The Wonder Woman premiere, Georgia's run off election, and friend of pivot Olivia Nuzzi

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hi everyone this is pivot from new york magazine and the vox media podcast network i'm kara swisher scott is out this week doing god knows what so in his stead we have a brilliant co-host hilary rosen who i've had on before um hillary how would you like to describe yourself and also, hello?

Hi there, Kara.

I describe myself as a jack of all trades, but mostly I do politics and PR.

And I'm one of those inside-the-beltway operations.

I'm an inside-the-beltway operative.

Operative, which is a very sketchy term, I think, frankly.

I think it's operational.

Operate.

All right.

Okay.

What you do, but you do it on the Democratic side.

You're not an operative for the Trump side, correct?

Or the Republican?

No, I don't pretend to be neutral.

Okay.

All right.

So let's make that clear.

clear we're going to talk a lot about politics we also have olivia nuzzie from new york magazine coming up to talk about it but let's start warner brothers let's because you also worked in media for a long time uh hillary's worked for the recording industry and various places and you've been through the wars you were i always call you napster killer you know as a fond term of of

yeah yeah so warner brothers released wonder woman 1984 in the u.s exclusively on hbo max on christmas day it was also in theaters um it did okay in theaters it was a small haul but it was pretty good for the pandemic in actual physical theaters.

And it did well for the streaming services, adding on a couple million people.

And about half the people on the service were watching it.

This is their HBO Max streaming platform.

What do you think of this development?

Because again, you went through it with the music industry, which resisted this for a long time.

And Hollywood's been pretty pissed about Wonder Woman and other things, all these movies going out on streaming platforms.

It is pretty amazing how much attention just putting one movie on one new release on streaming.

They put seven has has uh gotten but this this one has gotten sort of the most attention and you know i i was chairman of the recording industry association for many years during the advent of digital and you know what we faced at the time was just an overwhelming onslaught of of new releases coming up every single day on on um on streaming, mostly illegal.

And so you would have thought that Hollywood would have just learned a little better that example.

The difference between music and movies, though, is Hollywood has had more control over this kind of windowing release, as you've said many times and smartly on your show, because the copyright laws are different.

So that they could actually control whether something went to TV first and then.

you know, or went to studios and then they got paid that way and theaters, then they went to the TV and then they went to streaming rights.

Whereas music, it just got all released at once because they didn't have that sort of copyright law advantage.

I think the lesson here, when you have half the people who are HBO subscribers watching it on the first day, is that consumers are going to make this decision.

Right.

You know, not the stealth.

We argued about many years ago, you and I, when you were, you know, the recording industry, I thought, went too whole hog.

I mean, obviously, a lot of it was illegal.

But when the reason it was illegal is it never put in place things that were not illegal.

Like, I think people got used to stealing it because they didn't, they didn't want to lean into the future.

In this case, streaming has been around.

People have been buying these big televisions.

It's much cheaper.

It's less of a hassle.

Movie theaters have done a bad job at their product, expensive and filthy, et cetera, and has been innovated.

What advice from going back, if you were yourself 20 years ago today,

what would you have done differently?

Well, my advice then was the same as my advice now, which is, you know, do things that are consumer friendly.

And, you know, people people didn't listen to me then.

And so we ended up where we are.

And the music industry is just now recovering a bit from

the fall of those early years because they finally embraced streaming.

But, you know, the interesting thing

then is a fault right now, which is

Music fans don't care whether Bruce Springsteen is on Sony the same way they don't care whether Wonder Woman is on Warner Brothers.

Right.

And so this idea of forcing consumers to go to six different platforms and figuring out where their favorite movie is going to come out, I think is going to end up being a shit show.

How do you solve it?

Because everyone, well, you solve it by licensing it in multiple places instead of what's happening now, which is that the studios, and let's not forget that the studios are not really the companies running these businesses anymore, right?

It used to be that the heads of the studios were the biggest people in the business.

Now the heads of studios are merely like

employees of giant cable and telephone companies and the like.

But they're trying to own the whole vertical.

And that's not going to fly over the long term.

I think the solution is sort of multi-licensing on multiple on multiple platforms, right?

So Warner Brothers has made a lot of money in television by licensing TV products to ABC and to NBC and to multiple places.

If your advantage isn't the Mandalorian or, you know, for Disney or Game of Thrones for Warner, they're going to try to lean heavily into that.

That's their IP.

You buy HBO, too.

I think this is going to end up falling flat.

I think for the first couple of years, it may work, but I think ultimately there's going to be a limit on how many different platforms consumers are going to be willing to subscribe to.

And what we have now is that the money is in the platforms, not in the content, as we've seen by the people complaining about these releases on streaming.

You know, you have directors and actors not making nearly as much money on these streaming platforms as they do with theatrical release or other windowing.

So I think there's a lot of mess yet to be sorted out here and including for the consumer.

All right.

So Wonder Woman, I want to talk about one more thing before we get to the big story, but you know, Wonder Woman 1984, did you like it?

I did not.

I did not.

Oh my God.

Same.

Same.

I loved, love the, love the first one.

Me too.

