Mike Murphy: The Chinese Own Elon

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Speaker 26 Hello and welcome to the Borg podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
We're in carnival season. I'm in my James Carville rugby shirt.
It's Muses Thursday.

Speaker 26 I'm delighted to be here today with a veteran Republican strategist, an OG never Trumper. He worked for McCain, Schwarzenegger, Romney, Jeb.
You might have heard of them.

Speaker 26 He's co-host of Hacks on Tap and co-director of Center for the Political Future at USC. He also runs the EV policy project, an effort to end the partisan divide over electric vehicles.

Speaker 26 By now, you figured out it's Mike Murphy. What's going on, man?

Speaker 27 Hey, man. Good to see you, Tim.

Speaker 26 Good to see you. It's been too long.

Speaker 27 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 26 I also have a bonus segment for everybody in segment two, so stick around with Michael Fanon. It was going to be a YouTube only thing, but Fanon was so good

Speaker 26 yesterday that the audio people got to hear it too. So stick around for Fanon.

Speaker 26 Because I know show business, I'm going to start with something here that both of us hate to admit and that the audience will hate to hear. Does that sound like a good way to start the podcast?

Speaker 27 Yeah, yeah. Reach for the mute button, America.

Speaker 26 But

Speaker 26 did you watch any of the cabinet meeting, the pay-per-view cabinet meeting yesterday? Did you catch any of it?

Speaker 27 I watched about 20 seconds on video before I started thinking about, I started thinking very bad thoughts.

Speaker 27 I mean, seeing Elon, that man-child, bouncing around in his Nazi tank commander outfit in the cabinet room of the United States, it just snapped me, so I couldn't take anymore.

Speaker 26 All right, well, good. Maybe our listeners will like to hear your opinion because I was about to give a wrong thought, which was the substance was gross.
We'll get into that.

Speaker 26 But boy, I thought the PR was pretty good yesterday. And I just think that Trump being in that room, it had kind of a question time British vibe.
He was insulting J.D. Vance over in the cuck chair.

Speaker 26 You know,

Speaker 26 he was taking all the questions. He seemed like he was kind of in command of the topics.
He didn't seem lost. And obviously, he says crazy stuff all the time.
It's Trump.

Speaker 26 But, you know, you have wall-to-wall TV coverage. He's announcing things that I think are good.
Again, substance aside, good marketing, like 5 million bucks.

Speaker 26 If you want to come to the country, we'll pay down the debt with $5 million gold cards. Again, it's huckster stuff.

Speaker 26 I just, I was like, it's hard to imagine Biden doing that. It's hard to imagine some of the other folks doing that.

Speaker 26 And like, you can, even though I find him just like you, disgusting, I can only handle that 20 seconds. Like, it was a moment where I was like, I can see why people at least can be conned by this.

Speaker 27 Yeah, no, look, he is very fluent in the complicated language of moron, which many politicians don't speak well. They think they're getting trouble for it.

Speaker 27 So he feels like an authentic brush of fresh air because he gets there and he does his drunk uncle thing. You know, you know what else? I don't like limousines.
I'm getting rid of all the limousines.

Speaker 27 JD, lose the limos. We're squaring this place up.
So it's good performative bullshit.

Speaker 27 And for his world that hates politics, hates Washington, hates the establishment, kind of hates reading, writing, and arithmetic, it plays great. So yeah, they're hitting a lot of doubles at that.

Speaker 27 The thing is, this is a long game. So, you know, and it's pretty hard, as you know, as president, you get a pretty easy first hundred days.

Speaker 27 But then stuff starts counting.

Speaker 27 And if you deconstruct this, the guy was elected to fix the economy because people perceived, and that's all that counts in politics, that the economy was better when he was president for all his flaws than it was under Biden.

Speaker 27 It was old and crazy, inflation, blah, blah, blah. So we'll see how it runs out.
But in the short term, doing his card tricks and, hey, Elon, I want you to, the toll boost, get rid of them.

Speaker 27 Who wants to wait at a toll, right, fellas? And they all clap like chimps.

Speaker 27 It's a good show.

Speaker 27 But the long game is

Speaker 27 the existential live or die in politics. And the long game, they're doing almost everything, in my view, wrong.

Speaker 26 Yeah, it was a good show. It was crazy, Uncle, not confused.
And I guess I just think that is important, right?

Speaker 26 Like, he's old, but he doesn't look, he looked like, you know, he looked crazy, not confused.

Speaker 27 But he's got a plan and he's a barstool, know-it-all. So we all know, we all know the Coast Guard.
They don't do anything real. It's the Navy.

Speaker 27 So get rid of the Coast Guard, cut the money, and charge the Canadians. We're guarding their coast, too.
A billion a day. I like them.
Half a million a day.

Speaker 27 Anybody writing this town, you know, it's an act.

Speaker 26 I only brought in guests during Mardi Gras season who I can just put a quarter in the machine and let them go because I know

Speaker 26 I'm not going to be at 100%. So that's why we got the Murphy doing the shit here.

Speaker 26 I want to get back to the economy stuff, but there's one ominous thing from the drunk uncle cabinet session yesterday, and I want to play that clip perfect.

Speaker 28 Is it your view of your authority that you have the power to call up any one or all of the people seated at this table and issue orders that they're bound to follow?

Speaker 28 Oh, yeah, they'll follow the audience. Yes, they will.
No exceptions. No exception.
Well, let's see. Let me think.
Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 28 She'll have an exception.

Speaker 28 Of course, no exceptions.

Speaker 29 You know that.

Speaker 26 I got to tell you, I was watching that live, suffering for you.

Speaker 26 And when he said, oh, let me see, she'll have an exception, like for a half of a second, for like a millisecond, I was like, oh, man, is he going to acknowledge that Pam Bondi doesn't have to do what he says?

Speaker 26 And then he obviously is like, no, that was a joke. Actually, everyone does exactly what I say because I'm the king.
And that is some pretty, pretty ominous stuff.

Speaker 27 Well, that's always the subtext is, you know, I'm just playing here because I'm El Supremo.

Speaker 27 And of course, you know, him, in fact, you know what I like? I like the Charleston. Everybody dance.
Dance for me right now. He's always a click away from that.

Speaker 27 So it's who he is. God help us.

Speaker 26 Yeah, God help us for sure. When you get into Wannabe Trillionaire hour here, a lot of news in the Wannabe Trillionaire class.

Speaker 26 Jeff Bezos yesterday at the Washington Post put out a statement about the plans for the Washington Post editorial page. He's fired the existing editor, David Shipley.

Speaker 26 I want to read a little bit from the post here. He said, we are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars, personal liberties and free markets.
I'm with you there.

Speaker 26 We'll cover other topics too, of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.

Speaker 26 There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader's doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views.

Speaker 26 Today, the internet does that job. I am of America and for America and proud to be so.

Speaker 26 Our country did not get here by being typical, and a big part of America's success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. I got a lot of thoughts on that.
What are yours?

Speaker 27 Yeah, it's not good. I mean, I'm a right-winger.
I'd like to see more classic conservative thinking on a lot more editorial pages.

Speaker 27 The post-editorial page, though, actually, over the last 20 years have been pretty good.

Speaker 27 You know, it has not been a left-wing

Speaker 27 wonderland as much as many other broadsheets, to the extent there are any left. So it's troubling.
You know, I can't figure out Bezos.

Speaker 27 I think I'm going to blame Wife 2 because I had lunch with him when he bought the post.

Speaker 27 Long story, but I'm sitting there having lunch with him.

Speaker 26 Just the two of you or it was like a group thing?

Speaker 27 No, it was me, him, and Carney.

Speaker 27 And so I had spoken at a CEO thing, and he was the host of it here in Los Angeles. And he walked up to me afterward and said, hey, you want to have lunch? I'm like, sorry, don't have time.

Speaker 27 I'm seeing the Zap guy.

Speaker 26 No, of course, of course I want to lunch. Bezos, tell me about Amazon.

Speaker 27 I have my customer. So, and it was interesting, but he was total technocrat, very curious about what to do with the Post.
And I said, have some fun with Trump.

Speaker 30 Put undercover, do the old

Speaker 27 Gloria Steinem thing. Put two reporters undercover at his hotel for three months, write about it.
You know, blah, blah, blah. And he was eating it all up.
He wasn't really ideological.

