Jeffrey Goldberg and Catherine Rampell: The Un-American

Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
We have a double

dip today, Catherine Rampell in segment two. But first, the man of the hour, he's back

on the Bulwark Podcast. It's the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.
His name is Jeffrey Goldberg.

Chief Goldberg, how are you doing?

Good. how are you

i'm doing well i'm doing well you have a article out today that is causing stir as we mentioned

the green room some people are mad at you mostly some of the worst people on twitter are mad at

you so it's kind of like many of them are actually probably real i think many of them are not yeah

many of them are real it's like some are real in russian some are ai but some are enjoying the

fall in st petersburg i think yeah do you know about transnistria? Actually, I've been to Transnistria. Really? I have been to Transnistria.
We've had a lot of Moldova talk on the pod this week. We actually moved to real business.
You have an article out last night. The headline is not subtle.
Trump, I need the kind of generals that Hitler had. There's something subtly amusing about the lack of historical knowledge there, but there's also something really alarming about it.
The article gets into much more than that, and I want to kind of pull out what jumped out at me. But you've been on this beat for a few years now, so I'm curious.
This is kind of a confirmation about what we know of him, but what jumps out at you as being particularly relevant here in the last two weeks of the election? Look, I mean, the disdain, I report on a lot of different aspects, disdain for the military, disdain for wounded warriors, disdain for military traditions, including the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which is a pretty important thing. Disdain for the role of a military in a democracy.
That's probably the most important thing, right? Which is to say, Donald Trump emerges from, I don't want to say that he emerges from any tradition because he doesn't know anything about the past. I think that's fair to say based on the long record and based on one particular thing in this piece.
It emerges from the Archie Bunker tradition. Well, Archie Bunker, I bet knew a lot more, honestly.
What strikes me is that his impulses, because he doesn't have an ideology, he has impulses, right? His impulses are all authoritarian, totalitarian, or fascistic, now the word of the moment. And the idea, I don't know, it's hard to get your mind around the idea that a former president, current candidate for president, actually would think on any number of levels that Hitler is a role model in some way, or at least his administration.
The Hitler administration was a role model for the way one should organize government, in particular, the relationship between the chief executive and the military, the generals, my generals, as Donald Trump says. Mine generals, actually.
Mine generals, exactly. I should have this piece translated into German, actually.
So it's just astonishing. Look, we've known about, you know, his attitude toward service, toward the war dead, suckers and losers and all that.
Finally got on the record confirmation from John Kelly about that, which was good. But, you know, it's this combination of authoritarian impulse and historical ignorance that allows this man, Donald Trump, to look to Hitler as a model of how he should be president.
I can't even believe that those words are words I'm saying, but that's true. He really thinks that.
I mean, the funny part is, as you know, is that he extols Hitler's generals as listening to Hitler. Hitler's generals did two things that are relevant to this conversation.
One, they tried to kill Hitler repeatedly. Two, they lost, right? As a person who doesn't like losers.
Well, I guess at three, they did execute some, well, Jews and also extra legal orders. So, yeah, yes, yes, yes, yes.
I mean, I'm not, you know, I'm going to give Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt. Maybe that's not a great know i'm gonna give donald trump the benefit of the

doubt maybe that's not a great idea i'm gonna give him the benefit of the doubt and and say that i don't think that in his mind he is thinking about the ss or the gestapo when he's talking about hitler's generals i have a feeling he's talking more about just sort of wartime management and the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe,

and just a kind of martial obedience that he's seen in some movies, I guess. The relevant part for Donald Trump about German generals is not their execution of the final solution, at least those generals in the parts of the German apparatus that did that were going down a rabbit hole.
But obviously, the Wehrmacht was also involved in that. I don't want to get into it, but, you know, this is complicated stuff.
But I think that his notion that they did what he said is hysterical because I've been in conversation with people about this. Fine, he doesn't read books, but there's a Tom Cruise movie about this, for God's sakes.
he must have seen that on an airplane i mean i think yeah most of his movie references are from i guess a little bit earlier than that era but i think probably i've seen it to me i think actually the most relevant outside of just the alarming and the grotesque nature of just complimenting hitler in any environment you know you don't have to hand it to hitler by the way by the way sorry, but John Kelly's advice to him, which he told me about, was first of all, Mr. President, as an American president, you never say anything good about Hitler, right? You never say anything good about Hitler.
And number two piece of advice is, because remember, remember Donald Trump asked John Kelly at one point, who were the good guys in World War I?

And John Kelly said, Mr. President, remember, the good guys in any war are the people who are on our side.
And this leads to actually, well, now you've taken me to a different place. I'll get back to where I was going.
No, but it's good. One of John Kelly's quotes, he did an interview at the New York Times as well that is out this morning.
and in that interview

I think one of the things

that jumped out at me

from his quotes

was

he certainly He did an interview at the New York Times as well that is out this morning. And in that interview, I think one of the things that jumped out at me from his quotes was he's certainly the only president that has all but rejected what America is all about and what makes America America in terms of the Constitution, in terms of our values.
And to me, that is kind of what sums it up. Whatever word you want to put on it, fascism or authoritarianism or all of this, those things tie together.
The fact that he doesn't understand that the Americans were the good guys in World War I. He doesn't understand the fundamental American values that have united every president, every major party presidential candidate before him.
I think un-American is a great description of what we're talking about. Un-American in a deep

level. Yeah, he's a flag hugger.
Okay, I love the flag. You love the flag.
But the flag is a symbol of deeper values. The flag is a symbol of ideas that are unique in the history of humankind.
The flag is a symbol of the Constitution, the rule of law, government accountability, democracy. you know you you could hug it all you want, but he doesn't understand anything about what it means.
And I think Kelly's right. The true novelty of Trump, look, we've had good presidents.
We've had bad presidents. We've had presidents who probably had authoritarian leanings, authoritarian impulses, people who abuse their power, obviously.
They all at least were hypocritically, they would at least pretend or attempt intermittently to adhere to what we would consider to be American democratic norms. Donald Trump just doesn't care.
Yeah. I don't know how you divide it.
He doesn't care or doesn't know. Kind of a distinction without a difference, really.
I mean, it doesn't matter when you're actually trying to run the country.

