Kamala Didn't Have the Courage!

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Welcome to Pod Save America.

I'm Jon Favreau.

I'm Jon Leavitt. And Tommy Vitor.
We're back! We're back. Good to see you guys.
You too. You too.
Missed this place. Quick announcement before we start.
Now that the election's over, we're going back to two episodes per week. Tuesdays and Fridays.
Maybe the occasional episode on the weekends. More news on that after the inauguration.
We heard you loud and clear. Do less.
Talk less. But for now, it'll be the three of us on Tuesdays, as it was.
Dan and I on Fridays and, you know, less chaos for all of us on Wednesdays. Yeah.
So that's that. On today's show, we're going to talk about how Republicans are gearing up to pass what Trump is calling one big, beautiful bill that'll fulfill his campaign promises on taxes, energy, and immigration.
We're also going to talk about President Biden's final list of Medal of Freedom recipients, which was criticized by Republicans, including incoming Vice President J.D. Vance.
But first, we're recording this on January 6th, a day four years ago when Donald Trump incited a violent mob of his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol, assault police officers, and threaten the lives of elected officials, all in a failed attempt to disrupt Congress's certification of an election he knew he had lost.
Four years later, most voters said, hey, let's give that guy another chance. And this time, the only clash outside the Capitol was a snowball fight.
That looked fun. Yeah, it did look fun.
More fun than four years ago. It took Congress about 30 minutes to certify the election.
No one objected. And the final results were even read by Trump's opponent, Kamala Harris, who as vice president was obligated by the Constitution to suffer this final indignity.
Let's listen. The state of the vote for the president of the United States as delivered to the president of the Senate is as follows.
The whole number of the electors appointed to vote for president of the United States is 538. Within that whole number, the majority is 270.

The votes for President of the United States are as follows. Donald J.
Trump of the state of Florida

has received 312 votes. Kamala D.
Harris of the state of California has received 226 votes. This announcement of the state of the vote by the president of the Senate shall be deemed a sufficient declaration of the persons elected president and vice president of the United States.
And here's Kamala Harris afterwards talking to reporters. Obviously a very important day.
And it was about what should be the norm and what the American people should be able to take for granted. Today, I did what I have done my entire career, which is take seriously the oath that I have taken many times to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Welcome back to hell, everyone. Yeah, really? Jesus.
The current president, Joe Biden, weighed in on January 6th with a Washington Post op-ed, as one does, where he calls out the, quote, unrelenting effort to, quote, rewrite, even erase the history of January 6th and implores us to commit to remembering January 6th every year because, quote, any nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it. Feels like the horse is out of the barn on that one.
But what do you guys think? How is the country supposed to process the reality that Trump's actions on January 6th just weren't enough of a problem for most Americans to keep him out of the White House. Don't you guys feel like an op-ed about January 6th is just the perfect encapsulation of how feckless everything feels in this moment? Yes.
Yes. So this has bothered me for a while.
It's just indulged me for a second. The quote is, those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.
But it's not about countries. It's about people.
And the actual quote, if you go back and look at it, is not about like the magical ability to remember things like memories do not prevent insurrections. Like that's not what the quote's about.
What the quote's actually about is if you don't remember anything, you're doomed to do the same thing over and over again. But if you're too mired in the past, right? If you become a, this is from the original philosopher, stubborn like an old man, you also become doomed to repeat yourself because you're not adaptable and you don't learn from what's happening in the actual present.
And so like- That's pretty on the nose. Yeah, it is pretty on the nose, Tommy.
At least he got a, he does get placement in the post post you know with bezos owning it i mean good for him he did have to start by speaking of coups you know yeah first couple of paragraphs are about how milani is looking more and more beautiful i have to say that i was handling the election results pretty well and did a good job disconnecting from the news over the break and it wasn't it's and we thought I okay, January 6th is going to be our first pod. Like, we should say something about January 6th because whatever, it's the anniversary.
When I started reading last night and then this morning, I got so angry. It's really started to hit me.
No, it's awful. It's really started to hit me in a way that I was not expecting or hoping wouldn't happen.
He just won by a bigger margin before. He will now take take office with both houses of congress in a court system that he stacked for himself a few years ago so yeah when we when it comes to fighting back uh his agenda in washington we are a bunch of we our party is one sad op-ed we will be doing messaging until the midterms it's uh you know we are both remembering past, seems this week.
I mean, a coup attempt wasn't disqualifying and no amount of remembering is going to change that. Right.
You know, and it's like, look, Biden and Congress, to their credit, Republicans and Democrats passed a bill to make it more difficult to overturn the results of future elections on January 6th in the certification process. You know, they can beef up security.
But there's just there's just no getting around the fact that Americans, most Americans used a free and fair election to say that they're OK with the president who tried to overturn a free and fair election. Like we're just we all have to live with that.
Yeah. And I also for all of history.
And that's what I think is so like and by the way, like I know I'm just like, hey, we're back. It's a new year.
Time to criticize time to criticize joe biden again it's like you're right like if we don't learn from the past we are doomed to repeat it but one of the things we should learn from the recent past is democrats performing virtue explaining over and over again why the insurrection was so terrible it didn't work like this style of politics is not working and like we should also probably remember the recent past ourselves.

