Ezra Klein: The Resistance, Back from the Dead

Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
Delighted to welcome back opinion columnist of the New York Times and host of the Ezra Klein Show, which is a podcast, but also available on YouTube. He's also the co-author of the forthcoming book, Abundance, with the Atlantic's Derek Thompson, who I like better than Ezra.
That's out next month. We'll be talking about that, you know, I don't know, in March or something.
We got some other news. How you doing, Ezra? I'm all right.
An amazing drive-by there in the intro. Thank you for that, Tim.
Well, we love Derek. Derek is more likable.
I don't actually think that's under debate. Yeah, I don't know.
There's something about your new facial hair also that is, I think, hurting your likability quotient a little bit. It feels like it's a dark Ezra era.
Have you looked at the era we're in? You think this is time for light Ezra? That's a fair point. It's a fair point.
All right. The last time you were on the pod, we were in the period between the Biden debate debacle and him actually stepping aside.
You said something then that created a little stir. It was this.
this he said i've had top democrats say to me basically something like i don't know why all these democrats who think donald trump is an existential threat to democracy are acting the way they are you went on to say that uh essentially those top democrats said to you that a lot of them were doing kayfabe they didn't really believe that he was the existential threat that many of them were saying. I think the revealed behavior in the intervening seven months has borne out that, but I'm wondering how you think those folks are feeling about that gamble now.
I don't think they're feeling great about it. I think ultimately it will have proven to be a mistake of Trump's.
I mean, you felt this. I feel like part of the job here is sensing the sort of structure, the emotional structure of American politics.
And after Democrats lost in 2024, they were psychologically pretty shattered. And there were quite a few of them who were willing to say, okay, this is a new world.
This time, the American public voted for Donald Trump fair and square. We have to work with this.
And there are plenty of them who are happy to work with Doge and we're excited to work with Elon Musk, right? Democrats are not fully turned on him in that sort of interrenum between the campaign and inauguration. And everything Trump has done has been a giant middle finger to them personally, right? To make them look like idiots personally.

And so, yeah, when I talked to some of those folks

who I think if the Trump administration

had come in with a slightly different strategy, right?

If they had come in and they had wanted to

aggressively reform USAID

and aggressively reform civil service protections

and do more in immigration and border security

and government efficiency,

if that had actually been what they wanted, if they wanted to get 70%, 60%, 50% of what they're looking for, there was a cohort of Democrats who were at least willing to entertain the idea that he was just going to be a president and you could work with him where you could work with him and not where you could not. And now Trump has gone into a place where he is threatening, I think, both in their view and objectively, the structure of American government itself.
He is, I think, a somewhat weak president, but he is acting like a fairly strong king. Yeah, I want to get to that, your weakness theory there.
But are you saying that you think that the Democrats who were of the view that maybe he wasn't quite as existential of a threat as some of the loudest alarmists, including most of us here at the Bulwark, including some loud alarmists said, you think they're changing their mind now, like after the first three weeks? Yes, I think they've changed their mind. That's what I'm saying.
I've spoken to them. I've spoken to some of the people I was thinking about when I said that.
And I am also watching people who are willing to work with Donald Trump when he won the election. They have moved from, we are willing to work with you, we're willing to work with Doge, we're willing to work with all these pieces.
We think the party has erred, it's gone too far left, etc. They have moved into opposition and resistance mode.
Whatever possible quanta of goodwill he had to, if he wanted to, build some bipartisan accomplishments, which I actually think he could have done, is gone. They have moved into he is a threat to the republic mode.
I guess if you could go back to the old George W. Bush terror threat level, where do you think everybody is right now on threat to democracy threat level? they're between orange and red it's funny my i taped a podcast this morning and we were joking

about the the threat level uh I think people are at orange. Okay.
High orange, burnt orange. Red is if and when he defies a court order.
You sort of referenced this already. You had a column, I guess it was what, last Friday or earlier this week, that also is a video pod.
You're multi-platform now. We're all contesting for video now.
It ended with this. This was kind of how you summed up the case.
The first two weeks of the Trump presidency have not shown his strength. He's trying to overwhelm you.
He's trying to keep you off balance. He's trying to persuade you of something that isn't true.
Don't believe him. You're making the argument that you should not believe that he has these powers that he's claiming to have.
My reaction when reading this was, that is cope. That is high grade, uncut, liberal elite cope, straight from Medellin.
And that is not right, actually. And that he has demonstrated that he can break a bunch of shit before anybody else gets out of bed in the morning.
But convince me otherwise. Is that where you are now? Yeah, that's where I am now.
That was my initial reaction. That's how I still feel.
So there are two pieces to the argument. One is about an orientation of opposition that I was watching.
I think I'm seeing less of it now, but I was watching many Democrats simply accept and treat as settled fact that he could do the things he was doing instead of treating the things he was doing as somewhere between a power grab and a crime.

So when I say don't believe him, I'm not saying don't believe that he's actually locked people out of the USAID building.

Like that's a like a fact of reality.

That's the texture of the world we live in.

I am saying don't treat that as

done. Treat that as provisional.
Treat that as an effort he is making to change the settled order.

I agree with that part of the argument.

