now looking back at why people don't trust guys in ties like Griffin. The answer to that is brilliant.

Because the guys in ties sold them out. Like, they came from nothing and they ushered in this era. And that's who Bill Clinton was. It wasn't just them, but they collaborated with him. The thing that drives me crazy about Bill Clinton... I mean, first of all, the decision to send him to Michigan and to, you know, make just insane comments about Israel and Palestine. And, I mean, it just, like...

Can we retire this man at this point? Come on. But the deeper problem... He's selling a new memoir, by the way. That's why he was on the movie tour. Interesting. Maybe he'll come here. Wouldn't that be interesting? The deeper problem is that Bill Clinton signed NAFTA. Bill Clinton pushed PNT, Permanent Normal Trading Relations with China. Like,

Like you want to talk about what devastated the working class. You want to talk about what cemented the working class shift away from Democrats. You would be hard pressed to find two more consequential events in that timeline. And so for him to come out now and be like, you know, the corporate power thing, maybe he's got a point. It's like you helped to author. You were the primary author in a lot of ways.

of this era of mass inequality and rampant corporate power and monopolies. And by the way, he helped deregulate Wall Street. And by the way, he cut the capital gains rate, all giant giveaways to the wealthiest among us that spiraled inequality out of control and that decimated, decimated vast swaths of the country. Like you were the author of that.

And there's just never been any real reckoning with that. He's still treated as this like brilliant political strategist and elder statesman, et cetera. But, you know, your point about like the class traitor piece of it, the suits and the, you know, the disrespect that that can read as sometimes when you're trying to cosplay as working class by wearing the flannel or whatever in that book.

book that I've referenced a couple times because I've thought it found a lot of parallels to the current time but about the back to the land movement in the 1970s. The hippies in this town in Vermont who had their commune and they're doing their whole like we reject hygiene and our our parents were these stiffs wearing suits and we're not going to do any of that. They were trying to get a job as school bus drivers in the town and

And they had maintained pretty good relations with their neighbors. And there were a lot of them. A lot of the people in the community were like kind of OK with it. And but there was a pushback because they found out like, oh, you guys are growing weed and we don't really want you drivers. So there was this town meeting that comes to a head where they're coming in to make their case for why they should be the school bus driver for this little town.

And everybody in this little town, conservative, like, you know, rural farming community, they all show up to this town meeting in their Sunday best because it's respectful. And the hippies who many of him came from these like affluent, professional, middle class or upper middle class families. So interesting. They're sort of donning poverty. Yep.

As like a fashion statement, show up all dirty and muddy and smelly and hair crazy and whatever. So interesting. Right? And there was something about that that also, I mean, that really rubbed people the wrong way of like, this is not, it's not cool and earthy that you're like this. It's disrespectful. Yep. To, you know, to our town and our traditions and, you know, this...

meaning that we take really seriously. And so, I don't know, the Fetterman cosplay thing and the way that so many of these politicians try to cosplay something that they're not, I do think comes off as phony and candidates worse come off as just like insulting, insulting. Yeah. It's like, we believe that this office has dignity. Don't you? We believe that. And like just the superficial signaling via clothing, it's,

It's Bill Clinton. I think the big problem with that interview is him still pointing the finger at Republicans for and podcasters. You know, that's what he's doing, pointing the finger at them for making people distrust the guys in suits instead of pointing his finger at the guys in suits.

for creating that distrust. That's right. The podcasters. That would implicate him. Right. Because he's the one that put those guys in suits in the place to do all of that damage. I mean, he's one of them. Yeah, that's right. So like the guys who, and you know, maybe Bill Clinton thought he was doing what was right. Let's just, you know, just hypothetically, maybe he thought he was doing what was right. And it wasn't about, you know, serving the class that he came to be a part of. But if you are still pointing your finger at Donald Trump

the Republican Party, disinformation, podcasters, for making the American people not trust the men in suits and ties and the women in suits, not usually ties, but the professional class. If you're still pointing your finger at Republicans and podcasters and the unwashed masses for not trusting them instead of pointing the finger at yourself, you do not get it. Yeah, no, I think that's right. All right, let's go ahead and get to some of these Trump cabinet picks, Emily, that are quite interesting.

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As of Friday night, in typical Trumpian fashion, the entire cabinet was completed. So Donald Trump's entire cabinet is now known to us. You can go ahead and put the first element up on the screen in the control room. Politico describes it as a Friday night flurry. Mm-hmm.

And, you know, it kind of was. There were a lot of nighttime flurries, actually, in the entire naming of the cabinet, Crystal. But the big one, obviously, is Pam Bondi. We can go ahead and put the next element up on the screen. Arguably the most important position in Donald Trump's entire cabinet, with the exception of maybe Secretary of State, which is probably most important in any cabinet. But given Donald Trump's plans, the attorney general position is just absolutely critical. Pam Bondi is slotted in after Matt Gaetz withdraws. Pam

Pam Bondi was the Attorney General of Florida. So she then went on to lobby. There's a lot to talk about here with the Pam Bondi nomination in particular. I want to show just a little bit of a flavor of how Pam Bondi, Florida has been one of the most important locations for this debate over campus issues.

anti-Semitism versus pro-Palestinian activism because University of Florida was headed by Ben Sasse, Ron DeSantis obviously wanted to be a big part of that discussion as well. And Pam Bondi weighed in once. So just as a flavor of what could happen from the Department of Justice under Pam Bondi, let's go ahead and roll B3.

Pam, Democrats like Alan Dershowitz have sounded the alarm over the growing virulent strain of Jew haters in the Democrat Party. It appears their agents in the unfair press are carrying that water. It is dangerous, is it not?

Yeah, it's very dangerous, Chris. It's extremely dangerous. And, you know, you look around, the thing that's really the most troubling to me, these students in universities in our country, whether they're here as Americans or if they're here on student visas, and they're out there saying, I support Hamas. You and I have seen that on all of these television shows. Frankly, they

to be taken out of our country, or the FBI needs to be interviewing them right away when they're saying, "I support Hamas. I am Hamas." That's not saying, "I support all these poor Palestinians who are trapped in Gaza." That's not what they're saying. So I think their student visas need to be revoked. I think we need to reinstate President Trump's travel ban immediately. There's a lot of things that can be done to stop this. But yeah, the anti-Semitism

that is rampant throughout this country now. And it's truly, truly heartbreaking to see what's happening to all of our Jewish friends in this country by really just, I think, a lot of ignorant kids and students and people who don't understand that Hamas equals terrorism, even worse, at its worst.

So something I think particularly disturbing about that, Crystal, is she just said ignorant kids don't understand that Hamas equals terrorism. And so let's just take her at her word on that, hypothetically. She then wants to deport kids for ignorance, right? She wants to take away people's students, even in her own formulation of what's happening there. It's, you know, your ignorance then gets your student visa ripped away or something to that effect. And

The Department of Justice oversees a lot of these questions. So just a flavor of the free speech support from Donald Trump's likely incoming Attorney General. Pam Bondi is very confirmable. She probably won't have issues. But what's interesting about her- No sex trafficking scandals with this one. Not that we know.

Not yet. But what's interesting about her, and this applies to other Trump nominees, but this is someone who we can put the next element up on the screen, actually, because it's what I was about to talk about. She has a long past as a lobbyist. She's lobbied for Qatar. She worked at

one of the firms, I think she worked actually at one of the firms that Susie Wiles worked at. She's similar to Susie Wiles in the respect that she's full MAGA, but also has like pretty, is deeply intertwined with the swamp, if that makes sense. So she's a Fox News favorite. She is a lobbyist. And yet she also is, she went and she defended Donald Trump during his impeachment trial, like was part of his legal team. She's totally loyal to Trump. She's also intertwined with the swamp. Yeah, she's, I mean, and that's, that's,

kind of typical in terms of Trump's world, because ultimately it's much less ideological than it is about how do you feel about the person of Donald Trump? What are you willing to do to stand up for the person of Donald Trump when he feels that he's being attacked or unfairly targeted, et cetera? And so the fact that she represented him in his first impeachment trial, that has earned her good graces in the Trump world. And the fact that she is a corporate lobbyist for

Amazon, GM, Uber, multiple finance firms, Cornyn, Ken Vogel, she's still registered for some clients. Not really a big deal. The other thing that was pointed out on Twitter is the fact that her sister, who's also a lawyer, actually represented Elon Musk in his case against the government in terms of the Tesla securities fraud allegations.

And so as attorney general, she would be in a position to quash that ongoing DOJ investigation. And given how much influence the richest man on the planet has in terms of this administration, I don't think anyone should be surprised if you see that ultimately happen.

You know, going back to her comments about deporting pro-Palestine protesters and or at the very least having them be interviewed by the FBI. I guess that was her, you know, compromise position. If we can't kick them all out of the country, at least we can harass them with the with the deep state.

In spite of Republicans positioning themselves as the free speech party, obviously there has been a giant glaring exception when it comes to any sort of pro-Palestine speech. And one of the things I want to talk about in my monologue about MSNBC and some of the Democrats who say they're going to find common ground with Republicans and with Trump specifically, this is one of the areas where you can fully expect Democrats, and they already have been, finding quote unquote common ground with Trump, with his nominees, with Republicans, to

Because this, you know, witch hunt to snuff out anti-Semitism and to crack down on speech on college campuses has been quite a bipartisan affair. So I don't think any of that will be a problem for her, certainly with Republicans or with Democrats. And, you know, it is interesting the sorts of things that are not a problem whatsoever when it comes to confirmation of the fact that she is a total swamp pick.

Doesn't really matter. I think she will be easily confirmed. It is also kind of funny that on the one hand, she's like making all these noises about shipping out pro-Palestine protesters. And on the other hand, she lobbies for Qatar. I mean, yeah, there's a, I'd love to hear it because if she's registered to lobby for them,

on behalf of human trafficking as an issue, because you have to say when you register for FARA what you're doing. And she says human trafficking and other issues, so I would be curious to hear more about her lobbying for Cutter, and I expect some of that will come out during her confirmation. But she also came in on the Tea Party wave. That's really where I remember her. She started doing a ton of Fox after that. I think she got an endorsement from Sarah Palin early on. So she comes from that world, which is its own kind of part of the conservative movement. Endorsement from Sarah Palin, yeah.

