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Welcome to Raging Moderates.
I’m Scott Galloway.
And I’m Jessica Tarlove.
Jess, are you at home in New York with your lovely children?
I am.
And we had a big three-year-old birthday bash on Sunday.
Frozen-themed.
I won’t sing for you.
But it was toddler intense, to say the least.
How was your weekend?
You’re wearing a tie.
In case people aren’t watching this, you’re very dressed up.
Yeah, my weekend could not have been more different.
I went with a group of 40 and 50-somethings
to a castle in the Cotswolds where we drank and then got up.
And about 30 people followed us into the middle of nowhere
and loaded our shotguns.
And we shot at birds.
And then the best part was the dogs that came and collected
the birds.
Fortunately, I’m not a very good shot.
So a lot of birds are around today
because I’m not very good at it.
But it’s a very British thing.
It’s probably my first–
it’s called a shoot.
And the best part about it was one I got to go.
I got to go with a friend, my friend John of John and Wendy.
He’s a super impressive venture capitalist.
But he loves shooting and he loves British culture.
So he said, I’ll take you for your outfit.
And I went and I bought this crazy outfit.
You get these boots and these things
you tie around your boots on.
He was called these ridiculous socks.
They look like leg warmers.
Anyways, it was a very kind of down nabby meets murder
kind of weekend.
So all right, so before we get into it,
I heard Jess actually, in addition
to hosting great parties for three-year-olds,
that you went to Donald Trump’s Patriot Awards last week.
And it was the first time that you were actually
in close proximity to the Donald.
Give us your impressions after that event.
Yeah, well, it was a vibe.
So it’s actually Fox’s Patriot Awards.
And Donald Trump was being honored.
So I was there for work.
We did a live show.
I was just excited that Donald Trump gets a Patriot.
That’s a shocker.
Well, that must have been–
Well, I wanted to blow your mind
after you blew the minds of birds.
Anyway, the Patriot Awards is something
that we do annually and is actually really lovely.
It’s all about honoring everyday heroes
and people who’ve served the country.
I’m sorry, go ahead.
He is your president-elect.
Just let me get it out and then you do whatever you want.
Sorry, go ahead.
Sorry.
This was the first year that Donald Trump was there.
Did they get a collective award?
No, they did not get an award.
Thank you for asking.
Sorry, go ahead.
Good.
Are you sure?
No, I’m not, but good.
OK, OK, I’m going to do it.
Anyway, so we were out there.
We did a live taping of the five, which is always fun.
I mean, some people who like me also got booed a little bit.
You did?
You got booed?
Kind of like, yeah, well, you know.
Like, joking, like, kind of funny, funny booze?
Yeah, like, I didn’t cry or anything,
but it’s never nice.
And everyone– the rest of the cast is like, come on, guys.
She’s actually even agreeing with us on this one.
But I get it.
It’s all part of it, and you get to play with the audience a bit.
But the Patriot Awards– and it’s going for a few years,
and we’ve done it in Florida.
We did it in Nashville last year at the Grand Ole Opry,
which was amazing.
And you meet some pretty incredible people
that are doing wonderful things for the country.
And you can insert your Donald Trump joke later.
But it plays into why this was such an interesting contrast
for me.
So the Patriot Awards this time honored–
I don’t know if you remember this story about an NYPD officer
named Jonathan Diller, 31 years old, out on Long Island.
Routine traffic stop was shot and killed.
He had a one-year-old son.
His widow was the opening award recipient and speaker.
And she was breathtaking, that this woman did not
have a complete meltdown doing this, talking about her husband
and his service and loving police officers.
And if you remember, there was a big back and forth.
Like, Donald Trump went to see the family.
And Biden didn’t go, and it became this kind of touchpoint
in the war over who actually backs the blue.
And she, in her speech, says how great she thinks Donald Trump is.
They had the UNC frat guys who protected the American flag
from the pro-Palestinian protesters
on Chapel Hill’s campus last spring.
These whistleblowers from the Phoenix VA,
the ones who actually ended up getting
Shinseki, the VA secretary under Obama, fired.
Basically, they exposed the VA for denying and putting off
care for hundreds of veterans who would have lived
had they gotten their care on time and this massive cover up.
And so those are the kind of people
that are being honored at this.
And you’re in this room with a bunch of people
who do not vote the same way that I did.
And they love these people whose message is over and over again,
we love the red, white, and blue, right?
Like, America is the best place to be,
even if we’ve gone through something terrible,
like this poor woman losing her husband.
And then a common current through all of it is,
and we also love Donald Trump.
There is a very good case to be made
that Democrats do not show up well enough
for these types of people,
that we don’t talk about our patriotism enough,
that we don’t talk about loving cops.
– Yeah, I agree. – Yeah, I agree.
– That’s my point, thank you. – Yeah.
– Anyway, so all these amazing people
who are getting these awards
and giving really captivating speeches full of Americana,
and then Trump comes out.
I’ve, you know, I’m in the front table
with a couple people. – Like, who do you sit with?
Who’s the most fun to drink with?
Who gets too drunk?
Was Pete Hegseth there?
Did he hit on you before like,
throwing up and passing out?
Is he still, does he go to that stuff?
– I give up, let’s move on.
I heard about your cable news cabinet from Pivot Though,
and I didn’t make it, which was kind of a bummer.
– I see you as sort of quiet power.
I see you as like, head of fundraising.
– Soft power. – Soft power,
I can totally see that. – That’s fine.
– Also, if you decide to ever run for Congress
or Senate, I’ll head your fundraising.
– Well, you’re honestly screwing me over
with these conversations,
because you’re making me seem a little–
– It’s all about awareness.
– They’re all presses, good press.
– Yeah, junior senator from,
wait, you grew up in New York, didn’t you?
– New York, yeah.
So me and AOC and the–
– No, no, no, no, no, no, no, we’re running you
for president, Kirsten Jillerranich.
– Straight to the top.
– Kirsten Jillerranich, Charles Schumer,
in my opinion, are like weak, weaker and weakest,
and I think they absolutely need a young,
dynamic, centrist Democrat to primary them.
There, I’ve literally got it figured out for you.
I’ve got it figured out. – Always.
– That’s why I’m here. – If you believe
Senator Tarloff has a nice ring to it,
then please DM me, I will take your name down,
and when we decide, when Charles Schumer turns 140
in 10 years, we can decide to primary him,
and when everyone decides to kiss Kirsten Jillerbrand
while being a thoughtful, nice woman,
is totally ineffective, then we’ll primary her as well.
I’m 100% behind this.
Okay, before we go here, before we bust in the news,
we wanna remind you to please follow Raging Moderates
on your podcast platform of choice.
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This week on Friday, we have an interview
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only on the Raging Moderates feed.
A lot of our interviews and our better stuff
is only on the Raging Moderates feeds.
Be sure to check it out.
Okay, in today’s episode of Raging Moderates,
we’re discussing Trump’s promises
for the first day of his tenure.
Assad flees to Moscow with Syrian rebels captured Damascus.
Biden’s preemptive pardons debate,
the final house math and leadership shakeups,
and finally our predictions for next year.
All right, where should we get to?
Let’s, over the weekend, President-elect Trump
told NBC’s Kristen Welker he plans immediate action
after taking office on January 20th.
He vowed to pardon January 6th rioters on day one,
extend his first term tax cuts,
deport millions of undocumented immigrants,
and push to end birthright citizenship.
Trump also said he’d work towards a solution
to protect dreamers, and he won’t impose
new restrictions on abortion pills,
on pardoning rioters, he claimed.
– This is the most disgusting, filthy place.
These people are living in hell.
– Let me just–
– And I think it’s very unfair.
So yeah, most likely I’ll do it.
– Jess, what did you make of this interview?
– This felt like actually the kickoff
to the new administration in a certain way.
I know we have to get to inauguration,
but it’s crazy how quickly I feel like things have turned.
I don’t remember this when Biden won in 2020
that he suddenly became the president,
but Donald Trump is, like he said Notre Dame
for the reopening.
He is meeting with world leaders.
He is meeting with Zelensky.
It feels like everyone has just kind of shut the door
on Biden and is like, hello, Trump, whatever that means.
And choosing to go on Meet the Press,
he has been interviewed by Welker before.
I think definitely trying to send a mainstream signal
right to the public.
I’m going to be out here in these places
that you recognize and you don’t have to come
and find me on the Andrew Schultz podcast necessarily.
But it was classic Trump in that the things
that he was promising to do are the things that he said,
depending on what your politics are,
it fits exactly in the box that you have put him in.
So he says, I’m ending birthright citizenship.
I’m deporting families together, right?
That was one of the big ones,
which Tom Holman, who’s his borders are,
had said on “60 Minutes” before when he was interviewed.
So the idea is like, oh, we don’t have to separate families.
Even if some of you are legal,
you should just all go together
and that he’s gonna jail Liz Cheney, right?
So if you’re diehard maga, you like that for obvious reasons.
And then if you’re more centrist or even a Democrat,
you’re crapping your pants again, right?
And saying this guy is going to do
all of these terrible things to the country.
And it’s just, it’s so difficult to pin him down,
which I think is why he ended up winning
because he’s whatever you want him to be, right?
He’s a dream politician in that sense.
And people have very legitimate arguments
on both sides of the authoritarian coin
as to which one he is.
And that was my big takeaway.
I mean, I wanna get into the specifics
of some of these things,
but what do you think about that?
I don’t know if you watched it or…
– I didn’t.
The weird thing that’s happened to me
is I have a tendency to believe that, okay,
the wonderful thing about our checks and balances
is that there’s a certain level of purposeful and transigence
where it’s very hard to get stupid, sweeping things done.
It’s also probably really difficult
to get really genius, disruptive things done.
And that it’s just unlikely.
I don’t think these tariffs are gonna go through
at anywhere near the magnitude.
I can’t imagine, I would like to think
that enough Americans look back
on one of the great stains,
one of the great stains of our society,
and that was interning great Japanese-American citizens
who for no other reason in the color of their skin
as many of their sons were fighting in the European theater,
that the moment we start housing, hosting,
aggregating, concentrating immigrants
and anything resembling a camp,
that the media and people and citizens in that neighborhood
are gonna go ape shit.
So I wonder how much of this is really gonna happen.
Now having said that,
what I’m also growing into is realizing,
I never thought,
I was never worried about Roe v. Wade being overturned.
I didn’t think there was any chance
would ever actually get overturned and I was wrong.
So nothing kind of surprises me anymore
and along those lines in the last two weeks,
I’ve had an iconic morning TV show host
and an iconic tech billionaire call me
and asked me about London.
And I thought, oh great,
you’re thinking about moving to London.
I moved to London not because of America
because I felt like I needed to leave.
I moved because of America.
Because America has offered me so much prosperity
and just wonderful opportunity,
I have the chance to give my kids an experience
to live in Europe.
These folks are scared
and they’re actually thinking about relocating to Europe
because they believe there’s a non-zero probability
they are going to be persecuted.
And I was just so flummoxed
that these are not reactionary stupid people.
These are household names
that are incredibly successful.
My first question is, you’re really,
you’re seriously really worried.
You really think he’s going to come for you?
And they said, I don’t know,
but I don’t need to live in a country where I don’t know.
– Yeah.
– The reason why America, in my opinion,
across a lot of dimensions is so successful
is you have to have a massive base of innovation
to create economic value such that we have the taxes
to pay for the best military in the world
and to argue over entitlements
and to argue over veterans affairs
and to bail out banks or COVID stimulus.
That top line number is really important.
And to start, both of these people
create tremendous economic growth.
Both of these people, and I’m not being biased,
are good people.
They’re good people.
I’m like, that’s the environment you want to create.
– Where do you think, can you handicap
what you think is going to happen post-election?
– I don’t know, I think– – That’s a difficult question.
– Yeah, I don’t.
– You can say I don’t know.
– I mean, I don’t know an exact number.
I do know, which we’ve talked about a few times,
that what Trump cares about most is economic prosperity,
because that’s what he knows he’ll be remembered for,
either good or bad.
