June 9, 2025 • 48 mins
The Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson skewers Trump weaponizing the National Guard against protesters.
David A. Graham details his new book The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds. And according to a new KFF Health
Tracker poll, about seven and ten adults that's seventy two
percent are worried about a significant reduction in federal funding
for Medicaid, which would lead to an increased share of
(00:22):
uninsured children and adults in the United States. That's all
hidden in the big, beautiful bullshit bill. We have such
a great show for you today. The Lincoln Project's own
Rick Wilson joins us to talk about Trump weaponizing the
National Guard against protesters. Then we'll talk to David A.
Graham about his new book, The Project. How Project twenty
(00:44):
twenty five is Reshaping America. But first the news.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Mai, So, David Hog callsed quite a stirred side the
DNC for wanting to not have people who die in
office constantly being we're sleeping open seats and diminishing our majority.
And there's a weaked audio of DNC chair Ken Martin
basically saying that what David Hogg did there supposedly has
(01:11):
poisoned his enjoyment of the job, and he does not
want to be there anymore. This seems bad at a
time when we have our authoritarian presidents sending in the
National Guard to California and we really need an opposition party.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
So here's the problem. Okay, the Democratic National Committee is
an impossible situation. You have a base that is furious,
largely agrees with David Hogg, wants democratic politicians really taking
a new playbook. Remember Democrats ran on the idea that
democracy was on the ballot. Trump is doing all sorts
(01:46):
of anti democratic things. They want, they're elected members of
Congress and senators to be absolutely pushing back in every
way they can. But if you're the chair of the
Democratic National Committee, you are trying to protect incumbents, right,
That's part of what they do, and also quell this
(02:10):
rage from the base. It's a very tough position. But
let me tell you, Ken Martin was put in this
job by state party chairs, so he has a relationship
with the democratic state parties. This means that he really
is a person who is involved in this sort of
democratic machine. If he's smart, he will figure out a
(02:33):
way to absorb the base's rage and channel that into
more better leadership. Because there's money to raise from that.
The problem is if he is too connected to trying
to protect incumbents, that's going to be a real problem
for him. This is a very very very very bad
(02:53):
moment to be the DMC chair. That's just it. I mean,
is he the right man for the job. They don't
know enough about him. But the point is, and again
here is I think a real tell. Right here in
the recording, an emotional Martin describes being deeply frustrated by
the fallout over Hog, who has ignited a firestorm in
(03:16):
the party by vowing to spend twenty million in safe
blue primaries to oust incumbent democrats he believes are ineffective. Look,
I don't think you need to squash that necessarily, especially
because some of these Democrats are not effective. But the
reality is this is going to be a major, major,
super important midterm where we really need to focus on
(03:39):
Democrats winning back the House. So if that means primary
one or two very old members of Congress who are
not showing up for votes, that's one thing. But I
don't know, this is almost a situation where Martin's response
is kind of worse than the crime. And you got
to remember somebody's leaking this yep.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
And it was pretty funny because David Hogg did screenshots
showing that he did not return the reporter's requests for
this try.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
To show it that it wasn't him.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
And then Malcolm Kenyada, who's also a part of the DNC,
kind of called.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Bull other vice chair, yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
Called bullshit on it. So we have a lot of
drama where we really need to be united pushing this back.
So this is concerning, but it's also a fight we
have to solve, right.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
It's clearly something we have to solve now. I do
want to say Malcolm Kenyata is pretty great and I'm
a little bit friendly with him, and he's quite smart.
I have a lot of respect for him.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
Agreed, and be honest with you.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
I like all involved, But yeah, I don't know Ken Martin,
but I like David too.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
So the Washing Post has a report that says the
Trump administrations weighing how they cancel funding for California. We've
discussed the stupidity of this before, but for the listeners
who may have forgot, I think you have some very
succinct thoughts on how disastrous this would be for Trump
and his administration.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
So fourth largest economy, you stop giving them money, they
stop giving you money. Literally, the best thing Donald Trump
could ever do to Gavin Newsom is say, I'm not
going to give you any more federal money. Because you
know who pays the most federal money. The fourth largest
economy in the world is California. So if you go
(05:23):
into a pissing match with someone who desperately wants to
be president, why there's no incentive for him not to
just escalate and escalate and escalate, and you stop getting
money federal money from California. The rest country's got a
big fucking problem. I think this is a disaster for
Trump is I want to add, this is so trumpy.
(05:45):
They're looking for a reason to cut off the money, right,
so they have the punishment but not the crime. As
I want to mention that in this article it talks
about how once Donald Trump is donely California, you know
who's coming for please tell me Main and you know
why because Maine has three trans athletes. Okay, I don't
(06:07):
know if it's three, maybe it's five, but I mean
it's some, you know, vanishingly small number. And I think
it's important to realize you cannot appease this man. If
you let him bully you, you lose, and you keep losing.
And by the way, all weekend long, we saw more
and more universities joining Harvard. You know why, because they
see what's happening to Columbia. Just like those law firms
(06:29):
that bend in the need for Trump, those guys losing
clients because you know what happens when you bend the
need of Trump. Trump just takes takes takes, so you
cannot appease. And that's really something that the people at
ABC should be thinking about one hundred percent.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
So I have a theory of the case. I'm curious
what you think of, which is that one of the
things that Democrats have missed an opportunity to run on
is that Republicans constantly make bills like these trans bills,
and now we have bills banning chemtrails that don't exist.
Democrats need to say, we're trying to change your lives.
They're trying making up fantasies that don't exist, and run
(07:06):
against this because this is bullshit and people want bills
that deliver and change their lives. What do you think.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
I think, yes, I think your thesis is correct. And
I think, look, Republican, this is something they've been doing forever, right,
fake bills to solve fake problems. Right, They're going to
outlaw something that isn't real.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Performative moronics is what we often called it.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Right, performative moronics. So of course this is what's happening.
And look, you have a health organization that's run by
a guy who spent the weekend tanning. Okay, my man,
he tends he swims in Rock Creek Park, he chews
chewing tobacco. This is not a healthy person.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
You mean the high froth.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
I mean, what are we doing?
Speaker 4 (07:54):
Man?
Speaker 2 (07:55):
Somi. We had footage this weekend of tanks rolling into
decent So unlike LA, this is for Trump's stupid parade.
There's going to be counter protests to it all over
America that I think our listeners might be interested in.
Can you talk to us a little bit about this?
Speaker 4 (08:13):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (08:13):
So I just I did a reading in Princeton, New Jersey,
at the library today, and what a lot of people
talking about is a no King's Day. The idea is
that Donald Trump has made himself a king. This is
a two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the United States
Military of the Army, but it happens to also be
this same day as Donald Trump's birthday. The Navy and
(08:36):
the Air Force don't get parades because they are not
on the same day as Donald Trump's birthday. You know,
Republicans are like, it's just a coincidence, it's for the army.
Speaker 5 (08:47):
It's not.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Okay, it is not a coincidence. This is Trump doing
authoritarian things. He's you know, I thought they were trying
to save money. We know that having a insane group
of tanks rolling through Washington, DC will not save anyone
any money. It's just a complete None of us should
(09:11):
be surprised by the performative moronics. And also, it really
is the kind of thing that feels like a souloritarian
want to be. Look, this is a guy who worships
Victor orbon This is what you get when you worship
Victor Orbona. Rick Wilson is the founder of the Lincoln
(09:34):
Project and the host of the Enemy's List.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
Rick Wilson, OLLI, Jong, fast, have you been arrested this weekend?
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Not yet.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
A question I started asking people these days because you
never can tell anymore.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
So let's talk about California. I want to just like
mention something which is anecdotal and not reported, but I
think important. A friend of mine who was in New
York at the protests said that she found the police
were trying there were there was a lot of them
trying to get the protesters to act out.
Speaker 4 (10:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
Yeah, I believe that. And I think that there is
a degree to which Stephen Miller and Tom Holman and
Christinoman the rest of these idiots they really really really
want an excuse and Pete Hegseth, they really want an
excuse to crackheads. Yeah, they want to. They want an
excuse to start beating the hell out of people, and
(10:33):
they want an excuse to say all Democrats believe in violence.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
So let's talk about protests because I want to like
just talk about like protests throughout history, because one of
the things we're seeing here is this is we're in
these periods of these very rapid cycles of backlash to
backlash to backlash. So I want to be cognizant of
like where so for example, well, there are people who
(11:01):
say that the nineteen sixties and the protests in the
sixties opened the door to Nixon.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
Now I think you could absolutely make that case historically, by.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
The way, right, So I want to be cognizant of
what's happening. That said, these protests are protests happening not
because of something, but really because they because of extraordinary
action from the Trump administration.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
Correct, this is not Vietnam. This is not so amorphous
and so distant from people. This is happening in communities
across this country right now. These are people, you know,
that are being harmed by what DHS and Trump is doing.
There's a reason they're not happy about it. It's because
(11:50):
they shouldn't be. And you know, you're seeing some of
these Republicans start to get very nervous, Like this morning
in Florida, you had Salazar, a Republican congressperson from Miami,
suddenly saying, Oh, I don't want all these people deported.
They're good people. Oh oh are they? You might have
(12:11):
mentioned that before your shill, but you know it is,
but it is. This is larger and more organic and
more dangerous for Trump. Then. I think that a lot
of a lot of his allies have realized they look
at this as Oh good, it's more Antifa going up
against the cops. We always win that battle. I'm not
(12:32):
sure you actually win this battle, because a lot of
the people that are being affected by this have more
ties into the communities that they're being expelled from than
a lot of the Trump folks think.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Well. I would also add, like Democrats sit around worrying
about losing Hispanic voters, here's a really good way to
lose Hispanic voters. Arrest them.
Speaker 4 (12:55):
Yeah, oh yeah, that's that's high them.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
To countries they haven't lived in in forty years.
Speaker 4 (13:01):
Or sending them to countries like Sudan.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (13:05):
Some of the stuff that.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
They're doing is so profoundly abusive, and in Florida in particular,
they're now saying, Okay, well, we we hate communism so much,
we have to send these people back to communist Cuba.
