D (3:49)

Thank you. Glad to be here.

A (3:50)

Let's start with you, John, because you wrote ahead of the State of the Union that it could be Trump's best chance to begin the sort of comeback he needs. Before we talk about the actual speech Trump delivered, what could it have been? What did it need to be? What might he have achieved with the address?

D (4:11)

I mean, we shouldn't overstate, of course, the importance of any one speech, and especially in a news cycle that's this fast and furious. But this is the biggest audience he'll face all year. And his aides had hoped that he would be able to deliver a message that would at least stabilize what has been an avalanche of terrible polls for him and Republicans in recent months. The election defeats in November, a number of special election losses since, including in some very red districts like in Texas and Louisiana. Louisiana. He's underwater in the polls on some of his signature issues like the economy and on immigration. And there was a hope that at the very least here he could sell his accomplishments, but perhaps acknowledge that more work needed to be done and lay out some sort of plan going forward. As we'll get into. He didn't really do that. I don't think he steadied the nerves of too many Republicans who right now are frankly in a quiet panic about how things look for their party ahead of November's midterms.

A (5:11)

Got it. And Susan, let me move to you because covering the actual speech, you saw it as hopeless to try to make him give the great policy address that his aides had not just hoped for, but actually advertised. They said that that's what he would do, and yet the message could not have been otherwise. I'm quoting from your New Yorker piece. Trump's default setting is triumphalism. So combining John's point, did that one trick pony aspect of him disserve him at a moment when the country is glum and looking for solutions?

B (5:47)

I think it's just not in Donald Trump's wiring to be offering up the kind of case for anything. He's not a persuader. Right. He is a pitch man. He is a salesman. And he has a default Setting that is all caps, exclamation point. You know, Panglossian, like any country that would have me as its leader, you know, obviously is doing great. And I think, you know, interestingly, this also was just, I mean, whatever you think of any kind of policy idea or prescription rate, mostly there were none of those. But more importantly, like, it was incoherent to the point of jarring. Right? So you did have this. Panglossian. Everything is fantastic. Beginning and end of the speech with about a 40 minutes in the middle of American hellscape and the evil Democrats and illegal aliens who are destroying the country and, you know, rampaging Somali pirates and, you know, the whole carnival of grotesqueness that, that Trump offers, as I think his way of rallying his followers and stiffening their spine because he's concerned about the turnout in the midterms. But to Jonathan's point, I just, I have to say, right, like the idea that these White House officials, every year with Trump, they put out this veneer of normalcy, this game of pretend, right, Where Caroline Levitt goes out and she speaks to reporters hours before this speech, which again, Trump was largely reading the speech. So these people wrote this speech and put it into a teleprompter. You know, they had some Trumpian, you know, like ad libs and riffs, but basically they knew what was in the damn speech and yet they still go out. It's fascinating. And she comes out to the media and she says, yes, this speech is going to be a well argued case for why Republicans and President Donald Trump are better positioned to help Americans respond to the affordability crisis in the country. Right. Like this speech was not that. And even if it wasn't delivered by Donald Trump, any human being who read those words on that teleprompter, that's not what this was. Right. And you have at the heart, I think, of this election year, this really fascinating dynamic emerging where his political strategists and advisors want Donald Trump to address an affordability crisis, which is interesting that she even used that term that he doesn't, deep down believe exists. And you cannot convince Americans that you are going to address a problem that you don't think exists.

A (8:32)

I mean, you wrote it. If Tuesday's speech proved anything, it's that it's hard to explain how we're gonna get America out of a mess that you don't believe exists. I wanna come back to the speech in a moment, but Bill, you've been in the position of these aides. I wonder. We have Ezra Klein saying that Trump actually believes his own bullshit. And it's similar to what Susan's saying, that it could only be this. Let's say that's right. What sorts of challenges does it pose both for his staff and the Republican caucus, knowing that he simply can't be deterred from his triumphalist, you know, rhetoric alloyed with the dark 40 minute hellscape that Susan described.

C (9:17)

This was so long ago, but in a different era, Central east of American politics. But when I was in the George H.W. bush White House as the Vice President's Chief of staff, there was always this focus on the. There always is. The staff loves the State of the Union, but you get to fight for two months about what's going to be in it. And you get to send in your favorite formulation.

A (9:32)

You get your own half sentence.

C (9:34)

Yeah. Which of course doesn't make it in. And then you can of course blame the failures of the administration for the next year and the fact that they didn't take your paragraph or your sentence. It's very useful. But if you're the incumbent, you're judged by results. There's only so much you can do. You can do a little spinning, obviously, but you're judged by results. And in that respect, I mean, Trump is not an ineffective, in his own way, salesman or con man. Right. I mean, he did get himself nominated three times by the Republican Party, including the first time when they'd never before nominated or certainly we'd never elected someone who hadn't been in political office or in a cabinet. I guess we Republicans nominated one of two businessmen who then lost. He got himself elected. He went through being president for four years January 6th, everything else, got himself nominated again and elected again. So he's a pretty good candidate when he's out of office. Not a good candidate in the sense of good for the country, but good for himself, you gotta say. But then you can run against the Hellscape, which is more natural. His more natural mode is, I think Susan is right, is everything's horrible and I'm going to fix it. And I alone can fix it. That is right. And I'm with you. Against the terrible people who are in office who are not with you. That's a coherent message, sort of. And I've got five simple solutions. And he was pretty good at that in 2016 and pretty good at it actually in 2024. We shouldn't underestimate just the political talent he showed in coming back from January 6th. Over those next three years, when you're president, you're A, you're judged by results, and B, to the degree you can affect how people see things, you sort of have to defend your record. I mean, or explain that you're going to pivot a little bit from your record. Clinton sort of thing. This part of your record's being underestimated. Or you can do versions of that. It doesn't fit very well, though, with the America's a Hellscape thing. And I do think Susan's really onto something. One of the real. I didn't watch the speech. I can't watch him. But I read it the next morning, which is a much. Transcripts are a wonderful adventure. We really owe a lot to whoever invented transcripts. I'm gonna say you could read them pretty quickly. You don't have to listen to all the insane applause and all this stuff and. Or the booing, I suppose. But when you read it, you're very struck by this. Well, what's his message? I mean, usually they begin, right. Incumbent presidents, the famous beginning, the iconic beginning. The State of the Union is strong, or the State of the Union is healthy, or the State of the Union is something, and that's okay. And then you can try to persuade people that's a little healthier than they thought it was, and that's not crazy. And suddenly Trump has some material. I'm the last person to give Trump credit for anything, but Trump has some material to work with. I mean, inflation is down a little bit. Growth is down a little bit, too. But he could say that at least in third quarter was pretty strong and the stock market's up. It wouldn't be. He's inherited certain things from Biden that haven't gone wrong. Tariffs hasn't been as disastrous so far. I think, as a lot of economists, that it wouldn't be crazy for him to try to give us. The drug price thing is mostly phony, but there's a little truth to it, I think. And it wouldn't be crazy to give the State of the Union is better than it was a year ago speech. It's a little crazy as an incumbent to give the State of the Union as horrible speech and every place is a hellhole. But I suppose you could try to still blame Biden for that and then say you're fixing it, but you can't give both at once. And I do think in that respect, it just was incoherent. And we're speaking on Friday. I feel like it was a month ago. We're discussing it here, so I'll give you credit for that, Harry. But honestly, by Sunday, by Sunday or Monday, it's not going to be the biggest story of the last week. Right. I mean, so I don't think it's a speech that has any lasting effect, honestly.