I thought the best parts of the story were about the story of all the, you know, women on the island and

her history.

And it just went into this kind of crazy male megalomania.

Very Trumpy.

You know, how do we Trumpy rule the world?

And I just feel like the story got lost.

Having said that, watching Gal Gado on screen is mesmerizing.

I was like, it's really charming.

She's compelling.

I can't wait to see actually her do some other things besides Wonder Women because she is so compelling.

She's in a lot of small roles.

I catch her every now and then in small, in movies, in tiny little roles.

And you're like, oh my God, that's Gale Godot.

But it's a franchise that has to

last.

It was a franchise that was interesting that was about women.

I mean, a lot of people felt it was like the first

strong woman depiction.

In this one, she's just planning for her man.

Like, right.

That's really so.

And the same thing with Kristen Wigg.

She just wants to date.

Like, that was really their two motivations.

She wants dating and power, and she wants her man to come back.

So, you know, having said that, if I could just buy the movie 10 times, I would, because I love it that Patty Jenks, the director, and

this franchise matters so much.

I feel like it's so empowering for a young girl.

This particular movie was not empowering.

I thought I thought it was actually anti-empowering, which was it because so many women were involved.

So, all right, we're going to get into that with a big story.

We're going to have two big stories.

It's politically orange, since that's what you are.

First, is the politics of the stimulus.

Trump finally signed the coronavirus relief bill last night.

No one knows why, after holding it up for a week for no one knows why, at a peak.

The $900 billion relief bill means a new round of stimulus checks and unemployment benefits, including for gig workers.

It also frees up funds for vaccine distribution and

means no government shutdown on Tuesday.

Obviously,

Section 230 is still in the bill.

It's not still in the bill, but he didn't get it taken out.

He says he hates the law because it allows them to discriminate against conservative voices, which is a canard.

Biden has said he's against it, too, because it lets big companies shirk their responsibility.

This is a bill.

This is a law that's been in place for decades.

In any case, he says, Trump, that he'll have a redline version of the bill back to Congress to get rid of wasteful spending, but it's kind of ridiculous.

No one told him he can't do that.

But they seem to convince him that he did.

So, how do you look at all this?

Because, you know, when we talked yesterday, he hadn't signed it, but then he did late last night.

What do you imagine is going to happen next?

You know, the

bizarre thing about this is all of the media today and everybody's mocking Donald Trump.

Oh, he got nothing out of this.

And why did he do this, et cetera.

But, you know, I don't think that's how Donald Trump operates.

And I think that if we've learned one thing, it's that he can't be shamed into doing anything.

Yeah.

You know, his advisors played to his vanity about what was in the bill, what he could take credit credit about, and then they went out and bragged about it

anonymously to reporters who all dutifully reported this morning that

that's how they got him to sign it.

But essentially, he just

turns his objections into

rage and he communicates above and beyond the insider world.

He is not really interested in what people like you and I have to say about how he does.

The only message that he's gotten out there that he cares about is that he wanted more money for people than Congress gave.

And the facts that he did nothing to get them more money for eight months, you know, will be lost on those same people.

Because he tried.

He was there for the little guy.

And so people won't believe us when we say, wait a minute, he actually could have done this.

quite a long time ago for a long time and didn't.

I think that that's all he cares about and that that's his,

you know, he's much more simplistic.

Was it a smart thing that he's doing?

Because, because someone in the Washington Post columnist wrote, Trump is growing smaller before our eyes every day, and there's proof what a bad deal maker is.

So, he's not a bad, he got the simple message: I'm here for you.

I tried, and these swampy people didn't want to give me what I wanted, even though the swampy people were actually the Republicans.

I think that, you know, from day one, Donald Trump has simplified a message that Washington has complicated, and we consistently forget that.

And that simple message works on a group of people who will continue to be in his enthrall.

And that may be up to us and, you know, in the media as to whether we pay attention to it or not.

I've heard multiple people today begging the media to give him less and less attention.

And whether we do, I mean, this will be something we'll talk to Olivia about.

later, but whether we do,

we'll end up,

you know, deciding whether or not he matters going forward.

Right.

So whether this was a victory or a fail.

Why did he think he decided to do it Sunday?

I thought that he'd wait until like to be the most dramatic moment possible right before shutdown.

Why did he decide to change his mind?

Was it the parade of Republicans on Fox News or Congressmen pressuring him because they didn't want to come back to D.C.

during a holiday week or what?

My guess is it's some of that, but you know, he had a golf game scheduled for this morning.

We know he already went to the course.

So I think he might have had other plans.

I wouldn't assume it was anything, you know, big or generous.

I assume that everything he does is more personal.

Right.

More that he just didn't feel like doing it and just wanted to show he stopped.

Yeah.

And he's surrounded by people who do that.

You know, Steve Mnuchin, our friend Stephanie Ruhl yesterday got a scoop.

Steve Mnuchin flew to Cabo, Mexico.

in a private jet.

He was escorted to his house by federales.

You know, he wasn't there renegotiating additional money for people.

You know, the Secretary of the Treasury, who supposedly was in charge of the stimulus bill, he was figuring out his own vacation plans.

Same thing with Pence.

