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- [00:00]
Scott R. Andersen
The last thing you want to hear when you need your auto insurance most is a robot with countless irrelevant menu options. Which is why with USAA Auto insurance, you'll get great service that is easy and reliable, all at the touch of a button. Get a quote today.
- [00:12]
Molly Reynolds
Restrictions apply.
- [00:14]
Quinta Jurassic
USAA.
- [00:18]
Scott R. Andersen
Molly of all the times we've recorded together and as familiar as I feel like I've gotten with your office backdrop, I feel like I just noted you have a giant stylized LPJ sticker attached to your filing cabinet. That is, I feel like a real statement these days.
- [00:31]
Molly Reynolds
Y so it's a gift from my father in law. It's from an early LBJ campaign. Next to it, you can't quite see as well, is a ticket from my trip to the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. Next to the JFK Library is what I consider to be the superior facility, the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the study of the U.S. senate, where I visited. I did not know this was happening when I went there and I'm being completely serious. I cannot have imagined a better day to go. I visited on the day that John McCain's funeral was happening and inside the Kennedy Institute they have a life sized replica of the Senate chamber. Like a one to one replica. It's exactly the same size, everything is the same. And they were showing the McCain funeral on like a large projection screen in the replica Senate chamber. And I cannot imagine this feels cringe to say, but I'm going to say it anyway. I'm kind of a cringe human. Like I cannot imagine a better time to have gone into a replica Senate chamber for a better purpose than to watch John McCain's funeral be broadcast.
- [01:44]
Scott R. Andersen
That is something. That is a real weird Molly moment.
- [01:47]
Quinta Jurassic
I will say that the Richard Nixon Memorial Library and Birthplace has. I'm not sure if it's a scale model, but there is a model Oval Office which when I visited I could not enter because I think there were people. It was either like a pre prom party or possibly a 50th anniversary or possibly those were happening at the same time, but so very dressed up. People were milling about the Oval Office and I was not able to go in so I had to content myself with listening to the Watergate tapes instead.
- [02:20]
Molly Reynolds
I also have a very good story about actually visiting the LBJ library, which is that I went with my now husband on a trip that we took to Austin and we were there over spring break when I was in graduate school. So it's like the beginning of March and we're there in the middle of the day in the middle of the week. And we arrive and we're told that we can, you know, wait 15 minutes and they'll show the like, orientation intro film. We're just waiting for this bus of tourists from South Dakota who are on a bus trip. And when they get there, they'll show us the film. So we all watch the film, we all tour the museum, we leave, we drive to a local barbecue restaurant for lunch. Who shows up but the busload of tourists from South Dakota. I was on the same vacation as a bunch of retired folks from South Dakota.
- [03:14]
Scott R. Andersen
I think you're giving away a lot more about yourself than you realize in this anecdote.
- [03:17]
Molly Reynolds
Oh, no, I get exactly how much I'm giving away about myself. I get that that's an extremely odd story.
- [03:23]
Scott R. Andersen
Very on brand. Hello everyone, and welcome back to Rational Security. I am your host, Scott R. Andersen. Thrilled to be back this week on the podcast where we invite you to join members of the lawfare team as we try to make sense of the week's biggest national security news stories. And I am thrilled to be joined by two veteran members of the Law Fair team. Rational Security regulars for former co host emeritus or current co host emeritus Former.
- [03:52]
Quinta Jurassic
Co host Quinta Jurassic Current emeritus from.
- [03:55]
Molly Reynolds
Do you become a former emeritus if you take the job back?
- [03:58]
Scott R. Andersen
I think that's called. I think that's called death. I don't know either that after that you come back or you die. And of course, lawfare senior editor and Brookings Senior fellow and congressional maven. I worked it in this time. Once again, Molly Reynolds. Molly, thank you for coming back on the podcast as well.
- [04:13]
Molly Reynolds
It's good to be here and we're excited.
- [04:15]
Scott R. Andersen
I'm excited to try the episode with just the two of you guys to stretch our legs a little bit. This is something we used to do back in the 2.0 days and now we're giving ourselves a little more rambling room by just having the three guests this week to talk about a couple of big stories happening. And it's worth noting there are some big stories happening this week that we're not quite covering because they are happening just as we're speaking. This includes the imposition of tariffs, shutting down of DoD centers intended to avoid civilian casualties. The state of the unit happened tonight. The this is all getting recorded in the afternoon on Tuesday, March 4th. So we're not talking about those this week, although they may come up next week. We have a couple of other events for the last few days we want to zoom in on and talk about as they clearly have a bearing on these sorts of issues we care about here at Lawfare. Topic 1 for this week Kyiv Calm and Tarry on this past Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the White House for what turned into a disastrous meeting in which President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. vance baited him into a heated public argument over Russia's invasion of his country. In its aftermath, Trump refused to sign the minerals deal Zelensky was there to finalize and has now cut off US Assistance to Ukraine, although just as we are recording, we are receiving reports that the Trump administration may be ready to move forward with the minerals deal after all in advance of tonight's State of the Union. Meanwhile, European allies have stepped up their support for Ukraine, while Trump's Republican allies have united in support of him and increasingly call for Zelensky's resignation. What contributed to this explosive about face in US Policy towards Ukraine, although it may be about facing yet again? And what does it tell us about the Trump administration's Decision making? Topic 2 Betting against the House House Majority Leader Mike Johnson scored what many are framing as a big win last week when he, with help from President Trump and ally Elon Musk, was able to unite his fractious caucus's narrow majority to pass their preferred budget resolution. But there are concerns that aspects of the budget and the broader agenda Trump is pressuring his party to unite behind will undermine Republicans prospects of holding the House in 2026 midterm elections. What is the state of governance in Congress at the moment, and what does it mean for the Trump administration's aggressive agenda and Topic 3 Prime Directive Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has once again intervened in the newspaper's opinion section, indicating last week that the paper no longer has a responsibility to reflect diverse views and would instead focus on issues of personal liberties and free markets that he thought were important for America, a mandate that led opinions editor David Shipley to resign. Is Bezos move an effort to dodge the ire of President Trump and his supporters, or is something else in play and what impact will it have on the paper's future? So for our first topic, I don't think I'm giving away any inside baseball that we had a very, very heated and somewhat emotional slack exchange on Friday as we watched in real time the meeting between President Trump, Vice President Vance, a number of other Cabinet officials and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy unravel really, really dramatic. President Trump at one point more or less insisted that the cameras keep running and the press be allowed to stay during part of the conversation because it was, in his words, good television or would be good television. And it did prove to be that, if somewhat dismaying television, seeing what had once been a very close alliance, really get put on the ropes because of this heated exchange over issues as weighty as why President Zelensky was not wearing a suit and whether that was disrespectful to the White House and the question as to what extent Russia was the aggressor in invading Ukraine. Quinta, I kind of want to come to you first on this question for your reactions. I know you had some strong reactions, I think a lot of us did, to this particular issue.
- [07:45]
Quinta Jurassic
You saw my Slack messages saying, oh my God, in all caps.
- [07:49]
Scott R. Andersen
Yes, exactly. A lot of emojis, a lot of very emotive emojis, not happy emojis, the ones you've really got to dig for deep in the catalog of emojis on Slack. Coming forward in response to these events from just about everybody here on the lawfare team, I'd be kind of curious, based on your initial reactions, what exactly is driving this and what are the dynamics that are surrounding both this move by Trump and those around him and its aftermath, where we're seeing Republicans very vocally and the White House very consciously trying to signal Republican support for what Trump and Vance did, which is essentially shut down Zelenskyy in a way that at least a lot of folks in the international community appear to have viewed as quite disrespectful and certainly contrary to the policy that they seem to have all been intended to lock in at this, which is some agreement on cooperation moving forward over minerals and then potentially security assistance as well.
