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The Campaign Moment: Gaetz’s downfall, Trump’s mandate
00:32:31
Former congressman Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) pulled his name from consideration for attorney general. What will this mean for Donald Trump’s other controversial Cabinet picks?
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- [00:03]
Martine Powers
So the big news of this past 24 hours is that former Congressman Matt Gaetz has withdrawn himself as President elect Donald Trump's pick for Attorney General. And since this came out on Thursday afternoon, there has been a lot of hay made about the fact that Gaetz's potential nomination did not end up lasting longer than a Scaramucci. For people who don't know, like explain what a quote unquote Scaramucci is, Anthony.
- [00:31]
Aaron Blake
Scaramucci was a very brief member of the Trump White House. He was communications director, I think for 11 days. And during those 11 days he gave a very ill considered interview with a reporter in which he like was attacking people and swearing and you know, saying, yeah. And so he was canned after 11 days. And so now we use that as a unit of measurement for things that don't last very long in politics.
- [00:58]
Martine Powers
Leanne, have you heard of this, like the Scaramucci as a unit of time?
- [01:01]
Leanne Caldwell
Oh, yeah, yeah. 100%, yes.
- [01:03]
Martine Powers
Do you mean it in your day to day life?
- [01:05]
Leanne Caldwell
No, no. But the funny thing is that Anthony Scaramucci uses it himself.
- [01:11]
Aaron Blake
Yeah.
- [01:11]
Martine Powers
Really?
- [01:12]
Leanne Caldwell
Oh, yeah. On social media.
- [01:14]
Martine Powers
Yes.
- [01:15]
Leanne Caldwell
He is in on the joke.
- [01:16]
Martine Powers
I love that. Welcome to the Campaign Moment on this Friday, November 22nd.
- [01:25]
Leanne Caldwell
Martin.
- [01:25]
Martine Powers
I'm Martine Powers, co host of Post Reports.
- [01:28]
Aaron Blake
And I'm Aaron Blake, senior political reporter and author of the Campaign Moment newsletter. We're also joined today by Leanne Caldwell, who is the co author of a must read newsletter for me called the Early Brief. It focuses on Congress, politics and the White House. Hey, Leanne, it's good to have you back.
- [01:45]
Leanne Caldwell
Great to be here.
- [01:47]
Martine Powers
All right, so this week we're gonna catch listeners up on the latest political transition news. Of course there is the big Matt Gaetz news and we're also going to get into Trump's new pick for Attorney General and we'll hear a little bit about some of his other recent choices for his Cabinet. And just a warning, we're going to be playing some tape that will include some bleeped swear words related to some of these Cabinet picks.
- [02:11]
Aaron Blake
We're also going to be talking about the very related issue of how much of a mandate voters actually gave Trump in the 2024 election. Republicans and Trump have argued that the election showed that voters clearly supported his agenda and want it enacted, but dove into some of the most recent election results, which of course have been rolling in for weeks now. And I found that that's a pretty strained argument. Republicans in this election didn't actually gain that much ground. So we'll dive into that.
- [02:40]
Martine Powers
And finally, we're gonna do something a little bit new, and we're gonna spend some time answering some of your listener reader questions about how the 2024 election shook out. Leigh Ann, are you ready to cover all of this and hopefully the next 35 minutes?
- [02:57]
Leanne Caldwell
Bring it. I'm ready.
- [02:59]
Aaron Blake
I'm always interested in what the listeners want to know, and I'm glad we're doing this today. It should be fun.
- [03:03]
Martine Powers
Yeah, yeah, it'll be really interesting. All right, so let's start by running through some of the highlights from Trump's Cabinet news this week. And as we mentioned earlier, the big news on Thursday was this announcement from Matt Gaetz. Matt Gaetz, of course, former Florida Republican congressman Trump's pick for Attorney General. And Gates announced that he was withdrawing from consideration. This is in part because he was deeply unpopular with fellow Republicans, but he was also the subject of a couple different investigations, which I know we've talked about on the podcast before. But there was a federal investigation. The allegations were that he was involved in sexual misconduct with a minor, that he violated sex trafficking laws, and that he used illegal drugs. The Department of Justice ultimately closed that investigation. And then there was also this House Ethics Committee investigation about those allegations. And the report from that investigation has not been released. So, Leigh Ann, what do you think was the final straw for why this potential nomination could not move forward?
