Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?

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Speaker 3 How many days left?

Speaker 1 So many 14 about 1499.

Speaker 3 We're in the 13s for sure.

Speaker 1 How many days?

Speaker 3 Are you asking the new China AI or the

Speaker 1 Inauguration Day 2029?

Speaker 1 Seems like that should have just been something Google gave me the answer to.

Speaker 3 Google's broken. Google.

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 1 Got to use Chat GPT for everything then.

Speaker 4 Yeah, right. You're right.

Speaker 1 You're right. I'm being stupid.
There won't be an inauguration day in 2020.

Speaker 1 1454. 454 days.

Speaker 3 I thought we were at 14.06

Speaker 3 when we talked about this.

Speaker 1 Maybe that's till election day. Oh, that's what I was.
That's till election day. 14.
1454 till inauguration day.

Speaker 3 Nothing much happens between the election and the inauguration, as we've found.

Speaker 3 this is good content we should use it for the show all right

Speaker 3 i think we're rolling

Speaker 3 Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Favreau.

Speaker 1 I'm John Levitt with Tabby Detour.

Speaker 3 On today's show, Trump is making good on his promise to go to war with the federal government.

Speaker 3 From loyalty screenings to dismantling diversity programs to pausing cancer research, we'll talk about which moves are more performative and which you should actually worry about.

Speaker 3 Democrats are finally beginning to talk and argue more openly about how to respond to all this craziness.

Speaker 3 We'll go through what we think is productive, what's a waste of time, and how the race for DNC chair plays into all of it. Some news on that front.
Stay tuned.

Speaker 3 Van Darlind, longtime immigration journalist and now a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council stops by to talk to Tommy about what's really happening with deportations and immigration policy and why it matters.

Speaker 3 But first, let's talk about the brief skirmish our president got us into with the Colombian government on Sunday, one of our biggest allies in South America.

Speaker 3 Basically, Trump tried to send a few military planes carrying deported migrants to Colombia. Colombia's leftist president, Gustavo Petro, said not so fast.

Speaker 3 His country would stop accepting these flights until the U.S. could guarantee a process where the migrants were treated with dignity.

Speaker 3 Apparently, this was all in response to Trump's use of military aircraft for these transfers.

Speaker 3 Colombia has allowed hundreds of flights carrying deported migrants on civilian aircraft under the Biden administration. Trump was not too happy about this, so he announced that the U.S.

Speaker 3 would be retaliating with a 25% tariff on all goods coming into the U.S. from Colombia, which would rise to 50% in one week.

Speaker 3 Just a reminder, we buy a lot of coffee, a lot of flowers, oil from Colombia. So that would likely mean higher prices on those things.
Petro then threatened retaliatory tariffs of 25% on U.S.

Speaker 3 goods imported to Colombia in a very long post where he also referred to Trump as a white slaver, said that he'd rather die than give in, and confessed that although he finds the U.S.

Speaker 3 a bit boring, he does like Walt Whitman, Paul Simon, and Noam Chomsky. It's an okay list.
He has a good list, yeah. Yeah, and then on Sunday evening, he did give in.

Speaker 3 White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt put out a statement saying Colombia had completely backed down, that the tariffs would be held, quote, in reserve, and added, quote, today's events make clear to the world that America is respected again.

Speaker 1 Love it or Levitt.

Speaker 3 And included.

Speaker 3 No, no, no.

Speaker 3 Get her on the show.

Speaker 4 Get her on.

Speaker 3 Included a warning to all other countries not to make the same mistake. I think the Colombians did say we did get some promises for better conditions for the migrants coming back, but.

Speaker 1 They got nothing. They got nothing.

Speaker 3 What did you guys make of this as a governing strategy, a foreign policy policy strategy, and a political strategy?

Speaker 4 I mean, it's like classic Trump, right? He's the arsonists and the firefighter. You know, it's like Petro is an interesting guy.

Speaker 4 He joined a Marxist guerrilla group as a teenager and then transitioned into politics. So he's not somebody who's scared to fight.

Speaker 3 We all did crazy things as kids.

Speaker 3 Yeah, no, we were wild.

Speaker 1 Wild group this table.

Speaker 4 A bunch of mathletes.

Speaker 3 A couple left-wing guerrillas right here.

Speaker 4 Something in my mentions I sometimes have.

Speaker 4 I do think Petro screwed up here. He gave Trump a win.
He overreacted. I think he claims that there was a video.

Speaker 3 Do you think he should have named Chomsky?

Speaker 4 Well, there was a deportation flight to Brazil that went viral on social media where people were handcuffed. And then there was the news that the U.S.

Speaker 4 is going to use military aircraft to fly these deportation flights.

Speaker 4 And I think a couple of Latin America experts I talked to think that Petro decided he could pick a fight here and it would help him politically.

Speaker 4 And then when people in Colombia realized that this might mean economic damage from tariffs or no visas for them to travel to the U.S.,

Speaker 4 they decided that was way worse. And he backtracked very, very quickly.

Speaker 4 But I do think broadly from Trump, like we're going to see a lot of this, picking fights with Democrats or leftists on immigration, bullying small countries to get little wins, and then acting like that wasn't a strategy available to every U.S.

Speaker 4 president ever, just to be a dick to Colombia.

Speaker 4 But ultimately, I think it's counterproductive and it raises questions about the U.S. as a long-term ally.
The Chinese are already trying to capitalize on it. So it's just stupid.

Speaker 1 Nerd shit from Tommy. Oh, they're going to capitalize it.
This was Trump at his bet. No.

Speaker 1 Like when I saw it over, when I saw it unfolding, when I saw it unfolding, what my honest first thought was, it was like, this couldn't have been scripted better for Trump if Trump hadn't paid this guy in Trump coins.

Speaker 3 I thought that too. At the White House, they must have been like, are you fucking kidding me? This is awesome.

Speaker 1 Because trade wars, tariffs, a lot of what Trump is promising, it's much easier to promise as a candidate because in reality, there are terrible, terrible trade-offs.

Speaker 1 And by the way, there are also terrible trade-offs in having a capricious American president, like upending our reputation as a stable and safe ally.

Speaker 1 Like there is incredible value for Americans day to day in having a president that is seen as a reliable partner.

Speaker 1 Because yes, it may mean there are times where you have to compromise and give with your partners, but you're a trading partner they can count on. You're a country they can count on.

Speaker 1 But he doesn't give a shit about any of that. So he gets this incredible, easy win, right?

Speaker 1 Like, obviously, like, you know, I saw people on social media be like, you know, our coffee's going to be more expensive. But like, this is bullying.

Speaker 1 You can bully a small country because they need us more than we need them. He knew that from the jump.
This guy caves. It's just another great news cycle for Donald Trump.

Speaker 3 I did see some people. on social media, various social media platforms, like cheering on the Colombian president and quoting from his statement and being like,

Speaker 3 oh,

Speaker 3 he's know throwing down with Trump and look at this. I'm here for this.
This is great. And it's like, guys, let's not, this is not the way to, this is not the way to respond to this.

Speaker 3 I do want to talk about it in the context of like Trump using tariffs as a threat to get what he wants from other countries, which,

Speaker 3 you know, this situation made me realize, oh, this is why he loves tariffs so much, because yeah, it's leverage and he thinks he's going to, this is how he's going to get his foreign policy objectives achieved.

Speaker 3 According to Trump advisors who spoke to the Wall Street Journal, Trump is, quote, very serious about hitting Mexico and Canada with 25% tariffs this Saturday, February 1st, even before any negotiations.

Speaker 3 Just wants to hit him with the tariffs, just to prove that he's not bluffing, apparently.

Speaker 3 The journal also reports that Mexico and Canada, quote, are quietly expressing confusion and bewilderment because they aren't even sure what Trump wants.

Speaker 3 What do you think's going on there?

Speaker 1 Have you ever seen the movie Marathon Man?

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 1 In the movie Marathon, Man, an evil Nazi dentist kidnaps Dustin Hoffman to demand answers. And the movie is chilling and terrifying because Dustin Hoffman actually genuinely does not have the answers.

Speaker 1 He thinks he's part of this plot, but he's not.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 that's what I thought about. That's what happened to Canada?

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's currently what's happening to Canada.

Speaker 4 No, Dustin Trudeau.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Dustin Hoffman could be Trudeau in the movie.

Speaker 4 You see it? Yeah, a little short.

Speaker 3 Grow your hair out. Get some whiffs.
I think it looks enough like Castro. Yeah, you know, like Castro.

Speaker 4 The journal story mentions also that Canada has already pledged to spend nearly a billion dollars to harden its southern border with us, which is one of Trump's big demands.

Speaker 4 And then Claudia Shanebaum, the new president of Mexico, has cracked down on migration through Mexico to our southern border and done a bunch of high-profile drug seizures.

Speaker 4 So Trump is getting what he wants from both of these presidents already, and I guess, and he's just going to tariff them as a negotiating position.

Speaker 4 I guess my reactions to this were: one, we probably shouldn't underestimate that there's a bunch of people in the White House that are bullies and assholes and want to wield power for the sake of just showing that they can.

Speaker 4 And that could be what's happening here. How else would you explain

Speaker 4 not telling someone what you want from them before you punish a sovereign country?

Speaker 4 I also think it sounds like Trump is going to try to renegotiate the USMCA agreement, which was what they called the renegotiated NAFTA.

Speaker 1 Yeah, which is just

Speaker 3 renegotiated by a horrible president. Who let that guy renegotiate?

Speaker 3 Donald Trump's Trump stands for the family.

Speaker 4 And I think they're mad about it because they feel like, I don't think Jared Kushner got that much out of that deal.

Speaker 4 And then finally, it's probably not a coincidence that we're talking about Trump messing with leftist and liberal governments in Colombia, Mexico, and Canada.

Speaker 4 In Canada in particular, Trump is trying to soften up the Liberal Party as much as he can because they have an election.

