Hacksgiving Minnesode (Dontcha Know)
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Hey, pull up a chair. It's Hacks on Tap with David Axelrod and Mike Murphy. Hello, hackaroos. It is that time, that sacred time. It's Hacksgiving.

We're continuing our multi-year trend of lame sound effects here, but welcome. Happy Thanksgiving. I am joined. I am Jive Turkey Mike Murphy, my old 70s radio disc jockey name. And with me is the pilgrim himself, Mr. Johnny Heilman. Hey, man. Yo, gobble, gobble. You know, when I heard the turkeys there, I had an image of Asher.

of Axe somewhere in the wilds of Michigan or Arizona or somewhere doing his thing he does now every Thanksgiving, which is the Sarah Palin shoving the turkey, putting the turkey into the wood chipper imitation. That's what I think is going on. That's my mental image right now. Well, there's a rumor it's hair replacement this week and he's off. But anyway, the official lineman is

On assignment. He's on turkey assignment, covering the stories that only we can and the way we do. But we thought, you know, we are the turkey kings. You got two of the three turkeys here. And there's a lot to talk about. So we're going to do a little Minnesota here.

And, you know, now I want to just take a moment, though, to dispel the rumors. And I know you've heard them, Johnny, too, that we're only doing the Thanksgiving episode because normally we take this week off because we've already sold advertising time and we'd have to refund the hundred and eighty five dollars. That is a filthy lie. I don't know where it got started. We're here because we love you people.

It's a filthy lie. It's the biggest lie I've ever heard. Biggest lie. Liars. Fake news. Fake news. Enemies of the people. Enemies of the turkeys. Whatever. It's a terrific show. Terrific. The best. People are saying, people say to me all the time, it's fantastic. Okay. Enough of our lame Trump imitations. What to start with? I think we probably have to start looking at the stock market this morning with the most beautiful word in the English language.

I've got, I've contemplated this question for a long time. Like what, as you know, as a writer, Mike, I think about it. Like I consult the dictionary, I consult the thesaurus. I wonder you're a man of language, right? I am a man of language. I words, words, words, as Hillary Clinton once said about Barack Obama, just words. And I thought about it for a long time. And then I was listening to Joe Rogan when he did that long, long interview with Trump, a lot of words in there too. And Trump,

helpfully provided us all with certainly what he thinks is the most beautiful, glorious word in the English language. Let's just take a listen to that. It has some implications for what's going on today. To me, the most beautiful word, and I've said this for the last couple of weeks in the dictionary today, is the word tariff. It's more beautiful than love. It's more beautiful than anything. It's the most beautiful word ever.

This country can become rich with the use, the proper use of tariffs. Did you just float out the idea of getting rid of income taxes and replacing it with tariffs? Well, OK. Are we serious about that? Yeah, sure. But why not?

So there he was, Mike, Donald Trump, not only saying that tariffs are the most beautiful word in the English language, but he basically says tariffs will solve everything that's wrong, allegedly wrong with the American economy. And my favorite answer maybe of the whole campaign, which is when Rogan says, you know, would you eliminate the income tax and replace it with all tariff revenue? Trump doesn't say yes, doesn't say no, says no.

Why not? Give it a try. Why not? It worked for King George, you know? Why not? There are a lot of economists who could give a lot of reasons why not, and they would give a lot of reasons why even the 25% he's proposing...

or he's going to supposedly find emergency powers, slap 25% on Mexico, 25% on Canada, and an additional 10 on China. I think most economists could find about 100 reasons, like, why not? Oh, it's so bad. You know, we're an integrated economy in North America, Mexico, U.S., and Canada. It's kind of our base to compete in the world. It's one of our great competitive advantages. You just look at the automotive stocks today. He managed to take a few billion off them.

Because your car is probably partially built in Mexico, designed and components at least sometimes fully built in the U.S. and in Canada. I remember when Barack Obama, the White House press leaked he had a Chrysler 300, kind of a cool, sassy car. Nobody figured out the thing was built in Windsor, Ontario.

So it's integrated. And this throws a huge monkey wrench into the whole machinery for everything. The raw materials way beyond just the auto industry. It is, it is, it is moron nomics. The other thing about it, Mike, is that, and this has been pointed out before, but you know, it has to be pointed out again. Trump constantly says, and I know why I'll throw this to you as the hack, as I propose the counter, if he was telling the truth,

What Trump would have to say is we are going to punish these countries we don't like by raising the prices of their goods in America so Americans will buy fewer of them, less of them, right? That's how tariffs work. Right. And consumers pay more. Consumers pay more. It's a tax. So they either buy less or it's a tax. But the key thing here is that – and I know this is a political strategy show, not an economic show, but this is so basic –

We pay the tariffs. We cannot... There's no slapping a tariff on China in China. American law doesn't work in China or Canada or Mexico. It's not like he's going and putting a tax on somehow delivering a bill to the Mexican branch of Toyota. The only people we have control over are people within the United States. Our laws are domestic. So...

