Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
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how many days left so many 14 about 14 about 13.99 we're in the 13s for sure how many days are you asking the new china ai or the inauguration day 2029 seems like that should have just been something google gave me the answer to google's broken the google 14 oh you gotta use chat gpt for everything all right you're right you're right i'm being stupid

There won't be an inauguration day in 2020. 1454. 454 days. I thought we were at 1406 when we talked about this. Maybe that's till election day. Oh, that's what it was. That's till election day. 1454 till inauguration day. Nothing much happens between the election and the inauguration as we've found. This is good content. We should use it for the show. All right. I think we're rolling. Let's do it.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. On today's show, Trump is making good on his promise to go to war with the federal government. From loyalty screenings to dismantling diversity programs to pausing cancer research, we'll talk about which moves are more performative and which you should actually worry about.

Democrats are finally beginning to talk and argue more openly about how to respond to all this craziness. We'll go through what we think is productive, what's a waste of time, and how the race for DNC chair plays into all of it. Some news on that front. Stay tuned. Then Dara Lind, longtime immigration journalist and now a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, stops by to talk to Tommy about what's really happening with deportations and immigration policy and why it matters.

But first, let's talk about the brief skirmish our president got us into with the Colombian government on Sunday. One of our biggest allies in South America. Basically, Trump tried to send a few military planes carrying deported migrants to Colombia. Colombia's leftist president, Gustavo Petro, said not so fast. His country would stop accepting these flights until the U.S. could guarantee a process where the migrants were treated with dignity.

Apparently, this was all in response to Trump's use of military aircraft for these transfers. Colombia has allowed hundreds of flights carrying deported migrants on civilian aircraft under the Biden administration. Trump was not too happy about this, so

So he announced that the U.S. would be retaliating with a 25% tariff on all goods coming into the U.S. from Colombia, which would rise to 50% in one week. Just a reminder, we buy a lot of coffee, a lot of flowers, oil from Colombia. So that would likely mean higher prices on those things. Petro then threatened retaliatory tariffs of 25% on U.S. goods imported to Colombia in a very long post.

where he also referred to Trump as a white slaver, said that he'd rather die than give in, and confessed that although he finds the U.S. a bit boring, he does like Walt Whitman, Paul Simon, and Noam Chomsky. It's an okay list. It's a good list, yeah. Yeah, and then on Sunday evening, he did give in. Yeah.

White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt put out a statement saying Colombia had completely backed down, that the tariffs would be held, quote, in reserve, and added, quote, today's events make clear to the world that America is respected again. Love it or love it. And included...

No, no, no. Get her on the show. Get her on. Included a warning to all other countries not to make the same mistake. I think the Colombians did say we did get some promises for better conditions for the migrants coming back. They got nothing. They got nothing. What did you guys make of this as a governing strategy, a foreign policy strategy, and a political strategy?

I mean, it's like classic Trump, right? He's the arsonist and the firefighter. You know, it's like Petro is an interesting guy. He was a he joined a Marxist guerrilla group as a teenager and then transitioned to politics. So he's not someone who's scared to fight. We all did crazy things as kids. Yeah. Yeah. No, we were wild. Wild group this table. A bunch of mathletes. Couple left wing guerrillas right here. Yeah.

Some of my mentions I sometimes have. I do think Petro screwed up here. He gave Trump a win. He overreacted. I think he claims that there was a video. You don't think he should have named Chomsky? Well, there was a deportation flight to Brazil that went viral on social media where people were handcuffed. And then there was the news that the U.S. is going to use military aircraft to fly these deportation flights.

And I think a couple of Latin America experts I talked to think that Petro decided he could pick a fight here and it would help him politically. And then when people in Colombia realized that this might mean economic damage from tariffs or no visas for them to travel to the U.S.,

They decided that was way worse, and he backtracked very, very quickly. But I do think broadly from Trump, we're going to see a lot of this. Picking fights with Democrats or leftists on immigration, bullying small countries to get little wins, and then acting like...

That wasn't a strategy available to every US president ever just to be a dick to Columbia. But ultimately, I think it's counterproductive and it raises questions about the US as a long-term ally. The Chinese are already trying to capitalize on it. So it's just stupid. Nerd shit from Tommy. Oh, they're going to capitalize it? This was Trump at his best. No. Like when I saw it unfolding, when I saw it unfolding, what my honest first thought was, it was like, this couldn't have been scripted better for Trump if Trump hadn't

Paid this guy in Trump coins. I thought that the White House they must have been like are you fucking kidding me? This is awesome trade wars tariffs a lot of what Trump is promising It's much easier to promise as a candidate because in reality there are terrible terrible Trade-offs and by the way, there are also terrible trade-offs in having a capricious American president like upending our reputation as a stable and safe country

ally. Like there is incredible value for Americans day to day and having a president that is seen as a reliable partner, because yes, it may mean there are times we have to compromise and give with your partners, but you're a trading partner they can count on. You're a country they can count on. But he doesn't give a shit about any of that. So he gets this incredible, easy win, right? Like, obviously, like, you know, I saw people on social media be like, you know, our coffee is going to be more expensive. But like,

This is bullying. You can bully a small country because they need us more than we need them. He knew that from the jump. This guy caves. It's just another great news cycle for Donald Trump. I did see some people on social media, various social media platforms, like cheering on the Colombian president and quoting from his statement and being like, uh,

oh, he's throwing down with Trump and look at this. I'm here for this. This is great. And it's like, guys, let's not. This is not the way to respond to this. I do want to talk about it in the context of Trump-

using tariffs as a threat to get what he wants from other countries, which, you know, this situation made me realize, oh, this is why he loves tariffs so much. It's leverage. Yeah, it's leverage. And he thinks this is how he's going to get his foreign policy objectives achieved. According to Trump advisors who spoke to the Wall Street Journal, Trump is, quote, very serious about hitting Mexico and Canada with 25% tariffs this Saturday, February 1st, even before any negotiations, just wants to hit them with the tariffs.

Just to prove that he's not bluffing, apparently. The journal also reports that Mexico and Canada, quote, are quietly expressing confusion and bewilderment because they aren't even sure what Trump wants. What do you think's going on there? Have you ever seen the movie Marathon Man? No. No.

In the movie, Marathon Man, an evil Nazi dentist kidnaps Dustin Hoffman to demand answers. And the movie is chilling and terrifying because Dustin Hoffman actually genuinely does not have the answers. He thinks he's part of this plot, but he's not. And that's what I thought about. That's what happened to Canada? Yeah, that's currently what's happening to Canada. Oh no, Justin Trudeau. Yeah. Dustin Hoffman could be Trudeau in a movie. You see it? Yeah, a little short. Grow your hair out. Mm.

Get some lifts. - Look enough like Castro. - Yeah, you know, Castro got. - The Journal story mentions also that Canada has already pledged to spend nearly a billion dollars to harden its southern border with us, which is one of Trump's big demands. And then Claudia Sheinbaum, the new president of Mexico, has cracked down on migration through Mexico to our southern border.

and done a bunch of high-profile drug seizures. So Trump is getting what he wants from both of these presidents already, and I guess... And he's just going to tariff them as a negotiating position. I guess my reactions to this were, one, we probably shouldn't underestimate that there's a bunch of people in the White House that are bullies and assholes and want to wield power for the sake of just showing that they can, and that could be what's happening here. How else would you explain, you know, not telling someone what you want from them before you punish a sovereign country? I also think...

