INTERVIEW: Isaac talks with Dave Weigel from Semafor

Summary

Podcast Summary: Tangle – Interview with Dave Weigel from Semafor Released on March 24, 2025

Host: Isaac Saul
Guest: Dave Weigel, Political Reporter at Semafor

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Introduction

In this insightful episode of Tangle, host Isaac Saul engages in a comprehensive discussion with political reporter Dave Weigel from Semafor. The conversation delves into the dynamics of Democratic resistance during the early months of the Trump administration, the effectiveness of legal strategies, and the evolving relationship between Trump and key administration figures like Elon Musk.

Democratic Resistance in the Trump Administration

Isaac Saul opens the discussion by addressing the prevailing perception among Democrats that their party is being steamrolled by the Trump administration with little to no effective resistance. He references Weigel's recent article highlighting the unexpected effectiveness of Democratic opposition, particularly within the judicial system.

Dave Weigel responds by contextualizing the structural challenges Democrats face. He notes, "Trump and Biden are the first presidents who've benefited from the lower threshold for confirming nominees the whole time. That's made presidents more efficient. They only need a simple majority for nominees. That's made the opposition each time look weaker because they can't really stop anything." (04:52)

Weigel explains that while Democrats lack significant influence in Congress to halt Trump’s legislative agenda, they have found a robust avenue for resistance through the courts. Legal groups and alliances, such as Democracy Forward, have been proactive in challenging administrative actions, achieving notable successes below the Supreme Court level. However, the conservative majority in the Supreme Court poses challenges for future legal battles, particularly concerning issues like impoundment of funds and executive overreach.

The Role of the Judiciary

Weigel elaborates on the slow-moving nature of the legal system compared to the rapid actions of the executive branch. He states, "Courts don't move at that speed. I respect the people whose beat full time beat is the legal system. And it's something I just had to bone up on as a reporter over many years." (08:30)

The discussion highlights how the judiciary serves as a battleground for Democratic efforts to counteract Trump's policies. Weigel points out that while lower courts have been somewhat favorable to liberal legal challenges, the Supreme Court's conservative tilt could limit future successes. Cases like Trump's birthright citizenship challenge are pending, and their outcomes could significantly impact the administration's ability to implement its agenda.

Trump and Elon Musk: Administrative Dynamics

Shifting focus, Isaac Saul brings up recent tensions reported between Marco Rubio and Elon Musk within the administration, questioning the sustainability of the Trump-Musk alliance. Weigel remains skeptical about potential conflicts, emphasizing the intertwined interests of Trump and Musk. He remarks, "Trump wants to get rid of what he calls the deep state because he believes it undermined him and made him fail as president the first time. Not that he called himself a failure, but stop some stuff he wanted to do. And Musk has experience in going organizations and firing tons of people." (22:41)

Weigel argues that despite occasional disagreements, the alliance is likely to endure due to mutual objectives. He draws parallels with previous administrations, noting that internal clashes rarely derail the overall functioning once officials are in place. Moreover, he highlights the media's role in amplifying perceived tensions without substantial evidence of functional discord.

Public Messaging vs. Private sentiments

Isaac Saul probes into discrepancies between public statements and private sentiments within the administration. Weigel acknowledges the challenge of discerning true private opinions, stating, "I care less about what they say in private than what they do publicly." (30:02)

He explains that while some Republicans may express private dissatisfaction with certain policies or actions, their public support remains steadfast, driven by fear of primary challenges or desire to maintain party unity. This dichotomy undermines the effectiveness of opposition and complicates efforts to gauge the administration's internal cohesion.

Economic Policies and Voter Reception

The conversation turns to the economic strategies implemented by Trump, including tariffs and layoffs of federal employees. Weigel critiques Trump's campaign promises versus the realities of policy implementation. He notes, "Trump lied because he said he could do all this with no trade-offs, and it's just already not happened." (34:31)

He assesses voter reception, observing that while Trump voters are generally pleased with actions like border closures, disappointment may arise as the promised economic benefits—such as immediate price reductions and job repatriation—take longer to materialize than initially projected. Weigel draws comparisons to historical figures like FDR, highlighting the unrealistic expectations set by Trump’s rhetoric.

Future Implications and Conclusion

As the episode wraps up, Weigel reflects on the long-term implications of the current administration's actions. He suggests that Republicans are focused on dismantling established administrative frameworks, making it challenging for Democrats to restore them if the latter regain power. This strategic dismantling could lead to lasting shifts in governmental operations and policy implementations.

