The New Non-Normal (with Jonathan Martin)
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Hey, pull up a chair. It's Hacks on Tap with David Axelrod and Mike Murphy. Today I nominated him for, I guess if you like health and if you like people that live a long time, it's the most important position, RFK Jr. Bobby, good. And I just looked at the news reports. People like you, Bobby.

Don't get too popular, Bobby. Yeah, Bobby, don't get too popular, Mike Murphy. I keep telling you that as well. Don't get too popular, man. Yeah, it's bad for your political health. Exactly. Very bad, bad, terrible.

So here we are looking through the rubble with the world's most fascinating and highly entertaining and somewhat quite depressing cabinet appointees. But we needed somebody who is not only a veteran political reporter and a great friend of the show, but an incredible world traveler, a man who looks at the globe as a vast canvas upon which to ply his trade.

So why don't you introduce our guest and let's find out where in the world is Jonathan Martin, the one, the only, yes, bringing us a global perspective on the election, or else he's looking for

Asylum in the strangest place. Go ahead, Jonathan. Where are you at? I can get you any kind of dim sum you want here in Hong Kong, but that's about the extent of my local expertise. Now, greetings from the great...

East here, the South China Sea, to be exact. Coming at you about midnight in Hong Kong. What are you doing over there? Yeah, and tell Colonel Chang I'll be reporting in soon now that I'm switching sides. That's technically unauthorized. I can't reveal that, Axe, but maybe off the air we can discuss this further. Seriously, Betsy, the lovely Betsy, my wife, is here for a conference.

I'm talking to all. Oh, good for you. Well, send her our best. She's part of the International Women's Forum. And so she is. I'm still suspicious that you guys are overseas and wondering whether this is a prelude to relocation.

The president could, president-elect could insist. There's an east wind blowing, David. If we were to take asylum, I don't think it would be in common. That's good. No, no, I think that's right. Especially now after 45 democracy fighters just got sentenced to long prison sentences there. That was a grim development in a world in which people are questioning the resilience of democracy. So let's talk about ours. Speaking of strong democracies, yeah.

Yeah. Our what? Our democracy? Yes. Yeah, exactly. Well, we had one. We have a new president, as everybody knows, dutifully and fairly elected. So now the fun begins. Well, I think, you know, one of the things that you heard a lot during the campaign from people who are going to vote for Trump but didn't particularly like the way he behaved or some of the things he said was, well, he'll never do that again.

Well, these cabinet appointments suggest that, yeah, he actually will do that. Or he'll try. Or he will try. Yeah, Jaymart, run them down, these cabinet appointments, in the order of audacity and your level of concern.

Well, the prime time lineup starts with Sean Hannity and Alan Combs. That's called Hannity and Combs. And then we go to Bill O'Reilly in the ninth game. I'm sorry, that was the Fox News Prime Time Network. Exactly. No, I mean, I only barely kid. It's like he's casting a Fox News variety show here. He is clearly looking at people upon how they appear on TV. And loyalty.

Yeah, well, that too. How do they come off? Are they good to Trump? And how do they appear on TV? Do they look the part? His favorite phrase goes. And that's why it's no coincidence that a lot of these people, including as of like

Very recently, his transportation secretary clocked from the Fox News lineup. He mostly cares about how these folks appear. And yet, David, to your point, loyalty. Who was good to him during the campaign? Tulsi Gabbard and RFK crossed the aisle. Boom, they get high-level slots. Matt Gaetz, somebody who was willing to toe the line for Trump to take it to his enemies, unfurled.

Boom. He gives him a job with chief law enforcement officer, Pete Hegseth, a guy he likes seeing talk about the military on Fox. Sure. Give him the Pentagon and on and on it goes. You know, there is a change though. I think what's driving a lot of this is the, his bad memories of the first term where he had a fair amount of heavyweight people with real government credentials, the Mattis's of the world.

And others, they weren't all that way, but there were plenty of them, particularly around the national security side. And he thought, wait a minute, when I give an order, they don't say, yes, sir. So we're not going to have any more of that. I want factotums and yes people here. And, you know, that's what he's going for. And nobody willing to say, hey, maybe that's not such a good idea, Mr. President, or maybe we should keep talking about this.

Instead, it's haphazard and it's saluting whatever you want, right? Well, first of all, let's just run through it. You mentioned a few, but Matt Gaetz is attorney general. And by the way, Trump's criminal defense team in the other senior positions in the Justice Department, essentially turning the justice. I mean, Matt Gaetz, who has two years of actual law practice in his background, who is a

the subject of an ethics report. We'll talk about that in the house for his, uh, uh, alleged frolicking with, uh, underage women who he paid for sex and drugs. Uh, that is the allegation. Uh,

You've got Robert Kennedy Jr., whose conspiracy theories about vaccines have literally cost lives, now being put in charge of the vaccine.

The CDC, the FDA, the National Institutes of Health, the entire health infrastructure of the country would be in the hands of Robert Kennedy Jr. Tulsi Gabbard, who has been essentially a mouthpiece for the Kremlin around this Ukraine war, who stealthily met with Bashir Assad.