The most interesting part of the piece for me, and there's a lot of different elements that you went into, how he lashes out at a dead soldier's family about the cost of a funeral. And there are a bunch of other reveals which we can talk about.
But to me, the thing that ties to the Hitler generals the most directly that tells us what a donald trump second term would be like that is the most alarming thing was this section about how he's acting during the 2022 george floyd protests and he said the chinese generals would know what to do according to former officials who described conversations referring to the leaders that carried out the tiananmen square massacre in 1989 can't you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something? When defense officials argued against Trump's desire, he screamed, according to witnesses, you're all fucking losers. Like to me, that is what he means by the Hitler generals, right? Like in the Chinese generals.
In the next term, I want people that are willing to shoot people that protest me. Look, he's praised Xi Jinping, who is the leader of the Chinese Communist Party and the leader of the People's Liberation Army, which, of course, is responsible for the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, in which several hundred to several thousand, we don't know the true number, student protesters were gunned down in the center of Beijing.
Americans are almost uniformly horrified by that. But he extols, and I think he just did this in the last 24 hours, he extols Xi as a guy who rules with an iron fist.
I mean, he literally used the term iron fist. You have a presidential candidate who is yearning to wield

an iron fist. I understand the impulse toward power.
People who run for president are automatically a little bit abnormal in the sense that they think they could do this, in the sense that they desire that level of power. I get all that.
But underneath everything else, I would make this observation. He's telling us exactly what he admires.
He's telling us exactly what he wants to do. He's telling us exactly how he would organize his administration.
There are no secrets. There's no mystery here.
This is not a, what he means by that is X. He means he wants to have the right and the privilege of shooting down americans in the street period there's no taking him seriously but not literally no no yeah when you talk to the sources for the story and obviously spoke to kelly who is now becoming more public and others i mean clearly their sense of alarm is high they saw it behind the scenes right and so they are probably the best positioned to determine how much of this is bluster, how much of this is real threat.
Like when you're having those conversations, what is your sense for how high their threat level is? They're scared shitless. They're scared shitless.
I'm allowed to say that on your show, right? Yeah. Oh yeah.
They're scared shitless.

That's my three word answer to you. Part of it, remember, is anybody who's crossed him publicly is in his gun sights.
And I'm even talking about, let's say, secondary characters in this drama, generals like Stanley McChrystal and Bill McRaven. Remember, they have been critical from time to time.
By the way, you know, really stone cold American warriors, obviously terrorist hunters, you know, serious guys, Donald Trump, and this is really fascinating. Donald Trump threatened to call them back to active duty.
If you're a four-star general, maybe three as well. Once you reach that level in the military, you are always call backable.
If the president of the United States, the commander in chief decides that he needs your services in a war, he can call you to active duty no matter how old you are. And Donald Trump literally talked about calling them back to active duty so that he could court martial them.
Right. So I think everybody who's been in his orbit understands that.
And, you know, at that point, Mark Esper, the former Secretary of Defense, who has come out against Donald Trump and Mark Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, both talked him off the ledge on that one. But there won't be people like that the next time around to talk him off the ledge.
You'll have, you know, the Kash Patels of the world who are encouraging this. So they are very frightened on a personal level, and they're very frightened.
I shouldn't say they're frightened on a personal level. These are not 10 people who sort of get paralyzed by fear, but they believe that they will be targeted, just as Donald Trump has promised to target a whole range of Democratic Party officials, for instance.
So they have that on the personal level, and then on the sort of structural level, the national level, they fear that he will spend four years destroying the structures and institutions of government that allow us to be a reality-based democracy. And is there a sense that, I mean, obviously there are going to be Kash Patels, there are going to be hacks.
Are there going to be careers that would want to go along with that? Are they just worried about the crisis or they just don't know? They just know a lot of bad potential outcomes and they don't want to live through them. Look, you have the problem.
I call this the problem of the colonels, right? You've got hundreds and hundreds of colonels, maybe thousands of colonels across the armed forces. From getting the colonel or captain in the Navy, from getting captain or colonel to general or admiral, it's a very, very, very narrow funnel.
And there's an incredible amount of effort deployed to winnow out all but the best, right? Sometimes you get a Mike Flynn, gets through the funnel, but usually not. So you could have a situation, A, in which the wrong people, quote unquote, are moved through that funnel.
But remember, if you're the commander in chief, you do get to pick who leads your armed services. But tradition, the Secretary of Defense makes a recommendation who should be the head of the army, who should be the head of the Air Force, and so on.
And the president accepts the recommendation of the experts. This might not happen.
My point is that in that vast pool of colonels, you could find people who will do your bidding. And by the way, there are always people, as we well know, who want to serve no matter what.
They want the status, the power, the relevance. And so they will staff the main departments of the government.
And there are also some people who believe that better me than someone else, right? You're not going to have the quality level of Mattis, Kelly, Milley, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, Gary Cohn. You're not going to have that level of quality because most people you know of quality this is that my impression probably yours too my impression is that people of quality understand that very few officials survive service in a trump administration with their reputations intact okay so if the premise is that're scared shitless, they're speaking out a little bit, you know, they've interviewed in the Times, I've talked to you.
They could do more. I mean, they have agency here, right? You know, I mean, there could be a press conference, could be a campaign event.
They could talk to Brett Baer, where they might reach people that are more persuadable. They could come on this podcast.
They could come on this podcast. They're all welcome on this podcast.
Anytime I open the invite. I've invited HR McMaster.
He declined to others. So yeah, I mean, plenty of opportunities, plenty of different places.
That's the thing that I just have trouble balancing, right? I'm scared shitless. I'm concerned that it's a fascist.
He's the biggest threat in the country. And what i'm going to do about it is i'll do one interview i don't get that can you explain it to me i get it i do get it look first of all there is a you know that there's a cost for this and and not everybody not everybody has the personal courage of a liz cheney right who's willing to just put it all out there on the line but liz cheney is also a politician liz cheney liz cheney comes from from a tradition in which you were involved in politics i had sarah matthews on the on the republican voters against trump bus tour last week she's 29 years old she blew up her career was a deputy press secretary who doesn't have money for his security doesn't live in a comfortable house anywhere you know what i mean so yeah no no no no i i get all that i do look these are guys who start at the age of 18 generally either in west point or at rtc or as enlisted men and it's drummed into their heads from 18 to you know 60, 60.
The military is above and separate from politics, and you shouldn't get involved, and you shouldn't endorse. And countries in which generals get too involved in politics are not generally good countries.
I do credit these guys with having a lot of hesitation, anxiety even, about participating at that level. However, I'll make your point, which is, especially for people like John Kelly, Jim Mattis, H.R.
McMaster, and so on, they did go into politics when they joined an administration. John Kelly told the Times he's a retired general.
And I'm like, actually, not right. You're a retired chief of staff.
That was your last job. Well, you're a retired DHS secretary.
your retired GHS. Look, I have a, I have a retired dhs secretary you're a retired dhs look i have a i have a hard time being critical of these guys because i appreciate the culture and i appreciate their service i also would question i mean you would know this better than i do but i would question who it would move.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe if you had Pence.