And frankly, it’s what got him across the line
in the 2024 election,
that people had a favorable view
of what the economy looked like when he was president.
And I’m curious as to what you think about,
I get it that the fear mongering
that is rooted in some very genuine policy chops
on people like Stephen Miller or Tom Holman, et cetera,
that are founded in xenophobia, as far as I’m concerned.
All of that is very–
– And it’s founded in bullying
when they were in the eighth grade,
but I agree with you.
– But definitely Stephen Miller, I don’t know about Holman.
He seems like he was always a bully,
but there are a lot of immigrants
and successful immigrants and well-educated immigrants
that are very big supporters of the president.
I mean, I was looking at the pictures of JD Vance
from Thanksgiving.
He’s married to Usha Vance,
whose parents are Indian immigrants.
He’s with her family for Thanksgiving.
He’s a mixed family.
And I would assume a lot of people in that group
are big fans of Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is out there saying,
I’m going to cut regulations like you’ve never seen before.
He saved $200 billion in cut regulations in the first term.
He wants to go even further.
I know there are a lot of people who run businesses
that are excited about that who feel like,
yeah, you can be successful here,
but you can be even more successful
if we get rid of some more of this red tape.
I’m concerned about certain pieces of quote unquote,
red tape that we need like climate protections
and things like that.
But there are going to be a lot of people who think
that this is actually a good place to be doing business
with Donald Trump in the White House
versus a more regulatory minded Democrat.
– It’s a great point.
And on the issue of immigration,
we have someone who’s worked with us for a long time
who’s incredibly talented
and English is her fifth language.
And yet she’s arguably our most talented
copywriter editor just in around immigration.
While she’s very progressive,
while immigration, I haven’t stated explicitly,
but I know I’m fairly confident saying
she doesn’t want people rounded up.
But she says, look, I waited in line to get here
and it took me seven years and I did it legally.
And so many people in America seem to feel
that we should just have open borders.
I was like, which is it?
Can I come?
Can my parents come now?
Which is it?
I waited in line.
And what’s interesting, we saw in this election
is a lot of recent immigrants
are the most pro-Trump’s immigration policies
that they feel like it’s just absolutely gotten out of control.
It’s gonna be, I’m just sort of fascinated to see
how the dynamics of what is effectively
sort of a semi-Lame Duck president,
he’s especially Lame Duck after 2026
and push back on economic policies should inflation take up.
And also, is he has a negotiating tactic starting really high
saying, okay, tariffs of 100% and then going down to 20.
And the thing that scares me about saying,
I’m never gonna deny people access to their abortion pills.
Well, okay, but if you keep appointing conservatives
to the Supreme Court, it’s gonna be a lot of land.
You don’t have to do it yourself, yeah.
That’s definitely a concern.
And there is no one at the top levels of the administration,
even with these appointments
that I can look to and feel secure about something like that.
I mean, they all feel like power, power, power people.
Let’s take a quick break, stay with us.
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– Okay, so what’s next here?
Let’s go to something a little bit more fun.
– Let’s go light Syria.
– Let’s talk to, let’s talk about Assad.
So the Assad family’s 50 year rule over Syria
came to an end following a swift rebel offensive.
President Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow with his family
where they were granted asylum.
President Biden called the regime’s fall
a historic opportunity for Syria to rebuild
while warning of risks ahead.
Rebel leader Abu Muhammad al-Jalani speaking in Damascus
hailed the victory as one for the entire Islamic nation
and pledged protection for minorities
under the new leadership by his HDS group.
I think this quite frankly is the most undercovered story
in the world right now.
– Totally, well, it was definitely undercovered
for the first 12 days.
And then it’s Syria fell on the 13th day
and everyone was like, oh, hey,
there’s something going on here.
I felt, I got chills watching some of this,
especially the footage of the prisoners being freed
from, I don’t want to mispronounce, the Sednaia prison,
that huge complex in Damascus.
But this guy, Jalani, who’s the head of HTS,
which is the main rebel group.
So there’s an amalgamation of rebels
that have come together to do this.
Seems like with some pretty heavy help from Turkey,
but he is the figurehead of everything at this moment.
He seems to be quite charismatic.
He’s former al-Qaeda, which is interesting.
And he’s been imprisoned before
and has had changed from, I guess, a jihadist
to a Syrian nationalist, though they are,
they’re very heavy Islamists,
as many sists that I put into one sentence.
But I have enjoyed, I guess, what he has had to say so far.
He’s ordered that all of the borders be opened
and that anyone who was displaced,
you know, there are 14 million Syrians
who have been displaced over the last 13 years.
And they’re flying the Free Syria flag at the embassy
as it was watching it up in Sweden.
There are 200,000 refugees that they’ve taken
over the years.
He’s said that there’s amnesty
for all Syrian soldiers and conscripts.
Like no questions asked.
You wanna come back and be with us.
You can be with us.
I don’t know if this will hold,
but he’s also commanded his troops
that they cannot interfere with women’s clothing at all.
So we’ll see how that holds up.
But it is fascinating geopolitically.
I mean, if Ukraine hadn’t taken Russia apart to this level
and if Israel hadn’t hurt Iran and Hezbollah
to the level that they have in the last couple of months,
this would never have been possible
because Syria just, Assad couldn’t do it
without Russia and Iran anymore.
And that seems to be why this happened.
But what are your initial thoughts?
– I agree a lot of the initial complexion
and body language is very positive.
But this is sort of a proble bringing together
a group of people from some very bad organizations.
So there’s some risk here in the Israeli sense at risk
and they’ve actually been intensely bombing
and attacking military sites and munitions,
caches inside of Syria thinking,
we don’t know anything about these people
and we don’t want them to have access to these weapons.
There’s no getting around it.
Bashar al-Assad, that regime,
him and his father, a murderous regime,
I think somewhere between half a million
and a million Syrians have been killed,
gas attacks on their own people.
Now, the world didn’t seem to be that outraged by it
because it wasn’t Jews killing these people,
but that’s another talk show.
But the thing that strikes me about this
is that we have such a self-hate for America.
We are so remiss and I believe at the hands of an America
where they see the top 1% doing better than them,
at the hands of platforms that have been weaponized
by bad actors that want to divide us
and get us to hate each other.
We don’t recognize that America and the West
are winning geopolitically.
And that is Bashar al-Assad, who does not share our values,
immediately when she got real, turned to Russia.
But here’s the problem.
A Russia is like, sorry, boss, we got our own issues
because unbeknownst to me,
where I thought I was gonna roll into Kiev
in about seven days,
the West backing the incredible Ukrainian army
is killing about 1,500 of my people a day.
I’ve lost half a million people.
I just don’t have the time, the resources or the energy
to come in and back you up.
And then he turned to his other friend, Iran.
And Iran’s like, well, I don’t know if you’ve heard,
but in addition to you,
our proxies, including Hezbollah, the Houthis and Hamas
are not doing that well
and our air defenses have been taken down.
And we’re a lot less popular amongst the Iranian people
than Hamas is among the Palestinian people.
Sorry, boss, we can’t show up.
So when you think about really bad people, Assad, Putin,
the Islamic regime and Iran,
the West being unified around their support of Ukraine,
you know, we’re winning.
And I don’t, it, it bums me out
that people don’t high five the Wests in our alliance
and our commitment to American values,
our support of Israel,
which has kicked such serious ass over the last,
since October the 7th over the last 14 months
doing our dirty work for us,
taking more people off the most wanted terrorists list
in six weeks.
And we’ve managed the last 25 years,
totally defanging this,
this quiet supposedly sleeping giant of Hezbollah
with the most precise anti-terrorist action in history,
going into Syria and making sure they don’t have weapons
in case these guys, you know, aren’t as warm and cuddly
as they’re pretending to be right now.
But basically Iran, Russia and Syria, this triumvirate,
oh, in North Korea is sending people
into a meat grinder now in Russia.
This is an enormous, this is,
essentially this is an indicator
that our good cholesterol has never been higher
and our bad cholesterol has never been lower globally.
You know, we are geopolitically,
the good guys are winning here
and the bad guys are just getting increasingly fucked.
They are having Putin, the Islamic regime and Assad
are having really bad days a lot.
And it strikes me that we never take time
to recognize how talented our security apparatus is,
how resolute and thoughtful and committed we’ve been
around joining forces to support Ukraine.
So I’m just, I’m both excited about it, possibly,
but I’m also disappointed that we don’t take more
of a victory lap for the West
and also recognize that Israel, in my opinion,
is essentially destabilizing the world for bad people
and stabilizing the Middle East.
In my view, over the medium and long-term,
the Middle East is gonna be a much less dangerous place.
It’s one of those things that’s so difficult to understand.
Do you know what Bashar al-Assad, you know, he was,
he and his wife were educated in the United Kingdom.
Do you know what he was educated as?
– No.
– He’s an ophthalmologist.
I mean, it’s such an interesting study
in how people descend into hell, right?
This guy was helping people see again.
This guy was doing cataract surgery.
And then, you know, fast forward 15, 20 years later,
or not even know if it’s that long,
he’s gassing his own people.
– But his dad was always doing this.
I mean, that was a facade.
I mean, I’m glad that some people can see better
because of him, but Assad was raised in this.
I mean, his family’s been in power for 50 years.
His wife and I, from when I lived in London,
there are a lot more people floating around there
who know these people.
And I heard similar, oh, she’s lovely.
Give her a chance.
No fucking thank you.
You knew what you were marrying into, at the very least.
But it is, I don’t know.
I’m all for people getting great educations, of course.
But I do hate that we share institutions
with some of the world’s most evil.
That really does burn me.
And this is one of those examples.
There were debates constantly at LSE about this,
about what money they would be taking from the Middle East
and who was gonna get to go.
And remember that about Ben Laden’s kids that went to Harvard.
I don’t think everyone should be punished
for what their parents did.
You may not go into the family business as it were,
but Assad surely did.
And on the Israel front, I totally agree with you.
I think the issue about us taking a step back
and spending more time reflecting
on how well the West is doing
or that these are good moments for Western values,
that is not computing for the average American citizen.
And I think a lot of it is due to the cost of all of this,
that they’re being hit constantly
with a barrage of information around,
you can’t get X thing for your kids,
but we’re sending another billion dollars
for people you’ve never met in your life
or that you feel completely disconnected to.
And that became such a key plank of Trump’s candidacy.
Where he was just like,
America first means that your kid should get a good education
and shouldn’t have a classroom full of kids
who are from another place and are here illegally,
or that that money that we’re sending abroad
should be going to you first.
And I understand for someone who is not living
as much of a charmed life as we are,
how that is persuasive.
It also made me think back to the red line
with Obama about Assad.
And that as much joy as I was feeling,
that maybe this would be a real positive future
for the people of Syria who have endured
more than my mind can even process.
I’m thinking, how did we let this continue?
What we saw the videos of the mass graves,
we knew he was gassing his own people.
We had a red line.
– Huge stand on Obama’s legacy, yep.
– Totally, and it does seem like that has been
one of the kind of lessons or big threadlines
in the aftermath of the election.
– A lot of people think Putin went into Ukraine.
I mean, these red lines,
when they no longer became lines,
a lot of people would argue that we were no longer–
– That he went to Crimea
because we don’t stand tall about this, yeah.
– We gave him a green light.
The thing that disappoints me,
I think it’s politically advantageous
and somewhat short-term minded,
expedient way of political opportunism.
You’ve never met anyone in Ukraine.
Do you really care?
Your son’s not doing well.
Do you really care about territorial sovereignty in Ukraine
when a 12 pack of bounty is $30?
Would frustrates me more?
I respect the fact they play that political opportunism.
What frustrates me is that we don’t have a Democrat
who can punch back and say, okay,
that’s the same argument that was made to FDR.
And they kept us out of the war too long in ’39.
That was the same argument that Parliament made to Churchill
about staying out of,
we don’t, he could have cut a deal with Hitler
and saved the Britain, at least in the short-term.