One piece of it. I think one thing authoritarians do, I mean, any political system is in some ways

a coordination and information game. And one thing authoritarians do that is maybe the most important thing is they get people to coordinate as if they are the authoritarian.
And so if Donald Trump can walk in and upend the whole thing, and we just report on it as, well, he did this and he did this and he did this and he did this, as opposed to approaching it as he is trying to do X. But that is going to be a fight, a contest.
That's going to go to the courts. That's going to be a fight over a government shutdown.
That's going to be a fight over a debt ceiling. That's going to be a fight in the midterms, etc.
You want to keep this provisional, right? If everybody begins saying, well, it's done, he's got all these powers, I guess what you're saying, I think that is actually... No, I'm not saying that.
I totally agree with that part of the argument. I think that is actually a kind of submission.
Totally agree with that part of the argument. The second thing I'm saying there is there has been a tendency to treat what they are doing as some grand plan that is all working out great.
This is a point that I'm making throughout the piece of overwhelm. One of their strategies is overwhelm what Steve Bannon has called at various points muzzle velocity or flooding the zone with shit.
You sort of run through what they're doing. They tried to upend birthright citizenship.
That got stopped by the court immediately, and they have not challenged the court on that. They're going to appeal, I think, but they have stopped for the moment.
They did the OMB spending freeze. The court immediately stopped that.
They rescinded the freeze, and the court has still put a hold on what they're doing there. USAID, they actually have gutted that thing.
So that's a place where I think the power is showing you can do quite a lot. You look at what they are doing around tariffs.
That was the thing Trump swore he wanted to do most of all. As soon as the markets had a reaction, he accepted some very, very paltry concessions, if they were even concessions, from Mexico and Canada and backed off on the tariffs, at least for now.
Mass deportations, which was another thing they said they were going to do, they're running deportations at roughly the pace they were at under Barack Obama. They are publicizing them very differently.
They're in some ways doing them more cruelly. But the sense of what their level of willingness or capability is to deal with that real-world friction seems lower to me.

In the last couple days, we've seen a series of things get frozen.

So they have frozen access, new access to the treasury payment system a judge did.

Two of Elon Musk's young lieutenants had it.

Then one turned out to be a huge racist.

So a couple hours after the judicial decision, he resigned.

So now one of them has it, and the judge has said it's read- access. You cannot write into the source code.
And the DOJ has accepted that. There was a lot of reporting they were going to try to close down the Department of Education.
They have not done that, which I think is good. I could sort of keep going like this, but one of the things we are seeing, to me, is yes, they are trying to do a lot, and they are doing a lot.
They're putting people on administrative leave. Oh, by the way, they also froze the federal buyout that they're trying to do.
And in the reporting of the federal buyout freeze, it turned out that of the 2.4 million civilian employees, only a couple tens of thousands have taken it at a not very different rate than you would normally see retirement. So it doesn't look like that buyout is going all that well for them.
So my point is not that things Donald Trump is doing aren't meaningful. Like they have completely, among other things, thrown all renewable energy permitting into complete chaos.
But in terms of the efforts to assert dramatic powers they did not have otherwise, that past presidents have not had and have not asserted, with the exception of USAID, which I think needs to be fought like hell and treated as provisional, they are getting stopped by the courts and stopping. They have pulled back on the tariffs.
They are not doing nationwide mass deportations, at least as of yet. They frankly don't seem to me to have a huge stomach for political fight when it comes to the real world.
And they're pretty fucked at the moment in Congress. So there's a huge amount of reporting going on in this.
They're having a ton of trouble putting together a spending bill that can even get enough Republican support. They don't know what to do on salt deduction.
They have no Democratic support in Congress. So one thing that would be stronger for them on a bunch of these issues is if they could actually get bills through that would make these changes more durable.
But they're not even trying because they can't do it. So look, I'm not telling people to be happy about what's going on.
I am saying, watch what is happening.

Watch where they are getting stopped.

And I think looking at this as like a lot of chaos,

they're throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks,

is important because the more people treat this guy

as some mastermind autocrat,

like the weaker all,

nobody is going to fight somebody who is invulnerable. But somebody who's invulnerable and keeps stepping on rakes.
Yeah, you will fight that guy. So that's my view.
I like it. I mean, I'm just, I'm taking the cope.
I'm getting a, I'm getting a spoon, I'm getting some baking soda and I'm like, I'm going to try to smoke it up and like, see if I can, I can live in that world. Here's my counterpoint.
Please. He has nominated an absolutely absurd clown cabinet of ridiculous people to lead the military, our Health and Human Services Department, the FBI, the Department of Justice.
And initially, there were smart people in D.C. and commentators who were like, you know, he's going to run into some trouble here.
And Mitch McConnell and Todd Young, who knows, they're going to vote against him. He hasn't suffered a single setback.
Matt Gaetz self-deported, but probably didn't have to in retrospect, but we'll never know. So he's going to get all those folks through.
He is in the middle of a dismantling of the federal government that is like out of the fever dreams of the most extreme like dork in the basement of the heritage foundation i mean i hear what you're saying about like how some of this stuff has been frozen but it is going to be hard to unravel other parts of it i mean like we'll get into usa id in detail but like going from,000 to 290 employees, senior FBI officials getting frog marched out of there, political firings that are at a scale of 100x what caused Alberto Gonzalez to resign 15 years ago. And I think internationally, as already put into motion, like kind motion the twilight of our values-based

Western alliance

to such a degree that I don't think

that most of these countries

are ever going to trust that they can be

in relationships with us again.

I don't know, man. I'm not saying

he's invincible. I totally

agree with the first part. I think that he should be fought.

But I think

the notion that they're just stepping on rakes everywhere

and that this is a clusterfuck

and they're actually very weak

Thank you. totally agree with the first part.
I think that he should be fought. But I think the notion that they're just stepping on rakes everywhere and that this is a clusterfuck and they're actually very weak, I'm not there.
Well, they're a mixture of weak and strong, right? As any president is. They're legislatively weak, right? They're not willing to go through things in Congress.
Do they care about that? Do they even want to pass things through Congress? If you want huge, durable changes to the way things work in America, right? There's a reason other presidents are like, you know, it would be awesome. Let's do it all through executive action because there's a lot you just can't do through executive action.
so I do think it's worth disaggregating pieces I don't really want to be in the position because my argument in that piece