Speaker 27 It wasn't anti-Trump, wasn't pro-Trump. It was, how do I make a great newspaper? That is not the guy given these dictates.
So I don't know what happened to him, but it's very depressing.

Speaker 27 I mean, the obvious theory is, oh, he's got business interests and all that. But these guys are often so rich.
Who the president is not that material to the yacht fuel bill?

Speaker 27 Something else is going on, and

Speaker 27 it's sad.

Speaker 26 And yet another institution buckles. What I think is going on is the Blue Origin stuff, right? Like you need Trump for Blue Origin for space, and that's not really money.

Speaker 26 You do need, you know, the government to either fund it, deregulate it, right? Like at some level, you need government involvement there.

Speaker 26 And so I guess maybe some worry about Trump, but also maybe he's been red-pilled. I don't know.
Like his statement.

Speaker 26 At some level, if somebody came to me and said, I'm starting a new, or I've taken over the post and I decided to just get rid of the opinion page together. A lot of great people over there.

Speaker 26 I would feel bad for them. I'd hope they'd find another job.
But I would understand the argument, right? Like a newspaper doesn't really need an opinion page anymore because of the internet.

Speaker 26 Like, that part of the argument for me works. Then the next step, though, to say, well, we just need to imitate the economists and the two existing editorial pages.

Speaker 26 We are going to ban all counter viewpoints in the name of freedom.

Speaker 27 That's the bad one. Yeah.

Speaker 26 Like, in the name of freedom also.

Speaker 27 And then they're going to be radio, you know, my frequency and nothing else.

Speaker 26 Yeah.

Speaker 26 And then it's like, I also want to be unapologetically about freedom in the economic realm, like says the person who is like mouth is on the teeth of the government in like so many different areas.

Speaker 26 I mean, like, think about all the ways that Amazon has like has tried to tilt the market in their favor with various regulations and local. You know what I mean?

Speaker 26 Like, it's not, this is not Reason Magazine here. I like it.

Speaker 26 And Bezos's hands aren't clean.

Speaker 27 It's just like Elon. He's the biggest corporate welfare profiteer in the world, right? You know, yet with a new libertarian superstate.

Speaker 27 What propped up Tesla for years is selling credits to regular car makers to to offset their emissions here and in Europe, billions and billions of pure profit. Yeah.

Speaker 27 If it wasn't for those regs, Tesla might not have made it.

Speaker 26 Right. So it just kind of like feels like you're peeing on me and telling me it's raining.
You know, it's one of those things. If I felt like this was authentic, you could at least listen to it.

Speaker 26 Right.

Speaker 27 And he had that when he stepped on the endorsement,

Speaker 27 you know, that kind of put him in the, okay, he's trying to put the fix in. Now, you know, there's a long history of guys buy papers and they get to be blowhards on the editorial page.

Speaker 27 But in this moment in time with an institution that's important, but also is struggling as opposed to,

Speaker 27 it's really troubling.

Speaker 26 And it's also not going to help the businesses, right?

Speaker 27 That's why it's just such an interesting thing.

Speaker 26 Like it hurts the business. People are unsubscribing.
By the way, if you've unsubscribed from the post, the Bullword Plus is available. So it's not helping the business.

Speaker 26 And

Speaker 26 it just doesn't make.

Speaker 26 sense across any and then also just morally and ethically like the threat of trump you want people challenge like the post the paper of record in dc should be challenging the status quo not like doing like wink wink america first stuff right and everybody there of any renown or weight is looking for a new job.

Speaker 27 There aren't a lot of new jobs, but it's going to be a talent drain.

Speaker 27 I mean, I wrote Bezos a big fan letter yesterday because his antics have led my wife Tiff to give up using Amazon, which is the welcome development I'm going to get killed for saying that she's a listener.

Speaker 27 But

Speaker 27 it is going to hurt the business. Yeah.
Just like Tesla's being murdered by Elon right now, both in Europe and the U.S.

Speaker 26 Yeah, let's go into that. Let's go into Elon.
I want to get your take with your EV hat on a second, but just like biggest possible picture thoughts on Doge and what Elon's been up to.

Speaker 27 You know, in campaigns, you're always ranting about government waste because people think 30% of the money is wasted. And as you know, well, perception is reality.

Speaker 27 Now, there is plenty of waste in government, some places more than others.

Speaker 27 But sending interns in and chimps with chainsaws to try to get to the payroll computer and screw everybody over with no plan, no, you know, if they had announced that Brad Smith, who's part of Doge, who I know, a very smart healthcare entrepreneur, hey, Brad, Elon's going to use this relationship to get behind you guys, come up with a smart plan to fix Medicaid.

Speaker 27 The fraud in California and Medicaid alone would make Tony Soprano feel guilty and like not want to be part of it. It's unbelievable.
But instead, they're doing the intern core, going into like USAID.

Speaker 27 One, it's no money. Two, soft power is really important.
And three, it's full of CIA people. So, you know, on every level, it's stupid.

Speaker 27 They're laughing their asses off in China and Russia right now about all this. It's so reckless and dumb.

Speaker 27 But publicly, people like the idea of some sharp pencil person coming in and shaking up, quote, government spending. The problem are these guys are incompetent.

Speaker 27 And even the Trump appointees who are not the bureaucratic operational hall of fame realize that he's screwing up agencies here.

Speaker 27 And so Doge is a good cause corrupted by arrogance, stupidity, and the lack of any plan at all. And politically, it's going to come back and hurt them.

Speaker 26 And putting your conservative hat on, I just, I ask everybody with a conservative disposition this question on here because I'm just trying to process it myself.

Speaker 26 Do you see any case for the idea that it's just like, well,

Speaker 26 just slash 30% across the board, you know, see where the chips fall. We'll fix it on the back end.

Speaker 26 And like, that's the only way to break up, you know, these entrenched interests that have gotten sclerotic. I don't know.

Speaker 26 I saw one of your old clients, saw Meg Whitman at an event recently, and Meg was like, Meg hates Trump. And so

Speaker 26 this was not a pro-Doge comment, but she's like, I've been in government the last few years, you know, having been appointed by the Biden administration.

Speaker 26 There's definitely some room to cut some stuff. So I don't know.
Do you see any argument for that at all?

Speaker 27 There is,

Speaker 27 but I would like a modicum of intelligence on what to cut. Why don't you go where the money is, which is entitlements? Now, they're big and bloated for a reason.
They have huge political support.

Speaker 27 That's what the Trump guys in his House budget, that's what they're going to spend the next 12 months discovering as we head to the midterm elections.

Speaker 27 Government is bloated because it form files function. People like bloated government.
But yeah, there's a smart way to do it.

Speaker 27 And if they think they can use their head of steam to take the political heat for cuts, I'm all for it. But I want a plan.
You know, I kind of want to put the cops where the crime is.

Speaker 27 It's like we're going to attack a crime way by sending the National Guard into Scarsdale, New York. Well, no.
You know, there ought to be a little thinking to this. And there isn't.

Speaker 27 The only thinking is tactical. How do we screw the agencies? We get to the payroll department and we freeze the, this was Elon's O trick.
Just stop paying bills.

Speaker 27 It takes people eight years to sue you. They'll just go away and eat the invoice.
That's what he did at Twitter.

Speaker 26 Yeah. And that's continuing.
So Sam Stein has reporting for us in the newsletter this morning that there's a new round of global health cuts, right?

Speaker 26 Like, so you got one judge that's putting a freeze on one set of cuts in various USAID and foreign programs. And that is now up to the Supreme Court.
Roberts is looking at that.

Speaker 26 Meanwhile, they have not done what the judge told them. Like, they've continued to freeze the cuts that are initially froze.

Speaker 26 They're like, whatever, you know, come and make me, I guess, is Elon's point.

Speaker 26 And then they've added on top of it another round of cuts, including things they said they weren't going to cut, including PEPFAR, you know, the AIDS program that W is so proud of.

Speaker 27 You know, American farmers are paid to make food, which they're great at, to ship the starving kids.

Speaker 27 There's half a billion of it rotting in ships on docks within a short truck drive of starving people right now. And you know what's going to show up next week if it hasn't already? The Chinese food.

Speaker 27 You know, the geopolitics of this. I mean,

Speaker 26 honestly, that's how dark the situation is. That's like the best case scenario that the Chinese actually fill in, you know, because like they're like real deaths.
I we're trying to track down.

Speaker 26 for YouTube later so people can can look at it. But, you know, Jeremy Kanindik, who led the U.S.