It sounds like Trump is going to try to renegotiate the USMCA agreement, which was what they called the renegotiated NAFTA. Yeah, which is just, you know, renegotiated by a horrible president. Who let that get renegotiated? Donald Trump. Donald Trump. And I think they're mad about it because they feel like I don't think Jared Kushner got that much out of that deal. And then finally, it's probably not a coincidence that we're talking about Trump messing with leftist and liberal governments in Colombia, Mexico, and

In Canada, in Canada in particular, Trump is trying to soften up the Liberal Party as much as he can because they have an election. My like serious reaction to all this is like, yeah, it's probably be good if the Canadians knew what we wanted. It would also be good if America knew what we wanted as well, because the question I have around what Trump has promised to do, we'll talk about it later. Like there's a lot of places where Trump has hit the ground and just sort of like putting in place things.

big policy changes, but actually hasn't really done that on tariffs. He's promising an announcement on tariffs as soon as February one. And he's threatening big tariffs on China, on Mexico, uh,

On Russia. On Canada, on Russia. More sanctions on Russia, too. And then you dig into it and it's like, well, you want to support American car manufacturing. One problem with that is a lot of parts that are involved in manufacturing cars in America come from Canada and come from Mexico. How will that impact our ability to make cars in the United States? There are very real implications and the details really matter and we don't have any.

any of them. And so the broader question is, is he going to win? Whatever he announces on February 1st, if he announces anything at all, is it a big show with targeted tariffs, more like what we saw in the first term, or is he serious? I just think we don't know. My reaction is I wonder what's going to happen when someone calls his bluff.

says like, all right, let's do it. Tariff us and then we're going to do retaliatory tariffs. And Trump's bet is the political pain that he will face here from all of us having to pay higher prices because that's who will pay for a trade war, us, will be not as great as the political pain faced by the other leaders here.

at home for the higher prices and the economic damage that they'll have to deal with from the trade war. And that maybe the political pain here that he'll face will be short lived because eventually those other countries will give in because they will, they're probably smaller countries or at least have a smaller economy because most,

countries in the world do, right? Compared to the US. Or the people just want to see him fight. They don't necessarily care about the impact. It's also given to what, right? Like this is just like tariff, taking off tariffs that aren't in place. Whatever weird thing he asks for, right? Like who knows what he's going to ask for, but I think he just, it's just a show, it's a show of strength. But I do think like, I think at some point when you start pushing

you know, all of these allies and countries around, you start like beating the shit out of them on tariffs. Like you're going to like push them into the arms of China, into the arms of like other countries. Like it just at some point losing a bunch of allies is going to come back to bite you in the ass. It is the type of thing for Trump that like, yeah, maybe not short term, short term. And everyone be like, oh, this is funny. He like won a new cycle against Columbia. Right. But like, you know, at some point you're going to need those allies.

You're beating up Colombia. You're going to try to annex Panama. You're going to try to steal Greenland. I mean, people are going to notice this stuff. They don't they don't love it. You know who's going to notice it? The Chinese. And then I just long term. My question through all of this is how bad do the impacts of what Trump is doing on America have to be to overcome the advantages he has?

in how news is distributed and received, right? And how much his team will be on his side to argue that either things aren't happening or they're not his fault or whatever it may be. I mean, that's going to be limited by people paying higher prices, right? If suddenly this gets out of control with one of these countries and people start paying a lot more for whatever good is affected by the tariff, then it doesn't really, it matters less what the media environment is. Right.

As we just found out over the last four years. And beyond tariffs, right? Everyone's like, how's this going to help the price of eggs? They're killing tens of millions of chickens now. There's a genuine bird flu crisis unfolding that is going to affect prices. And Donald Trump is president. He owns these things. Yeah, well, we also pulled out of the World Health Organization and can't even...

work with the World Health Organization anymore. So one of the things that we're not going to get anymore is alerts from around the world about the developing avian flu pandemic in other countries. Well, the good news is we're at the epicenter. Yeah, well, as it mutates, that's what you get. You get memos from other countries and you get alerts and we're not going to get those anymore. So.

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Trump's also fighting a war at home, mostly against the government he now leads. He capped off his first week in office by meeting with hurricane survivors in North Carolina and inspecting the fire damage in California, a trip where he floated eliminating FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. On Saturday, he held a thank you rally in Las Vegas, where he congratulated himself and the MAGA faithful on everything they were accomplishing together, including notably this. I signed an order that will end all of the lawless diversity, equity and inclusion nonsense.

all across the government and the private sector. We abolished 60 years of prejudice and hatred with the signing of one order, all approved by the United States Supreme Court. We're allowed to do it because we are now in a merit-based world. We're a merit-based country. It just feels so merit-based. I feel it every day. I just see the press releases come out of this White House and I think,

Best of the fucking best, you know, at the at the at the keyboards, all those billionaires sitting behind him, all merit based. So that seems to be a reference to both the Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action in 2023 in college admissions and.

and Trump's promise to eradicate diversity, equity, inclusion programs, also known as DEI, wherever they exist, but especially in the federal government. On Monday, Trump signed more of these anti-DEI executive orders, this time targeted at the military, which is now led by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

who squeaked by in a Senate vote where J.D. Vance had to break the tie on Friday night. Those EOs included one that looks like it will ban transgender Americans from serving in the military based on military readiness. This is according to the New York Post. Dan and I went through some of the executive orders from the first week on Friday's show, but there's some other moves we should mention.

On Friday night, Trump also fired more than a dozen inspectors general. Those are independent watchdogs whose job it is to root out waste, fraud and abuse in government agencies. He has frozen most foreign aid, even aid in the process of being handed out, with the notable exception of military aid to Israel and Egypt.

He also said of Gaza that we should, quote, clean out the whole thing and have Gazans move to Egypt and Jordan. Trump also put a pause on all travel communication and meetings at the National Institutes of Health, including grant review panels that greenlight funding for critical research into cancer and deadly diseases.

Though apparently the acting NIH director sent an email today and a memo trying to clear things up, said that clinical trials are still ongoing and that the restrictions don't apply to clinical trial participants or purchasing supplies for ongoing research. But there's some confusion among researchers over what that means. So there's a lot of just mayhem.

Mayhem going on at the NIH. Was this incompetence? Were they trying to put a pause on this? No one knows. But I guess it was a really rough week for NIH researchers who were doing everything from, you know, looking into cancer research and all kinds of other diseases. And they had to sort of pause everything during this chaos.

And the CDC, as I just mentioned, has also been ordered to stop working with the World Health Organization, which we pulled out of thanks to Donald Trump. Trump also fired or reassigned hundreds of government officials and is making others take MAGA loyalty tests in order to keep their jobs.

A bunch of people who did not pass the loyalty test. All the people involved in investigating him for both January 6th and the classified documents case in the Department of Justice. They were all fired just today on Monday. You think it would be that hard to just make it through one episode of Gutfeld?

Is that the test? Your eyes are pried open like clockwork orange. Yeah, exactly. Tommy passed the loyalty test through a Jesse Waters interview. With that bone structure? He's a Hegseth guy, this guy. Get on that team. You can sneak Tommy in. Where to begin? What's most alarming to you guys of all that?

- Oh, we're ranking, we're choosing our favorites. - Just something that stuck out at you. When you read it all, something was like, "Ugh." - So when you look at the, there's a great episode of "Strict Scrutiny" about some of these orders that you should listen to, but what jumped out at me and what they talked about as well

is these they're they're calling a DI it's obviously going much further than that people talked about that it's going deep into just the rules that have been in place since Lyndon Johnson to protect basic civil rights is going after civil rights rules there's an EO that was about federal contracting and making sure there's no discrimination among federal in federal contracting that was signed by Lyndon Johnson that was

part of the Equal Opportunity Employment Act. - But what really jumped out is the ways in which it is empowering government agencies to, and by the way, private citizens, to go after private companies that may have

of DEI policies, because if you're going to become a federal contractor, you have to assent to certain statements in these EOs that could make you liable. And it's going to make a lot of these companies afraid that their diversity policies run afoul of this. They're a government contractor. A private citizen can claim this is an abuse of the federal contracting system, which they're legally allowed to do. And it's another example of trying to kind of

It's a part of an ideological trend, right? It has to do with the same as like the don't say gay bill in Florida, which is you empower private citizens to be a watchdog and you basically...

tried to intimidate private individuals, private companies for fear of being sued and dragged into court. The bounty law in Texas, there's just other examples of this and they're implementing that now in these federal contracting rules. I think why the Supreme Court affirmative action ruling comes into play here too is that some of these companies that are now sort of rolling back D.C.

DEI programs are and have been concerned for a little while since that Supreme since the Supreme Court decision, which was about universities and colleges and admissions process that that maybe their policies run afoul of the Supreme Court decision. And now Trump doing this only strengthens that.

