Trump’s Strategy: Distraction and Executive Action

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Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making better decisions.

I'm Maria Konakova.

And I'm Nate Silver.

Today we'll be talking about the new president, the 47th president, Donald John Trump,

who, in a funny coincidence, happens to be the exact same man who was the 45th president of the United States.

You don't say that.

wow.

Bate, I think this is the first time I've ever heard you call him with his middle name.

I think this is the first time I'm talking about the

John, Donald J.

Trump.

But let me tell you, let's start with this, right?

If you listen to this show, We're Two People Who Voted For Kamala Harris.

You know,

I'm not sure if I'd say enthusiastically on my part, but it wasn't, I didn't find it that tough a choice.

And here we are kind of like

laughing and I don't quite sense a mood of like

gallows humor, right?

But like it, the reaction, it feels very different than eight years ago, right?

I mean, do you remember kind of

how you felt in 2017 or 2016 when Trump was declared the winner?

So I definitely remember 2016 because back in 2016 on election night, I was actually doing a live event on stage at the Bellhouse in Brooklyn.

Slate was doing kind of this thing with some of their podcast hosts.

And I was part of the GIST podcast.

I did up a segment called Is That Bullshit.

So I was on stage commenting on this and the mood in the room just like went from like, yay, happy to like, holy shit, what's going on?

To the point where I actually left,

tapped out, went home and said, you know what, you guys can cover this and I will not.

It's a nice venue, the Bell House.

It's very Brooklyn, right?

And you can imagine the panic in this nice, warm room that begins to ensue as all the returns are going to Trimp.

Yep, that's exactly what happened.

And I just couldn't take it anymore.

This time around,

you know, I think

it was more expected in a sense.

Like,

Of course, I really wanted Kamala Harris to win,

but I was not nearly as shocked.

I do think in many ways this is actually a much more dangerous moment.

It's so funny, right?

Ironically, I think that this is actually a much more dangerous moment than the last presidency because, and we've talked about this on the show before, when you're talking about kind of the ability for people to make sweeping changes, we have a lot of institutions in place, a lot of guardrails, a lot of things that have been weakened, as we've talked about, over Trump 1.0.

um and i think that trump right now is feeling much more empowered much more confident and has surrounded himself with very different people from the first time around so in some ways i actually think that this is a more dangerous um and uh difficult period that we're about to enter but as you as you correctly point out like

I think all of us are exhausted and it feels a little different in that sense.

I'd say it's a higher, and here's where I

probably show my comparative centrism.

It's a higher leverage moment, I think, right?

And Trump seems to sense that, right?

He's promising like a new, I guess not century, but promising like a new era of American greatness,

which is unambiguously a conservative era, but like talking about American dominance and the world.

And

talking about, hey, you know, maybe that Panama Canal deal, you know, maybe we don't like the term so much, right?

Yep.

But like, you know, look, I think the kind of old regime, the regime that produced Biden, who Biden,

I don't know how much you want to talk about Biden.

Maybe we'll loop back around him.

But like this kind of sclerosis, sclerotic regime like

wasn't governing effectively and I think wasn't persuading people effectively.

And I don't know, I don't think we'll look, I, you know, there's a chance we could look back and say

Trump did a lot of crazy things and also some things that were okay, right?

And sometimes the whole point of democracy is you have to have like sweeping change.

I mean, yeah, look, it is different, I think.

You know, nominally, so Trump, I looked this up.

Trump had a, what are we, 47 seat majority in the U.S.

House in 2020 or 2016.

Rather, it is confusing with the skipping the one Trump term,

which is much larger than he's going to have this year, which is just a few seats and vulnerable to

retirements and cabinet appointments and things like that, right?

He did win the popular vote this time by a point and a half, roughly, 1.5, 1.6,

which he didn't, of course, in 2016.

But like it does, it does feel different.

Let me point out like six or seven factors here that I think make this feel different.

And I don't know if you want to jump in and

critique or agree or whatever else, right?

First of all, it's much harder.

We got into this to write this off as a fluke.

He won the popular vote.

You know, there's also like no,

you know, on the one hand, people are taking it more calmly, but there's no like

protest activity against Trump.

Instead of surging, you know, subscriptions to these liberal newspapers like the Washington Post, they have lots of issues, frankly, but like are down MSNBC ratings.

I'm sure they were good yesterday, aren't doing that well.

Right.

You know, mom and dad are fighting.

The Biden and Harris teams are fighting over whose fault it was, mostly Bidens, by the way.

98,

90,

98.9%

Biden's.

No, maybe 80%.

No, no, 90%.

And also, like, of the 10% of Harris's fault, like, it's mostly because she hired the fucking stupid Biden people, right?

