Deep Dive
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She just wrote a nine-page paper about him. She's, like, very excited. She's like, I want to say the most I can about the fewest number of days in office. She loves him. How old is your daughter? She's 13. I mean, she has a bright future at places like 538. Yeah.
Hello and welcome to this Trump inauguration edition of the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. It's about half past three in the afternoon Eastern Time. So former President Donald Trump and now President Donald Trump was sworn in to be the 47th president of the United States just hours ago.
He gave his inaugural address in the Rotunda at the Capitol. The event was indoors because of the freezing temperatures in Washington, D.C. And he gave something of a two-part inaugural address. He gave the usual sort of inaugural address in the Rotunda. And then he met supporters afterwards where he gave something of a part two of his inaugural address where he explicitly said that folks like J.D. Vance and his wife had suggested that he exclude certain pieces
pieces from his actual inaugural address and that he wanted to talk about them in that context.
He said he was going to usher in a, quote, golden age in America. And he talked about some of the executive actions that he plans on signing during his first day or so in office. They really run the gambit from things that were completely expected on immigration and the like to things like renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
America. As of this very moment in time, the only executive actions he has signed pertain to making it a rule that on all inaugurations going forward, the flag will fly at full staff. Right now, it was being flown at half staff because of the mourning of President Jimmy Carter. But now, forevermore, even if we're in a mourning period, the flag will fly at full staff.
along with some other actions that include installing his government as Joe Biden's administration leaves office. But we do expect a
a lot of executive actions coming down the pipeline throughout the day. And so we're going to talk about some of what we expect. We're going to talk about some of what we heard so far today. And here with me to do all of that is senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich, welcome to the podcast, Nathaniel, joining us from D.C. How cold is it there? Okay.
I will say it was not that cold. The wind chills were pretty chilly, but they got up to like around 30 degrees. Like the snow that has been on the ground, like there were puddles, there was liquid water out there. I don't know. You know, I am not a meteorologist and, you know, a
crowd expert and event planner, but I felt like the cold was, it was certainly not as bad as they were preparing us for. All right. Also here with us is senior researcher Mary Radcliffe. Welcome to the podcast, Mary. Hey, Galen. How's it going? It's going pretty well. Going pretty well. Also here with us is senior elections analyst Jeffrey Skelly. Hey, Jeff. Is it any colder up in Vermont? Yeah, it is about...
I think 14 degrees outside where I'm at. So about half the temperature in DC. And it sounds like just, this is based on some data I just found from Hearst television that put together the coldest temperatures for inauguration days. And if the temperature is around 30 degrees, that puts it in league with,
Barack Obama's in 2009, Jimmy Carter's in 1977, and Franklin Roosevelt's in 1941, where temperatures were in the high 20s, 28, 29 degrees, but warmer than JFK's, 22 degrees in 1961, and warmer than Ronald Reagan's, which was apparently seven degrees in 1985, and it was moved indoors, his second inaugural. So.
So interesting. Just, you know, weather and politics, they go together. Yeah. So the official temperature at the airport at noon was 27 degrees. So it's right in the same ballpark. The fifth coldest on record. We appreciate the exactness, folks. We got a lot to cover today. We recorded basically a 30 minute pre-podcast before we ever pressed record.
record as evidence of how much we can really get into. We've been told by the producers that we need to tone it down a little bit for the official podcast. We'll see how we do. Let's start with the actual speech. How did it compare to...
Trump's inaugural address in 2017. Nathaniel, I know you went back and actually watched it as a comparison point. And maybe how did it compare to your expectations otherwise? I did. Yeah, it was a very dark speech, right?
It started off in the kind of the traditional way addressing the dignitaries who were gathered and did a kind of very Trumpy thing of saying, you know, we're taking the power back from the D.C. establishment type of thing. But then he really painted a very dark picture of America under the Biden administration and was pretty pointed in blaming the Biden administration for those things.