Maybe if you had pence maybe if you had millie mcmaster mattis and kelly sitting up there you know with 200 reporters and just going for two hours about this is all it has to be is this is what i saw yeah i mean I suppose from a razor thin margin, toss up race type situation that we're in, you don't have to move millions. You got to move 30,000 people in Wisconsin.
Yeah. I don't know.
I mean, we're just speculating. I noticed the Times didn't ask him who he's voting for.
Did you ask him who he's voting for? I don't know who he's voting for and he wouldn't tell me. I'm not going any assumption well he's not gonna vote for trump he's not gonna vote for trump we know that yeah i would bet it's between uh kamala harris and kamala harris but that's just yeah anything else in the story that jumped out at you before i leave you the gallagher section i thought was really alarming as well i mean just again just kind of trump's mindset thinking how he thinks about his military he, you all are just killers.
What's the difference? You don't have to follow any rules. That's a terrible thing to say.
He said it to Milley for context. He said to Milley that you all are just killers in defense of Eddie Gallagher who had committed a war crime, really, and he wanted to pardon him, and he was trying to justify it.
But anyway. It's almost as if he doesn't understand that there's such a thing as a war crime right and obviously our military i mean sometimes does not succeed in being in carrying out only lawful acts but not for lack of trying and not for lack of lawyers and trump is saying oh you guys are just you just kill for a living so what's the difference if you desecrate the corpse of an Afghan? Like, who cares? And, you know, we like to think that we're different than other countries, that we don't act like Russia on the battlefield.
But again, it's in that large category of things Donald Trump doesn't understand and may be incapable of understanding. The article, again, Trump, I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.

Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.

Thank you for popping on here last second.

Obviously, something we'll be continuing to cover here at The Bulwark,

and we'll be talking to you and your colleagues a bunch the next few weeks.

Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

Up next, Catherine Rampell of The Washington Post.

We're going to do a little economy talk. Stick around.
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All right, and I'm here with Catherine Rampell. She's a syndicated opinion columnist at the Washington Post on economy and other issues.
She's also an economic and political commentator for CNN and a special correspondent for the PBS NewsHour. She's been getting spicy with my buddy Scott Jennings on the cable panels.
We'll get to that in a minute. But welcome back to the podcast.
How you doing, Catherine? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me.
Happy to have you. We need to do a periodic economic check-in, and you've been doing such good work lately.
And you had at the Post this week a little test that people were taking. We'll put the link in the show notes here and people can go test out whether they're more aligned with Kamala Harris or Donald Trump on policy.
I guess people listening to this podcast probably know the answer to that already, but it seems like you got some interesting results. Yeah, go ahead.
Yeah. Well, what we did was we got a bunch of data from YouGov, the polling organization, that had run blind surveys, effectively, on like 130 different policies from either of the candidates or both of the candidates, or in some cases, neither of them, where basically they asked people to rate how much they agreed with them without knowing which candidate had proposed them.
And then separately, they asked people to evaluate the policies again, guessing which candidate had embraced them. And the results were super interesting.
Among other top line findings, we found that Kamala Harris's policy agenda is actually way more popular than Trump's. Again, in a blind test, people don't know who proposed what.
So almost all of her policy agenda is above water. you know majority of the population supports almost all of her ideas for trump it's about half of his ideas have majority support, which is actually better than I expected.
We had done a similar or YouGov had done a similar smaller scale version of this back when Biden was on the ballot. I want to say early summer.
And in that case, almost all of Trump's policies were below water. So Trump did better, but still not as bad.
He's added in a few kind of a few, a few gimmies, a few giveaways, you know, he's stealing from the Democratic playbook a little bit here down the stretch. Yeah, he's had sort of a panderpalooza recently, or an Oprah-esque spirit, you know, you get a tax cut, and you get a tax cut, and you get a tax cut.
And so, in fact, his most popular idea across his entire agenda was making Social Security benefits tax-free. So, as an aside, just because an idea is popular does not mean it is a good, meritorious idea, whether we're talking about Social Security benefits or other things that are making them tax free anyway, or other things that I think are sort of politically, economically foolish, like tariffs poll relatively well.
We can talk about that, I guess, later in the program. And I do not think that Trump's universal tariff idea is a good one for all sorts of reasons.

