Is Trump's Honeymoon Over?

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welcome to pod save america i'm john favreau i'm dan pfeiffer on today's show donald trump Donald Trump and Elon Musk make their bromance official during a joint interview with Sean Hannity, but is the honeymoon over for the American people? How's that for a cable-esque tease, Dan? That's almost sports radio-esque. We'll talk about why these two men are so in love and why new polling shows problems for both of them.
Then, hours after telling Hannity he'd never support cuts to Medicaid, Trump endorses the House budget resolution, which drastically cuts Medicaid, even as Republicans in Congress are starting to squirm about all the doge cuts and firings that are starting to hurt their constituents. And later, Dan talks to former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissman about the purges going on

at the Justice Department, the prospects for the corruption case against Eric Adams, and much more. But first, I know it's hard to keep up with all the news lately and that people don't tune in to this particular podcast to hear the two of us just riff on global affairs.
Their mistake, not ours. I do think it's important for everyone to understand that this week, America has essentially switched sides in the war between Russia, a repressive, brutal dictatorship, and Ukraine, the neighboring democracy that Russia invaded.
On Tuesday's episode, Tommy and I talked about how Trump and his administration have been speaking about negotiating an end to the war in a way that mass murderer Vladimir Putin couldn't have scripted better himself. Including Trump's claim that Ukraine started the war, which the whole world knows isn't true, including the vast majority of Americans.
Putin has said repeatedly that Ukraine isn't a real country, that it belongs to Russia, and that Russia wants it back. That's why he invaded Crimea in 2014.
That's why he invaded Ukraine three years ago, when Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky gently corrected Trump on this point by telling reporters that he greatly respects President Trump, but worries that he lives in a, quote, disinformation space. Trump, of course, lost it.
He posted an angry truth on his way to his beach club in Miami. Here's how he responded.
He refuses to have elections. It's low in the real Ukrainian polls.
I mean, how can you be high with every city is being demolished? It's hard to be high. Somebody said, oh, no, his polls are good.
Give me a break. A dictator without elections.
Zelensky better move faster. He's not going to have a country left.
Got to move. Got to move fast because that war is going in the wrong direction.
In the meantime, we're successfully negotiating an end to the war with Russia, something I'll admit that only Trump is going to be able to do in the Trump administration. We're going to be able to do it.
I think Putin even admitted that. Yeah, of course.
That's Trump speaking in Miami at an investment conference organized by Saudi Arabia, because of course. Then on Thursday in the White House briefing room, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz got this question from Fox News's Peter Doocy.
Who does he think is more responsible for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Putin or Zelensky? Well, look, his his goal, Peter, is to bring this war to an end, period.

Some of the rhetoric coming out of Kyiv, frankly, and insults to President Trump were unacceptable.

Who's to say? Who's to say who's responsible for the Russian invasion of Ukraine?

It's right there in the question, Dan.

It feels like the absolute craziest resistance Russia conspiracies from 2017 have now come true what is your reaction to all this as I do whenever I want to understand what's happening in the world I listen to pod save the world so I can have Tommy and Ben explain it to me and like this obviously felt like a big deal in the moment it seems crazy and insane but I think Ben and Tommy would put it in a perspective that I did not fully comprehend at the beginning of this, which is this is not just the shift between Biden's foreign policy to Trump's foreign policy. This is the abandonment of the entire bipartisan principles that have undergirded US foreign policies since World War II.
We've decided that we are no longer a leader in the forces of democracy, that we are going to side with autocracy. And that is deeply alarming.
It is incredibly scary. You have the President of the United States not just siding with Putin, but calling Zelensky an unelected dictator.
And then no one in the administration would be willing to say that Putin, not exactly known for free and fair elections, to call him for what he is. It is truly insane through the looking glass stuff.
And it has huge consequences for the United States's role in the world going forward. And our safety and security.
I mean, I'd say when the week started, my anxiety over this was at like a six or a seven. Which is your natural resting state, to be clear.
Exactly, exactly. Last few days, bumped it up to a nine.
And honestly, part of that was listening to Pod Save the World, which I know that's a tough plug for Pod Save the World, but you should all listen to this. Ben and Tommy did an excellent job with this this week.
And I guess we both, we both listened to it before bed. Coincidentally, I listened, I listened to, I, uh, I, I'm more into sleep hygiene than you.
So I listened to it, uh, earlier in the day, but was thinking about it all throughout the rest of the day. Cause it really stuck.
Yeah. Cause I was, I was texting you last night when I, i listened to it i was texting tommy and ben and you and being like that is this scariest fucking thing just i'm not here i'm not here to give you advice but if i were to give you advice it's just like because i know what your sleep habits are it's i would just i'd pick a time right before dinner and say i'm not gonna listen to any more political podcast even once done by two of my best friends but i've been thinking about it you know, we all know the polls.
We've talked about it. You know, do Americans really care about foreign policy and even foreign wars that Americans aren't fighting in? And what does that have to do with us? And why are we are we sending money to Ukraine? That's crazy.
We should spend more money home. And what do we have to care about that? And, you know, the global order and institutions, like, what does that matter? Putin wants to reconstitute the Soviet Union.
He has for a long time. He has nuclear weapons.
He almost used nuclear weapons on the battlefield in Ukraine. We know that from the Biden administration, from what we learned in 2022 and 2023.
Putin is getting help from North Korea and China to other nuclear-armed dictatorships. And now he knows, and the entire world knows, that the United States, the world's other biggest nuclear power, no longer has any interest in supporting Ukraine, doesn't seem to have much interest in supporting Europe either or defending

Europe, wants to take over Canada, might bomb Mexico, is sending asylum seekers who are escaping persecution from China, Iran, Afghanistan, to a camp in a jungle in Panama, another country that Trump is bullying because he wants to take over the Panama Canal.