Did you see the Trump team set up like an email account where you can snitch on whatever entities, companies, whatever. In fact, you're encouraged to. That are still promoting DEI, but now it's getting mass spammed with just nonsense and bullshit. Love it. Yeah. That's great. It's DEIA truth at OPM. A is accessibility as well. It's DEI and... Be a real shame. Disabled workers catching fucking strays. Jesus. It's also, it's like you have to...

They are now, a lot of people on the right, including a lot of people in the Trump administration, you know, they've started to like, it's a slippery slope on how they're defining DEI now. Now it's like, oh, that the head of the Coast Guard is a woman? She's too focused on DEI. Get her out of there. Well, they hated that. They hated that California lesbian fire chief until she started making fun of Mayor Bass. And then they were like, we're back in. We're back in. Stop bring up the lesbian fire chief said something we agree with. So everybody chill out. Yeah.

The U.S. military, though, is a good example of an organization that needs an effective DEI program, because if you look at across the U.S. military, the proportion of black service members, it's well over represents the total U.S. population. But they are wildly underrepresented at the general officer level, especially like the three star, four star level. It's extremely white and extremely male at the very top.

And that's because of overt racism in some cases or just like structural problems or cultural challenges in other cases and should be fixed and could be fixed. But like Tom Cotton is mad that an army unit had to read a Robin DiAngelo book one time and they are just like throwing out the entire program. And the result is we're not allowed to teach people about the Tuskegee Airmen anymore for like 24 hours. It's just a stupid overreach. Yeah. Well, maybe no more Robin DiAngelo books is probably...

It's just like, it's like, this is, but this is throw them at the enemy. It is clear that in workplaces and government, um, that, um, people,

People of color and women are just have not been represented because of historic racism and structural inequality, right, that we have faced for decades and decades. And then I think what happened is a lot of these DEI programs not only sort of focused on making sure that there were diverse workforces and that we're focusing on diversity in hiring and pay and promotion, but also these like unconscious bias training programs, which I think is what rubbed quite a few people the wrong way who aren't just MAGA.

For sure. It's just the proportion of time spent on those programs in the U.S. military compared to everything else they're doing is zero. And this is just a wild overreach. It's very stupid. Well, that's what Chris Ruffo and all those assholes, they decided to highlight all that stuff. And so that made people think the DEI is that and not just trying to have equitable workforces, which we've wanted to have for a long, long time and have it. You see this, right? Like they ban DEI, then all of a sudden the Tuskegee Airmen are out of some...

Air Force training.

learn about the Tuskegee Airmen or other groups of underrepresented people who have done heroic things in the military. World War II heroes. There's also the Women Air Force Service Pilots or the WASPs, and that's

That video was gone for a while too. And then after like 24 hours, everyone was like, oh, I guess that's okay to teach. I guess we could bring that back. First of all, when I saw WASPs, I was like, they've banned teaching about WASPs? I thought those weren't minorities. I thought this is America. You can't teach about Tommy. Finally, Tommy's hit hard. Tommy's taken out of the training video. Talking about catching strays. But like over and over again, like you see, these executive orders are political documents. They are not written to govern. So you have this, so-

They put out this this overreaching rule and nobody really knows exactly how to implement it. They're afraid of getting on the wrong side and getting drawn into Trump's evil eye. You see the this rule about nobody at the NIH being allowed to communicate. Like, does that mean we can't pay our bills? Does that mean we have to stop research? Like, no, no, no, no, no. And it's all kind of now. Is it intended to make people angry?

feel intimidated, unsure? Is it just incompetence? It doesn't really matter. It shows a lack of care. It's a fecklessness. Well, but importantly, I think the effect is that it's going to make people feel like here's the long term. It may be invisible to most Americans in the short term, but long term, this is going to bite us in the ass because who's going to want to work in government now? Who's going to want to work in the federal government and not like

Women are going to feel like they're not included. People of color are going to feel like they're not included. Black people, Latino people, this is going to go... But also, there are people at every level of the federal government who are being fired right now, who are experts in their field, but because they're not MAGA loyalists, they can't work in the federal government. Who's going to want to work at the National Institute of Health? A lot of these people can go get private sector jobs, pay them a lot of money. Who's going to work? We're going to hollow out the federal government now, which a lot of...

I realize a lot of voters think, eh, federal government, what does it do for me? It's big and bloated and wasteful and blah, blah, blah. These are people who are funding. These are people who are doing important research, medical research. These are people, lawyers at the Department of Justice. There was a program where people out of law school were getting really good law school students in their third year at law school. They got grants and they had jobs in the Department of Justice, and they just froze all of those jobs and all those people are out of work now.

Saw a doctor talking about this on social media and I found it really like Heartbreaking which he said, you know if you have a member of your family who has a very serious illness that they may not survive and you're at the doctor's office and you're saying you have to try something you have to try something isn't there anything you can do and There's like the anything you can do the last-ditch thing you can try are the kinds of research that happen at the National Institutes of Health and

And then you, and, and like Trump doesn't care about that. These people don't care about that. They just want to destroy these institutions. Like even the trans ban, like I remember when the first trans ban for military service went out and at the time it just talks about how much things have changed. Everyone was outraged in part because it was done so haphazardly. It was just

issued. It wasn't clear how it was going to be implemented. It wasn't sure what it would mean for current service members. You look at this document that they've put out and it's still not clear what they're talking about, right? Because they say, oh, the military will no longer, for readiness, you can't have people who are in transition. And oh, by the way, you can't use the pronouns of your choice. But what about service members who transitioned long ago and have been serving their country with distinction this entire time? You

Is it because they were using the wrong pronouns? What if they use the pronouns that you demand for them? Are they allowed to stay? How does this get implemented? They don't care. They don't care what this does because they don't care about service. They don't care about these basic values. And so they throw us all, they throw these soldiers to the wolves because they don't, they're ideologically inconvenient.

Yeah, they're just it's just broad. They're just sweeping everything off the table. They're freezing all foreign aid except for things that directly support Israel security. Well, that means that, you know, the Times had a piece over the weekend about how the the State Department office that funds the cleanup of unexploded bombs all over the world now has to cease operations.

So what happens usually when you have a cluster munition and 10% of it doesn't go off, it's called a dud. They just sit around and you'll find some little kids and they pick them up and they fucking play with them because they look interesting and they blow off their arm. And that's who's going to get hurt by these programs. And it's like, why did we need to pause on the cleanup of unexploded ordnance? Like there's no, there's no ideological viewpoint on that. It's

it's crazy how about everything we're funding overseas for like helping with disease and and hiv and all this like oh yeah the pep fires just have frozen just frozen and like most successful republican initiatives ever who knows you know it's early and maybe this all gets started back up and the pause ends in like a couple weeks but what what was this for right we're just gonna hurt a bunch of people in the meantime no it was i forget what it was some u.s senator found out that like

some tiny fraction of money, like six grand out of like tens of billions of dollars was used for abortion services. And I think that led them to just unravel the entire program. It's crazy. Apparently they just put all the top officials at USAID on leave. Just got rid of all of them. Like career people, not even political appointees. Yeah, it was Jim Risch of Idaho figured out that something like

$4,100 had been spent by the government in Mozambique on abortions. That money was all refunded, but they've put the entire PEPFAR program in jeopardy.

Yeah, so we're going to pick out the worst, but it's pretty much all of them. It's pretty bad. It's pretty bad, the war on the government. It's so frustrating and infuriating because I do think this is a hard one to break through to most people, right? Like, you know, in the what's going to be most effective to talk about politically pile, right? Like his war on the federal government, I don't think is going to be high up there, but it is extremely damaging. And again, next time there's a pandemic, what's going to happen? Yeah.

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Apparently there is another political party in this country. Uh, they're known as the Democrats. Democrats. That's right. Uh, I've never heard it said though. We haven't, we haven't, I've read it. We haven't heard much from them lately. Uh, Politico had a good piece about how, uh, much more low key the resistance to Trump is this time around. It noted that almost none of the top early contenders for the 2028 democratic nomination had put out statements about the January 6th pardons or Elon Musk's salute, whatever it was. Uh,

Lots of quotes in the story, mostly from anonymous strategists. Great. About how Democrats are, quote, rudderless and overlearning their lessons. In general, there is still a lot of backward looking recriminations about what we did wrong in last year's election, as evidenced by this viral clip of Stephen A. Smith on Bill Maher the other night. Let's listen. Here's the deal. The man was impeached twice. He was convicted on 34 felony counts. And the American people still said he's closer to normal than what we see. Exactly.