- [08:41]
Quinta Jurassic
I mean, I thought it was appalling. I confess I have not watched the full. I think it's an 11 minute video because I didn't want to subject myself to that. But I've seen at this point quite a few clips and it's really something else to watch Trump and Vance kind of play off one another and try to bully Zelensky into submission. At this point, I feel like I'm pretty inured to shock, but this genuinely shocked me. Not in that I didn't think they were capable of it, but just that it's something else to see it unfold on your screen. Particularly, I will say, you know, at this point, I think we're familiar to Trump's kind of style of bullying everyone who covered the 2019 impeachment, which we're all very familiar with. We know exactly how Trump goes about talking to Zelensky because we've seen the transcript where he tries. Tries to push Zelensky into doing him a favor so that Ukraine can continue to receive aid. So that wasn't particularly surprising, although it's striking to see it in front of the cameras, since the White House apparently thought that this would make them look good. But the thing that really made the hair on the back of my neck stand up was watching the Vice President kind of step in and demand to know whether or not Zelenskyy had said thank you, suggested that Zelenskyy was misunderstanding the contexts of the war his country is fighting to survive. Sort of sneer. When Zelenskyy asked him, you know, have you ever been to Ukraine? It was really genuinely repulsive on any number of different levels. I mean, on an initial level, you know, this is someone who's a president of a country at war and demanding that he kind of kneel on the floor and say thank you is incredibly disrespectful to someone who is the leader of a sovereign nation that is fighting for its own right to exist. And the kind of smarminess with which Vance put that forward, I found really, really off putting. I also think there was a bizarre kind of almost abusive dynamic in how Trump and Vance sort of seemed to be trying to get Zelensky to break. And then once he had expressed sort of a bit of irritation, kind of pounced on that and said, you know, why are you being rude? More or less. I think that is consistent with some reporting that's come out that there was an element of staging to this, or certainly once it started happening, the White House was more than happy to allow the cameras to continue to roll. And certainly the White House has done its best to frame the interaction as something where Zelenskyy was, you know, out of control in some way. I will say I walked by a pro Ukraine protest in front of the White House over the weekend, and there was a counter protester who was blasting audio of Vance attempting to dress down Zelensky, which I thought was very funny, because you could just as easily imagine that that guy was with the Prot and was blasting it to underline how important it was that the United States support Ukraine. So overall, I think it really brought home to me just how much Trump and Vance seem to believe in their own kind of faux macho performance, except it's not even faux macho, because the person who they're trying to out macho is a guy who is leading a country at war and who is not wearing a suit because his country is at war. But they really seem to believe that there was something compelling about this sort of display of bullying. And it's not clear to me whether or not that will actually end up being the case domestically. Certainly it wasn't in Europe. My impression, and Molly, correct me if I'm wrong, is that Congressional Republicans have mostly fallen in line, although not entirely, but I think it's too early to see how it plays out in polling.
- [13:01]
Scott R. Andersen
Let me turn to you on that congressional question, Molly, because that's exactly where I want to go next is kind of open the aperture a little bit. Because in the aftermath of this incident, you saw a few things happen in pretty rapid succession. First, almost every Cabinet official who was in the meeting tweeted or otherwise released on social media. I think it was almost universally on Twitter, though, a message saying support for the president, some of which were almost fawning in their praise. You also saw that from a number of prominent senators. Lindsey Graham's is the one that kind of stood out more than others, where he said he think he was something to the effect of prouder of President Trump than he's ever been in the past, even though Graham was someone who is supportive of Ukraine, met with Zelenskyy before this meeting, and according to media reports, even coached Zelenskyy. Don't take the bait. If they try and provoke you, come in, be thankful, be grateful, and just sign the deal and get it on paper. And since then, we've seen the White House coordinate not one, but actually two sort of waves of press releases that document Republican support for Trump, basically collect all these tweets and assorted other public statements from a variety of figures in the government, in the con, elsewhere in the media, and lay out, here's all these people supporting Trump, which I generally don't take that actually to be a huge sign of strength when the White House feels that that is necessary to do not once but twice after the president does something. But, you know, this administration does like to make the president look and feel good. So who knows exactly what the strategy behind that? My question for you is like, what do you make of the congressional dynamics around this? We know there are a lot of members of Congress in the Republican Party, particularly in the Senate, who are strong supporters of Ukraine and want to see this deal and real US Security assistance continue, if not increase. But these people also appear to be falling in line behind Trump. What is the strategy now? How does that translate into their policy goals? And into the broader sort of relationship between Congress and the President.
- [14:57]
Molly Reynolds
I mean, one way to read the White House's decision to issue a series of press releases touting congressional support is that it's a, an attempt to chill congressional opposition, to sort of signal to those Republican members of Congress. And you are correct that there, there is a. There's a block of folks who over the past several years have been quite vocal in their support for assistance to Ukraine. You know, we saw, oh, I guess this was about a year ago. It is difficult to remember, but about a year ago was sort of the last big pot of money that got that Congress kind of managed to reach an agreement on for additional assistance to Ukraine. It had been sort of pending. It was part of the situation that led to the downfall of Kevin McCarthy in the fall of 2023. And then it was ultimately resolved and not until the spring of 2024. So, you know, there, there does exist this block, you're absolutely right. But I do think that with Trump in the White House, just generally this desire on the part of congressional Republicans not to cross Trump, Trump has always been someone prone towards retribution against people who he feels has. Have crossed him. I think many things we have seen in the opening of the second Trump administration suggest that those impulses are even less checked now than they may have been in the first term. So I think that sort of general concern about bucking Trump is prob. Part of it. And then I do think, and I say this not to sort of at all minimize the concerns of Ukrainians and people who really care about what is happening in the conflict, but sort of Trump and Trump's position on Ukraine and the Republicans position on foreign policy more generally isn't operating in isolation from a whole bunch of other stuff happening with Republicans in Congress. And this is a preview for one of our later segments. Republicans in Congress not generally standing up for their institutional interest as members of the US Congress right now. But I think this is also just sort of in line with what we're seeing in a number of different situations.
- [17:20]
Scott R. Andersen
So the other half of this is the European reaction and then the American, or particularly Trump administrative reaction to the European reaction. Right. So we saw the Europeans, and particularly under the leadership of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, hold a, I don't believe, previously planned, I think, an impromptu summit this past weekend in London aimed at putting together essentially a European proposal for a ceasefire that will include support for Ukraine, with the idea of bringing a consolidated sort of model they can bring to the Trump administration with Ukrainian Input, I believe. I don't think Zelenskyy was actually attending. I could be wrong on that, but I don't believe so. And actually have a plan that will provide some degree of counterbalance to the idea, some alternative path forward other than the minerals deal that at the time looked like it had failed and would have the additional backing of Europe, actually putting some skin in the game, like being willing to deploy troops to Ukraine in particular, something that we've actually seen France, the UK And a few other governments really step forward and express a willingness to do. And this is something that you, weirdly, is kind of in alignment with something the Trump administration has been hitting since its first term in office, which is the need for Europe to take more responsibility for its own security. Because this would be Europe putting skin in the game, putting its own troops at risk, increasing its own security assistance to Ukraine as well, as I understand it, under this proposal. But instead it was met in a pretty hostile fashion, I think it's safe to say, by the Trump administration and by Republicans more broadly. We saw Elon Musk, of course, a Trump ally, a kind of pseudo cabinet official, tweet something to the effect of it's time to, or I think retweet something retweeted by kind of a right wing media figure it's time to withdraw from NATO and the UN I've heard reports that there are at least some Republican members of Congress drafting up resolutions endorsing that idea, at least as in relation to NATO, although I suspect UN Is as much in the picture as well. And of course, we saw President Trump at some point suggest that any sort of European proposal is going to need to buy weapons from the United States still, and threatening to sanction certain EU officials for getting out, out of line. To some extent, this proposal, I couldn't really make much sense of what exactly Trump was exactly angry about, except that it seemed to be hostile towards this general idea. What does this dynamic tell us about what the administration is worried about? This seems in many ways what they were pushing for. The obvious outcome. If the United States was not going to play a role in this peacemaking, this European intervention, how does that enter into the equation? Quinta, do you have thoughts about this?