And then he started going through all of the executive actions that he's planning on taking to, you know, quote unquote, make America great again. And I do remember that back in 2017, everybody was kind of taken aback by Trump's speech, which, of course, had the famous line American carnage describing, you know, how things
not going great under the Obama administration either. But and so this speech really did kind of startle me. But I was like, oh, maybe maybe this was just what Trump did in 2017. So I went back and watched that 2017 speech. I would say this was significantly darker and also more norm breaking in terms of becoming basically a campaign speech. Right. It was attacking his political opponents and laying out his policy proposals and the things that he's going to do, whereas this 2017 speech had those dark elements, but kind of
Came back to a more aspirational, lofty rhetoric type of thing that is the normal fare that you hear in inauguration addresses. So I do think that that 2017 address was kind of maybe one step, you know, if we're thinking about this whole thing, that was Trump 1.0. This is Trump 2.0.
And some of the things he talked about in front of his supporters in part two of the inaugural address that he excluded from part one were, you know, pardoning January 6th rioters, for example, which we do expect him to do if the reports are correct. He also didn't mention trying to end birthright citizenship in his inaugural address. He didn't actually even mention it in part two either, but that's still something that we...
expect. Jeffrey and Mary, I'm curious what you took away from both parts one and two of those addresses. I mean, I do agree with Nathaniel. I thought this was kind of a dark speech, the official inaugural address. I was also surprised by how campaign-y it felt. I mean, he spent a piece of the speech talking about how well he won the election, right? Like all the swing states and the popular vote and whatever. And like, that is true. And the demographic
cross tabs, Mary. He put that in for you. It's well, OK. It just felt out of place a little bit. You know, this is the kind of speech where you are addressing all of America. You are not addressing just the people who voted for you. And it felt a little weird to have some of those elements in there. It felt like
He wanted to be giving a rally speech and his advisors were like, well, you can't go full rally, which is why he did this second thing. I do think it was interesting that that he had sort of two parts to an inauguration speech. That's different. OK, we knew he was going to talk about immigration.
And then he did talk about the economy a little bit, cost of living, talked about how, you know, you rein in spending in order to reduce inefficiencies and make things work better and...
Save costs. And then he started talking about basically manifest destiny. And I was like, all right, he's including this in an actual inauguration inaugural speech. He used that phrase. He was the first president in history. I went back and looked to ever use that phrase. I would have thought James K. Polk or somebody would have used it. But nope. Yeah. So, you know, he talked about specifically talked about the Panama Canal and wanting it back.
And that Panama had essentially broken its promises or treaty agreements with the United States. And so, yeah, U.S. president specifically talking about expansionism. It's one thing for him to mention it in passing or to talk about it in an interview or to make a statement about it at a rally. But it was...
Interesting and, you know, pretty striking that he chose to bring it up in his inaugural address. Yeah, we were all chatting a bit as he was making the address. And the comment that I made to you all was something along the lines of, OK, he has finally gotten America under.
along for the ride when it comes to his biggest issues. Right back in 2015, 2016, Americans weren't really aligned with him on immigration, even if his staunchest supporters were really into it. Now, fast forward eight years, he's got Americans on his side on some of these big issues. I mean, immigration being number one, but of course, they have more faith in him when it comes to the economy and law and order and things like that.
And we didn't hear very much about all of the things that he's won Americans over on. All of a sudden, we're talking about all of these new issues. We're talking about Greenland. We're talking about Panama. We're talking about going to Mars. And it just struck me as...
you know, I don't know, maybe this is too broad of a brushstroke, but like how frequent it is that presidents over interpret their mandate. Right. You got elected talking about, well, because Americans had trust in you on some issues that they cared about. And now that you're here, you're talking about things that Americans don't care about at all. I noticed this too, Galen, actually. He only said the word inflation two times.
in the official inauguration speech. And so I went back and found some polling about this. So Signal did a poll in January asking about what the priorities were for the Trump administration. And reducing inflation and lowering the cost of living is like the highest priority, right? The number of people that say that's extremely or very important is
85 percent, 85 percent of Americans said that is among their top priorities. Higher than anything else. He barely mentioned it. Wait, OK. And what's the polling on Mars, Mary? How what percentage of Americans? I'm sorry, they didn't include that. They didn't include that in the survey because we just heard about that today.
