Trump’s First Moves, Biden’s Final Words

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This month on Explain It To Me, we're talking about all things wellness.

We spend nearly $2 trillion on things that are supposed to make us well: collagen smoothies and cold plunges, Pilates classes, and fitness trackers.

But what does it actually mean to be well?

Why do we want that so badly?

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That's this month on Explain It To Me, presented by Pureleaf.

Welcome to Raging Moderates.

I'm Scott Galloway.

And I'm Jessica Tarlov.

Jessica, I've decided after this kind of two-week free trial of 2025, I want my money back.

Are you going to do this every week?

But I get the joke now.

Oh, did I use it?

I recycle my stuff.

So, by the way, when your kids are a little bit older, especially your son, a decent means of...

I don't have a son.

You have two daughters?

I knew that.

Yeah, sure.

And they're lovely.

Yeah.

No one cut this, by the way.

Yeah.

Oh, God.

Yeah.

You have kids?

They're so cute.

They look just like you.

You have kids.

Let's start rumors.

I am a birthing person.

So one of the great, I guess you could do this for your daughters, decent education and power and history and politics and culture and also, oddly, sex education is to have your six-year-old boy.

And I'm about to do it with my,

I did it when he was 15, but I did it two years ago with my 17-year-old.

I'll do it in a year with my 14-year-old is to watch the entire

Game of Thrones series.

It just touches on everything, and it's very bonding.

And in one of the episodes, Stannis Baratheon decides to burn his daughter, Shireen, at the stake.

And it is so incredibly uncomfortable.

And I decided for my mental health going through the second run-through of it, because we're watching it again together.

I would not watch that scene.

Yesterday was Shireen Baratheon being burned at the stake.

I didn't watch it.

So you've got to carry this show because for my own mental health, I just couldn't watch this shit.

I just, I couldn't do it.

So you tell me what, what happened yesterday real quick?

Like the inauguration or in my toddler's life?

Let's start with it.

Let's start with the important stuff, your toddler's life.

Well, I don't know actually, because I was at inauguration.

So all roads leave

the second inauguration.

Yeah.

Have you even looked at the script?

I have two daughters and I went to the inauguration.

You went to the inauguration as part of Fox?

Well,

I mean, we weren't in the Capitol because there were very few people in the Capitol.

We had reporters there, but

we had two gorgeous sets that were built, one looking at the Capitol, one looking at the White House.

And yeah, I was there Sunday and Monday doing coverage, and it was wild.

Yeah, it was pretty cool.

Give us a sense for the vibe.

Like what, give us some on-the-ground, sane vibe check.

You said pretty cool.

So immediately I disagree with you because I can't imagine anything about that would be cool, but I'll defer to you because you were there.

I wasn't.

Yeah, it was like

a megapolar vortex with the wind chill and the Trump enthusiasm bottled up.

When I say pretty cool,

I think if something's only happened 47 times in our history, there's something cool about it.

And I definitely felt the gravity of the moment, how important it is, and watching the peaceful transfer of power go off without a hitch when everything got changed, you know, just

transferring it.

I'm sorry, go ahead.

A hundred percent.

And that was a major theme of the day that obviously January 20th, 2021 looked nothing like this.

And a lot of people, even folks who like Donald Trump more than me, if that's possible,

were citing how gracious

now former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris were about this and have been in the, you know, since the transition started with Biden having Trump over right away and saying to him, welcome home, which seems pretty above and beyond considering the level of vitriol that's been spewed between them, the level of, I'm going to jail you.

No, I'm going to jail you.

And then everyone's having tea and crumpets, which probably says something terrible about our political class, that they make us think that everybody is an existential threat to the Republic.

And then actually they're just pretty chill.

And I want to hang out with them at Jimmy Carter's funeral.

But,

you know,

some things are bigger than politics and being able to cover an inauguration like that and to have the kind of access that we had and to be able to walk around a city that was totally shut down for events that didn't end up happening, but filled with tens of thousands of people that came from all over the country and all over the world.

It was obviously a foreign influence problem, but this is the first inauguration to have foreign dignitaries there like this, you know, hoping to sit next to Bezos and Lauren Sanchez and her bra

and get some business done and get access to the Trump family.

I won't even go there.

Anyways.

No, you won't?

No, yeah.

Feel free.

I mean, I think actually a story point.

I think that could save America and I'll come back to that.

But as Jess is talking about, we're going to cover Trump's inauguration we'll come back to this biden's 11th hour legacy and tick tock's ban reversal so i did see i have seen some clips and my favorite one is all of your colleagues going uh insane over michelle obama not showing up about how selfish and outrageous it is and rumor is that trump didn't show up to biden's inauguration and maybe even inspired

somewhere maybe even inspired kind of the duck dynasty insurrection that was a low point in our our nation's history but yeah michelle Obama, First Lady Michelle, not showing up.

That's really outrageous.

So, all right, let's bust right into it.

Donald J.

Trump was sworn in as the 47th President of the United States in a ceremony at the Capitol Rotunda.

Wasting no time, he signed a flurry of executive actions, including revoking 78 of Joe Biden's policies, withdrawing the U.S.

from the Paris Climate Agreement and the World Health Organization, and ending birthright citizenship.

He also issued sweeping pardons for over 1,500 January 6th rioters, including members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys convicted of seditious conspiracy.

For supporters, it's the fulfillment of bold campaign promises.

For critics, it's a troubling start to a presidency pushing the limits of executive power.

So it feels like you got you were excited and caught up or

appreciate the majesty of the moment.

Any surprises or anything that you found sort of out of the ordinary or interesting in your couple days in D.C.?

Well, the whole thing was, excuse me, I also lost my voice there to make millennial vocal fry even worse.

So I apologize for that.

The whole thing was out of the ordinary because it was inside.

Yeah.

