1/22/25: Trump Hypes H1b, ICE Raids Begin, $500 Billion AI Project, Israel Invades West Bank & MORE!

Summary

Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar
Episode: 1/22/25: Trump Hypes H1B, ICE Raids Begin, $500 Billion AI Project, Israel Invades West Bank & MORE!
Release Date: January 22, 2025
Host: Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti
Publisher: iHeartPodcasts

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Overview

In this pivotal episode of Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar, the hosts delve into a whirlwind of critical issues shaping the early days of the Trump administration. From aggressive immigration crackdowns and substantial AI investments to contentious foreign policy moves in the Middle East, Ball and Enjeti dissect the administration's strategies and their broader implications. The conversation is punctuated with insightful commentary, backed by notable quotes from both hosts and political figures, providing listeners with a comprehensive understanding of the current political landscape.

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Trump's Immigration Policies and the H1B Visa Debate

The episode opens with a detailed analysis of President Donald Trump's recent press conference, focusing on his intensified immigration policies and the contentious debate surrounding H1B visas.

• Aggressive Immigration Crackdowns:
  Trump announced the commencement of ICE raids nationwide, prioritizing the deportation of undocumented migrants. Saagar Enjeti notes, “Trump is on an absolute roll” as he implements these stringent measures ([02:50]).

• H1B Visa Controversies:
  A significant point of contention is Trump's stance on H1B visas, which are crucial for bringing skilled foreign workers into the U.S.

  • Krystal Ball quotes Trump: “He needs engineers like nobody's ever needed engineers” ([05:02]).
  • Enjeti critiques the administration's approach, highlighting the exploitation inherent in the H1B system, where employers benefit from cheaper labor without providing adequate protections for foreign workers ([07:18]).

• Internal White House Tensions:
  The administration faces internal conflicts, particularly between pro-business oligarchs and extremist elements like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, who oppose H1B visas. Ball emphasizes the frustration: “They have real ideological ends” ([08:26]).

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Pardons and the January 6th Defendants

A significant portion of the discussion centers around Trump's controversial pardoning of individuals involved in the January 6th Capitol riot and the retirement of Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road.

• January 6th Pardons:
  The administration's decision to pardon certain defendants from the January 6th events has sparked intense debate.

  • Ball questions the rationale behind pardoning individuals who assaulted police officers, noting the inconsistency in Trump's tough-on-crime rhetoric versus his leniency towards these pardons ([14:28]).
  • Enjeti highlights the potential normalization of political violence: “He is effectively immunizing his followers from committing violence in his name” ([87:20]).

• Ross Ulbricht's Pardon:
  Trump’s pardon of Ross Ulbricht garners mixed reactions.

  • Ball points out, “A life sentence for facilitating drug sales is mind-boggling” ([27:49]).
  • Enjeti discusses the political maneuvering, suggesting that pardoning Ulbricht serves to placate the Libertarian Party without addressing more significant figures like Edward Snowden ([26:09]).

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AI Investment and Energy Policies

The Trump administration has unveiled a monumental $500 billion investment in artificial intelligence (AI), aiming to position the U.S. as a global leader in AI technology.

• $500 Billion AI Project:
  The investment focuses on building extensive data centers in Texas, intended to create hundreds of thousands of jobs and spur innovation.

  • Enjeti remarks on the administration's favorable policies towards AI: “It'll be great for Americans, great for the whole world” ([60:05]).

• Energy Crisis Due to AI Demands:
  Trump's executive order, titled "Unleashing American Energy," declares an energy crisis driven by the high demand from AI data centers.

  • He states, “We are going to sweep away a lot of regulations to drive down prices” to support this massive infrastructure ([62:00]).

• Comparison with China:
  The hosts draw parallels between the U.S. and China in the AI race, emphasizing concerns over energy efficiency and decentralized AI development in the U.S. versus China's approach.

  • Enjeti underscores the potential risks: “Our AI policy is not made by me as a voter. Our AI policy is made by Sam Altman and our oligarchs in China” ([74:14]).

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Israel's Raid on Jenin and Regional Stability

The episode shifts focus to escalating tensions in the Middle East, particularly Israel's military actions in Jenin and the fragile ceasefire in Gaza.

• Raid on Jenin:
  Israel launched a significant military operation in Jenin, a stronghold for Palestinian resistance.

  • The raid resulted in casualties and heightened tensions, with Netanyahu asserting, “We're acting systematically and decisively against terrorism” ([78:30]).

• Ceasefire in Gaza:
  A temporary ceasefire agreement has been brokered, but its stability is in question.

  • Trump expressed skepticism about the longevity of the ceasefire: “I doubt it” and referred to it as, “their war” ([105:42]).

• Political Repercussions:
  The interplay between the U.S. and Israeli policies creates a complex geopolitical landscape, with Trump’s administration seeming poised to diverge from traditional Republican stances on interventionism.

  • Enjeti and Ball discuss the potential for Trump to leverage these actions to realign U.S. foreign policy in favor of a more aggressive stance against Iran, despite internal and external challenges ([96:24]).

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Media Coverage and Elon Musk's Gestures

The hosts critique media interpretations of Elon Musk’s recent gestures, which some have misconstrued as extremist signals.

• Elon Musk's Controversial Gestures:
  Musk was accused of making Nazi salutes during public appearances.

  • Ball and Enjeti analyze the gestures, suggesting they might be misunderstood or intentionally provocative: “He is being a troll” vs. genuine extremist signals ([86:05]).

• Rachel Maddow and The View's Reactions:
  The episode highlights contrasting media responses, with Rachel Maddow linking Musk's actions to broader themes of authoritarianism, while The View offers a more nuanced take, reflecting differing media landscapes and their impact on public perception ([91:26], [95:59]).

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Weather Extremes and Political Implications

Extreme weather events, such as unprecedented snowfall in the southern United States, are discussed in the context of political and environmental policies.

• Unusual Snow in the South:
  Florida and New Orleans experienced historic snowfall, a rare occurrence that has sparked political debate over climate change and governmental preparedness.

  • Enjeti connects these events to Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord, framing it as a move to save on regulatory costs while ignoring the escalating climate crisis ([52:54], [79:13]).

• Climate Policy Critique:
  The hosts argue that Trump's rollback of climate policies is not only fiscally misguided but also environmentally perilous, with severe repercussions for vulnerable regions ([52:54], [83:42]).

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Conclusion

This episode of Breaking Points paints a stark picture of the early Trump administration's multifaceted approach to governance, marked by aggressive immigration policies, significant investments in AI, and contentious foreign policy moves. Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti provide a critical examination of these initiatives, highlighting the underlying ideological battles and their potential long-term impacts on both domestic and international fronts. Through incisive commentary and a thorough exploration of recent events, the hosts offer listeners a nuanced perspective on the shifting political dynamics in the United States.

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Notable Quotes:

• Saagar Enjeti on Trump's Immigration Roll:
  “[02:50] Sagar Enjeti: The guy is on an absolute roll.”

• Krystal Ball on H1B Visa Exploitation:
  “[05:02] Krystal Ball: He needs engineers like nobody's ever needed engineers.”

• Saagar Enjeti on Oligarch Influence:
  “[09:36] Sagar Enjeti: It’s something other people don’t experience.”

• Krystal Ball on January 6th Pardons:
  “[87:20] Krystal Ball: He is effectively immunizing his followers from committing violence in his name.”

• Saagar Enjeti on AI Policy Control:
  “[74:14] Sagar Enjeti: Our AI policy is not made by me as a voter. Our AI policy is made by Sam Altman and our oligarchs in China.”

• Krystal Ball on Extreme Weather:
  “[79:13] Krystal Ball: That's right.”

These quotes encapsulate the critical viewpoints and themes discussed throughout the episode, providing listeners with key takeaways from the hosts' analysis.

Transcript

[Krystal Ball]

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[Sagar Enjeti]

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[Krystal Ball]

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[Emily Jashinsky]

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[Krystal Ball]

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[Emily Jashinsky]

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[Krystal Ball]

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[Sagar Enjeti]

Amazon One Medical presents Painful thoughts I.

[Krystal Ball]

Could catch anything sitting in this doctor's waiting room.

[Emily Jashinsky]

A kid just wiped his runny nose on my jacket and the guy next.

[Krystal Ball]

To me sitting in a pool of.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Perspiration insists on sharing my armrest.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Next time, make an appointment with an Amazon One medical provider. There's no waiting and no sweaty guy. Amazon One Medical Healthcare just got less painful.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Hey, guys, Sagar and Krystal here.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Independent media just played a truly massive.

[Krystal Ball]

Role in this election and we are so excited about what that means for.

[Sagar Enjeti]

The future of this show.

[Emily Jashinsky]

This is the only place where you.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Can find honest perspectives from the left.

[Emily Jashinsky]

And the right that simply does not exist anywhere else.

[Krystal Ball]

So if that is something that's important to you, Please go to BreakingPoints.com, become a member today, and you'll get access to our full shows unedited ad, free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox.

[Emily Jashinsky]

We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Hope to see [e-mail] all right. Good morning. Welcome to Counterpoints. I'm Ryan Graham. I'm here in the studio by myself here. Emily Jasinsky, out on the road, a working journalist, but joining us for the show nonetheless. Deeply appreciate it. Emily, how you doing?

[Emily Jashinsky]

Great. I'm here at Scenic laguardia and now I actually mean that because they did a nice job with LaGuardia when they did their Covid renovations.

[Sagar Enjeti]

America was made great again. So what we learned over the last two days is that the next four years is going to be nothing if not exciting, that's for sure. From the left, it might be utterly terrifying. Some parts of it might be invigorating. But there's. I don't know when this guy is going to slow down. Maybe he's going to plow right through his first 100 days. When is Trump going to get a round of golfing? The guy must be shaking at this point.

[Emily Jashinsky]

You just had to go for the golf, Ryan. If anything, you should be wanting him to golf. It relaxes himself.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Absolutely. I mean, the guy is on an absolute roll. We're gonna talk about more of the executive orders that he's been rolling in. He had a kind of wild press conference last night. Not wild. It was a Trump press conference. That's what it was. It's not wild.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah, we have to stop calling them wild.

[Sagar Enjeti]

It's not wild. At this point, there's a ton of news on the immigration front. Announcement that raids are starting, a kind of backdoor Muslim ban, getting kicked in, fights about H1B visas kicking up inside the White House. And then We've got a $500 billion investment announced in Texas towards AI which has an interesting through line with the immigration conversation. We can talk more about that. The south is blanketed with snow. Wild. The scenes out of New Orleans are pretty incredible. Probably a decent number of the people watching this show are experiencing just an extraordinary weather event right now. I know down here in D.C. it feels like it's getting close to zero. Awfully, awfully chilly down here. We're going to talk more about the fallout from Elon Musk's, what do they call it? Awkward hand gesture. Whenever somebody is out there supporting the far right wing in Germany and puts his hand straight up in the air, everybody thinks it's a sea kale. It's quite outrageous. We're going to talk about some of the response to that. And also we're going to give an update on the Israeli raid on Jenin, as well as the kind of ongoing attempts to keep the ceasefire in Gaza together, as well as the possibility of an actual future deal with Iran that we may go from Trump ripping up the Obama nuclear deal to Trump having his own Trump nuclear deal. So, Emily, let's start with Donald Trump's press conference yesterday and we can pick up. Let's pick up with this question that where he gets asked about the brewing debate within the Maga coalition about H1B visas and HB1.