That's what they're saying. He's closer to normal. Why? Because something that pertains, when you talk about the transgender community, for example, and you're talking about the issues that pertain to less than 1% of the population, the Democratic Party came across as if that was a priority more so than the other issues. And so he comes into office. Now you're talking about childbirth, citizenship, and what have you. He knows that's not going to pass the mustard, but he knows that he made that promise. So when he shows up week one on Capitol Hill and he says, this is what we're going to

do through an executive order, even though it's going to be shot down through the courts and what have you. He's saying, I kept my promise. A lot of other things that he's going to point to that he's going to try to do, I kept my promise. Then you turn around and you look at the left and you say, what promises did you keep? Now, you might know the answer to that. I'm certainly not questioning your knowledge about that at all. What I'm saying is, what resonated with the voter? What

voter out there can look at the Democratic Party at this moment in time and say, there's a voice for us, somebody that speaks for us, that goes up on Capitol Hill and fights the fights that we want them fighting on our behalf. They didn't do that. And that's why they're behind the home. And that man is back into the White House and they want to sit up there until you look at the networks right now. They're talking about it. Look at it. This is the latest. Look at him. Here he goes again. Well, you know what? Here he goes again means he's doing what he said he was going to do.

He promised you he was going to do these things, and he walked into office week one, and that's exactly what he's doing. And he's saying, y'all do something about it. And when you try to do something about it, he's going to say, look at them now. Now they're concerned about these issues. Were they talking about that during the campaign? Hell no. That's really it.

So what did you guys think of Stephen A's argument there? I get why this went viral. I get that it resonates on an emotional level for some people because we're all mad at Democrats because we got our asses kicked and we're mad about the election. We're mad about Joe Biden. But he's just so wrong on so many different levels. I mean, Republicans...

Democrats didn't make the whole election about trans rights. Republicans ran tens of millions of dollars of attack ads on TV attacking Kamala Harris on this issue. That's why it was salient. And then Stephen A-- Well, because of what she said.

in 2019, not in 2024. And then Stephen A.'s definition of Trump keeping his promise is putting forward an executive order on birthright citizenship that he knows will get struck down in court. That is not how Joe Biden was judged. Like when Biden put forward a student loan forgiveness plan and it got struck down by a Republican Supreme Court, everyone got mad at Joe Biden and said he was feckless. Like I'm not here to make excuses for Democrats or Biden or Harris or say the campaign was good, but it's like,

It's a 50-50 electorate. There was an anti-incumbent wave. Trump is not delivering for the American people in some profound way right now. It's just all vibes. And, like, I get the vibes and the anger driving them, but it's just like, he's like, he points to Ro Khanna's, like, you might know all the details of the things Joe Biden promised and did deliver on. I didn't bother to Google them. And it's just like, come on, man. Yeah, I...

It's so frustrating, right? Because you see that clip and you're like, well, let's break it down, right? Let's explain all the ways that this is wrong, right? All the ways in which actually Joe Biden delivered on a lot of his promises. And Donald Trump is going to, and has all, Donald Trump failed in his first term on virtually every promise that he made other than cutting taxes for the richest people. That Joe Biden had more deportations while he was president than Donald Trump had while he was president, right? There's a lot of ways to break it down. What was interesting to me about the clip is like,

You see like a kind of conventional wisdom kind of taking hold in real time. And you see like this kind of this, like Bill Maher says exactly. And the whole audience applauds. And I've tried to think like if Kamala Harris had won,

Like, what is the list of big executive orders she could have signed in the first day that would have had like rapturous applause? Like, she's fucking doing it. She's delivering on what she said she's going to do. It's happening. It's happening. And like, that's not to say that like that part of that is just the failures of incumbency, right? Like, well, I was going to say it would feel different because she would have taken office not after four years of the other party. You just unravel what the other guy just did. That's what all these EOs are. And there was a little bit of that when Biden won, right? And then remember the first week? We got back in Paris. We

Yeah, there was a boy did that make it fixed it but no fires But what I the reason I bring that up is only to say like yes It is different when you're trying to run to replace someone in your own party versus replace them on the opposite party But like I think back to 2006 and I remember all the Democrats campaigning for the house and they had their like checklist of the things that they were gonna do if they won and the things that were gonna stop it they did the anti-corruption measures raising the minimum wage there's a whole list of simple to understand policies and like

Forget. Yes. Look, we asked. We have asked and answered. We paid in blood for Joe Biden giving up the bully pulpit. Like, yes. Now we're talking about all these Democrats kind of overthinking. How are we going to respond to this? Let's get out the abacus and like move the move, move the move the beads around to figure out the

perfect response. And I can't possibly start speaking until I know exactly what my overall vision is for the future of the country. And it's like, isn't, is that the lesson you draw from the last four years? Get the fuck out there, get out there, start responding, tell the truth. How about that? Like you're asked about what you think about the January 6th pardons. Tell us what you think of them. You're, you're worried about what's happening at the National Institutes of Health. Tell us what you're thinking about it. You're not, you don't leave the

the field and build some playbook for how to respond and defeat Donald Trump. You get out there and you start doing it. You see what works. You see what doesn't. Like that whole piece was just a bunch of people kind of trying to like, we're going to crack the code finally at long last. Yeah. The political piece was just all about how we're going to crack this fucking code. And it's like, guys, everybody's applauding Stephen A. Smith for this, like this, this rant of like basically easy to refute nonsense. Where are we? Here's what, here's what I found frustrating about the Stephen A. Smith thing is it,

It sort of pulls you in and your first instinct is to tick off all the reasons it's wrong, right? Because you want to defend, right? And then suddenly you find yourself like defending Joe Biden's record for four years, which by the way, there was a lot of good things. We've said this and also saying things like, guess what? Joe Biden couldn't really control inflation, right? That was, you know, and also Republicans picked out

a bunch of culture and identity issues that yes, Democrats gave them some ammo on, but they get more attention in this information environment, culture and identity issues than the fights that we want to pick as Democrats, right? So you can explain away why this happened. And yet that perception is real about the party. And so you don't want to just be like running against the perception that's there. And so like,

I don't know. All you can say to Stephen A. Smith is like, you know what? Yeah, we want people want Democrats. People don't want excuses. They want politicians who are going to actually go out there and fight for them and like and give a damn and look like they give a shit and not look like they are reading. I said this on Friday's pause Dan's line, but like reading the fucking stage directions already. I feel like I feel like sometimes giving messaging advice to Democrats is like giving fucking kids matches.

You know, it's like you say something about like inflation and the cost of living and suddenly they're all out there being like, that's not going to do anything to lower the price of eggs. It's like, come on, make it fucking believable, guys. It's not believable right now. No one is out there thinking that Donald Trump is going to lower the price of eggs or lower the cost of everything after a fucking week. I think that...

What was annoying about some of the statements you guys talked about was, you're right, you don't have to combine the cost of eggs and January 6th pardons. It's bad to pardon insurrectionists that beat up cops. What I think I found so annoying about Stephen A.'s kind of the end of his rant is he was...

criticizing Democrats for criticizing Trump or trying to block Trump or being an opposition party. And it's like in 2008, when Barack Obama won 365 electoral votes, did the Republicans just like lay down arms and give up? No, they filibustered every single thing we did. That's the role of an opposition party. You're going to disagree with the president and you're going to talk about it.

and he's in he like makes them sound like they're just out there carping when the reality is that they're not really actually saying much saying anything yeah trans issues keep coming up and then people are like it's one percent of the population it's one percent of the population yeah it's a tiny group of people that are scared to go to the bathroom at the airport and like republicans have made trans issues the center of our politics but i will say like

John made the point, well, it's based on something she said in 2019. But I do think it's more than that. And it is a larger credibility issue, right?

