What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition

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Speaker 4 Welcome back to Inside 2024. I'm Alyssa Mastramonico.

Speaker 3 And I'm Dan Pfeiffer.

Speaker 4 Buddy, is it still Inside 2024? What are we going to call it in 2025?

Speaker 3 Are we allowed inside again?

Speaker 4 Maybe it's just outside.

Speaker 3 Yes, outside the country, 2025.

Speaker 4 Outside the country, 2025. Wait, before we get started,

Speaker 4 I have to give you a little fun fact. Oh, please.
Do you realize as we sit here and record today, we are older than Barack Obama was when he became president?

Speaker 3 Well, gee, thanks, Alyssa. That's great.
It's exactly what I needed during the holiday season. Yes, I'm well aware of that.

Speaker 4 At least we're the same age. I'm doing it to myself, too.
Do you know what? What?

Speaker 3 Between us, we host like five podcasts. How many podcasts did Barack Obama host when he became when he was 47?

Speaker 3 None.

Speaker 4 Okay, so we're thriving.

Speaker 3 So he's ahead of us in some ways and we're ahead of him in other ways. It's fun.

Speaker 4 Well, but it's December. We're winding down for the holidays in theory, and it's time to rest and recharge.

Speaker 4 But alas, we are knee-deep in a presidential transition period straight out of the upside-down world.

Speaker 4 So, Dan, we're two old vets of the process. Caroline wrote that.
We both served on the transition committee in the Obama years, so we have some valuable insight to impart on this very abnormal moment.

Speaker 4 So, today we're talking about just that. Also, here to moderate this conversation, definitely not an old vet of anything, is producer Caroline Rustin.

Speaker 3 Did she write that too? No, I wrote that. Okay.

Speaker 5 I didn't see that you wrote that. I mean, I've been here six years.
I'm like an old vet.

Speaker 4 When I tinker with the outline, I tinker with the outline.

Speaker 5 Also, I just want to point out that Obama posts being a president got into podcasting. So he kind of is following in your footsteps.
You can shut up.

Speaker 3 That's exactly how he sees it, too.

Speaker 5 No, I mean, he did.

Speaker 5 So you were both part of the Obama Transition Committee. What does that mean? What were your roles? What did you do?

Speaker 5 Tell me all about it.

Speaker 3 I was the communications director for the transition, which meant that during the campaign itself, I had sort of a second like half job, which was to begin thinking about how we staffed the transition, what kind of resources we would have, how we would think about communicating with the public after we won, which was a terrible job.

Speaker 3 I hated even spending. I was so superstitious.
I hated spending any moments thinking about what would happen if Barack Obama would win when he had not yet won.

Speaker 3 And once the election was over over and Obama became the president-elect, I went to Washington like a couple of days after the election and was in charge of sort of the messaging in the transition, which really counted to both helping coordinate how we responded to reporter questions about what the president-elect was going to do and mostly rolling out all of his nominees.

Speaker 3 The cabinet secretaries, the new White House staff, the people who are going to serve on the Federal Reserve Board, that sort of stuff, like how we rolled them out, what kind of press events we did, what we said about them, how we responded to attacks on them.

Speaker 3 And so it was sort of just like a, it was go, it was sort of just very, it was very similar to my communications director job on the campaign, but focused on what the administration would look like when we, he actually took office in two months.

Speaker 4 So I actually, I was on the transition. The transition for us was split between Chicago and Washington, D.C.

Speaker 4 And so Barack Obama, then President-elect Obama, and

Speaker 4 Michelle and the girls, they were staying in Chicago until the holidays because girls were still in school. So I was split between Chicago and D.C.

Speaker 4 And I, with Pfeiffer, worked on, this is actually, here's one of our funniest transition stories. So like Pfeiffer said, we did a lot of the,

Speaker 4 we did a lot of the coordination around the cabinet secretary rollouts. They did not happen on Twitter as they do this time around.

Speaker 4 We actually had events where everyone would fly in and stand with the president for the most part and be announced.