We hate communism so much, we have to send these
people back to Venezuela and in the Maduro regime. No interesting,
interesting approach. Not what I would have thought of.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
Well, so here's the question. Then we have Steven Miller
two weeks ago says I'd like to see more raids
at the home depot.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
Today we see raids at the home depot in a
Hispanic neighborhood in California. Stephen Miller comes from Santa Monica,
has a certain hostility towards California. California fifth largest economy
in the world. We see reporting the Trump administration trying
to figure out ways to cut federal funds to California, right,
(13:56):
I mean, this clearly is very intentional targeting.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
I think I think we could make a very strong
case that a lot of the craziness that we're watching
has to do with the pathologies of Stephen Miller's upbringing.
And you and I have talked about, well, there is
something wrong with that guy. There's something wrong with him
at a really fundamental level, something broke in his childhood
(14:21):
that we can't really understand, I guess, but he is
a really, really messed up guy.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
And Jesse would the fact check California fourth largest economy.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
Well, there it is, right. I feel like there's a
degree to which we have never had anybody like Steven
Miller in the White House in a long time, in
part because he is so quite obviously a broken individual.
And this is like a this stuff is the acting
(14:52):
out he's doing is so over the top and so dramatic,
and so you know, I will or the beauty of
the of the white race. Bullshit that it's ugly and
it's terrible, but it's also vaguely intriguing, Like, how do
you how do you psychoanalyze this guy? Because there's a
lot wrong with this guy.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Yeah, I mean I also think there's this tension of
Trump administration really wants you know, they've run on this
white National List esque kind of racism.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
But now Trump has grown his coalition to include Latino
He's grown his voting based with Latino men and black men.
So if you're going to deport those people, there will
be political consequences. Now, again, Trump is not running in
the midterms. There's reporting that says he cares about the midterms.
(15:45):
It's hard for me to imagine Trump caring about anyone
who's not him.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
Yeah. I have a lot of trouble imagining Trump laying
awake at night going, oh goodness, I wonder if if
Mike Lawler is going to be okay, but you know.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
He doesn't want to get impeached again.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
Yeah, but you know what, if I were the Democrats,
I wouldn't even mention impeachment right now. This is this
is a guy who the criming is so extraordinary and
so constant that you know, impeachment almost seems inadequate for it.
I mean, this is a guy who quite literally every
single day is involved in some some type or form
(16:24):
of criminality that has never been imagined in the White
House before. So, you know, I just I feel like
I feel like it's it's a better argument in this
point in the in the in the debate to tell
the voters that you're going to have Donald Trump's cabinet
members and the people he who work for him, and
the people who are doing all this horrifying crap not
(16:47):
only in America, but two Americans. They're they're going to
hold him those people account. Well, you're going to have
Christy Nome and Steven Miller and Tom Homan and and
you know the rest of these nut jobs up in
front of Congressional committees come next fall or come next
spring and have fun. Because there's a sense of right
(17:09):
now of immunity among the Trump world where nothing that
Republicans can couldn't possibly lose Congress, and so they feel
like they feel like nothing can go wrong.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
I think that's right. I do wonder though, as we
look at this and we watch what's happening at this moment.
There are going to be unintended consequences for Trump. Is
like with the tariffs. So on Saturday, the steel tariffs
came on. Now it is more expensive to buy steel
if you want to manufacture in the United States. That said,
(17:42):
if you want to bring in things that are made
with steel, you don't necessarily have the same tariff structure.
So again, yet another moment of unintended consequence.
Speaker 3 (17:53):
This administration is marked by a lot of not terribly
smart people do things that they think will appeal to
Trump's base. Yeah, and appeal to Trump and over and
over again. As you just correctly pointed out, something like
the these steel tariffs, it's one more layer of a
(18:13):
really bad economic theory being applied unwisely by people who
don't think things through. They have not thought any of
this through at all. There's been no like, hmm, what
could go.
Speaker 4 (18:28):
Wrong with this theory? When when a lot seems to
go wrong with most of the things they do.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
All Elon's people want is for Trump and Eline to
make peace because they know they're fucked right, Like David
Sacks is like I poured all this money into.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
This and yep, so guys like David Sacks and and
and the you know, the all in guys kind of
nervousness is something to behold.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
I love it, Okay, So.
Speaker 3 (18:58):
I'm eating it up with a spoon.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
So ABC News reports on Friday, shortly after seven am,
they called Trump. The journalist who calls him asks him
about Musk. Trump says, you mean the man who has
lost his mind? Right, He's not particularly interested quote unquote
in talking to him right now.
Speaker 3 (19:18):
No, And I think I think one thing you're going
to see here is like a lot of stuff in
the in the Maga verse, they convinced themselves that the
world looks one way and only that way, because you know,
before this divorce, mommy and Daddy loved each.
Speaker 4 (19:36):
Other, right, and they.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
Were the super team and they were going to make
the world. You know, they were those who was going
to save seven trillion dollars the whatever random number. It was.
That Musk represented a sort of new philosophical basis for
the Republican Party on how they were going to handle things,
and all of it was garbage, Yeah, every bility. It
(19:59):
was just like h a fever dream. And so now
you've got you know, guys like David Sachs, I can't.
I think it was Stephen Colbert who said, like David
Sachs desperately texting mommy to pick please pick me up
from school?
Speaker 1 (20:10):
You know, well, I also just think, like David Zacks Trump,
I think you see Elon being like, well, maybe we
should make peace. But the reality is like Elon may
be erratic, but Trump is a radic. Like Trump is
not gonna be friends with him.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
Again, Let's remember this the four one of my one
of my rules about Trump, the four things that motivate Trump,
what makes him money, what keeps him in the spotlight.
Sex used to be on the list more, but it's
not as much now.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
Gradu turning seventy eight.
Speaker 3 (20:46):
Has something to do with it, and what humiliates people? Right,
and now Elon is only in category four, right he
And and you know, Michael Moritz, who's a big Silicon
Valley guy, wrote a piece in the Financial Times today
like basically saying to people who who thought they were
getting like good things for Crypto and good things for
(21:08):
the valley and good things for AI. He's like, if
you guys just jumped in with Trump on this, you
understand he's going to you know, completely f you and
you know that's what Trump. I mean, part of the
trust behavior is unclear to people at this late stage
in the game.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
No, I agree, but it is. But it is unclear
to people like those Latino voters voted for Trump even
though the white people and some Latino people at the
Republican National Convention were waving mass deportation now.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
Sometimes yeah, and look there there are there are two
groups of people in this country that I think have
been in the finding out box about Trump more than
any other this year. A lot of those Arib Americans
in Detroit, Michigan, Lacomb County who all said, we're going
to teach Biden to lesson. We're going to show the
Democratic Party that I've committed us on Israel from now on. Yeah,
(22:03):
and we're gonna and we're gonna show. We're gonna show
Killer Joe, you sure did good work. And now they're
in a position where where you know, we have we
have a country where if you were an African American,
Trump looked at you as a prop, you know, as
a stage prop, and if you're Hispanic, pretty much the
same thing I heard from one point person around the
(22:25):
campaign at one point that they never did anything with
the air of American vote because they just couldn't believe
it was actually happening, that anybody could be that stupid.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Yeah, yeah, so that's pretty dark. So let's talk about
what happens now. National Guard is in California. Not much
for them to do now, pretty stupid. They've sent the
National Guard to California before, during the Rodney King riot. Ye,
there isn't really that's not what's happening here.
Speaker 3 (22:55):
This isn't really a an actual thing that calls for
the for the inclusion or the use of federal military force.
Speaker 4 (23:06):
Yeah, that said, this is their cosplay. But they want
some violence.
Speaker 5 (23:10):
They want violence.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Now, we have seen a lot of stupid things that
legislators have done to the Guard. For example, in New
York City, the Guard is on our subway, have almost
nothing to do there, but it's still you know, and
so so it is something there is some precedent for it.
But I think it's really important to remember that when
(23:32):
you look at the Twitter account of one Stephen Miller,
it's all this is an insurrection. This is an insurrection,
this is the end of days. But what it looks
like on the ground is people, people were pushing back,
and now it's a little bit more, it's more subdued today.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
Look, I think I think we're seeing right now in
Los Angeles a fairly understandable, explicable response to the very
heavy handed nature of ICE, which is, you know, again,
that is all Steven Miller. Every bit of that is
(24:11):
Steven Miller's model for doing this. They want to bring
in the heavily armed up, tooled up, tactical sort of
idea so that they can provoke people to do something dumb.
They want one person to push one cop so that,
you know, Donald Trump can can do everything short of
(24:31):
New King Los Angeles. It's really clear why they want
to do it this way. It also is something that
plays into the way their base works and thinks and
looks and talks about everything. It's all Antifa, it's all
a radical left wing conspiracy trying to destroy America. All
these things are very like well known We've heard this
(24:55):
song a lot of times. Let's put it that way.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
Yeah, And you know, I just want to point out
one more time, between the Elon Trump trauma and the
what's happening in California, there is a massive piece of
legislation that has a lot of crap in it, a
lot of crap. Now, some of it's gonna get shot
down by a descent of parliamentarian. But there is also
(25:19):
an opportunity here of Democrats are smart to push, push,
push against his fucking bell on this app.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
Mollie, I could not agree with you more. It is
a it is a moment that is rarely handed to
this to the Democratic Party, where where all they have
to do is take advantage of some basic luck.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
So let's talk if you were if you were working
in Chuck Schumer's office right now, what would you do?
Speaker 3 (25:44):
Look, I would be doing well. First off, Yes, Line
one in the in this thing is the parliamentarian. Yeah,
that is. That is there's a lot of liquid, hot
garbage in this thing that cannot survive. But round two
is you got time now to talk about what this
is going to do to real people and to voters
(26:07):
in these in these in these Republican districts. And right
now I haven't heard the Democrats aggressively doing that, to
my mind enough, But they've got a moment here where
they can start outlining the harm of this bill, they
can start outlining the things that are in it. That
are the stinkers that they that the Republicans all claim.