Speaker 1 My serious reaction to all this is like, yeah, it's probably be good if the Canadians knew what we wanted. It would also be good if America knew what we wanted as well.

Speaker 1 Because the question I have around what Trump has promised to do, we'll talk about it later.

Speaker 1 Like, there's a lot of places where Trump has hit the ground and just started putting in place big big policy changes, but actually hasn't really done that on tariffs.

Speaker 1 He's promising an announcement on tariffs as soon as February 1, and he's threatening big tariffs on China, on Mexico, on Canada, on Russia.

Speaker 1 And then you dig into it, and it's like, well, you want to support American car manufacturing. One problem with that is a lot of parts

Speaker 1 that are involved in manufacturing cars in America come from Canada and come from Mexico. How will that impact our ability to make cars in the United States?

Speaker 1 There are very real implications, and the details really matter, and we don't have any of them.

Speaker 1 And so the broader question is, is he going to whatever he announces on February 1st, if he announces anything at all, is it a big show with targeted tariffs, more like what we saw in the first term?

Speaker 1 Or is he serious? And I just think we don't know.

Speaker 3 My reaction is I wonder what's going to happen when someone calls his bluff, says like, all right, let's do it. You're like, tariff us, and then we're going to do retaliatory tariffs.

Speaker 3 And Trump's bet is the political pain that he will face here from all of us having to pay higher prices because that's who will pay for a trade war, us, will be not as great as the political pain faced by the other leaders at home for the higher prices and the economic damage that they'll have to deal with from the trade war.

Speaker 3 And that maybe the political pain here that he'll face will be short-lived because eventually those other countries will give in because they're probably smaller countries or at least have a smaller economy because most countries in the world do, right?

Speaker 3 Or the US.

Speaker 4 They just wanted to see him fight. They don't necessarily care about the impact.

Speaker 1 It's also given to what, right? Like this is just like tariff, taking off tariffs that are not.

Speaker 3 It's a weird thing he asks for, right? Like who knows what he's going to ask for, but I think he just, it's just a show, it's a show of strength.

Speaker 3 But I do think like, I think at some point when you start pushing, you know, all of these allies and countries around, you start like beating the shit out of them on tariffs, like you're going to push them into the arms of China, into the arms of like other countries.

Speaker 3 Like, it just, at some point, losing a bunch of allies is going to come back to bite you in the ass.

Speaker 3 It is the type of thing for Trump that, like, yeah, maybe not short term, short term, may everyone be like, oh, this is funny. He, like, won a new cycle against Colombia, right?

Speaker 3 But, like, you know, at some point, you're going to need those allies.

Speaker 4 You're beating up Colombia. You're going to try to annex Panama.
You're going to try to steal Greenland. I mean, people are going to notice this stuff.

Speaker 3 They don't love it. You know who's going to notice it? The Chinese.

Speaker 1 And then I just, long term, my question through all this is: how bad do the impacts of what Trump is doing on America have to be to overcome the advantages he has in how news is distributed and received, right?

Speaker 1 And how much his team will be on his side to argue that either things aren't happening or they're not his fault or whatever it may be.

Speaker 3 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I mean, that's going to be limited by people paying higher prices, right?

Speaker 3 If suddenly this gets out of control with one of these countries and people start paying a lot more for whatever good

Speaker 3 is affected by the tariff, then that's going to then, you know, it doesn't really ⁇ it matters less what the the media environment is.

Speaker 1 Right. And, you know, as we just found out over the last four years.
And beyond and beyond tariffs, right? Like, you know, everyone's, everyone's like, how's this going to help the price of eggs?

Speaker 1 They're killing tens of millions of chickens now. That's hard.
Like, like, there's a real, there's a genuine bird flu crisis unfolding that is going to affect prices.

Speaker 1 And like, Donald Trump is president. He owns these things.

Speaker 3 Yeah, well, we also pulled out of the World Health Organization and can't even

Speaker 3 work with the World Health Organization anymore. So one of the things that we're not going to get anymore is alerts from around the world about the developing avian flu pandemic in other countries.

Speaker 3 Well, the good news is

Speaker 3 we're the epicenter. Yeah, well, as it mutates, that's where

Speaker 3 you get memos from other countries and you get alerts, and we're not going to get those anymore.

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Speaker 3 Trump's also fighting a war at home, mostly against the government he now leads.

Speaker 3 He capped off his first week in office by meeting with hurricane survivors in North Carolina and inspecting the fire damage in California, a trip where he floated eliminating FEMA, the federal emergency management agency.

Speaker 3 On Saturday, he held a thank you rally in Las Vegas where he congratulated himself and the MAGA faithful on everything they were accomplishing together, including notably this.

Speaker 7 I signed an order that will end all of the lawless diversity, equity, and inclusion nonsense

Speaker 7 all across the government and the private sector. We abolished 60 years of prejudice and hatred with the signing of one order, all approved by the United States Supreme Court.

Speaker 7 We're allowed to do it because we are now in a merit-based world. We're a merit-based country.

Speaker 3 Just feels so merit-based.

Speaker 1 I feel it every day. I just see the press releases come out of this White House and I think best of the fucking best.

Speaker 3 You know?

Speaker 1 At the keyboards.

Speaker 3 All those billionaires sitting behind them, all merit-based.

Speaker 3 So that seems to be a reference to both the Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action in 2023 in college admissions and Trump's promise to eradicate diversity, equity, inclusion programs, also known as DEI, wherever they exist, but especially in the federal government.

Speaker 3 On Monday, Trump signed more of these anti-DEI executive orders, this time targeted at the military, which is now led by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who squeaked by in a Senate vote where J.D.

Speaker 3 Vance had to break the tie on Friday night. Those EOs included one that looks like it will ban transgender Americans from serving in the military based on military readiness.

Speaker 3 This is according to the New York Post. Dan and I went through some of the executive orders from the first week on Friday show, but there's some other moves we should mention.

Speaker 3 On Friday night, Trump also fired more than a dozen inspectors general. Those are independent watchdogs whose job it is to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in government agencies.

Speaker 3 He has frozen most foreign aid, even aid in the process of being handed out, with the notable exception of military aid to Israel and Egypt.

Speaker 3 He also said of Gaza that we should, quote, clean out the whole thing and have Gazans move to Egypt and Jordan.

Speaker 3 Trump also put a pause on all travel communication and meetings at the National Institutes of Health, including grant review panels that greenlight funding for critical research into cancer and deadly diseases.

Speaker 3 Though apparently the acting NIH director sent an email today and a memo trying to clear things up, said that clinical trials are still ongoing and that the restrictions don't apply to clinical trial participants or purchasing supplies for ongoing research.

Speaker 3 But there's some confusion among researchers over what that means. So there's a lot of just mayhem going on at the NIH.
Was this incompetence? Were they trying to put a pause on this?

Speaker 3 No one knows, but I guess it was a really rough week for NIH researchers who were doing everything from, you know, looking into cancer research and all kinds of other diseases, and they had to sort of pause everything during this chaos.

Speaker 3 And the CDC, as I just mentioned, has also been ordered to stop working with the World Health Organization, which we pulled out of thanks to Donald Trump.

Speaker 3 Trump also fired or reassigned hundreds of government officials and is making others take MAGA loyalty tests in order to keep their jobs.

Speaker 3 A bunch of people who did not pass the loyalty test, all of the people involved in investigating him for both January 6th and the classified documents case

Speaker 3 in the Department of Justice. They were all fired just today on Monday.

Speaker 1 You think it would be that hard to just make it through one episode of Gutfeld?

Speaker 3 Is that the test?

Speaker 4 Your eyes just prior open like clockwork warnings.

Speaker 3 Exactly. Exactly.
Tommy passed the loyalty test

Speaker 3 by sitting through a Jesse Waters interview. Okay.

Speaker 1 That bone structure.

Speaker 4 Me and Jesse Waters.

Speaker 1 He's a hexet guy. This guy.

Speaker 3 Get on on that team. You can sneak Tommy in.

Speaker 3 Where to begin? What's most alarming to you guys of all that?

Speaker 1 Well, we're ranking. We're choosing our favorites.

Speaker 3 Just something that stuck out at you.

Speaker 3 When you read it all, something was like,

Speaker 1 so when you look at the, there's a great episode of Strict Scrutiny about some of these orders that you should listen to. But what jumped out at me and what they

Speaker 3 talked about as well is

Speaker 1 they're calling it DI. It's obviously going much further than that.
People have talked about that.

Speaker 1 It's going deep into just the rules that have been in place since Lyndon Johnson to protect basic civil rights. It's going after civil rights rules.

Speaker 3 There's an EO that was about federal contracting and making sure there's no discrimination

Speaker 3 in federal contracting that was signed by Lyndon Johnson, that was part of the Equal Opportunity Employment Act.

Speaker 1 But what really jumped out is the ways in which it is empowering government agencies to, and by the way, private citizens, to go after private companies that may have DEI policies.

Speaker 1 Because if you're going to become a federal contractor, you have to assent to

Speaker 1 certain statements in these EOs that could make you liable. And it's going to make a lot of these companies afraid that their diversity policies run afoul of this.
They're a government contractor.

Speaker 1 A private citizen can claim this is an abuse of the federal contracting system, which they're legally allowed to do. And it's another example of trying to kind of,

Speaker 1 it's a part of an ideological trend, right? It goes, it has to do with the same as like the don't say gay bill in Florida, which is you empower private citizens to be a watchdog, and you basically

Speaker 1 try to intimidate private individuals, private companies, for fear of being sued and dragged into courts.

Speaker 1 The bounty law in Texas, there's just other examples of this, and they're implementing that now in these federal contracting rules.

Speaker 3 I think why the Supreme Court affirmative action ruling comes into play here, too, is that some of these companies that are now sort of rolling back DEI programs are and have been concerned for a little while since that Supreme, since the Supreme Court decision, which was about universities and colleges and and an admissions process, that maybe their policies run afoul of the Supreme Court decision.

