100 Perfect Days

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I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vittor.

On today's show, we are somehow only 100 days into Donald Trump's second term. And the only promising news is that just about all the polling is now showing that the president and his agenda and his party have already reached historic levels of unpopularity in just three months.
We'll talk about where things stand, how we're feeling, and the state of the opposition. Then you'll hear the conversation that Dan had when we were in D.C.
with our old friend Neera Tanden, who's once again running the Center for American Progress. But let's start with what the White House wants to be talking about on day one of what they're calling 100 Days Week.
Wait, what? 100 Days Week? Yes, Tommy. Seriously, they're calling it 100 Days Week.
So it's like it's the 100th day, but then it's then it's a week of days i wonder if it's like 100 days month again how do you do the math there just beaten by the dumbest motherfuckers on earth a friend of mine we sure are a friend of mine is on a jury uh and it's federal or it's in a federal building and he went to report for jury duty and there was a notice on the front of the doj saying that they hadn't been paying their water bill and that the water is going to be turned off starting next week. It feels like that's an Elon question.
An Elon question. They doged the water.
Did Big Balls turn the water off? They doged the person that's in charge of paying the bill. They doged the water payment person.
On day one of 100 Days Week, they want to talk about deportations. They kicked things off onay morning by putting signs all over the white house lawn that had photos of people they've deported along with the crimes they've committed i'm sure steven miller was out there in the middle of the night putting up the signs he was doing photoshop he was making these himself yeah i mean doing something doing something that's how he gets pretty excited not pictured on the lawn were three small american kids uh the just deported.
A two-year-old, a four-year-old, and a seven-year-old. All U.S.
citizens who were sent out of the country when they showed up with their mothers for routine immigration check-ins in New Orleans. The two-year-old's father is an American citizen who had asked a federal court to keep his daughter with him.
But before the courthouse could open, the government had already deported the girl and her mother to Honduras. The presiding judge, who is a conservative Trump appointee, said it's, quote, illegal and unconstitutional to deport a citizen and scheduled a hearing for May 16th, quote, in the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S.
citizen with no meaningful process. That is the conservative Trump appointee.

The four-year-old and the seven-year-old are siblings. And according to the family's lawyers, the four-year-old has stage four cancer and was deported without their medication or the ability to contact their medical team.
Stomach churning stuff. The other big deportation story is the highly publicized arrest on Friday of a county judge in Wisconsin, Hannah Dugan, who the administration says helped an undocumented immigrant escape from her courthouse as ICE agents arrived to make an arrest.
FBI Director Cash Patel essentially live-tweeted the arrest and later posted a photo of Dugan being frog-marched to a cop car, while Attorney General Pam Bondi called Dugan, quote, a criminal judge on a criminal bench and labeled all judges who opposed Trump's immigration crackdown, quote, deranged. And here's border czar Tom Homan talking about the deported children today.
If you choose to have a U.S. citizen child knowing you're in this country legally, you put yourself in that position.
You put your family in that position. what we did is remove children with their mothers who requested the children depart with them this was a parental decision parental one of parent parenting 101 the mothers made that choice and i tell you what if we didn't do it the story today be trump administration separating families again lawyers for the family said the mothers did not make that choice but you did, you did separate families, but anyway, Tom.
So the White House line is basically, these weren't deportations, these were mothers who chose to take their kids with them, you just heard Homan. But the Trump judge in Louisiana said in his ruling, basically, that he couldn't take that into account until the administration actually proved it in court.
What do you guys make of all this, Tommy? I mean, I think big picture, it tells you that the process is a rushed disaster and the Trump administration doesn't really care. I mean, you hear Tom Homan there, he's just so unapologetic about the human suffering involved in this.
I think they think it's the price of doing business. It's similar to what we saw with the Venezuelans who were sent to El Salvador, who were just people who had tattoos, who are clearly not members of a gang in 90% of the cases.
And, you know, in this case, I mean, you have a father, apparently ICE threatened to arrest the dad too. Yeah.
And the dad was allowed a one minute conversation with the mom while she was in custody before they were deported. So, I mean, they're just, I mean, the cruelty is the point has become a cliche, but clearly they are rushing this process because, as we've read, there's a goal of deporting one million people this year.
I think Tom Homan said today they deported 138,000 so far. So they're behind schedule.
And so they're just moving as quickly as they can. Yeah, it's a.
So in the past, look, there are undocumented people who have citizen children. That creates a horrible circumstance if that person is going to be deported.
The way he says it is disgusting. He is pointing at the fact that there is inherent cruelty in any immigration system, even when it is operating with compassion and decency as much as it can, because there are difficult human questions in our immigration system.
But that's why the lack of due process is so evil and awful. These are questions that require humility and compassion and time and attention by people who have some modicum of decency in dealing with this.
But for them, there's just two kinds of people, like citizens in Trenda O'agua. And so if this has happened to you, it's your fucking fault.
And if we do something cruel, it's your fault. There's a guy that took a wrong turn.
I don't know if you saw this story. It happened, I think, over the weekend or just before the weekend.
Somebody took a wrong turn and ended up uh crossing into canada it's happening all of it all the time and he's uber doing uber eats and gets picked up uh it doesn't it's not clear if it was purposeful or just in error but then the family can't find him turns out he is in el salvador even though he wasn't on the record so i guess they corrected that and of course the the Department of Homeland Security and the spokesperson who was consistently lying throughout this whole process, like, no, Trendyragua, got him. And the family is like, this is not true.
And we're desperate to get in contact. Only because the New York Times investigated to get this information.
And I don't know what I've like realizing as just watching all this unfold is how competence is part of how you show empathy in a society, that mistreating people this way, whether cruelty is the point or just ham-fisted fucking morons, doesn't really matter because they're being so callous and reckless with people's lives. Yeah, it just didn't, like, there are tough choices you have to make when, like you said, there's undocumented immigrants who are getting deported and then they're U.S.
citizen was not a case where like they didn't apprehend this woman either of these women she went they showed up for a check-in right so there was no danger there there was it wasn't like no criminal conduct there they were worried about they did not according to the lawyers families and we'll find out in court later they didn't give the mother's options they didn't give them time to talk to the fathers or the caregivers or the lawyers and And one mother was pregnant. There was no reason not to let them contact caregivers or the fathers or anything.
There was no reason to do it this fast. There was no reason to do it before the court opened.
There was just no reason to do it like this. And now they get into this defensive crouch like they always do where they're like, oh, do you think we made a mistake? No, fuck problem well they lie right like uh jose hermiseo the 19 year old u.s citizen who was in prison for 10 days by u.s immigration authorities it turns out he had a

seizure and he went to the hospital and then he saw a border patrol agent and asked that guy for

help and then they they threw him in jail it's and then they then trisha mclaughlin the the uh

dhs spokesman went online on twitter and lied and made up this whole story about how he went up

Thank you. him in jail it's and then they then trisha mclaughlin the the uh dhs spokesman went online on twitter and lied and made up this whole story about how he went up to a border patrol agent claimed to be from mexico and the country illegally and it's like this is just the pattern over and over and over again they do something horrible and they pretend something else happened so i feel like you have if you deported even if the mother wanted the kid to come if it's a four-year-old with cancer and you find that out and you're the government, wouldn't you do something? Wouldn't you like make it so that the kid could get their medication or a doctor or something? These people don't fucking give a shit.
On the Judge Dugan case, it certainly seems like whether or not she broke the law, there wasn't a legal or public safety rationale for frog-marching her out of the courtroom and having the FBI director and the attorney general essentially celebrate the arrest in the media. What did you think of the story? How alarming was it to you, Lovett? You know, Donald Trump's been arrested, and nobody showed up at his house and frog-marched him out of the door because they understood that he's not a danger in that circumstance, that there's no urgency to this, that you can show some respect and have this person report.

Clearly, this judge is going to fight these charges. The judge was angry that they were even trying to serve this arrest warrant.

The judge claiming they had the wrong kind of warrant.

We're going to learn more about this.