It mattered a lot back in like 20, I want to say it was like around 2010, something like that. Yeah, that would make sense. Yeah, it was a big deal to get a Sarah Palin endorsement back then. And she really rode that wave in. And so you can understand how being in Florida, she was able to be pretty friendly in the MAGA circles and then ultimately ends up defending Donald Trump as part of his legal team, goes back to lobbying afterwards, and now will be attorney general probably. Yeah, looking like it, looking very much like it.

But wait, there's more. Yeah, there's a lot more. B5, we can put this up on the screen. Scott Besson is the Treasury Secretary. We're going to talk about some others too. But this is Elon Musk weighed in in favor of Howard Lutnick in the Lutnick versus Besson race for Treasury Secretary. Lutnick obviously ended up as Commerce Secretary.

Elon Musk was seemingly suspicious of Besant as being sort of a swampy type of person that wouldn't be a disruptor. He said Lutnik would be a disruptor. He kind of went out of his way not to say anything super negative about Besant, maybe reading the tea leaves on that. But

I mean, he would be right with Besson's background to be suspicious of that. The New York Times story that you just saw up on the screen is how Besson went from being a Democratic donor to Trump's Treasury Secretary pick, which actually, it's funny they say that because that's not unusual in Trump world at all. A lot of the people that he's put in top positions are swampy.

Trump himself was a Democratic donor and has said that's how you got things done. So it's not surprising, really. What is your sense of Scott Besson? Because I've seen different things. Where I've seen him is going on CNBC to basically reassure Wall Street like, well, Trump's not really serious about this whole across the board tariff thing. That's more of an opening negotiating position to try to coerce people into, you know, making better trade deals with us.

and trying to calm the waters of Wall Street. He's very trusted there. I mean, the other thing that's really funny about him is he worked closely with George Soros, made a lot of money working closely with George Soros. He's described in this New York Times story as a protege of George Soros. That's right, yeah. And I think that that is quite accurate. So that's the other part about this that is quite funny. I mean, he is definitely a Wall Street figure, but I do think he's been somewhat open to at least some use of tariffs

And, you know, sees that as a path forward, even as he, because he's such a familiar face on Wall Street, has been able to kind of calm the waters of, you know, business executives and Wall Street executives to say, like, yeah, he's not going to go too crazy with this whole tariff situation. Yeah, and that's really important, I think, because part of the reporting about...

how Trump was looking at this decision is that he was worried about spooking the markets because he takes that as a referendum on the president. Right. We know that. He talks about it all the time. And so he was worried that someone completely out of the blue would be disruptive to the markets and would thus make him look bad. So it's,

I guess, logical through that framework of what Donald Trump was thinking for. And as the Times reports, in recent months, Mr. Besant has pitched a quote 333 plan that would aim for 3% economic growth, reduce the budget deficit to 3% of gross domestic product, and increase domestic oil production by 3 million barrels a day. He also came up with an idea, and this is interesting, that would allow the president to essentially sideline the chair of the Federal Reserve, although he is back down from that for

in the face of opposition, that obviously would be music to Donald Trump's ear and you can kind of understand why Besant was able to have a great pitch to Trump. - Yeah, absolutely. So that'll be interesting to see how that plays out. And we've talked to Jeff Stein, great economics reporter for the Washington Post,

He has been of the opinion that, you know, when Trump says consistently we want to have across the board tariffs, that you should take him seriously at that. And that, you know, and the implications of that, which would likely raise prices kind of across the board and be quite inflationary.

But they have already been looking at what sort of powers they could use just at the executive level without having to go through Congress to implement something approaching an across-the-board tariff. So in any case, we'll see how that all plays out. But Treasury, very significant, very high-powered, very influential. So that was a really important pick that was made there. Another one that this one is very kind of like

under the radar, super powerful, important in government. And that's the head of the Office of Management and Budget. Russ Vogt of Project 2025, no less, has been tagged in for that one. We can put B6 up on the screen. Trump's pick to lead his budget office, Mother Jones writes, wants to use it to deliver on MAGA's

big dreams. Emily, why don't you break this one down for us, what Russ is all about, what his deal is? Yeah, so Russ is also kind of of the Tea Party to MAGA pipeline. He's someone who I actually, as an ideological conservative, like a lot. But if you're looking at the screen, the Mother Jones tagline there is, quote, we want to put them in trauma, Russ Vogt has said, of federal workers. Yes, that is absolutely- He's an ideological warrior. Yeah.

way, way hardcore on some of those questions and has spent actually the last several years, he has something called the Center for Renewing America, figuring out what the blueprint for whether it was DeSantis or Trump or someone else, what that would look like. And so he did contribute to Project 2025 and is among the people who were leading this charge that were saying,

the next Republican president has like the rarest opportunity to just go wild. Like everything that the conservative movement said that it wanted to do in the 1980s under the Reagan revolution, it has never come to fruition. And that is because the swamp has like attached itself to the conservative movement. So let's just blow it all up. And here's the outline to do that. And so Russ is like an absolute leader in that movement and a very like hardcore ideologue in that movement, which will be,

run a clip in just a second getting to that. But yeah, if you listen to the Ezra Klein show, this was predicted by someone at this table, Crystal. Interesting. Well, I mean, you weren't buying the Trump has nothing to do with Project 2025 and has no interest in Project 2025. I mean, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, people like Russ have spent millions of dollars over the last couple of years trying to figure out what this would look like. He's put tons of energy into what this would look like. And if you're a federal worker, yes, you should be pretty frightened that Russ Vogt is now in this position because as the head of the OMB, which he was under Trump's first administration, you are in charge of implementing the budget.

You're in charge of thinking about the budget, implementing the budget. And so you're looking, I mean, that's where Doge, like that's all of those recommendations. That's where Russ can go and implement them. And he has concrete plans that he's talked with lawyers about that he's spent like time in think tank circles conceiving of over the last few years. So he's hardcore very much. And he's one of the big thinkers behind, quote unquote, Schedule F.

Yes.

We do have this like hidden camera video actually of Russ Faux talking about some of his priorities. And this was before Trump was elected. So he's also talking about his relationship to Project 2025 and saying he says effectively, like, yeah, don't worry about the fact that Trump is downplaying this. Obviously, it's just a branding issue for him. But don't worry, we're in good stead. We're in position to implement everything that we want to, which, you know, anyone with a

three brain cells could see at the time. In any case, let's take a listen to a little bit of what Russ has to say about what he wants to accomplish. He talks about rape, incest, and life of mother. I don't actually believe in those exceptions. I want to get to abolition, but I also, we got to win elections.

And so I want to get as far as we possibly can. His view of who should be an American. So I want to make sure that we can say we're a Christian nation. And my viewpoint is mostly that I would probably be Christian nation-ism. That's pretty close to Christian nationalism. Can we, if we're going to have legal immigration, can we get people that actually believe in Christianity? Is that something? Or do we have to have, you know...

We're not allowed to ask questions about Sharia law. What could we see America looking like, I guess, in an ideal world? In an ideal world, I mean, I think we could save the country in a sense of...

You have the largest deportation in history. And even pornography. We'd have a national ban on pornography if we could, right? National ban on pornography. Here we come. Which, by the way, he can't do at OMB. You never know. But, you know, obviously, as you said, Emily, what comes across there is this is an ideological warrior and across the board, hard right. You know, he says, I get Trump's got to take talk about these exceptions for rape, incest, the life of the mother when it comes to abortion. I don't actually support those exceptions.

uh, exceptions, but what are you going to do? You got to win elections. Um, you know, he's talks about, let's have the largest deportation in history, just very, very ideological here. And, you know, that is significant when you have someone in, like you said, a position that is quite consequential in terms of the budget. Um,

He's also, I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, Emily, been one of the thinkers who has supported this idea that even if Congress appropriates funds, there's no obligation for the executive to spend them. That means that you would have unilateral ability to cut whatever you want. So contrary to this notion that what Elon and Vivek are doing is like this make work project.

On the contrary, if there actually is the power for the executive unilaterally to cut slash social safety net programs and everything in between, we would expect Russ to be very involved in helping to implement those cuts throughout the federal government. So having someone like that in this position is quite consequential.

That is such an important point. This is becoming a really raging debate on the right because people are starting to realize that they actually have the power to do this. It's not like an abstract conversation anymore about whether the president can override congressional expenditures or congressional prescriptions for spending basically because of the separation of powers. So it's like, can the president say, this is a congressionally passed mandate. We're not doing it though. That's an enormous power. And just to put a bow on this conversation,

Russ Vogt is not just like a Pambande type person who understands the temperature and will go along with the temperature. She's a finger in the wind type. Exactly. Yeah. He's an architect of this on an ideological level. And, you know, most of his philosophy that he'll be able to implement and that what is like really guiding him is super against DEI spending. He'll be super against like the waste, fraud and abuse that you hear Elon and Vivek talking about. Like he's a

He's a Tea Party kind of limited government guy. He was around in those times and like that's informs it but he's now very MAGA as well. So it's about the sort of reforming the American government along the lines of what the conservative movements like fantasy has looked like because they feel like they've never had the power and the will to actually implement it. So hugely consequential appointment to your point like a little under the radar but a very consequential appointment for Trump loyalists. And I think

To me, what we're seeing taking shape is a very different Trump administration than what we saw in 2016, even as Russ was in the similar position last time. He was in the same position last time around. But in the offseason, you know, they have been preparing. They've been thinking about, OK, what what did we learn last time? What stood in our way of accomplishing our most maximalist goals?

