Trump’s Day One Agenda, Syria’s Civil War, and 2025 Predictions

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Welcome to Raging Moderates.

I'm Scott Galloway.

And I'm Jessica Tarlove.

Jess, are you at home in New York with your lovely children?

I am.

And we had a big three-year-old birthday bash on Sunday.

Frozen-themed.

I won't sing for you, but it was...

It was toddler intense.

Wow.

To say the least.

How was your weekend?

You're wearing a tie.

In case people aren't watching this, you're very dressed up.

Yeah, my weekend could not have been more different.

I went with a group of 40 and 50 somethings to a castle in the Cotswolds where we drank and then got up.

And about 30 people followed us into the middle of nowhere and loaded our shotguns and we shot at birds.

And

then the best part was the dogs that came and collected.

the birds.

Fortunately, I'm not a very good shot.

So

a lot of birds are around today because I'm not very good at it, but it's a very British thing.

It's probably my first, it's called a shoot.

And the best part about it was one I get to go.

I got to go with a friend, my friend John of John and Wendy.

He's a super impressive venture capitalist, but he loves shooting and he loves British culture.

So he said, I'll take you for your outfit.

And I went and I bought this crazy outfit.

You get these boots and these things you tie around your boots.

I don't know what it's called, these ridiculous socks that look like leg warmers.

Anyways, it was a very kind of downtown Abbey meets murder kind of weekend.

So, all right, so before we get into it, I heard, Jess, actually, in addition to hosting great parties for three-year-olds, that you went to Donald Trump's Patriot Awards last week, and it was the first time that you were actually in close proximity to Donald.

Give us your impressions after that event.

Yeah, well, it was a vibe.

So it's, it's actually Fox's Patriot Awards, and Donald Trump was being honored.

So I was there for work.

We did a live show.

I was out there.

I just decided that Donald Trump Trump gets a Patriot Award.

That's a shocker.

Wow, that must have been.

Well,

I wanted to blow your mind after you blew the minds of birds.

Anyway, the Patriot Awards is something that we do annually and is actually really lovely.

It's all about honoring everyday heroes and people who've served the country.

I'm sorry, go ahead.

He is your president.

Just let me go.

Let me get it out.

And then you do whatever you want.

Sorry, go ahead.

Anyway.

Sorry.

This was the first year that

did they get a collective award?

They did not get an award.

Thank you for asking.

Sorry, go ahead.

Okay.

Go ahead.

No, I'm not.

But go ahead.

Okay.

Okay.

I'm going to do it.

Anyway, so we were out there.

We did a live taping of the five,

which is always fun.

Meet some people who like me.

Also got booed a little bit.

I got kind of like, yeah, well, you know, like joking, like friendly fire.

Funny booze.

Yeah, like I didn't cry or anything, but it's never nice.

And everyone, the rest of the cast is like, come on, guys.

She's actually even agreeing with us on this one.

But I get it.

It's all, it's all part of it.

And you get to play with the audience a bit.

But the Patriot Awards, and it's been going for a few years.

And we've done it in Florida.

We've done it, we did it in Nashville last year at the Grand Old Opry, which was amazing.

And you meet some pretty incredible people that are doing wonderful things

for the country.

And

you can insert your Donald Trump joke later, but it plays into why this was such an interesting contrast for me.

So the Patriot Awards this time honored, I don't know if you remember this story about an NYPD officer named Jonathan Diller, 31 years old out on Long Island, routine traffic stop, was shot and killed.

He had a one-year-old son.

His widow was the opening award recipient and speaker, and she was

breathtaking that this woman did not have a complete meltdown doing this, talking about her husband and his service and loving police officers.

And if you remember, there was a big back and forth, like Donald Trump went to see the family, Biden didn't go, and it became this kind of

touch point in the war over who actually backs the blue.

And she, in her speech, says how great she thinks Donald Trump is.

They had like the...

the UNC frat guys who protected the American flag from the pro-Palestinian protesters on Chapel Hill's campus last spring.

These whistleblowers from the Phoenix VA, the ones who actually ended up getting Shinseki, the VA secretary under Obama, fired, basically they exposed the VA for denying and putting off care for hundreds of veterans who would have lived had they gotten their care on time in this massive cover-up.

And so those are the kind of people that are being honored at this.

And you're in this room with a bunch of people who did not vote the same way that I did.

And they

these people whose message is over and over again, we love the red, white, and blue, right?

Like America is the best place to be, even if we've gone through something terrible, like this poor woman losing her husband.

And then a common current through all of it is, and we also love Donald Trump.

There is a very good case to be made that Democrats do not show up well enough for these types of people, that we don't talk about our patriotism enough, that we don't talk about loving cops.

That's my point.

Thank you.

Anyway, so they all these amazing people who are getting these awards and giving really captivating speeches full of americana and then trump comes out i've you know i'm in the front table with a couple people like who do you sit with who's the most fun to drink with who gets too drunk was pete hegseth there did he hit on you that before like throwing up and passing out is he still does he go to that stuff i give up let's move on I heard about your cable news cabinet from Pivot, though, and I didn't make it, which is kind of a bummer.

I see you as sort of quiet power.

I see you as like head of fundraising.

Soft power.

Okay.

Soft power.

I can totally see that.

Also, if you decide to ever run for Congress or Senate, I'll head your fundraising.

Well, you're honestly screwing me over with these conversations because you're making me seem a little.

It's all about awareness.

All press is good press.

Yeah,

junior senator from...

Wait, you grew up in New York, didn't you?

New York, yeah.

So me and AOC and the

We're running you for president Chris and Kirsten Gillibrand

Kirsten Gillibrand and Charles Schumer in my opinion are like weak weaker and weakest and I think they absolutely need a young dynamic centrist Democrat to primary them there I've I've literally got it figured out for you I've got it figured always if that's what I'm saying if you believe Senator Tarloff has a nice ring to it then please DM me.