Whatever the exact facts turn out to be, this will be a gray area. Even if it's the worst possible version of what fucking Cash Patel is saying, it will be a gray area at best.
I can't trust these people or anything that they're saying about it anyway. What is certainly clear is they are excited about the prospect of arresting a judge and sending a message to other judges about, hey, if you're thinking about standing up for an immigrant that's in your courtroom, that's a dangerous thing to do.
You should be really careful about how you do that. You should be worried that if you cross some invisible line that you won't know about till after, till we tell you about it, you might find yourself arrested in front of your courthouse.
Yeah, Tom Homan threatened others today at that press conference at the White House. I mean, it's very clear that these guys, Homan, Stephen Miller, all the hardline immigration folks, they want to fix fights with state and local officials so they can call them soft immigration or call them sanctuary cities or whatever.
And this does seem like it's a shocking escalation. But also, clearly there was a weird PR rollout that had been planned, right? Because Cash Patel tweets about it.
He deletes it. Then Pam Bondi tweets about it.
And then they push this. They do this big PR push.
The story is very weird. The facts are facts are weird like why would a judge help someone who was before her for battery charges get out of the courtroom you're right there was no public safety problem because they uh the cops immediately arrest the guy the same day so it's not like he was on the lam and then they also arrested her at work when she arrived no that's the public safety problem like i was bizarre it was yes right, that, oh, she secretly directed him out one door and then another.
They got him right then. It didn't lead to any actual negative consequences.
Clay Higgins, a Republican House member, said, I hope they arrest a hundred more judges. Cool.
He's a member of Congress. I was looking into this because Andrew McCarthy, of all people, was like a very right-wing, conservative, legal pundit.
He was writing in the National Review why it was very bad that they did this, basically. And he said, look, whether she did the right thing or not, whether she's guilty or not, he's like, the deal is in Milwaukee and Wisconsin and other places like this, the state judge doesn't necessarily know the person's immigration status that comes to the courtroom for this other trial.
And the federal agents didn't tell the judge they were coming. They didn't alert the police.
They could have alerted the chief judge ahead of time. They needed to get this guy and like make arrangements.
So they could have, again, if they wanted to get this guy, you call up the local state authorities and be like, hey, there's this guy. He's a danger.
We're going to get, you know, didn't do any of that. And state court judges don't necessarily like federal agents just jumping into their courtrooms and arresting people because you're trying these cases in state court.
And if people who are supposed to go into state court, whether they're defendants, whether they're testifying, if they know that like federal agents can come scoop them up at any time, then they're not going to come testify for the other cases, right? So there's a reason not to do this. And the idea that feds can just come in without a federal search warrant, right? Because they had an administrative warrant.
Which is what the judge objected to. Right.
And this is what she objected to. And again, right, like they ended up getting the guy.
And they just, they, this happened, I guess, in the first trump term as well there was a judge in boston um who told an undocumented immigrant to go down into the basement and the difference was they let the judge come in on their own they didn't arrest them right there and the charges were eventually dropped and they had like the state um disciplinary board uh deal with it it was like an ethics case yeah it was like an ethic yeah exactly yeah it's not like they think this judge is, I don't know, it was a danger to the community, flight risk. The judge is out now, of course.
It's ridiculous. They love this.
They love this. One other big story that Trump is probably less eager to discuss on immigration on Friday, the administration abandoned its efforts to terminate the legal status of thousands of foreign students.
Tommy, what do we know about why they did this and what happens now? I mean, it sounds like there are about 100 lawsuits and nearly two dozen court orders blocking them from deporting these people or getting them out of the country. And it sounds like ICE was about to have to testify under oath about the process.
So maybe that was a concern. Just on the merits, if the administration cares about that, this likely would precipitate a huge drop in foreign students, which would impact not just school revenue, but the U.S.'s ability to get the smartest researchers and the engineers to come here and to learn and to conduct research and do things that are very beneficial to the country.
I'm not confident that the administration won't find some other way to punish foreign students. It's not at all clear that this is going to help people like Mahmoud Khalil, who was arrested for peaceful protests over the war in Gaza.
By the way, speaking of cruelty, he was denied a request for a two-week furlough with an ankle bracelet to be present at the birth of his first child. I said no.
But, you know, it does seem like there's a reprieve here for a lot of other students. Yeah, we talked about this early on and about what it looks like for the administration to follow court orders.
And following court orders doesn't just mean what you do or don't do after the order has come through. It's all the work that goes into treating the courts with respect and showing up.
And they're a little bit like Lucy with the chocolates right now. If they do a brazenly illegal move to hundreds, if not thousands of students, suddenly there's a hundred lawsuits.
Suddenly there's all these people with very valid claims in front of very angry judges. The Jenner Block case is before a judge, and the DOJ person's trying to defend this ridiculous order.
And actually, it's because of racial discrimination. And the judge is like, what the fuck are you talking about? It's embarrassing.
And so they're kind of brushing up. It seems like, look, I do not think they give a fuck about whether or not colleges recruit students from around the world.
I think they are thrilled to fuck with colleges and their ability to recruit foreign students. But I do think they are hitting some kind genuine like human capacity limits to pursue all this like brazen illegal conduct and then defend it in court does lucy have a move with chocolates too lucy so there's lucy with the football that's charlie brown i'm talking about oh i'm sorry i love lucy with the chocolates on the conveyor belt so they're doing illegal the chocolates are i think the chocolates are crimes of some kind.
That's, you know, and they're trying, she, or they're trying to. Lucy with the construct.
Yes. No, I hear that.
I hear that. Lucy with the chocolates.
Lucy with the football. Sorry.
It seems like what happened here, there may have been AI involved, which is there's this big database of all the students who have this specific kind of visa. This is the F1 visa, right? And this is, and so they were not going to deport them like they did Mahmoud Khalil, right? That was like the Secretary of State somehow.
It's Marco Rubio saying he's a threat to national security. Right, yeah.
Somehow that's something that the Secretary of State can do. This was, so they all have their legal status.
It's in some database, right? And then they went through and anyone who's ever had the most minor brush with the law, they just terminated their status. Traffic violations.
So one woman in Connecticut said she was targeted after a dispute over a luggage fee. One was accused of boarding a bus that was out of service.
One was cited by police for driving too slowly. So these are the kinds of things that people...
And so then they'd go to court and the judge was like, and the DOJ would be like, well, that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to get deported. It's just that they can always challenge it.
And they're like, yeah, but what if they just get scooped up? And they're like, well, their status was terminated in the database, but that doesn't necessarily. And so one of the judges, an exasperated U.S.
district judge on a race, this was in the Politico story about this, said, he's either here legally or he's not here legally. There is a yes or no answer here.
This is not Schrodinger's visa.

Either he's here legally or he's not. Nice.
Like this, and I think this is one of the reasons they sort of backed off because it was, again, it's cruelly, but it's just like incompetence. They can't get in front.
These guys have to go in front of a judge and defend these indefensible decisions. It reminds me a little, it makes me like, I think to Tommy's point, it reminds me of when they, in the early days in 2017, did their Muslim ban.
It gets thrown out and then they go back and figure out a way to do it that can like pass muster with at least conservative judges. And that's what they're doing.
They're going to go back and trying to figure out a way to do this. Yeah, I think that's right.
But I also do think this is exactly what they did with the Venezuelans they sent to El Salvador,

which was they pulsed the ICE database

for anyone somehow connected to Trundale, Aragua,

and it found people who just had tattoos

or like wore a Bulls jersey.

And the problem there is the damage is done

and these people are now rotting in hell

in an El Salvador prison.

Or people that just happened to have been touching

the immigration system at the moment

where they were getting beat down by their boss to go find people. Right.
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Give us a call and book your next appointment today. So here we are at 100 Days, which is a completely made-up milestone in every president's four-year term that gives an administration the chance to talk about its accomplishments.

Media's a chance to do some retrospectives, and if they're lucky, get an interview with the president.

Pollsters get a chance to put out a bunch of new polls.

Trump's doing a rally in Michigan on Tuesday night.

He'll also be sitting for an interview with ABC News.

He's already done big interviews with Time Magazine, another with our friends Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer at The Atlantic. That one posted on Monday morning as we were getting ready for this recording.
You guys have moments from The Time or Atlantic interviews you want to talk about that stood out to you as either newsy or at least noteworthy? I mean, first of all, the Time one, there's a the one one thing that it's just it just sucks to sort of sink into a

trap newsy or at least noteworthy? I mean, first of all, the time one, there's the one thing that it's just, it just sucks to sort of sink into a Trump interview because it's just sand through your hands. But I did want to note that he basically says when he's talking about the law firms, that the law firms going along with these deals, and these are smart people.
They went along with these deals because they know they did something wrong. And I just hope the people that made those deals feel pretty proud of themselves that now he's just basically saying look these guys are copping to it that's what happened here in the atlantic one he did something similar about with the with the media people like he was talking about bezos but with them he was like at some point you just keep going you keep pushing you keep pushing and then they say no mas no mas um you know the first kind of days, a person who raised up 100 days milestone?

Who?

Is it FDR?

FDR.

Yeah.

Nice, John.

Good trivia.

Another great president who served more than two terms.

Oh, God.

Yeah, I mean, a couple, from the Time Magazine one,

when he's talked about the Supreme Court's ruling on Abrego Garcia,

they read the language from the ruling that's like,

the order properly requires the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia's

release from custody in El Salvador. And they say, are you facilitating his release? Trump ducks the question.
He's like, I leave that to my lawyers. I give them no instructions.
You know, they feel the order says something different than what you're saying. So it just it reminds you that if he's going to defy the Supreme Court, it's not going to be openly bravely.
It's going to be through bureaucratic bullshit like that and cowardice. Also, that is going to, he then says, yeah, I mean, I'm for bringing him back and doing it here the right way, but I'll leave it to my lawyer.
So like even him acknowledging that he's willing to bring him back, that is going to fuck him in these court hearings because now the Supreme Court's gonna be like, all right, we must facilitate his release you must take steps to facilitate his release and then the president just told a reporter that he's fine with that but you jokers are refusing to do that it's very general yeah that's not going to work so well in court i don't think yeah that to me was one of the big takeaways from the two from the two i agree no i agree and there was something strange about that right because the court has already ordered him to do it whether he wants to do it or not so it's almost like it's almost beside the point whether he wants to do it yeah or not unless he's trying to push it onto his underlings for failing to do it which of course is something he'll he'll be interested in doing he's leave it at the pam as uh steve miller said he also promises to veto any bill that cuts social security medicare and medicaid so file that one away uh fraud and abuse everything. Everything's going to be fraud and abuse.
Right, everything's fraud and abuse.