And even though, you know, Trump didn't even get 50 percent of the vote, he feels that he has this overwhelming mandate to blow everything up. And so, you know, I think contrary to a lot of the analysis that you saw from Wall Street and

And even from, you know, some Trump allies, even from his own transition co-chair, Howard Lutnick, that like all these things he's saying, like he's not really going to put RFK Jr. at HHS. That's right. He's not really going to do across the board tariffs. He's not really going to blow up the federal bureaucracy. He's not really going to get rid of the Department of Education. I think that the things he said on the trail.

including, you know, Elon Musk saying, I'm going to cut $2 trillion from the budget now. Is he going to be able to cut $2 trillion when that is more than all of the discretionary budget in the entire federal government budget? Probably not. But I think you should take seriously the things, the maximalist plans that Trump laid out on the campaign trail, because there have been people like Russ Vogt out there in the offseason thinking about, OK, if we get another chance next time around,

what are we going to start with? And emblematic of that is, you know, they didn't start going down this Schedule F path until the very end of Trump's term. Exactly. Last time around, so there wasn't really time to, like, get it spun up and get it implemented. This time, they're coming out of the gates with the Matt Gaetz, perhaps. Oh, no, Crystal, no. No.

Coming out of the gates with those plans in place and have thought a lot about, OK, what can we do where we don't even need to consult Congress? What can we do to make sure that any institution, whether it was the military or the Senate or the DOJ that stood in our way last time around, what can we do to make sure those roadblocks are met?

are out of the way this time. And, you know, I think we should take seriously the things that Trump said on the campaign trail. Yeah. I mean, just the last point on the whole rest of the thing is we talked about this last week. I do think that there's going to be an impulse to overreach because, you know, the sense that there's a mandate and the American people are all on board with gutting the bureaucracy in the abstract.

that may be true. I mean, it may be like people just got to go and shake up Washington and drain the swamp. But when it's actually playing out, you know, that'll be another story. And again, I think people like Russ Vogt, and I know people that are like in that orbit, they are stealing themselves for just like making those hard decisions that won't necessarily be responsive to public pressure or public opinion. And Donald Trump, he's another story. I mean, to the extent he interferes with what's happening at OMB, you know, he'll make sure that they're doing what they want to do. But

But he also doesn't have to run for re-election anymore. So he doesn't really even have to care at all about public opinion. And, you know, I mean, we saw this last time around as well after he was elected in 2016 and tries to implement, you know, some of the

um, uh, aggressive, uh, anti-immigrant policies that he had run on, there was a huge backlash and actually being pro-immigration was like never more popular than it was under Donald Trump. Because when people saw what this meant in reality, when they saw kids, you know, crying and separated from their parents and orphans and just the human cruelty that that entailed, the public had no stomach for that. So, um, you know, it's, it's one thing to, you

to theoretically, you know, it sounds good. Okay, get the waste, fraud and abuse out of government. All right, that sounds good. Who doesn't support that? But when it's like, oh, and now, you know, you don't have a WIC budget to be able to feed baby's formula, then it turns into a very different matter when the rubber hits the road.

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Speaking of the rubber hitting the road, we couldn't do the show today without giving you a little taste of what Matt Gaetz has been up to in the last, I don't know, Crystal, 72 hours. He's a busy man. Yeah, moves fast on to the next thing. Moves fast on to the next thing. Immediately after withdrawing, basically, from the attorney general confirmation process, he joined Cameo, as one does in these scenarios. In these times.

Yes, because he will not be returning to the House seat. He actually won re-election, so he technically could have resigned from this Congress, but not from the next Congress. So he technically could have taken the seat back if he wanted to, but he doesn't want to, maybe because he wants to run for Florida governor, or maybe because in 2024 in the United States of America, it's way more fun to be on Cameo.

So more fun to be an influencer. Take a look at Matt Gaetz talking to a longtime patriot on Cameo. Hey, Lisa Kovach, it's your favorite former Congressman Matt Gaetz. I just wanted to thank you for being a longtime patriot, for supporting President Trump through thick and thin. And I know you were bummed out when the news broke that I wouldn't be the next attorney general. We did get a great replacement in Pam Bondi. She's going to do an awesome job. You have nothing to worry about. But hey, listen, I'm still going to be in the fight for you and your family.

And I know things are tough right now dealing with your car and Bruce, and I wish him a very speedy recovery. So next time you visit Florida, as everyone should do very frequently, make sure to pay a visit with your lovely Aunt Kathy. Stop by and say hello. Also say hello to your mother, Carol, for me. And have a Merry Christmas. Have a great Thanksgiving. Enjoy your family. And this is just such an exciting time to be an American.

We've got the House. We've got the Senate. We've got Donald Trump in the presidency. We're going to actually fix the problems. We're going to secure the border, clean up our streets, get the economy roaring again. So we've got a lot to be thankful for. I think he's found his calling. It's $500 plus. That's what's listed as the price right now. It was originally $250. You know, I guess demand surged and he had to up the price there. He has 12 reviews, all five stars. So he's most popular for a pep talk.

Roasts, so if you're if you're interested Matt Gaetz and you and you have 500 plus dollars lying around One of the funny things I think is him being excited about the Pam Bondi pick because one of the things we've talked about this before that Matt Gaetz is actually very good on is like swampiness he's completely consistent on like congressional stock trading on Foreign entanglements on all of those like serious serious

And important things that nobody else wants to talk about or take seriously. Pam Bondi, of course, is now coming from work as a cutter lobbyist. And Matt Gaetz is like, excellent pick. It's just, you know, that's that's MAGA world. Yeah, that is MAGA world. No, I mean, I think with Pam Bondi in there, any hope that there's going to be like increased antitrust action or whatever, like that's definitely not happening.

whatsoever. Maybe on tech, it's possible that on Google or something you would see it. Something where it's seen as an ideological adversary. Because even Bill Barr did that. Even there though, all the tech people also bent the knee to Trump. They also have done what they need to do to get in his good graces. So I don't expect it there either, but you never know what direction they'll ultimately go in.

I did think it was noteworthy. I'm curious your thoughts, Emily. I did think it was noteworthy that Gates decided to pull out of this process and basically was like, look, Trump –

According to the reporting, Trump came to him and was like, look, you just don't have the votes. Now, why is that significant? Well, because it's an indication that they're not just going to go to the mat and try to do recess appointments for all of these picks. And, you know, Gates is not the only one who could potentially face trouble getting confirmed. RFK Jr., I think, is a question mark, although I think there's a decent chance he'll get through.

Pete Hegseth is the other one that I would say is a question mark at this point. There may be others as well. In fact, actually, the Department of Labor head who's pro-union Republican might be weirdly enough, might weirdly be enough be a problem, although I suspect that enough Democrats would cross to vote for her that that would mitigate any problem that she might have from the right wing with regard to her confirmation.

But, you know, it was it was noteworthy to me that it was effectively a sign of backing down from their most aggressive posture of basically like you're going to accept whatever nominees we're going to put up. You're going to vote for them. And if you aren't willing to vote for them, we're just going to shove them through in a recess appointment. So I found that to be an important indication of how these things are going to play out.

Well, yeah, I think that's a good point. And with Gates, I think it really underscores that the reason, I mean, it's true he didn't have the votes. This was not 40 chess to the extent that I can tell. It wasn't like this brilliant plot to get Matt Gates in a better position to run for Florida governor. We can actually put B9 on the screen. This is Matt Gates's resignation letter to Mike Johnson saying, basically, I'm not going to take the oath of office for the same position in the 119th Congress. So that would be when that happens in

January, so I don't think that this was, you know, an attempt to set him up and say, you know, we're just gonna, we know he's not gonna get through, but we'll elevate him and then he can have a glide path to some other position. Or the other theory was also like, oh, he'll take the heat off the other ones and make it

easier for them to get confirmed. Which I think actually may partially be part of the calculation. I don't know. To me, it makes sense that they realized it would be a really tough one. Donald Trump would love to have Matt Gaetz as attorney general. There's no question about it. And I think part of it was he wanted to smoke out the senators and sort of see where certain people like Mitch McConnell is a really good example, reportedly one of the people who would not have been voting for Matt Gaetz. There's no surprise about that at all. But I think Trump partially wanted to test the

first of all, John Thune in his first like literal week as Senate majority leader or he will be, well, yeah, as Senate majority leader. And so he partially wanted to test the waters on that. He wanted to see what Gates could do if it was possible. But then also he now can say, oh, Mitch McConnell, you weren't voting for Matt Gates. Okay, that's interesting.

And that new guy coming in in Utah was another one. Curtis, who's replacing Mitt Romney in the Senate, was another one who reportedly was not going to vote for Matt Gaetz. Yeah. It's an important piece of information for the Trump people to know. And I think the other thing to just cap that is, and the point that you're making is, this is the most important position as Donald Trump sees it. Like if this was the State Department, I think Donald Trump and

his allies might have kept going, even though that's a hugely consequential position, because they want to have everybody in place at the Department of Justice on day one. They do not want there to be any time wasted with the DOJ. That is the one agency that they are laser focused on more than any other, because that is when Donald Trump says, I am your retribution, that is firmly the

directed at the DOJ. So my sense of this is that they realized it would be uncertain what would happen with Gates through the holidays and then into January. And just like, this is not worth our time at all. We need to have somebody who will be confirmed and can start saying, I'm hiring this person, this person, this person, this is what we're going to do on day one, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah.

They want to go. I think it's also worth noting. I mean, I think Gates as a human being genuinely sucks, but he does. He does actually have some more heterodox positions when it comes certainly to antitrust and economics and these things. Pam Bondi has none of that. And so the fact that Trump found each of these people to be sort of like equally worthy candidates for attorney general tells you that it has nothing to do with how they think about corporate power or whatever. It has to do with one thing, one thing alone.

Are they loyal to Donald J. Trump? Are they going to do what he wants them to do in that position? That was always and will always be the only qualification, the only thing that really matters to him in terms of putting in this position. When he says, I will be your retribution, like who if you were out there in the world and you've been a Donald Trump adversary, critic, whatever, like who should be worried right now? Right.