He really is just basically saying, I'm going to punish our foreign competitors by making Americans pay more for this good. And, of course, that wouldn't necessarily – I can't imagine even you with all your skill could make an ad where I'm going to raise your prices by 25 percent would be a winning message. Well, I couldn't afford the editing equipment to make the ad because, of course, I'm going to be paying a massive tariff. Hey, kids, those laptops, those apples going straight up. And they're retaliatory tariffs.

Occasionally, you have little mini tariff squabbles. Some country won't let American strawberries in, so fine, we hit them on their cheese or whatever. It's a negotiation tool. But when you launch a big tariff war like this, everything costs more on both sides, and basically you create huge unemployment. So in my heart of hearts, I think this is a mix of –

Trump's stupidity and Trump trying to bluff. They're all going to I'm going to scare them. You know, my comic friend Dana Gold has a great joke in his stand up set where he says, you know, stupidest things you ever heard. And one of them is and he adopts the persona of a moron. OK, everybody, watch me scare the president. You know, so that's what the terror thing is. I have a political question for you. Here's the thing. I mean, there's a lot of reasons why Trump won.

and a lot of reasons why Harris lost. And we've talked about them on the show. Others have talked about them endlessly. We'll be talking about them probably for years. But one of them clearly is it was inflation, right? The legacy of inflation, you know, people were sick of high prices. There's a lot of data that shows how important that was.

What happens politically if Trump went through with this when for many, many, many of his voters, the thing was Trump's going to make, you know, we're sick of paying so much money for eggs and bacon and gas and everything else. What's going to happen politically? When does it bite politically with prices on a whole range of American goods go up within the first quarter?

of Trump's second term. When is that fight? I think you could turn on him really quickly. We got a grumpy, wrong track electorate. They fired Biden. They fired Kamala for being connected to Biden. And Trump has raised expectations that now everything's going to be cheaper and it's going to be just like it was four years ago. Well, there's nothing you could do that would be faster and more effective to screw that up than a significant tariff war.

So, we will see. But this gets to, I think, a larger point. And then we're going to enter the Star Wars bar scene of the cabinet because there's plenty to talk about there. We've never had a three-headed secretary of labor before. But there was this – after the election, you know, and we're all bitter and depressed because I'm one of these anti-Trump Republicans and Trump easily won. And we've talked about that a lot.

But there was this kind of I won't call it normie, but this thing of, well, he won fair and square. So, you know, all is kind of forgiven. And look at that. The Treasury secretary nominee can eat with a knife and fork. So it's going to be OK. And I think part of that was Trump had vanished pretty much from the public. And then he comes up to the floorboards yesterday. Hey, I'm going to I'm going to attack Canada.

I'm going to wipe out their economy in Mexico and all this. And now you can feel the, hey, wait a minute. Maybe it is the same old Trump. We just forgot because he's out of the spotlight for a while. But there's kind of just been this novocaine of numbness period. And now he's acting like Trump again. People are like, wait a minute. It all happened. So I'm curious about that phenomena.

Well, I think you've got a situation where... Look, I think you saw this with some of the cabinet picks too, obviously. As you said, we're going to talk about the Star Wars bar, but as soon as...

You have that kind of Susie Wiles, Marco Rubio. Those are reassuring normie picks, basically. Yeah, we're in a world where Rubio looks like Kissinger, which tells you what they've done to the yardstick. But yeah. Exactly right. But there is this tendency, and some people it's like whistling past the graveyard of kind of like, it's all going to be fine. Don't worry. Be happy. Bobby McFerrin, let's sing that song.

Other people are just exhausted and are like, you know, this is one of the big challenges for Democrats and the left is, you know, that people are like, I'm tired of resisting. Like, I just want to go fucking. I want to take a long nap. I want to watch some football. Right. Read a mystery novel. I'll bet sales are up. Just get it. By the way, Bobby Farron got Amtrak just came over the wire.

It's like, you know, I just want to take some time off. Call me in two years or four years when the next election comes around. And then there are people who are in the – who are not in the don't worry, be happy camp and not in the kind of exhausted camp but in just kind of the natural – look,

It's kind of built into the system, right? Someone gets becomes president elect. They start to make cabinet choices. We have to cover those in journalism. We think, right, you know, even if you think Trump is a threat to democracy, there's still our responsibility is to cover those picks. So we cover them in the way that we know how to cover them, which is this person's been picked. Will there be the votes and kind of in just talking about that in the way that we do is

It is a normalizing thing because there is no other way to talk about it. Yeah, that's insightful. What's the Senate going to do? Is he going to get the vote? There's no other vernacular. You have to call him Mr. Secretary, even if it's RFK Jr. A hundred percent. And so that kind of is a natural thing.

