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– Welcome to Raging Moderates, I’m Scott Galloway.
– And I’m Jessica Tarland.
– Jess, this is the part of the show where we banter.
– I’m reading the same note.
What would you like to banter about?
– Well, let’s bring this back to me.
Show, ask me what I do this weekend.
– What did you do this weekend?
How fantastic was it?
– Well, Jess, I don’t like to talk about me
or my personal life, but on Saturday morning,
I had my 14 year old, just me and him.
And so I said, what do you wanna do?
And I knew it involves something in football.
So we jumped on the Euro star on Saturday morning.
– Which is lovely.
– Amazing.
– Yeah.
– It takes two hours and 20 minutes.
Pancras, or St. Pancras Station is about 10 minutes
from where we’re living.
Two hours and 20 minutes later, we’re at Garde de Nord,
which is I think train station of North or something
in French, just for those of you out there.
And then we’re at the hotel.
We went and had an amazing, my favorite,
or our favorite lunch, we had steak frites.
And then we went to the most amazing little stores,
mostly chocolatiers and crepe stores.
And then we went back and napped and went to the pool.
When you have a 14 year old, you gotta go to the pool.
I’ve learned that.
– That lasts until high school?
– Yeah, no.
– That they’re into going to the pool?
– You know, his only criteria for a hotel
is do they have a pool?
And we always go to the pool.
And then we went and then we had a dinner
at the most fabulous restaurant at the top
of this new fancy hotel called Cheval Blanc.
And we got dressed up and then we got dressed down
and we went to the PSG Paris Saint-Germain football
that’s the major team in Paris.
Oh, someone’s gonna say, “No, they’re not.”
Ty Renz, which was a big disappointment for PSG,
but we went and saw the football game,
came back next morning, woke up, had a lovely breakfast
and then went to Notre Dame, which is spectacular.
– Oh, it looks amazing.
– Spectacular and then caught the US star back,
I mean, 24 hours and just it was one of those
incredible weekends with my son.
What did you do?
– Well, I went to a three-year-old’s birthday party
on Saturday morning.
There was cake, funfetti flavor, which is my favorite.
So–
– Do they rent a place or is it one of those
where it’s rich people in Tribeca?
Do they have to rent a place?
– Well, I think both of those types classify as–
– Wealthy.
– Rich people, ’cause if you can rent a place
for your toddler’s birthday,
they did it at their building, actually.
So, and I don’t know what they earn,
so I can’t comment on that, but it was a lovely party.
And then Saturday night,
we went out to dinner with three other couples,
which was very lively, a lot of fun.
We’re trying out a new babysitter.
It seemed to go okay.
The toddler by the end said, “I liked new babysitter.”
So, great, but it was nice to go out.
You know how you usually are out with one other couple,
but being out with three other couples,
tons of conversations going on.
We had a nice time, but home by 9.30,
asleep by 10, the usual.
– So, four couples that usually gives everyone permission
to drink more is what I find.
And two–
– There was a lot of drinking and a discussion
about how one person thinks
that their partner drinks too much.
– It makes company, that’s nice.
– Yeah, I asked to be excluded from the conversation,
’cause also I barely drink, I’m not.
I’m a lightweight, and I guess not that fun.
And so, I’m always very uncomfortable
with those conversations.
– Yeah, so I’ll give you a little bit of a heads up
on what’s coming your way.
In about seven to 10 years,
you’re gonna freak out about the fact
that you’ve spent so much time just raising kids,
and that you’re losing your youth,
and you and your female friends will start parting
like fucking rock stars diagnosed with ass cancer.
You’re gonna start drinking like crazy.
You’re gonna start doing girls trips all the time.
You’re gonna abuse alcohol,
you’re gonna experiment with drugs,
and you’re gonna make all the guys trips
that movies have been depicted on seem like a tea party.
They talk about the midlife crisis that men have.
I think men’s are longer, but less severe.
The midlife crisis for women happens earlier.
Specifically, I think when they leave
kind of their birthing years and they’re worried
they’re losing kind of their hot girl 20s and 30s,
and they go ape shit.
So anyways, you got that coming.
You got that coming.
Well, well, that sounds like fun,
’cause I, yeah, I’m definitely not doing any of that.
No, none of that.
At this point.
Well, it’s hard, you know, what are you gonna do?
Every once in a while, I have a lot of good friends
because I–
You have a second glass of Chardonnay.
Is that when you–
No, I’m not, wait, I have one drink also.
What is your drink?
I only drink Tito’s grapefruit and soda.
You’re so fancy.
It’s like a modified Paloma.
So here’s another prediction.
I mean–
You’re gonna start getting unsolicited bottles of Tito’s.
When I started talking about how much I love Zacapa,
I’d show up to events and they’d have a bottle of Zacapa.
So everyone, Tito’s for the lady.
Good, good, all right, enough of that.
Grape banter, I loved it.
Yeah, that worked, check that box.
In today’s episode of Raging Moderates,
we’re discussing Trump’s whirlwind first week in office,
how Democrats are responding to Trump,
and what it really means to be a moderate
in today’s political climate.
Okay, so let’s bust right into it.
Donald Trump has hit the ground running
in his first week back in office,
signing nearly 50 executive orders and actions
that are already sort of reshaping politics in our country.
These include escalating immigration crackdowns
or deportation flights in a southern border troop surge,
as well as targeting birthright citizenship
and freezing asylum programs.
On Sunday, he also got into a feud
with the president of Colombia over deportation flights.
Meanwhile, he has halted foreign aid worldwide
and revoked security clearances
from former officials critical of him.
Add to that his controversial pardons of January 6th
defendants, the confirmation of cabinet appointments,
including Pete Hegset, despite numerous allegations
against him and threats to eliminate FEMA
while visiting disaster zones,
including Hurricane Helene’s wreckage in North Carolina
and wildfire ravaged California.
It’s a whirlwind start that is already redefining
how America Governs communicates
and is viewed globally.
Jess, there’s a lot to unpack here from Trump’s first week.
What stood out to you the most?
– That there is a lot.
That’s the point, right?
We’re so quickly back to where we left Trump 1.0,
which is I’m gonna throw everything at the wall
and just see what sticks.
And it feels as though we have a bunch of angry teens
that are in charge of the government, right?
Trying everything, pushing boundaries,
waiting for someone to slap them on the wrist to push back.
Maybe that comes from, you know, part of the internal caucus,
but we’ll talk about that later on
with some of the DEI initiatives that they scaled back,
but like waiting for the courts to come and get them,
you know, hoping that they just can skate through
with some of this stuff.
I feel there’s an overwhelming sense of manufactured chaos
to everything and that we are living in the midst of,
you would know better than me.
If it is, in fact, the biggest branding exercise in history,
but this golden age of America,
and he has lots of social media spots about it
out there on all of his channels,
it feels like he’s just going full steam ahead
with this social media driven approach to governance,
loyalty tests, everything that he left on the table
from the first time around,
he’s picking it up and doing it to the nth degree
if he can get away with it.
And he’s just calling our bluff, right?
Just saying, well, come and get me, right?
So that’s my feeling writ large
about what’s gone on so far, what about you?
– Yeah, I think that’s right.
It feels as if one, you could argue this is leadership
that he’s had kind of four years to prepare
for what he would do and just hitting the ground running
and has decided, okay, I’m gonna, you know,
promises made, promises kept,
and it’s going aggressively at everything he talked about
and moving, you know, their fleet of foot,
signing executive orders on the dais.
So you could argue it’s leadership.
I like what you said, the world’s largest branding event.
I hadn’t thought of it that way.
I think that’s really interesting.
At the same time, you sort of flooding the zone,
which is so much shit or actions
that wouldn’t have flown before.
And one of the things about our government,
the reason why we have three branches
is it’s meant to have this wonderful intransigence
where we sometimes to a fault,
wrestle stuff to the ground and really examine it.
And there’s just none of that now.
The, I would give more points to the Trump administration
than I would give to the Democratic party right now
who appears to be just caught flat footed.
In this mixed of, can you believe this shit?
We don’t know what to do.
And trying to sign up for this PBS Hallmark Channel
bullshit of we need to come together
and we need to cooperate with the president.
And they’re all trying to,
they’re all in such shock about this win.
And, you know, while it was a small number of votes,
so you went kind of seven for seven in swing states,
they’re all trying to pretend to be more moderate
and say, I’ll work with the president
and they don’t want to come right out of the box
shitposting them.
I think that’s a failed strategy.
I think they wanted war.
I think we should have it.
I’m not up for normalizing an insurrectionist and a rapist.
So I guess that doesn’t make me a moderate
because I won’t sign up to this.
– Great.
We’ll just end the podcast right now.
– But I would argue that there’s this,
we have this sort of notion it’s time to come together.
– I don’t agree.
I think Democrats and moderate Republicans
need to come to the rescue.
I think some of this stuff is just so over the line
and so un-American, you know,
rescinding the security detail of people who he doesn’t like.
– With live Iranian threats to their lives.
I mean, if you have Tom Cotton,
maybe the hero in all of this,
which is frightening to me, but.
– Well, he wants a security detail when he’s out of office.
– Well, he definitely wants one on January 6th.
Oh, no, it was Josh Hawley.
He was riding away like a little girl.
No offense to little girls.
Some of it is just petty.
Some of it is the revenge tour.
Some of it I do think is rooted in a genuine ideology,
but then it’s always taken one step further.
And I’ve been thinking about this notion of
what is the kernel of truth that gets us
to the crazy place that we’ve ended up, right?
Because a lot of what’s going on right now,
I believe is Democrats fault, right?
Like we walked into very specific traps.
And so we ended up with people telling us,
essentially I want a bloodless revolution, right?
I want the establishment so far away
that I can’t even see Nancy Pelosi.
All of this makes me sick.
And I would rather take a flyer on the chaos agent
than have someone who is routine and boring
and also is afraid to say things that are common sense.
Like the thing that’s right in front of you.
So if we look at with the DEI revolution
that’s going on now, that comes from, you know,
after the murder of George Floyd,
that companies just added, you know,
50 to 100 DEI employees or it was crazy.
I was looking at data from Loudoun County, Virginia.
They have a DEI office that they’re spending enough on it
that they could hire 125 new teachers
if they took that money and did that.
Obviously a parent in that district is going to say,
I would rather have new teachers
than have dozens of employees in the DEI office.
For instance, on the trans issue,
we talk about this regularly.
If you’re going to say that it’s fine for Leah Thomas
to compete at the collegiate level,
people are going to think that you are insane on trans issues
and then they’re going to pick someone
who’s going to over correct
and take away protections for trans people.
On immigration, if you’re going to say the border is secure,
people are going to look at you like you’re a lunatic,
especially once migrants are getting bust
to northeastern liberal cities
and they’re understanding the implications
of how El Paso taxes has been living.
And we’re going to have the overcorrection
and we’re going to see stuff like this.
Like, I don’t even want to call it a rise in deportations.
I find it fascinating,
and this goes to the social media presidency
or just who has the best branding exercise of this
because they’re out there saying,
promises made, promises kept.
We deported 310 undocumented people or illegals,
they would say, I would say undocumented because I’m polite.
And Biden was deporting,
sometimes it got over 400 people per day.
I think on average, he was at 310 per day,
but the Democrats never talked about anything
that they were doing.