If Democrats had more credibility broadly with the American people on the big issues, the economy, on like the cost of living, on education, on health care, whatever it is, if Democrats had earned credibility, if they were seen as fighters, as champions for the people we need to be fighters and champions for, there would be more space to say, and you know what? We may not agree on trans issues. You may not be where I'm at yet, but I'm going to fight for trans people every goddamn day. And this has been the case for decades. This used to be the case with

Right. When abortion was not when when the pro-choice position was not as popular as it is now. And there were Democrats who would be in in red or rural districts. And they'd say to Sherrod Brown always would tell stories like this. He would tell about guns. Right. He has a story in Ohio where he's talking to these people and they're like, you know, well, I don't like your position on on guns. Right. I think, you know, I want to keep my gun, but I like you because you're for me and you're and you've been fighting like hell for me.

You know, and so like you're absolutely right about that. It's like right now it is overthinking every single thing. And I want to just and I think like sometimes we, you know, let's let's do what we say people should do, which is like we're like, let's explain why that's bad. Right. Like we say that all the time. Oh, you sound like you're reading from a message. You sound like you're reading from a message. Like, why is that so bad? Well, it's because if people don't believe you when you are talking about the economy or issues they really care about.

Because you sound like you're reading from a script. You sound like you sound like a normal politician. They're not going to come along with you when you disagree. They're not going to trust you when you see things a different way. I also think that part of the whole price of eggs thing is Democrats aren't saying what like we want Trump to do or what we would do. And, you know, when they spent four years attacking Joe Biden for all kinds of bullshit, they would say things that, you know, I didn't believe like Trump would say, I'm going to do tariffs and that's going to fix this. I'm going to drill, drill, drill. Yeah.

We cannot go around for the next year just saying that did not lower the price of eggs. That is not fucking sufficient. And you know why it's not sufficient? Because people aren't going to believe it because it's not believable to just go around saying that all the time.

Like have a story you tell about what working people are facing in this country, what we should do for working people, how we're going to make sure that everyone who works and actually like pay their bills and shit, like have a whole fucking story about it. It just sounds bitchy. It does. It's like people are just not stupid. He's been president a week. You know, it's going to take a minute. Like I have a little more sympathy for Democrats than...

He just took office. We're probably not hearing like Pat Ryan did a bunch of Twitter threads, talked to Playbook over the weekends, Congressman from New York saying some smart, thoughtful, interesting things, good framing, good focus, right? People are saying the right thing. There's just no leader. There's no megaphone. Nobody's getting picked up. No one's getting hurt. It's just the Trump show all day, every day. But there's also not a lot of emotion, you know, like I've seen Democrats, you

you know, or you give like a floor speech in the Senate. That's not going anywhere. Or you're doing a video where you're talking about why this is. It's like even the it was interesting, even the way the Politico story was framed, how it's like they didn't Democrats didn't do statements on the Elon Musk thing or the J6 pardons because they were they connected those both. And I'm like, those are nothing like one matters and one does. That's what I was. The Elon Musk thing. It's like we're going to say you did a Nazi salute. He's going to say, no, I didn't. The conversation dies there.

It's like, you're going to win the great debate about whether he did the Nazi salute or not, and then what happens? He goes away, he disappears? Talk about his AFD rally. That's a lot more relevant. Also, I just saw a Times story. The Trump administration has instructed organizations in other countries to stop dispersing HIV medications purchased with U.S. aid, even if the drugs have already been obtained and are sitting in local clinics. What are we doing? Atul Gawande, who was the...

led the health programs for USAID. He had this, he tweeted this long thread about all the consequences of both freezing foreign aid from a health perspective and having the CDC not work with the World Health Organization. And that was part of that. This is just PEPFAR. PEPFAR saved 25 million lives. And we're letting these drugs just sit on a shelf? Yeah. I do want to say, like...

The January 6th pardons, though, like not speaking about that is crazy to me because like most importantly, they are dangerous and that they give right wing extremists a green light to go commit political violence, even against law enforcement, because, hey, Trump's got their back. Right. But they're also extremely unpopular, even if you just want to be political about it. Right.

It took a minute, though.

It's a week. It's a week after this happened. What were you doing, guys? There's an insurrectionist that was already arrested on gun charges before recorded today. Jokes aside, there was one killed in an incident with police resisting arrest. These are dangerous people. Forget politics. Forget ideology. Donald Trump released...

1,600 people, many of whom are very dangerous. And they're out there being arrested and causing mayhem right now. The QAnon shaman tweeted, time to go buy some guns. Well, also, you know, when they had this story this morning about the resolution, every Senate Democrat had signed on except John Fetterman. And at first there was a lot of criticism. I was like, what the fuck? What's wrong with him? He's not signing on to this? So then he signed on. So it was fine. And then someone asked John Fetterman, I guess just a couple hours ago, why didn't you sign on at first? He's like, no, no, no. I was out. Look, he was like, I've been against...

pardons for january 6th insurrection is forever i've been on record he goes but i do think what we need is another another performative more performance art where we pass another resolution that'll really that'll really get them and it's like yeah okay okay buddy you your life is performance art you wear shorts and hoodies to like the senate floor to like send a message come on but i do get where it's like i would rather have democrats have gone to the mic

the morning after it happened with the j6 thing and like all of them with with capital police officers with everyone else and like shown some real emotion then i would an official resolution that passed well i just think it's very easy to do both yeah i think the problem though is it's like really what you're saying is not so therefore our strategy should be to look for opportunities to show emotion and really what we're saying it's like it's reading the stage directions just fucking do it well right what we want is somebody who sees this happening unfolding and is like fuck i gotta get out there this is terrible i'm gonna go to the

microphones and bring some people out is that too much and you know what let's get hey get a couple capital police officers stand behind me because it's so outrageous i'm furious not everything has to be planned perfect thought out just go fucking do stuff guys and and and you know forget it it's just uh probably hammered this point a little okay we're just no no no i'm laughing um i do think one of the other very funny things that i just want to bring up before we go is cnn did a story on this and they

And they talked about how this was all in the they had this meeting in the Senate Democratic Caucus about how to go viral and the media environment, all that. And this CNN story said one of the they called this a bright spots. The Democrats highlighted, according to a source familiar, was a viral video from the pandemic of Mark Warner making a tuna melt in his kitchen that led to the lawmaker being cheered and jeered by people who questioned his culinary leanings.

That was the bright spot. That's the Senate. Going back to 2020 and being like, hey, remember when Warner had that viral tuna video or grilled cheese tuna melt video? It was a warm tuna. That's where we're at. That's the bright spot. The bright spot is hot kitchen tuna. Well, it was such a badly made tuna sandwich. It was a microwave, right? Wasn't it a microwave tuna melt? He did such a bad job making this thing that people got excited about it.

So all these questions loom, especially large in the DNC chair race. DNC members will vote for the new chair on Saturday. As you all know, we here at the show, big Ben Wickler fans and supporters for a long time. We've talked about in this pod a million times.

we wanted to talk to any of the candidates who wanted to come on uh i interviewed ken martin and ben uh dan interviewed uh faz shakir on a friday show i personally think all three of them would make great dnc chairs um but maybe unsurprisingly we were almost impressed with ben's vision and his plans uh and you know maybe we're all just hopelessly biased because we have known him and worked with him now since basically we've started this podcast but even putting that aside i think

Wisconsin was the most Republican-leaning blue wall state in 2020, the third most Republican-leaning swing state of all in 2020 after Arizona and Georgia. Everyone was worried about it in 2024 because it's a very rural, non-college-educated state. It ended up to the left of the national vote. That means that Kamala Harris did worse in the national popular vote than she did in Wisconsin. And, you know, the operation that Ben built was a huge part of that. So if we were voting members of the DNC, which they will probably never make us. Right, yeah.

