Raging Moderates: The Real Housewives of the Oval Office (Feat. Anthony Scaramucci & Gov. JB Pritzker)
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Welcome to Raging Moderates. I'm Jessica Tarlow. Scott is off today, but I've got the great Anthony Scaramucci on the show. Anthony, welcome. How are you doing? Thank you for joining me. Well, it's very sweet of you to bring me on. And I haven't seen you in the flesh in a long time. We used to work at Fox together. People forget that because it's probably a decade now, but I hosted Wall Street Week for Fox Business. Yeah.

And we used to be able to share the set together on the Fox News channel and also Fox Business. So it's great to be with you. Yeah, those were I can't believe how long ago that is, but also how long I've been there. Like when anyone asks about it, I'm like, it's my entire media life has been at Fox. But that was great. And Wall Street Week was such a great and I don't want to say it.

It was obviously serious. There was some levity to it, but it was so substantive. That's the word that I'm looking for. Wall Street Week was so substantive. Look, Maria Bartiromo, a very good friend of mine, is still doing that show. She calls it Maria Bartiromo's Wall Street. And so the show had legs and...

And I got the education of my lifetime because I left Fox to join the Trump administration. Yeah. And so it's been the education of my life. Well, we still talk about your tenure there. Scaramucci's or Scaramucci is a...

I don't want to say daily use. I mean, certainly on the Internet, it's a daily use. But we think about it. But you have unique perspective. Yeah, listen, I'm just glad that the president, when the president goes after me on his Truth Social account, he does use 11 days. And I think he should be the official scorer because some of these journalists that don't like me, they use 10 days. And that hurts my feelings, Jess. I don't want to.

have my feelings hurt, right? Why chip me at a 9.1% of my federal career? No, it's interesting that he's the one that's more generous about it, though. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I mean, he knows. He knows. He knows exactly. There are some things he does know, and he knows exactly how long someone worked for him. Exactly. He lies about a lot of things, but he's got my employment tenure correct. All right. Well, I'm always searching for positive things to say about him. So now you've given me one. Yeah. Well, I could say other positive things about him. Yeah. Wait for the show. I was kidding. I have some good things. I have a list that I always go back to. I talk about the Abraham Accords. We'll always do that. But he's not always the most generous. He has...

and then post getting kicked off Twitter. He has true socialed about me, but he never gives me an extra 9.1% of anything. It's always pretty brutal. But...

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Hey, at least you're in the space. You know, I want to be in Trump's head space and I want to be one of his irritants. I think you're pretty effectively doing that. But let's hope that we can continue to push that goal forward in today's episode. So we are going to be talking about Trump's explosive meeting with Zelensky, the state of the free press and free speech in the White House. And later on, I have an interview with Governor Pritzker to talk about how he's standing up to the Trump administration.

So, Anthony, let's get into it. Last week, I think saying it got heated is an understatement of what went on in the Oval Office. Donald Trump and Zelensky's meeting turned into a full-blown shouting match. Trump berated the Ukrainian leader while Vice President J.D. Vance questioned whether Zelensky had shown enough gratitude for U.S. support. Zelensky left early, the press conference was scrapped, and Trump later posted that Zelensky can return when he is, quote, ready for peace. Where do you think this leaves Ukraine?

U.S.-Ukraine relations? And what was your general response? I've seen some of your posts on social media, but for our audience, can you just talk about, you know, your gut reaction to what happened and where you think we are now? Well, first of all, I maintain that that was a setup, and I maintain that the way J.D. Vance, Vice President Vance, went after President Zelensky was a setup and it was contrived. And I

You know, I watched it now several times. I think the one thing that President Zelensky did, which I wish he didn't do, was he said, you know, you're protected by this ocean, but you'll see what will happen. And that obviously antagonized Trump. But the outcome of that would have been the same if Zelensky was Mother Teresa in that meeting and he was the combination of Keir Starmer and Macron and other people that have been –

Lauded by the press for doing well with Trump,

It's still that would have been the outcome. They were trying to get that outcome. They were trying to eject him for some reason. They've aligned themselves with the Kremlin. They use Kremlin talking points when they're talking about the Ukrainian situation and the the country Ukraine. And that's fine. I don't agree with it, but that's them. Right. So they went hard at him. Trump is a television producer. He even admitted that this is good TV.

And reality television, which Trump was a star of for many years, you need conflict. And so this is the conflict setup. It was sort of like watching the real housewives of the Oval Office when they were doing this to President Zelensky. And I think it has real ramifications for the United States. I just want to give you this analogy, and I want your viewers and listeners to think about this. Let's say you have a blue-collar kid, and he rises in his family. He's got a lot of poor people in his family.

And he rises and he's wealthy now. And so maybe he buys a few cars or maybe he helps out with some tuitions or plays some emergency medical expenses. That's one family. And then the other family, the same thing happens. And the person builds this big, beautiful mansion with a swimming pool. And then they say to their family members, okay, you can come over to my swimming pool today on a Saturday, but I'm going to charge you admission into my swimming pool.

And America has to understand something about itself, whether they like it or not. The world sees America very different than Americans see America. And so how does the world, at least when I was growing up in the world, the world saw America as a benevolent country, generally. The world saw America as a peacekeeping country, generally. Not that we didn't have failures in Vietnam or Afghanistan and so forth, but in general, we were trying to

provide a security umbrella for the free world. And, you know, Trump doesn't understand this. And I tried to explain it to him in 2016, but he dismissed me. Eisenhower didn't want them to spend the 2%.

Eisenhower was the first head of NATO, and he told Marshall, don't let him get to that threshold. The less military spending around the world, the better. We're a benevolent democracy. We'll spend. He didn't want Germany to rearm back in the 1940s and 50s. And so Trump wants them to. OK, world has changed. I accept all of that. But let's not pretend that we didn't have a thought process involved.

Jess, we uneven the trading system with the general agreement of trade and tariffs. Why did we do that? We were 2% of the world's population, 65% of the world's output in the late 40s, and we were trying to create rising living standards. So we accepted goods into our country unfettered.

And we were willing to accept some form of tariffs on our goods to protect those labor markets so that we could protect freedom around the world. Trump now wants to go to reciprocal tariffs everywhere. A lot of his...

trade specialists, I won't go into which ones because they'll be mad at me, don't like it. They think a more surgical approach would be better. And so now he wants to hijack Zelensky. Zelensky's country was invaded. 1994, we entered into a security guarantee with Ukraine. They had the sixth largest nuclear arsenal. We're trying to

end nuclear proliferation. Now we're trying to increase nuclear proliferation. We know that that can't go well, so we're trying to slow it down. And so then we had something called Operation Porcupine, where we were providing all this anti-ballistic missile defense, anti-tank defense. Trump slows down the arms shipments. He creates space for Putin.

Look, you know, we've got to be fair, right? We're raging moderates. Biden mishandled the 2022 situation. He mishandled it. They're too surgical. They should have said to Putin, look, I'm sorry.

That is a neighbor you're trespassing on their land. You're going to get hit like what happened with Bosnia and Herzegovina. We're not going to hit you in your sovereign territory, but as your troops cross into their sovereign territory, you're going to get hit. That's our security guarantee. So if you want to negotiate something and you want to have a 10-year impasse on NATO, or by the way, you want to try to get back into the G8, no problem, but you can't come into that territory, right?

And he could have made a speech like Roosevelt made. Remember when Roosevelt said, well, I'm going to lend my neighbor's house is on fire. I'm going to lend them my garden hose. And then the people of the United States said, OK, that's Lend-Lease. We're good with it. Biden should have said, hey, look, I'm sorry, they're trespassing on our neighbor's yard. That goes well in Texas, by the way. You know, you're trespassing on your yard. We're going to take the gun out and shoot the guy. OK, no problem. OK, but we didn't do that.

And we set the seed for this equivocation. And what we've done with our military the last 60 years is exactly that. We take measured steps, measured steps, and measured steps never work. And now we've got a good portion of Ukrainian territory taken by the Russians. And we have an American leader now that wants to, I guess, let that happen. I don't know, but I'm against it. And I think we have to get

backbone in the country. We have to get organized dissent and we have to explain to the American people why we're against that. We're against that because we are for freedom. We're against that because 5.7 billion people live under totalitarianism. We're against that because we understand our history and we know if we band together, we can protect ourselves. So we're against that. But if you're telling me now Trump wants a sphere of influence and

And he's going to, I guess, annex Canada and take back Panama Canal and buy or annex Greenland. And he's going to have a North American sphere of influence. And Putin's going to have a partial Eurasian sphere of influence with the Chinese. And we're going to be indifferent to Europe and Eastern Europe and the Western European democracies. OK, but if we're doing that, we got to litigate that, Jess. We can't we can't we can't.