Syria, now the Director of National Intelligence, though she has no intelligent experience in. Talk about oxymorons, but go ahead. I mean, that's an epic one. You mentioned Pete Hegzeth, who is a veteran, but bizarre choice in many ways, has never managed anything and is now coming off the couch at Fox & Friends to take over

the Pentagon. But it does reflect Trump's view of both the military and the foreign interventions. But remember, Trump, I mean, what the story is here is Trump trying to corral these institutions that defied him.

the Justice Department, obviously. Now there's, by the way, a rumor he hasn't announced it yet that Kash Patel will run the FBI.

You know, another conspiracy theorist who has promised to use the tools of the government to go after Trump's enemies. So it's pretty clear what he's doing. He is trying to knock out all independent sources of accountability and take all these sort of.

arms length institutions, arms length for a reason and put them under the control of president. You guys, I'm older than all, both of you. I remember, but except for Murphy, uh, Murphy's brain, which lives in a different era and can recite history from a different era, 23 skidoo. But, uh, you know, I remember very well, uh, the post Watergate era when, uh,

Gerald Ford recruited the president of the University of Chicago, Edward Levy, to come and restore public faith in the FBI, in the intelligence community after it had been co-opted by Richard Nixon. And all of these norms grew up out of that era. When I was in the White House, I couldn't even, I was not allowed to call the attorney general. I was not allowed to call, I was senior advisor to the president. I never, ever,

talk to the FBI director, other than when he came in to brief the president on some disaster. This is really, really shocking to watch this. Well, they're throwing all the norms out the window. I mean, the bipartisan norms of the last, you know, the modern era, even beyond. So now they're going to be hanging around Mar-a-Lago or the White House and

you know, playing mumbly peg and saying, Hey, Bobby, how's it going over there? Why don't we, you know, Pfizer irritated me the other day, put them out of business. Now, the thing is though,

I have a bunch of friends who've served in the cabinet, and what they all say afterward is, yeah, it's pushing spaghetti uphill to try to get the bureaucracy to do anything. I bark an order, and three years later, they get back with a report about why they didn't do anything. So there is, and believe me, I'm not trying to minimize any of this. We have to talk about who's actually going to get through because he's trying to bum rush Drake. Well, that's a political question at the moment. But it is really hard to...

do huge change-oriented things for good or bad. One 20,000-foot observation on this, and that is, in some respects, Trump wasn't hiding the ball during the campaign. It's not like, you know, he wasn't campaigning on a sort of modest capital gains, a tax cut and good government everywhere else. He was pretty open about what he wanted to do and how he wanted to seize the levers of government. On the other hand, every time I hear, well, half the country voted for this,

That's not really true. They did not. No. Look, the fact is millions of American voters supported him because they wanted lower gas in their car and they wanted cheaper eggs bacon at the grocery store.

And the border. And a more secure border. But mostly they wanted to improve their quality of life, put more money in their pocket. They weren't voting for somebody who was going to put unpasteurized milk in every bucket across the country, you know.

Yeah, which is what something Kennedy advocates. No, I think you're absolutely right. It leads to the political question. I mean, he was hired to deliver more prosperity and lower prices to people. And I can tell you, and Mike, you were privy to these, Jaymart maybe used some of them, that

In focus group after focus group of swing voters, people who could go either way, they would say, I don't like Trump. I hate what he says. I hate what he does. But if he can, you know, but I did better when he was president and maybe I'll do better again. Right, right. It was the mainspring. Yes, but they did not. This is exactly what they feared.

They feared that it would become sort of some political vengeance mission with all these exotic players and kind of a circus. Well, children, read the warning label, you know?

They didn't, and they got them, fair and square. Read warning labels while you can before RFK. Yeah, they're all erased. By the way, that one, not only do these appointments, are they a divergence, what from people want, but the other thing that he promised you guys was to make people safer. None of these appointments are going to make people safer. Matt Gaetz running the Justice Department. No, I know, I know. Kash Patel, you know, in this kind of...

crazy patchwork group of Trump loyalists who have no real background in any of this, not going to make the country safer. The week before the election, the FBI and the IC thwarted an Iranian plot aimed at Trump.

Like, they do real work, these agencies, and they're not going to be doing that work. That won't make them safer. Bobby Kennedy, you know, with his weird theories about vaccines and, you know, raw milk and all, that's not going to make people safer. No, no, no. I agree.

I agree, man. What does it mean in two years? Well, not only that, the question is right now, what happens in the next hundred days? How many of them actually get through? Because now the great and mighty Republican Senate will enter the spotlight in January. And so I think we ought to hack out a little bit on what the process, because I agree, they're all pirates and villains. But let's project forward a little what happens in the short term. And then

In this chaos world that is, I agree with you, actually not what people voted for. Now they have huge expectations, too. Everything's got to get better overnight because the magic man is there. What happens in the midterms where the Democrats have a big chance to grab power in just two years? Okay, let's take a break right here for a word from our sponsor. We'll be right back.