And... A camp in a jungle in Panama, another country that Trump is bullying because he wants to take over the Panama Canal.
And what does all that tell Putin? Like, do you think that makes him less likely to invade Europe? Do you think it makes China less likely to invade Taiwan? The whole world now sees the United States and see what Trump has done and thinks, and all the bad actors in the world, all the bad regimes, all the nuclear armed regimes are going to say like, well, Donald Trump and the United States aren't going to step in. They're looking to take over a bunch of countries themselves.
So why don't we do whatever the fuck we want? And once Trump and his new dictator pals who all have nuclear weapons have finished carving up the world do we think that they're just gonna like relax and leave each other alone is that how things usually happen when the world order is just a bunch of nuclear powers with fucking lunatics running them who are dictators like what i mean this is, what has held the world order together is that you had the strongest military in the world, the United States, on the side of democracy, which puts you on the opposite side of the Soviet Union, then Russia, then China. And if the United States leaves that, then the entire balance collapses.
Europe, individual European nations, Europe together,

NATO without the United States cannot muster the response and certainly does not pose enough of a threat to cause Putin or China or Iran or someone else not to fulfill their ambitions. And the craziest thing, one of the craziest things Trump said this week, and it sort of went underreported in his, I think it was his post about his, it was like a readout of his call with Putin, or maybe it was about Ukraine.
I don't know what it was, but he was like, what do we care about this? We have a big, beautiful ocean to protect us in between. It's like, do you see world war two? Well, like what do you see any war with boats? Any, well, like, what are you talking about? It's fucking 2025.
It could be, it could be fucking 1825. People have taken boats to war before.
How many nuclear weapons could reach the United States? What are you talking about? You fucking moron. It is, it is really bad though.
And you know know it like this whole thing and through the campaign oh isolationism america first we want to turn inward it's not turning inward at all actually that's the trump going out there and saying i want to be friends with the other autocrats and who has he bullied he's bullied canada mexico denmark all our allies your germany jd vance bulliedance went to Germany and bullied Germany and tried to bolster the far right party in Germany.

So like, oh, then maybe we can have a far right arm to the teeth Germany.

That always works well.

Well, it's also just the fact that the United States is now on the side of the pro-Russian far-right parties within European countries like Germany. Yep.
And even if that doesn't lead to another world war or nuclear war, that leads to a world where millions, billions of people all over the world are brutally repressed because they live under dictatorships and they don't have rights. And that's what Vladimir Putin is.
And that's what Xi Jinping is. And that's what all of these guys that we're now in bed with are.
It's bad. It's bad.
It also seems like a fair amount of the motivation here is economic. In the press briefing, Waltz also scolded Zelensky for rejecting a deal where Ukraine would give us the rights to 50% of their rare earth minerals forever in exchange for US support that somehow wouldn't include any security guarantees.
We talked about this a little bit on Tuesday's pod, but now they're like really mad that Zelensky didn't like, what a deal. You give us half of your resources and we'll what? Say that we support you? We, you know, militarily support you.
We won't even invite you to the negotiations about your own country. Right, like what kind of a fucking deal is that? We also know that the Russian negotiators made, of course, an explicitly capitalist argument to the American team that American corporations stand to make billions if the U.S.
will allow investment in Russia again. Of course.
So is the new world order also going to be autocrats like Putin and Trump just carving up the world and plundering all the wealth? It seems like we're heading that direction. In all seriousness, there is a reason that the world order exists as it does.
There's a reason there are organizations like NATO. There are reasons that there are alliances, is that this shit is much harder than Donald Trump thinks it is, right? Even the United States is safer, more secure, stronger when we are working with other people.
And even in just this deal that Trump is trying to, I mean, just you couldn't fucking script this, with Putin in Saudi Arabia without Ukraine, about Ukraine, is how is that going to be implemented without Europe? Right. The United States has already said they're not going to provide security.
So who is going to do that? Trump is going to, at some point, need these countries for things. They are major US trading partners.
They are our allies. We are involved in security agreements and intelligence agreements with them all over the world.
Trump wants to head in one direction, but there is a reality to foreign policy in a complicated, interconnected world that is going to make it hard. It doesn't mean it can't happen, but it does put challenges into this absurd premise that trust.
I do just want to say that it is not a coincidence that so many rich tech people have adopted this pro-Russian stance in recent months and years. Russia is right that that is a very large market that US companies could be doing business in, and that is causing a lot of people to throw aside what they care about to hopefully make a little bit more money.
Well, yeah, and corruption is a feature, not a bug, of authoritarian regimes, right? Like the only thing dictators love as much as they love power is money, and that's why they're all surrounded by oligarchs, and they spend all the time stealing from their own people who then hate them, and then they repress. That seems familiar.
I can't put my finger on it, but it seems like we've been running to that recently. You know what? That's a great segue.
I've read the outline. I knew what we were doing here.
Oh, you did. Okay.
I'm glad. That's so nice.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk sat for a joint interview with Sean Hannity that aired on Tuesday night, which didn't make too much news, but was mostly notable for how nauseating it was to watch. Let's listen.
They want you two to start. They want a divorce.
They want you two to start hating each other. Well, I respect him.
I've always respected him. Well, I love the president.
I just want to be clear about that. You love the president.
I think President Trump is a good man. That's nice the way he said that, you know, there's something nice about him.
Not once have I seen him do something that was mean or cruel or wrong. I couldn't find anyone smarter, right? We settle on this guy.
Well, thanks for having me. I actually am tech support, though.
But he gets it done. He's a leader.
This guy's a very, he's a brilliant guy. He's a great guy.
He's got tremendous imagination. You're much more than a technologist.
You are that but he's a leader this guy's a very he's a brilliant guy he's a great guy he's got tremendous imagination you're much more than a technologist you are that but he's also a good person he's a very good person this is going to be hard i feel like i'm interviewing two brothers here fucking get a room you two what did you make of the of the interview and their budding relationship? I would say it is a phenomenal achievement that Sean Handy, he does an hour-long interview with two of the world's most famous and controversial people. People famous for saying interesting, crazy, insane things and have that interview make no news.
You said not much news, no news. It was ungodly boring.
It was like watching wallpaper dry on the wall. It was so boring.
The fact that he pulled that off, I just can't even imagine how that even happened. Donald Trump has never sat for an hour without saying something interesting before.
Elon Musk never sat for an hour without saying something controversial or angry. I mean, just truly mind-numbingly boring and stupid.
As for the relationship, maybe they like each other. Maybe they do.
It seems like, who am I to say? I don't want to play psychologist here, but Donald Trump's not exactly known for hiding his feelings. He can barely look at J.D.
Vance when they're in a room together. He can never even – it's clear he cannot stomach Mike Pence at all.

I thought he was just a huge goober.

Or his wife.

Or his wife.

Or his own wife, too.

That's what I'm saying.

Yeah.

Sorry.

Forget Mike Pence's wife.