Yeah, it's not a remembering problem. It's a caring problem.
And part of that, like we can, we don't need to litigate the whole election. Obviously, like inflation was a big part of it and people how they were feeling economically.
But a majority of voters just decided that they were okay voting for the guy who did the insurrection. And some of that is propaganda and the power of autocrats like Donald Trump when you have this media apparatus on the right to rewrite history, right? I mean, it was not long after the insurrection that people like Tucker Carlson were leading the charge and suggesting that it was like an FBI op and a false flag operation, yada, yada, yada.
But most of it was just people didn't care. And it's a really sad story also about tribalism and the fact that a lot of Trump fans from the people who stormed the Capitol to his new billionaire buddies in the tech industry just don't care.
They hate Democrats more than they care about what he tried to do to democratic institutions. I mean, to your point, Lovett, about how it like sounds the same, it's like the same tone from Democrats.
The problem for me is not necessarily like saying again what happened on January 6th. I wouldn't mind that actually, because I do think like, I mean, I read Sergeant Gunnell, who was one of the police officers who was assaulted on that day.
He was writing in the Bulwark on Monday. And this guy served in Iraq for over 500 days.
He said that of all those days, January 6th was the scariest day of his life, even considering he was in harm's way in Iraq, came back with PTSD. He was assaulted more than 40 times that day, lost his job afterwards, lost his health.
And reading that got me like really really angry because at least it was like it puts you back in that day that what i couldn't handle on january 6th was like all the talk about the institutions and our democracy and like isn't it great that democrats know how to do the peaceful transfer of power and like look kamala harris just is in a terrible position on on January 6th like I really feel for her so I don't want to criticize her for her comments much but like Biden's op-ed did not say anything most Democrats were like this is what it's basically like this is what it looks like to lose like a slug not be sore losers good losers that's what we are now and look I'm not you could have easily said donald trump incited an insurrection and and this he he's tried to lie about he's tried to ray history he's wrong he's unfit the american people disagree with my assessment and other people's assessment but i don't have to pretend that everything's okay you know like you can still accept the result without sounding like pat me pat on the back because I've defended institutions. Well, that's what was so like, like the op-ed by Joe Biden does not mention Donald Trump by name.
And I understand the logic of that, which is like, you're trying to, I don't know, perform that you're performing normalcy to, I don't know, hope Donald Trump learns from your example. It doesn't like, but, but it's proof it's privileging normal behavior, normal looking behavior over being honest about the situation, which is you are handing over power to someone who has promised to use the pardon power and the powers of, uh, of the justice department against his enemies in terrifying ways.
You are doing that. That is what you believe is your responsibility, but you're not being honest about it.
You say in this op-ed, we cannot accept a repeat of what happened four years ago, but just in how you're talking about this right now, you're accepting it. Well, he says like, you know, and on that day, democracy prevailed.
And it's like, yeah, maybe on that day, but like, guess what? Today feels like the coup worked. Yeah.
You know, it took longer than Donald Trump expected, but it worked. I had similar mixed feelings.
I appreciate them modeling adult leadership and respect for institutions and democracy and the peaceful transfer of power. It is what makes the United States special.
But it also, it did make me very frustrated at Joe Biden all over again for running for reelection, in part because there were all these stories over the break about Biden and his like closest, closest aides telling people that they think he would have won. And it's like, boy, talk about doomed to repeating mistakes if we don't learn from them.
Right. Like that is delusional.
And anyone entertaining that kind of delusional thinking is doing Biden and the Democratic Party a disservice. Yeah.
And again, it's just it's the tone. And, you know, I thought that now we and others have talked too much about the whole made the whole point about like democrats just can't be the defenders of institutions we got to reform institutions i was like all right we've we've made our we've set our piece on that but then today and i get it's january 6th and it's about democracy whatever so people talking about it but like just the the language there's like an entire language that democrats need to just fucking throw in the trash about like institutions, democracy, sacred this and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, no. It's like, OK, Joe Biden, I've read your op-ed.
I've gotten to the bottom of it. I agree.
I'm doing it right now. I'm remembering January 6th.
Here I am. I'm remembering it.
There's no next step. There's no next step for what you do to actually prevent an insurrection or to prevent an overthrow of our democracy.
There's no, there's just, there's no kind of, I don't know, like sense of agency. We're just passengers.
That's good luck for four years. Yeah.
Or like just attunement with the millions of people in the country who were probably wrestling with this like we are, like other people are, and who just can't believe this is about to happen. No acknowledgement that people are angry, in despair, it's just sort of like riding up here, you know, like surface level.
Whiplash from the campaign messaging. Yes, exactly.
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USAA! So, more than 1,500 people have been charged with crimes related to January 6th. More than 170 who've been accused of using weapons to assault police officers.
170. More than 1,000 have pleaded guilty.
More than 200 were convicted at trial. The Department of Justice is still weighing whether to charge hundreds more.
But of course, Trump has promised to pardon these fine Americans on day one. Though he has said, he said to Time in late November, I'm going to do case by case.
And if they were nonviolent, I think they've been greatly punished. So unclear what he's actually going to do here.
He certainly has the power to pardon any or all of the rioters, even the violent ones. though if he does, I think it certainly comes with some pretty scary implications going forward.
What do you guys think? Are we supposed to just sort of accept that most Americans didn't care enough about this? No, I think this is very politically precarious for Trump, no matter what he does, because people may have forgotten about January 6th or they just stopped caring about it, but it doesn't mean they agree with him. I think the Washington Post had some polling around the three-year anniversary that found people thought it was an attack on democracy, not a peaceful protest or whatever Trump's narrative was.
So I think if Trump pardons violent offenders from that day, we need to lift those stories up as much as possible, especially the specific stories, a cop who got beat up or this or that, right? Because the horror of the day can get lost in kind of the collective way we talk about January 6th. Like it was one singular event.
Actually, it was like a whole bunch of awful things that happened to thousands and thousands of people who stormed and rampaged through the Capitol. So lifting up those individual stories is important.
But if Trump doesn't pardon all of these violent offenders, like the former head of the Proud Boys is out there today. Yeah.
Demanding a pardon. Enrique Terrio.
Yeah. If Trump doesn't pardon guys like him, then he's going to have a whole bunch of rip shit MAGA types.
And I think that's valuable because we want to fracture the MAGA coalition. So I think this is a pretty precarious moment for him.
It's like a real put up or shut up moment.

