Trump’s American Carnage Inauguration Sequel With Marc Caputo
44:58 Share

In the fall of 2014, a group of hackers pulled off the biggest Hollywood heist of all time. They broke into computer servers belonging to Sony Pictures and released hundreds of thousands of top-secret documents. The attack would cause an international incident, upend thousands of lives, and change the movie industry forever. From Spotify and the Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Brian Raftery, and this is The Hollywood Hack. Listen on the Big Picture feed.

This episode is brought to you by Amazon Prime. Here's the thing about Prime. Whatever you're into, it makes it even better. I love, because we watch a lot of Prime movies for the rewatchables, I love being able to pop up the x-ray thing that tells you what actor is in what scene. I love that. I love being able to rent movies that just came out or buy them, if I'm excited to do that. From streaming to shopping,

It's on Prime. Visit amazon.com slash prime to get more out of whatever you're into. This episode is brought to you by Viore. I love sports. I know you do too. I also know that lots of you exercise, but if you're like me and my wife, the beloved sports gal, you're sick and tired of ugly, uncomfortable workout gear, especially, you know, I do a lot of walking. I walk around LA. I make calls. I listen to podcasts. Here are two words that will change everything. Viore clothing.

a line of active wear that is unbelievable. The best thing about Viore is you can lounge around in it. You can work out in it. You can go outside. You can go shopping down in your local wherever, and you never feel like you're either underdressed or overdressed. You're just comfortable. You can wear it when you're training, traveling, lounging around the house. Go get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet.

Here's the deal. Our listeners get 20% off their first purchase at viore.com slash Simmons. Once again, V-U-O-R-I.com slash Simmons.

Hi, I'm Tara Palmieri, and this is Somebody's Gotta Win. We're recording just moments after the inauguration of Donald Trump. I'm here in D.C., and it may be freezing outside, but it is warm and chic here at the new Neds Club, overlooking the White House and the Washington Monument. There's nobody better to unpack Trump's big speech than one of Washington's top reporters, Mark Caputo of Axios.

Mark, thanks for being here. I'm surprised you even made it after your night. You clearly couldn't even get your wristband off. I can't get the alcohol fumes out of my breath. Yeah, I went to the Uber party and they have this wristband that's irremovable.

Right. Basically, they didn't want the riffraff to come in. No, they want the branding on you forever. I guess. There's Uber, there's X. And I've been too remiss. I had to do a CNN hit this morning early, and I've been too remiss to find a way to cut it off. The point is, he's been out all night, and he can't get it together. And I'm too old for that. But luckily, he is one of the top reporters in Washington, so it matters what he thinks, even when he's on fumes.

I will be on CNN tonight before him, though. No, I think I'm going to try to tie. Okay, we'll see how that goes. We'll do the two Italians talking over each other. That'll be fun. We'll try not to do that during this show. But Mark, okay, top takeaways. Here's mine. I want to just speak before you, obviously. Like, that was American Carnage, the sequel, right? Everyone said that Trump was going to have a more unifying speech, that it was going to be all about, like, building consensus. But this speech was really just, like,

Biden years were hell. They were terrible. It was American wasteland. And now I'm going to save you without the words American carnage. And the next few years will be gilded and golded and dipped in whatever. And it's going to be great. He's going to fix inflation. Not really sure how. But there were a lot of promises made and, you know,

I guess it wasn't like as angry, like his face wasn't as angry. He didn't seem quite as, but it was his greatest hit. Like it wasn't as, I don't, it didn't feel quite as like severe as the first time around. He was subdued. He was subdued, but he's been normalized. And so maybe that's why it feels different. Well, that's just it is, yeah, it is American Carnage part two. In part, it's a little more rosy than his first inaugural speech.

But in the end, one of the things that we kept getting criticized in the media from the left was, oh, don't normalize Donald Trump. Don't normalize Donald Trump. The voters have. This is Donald Trump, despite his staff's

Herculean and effective efforts of persuading other reporters, this is going to be a different Donald Trump. This is going to be a different speech. Have they really been telling you that? No, they didn't tell me that. But you were saying- I keep reading it and I'm like, yeah, right. Who's writing the speech? Stephen Miller. Okay. Well, and the other thing is like, have you paid attention to Donald Trump? Donald Trump always usually gives two speeches. This was a little different. The one that staffs writes and then the one that he wants to say. Here, it was a blend of both. It was a well-written speech. It hit

the notes he wanted to hit because yes, he didn't riff, which is weird. It's weird to hear him not riff. Yeah, that is true. And he was, he was in this case, disciplined. He was in his first inaugural as well though.