And that’s the difference in this.
If you leave people in the dark
about what your administration is actually doing,
and I’m talking about the stuff that matters to them,
not the stuff that feels ancillary or for show,
they’re going to pick the other person.
And now people are running around saying,
oh, well, Donald Trump is the toughest on immigration.
No, actually Barack Obama was the toughest on immigration.
And we have been deporting a lot of people.
People don’t know that border crossings are down 55%
at the end of the Biden administration,
after obviously a huge surge in the beginning.
So we need a new digital strategist, that’s for sure,
the next time around that we do this.
And I don’t know, have you listened to any of Chris Hayes’
interviews about his new book about attention
and like the attention economy?
– Oh, that’s a new term, attention economy.
Let me think, I started using that
about 15 fucking years ago.
Anyways, what did Chris Hayes said?
He’s discovered the attention economy?
What does Chris have to say?
– No, he didn’t, no, he didn’t discover it,
but he’s talking about it in context of recent outcomes
and this race just to be the first person to say something
that someone sees on their phone
and how meaningful that is for that.
And I cannot think of an instance where Democrats
were the first people to be able to say something.
It’s always the Republicans and usually it’s Trump.
– Well, just starting there.
So first off, I would like to see
the, what committee would it be?
– We need immediately, in my opinion, to get,
probably not Musk,
because I think it would be too much of a spectacle
and just bring him more power.
It’s like one of those villains in a comic book
that the more you throw shit at him,
the more he absorbs it and becomes more powerful.
But the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee
in my opinion have hearings in the tech industry’s
influence on democracy and its elections
because there, I think, is now emerging evidence
that basically Musk and Yacarino weaponized Twitter,
including creating thousands and thousands of accounts
to elevate misinformation and essentially spread
just a ton of propaganda misinformation
that had a real impact on the election.
I’m not sure it’s illegal.
It’s a private company.
He can do what he wants with it.
But I want her up there to under oath to say,
yeah, I knew that he was creating thousands of bots
pretending to be humans.
And we were elevating information or lies,
even though we knew they were lies,
such that it would influence the outcome of the election.
I just want her to go on record saying that
so Americans know what they’re dealing with.
And they have very effectively,
even if it’s Umberta Eco, the Italian philosopher said,
along the lines of the attention economy,
that it’s not what you’re famous for,
it’s just about being famous.
So say something incendiary,
and as long as you’re dominating the news cycle,
I mean, I feel like Republicans are dominating
90% of the news cycle right now.
And unfortunately, we have Senator Schumer,
who brightens up a room by leaving it,
just kind of doing nothing or saying nothing.
We have Speaker Emerita Pelosi,
who just purchased $50,000 to $100,000 worth of call options
on Tempest AI.
And when that was disclosed,
the company had its best one day performance in history
at 35%.
So she’s spending more time on Robinhood,
engaging what is effectively insider trading,
than actually paying attention to real issues.
You know, my question is, where the fuck are Democrats?
I don’t agree with a lot of AOC’s policies,
but at least she’s out there.
At least she’s trying to push back.
Where is Senator Klobuchar talking about,
you know, antitrust and competition and inflation,
and talking about how the tenure is surging,
and that these policies are incredibly inflationary.
We have, we’re literally fighting fire
with fucking squirt guns.
And when I say squirt guns,
I mean senior leadership in the Democratic Party
that is too old, too tame,
thinks they’re in a PBS drama,
where they, good sir,
and they like hit them with their glove.
I mean, enough already.
That this is insane that we don’t have,
I wanna see hearings on,
let’s immediately have a hearing
on this new crypto AI community.
And first thing is we need them to come,
this committee who organized by the president,
we should have the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing
investigate legal implications of Trump’s meme coins.
I want and bring the new head of this AI and crypto community
to explain the Trump and Melania coin.
Let’s have him go on the record and say,
what is this and is it good for the economy?
And we’ll be able to invite dozens of the 60,000 people
who bought this coin and are now off 70 or 80%
in about 72 hours.
Instead, we just sort of sit there
and give this bullshit, let’s time to come together.
There’s things we can work on together, work on together.
We had an immigration bill that the president basically
from Mar-a-Lago killed, so he could take credit for it.
And we’re all sitting around thinking,
it reminds me of the movie, “The Mission.”
I don’t know if you saw that movie
with Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons.
But Jeremy Irons plays this,
I’m gonna call priest, a religious figure,
and the British are coming basically to slaughter
this indigenous community.
I don’t know if it’s Argentina or Brazilian.
They’re missionaries, anyways.
And the priest, Robert De Niro is trying to get everyone
they know they’re coming to prepare for war.
And the priest says, we’re about non-violence.
And they’re slaughtered, of course.
I just watched a movie called “24,”
which was about the most famous Norwegian spy
of all things, and a woman stands up,
as he’s speaking to this university, saying,
why didn’t you try non-violence?
I feel like the Democrats have decided to try non-violence.
And I’m like, sir, say, I choose violence.
This is not working.
Sitting around trying to pretend
we’re taking the higher ground
and we’re gonna work with the president.
It hasn’t worked, folks.
We need to be calling balls and strikes here
and saying that this is, when you have the president
saying things like polluting blood,
and then you have the person who, in my opinion,
weaponized a platform to get him elected,
telling the far-right party in Germany,
you shouldn’t dilute your culture.
I mean, this is pre-Hitler shit.
And yet, I don’t see a single Democrat
with anything resembling a following of social media
out there saying, fuck all.
So yeah, right now, as far as I can tell,
we have one party and another party
that thinks they’re at Catillion
training their kids to be polite
and that peace and love will win out.
Thank you for my TED talk.
Okay, let’s take a quick break.
Stay with us.
It’s Today Explained.
I’m Noelle King with Miles Bryan.
Senior reporter and producer for the program, hello.
Hi, you went to public school, right, Miles?
Yes, go South High Tigers.
What do you remember about school lunch?
Oh, I remember sad lasagna, shrink-wrapped
in little containers.
I remember avoiding it.
Do you remember the nugs, the chicken nuggets?
Yeah, if I had to eat school lunch,
that was a pretty good option.
I actually liked them.
But in addition to being very tasty,
those nugs were very processed.
And at the moment, America has got processed foods
in its crosshairs.
It’s true, we are collectively very down
on processed food right now, none more so
than Health and Human Services’ secretary nominee,
Robert Fluoride Kennedy, Jr.
I’ll get processed food out of school lunch immediately.
About half the school lunch program
goes to processed food.
Hen the man who once saved a dead bear cub for a snack
fixed school lunches.
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– So a couple of things.
Democrats said all the stuff that you just said
before the election for months
and voters turned up and said, “I don’t care.”
Right, so I care.
Millions of people do care,
but the pivotal number that seven million people
who voted for Biden in 2020 sat home in 2024.
That’s how little they cared about
what you’re just talking about.
AOC is out there.
She posted before the inauguration,
people are asking me why I’m not going to inauguration
and I’m not going to the inauguration of a rapist
to use the term that you use,
though I know there’s a legal conversation about that
and I’m not looking to have a defamation suit.
So AOC is saying stuff like that.
She was on John Stuart’s podcast,
talking a lot like you are just now.
But I feel like for someone like Hakeem Jeffries,
who is a very unifying leader,
he is trying to figure out as Nancy Pelosi had to for years,
how to manage a caucus that is being pulled
in many different directions
because the difference between what goes on
for a safe seat Democrat and a swing seat Democrat
is like night and day.
And we’re going to have Congressman Tom Swazi
on for an interview later in the week,
talk to him about this as he’s from a swing district
and he was one of the first people out there saying
these are the issues I’ll be able to compromise on.
We got to work together like the Lake and Riley Act
for immigration and I’m definitely looking forward
to pushing him about the parts of that bill
that are definitely not good, right?
In terms of not projecting dreamers and minors,
but obviously you can’t affect any change
if you’re not in office.
And if these people want to continue to be reelected,
so they can even make incremental progress,
they’re going to have to work with the other side
to some degree.
It’s something like 83% of the American public
wants the two sides to work together.
And that’s why I think going back to the executive orders
and kind of the beginnings of this,
like it is important to look at the list of things
and to say this is stuff that I kind of understand, right?
Like if you want to call it a national emergency
on the Southern border,
if you want to put more resources down there,
I can get on board with that.
I completely understand it.
All the people who live along the border would tell you
that’s exactly the kind of conditions
that they’re living in.
But the stuff that you have to figure out a way
to effectively hold the line,
not just rail about it or post about it.
He’s basically undoing the entire asylum system.
I was watching Tom Homan, he was being interviewed
about what happens now to all the people
who had their customs and border patrol appointments canceled
’cause they got rid of the CBP One app.
And he said, well, go to a port of entry.
And the whole point was that you don’t want people
showing up at port of entries.
I mean, there are tens of thousands of people
who have been waiting in Mexico,
some upwards of a year to do this the legal way.
Also completely forgetting the fact
that people who are here illegally do have rights.
That is enshrined in our constitution
that they have a right to legal counsel,
that they have a right to do process.
And the DOJ has new directives.
This is one that I thought this can’t be real,
where they’re now telling legal service providers
who get federal funding not to do their jobs,
not to help these immigrants that are here
who might have a completely legitimate asylum claim.
I already mentioned the DEI offices
in the Fairfax County, sorry,
I said Loudoun County before it’s Fairfax County.
So that’s obviously bad, but then you sprint ahead.
Did you see this, that the Department of Defense,
’cause they took down all of their DEI stuff,
removed promotional video material
about the Tuskegee Airmen.
– Yeah, and women in World War II.
– Yeah, the Wasps, which is such a great name for it.
And it was Katie Britt from the center from Alabama
who tweeted, “Oh, this must be a mistake.”
And within a couple of hours,
the new defense secretary, Pete Higgs,
was like, “I’ve fixed it.”
But that feels like one of those circumstances
where they were trying it on, right?
They thought, well, we could just go ahead
and get rid of these things.
And if someone catches us, so what, we’ll put it back up.
– And we’re in the news, as long as we can.
– Right, and we’re dominating the cycle no matter what,
because all news is good news
or all press is good press, I guess.
And that’s a credo that Trump has lived by forever.
There’s also just such a lack of expertise
and willingness to want to do the work, right?
They want to eliminate things en masse
and not spend the time going through
and actually looking at what the relevance is,
like purging the government of any of those checks.
They got rid of, I think, 17 inspector generals
over 12 huge bureaucracies, right?
These are things that used to piss off
storied members of the Senate, like Chuck Grassley,
lost his mind in 2021.
Trump got rid of two IGs.
Now 17 have been removed.
Did you see this communication freeze for the NIH and the CDC?
Like in the midst of bird flu,
they can’t tell people what’s going on with something.
Yeah, exactly.
And the foreign aid freeze is just totally frightening.
– Yeah, I’m a chairman of the World Health Organization.
To your point about sticking our chin out,
I believe Biden’s first executive order had to do
with transgender athletes’ rights,
and it took him three years
for an executive order on immigration.
– And to your point, illegal border crossings
had dropped to about 45,000 in December of 2024,
but in December of 2023,
a quarter of a million people came across
the border illegally.
What I find sort of ironic and telling about these,
I don’t know what the term is, roundups,
or when the ice shows up,
they’ve decided the most efficient place
to quote unquote find these unproductive people
who are freeloading.
