11/20/24: Trump Taps Dr. OZ, MTG Threatens Blackmail To Protect Gaetz, Morning Joe Collapse, Laken Riley Trial

Summary

Breaking Points with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti
Episode: Trump Taps Dr. Oz, MTG Threatens Blackmail To Protect Gaetz, Morning Joe Collapse, Laken Riley Trial
Release Date: November 20, 2024
Host/Author: iHeartPodcasts

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Overview

In this gripping episode of Breaking Points, hosts Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti tackle a series of high-stakes political developments. From President Trump's strategic nominations and Marjorie Taylor Greene's aggressive tactics to the declining ratings of MSNBC’s "Morning Joe" and the harrowing Laken Riley trial, the conversation delves deep into the heart of American politics. This detailed summary captures the essence of their discussions, enriched with notable quotes and precise timestamps to provide a comprehensive understanding for both regular listeners and newcomers alike.

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1. Trump Nominates Dr. Oz to CMS

Discussion Highlights:

President Donald Trump's recent decision to nominate Dr. Mehmet Oz to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) raised immediate concerns about potential conflicts of interest given Dr. Oz's substantial investments in Medicare Advantage plans. Ryan Grim elaborates on the possible market implications and Trump's sensitivity to economic stability.

Notable Quotes:

• Ryan Grim [08:39]:
  “He doesn't necessarily want to spook the markets too much by putting a disruptor like people think Lutnick could be.”

• Saagar Enjeti [11:07]:
  “Mike Lindell is Commerce Secretary. Like, that's just, that's not gonna fly. And so he, so it's not about baggage.”

Key Points:

• Economic Stability: Trump’s apprehension about market reactions influences his nominations, aiming to balance disruption with economic predictability.
• Credibility Over Chaos: The preference for nominees with solid credentials to maintain market confidence while still pushing Trump's economic agenda.

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2. Marjorie Taylor Greene Threatens Blackmail to Protect Matt Gaetz

Discussion Highlights:

Marjorie Taylor Greene (MTG) has made headlines with her threat to release all ethics reports and allegations against Republican colleagues if they do not protect Representative Matt Gaetz from ongoing investigations. This aggressive stance underscores the intense political maneuvering surrounding Gaetz's controversial nomination to the Department of Justice.

Notable Quotes:

• Marjorie Taylor Greene [32:37]:
  “If we are going to release ethics reports and rip apart our own that Trump has appointed, then put it all out there for the American people to see.”

• Ryan Grim [43:03]:
  “They’ve been leaking salacious stuff about this investigation all along the way and ultimately couldn't get him.”

Key Points:

• Double Standards in Ethics Reporting: MTG’s actions highlight perceived inconsistencies in how ethical investigations are handled within political parties.
• Political Pressure: The use of ethical scrutiny as a tool for political leverage and protection against opponents.

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3. Morning Joe’s Ratings Collapse

Discussion Highlights:

MSNBC’s Morning Joe has experienced a significant drop in viewership following the hosts’ recent visit to Mar-a-Lago and their interactions with Donald Trump. Krystal and Saagar analyze the factors contributing to this decline, emphasizing the loss of trust among the core audience.

Notable Quotes:

• Ryan Grim [54:06]:
  “It's a huge conflict for them going forward. And they're at a fork in the road. They can decide to do news or do comfort food. So best of luck to them.”

• Sagar Enjeti [60:43]:
  “It's a huge conflict for them going forward... They can decide to do news or do comfort food.”

Key Points:

• Audience Alienation: The attempt to rekindle a relationship with Trump has backfired, leading to a loss of viewers who felt betrayed by the hosts’ actions.
• Content Strategy: The struggle between maintaining journalistic integrity versus catering to ratings-driven, less substantive "comfort food" content.

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4. Ongoing Trial of the Murder of Lake and Riley

Discussion Highlights:

The trial of Jose Ibarra, accused of murdering 22-year-old nursing student Lake Riley in Georgia, serves as a focal point for debates on immigration policy. The hosts discuss the broader implications of the case on public perception and political discourse surrounding undocumented immigrants.

Notable Quotes:

• Ryan Grim [72:50]:
  “It's beyond awful because any criminal act, particularly this one committed by an illegal alien, is one that's preventable.”

• Sagar Enjeti [74:18]:
  “Republicans have held the Republican administration's feet to the fire over immigration.”

Key Points:

• Impact on Immigration Debate: The case is being used as a rallying cry for stricter immigration reforms, influencing voter sentiment in the 2024 elections.
• Statistical Context: Discussion on crime rates among undocumented immigrants, with reference to CBP statistics highlighting a relatively low incidence compared to legal residents.

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Concluding Thoughts

Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti conclude the episode by reflecting on the interconnectedness of these political events and their implications for American democracy. They emphasize the crucial role of independent media in providing balanced perspectives and holding those in power accountable. The hosts encourage listeners to remain informed and engaged, underscoring the importance of vigilance in an ever-evolving political landscape.

Final Notable Quote:

• Ryan Grim [03:45]:
  “The mainstream media has discredited itself. I think if you've been watching this program over the last several years, you have been much better informed than any of your peers.”

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Takeaways:

• Strategic Nominations: Trump’s appointments are carefully balanced to maintain economic stability while advancing his political agenda.
• Political Tactics: MTG’s aggressive defense of Gaetz illustrates the lengths to which politicians will go to protect their allies.
• Media Trust: The decline of Morning Joe’s ratings underscores the fragile relationship between media figures and their audience.
• Immigration and Crime: The Lake and Riley trial highlights ongoing tensions and debates over immigration policy and its societal impacts.

This episode offers a comprehensive analysis of current political dynamics, providing listeners with valuable insights into the machinations shaping the United States today.

Transcript

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[Ryan Grim]

Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election and we are.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So excited about what that means for.

[Ryan Grim]

The future of this show.

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[Ryan Grim]

All right, good morning and welcome to Counterpoints. How you doing Emily?

[Sagar Enjeti]

I'm Doing great. This is our last show together before Thanksgiving. So just know, Ryan, that I'm thankful for you and thankful for everybody who's watching.

[Ryan Grim]

Thankful for you, too. Thankful for all of you. And, you know, don't burn your porch down. Deep frying your turkey.

[Sagar Enjeti]

We were just talking about this. Ryan and producer Griffin are obsessed with deep frying turkeys, apparently.

[Ryan Grim]

But we also do it outside and not on wood.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yes. Now, BreakingPoints.com is where you go for a premium subscription. But if you can't cover the premium subscription, not the best use of your money right now, you're spending all of it on turkey deep fryers. Ryan, what can you do?

[Ryan Grim]

Look, if you share our stuff that is almost more valuable, almost more valuable than a Breaking Points premium subscription. Like it. Subscribe. And also importantly, share it. Make sure that we're spreading this because right now is the most important time to kind of get this in front of people because the iron is hot. People are like, wait a minute, we've been lied to for so long. And wait a minute, what's going on with this Mika and Joe thing? What? I thought these were the resistance leaders.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yes.

[Ryan Grim]

And now they're like angling for cabinet positions.

[Sagar Enjeti]

The time is ripe.

[Ryan Grim]

So the time is ripe. The mainstream media has discredited itself. I think if you've been watching this program over the last several years, you have been much better informed than any of your peers. So you can either keep that by keeping it a secret and then you can be the smart one in your social group.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Which is one way to do it.

[Ryan Grim]

Which is one way to do it. Or you can share this, you know, more generally. And also in the comments section, it's always nice if people say when this, when the news actually starts in the A block.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yes. Because often Brian will monologue in the. No kidding. Brian does have a great monologue prepped for the end of the show that's going to be about why Democrats lost. I'm really excited for that. We're going to start with new Trump appointments. Also late last night, naming an education secretary. We're going to walk through all of that. And actually on the point Ryan was.

[Ryan Grim]

They're even getting funnier almost.

