Shocking DOGE Findings, Elon vs. Sen. Kelly, and Hillary's Hypocrisy, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, and Dan Turrentine | Ep. 1037

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Speaker 3 Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at Midnight.

Speaker 3 Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show and happy Friday.
Yes, it's Friday. Did this feel like a long week to you or a short week? I'm kind of in between.

Speaker 3 In any event, it's going to be a great day today. It's day 67 of the Trump administration.
Only 67. Can you believe that?

Speaker 3 You know how, like, after 100 days, the news media always looks back and says, like, what did this president accomplish? It's only day 67.

Speaker 3 He's lived up to virtually every single campaign promise he made. It's absolutely stunning.

Speaker 3 Through no thanks of the courts who have been trying to stop him via leftist petitions to do just that at every turn. And we have breaking news on that in one second.

Speaker 3 But first, just let me give you a couple of the headlines we're looking at this morning. We've got Elon Musk's Doge

Speaker 3 now going on real offense. This seems like overdue to me because, look, they've been taking such a beating in the press and in terms of their reputation and so on.
And finally, they spoke out.

Speaker 3 They went on with Brett Baer last night, Elon, and some of his top lieutenants in Doge. And what a difference.

Speaker 3 I think the numbers on Doge are going to go up after that interview and pretty quickly, their efforts to cut waste, fraud, and abuse.

Speaker 3 I really, now having seen them, I'm like, why did they let this image of just young whippersnappers in their backpacks and like surfer boy clothes go on as long as they did? These are studs.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 they should have been put out there a little earlier. Well, whatever, you know, better late than never.
So we'll show you a lot of the clips from that.

Speaker 3 And we are also going to talk about this, the breaking news at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Speaker 3 I'm going to get to it all with editor-in-chief of Tuway Mark Halperin and host of the new Megan Kelly media podcast called Next Up with Mark Halperin, launching soon, along with former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer and former Democratic strategist Dan Turantine.

Speaker 3 Together, they are the hosts of the morning meeting on the Tuai YouTube channel.

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Speaker 3 Guys, welcome back.

Speaker 5 Good to see you. Good to be here, Megan.
Thank you.

Speaker 3 Mark, I'm so excited to be working together. I can't wait to get this thing started.
And the feedback from the viewers has been overwhelming. They are in love with this idea.

Speaker 5 Well, I couldn't be more excited. Very grateful to you, Steve, and your colleagues there for inviting me to join up.
And it will be fun. And I hope to be worthy of being part of the mega metropolis of

Speaker 5 your media empire. So thank you.
Very excited about it.

Speaker 3 Mark my words. You will be.
Okay, let's get to it. So moments ago, the Trump administration filing a petition with the U.S.

Speaker 3 Supreme Court asking it to review the Court of Appeals order in the Judge Boesberg case on the deportations of Venezuela, suspected Venezuelan gang members.

Speaker 3 This has been one of, if not the biggest, legal matter that they've been hashing out in the courts, though how can you really choose?

Speaker 3 And Trump lost on Wednesday with a divided DC Circuit three-judge panel.

Speaker 3 A Trump appointed judge would have sided with the administration, and Obama appointed judge sided with the ACLU. And the splitter was an H.W.
Bush appointee who sided with the Obama judge and said,

Speaker 3 you can't use the Alien Enemies Act to just deport a bunch of people. Now, here's what's interesting.

Speaker 3 So they're asking the Supreme Court for immediate review because right now what's happening is Judge Boesberg's order halting these deportations stands.

Speaker 3 So the Trump policy has effectively been shut down until we get a final ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court on this.
And

Speaker 3 there's been no like real evidentiary hearing. Like Trump is in there saying, no, the

Speaker 3 policy should be allowed to go forward until we have our final order. This is wrong.
Okay, so we'll find out what the Supreme Court does.

Speaker 3 But as this happens, a very interesting piece in the news this morning. Okay, it was, do you have it, Abby?

Speaker 3 All right, now I don't think that's it. Hold on, stand by, stand by.

Speaker 3 Okay, I've got it. Sorry, I have so much paper.

Speaker 3 This is all stuff we're going to be getting to, so buckle up.

Speaker 3 The question is whether the Alien Enemies Act can be used by a president when it's not technically a time of war, meaning war hasn't been declared by Congress, but the president has used other language from the Alien Enemies Act to declare an invasion or an incursion.

Speaker 3 Now, Judge Bozberg was not convinced that a president can do that by proclamation and that if he can, it's an appropriate circumstance here.

Speaker 3 And the Court of Appeals agreed with Judge Bozberg on those points. They're not convinced that this is an incursion or an invasion, as those terms would typically be used.
Enter this piece

Speaker 3 today. It's posted on Real Clear Politics.
It's by Bart Marquis, C-O-I-S.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 he makes the strong case based on

Speaker 3 another piece of journalism he had witnessed that Trenda Aragua is indeed,

Speaker 3 it qualifies as a military incursion that's been unleashed on us by

Speaker 3 the Venezuelan government. And he goes through it in great detail, guys.
He says,

Speaker 3 there was an extraordinary article last week by Miami Herald investigative reporter Antonio Maria Delgado.

Speaker 3 And Delgado interviewed a team of high-level investigators and analysts who had been following the Venezuelan regime for over 10 years.

Speaker 3 The only team member to speak on the record was Gary Bernson, among the most highly decorated CIA veterans in recent history. The author here spoke with Bernson as well.

Speaker 3 He confirmed that Trenda Aragua was purposefully sent into the U.S. to destabilize our country by the Venezuelan government.

Speaker 3 Quoting Bernson here, the Venezuelan regime has assumed operational control of these guys, Trenda Aragua, and has trained 300 of them.

Speaker 3 They have given them paramilitary training, training them to fire weapons and how to conduct sabotage. They have given them all a four to six week course.

Speaker 3 They put these 300 guys through that course and then they were deploying them into the United States to 20 separate states.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 Bernson confirming to the author here that sabotage includes arson, taking a look at the LA wildfires, the cause of which we still have not yet determined and so on.

Speaker 3 The CIA, he says, doesn't have this information, according to Bernson, because they refused to look at it. We tried to brief them about this three years ago.

Speaker 3 They were directed by the Biden administration to ignore it. And now those officials are trying to undermine President Trump, who listened.

Speaker 3 I have to tell you, as a lawyer, this is a very important addendum to this argument. And if they can just get a hearing in front of this court to justify Trump's declaration of invasion or incursion.

Speaker 3 I'll start with you, Anna Spicer.

Speaker 3 It could be a game changer.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I'm going to go back to that. I'm sure as a lawyer, you know, the case I'm going to cite, common sense versus nut job, where it very clearly

Speaker 6 the court ruled that you shouldn't have to argue that hard to get known gang members out of a country who came here illegally.

Speaker 6 I mean, this is on its face an insane idea that a president of the United States has to go all the way to the Supreme Court to argue that people who are known gang members coming illegally into the country have to go through some serious process to get sent back.

Speaker 6 I believe the court will side with President Trump, but I think it's sad that we actually had to go to this level to do it.

Speaker 3 I don't, you know, this clearly has the support, I think, of most Americans. The deportation plan in general, Mark, has the support of most Americans.

Speaker 3 Maybe they've got some questions on Turin Duragua, but if so, that hasn't manifested in any polls I've seen.

Speaker 3 I think, you know, the more dangerous the potential illegals are, the more Americans want them gone.

Speaker 3 But you tell me how you see it, because as a legal matter, it's tricky, but I think Trump's in the right. But the biggest matter will be politically, if the Supreme Court doesn't uphold the D.C.

Speaker 3 Circuit and allows Trump to do this, how does it play? And

Speaker 3 if they don't allow Trump to do this, how does it play?

Speaker 5 Well, Henry, common sense versus nutjob, there's always in the law, right, there's always ambiguity. And we don't know how any of these judges or justices will rule.

Speaker 5 When you add in the overlay of politics, it becomes more complicated. I think there's two important things here.
One, you've illuminated, which is super important, which is the actual facts.

Speaker 5 If those facts are true, you'd have to make it akin to the president striking the Houthis.

Speaker 5 No federal judge is going to say, I'm enjoining the president from striking the Houthis, because this is for most Americans, and as a practical matter, it's every bit as urgent a war, in some ways more urgent, because it's right here at home than the president trying to clear up the shipping lanes in the Middle East.

Speaker 5 So number one, the facts matter. And if those facts are close to true, he should be unshackled to do this.

Speaker 5 And these district court judges, I think, should show some humility about what they're interfering with and stop acting like this isn't urgent.

Speaker 5 Number two, as someone who's had, who had federal litigation that lasted 20 years, I know full well how slow the wheels of justice grind.

Speaker 5 In this case, I urge every district court judge, every appellate judge, every Supreme Court justice to think about these cases and not treat them all like they're on the same conveyor belt of slow molasses moving.

Speaker 5 This one should get expedited and ruled on so the president can deal with not just fulfilling a campaign promise, but dealing with something that's threatening the life and liberty and property of Americans, which is, yes, akin to a war.

Speaker 3 Here's how the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals saw it, Dan.

Speaker 3 They said, we understand that the government is arguing that we've had these unwanted illegals come into the country unlawfully, and you're calling it an invasion or an incursion. But the court said

Speaker 3 those terms, as used in the statute, must be considered in their military sense. Now, already as a lawyer, I'm thinking, okay, that's fine.
Who has the ultimate say on military calls?

Speaker 3 It's the commander-in-chief. It's not Judge Boesberg.
And it's not even the U.S. Supreme Court.
And if you read the terms of the Alien Enemies Act, it specifically says that.

Speaker 3 I mean, the Supreme Court's already said we don't have jurisdiction to review commander-in-chief calls under this, but under very limited circumstances, they can review a couple of pieces of it.

Speaker 3 So in any event, that's what they said, first of all. Those terms, invaded or incursion, has to be considered in the military sense.
And then they go on to say,

Speaker 3 okay,

Speaker 3 these words in the statute must be read to mean, quote, a hostile encroachment by a nation state, and concluded that these conditions do not exist because we haven't had a hostile encroachment by a nation state.

Speaker 3 Now, if this stuff about Trenda Aragua is true, that's a very different story.

Speaker 3 And Judge Bozberg had no right to shut down the commander-in-chief's call on this

Speaker 3 just from just with his pen. He hasn't had an evidentiary hearing at all.
He shut it down saying, I believe they're going to win. And the D.C.
Circuit Court said, yeah, us too.

Speaker 3 And now if the Supreme Court doesn't step in, this whole policy could be shut down, even though the Venezuelans really may be trying to send an incursion into the United States because Judge Boesberg thinks he knows better.

Speaker 7 Look, Democrats should not ever be on the side of criminals who are illegal immigrants. And I think the issue of immigration has bedeviled the party now for the last eight or nine years.

Speaker 7 And I think to Sean's point, we have been on the wrong side of common sense issues the last couple months.