No, I agree with that. You know, it's like in the same way that like we talk about like how to remember when like whenever North Korea would test a nuclear missile, the State Department would say, well, this is unacceptable.
And it's like, OK, seems like then what? You've accepted it. It's accepted.
Yeah. And so it's like, are to accept that that that all of these people that that that we're just going to accept that uh uh the country's just going to move on from the insurrection well like yes it's true that's what's happened but the question is what do we do and also like again like how do we learn from the fact that this wasn't salient enough important enough for people enough people as they voted to make the Why? Right.
Some of it is just time, right? Like some of the most right wing Republicans thought Trump was finished after January six, not just the like establishment types, but like real right wing Republicans thought he was doing so much damage to himself and to the conservative cause that he had to be pushed aside. Now, Charlie Kirk, right after the insurrection said, enjoy jail to all the riders, like enjoy jail.
Yeah, let's get them. Let's put them in jail.
And so like over the years that followed, there was this slow, deliberate effort to keep moving the kind of politics on this from Donald Trump is finished to this wasn't led by Donald Trump to this was a false flag operation led by the FBI. Now we're at the point where these are political prisoners and actually nothing.
They didn't do anything wrong that Donald Trump won the election. Right.
And like, I do think it's worth thinking, OK, well, what's next after that? Right. Well, I do think part of what I hope we can do and Democrats should do in the coming years is like tell people why they should care about something that happens instead of just being outraged about it.
Yeah. And, you know, Matt Iglesias in his sub stack Slow Boring today talked about how he's more alarmed today than he was on January 6th, 2021, because at least then, you know, all those Republicans you just talked about came out and it seemed like it was over for Donald Trump and that was it.
And, you know, it was, and thinking about the pardon power here, which man pardons over the last month, my, my views on the pardon power, like I always thought it was sort of expansive and dangerous. Now I'm really like, this is a real Iglesias talks about how it's like potentially a backdoor to dictatorship.
Right. he sets out a scenario right like if if trump decides now to pardon people especially the people who committed violent assaults against police officers if he decides to do this what that basically says to trump supporters and trump aides or anyone else is if you commit a crime but you do it for donald trump you can do it because he'll just pardon you.
And so, you know, Matt was saying, imagine Kash Patel goes into the FBI and starts ordering a bunch of FBI agents to do illegal surveillance on all of Trump's political enemies in secret. And they don't want to do it.
But he says, oh, no, don't worry. If you're breaking the law, like Donald Trump's got you.
or a Trump aide or a Trump goon goes into Congress and shoots a member of the opposition, you know,

and you're in D.C. and it's federal jurisdiction and then Trump just pardons them.
or a Trump aide or a Trump goon goes into Congress and shoots a member of the opposition, you know,

and you're in D.C. and it's federal jurisdiction and then Trump just pardons them, right? And they're like, not to say that that's going to happen, but like this is where it leads to start pardoning people who have broken the law, some for violent crimes, just for political reasons.
Yeah, and those are obviously extreme examples. but I thought Iglesias' piece was smart in that it recognized the reality right now,

which is usually after a president is elected, there's some sort of rallying around the flag effect of people are like, let's give them a chance. Let's come together for the country.
And that's not really what we're seeing this time. We are seeing a lot of people, even Trump supporters, scared of scared of him right like tim cook giving a million dollars personally to his inauguration big tech sucking up cutting big checks to the inauguration it goes beyond just them doing it for business reasons they are scared shitless of him and and even his powerful supporters will not criticize anything about trump and like you know the way he spelled it out in that piece, it makes you think.
Yeah. And, you know, part of me thinks, OK, Trump, hopefully here, is a lame duck.
And at some point, you know, what is the utility of constantly, you know, us talking about Trump, going after Trump? Well, first of all, he's like the president for the next four years and his agenda is going to matter what he does. Right.
But also, I think the Republican Party has learned from Trump that this kind of, you know, just loyalty above all else, like this is the way this is the way you hack the system. Right.
Like partisanship above all stick together, just excuse anything possible. And so even when Trump's long gone from the scene, they continue this kind of attitude, this kind of strategy like that.
This is what we're going to get.

And for the midterms too, right?

We make them all comment on it and vote on it.

Yep, absolutely. Right, well, that's where I think there's

some little glimmer of hope, right?

Because all of that's true, right?

Like Republicans, they're not afraid of right-wing media

because right-wing media is on their side.

They're not afraid of the mainstream media

because they've now discovered

that it's mattering less and less and less, right?

They're only afraid of Donald Trump.

Donald Trump's the only one that can hurt them.

But that's not true of a vulnerable House Republican who is up for reelection and just wants to keep his or her job, right? There are still places where the reality distortion of Trump can be broken. Yeah, which brings us to our next topic because because for the next year, which is basically all the time they have two years, really to the midterms, they're going to try to pass everything they can, because as most parties do, they expect that potentially they could lose the House, right? Maybe the Senate, but the House is definitely in play in 2026.
So let's talk about their big plans for 2025. Basically one giant bill that includes everything from tax cuts for the rich to money for mass deportations.
Some Republicans, mostly in the Senate, think it would be easier to do immigration first and better to do immigration first in one bill and then taxes in a second bill. Here's what Trump said about it on Hugh Hewitt show.
Well, I favor one bill. I also want to get everything passed.
And, you know, there are some people that don't necessarily agree with it. I'm open to that also.
My preference is one big, as I say, one big, beautiful bill. Now, to do that takes longer.
You know, to submit it takes longer, actually. But but so it's a longer process.
I would say that I'd live with that.

Build back horrible.

Yeah, we're there again. It seems like this is just a question of which path is more politically feasible for Republicans, one bill or two.

But what do you guys think are the considerations are here?

So there are some friction points in immigration, which we'll get to in a minute.