Speaker 4 And he would have met with them and he'd come out and be like, I just met with my economic team and here's who they are.

Speaker 4 But one time, things moved so fast and furious on the transition that one of my deputies, Lizzie, called Stephen Chu, who was going to be Secretary of Energy, to coordinate his travel.

Speaker 4 And when she called him, he goes, I guess I got the job.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 4 we had,

Speaker 4 it is fast and furious. But yes, so I oversaw.
everything that the president-elect was doing, both in DC, Chicago when he traveled.

Speaker 4 And then also Pfeiffer and I were both, even though they're separate entities, there was the inaugural committee.

Speaker 4 And we both had a lot of visibility into that too, because you can't have an inauguration that's off message or poorly organized i mean i feel like you can't now i mean yeah we thought there's a lot of things we thought you couldn't do that you absolute

Speaker 5 standard you know i love that the way we used to announce cabinet picks was like a debutante ball and not just like on twitter i mean people

Speaker 4 really don't understand how few resources there are on a transition committee.

Speaker 4 Like Pfeiffer was in DC, so I'm not sure if he saw the same level of it, but where I was, because President Obama was there most of the time, we had

Speaker 4 Secretary Clinton, then Senator Clinton was coming to see President Obama. And he's like, can we get her some juice or something?

Speaker 4 And it required going to bed, bath, and beyond to buy a pitcher and then go to the Whole Foods to buy the apple juice. And then one of us had to take the pitcher home at night and wash it.

Speaker 4 And when he heard it was Peter Orzak's birthday, who was going to be our director of OMB, he's like, we should make him a cake, which meant one of us made him a cake.

Speaker 4 So those were very different times when John McCain was coming to see President Obama after the election. He flew out to Chicago.
There was no car service to pick him up.

Speaker 4 There was a nice guy named Ted Chioto who picked him up McDonald's on the way so he could eat. That is, it's, it's rough and tumble.
It is not a fancy, it is not,

Speaker 4 the taxpayers are getting their money's worth through that process.

Speaker 3 Wow, that's that's kind of well, that's an important difference, right? Is that we you there is taxpayer money allocated for transitions. We use that money.

Speaker 3 And so essentially, we all became government employees the day after the election.

Speaker 3 And therefore, we had a whole bunch of rules we had to follow, like what you can spend money on, what you can't spend money on. And Trump is not doing that.

Speaker 3 He is funding his transition through private, mostly secret money. And so they can do lots of things we could not do.

Speaker 3 And we had to follow a bunch of rules that they don't have to follow, including ethics requirements. Yes.

Speaker 3 All right.

Speaker 3 Basically, in exchange for the taxpayer funds, you follow government rules. If you don't take the taxpayer funds, you don't have to follow those rules.
Work smarter, not harder.

Speaker 3 I mean, if we could have announced those cabinet breaks on Twitter, we probably should have.

Speaker 4 It would have been so much easier.

Speaker 5 So you're talking about how previously before even winning the election, you are already prepping, even though you feel like it's bad juju. Okay, you won.

Speaker 5 What is happening the next day?

Speaker 3 It is hell on earth. It's horrible.
Horrible. Howard Wolfson, who worked for Hillary Clinton, described presidential campaigns as a pie-eating contest where the prize is more pie.

Speaker 3 And that's exactly what it is, right? Where it's you,

Speaker 3 we won. We had a victory celebration late into the night.
And then several of us, myself and Ellis included, had to come to the office at like 9 a.m.

Speaker 3 the morning after the election to meet with our new boss, Rahm Emmanuel.

Speaker 4 It was like eight, it was like 7.30, 8 a.m.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it was just, and then you're just like, you're working.

Speaker 3 For the people who were going to work on the transition, you went like, which includes mostly the sort of the senior staff of the campaign you went right to work on your new job there was no break uh and i'd never decided of your life to the worst yeah it's a truly a terrible morning and it just pure chaos but the other thing that's really hard about it is that like for example

Speaker 4 Pfeiffer and I had worked together at that point, like side by side for two full years. And now there are just all these new people flooding in.