I do think that the cabinet picks were a shock to the system. I really do think that some of them, you know, the obvious ones, the RFK Jr., Pete Hegseth, and Tulsi. The fact that Matt Gaetz is gone now is kind of a...

a reassertion of some, like the Senate hasn't completely. Yeah. That and Thune, you know, secret ballot, but they did go with the most normie choice on the menu. But, but Trump still does seem to be, you know, I mean, we'll talk about cash Patel in a second here. And there's seven, you know, these, these people, I mean, these are, these are bonkers buggers.

batshit picks and they'll keep he keeps doing those kinds of things along with the tariff thing and other things he's going to be reminding people from now until january 20th that this is not going to be a normal right close to normal uh administration it's not even going to be last time

This is going to be, you know, Trump unleashed, the new Trump. Soon there will be a kind of a treatment of the Trump first term. People will be reminding it the way, remembering it the way they know George W. Bush. It's like, wow, God, the days of Mad Dog Madison, Henry McMaster. Can't we just ban Muslims? It was so much easier when that was the craziest thing. Not the fact that we now have oil can fires outside shutdown auto factories.

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Well, what do you think in terms of the cabinet? You said the Star Wars bar scene. Talk about that a little bit. I mean, does the fact that Gates went down in the way that he went down, A, does it to you make you think the Senate now has its – they didn't ever have to vote on this, but they made it pretty – the Senate's resistance to Gates was part of why Gates only gave up. Right. Oh, totally.

Do they now feel, well, we got that one without even having to really vote on it. Now we can go after Hegseth or go after Tulsi. And who is it if they go after someone? My question has always been, how many of them can they stop? Because he's trying to swarm a bunch through. So how many magic beans do they have to get the worst dragons? Yeah.

So what intrigued me about it was there were two tells in all this. I wasn't surprised the gates went down. I was surprised there wasn't a thundering Trump afterward. All right, you get one. I'm putting you on notice. I'll hold a rally in your state. Instead, Trump just kind of meowed like a kitten and it was over. That sent to me a good signal, I think from a power point of view, a weak signal from Trump saying there's no consequence here. The other thing was

So Mitch McConnell 3.0 here because he's no longer a leader. He's Yolo Mitch. Yeah. Turning to 26. And, you know, he was right there getting out the – I can just see him, Jasper, bring me a mint julep and my cutting knife because, wham, he was one of the four right up there with Murkowski and everything. Right.

So Mitch, who hates Trump for all the right reasons, you know, this is interesting. There's now a coalition that isn't as afraid of him. I mean, Collins, Trump going after her is a good thing for her.

Same thing with Murkowski. Mitch is two years and made out of chrome, and it looks like he's ready to fight on some of the crazy stuff. And Trump didn't roar back, as I mentioned, to do anything. So I think there's a good chance they're going to clip a few more of them. And, you know, you've got others in kind of the national security wing, the rich from Idaho, the rounds from South Dakota.

They're barking, too, at least for regular hearings and all that, which is Senate talk for, no, no, we're going to put you out there in the bristling acid and let you melt.

So hopeful signs. But, you know, even if they kill those, it means the win here is the really crazies or the really dangerous flashy ones go and the mediocrity and a few dangerous ideologues stay like OMB or Vought or Vote or whatever his name is. It means business. And that's powerful agency.

Right. Here's the, here's, you know, you think about the, there is this constituency and McConnell is obviously part of this on national security. That is the either traditional Hawks or neoconish Hawks or whatever, who I think are appalled by Hegseth and Tulsi.

Completely. I think in some ways, look, I think neither one of them is qualified for the job. I think both of them deserve to be taken out. But I do think either unqualified or potentially insidious in Tulsi's case. Yeah, particularly with her. Pete Hegseth is so wildly unqualified to run a thing as big as the Pentagon. I have a feeling that in a way the DNI is one of these jobs that

The intelligence people care a lot about it, but normal Americans don't get what that is. I think a lot of normal Americans do understand that the Pentagon and the Defense Department is a big deal. And I think it's maybe easier to go after – if I had to guess, I would think that it would be easier for those – that faction in the Senate, Republican senators, to focus on Hegseth.

than to focus on Gabbard because it is just so much more of a high profile and more legible job to a lot of Americans. No, I think you're right about that. 2.8 million employees. We understand that bombs, bullets, nuclear chain of command, like all of that stuff makes sense to people. D&I is a coordinating job where you sit at the center of all the other. Right. What is that? The Coast Guard? Yeah. Yeah. I agree. The other thing about D&I, the director of national intelligence was created to better integrate all our

our intelligence agency, of which we have many, that kind of were like cats that wouldn't march. And it was part of the post 9-11 stuff. I think because, you know, CIA used to be cabinet level. Now it's under DNI. And there's still institutional fractures about all that. If she becomes DNI, none of the subordinate agencies are going to trust her.