Yeah, I would say the DOJ is probably anyone who's like a career at the DOJ, meaning they've been there for decades and were working on indictments against Donald Trump or people who were working on like face act stuff against anti-abortion protesters. Like that stuff is going to be very clear. Do you mean retribution in terms of also like where they might- Investigations. Aggressively. Who will be targeted? I bet. I don't know.

I bet. I mean, well, it's kind of interesting because some people have said there'll be more scrutiny on Hunter Biden and Joe Biden's relationship with Hunter Biden. But then Trump has this weird thing where he didn't go after Hillary Clinton. I kind of doubt that, to be honest with you. It's interesting, though. I mean...

I don't know. It's also the other place I would have said is the tech leaders who, to your point, have kind of bent that knee. Well, a lot of what Trump world would have wanted to do in 2021, 2022 was go after those tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg. And Zuckerberg has said he regrets listening to...

The former FBI people and the FBI people, Mark Zuckerberg famously met with the FBI and had this conversation before the Biden laptop drops. The Hunter Biden laptop drops is saying, you know, expect something that's going to look like and we now know they already had the laptop, but that's going to look like Russian disinformation.

And Zuckerberg was like, oh, OK. So when the laptop story broke, he was eager to surprise it. Primed to see it that way. Right. And so that previously, I mean, there would have been investigations of those guys. There's no question about it. But I think instead is what you're going to see is investigations of people who were involved in Russia collusion. And even though some of those people have already been investigated, I think you'll see even more scrutiny. Anybody who like

anybody who was leaking to the press during that, you know, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page. I know those are old names and it sounds like, but I think it's like these random people that were parts of that I think is especially going to be room for targeting. And what about Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Fonny Willis?

Yeah, yeah, probably all of the above. And Fannie Willis seems to have the most spotted record of all of them in terms of like soft corruption. So that'll be a lot of fun for them. I think what you're pointing to as well and what we're discussing with, you know, Google, Zuckerberg, et cetera, bending the knee in advance. And, you know, I saw a similar dynamic with Jeff Bezos over the Washington Post, like, oh, we're not going to we're not going to endorse Trump.

you're all good here. And actually even getting in a little Twitter exchange back and forth where Elon had suggested that Jeff Bezos was saying negative things about Trump's potential victory. Yes. And Bezos jumps on, no, no, no, that's not true. Yes. And, you know, also fits with

Joe and Mika making their trek down to Mar-a-Lago and Steve Bannon had said, now whether this has any veracity, we don't know, but he had said that the DOJ is going to go after MSNBC hosts. Yes. He named Czech specifically Ari Melber, but you would think that, you know, Joe and Mika could potentially be at the top of that list. And so I think a lot... Ari Melber? It was a random one to be at that, like, I don't know

I don't know why. I feel like already covers a lot of the legal stuff. Yeah. Like that's his beat. He's, you know, former lawyer that he like goes in on that. And I think he's even had, I want to say he's had Bannon on the show and they've like fought with each other. Anyway, apparently Steve Bannon has a grievance, particularly with Ari Melber.

But, you know, I think a lot of the work is already done in terms of just having, you know, the threat of a Matt Gaetz, the threat of a Trump loyalist out there to go after people with investigations or to hurt their businesses. In the case of Jeff Bezos, who has a lot of business with the government. You know, so there's a lot of sort of like compliance in advance.

to try to get on Trump's good side and try to avoid the worst of the federal government being weaponized against you. So in any case, obviously, that position will be really consequential. I did the other piece that I was curious about is whether Pete Hegseth seems to me like he would be the other one that would be difficult potentially to get confirmed. Also, reportedly, Trump was pissed that Hegseth hadn't been up front with him about Trump

not only the specifics of the allegations, the sexual assault allegations against him, but also the fact that he had paid some undisclosed sum to the woman who accused him of rape. He denies the charges and put out his side of the story. But let me go ahead and play for you. This is getting a lot of attention on CNN. Dana Bash going back and forth with Senator Mark Wayne Mullin about the Pete Hegseth allegations. Go ahead and take a listen to that. I wanna

just make sure our viewers know what that report said, that the woman said that when she tried to leave Hegseth's hotel room, he blocked the door, ended up on top of her and performed a sexual act. She also said that she, quote, remembered saying no to a lot. Yeah, go ahead.

Dana, if we're going to get into that, let's talk about the whole police report. Now, I know you've read it, and I have definitely read it. First of all, the police report, if you look at it, it's very clear that what Pete was saying and what his attorney was saying was accurate.

There was no case here. He was falsely accused. If you go back and you read the report, there was two eyewitnesses said that she was being the aggressor. Pete wasn't even flirting with her. He was flirting with a different girl and the other girl was trying to flirt with Pete. The Jane Doe here that is unmentioned. They also said that she was holding his arm as they were leaving and that Pete was intoxicated and that Jane Doe was not.

They obviously said, multiple people said, that she was aggressively, to the point of aggressively, use the word aggressively, flirting towards him when they were in the courtyard. Senator, Senator, I was going to... When the hotel staff came in. Senator. Well, I'm just saying that you told one part of this, Dana, that isn't accurate. I wasn't done. I wasn't done.

I wasn't done. You're giving his side, and it was definitely, the police report is definitely what she said and what he said. You're absolutely right. I hadn't gotten there, but I appreciate you giving that other side for me. So I guess that just kind of answers the question, which is, from your perspective, you believe his part of the story and not hers.

I absolutely do. He wasn't charged. He wasn't even kind of charged in this. There was no crime committed. The police dropped everything. It's what's unfortunate in today's world. You can be accused of anything. And then if especially if it's something like this, you're automatically assumed to be guilty. If you read the police report from cover to cover, which I have and I know every reporter has to.

It is clear there was nothing there. So he's obviously prepared to vote for Pete Hegseth, but may not be representative of the entirety of the Republican caucus. What do you think? What is your sense there, Emily? Because not just because of these allegations, but in addition, I mean, Pete Hegseth is also a very ideological guy who said that, like, for example, women shouldn't serve in combat roles. And I can imagine there being at least a few Republican senators who may take issue with that.

We take issue with that because, you know, senators obviously aren't up for election every two years, but you can imagine being Susan Collins and voting to confirm somebody like Pete Hegseth and then having to run for re-election and answer for it. Yeah, maybe even not when you're running for re-election, but even when you're just back in Maine talking to constituents. That, you know, is not going to be super easy for somebody like Susan Collins, and he can afford to lose a few votes.

But, you know, if you have a mass defection or even if you have like five to ten, that's not good enough. You can't. There will be no Democrat who would vote for Pete Hegseth. So you're not going to get any crossovers. No, no, not at all. And let's also remember that, you know, Pete Hegseth is firmly opposed in some good ways and in some ways that both of us would probably disagree with. But in some good ways, firmly opposed to this like entrenched bureaucracy at the Pentagon and everywhere.

poses a major threat to a lot of that. And he's somebody who's from the outside that the con, the defense contractors are not familiar with and not comfortable with. He, uh, has positions on Ukraine that they're definitely not comfortable with. And to that extent, um,

I think there's going to be a ton of pressure on people again, like Susan Collins, like Mitch McConnell, who's not going to want to shake up the Pentagon bureaucracy. He's now staying in the Senate specifically to keep the money flowing to Ukraine. Like that is how he has positioned himself and said it's going to be his legacy. So it's not just this. This is something that's going to make it a lot more difficult. But that pressure is going to be enormous.

enormous and I know that he kind of has normie conservative positions on things like Israel and even on of course different questions But he's he's from outside the Pentagon and that makes them very very uncomfortable And so the lobbyists will be out in full force Pressuring people unless they think unless they decide they think they can work with the guy or that he'll be easily manipulated That doesn't seem to be the case so far It seems like everyone's pretty opposed to him, but the pressure is gonna be enormous not to confirm Pete Hegseth. I

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So a very interesting pick by Donald Trump for Department of Labor. He found one of the only in existence, somewhat pro-union Republicans. Let's go and put this up on the screen. So some moderate congresswoman. She just actually lost narrowly reelection in the state of Oregon. Her name is Lori Chavez de Ramer. I might be saying that wrong. I'm sorry if I am. But basically, she's a moderate congresswoman.

I had never heard of her. The one thing that makes her noteworthy is she did actually vote. She was one of very few who voted in favor of the PRO Act, which is pro-union legislation in the House. And the other thing that is noteworthy about her is that Sean O'Brien, who is the president of the Teamsters Union, who spoke at the RNC and decided to keep his union out of the endorsement game whatsoever, which was taken as a huge...

victory by Trump and his side. This is the candidate that he was ultimately pushing for this job. So, you know, it's quite a remarkable, you know, quite a remarkable shift to have for Trump specifically, who has been a union buster his whole life.

to have someone who's remotely pro-union put into this position. And, you know, I think it's sort of like a payoff for Sean O'Brien, who was tweeting about this. Let's put this up on the screen. He says, thank you, Donald Trump, for putting American workers first by nominating

Lori Chavez de Ramer for U.S. Labor Secretary nearly a year ago. You joined us for Teamsters Roundtable and pledged to listen to workers and find common ground to protect and respect labor in America. You put words into action. Now let's grow wages and improve working conditions nationwide. Congratulations on your nomination, et cetera, et cetera. So he's certainly taking a victory lap with this. And, you know, for me, Emily, it's both really consequential. Listen, for the labor movement, which you guys know is one of my key priorities, it's

The labor union used to have bipartisan support like in the New Deal era and still does if you go into state legislatures in places that are more like pro-union friendly. I can speak to the Kentucky legislature still had, at least last I checked, some Republicans who would be pro-labor, pro-union. So it is a flavor that did exist before.

But, you know, it is better for the labor movement when you have bipartisan support, because one of the problems with the union movement is that since Republicans became just like 100 percent ideologically aligned against it, you had a raft of legislation that was passed in states that made it more and more difficult to organize elections.

You had an effort to paint unions as just being sort of like plants for the Democratic Party. So overall, it's really good to have some bipartisanship within the union movement. But I also don't want to overstate what this means.