I thought you meant Karen Pence.

Yeah.

No, no.

It definitely doesn't like her.

But no, he doesn't even like Melania.

It's – I mean, maybe they do.

It is – I mean, Elon Musk is one of the few people in the world who Trump needs more than they need Trump. Right? He's got, he spent a quarter billion dollars to get him elected.
He is this cudgel for Trump as he tries to implement his policy because Musk keeps saying he'll fund primaries against people who don't vote for his nominees. That clearly was quite effective since the earlier – on Thursday, we confirmed Kash

Patel as FBI director.

So anything goes.

And Elon Musk controls his favorite social media platform.

And so like they're – like I don't know if they really like each other or not, but

Trump is not – he is more forgiving of Musk or more willing to tolerate

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sponsoring this episode. prologue with zero apr to drive the best ask anyone who owns a honda and search your local honda dealer see dealer for financing details financing on credit approval offer ends 4 30 25 uus news best cars at cars.usnews.com my main takeaway from the interview besides yes that it was boring yes that sean hannity somehow managed to like sit for an hour with these two and never brought up anything interesting it was just a love fest the entire time uh and it was nauseating to watch but as i watched i was like i think i was completely wrong about and i think all of us were wrong about all of the guesses about this relationship and like when's the when's the divorce coming when's the falling out and like i think you're right that trump needs elon and uses elon but trump needs and uses a lot of people and doesn't love them yeah or doesn't even like them or doesn't show that kind of affection for them like i think they genuinely like each other because they're just they're kindred spirits like trump in his first term was extremely frustrated that he couldn't do whatever he wanted.
It was lawyers and his advisors and people in the federal government telling him no, or this is against the law, or this is a bad idea, whatever. And now he's got another famous rich dude authoritarian who doesn't care about laws, doesn't care about other people's opinions, thinks he knows everything and is willing to be his enforcer.
And that's what he needed, right? Like no one else has been able to take what Donald Trump wants to do, much of it illegal, much of it corrupt and do it for and i think the reason that elon does it is because he he's been radicalized he craves attention he craves recognition wants to be even richer and more powerful and and you know of course also he he he confuses attention and recognition and both of them them, both of them do. Both of them have this deep, bottomless need to be loved.
And they can't get it. And neither of them are truly happy until they just keep wanting, wanting, wanting.
They want more money, more power. And they found a kindred spirit in each other.
I think they genuinely like each other. It's interesting because, like you point out, they're very, very similar people.
And usually two people who are exactly the same, particularly powerful people, butt heads immediately. Because you can see in the other person what you subconsciously don't like about yourself.
But that doesn't seem to be the case here. And I think maybe with Trump, it is he respects two things more than anything else, money and attention or fame.
And Elon Musk has more of both than any other person on the planet. He's the only person- Especially a good point on the attention, yeah.
He's the only, and that is why, I agree with you that they genuinely like each other, but even if they didn't, it's one of the reasons why Trump is, I do not think a divorce is coming is because if they're the only person on the planet that Trump would probably be worried to get into a online spat with would be Musk. He controls Twitter, he gets more attention, he is better at it.
And like he is, no one else has a megaphone as big as Trump's with the possible exception of Elon Musk. Small thing, but at one point,

I think we played the beginning of it in the clip, which is when Hannity's like, oh, they're trying to drive a wedge between you two. And Trump responds by saying like, I know, I saw that.
He's like, it's so, he goes, they're so bad at it. Democrats are so bad at it.
I used to think they were good at it. They're really bad at it.
And you know what? He's right. Because Because it has been so fucking glaringly obvious.

I keep thinking about what you said which is like reading the stage directions you know and it's like president elon president musk and time has them behind the fucking desk and it's it's like can we like just everyone's gonna learn the art of subtlety just a little bit here. It's so painfully obvious and cheesy.

It's so painfully obvious and cheesy.

It's, of course, what the Democrats are trying to do by driving a wedge

is obvious to Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

We can't communicate our own economic policies to our voters

with $2 billion of advertising money.

I don't think we're going to be able to tweet our way into splitting up Donald Trump and Elon Musk. It's just embarrassing.
One bit that did make a little news, Trump acknowledged, quote, inflation is back before saying I had nothing to do with it and blaming Biden. You and I talked about how some polling from a few weeks ago showed that most people don't think Trump's doing enough to bring down prices.
There's been a slew of polling this week that basically says the same thing and also shows some deterioration in Trump's political standing. Trump's approval ratings are now underwater across the board.
His economic approval, notably, is worse than his overall job approval. People like what he's doing on immigration.
Other issues are OK, but like he's actually underwater on economic even worse than his job approval. And Elon Musk's approval ratings are even worse.
Pew has Musk at 42 percent favorable, 54 percent unfavorable. A new Quinnipiac poll has 55 percent of voters saying that Elon has too big of a role in the government, with only 36 percent saying his role is just right.
And a new Reuters poll shows 71% of respondents agreeing with the statement, the very wealthy have too much influence in the White House. Washington Post analysis headline on Thursday was this, polls show Trump's honeymoon is over.
What say you, host of Polar Coaster and author of MessageBox? I'm so glad you segued to that Message Box, because if you were listening to this on Friday morning, in your inboxes right now is my take on this very question. No, thank you to the Washington Post for trying to get in front of me here.
But there are two points here. One is Trump definitely had a honeymoon.
He was more power at the outset of this presidency than at any point previously. But it's the lamest honeymoon in history.
His net approval rating when he was elected or when he was sworn in was 43 points lower than Barack Obama's. He was even about 15 points lower than Joe Biden at the same point.
He is the only modern president with lower approval ratings at the outset of the presidency than Donald Trump in 2025 is Donald Trump in 2017.

Yeah.

But having said that, the direction of the polls is very clear.

He is now back.

He's back to mid-40s in most of these polls, which is where he was.

That's sort of the high end of his range for much of his first term. And there are three reasons for this, and they're pretty clear in the polling.
One issue pointed out is the economy. His economic approval rating in the Reuters poll has dropped to 39.
It has dropped significantly over the last month. You saw this in the CBS poll that two-thirds of voters thought he wasn't focused enough on lowering prices.
The second reason is people don't like his agenda, right? You have majorities who in the Washington Post poll who do not agree with what he's been doing. And that makes complete sense.
He ran on lowering prices as curing the border, but all of the news is about slashing government, weaponization, cozying up to Putin, all of these things. And it's like presidents get in trouble

when they campaign on one agenda and govern on another.