[Donald Trump]

I know the program very well. I use the program Maitre D's wine You know, experts, even waiters, high quality waiters. You got to get the best people. Now, then you go into people like Larry, and he needs engineers, and Masa needs. And this gentleman needs engineers like nobody's ever needed engineers. Right? So.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So this puts Trump in a situation where I don't think he's quite comfortable, Emily, basically being the defender of migrant labor and siding with the big tech barons who are literally in the room with him there, saying that they need this cheaper labor from overseas. On the kind of the MAGA side, the argument is, show us. Show us who these maitre d's are that are so good at maitre ding that you have to bring them over and you have to replace somebody who's here in the United States. You have to take the job away from them and give it to somebody who you used this process to bring in from overseas. And what they say is, no, actually, what you like is that you can pay that maitre d one third to a half less than you pay the American worker. And the maitre d is not going to complain about sexual harassment by the manager, not going to make demands about wages, not going to organize with other people in the workplace, not going to file any complaints, because the second you do, Mar a Lago owns that visa and can just yank it and the maitre d is back to where the maitre d came from. That is the reason that employers like these programs, not because they can't find the skilled workers. That's the counterargument. So what I'm hearing is that this is really erupting inside the White House now. But you have the kind of big tech. I heard Steve Bannon calling them brologarchs, which is pretty funny that the brologarchs seem to be winning this argument so far. What are you hearing?

[Emily Jashinsky]

Well, you know, it's funny you say the brologarchs line and that Steve Bannon says it, because I had a source who was at the bitcoin ball last Friday and said Snoop Dogg's line of the night was, quote, where my ladies at? Because there just weren't many ladies at the bitcoin ball. But I'm sure someone will dispute it. And I was. I was a woman who was there, and I'm sure there were many lovely ladies there. But it was so funny that Snoop Dogg at least picked up on it. And the way that Donald Trump just described his personal use of H1B visas, at least to the extent he remembers it, is exactly why people like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon are deeply against H1B visas. Sager explains this over and over again. Bernie Sanders has explained this over and over again. And, Ryan, you just explained it over and over again.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And can we pause on that? He probably uses H2B, which is.

[Emily Jashinsky]

He said HB1.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. But he probably uses two, which is a category for service workers, which sometimes you actually do need. You're in a town that has a resort, and there just literally aren't the people in this rural area in order to work in this, like, this giant resort that you've got in the middle of nowhere. And then. Okay, then you bring in people. Anyway. Go ahead.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Well, no, I mean, one of the things I heard, though, that was interesting, is he saying, I've heard from X, Y and Z. And this is the danger of sort of surrounding yourself with a literal circle of oligarchs, as we're seeing right now, is that they're the ones who have your ear over Bannon and Stephen Miller. Maybe you don't like Bannon and Stephen Miller, but there's sort of populist sensibilities. And their mission is actually not to mine as much money from the US Government as is humanly possible. It's, you know, they have real ideological ends. And so the way that Donald Trump just laid that out is going to. Maybe Steve Bannon would see it this way. His optimism take would be that it heightens the contradictions, Right. That it gets the oligarchs out faster because the sort of rupture happens earlier in the administration. But who's going to win out in the battle over Elon Musk, Larry Ellison and Steve Bannon and Steven Miller? I genuinely don't know how those guys are going to deal with. With these deep, deep ideological disruptions when Steve Bannon has been calling Elon Musk literally evil. He has been calling him evil for a matter of days now.

[Sagar Enjeti]

It feels weird to be rooting for Steve Bannon in a fight, but these are the teams that are on the field. So I'm gonna pull for Bannon in this one.

[Emily Jashinsky]

I'm gonna get you a jersey that says Bannon on the back.

[Sagar Enjeti]

He made a comment.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Eagles jersey.

[Sagar Enjeti]

He made a comment on his podcast last night that I found stunning because of how much it resonated with me. And I didn't know that this particular sentiment that I'll describe actually existed on the right. But tell me if I'm just ignorant of kind of, you know, the broader kind of intellectual universe there. He said, and it was almost an aside, but he. But he said It. And he made a point of it. He said, another reason I'm against This kind of H1B program is because it creates a brain drain in these other countries. He called it intellectual imperialism. That, you know, we as. He said we as nationalists want all nations to have sovereignty and all nations to thrive like we thrive. And I had not heard nationalists act as sort of internationalists before, like, wow. The way that I've always conceptualized a right wing nationalism is that it's a zero sum competition against these other countries. And that if we drain the, you know, the best and the brightest from India, from Mexico, from Canada, wherever we pull them from, you know, too bad for them we have a better country and we're doing better. But his phrase intellectual imperialism I find to be completely accurate and I respect it from the perspective of, you know, somebody who has covered a bunch of these other countries that have experienced like legitimate brain drains. It is it. And from somebody who is from a rural area that experiences brain. Brain drain. You pull out all the people after they graduate high school or because there just aren't any jobs for them. It does actually change the culture of that place. And to hear somebody say that that matters was to me kind of surprising. Should I be surprised by that? Or is that kind of a. Is he out on a ledge there?

[Emily Jashinsky]

No, I mean, I think he's out on a ledge, but it's not a particularly surprising ledge for him, as you know. And for my fellow red blooded Americans, when Ryan says internationalist, it's sort of in the Marxist, or maybe you would say, yes, in a good way.

[Sagar Enjeti]

The working people of the world unite. Like, we're all humans around the world. We should all value each other.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Well, we've seen the issues that can crop up with those domestic disparities, as you just mentioned, like rural brain drain. The tensions that they can create culturally, the disparities they can create, but on an international scale, there's a serious question to be asked as to whether the United States is safer, more stable. If it is plucking the highest or the most ambitious people from different parts of the world, does that destabilize other regions? And that's probably. I mean, I don't know. Bannon is really deep into like Marxist Leninism. Whether or not he agrees with it in full, he actually is like, he's very familiar with Hagel. So it wouldn't be entirely surprising to me if he is starting to see this through that lens. He's mostly alone in that respect, is a small slice. But I don't think it's entirely surprising. I don't hear that argument a lot, but I think it's a serious one.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Well, speaking of Steve Bannon, let's talk about the January 6th pardons that he announced, I guess, what, two nights ago, and then has been responding to questions throughout the day. He was asked about it at his press conference. Let's roll some of that. You would agree that it's never acceptable to assault a police officer?

[Donald Trump]

Sure.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So then, if I can, among those.

[Krystal Ball]

You pardon DJ Rodriguez.

[Sagar Enjeti]

He drove a stun gun into the neck of a D.C. police officer who was abducted by the mob that day.

[Krystal Ball]

He later confessed on video to the.

[Sagar Enjeti]

FBI and pleaded guilty for his crimes. Why does he deserve a pardon?

[Donald Trump]

Well, I don't know. Was it a pardon? Because we're looking at commutes and we're looking at pardons. Okay, well, we'll take a look at everything, but I can say murderers today are not even charged. You have murderers that aren't charged all over you. Take a look at what's gone on in Philadelphia. Take a look at what's gone off in la, where people murder people and they don't get charged. These people have already served years in prison and they've served him viciously. It's a disgusting prison. It's been horrible. It's inhumane. It's been a terrible, terrible thing. I also say this. You go to Portland, where they did. Where they wrapped police officers, shot police officers. Nothing happened to anybody. You go to Seattle, where they took over a big chunk of the city and people died. Portland, a lot of people died. Wait a minute. And you go also take a look at Minneapolis, because I was there and I watched it. And if I didn't bring in the National Guard, that city wouldn't even exist today. People were killed and nobody went to jail. So these people have already served a long period of time. And I made a decision to give a pardon. Joe Biden gave a pardon yesterday to a lot of criminals.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So it's kind of wild to watch the Trump's ability to just be two things at once. Like, you know, he's this. He's this tough on crime guy who's going to, you know, talk about Philadelphia and talk about Portland every chance he gets. And then we're going to talk about Ross Aldrich in a second. You know, he's happy to talk about how drug dealers ought to be executed and praise Chairman Xi for his, you know, the way that he cracks down on drug dealers. And then the second. And then he Frees Ross in the next second, or to be the greatest champion of the police and then to free somebody who stuck a stun gun in a cop's eye. How does he get away with this? What is the trick that he's able to pull off here?

[Emily Jashinsky]

Well, the obvious answer, I think, is the level of corruption at the FBI. What has created the permission structure for him to feel like there's a real political license, if not demand for him to do what he did. And Washington really hates it. But the FBI, in the cases of some. January 6th, I mean, I was one of the first people, because I was covering January 6th, as I said many times live on the west side of the Capitol. And I was one of the first conservatives to come out and say this was not, you know, a lot of people were acting of their own volition. Whether or not there were feds in the crowd. This was a serious, you know, riot by people who were really pissed off and, you know, conservative Trump supporters who were really pissed off. And then the FBI wildly mistreated and abused the justice system in these just prosecutions of people who were beating cops. And so it created this ridiculous politicization of the situation. And the same thing, I mean, I don't want to do a one to one with Ross Ulbricht and the J6ers, but the FBI also wildly over prosecuted Ross Ulbricht, who Trump obviously just pardoned. And so it makes it easier. And Biden, obviously, his pardons make it a lot easier for Donald Trump to feel like he can at least suppress or undermine the left's criticism of what he just did. So with a lot of voters, it just doesn't pack the punch that it did anymore because they don't necessarily buy the narrative that they're being fed by the media. Doesn't make it right, just makes it easier for Trump to do and see.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And so when, and when people say, when the people on the right say that the Justice Department abused the system and the prosecutions were abusive and their conditions that were like gulag conditions, you know, they talk about the horrifying conditions that the people were kept under. I think what this shows is that they just weren't familiar with our justice system before this.

[Emily Jashinsky]

And yeah, there's definitely truth to that.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And I like when conservatives go to prison because they come out as criminal justice reformers, like, almost, almost universally, they go in and they go through this horrifically dehumanizing system that is, I swear.

[Emily Jashinsky]

If you send me to prison for.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Anything, just six months or soga's the only guy just a short stint in a medium security. But going through that dehumanizing process and experiencing that changes the way that you understand our quote, unquote, justice system. And you no longer laugh at people who want to like using the term justice system. Like you no longer consider them to be like, you know, woke lunatics, but actually people who understand what's going on here. So I think that they are correct that the system was abusive and the conditions were horrible. What I don't think they're correct about is that it was any. That they were treated any differently than anybody else that gets put through that system except for, you know, the 0.1% when they. When they wind up in there, they get. They get the kid glove treatment. But everyone else gets abused by our system. And I wish that they had come out of it with more of a universalist, and I suspect some of them will. The fact that so many were segregated just among other J6ers, I think will limit that capacity. But I wish that people would come out of it with more a universalist kind of reform approach to the system than saying we were actually, you know, abused. Now, there could be cases where there were indeed actually like, particular abuses. Is there anything you want to add on that? Any particular kind of abuses that were. That gave the permission structure for the blanket pardon?