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One of the things that's going to be determined in the next month or two is, does Article 1 of the Constitution, which invests in the Senate certain responsibilities to advise and consent on appointments, does that matter? Well, let's talk about what a recess appointment is real quick, just because that's being bandied around. And then, Jim, we're setting you up here to try to untangle what you think will happen. So...

Way back when horses and carriages were involved, Congress couldn't always get together that often, not like the permanent institution is now. So with this institution of the recess appointment, which was, hey, the president's got to get something done, Congress has gone for two months.

And in the squabbles of late in both Bush, Obama, I think Clinton, occasionally the administration would put an appointee in without Senate confirmation while the Senate was out of session, but never at the level of a cabinet secretary.

So now, and there was actually a Supreme Court case about this, I think, when Obama tried national relations. And he lost. He lost. So now they've taken that idea and put it on steroids. And Trump would like to just be able to appoint anybody he wants and tell the Republican Senate, go take him.

you know, three weeks off or whatever the minimum is, which the court case stipulates. And I'll just appoint everybody. That requires institutionally the Senate to really back off a prerogative they tend to guard pretty jealously. So here we are. Great drama.

They have a three-vote margin. I think Murkowski, the independent-slash-Republican from Alaska, and Susan Collins, two votes they may not get for some of the most egregious appointments. I mean, we're in a world where Marco Rubio looks like Kissinger, so a lot of them will get through. But on the real whack-a-doodles, the Tulsi Gabbards and the others we talked about, J. Mart, how do you think this thing will unfold? What are you hearing? Let's start with the recess possibility. I think you'll find...

enough institutionalists in the Senate who are going to block any effort to take the Senate into recess so that Trump can effectively have an entirely acting cabinet. Um, uh, I think that that's, that's not going to happen. Um, let's take them one by one. I think, uh,

Like, to your point, you got to find four Republican senators. I think that there's going to be four there. You mentioned Collins and Murkowski. I'll just toss this out to you.

There's other senators who are up for reelection in 2026 and 2028 who are probably never going to face the voters again, who I think are also going to find some level of courage because of that fact. Right. And I think that that gets you to four in a couple of these scenarios. Gates, I think, has the longest shot.

you know, I'm not sure he will even come to a vote. I think a lot of Republican senators are going to tell Trump don't make us even have a vote because it's not going to be pretty on this. Then I think Hegstaff, given the claims of sexual misconduct, I think is going to have a challenge. And then I think, you know, Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard. Kennedy just because it's outside the mainstream of public health. And I think Gabbard because

A lot of the hawks left in the Senate are not going to like her background. But here's the problem, guys. If these Republican senators spend their capital blocking Pegs and Gates, are they going to have any capital left slash courage left?

to also block the rest of the crew, which is to say, that's the idea. How many, how many, how many of these folks do you think that they're going to have the spine to actually stand up and, and, and block and block, which is why I come back to what I said. I think a lot of this hangs on who is not going to seek reelection, who will never face a primary again in the Republican party.

Tell me who that is, and I'll tell you who the no votes are. So let me just raise one thing on this recess appointment issue. There is a provision in the Constitution that authorizes the president to adjourn the Congress.

It's never been executed by a president before. But, you know, I'm operating now under the under the he would never do that thing is out the window. Yeah. You know, we've said it so many times before. But, you know, he's calling around on Gates, according to Axios. He's calling around on Gates and pressuring people trying to get him. Will he accept defeat?

on this? Or will he try and take the most extraordinary measures? And then will the Supreme Court back him on these things? I mean, you know, this is the level at which we got to think about this. Yeah, I agree. We're pressure testing the unthinkable scenarios. I think he'll take one hit, maybe two. That's it, Mike. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it kind of becomes a question of,

All right. Who's number one with a bullet in terms of just that's the one he'll take the hit on? Probably Gates. But the question is then, does that get RFK Jr. or Hegseth through? I think Gates and RFK are probably cooked, but I'm guessing. But the rest of them, including Hegseth and the exorable Tulsi Gabbard, I think.

I think there's a point where this iron Senate will fold. This Hexeth thing is important as well because the president has talked about creating this board to test the loyalty of generals and high-ranking military officers and dismissing

I mean, he believes the military should work for him. No, the Wehrmacht model, they should take a personal oath to the leader. It's unbelievable. But to Mike's point, though, the risk is if you make him eat four or even five, does that get him to...

frustrated. He says he's not going to eat even one of them. And then acts to your point says, let's make them all acting. Right. And I think that's the challenge. The Senate Republicans have is they may have to choose which of these ones that they reject. If they reject all of them, that may prompt just Trump just to try to get them all, you know,

operating as acting secretaries. News came across the wire that he's also going to nominate his transition director, Howard Lutnick, from, you know, a Wall Street financier as Treasury Secretary. Commerce. And there's a bit of real criminology in there because he was in contention for Lutnick for Treasury Secretary. And Elon was out tweeting. There were two names involved. He was trashing the other guys. So now he's going to Commerce, right? Well,

Oh, Lutnick's going to commerce? Is that what it was? Yeah, that's what the bullet was. So, but anyway, this is interesting. So, but this is a big deal. So, Treasury's numero uno, along with, you can argue, State and Defense. So, Lutnick lost the internal battle, and Elon publicly was out banging for Lutnick. And I think it's a bad idea to step on Trump's toes on Twitter about this kind of stuff. I've always thought that Elon and Trump are two tomcats in one pillowcase, and it will not last. Right.