Speaker 4 And as Pfeiffer will attest, I don't like you until I like you. So that was a very hard time for me.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it is. That's an important point, which, which is, as like some of us on the campaign would dip in and out of the transition because we were going to take jobs in the transition if we won.

Speaker 3 But separate from the campaign, there is an entire operation run by other people, staffed by people we don't know, working out of an office in DC who are putting together binders of staff names and cabinet secretaries and doing research on them and

Speaker 3 thinking about what executive orders you would do in the first hundred days, just like an entire policy brain trust that we never spoke with, never saw.

Speaker 3 And then the day after the election, you're like, meet your new colleagues.

Speaker 4 And I was like, no.

Speaker 3 Yeah, Alyssa was like, no.

Speaker 5 I think what you guys are talking about is something I actually didn't know existed, which is the Presidential Transition Act of 1963, which requires GSA to provide office-based administrative support to the president-elect.

Speaker 5 So looking at like the Biden administration right now, like when does the new president-elect start to get looped looped in? Like, how does that whole like literal transition process start?

Speaker 5 And like, how does that work? When is Trump getting clued in to what's going on?

Speaker 3 After they become the nominee.

Speaker 3 If they want to. Oh, wow.

Speaker 3 So after you become the nominee, you are officially the nominee, which happens after the convention.

Speaker 3 Then you now get access to this government transition funding, which most people, Biden, Trump last time,

Speaker 3 we did, they take advantage of it. So they open an office that is run by the General Services Administration, which is sort of the government administrative arm.

Speaker 3 And you hire a bunch of staff, they get a bunch of volunteer policy people, they all start working.

Speaker 3 And then periodically during the campaign, the candidate and hopefully president-elect will get briefed on, here's the names we're thinking about if you win, because you're going to have to move quickly.

Speaker 3 And so they kind of will be like, yes, yes, no, no, ask me about this again if we win sort of stuff.

Speaker 3 And then same for some staff like us who would be like, These are the things you have to be thinking about. We're going to have to hire these people to work on the transition.

Speaker 3 Are you okay with these people? How should we staff it? How many jobs should we hold open for people who are currently on the campaign to work on the transition

Speaker 3 until January 20th on inauguration day?

Speaker 5 Are nominees being told that like the Syrian regime is on the brink,

Speaker 5 like top national security information when they're the nominee?

Speaker 3 Yes, they you start getting classified briefing. You have, you can start getting classified briefings briefings as the nominee

Speaker 3 from the CIA base, essentially a dumbed, let's correct me if I'm wrong here, but it's like a dumbed down version of the presidential deal.

Speaker 4 CDB. Yeah, so what happens, and I learned this more,

Speaker 4 I sort of was clued into this more in 2012 when as deputy chief of staff, I actually ran the internal sort of transition process.

Speaker 4 So we were sitting in the White House, but I still had to reach out to the Romney team, onboard them.

Speaker 4 There's a small handful of people around, so there are a small number of people around Mitt Romney who were submitted for security clearance so that they could be with Mitt Romney if and when he received any of these briefings.

Speaker 4 And you just get them all, you get them all briefed up. So

Speaker 4 it's the nominee plus, I'd say a small handful of people who all have access to a sort of maybe slightly diluted presidential daily brief.

Speaker 4 But you know, when we were the nominee and headed into the financial crisis, the Bush team was actually really good about looping in in Obama and McCain on everything that they were thinking and talking about in the days leading up to the election around the financial crisis.

Speaker 5 In 2009, the Obama administration was coming into a huge recession.

Speaker 5 And I know we talked a little bit, you were just talking about how the outgoing administration has to loop in the incoming administration.

Speaker 5 But when something like a huge economic crisis is happening, what does that look like? I imagine you you need to hit the ground running.

Speaker 5 What are the things you're doing day one when you're the nominee on something like that? Are the Bush folks like nice to you?