No, but I want to I really want to like underscore this point, too. And he said in his like after speech to the supporters in the visitor center, he specifically said like, you know, people said like I want on inflation, but like, you know, I didn't really care about inflation. Like, you know, yes, there are only so many ways you can say that like food is more expensive, but like.
My big thing is immigration. And like, obviously, yes, like Americans were also concerned about immigration and they do. They have largely come around to immigration policies. But like if that's your interpretation, dude, of like the quote unquote mandate that got you here, that's not going to serve you well. Yeah. And not only that, but Americans have high expectations for him on immigration.
dealing with inflation. There was a YouGovCBS poll this weekend that had more Americans believing prices will go down under Trump than that prices will go up or stay the same.
I mean, it's a plurality, right? There's three options here. But the idea that people believe prices are either going to go down or stay the same. I mean, it was only 36 percent that thought we would see prices continue to go up, which is crazy. 40 percent saying they think their prices are going to go down. And he's like, oh, whatever. I don't even care about that. People have such high expectations for this. And he doesn't seem like he's taking that seriously at all. Which, to be clear, we should have every expectation that prices will continue to go up.
I mean, we're not economists on this podcast. Deflation is highly unlikely. I know how to read a graph. Well, deflation is not only highly unlikely, but would be a very bad thing, usually for an economy. Right.
I mean, what most people would say is we want prices to keep rising, but at a slower rate, not 9 percent like the summer of 2022. And at the same rate as wages. We're slower than wages, right? Let's make Americans richer. Come on, Nathaniel. Sorry, I wouldn't be a good president either. OK, is there anything else that we want to discuss?
pull out from the speech before we get into the executive actions, because I don't know, just visually, it was quite a remarkable thing to watch. The quarters in the rotunda at the Capitol are quite close. And so when, for example, Trump is talking about how bad of a
President Biden was. Biden is like the closest person to him in the shot, literally right next to him. You can see the reactions of all of the former presidents and the tech executives and whatever to almost everything that he says, which that was another sort of remarkable thing. We had Jeff Bezos. We had Mark Zuckerberg. We had, you know, some folks who were in the closest
called down friends and family section that you could not have imagined four years ago. Gilded age 2.0. Let's let's do it. You know, let's have extremely wealthy people in places of, you know, yeah, it's the late 19th century just keeps looming larger and larger to me. William McKinley got a really glowing shout out in this inaugural address. And he's like, yeah, we will keep we will go back to calling Denali.
Mount McKinley in Alaska, you know, the tallest mountain in the United States. Because he said he liked his tariff policies. Yeah. And he was he was pro tariff. They raised tariffs. Yeah. So, yes. OK. I am actually curious because I know that Mary pulled these numbers. Can we talk about the popularity of renaming the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America? People hate renaming stuff in general. In this one in particular, I had a Harvard Harris poll from just last week that had a
support for renaming Gulf of Mexico as Gulf of America at 28 percent, opposition at 72 percent. They did not give an undecided option. So it's almost three to one against. To Jeffrey's point, right. These are not high salience issues. People care about inflation and then to a lesser extent, immigration. And that was my point.
Yes, that was that's been all of our points. But like, right. No, going back to what you said, though, Galen, about like presidents overreading their mandate, it really is the the tale as old as time. And like you are seeing in real time why the pendulum tends to swing against the party in power, because a president just does not seem capable of just being like, you know what, I'm just going to fix the little thing that the president that people told me to fix it, not that it would be easy to to fix inflation or make people at least kind of keep
prices steady the way that people want. But like, you know, Donald Trump, I mean, we'll see with some of these executive actions how people react. But yeah, I mean, to be fair to Trump, this is, as Nathaniel was saying, this is very normal. And part of it has to do with how party politics works and the fact that
You got supporters who helped put you in this place, and the people who are loudest tend to be most committed to the viewpoints of the president who got elected or the party and
So the president's looking to reward those people by pursuing policies that they support. And those policies oftentimes are not exactly broadly popular. Sometimes they are, but sometimes they're unpopular, but they still pursue them because it's in the
Sort of the, you know, it's a goal of the party. Overturning Roe v. Wade, not popular, but he appointed the Supreme Court justices who got it done eventually. And so, like, in that sense, conservatives feel like, you know, he achieved this end that we've been going for. It's just a past example. Yeah, but that's why it's so weird that he spent so much time in this speech talking about this expansionism and this, you know, sort of go west young man world thing.
because that's also really unpopular, right? Like the things that he got elected for, the things that are popular, it felt like he didn't spend the time on those things. And instead, he's taking this weird pivot, as you said, Galen, to stuff that's like he didn't campaign on. And just to put some numbers around that. So Emerson College asked earlier this month if the United States should add more states or territories or keep it as it is.