Like he held it to the allotted time. Right. And I need to find the quotes. He was still in shock that he had actually won, I think, the first time around. Yes. And I think this one, they felt that they were going to win this race since about March. And. Well, they had good reason to believe that in June when Biden started like glitching on stage. But, you know, still. This is John Anzalone, who was Biden's pollster. I was talking to him about this issue of the

the degree to which Donald Trump has been normalized. I said, what do you think of the speech? He said, that may be the best speech he's ever given. And

Anzalone says, clearly written to give America a patriotic hard-on. That is our frequent guest on our show as well. And obviously he's very close to Joe Biden. There have been reports that like when Joe Biden was cratering after the debate, John couldn't even get his polls to Biden to explain to him like just how bad it was that he had like a, what did they say? Like a 4% chance of actually winning at that point. No, it was a little higher than that. But

But yeah, John is another outspoken Italian. But what you're saying right there is a great example of, if we just kind of rewind some of the media narrative about Donald Trump and about Joe Biden, a lot of the things that were said about Donald Trump during his first presidency, during the presidency, is that he's headstrong and he doesn't listen to other people. He creates an information structure where it's just surrounded by yes-men.

He's going to pardon. Wait, don't all presidents do that? Well, that was heavily tilted toward Donald Trump. And what do we see with Joe Biden? All of those criticisms about Donald Trump were true of Biden, but it's not like it was really reported in real time. Now that Biden's lost, now you're seeing the New York Times come out like, oh yeah, he was too old and six people knew about it and controlled access. Yeah, and actually never met with Janet Yellen like ever. You know what I mean? No big deal in the middle of basically, I don't know if you'd say it was a recession, but definitely an economic downturn. Yeah.

Joe Biden was in part chased out of the presidential race because the toll inflation was having on his poll numbers. And obviously, he wasn't physically up to the job. No, he glitched out, and that's why he was forced out. They were like, everything that the American people had seen was finally like, Washington got it. They're like, we knew this all along. The background radiation of inflation cannot be underestimated. Right.

Right. But the question is, like, how does Trump really fix that? You know, you can't go to the Fed and make them turn the rates down. That'll also cause more inflation. Like, also tariffs. I mean— We didn't really hear tariffs in his speech, did we? No, we didn't, actually. We heard a lot about foreign policy, a lot about foreign policy. Manifest Mars?

Um, that's the ultimate foreign policy. Yes, exactly. That's an Elon Musk. I already, um, you know, Panama. How, why, why were we stupid enough to give Panama? We're going to get, I guess it's all about expansion, American exceptionalism, creating the idea that like we deserve to take whatever we want. Um,

And, you know, obviously he wants to change the name of the Mount McKinley to from it was Denali Mountains that Obama changed it back to like its its original native name, Native American name. And now Trump wants to bring it back again.

And this is obviously like another unwinding of a legacy and just sort of showing like, you know, I can put my cultural stamp on whatever I want. And it's a bit of a slap in the face. I think the whole entire inauguration was a slap in the face to all of his Democratic predecessors. And they were literally sitting there like Biden and Obama. And it's like everything sucked before me. It was terrible. And then they basically had to eat it. I think to your point about Trump's...

talking about Panama, about Greenland, you know, renaming the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America. And what I was saying about, and what we were saying about how Trump is the new normal, is Trump is very much a reincarnation of these frontier era presidents. He captures that frontier spirit. He even talked about the frontier. So when he mentions, and he had a kind of a

for lack of a better term, like a well-written passage about how our ancestors

a nation out of the wilderness, and now we have to look to the star. Yeah, we forced the ones that are natives out. But yeah, it suggests American strength and American determination. That's part of our story. Manifest destiny, but this is who he is. Let's forget the Trail of Tears, but sure. This is who he is. This is who he is. We deserve this. It's masculine energy. It's like, claim what's yours, take your land, build your fiefdom. He's almost like a feudal lord. I don't know. He's a classic of...

Not a modern, but a classic American president in that mold. I mean, think Andrew Jackson. I'm sure he wants his legacy to be like, I expanded America's territories. You might be right. I mean, he's kind of talking about that. He's kind of saying that. But is he going to treat them like they're Puerto Rico and Guam? I've not been to Guam. I've been to Puerto Rico, and there's a lot of understandable gripes about folks in Puerto Rico about the way we treat them. One thing is, at a certain point, there is going to be

a crisis point or an inflection point of Trump, the non-interventionist, no-wars guy.

and Trump, the imperial president, who wants to expand. I mean, ultimately, unless you find some very clever way to buy Greenland, which Denmark says is not for sale, I don't really see how that happens. I mean, he seems to be really serious about it. His ambassador, who I know, Ken Howery, the ambassador to Denmark, like he's actually talking to them about it. It is a strategic piece of land, obviously. So is Panama. Right. Okay. So,

Trump is obviously, it's weird because he never talked about this on the campaign trail, by the way. He didn't. He talked about it in 2019 and 2018, and then it went into remission. And then all of a sudden, the New York Post had the great headline, not Monroe Doctrine, but Donro Doctrine.