Speaker 26 government's response to Ebola, was posting just today about like how they, again, this is one of those things where they said that they were going to do a carve-out for this, but there hasn't been any.

Speaker 26 And these groups in Africa, the NGOs, are just shutting down. So there's like real human cost to this for like, is there even any benefit, right? Like

Speaker 26 no real benefit, I don't think, budget-wise.

Speaker 27 No, no, it's part of the thing about he's cutting one of the dumbest things to cut, and he's not getting any real money for it. That, you know, it's so scatter shot.

Speaker 27 It's chimp with the chainsaw stuff. And geopolitically, soft power is important.

Speaker 27 And we had a time where we don't really want to be retreating in that world because we got powerful bad guys on the march. So, you know, this is the thing about Trump.

Speaker 27 He's got this perceived image as smart business genius. When the truth is, if he took his inheritance and he put it in an index fund, he'd be a lot richer.

Speaker 27 It's the relentless stupidity of Donald Trump that is the real tell, though, you know, he built a television career on primetime in a cardboard set pretending to be a business tycoon, hiring and firing Gilbert Godfrey.

Speaker 27 And in the world of perceptionist reality pop culture, wow, he already knows how to straighten things out. No, he doesn't.

Speaker 26 So, I mean, that takes us to like the budget element of this, which is not Trump, really, because he's letting the guys on the hill do this, but

Speaker 26 he's going to be the one that ends up arm twisting if they're even able to get it through. It squeaks by by one vote in Kanderson, I guess, since you've mentioned your spouse.

Speaker 26 I didn't think they'd even be able to do the non-binding budget. My husband was like, I think that they'll squeak it out.
He's a lobbyist. So he's the vote counter in the family.

Speaker 26 So he got that one right. Kudos to him.
But they squeak it out by one vote. Now they actually are going to have to go do it again with

Speaker 26 the weight of law behind it and with like real details.

Speaker 27 Right. I mean, this was the hard, but it's the easiest one because it's the least binding.
It's the least binding and there's the least details. Right.
It's the wish list. Yeah.

Speaker 26 You can say, you can kind of lie the Medicaid thing. Like I saw Mike Waller, the supposed moderate that never does anything moderate on TV talking about like, well, this isn't real Medicaid cuts.

Speaker 26 You know, it's just like we're cutting under HHS and we're going to find fraud and we'll see what the details are.

Speaker 27 It's directional. You know, it's an aspirational budget.

Speaker 27 And when do they get to the Senate, by the way, with the old dragons? They're going to be like, hey, wait a minute.

Speaker 27 I think in their easiest place, the House, by one vote, they got their easiest thing done. by one vote.
Still something. I would have probably bet against it, but not a lot of money too.

Speaker 27 So I would have lost lost a bet with your husband. But it only gets harder from here.

Speaker 27 I heard a savvy former ways and means Republican lobbyist, you know, the tax writing committee in the House saying, well, now they got to kill, they got to decide between slashing Medicaid, which we've never been able to do because all the Pauls are afraid of it, or slashing the salt tax they want to give back that he's promised, or making him eat his words on tax cuts.

Speaker 27 It's going to be fun to watch. They're putting their hands into two disposals simultaneously.

Speaker 26 We're just juicing the debt by $4.5 trillion, which takes back to the Elon thing.

Speaker 26 Even the budget that they put through,

Speaker 26 even with using

Speaker 26 the mega

Speaker 26 Heritage Foundation money counters who are throwing some stuff under the couch, cushions and sending it to the counter.

Speaker 26 Even they say it's, I think, not $865 billion

Speaker 26 is the debt increase over 10 years.

Speaker 26 The real number is 3 trillion, probably, maybe more. And just extending the tax cuts themselves or 4 trillion and then sort of deal out the cuts.
And so so it's like they don't even have

Speaker 26 a directional plan towards cutting the deficit or debt. And so they're doing all these painful cuts in the name of cutting the deficit and then they're not going to do it.

Speaker 27 And they're doing top lines that are incredibly hard. Even if you squeezed all the waste out of Medicaid, you probably can't get there.

Speaker 27 You know, the real, the reality of it, it's like the old Dennis Miller. joke about judges.
There ought to be three verdicts now because crimes are so horrible.

Speaker 27 Guilty, innocent, and you're shitting me. And that's what this budget is, you know, or this budget framework, this non-binding aspiration.
So yeah, there's gravity in politics. It takes a while.

Speaker 27 And that's the point Carville was making in the New York Times today.

Speaker 27 And I'm like three quarters where he is, which is, you know, there's nothing wrong, Democrats, in the short term with retreating into the step and let them over-advance and starve over time.

Speaker 27 Because I think in the whole price of eggs department, that could be what happens. You ought to loudly peck at them.

Speaker 26 You do think that's right. I was going to get into the economy, but me and Carville, I'm in the Carville shirt, so I can say it.

Speaker 27 I know, I say it with love.

Speaker 26 I'm like not with them on this one. I think that what's the harm in

Speaker 26 just

Speaker 26 being monkeys with shit and throwing the shit right back in their face right now and seeing which what hits. I don't, I'm kind of on that side of things.

Speaker 27 Well, my view is you can kind of do both. Tactically, you ought to gnaw on them every day, but don't do it at haughty, Democrat, NPR language.
Oh, you know what they did today?

Speaker 27 They laid off 100 baby food inspectors at agriculture. What? You know, bumper stickers that people understand and peck away at them.

Speaker 27 But fundamentally, knowing you don't have any power, letting him run wild for a while since you really don't have any option and

Speaker 30 let him dig the hole that he is digging.

Speaker 27 I mean, name an American politician that went crazy on Medicaid cuts and survive. You know, name a governor.
So Carville's doing the old General Zhukov thing, retreat into Russia and wait for winter.

Speaker 27 And I think that is true and going to happen anyway, but I'm for sniping all the way there.

Speaker 32 You know,

Speaker 26 I agree with you that. And on the language, I was just on with

Speaker 26 John Lovett over of Apante of America. We were doing this kind of discussion of the different Democratic strategies.
We're going through the videos of what Democrats have been saying.

Speaker 26 And there are some AOC videos. And like AOC has these two wolves inside of her.
One is like bartender AOC. Yeah.
And the Republicans make fun of her over that.

Speaker 27 But I think that's the right one.

Speaker 26 Right. Like, and then like like the other one is like toughs, like I'm in a toughs meeting of an intersectional activist group, AOC, right? And it's like, that is the one that like isn't landing.

Speaker 26 But I think that like bartender AOC, Ruben Gallago was on the pod yesterday.

Speaker 26 I thought he was really good at this, like just speaking plainly about what they're, the harm they're causing, I think is the right path, right?

Speaker 27 Yeah, in bumper stickers, people understand. People fired Biden and by extension, Kamala, because he thought he was a crazy old man who turned out couldn't run the economy.
Well, guess what?

Speaker 27 Over time, Trump is a crazy old man who can't run the economy either. I mean, today he tried to announce he had another scary tariff.
Tariffs are economic poison.

Speaker 27 They hurt his voters more than anybody, which is, of course, the sick irony of it all.

Speaker 27 So let Trump screw himself up because you can't really stop his power right now and snipe all the way in people language that they understand.

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Speaker 26 I've been desperate to talk about what like the economic trajectory is, and both of us are political hacks. So I'm going to have somebody that actually knows a thing or two that did better.

Speaker 26 I think I got a B minus in microeconomics 101 at GW. So we'll bring in somebody who's an expert.
But just like using common sense. I think that the economic trajectory right now is extremely shaky.

Speaker 26 And I was intrigued to see this clip from Steve Cohen, who's done very well for himself in the economy and is no far-left lib finance guy. He was a big supporter of Christie.

Speaker 26 And I think he even supported Trump in 16, doesn't anymore. But I want to listen, play you just a clip of him on a panel the other day that caught my eye.

Speaker 29 This is one of those moments where there's really a lot of uncertainty. I mean, tariffs cannot be positive.
It's a tax. Taxes are never positive.
On top of that, we have slowing immigration.

Speaker 29 And in addition, now you have Doge. Wherever you lay on the Doge issue, I mean, that's austerity.
It's got to be negative for the economy.

Speaker 29 We think growth is going to slow to 1.5 percent from 2.5 percent in the second half. The reality is we've got a brew of sticky inflation, slowing growth, and austerity in the government.