Speaker 3 And now Trump doing this only strengthens that.

Speaker 4 Did you see the Trump team set up like an email account where you can snitch on whatever entities, companies, whatever

Speaker 4 promoting DEI, but now it's getting mass spammed with just nonsense and bullshit?

Speaker 4 Love it. Yeah, that's great.

Speaker 3 DEIA truth at OPM.

Speaker 3 A is accessibility as well. It's DEI.
It'd be a real shame for you.

Speaker 1 disabled workers catches fucking strays.

Speaker 3 Jesus.

Speaker 3 It's also, it's like you have to,

Speaker 3 they are now, a lot of people on the right, including a lot of people in the Trump administration, you know, they've started to like,

Speaker 3 it's a slippery slope on how they're defining DEI now. Now it's like, oh, that the head of the Coast Guard is a woman? She's too focused on DEI.
Get her out of there.

Speaker 1 Well, they hated that. They hated that California lesbian fire chief until she started making fun of Mayor Bass, and then they were like, we're back in.
That's an amazing thing.

Speaker 3 We're back in. Stop.

Speaker 1 Don't bring up the lesbian fire chiefs. That's something we agree with.
So everybody chill out.

Speaker 4 The U.S. military, though, is a good example of an organization that needs an effective DEI program because if you look at across the U.S.

Speaker 4 military, the proportion of black service members, it's well overrepresents the total U.S.

Speaker 4 population, but they are wildly underrepresented at the general officer level, especially at like the three-star, four-star level. It's extremely white and extremely male at the very top.

Speaker 4 And that's because of overt racism in some cases or just like structural problems or cultural challenges in other cases and should be fixed and could be fixed.

Speaker 4 But like Tom Cotton is mad that an Army unit had to read a Robin DiAngelo book one time and they are just like throwing out the entire program.

Speaker 4 And the result is we're not allowed to teach people about the Tuskegee Airmen anymore for like 24 hours. It's just a stupid overreach.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, maybe no more Robin D'Angelo books is probably.

Speaker 1 It's just like, it's like, look, this is, but this is, throw them at the enemy.

Speaker 3 It is clear that in workplaces, in government,

Speaker 3 that

Speaker 3 people of color and women have not been represented because of historic racism and structural inequality, right, that we have faced for decades and decades.

Speaker 3 And then I think what happened is a lot of these DEI programs not only sort of focused on making sure that there were diverse workforces and that we're focusing on diversity in hiring and pay and promotion, but also these like unconscious bias training programs, which I think is what rubbed quite a few people the wrong way who aren't just MAGA.

Speaker 4 For sure. It's just the proportion of time spent on those programs in the the U.S.
military compared to everything else they're doing is zero. And this is just a wild overreach.

Speaker 3 No, and that's stupid. Well, that's what Chris Ruffo and all those assholes, they decided to highlight all that stuff.

Speaker 3 And so that made people think the DEI is that and not just trying to have equitable workforces, which we've wanted to have for a long, long time and have it. You see this, right? Like

Speaker 1 they ban DEI, then all of a sudden the Tuskegee Airmen are out of some

Speaker 3 training. Air Force training.
And now they're going to be a lot more likely.

Speaker 3 We should explain that a little bit because you just kind of mentioned it quickly, but it's the Tuskegee Airmen.

Speaker 3 Because of the just, let's eliminate all DEI, there was a directive sent out that

Speaker 3 people in the military could no longer even learn about the Tuskegee Airmen or other groups of underrepresented people who have done

Speaker 3 heroic things in the military. World War II heroes.
World War II heroes, right? There's also the women Air Force service pilots or the WASPs. And that video was gone for all that.

Speaker 3 It was gone for a while, too and then after like 24 hours everyone was like oh i guess i guess that's okay to teach i guess we could bring that back yeah first of all when i saw wasps was like they've banned teaching about wasps like i thought those weren't minorities i thought this is america you can't teach about tommy finally tomy said

Speaker 1 tommy's taken out of the training video but talking about catching strays over and over again like you see these executive orders are political documents they are not written to govern so you have this what so they put out this this

Speaker 1 overreaching rule and nobody really knows exactly how how to implement it. They're afraid of getting on the wrong side and getting drawn into Trump's evil eye.

Speaker 1 You see this rule about nobody at the NIH being allowed to communicate. Like, does that mean we can't pay our bills? Does that mean we have to stop research? Like, no, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 1 And it's all kind of now, is it intended to make people feel intimidated and unsure? Is it just incompetence? It doesn't really matter. It shows a lack of care.
It's a fecklessness.

Speaker 3 Well, and the but importantly, I think the effect is that it's going to make people feel like here's the long-term problem.

Speaker 3 a it may be invisible to most Americans in the short term but long term this is going to bite us in the ass because who's going to want to work in government now who's going to want to work in the federal government and not like women are going to feel like they they're not included people of color are going to feel like they're not included you know black people latino people like this is going to go but also like there are people at every level of the federal government who are being fired right now who are experts in their field but because they're not maga loyalists they can't work in the federal government who's going to want to work at the national institute of health like a lot of these people they can go get private sector jobs, pay them a lot of money.

Speaker 3 Like, who's going to work? We're going to hollow out the federal government now, which a lot of, you know, I realize a lot of voters think, eh, federal government, what does it do for me?

Speaker 3 It's big and bloated and wasteful and blah, blah, blah. These are people who are like funding.
These are people who are doing like important research, medical research.

Speaker 3 These are people at the lawyers at the Department of Justice.

Speaker 3 There's a program where people out of law school were getting like really good law school students in their third year at law school, got all these, they had got grants and they had jobs in the Department of Justice, and they just froze all of those jobs and like all those people are out of work now.

Speaker 1 I saw a doctor talking about this on social media and I found it really

Speaker 1 like heartbreaking, which he said,

Speaker 1 you know, if you have

Speaker 1 a member of your family who has a very serious illness that they may not survive and you're at the doctor's office and you're saying, you have to try something, you have to try something.

Speaker 1 Isn't there anything you can do? And there's like the anything you can do, the last-ditch thing you can try are the kinds of research that happen at the National Institutes of Health.

Speaker 1 And then you, and like Trump doesn't care about that. These people don't care about that.
They just want to destroy these institutions.

Speaker 1 Like even the trans ban, like I remember when the first trans ban for military service went out. And at the time, it just talks about how much things have changed.

Speaker 1 Everyone was outraged in part because it was done so haphazardly. It was just issued.
It wasn't clear how it was going to be implemented. It wasn't sure what it would mean for current service members.

Speaker 1 You look at this document that they've put out, and it's still not clear. what they're talking about, right?

Speaker 1 Because they say, oh, the military will no longer, for readiness, you can't have people who are in transition. And oh, by the way, you can't use the pronouns of your choice.

Speaker 1 But what about service members who transitioned long ago and have been serving their country with distinction this entire time?

Speaker 1 Is it because they're using the wrong pronouns? What if they use the pronouns that you demand for them? Are they allowed to stay? How does this get implemented? They don't care.

Speaker 1 They don't care what this does because they don't care about service. They don't care about these basic values.

Speaker 1 And so they throw us all, they throw these soldiers to the wolves because they're ideologically inconvenient.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's just broad. They're just sweeping everything off the table.
They're freezing all foreign aid except for things that directly support Israel's security.

Speaker 4 Well, that means that, you know, the Times had a piece over the weekend about how

Speaker 4 the State Department office that funds the cleanup of unexploded bombs all over the world now has to cease operations.

Speaker 4 So what happens usually when you have a cluster munition and 10% of it doesn't go off, it's called a dud. They just sit around and you know who finds them? Little kids.

Speaker 4 And they pick them up and they fucking play with them because they look interesting and they blow off their arm. And that's who's going to get hurt by these programs.

Speaker 4 And it's like, why did we need to pause on the cleanup of unexploded ordnance? Like, there's no ideological viewpoint on that. It's crazy.

Speaker 3 How about everything we're funding overseas for like helping with disease and HIV and all this kind of, like, oh, yeah, the PEP far is just

Speaker 3 frozen. Just frozen.

Speaker 4 And one of the most successful Republican initiatives ever.

Speaker 3 Who knows? You know, it's early and maybe this all gets started back up and the pause ends in like a couple of weeks. But what was this for? Right?

Speaker 3 We're just going to hurt a bunch of people in the meantime?

Speaker 4 No, it was, oh, God, God, I forget what it was. Some U.S.

Speaker 4 senator found out that like some tiny fraction of money, like six grand out of like tens of billions of dollars was used for abortion services.

Speaker 4 And I think that led them to just unravel the entire program.

Speaker 3 It's crazy. Apparently they just put all the top officials at USAID on leave.
Just got rid of all of them, like career people,

Speaker 3 not even political appointees.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it was Jim Risch of Idaho figured out that something like $4,100

Speaker 4 had been spent by the government in Mozambique on abortions. That money was all refunded, but they've put the entire PEPFAR program in jeopardy.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so we were going to pick out the worst, but it's pretty much all of them.

Speaker 3 It's pretty bad. It's pretty bad, the war on the government.
And

Speaker 3 it's so frustrating and infuriating because I do think this is a hard one to break through to most people, right?

Speaker 3 Like, you know, in the what's going to be most effective to talk about politically pile, right?

Speaker 3 Like his war on the federal government, I don't think is going to be high up there, but it is extremely damaging. And again, next time there's a pandemic, what's going to happen?

Speaker 3 What's going to happen? Yeah, I love that. Or some other crisis or some other disaster where we need the federal government to protect Americans.

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Speaker 3 Apparently, there is another political party in this country. They're known as the Democrats.
Democrats. That's right.

Speaker 1 I've never heard it said.

Speaker 3 Though

Speaker 3 we haven't heard much from them lately. Politico had a good piece about how much more low-key the resistance to Trump is this time around.