I was talking to Mark Thiessen, who is a Washington Post opinion columnist and was a speechwriter for George W.

Bush, now the greatest Republican president in everyone's eyes because he does.

oil paintings, right?

And doesn't start wars anymore.

He was saying that he didn't think that we would ever have it outside again because

there's just no way to secure the perimeter to make people safe.

And that's a massive change in the way that this is going to happen.

Obviously, Reagan went inside because of freezing temperatures.

This was a combination of, it was cold, though, around the same as Obama's inauguration, which was outside with 2 million people.

But people are, you know, very clear about the fact that there was a real security threat, which I completely believe.

There have already been two assassination attempts that we even know about.

I'm sure lots of plans that have been foiled.

So yeah, I'm sure he was in part concerned about crowd size, real security threats, and then cold temperatures, especially with an older base of people that were going to come for the inauguration.

And they did a beautiful job.

I don't know if the clips that you saw were of the inauguration itself or kind of the stories that were going along around on the sidelines of this, but it looked unbelievable.

And they had the overflow room, which was filled with people like governors of of major states like Texas, so they could fit our new kleptocracy in the main room.

And the rangers and tech CEOs bumped out or pushed out, shoved governors.

Well, they're also government officials now, a lot of them.

Technically.

But

that was, there's something,

I don't want to say beautiful because it breaks my heart.

But there's something

refreshing in, I guess, about the fact that Trump and Co.

don't hide anything.

Agreed.

Yeah.

Right.

It's just like, hey, I'm going to stab you in the front.

And when I do, it's going to have Mark Zuckerberg's perm, right?

Or I'm going to have the CEO of TikTok sitting next to our new director of national intelligence, like Tulsi Dabbard, just sitting next to the CEO of TikTok.

And we're going to talk about TikTok later in the show.

But I went to the free press party, which everyone wanted to go to because Jerks Bentley was performing, saw a lot of interesting people there.

But these guys from the Norwegian embassy came up to me and they were like, oh, you know, we love watching you.

And it's amazing also

how much of our cable news is consumed abroad.

That was a theme I met, an Israeli reporter from Tel Aviv in the train station.

I took the train back and forth who was like, we watch the five every day.

And I'm like, aren't you guys?

busier and he was like well this is agenda setting right especially when it comes to what's going to happen with the ceasefire deal and and hopefully that continues to go through as planned But the Norwegian embassy guys came up to me and I was like, what are you guys doing here?

They're like, oh, well, you know, we want to go to the party.

And I said, are you trying to just not end up like Greenland?

And obviously, Norway is a much bigger country and has a lot more going on there.

And they said, everyone is just trying to figure out how to navigate, right?

Everyone needs to be on the right side of this.

So he doesn't wake up one day and say, hey, your natural resources are very appealing to me.

Hey, you're in great strategic position, right, to counter Russia and China.

Let's work a deal out, right?

I know you're a sovereign nation and I know you pay your bills on time, but I really like what you got over there.

And that was a major theme of the weekend.

I mean, all of the enormous sponsorships from big tech companies that didn't even do this when their candidate of choice, because they were liberal leaning until 20 minutes ago, was getting into office.

You know, everything was sponsored by X, Google, Meta, TikTok.

That really stuck out to me.

How do you get 100 drunk Norwegian fraternity guys out of your pool?

Oh,

I don't

drain it.

Hey, guys, would you please get out of the pool?

I mean, Norwegians are so nice.

They're just so nice.

Get it?

Anyways.

Yeah, and follow directions.

That was, I thought, one of the weirdest parts of his inaugural address.

He made statements about expanding America's borders and bringing our flag to new

to new.

Yeah, but even that that's a renaming thing.

That's just a weird, I don't know, whatever that is.

That's his rebranding.

Let's call it, I don't know, let's call it Altria instead of Philip Morris.

Whatever.

That I think is unimportant.

But when he says, it strikes me that his role model here, hands down, is Putin, both in terms of his kleptocratic inclinations, but also this sort of new,

we want to withdraw from the world in terms of military aid, but we might invade you if we can raise a flag.

It's

very.

Well, well, who does he have designs on?

Well, okay, he has designs on Greenland.

Like,

who's next?

We're going to start invading other nations.

I don't, that I found very strange, but it's striking how much he seems to be parroting or kind of mimicking what I would call Putin's sort of approach to governance, if you will.

The, we will start no new wars, but also we're an imperialist nation

is an interesting contrast.

But I mean, this leads me to the broader thought process that I was going through over the course of the 48 hours.

And I've been thinking a lot about what we did wrong in terms of liberals when Trump got into office and all of the capital and mental health and well-being that we wasted, right, on freaking the fuck out about absolutely everything.

And then this election came around and a lot of people told us it's just not that serious, right?

So do you remember, and I don't know who originally said it, but when it became the talking point that you had to take Trump seriously, but not literally.

And so I thought, okay, I'm going to try to take him seriously.

Like think about what undergirds what he's saying, like the imperialist imaginations that he's clearly got.

in all of this.

And maybe he's not going to actually take over X country, but what could he do in reality?

Or, you know, the number of inaccuracies, right?

In his inaugural address, then the speech that he gave in the overflow room, which got progressively more like a rally speech where he starts talking about, you know, jailing Liz Cheney, though I assume he was off script, but it was amazing in the inaugural that he was like, you know, I think actually, you know, we won California.

I'm going to have them look into it.

Like he's so high off his own supply or whatever you're supposed to say.

And I mean, he did become president again.

So I guess it's a big day.

But if you try to take him seriously and not literally, how do you square that with

like the first flurry of executive actions, which are literally the bad stuff that he said?

Right.

This isn't, I'm not coming after Abuela, don't worry.

I'm just coming after the criminals.

Or why is your hair on fire?

Like my hair is on fire because you just tried to take away birthright citizenship from the vice president's wife, right?

