Trump: Here We Go Again
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It's Tuesday, January 21st. I'm Jane Koston, and this is Water Day, the show that's very interested in obtaining Melania Trump's inauguration hat. It appears to create a powerful force field that keeps Donald Trump at arm's length. Where can I get one? On today's show, President Biden says peace out, but not before signing a bunch of preemptive pardons for Trump's political enemies. And Vivek Ramaswamy flames out at Doge to maybe run for governor of Ohio.

Oh, right. And we have a new president who's also an old president, both in the literal meaning of the word old and in the way that this is, unfortunately, not the country's first rodeo with this guy. The golden age of America begins right now. From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world. He doesn't sound very excited about it.

Donald Trump delivered his inaugural address at the Capitol Rotunda, and was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States. At 78, he is the oldest man to be sworn in as president in U.S. history. His inauguration speech wasn't quite the American carnage of his first address eight years ago, but he did spend a lot of time talking about how everything sucked before Monday because previous administrations had run the country into the ground, you know, minus the four years he was running the country.

My recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal and all of these many betrayals that have taken place and to give the people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy and indeed their freedom.

From this moment on, America's decline is over. That's right. As Trump would have us all believe, everything magically changed at noon Eastern time and sunlight poured over the entire world or something. And now he'll get to work fixing all the country's problems, except there are no more problems because he's president again. So to talk more about President Donald Trump's second inauguration and what it says about his plans for a second term, I called up longtime Washington reporter and friend of the pod, Todd Zwilich.

Todd, welcome back to What A Day. Always a pleasure. So, Trump has made a ton of promises, like free IVF or NIVF.

ending the Ukraine war before even taking office, which he already hasn't done. There's no way he can keep them all, and I don't think he really plans to. But we've also talked on this show about how deliverism, the concept of delivering on your campaign promises for your base to keep them happy, maybe matters less than vibes now. Making your base feel like you're delivering for them without actually having to do anything. What do you think?

I think these things inevitably are going to clash. There are a bunch of things that Donald Trump will be able to deliver on. You know, look, he is delivering on closing the border, ending asylum, remain in Mexico, naming –

drug cartels, his terrorist organizations, all those things he is delivering. There were a bunch of other promises. It's going to be really hard to deliver on things like tax-free overtime, no taxes on tips. That stuff costs hundreds of billions of dollars, and he's got a Congress that

that is going to deliver on tax cuts for corporations and for the wealthy, they're going to run up the deficit while they do it because they're also going to increase defense spending. So another couple hundred, I don't know how many hundred billion dollars, I'm not sure, to do some deliverism on those things. There are a lot of casual low information or just sort of low engagement voters who probably said tax-free tips. Yeah, amazing. I make tips. Tax-free overtime. That's great. I get overtime.

Delivering on that, it's possible. They can make choices to do it. It's going to be really hard. And if and when they don't do it, Donald Trump is not the one who's going to pay the price. Let's talk about the wealthy. Trump also made sure that the world's richest tech oligarchs like Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Google's Sundar Pichai, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, and of course, his new best friend forever, Elon Musk, were prominently seated next to Trump's own family.

They were even sitting in front of Trump's own cabinet picks and Republican governors got shunted off to some overflow room. And it made for a wild split screen moment when Trump said this. As we gather today, our government confronts a crisis of trust. For many years, a radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens while the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly incomplete disrepair.

First and foremost, it's always striking to me how Trump sounds so low energy when someone else wrote the speech. Like, he could not be more bored. It is not possible for a person to be more bored. But also...

A lot of Americans think these very men, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, are the ones who are extracting power and wealth from citizens and are also directly responsible for the crisis of trust Trump mentions. But their front and center presence says a lot about who is going to have the president's ear in a second term. And it's not the working class. The tacit message I got from that split screen or that combination screen, as you just described it,

Is who's going to have the public's ear or who at least Donald Trump thinks is going to have the public's ear? What do I mean? Who did Trump place in that shot? We all know Donald Trump designs a shot. Whoever's in the shot is who he wants in the shot. All of the tech oligarchs, including Mark Zuckerberg that you described, um,

He's lying in that statement in a very complex and nuanced way, the one that you played. And I think the message is we now control what the public, especially the lower information public, will glean from that irony or from that disconnect. We control the message. We have increasing control over the algorithm. The CEO of TikTok America was also behind Trump. He wasn't quite in the shot.