[Sagar Enjeti]

There's a WWE connection. We'll get into that in just a moment. We'll be talking about Matt Gaetz and to the point you were just making Ryan. I mean, I think this has been covered very poorly by media. There's just a lot more context that makes the story, whether you love or hate Matt Gaetz actually more interesting. So we'll be talking about Matt Gaetz today. We'll be talking about the second day of Morning Joe outrage. Why is it worth talking about? Because it's fascinating to see how the inner circle of the Joe and Mika world is reacting to them. We'll be talking about the ongoing trial of Lake and Riley and the murder of Lake and Riley. And we have a guest, Ryan, talking about Israel.

[Ryan Grim]

Yeah. Khaviv Retigur is a very high profile journalist in Israel. I would describe him as kind of a bit to the right of Netanyahu. So we'll let him plant himself on the spectrum, but I don't think he would even consider that to be an insult. We're going to talk to him at the back end of the show. A couple things. Maybe we'll get to talk to him about the joint resolution of disapproval. That's the technical name for a measure that is coming up in the Senate later today that would basically restrict some arms to Israel. It's a historic vote in the sense that the Senate never allows kind of floor votes on blocking weapons to Israel. There's a particular provision of law that allows any senator to get such a measure onto the floor. Bernie Sanders has gone through that very complicated process to make that happen. So that's going to happen later today. The advocates of it are hoping for maybe 20 votes max. Like they're not expecting it to pass, but they think if they can get above 20, push closer to even 30, that at least it sends a shot. One other thing we won't get a chance to talk about, but since we won't be doing a Show before then, November 24th, it's gonna be a revolution in Pakistan. So it's gonna get wild.

[Sagar Enjeti]

You heard it here first.

[Ryan Grim]

Imran Khan has called for massive nationwide protests and particularly focused on Islamabad. I'm hearing that in Pakistan, the government now military government is basically barring buses from bringing people to Islamabad, shutting down gas stations, doing everything they can to try to prevent millions of people from descending on the Capitol. Well, they believe that Trump is more sympathetic, much more sympathetic than Biden to their democracy movement, which is interesting and probably also true.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Although then you have to talk about people like Tulsi Gabbard and others that'll be around Trump who might deal with these questions before they even get to Trump.

[Ryan Grim]

Yeah. But who knows? Who knows where she comes down on that question? It's going to be extremely interesting. Rick Grinnell, who's very close advisor to Trump, has played footsie with the Imran Khan kind of movement.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Very interesting. All right.

[Ryan Grim]

Like right before the election, he was like retweeting photos of himself with like Imran Khan or whatever, really sending subtle signals. He wouldn't quite say anything positive, but he was sending very subtle signals that were picked up loud and clear. So Imran Khan is thinking like, this is my shot that we're going to, we're going to kick it off now and we're going to stay in Islamabad until Trump is inaugurated and see what happens.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Well, if you care about this issue, you want to stay tuned to Ryan's coverage here on Breaking Points because it is truly incredible.

[Ryan Grim]

It's coming to a climax, it looks like.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Fascinating. All right, well, let's start with the A bloc and Trump's decision to nominate Howard Lutnick, who was, we can put this up, a one who was under consideration, very seriously under consideration. Consideration for Treasurer, Treasury Secretary. He's now being nominated for Commerce secretaries. The CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, he had been pushed by Elon Musk as a disruptor for the treasury secretary job. Trump is apparently very nervous about the markets. This is some of the reporting is that if you nominate a disruptor for treasury, it could affect the markets in ways that Donald Trump is very sensitive to how that reflects on the president. So he doesn't want to reportedly, this is the theory. I think it's actually probably a pretty good one. Rya. He doesn't necessarily want to spook the markets too much by putting a disruptor like people think Lutnik could be. I'm not sure how true it is that Lutnik would be a disruptor, to be honest, but he's at Commerce now. It's sort of a loss for him.

[Ryan Grim]

Yeah, I think Trump was spooked when some of his Gates like and Gates appointments kind of spooked the market and started creating a lot of volatility. There's this famous anecdote from when James Carville and Bill Clinton first took power in 1992. They came in with these, I'm not going to call them ambitious plans, but they came in with plans and they were immediately confronted by their economic advisors saying if you do X, Y and Z, the bond market is going to respond this way. And when the bond market responds this way, that changes all your calculations over here. In this way, you're actually already seeing 10 year treasuries falling and mortgage interest rates increasing because the market believes that Trump's policies of mass deportation and tariffs are going to be inflationary. And so the bond market is already kicking Trump's rear end. So the famous anecdote is that Carville said when he died, he wanted to come back as the bond market because it's the most powerful institution in the world. It's still true. And so I think, and Trump intuitively understands interest rates because his entire real estate game play for decades was just an interest rate and cash flow play. So he really has a feel for interest rates in a way that most politicians don't. And that's why I think he berated the Federal Reserve so effectively throughout his first term. The first president to really kind of break that wall between the supposed independence of the Fed, which is not independent, it's a political institution, and the elected leadership in the country. So, yes, I think you're right that he's being dragged around by his tail by the bond market here.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And Lutnick was the co chair of the Trump transition. And he's been sort of stumping for Trump on CNBC and has for a while, which Trump is also reportedly not very impressed with cnbc. He's been watching the morning show over on cnbc and Lutnick had some really viral moments, like giving this defense of Trump. It was even like, you could call it offense, going on offense for the Trump position and you know, on tariffs and actually taking the full Trump economic agenda and trying to sort of put his Wall street spin on it. One question I have for you, Ryan, is what does he bring from Cantor Fitzgerald in terms of like either baggage or advantages going into the Commerce job?

[Ryan Grim]

Well, it's the pedigree, the credibility. Trump wants somebody who has, you know, went to the right schools and worked at the right banks to signal to the markets that this person's not a crank. But he doesn't want the guy from like Birch Gold as his treasury secretary.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Mike Lindell for Treasury.

[Ryan Grim]

Mike Lindell is Commerce Secretary. Like, that's just, that's not gonna fly. And so he, so it's not about baggage. Like, he's, I think he's looking for some type of credibility. And I think you can tell how upset he is about the fact that he had to name him Commerce Secretary by the fact that when he announced the pick, he said he will also oversee ustr, which is the trade representative. So he's like, okay, fine, I'm not getting my treasury pick bond market, you win. But my commerce secretary is gonna run trade policy.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Right.

[Ryan Grim]

Which, and the ustr, this is the trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, who will probably get that job. But Trump is probably, it's a cabinet level Pick and it doesn't really report to any agency. But what he's suggesting is Lutnick is going to be the direction of trade, not whatever neoliberal banker I'm forced to appoint. This goes with the Treasury.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I think this goes with your theory, though he is everyone expects this to be Robert Lighthizer. It seems like the most obvious appointment that Trump could make. And I wonder if he is slow walking it because he's trying to dish it out to the markets in a different clip to avoid any massive.

[Ryan Grim]

I think the markets wouldn't freak out about Lighthizer like because he's the devil they know.

[Sagar Enjeti]

True.

[Ryan Grim]

And the devil they don't know because they know that Lighthizer is not actually going to do 20% tariffs on everything.

[Sagar Enjeti]

How dare you.

[Ryan Grim]

That he's going to do much more targeted ones.

[Sagar Enjeti]

200% tariffs.

[Ryan Grim]

Yeah. And the way you do it, you do tariffs on everything and then you waive it for Europe and Africa and Southeast Asia and India and South America and by the end you're like, oh wait, this is just China.

[Sagar Enjeti]

It's just Antarctica.

[Ryan Grim]

This is just China and Antarctica that are getting hit with this. There's also some talk that maybe Lighthizer gets a trade czar position which kind of almost is over top of ustr. But I think the basic point is, yes, this and Marco Rubio are one of the times he blinked. Now, maybe he comes in with some radical treasury secretary nominee, but I wouldn't think so because he was looking for somebody who had credentials and bought into a lot of Trump's economic policy. The Venn diagram of that is like one guy. Maybe if there are any more, I don't know them well.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Speaking of whether Trump is blinking on some of these, let's put a 2 up on the screen. He made another nomination later last night after passing her over for Commerce. Tara Palmieri wrote, I'm hearing that Linda McMahon is the lead contender for secretary of Education. She's co chair of the transition with Lutnick, actually, and former head of the small business Admin during the first term. I'm hearing that by Friday all of the major cabinet postings will be announced. Now, Trump made that official hours after Palmieri reported it. It was like 8pm Something like that. So Linda McMahon is not somebody who has been involved in the education world at all. People who work on conservative education policy and it's a fairly big ecosystem is not they don't have any like familiarity with Linda McMahon as an education reformer.