Dave Weigel concludes with a forward-looking perspective, emphasizing the resilient nature of the Republican approach under Trump and the formidable challenges Democrats face in mounting an effective opposition within both the legislative and judicial arenas.

Notable Quotes

• Dave Weigel: "Trump and Biden are the first presidents who've benefited from the lower threshold for confirming nominees the whole time." (04:52)
• Dave Weigel: "I care less about what they say in private than what they do publicly." (30:02)
• Dave Weigel: "Trump lied because he said he could do all this with no trade-offs, and it's just already not happened." (34:31)

Closing Remarks

Isaac Saul wraps up the episode by encouraging listeners to follow Dave Weigel's work at Semafor and on Twitter. He highlights the collaborative efforts of the Tangle team and invites the audience to explore more content on their website.

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Credits:
Podcast written by Isaac Saul, edited by John Wall, with contributions from Ari Weitzman, Will K Back, Bailey Saul, and Sean Brady. Logo designed by Magdalena Bova. Music produced by Diet75.

Follow Dave Weigel:
Keep up with Dave's reporting at Semafor or follow him on Twitter @DaveWeigel.

Explore More:
Visit readtangle.com for additional content and subscribe to the Tangle newsletter.

Transcript

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[Isaac Saul]

From Executive Producer Isaac.

[Dave Weigel]

Saul this is Tangle.

[Isaac Saul]

Good morning, good afternoon and good evening and welcome to the Tangle Podcast.

[Isaac Stahl]

A place where you get views from.

[Isaac Saul]

Across the political spectrum, some independent thinking.

[Isaac Stahl]

And a little bit of my take. I'm your host Isaac Stahl and first.

[Isaac Saul]

Of all, I just want to let you guys know that today is the beginning of the Tangled Team's Spring break. As part of fostering work life balance and also assuring our small team can survive the non stop stream of news, I give our staff three breaks a year. One during August recess when Congress is out, one between Christmas and New Year's and one in March during a quote unquote Spring break period. Our March break begins today. The team is taking full advantage of it, spread out from Japan to West Texas, taking vacation or recharging at home. However, as our team has grown, so too is our capacity to provide some content while we take breaks like this. So this week in lieu of a newsletter, we are going to be sharing a series of podcast episodes that we didn't get a chance to publish in the craziness of the day to day news cycle. The first is with Dave Weigel, a reporter at Semaphore. Weigel is one of my favorite journalists. Whenever I check in on his Twitter feed or read his updates in Semaphore, I get the sense that he is fair minded and critical of all his subjects, regardless of their politics. On top of letting his personality shine through in his writing, he's also well sourced, level headed and forward thinking. So when he agreed to chat with me about the first couple months of the Trump administration, where Congress is headed, and how voters are reacting to all of this, I was thrilled. We're about to play that conversation for you now, and before we do, I just want to remind you that if you are still listening with commercials on the podcast, you can get premium ad free podcasts by going to Readtangle membership and becoming a podcast member. So keep an eye out for some more content coming out tomorrow, Wednesday and Thursday. And as always, feel free to give yourself a little news vacation if you need it too. When be back next week. Have a great spring break and we'll see you then. And here's Dave Weigel.

[Isaac Stahl]

Dave Weigel, thanks so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

[Dave Weigel]

It's good to be here. Thanks for having me.

[Isaac Stahl]

All right, so first of all, I want to start with some of your recent coverage about Democrats and what we're kind of seeing in the early months of the Trump administration. I think a perception that I've certainly encountered a lot in Democratic circles and among activists and voters who I know in my personal life is kind of this sense that Democrats are just getting steamrolled and there's no real resistance, which made an article you published about a month ago really catch my eye. And I think it was the reason it got a bunch of traction online about the Democratic resistance actually being pretty effective, maybe not so much in Congress, but in the courts. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what you were seeing in your reporting and how you think Democratic opposition to the Trump administration is going right now.

[Dave Weigel]