- [19:59]
Quinta Jurassic
I mean, I think the answer is that they like Putin, they like the current Russian government, and they want Russia to win the war, period, the end, full stop. And that they're fundamentally thinking in a sort of imperialist, expansionist model under which bigger states can gobble up smaller states. Canada, and they like that Putin is trying to do that. They think it's cool. They want to do it too. And they want Ukraine, Ukraine to lose, and that's it. I think there is also an element of their kind of being high on their own supply, to use a technical term, when it comes to, or maybe high on the Kremlin's supply, high on Alexander Dugin's supply, when it comes to kind of believing the Russian propaganda about the superiority of the Russian armed forces. You saw this also with Pete Hegson, this comment about how the Russian Navy could destroy the U.S. navy, or I can't remember his precise wording, but it was something the Russian Navy was superior to the US Navy, which is quite something to say given that the Black Sea Fleet was destroyed by a country that doesn't even have a navy. So there's this desire to see Russia as a hegemon, as a military power, as sort of a source of rising authority, because they fundamentally. Well, when I say they, to be clear, I mean there are a bunch of different things bumping around here. I think what I'm describing here is a sort of combination of the Trump Vance version. They fundamentally buy the propaganda that has been coming out of the Kremlin since over the last 10 years that Russia is a sort of white nationalist state that represents traditionalist values and is standing against a sort of corrupted, non white, decadent West. They like that. They want to see it triumphant. And so they want to believe that Russia can and will win and they want to help it win in Ukraine. I mean, you saw this early on in the war when there were all these jokes about how the Russian troops, the manly Russian troops, were just going to plow over the LGBT Ukrainian troops waving rainbow flags, that kind of thing. Boy, did that not pan out. And so I think Ukraine winning the war or holding out messes up their whole theory of the world as both a place where sovereignty matters, even from smaller states, where national self determination matters, where victory is not determined, determined by how based you are or whether or not you converted to Catholicism or Russian Orthodoxy. And so they want to align with Putin in that sense. And I think that the outrage over Europe doing what on paper is exactly what Trump has been pushing them to do, really drives that point home.
- [23:13]
Molly Reynolds
Yeah, I don't disagree with anything Quinta just said. I will also say that I think there's the possibility that in this situation, like many other situations, there's some element of this that's not entirely strategic thinking on display. So here I'm thinking particularly about JD Vance's comments about how an American economic deal with Ukraine was, quote, a better security guarantee than the 20,000 troops from some random country that hasn't fought a war in 30 or 40 years. A comment that the Brits at least are taking as being directed at them and has brought, among other things, criticism from, of all people, Nigel Farage, who has and I'm quota here, said J.D. vance is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. And so if again, I think I'm not disagreeing with Quinta, but I also think that like many things, there's just a little bit of some people are out over their skis. There's not necessarily a whole lot of strategic thinking behind what's happening.
- [24:19]
Quinta Jurassic
Or alternatively that you know Vance well, Vance has said he wasn't thinking about the UK And France. I would say that if you take Vance at his word, he has also.
- [24:30]
Molly Reynolds
Not offered any alternative countries that he's thinking about when criticized by both the Brits and the French.
- [24:38]
Quinta Jurassic
Right.
- [24:39]
Scott R. Andersen
I don't fundamentally disagree with the idea of I think people in the administration, particularly Vance and Musk and that kind of sex. Trump himself I think is a little bit more of a cipher I'm less confident in. But that is tied into this kind of weird alt right politics. You are taking on at least the view that Russia is not the strategic rifle that it was viewed as by the Biden administration, by most Americans, honestly. And there might be more common interests or more commonalities that are worth exploiting. But I wonder whether there's a countervailing interest here as well, even in the very self interested ranks of, of the White House and in Trump himself, who at a minimum, even if he doesn't buy into that whole worldview, is not attached to Ukraine, clearly has hostile priors about Ukraine, whether it's from this impeachment or whether it is from personal relationships, interactions with Zelensky, the perfect call and all that followed from it. But countervailing, that is the fact that he made a commitment to accomplish some sort of peace on the campaign trail and he seems serious about doing it to some extent. He doesn't care about the terms. I think that's the danger for Ukraine. But I also think he understands that he can't totally let Russia run roughshod over Ukraine in its entirety without looking like he failed. So I do think there's a countervailing pressure there and that might indicate why now, in advance of the state of the Union, Trump appears to be saying, no, we're going to sign this minerals deal and we're going to take up some sort of continuation of these talks with Ukraine. Now, bear in mind, the minerals deal, of course, doesn't include security assistance or guarantees of any sort, but it does evidently allude to the possibility of it, and it's clearly designed to be a prelude to that. And at a minimum, what it does do is that it gives the United States an economic interest, something Trump seems to really care about in Ukraine as a continuing entity that it doesn't have with Russia, although maybe Russia will try and meet it or beat it at some point down the road. Does that seem plausible to you all? I do feel like there is still even in Trump's mind and camp this idea that he still needs to bring some sort of peace or some sort of resolution to the conflict that has to involve something other than Ukraine no longer existing. I'm not sure he can go that far.
- [27:03]
Quinta Jurassic
He's Mr. Deals. He wants to do a deal. But I don't think that that is necessarily consistent or well worked out when it comes to his attitud toward Russia, which is basically one of fealty. And I don't think it's necessarily consistent with Vance's, I think somewhat more noxious but better worked out posture. Right. I think it's just that he's sort of a bunch of different instincts in a trench coat and that the administration right now is a bunch of different power centers sort of jostling around him and pulling him in different directions. And some of those are people who are making the argument that you do about, well, maybe the US Will have an interest in the development of Ukraine, so on and so forth. And there are others in the van's camp who seem to just, without quite saying it, just want Russia to win. So I think that the incoherence is really just a function of how things are working right now.
- [28:04]
Molly Reynolds
And I would also say there's a bloc who's just like generally opposed to US Dollars being spent in other places, Ukraine being one of them. And there we can situate sort of the no more military assistance to Ukraine in the broader no more USAID and no more other foreign assistance and et cetera, et cetera. And so some of it is also being driven, I think, to Quinta's another element in the trench coat to continue Quinta's analogy is just this general isolation posture on the part of some number of Republicans.