[Ryan Grim]

Yeah, she won. And I remember this because she ran for Senate in 2009. This hilarious. She spent $50 million of her and Vince's money, founders of WWE, to run for Senate. And it was just an utterly insane campaign. And it was winnable because it was in the backlash period against Obama winning. A year later, Republicans with Scott Brown won a Senate race in Massachusetts. So it wasn't an unwinnable race in Connecticut. She at the time, she had just been elected to the Board of Education in Connecticut. But it was, that was like a make work kind of credential gig to put it on your resume so that you're not just Vince McMahon's wife running for. Running for Senate. You have something that you can point to. So basically that's her experience. I think she's been on the board of some schools.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, she's like, I mean, most rich.

[Ryan Grim]

People have been on the board of schools. If you give money to the and they put you on the board, how.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Could you show up at the annual ball without. Yeah, it would be hard to not.

[Ryan Grim]

Be on the board if you're giving the amount of money that they're giving to these schools.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, right. So but anyway, all that is to say she was in the running for Commerce. So Trump gives commerce to her co chair in the transition, Lutnick, and then slots Linda McMahon into the education role. Betsy DeVos obviously was his education secretary last time around. And DeVos, who had a rocky confirmation, actually was spent decades and decades deeply enmeshed in education policy in a way that frankly was terrifying to people who opposed school choice and voucher systems and all of that. And I'm sure published a book about.

[Ryan Grim]

Her called Schoolhouse Rec.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I remember this. Yes, that's right. So if you're on the left, Betsy DeVos, decades of experience in education policy is actually like a huge threat. Linda McMahon, incoming Donald Trump says we're going to send education back to the states. That was part of his statement nominating Linda McMahon. McMahon last night. That should be much less terrifying to anybody who is opposed to like conservative reforms to the Department of Education. Because I don't understand how she'll have like the appetite for like pretty radical change, to be honest with the appetite and like the know how for that doesn't seem like it's a deep unabiding passion of hers. And it doesn't seem like, I mean, there'll be people in the Department of Education that are more from the DeVos.

[Ryan Grim]

Camp, but yeah, I'd say less terrifying from the left perspective than devos, but it seems like the play Here is that this is a win for kind of the MAGA world because she's close ally of Trump. She's gonna do what Trump asks. She's definitely not gonna buck him with her own education ideas, which means that.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Does she have education ideas, though? Seriously?

[Ryan Grim]

That's the point. Yeah. And then the MAGA world that does have education ideas, let's say. And Chris Rufo is. He is he welcomed back into Mega World after his support of desantis. He's back in.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, everyone's welcomed back in, honestly. Except as long as you weren't, like, a Jeb person.

[Ryan Grim]

Okay.

[Sagar Enjeti]

But even then.

[Ryan Grim]

Even then, yes. It's. It's, you know, big rainbow coalition come back together. So for people like Rufo, I feel like this is a victory because it's a kind of weakness secretary who's going to then be able to be pressured to do particular things or will be.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Because she doesn't have the conviction to go along with a Rufo will block it because it seems unpopular. I mean, I think that could definitely cut both ways. And I would imagine, if you are a rufo. And that's why I think this is an example of Trump blinking, because the one area of policy other than taxes that the conservative movement has a very robust ecosystem and is education policy. And there are a lot of very radical people in that space who have a lot of ideas, especially just germinating over the last half decade, have a lot of ideas about reform for the Department of Education and want to go run wild, as Trump says he's gonna let Bobby do at HHS and would love to do that at Education, and he went with Linda McMahon. So in a sense, yeah, maybe she's really malleable and maybe she can be pushed around a little bit. But also, if you lac the stomach for when you have those activists showing up outside the Department of Education saying you're starving children in the inner cities or you are making kids worse off and you succumb to the pressure rather than digging your heels in and fighting, as some of these education people on the right would want you to do, and Betsy DeVos probably would have. She stuck to her guns on Title ix. She was a little delicate about it. But all that is to say, I don't know what Linda Mc. I genuinely don't know.

[Ryan Grim]

It's not a culture warrior that the culture warriors would have wanted.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And there are a lot of culture warriors on education in the right.

[Ryan Grim]

Yeah. So actually maybe dodged a bullet. We'll see. Nobody knows how any of this is going to go true.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Even Randy Weingarten put out a fairly anodyne statement about Linda McMahon and said, we look forward to learning more about Linda McMahon. Instead of saying, like, this is just.

[Ryan Grim]

Another example of Donald Trump, they'll probably rush to confirm her.

[Sagar Enjeti]

We'll see.

[Ryan Grim]

Let's hurry up, because who knows what could be coming elsewhere.

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[Ryan Grim]

So Trump has yet to name Baltimore real estate developer stringer bell as HUD secretary. He did name Dr. Oz to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. I stole that from somebody online. Be a hilarious pick. So, yeah, Dr. Mehmet Oz to run Medicare. This is reporting from the 2022 race against John Fetterman, in which Dr. Oz is pushing for Medicare Advantage for all. And so this is actually a pretty layered and interesting debate here. As the Lever points out, because Dr. Oz is so stinking filthy rich, he owns a bunch of United Health Group and CVS stock and they make a lot of money from Medicare Advantage. Medicare Advantage is a privatized form of Medicare, which, if you're watching this and you're over 65 or you have parents who are over 65, there's a 50% plus chance that you're on Medicare Advantage. I think something about 52% of people on Medicare are actually getting Medicare Advantage now. And the left posture on Medicare Advantage for many years was that it is just straight up bad. And one of my first investigative stories 15, 20 years ago was a dig into the way that insurance companies were using Medicare Advantage to rip off both Medicare and patients and doctors and everybody else just to make profits for themselves under the Biden administration. There has been a crew of people running CMS that have, that have really cracked down on a lot of that. And so it's not, I don't think it's as principled an argument as it, as it used, as it was framed as before, because there are ways, and Florida has shown the way of ripping off regular Medicare in incredible ways. You know, setting up fake wheelchair companies and billing the federal government for $100 million and then shutting your post office box down, moving to the Caymans or whatever the problem comes in with, you know, what the rules are, who's in charge, who has the power in that political economy. And if you actually are regulating it in a serious way, that having private brokers involved isn't necessarily the worst thing in the world. And for Dr. Oz to say he wants Medicare Advantage for all, that's fascinating. That's basically like a publicly funded private health insurance option, which compared to our current system would be a vast improvement.

[Sagar Enjeti]

That's interesting. You say that.

[Ryan Grim]

Not like he's going to get it through. And it was, it was his response to Fetterman being for single payer when that was more popular back in 2022.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So Medicare, Medicare Advantage in practice is something that's criticized. Like you criticize Medicare Advantage in practice, but if we expand it to Medicare Advantage for all because it creates a private public option type dynamic, that would be better than the current system, thus.

[Ryan Grim]

I mean, give more coverage to more people.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And so not that he'll really have control over this.

[Ryan Grim]

So Medicare Advantage is bad when it's run by scammers who go around the old people and say, so basically the way Medicare Advantage runs is you Say, all right, Medicare will pay you X amount. Pay this company X amount, which is equal to. Supposed to be equal to what Medicare is paying for per individual, plus a little bit. And then you are going to do a better job for less money, because that's what the private sector says it can do. And so it's at its worst when people go around and say, we're going to give you vision, we're going to give you dental, we're going to give you hearing. And then when you sign up for it, you find that the actual coverage when it comes to those areas is skeletal at best. And it's just designed to trick you into signing up for it. Now you're stuck, and it actually has narrow networks and you're getting ripped off and you're getting worse care. The best version of Medicare Advantage is when a private company says, okay, we're going to take a health first approach. And there are companies that are doing this that are saying it is in our financial interest because we're getting, let's say, $20,000 to take care of this person's health care for the year. If we can get their health problems at the front end under control, and then they go to the hospital less, they go to the doctor, they get sick less, they need fewer medications, then we save money. So therefore, we are going to invest in exercise, nutrition, preventive medicine, like making sure that it's easy to go to the doctor to get a checkup. Like those things that then they argue save money in the long run. If that's the version of Medicare Advantage that prevails, who would argue against that? Because it's not that people want lots of medical care. People would rather be healthy.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Nobody wants to go to the doctor.