20% said we should add more states and territories. 67% said to keep the territories as they are. And if you look at specifically around the three that he's really focused on, Greenland, Panama Canal, and Canada, a bunch of different pollsters asked us with a bunch of different question wording. I just grabbed them all up and averaged them together, all the ones I saw from January. All three are underwater double digits. Reclaiming the Panama Canal is the most popular of these underwater by 16 points.
I don't understand what's happening. Well, the Mars piece of this seems to be coming from folks like Elon Musk.
And that's where you get to this point where there are activists in the party who want certain things like a tougher stance on immigration, like the Stephen Miller wing of the party and Steve Bannon. Like, you know, the people who have been there for a long time, the people who I would say have won a part of the argument, not just because their argument was persuasive, but because the facts on the ground have changed a lot since 2015, um,
There's the traditional conservatives who want more religion in American life or more traditional values, whatever. And then there's the tech CEOs who are focused on things that are pretty unmoored from the average American's experience and who are also arguing with the immigration hawks about H-1B visas and all of this kind of stuff. And that's where you start to see, like, I don't think it's in Trump's best interest to sort of
chart this new agenda forward, which is focused on the biggest priorities of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg. But weirdly, that stuff is getting a decent amount of play. It's even more complicated maybe than the usual over-interpreting your mandate. It's not like Joe Biden...
you know, putting too many funds into the American rescue plan or doing too much on, you know, climate change with the inflation reduction act. It's him pivoting and saying, actually, what I really care about is, um,
I don't know, like making Puerto Rico a state and maybe Democrats support that. But it's not anything he ever talked about during the campaign. People do want to go to Mars, though. People do want to go to Mars. Of course they do. I'm an idiot then. No, going to Mars, going to Mars is awesome. Do it. It must have been that the last time we had a news cycle about this was in 2019 because I found a whole bunch of polls from 2019 about this.
So I have a CBS News poll in 2019 that just straight up asks if people would favor or oppose sending astronauts to explore Mars. And we've got favor 76 percent, opposed 21 percent. But I will say I found another one from Gallup that in the question wording reminds people that sending astronauts to Mars would cost money.
a lot of money and people still favor it, but only by a seven point market share. That's actually pretty impressive. Like to have it be weighted that much and still be supportive. OK, well, then let's take Mars out of the conversation because clearly that is popular. It's just it's just very cool. I mean, look, there is there is the possibility. Another angle to this is worth considering, which is if Trump is worried that he can't lower costs or make people think the costs have lowered,
pursue other things that people might eventually be find either a distraction or positive in the long run. Like people will end up being like, well, I'm really glad he did that or that was good for the country. So I think it's worth remembering that kind of throwing that stuff out there is also a
perhaps part like a part of this and obviously talk about immigration clearly but just adding in some other things knowing that it will be challenging and I think there was just a report the other day about now there's some expectation that inflation might pop up again under some of Trump's policies and
You know, what's he want people to be talking about? What does he want his supporters to be talking about and focused on? And as usual, it would be very interesting to see how much of a grace period Trump gets before people start judging this as his economy, for example. I mean, one thing they talked about on the campaign trail that we didn't hear today are those freedom cities, right, where he's going to build all of these new American cities and he's going to move around.
all of the sort of civil service jobs out of Washington, D.C. to, you know, sort of remaking the American map in a way, which I, you know...
I think in general, you know, taking power away from Washington, D.C. is pretty popular. Building brand new cities is incredibly hard. And to Mary's point about industrial policy last week on the podcast, you know, putting a lot of effort into things that Americans won't bear the fruits of for decades to come is not maybe good immediate or near term politics.