Speaker 7 And so I think the party's probably best path here is to support the crackdown on criminal, illegal immigrants. and just say, look, the justice system should work this out.

Speaker 7 We have rules and processes in place. You know, let's let it work its way, but not try to kind of like spike the football and look like we are on the side of protecting criminal illegal immigrants.

Speaker 7 It is in everyone's interest to get them off the streets. To Mark's point, poll after poll, you know, here where I live in New York City, down in D.C., they had the big arrest earlier this week.

Speaker 7 MS-13 has been terrorizing parts of D.C. where a lot of Democrats live.
for the last 10 years.

Speaker 7 And so where they're doing this, we should applaud Trump's efforts to try to clean up the streets and make America safer.

Speaker 6 Megan, if I can real quick, this is a win-win politically for President Trump.

Speaker 6 If the Supreme Court, which I believe it will, rule in his favor for all the reasons that you kind of enumerated there, then it's a political win.

Speaker 6 If by chance, the court at the highest level rules against him, I think at least on the MAGA base side, and I think for a lot of independents, after the four years that we were gaslit and told that there was no no problem with immigration, that the border was sealed, that criminals weren't coming in, they'll give President Trump credit for fighting.

Speaker 6 And so, you know, this to him is a perfect issue because there is no downside. There's a downside for the country.

Speaker 6 If the court rules against us, God forbid they make us bring criminals back into the country.

Speaker 6 But at the end of the day, I think this is one of those ones where if you're President Trump leading this, to Dan's point,

Speaker 6 you've put Democrats in a trap. They either have to side with you or with the criminals.

Speaker 3 Yeah, with the worst of the worst, at least in some cases.

Speaker 3 The Trump administration is asking for an urgent review at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Speaker 3 And my understanding is, though, I'm going to have to go back and check this, but my understanding is it's potential, it's potentially the case that Chief Justice John Roberts will be able to grant that.

Speaker 3 I know he can either at least grant them urgent review. My only question is whether he can actually,

Speaker 3 without the support of at least four justices in this circumstance,

Speaker 3 reverse the temporary restraining order being blocked. Anyway, I'll find out, but this is getting hotter, this whole case.

Speaker 3 And now it's going up to the big boys and girls who actually will have the final say.

Speaker 3 And one of the reasons why that's good is because I've made this point on this case before, but the Supreme Court's more aware than anyone, more aware than anyone, Mark, that

Speaker 3 they don't have police power.

Speaker 3 And that the only thing that gets us to comply with their rulings is our general respect for the rule of law, for one another, for this sort of implicit agreement we have to live as non-barbarians in a country where we've agreed that there's this through line

Speaker 3 that will keep us all within a certain bounds of behavior. And the Supreme Court has the ultimate authority on what the law is.

Speaker 3 And the Supreme Court knows, however, John Roberts above all knows, if he hands down a ruling telling the commander-in-chief that the nine men and women in black robes have the final say

Speaker 3 over what is perceived as a military threat unleashed on us by a foreign government, he's on the thinnest of possible ice. And he's so obsessed with the court, I just can't see him wanting to do it.

Speaker 5 Well, he's an interesting figure, right? Because he does vote sometimes against Republican presidents, including this one. He does care about the integrity of the court, the reputation of the court.

Speaker 5 The statement he put out a few days ago

Speaker 5 in reaction to the president calling for impeachment of judges whose rulings he didn't like testifies to his willingness to play in the real world and not just in the rarefied earth air of the high court.

Speaker 5 I think that they're going to rule some against the president and some for him. And and they're going to be some that are result-oriented.

Speaker 5 They don't all rule on the merits, sad to say.

Speaker 5 I think in this case and in the ones that are comparable, as you suggested, as has been mentioned, deference to the commander-in-chief on this stuff, something where there's clearly popular will.

Speaker 5 You can find that.

Speaker 5 You don't need to look outside the walls of the Constitution to find that. And I agree with Sean.
They'll probably vote with the president on this one. But Roberts has got to expedite these things.

Speaker 5 It doesn't make any sense for America to not expedite them. These should be on the fastest of tracks.
They should be on a track like Bush v.

Speaker 5 Gore, not treated at all like normal cases, because it's a campaign promise and it's happening now. This is not some abstract thing.
It's happening now. So

Speaker 5 I wish he would expedite them. And then, however, the court rules, I hope the president does what he said several times he'll do, which is adhere to the rulings of the court.

Speaker 3 I think he will. I actually do.
I think he will. I think he understands.
I agree. Blowing off the Supreme Court is, and that really is a true constitutional crisis.

Speaker 3 We can't have more Lake and Rileys while we wait this out. John Roberts, controversial though he is, especially with righties who wanted somebody who was more like a Thomas or an Alito, is a good man.

Speaker 3 And he is going to understand the danger of leaving little kids out there getting molested by these rapists. That is happening with these gang members.

Speaker 3 young women and men being murdered by them. I mean, every week we have a story.
So time is of the essence.

Speaker 3 It's long overdue thanks to Joe Biden, and Trump is trying to clean up a mess that was not of his own making. I just don't see John Roberts wanting the Supreme Court to be the thing that stops him.

Speaker 3 We'll see. We'll know better after we hear from them and if we get an oral argument after that.
Okay,

Speaker 3 let's...

Speaker 3 I want to get to Elon Musk and what happened last night because it was such good stuff.

Speaker 3 But before we go there, can we just spend a minute on something else Trump did yesterday, which I think is awesome and not getting enough attention?

Speaker 3 We got an executive order that will pull wokeness, DEI, and radical,

Speaker 3 you know, race essentialism and gender ideology out of the federal museums, including most specifically the Smithsonian,

Speaker 3 the zoo he mentioned. And also, he's directed J.D.
Vance to restore the national monuments and statues that fell post-George Floyd, meaning they were ripped down by protesters.

Speaker 3 Not all necessarily, but he wants him to take a look at this.

Speaker 3 I mean, it wasn't all, you know, people who were pro-slavery or who were armies in the Confederate Army, or generals in the Confederate Army, Sean. We tore down, we, the country,

Speaker 3 Christopher Columbus statues, Thomas Jefferson statues, George Washington statues, Ulysses S. Grant, Francis Scott Key.

Speaker 3 Like, you didn't have to be all that controversial for these things to get torn down. And so Trump is actually going to take a look.

Speaker 3 For example, at this women's museum that's being built, he says specifically they were about to put trans women, meaning men posing as women, and honors to them in this thing of Trump is stopping it in its tracks.

Speaker 6 Well, look, obviously, this is a big issue in the election.

Speaker 5 Dan referenced it earlier, later before.

Speaker 6 I mean, the wokeism, the pendulum swung way, way, way too far. And I think what Trump is doing is resetting that.

Speaker 6 This is, again, where he can get some great wins on these things through executive order that while he waits for reconciliation, some of the big policy issues to come in, really kind of score points with the American people, resetting the culture issues that swung too far.

Speaker 6 And so going through the museums, resetting these things, rebuilding these statues. And the funny thing is, it's been probably eight or nine months since I see

Speaker 6 any inside polling on this. But even when it comes to Confederate statues and renaming things like Fort Bragg, those were extremely popular.

Speaker 6 It didn't mean that anybody was a Confederate or racist or anything like that. I just, I think there's an aspect of not whitewashing history that was important.

Speaker 6 So there's, this kind of covers a lot of ground that I think he's on solid ground with the base and probably the majority of Americans, regardless of party.

Speaker 3 What he's doing, Dan, is he's actually having J.D. Vance take a look at the Smithsonian and the zoo, et cetera.

Speaker 3 And he's having Doug Bergham, as Secretary of the Interior, take a look at public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, and similar properties that have been removed or changed.

Speaker 3 He says, to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, et cetera. He can't go after like state monuments.

Speaker 3 He can't go after, you know, the Museum of Natural History had Teddy Roosevelt out there. He got torn down because there was a Native American near him.
Like whatever.

Speaker 3 There's just been a lot of tearing down. He can't, if it's a local thing, he doesn't have jurisdiction.
But the federal land land stuff and federal monuments, he does.

Speaker 3 Here are a couple of examples on what he's concerned about.

Speaker 3 In the Smithsonian American Art Museum, there's an exhibit that said, quote, societies, including the U.S., have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.

Speaker 3 By

Speaker 3 at another National Museum of African American History and Culture, proclaimed that hard work, individualism, and the nuclear family are aspects of white culture.

Speaker 3 By, and then, as I told you, the Women's History Museum, soon to, soon, soon it will be forthcoming, planned to feature female

Speaker 3 athletes, including male athletes who claim to be female, which is not a thing. It's not real and it's not recognized by the Trump administration.
So what do you think?

Speaker 3 I mean, here's the interesting thing. It's going to happen.
Trump will sanitize these organizations of all this.

Speaker 3 And then we're going to be in an interesting position four years from now if a Democrat were to to win the presidency.

Speaker 3 Because I think this stuff will be very popular to get rid of this nonsense, to put back up the non-controversial statues, George Washington among them.

Speaker 3 And whenever Trump does something, I guess, with an EO, Dan, I've been asking myself, would the Democrats really have the nerve to tear back down George Washington, to shove back in the race essentialism at the Smithsonian, the trigger warnings on the national archives that were all over the electronic database about our Declaration of Independence?

Speaker 3 Like, what do you think?

Speaker 7 I certainly hope that no Democrat would talk about doing that. I mean, as a rule, this is mostly one of those 80-20 issues.

Speaker 7 You know, James Carville said last summer, or I think it was maybe a few years ago, that sometimes Democrats sound like they're talking at the Harvard faculty lounge and not like a real person in the real world, you know, on the streets of any town USA.

Speaker 7 I think where Trump does stuff like, you know, put George Washington back on an

Speaker 7 military base or something like that, there is general support for it.

Speaker 7 I think when he does something like eliminate the, you know, recognizing the Tuskegee airmen at the Pentagon, I think sometimes people will say, hey, it's a little too far and this is like small and petty.

Speaker 7 And so I think generally speaking, though, look, Sean said it, this was a huge issue in the election. The country kind of voted pretty overwhelmingly on this front.
I think he enjoys broad support.

Speaker 7 And look, I don't know how much you remember.

Speaker 7 I think it was a year and a half ago or two years ago, the San Francisco School Board, several members were voted out in a like recall election because the people of San Francisco, parents who lived in downtown, were upset that the school board meetings during COVID were focused on renaming the schools in these kind of DEI, you know, neutral names.

Speaker 7 and not reopening the schools for their kids to go back to.

Speaker 7 And so the history of Democrats focusing on issues that aren't, you know, important to the average American per se is part of what has got us in the hole that we've dug.

Speaker 7 And so to get out, I think we are best to focus on real issues that impact the real lives of real Americans and not go back to trying to relitigate DEI.

Speaker 3 What do you know? Tim Waltz has a bone to pick with you, my friend. He was out there campaigning with Betto or O'Rourke.
Okay. Why? I don't, but he was out there having a town hall with Betto.