And he campaigned as, it was bullshit,

but he campaigned as a populist

who wanted to fight for the working class.

He is governing as a government slashing,

Medicaid cutting austerity agenda.

That's not what people voted for in that asserting him.

And the last thing is that Elon Musk

is dragging him down in some ways. And one of the more interesting things, like Elon Musk's favorability ratings are fine.
You know, 44, it's not great, but he's actually more popular than just about every politician who's not named Barack Obama right now in Donald Trump. But the better question to ask is, do you approve of the job he's doing? Because the favorability rating includes, do you like him? Seems highly unlikely.
But also all the Tesla, SpaceX, everything he's accomplished for the world and the planet, which some of it is quite good. When you ask, do you approve of how he's doing his job in government? Only 34% of people in the Washington Post approve of him.
Yeah. They had quotes from some of the respondents in the Washington Post poll about why they supported Trump or opposed him or whatever.
And I saw one woman who voted for Trump said, Elon's a smart guy and I think he's really smart with his companies, but I really don't like what he's doing, cutting all these programs. He's got too much influence in there.

Yeah, and you see that in like 26% in that Washington Post poll approve of Elon Musk shutting down federal agencies and 52% oppose.

You have 6 in 10 people who think you are concerned about Elon Musk and the DOS team having access to sensitive personal information.

Elon Musk is a political – he is helping Trump accomplish his agenda, but he is hurting him politically in how he's doing it because the agenda he's accomplishing is unpopular. It's not what people voted for.
It's not what they want. I think there's also something instructive in all these numbers for Democrats and anyone trying to oppose Trump right now and wondering like what we should do and does anything matter, which is like when you ask people, you know, there's been some analysis that Trump's approval ratings, at least for the last couple of weeks, have been relatively high, partly because he's taking action and he's doing stuff and people like presidents who take action.
And I think that's right. That analysis is correct.
And when you ask people, oh, well, what do you think about him making government more efficient? People like the idea of making government more efficient. They unfortunately, you know, a slight majority likes the deportation agenda.
That's also because they think he is deporting undocumented immigrants with criminal records, which he is clearly, that is only a small portion of the

immigrants he's deporting. We can talk about that some other time.
But when you get into the programs he's cutting, what Elon is doing, even with something like USAID, when we talked about this, six and 10 oppose closing USAID, even when it's talked about like that, just, you know, which has now become famous,

the reporting around Doge,

what Elon has been up to,

what the Doge bags have been up to, the cuts, the firings, and what Democrats have been saying about this and the noise that people have been making just across the country about this. I think it is, it's breaking through and people are hearing it.
And so we're going to see it in the polling that, yes, maybe people liked him taking action. And yes, they want government to be more efficient.
But the way that they're seeing it happen, they despise. And just as a point, and this is a – if we continue on the right trend, this could go down as one of the great political miscalculations in history is, let's say Donald Trump had put Russell Vogt in charge of Doge.
Yeah. That's interesting.
No one would know. But because they put a person who gets more attention than almost anyone else on the planet in charge of implementing the unpopular agenda, people know about the unpopular agenda.
Elon Musk is a figure, and this is sort of how the media environment works. If you have people who are controversial, who you talk about, and then you get engagement, you create this incentive structure for more and more people to talk about it.
No one is getting more TikTok views or X reposts or whatever you call them or skeets or whatever else talking about Russell Vogt or Kevin Hassett, the NEC director, anything like that. But if you put

a huge, giant, famous celebrity who loves attention in charge of doing things that you

probably wish people did not know, you're probably going to suffer politically from that down the

line. Who has one of the biggest megaphones in the world and is literally narrating what he's

doing minute by minute, including many of his fuck-ups.. Yes.
I mean, it's it is a wild choice, which is and I know you were another message box on this, like whether it's the right strategy for Democrats to focus on Elon Musk. I say yes.
Yeah. I mean, that's the conclusion you came to as well.
But I don't see any downside to this. I think you have to do it in the right way.
The reason you have to do it is we can't get attention for our message. We have to go where there is attention.
We can't make attention. We have to go get it.
And it is with Elon. Democrats have been attacking Donald Trump for a decade now.
That is not in and of itself newsy and interesting. If you attack Elon Musk, you're going to get more attention.
I do think it's important to weave it into a larger narrative and not just simply calling Elon Musk a dick, although it was quite funny when Robert Garcia did that. That's not exactly what we have to do here.
We have to make Elon Musk be a data point in a larger story, not just about Trump, because barring a dramatic change of the Constitution, he's not running again, but about the Republican Party that's going along with this, right? About the corruption, about the influence of the world's richest man rooting around in our government, affecting agencies that are investigating or regulating his companies. It has to be part of a larger story about corruption because the polls show that people are very concerned about the influence of corporations, billionaires, and Elon Musk specifically.
And so we should make that part of the story. And how it's affecting you.
And like, you know, he's destroying jobs and he's breaking government services that people depend on and that keep us safe. And I think that like making, that's why the whole, you know, the drama between Elon and Trump and the relationship and all that kind of stuff.
And it's just a, it's a, it's a little bit of a sideshow because I think what's going to be

most impactful

is making sure

that we connect

all of the firings

and all of the services

that are cut

to what Trump and Elon

and the whole Republican Party

are doing.

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You gotta talk to them. You have to sit down and have someone who their job is to just listen and to give you advice.
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In addition to all the polling, Axios reports that Trump and Elon face a growing doge revolt from GOP lawmakers who are, quote, growing unnerved by what they see as an imprecise exercise. I would say yes.
I love that. Susan Collins suggested that it's unconstitutional for the executive branch to refuse to spend money Congress appropriated.
No shit. And said the administration is, quote, moving too fast.
Lisa Murkowski told CBS News that the job cuts are hitting Alaska really hard and that a lot of the firings are, quote, flat out wrong because people are getting told they're losing their jobs for performance reasons when that clearly isn't true because they've had performance reviews that said that they are doing an excellent job and then they get fired. Meanwhile, the Doge wrecking ball continues to swing with huge cuts and firings happening at TSA, the IRS, FEMA, HUD, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the entire agency that helps respond to disasters for people's homes when they when a disaster hits, cutting like 80 percent of that.
They're even cutting the NIH unit that focuses on Alzheimer's research. in the morning after Trump told Hannity that, quote, Medicare, Medicaid, none of that stuff is going to be touched.
He weighed in to endorse the House Republican budget that would, in fact, cut Medicaid by $880 billion. Why would he do this? I mean, I would just want to focus on the NIH one for a second.