Speaker 4 Extremely. Extremely.
The Bush, I don't think that we could have been any luckier in our transition than how the Bush folks handled it.

Speaker 4 And they had told me in some of my transition meetings that in some ways it was kind of informed by how they came into office in 2000, which was different and a little contentious and, you know, maybe not the jolliest of transitions after, you know, the Supreme Court decided the election.

Speaker 4 But I found, and I'll let Pfeiffer speak to the financial crisis because to just show how

Speaker 4 sort of organized or whatever the Obama campaign was, the economy was not my bag. And so I did not pick it up.
I had to watch the movie Too Big to Fail to totally understand the financial crisis.

Speaker 4 So Pfeiffer would have a better sense of that.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, Alyssa's right. The Bush people took real pride in having a real transition.
And she's right.

Speaker 3 Bush's transition was not great for a couple of reasons, but mainly he didn't get to start doing the transition for 37 days after the election because of the recount in Florida.

Speaker 3 And then there are some reports, some of which have turned out to be apocryphal about some tension between the Clinton folks and the Bush folks after the election. But Bush did take real pride.

Speaker 3 And they were very helpful. Everything we asked for, they were very helpful.
They all, everyone

Speaker 3 whose job we were about to take spent plenty of time with us, meeting with us and talking about how to do the job so we could hit the ground running.

Speaker 3 But it was especially important because we were existing in the middle of this financial crisis and it's important to understand that george bush was basically had been a lame deck president for about a year and a half at that point like fully lame deck he his approval rating was sub 30 he didn't really have the juice to get anything done he'd kind of because he was such a political albatross around the uh the republican nominee's campaign that he basically had been did disappeared um so it's not not dissimilar to how biden had been sort of absent throughout this whole campaign because him being in public was not seen by the nominee as helpful.

Speaker 3 So, Obama sort of had to become president

Speaker 3 for all intents and purposes on day one as president-elect, because Bush wanted to pass a bunch of legislation to respond to the financial crisis, and he could not do it on his own.

Speaker 3 He did not have the juice to do it. So, Obama had to take a real role in lobbying members of both parties to

Speaker 3 vote for bills. He had to begin writing legislation so that he could submit, he could release his economic stimulus bill before

Speaker 3 he even took office.

Speaker 3 And And so we were, that was one of the hard ways of our transition was we were having to do a normal transition to prepare for all the normal things you would do and hire all the right people and have your first week of events and be president at the same time during an absolute crisis with no margin of error because of who because of the history making nature of Obama's election, because of his relative inexperience, Washington inexperience.

Speaker 3 Like you, if you one fuck up and it could damage his presidency for a year.

Speaker 4 You can describe the transition most succinctly, I think, as just when the chickens come home to roost, like just across the board.

Speaker 3 You're so, you're so much more stressed because you're, by the time we met, the campaign was incredibly stressful, but we've been on it for two years and it's what we did.

Speaker 3 Like we were campaign people, we knew how to do it. And now you have a totally different job.
The stakes are much higher. You're navigating different,

Speaker 3 like a different culture, a different set of objectives with a bunch of people you've never met before. Like, we had the most closely knit campaign.

Speaker 3 There was a, there was maybe 10 to 12 people who had worked together for two years. We loved each other.
We made all decisions together. We trusted Obama.
Obama trusted us.

Speaker 3 And all of a sudden, you have all these new people, which we needed them, right? They had experience we didn't have.

Speaker 3 But it was hard. I remember my first day of the transition.
I walk in. I've been the communication direction on the campaign.
I'd been there on day one with Alyssa and Favs and Tommy.

Speaker 3 And we had just won this presidential election. I walk in the transition and my name's not on the list.
I can't even get in the building. And all these people

Speaker 3 whose names I only knew because they worked for people who ran against Barack Obama in the primary, just buzzing through with their IDs. I was standing there waiting for someone to come get me.

Speaker 3 Like the kid, it just so demoralizing.

Speaker 4 When I say the chickens come home to roost, it's everything.