(26:28):
I never had a chance to read.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
That, right, I didn't see the judis, but but I wonder.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
It's like what I said that I joked. I was like, oh, well,
I didn't know that the throwing puppies in the wood
Chipper bill would mean we would throw puppies in the
wood chipper, right.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
The refusal to regulate AI, to not allow states to
regulate AI, to put that for a decade, I mean
insane lawmaking at every point. Here's the other thing I want.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
Decade from now, Molly, the robot overlords will have destroyed
us all at this point.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
Well, and it's also but it's also I think a
really important point, which is like right now, Elon Musk
has said this bill is a no go. That is
the biggest Republican donor. So you you know, if John
Thune wants to go to war with the money for
the Republican Party, bring it on.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
And look as Trump Trump tried to threaten Elon today
with that whole like the very serious consequences if he
does anything, gives up give money to other people. I'm thinking,
you know, first off, yes, thank you very much for
the once again reminding us that the Free Speech Party
is anything but. And secondly, you know this is this
(27:46):
is a pretty hollow threat. If klon Musk wants to
spend his money, He's going to spend his damn money.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
And again, as you said, I strongly encourage Elon to
pursue every possible rem to the harm that's been done
to him, because.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
Yeah, heartily, heartily, heartily gray. David A. Graham is a
writer at the Atlantic and the author of the project
How Project twenty twenty five is Reshaping America.
Speaker 5 (28:19):
Welcome to Fast Politics, David.
Speaker 6 (28:21):
Graham, thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
I think we should talk about this book you wrote
about Project twenty twenty five, because the thing that I'm
struck by and I feel like I'm going crazy because
every day I'll be like, oh, yeah, this was in
Project twenty twenty five.
Speaker 5 (28:33):
Oh this, this was.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
In Project twenty two. Like I was actually talking to
someone political this morning who's a straight news reporter. We
were like debating whether or not Trump is tireder than
he once was, and he was like, well, he's gotten
a ton done in the first hundred days, and I
was like, yes, everything from Project twenty twenty five.
Speaker 6 (28:52):
Yes, totally. I have the same experience. I keep seeing headlines,
Oh yeah, that's the that's there, just over and over
every day.
Speaker 5 (28:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
You read it the South and was like and were like,
oh fuck, and then just wrote a book about it.
Speaker 6 (29:03):
I mean I read bits and pieces last summer, and
then I actually didn't read I didn't sit down to
read all through as one thing until after the election,
and then read it really fast.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
And then you were like, oh fuck, what I like
about it? And I haven't read the whole thing cover
to cover. Is it a thousand pages? It's pretty big, right, Yeah.
Speaker 6 (29:22):
I think at the nine hundred and twenty two give us.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
The whole like elevator pitch about it, just for those
who have not been who can sleep at night.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (29:33):
So in twenty twenty two, the Heritage Foundation asked Paul Danz,
who had been in the first Trump administration in a
kind of low level position, to put together a bunch
of contributors and have a plan for the next conservative president.
And so they got seventy people, a bunch of them
former Trump administration members, think tankers, conservative wonks, that sort
of group, all from kind of across the whole MAGA, right,
(29:54):
And they put together this plan for what they would
do department by department and also how they would do it,
and they produced this document. They put it online in
September twenty twenty three. You know, as we're saying, it's
been kind of the blueprint for how Trump is operated.
And I think the thing that is notable about it
is not just the things that they said they wanted
to do, which is what I had been aware of,
(30:15):
you know, last summer, but how carefully they laid out
plans to do it, and in particularly the way they
want to seize power for the president and take over
powers that belonged to Congress or to other parts of
the executive branch.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
My favorite part of the whole story, and by favorite,
I mean, oh, my fucking god, was when everyone was like,
he's going to do Project twenty twenty five. Because they're
saying he's going to do Project twenty twenty five, and
in the introduction is like, I'm doing Project twenty five five,
and then Trump comes out and it's like, no, I'm not.
I don't know anything about it, and everyone's like, oh, okay, yeah.
Speaker 6 (30:48):
It's amazing that it flew at all. I mean, these
people are straight from his administration. I think about somebody
like Russ Vote, who was the head of OMB in
the first administration, ran his policy committee at the RNC
in twenty twenty four and is now back at LMB.
Never plausible at.
Speaker 5 (31:02):
All, never even and everyone was like, oh, okay.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
The thing that I got from it was a great
expansion of presidential powers, creating a world in which each branch,
like the DOJ, which used to be a separate entity,
would really be an arm of the president'sy. We are
seeing that so clearly with Air Force one Gate. I
(31:27):
wonder if you could talk about that mechanism, which is
that I feel like is one of the many new
things in this.
Speaker 6 (31:35):
Yeah, there's a bunch of these things. And it's a
mix of like blowing through informal guidelines or rules that
existed that weren't laws, and then in some cases going
right through laws, or trying to get the Supreme Court
to approve overturning laws.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
Right or using laws that everybody had forgotten about because
they were so stupid and insane.
Speaker 6 (31:53):
Exactly, or applying them in ways that no one had
anticipated exactly. So the big things I think are one, yeah,
taking over the Justice Department, which you know they point
out it's the attorney general is appointed. But there've always
been rules that not always there have been long been
rules that insulated DJs, so there weren't abuses and their headituties.
That is bad right where they've been, you know, firing
civil servants in violation of the law. They want to
(32:15):
convert civil servants to political appointments so they can fire
them and also tell them what they want to do.
They want to seize control of the independent regulatory agencies,
so you know, the FCC, the FEC, so on and
so forth. We've seen them trying to fire people in
those positions in obvious violation of the law, and those
are now in lawsuits. And then also there is the
(32:35):
attempt to impound funds so to basically take the power
of the purse away from Congress. So all of that
combines to make a much more powerful presidency.
Speaker 5 (32:42):
Right, the imperial presidency.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
What I like so much about this is that since
they do this thing where you say what they want
to create an imperial presidency and they go yeah, mm hmm,
like instead of being like, no, we don't want to
do that they're like, yeah.
Speaker 6 (32:59):
I mean it's a to me that they just put
this all online in summer of twenty twenty three. Here's
our playbook, here's what we are going to do, and
then they've done it. Well, you know, we can't say
we weren't warned exactly.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
So what I like also about Project twenty twenty five
is like everybody has a peccadillo, because these are highly
aggrieved people who feel that they have never gotten their due, right.
I feel like the entire trumpest regime sort of runs
on conservative agreement, right that you know, I didn't get
(33:30):
into Harvard. I only got into pen because Harvard was
taking liberals, right, or you know the Charlie Kirk of it.
I didn't get into college because other people who were
less deserving got into college and they weren't white. Ergo,
I am now going to do racism. Okay, there's a
lot of that kind of aggrieved thinking in this book.
(33:52):
Talk to me about the sort of in Project twenty
twenty five. What are the kind of most aggrievedy kind
of or whatever you've seen in there.
Speaker 6 (34:02):
Yeah, So there's like it operates on a bunch of levels.
There's a kind of general grievance like liberals have taken
over the culture. You know, they say, we're in the
late stages of Marxist takeover. They're taking away the America
we love. We have to take it back. So there's
this kind of broad one. There's a sense that within
the government, liberal elites have a stifled the ability of
conservatives to do what they want or to control the government.
You know, they stifled Trump in his first term. There's
(34:24):
a sense of grievance about the twenty twenty election being
supposedly stolen, and then also about the prosecutions of Trump,
so they're very upset about that. And then you get
kind of particular grievances to individuals and inside departments. So,
I mean, I think Paul Dan's is a great example of.
Speaker 5 (34:38):
This, right, this is the most interesting.
Speaker 6 (34:40):
Yeah, Like Paul Dan's is angry that one of the
reasons he wants better political appointments and why he focused
on this is he's angry that he didn't get a
better job in the Trump administration in twenty seventeen, and
he thinks he was blocked by bush people and rhinos
and he wanted real maga people in the government. And
he has this real like crusade against who he sees
what he says as bad political appoint ease. And then
(35:01):
you get like, you know, in every individual chapter you
have an element of this. So yeah, you know, I
think about like the intelligence chapter complains that, you know,
conservative dissenters have been not allowed to speak in intelligence,
but they also say intelligence analysts need to keep their
mouths shut and go along with the program. So there's
a real contradiction there.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
There's a lot of abortion stuff in here that I
feel like so much of the modern conservative movement we
shouldn't even call it conservative because that's such a misnomer,
but so much of this modern movement, ohs great credit
to this sort of fillish slack play wing of insanity.
(35:39):
Talk to me about that, this sort of anti feminism,
et cetera.
Speaker 6 (35:43):
I want to go back real quickly. I mean, you
said this, it's not conservative, and I think that's a
great point. And I have been trying and not always
succeeding to think about it that way, to talk about
it that way, like it's right wing. But I don't
think it's conservative. I think they're contemplating power grabs and
approaches and use of government that conservatives have traditional lyrisistay.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Right, I mean, and that's why you see on his
own rand Paul just by himself being like, hey, hey,
that's not what we are talking about.
Speaker 6 (36:10):
Yeah, there's I mean, there's a very anti feminist strain.
The number of ideas they have for abortion, I think
is remarkable. People. Obviously they would like a national abortion ban,
but they also want to withdraw FDA approval from pristone.
They want to prevent it from being mailed using this
eighteen seventy three law. They want to create a database
that tracks abortions at the state level, in part to
track whether women are crossing state lines to get abortions.
(36:33):
They want women mostly to be at home looking after children.
They want men to be the breadwinners. So it is
this very traditional schlafy esque kind of vision of how
life should work.
Speaker 1 (36:44):
I want to talk about Comstock because I think of
Comstock as one of these zombie laws.
Speaker 5 (36:50):
Right, those laws.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
That Comstock comes from, anti corruption laws. Anti corruption laws
seemed so outdated that no one in Congress bothered to
repeal them. I want you to talk to us about
other zombie laws in this book, or other things that
you saw that were leaziness had left them on the
books or anything along those lines.
Speaker 6 (37:11):
Yeah, I mean, you know, you see the Alien Enemies Act,
I think is a great example of this. This is
something that goes back to the late eighteenth century that
they're resurrecting.
Speaker 5 (37:20):
More of eighteen twelve.
Speaker 6 (37:21):
Yeah, the Insurrection Act. Using it in other place, is
trying to, you know, argue there's an invasion of the country.
And so they're really clever about digging into the law.
And these are people who spend a lot of time
in government and understand government well, different from Elon, who
you know, seems to be discovering how little he knows.
These guys have done the work and they they've been
spent a lot of time digging up where they see
(37:42):
laws they can use like this and apply in totally
novel ways.