- [28:48]
Scott R. Andersen
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's a really good inclusion. There's obviously a strong overlap there. And what we've kind of classified as the Vance Musk sort of perspective in terms of commonality of not supporting Ukraine or constraining support on Ukraine. I think that's exactly right. Like we're seeing this effort to appeal to Trump, that's very personalized, normalized foreign policy. Whereas whoever can sway Trump and Trump is persuaded not just by policy interests or these broad views, but about a sense of personal, or at least national economic interest. And then a lot of just pride and emotive interactions, personal motives. I think that's really like, Vance really seemed like the provocateur in chief in my mind at that meeting. And if I had to read intentionality into it, and I think it was too deliberate to not be intentional. And plus you had the add on of kind of like a right wing media figure asking the very leading question about Zelenskyy's suits that then blossomed into kind of the biggest heated part of the exchange. It really is an effort to drive a bigger wedge between Trump and Zelenskyy by using Trump's ego against it. And so when you see Lindsey Graham and these other folks expressing fealty while still going backing Ukraine, to some extent, it seems like they're trying to balance Trump's personal ego and the necessity to get that on board with these policy goals. You're walking a very difficult and fine line. And who knows if you can actually walk both lines at the same time. It's a tricky proposition. But I did think it was interesting that Graham, one of the first things he actually did is he retweeted Zelensky when Zelenskyy tweeted earlier today, hey, we're willing to take a unilateral ceasefire more or less without conditions. Graham retweeted it with a thumbs up and said, I think we're headed in a good direction. This is just 48 hours after he said, I think Zelenskyy is going to need to resign or otherwise come to the table and make a lot of apologies for the sort of conduct. So I do think there's just this navigation, but it just underscores this weird position where we're in, where policy can swing dramatically upon what objectively seem to be incredibly petty and personalized. Perceptions and grievances, differences. And to some extent there's always an element of that in foreign policy and in diplomacy and diplomatic relations. But here it's being drawn out so much in regard to somebody we know is a very mercurial personality. It strikes me as just reflecting what an incredibly dangerous moment, frankly, we're in and explains a lot about why A lot of countries, unlike with Trump's first term, are now convinced they need to start acting on their own in a way that they can't rely on the United States stability, but actually really providing a counter wait. Well, as we have already started talking about at least some members of Congress, let us shift our conversation there because it has been a big week in the legislative branch, a big two weeks. We saw speaker of the House Mike Johnson score a big victory last week by most accounts, where we saw the incredibly fragile Republican caucus with its very slim majority, which has very, very deep internal cleavages around budgetary questions, funding questions, do something that a lot of people weren't sure they're going to be able to do, which is muster enough votes to pass through the House, the proposed Republicans budget or the House version of the Republican budget. They had one defector, as I recall. I think just one Republican member of the House did not vote for the package.
- [32:17]
Molly Reynolds
Thomas Massie is going to do Thomas Massie things.
- [32:20]
Scott R. Andersen
There you go. Exactly. But many of the people who usually do their own thing as well chose not to in this particular case. Case including at least one following evidently, at least as reported, a fairly aggressive berating by the President regarding the fact that she was considering voting against the bill. That's Representative Spatz, as I recall.
- [32:38]
Molly Reynolds
Spartz is her name.
- [32:39]
Scott R. Andersen
Is it Spartz? Oh, Spartz, sorry, Representative. What's her first name?
- [32:42]
Quinta Jurassic
Chaos queen. As I saw one congressional reporter.
- [32:46]
Molly Reynolds
She is a chaos agent in a conference of chaos agents.
- [32:49]
Scott R. Andersen
There you go. It is really being celebrated, I think as a big victory for Johnson. But almost as soon as it happened, you had a lot of people say, but, but this still has to go to the Senate, which has already basically said it will not fly by them, at least in its current state. The White House probably is going to go along with whatever they get out of it, but maybe not. We'll have to wait and see. Maybe they'll have some sort of hang ups if it really gets changed by the Senate. And then the question is, what does this all mean for down the road? Because the budget sets up a lot of cuts in either items that people fear are going to press proved pretty unpopular in the lead up to the midterm elections. So Molly, you are, as mentioned, our Congress maven at Lawfare and at Brookings more broadly. At least one of our mavens at Brookings talk to us about how you see this victory, if it is a victory, fit into this broader question of how Congress is operating and what Congress is able to do because, notably, this is kind of the only thing we've seen Congress do since this new Congress convened, other than confirmation hearings, at least that, to my knowledge, we haven't seen major legislative packages moving otherwise. Is this the main item, and what does it tell us about how Congress intersects with the rest of Trump's agenda?
- [34:01]
Molly Reynolds
It is worth remembering that even as the executive branch itself is implementing a sort of maximalist strategy of destabilization across the federal government, that to the extent that there are things that do actually require congressional action, like adopting a budget resolution that would set up the ability to move subsequent legislation without the threat of a filibuster in the Senate, it's important to say that, because that's sort of why we're talking about this at all there. We are seeing Republicans in Congress struggle with coming to an agreement on how they want to proceed. And so you should have asked whether this is a win for Mike Johnson. I mean, it's certainly a win in comparison to it not passing, which did, in fact, look like it was a possibility when they did adopt it. They had scheduled the vote, they announced that they were canceling the vote. They sent everyone home, and then they announced that they were un canceling the vote and told everyone to come back. And so, as I said at the time, this had real, like, 2017 vibes for anyone who had the great pleasure of living through the fits and starts and ultimate failure of Republicans attempt to repeal the Affordable care Act in 2017. Real similar energy to various stages of that process. And so, again, if the sort of barometer here is are Republicans moving the ball down the field, then yes, like this was a victory for Mike Johnson. Certainly there's a. I think often for Republicans in Congress, there's sort of a psychological element where when they do things that they have been told by the mainstream media that they aren't going to be able to do that, like, that's seen as a psychological win for the conference. And so there's some element of that as well. But I can't stress enough the differences between what the Senate has laid out for how it wants to proceed and what the House has laid out for how it wants to proceed. Proceed. And it may well be the case that folks in the House, Mike Johnson, Jason Smith, who's the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which is the one with jurisdiction over tax policy, it may well be the case that those folks go to the Senate and say, look, this is the best we can do. Literally this. It was like pulling teeth to get this through the chamber. We can't. If you come back to us with a different plan, there's no way we're going to get that through the House. So you just have to eat what we've sent you. That's a possibility. The real challenge to that approach, if you are House Republicans, is that one of the things that House Republicans have put in this spending blueprint is very, very large cuts to Medicaid. Now, now, if you followed this at all last week, and you listen to any congressional Republicans, they will have told you the word Medicaid does not appear in the budget resolution. That is technically true. But the way that this works is that the budget resolution, when you are using a budget resolution to tee up future reconciliation legislation, has instructions to different congressional committees, and it says this committee has to cut this amount from the deficit or this committee can report out language that increases the deficit by this much. In the House budget resolution, there's an instruction to the House Energy and Commerce Committee to achieve cuts of $880 billion. There is mathematically no way for the House Energy and Commerce Committee to satisfy that instruction without making really substantial cuts to Medicaid. There are House Republicans who are nervous about this possibility, and to a greater degree, there are Senate Republicans who are nervous about this possibility, particularly folks, folks who represent states that have chosen to expand Medicaid in the almost 15 years since the passage of the Affordable Care act, and also just Republicans who represent states with large Medicaid populations. And so the idea of getting the Senate to sign off on cuts of this size, there's a challenge there. At the same time, if you go back to the House and say, and the Senate says we can only pass something with smaller cuts, then you start to lose those folks in the House who are really hard to get to vote for the House's budget resolution in the first place because they don't think that the cuts that are in the House's budget resolution are big enough. And so this is a very hard circle to square. It's also the case that one of the big issues for the Senate in kind of legislating for the rest of the year is the question of whether to make the Trump tax cuts permanent, which is not something that's sort of contemplated by the House's budget resolution. This is part of why the Senate the whole time has wanted to do one reconciliation bill now that basically just increases spending in some areas, like defense spending, spending on border enforcement, and then punts till later in the year. The really hard task of writing a tax bill bill. And the sort of effective deadline for writing a tax bill is the end of the calendar year, because that's when the tax provisions in the 2017 tax cuts start to expire. And so the Senate would like to sort of take the tax piece and say, we're going to do that later. It's going to be hard. We really want to make the tax cuts permanent. We probably got to do some budget gimmickry to make that happen. Maybe the parliamentarian will say no to that, but we really want to save that fight for later. And we really just want to watch notch a big win now. We want to pass a smaller first reconciliation bill that increases spending, and we don't really want now at least to get into this fight with the House about these really big spending cuts. Again, there are senators, Republican senators, who would be very happy to cut $880 billion from Medicaid, but I don't think they have the votes to do that, or at least it's not clear to me that they have the votes to do that. And so while again, we've gotten like, marginally closer to the finish line and better for Mike Johnson to have gotten marginally closer than to still be at the starting line, there's just a real, a real big challenge here. And the last thing I'll say is that this is a place where eventually Trump is going to be important. As you said, Scott, we saw in the Houses when the House did adopt its budget resolution, reporting suggests that Trump was important in getting those last couple of votes on board. But sort of cutting these kinds of complicated legislative deals is not Trump's strong suit. It's not quite clear to me who is going to be the administration's point person on negotiating these sorts of things and helping Republicans come to agreement on these sorts of things. In the first Trump administration, it was Steve Mnuchin who less so on, say, like the ACA stuff, but in later rounds of congressional negotiations around things like the debt limit, he was often the lead administration negotiator. But it's just not clear to me who that's going to be. And at some point, if they want to be able to bridge these divisions within the House Republican Conference, they're probably going to need Trump's help to do that. But it's, and Trump is, particularly in the context of dealing with Congress, quite susceptible to just doing the last thing that someone told him. And it's not clear to me that that's going to be sufficient to help, to help Trump help Republicans solve some of these debates.