Because, you know, if you were really serious about advancing labor rights in the way that the Biden administration actually was, you would keep, for example, Jennifer Abruzzo in as general counsel at the National Labor Relations Board. You would reverse some of the incredibly hostile actions that the Trump administration took last time they were in office.

The Biden administration, they ramped up their enforcement minimum wage, overtime, worker safety. Trump has been on the other side of many of those. And one of the most consequential pieces is that the Biden administration has pushed to make it easier to classify contractors like those Amazon drivers as employees, which has really aided union drives specifically that apply to the Teamsters.

And there's no real indication that the Trump administration plans to continue in that direction. So while it is significant, I also don't want to make too much of it because ultimately it matters what this Department of Labor does once the rubber hits the road. This is...

truly significant. I mean, there's just no other way to look at it because as some of these cabinet nominations have come out, there's been tons of pressure, as you know, on Sean O'Brien, people saying, look at this, you bet on the wrong horse and here's what you're getting because various of these nominees have come from, you know, the conservative movement, somebody like Russ Vote, for example, who maybe, you know, think differently about unions post-Trump, but definitely before Trump, um,

were not in favor of any of this at all and were much more aligned openly, proudly with the business community than with unions. And so this could have been somebody, I mean, remember Donald Trump's first nomination, his first labor secretary was Alex Acosta, the guy who approved Trump's

the deal for Jeffrey Epstein. I mean, this could have been someone that was very, very hostile to organized labor. No matter what Donald Trump said on the campaign trail, it's just the selection of people to go from. It's just very, very difficult to actually align yourself in that way. And for him to align himself with Sean O'Brien here,

I mean, this is massive. This is truly massive. The labor secretary is in charge of so much policy. It's not just what goes through Congress. Like the labor secretary is extremely consequential for the day-to-day policies of or the day-to-day practices of what happens in the business world. This is a huge, huge deal for a Republican president. Yeah, so no doubt about that.

On the other hand, you know, there are many contradictory signs in terms of the posture towards unions within this administration. We can put this next piece up on the screen. So one of the biggest problems, Ro Khanna here tweeting, what could be a bigger betrayal of working class voters than to dismantle an FDR created agency that be the National Labor Relations Board that protects unions and workers from exploitation? And he links to a

Washington Post article here about the efforts by Elon Musk and supported by, you know, many Trump allies to deem the National Labor Relations Board unconstitutional, which would be kind of a death blow for union organizing. Um,

So Elon has been very involved in this. Amazon, SpaceX, they've all argued in federal court. Starbucks, they've all argued in federal court that the NLRB is unconstitutional. They also write in this article that Trump's presidential administration is poised to oversee major cuts to the powers of Trump.

the National Labor Relations Board and firing the Democratic members of that board. And I know this can seem really in the weeds, but we've covered it extensively here. So if you've been watching the show for a while, you'll know some of this. This wave of grassroots union organizing that we've seen at places like Amazon, at places which is represented by parts of the organizing driver being led by the Teamsters, at places like Starbucks.

The workers get all the credit for doing the work and taking a risk and all of that, but it also was really dramatically enabled by a pretty aggressively pro-worker National Labor Relations Board, the general counsel of which, her name is Jennifer Abruzzo.

she is very likely to be fired by the Trump administration. I don't think there hasn't been the whole like, you know, Lena Khan conversation. She hasn't been, um, conversation conversation. She hasn't been made central to this, but she really should be because if you actually care about expanding union rights, this is someone who has done incredible work. Um, the Biden administration with Jennifer Bruzos also worked to ban, um, these, uh,

meetings that they force workers to go into to hear like anti-union propaganda. There have been very important decisions made about even the way in which the Starbucks organizing could unfold. And so that's been super consequential. And with Elon Musk in here as, I mean, this is a guy that brags about firing striking workers that Trump was like, yay, way to go, good job. With Elon Musk in here as an incredible influence who thinks unions should just basically be illegal. Yeah.

It's still, I still, if you're a labor supporter as I am, I don't think you should be resting easy by the fact that they picked, you know, this Congresswoman who supported the PRO Act to head the agency. There's still a lot of huge questions about what the orientation is actually going to be. And of course, in the first Trump administration, he was aggressively anti-union, which fits with his business career in which he also was a notable union buster. Yeah, this is one of the questions that I asked my friends who were sort of working in the, people who are like,

I've seen these negotiations behind the scenes in the offseason, as you put it earlier in the show, to see what a new Republican administration with their fantasy policies in place. I've asked them, like, do you have enough people to staff a potentially pro-labor labor department under Donald Trump? Like those all of those middle positions. Right. Which are also extremely consequential.

who are you going to put in them that's not from the, like, Coke world, truly? Right. That didn't grow up, like, in that time and doesn't come with some of those predispositions. And I don't know that that can happen. And so you just, it means that maybe a lot of careers will be protected at the Labor Department. I don't know. Maybe. But, you know, the other thing is, like, okay, so you give Sean O'Brien what he wants here. And you have Elon and Vivek coming in to basically take an axe out of him.

to the whole agency. Although they don't have any power. But... They'll want to. Yes, and Russ Vogt and others have this theory that you can make unilateral cuts without having to go through Congress. So, you know, I think it's very possible that you have her...

at the head of what ends up being sort of a skeleton agency that even if it wants to, it doesn't really have the power. Already the Department of Labor and the National Labor Relations Board does not have sufficient staffing to be able to handle worker grievances and disputes and elections in a timely manner.

already stretched incredibly thin, especially as there's been a significant increase in union organizing activity. So it's entirely possible you end up with a figurehead overseeing what's effectively like a skeletal agency that basically gives a nod to the union voters and to Sean O'Brien and people who supported Donald Trump, but isn't actually effectively able to protect workers' rights because that does take

and people in positions who can, you know, do the work to make sure those rights are protected. Somehow the bureaucrats at the NLRB had enough time to subpoena me over a joke tweet that my then boss said five years ago. Yeah, maybe I'll tell the story about that one time. But it's all been reported. It was, yeah, it was like a joke tweet about, like, whether employees at the Federalist would unionize. You could Google it. But they did just subpoena the women, and they somehow found the time to do that. It was really fun. They're protecting your rights, Emily. Yeah, yeah.

But we can put this Dan Maron's tweet up because I think it's really interesting. And Crystal, I know you and I disagree on this. I've always been frustrated about the PRO Act itself being sort of the litmus test. This is kind of conservative world freaking out about the Chavez de Ramer nomination because as Dan points out in one of his posts, even some Democrats have issues with the PRO Act forcing companies to treat all gig workers as employees. And we could debate that. I think maybe we have like a couple of years ago, but it's significant even

that as some Democrats have issues with the PRO Act, this one Republican was like, hey, I'm getting on board with the PRO Act, even though corporate Dems are uncomfortable with the PRO Act. Well, at the Senate level, I think

Every Democrat except for Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema supported it. Yeah. So it was pretty unanimous. And then once Mark Kelly started getting floated for being the vice presidential pick, he also was like, I support the PRO Act. But hey, listen, I'm happy to go back to card check, which was what was being pushed, the Employee Free Choice Act, which was what was being pushed under the Obama administration.

We can go ahead forward with some of these tweets so we can show there's, you know, real freak out happening here. You say a Republican labor secretary supports the anti-worker pro act would be a very bad start for Trump. Arguably the worst bill in Congress. Anti-freelancer, anti-franchisee, anti-secret ballot, anti-worker. Can go ahead to the next one.

If you think union leadership is in step with the union rank and file, you've learned absolutely nothing. Union members didn't vote for Trump to end right to work and empower teachers unions. They just wanted lower prices. So this is an interesting argument, that one of like, no, they knew that Trump is anti-union and they voted for him anyway. That's an interesting that's an interesting take. And.

Maybe correct. Partially, yeah. It could be correct, yeah. And then this one, this person says, Lori Chavez-Durimer co-sponsored the pro-act. That's all I need to know. I don't think they mean that as a positive, Emily. There's so many people like that, though. I mean, truly, like this is, the Koch brothers were the engine of the

let's say the labor nonprofit movement on the right. And it's not as though people needed to be paid by the Koch brothers to have anti-union positions. It was just that the conservative movement was reflectively in support of business over organized labor. It was part of the ideology that we trust the business more than we trust the government. And I mean, it's just, it's baked into the cake here. And so I don't...

Most of the people in the conservative movement who focus on labor issues have those takes. And there are some people like Oren Kass who have been toiling in the trenches and getting trashed by guys like that to come up with a slightly more pro-worker policy agenda for the Republican Party. And even when they step a little bit out of line, they get...

You see Sager get it, I get it. It's not a big deal, but for people like Oren, who are the figureheads of this, they make it impossible to get money from people who want the conservative movement to have a slightly more pro-worker agenda. If you take any money from the left, you'll just get trashed. So that reaction is...

The pressure is going to be on. There's just no question about it. Yeah, she'll get confirmed because I think quite a number of Democrats will actually vote for her, too, because of the available choices. Like you are not going to get a more pro-labor, departmental labor head than she is. But it'll be interesting whether there are any Republicans who vote against her. You know, the super business like Chamber of Commerce types vote.

are going to be under pressure probably, although maybe they don't really even apply pressure because they know it's a bit of a lost cause with Democrats being willing to vote for her. So I'll just say for my part, you know, I do think it's obviously noteworthy and an important break from the

Trump administration last time around and from Republican orthodoxy in general, I think it is incredibly positive for the labor movement. If there are some Republican bipartisan support for unions, no doubt about it. I'm going to need to see a lot more before I'm convinced that Donald Trump is going to be remotely good for

labor organizing, given his personal history and given the way the first administration unfolded and given that probably the most powerful person, advisor to Donald Trump right now, is Elon Musk, who is vehemently opposed to unions even existing in the world. That's an entirely fair point. And the one thing that I always say to people on the right about this is I grew up in a split household. My dad is a union. My mom worked in HR. So it was like a little...