So 100%, it's Biden's fault, right?

Never hire anybody who worked in the senior Biden administration if you want to win a campaign.

Again, is my advice personally.

There's this whole intervention from the tech right is a term that's sometimes used.

It overlaps with my term,

the river.

But yeah, you have all these oligarchs and now I'm adopting Biden's term, but you know, I'm not sure that's so bad.

I mean, saying rule by powerful rich people.

I mean, I think it's accurate.

Yeah.

So Trump is showing whether it's good or bad.

I think it's accurate.

By young Baron Trump on stage was sitting Elon Musk.

And next to Elon Musk is, who was there, Mark Zuckerberg?

And you had who else?

I mean, everyone was there, right?

All the rich people.

CEO of TikTok.

CEO of TikTok.

and Facebook is making all these changes, some of which I agree with.

I think the way that fact-checking was being done was often politically biased, but like they're getting rid of all their DEI initiatives and stuff that often just seems like

symbolic, right?

you know, removing tampons from the men's room.

Like who cares, right?

Why, I mean, why are you picking these minor fights?

But clearly, the right

and the center, and we can debate whether the center is really the center or the center right or whatever else, feels like they have wherewithal to do kind of whatever they want right now, right?

The referees have been discredited, the teachers have left the room, right?

And it's a recess with no rules in place anymore.

So and by the way, it's not just the United States.

We've had a revolt against incumbent parties all around the world.

You know, I would have to spend a little more time with it to say, is it is it mostly a revolt against liberalism as opposed to whoever happened to be in power, but certainly there's like an anti-immigrant anti-immigrant tide, right?

Which is the first thing that Trump emphasized.

You know, that's priority number

one, really, for Trump is the immigrants.

And given that executive discretion plays a big role in immigration policy, kind of an area where he'll be

successful, probably given given kind of what he's fighting on.

And then there's all this new stuff.

He announced an initiative today to invest a lot in

AI, which is very interesting given the politics of Silicon Valley, where Elon Musk is quite worried about AI acceleration and risk, whereas other people, the Mark Andreessens of the world, are accelerationists or at least accelerationists adjacent.

So I've talked a lot, Maria.

What are you thinking about here?

Well, I'm thinking about a lot of things, including one way.

You know, I think that what you were saying about kind of the teachers are out and we're at a supervision-free recess is actually a really nice way of looking at this because

last week on the pod, we talked a lot about the fact that irrational exuberance is still alive and well.

And I actually think that that's kind of a theme in how the types of decisions that Trump is making and how he's thinking about risk and how his kind of the people surrounding him are thinking about risk right now, which is infused with this irrational exuberance that, oh, we can get away with anything.

And I think that is prompting some things that are clearly overreach, right?

Like trying to do an executive order that gives, gets rid of birthright citizenship.

You can't do that, right?

Like that's just unconstitutional.

That is part of the constitution.

That is going to have to be an amendment process.

And he, and there are actually multiple things.

I'm not, you know, I'm not a lawyer.

I'm not a constitutional expert.

So I'm not going to spend the time right now to go through every executive order and being like, this one's going to get challenged.

This one's going to get challenged.

Right.

But there are a lot that are going to get challenged, a lot that are just flat out illegal that he can't do.

And yet he's doing it because some of it is kind of theatrics, right?

And showing that like, oh, look, I'm not going to be able to be stopped.

But some of it is also just showing, you know, I am the strong guy.

I'm the bully, right?

I'm the one who can just throw all of this at you.

And what are you going to do about it, at least in the immediate term?

It's very funny that you have someone who's comparing himself to McKinley, you know, U.S.

history lesson.

That's not a president that normally people compare themselves to, um, because that was not necessarily kind of the finest moment of American history, but someone who uh liked to take things.

And so, at the same time, he's saying, you know, let's grab the Panama Canal.

I'm going to rename this, is no longer going to be Gulf of Mexico, and I deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.

Let's have a draft of

so all the Canadian provinces are eligible, Greenland, Panama Canal.

What's your first pick?

Ontario, British Columbia?

Yeah, I mean, I think that Ontario is probably

a good one, a good first pick.

It's a big blue state.

What's going to be like probably 26 electoral votes or something?

That might be a mistake for Transportation.

It might be a mistake, but he's not going to want Quebec because those are French speakers.

And we don't like foreigners

around here.

Got to go for the nice English speakers.

And I think that we just need to kind of put this,

try to figure out like, obviously we know where he's coming from, right?

Like, and it is this very hubristic, like, I can just do anything right now.

But also, as you, as you said in the beginning, like, with the, like, what kind of shift is this going to be, will that lead him to kind of taking it a little bit too far where there will be pushback?