[Ryan Grim]

You don't want your bills to be high. And if you can align those incentives. That's interesting. So maybe when Dr. Oz sits down with the people who are at CMS now and they show him what they're doing, he might be like, you guys are doing good work here. Let's keep those now. At the same time, he's gonna push Medicare Advantage hard. That means by the end of Trump's term. I've seen estimates that have said 75% of people could be on Medicare Advantage, which is like a. You're basically fully privatized Medicare at that point, which is scary.

[Sagar Enjeti]

He doesn't this rule, obviously, you would need Congress to do anything really dramatic. So he can, essentially. So he's.

[Ryan Grim]

He can do a lot without Congress.

[Sagar Enjeti]

To overhaul the American health care system. He Would.

[Ryan Grim]

Oh, oh, yes, yes. He couldn't do Medicare Advantage for all.

[Sagar Enjeti]

But he could sort of tinker with the regulatory policies significantly. Significantly. In order to incentivize Medicare Advantage plans.

[Ryan Grim]

Yeah. There are small tweaks he can make that could juice signups like just making it the default, putting it on the website and pushing it. Pushing a little harder to seniors subsidies probably.

[Sagar Enjeti]

It's a different direction.

[Ryan Grim]

Yeah, tweak the, you know, tweak the benefit of it.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. Interesting. Very interesting.

[Ryan Grim]

But so it's ripe for corruption but also could make things better. Like we shouldn't pretend that regular Medicare is perfect. Yeah, don't kill me for that.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I was gonna say, but it's not. Okay. Bernie.

[Ryan Grim]

Yeah, Bernie would agree. Bernie absolutely agrees with not, not necessarily that Medicare Advantage needs to be. Is the answer, but that Medicare as it is needs serious supplementation.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah.

[Ryan Grim]

That's why he's always arguing needs to have dental because Medicare doesn't currently cover dental vision and hearing.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, it's a serious. I mean.

[Ryan Grim]

And that's the way that Medicare Advantage creeps in.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. No, I mean honest leftists like you and Bernie pretty clear eyed about the problems there.

[Crystal Ball]

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[US Cellular Representative]

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[Chinette Representative]

Here's to the holidays, to the smell of grandma's fresh baked casseroles. To bundling up by the fire with family and football. The Chinette Brand wants you to savor all the joys of Turkey Day while skipping the hassle of cleanup with their Chinette Classic collection. And since Chinette Classic plates and bowls are compostable, you're not only keeping the sink clean, you're helping leave less of a mess behind for future generations. So here's to being together. Here's to us, all of us. Find a local [e-mail].

[Sagar Enjeti]

Speaking of problems, should we move on to.

[Ryan Grim]

Let's do that.

[Sagar Enjeti]

America's sweetheart, Matt Gates. So the ongoing saga of Matt Gaetz nomination to head up the Department of Justice keeps taking turns by the hour, it seems, because every reporter in Washington is now on the Matt Gates beat and is now working hard to get to the bottom of the ethics investigation in particular. So we can actually put B1 up on the screen. This is a report from the New York Times yesterday. This is Robert Draper, who said an unidentified hacker has gained access to a computer file shared in a secure link among lawyers whose clients have given damaging testimony related to Matt Gates. So that I had to read that sentence a few times just to be like, okay, who did what and how? Because I found it to be somewhat confusing. But basically, someone seems to have hacked a link that lawyers representing women who have accusations against Matt Gaetz. Someone hacked that secure link with all of the testimony from the witnesses. And the file of 24 exhibits Draper continues is said to include sworn testimony by a woman who said that she had sex with Mr. Gates in 2017 when she was 17, as well as corroborating testimony by a second woman who said that she witnessed the encounter. The information was downloaded by a person using the name Altom Beasley at 1:23pm According to the person who is not authorized to speak publicly with the New York Times. So now Marjorie Taylor Greene weighs in with a tweet yesterday saying for my Republican colleagues in the House and Senate, if we are going to release ethics reports and rip apart our own that Trump has appointed, then put it all out there for the American people to see. Yes, all the ethics reports and claims, including the one I filed. All your sexual harassment and assault claims that were secretly settled playing paying off victims with taxpayer money. The entire Jeffrey Epstein files, tapes, recordings, witness interviews, but not just those. There's more. Epstein wasn't. Slash isn't the only asset. If we're going to dance, let's all dance in the sunlight. I will make sure we.

[Ryan Grim]

When she's right, she's right.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So sort of openly threatening blackmail and in a way that I think whatever Donald Trump and his allies are doing to senators, they are having some success so far because we have a mashup here of Senator Mark Wayne Mullen of Oklahoma, who was the source of the claim. He publicly came out. He was, like, on the steps of the Capitol giving an interview to, I think it was cnn, saying that Matt Gaetz, and this was before Gaetz was nominated, was showing pictures of his nude exploits on the floor of the House of Representatives. Let's just roll this clip.

[G]

I think the president wants a hammer at the doj, and he sees Matt Gates as a hammer and all these other appointments. He is. He's very confident in where they're at and can deliver the administration that he's wanting. His picks have been maybe unconventional, but we hired an unconventional president, and the American people wanted that. They don't want politics as usual. They want someone that's going to shake up Washington, D.C. you got to think about this guy. This is a guy that didn't have. That the media didn't give a time of day to after he was accused of sleeping with an underage girl. And there's a reason why no one in the conference came and defended him, because we had all seen the videos he was showing on the House floor that all of us had walked away of the girls that he had slept with. He'd brag about how he would crush ed medicine and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night. This is obviously before he got married. And so when that accusation came out, no one defended him, and then no one on the media would give him a time of the day.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So there you had Mark Wayne Mullen after the Trump pressure campaign, and then before the Trump pressure campaign, when Matt Gaetz hadn't been nominated to head up the Department of Justice. Just openly talking about what everyone who has worked with Matt Gaetz will tell you was common among Matt Gaetz. Among the circles that Matt Gaetz was clearly running in, which were unsavory, to say the very least. This is sort of what's amusing about some of my friends who are supportive of Gates nomination. They see him as a disruptor, saying Joel Greenberg is an unsavory character. He's in prison, he's lied. It's like, well, he was. Matt Gaetz is arguably Matt Gates, his best friend. It doesn't speak well of Gaetz that Joel Greenberg is a bad person, necessarily. Let's check in on Representative Anna Paulina Luna. We have a mashup to roll from her.

[T-Mobile Representative]

Let's roll this, the Republicans asking for this House, House ethics report to be released, it's people like Senator John Cornyn of Texas. It'd be hard to describe him as anything but aligned with maga. Are you suggesting that there's something in his stock portfolio that's questionable?

[H]

I'm suggesting that John Cornyn, I, to my knowledge, made statements that was actually anti MAGA about President Trump and same with the new elected Senate leader. But I will say that Thune has since changed his tune, and it seems like he's more aligned with MAGA and President Trump. So I will say, when they ask for.

[T-Mobile Representative]

When they ask for the House ethics report, do you think that there's something corrupt about that? When they're asking for testimony, when they're asking for this report, again, a bipartisan report, do you think there's something unethical about that?

[H]

I think that what's unethical about it is that this has been shut down, that they're not requesting reports on other people who are knowingly under investigation currently, and that those. I find it interesting that these actual allegations come out at peculiarly peculiar timing while he's being nominated to be the Attorney General. To be clear, I do think Mackay is going to be an incredible attorney general. I think this baseless smear campaign, frankly, is abhorrent, that it's happening to someone like Matt Gaetz, who's done so much to fight the government corruption. And there's a reason why President Trump won not just the popular vote, but also the electorate vote. Frankly, people trust President Trump's judgment more than any news outlet out there.