I will take your name down.

And when we decide when Charles Schumer turns 140 in 10 years, we can decide to primary him.

And when everyone decides to kiss Kirsten Gillibrand while being a thoughtful, nice woman is totally ineffective, then we'll primary her as well.

I'm 100% behind this.

Okay,

before

we go here, before we bust in the news, we want to remind you to please follow Raging Moderates on your podcast platform of choice.

If you want Senator Tarloff and you want daddy to still have the money to go on his shoots and not kill birds, please just subscribe.

Please help us out with that follow button.

This week on Friday, we have an interview with Tim Miller from The Bulwark only on the Raging Moderates feed.

A lot of our interviews and our better stuff is only on the Raging Moderate feeds.

Be sure to check it out.

Okay, in today's episode of Raging Moderates, we're discussing Trump's promises for the first day of his tenure, Assad flees to Moscow, Assyrian rebels capture Damascus,

Biden's preemptive pardons debate, the final house math and leadership shakeups, and finally, our predictions for next year.

All right, where should we get to?

Let's over the weekend, President-elect Trump told NBC's Kristen Welker he plans immediate action after taking office on January 20th.

He vowed to pardon January 6th rioters on day one, extend his first-term tax cuts, deport millions of undocumented immigrants, and push to end birthright citizenship.

Trump also said he'd work towards a solution to protect dreamers, and he won't impose new restrictions on abortion pills.

On pardoning rioters, he claimed.

This is the most disgusting, filthy place.

These people are living in hell.

Let me just.

And I think it's very unfair.

Let me like it.

I'll do it.

Jess, what did you make of this interview?

This felt like actually the kickoff to the new administration in a certain way.

I know we have to get to inauguration, but it's crazy how quickly I feel like things have turned.

I don't remember this when Biden won in 2020, that he suddenly became the president.

But Donald Trump is, like he said, Notre Dame for the reopening.

He is meeting with world leaders.

He is meeting with Zelensky.

You know, it feels like everyone has just kind of shut the door on Biden and is like, hello, Trump, whatever that means.

And, you know, choosing to go on meet the press.

He has been interviewed by Welker before.

I think definitely trying to send a mainstream signal, right, to the public.

I'm going to be out here in these places that you recognize and you don't have to come and find me on the Andrew Schultz podcast necessarily.

But

it was classic Trump in that

the things that he was promising to do or the things that he said, depending on what your politics are, it fits exactly in the box that you

have put him in.

So he says, I'm ending birthright citizenship.

I'm deporting families together, right?

That was one of the big ones, which Tom Holman, who's his borders are, had said on 60 Minutes before when he was interviewed.

So the idea is like, oh, we don't have to separate families.

Even if some of you are legal, you should just all go together and that he's going to jail Liz Cheney, right?

So if you're diehard MAGA, you like that for obvious reasons.

And then if you're more centrist or even a Democrat, you're crap in your pants again, right?

And saying this guy is going to do all of these terrible things to the country.

And it's just, it's so difficult to pin him down, which I think is why he ended up winning because he's, he's whatever you want him to be, right?

He's a dream politician in that sense.

And people have very legitimate arguments on both sides of the authoritarian coin as to which one he is.

And that was my big takeaway.

I mean, I want to get into the specifics of some of these things, but what do you think about that?

I don't know if you watched it or.

I didn't.

The weird thing that's happened to me is I have a tendency to believe that, okay,

the wonderful thing about our checks and balances is that there's a certain certain level of purposeful intransigence where it's very hard to get stupid, sweeping things done.

It's also probably really difficult to get really genius, disruptive things done.

And that it's just unlikely.

I don't think these tariffs are going to go through at anywhere near the magnitude.

I can't imagine, I would like to think that enough Americans look back on one of the great stains, one of the great stains of our society, and that was in turning great Japanese American citizens who, for no other reason, than the color of their skin, as many of their sons were fighting in the European theater, that the moment we start

housing, hosting, aggregating, concentrating immigrants in anything resembling a camp, that the media and people and citizens in that neighborhood are going to go ape shit.

So I wonder how much of this is really going to happen.

Now, having said that, what I'm also growing into is realizing I never thought, I was never worried about Roe v.

Wade being overturned.

I didn't think there was any chance chance it would ever actually get overturned, and I was wrong.

So nothing kind of surprises me anymore.

And along those lines, in the last two weeks, I've had an iconic morning TV show host and an iconic tech billionaire call me and ask me

about London.

And I thought, oh, great, you're thinking about moving to London.

I moved to London not because of America, because I felt like I needed to leave.

I moved because of America, because America has offered me so much prosperity

and,

you know, just wonderful opportunity, I have the chance to give my kids an experience to live in Europe.

These folks are scared and they're actually thinking about relocating to Europe because they believe there's a non-zero probability they are going to be persecuted.

And I was just so flummoxed that these are not reactionary, stupid people.

These are household names that are incredibly successful.

My first question is, you're really, you're seriously, really worried?

You really think he's going to come for you?

And they said, I don't know, but I don't need to live in a country where I don't know.

Yeah.

The reason why America, in my opinion, across a lot of dimensions is so successful is you have to have a massive base of innovation to create economic value such that we have the taxes to pay for the best military in the world and to argue over entitlements and to argue over veterans affairs and to bail out

banks or COVID stimulus.

That top-line number is really important.

And to start, both of these people create tremendous economic growth.

Both of these people, and I'm not being biased, are good people.

They're good people.

And like, that's the environment you want to create.

Where do you think can you handicap what you think is going to happen post-election?

I don't know if that's a good question.

That's a difficult question.

