A Tale of Two Speeches
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Hey, pull up a chair. It's Hacks on Tap with David Axelrod and Mike Murphy. Hacks on Tap

So, President Trump, we set the name of the Lord upon you, and we declare that no weapon formed against you will prosper, that every tongue that rises up against you in judgment will be condemned, and if God be for you, who can be against you? We bless you, President Trump, in Jesus' name. So that, boys, was the...

One of the opening invocations to the rally the night before the inauguration at the Capital One Arena in Washington.

David, I'm glad to hear your voice. I was expecting to hear Oral Roberts or Jimmy Swagger just now rather than yours. This is Hacks on Tap. I'm running it as a cautionary note to both of you guys. Yeah, our tongues may be smote. If you don't watch yourselves on this podcast and all future podcasts for the next four years, you may find yourself in a pile of ashes.

You know, we are going to have the first Old Testament presidency, I guess. It is something, you know, the other kind of callback to that was when

Vance did the inaugural dance to Battle of the Republic. I've never seen anybody dance to that before. Yeah, no, it's one of his favorites. Yeah. The Horace Vazel song, too, he's a little fond of. But anyway, I digress. The man's got moves. The man's got moves, and he wants to show them off. Well, he does have moves. He's 40 years old, and he's vice president of the United States. That's pretty fast moving. So anyway, guys, it's...

Here we are. We're in the day two of the Trump presidency here. I guess it's really day one, full day, but he had a full day yesterday. Jesus. Talk about bread and circuses. You know, I really, you know, I was... The thing with Trump is you get kind of consumed by all of the, you know, the grievances and the gracelessness, but then you have to step back and say...

If you were sitting over there, how would you feel about that day? And they had a, you know, they wanted to connote action. They wanted to take, they wanted to look like they were on the move on the things that he had said he was going to do.

They had this, you know, kind of pile of executive actions. But the main thing was and we'll talk about those. He was in action, you know, and I think they wanted to set a contrast with Biden. Oh, totally. Yeah.

Totally. You know, they just, that was the, the MAGA victory celebration, happy Trump, the Coke buttons back on the desk. And yeah, and they did this whole flutter of combination of like campaign press release type crap. I hereby set up a task force to stop inflation and real stuff. So it was action, man. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Uh, they had a good day from their point of view. Um, uh,

From the countries. We don't know. We can get to what the countries in a second. But we are hacked. So I'm just hacking it up here on that element of it. This one is hard, though. I'm hacking up phlegm. This one is tough. That was a tough day to watch. I hear you. I hear you. I have the same concerns. But Heilman, I mean...

There was a moment last night, because, you know, he did event after event after event. And one of them was, you know, they delayed the announcement of him completely pardoning all of the J6, what he calls hostages. In fact, he said that in front of the families of Israeli hostages, which I thought was kind of tasteless. Yeah, kind of. Yeah, taste wasn't really the high lantern of yesterday. Go ahead. No, no.

but he goes over to the oval and he's signing and he has the media in there and he's doing like running commentary. And that was the best part. It was totally revealing. They should have called it the fake, the fake talk express, uh, Murphy, because it reminded me of, uh,

your campaign with McCain, everybody's sitting around. It was like open mic night. No, it was, I thought it was the most, I luckily I was on a plane. So I read the transcript and then I watched bites of the actual speech and then the rallies and all, but I, I found myself glued last night and,

the nonstop open mic coverage of signing. I mean, he had the lick spittle there. Give me one of those. What does that one do? Oh, and then they do the Frank Lund sing. You know, it's not a haircut. It's follicle reform. Well, we're going to reform the SAS. That's code for let the political thugs muscle the civil servants around. You know, all right, that'll be a good one. Oh, this is

a biggie here, World War III. Yeah. No, they'd bring them these things and he'd say, oh, wow. You know, we're pulling out of the World Health Organization. Ooh. Yeah, yeah. Goodbye, Mississippi. It's going to be the mighty Trump River now. It was unbelievable. Where I was going was there was one really revealing moment where he said,

He said, hey, Biden never do this? You ever have any press conferences like this? I know. Did he ever not know what he's signing? Well, I mean, look, it's weird to see my colleagues in the press be so deferential to Trump in that room. Like, you know, Trump, Biden never had a press conference where people were constantly yelling at him. And again, I say that not as a Biden partisan, but I mean, boy, the press was very quiet and like letting Trump proceed at his own pace and control the room. I mean, I don't know how long that'll last, but...

I feel like yesterday, until he got back to the Oval to sign those executive orders, was like a tale of two...

right? There's the speech he gave, uh, the official inaugural. And then there was the alt inaugural, right? Which, where the difference was between like yacht rock Trump versus like speed metal Trump. And the second one, the one in the visitor center was the one that he really wanted to give. In fact, he kept saying that, you know, well, this was better. Here's all the things I really wanted to say until Milani and JD Vance held me back. The biggest, the biggest, the biggest tell of the entire thing was the moment when he said, and Milani has said to me, sir,

Melania said to me, sir, don't put all that stuff in this beautiful speech. And then he realized that it blew off his whole thing, which is he always says, she came to me with tears in her eyes and she said, sir, sir. Um, and then he said, well, she calls me, sir, when she's mad at me. And then he realized, okay, I'm really in trouble here. Where a moment when Trump goes, I'm just kidding. Okay. The press is going to be all over me. If I don't acknowledge that I just made that up. Um, and, and those two, you know, he does one speech, which is like sedated Trump, uh,

where the best rhetoric in it, you know, you compare it with malice towards none and charity for all. The only thing to fear is fear itself. That's not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country and drill, baby, drill, drill, baby, drill is like, you know, that's bad speech. It's like laundry listy.

But do they feel good about it? I'm sure they do. He could have at least done with charity for, for, with malice for all and charity for none. For none, right, exactly. But I think, but to your point, David, I think they thought, you know, it looked like he was, I mean, signing all those executive orders in public, you know, doing that action man. And then he gets to do all of his venting about that, that feeds the base and talks about, you know, how the election was stolen and blah, blah, blah. So then, but that, you got to that third act, right?

And I just, I mean, just on the politics of it, forget about like that being put aside for the moment.