[T-Mobile Representative]

Congressman, I just want to clarify something. You said you got direct, firsthand accounts from DOJ and the FBI when they declined to prosecute him criminally. Were you able to review the testimony yourself?

[H]

What I can tell you is they came out in a public statement, actually had dropped charges against Representative Matt Gates. That's what I mean by that. And frankly, what I'm finding is these baseless allegations when people go out there and smear reputations. This happened to Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So not true, of course, that the ethics report was just brought out, was just like, sort of made public when Matt Gaetz was nominated. This was the Department of Justice investigation, goes back years. And the ethics report obviously was set to be released a couple of days before Gates was actually named the nominee.

[Ryan Grim]

It seems pretty clear he resigned. There's no reason to resign the end of your term, right? Other than to prevent the release of this. So it was actually. It's actually Kind of the reverse.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah.

[Ryan Grim]

That it's not that these allegations are surfacing because he was nominated, his nomination and his subsequent resignation buried. Potentially buried them.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Well, if he doesn't get confirmed, he's resigned. So he's not in Congress.

[Ryan Grim]

It's hilarious. He's resigned from this term. He could get sworn back in. He can get sworn back in January.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Because he was reelected.

[Ryan Grim]

Yeah.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah.

[Ryan Grim]

So it's the funniest resignation ever.

[Sagar Enjeti]

That is pretty funny.

[Ryan Grim]

It's like a two month resignation.

[Sagar Enjeti]

But if he gets sworn back in, then that's why it was so pointless.

[Ryan Grim]

And so obvious why he did it.

[Sagar Enjeti]

But then the ethics probe is back in play. Assuming he doesn't get confirmed, then the ethics probe of a sitting member of Congress is back in play.

[Ryan Grim]

Do they have to start it all over again? It'd be hilarious.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I don't think so. But I wonder. They've probably never had that specific dilemma before. Yeah. Ryan, though, there's a lot of other context to this. Lest we fall into the sort of camp that most of the mainstream media is in, which is just reflexively treating this as though it's a cut and dry sexual misconduct situation, there is a lot more going on beneath the surface, especially with the Department of Justice. You're the one who suggested, actually we take a look at this piece by my friend Molly Hemingway, my boss at the Federalist.

[Ryan Grim]

This is B5, and let me explain why. I think the people watching this show are adults with their own kind of complex moral worldviews and are able to hold together multiple thoughts in their head.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yes.

[Ryan Grim]

We'll find out the headline. Let's talk about this, because this is. Buckle up. This is wild.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And if you're listening, the headline is house Probe into Matt Gaetz Relies on Witnesses DOJ found lacked credibility.

[Ryan Grim]

Right. All right, so go read the Molly Hemingway piece. Like this is. It's a good piece.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Very viral.

[Ryan Grim]

It's gone viral for good reason. And it is sourced to public documents. It's not the kind of thing where you have to take Molly Hemingway's word on anything here. The point that she's making here, and you correct me if I'm wrong here, is that the two women that were just referenced in that New York Times article. Right. Are publicly. According to a jailhouse snitch, by the way. You got it.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah.

[Ryan Grim]

Always be skeptical of jailhouse snitches who are telling you something usually so that they can, you know, get themselves out of whatever trouble they're in that got them in the jailhouse to begin. With. However, it doesn't appear the reason I find this particular jailhouse niche credible is because of the details that he has. He was in a cell with Joel Greenberg, and according to him, Greenberg told him that he had two young women who were willing to lie to back up Joel Greenberg to support his claims against Gaetz.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Right.

[Ryan Grim]

So where would now, like I said, you can be skeptical of a jailhouse snitch if you want. This is what the snitches said. And therefore, we need to know more about these two sources that the New York Times is talking about. Are they the same ones that Greenberg allegedly said were willing to lie in order to back up Greenberg and harm Gates? Greenberg is serving 11 years for sex trafficking and all sorts of other scammy, scummy stuff.

[Sagar Enjeti]

He was like, the tax collector of Seminole County.

[Ryan Grim]

Yeah.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah.

[Ryan Grim]

And to your. To your.

[Sagar Enjeti]

He pleaded guilty to underage sex trafficking, wire fraud, stalking, identity theft, producing a fake ID card and conspiring to defraud the US Government. Pleaded guilty.

[Ryan Grim]

Yeah. Just a despicable human being and has previously concocted claims against political opponents for sleeping with minors. There was a. I believe it was a teacher who was running against him for tax collector. They smeared it, I guess, as a Democrat. And he created this elaborate scheme where he created a fake email and emailed the school and made these fake claims about this teacher to try to destroy the person, not just the person's electoral chances against him, but the person's entire life. Because you get an allegation like that, the school, the community, everyone is going to take that immensely seriously. Because what, just being made up? What are the chances of that? Well, the chances are remote, but it turns out sometimes that happens.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And Greenberg actually apologized for this.

[Ryan Grim]

So it's not like, this is not in dispute. Like, we know for a fact that this is a card that this guy plays. Now, why I say we are treating our audience like adults here, able to hold complicated and contradictory thoughts in their mind, is that this guy was, like, Gates, best bud. And they were at parties with high schoolers and college girls.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yes.

[Ryan Grim]

Like, which is gross.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yes. In their mid-30s.

[Ryan Grim]

In their mid-30s. Like, get a grip. But that's not. It's not a crime, and that's not what they're being accused of. So you can think that they're gross dudes. But the question here is, did they do. Did Gates do this crime?

[Sagar Enjeti]

Exactly.

[Ryan Grim]

The Justice Department, according to people that familiar with this matter, found the witnesses not to be credible and dropped the charges.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Right.

[Ryan Grim]

So they apparently found the jailhouse niche to be credible. This is the Biden Justice Department.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Right. And this is part of a plea deal with Greenberg, by the way. They wanted to get Gaetz so badly that they struck this plea deal with Greenberg. So that could reflect on the credibility of everything that he's admitted to, of course, but he's still got a long prison sentence. And this is the Biden Justice Department that has been targeted by Matt Gaetz over and over. Matt Gaetz is one of the harshest, most vehement critics of the Biden Justice Department, of the Justice Department in general. So if there's anybody that they would want to get and do it quickly, it would have been Matt Gaetz. They tried and they were leaking salacious stuff about this investigation all along the way and ultimately couldn't get him. They couldn't get him. And there's a lot of. Where there's smoke, there's fire. In this case, there are tons of Venmo transactions between Matt Gaetz and his two female accusers.

[Ryan Grim]

Right. There's a. There's a new one that's like 700 some dollars. It's up to 10,000, the memo says, like tuition reimbursement.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yes, I have them. Right.

[Ryan Grim]

So this is gross stuff.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah.

[Ryan Grim]

Gates has said that people are mistaking his generosity to his ex girlfriend for paying for prostitution.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. No, I mean, you can literally look at the Venmo transactions. It's there.

[Ryan Grim]

Very generous.

[Sagar Enjeti]

You can see it again. This is a guy at best. He's in his mid-30s and he's hanging around, flying these girls around the country and paying them on Venmo. One of them reportedly lied and said she was over 18 when she was 17. Either way, they're very young women. And that's a different question then.

[Ryan Grim]

And as Marc Caputo reported in Politico in this article, and 20, 21 or 3, whenever it was, they went on this trip to the Bahamas, all these creeps. And the customs and border patrol stopped the plane when it. The private plane when it landed because there were such young looking women on the plane. And like, they were like, this is creepy. That's a bunch of old dudes. And some very young women.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah.

[Ryan Grim]

They turned out to be 18.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah.

[Ryan Grim]

So it does show how low you have to stoop to make the case for Matt Gaetz, which is. Your honor, they were 18. Like, that's pretty pitiful. On the other hand, the charge is that they were 17. And so far, the claim, the charges don't look like they're sticking.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah.