Yeah.

No.

You can say I don't know.

I mean, I don't know an exact number.

I do know, which we've talked about a few times, that what Trump cares about most is economic prosperity because that's what he knows he'll be remembered for, either good or bad.

And frankly, it's what got him across the line in the 2024 election that people had a favorable view of what the economy looked like when he was president.

And I'm curious as to what you think about,

you know, I get it, the fear-mongering

that is rooted in some very genuine policy chops on people like Stephen Miller or Tom Holman, et cetera, that are founded in xenophobia, as far as I'm concerned.

All of that is.

They were founded in bullying when they were in the eighth grade, but I agree with you.

But definitely Stephen Miller.

I don't know about Holman.

He seems like he was always a bully.

But

there are a lot of

immigrants and successful immigrants and well-educated immigrants that are very big supporters of the president.

I mean, I was looking at the pictures of J.D.

Vance from Thanksgiving.

He's married to Usha Vance, whose parents are Indian immigrants.

He's with her family for Thanksgiving.

He has a mixed

family.

And I would assume a lot of people in that group are big fans of Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is out there saying, I'm going to cut regulations like you've never seen before.

He saved $200 billion and cut regulations in the first term.

He wants to go even further.

I know there are a lot of people who run businesses that are excited about that, who feel like, yeah, you can be successful here, but you can be even more successful if we get rid of some more of this red tape.

Now, I'm concerned about certain pieces of quote-unquote red tape that we need, like climate protections and things like that.

But there are going to be a lot of people who think that this is actually a good place to be doing business with Donald Trump in the White House versus a more regulatory-minded Democrat.

It's a great point.

And on the issue of immigration, we have someone who's worked with us for a long time who's incredibly talented, and English is her fifth language, and yet she's arguably our most talented copywriter, editor, just and around immigration.

While she's very progressive, while immigration,

she hasn't stated explicitly, but I know she I'm fairly confident saying she doesn't want people rounded up.

But she says, look,

I waited in line to get here and it took me seven years, and I did it legally.

And so many of these, so many people in America, you know, seem to feel that we should just have open borders.

I was like, which is it?

Can I come?

Can my parents come now?

You know, which is it?

I waited in line.

And what's interesting we saw in this election is a lot of recent immigrants are the most

pro Trump's immigration policies that they feel like it's just it's just absolutely gotten out of control.

It's going to be,

I'm just sort of fascinated to see how the dynamics of what is effectively sort of a semi-lame duck president, he's especially lame duck after 2026,

and pushback on economic policies should inflation tick up.

And also,

is he as a negotiating tactic starting really high, saying, okay, tariffs of 100% and then going down to 20%.

And the thing that scares me about saying, I'm never going to deny people access to their abortion pills.

Well, okay, but if you keep appointing conservatives to the Supreme Court, it's going to be the law.

Yeah,

that's definitely a concern.

And there is no one at the top levels of the administration, even with these appointments, that I can look to and feel secure about something like that.

I mean, they just

all feel like

power, power, power people.

Let's take a quick break.

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Okay, so

what's next here?

Let's go to something a little bit more funny.

Let's talk about Assad.

So the Assad family's 50-year rule over Syria came to an end following a swift rebel offensive.

President Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow with his family, where they were granted asylum.

President Biden called the regime's fall a historic opportunity for Syria to rebuild while warning of risks ahead.

Rebel leader Abu Mohammed Al-Jalani, speaking in Damascus, hailed the victory as one for the entire Islamic nation and pledged protection for minorities under the new leadership by his HDS group.

I think this, quite frankly, is the most undercovered story in the world right now.

Totally.

Well, it was definitely undercovered for the first 12 days, and then

Syria fell on the 13th day, and everyone was like, oh, hey, there's something going on here.

I felt, I got chills watching some of this, especially the footage of the prisoners being freed from, I don't want to mispronounce the Sednaya prison, that huge complex in Damascus.

But

this guy, Jalani, who's the head of HTS, which is the main rebel group.

So there's.

an amalgamation of rebels that have come together to do this, seems like with some pretty heavy help from Turkey, But he is the figurehead of everything at this moment.

He seems to be quite charismatic.

He's former al-Qaeda, which is interesting.

And he's been imprisoned before and has had changed from, I guess, a jihadist to a Syrian nationalist,

though they are.

They're very heavy Islamicists, as many ciss that I put into one sentence.

But I have enjoyed, I guess, what he has had to say so far.

You know, he's ordered that all of the borders be opened and that anyone who was displaced, you know, if there are 14 million Syrians who have been displaced over the last 13 years,

and they're flying the Free Syria flag at the embassies, I was watching it up in Sweden.

There are 200,000 refugees that they've taken over the years.

He's said that

there's amnesty for all Syrian soldiers and conscripts.

Like no questions asked.

You want to come back and be with us?

You can be with us.

I don't know if this will hold, but he's also commanded his troops that they cannot interfere with women's clothing at all.

So we'll see how that holds up.

But it is fascinating geopolitically.

I mean, if Ukraine hadn't taken Russia apart to this level and if Israel hadn't hurt Iran and Hezbollah to the level that they have in the last couple of months, this would never have been possible because Syria just, Assad couldn't do it without Russia and Iran anymore.

And that seems to be why this happened.

But what are your initial thoughts?

I agree.

A lot of the initial complexion and body language is very positive.

But this is sort of a Pro Bowl bringing together a group of people from some very bad organizations.

So there is some risk here, and the Israelis sense that risk, and they've actually been intensely bombing and attacking.

military sites and munitions caches in inside Assyria, thinking, we don't know anything about these people and we don't want them to have access to these weapons.

There's no getting around it.

Bashr al-Assad, that regime, him and his father, a murderous regime.

