Trump Comes for the Judges
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some pop music, and 90s throwbacks, because we believe there's no better way to unwind after an oral argument than by watching a stupid reality TV argument. Subscribe to Strict Scrutiny wherever you get your podcasts, and don't forget to check out full episodes on YouTube.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's show, we'll talk about Donald Trump's probably unlawful order to kill the Department of Education and his move to starve colleges of funding that have political views he doesn't like. Doge is busy making it harder for seniors to get their Social Security, which seems efficient. And they literally staged an armed invasion of the U.S. Institute of Peace. We'll get to that wild story later.

And because we're nerds, we're going to dive into the election postmortem from David Shore and Blue Rose Research, which is notable because it includes 26 million survey responses. So lots of data to dig through. But first, now that we have a Republican Congress that seemingly exists only to do whatever Trump tells them to do, the last remaining check on the president's power is the judicial branch, which Trump and Elon and the MAGA regime are now going to war with.

So for several weeks now, the president's billionaire top advisor has been using his social media platform to call for the impeachment of judges that rule against the Trump administration.

But the situation escalated last week when James Boasberg, the chief judge of the D.C. Circuit Court, tried to block Trump from jailing people in a foreign prison without due process, an order that the Trump regime partly ignored, arguing that some of the flights were already over international waters when the ruling came down.

The MAGA position is apparently that the president should be able to lock up whoever he wants in an El Salvador mega prison run by a brutal dictator so long as he tells us they're a threat to America. We just have to take his word for it.

So one of Trump's minions in Congress, Brandon Gill, introduced articles of impeachment against Judge Boasberg. Trump himself also called for the judge's impeachment. And here's what he said when asked about it by Laura Ingraham this week.

Many people have called for his impeachment, the impeachment of this judge. I don't know who the judge is, but he's radical left. He was Obama appointed. We have very bad judges and these are judges that shouldn't be allowed. I think they I think at a certain point you have to start looking at what do you do when you have a rogue judge? The judge that we're talking about, he's you look at his other rulings. I mean, rulings unrelated, but having to do with me.

He's a lunatic. You have local judges, local federal judges, local judges period and DAs and prosecutors, DAs, state attorney generals, attorney generals that want to really take over. I think some of it's for the publicity. They love the publicity. All of a sudden they're on the front page of every newspaper, but they have no right to be.

So we are only about 60 days into Trump's second term and we are in a very dark place already. So dark, we even got this highly unusual statement from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts this week. Quote, "For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.

What do you think? John Roberts, welcome to the resistance. I mean, good job, John Roberts. Not a sentence we say very often on this podcast. Yeah. The fact of the statement is very notable, right? And I will say that the statement was like, there was a lot of sort of like criticism online that he never mentioned Trump's name. But then when I actually went and read it,

It's actually a lot less mealy-mouthed than I assumed, and John Roberts is pretty mealy-mouthed in a lot of ways. And so to his credit here, and I think the statement probably speaks to what we're going to see from John Roberts over the course of the next few years here, which is trying to walk this fine line between defending the independence of the judiciary and preserving his legacy. He has overseen the greatest drop in trust in the Supreme Court in its history during his period of time as Chief Justice.

While not going so far as to poke the bear to the point where Trump will outright defy in order or even begin to radicalize people against the Supreme Court. Because if Republicans stop liking the Supreme Court, no one's going to like the Supreme Court because they already turned off a whole bunch of Democrats with everything they've done, but most notably the Dobbs decision.

We should also say this about Judge Boasberg. He was elevated to the D.C. Circuit Court by Obama, but he was not appointed by Obama. That is incorrect from Trump, from the White House. Every Republican has been saying that. He's a George W. Bush appointee. Some of the things Boasberg has done, he dismissed Trump's tax return lawsuit so that we couldn't see Trump's tax returns. He ordered the release of Hillary's emails, limited grand jury material disclosure in Trump's classified documents case.

So not exactly. Maybe we should impeach him. Not exactly a radical left lunatic. He used to be the head of the FISA court, which is the court that approves surveillance warrants. So this is not some lunatic leftist. So the White House and Republicans in Congress, they have to know that they don't have anywhere close to the votes needed to impeach anyone, let alone a judge. You need 67 votes in the Senate to convict.

So why do you think they keep pushing this? Like is the hope that the constant threats and accusations are just going to undermine the legitimacy of the judicial system? Is that the play? Do you think – you're sure they know that it takes 67 votes? I mean I don't think Elon does. He's been tweeting about it forever and I think he's just a dumb shit who has not –

spent a lot of time studying up on the government he's trying to destroy, but that's him. Yeah. So I think Elon, maybe some of these members of Congress, there is a collection of people with broken brains who spend too much time online, have time reading books who don't know it. But Stephen Miller was tweeting about this. Those people do know. And I think the goal here is pretty clear. It is to set the stage to till the ground for the moment when Trump wants to defy a court order.

Because he has not done that yet. He said he's not going to do it. And he does not have the public on his side, right? There is a Washington Post-Ipsos poll that shows that 84% of voters, including strong majorities of Republicans, believe that if a court declares something the Trump administration is doing is illegal, that Trump must abide by that order. Only 11% think he should defy it.

And so if you want to get to the point where you can actually do that, you have to do what they did to the media, do what they're doing in the universities. You have to destroy trust in that institution. And this is the beginning part of that process.

We should say that just before we recorded, Judge Boasberg just accused the government of evading its obligations and moved closer to holding them in contempt for not explaining. They still haven't explained why they didn't abide by his order to turn the planes around. So he is not backing down.

um, with all these threats, but he is, uh, he's pretty angry at the government and he, I think he should be. This is the most, the Trump administration thinks that they are on solid ground on this one because it's a, they think, you know, who really wants, uh,

Venezuelan gangs in the United States. But the more we learn about this and the more information that's come out, not because of the government, but because of reporting and because some of these people's families have and lawyers have learned about where they are. It is shocking, shocking what is happening. The New York Times reports that the Trump folks believe that

that the Alien Enemies Act, which is what Trump invoked to do this, allows federal agents to enter homes without a warrant.