All of a sudden, Trump as the, again, the sort of modern Monroe Doctrine era president is here. It's interesting because like the only other country that's really, well, the only other two countries that are trying to really expand their territory, well, three, they're okay. There are a few out there that are trying to expand their territories. But China, you know, Russia, and now us, and there are a few others, but, you know, it's

It's interesting that this is a priority for Trump right now. I don't want to say it's impossible for me to see him doing it, but I know that I think it was around 2019 when Marco Rubio, then a Florida senator, now about to be Secretary of State, was one of Trump's top advisors on Latin American policy to Trump.

And some people were trying to persuade Trump to engage in military action in Venezuela to topple Nicolas Maduro, the dictator, and allow for Juan Guaido, who was essentially who should have ascended to the presidency, to take over. And Trump was sort of attracted to the idea of military action in Venezuela. And it was Rubio who sort of talked him out of it. And so...

There have been times where he has considered these sorts of military adventures and hasn't done it. I just... He wanted to do military action in America. That's true. Well, he's going to now with immigration. Totally. His executive order that he mentioned, and I know we've talked about it and his critics have lost their minds over it, but I do think it's a little underplayed, the idea of these executive orders that he mentioned in the speech.

clearly, according to what they've been telling us, I haven't read the order yet, give the president the complete authority to use the military to enforce our borders and immigration policy. That's different. That's not just ICE agents going in and doing raids. That's like actual... That's troops at the border. Troops at the border, but troops in the cities too? Maybe. It's been reported that there's going to be some major raids in like... Chicago. Chicago, exactly. Yeah.

Now, I just wonder how this is going to play out. Like, is this if the press sees like families being broken up, maybe the sentiment, which is actually largely in favor right now in America of deportations. Well, more than 50 percent of people say they want to see deportations, according to your publication, Axios. But when you get in the specifics in that poll. Yeah.

It starts to lose more support. Right. People who are already in detention. People like the general idea that if you were here illegally, you should leave. Right. But, you know, it's kind of that good idea. Okay, well, how do you do the execution? But Trump is going to want to have a show of force. Like, he's going to want to show that he is making good on his promise. It's just like, if it's too forceful, will it blow back in his face? It's not like these ICE agents can be produced. Like, he produces his own presidency. Right.

Right. One of the things I've grown increasingly hesitant to do with Donald Trump is kind of predict how his actions are going to influence public opinion. It's proven to be a fool's errand. Right. And also, it's like if there truly is a flood of information and like, as Steve Bannon said, a tsunami in which... Flood the zone with shit. Reporters like us will not be able to keep up. And I have to tell you, having covered the first administration as a White House correspondent, it was, I felt like...

Every day I was just being whipped around. I had whiplash. It was hard to keep up. And a lot of it is just him trying to get you to pay attention to his rhetorical flourishes, his tweets, his craziness, and then what's actually happening. And what was actually happening was not a lot, if you think about it, right? Even, like, I had Ken Cuccinelli on the show last week, and he was like, Trump could have done more on the border, and he didn't. But what he was very loud about the border...

So, you know, that's the question with Trump. Like, how much of this is rhetorical flourishing? How much of this is just shows of force, the idea of military strength, but then, like, he's producing it for the media. This is a guy who had a hit show. And how much of this is real action? Well, one thing that we need to keep clear or be clear about is from everything we've seen is Donald Trump 2.0, Trump 47, the 47th president,

is a more evolved version of Trump 45. Like he knows what he's doing this time. Trump 45 took office. He had Steve Bannon. He had Jared Kushner, his son-in-law. He had Reince Priebus, his chief of staff. And they were all in a murder-suicide pact, stabbing each other in the back and using White House staff to...

undermine each other. But that's what Trump likes. No, not anymore. This White House, at least currently, does not have that. You have a unified command structure, at least so far. But then Elon on the outside kind of like blasting off. Remember, Trump always has different concentric circles, right? Or different silos. But he has in the White House a unified command structure currently that is essentially half of his campaign team, his upper echelon campaign team. And then on the political side, he has the other half.