I saw a post on social media about this, which is the most impactful and innovative research on Alzheimer's is coming from NIH. And they've made real progress with therapeutic drugs in recent years and could be close to some sort of treatment or cure.
and the way it was described was basically cutting funding for the NIH right now

is like taking away your kid's bike the day the training wheels come off just after someone told you that they had the possibility of entering the Olympics. Right? It's just like, we're close to doing something and you were gutting it.
And all of these things do, they do matter and they do break through to people because they're basically finding something that every person in America cares about. Everyone cares about different things.

And then cutting it and affecting it.

And why are they doing this?

I can't possibly fathom. You just have a bunch of people who know nothing about government,

who don't seem to care about people, who view government as the enemy, trying to just meet some number of fired employees, budget cuts without really thinking in any holistic way about how you actually help people. Because they don't think government should help people.
That's not what they believe. And we have seen this to a lesser degree when George W.
Bush was president. And he put a bunch of hacks in at FEMA and Katrina happened.
And this is like, we are in dangerous territory here. This is what happens when people who hate government are in charge of government.
The Medicaid thing is going to be a huge problem for them because either they don't touch Medicaid, like Trump said on Hannity, which means that if they don't touch Medicaid and they're not going to touch Medicare or social security, and they're going to add to defense spending, there's just not enough money to cut anything else and also pay for a $4.5 trillion tax cut. So basically, then you get down to drastic cuts to all the other spending in government, food inspection, NIH, healthcare, all this other stuff, right? And you still have just, you just add a huge, huge amount to the deficit because you just give a huge tax cut to rich people so that's one option the other option is an 880 billion dollar cut to medicaid which is what is in the house republican budget that trump endorsed so they talk about work requirements and uh okay well if you get medicaid you should work now that's kind of bullshit because what happens when you institute work requirements in a state that is giving people Medicaid is you end up just a lot of people lose their coverage.
And it's not like they're not working because they don't want to work. A lot of times they're not working because they can't work.
Regardless, if you instituted work requirements, it would save you about $100 billion in Medicaid. Okay, so they want $880 billion.
So you still get $780 billion to go. Okay, Medicaid covers 72 million Americans.
It covers nearly half of all births in this country. Half.
Two-thirds of all nursing home stays. Working class people who are just above the poverty line are on Medicaid.
By the way, a lot of these people who are on Medicaid, probably most of the people who are on Medicaid now, are in red states and are Trump voters, which is why Steve Bannon's out there saying, why would we cut Medicaid? We can't cut Medicaid. They're going to have problems both on their right flank, I think, cutting Medicaid

among some of the populace like Bannon, and they're going to have a ton of problems, they already are, with Republicans, House Republicans and Senate Republicans who were in vulnerable districts and states in 2026. So I don't know how they're going to get all the math done here and get all these cuts done because you cut

$780 billion,

$880 billion from Medicaid.

You were... I don't know how they're going to get all the math done here and get all these cuts done.
Because you cut $780 billion, $880 billion from Medicaid. You are throwing millions and millions of people off their health care.
I mean, it's a politically insane thing to do. And you're right, how they get it done.
I mean, the most likely scenario is they just pass the whole thing. Like, one way in which they could do it is they just pass it with no pay-fors, right? You can do some how they do the CBO scoring, the Congressional Budget Office scoring, to make it seem less added to the deficit.
And you can make it nine years instead of 10 years so you can own the budget. There's all this nerdy stuff you can do.
It's still unpaid for. It's all gimmick bullshit.
But can they get House Freedom Caucus members who are demanding trillions of dollars in cuts to go for that? Maybe. Maybe Trump just is like, you or else elon musk will fund a primary challenge and i'll i'll send my pardon january 6 goons after you well he got them last time right he did get them to do this is exactly what this is the how things played out in uh 2017 when they passed their tax cut now it's a much narrower majority now now you can lose by the time this happens three people probably.
But it's fascinating that they are taking on this sort of – it's a truly insane thing to do. And it's even more insane now that the Republican Party is branding itself as this multiracial working-class coalition that you're going to kick a lot of your coalition off healthcare.
It's actually probably – it is, by the numbers, way worse politics than repealing Obamacare. Way worse.
It's more people for more things in more parts of the country. And Bannon gets it and like Josh Hawley gets it.
But then I guess they were in their Senate caucus meeting and Ted Cruz was like, Medicaid cuts must be on the table. And there was like a lot of applause because it's still a lot it's still paul ryan's party and i bet who i bet we're gonna see elon musk tweeting about how we need to gut medicaid too the fraud in medicaid so much about oh it's gonna be a whole thing i mean he's already doing on social security so i don't think that's gonna help the their cause either one thing that might help their popularity is the idea they're floating now to take some of the savings that Doge is allegedly making and return that money to taxpayers in the form of tax refunds or checks or something.
There's this idea floating around that they take 20% of the savings, the Doge savings, and they use it to pay down the deficit. They take another 20% and they hand out refunds to everyone, a $5,000 check for every family.
What do you make of that proposal? It seems like it's probably great politics. It seems like Trump is going to love it because he loves sending checks to people.
In his somewhat simplistic brain, just giving people money means that they'll support you. So I think he would like it.
I think there are some real challenges to doing it. One, almost certainly would increase inflation.
So that's one. Although Kevin Hassett, who is an economist, I believe, and Trump's economic advisor, said it would not, which means he should have to turn in his, because he said, if you give people money, they'll spend it.
It's like, yeah. Yeah, that's that.
Yeah. That's that you're overheating the economy uh so that's one two mike johnson speaker of the house today said that it was essentially said it was a non-starter for him because his caucus wants to that's more spending right he wants to take those he's he's doing the math yeah to get to to get to five thousand dollars of family right and first of all they they cut out doesn't pay income taxes, which is 40% of people in the country, right? So then you're given $5,000.
And basically, it's $400 billion is 20% of the trillion that they're thinking they're going to save in spending cuts. But first of all, Doge has saved a couple billion so far.
So the idea that they're going to get from a couple billion to a trillion and then give everyone a rebate seems a little fanciful. Yeah.
But I wouldn't be surprised if at the end of the day, the tax cut package includes something that they call a doge rebate that is some number much smaller than $5,000 that Donald Trump and Elon Musk both signed together with hearts over the eyes and their names. Well, you remember this is what George W.
Bush did in the 2001 tax cut. He sent people checks.
Yeah. I mean, it's too appealing to Donald Trump and to Elon Musk to avoid.
So I could see some version of it ending up in the final, but certainly not $5,000 checks, and they're certainly not finding a trillion dollars in doge cuts that aren't incredibly

unpopular. Yeah, that's right.