[Ryan Grim]

And you wind up with these situations like Sunny Hostin got herself into yesterday at the View. I don't think we have that clip handy, but I don't know if you saw this. She was forced to do like a legal read because if you say with certainty that these things happened, you're not on very firm legal grounds. So she was forced to do on the View a legal read where she looked at the camera and said, matt Gaetz denies, blah, blah, blah, and the Justice Department dropped the claims and kind of embarrassing to have to do.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, so this is also a really impossible story to follow because the details are just. It's layers and layers and layers. Yeah. And one of the women.

[Ryan Grim]

Panhandle thing. Possible.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Very panhandle. One of the women, the one who I referenced, lying about her age. That was reportedly to Greenberg, just to clarify. But all of this gets back to whether or not Matt Gaetz had sex with a 17 year old when he was in his mid-30s.

[Ryan Grim]

And this 17 year old, this is something Greenberg was like trafficking.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah.

[Ryan Grim]

To other. To his friends and stuff.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And that's what it gets to. Right. So there's that question. There's also just ample, ample evidence that Matt Gaetz, if you are hardcore maga, is not the person that is going to successfully uproot the Department of Justice compared to what somebody like Jim Jordan could do or somebody who comes in without the sleazy baggage. In this case, I don't think it's necessary to pluck the sleaziest person out of Congress because he's one of the most ardent, ardent opponents of a department that desperately needs ardent opponents. Like, he's not the only person. He wasn't the only option. I think he was an option, though, to make a point that we are going to, as Trump says, we are going to go wild. Like, we are going to dismantle this department. We are absolutely deadly serious about it. And that's why Trump is doubling down. He said he was asked yesterday if he would reconsider Gates and he said no. Lee Fong makes an interesting point on X. He said before he was appointed AG in 2009, Eric Holder helped Purdue Pharma negotiate a sweetheart West Virginia settlement as the firm was flooding Appalachia with dangerous opioids. Made a career of helping large corporations dodge accountability for fraud. Yet that was never a major scandal. And so there's this meta conversation as well about how all of our politicians are extremely sleazy and the media and political establishment has a double standard to your Point Ryan. All of that stuff can be true. Matt Gaetz can be excellent on Lina Khan and antitrust and be excellent on surveillance and all of those seriously very important topics that nobody in the political establishment, they might pay lip service to it once in a while or they might not, but they are not serious about actually creating change. Matt Gaetz seems to be. He's one of the boldest proponents of antitrust reform on the right. He has actually put his money where his mouth is. He has stuck with it and made consistent, not waffled like the people we had Ty Cruz on. He has, you know, break up big tech in his book. He cannot stand Lina Khan. You know, this is like, this is rare. And there's something about Matt Gaetz being at the Department of Justice that would be somewhat satisfying from a policy perspective. But it's that it's easy to get caught, I think, in the meta conversation and not just sort of the simple, if we're draining the swamp, you know, what's Matt Gates?

[Ryan Grim]

And maybe you're right to the point that the left's best hope might be that he's just not equipped experientially to run an organization of this size in the way that he wants.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Right, Yeah.

[Ryan Grim]

I mean, and when, I mean the left, I mean, people concerned about what he's going to do when it comes to weaponizing the Justice Department in defense of, you know, Trump's worst instincts, the left would be happy if he actually succeeded in pushing forward surveillance reform, antitrust stuff, that kind of thing.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. So no, I mean there's obviously he was, I think he was targeted for political reasons. I think he's continuing to be targeted for political reasons. I think the media has a total double standard when it comes to Matt Gaetz. I think we do have a whole lot of awful politicians. I'm not sure that from a conservative perspective that practically or morally justifies Matt Gaetz. I just disagree with that argument. But hey, yeah.

[Ryan Grim]

And just because it seems like the claim that he slept with a 17 year old is not well founded doesn't mean you have to like the guy and think that he's a morally upstanding figure.

[Sagar Enjeti]

It also to me seems like he's so ripe for blackmail when you're leading a department like this. Part of the reason, how do you.

[Ryan Grim]

Blackmail guys where everything's already out?

[Sagar Enjeti]

That's true. But I don't know that everything is already out.

[Ryan Grim]

That's true. Good Lord.

[Sagar Enjeti]

He brought Chuck Johnson to the State of the Union. Known Fed Chuck Johnson, the State of.

[Ryan Grim]

The union one year there's a lawsuit against him for not being a fed from some like AI Silicon Valley antagonist of his that he's falsely claiming to be a fed.

[Sagar Enjeti]

He's falsely claiming to be a fed.

[Ryan Grim]

That's according to this lawsuit.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Incredible stuff.

[Ryan Grim]

Yeah, but he did out Peter Thiel as a fed, and Peter Thiel then acknowledged that he had been doing that.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Matt Gaines is entangled in a very interesting web of personalities. And anyway, that's I think I hope that people leave this segment more well informed than anyone leaving the segments done by our next subject here, which would be Morning Joe.

[Crystal Ball]

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[US Cellular Representative]

Gifting is hard, but here's a Give the gift of connection from US Cellular. Not sure what that means? Here's a slightly more specific hint. You can choose four free phones and get four lines for $90 a month from US Cellular. Your family wants new phones. How do we know? They told us. The good news is that compared to wrapping presents, you're great at getting hints. So take the hint and get them. Four free phones and four lines for $90 a month US Cellular built for us.

[Chinette Representative]

Here's to the holidays. To the smell of grandma's fresh baked casseroles. To bundling up by the fire with family and football. The Chinette brand wants you to savor all the joys of Turkey Day while skipping the hassle of cleanup with their Chinette Classic collection. And since Chinette Classic plates and bowls are compostable, you're not only keeping the sink clean, you're helping leave less of a mess behind for future generations. So here's to being together. Here's to us. All of us. Find a local [e-mail].

[Sagar Enjeti]

Let'S pivot to Morning Joe Hard pivot to Morning Joe. We have to roll this clip of them every day now. It's sort of like, reality television, which is always what Morning Joe actually, I think has some of the best production quality in television. Like, it's so casual. They understand why people watch tv, even if the content is terrible. The production is generally kind of compelling at Morning Joe because it's like reality television. And that's what we are seeing play out on the show this week as they are just absolutely playing up the attention they've received for kissing the ring.

[Ryan Grim]

At Mar A Lago or the attention they're not getting too. From their viewers.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yes, a little bit of both. So let's roll this clip from yesterday's edition of Morning tr.

[T-Mobile Representative]

Yesterday saw for the first time what a massive disconnect there was between social media and the real world, because we were flooded with phone calls from people all day, literally around the world. A very positive, very supportive going, understand what you do. You did, etc. Etc. But once in a while I would get a text or a call from go, oh, man, I hope you're doing okay. And I call them back and I go, well, Eddie Gladwis, one of them. I go, eddie, are you on Twitter? And he goes, I am. I go, okay, well, I'm not. So we've had a good day. Mika just had a wonderful event and it's fantastic.

[Sagar Enjeti]

They're just like leaning into each other like a team member.

[Ryan Grim]

Our desk is too far apart. Can't quite.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And we don't have any Starbucks like that. They always have Starbucks.

[Ryan Grim]

Well, yeah, they're sponsored there.

[Sagar Enjeti]

We have Sauger's weird African coffee.

[Ryan Grim]

Yeah. But we also got our own faces.

[Sagar Enjeti]

We have our own faces, which you.

[Ryan Grim]

Should go buy in the mug store that we got over there.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Buy the mugs. That was the point of the segment, was to sell mugs.

[Ryan Grim]

And so, yeah, obviously this comes after they went down to Mar A Lago, kissed the ring. Their audience recoiled because their audience has been told for the last eight years that this is Hitler reincarnated by them. Yeah, by them. Told by them. And so now they're saying, well, we better go ahead and kind of kiss and make up and, hey, he won, so we should all be friends. And that just doesn't clash, like if those two things just do not work together. And so their audience is absolutely livid. Their friends who have their cell phone numbers think it's cool. And so from Mika and Joe's perspective, that shows that Twitter is not real life.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Which, by the way, it's the year of our Lord 2024. They're just coming to this realization they cover politics every single day.

[Ryan Grim]

In this case, I think they're wrong. I think the people in their cell phones are not real life.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yes.