When fascists or murderous autocrats invade Europe,
it usually doesn’t end well when we just let them.
And then to go straight to the numbers.
And that is, I would have gone on offense.
There are few investments that have shown a greater ROI
than our and Europe’s greater investment
than the US’s in the support of the Ukrainian army.
We’re talking about $60 to $80 billion.
I think it’s maybe over a hundred now.
But when you look at, we spent $800 billion a year
on our military and in exchange,
if someone had come to us and said, you know what?
I’m gonna take out a third to almost half
of Russia’s kinetic power.
I’m going to delegitimize their army.
I’m going to take out a half a million troops.
I’m going to make it less likely
that China invades to Taiwan
’cause they see what a small, motivated,
technically sophisticated defense force can do.
Would you pay $80 billion for that?
We would hit that bid all day long.
This was, instead of apologizing
and talking in broad sweeping strokes,
they should have said, folks,
if we had been offered the ability, Russia’s our enemy,
Russia wreaks havoc.
Russia takes oil prices up purposefully.
Russia creates instability, greater likelihood of war.
For $80 billion, we’re gonna pull the mask off this clown.
We’re gonna absolutely decimate the reputation
and we’re gonna take out a third to half of their kinetic.
And Americans won’t die for it.
And that’s an important part.
Great point.
And not a single American boot on the ground?
Yeah, I’m in training, but not dying.
For seven, our federal budget is $7 trillion.
So I need about 1%, for 1%–
I need a penny.
Yeah, I need a penny on the dollar to do this.
This is the best investment America has made
in the last 10 years.
But no one says it like that.
And the way that they wrote–
Well, not until the new junior senator from New York.
Hey now.
There you go.
And her friend who shoots birds.
No one conveys it in those terms
because we are always into the soaring rhetoric
about protecting democracy.
And people like to hear we took out X amount of terrorists.
That’s what they wanna hear in all of this.
Or Vladimir Putin is flipping out
because he has lost control of these 10 areas.
Right, and this is what their economy looks like.
And I don’t wanna say that there aren’t any Democrats
that communicate well about these things.
I think especially the folks who are veterans
that know exactly what this fight means
are good about it, like the Jason Crows of the world.
But you know who I think does a pretty decent job?
Cocaine Mitch.
I listen to Mitch McConnell talk about why we need
to continue to send money to Ukraine and to Israel.
And you can tell that that man deeply feels this.
And I know that a lot of Republicans,
especially the MAGA wing,
detest him probably for being this,
having this level of clarity.
– Okay, let’s take a quick break.
Stay with us.
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– Welcome back.
Since Hunter Biden’s pardon,
there’s been chatter about whether Biden should issue
preemptive pardons for other people
that Trump has openly targeted,
including Adam Schiff and Liz Cheney.
Political reports, there’s a heated internal debate
on the White House, but Biden hasn’t weighed in yet.
Supporters, including Brendan Boyle,
say Trump’s move to put Kashpatel in charge of the FBI
shows this isn’t just hypothetical.
Shift, ironically, is urging Biden not to do it,
saying it would look defensive and unnecessary.
Jess, pardons, what are your thoughts?
Do you think that doing this preemptively
is a smart move or a bad precedent?
– It could be both at the same time,
but the problem is there’s no crime.
They haven’t been charged with anything.
I mean, there’s even though to be within the Democratic Party,
I don’t know if you saw Bill Clinton was being interviewed
and it came up about Hunter’s pardon
and how he had pardoned his half-brother,
I think, or step-brother.
And he said, “But he served time.”
There’s a big difference between even just getting convicted
and then getting a pardon,
which is what had happened with Hunter,
but let alone someone who hasn’t even been convicted
of anything.
And it scares me for these people.
I think the fact that Kashpatel has an enemy’s list
in his book, “Government Gangsters,”
and I’m sure has been adding to it on a nightly basis,
like mirror, mirror on the wall.
Who else should I put in jail?
But what are you gonna do?
Just say for crimes that they may have committed
within the last five years
and that they may commit in the next 20 years?
I don’t understand it.
I think Adam Schiff is completely correct.
And then Jim Clyburn in the same interview
where he’s talking about the pardons
for the January 6th folks from the committee,
not the January 6th rioters,
said that Biden should pardon Trump
and that it would clean the slate,
I think was the term that he used.
And I cannot think of anything that would enrage
Democrats more than Biden pardoning Trump.
Yeah, I don’t think that’s gonna happen.
It used, my understanding is it used to be,
let’s review some of the most outrageous miscarriages
of justice because if you have a big system
that unfortunately gets it wrong
as anytime you rootinize anything,
this is an opportunity that the president
has sold the scratch and over to just kind of,
as you said, clean the slate.
And I wonder who started this mess?
And I go to, was it Clinton when he pardoned
one of his donors?
I mean, pretty soon there’s gonna be an implicit number
on pardons, the head of fundraisers is gonna say,
well, I can’t care what you think.
I can’t put this in email.
But generally speaking, I think a donation
of 10 million or more might get you a pardon
for you and your family should something happen to you
over the next four years.
It just seems like we’re becoming that nation.
Well, there was, at least there was rumor reporting
that those were conversations going on
in the first Trump administration.
And then I imagine with him not even thinking
about running again.
I mean, who knows what he’s gonna be thinking about.
But let’s just say that he knows that he has to leave
after the next four years that there’s skies the limit
on the kind of salacious pardon activity
that’ll be going on.
But Congressman Steve Cohen, who’s from Tennessee
has proposed a constitutional amendment
to limit presidential power, pardon power.
And he’s never once had a Republican co-signer.
The people are out there, you know, pants on fire,
like losing their minds about what Biden did.
I mean, this is something that gets abused on both sides.
And they should really look at limiting it.
And I was listening to a really interesting conversation.
Preet Bihara and Joyce Vance have a podcast
and they were talking about it, the Hunter Pardon.
And they were on opposite sides of it.
Preet was against it.
Joyce Vance was for it, laying out their cases.
But Preet Bihara said, which I thought, good on you.
He said, if you are in the same position as Hunter,
committed a similar crime, been convicted of it,
got getting sentenced, reach out to me
and let me defend you.
Like come to me and I’m gonna try to help you get a pardon.
I shouldn’t say defend you.
They had already been defended.
But he’s like, I will go to the president
and say there are actually a whole host of people
who are in the same position as your son
that are deserving of pardons by this logic.
And my guess is that they’re not,
if those people come forward,
are not gonna be given the same treatment.
Again, we both think that we would have done
the same thing for our children.
But it’s a very ugly road that we are traveling on.
– Okay, let’s move on, Jess.
Let’s move on.
Let’s talk about what’s happening in the house.
With Adam Gray’s narrow win in California,
we’re looking at a razor thin,
way for thin margin of 217 to 215 Republican majority.
If Democrats stick together,
they’d only need one Republican to flip for a tie,
which in the house means the vote fails.
But even with that slim margin,
Republicans still get the gavel,
control committees and set the agenda.
Meanwhile, Democrats are shaking things up,
bumping older ranking members
for younger, more telegenic folks.
Jamie Raskin just ousted Jerry Nadler on judiciary,
apparently with Pelosi’s support.
On oversight, AOC has hinted she might go for Raskin’s old spot.
Jess, what do you make of these leadership shakeups?
– So first I wanna say that the narrative,
if you would like to revisit the initial conversations
about the election where you said we got shellacked,
might need a little bit of a revision.
So in the end, well, I don’t know.
– On the presidential?
– No, but the mood in totality was
Democrats got their asses completely kicked
and we ended up picking up two house seats
and won very, very competitive races
and held a lot of really important Senate seats.
It could have been much worse.
I mean, they were expecting
that we were gonna lose Nevada,
that we’re gonna lose Wisconsin.
Pennsylvania was a big pickup with McCormick.
Anyway, it was not as bad as people make it out to be.
In terms of the new chairs of the big committee is,
I think it’s time for these things to happen
and it’s folks- – Oh, you think?
– Well, I don’t like to, I’m a traditional gal
and I think that when people have served honorably
and done these incredible things for the country,
it’s very hard for me to get to the point
where I wanna say, Nancy, you take a seat, right?
You shouldn’t be doing this anymore.
And I know she stepped back from being speaker,
but she still holds her seat.
And there are still a lot of young Democrats
that wanna run for Congress in San Francisco.
Jim Clyburn is still there.
Steny Hoyer is still there.
And while they might not be as powerful as they were before,
this is rarefied air that they’re breathing, right?
They’re only, was it 435 of them?
And I think the transition to a new generation
is bigger than they are allowing to happen right now.
That said, it’s great to see Jamie Raskin doing this,
though he’s in his sixties, this is not a kid.
The AOC thing, I think, will be fascinating
if it is what happens.
And she’s clearly positioning herself
for at least statewide election, maybe national,
if she’s gonna run for president.
But if you noticed at the DNC,
and we were both very taken with her speech,
great speech, one of the top ones
from the convention, at least for me.
She struck every note properly.
She manages the economic populism, I think, better
than anybody.
She’s clearly moderated on a lot of stuff.
But in interviews since then,
she talks about upstate New York all the time.
She was giving an interview with someone,
she mentioned Buffalo twice.
I’m like, have you ever been to Buffalo?
So clearly she’s thinking about what does AOC look like
beyond the Bronx and Queens, right?
Like, what does AOC up North look like
and wants to make sure that she is palatable
to those people and getting a committee chair
and getting to show off in those ways
will be one route to potentially getting a Senate seat.
So what do you think about the new Jen?
Next, Jen.
– I think Sharon is good.
I think these people are way too old.
We have the oldest legislative body.
I believe in the world outside of Iran.
I mean, it’s just insane that our leaderships
become a cross between the walking dead
and the golden girls.
I don’t, this must be the most amazing job in the world
because they never seem to want to leave
unless it’s feet first.
I would love mandatory retirement age.
I just think in the US,
most corporations are used to be 65.
And because of gerrymandering and fundraising
and Citizens United,
these fossils keep getting reelected.
And I love, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.
The fact that we let a convicted felon,
a convicted rapist, an insurrectionist
regain the White House means they should clean house.
How did we let this happen?
This was the way I see it.
And Charles Schumer versus Mitch McConnell.
Senator McConnell has played Senator Schumer
like a fucking fiddle.
Anna’s older, but he’s still got it
in terms of his chess game.
You show that, you brought up Speaker Pelosi.
Speaker Pelosi has some of that Machiavellian, you know, Riz.
She deserves it.
By the way, she’s gonna make it nearly impossible
for anyone to launch a campaign in her district.
And then she’s going to decide to coordinate her daughter
who by the way, was born when Castro declared martial law.
That’s how old Speaker Pelosi is.
So she’s not, I’ll be curious what happens in San Francisco.
That’ll be an interesting race.
But we need a new set of leadership and voices.
And for God’s sakes, some of these people
just need to get a gold fucking watch and leave.
Or at least bring in, I mean, AOC’s policies to me,
she’s not my cup of tea from a policy standpoint.
She’s a leader and she’s telegenic.
And she represents youth and she can speak to what it’s like
to be a waitress and how important tips are
and what it’s like to work for a living.
And what it’s like to be a young woman in America.
I mean, a young, you know, non-white woman in America.
She’s fantastic.
She’s a fantastic representative
for the Democratic Party.
Raskin, yeah, early 60s, fine.
That dude, he was so quick on his feet.
I might be being unfair, yeah.
Oh yeah, he’s amazing.
He’s fantastic.
We need some gangsters to go in there
and go toe-to-toe with these people.
My favorite is, I think we talked about a long time,
you mentioned his name, the congressman from Florida
who chose- Oh, Moskowitz?
Yeah, who moved to impeach Biden on that ridiculous panel
’cause he realized none of them had any desire to do it
or had any, that this panel was just nothing
but an attempt to feed Fox with more fodder
for their evening programs
and was wasting the time and taxpayers’ money.
Anyways, they are just much,
they’re just better than us, quite frankly.
The Democratic Party suffers from something
I suffered from my entire professional life.