Yeah.

They were all going other places.

So a lot of Republicans said if he hadn't signed the bill, it would have hurt their chances for

Georgia in the coming weeks.

It's the fifth.

Was he concerned about the runoff races, which will determine the controls?

Was this very hurtful in Georgia for Kelly and David on the Republican side, or helpful for John and Reverend Warnick on the other side?

I think it's been a bad few weeks for Georgia Republicans because of Donald Trump.

And,

you know, the Senate Republicans are doing everything they can to push money and businesses to get in there and help them.

But essentially, Donald Trump succeeded in stealing all of the thunder about the Georgia election for himself.

And, you know, look, my personal theory is that he wants

these Republicans, senators to lose.

Oh, tell me about that.

Why?

Because I think he

is perfectly happy for the house to be on fire when he leaves and he wasn't on the ballot.

And he will say, look, when I'm not on the ballot, when I'm not out there helping these people, Democrats win.

So you got to get me back there so that I can help Republicans.

And so he takes credit for, you know, these Republicans being in office and he doesn't want them to win when he's not there.

Huh.

So he's going there, what,

next week, right?

Is that a good thing?

Well, I think it might be a little too late.

I mean, millions of people have already voted.

You know, we obviously only have a few days left.

We'll see his, you know, whether his peak can do anything, whether he'll get there and call about.

you know, his desire for $2,000.

That may be in Mitch McConnell's hands.

It'll be interesting to see if McConnell thinks...

if they add to the stimulus, that will be because Mitch McConnell will think that Donald Trump's message will be successful in Georgia, saying that, you know, I wanted to give you more money, but that the Republicans wouldn't.

But what we've seen from

this election in Georgia, the thing that interests me the most is how many people are invested in government that doesn't work.

And the reason we know that is because

there are so many businesses and rich people who are giving money to the Republicans so that the Democrats don't take control of all three branches of government.

And that

tells me that they don't want peace on earth.

They don't want the government to be effective for the people.

They like the gridlock.

They like the drama because it serves their you know business interests.

Well, we're going to get to that in a minute, but let me ask you a question about when you think about that, what is your assessment of what's going to happen in georgia do you have a prediction or do you see any trends there's been some troubling trends down ballot in georgia republicans did really well they did really well we saw that um uh the two democratic candidates underperformed relative to joe biden in november so that getting those same voters back there for joe biden uh for um uh warnock and ossoff is going to be a challenge there's a renewed effort to get out uh the black vote and on the the

southern part of the state.

So I, look, I'm optimistic because I think that the enthusiasm and the heart is on the Democratic side.

And I think the Republicans are

focused on this kind of negativity around Donald Trump.

And election fraud.

And election fraud.

But, you know, having said that, the

money advantage.

uh for Republicans is very significant.

And so whether that money advantage affects turnout is...

The Democrats have raised more on the on the lower end.

They have more money.

Democrats actually have more money.

No, no, no, no, no.

That's a misnomer.

Okay.

The Democratic candidates have raised more in direct contributions, only about $50 million

more combined.

But the Republicans have raised over 300 million more, 300 million more in the so-called dark money or soft money, so that the attack ads going against Osoff and Warnock have been funded by outside groups, which the Republicans have spent a significant more for.

So what is their best message for the Republicans?

And what's the best message for Democrats?

Look, the Republicans' best message is you can't let Joe Biden and the socialists take over Washington.

That's a message that has been effective in some places,

as we saw in November, particularly where we lost a bunch of House seats.

And the Democrats' best message is that Republicans have not taken care of you.

They let you get sick.

They did not support you when you needed, when your, you know, friends and neighbors were out of work and they've wanted to do more for you individually.

And they've taken away your health care benefits.

And the only way to get it back is to give us control.

I see.

Okay.

All right, Hillary, let's go on a quick break.

When we get back, we'll talk about President-elect Joe Biden's cabinet picks and how pro-business they are.

And then welcome friend of Pivot, New York Magazine White House reporter, Olivia Nuzzy.

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Hillary, we're back.

We're going to talk about Joe Biden's cabinet picks.

I know you're close to the Biden folks.

Progressives have been complaining that Biden's cabinet is way too corporate-friendly.

There's no one in the cabinet to advocate for all the progressive things he campaigned on, free college, universal health care, Wall Street agenda, raise the minimum wage.

Reports from financial papers that Wall Street was thrilled about Janet Yellen as Treasury Secretary.

BlackRock executive Brian Deese is being tapped ahead of the NEC.

Climate activists are suspicious of him as a placator.

He's always find a corporate-friendly way to compromise in the climate shift.

He defended Arctic drilling and used his influence to kill shareholder resolutions to make companies more sustainable.

So tell me, here's the relevant picks.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellens, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, Economic Advisor Brian Dees, U.S.

Trade Representative Catherine Ty, OMB Neera Tandon.

So

is there no way Joe Biden can make people happy?

I mean, Democrats don't love to be happy, as you know.

We don't love to be happy.

We see the gray when there's potential black and white.

And we kill our own.

So, you take those three things, and there's no way that this transition would go as smoothly as a potential

alternative.