The substantive critique, a withering substantive critique that one might want to offer for what he did with the pardons of the J6 convicts. Is that good politics in the long run? It just doesn't seem like good politics for Donald Trump. No, no, no, no, no, no. Trump, look, Trump is an interesting animal. He's formidable on the outside pissing in. You know, he's won two campaigns that way. Once he's on the inside, he gets in trouble.

You know, hence the loss to Biden and the reelect. So we'll just see how this turns out. From their MAGA point of view, he had the action man Trump show he wanted. Going to grow old.

because he's got expectations. And by the way, the Canadian embassy, and I'll finish with this, David, I read in the post this morning, they were having a big rooftop party. Woo-hoo, hey, no tariffs, hey. And then the first thing you did, oh yeah, February 1, we're going to rain hellfire. Yeah. You know, so let's just see what we get here, because I think that sign-a-thon was the tell. That's who he is. The only quibble I'd have with you is,

He was doing pretty well for three years politically, you know, despite the impeachment and all of that. You know, he beat the impeachment back and he was he was doing OK until the pandemic came along and he had to deal with a real crisis. I mean, he did get it. He did his party to get his ass kicked in the midterms in 2018. That's true. Yeah. He had about a good 17 months. The party never prospered under Trump. The party didn't prosper in in 2018.

In 17, 18, 19 or 20, the party didn't prosper under Trump. Trump was doing OK with his personal approval ratings. He was doing OK. I'll tell you something. You talk about prospering. I think that the most dangerous time for Trump is when he's feeling prosperous, when he's feeling hubris. And, you know, when he and right now.

He feels like he has beaten back the most determined effort to destroy him. And he has returned to Washington, you know, as a conqueror. He's not wrong. Though I'll tell you one more point on expectation. That action man stuff does crank up expectations.

Because now, okay, deliver. Because some of that stuff was ridiculous. But to his world, it's like, well, he solved that. He just signed a piece of paper. Now no more inflation. Mike, he sat there in the Oval Office and maintained that he could repeal

part of the United States Constitution by signing an executive order. It's the I mean, talk about raising unrealizable expectations. Even the Supreme Court is not going to buy on going to sign off on that. That is true. A bunch of what he signed is going to be contested. But, you know, I always remember the story about Trump when they came to him about the tax cut. And they say, you know, this is going to create much bigger deficits and

You know, it's going to create add to the debt. And he said, hey, that's someone else's problem. We're not going to be here when they have to deal with that. So his thing is, let's let's just win the day. OK, we're winning the day here. It looks like we're doing stuff. And frankly, look, you know, they're his challenge on the 14th Amendment is pretty interesting because basically what he's saying is people who come here illegally are

Their children should not be American citizens. Right. So-called birthright citizenship, which we have now. And he wants to undo it with a felt tip pen. But here's my point. He's doing it in a surgical way. So if you polled the American people and said, should the children of illegal immigrants who were born here...

after they come here, should they become citizens? I'm not sure how that would poll. I think it's a 50% issue. I think somebody went through it yesterday with me and said that the polling, you know, getting rid of criminal illegal immigrants is super popular now. Getting rid of all illegal immigrants is a more than 50% issue. Ending birthright citizenship is right at about 50. And the only thing that he wants to do in immigration that's not a majority issue is ending DACA.

It's the only one that's like about 40. Yeah, I don't know if that's true. The Wall Street Journal poll had overall 57%. I'm sorry, where is this? Oh, 64-31 against reversing birthright citizenship. Well, that would be encouraging if true. And the polling is a little fungible because it's how you frame it. Yes, totally. You know, when it's a high school quarterback who can't go to college now because he came here as a one-year-old without documentation, right?

That story moves numbers one way. The kind of dry description of should people who broke into this country illegally looking for the free stuff, the welfare, should they be – and that's another cut. But I take your point, David. He's fighting on good ground for him on this immigration stuff. It's a winner for him. Yeah, on some of it, on some of it. But my point is only that –

I think that someone over there is trying to craft this stuff in ways that they think will get them closest to being advantaged. And just looking, you know, this is his, the thing he can deliver on most quickly is the border stuff and deporting, you know, criminals. And no matter how many he deports, he'll do it noisily.

and he'll say it's the biggest deportation ever. And it doesn't matter how many he deports. I mean, the truth is, and we got a lot of crap for it, but during the Obama administration, he actually prioritized the deportation of people who had

committed crimes. Yeah, he started in Chicago, so he'll get credit for that. God knows. It'll be a hit to the voter rolls, but we're, you know... We got it in early. Let the record show that 15 minutes in, he got the Chicago voting joke in. It's a new year! I didn't want Mike to go without on this episode.

But think about it. Here's the funny thing about this deporting criminal. And I'm all for deporting criminals. I'm for deporting some Americans, frankly. I've got a list. A bunch of them are at the inaugural. I was going to say most of them are Trump's cabinet. Yeah, I've got a lot of ideas. I'll trade a Mexican carpenter for three or four MAGA undersecretaries of commerce.

in a minute. Give me that for one sec. Kara Swisher said to me the other day, she's like, I think Elon would be a good president of Mars. Well, you know, he did give the Romulan Star Empire salute. Real Trekkies understand what that was. East Germans of space. No, no, but, all right, so I'm Frederico the Killer Axelrod and I'm locked up in San Quentin and they're going to deport me because I'm a criminal.

So now I'm out of H block and I'm in Mexico. It's easier to break into the country than it is to break out of San Quentin. So net net, um, I just, I want to make that ironic point because I often think now in the new era we're entering, like, you know, about escaping from prisons and that sort of thing. And, uh, and it just, I don't know, we've entered a Kafka as funhouse mirror thing now. And, uh,

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So I have a question for you guys about this, to go to David's point about fighting on turf that's favorable to him. I think we'd all agree that fighting on the immigration turf is favorable to him, even though, you know, the two things he declared national emergencies yesterday were on energy and on immigration. On the merits...