But immigration seems easier for them than taxes. Taxes are hard because taxes get back to kind of good old-fashioned Republican politics, which is the base versus the pro-business funders.
So they think they could do immigration first and get a win on the border, and they can keep everybody in line, which would be good. They want to get a quick win on the board, but they think they need immigration because tax is going to be so tough given they only have a one seat majority.
And that actually could become a two or three seat majority once they have these special elections in a couple of weeks. So the question is, do they jeopardize a quick win that they could get on the border in order to make a tax victory later in the year more feasible because they can use both to kind of wrangle people and sweeten the deal to get some people in man if i were them and reading the political winds i would say democrats are scared shitless on immigration and of all the things where we might have a chance of getting 60 votes in the senate this might be it and i might go for that but i mean depending well they won't they will it's that would be reconciliation too well right i'm saying like if you want to do multiple bills because you're only gonna have one or two shots of reconciliation so breaking into pieces requires you to at some point go through the regular process no that basically there's two reconciliation shells that they have that's what i'm saying you do two reconciliation shells the the the the counterpoint of like do a bunch of bills get a bunch of wins oh bunch no i think it's a question of like do you can you do one right one or two it's just immigration and then a second one that's everything right but if you look at what they're talking about about, depending on what you read, there's proposals that this could be immigration, energy policy, tax cuts, maybe military spending, and then God knows what members of Congress try to jam in there or various lobbyists or whatever.
So I was just reacting to Lovett's point that I do think their strongest political footing is immigration. Right, and so do they want to spend it and get the win or do they want to use it to try to get some of their more unpopular tax policies across? The other thing they have to deal with is for taxes, there's a cliff at the end of the year.
So if they don't get, so say they do immigration and that takes up a lot of time. I think this is probably why they, one reason why they want to do both together.
So they take a bunch of time in immigration, they get a quick win, and then they only have X amount of months left to the end of the year. Because if the Trump tax cuts from last time are set to expire at the end of the year, they don't do anything on taxes.
They can't agree on something. That means every single person in America, their income taxes go up.
So like, tough, talk about talk about cliffs that like force you to do things. And and so there's so there's that part of it.
then they've also, there's another side of this, which is they have to raise the debt ceiling. And they've promised, in order to keep the government open over the holidays, they promised $2.5 trillion in cuts on top of that.
So they have built for themselves quite a, I don't know what you'd call it, bear trap? Spending disaster. I mean, extending the tax cuts, the Trump tax cut, the price tag from the CBO is 4.6 trillion over 10 years.
So there's no way they're going to be able to pay for this. Well, and some of them don't give a shit, right? And don't care about paying for it.
But the Chip Roy's of the world and the House and the Freedom Caucus people, they've basically, I mean, to your point, they've basically said, no, we're not. And this is where, this is for some of them, it's truly is like, this is why they're there.
This is what they believe. It is genuinely motivating.
It is a sincerely held belief. And this is where they don't really care about Donald Trump.
Right. It's the one issue.
Isn't that interesting? Chip Roy and some of these people are like, they're fine, Donald Trump being mad at them because they're like, look, we're here to, you know, eliminate government as much as we can. And but like five trillion.
I mean, some of the pay for's that they've been throwing around the tariffs, which is just a tax on consumers, repeal all the clean energy investments and clean energy jobs that Joe Biden helped create with the Inflation Reduction Act. And by the way, just one note on those.
Most of those are red states. Yep.
And a lot of that money is already out the door. Repeal student loan forgiveness and get some money from there.
And then cut the entire education department. They're looking to close down the education department.
Food stamps, Medicaid, another 40 billion they can get by deciding that Medicare and Medicaid cannot cover Ozempic or Wagovi or some of those new, yeah. Coming for the king.
From my cold, dead hands. And then, you know, some of the idiots are still, even though, you know, Trump has publicly ruled it out and other Republican leaders, you know, they've talked about Medicare, Social Security, and all the rest.
Well, that's the rub. That's the only way you can actually pay for a price tag this high is to go after entitlements.
I don't know how they're, I mean, we'll see. We're going to have a whole year to talk about this, but I don't know how they're going to square this circle.
Yeah. Many circles that they have to square.
You can get, look, we Democrats do, Republicans do it. There's some budget trickery they can do, right? They can sunset certain things and set up a new cliff down the road.
Like there are ways to get around it. But again, like you getting that by Chip Roy and those guys.
But yeah, so there's that. But then there's also just Donald Trump saying that Medicare and Social Security are off the table means you're pushing for steeper and actually more difficult, far more difficult cuts to get through Congress on Medicaid, on food stamps, on on veterans.
By the way, they talked about cutting veterans and the debt limit thing makes it harder. So the debt limit expires in late spring, early summer, which is, I think, one of the reasons they're talking about April or May to get this on Trump's desk, which, like, good luck with that.
Now, if you do debt limit within a reconciliation bill, like either of these bills they're talking about, then Republicans can lift the debt limit or eliminate the debt limit on their own, right? They don't need Democrats because Democrats aren't going to vote for this because it's 51 votes. But if they can agree to include the debt limit in one of these bills or just one bill, if they do one bill, then they have to negotiate with Democrats because then you have the 60 vote threshold.
And so like, but the hard thing about doing the debt limit in the reconciliation bill is again, the Freedom Caucus, because they're going to be like, oh, we're going to raise the debt limit and spend $5 trillion on tax cuts. It's just getting them all to agree, even just the Republicans in the house on everything you write down in a bill about all these various issue areas seems almost impossible to me, especially with a pretty weak speaker.
Do you guys have any thoughts on like, so Democrats don't have the votes to stop any of this. And, you know, we can't call them feckless for it.
They don't have the votes that everyone should know. Democrats cannot stop anything in Congress right now.
Just they don't. They can't.
They can try to make it more unpopular in a setup for the midterms to try to take back the House and maybe the Senate. Do you have any ideas on what to focus on? You could see many bad messages.
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
That are that are recycled from the last 10 years, 20 years. You know, like it's chaos again in the House.
You know, like I does make one pitch, though, please. Just one thing.
just like... Nobody say the phrase tax scam again.
I don't understand. The tax scam, it's nonsense words.
How did we land on that? It must have tested well in some messaging document, but it sounds fucking stupid. I hate tax scam.
Look, I think the... Look, I think you can...
They're trying to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, basic services for people in order to pay for tax cuts for their wealthiest benefactors, friends, andonies and the biggest corporations shipping jobs overseas. There's some like basic stuff that you can do.
My question is only like, how much should Democrats get ahead of the part of this, which is that some of the tax cuts, a small portion of it, but some of the Trump tax cuts were tax cuts for the middle class, for the working class. Right.
And so you need to get out there and say, here's our proposal. Right.
We would love to extend the tax breaks for the middle class. We'd love to attend the tax breaks for working people in this country.
And we'd love to attach it to a raise in the minimum wage. Donald Trump says he's for working.
And by the way, you want to do no tax on tips. Here's our proposal for no tax on tips.
We'll do all the middle class stuff. And here's, and we know how to pay for it.
Now it's your turn. Because I think like that to me is where they're going to try to say the Democrats are for a big tax increase.
It's as simple as like, they want to cut taxes for rich people and they want you to pay for it. That's it.
You get the bill. It's not free.
It's a huge giveaway to them. You get the bill.
Yeah, the 2017 tax cut, the households with incomes in the top 1% got an average tax cut of $60,000 in 2025 compared to the average tax cut of less than $500 for households in the bottom 60% according to the Tax Policy Center. So you just have to make the case that we are spending, we're burning trillions of dollars on tax cuts for the richest people in the country.
How do you pay for that? On the back end, it's going to be cuts to Social Security, Medicare, programs you care about. I also think you can- And potentially tariffs, which is a big taxing.
Yes, yes. And I do think you can find, I think we should look for some kind of process point about how bad this process is.