Speaker 4 It is like Pfeiffer and I were the heads of our departments on the campaign, which meant that, you know, for me, I probably had a hundred and some full-time employees. I had 500 part-time employees.

Speaker 4 Every single one wants a job. But meanwhile, we're like, well, do we even have jobs yet?

Speaker 4 Because like, there's a lot of faith, you know, you're like, oh, I'm just going to start on the transition, but you haven't been given your job in the White House yet.

Speaker 4 And so, you're a little bit on, you know, pins and needles. And to Fiverr's point, you know, we have this thing on the campaign called the block schedule, which is like the Bible.

Speaker 4 It's everything Barack Obama is going to do. And I was in the transition office, and this woman, who I'm going to say her name, because I love her today, but at the time, I almost had a stroke.

Speaker 4 Mona Sutphin, who was deputy chief of staff for policy, goes rolling through with the block schedule and it's all marked up with her handwriting.

Speaker 4 And she's like, Rahm wanted me to take a whack at the first 100 days.

Speaker 3 I was like, 100 days of what?

Speaker 4 That is my job. Give me my schedule back.
It was, and the thing is, the thing that was so hard for me is that Pfeiffer and I were not in the same office.

Speaker 4 So I couldn't go into his office, close the door, and be like, buddy, you're not going to believe what happened. I had to like secretly call him from the bathroom in the Chicago transition.

Speaker 5 Does anyone give you a tour, or do you just kind of like waltz in and just walk off?

Speaker 4 He waltzed in. It's like a make no mistake, it's sort of prison-like.
Like, if you think about the DMV, that's kind of what it's like.

Speaker 5 So, in 2020, when Biden was president-elect, Trump and his administration famously stonewalled the transition.

Speaker 5 What does that even mean?

Speaker 5 What are the stakes for stonewalling an incoming presidency? And what literally are they doing to stop the transfer of information?

Speaker 4 You know, historically, vetting is part of the transition. It is, you know, you need your papers, you need to submit them.
They need to be vetted by the FBI and other people. You're learning.

Speaker 4 I mean, the one thing that Biden had to leg up on is that he and several of his closest advisors had been in the White House for eight years as vice president.

Speaker 4 So a lot of the things that we kind of suffered from or would have suffered from in 2008 and 9 had we not been given the access that we got weren't as catastrophic for him.

Speaker 4 But they still, they still just slow everything down

Speaker 4 in a world where you still only have what, like 60 days, buddy, like ish to transition, give or take? I mean, here's 75.

Speaker 3 Here's where it matters, right?

Speaker 3 In a normal transition, immediately after the election, the president-elect and the incumbent president sign a memorandum of understanding, and then teams go into all the individual agencies and they look at the org chart, they look at the policy that's happening, they understand the budget so they can begin to make decisions about staffing and policy happening on day one.

Speaker 3 This is most important on national security because there are a whole set of things happening, intelligence, operations happening that are ongoing and are don't just, they don't stop

Speaker 3 on January 20th because a new president's coming in. Like they have, you have to know what is happening and be able to jump in on day one.

Speaker 3 Like, and like to know what ongoing threats to the country are that are, that you have to be prepared for.

Speaker 3 And none of that stuff got to happen in the, for the Biden-Trump transition because Trump was trying to steal the election up through January 6th.

Speaker 3 And there probably, as Alyssa points out, if there was ever any incoming administration that could best navigate that,

Speaker 3 it was the Biden administration because of his experience. And it was, and he was coming back only four years after leaving.

Speaker 3 So government had changed, but not so much that it was like impossible to fathom. So they were able to come back.

Speaker 3 Everything was further complicated by COVID at that time.

Speaker 3 The fact that people weren't going to be in work, that all their, the senior staff meetings of the White House, what monthly transition in the White House were happening

Speaker 3 from home, right? Or people in the same building, but not in the same room.

Speaker 3 So they had a very complicated, even if Trump had not been an insurrectionist asshole, they would have been a very complicated transition. So he made it much harder.

Speaker 5 So is Biden and his team just not getting information during that time?