You could argue that there was an immigration emergency a couple years ago. The numbers now— Not that there is, that there was. I'm saying there was. You could argue—I'm saying you could argue as in I think there was an immigration emergency. It's not really—the numbers don't really justify that now, but it's still a favorable political term. Can you guys explain to me why—

he thinks energy at this moment is favorable political turf for him because I get it when gas prices are sky high, but like, there's no one right now who thinks that, that, that, that drill baby drill is, has the same resonance at this moment that it did a couple of few years ago. He gave some tells during his open mic thing with the signing. He's like a mercantile guy. How, how many pounds of coal do we export and what do we bring in? So he thinks if we, and his, his oil guys tell him this,

If we drill like crazy and have massive exports of petroleum, we become the new Saudi. We ship petroleum abroad, and the balance of payments gets better. So his little – he even said it. Well, here's how they get out of the tariffs. They buy American oil because we're going to have so much American oil, and that will fix the balance of payments. And, you know, let's put it this way. The guy –

never showed up for an econ class at Penn. And I'll tell you, other than the bone spurs. No kidding. It's ludicrous. We could become the new Saudi. I'm joking.

Yeah, that's his big plan. No, he loves it. And of course, he'd have a monarchy. It all fits together. Someone named Donald Trump showed up for the econ class, but it wasn't him. It wasn't him. It wasn't him. So, you know, it's the old story about if Trump had taken his inheritance and put it in just an index fund, he'd be a lot richer. Every time he ran his own money, he would, you know, the whole Trump, the business genius thing is a fraud. But he got back into the tariff business yesterday.

And he kept going back to it. It's like the kid and the finger in the electric socket. Oh, we told him not to. And he keeps trying. So that one, he does. Does he really not understand that it is impossible to tax to impose taxes in other countries? Yeah. Well, you impose it on our consumers. So, you know, everything you buy. But that's what I'm saying. He keeps saying, no, our consumers are going to pay for it. We're going to impose the tariffs in these other countries. And you're like, dude, no,

You don't, you can't, we're going to set up tariff offices and we're going to have, we're going to affect the laws of all these sovereign nations. Well, that was one of his EOs. He said, we're going to have the Department of External Revenue because they're going to be there at the docks of Canada taking engine parts on the way to the Chrysler plant and doubling the price. So your car costs $90,000. Yes. And tariffs, by the way, are not all that popular. And they're in the same polling system.

You know, I forget. I'm looking for the number here. But people believe that 68% say that tariffs will make things more expensive. The biggest gap in his... He spent...

Axios had a word cloud of the subjects that he dealt with. The economy actually got very little space in his inaugural speech. And it's the thing that he's most going to be judged on. Back to my thing about the ticking clock on this guy.

Yeah, no, that's a, I know, but I, as I said to you offline yesterday, it's funny. Go for you. You've been predicting his doom and you know, it gets to the, you know, maybe the stop clock is right. Once every 24 hours, you just keep doing it. You watch. I think we have to recognize that. And we'll get to the J six stuff and so on, but this guy, whatever else he is, he is the best player.

brander, marketer, and salesman that we've probably had there in the sense that he'll, he just, you know, Alyssa Farrah Griffin told this story on the air once. She said, she went into his office one day. He said, go out and tell them this. She said, well, that's not true. And he said, if you say it enough, they'll believe it is. Right.

Yeah, he borrowed that from somebody else, but yeah. The guy's still—look, I agree. You won't get me to disagree, David, with the notion, which we've said on this show many times and in other places, that there's a kind of feral genius to Trump, and he definitely—

I mean, look, the guy won the second most votes of any presidential candidate in the history of the country in 2024. After leaving Washington in well-deserved disgrace and being indicted four times. So I want to give the man his due. He won this election. He won it fair and square. We know how many counties shifted towards Trump. It's a real phenomenon.

he still got 49.9% of the vote and any, and any president, any president that you guys worked for an incoming president with 49.9, you would do what George W. Bush did back in 2001, which was like, Hey, if I want to get some big things done, I got to convince some people who didn't vote for me to support me. Right. You, that's the way every, that's the way anybody you guys ever worked for or advised would approach this. And,

All I heard was base material yesterday in the official inaugural, in the official inaugural, in the alt inaugural, and from behind the desk in the Oval Office. It's all just base servicing. I just don't see how that gets you to, if you're such a brilliant marketer and brander, you'd think you might at this point be able to start to expand your coalition.

My point is that this guy has been selling horse shit products for his whole life. Whole life, yeah. I mean, steaks and vodka and...

Universities and all that stuff. I agree, but I'll push back on this a little. All right, go ahead. No, he's a great flim-flam man. I would say he's not a brilliant marketer. I would say he's the most brilliant moron wrangler in American history. And there are more morons to wrangle now. Trump's formula for victory has two components.

When Trump destroys norms and goes out there and says all this crazy stuff, and a whole lot of people, particularly morons, believe it. The second thing is he needs a Democratic failure. He needs a Biden. He needs a Hillary. Where...

His stuff punches through because, you know, you're right about George Bush and people before him. They look at the machinery and say, all right, I'm a 49 percent guy. I got to triangulate. I did it as governor. I got to get some Dems. Trump is I got to smash the machine and build one so I can do whatever I want and just grab power.

And he's a power politician like we've all had. He doesn't care about norms or institutions or the franchise. He's just like, what do I get and take? The most dangerous thing about Trump is that he genuinely, genuinely does not believe in rules and laws and norms and institutions. Thinks they're for suckers. Thinks the world, and we've said it here before, thinks the world is...

hunger games and the strong take what they want. I was listening to Ian Bremmer this morning somewhere, and he was saying that, you know, the danger for the world is that for the first time, like America is actually going

destroying the global architecture that it created. Right, the post-war period. I want to play a clip from the sign-a-thon that I think is super revealing about TikTok. No, but it could very well be. It makes sense for it to be because it's got tremendous value. But if we create the value by approving, in other words, that approval gives a tremendous value.

If that's the case, then we should be entitled to 50% as a country. You haven't heard that one before, right? It's called a joint venture. He went on to say, I got a lot of rich people calling me. Right, right. It's so Trump. So we got this TikTok national security and mind bending problem. We're in a standoff with the Chinese and he's thinking, well, wait a minute. I can turn this into commerce.

You know, I got leverage here. Nothing about the national interest, the TikTok problems, kids' brains. No, no, no, no, no. I smell a hustle here. I happen to own all the ice cubes on a hot day. So, you know, it's unbelievable, but it is core Trump. That is the, that's the firmware there. You just heard it, how he looks at every, the leverage thing. He talked about Kim Jong-un and he said he's got. And Gaza, beautiful real estate. Condo, a lot of great.