Speaker 29 And so I'm actually pretty negative for the first time in a while. And it may only last a year or so, but it's definitely a period where I think the best gains have been had.

Speaker 29 And it wouldn't surprise me to see a significant correction.

Speaker 26 Sticky inflation, slowing growth, and austerity. That doesn't seem like a winning package to me.

Speaker 27 Most of the economists would make exactly that argument. But it's back to the Trump paradigm.
Tariffs are on the street popular because they sound smart.

Speaker 27 Well, why we got all that, you know, Canadian steel coming in here? Well, here's what actually happens: you put a 25% tariff on Canadian steel.

Speaker 27 Let's pretend you didn't go into politics, save America, and you're running a Chevy plant, okay, in Oakland County, Michigan. Well, you're buying a lot of steel.
Now it costs 25% more.

Speaker 27 So you pick up the phone and call up U.S. Steel and Pittsburgh and say, hey, I need 50,000 tons of rolled steel.
The Canadian stuff costs 25% more. Well, what does U.S.
Steel say?

Speaker 27 Well, our shit costs 25% more. We just raised prices.
That's what steel now costs, smart guy. And by the way, because Chrysler is on the other line and Volkswagen from Tennessee,

Speaker 27 we don't have enough steel to fit the demand, so we're going to bump it up another 10%. You want your steel? You want to close your plant, smart guy? And it cascades.

Speaker 27 But on the street, it's like, yeah, screw them. USA number one.
One third of Republicans, indulge me for 20 seconds of car shit.

Speaker 27 One One-third of Republicans think the United States is the world's largest producer of automobiles. Another third thinks we're number two to Japan.
Neither are true. China's number one.

Speaker 27 We're number four.

Speaker 27 So, you know, this USA number one thing, Trump will say, we're going to build beautiful, new, beautiful steel plants. Fabulous.
The best you've ever seen. Takes eight to 10 years.

Speaker 27 Good luck with the permitting. So this whole tariff thing is anthrax for the economy.
It's just going to be a mess.

Speaker 26 Yeah. Good luck with the actuarial tables on that, too.

Speaker 26 It is. And I guess my question is:

Speaker 26 are the Republicans on the Hill, the whatever, the Jon Thunes of the world, the ones that you might have worked for in a different era, are they drinking the Kool-Aid?

Speaker 26 Are they wish casting? Are they trying to just dream into reality, like

Speaker 26 think positive thoughts, get positive outcomes?

Speaker 26 Because, I mean, they could do some things that would limit the damage that Cohen laid out there, but it doesn't seem like they're really interested in that.

Speaker 27 Yeah, at least publicly they're not. I think privately there's a lot.

Speaker 27 I mean, I had no idea after 40 years running campaigns for a lot of senators and congressmen and all the rest that free haircuts in the U.S. Senate were so damn seductive.

Speaker 27 Because we're not asking these guys to land on Anzio Beach for crying out loud. But boy, oh boy, they all line up.

Speaker 27 I had a conversation with one of my guys back in the day saying, you know, this guy's a clown and from a red state.

Speaker 27 And the senator said, oh, yeah, the other day, you know, we had to get the military aid to help him find Pakistan on a map, took an hour. You know, he thought it was next to Mexico.

Speaker 27 It's really, really pretty bad. And I said, well, why don't you tell him to go to hell? And he said, I'd love it.
My wife would speak to me again.

Speaker 27 I'd like to be on you spouting off on television about Trump all the time. I love it.
But here's the problem. I spout off against Trump.
I get a primary. I'm gone.

Speaker 27 A guy in an Uncle Sam suit is now in my job screwing up all the little stuff that I do to help Barneyville get the new whatever. And I said, fair enough.
What if three of you did it?

Speaker 27 And he said, call me when you get the other two. I'm in.

Speaker 27 And, you know, survival is the fundamental rule of politics, unfortunately, because it's hard to get there.

Speaker 27 So I think the Thunes of the world are hoping that they got bands calling them saying, don't worry, we're talking out of the crazy stuff, except, of course, Ukraine tariffs, you know,

Speaker 27 war on Greenland. But they're just clinging to that hope that he'll get all his yayas out and they'll be able to work some stuff out.
But, you know, I don't see it.

Speaker 26 And I guess they have gotten the delays in the tariffs. He kicked the can again yesterday to April 3rd or whatever.
So who knows? We'll keep kicking that can till Barron's president.

Speaker 27 But it's getting to the point where the strongman can't,

Speaker 27 you know, okay, Superman, you keep saying you're going to lift up a locomotive and you keep delaying it. Carpal tunnel, but you ain't Superman, huh? You know, he's putting himself in a corner.

Speaker 27 And by the way, if the Canadians got really pissed, the entire U.S.-Midwest runs in Canadian oil. They could knock oil to eight bucks a gallon in Ohio in a week.
You know, just saying

Speaker 27 trade wars suck.

Speaker 26 I've encouraging the Canadians to buck up. But I guess the rationale for that, for their pause on this makes sense, right?

Speaker 26 I mean, I was watching one of these funny spoof videos where it's a Canadian like pretending to be on the other line with Trump. And he's like, what do you want there? You just want a czar?

Speaker 26 He's like, you know, it's like, oh, yeah, we got Teddy over here. We just made him the czar.
All right. Good deal, Mr.
President. No problem there, right?

Speaker 26 Like, well, you want a couple barrels of maple syrup?

Speaker 27 Yeah, done. 10 more fighter planes and declare victory.
But you know what the number one applause line if you're a Canadian on the stump running for prime minister is?

Speaker 27 The old joke, how do you get 25 drunk Canadians out of a swimming pool? Hey, guys, please get out of the pool. But I've worked up there and I love Canada.

Speaker 27 But the great stump joke is, you know, after all, we settled the tough half of North America. And the crowd goes wild.

Speaker 27 They're pretty tough bastards under all the smiles and politeness. So I hope it doesn't escalate.
And they don't want it to. It's not in their interest.

Speaker 27 But, you know, I think Trump, like everything, sees a stereotype of Canada.

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Speaker 26 We got waylaid during the Elon section. I did want to get back to the EV side of things

Speaker 26 since you do some work on that. I mean, we were trying to figure what is happening with Bezos.
And

Speaker 26 who knows? Is it Blue Origin? Is it Red Pill? Is it I want to be the first next trillionaire? It's the second wife. It's a combination of all those things.
Maybe.

Speaker 26 Elon, though, is on the one hand, I mean, he's getting richer.

Speaker 26 And there's a story out today that I guess the FAA is potentially canceling a contract with Verizon and giving it to Starlink to the tune of billions and billions of dollars.

Speaker 26 So definitely some corruption opportunities here. So he might get personally richer.
He might personally have more power, but it is harming like Tesla, one of his babies, right?

Speaker 27 Yeah, yeah. We did, if you go to evpolitics.org, we do all this polling.
And, you know, we showed among people who say they're seriously interested in buying an EV in the next year,

Speaker 27 a small, but it's about 20% of the largest definition of the new car market. Toyota, Ford, and Volkswagen, we tested one German, one American, one Asian, are all far more popular than Tesla.

Speaker 27 You know, among Harris voters, Elon's unfavorable is 76%.

Speaker 27 And right. And his favorable is five.
Yeah, room to grow there. Yeah, a little room to improve.
And that was a while ago. That was after the election.
Now it's worse, I'm sure.

Speaker 27 I don't know how much worse it can go. Among Trump voters, he's 70 over 10.
He's right up there with the other president. So it's hurting him.
But, you know, again,

Speaker 27 Tesla's, people say, why is Trump going after all the EV subsidies? It'll hurt Tesla. And it will a little bit in the short term.

Speaker 27 But Tesla's most lucrative business is selling credits to other car companies that make gas cars and need to buy offsets. So he's in the Tesla business, not the category of EV businesses.

Speaker 27 And I think Elon thinks the future is not making cars. Well, it's making self-driving cars and robots.

Speaker 27 And if you have a car that after you drive to work, you push a button and it drives away to go be a taxi all day and make money and come back and picks you up, instead of running for one hour every 24, it'll run for 10.

Speaker 27 If we utilize cars like that and this future, people imagine, we need a hell of a lot less cars.

Speaker 27 The problem is all that self-driving stuff that Elon has convinced Wall Street, and that's why he's valued like a tech company, not like a car company, that's coming, BYD, the big Chinese world-killing car company, just announced, yeah, we're going to give it away for a buck in every car.