- [04:08]
Leanne Caldwell
Ultimately, it became clear that he didn't have the votes to pass through the Senate and that it was going to be really hard to change the people who didn't want to vote for him mind, which, you know, I will say, at the beginning of this process, when Donald Trump nominated Matt Gaetz, I for sure thought that Matt Gaetz was going to be Attorney General. I was one of those people was like, look, the Senate is going to roll. I just didn't think that these senators were going to be able to stand up to Donald Trump. But we got to a point where we didn't even see that yet. And so I think that it became clear it was gonna be harder for them or to roll. And so, you know, ultimately it came down to the votes. And I was quite surprised that this only lasted, what was it, eight days? Less than a Scaramucci.
- [05:05]
Martine Powers
Yes, less than a Scaramucci. One thing I do wanna note here is that Gates has now said that he does not intend to return to the House in the next con. So it seems like for now, his days as a congressman really are over. But I want to talk a little bit about what this means for President Elect Trump. And is this a major setback for him? The fact that this high profile nomination did not work out for him and the fact that in this case, it seems like the Senate, to your point, Leigh Ann, didn't just roll over. I mean, obviously they never got to actually voting on Gates and on his potential nomination.
- [05:46]
Leanne Caldwell
But.
- [05:46]
Martine Powers
But that there was really clear opposition that they were not gonna play along with this, even though this is what Donald Trump wanted. So what do you think this means for Trump?
- [05:56]
Aaron Blake
I think it's a clear setback. I mean, this is the first big potential fight that Donald Trump picked after he was elected. You know, he announced this pick, I think, eight days after the election, and he was challenging Republican senators to stand up to him. Like, that was the initial narrative that we all wrote about. At the same time, rejecting Matt Gaetz is not a very high bar. This was always something that was going to be very difficult to do. But I do think it does show that some of these guardrails that we often talk about when it comes to Donald Trump still exist. The media coverage of Matt Gaetz had an effect. We saw the legal and ethics processes have an effect. And also, you know, Republican senators to some degree stood up. You know, they weren't out there publicly saying, I'm, you know, I'm never going to vote for Matt Gaetz necessarily, but they were sending a pretty strong signal that they were not going to support him or they were very skeptical of him. And there, you know, there are a lot of institutionalists in the US Senate. There are people who want to stand up for the prerogatives of the Senate and don't want to just get rolled by Trump and do things that they don't want to do. There's also senators who are moderate senators who are retiring and don't have future political considerations, who have a little bit more latitude.
- [07:22]
Martine Powers
They're in a position to be able to die on this hill and be like, we don't like this guy. We're just not going to.
- [07:26]
Aaron Blake
It only takes four of them. Like, it's not a huge number that need to cross over. And it's a difficult thing to do, but it can happen. And in a case like this, it was pretty easy for them to stand up. I guess we'll see if they intend to do it on some future things that are very high profile.
- [07:40]
Leanne Caldwell
And I think that Matt Gaetz is such a unique case study though, too. It's all the things you said, Aaron, but the reason, the other reasons are Matt Gaetz has really angered a lot of his fellow Republicans. He can't. He didn't. He not only campaigned against Senator Elect Tim Sheehy of Montana and Senator Elect Curtis of Utah, but he campaigned for their primary opponents and really spread some false information about them in their primary campaigns. And so these two incoming senators who definitely don't want to rock Donald Trump's boat, especially Tim Sheehy, who is very, very close with Trump world, they had to take that into consideration, too, that this person that they were going to have to vote for not only tried to defeat them, but also ran a really nasty campaign against them. And then there's, like, other members, too, who just have this personal, deep, deep dislike of Matt Gaetz because of things that had happened in the past.