And those two show a sign of working hand in glove. When Donald Trump took office in January of 2017, he didn't have 100, 200 executive orders ready to go. He's got that now. He's got Stephen Miller, his top advisor, who has been in his

his lab cooking all the stuff up. Right. So I think it is now way more serious and could be, should be, and it's likely to be way more effective than anything that Trump 45 tried to do. But we're not going to see 10 to 20 million people deported on day one, which is technically right now. You literally can't do that. You just don't have the infrastructure to be able to do that. Totally. It'll be even hard to deport a million. But tomorrow, if there are raids, well, when you listen to this, it might be today. I think...

you're going to see, you might see public sentiment shift. We'll have to see if Trump can actually execute on these promises. But let's talk about those promises for a minute because he really went over them in his speech. Now, I know you were telling me that you go on YouTube to find out how to fix things. You're like trying to find out the other day how to fix a washing machine. If you were going to make a how to fix America by Donald Trump based on this speech, what would you say? Number one, deportations. Number two, deportation. Number three, deportations.

Fight the woke agenda, right? I think he mentioned transgenderism or whatever the phrase is. Take back our cultural heritage, so to speak. Rename

Mount Denali to Mount McKinley. So that would be my top five. What do you have? I think it would be... Of course, I cheated. The three of them are... Yeah, that would actually be the top three. Yeah, I think that those are three. He said, you know, fix the economy, obviously. Bring back American jobs. Stop foreign wars.

He said, you know. Unless you want to take over Greenland, of course. Maybe we could use, you know, military force for that one. You know, I don't have any notes in front of me, but those are the ones that really stuck out. Manifest Mars. I think we mentioned that as well. Right. Elon Musk was loving that.

too. Yeah, exactly. So that means more exploration. That means obviously more research and development. I mean, he did, the guy did start Space Force. Not really sure how that's going under Biden. So I'm sure he's going to want to pick that one. Not Space Force. Was it called Space Force? Yeah, Space Force. Yeah. Under, I actually met somebody who was in the Space Force back then. And it was like,

Like, it was really weird. It's like you've decided you're in the military that you're going to switch over to Space Force. But now it might be cool. Like, maybe they'll be able to get some recruits. At the time, it was a little fringe. I mean, Trump was kind of in the right on the main. Oh. It is the next frontier. I mean, it's been the next frontier since, what, Star Trek? Totally. Okay. Also, basically, NDEI, right? Right. That's Wokajan. Fine. I met his...

The guy who's running the anti-DEI program within the Department of Justice, Leo Terrell, last night at the Turning Point Ball. Interesting guy. That is a very Washington statement right there. Yeah, yeah. He had a hat on that said Leo 2.0, so he's about to go wild, I guess you could say. You know, it doesn't end there. He's obviously said he's going to change the media so that there's free and fair speech, but that I think really means like the media is bending to his knees.

right now, bending on their knees right now, trying to make him happy. So what do you think free speech means to Donald Trump? Well, free speech to Donald Trump means speech he likes generally. It's notable that Trump had in the front row, he had Zuckerberg from Meta slash Facebook. He has Elon Musk, owner of Twitter. He has the head of TikTok, whose name escapes me at the moment.

Chew, I think. Chew. Yeah. So he has the people who are basically in charge of delivering content. And then he had- Many of whom were Biden's old pals and donors. Right, well- Now his besties. Life comes at you fast, man. And he also had what? You had Google. The Google CEO is sort of in tow with him today. He has Jeff Bezos. Amazon controls a lot of the information storage mainframes. It's-

It is an utter concentration of the means of delivering information that is essentially

hand in glove with Donald Trump. It is a remarkable amount of power. And they're all shifting rightward. You saw, you know, Mark Zuckerberg saying he's not going to do fact checking anymore. And a lot of these corporations are, they feel like they're unshackled. They don't have to, you know, they don't have to support DI programs anymore. They feel like they can be free after years of feeling like their corporate policy had to reflect like

the sentiments of the last administration. Right. I mean, they're also following public sentiment. Public sentiment doesn't seem to be there anymore. And I think we underestimate sometimes the effect that the media and the government played during the pandemic in

declaring certain things disinformation when they weren't. And there is perhaps no greater damage to our credibility in the media and the government's credibility when it came to health scares like saying, oh, this virus that erupted in a city where there's a virology lab

was natural. It came from some wet food market. Even though the bat is found like how many thousands or hundreds of miles south of it. Yeah, it was weird. They're making a coronavirus in the same city. Right. And this is where they're experimenting on the coronavirus. But then the government and the media coverage of that was like, oh, it's a conspiracy theory. Because Trump called it the Wuhan flu. Right. And it's just because Trump says it doesn't mean it's wrong. It doesn't mean it's right, clearly. He did at the same time tell people to drink disinfectant. So, you know.