Speaker 27 So, there goes that five-grand a car pure profit thing Wall Street was betting on for Elon.

Speaker 27 You know, I'm in this because I'm from Detroit, and the American auto industry, the American manufacturing auto industry, which is Volkswagen in Tennessee, Ford in Detroit, et cetera, et cetera, Mercedes, could go away in a decade.

Speaker 27 People don't understand how big this is.

Speaker 26 Really? Tell me more.

Speaker 27 Well, the Chinese can, if we let them, they can import a great $30,000 electric or gas car in that is essentially equal or better to anything you can buy in the market now.

Speaker 27 The president of Ford, who's one of those visionary guys in this, Jim Farley, about eight months ago went over to China and drove his Zhao Mi SU-7, catchy name. Very popular new car.

Speaker 27 And he loved it so much, he had it stuffed in a shipping container and shipped it to to Detroit and drove it around Ford and let his executives drive it for six months. He doesn't want to give it up.

Speaker 27 It's the only one in the country on a temporary plate. The feds are probably going to seize it.

Speaker 27 And he said, if we can't make one of these in a few years, there's going to be no more Ford and Motor Company.

Speaker 26 What does he like so much about it? Like, what is...

Speaker 27 Well, the software is really good. The cost of production, they designed their cars to be cheaper to make, kind of like Tesla does.

Speaker 27 The battery tech is more advanced than what we have right now, though we're catching up. And they pay their auto workers $10 an hour.

Speaker 27 So they are very competitive vehicles. The Mexican car market has been the canary in the coal mine.
Four years ago, China sold 40,000 cars in Mexico, gas and electric combined.

Speaker 27 This year, they're probably at half a million. Wow.
They're eating the market there. They've already eaten it in Israel.
They're in Europe. They're everywhere but here.

Speaker 27 And Trump thinks, well, we're just at the American market. American market is only 10% of the world market.
GM sells as many cars in Asia as they do in the United States.

Speaker 27 So if our guys can't compete worldwide where the trend is unstoppably and undoubtedly electric, you know, we're going to be British Leyland.

Speaker 27 The government will be propping up a couple of companies that are the minor players in the world. So, this is a huge issue.

Speaker 26 I didn't mean to go deep on this, but you've intrigued me.

Speaker 26 I don't have a ton of hope that this administration is going to do some smart domestic industrial policy, but what would be the best thing to do to help us compete?

Speaker 27 The Biden stuff had typical bureaucratic ham-handedness in it, particularly the charging subsidies. But the loans to build new extremely competitive high-tech factories like Ford's thing.

Speaker 27 And by the way, these guys don't pay me. I do this for free.
I'm the donor here because I care a lot about it.

Speaker 27 The new Rivian plant, 9,000 manufacturing jobs in Georgia, those loans to build those plants to compete are vital, and Trump should leave them alone. The other thing is the consumer subsidies.

Speaker 27 You want a great car, you can go get an electric car and basically 200 bucks off a month in lease because Uncle Sam gives you 7,500 bucks. Now, I'm a Republican.

Speaker 27 I don't like subsidies, but there are 99 car companies in China and only a couple of them make money because the government has said, we don't care about making money.

Speaker 27 Build factories and take over the world market. That's your job.
So our guys and our allies in Germany or South Korea or Japan are competing against guys who don't have to make money.

Speaker 27 So we need subsidies now to muscle up and catch up our domestic stuff to make them world competitive.

Speaker 27 And to support our ally company, BMW makes more cars in their biggest plant in their entire systems in South Carolina. So this is a U.S., NATO, South Korea, Japan, Axis.

Speaker 27 And everybody's getting their lunch eaten, including Elon, by the way. His biggest plant's in China.
And BYD is eating Tesla's lunch there.

Speaker 26 This whole fact pattern, though, leads me back to like Elon really has lost his mind. You can argue.
Right. Because he's corrupt.

Speaker 26 A corrupt Elon, which would not be good in there, would be doing

Speaker 26 things necessary to like go after China, be aggressively to go after China, and to work with the Japanese, South Koreans, et cetera, like our axis, right, on international relations.

Speaker 26 We're like doing the opposite, kind of, I mean, we've put these tariffs on China, so I guess that's true. But Elon is alienating the markets that would be potentially open to his product.

Speaker 27 He is and he isn't. He's alienating the Germans.
He's had an 80% sales drop there in Europe.

Speaker 27 But the Chinese own Elon. That's the other little his largest plant is in China.
And that government can decide tomorrow, yeah, it's now people's plant number five, Elon.

Speaker 27 They let him build it on a waiver. He did not have to do the joint venture stuff.
They owned the paper on him.

Speaker 26 So here we are again. The Democrats, this is why the Democrats have to go in on China hawking.
I just, people don't get it.

Speaker 26 Like the fact that Elon is on the take from China and pretends to be a free speech warrior on the same time.

Speaker 26 And I was just talking about this this morning that there's this Chinese crypto guy who I've talked about here, Justin Sun.

Speaker 26 And Justin Sun put in tens of millions into Trump's, one of Trump's crypto griffs. And he's a fraudster.
He's a Chinese crypto fraudster being investigated by the SEC. Excuse me.

Speaker 26 He was being investigated by the SEC until this morning. There's a new press release out that shock, the guy that put all this money into Trump's crypto grift.
They're trying to come to a deal.

Speaker 26 So we'll see. We'll see how that shakes out.

Speaker 27 Yeah, he's innocent. We found out.

Speaker 27 It turned out we were wrong.

Speaker 26 The amount of China corruption in this administration, I just don't, I don't think it sunk in with people. All right.
A couple other things, really quick.

Speaker 26 We'll do a little round-the-horn of the clownery. I guess we'll go saddest to funniest.
Saddest, we had an unvaccinated school-aged child die of the measles yesterday in Texas.

Speaker 26 RFK, our new HHS secretary, who spread measles vaccine disinformation not too long ago yesterday

Speaker 26 during that cabinet meeting said basically, yeah, there's there's measles outbreak all the time. Like, we're on it.

Speaker 27 No, it's heartbreaking. A lot of the Trump stuff hurts places that vote for Trump more than anything else.
And we have a measles hotspot now and it'll it'll grow.

Speaker 27 And we got a guy who would rather try voodoo running HHS. It's disgusting.

Speaker 26 Our new FBI director, Cash Patel.

Speaker 27 Oh, God. How about his deputy, too? They got a radio blowhard who, you know, used to guard the president's dog.
Are you concerned about that?

Speaker 26 I have a funny news item I want to share, but what's your level of concern about

Speaker 27 we have the only plainclothes national secret police police of any superpower that are good guys you know you know generally when you have a the federal government has a plain clothes national secret police you know it's the trouble instrument and we've gone to great pains since the hoover era had some trouble yeah but that culture's been cleaned up it's highly professional it's really important

Speaker 27 and I think the culture is so embedded there it'll survive this, but we're going to pressure test it now. And it's a horrible insult to the rank and file professionals in that agency.

Speaker 27 So it's heartbreaking. Luckily, some of these guys are stupid and incompetent, which gets in the way of their vanality.
But

Speaker 27 it's terrible. Now, do I think I'll get hauled away in the middle of the night? No, no, no.

Speaker 27 But the FBI is going to go into an internal turmoil there now, which is bad for them and bad for the country.

Speaker 26 Yeah, speaking of the vanality, I enjoyed this story this morning from Evan Perez at CNN. Here's the nut graph.

Speaker 26 FBI director Cash Battelle walked into his new office on the seventh floor, HQ, and made an immediate order. So that's kind of ominous.
I was nervous when I heard that sentence.

Speaker 26 I was like, uh-oh, is he coming after,

Speaker 26 you know, is he coming after Comey? What's the immediate order? He wanted new carpeting and window coverings. He called the office dingy.

Speaker 27 So there you go.

Speaker 26 Doge in action.

Speaker 27 That's right. Yeah, no, you can't run a police state with a shitty office.
You know, come on. The enemies list board alone takes up eight square feet on the wall.

Speaker 27 It's like the thing where Trump ordered, I can't forget which Lick Spittle got it, but he wants $200 million ad campaign thanking him for the border. And I'm like, where's Doge? Where's

Speaker 27 $200 million bonfire to have Trump doing political ads on the government payroll?

Speaker 26 Yeah, we can't give rice to starving people in Africa, but we can do a great job, Mr. Trump, ad campaign.
All right, my last topic, moving on to the Democrats.