[Ryan Grim]

Twitter is actually much closer to real life in this sense than the fact that all of their friends around the country are like, yeah, sure, this is working for you. Right, let's roll. Well, not roll, but put up C2 here. This is an interesting kind of way that they're responding to this. Our friend of the show, Aaron Rupar, who has some irrational hatred of me that I've never quite told.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Oh, of you. I didn't know that.

[Ryan Grim]

It's quite bizarre.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Many such cases.

[Ryan Grim]

Many such cases. So he writes, Morning Joe has turned off replies to tweets and hasn't been posting clips of the show. The trip to Mar a Lago not going well.

[Sagar Enjeti]

This is Pete RuPaul. He noticed before anyone that Morning Joe wasn't posting clips.

[Ryan Grim]

I agree with RuPaul here. This is fair observation. If you're a show that is afraid to be seen, that doesn't bode well because your job as a show is to be seen.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. So let's put the next element up on the screen. Just continuing on with this theme. This is also resistance. Ron Fibolkowski, if Trump has them that intimidated that they need to retire. And MSNBC hosts piled on CNN earlier this year, but their code of silence on this is gross. Have some courage and integrity. Is that too much to ask or are you just too comfortable? He was responding to this George Conway tweet you see on your screen where Brian Seltzer reported that according to two sources with direct knowledge, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were credibly concerned that they could face governmental and legal harassment from the incoming Trump administration. George Conway quote, tweets that this Twitter drama is positively middle school esque and says, sadly, Brian's reporting is correct. Over the past week, I heard from two entirely separate but very reliable sources with some vivid detail that they are absolutely terrified of Trump. Entirely separate, very reliable sources. I wonder if those sources were Joe and Mika or if they were people like Joe and Mika who are absolutely terrified of Trump. But George Conway, who goes on msnbc, would be in a position to know what the mindset is of people in that orbit saying, basically Joe and Micah went down to Mar a Lago because they don't want to face backlash, legal backlash, potentially from a Trump administration. Now, Ron, Phil Bukowski and Jen Rubin, another person who goes on msnbc, have been apoplectic about this, about Joe and Mika going to kiss The Ring. And indeed, it appears that the audience, to the point you made, is as well. So let's put C4 up on the screen. This is a report from the Daily Beast. The ratings are falling. So the headline is, morning Joe ratings fall after Trump meeting announcement. Nielsen data showed a drop in viewers after the 6am hour.

[Ryan Grim]

And what's fascinating about that is that the show goes from 6 to 10, God bless them. And obviously, because most of the country still sleep at 6am the audience for the program builds. Builds throughout the day and then falls kind of toward the after people have things to do. But what the Mediaite records that they obtain show is that they go on and they say, hey, everybody, guess what? Cool news. We went down to Mar A Lago. Trump's okay. Their audience collapsed. 30% of those in the 25 to 54 demographic had stopped watching by the next hour.

[Sagar Enjeti]

That's significant.

[Ryan Grim]

Yeah, because normally you're going up and now you're losing 38%.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And 38% is a lot.

[Ryan Grim]

I'm not a math major, but that's a lot. And so clearly what happened was people were like, are you effing kidding me? Right click. Not dealing with this if you want your resistance content from the people who've been giving it to you for eight years. And now all of a sudden, they're telling you that actually, which, you know, we're not gonna beat up their audience. But throughout the 2016 campaign, it was quite obvious that Mika and Joe were, like, longtime friends of Donald Trump, of course, and loved the fact that he was running because it was incredible for the ratings. He was constantly calling in and flirting with them.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Literally.

[Ryan Grim]

Yes, literally flirting with them. And then he actually shocked them by winning. And then their relationship soured. And so here we are.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Right? And they say they did all of this because in their sanctimonious way, it was absolutely worth it, Quote, absolutely worth it to get Donald Trump to come out and make a statement saying he supports a free and fair press. That is essential. This is their argument, is that it was worth their time to go kiss the ring because they got him to say nice things about the press. And that's just absolutely essential to the work that they've done so that to support the media here.

[Ryan Grim]

And maybe you agree with everything that they're saying, but what is clear is that they're only saying it out of fear. Right. And because things have not gone their way, and to me, they should just then step down. Like, if you are acting out of fear rather than out of Your true genuine impulses that you want to share with the audience. Let somebody else do the gig.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Well, interestingly, Comcast officially announced that it plans to spin off NBCUniversal cable channels into a separate publicly traded company.

[Ryan Grim]

That's official now.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, that broke Crystal text this morning.

[Ryan Grim]

Oh boy.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, so I mean that's an interesting.

[Ryan Grim]

Talk about what that means.

[Sagar Enjeti]

It means an interesting future ahead of MSNBC because the NBC News and NBC MSNBC tension seems to be higher than it ever really has been in their history. By the way, the Ms. And NBC, do you remember what it stands for? Microsoft, Microsoft, NBC. Microsoft NBC. It's sad that Microsoft didn't just buy MSNBC back because we would be in for the same Joe and Mika bullshit. Because that's what I mean, that's the real problem with MSNBC is that they have spent years like you said, they wanted it to be known. They were very close to Donald Trump. They had access to power. They always thrived on that access. They broadcast from the middle of Manhattan in 30 Rock. And they want you to know that they want it to be clear that they are talking to the movers and the shakers and that they're friends with them. And that's what you see when they're in their quarter zips drinking their Starbucks is this is just friends chatting. And you never really get much like disruptive content even when they frame sort of things like oh, maybe this wokeness stuff has gone so far, gone a little bit too far as disruptive.

[Ryan Grim]

Right.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So now they like. It's fascinating to see what will happen with msnbc. Does it become just the network of people like who tune in for George Conway and Jen Rubin and the niche partisan content, Nicole Wallace, whatever else, Jen Psaki, is it going to become that network or is it still going to try to be a news network? I mean I think it's a pretty interesting question if you're the executives looking at the future.

[Ryan Grim]

Yeah. And basically you're just going for people over 45 and 50 at this point. Like the idea that you're going to get any new people under that age to start watching cable news, I think at this point most smart people recognize as a fantasy. So then it's like, well, okay, well how many of those people are Democrats and independent leaning? Democrats are Democratic leaning Independents. And basically can you convince cable companies to continue carrying you and paying you? Because that's for people that don't understand the way that cable companies make money. It's not mostly through the advertising. It's from your cable bill that you pay to the cable company, a piece of that goes to Fox or MSNBC or cnn. And the way that they maintain that is by maintaining their relevance, that people say, if I'm getting cable, I want these cable news channels. And you'll have fights where people will say, I don't want to have to pay for Fox, make Fox a la carte. Or I don't want to have to pay for CNN or whatever. But other people are like, I'm paying for basic cable. I want the news. What else am I doing? What else do I want here? I can get the rest of it anywhere else. So as long as there's a minimum threshold number of people who want MSNBC as part of their cable package and that that is understood through surveys of their users and angry phone calls, then the cable companies will keep paying them these kind of these very lucrative amounts of money. Because think about how much money you pay every month for cable if you still get cable. It's a lot. And a huge chunk of that then goes back to these networks.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Well, and it's why there's this incentive to be nicheified. And so that's what Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski are really trying. They're popping right now in a very uncomfortable way, this niche audience that they've cultivated in a bubble, which is, listen, I don't think niche audiences are necessarily a bad thing. I think they're really dangerous in politics, but they're cool in music and they're cool in all kinds of different cultural spheres. I think it's great that we have a media environment where Shane Smith can come back and do his show for Vice and there's some type of audience for it. But this is also really dangerous if it's creating political bubbles that people. For example, Tom Cotton publishes an op ed in the New York Times because the New York Times builds this not monoculture audience over the course of the Trump administration, but niche audience of resistance people. Because they published this Tom Cotton op ed, people cancel their subscriptions. Or Washington Post, same thing. People are canceling their subscriptions because the Post made a decision to go back to the pre1976 standard of not endorsing a presidential candidate because they saw their business failing. It's actually really fascinating and interesting decision that these executives have to make is whether they want to reach the broadest audience possible or corner a niche. And you can do really well. Like Stephen Colbert, least funny, most partisan guy in late night. Over the course of Trump administration, he was the top rated for most of the administration because people tune in over and over again when a lot of people, people who don't work in politics, they just want the comfort food. And if MSNBC was giving people comfort food, it wasn't really doing news unless it was maybe some connection to NBC News, some of their reporters coming on, whatever. So as soon as you start dishing out vegetables, you're going to lose your audience because that's not why they patronize your product anymore. And so that's a huge, huge conflict for them going forward. And they're at a fork in the road. They can decide to do news or do comfort food. So best of luck to. Best of luck to them.