I once traveled in the Piedmont region in Italy and watched dogs that were trained to find truffles in the earth.

They would run across the frozen earth for a hundred yards. They'd find a spot. They start to dig and then they pull a truffle out of the wall, out of the, out of the earth. That is Donald Trump at a grift. The man can sniff a grift out at a hundred yards under 10 feet of frozen tundra. You know, he's a, that's Mike to your point. I mean, I, and it's amazing because it's essentially like, Hey, you know what?

Let's take over TikTok. My son and my friend Elon are basically already running Twitter. And on top of that, I've got my own cryptocurrency now. The guy on the eve of becoming the president of the United States has issued his own currency from which he will directly profit. It's the griftiest grift of all grips. Yeah, and $14 billion in sales.

And, you know, it's gone down like CNBC did a great story on it. He is. But here's the problem for the country beyond the I agree with you totally the atomic clock of drifting. I mean, Madoff is spinning in his grave embarrassed at this stuff, but he's got grip cataracts. He only can see the grip. He looks at TikTok, sees a grip and nothing else when there are much bigger national interest issues here.

He looks at Gaza and he says, who can get the land on the rebuild as long as I cut my kid in for some beachfront condos, the deal I want to make with the North Korean dictator who causes famine for his own people. I mean, he only sees the grip. Tunnel vision. Yeah.

Yeah, he and Melania both issued Bitcoin meme coins. She had tears in her eyes when she did it. She called him, she referred to him as sir. Yeah, again, moron selling. Now morons are going to lose money on it. I love that title. It might be the title of my next book. This is actually part of the problem for Democrats, actually, because I think a lot of Democrats would embrace exactly what you just said, Mike. And the question is, why?

I think there are a lot of people. He does have a core third of the vote. I mean, that's as his base. There are a lot of people who voted for Trump who had lots of lots of reservations about Trump, but they have big reservations about paying 20 percent more than they were a few years ago. And they saw Biden. Of course. So so I don't think it's necessarily moronic to say I'm not doing very well here. Maybe this guy can.

Can can help. And I think I when you cannot fill the vacuum with a Democratic candidate is not a train wreck. Yes. The pain has nowhere else to go because they're voting for change. They're not voting for Trump.

And it's totally legitimate. I have a lot of friends who voted for Trump, I guess. But if you, you know, I don't think he's the sophisticated. Tell them you're not calling them morons. No, no. But you're deconstructing my thing in a wrong way. Okay. I'm saying Trump is really good at making politics really stupid to capture simple grievance. That's what I mean by moron wrangling. And the Democrats give him half the win every time.

Because the Democrats are no longer a functional, appealing national political party anymore. They nominate the Hillarys and the Bidens stick around with a cover-up. And then Kamala Harris, who's a ridiculous choice ultimately for any hard-headed strategic way to win the damn election. We don't have to – I know, I know. I'm doing my speech here and I'll wrap it up. I like David's read on Murphy's thing better because it made it – for a minute I was imagining Mike as like a resistance mom.

All these Americans are all such morons. Yes. Well, there's plenty of it. You can take the boy out of MSNBC, but you can't take the MSNBC out of the book. Look, I quit MSNBC for a reason. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Yeah, yeah, again. Okay, then let's take a break right here, and we'll be right back.

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Just talk for a second about the J6 pardons. Because we really, we kind of, before we get to Biden and his pardons, because that was another moment I thought was incredible in the Oval Office, because Trump basically in that moment in the Oval Office was like, these Biden pardons are really, he basically was like, oh, it's totally inappropriate for him to pardon all these people. As he's about to pardon people who beat cops with baseball bats. Well, let's talk about that, because, yes.

What he did was egregious, and they knew it was egregious, which is why they waited until the dark of night to do it. So they didn't step on their own story. Pardoned them all. Pardoned the Proud Boy leader. Pardoned the Oathkeeper leader, both of whom had long prison sentences.

And this was after, let me just play this clip. This is after J.D. Vance announced to the country the other day on Face the Nation this.

If you protested peacefully on January the 6th and you've had Merrick Garland's Department of Justice treat you like a gang member, you should be pardoned. If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn't be pardoned. And there's a little bit of a gray area there, but we're very much committed to seeing the equal administration of law. And there are a lot of people, we think, in the wake of January the 6th who were prosecuted unfairly. We need to rectify that.

All right, so there you have it. Someone didn't clue him in. And Pam Bondi in her confirmation hearing basically said the same thing. Yeah, so this is the rumor that was out there yesterday, you guys. A prominent Republican told me that he was told two hours before this announcement that Trump—they were originally to go with a more discreet—

list of parole, pardon recipients. And after the Biden thing, Trump said, screw it, I got cover here. Let's just go for the whole thing. Now, I don't know if that's bullshit or not. Well, it's not smart politics. This one's a mistake for him. Say why, Murphy. Well, it's...

He might have found 100 martyrs who were little old ladies on their way to a prayer meeting and got sucked into the crowd, and he can go bang up. There are going to be some bad apples in this 1600. There are people trying to kill cops, and they're going to be famous now. We're going to take another look at the top 20 of them, and it's going to be a rogues gallery. And now the news cycle is this is going to go on for a bit. Who were they? What happened? There will be outrage.

It's a bad bet. He's supposed to fix the economy, not release thugs. 57% of Americans oppose these pardons, and the number is higher in the 60s when you talk about people who assault the police. But the question is, I mean, remember, they voted for a guy who instigated and fired these people to go there and do what they did.

And David, who promised over and over again he was going to do this thing throughout the campaign. I was there at Waco for that first campaign event when I saw when he did something he would then do for months thereafter, which was get the J6 choir version of the national anthem and stand up with his hand over his heart. It was truly one of the most surreal and dispiriting things I've ever seen at a presidential campaign event. And yet he did it for a year and a half.

and still got it still performed better than he's ever performed in a national election so i don't think people voted for that but i think that they but i think they didn't give a shit enough to vote to vote against him for it well no they've they cared about other things more they voted to

fired joe biden fixed the economy and they thought she was a whack-a-doodle san francisco that's just another way that's just another way of saying they didn't care enough about this yes have that be disqualified for trump well that's the thing about trump there's such a word salad you don't read the fine print lot you read the fire biden part but you get the fine print now you sign the car lease and guess what what do you mean the payment's 1800 bucks a month and no service i didn't book

One thing they did read was, I'm going to get your costs down quickly. Right. They did read that. And if he doesn't do that, all these other things will become much more vexing for him. If he does do it, I think there'll be a lot of forgiveness for some of his other trespasses here. So we'll see what happens. So that's why tariffs are a disaster if he slows the economy down. Long term, all of this is corrosive to...