Speaker 1 (37:45):
How does Elon sort of dovetail in this since on today?
Speaker 6 (37:49):
I think Elon has been a good vessel for a
lot of the Project twenty twenty five people where they
didn't anticipate him and when the you know, when they
produced this report, he was not yet, he hadn't gone
full Trump yet. But they've been really good just sort
of pointing him where they want, and so they had
they imagined, i think, a pretty slow attempt to shrink
the federal workforce by firing a lot of people by
using legal means, which they had thought about a lot,
(38:10):
and they realized that they can sort of point eline
at something and he'll just drive the bulldozer through. Some
of those things will probably get knocked down in court,
but I think there's going to be a permanent shift
because you can't simply reconstitute these things. Once you've laid
a lot of people off, they're not going to come
back to work. They're not going to come back to
work in the government. You're not going to restart these programs.
And so he has been a really effective agent for them.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
I mean, tell me what's in there that really surprised
you or that people are not talking about but Trippe
or that's just weird.
Speaker 6 (38:34):
Yeah, God, there's so much that's just weird. I mean, like,
you know, they want to ban porn entirely, and right,
I love it.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
By the way. That's like I'm like, that's what's so
great about the thing is that like nobody, not even
Steven Miller, has read the whole time, right, So like
they do want to ban porn? And everyone's like, no,
that's not true, and it's like no.
Speaker 6 (38:52):
No, really do they want to, you know, eliminate regulation
of forever chemicals. I mean it's just like in every
section you can find something like that. I think the
environmental stuff is starting to get attention, but has not
sufficiently because it is I mean, they just want to
eliminate almost all climate research. They want to get rid
of climate regulation. It's such a sweeping assault on the
data and on any protections for climateacation, and their answers like, well,
(39:16):
private business and innovation will is the best way to
take care of this, which is not an answer at all.
I think that's really important. I mean, I think the
assault on the Education Department and the desire to effectively
snuff out public schools is really important and people have
gotten a little bit of that, but maybe not quite
how deep it is. And the family stuff, I mean,
the way they want to use every arm of the
federal government to encourage this biblically based vision of the family,
(39:40):
I think is a really sweeping grab onto power as well.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
Yeah, I mean that's a really good point. The data stuff,
the idea that somehow knowing things will make them true
is super interesting. And that's like the war against the
national the weather. Talk to me about that because that's
a thing. It's just so strange, but it makes sound right.
Speaker 6 (40:03):
Yeah, I mean so much of their ideas like we
want research with a for ordained conclusion. So they want
research on, you know, the harm that abortion does to women,
or they want research on how traditional families produce better outcomes.
You've already declared what you want, and I think this
is true. You know, when they talk about climate they
say they want the federal government to do research and development,
(40:23):
but then they talk about all the things they want
to cut, and that includes funding for a lot of
basic research and includes funding for understanding even what you know,
what climate is doing. They want all that stuff privatized
because it helps people who are related you know, Trump
donors and people involved in the movement, but also because
once you have good data that suggests climate change, it's
very hard to argue against taking action, which they don't
(40:44):
want to do.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
Some of it can be pretty easily undone, right, Like
Trump did one hundred executive orders about things that are
like Mark Olias makes me mad. I understand, he makes
you mad, but that's not actually how any of it works.
But is there anything else where you sort of see
a real opportunity to undo or where you really say
(41:08):
that it's going to be hard to get back from.
Speaker 6 (41:11):
I think it's a kind of question of how long
we go. There's a lot of these things that Congress
could stop quickly, but the or the courts will stop slowly.
But the longer they go on, the harder they are
to reverse. And so even if you can, you know,
you can switch the executive order, you can cancel something,
but I think some of the damage to like the
sort of infrastructure of federal government is going to be
a lot harder to undo. And also, like I mean,
(41:32):
executive orders is exactly right. I mean, I remember how
angry so many people in the Republican Party were when
Obama was talking about using executive orders in twenty thirteen,
twenty fourteen, and now they didn't have a legislative agenda.
It's all just using executive power to force these things through,
which is another reason why I think it's on. You know,
it's not conservative at all.
Speaker 1 (41:50):
Rare, It's true, it's not conservative at all. It's something else.
It's some strange kind of neo monarchist to function. A
lot of people were surprised at how much Congress rolled over.
I have not actually been so surprised by that. I mean,
I think if you saw Trump one, you realize, like
(42:11):
these people, you know, the few people who are not
completely cowed to him, really did just lose their seats.
I wonder, though, when he came into power, he swept
in on a certain you know, he won the popular vote,
he was in a better position than he had been
in twenty sixteen. And again, maybe I'm just a cock
eyed optimist, but I wonder now we see that a
(42:33):
lot of this is unpopular. We you know, the sort
of thalt of trump Ism. You know, he wants to
do a lot of stuff that's going to be expensive
and unpopular. And you know, there really is the invasion
that they had said was a thing is not, you know,
Trende Aragua is not coming to Ohio and Republican the
(42:57):
brand clearly he has tarnished. Do you think there's a
way here that Republicans find bravery?
Speaker 6 (43:03):
You know, the one time I've seen Republicans do anything,
it's interesting, was when Russfold tried to impound funds at
the very start of the administration, and you had a
group of Republican senators say, hey, wait a second, that's
money that's going to our states, and immediately the White
House back down. And that's the only time they've spoken up.
And that was really striking to me. I do think
it's really unpopular, and I think that will backfire. But
I also think for the authors of Project twenty twenty five,
(43:26):
they understood that. They mean, we had pulling from heritage
last summer, that it was at polling over seventeen percent
in battleground states, right, and then.
Speaker 5 (43:35):
Last even when people got to know about it, Yeah.
Speaker 6 (43:38):
Yeah, And so they were like, we need to get
as much of this done in the first one hundred
days and in the first two years as we can,
because they knew they would be backlash and they just
want to move the baseline as far as they can.
And so for them, Trump is a means to that end,
and if he becomes unpopular, it's less of a big
deal for them because they're playing a long game.
Speaker 5 (43:54):
Right.
Speaker 1 (43:54):
I really think that is the most salient point of
this whole thing. And that again, and when you look
at the war and the courts right, that moving the
courts the right like they overturned row The things they
want they're getting, and they're sort of moving fast and
breaking things because ultimately they don't really care what happens
to Trump.
Speaker 5 (44:14):
Trump is a vassal for those.
Speaker 6 (44:16):
Yeah, exactly. They're very clever about I mean, I think
we saw this with Rowan and we see this year.
They're very clever about playing a long game and thinking
about the methods they want to do and thinking far ahead.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
People have been saying that Democrats should have a Project
twenty twenty nine. Do you think that's a good idea
or do you think that actually Project twenty twenty five
has been largely harmful.
Speaker 6 (44:37):
I think the thing that Democrats need to take is
about the planning and methods, Like it's not enough to
have what you want to do, but you need to
have an idea of how you want to do it.
And I think that's really important. But I also think
the thing that we really need that I've been thinking
about is we need to empower Congress. Congress has been
so disempowered. This is something that the Project twenty twenty
five authors say, but a lot of people agree, and
we see them rolling over to Trump. So the best
(44:58):
thing I think to strengthen democracy is to find whey,
is to get Congress back in action and defending its
prerogatives in doing its work.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
And maybe having people who are not one hundred years old.
Speaker 5 (45:08):
Thank you, Thank you, David Graham.
Speaker 6 (45:11):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (45:14):
No moment, Rick Wilson, Molly john Fast, what is your
moment of fuck ray?
Speaker 3 (45:23):
Oh gosh, I mean Steven Miller is the easy, low
hanging target. But actually I think my moment of fuckery
right now is we're gonna go We're gonna go down
to old Joe Rogan. This. Uh, I'm the great independent
voice of the media. I'm not one of those people
that censors myself. And the other day, when he's sitting
with Cash Patel and Cash Patel tells him, by the way,
(45:43):
Elon says that that Donald Trump is in the Epstein files,
Joe Rogan immediately sobs and goes.
Speaker 4 (45:51):
What about Hunter Biden?
Speaker 3 (45:53):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (45:53):
Wow, you know, I'm sorry.
Speaker 3 (45:55):
The act of independent journalism and fiery pursuit of truth
is on the right is some horseshit of the of
the highest order.
Speaker 1 (46:04):
Do you know what my moment of fuckery is?
Speaker 3 (46:06):
Do tell?
Speaker 1 (46:08):
It's uh? ABC news, Oh oh Man, and the senior
national correspondent Terry Moran is suspended, and he is suspended.
By the way, did you see this that maybe they
didn't call in the National Guard?
Speaker 4 (46:27):
No, I have not.
Speaker 2 (46:29):
The newsom said that he confirmed they called it in.
Speaker 1 (46:32):
Okay, because ABC News is saying they're not. But anyway,
it doesn't matter. The point is, but here's Terry Moran.
He says. The thing about Stephen Miller is not that
he's the brains behind Trump is. Yes, he is one
of the people who conceptualizes the impulses of Trump, the
trump Is movement, and translated them into policy. But it's
not what's interesting about Miller. It's the brain. It's not
(46:52):
the brains, it's the bile. And then there's more about
him being a world class hater. Somehow Trump World furious
about that this. I would like to remind you that
Donald Trump does stuff ten times worse than this every day.
But the idea here is that journalists are not I
don't know, it's fake out right.
Speaker 3 (47:12):
I gotta tell you, I gotta tell you this is
this is so far short of I think what would
be a justification for suspending a journalist like Terry, who
is a professional, who is not a who is not
a not a hack type guy. But again, the Party
of free speech is all for free speech until it
(47:34):
intrudes on the ego of a certain giant, jiggling, obese
lard heap in the Oval Office. I also don't understand
the possible motivation of ABC to say themselves, Hey, you
don't want to be a great idea, let's comply in advance.
Let's give it to Trump before something happens. It just
it makes no sense whatsoever, and it gives me right.
(48:00):
I'm sorry. This is not how this should work in
a functioning republic.
Speaker 1 (48:06):
Thank you, Rick Wilson, See you soon. That's it for
this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday,
Thursday and Saturday to hear the best minds and politics
make sense of all this chaos. If you enjoy this podcast,
please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going.