He's asked about promising to end the war in Ukraine on day one.

And Trump now says he meant it, quote,

figuratively as an exaggeration and in jest.

So your classic joke about a war that you are also saying

is going to lead to World War III.

And then when the interviewer suggests he was kidding about annexing Canada

and just trolling them, he says, actually, no, I'm not.

Repeatedly.

The other thing I took from the Atlantic piece is he is not backing down on the tariffs in this trade war because Cher at one point asks him, you know, folks on Wall Street are calling it the Trump put. And they're saying that if things get bad enough and the market gets bad enough, the economy looks like it's going to recession, that you will pull back on the tariffs because you don't want the economy to go into recession.
Is there any truth to that? And Trump's like, no, no. He's like, look, I've been talking about this stuff for 30, 40 years and this could have been, I could have been easy.
I could have came in here. I could have not done the tariff stuff and just had everything be fine.
But I think this is important to do. And so I'm doing it.
Yeah. It's so hard to figure out what's going on with their, because they don't have a long-term plan, like what their long-term plan is on tariffs.
If he is ever going to relieve them, he can't say that he's going to do it. He's also making ridiculous claims about how much tax revenue will come from these tariffs and claiming it's going to be able to reduce income taxes or get rid of the income tax, which is absurd on its face.
And it can't do both. It can't restore American manufacturing and replace income taxes because they're in cross purposes.
So I just think he's just full of shit on top. I think he's full of shit too.
I think what'll happen is they'll try to negotiate some sort of memorandum of understanding with the non-China countries that suggest there's a trade agreement. It won't be a real trade agreement because real trade agreements involve caring about the details and those take years.
And they'll kind of muddle through that way. The big question to me is what happens with the china piece of this because xi jinping ain't backing down if trump doesn't want to back down it's going to cause some serious problems in the long run yeah this is my issue with this is that like i i'm sure besant is and and the people who don't want a global economic meltdown are pushing this like we're going to get some you know parameters of a deal and then he'll back off so fine he backs off the reciprocal tariffs like the china the china piece is still there we still have a 10 universal tariff for everywhere else even without the reciprocal tariffs you still have the 25 on canada mexico and so we're still a couple weeks out from really experiencing like the full effects or at least the start to experiencing the effects of the trade war like empty shelves and higher prices the rare earth minerals piece is the biggest scariest part yeah like this is all this is all a couple weeks away and the idea that we're just going to announce a couple deals or sub deals as they were called over the weekend by some people in the administration and that everything's going to be fine like yeah maybe the markets rally for a little bit but that's not gonna like we are headed for some some some bad economic times here it's also just very silly that like that like okay look trump the united states has power and economic might we have leverage on our relationship with china china has its power and its leverage and its and its might that it can wield in this kind of a negotiation.

But like, do you think you're going to wait him out? Do you think you can wait out? Do you think Donald Trump has the discipline to wait out China? Have you read anything about China and how it works over time? Historically, they play a long game. How long their dynasties are? You think Donald Trump, the most impatient and undisciplined, you don't think they're smart enough to know that they can hold out longer than donald fucking trump i gotta say i think you got two very stubborn authoritarians uh sitting there and the one thing i got from the full atlantic interview this guy does just he does not give a shit he really is at a point in his life where he's like everything's you know i came back from he thinks that he came back from the dead although he doesn't like to a comeback, he said, because he thinks he was never really gone.
But he basically thinks he has defied political gravity. And what's worse, the people around him are all people who believe he has chosen by God and has defied political gravity.
Well, he was. Right, of course.
And so none of them are going to pull him back either, except poor Scott Besson, who's like hoping that we don't have a global economic collapse. So I really do think, look, he's Donald Trump at some point.
He pulls back how much damage there is, who knows. But I think in general, whether it's tariffs or anything else, he is going to go much further than he ever has in the past because he does not care as much about public opinion as he ever did.
Yeah. Oh, I think that's, first of all, I think that's already true.
He's already gotten further than he did in his first term. Now, I have no idea whether or not Donald Trump will cave.
I just think, I don't think he'll show the same patience as the nation of China. Yeah.
I think the Chinese, you know, Xi Jinping has prepared his people for a war and the American people are not at all prepared for what a war with China could look like.

What it means if we have zero rare earth minerals, that means we can't produce cars anymore.

If 99% of child safety seats are coming from China and you can't travel with your kid anymore because your car seat's too small.

Or buy them toys. 95% of cooking appliances, 93% of coloring books for kids, 88% of microwave ovens.

Like, yeah, 70% of toys intended for children under 12 are from China.

Like, Americans are going to squeal if this shit really happens.

And I do think political gravity will come for Trump because he's a Congress unlike the Chinese Communist Party.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think when people started going to Walmart instead of church on Christmas, it really, really made having stuff on the shelves important. Let's talk about the polls, which are much worse for Trump than they were even a few weeks ago.
Certainly worse than they've been for any other president at this point. I think his average approval rating is now tied with his first term approval rating at 100 days.
A New Times Siena poll has Trump at 42.54. Or he's underwater every issue.
Immigration by four points. The Abrego Garcia case specifically by 21 points.
And the economy by 12 points. ABC Washington Post has him at 4255.
CNN's 4357. Pew, 459.
Fox is 4455. And AP is 39559.
Trump's numbers with young people,

independents, and Hispanics

are pretty abysmal

after he made inroads

with all those groups

in the last election.

And most of the slide

has to do with people's feelings

about the economy

and their own personal finances,

which are bad.

Any thoughts on the polling here?

There's one number

from the Harvard poll

that jumped out,

which is I think 59% of young men

now disapprove of Trump.

So he's lost the boys. Tough.
The vibe shifts has shifted back. Let's hope.
It's abysmal. The numbers are abysmal.
I mean, ABC News had him with the lowest 100-day approval rating of any president in the past 80 years. And the second lowest was him last time.
And it's funny just because the narrative around his presidency in 2017 was that it felt very weak and unsteady because he shouldn't have been elected and it was a shock to everybody and they were just getting up to speed and the narrative after this election was how much stronger he was politically how much more overwhelming the victory was and now he's in worse shape it's that away yeah so it's just good to remember this guy's not 10 feet tall he never and he also by the way in the first term he never really recovered from the 100 day mark like it only got i mean it was in a narrow band from like you know 39 to 43 44 and then he lost not by much but he lost it's also interesting most people including those who voted for him think he's gone too far that's like the theme of the new york times sienna poll is that even even people who you know there's still like a slight majority support for deporting undocumented immigrants but they just don't like the way he's doing it because of Abrego Garcia, because of other things they've heard, because of defying court orders. I also thought it was one of the more hopeful parts of the New York Times-Center poll was they asked about support for deporting citizens to El Salvador, U.S.
citizens who were convicted of crimes to El Salvador. And they asked about whether you support him defying the Supreme Court and Nate Cohen was saying he had almost zero percent on those Supreme Court defying the Supreme Court six percent would approve of that six you don't get you don't get that for anything anymore no that's like that's that is heartening that is heartening and it is the uh I mean you see them this is why I think if the public opinion matters you see them backing off in certain places and And this is why I think the public opinion matters.

You see them backing off in certain places.