So currently, immigration agents without a warrant can basically just knock on your door and ask to come in. And that's all they can do unless they have a warrant because of the Fourth Amendment. But Trump and the government are basically now saying, well, Alien Enemies Act, if we think that there's, you know, a Venezuelan gang in there and we've labeled them a domestic terrorist organization or then we can just come, you know, have send federal agents in federal ICE agents into people's house without a warrant.

Which now you may say, okay, well, if I'm a U.S. citizen, then they're not going to come to my house. Well, how is anyone going to know? How's anyone going to know? They can show up at a U.S. citizen's house and say they suspect that Trende Aragua is hiding in your house and then take you away. And who's going to know since we're not doing due process anymore? We're just fucking putting people on planes, sending them to El Salvador and locking them up for indefinite periods of time. It is just...

truly astounding that they've taken all of the checks and balances out of the system, right? You don't need to go to a judge to get a warrant to go in the house. And the person you get in the house, you do not have to present to a judge before you send them out of the country. And if the Trump administration can be so fucking stupid as to accidentally cancel an Ebola prevention program,

Do we really think they're not going to make some mistakes on the people they're deporting? And we're already hearing stories of these. There are people waking up in an El Salvadorian mega prison that is famous for how horrible the conditions are, infamous for how horrible the conditions are, who were not members of these gangs, right? Who should not have been subject to this. Because the point is you stop in front of a judge and a judge helps verify that this is the person that the Trump administration says it is. And then if they are...

are a member of this gang or if there's another reason why they should be deported, then they're deported. But now this is just, it is, I mean, it is fully and totally authoritarian. It runs against everything that our system was set up for.

They grabbed this guy who's a professional soccer player in Venezuela. This guy showed up at two protests to protest Maduro, the dictator in Venezuela. And Maduro's regime tortured him. And he got away. He came to the United States. He applied for asylum.

And they mistakenly think his tattoo is Trend de Aragua when it's actually a fucking soccer tattoo. And so they got the tattoo artist to like sign an affidavit to say this. And so the family was waiting for an immigration hearing and all this because the guy had been held for a while and then just woke up one day and was just taken to this El Salvador in prison. So man, it was tortured by the Maduro regime.

It is now being held indefinitely in a prison in El Salvador because they mistakenly think he's a gang member. And then when DHS was asked about this, they're like, well, that's one tattoo. And there was also a social media post where he had a gang sign and that everyone's like, no, that's just a like a thumbs up like soccer sign that they have. I mean, it's fucking ridiculous. This is what's happening. No hearing, no evidence, no nothing. It's not good.

It's not good. You see Elon's maxing out on donations to Republicans who support impeaching judges? Of course he is, right? The guy loves to buy a politician. And giving federally...

Regulated campaign contributions is a pretty inefficient way for Elon Musk to flex his muscle because he can only get the same amount of people like you and I or anyone else out there. But it just creates this incentive structure for more people to act like morons and support these impeachments. Yeah, exactly. So you're going to get more people that because they want the money, they want the support, they want the attention that comes from being associated with Elon. And that is one thing Elon Musk is very good about doing. It is leveraging his money for attention to influence. And this is another way in which he's doing that.

He's also spent well over $10 million on a Wisconsin Supreme Court race that could flip the state's liberal majority back to a conservative majority. So early voting is now underway in that race, and the election is April 1st. Dan, you want to talk about the stakes here? Yeah. So if you live in Wisconsin, this is an absolutely essential race because the balance of the Supreme Court is once again in question. You may remember not that long ago, we talked on the show a lot, there was a race to vote

A couple years ago, Janet Procewicz, who I think you guys even campaigned with in Wisconsin, won an election, gave the liberals a majority. These are technically nonpartisan races, but the parties have lined up behind the candidates, Democrats behind Susan Crawford and Elon Musk and Republicans behind Brad Schimel.

And when the liberals have the majority now, we're able to undo one of the nation's most unfair gerrymandering systems and make it so that you have more free and fair elections. Because Wisconsin, as we all know, is the quintessential battleground state, but Republicans were dominating the legislature and the congressional delegation because of that. And going forward, the Wisconsin Supreme Court will hear cases on things like abortion, personal freedom, civil rights. And if you think about this from the perspective of people who aren't in Wisconsin, many of the big cases that are about

how the 2026 and 2028 elections are going to be conducted will come before that court. So you're either going to have a majority of people who abide by the rule of law or a Supreme Court majority that is bought and paid for by Elon Musk. And just even beyond that for everyone else is this is the first major election in a battleground state since Trump won. Elon Musk is on the ballot here. He has spent $10 million. The Democrats and the Crawford campaign have made Elon Musk a centerpiece of it.

Brad Schimel has not committed to recusing himself of any cases involving Elon Musk come up before the court, even though Elon Musk has spent already $10 million to elect him. And this is a- And Tesla is currently suing the state of Wisconsin. So the case may come to Brad Schimel, yeah. And if you want to send a message to Elon Musk and to every Republican in the country about how toxic it is to be associated with what Elon Musk is doing, the best way to do that right now, the best way to-

flicks some measure of political accountability on Elon Musk and Donald Trump is to win this election in Wisconsin on April 1st. Yeah, and it's close as they always are in Wisconsin. So it's going to be a really tight race. In order to tip the race, we're sending John Lovett to Wisconsin this weekend. He's doing six kickoffs.

And he's going to be around Madison on Saturday and Milwaukee on Sunday. So go see Lovett if you're in Wisconsin. And he'll be with Ben Whitcliffe. So just, you know, he's chaperoned. On this trip, yes. To be clear, he's chaperoned. Yeah, we don't send him to Wisconsin by himself. And you can also go to votesaveamerica.com slash Wisconsin. And there's going to be – there's plenty to do as we get to Election Day here. Also –

Tommy and I are not going to Wisconsin, but we are going to Norco, California this weekend, Dan. That is not NorCal, California. That is Norco, California. Norco, yeah. Stay on your side of the grapevine, okay? It's about an hour and a half east of L.A. We're going to be with Ro Khanna, who's doing a town hall in the district of a House Republican who refuses to hold a town hall, Ken Calvert.