So, you know, just because people like something doesn't mean that it is substantively meritorious.

But if we're just talking about like what voters prefer, they are much more on board with Harris's agenda.

And then we broke down policies by topic, by issue.

So like there is a bunch of economic ideas and a bunch of healthcare ideas and a bunch of foreign policy ideas to see if there were relative strengths or weaknesses between the candidates. And in that case, Harris does best on pretty much everything on the economy, immigration and foreign policy, they're like roughly tied.
But, you know, even things like crime, people vastly prefer Harris's agenda to Trump, which is pretty striking, considering if you ask people in the abstract, which candidate do you trust more on crime or guns, they say Trump, or, you know, a higher share say Trump. But then if you look at what ideas they like, they like Harris's, but part of the problem is they don't know whose ideas are whose.
Part of this is, is meshing. And this gets more into my, my space, but like the Democrats, I've been saying for a while, the Democrats are scared.
If they just ran on nineties, democratic guns and crime policy, I feel like they would be in a pretty good, pretty good position. And those are popular issues they're, to steal your word, generally meritorious.
And so I feel like they've let themselves get defined by members of the coalition that maybe have policy ideas that aren't as popular. You may be right.
I don't think that's the primary problem here for Harris. Okay.
A lot of her ideas that pull super well are things like universal background checks, universal mental health and criminal background checks for guns, or having a national database to track police misconduct, or career training and substance abuse programs for former prisoners. Like things that are, I don't know if exactly those versions were on the platform in the

90s, but like maybe you would consider them more liberal.

I don't know.

But they are not particularly salient in this election.

High popularity, low salience.

Yeah, I think that there are kind of two issues here.

One is that Harris and her Democratic surrogates have not done a great job communicating to the public what she stands for. And, you know, the examples that I just gave are ones that probably, if you looked at the data, like people are relatively able to code those as Democratic.
But a lot of her other ideas that people really like that are sort of more law and order ideas,

maybe this is hearkening back to the 90s, people don't realize are hers. So like her most popular policy, actually, the most popular policy across our entire data set was a border security measure.
It had to do with investing in new technology to detect fentanyl and other drugs at the border.

Yeah, I think 90% of voters, registered voters, liked that idea. But almost everybody thought it was Trump's.
Because it's border security, it's drugs, it's law and order. And so they associate with him and she has not been able to sort of escape the branding that Republicans have placed on her as like open borders, lawlessness, all that good stuff.
It's not so much the ideas they're proposing. It's like partly their ability to communicate them.
And then frankly, I think a large reason for this failure of voters to understand who stands for what has to do with media coverage.

It's just that policy issues like always get crowded out.

You know, usually they get subordinated to horse race coverage.

That's this is always my complaint.

I write primarily about policy and like every election cycle.

I'm like, why don't people care about the issues?

And it's just, you know, that's what what gets covered is the polls.

I think that's partly reflecting audience preferences. But it's also just like, it's much easier for journalists to write about horse race than to write about the issues, especially if it's not your specialty, like if you're a political reporter, getting into the nitty gritty of the tax code or how insurance markets work or whatever, it's just like, it's hard and you don't have time to do it on deadline.
So it's partly about that. That's an ever present issue.
And it's especially difficult to get policies onto the front page right now with Trump in the race. So like, as an example, this project that we're talking about that I did with my colleague, Yo-Yo Joe, on what the candidate's policy agenda is and who stands for what and how little people know about it.
I was going to talk about it on CNN last night and this morning. And Trump likes Nazis.
Yes. And now Trump, you know, now everything is Trump, Trump and Nazis, which I'm not suggesting should not be covered, right? Like, that's a very important headline.
And all of the stuff that's come out from John Kelly is really damning and is important for the future of our republic, that voters know it. But it also means that it's another news cycle about Trump craziness.
And I guess there's some like tangential policy issues related, like you don't want fascism, but we're still not hearing about what his other policies are, let alone Kamala Harris and her ideas. So it's just been very difficult to get the airtime to talk about this.
And I think a lot of people blame voters. Like, you know, voters say that they need to know more about Kamala Harris.
And how can they say that? Like, isn't there more than enough information? And it's partly that the media doesn't really give it to them. Or at least doesn't prioritize it.
I saw a poll yesterday. Blueprint, those guys are Blueprint.
We've done some coverage of their message testing polls, which I think are pretty good. And they were looking at 18 to 29-year-old men, boys, we might call them, who don't know anything.
So if you have an 18 to 29-year-old male in your life who's on the fence, doesn't think there's any difference between the two candidates, this is a good quiz to send them. You say you care about the policies, take the quiz, see how it turns out.
Yes, I should say, in addition to our findings about what other voters believe about the policies, our Washington Post piece, my piece with Yo-Yo, allows people to take a quiz so that they can see in a blind test which candidate they align with more on what policies. Take the quiz, send it to the 18 to 29 year old male in your life who's deciding what to do in the election still.
As far as specific policy issues, we can do that here. We can get serious.
You wrote recently about a test policy in Flint that the Harris campaign is looking at taking nationwide, which is essentially just a direct cash transfer to families, people having newborns. Talk a little bit about the policy and what we've seen as far as the results and whether there is anything that could be scaled there.