Speaker 3 It noted that almost none of the top early contenders for the 2028 Democratic nomination had put out statements about the January 6th pardons or Elon Musk's salute, whatever it was.

Speaker 3 Lots of quotes in the story, mostly from anonymous strategists, great, about how Democrats are, quote, rudderless and over-learning their lessons.

Speaker 3 In general, there is still a lot of backward-looking recriminations about what we did wrong in last year's election, as evidenced by this viral clip of Stephen A. Smith on Bill Maher the other night.

Speaker 3 Let's listen.

Speaker 8 Here's the deal. The man was impeached twice.
He was convicted on 34 felony counts. And the American people still said

Speaker 8 he's closer to normal. than what we see.
Exactly.

Speaker 8 That's what they're saying. He's closer to normal.
Why?

Speaker 8 Because something that pertains, when you you talk about the transgender community, for example, and you're talking about issues that pertain to less than 1% of the population, the Democratic Party came across as if that was a priority more so than the other issues.

Speaker 8 And so he comes into office. Now you're talking about

Speaker 8 childbirth citizenship and what have you. He knows that's not going to pass the mustard, but he knows that he made that promise.

Speaker 8 So when he shows up week one on Capitol Hill and he says, this is what we're going to do through an executive order, even though it's going to be shot down through the courts and what have you.

Speaker 8 He's saying, I kept my promise. A lot of other things that he's going to point to that he's going to try to do, I kept my promise.

Speaker 8 Then you turn around and you look at the left and you say, what promises did you keep? Now, you might know the answer to that. I'm certainly not questioning your knowledge about that at all.

Speaker 8 What I'm saying is, what resonated with the voter?

Speaker 8 What voter out there can look at the Democratic Party at this moment in time and say, there's a voice for us, somebody that speaks for us, that goes up on Capitol Hill and fights the fights that we want them fighting on our behalf.

Speaker 8 They didn't do that. And that's why they're behind the home.
And that man is back into the White House. And they want to sit up there and tell you, look at the the networks right now.

Speaker 8 They're talking about him. Look at this.
This is the latest. Look at him.
Here he goes again. Well, you know what here he goes again means? He's doing what he said he was going to do.

Speaker 8 He promised you he was going to do these things. And he walked into office week one and that's exactly what he's doing.
And he's saying, y'all do something about it.

Speaker 8 And when you try to do something about it, he's going to say, look at them now. Now they're concerned about these issues.
Were they talking about that during the campaign? Hell no. That's really it.

Speaker 3 So, what did you guys think of Stephen A's argument there?

Speaker 4 I get why this went viral.

Speaker 4 I get that it resonates on an emotional level for some people because we're all mad at Democrats because we got our asses kicked and we're mad about the election and we're mad about Joe Biden.

Speaker 4 But he's just so wrong on so many different levels. I mean, Republicans,

Speaker 4 Democrats didn't make the whole election about trans rights. Republicans ran tens of millions of dollars of attack ads on TV attacking Kamala Harris on this issue.
That's why it was salient.

Speaker 4 And then Stephen A. Just because of what she said

Speaker 4 in 2019, not in 2024.

Speaker 4 And then Stephen A's definition of Trump keeping his promise is putting forward an executive order on birthright citizenship that he knows will get struck down in court.

Speaker 4 That is not how Joe Biden was judged.

Speaker 4 Like when Biden put forward a student loan forgiveness plan and it got struck down by a Republican Supreme Court, everyone got mad at Joe Biden and said he was feckless.

Speaker 4 Like I'm not here to make excuses for Democrats or Biden or Harris or say the campaign was good, but it's like it's a 50-50 electorate. There was an anti-incumbent wave.

Speaker 4 Trump is not delivering for the American people in some profound way right now.

Speaker 4 It's just all vibes.

Speaker 4 And like, I get the vibes and the anger driving them, but it's just like, he's like, he points to Rokana is like, you might know all the details of the things Joe Biden promised and did deliver on.

Speaker 4 I didn't bother to Google them. And it's just like, come on, man.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 1 it's so frustrating, right? Because you see that clip and you're like, well, let's break it down, right? Let's explain all the ways that this is wrong, right?

Speaker 1 All the ways in which actually Joe Biden delivered on a lot of his promises. And

Speaker 1 Donald Trump is going to and has all Donald Trump failed in his first term on virtually every promise that he made other than cutting taxes for the richest people.

Speaker 1 That Joe Biden had more deportations while he was president than Donald Trump had while he was president, right? There's a lot of ways to break it down.

Speaker 1 What was interesting to me about the clip is like you see like a kind of conventional wisdom kind of taking hold in real time. And you see like this kind of, this, like Bill Maher says exactly.

Speaker 1 And the whole audience. applauds.

Speaker 1 And I'm trying to think like, if Kamala Harris had won, like, what is the list of big executive orders she could have signed in the first day that would have had like rapturous applause?

Speaker 1 It's like, she's fucking doing it. She's delivering on what she said she's going to do.
It's happening. It's happening.

Speaker 1 And, like, that's not to say that, like, that part of that is just the failures of incumbency, right?

Speaker 3 Like, well, I was going to say, it would feel different because she would have taken office not after four years of the other party.

Speaker 4 You just unravel what the other guy just did. That's what all these EOs are.

Speaker 3 And there was a little bit of that when Biden won, right?

Speaker 3 And then remember the first week, Biden got away from the women. Back in Paris.

Speaker 3 Oh, boy, did that make a difference. dude?

Speaker 3 No fires.

Speaker 1 But the reason I bring that up is only to say, like, yes, it is different when you're trying to run to replace someone in your own party versus replace someone in the opposite party.

Speaker 1 But like, I think back to 2006, and I remember all the Democrats campaigning for the House, and they had their like checklist of the things that they were going to do if they won and the things that were going to stop it.

Speaker 1 They did the anti-corruption measures, raising the minimum wage. There's a whole list of simple to understand policies.

Speaker 1 And like, forget, yes, look, we asked, we have asked and answered, we paid in blood for Joe Biden giving up the the bully pulpit. Like, yes.

Speaker 1 Now we're talking about all these Democrats kind of overthinking, like, how are we going to respond to this?

Speaker 1 Let's get out the abacus and like move the, move the, move the, uh, move the beads around to figure out the perfect response.

Speaker 1 And I can't possibly start speaking until I know exactly what my overall vision is for the future of the country. And it's like, isn't, is that the lesson you draw from the last four years?

Speaker 1 Get the fuck out there. Get out there.
Start responding. Tell the truth.
How about that? Like, you're asked about what you think about the January 6th pardons. Tell us what you think of them.

Speaker 1 You're worried about what's happening at the National Institutes of Health. Tell us what you're you're thinking about it.

Speaker 1 You don't leave the field and build some playbook for how to respond and defeat Donald Trump. You get out there and you start doing it.
You see what works. You see what doesn't.

Speaker 1 Like that whole piece was just a bunch of people kind of trying to like, we're going to crack the code finally at last. Oh, the last code.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the political piece was just all about how we're going to crack this fucking code. And it's like, guys, everybody's applauding Stephen A.

Speaker 1 Smith for this, like, this, this rant of like basically easy to refute nonsense. Where are we?

Speaker 3 Here's what I found frustrating about the Stephen A. Smith thing:

Speaker 3 it

Speaker 3 sort of pulls you in and your first instinct is to tick off why all the reasons it's wrong, right? Like you were because you want to defend, right?

Speaker 3 And then suddenly you find yourself like defending Joe Biden's record for four years, which by the way, there was a lot of good things. We've said this.
And also saying things like, guess what?

Speaker 3 Joe Biden didn't really, couldn't really control inflation, right?

Speaker 3 That was, that was, you know, and also Republicans picked out a bunch of culture and identity issues that, yes, Democrats gave them some ammo on, but they get more attention in this information environment, culture and identity issues, than the fights that we want to pick as Democrats, right?

Speaker 3 So you can explain away why this happened. And yet that perception is real about the party.
And so you don't want to just be like running against the perception that's there.

Speaker 3 And so like, I don't know. All you can say to Stephen A.
Simpson is like, you know what? Yeah, we want, people want Democrats. They don't, people don't want excuses.

Speaker 3 They want politicians who are going to actually go out there and fight for them and like and give a damn and look look like they give a shit and not look like they are reading I said this on friday's pause dan's line but like reading the fucking stage directions yeah already i feel like i feel like sometimes giving messaging advice to democrats is like giving fucking kids matches you know it's like you say something about like inflation and the cost of living and suddenly they're all out there being like that's not going to do anything to lower the price of eggs it's like come on make it fucking believable guys it's not believable right now no one is out there thinking that donald trump is going to lower the price of eggs or lower the cost of everything after a fucking week.

Speaker 4 I think that what what was annoying about some of the statements you guys talked about was, you're right, you don't have to combine the cost of eggs and the January 6th pardons.

Speaker 4 It's bad to pardon insurrectionists that beat up cops.

Speaker 4 What I think I found so annoying about Stephen A.'s kind of the end of his rant is he was criticizing Democrats for criticizing Trump or trying to block Trump or being an opposition party.

Speaker 4 And it's like in 2008, when Barack Obama won 365 electoral votes, did the Republicans just like lay down arms and give up? No, they filibustered every single thing we did.

Speaker 4 That's the role of an opposition party. You're going to disagree with the president and you're going to talk about it.
And

Speaker 4 he like makes them sound like they're just out there carping when the reality is that they're not really actually saying much.

Speaker 3 Saying anything, yeah.

Speaker 1 Trans issues keep coming up and then people are like, it's 1% of the population. It's 1% of the population.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's a tiny group of people

Speaker 1 that are scared to go to the bathroom at the airport. And

Speaker 1 like

Speaker 1 the Republicans have made trans issues the center of our politics. But I will say, like,

Speaker 1 you know, John made the point, like, like, well, it's based on something she said in 2019, but I do think it's more than that. And it is a larger credibility issue, right?