We can't just say, OK, we're going to let that happen. How are we going to let that happen? I agree with you. I just also happen to think that the last few years we just had the third anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. There's been ample time for people on both sides of the aisle who feel the same way that we do about protecting democracy.

and giving Ukraine the chance not only to be a sovereign nation, but to even get into NATO and to be part of this group with us, have had the opportunity to litigate that to the American public, right? There have been, you know, everyone, you know, high up on either side, the Chuck Schumers of the world, Mitch McConnell's of the world, President Biden, President Trump, used to be speaking a lot more fondly about Ukraine, certainly than he has been in the last couple of weeks. It seems like some sort of switch has flipped, right?

But the American public is not as open to that argument anymore. Obviously, Republicans more than Democrats. But over 40 percent of the American public thinks we just give too much aid to Ukraine. And we are in...

an enormously selfish phase in American history where people are saying, well, what about me? What about my life here? And that's a result of the fact that our leadership has never been able to properly explain why USAID is a good thing, why it makes sense to keep people safe and fed abroad because people

pumps money back into our economy anyway. But being in a safer, more prosperous world is better for a safer and more prosperous America. And I fear that it is too late for that. I was particularly struck by the scenes out of the meeting in London on Sunday with all the European leaders and the NATO leaders. And you think,

while we were a major topic of conversation, the U.S. and getting us back to the table and that maybe Zelensky just has to sign that minerals rights deal, which seems like a big loser for him since it has no security allowances. But you see the rest of the world or our friends or who I thought were our friends going about their business without us. And

And it doesn't feel like at least for the next three and a half years that the U.S. is going to want back on that ramp. Right. We are choosing a different path in it. So do you actually think it's possible to make that argument to an American electorate that doesn't seem that interested in it?

Okay, so I think you're making a brilliant analysis of what's happening. That's why I invited you on this podcast, Anthony. Thank you. Well, but you are. Just say I was brilliant. Okay, okay. I do think it's a brilliant analysis, and I just want to go back a little bit, and I want to get your reaction to what I'm about to say. Okay. So I think our failure has to do with political service and public service indifference born from...

the laxity of getting reelected. And just hear me out for a second. So Ross Perot enters the race in 1992. He gets 19.9% of the vote as a third party, scares the life out of the Republicans and the Democrats. They strengthened a duopoly. They strengthen it. How do they do that?

Tougher restrictions for third parties, tougher operational procedures, more signatures, lots more money. Can't form a third party the last three decades. Secondly, that happens is they go after the gerrymandering with a vengeance. Both sides do.

And I submit to you, are we in a real democracy if the politicians are picking the voters? I thought the voters are supposed to pick the politicians. And so now we have a 14% approval rating for the Congress, just above Kim Il-Jung. But we have a 95 plus percent re-election rate for the incumbent. So it's almost like having a chef got horrific Yelp ratings for the restaurant, but the chef is still employed because it's the only restaurant in town.

And so what ends up happening is they become very lax, very complacent.

Third thing that happens is Citizens United. Lots of money gushes into these people from big business, oligarchs, big pharma. Go look at the legislative agenda over the last 15 years. January 2010 was Citizens United decision. It's all skewed towards them. It's not skewed towards a little guy. And then let me weave in one more thing. And Bush would tell you this. George Bush said he made a mistake. 9.5.

In 2008, we made a decision to put a trillion dollars of TARP money into the banks. What Bush would tell you is he accidentally created Occupy Wall Street and he accidentally created the Tea Party movement because there was nothing in there for the little guy. So the little guy said, what the hell is going on? You're saving the banking executive's job. I'm losing my house.

And then those two movements morphed into the MAGA movement. What about me? I was once in a blue collar aspirational family over 30 years of bad policy. I'm now in a blue collar desperational family. And so you have to, everything you just said at the top line is true, but we have to understand how we got there.

OK, and this is politicians lapse. You know, you're raging moderates who used to vote for Jack Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, their grandparents or their great grandparents, Franklin Roosevelt. There was nobody there, nobody there to help them. And so in comes Donald Trump in 2016 with his message. And they're like, hey, I'm a white, lower income voter. No one's speaking to me anymore.

He is, I'm with him, whether he shoots somebody on Fifth Avenue. So unless you're telling me you're going to find a leader that can go to the American people, explain to them what happened, and then tell them why where we are now is wrong, and we have to reset the table for ourselves and reset the table for our lower and middle income people, but also stay integrated into the world,

You know, we got a problem because Trump doesn't care. He's very transactional. Trump is using Putin's talking points. Why is he doing that? OK, I don't know. I'm not going to say that he's an agent for Vladimir Putin, but he acts like one. Right. So so why is he doing that?

And then what you're saying is absolutely true. 50% of the country says, I'm done helping the world. I need help in my own backyard. And my response to those people is, you're right, you do. But we also need to help the world because if we don't help the world and a fire breaks out somewhere in the world, we're going to get drawn into it. You know, USAID, you mentioned that. Let me just point this out. When we were pumping USAID into Guatemala,

and into the lower part of the Yucatan Peninsula, we had less border traffic because it's like an ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure. You put one, two, three billion dollars into those economies and people have jobs and they have some satisfactory living standards. They don't run with their newborn baby 800 miles to the border.

Right. But we're now going to cut the USAID. And so you're going to cause more problems, more stress. But by the way, if you've got medical illnesses and you've got viral activity in Africa or other parts in the world, are we breathing the same air, Jessica? Are we? I think we are. So what's going to happen?

What's going to happen? You don't want to stop the illnesses in Africa? You want them to transfer to everybody around the world? Is that what you want to do? Okay. But again, it's the rich mansion holder. Is he going to help the world or is he going to charge them to go to a swimming pool? You got to make a decision and you got to educate your people. Yes, yes, we left you out. We left you out due to our ignorance and our apathy.

But we've got to integrate you back in.

And they want to go and help someone. You have to hear about the brass tacks of what's going on, like how our farmers are benefited by those USAID contracts. And a lot of Republican senators have been standing up and making those arguments. Senator Wicker, Senator Moran, for instance. So I'm in complete agreement. And you said so many things that were interesting to me. And I'm sure that I'm forgetting some of them. But I wanted to add—

to the, you know, the Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party having a baby. And we ended up with MAGA. And you said, we need someone who can speak to this. And I've been thinking a lot about Bernie Sanders, who I have never been a supporter of in 2016. I was a big Hillary person. That was who the base wanted. The base of the Democratic Party has consistently been Black voters. Bernie Sanders has never appealed to Black voters in any sort of consistent or large way. But...

But when you look at how the coalition got scrambled in this election, you say like white working class people like Donald Trump. Well, look at the 2024 results. Now it's black, Latino and white working class people and some Asian as well liked what Donald Trump was selling. Now, do I think that they are permanently Republicans? No, I think Donald Trump is.

is an incredibly special talent and has an appeal that cannot be replicated. But obviously, they are open to someone that is going to be making an argument along the lines of the one, frankly, that Bernie Sanders is making. And he has been out there. He's on a, you know, fighting oligarchy tour, you know, packing arenas. His

spillover rooms are sometimes even bigger than the main room that he's speaking in. And you see, he's going to Republican states as well, that people are hankering to hear this message from someone who isn't Donald Trump. There is an understanding that Donald Trump has

of interest built into him inherently by being a business person, not to mention the fact that his grift is so obvious. And we're going to get into this crypto strategic fund later on in the conversation. But people are very open to someone who has that economic populism to the way that they speak. Bernie is filling that void at the moment. But Bernie Sanders is not a sustainable option for the Democratic Party. He's 83 years old and he's already tried this a couple of times. So I'm very focused on who can possibly win.

fill that void. And a very smart friend of mine who works in democratic politics wrote an op-ed over the weekend that he put on Fox, which I appreciated because you should be talking to people who disagree with you. And he's arguing for us to stop talking about rebuilding the Obama coalition. It's like, it's done. We have to find a growth strategy at this point and looking backwards to what worked for

for a generational talent in 2008 is not going to get us anywhere in 2028 when we have to fight this fight again. Oh, using the Kremlin talking points, I cannot even...

imagine how good they feel in Moscow right now. You see Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesperson, out saying, you know, this, the rapidly changing U.S. foreign policy configurations coincides with our vision. You had Medvedev saying something similar. You know, Putin probably thinking, how did I get this lucky? And you've said, I don't know why he's doing it, but I need someone to be able to tell me why, honestly. I get it that he wants to pick someone

on the small guys. He thinks he can control Canada and Greenland and Panama, has, I think, more respect for the big powers in this, you know, China and Russia, Iran, maybe North Korea. But it feels as if we are now living in a full-on gangster state where there is no moral code to it. And I look at someone like Marco Rubio, and he has been a meme many times before, but he's

