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10 Minute Drill
What Trump's cabinet is doing differently, Dems $20 million bad bet , Unpacking Elon’s Legacy
00:12:27
10 Minute Drill – May 29, 2025 🎧 Fast, Fierce, and Unfiltered Political Insight – in Just 10 Minutes On today’s episode of The 10 Minute Drill, we break down the most important political stories you need to know for May 29, 2025. From rising...
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Host or Anchor
We break down brand new data that tells you how the American people really feel about the economy. We're going to examine the legacy of Elon Musk and Doge. And the New York Times reports on a $20 million plan for Democrats to rebrand, or as we call it here, $20 million to avoid touching grass and talking to a normal person. All of that and more today on the May 29th edition of 10 Minute Drill.
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Donald Trump
Everybody get up. Get up.
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Political Analyst
The story of America is the story of an adventure.
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Donald Trump
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 or Anchor
President Trump got some incredibly positive new data finding that consumer confidence beat expectations.
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Political Analyst
Yes, and there are some surprises here. This is our May read on consumer confidence from the conference board. On the headline number, we're expecting a number somewhere north of 87 comes in strong 98.0. That is the best number since February of this year.
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Host or Anchor
At the same time, Rasmussen porn shows that 50% of the country feels like we are moving in the right track. That's the highest number in history. This comes as the United States and the European Union are making progress in trade tax, according to the Wall Street Journal. And Wall street appears to be believing that the worst of the trade war is behind us. At the same time, the Wall Street Journal editorial board has a strong piece taking Democrats to task for lying about the impacts of the Republican plans to fix Medicaid. Meanwhile, a new polling Punchbowl found that 72% of people support the Republican approach to fixing Medicaid so that it works much longer for more people, Politico wrote this morning. The sound of silence. By lunchtime today, it will have been 48 hours since Donald Trump stepped in front of a TV camera for a future question and answer, the first time that's happened outside of the weekends since he returned to the White House on January 20th. Whatever your politics, that's a remarkable record of public availability, especially when compared to his famously sheltered predecessor. One thing that I have noticed as a former Senate staffer who was around for all the confirmation hearings of President Trump's Cabinet secretaries, his first round was how Cabinet secretaries handled Congress, the House and Senate when they went before them for different hearings in the past administration, it was usually pretty docile, pretty peaceful. They kind of went before members and took their lumps. But this set of Cabinet secretaries and President Trump's second term appears to have taken a very different approach, a much more gloves off, open, ready to push back approach. First, let's take a look at Lee Zeldin in an exchange with Sheldon Whitehouse.
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Political Analyst
We're not going to waste dollars just because you insist on EPA lighting taxpayer dollars on fire. The American taxpayers, they put President Trump in office because of people like you.
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Host or Anchor
It's important to remember as you watch this that Sheldon Whitehouse has been found to have diverted millions of our tax dollars to his wife's dark money climate change nonprofit. So when Administrator Zeldin takes him to task there, he's got a lot to talk about. Moving on to Robert F. Kennedy. In a hearing with a House member whose name I've never heard of, and I'm not going to dignify by looking up his name, the House member pushed hard on this notion, which has been proven false, that there's major cuts to Medicaid. Here's what RFK said. So do you disagree with the cuts that are being proposed for Medicaid right now?
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Donald Trump
Oh, the cuts.
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Host or Anchor
You know, this is a, I don't.
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Donald Trump
Know if you understand this or whether you're just mouthing, you know, the Democratic talking points.
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Host or Anchor
Third, former senator, someone who's really used to these hearings, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, he went before the House and Senate just in the last couple weeks to talk about the budget for the State Department and things like that and got into a number of kerfuffles with members. Here's one of my favorites.
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Donald Trump
Well, first, I will tell you that there has been no conversation about entering into one, for example, during the recent trip. I've got limited time. So here's the thing. I can either give me a yes, give me a no. I'm giving you my answer. If you want my answer, I want a yes. This is not a game show. Reclaiming my time. Well, reclaim your time, but it's not a game show. I get to answer. These are complex questions. Let me ask Mr. Secretary. I'm reclaiming my time. Filibustering takes place in the Senate, not here. I'm not filibustering. I'm trying to answer your question.