- [41:54]
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- [43:37]
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- [44:39]
Scott R. Andersen
What are Trump's priors on this in terms of a position substantively Medicare on Medicaid, these other items? Yeah, I mean, like, how much is he willing to. Is his vote in support of the House bill because he likes the House bill or because he wanted a House bill to pass without having to compromise with Democrats, and then how much does it come out the end? We don't really have a sense of it, is my sense. Right.
- [45:02]
Molly Reynolds
I'll say a couple things. One, I think he may, at least in some small part, just really like the idea of one big, beautiful bill. Like, that's a very Trumpy thing to want.
- [45:15]
Scott R. Andersen
Three B's. Gotta love it.
- [45:18]
Molly Reynolds
On the underlying substance, this is actually sort of an interesting question because particularly in his first campaign and to some degree in his first term, the one place where he was often out of step with more recent Republican orthodoxy was on the question of entitlement spending. So we had, prior to Trump, we had sort of a decade or so of Republicans in Congress kind of typified by Paul Ryan, who had sort of very detailed, very wonky ideas about how to dramatically reduce the size and scope of entitlement programs. Medicare and Medicaid, and to some degree, Social Security. If we go back to sort of the Bush privatization push, bush in the mid-2000s, and I think Trump correctly intuited that that's really unpopular, that Americans, particularly on the Medicare and Social Security, Social Security side, Americans don't like having their benefits cut. They don't like having. They don't like big cuts to things that they have come to rely on. And so that was not in the same way, like a core piece of, of Trump's appeal or Trump's campaign messaging as it had been for previous Republicans kind of in the era preceding Trump. At the same time, if you listen to congressional Republicans talk about cutting Medicaid, a lot of them will really like, lean into the idea that there is waste, fraud and abuse in Medicaid. I'm not saying there's no waste, fraud or abuse, but you're not going to get to $880 billion in cuts by reducing wage fraud and abuse. You're cutting people's benefits. I mean, you're imposing work requirements that then act as benefit cuts because that's what work requirements do. And so I guess to sort of come back to your question, Scott, like, I, I don't know how he sort of actually feels about this, which again, may be part of what makes it hard for him to help drive them to agreement.
- [47:35]
Quinta Jurassic
One thing that I think is sort of an interesting complication here is that, as you say, Molly, Trump had previously been pretty clear on the fact that he did not want to cut entitlements, but now Elon Musk is running around with a chainsaw everywhere. And Trump, including the Social Security administration. Yeah.
- [47:58]
Molly Reynolds
Which is if you were going to take a chainsaw to any part of the federal government that average Americans might.
- [48:09]
Quinta Jurassic
Notice, it would be that one.
- [48:11]
Molly Reynolds
It would be that one. And Martin O'Malley, who just finished a term as the commissioner of the Social Security Administration after a failed presidential run in 2016, there's reporting yesterday that he, based on his sort of time as the head of ssa, has said that with the kinds of cuts that are being talked about, ssa, they're not going to be able to process new applications in a particularly timely way. And so people who are entitled to benefits are not going to get them in the on the timeframe that they would expect because Elon Musk has taken a chainsaw to the agency, one of the most visible things that the federal government does for people. They also have announced that they would like to close Social Security offices, which again, if you think about the ways in which individual Americans tend to have touch points with the federal government, it's things like I'm changing my name because I got married. I need to go to a Social Security office and do that. I want to file my taxes. Let's talk about the, like chainsaw being taken to the irs and I would like to get my tax refund in a timely manner. So it's not just the idea that they are doing things in a haphazard way that are going to have real consequences for people and are going to have real consequences for people quickly. It's that they're doing things, things that people are going to notice. And I think that leaves a lot of people, including me, with questions.
- [49:34]
Scott R. Andersen
Well, I think that tees up really well. A question for you, Quinta, or that I welcome your thoughts on, which is right now it seems like we're in this situation where Speaker Johnson relies entirely or substantially or in large part on the president to corral his caucus to get on the same page, at least around these items. But most of the big items they're going to have to address deal with these big budget questions that are going to invoke a lot of the same concerns. How stable is that going to be as a solution moving forward? One thing I've said on this podcast a number of times, I still think it's true, is that Donald Trump is still very close to the peak of his powers. Right now, the president is Most powerful on January 21st or maybe a few days later, once you actually get people their computer logins and know what they're doing and things like that. Right. But the president's power comes quickly after they enter office and then declines as things get harder. They make mistakes, they get closer to elections. And people have incentives to dispute, to try and put distance with presidents and to deal with contrary policies. So I guess in my mind that means that at least part of that coercive power, the political power the president's able to bear, may be on the decline, particularly if certain things he's doing now have the potential to prove very unpopular very quickly. There's definitely at least a chance of that. But are there other components of this that I'm being too skeptical of that might still prove a more unifying element that gives Trump more power over caucus than we appreciate? I mean, the other factor that jumps to mind is of course, Musk himself being a big pocketbook who, at least in the context of confirmation that's proven willing to throw money or threaten to throw money into primary fights. Are there other tools the Trump administration has to bear that might let it corral Congress more effectively moving forward to advance its agenda? Or is this really maybe a one time trick it can pull together?
- [51:28]
Quinta Jurassic
I think it's really hard to say, in part because some of the dynamics that we saw in Trump 1, are not present or are sort of mixed up in confusing ways in Trump. Two, so Trump does seem to have greater control over the Republican caucus than he did last time around. He also seems more checked out. And Musk is powerful in the sense that he is aligned with Trump and has a lot of money to spend on primary challenges, which he's been threatening. But he has really bad political instincts, like going after Social Security. So I think it's really difficult to say. It seems like a very combustible combination, especially because we don't know what Trump's popularity is going to look like going forward. Right. I mean, there's a special election to fill. Elise Stefanik's seat, which was a very red seat. But energy prices in Maine went up by 25% this morning because of the tariffs. And I saw that Ontario was planning on either cutting or sharply limiting electricity going into New York State, which would include that district. So anything could happen.