I do want to get to the executive actions that we expect later today, or maybe by the time you're listening to this podcast, but first, a break. Today's podcast is brought to you by BetterHelp. How do you stay cozy during the winter months? For some, wrapping up in a blanket with a mug of hot chocolate or watching a movie with family is the best way to spend the month of December. Well, therapy is also a great way to bring yourself some comfort that never goes away, even when the season changes.
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Within a matter of hours, or perhaps this has already happened by the time you're listening to this podcast, Trump will begin signing executive actions. And of
according to all accounts, we expect him to break records in terms of the number of executive actions he signs in the first day or in the first couple days. The number that's been cited is in the range of 100 or so. But of course, we do not have any news yet about the actual number. We do have reporting on outlines of what to expect. And they address things like immigration and the border. They address things like
and the civil service, things like, you know, how gender is considered by the federal government, some of the renaming questions that we've already talked about, other things like bringing the federal workforce back to working in person. And the list goes on and include, you know, tariffs and trade provisions and the like. Some of these will be
be challenged in court, perhaps all of them. And some of them will probably be likelier to stick around than others. Others will likely need Congress to actually put some teeth into them. And we're going to see how that all plays out over the coming days and months. But
I think we should start with immigration because that has been the most talked about when it comes to declaring a national emergency at the southern border that would, you know, presumably give Trump the ability to use the National Guard in trying to secure the border, demarcating, uh,
gangs as terrorist organizations, which would give him more power in terms of pursuing gang members and things like that in the United States. The other one that we've already mentioned here is Antifa.
ending birthright citizenship, which is literally in the 14th Amendment and to, you know, as far as we understand, would require a constitutional amendment in order to change. And then there's other things like reinitiating remain in Mexico and trying to end catch and release and the like. From everything that I have discussed, Mary, I'm curious, what do Americans support? And if we know, like, what's the likeliest to actually stay in place once Trump
you know, signs these executive orders. This has been really fascinating, actually, because in general, we see in the polls, if you ask a really like pared down question about whether Americans support deporting millions of undocumented immigrants, you generally get support for that. And it can it ranges in how how much support generally in the 50s or low 60s. I think you would get support for that. But it's
If you ask more nuanced questions, you really get more nuanced answers. So if you ask if you would like to detain and deport immigrants who've lived here for more than 10 years and pay taxes, we get opposition on that. So The Wall Street Journal had a survey out this weekend that had opposition to that negative 44 net.
Right. So people don't want to deport undocumented immigrants that are functioning members of society, even though if you ask them sort of the more general question, they say, yes, we do want to deport lots of undocumented immigrants. The other thing I would mention is, you know, this this national emergency, the stated rationale is to free up resources, in particular military resources, right?
to assist in plans to remove undocumented immigrants from the country and secure the border. Um, and there's actually pretty stark opposition to the use of the military for any sort of border enforcement or, um, immigration related stuff. So Axios Ipsos had a survey out recently, um, where Americans, uh,
opposed using money allocated to the U.S. military to pay for deportation by a margin of 41 points.
and opposed using active duty military to find and detain undocumented immigrants in the U.S. interior by a margin of 21 points. So this idea of this executive action making it possible to take these further steps, I don't know that that's going to be something Americans feel good about. Yeah. And in terms of, you know, to get to your other question, Galen, obviously none of us on this podcast are lawyers, but I think the
The general understanding is that most of these immigration executive orders or potential executive orders, actions, whatever you want to call them, are within his purview to do. Obviously, things like the Remain in Mexico policy, you know, they have been the policy in the past. The big exception, of course, is the birthright citizenship piece, which, as you mentioned, is literally in the Constitution and will certainly invite a court challenge. And I would imagine even with a fairly
fairly conservative Supreme Court, many of whom were appointed by him, would, I think, pretty easily be struck down if it even makes it that far. I should say also people generally oppose ending birthright citizenship. There's a couple of surveys that have slightly different question wording, but all of them sort of have to give a little like preamble, like, hey, what is birthright citizenship? So people know what they're being asked.