Or from Kamala Harris, if this was actually to be implemented and it'll be challenged in the courts.

But

I don't know how to do this yet.

And if it's going to be a long four years, it was always going to be a long four years.

What do you think about the take him seriously, not literally, and how to navigate this in a sane way that doesn't make you personally crazy, but also doesn't continue to alienate people who might want to be part of your coalition.

I think a lot of us are struggling with.

So do we sort of come together and recognize the election has been decided, it's time to all be Americans, versus an inclination I think I lean on, and that is, I just sort of refuse to normalize this shit.

I don't, I don't, I can't, I can't kind of come together around a guy who

inspired people to attack Capitol Police and refused to show up at the last inauguration that doesn't believe in the peaceful transfer of power.

I don't, you know, I'm just sort of, look, I, I purposely didn't want to watch the inauguration because I wouldn't be able to resist shit posting it on

online.

And I thought, well, at least give them 24 or 48 hours of grace.

But I do struggle with the tension between being more graceful and trying to come together and also thinking, you know what, I'll do about, I'll show half the grace they showed us, which is not.

Anything times zero.

Which is not.

Yeah, half of zero is thinking back.

Half of zero is on that phase.

And then

the thing that was on display that I saw these pictures of that was so disappointing for me

was the kind of the knee bending of all these tech billionaires.

And I know what they're thinking.

The smartest thing to do, this guy's pretty easy to manipulate, and that is if I show up and I give a million bucks to his inaugural committee, it's worth tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars to my company's shareholder value because I'll stay in his good graces.

This is just a good trade.

At the same time, you know, where are the Americans?

Where's the fidelity to competition?

These guys don't, these guys don't like him.

They don't like each other.

They don't want to sit next to each other, which brings me back to who is the most powerful person on the planet right now.

And stick with me here.

I think Lauren Sanchez, I've met her two previous husbands, and they're both amazing guys.

One, I think his name is Tony Gonzalez.

He's this NFL player.

I met him in F1 Vegas.

He's tall.

He's handsome.

He's super funny.

He's just seems like a wonderful guy.

Her second husband was a guy named Patrick Weitzel, who's like 6'4, handsome.

He's kind of the Ari Emanuel that's lower key.

He's this super agent, incredible businessman, you know, the guy you want to be.

And then her third husband, Jeff Bezos, is obviously a very impressive guy.

So this Lauren Sanchez, I would argue, is one of the most skilled people in the world.

I don't entirely know what those skills are.

I think she's got a magnetic personality.

Everybody I know says she's, but she's just got to be a captivating person.

When I saw the Zuck staring at her chest, it dawned on me that if she really wants to do the world a solid, she should give, her fourth husband should be the Zuck.

And then Priscilla Chan

would get half the voting shares.

And I think you'd see a dramatic spike in mental wellness and trust in our institutions.

So I think Lauren Sanchez is the leader we need right now.

Your thoughts on the impending divorce energy of Mark Zuckerberg?

Well, I was actually surprised to see Priscilla Chan was there.

She didn't get to be in the room.

It was only Lauren Sanchez that got in the middle of the day.

You're kidding.

So

Bezos' wife or girlfriend got in, but not

but not Zuckerberg's wife?

Yes, exactly.

Which supports your argument that she's the most powerful person in the world or that Jeff Bezos is

more valuable to Trump than Zuckerberg is at this point.

So he'll have to continue going on Joe Ross.

Because Trump likes her look.

But anyways.

I mean, who doesn't like that look?

I didn't think the look for the inauguration was appropriate.

She looked great.

Well, yeah, she looked great, but I don't think you should have your bra out in the rotunda.

I mean, listen,

I was probably not the target audience for it that that felt like a

straight guy's look at me look.

It was also high fashion.

But I think it was Alexander McQueen.

But I should note as well, the fashion was incredible.

And I brought this up on air.

It is very meaningful that all the big fashion houses have now signed on to dressing the Trumps and the Vance's.

And clearly, Usha Vance is the star of all of this.

Her fashion coming out, seeing her all done up and how much she was reveling in this and the sweet way that she was looking at her husband with the little kids.

I don't know if you saw the daughter, the three-year-old toddler had band-aids on all of her fingers.

Did your kids love band-aids when they were little?

It's funny as soon as they were all over.

I would have liked, that's one image I would have liked to have seen.

That sounds really adorable.

I'll text it to you.

It's very cute.

And the young family energy being back at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, or I mean, they live in the Naval Observatory, I think is very good for the country.

I mean, he's the first millennial vice president.

It's a big deal.

She's the first Southeast Asian second lady.

Yeah.

I don't think it's fair.

I think there's a lot of family energy with Biden.

His great, great, great, great, great grandkids were everywhere.

Get it?

Great, great, great, great-grandkids.

I do.

And also, I mean, there's an implicit joke.

My humor is not landing.

My humor is not landing.

There was another way to go with the joke, though, as well, because there was the Hunter's kid that they don't recognize that lives in the South and doesn't doesn't get to be part of the Bidens.

I thought you were also making that joke.

I didn't know that.

But no, it was just an old joke.

But Trump was the one who was falling asleep at the Capitol One Arena.

Later in the day, Biden looked alert, perturbed, and then on his way as he left on Marine One.

And then Trump loaned him Air Force One to go out to California for vacation.

Okay, that was the positive stuff.

No, I generally agree with you.

I think that the tech billionaires and really just the billionaires writ large.

I mean, this is in the administration, there'll be, I think, 13 billionaires, which is the most there's ever been.

And I hear from my colleagues like, oh, are you going to say you don't like rich people?

No, of course we like rich people, but at least we have the decency to just make them an ambassador and not the head of a department that they have no business.

Or put them in the rotunda versus someone elected to be governor of a huge state.

Watching, because Trump had this whole long exchange with Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, and he did make a joke because, you know, everyone was standing.