I think somewhere between half a million and a million Syrians have been killed, gas attacks on their own people.

Now, you know, the world didn't seem to be that outraged by it because it wasn't Jews killing these people, but that's another talk show.

But the thing that strikes me about this is that we have such a self-hate for America.

We are so remiss, and I believe at the hands of an America where they see the top 1% doing better than them, at the hands of platforms that have been weaponized by bad actors that want to divide us and get us to hate each other.

We don't recognize that America and the West are winning geopolitically.

And that is Bashra Assad, who does not share our values,

immediately when Chic I Real turned to Russia.

But here's the problem.

Russia is like, sorry, boss, we got our own issues because unbeknownst to me, where I thought I was going to roll into Kyiv in about seven days, the West, backing the incredible Ukrainian army, is killing about 1,500 of my people a day.

I've lost half a million people.

I just don't have the time, the resources, or the energy to come in and back you up.

And then he turned to his other friend, Iran.

And Iran's like, well, I don't know if you've heard, but in addition to you, our proxies,

including Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Hamas, are not doing that well.

And our air defenses have been taken down.

And we're a lot less popular amongst the Iranian people than Hamas is among the Palestinian people.

Sorry, boss, we can't show up.

So when you think about really bad people, Assad, Putin, the Islamic regime in Iran, the West being unified around their support of Ukraine, you know, we're winning.

And I don't, it bums me out that people don't high-five

the West and our alliance and our commitment to American values, our support of Israel, which has kicked such serious ass

over the last, since October the 7th, over the last 14 months, doing our dirty work for us, taking more people off the most wanted terrorist lists in six weeks than we've managed in the last 25 years, totally defanging this

quiet, supposedly sleeping giant of Hezbollah with the most precise anti-terrorist action in history, going into Syria and making sure they don't have weapons in case these guys

aren't as warm and cuddly as they're pretending to be right now.

But basically, Iran, Russia, and Syria, this triumvirate, oh, and North Korea is sending people into a meat grinder now in Russia.

This is an enormous, this is essentially, this is an indicator that our good cholesterol has never been higher and our bad cholesterol has never been lower globally.

You know, we are geopolitically, the good guys are winning here, and the bad guys are just getting increasingly fucked.

They are having, Putin, the Islamic regime, and Assad are having really bad days a lot.

And it strikes me that we never take time to recognize how talented our security apparatus is, how resolute and thoughtful and committed we've been around joining forces to support Ukraine.

So I'm just,

I'm both excited about it, possibly, but I'm also disappointed that we don't take more of a victory lap for the West and also recognize that Israel, in my opinion, is essentially destabilizing the world for bad people and stabilizing the Middle East.

In my view, over the medium and long term, the Middle East is going to be a much less

dangerous place.

It's one of those things that's so difficult to understand.

Do you know what Bashrul Assad, you know, he was, he and his wife were educated in the United Kingdom.

Do you know what he was educated as?

No.

He's an ophthalmologist.

I mean, it's such an interesting study on how people descend into hell, right?

This guy was helping people see again.

This guy was doing cataract surgery.

And then, you know, fast forward 15, 20 years later, or not even know if it's that long, he's gassing his own people.

But his dad was always doing this.

I mean,

that was a...

a facade.

I mean, I'm glad that some people can see better because of him, but Assad

was raised in this.

I mean, his family's been in power for 50 years.

His wife, and I, from when I lived in London, there are a lot more people floating around there who know these people.

And I heard similar, oh, she's lovely.

Give her a chance.

No fucking thank you.

You knew what you were marrying into at the very least.

But it is, I don't know, I'm all for

people getting great educations, of course.

But I do hate that we share institutions with some of the world's most evil.

That really does burn me.

And

this is one of those examples.

There were debates constantly at LSE about this, about what money they would be taking from the Middle East and who was going to get to go.

Remember about bin Laden's kids that went to Harvard.

You know, I don't think everyone should be punished for what their parents did.

You know, you

may not go into the family business, as it were, but Assad surely did.

And on the Israel front, I totally agree with you.

I think the issue about us taking a step back and having

spending more time reflecting on how well the West is doing or that these are good moments for Western values.

That is not computing for the average American citizen.

And I think a lot of it is due to the cost of all of this, that they're being hit constantly with a barrage of information around, you know, you can't get X thing for your kids, but we're sending another billion dollars for people you've never met in your life or that you feel completely disconnected to.

And that became such a key plank of Trump's candidacy, where he was just like, America first means that your kid should get a good education and shouldn't have a classroom full of kids who are from another place and are here illegally, or that that money that we're sending abroad should be going to you first.

And I understand for someone who is not living as much of a charmed life as we are, how that is persuasive.

It also made me think back to the red line with Obama about Assad

and that

as much joy as I was feeling, you know, that maybe this

would be a real positive future for the people of Syria who have endured more than my mind can even process.

I'm thinking, how did we let this continue?

We saw the videos of the mass graves.

We knew he was gassing his own people.

We had a red line.

Huge stain on Obama's legacy.

Totally.

And it does seem like that has been one of the kind of lessons or big thread lines in the aftermath of the election.

A lot of people think Putin...

Putin went into Ukraine.

I mean, these red lines, when they no longer became lines, a lot of people would argue that we were no longer

that he went to Crimea because we didn't stand tall about this.

We gave him a green light.

The thing that disappoints me, I think it's a politically advantageous and somewhat short-term minded, expedient way of

political opportunism.

You've never met anyone in Ukraine.

Do you really care?

Your son's not doing well.

Do you really care about territorial sovereignty in Ukraine when a 12-pack of bounty is $30?

What frustrates me more, I respect the the fact they play that political opportunism.

What frustrates me is that we don't have

a Democrat who can punch back and say, okay, that's the same argument that was made to FDR and they kept us out of the war too long in 39.