Speaker 3 And he sees the loss in 2024 very differently than you do, my friend. Here he is.

Speaker 6 That our strength is our diversity. We've been talking about this for years as a country of immigrants, and we let them define the issue on immigration.

Speaker 6 We let them define the issue on DNI, DEI, and we let them define what woke is.

Speaker 6 We got ourselves in this mess because we weren't bold enough to stand up and say, you damn right we're proud of these policies. We're going to put them in and we're going to execute them.

Speaker 3 Lean in, he's saying, lean in to all those messages.

Speaker 3 Sean agrees. Sean says, yes, go for it.
That's how we all talk.

Speaker 6 I have his back. Lean in, lean in, brother.

Speaker 3 And more of Jasmine Crockett, I think we can all agree, except for Dan.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think that, look, I think.

Speaker 7 Most Americans, I think, do applaud efforts to diversify like a workforce to have, to include different people in decision making.

Speaker 7 Like I think companies, you know, and there's a lot of research that you do get better outcomes if you have different aspects, different slices of America at the table.

Speaker 7 I think where there's real objection is on the E, the equity, the idea that you're going to specify 30% has to be X and 30% has to be Y, not who's most qualified, not who is the best for that position.

Speaker 7 And I think that's where the party kind of just really lost control of this issue.

Speaker 7 I think if we just say we're proud of having, you know, a diverse country, we're proud to try to include people, but the most qualified, the best person should be hired or get the admission slot is probably kind of the middle ground when we think about the future.

Speaker 3 On Governor Waltz.

Speaker 3 Go ahead.

Speaker 5 On Governor Waltz, I didn't understand why he was picked originally, and nothing he's done since he was picked has cleared up my confusion.

Speaker 5 On the question of these policies, your viewers understand the central role these issues played in the election.

Speaker 5 I think part of the challenge for the part of the country that still doesn't get it is the media, for the most part, still doesn't get it.

Speaker 5 And when you ask about will a Democrat change it back, well, if they rename Dulles Airport, Steve Bannon Airport, maybe they would change that back.

Speaker 5 But most of these things I think will be very difficult to change back because the energy in this country is not with this frog boiling in the water move towards a fetishizing race and gender.

Speaker 5 But the energy is for people who say, thank goodness for the change and the change happening quickly. The changes in the other direction happen very slowly,

Speaker 5 but they change dramatically over time. President Trump and the cultural and social forces that are pushing back are happening quite quickly.

Speaker 5 And I think they're going to move as things tend that move quickly tend to move hard and fast.

Speaker 5 And I think it's going to be very difficult for a Democrat, not just politically, but practically, to try to put these things back.

Speaker 3 The Republicans and frankly, the more centrist Democrats who objected to this stuff when it was overwhelming us,

Speaker 3 they were silent about those objections because they were scared.

Speaker 3 Not only has that fright been eliminated, they're emboldened. You know, they voted for Trump.
He's emboldened all of them. They're ready for this war.

Speaker 3 They now have learned that they're in the majority and that this was a temporary insanity that we went through and that it has to be stopped because it's actually extremely dangerous.

Speaker 3 It's like the whole, everything's turned, you know, in the past five years, been dramatic. So I agree with you.
It will not be brought back because the popular will of the people will not allow it.

Speaker 3 Now, I opened the show talking about Elon on with Brett Baer and

Speaker 3 some members of the Doge team last night. And,

Speaker 3 you know, I did wonder in watching it, why didn't we see this earlier? These guys are amazing.

Speaker 3 Like, this is exactly, we should all be on our hands and knees at night, thanking God that men, and I presume there are women too, they weren't on the set last night, are willing to take time off from their real jobs and real lives and do this for us.

Speaker 3 They were all really just public servants.

Speaker 6 Go ahead, Sean. But to your point, the caliber of these people, when he was talking about, when Brett Baer was telling him, so you co-founded Airbnb, you're the CFO of Morgan Stanley.

Speaker 6 These, the credentials of these people, we talked about this a little on the morning meeting this morning, that it was the illumination of just the, it wasn't like.

Speaker 6 you know, finding some buried treasure. The guy was like, yeah, we found out that the Department of HHS has 40 CFOs, 40 CFOs, I mean, 40 CIOs, chief information officer.

Speaker 6 There are 4.3, 4.6 million government credit cards and 2.1 million employees. There's obvious things that are like, that doesn't make sense.
That doesn't compute.

Speaker 6 8,000 American federal workers can retire in a given month because that's all the system can handle because it has to take a manila envelope going down a mine, a mine.

Speaker 6 That's how many envelopes can go down in a month. That's insane.

Speaker 6 And the idea that they were talking about utilizing common sense, technology, reforms, efficiencies to allow the government to run better.

Speaker 6 And even Elon, when it came to Social Security, made it very clear that what 40% of the people who call the Social Security hotlines were fraudsters trying to steal the money of American retirees.

Speaker 6 And what they're trying to do is put processes in place to protect the American consumer from fraud. It's something that I agree with you.
I was like, where has this been?

Speaker 6 I wanted to hear this for for the last 70 days. And I finally am here.
I was excited. I was fired up.

Speaker 6 I hope they do more because I think that the more people hear about not only what really goes on in government, but how it's being corrected, the more support Doge and Elon will get.

Speaker 3 Here's just a little bit. You mentioned this in your last answer of Joe Jabia, the Airbnb co-founder and Doge Digital Retirement Project guy.
Here he is, Satan.

Speaker 10 Now picture this.

Speaker 10 This giant cave has 22,000 filing cabinets, stacked 10 high to house 400 million pieces of paper. It's a process that started in the 1950s and largely hasn't changed in the last 70 years.

Speaker 10 And so as you dug into it, we found retirement cases that had so much paper, they had to fit it on a shipping pallet.

Speaker 10 So the process takes many months, and we're going to make it just many days.

Speaker 11 Will it be digitized?

Speaker 10 Absolutely. So this will be an online digital process that will take just a few days at most.

Speaker 10 And I really think, you know, it's an injustice to civil servants who are subjected to these processes that are older than the age of half the people watching your show tonight.

Speaker 12 So we really believe that the government can have an Apple store-like experience.

Speaker 10 Beautifully designed, great user experience, modern systems.

Speaker 3 He said that we're actually at the point where we have to train federal employees on how to retire. They have to go through a training.

Speaker 3 Training.

Speaker 6 It's so embarrassing.

Speaker 3 It is embarrassing. You know, Mark, I like what American sitting at home is going to have any reaction to that other than, what?

Speaker 5 It's great to have private sector people in the government who, you know, my favorite moments was when Brett was asking them their motivation for doing it.

Speaker 5 And one of them said he's got four kids and he doesn't want the country to decline for his kids um they're an impressive group and

Speaker 5 you know even democrats most democrats will say yeah there's inefficiencies the federal government but this is an attempt to to get rid of them uh you know we're talking about waste fraud and abuse this is you know you could call it waste but it's really just inefficiency and it's really not having the will to use the ingenuity of the private sector up until now to try to change these things.

Speaker 5 Al Gore talked about reinventing government, but that was in the dawn of the digital age. There's so much more that can be done now using digital stuff.

Speaker 5 And this is, again, as Sean said a couple of times, this is such an impressive group from the private sector.

Speaker 5 I just hope that they're adhering to guidelines and I just hope that they don't get shackled. They do need to move fast for all the reasons that this plan was launched.

Speaker 3 In my head, like the way they were being described by the media, it was like, I have pictured like these dope-smoking, hacky sack-kicking, beanie-wearing foggy shirts,

Speaker 3 put them in tie shirts.

Speaker 3 Then I see these guys. Were they wearing Crocs

Speaker 6 or Birkenstocks in your mind?

Speaker 5 I couldn't get sandals.

Speaker 3 I never got down below the ankle in picturing them, but I definitely, I could smell the aroma. I had a perceived smell.

Speaker 3 They're not that at all. These are actually really accomplished, badass professional guys who are super articulate on top of their game.

Speaker 3 Now, I'm sure they sent their best for the Brett Baer interview. There may be guys who better match my description.

Speaker 3 But, you know, chief among them was Elon with some very interesting facts of his own. Here's one

Speaker 3 here that

Speaker 3 somebody mentioned, but it's sought for.

Speaker 12 The sheer amount of waste and fraud in the government. It is astonishing.

Speaker 8 It's mind-blowing.

Speaker 8 Just

Speaker 4 we routinely encounter wastes of a billion dollars or more casually.

Speaker 12 You know, for for example like the the the simple the simple survey uh that was uh

Speaker 13 uh literally a 10 question survey that you could do with survey monkey cost you about ten thousand dollars uh was uh the government was being charged almost a billion dollars for that for just the survey a billion dollars for for a simple online survey do you like the national park and then there appeared to be no feedback loop for what would be done with that survey so the survey would just go into nothing it was like insane

Speaker 3 Casually. And you know what? What's so devastating about that, Sean, is you know it's true.

Speaker 6 I know.

Speaker 6 I've been in the military for 26 years in and out of government. I mean, it's finally good hearing someone articulate what I've known to be the case for decades.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And just be honest about it.
That's like the social security thing. Everybody can understand that too.

Speaker 3 Why are we sending social security checks to people who appear to be 120 or an infant, which is what Elon was saying. He was like,

Speaker 3 people are, we're sending checks to infants. And he was explaining exactly how they do the fraud.

Speaker 3 Someone has a baby and they steal their own child's social security number and they use it to get some sort of payout from the federal government and they ruin that child's credit because they just don't give a damn.

Speaker 3 Here is Steve Davis, who was called the CEO of Doge, though he didn't seem totally comfortable with that label,

Speaker 3 speaking to some of that issue in SOT6.

Speaker 14 No,

Speaker 14 the amount of issues that were the Social Security system are enormous.

Speaker 14 As an example, there are over 15 million people that are over the age of 120 that are marked as alive in the Social Security system.

Speaker 11 And that's an accurate figure.

Speaker 14 Correct.

Speaker 14 Correct. This has been something that's been identified as a problem, again, pre-existing problems since 2008, at least from an IG report.
So

Speaker 14 there were some great people working at the

Speaker 14 Social Security Administration that found this, 2008, and nothing was done.

Speaker 14 And so 15 to 20 million Social Security numbers that were clearly fraudulent were floating around that can be used only for bad intentions. There'd be no way to use those for good intentions.

Speaker 14 And so one of the things the Doge team is doing is carefully and very methodically looking at those and making sure that any fraudulent ones are eliminated.

Speaker 3 Well, that is shocking, but also not.

Speaker 3 And here's my question. I'm going to play one more side on Social Security, Dan, but this question is coming to you on

Speaker 3 how are the democrats going to object to this everybody knows what a money suck social security is along with medicare slash medicaid we all know that we all know we're not going to make a lot of progress if any on our national debt unless we get honest about what's happening there nobody wants us to touch the retirement age we get it it's political poison but this stuff

Speaker 3 this stuff we can do we can do but the democrats are saying no no to doge no to elon he's evil here's the second sound bite on social security with a guy named aram Mogadasi. He's a Doge engineer.