Yeah. So we already have at the national level a child tax credit.
It's been around for decades,

usually with bipartisan support, although has become more partisan in recent years.

And during the first year of Biden's administration, they expand, Democrats expanded it to make it refundable, meaning that even if you have very low earnings or zero earnings, you can still get this essentially cash for having a child. The expanded version expired.
And Kamala Harris has said not only would she increase the existing level of the tax credit to be what it was under the American Rescue Plan, but in addition, she would give every family with a newborn $6,000 cash, refundable and maybe available in some kind of monthly installment or whatever, not just at tax time. So that's the idea.
I was talking with people on the campaign, like, where did you come up with the $6,000 figure? Is it like based on some calculation of what it costs for a newborn baby, you know, with the strollers and diapers or whatever? And I was told, it was inspired by this program in Flint.

Flint, Michigan, is obviously not a place that would usually be used as a role model for good government policy. We're not taking the pipes nationwide.
We're not taking the Flint pipes nationwide. Yes, yes.
Although, you know, Flint was the site of this major water crisis where lead was leaching into the water, poisoning the residents, including children. And they ultimately have fixed most of it.
And actually, while I was there in Flint to write about this other thing, this other baby bonus program, incidentally, the EPA rolled out a lead pipe replacement regulation nationwide. and so people in Flint were like, yeah, we're so proud that our crisis means that, you know, this is hopefully not going to be an issue in other states.
So yeah, you don't want the same problem that Flint had, but maybe in some ways, you know, they've inspired better solutions in other places. So Flint, normally a poster child for government failure.
In this particular case, actually the same woman who exposed the Flint-led water crisis a decade ago, her name is Dr. Mona Hanna.
She's the person who came up with this $6,000 baby bonus program. She's like incredible.
She's one of the most charismatic people I've ever met. Everybody in town knows her as Dr.
Mona. And basically, she's a pediatrician.
She treats patients in Flint. And she said for many years, she was very frustrated by the fact that a lot of her patients' various problems were related to public health issues and that she'd see kids with breathing problems or asthma.
And she's like, well, I think you just probably need better living conditions, but that costs money. Or poor nutrition, you need better nutrition, but that costs money.
The way that she put it to me was, for a really long time, she wished she had something in her doctor's bag that could just prescribe away poverty. And so basically, that's what she decided to do.
She was presented with this grant opportunity to come up with a new program. and she said what if we just like gave every family, you know, not contingent on on income, $6,000 on the occasion of having a baby.
So they give expectant mothers $1,500 at 20 weeks. And then when the baby is born, people get, I guess it's $500 a month for the first year.
So $6,000. And people can use it however they like.
I guess in theory, they could use it to buy a flat screen TV or whatever if they really wanted to. But in practice, I talked with a lot of moms in Flint and they're like, oh my God, babies are so expensive.
You have to get the stroller and the car seat and the diapers and the wipes and the formula bottles and whatever. So people can use it however they like, which some people like and some people don't like.
The traditional Milton Friedman version of this would be much better to just give people cash to do what they want with stuff. He was sort of a well-known proponent of a negative income tax or a basic income.
Get the local bureaucrats out of the system. You got to go to some office in Flint.
You got to wait in line and fill out paperwork and just cut all that out. Yes.
And in Flint, it's very administratively light. So basically, you have to prove that you live in Flint.
You don't have to prove any level of income. Like I said, it's universal, but Flint is a very low income place.
It's like, it has, I think, the highest child poverty rate in the nation or among the highest child poverty rates. So it's very, very low income.
You're not going to see a lot of like billionaires getting the $6,000 baby bonus there. And the actual cash benefits are administered by GiveDirectly, which is a well-known global nonprofit that does cash transfers.
So people get the money through a debit card. They get it through their direct deposit in their bank account, and then they use it as they like.
It's early days. They have, I want to say, like about 1,000 families enrolled.
But the early results of the program are promising. They have lower rates of smoking in the third trimester for pregnant moms, fewer cases of very low birth weight births, and better nutritional access.
And then they also asked people about sort of softer questions, more subjective things that you might not think of as like traditional metrics. Like, do you feel loved? Do you feel respected? Do you have hope? And so, you know, I think the argument for those who are running this pilot is that this is not just about the material needs of these families, but it's also like about rethinking the social contract and that you want people to feel like the community supports your decision to have a child and is supporting your ability to make ends meet.
And so some of it's like this sort of traditional metrics like birth weight. Some of it's about how much do you trust government institutions, where, again, in Flint in particular, people really do not trust government institutions and the health care system.
So then the question is, how much does any of this scale up to the country? Like I said, Kamala Harris, her campaign has sort of used this as a template of sorts, or at least the baby bonus part, not the prenatal bonus part. And in terms of administrative likeness, keeping the bureaucrats out of your business and letting you spend the money as you see fit, that's obviously the same or very similar.
One difference is that, again, Flint is a very low income population relative to the rest of the country. Whereas if you expanded this nationwide, it would be available to lots of families higher up the income.
It's basically the same eligibility criteria as the current child tax credit, which goes up, I think you can get the full amount up to $400,000 of income or something like that. I don't have the numbers in front of me.
So somebody should check that before you make tax decisions. Well, I think the other good news about this is for the small percentage of pro-lifers who have demonstrated that they're motivated by the health and well-being of the child and not by hatred of women, we could have the opening for a future compromise, the prenatal health cash.
Absolutely. So there's something there.
And actually, in Michigan, they are now expanding the program to a few other areas, including to some quite conservative areas in the upper peninsula. And there have been Republican pro-life lawmakers who are very much behind it.
So I agree. I think, as I said, the child tax credit in general, historically had a lot of bipartisan support.
I think there is an opportunity for more conservative pro-lifers to put their money where their mouth is, so to speak, and say, we actually want to make it easier for people to raise kids, not just force them to have birth, but like actually be supportive of the babies that result from that birth and giving people cash to help them pay for diapers or whatever, whatever they see fit when the baby is born is a really great way to demonstrate that. At the national level, I think, you know, the jury's still out on how much actual investment Republican senators and congressmen will make in this.
I think that's a very judicious and kind way to put it. I want to talk about a different article that you've written recently, well, several, about how the economy is doing, to use your phrase, spectacularly well.
You know, we could go through all the stats. I don't know how much value is in that.
The more more interesting thing i want to get from you since you've kind of followed this stuff day to day more closely than i do i do think that like there is a lack of appreciation for like the expectations beat on the economic landing here i know that occasionally like joe biden likes to tweet about it and maybe that was just kind of the fallout from his communications failings. But just a remarkable result for where the economy is right now versus where all the experts thought it would be 12, 18, 24 months ago.
So I will start my answer with the caveat that catrifactuals are really hard and they're especially hard to communicate