Speaker 3 Obviously, none.

Speaker 5 You know, I wanted to ask this question earlier, but I saw that Trump was at the reopening of Notre Dame in Paris and had a meeting with Macon, the president of France, and the Ukrainian president Zelensky.

Speaker 5 Is that normal for an incoming president to be meeting with other world leaders? And is Biden ever clued in on what they're talking about? Because they had a closed-door meeting.

Speaker 4 I don't know what mechanism would inform Biden of what they're talking about.

Speaker 3 All the surveillance equipment.

Speaker 3 Probably.

Speaker 4 Well, the Chinese may have.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 the Chinese may have. They're always with us.

Speaker 4 They might have given a little parting gift. Like, here's a summary of the extra, the off-label conversation that they had.

Speaker 4 But no, in general, Caroline, most of the foreign relations leader-to-leader contact is pretty ceremonial, I guess, during the transition and by design, because nominees and presidents-elect aren't supposed to be conducting foreign policy until they're president.

Speaker 4 So when you come into office, almost every foreign leader on the planet calls up and wants to talk to you. And then you,

Speaker 4 with the help of 30 members of the National Security Council, figure out which order you reply to those calls in and how you set them because you don't want to offend people. And there's

Speaker 4 a lot of considerations that go into the order in which you return the call.

Speaker 5 Who is Obama's first call?

Speaker 3 It's got to be the British.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's got to be the U. I would imagine it was the U.S.

Speaker 5 Our former mommies.

Speaker 4 Yes, but thanks, Caroline. But it should, for the most part, it is usually kept to that.
You know, phone call, look forward to working with you. See on the backside, you know, onward.

Speaker 3 This has been just

Speaker 3 a unique situation because Trump was having some of these conversations during the campaign. Yeah.

Speaker 3 But like Obama did, and like, if we're being fair, Obama did go meet with world leaders as the candidate.

Speaker 3 We went on a foreign trip. We sat down with all these world leaders.

Speaker 4 As a U.S. senator.
As a U.S. senator, yes.
As a U.S. senator.
Yes.

Speaker 3 And the potential next president of the United States. But Trump, because he was a recent former president, was talking to people like Netanyahu during the campaign.
And so this,

Speaker 3 like, I know it is unusual that he is doing this. It is probably low on the list of outrages of the Trump transition so far, but it is definitely unusual.

Speaker 3 It's not super weird that he went to Notre Dame and saw Macron there. Like, that's not, it's not.

Speaker 5 But the closed door meeting that happened after is.

Speaker 3 It kind of depends on what's said, but it's like to what end, right? Like, what is the worst thing?

Speaker 4 He's also been president before, so I think that's maybe a little bit different.

Speaker 3 Like, it wouldn't be unusual if Trump was not, it would, it's not unusual for a former president to travel to another another country and meet with a sitting world leader. Like, that is not.

Speaker 4 That's a good point.

Speaker 5 I would say that's like kind of the perk of being the president-elect. It's like, you know what? I'm going to go to Greece and meet with the princess.

Speaker 5 So, looking now at President-elect and his transitional team, it is helmed by Linda McMahon. I, by the way, I've been really loving looking at her old videos of getting like body slammed.

Speaker 4 Nothing like a half Nelson.

Speaker 3 Just scream, I'm ready to serve.

Speaker 5 What should the Trump administration and their transition team be focusing on right now?

Speaker 3 I'm not convinced that they're not focused.

Speaker 3 They're doing a lot of the same things we were doing. They are rolling out nominees.
They're doing it differently. They're definitely not vetting their nominees in advance.

Speaker 3 That's something we spent a lot of time doing to make sure that we knew all of the problems before you put them out. And even when you do a great job of that, you will miss some.

Speaker 3 They are doing, they're basically picking people almost at random for some of these jobs.

Speaker 4 Shooting them out of t-shirt guns.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 they don't really seem to care about qualifications because they think they're going to be able to get everyone through the Senate. And they very well may be right.