But now that picture of him sunk into the couch, right, during the meeting with Zelensky, his suit boxing up basically over his head where you think, has a man ever wanted to disappear from somewhere more than what's going on with Marco Rubio? And then you hear reporting that he and Mike Waltz, who has a similar view of the world, the national security advisor, were the ones who

that executed the taking Zelensky out of the White House, right? And essentially saying, we're done for the day and all of this. And what do you think has happened to these traditional neoconservatives that have found their way into the Trump administration? Because I do not believe, and I know some of them,

That they have just wiped the slate clean of everything that they have believed for decades. Some of them who sacrificed, you know, have veterans that have gone to fight for us and protect this new world order. I don't think that they had a lobotomy. So what is going on with the people who are working for him and protecting

Do you think there is anyone that is going to stand up like there was in the first administration? OK, so there's so much to unpack there. But let's let's talk about Trump and the Russians for a second. So Curtis Yarvin, who is a philosopher out on the West Coast, who believes that the democracy is obsolete and Curtis Yarvin believes that we should no longer have

have a democratic process. There should be some type of oligarchic monarchy. Very smart people should run everything and leave everybody out. And obviously, you may remember this from the remains of the day, right? There was an allegory there where they were asking Anthony Hopkins to Butler questions. He didn't know the answers. And then the aristocrats scoffed at him and said, well, why would we give him the vote? In the meantime, they're bringing the Nazis into the front door.

Right. And the allegory was, even though you may be rich and think you're smarter than Anthony Hopkins, the mundane butler, you need everybody. You need the democracy to have this sort of wisdom of the collective crowd. Right. So there is a allegory. There was a warning there. But let's give Trump the benefit of the doubt. This is a Curtis Yarvin thing. This is Peter Thiel, acolyte of Yarvin, J.D. Vance, acolyte of Yarvin, Elon Musk, the

the same, a follower of Yorvin. And Trump, who's less organized than them, more transactional, they've bandied together with him and they wrote something called Project 2025. And they're going to dismantle and weaken the checks and balances in the system and expand the executive power due to this ideology that the democracy is obsolete. And Thiel's publicly said that to people. So

So that could be the best case. The worst case is that they've laundered money through Trump and they've laundered money through the Trump organization. And he's tied to the Russians and he owes the Russians something and he's trying to deliver to them what they want. That's the worst case. OK, so that's Trump. As it relates to Walsh and Rubio, I understand that perfectly because I live that.

And it doesn't reflect well on me as a human being, but I did live that. I was a George Bush, Mitt Romney, garden variety establishment Republican. Actually, more to it than that, Jess, I was a Rockefeller Republican. I was agnostic to social issues, and I helped Andrew Cuomo with the gay marriage initiative in 2008. But I was sort of a right-of-center Republican as it came to business and free markets. Right.

And so now Trump wins or Trump is about to win and people like winning. And so I start to shade myself to accept Trump's point of view. Trump is messaging something to blue collar people. I grew up in a blue collar family. I relate to that.

And then Trump wins. And then six months into his office, he offers me a job. And then my ego kicks in and my ego and my pride. My wife hates Trump almost as much as Melania hates him. And I'm telling you, that's like way up here. OK. And she begged me not to do it. But I did it. OK. And that was ego based. That was egocentrism. That was pride based.

And Marco Rubio wants to be the Secretary of State of the United States, second or third most important job in the world or most important job in the country. Mike Walsh wants to be the National Security Advisor. He served in the U.S. military and he wants to be that. And so what ends up happening, you start shifting your views because you want the power over your principles, right?

I did it. I'm embarrassed to admit that to you. Now, we were fighting in the White House. I got summarily fired. I remember there was one day and I got fired about 24 hours after that. Trump called me a deep stater and I laughed and I said, I haven't even been to Washington on a field trip from like elementary school. I mean, how could I be a deep stater? But he was implying because I was saying to him, hey,

You know, we work for the Constitution. You know, he told Paul Ryan that he worked for him. Paul Ryan looked at him and said, I don't work for you. I'm in a totally separate article of the Constitution. And these checks and balances are in place to preserve the sanctity of the system. It's the reason why we're so free and prosperous. Trump didn't want to hear it. And so Rubio and Walsh are now there.

They're now there. They are in the barrel and they are going over the waterfall. Now, they could say, hey, my personal power, my personal ego, I'm going to subordinate that to the greater good. I'm going to get out and denounce what Donald Trump is doing.

Or I'm going to twist myself into a pretzel. I'm going to speak to Caitlin Collins on CNN and my tongue is going to come out like a twisted bow tie and I'm going to lie on behalf of Donald Trump. That's what I'm going to do. And they have to make a decision if they want to do that. Now, if you're telling me Rubio in eight years is completely morphed into Donald Trump light, I don't believe that. But I believe that he is selling pieces of his soul. McCarthy did it.

McCarthy wasn't there, but McCarthy said, you know, I got to be the speaker of the house. He lasted 24.5 Scaramucci's. That's it. But I got to be the speaker of the house. Uber Alice. It doesn't matter. OK, no, we should he he was calling Trump and saying, what the hell are you doing? We need help up here. There's an insurrection that you premeditated.

McConnell and McCarthy could have impeached and convicted Donald Trump. They blinked. And McCarthy told his buddies, well, he's finished. He's finished. After a fiasco like this, he's finished. We don't need to do that. Let's stay in our partisan bucket. Did Barry Goldwater do that? Did Bob Dole do that? No, they didn't because they were from the World War II generation and the Constitution was more important to them. These guys' power...

is way more important than the principle. And by the way, by the way, I get it because I did it. I have to live with that for the rest of my life. I moved my principles to serve Donald Trump. And then I said, okay, that's a bridge too far. I have to tell people the truth about what I'm seeing. And I have to explain to people. Now, will Rubio do that? I don't know, but he's a politician. Politicians want power.

You remember what Jack Kennedy said about the profiles of courage? They said to him, congratulations, you won the Pulitzer Prize. Yo, thank you. But the book is so thin, Senator Kennedy. Why is the book so thin? He said, well, there's not a lot of courage out there. I could only find, you know, 10 or 14 situations. The book Profiles of Cowardice would have been the Encyclopedia Britannica.

But I could only find a few stories, and that's why the book is so slim. I love that, and I didn't know that. I wanted to pick up on something because you mentioned the separation of powers, right, and Paul Ryan, you know, essentially being told that he worked for Trump. And what's going on with Elon Musk and Doge and watching that cabinet meeting play out where you could tell that at least half of the people in that room were

We're doing a, you know, dying Marco Rubio inside, you know, watching Must Parade Around in the tech support shirt and having an understanding that not only do the American people not want this, they want waste, fraud and abuse cut, but they don't want an unelected billionaire situation.

serving himself over serving the American people, but that they might not be able to do anything about it, which I think is folks who have gotten into public service that should at least be part of the concoction of what motivates you to do it. Even if you are someone like a Linda McMahon, you know, or Howard Lutnick, et cetera, I think that they understand that public service is

at least in its prior form, used to be about making the country as good as possible for the widest amount of, the largest amount of people. And so,

Where do you think the Musk of it all shakes out? You know, people say they're going to have some huge fight. They're going to break up. Trump doesn't like not being in the spotlight. And it feels like Musk is increasingly taking it as someone who was on the inside of all of this. How are you viewing it? Well, so I have this contrarian view on the situation because Musk is the richest person in the world and lit Trump up with three hundred million dollars.

during the campaign. And he has a $44 billion megaphone known as

Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it. And I think Trump is afraid of Musk, if I'm just being brutally honest. You can even see it in the tentativeness when he talks to Musk. Now, he wants Musk to burn out. He's told people inside his inner circle, who I still speak to, that Musk will get bored and Musk will burn out and go back to his job. Let's let him burn out on his own without us pushing him out.

And Trump, I know his personality well, was projecting in the cabinet room. Anybody that doesn't like Musk speak out or forever hold your peace. That's him. He don't like Musk. He's trying to tell you that with his projection.

And so Musk will burn out. You'll find that the Doge thing may save some money here or there. A lot of that USAID will get restored in a follow-up Democratic administration. It'll have to be. It's just good sense for the American people. The American people have to understand it. But Musk will flame out. He'll return to Tesla and X and SpaceX, etc.,

And Trump will not have a Pyrrhic debacle with him like he had with me or Kelly or Mattis or Mark Esper. He won't because he's afraid of him. He'll want it. And it's in their mutual best interests not to do that. You see what I'm saying? Yeah. But that will end. And I predict it will end quickly. I see Musk as Bannon.