Yeah, that story grew out of mentioning this to my editor and him asked me to just write it because the this is the fourth time I guess I've covered a transfer of power. One party's in the minority and can't actually influence anything. It has the ability to stop through filibuster Senate legislation. It doesn't have the ability to stop nominees, which is fairly new. Trump and Biden are the first presidents who've benefited from the lower threshold for confirming nominees the whole time. That's made presidents more efficient. They only need a simple majority for nominees. That's made the opposition each time look weaker because they can't really stop anything. People FORGET Obama had 58 and 59 senators when he was confirming his first Supreme Court nominees and There still is an effort to pull Republicans on board because they had the power to filibuster them. So I just, from a structural perspective, I said, okay, their party's out of power, barely. They can't really stop anything. They're not resisting like they used to. There's another part of this that the. Some of the liberal groups that were well funded in the first Trump years were not getting funded this time. And you could also tell that liberal news consumers were tuning out, which I thought would happen for the election. Definitely happened. They're just not buying subscriptions to read daily news about Trump like they used to. My theory, backed up, I guess, by talking to people for years, is in 2017, they thought, well, maybe I need to keep track of the news because something's going to happen and Trump's going to have to resign. And no one thinks that anymore. But the people on the left in liberalism who had a plan were these legal groups. And the thing as a reporter covering politics, the judicial, judicial branch, the legal system, it's a specific beat. It moves slowly. It does not give you the instant narratives and stories of Congress or of the White House. It's more secretive. There are different rules in how you cover courts versus how you cover Congress. You can't just walk up to judges and ask what they're going to do. You can walk up to numbers in Congress. So part of what I was doing was explaining this information gap where, yeah, there is a part of the liberal coalition, the legal coalition, which is pretty vast, and hundreds of groups in the Democracy Forward alliance that launched after the election that were ready to sue Trump and have been pretty successful because Trump acted like they thought. Like he said on the campaign trail, he was acting beyond the usual powers of the president to impound funding and shut down government agencies he didn't like through mass firings. Their plan was sue and stop him, because you're not allowed to do that. And that's been somewhat successful in a fairly conservative legal system. Obviously, it's very successful below the Supreme Court level and moderately successful thus far at the Supreme Court. And the first test they passed, that was kind of my point. They said there was no political ability by Democrats to stop the administration, but by the attorneys general, by these legal groups. They had tools and they were really fast into action, even compared to Republicans. When Biden took office, there were lawsuits. There was a successful Stephen Miller legal effort to stop mass relief for black farmers, but they were slower off the blocks than liberals. The liberal resistance legally has actually been quite effective.

[Isaac Stahl]

Yeah. So I'm curious, I guess, you know, you published that piece about a month ago. I'm wondering if your assessment has changed at all or if there have been any moments relevant to that initial piece that have happened in the four weeks since that kind of stand out to you.

[Dave Weigel]

Again, it moves slowly. So the, it's a number of groups that jump into these legal fights. They typically, for example, they're different aid organizations that were using Public Citizens Litigation Group as the, as the vehicle for suing the administration, getting it to the D.C. circuit. You can see the Perriman courthouse in Guardtown, D.C. it's not a huge landmark, but all the stuff is just happening there. So they've been, they have had less success in stopping some of the layoffs in federal agencies because judges have determined that presidents have a lot of leeway to do that. These things also happen in years. One easy way of looking at this maybe, is the courts are the hour hand and the Senate is the minute hand or the Congress of the mini hand. There are years of precedence from different politically motivated people to make it easier for the executive branch to do things, to lay people off, fire people. Biden did some of this in his first month because, remember, he comes into office after January 6th and there are a lot of holdovers and positions that Trump left in. He fires them before their terms are up. So legally, Trump has been able to fire people whose terms were not up. In some cases, they resigned rather than fight over it, like Chris Wray at the FBI. So it has not been a series of huge wins. And all of it is in the shadow of a 6:3 conservative Supreme Court, with Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett being the least interested in blowing up recent precedent. So far, not everything and not everything has gotten to the Supreme Court yet. For example, we're waiting for whatever case becomes the vector for impoundment, becomes a way for basically Sam Alito and I'd say Sam Alito and Brett Kavanaugh to decide whether the power that Congress took away from the president in the 70s to say I'm not going to spend this money is correctly assigned to the president. No one has tried this in I'd say, well, actually no one's tried this, a version of this in 28 years because Bill Clinton had the line item veto for about five minutes. This is a different court. No one who actually, I should correct myself, only Clarence Thomas was part of the court at that time and is still on the bench. Now, the impoundment powers, obviously, no judge, no justice who upheld the Impoundment act in the 1970s is still there. So we're waiting for this test to get there. And if it turns out that the president can just decide not to spend money appropriated by Congress, that allows Trump to do a ton of things. If it turns out that he can't, it doesn't. And he's going to be severely limited. He has lost in every court. I saw the First Circuit before we started talking on his birthright citizenship challenge. We don't know how the court's going to rule on. That could be a total reversal, which would be embarrassing for Republicans. It could be because they're asking for quite a lot what they're suing. They're trying to get people whose parents are here with legal status but are not citizens for their children to not get citizenship. There could be a ruling that allows some of what Trump wants. We don't know yet. And this is again, this difficulty. We have basically timelines, fiscal year, we have when Congress is in and out of session. We have the speed that Trump can choose to move at, and those are all much faster than the legal system. There is no calendar for the Supreme Court. You saw this. Not to get too in the weeds, but you saw this over the various lawsuits to get rid of Obamacare. It was almost two years between Reed O'Connor and Texas saying that the ACA was unconstitutional based on. Based on the end of the individual mandate in Congress because they zeroed it out under Trump. Two years between that and the majority of Supreme Court saying, actually that's fine and they can move that slowly if they want to. So that's the thing. That is why as unsatisfying as because news moves quickly. A story that is very interesting on Monday might be very boring and played out on Friday. And courts don't move at that speed. I respect the people whose beat full time beat is the legal system. And it's something I just had to bone up on as a reporter over many years, really, since those first Obamacare lawsuits, just to understand how this is moving, what questions to ask. The final thing I'll say on this is you often see something moving through the legal system and you ask politicians about it and they don't know what you're talking about because in their world, it's illegitimate for the courts to stop them from doing something they wanted. That flips back and forth whenever a different party has power. Not evenly. Republicans are a little bit more brazen now than Democrats were six months ago about whether a court reversal is legitimate. Republicans have said Trump, led by Trump flat out that these judges who are stopping their agenda are unelected and they don't deserve, they are overruling the will of the American people. That's harder rhetoric than Democrats use, but it's the same principle that politicians get elected. They have the mandate of the people through the Electoral College or through Congress, and they resent it when some judge says you can't do that. Ron DeSantis has gotten away with a bunch of things in Florida that people didn't think he could, but he's also been reversed in court and he just stopped. The difference is that Trump doesn't stop as much as other people. And also Trump is doing things like layoffs of federal workers that even if they're reversed in court at some point might not matter for the people who have left those jobs, found other work, moved somewhere else, left the country, whatever. Whatever the case, a lot of the Trump strategies just to do this at normal executive branch speed, do it quickly so that when courts catch up, it's too late for them to really change anything.