Having said that, you know, I fully believe that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris know what brought them to the table.

And what brought them to the table was this just giant sense of three things: giant sense of inequity in the world today, in the United States today,

a pandemic that let the most vulnerable among us flounder, flounder and a climate that is being ignored.

And so I fully believe that they know what they have to do, that they are putting people in place, not because they care more about companies than people.

The people they're putting in place actually know how government works.

And that is a big difference.

And that is a significant advantage.

They want to

get to January 20th with a fully in place group of people who can start acting immediately.

Right.

Except that's the old tag on the same old, same old people and not, you know, you don't see an Elizabeth Warren on the cabinet.

You don't see a Bernie Sanders getting a big role, AOC.

Well, Elizabeth Warren's top economic person is actually going to be in the National Economic Council next door to Brian Dees.

So you can be sure that, you know, a multitude of voices are going to be there.

So what else would they need to do to ensure that?

Because they could spend a lot of time fighting on all the flanks, you know what I mean?

The business flank and the and the more pro-business flank and the more progressive flank.

How to avoid that?

Or is it unavoidable?

I don't, I think that Joe Biden is feeling like this is not a trade-off he has to make right now.

I do think that the one issue that may end up

defining that is something like, you know, who knows when they get around to repealing the Trump tax cuts.

You know, I think that the Biden team will be unlikely to want to shake up the economy or do bad things for the economy, that they'd rather stimulate the economy by getting more money into the hands of individuals.

So I think that,

you know, they're hoping that this is sort of a false choice right now.

They're going to sign the climate agreement, the Paris Accords, the day that he gets inaugurated.

They're going to reinstitute

fuel efficiency standards that the Trump team pulled back on and that the new energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, is committed to.

So I think that we will see a lot of action very quickly that will demonstrate that they actually are going to care about the issues that he ran on.

Are you worried about inviting, though?

Are you, I mean, there is still sort of an opposition within the party, which is typical, but also you see it flare up.

Is it going to be a problem?

The other issue is if they do lose in Georgia, there's going to be a Senate that's not friendly to the change.

Georgia is everything, right?

What happens on January 5th is everything in terms of what they can do.

I liked what AOC said recently, Congresswoman Casio-Cortez said.

She said, it's actually our job to encourage the government to do as much as we can to further a progressive agenda.

And so let's not see policy fights as personal or problems.

Let's see them as, you know, desire to get to some good solution.

And, you know, I ascribe to that.

That there can be.

There is.

There can be.

And by the way, we're not lockstep.

We won't fall in line the way that Republicans did with Donald Trump.

The Democrats will not do that for Joe Biden.

And he has no such illusions that they will.

Well, how do they shake the populist part,

the populist attraction that Trump had and the idea that they're socialists?

How do you, you said that this is a factor in Georgia.

How do you shake that, especially if you want to be pro-business, you want if business wants this to be chaos in order to prevail,

how do you shake that idea of socialism?

Yeah, I don't think he's coming to office to make businesses feel better.

Look,

we have a stock market that's creating value in these companies for

shareholders in a very healthy way.

but what it's not doing is bringing the bottom up and that I think is going to be his focus so I don't think he's too worried about

what companies say right I think he's more worried and and the accusations of socialism I think he's actually more worried about the the logistics of getting health care to more people and raising the minimum wage and requiring some

standards.

So from a business point of view, one of the issues he's inherited, a disaster.

Trump has left, speaking of burning down the house, it's really burnt.

There's disaster all over the country.

We still have to roll out vaccines.

The country probably won't.

Most

presidents have that year.

This year is not going to be a year he's going to get to be to roll out his big giant bold platforms.

Is that a correct?

Yeah, I think the

The Biden campaign has created these four pillars, if you don't know that.

The four pillars are getting the COVID pandemic under control,

rebuilding the economy, instituting more more racial equity in cultural and business life, and addressing climate change.

So they've said consistently that those are their four things, but the first issue is really number one, two, and three.

And they know that if they don't get this pandemic under control, businesses are screwed and people are screwed.

And so that is, I think, going to take up a huge amount of their energy.

So Hillary, just to finish up on this, do you,

one of the things that Democrats have been that has united them has sort of been to be anti-Trump.

Is that, that's not going to work, presumably, anymore?

I mean, he's going to float around, but we're going to talk in a second with Olivia Nuzzy about that.

But

what is the organizing factor then if it's not Trump, or can it still be Trump?

By the way, we still hate Trump this week and you hate Trump next week.

Yeah, I think that gets, it's a great question.

I think it gets to two big issues.

The first issue is just, are people going to disengage and ignore politics because they're so fucking exhausted by Donald Trump?

And, you know, the Biden team believes that one of the reasons he was elected was that he would just calm the country down and they would not have to think about politics every day.

And that is going to be an operating principle of theirs.

They're not going to so-called feed the beast all the time, you know, generate a lot of news and make try and make people, you know, get all hyped up, et cetera.

And so it begs the question about if there are these policy fights, if there, you know, since there will be such a close

ratio between Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill and therefore be hard to get things done, you know, how are they going to move the people to one side or the other to get that kind of action?