Is it workplaces?
– Right.
– I thought, so if you wanted to deport Americans,
you’d probably go to McDonald’s
or to their basements where video games are,
but with undocumented workers,
you go to places of work ’cause that’s where they are.
I thought that was sort of ironic,
but we had this coming.
We ignored the problem, it got out of control,
and just as you can never actually visually spot
a pendulum at the middle,
they have swung, they have taken advantage of this
and they swung back.
And quite frankly, I don’t have a problem
with deportations of undocumented workers,
but let’s start with those who are in prison,
let’s start with those who’ve now committed two crimes,
one crime coming over here, legal, the second one.
I think that’s absolutely fair game.
The, I mean, some of the other issues
that we really screwed up on,
we talked about transgender, we took just a,
I don’t wanna say irrelevant,
but an issue and gave them just a free gift
would purchase for parents all over the nation
who don’t wanna have their daughters kind of run over.
The macro, the biggest issue, hands down in my opinion,
is that a mix of identity politics,
weaponization by special interest groups,
essentially had the Democrats implicitly
and explicitly turn their backs on the group
that has struggled the most the last 40 years.
Everybody feels when young people aren’t doing well.
Their parents, society,
and these are the people on social media saying,
okay, great invidious, we’re $3 trillion,
I can’t afford rent.
So instead of focusing on policies like inflation,
how to build more houses, bring down costs,
lower enrollment instead of being weaponized
by these universities that are,
I mean, essentially some of the most corrupt organizations
in the world are seen as the center
of democratic politics, specifically my industry.
What is more of an epicenter of kind of democratic ideals
than elite institutions
who I just interviewed the president Dartmouth.
They have an $8 billion endowment and they let in 500 kids.
– Okay, excuse me,
but you’re not this elite cast enforcer
talking about big, big fancy ideals,
but you don’t want to give people this drug
that decreases obesity, anxiety,
gives them a shot at getting married, making money.
No, you’d rather hoard it just for you and your elite friends.
So let’s create a misdirected DEI.
Michigan, University of Michigan has 200 DEI officers.
60% of Harvard’s freshman class identifies as non-white,
but we need to have DEI on campuses
such that we can discriminate against,
what, white kids and rural states?
I mean, it’s just, we got so out of control
with the identity politics, the DEI apparatus,
not focusing on inflation, not focusing on young people,
that we just gave them a layup to become sort of,
you know, just go overboard, flood the zone
with a ton of shit.
I get it, we deserve it, we had it coming.
What I’m really disappointed about
is why we’re all taking it
and calling on people to work together.
As far as I’m concerned,
it used to be about a certain level of mutual respect.
You know, Democrats and Republicans at the end of the day
thought, well, if they get in power,
I want them to show me some mutual respect.
It seems to me like we need to move to mutual destruction
and say, look, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Stephen Miller,
if you want to start revoking security details,
just be careful what you ask for,
’cause once you’re out of office,
my guess is you’re gonna be real fond of a security detail.
You know, if you want,
I mean, if you want us to stick the DOJ on you
after our guy gets in office,
but right now we’re giving them the impression that
if you hit us, we’re Gandhi,
and we believe that peace is gonna work here,
and I think it’s to our disadvantage.
I think we come across as total wimps
and there’s no incentive for them to say,
well, maybe we shouldn’t be cutting
the security detail of General Milley,
in case our generals that we like are under threat
after they leave office.
I don’t think there’s any sense
that we’ll ever hit back, so to speak, your thoughts.
– Yeah, to back up your point,
that I think it’s crazy that we had his whole transition
knowing exactly who he is, what he’s going to do,
he’s telegraphing it every day,
and that we showed up on January 20th at inauguration
and did not have a solid message or a plan for countering this.
– The Democrats response post inauguration
or the complexion, for me, defines the term flat-footed.
Just on our heels, not even responding,
just kind of paralyzed, just incredibly encephaletic
and not counter punching at all.
It feels to me like in terms of the viscosity or strength
of the Democratic Party right now,
we have, I’ve never seen us this week.
– That’s a major declaration.
I don’t know if it’s necessarily wrong.
I think the right attitude,
like Congressman Golden’s team has said,
we’re not gonna respond to everything that Trump does
’cause you can’t live in the midst
of an outrage cycle constantly.
But if we just take it on the chin constantly,
I could see voters showing up again in 2026
and just saying, well, what are you about?
I still have absolutely no idea.
So Huckin’ Jeffries really wants to focus in
on cost of living issues,
and the Republicans have put forward all these EOs,
they have a bill about banning transgender people
from athletics, but they don’t have a cost of living bill
and JD Vance was on with March Brennan over the weekend
and said, well, it takes time to bring prices down.
When they had told us it would happen on day one.
So I think you have to keep hammering that,
but you also need to have a personality
and be able to go on a long-form podcast
and chill with people and talk about other things
besides politics and I’m not seeing that
from that many key players in the Democratic party.
Most people, myself included,
thought Biden went too far with his preemptive pardons,
but he may be vindicated in that in the long term,
that these are ruthless people
who have said in public forums
that they’re going to come after these folks
and that that was actually the right thing to do.
I mean, that’s a Mitch McConnell move, right?
It’s not a traditional Joe Biden move
to go for the absolute worst case scenario.
So, you know, I hope that if Kashpatal gets confirmed
and it looks like he will,
because it looks like everybody will,
maybe not Tulsi, that he isn’t as punitive
and as motivated by retribution as he details in his book,
but who knows?
And I wanted to add to what you were saying
about young people.
I was talking to a friend of mine whose brother is 30 years
old, went on a bachelor party, 13 guys,
10 of 13 voted for Trump.
And these were all liberal-minded guys
that went to university together.
And what we were discussing that I found so interesting
and it links also to the discussion
about what’s going on with higher education
is that we just are seeing now amongst young people
a new definition of what sounds smart.
So, it used to be, you know, all of your degrees,
your level of credibility was directly connected
to how fancy the school you went to was, right?
Like what kind of job you had,
how that you knew which fork went with which, right?
Like going back to the pretty woman scene, right?
Slippery little suckers, right?
Like that that was what low-class looked like
and high-class looks like someone
who dedicates their life to public service,
but also has a trust fund that they’re relying on
and went to Harvard for everything.
And now the people that are revered
or that folks think are smart
are the ones who are asking questions incessantly.
And it doesn’t matter what they’re questioning.
Like RFK, well, I’m just asking questions, right?
About the measles vaccine or fluoride in the water
or whatever it is that day.
And the right has weaponized that against us
to an incredible advantage
because all of these young people who are smart
and very well-educated now think that it is cool
and forward-thinking and what they want to see in leadership
for people to not actually know the answers to questions.
And I don’t know how you rectify that
because, you know, I talked to my toddler
and she’s asking questions all the time, right?
Like, but why, mom?
Mommy, why?
Why do we do this?
Why are you going here?
Why do I have to brush my teeth?
Why do I have to make my bed?
And then you fast forward
to where she’ll be in 25, 30 years, let’s say.
Is she gonna think Joe Rogan is the smartest person
in the world because he’s just asking questions?
I mean, even Lex Friedman,
someone is a very traditionally smart person, right?
In terms of education and productivity
is just asking questions.
Like asking Zelinsky, why don’t you just give up your country?
And that’s what passes now
as the folks that we should be looking up to.
And that’s leading to a set of government officials
who are also doing that same thing
who are just flooding the zone with wild questions
that then leave them with this route
that they can go through to throw all of this
administrative shit at the wall.
And we’re ending up with a government
that I’m sure will be in complete crisis
in a matter of months.
– Yeah, it’s definitely, I mean, we say this a bunch
that we’re sort of in uncharted territory.
It seemed like I’m just, you said something
that sort of, I don’t know, piqued my interest
because you know more about this than I do,
but that you believe Kashpatel will be confirmed
and that there’s a chance that Tulsi Gabbard won’t be.
And I would have reversed that, but I don’t know the latest.
What’s going on there?
– What, well, what’s going on is, I mean,
you saw Pete Hegsas go through.
So there were three no votes on that.
It was quite clear that Senator Tillis did want
to vote against him ’cause he required Hegsas
to write a letter to him answering specific questions
about accusations of abuse against his second wife.
There was a big New York Times piece about this.
And you can see if an unjoney earns his face
that she didn’t want to do this.
But when you’re threatened with a primary
and probably with violence,
knowing how the internet works, you do those things.
The reason that I say that I think it’s possible,
Tulsi doesn’t get confirmed,
Lindsey Graham over the weekend wouldn’t answer, right?
And how he was voting on it.
And I feel like if there is anyone
who’s not gonna get through,
it’s the one that people are being the quietest about.
And no one really talks about Tulsi Gabbard.
They’re talking about the other ones.
I think it’s feasible that Republicans decide
that RFK Junior is not actually a threat
to vaccines or whatever and let him through.
But it seems like they’re advertising,
having good meetings with Cache Patel.
And I haven’t seen one thumbs up MAGA post
with people standing with Tulsi Gabbard.
So, but I’m prepared for all of it to get through.
– I love someone said that Mitch McConnell voting
against Hexath would be like Hannibal Lecter
going vegetarian on his death bed.
It’s just like, don’t hold your breath.
But yeah, it’s-
– You did it.
– Yeah, again, he’s got very little to lose at this point.
Right?
– Totally.
– He’s leaving his old, I mean-
– Profiles encourage though, right?
That you’re doing it and then nothing really to show for it.
But, you know, I guess I appreciate it anyway.
– But you think Cache Patel is gonna get through?
That’s super interesting.
– Right now, I don’t, you know, who knows,
but it looks likely and people seem to be thinking
that Donald Trump is entitled to whatever he wants
in terms of a cabinet.
And usually people do get what they want.
There have been cases where it hasn’t happened,
but they strong arm everyone.
And they have this fleet of people online
just threatening anyone who opposes them,
including, you know, members of their family
will do things like that,
whether that is a sitting elected representative
or the president of another country.
Like this game that went on with the Colombians
about using military planes
versus the regular detention planes.
I mean, first of all, it costs three times more.
They can get up to $852,000 to send back migrants
on these C-130s, I think, or C-17s.
– It’s all about branding, right?
– And so it’s like a huge, it’s all the show.
And CNN was reporting this morning
that they want all of the ICE agents
to be wearing their vests.
And for this to be made for TV,
’cause we’re in the Truman Show,
but like a really bad version.
– Yeah, the one jet blue.
Okay, let’s take a quick break.
Stay with us.
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(upbeat music)
– Welcome back.
Before we wrap, we gotta adjust something
we’ve been hearing from some of you.
Apparently there’s a feeling that we’re not quite living up
to the moderate in our show name.
Maybe we’re leaning a bit more into the raging side.
People say we’re more raging than moderate.
That’s a fair point.
So what does being a moderate really mean to us,
especially during this new administration?
Jess, you kick us off.
What do you think it means to be a moderate?
– Well, first, the fact that we’re talking about this
is your fault because you made me a comments monster.
And I went and looked at what people were saying
and there’s a lot of positive stuff.
But it–
– Oh, don’t look at the comments.
I mean, read the first five, learn from it
and then ignore it, just your own mental health.
– I stay up later than everyone in my household
so I could spend a good amount of time
comments doom scrolling.