Alright, one more thing before

we go to your interview with Andrew Weissman.

Right before we were recording,

Elon Musk did take the stage

at CPAC.

He didn't make a lot of news,

but the appearance was so

special that

I asked the team to put together

some highlights

so that you and I could react to them in real time for the first time.

Have you seen any of this?

I caught like one part of it maybe, but I was rushing and I just told Saul, you give us the super cut and Dan and I will react.

Yeah, I was doing the Andrew Weissman interview immediately

before we recorded and I learned about his appearance uh not long ago so cool let's do this amazing okay I wish we could we don't have any video do we that's okay Dan's gonna have to say the beginning part is amazing I'll just tell you he walks on stage and Javier Mille the uh president of Argentina

hands him a chainsaw.

And Elon Musk

is waving. So the first thing And Javier Miele, the president of Argentina, hands him a chainsaw.

And Elon Musk is waving.

So the first thing you'll hear is Elon Musk waving around the chainsaw.

And then we'll see what happens.

This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy.

Chainsaw.

In Europe, they put people in prison for memes.

Yeah, we want to go see it and just make sure somebody did a spray paint some lead or something, you know? Yeah. Like, is this real gold? Fight the bar? We're fighting the Matrix big time here.
Legalize comedy. I am become meme.
What is it like inside your mind? I mean, my mind is a storm. Yeah.
So, it's a storm. So he walked out, Dan.
He's got sunglasses on indoors and a heavy gold chain, and he's holding a chainsaw. I don't think he was okay.
He seemed really, he seemed kind of fucked up. I don't know if he was just a little punchy, a little silly, but he wasn't making much sense.
Something else that happened while he's on stage, literally while he's walking out with the chainsaw, there is a tweet from Grimes replying to Elon, and it says Grimes is a mother of some of his children. Please respond has reached out to him on his platform.

But this is what was happening

while he was out on stage

talking about how he is meme

and we should legalize comedy

and he's yelling

and he's talking about his mind

and going to the,

this whole thing now

that he and Trump have about

going to Fort Knox

to make sure the gold is there.

What the fuck is happening?

This is probably, I don't know who the right person to direct this question is, but there's obviously some weird right-wing conspiracy theory about this. You know what? I'll dig into it before next pod.
I will get the answers. Anyway, in case you were wondering who the enterprising journalist that interviewed Elon Musk was, it was a Newsmax host.
Oh, of course. Of course.
Anyway, that's Elon at CPAC. All right.
When we get back from the break, you'll hear Dan's interview with Andrew Weissman about Trump's attacks on the rule of law. One quick thing before we do that.
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Here to talk about all of the chaos happening at the Department of Justice and the potential collapse of our whole system of law and order is friend of the pod, Andrew Weissman, a former federal prosecutor, MSNBC legal contributor, and host of the excellent podcast, Maine Justice from MSNBC. Andrew, welcome back to the pod.
Yeah, we're going to do all of that in 10 minutes or less, the fall of Western democracy. That's right.
That's really the running theme of all of our podcasts this last month here. Arts as well.
All right, Andrew, let's start with the shakeups of the Department of Justice. This week, Trump ordered the firing of all the Biden-era U.S.
attorneys, saying the department is too politicized. This has caused quite an outcry and levels of concern from people out there.
Is this normal? Is it concerning to you? What do you think? So of all the things that have gone on, all the actions at the FBI, the Eric Adams case, the resignation of the chief of the criminal division in the DCU's attorney's office, all of that, as well as the statements being made by Emil Bove, and all of Pam Bondi's sort of day one memos at the bottom of the list is asking the presidential appointed U.S. attorneys to resign.
So that is fairly standard. It's not standard the way it's done.
I mean, it's usually not sort of as abrupt and it's not talking about weaponization and politicization. The U.S.
attorneys typically, typically do change over when there's a change in party control. So that's not, that's the least of it in my book.
If I remember this correctly, when Obama came in in 2009 and he did the same thing as other previous presidents have done, he did leave in place the Bush-appointed North Carolina U.S. attorney because that U.S.
attorney was in the midst of investigating Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, and he didn't want to seem like he was interfering with that. Are there any open cases or investigations here that could be affected by these firings? So the answer is yes, but we already have.
We have bigger problems. Exactly.
We have so many other things that are going on. I mean, those kinds of wonderful norms.
Let's just start with President Obama brought in the new U.S. attorneys.
And what he told them is, I know that I have nominated you, and the Senate confirms you, but you need to understand your allegiance is to the Constitution, not to me. That is, which of course is like any fourth grader would understand that that's the way it's supposed to work, except that in the world we're in, that needs to be retaught because that's the opposite of what Donald Trump, in my view, wants.
He wants it first to be, you are loyal to me. Well, that's a great segue into the Eric Adibs case.
I listened to your whole podcast on this on Made Justice, which was fabulous. And we could have a whole podcast conversation about it.
But could you at least explain, give the short version to our listeners, what happened here and why this was such an unusual decision and process from the Department of Justice? Sure. Mayor Adams is somebody who was charged during the Biden administration with five felonies.
he is a Democrat. And so any sort of claim about politicization, it's a little weird because it was a Biden administration that charged him.
He was charged about nine months before the primaries here in New York City. This is what's unusual.
The first sort of way this blew up is that the acting US attorney in the Southern District of New York that has the case sent a letter to Pam Bondi saying, I have been ordered to dismiss the case. And I've been told to dismiss the case, not because there's a factual issue, not because we've got the law wrong, but because this is going to, among other things, interfere with Eric Adams' ability to carry out the Trump administration immigration policies.
And that is a quid pro quo using from her point of view, using the the criminal case to get somebody to do the political bidding of the president.