A (12:55)

John, what about this tone point? He did make certain triumphal claims that just were completely false, like a miraculous turnaround for the economy. But then there was this middle piece of just, I was reminded of his very bizarre inauguration in 2017. The darkness of it was that just trying to reach the faithful at that point. And that combination. Did it strike you as self defeating?

D (13:23)

Basically, Trump only has so many notes, his color palette is pretty limited. And I think that, yes, agreeing with what Bill just said, he made the few things he was able to make a decent argument on. And then the middle felt and friendly with some pretty graphic descriptions of violence in injury. It was sort of almost like a slasher film there for a little while. And you know, it also is noteworthy for what it didn't include. And I know we're going to talk more about Iran later in this show, but the fact that we seem to be on potentially on the verge of a war and he had a national audience and made no effort to make a case to justify the conflict or why it would be in Americans interests for him to do this is striking. And I think that it was people I've talked in the last couple days. Again, no one was expecting a home run that would change the trajectory of his presidency, but they hoped it would just help a little. And I'm not sure it did. I don't know that hurt him necessarily, but it didn't help. And I think that Republicans who were looking for something more came away disappointed. And I do think more than anything it's because Trump is unable, if he's not blaming Joe Biden. And there was plenty of that. And poll after poll suggests that Americans are saying, hey, this is your economy now, you own this. Like you can't, you can't be blaming your predecessor any longer. But if he's not blaming Biden, he's unable to ever admit that something isn't the biggest, the best, the greatest. And that's simply a disconnect for what so many Americans are feeling. And I think that's what I came away with. And a number of people in both parties I've talked to in the last couple of days, that was their takeaway. First of all, you know, we have a four hour show every morning and we couldn't fact check every lie. We ran out of time. But More than that, just that he seems so out of touch. It really reinforces his belief that every president's a bubble. I don't know that anyone's ever been quite as isolated or his own reality as this one is right now. And there's a sense that the story he was telling about the economy simply wasn't Americans lived experiences. And that's not going to help him or his party.

A (15:22)

And record breaking length breaking his own, you know, such terrible food and such huge portions. Maybe it's even, at least in his hands, something that is a big tradition but doesn't really mean anything anymore. Susan, I think in your piece you talk about Obama's speechwriter Jon Favreau saying it's become a relic of a speech that barely matters for even the 24 hours everyone's paying attention. Time to retire the State of the Union tradition, you think, you know, it's

B (15:53)

interesting you say that. I actually, I think there's something to it. I mean, I found these things to be terrible and impossible to listen to even outside of the Trump context. I mean, let's be real, like Biden's things, it was this sort of caricature version of the Bill Clinton laundry list of technocratic proposals. It's a speechwriter's nightmare. It's very hard to make something coherent out of it. Bill pointed out that White Houses have been using these over the last few decades as a sort of internal organizing principle. And you can imagine the benefit to that. But there still could be the requirement to send to Congress a written message which would perform some of that function. And so there's a case for this on two levels, it seems to me. One is Trump specific, which is to say, if Democrats were to retake the House and the Senate, why on earth should they feel obliged due to just the idea of tradition which Donald Trump is blowing up anyways? Why should they feel obliged to give him a national podium to lie to America for two hours? I mean, that's actually what happened to Jonathan's point about the fact checking. I mean, even by Trump's standards, almost every factual, alleged factual statement that came out of his mouth, you know, had something wrong with it and was the underpinning of this very weird and misleading case to America. So I don't think there should be an obligation to give somebody a platform to lie to the country. That's first of all. And second of all, just even on a non Trump specific level, I mean, you know, you sort of see all modern presidents have struggled with this, right? And so they've come up with either the Reagan solution or the Clinton solution. And then Trump's people just fuse those two things together. So the Reagan solution was the bring on everyday people guests. And Trump took that. We haven't mentioned that. But, you know, there were three aspects to it. One was American carnage, dystopian hellscape. One was, I'm the greatest in the world and therefore my country is the greatest in the world. And, and then the third aspect of it was, you know, I'm the host of America's, you know, telethon Emmy award winning, you know, like performance here. And he, he actually gave out six different medals and commendations in the course of the evening. This, again, everything about Trump 2.0 is the metastasization of even Trump 1.0. I remember when it was like a crazy hokey thing in Trump 1.0 when he handed out the medal to Russ Rush Limbaugh in the middle of the State of the Union speech. And now we did that six different times. So there's this sort of weird carnival barker aspect of it too. So that's the Reagan approach on steroids and then the Clinton approach on steroids of just a laundry list of every kind of proposal from, you know, poll tested, eye rolling, technocratic mumbo jumbo. And so why do it?