[Ryan Grim]

Yeah.

[Sagar Enjeti]

All right, let's move on to our next block. This is the ongoing trial of the murder of Lake and Riley, which is taking place down in Georgia. We can put the first element up on the screen. This is the write up from the New York Post. You can see a picture of Lake and Riley on the screen there if you're watching it. Lake and Riley was 22. And I'm just going to read a little bit from an ABC News report about the trial yesterday. The last moments before Lake and Riley was killed while out on a run on the University of Georgia's campus were shown in court on Tuesday on the third day of the trial involving the murder of the 22 year old nursing student. The Augusta University student was found dead in a wooded area on the Athens campus on Feb. 22. Jose Ibarra, 26, is accused of murdering Riley after prosecutors said she, quote, refused to be his rape victim. Ibarra, an undocumented migrant who was charged with malice murder and felony murder in connection with her death, which became a rallying cry for immigration reform for many conservatives, including President Donald. So as this murder trial plays out, it is harrowing and I've seen it actually covered by a lot of the sort of women centric publications like people that cover true crime a lot because American women are very interested in true crime. I'm not saying that in any sort of misogynistic way that is literally statistically true. Like there's polling on it. And that means it's sort of undermining the point that ABC just made in its article that it became a rallying cry throughout the presidential election case study of Lake and Riley and I think Ryan, it was actually one of the most important moments in the 2024 election in terms of like deciding people's minds changing on the Biden immigration policy to sort of put a Face on it for a lot of people who were thinking about the Biden administration and Kamala Harris and deciding, you know, what they wanted to see. I think it makes people more comfortable with Donald Trump, for example, when there's a picture of a 22 year old nursing student and the sort of horrible situation that she endured. And that's not trying to politicize, that's just trying to explain why I think it was powerful in the election, I.

[Ryan Grim]

Guess, you know, it's a horrific tragedy.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah.

[Ryan Grim]

It always makes me uncomfortable when people, when a particular tragedy gets its attention because of who the assailant is rather than. And because it fits a political agenda. Like people who were born here in this country commit horrific murders actually every day. Yeah. And there's a lot of racism. Their victims are no more, no less worthy of our attention. And so that part of it makes me uncomfortable, but of course it's horrifying. And I think the thing that has helped to catapult it into the public's imagination is also the way that it happened. Just going for a jog and getting gratitude. It's the worst nightmare of people who are running early in the morning just as the sun is coming up that some murderer is going to jump out of the bushes. And it's out of that kind of storybook fear that fortunately is rare, but when it happens, it's going to get elevated and then when it turns out that the person was here illegally, then it's going to be weaponized. So, yeah, we'll get a verdict in the next couple days probably.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. And that's the thing with this trial is that it's really playing out like a pretty traditional true crime trial does these days where you're hearing, I mean, you're seeing the mother's last text messages to Lake and Riley and just all of the sort of heart wrenching details that come out in trials.

[Ryan Grim]

His brothers to testify. He's been, he's been called and he won't.

[Sagar Enjeti]

He is, he's not testifying. Jose Ibarra is not testifying. So that it's a. Yeah, his brother's supposed to testify.

[Ryan Grim]

And according to one of the witnesses who was, and it was complicated, that he said that he basically acknowledged that his brother did it and that if the woman said anything about it, he'd kill her too.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And he's supposed to. So part of this is that the prosecution, or I'm sorry, the defense seems to be pointing its finger subtly, as some people have said, at the brother. That's part of the defense is suggesting that it was a nibara. So, yeah, it's a very complicated trial. It's no surprise that it's getting as much attention as it is now in the New York Post.

[Ryan Grim]

Right. Because the quote from the brother was, I'll kill you too, or something like that, which suggests that he's saying that he was the actual killer, not the brother.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. And he was getting some federal benefits. Ibarra was. That's why, I mean, we probably disagree on the implications of this because I agree with you that there is a lot of evidence that people who come into the country illegally actually commit crimes at a lower rate. And while that might be true, I mean, there's competing research on it, the research that I've looked at, it seems to lean more heavily into the direction that it's a lower rate of crime committed. But there's partisans on both sides doing this research, so it's hard to actually get to the bottom of that. What I would say though is, you know, I think most Americans would look at, I have the CBP numbers up in front of me right now. Fiscal year 24, 1000 cases of people who were in the country illegally committing assault, battery, domestic violence, 2,800 cases of driving under the influence, 30 cases of homicide and manslaughter. You know, this is compared to the rest of the country. Obviously these are small numbers, but when.

[Ryan Grim]

It'S, and you need to know the denominator, how many people are here illegally? Is it 12 million? Is it 20 million?

[Sagar Enjeti]

Right. Which we literally don't know. We genuinely don't have a clear number on that question. But if you are the family of Lake and Riley and you're looking at an alleged Trende Aragua member who was getting taxpayer funded flights from Kennedy to Atlanta, JFK to Atlanta, and you know, he's already in the country. It's not legally in the country. This is already a question. It probably will reflect on the immigration policy from your perspective. It's, you know, we have plenty of, to your point, we have plenty of murder in the country as it is. We have plenty of, you know, our own domestic problems to deal with as it is. And so that's the extent to which I think it reflects on that is like that question of fairness. So we probably disagree on that. But that's, I think, why the trial resonated with so many people in the election. Yeah, for sure. We have this clip of Chad Wolf who was a Trump administration. He was, he was DHS under Trump, wasn't he? I think he was, like, acting or was he? Yeah, yeah, he was acting Secretary of dhs. I don't think he was ever formally confirmed. Here's how he reacted on Fox News. For a taste of how we could see the Trump administration handle this down the road.

[I]

Well, it's beyond awful because any, any criminal act, particularly this one committed by an illegal alien, is one that's preventable. They shouldn't be here to begin with. And they were facilitated. This individual appears to be facilitated by the Biden administration's border security policies. Right. He's from Venezuela. He gets in on a parole, he gets flown and transported to New York City. He's not happy there. Right. So New York then moves him to Georgia. All of this could have been avoided. If you actually have policies in place that deter this illegal immigration and folks that do claim asylum do claim some type of protections under law. We don't simply release them into the country. Right. You use, remain in Mexico or use other things that, that were put in place to hold these individuals and then allow them their, their time in court, if they get to do that.

[Sagar Enjeti]

But it'll be obviously a powerful talking point for the Trump administration in the months ahead as they decide. That question of mass deportations, which we continue to hear from Trump administration officials or incoming Trump administration officials themselves, is very much on the table Now. Mass deportation is not a technical, clinical term. We don't know what mass deportation would actually be. We're told that it would start with the quote, unquote, worst of the worst. The people who are here and already have rats sheets or have been coming in and out and trafficking whatever it is. Now, that's a very difficult thing to do in and of itself. So we don't know.

[Ryan Grim]

Yeah. What's gonna happen if they Trump empties out the jails and prisons, deports people who are here illegally but were serving sentences. They then come back into the country, get around his magical wall, commit a crime. Are we going to get wall to wall coverage of that, you think?

[Sagar Enjeti]

I mean, it's a pretty. And will that then be held against the Trump administration?

[Ryan Grim]

Yeah, I mean, because this wouldn't happen if the person had been left in prison.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. Republicans have held the Republican administration's feet to the fire over immigration. I mean, this was actually part of the problem with the Cornyn vs Thune vs Rick Scott conflict we talked about last week is people were absolutely furious about how Cornyn and Thune had handled the immigration bill under Langford and McConnell last year. So maybe. But obviously it's always different when it comes to Donald Trump.

[Ryan Grim]

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