That was the same argument that Parliament made to Churchill about staying out.

He could have cut a deal with Hitler and saved

Britain, at least in the short term.

When fascists or murderous autocrats invade Europe, it usually doesn't end well when we just let them.

And then to go straight to the numbers, and that is, I would have gone on offense.

There are few investments that have shown a greater ROI than our and Europe's greater investment than the U.S.'s in the support of the Ukrainian army.

We're talking about $60 to $80 billion.

I think it's maybe over $100 now.

But when you look at, we spent $800 billion a year on our military.

And in exchange, if someone had come to us and said, you know what, I'm going to take out

a third to almost half of Russia's kinetic power.

I'm going to delegitimize their army.

I'm going to take out a half a million troops.

I'm going to make it less likely that China invades Taiwan because they see what a small, motivated, technically sophisticated defense force can do.

Would you pay $80 billion for that?

We would hit that bid all day long.

This was, instead of apologizing and talking in broad sweeping strokes, they should have said, folks, if we had been offered the ability, Russia's our enemy.

Russia wreaks havoc.

Russia takes oil prices up purposefully.

Russia creates instability, greater likelihood of war.

For $80 billion,

we're going to pull the mask off this clown.

We're going to absolutely

decimate the reputation, and we're going to take out a third to half of their connection.

Americans won't die for it.

And that's an important point.

Great point.

And not a single American boot on the ground?

Yeah.

Okay, for training, but not die for it.

Our federal budget is $7 trillion.

So

I need about 1% for 1%.

Yeah, I need a penny on the dollar to do this.

This is the best investment America has made.

But no one says it like that.

And the way that.

Well, not until the new junior senator from New York.

Hey, now.

There There you go.

And her friend who shoots birds.

No one conveys it in those terms because we are always into the soaring rhetoric, right, about protecting democracy.

And people like to hear, we took out X amount of terrorists.

Like, that's what they want to hear in all of this.

Or Vladimir Putin.

is flipping out because he has lost control of these 10 areas, right?

And this is what their economy looks like.

And I don't want to say that there aren't any Democrats that communicate well about these things.

I think especially the folks who are veterans that know exactly what this fight means are good about it, like the Jason Crows of the world.

But you know who I think does a pretty decent job?

Cocaine Mitch.

I listened to Mitch McConnell talk about why we need to continue to send money to Ukraine and to Israel.

And you can tell that that man deeply feels this.

And I know that a lot of Republicans, especially the MAGA wing, detest him probably for being this,

having this level of clarity.

Okay, let's take a quick break.

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Hello, Daisy speaking.

Hello, Daisy.

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Welcome back.

Since Hunter Biden's pardon, there's been chatter about whether Biden should issue preemptive pardons for other people that Trump has openly openly targeted, including Adam Schiff and Luce Cheney.

Political reports there's a heated internal debate in the White House, but Biden hasn't weighed in yet.

Supporters, including Brendan Boyle, say Trump's move to put Cash Patel in charge of the FBI shows this isn't just hypothetical.

Schiff, ironically, is urging Biden not to do it, saying it would look defensive and unnecessary.

Jess, pardons.

What are your thoughts?

Do you think that doing this preemptively is a smart move or a bad precedent?

It could be both at the same time, but

the problem is there's no crime.

They haven't been charged with anything.

I mean, there's even the debate within the Democratic Party.

I don't know if you saw Bill Clinton was being interviewed and it came up about Hunter's pardon and how he had pardoned his half-brother, I think, or stepbrother.

And he said, but he served time.

There's a big difference between even just getting convicted and then getting a pardon, which is what had happened with Hunter, but let alone someone who hasn't even been convicted of anything.

And it scares me for these people.

I think the fact that Cash Patel has an enemies list in his book, Government Gangsters, and I'm sure has been adding to it on a nightly basis, like mirror, mirror on the wall.

Who else should I put in jail?

But what are you going to do?

Just say

for crimes

that they may have committed within the last five years and that they may commit in the next 20 years.

I don't understand.

I think Adam Schiff is completely correct.

And then Jim Clyburn in the same interview where he's talking about the pardons for the January 6th folks from the committee, not the January 6th rioters, said that Trump should pardon, that Biden should pardon Trump and that it would, you know, clean the slate, I think was the term that he used.

And I cannot think of anything that would enrage Democrats more than Biden pardoning Trump.

Yeah, I don't think that's going to happen.

It used to, my understanding is it used to be, let's review some of the most outrageous miscarriages of justice, because if you have a big system that

unfortunately gets it wrong as any time you routinize anything, this is an opportunity that the president has sole discretion over to just kind of, as you said, clean the slate.

And I wonder who started this mess.

And I go to, was it Clinton when he pardoned one of his donors?

I mean, pretty soon, there's going to be an implicit number on pardons.

The head of fundraising is going to say, well, I can't guarantee anything.

I can't put this in email.

But generally speaking, I think a donation of $10 million or more might get you a pardon for you and your family should something happen to you over the next four years.

It just seems like

we're becoming that nation.

Well, there was,

at least there was rumor reporting that those were conversations going on in the first Trump administration.

And then I imagine with him not even thinking about running again, I mean, who knows what he's going to be thinking about, but let's just say that he knows that he has to leave after the next four years, that there's sky's the limit on the kind of salacious pardon activity that'll be going on.

But Congressman Steve Cohen, who's from Tennessee, has proposed a constitutional amendment to limit presidential power, pardon power, and he's never once had a Republican co-signer.

The people are out there, you know, pants on fire, like losing their minds about what Biden did.

I mean, this is something that gets abused on both sides, and they should really look at limiting it.

And I was listening to a really interesting conversation.