But seeing a lot of this, like this is not
what a moderate means.
And I am completely willing to accept
that A, a moderate means different things
to different people.
And that also, I think of myself as a liberal moderate,
not someone who is a swing voter at this point.
And most people who advertise that are lying
’cause there’s usually a crucial issue
that puts you into one camp or the other.
For a lot of people, it’s whether you’re pro-choice
or pro-life, and as a pro-choice person,
I would be hard-pressed to support
a candidate that was pro-life.
But I guess I wanted to talk about this
because I think what we share
and why we wanted to do this specific podcast together
under this name is because we wanna talk
about politics through the framework of pragmatism,
not just optimism or what we want to happen.
And that it’s important to have political discussions
that are cognizant of the guardrails
of the way government actually operates.
And also, I think most crucially,
understanding that the framework of a partisan worldview
is not how the general populace operates.
And the 2024 results were so indicative
of that transformation,
that people are not interested in backing a team
in the same way of anything they’re backing Trump
because they back that player, right?
Like that’s their favorite football player,
their favorite basketball player or whatever sport they’re into.
And I think that being a moderate right now is trying,
as per our earlier discussion,
to see the good in what the other side
may be bringing to the table and saying like,
“Sure, that works for me.”
And also I have constituents or I have people that I know
who absolutely feel that way,
recognizing the faults of the party that we both belong to
and then trying to find a way to constructively
and effectively push back where we need to.
And that’s how I see it right now.
I don’t, how do you see it?
Even though you said earlier, you’re not moderate.
So the podcast is over.
– I would define myself as kind of ground zero
for moderates.
And that is what, as far as I can tell moderates
are basically people that everybody hates.
And essentially, I mean, the generous
or the actual Webster definition would be someone
who has tempered views
and is somewhere in the middle on the political spectrum.
And the way I see it is I’ve tried as I’ve gotten older
to not be lazy and sign up for any political orthodoxy.
When I hear something crazy on the left,
I like to call it out when I think our democratic leadership
is too inefficient, feckless, cowardly, I call it out.
When I think DEI is out of control,
when I think that immigration is out of control,
when I think that social security spending is out of control,
you know, there’s some of their favorite policies
of the left, I call it out.
And when I am, you know, I’m vigorously pro-Israel.
It’s like, I don’t bark up any one tree.
I try to have my own views.
In this environment, based on where the political spectrum is,
I’m now seen as center left.
In the 70s, I would have been a Rockefeller Republican.
I just would have been, I would have,
I would have been in that party.
But I think it’s also just saying,
look, I’m gonna look at, I’m gonna be a critical thinker.
I’m gonna look at issue by issue.
And regardless of the political orthodoxy
you’re supposed to sign up to, you say,
okay, I’m not down with this.
And it’s almost like you become, unfortunately,
to a certain extent, the left is much harsher on moderates.
They treat you like an apostate.
Yeah, Scott, I thought we could trust you.
People from the Biden campaign, sign up.
Don’t you understand the assignment?
Sign up.
Well, no, he’s too fucking old.
What are we doing here?
And then people on the right are just like,
kind of write you off as a libtard.
But they don’t come after you the same way the left does
when they thought you were, quote unquote,
when we thought you were one of us.
So I see a moderate as someone who says,
okay, I’m gonna go issue by issue.
I’m gonna use critical thinking.
I’m gonna be unafraid to say this makes no sense,
regardless of the cult dynamics of pressure
to sign up for the full orthodoxy and narrative.
Because when the narrative gets crazy
or makes no fucking sense, you say, okay, I don’t buy this.
I don’t have a problem with deporting criminals.
I get the symbolism of it.
I don’t have a problem with a surge of troops
at the border, fine.
Deficits, anyways, my point is,
I’d like to think a moderate is someone who says,
I’m a critical thinker.
I’m gonna look at the issues
and I’m gonna decide one by one,
what I think is the right view on this.
I’m not gonna sign up and just say, okay,
I’m a fan, I’m a cultist, no matter what they say.
And this is true about the left and the right.
But I will say as someone who’s seen or identified
as a Democrat that I get more hate from the left
than I do from the right.
The right has just kind of written me off.
And that’s how it is in our society.
You gotta pick a side.
You can’t say, well, I wanna go issue by issue, right?
Do I believe women should have the right
to terminate a pregnancy?
Yes.
And the third trimester?
Okay, that’s worth a discussion, right?
If the woman’s health or the baby’s health is not in danger,
at the same time, nobody trusts each other.
So nobody wants to have anything resembling
kind of a moderate conversation.
In addition with Citizens United and gerrymandering
that has hard right and hard left districts,
there’s no political room for moderates anymore.
They can’t get elected, right?
Because basically every election now
with these hard blue and hard red districts
is decided in the primary.
So it’s basically who can be craziest.
Who can be more crazy left or who can be more crazy right?
And a moderate is just a recipe for not getting elected.
So I think in the media or as a commentator
or whatever you wanna call yourself a thought leader,
I think it’s especially important that we demonstrate.
It’s okay to be a critical thinker
and occasionally have your followers on threads
or blue sky come after you because you say,
yeah, I don’t get this democratic policy.
I think the vice president was a great senator.
I think she’d be a great Supreme Court justice.
I don’t know if she’d be a great president.
And then everyone comes for you.
And I’m not willing to sign up and blind,
bend the knee for C above an insurrectionist and a rapist.
– Critical thinking, look at every person,
look at every issue and decide where you are on it.
Because that’s my story and I’m sticking to it, Jess.
– No, I think that’s the right story.
And I think that there’s so much pressure
to always be a good soldier.
I certainly feel this in my role,
being part of the conservative media ecosystem,
that there are liberals who get enraged if I even say,
well, this doesn’t make a ton of sense.
Or this is an issue that 70% of Americans agree on.
Like, why can’t that just be our position?
It seems pretty normal.
Like, you know, the was a prop 36 on the California ballot,
making it not okay to shoplift up to $950
without getting arrested.
Like these are just obvious things.
And you should be able to have opinions about them
without people flipping out on you.
But I do think a critical component
of how we approach politics
and how people who are governing more in the middle do
is that they fundamentally understand
that it’s not the intentions that matter,
it’s the outcomes that matter.
And we just had an enormous outcomes election
where people said that governance in blue cities and states
is not meeting the moment, far from it.
That riding the subway is not a good option anymore.
That we don’t support law enforcement,
that we have people who are incompetent,
perhaps corrupt in big positions of power.
And that we are not living up to the covenant
that our elected officials make with the people
who send them there.
And that we’re actually failing ourselves
when it comes to our values
because of how poor that governance has gotten.
And that’s really crucial to how I think about politics
and how I think about my advocacy for policies
that I think will improve quality of life.
And more often than not, those policies are linked
to more liberal legislators or people who see the world
through a similar prism to me.
But I am completely open to the fact
that there are good representatives
from the other side of the aisle
that also live by those ideals
or certainly can meet us somewhere in the middle
to get something good done.
And I remember when the Democrats were funding MAGA candidates
to run against moderate Republicans.
And I understood it from a, we got a win perspective.
But it was upsetting to me
that good people like Peter Mayer in Michigan lost his seat
because we put in tons of money to back a crazy person
that would then go on to lose to the Democrat.
And I think that those are the kinds of things
that we need to explore
because we’re only gonna have a healthy political system
if we do have two thriving parties, right?
That are full of people that actually capture
the cultural and political zeitgeist of the country.
And the extremes on both sides are wildly dangerous.
And I think that the right more dangerous than the left.
But when you look at what people think
and how they’re talking about the issues,
you know that the Marjorie Taylor Greens of the world
are not appealing to the general population writ large.
And that first sound like the Alonno Mars
or the Rashida Thalibs of the world
are not appealing to them either.
And so I think it’s important to be trying to stake out ground
to have these discussions about it to, you know,
bring people on from the other side of the aisle
or people who work regularly with Republicans
so that we can hear about how progress can actually be made
because they’re the ones,
we can talk all we want from our studios,
but they’re the ones actually casting the votes
for all of this and hopefully making a big difference
in people’s lives.
– Yeah, something I think the Republicans
have done much better than Democrats.
And your buddy Tim Miller, I thought made a great point on
from the Bollard podcast that they kind of the coarseness
and the, I don’t know, just the provocative,
sometimes stupid, sometimes weirdness
that’s come out of the right.
It came across as authentic, whereas Democrats,
it’s as if they’re reading off a press release
or believe that they’re crossing the Delaware
or giving an inauguration speech.
I mean, they’re just so like,
it’s like speak like a regular person for God’s sakes.
And the Republicans do that better than Democrats.
Also, it strikes me that a big component
in terms of what impacts people’s lives
and gives them the impression of the respective brands,
we have to get our shit together around on the ground,
running some of these Democratic cities.
A bunch of my friends lost houses in the Pacific Palisades.
And they basically all said the same thing.
They’re like, I keep hearing these excuses
where the reservoirs weren’t full,
the water pressure was down, whatever it is.
And he’s like, we pay 13% a year in additional taxes.
If I’m gonna have my house burned down,
I’ll move to Florida or Texas where I pay 0%.
It’s like, we should have the supersize gold-plated VIP,
a white glove government when you’re paying 13%.
And instead, some of the highest tax,
highest tax states are offering,
I mean, they’re expensive but bad,
which isn’t a recipe for a good product.
And the most expensive but bad metros right now
are governed by Democrats
who seem to be weaponized by unions
or whatever it might be, special interest groups
and are just taxing the shit out of their local residents
and doing head up your ass, you know,
enforcement like you’re talking about
where if you steal less than $900,
they don’t even prosecute you.
So I think until, and by the way,
I don’t think that’s true of New York.
New York has 12, I think it’s a total
of about 12 or 13% also in taxes.
But I would argue Manhattan is worth it.
I think it’s actually, I think Manhattan is well run.
And I don’t know about you, but I do feel,
I do feel that the subway feels a little bit different.
I’ve noticed that, I’m more aware.
– That’s an understatement.
– Yeah, you really feel it, don’t you?
– Well, I do personally,
but I don’t remember I grew up here
and have ridden the subway my whole life,
the number of people being like thrown in front of cars,
being punched, slashed, a woman burned on the F train.
That’s not normal.
Oh, things happen every once in a while.
– Agreed.
– And Cathy Hookle is definitely getting the message
because of Richie Torres, but it’s bad.
– Yeah, and also I just, in terms of crime, I think it’s-
– Well, crime is down, but those are also
to the point about the messaging of this.
No one, if they feel less safe and you come at them
with a bunch of statistics, it doesn’t matter.
– If I don’t feel safe on the subway,
if I can’t have my AirPods in,
’cause I need to, I have to feel like I’m more aware.
All right, that’s all for this episode, Jess.
Thank you for listening to Raging Moderates.
Our producers are David Toledo and Chenenye Onike,
our technical director is Drew Burroughs.
You can find Raging Moderates on its own feed every Tuesday.
– That’s right, Raging Moderates on its own feed.
Please follow us wherever you get your podcasts.
Jess, have a great rest of the week.
– You too, Scott.
– Thank you.
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– Welcome to Raging Moderates, I’m Scott Galloway.
– And I’m Jessica Tarland.
– Jess, this is the part of the show where we banter.
– I’m reading the same note.
What would you like to banter about?