I mean, it's a terrible thing what he did. But from a hack perspective, he's just making cynical judgments about what he can get away with. And he thinks he can in the short term get away with this. And he, you know, listen, I said last night on TV, you know,

In some ways, it was a very honorable thing he did because he was the guy who sent them there. He made up on the basis of the way he campaigned and what he promised to do. He paid no short term political price for promising to to to pardon them. And so he apparently determined that he was going to pay no political price for actually pardoning them. I will just say in a non hackish way, if this was any other country.

we would be talking about how this is a standard move of an autocrat who had just freed the paramilitaries. That's what we would say in another country. We would be talking about how this is the paramilitary guard. He let out the... Putin would be saying, not bad, Chapter 4, he's learned. Yeah, seriously, seriously. That's what we would be saying. As he would about the executive order to protect free speech, i.e.,

uh don't allow there to be any sort of free speech yeah well i mean no fact checking but i mean and this is from a guy who said you should be jailed if you criticize eileen cannon the judge that

You know, if you criticize judges who are friendly to me, that actually should be a crime. And he's a champion of free speech. This is a guy who's suing a pollster for a poll he didn't like. For a poll he didn't like, okay? That was wrong, epically wrong. But still!

I know, I know. Next year, start suing podcast blowhards, and then we're all going to have to move to Canada. Listen, John, I take all your points. I mean, there's no doubt that this is a guy... Part of not believing in rules and laws and norms and institutions is you don't really believe in democracy because all of that...

it depends on all that and he's sundering all of them to his own advantage. Let's just stipulate that. But, but, but on the politics of it, I think he probably, you know, if he, if he delivers on the fundamental thing,

which is lowering people's costs and people feel like they're safer, the border. He'll get a lot of leeway on this other stuff. Yeah, it can go two ways. I mean, this thing, I think it is not so complicated. One is if he does do the tariff stuff and there's massive incompetence and everything, it'll start to grind at him. And by the way, the House hours are like, go, Maga, go. By the way, we're going to lose in two years. And this guy's going to make it worse if he has a chain of trouble. And the tariffs are the worst thing.

Or the tariffs are a bluff. He doesn't do the crazy stuff there. The Fed is good to him. Big if. Energy prices ticked down a little bit because he's going to flood the supply. You do too much of that, by the way, you get a big oil collapse. But let's see what happens. And then it's happy days are here again.

He'll still probably lose the house on the cycles, but he'll run against the Dems and it'll be okay for him. A footnote on the oil stuff. It takes years for these things to actually come online. And a lot of these companies are not. There's a lot of this territory that he's freeing up.

That they're not going to want to explore. So the notion that that's going to have some sort of immediate effect is... No, no, I'm not saying that, but he will be able to knock up oil production quicker than normal. But that lowers oil prices, which cuts off oil investment. You know, the oil thing is cyclical. We're already at record levels of production here. Oh, more can happen. I have no doubt. Let me ask you guys this question, okay? So the other striking thing about yesterday, obviously, was the tableau of...

corporate upsuckery and in particularly the tech bros right who were all over that that his uh his inaugural speech there are members of congress uh who couldn't bring their spouses the tech bros the tech billionaires the the bezos's and the zuckerberg's and the elon musk's and all those people were able to bring their spouses and there were governors who were like in overflow rooms right trump basically made presented this tableau he loves the fact that all these these these

billionaires are sucking up to them the way that they are. And so the, and so the, and some of the other things we've talked about here, advertise the degree of kind of oligarchic corruption that's going to be on display over the next four years. The question I have for the two of you is this, I think like if you were to take a poll of the consultant class right now,

a democratic consultant class right now they would say this is what democrats need to fashion their their their message around the notion that trump is really the another version a more exaggerated version of the he's not in it for you he's just in it to make himself rich and his cronies rich and that's the message that they have to just focus on that for the next two years and try to win back control of the house a well the question is i think you guys would agree that's a

the core conventional wisdom now of the consultant class. Do you agree with it? Yeah, no, listen, I think if they're half, I think they're half right. Now, Mike won't because he actually, he's from the old Republican party where they embrace, you know,

They embrace the plutocrats. What we used to do with all the big corporations, we'd wait for like an Obama to win and give millions for the inaugural. And now the crypto bros are flying in for it. You know, a corporate stock up is not new. I like the Trump's motives or him, but I want to hear about failure. I want to hold them to those expectations on this. So I think that's half right, John, because I mean, the fact is when people let

when they get hip to the fact that when he talks about draining the school swamp, he's talking about draining it into his right into his own pocket in the pocket of his friends. And,

that's going to piss them off, but especially if they're not benefiting, if they don't see benefits themselves. But the Democratic Party, it's not just about what Trump does. I think the Democratic Party has to recognize its own trust issue. The fact of the matter is that Democrats programmatically, generally, are right on for

And for these working class voters, they just culturally and attitudinally, it's like I've said a million times that we're missionaries coming to help you become more like us. And by the way, when you become more enlightened, you'll get the whole idea.

All the social issues, too. When you're college educated, you'll understand. The post-modernist construct will really impress you here in the welding pit. Trump is leaving a lot of DIA traps in some of this stuff. Many things I oppose. But the Dems may take that

that bait and give him another fight that's good for him. Trump would love to fight on culture of the democratic elite. And they love to fall for that every single time. Culture is the shiny object that, uh, he points people to, you know, while they're draining the swamp into their own pocket. So I think there that it's, it's a lazy sort of construct and to say, all we have to do is, uh,

is paint Trump as a tool of the blue of the plutocrats. And, uh, and we will win. Yeah. Workers of the world unite. They've tried that, but you guys got off of something more too quick. I have to apologize. I got to go. I'm I'm here and I'm, I'm working and I've got to work on my new identity to, uh, stay out of Trump thought police.

So if you guys can land the plane. The toupee is very handsome, by the way. No, no, no. And I'm going with the beard. I got a couple of costumes here. All right. Love you, brothers. See you next week. Hang on, America. We'll talk to you later. Later, Mike.