Speaker 15 I'll say the two improvements that we're trying to make to Social Security are helping people that legitimately get benefits, protect them from fraud that they experience every day on a routine basis, and also make the experience better.

Speaker 15 And I'll give you one example is At Social Security, one of the first things we learned is that they get phone calls every day of people trying to change direct deposit information.

Speaker 15 So when you want to change your bank account, you can call Social Security.

Speaker 15 We learned 40% of the phone calls that they get are from fraudsters.

Speaker 4 40%.

Speaker 12 That's right.

Speaker 3 Almost half.

Speaker 8 Yes, and they steal people's Social Security is what happens.

Speaker 13 They call in, they say they claim to be a retiree,

Speaker 16 then

Speaker 8 they convince the Social Security person on the phone to change

Speaker 16 where the money is flowing.

Speaker 8 It actually goes to some fraudster.

Speaker 3 In 67 days, they figured all of this out, Dan. Why would the Democrats stand in the way of these fixes?

Speaker 7 So I think the important thing for the party is they need to split what is common sense from what is questionable.

Speaker 7 I think what they're talking about here, and I actually saw this morning too, they're talking about trying to upgrade the social security software and computer systems, which are literally decades old, just because they haven't received the funding.

Speaker 7 They want to migrate it to a new platform. Where they're trying to do stuff like stop fraud, I ran government relations for HR Block, and I know a lot about the IRS and fraud.

Speaker 7 And they're absolutely right. It's the Russian mob.
It's all sorts of people who try to steal your social security, file returns falsely before you do and get your refund.

Speaker 7 And by the time you realize what happened, it's too late. Where they're trying to do that, we should say.
that is good. It will also give us credibility with the public for when we say time out.

Speaker 7 This might be objectionable. And one of those things is, I know we all say, okay, cutting phone service and making you have to come in makes sense to try to deal with fraud.

Speaker 7 Sure, if I live in New York City, I can walk down to the Social Security Administration or take the subway or a bus. In lots of parts of this country, it is hundreds of miles to reach it.

Speaker 7 And the elderly, it's hard. Some of them don't drive.
They have medical issues that makes movement challenging. And so when Democrats say, wait a second, you need to offer those telephone services.

Speaker 7 People need, there has to be a way for them to verify and get through. That is where I think the public will say, yeah, okay, all right.

Speaker 6 But if all we do is always scream no and everything,

Speaker 7 it's a huge problem. And I actually thought, you know, look, we're making some headway, we Democrats, with Elon's favorabilities coming down.
But to your point, Megan, those were real people.

Speaker 7 They were uncomfortable. They looked anxious.
There's empathy and sympathy as they talked because they're just regular, real people trying to help.

Speaker 7 And that, as Democrats, you know, is something that we need to recognize.

Speaker 3 I mean, it's the same party that didn't stand for the little boy who got the badge and became the honorary secret service mate. So I don't think they're going to feel for the Doge agents.

Speaker 3 But here's why I think, Mark, they're not going to give an inch on Doge or Elon.

Speaker 3 NBC News just did a focus group of black men who backed Trump and approve of his presidency and and asked how they're feeling.

Speaker 3 And that focus group showed that nearly all of them, 10 of the 12, still are with Trump and staunchly. The only concern that some of them raised

Speaker 3 was about Doge. They said, I'm trying to get my numbers.
They say 10 of the 12 said they approved of Trump's early tenure during his second presidency.

Speaker 3 But only five said they approved of Doge's actions. Only five said they approved.
Three said they disapproved. And the rest of the group, they weren't sure.

Speaker 3 So if I'm a Democrat who really just wants to win back power, I see something I can exploit here.

Speaker 3 And I'm not sure I want to do anything to give Doge credit for anything, even if it would be good for the country.

Speaker 5 Well, except as Dan said, they need to have credibility. I think we've all wondered why.
what we saw last night, those very articulate spokespeople for this effort were not out sooner.

Speaker 5 I'd say there are two other things that they've done to hurt their cause and made it easier for Democrats to rally public opinion around some things.

Speaker 5 Number one, they've not totally been truthful and accurate, as Musk has acknowledged, about what's being saved, about certain programs they're using as examples.

Speaker 5 And they've not quantified it or qualified it accurately. And that's allowed the press, which is hostile to Doge, and those Democrats who want to be against it to be against it.

Speaker 5 But the other thing I think they haven't done is is they haven't told the stories. They haven't humanized it.
We saw humanization last night with these folks.

Speaker 5 But to say, here's, to just assert people are having their social security stolen, this has to be on a human level because cuts, while popular in the abstract, when you start to cut specific programs, you run into trouble.

Speaker 5 I don't think the Democratic Party has a plan right now.

Speaker 5 They're all over the map about how to deal with this, but their job of opposing it would be a lot more challenging if the administration talked about this in a way that was easier to understand why it's a good thing, not just in the abstract, but with some real specifics that can be

Speaker 5 emotionally told in a way that involves great storytelling. I don't know why they haven't done it.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Why don't we see the guy who says, I tried to retire and it took me six months to, I wanted to retire and one month took me six months to just get out because of the paperwork.

Speaker 3 We haven't seen those people all over TV.

Speaker 3 We had these guys getting closer and closer to real person stories where you were like, oh, yeah. Oh, God, that would be really annoying.
Oh, that sounds so dumb.

Speaker 3 Here's one, Anthony Armstrong,

Speaker 3 Doge OPM. What does that stand for? Operating

Speaker 5 personality personnel management.

Speaker 3 Office of personnel. Well, aren't they all? I guess he's over there in particular.

Speaker 3 Anyway, he's over there at the group that takes care of all your paperwork if you're a federal government employee. And here's what he said, Saad.

Speaker 9 A good example of overstaffing would be the IRS has got 1,400 people who are dedicated to provisioning laptops and cell phones.

Speaker 9 So if you join the IRS, you get a laptop and a cell phone, you're provisioned.

Speaker 9 So if each of those IRS officers or employees provisioned two employees per day, you could provision the entire IRS in a little more than a month.

Speaker 3 So 12 times a year, it's a reason.

Speaker 4 Why would you have 1,400 people whose only job it is to give out a laptop and a phone? Right.

Speaker 3 The whole IRS could be handled once a month.

Speaker 9 So

Speaker 9 that doesn't make any sense. And President Trump's been very clear.
It's scalpel, not hatch it, and that's the way it's getting done. done.

Speaker 3 I mean, that sounds so right. Sean, you've worked for the federal government.

Speaker 3 That sounds so right that you'd have to go through that number of people just whose only job is to do two things, give you a laptop and give you a phone, which literally should take, even if you consider setting up your password and getting you registered on it, at most a half an hour.

Speaker 3 How does somebody, how do we have 1,400 of those in the IRS alone?

Speaker 6 Yeah, well, the scary part is that they're not alone. There's probably 1,400 people who do various other tasks.
And as a guy who, look, I'm all about tech support.

Speaker 6 I either have learned that you just power things on and off. And that's the extent of my tech support.
So I get it. I appreciate that.
And I welcome it. But I think 1,400 is a bit excessive.

Speaker 6 And unfortunately, it's not, you know, like I said, you go to HHS and they talk about having 40 chief information officers, 40. I mean, generally when you're the chief, there's only one.
But

Speaker 6 it just shows you the duplicity that exists.

Speaker 6 um i think to your point these individuals themselves did them the the the effort a huge bonus by going out the examples they gave and then if we can add in the human element the number of people who you know took a a month to retire or who couldn't get a benefit or who had their money stolen we're missing that

Speaker 6 third of the of the piece i was thinking about this as you were saying a moment ago you know that the the young gentleman that that was so cool um during the state of the union President Trump, I think, did better than any previous president highlighting his policies through those individuals in the gallery.

Speaker 6 I think they almost need to embark on a very similar policy or similar effort now, which is to go highlight individuals who've had struggles with the federal government, who haven't been able to retire, who were taken advantage of, who worked in the government, but there was massive duplicity, or et cetera, and start to literally put faces to these problems because they did.

Speaker 6 And by the way, continue to roll out members of Doge

Speaker 6 who are finding these things, not just the dollar amount in the programs, but the overall crisis that exists.

Speaker 6 Because that's not, to Mark's point, those aren't, it's not waste or fraud, the fact that you can't retire, you know, that you can only retire 80,000 people. It just doesn't make sense.

Speaker 6 In the military, we went to medical record, electronic medical records, because literally you would have to carry your bulky medical record around with you wherever you went from assignment to assignment, station to station.

Speaker 6 And that's how we handled it for until some genius realized, wow, we could just digitize this like everyone else. And it has made life a lot easier, right?

Speaker 6 If we can start doing that within the federal government, it's a win-win for the government. It saves us money.
It saves us time. It cuts down on bureaucracy.

Speaker 6 In fact, I'm sure, as one of those gentlemen alluded to,

Speaker 6 the federal workers themselves would probably like to go that route as opposed to climbing up 10 file cabinets high to grab somebody's record from 1979. So

Speaker 3 you're training on how to retire. How to retire?

Speaker 3 The least amount of time you want to take on new training. Personally, I think they should just move all these records onto Signal.
It could make everybody's life easier.

Speaker 5 Nothing more secure.

Speaker 6 Right.

Speaker 6 I get added in.

Speaker 3 We'd all get at it. The best people use it.

Speaker 3 All right. Stand by, guys.
I will be right back, and I want to play you an extraordinary exchange with Elon. Let's talk about that car you own, but don't use.

Speaker 3 The one you're paying to keep registered and insured that's just sitting out there taking up space out front and it's not doing anybody any good. You have a choice.

Speaker 3 You can give cars for kids, that's cars with a K, a call and have them take care of it for you.

Speaker 3 Just give them the info and they will come to you as soon as the next day and take that car off your hands at no cost to you. Even better, they will turn that car into funds to help children.

Speaker 3 So visit cars with a K for kids.org slash MK. That's Cars with a K.

Speaker 3 And then the number four to donate or just call Cars for Kids directly at 1-877-CARS4KIDS and they will get that car picked up quickly. Plus, you can get a tax deduction and a vacation voucher.

Speaker 3 These guys have been around for 30 years. You've seen the ads, right? They've done this over a million times.
Call now or head on over to CARS, K-A-R-S, the numeral for,

Speaker 3 and then kids.org slash MK right now to get this done. Carsforkids.org slash MK.
That's cars with a K.

Speaker 17 There's something special about American manufacturing. Whether you're running a small machine shop or building military aircraft components, you're creating the products that keep America strong.

Speaker 17 For over 50 years, Chubb has stood with manufacturers across this great nation. From traditional fabrication to advanced technologies, We protect the companies that make America great.