is that you should just try to look at him

clearly not you should

ignore what is happening

like I'm trying to stiffen people's spines, not trying to get them to live in a fantasy land. Like you, I'm reporting on this stuff every day.
But I think it's worth taking these pieces in turn. So, you know, the things that you mentioned there, will Donald Trump get his nominees through? He will, right? I don't know who in Washington, who was a liberal pundit was telling you that we're not going to get them through, but it wasn't fucking me.
So it's fair. Is he going to get his nominees through? He will.
I don't see that as a, like, I think it's bad. I think Kash Patel is a bad nominee.
I think all these people are bad, but that doesn't surprise me or strike me as a huge overturning of the governmental order. That's just not a sign of weakness.
It could have been a sign of weakness, I guess, is all I'm saying. There could have been an alternate world where he lost a couple of them, and that would have shown a deep weakness.
I think he did lose Matt Gaetz, but that had not really occurred to me to count as the bar here. I don't think modern presidents lose a lot of nominees.
So then there's a question of the international alliances. I mean, yeah, like we elected Donald Trump and the president has a lot of power over that.
I don't really buy that nobody, that these countries will not come back into alliance. I've lived through that argument with George W.
Bush and then the alliances rebuilt during Barack Obama. Then I lived through that argument with Donald Trump won and then the alliances rebuilt with Joe Biden.
The other nations are transactional, much like we are. And I think that the danger of the alliance system is right now, as it is happening, if the next president is Pete Buttigieg or Josh Shapiro, I think that the UK is going to be perfectly happy to work with us again.
But it's bad, right? I don't think it's good. I don't think pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord is good.
I think all these things are very, very upsetting. The civil service is the big one here to me.
Because as you say, this is running a wrecking ball through it in a way that had, I think, not even been contemplated by past Republicans. And to some degree, they are showing they can do it because the courts move, particularly on things like firings, much more slowly than the firings happen.
So yes, you can come back and say, I was wrongly fired under civil service protections. But it is, unless there are some injunctions coming down the pike, which we have not seen on this particular issue, they're already going to be out of there.
So what, they get back pay? Maybe they get reinstated? I don't see that as a remedy that's potent. I mean, there was an NOAA official I saw this morning that said, he said, their strategy is we're just going to do it and dare somebody to stop us.
And by the time they stop us, we'll have destroyed it. They'll have destroyed it.
That's their strategy. I am not convinced on multiple levels that this is a good strategy, including for the heritage foundation theory of the world.
So this is one of the other arguments of that piece, which is the theory that they will overwhelm us is a way of also overwhelming themselves. They are not carefully running through this thing, thinking about who it is a good idea to lose and who it isn't.
So this is going to be very bad for the country. But everything that goes wrong, the government touches from here on out, they will own at a startling level.
So that email, the buyout email, it went to all the VA primary care doctors. How many VA primary care doctors do they actually want to lose? Now, replicate that across the entire federal government.
Every regulator, everybody who regulates poison in a stream, everybody who regulates financial industries, everybody who does things so that, you know, you don't get killed in a workplace accident. A lot goes wrong over the course of a couple of years.
Yuval Levin, who's an American Enterprise Institute guy, conservative, very, very thoughtful. I mean, very, very thoughtful, but been feeding high-level center-right cope to people about how the institutions will hold for a while now.

So obviously, it would be Yuval. Yuval has not been on the alarmist side of things for a decade.
He is not alarmist. It is true.
He is not alarmist. It is true.
But I probably have a higher opinion of some of those arguments than you do. but one thing that he said that I thought was very smart

which is that there's a rhythm to presidencies

which is that at the beginning

they're very much in control of events and they're unleashing all these executive orders and they're unleashing all these plans and they've been sitting in back rooms and russell you know vod is like twirling his mustache somewhere doesn't really have one but you know what i mean and so for a while you're like oh man it's them it's's them, it's them. And then pretty quickly, within a couple months usually, what happens is the world starts coming at them.
Instead of choosing what they're focusing on, it gets chosen.