We've already been to Ken Calvert's district once when we were trying to elect Will Rollins in this last cycle. So we're heading back this time with Ro Khanna. Ro's doing, much like Bernie and AOC are doing these town halls, Ro is doing a series of town halls as well. So that'll be fun. We're going out to see some folks. So come say hi if you're in Norco or come out to Norco if you're in L.A.

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Look, we know things don't feel great right now, but we can equip ourselves for the unprecedented months ahead without letting the news overwhelm us. Join us each week at Strict Scrutiny as we break down the cases that will decide the rules we all have to live by. We'll supplement your daily news diet with a dose of necessary legal analysis and a healthy serving of our Real Housewives takes.

Some pop music and 90s throwbacks because we believe there's no better way to unwind after an oral argument than by watching a stupid reality TV argument. Subscribe to Strict Scrutiny wherever you get your podcasts and don't forget to check out full episodes on YouTube. Big day at the White House on Thursday. Trump signed an order eliminating the Department of Education, which has already seen its workforce halved.

Promises made, promises kept. The AP notes that the department handles $1.6 trillion in federal student loans and billions of dollars in programs for colleges and school districts. It also accounts for roughly 14% of public school budgets. The White House claims that none of the department's services or benefits will be disrupted, though they aren't saying how they'll do that without, you know, an actual department with actual employees.

Here's what Trump had to say at the signing. Today we take a very historic action that was 45 years in the making. In a few moments, I will sign an executive order to begin eliminating the federal Department of Education. And it sounds strange, doesn't it? Department of Education, we're going to eliminate it and everybody knows it's right.

And the Democrats know it's right, and I hope they're going to be voting for it, because ultimately it may come before them, but everybody knows it's right. It's doing us no good. We want to return our students to the States. Look, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, I have to tell you, I give them a lot of credit. China's top ten. And so we can't now say that bigness is making it impossible to educate, because China's very big. What the hell is he talking about? Bigness. Bigness.

So as you heard him there, like they're acknowledging that they'll need Congress to officially shutter the department, though they certainly don't have 60 votes in the Senate for that. Republicans have already said they'll introduce legislation right after Trump's announcement. What do you think happens here? What do you make of all this? As you mentioned, they're not passing this bill, right? That is not that is not the Congress is not going to act on this. To put that in some perspective about how hard it is to

to shut down the private education. Ronald Reagan ran on it. It was a big part of his campaign platform.

After winning more than 500 electoral votes in 1984, he couldn't get any traction on it. So it has not become any more popular since then. The Economist YouGov ran this interesting poll where they asked people about the Department of Education, do you want to expand it, keep it the same, reduce it, or eliminate it? The plurality was expanded at 39%. The combined keep it the same and expand it was over 60, and only 17% of people wanted to eliminate it. There is no...

There was absolutely no appetite for this anywhere. What it is, is it's just, this is sort of like the birthright citizenship EO he did. It's, he can say, he can say promises made, promises kept, and he did this. And then it goes nowhere, but it does, it,

sort of create the predicate for Musk and Doge to go in there and eliminate it even further, right? Like maybe the building will still stand and there will still be an office that Linda McMahon will have the opportunity to go to periodically, but the core functions, absent some judicial intervention, are going to be gutted and it's going to have devastating effects.

Yeah, I mean, you know, they keep I think they know how unpopular it would be to sort of cut the funding or disrupt benefits and services. You got student loans in there. You got the education of the federal education department is responsible for Title I funds for the state. Title I funding is for school, public schools and disadvantaged communities. So poor working class families. It's for children with disabilities, right?

And so you have kids with disabilities, low income schools and all the student loans in the country. And the Trump administration is trying to say, well, they're either going to move the distribution of those under other departments or they're going to have a smaller or they're going to have I don't know what they're going to do. But the idea that those services are going to be completely uninterrupted just doesn't square with what most people.

people in education believe, experts in education believe, and also how the entire Doge process has gone so far. That's the key point. That's the key point. Like they might think to themselves genuinely that they're not going to disrupt any services and benefits, but they keep firing everyone who knows anything about education. It's like to what end, right? Is that they want a real estate transaction to sell the building to

It's just right. This has been this is a they're saving so much money just like getting rid of all those employees. And they're not because that's not where most of the money that the Department of Education oversees is coming from.

It's just, it's also stupid that like, this is a way to check off something that was on the wishlist long before project 2025. It was a big part of project 2025. This has been new King rich ran on this in the nineties with a contract for America. This has been a Republican pipe dream, and this is where you get the chance to say they did it. Even if they're not accomplishing the specific goal, because they do need Congress for it, they can accomplish the goal in spirit, which is to gut public education in this country.

It seems like a good fight for Democrats to take on. What do you think? I very much think so. In fact, if you're a Messagebox subscriber, you have in your inbox right now a full messaging guide on this. If you are not a Messagebox subscriber, you're lost, I guess. Well, then I don't know what you've been doing. So I go through a whole bunch of the polling on a bunch of the message guidance. But let me give the short version of how I think Democrats should talk about this, which is

Elon Musk and Donald Trump are shutting down the Department of Education and gutting public education to pay for tax cuts for billionaires. The result of this is going to be teachers are laid off, more kids in the classroom, dilapidated schools, and huge cut to special education funding, all to pay for tax cuts for the ultra wealthy like Elon Musk and Donald Trump. That is how you talk about it. It is not about cutting individual funding streams. It is important to say...