And then Greg Abbott's in a wheelchair, so he obviously doesn't stand.

And Trump had like a little, you know, funny back and forth with him about it.

But he spent 10, 12 minutes talking to Greg Abbott.

Greg Abbott was front lines of the border crisis, right?

And you can't get that guy in the rotunda, but Lauren Sanchez can be in there or the CEO of TikTok.

Well, they do understand optics, so I'll give that to them.

The thing that kind of summarized what's happened here and that I found incredibly discouraging and the most underreported story of the last few days was that the day before he was inaugurated, he launched the Trump coin.

And this is essentially a meme coin.

It's a means of supporting the president on its first day at random, I think, $11 or $12 billion in market cap.

And I don't think I'm being an alarmist here, but the conversation I see will happen or may have already happened is something along the following.

President Trump, congratulations on your great victory.

This is your buddy Vlad.

Just FYI, I'm thinking about putting 600 billion rubles or 10 billion US dollars into your amazing Trump coin as a means of stabilizing our currency outflows.

We want to have more crypto.

And my economists have done the math.

And guess what?

If based on the limit amount of float, if I just put $10 billion in, which is nothing for me,

controlling the 12th largest economy in the world, I think it'll take probably the price of the market cap of the Trump coin to 50 billion.

And based on your stake, this would make you one of the five wealthiest men in America.

Just FYI.

And oh, and unrelated news, could you please seize arms shipments to Ukraine?

I mean, the potential here.

We thought Donald Trump media was a conflict and a bad idea, but they have to file forms with the SEC, making it sort of transparent when they sell shares that would crash the stock, all sorts of conflicts of interest.

He's tried to distance himself by that by putting into a trust controlled by his sons, which makes no fucking sense as if he doesn't control his sons.

But now they've figured out the ultimate grift, and that is a meme coin that they can basically say to, say they need another vote to have a federal ban on abortion.

And a few, Susan Collins or whoever it is or holdouts, pretending to be moderates, you can call them and say offline and say, by the way, I can put $10 million in your account for your campaign or your personal account.

And nobody even knows because I can do it with the Trump coin, which, by the way, has a $12 billion market cap, although it lost half its value yesterday.

The level of like frictionless grift that was slipped under the cover of night the day before the inauguration, while the news cycle would squeeze it out.

I mean, it feels to me that this is a full, the shape-shifting of America from a platform for, among other things, prosperity, economic growth, all great things, producing very wealthy people, also, I think, a wonderful thing.

But it also used to be a platform for rule of fair play, civil rights, a lack of corruption, an electoral process that sent people that were supposed to think about preventing a tragedy of the commons and think long term and deny the rights of special interest groups, specifically corporations and rich people, such that we didn't end up with such great income inequality that it leads to revolution, that we projected democracy and women's rights and freedoms and humanity and no, you know, no forced weddings or honor killings, that we would project that power around the world.

It feels like all of that is now an asterisk on a giant fucking dollar sign.

And that that is we are now a full platform for figuring out a Hunger Games economy where you can take the most prosperous platform in the world, the United States, and either figure out a way to make the jump to light speed to become very, very wealthy, at which point you have political power, the power to get wealthier and wealthier, and everything else has been crowded into a small corner that occasionally gets a nod.

But we've gone.

I mean, we have gone, and to your point, I sort of admire how brazen and upfront they are that we are now a kleptocracy.

But the Trump coin for me and the Melania coin perfectly embody that we no longer seem to care that, okay, the U.S.

has been for sale for a long time, including Democrats through Citizens United and healthcare lobbyists who have weaponized both people on both aisles.

But now the world is for sale.

And effectively,

he could call

he could get the warring parties in Sudan.

I talked to Ian Bremer

and he said the way Trump gets a Nobel Peace Prize, and he's supposedly obsessed with getting one, would be to go in and solve

the civil war in Sudan.

More people are dying in Sudan every day than in

Gaza or Ukraine combined, but no one gives a shit, right?

But I don't see him trying to solve it.

I see him calling both parties and say, who's going to buy more Trump coin?

And whoever buys more Trump coin and takes my wealth up one, two, $10 billion,

I'm going to weigh in with U.S.

military intelligence, some heavy equipment, and this side is going to win.

It's going to be like eBay hits geopolitics.

Who is the highest bidder in an elegant, non-traceable, totally opaque method through this new vehicle they have figured out?

And it's sort of, there's an insidious genius around this called the Trump coin.

And

I just didn't see that much coverage.

I saw a lot more coverage of Zuckerberg staring at Lauren Sanchez's chest than I saw of.

all the potential scenarios that are very, very bad for the Trump coin.

Yeah, I totally agree with you.

And it was one of those stories, I guess, on Friday when it started trickling in that this was happening, and certainly over the weekend, where I thought, is this because we don't have people up to the job of reporting on this?

Or is this a choice that our major news outlets are now making?

to not cover him objectively.

And this is part of the war that's going on within the Washington Post, right?

Why so many of their star reporters are leaving the paper because they don't feel like they'll be able to, at least to their mind, cover him objectively and accurately because Bezos doesn't want there to be a slant against him.

And

I thought a lot about the committee hearings when they bring in the tech CEOs and it's so clear that the senators are not up to the job of

interrogating them about what's going on on their platforms and not just the kind of objective stuff that we all see Like you're ruining the lives of 13 year old girls, right?

There is a spike in harmful behavior.

Their mental health is completely in shambles because you allow them to be served ads that make them feel terrible about themselves.

You let predators into their inboxes and their DMs.

I feel like it was only Snapchat really that took it seriously about how many kids were being groomed online on these panels.

And I think that was the main motivating factor for Mark Zuckerberg to show up on Rogan and have this come to Jesus moment.