to the public like telling people well it could have been worse yeah just trust me is not always the most convincing message could have had hyperinflation exactly i could you know could have had a depression so it is a really hard thing to communicate but you were absolutely right that the economy has beaten like all expectations in the sense that we are not only doing better than had been projected a year or so ago when there had been widespread fears of recession, not just among like Republicans wishing for a bad economy to make the election harder for Democrats. I feel like there's this like people on the left are like, oh, you know, it was just all of this propaganda telling you that the economy was going to fail to help Trump or whatever.
That's not true. Like Wall Street analysts whose job it is to get forecasts right were predicting overwhelmingly recession not very long ago.
And with good reason, usually when there is a period of high inflation in American history, or recent history anyway, it has been followed by a recession. That did not happen.
Knock on wood, it will not happen anytime soon, I think because of some judicious decisions by the Federal Reserve, which they largely don't get credit for also among people on the left. That is not true here.
We have a little Jerome Powell, if we win this election, is going to be in a little sculpture garden with Mark Cuban and Liz Cheney. We're crowdfunding for it right now.
Okay. Yeah, it's funny.
It's like Jay Powell seems to be sort of a villain among a lot of progressives, which I don't understand. It's like, if we get a soft landing, yes, he should get a Medal of Honor award.
Any event. So not only did we escape that fate so far, we're actually doing better as an economy than had even been predicted before the recession happened, before the pandemic happened, I should say.
So if you look at where the Congressional Budget Office or the International Monetary Fund thought the US economy would be in 2024, when they made their forecasts in like January of 2020, we have more jobs and higher output, in higher wages than had been forecast, which is unusual and bizarre, because obviously we went through this horrible pandemic recession, which you would think we would still have some scars from. The rest of the world basically does.
We don't. And you can debate why that is.
And I think the answer is not quite clear. But either way, we're doing very well.
American exceptionalism, I think, is the answer. The rest of the world has also had, most of the developed world, I should say, has had more exposure to the war in Ukraine and a bunch of other things.
We're doing a lot better than had been forecast. And on almost every metric, things look very good,

except for the one, which is, I know, a little bit like asking, other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln, about inflation? And inflation has cooled a lot.
It was obviously quite high. In much of the rest of the developed world, it was higher.
It has been higher, again, partly because of the war in Ukraine. But either way, it was painful in the

United States. world, it was higher.
It has been higher, again, partly because of the war in Ukraine.

But either way, it was painful in the United States. It has cooled a lot.
I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about the general public about what is supposed to happen to prices now. economists are looking for price growth to slow.
So that means prices don't go up as quickly now as they did a couple of years ago. The general public has been looking for prices to fall.
That's a different thing, right? That's like the best way to analogize this maybe is as a car, right? The car is going to continue moving forward, it's going to move forward more slowly, it's going to decelerate, it's not going to move backwards, which is a really tricky concept to get people to understand just like counterfactuals are hard, you know, understanding price growth and price levels is also really hard too. So people are still ticked off about the fact that a night out costs a lot more.
A night out at a restaurant costs a lot more than it used to. The grocery bill costs more than it used to.
Now, of course, over time, everything costs more than it used to 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 50 years ago, more or less with some exceptions, like actually for flat screen TVs. But basically, the price level goes up.
It's just that people have more time to acclimate to prices going up than has been the case in the last few years. So I think people are still reasonably frustrated and ticked off that they were like going to the grocery store and it's still relatively fresh in their mind how much milk used to cost or how much a pound of beef used to cost and they just need to get used to it and i think part of the reason you may have seen some improvement in consumer sentiment in sort of these softer uh measures of how people feel about the economy is that they're just getting used to it right which is going to happen eventually again price growth has slowed wages are outpacing price growth and that's been the case for over a year now so people aren't like you know super enthusiastic about the economy but i think they're less pissed off.
And I think, among other things, that means the gap between consumer views of the economy and those more traditional metrics is shrinking. But also, it's probably going to be less of a problem for the incumbent party.
I don't think the economy is ever going to be a winning issue for Kamala Harris, but it may be less of a problem than it has been. Okay.