So you can look at this in past presidencies. I mean, you know, you see with Joe Biden, this sort of after the Afghanistan withdrawal, I would say, basically lose control.
Inflation, Gaza, and not in this order, inflation, Ukraine, Gaza, and a number of other issues besides those begin to be things they're responding to, not a world they're controlling. Under Donald Trump, you saw something similar, particularly once we hit the pandemic, right? All of a sudden, the world was not as they had chosen it.
The world was something that they were responding to. Barack Obama was fighting with high unemployment.
And there are all these things that happen in every administration. They are dramatically increasing the likelihood that something breaks or they break something, or in the future, they don't have the people they need to respond to something.
And that's not a USAID problem for them specifically. USAID, I think the reason they chose to try to destroy that one is that it's not, I mean, morally, it is an abomination what they are doing.
It is not mission critical for keeping things from breaking down for Americans, right? It does not have a domestic American constituency. But you imagine a bad public health situation happening in a denuded HHS under the leadership of a person people do not trust to lead a public health agency, and that might end up looking very bad.
I'm not telling you that this is the way it will go. I am saying that I don't think there is a plan here.
They are just running through the thing with a chainsaw. And there's a reason that usually you don't do that.
It's fine if you bought Twitter and you don't care if Twitter goes down, right? That's the theory of action here. You're trying to break the thing enough that you can control it.
What Elon Musk successfully did at Twitter was he broke the thing so he could actually control it. But he didn't make Twitter work better.
What he made it was something that he could use as a vehicle and a venue for himself. Twitter itself works poorly.
If you imagine that whole thing applied to the federal government, either you have a very low opinion of the federal government which these guys obviously do but since i don't have that low of opinion the federal government when things break over the course of a couple years i think people are going to notice you imagine something like the plane crash we saw um like the terrible tragic plane crash from a few weeks ago happening in a year when there is a lot more paper trail of how they fucked up the faa i don't know that looks great for them so that's not to say this is like great or you should be excited that he's doing this it is to say i don't think it is like a genius plan that some machiavellian omniscient mind at the heritage foundation cooked up they are causing chaos not just not just for everybody, but ultimately for themselves. Yeah, I guess my final point on this is like, it's just easier to destroy than to create or to maintain, right? And so I also don't think that this is a brilliant Machiavellian tacticians or that I have seen some articles out there from people talking about how they really had a great plan this time and Rose Vogt came in and had this very meticulous plan.
It seems like a lot of haphazard and chaos that marked the first administration. But what seems different from the first administration is that there aren't any lawyers around.
There's not any Don McGahn around that's like, I don't know, maybe we should do this. We should tailor that.
We haven't seen a lot of evidence that, like, they've backed off, Trump's backed off, external lawsuits have frozen things, but they haven't, there's no limiting principle internally. It doesn't seem like to me, besides Trump's whims.
And so, yeah, I think that they will do damage. I think that they are chaos agents and chaos will lead to some unpredictable damage downstream.
We don't know which one of these things will be the thing that hurts people and causes people to get upset at the administration and their management of things. My concern is that they will have broken a lot of things semi-permanently to permanently by then and that they will have rested control of big parts of the administration in ways that they intend to.
I probably don't agree with the word permanently, but otherwise I agree. That's depressing.
All right, I'm sorry to everybody. People tune in for this, huh? They enjoy this? They enjoy this perspective on the world? Yeah, apparently.
I don't quite get it. I would be checked out and just been listening to my Denver Nuggets podcast if it was me.
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Let's talk about a couple of the specific items. We got the FBI.
There's a new memo to workforce last night acting fbi director brian driscoll disclosed he'd been ordered by acting deputy attorney general emil bove to turn over the names of all fbi employees who worked on the january 6 cases driscoll could be removed as acting director at any point and also fired from the bureau he's not eligible for government pension both laid the groundwork for doing so by calling Driscoll insubordinate in a memo. So, I mean, the cash hearing is now next Thursday, or the cash vote rather, but this feels inevitable that we have a night of the long knives coming for the FBI here in the next couple of weeks.
So, I was just doing a show that was partially about this. Have you guys talked about the weird story of Driscoll yet, the drizz? A little bit on the surface, but I'm very, I'm confused by it, to be honest.
So Chris Wray, former Trump appointee running the FBI, resigns, even though his term was not up because Trump was going to fire him. So they need an acting director of the FBI.
They appear to make a mistake on the website because they're a bunch of fools and they put the wrong guy's name this being driscoll and because it would be embarrassing to say we put the wrong guy's name as acting director of the fbi on the website now driscoll who was not supposed to be the acting director of the fbi is director and they think to themselves, it's only going to be a little while anyway. Okay, maybe I'm coming around to your position on the rakes.
Then, because Driscoll is not a soulless careerist who they have chosen for this role, he goes to the FBI quite directly and says, we are in the fight of our lives. We are not going to let them destroy this agency.
I'm paraphrasing the emails he sent out. And now it becomes like a sort of meme inside the FBI and he's got, you know, sort of like he looks like he just walked out of a saloon.
He's like an amazing looking guy. He will be fired, I expect.
But one thing that's happened, Benjamin Wittes had, you always know things are bad when you're reading Lawfare again, right? The website, like that's when things are bad. We love Wittes.
We had a period of time where we had Wittes Wednesdays on here. It might be time to reignite.
That's when you know threat level's orange. Yeah.
So he had a good piece about what's going on with the FBI. So they wanted to do this thing where they would have all the FBI agents self-report if they touched the January 6th investigation so they could do an effective purge.
And there appears to be now mass insubordination to that. Like none of them, not none of them, but huge swaths of the FBI are refusing to develop the forms.
So they actually don't have that. There's also now a lawsuit about this gathering of information.
They might purge the FBI. A lot of us were expecting the purge to have already happened.
Week by week, it becomes harder for them to purge things, because more attention is on them, there's a loss of political capital, there aren't enough other things happening. And Cash is going to have to do something.
But Cash is going to purge parts of it, but there's a difference between knocking out 200 people and knocking out what we initially heard, which was 6,000 people. I'm not saying I know how it's going to go but the fbi has become an interesting story because driscoll became a very unexpectedly effective internal leader who stiffened a lot of spines there and now people are digging in and one thing they did here i think i mean democrats i think the bureaucracy was pretty exhausted and ready to cooperate with trump too like Like, just people felt they lost, that the normal order of things was like, you accept the next administration.
They went at everybody so hard, they rebuilt a resistance that had died. Like, two weeks ago, I'd say the resistance is gone.
Now I'd say, you know, you might want to give it a different name because it's a harmed brand, but it's sort of coming back, particularly among the bureaucrats who are pissed. And at the FBI level, those are hard people, though it is a point Wittis makes.
These are actually a lot of hard people to replace. These are not entry-level jobs, right? You need counterterrorism, expertise, etc.
And again, to the point I was making before, you fire a bunch of the wrong people and there's a terrorist attack you don't catch. And now you look really bad, right? So there's a theory that one thing that is stopping them from doing the FBI purge is among the few things that the Trump people take seriously in terms of functions the government does, they actually do believe that cross-national gangs threaten America.
And the idea that you will do a night of the long knives and knock out thousands of FBI agents without knowing who you're taking out, and now you've turned the entire agency against you, that may not be great. So I'm not saying I know it's going to go.
Kash Patel, of all the nominees, is the most frightening to me and the most revealing of what Trump really wants to do with some of these agencies. So if anybody thinks what I'm offering you here is like a sanguine perspective, I'm not.
In fact, I'm saying something very similar to what I think you were saying. They are breaking the thing.
They are trying to break the thing. But the way they're doing it has created a kind of also internal counterforce where now people are trying to fight them.
So they really would have to fire everybody now. And now there's already a court case about the data they're collecting.
The whole thing is getting messier and messier and messier and messier by the day and these aren't the smartest guys you know in the philosophical version of like speech acts right like speech you're trying to use to make things true i think it is important for people to like really say this a lot that this is not being done well or going well because like the worse people understand it's going the more emboldened they are to keep fighting it like i really do think this like resignation that so many people greeted trump with is a is a kind of submission in in advance but like the fbi like they fucking put the wrong guy in charge he became a hero for resisting them changing the internal culture culture of the FBI that they were targeting overnight. And now they're going to have a fight on their hands that they had done this maybe competently from the beginning, including by putting in charge somebody who does not look like such a hatchet man as Kash Patel does.
They could have accomplished the same end more quietly and competently, but they didn't. So now we're going to see what the fight is, and people should be paying a lot of attention to that fight.
A couple of thoughts on that. The MAGA brand was pretty tarnished as well, and it recovered.
So there's hope for the resistance brand. And I'm intrigued just listening to you, thinking about the Bill Kristol FBI agent, Ezra Klein AOC alliance that has formed in our very strange world.
Nobody wanted this. Nobody asked for this.
This is why you're the whisperer, because I take your perspective now, having heard it fleshed out more. Because for me, instinctively, the idea that there is hope that they fail is not really the motivating factor.
I think like, you know, the never Trumper contingent, that few of us are pretty motivated by hopeless causes and, you know, fighting them righteously. But I do- You sit with a true tragic view of life.
Yeah, exactly. Right.
And so I do, like, this will probably end. Darkness will probably befall the West, but we should fight it anyway.
We should fight against the dying of the light. But I do understand how it's probably motivating to government officials, to people that are federal government workers, to people that are going to have to have a stiffened spine to think this is not a hopeless endeavor.
Well, I think that's true. Although I do want to just say from my own perspective, I do not understand what I am saying here as giving people a nice bedtime story so they're not too afraid when they go to sleep.
I think I am saying the true thing that is happening. They are trying to purge the FBI, but they are doing a shitty job of it.
They have created a lot of internal resistance now, and people should pay close attention to what's actually going on. They tried to take over the entire spending power, but they did a shitty job of it.
Then they had to rescind their own OMB directive. And then a judge did an injunction anyway, just to make sure they couldn't keep going.
They have gotten some access to the treasury payment system, but they did a shitty job of it. So then a judge stopped giving anybody else access.
And also one of the two people they gave access to had to resign for being a racist, which to be such a racist in the Trump administration that you have to resign means you are pretty racist. Yeah, I got some of the tweets here.
Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool. You could not pay me to marry outside my ethnicity.
It gets worse from there, but there are a couple of them. They're not sending their best.