[Isaac Saul]

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[Isaac Stahl]

Yeah, that's a perfect lead into what my next question was, which was it feels a little bit silly to ask this, but how much does it matter? I mean, you know, on something like the birthright citizenship question, obviously the way the court rules matters a great deal because it's either going to stop this effort in its tracks or set them up for failure or it's going to open the door to maybe a really consequential historic change in our law. When I think about the Doge stuff, which I know you've done a lot of reporting on, and you know, to what degree can trump and, you know, the Doge crew lay off a bunch of federal employees or not send out this money that's already been appropriated? It feels to me a little bit like they've already done the thing they wanted to do. And regardless of how the courts rule, it's going to have a huge impact. I guess I'd be curious your read on how, you know, the court rulings might impact that and to the degree to which the rulings actually matter now that so much disruption has already taken place.

[Dave Weigel]

Yeah, that's what I was trying to point to, that some of these decisions will not really be revoked by courts because the personnel that the administration wanted to get rid of will be gone already, for example, total victory. USA got a pretty great victory here. Supreme Court just asking for some clarity from a lower court and saying the president didn't have the authority to just cancel $2 billion of aid contracts that were already dispersed. But USAID had massive layoffs. Their office was given over to cbp. If you know that part of Washington, the Border Patrol's office was next to usaid and the administration just gave the US Aid offices to the Border Patrol. If a court says you have to completely reverse that, they can't. That's not going to happen because people will have moved on. And we've all reporters talk to federal workers who are considering their options and few are. Look, there are some, for example, the NLRB staff who were laid off and brought back. There are some waiting for quick resolutions. The tens of thousands of staffers being laid off are expecting more permanence because of that timing. And that's why this is not symmetrical between Democrats and Republicans. We use words in politics or terms that get kind of locked in, but don't necessarily explain what's happening. One is status quo. And Democrats are, in a way, the party of status quo, but they're really the party of a complicated post New Deal, large executive administrative state that's pretty permanent, that's hard to break down quickly, and that is usually funded automatically by Congress every year. And what Republicans want to do and what they've wanted to do since the New Deal is get rid of all that stuff by not funding it, by abolishing it. They for a long time thought, this will take an act of Congress. This will take us passing a bill. They're very confident now, and this is a theme taught in Republicans all the time, that one, Trump can just do this through all of the breakneck speed we talked about, and two, that they could just sign off on it. Trump and Elon Musk and Doge will lay people off and say that we're no longer funding this agency. Then they'll pass a budget that says, that's right, we're not funding this agency anymore and it doesn't exist. And when Democrats come back to power in four years or eight years, do they. How do you rebuild that? Can the President say, well, USAID was never actually abolished, it was just laid off. We're passing a budget now that restores the budget and hires a bunch of US Aid back. Well, you don't also need to take back the office space. You need to deal with the legal slowdown for Republicans. I'm using a lot of words to explain something obvious, which is it's much easier to break something than to build something. And Republicans are the party breaking that administrative status quo, and Democrats the party that want to restore it, but they're not sure how much they can restore. They knew this before the election. A lot of their warnings about Project 2025 were about the most popular things that Democrats stood for, like abortion rights and warning that Project 2025 would get rid of it. And the. But they knew this was coming. They knew that if Trump was elected, the plan was to get rid of all these agencies and it'd be trouble for them to ever rebuild them. And that's where we're at right now. They're not sure how to rebuild them.