– Well, let’s bring this back to me.
Show, ask me what I do this weekend.
– What did you do this weekend?
How fantastic was it?
– Well, Jess, I don’t like to talk about me
or my personal life, but on Saturday morning,
I had my 14 year old, just me and him.
And so I said, what do you wanna do?
And I knew it involves something in football.
So we jumped on the Euro star on Saturday morning.
– Which is lovely.
– Amazing.
– Yeah.
– It takes two hours and 20 minutes.
Pancras, or St. Pancras Station is about 10 minutes
from where we’re living.
Two hours and 20 minutes later, we’re at Garde de Nord,
which is I think train station of North or something
in French, just for those of you out there.
And then we’re at the hotel.
We went and had an amazing, my favorite,
or our favorite lunch, we had steak frites.
And then we went to the most amazing little stores,
mostly chocolatiers and crepe stores.
And then we went back and napped and went to the pool.
When you have a 14 year old, you gotta go to the pool.
I’ve learned that.
– That lasts until high school?
– Yeah, no.
– That they’re into going to the pool?
– You know, his only criteria for a hotel
is do they have a pool?
And we always go to the pool.
And then we went and then we had a dinner
at the most fabulous restaurant at the top
of this new fancy hotel called Cheval Blanc.
And we got dressed up and then we got dressed down
and we went to the PSG Paris Saint-Germain football
that’s the major team in Paris.
Oh, someone’s gonna say, “No, they’re not.”
Ty Renz, which was a big disappointment for PSG,
but we went and saw the football game,
came back next morning, woke up, had a lovely breakfast
and then went to Notre Dame, which is spectacular.
– Oh, it looks amazing.
– Spectacular and then caught the US star back,
I mean, 24 hours and just it was one of those
incredible weekends with my son.
What did you do?
– Well, I went to a three-year-old’s birthday party
on Saturday morning.
There was cake, funfetti flavor, which is my favorite.
So–
– Do they rent a place or is it one of those
where it’s rich people in Tribeca?
Do they have to rent a place?
– Well, I think both of those types classify as–
– Wealthy.
– Rich people, ’cause if you can rent a place
for your toddler’s birthday,
they did it at their building, actually.
So, and I don’t know what they earn,
so I can’t comment on that, but it was a lovely party.
And then Saturday night,
we went out to dinner with three other couples,
which was very lively, a lot of fun.
We’re trying out a new babysitter.
It seemed to go okay.
The toddler by the end said, “I liked new babysitter.”
So, great, but it was nice to go out.
You know how you usually are out with one other couple,
but being out with three other couples,
tons of conversations going on.
We had a nice time, but home by 9.30,
asleep by 10, the usual.
– So, four couples that usually gives everyone permission
to drink more is what I find.
And two–
– There was a lot of drinking and a discussion
about how one person thinks
that their partner drinks too much.
– It makes company, that’s nice.
– Yeah, I asked to be excluded from the conversation,
’cause also I barely drink, I’m not.
I’m a lightweight, and I guess not that fun.
And so, I’m always very uncomfortable
with those conversations.
– Yeah, so I’ll give you a little bit of a heads up
on what’s coming your way.
In about seven to 10 years,
you’re gonna freak out about the fact
that you’ve spent so much time just raising kids,
and that you’re losing your youth,
and you and your female friends will start parting
like fucking rock stars diagnosed with ass cancer.
You’re gonna start drinking like crazy.
You’re gonna start doing girls trips all the time.
You’re gonna abuse alcohol,
you’re gonna experiment with drugs,
and you’re gonna make all the guys trips
that movies have been depicted on seem like a tea party.
They talk about the midlife crisis that men have.
I think men’s are longer, but less severe.
The midlife crisis for women happens earlier.
Specifically, I think when they leave
kind of their birthing years and they’re worried
they’re losing kind of their hot girl 20s and 30s,
and they go ape shit.
So anyways, you got that coming.
You got that coming.
Well, well, that sounds like fun,
’cause I, yeah, I’m definitely not doing any of that.
No, none of that.
At this point.
Well, it’s hard, you know, what are you gonna do?
Every once in a while, I have a lot of good friends
because I–
You have a second glass of Chardonnay.
Is that when you–
No, I’m not, wait, I have one drink also.
What is your drink?
I only drink Tito’s grapefruit and soda.
You’re so fancy.
It’s like a modified Paloma.
So here’s another prediction.
I mean–
You’re gonna start getting unsolicited bottles of Tito’s.
When I started talking about how much I love Zacapa,
I’d show up to events and they’d have a bottle of Zacapa.
So everyone, Tito’s for the lady.
Good, good, all right, enough of that.
Grape banter, I loved it.
Yeah, that worked, check that box.
In today’s episode of Raging Moderates,
we’re discussing Trump’s whirlwind first week in office,
how Democrats are responding to Trump,
and what it really means to be a moderate
in today’s political climate.
Okay, so let’s bust right into it.
Donald Trump has hit the ground running
in his first week back in office,
signing nearly 50 executive orders and actions
that are already sort of reshaping politics in our country.
These include escalating immigration crackdowns
or deportation flights in a southern border troop surge,
as well as targeting birthright citizenship
and freezing asylum programs.
On Sunday, he also got into a feud
with the president of Colombia over deportation flights.
Meanwhile, he has halted foreign aid worldwide
and revoked security clearances
from former officials critical of him.
Add to that his controversial pardons of January 6th
defendants, the confirmation of cabinet appointments,
including Pete Hegset, despite numerous allegations
against him and threats to eliminate FEMA
while visiting disaster zones,
including Hurricane Helene’s wreckage in North Carolina
and wildfire ravaged California.
It’s a whirlwind start that is already redefining
how America Governs communicates
and is viewed globally.
Jess, there’s a lot to unpack here from Trump’s first week.
What stood out to you the most?
– That there is a lot.
That’s the point, right?
We’re so quickly back to where we left Trump 1.0,
which is I’m gonna throw everything at the wall
and just see what sticks.
And it feels as though we have a bunch of angry teens
that are in charge of the government, right?
Trying everything, pushing boundaries,
waiting for someone to slap them on the wrist to push back.
Maybe that comes from, you know, part of the internal caucus,
but we’ll talk about that later on
with some of the DEI initiatives that they scaled back,
but like waiting for the courts to come and get them,
you know, hoping that they just can skate through
with some of this stuff.
I feel there’s an overwhelming sense of manufactured chaos
to everything and that we are living in the midst of,
you would know better than me.
If it is, in fact, the biggest branding exercise in history,
but this golden age of America,
and he has lots of social media spots about it
out there on all of his channels,
it feels like he’s just going full steam ahead
with this social media driven approach to governance,
loyalty tests, everything that he left on the table
from the first time around,
he’s picking it up and doing it to the nth degree
if he can get away with it.
And he’s just calling our bluff, right?
Just saying, well, come and get me, right?
So that’s my feeling writ large
about what’s gone on so far, what about you?
– Yeah, I think that’s right.
It feels as if one, you could argue this is leadership
that he’s had kind of four years to prepare
for what he would do and just hitting the ground running
and has decided, okay, I’m gonna, you know,
promises made, promises kept,
and it’s going aggressively at everything he talked about
and moving, you know, their fleet of foot,
signing executive orders on the dais.
So you could argue it’s leadership.
I like what you said, the world’s largest branding event.
I hadn’t thought of it that way.
I think that’s really interesting.
At the same time, you sort of flooding the zone,
which is so much shit or actions
that wouldn’t have flown before.
And one of the things about our government,
the reason why we have three branches
is it’s meant to have this wonderful intransigence
where we sometimes to a fault,
wrestle stuff to the ground and really examine it.
And there’s just none of that now.
The, I would give more points to the Trump administration
than I would give to the Democratic party right now
who appears to be just caught flat footed.
In this mixed of, can you believe this shit?
We don’t know what to do.
And trying to sign up for this PBS Hallmark Channel
bullshit of we need to come together
and we need to cooperate with the president.
And they’re all trying to,
they’re all in such shock about this win.
And, you know, while it was a small number of votes,
so you went kind of seven for seven in swing states,
they’re all trying to pretend to be more moderate
and say, I’ll work with the president
and they don’t want to come right out of the box
shitposting them.
I think that’s a failed strategy.
I think they wanted war.
I think we should have it.
I’m not up for normalizing an insurrectionist and a rapist.
So I guess that doesn’t make me a moderate
because I won’t sign up to this.
– Great.
We’ll just end the podcast right now.
– But I would argue that there’s this,
we have this sort of notion it’s time to come together.
– I don’t agree.
I think Democrats and moderate Republicans
need to come to the rescue.
I think some of this stuff is just so over the line
and so un-American, you know,
rescinding the security detail of people who he doesn’t like.
– With live Iranian threats to their lives.
I mean, if you have Tom Cotton,
maybe the hero in all of this,
which is frightening to me, but.
– Well, he wants a security detail when he’s out of office.
– Well, he definitely wants one on January 6th.
Oh, no, it was Josh Hawley.
He was riding away like a little girl.
No offense to little girls.
Some of it is just petty.
Some of it is the revenge tour.
Some of it I do think is rooted in a genuine ideology,
but then it’s always taken one step further.
And I’ve been thinking about this notion of
what is the kernel of truth that gets us
to the crazy place that we’ve ended up, right?
Because a lot of what’s going on right now,
I believe is Democrats fault, right?
Like we walked into very specific traps.
And so we ended up with people telling us,
essentially I want a bloodless revolution, right?
I want the establishment so far away
that I can’t even see Nancy Pelosi.
All of this makes me sick.
And I would rather take a flyer on the chaos agent
than have someone who is routine and boring
and also is afraid to say things that are common sense.
Like the thing that’s right in front of you.
So if we look at with the DEI revolution
that’s going on now, that comes from, you know,
after the murder of George Floyd,
that companies just added, you know,
50 to 100 DEI employees or it was crazy.
I was looking at data from Loudoun County, Virginia.
They have a DEI office that they’re spending enough on it
that they could hire 125 new teachers
if they took that money and did that.
Obviously a parent in that district is going to say,
I would rather have new teachers
than have dozens of employees in the DEI office.
For instance, on the trans issue,
we talk about this regularly.
If you’re going to say that it’s fine for Leah Thomas
to compete at the collegiate level,
people are going to think that you are insane on trans issues
and then they’re going to pick someone
who’s going to over correct
and take away protections for trans people.
On immigration, if you’re going to say the border is secure,
people are going to look at you like you’re a lunatic,
especially once migrants are getting bust
to northeastern liberal cities
and they’re understanding the implications
of how El Paso taxes has been living.
And we’re going to have the overcorrection
and we’re going to see stuff like this.
Like, I don’t even want to call it a rise in deportations.
I find it fascinating,
and this goes to the social media presidency
or just who has the best branding exercise of this
because they’re out there saying,
promises made, promises kept.
We deported 310 undocumented people or illegals,
they would say, I would say undocumented because I’m polite.
And Biden was deporting,
sometimes it got over 400 people per day.
I think on average, he was at 310 per day,
but the Democrats never talked about anything
that they were doing.
And that’s the difference in this.
If you leave people in the dark
about what your administration is actually doing,
and I’m talking about the stuff that matters to them,
not the stuff that feels ancillary or for show,
they’re going to pick the other person.