I mean, he said it was about free speech and censorship around COVID, but I think it's really about, you know, the FTC coming after them and everyone knowing the dirty tricks that go on with these huge social media platforms.

But we need good journalism on this more than ever because the amount of people that I know who are very smart, informed people who didn't even know about the Trump coin, then the Melania coin.

And I mean, this has permeated the entire Trump bubble.

I saw there was a pastor who also spoke at the RNC, a big Trump guy.

He launched a coin after he spoke yesterday at inauguration, right?

So the grift is spread across anyone that is

MAGA adjacent at this point.

And it feels there's no way to stop it.

I mean, there were very obvious ways to curry favor with the Trumps round one.

You stayed at Trump International.

And all of these foreign dignitaries did it and they made sure their staff did.

Remember, they had to stay at, you know, his golf courses where, you know, oh, just go to Scotland, check in, let's pay.

Trump will see it on the ledger.

But now you have what's going on, obviously, in the Bitcoin world or the cryptocurrency world, I should say.

But then Eric Trump announced that they're opening a new hotel in Albania.

Oh, and we're supposed to act like this is normal development, right?

For the first family.

Well, of course, they have these jobs.

He's a businessman.

That's all fine.

That's all well and good.

You know, we used to say, like, oh, Ivanka Trump got the patents for her shoe line from China while Trump was in office.

And Jerry Kushner makes a couple billion dollars getting the Saudis to invest in his fund.

And we're like, okay, well, these are things that we can spot.

We think they're bad.

Not enough of the American public, right, thought it was bad enough to keep them out of office again.

But this will be running out in the public, but underneath the public eye at the same time.

A lot of people don't understand what's going on.

They also don't know that 80% of Trump coin was reserved for the family and early investors.

And all of that will vest during his first presidency.

This wasn't like putting your peanut farm in a trust, right?

That we could revisit this afterwards.

And no one seems like they're up to the job of dealing with it.

Well, when you have Nancy or Speaker Pelosi trading stocks, which she shouldn't be able to do with what is the world's most privileged insider information, it's the beginning of this corruption.

And hotel rooms, booking hotel rooms, occurring favor around patents from China.

That is all just checkers versus the chess of this.

Those are all slingshots.

This is an elephant gun.

Even after a 30% decline in the price of the Trump coin, it has a market cap, as we record this, of $7.5 billion.

They own about 80%.

So he basically made $6 billion on paper.

And as far as we know, he's already borrowed against it.

He's already given it to Supreme Court justices to uphold a ban.

And if you don't think Clarence Thomas would take $10 million in Bitcoin, well, that's like saying he wouldn't go on a yacht or a cruise with someone who had

issues before the court.

I mean, this is.

And it's sort of, we're sort of turning into, okay,

like they say to unfortunately, some law enforcement people in countries with big drug cartels, you know, either lead or gold.

And that is he's demonstrated power to kind of run people out of politics or sick online trolls after them, death threats, people showing up at your house, which puts a chill on free speech and his critics.

But at the same time, he now has the ability to not only become the wealthiest man himself through grift in other countries by selling foreign assets and foreign interest to the highest bidder, he can start doling out money to other people very covertly.

to get essentially what he wants.

I mean, this is just so,

it's, I got to admit, the thing I like most about it is it's just so brazen.

They're not even, they're not even trying to hide it.

All right, let's take one quick break.

Stay with us.

We'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

During Biden's final week, he gave his farewell address from the Oval Office.

Biden chose to focus on economic inequality and take a final shot at the tech oligarchs.

He opened by addressing the ceasefire deal reached between Israel and Hamas, an agreement he worked on with the Trump administration.

Hours before the transition of U.S.

leadership, President Biden issued pardons for General Mark Milley, Dr.

Anthony Fauci, members of Congress involved in the January 6th investigation, and members of his family.

Jess, any thoughts on the ceasefire deal, the timing of it, and kind of, if you will, Biden's sort of last sort of actions on his way out?

Yeah, well, I was excited.

There was a ceasefire deal.

I don't know how this didn't happen earlier since it's the same deal that's been on the table for what, like eight months at this point, and three phases to it.

We're in the first phase, which is in the last 42 days.

The big headline that 33 hostages are going to be coming home.

We're not sure how many of them are alive or dead, but we did see three returned over the weekend.

And those reunion videos were some of the most beautiful

footage I've ever watched in my life.

And I can't believe the strength of these young women who all thank God were quote unquote returned healthy.

Now, what's going on in their minds and the lifetime of trauma that they will endure for this cannot be underestimated, but thrilled to see it.

I really want those Beabus babies, those little red-headed babies better be coming home and they better be alive.

I know everyone is on pins and needles waiting for that.

It's interesting that the deal goes through the rebuilding of Gaza, which is in phase three.

And Mike Huckabee, who's the new or will be the new ambassador to Israel, gave an interview talking about a two-state solution.

And he said, I'm not really interested in that.

And I think for BB, music to his ears, right?

That's what he wants to hear.

And who knows how far the implementation of the deal actually goes through.

We may just get through phase one and two.

And then Israel kind of says, like, actually, this isn't good for us.

Or God knows, you know, Hamas starts again because watching the dozens of

prisoners and terrorists, Palestinian, released for these hostages that are coming back back to Israel.

And

they're rejoining the fight.

Within seconds, there are videos of them back with their terrorist cohort, you know, talking about how they will continue with the plan.

So bracing for more in terms of impact of terrorism, but very thankful that there is a deal on the table and it has at least begun being implemented.

What do you think about it?

Yeah, so I think you got to give credit where credit's due, and that is the upside to Trump's unpredictability.

This just had so many echoes of when Reagan came into office and then

Iran decided to release the American hostages.

And that is, I do think there's just no getting around it, despite what are probably heroic, nonstop,

very,

you know, well-orchestrated, intelligent efforts of Secretary Blinken and the Biden administration.