And Bannon was President Bannon. Bannon was co-president with Donald Trump. And Bannon lasted eight months. He actually got fired on the same day that I did. He's such a baby, he didn't want to leave the White House with me. So he asked General Kelly, could he spend two more weeks in the White House before he walked out the front door? And so I think that this will fizzle sometime by Labor Day. Musk will be back at his job.

And Musk has hurt himself here. He hasn't helped himself. He's hurt himself. Because by inserting yourself in politics, by the way, I've hurt myself. This is your job, so this hasn't hurt yourself. I've hurt myself. You insert yourself. Warren Buffett was on CBS Sunday Morning News this week, and they asked him political questions. He said, sorry, diplomatically, I'm not going to answer those. George W. Bush has said, hey, no, I'm good. So you hurt yourself because if you tell somebody what you think,

50% of the people don't like you. They stop buying your sneakers, quote Michael Jordan, right? But Musk is hurting himself because people are slowing down their Tesla sales or doing certain things now because of his political leanings. And so I believe he, I believe this ends. It doesn't end empirically. And Doge, like the Grace Commission under Reagan, and,

Like the, there was something under Obama. There was a, you know the guys. It was a Alan Simpson Bowl. Simpson Bowl Commission. Okay, it didn't go anywhere. Okay, this won't go anywhere. It turns out we do have some fat and double spend and maybe even possibly some fraud in the government. There's possibly some Medicare or Medicaid fraud. I get it. There's fraud in lots of different things. And we can trim it and maybe we will trim it.

But the best thing we could do is to go back to what Bush and Clinton did, which was pay as you go. We had pay as you go legislation in place. There were guardrails put up. This is the amount of money you can spend. If you're going to tax somebody, that's fine. You've got to cut spending. If you're going to increase social expenditures, you've got to raise taxes. And if we do that and we hold the line, the economy will outgrow the deficit.

Bush and Clinton adhere to that. We were running a budget surplus by the end of 2000. George W. Bush unclipped us from pay-as-you-go because of what happened with the Iraqi war. And by the way, he cut taxes in March, Bush.

And we went to war in October. It was the first time in U.S. history that we went to war without a tax increase. In fact, we had a tax cut. And that really started the wild trajectory of deficit spending. So it's all healable. It's all solvable. But you need a long-term approach. You need a 15- or 20-year plan to right-size the deficit. You're not going to do it in two minutes. Okay, but your points are...

Musk is there. It's a good idea to cut things. It's a good idea to cut waste. But the way they're going about it

is hurtful. It's not going to help anybody. You know, it's, you know, Trump, Trump was right about the border. Yeah, I know this is raging moderates. Trump is right about the border, but he did it in such a vicious way that it turned off a lot of Democrats. So when Biden got the job, he reversed the decisions. We're not Trump. We're more humane than Trump.

But it was wrong. And the people poured over the border and the Americans got upset. Go look at the exit point. Yeah. OK, so we've got to be very careful. Like we talk about crypto. If it's a Trump crypto reserve, then when the next Democrat gets in, they're going to rip it up and throw it out. It's got to be bipartisan. And we got to stop with the left and the right and look at what's right or wrong and just say, OK, is this right or wrong for our society?

And what Trump is doing right now with the UK is wrong. It's wrong for our society. It's wrong for the average American. Well, why is it wrong? It weakens the cause of freedom and liberality around the world. That's bad for our markets. It's bad for the risk profile of the American capital market system. Yeah. It's wrong. We don't want to live in an imperialist world. We don't want to do it.

Living in an imperialist world will lead to a disaster. And what did we learn about the imperialists? Great Britain got hurt. India got hurt. Africa got hurt.

Nobody benefits from colonialism. Trump wants to take Canada and Greenland. OK, let's take Canada and Greenland. Let's see how that goes for the United States. I think you are already hearing it at the hockey games about how it's going to go for the United States. No, it's it's it's absurd. And so for me personally,

I get it. Got a lot of riled people. Your network does a good job at riling those people. There's a good chant about nationalism and us first, and we're tired of carrying the world. But whether you like it or not, Roosevelt said it better than anybody. We're integrated with the world, whether we like it or not.

We are integrated. It's connected. It's the rich person with the house. You're going to charge people to come into the swimming pool or you're going to help them with their college tuitions. Which family is going to do better? Well, what about your son here in the United States? Can you help? Yes, we have to help him too. But we have to think like that. We're 4% of the world's population, 26% of the world's output.

OK, the more benevolent we are, the better it's going to be. When I was growing up, when I was in Europe in the 1980s, people were buying me drinks. Ask American servicemen in Germany in the 1980s, Ramsted. They were getting drinks off them. Thank you for helping us. Thank you for being part of the cause of freedom and protecting us. Now you go to Europe and say, you guys have lost. Are you guys OK over there?

Why have you lost your minds? Why have you flipped into this proto-authoritarianism? Why have you done that? And the answer is, well, we have shitty Democratic leaders and we had a really bad intergenerational transfer of leadership.

And so the orange man bad, but a lot of people held their nose and voted for orange man because of what the Democrats were doing. You gave this poor woman 107 days to try to figure it out. You know, Joe, Joe Biden and Barack Obama caused this. Barack Obama said to Joe Biden, no, you can't run against Hillary Clinton in the primary. OK, so Hillary Clinton wins. She doesn't go to Wisconsin.

She goes one time to Michigan, twice to Pennsylvania. Trump outworks her and beats her in the Electoral College. OK, now we're going to let Joe Biden run. OK, he beats a sitting president, but he's 78 years old, not 78 years young. He needs to drop out in September of 2020. Joe Biden is the Marco Rubio president.

of the Democratic Party. You say, well, what do I mean by that? He let his ego get to him. I got the job. I want to stay in the job. Lady Macbeth, Shakespeare. Well, Joe, you can't remember people. If Jessica Tarloff walks into your office, you don't remember her. Okay, well, that's okay. I want to stay in the job anyway. Okay. And so he embarrasses himself with the June debate.

Now the party's in flummox. They could have resolved that in September of 2023, had a formal primary process, and had a young he or she Democratic candidate wipe the floor with Donald Trump. Think about how close that election was. I know. Yeah. Okay. And it was, they had an unmitigated disaster in terms of intergenerationalism. So when I'm in Europe, we got two things going on. Yes, we have a Bozo movement of proto-fascism.

that we need to put down and we need to just help people economically. Galloway is right, Professor Galloway. It's an economic thing. And we need to make sure that these people feel restored and aspirational. And then they won't care about fascism.

And we need to fix the democracy. We need to end gerrymandering and Citizens United right size the deficit do really smart powerful things to help the American people. I'm totally with you and I you know I was young during the 90s but I talk a lot about the Clinton years and how it feels like we are.

for something like that to happen again if there is a charismatic leader with that kind of common sense approach to everything. I just want to say, and I want to move to a conversation

a conversation about the free press. But what you're describing as what happened here in America, which it certainly did, is happening all over the world. I mean, the liberal order is failing, you know, across Europe. Far-right parties are getting larger shares than I certainly ever envisioned. I lived in London from 2006 to 2012. So, you know, peak Obama years was there, to your point about, you know, during...

the Bush era, everyone kind of banding together but thinking, you know, you guys need somebody else. I was there on election night in 08 and

And London was as jazzed about Obama being elected as they were back home. But something has shifted. I know the AFD underperformed what Elon Musk and J.D. Vance wanted in the German elections, but they still got a bigger share. And this conversation specifically about immigration is really what's fueling it, because everyone has lost any semblance of an idea of what borders or national character means to the average person. And while they might be benevolent insofar as thinking that

were pro-immigration and that people should, you know, have rights to some goods and services, we all basically laid down and just said, you know, come on in. That will be Angela Merkel's legacy.

which is sad for her and everything that was accomplished during that time. But that's what I'll be remembered from. And you just have to look at what the CDU looks like now to understand how badly she messed that up and the lessons that that sent through Europe. But we need to take a quick break. So stay with us. Support for the show comes from NetSuite. Nobody knows what the future will bring. Sure, you can keep an eye on trends and cross your fingers, but rates will always rise and fall and rise again.

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Welcome back. I wanted to quickly talk to you about the state of the White House press and free speech under the Trump administration. You were there for your 11 days during his first term. And we need your inside sources. The AP filed a lawsuit against the White House after restricting access to the Oval and Air Force One. Following this, the White House announced that they'll choose which journalists have access to the press room. All

All of this is happening while Jeff Bezos told The Washington Post staffers that he'll be making changes to the publication that align more with the right, leading to opinion editor David Shipley's resignation.