Like why they're doing it, what is going to happen? It's be specific of what's going to happen and who it benefits. Yeah. It's I think along with some of the healthcare cuts, this has got to be probably what's going to piss people off the most, especially if and when we start getting the stories about people whose benefits or loans or whatever else or funding for certain schools was disrupted. Then I think it's really going

blow up. There's just a context for eliminating the Department of Education that does not exist for USAID, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or the Institute of PEDAs we'll talk about in a minute. People have been talking about this for a very long time. This country probably has been trying to do it for a long time. Voters keep rejecting it time and time again. And now Trump is doing it unilaterally at the behest of the world's richest man in order to pay for tax cuts for billionaires. And so this is a

Huge opportunity for Democrats. It is one of the things that has the best chance of breaking through in the flood of all the terribleness that's happening.

So and Trump is also targeting colleges and universities he doesn't like. We have mentioned before the $400 million in federal funding he's threatened to withhold from Columbia unless the school acquiesces to the administration's demands, the deadline for which is Friday when you're listening to this. Some of those demands banning masks because they were used at the protest last year, giving campus law enforcement wider latitude to arrest, quote, agitators who foster an unsafe or hostile worker study environment and

and placing the school's Department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies in, quote, academic receivership, which means it's no longer overseen by the actual faculty who teach within it. Now, Trump is also going after his own alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, where the administration froze around $175 million in federal funds because of a trans athlete and swimmer, Leah Thomas, who competed and graduated in 2022.

The White House rapid response account posted a clip of Fox News announcing the move with the words, promises made, promises kept.

Given that Leah Thomas graduated three years ago, is this promises made, promises kept, or just another way to own the libs that's going to end up just hurting a lot of students at the University of Pennsylvania? I mean, it's clearly punitive. It's clearly not based on any sort of substance or reality. And I think we have to view it in the context of the larger conservative project to systematically and strategically take out

Any institution that they view as an opposition to right wing thinking in this country. Right. It's why they spent so much time to try to take down unions. Right. Passing right to work laws. It is why they have gone after the media, which they view as an incorrectly my view, but view as an ally of liberals and Democrats, in part because they are fact checking and calling out the hypocrisy of what's on the right.

And universities, they've always believed to be a breeding ground of liberal thought. And so they are trying to destroy them. They are trying to cowl them into acting a certain way, and they are trying to gut their funding. And it is part of a bigger project. And we have to view it in that context, I think.

Alan Blinder at the New York Times reported on Thursday about layoffs, hiring freezes, lab shutdowns at universities across the country. What did you make of that story? I mean, this is the end result of what they're doing. I thought what was notable in that story was that they wrote that academia was caught flat-footed.

I was like, oh, the one time the famously nimble academia was asleep at the wheel. I mean, there is a longer term challenge. There is more appetite for what Trump is doing here. And it's not just because of the protests around Gaza and the controversy of how a lot of universities handle that and what some of the presidents said before Congress. Pew, this was in the New York Times, I don't know, Pew tracks how

people feel about the impact of various institutions on American society, and they ask people about universities. And in 2012, only 21% of Americans thought that universities had a negative impact on our society. And by last year, it was up to 45%.

And that's not just Trump and Republicans. That is the high cost of college. It is student debt crushing people and this idea that – people have been sold on this idea that the best pathway to success is a four-year college education, but you're going to leave there with so much debt that it is going to crush you financially. And universities have done a very bad job of both in the short term around Trump and the time before that of –

One, dealing with the sort of indefensible rise in tuition, but in sort of explaining the role they play. And because they are these nonprofit institutions, some of whom, like the most famous ones, who have billions of dollars in endowment, but then take taxpayer money. And what we have not explained, and they have not explained, and maybe people before Trump did not explain well, is that these universities are the laboratories for America. Yeah.

They're the ones doing the research that is helping us build new technologies, discover new medicines, figure out how to fight disease. And the universities haven't made that case, and people supporting that sort of R&D funding have not made that case.

Well, and the two problems you just mentioned are undoubtedly going to get worse because of what the Trump administration has already done. Universities have not kept tuition down. They haven't done a good job. And so, you know, therefore we are subsidizing higher costs at universities through financial aid, student loans and all the other stuff that the federal government does to help students attend school and

Meanwhile, the costs keep rising and rising and rising. So that's a huge problem. But gutting a bunch of federal funding at universities, do we think that's going to make tuition go down? That's going to help costs at college? Well, they're not interested in it. They want fewer people to go to college.

Right. And then the other and then the big one that you mentioned is between what the Trump administration is doing to colleges and universities, between what they're doing to the NIH, what they're doing to other public health agencies, other agencies that are responsible for medical research, for technological research. I mean, it's not...

Look, part of this is you gut research here and innovation and medical research and scientific research. There's going to be a huge brain drain. And a lot of these scientists and researchers and experts are going to go to other countries. And other countries are going to develop the breakthrough technologies and discoveries and cures that usually happen in the United States.

and the industries and jobs and everything else is going to go overseas as well. And we're not going to have them here. But then there's a broader issue, which is like the United States is the place where a lot of these discoveries happen. And if they don't happen here because we're gutting the funding for them, they're just not going to happen.

And there's like, there's like, it was a diabetes study that was like a 30 year diabetes study that they just canceled the contract for. And like that, you're not getting that back. You can't turn this stuff back on. Like there was a report right before Trump took office about how close we were coming to a vaccine to deal with colorectal cancer. I thought it was pancreatic, wasn't it? Or maybe it was both. Maybe. I think there was an mRNA for pancreatic cancer.

Well, we can leave all of this in. But anyway, there was multiple. But like we're on the cusp of something incredibly important. Like they're all the progress that's made on Alzheimer's research. All of that stops and it doesn't start again. And the law. So that's the issue point out. Like that is the progress on very specific things that have tremendous benefit to people in the world is going to stop and it's not going to happen.