I just don't think it's any accident that on the eve of inauguration, this deal went through.

Of course.

And I do think that Trump's unpredictability, and quite frankly, also his just resolute backing of Israel played a role here.

So I think, you know, who gets credit for this?

I think the answer is yes.

And I don't think it's a zero-sum game around this.

It is time, or it feels like it's time for the war to come to something resembling an end.

I found that image of the transfer of the hostages and all of those

folks in

mass Hamas just looks as strong as ever.

And just to see that kind of level of chaos,

it just was a very chilling, frightening scene to me that we're nowhere near a resolution.

I don't know what that says about the way the war was prosecuted, about the future of that region, but that was frightening to me.

And I'm glad.

I'm really glad those folks are home.

I'm glad I'm hoping that death and destruction lets up here.

You know, Gaza has become ground zero, the greatest concentration of child amputees.

So,

you know, it felt like this just needed to come to an end.

And my kind of yoda on this is again, a guy named Dan Senor, who has a wonderful podcast called Call Me Back.

And he's basically said, this was a bad deal for Israel, but a deal they should take.

And I thought that kind of summarized it perfectly.

And again, people didn't talk much about that because it was sort of overridden.

Well, I do want to say, and you know, when I mentioned like, why didn't this happen eight months ago?

I understand why it didn't happen eight months ago, but I wonder.

So the key player in this was Steve Witkoff, who is the special envoy in charge of this.

He's a real estate developer and investor, and he spoke at the Capitol One Arena yesterday at the kind of rally section of Trump's inauguration.

And it has been interesting to see bonus points for bipartisanship that

Steve Witkoff and Jake Sullivan.

leaving the Biden administration have talked about how this was a joint effort and how important the support support has been on both sides of this.

And I do want to plug Jake Sullivan gave a great interview with Ezra Klein that was much more satisfying than Anthony Blinken's interview on The Daily, to say the least.

But joint effort, I do wonder, like,

why couldn't the Biden administration get a special envoy like Steve Witkoff, if it wouldn't be Steve Witkoff himself?

I know he's very close with Trump.

I'm not saying that this would have happened necessarily eight months ago, but it feels like we probably could have made more progress than we thought if we had had the right kind of talk and the right kind of people at the table for this.

Easy for me to say sitting here, but very thankful for the outcome.

And the hostage families, not all of them, but a lot of them were on stage with Trump.

at the Capitol One arena.

And it sends a very clear signal about which administration people think is on the side of Israel.

And I heard that over and over again.

So let's just briefly I'm just going to rattle off these executive actions and I got to be honest I think I think that sends a very strong signal around leadership and governance to almost like practically on stage on the on the day of on stage he had a little desk and signed them there you go so ending birthrights I'm going to go through all of them and any specific ones that stand out to you ending birthright citizenship leaving the World Health Organization renaming the Gulf of Mexico, revoking electric vehicle targets, reclassifying federal employees, making them easier to fire, declaring a national energy emergency, creating a policy recognizing only two genders, pausing the TikTok ban, rescinding 78 Biden-era executive actions, declaring a national border emergency, issuing pardons for January 6th defendants withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement.

I'll stop there.

Anything especially stand out to you as especially good or bad?

I don't really have a lot that feels good about this.

It wasn't, I mean, we have to be conscious of the fact that a lot of the things like like cutting red tape, et cetera, is going to come in the reconciliation bill, or that's how they want it to be.

Speaker Johnson didn't even want him to rescind the electric vehicle mandate because he wanted to make sure that that could be part of the legislation that should hopefully get passed in April.

But, you know, stuff that sticks out to me, obviously, ending birthright citizenship is a huge headline in that.

I already mentioned that that means Usha Vance and Kamala Harris wouldn't be American citizens.

It's supposed to take effect, I think, February 25th.

There will be huge litigation around that.

I think we have to separate the EOs into buckets of, you know, ones that are kind of expected, like taking down the Spanish language version of the White House site or taking off the women's reproductive healthcare government site as like,

we kind of knew this was coming.

It's shitty and weird, like, especially when you won record numbers of Latino support.

Like, why do do you need to get rid of the Spanish language Twitter account, right?

Designating that America only has two genders, male and female.

You know, it was really interesting to see someone like Caitlin Jenner cheering all of this on and wondering where she fits in all of this.

I think that a lot of the

border security slash immigration EOs are a really big deal.

They canceled the Customs and Border Patrol app, which was the legal way that everyone was making making appointments for their immigration hearings.

Upwards of 30,000 people had their appointments just canceled yesterday.

And these are people, by the way, that are waiting in Mexico for their appointments.

They're not running wild on the streets of Chicago killing people.

They are waiting in proverbial line, right, to have their appointment.

I think that that's a very big deal.

You removed.

All of these people or took away the power from all of these people in the Justice Department that oversaw our immigration laws.

I think that's a big deal.

We're withdrawing from the World Health Organization.

That was approved by Congress.

He can't do that.

And that links to our conversation that we're going to have about TikTok.

You know, Congress passes laws.

There's supposed to be separation of government, three equal branches.

He obviously doesn't believe in that, which if you aspire to be Vladimir Putin, I totally get it.

The pardoning of the January Sixers.

J.D.

Vance was on Fox News Sunday last weekend, and Shannon Bream asked him about this.

And he said, well, it makes sense to pardon people who are nonviolent offenders.

And having listened now to a lot of interviews with people who literally literally did just walk around the Capitol, I mean, you should have figured out that you shouldn't have been there, but that versus violent offenders who beat cops, pepper sprayed them, use metal poles against them, riot gear, et cetera, is crazy to me.

And he pardoned everybody.

And there was an interview, I think on MSNBC

with a guy who had turned in his father.

for

being part of the January 6th riot.

And he said he's he's scared that he's going to come and kill him now, that he's gotten out.