Speaker 17 Chubb Insurance, built to protect what you build.

Speaker 11 Are you surprised at some of the legal efforts and some of the judges that have weighed in? There's about eight or ten now of these cases that are at least temporary holds.

Speaker 11 They're being challenged by the DOJ.

Speaker 11 Are you surprised by that pushback?

Speaker 16 Well,

Speaker 16 the DC Circuit is notorious for having a very far-left bias.

Speaker 16 And when you look at the people close to some of these judges,

Speaker 16 where are they working? Are they working at these NGOs?

Speaker 16 They're the ones getting this money. Does that seem like a system that lacks corruption? It sounds like corruption to me.

Speaker 3 I mean, not said was one of the judges he's thinking about is almost certainly Judge Boesberg, who is the one behind the blocking of Trump's effort to deport Venezuelan suspected gang members to El Salvador.

Speaker 3 Back with me now, my panel, Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, and Dan Turrentine of Tuway. Okay,

Speaker 3 I did look up the SCOTUS protocol for that appeal, and here's how it's going to go down. So just for those who weren't with us at the top of the hour, the Trump administration has appealed the D.C.

Speaker 3 Circuit Court of Appeals ruling against him on his effort to use the Alien Enemies Act to deport suspected Venezuelan gang members out of the United States and place them in an El Salvadorian prison.

Speaker 3 The trial court judge was Judge Boesberg, an Obama appointee, originally put on the bench by W many years ago, but elevated to the federal bench by Obama. He has had a leftward bent, no question.

Speaker 3 And he's got a wife and a daughter who own and work in and run, respectively, an abortion clinic and reportedly the daughter with this NGO organization that helps illegals and gang members.

Speaker 3 So, yeah, I think that's what Elon's suggesting is maybe going on there.

Speaker 3 And now the Trump administration, just before he came to air, has appealed their loss

Speaker 3 on the temporary restraining order Boesberg put against them to the U.S. Supreme Court just before we came to air.

Speaker 3 They want the high court to lift that temporary restraining order so they can continue deporting these Venezuelan illegals and shipping them off to El Salvador during the pendency of the litigation.

Speaker 3 And I was unclear when we started whether

Speaker 3 Justice Roberts could do this Chief Justice alone. And I was right.
He can do it alone. He's the Chief Justice of the United States.

Speaker 3 And each justice on the court has a region of the country for which he or she is responsible.

Speaker 3 And as the Chief Justice, he oversees the DC region, which is where this case is coming out of, because all these federal government agencies are in

Speaker 3 D.C. Anyway, that's where it is.
And so John Roberts, if he wants to, can grant the relief himself. He could, with the stroke of his pen, lift the TRO and say, have at it, Trump.

Speaker 3 And then the case would go back down to Judge Boesberg for litigation on the merits. You know, they would hash it out.
It's not a final adjudication, but it is on the TRO.

Speaker 3 It's in a form of relief that he could grant to Trump.

Speaker 3 Or he could say, I'll give you an expedited briefing schedule in front of the United States Supreme Court at large.

Speaker 3 And so we'll keep the pedal down, but we'll let all nine of us decide whether you can do this.

Speaker 3 Or he could just deny it and say, I'm not dealing with any of this yet and kick it back down, which would be a loss for Trump.

Speaker 3 So Trump could win with a stroke of a Roberts pen, he could lose with a stroke of a Roberts pen, or he could get a hearing in front of the all nine justices.

Speaker 3 And hopefully we'll find out soon which one of those it's going to be. Okay.

Speaker 3 Elon Musk sat across from me in September at the all-in summit and said one of the main reasons he wanted Donald Trump elected and was willing to serve and was talking about forming Doge and doing the finding the efficiencies was his experience as really a rocket scientist, right?

Speaker 3 As a rockets guy. And talked about how it takes longer to get the permission slip, in his words, to launch a rocket than it does to build the rocket and how insane it is.
And how

Speaker 3 you get fined $40,000 for dumping potable water, like water that one could drink. You'd dump it out of the spaceship when you got back.
And the government would swoop in and fine fine you for it.

Speaker 3 You say, well, what do you mean? It's it's potable water. Why is why am I getting fined? That like comes out of the sky.

Speaker 3 Why if God drops it, is there no fine? But if I drop it, I'm getting fined. Well, that's just the rules.
That's the way, well, what do you mean? Like, I'm trying to get us to Mars.

Speaker 3 Why are you hassling me this way? Like, I could, my daughter could come by with a little garden pitcher and do the same thing. You're going to find her 40,000.
This is what he was dealing with.

Speaker 3 And he had it up to his eyeballs, which is why he's now doing doing all of this, the red tape.

Speaker 3 And for those out there thinking it may just be a Republican issue, think again, because Ezra Klein of the New York Times, who's on this book tour, making a bunch of stops, swung on by Jon Stewart's podcast, I guess.

Speaker 3 I don't know. I don't follow Jon Stewart at all, and it makes me a very happy person.
But there was the following exchange. Watch.

Speaker 18 Step four has to review and approve and award, again, planning grants, not broadband grants, planning grants. Step eight is states must submit an initial proposal, an initial proposal to the NTIA.

Speaker 18 Then.

Speaker 6 Is that the result of their $5 million planning fund?

Speaker 18 This is a program. I assume, but then what was the five-year plan? And what the fuck did they apply for? What was their NOFO?

Speaker 18 Like if the five-year action plan isn't the initial proposal, then what's the five-year action plan? Forget NOFO. MOFO.

Speaker 18 Step 10, states must publish their own map and allow internal challenges to their own maps.

Speaker 19 Wait, who's challenging it within the state?

Speaker 18 Well, you know, organized interest groups, environmental groups, like I don't know who groups specifically, but any, literally anybody. This is, I want to say something because it's very important.

Speaker 18 I say this. This is the Biden administration's process for its own bill.
They wanted this to happen. This is how liberal government works now.

Speaker 18 This is a bill passed by Democrats with a regulatory structure written by Democratic administration. Okay.

Speaker 6 Step 12.

Speaker 18 States must run a competitive sub-granting process.

Speaker 19 Oh my fucking God.

Speaker 18 At step 12, after all this has been done.

Speaker 17 I'm speechless.

Speaker 3 This is the $42 billion expansion of broadband internet service under Joe Biden, which has yet to connect a single household.

Speaker 3 As reclined there detailing how in the end, only three of the 56 jurisdictions that did apply for for it actually finished the process by the end of 2024. I mean, this is just, this is devastating.

Speaker 3 And you know why? You know why? I mean, you guys tell me. I'll let any of you take it.

Speaker 3 This is why I think Trump's approval ratings are at a historic high for him and why the direction of the country numbers are so positive for him is because everyone knows this. They didn't apply for

Speaker 3 broadband internet expansion, but they've had to deal with the federal government when their tax refund didn't come.

Speaker 3 It's a nightmare when they wanted to go on Medicare Advantage and like upgrade, like when they, when anything went wrong with their federal government paperwork, they had to correct it.

Speaker 3 We've all been there calling or dealing with the federal government on any of this stuff, never mind like your taxes. It's a nightmare.

Speaker 3 So what Elon's saying, the Doge guys are saying, and Ezra's saying, it all has the ring of truth.

Speaker 3 And I do think like while Elon's getting battered and bruised, the people are generally going to back this.

Speaker 3 Maybe they feel a little bad about the layoffs of the federal employees, or maybe they just don't really like Elon because he's brash, but they like the cleanup in Isle 7. Who would like to take that?

Speaker 6 Well, it's even worse than that, right? So that just laid out the stupid process and the amount of money we wasted on

Speaker 6 on broadband. And people look at that and say, I had my own experience with like some T T fly in the backyard when they would let me put a shed up.

Speaker 6 But then they also look and go, wait a second, isn't there a thing called Starlink that that you can get for like eight bucks that you don't even need to do all that?

Speaker 6 Right. I mean,

Speaker 6 it's worse than even that example that Ezra Klein was going through. That's, that's just if you wanted to, you know, what it takes to lay down broadband and do this.

Speaker 6 But then you go, okay, that's stupid enough as it is. But there's actually an alternative that's costs like no money.
And that's.

Speaker 6 linking up to Starlink, getting you internet, not having to lay down all that.

Speaker 6 The mindlessness of everything

Speaker 6 that the federal government touches is unbelievable. And you're right.
Most people get it, and they just need to have it validated in terms of the absurdity.

Speaker 3 Explain to them. Yes.
All right. So I teased this before we took the break.
We got into a bit of why Elon

Speaker 3 is disliked by some. You know, he's not afraid to throw a barb on X, which he owns.
You know, he's not, he doesn't sound like Supreme Court Justice John Roberts.

Speaker 3 he does not sound he doesn't speak the same way he does and um one of the things he did was to call senator mark kelly of arizona a democrat who's married to gabby giffords and he's the brother of scott kelly both of whom are astronauts scott's amazing by the way came on my show at nbc and told us all about how he was a straight c student Straight C, right?

Speaker 3 Isn't that your first question? Did you get all A's? You crushed physics. You know, you were a math, whiz, and a science.
No, he was like, I was listless.

Speaker 3 I had no direction, and I was a terrible student. Became an astronaut.
That's Brother Scott, Brother Mark, also an astronaut, and now a Democrat senator.

Speaker 3 Elon called him a traitor in the context of Ukraine. And Brett asked him about it.
And listen to this answer.

Speaker 13 We should have empathy for the thousands of people that are dying every day in trenches, for no movement in the lines.

Speaker 4 So the borders remain the same.

Speaker 12 For the past two years,

Speaker 4 thousands of people have died every week for nothing. For what?

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 4 I take

Speaker 4 great offense

Speaker 4 at

Speaker 12 those who put the appearance of goodness over the reality of it.

Speaker 8 Those who virtue signal and say, oh, we can't give in to Russia, but have no solution. to stopping thousands of kids dying every day.
I have contempt for such people.

Speaker 4 I don't want to make that clear.

Speaker 8 So you're optimistic, because their butcher signaling and

Speaker 8 their lack of a solution means that kids don't have a father.

Speaker 8 It means that parents lost a son.

Speaker 3 For what?

Speaker 8 Nothing.

Speaker 3 Pretty powerful. Mark Kelly came in his crosshairs because he posted something on X about having just returned from Ukraine and how, in his view, it was very important that we stand by Ukraine.

Speaker 3 He wrote,

Speaker 3 everyone wants the war to end, but any agreement has to protect Ukraine's security, can't be a giveaway to Putin, and went on from there.

Speaker 3 Here again, I have to say, Dan, I think the American public is with Elon.

Speaker 3 I think the American public, while they have nothing but empathy in general for Ukraine, they realize where we are, that this thing needs to end, and that we can't keep throwing good money after bad as Americans.

Speaker 7 Well, I think there's two things here. I think generally speaking, President Trump ran on trying to end the war in Ukraine.
And I think you're right.