And that is because I think courts will be more confident when they feel like public support is behind them. And Trump will be more weak and afraid of the consequences of violating court orders when the public are so thoroughly behind the courts.
It is interesting thinking about 2017 versus now, because chaos was the kind of order of the day when Trump first won. And he was at his lowest ebb when he was actually almost, it didn't come through because of John McCain, but he was on the precipice of repealing Obamacare.
And it was a moment where he was about to be effective. And when he was about to be effective, he was never more unpopular.
And I do think like the early days we were, I think, caught off guard by the swiftness and like, I think we're effective is wrong, but like the speed and deliberateness with which they were like attacking the government, going after immigrants, kind of implementing the 2025, probably 2025 agenda. But he's actually paying for that success.
He's paying for the lack because chaos stopped him from doing the policies that we are currently seeing that the American people, even though it's very clear that this is what Trump has always said he was going to do, we're not fully couldn't fully imagine what it would feel like to live under. Yeah, I think that's right.
I also think, you know, deciding to tank the stock market, not a great political strategy. I mean, I think 73% said the economy is in bad shape.
53% said it's worse since Trump took office. 41% said their own finances have worsened.
62% said prices are rising. So they're doing a ton of shit.
They're doging, they're harming migrants, et cetera. But they're doing nothing to deal with inflation.
And the tariffs are just actively causing inflation. And no one, only 31% believe that they'll strengthen the economy long term.
Like 64% of people disapprove of the tariff. So they're not, the American people are not buying what he's selling on the theory of the case here.
Yeah, and he did act fast and he did do a lot. But the Times asked people for like a word to describe the first hundred days and chaos was still the order of the day.
Yeah, it's his essence. It is his essence.
Question on the polling. The guy can't run for re-election despite selling Trump 2028 merch on his website.
How much do you think the polling matters? I talked to Ro Khanna on Love or Leave It about what the prospects are for reconciliation. And he basically said he never had felt more confident or hopeful.
I don't think he would say he's confident, but more confident that they'd be able to get enough Republicans to say no, at least before they strip out certain parts, who knows where it leads. But I do think it matters because he has a razor thin majority.
And there are a lot of Republicans who would like to stay in Congress. And there are a lot of them in districts that right now, they are going to have a very hard time successfully getting reelected in.
And I just think that is going to affect their ability to pass this agenda. He was much stronger a couple of weeks ago.
He was much, and that's why you saw today, he posted on True Social, like, they should arrest the people disturbing these town halls because it's creating the illusion that there isn't incredible unity and love amongst Republicans. And I think he's feeling the heat there.
And I think it's making his job much harder. Yeah, we want the vulnerable Republicans to feel like they can defy him.
And when they're doing some calculus, like, am I worried about a primary challenge or a general election? We want them to fear the general election more. Now, the problem is, you know, he still has the North Korean numbers with the Republican base, so he can fuck with them in the primary.

The timeline isn't good for him either. Thune said today that he doesn't think this thing is getting done until later in the summer.
But he said it's a moving target because of when we hit the debt ceiling and we run out of money, just in case we needed another crisis. So as the effects from the trade war start to hit and the economy gets even worse and people get even angrier, then we're going to have a debate in Congress about how big a tax cut is that goes mostly to rich people.
And cutting Medicare. And cutting Medicaid.
And they've already now ruled out a tax increase on the rich, you know, which like Steve Bannon wanted and Trump's floating and some of the populists wanted. There was like a 40-hour window when that was on the table.
So that's on the table. So now, and they also have to do something on taxes because otherwise everyone's taxes goes up at the end of the year, at which time we'll probably already be in a, we could be in a recession, right? I don't know how this, I don't know how this goes.
The other side of this is there are a bunch of Republicans that just signed a letter about not wanting to cut Medicaid. Right.
And so let's say they strip it. I don't think it's inconceivable that they strip out the Medicaid cuts and just try to do a tax cut.
But one of the only places where even Freedom Caucus members have bucked Trump is when it came to raising the deficit. They sincerely believe and they believe they care about it as much as they care about pleasing Donald Trump.
It's one of the only issues and the only group of people that do this in the Republican Party that they don't want to vote for increased deficits. If you lose those guys, you don't have a bill.
You don't have it. So I think it fucks up his congressional agenda and the polling makes life pretty bad for Republicans.
I also hope that this kind of polling emboldens more people to speak out against him. Colleges, media, business, whatever you thought about Trump at the beginning, how strong he was, how scary this was.
Like, it's just, he's not there now and you should not feel that same fear. I also wonder if, look, I know courts are just, they're just calling balls and strikes.
Judges are just calling balls and strikes. But you've got to imagine if you're in the Supreme Court or in some of these courts and you're thinking what the administration is doing is unlawful or unconstitutional and it comes before you, you're a little less nervous about making the ruling you want to make when the numbers are like this.
Oh, absolutely. I would hope.
So that's how regular Americans say they're feeling. How are you guys feeling being Americans honestly I've never been less regular frankly under the Trump administration also just a couple days on the road oof I know I know time zone changes I wish I was a regular American I'm.
Maybe I'll kind of figure out a new kind of smoothie in the morning.

Join my fellow regular Americans.

We're sitting in the airport waiting to go home.

Love it.

Not already.

Take out just a bottle of those fiber gummies.

You bet.

You fucking bet we do.

And I started laughing, but then I said, yeah, I'll take a couple.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'll take a couple. Tommy didn't want one.

Tommy didn't want one.

Tommy's too cool for the fiber gummies that'd be at the Delta Lounge.

I was just trying to make it through a hangover at 44. I don't think fiber hurts.
I don't think fiber hurts. Anyway, what are your takes on how consequential these 14 weeks have been? That's the question I wrote down here.
It's been consequential. I mean, it's been a historically damaging 100 days.
There's no way to sugarcoat it. Millions of people are going to die because of USAID cuts.
God knows what RFK Jr. is doing behind the scenes, but the stuff he's talking about publicly.
We haven't had time to talk about him. We've got to devote a whole segment to that.
Yeah, I'm are going to die because the USAID cuts god knows what rfk jr is doing behind the scenes but the stuff he's talking about publicly we haven't had time to talk about him we got to devote a whole segment to that yeah i mean he's just going to gut public health he's going to cherry pick data he's you know demagoguing uh anybody with autism i mean it's just really terrible stuff get corporations folding left and right we're seeing the weaponization of the department of justice to punish law firms news outlets uh former trump officials i'm also worried that the the tariff war has set in motion some economic changes that will be impossible to walk back and will be very damaging too but so i'm like on some level it's heartening to know that the polling has collapsed at least for this amount of time um because voters don't want chaos they don't want the stock market crashing they. They don't like the deportations, despite everyone's concern that Democrats were off sides on immigration.
They actually think these deportations are cruel and over the top. But I'm also worried that it's not going to stop him.
I had the exact feeling, which is like, I think that the polling is going to get worse for Trump and Republicans. And I think the damage is going to get worse because I think that they're not backing down.
Like there's one scenario where the polling gets really bad and they all back down or they just, then I guess what we have like a semi-normal administration for the next couple of years where they just like, that doesn't seem like Trump to me. So then the other thing they do if the polling gets worse is they double down down like they've been doing so far or they never show weakness, never apologize.
And then we're in a situation where the country is very angry and the economy is bad and we have crises that we're dealing with here and all over the world. And then the Trump administration decides to like use all the power they have to crack down even more.
So that's what I'm sort of worried about. Yeah.
I think like you have to start to say he is doing a lot of damage. He is hurting a lot of people.
There are people that will die that would have lived. I mean, he is, and that destruction can't be undone.
There's no pretending it didn't happen. We'll be digging out of this for a long time.
Internationally, we will be digging out of this for a long time, though, like, I want to believe in, like, the resilience of the American economy and the unique place we have as, like, an innovative and kind of creative country that contributes so much to the world that we can repair the damage. But to me, like, the core question from the day Trump won is, is Donald Trump's second victory a door that locked behind us, right? Like the damage can't be undone, but we can kind of rebuild and repair if we can win, right? If we can take back the House, take back the Senate, take back the White House.
I do worry about what happens if the economy gets worse, the chaos gets worse. That's a tinderbox.
It's people in the streets and an authoritarian president that is... Who's already unhappy with people at town halls.

Already unhappy with town halls. You had Stephen Miller out there today criticizing J.B.
Pritzker, suggesting that what he's doing is inciting violence just for calling for protest, right? Like, it is dangerous. These are people that are...
They are instinctively fascist. They are instinctively authoritarian.
That is incredibly dangerous. but one sign to me of at least hope

is just I think think even the past couple of weeks, we've seen Democrats starting to get their legs under them a little bit in a lot of interesting ways. You could talk about Pete, you could talk about Pritzker, you could talk about Ro Khanna, you could talk about a bunch of people, Cory Booker, others.
and I did have this feeling in the first like few weeks of the Trump administration

of a kind of like

like defeatism like oh he's turning us into Hungary, he's turning us into Russia. And I really was looking for more leaders to say, but we'll have to fight that and we'll win because America is filled with Americans and we're a rebellious and freedom-loving and democracy-loving bunch.
And maybe we're a little bit, we're a little soft and a little decadent, but like, we'll find our

footing and we'll fight back and we'll win. And he can't take this country from us.
And I feel like

that energy is starting to appear more and more. You see it at protests, you see it at people

showing up at rallies and town halls. And so that has made me feel like the question, like,

is the door, did the door lock behind us i think the answer's still no pod save america is brought to you by stamps.com we've been using stamps.com from the beginning from the beginning basically when we were just a couple people who didn't have time to go to the fucking post office children we were in a it was a simpler time we thought it was not a simpler time we thought it was a complicated time no boy wrong boy that was the simple time we could all we could tell tell the us of 2017 yeah you think that's bad wait till he that guy's gonna figure out how to do puzzles here's what that guy's gonna learn how to unlock the doors here's what hasn't changed we're still.com. Flexibility in your workday means you can decide when and where to invest your time, like focusing on the important parts of the business that only you can do.
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So let's talk about fighting back and sort of the general state of the opposition at 100 days. We do have some reassuring updates about what Democrats, media outlets, universities, and law firms are doing to fight back against Trump.
To start with the politicians on Sunday, Senator Cory Booker and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries held a 12-hour sit-in on the Capitol steps to protest the Republican budget. Meanwhile, Illinois Governor J.B.
Pritzker, a 2028 presidential hopeful, gave a barn burner of a speech in New Hampshire. Why New Hampshire? I wonder.
Let's listen. Fellow Democrats, for far too long, we've been guilty of listening to a bunch of do-nothing political types who would tell you that America's house is not on fire, even as the flames were licking their faces.
Time to stop wondering if you can trust the nuclear codes to people who don't know how to organize a group chat. It's time to stop ignoring the hypocrisy and wearing a big gold cross while announcing the defunding of children's cancer research.
Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now.
These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have.
We must castigate them on the soapbox and then punish them at the ballot box. Okay.
Side note, if you guys listening out there want to heed Pritzker's call to mobilize, you can find events and actions near you by visiting go to saveamerica.com. And they're all peaceful protests.
No inciting violence like Stephen Miller. Clean today.
Yeah. What'd you guys think of Pritzker's message? I really liked the speech.
I really did. I, you know, the part you played, I know I'm sure your ears had a little bit of a little sing-songy.
Yeah, a little bit.