And so I think the jury is really out on that.

That's one big question for me.

The other big question is:

Are we so conditioned now

about campaigning that

the next presidential campaign, the next election will start on January 21st because it's a disease.

It's an addiction.

And

whether we have decided that we can't make it happen any other way.

And so

those two big questions I think the jury's out on.

And I honestly don't know where we go with it.

Perfect, since we have a friend of pivot.

Olivia Nezi's Nezi's New York Magazine's White House reporter.

She is on the horn right now.

Olivia, welcome to Pivot.

Thank you for having me on the horn.

It's a horn we have.

So talk to us about this idea of what comes next.

We have a lot of questions for you.

I want to, from whether Trumpers have started their rehabilitation campaigns, but coming out of this,

do we stay in a permanent campaign mode?

Can we ever quit Donald Trump?

Well, I don't think it's just about Donald Trump.

I think Hillary is right that this is kind of a disease.

I was just talking about this with an editor at New York Mag this morning where our politics is so broken that if you want to be a part of the conversation in a meaningful way, if you want to be a part of the kind of crew of people who is quoted, they're quoted a lot in stories.

They're on cable news.

Maybe they have cable news contracts.

They get to decide in part what the quote-unquote conversation is.

The best way to do that is to run for president.

That's why you have Eric Swalwell or Pete Buttigieg or any number of people on the right.

And we've seen this, we saw this in 2012 famously with that enormous field.

We saw it in 2016.

We saw it most recently on the left with the Democratic primary field.

And I think we're going to see it starting immediately.

I think it's already begun on the right for 2024.

You see people like Christy Noam or even Chris Christie.

suggesting through their statements, through their motions, that they are already looking ahead to, you know, Iowa and New Hampshire.

And I think it is kind of a disease, not just on a personal level that people become obsessed with the idea that they could be president and it's like a mental illness.

But I think it's also a disease in the media where we help to create this environment where that is the best way to have your ideas heard.

But part of it, and Hillary, we'll have a question in a second, is Trump hasn't left.

Is he leaving?

I mean, you covered him for so long and you've had some of the best interviews.

The one of you in the offices, he kept bringing people to impress you and was a classic.

But does he leave?

Does he, does he, how does the leaving happen?

Because we still have the stupid January 6th thing where everyone's worried about.

Happy birthday.

Yeah, whatever.

Really?

Yeah.

Happy birthday.

It's important for so many reasons.

What happens in the next couple of weeks?

Sort of lay it out with hands.

And then does he go or what?

Because a lot of what you're talking about predicates the fact that he leaves the scene.

Right.

Well, it's hard to know.

I mean, he spent decades prior to his run in 2016 pretending that he was running for president, all to generate media attention.

And at the beginning, you'll recall,

of his run in 2015, even after he made the announcement formally, it was still sort of conventional wisdom that it wasn't real.

right that he was not really going to file the paperwork i remember that being a big thing in my newsroom at the time like wait till he actually files the paperwork, don't pay attention to what he says.

And obviously the joke was on all of us.

I'm still covering him like five years later.

But I think that

he so, when I talk to people who are close to him, who talk to him a lot, the fact that he

hates being president is so central.

You know, he hates the responsibilities of the office.

He likes to be in there because it makes him feel important.

He likes to give White House tours.

He likes to be in in the Oval Office for purely superficial reasons and reasons relating to the ego.

But when it comes to actually governing, I mean, he just doesn't do it.

He sits it out most of the time.

Does he care about that though, Olivia?

Because you're exactly right.

He loves the trappings of the office, but he seems to have zero interest in the actual job.

And, but that's our analysis.

Does he actually care that he has no interest in the job or does the are the trappings so attractive?

I mean, it's hard to know, right, without being in his head.

I would love to be in his head, but it's hard to know.

All that I can do is talk to people who talk to him a lot, right, and people who work for him.

And

those people have said for years now, and especially now that he's had to, he doesn't have to pretend to be even mildly interested in it anymore because it is over.

And he knows that it's over, even if he's not saying that out loud or he doesn't want to talk about it.

He has no interest.

He's a man with no intellectual curiosity, right?

We've seen that again and again for years now.

And so I find it very difficult to believe that in all of his exhaustion, when he finally leaves and he heads back to Mar-a-Lago permanently,

that he's going to want to do anything other than the stuff that he enjoys from the campaign trail.

He likes to be out in front of a crowd.

He loves his rallies, right?

He loves to get the energy from a crowd to feel important, to be leading on every cable news chiron, right?

He loves to drive a news cycle.

But when it comes to actually

getting into a race again, when it comes to all of the complications that that entails, I don't know if he's really going to want to do it.

And so many people I talk to who are close to him say, like, there is a certain amount of relief that they detect when they speak to him now.

So you've been to how many rallies?

You've been to.

I have no idea.

Lots and lots and lots.