I think there's going to be a huge spike in domestic violence as a result of this.

Saw one woman who actually refused the pardon.

She said, from her time, she had 60 days in jail.

She said, I realized what I did wrong and also who's responsible for this in Donald Trump.

And I don't want it.

But that obviously sets an enormous precedent that there are no lines in the sand for people who attack law enforcement.

Back the blue out the door, obviously.

That one stuck out.

The guy who's the head of the Proud Boys getting out.

And then I wanted to ask you about, well, tariffs.

He says February 1st, he's going to start a 25% tariff on Mexico and Canada.

Get all your avocados while you can.

And then removing the security clearances from all of these former heads of the CIA, directors of national intelligence, anyone who signed that letter saying that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.

He's a yanked security clearance.

Yeah,

some of it is more meaningful than others.

The renaming stuff,

you know, some of it declaring the border a national emergency, the lifting the bans.

This stuff around, the rhetoric around energy strikes me as especially just, I don't know, inaccurate.

So all of this, this drill, baby, drill, it should be build, baby, build.

We're the number one oil producer in the world.

Biden okayed a bunch of drilling permits.

That's just pure rhetoric.

The naming stuff is bullshit.

I don't necessarily agree, but I can understand declaring the border a national emergency.

I get that.

And saying they're going to expel or deport criminals

who are undocumented workers.

Technically, they've committed two crimes.

I get that.

But the birthright stuff.

Pulling down the Spanish language, that feels more like, fuck you, I'm a racist.

That's just,

it's it's unnecessarily mean and waving your middle finger in the face of people I don't I don't understand I think he loses a lot of credibility and most you know he creates a lot of unnecessary enemies when he does this stuff that seems just more coarse than effective and I don't you know some of it revoking electric vehicle targets, okay, fine.

The thing I like is reclassifying federal employees, making them easier to fire.

I don't see any reason why government employees shouldn't be subject to the same pressure and accountability as private sector employees.

Now, having said that, this notion that government is out of control, you might find that government spending is out of control, but that's mostly around entitlements and the ballooning interest on our ballooning deficit.

The number of people who work for the government has ranged over the last 50 years or 60 years between 14 and 17 percent.

And it's actually towards the low end right now.

So, and the majority of our employees that work for the government work for state and local.

So, the notion that all of a sudden the government state or the social welfare state has just ballooned, that's not really true.

You could argue that government spending has ballooned,

but it's not, you know, anyways, I like that.

I think that, I think that made sense.

Declaring a national energy emergency, that's just bullshit.

It's just not true.

We just don't,

we don't need

creating a policy recognizing only two genders.

I'm sort of of the mind, like, give it to them so we can stop talking about this because it's been such an effective cudgel and weapon against Democrats.

And that is, I don't, you know, okay, fine.

Have at it.

Let them decide that there's only male and female.

That's that's fine.

I do think the Democrats served up the mother of all fastballs by deciding that, oh, a six foot four swimmer can show up in a unitard and win everything at the women's nationals or that a

transgender woman can cross the finish line in a bike race five minutes early and everybody, all the Democrats gather around and say it's inspiring.

So I'm always sort of like, give them that, let them move on, stop demonizing this group of people, of which there are less than the number of people probably paying Pidel in California.

But some of this just felt, yeah, I don't agree with his economic policies.

The tariffs thing, I actually think is being, I don't think tariffs are a good idea, but I think he's more pragmatic.

And if you look at his first term, he was seen more, he proved to be more of a pragmatist than an ideologue.

I think he's trying to, he sees himself as a deal maker here.

And I think he's trying to send a shot across the bow of these nations saying, you need to come to the table and give me something or I'll implement.

Because he could have implemented those tariffs today, but he decided not to.

So I do think he's being pragmatic around that.

I mean, I hope so.

And maybe it goes down to 10%.

I just,

I think in his race to always do the most, like, I'm going to sign the most executive orders of anyone on their first day in history.

You have a lot of bullshit in there.

And it creates these outrage headlines.

And then you can slip a Trump coin in, right?

Because we're all hair on fire

about

totally.

But one thing that I cannot look over here about is the nearly 1,660 Afghans that had their resettlement in America canceled because he got rid of these refugee programs.

These are people, a lot of them who have American service members, family, people who worked with us during the Afghan war.

And

they're up a creek.

A lot of them are going to have retribution coming their way from the Taliban.

And this is making one of Biden's biggest mistakes, right?

The way that we left Afghanistan so much worse.

And I don't understand it.

If you made it a centerpiece of your campaign that Biden was a terrible foreign policy president, right?

And that he, 13 of our service members died, and that we left thousands of people that helped us over the course of this long war and risked their lives for us.

And now you're just like, F it,

you got to stay.

I, I

hair on fire about that one for sure.

Well said, Jess.

Okay, we have one more quick break.

Stay with us.

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now?

Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with a class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

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Welcome back.

Before we wrap, this weekend, TikTok went dark for U.S.

users after major app stores removed the platform following the enforcement of a 2024 law banning TikTok unless it divests from Chinese parent company ByteDance.

Less than 24 hours later, TikTok flickered back to life, credited to President Trump.

Trump said he wants to delay the enforcement of the ban for 75 days, aiming to negotiate a deal to protect national security while allowing TikTok to continue operating in the U.S.

What are your thoughts on this, Jess?

It seems really bad.

And Congress passed a law.

I mean, we are now

in a new frontier in terms of the separation of powers or returning to the old frontier, but this time more emboldened by the fact that he has four years to try to do as much crazy stuff as possible.

And obviously, this was something that started under him.

I was struck, and I didn't know this, that all of the senators who received the classified material about the Chinese Communist Party's influence on TikTok voted to pass this law banning it.

50 to zero.

When do you get 50 to zero about something?

And I don't know.

I mean, Tom Cotton is raising hell about it.