What do you think is happening with the free press issue vis-a-vis this White House? I've heard people on both sides of it. Fox News has been steadfast in standing up in support of keeping things the way that they have been with the traditional press pool and with the AP. But what do you think the game is here for the Trump administration? Chill the press. Trump hates it. And chill the press. You know, we were talking about Victor Orban.

And J.D. Vance has a love affair with Victor Orban. He was very happy with the way Victor Orban took over the schools and the press. And they want to chill the press and they want to intimidate people into not speaking. And you have Kash Patel has openly said he has an enemies list. A lot of the enemies are the press. I got into trouble with Donald Trump in April of 2019. I wrote an op-ed for The Hill.

And I said, it was an open letter to the president. I said, dear Mr. President, the press is not the enemy of the people. And obviously I went into the rendition of it being the force of the state and checking people in power. But there's something else that's elemental to the free press, and that's our economy. We teach our second graders to speak and think freely. They go on to think creatively, and they create Facebook and Apple Computer, and they create things like Bitcoin and other things.

technology and great ideas and entrepreneurship. If you tell somebody in the second grade that they can't talk about certain things and you'll put them in a reeducation camp if they talk badly about dear leader, then they can't create. They got to steal our intellectual property. And so I said the press is very important. Trump called me on Easter Sunday, 2019, last time I spoke to him. I thought he was calling me to wish me a happy Easter. He was not. He was calling me to berate me.

And he said that I was wrong. The press is the enemy of the people and he wants to chill the press. My first meeting as White House communications director in the Oval Office was, can we break up Amazon? Excuse me? Well, you went to law school. Can we break up Amazon? I hate Jeff Bezos and I hate the Washington Post. Not anymore. I don't want to break up Amazon.

OK. And I looked at him and said, no, actually, you can't break up Amazon. It doesn't meet the checklist that's in the Sherman Antitrust Act. Not the thing that he wanted to hear. So so he don't like the free press and his team doesn't like the free press and follow Victor Orban. What Victor Orban is doing, Trump would like to do.

And so now you've got guys like Bezos who, you know, Khashoggi got lost at the Washington Post. Democracy dies in darkness, something that Bezos's team came up with that he sponsored. And he's like, wait a minute.

These guys could threaten my lifestyle. They could threaten me. They could threaten my family. And you know there's threats going on everywhere in Washington. You're part of the press, so you know that the senators are getting threatened if they don't vote for certain cabinet members and stuff like that. And so basically, I got a great life and we're $200 billion. What the hell am I doing? Let me lock and load on Trump and spend some money on him. Let me show up at the inaugural, have dinner with him, and let me tone down the Washington Post. I don't need this headache.

And so, but that's the reason why he's a billionaire. And that's the reason why you and I are never going to be billionaires. Okay. Because, because, you know, he's transactional and he's decided that the principles of the democracy, not dying in darkness, right?

are not as important as him maintaining his lifestyle and keeping himself free. But then why doesn't he sell it? Maybe. Because, I mean, he has enough money and it doesn't make money for him, right? And subscriptions are way down. So there are plenty of people who want to buy it. Why doesn't he get rid of it versus compromising his principles to this level? Well, maybe he will, but maybe he won't. And maybe, you know, people are...

People are funny in their own brains. You know, when I was compromising my principles to work for Donald Trump, do you think I thought I was compromising my principles?

You know, maybe like in your, you know, like in the shower, right? When you're standing there and you're like doing your deepest thoughts. No, no, no, no, no. I was, I was bullshitting myself. Let's just be honest about it. Okay. And maybe Jeff saying to himself, uh, I've really had a change of heart politically and the woke ism. That's a huge piece of this though. I mean, the, the reaction to the left going too far left is,

has been massive. The amount of times in regular conversations with my friends, we're all pretty normie Democrats, but they talk about the Charlemagne the God ad, right? About, you know, she's for they, them, I'm for you. And all this stuff that Bill Maher is talking about all the time, you know, that's pretty deeply felt. Yeah, Bill, you should get him on your show. Bill is a raging moderate. That's where Scott and I met, Bill Maher. That's our meet cute. Bill, you know, I'm a huge fan. I've been on his show many times.

And I would say that Bill gets it. And I would say that, look, if I were the Democrats, which I'm not, and they would never accept this because, again, it's all ego based, but I would team up with the former Republicans.

I would go to the Christies and the Kissingers and the Cheneys. Isn't that what we did, though? I mean, we're sitting there with Liz Cheney, you know, Kamala's with her the day before the election or whatever. We really haven't, though, because the hard left didn't accept it. They derided it. And there were certain trips that were supposed to be on the campaign plane. And the hard left says, NFW can't bring Christie's or can't bring this person or he can't bring that person. You know that and I know that. But what I would say is that democracy is at stake.

So let's have a pro-American, pro-democratic, pro-democracy party, and let's expand the tent. And even though you may not like Chris Christie, I do. I was one of his donors. But you may not like Liz Cheney. Hold your nose. Yeah, that's fine. And even if you don't like AOC, hold your nose, get in the boat together, and take out the Whig Party. Let's go over to who the Whigs were. The Whigs were...

taken out by a new party formed in 1856 known as the Republicans. And they went after the abolitionists in the Whig Party, and they went after the abolitionists in the Democratic Party, and they formed a new party, and their first Republican elected president was Abraham Lincoln. And they destroyed the Whig Party. They weakened it to the point where it disintegrated. You could do that

to the MAGA party. You know, this party known as the Republicans was a hostile takeover by an insurgent third party known as MAGA or Trumplicans. They call themselves the Republicans. See, Trump couldn't run as a third party because he knew he couldn't win, but he had to take over one of the two traditional parties, which he did. There's been a full decapitation and a full hostile takeover of that party. But the other people, the Lincoln, whatever they are,

merge them into the other party. They're all pro-democracy people. They all understand that the Constitution and that the democracy is more important than any one individual policy. I may disagree with AOC on XYZ or the Amazon situation along on Island City. I may disagree with her, but so what? She's pro-democracy. I'm pro-democracy.

Let's team up like we did in the 1850s and knock these guys out of the boxing rink. I like it. It's a good slogan. Let's make the 1850s cool again. Well, maybe. No, maybe. Listen, I've always felt that way. The 1850s were a terrible time. Listen, James Buchanan, terrible president, caused the Civil War. A lot of things could have happened to not have that happen. You know, we could kill 600,000 Americans. The backlash...

The John Wilkes Booth assassination totally botched the reconstruction. I mean, we've gone through very tough times in this country as we're reordering the country to try to make it a more perfect union. But, you know, so this time we're going through right now pales in comparison to the Civil War or the advent of the Second World War. But let's fix it. But we got to stomach each other.

Oh, I can't work with Anthony. He was once with Trump. You know, my 32-year-old son has a great line. He's like, hey, dad, you're killing me. The Republicans hate you because you left Trump. The Democrats will never accept you because you were with Trump. You're just killing my networking opportunities, dad. Oh, maybe I'm getting close to the truth.

And I would say, I feel like the Democrats are very happy to have you talking the way that you're talking about being pro-democracy. They don't put me in their tent. Trust me. They won't put me in their tent. They let me help Vice President Harris on the debate because I understood Trump and I was able to get some fun lines into the debate. But they won't bring me in because I'm not a Democrat. Well, I used to even have that much so...

less since I started co-hosting The Five. But people, Democrats are suspicious of me because I work at Fox. Right, exactly. Like it makes no difference what I'm saying or to how large of an audience. You're helping Fox prosper. But by the way, you know, I applaud Fox for supporting AP. I applaud them for that. And again, you know, there's opinion people at Fox, there's journalists at Fox.

And and that's a that's a point of view. And we should have that point of view and we should have a healthy, rigorous debate about it. But the Trump stuff has taken it to a different level.

Trump thinks like a Victor Orban. He doesn't think like a traditional American president. Okay, the presidents since Roosevelt were grounded in some bipartisanship and grounded in some democratic principles and were committed to the idea of containment and the promotion of freedom and raising living standards around the world.

OK, they weren't, hey, it's my swimming pool and I'm now going to charge you to come into the swimming pool. Yeah, I think the defining distinction between what's going on right now and in the past, and I'm certainly not combing this to the way that we were split during the Civil War, but is the information game in all of this and the disinformation, because, you know, you

Used to be people looked at maybe one paper, right? And odds are that you and your neighbor were looking at the same thing. And today people are living in diametrically opposed information cesspools. And we do not have a common language as to what truth is, what right or wrong is. You know, is the sky blue?