But this is interesting. I think Trump showed that nobody is going to Buffalo him.

And now a slightly more normie candidate, I'm blanking on the guy's name, another Wall Street guy, may be the frontrunner for an hour until somebody serves cold meatloaf at Mar-a-Lago and everything's upended again. By the way, also in the bulletin, Senator-elect Sheehy backs Trump's nomination of RFK Jr. RFK Jr. is a fantastic nominee to lead the reinvigoration of the American health system.

health care system she he said just to add one thing you know who else hates rfk big pharma

So you can bet in the Senate, that's another pressure point. That's nothing to sneeze at. Yeah. That's probably from a political standpoint, a selling point for him, but I do worry, you know, just under the safety issue, uh, if they sort of, if they knock out liability protections for, uh, for pharmaceutical companies, biotech companies who are trying to develop vaccines, you're going to see how many vaccines actually get, uh, developed. But, um, uh,

So back to the nominating process. So you guys are betting that Gates will go. One of the things that we haven't discussed is this issue of this ethics committee report in the House. The Speaker of the House last week said he would not involve himself in whether the ethics committee released publicly or to the Senate their report. And then someone came and rearranged his spine.

And the next day he he said he would. And here's a little bit of him on Sunday trying to explain his overnight 180. What I said is entirely consistent. The Speaker of the House is not involved in Ethics Committee work. Can't be, shouldn't be, because the speaker can't put a thumb on the scale or have anything to do with that. So I have no idea what the contents of this report are.

would be I didn't even know about it Jake until the middle of this week when it was announced in the press. What I have said with regard to the report is that it should not come out and why? Because Matt Gaetz resigned from Congress. He is no longer a member. There's a very important protocol and tradition and rule that we maintain that the House Ethics Committee's jurisdiction does not extend to non-members of Congress.

Basically, what happened was that Gates got appointed defense secretary. I mean, I'm sorry, attorney general. I'm getting everybody in the wrong. Yeah, you're mixing up the other gates of the we apologize, Bob. Yeah, exactly. And he quit Congress immediately because he knew this ethics report was coming. J. Mart.

Already the story is leaking out. Yeah, leak it out. The two young women who were involved, their lawyers went public. They said they were paid on Venmo, by the way, for sex with the attorney general designate and drugs. So...

Does the Senate committee get that report? It's a long way from Ed Levy. Yeah, I'd say. To put it mildly, I'm not sure that it gets to the point of the Senate getting the report. I think a lot of this gets to what are the back channel or at least the private conversations between Senate Republicans and Trump and Trump's top lieutenants.

because I can tell you what some of the chatter is. Don't make us take this vote. Yeah, don't make us walk the plank. It's a nightmare. Don't even send him up here. And by the way, even before the details of this report started to leak out, there was no appetite among the vast majority of Senate Republicans to make Matt Gaetz the top law enforcement officer in the U.S. He's the most hated guy in the Congress. This report just makes it easier on them to shoot it down because now they have a tangible advantage

tangible reason beyond not liking the guy to actually vote against him. But yeah, look, the details of this coming out day in, day out, obviously are sort of casting a shadow over not just his nomination, but all of Trump's appointments, right? Think about the conversation the last 10 days. You go from Trump's, you know, significant

really emphatic victory capturing the popular vote. And guys, almost overnight, the conversation turns away from his success to his questionable picks. And it's the best reform Democrats could ever hope for, right? I mean, the best recipe for Democrats is obviously Trump overreach. And he's given it to him here in the first days of his administration. Yeah, predictably. We should point out that Hegseth also has...

a problem in that he had to acknowledge that he paid a woman who had accused him of sexual assault. So you've got Gates, you've got Hegseth, and Trump himself, you know. Yeah, there's a third. Tulsi Gabbard allegedly has an FBI file that makes Alger Hiss look like Captain America. The problem is it's a felony to leak any FBI file. But there's a, in the intelligence community, which is

batshit about the idea of her as DNI, which is over the CIA, over all the domestic, you know, and foreign intelligence agencies other than the stuff inside the Pentagon, is he could declassify it. Biden could. And then it could get into the public domain. But Biden seems pretty passive about that kind of thing. And I think they don't want to partisanize it. And I understand why. But there's grave concerns among people who know a lot about her but can't talk about it.