In the survey from the Wall Street Journal that I mentioned, ending birthright citizenship is underwater by 33 points. In a survey from the New York Times and Ipsos, they specifically mention ending birthright citizenship for people in the country illegally, and it's still underwater by 14 points. So even when you put context around it, that we would only be ending birthright citizenship for undocumented immigrants, people still don't want to do that. I'm curious about some of the other...
other actions. I mean, energy seems to be like a big one tariffs as well, but declaring a national energy emergency, which could allow Trump to unlock powers to speed permitting of pipelines for power plants, you know, open the Alaska wilderness to more oil and gas drilling, just generally loosening some of the, you know,
green policies put in place by the Biden administration is that popular for the sake of cheaper energy? I mean, he suggested, you know, goals as specific as cutting gas prices in half.
you know, I mean, I'm sure Americans like cheap gas. Yeah, but I mean, there's a couple of different questions you see in surveys. Some are asking about offshore drilling. Some are asking about oil drilling on federal lands, which has also been a policy that's been floated by the Trump administration. And the surveys are really mixed on that, right? So there's, I pulled two on oil drilling on federal lands. One from the Wall Street Journal has Americans in favor by a margin of four points and one from
APNORC has Americans against by a margin of four points. So this is a pretty tied issue. And I do want to round out some of the other issues here. I think the last time we talked about tariffs on this podcast, Mary, it was like support was pretty decent. But as soon as you said
But it might increase the cost of your blue jeans. And I think you got specifically asked, do you support tariffs if it makes your blue jeans like $10 more? Do you support tariffs if it makes your blue jeans $20 more? And as soon as the price of goods started to get more expensive, the support for tariffs declined pretty dramatically.
Are we in just about the same place now? Yeah, yeah. I remember that. There was a, I think it was an Echelon Insights survey that had a split sample on this. One was just blanket support and one was support even if it meant prices go up and people are like, oh, no. So I think we're still pretty much in that same place. We did have in Harvard Harris survey this month,
support for, this is the question wording, imposing new trade tariffs on China with the goal of aiding American manufacturing. People do support that, but not by a ton. The margin was four points. However, imposing new trade tariffs on Canada and Mexico with that question, it's underwater by 20 points. So it seems like people are interested in a targeted approach here, right? Like people are pretty mad at China, right?
but aren't as sanguine about sort of these ideas of blanket tariffs on our allies. So we'll have to see what exactly the language in the coming executive actions and orders is to see whether we're in
the slight support or strong disapproval category. And lastly, there's stuff focusing on D.I. initiatives within the federal government. So establishing, you know, biological sex definitions for federal workers, for example, there's only male and female, as Trump said in his inaugural address yesterday.
Today, you know, removing certain protections for transgender people in federal prisons or migrants in U.S. custody and the like. I actually heard a Republican on TV today saying, you know, something along the lines of the woke stuff is easy to fix. You can sort of do that overnight. The broke stuff is much harder to fix.
So some of the more signaling issues you can do really quickly because it was done really quickly to begin with. It was Biden signing an executive action to begin with, but fixing the things that Americans are mad about, like...
Yes.
And I think your framing of this is exactly right, Galen. So in general, I think people do not like the idea of DEI as it is generally framed by Republicans. So to put some specific numbers on that, there was a question in the Harvard-Harris survey mentioned earlier about whether –
Americans with support ending hiring for government jobs on the basis of race and returning to merit hiring of government employees. So that question framing is, I think, the kind of framing you generally see from people on the right side of the political spectrum.
And the support for that was 59 to 41. So, yes, people generally do support that approach. However, this idea of low salience, I think, is also true. I mentioned that signal survey earlier that had 85 percent of Americans saying inflation was extremely or very important.
They also had a couple of questions in that priorities list about gender issues, and those ranked way lower on priority. So you only had 57% of people saying that stopping pushing transgender ideology on kids was extremely or very important, and 58% saying to stop allowing biological men to compete in women's sports was extremely or very important.
I know those numbers might sound high, but you have to also think about the survey design here. If you give a range from extremely important to not at all important, you tend to get a lot of people clicking on the edges here. So to be as low as in the 50s actually means more than it sounds like. Yeah, because like 85% of people will say like inflation is extremely important or 90%, you know, in those kinds of questions to give people an idea of-
when you know something really is important. They have a scale. They have basically a one to five scale to rate importance. And when you see surveys with a one to five scale, you tend to see people clicking only ones, threes and fives.