He would get our vote. But what do you guys want to add? Siren. Pod Save America endorsement. Add the siren in post. First of all, I also like was just based on our conversation. I also just think all three of them had very smart things to say in the conversations that you had with them on Pod Save America. In particular, I thought Faz talking about what it means for the Democratic Party to look

uh, like it's fighting for people and, and it was very smart. And like, regardless of who's the DNC chair, I think that is really important and kind of goes, and it actually fits a lot with what Ben was talking about as well. And what we've been talking about that it's not just about the right words or the right message. It's about picking the right fights. It's about breaking through and figuring out how to do that in this messy and noisy environment. But like we've, we talked about this a long time that if that, that if we could,

duplicate Ben Wickler and put him in all 50 states, we'd be much better for it. And I think we've felt this personally just over the years of going to Wisconsin, that Wisconsin was this warning.

about what could this omen for what could happen in the country when a group of radicalized Republicans tried to do unpopular things and strip away Democratic accountability for it. And as he said in your interview, that they've been kind of on the edge of a cliff this entire time. But what's been exciting, having gone to Wisconsin, starting when we first did the show all these years later, is watching them slowly build this operation and figure out how to respond to that kind of a threat and do it in a way that's successful. And like there are so many lessons from what Ben has done in Wisconsin that are valuable nationally.

Yeah, I mean, we're biased. I met Ben in 2006. So it's like I had nothing against anyone else in the race. But I think one thing that we've all noticed about Ben is he has no off switch. You're getting texts from him 24-7, 365 days a year about races big and small across Wisconsin. And he was able to raise money and awareness and build a state party organization that was always doing work, always organizing, always building and trying to get power back. And they started from a serious deficit in Wisconsin.

And that doesn't mean they won every race, but that's not a fair expectation. But they didn't sit out any races. And I think like that's the kind of mindset you want at the DNC. And it's also just like a vibe and a tenor and a tone. Like Ben, we went to lots of events and organizing sessions with him and trainings. He's always preaching like an inclusive, empowering form of politics that I think would help out the party and translate well to the DNC and make people want to be a part of the Democratic Party. So I think he'd be great at it.

All right. Well, and you know what? If you're listening and you're a DNC member and you're going to be voting and you like Ben or you think that Ben should be, Ben should be the, uh, the chair, then, you know, I think it'd probably help in this last week to, to go public and, you know, making it probably more helpful than us because we're not voting. Yeah. And probably has turned off a few people. I,

I think, look, I think hopefully net positive, hopefully net positive. But if you're out there listening and you, and you're thinking the same thing, you know, go with Ben, go with Ben. After the break, you're going to hear Tommy's conversation with Dara Lind of the American immigration council. But two quick things before we do that latest episode of assembly required. Uh, Stacey Abrams is joined by strict scrutinies, Melissa Murray to dissect the impact of Trump's sweeping executive orders from renaming Denali to ending birthright citizenship and what we can all do to protect our democracy. Uh,

New episodes of Assembly Required drop every Thursday. Find them wherever you get your podcasts or on YouTube. Also, we're out with our first post-election episode of Polar Coaster, Dan's subscriber-only show. In this episode, Dan takes a look at the early polling from Trump's return to office, unpacks the chaos that got us here, and tackles listeners' questions. To access this exclusive subscriber series, enjoy ad-free episodes of Pod Save America and more, subscribe now at cricket.com slash friends or directly on Apple Podcasts. When we come back, Darland.

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So the Trump administration has been firing off executive orders left and right. Many of them seem extremely consequential. Some are glorified press releases, but many of the more consequential seeming EOs focus on immigration policy, which is why I am so excited to have Dara Lind on with me today. She's a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, an immigration policy expert, an excellent journalist. Dara, welcome to the show. Thank

Thank you. It is. I mean, I can't say it's great to be on, right? But it's like, it's certainly the kind of moment that people with my expertise are in demand, I guess. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, very much so, because it is quite confusing. And we're going to talk through some of the complexity and uncertainty of this moment, especially when it comes to immigration. So first question is just big picture. I mean, what do you think are the most important things that Trump has done so far when it comes to immigration policy?

I think that the most salient thing, and this is not just the day one executive orders, it's a lot of stuff that has come out since then in the form of like departmental or agency memos or just in what people are seeing on the ground, is a really...

aggressive ramp up of interior enforcement against people who have been living in the United States, many of whom were given some form of protections under the Biden administration. We know that the Trump administration is

has changed regulations so that anyone who is apprehended anywhere in the U.S. who cannot prove to an immigration agent's satisfaction that they've been here for more than two years could be deported without a court hearing. Huge change. We know that they are making an effort to strip immigrants

parole protections from people who came under the Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan parole programs, other Biden parole programs when they encounter them. Not that we don't know how broad that's going to be, but that those people will be considered vulnerable for deportation and that there might be efforts to take people who are in immigration court, close the immigration court case, and try to deport them without a court hearing. And we know that they're stepping up

The use of, you know, agents from other agencies, whether that's DEA, ATF, that they're stepping up the use of military assets, including planes. And so given that most of the biggest impediments to like deporting 11 million people were not legal, but logistical, that kind of force multiplier could be a very big difference in how many people they're ultimately able to deport.

I want to ask you about that logistical point, because you wrote in this Great Times op-ed after the election, but before inauguration, that the largest constraint on mass deportation is logistical and that deporting one million people per year would cost an annual average of $88 billion. Can you kind of unpack those logistics for us and explain whether you think there's kind of anything in that insight that opponents of Trump's immigration policy could use to fight it?

Sure, absolutely. So there are essentially four major steps that are generally taken to take somebody who is in the U.S. without authorization and move them to being somebody who's been deported.

deported. The first is arresting them. The second is finding somewhere to keep them in custody, given that this administration doesn't particularly like releasing people pending their court hearings or pending further action. There's the court case itself, which they're trying to kind of abridge by using this expedited removal provision more aggressively. So that's kind of an optional one. And then four, you have to physically deport them. You have

to have the seat on the plane and you have to have a country that's willing to accept them. So even if you look at what they've done over the last week and say, okay, in general, they're really trying to get rid of this third stage of the process wherever possible, that still leaves arrest, detention, and deportation. So, you know, the more agents they have,

who are not just ICE agents, but other agencies that are being tasked with immigration enforcement. And the more they're able to enlist state and local police to do immigration enforcement, the easier the first one gets. The more they're able to build temporary facilities, especially using military money under the emergency declaration that was one of the day one executive orders, the easier the second of those is. And the more that they can both

both use military planes and bully other countries. And we saw some of this over the weekend with a, you know, a standoff, a very brief standoff with the country of Columbia over the use of military flights to deport Colombian nationals. The more they can bully other countries to take back military planes or to take back a lot of ice air flights, the easier the deportation part of that is.

So those are kind of where I'm seeing the big variables right now. But ultimately, all of those are still resources. And even if you're tapping the DOD budget for a lot of things, Congress still has to, at a certain point,

You know, you're going to either run out of ICE budget or Congress is going to have to appropriate in the future the kind of money that anticipates that you're going to be running a Department of Defense that is also engaged in immigration enforcement. And so while in the short term, they're acting really, really aggressively, how long they can keep this up is going to depend on whether Congress is writing them a blank check or whether they're going to start asking questions about just how much can be spent on it.

And just your point for I think, like, we don't have the best relations with Venezuela. For example, there are a lot of folks who have left Venezuela over the past decade or so, and made their way north United States. What happens if Venezuela just says no, American C 17s will never set down in our territory? I mean, do we have to get to a point where we're like, having to coerce that militarily? Is that what Trump is threatening here?

We're not quite to that point yet because immigration law doesn't technically require you to deport somebody to the country where they came from. And this is where the diplomatic aspect of this gets very complicated and very important.

In the recent past, under the Trump and Biden administrations, Mexico has agreed to accept some non-Mexicans, whether that's temporarily while they await court hearings in the United States under the Remain in Mexico program, which the Trump administration is now trying to restart, or whether that's actually taking people who are essentially being deported, but deported to Mexico.

Whether and how many people they're willing to accept in that is going to be a very important variable because it's so much easier to deport people back to Mexico than it is to fly them other places. You know, it's just so much cheaper that not only is that going to be a help on the logistical end, but also, as you mentioned, for countries like Venezuela, where it's not.

really foreseeable that you're going to have some kind of breakthrough where the Maduro government is going to like say, yes, this is awesome. We love the U S now having other places you can return them to starts to become a really important variable. We've already heard rumors that the government of El Salvador is very gung ho about signing an agreement with the United States that will allow people to be deported to El Salvador who aren't from El Salvador.