A (18:54)

And there's this other point that's just so hard to watch, I think the forced partisanship where the Republicans have to stand up and clap while the Democrats look dour and defiant and then vice versa. Not to mention, by the way, the U.S. supreme Court that people were really zeroing in on right in, in front of him, some of the pictures there, you know, if looks could kill. I just want to stress one thing. I hadn't realized this detail, like, Bill, I didn't watch it. It's really telling to me that he was reading the speech. So everything you're saying is actually the aides having served up well, we're gonna let Trump be Trump, as it were. I guess we don't have a choice. And that says a lot about how the White House tries to manage or not manage him, as the case may be. And one other point about your piece that struck me, Susan, is like, he is a salesman and this is. But this is the moment when you bring the used car back and it's got the muffler and all the problems. And that's very much, you know, the carnival barker who sold you the car is not going to be helping here at all.

B (20:01)

The specific point is like, America wants a Refund. Look at the polls, right? This is not a speech even if it made some sense, I suppose or passages of it to your base at a time when the CNN poll this week had Trump at 62, 63% disapproval. America's asking for a refund. And that's not the speech that you give to a country in that frame of mind.

A (20:23)

We need a lemon law.

C (20:24)

You know, the hokey, the medal giving and hero, you know, hero or quasi hero phrasing stuff I do think I saw afterwards on the next morning, I guess navigator did one of these dial tests which are not actually sometimes could be somewhat interesting and informative. People like actually, I mean once you're going down this path, why not? I mean it's more interesting to hear about these people and Trump is capable of reading the accounts of what they did and some of them did very admirable things. The helicopter pilot in Venezuela and so forth. People kind of like that. I think he would have been better off honestly just being the game show, the host of the Americans achievements and then go totally patriotic. USA and men's hockey. Nice to have the women's hockey team there too. And he could have gone Reagan in a way. And then the risk of course is that people aren't very happy about the economy and they don't approve of his presidency. But maybe you pivot and maybe they'd approve more if he weren't killing Americans in Minneapolis and weren't doing other crazy things. As I say, it's not as if he has nothing. I guess I am struck by this a little bit. You do have to play the hand you're dealt somewhat. I mean I don't approve like his foreign policy at all. And I think it's really potentially very disastrous in terms of Europe and the whole world order. And Susan and I have discussed this many times and John's talked about it a lot too and Harry, we've all discussed it. Having said that from a short term point of view he could take credit for Venezuela. It was impressive. He could sort of fake take credit for the Gaza sort of agreement and the hostages did all come back. I mean you could same with some of the economic stuff. You could give a sort of coherent account of how I've gotten things better. I inherited a very tough situation when I took over Ukraine. You can't really say much about one way or the other, I suppose but I'm struck that he didn't really do that much. That's just because he can't constitutionally. He has to praise himself but he can't really give an account of things out there getting better, but also not being great, right? Not being the best ever. And he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize and all that. His personal grievance and solipsism and narcissism makes it hard for him to make, I think the kinds of calculations we're sort of talking about. Having said all that, I mean, people have their views and I mean, I give the public credit honestly for getting, you know, I've been frustrated at times that they've very frustrated they reelected Trump and frustrated that they didn't see how horrible some of the things he was doing have been. He has lost 9, 10 points in public opinion in a year. That's not nothing. You know, if you start at 49, which is his electoral number and his original number a year ago was he gave the speech to Congress, was also 49, 48. Now in the times average is 40, 56. CNN has been down even 36, 62, let's just say 40. That's, I think, conservative, actually maybe a little generous to him. You're losing nine out of 49, 49 to 40. That means you're losing one out of six of your supporters. That's a lot in a year. And if that continues down, Republicans are right to think that he'll be at 37 or 36 or 35, and they will get slaughtered, I think, at that point in the midterm. So the public has moved away from him. That's a hard thing to fix once it starts to happen. I say this as someone who is in the George H.W. bush White House, and the public unfairly, in my view, moved away from us very, very rapidly in 1991 from like 91% to 38%. Very great achievement of being part of the White House. That had the fastest drop ever. I don't know, were things that terrible by the end of 92, you won the Cold War, we won the Gulf War. The economy was coming back from a mild recession, honestly, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But whatever, people have their, you know, it's hard to change people's minds if once they get that in their head,

A (23:53)

but airing of old grievances.

C (23:55)

But again, he would have to. You have to give people. Yeah, I like to do that. He would have to give people some reason to rethink. And I do think this is John's point, which is very important. I mean, that you need to do that. You need to sort of acknowledge their unhappiness and then say but look, look, I mean, Reagan in 82. I went back and looked at this for two minutes just because I was kind of curious. After his first year, people were not in a great mood in January of 82.

D (24:17)

Right.

C (24:17)

I mean, they hadn't gotten inflation out of the economy yet and we had a recession because Volcker was crushing, you know, was trying to get inflation out of the economy. The Reagan tax cuts had not kicked in yet. So it was a kind of prospective thing. Supply side economics was onboarding in America. And Reagan played the hand he had, which was stay the course. You know what, it's going to get better. It's a little rough now, but we're doing the right thing. He had an easier thing to play off because the economy was in such bad shape under Carter and Carter was perceived as such a failure in terms of Iran hostages and so forth, that he had an easier contrast to make. But even so, he played that hand. It didn't rally everyone right away. They had some House losses, not so much in the Senate in the midterm. But he laid the groundwork for coming back and that he could say at 83 and 84. See, I said if we stayed the course, it'd be better.

A (25:06)

And he won a landslide.

C (25:08)

Yeah, Trump could have tried something like that. But again, I think there, the short term character of Trump and Trumpism and all that just overwhelms any sort of strategic thinking.

