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10 Minute Drill
Democrats use Meghan Markle's playbook to fight Trump with cringe, Elon trades chainsaw for scalpel
00:22:15
There’s a civil war amongst the democrats! We break it all down. Is taking a page out of Meghan Markle’s playbook the best move? A CR is not the preferred move for Republicans, but Trump knows it’s the best short term option....
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- [00:00]
Host
Did Donald Trump break the Democrats? And what do Meghan Markle, Gavin Newsom, and TikTok all have in common with Democrats? Current challenges? All that and more today on 10 Minute Drill.
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Randy Weingarten
Everybody get up. Get up.
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Donald Trump
The story of America is the story of an adventure.
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Kamala Harris
I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. We are a nation under God, and I believe God intended for us to be free.
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Host
Did President Trump break the Democrat Party? Their civil war reached a boiling point last week as we talked about with Al Green interrupting President Trump's joint address and then facing a bipartisan censure from both Republicans and Democrats. Now a lot of people are asking Democrat leader Hakeem Jeffries if he feels secure in his position because he had asked Democrats not to make themselves the story.
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Gavin Newsom
And.
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Host
And as we know, they did the opposite of that in terms of leading.
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Pete Buttigieg
And controlling your conference. How are you feeling about Democratic unity under your leadership? Are you feeling secure with that and in your leadership position right now?
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Gavin Newsom
Yes.
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Host
That civil war is happening at the same time as Democrats are facing a major identity crisis, both in terms of style and in terms of substance. The style problem I describe as the Meghan Markleization of the Democrat Party. For anyone who saw any of it or heard about Meghan Markle's new Netflix series, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Hiring very expensive public relations consultants to come in and try and make a person who's deeply awkward look relatable. My favorite example of this is Kamala Harris when she hired child actors to come to the Vice president's residence to talk about space.
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Randy Weingarten
But the other. You guys are gonna see. You're gonna literally see the craters on the moon with your own eyes. Oh, my. With your own eyes. I'm telling you, it is gonna be unbelievable.
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Host
This exercise was panned not just because she overacted and was incredibly awkward with these kids, but because people found out that their tax dollars were funding this very weird production. And also that filming happened at the exact same time as the fall of Afghanistan, the event that defined the entire Biden presidency. The city of Kabul was surrounded by the Taliban, and. And Vice President Harris was filming with child actors about space, looking very uncomfortable. This has manifested itself now in things like really uncomfortable TikTok videos, like one we saw last week. I will note that that meme, the choose youe Fighter meme, is not new. We used it at the National Republican Senatorial Committee to mock a Democrat all the way back in 2019. That is six years ago. And these are the fresh young hip Democrats who are leaning on these things. Another great example is Rosa DeLauro in her TikTok as the Rizzler.
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Kamala Harris
Yo, this is the ranking rizzler on appropriations serving Connecticut's third district. It's time to enter your dark academia Congress era. All right, besties.
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Host
Yesterday or over the weekend Politico had a story about Democrats latest strategic effort which is using profanity to try and make their points even if they don't necessarily have a new message. My favorite bit of commentary from that was Pete Buttigieg advisor Liz Smith who had a really great quote that said if the first time you've ever said a cuss word is when you're reading it off a script from a political consultant, it probably isn't going to come off as authentic. What Democrats are trying to do right now is fix a major policy problem with a communications solution, something that my friend Dana Perino talks about quite a bit. Another example of this is Gavin Newsom who just launched a new podcast to try and pivot to the center. Let's take a quick look at him.
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Gavin Newsom
You say no men in female sports.
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Donald Trump
Well, I think it's an issue of fairness. I completely agree with you on that. So that's easy to call out the unfairness of that.