Not only about her bad judgment, just about her general relationships, I guess. Putin is pretty gleeful about it. The Russians have been very open about their delight with all of these developments. They can't believe it. They won the lottery every day. And the other thing is they've been bleeding out in this war in Ukraine. Now they're bringing in North Korean troops by the 10,000s.

And of course, just on the cusp of breaking them, we got team abandon Ukraine moving into power too. So the Russians can't believe their luck. In addition to these appointments, there's going to be policy rollouts. Apparently, the Trump tax cuts are going to be extended and maybe augmented $4.6 trillion in more tax cuts. But there was an amazing story in The Times yesterday.

yesterday uh in which all the billionaires were uh reveling in uh what what is going to what is going to happen now the tax cuts deregulation end of antitrust so that they can pursue mergers and acquisitions you know without with reckless abandon and you know mark andreessen uh

a tech billionaire out there on the West coast was just chortling about how they, you know, their time has come, which is a weird thing given the sort of populist nature, J Mart of the, uh,

Trump candidacy, I mean, the big winners, the billionaires are just describing themselves as the big winners. Right. Whereas Trump's margin is entirely a result of education realignment across racial lines, which is a sort of academic way of saying he won a lot more blue collar voters from every conceivable background. Right.

His majority, his success in this election stems almost entirely from doing a lot better among working class people. And, you know, there's now a perception among a lot of investors. Look at the bank stocks that have soared ever since his win because they're expecting more deals and mergers to come. But

But guys, this is where it gets complicated, though, because if Trump does push forward this tariff regime and there is the uncertainty of that prospect, the markets are going to go haywire. And Trump does respond to markets. And we haven't talked about this yet. But guys, ever since the RFK nomination, the Trump bump in the stock market has taken a hit. The farmer stocks have collapsed because the Pfizer lost seven in one day. Trump is responsive.

Media coverage and the stock market are sort of Trump's two daily indices, guys. And if the coverage goes really, really south and the markets turn south, too, that's going to prompt Trump to act. Just for a sec, I want to address the billionaire thing predictably. There are a lot of Democrat billionaires, too. Well, you being one, I mean, I would say that would be a sensitive area. We all hang together.

There are a lot of Democrat billionaires, too. And I disagree with Marc Andreessen on Trump, but he's a friend of mine. So I got to say, the motive isn't always greed. A lot of these guys think a more unfettered capitalism, in Marc's case, a lot more freedom to let crypto soar, which he thinks will have a societal benefit for everybody. So I just want to do a lot of these people who think there's been overregulation by the Democrats. I agree with some of this.

And so they, and here's where I think they're wrong. They see half of the Trump coin. They see the shiny part that could lead to explosive economic growth with lower taxes, less regulation, et cetera, et cetera.

They don't see the flip side, insane tariff war, craziness, kindergartners running national security, all of which can be devastating to the economy. So I think there's some rose-colored glasses and enthusiasm there. But it's not all greedy guys in top hats trying to make them buck.

I think it's more complicated than that. And most of them think it would be good for America. Well, Andreessen was celebrating in this New York Times story. Yeah, no, I saw it. I saw it. He was a big Gore donor, too. The cancellation of the president's executive order. I know, but they haven't, Mike. The cancellation of the president's executive order on...

artificial intelligence, including requiring companies to file reports to the government about risks that their AI systems could help countries or terrorists make weapons of mass destruction. And Andreessen was very happy about this, said, stick a fork in it, it's over. Yeah, okay, we'll see how that all works out. But good note on your part. All right, let's take a minute to hear from one of our esteemed sponsors.

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In addition to these tax cuts, in addition to the tariffs, there is also mass deportation, which he's announced he's going to do on day one using the military. All of these have economic implications.

All of these would drive if they actually happen. And if they happen in close proximity, inflation is going to go nuts. No, no. And he's created all these expectations that all he's got to do is bark some motors in the oval and all your car payments drop. He's also wiping out the American auto industry, by the way, by going after the EV tariffs. The biggest gift to the Chinese auto worker in the history of time.

So, yeah, yeah, I actually think there's going to be this is your earlier point, which I agree with. There's going to be more. I think we're having the short term sugar high based on rose colored expectations. I think we're actually going to have more economic pain and that'll that'll things can fold in on him quickly politically because of all those expectations.

And the idea that he would straighten everything out. So we will see what the half-life is of this fraud. It's the easiest case in the world for Democrats because they can turn it around and make the same case that was made against them, which is you guys promised you were going to lower costs. Right. Guess what? I'm still paying $3.75 a gallon for gas.

And you guys are in charge. And you said you were going to fix this and you haven't. Fire the crowd that's running the show. Yeah, yeah. No, the wheel of democracy can be brutal when it rolls over you, but it keeps rolling and it can roll over them as well. And remember, he's not running again.

So you've got other people who have a much more longer term interest. Right. Yeah. Oh, don't think that plotting hasn't started. I know Republicans are thinking about where's the Trump turn going to be inside the party midterm wipeout.