Speaker 3 But they're like, there's definitely an operation that's happening that's thinking of and drafting, according to all the reporting, executive orders they're going to issue on day one.

Speaker 3 What they're working with the Speaker of the House and the incoming majority leader of the Senate about what their legislative strategy is going to be.

Speaker 3 Are they going to do Texas first, border first, both at the same time? And so they're kind of doing those same things. They don't seem to be doing it super competently or super

Speaker 3 responsibly, but it's not like they're, they are doing the things that you're supposed to be doing. Just the outcomes seem quite dangerous and poorly thought out.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it's really interesting watching it from the difference from 2016. I feel like this, this time, it's feeling much more like politics as usual.

Speaker 5 Like it just seems more formal and like they have their shit together, even though it's like math. It's like a small band-aid on chaos that's underneath.

Speaker 3 I think it's, I say, I kind of dispute that because last time he really did pick people who we hated, but were theoretically qualified for their jobs for the most part, right? Like he got H.R.

Speaker 3 McMaster to be the national security advisor. Rex Tillerson, like, I'm not picking the CEO of Exxon to do something, but that's a serious, that's a person with serious credentials, right?

Speaker 3 This time he's picking Matt Gates, Tulsi Gabb. Like his picks are fucking bananas.

Speaker 3 But what I think has happened is our, everyone's perspective eight years later about like how you do things has changed.

Speaker 3 I remember right after the election, I was in DC and I went and saw Obama and Trump had just won.

Speaker 3 So, and we were talking, we were talking and he said that he had just met with his national security team. I think he had done a call to a world leader or something.

Speaker 3 And he said, I guess we're going to find out if all this prep work and briefing really matters or not. And it clearly does, right? It clearly does.

Speaker 3 But because of the like the dumb fuckery that was so much of Trump's first term, but just like some of the formal ways in which we do it.

Speaker 3 Like, if Obama in 2008 had just started announcing cabinet secretaries via email, which is how you would do it back then, people would think that was insane.

Speaker 3 But like some of the, and some of it is fine that it's changed, but it's like our expectations for what is acceptable conduct from Donald Trump have been so lowered because we're comparing it to Trump of 16, not the previous

Speaker 3 44 presidents.

Speaker 5 This is a great time for me to ask this question that I've been dying to talk to you both about. RFK, I don't know if you guys saw this story.

Speaker 5 It was reported that there is a job application process that is asking some batshit questions.

Speaker 5 Let me give you one example. This is per the independent.
One section asks applicants to pick three or more attitudes that suit them as such. Quote, I require excessive admiration.

Speaker 5 Or I quote, I don't have that much interest in having a sexual experience with another person.

Speaker 5 Another was, I believe in many things. Others don't, like having a sixth sense, clairvoyance, and telepathy.
And as an adolescent, I had bizarre fantasies or preoccupations.

Speaker 3 Is this normal?

Speaker 5 Are these the job applications to work for the administration?

Speaker 4 It is so wild. I had to read it many times.
So I'm like, this can't be true, but it is.

Speaker 3 I have no recollection of what. Our job application was.

Speaker 4 No, we didn't because these are for the cabinet.

Speaker 4 Oh, these are people who are going to be in the cabinet, yes, these are his applications, but I still don't think Kathleen Sebilius was digging into these kinds of uh thought starters.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's it's bananas, okay.

Speaker 5 So, that's not normal. What is a typical question you are asked?

Speaker 3 No, no, Caroline, that's not normal.

Speaker 5 Well, I don't know, okay, I have no words for that.

Speaker 3 It's fair to ask.

Speaker 5 We don't even know if there were questionnaires when we were in the office, they just kind of bet you.

Speaker 4 We just got vetted, you know, you have to get away from that. I mean, I think people

Speaker 3 submit resumes for

Speaker 3 their open position. There was a website with open positions and people submitted resumes, or you just submitted your resumes and then people sort of sorted those resumes

Speaker 3 to positions.

Speaker 5 All right, here's my last question for you guys before we wrap up. And this is honestly something I've been thinking throughout.