And she'll get isolated there. Nor Five Eyes, nor the allies. Right, right. No, exactly. All the people we share a lot with. So it'll become island DNA, I think, in the biggest bureaucratic war of all time. Because there are a whole lot of career people who make great sacrifices to work in those agencies. And they're not going to trust her. I wouldn't. It's going to be a mess. I was just going to ask you about one other category of thing here. Because the Bobby Kennedy Jr. thing is another question. Yeah.

But here's the, you know, when you said Star Wars bar, I immediately thought Seb Gorka and, and Kash Patel. Now, you know, Seb Gorka is going to be inside the white house. Uh, that's not Senate confirmable. We don't know where, where Kash Patel is going to go, but there's been a lot of talk about some senior job, either at CIA or FBI. Um, and, and I got to say of all these people, the one who's been most, uh,

someone who has actually had a senior government position previously, Kash Patel did. He's been most vocal over the last couple of years in speaking openly about like retribution against journalists, against the deep state, against, you know, the people who've gone after Trump, the prosecutors who have tried to prosecute him. And he, you know, he and Bannon have said some incredible things on the air about, about this. And, and,

And some of you can say who cares about Steve Bannon. He's got a podcast. What's the difference? But Kash Patel might be at the CIA, at a senior level of the CIA or a senior level of the FBI. Here's this thing he said not that long before the election where he was talking about what he would do to the FBI if he were running it.

And the biggest problem the FBI has had has come out of its Intel shops. I'd break that component out of it. I'd shut down the FBI Hoover building on day one and reopening the next day as a museum of the deep state. And I take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals. Go be cops. You're cops. Go be cops. Go chase down murderers.

and drug dealers and violent offenders. What do you need 7,000 people there for? Same thing with DOJ. What are all these people doing here? Looking for their next government promotion, looking for their next fancy government title, looking for their parachute out of government. So while you're bringing in the right people, you also have to shrink government.

So there it is. Mike, what do you think about the idea of shutting down the Hoover Building and turning it into a museum of the deep state? Yeah. No, no. That, to me, is the scariest part of all this. Not the buffoons, but the ideologues who have some idea how government works, who have madcap ideas they've been keeping in their secret Franco room in the basement. And now they're going to be toddlers of machine guns, but they have some competence.

And they believe this stuff. The OMB guy, I'm sorry, I think it's James, is either vote or rot, is an experienced bureaucrat, worked on the Hill and everything, and is, let's just say, has a lot of cataracts about what the

And OMB is very powerful. They're the super bureaucracy behind the bureaucracy. And a guy like Patel inside wherever, I think Radcliffe and some of the national security people who are a little more normie in the Trump world who got CIA, which they could have done worse.

I mean, again, this is the theme of the Times. Could have done worse, I guess. Did Mussolini have a kid? Where is he? You know, it's very troubling because there do some danger. Now, I am of the theory that Trump wins. And you know how journalism works. There has to be a genius hero. So now Trump is the genius hero. It might not just be fire Biden over the price of bananas.

So now Trump's going to come in with this superstar team of villains. I think it might be a superstar team of squabbling incompetence. And the whole thing could collapse, particularly if Trump starts real economic pain quickly through his addled incompetence. So this thing could crack up faster than people think. But you have to plan for the downside scenario, which is they hold it together. And some of these people ply their trade, so to speak. I mean, we haven't even gotten to the mass deportation stuff.

You know, I mean, you can go down every agency, although I'm personally, I go back to 1995 on abolishing Department of Education because it really doesn't do anything federally. You could block grant all that money. But, you know, that used to be the wild idea. Now that's the soft idea among this crowd. You also, Elon, don't save any money getting rid of DOE.

I don't like, of all the things to worry about right now, and again, all due respect to the DOE, people who work at DOE. We should say Department of Education. I guess DOE is energy. So we're just screwing up. The Department of Education, very dedicated public service trying to make schools better in America. But the truth is we control schools at the local and state level. Right, exactly. I've had two friends who had that job, and they're both like, eh, doesn't do a lot. It's not like the Department of Education decides what the curriculum is going to be in your child's high school, okay? That's not how it works. And thank God for that.

That's yes. Thank God for that. I'm not sure that I'll... I've seen a really good set of bureaucrats who are going to make those decisions at any level, but that's not the problem. The thing of...

the weaponization of the Justice Department because they have so much power. If you get a bunch of ideologues at the Justice Department and in the intelligence communities, people who have the ability to spy on you, people who have the ability to get into your tax records, people who have the ability to, if you want to mete out punishment, those are very dangerous agencies that can do a lot of terrible shit. And to hear people saying things, you know, the mayor of Denver yesterday, Mike, I think, you raised mass deportation. I don't want to go off on a huge tangent about this, but

I think you and I agree. The politics of trying to carry this out beyond – it's connected to the substance and the reality of it. But if you try to carry it out on a large scale, the political risks are enormous. And then you hear –

The mayor of Denver say, I'm not going to take part in this. Right, right. Oh, the whole state of any blue state, same deal. And you hear the Trump people say, fine, then we'll just arrest you. And I, you know, it's loose talk, you know. Will they ever try to go through with it? It's just...