And now people are running around saying,
oh, well, Donald Trump is the toughest on immigration.
No, actually Barack Obama was the toughest on immigration.
And we have been deporting a lot of people.
People don’t know that border crossings are down 55%
at the end of the Biden administration,
after obviously a huge surge in the beginning.
So we need a new digital strategist, that’s for sure,
the next time around that we do this.
And I don’t know, have you listened to any of Chris Hayes’
interviews about his new book about attention
and like the attention economy?
– Oh, that’s a new term, attention economy.
Let me think, I started using that
about 15 fucking years ago.
Anyways, what did Chris Hayes said?
He’s discovered the attention economy?
What does Chris have to say?
– No, he didn’t, no, he didn’t discover it,
but he’s talking about it in context of recent outcomes
and this race just to be the first person to say something
that someone sees on their phone
and how meaningful that is for that.
And I cannot think of an instance where Democrats
were the first people to be able to say something.
It’s always the Republicans and usually it’s Trump.
– Well, just starting there.
So first off, I would like to see
the, what committee would it be?
– We need immediately, in my opinion, to get,
probably not Musk,
because I think it would be too much of a spectacle
and just bring him more power.
It’s like one of those villains in a comic book
that the more you throw shit at him,
the more he absorbs it and becomes more powerful.
But the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee
in my opinion have hearings in the tech industry’s
influence on democracy and its elections
because there, I think, is now emerging evidence
that basically Musk and Yacarino weaponized Twitter,
including creating thousands and thousands of accounts
to elevate misinformation and essentially spread
just a ton of propaganda misinformation
that had a real impact on the election.
I’m not sure it’s illegal.
It’s a private company.
He can do what he wants with it.
But I want her up there to under oath to say,
yeah, I knew that he was creating thousands of bots
pretending to be humans.
And we were elevating information or lies,
even though we knew they were lies,
such that it would influence the outcome of the election.
I just want her to go on record saying that
so Americans know what they’re dealing with.
And they have very effectively,
even if it’s Umberta Eco, the Italian philosopher said,
along the lines of the attention economy,
that it’s not what you’re famous for,
it’s just about being famous.
So say something incendiary,
and as long as you’re dominating the news cycle,
I mean, I feel like Republicans are dominating
90% of the news cycle right now.
And unfortunately, we have Senator Schumer,
who brightens up a room by leaving it,
just kind of doing nothing or saying nothing.
We have Speaker Emerita Pelosi,
who just purchased $50,000 to $100,000 worth of call options
on Tempest AI.
And when that was disclosed,
the company had its best one day performance in history
at 35%.
So she’s spending more time on Robinhood,
engaging what is effectively insider trading,
than actually paying attention to real issues.
You know, my question is, where the fuck are Democrats?
I don’t agree with a lot of AOC’s policies,
but at least she’s out there.
At least she’s trying to push back.
Where is Senator Klobuchar talking about,
you know, antitrust and competition and inflation,
and talking about how the tenure is surging,
and that these policies are incredibly inflationary.
We have, we’re literally fighting fire
with fucking squirt guns.
And when I say squirt guns,
I mean senior leadership in the Democratic Party
that is too old, too tame,
thinks they’re in a PBS drama,
where they, good sir,
and they like hit them with their glove.
I mean, enough already.
That this is insane that we don’t have,
I wanna see hearings on,
let’s immediately have a hearing
on this new crypto AI community.
And first thing is we need them to come,
this committee who organized by the president,
we should have the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing
investigate legal implications of Trump’s meme coins.
I want and bring the new head of this AI and crypto community
to explain the Trump and Melania coin.
Let’s have him go on the record and say,
what is this and is it good for the economy?
And we’ll be able to invite dozens of the 60,000 people
who bought this coin and are now off 70 or 80%
in about 72 hours.
Instead, we just sort of sit there
and give this bullshit, let’s time to come together.
There’s things we can work on together, work on together.
We had an immigration bill that the president basically
from Mar-a-Lago killed, so he could take credit for it.
And we’re all sitting around thinking,
it reminds me of the movie, “The Mission.”
I don’t know if you saw that movie
with Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons.
But Jeremy Irons plays this,
I’m gonna call priest, a religious figure,
and the British are coming basically to slaughter
this indigenous community.
I don’t know if it’s Argentina or Brazilian.
They’re missionaries, anyways.
And the priest, Robert De Niro is trying to get everyone
they know they’re coming to prepare for war.
And the priest says, we’re about non-violence.
And they’re slaughtered, of course.
I just watched a movie called “24,”
which was about the most famous Norwegian spy
of all things, and a woman stands up,
as he’s speaking to this university, saying,
why didn’t you try non-violence?
I feel like the Democrats have decided to try non-violence.
And I’m like, sir, say, I choose violence.
This is not working.
Sitting around trying to pretend
we’re taking the higher ground
and we’re gonna work with the president.
It hasn’t worked, folks.
We need to be calling balls and strikes here
and saying that this is, when you have the president
saying things like polluting blood,
and then you have the person who, in my opinion,
weaponized a platform to get him elected,
telling the far-right party in Germany,
you shouldn’t dilute your culture.
I mean, this is pre-Hitler shit.
And yet, I don’t see a single Democrat
with anything resembling a following of social media
out there saying, fuck all.
So yeah, right now, as far as I can tell,
we have one party and another party
that thinks they’re at Catillion
training their kids to be polite
and that peace and love will win out.
Thank you for my TED talk.
Okay, let’s take a quick break.
Stay with us.
It’s Today Explained.
I’m Noelle King with Miles Bryan.
Senior reporter and producer for the program, hello.
Hi, you went to public school, right, Miles?
Yes, go South High Tigers.
What do you remember about school lunch?
Oh, I remember sad lasagna, shrink-wrapped
in little containers.
I remember avoiding it.
Do you remember the nugs, the chicken nuggets?
Yeah, if I had to eat school lunch,
that was a pretty good option.
I actually liked them.
But in addition to being very tasty,
those nugs were very processed.
And at the moment, America has got processed foods
in its crosshairs.
It’s true, we are collectively very down
on processed food right now, none more so
than Health and Human Services’ secretary nominee,
Robert Fluoride Kennedy, Jr.
I’ll get processed food out of school lunch immediately.
About half the school lunch program
goes to processed food.
Hen the man who once saved a dead bear cub for a snack
fixed school lunches.
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– So a couple of things.
Democrats said all the stuff that you just said
before the election for months
and voters turned up and said, “I don’t care.”
Right, so I care.
Millions of people do care,
but the pivotal number that seven million people
who voted for Biden in 2020 sat home in 2024.
That’s how little they cared about
what you’re just talking about.
AOC is out there.
She posted before the inauguration,
people are asking me why I’m not going to inauguration
and I’m not going to the inauguration of a rapist
to use the term that you use,
though I know there’s a legal conversation about that
and I’m not looking to have a defamation suit.
So AOC is saying stuff like that.
She was on John Stuart’s podcast,
talking a lot like you are just now.
But I feel like for someone like Hakeem Jeffries,
who is a very unifying leader,
he is trying to figure out as Nancy Pelosi had to for years,
how to manage a caucus that is being pulled
in many different directions
because the difference between what goes on
for a safe seat Democrat and a swing seat Democrat
is like night and day.
And we’re going to have Congressman Tom Swazi
on for an interview later in the week,
talk to him about this as he’s from a swing district
and he was one of the first people out there saying
these are the issues I’ll be able to compromise on.
We got to work together like the Lake and Riley Act
for immigration and I’m definitely looking forward
to pushing him about the parts of that bill
that are definitely not good, right?
In terms of not projecting dreamers and minors,
but obviously you can’t affect any change
if you’re not in office.
And if these people want to continue to be reelected,
so they can even make incremental progress,
they’re going to have to work with the other side
to some degree.
It’s something like 83% of the American public
wants the two sides to work together.
And that’s why I think going back to the executive orders
and kind of the beginnings of this,
like it is important to look at the list of things
and to say this is stuff that I kind of understand, right?
Like if you want to call it a national emergency
on the Southern border,
if you want to put more resources down there,
I can get on board with that.
I completely understand it.
All the people who live along the border would tell you
that’s exactly the kind of conditions
that they’re living in.
But the stuff that you have to figure out a way
to effectively hold the line,
not just rail about it or post about it.
He’s basically undoing the entire asylum system.
I was watching Tom Homan, he was being interviewed
about what happens now to all the people
who had their customs and border patrol appointments canceled
’cause they got rid of the CBP One app.
And he said, well, go to a port of entry.
And the whole point was that you don’t want people
showing up at port of entries.
I mean, there are tens of thousands of people
who have been waiting in Mexico,
some upwards of a year to do this the legal way.
Also completely forgetting the fact
that people who are here illegally do have rights.
That is enshrined in our constitution
that they have a right to legal counsel,
that they have a right to do process.
And the DOJ has new directives.
This is one that I thought this can’t be real,
where they’re now telling legal service providers
who get federal funding not to do their jobs,
not to help these immigrants that are here
who might have a completely legitimate asylum claim.
I already mentioned the DEI offices
in the Fairfax County, sorry,
I said Loudoun County before it’s Fairfax County.
So that’s obviously bad, but then you sprint ahead.
Did you see this, that the Department of Defense,
’cause they took down all of their DEI stuff,
removed promotional video material
about the Tuskegee Airmen.
– Yeah, and women in World War II.
– Yeah, the Wasps, which is such a great name for it.
And it was Katie Britt from the center from Alabama
who tweeted, “Oh, this must be a mistake.”
And within a couple of hours,
the new defense secretary, Pete Higgs,
was like, “I’ve fixed it.”
But that feels like one of those circumstances
where they were trying it on, right?
They thought, well, we could just go ahead
and get rid of these things.
And if someone catches us, so what, we’ll put it back up.
– And we’re in the news, as long as we can.
– Right, and we’re dominating the cycle no matter what,
because all news is good news
or all press is good press, I guess.
And that’s a credo that Trump has lived by forever.
There’s also just such a lack of expertise
and willingness to want to do the work, right?
They want to eliminate things en masse
and not spend the time going through
and actually looking at what the relevance is,
like purging the government of any of those checks.
They got rid of, I think, 17 inspector generals
over 12 huge bureaucracies, right?
These are things that used to piss off
storied members of the Senate, like Chuck Grassley,
lost his mind in 2021.
Trump got rid of two IGs.
Now 17 have been removed.
Did you see this communication freeze for the NIH and the CDC?
Like in the midst of bird flu,
they can’t tell people what’s going on with something.
Yeah, exactly.
And the foreign aid freeze is just totally frightening.
– Yeah, I’m a chairman of the World Health Organization.
To your point about sticking our chin out,
I believe Biden’s first executive order had to do
with transgender athletes’ rights,
and it took him three years
for an executive order on immigration.
– And to your point, illegal border crossings
had dropped to about 45,000 in December of 2024,
but in December of 2023,
a quarter of a million people came across
the border illegally.
What I find sort of ironic and telling about these,
I don’t know what the term is, roundups,
or when the ice shows up,
they’ve decided the most efficient place
to quote unquote find these unproductive people
who are freeloading.
Is it workplaces?
– Right.
– I thought, so if you wanted to deport Americans,
you’d probably go to McDonald’s
or to their basements where video games are,
but with undocumented workers,
you go to places of work ’cause that’s where they are.