A (25:18)

Yeah, I mean, I think a bottom line here is he's just so clearly a better slashing campaigner than he is president. All right, well, again to your point, Bill, that I think is really trenchant. It's maybe a 12 hour story. And the thing that immediately displaced it is, is the kryptonite still continues to be, it seems for the administration, the Epstein scandals. And every time anyone scratches a little bit or scrutinizes this partial, very sloppy delivery from doj, more problems come up. So now it comes out that a very high profile, whatever you think about its veracity, but series of allegations and then with the interviews from the FBI just were not disclosed. Let me just put it this way. It's really phenomenal ineptitude. Remember, the law was you do everything, including redactions by December and they're way more than a day late and a dollar short and Democrats are talking cover up. And I just want to add one other fact, which is when they came out of the gate with their first production, it was 100 pages all about Bill Clinton. So you know that they can select, choose and call through. So on the one hand, all the revelations about victims we just found out, I'll say as a former prosecutor, mind bending that they revealed certain witnesses wanted to cooperate. That will get you shanked in a heartbeat in New York. Prison ineptitude, or is it fair to be using the C word of not the crime, but the COVID up at this point?

D (26:58)

I think it's a reasonable question. Yeah. I mean, first of all, you're right to highlight how selective this has been. This is a legal proceeding, to be sure. It's very political. And every time Trump's Department of Justice seems to be bending over backwards to protect him, I'd argue they have done it very poorly. And in fact, they have just created more questions than they've tried to tuck away. And this, this week is a great example. I mean, the State of the Union was indeed drowned out by this revelation. Earlier in the day, NPR had first citing some Daily Beast reporting. I believe that other media outlets have matched it, that these interviews were not part of the file. There's pages missing, these 302s, and that is a pretty credible Pictures. Yeah, pictures. A very serious allegation against Donald Trump. Now, we should be clear, we don't know if that allegation is true, but we should also be clear it is very suspicious that it's missing from what was released. And then you combine that with, first of all, you have the Department of Justice, which is trying to present itself as a, a neutral arbiter of getting to the bottom of what happened here, when literally the Department of Justice headquarters in Washington currently flies a huge banner out front that has President Trump's face on it. We combine that with what the Republicans in the House have been doing to try to do his bidding by trying to shift blame on the Clintons. And this week, we've had depositions by former President Bill Clinton as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Chappaqua. After much months of negotiations, the Clintons agreed to do it, wanted it public. Republicans said no, you know, which I have reported, and others as well, that some of the White House. That makes some of the White House pretty leery, because that's like, that's setting a precedent for President Trump perhaps, or members of his Cabinet to also be called for depositions at some point, some point, if not now, but down the road, if the Democrats take control. And as Secretary Clinton said it at the end of this week, she's like, look, I never even met Jeffrey Epstein, more or less saying this is such a clumsy effort to redirect when it's Very clear. It's almost like an embarrassing game of mistaken identity where the former president and former first lady were called to testify. When it's the current president and current first lady who actually appear all over these Epstein emails and even in photographs with them.

A (29:14)

I mean, that doesn't seem like a hard leap, does it? Well, you had Clinton, you should have, for starters, Howard Lutnick, but also Trump. The first time ever a former president was forced to testify. Truman did it, but voluntarily. And the big thing though, to John's point, is they were forced, they had no leverage at all, knowing that Comer would love to, to vote out contempt and who would be behind it. You serve it up to the Department of Justice. Pam Bondi could have, happily, because it would have pleased Trump, actually greenlighted a criminal prosecution against them. There's this kind of anti Clinton virus that just won't go away, I think in the veins of a lot of the right wing. But they, but it's hurt them before. Thinking about Hillary's deposition, how did she handle it? And are they, you know, are they the dog that caught the car? Is it a mistake to try to divert attention onto the Clintons because they're going to get zinged?

B (30:16)

Look, we're talking about it. So unfortunately it succeeded in that sense because what we should be talking about is that a member of the Cabinet was with Jeffrey Epstein after he had already been convicted of being, you know, a sex criminal. Okay? So that's a sitting member of the Cabinet and the sitting President and First lady, as you guys pointed out, not only all over these files, except where they've been deleted for what appears to be very questionable reasons that we don't understand. And the idea that these files have been released and so many people have lost their jobs, you know, find themselves the subject of criminal investigations not only in the United States, but around the world. You know, look at the difference between what's happening in the United Kingdom, where basically the Epstein files have engulfed the government of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. He's lost his chief of staff. The former British ambassador to Washington is under criminal investigation. The former Prince Andrew is under criminal investigation. This is happening in Norway, in the United States. It's not only the final catastrophic blow up of Larry Summers's career, but George Mitchell is having to take his name off of the Mitchell Institute as a result of the disclosure of these files. And on you go. I think the new head of the World Economic Forum was forced to resign the other day. Bill Gates, in a sort of Slow burn scandal there. And, you know, I just. It can be rage producing when you see, to me, it's kind of similar to the MeToo dynamic in Trump's first term, where so many people face consequences, but sort of bubbling beneath the surface is this kind of rage in a large swath of America that the person who should be held accountable, who's in the position of ultimate power, is not being held accountable. And so I, I think that's a dynamic we're seeing here. And I just have to say it's kind of hard to read all the pieces about the Clintons, A, lumping them together, B, here we are once again. She literally never met the guy. There's plenty you want to criticize Hillary Clinton. Come on. There's plenty to criticize her about. But it reminds me of her being accountable in the eyes of so many people for her own husband cheating on her. I mean, the toxic anti woman climate in this country has been exacerbated and magnified in the Trump 2.0 presidency in the same way that it was in the 1.0 presidency. And, you know, what are we presented with in terms of our public sphere right now? A small handful of MAGA women in the Cabinet who have literally been forced to physically transform their appearances into a disgusting caricature of femininity in order to please Donald Trump, while at the same time, we have women's rights being rolled back and literally the former Secretary of State and first lady being dragged in to testify in a scandal involving a disgusting exploiter and abuser of women who she never met.