Speaker 7 even within the Democratic Party and the Bernie Sanders kind of base, there is a desire to spend, you know, focus and spend money on problems at home, not necessarily abroad, although aspirationally, as you say, people would like Ukraine to be protected.

Speaker 7 I think where Musk gets in trouble is when he makes statements like that.

Speaker 7 People died because Russia tried to invade Ukraine and they're trying to defend their homeland. Right.

Speaker 7 So I get why they've dug trenches and they're doing everything they can to resist a country that's trying to take it over.

Speaker 7 I think when Musk does stuff like in the interview, say, this is a revolution. We're trying to revolutionize things.

Speaker 7 The public doesn't necessarily love that language. I mean, this goes to like Joe Biden trying to suddenly become FDR, right? That's not what a lot of people signed up for in 2020.

Speaker 7 And so I think Musk, to your point, is brash. I would never bet against him as a businessman.
He's unbelievably successful, to state the obvious, but he's rough around the edges.

Speaker 7 And I think as he wades more into politics, whether it's trolling people on X or kind of forcefully interjecting into politics, you get the good, but you also get bad that I think, you know, you have to be willing to digest.

Speaker 7 But I think his numbers are coming down. He is the wealthiest man in the world with conflicts, you know, from here to kingdom come.

Speaker 3 I'm not saying they don't care about that.

Speaker 7 Well, they, they, I, I actually think they do a little bit.

Speaker 3 George Soros.

Speaker 7 Well, that's it.

Speaker 7 Americans are inherently distrustful of very wealthy people who start getting involved in government and to your point democrats who have had a lot of them in our corner and we loved it it was damage was done to us on george soros and other things so i i i think again it's good and bad with elon

Speaker 3 i want to get to what elon's doing in wisconsin because this is an important uh election that's coming on tuesday and you guys are the people to ask about it but before we go to the special elections and what's happening in wisconsin with this judicial election can we spend a minute on hillary clinton

Speaker 3 Hillary Clinton decided to drop an op-ed in the New York Times today that's entitled, How Much Dumber Will This Get?

Speaker 3 And she uses SignalGate and the messaging by Pete Hegseth and Mike Walls and J.D. Vance and Tulsi and others on there as the jumping off point to talk about how dumb the Trump administration is.

Speaker 3 Some highlights. She calls the Trump administration hypocritical, dangerous, and dumb over this story.
It's not the hypocrisy that bothers me, it's the stupidity.

Speaker 3 We're all shocked, shocked that President Trump and his team don't actually care about protecting classified information or federal record retention laws. I mean, this is so rich given her history.

Speaker 3 But we knew that already. This is her just trying to say, like, I did nothing wrong and my whole controversy was made up.

Speaker 3 No one actually cares about any of that because they're not blaming Trump harder and Trump allowed this in the first place.

Speaker 3 What's much worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat.

Speaker 3 That's dangerous and it's just dumb.

Speaker 3 Okay, I mean, fine. I really think Hillary Clinton should have sat this one out, given she's in no position to throw stones.
She did this willingly. She had her homebrew server for years.

Speaker 3 An intentional choice. Actually, we do need to stop and take that one for a bit.
Like for years, an intentional choice that she's trying to be like, no one really gave a shit about that.

Speaker 3 This is far worse. This unintentional mistake that was done by adding in the journalist.

Speaker 3 And yes, obviously they intentionally chose Signal to have the discussion on, but we've already heard in recent days, Mark, that this was. a means of communication used by the Biden administration.

Speaker 3 I just think she should have had Bill write it. She should have had some friend of hers on Team Blue write it.
Someone other than the person with this brand of problems.

Speaker 5 Well, in Arkansas, we have a word for it. We call it chutzpah.

Speaker 5 Look,

Speaker 5 Dan knows Hillary Clinton better than I do, but you can hear her voice in that thing. There may have been some ghost writing help, but that's her.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 she has the

Speaker 5 rare honor, along with Kamala Harris, of losing presidential elections to Donald Trump.

Speaker 5 And she will never get over it.

Speaker 5 And I understand why you're saying she shouldn't have been right when they write it, but it's a pretty good enunciation of the view of tens of millions of people about what's going on.

Speaker 5 And the Clintons, both Clintons, they just love the national town square. They don't want to be away from it.

Speaker 5 I will also say that she

Speaker 5 has, not just because she lost to Donald Trump, but because of her worldview, she has

Speaker 5 a genetic inability to stay off of

Speaker 5 the stand to criticize him. It's just, it's in her craw and she cannot help herself.
And I'm surprised that she's been relatively low-key

Speaker 5 in the first 100 days here, because she is, I know from talking to her friends, she's very engaged on this in a day-to-day capacity.

Speaker 3 Here's what really galls me, Sean. She writes that as Secretary Secretary of State under Obama, she used smart power, while Trump is now using dumb power.

Speaker 3 As Secretary of State during the Obama administration, I argued for smart power, integrating the hard power of our military with the soft power of our diplomacy, development assistance, economic might, and cultural influence.

Speaker 3 None of those tools can do the job alone. Together, they make America a superpower.
The Trump approach is dumb power.

Speaker 3 I believe she's talking about, among other things, Ukraine, where

Speaker 3 she was Secretary of State when we went over there. And

Speaker 3 to say we meddled in their election is to understate where we are today as a result of that meddling in part.

Speaker 3 for which she takes no responsibility.

Speaker 3 She just talks about how smart she was and the way she manipulated the world and how dumb Trump is, who's now again having to clean up a massive Democrat-fueled, if not made, but at least fueled mess that's cost countless numbers of lives.

Speaker 6 Yeah, if she still has that reset button that she handed Sergei Lavrov, maybe she wants to take a do-over

Speaker 6 on this op-ed and get a reset there. I mean, this is the woman who literally brought a re

Speaker 6 reset button to try to make a joke over our relationship with Russia and wants to lecture somebody else about that. I really wouldn't go there.

Speaker 6 Then to go into the classified issue, after having kept all of your stuff on an unclassified server, wiping it with bleach blit.

Speaker 6 I just, there are days when you go, you might want to sit this one out. This was one.

Speaker 3 Wait, one quick follow-up for you on it, Sean. Then she goes on to say,

Speaker 3 she criticizes him for de-emphasizing the importance of embassies. Oh my God.

Speaker 3 Why would she touch anything having to do with an embassy or a diplomatic facility after Benghazi?

Speaker 6 I just, there's a million. I literally feel like she's the one who let someone in her chat that shouldn't have gotten in and wrote that op-ed.
Because that, that, that reeks.

Speaker 7 I know.

Speaker 6 That's where it's like, I wish she could have at least blamed that on somebody and used the reset button.

Speaker 6 But it's just embarrassing how clueless and how unself-aware she is of her own vulnerabilities.

Speaker 6 Cause it's not just that

Speaker 6 when she does stuff like this, it means the Democrats have to answer for it.

Speaker 6 We get to talk about it. This is one where you literally say, I'll write it for you and then hand it off to somebody else or just sit this one out or don't send it into the New York Times.

Speaker 6 Write it in your journal or put it on your unclassified server. I don't think she did anything wrong.

Speaker 3 Keep it for yourself. I know.
Remember how she tried to act bored during the Benghazi hearings?

Speaker 13 Like, oh my God, I just didn't listen to this nonsense.

Speaker 3 Well, also,

Speaker 3 cell phones were wrong either.

Speaker 6 Go ahead. But, but for just one thing we got, we lost in the conversation about SignalGate

Speaker 6 was that the president and his team knocked out all of those Houthi targets. No lives were lost.
Targets were hit.

Speaker 6 The Obama, the Biden administration lost 13 lives coming out of Afghanistan. She dealt with Benghazi.

Speaker 6 If we want to talk about missions and diplomacy and actions, I'll take the Trump record over her record over Biden's record any day of the week.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I mean,

Speaker 3 we lost an ambassador. Like she, now she's just kind of like, oh, the embassies.
There's a de-emphasis.

Speaker 3 Would you like to have the embassy conversation? Because we could do that. We could definitely get back into it.
You purported to be bored about it. I know you like this thing, Dan.

Speaker 3 How did you like this thing?

Speaker 7 So I actually loved it.

Speaker 3 I will fully admit all the things.

Speaker 7 Yes, all the things that you guys both said and Mark, that she may not be necessarily the best messenger for the reasons that you guys all said. But I think she fully believes it.

Speaker 7 She's throwing punches. And I think the party has sat around frozen since Trump got elected.
They're exhausted. They don't know what to do.

Speaker 7 They're questioning all their strategies and tactics the last four or five years against Trump.

Speaker 7 And I think to Mark's point, she sits there and she's, I mean, Hillary Clinton is, if nothing else, one tough SOB.

Speaker 7 And I think she's just like, gosh darn it, we need to stand up and start saying stuff and I'll do it. And look, I give her credit.

Speaker 7 I mean, she knows exactly what we're saying are all the worts about her.

Speaker 7 And she's not going to be our candidate in 2028, but she is trying to give some steel to the spine of Democrats to just say common sense, as we see it, stuff and get in the game and start trying to go at him.

Speaker 7 instead of just sitting around in the fetal position getting rolled.

Speaker 6 Dan, do you think your donors on the Dem side or House rank and file house members were excited to see that op-ed in the New York Times this morning?

Speaker 7 I think they were probably not excited to see the name. There are the reasons that we all just, but I think they probably say, all right, you know what, she's getting off the sideline.

Speaker 7 Like I think, and we may get to this, this has been the best week for Democrats probably since August of last year. Kind of optimism going into the convention.
There was less coming out of it.

Speaker 7 But I think they're like, all right, now Hillary's in the game.

Speaker 5 She's one of the few people in the party who's an aircraft carrier, who can take the fight to Trump with clarity.

Speaker 5 And while the answer is some donors were not happy to see it, I know some were, not because it was her, but because, as Dan said, they need someone to enunciate the contrast.

Speaker 5 You know, Bill Clinton could do it. You know, Barack Obama could do it.
They won't.

Speaker 5 They won't because they're former presidents, but she will. And so she's not, she's an imperfect messenger, obviously, but go read it and take the name off of it.

Speaker 5 And you'll see a lot of stuff, as Dan said, Democrats want to hear somebody saying.

Speaker 3 Oh, I want to ask you a follow-up on SignalGate, but you mentioned that they won't do it because they're former presidents.

Speaker 3 And, you know, there's this, I guess, unwritten rule, or at least used to be about unwritten, about

Speaker 3 sitting presidents.

Speaker 3 former presidents trashing the sitting president. And this is what Joey Behar said about it on Thursday.

Speaker 3 They also have a tendency to blame the Biden administration. It's like, move on, that ship has sailed.
I never remember in my lifetime a sitting president trashing a previous president.

Speaker 3 I've never heard that before. You never heard, you know, Donald Reagan didn't do it.
They were saying models.

Speaker 3 And just quickly, just found in like a 30-second Google search. Hey, here's Joe Biden as president.