- [08:46]
Martine Powers
I do wanna push back a little bit, though, on this idea or what you said, Aaron, about this being a setback for Trump, because I feel like there's another way to look at it in which this is part of his strategy for how he's going to get so many of these controversial and arguably unqualified Cabinet picks through. I heard someone use the term bum rush, which I think made a lot of sense to me, that because the Senate can say that it died on the Hill of preventing Gates from being Attorney General, that that is kind of gonna allow a free pass for everybody else that Trump wants to nominate to get through pretty easily. Because the Senate sort of, like, used their one veto card in this instance.
- [09:31]
Aaron Blake
Yeah, I see the argument here. And this is something that a lot of people theorized when Gaetz was initially picked. I think there's no question that, to paraphrase Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser, White House campaign, you know, Trump likes to flood the zone with stuff. He didn't say stuff, but he says, you know, basically, you put forward all of these things and you overwhelm people with, you know, these Cabinet picks that they might find unacceptable, and they can only object to a certain number of them. That's possible. Maybe that was the intent here. I think. A couple points, though. One is that the Matt Gaetz thing flamed out so quickly that, like, it never really got to the point of taking up all the oxygen and taking up the focus, you know, taking it away from Pete Hegseth, who is the Defense Secretary pick, and Tulsi Gabbard, who is the pick for Director of National Intelligence Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Who is the controversial pick for Health and Human Services. Those people are still going to get a huge public airing, and it's gonna be more of an airing now that there's not this Gates thing that's hanging over everybody. The other thing is that some Republican senators could view this situation as potentially emboldening them. You know, they defeated a Trump nominee. It was relatively bloodless. They didn't get, you know, these threats of primaries and things like that and public attacks from Trump. Like, they've shown that they can stand up and it can be effective. You know, the lesson of the Gates thing is not necessarily that they're going to pay a huge price for resisting that. Hmm.
- [10:59]
Martine Powers
And I do wanna take a moment here to think more broadly about, like, where Trump is at in this moment. It seems like he has operated at least in the past week and a half with a sense of, like, I can get whoever I want through the Senate, through the nomination process. And it turns out that that might not be the case. But also, thinking about this narrative around Trump since the election of this is someone who has now won the popular vote and he has this profound mandate from the American people to, like, do what he wants in the way that he wants, because he performed very well in this election. And, Aaron, I know you have thoughts on that, or a sense of, like, maybe the narrative here is a little bit more complicated than just Trump having this blank check mandate from the American people.
- [11:48]
Aaron Blake
I think on election night, we were all somewhat surprised that Trump swept these swing states. It was a decisive Electoral College victory. You know, the number of electoral votes he won was larger than Biden in 20 and Trump in 16, the largest number since 2012. So it was a pretty decisive election. But as the fuller election results have rolled in since Election Day, we've kind of gotten a more nuanced picture, and a lot of it points in the direction of, yes, Trump won, but this was not an overwhelming victory for the Republican Party. And so a few stats that I think really point in that direction are Republicans flipped the Senate, but they did so largely by winning states that Trump won by double digits. So the Ohio, West Virginia, Montana, Senate races, they actually lost Senate races in four out of the five swing states that were up in the Senate. This time, the House is going to be basically a status quo election. Republicans could actually lose one seat with a couple races outstanding. And then I also dug into the state legislative races across the country, and I thought this was really interesting because, you know, I think this points to more, you know, how people view the two parties and how much they shifted one direction or another, because there's more than 7,000 state legislative seats across the country. And if you look At.
- [13:09]
Martine Powers
Wait, did you just. You went and tabulated all the state legislature seats for.
- [13:13]
Aaron Blake
I didn't. All the seats in the group. I like the idea that you think I could do that, but no. The National Conference of State Legislatures is an organization that does great work on this. Their report after the election shows that Republicans gained less than 1% of state legislative seats across the country. And my favorite stat on this is that literally half of those gains came in one state. And you guys will never guess what state it was unless you've read my story.