That's funny.

then imagine how they treat their workers. Like just take that and say, if you believe this is reflective of moral rot inside of corporate America, then imagine working for Amazon. Yeah. It's really simple. Yeah. Translates right across the board. Yeah. So such a great point. Yeah. All right. We've got another great guest standing by, um, an activist who has been pushing to try to implement a weapons embargo against Israel. Let's go ahead and get to that.

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Very happy to be joined this morning by Mohamed Nobolsi of the Palestinian Youth Movement, who's been engaged in some very interesting activism. We were hoping you would break down for us here on the show. Welcome, Mohamed.

Thank you for having me. Yeah. So we have seen how the U.S. in particular, but other countries as well, primarily the U.S., though, has been reluctant to follow our own laws, let alone international laws. And so you at Palestinian Youth Movement have decided to take some actions to put pressure on shipping giant Maersk in particular, regards to shipping weapons to Israel. Just break down for us a little bit about your organization and what you all are up to.

So yeah, the Palestinian Youth Movement is an organization of Arab youth in the diaspora, primarily located in the West and in North America and Britain. And we've been organizing over the last year and a half since the start of this genocide to place pressure specifically on the Biden administration to relent in its support of this ongoing genocide. And so the main demands obviously have been ceasefire, but as the war proceeded,

the demand of an arms embargo became more central because we started to recognize that first, that the Biden-Harris administration was able to co-opt the language of ceasefire to say that they wanted to ceasefire while also doing nothing to actually bring it about beyond just empty platitudes in front of podiums. And so an arms embargo became the central demand because we recognized that that is the only way we'd be able to actually achieve a ceasefire.

And so after that sort of recognition took place, we also saw that the Biden-Harris administration was reluctant to do anything in the way of an arms embargo, despite sort of the global pressure to bring that about. And we've launched this campaign, Mask Off Maersk, in May of this year.

And we began by recognizing or understanding that Maersk, this Danish company, one of the largest, if not the largest logistics and supply chain company in the world, that's responsible for basically taking goods, products,

military cargo from the U.S., from everywhere, really, and transporting it across the globe. And so Mask Off MERS was meant to unveil the role, expose the role that MERS is playing in sustaining this genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. We published a report more recently, and I'm happy to discuss the details of that report because there have been major developments in response to the publishing of the report, the

the coverage by The Intercept and by Spanish media resulting in the Spanish government banning or preventing the docking of two Maersk ships on its shores. I was going to say, please tell us more about the response because it may sound like one company, but Maersk is an incredibly consequential company in the global economy. So tell us a little bit more about what's happened and maybe even specifically a little bit more about how Maersk

Like, the ships themselves are involved, as the report outlines, in some of this activity. Absolutely. So we basically documented—and this is from publicly available information reviewing the actual shipments that have taken place—that from September of last year, 2023, Maersk has shipped millions of pounds of military goods, military cargo, to the Israeli Ministry of Defense from the U.S.

And these are U.S.-manufactured military cargo paid for by the U.S., paid for really by U.S. taxpayers, shipped across 2,000 shipments. And these shipments included hulls, engines, specialized parts for armored personnel carriers, tactical vehicles, specifically a vehicle that I think your audience and a lot of people would recognize, the Oshkosh.

a tactical vehicle where you might have seen the photo of Palestinians blindfolded, stripped, rounded up and placed in the back of this truck, essentially being carried off to be either tortured, imprisoned or whatever.

these ship, these, uh, Maersk ships, basically, um, the way that it operates, they're called transshipment, um, vessels, and they're picking up goods from the port of Houston, taking them to the port of Elizabeth in New Jersey. And then they drop off their cargo in, in Spain, um, at their transshipment pubs. And as you can imagine, Maersk's leases, um,

essentially controls terminals at multiple ports, uh, at the entry of the Mediterranean. And so for Maersk, these vessels, they drop them off in Spain. And from there, Maersk ships that are responsible, they're smaller in size, are responsible for basically, uh, doing a loop around the Mediterranean where they pick up the goods from Spain and then drop them off, uh,

either in Port Said in Egypt or in Turkey or directly towards the actual port in Haifa. And so these vessels, they need to drop off their goods at this entry point. Now, with Spain basically implementing an arms embargo themselves, the Spanish government has spoken extensively about the fact that they're not going to allow any weapons to be shipped to Israel.

either from them directly or through their ports. And so Spain, following the reporting from the intercept covering our report, essentially was forced to respond. And as a result, they banned Maersk from docking these ships at its port. Now, Maersk itself responded.

They first stated that they don't ship any weapons or ammunitions to Israel or conflict zones more broadly and that they take care of sort of humanitarian concerns, all of this sort of jazz. But you have to be really specific about the language here. So Maersk says we don't ship weapons and ammunitions. And this is a it's really a way for them to get around what they're actually doing.

Weapons here refers to, you know, assembled parts, like actual assembled weapons or ammunition, meaning live ammunition involving gunpowder or things of that nature. Basically, what Maersk is doing is shipping everything but that. Right. It's it's so so, for example, they say, well, we're shipping the body of a tank, the engine of a tank, the armor of a tank. But we're not shipping the tank.

But that is the tank. It's being assembled in Israel itself. Gotcha. So the same thing they're doing about like bullets. They'll ship the bullet casing. They'll ship the actual like body of the bullet. And the same for the rockets. They'll ship the body of a rocket. They won't ship the actual ammunition.

And this is because, first of all, it's much more costly to do so. And it involves higher wages for workers at docks to be able to actually carry it because this is really hazardous material and dangerous material. So they send everything but that.

And what we've seen, I mean, if anybody's followed this war so extensively, which is obviously one of the most documented war on social media, you know these exact vehicles. You know the Neymar armored personal carrier, which is what they're responsible for sort of transporting. All of these things are what they're transporting. And they use this turn of phrase, this technical word to avoid basically conceding that they are shipping actual weapons. And

You know, at least in a layman understanding or in every everyday person's understanding of weapon, these are weapons. And for the Spanish government, that's how they understood it as well. And so they've banned them. And now as a result of that, as a result of banning them from being able to dock in Spain, they've moved to Tangier. It's another terminal they essentially control. Tangier is located in Morocco. Morocco has obviously normalized relations with the state of Israel and

Now, the fight has shifted to Morocco because the population there, the actual people of Morocco, are up in arms over this. And we've seen several dock workers walk off the job. They've resigned. We've seen multiple leaks from within. You know, these are essentially Maersk employees because they work at this terminal that's leased by Maersk. Leaking photographs from CCTV footage. They've leaked photos.

you know, essentially a bunch of, a ton of information to media locally. And there's been a mobilizations across Morocco and specifically at this port in Tangier. Now I'll end here because I know I'm talking on for a while, but the main point I want to say is, is that you have to understand this is an extremely important area for MERS to be able to operate the Mediterranean. We know what's occurred essentially through the red sea in Yemen in terms of

the port of Iliad in the south. And we know that MERS needs to ship, to drop off these goods at these specific ports. They have really two options, Morocco and Spain.

If Spain is shut off, Morocco shut off, where are they going to go? And you have to understand that the cargo that these ships carry, the military cargo, is just a small component of a much broader cargo. Most of it consumer goods. And so this is a small aspect. You're jeopardizing this broader cargo.

your broader ability to ship throughout the Mediterranean for something very small on your ship in terms of the space it takes up. And so these developments have been really important for the campaign. And something that we all learned in the pandemic, and I think activists have known for many, many years, is how critical these supply chains are and how when they get mucked up, it becomes very difficult to operate and do the things that you're trying to do. I'm sure Israel is quite keenly aware of that.

Mohamed, while we have you, I wanted to also get your reaction to last week. We got the long awaited news that the ICC was, in fact, issuing arrest warrants for Bibi Netanyahu, Yoav Galan, and also a leader of Hamas. The U.S. is not a party to the ICC. And we actually have something called the Hague Invasion Act that threatens war against the Netherlands. Were they to do anything that we don't want them to do? U.S. Senator Tom Cotton already threatening to invoke the Hague Invasion Act.

But many other countries around the world said, no, we will abide by these arrest warrants. And if Bibi Netanyahu comes here, he will be arrested. Justin Trudeau of Canada was one of the world leaders who made comments to that effect. Let's go ahead and take a listen to that. Now that the ICC has issued warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Khrushchev,

First of all, as Canada has always said, it's really important that everyone abide by international law. This is something we've been calling on from the beginning of the conflict.

We are one of the founding members of the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice. We stand up for international law and we will abide by all the

all the regulations and rulings of the international courts. Trudeau was not alone there. I can put this tear sheet up on the screen. There are 124 member nations of the International Criminal Court. We don't know that they will all comply, but quite a number of them have said that they will. This is a map showing those countries that have responded thus far. They include Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, Lithuania, Canada, Ireland, South Africa, Turkey, Jordan, Norway, and Sweden. How

significant Muhammad do you think that we should we should find all of this to be?

I mean, it's going to really depend on the actual implementation. I do think that the formalization of arrest warrants allows for greater capacity for popular pressure to actually exact pressure on governments and their responsibility or role in this genocide. And so I think, for example, if you look at more recently the EU, the European Union's foreign policy chief, Joseph Borrell, he stated, this is just a few days ago, that EU member states cannot pick and choose which warrants they execute.

And so this is going to create pressure on European Union member states. And I think it's also going to create pressure on companies, multinational companies that are sort of bound by EU law to recognize that complicity in this, you're essentially aiding and abetting a war criminal, right? It's very direct. It's one thing for people to accuse Israel of genocide or accuse Israeli leaders of war crimes. It's another thing for an international institution that

Countless countries are bound by their decisions, bound by their sort of prescripts to actually be then bound formally to implementing these types of sort of rulings. And so I think it's going to be important for us to be able to use this more so than it is to see what happens. Because at the end of the day, I think you all know and your audience knows that the U.S.,

is likely to intervene in one way or another, whether it's through political or economic pressures on these countries. We've seen that in the way that it's happened through the U.S.'s prevention of them, prevention of the United Nations Security Council, ceasefire resolutions.

or whether the pressure placed on the ICJ, the threatening of sanctions coming from Congress against the ICC prosecutor, all of these things, we'll see how they're able to weather them. But I think for companies like Maersk, for example, it's a Danish company, operations throughout Europe, now on notice that

weapons that it's shipping directly to Y'all of Galant in the Ministry of Defense are going towards aiding and abetting war crimes. So they can't run away from this. And they might be potentially legally complicit in the same way with the other countries in the genocide. And that's why the genocide sort of ICJ probability ruling, right? The U.S., U.S. officials, various other officials across the globe, they could be themselves found to be complicit in a very direct way.