But I thought it was great.

I actually really liked a lot of it. One section that I thought is worth looking at is the way he handled immigration.
Because he was so strong on due process, on the inhumanity of some of these deportations, while talking about what we actually need to be for, unabashedly. There was a lot of places in there where I thought the rhetoric wasn't as

sanded down as you would hear from Democrats in the past. And there was a part where he talked

about one reason Democrats lost is not because Democrats don't have the right values, but because

the American people just don't see Democrats as the kind of people that will fight for them.

And I really liked it. And it was a turn into this section that you played.
And on the whole,

I hadn't seen him give a speech like that before. And to me, like the two best speeches I've heard lately was this speech and the speech where O'Connor gave at Yale, which is a much more kind of cerebral and academic and philosophical speech.
But putting them side by side, I thought like, oh, like there's an interesting kind of broad message there that I really liked. What'd you think, Tony? Did you guys feel like a lot of this was a pretty, not that thinly veiled shot at Chuck Schumer? Oh, I was, I picked it.
You kept talking about Democrats who hoped that one day Republicans would come to their senses, which Schumer famously talked about in that New York Times interview around the cave, the budget cave. I thought Newsom.
Newsom. I i thought whitmer and then i thought it was just a general like you know obama biden years the fever's gonna break kind of thing like it was a it was like a sort of yeah vague shot at all that yeah we were shadowboxing a lot of straw men there was that's you know yeah you know it's funny i i'm doing what i told myself i didn't want to do which is like i i watched the speech and i'm like i could pick apart a lot of different parts of the speech and some of it is like as a speech writer some of it is like what do you actually mean by that yeah no i know i know straw man thing and then some of it was you know for a for a speech where you're supposed to be like we just got to say what we believe it does feel like a lot of rhetorical lines that are you do to get applause but overall i'm like good for him for fucking getting out there and saying something yeah i want to be i actually liked it i mean like i watched all 30 minute long speech and it made me feel good and i was like oh this guy's a fighter and he's not pulling punches he's calling uh rfk jr nepo baby and pete hegseth a washed up fox tv commentator who drank too much and committed assault.
Like this was red meat. A weird Nepo baby that threw the bear in his trunk.
These are like fun lines designed to rev up a crowd. It's a great speech to, you know, hit the primary trail.
I thought he did well. And I thought it was called arms.
I like when he said, as a Jew, like stop tearing down the Constitution in the name of my ancestors. Yes, I really liked it too.
Because when the pendulum swings back, you'll contribute to the climate of retribution, I think was the line. So I thought there was a lot of interesting points he made.
The language was tough, but quotable and made news. And I liked it.
Yeah, that was my only, it's funny that you brought, because I actually thought it was directed more at Newsom. I didn't think of Schumer.
And then I like, when I was getting to the, when he was talking about the Democrats, he was critiquing. That was like my, I was like, well, these are applause lines about a kind of Democrat anybody would hate.
But like, who, who do you mean? And what does it look like to do something different? But I think that's what the next few months are about. It also made me think of like, you know, we'll get to that point, a primary debate stage.
And he's going to be the one that makes a lot of the other Democrats on that stage feel uncomfortable because he's not going to let them get away with, you know, not going hard. Yeah.
At Trump and Republicans. And I think you need that kind of person in a primary for sure.
And we certainly need that kind of leader right now. Just who's going to call out the bullshit.
It's interesting. Like we, you know, we were talking over the weekend about Pete's two and a half hour conversation on the flagrant podcast with Andrew Schultz.
And it's just such a different style. And, but like Pete did a really great job in that interview.
Totally different than Pritzker, totally different than, you know, a lot of these other candidates that we talked about. So So I kind of like seeing everyone out there doing something different.
Yeah. And speaking of just like what has made the last, even as things have been so terrible, like what has made me feel at least some glimmer of hope, it is, you know, people have asked, well, who do you think the next generation of leaders are? Like, who's the next one? Who's the next one? And like, it's not, they're not going to come out of an egg.
Like,'re going to come through what we get to see. And like what we've seen is like really interesting stuff.
We've seen Cory Booker on the floor. We've seen Van Hollen go to El Salvador.
I like what Rose doing. I like the speech by Pritzker.
I like seeing what Pete's doing. And it's it's sort of leadership is as leadership does.
And I'm like heartened by what what by the Pritzker speech. There are also encouraging signs from various institutions.
Wall Street Journal reports that a group of about 10 schools, including the Ivies and the major research schools, is coordinating behind the scenes to make sure no one else folds like Columbia did. I love it you mentioned Jenner and Block, one of the law firms that refused to capitulate to Trump, how they were in court and they were asking a federal judge on Monday to permanently block Trump's executive order targeting them.
The judge hasn't issued a ruling yet, but he's a George W. Bush judge, seemed pretty hostile to the government's case, shouting, give me a break, to the DOJ lawyer who attempted to justify blocking Jenner employees from all federal buildings.
Based on the fact that Jenner and Block had DEI policies, that sort of, it was like a ridiculous claim. The reason that it's okay for the administration to block them from federal buildings is because they are racist.
Oh. Yeah.
And that the order can't be illegal because what the order says is this order must follow applicable law. Yeah, that's right.
Also, we've talked a lot on the show about the Trump lawsuit and pressure campaign against 60 Minutes, whose executive producer Bill Owens resigned last week out of concern that Paramount might cave to Trump in order to win approval for a merger.

If you were wondering how the rest of the team feels about it, Scott Pelley ended Sunday night 60 Minutes broadcast with this. Bill resigned Tuesday.
It was hard on him and hard on us, but he did it for us and you. Stories we pursued for 57 years are often controversial.
Lately, the Israel-Gaza War and the Trump administration.