Oh, you know, Galen, I wanted to also just mention that, you know, there was also a poll from The New York Times and Ipsos that asked a little bit. So to about about issues like transgender athletes and and the use of medication to for someone who's in transgender care. And, you know, in terms of it being maybe, you know,
Easy wins for Trump in a way, of course, how he goes about doing that will perhaps impact how people react to it, of course, the actual process of doing.
affecting the lives of people who are transgender. But for instance, in the poll, they asked, you know, do you think transgender female athletes, meaning athletes who were male at birth but currently identify as female, do you think they should or should not be allowed to compete in women's sports? And basically 80% said they shouldn't be allowed. And you had majorities of Democrats and independents saying that.
And obviously almost all Republicans. And, you know, somewhat similarly, 71 percent said no one under the age of 18 should have access to puberty blocking drugs or hormone therapy when it comes to those who are transgender.
And the other options for minors having it were – had much less support. So that may get at the whole idea that the woke stuff feels easy for Republicans right now. And obviously the degree to which that mattered to the election result is pretty debatable. But it is worth remembering that Trump was running ads talking about how Kamala Harris –
cares about this stuff and not the really important things, you know, and to use his framing. And I saw that ad a lot. Yeah, it was the Charlemagne the God ad, right? Yeah, yeah.
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The last bucket of executive actions that we're going to get to today actually pertains to both the current president, now Donald Trump, and the former president,
Joe Biden, which pertains to pardons. So moments before the transition took place, once Biden was literally already seated in the rotunda at the Capitol, we got word that he issued preemptive pardons for members of his family. Earlier in the morning, we also heard that he had issued preemptive pardons for members of the January 6th committee and also Fauci.
et cetera. This is something that we've talked about on the podcast before with our resident expert on these things, Jessica Roth. And, uh,
Of course, this hasn't been done before. So we don't know if what Joe Biden did is constitutional, but we absolutely know that it is norm breaking to issue. There have been no files charged. We have no idea what these what behavior would even be pardoned because there for all we know, there may not even be a criminal investigation into any of these people at this very moment.
Maybe this is all too soon to sort of ask whether there's polling on this, Mary, but obviously Biden did pardon Hunter. So we have some sense of how the public digested that. And I'll say that by the time folks are listening to this, Trump may have pardoned January 6th rioters as well. So that's the other piece of this. But what do we know about public opinion, Mary? Well,
Well, people really didn't like the Hunter Biden pardon. The public opinion shifted a little bit from the sort of hypothetical, how would you feel about it if this happened? Once it actually happened, you saw more Democrats sort of get on board and say, hey, it's okay to pardon Hunter. It's fine. But even with some more Democrats getting on board overall, which is generally pretty unpopular. The other thing that's been really interesting after the Hunter Biden pardon happened
is that there's been some polling just about the power of the presidential pardon as a general concept. And there's sort of a sudden growing support for discussing some reforms on that. So I think there's like an interesting potential universe where after both the Biden and Trump presidencies are over, that we could see a push for a constitutional amendment limiting that power significantly.
For future presidents, given that both of them have sort of talked about and use the pardon power in ways that were pretty unpopular with the American people. With respect to January 6th pardons, you would not be surprised to hear that that's also pretty unpopular.
There's an interesting split sample from the Wall Street Journal survey that came out this weekend where they asked half the sample just generally if they favored or opposed Trump pardoning January 6th defendants or those who've been convicted. And they asked the other half if they favor opposed Trump pardoning people convicted for the January 6th riot, except for those convicted initially.
of physically assaulting police officers. And both were underwater, although with that extra caveat of omitting those who committed violent crimes against police officers, that one's a little bit closer. But that's even still underwater by 11 points. The more general statement's underwater by 19 points. And this is pretty indicative of all the rest of the surveys we've seen about this. People didn't like January 6th.