It's not – it is loose talk and they may never try to go through with it. But just the idea that that's their mind frame going in, which is like to start just – they're very casually tossing around the kind of terminology that – I totally agree. Like broken records. It's the kind of language that you hear and you can easily kind of laugh it off. Well, they'll never do that. And you're like, I don't know. Well, the problem is if you start – so –

The FBI. I was talking to somebody from a totalitarian government once, one of their wine and cheese drinking ambassador types. No, no, no, no. That would be – what was that lobbyist in D.C. who had all the –

Paul Manafort?

how totalitarian regimes work, you know, and one of the things that is a feature is plainclothes national police who can go arrest anybody anywhere and don't wear a uniform. It's the Stasi. Right. But he would less. Yes. Like your FBI, because we do have a plainclothes national federal police. Now, we keep it under very tight wraps and it has a very, I believe, a very good culture.

that's the kind of thing you can't lose. But you appoint the right clown there. And what will happen is there'll be a huge internal resistance, but it's dangerous. One, opportunity costs, they get off the normal stuff they're supposed to be doing, which is really important, not just national security and counterintelligence, but organized crime, everything else they do. But you don't want to corrupt that culture because on paper, they have a lot of power.

And so the idea of a bad rogue Justice Department or at least bad rogue leadership, again, I think the rank and file would revolt. It is very, very scary with the FBI being right in the middle of that. And of course, Trump...

Take everything, every bad hardball instinct, we're going to get mail for this, but I'll say it, that Bobby Kennedy has, and put it on crazy steroids and try to use the FBI as a personal get-even thing. And Nixon had a whiff of this, too. And then you get into the world of tax audits and all that. It's really bad. It's really bad. It's really potentially bad. It's the thing we really have to keep an eye on. We'll be right back with Hacks on Tap.

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Just because we promised our listeners this episode, and we also promised them, as you believe, you called it a mini episode, a Minnesota, a Minnesota? Is that what you called it? Minnesota, one of our top rated states. Right, a Minnesota for Minnesota. We want to turn the corner here, I think, and address our last topic, which relates to the other side of the aisle. Yeah, the Democrats.

As we head into Thanksgiving, Mike, how do you think the the the the loyal opposition is looking right now? It's got DNC elections going to happen after the first of the year, but we're starting to see who the contestants are there. Well, I understand they called the whole in the wake of the defeat. They've called the entire Democratic apparatus together and they're having a mass. They're all all coming together to make dream catchers.

So, you know, we're getting ready to really, really pivot and get out of the woke stuff. And we're going to teach everybody a lesson. You know, I seriously I the DNC fight so far is uninspiring from my point of view. As somebody who would like to stop Trumpism, then I can go back to being a Republican again. I hope Rahm Emanuel is obvious. But instead, you've got a whole bunch of tier B candidates jumping out, which is proof that

One, that old politicians, the Martin O'Malleys of the world, don't lose their ambition. And by the way, don't mention The Wire to him. Apparently he goes crazy, which, of course, is the best pop art to come out of Maryland in 50 years. Well, it's not a super flattering portrayal of him.

and his doppelganger in that is not a super flattering thing. I understand it. Well, yeah, but he thinks it's about him. I think maybe you're not that big, Martin. But anyway, not inspiring. You got Max Rose, who's kind of interesting. He served one term in Congress from a Republican district he captured through sheer grit.

Afghanistan war veteran, kind of an interesting character. But, you know, a one-term member of Congress who lost two comeback attempts doesn't strike me as a super home run hitter, although I think his instincts are pretty good in politics. And then there's the committee person from somewhere running. So, you know, considering we're looking for a general marshal or general patent here, and I'm seeing a lot of buck privates.

other than Emanuel. And apparently there's a limited groundswell for him, which is a bad tell. I think the other thing to worry about is historically the odds with this narrow margin the odds have in the House, the odds that the Democrats can take it back in the midterms in two years and get the checkbook are really high.

But even if they get out the Dreamcatchers and Bernie and Power to the People and new songs and, you know, make Stacey Abrams apparently now has taken herself out of it, the last week's whispered DNC answer, which, of course, is exactly the wrong thing to do ideologically.

They could win anyway and get all the wrong ideas and blow another presidential election. And then you get Vance or God knows who. So I'm worried about that. Democracy is now too important for the Democratic Party internal world to be in charge of. And I'm hoping I'm hoping they wake up. Well, listen, here's here's my here's going to be my controversial take for the day.

I don't really give a shit. I think that the chairman, chairwoman, chairperson of the DNC, there's never been a time when the party chairmanship has mattered less. Our politics...