(48:30):
Thanks for listening.
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds. And according to a new KFF Health
Tracker poll, about seven and ten adults that's seventy two
percent are worried about a significant reduction in federal funding
for Medicaid, which would lead to an increased share of
(00:22):
uninsured children and adults in the United States. That's all
hidden in the big, beautiful bullshit bill. We have such
a great show for you today. The Lincoln Project's own
Rick Wilson joins us to talk about Trump weaponizing the
National Guard against protesters. Then we'll talk to David A.
Graham about his new book, The Project. How Project twenty
(00:44):
twenty five is Reshaping America. But first the news.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Mai, So, David Hog callsed quite a stirred side the
DNC for wanting to not have people who die in
office constantly being we're sleeping open seats and diminishing our majority.
And there's a weaked audio of DNC chair Ken Martin
basically saying that what David Hogg did there supposedly has
(01:11):
poisoned his enjoyment of the job, and he does not
want to be there anymore. This seems bad at a
time when we have our authoritarian presidents sending in the
National Guard to California and we really need an opposition party.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
So here's the problem. Okay, the Democratic National Committee is
an impossible situation. You have a base that is furious,
largely agrees with David Hogg, wants democratic politicians really taking
a new playbook. Remember Democrats ran on the idea that
democracy was on the ballot. Trump is doing all sorts
(01:46):
of anti democratic things. They want, they're elected members of
Congress and senators to be absolutely pushing back in every
way they can. But if you're the chair of the
Democratic National Committee, you are trying to protect incumbents, right,
That's part of what they do, and also quell this
(02:10):
rage from the base. It's a very tough position. But
let me tell you, Ken Martin was put in this
job by state party chairs, so he has a relationship
with the democratic state parties. This means that he really
is a person who is involved in this sort of
democratic machine. If he's smart, he will figure out a
(02:33):
way to absorb the base's rage and channel that into
more better leadership. Because there's money to raise from that.
The problem is if he is too connected to trying
to protect incumbents, that's going to be a real problem
for him. This is a very very very very bad
(02:53):
moment to be the DMC chair. That's just it. I mean,
is he the right man for the job. They don't
know enough about him. But the point is, and again
here is I think a real tell. Right here in
the recording, an emotional Martin describes being deeply frustrated by
the fallout over Hog, who has ignited a firestorm in
(03:16):
the party by vowing to spend twenty million in safe
blue primaries to oust incumbent democrats he believes are ineffective. Look,
I don't think you need to squash that necessarily, especially
because some of these Democrats are not effective. But the
reality is this is going to be a major, major,
super important midterm where we really need to focus on
(03:39):
Democrats winning back the House. So if that means primary
one or two very old members of Congress who are
not showing up for votes, that's one thing. But I
don't know, this is almost a situation where Martin's response
is kind of worse than the crime. And you got
to remember somebody's leaking this yep.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
And it was pretty funny because David Hogg did screenshots
showing that he did not return the reporter's requests for
this try.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
To show it that it wasn't him.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
And then Malcolm Kenyada, who's also a part of the DNC,
kind of called.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Bull other vice chair, yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
Called bullshit on it. So we have a lot of
drama where we really need to be united pushing this back.
So this is concerning, but it's also a fight we
have to solve, right.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
It's clearly something we have to solve now. I do
want to say Malcolm Kenyata is pretty great and I'm
a little bit friendly with him, and he's quite smart.
I have a lot of respect for him.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
Agreed, and be honest with you.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
I like all involved, But yeah, I don't know Ken Martin,
but I like David too.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
So the Washing Post has a report that says the
Trump administrations weighing how they cancel funding for California. We've
discussed the stupidity of this before, but for the listeners
who may have forgot, I think you have some very
succinct thoughts on how disastrous this would be for Trump
and his administration.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
So fourth largest economy, you stop giving them money, they
stop giving you money. Literally, the best thing Donald Trump
could ever do to Gavin Newsom is say, I'm not
going to give you any more federal money. Because you
know who pays the most federal money. The fourth largest
economy in the world is California. So if you go
(05:23):
into a pissing match with someone who desperately wants to
be president, why there's no incentive for him not to
just escalate and escalate and escalate, and you stop getting
money federal money from California. The rest country's got a
big fucking problem. I think this is a disaster for
Trump is I want to add, this is so trumpy.
(05:45):
They're looking for a reason to cut off the money, right,
so they have the punishment but not the crime. As
I want to mention that in this article it talks
about how once Donald Trump is donely California, you know
who's coming for please tell me Main and you know
why because Maine has three trans athletes. Okay, I don't
(06:07):
know if it's three, maybe it's five, but I mean
it's some, you know, vanishingly small number. And I think
it's important to realize you cannot appease this man. If
you let him bully you, you lose, and you keep losing.
And by the way, all weekend long, we saw more
and more universities joining Harvard. You know why, because they
see what's happening to Columbia. Just like those law firms
(06:29):
that bend in the need for Trump, those guys losing
clients because you know what happens when you bend the
need of Trump. Trump just takes takes takes, so you
cannot appease. And that's really something that the people at
ABC should be thinking about one hundred percent.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
So I have a theory of the case. I'm curious
what you think of, which is that one of the
things that Democrats have missed an opportunity to run on
is that Republicans constantly make bills like these trans bills,
and now we have bills banning chemtrails that don't exist.
Democrats need to say, we're trying to change your lives.
They're trying making up fantasies that don't exist, and run
(07:06):
against this because this is bullshit and people want bills
that deliver and change their lives. What do you think.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
I think, yes, I think your thesis is correct. And
I think, look, Republican, this is something they've been doing forever, right,
fake bills to solve fake problems. Right, They're going to
outlaw something that isn't real.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Performative moronics is what we often called it.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Right, performative moronics. So of course this is what's happening.
And look, you have a health organization that's run by
a guy who spent the weekend tanning. Okay, my man,
he tends he swims in Rock Creek Park, he chews
chewing tobacco. This is not a healthy person.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
You mean the high froth.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
I mean, what are we doing?
Speaker 4 (07:54):
Man?
Speaker 2 (07:55):
Somi. We had footage this weekend of tanks rolling into
decent So unlike LA, this is for Trump's stupid parade.
There's going to be counter protests to it all over
America that I think our listeners might be interested in.
Can you talk to us a little bit about this?
Speaker 4 (08:13):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (08:13):
So I just I did a reading in Princeton, New Jersey,
at the library today, and what a lot of people
talking about is a no King's Day. The idea is
that Donald Trump has made himself a king. This is
a two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the United States
Military of the Army, but it happens to also be
this same day as Donald Trump's birthday. The Navy and
(08:36):
the Air Force don't get parades because they are not
on the same day as Donald Trump's birthday. You know,
Republicans are like, it's just a coincidence, it's for the army.
Speaker 5 (08:47):
It's not.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Okay, it is not a coincidence. This is Trump doing
authoritarian things. He's you know, I thought they were trying
to save money. We know that having a insane group
of tanks rolling through Washington, DC will not save anyone
any money. It's just a complete None of us should
(09:11):
be surprised by the performative moronics. And also, it really
is the kind of thing that feels like a souloritarian
want to be. Look, this is a guy who worships
Victor orbon This is what you get when you worship
Victor Orbona. Rick Wilson is the founder of the Lincoln
(09:34):
Project and the host of the Enemy's List.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
Rick Wilson, OLLI, Jong, fast, have you been arrested this weekend?
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Not yet.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
A question I started asking people these days because you
never can tell anymore.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
So let's talk about California. I want to just like
mention something which is anecdotal and not reported, but I
think important. A friend of mine who was in New
York at the protests said that she found the police
were trying there were there was a lot of them
trying to get the protesters to act out.
Speaker 4 (10:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
Yeah, I believe that. And I think that there is
a degree to which Stephen Miller and Tom Holman and
Christinoman the rest of these idiots they really really really
want an excuse and Pete Hegseth, they really want an
excuse to crackheads. Yeah, they want to. They want an
excuse to start beating the hell out of people, and
(10:33):
they want an excuse to say all Democrats believe in violence.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
So let's talk about protests because I want to like
just talk about like protests throughout history, because one of
the things we're seeing here is this is we're in
these periods of these very rapid cycles of backlash to
backlash to backlash. So I want to be cognizant of
like where so for example, well, there are people who
(11:01):
say that the nineteen sixties and the protests in the
sixties opened the door to Nixon.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
Now I think you could absolutely make that case historically, by.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
The way, right, So I want to be cognizant of
what's happening. That said, these protests are protests happening not
because of something, but really because they because of extraordinary
action from the Trump administration.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
Correct, this is not Vietnam. This is not so amorphous
and so distant from people. This is happening in communities
across this country right now. These are people, you know,
that are being harmed by what DHS and Trump is doing.
There's a reason they're not happy about it. It's because
(11:50):
they shouldn't be. And you know, you're seeing some of
these Republicans start to get very nervous, Like this morning
in Florida, you had Salazar, a Republican congressperson from Miami,
suddenly saying, Oh, I don't want all these people deported.
They're good people. Oh oh are they? You might have
(12:11):
mentioned that before your shill, but you know it is,
but it is. This is larger and more organic and
more dangerous for Trump. Then. I think that a lot
of a lot of his allies have realized they look
at this as Oh good, it's more Antifa going up
against the cops. We always win that battle. I'm not
(12:32):
sure you actually win this battle, because a lot of
the people that are being affected by this have more
ties into the communities that they're being expelled from than
a lot of the Trump folks think.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Well. I would also add, like Democrats sit around worrying
about losing Hispanic voters, here's a really good way to
lose Hispanic voters. Arrest them.
Speaker 4 (12:55):
Yeah, oh yeah, that's that's high them.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
To countries they haven't lived in in forty years.
Speaker 4 (13:01):
Or sending them to countries like Sudan.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (13:05):
Some of the stuff that.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
They're doing is so profoundly abusive, and in Florida in particular,
they're now saying, Okay, well, we we hate communism so much,
we have to send these people back to communist Cuba.