C (33:35)

Yeah, the Hillary Clinton thing was just idiotic. I mean, they should just call Bill Clinton. I mean, Bill Clinton does have some exposure here, let's not kid ourselves. And there's nice photos of him in there. I mean, I'm happy to see if Bill Clinton did. I wouldn't mind learning more about exactly how close he was to Epstein. I don't think it's necessarily relevant to anything much because he's not charged with any crimes, presumably. And it was after he was president, it seems like he got to know him and stuff. But there are two coherent positions that seems to me to take on the Epstein matter in general. One, it's a horrible scandal. It's a scandal of the ruling parts of the ruling class. It's been handled terribly by administrations for 25 years or 20 years, and really just more than terribly, but really disgracefully. And it needs to all be exposed. Could Trump have gone down that path? He rhetorically did a little bit of course, as a candidate and certainly Maga World did, he could have. I think it would be a little tricky. I knew this guy. But he does have that line about how it's sort of half true, well, quarter true that he broke with him when he might have learned about the investigation of him. He could pretend he didn't know he knew Epstein liked younger women, but it wasn't. You didn't think it was underage girls. And anyway, you could have had a bit of revelation about how horrible it was after the fact or you just had to stick with their original line which wasn't crazy. I mean they got a huge amount of criticism when they put out that memo on July 6, Bondi and Patel about we found nothing. But I remember this is one of the few things I've got to say I got right I think in general in the last few years, in real time, once you do that, you've got to stick with it. They could have stonewalled and I don't believe they wouldn't have incidentally, we wouldn't have gotten these papers. It would have been a criticism. It would have kept chugging along a bit. But at the end of the day they would say I'm sorry, we're not overriding this judgment of professionals that there was no. This is the judgment incidentally, the Biden administration seems to have made. If they thought there were people who should be indicted, they should have died. We're not going to send out files with unverified FBI 302s interrogating people, some of whom clearly weren't actually telling the truth presumably. And some of them are just disturbed unfortunately and so forth and just shut it down. They would have taken some hits on it. But, but that's. They probably could have gotten. They could have sustained that. They ended up panicking I think after in July and then they had the. We're looking at it again and then Blanche goes to see Maxwell and then we're really into then at that point I think the string start, the coverup starts to unravel and cover ups are hard to manage when they're unraveling. And we've seen that over the last six months and of course it's a cover up. I mean how can you look at Todd Blanche going to see Ghislaine Maxwell there and then moving her to a nicer prison and think we're not in the business of trying to prevent certain stuff from coming out now if there's stuff they don't want out because Trump would be even more injured by it than they're in a cover up situation. They haven't done that very well either. And I guess we'll see what happens on it. But it has hurt them quite a lot. But I would say incidentally, I think there's a. People are upset about it, not quite as Trump specifically, maybe as we were saying. I mean, they are really upset by what has been revealed and I am upset about it and it's horrifying. And I do think that the kind of Ro Khanna line about the Epstein class and all that has a lot of it has enough truth to it that it'll be potent politically for quite a while. I think both in 2026 and conceivably in 2027, 2028. I mean, this has been a pretty horrifying window. I mean, Susan's absolutely right about also to misogyny and views about women and the exploitation of women. And Trump is just so incapable of even pretending to care about that. He had Epstein survivors there right in the gallery. I didn't see it as I said, but I think he could have said, look, it's been complicated handling this and I just want to make clear that I knew Jeffrey back when I didn't realize what he was doing. I want to say we all feel terrible about what happened to you and I want to say as president, United States, this shouldn't happen here. It wouldn't. I mean, it's not Trump style, but any normal president would have done it. Incidentally, it's a totally obvious thing to do. He has never said that ever in this whole story.

B (37:21)

Because he's not a normal president.

C (37:22)

I know, but in the. But he's not even a normal human being. He's not even a normal human being because a dishonest, you know what, all those people you mentioned who've quit and who maybe justifiably, honestly I'd say been sort of driven off out of respectable office a little bit. They've all said that. In fact, I mean, it's maybe disingenuous, maybe it's honest. They regret it, they feel bad, they have great sympathy. Trump can't even make himself do that. And I do think in that respect, when you have what's been exposed about the breadth and depth of the Epstein scandal and you can't have the President of the United States say this is something that shouldn't have happened here, you know, and then while maintaining his own innocence and all that, that really does rub people the wrong way. So I think it's less that people think Trump was necessarily involved in everything and more that he just hasn't even sounded like an appropriate national leader in this respect.

A (38:12)

Yeah, well and I first I do want to add, I've been kind of gobsmacked. I think the story has gone a lot bigger than Trump. But to your cover up point in the sort of classic political maxims here, remember this something I always come back, he was really adamant about trying to keep this stuff from coming out. He would shedded his allies when like what was that about? But then he said forced into a corner, everything has to come out and it's the timing now. So there are by some accounts like Ro Khanna a couple million pages still out there. And it's at this point that Todd Blantz is saying nothing to see here move along. We've done our job and, and here's how many pages we've produced that doesn't speak at all to what about the is it 5, is it 50, is it 1000 documents that have to do with Trump and they've thought they could kind of cabinet. But as more and more comes out about other people, the hydraulic force is just not going away. Comer speculates maybe the committee might, might subpoena Letnick, the Commerce Secretary who's been caught in a lie, et cetera. You would normally think that makes it inevitable. Is there gonna be a scalp, is it now inevitable that Letnick is hauled in? Especially when this is the one area maybe where Congress has shown some backbone and been out front of Trump.