And then there is sort of the economic impact in the United States where, you know, these universities, like in this story, they talk about how they may have to stop teaching biochemistry at universities because the labs are funded by research grants. And if the research grants are not there, the labs are not there and then they won't teach that. And so the next generation of scientists, researchers, doctors, technologists, all of that is not going to happen because of this idiotic short-sighted effort from the Trump administration. And,

This fixing this is not for nothing. This is not saving us much money. This is not changing like bloated budgets that, you know, needed to be changed. This is just destroying shit because they don't know what the fuck they're doing. They're going in with a sledgehammer. Elon Musk doesn't know what the fuck he's doing. Doge doesn't know what the fuck they're doing. Donald Trump certainly doesn't know what the fuck he's doing. Neither is his dumb fucking cabinet.

And the saddest part is like we're not going to know, you know, like there's just going to be these studies are going to go away and these researchers are going to lose their jobs. And we're not going to know all of the potentially life-saving discoveries that we lost like 10 years down the road.

Yeah. It is deeply depressing because so much in between administrations can be turned back on, right? There's tremendous damage in the four years, but you come back in, you can put in new policies, sign a new executive order, pass a new law. The things that Trump is doing both to universities and the federal government itself are not things that can be fixed in one four-year term. Yeah.

I know. I keep thinking about the next Democrats running for president or, God willing, the next Democratic president. And there's going to have to be a massive nationwide, maybe even global effort to try to recruit really good, smart people back into government and public service and researchers and scientists and medical and just like an experts. And

I think it's going to be really fucking hard, too, because, again, why are you taking it? Like, maybe you want to work for the next Democratic administration. But what happens when another a J.D. Vance or another Trump comes into office and then you don't have job security anymore? Right. Like, can the next Democratic president bring in a bunch of incredibly talented people?

political appointees to tackle these problems? Absolutely. And I suspect that will happen. There will be a mobilization of the best and the brightest to come in and do that. But what about the people who keep the government running all the time, the ones who have these jobs in part because of job security? They could do other things

But they're in it for public service and they're in it because there's a stability in government employment with good benefits. You know what the pay structure is. You can be there a long time. And if that security will no longer exist, having those people there is going to be deeply damaging. I don't know what we would have done when we arrived in the White House if there hadn't been a whole bunch of people who'd been there for the last three presidencies who had been making everything work, who knew things, who had institutional knowledge. I mean, it is deeply concerning. Yeah.

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How do you make an Airbnb a Vrbo? Picture a vacation rental with a host who's showing you every room like you've never seen a house before. Now get rid of them. There you go. No host ever. Now it's a Vrbo. Make it a Vrbo.

Speaking of Doge, let's check in with the Doge bags and Trump's broader effort to destroy the federal government. Politico reported Wednesday that the Department of Agriculture, USDA, is stopping millions of dollars worth of deliveries to food banks in at least six states. And earlier this week, the Social Security Administration announced that you can no longer apply for benefits or change the account where your benefits are delivered over the phone.

You either have to verify your identity online or go in person to your local Social Security office, which will be tough because the AP reported that almost 50 Social Security offices have shown up on Doge's list of federal government site closures. Is this government efficiency at its finest, Dan? We're just making it harder for seniors to obtain their Social Security benefits. It is Donald Trump waging war on his own voters.

The people who are going to be affected most are the people in the rural parts of the country where they are not near a Social Security office, and probably the nearest one just got on that list of 50 that's going to get closed, and it's going to make it impossible for people to get their benefits. There was a report today that there was a two-hour wait time for calls right now and a one-month waiting period for appointments in an office that may close sometime soon.

It is truly insane. And these are the kind of things that have real political impact. Congressman Mike Lawler, the Republican, today put out a statement attacking, criticizing Trump and Musk for trying to close the Hudson Valley Social Security Office. So I think you're going to see that from a lot of people because this is where it matters. This idea that you're going to make it impossible for people to access their benefits, you're going to make

People, you know, older folks have to verify their identity online as opposed to be able to call or is truly is going to be is deeply damaging. And I think it's going to hurt politically to 39 million people live in households without any Internet connection. Twenty five percent of Americans 65 or older have reported never going online.

So and those are those are Social Security beneficiaries. And like you said, if you the the low income areas, rural areas, people with disabilities, people who just can't get around because they're older, those are going to be the people hurt by this. And.

I don't know. Maybe Mike Lawler, because he's a Republican in good standing, or will do something crazy. Maybe he'll... Mike Lawler will introduce a couple articles of impeachment against a federal judge, and then they'll open up the Hudson Valley office, and they'll close one down in a blue district. That's probably where we're headed. I do think this is

I'm sure Democrats are going to be all over this one because every single poll you see everywhere is social security is like the number one issue for folks. And it's probably, uh, it was, it's the number one vulnerability for Republicans. And it's probably why Donald Trump has said over and over again, he's not going to touch social security. So, um, hoping that the Democrats jump all over this. Go. I mean, this is old school, but go to press conferences outside the social security offices on that list. Yeah. That,

That's a good idea. Invite some influencers. We'll make it New Age Communications, but go stand in front of them. Take a vertical video of yourself in front of one, but go to a social security office. Bring all your canes. Wave them around.

Go from the Tesla dealers to the Social Security offices, right? Fewer Tesla dealers, more Social Security offices. Again, peaceful. One last Doge item. Not so peaceful. We got to talk about Doge's armed invasion of the U.S. Institute of Peace. This is unfortunately a real story, Dan. Here's the short version.

Some dogebags gained access to the Institute of Peace on Monday night. The Institute of Peace, we should let you know, is a nonprofit organization. It is not part of the executive branch.

Yes.