Speaker 1 Like, if Democrats had more credibility broadly with the American people on the big issues, the economy, on like the cost of living, on education, on healthcare, whatever it is, if Democrats had earned credibility, if they were seen as fighters, as champions for the people we need to be fighters and champions for, there would be more space to say, and you know what?

Speaker 1 We may not agree on trans issues. You may not be where I'm at yet, but I'm going to fight for trans people every goddamn day.
And this has been the case for decades.

Speaker 3 This used to be the case with abortion, right? When abortion was not, when the pro-choice position was not as popular as it is now.

Speaker 3 And there were Democrats who would be in red or rural districts, and they'd say to Sherrod Brown always would tell stories like this. He would tell you about guns, right?

Speaker 3 He has a story in Ohio where he was talking to these people and they're like, you know, well, I don't like your position on guns, right?

Speaker 3 I think, you know, I want to keep my gun, but I like you because you're for me and you've been fighting like hell for me, you know? And so, like, you're absolutely right about that.

Speaker 3 It's like right now, it is overthinking every single thing.

Speaker 1 And I want to just, and I think like sometimes we, we, you know, let's, let's do what we say people should do, which is like, we're like, let's explain why that's bad, right?

Speaker 1 Like we say that all the time. Oh, you sound like you're reading from a message alchemy.
You sound like you're reading from a message. Like, why is that so bad?

Speaker 1 Well, it's because if people don't believe you when you are talking about the economy or issues they really care about, because you sound like you're reading from a script.

Speaker 1 You sound like you sound like a normal politician. They're not going to come along with you when you disagree.
They're not going to trust you when you see things a different way.

Speaker 3 I also think that part of the whole price of eggs thing is Democrats aren't saying what like we want Trump to do or what we would do.

Speaker 3 And when they spent four years attacking Joe Biden for all kinds of bullshit, they would say things that I didn't believe. Like Trump would say, I'm going to do tariffs and that's going to fix theirs.

Speaker 3 I'm going to drill, drill, drill.

Speaker 3 We cannot go around for the next year just saying that did not lower the price of eggs. That is not fucking sufficient.
And you know why it's not sufficient?

Speaker 3 Because people aren't going to believe it because it's not believable to just go around saying that all the time. Like,

Speaker 3 have a story you tell about what working people are facing in this country, what we should do for working people, how we're going to make sure that everyone who works and actually like pay their bills.

Speaker 3 Like have a whole fucking story about it.

Speaker 4 It just sounds bitchy.

Speaker 3 It's still expensive.

Speaker 4 It's like, people are just not stupid. He's been president in a week.
You know, it's going to take a minute. Like, I have a little more sympathy for Democrats.
He just took office.

Speaker 4 We're probably not hearing like Pat Ryan did a bunch of Twitter threads, talked to Playbook over the weekends, Congressman from New York saying some smart, thoughtful, interesting things, good framing, good focus, right?

Speaker 4 People are saying the right thing. There's just no leader.
There's no megaphone. Nobody's getting picked up.
No one's getting hurt. It's just the Trump show all day, every day.

Speaker 3 But there's also not a lot of emotion, you know? Like, I've seen Democrats, you know, or you give like a floor speech in the Senate. That's not going anywhere.

Speaker 3 Or you're doing a video where you're talking about why this is.

Speaker 3 It's like, even the, it was interesting, even the way the political story was framed, how it's like they didn't, Democrats didn't do statements on the Elon Musk thing or the J6 pardons because they connected those both.

Speaker 3 And I'm like, those are nothing.

Speaker 4 It's like one matters and one doesn't. That's what I was.

Speaker 4 The Elon Musk thing, it's like, we're going to say, you did a Nazi salute. He's going to say, no, I didn't.
The conversation dies there.

Speaker 3 It's like, what are you going to do? You're going to win the great debate about whether he did the Nazi salute or not? And then

Speaker 3 if he goes away, he disappears. Talk about his AFD rally.

Speaker 4 That's a lot more relevant. Also, I just saw a time story.
The Trump administration has instructed organizations in other countries to stop dispersing HIV medications purchased with U.S.

Speaker 4 aid, even if the drugs have already been obtained and are sitting in local clinics.

Speaker 4 What are we doing?

Speaker 3 Atul Gawande, who

Speaker 3 led the health programs for USAID,

Speaker 3 he tweeted this long thread about all the consequences of both freezing foreign aid from a health perspective and having the CDC not work with

Speaker 3 the World Health Organization. And that was part of that.

Speaker 4 This is just PEPFAR. PEPFAR saved 25 million lives.
And we're letting these drugs just sit on the shelf.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I do want to say, like,

Speaker 3 the January 6th pardons, though, like, not speaking about that is crazy to me because, like, most importantly,

Speaker 3 they are dangerous in that they give right-wing extremists a green light to go commit political violence, even against law enforcement, because, hey, Trump's got their back, right?

Speaker 3 But they're also extremely unpopular, even if you just want to be political about it. They're unpopular.
So, why wouldn't you go out to the microphone somewhere and be outraged about that?

Speaker 3 And then, I know that I'm glad all the Democrats are signed on to a resolution condemning

Speaker 3 the pardoning for the J6. It's like

Speaker 3 it's Monday.

Speaker 3 It's a week. It's a week after this happened.

Speaker 3 What are you doing, guys?

Speaker 1 And there's an insurrectionist that was already arrested on gun charges before recorded today. Jokes aside, there was one killed

Speaker 1 in an incident with police resisting a rise. These are dangerous people.

Speaker 1 Forget politics, forget ideology. Donald Trump released

Speaker 1 1,600 people, many of whom are very dangerous. And they're out there being arrested and causing mayhem right now.

Speaker 4 The QAnon shaman tweeted, time to go buy some guns.

Speaker 3 Well, also, you know, when they had this story this morning about the resolution, every Senate Democrat had signed on except John Fetterman. And at first there was a lot of criticism.

Speaker 3 And I was like, what the fuck? What's wrong with him? He's not signing on to this. So then he signed on.
And so it was fine.

Speaker 3 And then someone asked John Fetterman, I guess, just a couple hours ago, why didn't you sign on at first? He's like, no, no, no. I was out.

Speaker 3 Look, he was like, I've been against pardons for January 6th Insurrectionist forever. I've been on record.

Speaker 3 He goes, but I do think what we need is another, another performative, more performance art where we pass another resolution. That'll really, that'll really get him.
And it's like, yeah, okay.

Speaker 3 Okay, buddy.

Speaker 3 Your life is performance art you wear shorts and hoodies to like the Senate floor to like send a message come on But I do get where it's like I would rather have Democrats have gone to the mic the morning after it happened with the J6 thing and like all of them with with capital police officers with everyone else and like shown some real emotion than I would an official resolution that passed

Speaker 1 I just think it's very easy to do both yeah I think the problem though is it's like really what you're saying is not so therefore our strategy should be to look for opportunities to show emotion and really what we're saying it's like

Speaker 3 it's reading the stage directions Just fucking do it. Well, right.

Speaker 1 What we want is somebody who sees this happening, unfolding, and is like, fuck, I got to get out there.

Speaker 3 This is terrible. I'm going to go to the microphones and bring some people out.
Is that too much?

Speaker 1 You know what? Let's get, hey, get a couple of Capitol police officers to stand behind me because this is so outrageous. I'm furious.

Speaker 3 Not everything has to be planned, perfect, thought out. Just go fucking do stuff, guys.

Speaker 3 And, and, and, you know, forget it. It's just,

Speaker 3 I hammered this point a little. Okay, we're just.
No, no, no. I'm crafting.

Speaker 3 I do think one of the other very funny things that I just want to bring up before we go is CNN did a story on this, and they talked about how this was all in the,

Speaker 3 they had this meeting in the Senate Democratic Caucus about how to go viral and the media environment and all that.

Speaker 3 And this CNN story said, one of the, they call this a bright spots the Democrats highlighted, according to a source familiar, was a viral video from the pandemic of Mark Warner making a tuna melt in his kitchen that led to the lawmaker being cheered and jeered by people who questioned his culinary leanings.

Speaker 3 That was the bright spot. That's the Senate.

Speaker 3 Going back to 2020, be like, hey, remember when Warner had that viral tuna video or grilled cheese tuna melt that was?

Speaker 1 It was a warm tuna. That's where we're at.
That's the bright spot. The bright spot is hot kitchen tuna.

Speaker 4 Well, it was just such a badly made tuna sandwich.

Speaker 3 It was a microwave, right? Wasn't it a microwave tuna melt?

Speaker 4 He did such a bad job making this discussion.

Speaker 3 People got excited about it.

Speaker 3 So all of these questions loom especially large in the DNC chair race. DNC members will vote for the new chair on Saturday.
As you all all know,

Speaker 3 we here at the show, big Ben Wickler fans and supporters for a long time. We've talked about on this pod a million times.
But we wanted to talk to any of the candidates who wanted to come on.

Speaker 3 I interviewed Ken Martin and Ben. Dan interviewed Faz Shakir on a Friday show.
I personally think all three of them would make... great DNC chairs.

Speaker 3 But maybe, unsurprisingly, we were all most impressed with Ben's vision and his plans.

Speaker 3 And, you know, maybe we're all just hopelessly biased because we have known him and worked with him now since basically we've started this podcast.

Speaker 3 But even putting that aside, I think Wisconsin was the most Republican-leaning blue wall state in 2020, the third most Republican-leaning swing state of all in 2020 after Arizona and Georgia.

Speaker 3 Everyone was worried about it in 2024 because it's very rural, non-college educated state. It ended up to the left of the national vote.

Speaker 3 That means that Kamala Harris did worse in the national popular vote than she did in Wisconsin. And, you know, the operation that Ben built was a huge part of that.

Speaker 3 So if we were voting members of the DNC, which they will probably never make us,

Speaker 3 he would get our vote. But what do you guys want to add?