Like Elon Musk was really mad about the length of the omnibus spending bill back in December. Right.
Remember then they all were really happy that it went from 1500 pages to 100 pages. Like, wait till you read this one, buddy.
I know. I was thinking that when I was reading it today.
One thing we all missed, or hopefully you all missed it, over the holiday break was the omnibus spending bill that almost shut the government down because Elon almost shut the government down. And then Mike Johnson barely won the speakership.
So, like, if you think anything's going to be easy to pass through the House with Elon. To the point about Elon, though, like, I do think that like we got to make this more vivid for people trump now has a cabinet full of billionaires and fuck it's like you're either a billionaire or a former fox news host literally yeah that's basically the whole cabinet and then you got elon there you got the other tech bros i would like have pictures of them with what kind of tax cut they're gonna get we can calculate it good elon's getting this many billion this one's scott bessemer whatever the fucking treasury secretary is getting this much like we got to make it proud gay american i just like we used to do this we used to do this back in like 2010 and 12 with fucking like the you know how much warren buffett's getting versus his secretary being warren buffett actually offered that yeah you know example like why don't we do that shit anymore remember the uh the Cornhusker kickback.
Oh, yeah. That's just not written in 2010 as part of the debate around the Affordable Care Act.
The Obama administration or the Democrats are trying to get votes from Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska. And basically the bill as written in one version gave massive subsidies to the state of Nebraska to try to get his vote.
And it became a huge scandal, an example of pork barrel spending. And it ultimately got stripped out.
And I think the Cornhusker kickback was part of the reason Nelson didn't run for reelection in 2012. So you got to find that thing.
You know, there will be some dirty pool being played by John Thune and Johnson and the congressional leaders. Also, the Cornhusker kickback, he was fighting for a kick for Kornhuskers.
Seems like it should have been good. Why wouldn't you like that? Don't you want your Kornhusker center to fight for Kornhusker kickbacks? Tip O'Neill did for his whole career.
Yeah. I bet another reason they want to do it in one bill, too, is because they are hoping to bait Democrats by including some of the worst sort of culture war stuff in this bill.
Right? And immigration is obviously the prime example. And I'm sure they want Democrats to focus all of our outrage on that and then just quietly do the tax cuts in the background.
Because, you know, the hardcore MAGA people, they don't give a shit about the tax cuts. Like, I know we have told ourselves that it's like, they're cutting this to pay for this, and that is what they're doing.
But the real MAGA, the real Laura Loomers and the Steve Bannons they don't give a shit about the tax cuts they just hate immigrants and a lot of other kind of people and they want to weaponize the Justice Department they want to go after immigrants and so I do think that they will try to push the tax cuts to sort of the back rooms and just negotiate that and then throw out bait just negotiate that. And then like throw out bait for the rest of us to like freak out about, which by the way, is also normal old school Republican politics.
Yep. That sure is.
It sure is. They're also smart enough to know that you think you have two years until the midterms, but you really only have a couple of months because you're, you know, things happen.
Maybe a member of Congress dies, right? There's an issue there about the size of the majority from natural causes, I'm saying.

Happened to Ted Kennedy from the Democrats.

And if you believe this, public stories.

Gunned down in his prime.

Foreign policy crises.

Exigent events.

Yeah, foreign policy crises.

Like, who knows?

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So one person who's already inserted himself in the debate over Trump's immigration policy and basically everything else is our pal Elon Musk. An intra-MAGA fight broke out over the holidays that pitted Elon and the new MAGA Tech Bros against the old guard MAGA immigrant haters like Laura Loomer and Steve Bannon.
It all started when Loomer criticized Trump's choice for White House advisor on artificial intelligence because he is an Indian immigrant who's been a big supporter of the H-1B visa program. And that is a program which allows American companies to hire skilled workers from overseas.
Elon weighed in with his support for the program, which he's used at his companies. I think he said he was an H-1B recipient himself when he was first an immigrant before he was a citizen here.
Then things got crazy. Bannon said that if Musk doesn't watch himself, quote, we're going to rip your face off.
For his part, Elon told H-1B opponents to, quote, fuck yourself in the face and endorsed a post that referred to American workers as, quote, retarded. Vivek Ramaswamy then jumped in to argue that American workers are lazy because, quote, a culture that venerates Zack and Slater over Screech in Saved by the Bell or Stefan over Steve Urkel in Family Matters will not produce the best engineers.
Incredible. Incredible.
Trump finally settled the whole thing for now by coming out in favor of the H-1B program, saying that he's used it too, but we think he's confused because he's used the other H1B program that is more about lower skilled workers that you can bring in front of his hotels. Well, no, I don't know.
H1B 2? Well, no, but H1B, if you go look at it, it's actually defined really strangely. It says for H1B that it is for skilled workers and fashion models.
And so I actually think- Oh, that's right. It is the fashion model.
I remember that, model. And so I think it might be because- Melania.
Melania and others, but Melania. What do you make of this fight, Levitt? It was a marketplace, beautiful marketplace of ideas.
What I thought when I saw it is that it's as if all these guys were kind of standing in an open field and then somebody stepped on a twig and they all started shooting. You know, it's like the piece broke.
The thing that was interesting to me is like, first of all, it's like, it's interesting just to see Elon Musk turn his like kind of way of talking about politics as somebody who is new to politics, which is just like, there's two kinds of people, your friends and retarded pedophiles. It's like, that's how we talk about politics.ific.
But if you put the name calling part of it aside, it was interesting to watch Elon Musk. Like he said, he said, think of it like a pro sports team.
If you want your team to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole team to win, which is not just an argument for the H-1B visa.
It's an argument for immigration. And he found himself just because he happened to have experience with this one kind of immigration, defending the concept of immigration.
And because he is new to this, he doesn't realize how anathema that is to all of these anti-immigrant right-wing zealots. He has, he and others in the tech world have let themselves believe that the opposition to all the talk about immigration from Trump and MAGA has really just been about the border and people who've come here who have been you know violent criminals and the lake and riley stuff and all that like they let themselves believe that was the case or at least some of them have and now and some of the just unbelievably straight up racist shit that was said over the holiday break about this from some of the trump people was fucking why they were just like what to your point when you said it were like imagine we're all on the same team people on the right maga people were like no we're not on the same team we don't want them on our team we're racist they should be in another country they shouldn't be here and like this is a riff this is not new to tech bros versus maga world this is a republican fault line like when george Bush proposed immigration reform, comprehensive immigration reform, he included a guest worker program because the free market, pro-immigrant, pro-business right has always understood that when you give the base the enforcement and border security they demand, you have to, for the sake of the economy, acknowledge in the law that our businesses and corporations run on cheap immigrant labor.
And so this has always been the friction point in this debate for Republicans. I just think we need to spend one more minute on the Vivek Ramaswamy Twitter screed, because I think it was written from inside a locker that he had been stuffed in sometime in the 90s.
We're a, we're a culture that elevates the prom king over the math.