And that is the ability to discern the difference
between being right and being effective.
And we’d rather be right and get our asses kicked
than effective.
And we absolutely need to take this crisis
as an opportunity to have a dramatic shift
in leadership.
Anyways, that’s my rant.
Go ahead.
I wasn’t really even a rant.
I liked it.
And I just want to add to it,
connecting it back to our conversation
about what’s going on in Syria.
And it’s been a lot of good days for the West,
but we haven’t been able to communicate it.
I do think that hearing about the U.S. on the world stage
from younger communicators, many of whom have served,
will be a great benefit to the party
and to the country in general,
like Alisa Slotkin, who just won the Michigan Senate seat,
Mikey Sherrill, who’s running for governor in New Jersey,
Abigail Spanberger in Virginia,
having a younger, more relatable face to people
telling you about why it is so important
to support our troops, Western values,
these fights against dictators and totalitarians,
I think will be much more resonant with people
than hearing about it from relics of the past.
– Senator Gallegos, Representative Moulton
out of Massachusetts, Senator Duckworth.
I think people in uniform deserve a hard look at their views.
I mean, the most patriotic people in America
are the ones, anyone with kids knows,
loyalty and affection is a function of your investment.
So your kids can end up being jerks,
you’re still irrationally passionate about their wellbeing
’cause you have so much invested in them.
And wouldn’t you know,
the most loyal and patriotic Americans
are the ones who’ve invested the most,
specifically our veterans.
And what’s so upsetting is the least patriotic
are the ones who’ve received the most
but haven’t invested a lot, I call them tech bros,
but these are the people who are the most blessed
and yet don’t want to acknowledge their blessings
and shitpost America.
Anyways, I do hope that we have a new cast of leadership.
All right, Jess, anything else on your mind before we go?
Oh wait, we’re supposed to do predictions.
Hold on, hold on.
Producers are freaking out. – That’s on my mind
because it’s in our script.
– It’s in our script.
Okay, so before we wrap,
this is our last regular episode of the year.
So let’s talk 20, 25 predictions.
It’s shaping up to be a big year
with talk of tax cuts, entitlement reform
and immigration changes, Jess.
What do you think is on the horizon?
– Well, politically speaking,
I do want to talk about Taylor and Travis
actually getting engaged or publicly engaged,
but politics-wise, I do think at least on the small level
that Trump is going to make good
on the main planks of his campaign.
So I think that there will be some immigration crackdown
and I really hope that Blue City mayors and officials
will play ball with ICE to turn over criminals
so that we can avoid a deportation force
the way that Tom Homan fantasizes about it.
I saw Michelle Wu, who is the mayor of Boston
talking about an absolute blanket no
to cooperating with ICE and protecting all Bostonians.
Criminals are, illegal criminals are not Bostonians.
You should play ball with them to do that.
Mayor Adams has already said that he will.
Then again, he also wants a pardon,
but I’m sure we are going to have some level
of immigration change.
It’ll be interesting to see what he does
in terms of executive orders on the border,
probably keeping in place a lot of what Biden
has put in over the last year
and in cooperation with President Scheinbaum of Mexico.
I agree with you, small tariffs probably coming,
not this huge 100%, 60% that he’s been talking about.
Tax cuts, we’re storing the Trump tax cuts
probably through reconciliation.
The kind of question marks for me
are around what Doge can really do
if you’re not going to go after the Pentagon
and Medicare and Social Security.
They’re talking about, quote, “small entitlements,”
things like food stamps, which are not that small
to a lot of people, but means testing
as much stuff as possible.
And then, what could make it
into a huge reconciliation bill?
I was listening to Larry Kudlow,
who was in the first Trump administration,
now as a Fox business host,
not going back to the administration,
even though Trump wanted him.
And he says that we are definitely going to have
a big reconciliation bill
that’ll probably be next September.
And I’m curious to see what’s going in there.
But I know that those tax cuts are a huge priority,
especially when you look at who got them
over the finish line, the billionaires,
that are smacking their lips
at the thought of another round of it.
So those are my predictions.
– I like it.
– Yeah, okay.
The Taylor and Travis part, or the Doge part.
– But the thing they’re going,
I don’t know if you hear this,
the thing they’re, first off,
my understanding is they are looking at the military.
So for, I didn’t, I knew this, but I didn’t know it.
The military has five air forces.
Do we need five air forces?
They, my sense is they are in fact,
actually willing to address the military.
The question I have around,
whenever I hear means testing,
I’m like, okay, let’s start with social security.
And I realize that social security
is technically an off balance.
She said, yeah, we pay for it,
but it still attacks on young people
who are less wealthy than they’ve ever been
relative to their seniors.
And yet, I don’t understand why there wouldn’t be
attacks on wealthy seniors.
They create social security for young people,
but that’s another talk show.
But I wonder if we’re ever going to have
a serious conversation around means testing social security
or pushing the age back,
given the fact that we’re all living so damn long.
But, you know, no one,
my sense is they don’t want to talk about that.
Have you heard them talk about entitlements at all?
– Yeah, a lot. – And what have they said?
– And they’ve said that quote unquote,
everything’s on the table.
Medicare, social security,
not an entitlement, right?
You’ve paid in.
I take your point, obviously,
about it being attacks on young people
who are never going to get to enjoy it.
There would be, if you want to see civil war,
take away Medicare and social security.
So I don’t think that’s happening,
but I do think– – Oh, I love Medicare.
– Yeah. – Without it,
let me clear this idea. – And Medicaid,
frankly, which I mean, states are expanding,
even Republican states at a rapid pace
and seeing incredible feedback from it.
And we talked about it, wasn’t the program
that your data’s using, Medicaid program?
– Yes, the home health care, yeah.
Yeah, I don’t, what I don’t understand.
– So they’re gonna go snap food benefits.
It doesn’t sound like anyone’s talking
about the child tax credit,
which was one of the things they said they were gonna do.
It’s just a lot of cuts versus helping people out
to cut child poverty in half, but–
– So my idea has always been,
or one of them around health care,
is lower Medicaid eligibility by a year,
every year for the next 44 years
until basically you do, you basically get away–
– The way of the universal.
– 100%, people love, people love Medicaid.
And when you look at, I mean,
we didn’t talk about the United health care issue.
– Oh my God, yeah.
– That’s gonna spawn a very,
or already has a very interesting conversation
around the fact that 40% of Americans
have some sort of medical debt related to dental
or traditional medical debt that impacts them
and their family.
This is, I think that’s been actually the tsunami
we didn’t see coming in terms of political discourse.
Any thoughts?
– Yeah, well, I would love to, we don’t have time.
But I was really disturbed to see
the glorification of this murder
and then people doxing other health care CEOs.
And I understand we need tremendous reform.
And some of these stories are absolutely harrowing.
And I realized how lucky I am
to have the health care problems that I do.
‘Cause I have some, right?
I’m getting bills constantly first off,
giving birth is still expensive
even when you have platinum insurance and all of that.
But obviously nothing compares to kids getting
their chemo rejected and whatever people have to go through
on a monthly basis with these people.
But I thought it brought out some of the worst sides
of the American populace looking at the reaction to that.
What about you?
– Over on Pivot Care and I were both saying,
this is the wrong way to go about having a conversation
and we’re horrified by it.
And I got a lot of feedback.
It sort of resonated and said,
spoken like someone who’s overinsured
or can afford health insurance.
And some of the memes were just so puncturing, right?
Like empathy is outside my coverage.
And the reality is which,
and this is no way justifies murder,
but which health insurance company
has the greatest percentage of rejected claims?
You guessed it, UnitedHealthcare.
– By a large part, it was like 20% more.
And the reality is when you look at how a lot
of these insurance companies have increased earnings
over the last five or 10 years,
it’s coming with algorithms and legal justification
for identifying who is less likely to push back
and rejecting claims.
And it just goes, for me, it goes to the same place.
I never used to think this,
but I look at the UK system and the NHS has real issues,
mostly around underfunding right now
because they’re not able to add a quarter of a trillion dollars
in four minutes post an earnings call in video.
But I like the idea of nationalized healthcare
for the 80 or 90% that want to use it
and then having a private layer on top
for people who want better service.
The bottom line is this is just an industry
where the profit motive begins to turn healthcare
into sick care.
And you’re going to have the same thing
in any capitalist environment
that is not perfectly regulated as this is not.
You have regulatory capture among corporations
and the top 10% who can afford it
have the best healthcare in the world
and the bottom 90 are being squeezed economically
and the amount of despair and anxiety,
the US healthcare system is causing people.
At some point we’ve got to realize
that regulatory capture around our food supply system,
tremendous stress and anxiety around,
oh, the bad news is your wife has lung cancer,
the worst news is you’re going to go bankrupt.
At what point does our healthcare system,
at some point for the bottom 50%,
if not the bottom 90%,
at some point do we have to realize
they’re the problem, they literally are the problem.
They’re creating more anxiety, obesity,
high blood pressure, deaths of despair.
We’re going to lose 45,000 people to suicide.
I’d like to know how many of those people
would cite financial strain, specifically medical debt,
which is now the number one cause of bankruptcy in America.
How much death by suicide is that cause?
So my prediction, I have two predictions,
one’s a domestic one.
I think the debate and the resurfacing
of regulatory capture and the for-profit US model
around US healthcare that has resulted in us paying $13,000
per individual versus 65 to 8,500 for other G7 countries
with shorter life expectancy, more anxiety and more obesity
is just isn’t, it just isn’t working.
That’s going to be the debate and the big discussion
we weren’t expecting at this moment.
And then on a geopolitical level,
I think we’re going to see a revolution in Iran.
I think Hamas had 70% support of Palestinians.
The ruling party in Iran does not have nearly that support.
It has a minority of people who supported.
It’s actually, Iran’s actually a very young country.
And there are a lot of people, I think,
who are waiting to see weakness,
which they have observed over the last couple of weeks
with the fall of Assad and all of the Iranian proxies
having kind of their being kneecapped.
I think it’s going to give a lot of license and backbone.
I bet there’s a lot of entities in Iran right now
who are thinking, is this our moment?
I think we’re going to see a revolution
or a rebellion similar to what we’ve seen
in Syria and Iran in 2025.
Yeah, I didn’t realize we were doing global ones,
but I like that one.
Oh my God, I feel shamed, I feel shamed.
No, I just, no, I like it, it’s good.
I think it’s really good.
I’m just curious with all of this,
like where Israel fits in
and whether a new Iranian regime, if such a thing happens,
where they are in terms of relations with Israel,
because the big accomplishment
from the first Trump administration for me
was the Abraham Accords.
And I hope that we see further normalization
of relations with Israel as-
The kingdom will go first, I think.
Well, yeah.
Jared’s already on the WhatsApp about that, so.
Oh, is that right?
I don’t know, I just think it’s crazy
that he made $2 billion off of Saudi
and was WhatsApp-ing about it.
Yeah, he raised $2 billion.
It’s not fair to say he’s made it so far.
We’ll see what he’s raised.
Why are you defending Jared Kushner all the time?
He was my student.
I don’t care, you’ve probably had a lot of students.
He was my student.
All right, fine.
Jared and Ivanka, they’re super nice.
They’re super nice.
And his brother, the brother, Josh Kushner,
is a total gangster, he’s a great VC.
I know, Carly Klaus is hot.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, come on.
That counts for a lot.
Yeah, and they’re liberals.
There you go, all right, that’s all for this episode.
Thank you for listening to “Raging Moderates.”
Our producers are Caroline Shagrin and David Toledo,
our technical directors, Drew Burroughs.
You can find “Raging Moderates” on its own feed
every Tuesday.
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Welcome to Raging Moderates.
I’m Scott Galloway.
And I’m Jessica Tarlove.
Jess, are you at home in New York with your lovely children?
I am.
And we had a big three-year-old birthday bash on Sunday.
Frozen-themed.
I won’t sing for you.
But it was toddler intense, to say the least.
How was your weekend?
You’re wearing a tie.