And he got folks in the House thinking, you know, we finally got a majority, which is a lot more fun in the House. How do we hold it now in a midterm where we're probably going to get clocked? What do we do about this? So, you know, the calculations quietly have already begun. The mitigating factor here is a president who's willing to use every tool at his disposal to bring people to heels.

And, you know, that's what putting all of these loyalists together.

qualified or not in these key, key positions in the Justice Department, in regulatory agencies and so on. We'll do from, you know, witness the Bezos example of the Post canceling their editorial in favor of Harris two weeks before the election while his people are meeting with Trump on his other enterprises.

You know, I think that the thing we're not factoring in completely is just how far is Trump and his people willing to go?

in terms of using that leverage that other presidents have been, you know, more skittish about using to try and bring news organizations to heel, businesses to heel, law firms to heel. Well, how about lawmakers too? I mean, Mike Johnson, news network, Mike Johnson's majority, you know, and, and speakership, uh, he hinges on Trump's continued support, you know,

You know, that's why Johnson's flying on the Air Force Two to the UFC fight, hanging out with Kid Rock and RFK Jr. Yeah, a nice boy from Shreveport, Louisiana, hanging out with Kid Rock and company Madison Square Garden. You know, it's because he needs Trump's support to keep his power in a very narrowly divided house. Let's dive in on the mass deportations, because that's the scariest sentence ever.

other than a politicized Justice Department, you know, it's going to be Bobby Kennedy and bizarro evil reverse over there. And that, I think, in many ways is where the most damage could be done. So what they talked about, and again, I'm not normalizing them, but I think context is important. They talked about using the right now. One of the problems is when they intercept people at the border, they have nowhere to hold them. So they let them out pending their trial.

Um, and some never come back. So they're talking about using the military to build, and this is a chilling phrase, you know, uh, camps, detention camps, detention camps. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Now I think when the average American hears mass deportation is like troops on the street and he's made some scary noises about that kind of stuff. Now, us military is 40% of color. I don't know if rifleman Gonzalez is really going to want to be in that point, a grandmother out of a house in East LA, uh,

But how much of this do you think they can actually do? You're going to have all the blue state mayors and governors saying not here.

You're going to have all the military leaders against it. They never see the U.S. military as a tool for domestic order. There's this craziness about the Insurrection Act, which doesn't really apply to this because there's no insurrection other than the one he helped fulmate, but that's over. There will be a lot of noise. There will be new uniforms and sirens, and Elon will inspect some troops. I mean, it's going to be a comic opera. But what do you think they can actually do other than have the Army build some...

camps that ICE can put people into. They apprehended the border. One thing that you said I think that we should drill down on here is, is this a fight that he actually thinks he profits from? If the blue state mayors and governors resist, you know, I actually think he thinks that strengthens him.

rhetorically, just operationally when he's held accountable to actually do anything is where it gets sticky. I think that the issue of how the military is used is going to be significant, and it's obviously one of the reasons why he wants Hegseth and people who are willing to

you know, overrule these norms in positions of responsibility. That'll be controversial. But, Jaymar, don't you think of all the fights he's picking, this is probably one that he feels most comfortable with? He does, because he thinks that the voters are on his side when it comes to this. And he thinks that there's an appetite for it. And to some extent, there is an appetite for cracking down on the border. I think we're

We're at a moment in American history like we have been so many times in which the public is sort of uneasy after a surge of immigration and they want and they want some some mitigation. And I think he's going to try and carry through. Here's my big question on this is how much does Trump just crave the perception of success when it comes to this? That's right. That's what he'll try to do because that's easier.

Can Trump be satisfied with, you know, some limited roundup of the folks who have committed crimes and who are here illegally? And you send in some ICE agents and you get the television cameras there for it and you get some tough looking guys and you send them back home. Is that going to be sufficient for Trump, who really cares mostly about TV and the perception of everything, right? That to me is the great question. How much has Trump invested in

in the actual substance of mass roundups? And how much does he just crave the idea of a victory on this on TV?

Yeah, yeah. Right. And the pivot from stories with Trump thundering about how we're going to straighten it out and I'm a tough guy. The stories about the eight year old kid with asthma who dies in the back of an ice car. Trump is like the rich jerk who walks into a fancy restaurant and starts complaining. My soup is cold. The waiter's too slow. I hate the decor. And they say, OK, fine. You're now in charge of the restaurant.

And the next day he's got a knife fight in the kitchen. The provisioners don't show up. There's a power failure. You know, can he do any of this? And I think he likes the rhetoric better than the action because he's

He's going to have a very hostile bureaucracy and everything else, like this stupid Elon Vivick thing. We tried that in California when Arnold was elected. California Performance Review. We had a lot of great ideas. Good luck with the bureaucracy. When Elon says, fire everybody at the Ag Department, replace them with drones, we don't need 8,000 land agents. Good luck. It'll be a 10-year pilot program. They've scheduled the report to be issued in the summer of 2026.