Speaker 1 Siren? Pod Save America endorsement.

Speaker 1 Add the siren and post.

Speaker 3 Woo, woo, woo.

Speaker 1 So first of all, I also like,

Speaker 1 just based on our conversation, I also just think all three of them had very smart things to say in the conversations that you had with them on Podsafe America.

Speaker 1 In particular, I thought Faz talking about what it means for the Democratic Party to look like it's fighting for people and was very smart.

Speaker 1 And regardless of who's the DNC chair, I think that is really important and kind of goes, and it actually fits a lot with what Ben was talking about as well.

Speaker 1 And what we've been talking about, that it's not just about the right words or the right message. It's about picking the right fights.

Speaker 1 It's about breaking through and figuring out how to do that in this messy and noisy environment. But like

Speaker 1 we've talked about for a long time that

Speaker 1 if we could duplicate Ben Wickler and put him in all 50 states, we'd be much better for it.

Speaker 1 And I think we've felt this personally just over the years of going to Wisconsin that Wisconsin was this warning about what could this omen for what could happen in the country when a group of radicalized Republicans tried to do unpopular things and strip away Democratic accountability for it.

Speaker 1 And as you said in your interview, that they've been kind of on the edge of a cliff this entire time.

Speaker 1 But what's been exciting having gone to Wisconsin, starting when we first did the show all these years later, is watching them slowly build this operation and figure out how to respond to that kind of a threat and do it in a way that's successful.

Speaker 1 And like there are so many lessons from what Ben has done in Wisconsin that are valuable nationally.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, we're biased. I met Ben in 2006, so it's like, I have nothing against anyone else in the race, but I think one thing that we've all noticed about Ben is he has no off switch.

Speaker 4 You're getting texts from him 24-7, 365 days a year about races, big and small across Wisconsin. And he was able to raise money and awareness and build a state party organization.

Speaker 4 that was always doing work, always organizing, always building and trying to get power back. And they started from a serious deficit in Wisconsin.

Speaker 4 And that doesn't mean they won every race, but that's not a fair expectation, but they didn't sit out any races. And I think like that's the kind of mindset you want at the DNC.

Speaker 4 And it's also just like a vibe and a tenor and a tone. Like Ben, we went to lots of events and organizing sessions with him and trainings.

Speaker 4 He's always preaching like an inclusive, empowering form of politics that I think would help out the party and translate well to the DNC and make people want to be a part of the Democratic Party.

Speaker 4 So I think he'd be great at it.

Speaker 3 All right. Well,

Speaker 3 and you know what? If you're listening and you're a DNC member and you're going to be voting and you like Ben or you think that

Speaker 3 Ben should be the chair, then, you know, I think it's probably helping this last week to go public and, you know, making it probably more helpful than us because we're not voting.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and probably this turned off a few people.

Speaker 3 Look, I think we're, I think, hopefully net positive. Hopefully net positive.
But if you're out there listening and you're thinking the same thing, you know, go with Ben. Go with Ben.

Speaker 3 After the break, you're going to hear Tommy's Tommy's conversation with Dara Lind of the American Immigration Council. But two quick things before we do that.

Speaker 3 Latest episode of Assembly Required, Stacey Abrams is joined by Strict Scrutiny's Melissa Murray to dissect the impact of Trump's sweeping executive orders from renaming Denali to ending birthright citizenship and what we can all do to protect our democracy.

Speaker 3 New episodes of Assembly Required drop every Thursday. Find them wherever you get your podcasts or on YouTube.

Speaker 3 Also, we're out with our first post-election episode of Polar Coaster, Dan's subscriber-only show.

Speaker 3 In this episode, Dan Dan takes a look at the early polling from Trump's return to office, unpacks the chaos that got us here, and tackles listeners' questions.

Speaker 3 To access this exclusive subscriber series, enjoy ad-free episodes of Pod Save America and more, subscribe now at cricket.com/slash friends or directly on Apple Podcasts. When we come back, darling.

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Speaker 4 So the the Trump administration has been firing off executive orders left and right. Many of them seem extremely consequential.
Some are glorified press releases.

Speaker 4 But many of the more consequential seeming EOs focus on immigration policy, which is why I am so excited to have Dara Lind on with me today.

Speaker 4 She's a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, an immigration policy expert, an excellent journalist. Dara, welcome to the show.

Speaker 3 Thank you.

Speaker 10 It is, I mean, I can't say it's great to be on, right? But it's like, it's certainly the kind of moment that people with my expertise are in demand, I guess.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah, very much so, because it is quite confusing. And we're going to try to talk through some of the complexity and uncertainty of this moment, especially when it comes to immigration.

Speaker 4 So first question is just big picture. I mean, what do you think are the most important things that Trump has done so far when it comes to immigration policy?

Speaker 10 I think that the most salient thing, and this is not just the day one executive orders, it's a lot of stuff that has come out since then, in the form of like departmental or agency memos or just in what people are seeing on the ground, is a really aggressive ramp-up of interior enforcement against people who have been living in the United States, many of whom were given some form of protections under the Biden administration.

Speaker 10 We know that the Trump administration

Speaker 10 has changed regulations so that anyone who is apprehended anywhere in the U.S.

Speaker 10 who cannot prove to an immigration agent's satisfaction that they've been here for more than two years could be deported without a court hearing.

Speaker 4 Huge change.

Speaker 10 We know that they are making an effort to strip parole protections from people who came under the

Speaker 10 Cuban Haitian, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan parole programs, other Biden parole programs, when they encounter them.

Speaker 10 Not that we don't know how broad that's going to be, but that those people will be considered vulnerable for deportation and that there might be efforts to take people who are in immigration court, close the immigration court case, and try to deport them without a court hearing.

Speaker 10 And we know that they're stepping up the use of agents from other agencies, whether that's DEA, ATF, that they're stepping up the use of military assets, including planes.

Speaker 10 And so given that most of the biggest impediments to like deporting 11 million people were not legal, but logistical, that kind of force multiplier could be a very big difference in how many people they're ultimately able to deport.

Speaker 4 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I wanted to ask you about that logistical point because you wrote in this Great Times op-ed after the election, but before inauguration, that the largest constraint on mass deportation is logistical and that deporting 1 million people per year would cost an annual average of $88 billion.

Speaker 4 Can you kind of unpack those logistics for us and explain whether you think there's kind of anything in that insight that opponents of Trump's immigration policy could use to fight it?

Speaker 10 Sure, absolutely. So, there are essentially four major steps that are generally taken to take somebody who is in the U.S.
without authorization and move them to being somebody who's been deported.

Speaker 10 The first is arresting them.

Speaker 10 The second is finding somewhere to keep them in custody, given that this administration doesn't particularly like releasing people pending, you know, their court hearings or pending further action.

Speaker 10 There's the court case itself, which you know they're trying to kind of abridge by using this expedited removal provision more aggressively. But, like, you know, so that's kind of an optional one.

Speaker 10 And then, four, you have to physically deport them. You have to have the seat on the plane and you have to have a country that's willing to accept them.

Speaker 10 So, even if you look at what they've done over the last week and say, okay, in general, they're really trying to get rid of this third stage of the process wherever possible, that still leaves arrest, detention, and deportation.

Speaker 10 So, you know, the more agents they have on the ground who are not just ICE agents, but other agencies that are being tasked with immigration enforcement, and the more they're able to enlist state and local police to do immigration enforcement, the easier the first one gets.

Speaker 10 The more they're able to build temporary facilities, especially using military money under the emergency declaration that was one of the day one executive orders, the easier the second of those is.

Speaker 10 And the more that they can both use military planes and bully other countries. And we saw some of this over the weekend with a you know,

Speaker 10 a standoff, a very brief standoff with the country of Colombia over the use of military flights to deport Colombian nationals.

Speaker 10 The more they can bully other countries to take back military planes or to take back a lot of ICE air flights, the easier the deportation part of that is.

Speaker 10 So those are kind of where I'm seeing the big variables right now. But ultimately, all of those are still resources.

Speaker 10 And even if you're tapping the DOD budget for a lot of things, Congress still has to, at a certain point,

Speaker 10 you know,

Speaker 10 you're going to either run out of ICE budget or Congress is going to have to appropriate in the future the kind of money that anticipates that you're going to be running a Department of Defense that is also engaged in immigration enforcement.

Speaker 10 And so, while in the short term, they're acting really, really aggressively, how long they can keep this up is going to depend on whether Congress is writing them a blank check or whether they're going to start asking questions about just how much can be spent on it.

Speaker 4 Aaron Powell, Jr.: And just to your point four, I think, like we don't have the best relations with Venezuela, for example.

Speaker 4 There are a lot of folks who have left Venezuela over the past decade or so and made their way north to the United States.

Speaker 4 What happens if Venezuela just says, no, American C-17s will never set down in our territory? I mean, do we have to get to a point where we're like having to coerce that militarily?

Speaker 5 Is that what Trump is threatening here?

Speaker 10 We're not quite to that point yet because immigration law doesn't technically require you to deport somebody to the country where they came from.

Speaker 10 And this is where the diplomatic aspect of this gets very complicated and very important.

Speaker 10 In the recent past, under the Trump and Biden administrations, Mexico has agreed to accept some non-Mexicans, whether that's temporarily while they await court hearings in the United States under the Remain in Mexico program, which the Trump administration is now trying to restart, or whether that's actually taking people who who are essentially being deported but deported to Mexico.

Speaker 10 Whether and how many people they're willing to accept in that is going to be a very important variable because it's so much easier to deport people back to Mexico than it is to fly them other places.

Speaker 10 You know, it's just so much cheaper that not only is that going to be a help on the logistical end, but also, as you mentioned, for countries like Venezuela, where it's not really foreseeable that you're going to have some kind of breakthrough where the Maduro government is going to like say, yes, this is awesome.