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of examples and they're hard to parse because some of them actually are kind of bs and when you're getting into these, like, cop beating stories, it's easy that they end up getting conflated with the stories of people who were like, you know, not fed their vegetarian meals or like Jacob Chansley is the really famous one, he wasn't fed a vegetarian meals. They tried to hide the evidence of him being walked through the Capitol doesn't make any of it right. But there was this big conflation and there were big sentences that were just ridiculous. And there. There was like, Enrique Tarrio is an interesting case. He was working. He was working as an FBI informant. So all of that gets brought into the mix. And there are literally hundreds of these cases. There were raids on people's homes that seem insane. There were, I mean, just crazy levels, intense prosecution, and sometimes, just sometimes very dubious. But I think to the point that you were making, Ryan, it's not entirely out of the sort of realm of plausibility for our justice system, but I think there was. I think we can all understand that there was a particular zeal for both just reasons like The Capitol was sacked and politicized reasons. But to your point, you know, it doesn't mean that it's. It's something other people don't experience.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. Which I think you couldn't separate because it really was a political crime. Like, it just by definition was. So it was always going to be politicized. But let's control room, if you don't mind jumping to a five, since we were just talking about Ross. So Donald Trump announced that he's giving a pardon, full pardon, to Ross Ulbricht, which was the top demand of the Libertarian Party. And my old colleague Ken Kibenstein made an interesting point. He's like, can you imagine the Democrats ever agreeing to any kind of demand made by the Green Party? Like, can you imagine, like, Democrats actually trying to get the votes of anybody other than, like, the Cheney family and their supporters? You know, if you were gonna try to get the votes of the Green Party, you might say, look, we know that you have been trying to free Leonard Peltier from federal prison for decades now. Like, many decades. He's going to die in prison probably at this point, because Biden did not pardon him. And just say, we know this is important to the Green Party, and it's important to a lot of Native American groups. We win, we're gonna pardon Leonard Peltier. It's like you cannot even, like, your brain breaks. Just trying to conceptualize Democrats ever doing that.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Didn't Biden pardon Leonard Peltier?

[Sagar Enjeti]

No, no. I mean, unless I. Unless I missed it. Did it. If that came through in the last minute, that would be absolutely amazing. Amazing. That's so. That's amazing. But so can you imagine Biden doing that on day one, promising to do it, and then doing it on day one? He commuted the sentence.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah, he commuted the sentence.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Well, great. So good commute. Wonderful. So if he's gonna do it anyway, like, think about the way that Trump did it, which is so different than the way Democrats would ever do it. So Trump comes in and says, by the way, that's such amazing news. Like, in the 1990s, I was making phone calls to the Clinton White House asking them to commute his sentence or pardon him.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Well, I was gonna say for viewers, like, Ryan has a ton going on right now. So I feel like that was kind of cool to see you watch that news in real time, because it matters a lot to you.

[Sagar Enjeti]

It's absolutely delightful. Like, in 2000, I went with a Green Party caravan to the prison that he's in in Kansas and was Part of, like, a candlelight vigil outside. Like, I'm so happy to hear that he's out. So setting that aside, think about the way that Trump did it. Trump goes to the Libertarians transactionally and says, aren't you tired of being losers? Like, support a winner, and in exchange, I know you like Ross Ulbrich, and I will pardon him. Let's make a deal here. And then Libertarian Party. There was an internal fight within the Libertarian Party. The faction that took it over wanted to make this the big thing that they asked for from Trump. They asked for it, they got it, and he does it. Now, a side note. Come on, Libertarian Party. Good for Ross. I'm happy for him and his mother. The whole thing about him trying to kill people is kind of. We can talk about that in a second. The fact that they went for him rather than Edward Snowden is curious. Do you have any insight into why they did that? Because one of them is such a stronger kind of ideological case for libertarianism and for exposing government secrets. Whereas Ross is kind of an anarcho capitalist. Like, he's a hardcore libertarian. Identifies as one. He acted as a libertarian. But anyway, like, why him over Snowden?

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah, because I think Snowden is too much of a popular figure. It would rankle way too many establishment Republicans. It would just be harder for Trump to get done without creating a firestorm that ends up with Ross is like an achievable thing. Right. Like, I just don't think most establishment Republicans care that much. He's been in jail since, what, his arrest in 2013. He was charged, or I. He was finally sentenced in 2015. So he's been in prison for a really long time. And the Internet has changed dramatically during that time, and a lot of people would argue dramatically for the worse. It doesn't mean that Silk Road is great. I feel a lot like Sager, who posted on X, basically, like, I'm not a big fan of Silk Road, but what you. If you read about what happened to Ross Ulbrich, it's one of the craziest things. It's not entirely surprising. Again, but it's a. It's an insane story. I think it was just less of a sort of explosive decision. Like, you know, if you pardon Snowden, that just goes off like a bomb. He's trying to get Tulsi through.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, makes sense. Yeah. So peltier pardoned. He's 80, and he will. He's pardoned to home confinement. Not pardoned. He's commuted to home confinement. So he's an old man. He's been held in very difficult federal prison conditions for many decades, which is going to take a toll on you. So at least I guess he'll get to die at home anyway. So what's been the reaction on the right to the Ross pardon?

[Emily Jashinsky]

You know, Libertarians are obviously really pleased. But I think it just goes to what we were talking about a moment ago, which is Republicans don't really care that much. I've seen, I think the free press published like dueling pieces on why it was good and why it was bad. The why it was bad is from Charles Vane Lehman at the Manhattan Institute. But they're just, it didn't ruffle many feathers. Again, I think it's a, a lot of people just see it as sort of old news and the Internet has kind of moved on during that time period. So it's not a scalp that people feel they need to cling to. So probably a very successful decision for Trump sort of vindicating for McArdle and those folks in that wing of the Libertarian Party.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And for people who don't know, we should have mentioned it off the top. He was the founder of or the CEO of Silk Road. Silk Road, which was place where you could buy and sell stuff. And you know, the main thing that people were buying and selling on there was or a main thing was drugs. And they, and they basically got him for that, some complicity in that, accused him of basically being a kingpin. Later, after he was convicted of that, they put forward some evidence that he had tried to take out contracts to kill people that apparently did not exist.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Like somebody was, it seemed like an entrapment. He claims that his supporters claim the FBI doctored emails to make it look.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Like he, his supporters say none of this happened. His supporters say this is fake.

[Emily Jashinsky]

He was never charged, which it probably didn't happen.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. Now they argue on the other side, well, we didn't charge him because you already had a life sentence. So what was the point? Also there was so much corruption, like extra levels of corruption in his prosecution. I think like several of the like lead investigators were like caught like stealing bitcoin and drugs and like it, it was an absolute gigantic mess. So they probably didn't want to kind of go back into that and kind of, you know, peel back the layers of that onion and find itself.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Well the, the judge said this life sentence, which again he was not convicted of any violent crime. It was all non violent. He wasn't convicted of selling any of the drugs himself. It was just Facilitating their sale. A life sentence for that is sort of mind boggling. So that excuse for them not charging him with the alleged murder for higher plot doesn't really pass the smell test.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. And there were no people, like. So even if you take the allegations completely at face value, they say that somebody was making up people that didn't exist that were harassing him and then extorting him to go and like kill those people, which is kind of bizarre and like, lends some credence to the claim that this, that that whole thing was made up. But yeah, like, there are a lot of illegal substances and illegal things bought and sold on ebay and Amazon and using lots of other platforms. And we haven't yet arrested Jeff Bezos, so you can see why people feel like this was treated differently. Although Silk Road is not exactly Amazon. Although Amazon has become like this absolute cesspool of scuffs.

[Emily Jashinsky]

It's rough.

[Sagar Enjeti]

When we were doing the push to get people to buy Ray Fat Ola Rear's book if I Must Die, we ended up selling, I think pushing like 20,000 copies in a matter of a week. And the Internet or somebody picked up on that and started making fake versions of it. So within days Amazon was selling fake copies of this book of poems and prose. And I heard from some people who accidentally bought it and it just shows up. It's like nothing, just total. It's like. And Bezos and Lina Khan has like, you know, looked very closely at this. Like they could do something about this that they're not doing, you know, but it works for them. Like they're making money. They're making money both ways.

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[Sagar Enjeti]

Of scams, if we can go jump to a four, let's roll this from. Maybe you can explain some of this to me, but here's Trump and his Meme coin benefited.

[Donald Trump]

I don't know where it is. I don't know much about it other than I launched it, I heard it was very successful. I haven't and checked it. Where is it today?

[Sagar Enjeti]

They made a lot of money serving up how much? Several billion dollars it seems like in.

[Emily Jashinsky]

The last several days.

[Donald Trump]

Several billion. That's peanuts for these guys.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So Trump made a Meme coin and wound up making several billion dollars since getting elected president. Is that what I'm supposed to understand here?

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yes, that is exactly what you're supposed to understand here, that he's sort of joking behind the po. That's peanuts for these guys as he's surrounded by Larry Ellison and Sam Altman at this one. You know, like we said, we tried to say it was wild at the Top. It was very much like vintage first Trump administration. Very similar. He was really going back and forth with these journalists, like mixing up with them for a long time, letting everybody ask as many questions as they wanted to, essentially, which has not happened over the course of the last several years. Biden, Kamala Harris rarely ever mixed it up with the press, let alone for this long. So it was a winding press conference. And, yep, the meme coin came up and it looks like that's exactly what happened. Ryan and Trump is enjoying that. And for context, Ryan and I are both on the crypto is a Ponzi scheme boat, so you can kind of see where we're coming from. I find it all to be rather gross.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. The incoming president, or the president is going to run a. Run a pyramid scheme anyway. What on earth. I mean, where do you even go with that?

[Emily Jashinsky]

I think we go to Ukraine.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah.

[Emily Jashinsky]

This is the next stop.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. So this was a quite poignant moment of the press conference where he's talking about Ukraine. Let's roll him. Talking here about the extraordinary human toll.

[Krystal Ball]

Vladimir Putin doesn't come to the table to negotiate with you. Will you put additional sanctions on Russia?

[Donald Trump]

Sounds likely.

[Krystal Ball]

Do you think that the war should.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Be frozen currently along.

[Donald Trump]

The war should have never started. If you had a competent president, which you didn't, the war wouldn't have happened. The war in Ukraine would have never happened if I were president, but that couldn't happen because the election was rigged. Yeah, go ahead, speak to President Putin. Could be very soon.

[Emily Jashinsky]

And you talked a bit about Ukraine.

[Krystal Ball]

And Russia, but how long do you think it would take to end that conflict?

[Donald Trump]

And I have to speak to President Putin. We're going to have to find out. He's not. He can't be thrilled. He's not doing so well. I mean, he's grinding it out. But most people thought that war would have been over in about one week. And now you're into three years. Right. So he can't be. He can't be thrilled. It's not making him look very good now, eventually, you know, I mean, it's a big machine, so things will happen, but I think you'd be very well off to end that war. We have numbers that almost a million Russian soldiers have been killed. About 700,000 Ukrainian soldiers are killed. Russia is bigger. They have more soldiers to lose. But that's no way to run a country.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Presumably Trump is speaking there from the briefings that he's getting from our military, because those are bigger numbers than we're used to hearing from public officials, nearly a million Russians, 6, 700,000 Ukrainians is an absolutely mind boggling and staggering death toll, like since 2022. Thinking of nearly 2 million families who had a son or a father or a brother in 2022 and do not today because of this war, and you ask yourself for what, like, what has been accomplished in the three years since then that would remotely justify the sacrifice of nearly 2 million lives. Emily, what did you make of that, that claim from Trump?