Which I don't know any Republican who's probably going to want that report issued then. But but on your point, you keep raising this point about bureaucracy, Mike. I think that one of the things to watch for is this is it schedule F, but this plan that he had implemented that Biden canceled to turn, you know, 40 or 50 thousand civil service jobs, that next strata of bureaucracy into political appointees.

And, you know, whether they have the capacity to fill those positions quickly or not. I think if that thing gets implemented, you're going to see a mass exodus happening.

Of talent. Yes, exactly. Technical talent. Bridge inspectors. You know, instead somebody's brother-in-law. Yeah. Biden guys put it back. They put some safeguards in it. Made it stickier and hard to undo. But the point is, we'll take it. They're going to try to run roughshod on personnel. Then they're going to find out they don't have any people. But anyway, go ahead, Jim. Whether it's personnel or the Elon-Vac-Doge scheme...

Forget 2026. This stuff is going to be tied up in the courts until 2036, right? Right, exactly. Any mass effort to sort of undo the modern bureaucracy is going to be fought at every level in the courts. It's going to take forever and a day. By the time it's resolved, you're going to have a new president. Elon's going to quit and get bored. He's going to find out it's not like Twitter. You don't fire everybody named Charlie with one email.

I want to be calm. I want to be sober about this. And you guys are making all the right points. One out of two isn't bad. That's where I'm going for it. Yeah, we are hacks on tap. You say Jay Marty cares about the stock market and he cares about television.

I don't think that's true when it comes to the Justice Department and the FBI. I don't think it's true when you talk about reprisals against people who he thinks are political enemies of his. I don't think he views that in the same category. I think he views that as a mission. And remember, he's not running for anything again.

So he doesn't have that disciplining effect. I think the skidding of the stock market will hit him hard if that happens. And one of the reasons they're going to want to rush these tax cuts through and this deregulation on all fronts is to try and juice the thing. But I do worry about that. And the Gates thing was a really flashing red light thing.

uh, you know, on all of that. So as we wrap up the, the lunar scape here, meanwhile, over Democrat headquarters, Trump overreaching nervous Republicans, midterms coming up fast, traditionally bad in the midterm for the new president. What are you hearing in the, uh,

in the Soviet halls there, the Democratic Party, about how they organize their army. I know we're both on the Rahm Emanuel bandwagon. What's up? I don't know. I don't know what's going on in the Soviet halls. You should ask Tulsi Gabbard what's going on in the Soviet halls. I'm not an expert on that. Yeah, it's

she's a full general. I floated the Rahm Emanuel thing last week. Uh, I don't know what he's going to do or where his interests lie. There are people who are talking to him about other things, uh, in public life that he's probably pondering, uh, over there, over sushi at the ambassador's residence in Tokyo. Uh, but, um, uh,

and that got the, you know, you got the expected blowback, uh, you know, uh, from some quarters of the left, uh, on that. Now I don't, so I don't know what's going to happen with that. Martin O'Malley, uh,

the former governor of Maryland has, and a former presidential candidate has thrown his hat in the ring, uh, for this. And that seems like a serious bid on his part. Yes. Just don't ask him about the wire. He went nuts in the New York times. You see that he tried to end the interview. Well,

What are you hearing? Go to Tokyo. You're close. Break some news here. Yeah, me and General MacArthur, we shall return. Although, actually, that was pretty good. Look, I think that there are people who are interested in the DNC who are running for DNC chair.

There have been obviously Martin O'Malley, the former governor of Maryland, Ken Martin, the state dem chairman in Minnesota. You probably see a couple others. Then there's the category of folks who are thinking about it, who people are sort of nudging, who I think could be capable DNC chairs. I just am not sure that they want to put the work in, guys. The constituency here is insane.

party chairs in every state and committee members from every state. It's not a glamorous job when it comes to getting the job. And I think that creates challenges when you're, say, the sitting ambassador to Japan or when you're in a cabinet already or when you're a former national chair or, you know, so

like that yourself, will you want to make 47 phone calls a day trying to get the support of the Idaho Democratic state chair? That's a bit, that's a challenge. The Rahm suggestion on my part was predicated on the notion that you kind of have, this is an extraordinary challenge and you have to kind of blow up the model and have someone who has a

high-level strategic fundraising, organizational messaging skills, and the ability to appear on television and be a face of the opposition to Trump and the Republicans. But there would be a scrap over...

among different factions of the party over that. And it may be that people decide at best not to fight that battle here. That's best fought in the presidential primaries of 2000 and, uh, uh, and 20, uh, eight. Uh, and you know, we'll see how that turns out, but listen, we're going to have a lot more on this and other things. We never got to Joe and Mika's, uh, summit with, uh, Trump at Mar-a-Lago. We should get back to that, but it is reflective of bread now in Helsinki. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. The Dems need a Generalissimo, and he's the guy, and they need a Patton, and boy, would he be set up for a huge win, because they can do well. So I'd put up with the Idaho chairman if I were him. Well, I've been pushing it, too, with no impact. Well, we're used to that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay, let's take a break right here for a word from our sponsor, and we'll be right back.