- [52:50]
Scott R. Andersen
Molly, what do you think about this question about the toolkit Trump has to bring to bear? I mean, the other factor we have to bear in mind is you've got a slim majority and a number of seats that are going to be up for grabs before 2026 in special elections for people who have been put in the Cabinet. Other people may yet be nominated for things, although, you know, one would hope, maybe the Trump administration has gotten the message that, like House members might be more valuable for them where they are, at least where they're not from super safe districts. So, you know, how durable is the Trump's influence in the House likely to be over the next year or two, at least until we get closer to the midterm elections.
- [53:29]
Molly Reynolds
Yeah, I mean, I think the sort of this question on its head, I think for me the bigger question is not how influential will Trump be? Because I think the answer is he'll continue to be quite influential and in some cases will continue to be the thing that particularly Mike Johnson uses to try and solve his conference management problems. But more like what is Congress going to try and do between now and the midterms? So we have the, the reconciliation efforts that I described earlier in some form, whether it's one bill or two bills, we have the continued need to fund the government. The next round of this is upon us. The current continuing resolution funding the government expires next Friday. And whether we pass that deadline without a shutdown is an open question. And then beyond that, they're going to have to deal with the debt limit at some point. It is possible for them to deal with the debt limit via reconciliation. There have been all manner of suggestions made about whether they will do that or won't do that and who likes that idea and who doesn't like that idea. And if they do it, how big should the increase be? My preferred option is just to have it be a comically large number and then we don't actually need to deal with the debt limit anymore. There was that brief moment before Christmas when we thought Trump and Elon Musk were going to insist Republicans get rid of the debt limit entirely before he became president. But that came and went. Went. But beyond that, I simply don't see that much legislatively happening. 1 Because of how Divided Republicans are. But also, unless Congress and, or the federal courts decide that they, in the case of Congress, sort of of its own choosing, and the courts kind of based on how they adjudicate individual cases, unless they sort of dramatically restrict the scope of what Trump and Elon Musk are currently doing, or unless Trump and Musk sort of feel political pressure to restrict the scope of what they're doing, there just isn't the need for Congress to do a lot. And this depresses me deeply as a person who thinks about Congress for a living. But it's just an acceleration to a whole other degree of a long historical trend of Congress being willing to delegate and give up power to the executive branch. And if Elon Musk and Donald Trump can just decide whether spending happens or spending doesn't happen, then what power is left to Congress and what motivates them to do at least Republicans to do much of anything, or to try to reach out to Democrats to try and have big bipartisan achievements if most of what's happening is just being is just happening at the discretion of the executive branch?
- [56:20]
Scott R. Andersen
That does strike me that there is one thing the Trump administration may need Congress to do, which is that if it is reversed on certain major components of the dramatic changes it's trying to implement in the courts, because, of course, big swaths of are being challenged as being beyond the president's authority, whether it's dismantling USAID and cfpb, whether it's firing tens of thousands of employees, whether it's refusing to spend foreign assistance. There are underlying legal challenges, all this, that are rooted in the separation of powers. Congress could remedy all those if it could enact legislation to verify them, basically reinforce that the Trump administration is doing what it wants. Some of that can't be done through reconciliation, but some of it could, I think, at least maybe on foreign assistance funding.
- [57:07]
Molly Reynolds
So the sort of short version of this is if we're talking about new streams of funding. So if it's, and here I think new funding for border enforcement is a good example. If what Congressional Republicans want to do is allocate a bunch of new money that would bolster enforcement efforts at the southern border or in the interior, what have you, that's pretty easily doable via reconciliation in terms of the rules of the reconciliation process. Putting aside the bigger political conversation we're having before the question about codifying the Doge cuts or kind of what Doge has been doing, it matters quite a lot specifically what we're talking about, because there it matters much more about what the current form of the funding is. Whereas if what you want to do is allocate new funding, then you have much more control over whether you make that funding the kind of funding that can be handled through the reconciliation process or the kind of funding that has to be handled through the appropriations process. So forward looking, you have more flexibility than trying to go back and reduce existing funding. I will say that Mike Johnson had at one point over the past week or so sort of floated the idea that a measure to keep the government Open past the 14th would codify some of the Doge cuts. He seemed to have backed off that a little bit, which, you know, makes a great deal of sense because if they're going to keep the government open past next Friday, the going to need Democratic votes to do it. And Democrats, there's a lot of reporting about what, if anything, Democrats are going to demand in terms of clawing back or stopping some of what Doge is doing. So the idea that you would get their votes if you tried to codify some of the Doge cuts in the bill, I think that's a real stretch. And I think again, Johnson's rhetoric has reflected that.
- [58:56]
Scott R. Andersen
Fascinating. Fascinating. Well, while we are on the topic of the decline of one vaunted institution here in the United States, let us turn to the decline potentially of another vaunted institution, at least for those of us native to our nation's capital. We have seen another tumultuous week at the Washington Post, a important and high profile publication with a long history in our nation and our nation's capital that has had a lot of tumultuous weeks in the past year or last several years, and particularly in the last year. Owner Jeff Bezos, of course, who is also the owner of Amazon, famously nixed the endorsement of Kamala Harris in advance of the 2024 election by the editorial board in a very controversial move. And now he appears to have taken one substantial step even further into guiding, shaping and arguably interfering with the opinions put forward by the opinion section of the Washington Post, specifically by indicating that in a letter to Washington Post staffers that the opinion section was no longer had a responsibility to reflect a broad range of views because the Internet had rendered that unnecessary, at least in Bezos's view, and that instead the focus moving forward would be on opinions focusing on the value of civil liberties or personal liberties and free markets, items that Bezos endorses imperial important for the United States. This, of course, is a particular substantive agenda of a particular character I.e. meet with agreement by many members of the editorial board or many readers of the Washington Post. We quickly saw the opinions editor resign instead of taking up this new mandate by Bezos that presumably is being rolled out as we speak. Quinta, you are a veteran of the Washington Post opinion section and editorial board from a chapter of your career a few years ago during your brief interregnum from the halls of lawfare. First, actually, let me ask you to help the reader, the listener and me understand a little bit more about what exactly this means. I think of the opinion section of kind of consisting of three different tranches of content. You have the official editorials written by the board that are kind of the top line main editorial that appear in the section. Then you have columnist opinion columnists that are employed by the Post op who publish regular columns on content. And then you have op EDS that are contributed by outside authors that are selected, edited and published. All of this under the kind of opinions rubric. How do you understand this edict from Bezos intersecting with all three of those streams of content and shaping them? And what do you think that does how big of a departure is this from the way the Post has approached it work in the past?