More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of Friends,

more math tutoring, fewer sleepovers.

What are you talking about?

Fewer sleepovers.

More weekend science competitions,

fewer Saturday morning cartoons.

You are such a loser.

And this led David Brooks in The Atlantic

to write a piece titled,

The Vake Ramaswamy is Not Invited to My Sleepover.

I'm not even going to tell him. That's real.
That's real. By the way, I think I have the credibility in this issue as the person who was at the Saturday math competitions and was not at the sleepovers and someone who was very clearly a screech desperately trying to figure out what are all these Zacks? I'm sitting at a table two fucking Zacks.
No, but I just, you know, someone pointed to that on Twitter that clearly he did not really watch Saved by the Bell because if you had, like I watched every episode about three times. Zach did better on his SATs than Screech.
It was a whole episode. Yes, yes.
The big grand reveal that Screech is also stupid was tough. That Zach is not just lazy, but also brilliant.
Terrific. Great model.
Thanks a lot. Kind of making Mavake's point.
That's America. That's America.
In real life, Screech's life took a turn, too. And Mark Paul Gosler seems like a pretty nice, normal guy.
Anyway. Anything else about that? This can be our Sputnik moment.
He actually put that. The great thing about this tweet from bavek is it was universally destroyed the far right hated it the right hated it the left mocked it it was a beautiful thing one other interesting thing on this is that like the some folks on the left like bernie sanders have been they basically sided with the bannons on this one not by being openly xenophobic at all i'm not saying that that.
But in fairness to them, people on the left have been complaining about the H-1B visa program like long before Trump. That's exploitative to workers.
And yes, Sanders' argument is it allows companies to hire foreign workers for less money and then they have more power over those workers because if they leave the job, they can be forced to leave the country. So, you know, they use the term which might be going a bit far, which is like they're indentured servants, you know.
But in Fanner Soberni, he then called for reforms like increasing guest worker fees for corporations, raising minimum wage for guest workers, allowing them to easily switch jobs, which I think are all good reforms to the programs. But I do think like a lot of folks on the left and center left like jumped in to be like, well, Elon Musk is right on this one, stuff like that.
But if we're thinking about the economy now and we're thinking about sort of inequality and the angst that sort of drove this election for a lot of people who drove a lot of people to vote for Trump. I do think it's worth pointing out that like Elon Musk and some of these tech founders and tech CEOs like they like having cheap labor.
They do. One reason they like the H-1B visa program is because, you know, it's going to help them get richer.
And I think if we say that a lot of these guys, a lot of these Elon folks and the oligarchs who are now running our country, when they come out for something, it's because it's usually going to make them a lot of fucking money. Yeah.
The, you know, Bernie also always. I think you can be for immigration.
Yes. More immigration in this country and still recognize what their motivations are.
Well, Bernie has always been against, H-1B is a form of guest worker, as is the farm worker programs that have been always, that Bush has been proposed, that were debated when Obama was proposing comprehensive immigration reform. And I'm not sure if he's always been completely against it, but Bernie's always been, I think, ideologically and ethically opposed to them because they are really ultimately about creating a kind of second class status for a certain kind of worker.
And the point that like I can't remember which right wing ghoul in between their racist rants went and looked at the entry level positions that have been filled by H1B visas. I think it was Loomer.
But like, yeah, like these are this is supposed to be you can't find the person in the U.S. and you're going to pay them what you would pay a U.S.
worker.

And obviously, as Elon knows and as all these right wing people know, that is not how it is used.

It is used to fill a bunch of positions for for for for less pay.

Yeah. OK, we're going to take a quick break.

One quick thing before we do that, though, four years after the insurrection, we're still examining the reach and the limits of presidential power.