Next message is here. You can't bet a thousand. So we in the press certainly didn't do ourselves any favors there. In fairness, I didn't cover coronavirus. I was working on Epstein, bigger problems. Fair, fair. But that is sort of a major sort of turning point in public sentiment and people who pay attention to how disinformation is framed. Another great example, when Politico did that terrible ill-fated headlines.

51 intelligence agents or former intelligence agents say that the Hunter Biden laptop was disinformation or bore the hallmarks of disinformation. Turns out that story was closer to disinformation because the Hunter Biden laptop appeared to be true. But then Facebook also pulled all stories down about the Hunter Biden laptop and I think Twitter did at the same time too. Correct. They punished the New York Post. It

It didn't help. I mean, Politico, my former employer, and I knew at the time, didn't do itself any favors. I was covering Biden at the time, and I remember coming to my editor and saying, hey, we need to write about the Hunter Biden laptop. And I was told this came from on high at Politico. Don't write about the laptop. Don't talk about the laptop. Don't tweet about the laptop. And the only thing Politico wound up writing was that piece that

called it disinformation, which charitably could be called misinformation at the least. Yeah, I mean, I had a hard time. You know, I wrote some pretty serious reporting on Hunter Biden, which actually ended up getting him prosecuted, the story on the gun. Yeah, and you consulted with me because you did the original report on the gun. And you came to me like, how do I write about this? I'm like, honestly, I don't know. Yeah, because it was hard to get it done. You figured it out. I spent three months on it. I went to the

laptop shop and I did all of the reporting in Delaware and I did all of that. But yeah, it had to be like much, it had to be a hundred percent nailed down. I had everything, you know, the police reports, every, like I, you know, I'm a solid reporter, but I do wonder if it could have, would have been published a little quicker. It was a different type of story. Well, it was the beginning of his administration. It was a honeymoon period. You know what I mean? Since we're spilling tea about our former employer.

I still have a copy of the story on my external hard drive. In 2019, a rival presidential Democratic campaign of Joe Biden's gave to me the tax lien, the oppo research, the tax lien on Hunter Biden for the period of time that he worked at Burisma. And I wrote what would have been a classic story saying, you know, the former vice president's son was slapped with a

big tax lien for the period of time that he worked for this controversial Ukrainian oil concern or natural gas concern, which is haunting his father on the campaign trail. That story was killed by the editors, and they gave no explanation for that either. So that general experience, obviously the public doesn't know about those things, but as a reporter having witnessed the way in which

We just get called the terrible mainstream media. It's like, you don't understand the process there. We also don't understand the dumb decision of cowardly editors. The man above us when we're trying to do our jobs. You know what I mean? We're just looking for scoops, man. The big bias is toward a good story. Save on Cox Internet when you add Cox Mobile and get fiber-powered internet at home and unbeatable 5G reliability on the go.

So whether you're playing a game at home or attending one live,

You can do more without spending more. Learn how to save at Cox.com slash internet. Cox internet is connected to the premises via coaxial cable. Cox mobile runs on the network with unbeatable 5G reliability as measured by UCLA LLC in the U.S. to age 2023. Results may vary, not an endorsement of the restrictions apply. The NFL playoffs are better with FanDuel because right now new customers can bet $5 and get $300 in bonus bets if you win. That's $300 in bonus bets if you win your first $5 bet.

FanDuel, an official sportsbook partner of the NFL. 21 plus and present in select states. First online real money wager only. $5 first deposit required. Bonus issued as non-withdrawable bonus bets which expire seven days after receipt. Restrictions apply. See terms at sportsbook.fanduel.com. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER.

This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. The new year brings new health goals and wealth goals. Protecting your identity is an important step. LifeLock monitors millions of data points per second. If your identity is stolen, LifeLock's restoration specialists will fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Resolve to make identity, health, and wealth part of your new year's goals with LifeLock. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit LifeLock.com slash podcast. Terms apply.

Let's get back to the shock and awe of it all. Trump's going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. He's going to maybe sign some executive orders. Apparently, according to Politico, our old employer, they do some great reporting there, too, at the same time. Apparently, they were planning to hire at least 2,000 people by now to work in the administration, but they're at 1,000. And they've been working on a lot of executive orders, too.

Do you think, like, Americans are going to feel anything today or tomorrow? Maybe the rate, right? We talked about it in Chicago, but... I mean, maybe, but no, generally. I mean, government is a huge ship. Yeah. It takes a long time to turn it and to make a difference. The...