Or maybe they are, actually. I've got wonk Ezra, so I want to nerd out on some other stuff.
I want to talk about some of the actual policies that are going through outside of the legal shit. You mentioned earlier what they're trying to do with renewables and energy policy.
I'm curious your take on that. Trump kind of leaked out some tax plan ideas yesterday

that I think the range was like a

six to ten trillion trillion price tag on that bad boy, which is, you know, fiscal conservativeism in its finest. This is just kind of open-ended for you.
Like, what is catching your eye as far as their policy objectives kind of outside of this legal, all these legal fights? So the energy policy is truly disastrous, in my view. As somebody who cares a lot about decarbonization, renewable energy, what they've basically done is try to throw solar and wind permitting into chaos, but make it easier to permit and build fossil fuel, you know, and dirty infrastructure.
So sometimes you would hear people criticize Democrats. It's like, it should be an all of the above energy strategy.
But Trump is not doing an all of the above energy strategy. He's doing a dirty energy strategy.
And solar was getting so cheap, so fast, that it's actually a huge contributor to the energy we're going to build. And now we're sort of in a race between the economics of solar and what they're trying to do to break that.
Elon Musk, right? People, I think, forget this now, but in the first Trump administration, he joined up to serve on this advisory board. And he quit the board when Trump withdrew America from the Paris Climate Treaty.
This is how far Elon Musk has radicalized and changed his own politics. He has gone from quitting an advisory board in Trump 1, because withdrawing from Paris Climate Treaty, as he said then, was bad for the country and bad bad for the planet to their withdrawing from it in Trump too, obviously, but they're also just like trying to destroy the electric vehicle transition, solar energy, et cetera.
And he's there, you know, helping to swing the hammer. It's just an incredibly disappointing heel turn.
So that's meaningful. I am waiting to see what they come up with on spending and taxes.
all of the reporting I am hearing and able to do is that in the meetings, they are not being able to get agreement. You know, see, my colleague rushed out that did a good podcast the other day with Steve Bannon.
And one of the things Bannon said, which I thought was interesting and tracks what I'm seeing, is that he said, we are not, we being the right in this, are not united.

He said, Congress, the Republicans' Congress, they fear Donald Trump. But there isn't a unity on what the agenda actually is.
And every one of these things is going to be a huge fight that divides huge parts of the party. So there are parts of the Republicans, and you've been seeing this on recent spending bills, who think the debt is getting too high.
and want to do something to cut it before they're going to,