And there are going to be a lot of people who say, you know, well, you can't do this, but who's to stop him?

And the CEO of TikTok at the inauguration, I think is meaningful.

You know, I get it.

There are 170 million Americans on that.

There are 6 million small businesses that make their livelihoods off of TikTok.

And that's the main argument that Kevin O'Leary, Mr.

Wonderful, is making for why we need to buy it.

He's put together a $20 billion bid for it that.

they don't seem that interested in, probably because this isn't about money.

It's about national security.

And by that, I mean our lack of national security.

But it's extremely scary.

And if you have a moment where you can get lawmakers together on something like this, why not go for it?

Also, why can't we just make our own?

I have not understood that fully.

So, the mere fact that

on a dime, TikTok could have their algorithm push out and elevate a ton of TikTokers who are understandably upset because they make their living or they just plain don't like it, 170 million Americans, if they can find 1% of them, 1.7 million.

And then I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that they massively elevated the distribution and viewership of that content that inspired massive political pressure and discourse and occupying the news, i.e.

propaganda.

The fact that on demand, in real time,

a platform that is obviously influenced by law and has to do with the CCP wants, the fact that they could inspire a real-time influence on our government is exactly the the reason it needs to be banned.

When do they do this again?

When they invade Taiwan or when they just want us to get angry at each other?

And this has a larger theme, and that is: are we as Americans a serious people?

We're in the Paris Accords, we're out, we're back in, we're out again.

We're in the Iran deal, no, we're out again.

We

have 79 U.S.

Senators, 350 odd congresspeople sign into law something banning it.

They had six months to figure this out.

They decided not to.

And on the eve of the banning, we blinked.

President signed this into law.

It was a law.

But what did the Chinese and the CCP say?

Hold my fucking beer.

And we blinked.

And now we're trying to figure out how to get out the knee pads and

filate the CCP.

What happens the next time we have real negotiations with any adversary or competitor globally?

We are not a serious people.

We blink.

We sign laws and then we repeal them.

We enter treaties and then we leave them.

We fund NATO and then

we start threatening other NATO countries.

This embodies or epitomizes the fact that we are losing currency and credibility around anything we say, any threat we make, even if it's a law that passes overwhelmingly, well, will it really happen?

I wouldn't take us seriously.

So, what happens when we threaten to

reciprocate or to defend Taiwan?

Do they take us seriously?

Or do they now feel like between our ability to turn Trump into a deca billionaire and the fact that even when they vote for a law and vote on something, they don't seem that serious, does anyone take us by our word?

We are no longer a serious people.

I would add to that that unfortunately this became a bipartisan problem because Biden blinked first on this.

He punted it to the new administration.

And I think that it's very much indicative or representative of this kind of cloud of disappointment and disgrace to a lot of people that he left the White House in.

You know, there were a slew of stories that came out over the weekend, big publications, right, in The Times, Politico, The Guardian, all these Dems who now feel emboldened to talk about how they, you know, knew Biden shouldn't have been the nominee, right?

And they had X experience with him.

And, you know, he's not talking to the Pelosis.

And Joe Biden said we were friends for 50 years.

And there's all this infighting.

And the time for that was in the public square, frankly, when Dean Phillips.

was screaming from the rooftops, you know, if I have to be the guy, I'll be the guy.

I would rather it would be someone better, right?

Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer, Whitmer, et cetera.

And I fully take responsibility for, I said on TV many times that I thought he could do it when it was clear that he couldn't do it and at least couldn't do it for the next four years, which he's now admitted as much, even though he says he would still win when we would have been absolutely obliterated.

But

he should have done this.

He should have not given Trump the opportunity to be the savior or perceived as the savior of TikTok and then to keep it operating for at least the next 75 days.

And when you think of how fast disinformation spreads or whatever they want the algorithm to say goes, 75 days is a lifetime, right?

And then it's going to be another 75 days until we figure out a way to.

What is their motivation to get a deal done?

Oh, we really mean it this time.

We gave you 180 days and you didn't listen, but now we're going to give you another seven, but we really mean it this time.

Well, he wants to also split ownership, right?

He He wants this, he had the

words social pose, like the 50.

There's a word for that, socialism.

We've decided, he's decided that the U.S.

government

that the U.S.

government should own 50% of a private enterprise.

I mean, how is that any difference in the U.K.

deciding to invest in DeLorean or Obama investing in Solandra?

That is socialism is when the government controls the means of production, when he decides certain businesses and he thinks he has a better business perspective, he decides we should own 50% of that and he's going to make us rich.

That That is socialism.

That is the basis of, okay,

we're going to now become the means of production and own businesses because we know better than private enterprise.

And well, even if he kicks it to private enterprise, it's going to be private enterprise that he controls.

And we just have gone through this whole rigmarole over government censorship, right, of the people.

I'm the ultimate free speech advocate, one of the biggest applause lines during the inauguration.

And we're back at zero or frankly less than zero

because a lot of people are willfully blind to all of this.

I'm going to finish where I started.

I see this as Shireen Baratheon being burnt at the stake.

I just am not down with this.

I refuse to normalize it, Jess.

I am not coming together.

I am not.

You have to.

It's in the title of the show.

Is it rage?

Kind of.

Well, I think I am being a moderate.

Well, let me go this way.

We're raging.

We're raging.

How's that?

Oh, we're promised to rage.

We're raging hard.

Yeah.

Okay, we'll rage.

All right.

But we have to work together where we can find normal ways to do it.

There you go.

All right.

That's all for this episode.

Thanks for listening to Raging Moderates.

Our producers are David Toledo and Chenenye Onike.

Our technical director is Drew Burroughs.

You can find Raging Moderates on its own feed every Tuesday.

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Please follow us wherever you get your podcast.

Jess, I hope you and your daughters are well.

We are great.

Thank you.

And have a few years before Game of Thrones.

Thank God.