Politico's story or the story, I didn't read that one about the staffing. When I checked this a number of weeks ago, maybe a month ago about their pace of hiring, there are some people who think it's a problem in the now administration, some people who didn't. That's an open question is Trump certainly shot out of the cannon and had an historic number of these top level cabinet picks and under secretary picks. The question is, were more of those worker bees needed

to be hired and weren't, and I'm not sure. So whether they were in place or not,

Would that make a difference in people feeling a direct effect on their lives? Also not sure. Because the reality is there's only so much the president can do about inflation to the degree that people actually feel something that is related to government policy. Well, the tariffs can certainly drive up the prices of goods and possible raids on companies that are using a lot of immigrants. They might end up jacking up the prices for consumers and stuff like that. Although Ken Cuccinelli and I got in a big fight about that on the last show. Just check it out. But I want

want to go back to like things that stole the show at the inauguration right like there's always like the moments that you see so I think that Melania's hat in which it was unclear if she could actually kiss Donald Trump because he'd have to like knock her hat off I

off. I wonder. And he knew. He didn't try. Yeah, because he's a producer at heart. He air kissed her. Yeah, he air kissed her. So as a producer at heart, you know, he pecked at her. But I think the hat, it was like Bernie Sanders mittens at the last inauguration. Like, that sold the show. Chris Eliza, he's got a YouTube show. He made a good point. He said it was like, she looked like a French tourist at the inauguration. And I feel like he nailed it. So yeah, Chris, you definitely nailed that one. I mean, she looked

chic as we say she's a former model not a high fashion model but still she has been very high like she's not she wasn't dressed during the first administration as far as i know by like top designers i think she actually had to buy them from like off the rack which most like first ladies they would have their clothes made for for them because the trumps were like so toxic at the time and that was a known thing but i wonder if this time now that they've become more normalized as you mentioned in the culture if designers are going to start dressing melania again

I would imagine so. I saw on Twitter Oscar de la Renta, the designer, boasted and photographed, posted on social media on X,

Ivanka Trump in some sort of stunning gown, as I described that, and also Usha Vance, the now, is she the second lady? Yes. Sorry, I should know those. You should. I'll blame that on last night. Right. So I think, yeah, Melania's outfit stole the show. And you couldn't even see her eyes. It's like the whole Sphinx thing. She really is a cipher. That's her whole brand. It

it's unclear how she's going to even have a presence in the White House. And she didn't seem to be like, she didn't seem to like being First Lady the first time around. But maybe she feels more comfortable. Could you blame her? Yeah, I mean.

I know. I mean, they were pariahs. So maybe now that there's a more welcoming Washington and world to her and maybe people start dressing her and wanting to like share the fact that she's wearing their clothing. Um, I remember she wears like Dolce and Gabbana to Sicily. I was on that trip and I was like, damn, like she looked sick, but I think she did have to buy it off the rack. So maybe Melania gets her second, uh, her second chance at being a true fashion icon as, as first lady, like the rest of them have been. Well, I mean, for some reason she wasn't on the cover of Vogue. Hmm.

whereas other ones weren't. But also to your point, Snoop Dogg eight years ago had posted on social media, any rapper who performs for Donald Trump is essentially sellout. Oh, and he did it this time. Eight years later. But he's at the crypto ball, technically not performing for Trump, but we get the joke. Yeah. A lot of the people that were stars this weekend at one point hated Donald Trump, like Megyn Kelly and others. I could keep going, but-

the evolution when he has taken over the culture. But there was another thing that stole the show even bigger than that, except you wouldn't actually see it on the inauguration. And that is Biden's pardon 15 minutes before the inauguration started of basically his entire family. Valerie Biden, his sister, closest aide. Francis Biden, a lobbyist, broadcaster.

brother, James Biden, lobbyist brother, all from weirdly the date January 1st, 2014 until now. Why do you think it was that date? And oh, by the way, my thought is like,

This is not going to help with the Biden family narrative that Republicans have been pushing for so long. Like, why do you need a pardon, right? At the same time, Donald Trump has vowed justice. He wants to go after the Bidens and his perceived enemies. He feels like he's been prosecuted for the past four years and persecuted, as we know. And it was just an interesting choice. I feel like it upstaged Trump, but it was also just like...

It was just crazy. You know, like, I guess he, maybe he feels like he has to do it. Oh, clearly he does. We're in a cycle of escalation and counter-escalation. And it's interesting, four years ago, when this came up as an issue about, is this,

Donald Trump going to self-pardon or pardon family members, it was covered in the mainstream media as, oh, he's doing it to protect the criminality of his family. Right? That's how it was framed then. Now, some of those same media outlets are like, oh, Joe Biden is doing this to protect his family from politically motivated prosecutions.

There are two conversations. There's a red conversation and a blue conversation. They all do the same thing. That's the point. It appears to be. Everyone wants to say...