In case people aren’t watching this, you’re very dressed up.
Yeah, my weekend could not have been more different.
I went with a group of 40 and 50-somethings
to a castle in the Cotswolds where we drank and then got up.
And about 30 people followed us into the middle of nowhere
and loaded our shotguns.
And we shot at birds.
And then the best part was the dogs that came and collected
the birds.
Fortunately, I’m not a very good shot.
So a lot of birds are around today
because I’m not very good at it.
But it’s a very British thing.
It’s probably my first–
it’s called a shoot.
And the best part about it was one I got to go.
I got to go with a friend, my friend John of John and Wendy.
He’s a super impressive venture capitalist.
But he loves shooting and he loves British culture.
So he said, I’ll take you for your outfit.
And I went and I bought this crazy outfit.
You get these boots and these things
you tie around your boots on.
He was called these ridiculous socks.
They look like leg warmers.
Anyways, it was a very kind of down nabby meets murder
kind of weekend.
So all right, so before we get into it,
I heard Jess actually, in addition
to hosting great parties for three-year-olds,
that you went to Donald Trump’s Patriot Awards last week.
And it was the first time that you were actually
in close proximity to the Donald.
Give us your impressions after that event.
Yeah, well, it was a vibe.
So it’s actually Fox’s Patriot Awards.
And Donald Trump was being honored.
So I was there for work.
We did a live show.
I was just excited that Donald Trump gets a Patriot.
That’s a shocker.
Well, that must have been–
Well, I wanted to blow your mind
after you blew the minds of birds.
Anyway, the Patriot Awards is something
that we do annually and is actually really lovely.
It’s all about honoring everyday heroes
and people who’ve served the country.
I’m sorry, go ahead.
He is your president-elect.
Just let me get it out and then you do whatever you want.
Sorry, go ahead.
Sorry.
This was the first year that Donald Trump was there.
Did they get a collective award?
No, they did not get an award.
Thank you for asking.
Sorry, go ahead.
Good.
Are you sure?
No, I’m not, but good.
OK, OK, I’m going to do it.
Anyway, so we were out there.
We did a live taping of the five, which is always fun.
I mean, some people who like me also got booed a little bit.
You did?
You got booed?
Kind of like, yeah, well, you know.
Like, joking, like, kind of funny, funny booze?
Yeah, like, I didn’t cry or anything,
but it’s never nice.
And everyone– the rest of the cast is like, come on, guys.
She’s actually even agreeing with us on this one.
But I get it.
It’s all part of it, and you get to play with the audience a bit.
But the Patriot Awards– and it’s going for a few years,
and we’ve done it in Florida.
We did it in Nashville last year at the Grand Ole Opry,
which was amazing.
And you meet some pretty incredible people
that are doing wonderful things for the country.
And you can insert your Donald Trump joke later.
But it plays into why this was such an interesting contrast
for me.
So the Patriot Awards this time honored–
I don’t know if you remember this story about an NYPD officer
named Jonathan Diller, 31 years old, out on Long Island.
Routine traffic stop was shot and killed.
He had a one-year-old son.
His widow was the opening award recipient and speaker.
And she was breathtaking, that this woman did not
have a complete meltdown doing this, talking about her husband
and his service and loving police officers.
And if you remember, there was a big back and forth.
Like, Donald Trump went to see the family.
And Biden didn’t go, and it became this kind of touchpoint
in the war over who actually backs the blue.
And she, in her speech, says how great she thinks Donald Trump is.
They had the UNC frat guys who protected the American flag
from the pro-Palestinian protesters
on Chapel Hill’s campus last spring.
These whistleblowers from the Phoenix VA,
the ones who actually ended up getting
Shinseki, the VA secretary under Obama, fired.
Basically, they exposed the VA for denying and putting off
care for hundreds of veterans who would have lived
had they gotten their care on time and this massive cover up.
And so those are the kind of people
that are being honored at this.
And you’re in this room with a bunch of people
who do not vote the same way that I did.
And they love these people whose message is over and over again,
we love the red, white, and blue, right?
Like, America is the best place to be,
even if we’ve gone through something terrible,
like this poor woman losing her husband.
And then a common current through all of it is,
and we also love Donald Trump.
There is a very good case to be made
that Democrats do not show up well enough
for these types of people,
that we don’t talk about our patriotism enough,
that we don’t talk about loving cops.
– Yeah, I agree. – Yeah, I agree.
– That’s my point, thank you. – Yeah.
– Anyway, so all these amazing people
who are getting these awards
and giving really captivating speeches full of Americana,
and then Trump comes out.
I’ve, you know, I’m in the front table
with a couple people. – Like, who do you sit with?
Who’s the most fun to drink with?
Who gets too drunk?
Was Pete Hegseth there?
Did he hit on you before like,
throwing up and passing out?
Is he still, does he go to that stuff?
– I give up, let’s move on.
I heard about your cable news cabinet from Pivot Though,
and I didn’t make it, which was kind of a bummer.
– I see you as sort of quiet power.
I see you as like, head of fundraising.
– Soft power. – Soft power,
I can totally see that. – That’s fine.
– Also, if you decide to ever run for Congress
or Senate, I’ll head your fundraising.
– Well, you’re honestly screwing me over
with these conversations,
because you’re making me seem a little–
– It’s all about awareness.
– They’re all presses, good press.
– Yeah, junior senator from,
wait, you grew up in New York, didn’t you?
– New York, yeah.
So me and AOC and the–
– No, no, no, no, no, no, no, we’re running you
for president, Kirsten Jillerranich.
– Straight to the top.
– Kirsten Jillerranich, Charles Schumer,
in my opinion, are like weak, weaker and weakest,
and I think they absolutely need a young,
dynamic, centrist Democrat to primary them.
There, I’ve literally got it figured out for you.
I’ve got it figured out. – Always.
– That’s why I’m here. – If you believe
Senator Tarloff has a nice ring to it,
then please DM me, I will take your name down,
and when we decide, when Charles Schumer turns 140
in 10 years, we can decide to primary him,
and when everyone decides to kiss Kirsten Jillerbrand
while being a thoughtful, nice woman,
is totally ineffective, then we’ll primary her as well.
I’m 100% behind this.
Okay, before we go here, before we bust in the news,
we wanna remind you to please follow Raging Moderates
on your podcast platform of choice.
If you want Senator Tarloff and you want Daddy
to still have the money to go on his shoots
and not kill birds, please just subscribe.
Please help us out with that follow button.
This week on Friday, we have an interview
with Tim Miller from the Bull Work
only on the Raging Moderates feed.
A lot of our interviews and our better stuff
is only on the Raging Moderates feeds.
Be sure to check it out.
Okay, in today’s episode of Raging Moderates,
we’re discussing Trump’s promises
for the first day of his tenure.
Assad flees to Moscow with Syrian rebels captured Damascus.
Biden’s preemptive pardons debate,
the final house math and leadership shakeups,
and finally our predictions for next year.
All right, where should we get to?
Let’s, over the weekend, President-elect Trump
told NBC’s Kristen Welker he plans immediate action
after taking office on January 20th.
He vowed to pardon January 6th rioters on day one,
extend his first term tax cuts,
deport millions of undocumented immigrants,
and push to end birthright citizenship.
Trump also said he’d work towards a solution
to protect dreamers, and he won’t impose
new restrictions on abortion pills,
on pardoning rioters, he claimed.
– This is the most disgusting, filthy place.
These people are living in hell.
– Let me just–
– And I think it’s very unfair.
So yeah, most likely I’ll do it.
– Jess, what did you make of this interview?
– This felt like actually the kickoff
to the new administration in a certain way.
I know we have to get to inauguration,
but it’s crazy how quickly I feel like things have turned.
I don’t remember this when Biden won in 2020
that he suddenly became the president,
but Donald Trump is, like he said Notre Dame
for the reopening.
He is meeting with world leaders.
He is meeting with Zelensky.
It feels like everyone has just kind of shut the door
on Biden and is like, hello, Trump, whatever that means.
And choosing to go on Meet the Press,
he has been interviewed by Welker before.
I think definitely trying to send a mainstream signal
right to the public.
I’m going to be out here in these places
that you recognize and you don’t have to come
and find me on the Andrew Schultz podcast necessarily.
But it was classic Trump in that the things
that he was promising to do are the things that he said,
depending on what your politics are,
it fits exactly in the box that you have put him in.
So he says, I’m ending birthright citizenship.
I’m deporting families together, right?
That was one of the big ones,
which Tom Holman, who’s his borders are,
had said on “60 Minutes” before when he was interviewed.
So the idea is like, oh, we don’t have to separate families.
Even if some of you are legal,
you should just all go together
and that he’s gonna jail Liz Cheney, right?
So if you’re diehard maga, you like that for obvious reasons.
And then if you’re more centrist or even a Democrat,
you’re crapping your pants again, right?
And saying this guy is going to do
all of these terrible things to the country.
And it’s just, it’s so difficult to pin him down,
which I think is why he ended up winning
because he’s whatever you want him to be, right?
He’s a dream politician in that sense.
And people have very legitimate arguments
on both sides of the authoritarian coin
as to which one he is.
And that was my big takeaway.
I mean, I wanna get into the specifics
of some of these things,
but what do you think about that?
I don’t know if you watched it or…
– I didn’t.
The weird thing that’s happened to me
is I have a tendency to believe that, okay,
the wonderful thing about our checks and balances
is that there’s a certain level of purposeful and transigence
where it’s very hard to get stupid, sweeping things done.
It’s also probably really difficult
to get really genius, disruptive things done.
And that it’s just unlikely.
I don’t think these tariffs are gonna go through
at anywhere near the magnitude.
I can’t imagine, I would like to think
that enough Americans look back
on one of the great stains,
one of the great stains of our society,
and that was interning great Japanese-American citizens
who for no other reason in the color of their skin
as many of their sons were fighting in the European theater,
that the moment we start housing, hosting,
aggregating, concentrating immigrants
and anything resembling a camp,
that the media and people and citizens in that neighborhood
are gonna go ape shit.
So I wonder how much of this is really gonna happen.
Now having said that,
what I’m also growing into is realizing,
I never thought,
I was never worried about Roe v. Wade being overturned.
I didn’t think there was any chance
would ever actually get overturned and I was wrong.
So nothing kind of surprises me anymore
and along those lines in the last two weeks,
I’ve had an iconic morning TV show host
and an iconic tech billionaire call me
and asked me about London.
And I thought, oh great,
you’re thinking about moving to London.
I moved to London not because of America
because I felt like I needed to leave.
I moved because of America.
Because America has offered me so much prosperity
and just wonderful opportunity,
I have the chance to give my kids an experience
to live in Europe.
These folks are scared
and they’re actually thinking about relocating to Europe
because they believe there’s a non-zero probability
they are going to be persecuted.
And I was just so flummoxed
that these are not reactionary stupid people.
These are household names
that are incredibly successful.
My first question is, you’re really,
you’re seriously really worried.
You really think he’s going to come for you?
And they said, I don’t know,
but I don’t need to live in a country where I don’t know.
– Yeah.
– The reason why America, in my opinion,
across a lot of dimensions is so successful
is you have to have a massive base of innovation
to create economic value such that we have the taxes
to pay for the best military in the world
and to argue over entitlements
and to argue over veterans affairs
and to bail out banks or COVID stimulus.
That top line number is really important.
And to start, both of these people
create tremendous economic growth.
Both of these people, and I’m not being biased,
are good people.
They’re good people.
I’m like, that’s the environment you want to create.
– Where do you think, can you handicap
what you think is going to happen post-election?
– I don’t know, I think– – That’s a difficult question.
– Yeah, I don’t.
– You can say I don’t know.
– I mean, I don’t know an exact number.
I do know, which we’ve talked about a few times,
that what Trump cares about most is economic prosperity,
because that’s what he knows he’ll be remembered for,
either good or bad.
And frankly, it’s what got him across the line
in the 2024 election,
that people had a favorable view
of what the economy looked like when he was president.