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Host or Anchor
I will tell you, as a Senate snob, nothing makes me despise the House of Representatives more than this weird sort of pushback line that House members have always used but started using a lot more in President Trump's first administration of reclaiming my time. It is intended to say, I'm taking my time back. You need to stop answering. But usually it comes at the expense of the person they're questioning, actually being able to answer their questions. Which again, is a reminder that these hearings are rarely about actually getting good questions in discourse. They're much more about speechifying and being able to lecture somebody with cameras on you, which usually don't have very much of a point at all. So again, as somebody who saw Cabinet secretaries in President Trump's first administration get pushed around while every Democrat used those hearings to create viral moments and to try and become the next Democrat star, I actually think it's valuable for a lot of these Cabinet secretaries to at least push back on false premises and try and get the best possible information on the record on so many of these really important issues. New polling this week from the Economist and you go. Shows that Democrats continue to trail behind Republicans in popularity and approval at the same time. The New York Times had a great report over the weekend. About once a week we're getting a new major story about some rebuild approach that Democrats are trying to try and fix their major brand and identity crisis. This one from New York Times first started out with some focus groups. They Talked to over 250 different people and asked them to describe what kind of animal they think best represents each party. And for the Democrats, it was turtles, slugs, sloths. Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that the face of their party for the last six months or so has been first Joe Biden and then a group of incredibly old Democrats shuffling from building to building in Washington, complaining about cuts to buildings and departments that most American people couldn't tell you what they did that might be a part of the problem. But when they asked people to describe Republicans, the answers were lions, tigers and sharks, apex predators who get what they want. So in order to fight this, Democrats are talking about a number of new ideas. For now, Democrat donors and strategists have been gathering at luxury hotels to discuss how to win back working class voters, commissioning new projects that can read like anthropological studies of people from faraway places. The prospectus of one new $20 million effort obtained by the Times aims to reverse the erosion of Democrat support among young men especially. It is codenamed Sam, short for speaking with American Men, a strategic plan and promises investment to study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces. It recommends buying advertisements and video games, among other things. So I want you to notice a couple things when you read that. First, when you hear Democrats talk about trying to reach male voters, it sounds so much like aliens coming to Earth, planning to study us, to learn our habits, to conquer. It reminds me a lot of the movie Coneheads, or maybe the faculty where aliens took Over a high school to study high school students, figure out human weaknesses and then try and take over. That is what Democrats sound like in 2025. Nowhere in this plan is there an effort to listen to men and figure out what they might actually care about. It's always about talking at them and figuring out what magic words you might be able to say to get the lecture to be a little bit more appealing to them, which I think is a big part of the problem. But the third piece here that I thought was incredibly notable was this idea of, for example, advertising and games. Democrats have always believed that there might be some kind of silver bullet ad tactic that they could use that would break through. For example, Kamala Harris touted the most expensive ad in history when they took over the sphere in Las Vegas and put her face on it. But for video, video game. If you're trying to reach young men, you don't necessarily want them to be playing a game like Fortnite or Minecraft or Grand Theft Auto. And then all of a sudden, Kamala Harris pops up to talk about, you know, the significance of the passage of time, or Tim Waltz pops up to talk about, you know, some kind of feminine products or how masculine he is. People want less about politics in their lives. They want less lecturing. And I think that's one big problem that Democrats have, is they just come off as lecturing. And trying to bring that lecturing to them in new places where they're going to actually get away from politics and get away from lecturing isn't necessarily going to help the situation. But bottom line here, this $20 million effort and all the other ones like it are just one more exp for Democrats to avoid dealing with their actual foundational problems, which is people don't agree with or like their ideas and policies. It shouldn't take $20 million to find out that their ideas are bad. But it's kind of turned into this fun game. Let's see how much they'll spend to avoid talking to a normal person. This week, while visiting my family in the Bay Area, I had the opportunity to see a number of protests outside of Tesla dealerships that are still going on, even though Elon is working his way back into the private sector. But as he returns and leaves his role at Doge, it's important to analyze the impact that he had. There's a lot of conversation about the impact of the Doge cuts, whether it was a mistake to focus so much on personnel over programs, spending, and things like that. But I do think that the Legacy of Elon more than anything will be starting this really important conversation about massive government waste, fraud and abuse that's become really a guiding principle for the Trump administration. A huge focus of the big beautiful bill is cutting fraud, waste and abuse and programs that's making these programs not work. When we talk about departments like the Department of Education, the fact that it's run like a corrupt charity where you know, it has 70 to 80% of massive waste and overhead to deliver a tiny percentage of actually very low quality service, and this has forced Democrats to try and defend so many of these programs that simply aren't working. And Republicans have maintained the opportunity to hold the popular position there. And this does matter to taxpayers. This is something we talked about in polling just a few weeks ago. Taxpayers are more supportive of tax cuts when they see just how absurd some of these spending programs are that they are funding with their hard earned tax dollars. So I think in the long run the impact of Elon and Doge will be incredibly valuable to everything President Trump's trying to do, but also trying to actually get this out of control government and massive government spending under control in the long run. A must read from over the weekend, Climate extremists make our kids Despair and Groom Them to join the Left Crusade A New York Post op ed from Bethany Mandel about climate hysteria. One quote that I loved an entire generation has been raised to believe they're living through the end of the world and their mental health reflects it. What Bethany talks about in this piece is that the left has spent millions of dollars and decades and decades conditioning young Americans to believe that the world's going to end. And it has created a completely unnecessary mental health cris. Surprise surprise. Democrats have positioned their policies and ideas as the only way to address and fix that mental health crisis. And so they've created this machine to essentially ensure that they have perpetual funding for their political goals forever and ever and ever. It's a very valuable read. We'll share a link in the show. Notes lastly, King Charles did a land acknowledgment in Canada.
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Donald Trump
I would like to acknowledge that we.
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Political Analyst
Are gathered on the unceded territory of the Algonquin and the Shinabeg people.
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Host or Anchor
Land acknowledgments have been an interesting trend from the very far left for the last few years. Basically where someone will get up and say we stole this land from this tribe, but for the King of England to do it. I think it's particularly ironic when you consider just how much of the world England has conquered at different times. I don't know if this means they'll be giving up all their territories around the world or if this means that King Charles has taken on Meghan Markle as his personal political adviser to do something that's absurd. We will see. But that is all the time we have for today. Thank you for joining us on this remote version of 10 Minute Drill. We look forward to bringing this back from our studio next week. Thanks again.