Bill made sure they were accurate and fair. He was tough that way.
But our parent company, Paramount, is trying to complete a merger. The Trump administration must approve it.
Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways. None of our stories has been blocked, but Bill felt he lost the independence that honest journalism requires.
No one here is happy about it, but in resigning, Bill proved one thing. He was the right person to lead 60 Minutes all along.
me, it was a sign that Trump successfully used the leverage he has as president to block this merger to at least dissuade critical reporting or at least drive someone who's good at the job out. And also, if CBS News gets sold to Skydance, I think David Ellison is notionally in control, but his father, Larry Ellison, I think is seen as like really controlling things behind the scenes.
David's a big Dem donor. Larry's a Republican donor.
So I don't know what that means for the future politics of the parent company. But I think this is a just dark kind of scary moment for media.
Yeah. It's the son of Fred Trump with a pressure campaign against the daughter of Sumner Redstone in a fight with the son of Larry Ellison.
It is a Nepo baby conflagration. I do think that between, I mean, you see why he undid the cuts of Social Security office, but if Trump fucks with Medicare, Social Security payments, and 60 Minutes, they will do to Washington what the British did in 1815.
I mean, it's just not, you can't do this. You can't do these people.
These people watch every weekend. They've been watching this for 40 years.
I thought it was good that Scott Pelley said something. Oh, yeah.
And that Bill Owens did it. It's great.
Oh, it's obviously a bad, bad, it's obviously bad. Courageous individuals.
It's obviously bad that it's happening. Cowards as corporations, you know? Yeah.
And Dan and I talked about this on the last pod, but like the corporate media side of this is not where we're going to find the real heroes. I'm glad the colleges are finally banding together, that some are finally banding together.
Good for Jenner and Block. I think that the executive orders on the law firms are fucking ridiculous.
And if they're not going to get laughed out of the courtroom, judges are going to yell like they did today. They're not going to hold up.
So the law firms that capitulated are going to be like, what the fuck were doing so i think that's good but i do think on the on the corporate media side you know these people this is what we were saying on friday like the for a lot of these big companies the media outlets are a rounding error in their in their business and so they're not going to feel like they need to really stand up for it yeah jv l the bulwark wrote a piece about this kind of i really it really kind of kind of stuck with me about the Pascal's wager of the Trump years, which is basically, if you think Republicans will seek political retribution, but you think Democrats are too good of people to ever do that, it creates a terrible incentive because you just go along with Republicans because you'll never pay a price. And I do think we need to be, and that's what he talked about in this piece, that we need to be thinking about what it looks like for us to make clear that we're watching what's happening here and capitulating to Trump in order to get a merger through.
Well, that's a merger to re-examine. There are ways in which we need to be signaling that going along with this, and the matter is that Trump's becoming less popular too, because this is not going to go on forever.
And I like that Pritzker says in his speech, we will win Congress and we will take back House. Like, people need to think that this era will end, that people will look back on what happened with it, with not just disgust but, like, with genuine consequences.
Are you canceling your Paramount Plus subscription? What do I watch on Paramount Plus? Survivor. I watch Survivor on Paramount Plus.
How about that? There you go. How about that? Remember that? Remember when I was on that? Still? I'm taking a break.
I'm in a strategic pause. It's a hazy memory, Yes.
I'm in a strategic survivor pause, but I'll be back. I think you're right.
There are some smart members of Congress like Tom Malinowski. I think Van Hollen, I think Adam Schiff, people talking about what can we do now to send a message that we're paying attention, we're keeping score.
And we're going to talk about this through hearings or whatever means down the road, whether it's, you know, uh, the authoritarians in El Salvador who are contributing to the rendition, extraordinary rendition of American citizens down there. Like that's going to lead to future assistance cuts or these law firms that are cutting these disgusting deals and forcing their associates to do pro bono work.
And it's like, what, like cataloging it all now is very important. Speaking of press freedom, we were in DC, the correspondence dinner, no president at the dinner, no comedian, no jokes and fascism, you know? Yeah.
Do you guys notice a difference? Why? What do you want? You want to, should we just, should we discuss, do a couple of minutes on our... Can I tell you something? There's a little bit too much of, uh, like you can't, you can't go to a party ironically, you know? There's a little too much, like, as long as I say this is weird and maybe uncomfortable, I can have a couple of drinks.
Like, there's no need to do this. Like, the opposite of, the opposite of, like, you don't prove how much you take Trump seriously by, like, not having a couple drinks.
I know. I said this to someone who asked me that question.
I was like, maybe it's just because we're in LA all the time. But I'm like, we this all day long talk about this and how scary trump is and we talk about like you got to go live your life too i just think that like the entire white house press corps the correspondence association would be better off not pretending that weekend is about anything but a fucking party it's always been about a party it is not about press freedom yes they do some good scholarships there's real speakers that talk but i've watched that room full of random celebrities talk over the children of deceased journalists who are killed in conflicts okay these this was a decade ago this is 15 years ago it was never about these high-minded principles it was a bunch of people getting loaded with the guys from the hangover movies or whatever it was.
Which is okay. Just be what you are.
Well, that's the thing is like, I think like there was- Went, got drunk, talked to a bunch of people who hadn't seen in a while. That was great.
It was great. And like, this is why like I- Didn't save press freedom? No.
And it didn't do much, too much damage either. But like, I talked about this with Eugene on Love It or Leave It that like part of the, like what i was disappointed by is that that amber ruffin who's great like would have brought a lot of attention to journalism and like there should be a comedian at dinner because otherwise no one's going to pay attention to it that's part of what the like the weekend is all about uh and then i said that like obviously i'm available like you know i think alex thompson got a lot of attention for talking about how the media should have done a better job covering biden's age etc and like there's some truth to that alex also has a book coming out on the subject so it's a little bit self-serving more than a little bit self-serving if we're being honest but also it's just an example like yes maybe there could have should have been more coverage of biden's age and mental acuity and decline but also the american people were very aware of it yeah it showed up in every poll every single one every single one even without the uh additional intrepid reporting yeah i kind of got the kind of got the hint yeah he was held accountable yeah like it seems like a couple of these yeah this is the this these these two journalists were picking it up i up dear listener I pointed at my eyes yeah yeah yeah yeah here's Leslie Stahl Leslie Stahl and Anderson Cooper on the case oh boy oh boy I'm excited for the book I'm excited for the book too I'm excited to talk to them on this podcast oh yeah we're gonna talk to them anyway anyway to them.
Anyway, anyway, it was a good time. Always good to pop into D.C.
and then leave. One more thing we wanted to mention before we go.
Semaphore's Ben Smith had a great story on Sunday about— Great story. Oh, my gosh.
So fun to read. These private group chats over the last couple years where the tech elite started to open up to each other about moving toward Trump.
Love it. You talked to Ben for a YouTube special today that you can get on the Pod Save America YouTube channel.
So check it out. But how was that? It's great.
First of all, it's just it's you should just read this story. But basically, all these guys that kind of radicalized a little bit during kind of the combination of I think COVID and Me Too and George Floyd and felt like, you know, they would say they were like basically under like Soviet occupation.
But basically, they didn't feel like they could they didn't want to post what they really thought because they didn't want to stand by it or face the blowback for whatever it was. So they took it to group chats, ostensibly to have a kind of freewheeling open conversation where all ideas will be welcome.
But they kind of slowly shift to the right and slowly become a little bit annoyed by people that aren't agreeing with them on certain issues. And it includes everybody from Mark Cuban to like far right activists uh and all of a sudden carlson tucker carlson but then all of a sudden donald trump is president and the economy isn't doing so hot it turns out maybe uh uh stopping wokeness isn't the most important thing when the stock market loses a couple trillion in value so it's a good conversation check it out the my favorite uh piece of that story it's not ruining anything is there was some big group chat called Chatham House that involved like kind of a bunch of hardcore MAGA people and then some journalists.
And David Sachs, the now AI czar, who is mostly known for being a huge douchebag, venture capitalist guy, wrote, this group has become worthless since the loudest voices have TDS. So and so you should start a new one with just smart.
Then it's like, David Sachs left the group. Tucker Carlson left the group.
Sean McGuire left the group. Tyler Winklevoss left the group.
They all just left in a fit of pique. It's so funny.
It's just, the whole idea is to have dissent. We've got to be able to talk about things.
We've got to have dissenting views. I talked about this with Ben, too, that one, they were on why uh none of them seemed to find it a big deal that donald trump was denying the results of the election and like house republicans or anybody else they have all these justifications for why they don't want to bring it up um but uh uh it isn't it is interesting when are we starting one i look i said this on my conversation with ben which is uh i will not send ben smith fucking anything all right add me you can look i look i it's all fun and games put me in it's funny that's all of this one guy mark andreason this venture capitalist who's starting all these group chats do you guys remember why he got canceled in like 2016 he tweeted anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the indian people for decades why stop now He was mad about something they did to hurt Facebook.
And it's like, yeah, well, you're wrong, sir. He's got a few other issues.
Colonialism was bad. It's also like canceled.
Like he got criticized. Exactly.
All these fucking people got criticized. It's such as like a kind of both sides of their mouth thing.
Because it's like, oh, you know, you can't say anything. Of course you can.
You just don't like what happens when you do. And that's okay.
You don't have to say it. That's okay.
You can be annoyed by that. Yeah.
Well, go check out Lovett's interview with Ben on Pod Save America YouTube. Go subscribe.
If you're not subscribed to the Pod Save America YouTube channel, I don't know what you're doing. Yeah.
Get on there. Okay.
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She served as domestic policy advisor to Joe Biden, worked in the Obama White House, worked for Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton. She's been around Democratic politics for a long time, but she's now the CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
Neera Tanden, welcome to Pod Save America. Great to be with you, Dan.
I should disclose at the top of this that on Inauguration Day 2017, while Trump was speaking, you called me and asked me to join the board of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. So I have been a board member of your organization for eight years now.
Yes. That was wild.
And I don't blame you for his inauguration. It was a really good time to get me to agree to something.
I thought so. It was very clever.
Very clever. All right, let's start.
The Center for American Progress was formed in 2003. It really rose up to be sort of in the center of democratic resistance and opposition for more than 20 years now.
It was sort of the locus of a lot of thought about how to defeat George W. Bush and how to build back from the loss that we had in those elections.
That's really a center of resistance in the first Trump administration. What do you think resistance in Trump 2.0 should look like? Well, I think resistance is very different from 2017.
We are in a very different time. The president, President Trump, is much more dangerous.
The country is in a much more fertile place right now for him. Fertile meaning'll say i mean meaning essentially you know because he won the popular vote i think a lot of people um are believe he has you know he has the majority with him and are much more scared of him in 2017 he lost the popular vote a lot of people it was a fluke.
So you didn't see institutions sort of pre-obey or cave. So I think the moment right now is much more dangerous in a real sense because, you know, I think Bannon and Trump and Russ Vot look at America as a battlefield and they are really systematically not just trying to their own forces, but take out oppositional organizations, things that they see as oppositional to them, whether it's the media or law firms or universities or unions.
So the country is in a much more dangerous place. And also, frankly, the brand of the Democratic Party is in a very different place than it was eight years ago.
Eight years ago, again, Hillary Clinton didn't win the Electoral College, but she did win the popular vote. And also, you know, President Obama was seen as a successful president.
And so the party was in a much stronger position than it is now. So I think resistance and opposition today has to mean three things.