And I’m curious as to what you think about,
I get it that the fear mongering
that is rooted in some very genuine policy chops
on people like Stephen Miller or Tom Holman, et cetera,
that are founded in xenophobia, as far as I’m concerned.
All of that is very–
– And it’s founded in bullying
when they were in the eighth grade,
but I agree with you.
– But definitely Stephen Miller, I don’t know about Holman.
He seems like he was always a bully,
but there are a lot of immigrants
and successful immigrants and well-educated immigrants
that are very big supporters of the president.
I mean, I was looking at the pictures of JD Vance
from Thanksgiving.
He’s married to Usha Vance,
whose parents are Indian immigrants.
He’s with her family for Thanksgiving.
He’s a mixed family.
And I would assume a lot of people in that group
are big fans of Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is out there saying,
I’m going to cut regulations like you’ve never seen before.
He saved $200 billion in cut regulations in the first term.
He wants to go even further.
I know there are a lot of people who run businesses
that are excited about that who feel like,
yeah, you can be successful here,
but you can be even more successful
if we get rid of some more of this red tape.
I’m concerned about certain pieces of quote unquote,
red tape that we need like climate protections
and things like that.
But there are going to be a lot of people who think
that this is actually a good place to be doing business
with Donald Trump in the White House
versus a more regulatory minded Democrat.
– It’s a great point.
And on the issue of immigration,
we have someone who’s worked with us for a long time
who’s incredibly talented
and English is her fifth language.
And yet she’s arguably our most talented
copywriter editor just in around immigration.
While she’s very progressive,
while immigration, I haven’t stated explicitly,
but I know I’m fairly confident saying
she doesn’t want people rounded up.
But she says, look, I waited in line to get here
and it took me seven years and I did it legally.
And so many people in America seem to feel
that we should just have open borders.
I was like, which is it?
Can I come?
Can my parents come now?
Which is it?
I waited in line.
And what’s interesting, we saw in this election
is a lot of recent immigrants
are the most pro-Trump’s immigration policies
that they feel like it’s just absolutely gotten out of control.
It’s gonna be, I’m just sort of fascinated to see
how the dynamics of what is effectively
sort of a semi-Lame Duck president,
he’s especially Lame Duck after 2026
and push back on economic policies should inflation take up.
And also, is he has a negotiating tactic starting really high
saying, okay, tariffs of 100% and then going down to 20.
And the thing that scares me about saying,
I’m never gonna deny people access to their abortion pills.
Well, okay, but if you keep appointing conservatives
to the Supreme Court, it’s gonna be a lot of land.
You don’t have to do it yourself, yeah.
That’s definitely a concern.
And there is no one at the top levels of the administration,
even with these appointments
that I can look to and feel secure about something like that.
I mean, they all feel like power, power, power people.
Let’s take a quick break, stay with us.
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– Okay, so what’s next here?
Let’s go to something a little bit more fun.
– Let’s go light Syria.
– Let’s talk to, let’s talk about Assad.
So the Assad family’s 50 year rule over Syria
came to an end following a swift rebel offensive.
President Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow with his family
where they were granted asylum.
President Biden called the regime’s fall
a historic opportunity for Syria to rebuild
while warning of risks ahead.
Rebel leader Abu Muhammad al-Jalani speaking in Damascus
hailed the victory as one for the entire Islamic nation
and pledged protection for minorities
under the new leadership by his HDS group.
I think this quite frankly is the most undercovered story
in the world right now.
– Totally, well, it was definitely undercovered
for the first 12 days.
And then it’s Syria fell on the 13th day
and everyone was like, oh, hey,
there’s something going on here.
I felt, I got chills watching some of this,
especially the footage of the prisoners being freed
from, I don’t want to mispronounce, the Sednaia prison,
that huge complex in Damascus.
But this guy, Jalani, who’s the head of HTS,
which is the main rebel group.
So there’s an amalgamation of rebels
that have come together to do this.
Seems like with some pretty heavy help from Turkey,
but he is the figurehead of everything at this moment.
He seems to be quite charismatic.
He’s former al-Qaeda, which is interesting.
And he’s been imprisoned before
and has had changed from, I guess, a jihadist
to a Syrian nationalist, though they are,
they’re very heavy Islamists,
as many sists that I put into one sentence.
But I have enjoyed, I guess, what he has had to say so far.
He’s ordered that all of the borders be opened
and that anyone who was displaced,
you know, there are 14 million Syrians
who have been displaced over the last 13 years.
And they’re flying the Free Syria flag at the embassy
as it was watching it up in Sweden.
There are 200,000 refugees that they’ve taken
over the years.
He’s said that there’s amnesty
for all Syrian soldiers and conscripts.
Like no questions asked.
You wanna come back and be with us.
You can be with us.
I don’t know if this will hold,
but he’s also commanded his troops
that they cannot interfere with women’s clothing at all.
So we’ll see how that holds up.
But it is fascinating geopolitically.
I mean, if Ukraine hadn’t taken Russia apart to this level
and if Israel hadn’t hurt Iran and Hezbollah
to the level that they have in the last couple of months,
this would never have been possible
because Syria just, Assad couldn’t do it
without Russia and Iran anymore.
And that seems to be why this happened.
But what are your initial thoughts?
– I agree a lot of the initial complexion
and body language is very positive.
But this is sort of a proble bringing together
a group of people from some very bad organizations.
So there’s some risk here in the Israeli sense at risk
and they’ve actually been intensely bombing
and attacking military sites and munitions,
caches inside of Syria thinking,
we don’t know anything about these people
and we don’t want them to have access to these weapons.
There’s no getting around it.
Bashar al-Assad, that regime,
him and his father, a murderous regime,
I think somewhere between half a million
and a million Syrians have been killed,
gas attacks on their own people.
Now, the world didn’t seem to be that outraged by it
because it wasn’t Jews killing these people,
but that’s another talk show.
But the thing that strikes me about this
is that we have such a self-hate for America.
We are so remiss and I believe at the hands of an America
where they see the top 1% doing better than them,
at the hands of platforms that have been weaponized
by bad actors that want to divide us
and get us to hate each other.
We don’t recognize that America and the West
are winning geopolitically.
And that is Bashar al-Assad, who does not share our values,
immediately when she got real, turned to Russia.
But here’s the problem.
A Russia is like, sorry, boss, we got our own issues
because unbeknownst to me,
where I thought I was gonna roll into Kiev
in about seven days,
the West backing the incredible Ukrainian army
is killing about 1,500 of my people a day.
I’ve lost half a million people.
I just don’t have the time, the resources or the energy
to come in and back you up.
And then he turned to his other friend, Iran.
And Iran’s like, well, I don’t know if you’ve heard,
but in addition to you,
our proxies, including Hezbollah, the Houthis and Hamas
are not doing that well
and our air defenses have been taken down.
And we’re a lot less popular amongst the Iranian people
than Hamas is among the Palestinian people.
Sorry, boss, we can’t show up.
So when you think about really bad people, Assad, Putin,
the Islamic regime and Iran,
the West being unified around their support of Ukraine,
you know, we’re winning.
And I don’t, it, it bums me out
that people don’t high five the Wests in our alliance
and our commitment to American values,
our support of Israel,
which has kicked such serious ass over the last,
since October the 7th over the last 14 months
doing our dirty work for us,
taking more people off the most wanted terrorists list
in six weeks.
And we’ve managed the last 25 years,
totally defanging this,
this quiet supposedly sleeping giant of Hezbollah
with the most precise anti-terrorist action in history,
going into Syria and making sure they don’t have weapons
in case these guys, you know, aren’t as warm and cuddly
as they’re pretending to be right now.
But basically Iran, Russia and Syria, this triumvirate,
oh, in North Korea is sending people
into a meat grinder now in Russia.
This is an enormous, this is,
essentially this is an indicator
that our good cholesterol has never been higher
and our bad cholesterol has never been lower globally.
You know, we are geopolitically,
the good guys are winning here
and the bad guys are just getting increasingly fucked.
They are having Putin, the Islamic regime and Assad
are having really bad days a lot.
And it strikes me that we never take time
to recognize how talented our security apparatus is,
how resolute and thoughtful and committed we’ve been
around joining forces to support Ukraine.
So I’m just, I’m both excited about it, possibly,
but I’m also disappointed that we don’t take more
of a victory lap for the West
and also recognize that Israel, in my opinion,
is essentially destabilizing the world for bad people
and stabilizing the Middle East.
In my view, over the medium and long-term,
the Middle East is gonna be a much less dangerous place.
It’s one of those things that’s so difficult to understand.
Do you know what Bashar al-Assad, you know, he was,
he and his wife were educated in the United Kingdom.
Do you know what he was educated as?
– No.
– He’s an ophthalmologist.
I mean, it’s such an interesting study
in how people descend into hell, right?
This guy was helping people see again.
This guy was doing cataract surgery.
And then, you know, fast forward 15, 20 years later,
or not even know if it’s that long,
he’s gassing his own people.
– But his dad was always doing this.
I mean, that was a facade.
I mean, I’m glad that some people can see better
because of him, but Assad was raised in this.
I mean, his family’s been in power for 50 years.
His wife and I, from when I lived in London,
there are a lot more people floating around there
who know these people.
And I heard similar, oh, she’s lovely.
Give her a chance.
No fucking thank you.
You knew what you were marrying into, at the very least.
But it is, I don’t know.
I’m all for people getting great educations, of course.
But I do hate that we share institutions
with some of the world’s most evil.
That really does burn me.
And this is one of those examples.
There were debates constantly at LSE about this,
about what money they would be taking from the Middle East
and who was gonna get to go.
And remember that about Ben Laden’s kids that went to Harvard.
I don’t think everyone should be punished
for what their parents did.
You may not go into the family business as it were,
but Assad surely did.
And on the Israel front, I totally agree with you.
I think the issue about us taking a step back
and spending more time reflecting
on how well the West is doing
or that these are good moments for Western values,
that is not computing for the average American citizen.
And I think a lot of it is due to the cost of all of this,
that they’re being hit constantly
with a barrage of information around,
you can’t get X thing for your kids,
but we’re sending another billion dollars
for people you’ve never met in your life
or that you feel completely disconnected to.
And that became such a key plank of Trump’s candidacy.
Where he was just like,
America first means that your kid should get a good education
and shouldn’t have a classroom full of kids
who are from another place and are here illegally,
or that that money that we’re sending abroad
should be going to you first.
And I understand for someone who is not living
as much of a charmed life as we are,
how that is persuasive.
It also made me think back to the red line
with Obama about Assad.
And that as much joy as I was feeling,
that maybe this would be a real positive future
for the people of Syria who have endured
more than my mind can even process.
I’m thinking, how did we let this continue?
What we saw the videos of the mass graves,
we knew he was gassing his own people.
We had a red line.
– Huge stand on Obama’s legacy, yep.
– Totally, and it does seem like that has been
one of the kind of lessons or big threadlines
in the aftermath of the election.
– A lot of people think Putin went into Ukraine.
I mean, these red lines,
when they no longer became lines,
a lot of people would argue that we were no longer–
– That he went to Crimea
because we don’t stand tall about this, yeah.
– We gave him a green light.
The thing that disappoints me,
I think it’s politically advantageous
and somewhat short-term minded,
expedient way of political opportunism.
You’ve never met anyone in Ukraine.
Do you really care?
Your son’s not doing well.
Do you really care about territorial sovereignty in Ukraine
when a 12 pack of bounty is $30?
Would frustrates me more?
I respect the fact they play that political opportunism.
What frustrates me is that we don’t have a Democrat
who can punch back and say, okay,
that’s the same argument that was made to FDR.
And they kept us out of the war too long in ’39.
That was the same argument that Parliament made to Churchill
about staying out of,
we don’t, he could have cut a deal with Hitler
and saved the Britain, at least in the short-term.
When fascists or murderous autocrats invade Europe,
it usually doesn’t end well when we just let them.
And then to go straight to the numbers.
And that is, I would have gone on offense.