- [13:43]
Martine Powers
What state was it?
- [13:44]
Aaron Blake
It's Vermont. So if you.
- [13:49]
Martine Powers
Vermont is the land of sweeping change.
- [13:51]
Aaron Blake
But aside from that, Republicans barely gained any ground in state legislative races across the. And I think that kind of signifies that this was not a massive shift towards the Republican Party. Yes, Republicans won. They have all three levers of power in Washington. That is significant. But it is not a situation where the American people flooded Republicans into office to do whatever they wanted and whatever Trump wanted them to do.
- [14:15]
Leanne Caldwell
Yeah, I think that's, that's absolutely right. But the thing is that Trump is not going to look at the final, final, final results. He is stuck on the narrative that it is a very decisive win, that he has a mandate, and that is how he is going to continue to portray it, and that is how he is going likely to continue to govern once he is inaugurated.
- [14:42]
Martine Powers
Interesting. Quickly, I do want to tick through just a few of the updates that we've heard in the last few days about some of the folks that Trump does want to have serve in his cabinet or in high profile positions, even if not Matt Gaetz. And I wanna start briefly with the individual who he is now choosing to replace Gaetz as Attorney General in the nomination process, and that is Pam Bondi, who's the former Attorney General of Florida. Thoughts on that? What that choice, I guess backup choice means?
- [15:12]
Aaron Blake
I think she's much more confirmable than Matt Cates. Of course, everybody is more confirmable than Matt Cates.
- [15:18]
Martine Powers
But the fact that she was the Attorney General of the state, she's the.
- [15:22]
Aaron Blake
Attorney General of fl, you know, kind of a standard issue politician in some ways. But she also has, you know, a lot of very loyal to Trump episodes in her past. You know, she was kind of out there promoting election denial. After the 2020 election when she was Attorney General, she took an illegal contribution from Trump's charitable foundation around the same time that she was deciding not to investigate Trump University. That's something that's going to come up at these confirmation hearings. So there is Some baggage there. There is some controversy. I don't think it's probably enough to put her nomination in any danger in a Senate where we have 53 Republicans.
- [16:04]
Leanne Caldwell
Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that some early reporting from our colleague Perry Stein at the Justice Department showed that what she's hearing from Justice Department officials, which is interesting, or people that work in the Justice Department, is that anyone is better than Matt Case. And so they actually feel, according to her reporting, a bit more relieved with Pam Biondi, even though she is a huge Trump loyalist. Correct me if I'm wrong, Aaron, but I believe that she was one of the first people to side with Trump in the election denial stuff. And in after the 2020 election.
- [16:48]
Aaron Blake
Yeah, she went up to Pennsylvania with Rudy Giuliani pretty quickly after the election.
- [16:53]
Leanne Caldwell
That's right, she did.
- [16:55]
Martine Powers
So.
- [16:55]
Leanne Caldwell
So, yes, she is still going to be a very maga, you know, Trump person in this, in this role, but at least she might not have criminal allegations in her background.
- [17:10]
Martine Powers
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So. So a couple others that we heard from this week. So Dr. Oz is on the docket. Dr. Mehmet Oz, who Trump has said that he wants to choose as the leader of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Obviously, Dr. Oz is celebrity doctor, also a former GOP Senate candidate. And then we actually also have another nominee who has a connection to television, which is Linda McMahon, who is Trump's pick to lead the Department of Education. And her TV connection is that she's the former head of World Wrestling Entertainment, WWE, with her husband, Vince McMahon. And I just have to say there are a lot of memes going around about Linda McMahon, like in the ring getting body slammed by some of these wrestlers. Aaron, I know you've been diving deep on this.
- [18:05]
Aaron Blake
This has been the most welcome distraction this week for everyone because she's not just a former head of W. You know, she and her family were also part of all the sketches that they would do. You know, so there's like, you know, the Stone Cold Steve Austin doing the stunner on her, you know, her being slapped and slapping her family members who are also in these sketches.