Because he doesn't have the majority that he had before, right?

He doesn't have those numbers.

Is he going to bring it to the point where people, even in the Republican Party, are going to say enough?

So far, we have not seen evidence of the fact that this is going to happen, right?

It seems like all of his confirmations are going to go through.

You know, it seems that people are just not

caring and they're going along with it for now.

But what's going to happen, you know, in six months?

Yeah, look.

So, yeah, that's one important difference is that you have these much narrower congressional majorities.

And in fact, relatively little, I was making a list of predictions of like what Trump will or won't do.

Very little of this

involves passing legislation through Congress in the first place, right?

A very little of it, right?

I mean, they already passed the Republican House

some bill to on youth gender participation in sports, right?

They can't pass that through the Senate anyway without getting a filibuster-proof majority.

I don't think they will.

Democrats are pretty unified enough to prevent them from getting 60 votes, right?

And so like, so like, you know, so that will have to be done by executive order and then litigating it in the courts.

And

Chief Justice Roberts and the other conservatives will have to decide where they draw the line.

I think birthright citizenship is one place where they probably will, right?

Or Trump running for third term or things like that.

I mean, you know, look, I'm not a constitutional scholar, but it seems pretty clear to me.

But like, so one big difference is that we aren't the only ones who were less surprised by Trump's win as compared to eight years ago, right?

I think Trump himself was pretty surprised by 2016, right?

And

there weren't a lot of people who

looked at this piece of real estate, the Trump 2016 campaign versus Trump 2024 campaign and began to plant their flags there.

Peter Thiel was a notable exception.

It's been quiet actually in this election relative, but I don't think he was there necessarily.

But like this time, people were like, okay,

look, Democrats are so fucking stupid.

They're running Biden again, right?

um and so we might own the presidency perhaps also the congress but most importantly the presidency right for um

for four years and it's a powerful executive and biden i think did little to diminish the power of the executive by the way um

and so um and so yeah let's actually have a plan of things that we can actually accomplish some of which are intended um as free rolls we would use a poker term right like if you were if you want to remove the birthright citizenship stuff right?

What's the chance the court will uphold that?

I don't know.

I'm guessing 10% or something, right?

Or maybe there's another 10% chance of some halfway in the door, but it doesn't cost you anything, really, right?

You get liberal tears and liberal outrage no matter what.

You distract them from.

Yeah.

I think that the distraction is part of it.

That's what I'm saying.

Like just try to overwhelm people, right?

And you throw stuff that is just blatantly unconstitutional in there, but then like you're putting out all of these fires and it does prevent you from doing something else.

I have a question for you, Nate, on another.

topic that we've talked about many times on the show, P Doom.

So because of what Trump has kind of done with AI in his first 24 hours, so first he rescinded the executive order that Biden had put into place, right, that had asked big AI companies to loop in the U.S.

government, right, and to kind of tell them be transparent with what they were doing with the technologies, et cetera.

That no longer has to happen.

And because he does seem to be on like team yay, let's go.

And even though Musk is close with him as of now, you know, it seems like Musk is right now more trying to placate Trump and stay in a position of power than he is necessarily trying to kind of counteract him and say, no, no, like this isn't good.

Because he, you know, he didn't say as much as Bat and I about the electric vehicle stuff either.

So it seems like he's trying to be kind of on team Trump right now.

So I think there,

my question for you is: what do we think the P-Doom probabilities from AI are?

Like, are there things that he's going to do in the next four years, right, in terms of

his policies that are going to be much more difficult to roll back, much more difficult to

talk about?

What do you think?

Look, I mean, Elon won this big fight

against Trump or against MAGA on H-1B or whichever visas, on skilled immigration visas.

I guess the kind of

narrow issue is, yeah, look, I think Trump is probably good for technology growth in the U.S.

relative to Democrats, maybe with if tariffs don't interfere with that too much, right?

But that also probably means that, yeah,

I think P-Doom risk is up a little bit.

And I also wonder whether this is going to polarize, because actually, if you look at public opinion data, people are in the abstract pretty worried about P-Doom.

I think we maybe overestimate kind of how much the average person thinks or knows about this, but if we reach even, I mean, Sam Altman's talking about how we're going to achieve artificial general intelligence at some point in the next three-ish years or something, right?

Like,

I imagine this is going to become a pretty big campaign issue in 2028.

And if it polarizes, maybe Dems are the party saying, we are the ones who have to restrain AI.

And like, I think that could actually be kind of like a popular message, right?

I mean, what's what's the path forward here, right?

Is it like oligarch versus oligarch?

Or is it oligarch versus everyone else?

And Democrats have to like, I think, pick one of those two lanes over a timeframe of like, of like 10 or something years, right?