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Host
What Gavin is trying to do there, we all know he's trying to shift to the center so that when he runs for president he seems a lot more palatable than Democrats today. The problem is like Kamala Harris, we're all very familiar with his record. He actually filed civil rights complaints against parents and against school boards when parents tried to get laws passed requiring schools to tell them what was going on with their own children at school. Now I understand this overarching problem. When I worked in the Senate, I worked for Orrin Hatch, who was in his 80s at the time that social media was really being adopted. He wanted to have a brand on social media. And so our goal was what things do people maybe not know about Senator Hatch or what things are interesting about his personality that we could showcase. So we focused on things like self deprecating age jokes, comparing him to a dinosaur. We focused on quirky things he liked, like all you can eat buffets, really loving bacon, a lot of things like that. And it ended up playing well and he got a lot of good feedback on it. Not because we created a new personality out of whole cloth like so many of these Democrats are trying to do, but because we focus on things that were actually likable about him and it was real and authentic. It was a really fun learning experience, but it highlighted the fact that you can't recreate a person. You need to focus on first getting your message right. And that goes to Democrats current substance problem. You don't get a 31% approval rating as a party just because of your tactics. And creating your own new Joe Rogan in the form of Gavin Newsom isn't necessarily going to get you out of that problem. You need to figure out how to realign with the American people and get behind policies that they actually care about. And that is the crux of their substance issue. With that, I wanted to share 10 minute drills 3 things I read from this weekend. First, an op ed from Steve Forbes and Stephen Moore in the New York Post. Tax cuts, then tariffs. They make the case for President Trump focusing first on extending the Trump tax cuts that affected all taxpayers up and down the economic ladder before shifting to tariffs because it makes America an even more attractive trade partner. Rob Collins, the CEO of Coyne in Town Hall Letting the people lead Our philanthropy Lessons from Doge. A great look at how Doge has exposed the government's sort of challenged efforts at leading philanthropic work and how the American people should lead on that instead. And then Laura Libby, the main representative who's been censured for standing up for women's sports in the Free Press. Her headline I was elected to fight for women and girls. Maine Democrats censured me for doing just that. Next up, government funding. Did President Trump help congressional Republicans avoid an upcoming government shutdown? One thing we talked about last week was that if these narrow Republican majorities, particularly in the House, want to get through some of these upcoming funding fights, President Trump and his team are going to need to really roll up their sleeves and play a role in whipping votes. Here's Caroline Levitt over the weekend, House.
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Pete Buttigieg
Republicans have negotiated and led a clean continuing resolution which President Trump fully supports. And he is counting on Republicans on Capitol Hill to work together to unite to get this clean CR passed.
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Host
I believe a lot of Republicans will look to that message and say, good, we have the sort of, you know, political drive we need to push forward and fund the government. Some conservatives will push back and say this feels like business as usual because we don't like continuing resolutions. But I think everyone can agree this isn't business as usual when it's done in the backdrop of having Doge taking a chainsaw to government funding as well as the Trump agenda, that does refocus on a lot of those conservative priorities. So the argument from Speaker Johnson and President Trump will be, let's fund the government so that we have the ability to use more of our political capital on these really big fights to come. And I think that they're gonna be successful at that with that extra help from President Trump, which will go a very, very long way. Speaking of Doge, over the weekend and last week, President Trump began to sort of shift the messaging about Doge's role when he said, essentially, we're trading in the chainsaw for a scalpel. And he talked about that in the Oval Office. Let's take a quick look at that.
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Donald Trump
I want them to do the best job they can. When we have good people, that's precious. That's very important. And we want them to keep the good people. And so we're going to be watching them, and Elon and the group are going to be watching them. And if they can cut, it's better.
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Host
I think we can all agree that the chainsaw had an important role to play, and it still may have a role to come. But more than anything now, President Trump wants Elon to work with Cabinet secretaries to really focus on narrow cuts. The focused on eliminating fraud, waste and abuse to avoid any collateral damage. However, as they get into this, let's look at what Randy Weingarten had to say last night about conversations about the Department of Education. I'm really angry about this.
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Randy Weingarten
No, because this is really angry.