So how do you, how do the Trumpers, the people who have been supportive of him and who haven't said anything, no matter how egregious what he says, including around election election fraud recently how do they how do they stick with him and yet not or is there chris christie seems to be going a different way you know like doubting him and and throwing a little bit of dirt on the trump you know machine the way others when reagan wasn't around they did not do they sort of wrapped themselves in reagan um despite lots of problems with reagen but he was you know affable and people had had an affection for him in this case what's the best strategy to wrap yourself in trump or is that a mistake

well i think it's kind of like it's not going to matter.

If you wrap yourself in Trump right now, and then the second that he's gone and 2024 begins in earnest with people like Christy Noam or Nikki Haley or whoever else starting to run Josh Hawley,

I think that people have fairly short memories.

I mean, if the architects of the Iraq War can have MSNBC contracts and be out there on cable news all the time, I don't think that as much as we would like to believe that those people will be shunned from polite society, I think history suggests otherwise.

And I don't think that it, I think it might matter to the president's base

to see who is supporting him now, who jumps when he says jump.

But I think that when it comes to the general public and people who casually observe this stuff, I don't think it's going to matter that much.

I think people are probably going to be able to have it both ways as

much as we would like to think that you can't.

That's smart do you do you think um that the pardons and what the legal situation will end up being with him will have an impact on this because if he is all of a sudden you know um uh really mired in just constant uh legal

legal problems um

that that it will end up finally penetrating and that people will you know, distance themselves from it.

I heard Michael Cohn this week, who you know well and you've interviewed multiple times uh make an interesting prediction that donald trump won't pardon his own children or jared uh because he doesn't want any of them to lose their fifth amendment rights because you know when you pardon someone they lose their fifth amendment rights and you have the ability to testify uh and cannot refuse to tell the truth and so

there's a theory that he's not going to pardon anyone who could actually testify against him, including his own children.

That's smart.

So that there's a,

that there's just this sense that he will be consumed with legal troubles.

Yeah, I mean, and that's something that he's been aware of.

I've talked to people close to the president who say that he is terrified of the idea that he might find himself arrested or in serious legal jeopardy post-presidency.

It's something that he's certainly thought about for years now.

I mean, if you're Donald Trump, think about how many people you know who have been in prison over the last several years, right?

A lot of members of his social circle were imprisoned.

And I imagine that that

kind of rattles you.

I imagine that that kind of rattles you

kind of like a death.

Yeah.

And it's something that he has certainly been preoccupied by.

I mean, it's not

It's not fake news that he has talked openly about whether or not he is able to pardon himself.

It is a preoccupation for him all right but one of the things that he's been doing too the preoccupation is this election fraud um now you wrote a fantastic piece about four seasons totaling

very important thank you

so what what was the funniest part of that and what do you think was the most important part of that you know julian and you keep you know you keep tweeting at giuliani to call you which is he will both pathetic and fantastic at the same time but what what tell me about what the funniest part of that was and what it meant with you know him sticking with all these sort of just awful people whether it's sydney powell who was in the white house or whether it was giuliani i think is probably the king of all of them but what what is it what what have you brought away from your experience with these sort of freaks this freak show

You know, I didn't find any of it particularly funny.

And I think it's because I actually slept through the actual four seasons total landscaping press conference.

And I woke up to just like thousands of messages from people asking me to figure out what had happened and so when I finally saw it I kind of I was never in on the joke the way that everyone who experienced it in real time was

but I felt like that gave me

enough distance to kind of approach it analytically in a way that maybe I wouldn't have if I had experienced it as a meme in real time.

So my sleeping late, I think, worked in my favor once.

But I don't know if any of it was particularly funny.

I thought it was more disturbing than anything else that

after election night,

people started, people around the president, multiple people reported to me that they were just outright avoiding him and that it was no longer worth it.

They didn't use these terms, but from my own perspective, it's like the whatever you might gain from dealing with this fucking lunatic, right, from being verbally abused by him, from tiptoeing around him, from trying to very carefully carefully navigate a conversation with him without angering him.

You can't gain that anymore, right?

It doesn't matter if you have proximity to a loser, right?

You're not going to get the White House job of your dreams or whatever in the last month.

And so a lot of people around the president were like literally not going into work or were showing up very late or were just staying away from the Oval Office and were only around him when he personally summoned them.

And those interactions were extraordinarily brief.

and in that vacuum came the crazies and this has always been the case for Trump right anytime that he's left alone whether it's late at night early in the morning anytime he's left to his own devices he is calling up people on the phone crazies and syncophants totally getting telling him how wonderful he is exactly getting in touch with people who make him feel better who tell him what he wants to hear or who energize him right who tell him it's not over sir stay in the fight he loves to hear that shit um and it is because of that

that that entire mess of a legal strategy, if you could call it that, unfurled.

And you had this kind of old school for Trump, the beginning of the Trump presidency, this was always the case, but it was especially true in like the first nine months that the infighting consumed like 80% of everyone's time internally.

They just spent their days.

knifing each other and leaking against each other.

And there was kind of something reminiscent of that with the legal team where you had the litigators and quote unquote serious people on the one side who were ready to deal with Supreme Court cases, were ready to deal with serious legal challenges.

And when I talked to those people, they were just furious.

And

it was unbelievable to hear their disappointment at this stage, because if you've been paying even, you know, moderate attention, you know what this is all about.

You know how it works.