And to make sure that he's doing that, she says, they want us to not dismiss the case for good. And that could be achieved also by the president pardoning Eric Adams, but they don't want that.
that they want to do is dismiss it without prejudice so that it's dangling over his head

like a choke chain, so that he has to do their bidding. And in fact, he has done that.
He then appeared on Fox News saying that he would allow ICE agents to come into New York City to effectuate arrests in locations. That's against the law, right? That's exactly right.
So one point I made with Jen Psaki is this, the current mayor of the city of New York is under indictment federally, currently with five felonies. He is out on bail and he is on TV saying ice agents should come in and violate local law.
So that's the state we're in. A motion has been made by the acting deputy attorney general to the judge overseeing the case to do just what he had directed the Southern District Prosecutor to do.
The reason he had to do it is, I think we're up to eight. I might have my math wrong.
I never do math in public. So it's either seven or eight.
Prosecutors, career people, some with stellar sort of conservative credentials have resigned over this, as they should, because the idea that you would use the criminal law to do your political bidding is, imagine, Dan, that the next step is, I'm going to ask a Democratic congressperson, I'm going to say, you know what, I'm willing to suspend your criminal case, but you're going to vote with the Republicans during that time. And let's see how your voting record goes.
And if you toe the line, I mean, that is a quid pro quo also. Or imagine that Eric Adams said to Emil Bovi, I'm going to give you a bag of cash to do this.
I mean, all of those things are why you're seeing so many career people say, this is not the role of the Justice Department. And just think about that awesome power that would give the president and the Department of Justice to actually bend people to their will on the pain of being criminally prosecuted and going to jail.
There was a hearing in this case this week, as you pointed out, that the deputy general had to make the argument himself because it appears like no one else would do it. What recourse does the judge have here? Could the judge deny the motion to dismiss? And if that were to happen, who would prosecute the case?

So the law is extremely favorable to the government because prosecutorial discretion is something that is recognized as almost uniquely an executive branch function. And as you point out, Dan, if the court were to say you have to go forward, the Southern District of New York, or now the Public Integrity Section, because the case was moved from the Southern District to the Public Integrity Section by the Deputy Attorney General, where, by the way, he moved it, and what happened was prosecutors resigned in the Southern District, he moved it to the Public Integrity Section, the Public Integrity Section people resigned because people are like, I didn't sign up for this.
So what can the judge do?

He has a narrow ability to say I'm denying the motion. And if necessary, he could appoint somebody to go forward.
He could decide that he's going to have the case dismissed, but with prejudice, not without prejudice, so that there isn't this sort of Damocles or choke chain component to it. He could hold a factual hearing.
That's what I would do. Because you need to know, is there a quid pro quo, and what's the nature of it and make people have to

testify under oath one of the little tidbits that i want to make sure people understand is danielle sassoon the southern district um acting u.s attorney who resigned noted in her letter that when they had a meeting with the acting deputy attorney general the the trump former trump criminal defense lawyer a New York minute ago,

that he ordered her people to stop taking notes and then confiscated them. And the acting deputy attorney general has not denied that.
He has admitted that he did it, but he says he did it to prevent leaks, that is not facially plausible to me that that's the reason, because you know how you can't prevent leaks by taking notes. People can leak without having notes of their conversation.
All it does do is eliminate the written record so that you can lie about what happened. If such a factual hearing took place, could the judge demand those notes? Yes.
Presuming they haven't found the bottom of a paper shredder somewhere in Maine Justice? So the answer is, yes, he can demand the notes. And if they have been destroyed, that is, one, it can be used by the judge as evidence that they would have been favorable to Danielle Sasson's position that there was a quid pro quo.
I mean, to me, you don't have to be a lawyer to understand that. If you confiscate the notes and shred them, you're entitled to draw inferences from the fact that you did that.
If they were helpful for you, you don't destroy them. Right, right.
You put them in a safe somewhere. Exactly.
So the other thing he could do is something that Emmett Sullivan did in the Michael Flynn case. So that is in Trump 1.0, where remarkably, this is like the only other time I've ever heard anything like this happening.
And I was a prosecutor for 21 years. The only other time I can think of a situation like this is from Trump 1.0.

And there, what the judge did is he appointed somebody to represent the public interest. He said, you know, I've got the government and the defense aligned here, but they may not be presenting everything because I have Danielle Sassoon's letter saying that's not what happened here.
So Emmett Sullivan was in that situation and he appointed a former judge, John Gleason, to represent and advocate with respect to the law and what else the judge should consider. It doesn't mean the judge had to agree with what that amicus said, but it was important to have another voice at the table when the whole idea is that there's a collusion between the government and the defense at issue.
Last question on this. I'm sort of obsessed with it, so I've gone a long time on it, but could a local prosecutor, maybe Alvin Bragg, take up this case? Absolutely.
So this is like music to my ears because I wrote a short piece for Just Security. Can I just give a big plug? Because even though I'm on the board there, the people who do the day-to-day work are so great.
Trust Security is affiliated with NYU Law School, where I teach. It's just a great place for independent, smart analysis.
It's also got a litigation tracker. So if you're trying to keep track of the, you know, I think we're up to 80 cases that have been filed since January 20th with respect to the actions of this administration, you can sort of see it there.
But I did a short piece pointing out that Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan District Attorney, definitely has the legal authority to do this. And he has the state crimes that are entirely comparable to the federal crimes.
And I sort of matched them up. And I think your listeners know that Alvin Bragg has done this before, where he has stepped into the breach, obviously, most famously with respect to the Donald Trump case when the feds balked, but he did it in the Steve Bannon case as well.
Could he get access to, I can't remember what happened in that case, whether the US Attorney's Office shared the evidence that they had gained with Alvin Bragg, but here I imagine the Pam Bondi term addresses would not do that for Bragg this time around. I agree with you that if it has not happened already, their position would be they would not want to do it.
But there's reason to think that it may have happened already. We wouldn't know it because it would be under seal.
But the prior, when Danielle Sassoon was still, you know, the acting US attorney, she could have shared that it is legal to do that under just to be nerdy federal rule Rule of Criminal Procedure 6 that governs federal

grand jury secrecy. There's a provision that permits the federal government to share that information with the state prosecutor.
And so that may have happened. And it's worth remembering that although it's not on the same charges, Alvin Bragg has a case involving public corruption of a principal advisor to Mayor Adams.

So he's already- Alvin Bragg has a case involving public corruption of a principal advisor to Mayor Adams.