- [18:31]
Martine Powers
You're simply a conniving. What?
- [18:38]
Aaron Blake
That's her mother.
- [18:41]
Martine Powers
Stephanie struck her mother down.
- [18:43]
Aaron Blake
And then maybe my favorite one is there is a clip of a wrestler named Kane. I don't know if people will be familiar with that, doing a tombstone pile driver on her.
- [18:52]
Martine Powers
Also, I have to ask her, Aaron, are you a WWE fan? I feel like you.
- [18:56]
Aaron Blake
I used to be. I used to Be, I mean, everybody watched it at one point, right? You guys watched it. Come on.
- [19:02]
Leanne Caldwell
Yeah, I, yes, with my brother, we would sit and watch wwe.
- [19:08]
Aaron Blake
So there's one clip of her, you know, wrestler named Kane doing a tombstone piledriver on her. And for those who don't know, the wrestler who is Kane is now the mayor of Knox County, Tennessee. His name's Glenn Jacobs.
- [19:27]
Martine Powers
Really?
- [19:28]
Aaron Blake
And so that clip is a clip of the mayor of Knox County, Tennessee, pile driving the potential future Secretary of Education. So what a world we live in.
- [19:41]
Martine Powers
Amazing. So WWE tombstone piledriver aside, what do you think is notable about these pics or what does it say about where Trump's head is at that these are some of his choices?
- [19:53]
Leanne Caldwell
They all do have. Most of them have one thing in common, that they are on television one way or another.
- [20:00]
Martine Powers
That's also true of Secretary of Defense pick Pete Hegseth, Fox News host. Also Sean Duffy, who is the pick for Secretary of Transportation. Fox News personality.
- [20:11]
Leanne Caldwell
Absolutely. And so that that still matters to him. The performance aspect still matters to Donald Trump. It's proof in his choices. But also he has made clear, people around him have made clear that the thing that is the biggest priority for Trump and his team is loyalty and being willing to do what what Trump wants to do with the agencies. All these people are absolutely loyal to the president elect.
- [20:44]
Aaron Blake
Yeah, I mean, I doubt Oz and McMahon are going to have a tough time getting confirmed. You know, McMahon was previously the head of the Small Business Administration in the first Trump administration. That's a lower profile pick. So it wasn't really a big confirmation process, but she got approved 81 to 19 last time she was nominated. So there but there is some baggage that comes with wwe. There was a scandal called the Ring Boys scandal where, you know, they were accused of turning a blind eye to sexual abuse. You know, wrestlers have died over the years and alleged maltreatment by the wwe. So some of those things could come up during these confirmation hearings. And you know, certainly Mehmet Oz's past history of using his TV show to promote claims that about, you know, supplements and things like that that weren't backed up by science could also be a significant thing. He was actually he testified in 2014 on the Hill and it was a pretty remarkable scene where a lot of senators pressed him on these, you know, green coffee bean extract, you know, cures that he was promoting that just weren't at all backed up by science.
- [21:51]
Leanne Caldwell
Now here's three statements you made on your show. You may think magic is make believe, but this little bean has scientists saying they found the magic weight loss cure for every body type. It's green coffee extract.
- [22:04]
Aaron Blake
Take green coffee bean extract as an example. I'm not going to argue that it.
- [22:09]
Leanne Caldwell
Would pass FDA muster if it was.
- [22:10]
Aaron Blake
A pharmaceutical drug seeking approval. So that could be a subplot of his nomination.
- [22:15]
Martine Powers
So we'll see how that all plays out as this nomination process continues. Okay, we're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, we're going to answer some of your lingering questions about the 2024 election. Be back in just a minute. All right, so Erin and Leanne, we are going to shift gears and try something a little bit different. And we are going to hear some questions. We here at the Post have been asking folks to submit questions about what happened in the 2024 election. We asked listeners on the podcast as well as Washington Post readers who comment online. And we wanted to know what people are still confused about, what they want to understand better about how everything played out. And we received some very thoughtful questions. Ready?