I think those are all really important points. Mohammed, tell people where they can find and support the work that you're doing.

Absolutely. I think so you can pass any news movements across social media, especially on Instagram. Mask off Mursk dot com is where you can follow the campaign. And then you also have if you if you if you're a worker, a dock worker, if you work for Mursk, if you have any important information related to Mursk and its its dealings with the Israeli genocide, you can email us at mask off Mursk dot.

I think it's important for people, your audience to know that, you know, this is a campaign that's built on popular power. It's about implementing an arms, uh, people's arms embargo. We heard from seven labor unions sent a letter to, uh,

uh, Joe, uh, to president Biden, telling him, urging him to implement an arms embargo. And we're building a campaign through labor, through the student movement with a strategic target, one that has specific role in this genocide, Maersk, one that is vulnerable because of where it is in friendly countries with powerful unions. One that is also has an incentive to change, has an incentive to stop its complicity because of the small part that this, uh,

cargo plays in its overall operations. And so, you know, we're trying to target ethical investment screens and get those implemented and add in Maersk to it. And so, you know, if you're a union, if you're a member of a union, if you're a dock worker, if you're a student, you can become involved in this campaign. You can reach out to us and talk to us. I think what's going to be important is for us to organize democratically through the sectors, through these popular institutions like trade unions, to actually educate

And this genocide, because I think I was listening to your show last week and there was an Israeli journalist on and he said he believes this war is going to last for a few years. The occupation of Gaza, the starvation of an entire people is going to last for a few years. And I think it's on us people to implement this arms embargo because it's not going to come from the U.S.

These rulings in the ICC or wherever are only as effectual as we make them. And so that's what our role will be. So I look forward to, you know, coming back on this show, sharing with you the developments as the Mask Off MERS campaign continues to grow. And hopefully next time we talk, it'll be about how MERS ended its complicity in this genocide. I think it's a really important movement. Mohamed, thank you so much for your time. And we definitely definitely stay in touch with us and keep us updated about what's going on.

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Crystal's going to be talking about the future of MSNBC, but I guess, Crystal, this is a rare moment of agreement between you and Elon Musk because he's also really not confident that MSNBC is going to be able to sustain itself in this corporate restructuring, the spinoff of properties that Comcast is doing right now, which leaves the fate of MSNBC hanging in the balance and also some other companies. It's not just MSNBC, but MSNBC is- Yeah, Kyle's very invested in the future of the Gulf Channel is actually tied up in this.

I'm not surprised to learn about that. Now, they didn't decide to spin off Bravo, which is huge news for Ryan and me. Oh, that's right. Less disruption to the housewives. Kyle said if they take away the Golf Channel, he's doing his own January 6th. Oh, my gosh. He's on the record with that one. But at Comcast headquarters, like, he's in Midtown with the bros, and they're just taking their nine irons to the window. Him and a bunch of 70-year-olds. Sorry.

Actually, that's exactly what would happen. And maybe you. But that's a key Donald Trump base right there. That's true. Great point. Yeah, don't mess with that. I'm sure Trump loves the Golf Channel. I think the Golf Channel would come out fine. So Elon Musk, though, appears to be, you can never quite tell, but appears to be flirting with a

purchase of MSNBC. I'm not sure exactly how that would play out, but let's go ahead and put this first element up on the screen. The memes were relentless over the course of the weekend. So Donald Trump Jr. said, hey, Elon Musk, I have the funniest idea ever in response to a post that said Comcast is putting MSNBC up for sale. CNN just announced massive layoffs coming. Maybe the new owners will figure out that lying nonstop to your audience is a lousy business model. Elon replies, how much does it cost?

And then we can put the next meme on the screen, which is what greeted me as I was scrolling Twitter on Saturday morning. It says, if you're listening to this, you're missing out on a hell of a visual. And lead us not into temptation, dot, dot, dot. And it is a monk with the caption, Elon Musk trying not to buy, and a woman with the MSNBC logo obscuring her nether regions. Yeah.

Just classy. Just make America classy again. And then, I mean, this has just been blowing up all weekend. Joe Rogan jumps in and says, if you buy MSNBC, I would like Rachel Maddow's job. I will wear the same outfit and glasses, and I will tell the same lies. And Elon replied, deal with a fire emoji, a rocket emoji, and a laughing, crying emoji. Crystal, as a resident MSNBC expert,

Yes. How on a scale of love it to really love it. How much are you supporting Elon Musk by MSNBC? I honestly feel like it's kind of irrelevant because as I'm about to go into in depth, MSNBC, like you did it already. It's already dead. It's not going to occupy the same position. It may, you know, hobble on, et cetera, et cetera. But they won't have the NBC News journalistic resources behind them. Right.

So then they're just, you know, a bunch of like not that interesting talking heads. And their whole theory of the world has been destroyed by Donald Trump winning and by then Joe and Mika going and like bending the knees. So like if you're not about Trump resistance, what are you exactly? And, you know, they face the same business trends that all the cable news nets face. Fox News is in a better position simply because they have a larger audience. But these are all aging demographics, right?

declining year over year. People are moving to the podcast world. You know, this is the podcast election. Independent media is only going to grow. No guarantee that that landscape is superior, by the way, to the one that we already have. But I just don't know why you would buy this asset at this point, no matter who you are, when it's already effectively been neutralized in terms of the ideological warfare space. Well, this is also...

The entire kind of conversation surrounding X and Elon Musk's buying X was that these sort of old media properties are dead compared with places like social media. And he brought Tucker onto X, for example, because it's more powerful than Fox News in theory if you're able to have a massive audience. And it's more sustainable in the long term if you're able to have a massive audience. Now, I think CNN has recently gotten sort of smart about how –

their off-ramp could look. They do big numbers on YouTube. There's some recognition at some of these old sort of dinosaur businesses that

And there's something they can kind of transfer. They can do both at the same time for now. I don't know if that's actually the case, but they're trying. MSNBC is not one of those places. And I don't know why it would be worth it for Elon Musk even. I mean, he clearly thinks it would be worth it just for the memes. Yeah, I guess. Maybe. I guess that'd be the only thing that would be worth it for. Because, I mean, you already have plenty of conservative, ideological conservative people

pro-Trump media out there, like adding one more to the list, I don't think is really going to particularly help their cause. Much savvier in terms of the ideological project was buying Twitter. So I don't know if he's serious about this stuff or not, but it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Well, you know what's interesting is CNBC is also being spun off. And Donald Trump apparently really likes CNBCs.

newly in love with CNBC. And so, I mean, there's something, I think that's actually kind of interesting. If there's something that could potentially be done with someone, I don't think it would be Elon Musk, but like you would have to have someone, a quote unquote disruptor who recognizes that the future of cable news is not super sustainable at the level that it's at.

and that would require like really dramatic you might have to actually do a cnn plus um because as ridiculous as it sounds that's always my like least popular take of the last several years is that cnn plus was not the dumbest thing in the world it was implemented in the dumbest possible way but like they were they saw what fox nation was doing which was getting people to subscribe

because that ad money, the ad revenue for cable is going to dry up. So you just need to be looking at different revenue streams. And so if you have someone that's actually going to do it,

Maybe you can turn it around, but the staff, the hosts, part of the reason, I guess, is like the Morning Joe hosts are making tons of money. - Oh, tons of money. - They're making tons of money. - And not just the hosts, but the operation there is so much larger, right? The number of production staff, the overhead of the sets and the design and the hair and the makeup and all those things. It's just like the business model does not business anymore. It doesn't make sense.

You know, when especially you no longer have news gathering resources. OK, then you're just in the hot take game like, you know, rando on YouTube with a microphone and a camera who's spending nothing on production. So none of these people there. I shouldn't say none. Very few of these people have their own organic audiences that will follow them to wherever. I think Rachel Maddow is an exception to that. There may be a few others, but by and large.

people watch because you were on this network. That's it. And so if you pull them out of that space and they're trying to make it in the Wild West with all the rest of us, like...

Good luck. They have a couple big podcasts, by the way. That's one thing that always gets overlooked about MSNBC. They've been sort of successful in that space. Rachel has a podcast that does well, right? Right. I don't know if it's actually an MSNBC or an NBC product, though, because that's a critical distinction now. And she has her own production company. I don't know if the podcast is like her thing in collaboration with MSNBC or what. I don't really know. It's a great question, but I mean—

Phil Griffin runs her production company for like her long form stuff. Oh, this is actually an MSNBC production. And that's again, like this is all relevant because to your point, so much of what was MSNBC, I know you're going to talk about this in a second, but it's based on the relationship with NBC News. So much of the resources comes from NBC News. So much of it is like a house of cards. It's like built on the foundation of NBC News. Without that, you're in trouble.

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So MSNBC appears to be in total freefall as ratings decline, Comcast announces a spinoff, and we've just learned their biggest star, Rachel Maddow, is taking a multi-million dollar pay cut.

Things are so rough that as we were just discussing, Elon Musk is even joking, question mark, about buying the network outright. It's hard to see what the point of that would be, though, since there isn't much left of the place to catch and kill. An article from Lachlan Cartwright on the Anklar substack lays out the state of panic and chaos that has gripped the network post-election.

In addition to getting the scoop about Maddow accepting a salary cut from $30 million to $25 million, I know, poor thing, right? Lachlan also scoops that multiple anchors, including Reverend Al Sharpton and Jonathan Capehart, could be on the chopping block entirely.