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Mike Murphy, Chris has a question for you. Hey, Hacks. This is Chris from Seattle. Can you explain what the hell is happening with the Harris campaign continuing to reach out for more donations? I happily contributed to the Harris campaign, but post-election, it sure seems unlikely that they're going to win considering they just lost.

I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on this particular issue. Thanks for everything. Well, these things are big machines, Chris. And in the last week, nobody's saying, well, cancel that rally. We might wind up $50 million in the hole. They're trying to win. I don't think it was necessarily the...

The most brilliantly financially controlled campaign, we don't know. And it's a little murky what kind of debt is left. But it's not an uncommon thing. But, you know, they're doing the typical thing, which is a loss. So take a look at how the $1.5 billion with a B was spent, $100,000 to light up the sphere in Las Vegas.

Well, it's a pretty cool sphere. So I don't know. I don't really want to get the details because I don't know anything. At EBPolitics.org, we did put out a report on Michigan where we know a lot about how money was spent and the difference between Slapkin who won and Harris who lost on some of the key issues based on polling we did. You can check that out. But not untypical. And I know a lot of people are grumbling about it, but I think it's time to put the...

the focus forward in the Democratic Party to the midterms. I think they had some debt, Jay Mark, didn't they? Yes, they have some. It's a little murky, though. Okay, next question on voicemail for David.

Hey, Max. This is Trevor in Kansas City. I'm curious to get your reaction to a new piece in The Atlantic saying New York and California are expected to lose eight electoral votes in 2030, while Florida and Texas will gain eight. How do you think that might change the calculus for the Democratic Party moving forward, especially because Kamala wouldn't have...

even had a chance to win if that were the case this year. All right. Thank you. This also implicates some of the battleground states that Democrats were relying on this year as a firewall, the northern industrial states. And we'll see how they fare in the redistricting, but likely to lose

electoral votes. It really does speak to the Democratic Party having to reorient itself and become more competitive in places that it's seating. Trump won, like, what, 90% J-Mart of the counties in this country? Yeah. And you can't just be blue dots in a select number of states.

and expect to win national elections. It also has implications for Congress. So these are big issues for the Democratic Party. The initial question is how they approach the 2028 election.

campaign and what is the messaging and what is the method of the presidential candidate. But obviously, population is shifting. It's shifting to the Sun Belt. And Democrats need to be competitive in these states and not see them.

Yeah, they got to change the battlefield. If you get the messaging and candidate right, the Electoral College will work itself out. But it's a real thing. Okay, Taylor has a question for Jaymar. Taylor writes, I'm a millennial Republican holding local office.

Good for you, Taylor. And I'm horrified at what's happened to my party in recent years. Tell me about it. Does Trump's re-election mean the permanent end of the Reagan-Bush GOP? Will the party realign itself after Trump's final term ends? Or are people like Murphy and I totally screwed? What do you think, Jay Mart? Totally screwed.

Be gentle, be gentle. Murphy's sitting right here. Hop in that time machine, pal. What? Hop in that time machine. Hello, Portugal. If you want to get a taste of the Reagan-the Republican Party, then there's only one way, and that's looking back, not forward, because Trumpism is not going to dissipate once Trump himself is gone, because the power of

of his, you know, populist nationalist appeals is not lost on other folks in the party. It's not a Trump thing. It's a marketplace thing. Voters like this, or at least, you know, enough of them do to sustain his control of the party. And I just, I'm skeptical that that's ever going to

Now, what could happen is if Trump especially collapses in a heap in 27 and 28, you could see somebody emerge that tries to fuse both Trumpism and the old guard in ways.

Yeah, that's what I think, the latter. Who can play both ends of that keyboard? It's sort of hard to find that person, guys. Well, the other thing about this is there are, I mean, we're going to find out when we do the autopsy of this election that there were not an insignificant number of voters in these very closely contested states who came out and voted for Trump and left.

and didn't vote for other people. So there is a, you know, the Republicans have done better with Trump on the ballot. Obviously they do better in general elections now, but they do better with Trump on the ballot. And the second thing is that it assumes a static Democratic Party that doesn't begin to encroach on Republican gains and force Republicans to figure out how to

you know, take back some of these suburban voters and so on. So, you know, these, this is a dynamic process, but I agree with you that whatever emerges is not going to be what went before. That's, that's never what happens, you know, it was always evolving.

Yeah. I'm bringing back the wigs. That's my master plan. More details to come. You and I need wigs. I'm doing a double thing. It's going to be the bald coalition. Powerful across all regions and demography. The bald connection. That's the way to get ahead. Anyway.

Well, enjoy Hong Kong there, J-Mart, and go to Tokyo. Flush out Rob. Yes, thanks for staying up late for us. Apologize to the lovely Betsy to us for keeping her up here. Any sacrifice is necessary to make for Axe and Murph. She will happily do it. She is incredible. Thanks, guys. Safe travels, my friend. We'll see you stateside. Adios. Take care.

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