So, but Donald Trump decided we're going to zero out the Institute of Peace, a couple other agencies, just like they're doing everywhere else. Okay, so the dogebags get access to the Institute of Peace on Monday night by apparently threatening the federal contracts for the outside private security firm that the Institute employed. This is according to Politico. Some of the staff at the Institute of Peace tells the dogebags that they're trespassing

But then they ignore the Institute of Peace staffers, the dogebags, and they, quote, proceeded to walk towards the gun safe. Then the Institute of Peace staffers contact D.C.'s Metropolitan Police Department.

on the trespassers, on the Doge people. But in an alarming twist, the police end up detaining the Institute of Peace's head of security and lawyers instead at the direction of a State Department flunky who has since been declared the U.S. Institute of Peace's new acting president and who by that time had shown up with even more Doge bags. D.C. police said in a statement that they were contacted by the U.S. Attorney's Office,

Our pal Ed Martin, his office in D.C., eagle-eyed Ed, who's threatening members of Congress and everyone else. Crazy man. The Institute then filed an emergency request in court trying to deny Doge access, which Judge Beryl Howell denied, though she did question Doge's tactics.

Good for her. Thank you. She said, quote, this conduct of using law enforcement, threatening criminal investigation, and using armed law enforcement from three different agencies. Why? Just because Doge is in a rush? Feels like all this could have been handled in a few emails. Like, hey, could you clear out of the office? We've zeroed out your budget. Like, what?

Or if they refuse to, like, hey, we're going to take you to court then because we believe we can shut your agency down and you don't think we can. But we, like, what did you make of all this? I mean, just it's truly perfect. A bunch of tech flunkies arranging an armed invasion of the Institute of Peace. I mean, it's just...

I mean, they probably don't have the authority to shut the thing down. Like, that is... You know, it is not, as you said, not a part of the executive branch, per se. Created by Congress. And, like, they sort of...

like brute force activity taking on the deep state. Ooh, we bullied the Institute of Peace guys. It's like bravado. It's just, it's like there's like, that is, that'll get you plaudits in MAGA Trump world. And so you can just, you'll see more of this absurdity. Like they seem so tough the way they got the cops to help them get into the Institute of Peace. And as opposed to just doing it, like, I guess another way I think about this is

There is a right way and a wrong way to do these things. Even if you disagree, no matter what you feel about the value of the Institute of Peace, there's a way to go about it. But Elon Musk and Doge will not and cannot do it the right way, which constantly keeps hurting their efforts to do the thing that we disagree with because they keep getting stopped in court and it keeps being messier and dumber than it needs to be. But this is just like the extreme example of that.

Yeah, and it's, what's really, I mean, it is, there's a lot of humor to that story because it's so fucking absurd. What's really worrying about it is like,

So now we have the Department of Homeland Security and ICE agents deciding that they don't need a warrant anymore and that they can now go in and look for Trende Aragua in any house that they want. We are flying people to prisons in El Salvador with no due process. We have a U.S. attorney in D.C. who is now like sending FBI agents

and DC police in to detain these staffers at this agency who just didn't want to let a bunch of...

people in to shut them down and it like who who what kind of like government bureaucrat or person at a non-profit is going to want to live in washington dc and you start thinking like oh yeah that's what they're trying to do here they're trying to make the city trump city now yeah to make everything so uncomfortable that people will just leave and they've had great success at that they've had great success and just like the number of examples now of using the power of the state the

Police, FBI, like just against Americans, against immigrants, against people they don't like. It's very scary. We are so far past right now what even some of the most hyperbolic arguments about what Trump would do are. We are right there. Yep. Yep. And it is...

I don't know if it's like part of it is the I know part of it's the media environment. I keep wondering why there's not more alarm every day.

And I don't know if it's just some people are like, I can't I can't tune in all the time. I can't, you know, get worried about this all the time. If it's just that people don't know or people aren't hearing about it all. If Democrats aren't fighting hard enough or making enough noise like I don't know what it is, but it feels oddly quiet for the level of insanity that's taking place right now.

I've been thinking a lot about, there are a million reasons for this. I think we, as a society, like political stakeholders, the media, the,

just average-early people lack the vocabulary and the imagination to talk about what's happening here because it's not something that we ever thought would happen in this country. And so we just don't know how to do it. And almost every other country in the world has faced this down at some point, or they've gone through it, where they've had an authoritarian regime, or they've been a dictatorship, and they've come out of that with so much reform. That's never happened here. It's never been a fear here since the very beginning. And so we just, we can't

Like, just we can't comprehend it. And like, I got a New York, like, I'm not complaining about the New York Times headlines here. But like, as an example, when Trump gave that insane speech at the Department of Justice, where he goes to the Department of Justice, a place where presidents almost never go and gives a speech, calling out his enemies while surrounded by his self-appointed law enforcement hacks. And it was like, Trump gives unusual, unusually fiery speech at the Department of Justice or something like that. Just like, we can't, we don't, no one knows how to talk about it.

But there is a media environment change here too. Think about what it felt like in 2018 when people became aware that Trump was putting kids in cages in detention centers. And the outrage, it dominated the conversation. I mean, I was on a book tour at the time. I lost all my interviews, right? Because that's all I didn't want to talk about for good reason, right? That was the right choice. They became the dominant national story.

Think about the first week when people flooded the airports because of the Muslim ban. Well, that's the response, right? That's another point is that there was a way in which the quote-unquote resistance was involved in attention-getting tactics that did drive some of these things, which is not happening now to the same extent. But just think about everything you said about what's happening in El Salvador.

If that had happened in a 2017, 2018 media environment, it would be a dominant conversation. But nothing can be a dominant conversation right now in the same way. And that's not just because Trump is a more effective flood-the-zone strategy now. It's because just the world has changed so much and people are living in these algorithmically designed bubbles. The power and reach and influence of the people who could drive the conversation on a mass scale just does not – is just –

massively diminished from where it was years ago. So we are, I mean, this is how this happens, right? This is exactly how it happens is that people aren't paying enough attention and the people who are opposing it are not drawing enough attention or grabbing people by the lapels to make them pay attention. And we are headed someplace very dangerous.

I've been wondering if this also partly explains sort of the odd polling numbers for Trump that we've been getting, which is he's so underwater on the economy. And it's like the one issue that's dragging him down the most and on a lot of other issues and his overall approval rating. It's not as low as you would think.