But he was there. And he was seated next to Tulsi Gabbard. Right next to Tulsi Gabbard, the hopeful for Donald Trump, director of national intelligence. Imagine that. So the irony, even though it's not very cool irony that I took away from that, is –

Yes, these two things are completely disconnected. Yes, I can blame an upsucking of money from a corrupt establishment on my enemies and literally have the richest people in the world sitting behind me. And you can think that's weird if you want to, but you may never in fact believe.

learn about it. And it was notable to me that former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, Goldman Sachs' own, and sort of the architect of the MAGA movement, he wasn't even there. But while leading by press release and social media may work for Trump, his model of politics has a risk for his party. First, Trump can't run again, and so far, no one's been able to successfully replicate his style of politics. And secondly, congressional Republicans will need to deliver some wins while they have majorities in both chambers, but

While those majorities are so thin and they all hate each other. What do you think? I think that Donald Trump won't have to worry about any of these things. As you mentioned, I think that the promise of a Donald Trump without the insanity, Donald Trump without the rank bigotry and Donald Trump without the circus like atmosphere was supposed to be Ron DeSantis. So.

So they haven't found that guy yet. How much will the deliverism part of that matter if they don't deliver on so many of the things that you mentioned at the top? Will Donald Trump's public abandon him? The base of the Republican Party won't, but Donald Trump got over the top when the popular vote by something shy of two million because lots and lots of people, a lot of people who voted for Joe Biden in the past and may have voted for Barack Obama, gave Trump a

a shot because of grocery prices or high prices or even immigration. So it's not all base next time. I don't know where this goes in four years. I'm worried about the information environment. I'm worried about the converts and propagandists sitting behind Donald Trump during that speech. But I also know that that's not the whole country, not the whole country is enveloped in these algorithms, not the whole country is quite as online

as you and I and Elon Musk to put us all in the same boat for a second. Sorry, Jane. But what that means is there are millions of voters out there who, if they don't get

tax-free tips if they don't get, I was promised tax-free overtime. I was promised great things on day one. You might lose people. Now, you might lose them to attrition to not voting at all. And if Democrats get smart, you might lose them to Democrats. Who knows? Midterms are in two years and the Republican House majority is two votes. Todd, thank you so much for being here. Always a pleasure, Jane. Thank you.

That was my conversation with longtime Washington reporter and friend of the pod, Todd Zwilich. After Trump's speech, he headed to the inauguration parade at Capital One Arena. Is there anything sadder than an inside parade? I'll wait.

That's also where Trump signed the executive orders he previewed in his inaugural address, spanning everything from an immigration crackdown and expanding oil drilling to ending diversity programs and renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. And those he didn't, like pardons for the January 6th insurrectionists. He did talk about those later during his inside parade. And, you know, tonight I'm going to be signing on the J6 hostages pardons to get them out.

And as soon as I leave, I'm going to the Oval Office and we'll be signing pardons for a lot of people, a lot of people. To walk us through the executive orders Trump signed on Monday and the ones he's promised to sign, I spoke with Eugene Daniels. He's a White House correspondent for Politico.

Eugene, welcome to What A Day. Thanks for having me. What a day. What a day indeed. So a lot of people have been bracing themselves for executive orders Trump said he'd signed to crack down on immigration. What orders did he actually put pen to paper on on Monday?

So with immigration, tasking the military with border enforcement was one of them. Designating cartels and gangs as terrorist groups was another. He declared a national emergency at the southern border, ordered the Department of Defense to be more heavily involved

tasking officials from there to deploy additional troops to the border. He shut down asylum and refugee admissions. And that's just like just of some in the immigration category, right? He rolled back 78 Biden-era executive actions, 1,500 pardons for January 6th rioters, left the Paris Climate Accords, left the WTO and is

trying to figure out a way to get rid of birthright citizenship. Let's get into that for a second, because I know it sounds like a really basic question, but what can an executive order do or not do? Like, the Constitution is very clear on the issue of birthright citizenship. It's come up with the Supreme Court a couple of times. So what does an executive order stating that birthright citizenship is over for children of undocumented immigrants actually do?