I think most people don't want to see pardons come out for folks that were engaged in that event. Yeah. So on the point about the Biden pardons, because this did just happen over the weekend, we don't have polling on it. I think there may be some hypothetical polling, but I would be really skeptical of taking that to the bank for the reasons that you mentioned, Mary, that
after the Hunter Biden pardon became reality, you did see some shift, particularly among Democrats. And I would imagine that something similar would happen is that by virtue of Joe Biden, Democrats president may taking this action, a lot of Democrats would probably say, oh, actually, I agree with that. I do think that's a good decision because they trust Biden or just because of normal partisanship and stuff. I do think it's interesting, though, from the perspective of potential reform and kind of the, you know, the issue like pardons is an issue that like
Right. It kind of frustrates partisanship a bit, right, because you have, you know, both presidents probably are going to issue very unpopular, norm breaking pardons. You know, either they have done so or about to do so. And, you know, if we kind of get to the point where these people that Biden preemptively pardoned,
perhaps unconstitutionally, if Trump actually tries to go after these people and then there's a big case to the Supreme Court about, oh, these people, can they actually be prosecuted? There's going to be a lot of stuff because it's, oh, this is prosecuting a Democrat and that's going to be very sordid politically. But then maybe it will make it like when the shoe is on the other foot, if
Like Trump tries to kind of abuse the power of pardons, either that legal precedent might be set or the public opinion might be set in a way that then people are like, oh, well, maybe like shouldn't Trump shouldn't do this because we didn't think that Biden should do it or vice versa. So it's anyway, it's very interesting. And it's worth noting, both of these people have already done some pretty unpopular pardons. So I think that there's an interesting shift in public opinion here. People didn't think about this before. And now it's I think it's become more. Yeah.
as in the news. Right. But we're also now in territory where, like I said at the start, we don't know whether or not this is constitutional. Now, you know, the Department of Justice has to prosecute one of these. In a sense, if we want this clarified, what has to happen is the Department of Justice has to prosecute one of these people, a member of Biden's family, Liz Cheney, Fauci, whatever it may be.
It has to go to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court has to tell us, can presidents issue laws?
preemptive blanket pardons, which is to say for no specific crime going into the future. I mean, it would be sort of ironic if that were clarified under Trump's presidency by saying that, yes, Trump's Department of Justice can investigate one of these people, but it will also then mean that at the closure of Trump's presidency, he may not issue preemptive blanket pardons.
So some very tricky constitutional and political questions there. But undoubtedly norm breaking behavior from Biden today. And actually, sorry, this makes me want to just cite a couple more numbers before we end because we haven't cited enough numbers on this podcast today.
Which is this whole idea that, well, because Biden did it and Biden's a Democrat, he'll bring some co-partisans along for the ride and it will make it more popular. What we should note here is that Biden leaves office officially today quite unpopular. You know, his last 538 average approved approval rating is 37 percent. His disapproval rating is 57 percent.
That means he's 20 percentage points underwater. And that's historically very unpopular. It's just about the least popular he's been throughout his entire presidency. Unlike other presidents, he did not get more popular in the interregnum period, sort of after, you know, Democrats lost, but before the transition takes place. And Trump comes into office today about a point and a half unpopular.
underwater, which is very popular by, you know, the very truncated standards that we have established for Donald Trump's popularity level. Now, what happens to those numbers next is in part up to Trump and it's in part up to Americans. Yeah. Putting a stake in the ground today for where American public opinion ends.
All right. With that, thank you, Nathaniel, Jeffrey, and Mary for joining me today. Thanks, Galen. Thank you, Galen. Thanks, Galen. And I should also
also say that when it comes to some chapters ending and others beginning, we are saying goodbye to a dear, dear, dear friend, which is Mary Radcliffe. Mary Radcliffe, this is your last podcast, at least for now. Your last day at 538 is tomorrow. I will be calling you to get you back on this podcast, just saying. Ha ha!
But Mary- I gotta still pay attention to the polls? Yeah, just for me, Mary. But I wanna say thank you. You have been a tremendous voice on this podcast and for helping us understand the world around us vis-a-vis the data, which is all we ever aim to do. And of course, having a great personality to go along with it. So thank you so much, Mary.
Thank you, Galen. This has been so much fun. We're going to miss you. All right. My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Tretavian. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcast at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or a review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening and we'll see you soon.
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