We need to close with our friend Scott Jennings. I guess we have two Scott Jennings items.
My former colleague, he gets really, he gets a little testy. I got a little testy with Sarah Longwell.
I got a little testy with you. I don't know if there's any trends there that we could notice, but I wanted to play one clip of an exchange you guys had after Donald Trump's's mcdonald's stunt let's take a listen i think it's an unfair attack on trump this minimum wage worker issue because mcdonald's is not the only employer in america you know that right like there are lots of other a lot of service am i am i arguing that they are but shouldn't he be able to answer you sat here and attacked him for attacking minimum wage workers because he went to mcdonald's and i just wanted attack him for that.
She did not do that. I didn't attack him for going to McDonald's.
I attacked him for his actual record, which is bad for the workers of McDonald's. But the reason you're sitting here is because he went to McDonald's.
The reason I'm sitting here is because I write on economic policy, and I know something about the economic policy. I guess this is where I need to be clear.
She's sitting here because she actually knows things about economic policy. But did did you what uh you had another one with ivf you're you're fighting a good fight in there but uh give us a little behind give us a little behind the scenes like what's happening so what's happening here i think i like scott actually i i feel like a lot of people after that exchange sent me a bunch of notes like, yeah, beat that guy down.
I'm like, no, I like Scott. I think he sticks pretty closely to the party talking points.
And that's part of his job as a Republican strategist type, as a surrogate on CNN. I don't really begrudge him.
It's a little weird to be a surrogate for somebody that you didn't like. Yes.
I can go back and play some old clips of Scott or any like 95% of these people talking about how awful Donald Trump is. But anyway.
Yes. I mean, you'll have to talk with him about how much he embraces Trump now versus, you know, as being a loyal foot soldier.
I don't know. I haven't asked.
It is doing well for a speaking feast. I know you're an economics reporter, so I don't know if that's part of your remit or part of your beat, but it is helping on that front.
I will say, I think that one broader takeaway from that exchange is that, you know how I was saying earlier that policy issues get crowded out by other shiny objects um yes this is a great point yes so i mean shiny objects is almost too dismissive for like the the trump nazi stuff but i would put trump's mcdonald's stunt in that category right you're trying to talk about minimum wage this actual issue that's infecting the workers. And instead you get in this kind of like optics argument, right? I think what Scott was trying to say to give him the benefit of the doubt, I think he was saying like, we're here to talk about his, his McDonald's stunt.
You're here to comment on the McDonald's stunt. My view of my role on these shows among other places, other, is not so much to talk about the stunt, but to talk about how that fits in or contradicts the actual things that the candidates stand for.
And as I said, you didn't play it, but I said, you know, Kamala Harris has done similar stunts in the past. I mean, you can call it a stunt or you can call it like camaraderie with a working man or whatever.
Like it's a tried and true tradition for politicians to do one of these

like work a day in the life of a common man, you know, traditional voter. Sure, sure, sure.

Somebody doing a menial job, whatever. Yeah.
But usually then when you get asked a question about

like, like, and then Trump is like, ask the question about the minimum wage and like, and like and like and what you know these workers lives are like and he just has no substantive answer at all it's just like right so so that's what that was the context for that exchange as well so you know the setup for that topic on the on the show was trump did this did this stunt people are want to talk about this stunt scott's point was like oh why are Democrats so mad about Trump doing this stunt. People are want to talk about this stunt.
Scott's point was like, Oh, why are

Democrats so mad about Trump doing this stunt? And I was trying to say, I don't care that he did this stunt. I think this was like the most normal thing that Trump has done in months, you know, way more normal to like do a photo op at McDonald's than to praise Nazi generals, or like give a tax break to everyone who comes into your peripheral vision.
But I care much more about how the optics of this fit into what he's actually proposed. So I mentioned, you know, he hasn't, he won't say whether actually at that McDonald's stunt, he was asked about his support for raising the wage wage and he would not say, he would not answer in past context.
He has been, you know, more clearly opposed to it. Minimum wage for those listening hasn't been raised since 2009.
He also cut funding for OSHA, which is the regulatory agency that does workplace safety inspections, which will affect the lives of McDonald's workers, of course. And under Trump, likewise, his National Labor Relations Board made it harder to hold McDonald's accountable if their franchisees commit wage theft, etc.
So I was talking about all of that. And Scott was saying, well, none of that has to do with this McDonald's stunt.
And I was saying, yes, it does. And my role is to talk about it because I cover economic policy.
So that's my more charitable explanation for what happened. Yeah.
Oh, I'm glad we got to have it all out. I don't really know about this is, I guess, not really your business.
And I guess I'm quasi I work for a competitor, not that I really care, but I'm anNBC analyst but like the new CNN thing it has been good for viral clips but like these five person panels are not particularly conducive to having extended conversations about OSHA and the impact on McDonald's workers I wouldn't say. It can be hard to get that in.
All right. We already talked to Jeffrey Goldberg about his story about John Kelly.