Preet Bahara and Joyce Vance have a podcast and they were talking about it, the Hunter pardon, and they were on opposite sides of it.

Preet was against it.

Joyce Vance was for it, laying out their cases.

But Preet Bahara said, which I thought, good on you.

He said, if you are in the same position as Hunter, committed a similar crime, been convicted of it,

getting sentenced, reach out to me and let me defend you.

Like come to me and I'm going to try to help you get a pardon.

I shouldn't say defend you.

They had already been defended, but he's like, I want to, I will go to the president and say there are actually a whole host of people who are in the same position as your son that are deserving of pardons by this logic.

And my guess is that they're not, if those people come forward, are not.

going to be given the same treatment.

Again, we both think that we would have done the same thing for our children, but it's a very ugly road that we are traveling on.

Okay, let's move on, Jess.

Let's move on.

Let's talk about what's happening in the House.

With Adam Gray's narrow win in California, we're looking at a razor-thin, wafer-thin margin of 217 to 215 Republican majority.

If Democrats stick together, they'd only need one Republican to flip for a tie, which in the House means the vote fails.

But even with that slim margin, Republicans still get the gavel, control committees, and set the agenda.

Meanwhile, Democrats are shaking things up, bumping older ranking members for younger, more telegenic folks.

Jamie Raskin just ousted Jerry Nadler on judiciary, apparently with Pelosi support.

On oversight, AOC has hinted she might go for Raskin's old spot.

Jess,

what do you make of these leadership shake-ups?

So first, I want to say.

that the narrative, if you would like to revisit the initial conversations about the election where you said we we got shellacked, might need a little bit of a revision.

So, in the end, well, I don't know.

Democrats team.

No, no, on the president, on the president.

No, but the mood in totality was Democrats got their asses completely kicked.

And we ended up picking up two House seats and won very, very competitive races and held a lot of really important Senate seats.

It could have been much worse.

I mean, they were expecting that we were going to lose Nevada, that we're going to lose Wisconsin.

Pennsylvania was a big pickup with McCormick.

Anyway, it was not as bad as people make it out to be.

In terms of the new chairs of the big committees, I think it's time for these things to happen.

And these

folks, well, I don't like to, you know,

I'm a traditional gal, and I think that when people have served honorably and done these incredible things for the country, It's very hard for me to get to the point where I want to say, Nancy, you take a seat, right?

You shouldn't be doing doing this anymore.

And I know she stepped back from being speaker, but she still holds her seat.

And there are still a lot of young Democrats that want to run for Congress in San Francisco.

Jim Clyburn is still there.

Stenny Hoyer is still there.

And while they might not be as powerful as they were before, This is rarefied air that they're breathing, right?

There are only, was it 435 of them?

And I think the transition to a new generation is

bigger than they are allowing to happen right now.

That said, it's great to see Jamie Raskin doing this, though he's in his 60s.

This is not a kid.

The AOC thing, I think, will be fascinating if it is what happens.

And she's clearly positioning herself for at least statewide election, maybe national if she's going to run for president.

But if you notice at the DNC, and we were both very taken with her speech,

great speech, one of the top ones from the convention, at least for me.

Thank you.

Thank you.

She struck every note properly.

She manages the economic populism, I think, better than anybody.

She's clearly moderated on a lot of stuff.

But in interviews since then, she talks about upstate New York all the time.

She was giving an interview with someone.

She mentioned Buffalo twice.

I'm like, have you even ever been to Buffalo?

So clearly she's thinking about what does AOC look like beyond the Bronx and Queens, right?

Like what does AOC up north look like and wants to make sure that she is palatable to those people and getting a committee chair and getting to show off in those ways will be one route to potentially getting a Senate seat.

So what do you think about the new, the new gen, next gen?

I think Chern is good.

I think these people are way too old.

We have the oldest legislative body, I believe, in the world outside of Iran.

I mean, it's just insane that our leadership's become a cross between the Walking Dead and the Golden Girls.

This must be the most amazing job in the world because they never seem to want to leave unless it's feet first.

I would love mandatory retirement age.

I just think in the U.S., most corporations, it used to be 65.

And because of gerrymandering and fundraising and Citizens United,

these

fossils keep getting reelected.

And I love a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

The fact that we let a convicted felon, a convicted rapist, an insurrectionist regain the White House means they should clean house.

How did we let this happen?

This was the way I see it.

And Charles Schumer versus Mitch McConnell.

Senator McConnell has played Senator Schumer like a fucking fiddle.

And he's older, but he's still got it.

in terms of his chess game.

You show that

you brought up Speaker Pelosi.

Speaker Pelosi has some of that Machiavellian, you know, riz.

She deserves it.

By the way, she's going to make it nearly impossible for anyone to launch a campaign in her district, and then she's going to decide to coronate her daughter, who, by the way, was born when Castro declared martial law.

That's how old Speaker Pelosi is.

So she's not, I'll be curious what happens in San Francisco.

That'll be an interesting race.

But we need a new set of leadership and voices.

And for God's sakes, some of these people just need to get a gold fucking watch and leave.

Or at least bring in.

I mean, AOC is policies to me.

She's, you know, she's not, she's not my cup of tea from a policy standpoint.

She's a leader and she's telegenic.

And she represents youth.

And she can speak to what it's like to be a waitress and how important tips are and what it's like to work for a living and what it's like to be a young woman in America.

I mean, a young, you know, non-white woman in America.

he's fantastic she's a fantastic representative of of uh for the democratic party raskin yeah early 60s fine that dude he might he was so quick on his feet

being unfair yeah he is oh yeah he's amazing he's fantastic we need some gangsters to go in there and go toe-to-toe with these people uh my favorite is i think we talked about a long time you mentioned his name the congress congressman from florida who tried

yeah who moved to impeach Biden on that ridiculous panel because he realized none of them had any desire to do it or had any that this panel was as nothing but an attempt to feed Fox with more

fodder for their evening programs and was wasting the time and taxpayers' money.