Because it is absolutely true.

And again, I don't think these oligarchs could go on a case-by-case basis, right?

The super rich Silicon Valley people, I don't think they're dumb people or bad people necessarily, right?

But they have economic interests and they have a philosophy that's that's actually quite predictable in some ways and transparent.

And they've kind of realized now that we have ways to like actuate our interests, right?

So there are various questions here.

You know, one question is whether, you know, there are a lot of Silicon Valley types who are either liberal liberals or like classic liberals, right?

Or just might say, okay, well, maybe I want to try to like

rekindle this Obama era alliance.

um in the democratic party with you know with the tech sector where you know 2008 was the facebook election, supposedly, whatever else, and all the Obama people worked at Facebook and vice versa and things like that.

You know, but you kind of have to pick one, right?

If you're Democrats, you should either be criticizing the oligarchs

and AI by 2028 will become a tangible issue there, in which public opinion might be on your side.

Maybe climate, I think it's a little more complicated, right?

But because they tend to be a little bit more sensitive to climate change, or do you want want to like draft your own Mark Cuban or dissident?

Or like, who knows how long Elon's relationship with Trump will

last, right?

Maybe Steve Bannon wins that fight.

Eventually,

Vivek Ramaswamy has already been ousted from Ghosh.

That was fast.

Well, he made this very cringe tweet about how like you got to put, you know, what was he referenced, like saved by the bell and how nerds don't get enough respect.

And like, it's like never heard from again.

He may know, he's running for governor of Ohio.

So maybe he'll governor of Ohio.

I think he may never be heard from again.

It was was just such a cringy tweet, right?

That even Elon was like, bro, that's too much.

But Democrats have to like pick a lane.

And I think the stuff about the fact that there is this

concentration of wealth and power is like, is quite,

it's true, right?

I mean, it's, A, it's true that like, and again, I'm a fucking neoliberal capitalist, right?

But it is true that

more and more wealth and power is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, especially at the very, very, very, very, very top end, right?

The 10 most, literally the 10 most or 20 richest and most powerful people in the world.

And they're increasingly actuating their political interests, right?

Like, I think that line of critique is more promising electorally and fresher and maybe truer than just calling Trump a fascist.

Right.

But that didn't work.

That, I mean, Joe Biden thought, oh, January 6th was so bad.

We'll just have to, I don't know what voice I'm doing here, but like, but that

just screaming democracy, democracy, democracy, right?

Like, that didn't work.

People are sick and tired of that.

And the fact is that the democratic system delivered a verdict that people are sick and tired of these candidates Democrats are nominating.

Um,

and Democrats can rebound for that system.

And I think they probably will in 2026.

I think that could be a bad midterm for Trump.

This global anti-incumbent mood could easily come back around to bite him.

You know, I think just kind of like the

efficacy of governance, right?

Like,

you know, Democrats are the expert class and

fucked lots of things up, right?

That doesn't mean to me that like the non-expert dilettante class is going to do any better necessarily, right?

Like maybe on every third, maybe one out of three things, yes, right?

Maybe four out of 10 things, right?

That still means there are six out of 10 things that might break and might break badly.

The pandemic happened under Trump's watch, although I think he deserves more credit for like Operation Warp Speed

and the first stimulus package.

You know, look, if you look at American history, there are big catastrophic fuck-ups.

And that's what produced shifts back, particularly in a liberal direction, right?

So

the Iraq war was one of those, plus the financial crisis that produces a huge shift toward a guy named Barack Hossein Obama becoming president for two terms.

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This start of Trump 2.0, we're in a very, very different place economically, politically than we were in Trump 1.0, right?

So we have the inflation and kind of recessionary kind of things and high interest rates that we didn't have back when he assumed power.

The economy that he's inheriting is in much worse shape.

And as you saw, by the way,

he didn't immediately like say tariffs, tariffs, tariffs, even though he said now, Mexico and Canada, if you're leading, if you're letting immigrants into our countries, I'm going to put tariffs on you and I will, you know, I'll see what else happens.

But

it will be very interesting to see,

because one of his promises was, oh, you know, we'll make everyone more prosperous and we're going to do all of these different things.

But that might actually be a moment where.

As we've talked about before, incumbents have been blamed for kind of this global economic malaise, but he's going to be the incumbent.

And unless, you know, it really depends on what we see in the next years in terms of economic policies in terms of how the average person feels when they go shopping so i just want to kind of make sure that that we understand that as we as we look at the next four years but i do completely agree with you that um i actually think it's much more promising and very accurate for the democrats to kind of attack the oligarchical

shift in the in the U.S.

government because it is,

I wouldn't say it's unprecedented, but it's unprecedented in modern times.