There are few investments that have shown a greater ROI
than our and Europe’s greater investment
than the US’s in the support of the Ukrainian army.
We’re talking about $60 to $80 billion.
I think it’s maybe over a hundred now.
But when you look at, we spent $800 billion a year
on our military and in exchange,
if someone had come to us and said, you know what?
I’m gonna take out a third to almost half
of Russia’s kinetic power.
I’m going to delegitimize their army.
I’m going to take out a half a million troops.
I’m going to make it less likely
that China invades to Taiwan
’cause they see what a small, motivated,
technically sophisticated defense force can do.
Would you pay $80 billion for that?
We would hit that bid all day long.
This was, instead of apologizing
and talking in broad sweeping strokes,
they should have said, folks,
if we had been offered the ability, Russia’s our enemy,
Russia wreaks havoc.
Russia takes oil prices up purposefully.
Russia creates instability, greater likelihood of war.
For $80 billion, we’re gonna pull the mask off this clown.
We’re gonna absolutely decimate the reputation
and we’re gonna take out a third to half of their kinetic.
And Americans won’t die for it.
And that’s an important part.
Great point.
And not a single American boot on the ground?
Yeah, I’m in training, but not dying.
For seven, our federal budget is $7 trillion.
So I need about 1%, for 1%–
I need a penny.
Yeah, I need a penny on the dollar to do this.
This is the best investment America has made
in the last 10 years.
But no one says it like that.
And the way that they wrote–
Well, not until the new junior senator from New York.
Hey now.
There you go.
And her friend who shoots birds.
No one conveys it in those terms
because we are always into the soaring rhetoric
about protecting democracy.
And people like to hear we took out X amount of terrorists.
That’s what they wanna hear in all of this.
Or Vladimir Putin is flipping out
because he has lost control of these 10 areas.
Right, and this is what their economy looks like.
And I don’t wanna say that there aren’t any Democrats
that communicate well about these things.
I think especially the folks who are veterans
that know exactly what this fight means
are good about it, like the Jason Crows of the world.
But you know who I think does a pretty decent job?
Cocaine Mitch.
I listen to Mitch McConnell talk about why we need
to continue to send money to Ukraine and to Israel.
And you can tell that that man deeply feels this.
And I know that a lot of Republicans,
especially the MAGA wing,
detest him probably for being this,
having this level of clarity.
– Okay, let’s take a quick break.
Stay with us.
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– Welcome back.
Since Hunter Biden’s pardon,
there’s been chatter about whether Biden should issue
preemptive pardons for other people
that Trump has openly targeted,
including Adam Schiff and Liz Cheney.
Political reports, there’s a heated internal debate
on the White House, but Biden hasn’t weighed in yet.
Supporters, including Brendan Boyle,
say Trump’s move to put Kashpatel in charge of the FBI
shows this isn’t just hypothetical.
Shift, ironically, is urging Biden not to do it,
saying it would look defensive and unnecessary.
Jess, pardons, what are your thoughts?
Do you think that doing this preemptively
is a smart move or a bad precedent?
– It could be both at the same time,
but the problem is there’s no crime.
They haven’t been charged with anything.
I mean, there’s even though to be within the Democratic Party,
I don’t know if you saw Bill Clinton was being interviewed
and it came up about Hunter’s pardon
and how he had pardoned his half-brother,
I think, or step-brother.
And he said, “But he served time.”
There’s a big difference between even just getting convicted
and then getting a pardon,
which is what had happened with Hunter,
but let alone someone who hasn’t even been convicted
of anything.
And it scares me for these people.
I think the fact that Kashpatel has an enemy’s list
in his book, “Government Gangsters,”
and I’m sure has been adding to it on a nightly basis,
like mirror, mirror on the wall.
Who else should I put in jail?
But what are you gonna do?
Just say for crimes that they may have committed
within the last five years
and that they may commit in the next 20 years?
I don’t understand it.
I think Adam Schiff is completely correct.
And then Jim Clyburn in the same interview
where he’s talking about the pardons
for the January 6th folks from the committee,
not the January 6th rioters,
said that Biden should pardon Trump
and that it would clean the slate,
I think was the term that he used.
And I cannot think of anything that would enrage
Democrats more than Biden pardoning Trump.
Yeah, I don’t think that’s gonna happen.
It used, my understanding is it used to be,
let’s review some of the most outrageous miscarriages
of justice because if you have a big system
that unfortunately gets it wrong
as anytime you rootinize anything,
this is an opportunity that the president
has sold the scratch and over to just kind of,
as you said, clean the slate.
And I wonder who started this mess?
And I go to, was it Clinton when he pardoned
one of his donors?
I mean, pretty soon there’s gonna be an implicit number
on pardons, the head of fundraisers is gonna say,
well, I can’t care what you think.
I can’t put this in email.
But generally speaking, I think a donation
of 10 million or more might get you a pardon
for you and your family should something happen to you
over the next four years.
It just seems like we’re becoming that nation.
Well, there was, at least there was rumor reporting
that those were conversations going on
in the first Trump administration.
And then I imagine with him not even thinking
about running again.
I mean, who knows what he’s gonna be thinking about.
But let’s just say that he knows that he has to leave
after the next four years that there’s skies the limit
on the kind of salacious pardon activity
that’ll be going on.
But Congressman Steve Cohen, who’s from Tennessee
has proposed a constitutional amendment
to limit presidential power, pardon power.
And he’s never once had a Republican co-signer.
The people are out there, you know, pants on fire,
like losing their minds about what Biden did.
I mean, this is something that gets abused on both sides.
And they should really look at limiting it.
And I was listening to a really interesting conversation.
Preet Bihara and Joyce Vance have a podcast
and they were talking about it, the Hunter Pardon.
And they were on opposite sides of it.
Preet was against it.
Joyce Vance was for it, laying out their cases.
But Preet Bihara said, which I thought, good on you.
He said, if you are in the same position as Hunter,
committed a similar crime, been convicted of it,
got getting sentenced, reach out to me
and let me defend you.
Like come to me and I’m gonna try to help you get a pardon.
I shouldn’t say defend you.
They had already been defended.
But he’s like, I will go to the president
and say there are actually a whole host of people
who are in the same position as your son
that are deserving of pardons by this logic.
And my guess is that they’re not,
if those people come forward,
are not gonna be given the same treatment.
Again, we both think that we would have done
the same thing for our children.
But it’s a very ugly road that we are traveling on.
– Okay, let’s move on, Jess.
Let’s move on.
Let’s talk about what’s happening in the house.
With Adam Gray’s narrow win in California,
we’re looking at a razor thin,
way for thin margin of 217 to 215 Republican majority.
If Democrats stick together,
they’d only need one Republican to flip for a tie,
which in the house means the vote fails.
But even with that slim margin,
Republicans still get the gavel,
control committees and set the agenda.
Meanwhile, Democrats are shaking things up,
bumping older ranking members
for younger, more telegenic folks.
Jamie Raskin just ousted Jerry Nadler on judiciary,
apparently with Pelosi’s support.
On oversight, AOC has hinted she might go for Raskin’s old spot.
Jess, what do you make of these leadership shakeups?
– So first I wanna say that the narrative,
if you would like to revisit the initial conversations
about the election where you said we got shellacked,
might need a little bit of a revision.
So in the end, well, I don’t know.
– On the presidential?
– No, but the mood in totality was
Democrats got their asses completely kicked
and we ended up picking up two house seats
and won very, very competitive races
and held a lot of really important Senate seats.
It could have been much worse.
I mean, they were expecting
that we were gonna lose Nevada,
that we’re gonna lose Wisconsin.
Pennsylvania was a big pickup with McCormick.
Anyway, it was not as bad as people make it out to be.
In terms of the new chairs of the big committee is,
I think it’s time for these things to happen
and it’s folks- – Oh, you think?
– Well, I don’t like to, I’m a traditional gal
and I think that when people have served honorably
and done these incredible things for the country,
it’s very hard for me to get to the point
where I wanna say, Nancy, you take a seat, right?
You shouldn’t be doing this anymore.
And I know she stepped back from being speaker,
but she still holds her seat.
And there are still a lot of young Democrats
that wanna run for Congress in San Francisco.
Jim Clyburn is still there.
Steny Hoyer is still there.
And while they might not be as powerful as they were before,
this is rarefied air that they’re breathing, right?
They’re only, was it 435 of them?
And I think the transition to a new generation
is bigger than they are allowing to happen right now.
That said, it’s great to see Jamie Raskin doing this,
though he’s in his sixties, this is not a kid.
The AOC thing, I think, will be fascinating
if it is what happens.
And she’s clearly positioning herself
for at least statewide election, maybe national,
if she’s gonna run for president.
But if you noticed at the DNC,
and we were both very taken with her speech,
great speech, one of the top ones
from the convention, at least for me.
She struck every note properly.
She manages the economic populism, I think, better
than anybody.
She’s clearly moderated on a lot of stuff.
But in interviews since then,
she talks about upstate New York all the time.
She was giving an interview with someone,
she mentioned Buffalo twice.
I’m like, have you ever been to Buffalo?
So clearly she’s thinking about what does AOC look like
beyond the Bronx and Queens, right?
Like, what does AOC up North look like
and wants to make sure that she is palatable
to those people and getting a committee chair
and getting to show off in those ways
will be one route to potentially getting a Senate seat.
So what do you think about the new Jen?
Next, Jen.
– I think Sharon is good.
I think these people are way too old.
We have the oldest legislative body.
I believe in the world outside of Iran.
I mean, it’s just insane that our leaderships
become a cross between the walking dead
and the golden girls.
I don’t, this must be the most amazing job in the world
because they never seem to want to leave
unless it’s feet first.
I would love mandatory retirement age.
I just think in the US,
most corporations are used to be 65.
And because of gerrymandering and fundraising
and Citizens United,
these fossils keep getting reelected.
And I love, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.
The fact that we let a convicted felon,
a convicted rapist, an insurrectionist
regain the White House means they should clean house.
How did we let this happen?
This was the way I see it.
And Charles Schumer versus Mitch McConnell.
Senator McConnell has played Senator Schumer
like a fucking fiddle.
Anna’s older, but he’s still got it
in terms of his chess game.
You show that, you brought up Speaker Pelosi.
Speaker Pelosi has some of that Machiavellian, you know, Riz.
She deserves it.
By the way, she’s gonna make it nearly impossible
for anyone to launch a campaign in her district.
And then she’s going to decide to coordinate her daughter
who by the way, was born when Castro declared martial law.
That’s how old Speaker Pelosi is.
So she’s not, I’ll be curious what happens in San Francisco.
That’ll be an interesting race.
But we need a new set of leadership and voices.
And for God’s sakes, some of these people
just need to get a gold fucking watch and leave.
Or at least bring in, I mean, AOC’s policies to me,
she’s not my cup of tea from a policy standpoint.
She’s a leader and she’s telegenic.
And she represents youth and she can speak to what it’s like
to be a waitress and how important tips are
and what it’s like to work for a living.
And what it’s like to be a young woman in America.
I mean, a young, you know, non-white woman in America.
She’s fantastic.
She’s a fantastic representative
for the Democratic Party.
Raskin, yeah, early 60s, fine.
That dude, he was so quick on his feet.
I might be being unfair, yeah.
Oh yeah, he’s amazing.
He’s fantastic.
We need some gangsters to go in there
and go toe-to-toe with these people.
My favorite is, I think we talked about a long time,
you mentioned his name, the congressman from Florida
who chose- Oh, Moskowitz?
Yeah, who moved to impeach Biden on that ridiculous panel
’cause he realized none of them had any desire to do it
or had any, that this panel was just nothing
but an attempt to feed Fox with more fodder
for their evening programs
and was wasting the time and taxpayers’ money.
Anyways, they are just much,
they’re just better than us, quite frankly.
The Democratic Party suffers from something
I suffered from my entire professional life.
And that is the ability to discern the difference
between being right and being effective.
And we’d rather be right and get our asses kicked
than effective.
And we absolutely need to take this crisis
as an opportunity to have a dramatic shift
in leadership.