Anyways,

they are just much, they're just better than us, quite frankly.

The Democratic Party suffers from something I suffered from my entire professional life, and that is the ability to discern the difference between being right and being effective.

And we'd rather be right and get our asses kicked than effective.

And we absolutely need to take this crisis as an opportunity to have a dramatic shift in

leadership.

Anyways, that's my

rant.

It wasn't really even a rant.

I liked it.

And I just want to add to it, connecting it back to our conversation about what's going on in Syria.

And it's been a lot of good days for the West, but we haven't been able to communicate it.

I do think that hearing about

the U.S.

on the world stage from younger communicators, many of whom have served, will be a great benefit to the party and to the country in general, like Elisa Slotkin, who just won the Michigan Senate seat, Mikey Sherrill, who's running

for governor in New Jersey, Abigail Spanberger in Virginia.

Having a younger, more relatable face to people telling you about why it is so important to support our troops, Western values, these fights against dictators and totalitarians, I think will be much more resonant with people than hearing about it from relics of the past.

Senator Gallegos, Representative Moulton out of Massachusetts,

Senator Duckworth.

I think people in uniform deserve a hard look at their views.

I mean, the most patriotic people in America are the ones anyone with kids knows loyalty and affection is a function of your investment.

So your kids could end up being jerks.

You're still irrationally passionate about their well-being because you have so much invested in them.

And wouldn't you know it, the most loyal and patriotic Americans are the ones who've invested the most, specifically our veterans.

And what's so upsetting is the least patriotic are the ones who've received the most but haven't invested a lot.

I call them tech bros.

But these are the people who are the most blessed and yet don't want to acknowledge their blessings and shitpost America.

America.

Anyways, I do hope that we have

a new cast of leadership.

All right, Jess.

Anything else?

Anything else on your mind before we go?

Oh, wait, we're supposed to do predictions.

Hold on, hold on.

Producers are free.

That's on my mind because it's in our script.

It's in our script.

Okay, so before we wrap, this is our last regular episode of the year.

So let's talk 2025 predictions.

It's shaping up to be a big year with talk of tax cuts, entitlement reform, and immigration changes.

Jess, what do you think is on the horizon?

Well, politically speaking, I do want to talk about Taylor and Travis actually getting engaged or publicly engaged.

But politics-wise, I do think,

at least on the small level, that Trump is going to make good on the main planks of his campaign.

So I think that there will be some immigration crackdown.

And I really hope that

Blue City mayors and officials will play ball with ICE to turn over criminals so that we can avoid a deportation force the way that Tom Holman fantasizes about it.

I saw Michelle Wu, who is the mayor of Boston, talking about an absolute blanket no to cooperating with ICE and protecting all Bostonians.

Criminals are, illegal criminals are not Bostonians.

You should play ball with them to do that.

Mayor Adams has already said that he will.

Then again, he also wants a pardon.

But I'm sure we are going to have some level of immigration change.

It'll be interesting to see what he does in terms of executive orders on the border,

probably keeping in place a lot of what Biden has put in over the last year and in cooperation with President Scheinbaum of Mexico.

I agree with you, small tariffs probably coming, not this huge 100%, 60% that he's been talking about.

Tax cuts, restoring the Trump tax cuts, probably through reconciliation.

The kind of question marks for me are around what Doge can really do if you're not going to go after the Pentagon and Medicare and Social Security.

They're talking about, quote, small entitlements, things like food stamps, which are not that small to a lot of people, but means testing as much stuff as possible.

And then, you know, what could make it into a huge reconciliation bill.

I was listening to Larry Kudlow, who was in the first Trump administration.

Now he's a Fox business host, not going back to the administration, even though Trump wanted him.

And he says that we are definitely going to have a big reconciliation bill that'll probably be next September.

And And I'm curious to see what's going in there.

But I know that those tax cuts are a huge priority, especially when you look at who got them over the finish line, the billionaires that are smacking their lips at the thought of another round of it.

So those are my predictions.

I liked it.

Yeah.

The Taylor and Travis part or the Doge part.

But the thing they're going, I don't know if you're this, the thing they're,

first off, my understanding is they are looking at the military.

So for I didn't, I knew this, but I didn't know it.

The military has five air forces.

Do we need five air forces?

My sense is they are, in fact, actually willing to address the military.

The question I have around, whenever I hear means testing, I'm like, okay, let's start with Social Security.

And I realize that Social Security is technically an off-balance

cheap separate.

Yeah, we pay for it, but it's still a tax on young people who are...

less wealthy than they've ever been relative to their seniors.

And yet I don't understand why there wouldn't be a tax on wealthy seniors.

They create Social Security for young people, but that's another talk show.

But I wonder if we're ever going to have a serious conversation around me incessing Social Security or pushing the age back, given the fact that we're all living so goddamn long.

But, you know, no one, my sense is they don't want to talk about that.

Have you heard them talk about entitlements at all?

Yeah.

A lot.

And they've said that, quote unquote, everything's on the table.

Medicare.

Social Security, not an entitlement right you've paid in.

I take your point, obviously, about it being a tax on young people who are never going going to get to enjoy it.

There would be, if you want to see civil war, take away Medicare and Social Security.

So I don't think that's happening, but I do.

I love Medicare.

Yeah.

Let me clear it.

But Medicaid, frankly, which I mean, states are expanding, even Republican states, at a rapid pace and seeing incredible feedback from it.

And we talked about it, wasn't the program

that your dad is using, a Medicaid program?

Yes, the home health care.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't what what I don't know.