You know, the Democratic Party is now more or less democratic institution in the sense that, you know, we don't have the old smoke filled back rooms. Alas, the funding of the party has now been privatized. I think that who heads the D trip, the triple C, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Well, that's the point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That matters a lot. I think who runs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee matters a lot. I think that the chairmanship of the party or chairwomanship, chairpersonship, whatever, I think has never been less relevant now. Now.

I do think I understand. I love Rahm. No, no. Let me just interrupt for a sec because I just want to answer that and then you can talk about Rahm. Go ahead. I'm going to buck for a job in the Rubio State Department here by saying I agree and disagree at the same time.

Oh, very good. Which is when I say DNC, I mean a party supremo. I mean DTRIP. Yeah. I tried to talk Axelrod into making a run for the DTRIP. That didn't work. And the senatorial committee is less important because the map is so bad, but it's still really important. So I want one generalissimo in charge of all their party committees to do the midterm election. So I fundamentally agree. Organizationally, yeah, if you get a knucklehead at DNC, you can go around that and just have the DTRIP be the island of

of sanity, but all of they need to up all that game tremendously. And that's what I'm not seeing at least yet. I agree. And look, here's the thing though. I mean, in a period when you don't have the white house, the Senate or the house, again, this is kind of old thing. It's like, well, yeah, nobody's in charge. Nobody's in charge. And then, you know, in the old days we would say, well, who's going to go on the shows? You know, it's like, and nobody gives a shit about the shows anymore, but you would be like, oh, the DNC chair at this moment in a vacuum would become the spokesman for the party. We'd go on, meet the press and would make it with it. Yeah. Going to make news on meat.

Right. Right. And now that's kind of a bygone day. I will say I love Rahm, and I think Rahm's been a great leader for the party. And I'm, you know, progressives don't like him. I don't care. I think Rahm is really smart and always has been really smart and has a good vision for the party. I do think that I understand when there are people in the Democratic Party who look

back on that period when it was, hey, our leadership is Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, Jim Clyburn, Joe Biden, and everyone's over 80. And Chuck Schumer in his mid-70s is the spring chicken. That still is the odor around Democrats. And again, we are old white guys, you and me, but

I can understand why some, I can understand why some people in the party think maybe someone a little like not, you know, quite as old as Rom and not a, like maybe not an old white guy. Oh yeah. I get it. I get it. Maybe someone who's, who's in the right place ideologically, Mike, if you could find somebody like, you know, if there was someone like Jared Polis, who I'm not, I'm not going to take this job, but a, a, someone who's a little bit younger in the right place ideologically to try to do what the party really needs to get done ideologically is,

But who seems a little bit more in touch with the median voter in terms of like where he sits on the age and the age continuum. Yeah. My thing is I want one campaign supremo with a big gun to put it heads to bring order to get the army whip together to maximize. There's the larger question of what they stand for and everything else. And so, I mean, there's the optical. I don't care who's on.

Right. Who's on the meat? Who's on the meat? Who's on the meat? Yeah, there still is meat to press. But I do care a lot about there being one general combined forces who knows what to do. And that's Rahm Emanuel, in my view. Time to pay the meter. But we will be right back. Now, let's hear from our sponsor.

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So here's the last question, which is, I think you, you, I think will agree with me about this. In reality, the leader of the democratic party is going to be

Ultimately, it's presidential nominee in 2028. We don't know who that is for a while. So there's already a very active. You can already see the field, the 2028 field forming. I know there's polling out now. Meaningless polling. You had all these Democrats who really wanted Kamala Harris to win because they wanted to stop Trump. But they also thought, well, if she loses, you know, if she wins, it's going to be kind of a problem for me. She could be president for eight years. What's going to happen to my career?

The fact that she lost means that the door is now open to a whole bunch of people. And I ask you, without going too far down this path, Gavin Newsom clearly getting ready to go. Bashir getting ready to go. I think Josh Shapiro. You see the stirrings among some of them. Some who are not stirring as much as people might have thought. I don't see that much stirring going on from Gretchen Whitmer right now. Maybe she's just biding her time. You don't see any really obvious stirring going on in some other quarters.

Who do you imagine? Then there's the Kamala Harris question, which will be put present center. She's got to make a decision. Uh,

shortly here because she has two options. Well, three if she decides to just get out of politics, but I don't think that's going to happen. She either can run for governor in California in 2026 or she can run for president again in 2028. A lot of people will say the latter is just completely off the board. They want her to run again. I think she must be thinking about it. How do you think she makes that decision

between governor in 26 and president again in 28? And what do you think of the broader question as you see the movements out there in the shadows, and sometimes not so much in the shadows, of various Democrats starting to get ready to gear up to run? Well, I'll start with what I think the rules of gravity are, which is the early thing, almost more important to think about than which candidate is going to the Lincoln Day in New Hampshire or the J.J. Day or whatever.