Apparently, in a tense meeting with the new spinoff company leadership, Mark Lazarus, there were more questions than answers about how the network would operate and what the future held for the network's talent, especially those people like Peter Alexander who pulled double duty over NBC and MSNBC. They mused about whether perhaps the network could partner with an outlet like maybe the Washington Post to handle news gatherings since NBC's journalistic resources would be staying with the parent company Comcast.

The whole thing is a giant cluster and the details are pretty interesting, but ultimately maybe not all that important because while the network might continue for some time in some form or another, it may look and feel something like what MSNBC has been. That previous network is now dead.

It's gone. And it wouldn't surprise me if the whole thing actually just collapsed as surely as neoliberalism has been dealt a final crushing blow by Trump's victory. One thing is for sure, MSNBC will no longer serve the role that it once did as perhaps the most significant space of liberal consensus making. Here, like nowhere else, consent was manufactured among the Democratic Party's liberal base with a worldview and tactical philosophy that was dictated by the party's elites. No more.

With its worldview and credibility shattered, it will now at best be one among many competing ideological spaces alongside riffraff like yours truly and many others in the alternative media space.

And you know what's funny? It wasn't actually Donald Trump who put the final nail in MSNBC's coffin, though he certainly helped hasten their decline. The crushing blow came from some of the network's biggest stars, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. With a single act of cowardly self-preservation and capitulation of Donald Trump, they revealed to the entire MSNBC liberal audience what a bunch of spineless frauds they actually are.

When they decided to turn on a dime from calling Trump Hitler to voyaging to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring, they nuked not only their credibility, but that of the entire network, exposing in a single act how their entire cosplay, a brave resistance over eight years, was really just for show and for personal benefit.

Last week for Crystal Kyle and Friends, I interviewed a former Morning Joe regular, Steve Schmidt, and he was scathing in his assessment of what that pair had become. Take a listen. And there's additional reporting, and I wrote about it today from Puck News, that the motivation, of course, for this is fear. They're terrified. And they went down to Mar-a-Lago and they did what they had to do to cover and protect their asses.

which is not the thing to do if you hold a seat which you hold with importance in the hierarchy of American journalism. So Mika justified this by saying Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Pole, the Jimmy Carter-era national security advisor, would have appreciated this

because he was a diplomat and he would have processed this as a diplomatic act. Nonsense. He would have regarded it as a capitulate act. He would have seen it for exactly what it was. And it has created a profound crisis of credibility at MSNBC

which actually won't exist for very much longer at all as we enter into the early hours of the Trump administration. Crisis of credibility. Let me just take a little bit of time to explain why Joe and Mika's act was so devastating because that matters for what is going to happen next.

So MSNBC had a particular ideology and worldview in the Trump era, which was very tightly controlled. This worldview had two central tenets. Number one, opposition to Trump is everything. Every issue position is defined in reaction to Trump. Every candidate is analyzed in relation to how they feel about Trump. This is how you end up with a bizarre world in which Liz Cheney is a hero because she hates Trump and white working class men writ large are villains because they tend to vote for Trump.

Number two, the way to defeat Trump runs through establishment Democratic politicians in collaboration with never-Trump resistors. Any candidate or issue set that colors outside the lines of Clinton-style triangulation is to be rejected as unsafe and unserious for the task of defeating Donald Trump.

If you didn't agree with those two central tenets, that Trump was everything and that the way to defeat Trump was establishment Democrats, you would not last long on that network to the extent that you made it there at all. In this calculus, Nicole Wallace, who cheered for the Iraq War, was a hero and welcome ideological fellow traveler and someone, well, maybe like me, who thought the way to defeat fascism was through social democracy, just as FDR did, was a villain.

The one-two punch of Trump winning and Joe and Mika's capitulation to Trump detonated both of those pillars, which were holding up the entire MSNBC universe. So their theory for how to beat Trump was totally broken, and their posture as brave resistance to Trump was utterly shattered.

Trump destroyed their theory that establishment Democrat politics was the way to win, the key to electability. Kamala ran the platonic ideal of that MSNBC campaign. She ran to the center. She bragged about her Glock. She pivoted hard right on immigration. She even buried her own popular price gouging proposals and ran around the country with the likes of Liz Cheney, Bill Clinton, and Richie Torres.

And the corporatists can run around all they want trying to blame the left for this campaign. But this was their candidate, their campaign, their tactics, their consultants, their media approach, all of it. They own it. And their theory that this establishment approach was the way to defeat Trump was so incontrovertibly destroyed that even people like Chris Murphy and David Brooks have been forced to admit, you know what, maybe, just maybe, Bernie had a little bit of a point.

Joe and Mika's decision to run to Trump to bend the knee provided the death knell for the other pillar of the MSNBC worldview: that resistance to Trump is everything. If the network is no longer about opposing Trump, what is this network about at all? The whole thing, including the universe of heroes and villains and which issues matter and which don't, all of that depended on Trump as the ultimate final boss of politics.

It's what could unify Joy Reid and Chris Hayes, who are more or less left liberals, with Republicans like Nicole Wallace and Joe Scarborough. Now Joe and Mika are running around talking about working on common ground with Donald Trump. What common ground could there be with a man that weeks ago they were calling literal Hitler? Unfortunately, as Adam Johnson writes...

There are actually plenty of areas where Joe and Mika and other establishment Democrats may be happy to collaborate with Trump in all of the worst ways possible. After all, morning Joe was as deranged as any program when it came to cracking down on pro-Palestine protesters, smearing them as anti-Semitic, demanding crackdowns on speech. Some Democrats already happily handing Trump power to dismantle any nonprofit group he deems to be supporting terrorism.

Already, of course, we've seen Democrats accept the Trumpian worldview that pins the nation's ills on immigrants and seeks a brutal crackdown on migration. I'm sure they'll be happy to find common ground as well on social safety net cuts of the type contemplated by Elon. After all, Morning Joe is the same show that slobbered all over Paul Ryan and treated him like the golden boy of politics.

I am quite confident Joe and Mika will also be happy to cheerlead the next war as well, since they've, I think, literally never seen a war they didn't think we should endlessly fight. And of course, they can find common ground in their obsession with power. Trump in having it, Joe and Mika in orbiting, flattering, and groveling at its feet.

Now, whether their show even continues in the new post-spinoff world in order to explore all of this copious common ground, well, that's another question, since already, even as the shows continue, in truth, only rubble remains after the ideological underpinnings have collapsed.

Now, if MSNBC was actually a liberal outlet, I would experience its death as a loss. After all, liberalism as an ideology has plenty of failings, but also some strengths. Liberal journalism has continued to make important contributions in the Trump years, and in the absence of anything approaching a mainstream anti-capitalist media, liberalism serves an important role as an adversarial force towards Trump himself and Trumpism as an ideology.

Sometimes, too. Genuinely brave commentary did also slip through the cracks on MSNBC. For example, it was the only place where you could find any significant criticism of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. But MSNBC's goal was not to advance a liberal ideology. It was to advance and protect a corrupt Democratic Party elite. And that's the reason why there is very little to mourn in their death.

It's bitterly ironic that the very network most centered around defeating Trump did the most to grease the skids for his ascent by blocking the Bernie left populist movement, most equipped to actually rival Trump's ideological project. They wanted to beat Trump and protect their executives class interests. Those two goals were mutually exclusive. And when it came down to it, the goal of protecting their class interests was vastly more important to them than the goal of defeating Trump.

Now, the path forward for media, to me, kind of mirrors that of the country at large. Most likely, everything is just going to continue to get worse. That's the most likely outcome. The gutting of mainstream outlets, rather than leading to some flourishing of vibrant, honest, courageous independent media, instead leads to a bunch of even more shamelessly corrupt sycophantic slop.

As liberals brush themselves off and look around, they could easily be consumed by a liberal version of the same deranged conspiracy nonsense and partisan cheerleading that right-wing influencers find so much money and success peddling. As trust in mainstream institutions faded, charlatans poured in. It feels like we're plunging deeper into a post-reality world, and liberals gave us a preview in Russiagate of how easily they could be swept up by fantasy and delusion.

But Trump's win has also created a possibility for something new and better that wasn't there before. Without the liberal establishment media enforcers, what could grow organically left of center that might effectively rival Trumpism? What would that look like?

What candidates could gain traction? What issues could be championed? What media outlets could gain purchase, traction, genuine sway? MSNBC was the central weapon for convincing liberals that caring about things like, oh, I don't know, healthcare, unions, wages, housing, that all of that was a luxury, that wanting a genuinely democratic process to select a candidate was pure frivolity. All distractions which could hobble the party in their quest to defeat the ultimate bad guy, Trump.

Now, as it turns out, delivering for people materially and modeling a commitment to democracy were critical in that fight for democracy against Trump. And if not for MSNBC's years of gaslighting and manipulation, I'm pretty sure that would have been obvious. And now, perhaps, it will be.

Although in Trump's business career, he was a builder. In politics, he really knows how to destroy. Might something better be built in the rubble? We've got no choice now but to find out. And Emily, you know, it really isn't... And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com.

Thank you guys so much for watching. If you're able to support us over at breakingpoints.com, that would be amazing. Help us do more things like the cool focus group with AOC Trump voters, getting to talk to them. I got a lot out of that. I hope you guys enjoyed that as well. And if you cannot subscribe or you're already a subscriber, please like and share our videos on YouTube because that really helps us out a lot. There are a lot of people searching for new media locations at this moment, and we would love to be one of those destinations. So Emily, thank you as always. And Emily,

to be back in tomorrow for another pre Thanksgiving show. So we will see you guys then.

Did you know Tide has been upgraded to provide an even better clean in cold water? Tide is specifically designed to fight any stain you throw at it, even in cold. Butter? Yep. Chocolate ice cream? Sure thing. Barbecue sauce? Tide's got you covered. You don't need to use warm water. Additionally, Tide Pods let you confidently fight tough stains with new Coldzyme technology. Just remember, if it's gotta be clean, it's gotta be Tide.

We'll be right back.

Amica. Empathy is our best policy.