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Host
I taught kids in Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn, New York. Randy Weingarten is very upset that there were rumors that the White House is now shut down, that President Trump was planning on shuttering the Department of Education. We can all agree. We wish Randy was that upset when her efforts to lead school closures led to an entire generation of Americans having major learning loss because, again, their schools were closed while teachers and teachers unions had asked for hazard pay and more and more money to keep them open. I think that if there's one place in our federal government where there is an opportunity for Doge to really chop fraud, waste and abuse, I think it is the Department of Education where we've seen billions of dollars go out the door around the country to fund really divisive political agendas like dei. While student success has continuously gone down, we know now that about 60% of students in America in the public school system are not reading at grade level. So let's hope that whether it's a scalpel, a hatchet, or a chainsaw dosh can do something about the Department of Education. Introducing a new segment today. Stepping a little bit away from the news, but on something that's still critically important. What I grilled this weekend, we threw a giant rack of beef ribs on the smoker while we went to chicken, came back, buried them in sweet Baby Ray's barbecue sauce with a tiny bit of honey and brown sugar, and we had some magic. It was a lot of fun. Last thing for today, we're introducing our very first overtime segment. Now, when we launched 10 Minute Drill, we explained that our goal is to have 10 minute breakdowns, your daily political spark notes, if you will, in that 10 minute window. But we also have occasionally guests who have something really interesting to share about a particular topic in our overtime segments that will often go overtime over those 10 minutes. Introducing our very first one of those for you today. Joining us for our first ever overtime segment on 10 Minute Drill, we have my good friend, oh Skinner, who I'm really, really excited to talk to today. He's the executive director of alliance for Consumers, an organization that has done a phenomenal job these last few years of talking about how, among other things, regulations and government overreach impacts consumers and normal people. One of the things we're excited to talk about today, first and foremost, is a project that they put out a couple years ago called the Biden Dream House. Oh, what inspired you guys to do that?
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Gavin Newsom
So the biggest sleight of hand that was done under the Biden administration was every single different agency, every single different way was stacking different environmental regulations and other regulations that were making everything in your house worse at doing its job while making it cost more. And at some point, everybody knew this and everybody was complaining about it, but nobody had ever stacked it up right. You'd see an article about dishwashers, you'd see an article about cars, you'd see something about gas stoves. But we realized that what people were feeling at home was all the effects of it and how every single thing in their house was worse. And if something broke and they had to replace it, life was going to be terrible. And so we decided that putting it all in one place would actually make it easier for, like, the media, elites and other people to actually see what everybody else was feeling. And so we stacked it all together and talked about how the average cost of a house is going to go up about $10,000 just based on the set of regulations using the cost estimates that Biden's own team were putting out. And it caught fire because it actually was able to be something that people even in elite circles could actually grasp. Finally, they could understand why somebody was mad about everything in their kitchen being worse and costing more because we packaged it in one place, which is how people actually feel it.
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Host
That's fantastic. What kind of reaction did you get when you talked to normal people about not being able to use the dishwasher they liked or the gas stove they liked, or even the light bulbs they liked?
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Gavin Newsom
What's so funny is at the beginning of the Biden administration, most of them didn't know why. They just thought everything was worse and they couldn't understand why. And when you explain to a person that the government is who's making all these things worse, it's the first way that a lot of them start to understand about how regulations actually end up, like, trickle down on them, because you have to say to them, the dishwasher company doesn't want to make a worse dishwasher every five years for you. That's not what they're trying to do. The reason that your dishwasher takes longer is because some government bureaucrat has said they have to use 10% less water and 10% less electricity, and then again, 10% and 10% less, and they keep grinding it down. And there was a light bulb moment for the average consumer. They go, that's why this thing in my house doesn't work anymore. That's why the thing that I grew up with was better than the thing today. Most things in America were really lucky. Don't get worse, they get better. And so that if you just start asking them questions about things in their house that bother them, and all of a sudden it would click. Dishwashers was the number one. Then you would talk about gas stoves, then you would talk about. And they would. Once they thought about their dishwasher, they were able to actually connect it to.
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Host
Everything else that makes perfect sense. One of the things that President Trump has zeroed in on and we talked about in a previous episode here is how to change that, how to fix things. And so we talked before about his executive order instructing EPA and the Department of Energy to address this. Can you tell us about that action that he took there?