We hate communism so much, we have to send these
people back to Venezuela and in the Maduro regime. No interesting,
interesting approach. Not what I would have thought of.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
Well, so here's the question. Then we have Steven Miller
two weeks ago says I'd like to see more raids
at the home depot.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
Today we see raids at the home depot in a
Hispanic neighborhood in California. Stephen Miller comes from Santa Monica,
has a certain hostility towards California. California fifth largest economy
in the world. We see reporting the Trump administration trying
to figure out ways to cut federal funds to California, right,
(13:56):
I mean, this clearly is very intentional targeting.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
I think I think we could make a very strong
case that a lot of the craziness that we're watching
has to do with the pathologies of Stephen Miller's upbringing.
And you and I have talked about, well, there is
something wrong with that guy. There's something wrong with him
at a really fundamental level, something broke in his childhood
(14:21):
that we can't really understand, I guess, but he is
a really, really messed up guy.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
And Jesse would the fact check California fourth largest economy.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
Well, there it is, right. I feel like there's a
degree to which we have never had anybody like Steven
Miller in the White House in a long time, in
part because he is so quite obviously a broken individual.
And this is like a this stuff is the acting
(14:52):
out he's doing is so over the top and so dramatic,
and so you know, I will or the beauty of
the of the white race. Bullshit that it's ugly and
it's terrible, but it's also vaguely intriguing, Like, how do
you how do you psychoanalyze this guy? Because there's a
lot wrong with this guy.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Yeah, I mean I also think there's this tension of
Trump administration really wants you know, they've run on this
white National List esque kind of racism.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
But now Trump has grown his coalition to include Latino
He's grown his voting based with Latino men and black men.
So if you're going to deport those people, there will
be political consequences. Now, again, Trump is not running in
the midterms. There's reporting that says he cares about the midterms.
(15:45):
It's hard for me to imagine Trump caring about anyone
who's not him.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
Yeah. I have a lot of trouble imagining Trump laying
awake at night going, oh goodness, I wonder if if
Mike Lawler is going to be okay, but you know.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
He doesn't want to get impeached again.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
Yeah, but you know what, if I were the Democrats,
I wouldn't even mention impeachment right now. This is this
is a guy who the criming is so extraordinary and
so constant that you know, impeachment almost seems inadequate for it.
I mean, this is a guy who quite literally every
single day is involved in some some type or form
(16:24):
of criminality that has never been imagined in the White
House before. So, you know, I just I feel like
I feel like it's it's a better argument in this
point in the in the in the debate to tell
the voters that you're going to have Donald Trump's cabinet
members and the people he who work for him, and
the people who are doing all this horrifying crap not
(16:47):
only in America, but two Americans. They're they're going to
hold him those people account. Well, you're going to have
Christy Nome and Steven Miller and Tom Homan and and
you know the rest of these nut jobs up in
front of Congressional committees come next fall or come next
spring and have fun. Because there's a sense of right
(17:09):
now of immunity among the Trump world where nothing that
Republicans can couldn't possibly lose Congress, and so they feel
like they feel like nothing can go wrong.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
I think that's right. I do wonder though, as we
look at this and we watch what's happening at this moment.
There are going to be unintended consequences for Trump. Is
like with the tariffs. So on Saturday, the steel tariffs
came on. Now it is more expensive to buy steel
if you want to manufacture in the United States. That said,
(17:42):
if you want to bring in things that are made
with steel, you don't necessarily have the same tariff structure.
So again, yet another moment of unintended consequence.
Speaker 3 (17:53):
This administration is marked by a lot of not terribly
smart people do things that they think will appeal to
Trump's base. Yeah, and appeal to Trump and over and
over again. As you just correctly pointed out, something like
the these steel tariffs, it's one more layer of a
(18:13):
really bad economic theory being applied unwisely by people who
don't think things through. They have not thought any of
this through at all. There's been no like, hmm, what
could go.
Speaker 4 (18:28):
Wrong with this theory? When when a lot seems to
go wrong with most of the things they do.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
All Elon's people want is for Trump and Eline to
make peace because they know they're fucked right, Like David
Sacks is like I poured all this money into.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
This and yep, so guys like David Sacks and and
and the you know, the all in guys kind of
nervousness is something to behold.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
I love it, Okay, So.
Speaker 3 (18:58):
I'm eating it up with a spoon.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
So ABC News reports on Friday, shortly after seven am,
they called Trump. The journalist who calls him asks him
about Musk. Trump says, you mean the man who has
lost his mind? Right, He's not particularly interested quote unquote
in talking to him right now.
Speaker 3 (19:18):
No, And I think I think one thing you're going
to see here is like a lot of stuff in
the in the Maga verse, they convinced themselves that the
world looks one way and only that way, because you know,
before this divorce, mommy and Daddy loved each.
Speaker 4 (19:36):
Other, right, and they.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
Were the super team and they were going to make
the world. You know, they were those who was going
to save seven trillion dollars the whatever random number. It was.
That Musk represented a sort of new philosophical basis for
the Republican Party on how they were going to handle things,
and all of it was garbage, Yeah, every bility. It
(19:59):
was just like h a fever dream. And so now
you've got you know, guys like David Sachs, I can't.
I think it was Stephen Colbert who said, like David
Sachs desperately texting mommy to pick please pick me up
from school?
Speaker 1 (20:10):
You know, well, I also just think, like David Zacks Trump,
I think you see Elon being like, well, maybe we
should make peace. But the reality is like Elon may
be erratic, but Trump is a radic. Like Trump is
not gonna be friends with him.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
Again, Let's remember this the four one of my one
of my rules about Trump, the four things that motivate Trump,
what makes him money, what keeps him in the spotlight.
Sex used to be on the list more, but it's
not as much now.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
Gradu turning seventy eight.
Speaker 3 (20:46):
Has something to do with it, and what humiliates people? Right,
and now Elon is only in category four, right he
And and you know, Michael Moritz, who's a big Silicon
Valley guy, wrote a piece in the Financial Times today
like basically saying to people who who thought they were
getting like good things for Crypto and good things for
(21:08):
the valley and good things for AI. He's like, if
you guys just jumped in with Trump on this, you
understand he's going to you know, completely f you and
you know that's what Trump. I mean, part of the
trust behavior is unclear to people at this late stage
in the game.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
No, I agree, but it is. But it is unclear
to people like those Latino voters voted for Trump even
though the white people and some Latino people at the
Republican National Convention were waving mass deportation now.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
Sometimes yeah, and look there there are there are two
groups of people in this country that I think have
been in the finding out box about Trump more than
any other this year. A lot of those Arib Americans
in Detroit, Michigan, Lacomb County who all said, we're going
to teach Biden to lesson. We're going to show the
Democratic Party that I've committed us on Israel from now on. Yeah,
(22:03):
and we're gonna and we're gonna show. We're gonna show
Killer Joe, you sure did good work. And now they're
in a position where where you know, we have we
have a country where if you were an African American,
Trump looked at you as a prop, you know, as
a stage prop, and if you're Hispanic, pretty much the
same thing I heard from one point person around the
(22:25):
campaign at one point that they never did anything with
the air of American vote because they just couldn't believe
it was actually happening, that anybody could be that stupid.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Yeah, yeah, so that's pretty dark. So let's talk about
what happens now. National Guard is in California. Not much
for them to do now, pretty stupid. They've sent the
National Guard to California before, during the Rodney King riot. Ye,
there isn't really that's not what's happening here.
Speaker 3 (22:55):
This isn't really a an actual thing that calls for
the for the inclusion or the use of federal military force.
Speaker 4 (23:06):
Yeah, that said, this is their cosplay. But they want
some violence.
Speaker 5 (23:10):
They want violence.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Now, we have seen a lot of stupid things that
legislators have done to the Guard. For example, in New
York City, the Guard is on our subway, have almost
nothing to do there, but it's still you know, and
so so it is something there is some precedent for it.
But I think it's really important to remember that when
(23:32):
you look at the Twitter account of one Stephen Miller,
it's all this is an insurrection. This is an insurrection,
this is the end of days. But what it looks
like on the ground is people, people were pushing back,
and now it's a little bit more, it's more subdued today.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
Look, I think I think we're seeing right now in
Los Angeles a fairly understandable, explicable response to the very
heavy handed nature of ICE, which is, you know, again,
that is all Steven Miller. Every bit of that is
(24:11):
Steven Miller's model for doing this. They want to bring
in the heavily armed up, tooled up, tactical sort of
idea so that they can provoke people to do something dumb.
They want one person to push one cop so that,
you know, Donald Trump can can do everything short of
(24:31):
New King Los Angeles. It's really clear why they want
to do it this way. It also is something that
plays into the way their base works and thinks and
looks and talks about everything. It's all Antifa, it's all
a radical left wing conspiracy trying to destroy America. All
these things are very like well known We've heard this
(24:55):
song a lot of times. Let's put it that way.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
Yeah, And you know, I just want to point out
one more time, between the Elon Trump trauma and the
what's happening in California, there is a massive piece of
legislation that has a lot of crap in it, a
lot of crap. Now, some of it's gonna get shot
down by a descent of parliamentarian. But there is also
(25:19):
an opportunity here of Democrats are smart to push, push,
push against his fucking bell on this app.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
Mollie, I could not agree with you more. It is
a it is a moment that is rarely handed to
this to the Democratic Party, where where all they have
to do is take advantage of some basic luck.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
So let's talk if you were if you were working
in Chuck Schumer's office right now, what would you do?
Speaker 3 (25:44):
Look, I would be doing well. First off, Yes, Line
one in the in this thing is the parliamentarian. Yeah,
that is. That is there's a lot of liquid, hot
garbage in this thing that cannot survive. But round two
is you got time now to talk about what this
is going to do to real people and to voters
(26:07):
in these in these in these Republican districts. And right
now I haven't heard the Democrats aggressively doing that, to
my mind enough, But they've got a moment here where
they can start outlining the harm of this bill, they
can start outlining the things that are in it. That
are the stinkers that they that the Republicans all claim.