And it is

very eyebrow raising when you see kind of who, you know, who is in, who is next, who is at Trump's side as we kind of enter this era and think through the implications of that

for the common person, right?

For your just like normal voter who just wants to live a normal life.

And I don't think that people have necessarily thought that through, but I think it will be if Democrats can seize upon it.

I think it could be a way to differentiate and get people actually excited.

Because by the way, even if a lot of what Trump has done is fascist and, you know, we don't have to go into it, but we have the Heil Hitler salute from Elon Musk.

Well, no, but that's an example of controversy.

But as you said, that hasn't worked.

No, it hasn't worked.

And it's because it's fucking stupid, right?

Like, like out of all these things, I mean, how many executive orders did Trump issue in the past

24, I guess 26 hours when we're taping this.

A lot.

Like, you know, he repealed the Biden AI executive.

I mean, like, like

focus on shit that, like, I mean, don't repeat the mistakes of like, of eight years ago.

The thing that wasn't a mistake, I mean, you had like the women's marches in like organized opposition.

Like, that seems to be like something you should do anytime you're the opposition party.

I'm like, who's in charge of the Democratic Party right now?

I mean,

you know, who's the leader of the Democratic Party right now, right?

Barack Obama, I guess, kind of?

Maybe beats me yeah i mean it require i mean the trump people spent more time strategizing for this moment and and i guess that makes it easier when

you know it's trump's way or the highway in the gop right where there's no no kind of equivalent figure in the democratic party but like look um

ordinarily there would be a strong case for for mean reversion um

meaning there are all these ways from the effectiveness of governance to, to overreach.

I mean, we talked a little bit about this kind of like pent up recess

lady is away for a few minutes kind of frustration.

I think there might only be

so much tolerance for beating up on

immigrants and trans people.

And kind of once the needle moves on some of these issues, then like, then it will become kind of gross and like tiresome and things like that.

Right.

I think there might be a limited tolerance for that.

Certainly hope so.

There's some corrections of like free speech and the fucking misinformation

people, right?

Like fuck them.

But like, but like, I think, you know, I don't think America went and we moved back to the 1950s or something when it comes to how we view sexuality and gender and things like that.

Right.

But

but you think there might be some mean reversion between like the fact that Democrats are competitive in all these elections, right?

No, Democrats lost a popular vote by more than two and a half points since 1988, right?

So every year that's been a, you know, within a field goal, and they've lost some of those and won some of those.

Um,

Democrats will probably take over the Senate, excuse me, the House, probably not the Senate in 2026.

They own a lot of these governorships.

They have

a bench of younger governors who are all better than the last three people they nominated for president, frankly.

And yeah, and now if you have this continuous anti-incumbent sentiment, then that benefits Democrats in

2020 or 20.

god damn it so confusing so many years 2028 i know i know everyone's timeline is up but like i i

look if democracy says hey let's let's run back the playbook but nominate a better candidate than kamal harris and this time inflation and the ups of the white house help us and not hurt us um

i mean there's a

50 50 chance that works maybe better than 50 50.

um i but i don't know if that actually kind of like wins the culture war or the political war in the long run, really.

Well, I think that the pendulum shift is an interesting way of looking at it because to go back to kind of where we started the show, which is kind of part of this.

irrational exuberance that that Trump is exhibiting, he may push things too far too far, even with the tech stuff.

Like we saw, you know, he has in the last week, we've seen the launch of a Trump meme coin and a Melania meme coin.

And even the crypto community is like, dude, right?

Like, what, what is going on here?

This is not a good look.

This looks like a very scammy, icky type of thing.

And rather than being like, yeah, you know, you go, they're like,

wait, hold on a second, right?

Like, this might be a step too far.

And these were some of his biggest supporters.

And so if he keeps kind of doing things like this, if he keeps attacking immigrants the way he has

and attacking, you you know, transgender, like, oh, there are only men and women, all of these things where he's really just pushing it way too far, including things that you mentioned, like, oh, no more tampons in the Facebook bathroom, which like, no matter who you are, you're like, what the fuck, right?

Like,

what in the world are we even talking about?

Right.

I do think that maybe then people will start finally reacting.

Maybe not, right?

I'm, I'm.

choosing to believe that humanity will react against i mean you did have a lot of

under the Democratic presidents, but actually more under Biden than Obama, right?

You did have a lot of like officials, government spaces and corporate spaces because Silicon Valley, we had thought of as being

quite left-wing.

I think it never really was.

We can talk about that, right?

But you did have a lot of kind of policy changes that people felt like were superimposed on them and that and that went further than public opinion might, right?

Usually you think that like,

you know, corporate institutions are more centrist, but, you know, on

a lot of these issues, then they were pretty far to the left

during the latter years of the Biden term.