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Gavin Newsom
Yeah. I mean, what's funny is the exact thing that was happening under the Biden administration, Trump's doing it in reverse. So Biden was dropping this rule over here, a rule over there, Department of Energy, Department of Environmental Protection, all these things that stacked up and made everything in your house worse. Right. What's kind of fun is President Trump, because I think he understands what regular people get mad about, turns around and does one giant EO that talks about, it talks about energy, it talks about a lot of things. But when you actually build it out and look at like a Trump dream house, it's all of the things in one package. It's I'm going to make your appliances easier, I'm going to make your car easier. He's talking about the everyday things that people care about. And you understand that it plays across their entire life, it plays across their entire house. And it's the dishwasher, the shower head, the gas grill, the gas stove, the car in your house, your water heater. It's these everyday items that were just under constant assault from every different angle in the last administration. On day one, they're announcing, we're gonna flip that around and start to prioritize what people want and make it so that, and I wanna be very clear, they're making it so that people who wanna live a whack job life in like a coastal enclave in California get to do that. And if you live in Plano, Texas, you get to live a normal life in Plano, Texas, and drive a suburban and have a dishwasher that works, that you can run twice a day because you have four kids. Right. The key with what President Trump's doing is he's not saying we're gonna ban anything that's efficient. He's just saying you get to have choices. And that is like, that's what consumers actually want.
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Host
That's fantastic.
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Gavin Newsom
Everyone, just to be clear, Nancy Pelosi still gets to buy however many thousands of dollars of refrigerators and freezers she wants to buy. And if you're cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, you can choose to not have air conditioning and be like, this very Belgian dishwasher, works in four hours, but it uses the tiniest little teardrops of water. They could be fine.
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Host
They can do that.
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Gavin Newsom
Go and have, go and be weird.
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Host
So everyone needs to go to alliance for Consumers, social media and website and see this Trump dream house that they released. It's fantastic. I think the graphics look awesome. But it really just puts into perspective what President Trump's vision is in comparison to President Biden, which is Consumers first. With that in mind, you wrote an op ed just, I wanna say last week, if not the week before, about the biggest hindrance to President Trump's energy agenda and his effort to improve life for consumers through energy policy. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah.
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Gavin Newsom
So, look, this is one of those things that you don't hear about a lot, but it affects your life, which is the Left didn't get the Green New Deal. We talk about it all the time, right? About what they wanted to do, but they didn't get it. What they immediately pivoted back to doing because they're losing elections, they're losing in state houses, they're not able to pass things in Congress that they wanted is they're bringing lawsuits. Many of them are public nuisance lawsuits, which you would think like a public nuisance is like a tree fell down on a road or something, but they bring public nuisance lawsuits that say climate change is a nuisance. So anybody who contributes to climate change, they start with oil companies, but it's car companies, it's farmers, because cows, very bad. Turns out the left does not like them.
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Host
They do not like the cows.
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Gavin Newsom
Yes. And they want to say, you're doing something that contributes to climate change. We need you to undo climate change. Now, if you're sitting at home, you're thinking like that seems like a big.
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Host
Task, doesn't seem scientific.
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Gavin Newsom
What they want is to go to an industry they don't like, farmers, energy companies, car companies, and say you have to pay gajillions of dollars to fix climate change. Well, you're a devious minded person. So your first thought is like, oh, I know what's going to happen. They're going to get that money, they're going to take it from an industry they don't like in hopes of bankrupting it or shutting it down. And then they're going to make the people spend all the money on green initiatives, left wing priorities and left wing NGOs. How do you fix climate change? In their minds, we bring a climate change lawsuit, we get a court to order this big bad company that the left doesn't like to pay billions of dollars into, all the stuff that we would have sent taxpayer money for as part of the Green New Deal. We're just going to fund it like this and we're going to shut down people we don't like. You won't be able to buy the cars you want, you won't be able to buy gas stoves, you won't be able to buy beef. And in exchange, we'll be able to fund all the things that Congress wouldn't give us the money for. So you're seeing these lawsuits in places like Oakland, in places like Baltimore, in places like Oregon. And this is their push to basically fundamentally change what you can do in America. And the really bad thing is most of what we think about when I just made the joke about coastal enclaves is that these rules in California, Gavin Newsom only affects California. Right. Or if Kamala becomes president, becomes governor of California, she gets to affect California. When they want you to stop climate change, they're going to demand that the company changes its behavior everywhere. You have to wipe the product off everywhere. Because if you produce, you know, if a cow farts in Virginia, they will say that affects the climate in Oregon. So you have to shut down your farming everywhere. You have to shut down your car production everywhere. You have to shut down your oil production everywhere in order to satisfy them. So this is a way for them to reach past their state boundaries and change all of America and wipe things away that they wish they could abandon Congress, they wish the AOC could have gotten done before. Now. They're just gonna go to court and try to do it themselves.