- [23:15]
Aaron Blake
Ready? Yeah.
- [23:16]
Martine Powers
Okay, great.
- [23:17]
Leanne Caldwell
Yeah, let's do it.
- [23:17]
Martine Powers
So first up is Dudley, who sent us this voice memo.
- [23:21]
Aaron Blake
Hi, my name is Dudley Bokowski and.
- [23:24]
Martine Powers
I live in Greensboro, North Carolina. Is there any sign the parties see.
- [23:29]
Aaron Blake
Their absolutist wings as problematic?
- [23:33]
Martine Powers
So Dudley went on to say that the two parties seem to approach politics from an either or standpoint, but voters appear to have taken a more nuanced approach. He talked about how voters want compassionate immigration policy but not open borders, that they want fair and equitable policing but not defund the police. So what answer would you give, Dudley about whether there are signs that the parties see their absolutist wings as problematic?
- [24:04]
Leanne Caldwell
I would say that that is actually the conversation that Democrats are having right now if they went too far, especially on some of the cultural issues. Cultural issues like the wokeism of language, of how they speak about their ties to the the interest groups, progressive interest groups. There's many on every single topic. But here's one example on climate change. The interest groups are very, very tough on Democrats on issues of climate change and who are pushing lawmakers to do more on climate even though they're light years apart from Republicans on the issue and lost sight of what kind of the country and where the voters were at. So there is a lot of like, introspection and trying to figure out on the Democratic Party and Republicans. As we talked about earlier, Donald Trump has believes he has a mandate and they are planning to be aggressive and quick and do all the things that they want to do. So no, they are not thinking that what they believe or the far right or the MAGA side of their party believes is too much. That's the agenda that they plan to implement and we'll see how voters respond in 2026.
- [25:28]
Martine Powers
All right, good answer, Leigh Ann. Okay, so the next question that we have I'm going to read because it was submitted online and it comes from a commenter named argentum2435. This person wrote, quote, I've heard that many Trump voters felt worse off during the Biden years than during the Trump years. Is that backed up by data that price growth largely exceeded wage growth? And this is something that came up a ton in our conversations with voters that we hear from people who said, look, I feel like my life was better financially four years ago than it is now. Erin, what do we know about this question?
- [26:05]
Aaron Blake
Yeah, I think we can say a couple things. One is that the inflation of the early years of the Biden administration loomed large in voters minds even as things clearly were moving in a better direction early in the administration. The really high inflation clearly wiped out the gains that we had seen in wages. By 2023, the wages started growing a little faster because inflation was cooling down. But people, if you look at the amount of money that they had inflation adjusted at that point, the inflation was still having a big impact on where people were at financially. And the other thing is just that inflation was very high and that has lingering effects for years afterwards. Inflation has dropped a lot. But also the inflation that we saw before is still impacting prices. So the price of eggs is much higher than it was four years ago because we did have that high inflation that hasn't dropped off and returned back to where it was before. It is higher now. And so that registers with people and we've seen in countries across the world that they had this post pandemic high inflation and it's always been bad for the almost without fail, the governing party in those countries lost ground, which I think is really telling about how this impacts politics in the world.
- [27:27]
Martine Powers
All right, so we've got one more question and this one is from a reader named Colleen and it's about turnout in the 2024 election. So Colleen asked, quote, where did people stay home? Everyone I talked to on election day, no matter where they were from in the country, small town, big city, red state, blue state, all said that their polling place was mobbed and the lines were very long. It appeared that turnout was massive, but neither candidates totals reflected that. Is this Simply in effect of fewer polling places voting by mail, or what? I'm puzzled. There are a few questions in there, but let's start with how did turnout in 2024 compare to other presidential years?