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah, we've seen, you know, those hundreds and hundreds of thousands of numbers sneak into some press reports. I think the Wall Street Journal had something like that. And it just, we just gloss right over it in the political news cycle of we don't do that here, but most people just gloss right over it as though this isn't happening, that this isn't something that we have funded over and over again and seem to have no legitimate plan to end. And that's what Trump, that's where Trump seemed to rank all. Some people who have have previously been hopeful about his anti interventionist streak. They heard him speaking in a way that felt hawkish about Putin last night. But I also wanted to say, Ryan, I think people read a little bit too much into all of Trump's different, like point A, B, C, D in his negotiations because he'll say one thing the next minute, say something totally different. And it's him trying to like set the terms of the debate. And so obviously right now behind closed doors, he feels like he needs to talk tough to Vladimir Putin. I don't know that that necessarily means he' all of a sudden, you know, on Zelensky side, 110% like going full Lindsey Graham. Hopefully, Ryan, what it means is that we're getting closer to an end of the conflict. Because when you hear those numbers, apparently from his security briefings, it's no wonder they're having to yank men in their 40s off the streets in Ukraine to fight this war. Because it's a death trap and it's miserable and there's been no end in sight. Absolutely no end in sight.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, this is, and this is very Trump, like he says the most belligerent thing he can, yeah, I'm gonna sanction Putin, etcetera, Whatever you can come up with. And then he talks later about it being positioning for his negotiation. We'll talk about John Bolton later. But even when it came to John Bolton, you know, the way he describes his hiring of John Bolton, his, yes, he was an idiot and a warmonger, but I used him very well. And what Trump claims now, whether this is retconning or actual strategy from the beginning, he claims that he brings in people like Bolton to be his yap dogs who are gonna make a whole lot of noise. And then he's like, you know, you don't want me to let this guy off the leash, do you? And then hopefully then he gets a better deal from Iran. Like that's his claim, whether it's particularly true in the Bolton case or not. But that is generally kind of how he operates. And the problem with being so transparent about it is you and I aren't the only ones that see it. It stops working, I would assume, if everybody can see it. And then in order for it to keep working, you have to ratchet it up higher and higher and higher. And every time you do that, you're playing with a little bit of fire. But we'll say, yeah.

[Emily Jashinsky]

I mean, that's sort of the thing. It's just very, very unpredictable. And I genuinely don't know how Trump behind closed doors is talking to both Zelensky and Putin, how he's talking to other NATO countries. We'll hear more in the days ahead. Obviously, we're literally like 48 hours into this administration less than that at this point. Marco Rubio has been sworn in as Secretary of State. So I think we're going to start seeing a lot more that'll tell us directionally what's to come in the days and weeks ahead. Like in the next 48 hours, probably, yeah.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And was it interesting that Trump had to issue an executive order telling Marco Rubio not to be a crazy warmonger like he. There's an actual executive order that says instructions to the Secretary of State to make sure that you have an America first foreign policy agenda. Like, that's kind of a. Did everybody get one of those or just Marco Rubio? That was a little.

[Emily Jashinsky]

He should give them to everybody. That would actually be just like his. It's almost like a valentine. Yeah. To everyone. I don't know. I've never seen anything like that before. But I think they're more similar than they are different, to be honest. And I know that's not great for the non interventionist, but it's almost like Rubio's met Trump in the middle. He has had some people who dismiss the sincerity of his changes ideologically are missing out on the real picture. That doesn't mean that he's suddenly like Rand Paul, but it means that he is genuinely like meeting Trump kind of in the middle on a lot of this stuff.

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[Sagar Enjeti]

All right, well, let's move on to the looming immigration raids around the country. Trump border czar Tom Homan was on Fox News talking about some of this last night. Let's let's roll some of this based on your initial schedule that today roundups of criminal illegal aliens in the process.

[Donald Trump]

Of deporting them would begin. That seems to have been Put on.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Hold for a little while. When can we expect that to happen? Where will it begin? No, it started. All these teams are out there as of today. We gave them direction to prioritize public safety threats that we're looking for that We've been working up the target list. There was some discussion about Chicago because the Pacific operational plan was released. So we had to look at and reevaluate. Does this raise off the safety concerns? And it does, but we address that.

[Emily Jashinsky]

And team draw perspective today.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. And so at dropsite we had some people in Chicago and they, they. And there were. They spoke to some undocumented folks who did actually said they had some encounters with ICE agents and they told them they were undocumented and the ICE agents let them go. They were kind of going around parking lots basically looking for people who look like day laborers and just asking them for papers. There's a lot of confusion going around. We can actually put up B2. This is a good example. This is in Chicago. Like every city has a news outlet focused on the restaurants and the reporting there that a lot of people are not showing up for work. There's a lot of skittishness. There's a lot of concern that the raids are going to hit, say kitchens and drag everybody out. What Homan is saying there is that announcing it as Trump did, that he's gonna hit Chicago on Tuesday created that kind of panic and may have then caused some officer safety issues. So I suppose what he's. But on the one hand, I'm curious for your take on this. On the one hand, Malik, they want, I, I believe they want spectacular images of confrontations between. We're not just confrontations but they want images of booted up ICE agents dragging migrants into the back of paddy wagons. They want those images on Fox News. In order to get those images, they've got to get the media out there and they've got to announce ahead of time where they're going to do these raids. Announcing where they're going to do these raids ahead of time causes the problems that Holman laid out there. So the question for you is am I right? Does he just want spectacular images or is there a deeper kind of policy being rolled out here?

[Emily Jashinsky]

I think there's something deeper because again, we were talking earlier in the show about Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller who we use kind of as representatives of this broader anti immigration coalition that is now in the administration and is powerful. They feel like they have a mandate to do a generational immigration crackdown. So I Don't think it's just about the optics. And I don't think that you're necessarily saying that, Ryan, but I think they also genuinely know they need those numbers in order to achieve their goal and they feel right. I mean, if you're talking to people in conservative circles, there's, you know, like a absolute appetite for images that the media would have previously sort of weaponized, genuinely, like heart wrenching stuff. But like, they're saying we, we don't feel like, I mean, New York Times ran that story on Sunday that said public support for Trump's policies exceeds support for Trump. And one of those things was deportations. And it's possible that people overreach. So there's an announcement, people overreach and take that as a, you know, mandate when it was just a mandate to, like, make significant changes. But I don't know, Ryan. Like, I think they're pretty, pretty serious about actually expelling a wide group of people. I don't think it'll have a huge effect on public opinion in the same way that it did back in, like 2017, 2018, during the false kids in cages narrative. That said, you know, this was implied at least that this was a new Donald Trump policy and that it hadn't been happening under Obama and blah, blah, blah. I think conservatives just now feel bullish because they feel like they have disrupted that kind of legacy media narrative setting ability and they're, they're kind of ready for what they would see as like a generational crackdown. So it's, I think it's totally serious.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Well, the difference in defense of the hysterics around the kids in cages, and I covered Obama's kids in cages in 2014, 15. Those were unaccompanied minors who were being held in bad conditions. And that was exposed. And it was good that that was exposed. And it was wrong what Obama was doing. And he was doing it for the reasons doing an immigration crackdown. What the Trump administration did was a deliberate zero tolerance policy directed at families who were with children. And they said if the family member is charged with illegal entry or something else along those lines, they will separate the children from the parents, and they will, and they will detain the children separately. And so that was an actual new policy. And when it was rolled out, it was rolled out specifically with the intent of creating images that would dissuade people from coming across the border. That's one of Miller's big ideas, that you need these images to scare people from coming in. So it was True that there had been kids in cages, but it was also a new policy related to child separation and.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yes, child separation. Yeah. And Tom Homan, though, actually comes out of the Obama administration like the Obama deporter in chief line. Tom Homan was a part of that policy, although the deporter in chief line didn't get much play outside of places like HuffPost, Huffington Post @ the time. And so I think there was a lot of really dishonest coverage from places like cbs, NBC, cnn, who had not seen the previous policies as deterrence or anything like that. So we don't have to get back to that debate necessarily. But.

[Sagar Enjeti]

But I think go ahead to your point earlier about whether or not there'll be a public outcry. I don't think there's going to be a kind of resistance, liberal kind of outcry over the principle of it. But how he rolls it out may have an effect.

[Emily Jashinsky]

I totally agree with that.

[Sagar Enjeti]

If people keep, if restaurants are shutting down, for instance, like as that article in Chicago suggested, there's some nervousness around what's gonna happen there. And sorry, control room to jump around, but if we could do B4 here about the farm workers, because this is relevant to this, whether or not this survey is accurate or not, directionally it seems powerfully in one direction, which is, you know, 75% of it says 75% of immigrant farm workers didn't show up yesterday in Bakersfield because of fears of ICE raids. America's rural and agricultural regions will be the hardest hit from Trump's immigration policies. Food prices are going to skyrocket. So, so that's the kind of claim that you're going to get from critics of this policy, that you actually need these people showing up for work to do the jobs that they're doing at work. And if they don't, the food rots in the vine. Restaurants don't open. All the obvious knock on effects that you'd have from what they would call a labor shock, a shock to the labor supply all of a sudden. If people aren't showing up because they're nervous now, people aren't going to stay home forever because they can't. They need to work. So it really depends on to me how this filters down to people and what the actual scale of it is. Is there any nervousness in Republican circles that they might create something that they can't control?

[Emily Jashinsky]

No. And I've never actually, I mean, I shouldn't say I've never seen anything like this, but it's a totally they Feel like, again, it's a new age, like Trump has been saying, the golden era, golden age line. But that is more than just like this sort of this attempt at aesthetic optimism. It's actually because they feel like there's a, it is totally a new day, meaning they can be aggressive about policies they feel like they have a mandate on and not cower and do sort of Gang of Eight style immigration politics like they were forced to in 2014. So I think they're actually eager for the crackdowns because it'll create, and I don't mean this callously, I think this is, you know, there's a substantive conversation about this, but it creates on the live moments. Right. Where people like that before tweet that we had up on the screen about farm workers. I just think they realize that lands differently with the public now. Doesn't mean that's a substantive debate to be had about that. But I think they're like, eager for this fight because they feel like immigration is a winning one in the same way that Democrats are eager to talk about abortion because they know that Republicans are on their back feet and it's a losing. The more Republicans are talking about abortion, the worse off they are. And I think Republicans say the more Democrats talk about abortion, the more the public is going to agree with Republicans because Democrats haven't moderated enough on it. So I think they're eager for the fight, to be honest. And I, you know, as I was saying earlier, I think that could create a real overreach. I don't know if it will, but I definitely think it could.

[Sagar Enjeti]

You mean immigration or abortion?