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Host
So that sounds crazy, and it's hard to imagine courts allowing that to stand. And as we've seen, some courts have rejected some of these cases.
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Gavin Newsom
The losses are starting to stack up. Like they've even gone too far for the courts in Oregon.
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Host
But one thing that we're seeing now is as some of these cases are falling down, certain very, very blue states are pivoting to a legislative track. Like Vermont and New York have their own laws that are focused on, okay, if we can't win this in court, we will just pass a bill that would allow us to take that money. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
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Gavin Newsom
Yeah, yeah. These are basically in New York and Vermont, they're trying to pass these. They call them Climate Super. I don't know. The Climate Super Fund. Yeah. Which is a weird name because that's not how super funds work. But basically their premise is, if you've emitted carbon in the past, we're going to charge you a huge amount because you caused climate change. And they're just going to take the money now. They're not taking the money from, like, Sinopec or Saudi Aramco or any of these people who are outside of America, because their actual goal is just like the climate. Public nuisance lawsuits take billions of dollars from people that we wished we could have banned in Congress and then funnel that money to the groups that we wish we could have given taxpayer grants to, but we couldn't because the Green New Deal failed. Right. It's just they're just taking and punishing people they don't like. And the part that is so hard for everybody people to understand is, from the left view, climate change is everything. Every single thing that exists in our country contributes to climate change. For them. It's cows, it's cars, it's energy, it's the electric bill in your house. Why do you see articles about how they want you to live without air conditioning? Because that's a problem for climate change. Not because it uses the wrong template, just it existing is bad. Having too many kids is a problem for climate change. Once they establish in their mind that climate change is the end all, be all, everything has to change. Every single thing in your life has to change to fit in with that, right? So it's crucial to understand that the same now they're trying to go and just basically not even use the courts. They lose in courts. Now they're just going to go and say, we're just going to take your money.
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Host
What do you think these people, these states, after they take billions of dollars from energy companies, what do you think they're going to use that on?
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Gavin Newsom
Well, see, the crucial thing from my perspective is no one sheds a tear for a Megadeth Corp, right? But the fear is that they're trying to get it so that the companies stop selling cars that they don't like, stop pumping oil at all, stop selling air conditioners, stop farming. And they want the money because they turn around and they say that the only way to undo climate change is to green proof things, right? So now you got to put solar panels and everything. You got to give money to an NGO to do various things. It's basically everything that you're seeing with doge, with usaid, it's just an ecosystem of money to support all of their preferred vendors and all of their preferred technologies because they've built this mindset that if they can just put enough money into their projects, then people will like them.
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Host
That sounds freaking crazy. Thank you so much to oh Skinner for joining us. Please look at all he's doing. Twitter orconsumers. We'll share links with our own social media. I think it is so important to understand how these policies work. And I think oh does a great job of taking complex legal issues that do have a major impact on our lives and explain it to people like myself, like I'm a five year old, which is incredibly helpful and important.
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Gavin Newsom
All you need to know is if your dishwasher sucks. It's a perfect example of why government is bad.
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Host
It is a perfect example. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for joining us for 10 minute drill. We appreciate you. Make sure you are subscribed on YouTube, share with your friends and we'll see you next time.