And so I, I think, I think the GOP has a little bit more mileage than usual than that because you're kind of rolling back from a point where like it was not reflecting public opinion to begin with.

But like, at the same time, though, I mean, look at, so why did Biden

fail?

And there are a few themes here.

I have another article about this.

One is he was 78 years old.

Trump is 78 years old at the start of his second term.

Unlike, fortunately for Trump,

he can't run for a third term unless he tries to get the Constitution changed.

And so there's not that temptation, right?

But like, but

you have issues of like performance and cognitive fitness that I think are valid to ask of any 78 years old.

Absolutely.

Two, Biden thinks he has this big sweeping mandate.

And he does win a majority of the vote, which Trump didn't, and a wider popular vote margin, about the same in Electoral College.

But it was kind of conditional, right?

It was kind of like, oh, the last guy really fucked up, especially in COVID.

And so he kind of overreached and overread that mandate.

And three, he was kind of like bogged down by lots of policy commitments to groups who were acting in their own interests and not in the long-term interest of the country or of Biden's party, right?

Just last week, Biden

claimed that we have a new 28th amendment, right?

This equal rights amendment, which was a simple amendment that just kind of said, okay,

we're explicitly saying that women are equal to men, right?

I don't know the exact terminology.

I mean, basically, it just asserted, and Kamala Harris's account asserted that, oh, now it's the law of the land, when it very much isn't, right?

You'd have to go through a whole process with the constitutional archivists to do this, right?

Congress in the 1970s, I think,

approved this ERA amendment, then it went to the states to ratify.

And they sent a seven-year timeframe saying you have to have 37, I think three-quarters states, is it 38 then?

Um,

ratify this within, yeah, 37 and a half, right?

So, 38.

38 states must ratify this in, I believe, seven years.

Um,

and they didn't get there, it was like 36 or something, right?

Um,

a couple of states then rescinded

their approval of it, right?

Um, but then later, like Nevada and Virginia, like in the past five years, approve this.

And so

and so it's a radical judicial overreach argument that, oh, well, actually this thing that Congress put in the law that's overridden by other provisions of the Constitution.

Oh, and by the way,

by the way, the fact that five or six states were sended this

just ignore that too, right?

But this is something that like, you know, I would say radical left

groups that have a different interpretation of the Constitution were pushing Biden to do.

And so it just looks fucking stupid.

And your last week in office, right, you're like doing this, making this fake amendment up

and then pardoning your family.

I mean, what are we doing, right?

Anyway, I'm on a on a Biden rant.

But the point is that like

the overreach of like an old

president who has a lot of people who are pushing for things and pulling for things that has a limited amount of bandwidth.

And, you know, and I watched Biden's speech from four years ago and like Trump kind of thought he was this, or Biden thought he was the savior, right?

Oh, I've been in this difficult time, but I'll, I'll deliver justice from systemic racism on top of solving the COVID pandemic and the economy, right?

And climate change, I'm going to solve it all, right?

And Trump says the same thing.

He's like, well, God saved me from that assassin's bullet.

I was put here for a reason.

And like, and like, I don't know, neither man is very introspective, I would say.

I want to clip your last 30 seconds and then run it.

If risky business still exists in four years, which I hope it does, run it at the end of the Trump presidency, because what you just said basically could be exactly like word for word, you know, what how Trump is acting right now.

78-year-old man thinks he has, you know, this mandate, is going to be overreaching and doing all of these things.

And I really want to see kind of how we'll be able to cut and paste that.

And I mean, I hope we will in the sense that I hope that he doesn't manage to be kind of more effective

in some respects, if that makes sense.

The courts are something we've talked about a lot on the show, haven't talked about today, don't need to talk about much today, but that is something that has changed in the last eight years.

Can I just make a request of like

the internet or not the internet, the media, right?

I would love to have a people I can rely on

for Supreme Court analysis that I think are looking at it from like an arm's length point of view, because what tends to happen is a lot of,

you know, hysteria and they always think that like everything is going to be ruled in a conservative direction when as a 5-4 court, it showed,

you know, it legalized.

gay marriage, which by the way is probably not vulnerable because it was also legalized by

statute.

There are some things that, so, you know, as I've been researching this, so NATO, Congress passed a law saying the president can't pull out of NATO.

Trump can and maybe will try, but like that goes to litigation.

But like, I would, I would, I want

more court analysis from people who isn't, who aren't super blue-pilled and can be quote unquote objective,

both about the law and about kind of just how the court empirically behaves.

I do think the court will see it.

I mean, look, if, if it says, oh, there's some end around to birthright citizenship, I mean, that would be, I think,

a very bad sign, right?