Speaker 5 Is there a petty part of you deep down inside that wishes the Biden administration was just like,

Speaker 5 fuck you, I'm not telling you anything. I'm going to stonewall this.
Like doing exactly what Trump did to Biden back in 2020.

Speaker 4 The risk you run by being the person who doesn't offer a productive transition is that if something bad happens, it can blow back on you.

Speaker 4 So I think that, you know, giving people the keys to the car is just generally the right thing to do.

Speaker 3 There is some, there's some petty history here.

Speaker 3 George, famously,

Speaker 3 I think it turned out when this was truly investigated, it wasn't true, but there are all these reports that when Bush came into the White White House, George W.

Speaker 3 Bush came into the White House, that the Clinton people had removed W's from the keywords.

Speaker 4 I always thought that was still true.

Speaker 3 I think there may have been one or two examples, but it

Speaker 3 turns out

Speaker 3 I think afterwards we learned it was not, there's a lot of bullshit there, unsurprisingly. I think the way to resist Trump is not to

Speaker 3 do something big and loud in the beginning. It's that the people who work in the government have to be very smart and quiet about how they do it and try to do what they can to

Speaker 3 protect the things that need protecting, delay the things that need to be delayed. But look, I am as petty as they come, right? I would be

Speaker 3 so the fact that I'm going to say this runs against type, but

Speaker 3 I think Trump is going, if Trump is going to blow up on his own, we don't want to give him something easy to blame, like

Speaker 3 the Biden staff being petty.

Speaker 3 Like, let's give him every opportunity to succeed, which, and then when he fails, that's on him, as opposed to like an easy, let's not give him an easy scapegoat.

Speaker 3 So I, the Biden administration is doing what they can to do the transition the right way. And I think they should absolutely do that.

Speaker 3 That's the right thing to do from just a general like point of government's public service. But politically, in the end, it's also the right thing to do.

Speaker 3 So because if and when, and it's more likely when than if Trump fails, Trump has no one to blame but himself.

Speaker 4 Real quick, before we wrap this segment, just want to let everybody, including listeners, know that the W's were in fact, according to ABC News, the springs under the W's were removed off of keyboards in the Eisenhower executive office building, but not in the West Wing.

Speaker 5 That's okay.

Speaker 5 If anyone in the Biden administration is listening to this, hide all the remotes. Like, that's a very innocuous, petty thing to do.
You know what?

Speaker 3 Even better than them, even better. That's great.
Switch them. Yes.

Speaker 3 So you think you have a remote, but you cannot figure out why it doesn't work. Exactly.
Exactly. Or take the phone, like the little thing that says what,

Speaker 3 like when we got into the White House, there's just a, right after the inauguration, there's a post-it note with your name on the door and then a post-it note with your phone number on the phone.

Speaker 3 Switch all the post-it notes.

Speaker 4 That's fun, too.

Speaker 3 No one knows how to call anyone.

Speaker 4 Co-sign all of these petty measures.

Speaker 3 Thanks for listening. Alyssa and I stuck around to do a Q ⁇ A from subscribers.
So to hear that and much more, subscribe to Friends of the Pod.

Speaker 3 Again, it's the best way to directly support Crookie Media as we build a counterweight to the right-wing media machine.

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Speaker 6 And before you hit that next button, you can help boost this episode by leaving us a review and by sharing it with friends and family. Pod Save America is a crooked media production.

Speaker 6 Our producers are David Toledo and Saul Rubin. Our associate producer is Farah Safari.
Reed Cherlin is our executive editor and Adrian Hill is our executive producer.

Speaker 6 The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer with audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis.
Writing support by Hallie Kiefer.

Speaker 6 Madeleine Herringer is our head of news and programming. Matt DeGroote is our head of production.
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Speaker 6 Thanks to our digital team: Elijah Cohn, Haley Jones, Phoebe Bradford, Joseph Dutra, Ben Hefcote, Mia Kilman, Molly Lobel, Kirill Pelavieve, and David Toles.

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