Speaker 26 To your governor, we have a new competitor. You know, Hacks on Tap and the Bullard podcast.
We have a new competitor in the podcast space.

Speaker 26 And I want to play the sizzle reel from this upcoming competitor.

Speaker 33 We need to change the conversation, and that's why I'm launching a new podcast. And this is going to be anything but the ordinary politician podcast.

Speaker 33 I'm going to be talking to people directly that I disagree with,

Speaker 33 as well as people I look up to.

Speaker 27 But more important than anything else, I'll be talking directly with you, the listener.

Speaker 33 Real conversations. What's going on with the cost of eggs? What are the impacts, real impacts to you around tariffs? What power does an executive order really have?

Speaker 27 And what's really going on inside of Doge?

Speaker 33 Look, there's an onslaught of information that we take in. So let's take it to the sources without the typical political mumbo jumble.

Speaker 33 In the first few weeks, we're going to be sitting down with some of the biggest leaders and architects in the mega movement. This is Gavin Newsom.

Speaker 26 All right. So the ad there is corny, but I'm going to give you an opinion that's going to shock you, Murphy.
I'm going to give you an opinion that's really going to shake you.

Speaker 27 I think this is a great idea, actually.

Speaker 27 I've got a lot of concerns with Kevin.

Speaker 26 And, like, we could do it. He's slick.
The ad, that's ad's too slick.

Speaker 26 But, like, actually talking to MAGA people and having him use his slick skills to put baby in a corner, to put Bannon or whoever the hell wants to take him on in a corner, I think it's probably smart, right?

Speaker 26 No, I don't know. What do you think?

Speaker 27 Well, I'm glad to know that he's breaking all the rules. You know, I'm looking forward to the backwards cap.
You know, he's taking it to the streets. He's

Speaker 27 not the man.

Speaker 30 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 27 Oh, you know, it's just the problem, he is so transparent. That's where he gets in trouble.
Yeah. So, you know how I'm going to save America?

Speaker 27 I'm going to argue with MAGA guys to impress Democratic primary voters so I can run for president. But it's really about America.
It's not about me.

Speaker 27 So, you know, it's like when he went down to Alabama and put up a billboard. I hate you, rednecks.
You know, Newsome for president. I mean, it's just.
So that's the problem.

Speaker 27 I think it doesn't pass the, oh, it's like the gimmick where my campaign is not about politics. You know what our bumper sticker is? No bumper sticker, man.
You know, and it reeks of that. That said,

Speaker 27 who knows?

Speaker 27 I think this was inspired by Buddha Judge because like, hey, that peep guy's a talker and he goes on Fox and does well.

Speaker 27 I'll recreate that and I'll argue with MAGA people on a podcast that, I don't know, you know, I'm for podcasting. Hope it does well.

Speaker 26 Yeah, welcome to the Fray. Murphy, who knew that we had the prime job? The governor of California, senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, Matt Gates is a podcaster.

Speaker 26 Now, Corey Bush and Jamal Bowman have a podcast.

Speaker 26 I just keep looking at the charts to see when one of them will pass us. Not yet, but a lot of podcasts.

Speaker 27 I'm willing to trade, by the way. He can have to say, I'll take governor of California.
I got some ideas.

Speaker 26 I'm in on that trade.

Speaker 27 God bless them.

Speaker 26 I'm with you. Obviously, it's very transparent.
I just think engaging the MAGA people, like the period of time in history where it's do not platform these people, pretend they don't exist, other them.

Speaker 26 I like othering them. I don't think they should be invited to parties.
I think that you should nag them and not give them the acknowledgement they deserve. I'm for all that.

Speaker 26 But the just pretending they don't exist didn't work. And engaging and arguing with them, I think, makes sense at some level, depending on how the execution.
We'll see.

Speaker 27 Yeah. Yeah.
We're see how it goes. But try it.
You know, pull them out, ridicule them.

Speaker 27 Again, while all the noise is going on, all the fundamentals that make or break presidents, the Trump guys are screwing up.

Speaker 27 So time compounds. And if the Dems can have a good off year, despite their stupidity, you see what the D-Trip leader put out that thing in the National Journal? I missed it.

Speaker 27 A bunch of Democratic consultants sent it to me, frobbing with rage. The new head of the D-Trip, and I apologize, I don't remember her name.
She's a member from somewhere, a member of Congress.

Speaker 27 The lead of the story is, if it isn't broke, don't fix it. I'm very proud that 49% of our vendor money was, you know, minority.
It was all identity. And we're going to double it this year.

Speaker 27 That's the way to win. You know, and I was like, Christ, they never learned.

Speaker 26 Susan, Susan Del Bane, she's welcome on the pod. She's Washington, first district.
I hear you. Last thing.
Okay, we've been mean. We picked on Gavin.

Speaker 26 I'm open to the Gavin thing. It wasn't mean, actually.
I'm open to it. I want to see how it goes.
We've picked on them a little bit.

Speaker 27 Let him take the. I've been disappointed.

Speaker 27 With his tools, he could have done more here, and he's been very cautious. Yeah.
You know, you can say Jerry Brown's crazy. He was a very dynamic governor here.
That's true. Did a lot of stuff.

Speaker 27 Gavin's been kind kind of like, I better check the focus groups. And when's the next flight to Concord, New Hampshire?

Speaker 26 I don't think we can have Jerry Brown in 2028. So I'm not asking to do the 2028 hot stove.
But are there any Democrats out there that you're just saying, like, oh, I like what they've been doing?

Speaker 26 Is there somebody that jumps out at you?

Speaker 27 Gavin's got skills.

Speaker 27 And if you're from California or you're from the future, maybe they're looking for that, but you got the Harris problem, which is the last California experiment, at least in the party conventional wisdom, didn't work.

Speaker 27 Buddha Judge is always a superstar. Gretchen Whitmer is an election winner.
I mean, there are some new gen Dems out there. You know you can get into Shapiro.
I mean there's a long list and a big

Speaker 27 bloody don't rig the calendar Democratic primary would be great for the Dems.

Speaker 27 But you know don't rig the calendar.

Speaker 26 Mike Murphy, thanks for coming on the pod. His pod is hacks on tap.
He's an EV man. He's won some elections and he's out there in California trying to hold it down.
There it is.

Speaker 27 I'm sending you a hat, man.

Speaker 26 Send me your address.

Speaker 26 Do you have a flat brim? I'm a flat brim, man. We're have one made up.

Speaker 27 Our people in China make good hats when they're not making cars.

Speaker 27 All right.

Speaker 26 We'll see you, Mike Murphy. Up next.
Good to be on, Timmy.

Speaker 27 Good to see you, pal.

Speaker 26 Up next, Michael Finnell.

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Speaker 6 Older homes are especially vulnerable to quake damage, so you may need to take steps to strengthen yours.

Speaker 3 Visit strengthenyourhouse.com to learn how to strengthen your home and help protect it from damage.

Speaker 16 The work may cost less than you think and can often be done in just a few days.

Speaker 19 Strengthen your home and help protect your family.

Speaker 22 Get prepared today and worry less tomorrow.

Speaker 23 Visit strengthenyourhouse.com.

Speaker 25 There's nothing like sinking into luxury. Anibay sofas combine ultimate comfort and design at an affordable price.

Speaker 25 Anibay has designed the only fully machine washable sofa from top to bottom. The stain-resistant performance fabric slip covers and cloud-like frame duvet can go straight into your wash.

Speaker 25 Perfect for anyone with kids, pets, or anyone who loves an easy-to-clean, spotless sofa.

Speaker 25 With a modular design and changeable slip covers, covers, you can customize your sofa to fit any space and style.

Speaker 25 Whether you need a single chair, love seat, or a luxuriously large sectional, Annabe has you covered. Visit washable sofas.com to upgrade your home.

Speaker 25 Sofas start at just $699 and right now, get early access to Black Friday savings, up to 60% off store-wide, with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Shop now at washablesofas.com.

Speaker 27 Add a little

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Speaker 26 Hey guys, Tim Miller from the Bulwark. I'm delighted to be here with a glowing Michael Fanone.
I mean, the dude went through some shit, and I'm just, I'm over here just monitoring his skincare.

Speaker 26 What's going on, Fanone?

Speaker 31 You know, just living the dream, man.

Speaker 26 Yeah, well, not exactly.