Indigenous Peoples Day or whatever they call it now in the Democratic side. The first law of gravity is nobody knows anything. The second law is early polls don't matter. They're all name ID. And then third law is vacuums get filled. So I think everybody's going to run. But maybe the most important law is you got to look, particularly in the Democratic side, at the primary calendar. And the Biden people got out the chainsaw and made a lot of changes.

If you can put Africans, Americans and white liberals together, you can probably get nominated. So you can't rule out Kamala. I think she's got a lot of candidate problems. And being a loser, it could be the Bob Dole scenario. You were vice president. You lost by a hair. Then you run and you get zero votes.

So I think a lot will run. I would keep an eye on Whitmer. I keep an eye on Newsom, who's going to try the California savior thing. And he's out picking Trump fights, and he'll be good at that. And he has a base. He performs well on television. You know, we could go down the whole list. I think a lot of them are going to run. They're really going to run in the preseason. So we're going to have this big midterm beauty contest of who's the best surrogate and who can claim the most credit.

A bunch of them or some of them will raise a bunch of money and do ads. And, you know, it's going to be the biggest midterm pre-presidential thing ever, particularly if Trump starts to implode and they can just taste the opportunity. So I don't see a commanding front runner. But, boy, I would want to be able to attract African-American votes either by being a credible African-American candidate or having a special appeal just based on the math of the new calendar. Right.

which is not as white liberal heavy. I mean, the Biden people literally designed this thing for a more comma-like candidate to do better before he imploded. As far as the California governor thing,

It's interesting. So, you know, it's a country, really big. We're going to have an open seat. Gavin's going to be done. Yeah. And almost certainly running for president, which is not unimportant in this calculation. Right. Not at all. You know, he, I think, has totally zeroed in on that. And I think he's going to try to be the leader of the Trump opposition. He did kind of a cute thing the other day. He announced...

It was a mix of smart policy and craven politics. He said, well, since Trump wants to wipe out the auto industry and get rid of EVs by killing the $7,500 subsidy, I'm going to do one in California because we're selling one out of four cars now as electric.

Except not for Tesla's, which, of course, is the only car company that manufactures in California. So even Elon blew his stack on Twitter over that. So what are the dynamics of the 26 race here? Well, first of all, we don't have traditional primaries. We're top two. So everybody runs on one ballot and a top two finish. So you could get two Democrats in a new world that doesn't exist. You could have two Republicans. So generally, it boils down to a three-way dynamic.

You know, does a crankcase Republican get into second with very little money and the Democrat walks in, which is what happened with Adam Schiff and Garvey? Schiff even spent millions of dollars to elevate Garvey to beat all the other Democrats. So he didn't have to have a runoff against Katie Porter, who was the number two Democrat. Or do you get a center Democrat who can edge out the electrify the border Republican and

and then make the top two between kind of a center Democrat and a more left labor-based Democrat. So a lot of people jockeying for different positions.

Will Kamala jump in and try to be the big McGill? You know, I don't know if her base, the early polls would say, go Kamala, go. But I don't know if when other choices are on the menu, if she'll stay strong. She, you know, very factionalized here. She's never been that popular with the bosses either in California. She doesn't get along with Karen Bass here, who's the mayor of L.A. So, yeah.

attractive. She'd be super credible, but I don't think it would be a complete cakewalk. Well, I don't know about a complete cakewalk. I'll just briefly say two things. One, the one person, the person who will definitely be voted would definitely be on her side and probably, you know, I could imagine some kind of in-kind contribution of like a vast amount of really expensive wine or other things. Gavin Newsom has got to be

praying that that she runs for governor because the last thing gavin newsom needs is to have a second california person running in the same primary with him for president in 2028 it's hard enough to to get uh to become the the democratic nominee if you're conceived as a california liberal try to do it when you're running against the previous nominee who's another california liberal gavin's like got to be begging uh harris to get in and i think uh all the i you know california native uh

We both have our different angles on the state. I just think that if Harris runs and puts herself in the governor's race, she's the prohibitive favorite in that race. She's the prohibitive favorite. She's won the Senate. She's done it before. Her profile's higher now. Yeah, but this is new loser Kamala Harris. I don't know. I agree. I'm not saying she's not the—that she's unbeatable. I'm just saying—

If that's a very easy, a much easier path, if she wants to stay relevant American politics and her two choices are governor of the seventh largest economy in the world or take another shot at the Democratic nomination in twenty twenty eight. I mean, the governorship is a way easier, a way easier path. Yeah, no, that's a good point. If she thinks she can win the governorship here fairly easy and play the long game.

That'll be an attractive argument to her. I think she'll have more trouble here than that, but I think she'll have a lot of trouble nationally. You know, from Gavin's point of view, I'm not sure I agree. I can argue either side of it. I mean, you make a good argument. The other argument is...