[Emily Jashinsky]

No, immigration. It could end up with some, like, really bad overreaches.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I see what you mean. Let's talk briefly about Trump announcing that he's in an executive order, that he's ending birthright citizenship, which I think as a news broadcaster, and correct me if you think I'm wrong, I should add immediately, you can't actually amend the Constitution with an executive order.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Is it just like Joe Biden declaring the Equal Rights Amendment? Like Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy?

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, right. Yeah. So, right. Biden, on his way out the door posted on Twitter that the 25th Amendment was now ratified. And the 25th Amendment was, this is the Equal Rights Amendment. And it needed to get, you know, had to get three quarters of the states and Virginia ratified it after Democrats took over the state. And boom, that made three quarters of the states. But in the law that was passed to create the process to amend the Constitution and add the 25th amendment it said you had to do it within a certain number of years.

[Emily Jashinsky]

The 28th Amendment. Right.

[Sagar Enjeti]

That's what I say. Oh, it's 25th. 25th is the one for crazy people like me who can't remember which amendments there are. So 28th amendment amendment, the era, and they didn't reach the timeline. They missed it by, I think, several decades. And Biden just announced. Okay, now, so apparently what Biden should have done is just said, by executive order, I have added the 28th Amendment to the Constitution. Because that's basically what Trump is doing here. He's telling you, don't worry about what the Constitution says. Don't worry about what Congress says, even executive order. So the argument that he's making is that the 14th amendment says that anybody born here and quote, you know, subject to the laws thereof, is a citizen. And his argument is that people who are here, whose parents are here without papers or without the right kind of papers, he's saying even if you're here on. He's saying if you're here on a student visa, that you are not subject to the laws of the United States. That's just wrong. That's not even an interesting kind of legal argument to hash out. Like, anybody who is watching this show who was here on a student visa, go ahead and try to rob a bank and find out whether or not you're subject to the laws of this country. People here on a student visa, people here completely illegally can be charged with crimes and in fact, are charged with crimes when they're arrested for them. So the idea that you're not subject to laws only applies, and this is what they meant, it applies to diplomats. If you are an ambassador from Uruguay and you are here in Washington, D.C. you are not actually subject to the laws of the United States. And it's a controversial thing. And sometimes you'll have. Have some drunk ambassador will run somebody over and kill them and go home, and that's it. Like, they don't get charged with that because they have diplomatic immunity. Anybody who's seen Lethal Weapon knows how that works.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Or Princess Diaries.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Or Princess Diaries. And so therefore, their children are then not American citizens. Like, that's the argument there.

[Emily Jashinsky]

I actually think the Biden parallel is a really good one in this case, because what they were both saying is, I'm using my executive authority to say this is now the official executive executive branch recognition of this legal interpretation of the Constitution. You know, I interpret the Constitution as President Joe Biden or President Donald Trump to say that for the birthright Citizenship is, you know, it wasn't actually intended to be interpreted the way it has been interpreted. And you can amend the Constitution even beyond the ratification deadline. It can be extended. It doesn't matter. The states have rescinded the ratification. So, I mean, this is becoming a theme of the early Trump administration, and it's not entirely surprising. But EOs like this are clearly overreach. That would have infuriated the conservative movement, the Republican Party under Obama, because Obama did like governing with his pen, and his pen is pad. And that was one of the biggest conservative arguments against Barack Obama. And in fairness, Trump is undoing some previous executive injections. But. But this is not one of them, and they not. They are not all like that. And this, to me, is very extra constitutional. Ryan. It is an attempt to move the goalposts in a way that sets the terms and sets the tone for the administration. They do see this as a generational immigration opportunity.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And if you can put up B3 here. So 22 blue states have already sued the federal government saying that, no, hey, actually, this is ridiculous. This is not how the Constitution is written. So we'll see. The Constitution is, in our current system what the Supreme Court says it is, not what it actually is. So this remains to be determinant. And speaking of fighting out the constitutionality of executive orders, there's a new kind of attempt at a Muslim ban. And this was. We can put up B5 here. So the way that the Trump administration is kind of backdooring the Muslim ban is that they're saying, okay, okay, we're not going to do what we did the first time around, which is basically single out these Muslim countries. What we're going to do is give the bureaucrats 30 to 90 days to look at all of the countries around the world and then report back to us about the countries that they believe are particularly dangerous based on this objective set of criteria. And then some are all, all of the travelers from those countries will be banned. And the assumptionand it seems to be the driving motivation. Tell me what you, if you agree, Emily, Is that the bureaucrats are basically being instructed to come back with a list of Muslim countries, which they then believe will qualify as some sort of objective enough process that it won't look arbitrary and racist and will be allowed to pass muster. Is that right, Emily?

[Emily Jashinsky]

I mean, it's a clever workaround as far as they go. That's the difference between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0, is you have four years of, and I say this seriously, Project 2025. I don't think Donald Trump is like, he doesn't have the book in front of him, but that's a stand in sort of for the broader plans that were made in the conservative movement. And that's what's happening. I mean, it's, you know, when you have four years to go back and say if we come in with a mandate, here's what we're going to do, it's almost like historically unusual that they said we have this guy in Donald Trump who's actually going to do what in some cases we didn't feel Ronald Reagan did. George W. Bush certainly didn't. But even though Donald Trump isn't of the conservative movement, he's someone who can be used to advance the cause of the conservative movement because he's that like Nixonian madman. He's against the deep state. He wants to drain the swamp and he doesn't care. And he sort of broke in politics and the paradigm and he can be the vehicle for like radical change. And that's, you know, so far, the first couple of days, we're seeing all of this get tested.

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[Sagar Enjeti]

Moving over to the artificial intelligence news yesterday at the White House, the main theme coming out of the first couple days of the Trump administration is this immigration crackdown. But interestingly, he also held an event with some with some broligarchs announcing a $500 billion worth of investment into a Texas data center to power AI. Let's roll a little bit of Sam Altman from the White House to create hundreds of thousands of jobs, to create a new industry centered here. We wouldn't be able to do this without you, Mr. President, and I'm thrilled that we get to. I think it'll be an exciting project. I think we'll be able to do all of the wonderful things these guys talked about. But the fact that we get to do this in the United States is, is, I think, wonderful. So thank you very much. First, let me talk to you, Sam, about what this means for AI and the future for the US Investment here. This means we can create AI and AGI in the United States of America. Wouldn't have been obvious that this was possible, but I think it's a different president might not have been possible, but we are thrilled to get to do this and I think it'll be great for Americans, great for the whole world. So this has been in the work. You can put up a 2 here. This has been in the works for almost a year. It's so at this point. But what you saw at the White house was these CEOs kind of slobbering over Trump and making sure that he felt like he was getting the credit for this rolling out. And it is the case that the Trump administration is going to be extraordinarily friendly towards AI. I think that's not even in doubt. We can put up C3 here. One of the executive orders that Trump rolled out was called Unleashing American Energy. And he basically declared that the United States was in an energy crisis. The previous energy crisis that y'all would remember from the 1970s was a crisis of supply. It was when the OPEC countries cracked down on. On supply of oil. People had to ration it. It created this American energy crisis. This one is described by Trump in his executive order as a crisis of demand. And the reason he says that it's a crisis of demand is, on the one hand, all of the kind of electricity needs that have been produced by the Biden administration's mandates around climate change. So he nods to that. But importantly, he says that the AI data centers are going to need just absolutely explosive amounts of American energy. And so that has created a crisis. And so he's going to sweep away a lot of regulations in order to drive down the prices so that you can have these $500 billion data centers. What I found kind of interesting about the timing here is that on the one hand, Trump is talking about an immigration crackdown, which from the populist right perspective is aimed at protecting American workers. With the other hand, he's doing everything he can to boost AI, which many American workers see as indirect competition with them, as aimed at creating a tech feudalism that is going to. To basically impoverish huge sectors of the American workforce. Emily, what does your make this roll out?

[Emily Jashinsky]

Well, I was gonna say it's no wonder he's listening to what Larry Ellison tells him on H1B visas when he's working, as we talked about earlier in the show, on this $500 billion investment. And Ryan, you know this. We often see public private partnerships like this touted at big ceremonies, and then jobs don't materialize. One of the most notable recent examples of this actually comes from the first Trump administration in my of Wisconsin with Foxconn, that never panned out to be anywhere near what it was promised in southeastern Wisconsin. And you'll remember they were out there with the shovels. Reince Priebus, Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, you know, they were shoveling the dirt to break ground. And so these things are not always done deals. You know, that's. That can change pretty significantly. And it can always underwhelm people. It could always end up underwhelming people. But the, I think the sentiment, I mean, if you went to, and you probably remember this to CPAC in 2014, all of these companies, Google and Facebook, had fancy events and they had, you know, sweets that were. Had the nicest champagne and, you know, amazing food and Conservatives in the first Trump administration looked back on that as a really gross thing. Like the conservative movement felt badly about itself because all of those, they felt all of those oligarchs turned on their cultural values and detested them and looked down on them. And this is, I'm curious, I think it's pretty clearly ushering in a new era and it's beckoning the conservative movement to open back the doors. I mean, I remember I used to go to all of these meetings with conservative news and Facebook, like Nick Clegg and a Facebook conference room saying, you know, here's how, you know, we, we didn't suppress this, we didn't suppress that. Tell me what your concerns are. And you know, it seems like that's just back, like it was, like it never went away. And it isn't to say that some, like the religious skepticism towards AI in conservative spaces is so generative, AI, I should say, is so profound that I don't think it's clear yet how this is going to pan out. But if, if history, if past is prologue, and it usually is, it looks like that moment is just going to fade away like it never happened. Basically.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, it does feel like we as a public have kind of lost control, control of this situation here in the United States and that the only thing that the oligarchs need to do is to kind of lavish, like you said, you know, money at the right places, but also then praise. And in this case on Trump, Larry Ellison of Oracle, who along with SoftBank, which is interesting from an America first.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Perspective, like this is from an Elon Musk perspective. Musk isn't Musk in an antitrust suit against OpenAI and Sam Altman.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Oh, yes, big time. Yes, they're at war with each other. And also SoftBank Foreign, that's a foreign investment fund. But here's Larry Ellison of Oracle doing the same as Altman, kind of lavishing Trump with Praise. This is C5. Once we gene sequence, once we gene sequence that cancer tumor, you can then vaccinate the person, design a vaccine for every individual person to vaccinate them against that cancer. Cancer. And you can make that vaccine, that MRNA vaccine, you can make that robotically again using AI in about 48 hours. So imagine early cancer detection, the development of a cancer vaccine for your particular cancer aimed at you, and have that vaccine available in 48 hours. This is the promise of AI and the promise of the future. Oops, sorry, that was a different clip that I expected, but that's fine because that's actually Kind of even more important one, which is this is what the kind of AI gurus are using to sell the idea of AI as utterly virtuous and making the world a better place. And of course, if they prove to be correct and they could actually do that, wonderful. We'd all love to have a vaccine that prevents us from getting cancer. Cancer answers the absolute worst. I'm not sure he was reading the room right there. By bringing up MRNA vaccines inside the Trump White House. What'd you make of that?