Speaker 26 You know, Fanon was with me. I was with him, I guess, better.

Speaker 26 I was hiding behind him at the principal's first conference over the weekend when Enrique Tario and some of these fuckers who led the attack on the Capitol, you know, came and tried to menace people, tried to pretend to be tough.

Speaker 26 He brought his little five-foot-two friend, the MAGA Marauder. And then the next day, obviously there was a bomb threat we don't really know the origin of.

Speaker 26 I mean, man, like, how do you process all this? Like, that these guys are running around, like, creating trouble after, you know, you lived through what they did a couple of years ago.

Speaker 31 Well, first of all, I mean, I think it's important to kind of understand who they are. I mean, specifically the Proud Boys.

Speaker 31 This was an organization that we saw pop up, you know, during Donald Trump's first presidential campaign. And, you know, really where they kind of came into their own was

Speaker 31 they would violently attack anyone who was opposed to their viewpoints. And they are very much so.

Speaker 31 embedded in the in the MAGA movement. Enrique Tario kind of emerged as the leader of the group or self-proclaimed leader of the group.
He was the one that showed up at the principal's first summit.

Speaker 31 But he, it seems to me, has kind of different motivations.

Speaker 31 He's not somebody that likes to get his hands dirty.

Speaker 31 What he likes to do is create these viral moments, put them out on social media to build his brand, build his profile, and then try to sell people shit.

Speaker 31 Sell the Proud Boy swag, sell, you know, the hats and the t-shirts and ammunition magazines that are embroidered with the, you know, Proud Boys logo.

Speaker 31 So for me, it seems as though his motivations are monetary. And he brought along, like you said, his little midget, Menace, Ivan Ranklin.

Speaker 27 They show up.

Speaker 31 They look like cartoon characters. He wears his little uniform, the Proud Boys uniform.
He's got his sunglasses on that he wears indoors.

Speaker 27 But everybody's wearing a body-worn camera.

Speaker 31 They're flanked by their little right-wing media guys with their cameras out recording the entire thing.

Speaker 31 Like I said, they're looking for a viral moment, and they're also looking for somebody, you know, bait somebody into an interaction in which they could sue them, whether it's threats or whether it's some physical confrontation.

Speaker 31 I mean, that's really what,

Speaker 31 at least in my mind, what that event was all about.

Speaker 31 And it's interesting because, you know, as a group that places masculinity in very high regard, you You know, where I'm from, the least masculine thing you can do to settle a dispute is sue somebody.

Speaker 26 I don't know. Actually, it might be even less masculine to try to settle a dispute by having a flunky videotape you for TikTok while you yell at somebody.
An influencer of beef. I don't know.

Speaker 26 That's not exactly tough guy material either, really.

Speaker 27 I guess it would have been cool if we had like a dance-off. Yeah.

Speaker 26 Zoolanders.

Speaker 26 How do you, though, process that?

Speaker 26 I mean, mean, look, I'm trying to put myself, it's hard for me to put myself in your shoes because, like, on the one hand, like, what you're saying now is very even keel and correct.

Speaker 26 Don't give these guys what they want, right?

Speaker 26 Which is some like little clip that he can use to get attention to sell things to the incels that like think that he's tough and sit in their basement, etc. Don't do that.

Speaker 26 On the other hand, fuck these guys. Like they

Speaker 26 instigated the violent attack on all of you who are just doing your job. And so, you know, maybe they need to be get a taste of their own medicine, right? Like, I understand the second impulse.

Speaker 26 That has to be a little tough to, you know, restrain.

Speaker 31 Yeah, no, I mean, listen, like, I was a cop for 20 years. So it's not the first time that somebody's called me, you know, a mean name.

Speaker 26 Yeah, or tried to bait you. Right.
Yeah.

Speaker 27 Yeah. Exactly.

Speaker 31 That being said, I mean, you're right. Like,

Speaker 31 I'm of the mindset that the appropriate emotions to be feeling right now are anger and outrage. And so I met that moment with anger and outrage.

Speaker 31 And I told Enrique Tario exactly what I think about him.

Speaker 27 And quite frankly, I told him who he is. And he is

Speaker 31 a convicted, seditious conspirator and a traitor to this country.

Speaker 31 And, you know, that was it. And I also called Ivan Reynkelin a bald-headed bitch, which is also what he is.

Speaker 26 True. Accurate.
It's important to be accurate when you're leveling criticisms, particularly on the bulwark.

Speaker 26 So I played a clip of you from when you were on stage. So for folks who don't have the backstory, so this is an event with a bunch of different panel discussions.

Speaker 26 You and Harry Dunn and Keel Gannell were on stage kind of discussing January 6th. That was before these guys showed up.
When you were up there, you talked about how the pardons.

Speaker 26 were in part motivated by Trump wanting to have, you know, some muscle, wanting to have some people out there that he thinks will, you know, create trouble on his behalf and, you know, have his own militia or whatever.

Speaker 26 How do you kind of balance like that impulse with like the performative side of it? Like, you know, how much of it do you think is like real, nefarious? People should be scared.

Speaker 26 And how much do you think is performative?

Speaker 27 I guess is my question.

Speaker 31 First of all, I think people should be extremely concerned. I mean, you just can't let that fear paralyze you.

Speaker 31 But, you know, make no mistake about it, these are violent extremist groups, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the 3%ers.

Speaker 31 They use the tactics, the same tactics of the brown shirts in 1930s and 40s Germany. They harass, they intimidate, and they use violence to

Speaker 31 suppress anyone that may have opposing viewpoints to their own.

Speaker 31 And, you know, going back to the pardons, you know, Donald Trump, in pardoning hundreds of violent insurrectionists, many of whom were members of these right-wing extremist groups, created his own civilian militia.

Speaker 31 You know, an organization or organizations that can go out and commit acts of violence on his behalf, who now feel emboldened to do so because they feel that if they do that, Donald Trump will simply pardon them.

Speaker 31 They will face no criminal accountability. And so I think Americans most certainly should be concerned.
They should be angry. They should be outraged.

Speaker 31 They should be raising this at every town hall meeting, calling their members of Congress, calling every elected official

Speaker 31 in their district and letting them know that this is absolutely unacceptable.

Speaker 26 You was talking to Ryan Goodman about the legal side of this yesterday, but

Speaker 26 on these pardons, there was another situation where one of the guys that got pardoned when the police went to his home, he had grenades, he had a sawed-off shotgun, he had some other illegal weapons, he had some classified documents, I guess, he took from the army.

Speaker 26 And the DOJ issued a statement yesterday that said, nope, all that stuff is also included in the pardon.

Speaker 26 That speaks more to your point about how, no, like he wants these guys out here menacing people, right?

Speaker 26 Like the idea that, you know, if the notion was just, oh, I want people to have a clean bill of health for what happened on January 6th because I thought it was BS.

Speaker 27 Obviously, I disagree with that.

Speaker 26 But if that was the only intention, then you wouldn't have your Department of Justice saying, oh, I also want to cover this guy who had grenades at his house.

Speaker 31 Right. It also speaks to the seriousness of some of these individuals' intentions.
I mean, this is someone who has grenades in their house.

Speaker 26 You got any grenades over there?

Speaker 27 No, I don't want to have any grenades.

Speaker 31 I wouldn't tell you if I did.

Speaker 31 Weapons charges for people that are prohibited from possessing firearms. I mean, all of that stuff should be deeply concerning to average everyday Americans.

Speaker 31 I mean, you have an active, you know, extremist groups who have found an ally in the president of the United States. I mean, that's absolutely insane.

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Speaker 26 Not to get too personal, but I do have to ask, because the reports are out there, but like, these guys are also coming from your mother.

Speaker 26 Is that true?

Speaker 31 Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, pretty much every member of my family, my immediate family, has

Speaker 31 suffered these threats and harassment. My mother seemed to have bear the brunt of it.
You know, she's been swatted in recent months.

Speaker 31 She had a confrontation with an individual that confronted her while she was raking leaves in her front yard, screamed at her that her son was a traitor, and threw shit on her.

Speaker 31 She's had bricks thrown at the house.

Speaker 26 And

Speaker 31 again, after Enrique Tario and his merry bunch of men showed up to the principal's first summit, You know, obviously the principal's summit was targeted with a bomb threat the following day.

Speaker 31 And my mother's house was also targeted with a bomb threat in that same bomb threat.