And I would I wonder if it's because the economy and inflation and cost of living is like the one issue that people are experiencing every day, even if they're not tuning into the news and the and the Trump show version two. And all the other stuff is just not breaking through as much because people aren't paying as close attention and because the media environment so diffuse. Yeah, your your news consumption is not correlated with your exposure to high prices.

Right.

The one issue that you cannot make go away is the economy, whether that's layoffs, high unemployment, or inflation. Pod Save America is brought to you by Mint Mobile.

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Look, we know things don't feel great right now, but we can equip ourselves for the unprecedented months ahead without letting the news overwhelm us. Join us each week at Strict Scrutiny as we break down the cases that will decide the rules we all have to live by. We'll supplement your daily news diet with a dose of necessary legal analysis and a healthy serving of our Real Housewives takes.

Okay, before we get to the new 2024 postmortem, it's time for our weekly corrupt date. What do you think, Dan? That's pretty good. I think that's pretty good. We've been through a lot of options here, and I think that's well done. That gave us corrupt date. Corrupt date.

Commerce Secretary Howard Letnick, who's become a real hype man for the administration's griftiest stunts, was focused this week on the only commerce that matters:

the kind that puts more money in the pockets of the world's richest man. Here's Lutnik on Jesse Watters with a free ad for Elon and free stock tips for all of us. - Buy Tesla. It's unbelievable that this guy's stock is this cheap. It'll never be this cheap again. People are gonna be dreaming of today and Jesse Watters and thinking, "Gosh, I should have bought

Elon Musk's stock. Elon Musk is probably the best person to bet on I've ever met. He's building the coolest robots you've ever seen. Go online and look up Optimus. It is the coolest thing you've ever seen. We're all gonna be buying robots. They're gonna cost about $30,000. You're gonna be buying a Tesla robot and anybody who doesn't buy a Tesla robot is going to be silly. No one's gonna be key in anything. Here's a tough headline from Axios that followed Lutnik's appearance.

Tesla falls after Commerce Secretary recommends buying stock. That's a good headline. What do you think? Are we all idiots if we don't buy $30,000 Tesla robots? It feels like there's a real chance those robots are going to turn on people, and I don't want them in my house.

You know, you got $30,000 laying around. You buy a Tesla robot. Buy some stock. The Commerce Secretary telling people to buy an individual stock. Like everyone else has to specifically put like in like leave their tweets about it. This is not financial advice, right? And here he is, an official of the federal government who is theoretically an expert in the economy, just pitching the stock of the president's biggest donor.

I mean, his boss was hawking Teslas on the White House lawn, so it's kind of all fits. Yeah. Did you see that Pam Bondi announced, quote, severe charges against violent Tesla arsonists who she's accusing of domestic terrorism now that vandalism against Tesla dealerships is domestic terrorism? Up to 20 years in prison for lighting Teslas on fire.

Uh, I have three thoughts on this one. Don't light Tesla's on fire. Don't let anything. No arson is bad, right? Arson is bad too. I don't know. That's our, that's our, that's our squishy centrist opinion. That's right. Make it that, make it the episode title. Arson is bad. Uh, two arsonists should go to jail, although I'm not sure this is technically domestic terrorism. Uh,

And three, there is a bigger thing here in that you see it in the comment. You see it on Trump selling Tesla's in the White House lawn is that the world's richest man spent $300 million to get this president elected. Now he has basically bought a government, right, where you have the commerce secretary pitching a stock, the president pitching his cars and the attorney general of the United States, the chief law enforcement officer going before the cameras to threaten the people who are protesting Trump.

at his dealerships specifically. She's not doing that for other things. She specifically, she like, he has his own government to do his bidding and it is truly wild. It's a, it's a good corrupt date. Uh,

All right. So we're finally getting some higher quality data about what happened in the 2024 election, at least higher quality than exit polls. David Shore and the folks at Blue Rose Research combined precinct level data from across the country with the 26 million survey responses they got from voters in 2024 to give us a pretty clear picture of who voted and why. Here are a few of the big takeaways.

None of them too surprising, but they really just sort of confirm some of the initial findings that we have been going over over the last couple of months. Number one.

Hispanic, Asian, young voters, immigrants and politically disengaged voters swung towards Trump by significant margins. In fact, politically disengaged voters swung towards Trump by so much that if everyone who stayed home in 2024 had voted, Trump would have won the popular vote by nearly five points.

Number two, Trump's favorability rating on Election Day 2024 was almost exactly the same as it was on Election Day 2020. The difference was that Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party were much less popular. And number three, the issues most important to voters were the issues where trust in Democrats were lowest. Cost of living, the economy, inflation, taxes and spending.

The next most important issue to voters was health care, which is the first issue where Democrats were more trusted than Republicans. In fact, the only five issues that were ranked important by more than 50 percent of voters where Dems were also trusted more than Republicans were health care, poverty, housing, mental health and Medicare.

And by the way, except for Medicare, maybe mental health, health care, they weren't trusted that much more than Republicans. And Republicans are trusted more on Social Security than Democrats. Yes. Oh, thank you. All right. Where do you want to start? So we can get into the details here, and I would encourage everyone to read the whole study. I will stipulate at the beginning here that this report has some controversy in Democratic circles. There are people who disagree with some of the conclusions from it.

This is one report, right? We're going to get other reports. I think David's a pretty smart guy and he's been pretty pressing on a lot of things, but we're looking at one report here. My takeaway from this is it adds some granular detail to what we've been talking about since the election. One way to think about these results is that everything that we thought was going to happen after Trump was elected in 2016 to politics, right? To the Republican coalition, to everything, the exact opposite happened.