Speaker 10 We love the U.S. now.

Speaker 10 Having other places you can return them to starts to become a really important variable.

Speaker 10 We've already heard rumors that the government of El Salvador is very gung-ho about signing an agreement with the United States that will allow people to be deported to El Salvador who aren't from El Salvador.

Speaker 10 That sort of thing. Of course.
You know,

Speaker 10 the more options that they have, the easier it's going to be for them to get around the recalcitrance of any one country.

Speaker 4 Of course, Bukeley is willing to take whatever number of people Trump wants to send to El Salvador. It seems to me that a lot of what's happened so far is PR and for show, right?

Speaker 4 I mean, I think the Trump administration is talking about the number of deportations over the weekend that may or may not be all that much above kind of the average you might have seen in terms of total deportations under the Biden administration.

Speaker 4 I suspect part of it also is they want to pick fights with like Democrats in liberal cities.

Speaker 4 I mean, what kind of strategies do you think these progressives can take to push back that doesn't play into this sort of PR effort, but actually is impactful for people in communities that are being harmed?

Speaker 10 So I tend to think about this as like a

Speaker 10 coordinate plane, right? One axis is

Speaker 10 how likely is this to get a lot of headlines, to generate a lot of b-roll, that kind of thing. The other axis is how much does it increase scope?

Speaker 10 You know, like how much does it make it easier for them to harm, to like to put more people into the process and move them through the process?

Speaker 10 And you're right, a lot of the things, you know, like things like putting out a press release every single day can imply that more is being changed than actually is.

Speaker 10 That said, one of the reasons that we're not really seeing movement on the numbers yet is because some of the authorities they're tapping into haven't really, you know, scaled, like they haven't really been able to make plans for what does an ICE raid look like when everybody's getting put into expedited removal proceedings, that sort of thing.

Speaker 10 So I think that the biggest reason that picking fights with blue cities is,

Speaker 10 you know, it's a big PR showdown is because in jurisdictions that don't have a lot of local cooperation with federal law enforcement, where, like, if they call up the city and say, you got to give us the addresses of everybody you know who doesn't have legal immigration status, and in cities that have laws requiring that information not to be shared, it's a lot harder for them to arrest people, to identify who is removable and take them into custody.

Speaker 10 And so, when they have these big raids on Blue Cities in the past, what we've seen is the numbers of actual arrestees they get out of them are very low.

Speaker 10 The biggest impact is in terms of freaking people out, getting people to not leave their homes, to not go to school, that sort of thing, which is a real harm.

Speaker 10 But it does mean that in kind of holding the line on lack of cooperation and lack of information sharing, and certainly not, you know, offering like state and local resources to help with immigration enforcement, that the amount of money that's being spent and time that's being spent is going to be greater proportionally than the number of people who they are getting out of it who can then be arrested and deported, which means that those resources are then being taken from other things.

Speaker 4 Right, right. Because a lot of the cooperation you've seen in the past has been federal officials going to local, state, and county jails, right? And then picking people up there for deportation.

Speaker 4 One other element of this is Trump is trying to end birthright citizenship.

Speaker 4 So that would end the practice of giving automatic citizenship to the U.S.-born kids of undocumented immigrant parents or to the kids of foreign workers or students.

Speaker 4 And I think it's important to note that that latter category is people here legally.

Speaker 4 When I talk with smart lawyers about the birthright citizenship EO, they say this is clearly unconstitutional, but if it gets to the Supreme Court, like, God help us.

Speaker 4 Does that sort of jive with your sense?

Speaker 10 I mean, I am,

Speaker 10 I have a general rule against engaging in Supreme Court punditry because I do think that to a certain extent, the law is whatever the judges say the law is.

Speaker 10 And heaven, you know, like, heaven forbid they take that, they like actually, you know, seize the reins of that power. But

Speaker 10 I do agree that I think that the way that this executive order was done, which is just saying, as far as we're concerned, this is not who birthright birthright citizenship applies to.

Speaker 10 And we're not going to be honoring the citizenship of anyone who was born in the U.S.

Speaker 10 under, you know, to these, to parents who like have these particular, you know, this lack of status or temporary status after February 19th.

Speaker 10 That is, we've already seen one preliminary ruling against it.

Speaker 10 I would be very surprised if it goes into effect as planned, you know, like in a few weeks.

Speaker 10 That's not to say that the Supreme Court won't ultimately rule in favor of the administration on this one, but like it is worth noting that this is, there's a pretty explicit century-old Supreme Court precedent that even if the, you know, the parents of the child cannot become U.S.

Speaker 10 citizens, the child is still a citizen of the United States. And so they would be,

Speaker 10 it's not really a

Speaker 10 reasonable people have disagreed on this for decades kind of situation.

Speaker 10 It is an effort to innovate the law in a particular direction.

Speaker 10 And so there's reason to believe that the Supreme Court is going to be a little more skeptical of this than they would be of other Trump administration policies.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, you mentioned there was this one ruling already from a judge, who I believe was a Reagan appointee. He said, I've been on the bench for over four decades.

Speaker 4 I can't remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order.

Speaker 10 Yeah, he was steamed. And, you know, the other thing about that case is the plaintiffs were extremely ready to file a complaint.

Speaker 10 And the administration, despite the fact that it was, you know, that it was their government, filed all of three pages in reply that were basically nah-ah.

Speaker 10 So like, they're not doing, at least so far, they're not doing a tremendously robust job of, if they truly believe this is what the law says, they're not doing the most aggressive, like the best job of showing up in court and saying that.

Speaker 4 Got it. Got it.
Congress is also getting in on the act here. So they just passed a piece of legislation called the Lake and Riley Act, passed on a bipartisan basis.

Speaker 4 The bill got 64 yes votes in the Senate, 263 yes votes in the House, including 46 Democrats in the House. Can you give us just like a quick overview of what the Lake and Riley Act does?

Speaker 3 Sure.

Speaker 10 So there are two total, like fairly separate parts of

Speaker 10 the law that are, one of which is, is kind of, it is, it expands immigration enforcement in a way that's, that Congress often acts to expand immigration enforcement and one of which is totally unprecedented and could be very could unfold in very unpredictable ways um the first is that it the lake and riley act requires that the federal government expeditiously take into custody anybody who is arrested or charged with or convicted of a certain certain set of crimes including theft charges now that um by saying you can't you don't have to be convicted you can just be like accused essentially certainly does raise due process concerns concerns.

Speaker 10 There are also prioritization concerns.

Speaker 10 Like, if you're saying that somebody that there's somebody in custody in rural Georgia and you have to get in your patrol car and go immediately to go get that person, there are other enforcement actions you could be engaging in.

Speaker 10 But the other part of Lake and Riley says that states can sue the federal government to force the federal government to deport somebody who they've chosen not to execute a final order of deportation against, to detain somebody, or to stop visas for a category of visa or a country

Speaker 10 if they believe the country is being recalcitrant in accepting deportees. So because there is on the books, you know, the federal government has the power to take sanctions.

Speaker 10 And so if the federal government isn't taking these sanctions, like

Speaker 10 the thing we're all thinking about is, okay, so what is stopping Ken Paxton from suing

Speaker 10 the federal government to force it to stop issuing H-1B visas to China? Because China doesn't take every deportation as many quite as many deportees as the U.S. might like.

Speaker 10 That's kind of a

Speaker 10 real wild card and we don't know how it's going to play out yet, but it certainly adds an interesting wrinkle to the dispute that we know is going on within the Trump administration over H-1B and high-skilled visas generally.

Speaker 10 Because if the Trump administration goes in a more dovish direction than, say, the Bannon wing would like, they now have this legal tool that they can use to try to stop them.

Speaker 4 Yeah, just to dig in on those two sort of pieces, I mean, look, I'm not a lawyer, but I thought that undocumented people had due process rights under the Fifth and the 14th Amendment.

Speaker 4 This bill says if you're just accused of basically petty shoplifting, you can be deported. I mean, that does not seem like due process to me.
Am I wrong?

Speaker 10 The fundamental thing you have to remember about immigration law is that deportation is not a criminal penalty. It is a civil penalty, and it's one you incur potentially simply by being in the U.S.

Speaker 10 without authorization. You don't have to have committed any other, any crime or anything else in order to be deportable.
So what this does is say, this person's already deportable.

Speaker 10 By getting arrested, they're now an enforcement priority,

Speaker 10 which is not something that you really have a due process claim against. Now, if you're not, in fact, removable, you can try to get yourself out of ICE custody.

Speaker 10 And yes, of course, there are due process concerns in like, in the sense of you're saying this person's a priority because you're classifying them as a criminal.

Speaker 10 They're not, you know, that, that, but they're not concerns that are legally actionable.

Speaker 3 God, that's terrible.

Speaker 4 Uh, part two, I mean, so, like, the attorney general in Oklahoma can tell Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, that he's no longer allowed to issue visas to a random country because, I don't know, it helps this Attorney General in Oklahoma politically to demand that the federal government, even the Trump government, be tougher on immigrants.

Speaker 3 That seems completely unworkable.

Speaker 10 It absolutely could be unworkable.

Speaker 10 This was originally part of the bill when it was introduced under the last Congress, which is to say under the Biden administration, which might go some way in indicating why it was added to the bill to begin with.

Speaker 10 I think that the assumption to a certain extent is that, you know, state AGs are going to not necessarily want to embarrass members of their own party.

Speaker 10 But I think the other part of the assumption is that judges are not necessarily going to be super eager to weigh in on this stuff.

Speaker 10 Judges tend to have a pretty narrow construal of like this sort of their ability to weigh in on this sort of thing.

Speaker 10 And so that that would,

Speaker 10 you know, I think that there's a certain kind of adults in the room understanding that this, that that would prevent it from being too entirely disruptive.

Speaker 10 I don't know that that's merited, but I think we'll see what combination of kind of political pressures and, you know, just and

Speaker 10 judicial professional pressures exist to check this.