One, really trying to drive facts about what Trump is doing

and really make clear to the American people in the miasma of Greenland and Canada,

he's actually harming your pocketbook, he's taking away security for your families, health security, raising prices. So it's really driving that connection.
I also think it's vital that we create an alternative agenda so that people see that they have two choices of change, not just Trump's wrecking ball versus a Democratic Party status quo. And then third, and I think this really goes to the democracy point, we have to think about how we bolster institutions and buck them up and really push against institutions that want to cave to Trump because that is also very, very dangerous and different.
Let's start with the institutions, right? You have talked about in some of your interviews since returning to the Center for American Progress Action Fund, that Democrats can't continue to be just like knee-jerk defenders of institutions. Yes, yes.
CAP is probably the most influential or one of the most influential of all Democratic Party institutions. It sort of sits at the nexus of sort of politics and policymaking and sort of thinking about the future of the party.
What is the alternative to defending institutions when Trump is trying to destroy them? Like, how do we I guess the question is, and I think it's a fair critique of all of us. Yes.
The like we took the election, like a lot of people took the lesson of the 2020 election is that people did not like Trump's destruction of institutions. He was trying to take down Congress, came out January 6th.
And so we became defenders of institutions. President Biden is an institutionalist to his core.
Like when he was most passionate, I think, in his presidency was in some of those speeches he gave about democracy and defending institutions. Like what's the what's the middle ground between where Trump is and defending the broken political system? So I think this is really a central question for the party going forward.
And, um, I think that, uh, in many ways we sort of misread 2020 and we being all of us, all of us misread 2020. I think, you know, every election is actually a change election.
Every election has been a change election since 2006, except for one, and that was President Obama's re-election in 2012, which if you think about it now going back, looks pretty amazing that given all the trend lines before and since, it's a realist standout. So every election has been a change election.
I think one of our challenges in 2020 was that, and I speak for all of us, is that we thought that it was really a restoration. It was like a restoration of the order.
And I think it may have just been a repudiation of the form and function of Donald Trump's presidency. And I really fundamentally believe that people in the country are still angry across the board about what, you know, a whole range of problems and that really the tactic that or the approach has to be, you know, that we're going to solve every problem.
And I think it's this is an even more important issue for Democrats because we believe in government. And so I look back and I'll say candidly, I think we should have solved problems earlier.
I wasn't there for the entire time on immigration and I didn't handle the border day to day, but I was on the immigration team and we should have handled that much earlier. You mean more aggressive, like moving more aggressive border security.
What does that mean? Yes. So we took actions in June of this year to really ensure that we were limiting border crossings and, you know, very painful to do in the party.
But candidly, doing it after Trump was the nominee really communicated to a lot of people. I think that, you know, if you really heard of an immigration, he was the force that was making us do it.
If we'd solved it a year or two earlier, then maybe we'd be in a different place. And I just think actually, I actually think the most important thing is that we offer solutions on a whole host of things.
And, you know, we've been working on, for example, we've been working on government reform issues. Now, Secretary Buttigieg, or I guess Pete Buttigieg, we call him now, talked about this the other day, which is, you know, it's actually not reforming the government to just slash programs, but it is totally reasonable for people to want the government to work better for them.
So we're undertaking a project where we're providing ideas about how to make government work more seamlessly for consumers, reduce friction, make the government put the citizen at the center of its work instead of making citizens go through lots of hoops. And that's really a product of a lot of conservatives who want to make government more difficult.
So we really see this as a moment where we have to offer actual ideas on a whole range of issues, take more seriously where people are on some of these problems. Sometimes I think, coming from the administration, sometimes I think we think, you know, people's concerns about an issue are really just political.
You know, a lot of people I think thought immigration was just an issue conservatives were pushing instead of a legitimate concern. Of course there's insane things they're doing now.
That people don't like.

That people don't like that actually sticking people who are legally here and prison gulags in El Salvador is wrong.

You know, we could have a happy medium, you know, on these issues.

So I think the real challenge for Democrats right now, I mean, there's multiple challenges.

Yes, yes, it feels that way.

It could be here for hours.

But a challenge for Democrats is not just defending institutions. I am angry at what they're doing, but I'm not sure doing a rally in front of a building is the most important thing.
More communicating, using your channels to communicate the impact of what that is with human stories, real people's stories of how they're, you know, being denied small business loans or other things or their prices are going up, or they're worried about the health of their children. You know, that I think is really crucial.
But also, it's really important to say what you would do. And I think the one, you know, asymmetric benefit or asymmetric asset that Trump has is he's very good at making his opponents, caricaturing his opponents as defenders of status quo.
Let's talk about an alternative agenda. This is something the Center for American Progress has worked on for as long as it's been around.
I remember in 2005, they worked on an Iraq plan to sort of help Democrats figure out,

particularly Democrats who had voted for the Iraq war, to figure out sort of how to get

to a, have an alternative, right? Yeah, and how to end the Iraq war in a way that increases our security, which a certain senator took up. Yes, yes, exactly.
I assume immigration is one of those issues in which you think we probably need an alternative. And I guess sort of another question is, like, I've been thinking about this a lot.
I get this question all the time. Like, Democrats need an agenda, which I agree with.
Like, it's, if you don't agree with that, I'm not sure, like, what you really believe if you're not willing to just accept that premise. Yeah.
But there is this question of, like, how do you, like, how do you communicate it? Like, in 2005, you could have Senate and House leadership before it, and it felt like that we had a party. Now, I just don't even know.
How are you sort of thinking about, A, what's in that agenda, but how do you let voters know that we have an agenda? Well, the truth is that, I mean, we will put out our agenda, but obviously it's like thousands upon thousands of conversations, right? It's leaders in the House taking them up. But, you know, it's really interesting right now.
You know, governors are reaching out for what do we say about immigration, particularly because they want to criticize what Trump is doing. But I think they also feel a little bit of insecurity about answering, you know, what do you do about immigration writ large? Or what do you do about the border and other things? So, you know, our ideas, which we'll be putting out very shortly, are how to fix the broken immigration system.
And the truth is our system is broken in multiple dimensions. And we have to be able to make that case.
So it is a problem that our border is not secure. But really, there has been an abuse of the asylum system.
That abuse started in the Trump administration and went up in the Biden administration. So we should fix that problem.
It's also a big problem in our country that these green card backlogs are decades old. And we should fix that.
And I actually believe that people want more or be open to more legal immigration if they felt that their border itself was secure. And so we're going to put forward ideas that basically fix all of the problems of the immigration system.
Not everyone's going to love our plan, I'm sure, but we really think the focus should be what is the problem and how are we fixing it and you know we both worked for political leaders who got up every day and thought you know when there's a big problem the country has to solve it and I think one of the changes in the presidency over the last couple of decades is you know people sort of expect the president to solve problems and you know they're not thinking of like, does this issue help? Or her Democrats are just really trying to get solutions. And I think one of the challenges is if you think about your job as oriented towards Congress and what can pass, then you think about just that dimension.
But if you're thinking about every problem you can solve for, sometimes that takes Congress. Sometimes that takes executive action.
Sometimes that takes working with governors. Sometimes that takes trying to change the culture.
But you are being a change agent in the way you're thinking about things. That is something.
I'm going to ask you in a second about Trump's first 100 days. But that is something that I was talking to Molly Murphy, who was a poster for President Biden and Kamala Harris.
But she was saying in her focus groups, like people don't really love what Trump is doing, but they do think he's doing things. Yes.
Right. Yeah.
And so he is given the perception of action. Yeah.
And he's leading. He's leading.
And we don't actually believe he's leading. Yeah.
People think people see that. I think he's leading us off a cliff.
Yeah, yeah. I guess you could be leading in bad ways.
He's definitely leading. Yes.
He's driving events instead of being driven by them. Exactly.
And he is, and this is something President Obama used to say, which is sometimes you just have to get caught trying. 100%.
And even if you can't, like, let's say a Democrat wins in 2028. Maybe we have a Democratic Congress.
Maybe we don't. Maybe we have a split.
But that president is going to be, like, has to seem like they are trying every day to solve the problem, even if they are limited somewhat by Congress, right? A thousand percent. And, you, I think this is, this is really also just

changed dramatically in the way communications have changed. You know, there's so much competition for attention, right? But the presidency and the president is, you know, what is still the national leader of the country.
And I, I, I think, you know, I think people just expect the president to solve their problems.