Right. It just – the idea was that Trump came in with this racist rhetoric and he was doing all this horrible immigration stuff and he was going to forever cost the Republicans votes with Latinos and black voters. Instead, he made gains there. And in fact, now race – politics has actually become less racially polarized with Donald Trump as president where –

Black and Latino voters who identify as moderate or conservative are now voting for Republicans at levels similar to white moderates and conservatives, right? Young voters, like the belief was that Donald Trump was going to radicalize all these young voters to be Democrats. The view was that

In 2017, people who were young voters then were the most progressive generation in history. Now, by some measures, you could argue that Gen Z is the most – driven mostly by young men, but not entirely – that Gen Z is the most conservative generation out there. And this is one stat here that just we have to just germinate on. A 75-year-old white man was more likely to support Kamala Harris than an 18-year-old white man.

That's the exact opposite of what everyone thought after Trump won in 2016. I mean, it's also the numbers around naturalized citizens. Yeah, this is going to be my other huge thing. Our best estimate is that immigrant voters swung from a Biden plus 27 voting block in 2020 to a Trump plus one group in 2024. He fucking won immigrants. Yeah.

And this is not they note here, this is not a small group, either naturalized citizens make up around 10 percent of the electorate. Now, again, this is that is based largely on precinct data. And of course, you can look at heavily immigrant precincts and and look at the swings.

you know, love it. And I were talking about this. You might also guess that, okay, maybe in these precincts where, um, there are a lot of immigrants, maybe the white voters swung more or maybe other voters swung more, uh, or, or not, you know, or, uh, Americans by birth swung more, but, uh,

When you combine that with their survey responses and you look at the districts they looked at or the precincts they looked at, which were heavily, heavily immigrant, that just can't – that can explain maybe some of it on the margins, but it can't explain the whole swing. That can make a little bit difference in the battleground states when you look at precincts in, like, Queens.

Yeah.

Yeah. Are there any charts or other takeaways that jumped out at you the most? And we could always put the charts up on the screen because we have the presentation here. Yeah, I think I would say the immigrant chart was the one that really stuck out to me because that once again just goes runs counter to the exact opposite of what you would think. Here is a home run.

who ran on building a wall to keep immigrants out, who passed a Muslim ban or signed a Muslim ban to keep immigrants out, who put kids in cages and then ran on mass deportation in his next presidential campaign, and he won immigrants. And we have to really dig in to why that is and where it is we failed to be able to make a case to those voters.

Before we move on, like overall, real quick, what kind of messaging strategy and attention strategy would you take from this data that you already that you haven't already taken away from the results? So when you look at like that chart that runs issue salience with issue trust, it obviously it's devastating for Democrats. But when you look at that, you sort of are saying, how do we win power back? And so you have there are two potential paths there.

One is you can look at the issues that voters already care about that they don't trust us on, and we can try to win trust back there. And we should definitely do that. That is our medium and long-term strategy. But in the short term, the strategy is to erode trust in the Republicans and Trump on those issues, right? And you're seeing that already on inflation in the economy. And so we have to keep doing that. And there is a seesaw effect to politics where if one side goes down, the other side goes up. So that will help us there.

But the other strategy that you have to think about is you have to – is can you take the issues where we are trusted and make them more front of mind and sell you? Like you're never going to get – as we were mentioning before, you're never going to make inflation not top of mind to voters, right? The economy will always – people's personal financial situation will always be top. But immigration is an issue that Trump made front of mind, right? He made it front of mind even before the border crisis. He created the idea that in people's minds, completely fabricated, that we were living in a wave of migrant and immigrant crime.

Like, do we – and Democrats are defeatist on this sometimes. And so we sort of say we don't have the power, the gumption, the megaphone, the messengers to take an issue that people trust us on and make it a top issue. Some of that is true. Some of that's a reality of our messaging situation. But the thing I look at is that healthcare dot. And you say there is our opportunity right there. And there's two opportunities right in front of us. One –

Republicans in Congress do not act. Premiums are going to go up for millions of Americans because the additional funding and tax credits that went in place during the pandemic are going to expire this year. And so Trump Republicans are going to raise people's premiums. And the second one is Medicaid.

Medicaid is healthcare for many Americans. It pays for so much of healthcare. What is it? Something like 40% of births in America are paid for by Medicaid, and the Republicans want to gut that. And so here's a chance where there is an issue that voters care about, where we have a huge trust advantage on, and we have two opportunities to drive that message home this year. And raising trust...

Like these things are, they're not, they don't operate independently of each other, right? If we raise the salience and trust of us on healthcare, that's going to help us on the other economic issues, right? Because it's going to seem like we're fighting for people. And that's what we have to do.

Almost as you were talking, I was looking at some of the issues. There's a cluster of issues in this chart where people rank them above 50 percent importance and they people trust Republicans more, but only slightly. So those are issues that I think we could like. And education is one. We just talked about that housing issue.

We're slightly more trusted. Civil liberties and privacy, which they are destroying right now, the Trump administration. Social security, which is talked about and and political division. So all issues that people really care about and they trust Republicans slightly more. Those seem like issues that we can claw back some some trust on. OK, so because we're nerds, we have a lot more we want to get into on this.

If you really want to hear us go deep on this, you can listen to the rest of this conversation on Dan's subscriber exclusive show, Polar Coaster. We're going to talk about it now and then we're going to have the rest of the conversation on Polar Coaster. So you can listen by subscribing to Friends of the Pod at Crooked.com slash friends. So go check out the rest of this conversation because we have a lot more to talk about with these results. And we're going to answer some of your questions about them.

Two quick housekeeping notes. Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams. Check out the latest episode. Stacey faces each executive order, legislative policy, and every news cycle, no matter how terrifying or absurd, by asking, what can we do to learn more about what's happening? What can we do to solve problems, however small? And how can we find the kind of hope that can sustain our work in difficult times? Listen to Assembly Required every Thursday on Amazon Music.

Also, check out the latest episode of Inside 2025. Dan and Alyssa are on to break down what a government shutdown actually is, who's affected the political fallout, and what really goes down behind the scenes. To access this exclusive subscriber series, enjoy ad-free episodes of Pod Save America and more. Subscribe now at cricket.com slash friends or directly on Apple Podcasts. That's our show for today. Have a great weekend. Talk to everyone soon. Bye, everyone.

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