Of course. Of course, Bukele is willing to take whatever number of people Trump wants to send to El Salvador. It seems to me that a lot of what's happened so far is purely because of the fact that Trump is not going to be able to get around the recalcitrance of any one country.

PR and for show, right? I mean, I think the Trump administration is talking about the number of deportations over the weekend that may or may not be all that much above kind of the average you might have seen in terms of total deportations under the Biden administration. I suspect part of it also is they want to pick fights with like Democrats in liberal cities. I mean, what kind of strategies do you think

these progressives can take to push back that doesn't play into this sort of PR effort, but actually is impactful for people in communities that are being harmed. So I tend to think about this as like a, you know, coordinate plane, right? One axis is

How likely is this to get a lot of headlines, to generate a lot of B-roll, that kind of thing? The other axis is how much does it increase scope? You know, how like how much does it make it easier for them to harm to like to put more people into the process and move them through the process?

And you're right. A lot of the things, you know, like things like putting out a press release every single day can imply that more is being changed than actually is. That said, one of the reasons that we're not really seeing movement on the numbers yet is because some of the authorities they're tapping into haven't really, you know, scaled like...

They haven't really been able to make plans for what does an ice raid look like when everybody's getting put into expedited removal proceedings, that sort of thing. So I think that the biggest reason that picking fights with blue cities is that

you know, it's a big PR showdown is because in jurisdictions that don't have a lot of local cooperation with federal law enforcement, where like if they call up the city and say, you got to give us the addresses of everybody, you know, who doesn't have legal immigration status in cities that have laws requiring that information not to be shared. It's a lot harder for them to arrest people, to identify who is removable and take them into custody. And so when they have these big raids on people,

blue cities in the past, what we've seen is the numbers of actual arrestees they get out of them are very low. The biggest impact is in terms of freaking people out, getting people to not leave their homes, to not go to school, that sort of thing, which is a real harm. But it does mean that in kind of holding the line on lack of cooperation and lack of information sharing and certainly not

you know, offering like state and local resources to help with immigration enforcement, that the amount of money that's being spent and time that's being spent is going to be greater proportionally than the number of people who they are getting out of it, who can then be arrested and deported, which means that those resources are then being taken from other things. Right.

Right. Because a lot of the cooperation you've seen in the past has been federal officials going to local, state and county jails. Right. And then picking people up there for deportation. One other element of this is Trump is trying to end birthright citizenship. So that would end the practice of giving automatic citizenship to the U.S. born kids of undocumented immigrant parents.

or to the kids of foreign workers or students. So I think it's important to note that that latter category is people here legally. When I talk with smart lawyers about the birthright citizenship EO, they say this is clearly unconstitutional, but if it gets to the Supreme Court, like God help us. Does that sort of jive with your sense?

I mean, I am, I, I have a general rule against engaging in Supreme court punditry because I do think that to a certain extent, the law is whatever the judges say the law is and heaven, you know, like heaven forbid they take that. They like actually, you know, seize the reins of that power. But I do agree that I think that the way that this executive order was done, which is just saying, as far as we're concerned, it's,

This is not who birthright citizenship applies to. And we're not going to be honoring the citizenship of anyone who was born in the U S under, you know, to these two parents who like have these particular, you know, this lack of status or temporary status after February 19th, that that is, um,

We've already seen one preliminary ruling against it. I would be very surprised if it goes into effect as planned, you know, like in a few weeks. That's not to say that the Supreme Court won't ultimately rule in favor of

administration on this one. But it is worth noting that there's a pretty explicit century-old Supreme Court precedent that even if the parents of the child cannot become US citizens, the child is still a citizen of the United States. And so they would be... It's not really a

reasonable people have disagreed on this for decades kind of situation. It is an effort to innovate the law in a particular direction. And so there's reason to believe that the Supreme Court is going to be a little more skeptical of this than they would be of other Trump administration policies.

Yeah, I mean, you mentioned there was this one ruling already from a judge who I believe was a Reagan appointee. He said, I've been on the bench for over four decades. I can't remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order.

Yeah, he was steamed. And the other thing about that case is the plaintiffs were extremely ready to file a complaint. And the administration, despite the fact that it was their government, filed all of three pages in reply that were basically, nah-ah.

So like, they're not doing, at least so far, they're not doing a tremendously robust job of, if they truly believe this is what the law says, they're not doing the most aggressive, like the best job of showing up in court and saying that.

Got it. Got it. Congress is also getting in on the act here. So they just passed a piece of legislation called the Lake and Riley Act, passed on a bipartisan basis. The bill got 64 yes votes in the Senate, 263 yes votes in the House, including 46 Democrats in the House. Can you give us just like a quick overview of what the Lake and Riley Act does? Sure. So there are two

totally fairly separate parts of the law that are one of which is is kind of it is it expands immigration enforcement in a way that's that Congress often acts to expand immigration enforcement and one of which is totally unprecedented and could be very could unfold in very unpredictable ways. The first is that.

The Lake and Riley Act requires that the federal government expeditiously take into custody anybody who is arrested or charged with or convicted of a certain set of crimes, including theft charges. Now, that...

So by saying you can't, you don't have to be convicted, you can just be like accused essentially certainly does raise due process concerns. There are also prioritization concerns. Like if you're saying that somebody that that there's somebody in custody in rural Georgia and you have to get in your patrol car and go immediately to go get that person, there are other enforcement actions you could be engaging in.

But the other part of Lake and Riley says that states can sue the federal government to force the federal government to deport somebody who they've chosen not to execute a final order of deportation against, to detain somebody, or to stop visas for a category of visa or a country if the country is...

If they believe the country is being recalcitrant in accepting deportees. So because that there is on the books, you know, the federal government has the power to take sanctions. And so if the federal government isn't taking these sanctions, like the thing we're all thinking about is, okay, so what is stopping Ken Paxton?

from suing the federal government to force it to stop issuing H-1B visas to China because China doesn't take quite as many deportees as the U.S. might like. That's kind of a...

real wild card. And we don't know how it's going to play out yet, but it certainly adds an interesting wrinkle to the dispute that we know is going on within the Trump administration over H-1B and high-skill visas generally. Because if the Trump administration goes in a more dovish direction than, say, the Bannon wing would like, they now have this legal tool that they can use to try to stop them.

Yeah. And just to dig in on those two sort of pieces. I mean, look, I'm not a lawyer, but I thought that undocumented people had due process rights under the fifth and the 14th amendment. This bill says if you're just accused of basically petty shoplifting, you can be deported. I mean, that does not seem like due process to me. Am I wrong?

The fundamental thing you have to remember about immigration law is that deportation is not a criminal penalty. It is a civil penalty, and it's one you incur potentially simply by being in the U.S. without authorization. You don't have to have committed any other any crime or anything else in order to be deportable. So what this does is say this person's already deportable by getting arrested. They're now an enforcement priority.

which is not something that you really have a due process claim against. Now, if you're not in fact removable, you can try to get yourself out of ICE custody. And yes, of course, there are due process concerns in the sense of you're saying this person's a priority because you're classifying them as a criminal. But they're not concerns that are legally actionable. Yeah.

God, that's terrible. Part two. I mean, so like the attorney general in Oklahoma can tell Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, that he's no longer allowed to issue visas to a random country because, I don't know, it helps this attorney general in Oklahoma politically to demand that the federal government, even the Trump government, be tougher on immigrants. That seems completely unworkable.

It absolutely could be unworkable. This was originally part of the bill when it was introduced under the last Congress, which is to say under the Biden administration, which might go some way in indicating why it was added to the bill to begin with. I think that the assumption to a certain extent is that state AGs are going to not necessarily want to embarrass members of their own party. But I think the other part of the assumption is that

Judges are not necessarily going to be super eager to weigh in on this stuff.

judges tend to have a pretty narrow construal of like this sort of their ability to, to weigh in on this sort of thing. And so that, that would, you know, I think that there's a certain kind of adults in the room understanding that this, that that would prevent it from being entire to entirely disruptive. I don't know that that's merited, but I think we'll see what combination of kind of political pressures and, you know, just, and, and,

judicial professional pressures exist to check this. You're going to get to liberal attorney generals in blue states just suing the State Department over nothing for fun. I also saw that ICE said the bill would cost $26 billion to implement in the first year. So back to your resourcing and logistics question, it seems wildly difficult to do this without, I guess, an appropriation of new money. Well, so the way that usually ICE has operated over the last several years is they keep spending the money

which is usually faster than they're budgeted to spend it. And then they write Congress letters of increasing alarm of tone saying, if you don't give us more money before the end of the fiscal year in a supplemental, we're going to have to start releasing criminals. And usually Congress says, fine, fine, here's the money you asked for in the supplemental.