I thought that was sort of ironic,
but we had this coming.
We ignored the problem, it got out of control,
and just as you can never actually visually spot
a pendulum at the middle,
they have swung, they have taken advantage of this
and they swung back.
And quite frankly, I don’t have a problem
with deportations of undocumented workers,
but let’s start with those who are in prison,
let’s start with those who’ve now committed two crimes,
one crime coming over here, legal, the second one.
I think that’s absolutely fair game.
The, I mean, some of the other issues
that we really screwed up on,
we talked about transgender, we took just a,
I don’t wanna say irrelevant,
but an issue and gave them just a free gift
would purchase for parents all over the nation
who don’t wanna have their daughters kind of run over.
The macro, the biggest issue, hands down in my opinion,
is that a mix of identity politics,
weaponization by special interest groups,
essentially had the Democrats implicitly
and explicitly turn their backs on the group
that has struggled the most the last 40 years.
Everybody feels when young people aren’t doing well.
Their parents, society,
and these are the people on social media saying,
okay, great invidious, we’re $3 trillion,
I can’t afford rent.
So instead of focusing on policies like inflation,
how to build more houses, bring down costs,
lower enrollment instead of being weaponized
by these universities that are,
I mean, essentially some of the most corrupt organizations
in the world are seen as the center
of democratic politics, specifically my industry.
What is more of an epicenter of kind of democratic ideals
than elite institutions
who I just interviewed the president Dartmouth.
They have an $8 billion endowment and they let in 500 kids.
– Okay, excuse me,
but you’re not this elite cast enforcer
talking about big, big fancy ideals,
but you don’t want to give people this drug
that decreases obesity, anxiety,
gives them a shot at getting married, making money.
No, you’d rather hoard it just for you and your elite friends.
So let’s create a misdirected DEI.
Michigan, University of Michigan has 200 DEI officers.
60% of Harvard’s freshman class identifies as non-white,
but we need to have DEI on campuses
such that we can discriminate against,
what, white kids and rural states?
I mean, it’s just, we got so out of control
with the identity politics, the DEI apparatus,
not focusing on inflation, not focusing on young people,
that we just gave them a layup to become sort of,
you know, just go overboard, flood the zone
with a ton of shit.
I get it, we deserve it, we had it coming.
What I’m really disappointed about
is why we’re all taking it
and calling on people to work together.
As far as I’m concerned,
it used to be about a certain level of mutual respect.
You know, Democrats and Republicans at the end of the day
thought, well, if they get in power,
I want them to show me some mutual respect.
It seems to me like we need to move to mutual destruction
and say, look, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Stephen Miller,
if you want to start revoking security details,
just be careful what you ask for,
’cause once you’re out of office,
my guess is you’re gonna be real fond of a security detail.
You know, if you want,
I mean, if you want us to stick the DOJ on you
after our guy gets in office,
but right now we’re giving them the impression that
if you hit us, we’re Gandhi,
and we believe that peace is gonna work here,
and I think it’s to our disadvantage.
I think we come across as total wimps
and there’s no incentive for them to say,
well, maybe we shouldn’t be cutting
the security detail of General Milley,
in case our generals that we like are under threat
after they leave office.
I don’t think there’s any sense
that we’ll ever hit back, so to speak, your thoughts.
– Yeah, to back up your point,
that I think it’s crazy that we had his whole transition
knowing exactly who he is, what he’s going to do,
he’s telegraphing it every day,
and that we showed up on January 20th at inauguration
and did not have a solid message or a plan for countering this.
– The Democrats response post inauguration
or the complexion, for me, defines the term flat-footed.
Just on our heels, not even responding,
just kind of paralyzed, just incredibly encephaletic
and not counter punching at all.
It feels to me like in terms of the viscosity or strength
of the Democratic Party right now,
we have, I’ve never seen us this week.
– That’s a major declaration.
I don’t know if it’s necessarily wrong.
I think the right attitude,
like Congressman Golden’s team has said,
we’re not gonna respond to everything that Trump does
’cause you can’t live in the midst
of an outrage cycle constantly.
But if we just take it on the chin constantly,
I could see voters showing up again in 2026
and just saying, well, what are you about?
I still have absolutely no idea.
So Huckin’ Jeffries really wants to focus in
on cost of living issues,
and the Republicans have put forward all these EOs,
they have a bill about banning transgender people
from athletics, but they don’t have a cost of living bill
and JD Vance was on with March Brennan over the weekend
and said, well, it takes time to bring prices down.
When they had told us it would happen on day one.
So I think you have to keep hammering that,
but you also need to have a personality
and be able to go on a long-form podcast
and chill with people and talk about other things
besides politics and I’m not seeing that
from that many key players in the Democratic party.
Most people, myself included,
thought Biden went too far with his preemptive pardons,
but he may be vindicated in that in the long term,
that these are ruthless people
who have said in public forums
that they’re going to come after these folks
and that that was actually the right thing to do.
I mean, that’s a Mitch McConnell move, right?
It’s not a traditional Joe Biden move
to go for the absolute worst case scenario.
So, you know, I hope that if Kashpatal gets confirmed
and it looks like he will,
because it looks like everybody will,
maybe not Tulsi, that he isn’t as punitive
and as motivated by retribution as he details in his book,
but who knows?
And I wanted to add to what you were saying
about young people.
I was talking to a friend of mine whose brother is 30 years
old, went on a bachelor party, 13 guys,
10 of 13 voted for Trump.
And these were all liberal-minded guys
that went to university together.
And what we were discussing that I found so interesting
and it links also to the discussion
about what’s going on with higher education
is that we just are seeing now amongst young people
a new definition of what sounds smart.
So, it used to be, you know, all of your degrees,
your level of credibility was directly connected
to how fancy the school you went to was, right?
Like what kind of job you had,
how that you knew which fork went with which, right?
Like going back to the pretty woman scene, right?
Slippery little suckers, right?
Like that that was what low-class looked like
and high-class looks like someone
who dedicates their life to public service,
but also has a trust fund that they’re relying on
and went to Harvard for everything.
And now the people that are revered
or that folks think are smart
are the ones who are asking questions incessantly.
And it doesn’t matter what they’re questioning.
Like RFK, well, I’m just asking questions, right?
About the measles vaccine or fluoride in the water
or whatever it is that day.
And the right has weaponized that against us
to an incredible advantage
because all of these young people who are smart
and very well-educated now think that it is cool
and forward-thinking and what they want to see in leadership
for people to not actually know the answers to questions.
And I don’t know how you rectify that
because, you know, I talked to my toddler
and she’s asking questions all the time, right?
Like, but why, mom?
Mommy, why?
Why do we do this?
Why are you going here?
Why do I have to brush my teeth?
Why do I have to make my bed?
And then you fast forward
to where she’ll be in 25, 30 years, let’s say.
Is she gonna think Joe Rogan is the smartest person
in the world because he’s just asking questions?
I mean, even Lex Friedman,
someone is a very traditionally smart person, right?
In terms of education and productivity
is just asking questions.
Like asking Zelinsky, why don’t you just give up your country?
And that’s what passes now
as the folks that we should be looking up to.
And that’s leading to a set of government officials
who are also doing that same thing
who are just flooding the zone with wild questions
that then leave them with this route
that they can go through to throw all of this
administrative shit at the wall.
And we’re ending up with a government
that I’m sure will be in complete crisis
in a matter of months.
– Yeah, it’s definitely, I mean, we say this a bunch
that we’re sort of in uncharted territory.
It seemed like I’m just, you said something
that sort of, I don’t know, piqued my interest
because you know more about this than I do,
but that you believe Kashpatel will be confirmed
and that there’s a chance that Tulsi Gabbard won’t be.
And I would have reversed that, but I don’t know the latest.
What’s going on there?
– What, well, what’s going on is, I mean,
you saw Pete Hegsas go through.
So there were three no votes on that.
It was quite clear that Senator Tillis did want
to vote against him ’cause he required Hegsas
to write a letter to him answering specific questions
about accusations of abuse against his second wife.
There was a big New York Times piece about this.
And you can see if an unjoney earns his face
that she didn’t want to do this.
But when you’re threatened with a primary
and probably with violence,
knowing how the internet works, you do those things.
The reason that I say that I think it’s possible,
Tulsi doesn’t get confirmed,
Lindsey Graham over the weekend wouldn’t answer, right?
And how he was voting on it.
And I feel like if there is anyone
who’s not gonna get through,
it’s the one that people are being the quietest about.
And no one really talks about Tulsi Gabbard.
They’re talking about the other ones.
I think it’s feasible that Republicans decide
that RFK Junior is not actually a threat
to vaccines or whatever and let him through.
But it seems like they’re advertising,
having good meetings with Cache Patel.
And I haven’t seen one thumbs up MAGA post
with people standing with Tulsi Gabbard.
So, but I’m prepared for all of it to get through.
– I love someone said that Mitch McConnell voting
against Hexath would be like Hannibal Lecter
going vegetarian on his death bed.
It’s just like, don’t hold your breath.
But yeah, it’s-
– You did it.
– Yeah, again, he’s got very little to lose at this point.
Right?
– Totally.
– He’s leaving his old, I mean-
– Profiles encourage though, right?
That you’re doing it and then nothing really to show for it.
But, you know, I guess I appreciate it anyway.
– But you think Cache Patel is gonna get through?
That’s super interesting.
– Right now, I don’t, you know, who knows,
but it looks likely and people seem to be thinking
that Donald Trump is entitled to whatever he wants
in terms of a cabinet.
And usually people do get what they want.
There have been cases where it hasn’t happened,
but they strong arm everyone.
And they have this fleet of people online
just threatening anyone who opposes them,
including, you know, members of their family
will do things like that,
whether that is a sitting elected representative
or the president of another country.
Like this game that went on with the Colombians
about using military planes
versus the regular detention planes.
I mean, first of all, it costs three times more.
They can get up to $852,000 to send back migrants
on these C-130s, I think, or C-17s.
– It’s all about branding, right?
– And so it’s like a huge, it’s all the show.
And CNN was reporting this morning
that they want all of the ICE agents
to be wearing their vests.
And for this to be made for TV,
’cause we’re in the Truman Show,
but like a really bad version.
– Yeah, the one jet blue.
Okay, let’s take a quick break.
Stay with us.
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(upbeat music)
– Welcome back.
Before we wrap, we gotta adjust something
we’ve been hearing from some of you.
Apparently there’s a feeling that we’re not quite living up
to the moderate in our show name.
Maybe we’re leaning a bit more into the raging side.
People say we’re more raging than moderate.
That’s a fair point.
So what does being a moderate really mean to us,
especially during this new administration?
Jess, you kick us off.
What do you think it means to be a moderate?
– Well, first, the fact that we’re talking about this
is your fault because you made me a comments monster.
And I went and looked at what people were saying
and there’s a lot of positive stuff.
But it–
– Oh, don’t look at the comments.
I mean, read the first five, learn from it
and then ignore it, just your own mental health.
– I stay up later than everyone in my household
so I could spend a good amount of time
comments doom scrolling.
But seeing a lot of this, like this is not
what a moderate means.
And I am completely willing to accept
that A, a moderate means different things
to different people.
And that also, I think of myself as a liberal moderate,
not someone who is a swing voter at this point.