Anyways, that’s my rant.
Go ahead.
I wasn’t really even a rant.
I liked it.
And I just want to add to it,
connecting it back to our conversation
about what’s going on in Syria.
And it’s been a lot of good days for the West,
but we haven’t been able to communicate it.
I do think that hearing about the U.S. on the world stage
from younger communicators, many of whom have served,
will be a great benefit to the party
and to the country in general,
like Alisa Slotkin, who just won the Michigan Senate seat,
Mikey Sherrill, who’s running for governor in New Jersey,
Abigail Spanberger in Virginia,
having a younger, more relatable face to people
telling you about why it is so important
to support our troops, Western values,
these fights against dictators and totalitarians,
I think will be much more resonant with people
than hearing about it from relics of the past.
– Senator Gallegos, Representative Moulton
out of Massachusetts, Senator Duckworth.
I think people in uniform deserve a hard look at their views.
I mean, the most patriotic people in America
are the ones, anyone with kids knows,
loyalty and affection is a function of your investment.
So your kids can end up being jerks,
you’re still irrationally passionate about their wellbeing
’cause you have so much invested in them.
And wouldn’t you know,
the most loyal and patriotic Americans
are the ones who’ve invested the most,
specifically our veterans.
And what’s so upsetting is the least patriotic
are the ones who’ve received the most
but haven’t invested a lot, I call them tech bros,
but these are the people who are the most blessed
and yet don’t want to acknowledge their blessings
and shitpost America.
Anyways, I do hope that we have a new cast of leadership.
All right, Jess, anything else on your mind before we go?
Oh wait, we’re supposed to do predictions.
Hold on, hold on.
Producers are freaking out. – That’s on my mind
because it’s in our script.
– It’s in our script.
Okay, so before we wrap,
this is our last regular episode of the year.
So let’s talk 20, 25 predictions.
It’s shaping up to be a big year
with talk of tax cuts, entitlement reform
and immigration changes, Jess.
What do you think is on the horizon?
– Well, politically speaking,
I do want to talk about Taylor and Travis
actually getting engaged or publicly engaged,
but politics-wise, I do think at least on the small level
that Trump is going to make good
on the main planks of his campaign.
So I think that there will be some immigration crackdown
and I really hope that Blue City mayors and officials
will play ball with ICE to turn over criminals
so that we can avoid a deportation force
the way that Tom Homan fantasizes about it.
I saw Michelle Wu, who is the mayor of Boston
talking about an absolute blanket no
to cooperating with ICE and protecting all Bostonians.
Criminals are, illegal criminals are not Bostonians.
You should play ball with them to do that.
Mayor Adams has already said that he will.
Then again, he also wants a pardon,
but I’m sure we are going to have some level
of immigration change.
It’ll be interesting to see what he does
in terms of executive orders on the border,
probably keeping in place a lot of what Biden
has put in over the last year
and in cooperation with President Scheinbaum of Mexico.
I agree with you, small tariffs probably coming,
not this huge 100%, 60% that he’s been talking about.
Tax cuts, we’re storing the Trump tax cuts
probably through reconciliation.
The kind of question marks for me
are around what Doge can really do
if you’re not going to go after the Pentagon
and Medicare and Social Security.
They’re talking about, quote, “small entitlements,”
things like food stamps, which are not that small
to a lot of people, but means testing
as much stuff as possible.
And then, what could make it
into a huge reconciliation bill?
I was listening to Larry Kudlow,
who was in the first Trump administration,
now as a Fox business host,
not going back to the administration,
even though Trump wanted him.
And he says that we are definitely going to have
a big reconciliation bill
that’ll probably be next September.
And I’m curious to see what’s going in there.
But I know that those tax cuts are a huge priority,
especially when you look at who got them
over the finish line, the billionaires,
that are smacking their lips
at the thought of another round of it.
So those are my predictions.
– I like it.
– Yeah, okay.
The Taylor and Travis part, or the Doge part.
– But the thing they’re going,
I don’t know if you hear this,
the thing they’re, first off,
my understanding is they are looking at the military.
So for, I didn’t, I knew this, but I didn’t know it.
The military has five air forces.
Do we need five air forces?
They, my sense is they are in fact,
actually willing to address the military.
The question I have around,
whenever I hear means testing,
I’m like, okay, let’s start with social security.
And I realize that social security
is technically an off balance.
She said, yeah, we pay for it,
but it still attacks on young people
who are less wealthy than they’ve ever been
relative to their seniors.
And yet, I don’t understand why there wouldn’t be
attacks on wealthy seniors.
They create social security for young people,
but that’s another talk show.
But I wonder if we’re ever going to have
a serious conversation around means testing social security
or pushing the age back,
given the fact that we’re all living so damn long.
But, you know, no one,
my sense is they don’t want to talk about that.
Have you heard them talk about entitlements at all?
– Yeah, a lot. – And what have they said?
– And they’ve said that quote unquote,
everything’s on the table.
Medicare, social security,
not an entitlement, right?
You’ve paid in.
I take your point, obviously,
about it being attacks on young people
who are never going to get to enjoy it.
There would be, if you want to see civil war,
take away Medicare and social security.
So I don’t think that’s happening,
but I do think– – Oh, I love Medicare.
– Yeah. – Without it,
let me clear this idea. – And Medicaid,
frankly, which I mean, states are expanding,
even Republican states at a rapid pace
and seeing incredible feedback from it.
And we talked about it, wasn’t the program
that your data’s using, Medicaid program?
– Yes, the home health care, yeah.
Yeah, I don’t, what I don’t understand.
– So they’re gonna go snap food benefits.
It doesn’t sound like anyone’s talking
about the child tax credit,
which was one of the things they said they were gonna do.
It’s just a lot of cuts versus helping people out
to cut child poverty in half, but–
– So my idea has always been,
or one of them around health care,
is lower Medicaid eligibility by a year,
every year for the next 44 years
until basically you do, you basically get away–
– The way of the universal.
– 100%, people love, people love Medicaid.
And when you look at, I mean,
we didn’t talk about the United health care issue.
– Oh my God, yeah.
– That’s gonna spawn a very,
or already has a very interesting conversation
around the fact that 40% of Americans
have some sort of medical debt related to dental
or traditional medical debt that impacts them
and their family.
This is, I think that’s been actually the tsunami
we didn’t see coming in terms of political discourse.
Any thoughts?
– Yeah, well, I would love to, we don’t have time.
But I was really disturbed to see
the glorification of this murder
and then people doxing other health care CEOs.
And I understand we need tremendous reform.
And some of these stories are absolutely harrowing.
And I realized how lucky I am
to have the health care problems that I do.
‘Cause I have some, right?
I’m getting bills constantly first off,
giving birth is still expensive
even when you have platinum insurance and all of that.
But obviously nothing compares to kids getting
their chemo rejected and whatever people have to go through
on a monthly basis with these people.
But I thought it brought out some of the worst sides
of the American populace looking at the reaction to that.
What about you?
– Over on Pivot Care and I were both saying,
this is the wrong way to go about having a conversation
and we’re horrified by it.
And I got a lot of feedback.
It sort of resonated and said,
spoken like someone who’s overinsured
or can afford health insurance.
And some of the memes were just so puncturing, right?
Like empathy is outside my coverage.
And the reality is which,
and this is no way justifies murder,
but which health insurance company
has the greatest percentage of rejected claims?
You guessed it, UnitedHealthcare.
– By a large part, it was like 20% more.
And the reality is when you look at how a lot
of these insurance companies have increased earnings
over the last five or 10 years,
it’s coming with algorithms and legal justification
for identifying who is less likely to push back
and rejecting claims.
And it just goes, for me, it goes to the same place.
I never used to think this,
but I look at the UK system and the NHS has real issues,
mostly around underfunding right now
because they’re not able to add a quarter of a trillion dollars
in four minutes post an earnings call in video.
But I like the idea of nationalized healthcare
for the 80 or 90% that want to use it
and then having a private layer on top
for people who want better service.
The bottom line is this is just an industry
where the profit motive begins to turn healthcare
into sick care.
And you’re going to have the same thing
in any capitalist environment
that is not perfectly regulated as this is not.
You have regulatory capture among corporations
and the top 10% who can afford it
have the best healthcare in the world
and the bottom 90 are being squeezed economically
and the amount of despair and anxiety,
the US healthcare system is causing people.
At some point we’ve got to realize
that regulatory capture around our food supply system,
tremendous stress and anxiety around,
oh, the bad news is your wife has lung cancer,
the worst news is you’re going to go bankrupt.
At what point does our healthcare system,
at some point for the bottom 50%,
if not the bottom 90%,
at some point do we have to realize
they’re the problem, they literally are the problem.
They’re creating more anxiety, obesity,
high blood pressure, deaths of despair.
We’re going to lose 45,000 people to suicide.
I’d like to know how many of those people
would cite financial strain, specifically medical debt,
which is now the number one cause of bankruptcy in America.
How much death by suicide is that cause?
So my prediction, I have two predictions,
one’s a domestic one.
I think the debate and the resurfacing
of regulatory capture and the for-profit US model
around US healthcare that has resulted in us paying $13,000
per individual versus 65 to 8,500 for other G7 countries
with shorter life expectancy, more anxiety and more obesity
is just isn’t, it just isn’t working.
That’s going to be the debate and the big discussion
we weren’t expecting at this moment.
And then on a geopolitical level,
I think we’re going to see a revolution in Iran.
I think Hamas had 70% support of Palestinians.
The ruling party in Iran does not have nearly that support.
It has a minority of people who supported.
It’s actually, Iran’s actually a very young country.
And there are a lot of people, I think,
who are waiting to see weakness,
which they have observed over the last couple of weeks
with the fall of Assad and all of the Iranian proxies
having kind of their being kneecapped.
I think it’s going to give a lot of license and backbone.
I bet there’s a lot of entities in Iran right now
who are thinking, is this our moment?
I think we’re going to see a revolution
or a rebellion similar to what we’ve seen
in Syria and Iran in 2025.
Yeah, I didn’t realize we were doing global ones,
but I like that one.
Oh my God, I feel shamed, I feel shamed.
No, I just, no, I like it, it’s good.
I think it’s really good.
I’m just curious with all of this,
like where Israel fits in
and whether a new Iranian regime, if such a thing happens,
where they are in terms of relations with Israel,
because the big accomplishment
from the first Trump administration for me
was the Abraham Accords.
And I hope that we see further normalization
of relations with Israel as-
The kingdom will go first, I think.
Well, yeah.
Jared’s already on the WhatsApp about that, so.
Oh, is that right?
I don’t know, I just think it’s crazy
that he made $2 billion off of Saudi
and was WhatsApp-ing about it.
Yeah, he raised $2 billion.
It’s not fair to say he’s made it so far.
We’ll see what he’s raised.
Why are you defending Jared Kushner all the time?
He was my student.
I don’t care, you’ve probably had a lot of students.
He was my student.
All right, fine.
Jared and Ivanka, they’re super nice.
They’re super nice.
And his brother, the brother, Josh Kushner,
is a total gangster, he’s a great VC.
I know, Carly Klaus is hot.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, come on.
That counts for a lot.
Yeah, and they’re liberals.
There you go, all right, that’s all for this episode.
Thank you for listening to “Raging Moderates.”
Our producers are Caroline Shagrin and David Toledo,
our technical directors, Drew Burroughs.
You can find “Raging Moderates” on its own feed
every Tuesday.
That’s right.
What a thrill, “Raging Moderates.”
Never mentioned that before.
Can’t bring that up enough.
“Raging Moderates” on its own feed,
please follow us wherever you get your podcasts.
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Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov dive into Trump’s big promises for day one of his presidency, the end of Assad’s regime in Syria, the heated debate over Biden’s potential preemptive pardons, the razor-thin House majority, and Democratic leadership shakeups. Plus, they give us their predictions for 2025.
Follow Jessica Tarlov, @JessicaTarlov.
Follow Prof G, @profgalloway.
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