Speaker 4 You're going to get a bunch of liberal attorney generals in blue states just suing the State Department over nothing for fun.

Speaker 4 I also thought that ICE said the bill would cost $26 billion to implement in the first year. So back to your resourcing and logistics question.

Speaker 4 It seems wildly difficult to do this without, I guess, an appropriation of new money.

Speaker 10 Well,

Speaker 10 so the way that usually ICE has operated over the last several years is they keep spending the money, which is usually faster than they're budgeted to spend it.

Speaker 10 And then they write Congress letters of increasing alarm of tone saying, if you don't give us more money before the end of the fiscal year in a supplemental, we're going to have to start releasing criminals.

Speaker 10 And usually Congress says, fine, fine, here's the money you asked for in the supplemental.

Speaker 4 Okay, so you mentioned also temporary protected status.

Speaker 4 On the way out the door, President Biden granted an extension of temporary protected status or TPS to nearly a million immigrants from Venezuela, El Salvador, Ukraine, and Sudan, which should protect them from deportation through, I think, the fall of 2026.

Speaker 4 I know the Trump administration is not a big fan of TPS or lots of

Speaker 4 pathways of legal immigration. Can they just rescind that extension? Or what do you think happens to TPS?

Speaker 10 This is where we get into some really uncharted territory, both legally and policy-wise, because the Trump administration said in one of its executive orders that it is going to review grants of TPS given under Biden.

Speaker 10 So we don't know whether that means they're going to say that some of these 11th hour TPS grants shouldn't have been issued to begin with and try to argue that they shouldn't be forced to honor them or not.

Speaker 10 That's something that's not clear. We don't know what happens to people who have applications for TPS, who,

Speaker 10 if you were paroled in under the CHNV, Cuban Haitian Nicaraguan Venezuelan parole program, but you were here as a Venezuelan when the Venezuela TPS extension was issued and you've applied.

Speaker 10 What is that? You know, can you be removed once your parole expires, even though you have this pending application? Are they going to try to do that?

Speaker 10 There are so many open questions about this, and it's really

Speaker 10 concerning because frankly, a lot of these are folks who are not the most tapped in to, you know,

Speaker 10 they're like to high information news sources anyway. And so the uncertainty that they're facing and the potential legal complexity of what they're facing is really difficult to predict.

Speaker 10 But we really, we absolutely could be seeing a pretty aggressive clawback front on TPS.

Speaker 10 And, you know, it's just going to depend on what they decide to announce from here and how much effort they're willing to spend on the USCIS side and sending, you know, individualized, no thank you, you don't have status anymore notifications and defending it in court.

Speaker 4 Man, I mean, I just, just to underscore how cruel it would be to start sending people back to Sudan, which has been in the middle of a horrific civil war for well over a year now.

Speaker 4 There's accusations of genocide against the rebel forces and even some of the Sudanese armed forces. I think half the country is at risk of starvation, millions of people being displaced.

Speaker 4 I mean, the idea that you would just put someone on a plane back to Khartoum right now is just like unthinkable from a moral level.

Speaker 10 Yeah, and this is, I mean, it's worth underscoring, even though we've been discussing it, that there is a difference between saying that somebody is legally vulnerable to deportation and actually taking the effort to deport them.

Speaker 10 And with TPS, you know, it is there

Speaker 10 is a certain extent to which the Trump administration has made it pretty clear that people who arrived under Biden are in their crosshairs.

Speaker 10 But in general, it is not necessarily true that somebody who had legal status and is going to have it sunset is going to become a target.

Speaker 10 But even just putting them in that pool puts them more at risk. And it also makes it harder for them to plan their lives.

Speaker 10 With TPS in particular, because so many of these people have had, you know, so many of these countries have had TPS for years and decades.

Speaker 10 These are people who have been making their lives in 18 to 24 month increments to begin with. And now you're giving even that assurance away from them.

Speaker 10 So it's a fairly profound change for the circumstances in which these people are living.

Speaker 3 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 4 Do you think, is it now kind of of all about enforcement and the kind of memos to agencies about how to implement these policies? Are you expecting more executive orders and major policy changes?

Speaker 4 We just don't know.

Speaker 10 We absolutely do not know. When Russ Vogt got caught on a hot mic last year, well, it wasn't a hot mic, it was essentially a sting operation.

Speaker 10 The now, again, head of OMB, who was running Project 2025, he said that

Speaker 10 there were a lot of things that they were working on that were very close hold, that they weren't putting in Project 2025, a lot of memos and policy guidance that they were pre-drafting.

Speaker 10 And so we just don't know what the volume of those is.

Speaker 10 We've continued to see things going out that almost certainly were developed before inauguration because it would just be a tremendous amount of effort to get them done after that.

Speaker 10 But we don't know how much there is. And it is, you know,

Speaker 10 there are some things in the executive orders that kind of hint at future action.

Speaker 10 There is, for example, one executive order that says that within 90 days, there should be a review of whether the Insurrection Act is necessary to invoke.

Speaker 10 So that is something that they've actually flagged could be coming.

Speaker 10 But for the most part, the MO of this administration is and was during the, you know, the end of the first term to find places in federal law that can be used to ramp up immigration enforcement that have kind of lain dormant for decades.

Speaker 10 So we don't know how many of those other places places they've found.

Speaker 4 The one thing I just haven't heard much about is any kind of increased penalties or scrutiny of employers versus individuals.

Speaker 4 I mean, for a long time, that was kind of the approach of a lot of immigration policy, right?

Speaker 4 Which is to make it really hard for people to work by punishing their employers if they hired undocumented people. But I'm just, I don't feel like I'm hearing much about that.

Speaker 10 The primary way that they

Speaker 10 would be going about this would be just engaging in enforcement.

Speaker 10 Usually, when there are large-scale workplace raids, those are associated with some form of, you know, prosecution or sanction or something against the employer who they are raiding.

Speaker 10 You know, that's a kind of stochastic thing, right? You're not like, you're not auditing an entire sector.

Speaker 10 And so the extent to which it's going to really shape employer behavior is unclear. But yeah,

Speaker 10 the biggest tool, the biggest thing that kind of hasn't been done on employer sanctions is legislative. It's mandatory nationwide e-verify.

Speaker 10 And that has not been as much of a priority of this generation of immigration restrictionism as it was like a decade ago, in part because there are employers who would, who are willing to stay quiet even as it becomes harder for them to hire people legally.

Speaker 10 But if you try to go after their workforce, then or if you try to prevent them from hiring anyone who doesn't have authorization, then they'll get mad at you.

Speaker 10 So, you know, I think it's still to be seen. It's certainly not a

Speaker 10 it's it's not a rhetorical priority for them unless you start talking about the economic benefits of immigration, in which case they start talking about how exploitative employers are.

Speaker 10 But there hasn't been a whole lot of effort to make it, you know, for example, Department of Labor priority to go after employers for exploiting unauthorized labor.

Speaker 4 Got it. I mean, just finally on the politics, I mean, curious how you think or why you think the politics on immigration policy changed so much over, I don't know, let's say the past decade or so.

Speaker 4 I don't know if it was just generally more migration, Biden's policies, like the relentless bussing from states like Texas to blue states. I mean, what's your big picture sense of that?

Speaker 10 I think that, you know,

Speaker 10 for one thing,

Speaker 10 the thermostatic effect, you know, like of public opinion swinging in favor of immigrants under Trump and then swinging against under Biden is really, really hard to, it's hard to overstate.

Speaker 10 And it's also hard to disentangle anything else from that kind of basic, oh, the government is doing some things I don't like. I'm going to make this more salient.

Speaker 10 In general, immigration isn't salient for a whole lot of people. And so they're very,

Speaker 10 it's very easy to kind of swing them from one direction to the other based on opposition to who's in office, based on, you know, seeing B-roll of people coming in, that sort of thing.

Speaker 10 I don't think that, I think it's, I think it's kind of not

Speaker 10 clear whether what we're seeing is an increase in the number of people who are really, really activated against unauthorized immigration or against immigration generally,

Speaker 10 or whether what we're seeing is the culmination of the fact that

Speaker 10 this is the signature policy issue of the man who's been the standard bearer of the Republican Party for a decade.

Speaker 10 And so anyone who's affiliated with the Republican Party has decided that this is a more important issue to them.

Speaker 10 But, you know, I think the other side of this is a lot of people who were in solidly blue jurisdictions saw strains on state and local governments responding to recent arrivals.

Speaker 10 And so were forced, you know, I think, I think were like put in a space where they were considering that actually there was a certain amount of zero-sum trade-off between investing in people who are already here and investing in new arrivals.

Speaker 10 And that the Biden administration, by kind of not.

Speaker 10 doing a whole lot to ensure that new arrivals were coming in an undisruptive way didn't necessarily help with this.

Speaker 10 But, you know, whether that was something that's going to really change a whole lot of people's opinions permanently, or whether it was a reaction to a moment under an administration that is no longer in office is something that remains to be seen.

Speaker 4 Yeah, very good point. Well, Dara, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Final, final question.

Speaker 4 You got the band back together with your old crew from the weeds with Ezra Klein and Matthew Glasius the other day on Ezra's podcast.

Speaker 4 Is there any chance of a comeback tour where you hit a few kind of the nerdiest cities? You know, we could sell sell out some stadiums.

Speaker 10 I am entirely on board with this.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 10 If and only if we can at least start talking to a venue in Stockholm, because if I have to talk about Swedish administrative data one more time without being in Sweden to do it, it's going to be very upsetting.

Speaker 4 I'm not even sure what you're referencing, and I love that. That's we're going to leave it there.
That is perfect. Dara, thank you so much for coming on the show.
I appreciate it. And thank you.

Speaker 3 Thank you. Yeah.

Speaker 3 That's our show for today. Thanks to Darlin for coming by.
And Dan and I will be back with a new show on Friday. Bye, everyone.

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