As a California candidate, a Northern California candidate, just like she was, she was from Oakland. He had been mayor of San Francisco. The last thing he needs is her reminding anybody of that. And, you know, the contrast between him, I'm future California. She's past California in a presidential race. She might fizzle. Their bases don't overlap much. And we're not a primary state. We don't matter. So, yeah.

You know, you kind of got to think of it from the foil point of view. What's better for him? I think he wishes she'd go take over the Rockefeller Foundation or something, go away, because he's got to shake that stigma of national Democrats saying, oh, you're kidding. You know, Jerry Brown, Kamala Harris, how many California disasters can the party take in national politics? By the way, a quick plug.

There's a great political reporter here in California named Alex Michelson. He's got a good weekend show on the Fox Broadcast Network. It's not a Fox show. It's straight down the middle called, God, I'm forgetting the name. You can look him up, ELE.

E.X. Michelson. Anyway, he did a great interview. There's a podcast and a video version with Jerry Brown last week. I retweeted it. It's really good. Brown is so smart and still sharp at like 86 or whatever he is. And it was a very savvy take on politics. I highly recommend it. Alex Michelson and The Issue Is is the show Jerry Brown interview.

I would say that Jerry Brown is the one of all the people I've ever covered. He's the one that I would think would have been the most interesting person I've ever covered if he'd actually got to be president of the United States. I agree. Now, where's the gobble? Let's hear the gobble one more time.

See, we are limited in budget, as any of our listeners can tell. That's our signal that we've gone already past what a Minnesota would require. I have a lightning round for you on Thanksgiving. These are one-word answers, and there is a right answer and a wrong answer to each one of these questions. All right, pressure's on. Here we go. Related to Thanksgiving, okay? Okay, here you go. When it comes to Thanksgiving dinner, white meat or dark meat? Dark meat. Correct. Stuffing cooked inside the bird or outside the bird? Inside. Inside.

Correct. Oysters in the stuffing or no oysters in the stuffing? Hell no, I'm not a communist. Okay, that one I actually happen to agree with you on that, although I love oysters. Cranberry sauce made fresh or from the can? Oh, fresh. If you can, a lot of work, so it's always the can.

Ocean Spray says, the can with the little ridges on the side of the can, just dump it out there. They make that in the same factory where they do STP motor oil in New Jersey. A little trivia. Well, that's another one of my favorite condiments is the STP motor oil. And finally, pumpkin pie or apple pie? Apple pie. I'm American. Oh, dear God.

Pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving, my friend. I love apple pie. Oh, you're out of your mind. You're out of your mind. The country is with me. I love apple pie. I love apple pie, but pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving. So I have one question for you. Have you ever done the deep fry thing where you burn down the garage? I have deep fried a turkey. I have cooked a turkey almost every way you can possibly cook a turkey. I did not burn down the garage because, and this is my parting shot here, if anybody ever considers deep frying a turkey...

Go on the internet and find the video that William Shatner made with my friend Griffin Hammond, who shot it, of how to deep fry a turkey without burning down the garage. He is hilarious. He is clearly drunk as a skunk. And it's been viewed like a billion times on YouTube. William Shatner, how to deep fry a turkey. That is my Thanksgiving gift to you and all our listeners. I had lunch with Shatner once, one of my favorite Hollywood experiences at the Paramount Theater.

when I had my office there and AC Lyles, this legendary producer came over and Shatner was kind of cranky because he had to drive in, he was pitching a show and there were some kind of smirking young Hollywood types at the next table and Shatner kind of felt them and it was irritating. And old AC Lyles in his perfect suit, you know, started with Cagney, walked over, still crisp, silver haired, you know, old producer type and said,

Don't let them bug you, Bill. You built the effing place. Shatner was a hoot. We did it once, and we didn't burn anything down. The turkey was delicious, but we have an oil stain in our garage about as big as a Volkswagen Beetle.

In the concrete. And that will never come out. Yeah. Well, there's a story. I always say, yeah, that's where we lost Jasper, my uncle, who didn't read the Shatner video or watch it on YouTube to know how to do this. Because the problem is water and boiling oil don't mix, my friends. The only question I have is, is this the largest stain ever?

as the stain of running Jeb Bush's Super PAC in 2012. We're in a good holiday mood and you have to... All right, all right. Love you, bro. I love you, too. Have a great Thanksgiving and a grateful thanks on this giving to all our Hackeroo listeners. I know I speak for Hacks, too. Thank you so much for giving us

Part of your precious time to listen to We Three Turkeys gobble on week after week. We really enjoy it, and we're very grateful to all of you. So, you know, here's my Thanksgiving. I'm putting on my pilgrim hat now. Find somebody you disagree with.

with politically and tell them something you're thankful for that you share with them. Yeah, that's a sweet idea. America needs more of that. So much more, a little more kindness. America needs more Mike Murphy, at least the spirit of Mike Murphy. There we go. Not what the MBS NBC ratings say, but thank you, my friend. Enjoy that turkey. Gobble, gobble.