- [28:09]
Aaron Blake
I mean, we did still have a high turnout election. It wasn't as high as it was in 2020, which was the record year. We had 160 million votes almost back then. I think the latest estimates, we have about 156 million this time. You know, the polling places might have felt like they were more crowded because a lot fewer people voted by mail in this election. There was a lot more in person voting than there was in 2020. And then also, you know, just in terms of, like, raw votes cast for each candidate. These were the second and third highest numbers of raw votes that we have ever seen. Trump got the second most behind Biden in 2020, and Harris got the third most votes ever in terms of raw votes. So those do suggest that we had high turnout. It wasn't as high as it was last time, but we did see, when it comes to what happened in the election, we did see some significant trends there. A big problem for Harris was that to the extent that we did see turnout drop off, it was generally more Democratic voters, and it was generally in more urban areas.
- [29:14]
Leanne Caldwell
It's important to remember that one of the key strategies of the Trump campaign was to turn out people who don't vote very often. They spent a lot of time and a lot of resources on those people. And so one thing that Democrats and Republicans are noticing is a shift. It used to be the Democratic voters that voted more often in presidential elections, and it's the Republican voters who always faithfully turned out midterm elections. And that seems to be changing in the Trump era because Republicans or voters like to show up for Trump, but they aren't necessarily motivated to show up when Trump's not on the ballot.
- [30:02]
Martine Powers
Interesting.
- [30:03]
Aaron Blake
Yeah. It's been a complete reversal of how this used to work in the Trump era.
- [30:07]
Martine Powers
Okay, well, these were some great answers to some very good questions. So thank you to the folks who submitted questions.
- [30:15]
Aaron Blake
Yeah, we should do that again sometime.
- [30:17]
Martine Powers
Yeah, yeah, I think that's a great idea. Yeah. I would love to hear more of what's on people's minds, and I think that's all the time that we have for today's episode. So, Leanne, thank you so much for being with us.
- [30:29]
Leanne Caldwell
Thanks for inviting me. It was fun, as always.
- [30:32]
Martine Powers
And Leanne Caldwell is a co author of the Early Brief Newsletter and an anchor of Washington Post Live. So on this podcast, we're going to be continuing to cover all the important news as the Trump administration prepares to assume power once again. So if you're listening via Post reports, keep tuning in on Fridays. We're going to keep having these updates, but we are taking off next Friday for Thanksgiving, so we'll be back in your feed in December.
- [30:59]
Aaron Blake
And make sure you're subscribing to my newsletter, which will also keep going during the Trump transition period. It is also called the Campaign Moment, and so make sure you're reading that for the latest analysis from now until Inauguration Day.
- [31:12]
Martine Powers
And you can find the link to Aaron's newsletter in our show notes and@postreports.com.
- [31:17]
Aaron Blake
Today's episode was produced by Laura Benshoff and mixed by Justin Gerrish. It was edited by Lucy Perkins and Mary Jo Murphy. And thank you very much to the Washington Post comments editor Michael Blackman, who collected these questions from readers online and brought them to us so we could answer them on the show.
- [31:34]
Martine Powers
Our team also includes Maggie Penman, Reena Flores, Monica Campbell, Ted Muldoon, Alana Gordon, Ariel Plotnick, Bishop Sand, Rennie Svanovsky, Sabi Robinson, Emma Talkoff, Shawn Carter, Peter Bresnan, Sam Baer, Allison Michaels, Renita Jablonski and Elahe Izadi. I'm Martine Powers.
- [31:53]
Aaron Blake
And I'm Aaron Blake.
- [31:54]
Martine Powers
Have a great weekend and a great Thanksgiving.
- [31:57]
Aaron Blake
Happy Thanksgiving. Gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble. Martine, what's your favorite finishing move in wwe?
- [32:17]
Martine Powers
Come on, I don't even know any.
- [32:19]
Aaron Blake
Come on, you gotta know one. I like the figure four leg lock, the tombstone pile driver, the Stone Cold Stunner, the People's elbow. You don't know the People's Elbow?
- [32:29]
Martine Powers
People's elbow, yes.
- [32:30]
Aaron Blake
This is. Come on.