Speaker 6 What, in your view, constitutes the primary threat to freedom and democracy at home?

Speaker 7 Donald Trump. Donald Trump and the MiGA Republicans represented extremism that

Speaker 3 was the very foundations of our republic.

Speaker 7 Donald Trump has no character.

Speaker 6 The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.

Speaker 11 There's one more thing Trump and his Republican friends want to do. These are the kind of guys you like to smack in the ass.

Speaker 3 Hey.

Speaker 3 So yeah, some of that was when Trump had declared, but I could have given you 20 other examples of Trump not running, of him doing it.

Speaker 3 There's no rule anymore. The only rule is there's no rules.
It's just like the same as the end of Greece when Danny Zucco and Kanicki were doing the drag race. The rule is there ain't no rules.

Speaker 3 That's where we are in today's day and age. Back to Signalgate.
Mark, what is happening with the weirdness between what seems to be like Team Hegseth and Team Walse? Like, are these two guys

Speaker 3 maneuvering against each other to see like if one of us has to go down, it's going to be you? What's happening?

Speaker 5 There's certainly people in their orbit who are interested in

Speaker 5 moving the spotlight if necessary to save their friend or their boss. I don't know about between the two of them.
I think

Speaker 5 my belief is that everyone on that chain bears some of the responsibility because they should have said, whoa, this conversation shouldn't be here.

Speaker 5 If there's two primary mistakes involved, errors of judgment beyond the shared error of all of them. One is allowing Jeffrey Goldberg on the chain.

Speaker 5 Still don't know how it happened, but the National Security Advisor is taking the blame for that. And for many, that's the big sin.
And so Waltz is taking the blame there.

Speaker 5 But the other is the sharing of information that almost everybody I know, including Sean, because we've talked about it on Two-Way, doesn't believe should have been on signal.

Speaker 5 And that falls primarily on the Secretary of Defense. So they both have primary responsibility for one of the things that went wrong.

Speaker 5 Many people have noticed that the president has been more critical of Waltz than he has of Hexeth.

Speaker 5 And there have been some reporting that for a couple hours, a couple days at least, there was some chance the National Security Advisor would go. So those guys are both

Speaker 5 ferocious competitors. They both want to stay in their jobs.
One of them has got more personal closest to the president, which is Hexeth. But it appears they're both fine for now.

Speaker 5 And in the last day, the tensions that I've heard between their camps have tamped down appreciably as it looked like they kind of teamed up to move the thing off the table.

Speaker 3 All right, Sean, same question.

Speaker 3 What do you see happening there? Yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 6 Well, this is my big tell.

Speaker 6 I said this this morning. It's the manifest to Greenland is important today.

Speaker 6 More importantly is the manifest

Speaker 3 coming from Greenland.

Speaker 6 Right. So pay attention to the manifest on the flight home.
Does anybody become the special envoy to Greenland and just get stuck in Nook?

Speaker 3 I hope it's not shocked.

Speaker 6 No, she's fine. I think everybody loves her.

Speaker 5 She bought a round trip ticket.

Speaker 6 But I do wonder if somebody ends up hanging around the commissary too long there at the base.

Speaker 3 John, can you speak to what he was saying about, you know, the biggest question is, and I've heard this too, from Trump, how did Jeffrey Goldberg get into Mike Wallace's phone?

Speaker 3 Something Mike is denying, but we all know he was in there in one way, shape, or form, or this mistake could not have happened.

Speaker 6 Yeah, so there's two things. Not all sins are created equal.

Speaker 6 And I think in Donald Trump's eyes right now, the sin of allowing Jeffrey Goldberg into that conversation is greater than Pete Hagseth probably going beyond what he should, sensitivity-wise, on that chain, right?

Speaker 6 And the mission was a success. So I think Trump looks at it and says, who am I more pissed at?

Speaker 6 Somebody who allowed this Jeffrey Goldberg guy into the thing, who obviously is someone of dubious character to begin with,

Speaker 6 and obviously a never suckers and losers smear.

Speaker 6 I think, Megan, the problem that a lot of people are having is and i said this on the

Speaker 6 jeffrey goldberg is in my phone i had to call and yell at him during the transition because of a horrible horrible story uh when i met him the first time that his reporter wrote that i called to chastise him about so like it's not a i think if mike waltz said hey yeah he was in my phone book because one time he was writing a profile on blah blah blah yeah and no one i i mean i have a lot of people in my phone that good and bad but because over 30 years you that's i mean i actually have mark halperin's contact information going back like 18 jobs time that i can do mark's bio because i don't delete anything but that's another story the point is that like it wasn't if if it doesn't jameson greer might have been the who's the us trade rep it's jg maybe that's who why would they be putting a u.s trade rep on the such a conversation i mean that's that's again That's a whole separate thing.

Speaker 6 But my point is it's an honest mistake. Instead of just saying, hey, look, the guy was in my phone book because I had to yell at him eight years ago, or he did, who cares?

Speaker 6 Instead of trying to do this, I don't know how he got in my phone book. I think that that's going to, that could be the bigger problem because he's opened himself up to,

Speaker 6 I think that we should investigate this. Well, at some point, I don't know enough about tech, but you know, maybe there's some way of finding out the date that a contact

Speaker 6 entered into your phone book or something like that.

Speaker 7 I bet there is.

Speaker 3 You don't want to look at Joy Reed, like, I don't know who made those anti-LGBTQ entries on my blog. I demand an FBI investigation.

Speaker 3 I agree with you. I don't think it's that controversial to have weird, bad, nasty, anti-Trump reporters or whatever.
In your context, it's like the nature of all of our industry.

Speaker 3 You deal with people you can't stand. You deal with people who can't stand you.
It's just

Speaker 7 change over time.

Speaker 6 I mean, you might have met someone 15 years ago. I've had people work for me during my six years at the RNC who I haven't spoken to since because of some of the positions they've taken.

Speaker 6 They're still in my phone book. I don't spend time purging it.
I don't think that was the big sin. And so this to me is going to be the rub.

Speaker 6 If there is something that comes of this, that's going to be a problem because a crisis should die after 48 hours if it's not given oxygen. And I think this thing has lasted way too long.

Speaker 3 I don't think they should have said it's not war plans. I just don't think that was worth.
a worthwhile argument. Well, I should have said Jeffrey Goldberg wasn't in Mike.

Speaker 3 I just think all of it, they should have said, here's exactly what happened. You just, I mean, the way you put out a scandal is you say, here's everything, here's everything.

Speaker 3 And we're going to be able to do that.

Speaker 6 I do get the defensiveness on the plan, though. I will say, as somebody who understands what those terms mean, right?

Speaker 3 I know.

Speaker 3 But the average person isn't really drawing the same distinctions. I mean, I get it.
I understand why he felt unfairly attacked.

Speaker 3 But I just think as a PR, like PR is something I actually know pretty well. He knows where people are.

Speaker 6 I know, but, but, but, but you also, but Megan, here's the thing. You also know the law very well.
And if I started pontificating and said, well, they should have just filed this motion.

Speaker 6 Inside of you, as the good lawyer you are, you'd say you can't do it. And I think there's a defensive posture for people in the national security space to say that wasn't a war plan.

Speaker 3 I've never seen that, though. Jeffrey Goldberg wouldn't have released the actual

Speaker 3 with the whatever you want to call those things. And the story didn't get better for Pete and Mike and everyone when he did that.
So it's like, it's not a good idea. I'm just saying.

Speaker 6 I'm just saying I get their defensive, reflexive

Speaker 6 response because you're defending something you know not to be true. I get why they did it.

Speaker 3 I know. It's just like, you have to be smart when it comes to PR, same as you do as a military planner and be able to see three, four, or five steps ahead.

Speaker 3 So it's going to make you feel better to do this counter-strike, but then what? Right.

Speaker 3 And that's, I bring it up because you're, you know, we're talking about how we're now in day five of what should have been a 24 to 48 hour scandal. I think it's over.

Speaker 3 I don't think it's, I mean, the Democrats will still continue to try to light the flame.

Speaker 6 Megan, we also, you know, one of the things that didn't get much attention, someone brought this up. I can't, I will steal the idea, but it wasn't mine.

Speaker 6 Is you think about this, Goldberg knew about this for weeks, right? And he held it until he knew there was a pre-planned hearing of the Intel chiefs on Capitol Hill. Like he got away with that.

Speaker 6 Just think about this. He timed the drop of that story until he knew those chiefs were going to be on Capitol Hill.

Speaker 3 I mean, you talk about the PR piece of this i will give the atlantic credit for for literally thinking about how to place this story and when to get the maximum effect well walter kern and matt taibbi were on the other day and they had a really good point they were like why would you ever declare that you were on there just think you could have four years of access to the most amazing communications ever and then at the end of the administration be like here's everything i saw oh my god like i could have been an even better scoop for them anyway i think it's over over.

Speaker 3 I just thank God nobody on our side got hurt. The mission went off perfectly and that we should be grateful that it did.

Speaker 3 I guess the trade representative might have been on there because we were striking trade routes and the Houthis therein.

Speaker 3 Okay, next up, we've got to talk about, you know, on Monday, all the news was how the Democrat Party is in shambles. It has its worst approval ratings in years within its itself.

Speaker 3 You know, it's Democrats hate the party. Democrats hate their leaders.
They have no leader. And then we start to see, like last night, Elise Stefanik was withdrawn as Trump's nominee for U.N.

Speaker 3 ambassador because he needs her to stay in her seat. And then we find out that there was a special election in Pennsylvania in a jurisdiction Trump won by double digits that went blue.

Speaker 3 And now we're looking at two in Florida where Trump won by huge margins that are potentially in trouble. So what's happening? Is this a party that's in trouble or isn't it?

Speaker 3 That's where we go with the guys right after this.

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Speaker 3 What are we supposed to make of what I said before the break? I thought the Democrats were imploding, and yet Elise has got to leave the UN job so she can hold on to that seat. You've got,

Speaker 3 this was a Pennsylvania state race that the Democrats won, but

Speaker 3 it was a jurisdiction.

Speaker 3 Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, it was a state Senate seat that Trump won by 15 points in November and included the more conservative parts of a county that only one Democrat presidential candidate, Lyndon Johnson, had won since the Civil War.

Speaker 3 So that's, Dems have to be feeling good about that.

Speaker 3 And then you've got the Matt Gates seat and the Mike Wall seat in Florida, which are normally totally solidly red, but Republicans are worried about those.

Speaker 3 Elise Stefanik won her seat by 24 points last year. And the guy who is running to replace her as the Republican on the ticket is up 16 points.
But still, Trump said, get back down there, Elise.

Speaker 3 We can't afford to lose it. So I like, what's happening, Mark? What's happening?

Speaker 5 Well, don't want to overstate the trend here because the country, the poll suggests the country's thinks, people think the country's on the right track.

Speaker 5 President Trump is still wielding his power in a pretty dramatic and some ways unprecedented way. I think there's three things going on.