But I think you've kind of got to be a bit of an optimist and a bit of an idiot to stick around for that long.

And these people were newly disappointed by Trump's willingness to let the show take over.

And people like Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis and Rudy Giuliani, they kind of filled the void left by

the people who might ordinarily

you don't have to think that they're good people, you don't have to think that they were effective, but they might ordinarily at least argue with Trump or present Trump with

inconvenient information or something to complicate the narrative.

They were kind of out of sight, out of mind.

And yet everybody talks.

I mean, that's the other thing that fascinates me is that everybody talks.

And so, you know, I'm so curious about this because you are, you're not just a brilliant reporter, you're also a really lucky reporter.

And

you kind of have a really broad birth, right?

You can sort of write about what,

you know, any aspect of politics that, you know, feels

important in the moment.

And so I'm wondering,

is the media addicted to this crazy?

Because the point Karen made is the right one, which is we have between now and January 20th, and then we have post-January 20th.

So

is there

what happens post-January 20th around the crazy, around the Trump attention?

What do you think?

I think there will always be interest in him.

And I think there's a bit of Stockholm syndrome for some reporters, right?

And certainly some members of the media.

I mean, we're all addicted to conflict, right?

Everyone wants to talk about the left or the right bias in the media, but it's more true to say that we're biased towards conflict.

If there's no change, right?

If there's no friction, then there's no story.

And so I think people are always going to be interested in whoever it is generating the most conflict, and that is reliably Donald Trump.

And I think that he will continue to be important to Republican politics, right?

If we're wondering, as you do after any election, what becomes of the party that lost, it's not as though you can explore that without exploring what becomes of Donald Trump and how he continues to affect things.

And so I think he'll continue to be important to the story.

I think the question is like, if he summons a press conference at Trump Tower in, I don't know, March, are we all going to show up?

Are you?

I am.

Yeah.

You are.

You are.

What about you and Ted?

I have two more quick questions and we got to go.

Giuliani, what happens to him?

I have no idea.

I hope he calls me.

I'd love to ask him about it.

I don't know what happens to him.

I mean, people who worked for him for a long time, who admired him when they felt there was something to still admire, talk about him like this great tragedy, you know, this man who is just withered before their eyes, has succumbed to God knows what

and

completely destroyed his legacy.

And to quote him

from our interview, right?

I mean, I asked him, what do you say about your legacy and he said my i'm paraphrasing but he said my opinion on my legacy is it yeah yeah well there you have it

and badly by the way bad bad he's done it himself um so last question as a reporter can you get excited about covering the biden campaign or administration is it what what's your strategy i can i i mean i prioritize

i can i had a you know i had a very short uh career prior to Trump, right?

I got my, it was the first,

that was the first campaign I ever covered.

This is the first White House I've ever covered.

But prior to Trump, I thought that my, if I had a talent, it was for

identifying the interesting characters kind of on the periphery and the people sort of outside of where reporters usually looked who might be influencing things in a different way.

And so I'm kind of excited to be able to be creative again and to not not have to focus on the gigantic circus that is at the center of everything.

Who peaks your Olivia Nuzzy interest right now?

Oh, I can't tell you that because they might get scared.

Oh, well, you're already scared.

Is there?

But you think that you could find things?

You can find.

It's certainly not a circus freak time.

It's sort of like going from a Ryan Murphy thing to something else.

But with Trump, I'm not the first person to say this, but it's like if you just described in plain prose what was happening, you sounded like Hunter Thompson, right?

I didn't take any special skill

to find something hilarious or poetic or fucked up about Donald Trump.

But I'm excited to kind of report on things that are not so obvious.

now.

It's been a bit exhausting and it's felt a bit ridiculous at times to devote so much energy to something that's playing out before everyone's eyes that anyone who's half-conscious could notice, right?

I think it'll be interesting to

have to work a little bit harder to understand people again in politics and their motives and what they believe, right?

When they're not just shouting at you in all caps.

Yeah.

Except for the Republican side will be interesting.

Is there any candidate you are interested in on that side?

I'm fascinated by Christina Ohm.

Yeah, me too.

Absolutely fascinated.

We got to talk about that when this podcast is over.

Okay, good.

She doesn't hold that fascination for me.

Oh, I think she is.

She's well, you just wait.

I'll show you.

Smart Sarah Palin or maybe not.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I feel like Nikki Haley's probably got more skills.

Christine Ohm seems to have stumbled a lot during this pandemic.

Well, we'll see.

Olivia, get on there on a plane.

Get on a plane.

I've never mentioned that Rushmore.

I'm excited.

Oh, well, you'll see.

Anyway, Olivia, thank you so much for doing this and good luck in the next iteration.

Are you going to miss Trump?

No, i can't don't ask me that don't cancel me

all right thank you so much bye thank you all right hillary one more quick break we'll be back for wins and fails

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Okay, Hillary, here's the part of the show where we decide who is winning and who is failing.

So I would like your wins and fails this week, please.

You know,

my win is not, I swear I'm not kissing his ass.

I've known him for 40 years.

I don't have to.

But Joe Biden

consistently impresses me over these last few weeks.