- [61:41]
Quinta Jurassic
So I don't think we know how broadly it's going to spread. I mean, the note from Bezos seemed to suggest that it was the whole page, so everything, the unsigned editorials, the columns, the OP eds, everything. But I don't think we really have a sense yet, as you said, David Shipley, who was the editor of the page and who himself had received a great deal of criticism for not standing up to Bezos and Trump departed rather than work on this project. But I don't think we've really seen much in the way of what the new and improved free markets and personal liberties Washington Post opinion page is going to look like so far. There was a column by Dana Milbank, who's a columnist, basically raising the question of what exactly Bezos has in mind here. Although I also saw that Eric Wemple, who is the page's press critic, was going to write an article about it and that was spiked. This is according to Gene Weingarten, who is a longtime columnist. And the page is no longer there, so I don't think we really know, but it's a huge departure. So I mean, I don't want to engage in stolen valor. I was only at the Page for six months under Fred Hyatt, who was the leader before David Shipley. Fred passed away in the last few years. But one of the things that was really notable while I was there. Is that was not so long after Bezos had purchased had been a few years and there was a certain nervousness about him. But generally people seemed to think he'd actually been really good in allowing the paper its independence, that he seemed to understand what it was all about about. And this is a massive change from that. It builds on Bezos's decision to get rid of the editorial board's planned endorsement of Harris before the November election. And it's a level of interference with the editorial pages priorities that I just don't think we've ever seen. Post staff and alumni have really hit the ceiling over this and I think that they're right to. Marty Barron, who is the former editor of the news side, not the opinion side, has a pretty searing article in the Atlantic about this sort of turn from Bezos. I think the thing that's important to drive home here is that typically you have an opinion page to put forward a range of opinions and papers have slants one way or the other. Obviously the Wall Street Journal opinion page is quite right leaning. The New York Times is more sort of like milquetoast liberal. The Post has always been in this kind of like pragmatic middle sort of category. But it, it would run things from a lot of different views. You know, it has columnists from a variety of different sort of political backgrounds. And the idea that you would have a page that only puts forward opinions that align with the owner's priorities is really disturbing and kind of, I don't want to say a death knell, but it's not a good sign for the independence of the paper. I think everyone is going to be watching very, very closely to see how this plays out on the opinion page. But it's also, you know, it's important to note, I don't think there's any reason to think that this is going to stop with opinion. There's people in the news business like to say that there's a firewall between news and opinion. So opinion doesn't shape the news, news doesn't feed information to opinion. But that firewall only exists because the owner and the publisher allow it to exist. And so I think that there's a. I at least am very concerned that it may not be long before Bezos decides that it's time to start meddling on the news side too. And tell them to soft pedal critiques of Trump, critiques of himself for that matter. The Post has done a lot of really hard hitting reporting about Amazon. I don't know if we're going to see that. I do trust that there are a lot of good people at the Post. There are a lot of people with a lot of integrity and if something like that happens, I suspect that they will raise holy hell. That is a different question from whether it will be enough to save the paper from Bezos or to save it financially, but because it certainly seems like they're taking a pretty significant hit in terms of subscriptions from these actions.
- [66:14]
Scott R. Andersen
Yeah. Molly, let me turn to you for your reaction to this as well. And particularly I'm kind of curious about where you view Bezos motivation coming from on this because I have really puzzled over this. I have been a vague Bezos defender kind of soft Bezos defender over the years. I'm glad he renewed Rings of Power for season three. Very excited about that. Other little decisions. You know, I generally think actually he's been very good, at least on the news side in keeping the Washington Post, you know, well funded and able to do really hard hitting journalism of which he took a lot of heat for including in his other businesses during the first Trump administration. But obviously I think this is a problem, to say the very least. This is where my defense of him comes grinding to a halt. But I'm not sure what exactly he's trying to accomplish because on the one hand you hear personal liberties and free markets and you're like, oh, that sounds like a very right leaning kind of libertarian ish line which makes maybe sense from a big time business person. Okay, that's fine. That's actually not necessarily a Trump friendly angle these days. Right. Like Trump is imposing massive tariffs. If you're really going to come to the defense of free markets, you would come out pretty critical of that and actually announcing that you're going to shift to this focus on free markets. The same week that Trump announced we are actually moving forward with tariffs on Mexico and Canada, which he has now done. It didn't strike me maybe that's not a coincidence. I'm kind of curious about your thoughts. This is being read mostly as Bezos signaling. I am acquiescing to the Trump crowd on a lot of the threats they can level against me. But is that really what's happening? Do we know or do you have a sense or maybe some other motivation?
- [67:59]
Molly Reynolds
I don't know if I knew what was going on inside Jeff Bezos head, someone would pay me more money than they pay me to do this job. But when I think about it, there's the possibility that sort of you outlined which is that it's a Trump motivated move. The other possibility is that it comes from a set of motivations that are more consistent with what we're seeing on sort of in the tech billionaire class class more generally, where there's overlap with Trump, but it's also somewhat distinct. I mean, there's overlap with Trump in that Trump is the president and he's a Republican, and their impulses are definitely on the right to the right. But I guess I read it more as in line with kind of what we're seeing from tech billionaires generally, which is this real right wing shift, this real sort of rejection of what they consider to be, quote, unquote, woke ideology, an embrace of all sorts of things that we see across Silicon Valley. And so, and I don't know if, like reading it through that lens resolves your confusion about his motivations, but I think there's a set of sort of right wing forces out there that are that aren't entirely Trumpy that you then can, at least for me, help me explain what we're seeing. So.
- [69:24]
Scott R. Andersen
Q. We're almost out of time on this, but I want to come to you with one sort of meta question that always comes up in the context of this sort of topics when they pop up, which is where does the editorial board, the opinion section or opinion journalism fit with conventional journalism and maybe in the broadcast, broader media atmosphere? Because on the one hand we are seeing both the Washington Post cases and with the LA Times earlier and a number of other cases, Wall Street Journal being a long standing one, ideological liens being imposed or perhaps grassroots get brought in onto editorial boards in a way that can undermine the legitimacy of the publication they are a part of. And we're seeing this kind of broad diversification of the different outlets which Bezos kind of alludes to in his note of all the different ways opinion journalism has additional outlets now, whether it's substacks, whether it's publications like Lawfare, which in some ways, if you hear Ben Sellett kind of grew out of his experience on the Washington Post editorial board, but sought to take it in a little bit of a different direction. So is this kind of the death knell, or one more nail in the coffin for the conventional model of a newspaper with an opinion section and an editorial board steering it, or is that model going to have more staying power, has a lot more virtue to it, even in this much very changed kind of broader media market.
- [70:41]
Quinta Jurassic
I mean, I think the role of the editorial board certainly is less obvious now than it was in a Pre Internet age, the whole sort of idea of the editorial board is really that you don't have the time personally to look into every city council candidate. So it's useful to have a group of people who can make the candidates come and come talk to them, and then they can decide which one they like. And you have a sense of their leaning. So, you know, if you trust their judgment and so on and so forth, that's a little less necessary when it's, you know, the sort of forums for gathering and accessing information are democratized, which they are in the Internet age. And I also think that there's, you know, a decent argument that editorial boards and opinion pages generally are confusing to readers because it's not clear what the difference is. It's not clear. If you read an editorial that argues something and then you read a news story about it, I think it's sort of natural to be confused. Like, wait, this paper, it can't possibly be neutral reporting, because I just read that the paper takes X view, even though anyone within the paper would tell you those two things are very carefully kept distinct. And I think that in an era of decreasing trust in the press and where we have real problems with media literacy, there are real questions about what best practices might be there. I don't think that making the Opinion page the outlet only for opinions that the owner agrees with is a good solution. Like, that's kind of. It's much more maximizing the contradictions than anything else, and I think takes what can be good and interesting and useful about these sections and turns it into something that is a mouthpiece for corporate ownership. And if anything is going to further degrade trust. I mean, Bezos, his pitch for what the section was going to do sounded a great deal like the Wall Street Journal editor page, which, I mean, I don't know why anyone would care for the diet version when they could just go read the Wall Street Journal. Likewise, on the flip side, you know, there are a lot of people who did trust the Post for their news, even if they didn't read the editorial page at all, and who now really distrust it and don't believe that it's reporting accurately, have canceled their subscriptions, who.
- [73:18]
Molly Reynolds
Just can't find local news.
- [73:20]
Quinta Jurassic
Local news, exactly. I was going to say if Bezos really cares about was, you know, like increasing trust in the press and revitalizing whatever. For the love of God, fund the Metro section. Jesus Christ, people.