Speaker 31 And then since then, in the past 24 hours, all of my immediate family has received harassing phone calls, threats, and other forms of harassment. So it's become a family affair.

Speaker 26 Man. How do you keep even Keo in this stuff? Like, I'm like, the rage is building up inside me right now.
Like, at the idea that somebody would come for your mother, I just, I don't understand,

Speaker 26 honestly, like how you control it.

Speaker 31 I mean, you know, when I'm engaged, I'm engaged. When I disengage, I completely disengage.

Speaker 31 You know, I try to keep my world very small when I'm not out attending these summits and interacting with people.

Speaker 31 But also, I mean, I'll be honest with you, Tim, like having opportunities like the bulwark. to come out and talk about these things is incredibly cathartic for me.

Speaker 31 And it makes me feel like I have the ability to afford or at least let people know what the hell is going on in this country because so many Americans are indifferent or oblivious.

Speaker 31 You know, only now are we starting to kind of see what's in store for all of us, regardless of who you supported in the last election. Donald Trump doesn't give a shit.

Speaker 31 You know, he's going to do what he's going to do and that's it. And so, you know, maybe now people will start to see that

Speaker 31 this behavior is unacceptable.

Speaker 26 Well, man, you can have a platform with us anytime to vent. Doors always open for venting because I just,

Speaker 26 man, I got a lot to get off my chest. And I didn't go through any of the shit that you went through.
But

Speaker 26 these fucking pussies, man, I just, I can't fucking take it. I just, they, they are so loathsome and so cowardly.
But we can, uh, we can vent about them more another day.

Speaker 26 I want to figure in on one other thing while I got you, though, because if we're to do politics and affect change, one group that the Democrats have really struggled with in convincing about

Speaker 26 the negative side of the MAGA movement is guys like you, like to be, for lack of a better description, right? Like you look like you got a little American flag back there.

Speaker 26 You worked in law enforcement. A lot of law enforcement people went for Trump.
You got tats. I assume you've, you know, you know your way around to Zen or some chewing, you know, some dip.

Speaker 26 Like, you know, you might know some MMA fighters, right? Like these are the guys that have been moving more and more towards Trump and MAGA? And so I just wonder, like,

Speaker 26 why do you think that is?

Speaker 26 And do you think that there's some kind of message or some kind of way, manner of speaking that might like break through about the kind of nefarious shit that they're supporting?

Speaker 26 Because I'm not talking about the dudes with the red hats. I'm like, there's some people that are unreachable.

Speaker 26 I'm talking about more of like the non-political, you know, kind of guys, working class guys that have been drawn in by Trump.

Speaker 30 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 31 and this really does apply, I think, to all politicians prior to Donald Trump's arrival on the scene, but there was always this,

Speaker 31 you know, very kind of

Speaker 31 over educated, elitist, condescending speak that was used when

Speaker 31 addressing the American people. And it seemed that there was more and more and more of a disconnect between politicians, whether at the local level or the national level, and the people that they were

Speaker 31 there to represent. I mean, for me, where Democrats completely lost me, and I was always very apolitical.

Speaker 31 I voted for both political parties, but I think when I started to pay attention was to defund the police movement.

Speaker 31 I was a cop for 20 years. I understood policing and our relationship with the communities.
And I knew that there was work to be done. I certainly thought that it was worth having a conversation.

Speaker 31 And then I saw

Speaker 31 the Democrats really just,

Speaker 31 instead of having the conversation in a productive way, they used it to bash cops to try to get votes. And so for me, that was it.

Speaker 31 And unfortunately, when it comes to, you know, applying that to today, you know, the Democrats really, they've kind of taken this,

Speaker 31 you know, we're just going to sit back and see what happens or let Donald Trump, you know, destroy himself, so to speak, as if we haven't, you know, learned the lesson over and over and over again.

Speaker 31 That's never going to

Speaker 31 happen. For me, it's disheartening because I'm somebody like yourself who's so avidly against what's happening in this country at this moment.
And to watch,

Speaker 31 I guess, the only political party that still is concerned about democracy sit back and wait and watch, it's pathetic.

Speaker 26 Obviously, I agree with that. I've been banging the drum on that.
Back to the defunding the police thing, because then thinking about, okay, let's be constructive, right? Like,

Speaker 26 how do you break through? And I don't know if like FBI

Speaker 26 agents are not as, whatever, sympathetic as regular cops, right? Like, it's a little bit, it's a little different. It's obviously different than somebody that's like a neighborhood cop, right?

Speaker 26 But still, like, it's the Republicans right now that are fucking over cops, at least federal law enforcement, right?

Speaker 26 And I do feel like

Speaker 26 at some level, there's got to be a way to break through with folks by talking about just like the damage that they're doing to federal law enforcement, to vets who are losing their jobs, to regular, you know, people say, like, oh, federal government employs bureaucrats.

Speaker 26 And like they picture some like guy in a suit on K-Street. But like, there are a lot of people who work for the federal government that are working class people.

Speaker 26 You know, I'm wondering if you think there's kind of an opportunity there.

Speaker 31 I mean, unfortunately, you know, I've been out here for four years and I really think that what's going to have to happen is it has to impact individual Americans' lives.

Speaker 31 It's got to impact a friend or a family member or yourself or your spouse.

Speaker 31 I mean, I've been on the phone, you know, for the past week with dozens of friends who have either been laid off from their federal jobs or fired from their federal jobs or, you know, whatever the hell Doge is calling it, dismissed.

Speaker 31 And, you know, that obviously

Speaker 31 is

Speaker 31 resonating with people when they can't put food on the table and they can't support their families.

Speaker 31 And then, you know, to add insult to injury, they're being villainized for being a part of some government agency.

Speaker 26 Scheme, fraud. It's all fraud.

Speaker 26 They're stealing.

Speaker 31 USAID workers that have dedicated their lives to doing things that are super fun, like going to third world countries to deliver bags of rice to starving people.

Speaker 31 They're lunatic leftists that are

Speaker 31 destroying the fabric of our country and they have to be purged.

Speaker 27 It's insane. It's insane.
All right.

Speaker 26 Where do we bring you back? I want to pick your brain on this. As an Efeet, you know, GW grad that lived in the Denver suburbs growing up.

Speaker 26 You know, I like sometimes I do my best, but like, I feel I've got a cultural gap sometimes with some of these folks that

Speaker 26 some of these voters that we're struggling with to convince. So I want to bring you back, chat about that.

Speaker 26 And unfortunately, I think there's going to be fucking more news on the law enforcement front and the pardon front and the proud boy front. So we'll have plenty of things to talk about.

Speaker 26 All right, bro. All right, man.

Speaker 27 Look forward to it.

Speaker 26 All right. Thanks so much to Michael Fanon.
I I love that dude. That is just a great American, great father.

Speaker 26 I'm so happy to have him and give you a little bonus segment on the pod today. Appreciate also my man Mike Murphy.
As I mentioned at the top, I'm going to be at the Muses Parade tonight.

Speaker 26 So we'll see you out there. Neutral ground side.
If I'm not at 100% tomorrow, I've got great news. We got the best podcast guest around to carry me.
So we'll see you all then.

Speaker 24 Peace.

Speaker 24 Paneluia is in bloom.

Speaker 24 Keep us trapped in greed.

Speaker 24 A green belts wrapped around our minds. An endless red tape to keep the truth confined.

Speaker 24 They

Speaker 24 will

Speaker 24 not

Speaker 24 focus,

Speaker 24 and they will

Speaker 24 stop decreating us.

Speaker 24 They will

Speaker 24 not

Speaker 24 control

Speaker 24 us.

Speaker 24 We will

Speaker 24 be

Speaker 24 freaked

Speaker 24 into changing a mind control. Come with the revolution and take its toll.
If you could, I think I'll switch and open your third eye. You'd see that we should never be afraid to die.

Speaker 24 Rise up and take the power. Back It's time

Speaker 24 that fat cats had a heart attack. You know that their time is coming to an end.

Speaker 24 We have to unify and watch our flag ascend.

Speaker 24 They

Speaker 24 will not

Speaker 24 fall.

Speaker 24 They will

Speaker 24 stop decreating us.

Speaker 24 They

Speaker 24 will

Speaker 24 not

Speaker 24 control

Speaker 24 us.

Speaker 24 And we will

Speaker 24 be

Speaker 24 victorious.

Speaker 26 The Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

Speaker 35 This is Matt Rogers from Lost Culture Eastas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Lost Culture East with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.
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