They're going to go snap,

snap

food benefits.

It doesn't sound like anyone's talking about the child tax credit, which was one of the things they said they were going to do.

It's just a lot of cuts versus

helping people out to cut child poverty in half.

So my idea has always been,

or one of them around health care, is lower Medicaid eligibility by a year every year for the next

44 years until basically you you basically

get away with universal

100% people love people love Medicaid and when you look at I mean we didn't we didn't talk about the United Healthcare issue but that

yeah

that's going to spawn a very or already has a very interesting conversation around the fact that 40% of Americans

have some sort of medical debt related to dental or traditional medical debt that impacts them and their family.

This is, I think that's been actually the tsunami we didn't see coming in terms of political discourse.

Any thoughts?

Yeah, well, I would love to.

We don't have time,

but I was really disturbed to see the glorification of this murder and then people doxing other healthcare CEOs.

And I understand we need tremendous reform.

And some of these stories are absolutely harrowing.

And I realize how lucky I am to have the healthcare

problems that I do.

Like, cause I have some, right?

I'm getting bills constantly first off.

Giving birth is still expensive, even when you have platinum insurance and, and all of that.

But obviously nothing compares to kids getting their chemo rejected and whatever people have to go through on a monthly basis with these people.

But I thought it brought out some of the worst

sides of the American populace looking at the reaction to that.

What about about you?

Over on Pivot, Karen and I were both saying, you know, this is the wrong way to go about having a conversation and we're horrified by it.

And I got a lot of feedback.

It sort of resonated.

It said, spoken like someone who's overinsured or can afford health insurance.

And some of the memes were just so puncturing, right?

My empathy is outside my coverage.

And the reality is, which,

and this in no way justifies murder, but which health insurance company has the greatest percentage of rejected claims?

You guessed it, United Healthcare.

Yeah, a large poor.

It was like 20%

more.

And

the reality is, when you look at how a lot of these insurance companies have increased earnings over the last five or 10 years, it's coming up with algorithms and legal justification for identifying who is less likely to push back and rejecting claims.

And it just goes, for me, it goes to the same place.

I never used to think this, but I look at the UK system, and the NHS has real issues, mostly around underfunding right now, because they're not able to add a quarter of a trillion dollars in four minutes post an earnings call, NVIDIA.

But I like the idea of national or, you know, nationalized health care for the 80 or 90 percent that want to use it, and then having a private layer on top for people who want better service.

I just, when you inject, the bottom line is this is just an industry where the profit motive begins to turn health care into sick care.

And you're going to have the same thing in any capitalist environment that is not perfectly regulated as this is not.

You have regulatory capture among corporations, and the top 10% who can afford it have the best health care in the world, and the bottom 90 are being squeezed economically.

And the amount of despair and anxiety the U.S.

healthcare system is causing people, at some point, we've got to realize that

regulatory capture around our food supply system, tremendous stress and anxiety around, oh, the bad news is your wife has lung cancer.

The worst news is you're going to go bankrupt.

At what point does our health care system,

you know, are they, at some point for the bottom 50%, if not the bottom 90%,

at some point do we have to realize they're the problem?

They literally are the problem.

They're creating more anxiety, obesity, high blood pressure, deaths of despair.

We're going to lose 45,000 people to suicide.

I'd like to know how many of those people would cite financial strain, specifically medical debt, which is now the number one cause of bankruptcy in America.

How much death by suicide does that cause?

So, my prediction, I have two predictions, one's a domestic one.

I think the debate and the resurfacing of regulatory capture and the for-profit U.S.

model around U.S.

healthcare that has resulted in us paying $13,000 per individual versus $65,000 to $8,500 for other G7 countries with shorter life expectancy, more anxiety, and more obesity,

it just isn't working.

That's going to be the debate and the big discussion we weren't expecting at this moment.

And then on a geopolitical level, I think we're going to see a revolution in Iran.

I think Hamas had 70% support of Palestinians.

The ruling party in Iran does not have nearly that support.

It has a minority of people who support it.

It's actually Iran's actually a very young country.

And there are a lot of people, I think, who are waiting to see weakness, which they have observed over the last couple of weeks with the fall of Assad and all of the Iranian proxies having kind of their

being kneecapped.

I think it's going to give a lot of license and backbone.

I bet there's a lot of

entities

in Iran right now who are thinking, is this our moment?

I think we're going to see a revolution or a rebellion similar to what we've seen in Syria and Iran in 2025.

Yeah, I didn't realize we were doing global ones, but I like that one.

Oh, my God.

I feel ashamed.

I feel ashamed.

No, I just, no, I like it.

It's good.

I think it's really good.

I'm just curious with all of this, like where Israel fits in

and whether a new Iranian regime, if such a thing happens, where they are in terms of relations with Israel, because the big accomplishment from the first Trump administration for me was the Abraham Accords.

And I hope that we see further normalization of relations with Israel.

the kingdom will go first, I think.

Well, yeah, Jared's already on the WhatsApp about that.

So, oh, is that right?

I don't know.

I just think it's crazy that he made $2 billion

off of

Saudi and was WhatsApping about it.

Yeah, he raised $2 billion.

It's not fair to say he's made it so far.

We'll see.

But he's raised $200.

Why are you defending Jared Kushner all the time?

He was my student.

I don't care.

You probably had a lot of students.

He's my student.

All right, fine.

Jared and Ivanka, they're super nice.

They're super nice.

And his brother, the brother, Josh Kushner, is a total gangster.

He's a great PC.

Carly Kloss is hot.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Come on.

That counts for a lot.

And they're liberals.

There you go.

All right.

That's all for this episode.

Thank you for listening to Raging Moderates.

Our producers are Caroline Shagren and David Toledo.

Our technical directors, Drew Burroughs.

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

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