Speaker 5 First of all, with any president, the year after the election, you almost always see some sort of bounce back, right?

Speaker 5 The two gubernatorial races, the year after the presidential, only two competitive races every year,

Speaker 5 or somewhat competitive, at least, New Jersey and Virginia. And for years, they swung almost always to the president, the party, not of the president.
So part of it is just it's a year after.

Speaker 5 Second is some of the stuff the president's doing does not seem relevant on the economy to a lot of voters, particularly

Speaker 5 on inflation.

Speaker 5 Where's the president's focus been on the economy? It's been on tariffs. Most people don't understand that.
Some people are worried about them.

Speaker 5 And we see consumer confidence is a little bit off. So, or in some polls, a lot off.
So I think that there's an economic gap.

Speaker 5 And you see that in the president's polling, where his ratings on the economy are lower. And that's a big issue for voters.
And then lastly, there's no perfect.

Speaker 5 off-year election that's going to tell you exactly what's going on nationally. But there's no doubt that a factor in these races is when Donald Trump isn't on the ballot, Republicans don't do as well.

Speaker 5 He's not on the ballot in these races. And Democrats finally have a little bit of pep in their step.
They finally have a feeling of, well, we can't beat him in Washington.

Speaker 5 We didn't beat him in the last election.

Speaker 5 But if we win these special elections, if we donate money, if we volunteer, if we get energized, we can send a message to everybody that we want to check on Trump.

Speaker 5 I think all those things have combined to put Republicans back on their heels.

Speaker 5 Doesn't mean they're going to lose any of these races necessarily, although they did, as you say, lose the one in Pennsylvania. But this is a time.

Speaker 5 We talked about it on the show this, our show this morning.

Speaker 5 It's been the best week, we all agree, for democrats since trump got elected and and that adds up to creating an electoral environment that's favorable right now for democrats as compared to the mean

Speaker 3 dan scott pressler is the guy who went to pennsylvania moved there for more than a year prior to the vote and really was very instrumental in turning it red um and he tweeted out i'm going to be honest with you even if you don't want to hear it republicans have been losing special elections all over the country even red districts in iowa and Pennsylvania.

Speaker 3 Democrats are fired up. Unless we begin focusing on ground game, we will lose 2025 and 2026.
Do you agree?

Speaker 7 You know, and I think James Blair, I think it was in an interview with Politico, the White House political director, recently said, like, it is a little bit of a problem that our team, meaning kind of Trump and MAGA supporters.

Speaker 7 are pretty kind of happy right now and you're always a little less energized when you feel like everything is being accomplished that you fought so hard for whereas angry MAGA is more effective.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 7 Whereas conversely, Democrats are fired up. And I think there's two things.
Democrats are fired up about Donald Trump.

Speaker 7 They've also, they're fired up about the kind of incompetence and ineptness of their own leaders. And what you're seeing is this, like, we've had enough.

Speaker 7 And now, like, we are going to force action from the bottom up for our own party to get its act together.

Speaker 7 And so on the local level, on the grassroots level, we can all talk about AOC and Bernie Sanders.

Speaker 7 Their politics are not necessarily my politics, but what they're tapping into, what they're showing the party, hey, we can get 30,000 people to show up in a red state. That is hard.

Speaker 7 I was in politics for 20 years. The only person who's been able to do it for year after year is Donald Trump.

Speaker 7 You know, Obama had like a two-year period where he was like really hot, could fill arenas, and then it became a grind. Trump is the only one in Bernie Sanders who can do it.

Speaker 7 And I think that you're seeing, you know, this week was signaled. It was a little bit of a ding, a self-inflicted error that Democrats said, okay, they're human a little bit, right?

Speaker 7 They were fumbling around, like it gave them some confidence. And so I think Democrats are energized.
Republicans, maybe not quite as much. And we'll see here.

Speaker 7 I also would not underestimate that what Mark said. Trump got elected on the economy and inflation.
And he doesn't even talk about those things most of the time.

Speaker 7 Most of these press conferences, DEI, doge with Elon Musk a lot, Ukraine. It's not on the economy.
And I think voters are frustrated.

Speaker 7 And you combine that with Doge having kind of a little bit of a rickety,

Speaker 7 you know, reputation in polls, you see some

Speaker 7 pieces together.

Speaker 6 You know, Megan, the thing,

Speaker 6 look, special elections are special. That's a fact.
There are, though, lessons to be learned.

Speaker 6 And one of the things that I learned out of Pennsylvania beyond, I mean, the environment we just talked about, there's no question Republicans aren't as fired up as Democrats right now, but mechanics matter and candidates matter.

Speaker 6 And in Pennsylvania, by all estimation, the candidate was not very good. The mechanics on the ground were horrible.
That's what worries me about the Florida two special elections.

Speaker 6 The first district, which is the one held

Speaker 6 previously by Matt Gates, should be okay. Jimmy Petronas has run statewide before and won several times.
So he's a good candidate. He's got a good fundraising base.
He's got people motivated.

Speaker 6 The sixth district, which is the

Speaker 6 Mike Waltz seat, which is the Republican nominee, state senator Randy Fine, is not

Speaker 3 Trump carried it by 30 points.

Speaker 6 30 points. This should be a slam dunk.
Now, again, it's special. So maybe he only wins it by 10 or 12, but right now it's dead even.
There's even one poll that shows the Dem up.

Speaker 6 This should be a huge wake-up call. The candidates matter.
The mechanics matter, but that, I mean, that should still keep it within five or 10. We have a problem.
Scott Pressler is absolutely right.

Speaker 6 And that's the thing is that at some point, you can, you know, those things matter for a few points here and there. We got a bigger problem too in terms of keeping the base motivated.

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 it won't be long until they get angry again. That's that's Republicanism.
There's always somebody disappointing you.

Speaker 5 Go from fat and happy to angry in a big hurry.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's easy.

Speaker 3 The Wisconsin Supreme Court race, we should spend a moment on, spend a moment on, too.

Speaker 3 I can't believe the amount of messaging I get on a daily basis about this race as somebody who lives in Connecticut. Like, why am I getting this online and everywhere? Elon's doing his, you know,

Speaker 3 you'll get a million dollars if you can show me that you voted. You don't have to tell me who you voted for.
He's doing that thing again, going back out there.

Speaker 3 Everybody's sounding very alarmist on this thing, but the Democrat is up and by a lot, according to the latest poll, where her name is Crawford, Susan Crawford. She's up against Brad Skimmel.

Speaker 3 And it's 50-42, according to the latest poll of likely voters, 500 of them, although Wisconsin, they say, is like impossible to poll. So what's going to happen there?

Speaker 3 And why does everyone care so very much? And is it redistricting that this court is going to have the final say on?

Speaker 5 Yes.

Speaker 6 Yes. That's the biggest issue.
Redistricting. I mean,

Speaker 6 that would be a huge issue that people should care about nationwide, not just the folks in Wisconsin.

Speaker 6 A lot of voter ID thing, a lot of early voting all goes through the, will go through the state Supreme Court. So yeah, for a lot of reasons, people should care about that.

Speaker 6 I think there's no question Democrats have the edge going into this. This This is going to be a turnout thing.

Speaker 6 And that's why you're seeing Elon Don Jr., others try to make the case, teletown halls, personal visits, et cetera.

Speaker 6 Republicans could do themselves a huge favor if they pick up the Supreme Court seat.

Speaker 6 And I would say that they're not favored to do it, but it's definitely one of those things as we head down the stretch that they have every ability to do.

Speaker 3 I can't think of any state.

Speaker 3 Sorry. Go ahead, Mark.

Speaker 5 I can't think of any state whose state Supreme Court decisions have been as impactful, not just in the state but kind of nationally resonant as wisconsin and like the the the political culture and the states and the u.s senators they are actually purple right you can't think of very many states because there aren't very many left who have senators from different parties wisconsin does ron johnson far right maga tammy baldwin pretty far left and You see on that state Supreme Court, the stakes are huge.

Speaker 5 Again, Wisconsin's probably been

Speaker 5 supplanted by Pennsylvania as the battleground state, but it's still number two.

Speaker 5 And so the stakes are high in order to not just impact that particular state, but the symbolism is what's important to so many.

Speaker 5 To say we're going head-to-head with all the outside money and the state ground games to see who can win a very contested seat in Wisconsin. We've seen it before with Scott Walker.

Speaker 5 We've seen it before with the U.S. Senate race.
It is high stakes there because of the national resonance of the state and our political culture.

Speaker 3 So, Dan, is what's going to happen? Let's say that if the Democrat wins, then the Democrats control that court.

Speaker 3 And then is it true that that could mean as many as two congressional seats, additional congressional seats for the Democrats?

Speaker 7 It could. I mean, we'll have to see.
There's going to be a gubernatorial race in Wisconsin here in two years in 2028. And, you know, we'll just have to see kind of how it shakes out.
Look.

Speaker 7 what it does do is just give a little you know momentum to the party we just lost but tammy Baldwin did win there.

Speaker 7 I think one of the things that we're really watching for, all three of us, and Megan, you probably as well, is Elon Musk in the fall last year was an asset to Donald Trump.

Speaker 7 I don't think anyone would disagree with that. He is now going there this weekend.
He's put a lot of money into this race. He's been very vocal on X and other places.

Speaker 7 I'm curious if his presence helps, if he is still an asset, or if what we're seeing in polls, that his favorabilities are coming down, his unfavorables are rising, like the Black focus group, people have concerns about him, does he become a liability?

Speaker 7 And if he does, that will be interesting, right? As we head into more Doge cuts, we head into this bill, the reconciliation bill, it will start to say to Republicans,

Speaker 7 perhaps the ground is shifting.

Speaker 3 Hmm.

Speaker 3 I don't like the chances in Wisconsin, but I'm heartened by the fact that the polls in Wisconsin are never correct. I mean, it's just like you, you can't, it's like having no poll whatsoever.

Speaker 3 So I suppose anything could happen because Trump won it. So, you know, it's not like it's not.

Speaker 6 So did Ron Johnson, so did Scott Walker. It tends to break to the right at the end, but that assumes a strong ground game.
And as, you know, these off-year ones are just so, so

Speaker 6 read an electorate is very difficult. So I, I mean, that's, you're absolutely right.
That's the one, one, one piece of hope.

Speaker 3 The GOP has to learn to win without Trump because, you know, he's not going to be on the ballot again.

Speaker 3 I mean, I know there's some banned talk, but he's not going to be on the banner, on the ballot again.

Speaker 3 You guys, it's a pleasure. Have a great weekend.
It's so great to see you. Thanks for sticking with me.

Speaker 5 Great to see you, Megan. Thank you again.
Great to see you. Thank you.

Speaker 3 Wow, so interesting. Aren't those guys great? If you would like to weigh in on the show, you can email me, megan at megankelly.com.

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Speaker 3 among other things that are newsy. Thank you all so much for watching, and you have a great weekend too.

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