Yeah, that's the thing about executive orders. A lot of them are just signals, right? So now he can say that he worked to get rid of birthright citizenship. And so everyone that is a MAGA fan, someone who is already predisposed to believing everything that he says,

is kind of going to assume that he got rid of birthright citizenship. It is obviously, as you said, not that easy. It is in the Constitution. The thing that is really interesting about the way that Donald Trump and his team think about this, that's the opposite of how most presidents have thought about it in the past, is that he is willing to call people's bluff.

He's willing to call the bluff of the Supreme Court to say, I dare you to take down this executive order that I signed. I dare you to do so. Other presidents wouldn't do something like that because they would say it's settled law, it's in the Constitution. That's not something that he seems to care about at all. I was talking to someone over the weekend recently.

who's been in touch with DOJ, now DOJ officials under the Trump administration. And they said that they're going to be pushing the limits, going to be at the edge of all of the things. And these EOs are a perfect example of how they're trying to do that. What else did he sign that stood out to you? I know we've talked about a couple of different things. What did you see that was particularly interesting?

Yeah, I mean, the pardons were really interesting. We knew that those were coming. It's a long list, right, commuting some of the sentences of some of the folks who have already been sentenced. I also think the kind of talking about there are two genders, right, that's something that is a cultural war fight that

the Trump folks have been trying to go back and forth with. I was in the rotunda on Monday when he talked about that in his inaugural address. And so he is clearly signaling over and over to the people that voted for him, the things that I talked about and that I promised to you guys, I'm going to try and do that. And it changes a lot of the way a lot of... A small...

part of the population operas, right? We know that trans and non-binary folk aren't this humongous population in the country, right? They make up a small subset of queer folks, right? But it stays in the minds of a lot of people and it gives them kind of an enemy, right? It gives them someone to be upset at. And this is one of those things that Donald Trump is very good at, is giving his folks someone to be angry with.

We're going to take a quick break, but we'll have more of my conversation with Politico White House correspondent Eugene Daniels after some ads. If you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads.

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Listen and subscribe to Hidden Brain wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get back to my conversation with Eugene Daniels, White House correspondent for Politico.

One of the things, though, I remember from the first Trump administration was the chaos of executive orders or tweets, for that matter, that were basically left to a bunch of other people to figure out how to put into place. Somebody else is going to have to figure out how to ask the Supreme Court, please, can you change the Constitution? Or like somebody else is going to have to do that. Is this all happening again? Are we just doing 2017 bizarro weirdness again?

2017, probably some of the things again, I will say this is more organized than it was before. Right. These aren't just tweets or X's or whatever. Yeah. Social post truth socials that he's sending out that these this tranche is has been kind of well thought out for for the Trump people well discussed.

at the very least, even as they were being announced, you know, there's someone that's standing next to him as he's signing and saying which ones he's signing. And Trump knew exactly which ones they were. The guy just kind of says one sentence and Trump could go into more of it. So it's a little bit more organized. But yeah, other people are going to have to figure this out, right? The lawyers within the administration are going to have to fight this. As soon as lawsuits happen, which 3-2-1 probably already, we

You are going to see the Trump administration have to defend a lot of these things. Birthright citizenship, I would assume, being kind of at the top of that list. And like the Supreme Court can't change the Constitution, right? We have a process. I'll go back to, you know, the, you know, I'm just a bill on Capitol Hill days when we were kids. But the process doesn't matter to Trump on some of these things. It is fundamental.

signaling to his folks that he's doing the things that he promised. And then if it doesn't end up happening at the end, he tried. Eugene, on what a day indeed. Thanks for being here. Thank you so much. And what a day tomorrow will be and the next day and the next day. What a days. That was my conversation with Eugene Daniels, White House correspondent for Politico. Here's what else we're following today. Headlines.

Yeah, plenty of time. Like the next four years, unfortunately. President Joe Biden took advantage of his executive power in the final moments of his presidency and preemptively pardoned former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley for

former public health official Dr. Anthony Fauci, and members of the House Special Committee that investigated the January 6th insurrection, including former Representative Liz Cheney. Trump has threatened to go after his political opponents and those trying to hold him accountable for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. In the past, he's called Cheney a, quote, deranged person. And during an event in Arizona, Trump also said, quote,

She's a radical war hawk. Let's put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. That is a real quote from the man who is now our president. In a statement on Twitter, Biden defended the pardon saying, quote, These public servants have served our nation with honor and distinction and do not deserve to be the targets of unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions. Trump mentioned the move in his rambling post-inauguration speech. Why are we trying to help a guy like Milley?