Bye. So, so John, you're trying to remember the thing that we got off of too quickly. No, I remember what it was and I don't want to, you know, we've pounded the Biden shit to death, but that was egregious. The 10 minutes before the inauguration, they, they, they announced that he's pardoned members of his family. I mean, man up, you know what I mean? Man up. And if you're going to do it, do it, but don't do it.

Literally, as you have one foot out the door so you don't have to explain it or be accountable for it. And what they did was they gave Trump a gift because it fuzzied up the it fuzzied up the story, the J6 story for him. And you heard him last night. You mentioned it. That's that's what made me think about it. I mean, it just could any could you end a presidency as badly as he has?

I mean, Trump did. So let's say that. I was going to say, he didn't, he didn't, he didn't foment an insurrection at the Capitol. Yes. So he's better than that. Yes. It's been, look, it's been shambolic and, and, and, and, and it's amazing how,

like little coordination there is. And they don't, they, they just seem to be kind of like they're doing all these things in a very, they did all the things they did on the way out the door in a very kind of higgledy piggledy way. There didn't like, there was no messaging coordination. There was no work with any allies. There was no work with other Democrats. They just, they didn't, they didn't do, it seemed like the whole thing just fell apart at the end. I will say, you know, this thing, John, this thing, just before you go, this thing,

It made the thing look particularly sleazy. Yes, I know. I totally agree. And look, here's and I would just let's give the guy credit. He got the ceasefire done. Yeah. So he did some things. And I love some of the pardon work he did. I love the stuff. I mean, I, you know, on the merits, I love the idea of the fact that he commuted all of those things.

uh those death row sentences or converted them all into life well the powdered versus yes especially the death row sentences though which i think yeah yeah no that was yeah a very principled thing to do life life without parole is a very is a very fine sentence

I look, I really, as you know, because we talked about it, I really objected. He commuted those. He commuted three of them. So I think commuted all of them, I guess, except for three. He left three on death row and he commuted the rest. So I love the I love the I'm sorry. I said before, you know, when we talked about this time, I hated the Hunter Biden pardon and I hated it because he promised not to do it. Right. And I on the substance and on the politics of it. Right. Number one.

Number two, on the merits, given the threats that have been issued at the members of the J6 committee and at his family over and over again, on the merits, I don't have as much of a problem with the prophylactic preemptive pardons of those people. But I agree with you, the timing is...

was terrible on the politics and i agree with you it showed lack of balls i mean he's president united states yeah just man the hell up and say you know i'm doing it because this guy threatened my family threatened these people who are doing their jobs and we're not gonna i mean man up people and just in terms of the politics of it if he'd done it two weeks ago was he gonna get

He was going to get some shit for it, but who cares? I mean, at this point, who cares if people were going to give him a hard time? He could have stood up and said, explained it the way he's going to explain it, and it wouldn't have given Trump the cover, the ability to do what he did on the same day. That is, to me, a gift he gave to Trump that he could easily have withheld from Trump politically by announcing these a week ago, three days ago, ten days ago. Pick your day, any day but the day of the inauguration when it looked like

it looked skeezy. And as I say, it just, it allowed Trump to, to, to do a false equivalency. And it's just terrible. It was mind boggling to me that they did it the way they did it. But, you know, I don't think he at this point really cares. And do you think the explanation for that is, I mean, look, what I think we would both agree, Joe Biden, uh, in some areas, Joe Biden's political team, uh,

committed some very significant long-term his world historical malpractice, but his white house staff is full of very smart people and they're very good. And they've been very good. You know, like they're not, it's not incompetent. Well, it's not an incompetent white house. Do you think it's just at the end that the staff just lost control and he was just making these decisions, basically anything related to his family. And some of these partners were just like, he was doing this on his own. Cause I can't imagine that.

his office of legal counsel and the comms shop and the rest of his political shop didn't see some of these things coming, that this would be a problem politically. Well, John, at this point, I can't even raise an eyebrow, you know, and say, wow, I can't believe that they would make a mistake like this. There have been so many mistakes over such a long period of time. And, you know, I don't know. I mean, they're smart people, right?

around him. And I don't know whether it's, you know, they got so used to accommodating him that, you know, I mean, the least savvy politician when it comes to this stuff in the group is Joe Biden. And that was probably true before he age overcame him. But, you know, he does have people around him who I think have enabled him and they but they didn't do him any

This looks like a thing that was called by the family and they went along, you know, but boy, oh boy, it was, it was a...

It was a mistake. It was really a mistake. Allow me to join with Amy Klobuchar and others who have watched this whole spectacle. I went back and looked this up yesterday, by the way, which is, you know, Trump in his first term did roughly the amount of pardons that Obama did. You know, and that George W. Bush, there was a kind of a, you know, these Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump pardons.

all kind of between 190 and like 300 pardons, basically. They're not a really wide band. Trump didn't go crazy at the end of his first term. I imagine now that my first thought yesterday was that he's going to pardon like a list of people at the end of this, over the course of this term, that's going to be like the length of the Manhattan phone book. Well, he's now got, he's got basically, he's been immunized by the U.S. Supreme Court and

And now I think he's going, I think that this notion of prevent, you know, preemptive

pardons is now this is the problem when you when you destroy norms and precedents very hard to resemble just destroy a norm set a new precedent and now it's it's fucking anarchy out there and that's why that's why as i'm watching all this i am now with amy klobuchar who's like we need to fix the pardon system like there's got to be let's get some let's figure out some way to reform this pardon thing because it's kind of it's always been ripe for abuse

And one of the things that you are making the point you're making about Trump is that what Trump has learned over time is that, like, norms schmorms. If it's not a law, like, what are you telling me? Democracy depends on norms? What's a norm? A norm is some thing, some precedent, some values-based thing. Like, what happens if I break it? Nothing? Okay. Let's just break it. Let's just knock him down. One thing about Donald Trump—and I've said it before—

The words that will not pass from his lips are, well, we could do it, but it would be wrong. Right. That is not in his range of thought. Or we could do it, or we shouldn't do it because that's just not how it's done. Right.