This week on Strict Scrutiny, Leah, Melissa and Kate break down what it actually looks like, why it matters, and how we've seen checks on it from sometimes very unexpected places. Tune into this very timely episode now, only on the Strict Scrutiny feed.
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Restrictions apply. USAA! So, Tommy, this wasn't Elon's only notable foray into politics over the holidays.
He's been busy. Yeah.
He's now going, he's taking the show on the road from the US to other countries. Yeah, he's going on tour.
I do do think this is important thing to watch and ben and i are going to talk about this tomorrow on pod save the world but like so we all watched elon turn twitter into a propaganda tool for trump and then dump what 100 some odd million dollars into pro-trump super facts but now he's starting to mess around in other countries and so it's i think it started in germany where he was been he has been attacking the chancellor this guy olaf a social democrat, for a long time. But then over the break, he endorsed the AFD, which is a very extreme, super far right, pro-Putin party in Germany.
In the UK, Elon has been attacking Keir Starmer, the new prime minister, Labour prime minister. But it got really ugly recently.
Elon said that Starmer was, quote, complicit in the rape of Britain and that he should be arrested. And then he also said he was deeply complicit in the mass rapes in exchange for votes.
He's talking about this horrific, horrific scandal where a decade or two ago, a bunch of young girls, like 1,400 or more girls, were sexually abused in this awful, it's called the grooming gang scandal. We won't get into all the details of it, but Elon is dredging that back up to attack Starmer.
And then I think just today, Elon went after, he started boosting far right candidates in Canada, and he's also been boosting far right parties and candidates in the UK. He met with Nigel Farage, I think at Mar-a-Lago.
And according to Farage, said he might spend up to $100 million on behalf of the Reform Party in the UK, which would be just an absolutely unprecedented amount of money and probably illegal. And then turned on Farage and said he needs to go because Farage doesn't support this guy, Tommy Robinson, who is this right-wing Islamoph.
Basically, he's like a mix between a soccer hooligan and kind of a far right agitprop guy in Britain, whatever. But it's a huge deal because Germany's got elections in February.
Canada has elections sometime later this year. Keir Starmer.
Where they will vote on whether they want to be the 51st state. Yeah, they will vote on whether to join America officially.
Honestly. We haven't even talked about it.
I forgot that. Honestly, it's one way to make the Senate fucking work for us.
For those who don't know, Donald Trump has been musing on Truth Social about Canada becoming the 51st state, potentially bringing Greenland, annexing Greenland, or letting Greenland choose to be the 51 51st or letting Greenland choose to be part of the United States.

And we're going to take back the Panama Canal.

And we're going to take back the Panama Canal.

No bad ideas in a brainstorm.

The canal, the Greenland thing in the Panama Canal are kind of oldies but goodies.

Carter's dead now.

We can get the canal back.

Calling Canada the 51st state is kind of a funny new wrinkle.

Don Jr. was in Greenland today.

I know.

Was he?

Yeah, but apparently it was like not an official business. It's for content for his podcast.
A source familiar said this. Hey guys.
Hey everybody. It's cold.
Not everything here is white for the same reason, right? I't find it. It is really hard to find.

What were we talking about?

Anyway.

Sorry, Elon. No, I just think it's really bad.

I mean, Twitter's a powerful tool.

Although, do you notice

that Elon recently said

that he's going to tweak

the algorithm

to make it a more positive place?

Great.

This is after he called

American workers retarded.

Yeah, and elected Donald Trump

or helped elect Donald Trump.

I'd like to see more content

about Jews being good at business.

But like he's messing around in these elections in these foreign countries.

None of these leaders know how to deal with it.

They're all kind of like, don't feed the trolls, try to ignore him and hope he goes away.

He's not going to go away.

But then more broadly, like the G7 is a mess right now.

Like Trudeau resigned today.

They've got an election coming up.

The French government is in this cycle of like collapse and then caretaker prime minister and collapse. They don't have elections until 2027.
The German government dissolved. They're about to have an election.
The South Koreans, the president declared martial law. He did a self-coup.
Now the cops are trying to arrest the guy, but he won't surrender himself. So they're trying to figure that out.
We're obviously a mess. Labor has kind of stumbled out of the gate.
And the most stable part of the G7 meeting will be the Mussolini fan running Italy. And it's just like, what the fuck is going on here? This goes back to my liberals who were like, maybe we should leave the country after Trump.
It's like, where are you going to go? Where are you going to go? Not a lot of safe harbors out there right now. Yeah.
That Joe Biden farewell international tour is not going to go so well. He's going to Italy.
See you with the Pope. Oh, yeah.
He's going to see you with the Pope. Great.
Have a good time with the Pope. Tommy, are we going to get like a right-wing government in Canada too now? Or are we going to get like a right-wing, like a Trump puppet there who then decides he wants to reunify with the United States in Well, Trudeau is just stepping down early, I think, to give his party, the liberals, a chance of, you know, riding the ship before elections.
I think they're going to be in October or September. So we got a while, but it's likely that one of these far right guys will win.
Think Trudeau wants a pod? I don't know. He's been in here.
He sat at that very seat. There you go.
We talked with him. Well, contact us.
Let us know. Let us know what you're up to.
All right. Before we go, on Saturday, in a ceremony at the White House, President Biden awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, to 18 individuals.
Among them, former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, NBA Hall of Famer Magic Johnson, celebrity chef Jose Andres, Bill Nye the Science guy, philanthropist and lead singer of YouTube, Bono, and Democratic mega donor, George Soros and crooked investor.

Well earned Medal of Freedom.

There's a good one.

Thank you, sir.

There's a good one.

Got one right.

Allow us to commend Joe Biden on this.