But I wanted to play, again, Scott talking about it last night, but also in the context of something that you've written about lately as a Jewish person, as a Jewish columnist, about these questions about invoking Hitler and how appropriate it is or how inappropriate it is in the context of Trump. But let's listen to Jennings one more time.
I think first of all, I don't know John Kelly, but I agree. I think he's an honorable person.
His family and his son certainly made the ultimate sacrifice for the country. So he certainly earned an opinion here.
And he's earned a political opinion. But I think like everything else with Donald Trump, opinions vary, whether you're coming out of the military or the private sector or government or anything else.
And I agree that two weeks before an election will cause some people to look at this in a jaundiced way, like, you know, you're trying to drop this here at the end, and there will be people who don't believe it. There will be people who refute it, and Donald Trump himself also refutes it.
I would just humbly submit to Mr. Kelly that if he's worried about Hitler and he's worried about fascism, he ought to pick up the newspaper.
There's thousands of Hitlers running around this country right now, running around college campuses, running around New York City, chasing Jewish people around, blocking their access on college campuses. If you're worried about Hitler and you're talking about Donald Trump,

maybe open your eyes and take in what's happening on the American left in this country.

Those are the Hitler's.

So, Catherine, two-point question.

Are you more concerned about fascism coming from the Republican nominee for president

who's tied in the polls or from a college sophomore at Columbia? And part two, what do you think about the broader kind of discourse around Trump's rhetoric on earned Hitler and issues such as this? I'm pretty much against Hitler in any form. I know that's a really controversial take.
Don't think it's great when there's anti-Semitism on the left or the right. And I've had it targeted at me from both directions in the past week, among other weeks of my life.
Same. I'm not even Jewish.
That's just the gift that Elon Musk has given us on Twitter now, where it's just totally free to make those kinds of stories. Actually, there are some Jewish millers out there.
I know. Yeah, that must be it or something.
I don't know about my face. I don't know.
You're in the the media and we can go to GW to who knows and I'm in the media. There are a lot of potential clues there.
But now I'm Gentile for all the trolls.

yeah so not not good however yeah i'm much less worried about a college student who who is not given the office of leader of the free world and commander in chief of our military espousing anti-Semitic comments.

Again, don't like it, but much more worried about someone who is a major party candidate for president who potentially has all of the powers of the state at his disposal and has beyond that, seemingly deliberately echoed a lot of the Hitler rhetoric. I wrote about this a few weeks ago, but as a columnist, a political pundit, whatever you want to call me, I never want to be the one tripping Godwin's law law godwin's law is this idea that as an internet conversation goes on the probability that someone invokes hitler or the nazis approaches one like everything devolves into like oh well you're just if you disagree with me you're just a nazi like you don't want to be part of that rhetorical problem.
However, it has become sort of inescapable with Trump, like even before this thing came out from Jeffrey Goldberg, where Trump literally praised German Nazis as being super loyal, which is sort of funny in a way for other reasons, because they were notoriously not loyal, but also they were Nazis. So either loyalty or not, probably don't want to hold them up as role models.
But I wrote a few weeks ago about like his use of the word vermin to describe his political enemies, his descriptions of immigrants and other disfavored groups as people who were not only coming to eat your pets, but rape and murder your daughters. And lots of other things that as someone whose ancestors fled pogroms are very troubling.
As I put in that piece, I don't know that he and Vance, J.D. Vance are like deliberately trying to start a pogrom against, for example, Haitian immigrants in Springfield.
But if they were, I don't know what they would be doing differently. And so that is very troubling and upsetting.
And even if you are an undergrad at, you know, name a random liberal arts school in America, and you're doing your encampments to to criticize zionists or whatever like you're not going to have the ability to rally millions of americans behind you to um you know put in danger the people you are demonizing like it was interesting at the time also when I wrote this that Vance was saying that Democrats, by calling Trump a fascist, were causing political violence. Meanwhile, I denounce political violence in any way, shape, or form.
But of course, Trump does have this coterie of Secret Service agents around him at all times. They're saying much more inflammatory things about very vulnerable immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, among other places, who, of course, do not have that level of protection.
So anyway, this was all very upsetting to me at the time. And I wrote about it then.
And I remember hearing a lot, getting a lot of pushback, like, oh, you're part of the problem. Meanwhile, a few weeks later, of course, Trump is praising Rommel.
Yeah, no matter how low that you think an accusation could be about Donald Trump, you'll always meet it. And in the spirit of your media criticism that we can't get into serious policy issues, we don't have enough time to have to talk about things such as this.
I did not get to the McKinley tariff. So if people want to learn, that's okay.
We don't have time. If people want to learn more, there's an amazing Bulwark article today about how Trump, it's called Trump loves the 1890s, but he's clueless about them.
That tells you what actually happened with the McKinley tariff. We'll put it in the show notes.
Go check it out. Thank you so much to Catherine Rampell.
After the election, we're going to do tariffs.

We're going to do OSHA.

We're just going to nerd out, all right?

I can't wait.

All right, thanks so much to Jeffrey Goldberg

for his intrepid, critical reporting in the Atlantic.

And thanks to Catherine Rampell for taking the fight to Scott Jennings

and for educating us on the economic policies. We'll be back tomorrow with a friend of the pod.
See you all then. Peace.
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