Because then it means there's like not really any restraint.

My priors are that you're going to have some, a fair amount of

restraint.

But I would love to read, I would love to have more go-to sources on that.

So would I.

By the way, 18 states,

while we've been taping,

have already sued to

challenge the birthright citizenship

executive order.

So that has already entered into the legal system.

We always knew that was going to be the first thing, right, that was going to be challenged.

But so we are already, we're seeing some of it.

And yes, I think that if the Supreme Court by the way, rules that there's a way around this, then that's just going to kind of confirm everyone, including mine, worst fears

that like this is just a complete sham.

Right.

So

let's hope that they don't.

But the legal system has changed a lot

in the last eight years.

And that is one of the guardrails that has become shakier.

So

it's interesting that you, obviously, that you're pointing out that, well, gay marriage is protected, but there are, you know,

There's no guarantee that things like that will remain protected if we start going down the slope of like, let's get rid of all of these rights that have been protected for a while.

So I hope it remains protected, but it's one of these things where, you know, I think we all have to be on alert.

I guess part of what I'd say is like,

you don't need slippery slope arguments because A, people aren't persuaded by them.

And B, like, there's so much shit happening right now, right?

And this is like, I mean, this is, you know, because it's not going to be a legislative

driven presidency unless, unless somehow Trump wins more seats at the midterms, which is pretty rare.

The big fights are happening right now, right?

Now is as important a moment as you'll ever have in the Trump administration because it doesn't take time to build up a coalition and things like that.

He's acting as like a unitary executive.

It's probably some term, legal term.

So he's acting as like a strong president, right?

Through executive order.

And so, and so

look, I mean, look, you're also in an environment.

People have incentives.

I mean, I'm sure that

the Elon making the

some person called it, it's an Italian salute.

You know, I don't know.

I mean, probably a bad look, but like, don't, don't waste bandwidth cycles on that.

But like, I'm also sure that like alarmist Roman salute, our producers are saying, just a Roman, hey, look, just a Roman salute.

But like,

focus, but the incentives are not the focus.

The incentives are for your X-Feed or your Blue Sky or your Substack or whatever else.

The incentives are for outrage media.

Right.

And I think that we, like, we need to band together.

And instead of the outrage media, as you said, focus, try to figure out what, what, what can, what's happening, like, what are the fights?

How do you like make a logical argument?

And how do you kind of, how do you, what do you do about it?

As opposed to get outraged at every one of these little things, because Trump is going to win that fight.

Trump is incredibly good at getting outrage media on his side.

And right now he has Musk on his side and Musk controls X.

So he is very good at at kind of that thing.

That's his forte, right?

The social media kind of outrage type of thing.

So I think not falling for that and to remain focused is, in my mind, one of the best things that we can do is how we allocate our attention and then how we allocate our resources.

as opposed to just, you know, getting, getting distracted and going all over the place, which is what he wants us to do.

So let's, let's, you know, I think this is like a good battle tactic from the old greats of, you know, Sun Tzu and Klaus Witz and all of the battle tacticians that I read

way back when.

Don't when the enemy tries to distract you, don't fall for it.

Right.

Figure it out, get focused and have a good plan of attack yourself.

Don't let them set the rules.

Figure out how to set the rules yourself.

You know, I don't even see it as a we or that.

You know, I, you know, I see myself as like an intellectual free agent.

I think I'm never going to become team Trump per se, but like, look, I like the pro growth stuff and the free speech stuff and some of it, right?

And so like,

and I don't think Democratic, the Democratic Party has offered very strong leadership over the past couple of cycles necessarily.

And so, you know, I see we as like an American citizen.

I'm saying we as like protecting the American people.

You know what should be the 28th Amendment?

What is?

Is an amendment limiting presidential pardon?

power at the very least to like self-pardons and and the family and things like that right We need an amendment to the Constitution to prevent presidential pardon powers from being abused.

I agree with you that presidential

pardons are being misused right now.

I don't know that that's our number one amendment priority, but I bet your point, but your point is taken.

And I do think that it's been, you know, it's a little bit ridiculous, this kind of tit-for-tat type of presidential pardons that we've seen in the last 48 hours.

And yeah, we'll just we'll see who

let's,

I think that we can go back to end with our like little kids on the playground or rhesus analogy.

Let's see who who can become adult more quickly, right?

Like who's going to be able to emerge from this and stop finger pointing and doing silly stuff and getting distracted and like get their shit together and actually think through the future of the country in a mature way.

This is a challenge to both Republicans and Democrats.

I think this is a challenge to our entire government and I hope that they rise up to the challenge.

We'll be right back after this message.

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This week, we're going to answer a listener question.

Why don't Nate and I have a driver's license?