Can you, can you, Tommy, can you explain to the audience what these medals are and why presidents give them out? Not in a way that'll make sense, but I'll try. I mean, it's the highest civilian honor.
It's bestowed by the president basically at his or her discretion. Nice and her or her there.
Well, thank you. I mean, look.
Maybe on the moon one day. Jesus Christ.
The current presidential medal of freedom, it exists in this form thanks to JFK, who updated a previous honor that was established by Harry Truman. But it doesn't make any sense.
You can give it to living people. You can give it to dead people.
You can give it to foreign nationals. Colin Powell got it twice for some reason.
You can add a with distinction flag with no real explanation for what that means. Oh yeah, Biden also just gave it to RFK.
Yeah, which I liked. I thought it was a cool move.
Yeah, just to stick in there. Now Trump can't do it.
And George Romney, Mitt Romney's father too. Lots of posthumous awards.
Yeah. Lots of posthumous.
Tuck a little pardon in there for some of those people. Yeah, I was going to say like, what a fucking consolation prize.
Liz Cheneyation prize. Liz Cheney didn't get the Medal of Freedom.
She got the one that was just below it. Which, by the way, pissed off some resistance folks on Twitter.
They're so mad. They're like, how dare he give Magic Johnson the Medal of Freedom and Liz Cheney, our hero.
I bet Liz Cheney could use a pardon more than the fucking medal. Why is there a silver in this? What are we doing? What is this? What is this? That's the question.
If it's going to be... I will say, because Obama gave out a whole bunch of them too, right? We gave them the most of any president.
Obama gave one to Biden, you know? And Biden did not return the favor. That's interesting.
Yeah. Well...
I guess they're not really on speaking terms, I suppose. After all that's happened.
But the process is just like White House staff, some interagency White House staff, they all get together and they talk about it and they drop a list. If you want to make it special and a reverent honor, you kind of got to have some kind of independent body that is just like, hey, president, here's where we go.
David Rubenstein got one who's like his house. Yeah, he loans Biden his Nantucket house.
Yeah, like what? Come on. The Carlisle Group.
Yeah, that's great. In his first term, George H.W.
Bush gave a Medal of Freedom to Ella Fitzgerald and Strom Thurmond. Make that make sense.
In 2009, Obama gave one to Stephen Hawking and Desmond Tutu. In 2011, Obama gave one to Bob Gates and Yo-Yo Ma.
Like, what is this price? It's just a cool thing you can get. I do think it's fun that you can do them posthumously, which sort of means you can go all the way back.
Right? Like, why not? And this, Joan of Arc, yeah, Jesus, yes. And there And there was a whole, there was a little dust up

because Trump infamously bestowed

the Medal of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh

and then to like Jim Jordan and Devin Nunes.

It's like, come on.

George Bush gave it to Bill Cosby.

Ooh, that one you might.

Well, that just looked bad in hindsight.

Ben Jacobs, reporter Ben Jacobs on Twitter

said that the collection of people

that Biden awarded the Medal of Freedom to on Saturday

looked like the National Heroes Garden for MSNBC viewers. That's a great joke.
It's a great joke. It's like Hillary Clinton and George Soros.
It's a little too on the nose. A little too on the nose.
What was the meeting where they're like, no, Liz Cheney gets one tear below. I don't get it.
I don't't either it's like it's a weird hodgepodge of like political leader like george romney yeah we got one ash carter who passed away who's defense secretary benny lou hamer that's a good one that's a great one great one ralph loren great one jose andres great one yeah give that man a peace prize but ralph loren that's the one you that you think the ralph loren's a great one you like those well there's just it's weird just nice oh you said's weird. Oh, it's weird.
I thought you said it was a great one. No, no, Jose Andres.
They're great clothes for a boat. Jose is a great one.
I don't have a problem with Ralph Lauren, but I don't, I mean, you know, I suppose it's nice to wear on a boat, but I don't think it's on the level of Desmond Tutu. I'm there with you.
I'm there. You know that Bill Belichick turned it down? Really? Donald Trump offered it to him.
He accepted it. Then January 6th happened.
So shout out, Bill. I guess January 6th changed one thing.
Well, next year it's going to be 18 people who are all fucking capital writers. Yeah, and that choir is going to sing.
The shaman. He'll get one.
It's going to be a very long time. Mike Pence.
With you for the duration. Anyway, that's our show.
Yeah. Stick with us for these next four years.
I read a book over the break called An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro. Okay.
And it was interesting because it was about what happens at- Ooh, the book report section. This show's over.
This show's over. Give us three books that are- I will give you three books, John, but I'll start with this one.
What was interesting about it is it was about what happens in a country after the fascist fervor breaks. And everyone's just looking around being like, why did you do this to us? And it was interesting.
What happens? A lot of people are pretty sad. A lot of death.
But it was interesting just because it was this older guy grappling with his involvement and the younger generation looking at disgust at what they did to the country yeah and it just reminded me as i was reading it that like there's a lot about what happens on the way in but there's also a way out well it's also interesting that like you just mentioned the fascist fervor and it's like i don't even think there's that much fervor right like a lot of it is like apathy or people being checked out or denial or like, eh, whatever. I was annoyed.
You know, people sort of, a lot of people probably voted for Trump out of like disgust with both choices, right? And it's just, people are going to be in for a rude awakening. Yeah, there's that part of it.
There's also a great piece in ProPublica from a couple days ago called The Oath Keeper's Militia Mole, I think is the title.

It's The Militia and the Mole.

It's about this guy who just decided on his own to infiltrate the three percenters and the Oath Keepers and all these right-wing groups.

And his story about why he did that, even though he didn't do it on behalf of the cops, he just wanted to expose them.

But the degree to which these groups now feel ascendant and validated because of Trump's re-election is very scary.

And it goes back to the pardon issue, too, with January 6th.

Because if they see them getting a pardon, they'll feel pretty emboldened.

So, anyway, coming attractions.

Should we do more books?

What else do you read?

I'm reading The Wide, Wide Sea by Hampton Sides.

It's about Captain James Cook, famous British explorer. Obviously, a lot of downsides to these guys running around the world, spreading diseases and rats and all killing off native peoples, but also kind of fascinating to imagine a period of time when you could hop in a boat and go someplace that no one you knew had ever heard of even.
It wasn't on a map. Wow.
Tommy's getting ideas. I'm just going to get in a spaceship with Elon.
Here you go. What'd you read over the break, John? I'm reading, I'm doing the thing.
You've done this before. I'm reading like many books at once now.
I like doing that. Reading Boy Mom, which is about raising young men and- Solid.
And, you know, modern masculinity. Uh-huh.
And I'm reading Patrick Ruffini's book, which was about uh how the gop has being or the realignment of the working class rough riders it's a good it's a good book and um even leanhart's book ours was a shining future about the uh american dream and inequality i read and i i read uh henry kissinger's last book about ai that he wrote with Eric Schmidt because it was very short.

And I was like, you know what?

I want a primer from the oldest man in the world.

Did he get a Medal of Freedom yet?

I'm sure he did.

I want the last musings on a new technology from a dying 100-year-old man.

It was interesting.

Oh, do you guys know Trump had a book called The Art of the Comeback from 1997?

Prescient.

Well, put that on your list. All right.
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