or at least they say before they will accept giant new things that increase it. The thing you would obviously do to cut it because of where the money is, if you have to pay for a huge tax cut, is cut Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.
That's where the money is in defense, right? Those are the things you could touch. I have said this for like decades.
The federal government, from a budgetaryary perspective is an insurance conglomerate with a large standing army. That is what we are.
That is what we spend money on. Everything else is stuff between the couch cushions.
And so they don't really politically want to cut any of those, but they're going to have to cut some of them to pay for some part of these tax cuts. Or they're going to run the tax cuts and they're going to see, can they pass out with a three-vote margin in the House? And maybe they can't.
And they also clearly probably cannot do a spending bill without Democratic support. But the Hakeem Jeffries line now is, unless they undo things like the USAID closure, they're not getting any Democratic support.
So the expectation, I will say, among House Democrats is we're headed for a shutdown in a couple of months, like a pretty big shutdown. And that's going to be the big collision over all this.
That is another big change, a big welcome change in the Democrats over the last three weeks, which I've been fully banging the drum on. And I'm happy that they're doing it.
I do wonder, but the Republicans do have a three-vote majority in the House. I've actually been seeing a contrary view that I hadn't really thought through, that they might be like, well, we're in charge of everything.
So whatever, we're not going to, we're not actually going to do a budget, but we're not actually going to shut anything down. We're not going to shut down the government either.
Like we're just going to do some hybrid thing. Continuing resolutions.
Yeah. Yeah.
Or we just shut down. That'd be a theory.
Yeah. They would have to be able to get internal support for the continuing resolutions, which maybe they can.
I don't think it's impossible. They hold every single member.
It's just not how they've really been working up until now. Right.
And the tax cuts are going to be much harder because the tax cuts have a lot of policy decisions that people there care a lot about. The Republicans are happy to give Trump all the power, but they're not happy to see their own constituencies gutted.
I thought the very funny example of this is what did you see a Republican in a high profile way really stand up on recently? It was Chuck Grassley who was like, this 25% tariff on Canada is a great idea, but it's really going to hurt my farmers on potash. So please, Mr.
President, like exempt it or undo it or something. They don't want their people to get hurt in a direct way.
I was told I pronounced potash wrong the other day. I don't know what the right one is, but this is- I'm a liberal elite, so obviously I don't- Yeah, I'm from the Denver suburbs, so I don't fucking know how to do it either, but I think we're both pronouncing it wrong, FYI.
But this what to do about the salt deduction is just like a huge difficult issue in the republican party right now and if you had democratic votes you would have more movement on it but you don't the spending bills that have passed recently have done so with democratic votes in general and so they're not going to get any unless they unwind a bunch of stuff now and they're not going to unwind a bunch of stuff without a big fight. So it's not clear where they're going to go.
One reason they appear to be breaking things into multiple bills, functionally anything they pass this year is going to come in a budget reconciliation bill, which means it first is only going to be budgetary stuff, taxes and things where you're spending money or cutting money or cutting taxes or raising taxes. You can do two of those.
They wanted to do a lot of stuff in the first. They were just going to do it all, like a huge, in the way that Biden wanted to pass every idea Democrats had ever had in Build Back Better, they wanted to do something like that.
They've already broken it up because they don't have the capability to get things into a bill that they all agree on that fast. So one of the things where the rhythm of this administration I I think is going to change a lot, is when they have to start going to Congress for things.
Because there's not enough internal unanimity on policy. And Donald Trump himself is not highly decisive on policy.
He cares about some big things like tax cuts in general, but he's not out there with his pencil going through deductions. Crayon, maybe, with the Yeah, there's energy stuff, there's

taxes, there's spending.

That's all going to get a lot harder, and they have no

Democratic votes, and they're going to have a shutdown.

So, I don't know. We're going to see

what that plays out as, but as

of now, I am watching

to see if they can even come up with a tax

bill that they think they

can present to their own members.

That is going to be told as a cluster, and I don't, I think it's possible that they just totally fail obamacare style on that so uh that we are totally aligned on that i want to get to one of your other recent columns somebody was praising the other day i forget who it was that had trump won the culture by more than he won the election your reasons were trump and his allies fight to control attention the way democrats don't. There's a corporate desire to shift right.
There's a mail backlash and Biden left a huge cultural and political vacuum for Trump to fill. I think this is a correct observation.
I'm curious to hear like why you think that is because he won by 200,000 votes. And I kind of wonder if they've like Jedi mind tricked us into believing that it was a bigger cultural victory than it was actually as well, similarly to the electoral victory.
But I'm wondering what you think about that. Yeah, there's a bunch here.
So yeah, they not only won by very few votes. I mean, 200,000 in the battleground states, it was larger than that.
But what? He won 49.8% of the popular vote, I believe. He had a smaller popular vote victory in 2024 than Hillary Clinton did in 2016.
And the reaction to Hillary Clinton's vote margin in 2016 was not, oh, Clinton is the future of American politics and the culture is going to move in her direction. So he wins.
You have this huge just swing. And it's like Mark Zuckerberg is coming out there with this chain and announcing the end of censorship and we're moving back to free expression.
Our buddy Chris Hayes is also doing the chain. What's happening? And this is all elder millennials.
You got some pearls. Are you thinking about a chain too? I'm just going to go with a single earring, I think.
A single earring? Okay. It's just a bunch of 42-year-old influencers just trying to deal with our imminent death.
Exactly. Well, I mean, that's a different podcast, I guess.
That's more the kind of thing I do. Where was I? Sorry, I'm on imminent death now.
Mark Zuckerberg's chain and the cultural win. So, it was a very, very narrow political victory.
And then I think there was a lot of pent-up pressure on some things that unleashed itself. So, I think that people who control a lot of attention have become very angry at their employee bases.

You know, Musk and Zuckerberg and, you know, all these sort of tech billionaires who have very, very loud voices. I mean, they are modern, like super important celebrities.
So they wanted to move right. They didn't like all the DEI stuff they'd built into their own companies.
They didn't like all some of the moderation stuff they'd built into their own company. So they took it as as an excuse as an opportunity to reassert a sort of cultural and de facto control over their own companies that made things feel like they were swinging faster i do think part of this is biden biden was sort of a like an interrenum like a sort of pause not in policy but in terms of the culture of american politics it's like you think about barack obama and the dominance he had like politics was about how you felt about Barack Obama.
And then you had Donald Trump. Barack Obama's literal opposite.
Politics was about how you felt about Donald Trump. Then you had Joe Biden.
And politics was about how you felt about Donald Trump. Biden people, whether because of the limitations of his communication, given his age, or also because of a strategy that they felt Trump mobilized their anti-Manka coalition, there was a sort of agreement to let Trump remain at the center of American politics.
And when he did that for long enough, he really became it. And so things shifted in his direction.
I do think there's a big gender war dynamic. I think we've moved from the future as female to Mark Zuckerberg's companies don't have enough masculine energy anymore.
and that's happening at a again like a big cultural level and i said in that column that i thought at that moment i was writing that column we were at or near the peak of trump vibes because he hadn't started governing yet and as soon as you do then actually begin to create your backlash then you begin to create your counter forces and i already think it culturally doesn't feel the same way. I mean, the resistance, the opposition, it felt so absent.
It felt so quiet. Democrats felt so fractured.
They had so little voice. And already, I think this is beginning to shift.
And so, you know, part of it was just also, it was easy for it to all be vibes for a while, but now it's things actually happening and people actually watching things happen and deciding if they're upset about the things that are happening. And so already, I think we're getting into more of the mess again.
What are things that Democrats could glom onto that would help them take back the culture? Because they seem to be lost in the wilderness on that front as much as on the political front. right? Like what, what is, was talking to somebody recently they're like if you're in high school like what is an issue that is democrat aligned that you could grab onto that would feel cool or feel like trendy or whatever it's hard to think about like when we were going up like gay stuff you know gay marriage like anti-irac war right there are plenty of examples of that and i don't know part of me thinks maybe the easy answer to this is like going after the phones and like the tech billionaires the billionaires and the phones like it's all together and something and they're breaking our brains and they got to fight them but i'm interested in your thing on that theory or other ideas you might have on that front yeah i'll say two things so this is an argument i've been making for for a bit i did a poet you, you mentioned Chris and his chain.
So I think he debuted that on my show, on this episode we did about attention. And you guys have the interesting camera work that you do where it's like cinematic up shooting.
Oh yeah, people should come watch it, it's great. It's a cinematic up shooting, it's very interesting.
But it's something he and I talk about in that, that one thing I really believe is that the next dominant politician, sort of Joe Biden was too old to be part of social media in an authentic way. And so I actually think in some ways it helped him in the 2020 primary because he hadn't absorbed some of the currents in progressive online media that got a lot of his competitors to take stances that were politically toxic.
And then Trump and Musk have completely embraced everything that makes social media terrible and is breaking our brains and they've broken their own brains brains, and they're making their broken brains like the model of a brain, right, at the moment in American politics and culture. I think the next person is going to actually be of this such that they can hate it and channel the rage people have at it.
In the way that, and I do think people forget this about Barack Obama, one thing that was very effective about him in 04 and 08? Was he channeled a rage at how politics and culture are