I got 10 people within 50 feet of me who feel differently about that. And to compound that, our adversaries are doing that to us. Oh, they're thrilled by it and they're doing it to their own people. You know, they've got a plan for us. They're dumping lots of disinformation. Yep. 100%. Thank you so much for joining me. No, I appreciate it. You're great to have me on. Please give Professor Galloway my love. You know, I'm a huge fan of his as well. I will. Thank you. Okay. After the break, my conversation with Governor Pritzker.

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Today, we've got Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker with us. He's been making waves, pushing for more jobs, affordable health care, and taking on Trump's immigration policies. He's also sounding the alarm on what he calls the GOP's growing authoritarian streak and even joined a multi-state lawsuit to block Trump's federal funding freeze last month.

Plus, he's backing a screen-free schools plan, which I love, to ban cell phones in classrooms. We've got a lot to cover. Governor Pritzker, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. No, it's so great to have you. You have been one of the strongest Democratic voices against Trump.

in general, but certainly since he won re-election. But there are some people who are saying that the party is still not pushing back hard enough. What do you think is the right strategy? Should we just be on offense all the time? Is there a risk of overplaying it? How are you thinking about this?

Well, first of all, I think we ought to be focused, right? It's clear they're trying to flood the zone. They want us to pay attention to Greenland and Panama Canal and all these things that really don't have anything to do with the lives of ordinary Americans every day. And so at least we Democrats ought to be focused on, frankly, what we ought to have been focused on in the last election, too.

which is affordability and just making life a little easier for people. How about health care where Democrats have the right solutions and the Republicans are just trying to take health care away from people? So I think we should talk a lot about that and focus on that.

But I think you can't overlook the fact that they're tearing down the institutions of our government, the institutions that have been established under the Constitution. And it's vitally important to all of us that we preserve those things. But again, average folks out there, if you knocked on 100 doors and talked to people at the doors, and I've knocked on a lot of doors, you know, nobody's going to say, oh, yeah, democracy, that's the number one issue.

even though it is something that is, you know, affecting people's daily lives. It just doesn't feel like that. It's, you know, when you buy your groceries, when you go to buy your automobile, you know, as soon as these tariffs go in with Canada and Mexico, which make no sense at all to me, unless you're trying to provide a large tax cut to the wealthiest Americans, of course. But because they're trying to collect from the American public those tariffs, that's who's going to pay.

So anyway, we've got a lot of work to do to make sure that we're communicating with the public in the right way. But sounding the alarm is something that I think is hugely important. It's what I've tried to do. It's why I gave the speech that I gave last week talking about the death of a constitutional republic. And and I wish more people were out there and out front.

you know, raising attention. Why do you think that they aren't? Because it was a very clear message on November 5th that that type of messaging did not work, right? The Liz Cheney's of the world did not compel that many people or really compelled the same percentage of moderates that voted for Biden in 2020. It was mirror image essentially in 2024. So there are a lot of Democrats who are concerned about adopting that strategy, but you, you

you seem fairly unconcerned. Well, you mean the strategy of which... Going out there, and you talked about, you know, comparisons to 1930s Germany and your state of the state. Yeah, but that wasn't a campaign message. I mean, that is my personal belief. I helped to build a Holocaust museum. I'm Jewish. I've been fighting anti-Semitism, well, it seems like my whole life now. Yeah.

And so I really felt compelled to talk about what's happening in the country broadly. It wasn't, you know, about what I think the message for 2026 ought to be or 2028. And that's why I really think we ought to be focused. If you want to talk messaging.

It needs to be around the challenges that people are facing every single day. Going to the grocery store and can't afford eggs or, you know, tomatoes or avocados or anything else that you're looking to buy, knowing that you want to go buy a car and now prices are going up. And by the way, they promised that they were going to lower prices on day one. Yep. That's what they said.

I don't know how they intended to get that done on day one, but that's what they said they would do. We're on day 39 now, and prices have only gone up, not down.

And they're making it worse with the tariffs, which again are taxes on middle-class Americans and working-class Americans. So I think that's the message. If you want to talk about what matters to people, it's their daily lives. Can I send my kid to college affordably? Can I save for retirement? Is there a way to get a better wage and a better job? That's another one. Let's talk wages. You want a stark contrast between the two parties?

We Democrats, we think $7.25 as a minimum wage and $14,000 a year, that's what that yields, isn't enough to live on. And we're for raising the minimum wage. Republicans, they're either okay with a $7.25 minimum wage or some of them want to do away with a minimum wage altogether. I'd like to fight that fight in 2026. I think that ought to be a central focus of at least one part of the economic message.

So that's what I think we ought to be talking about. Meanwhile, as you know, you know, I do think that many of us, you know, need to, as leaders, remind people that the institutions of government are why you're able to get the things that matter to you. And when they get torn down, in other words, if you care about health care, if you care about veteran services, if you care about, you know, being able to get a rise in the minimum wage, you need a representative democracy that actually is representative.

And you need to make sure that the courts are forcing the administration and the Congress and everybody else to follow the law. But if the administration ignores the courts, then, boy, we're all done for in this country. We're not going to have a democracy two or four years from now.

That does seem to be like the main vulnerabilities so far in the first, you know, 39, 40 days of the Trump administration, which is centered around what Doge is doing, the kind of cuts that they're making. There have been several judges that have said this is illegal. Elon Musk's popularity has been plummeting while Trump's has gone down a little bit, but not nearly as much.

the change that we've seen with Musk voters two to one aren't comfortable with what Doge is doing. Do you think that that is a central point of focus where Democrats can play it safe and opposing Trump without seeming like they're out of step with their voters? Yeah. You know, I, I was asked this earlier today at a press conference. Um, you know, what, what should, you know, what, what should we do to amplify this? Look, uh,

It's happening on its own. I can tell you that, you know, we've seen polling data in the state of Illinois where back in December and January, voters out there wanted leaders in Illinois to work with Donald Trump to get things done.

We're now a month and a half after that. And I've seen polling data very recently that says, actually, instead, now they want you to resist Donald Trump. So that's the beginning of the fall of his numbers. And it's going to be a challenging, I think, spring and summer for him because people's lives are being affected in a negative way. Yeah.

I do think that one of the things that we need to be doing is talking about not only preserving important institutions that preserve people's way of life. By the way, do you want to get on an airplane and know that there aren't air traffic controllers in the tower that can do the job? Elon Musk letting go air traffic controllers. And then I think yesterday tweeting, oh, no, we need hundreds of them to come back, please.

The Ebola scientists that they fired and then discovered, oh, I guess we do need to actually react when there's a deadly disease that needs to be addressed. So those institutions and NOAA, I don't know if you've heard about the, you know, they're shutting down the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Remember, that's the thing that helps you know whether the hurricane is coming to Florida or to Georgia or to Texas.

And so these are the things, you know, if they tear all that down, your daily life is going to be affected. And that's what's happening now. So what should we be doing? Well, first, we need to highlight what they're tearing down. Medicaid. If we're not talking about Medicaid and health care for people, we're missing the boat because seniors, children in my state, half of children are on Medicaid. Half.

And seniors, you know, everybody either has a grandma or has a friend with a grandma who's in a nursing home because she has Medicaid and won't be in the nursing home if she loses her Medicaid. So these are the things I think, again, that we ought to be focusing on. And I think that's why you're going to see those poll numbers dropping. You are right about Elon Musk.

Those numbers have been dropping like a rock. And it's certainly a feature of talking points to point at this person who is literally the wealthiest person in the world and who is now essentially running the U.S. government. You know, it used to be that government was actually the check on too much power in

And particularly, you know, remember Teddy Roosevelt and antitrust laws. You know, that's why there are antitrust laws. You don't want any one company or any one person to have too much economic power in this country. You're absolutely free to go out and earn like heck and become a millionaire and a billionaire. But you shouldn't be put in charge of the reins of government, which are supposed to be regulating your business.

Well, especially if you don't even have a real role. And I think all of us were a little bit surprised to hear that Amy Gleeson is actually the administrator of Doge. I think she was on Mexican vacation when she heard about that one. But I do agree with you that that seems to be the soft spot in all of this. And you brought up Medicaid, which I wanted to talk to you about. This spending bill that the Republicans have pushed through narrowly through Congress,

It looks a bit dead on arrival in the Senate. Even hardcore conservatives like Josh Hawley are saying they are not going to sign anything that cuts Medicaid like that. Twenty one percent of his constituents are on Medicaid. But you've seen Hakeem Jeffries centering his messaging around these cuts specifically to Medicaid. What will Illinois do to protect Medicaid?

Medicaid beneficiaries if these cuts do come through? Are you guys going to back them up and make sure that they still have their health care? Or what can people do on an individual state basis? Well, let me be clear up front that I believe in universal health care. And that doesn't mean that we have to have one system that covers everybody. It does mean that we've got to have systems that cover everybody. And Medicaid is part of that patchwork of systems that we want to put together to

But, you know, Medicaid...