Right. I mean, his thing is you do whatever you can to get whatever you want. And the only thing you can do that's wrong is not doing the thing that's in your self-interest. Right. And wait for someone to stop me. Like, hey, someone wants to try to stop me. Try to stop me is his basic approach. Which is which is dangerous. It's dangerous for the country. It's a dangerous impulse in a president. It's dangerous for the country, dangerous for the world.

Uh, and as we said earlier, an unbridled Trump, uh, a hubristic Trump who feels like he is on, there are no guardrails, you know, that's a, it's going to be, it's going to be challenging. One thing, by the way, before we get to mail, because we should do mail, the one thing that, um, uh, Caitlin Collins made a great catch last night as you know, cause they flooded with these, um,

I mean, there are a couple of executive orders that didn't get enough attention. You know, he's they're going to fire.

So based on the order that he signed, they're going to try and fire a whole bunch of folks who are career government people, and they're going to try to replace them with political appointees. The Schedule F move that he tried to do at the end of his last administration, taking jobs that have civil service protection and essentially designating them as employees.

what is effectively a political appointment that is going to be a story that has watched that sort of slipped through the discussion last night because there was so much else going on. The other thing was that she found was this executive order that basically gives him the ability to designate anyone in, you know, for an interim period as recipients of top secret information, whether they pass,

you know, before they pass the requisite background checks. So he can basically say, you know, Elon Musk should see, he needs to see these documents. Anybody else needs to see these documents. That's my reading of it. So there are all kinds of things going on here and he flooded the zone. So,

It's going to take time for all of those things to permeate. But speaking of time. And speaking of floods and permeation and zones. Yeah. Yes. Maybe we should flood the zone with some mail. Listener mail.

All right. If you have questions for the hacks, send them to hacksontap at gmail.com. Or better yet, because people are not apparently using our crack voicemail system.

Read your questions to us so we can hear your voices and the emotion and the passion that you bring to these questions. And we can check out that you're not ringers. So to do that, just call this number.

773-389-4471. I'll repeat it because who can remember that? 773-389-4471. I love that, John, because, you know, I miss Mike when he slips off like that and then I can hear his voice again and it just...

It's really good. It's warm. It's comforting. It's reassuring. I also love AI Mike. AI Mike is great. AI Mike. He also doesn't talk back, which is sort of nice. He says his piece, and then we can say whatever the fuck we want. There's no more bullshit Mike. Yeah.

Hey, I have a question to read to you. Yes. I'm just going to select your question for you. All right. Okay? This is a question that we have from Anne in the listener mailbag, okay? Yes. Do political consultants, a.k.a. strategists, a.k.a.

hatchet men such as yourself formerly, do they ever struggle when a client they dislike prevails in an election? Will a political strategist turn down offers from potential clients who they do not think can serve in the position they are interested in running for, or do they leave that up to the voters? Those are two kind of conjoined questions, basically asking the question of whether you have any heart, soul, or ethics as a class. Yeah. Well, I hope I...

the stereotype here. I used to fire clients all the time and I would refuse clients, particularly as I moved up in my

uh, career. Um, you know, I was involved in a governor's race once with a candidate, uh, who's, um, when I got into it, lack of depth on some things that he should have known, uh, were so shocking to me, uh, that guy was running for governor. And I just, I, I quit the race. I like how you changed it to a guy given that I know it was Sarah Palin.

I know it was a guy. And but and I've told this story publicly. I personally, you know, I represented Rob Lugojevich when he ran for Congress and I liked Rod and and and in many ways, I still like Rod very much. But he was when he came to me and said he wanted to run for governor, I was kind of, oh, I don't know about this. And I said, well, why do you want to run for governor? So, well, you can help me figure that out.

And I said, if I have to help you figure this out, you should, you should really think about whether this is the right thing to do. And he said, come on, we're going to raise a lot of money. It's going to be fun. And I said, no, man, I'm, I'm out. You said that you said I'm too busy helping Barack Obama figure out what he wants to do, what he wants to do as president. The, the, the truth of that is that in the, I did not work for him. And, uh, uh, I am, uh,

And and then the summer of 2002, he would he hired another firm that was a highly proficient firm. They ran a very smart campaign because the last governor was going to prison, too. And so they ran as a reformer. You know, I'm a reform candidate. They ran as an anti-establishment reform kind of campaign. And by the summer of 2002, it was clear to me that he was going to win.

And I found that, you know, as I said, I really, as a person, I really, you know, Rod was fun. I think he did have actually a sense of everyday people that a lot of, that some politicians lack. He was funny. He was very kind to my family. I had, but I was a kind of appalled because of what I knew about him and, and a lack of seriousness. And, and,

And at that moment, literally as I was brooding about whether I should stay in consulting, I got a call from Barack Obama, who was a state senator, who was a friend of mine who had just lost a campaign for Congress by like 30 points primary. And he said, I got one race left in me. And Michelle said,

I told Michelle it's up or out, you know, and I want to run for the Senate. And that's how that all began. So and I was so I thought if I could help Barack Obama get elected to the U.S. Senate, that would revive my sense of idealism. And so it was really serendipitous that he called Obama.

when he did because i was really thinking about getting out of the business so there's your answer and i was going to say it's like here's a there's that phrase like a door closes a window opens and exactly in that case it was like in that case it was like a doorway to it was a doorway to hell uh and a stairway to heaven absolutely true bill john heilman writes i'm piggybacking on a great piece by david brooks in the new york times called we deserve pete hegseth

Among many points, and it really was, I thought it was a very good column. A key one he made, I'd like your take on, is how Dems are still hammering away at points of character and morality when they should be addressing competence and qualification. In your opinion, who's going to lead this shift to addressing the inevitable incompetence of Trump and his cabinet, and how should it be done? I want to just amend it just a little bit. I thought that the focus on his sort of personal issues

you know, obviously sexual assault is one thing, but about, you know, his wife and cheating on his wife and all of that stuff, I thought was sort of unproductive. It was unproductive. It led them, it sort of led them down the wrong path. This is a guy who is wholly unqualified. So, I mean, I'm wondering what you thought about that. Well, what I thought about that is that I have thought from the very first day

uh, that Donald Trump got reelected that, uh, with, with, with, with, you have to have an incredible, uh, you have to have an incredible miscreant, uh, for all of his, uh, nominations not to get confirmed. And that the only way it would be incredible miscreant would have to take himself out of the race. I was shocked that he picked Matt Gates. I was, uh,