And most people who advertise that are lying
’cause there’s usually a crucial issue
that puts you into one camp or the other.
For a lot of people, it’s whether you’re pro-choice
or pro-life, and as a pro-choice person,
I would be hard-pressed to support
a candidate that was pro-life.
But I guess I wanted to talk about this
because I think what we share
and why we wanted to do this specific podcast together
under this name is because we wanna talk
about politics through the framework of pragmatism,
not just optimism or what we want to happen.
And that it’s important to have political discussions
that are cognizant of the guardrails
of the way government actually operates.
And also, I think most crucially,
understanding that the framework of a partisan worldview
is not how the general populace operates.
And the 2024 results were so indicative
of that transformation,
that people are not interested in backing a team
in the same way of anything they’re backing Trump
because they back that player, right?
Like that’s their favorite football player,
their favorite basketball player or whatever sport they’re into.
And I think that being a moderate right now is trying,
as per our earlier discussion,
to see the good in what the other side
may be bringing to the table and saying like,
“Sure, that works for me.”
And also I have constituents or I have people that I know
who absolutely feel that way,
recognizing the faults of the party that we both belong to
and then trying to find a way to constructively
and effectively push back where we need to.
And that’s how I see it right now.
I don’t, how do you see it?
Even though you said earlier, you’re not moderate.
So the podcast is over.
– I would define myself as kind of ground zero
for moderates.
And that is what, as far as I can tell moderates
are basically people that everybody hates.
And essentially, I mean, the generous
or the actual Webster definition would be someone
who has tempered views
and is somewhere in the middle on the political spectrum.
And the way I see it is I’ve tried as I’ve gotten older
to not be lazy and sign up for any political orthodoxy.
When I hear something crazy on the left,
I like to call it out when I think our democratic leadership
is too inefficient, feckless, cowardly, I call it out.
When I think DEI is out of control,
when I think that immigration is out of control,
when I think that social security spending is out of control,
you know, there’s some of their favorite policies
of the left, I call it out.
And when I am, you know, I’m vigorously pro-Israel.
It’s like, I don’t bark up any one tree.
I try to have my own views.
In this environment, based on where the political spectrum is,
I’m now seen as center left.
In the 70s, I would have been a Rockefeller Republican.
I just would have been, I would have,
I would have been in that party.
But I think it’s also just saying,
look, I’m gonna look at, I’m gonna be a critical thinker.
I’m gonna look at issue by issue.
And regardless of the political orthodoxy
you’re supposed to sign up to, you say,
okay, I’m not down with this.
And it’s almost like you become, unfortunately,
to a certain extent, the left is much harsher on moderates.
They treat you like an apostate.
Yeah, Scott, I thought we could trust you.
People from the Biden campaign, sign up.
Don’t you understand the assignment?
Sign up.
Well, no, he’s too fucking old.
What are we doing here?
And then people on the right are just like,
kind of write you off as a libtard.
But they don’t come after you the same way the left does
when they thought you were, quote unquote,
when we thought you were one of us.
So I see a moderate as someone who says,
okay, I’m gonna go issue by issue.
I’m gonna use critical thinking.
I’m gonna be unafraid to say this makes no sense,
regardless of the cult dynamics of pressure
to sign up for the full orthodoxy and narrative.
Because when the narrative gets crazy
or makes no fucking sense, you say, okay, I don’t buy this.
I don’t have a problem with deporting criminals.
I get the symbolism of it.
I don’t have a problem with a surge of troops
at the border, fine.
Deficits, anyways, my point is,
I’d like to think a moderate is someone who says,
I’m a critical thinker.
I’m gonna look at the issues
and I’m gonna decide one by one,
what I think is the right view on this.
I’m not gonna sign up and just say, okay,
I’m a fan, I’m a cultist, no matter what they say.
And this is true about the left and the right.
But I will say as someone who’s seen or identified
as a Democrat that I get more hate from the left
than I do from the right.
The right has just kind of written me off.
And that’s how it is in our society.
You gotta pick a side.
You can’t say, well, I wanna go issue by issue, right?
Do I believe women should have the right
to terminate a pregnancy?
Yes.
And the third trimester?
Okay, that’s worth a discussion, right?
If the woman’s health or the baby’s health is not in danger,
at the same time, nobody trusts each other.
So nobody wants to have anything resembling
kind of a moderate conversation.
In addition with Citizens United and gerrymandering
that has hard right and hard left districts,
there’s no political room for moderates anymore.
They can’t get elected, right?
Because basically every election now
with these hard blue and hard red districts
is decided in the primary.
So it’s basically who can be craziest.
Who can be more crazy left or who can be more crazy right?
And a moderate is just a recipe for not getting elected.
So I think in the media or as a commentator
or whatever you wanna call yourself a thought leader,
I think it’s especially important that we demonstrate.
It’s okay to be a critical thinker
and occasionally have your followers on threads
or blue sky come after you because you say,
yeah, I don’t get this democratic policy.
I think the vice president was a great senator.
I think she’d be a great Supreme Court justice.
I don’t know if she’d be a great president.
And then everyone comes for you.
And I’m not willing to sign up and blind,
bend the knee for C above an insurrectionist and a rapist.
– Critical thinking, look at every person,
look at every issue and decide where you are on it.
Because that’s my story and I’m sticking to it, Jess.
– No, I think that’s the right story.
And I think that there’s so much pressure
to always be a good soldier.
I certainly feel this in my role,
being part of the conservative media ecosystem,
that there are liberals who get enraged if I even say,
well, this doesn’t make a ton of sense.
Or this is an issue that 70% of Americans agree on.
Like, why can’t that just be our position?
It seems pretty normal.
Like, you know, the was a prop 36 on the California ballot,
making it not okay to shoplift up to $950
without getting arrested.
Like these are just obvious things.
And you should be able to have opinions about them
without people flipping out on you.
But I do think a critical component
of how we approach politics
and how people who are governing more in the middle do
is that they fundamentally understand
that it’s not the intentions that matter,
it’s the outcomes that matter.
And we just had an enormous outcomes election
where people said that governance in blue cities and states
is not meeting the moment, far from it.
That riding the subway is not a good option anymore.
That we don’t support law enforcement,
that we have people who are incompetent,
perhaps corrupt in big positions of power.
And that we are not living up to the covenant
that our elected officials make with the people
who send them there.
And that we’re actually failing ourselves
when it comes to our values
because of how poor that governance has gotten.
And that’s really crucial to how I think about politics
and how I think about my advocacy for policies
that I think will improve quality of life.
And more often than not, those policies are linked
to more liberal legislators or people who see the world
through a similar prism to me.
But I am completely open to the fact
that there are good representatives
from the other side of the aisle
that also live by those ideals
or certainly can meet us somewhere in the middle
to get something good done.
And I remember when the Democrats were funding MAGA candidates
to run against moderate Republicans.
And I understood it from a, we got a win perspective.
But it was upsetting to me
that good people like Peter Mayer in Michigan lost his seat
because we put in tons of money to back a crazy person
that would then go on to lose to the Democrat.
And I think that those are the kinds of things
that we need to explore
because we’re only gonna have a healthy political system
if we do have two thriving parties, right?
That are full of people that actually capture
the cultural and political zeitgeist of the country.
And the extremes on both sides are wildly dangerous.
And I think that the right more dangerous than the left.
But when you look at what people think
and how they’re talking about the issues,
you know that the Marjorie Taylor Greens of the world
are not appealing to the general population writ large.
And that first sound like the Alonno Mars
or the Rashida Thalibs of the world
are not appealing to them either.
And so I think it’s important to be trying to stake out ground
to have these discussions about it to, you know,
bring people on from the other side of the aisle
or people who work regularly with Republicans
so that we can hear about how progress can actually be made
because they’re the ones,
we can talk all we want from our studios,
but they’re the ones actually casting the votes
for all of this and hopefully making a big difference
in people’s lives.
– Yeah, something I think the Republicans
have done much better than Democrats.
And your buddy Tim Miller, I thought made a great point on
from the Bollard podcast that they kind of the coarseness
and the, I don’t know, just the provocative,
sometimes stupid, sometimes weirdness
that’s come out of the right.
It came across as authentic, whereas Democrats,
it’s as if they’re reading off a press release
or believe that they’re crossing the Delaware
or giving an inauguration speech.
I mean, they’re just so like,
it’s like speak like a regular person for God’s sakes.
And the Republicans do that better than Democrats.
Also, it strikes me that a big component
in terms of what impacts people’s lives
and gives them the impression of the respective brands,
we have to get our shit together around on the ground,
running some of these Democratic cities.
A bunch of my friends lost houses in the Pacific Palisades.
And they basically all said the same thing.
They’re like, I keep hearing these excuses
where the reservoirs weren’t full,
the water pressure was down, whatever it is.
And he’s like, we pay 13% a year in additional taxes.
If I’m gonna have my house burned down,
I’ll move to Florida or Texas where I pay 0%.
It’s like, we should have the supersize gold-plated VIP,
a white glove government when you’re paying 13%.
And instead, some of the highest tax,
highest tax states are offering,
I mean, they’re expensive but bad,
which isn’t a recipe for a good product.
And the most expensive but bad metros right now
are governed by Democrats
who seem to be weaponized by unions
or whatever it might be, special interest groups
and are just taxing the shit out of their local residents
and doing head up your ass, you know,
enforcement like you’re talking about
where if you steal less than $900,
they don’t even prosecute you.
So I think until, and by the way,
I don’t think that’s true of New York.
New York has 12, I think it’s a total
of about 12 or 13% also in taxes.
But I would argue Manhattan is worth it.
I think it’s actually, I think Manhattan is well run.
And I don’t know about you, but I do feel,
I do feel that the subway feels a little bit different.
I’ve noticed that, I’m more aware.
– That’s an understatement.
– Yeah, you really feel it, don’t you?
– Well, I do personally,
but I don’t remember I grew up here
and have ridden the subway my whole life,
the number of people being like thrown in front of cars,
being punched, slashed, a woman burned on the F train.
That’s not normal.
Oh, things happen every once in a while.
– Agreed.
– And Cathy Hookle is definitely getting the message
because of Richie Torres, but it’s bad.
– Yeah, and also I just, in terms of crime, I think it’s-
– Well, crime is down, but those are also
to the point about the messaging of this.
No one, if they feel less safe and you come at them
with a bunch of statistics, it doesn’t matter.
– If I don’t feel safe on the subway,
if I can’t have my AirPods in,
’cause I need to, I have to feel like I’m more aware.
All right, that’s all for this episode, Jess.
Thank you for listening to Raging Moderates.
Our producers are David Toledo and Chenenye Onike,
our technical director is Drew Burroughs.
You can find Raging Moderates on its own feed every Tuesday.
– That’s right, Raging Moderates on its own feed.
Please follow us wherever you get your podcasts.
Jess, have a great rest of the week.
– You too, Scott.
– Thank you.
(upbeat music)
Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov dive into Trump’s whirlwind first week back in office. From immigration crackdowns to controversial pardons and foreign aid freezes, they break down the chaos and its implications for the U.S. They also explore why the Democratic opposition is falling short, the balance between confrontation and compromise, and how moderates fit into the current political climate.
Follow Jessica Tarlov, @JessicaTarlov.
Follow Prof G, @profgalloway.
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