I mean, I can't even tell you how important it is that we preserve that and that that's a central part of a message. But what will we do in the state of Illinois? Well, let me make clear what we're talking about. If they do away even just with the expansion of Medicaid, and I expect based on the budget that was passed in the House, if that were to become law somehow, the only way they could make that work is to cut Medicaid even further.

than just the Affordable Care Act. But let's talk just about the Affordable Care Act. 770,000 people in my state would lose health care. And if we were to try to make that up, it would be $7.4 billion. Now, our whole budget for the state is $55 billion. That's what I proposed. $55 billion. We don't have $7 billion to try to make up for the federal government not sending us those dollars. So,

So it would be devastating. And what would we do? Well, we'd have to, first of all, we'd lose our rural hospitals and our safety net hospitals, rural hospitals across most of my state, safety net hospitals in Chicago, and we can't afford to lose those. So we would have to shore up those hospitals. We'd have to make sure that there's as much free care as we could provide, which, you

going to be very difficult to do. But, you know, the $700 million, $750 million that the state provides as part of that Medicare expansion, we would probably have to turn that into subsidies for hospitals and for clinics. So it's not good enough, honestly. I mean, it's what we would be able to do, but it's not good enough. And that's why we've got to go out, all of us, and fight like heck.

One more thing. The people who will lose their health care as a result of what they're trying to do in the House budget,

Many of them are Republicans. Indeed, I think about half in Illinois. And we're not a 50-50 Democrat-Republican state. But half the people who would lose Medicaid as a result of that would be people who live in Republican districts. And they're typically, they are Republicans. Rural Americans who have most often voted for Donald Trump didn't know when they voted for him this last time that they'd be losing their health care. So I

I don't know what to say. I mean, I'm frustrated as heck by this because if I had the resources available, of course, I would put that back in place and make sure that people are not harmed by what the congressional Republicans and Donald Trump are doing. Last thing on this topic, which is, or at least for me, Donald Trump says he keeps saying, oh, no, he's not going to hurt, you know, he's not going to cut Medicaid, Medicare or Social Security. Well, meanwhile, indeed,

He endorsed the Republican plan in the House that would cut Medicaid. So he's lying. I mean, I don't think that's a surprise to a lot of people. He's lying. But if he's lying about Medicaid, is he lying about Medicare and Social Security? Probably. We don't know yet, but you ought to be awfully suspicious.

Absolutely. I think that they often rely on the fact that some of their own supporters aren't necessarily going to actually look at the language of the bill or connect the dots for them. But I think the Democrats have actually done a very good job of drawing that line straight to the Medicaid pot. And I'm glad to hear that you do have a backup plan, though obviously these things will not be adequate to compensate for it and

It's a tough position to be in, to be championing what the federal government is doing for you, because I think people, generally speaking, are suspicious of it or aren't taking account of the things in their daily lives that are from the government. But it seems like the smartest way forward with us to say there are inefficiencies.

but you get a hell of a lot out of the federal government. Yeah, and I think it's okay to talk about the inefficiencies. Yes. You know, admit that government, listen, I've seen it. I was in business before I became governor. You know, now I'm in charge of a government, and I can tell you that there are inefficiencies everywhere, and, you know, waste, fraud, and abuse, as people like to talk about it, it exists for sure, and we're always trying to root it out. But unlike, you know, using a chainsaw,

the way that Elon Musk talks about, and just, you know, cutting programs entirely. Instead, what you need to do, and this is the hard work of governing, by the way, is you need to go into the agencies and task the people running the agencies with finding the areas of inefficiency, right?

and in effectiveness. And I want to focus on that last part because effectiveness is the important part of these programs. People need healthcare. They want efficiency, but most of all, they want it delivered effectively to them. And that involves efficiency. So I say that because delivering, making our institutions work is really important for reinstilling trust that people have in government because I get it.

People don't trust government. And, you know, I'm again, I came from outside of government. I can tell you, you know, when I saw, for example, that that in Illinois, when I showed up, my predecessor, the Republican who preceded me, had left one hundred and forty thousand Medicaid applications that they hadn't looked at. And they were basically just delaying giving people their health care because he didn't want to pay for it. Right.

Right. That's that's ineffective and inefficient. You need people to get health care. Otherwise, they're going to end up in an emergency room. It'll cost you a lot more. And then there are a whole lot of things that happen in government that take too long.

And so we've got to just acknowledge those things and recognize that, of course, there's inefficiencies. People are all excited about, oh, a Department of Government Efficiency. That sounds great. But I have to say, not if they're taking away the things that really matter to you, like child care, like Meals on Wheels, like Medicaid.

Absolutely. I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about immigration, which was such a central piece of the presidential election, obviously, and what happened under the Biden administration hurt candidate Biden and then candidate Harris.

a lot more than maybe some expected it to. You have discussed the fact that you will cooperate with ICE insofar as they are coming to pick up convicted criminals. Tom Homan has shown up the border czar in Chicago, is talking about rounding up people. Where does all of that stand and what are you doing in Illinois to make sure that you can be responsive to the way that people voted and that they believe there is a migrant crisis going on and also protecting people?

Yeah. We've got to have an immigration policy that actually makes some sense. They showed up in Chicago, Tom Homan did, with Dr. Phil in tow. What do you have against Dr. Phil? It's...

Listen, I think everybody in government could use a therapist. But the fact is that showing up with a television personality, I mean, it really tells you it's all for show. And, you know, they want to parade in front of the cameras the undocumented immigrants that they're finding when it turns out that, first of all, quite a number of the people that they rounded up

Yeah.

So it's been a it's been a, you know, a, you know, a terrible, you know, show for everybody. First of all, and second of all, you know, you have to have a coherent policy. You can't just say we're going after all the undocumented immigrants.

Let's start with the most violent, the people who've been convicted of a crime. I think none of us out here, governors, you know, anybody believes that someone who's been convicted of a violent crime who's undocumented deserves to stay in this country. So fine, come get them. That's great. We've always wanted help trying to arrest people who are violent criminals. But, you know, they're not showing up at our prisons and our jails with violence.

from a court, which is all you need, right? And it would be easy to get to say this person's undocumented. We should deport them. Why aren't they doing it? It's one of two things. Either they're smart enough to recognize that if you take people who are undocumented out of prison and then deport them and let them free,

that they might end up coming back to the United States. These are violent criminals. We caught them. We convicted them. We put them in prison. So you don't really want to let them go. That's, you know, perhaps they understand that perhaps there, but they're not showing up at our prisons and our jails to with warrants to, to, to take them away.

The second thing I think just to point out is that there are a lot of undocumented people who live in Illinois and all across the country

who are law-abiding citizens or residents, rather, who hold down jobs. They pay taxes. They're actually pillars of their community. They're our neighbors and our friends often. And these are the very people that if you had a good immigration policy, you'd want to come into the country. So if they're already here, how about we give them a path to staying here? Again, these are people, law-abiding, good people. Some of them own businesses.

or they've started businesses in this country. And the last point I'll make is, because again, I'm a business person, you look at the Fortune 500, 46% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children, their first generation children. We want immigration in this country. It's good for our economy. It's good for the future of the country. And with birth rates going down, we're the one country in the world that is founded

in many ways, on immigration. And so we ought to take advantage of that when you look at all the other wealthy countries in the world. We're the one that really has the opportunity to take advantage of our history and our belief in immigration to help ourselves in the world economy.

I agree with you on the point, the larger point, but I can't escape the fact that here I'm in New York City. People in Chicago felt exactly the same way that the migrant crisis got wildly out of control and that we essentially had an open border policy. And then once some Republican governors started busing migrants away,

up to our cities that we realized what life is like in Eagle Pass, Texas for our fellow Americans there. And there were a number of city council meetings in Chicago that were widely covered. We did here at Fox where residents were showing up and talking about how their resources were being diverted to people who were here illegally.

And that that wasn't okay, that it had to be in this sense, America first. And that's been a key contributor to Mayor Brandon Johnson's low approval rating. I believe it was 6% in an M3 poll that came out earlier this week.

What can be done about that to make sure that, you know, people who love the cities that they live in, who love immigrants the way that you're talking about, but feel like we're not on their side or people in elected office are not on their side, feel like they're more responsive to them? Well, I was a critic of the Biden administration's policy. In fact, I reluctantly I wrote a public letter. I sent it to the president and made it public and.

about the mistakes that I think were being made at the border and the ways in which, you know, the federal government needed to step up and do a better job on immigration, particularly around the migrants. You know, meanwhile, just to be clear, and I know there were a lot of people not just in Chicago, but around the country who were upset about migrants showing up in their communities.