So you got to give it to him.

All right.

He has been classy.

He's been thoughtful.

He hasn't, you know, made a lot of mistakes that,

you know, he had a reputation of being gaffe prone.

And every time he shows up, even when he's spontaneously speaking, and he has done that a lot.

Well, he's standing next to a dumpster fire.

But still, he's, I think he is inciting a level of calm and

among people that that is comforting.

And so he's my win for the for the

Gramps vibe here.

A good Gramps vibe.

A good Gramps vibe, but a smart Gramps vibe.

So I'm feeling good about that.

All right.

The fail, look, it's too easy to blame Trump and the congressional Republicans for this fail.

It's too easy to blame Fox News for this fail, even though weren't we personally delighted to see Rupert Murdoch finally

attack Trump in the New York Post today?

Of course he was going to do that.

Of course he was going to do that.

But he doesn't do it on that.

Never turn your back on Uncle.

He doesn't do it on Fox News, though, because you can't afford the ratings competition, right?

Never turn your back on Uncle Satan, I say, but go ahead.

So I'm going to say that the fail has to go.

to those Americans that still are not

taking this pandemic seriously, that are just buying it.

It's It's like one thing

to spout the stupid.

It's another thing to listen to the stupid and not turn your back on it.

And when you still have every single day people throwing their masks away, not putting them on, ignoring it and pretending that these holiday travels are not relevant to people getting sick.

That, you know, that's a big fail.

Yes, I would agree with you.

I think it's interesting, though.

I think at some point when there's a reassessment of this, we do have to look at what works and what what doesn't work.

You know what I mean?

In terms of politicizing something that should have just been sensible.

And I think having a site either you had to shut down or you had to stay open is not neither of which was smart.

Because a lot of stuff, we don't know what worked, but certainly masks and social distancing works.

But the way it got so quickly politicized, largely because of a reaction to Trump, was, I think it probably was impossible not to, but there's going to be a lot of reassessment everywhere in terms of

there would have been more, you're, that's a fair point.

There would have been more um uh patience for learning on a job if it were not for donald trump yes yes 100

um and so i think it's really it's an interesting time to reassess i just think you're not going to convince people that shut i still hear it from a lot more people like these shutdowns were bad i'm like that's complex people don't i think what i would like to see is a return to complexity that things are a little bit more complex there was a story i thought everyone should read and it's both a win and a fail in the washington post about a young man who put up a short video of a young woman, a white woman,

saying a terrible word, and she got tossed out of college.

And of course, it started again, the whole cancer culture brigade on it.

But it was a very complex story.

It was a suit.

And I like that.

I was like, this is not an easy thing.

And, you know, of course, the cancer culture people are like, oh, it's all about, because they think that's the most important topic of our age right now, despite all these people dying, you know, losing jobs and having hunger issues, which I think are bigger.

It is unbelievable how it takes over right yeah it's ridiculous but what it is is the idea that that it's complex and I thought that story if you read any story this week that one really was because you can't come to easy conclusions on either side and that's I think where we have to get to

reprehensible what she said at the same time was the you know this idea of how we complexity should be back that's what it is complexity is a difficult thing to to do in this world and i think once donald trump leaves the thing things aren't going to be things are complex complex i say it is but it it it puts more onus on all of us to yes you know for our own behavior right in terms of how how much we're willing to listen that's true but i'm still mad at my will

for going inside restaurants and showing up at my house without a

yeah well certain things won't change and that's including your relationship with your mother

that's true okay hillary that's the show thank you so much for being on it did a lot of great insight to politics.

So let me ask you for one prediction because we don't usually do predictions for you.

January 20th, does Donald Trump fade away or does he continue?

If you're part of the Biden administration, what's the strategy with him?

If he keeps making noise or he announces something, he's going to do crazy things between now.

You know, whether it's I might do martial law, I might do the Insurrection Act, all this stuff that they keep popping out there.

What do you expect on January 20th?

Well,

I know the Biden people are expecting to ignore Donald Trump and what he does.

They don't expect him to show up at the inauguration and they expect him to try and create some alternative event or news and they're going to ignore him.

I think whether the media does and whether the public does is an open question.

We heard from Olivia that they probably won't ignore him because he's too tempting as a

conflict figure.

But I'm pretty confident that the Biden folks are going to try and move this country along.

So, thank you next.

Yeah.

Or not thank you.

No, thank you.

No, thank you.

Next.

Okay.

All right.

I'll be taking a rest this New Year's Eve.

Hillary, thank you so much.

Thanks for having me.

Back in your feeds next Tuesday.

I'll have another guest who is Stephanie Ruhl at this point.

And then my son and Casey Newton are coming on for another one until Scott gets back.

As a reminder, we love listener mail questions.

We're trying something new.

Go to newnymag.com/slash pivot to submit your question for the Pivot podcast.

The link is in our show notes.

And I'm going to read us out.

Today's show was produced by Rebecca Sinanis and Camila Salazar.

Ernie Indra Dot engineered this episode.

Thanks also to Hannah Rosen and Drew Burroughs.

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If you liked our show, please recommend it to a friend.

Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media.

We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business.