changed? it in the way that and i do think people forget this about barack obama one thing that was very effective about him in 04 and 08 was he channeled a rage at how politics and culture change like the political consultants the red and blue dicing us up the cable news 24-hour news cycle he used to make fun of politico people didn't like how things felt and he was very good at channeling he was of it but he like them didn't like it like my joke is that the next person to win will have read a lot of Jonathan Haidt. You see this happening in a bunch of states, Republican and Democratic governors alike are banning cell phones in schools.
Trump in like embracing all this stuff so tightly, TikTok and this and that, there's some good politics in it, but he's not able to sort of be in the thing that most of us sense, which is whatever you want your actual strategy with it to be. Maybe it's not closing down TikTok, maybe it's banning phones in schools, it's things like that.
The sense that something has gone terribly wrong at that level of culture is very real. The other thing though that I would say is that I think there's something to the way communication works now that you see incredibly potent cultural moments rise and fall very, very fast.

So, you know, we're like,

oh, Democrats have no handle on the culture.

Well, they completely dominated it.

Like four or five years ago,

you saw Black Lives Matter,

you saw Me Too, right?

Wokeness, before wokeness was an epithet,

you had Jack Dorsey on stages wearing a Stay Woke shirt.

It was not initially seen as a bad thing.

Things move.

I think it has something to do with the way social media selects for engagement. So they select for first the engaging new idea and then all of the anger the engaging new idea creates over time then subsequently gets selected for.
So you have Me Too and then you have Pete Hegseth. You have all the way backlash, Donald Trump, this set of people.
There's going to be, I think, a sort of almost hydraulic system like that. I think our culture is very unstable because of the way we communicate and drive it.
So I'm not sure what is going to drive it is so much a policy topic people glom onto. What worked for Trump is that he represents a kind of masculinity that became degraded, that he was one of the last people who was very significant in public life still holding to.
And you could feel that all click together around the shot with his hand fist in the air after the assassination attempt. And I don't know what'll be the next thing, but I don't think it'll just be they came up with a good policy.
I mean, it might be anti-Trumpism. That's going to be possibly a very, very powerful politics, depending on how things go.
I do think Democrats need to learn how to exist in the culture that we have. One of the things I think is always very telling is when Democrats keep saying they have a media problem, that they still think of it all as a media, that if only the gatekeepers are better or they get booked booked on the right shows they have to go out and compete joe rogan was not three or four years ago a closed space to them they like drove him away i was at a conference like of democratic types so they're strategizing they're like we need more liberal media outlets and we got to fund them and create them i'm like sure you can do But like, that's not it.
Like you got to engage with the non-political cultural outlets.

Yes, exactly.

And that means you need people who are attractive to those outlets,

which have a lot of different,

I'm not saying it's only Joe Rogan, it's Brene Brown.

It's all these different things out there that matter.

But you need people who are authentically of the era of the moment.

And we don't know who that person is.

That'll be a person, not a party. Parties don't change culture.
People do. Final topic.
Speaking of losing touch with culture and midlife crisis, Kanye West was tweeting last night. I wanted to get your takes on this.
I didn't see this coming. Great.
We're going to do it live together. I noticed you're off Twitter, so I'm doing this for you.
I'm suffering for you, Ezra. Here's Kanye.
Here's Ye. Call me Yadolf Yitler and your bitch still wants to fuck.
Hitler was so fresh. I will say nothing bad or against China.
They always showed me love when Americans turned their back on me because of a red hat. I get money with China.
I'm a Nazi. I love Hitler.
Now what, bitches? There were are about 20 more like that i actually take it as a signal of something that that didn't somehow make its way to me it's not like i didn't turn on my computer today you know you saw the ufc fighter saying he thought hitler was a good guy you know there are some pretty dark forces being unleashed i have a a lot of trouble believing Elon Musk is simultaneously really going all in on the AFD in Germany, the far right party, and going to their conference and telling them the Germans become too embarrassed of their past. and he's making things that sure look like the salute totally unknowingly.
Maybe it's all just a big coincidence, but then he has to

let go of a kid on

his team who he's given access to the treasury payment

system because that kid you know, the salute totally unknowingly. Maybe it's all just a big coincidence, but then he has to let go of a kid on his team

who he's given access to the treasury payment system

because that kid is too racist

even for this administration in this moment.

The online right is very racism-pilled

and specifically racism-pilled in some sort of edgelord.

Oh, look, they can't keep us from saying this.