D (39:43)

Yeah, I mean this is something I've been thinking about a lot in the last day or two. So to recap, yes, he was Comer was asked yesterday outside of the Secretary Clinton's deposition if Lutnick could get called and he allowed for the possibility. And that came the same day that some photograph of Lutnick and Epstein on Epstein island, which had resurfaced in the material was suddenly pulled back, which raised a lot of questions. Why is DOJ doing that? You know, adding to the COVID up speculation whether Lutnick gets called or not. You're right. It's possible that this Epstein is one of the very few issues where Republicans in Congress are willing to defy the president, but they still largely take their cues from him. And if Trump sends signals no, we ought to want this and they probably won't. And by my reporting, Trump's not bothered really with Lutnick's presence in the Epstein files, certainly not in terms of a moral legal issue, maybe just as an embarrassment to his administration. But it doesn't seem like that's moving the needle either. But the bigger question I have also coming to grips with is Trump. You mentioned scalps. Trump has prided himself this time around, no scalps. That's a policy like, we're not going to fire people. We're not gonna give the media conventional wisdom. Democrats, whatever, some sort of victory here. I'm not gonna admit a mistake. And he really regrets the turnover of his first term. He wishes he could do that differently this time around because there have been a number of cabinet officials who could be easily dispatched right now, and frankly, it would be viewed favorably by Republicans. He might get a boost in the media. You know, Lutnick's the most recent example, but there have been moments where that could be Cash Patel, that could be Pam Bondi, it could be Pete Hegseth. The list goes on and on about people. Kirsty Noem, probably tops of the list, who could go and I think would actually be a bit of a boost for the Trump team. But he just seems refusing to do that, in part because perhaps he foresees a difficult confirmation battle ahead for a replacement. But also, I think he just doesn't want to give in to his opponents. And also he doesn't prize competence. Most of all, he prizes loyalty. And the team he has now are true believers who he knows will do what he asks.

C (41:52)

Can I add a word on that? Because I think it's such an interesting contrast with the first term, but I think the contrast is reasonable in this way. If you staffed your administration with establishment people who aren't loyal to you particularly, or the way Trump thinks of loyalty and who are stopping you from doing things. He liked firing them. I mean, he liked showing his power by getting rid of them. Now, he didn't always replace them with people who were more loyal or were better. And so it didn't always work out well for him. But in a way, given the situation he put himself in, and in the first term, it made sense for him to fire these people who were standing in his way. No one, as John said, is standing in his way. None of those people we've mentioned. And so he has no reason to fire them in that respect. B, they're doing what he wants. They're a little incompetent at doing what he wants, but they're doing what he wants. And he can't be quite this confident that if he lets these people go, the next guy will come in and have in the back of his mind or her mind I got to be a little careful about doing everything he wants because it didn't work out so well for Pam Bondi. So I'm going to be a little more responsible. I'm going to be a little more respectful of norms. So in a weird way, he's right not to fire any of these people. I don't think it would be wise for him to do so. You get like one day of good press from all of us and from the Republicans on the Hill, and I'll put it this way, in a very simple, slightly exaggerated way, but only slightly. If you're running a big criminal enterprise, you can't fire your collaborators. You can't afford to. They know everything.

A (43:09)

They can all drop the dime on you.

C (43:10)

They know everything. Mafia people do not fire like their junior colleagues in the Mafia. Now, occasionally they just get rid of them if they're too dangerous. But mostly you gotta keep them on board once you start it. And the, the path he has started down, which is so much massive corruption, so much destruction of any rule of law or regular procedures in any of these, in the Defense Department, the Justice Department, dhs, he's got to be very careful about who he dumps. And that's why, incidentally, when as soon as he dumps someone, they get another job or they get taken care of on the outside and a huge amount of money floods to them. So Ed Martin can't get confirmed, so he's somewhere else in the Justice Department, Department and other people, you know, can't make it as assistant one of these U.S. attorneys, so they find something other thing. He's got to hug these people close because he can't afford to have them turn on him. Whereas if Jim Mattis turned on him or John Kelly or something, well, those weren't his people.

B (44:02)

Anyway, I think this is a really important point. Bringing in new people is, is actually riskier for Trump at this moment. And one, I think Jonathan's right. The confirmation is already a big question mark, you know, in the Senate. But putting that aside, why does Marco Rubio have three jobs, right? You know, why is he the national Security advisor, the Secretary of State, and the acting national archivist? He may have more jobs by the end of all this as well, because I think, you know, having selected people and brought them very far down the road of doing things that will get you in a lot of trouble in any other context. You know, who else do you, do you bring into the gang at this point? And I think that explains a lot of the Epstein story. I really do I think that, you know, Donald Trump is guilty of doing whatever it is that we don't know about that he did with Epstein. Whatever Howard Lutnick did with Epstein is almost certainly a lot less than what Donald Trump did, who had a much closer relationship for many years in even by his own account with Epstein than Howard Lutnick ever did. So, you know, again, I think the chaos flows from Trump. The chaos is not really Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski, you know, it's Donald Trump. And I think, in fact, you could argue that this is all Trump 2.0 is a very interesting demonstration of that theory, of the case. Right. There was chaos in Trump 1.0 despite having people like Jim Mattis and John Kelly who push back against it. There's a different, much more over the top version of it this time now that he's hired a different set of people. But there's the through lines are. Because Donald Trump is the through line here.

A (45:47)

So true. And two very quick points. And then let's move on. The first is in that set of people who might otherwise be on the block from that Jonathan mentioned four of them or so are the most controversial nominee that he really went all out for and said in those terms, we can't let the Dems get a scalp. They've all proven to be controversial, problematic, Kennedy, Noem, Hegseth, Patel. It's been this sort of all in strategy from the start. The second point is, I do think, to the mob boss mentality that Bill mentions. A lot of the people are staying in the fold. Maybe they're true believers, but they also think there's a pardon for them down the line. And when you actually cut someone loose and they don't have that assurance anymore, that could really matter. All right, it is now time for a spirited debate brought to you by our sponsor, Total Wine and more. Each episode, you'll be hearing an expert talk about the pros and cons of a particular issue in the world of of wine, spirit and beverages.