[Emily Jashinsky]

Or maybe he was, because this is the White House. This is the continuation of the first White House that spearheaded the. Yeah, the pioneering MRNA vaccine is vaccine through Operation Warp Speed, which was itself a public private partnership, if you can really even call it that, to be honest. It was just all melded together. So if anything, anything like Mary, maybe Larry Ellison is singing from the exact right hymn book. No, I mean, obviously I think it does highlight the, the what would seem to be ideological barriers between again, the Steve Bannon's, the ideological populists and the libertarian, I should say the, the quote unquote, America first populists and the libertarian populists, the tech populists and the, the sort of middle American populists that now form Trump's coalition. It's a really uncomfortable marriage and so far it's sticking together. But when you put all of these billionaires so deeply into your own coalition, your own inner circle, just the feuding between Musk and Altman, I mean, they all have a lot on the line, like their futures, their freedom, their businesses, that's all on the line relationships with Donald Trump. So they have intense scrutiny or they have intense, you know, incentives to get along with each other and to continue getting along with Donald Trump. But Ryan, it is so fragile among them and then among the broader public, unbelievably fragile.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And this of course, is a global competition which China is, is participating in. And not coincidentally, on, on Monday, the, on Inauguration Day, the Chinese company Deepseek, which is a competitor of OpenAI AI, published a peer reviewed paper that announced that effectively they had been able to produce this AI application that uses much less energy and is much more efficient and is wide open and could be decentralized. And so for people that are just listening to this, this is just one tweet from a guy pointing out the irony. He says, quote, we are living in a timeline where a non US company is keeping the original mission of OpenAI alive. Truly open frontier research that empowers all. It makes no sense. The most entertaining Outcome is the most likely. In other words, OpenAI was started as a nonprofit, intended to be open, obviously, as open is right there in the name and decentralized and aimed at making the world a better place. It has since been legally and dubiously converted to a for profit company. That's what most Musk's fight with Altman is about. Musk wanted to keep it as a nonprofit. And they are going for a centralized approach where they are going to spend at least $500 billion on these data centers, with the idea being that they are going to just build so much computing power that nobody's going to be able to keep up with them. Whereas the Chinese are taking the original OpenAI version and saying that everything's going to be open, it's going to be as cheap as possible, it's going to use as little electricity as possible, and it's going to be available to basically anybody who wants to use it for a very nominal fee. And that decentralized approach is going to be what allows it to get everywhere. So we'll see who's able to win at that. But at least from the, from the Chinese perspective, they're not, it's interesting they're not having their policy dictated by oligarchs like we are the democracy, where, you know, we have elections, local elections, we have midterms, we got presidential elections. I have a voter registration card, I can go down to my elementary school and I can cast a ballot. Yet our AI policy is not made by me as a voter. Our AI policy is made by Sam Altman and our oligarchs in China. Nobody there can vote. Yet the Chinese public seems to have much more say over what their AI policy is than we do here. How do we explain that and how do we understand democracy if we're less democratic?

[Emily Jashinsky]

I mean, I don't know democratic in.

[Sagar Enjeti]

The sense that we have control over our government.

[Emily Jashinsky]

I don't know that I agree with that, but I do think that we lose a lot of our credibility. I mean, I think there's just more of the marriage between. It's almost like you can't call Chinese business people oligarchs because the, the distinction between public and private just doesn't really exist. And I think things like this, especially when they're not successful and when they're croniest, which is, you know what, that's what Marc Andreessen is trying to say the Biden administration did with AI, by the way, is that they said it was so dangerous we need to just let the big guys do it and they need to listen to us. And I think Sam Altman seems to have said, all right, well, if that's policy that then we can, you know, basically stamp out any competition. We can be the best big guy and we can, you know, try to mold the government to our preference. We'll give Donald Trump money for his inauguration. We will be there, we will say nice things, and I bet he'll give us what we want, especially if it makes it look like this is America first, bringing lots of investments. And so, you know, they're playing Donald Trump and they're playing the system. They're playing the game in the way that they have for a really long time. But the point about voter control over AI is really interesting because that is, I think, probably one of the clearest examples that and probably some of our defense policy of like the actual definition of oligarchy, which I used to blanch at and criticize Bernie Sanders for using in the United States. But that's oligarchy. That's literally what it is. It's when people have, have so much money that they can circumvent democratic control and change people's daily lives with the flip of a switch. And that's what's happening in AI. So no doubt about that. I totally agree.

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[Sagar Enjeti]

Let'S move over to a weather update, and I feel like we're going to be increasingly covering the weather over here at counterpoints and breaking points as it gets more, more and more just extreme. If you live in the south right now, you're getting absolutely walloped in Florida. They're seeing something they almost never see. Let's roll a one here which also covers some of the other. So this, yeah, here's like when was the last time anybody in Florida has experienced like this level of snowfall? You'll sometimes get a few flakes here and there all across the Gulf. Gulf of America, if Donald Trump prefers.

[Emily Jashinsky]

That's right.

[Sagar Enjeti]

You go across the Gulf of America over to New Orleans, you're seeing just absolutely extraordinary amounts of snow. I don't think that thing's designed to be doing that, but looks actually kind of fun. So I think I would love to hear from people who are down there. I think this would be one of the segments where, you know, if you're watching this from the south. Go down in the comments section like, let us know what you're experiencing down there and how people are, how people are responding to it. That amount of snow in a place that's familiar with snow and used to getting it isn't the problem problem at all. But we can put up this next element here. You can see how deep and vast this snowstorm is covering New Orleans all across the panhandle into Georgia. Just truly unusual amounts of snow and cold in places that just aren't prepped for it. Now obviously, because this is the timeline we live in, everyone immediately starts making this political, the political link here. Of course, you can put up D3 here. Trump, aside from announcing an energy emergency and saying that he's gonna lift any restrictions he can find on drilling, baby drilling, drilling in Alaska, drilling off the coastline, whatever you find, he announced, you can put up D3 here, that the US is going to pull out of the Paris Accords, which on the one hand doesn't matter. The Paris Accords are voluntary commitments. And if, oh, D3 is a SOT here, let's roll. Trump talking about withdrawing from the Paris climate courts. Next item here is the withdrawal from the Paris Climate Treaty. Yes sir, we're going to save over a trillion dollars by withdrawing from that treaty. So they say there we're going to, you heard the announcer at the end say we're going to save over a trillion dollars withdrawing from the Paris climate Accords. That is just complete absurdity. You know, the cost of dealing with the climate crisis I think is far less than the cost of not dealing with it. Ask anybody who's dealing with any of the knock on effects of the climate crisis. And like I was saying, it's a voluntary accord, so the costs are zero. Like it's just we sign and we say we're going to try to do X. We're also getting to a place where it's very difficult for us to use the arguments that we used to use. We used to say it's just not fair that we're being, being asked to deal with the burden of reducing our emissions when you've got countries like China over here who are just blasting away with their emissions. That was always a specious argument because China was blasting away creating emissions to produce junk that they would put on barges and send over here for us to use. So really the one responsible for the emissions is to me, the one that's enjoying the kind of product of it rather than the one that's making it. But setting that aside, China has either peaked already or is set to peak very soon when it comes to its emissions. And it's on the way down and is also producing virtually all of, say, the components for the solar industry, wind turbines, et cetera. So we are going to be complaining about bearing the sole burden of addressing the climate crisis for an eternity while China actually goes and addresses the climate crisis.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Today's show was sponsored by bytedance.

[Sagar Enjeti]

That's right. So anyway, first of all, are you hearing from anybody down in the south dealing with this?

[Emily Jashinsky]

You know, I've heard from people enjoying it. If you're not in an emergency situation, you can see how kids are just loving this. They're calling this a once in a generation storm. Across these Gulf states, there are emergencies. There have been emergencies issued across, I believe, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Florida and Mississippi. They're getting snow in Texas, significant snow in Texas. Actually. The other thing I just want to mention, Ryan, is that as evacuations are happening down in San Diego now from another wildfire and there have been lots of deaths in the state of California just in the last couple of weeks. The death toll we shouldn't forget from Hurricane Helene was, I think 230. As of what we know right now, there's already there already where people are waking up this morning to, I think, news that 10 people have passed away. This is Axios. Historic snow and icy conditions have been linked to at least 10 deaths as it disrupts travel across the Southern United States. So this is, you know, it's depending on how you're experiencing it, obviously affecting people differently. But this, this stuff is no joke. No joke. Joke at all.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. So be safe out there and yeah, enjoy yourself. See if you can find a sled. I doubt many people have them.

[Emily Jashinsky]

You can use cardboard, by the way. That's a. Yeah, that's a tip. You can't if you don't have a sled and they don't sell it at a Winn Dixie. Just get some cardboard.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Everybody's, everybody's got cardboard and yeah, it'll last for half hour, 45 minutes. Then go get another piece of cardboard.

[Emily Jashinsky]

You have a lot of it because of Jeff Bezos.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yes. You're absolutely.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Well, obviously it's Donald Trump's first week in office and the media is reacting about as you would expect. Now there's raging debate over Elon Musk's alleged Nazi salute. And I know Kristol and Sagar covered that yesterday, but we wanted to bring this clip of Rachel Maddow reacting to the, the moment that Elon Musk, he says you gave his heart out to the audience. That was the line he followed up the salute with. But here's what Rachel Maddow had to say, and then we'll bring you a fun clip from the View. So stay tuned for, for that.

[Sagar Enjeti]

My heart goes out to you.

[Krystal Ball]

He does it twice.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And again, maybe that's not what he meant.

[Krystal Ball]

Maybe he doesn't know what that is. That happened today. What we're seeing here with the January 6th pardons, this kind of thing does have the benefit of novelty.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Right?

[Krystal Ball]

We've never quite seen something like this before. But like with the corruption, the boring thing about it is that we know exactly what this leads to. Authoritarian rulers all over the world have always liked to have paramilitary loyal but unofficial perpetrators of violence and menace to work on their behalf, to intimidate and hurt anyone in opposition, to make it too scary for normal people to participate in politics or civic life, to make everybody who might oppose Trump in any way worry about the thugs that might turn up at the door. Trump pardoning and releasing from prison the January 6th defendants, including the paramilitaries, means he is effectively immunizing his followers from committing violence in his name. He's making clear, you know, if you support me, the law doesn't apply to you. We've had political violence before. We've had civil war. But before, each of those things has been treated as a calamity and a scandal. This time, it's a platform.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Okay, Ryan, so what she did there was make this case that Elon Musk, and if, if people were listening to this, they didn't see on the screen what her Chiron. What wasn't the chiron, it was a picture box on the screen said was all caps. This is not a drill. And so she's making the case that Elon Musk's, which she seemed to believe was a suggestion or a gesture towards metaphorically and literally, that that kind of fasc, right wing and maybe even Nazi history. What she's saying is that ties into the J6 pardons because it's this nudging of paramilitary groups that support Trump to kind of mobilize and rally behind him. So what did you make of that? That's an argument that actually I can see it being sort of ascendant. What do you make of it?