It's funny.

Ha ha.

Here's a meme.

Oh no, I actually believe it.

And it's there.

It's a very thin membrane between I'm doing trolling racism and being like,

oh, wait, I actually don't want to marry outside my race.

People slide between that very easily.

The funny memes are a bug in your own software to get too into it's like it's your you're running an exploit hack on your own mind and then your mind changes and you end up where some of these people are i don't know what all this is going to amount to but in some ways Trump in Charlottesville seems quaint but again

I think what all this is going to amount to but in some ways trump and charlottesville seems quaint but again i think i don't like when you've got yay coming out and saying great hitler's fantastic i'm a nazi now i think you have to look at that and say this probably isn't great for that side you don't happening. Like, that's not what you want from the guy who's like, you know, very well known for your MAGA hat.
The famous tweet the House Judiciary Republicans sent, Elon, Kanye, Trump. Yeah, the future, right.
So, I think there's something brewing here that is, we'll see what form it takes. I mean, maybe we just enter into another dark era of state-sponsored racism.
But you were saying earlier that there's no one like Don McGahn. There are none of these people who are holding him back in the first time.
I had this essay before the election about Trump and disinhibition. And I was saying in that essay, it's also, by the way, true for Elon Musk.
I like that essay. I was saying in that essay that Trump's fundamental characteristic as a public figure, as a human mind is disinhibition.
And I was saying in that essay, it's also, by the way, true for Elon Musk. I was saying in that essay that Trump's fundamental characteristic as a

public figure, as a human mind, is disinhibition. He's disinhibited in a way just almost no other

human beings are. And that is both behind some of what makes him really compelling as an

entertainer and a voice and what lets him do things other people wouldn't do and try strategies they

wouldn't try. And it's what makes him dangerous.
But in the first term, he governed in a very

uneasy coalition with the traditional Republican Party. And one way of taking that, which the people around Trump is the way they understand it, is that held him back.
And another way of taking it, which is more how I understand it, is that was a crucial balance of that administration. That when the Secretary of the Army, the Secretary of Defense, I'm sorry, Esper,'m sorry esper said no we're not gonna open fire on all these protesters in washington dc that was good for donald trump as opposed to bad for donald trump when nobody followed up on the let's launch patriot missiles into mexico idea that was good for donald trump not bad for donald trump and in this one they've of the, both in terms of Trump's administration, they've gotten rid of the brakes, they got rid of the external inhibitors, and in the movement broadly.
There's no external inhibition. There's no sense of what you shouldn't say, no sense of what's too far.
maybe it turns out that's great my suspicion is that's actually super dangerous and in the long

run doesn't wear well, particularly in a country where you just won 49.8% of the vote, not 68.9% of the vote. So I don't know.
It doesn't look to me like a great stable ground to build on. this is why you're at the top of the game Ezra you know I ask you about Kanye tweeting

call me Yadolf Yitler and like you get

it all the way back to your disinhibition column. It's such well-executed.
Wrap it right up in a bow. Wonderfully done.
Everybody, Ezra Klein, go get his book with Derek Thompson. It's called Abundance.
We'll have them back and talk about that in a month or two. So we can do a little book club together.
Pre-order it, read it, and we'll all chat

about it in a little bit. Thanks so much, Desiree Klein.

Always a pleasure, my friend.

We'll see you all back here on Monday. Peace.
Cause I'm living low next to the base Turn up the radio They're claiming I'm a criminal But now I wonder how Some people never know The enemy could be the French guardian I'm not a hooligan I rock the party and clear all the madness I'm not a racist Preach the teacher Cause don't they never have this? Number one I'm gonna run about the gun I wasn't licensed to have one The minute they see me, fear me, I'm the epitome, a public enemy Used to fuse without clues, I refused to blow a fuse They even had it on the news Don't believe the hype Don't, don't, don't believe the hype Don't, don't, don't, don't believe the hype Yes, was the start of my last jam So here it is again, another death jam But since I gave you all a little something that I knew you lacked They still consider me a new jack All the critics, you can hang them, I hold the rope But they hope to the Pope and pray it ain't dope The follower of Farrakhan They'll tell me that you understand Until you hear the man They'll book up the new school rap game Writers treat me like Coltrane insane yes to them but to me I'm a different kind we're brothers of the same mind unblind caught in the middle end not surrendering I don't rhyme for the sake of Ritalin so claim that I'm a smuggler some say I never heard of ya a rap burglar false media we don't need it do we it's fake that be to you, dig me? Yo, Terminator X Step up on the stand and show these people what time it is, boy Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't believe the high Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't believe the high Don't believe the high Don't believe the high Don't, don't, don't, don't believe the hype Don't believe the hype, it's a sequel As an equal can I get this through to you? My 98 booming with a trunk of funk All the jealous punk can't stop the dunk Coming from the school of hard knocks Some perpetrate, they drink Clorox, attack the blacks Because I know they lack exact, the cold facts And still they try the Xerox The leader of the new school, uncool Never played a fool, just made the rules Remember there's a need to get alarmed? Again I said I was a time bomb In the daytime, radio scared of me, cause I'm mad Plus I'm the enemy, they can't come on and play me in prime time, cause I know the time, cause I'm getting mine, I get on the mix late in the night, they know I'm living right so here goes the mic site, before I let it go don't rush my show, you try to reach and grab and get elbow, word to her, yo if you can't swing this, learn the words, you might sing this, just a little bit of the taste of the bass for you As you get up and dance at the LQ With some denial defiant, I swing folos Then in a clear lane, I go solo The meaning of all the latter media is the wax As you believe it's true, it blows me through the roof Suckers, liars, get me a shovel Some writers I know are damn devils From them I say,'t believe the hype. Yo Chuck, they must be on a pipe, right? Their pens and pads I snatch cause I've had it.
I'm not an addict being there for static. I see their taste recorder and I grab it.
No you can't have it back, silly rabbit. I'm going to my media assassin, Harry Allen.
I gotta ask him.'re Harry you're right are we that

the board podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brow