E (47:03)

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A (48:30)

Thanks to our friends at Total Wine and More for today's a spirited debate, the story that maybe is eclipsing even Epstein, at least today as we tape so, you know, over the past few weeks, it seemed like little by little, but now, all at once, we may be getting into some kind of military conflict with Iran. This morning, the US has advised its embassy staff in Israel, if you're going to leave, leave now. And obviously Israel is in the middle of all this. There's reporting that the administration prefers Israel do a first strike. What's the game plan here with respect to Iran as as now? You know, people were thinking about it because of its plunging ratings before the State of the Union in a wag the dog way. We're on the other side of that. But he's still beset with all these problems. Are we getting into some new big, thick mess in the Middle East?

B (49:31)

Well, I mean, first of all, to the point about what is the it, Right.

C (49:36)

Yeah.

B (49:37)

So we don't know what will happen. And it could be by the time, you know, this airs. We already have some answers. But, but we do know that Donald Trump has assembled an incredible vast American military armada of both air and sea power in the Middle east aimed at threatening Iran. His State of the Union, as we said, did not really illuminate because we're, we're in a, I think Trump is in a bind here. He's got a huge military buildup with unclear aims, even an unclear precipitating factor in the sense that, as he said in the State of the Union, we may or may not go to war in Iran in order to obliterate a nuclear program which I already claimed we obliterated. And actually he repeated that claim in the State of the Union address at the same time he said, yes, I obliterated it. And also we might have to go to war to get rid of it again. Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump's kind of all purpose envoy, was on television a few days ago and he claimed, and it was subsequently in the Wall Street Journal had very good reporting pointing out that this was not accurate according to, you know, experts and publicly available satellite information, whatever. But Witkoff went on TV and claimed that Iran was as little as one week away from, you know, re establishing weapons grade material. Trump also made this kind of intriguing but fragment sentence claim about, well, Iran might have missiles, ballistic missiles that could threaten the continental United States itself. So maybe that's the prerequisite for war. We're also seeing lots of reporting suggesting, as you pointed out, Harry, that this is a joint US Israel production in some way that has yet to been made fully clear to us. And then there is the factor which I think it's really important for us all to think about, which is what's been happening inside Iran itself, which is this incredible bloody crackdown of an enormous scale against internal dissenters and protesters. Trump cited a number in the speech of, I believe 32,000 dead. By whatever measure it is, ultimately this is one of the bloodiest, most tyrannical uses of force against its own population we've seen in modern times. Tiananmen Square, by contrast, was really only a few, a couple thousand people who were killed. So is Donald Trump gonna take the United States to war in the Middle east because of human rights or the internal situation in Iran that's almost inconceivably distant from the vision of foreign policy that he has sold to the country and his followers over the last decade. So I mean, my basic take is that Trump prefers militarized displays of one off, awesome American military power and then he wants to sort of claim victory and walk away. He doesn't have the zeal, the appetite, the strategic focus or discipline to launch a longer term operation. And also he's very wary of, of sort of metastasizing an uncontrollable war in the Middle East. Like that is like one of the things that he is really, I think, genuinely afraid of as a politician and as a person. So I would look for more in the realm of spectacular strikes and, you know, demanding concessions from Iran in the wake of that.

D (53:08)

I think there's also a possibility still of a deal, but for, for Trump, it would need to be a clear win, it would have to be better than the Obama nuclear deal that Trump himself pulled us out of. Like he, he'd need to be able to claim a real victory in order to back down because he is afraid of also showing some weakness. I completely agree with Susan, but they don't want like a full on wide, weeks long, months long conflict. That's something that Trump, I think really does not want. He would much prefer a targeted limited strike. But targeted limited strikes sometimes turn into wider conflict. You can't control it. The other side gets a vote often. Yeah. And I think they're, they're still, as of, you know, last night, still debating what to do. I don't know that Trump has made his decision. They have certainly now put things in place with the embassy warning the assets in the region that if Trump gives the order to go, they can go. And I think what I've been told is he was pretty eager to do it a few weeks ago during the height of those protests, but they simply couldn't. They didn't have the assets in the region and now they're there. The protests have largely been quashed. So it's unclear exactly what the motive is or the ticking clock does this have to be now? And I think there's a lot of people in Washington who are wondering about that. But it is very possible that he is so in love with the idea, with the military strength that he was able to display in Venezuela, that he will order up something similar this time around. But even that could be, we may have, we may be on one, on the precipice of one of the most consequential decisions of his presidency. But a lot can change the next handful of days.

A (54:43)

You would normally think that a president would sort of prepare the way much more than he has with the American people, but an autocrat wouldn't. And maybe it's an autocrat's path to war. Bill, I want to ask you for the last word here, but to John's point, what do you think, think if he does something is the minimum he'll need to claim success? Some kind of solid nuclear deal? Do we need regime change? What's his price for the kind of quick, spectacular pyrotechnics that Susan's talking about?

C (55:18)