But I stand by my notion that there's a possibility that Gates had stayed in, that he might have actually gotten confirmed. And I think that it's a relevant – it's a good question. I remember we talked about this with Governor Christie at the time about the focus on –

on, on the, I don't want to call these peccadilloes. I mean, like the man that it's like, you know, with Hegseth, this is a little bit like, you know, uh, come for this, for the white nationalism, stay for the, stay for the sexual assault. I mean, the guy's got all kinds of problems. Those are not small things, you know, being, being an alcoholic, being someone who's,

The accusations of drinking on drinking on the job, his pledge to quit drinking if he becomes if he becomes secretary of defense. I mean, those are these are these are things that have in the past. John Tower, for example, there was the things that took them down. And and he's obviously not qualified for the job. But I just don't believe fundamentally on the basis of history.

that there's any reason to think that Senate Republicans are going, we're going to grow enough of a spine to stop any of these people. And I think whether it's Hegseth or Gabbard or Cash Patel or Robert F. Kennedy Jr., I'm not saying it's impossible, but like other than John McCain on the Affordable Care Act,

Can anybody please name me an example of a time where Republicans who were under pressure to do something Donald Trump wanted stood up to him and didn't give him his way? There is no other example besides John McCain on health care in 2017. So there's no precedent for it. I think I think they're all going to get through. The question is really what was the most. I think there are certain elements of there. There are certain elements of his personal life that were.

Keenly relevant. And I mean, the sexual assault thing is really important because that has been a problem for the for the military. But, you know, alcoholism in a secretary of defense.

A guy, you know, with those weighty responsibilities is a particularly is a particularly concerning thing. White nationalist. Yeah, I know. I was making a joke. Particularly. No, no. But I mean, I'm not I'm not saying that all of it is irrelevant. I'm saying that, you know, I remember when Dale Bumpers was defending Bill Clinton in the Senate in 1999.

in the or 98, whatever year it was, 99, I guess, by this time on the whole issue about Monica Lewinsky. And he said, you know, I know a lot of the proponents of this impeachment say it's not about sex. He said, and let me tell you something, when people says it's not about the sex, it's about the sex. Yeah. And so, you know, I just think especially given all the other, you know,

stuff that we've gone through lately. That became sort of a diversion. Just to be specific about it, I thought Tim Kaine's line of questioning was out of character for Tim Kaine and not productive. I thought Mark Kelly's line of questioning when he went through all the reported instances... Yes, yes, yes, that was productive. ...and made Hegseth say that these are all scandals, they're all...

anonymous slurs or whatever he had to say, said it over and over again, but he never denied any of them. And then at the end, when Kelly said, if you were under oath, would you change your testimony? And, and, and Hanks had basically refused to answer. I thought that was actually a very effective line of questioning. I got Hanks. So basically I acknowledged that all of these things were true without in a skillful way. There's no doubt. He was a falling down drunk. Hanks would have been better to sort of continue down the line. He went in his opening statement and say, yeah,

Yes, I was. But I found God. I found God. I'm reformed. Like a lot of people in America. Like a lot of veterans. I came back from the war and I had problems. And like a lot of non-veterans. To say, yes, I had a problem with alcoholism. Like 20, like a billion people, whatever the number is, you know, like tens of millions of Americans. I was, I had a problem with alcohol. I am now reformed.

I went into a program. I've come out the other side. But with the help of my God and my sponsor— Yeah, that would have been more compelling. I've now moved past it. Two other—before we go, two other people who I thought senators who did quite well were Tammy Duckworth—

who basically elicited from him a stunning lack of depth. Yes. Couldn't answer basic questions about global security organizations. His invocation of three countries not in ASEAN in a question about the members of ASEAN was really quite something. You don't usually get the gotcha questions. They usually weren't quite that well, but that one really did. And then I thought Alyssa Slotkin was...

Good and sort of challenging him on whether he would refuse a whether he would fuse an illegal order. Not surprised. Not surprisingly, the female veterans turned out to be turned out to be very, very good, which is why, of course, Joni Ernst, if she were not just like every other goddamn Republican, like, you know, Joni Ernst would have been the nail in his coffin if she'd if she could. She I'm sure.

If she had done a job where she was actually trying to interrogate him to actually make a judgment about his fitness for the office, whether it's on qualifications or on some of these character issues, I think Joni Ernst would have eviscerated. If she just talked about her history in the military and talked about her history as a sexual assault survivor, she would have reduced him to rubble. But she was not interested in doing that for a variety of reasons that have everything to do with why all of these nominations are likely to get confirmed. Yeah.

Speaking of putting a nail in things, we've got to put a nail in this. But we are going to have an interesting four years here. And again, you know, I think we have to we have to we're going to have to we should not spare time.

judgment on, on some of the things that Trump does relative to, you know, democracy relative to, you know, the probity and integrity of government and so on. Uh, but it's going to be an interesting political spectacle as well. And, uh,

that's what people expect from hacks like us. Hey, if I was more, uh, if I was inclined to be cliched, I do that Chinese proverb, you know, that says like, may you live in interesting times. What it really means is boy, you're fucked. Um, but, uh, but, but I'm not, I'm not that I'm not, I just look at it. You would not do a cliched thing like that. I think one of the things is, is to, is to be, is to, you know, I, I, people have now gotten on this, this thing of last thing I'll say on this thing of like, pay attention to what Trump does, not to what he says. Um,

I think that's it's kind of intuitively and instinctively appealing. But whether it's on the political side or on the normative substantive side, the problem is that Trump, you know, as with the J6 pardons, he both says it and does it. It's a false binary. It's I mean, you know, the thing is, he says a lot more things than he actually does. But it's part of our part of the interesting thing is trying to figure out.

which of those things are the things where he announces what he's going to do and then he doesn't and which of them count? You know, it's like more of a signal-to-noise problem rather than a what-he-says-versus-what-he-does problem. Well, we're over here, but I'll just say as a final point, when you're president,

What you say is as important as what you do in some ways, because presidents, when they speak, can send armies marching and markets tumbling. And so that is, you know, we got to pay attention to both. But we also have to pay attention to the clock here, brother. So, David, may you live in interesting times. Oh, there you did do it. Yeah, I had to. Thank you. See you, brother. Later, man.