(26:28):
I never had a chance to read.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
That, right, I didn't see the judis, but but I wonder.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
It's like what I said that I joked. I was like, oh, well,
I didn't know that the throwing puppies in the wood
Chipper bill would mean we would throw puppies in the
wood chipper, right.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
The refusal to regulate AI, to not allow states to
regulate AI, to put that for a decade, I mean
insane lawmaking at every point. Here's the other thing I want.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
Decade from now, Molly, the robot overlords will have destroyed
us all at this point.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
Well, and it's also but it's also I think a
really important point, which is like right now, Elon Musk
has said this bill is a no go. That is
the biggest Republican donor. So you you know, if John
Thune wants to go to war with the money for
the Republican Party, bring it on.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
And look as Trump Trump tried to threaten Elon today
with that whole like the very serious consequences if he
does anything, gives up give money to other people. I'm thinking,
you know, first off, yes, thank you very much for
the once again reminding us that the Free Speech Party
is anything but. And secondly, you know this is this
(27:46):
is a pretty hollow threat. If klon Musk wants to
spend his money, He's going to spend his damn money.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
And again, as you said, I strongly encourage Elon to
pursue every possible rem to the harm that's been done
to him, because.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
Yeah, heartily, heartily, heartily gray. David A. Graham is a
writer at the Atlantic and the author of the project
How Project twenty twenty five is Reshaping America.
Speaker 5 (28:19):
Welcome to Fast Politics, David.
Speaker 6 (28:21):
Graham, thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
I think we should talk about this book you wrote
about Project twenty twenty five, because the thing that I'm
struck by and I feel like I'm going crazy because
every day I'll be like, oh, yeah, this was in
Project twenty twenty five.
Speaker 5 (28:33):
Oh this, this was.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
In Project twenty two. Like I was actually talking to
someone political this morning who's a straight news reporter. We
were like debating whether or not Trump is tireder than
he once was, and he was like, well, he's gotten
a ton done in the first hundred days, and I
was like, yes, everything from Project twenty twenty five.
Speaker 6 (28:52):
Yes, totally. I have the same experience. I keep seeing headlines,
Oh yeah, that's the that's there, just over and over
every day.
Speaker 5 (28:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
You read it the South and was like and were like,
oh fuck, and then just wrote a book about it.
Speaker 6 (29:03):
I mean I read bits and pieces last summer, and
then I actually didn't read I didn't sit down to
read all through as one thing until after the election,
and then read it really fast.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
And then you were like, oh fuck, what I like
about it? And I haven't read the whole thing cover
to cover. Is it a thousand pages? It's pretty big, right, Yeah.
Speaker 6 (29:22):
I think at the nine hundred and twenty two give us.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
The whole like elevator pitch about it, just for those
who have not been who can sleep at night.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (29:33):
So in twenty twenty two, the Heritage Foundation asked Paul Danz,
who had been in the first Trump administration in a
kind of low level position, to put together a bunch
of contributors and have a plan for the next conservative president.
And so they got seventy people, a bunch of them
former Trump administration members, think tankers, conservative wonks, that sort
of group, all from kind of across the whole MAGA, right,
(29:54):
And they put together this plan for what they would
do department by department and also how they would do it,
and they produced this document. They put it online in
September twenty twenty three. You know, as we're saying, it's
been kind of the blueprint for how Trump is operated.
And I think the thing that is notable about it
is not just the things that they said they wanted
to do, which is what I had been aware of,
(30:15):
you know, last summer, but how carefully they laid out
plans to do it, and in particularly the way they
want to seize power for the president and take over
powers that belonged to Congress or to other parts of
the executive branch.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
My favorite part of the whole story, and by favorite,
I mean, oh, my fucking god, was when everyone was like,
he's going to do Project twenty twenty five. Because they're
saying he's going to do Project twenty twenty five, and
in the introduction is like, I'm doing Project twenty five five,
and then Trump comes out and it's like, no, I'm not.
I don't know anything about it, and everyone's like, oh, okay, yeah.
Speaker 6 (30:48):
It's amazing that it flew at all. I mean, these
people are straight from his administration. I think about somebody
like Russ Vote, who was the head of OMB in
the first administration, ran his policy committee at the RNC
in twenty twenty four and is now back at LMB.
Never plausible at.
Speaker 5 (31:02):
All, never even and everyone was like, oh, okay.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
The thing that I got from it was a great
expansion of presidential powers, creating a world in which each branch,
like the DOJ, which used to be a separate entity,
would really be an arm of the president'sy. We are
seeing that so clearly with Air Force one Gate. I
(31:27):
wonder if you could talk about that mechanism, which is
that I feel like is one of the many new
things in this.
Speaker 6 (31:35):
Yeah, there's a bunch of these things. And it's a
mix of like blowing through informal guidelines or rules that
existed that weren't laws, and then in some cases going
right through laws, or trying to get the Supreme Court
to approve overturning laws.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
Right or using laws that everybody had forgotten about because
they were so stupid and insane.
Speaker 6 (31:53):
Exactly, or applying them in ways that no one had
anticipated exactly. So the big things I think are one, yeah,
taking over the Justice Department, which you know they point
out it's the attorney general is appointed. But there've always
been rules that not always there have been long been
rules that insulated DJs, so there weren't abuses and their headituties.
That is bad right where they've been, you know, firing
civil servants in violation of the law. They want to
(32:15):
convert civil servants to political appointments so they can fire
them and also tell them what they want to do.
They want to seize control of the independent regulatory agencies,
so you know, the FCC, the FEC, so on and
so forth. We've seen them trying to fire people in
those positions in obvious violation of the law, and those
are now in lawsuits. And then also there is the
(32:35):
attempt to impound funds so to basically take the power
of the purse away from Congress. So all of that
combines to make a much more powerful presidency.
Speaker 5 (32:42):
Right, the imperial presidency.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
What I like so much about this is that since
they do this thing where you say what they want
to create an imperial presidency and they go yeah, mm hmm,
like instead of being like, no, we don't want to
do that they're like, yeah.
Speaker 6 (32:59):
I mean it's a to me that they just put
this all online in summer of twenty twenty three. Here's
our playbook, here's what we are going to do, and
then they've done it. Well, you know, we can't say
we weren't warned exactly.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
So what I like also about Project twenty twenty five
is like everybody has a peccadillo, because these are highly
aggrieved people who feel that they have never gotten their due, right.
I feel like the entire trumpest regime sort of runs
on conservative agreement, right that you know, I didn't get
(33:30):
into Harvard. I only got into pen because Harvard was
taking liberals, right, or you know the Charlie Kirk of it.
I didn't get into college because other people who were
less deserving got into college and they weren't white. Ergo,
I am now going to do racism. Okay, there's a
lot of that kind of aggrieved thinking in this book.
(33:52):
Talk to me about the sort of in Project twenty
twenty five. What are the kind of most aggrievedy kind
of or whatever you've seen in there.
Speaker 6 (34:02):
Yeah, So there's like it operates on a bunch of levels.
There's a kind of general grievance like liberals have taken
over the culture. You know, they say, we're in the
late stages of Marxist takeover. They're taking away the America
we love. We have to take it back. So there's
this kind of broad one. There's a sense that within
the government, liberal elites have a stifled the ability of
conservatives to do what they want or to control the government.
You know, they stifled Trump in his first term. There's
(34:24):
a sense of grievance about the twenty twenty election being
supposedly stolen, and then also about the prosecutions of Trump,
so they're very upset about that. And then you get
kind of particular grievances to individuals and inside departments. So,
I mean, I think Paul Dan's is a great example of.
Speaker 5 (34:38):
This, right, this is the most interesting.
Speaker 6 (34:40):
Yeah, Like Paul Dan's is angry that one of the
reasons he wants better political appointments and why he focused
on this is he's angry that he didn't get a
better job in the Trump administration in twenty seventeen, and
he thinks he was blocked by bush people and rhinos
and he wanted real maga people in the government. And
he has this real like crusade against who he sees
what he says as bad political appoint ease. And then
(35:01):
you get like, you know, in every individual chapter you
have an element of this. So yeah, you know, I
think about like the intelligence chapter complains that, you know,
conservative dissenters have been not allowed to speak in intelligence,
but they also say intelligence analysts need to keep their
mouths shut and go along with the program. So there's
a real contradiction there.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
There's a lot of abortion stuff in here that I
feel like so much of the modern conservative movement we
shouldn't even call it conservative because that's such a misnomer,
but so much of this modern movement, ohs great credit
to this sort of fillish slack play wing of insanity.
(35:39):
Talk to me about that, this sort of anti feminism,
et cetera.
Speaker 6 (35:43):
I want to go back real quickly. I mean, you
said this, it's not conservative, and I think that's a
great point. And I have been trying and not always
succeeding to think about it that way, to talk about
it that way, like it's right wing. But I don't
think it's conservative. I think they're contemplating power grabs and
approaches and use of government that conservatives have traditional lyrisistay.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Right, I mean, and that's why you see on his
own rand Paul just by himself being like, hey, hey,
that's not what we are talking about.
Speaker 6 (36:10):
Yeah, there's I mean, there's a very anti feminist strain.
The number of ideas they have for abortion, I think
is remarkable. People. Obviously they would like a national abortion ban,
but they also want to withdraw FDA approval from pristone.
They want to prevent it from being mailed using this
eighteen seventy three law. They want to create a database
that tracks abortions at the state level, in part to
track whether women are crossing state lines to get abortions.
(36:33):
They want women mostly to be at home looking after children.
They want men to be the breadwinners. So it is
this very traditional schlafy esque kind of vision of how
life should work.
Speaker 1 (36:44):
I want to talk about Comstock because I think of
Comstock as one of these zombie laws.
Speaker 5 (36:50):
Right, those laws.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
That Comstock comes from, anti corruption laws. Anti corruption laws
seemed so outdated that no one in Congress bothered to
repeal them. I want you to talk to us about
other zombie laws in this book, or other things that
you saw that were leaziness had left them on the
books or anything along those lines.
Speaker 6 (37:11):
Yeah, I mean, you know, you see the Alien Enemies Act,
I think is a great example of this. This is
something that goes back to the late eighteenth century that
they're resurrecting.
Speaker 5 (37:20):
More of eighteen twelve.
Speaker 6 (37:21):
Yeah, the Insurrection Act. Using it in other place, is
trying to, you know, argue there's an invasion of the country.
And so they're really clever about digging into the law.
And these are people who spend a lot of time
in government and understand government well, different from Elon, who
you know, seems to be discovering how little he knows.
These guys have done the work and they they've been
spent a lot of time digging up where they see
(37:42):
laws they can use like this and apply in totally
novel ways.