You know, it's like,

we've all had the experience where you're talking to somebody and they're basically like, why hasn't the president fixed, you know, for example, homelessness. And, you know, you can get into a robust conversation about actually how homelessness is mostly a localized problem.
It's not in most places. You know, most of the resources are at the local level.
But this is, you know, I mean, I think this is one of the things that Trump has done, which is that, you know, there's no differentiation in his mind between federal, state, and local. He won't comment on anything.
He will attack anything. He was commenting on the changing of a mask on a Long Island high school the other day.
No, but he'll, and like, he will try to direct resources on anything. And, you know, I do think, you know, we both worked for President Obama and, you know, like something would happen.
He, you know, he would try to see how he could fix it. Right.
And even if Congress was out of the way, he'd kind of think about how he'd try to it another way. And sometimes people would malign that as like pat and pen strategy.
But actually, it was a how do we fix this problem strategy? People, I thought it's I think it's always important to communicate that you are trying to fix a problem, get caught trying. But actually, you're trying to fix a problem, whether it's through Congress, through the executive branch, or any other way.
And, you know, I think this is the way governors think. Yeah, that's right.
You know what? So we're coming up on the hundredth day of the Trump presidency. I shouldn't smile.
It's very grim. Well, I mean, it could it could be worse.
We're going the 50th day. Right.
So it's 100 days behind us. What's your sort of assessment of how like there's a lot of noise, right? A lot of things, he keeps doing a lot of things.
Many of those things have been stopped in court or the executive order doesn't really add up to a lot of substance. I mean, it's really, these executive orders are like press releases, honestly.
As someone who was a staff secretary, that must be quite frustrating. Well, I'm also like, I just wish we could have gotten away with this tactic of just doing a press release and people like obeying ahead of a time, you know? When we were in the Obama White House, I wanted, and I was the communications director, and I wanted to do a presidential memorandum on something.
And we really had to like get it done for the news cycle. And obviously, as you know, there's a very robust interagency process to get it approved.
And I was like, no, we have to get it done tomorrow.

And the person in the staff secretary's office told me I was taking the guardrails off government,

which is, I don't think that phrase is used very often in the Trump administration.

I don't think they're running a process.

The great notions of asking agencies how it would affect people.

Yeah, it's kind of a crazy thing.

But how do you think about just what's your sort of your quick assessment of the first 100 days? You know, I actually think we've turned a real corner in the last couple of weeks. And I don't know if it's like Harvard stood up or Democrats getting a spine on immigration issues, like on the deportation issues.
But I actually think that, or maybe it's just Trump has done so much that the levels of chaos with the tariffs and the economic dislocations have all just like gone into a whirlwind. But I do think fundamentally he is in a very different place.
And honestly, he's got a great communications, a range of communications assets. But the truth of the first 100 days is that I think he will, people will look back at this and say he used a lot of his political capital in ways that were ultimately squandered.
Most of his EOs were being shut down by the courts. There are temporary restraining orders, and he is actually, his administration is obeying most of those TROs.
So I think he kind of came in and thought, I'm going to do all these executive actions, and he's actually been quite limited. And it is really important that people are standing up.
I mean, this is why mass protests are really important because everybody sees that there is a strong opposition,

and that's been hugely critical.

Yeah, I mean, it is.

If you just were to assess it politically,

he is underwater.

He's underwater.

The only person with lower approval rates at this point

is Donald Trump in his first term.

100%.

Obama and George W. Bush from the 60s,

President Biden was at 54 his approval rating at this point, and Trump's 46. 45, yeah.
45, depending on the moment in which poll comes out. Let's hope it's just a trend like that.
Well, I mean, he has lost a point every week in his approval rating for the last two months. Yeah, now I do think, and this is an important thing for all of us, I do think it feels very different if you were in the 30s than if you were in the 40s.
And I think institutions will treat him differently. And, you know, I keep harping on these institutions, but I will say when you look at other countries that face an authoritarian threat, it feels very different in the country when all, like a whole range of institutions are just, you know, kowtowing to the administration.
So it is important that we keep at it and drive his numbers down. And I will say, cap and cap action, we are very focused on driving the connection every day between a thing Trump has done and the cost to you and your family.
Last question for you. You did an interview with Ben Smith of Semaphore, where you talked about one of the things you really want to understand is why, quote unquote, Bidenomics did not have the political impact.
You thought did all these things that were very good for the country, very good for a lot of the people who left our party to vote for Donald Trump in this election. What's your assessment on why that is or how you're thinking about it? Well, I think, honestly, lots of people are cross-pressured on lots of issues.
And I think it's multidimensional, and it's not just economics. I mean, Joe Biden had an agenda for working class people.
It was, I'm going to get the Congress to pass hundreds of billions of dollars in investments and 70 to 80% of those jobs are going to go to people without a college degree. Now, maybe we didn't communicate that, but that was definitely a strategy focused on working class people.
And he talked about plants and manufacturing locations and jobs in places that had been economically left behind in red state and blue state and purple states. And that message was trumped by other messages in this last election.
Now, maybe it's also possible we didn't communicate it well. Always a possibility.
So I think we should understand that. But I also think there's two other things that are going on that we also have to wrestle with.
First, there are kind of security issues, culture issues, where, you know, I mean, I do think a range of voters thought of immigration as a kind of economic issue as well. The right really focused on large numbers of people coming in and raising rents and other issues.
So that's something that I think we have to wrestle with and address and actually address, which we're working on. But I also think, and this is, you know, I kind of defer to you where I think there's just a constant drumbeat online and elsewhere that by the right, well-funded, that says liberal elites look down on you as a working class person.

They judge you. Their values are different from you.

And I think there's two ways to bridge that.

First, we should figure out our own mechanisms of communication.

But I also think we have to go out of our way in instances where that might feel like it's happening to to to distinguish ourselves, say that's wrong, go out of our way to really listen to people. You know, I mean, I think, you know, there's this big, robust debate about where things are in the party.
And, you know, and I think we have to wrestle with the fact that white working class people, not all working class people, but white working class people have voted for a billionaire three times. And like, how do we impact that? And how do we question our own assumptions when we do that? And an increasing share of non-white working class people, which I think is the part that really, I think, flummoxes a lot of how a lot of people thought about politics in the Trump era.
Yeah. And I think, honestly, we have to think about economics from a fairness perspective, absolutely.
But I think for a lot of people, young people, the working class people of color, we lost particularly the men. What I've heard from a lot of people doing analysis is that they have been really focused on economic success, opportunity, like how their family will do better.
And I think that's an area where we have to come up with ideas. And CAP will be working on that over the next several months as well.
The hard part is, I mean, there's sort of a twofold problem here. As you mentioned, there's a communications issue where just people did not have the information.
Like, that did not break through to people at all. Like, you would – like, I saw all the polls, which is like, what did – you know, did Biden do all these things? No.
Here are the things Biden did. Do you like them? Yes.
Yeah. Now, but what's interesting there is it did not lead to them to vote for him.
Vote change. Yeah, vote change.
But that's like the business. The business is in – everybody – you know, people like a lot of things.
It's like like what persuades them to vote for you over the other guy? And I think one thing as a party we have to think about is like we need you need the policy, right? You need the ideas. But we have to think about economics as an identity issue.
A hundred percent. Which is like, am I like, are you am I fighting for you? This is what Trump is very good at.
Yeah. Right.
It's they think, some group of people think that he'll fight for them, right? Like he had an advantage in this election just because he was not the incumbent at a time of inflation. And people remember lower costs from his age.
But in general, all of this stuff, this like absurd policies that don't really make a lot of sense or would only address a small portion. Like the tax on tips.
Yeah, I think it's a good it's a signifier. Yes, you know, it was a signifier to voters that he got what it's like to be a waitress or waiter because he was really focused on that issue.
I mean, I think we should learn lessons from that. We need signifier policies where we we're we're communicating like we get this we get what it's like.
I mean, I think sometimes we think about the biggest policies. But I guess my take on, you know, on everything you were talking about is he has an advantage, which is, you know, he will say kind of crazy things that nobody would, no political advisor would tell you to say.
So people are like, well, he's obviously being candid. And, you know, he has a whole frame of I'm fighting for you because he gets attacked a lot.
And he has a way of speaking. And, you know, I think we have to do many things.
But I think the fundamental problem or a fundamental issue is that he himself says, and there is a constant message machine, that liberals look down on you and hate you and distrust your values and don't know what your life is like. And there's a way to talk about that.
There's a way to communicate about those issues. I mean, no one really remembers this, but the, you know, President Obama's share of working class voters and white working class voters was higher than our last several nominees.
And he was a black man and they were white. But he was an outsider.
Yeah, but he was an outsider. He was an outsider and he had a populist critique of Romney.
And also, I just think that, and he was, you know, he was arguing for change in multiple ways. So, and he was running, you know, John McCain was an institutionalist.
So I think there's, you know, we just have to be super mindful of talking, like, you know, representing ourselves as champions of change, but also, you know, champions of people who are struggling every day. Well, Nir, I could talk to you about this for hours and we probably will offline.
But thank you so much for being here on Pod Save America. And it's always great to talk to you.
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
That's our show for today. Dan and I will be back with a new show on Friday.
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