[Sagar Enjeti]

I mean, in general. Yeah. And I think a guy like Elon Musk, who is currently out supporting the far right in Germany, doesn't get a whole lot of benefit of the doubt when he does this gesture twice. One time, okay, whoops. Then he does it another time. I mean, I also think, and Musk has said many times that he is at heart a troll. And the troll kind of meme world that he comes out of loves to flirt with this kind of stuff. Like, that's one of their main trolls. They love to get the libs upset about something like this. And so I could see him having done it deliberately with some type of deniability, just to create this spectacle, because the far right people absolutely saw it for what they believe it was. They loved it. Like, they thought it was directed right at them. Like, look what he's doing. And it's not as if he was like, oh, wow, sorry about that. I can't believe I did that. He's just kind of laughing along with it. Which is what you would do if you were deliberately doing it as a troll.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Although it's also what you would do if you were like, if you see everybody just totally overthinking your attempt. And I'm just taking his chance. I'm taking his explanation here. Charitably. He was. He. He says that he was, you know, giving his heart to the audience. So when he patted his chest, he was patting his heart, and then when he extended his arm, he was extending it out to the audience. So the charitable.

[Sagar Enjeti]

You did it like this, right? That's how you would do that.

[Emily Jashinsky]

I also smacked my computer, but that's.

[Sagar Enjeti]

How you would do that. He did what? He's sprinkling his heart on people. Like, how do you. How do you go from. How do you go that way? Unless you're deliberately, like, come on.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Like, you're giving him way more credit for being a well adjusted sort of adult human being, I think.

[Sagar Enjeti]

But even you have to. It's more work to do that than. Than the normal, like.

[Emily Jashinsky]

But I was just saying, like, it's also like going along with it and joking about it and is, I think, also how you would react to it if you're like, oh, my gosh, people are overthinking this stupid gesture that I made with my arm. So I don't know if the reaction itself is any, like, vindication of the point that this was a Nazi salute. And I also, I mean, afd, that's what you're referencing support for in Germany. I mean, Elon Musk says that he supports AFD for, like, similar reasons that he supports Donald Trump, meaning the. The borders, immigration, refugees, asylum, that sort of thing. And AFD is. It's just so wild. And German politics are wild. But, I mean, I don't think there's.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Putting it.

[Emily Jashinsky]

I don't. I don't think there are, you know, at least not yet shades of. Of early Hitler and Elon Musk. So to that extent, I just feel like I'll freak out when he says something that makes him sound like a Nazi and gestures like this. To me, it just looks like Elon Musk being a weirdo.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Anyway, the View responded to it. You know, let's. Let's hear some of the View.

[Emily Jashinsky]

The View has been having a week. They've been talking in general about Trump reacting to his inauguration speech. And they had an interesting take. Let's take a listen.

[Krystal Ball]

The speech itself, I remember when it was done, my first reaction was, you know, what is this country he speaks of? Because I immediately couldn't reconcile the way I see the country and the people and how it is right now. And where he saw it. He didn't say carnage, but he said carnage pretty much in everything else. Do you remember the reference from his first inauguration when he said carnage? I just kind of felt this dark feeling. And then he had this kind of martyr, like, you guys are downtrodden and almost irreparable. You can't save this place, but I can. And, like, it had this, like, godlike complex without any Jesus qualities. Like, it was kind of like a juxtaposition. But I was really disappointed. Not surprised, just to be clear, but disappointed that there wasn't one kind thing to say about the outgoing administration.

[Emily Jashinsky]

My posture is this.

[Sagar Enjeti]

You guys know my criticisms of Donald Trump.

[Krystal Ball]

They remain.

[Emily Jashinsky]

I'm going to pray for the president.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I'm going to thank him when he does things that are good, like the hostage deal, I commend him. I am grateful for that. And I'm going to call it out when he does things that are reckless and dangerous, getting the Israeli hostages.

[Krystal Ball]

And I'm going to call it out.

[Sagar Enjeti]

When he does things that. You're talking about Trump now.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yes.

[Sagar Enjeti]

That are Biden, who's been negotiating. Love to see our old rising hosts over at the View now. Big star.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Everyone's having fun. I mean, the other thing, that was.

[Sagar Enjeti]

A list of Farah. But yeah, for people who don't know, like, she was briefly a rising co host before she got snatched up by the ladies of the View.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Snatched up by the ladies of the View. A memoir. The great memoir title. But yeah, I mean, it's interesting because. Just one more point on the Elon Musk thing. I just remember when I was at the federal list, I think the right is kind of sensitive to this and hopefully it doesn't lead to something that gets taken advantage of by genuine bad people who have often awful, like, racist, bigoted intentions. But the. When I worked at the Federalist, there was like a mini news cycle. You might remember this Ryan, about the Federalist eagle being a crypto as a cryptic Nazi symbol. And just like to me, it. This feels like it was plucked from that era of like 2017 and 2018 of like finding Nazi stuff in everything. But maybe it's also just sort of a Rorschach test, I don't know. But I think the View also, that clip, the reason I wanted to include it here, is just that these differing reactions to Trump 2.0, there's some people who. And I think this is the Views example. I mean, when Trump 1.0 started, Alyssa was working for Donald Trump, and now it's 2025. Enthusiastically working for Donald Trump, and now it's 2025. And I feel like the View is sort of stuck in 2017, 2018. Whereas we're starting to hear, I guess, smarter criticisms of Trump from different corners of the media. I don't know if you've noticed that or like evolved criticisms of Trump that don't feel quite as hysterical as I would say that the Matto clip did just now, or the View, I don't know. Do you agree with that? That it has an evolution?

[Sagar Enjeti]

The entire resistance level liberal architecture is gone. Like, it has not reappeared at all. Like the last time, eight years ago, on January 21, there were five, roughly 5 million people in the streets. It was the largest single day demonstration in American history. Hundreds of thousands, maybe half a million in Washington D.C. and then another some 4 plus million in cities all across the country, Alaska, like, you name it. Everybody who had been kind of just passively involved in politics on the Democratic side and did not think that Donald Trump was going to win, was kind of shocked into action. A lot of them ended up running for office, but they came out and protested the Muslim ban shortly after that. And that kind of changed what Trump was able to get done. It did create a political counterbalance. It's not even remotely there this time. Like, nobody's even trying to pull that together.

[Emily Jashinsky]

You wouldn't have known the protests happened unless you were on the National Mall over the course of the inauguration weekend. And that was so different from the Women's March where, you know, you could. It was. It bled into everywhere.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, yeah, it's. It's just a completely different world which which then creates space for some different kind of criticism and reaction which is still taking form and shape. And we'll see what that ends up looking like.

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[Sagar Enjeti]

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[Krystal Ball]

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[Sagar Enjeti]

Ceasefire in Gaza, Israel launched a massive raid into Jenin, which is a resistance foot stronghold in the West Bank. We can put up this article here by Sharif Abdel Kaddus and Mariam Barghouti in Drop Site News. Just want to read from a little bit about this they write Israel launched a major military operation in the occupied west bank on Tuesday, raiding the city with troops, military vehicles and bulldozers backed by airstrikes, drones and Apache helicopters. At least nine Palestinians have been killed and more than 40 wounded in the ongoing operation, according to the Ramla based Palestinian Health Ministry. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the goal of the quote, large scale and significant military operations was to eradicate terrorism in Jenin, Netanyahu wrote on Twitter. We are acting systematically and decisively against the Iranian axis wherever it extends its reach. Now this is coming at the same time that there have been riots in Jerusalem. We can put up some of this footage over there because after some of the Palestinian captives were released by Israel as part of the ceasefire deal, settlers, Israeli settlers then kind of stormed into a refugee camp to try to take revenge over that. The IDF or the Israeli police showed up and saw masked men with guns and believed them to be Palestinians. Palestinians shot at them, not realizing that they were Israeli extremist settlers and critically wounded two of them. And the result of that shooting has been these riots from the Israeli public saying, you know, condemning the Israeli government for accidentally mistaking Israelis for Palestinians Palestinians and shooting at them. And so while so far roughly 90 Palestinians were released as part of the hostage deal already Israel has detained more than 90 Palestinians in the west bank, giving a real kind of spinning the wheels feel to the attempts to reach some type of peace agreement here. At the same at the same time, Trump's Middle east envoy, the man Witkoff, who was able to kind of browbeat Netanyahu into agreeing to this ceasefire deal, said a couple days ago that he was considering a trip to Gaza to see for himself what the destruction has been like there. That was followed yesterday, yesterday with, and we can put up F4 here with an explicit invitation from Hamas to Say that Witkoff is welcome to come and engage in direct talks with Hamas to see for himself what the situation is and to hear directly from Palestinians and from Palestinian leadership, you know, where they are on the unfolding ceasefire. Emily Witkoff's intervention into this, at Trump's behest, into this conflict has seemed to change the tenor of it. But what Netanyahu is showing here, it seems, is that he is intent on ratcheting up violence, you know, wherever and whenever he can. Now, Bezel Smotrich was quoted as saying that this raid in Jenin was authorized by the war Cabinet as a new kind of war aim in exchange for Smotrich and his party agreeing to the ceasefire in Gaza. So, in other words, if we're going to sign onto this cease fire, you have to launch this incursion into Jenin and make this not just a police action, as sometimes happens in Jenin, but a full scale invasion. So Netanyahu agreed to that and is also saying that he holds open the possibility of not just possibility, but almost the certain of resuming the war in Gaza. But then enter Wycoff. Do you think that Wycoff or Trump kind of have the will to intervene here? Because it seems like they'd have to just constantly be fending this off. Like, this isn't the kind of thing you can do once and then it's done. They have to be there with their foot in the door, keeping it from closing at all times.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Basically, no Republican president other than Donald Trump would have agreed to this particular ceasefire, a deal. This is another way in which he totally confuses the boundaries or he totally, like, sort of explodes the boundaries of acceptable policy maneuvering on the right. And so I don't know that people in Trump's orbit expected what you just laid out, Ryan, which I think is totally correct, because we know one thing Donald Trump is more sensitive about than just about anything else is looking a fool, being made to look a fool. He doesn't seem to particularly like Benjamin Netanyahu we've mentioned before, but he posted the reposted that Jeffrey Sachs video about a month ago, and he's, he's had plenty of criticism for Netanyahu in the past. So I don't think he wants to put up with Netanyahu or what he sees as Netanyahu's bullshit. He doesn't want to look like he's being, you know, steered by Benjamin Netanyahu and that he is not fully in control as Donald Trump. And that's the dynamic, I think that's going to unfold with, alongside this new ideological component to the point about no Republican president, you know, agreeing to this deal other than Donald Trump. I don't think most Republicans in Congress would have agreed to this deal and maybe not even in his own cabinet. And so at least Stefanik, as she was before we get to her.

[Sagar Enjeti]

One other piece that people have probably seen. Trump was asked about whether he thought the ceasefire in Gaza, it would hold at one of his Oval Office press conferences. And he said, I doubt it. He said it's their war, which I'm sure was cause for celebration in Tel Aviv among Netanyahu circle.

[Krystal Ball]

Right.

[Emily Jashinsky]

But what does that mean in terms of US Support? So is that what's on the table with Donald Trump? This is your war, right?