Which, by the way, the listener is wrong about one of those two people.

This is true.

We have a question from Kenny in Detroit, and the question is: Why the hell do neither of you have a driver's license?

Kenny, I now have have a driver's license.

I have after,

yeah, I've driven.

Nate has driven with me and I did not crash us, right?

I did a good job.

I took driving lessons after I, you know, moved to Nevada.

You

need to have a driver's license and know how to drive.

So I took lessons

and I am now the proud possessor of driving skills.

Before that, I did not have a license because I've always lived in the city, right?

As an adult, I've lived in New York and my entire adult life.

And you do not need a driver's license.

You do not need a car.

It's very hard to have a car in New York.

We talked last week about congestion pricing, but even before that,

you know, parking is a pain in the ass.

Driving is a pain in the ass.

And I grew up in Boston.

And I think Boston, a lot of people will say, is the worst city in the country to drive because Boston drivers

are very aggressive, very unpredictable, and Boston streets are horrific.

So I'm also the youngest of four kids.

So people always drove me around and I skipped a few grades in school, skipped one grade, but was young to begin with.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I couldn't get a license until after I graduated.

And by that point, I went to college.

Our producer is asking if you drive like a Bostonian.

Yeah.

No, I do not drive like a Bostonian.

Was that a question to you or to me, Maria?

No, I know.

I didn't notice any

custodian tendencies.

I thought Maria drove pretty well.

I think we got lost in a casino parking lot.

My mixing this up, but like maybe it was with someone else.

It's confusing, though.

Those casino parking lots are, you go around in circles and they change it, but the driving itself seemed good.

I appreciate that.

No, that was with me.

I drove us in circles a few times, but then I got us out of there.

I hate casino parking lots.

They're designed like casinos.

Casino design is meant for you to get lost in there so that you end up having to walk past all the different machines.

And like you just get, if you look at the old casinos, right, like a Caesars,

you just, your sense of orientation goes out the window.

It changed.

Steve Wynne actually changed the design elements and it's much more pleasant and open and you don't get lost like at an Encore the way that you do at Caesars.

But I feel like casino parking lots were designed.

by the same principle.

Like how the fuck do you get out of there?

And it's impossible sometimes to figure out like where the exit is, where the exit is not.

And you find yourself going in circles.

And I just want to say there are no slot machines in the, in the garage.

Just make it easy.

Make it easy for me to get out.

I don't know how to solve that problem.

But Nate, yeah, you're a New Yorker.

So I think that that answers why you don't have a license.

But you didn't grow up in New York.

Well, I wasn't originally.

I grew up in Michigan.

I grew up in Michigan.

the automotive state.

The short-ish version is like, I was kind of a klutzy kid.

I failed my initial driving test.

I then got, I then passed.

Mate, I didn't know that.

Yeah.

I'm more coordinated now than I used to be.

I then passed,

I then got, however, I took a class at like Sears.

God, I'm fucking old, right?

And got a permit.

And my dad was like, but you got to drive another 50 hours with me before I sign off on the license.

And then, and then I do some of that.

But then I go to college in Chicago.

And then,

and I've lived in Chicago and

New York my whole life

since then so um

and my partner drives we do have a car uh so it just kind of isn't like hasn't quite been worth the investment but it'd be fun it'd be fun to like yeah

I don't know prove people wrong I don't know but I get I feel like would I be a good driver probably not

high variance I think

well yeah well we'll just uh we'll see um in a few years whether you've learned how to drive or not.

I'm glad I now know how to drive,

but it was really, really nice.

I'll end on this.

It was really nice not being able to drive because no one can ask you to do shit, right?

Like you can't run errands and you can't pick people up and you can't do anything like that because you're like, sorry, I don't know how to drive.

But now that excuse no longer applies.

So there was part of me that actually really liked the fact that.

No one could ever ask me to run any car-related errands.

No, it is interesting, right you don't want to give people the option i'm trying to think of some is there some name like burning your bridges there's got to be some other more updated feeling heuristic right but like denying people the option right um yeah

yep i think i think that's good so yes that that is the answer to your question kenny from detroit um and so far i have a pristine driving record knock on wood

Let us know what you think of the show.

Reach out to us at riskybusiness at pushkin.fm.

Risky Business is hosted by me, Maria Kondakova.

And by me, Nate Silver.

The show is a co-production of Pushkin Industries and iHeart Media.

This episode was produced by Isabel Carter.

Our associate producer is Gabriel Hunter Chang.

Our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein.

If you like the show, please rate and review us so other people can find us too.

And if you want to listen to an ad-free version, sign up for Pushkin Plus.

For $6.99 a month, you get access to ad-free listening.

Thanks for tuning in.

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