So he's already in the mix.

Now, it's not the same scheme. I just want to make sure, as people know, it's not apples to apples.
But all of that suggests to me, if I were in the Southern District of New York, I would have been thinking about making sure that the evidence that I've amassed lives somewhere independent of people who want to engage in bad behavior. On a separate topic, the interim U.S.
attorney of Washington, D.C. has been suggesting that he's going to investigate and probe people who make threats.

He sent a letter to Senator Schumer about a comment Senator Schumer made four years ago about Supreme Court justices. There's been some contact with Congressman Robert Garcia's office.
Just what is your reaction to this? I know weaponization is a real term that doesn't mean anything anymore after Trump's in charge, but the sort of weaponization of a US attorney's office. So can I just say with the word weaponization, like this is, that is a real thing.
I don't want Donald Trump to be able to co-opt it to say, no, you're doing it. No, I'm doing it.
Facts matter. And what we're seeing is the actual weaponization of the Department of Justice.
And so, you know, I'm big on, if you want to use a label, where are the facts to support it? And that isn't something that they have. What, in my view, what Ed Barton is doing, I doing, he's never, as far as I know, has never been a prosecutor.
He's engaging in behavior that is completely thuggish.

and you know this is one of those things where at some point the worm will turn and he will not be in that position if If he engages in behavior that is criminal, there are sanctions for that. If he engages in behavior that violates professional norms, I know this seems small bore, but he can be sanctioned and actually disbarred.
So, one of the things that I think there's already a bar complaint against him is he is the acting U.S. attorney.
He previously was doing defense work and was actually the counsel of record on January 6th cases for those defendants. There's nothing wrong with that.
I mean, being a defense lawyer on controversial cases can be a very noble thing. He did both at the same time.
He actually sought to dismiss cases where he was the prosecutor and the defense. That is not allowed in the legal profession.
You know, you've mentioned Daniel Sassoon and these members of the public integrity section who have resigned. And resigning is a principal thing, but also maybe the other way of thinking

about it is the principal people keep leaving the department at a time when it really needs principled people. You're a longtime veteran of the Department of Justice.
What do you think they should be doing? What's the right thing to do here? What's the best way? Is there a way to protect the rule of law from within the department in the situation they're in. That is a tough and great question.

Here's, so one, I think it's a very individualized decision about sort of what you do.

But at some point, there is no choice because you are being directed to do something that

you have determined is either illegal, unethical, or just violates, you know, whatever principles you have, and you can't stomach. For instance, I don't believe in the death penalty.
If somebody directed me and said, you have to prosecute a death penalty case, I would either say you have to fire me or I'm going to resign. I think that's sort of dancing on the

head of a pin about which way you do it, the arguments either way. So, at some point, if you're in that position where you're directed to do something, you actually have no choice.
I mean, you can't go forward and look at yourself in the mirror. I think the harder situation is reportedly when

Amiel Bove was trying to find

somebody to do the evil deed

of like filing this motion. And he takes the Southern District of New York prosecutors off and then he goes to public integrity of all places, the public integrity section that is public corruption cases.
And he basically is on Zoom is like putting them in a meeting and it's basically cough up somebody or I mean, what I understand is it's cough up somebody or you're gone. That's sort of the message.
And that's where there's, I think, a healthy debate about what's the best way to deal with that? Do you cough somebody up? Do you all resign? I mean, And I think there are pros and cons. What ultimately happened was one person who was near retirement said, I'll sign it.
And essentially, he then saves what I'll call the good people because they don't then all get fired. And so, that is a positive.
And if you look at the actual filing that he signed, it's really interesting because the attorney who signed it did not make any factual representations that were false. Everything was, the acting deputy attorney general has determined the following.
The acting deputy attorney general believes this. The acting deputy attorney general has directed X.
So the person put their name on it, but was not going to represent anything as being true or his own beliefs. And one other point, when this actually went to court, you've noted that only Emile Bove came.
And I think there's a reason for that, because if the other lawyer had shown up, and this is essentially what happened in the Roger Stone case, when the same similar situation happened and career prosecutors withdrew from the case, if you have that person show up, that would have given Judge Ho the ability to say, tell me what happened. like what happened why are you here why did you sign it um what's going on and all of the facts

about what happened and what em you here? Why did you sign it? What's going on? And all of the facts about what happened and what Emil Bové had said to the group of public integrity people would have spilled out on the record. So in some ways, Emil Bové was smart to be the person to stand up.
But Dan, that's another thing that's just so unusual. Not only is it completely unheard to see career people resign.
Last time I can think of it was Trump 1.0. And prior to that, of note, it's the Saturday Night Massacre.
But the deputy attorney general does not go to court. Right.
That's right. They're busy.
Theoretically. He's been very busy, clearly.
Last question for you. These are obviously very dangerous, scary times for lots of people.
The, you know, as you point out, Trump is, and Ed Martin and Emil Bovay, these are people are weaponizing the Department of Justice. Things are going to get a lot scarier.
Kash Patel was confirmed on Thursday to be FBI director. There have been explicit threats made to you.
Steve Bannon suggests that you should go to prison for a long time. How are you processing that? What is your reaction to it? How are you thinking about the personal risk for yourself? Well, I'm in very good company.
There are lots and lots of people on that list. I still, after all this time, I'm still an institutionalist who believes that facts and law matter, since I haven't done anything wrong.
It doesn't mean they can't make my life and a lot of other people's lives, you know, hell and misery. But there are judges in this country, and there are juries in this country, and there are grand juries, and there are judges in this country and there are juries in this country and there are grand juries and there are trial juries.
And that so far is not, those institutions have not been undermined. It's a very sad state that we're sort of where we are.
But I tend to try to not sort of personalize it and just think about sort of big picture where we are. And just going back to what you were, we were talking about when you asked what should career people do? I don't really have any other choice because I'm not going to stop speaking what's on my mind and

saying what I think. And the day I stopped doing that, it's like I can't look at myself in the

mirror. And I don't think I deserve any credit whatsoever for that.
I think there are a ton of people in this country who feel exactly the same way. Andrew Weissman, thank you so much for joining us.
It's always great to talk to you. Let's talk to you.
And everyone check out his podcast, Main Justice. That's our show for today.
Love It's going to be back in the feed on Sunday with the one and only Bill Maher. Talk to you then.
Have a good weekend. Bye, everyone.
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