It's just, yeah, they all did the same, essentially. But it depends. I mean, I think the way that Trump dresses it up, though. I believe Biden is the first person to preemptively pardon or proactively pardon family members. And yet four years ago, when asked if Donald Trump should do it,

Joe Biden cast this as an issue of being abnormal. Now things have changed and certainly there are threats out there.

But the problem that we're in, again, is that cycle of accusation, counter-accusation, investigation, counter-investigation. I'm not sure the cycle's broken by this. Yeah, I didn't think the Republicans were going to give up on the Biden family. I don't know. They needed a bully pulpit, right? Or something to attack, a foil. What's the new foil? Who's the new foil? I mean, you mean as far as like a political rival? Yeah. The Democrats are so weak. Is it even worth beating them up?

I mean, it's always worth probably keeping your foot on the neck of your opponent. That's true. And I still think AOC has emerged as, if not the preeminent Democratic leader right now, one of them. Yeah. She's the most social media savvy. She got in front of the TikTok news, for instance. She has a large following. And I think she has the ability to be more of a transformational candidate than a lot of other conventional candidates out there.

She had a really good post this morning. See, there we go. She said, you know why I'm not going to the inauguration? Because I don't want to support a rapist. That is really strong shit you put on the internet, and that goes viral. Yeah, and she knew what she was doing, and obviously ABC was sued by Trump over it and decided to settle for using that word. I'm not even going to say, I don't want to get sued. So as ABC had initially pointed out,

The judge in the case had said that the finding of liability for sex abuse was tantamount to that crime. However, ABC then decided to settle and really put the rest of the media in kind of an interesting situation of almost having to realize that you're going to get sued by Donald Trump and your risk management department might wind up settling with him, even though you would probably prevail in a court of law. It's really a

It's a sticky wicket. I think it was more about just settling to have access and be able to cover the White House. No. You don't think so? Modern media companies are run by attorneys, by standards departments, which are their shadowy hand. Oh, yeah. I'm very well aware of standards departments. And to a degree, the human resources industrial complex. But I think more so now they're terrified of Trump and they would rather be on his good side. There's that too. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. So I actually think that has devalued those same groups of people, the HR, the standards. Well, I think it's obviously penetrated to them as well. Okay. On a lighter subject, the inauguration was a party this weekend. There were balls. There were events. Every corporate sponsor wanted a piece of the action of the Trump inauguration. This was not the case in 2017, okay? Right. After people were horrified, they were in shock.

I think Trump was also in shock, but corporates were like, we're not spending money on events. It did not feel like a party. You do not have all these big influencers out there mucking it up, stealing a show. I saw Jordan Peterson last night at the Turning Point Ball. I saw Amber Rose, who was rejected from the VIP section. I got in, though. I don't know how. I saw, you know, Ben Shapiro. Bearing the lead, Tara. Yeah, Ben Shapiro, Megyn Kelly, you know, just like all of these, like, there were others, too, who were kind of kid rock, you know,

People that you wouldn't expect were, well, no, maybe Kid Rock, but I guess they were celebrities on the right, but now they're sort of celebrities across the board. Well, again, Snoop Dogg performed here. Yeah, exactly. Carrie Underwood decided to perform. They wouldn't have been out there celebrating Trump in 2017. And you had...

major companies like on your hand uber x the free press now willing to sponsor yeah you know chevron etc they're all happy to be a part of the trump show trump has sort of re-established himself as a cultural figure yeah trump was a cultural figure who became a presidential candidate and then sort of an accidental president right to a degree and then he became vastly unpopular and uh

and clawed his way back. I mean, after January 6th, they were like, we're never touching him again. Corporates were like, we're done with him. We don't want to even give money to them. We don't want to give money to people who support him. And now, so much money is pouring over the transom from special interests, from corporate interests, from donors, that Trump's administration, or better said, Trump's political operation is on the way to raising as much, they project, as $500 million by June. That's insane. And there are cases, which I'd reported in Axios, where

I can't name the company. I was, I agreed not to name the company. A person was in the room where a company came in to Donald Trump and stroked a check to him. And he looked at it and then he pulled out their balance sheet. And he's like, you made this amount of money last year. And this is how much you're giving me here. And you're going to make more money over me. And by the way, where the fuck were you for four years? And dressed them down. Whoa. Can you say who it is? I can't. I agreed not to. Mark.

But apparently he's done this more than one time of telling people, where the fuck have you been for four weeks? Well, corporate tax breaks are up. The tax reform bill is coming up. So everyone's trying to make nice with Donald Trump. Also, you have the giant- Energy bill. The reconciliation package. Everything goes in that.

The energy, immigration. It's going to be stuffed with goodies for corporates, and that's why. And you have DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. And DOGE is now used as a verb. I don't want my project DOGED. People are saying that. Well, it's interesting. You know who got DOGED?