Why are we doing Millie? He was pardoned. What he said? Terrible what he said. Why are we helping some of the people? Why are we helping Liz Cheney? I mean, Liz Cheney is a disaster. She's a crying lunatic.

Biden also pardoned several members of his family in a final batch of clemency decisions. The White House announced those pardons 20 minutes before Trump took his oath of office. Biden said they were made out of fear his family would be prosecuted unfairly by the new administration. Biden said, quote, Unfortunately, I have no reason to believe these attacks will end. Yet, then he welcomed Trump back to the White House. That's some wild cognitive dissonance. The nomination...

of the great Senator Marco Rubio from the state of Florida is confirmed. Trump's minions in the Senate are working quickly to advance his cabinet picks. Marco Rubio was confirmed as Secretary of State Monday in a unanimous vote. His nomination was the first to be approved after Trump's inauguration. Senate committees voted to advance four other Trump picks on Monday. The Senate Intelligence Committee advanced John Ratcliffe's nomination to lead the CIA. The panel voted 14 to 3 in favor of Ratcliffe. All three no votes were cast by Democrats. And the Senate Intelligence Committee

and Pete Hegseth's defense secretary nomination was approved to go to the Senate floor. Every Republican on the committee voted in Hegseth's favor while every Democrat voted against him. Hmm, I wonder why. Nominations for Kristi Noem, Trump's pick to lead the Department of Homeland Security, and Russell Vogt, the nominee for White House budget director, were also advanced. Vivek Ramaswamy is reportedly planning on leaving the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOJ for short. For

President Trump tapped Ramaswamy to lead the new department with tech billionaire Elon Musk last year. Musk and Ramaswamy had big plans for how to cut federal spending, even though the department isn't a real government entity. Ramaswamy is reportedly peacing out because he's gearing up to launch a gubernatorial bid in his home state of Ohio next week. But Politico reported that Doge, Musk in particular, wanted Ramaswamy gone.

Tensions between the two were already high ahead of Inauguration Day. Ramoswamy and Musk's Twitter beef about H-1B visas last year was a big point of contention. And as a native Ohioan, I can tell you, no one flees D.C. for the warm embrace of Columbus unless they have to. Musk will now lead Doge solo, and he's got his work cut out for him. Because his department was sued just minutes after Trump was sworn in. I'm not kidding. At least three federal lawsuits were filed against Doge on Monday.

China said on Monday that it's open to selling TikTok, which would allow the social media company to keep its U.S. market of more than 170 million users. TikTok is already back online after it went dark over the weekend. But Congress's ban on the app, which requires TikTok to cut ties with its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, is still on the books. The Chinese government initially said it would not allow ByteDance to sell TikTok to a foreign buyer. Monday's reversal is good news for folks like tech billionaire Frank McCourt, who have shown interest in buying the platform.

Trump signed an executive order on Monday granting ByteDance a 90-day extension to sell. And that's the news. Before we go, Trump is back in the White House after Monday's inauguration, and the chaos isn't letting up. On the latest episode of Inside 2025, Dan and Alyssa take a deep dive into how inaugurations come together, the scandals from the past, and their favorite moments from previous ceremonies. Get access to this exclusive subscriber series and more by joining Friends of the Pod. To learn more, visit crooked.com slash friends.

That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, ask me for random facts about William McKinley, and tell your friends to listen.

And if you're into reading and not just about how William McKinley loved tariffs, believed he wasn't a great public speaker, and campaigned on his own front porch having people come visit him at his house every day, except some days, to just hang out. Like me, What A Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at cricket.com slash subscribe. I'm Jane Koston, and don't even get me started on the Spanish-American War.

What a day is a production of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producers are Raven Yamamoto and Emily Fore. Our producer is Michelle Alloy. We had production help today from Johanna Case, Joseph Dutra, Greg Walters, and Julia Clare. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our executive producer is Adrienne Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gillyard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. What?

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