[Sagar Enjeti]

Is it our weapons in their war? Because that. Right, exactly. What makes it their war rather than our war? So that seems to be his, his wish. Like, I think that's what Donald Trump wishes, that it was their war and not ours, but it, it is ours.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Well, and a big reason for that is because the sort of ideological convictions of the sort of coalition that's been part of the Republican Party for a long time that we'll see on display here. This is E5. This is Elise Stefanik getting asked. And remember, Trump's ambassador to Israel is Mike Huckabee as well. So when you hear Elise Stefanik's answer to answer to this question, just bear in mind that this is, you know, obviously we all know this. You don't even need to be reminded of this, a fairly consensus position among the sort of intellectual class of the Republican Party. Maybe not the median Republican voter, although I'm sure many would say yes. But here's how at least Stefanik handled the question about the kind of ideological underpinnings of her position here.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Answers in my office. But I did ask you whether you subscribe to the views of Finance Minister Smotrich, who, who, I'm sorry, Financh. This is the Israeli Finance Minister Smotrich and, and the former National Security Minister Ben Gavir, who believe that Israel has a biblical right to the entire West Bank. And in that conversation you told me that, yes, you should shared that view. Is that your view today?

[Krystal Ball]

Yes.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Okay. I think when it comes to this very difficult issue, if the president is going to succeed at bringing peace and stability to the Middle east, we're going to have to look at the UN Security Council resolutions, not just the ones on Lebanon, which we should enforce, but other UN Security Council resolutions. And it's going to be very difficult to achieve that if you continue to hold the view that you just expressed, which is a view that was not held by the founders of the State of Israel, who were secular Zionists, not religious Zionists.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Okay, so she's being confirmed for ambassador to the United nations. And you could parse that in a bunch of different ways. I'm sure she could. Or a defender of hers could argue that when she says she believes that there's a biblical claim to those lands, they just mean it in terms of like the Bible laying out the history of the Jewish people having a claim to being the indigenous people.

[Sagar Enjeti]

The claim is different than. Right, right.

[Emily Jashinsky]

But. Oh, yeah, I mean, so I think the, the obvious. And you know, an evangelical Christian like a Mike Huckabee would say that biblical Israel and the way that it's sort of described not just in the Old Testament, but the New Testament is referring to the modern political state of Israel. And that's not an uncommon belief in evangelical circles. It's not an uncommon belief in many religious circles. So I think that's likely the interpretation that's correct in this case, in her case, to explain why elisefaik answered the question that way.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, the word Israel is in the Bible. Like, okay, that's true. But what that has to do with UN Security resolutions is like nothing.

[Emily Jashinsky]

It definitely makes any two state solution, which is like the point that US Politicians push on Israel when it. Netanyahu says he doesn't believe in a two state solution. That's the ideological position of even secular Zionists, even somebody like Netanyahu. And that's a pretty hard square to circle if you're trying to deal with the West Bank.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And so it's such a convoluted mess because of that out of control ideology, ideological relationship to Zion, Zionism that you're describing there, coupled with some other developments that we're seeing, not just the ceasefire that we have so far, but also we can put up this next element up on the screen here. Trump, in one of his first actions, stripped John Bolton of the security detail.

[Emily Jashinsky]

That's a great tweet though, by the way. You should read it on the screen.

[Sagar Enjeti]

If people aren't looking. Matthew Petty tweeted, The Iran Deal 2.0 will be offering John Bolton as a blood sacrifice in exchange for building Trump Tower Tehran, which is like everything in this era a joke, but also not a joke. Like, these are the times we're living in. Like, Trump just yesterday was talking about how North Korea has incredible condo opportunities because of the seafront. You know, so much seafront property. He talked about how spectacular you could do a kind of, kind of condo rebuild in Gaza. So the idea of a Trump Tower Tehran is not ridiculous. And the idea of that they're literally.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Doing one in Saudi Arabia. No, I mean they literally announced. The Trump Organization literally recently announced they're doing a second Saudi Arabia Arabia and Tower. To your point, Ryan, like it's a joke, but they're also like literally building these towers and with countries that we do these, like extremely important foreign relations with. And Trump is technically divested from Trump Organization at all of that. But we don't need to open up the can of worms to say that the joke has some legs.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. And my view on the Bolton. Curious for your take on this. My view on the Bolton decision to not, not give him this 24 hour security anymore is Bolton. I don't want anybody killed. But Bolton has made his choices. Bolton has decided to live by the sword. Like the most militaristic kind of policy career that you could really conjure up in 20th and 20th first century America. Like the body count that trails behind him is just completely countless. So he got to do that with his career. The public does not then have some special obligation to him because he made those decisions. Security details are insanely expensive. Like, you know, it could, you know, I don't know, we don't know what it cost, but like millions and millions of dollars. Like this is not a, it's not a small amount of money to have a security detail on a single person like this.

[Emily Jashinsky]

And correct me if I'm wrong, Ryan, this was. He was the subject of an alleged Iranian assassination plot. And that's right.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And related presumably to his push to assassinate Qasem Soleimani, who was in Iranian official who was killed in Baghdad after landing in the airport and then getting into a car with some other Iranian officials wearing a suit. He ran the IRGC and he had himself a huge trail of bodies behind him. He made his choices. But assassinating him with a drone in another country was a huge break with norms. And I believe that's the main thing that Iran has said that they're angry at Bolton for. For Trump to so quickly strip the security detail from him does to me suggest that he's serious about actually some type of Iran rapprochement which he himself blew up by walking out of the Iran nuclear deal and then entering into the Abraham Accords in an attempt to kind of combat and counteract Iran through a combination of an alliance between uae, Israel and Saudi Arabia. What's fascinating is that while we're inaugurating a new president here, over in Davos, the World World Economic Forum honchos are meeting. So, of course the Saudis are there as well. You can put up F7 there. The Saudi foreign minister at Davos gave a speech basically very strongly encouraging Trump to continue pursuing warm relations with Iran. And, you know, so Israel's assault on Gaza over the last 15 months has created the kind of political pressure in the region that has pushed, paradoxically, Saudi Arabia and Iran closer together. China has actually helped to broker a rapprochement between them. And what the Saudi foreign minister is saying is, keep that going. We don't actually need to be adversaries in the way that we are with, with Iran. And so if this is some kind of blood sacrifice fig leaf, maybe that joke of a tweet was not reading too much into it. And go to this last element and then we get your response to it. This is F8 yesterday. So the headline here on the Jewish Insider is Pro Israel Republicans alarmed over Trump's Defense Department Appointee. And it's actually kind of plural. Yesterday, the Trump administration announced a whole slew of top political appointees over at the Pentagon. Dozen or more names, and not a single neocon on that list, not a single Iran hawk on the list. They also announced that they were firing Brian Hook, who we reported on here. Who was he? He was one of the hardest core Iran hawks in the previous Trump administration and was brought in to be the chair of the State Department transition. And when he was appointed to that, a lot of people were like, oh, yikes, this is bad news. If you've got him in there. This seems like you're going to be organizing for a confrontation with Iran. The first thing he tried to do was try to get Mike Pompeo out Secretary of State. That failed. And now Hook himself has been fired, and Trump fired him. I don't know if you noticed this in a hilarious way. He said, I have. Basically, he said, I have fired a bunch of idiots from the previous administration. And he put him on the list of those idiots who worked for the previous administration. What he was implying is that he worked for Biden, but he actually worked for Trump and was the chair of Trump's State Department transition. So just to. That's a classic Trump of hiring the guy and then when he fires him, saying he didn't even know him, and he's like pretending he wasn't the chair of the transition and, hey, I'm not gonna call him out, cuz. Good, cuz, you know, get that guy out of here. I think Sager posted something on Twitter yesterday saying like the list of names that were at the Trump department was just banger after banger. Like, these are kind of anti interventionist. You know these folks better than I do. But from my people in this world, they were thrilled at this. And the fact that Jewish Insider, which is a very strong reflection of the kind of aipac Likud wing, is alarmed, suggests that the excitement has some merit to it. What's your assessment, Ryan?

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah, they did this as well. I forget which publication it was. It was a conservative publication and it was, I think, relatively pro interventionist publication that did this with Bridge Colby.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah.

[Emily Jashinsky]

At the Pentagon. Yeah, Sagar's totally right that like this is again, we were talking earlier in the show about the immigration hawks seeing this as a generational moment for a crackdown because they had these kind of four Biden interim years to plot a potential Trump return and potentially with a popular vote win that they feel like is a mandate and the wind at their back. And they got basically exactly what they were looking for. And that'll have some interesting ramifications. But one place where it could be really positive is on foreign policy where the conservative movement has made a genuine shift. Not everyone, of course, but, you know, Donald Trump, you know, out with Bolton and in with these guys, in with the, quote, banger after banger list that you referenced from soccer. Taking a look at who's at the Pentagon, you could say the same thing over at the State Department. It's shaping up, from what I'm hearing, to look really similar. So that's obviously not to say that this is going to be like Rand Paul's Pentagon and State Department or Bernie Sanders Pentagon and State Department. But. But just about anything is better than the status quo we've been experiencing and, you know, for the last how many decades. And whatever you think about Donald Trump, he is very good at disrupting the status quo. And if it's going to get disrupted, please, please disrupt our foreign policy because it desperately needs new, fresh voices and Trump is sincerely bringing them in. So we'll see where that goes. I mean, the Israel, he seems very happy with stuff. Steve Witkoff so far. He seems very happy with the deal so far, even if a lot of his Republican allies are not. But this can all. I mean, obviously this is, we were talking about this is the theme of the show is his coalition of personnel is so fragile, his coalition of Personnel worth his coalition of supporters is fragile in and of itself. So there's just a lot that can change very quickly. But he's at least setting himself up in a much better position in terms of positive foreign policy outcomes than he did in 20.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, and the reason we wanted to do all this in one segment is because all of those things are related. If Trump only cared about the Gaza ceasefire deal because of Gaza per se, it would fall apart because he doesn't really care about that. But the Saudi, Iran and Israel relationship is key to that. Trump very much wants a Saudi, Israel normalization deal like that. He desperately wants that. And he wants that to be one of the things he does in order to get that Gaza can't be in a conflagration. There cannot be a genocide still going on in Gaza. To get that Nobel Peace Prize that we were talking about on the show last week would require an Iran, Saudi, Israel. You know, you're not going to get Iran and Israel, but if you can get Iran and Saudi Arabia, Iran and the us, Israel and Saudi, Saudi Arabia together in a deal that is, that's like peace prize worthy. And none of that can happen if Gaza is still undergoing the genocide like that. So that would be the structural reason that he would actually kind of push back on Netanyahu's effort to keep this going. The article you're talking about, by the way, also was in Jewish Insider and the headline was rumored for a Trump posting. Elbridge Colby's dovish views on. On Iran stand out.

[Emily Jashinsky]

And then it's just absolutely stupid. It's complete nonsense. He's a realist. Anyway, we don't need to get into it, but it is just idiotic.

[Sagar Enjeti]

He steamrolled through Albridge Cobley is in.

[Emily Jashinsky]

There and people are very excited about it in the sort of D.C. mAGA world. They're very excited about it.

[Sagar Enjeti]

All right, we'll see where that goes. Anyway, Emily, thanks for bearing with us. No, on your on the road. Have a good day.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Thanks for bearing with me. Yeah, no, Ryan and I obviously both have full time day jobs, so sometimes life takes us on the road. But just great to be here with you, Ryan, and hope you have a great rest of your week and we'll.

[Sagar Enjeti]

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[Emily Jashinsky]

Okay, just wiped his runny nose on my jacket and the guy next to.

[Sagar Enjeti]

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