Okay. So you mentioned also temporary protected status. On the way out the door, President Biden granted an extension of temporary protected status or TPS to nearly a million immigrants from Venezuela, El Salvador, Ukraine, and Sudan, which should protect them from deportation through, I think, the fall of 2026. I know the Trump administration is not a big fan of TPS or lots of

you know, pathways of legal immigration, can they just rescind that extension? Or like, what do you think happens to TPS? This is where we get into some really uncharted territory, both legally and policy wise, because the Trump administration said in one of its executive orders that it is going to review grants of TPS given under Biden. So,

We don't know whether that means they're going to say that some of these 11th hour TPS grants shouldn't have been issued to begin with and try to argue that they shouldn't be forced to honor them or not. That's something that's not clear. We don't know what happens to people who have applications for TPS who, you know, if you were paroled in under the CHNV, Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, Venezuelan parole program,

But you were here as a Venezuelan when the Venezuela TPS extension was issued and you've applied. What is that? You know, can can you be removed once your parole expires, even though you have this pending application? Are they going to try to do that? There are so many open questions about this and it's really interesting.

It's concerning because frankly, a lot of these are folks who are not the most tapped in to high information news sources anyway. And so the uncertainty that they're facing and the potential legal complexity of what they're facing is really difficult to predict, but we absolutely could be seeing a pretty aggressive clawback front on TPS. And

You know, it's just going to depend on what they decide to announce from here and how much effort they're willing to spend on the USCIS side and sending, you know, individualized, no, thank you, you don't have status anymore notifications and defending it in court.

Man, I mean, just to underscore how cruel it would be to start sending people back to Sudan, which has been in the middle of a horrific civil war for well over a year now. There's accusations of genocide against the rebel forces and even some of the Sudanese armed forces. I think half the country is at risk of starvation, millions of people being displaced. I mean, the idea that you would just...

put someone on a plane back to Khartoum right now is just like unthinkable from a moral level. Yeah. And this is, I mean, it's worth underscoring, even though we've been discussing it, that there is a difference between saying that somebody is legally vulnerable to deportation and actually taking the effort to deport them. And with TPS, it's,

There is a certain extent to which the Trump administration has made it pretty clear that people who arrived under Biden are in their crosshairs. But in general, it is not necessarily true that somebody who had legal status and is going to have it sunset is going to become a target.

But even just putting them in that pool puts them more at risk. And it also makes it harder for them to plan their lives with TPS in particular, because so many of these people have had, you know, so many of these countries have had TPS for years and decades, right?

These are people who have been making their lives in 18 to 24 month increments to begin with. And now you're giving even that assurance away from them. So it's a fairly profound change for the circumstances in which these people are living. Yeah, absolutely. Do you think, is it now kind of all about enforcement and, you know, the kind of memos to agencies about how to implement these policies? Are you expecting more executive orders and major policy changes? We just don't know. We absolutely do not know.

When Russ Vogt got caught on a hot mic last year, well, it wasn't a hot mic. It was essentially a sting operation. The now, again, head of OMB who was running Project 2025, he said that there were a lot of things that they were working on that were very close hold, that they weren't putting in Project 2025, a lot of memos, things.

and policy guidance that they were pre-drafting. And so we just don't know what the volume of those is. We've continued to see things going out that

almost certainly were developed before inauguration because it would just be a tremendous amount of effort to get them done after that. But we don't know how much there is. And it is, you know, there are some things in the executive orders that kind of hint at future action. There is, for example, one executive order that says that

that within 90 days, there should be a review of whether the Insurrection Act is necessary to invoke. So that is something that they've actually flagged could be coming. But for the most part, the MO of this administration is and was during the, you know, the end of the first term, defined places in federal law that can be used to ramp up immigration enforcement that have kind of lain dormant for decades. So we don't know how many of those other places they've found.

The one thing I just haven't heard much about is any kind of increased penalties or scrutiny of employers versus individuals. I mean, for a long time, that was kind of the approach of a lot of immigration policy, right? Which is to make it really hard for people to work by punishing their employers if they hired undocumented people. But I'm just I don't think I'm hearing much about that.

The primary way that they would be going about this would be just engaging in enforcement. And usually when there are large scale workplace raids, those are associated with some form of, you know, prosecution or sanction or something against the employer who they're raiding. You know, that's that's a.

kind of stochastic thing, right? You're not like, you're not auditing an entire sector. And so the extent to which it's going to really shape employer behavior is unclear. But yeah, the, the biggest tool, the biggest thing that kind of hasn't been done on employer sanctions is legislative. It's mandatory nationwide e-verify. And

that has not been as much of a priority of this generation of immigration restrictionism as it was like a decade ago, in part because there are employers who would, who are willing to stay quiet, even as it becomes harder for them to hire people legally. But if you try to go after their workforce, then, or if you try to prevent them from hiring anyone who doesn't have authorization, then they'll get mad at you. So, you know, I think it's, it's still to be seen. It's certainly not a,

It's not a rhetorical priority for them unless you start talking about the economic benefits of immigration, in which case they start talking about how exploitative employers are. But there hasn't been a whole lot of effort to make it, you know, for example, Department of Labor priority to go after employers for exploiting unauthorized labor. Got it. I mean, just finally on the politics, I mean, curious how you think or why you think the politics change.

on immigration policy changed so much over, I don't know, let's say the past decade or so? I don't know if it was just generally more migration, Biden's policies, like the relentless busing from states like Texas to blue states. I mean, what's your big picture sense of that? I think that, you know,

For one thing, the thermostatic effect, you know, of like a public opinion swinging in favor of immigrants under Trump and then swinging against under Biden is really, really hard to it's hard to overstate. And it's also hard to disentangle anything else from that kind of basic idea.

oh, the government is doing some things I don't like. I'm going to make this more salient. In general, immigration isn't salient for a whole lot of people. And so they're very, it's very easy to kind of swing them from one direction to the other based on opposition to who's in office, based on, you know, seeing B-roll of people coming in, that sort of thing. I don't think that, I think it's kind of not,

whether what we're seeing is an increase in the number of people who are really, really activated against unauthorized immigration or against immigration generally, or whether what we're seeing is the culmination of the fact that this is the signature policy issue of the man who's been the standard bearer of the Republican Party for a decade. And so anyone who's affiliated with the Republican Party has decided that this is a more important issue to them. But I think the other side of this is a lot of...

of people who were in solidly blue jurisdictions saw strains on state and local governments responding to recent arrivals. And so we're forced, you know, I think, I think,

were put in a space where they were considering that actually there was a certain amount of zero sum trade-off between investing in people who are already here and investing in new arrivals. And the Biden administration, by kind of not doing a whole lot to ensure that new arrivals were coming in an undisruptive way, didn't necessarily help with this. But whether that was

something that's going to like really change a whole lot of people's opinions permanently or whether it was a reaction to a moment under an administration that is no longer in office is something that remains to be seen. Yeah, very good point. Well, Dara, thank you so much for coming on the show. Final, final question. You got the band back together with your old crew from the weeds with Ezra Klein and Matthew Iglesias the other day on Ezra's podcast. Is there any chance of a comeback tour where you hit a few kind of the nerdiest cities? You know, we could sell out some stadiums.

I am entirely on board with this. If and only if we can at least start talking to a venue in Stockholm. Because if I have to talk about Swedish administrative data one more time without being in Sweden to do it, it's going to be very upsetting. I'm not even sure what you're referencing. And I love that. That's we're gonna leave it there. That is perfect. Dara, thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah.

That's our show for today. Thanks to Dara Lynn for coming by. And Dan and I will be back with a new show on Friday. Bye, everyone.

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