- [73:34]
Scott R. Andersen
I.
- [73:35]
Quinta Jurassic
People would subscribe. Like there are actual constituencies that could be served here and that you could reconceptualize you know, get rid of the editorial page entirely and put those resources into the metro section. Focus the editorial page around local issues so the editorial board doesn't have to weigh in on every single thing, but is focusing on issues that are specific to dc. There are tons of different things that you could do and different experiments that you could run. And just as I think the LA Times is deeply wrongheaded in putting AI bias meters on its OP eds, I think it's deeply wrongheaded to orient the Post's opinion page around things that Jeff Bezos agrees with. It doesn't fix any problems, it exacerbates some. And it also brings in new ones, which is really not something that anyone needs right now.
- [74:28]
Scott R. Andersen
Well, at least so long as the Washington Post remains an institution and the press remains an institution, we'll have opportunities to revisit this topic in the weeks and months to come. But for now we are sadly out of time. But of course this would not be rational security if we did not leave you with some object less than to ponder in the days to come. Until we are back in your podcatcher quinta, what do you have for us this week?
- [74:48]
Quinta Jurassic
I would like to recommend a very long New York Times Magazine article that is titled Inside the Murdoch Succession Drama. And the short version is that the New York Times Magazine got hold of 3,000 pages of documents from internal Murdoch family legal machinations involving who's going to take over the business empire when Rupert is gone. Bill Barr has a cameo, very unexpected. There are references to succession, including people in the Murdaughs world watching succession and thinking oh no, what if that happens to us? And then changing their plans accordingly. So it's a real life imitates art imitates life situation and it's also just a rip roaring good story about a profoundly, profoundly dysfunctional family and, and also a legal drama. There's, there's a lot in here about Utah estate law which, like who knew? Or Nevada Utah or Nevada Nevada estate.
- [75:56]
Scott R. Andersen
Law if it's state law and Utah or Nevada, it's more interesting than you think. That's been my experience so far. They make some interesting choices.
- [76:03]
Quinta Jurassic
I highly, highly recommend it. It is a rip roaringly good read.
- [76:08]
Scott R. Andersen
Wonderful. Well, for my object lesson this week, I have had the joyful experience the past week or so of finally sitting down and trying once again to read one of my favorite kind of young adult novels to my son who is 4. So maybe still a little premature admittedly, but that is the book of three it's the first book in the Chronicles of Prediction, a like, phenomenal fantasy series from the 60s by Lloyd Alexander. I love it. And this time, my son, I tried it like a year and a half ago, way, way too young. I was just reading for myself, honestly, while he was going to sleep. But now he's actually getting it and engaged. Although he have to ask like kind of what every other sentence means exactly. But he often has trouble visualizing it. And while stumbling around the Internet, I found something that's phenomenal, which is a comic novel that somebody did, or graphic novel, I should say that somebody did, of the Book of Three, although I don't think they're quite finished yet, as far as I can tell, entirely free online. That's phenomenal. Well done. Really quite lovely. And my son really found this incredibly useful to kind of engage and contextualize and figure out what's going on as we kind of look at certain pages. I had to censor it a little bit. It's a little more violent than I remember. Some people get immolated like three days, three chapters into the book, skip that section for the sun, skip the comic pages accordingly. But the rest of it is like, pretty manageable and I'm really enjoying it. So my object lesson is going to be this really phenomenal online comic of the Book of Three, a dramatically underappreciated and super charming fantasy novel and fantasy series. And I will ask listeners if you all know of any other good, you know, particularly like graphic novel facing renditions of science fiction or fantasy that might be appropriate for like a young kid or can be adapted for young kids. Send it my way, because I am really desperate to get to start reading some of this fun stuff with my son as soon as possible. I hear there's a really good Harry Potter graphic novel. And I've never actually read Harry Potter, so that might be next on my list. But if people have other suggestions, I would really welcome them.
- [77:52]
Molly Reynolds
We're kicking you out of the Millennial Ratzach Club for never having read Harry Potter.
- [77:57]
Scott R. Andersen
Scott I'm an elder millennial, you see.
- [78:00]
Molly Reynolds
So am I.
- [78:01]
Scott R. Andersen
But I think there was a gender divide, I feel like at our exact age, because I feel like all the girls I knew read Harry Potter when it came out and none of the boys did. And I had never read a chapter. I had a very awkward first date to the first Harry Potter movie. I think in high school that was enough of a traumatizing experience. I never really circled back. And on that note, Molly, what do you have to share for us this week in terms of object lessons.
- [78:24]
Molly Reynolds
So continuing with the theme of Rat Stack, listeners learn things about me from the open. My object lesson for today is something else near and dear to my heart, which is that, friends, we are at the end of Girl Scout Cookie season. I was a Girl Scout from kindergarten through 12th grade. I'm in fact a lifetime member of the Girl Scouts and so I encourage you should there still be Girl Scouts selling Girl Scout cookies outside your local grocery store to buy some? You should ask the girls selling them what they're going to do with the money. It's a great question because either you get a good answer or you get a totally wild answer because they haven't thought about it before. Also turns out one of my in addition to having deep esoteric knowledge of things related to Congress, I can also explain to you why Girl Scout cookies have different names depending on which part of the country you look live in. So there we go. Enjoy the rest of Girl Scout Cafe season while it lasts.
- [79:19]
Scott R. Andersen
The Girl Scouts get to keep the money.
- [79:21]
Molly Reynolds
I mean, their troop gets to keep the money. And then you use it to do things. Maybe you use it to go camping, maybe you use it to go on a trip. Maybe you use it to do any number of things. And I guarantee you if you ask an 8 year old this question, you're gonna get a good answer.
- [79:37]
Scott R. Andersen
We used to sell popcorn when I was a Boy Scout as I recall, and I was like, I didn't get a dime from that. But now it makes more sense. Maybe the Den Dads are taking some taking some weekend trips on our on our budget. Well folks, that is the end of this week's episode. But Rational Security is of course a production of Lawfare, so be sure to Visit us@lawfairmedia.org for our show page with links to past episodes, for our written work and the written work of other Lawfare contributors, and for information on Lawfare's other phenomenal podcast series, including our new docu series, Escalation on the War in Ukraine, Episode two, now available in your podcatcher. In addition, be sure to follow Lawfare on social media wherever you socialize your media. Be sure to leave a rating or review wherever you might be listening and sign up to become a material supporter of Lawfare on Patreon for an ad free version of this podcast and other special benefits. For more information, visit lawfaremedia.org support our audio engineer producer this week was Noam Osband of Goat Rodeo on Our music, as always, was performed by Sophia Yan. And we were once again edited by the wonderful Jen Patcha. On behalf of my guests, Quinta and Molly, I am Scott R. Anderson, and we will talk to you next week. Until then, goodbye.
- [80:52]
Sophia Yan
Hey, have you played Cash Pop yet?
- [80:54]
Scott R. Andersen
Cash Pop?
- [80:55]
Sophia Yan
Yeah. Oregon Lottery's latest draw game. You just pick a number from 1 to 15, make a wager, and if it matches, you win.
- [81:04]
Scott R. Andersen
Wait. So all you need to play is $1 and your favorite number?
- [81:08]
Sophia Yan
Yep. Easy, right?
- [81:09]
Scott R. Andersen
Yeah. Sounds fun. I'm gonna grab a ticket now.
- [81:12]
Sophia Yan
Me too.
- [81:13]
Scott R. Andersen
Cash Pop from the Oregon Lottery. Play your favorites.
- [81:16]
Sophia Yan
Must be 18 or older to play. Lottery games are based on chance and should be played for entertainment only.