Speaker 1 (37:45):
How does Elon sort of dovetail in this since on today?
Speaker 6 (37:49):
I think Elon has been a good vessel for a
lot of the Project twenty twenty five people where they
didn't anticipate him and when the you know, when they
produced this report, he was not yet, he hadn't gone
full Trump yet. But they've been really good just sort
of pointing him where they want, and so they had
they imagined, i think, a pretty slow attempt to shrink
the federal workforce by firing a lot of people by
using legal means, which they had thought about a lot,
(38:10):
and they realized that they can sort of point eline
at something and he'll just drive the bulldozer through. Some
of those things will probably get knocked down in court,
but I think there's going to be a permanent shift
because you can't simply reconstitute these things. Once you've laid
a lot of people off, they're not going to come
back to work. They're not going to come back to
work in the government. You're not going to restart these programs.
And so he has been a really effective agent for them.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
I mean, tell me what's in there that really surprised
you or that people are not talking about but Trippe
or that's just weird.
Speaker 6 (38:34):
Yeah, God, there's so much that's just weird. I mean, like,
you know, they want to ban porn entirely, and right,
I love it.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
By the way. That's like I'm like, that's what's so
great about the thing is that like nobody, not even
Steven Miller, has read the whole time, right, So like
they do want to ban porn? And everyone's like, no,
that's not true, and it's like no.
Speaker 6 (38:52):
No, really do they want to, you know, eliminate regulation
of forever chemicals. I mean it's just like in every
section you can find something like that. I think the
environmental stuff is starting to get attention, but has not
sufficiently because it is I mean, they just want to
eliminate almost all climate research. They want to get rid
of climate regulation. It's such a sweeping assault on the
data and on any protections for climateacation, and their answers like, well,
(39:16):
private business and innovation will is the best way to
take care of this, which is not an answer at all.
I think that's really important. I mean, I think the
assault on the Education Department and the desire to effectively
snuff out public schools is really important and people have
gotten a little bit of that, but maybe not quite
how deep it is. And the family stuff, I mean,
the way they want to use every arm of the
federal government to encourage this biblically based vision of the family,
(39:40):
I think is a really sweeping grab onto power as well.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
Yeah, I mean that's a really good point. The data stuff,
the idea that somehow knowing things will make them true
is super interesting. And that's like the war against the
national the weather. Talk to me about that because that's
a thing. It's just so strange, but it makes sound right.
Speaker 6 (40:03):
Yeah, I mean so much of their ideas like we
want research with a for ordained conclusion. So they want
research on, you know, the harm that abortion does to women,
or they want research on how traditional families produce better outcomes.
You've already declared what you want, and I think this
is true. You know, when they talk about climate they
say they want the federal government to do research and development,
(40:23):
but then they talk about all the things they want
to cut, and that includes funding for a lot of
basic research and includes funding for understanding even what you know,
what climate is doing. They want all that stuff privatized
because it helps people who are related you know, Trump
donors and people involved in the movement, but also because
once you have good data that suggests climate change, it's
very hard to argue against taking action, which they don't
(40:44):
want to do.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
Some of it can be pretty easily undone, right, Like
Trump did one hundred executive orders about things that are
like Mark Olias makes me mad. I understand, he makes
you mad, but that's not actually how any of it works.
But is there anything else where you sort of see
a real opportunity to undo or where you really say
(41:08):
that it's going to be hard to get back from.
Speaker 6 (41:11):
I think it's a kind of question of how long
we go. There's a lot of these things that Congress
could stop quickly, but the or the courts will stop slowly.
But the longer they go on, the harder they are
to reverse. And so even if you can, you know,
you can switch the executive order, you can cancel something,
but I think some of the damage to like the
sort of infrastructure of federal government is going to be
a lot harder to undo. And also, like I mean,
(41:32):
executive orders is exactly right. I mean, I remember how
angry so many people in the Republican Party were when
Obama was talking about using executive orders in twenty thirteen,
twenty fourteen, and now they didn't have a legislative agenda.
It's all just using executive power to force these things through,
which is another reason why I think it's on. You know,
it's not conservative at all.
Speaker 1 (41:50):
Rare, It's true, it's not conservative at all. It's something else.
It's some strange kind of neo monarchist to function. A
lot of people were surprised at how much Congress rolled over.
I have not actually been so surprised by that. I mean,
I think if you saw Trump one, you realize, like
(42:11):
these people, you know, the few people who are not
completely cowed to him, really did just lose their seats.
I wonder, though, when he came into power, he swept
in on a certain you know, he won the popular vote,
he was in a better position than he had been
in twenty sixteen. And again, maybe I'm just a cock
eyed optimist, but I wonder now we see that a
(42:33):
lot of this is unpopular. We you know, the sort
of thalt of trump Ism. You know, he wants to
do a lot of stuff that's going to be expensive
and unpopular. And you know, there really is the invasion
that they had said was a thing is not, you know,
Trende Aragua is not coming to Ohio and Republican the
(42:57):
brand clearly he has tarnished. Do you think there's a
way here that Republicans find bravery?
Speaker 6 (43:03):
You know, the one time I've seen Republicans do anything,
it's interesting, was when Russfold tried to impound funds at
the very start of the administration, and you had a
group of Republican senators say, hey, wait a second, that's
money that's going to our states, and immediately the White
House back down. And that's the only time they've spoken up.
And that was really striking to me. I do think
it's really unpopular, and I think that will backfire. But
I also think for the authors of Project twenty twenty five,
(43:26):
they understood that. They mean, we had pulling from heritage
last summer, that it was at polling over seventeen percent
in battleground states, right, and then.
Speaker 5 (43:35):
Last even when people got to know about it, Yeah.
Speaker 6 (43:38):
Yeah, And so they were like, we need to get
as much of this done in the first one hundred
days and in the first two years as we can,
because they knew they would be backlash and they just
want to move the baseline as far as they can.
And so for them, Trump is a means to that end,
and if he becomes unpopular, it's less of a big
deal for them because they're playing a long game.
Speaker 5 (43:54):
Right.
Speaker 1 (43:54):
I really think that is the most salient point of
this whole thing. And that again, and when you look
at the war and the courts right, that moving the
courts the right like they overturned row The things they
want they're getting, and they're sort of moving fast and
breaking things because ultimately they don't really care what happens
to Trump.
Speaker 5 (44:14):
Trump is a vassal for those.
Speaker 6 (44:16):
Yeah, exactly. They're very clever about I mean, I think
we saw this with Rowan and we see this year.
They're very clever about playing a long game and thinking
about the methods they want to do and thinking far ahead.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
People have been saying that Democrats should have a Project
twenty twenty nine. Do you think that's a good idea
or do you think that actually Project twenty twenty five
has been largely harmful.
Speaker 6 (44:37):
I think the thing that Democrats need to take is
about the planning and methods, Like it's not enough to
have what you want to do, but you need to
have an idea of how you want to do it.
And I think that's really important. But I also think
the thing that we really need that I've been thinking
about is we need to empower Congress. Congress has been
so disempowered. This is something that the Project twenty twenty
five authors say, but a lot of people agree, and
we see them rolling over to Trump. So the best
(44:58):
thing I think to strengthen democracy is to find whey,
is to get Congress back in action and defending its
prerogatives in doing its work.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
And maybe having people who are not one hundred years old.
Speaker 5 (45:08):
Thank you, Thank you, David Graham.
Speaker 6 (45:11):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (45:14):
No moment, Rick Wilson, Molly john Fast, what is your
moment of fuck ray?
Speaker 3 (45:23):
Oh gosh, I mean Steven Miller is the easy, low
hanging target. But actually I think my moment of fuckery
right now is we're gonna go We're gonna go down
to old Joe Rogan. This. Uh, I'm the great independent
voice of the media. I'm not one of those people
that censors myself. And the other day, when he's sitting
with Cash Patel and Cash Patel tells him, by the way,
(45:43):
Elon says that that Donald Trump is in the Epstein files,
Joe Rogan immediately sobs and goes.
Speaker 4 (45:51):
What about Hunter Biden?
Speaker 3 (45:53):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (45:53):
Wow, you know, I'm sorry.
Speaker 3 (45:55):
The act of independent journalism and fiery pursuit of truth
is on the right is some horseshit of the of
the highest order.
Speaker 1 (46:04):
Do you know what my moment of fuckery is?
Speaker 3 (46:06):
Do tell?
Speaker 1 (46:08):
It's uh? ABC news, Oh oh Man, and the senior
national correspondent Terry Moran is suspended, and he is suspended.
By the way, did you see this that maybe they
didn't call in the National Guard?
Speaker 4 (46:27):
No, I have not.
Speaker 2 (46:29):
The newsom said that he confirmed they called it in.
Speaker 1 (46:32):
Okay, because ABC News is saying they're not. But anyway,
it doesn't matter. The point is, but here's Terry Moran.
He says. The thing about Stephen Miller is not that
he's the brains behind Trump is. Yes, he is one
of the people who conceptualizes the impulses of Trump, the
trump Is movement, and translated them into policy. But it's
not what's interesting about Miller. It's the brain. It's not
(46:52):
the brains, it's the bile. And then there's more about
him being a world class hater. Somehow Trump World furious
about that this. I would like to remind you that
Donald Trump does stuff ten times worse than this every day.
But the idea here is that journalists are not I
don't know, it's fake out right.
Speaker 3 (47:12):
I gotta tell you, I gotta tell you this is
this is so far short of I think what would
be a justification for suspending a journalist like Terry, who
is a professional, who is not a who is not
a not a hack type guy. But again, the Party
of free speech is all for free speech until it
(47:34):
intrudes on the ego of a certain giant, jiggling, obese
lard heap in the Oval Office. I also don't understand
the possible motivation of ABC to say themselves, Hey, you
don't want to be a great idea, let's comply in advance.
Let's give it to Trump before something happens. It just
it makes no sense whatsoever, and it gives me right.
(48:00):
I'm sorry. This is not how this should work in
a functioning republic.
Speaker 1 (48:06):
Thank you, Rick Wilson, See you soon. That's it for
this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday,
Thursday and Saturday to hear the best minds and politics
make sense of all this chaos. If you enjoy this podcast,
please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going.
(48:30):
Thanks for listening.
Host
Molly Jong-Fast
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