Yeah, I mean, I've been surprised at the huge movement of military forces there, which, I mean, you don't need those incidentally, for the one off thing, which is what I assume he would like Venezuela type thing claim or what he did before in Iran. And just another version of that, I suppose. And then he'll take credit that the nuclear program has been set back more or they'll have some deal that's no better than Obama's deal, but he'll say it's better and that's adequate probably for him. Except you don't need all the forces there. That's. I'm a little, I gotta say I've always assumed he was extremely avert. The one lesson he's learned from politics, one lesson of the lessons he's learned over 50 years is don't start wars, especially in the Middle east. They get out of control, they hurt presidents whether they're well intentioned or not and so forth. So I've always assumed that's the one thing he would shy away from. But you don't need all these forces to do what he did in the summer. I mean he did it in the summer without the bite. I mean we can fly B2s from here and from Europe and we can fly other things from there. People I know in defense world are a little, therefore who would share everything John and Susan just said about what they assume Trump wants are a little freaked out by just the forces that are. The forces that are there are the forces you have for a weeks long bombing air campaign that really tries to either destroy the regime basically and create the conditions where the Iranian people would rise up. And I think they haven't quashed. My personal view talking to people, a couple of people who know about this stuff is maybe they haven't quashed things as much as people think. So the people might rise up again. That would I guess be the best case for Trump because lucky some bombing and then there is a regime overthrow. Who knows what comes next. But it can't be worse presumably so maybe so I don't quite know if that's what he has in mind or not, but the moving of all the forces there now maybe there's just. He likes showing being a tough guy and he moves more forces than he needs to a place but it has a certain dynamic of its own, right? And people I know who are pretty normally pretty calm about the world are pretty freaked out by what could happen over there and as John said, the onyx consequences of these things. Trump can think to himself, they can sit around and say I think we could get this deal. That would be nice. But the Iranians get a vote and other parties get a vote incidentally and other nations could do other things at the same time, whether it's Russia Or China. I mean, these are very unchartered waters, I think, and dangerous ones, actually. And again, for what? No one seriously thinks the Iranian nuclear program is as much of a threat now as it was to anyone, let alone to us. It's never really been a direct threat to us, honestly, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't care about it. It could destabilize the region. It could attack friends and allies of ours. It has been a threat in the past. There were diplomatic efforts, there were talk about military efforts to deal with it. We've done some of each. We've killed Soleimani, who arguably we could tie into the kind of retribution for killing Americans and for the war on terror. What's the urgency now? There's literally no. The nuclear thing is totally unurgent, despite what was a Witkoff or someone said to the New York Post is like literally crazy. I mean, half the thing is buried under a hill. Could they dig it out in a mountain? Could they dig it out in two years? Sure. Well, that gives us time to work for two years on the human rights or democracy side. As Susan said, there was urgency. Maybe there still is, but that's not the rhetoric. That was not the rhetoric of the State of the Union. Right. So I don't know. I'm pretty worried. I mean, you are playing with fire when you threaten war, move troops to a place, talk about the urgency of doing it and have no theory of really. I don't think of exactly what you're trying to accomplish. And again, if I don't have great confidence honestly in this team thinking this through either. So I'm pretty worried about it just as a sort of matter of what it could do to the world.

A (58:54)

Look, that's the final point that ties the whole episode going back to the State of the Union and the absence of of any kind of real policy and just the vitriol. You've got an erratic president who could be moved by some little insult or whatever now that all the toys are there to really do something imprudent and reckless.

C (59:19)

And no congressional authorization for the use of force, which whenever you think of Iraq, there was like a kind of a big debate for months at a big congressional vote and the Democrats to their voted, half of the voted for it and so forth.

A (59:30)

I think we all agree that that's no deterrent to him either.

C (59:34)

Well, but it changes things going forward, though, just in the sense that no one has any. If he had gone to Congress, I'm not sure he couldn't have gotten a Congressional vote to authorize the use of force against Iran. Iran is not very popular. But not getting that does expose him, I think, in a way that's very unusual in modern American politics to a kind of personal blowback almost if this thing goes in a bad way.

A (59:55)

Although you have to imagine if they start in. That is when in the playbook of modern presidents, he'll go for some kind of something if they're already there. You're disagreeing, Bill? Tell me why.

C (60:06)

Because I think if he starts in, people are gonna say, we're gonna. I mean, I would not vote. I'm a hawk on Iran. We're halfway down some road that Trump has got us on, and you're gonna vote to authorize it, then I think people will say, forget it. Maybe some Republicans wouldn't support it, incidentally. So I don't know. It's easier to get authorization for the use of force before you start using the force, generally, I think. I don't know.

A (60:26)

All right, we have to leave it there. We're out of time on a really. It just seems to me like a very volatile, fluid moment with exactly the wrong guy at the helm. We just have a minute for our Five Words or Fewer feature. Kash Patel defended his. You know, he had a little bit of extracurricular frolicking in. It could have happened to anyone during the Olympics. But he was there. We were told to provide security expertise. What kind? Five words or fewer, please. What kind of security expertise did Cash Patel provide to the USA men's hockey team with whom he was partying after their overtime victory against Canada?

D (61:09)

Cash Patel, FBI. Federal Budweiser inspector.

B (61:15)

Nice. Maga. Beer chugging?

C (61:17)

Yeah. Sort of manosphere. Attractive behavior.

A (61:25)

Yeah, he thinks I was thinking about.

B (61:28)

I don't know. There's something really creepy about that, though.

C (61:31)

I know, I know.

A (61:32)

I feel.

C (61:32)

As I thought of it just now, I felt creepy even saying it.

B (61:35)

You know, it is creepy. It makes you immediately feel bad things.

A (61:41)

All right, I had beer pong and stuff like that, but security. So my maybe. Boring answer. Wiretap on Team Canada's bench. Okay, we're out of time. Thanks so much, Susan, Bill and John, on a really, in some ways, it seems to me, dramatic and unsettled moment. Hope to see you soon on Talking Feds. Until then, talk to you later. Thank you so much, Susan, Bill and John, and thank you very much, listeners, for tuning in to Talking Feds. If you like what you've heard, please tell a friend to subscribe to us on Apple podcasts or wherever they get their podcasts and please take a moment to rate and review the show. Check us out on substack@harrylittman.substack.com where I'll be posting two or three bulletins a week, breaking down the various threads to constantly institutional norms and the rule of law. Paid Substack subscribers can now get Talking Feds episodes completely ad free. You can also subscribe to us on YouTube where we are posting full episodes and my daily takes on top legal stories. Talking Feds has joined forces with the Contrarian. I'm a founding contributor to this bold new media venture, committed to replacement reviving the diversity of opinion that feels increasingly rare in today's news landscape, where legacy media seems to be tacking toward Trump for business reasons rather than editorial ones. Find out more@contrarian.substack.com thanks for tuning in. And don't worry, as long as you need answers, the Feds will keep talking. Talking Feds is produced by Luke Cregan and Katie Upshaw, associate producer Becca Haveian, sound Engineering by Matt McArdle, Rosie Dawn Griffin, David Lieberman, Hamsum Mahadrenathan, Emma Maynard and Hallie Necker are our contributing writers and production assistants by Akshaj Turbailu. Our music, as ever, is by the Amazing Philip Glass. Talking Feds is a production of Dio llc. I'm Harry Littman. Talk to you later.