You know, and it cost our state quite a lot of money and our city of Chicago. But let me be clear. This was a humanitarian crisis from my perspective. I didn't create the crisis myself.

Uh, but all of a sudden, as you're pointing out, you know, buses showed up and they were aimed at Chicago. It wasn't like people just naturally decided in the middle of winter, they're going to get on a bus from Texas and go to Chicago, you know? Um, and indeed people showed up here with t-shirts and sandals on when they arrived. So, uh, the, the, it was an enormous challenge. Um,

The policy wasn't right. But when they when people show up, you know, we're Americans, you know, we it doesn't you know, at that moment when someone is, you know, without shelter, without the proper clothing and needing to be fed, you do all those things. And we did those things because it was the right thing to do. But, yeah, the policy was wrong. And we need to have a we need to have border security.

And I love, by the way, that Ruben Gallego, I think, says it best. You know, you don't have a country if you don't have a secure border. So let's have a secure border. But let's also have like robust immigration.

And immigration that isn't just about people who are willing to pay $5 million or have $5 million to pay for a gold card to get into the country and take advantage of whatever tax breaks they might be given, but also immigration that allows people like my family, who came here three generations ago and had nothing. We were refugees from Ukraine, would have been killed had they stayed, as many Jews were.

Um, and we're allowed to come into this country and, and, you know, and had nothing, but,

The most driven people, you know, that are in our country are often the people who show up from somewhere else escaping something, wanting to make a better life for themselves and their families. And so that's the, you know, it's a challenge. There's no doubt. But it doesn't seem, frankly, all that complicated if you secure the border, which we can do. It seems like it's happening now.

But you can secure the border, but also think about the economic future of the country is dependent upon having more immigration, not less.

Absolutely. I want to stick on Chicago for a second and talk about the public school education problem, which is not just an issue for Chicago. It's happening nationally, but particularly pronounced there. You know, bad testing rates. You have low enrollment. Kids not showing up to school. Teachers unions want a new contract. How do you think we can revive the American public school system? Yeah. Invest in it. Let's begin with that.

But also I'd like to just challenge at least

a couple of notions you put forward. The NAEP scores, which are the English, the reading and math scores that are done nationally, these are the tests that are given all across the nation, just came out. And our eighth graders in Illinois came in second in the nation. Number one was Massachusetts, number two was Illinois. Our eighth graders in math came in fifth in the nation.

So we're actually doing pretty well. I'm talking about, you know, the state of Illinois is doing reasonably well. There are always challenges in big cities versus other places like suburbs, for example. But that doesn't mean we got to give up on those kids or give up on investing in those schools. But they do need to be managed well. And we do need to attract kids.

teachers. We don't have enough teachers, and we're going to need more. And we have put in programs I have to attract teachers to provide, you know, signing bonuses to help them get housing and so on. And we have the ability to attract them because we pay reasonably well if you want to be a teacher in Chicago or anywhere in the state of Illinois. So it's an attractive place to teach. But

We've got to invest in these schools. We're not fully invested in the state of Illinois. We're trying really hard. You know, I inherited a fiscal situation that was terrible in 2019 when I came into office. And, you know, we've gotten nine credit upgrades and we've finally got a rainy day fund and we've increased funding for education by more than $2 billion since I came into office. And we're continuing that with the proposed budget I put in place. But, you know, the fact is that our...

Our kids are worth investing in. And I would say the wraparound services that you need for their families is also hugely important in order for our kids to get ahead. Last point I'll make on this, early childhood education. I've been involved in this arena for 25 years, long before I was governor, is perhaps the most important arena for us to invest in.

You know, it's universal preschool, but it's also, you know, everything from early intervention services, which can make the difference between a child growing up, you know, with challenges and autism their whole life, or perhaps being able to actually join a school.

classroom in a public school and, you know, graduate and go to college. Those early intervention investments make a big difference. So do home visitation programs. We've seen that, that nurses or professionals showing up and helping parents do a better job and answer questions for them, you know, and providing them a health care check.

makes a big difference. So I mention all that because I think people think that, well, if children are not doing well in school, if our school isn't doing well, well, maybe we ought to divest from schools and just let it kind of happen on its own in a private market. And the reality is that public education is the foundation of our democracy, and we need to invest in it, not divest.

Yeah. I wanted to, as an extension of the school conversation, could you talk a little bit about your push to ban cell phones in school and, you know, some of what you're hearing also from concerned parents that they won't be able to reach their kids if, God forbid, there's an emergency? Yeah. And that was a very important thing that I considered as I put the policy together. Yeah.

We need to first we need kids to be focused in class. We need teachers to not have to fight the fight with students about their their devices in class. And if you ask teachers and ask most parents to.

And I have done that. I've talked to an awful lot of people about this. Most parents will tell you they would rather their kids didn't have those devices in class. They do want them to have them in school, though. They want, in other words, it's okay with them if it's in their locker or if they check them in outside the classroom. They want their kids, though, to be able to focus in class, and they want their teachers to be able to focus on their kids in class.

So, parents, generally speaking, very much in favor. How do we take care of the problem where their parents, remember, there are some kids who actually need to have a device because there are a variety of reasons why, but, you know, one is just anxiety.

And so that's just one example. But what we've done is proposed a policy where the schools get to work on their individual policies, but they're designed to have exceptions. Again, there are also health needs. I mentioned a mental health need and anxiety, but there are other health needs, diabetes, for example. And we've got, you know, automatic readers for people who have diabetes, etc.

So these are all things that are taken into account in this policy. Broadly speaking, though, this is hugely popular. There's just no doubt about it. And it's the right thing to do. And I have kids who graduated just two, three, four years ago, two of them, you know, from from high school. And I went and asked them, you know, about how distracting is it? And also, did you, you know, did did your friends experience cyberbullying, you know, in classes?

And the answer is yes, that there is that going on just in a single classroom. People are getting bullied on their device.

So I think the tradeoff is actually a really positive one. Just leave the device outside the door. You know, there's a way to lock them up. And you can get it when you leave class. And for the most part, it's not going to be a problem. And schools get to make those decisions for themselves. Last thing, and I do this with all of our guests. What's one thing that makes you rage? And what's one thing that you think we should all just calm down about? Yeah.

You know, one thing that makes me rage is and this is a funny thing to say in the context of that question is I watch our public officials and what's happening in our political life. And it's like people have forgotten how to be kind.

And it seems to me that the whole purpose of public service is to, you know, deliver what people need to make their lives better. And that seems like a, you know, part of the answer to the question of how can you be kind. And we ought to be kind to one another. And what makes me rage is to look at the political arena and see that that seems to have gone out the window.

And so it drives me crazy. It's not something I'm not a person who will rage in public. But, you know, you saw the speech that I gave. Yeah. About about the death of a constitutional republic. And and obviously my experience, you know, my own family escaped the pogroms in Ukraine. I helped to build a Holocaust museum. So you can imagine that watching our constitutional democracy be destroyed.

torn apart is enraging to me. Absolutely. And calm down about something? Or should we just...

Stay. I don't I'm not sure what to calm down about right now. That's an answer. Yeah, I totally get it. But I do I do think we've got a lot of work to do, all of us to refocus ourselves on on the direction of the country and again on the most vulnerable people in our society, working class Americans, middle class Americans. That's where we ought to be focusing and not letting the richest man in the world dictate the policies of the U.S. government.

Amen to that. All right, Governor Pritzker, thank you so much for your time. I loved getting to interview. Appreciate you. Thank you all for listening to Raging Moderates. Our producers are David Toledo and Shanayne Onike. Our technical director is Drew Burrows. You can now find Raging Moderates on its own feed every Tuesday. That's right, its own feed. And there you'll get exclusive interviews with smart voices in politics. Please follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks.

All right, Sean, you can do this promo talking about all the great Vox Media podcasts that are going to be on stage live at South by Southwest this March. You just need a big idea to get people's attention, to help them, you know, keep them from hitting the skip button. I don't know. I'm going to...

throw it out to the group chat. Kara, do you have any ideas? In these challenging times, we're a group of mighty hosts who have banded together to fight disinformation by speaking truth to power, like the Avengers, but with more spandex. What do you think, Scott? I'm more of an X-Man fan myself. Call me Professor. Can I read minds? I can't really read minds, but I can empathize with anyone having a midlife crisis, which is essentially any tech leader. So I'm

Minds are important, Scott, but we're more than that. I think that you can't really separate minds from feelings. And we need to talk about our emotions and explore the layers of our relationships with our partners, coworkers, our families, neighbors, and our adjacent communities. I just want to add a touch more. From sports and culture to tech and politics, Vox Media has an all-star lineup of podcasts that's great in your feeds, but even better live.

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