Mr. Vivek Ramaswamy. Apparently so. I heard he was just annoying. It was after that H-1B visa fight when he was saying that Americans need to, like, respect the nerd screech and not Zach from Saved by the Bell that, like, America's so obsessed with jocks and the cheerleaders. And I was thinking to myself, like... It's like, do you know who the Trump is? Yeah, he's a jock who married the pretty cheerleader model.

But yeah, so he has been basically quiet on Twitter ever since, although I thought he got some prime seating at the inauguration likely because he was a good surrogate on the campaign trail. But yeah. Well, that was shitty surrogate work there because while Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and to a degree Donald Trump agree

More than they disagree, apparently, on the H-1B visa issue. The base, the MAGA base, and Steve Bannon was the only one to really go out there, Laura Loomer, to say this shall not stand. But it's not just the MAGA base. Working class people, when they are presented with just the 10,000 foot view facts of how the H-1B visa system has been used.

They believe it's bad. It's anti-American. Yeah, they think it's a Trojan horse for cheap labor. Yep. And so that is something that Trump has. Trump was against the H-1B visa, although after the fight he signed with Elon Musk. He was also against TikTok before he was for it. Yeah. He's supple. That's the word. Trump is supple. Supple. Okay. Okay.

Subtle, maybe. I don't know. Well, we know the bank is, according to some reporting, is looking to be governor of Ohio after he was passed over for the Senate appointment for the open seat vacated by the J.D. Vance, the new president.

Vice President, I saw him last night at the Turning Point Ball in which he said, justice will be returned to America tomorrow. What does that mean? So we know that 51 people with... In the Politico story, though, are referenced. Yes, yeah, exactly. So some people have their security clearances revoked.

The pardons for the January 6th? And it's not just that. When you put the 51 intelligence officers with their security clearances revoked, the pardons of some of these J6ers, but also look at what now former Florida Congressman Mike Waltz, now the National Security Advisor to Donald Trump, said in Breitbart last week. He said he's going to be purging—I'm using the verb purge for now—

That is, it's my term. I can't remember if he had actually used that verb. The national security apparatus of disloyal, in their words, deep staters. This is not just a one-off. You're going to see...

a real effort to get rid of a lot of people in the national security apparatus and, to a degree, state. And this is something that not only Walz agrees with, Marco Rubio, Secretary of State. It didn't come up in the inauguration address, though. It didn't, but this is something to watch for. Basically, the purging of Washington, which is… To a degree. Yeah. We'll see. We'll also have to see if Kash Patel actually gets confirmed.

He's been nominated, but we'll see if he gets confirmed. Confirmation will be the next big story. If I had to bet, I would think yes. But I think in talking to the Trump people, the one that they have the most concern about, but they'll never cop to the term concern, is Tulsi Gabbard. She's hitting the most turbulence right now. Because of her concern that she's a foreign agent. Which is kind of absurd in that she is an active...

or she's what, active duty? She is still in the U.S. military. Right, they haven't done that concerning, although she did. Last night is still catching up with me. Yeah, we're both on fumes right now, so please pardon us. Actually, while we're here on fumes, I'm going to look at the light and this beautiful view. We're in the NED. It is a new private members club in Washington. I've been thrown out of a lot worse places. I'll tell you.

It's amazing that we even got Mark in here. He came all the way from Florida. Normally I'm here with a mask and a gun in place like this. Looking to steal some stereos, you know, make a lot of money on the side. Yeah, no, it's a nice addition. Are you getting a cut now? You know what? I should ask them about that. You should, yeah. No, can't do that. But it's been fun. So we're really grateful to them for giving us the space this time. And we'll see. Maybe they'll let you in again. Maybe. I'll come in in a disguise. Yeah.

Mark, thanks so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it. It was really fun. I think everybody got as much as they needed of both of us for the rest. Probably too much. Yeah. Or at least another day or two.

That was another episode of Somebody's Gotta Win. I'm your host, Tara Palmieri. If you like this podcast, please subscribe, rate it, share it with your friends. If you like my reporting, please go to puck.news slash Tara Palmieri and sign up for my newsletter, The Best and the Brightest. You can use the discount code Tara20 for 20% off a subscription at Puck. That's uppercase T-A-R-A-C-K. See you again this week. ♪

These are violent criminals, so they're not going to go down easy. ABC Tuesdays. Let's get this done. The Rookie is back. We have two new rookies starting today. Being a cop is stressful 24-7. Every year on the job is different. And Training Day. We have a serial killer at large. Never ends. The Rookie. All new Tuesdays on ABC and stream on Hulu.