[Isaac Stahl]

Yeah, I'm curious I guess looking ahead, I mean, we've started to get some reporting now, or at least the first reporting that maybe there's a little bit of tension starting to bubble. The New York Times had this scoop about the Marco Rubio, Elon Musk confrontation in a meeting with the Cabinet members. And Trump is telling members of the Cabinet that, you know, they have final say on what to do with their agencies. I'm curious kind of what your read is, you know, spending so much time in Congress and around people in this administration on kind of where this is heading. I mean, I, I think the conventional wisdom a few months ago was maybe there's no way this Elon Trump honeymoon could last for a long time. Just two big egos and people who, you know, love the spotlight and love the power. But it seems like they're getting on pretty well. And, you know, despite some of the turbulence here and there, Trump still seems to really, you know, have his back full throated. I'm curious, kind of what you think the dynamic looks like in the months ahead between some of the cabinet leaders in Congress trying to pass this budget and Elon who's just kind of, you know, letting the Doge guys run wild and slash the budget and fire people and all that stuff.

[Dave Weigel]

Yeah, so I never bought into the idea that the Elon Trump static was going to be a problem that Elon Musk pushed out of the administration. I made a faux pas yesterday because I was saying, where did that whole idea come from that Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, created Doge just to give you want something to do and be irrelevant? And one of my colleagues said, oh, I believe that. I'm not trying to throw them under the bus. But it was, this happens sometimes in Trump era politics that everyone who knows something in your Rolodex will say, well, this is how it's going to happen. And the Trump folks don't play by those rules. So it doesn't happen. I think it'd be the same Bernie Sanders who present. They're just the information flows in D.C. through people, through years of connections reporters make with sources. And sometimes the sources are confident and don't know anything. A lot of economic reporters will tell you this about the very confident lobbyists who said Trump was not actually going to do the tariffs and now he is so not here to toot my horn about that. I'm saying the idea that Trump was going to get pissed off by Elon Musk doing this, I didn't think it was based in much except palace intricate speculation what are the incentives for everybody here? One, Trump wants to get rid of what he calls the deep state because he believes it undermined him and made him fail as president the first time. Not that he called himself a failure, but stop some stuff he wanted to do. And Musk has experience in going organizations and firing tons of people. He's loaned him out to do that. And I want to get back into all the legal machinations we just talked about. But yeah, their interests are very intertwined. There are some disagreement over, for example, H1B visas, some immigration policy. You have Steve Bannon, who was a Trump advisor and is now on the outside complaining about Musk attacking him. The way I've read that really is somebody who talks. I've talked to Bannon, but not frequently Musk, not frequently at all really. I've emailed him stuff and he hasn't responded. That's just a very. Anytime you're talking about a Bannon Elon fight, one, you're talking about policy that Republicans want to talk about, which is immigration, and two, you're not talking about opposition from Democrats. It's a Republican discussion. And I've always viewed, maybe in a crank way, the news cycle is like a jar of marbles and it gets full. You put 200 in and you can't put anything else in. That day when Elon and Bannon and Trump are in some sort of NAFTA standoff over a policy, I don't see that as here it all comes falling down. I see that as this is a convenient fight for them to have for the stories they want to tell and just look at the results. There has not been. There have been. So you mentioned the your time story. Yes. There have been moments where Elon got over his skis and was cocky and arrogant and got something wrong and he looks like a fool for doing it. And other people in the administration are angry that he did it, but how do they respond? Can Marco Rubio post on Twitter X to 200 million people and say Elon is wrong? No, he can't. He doesn't have as many followers. Elon can go on truthfully or not truthfully, often untruthfully. He falls for lots of conspiracy theories. He can always flood the zone with what he wants to say. And I always bet I was talking about who I trust, the conventional wisdom people, the well sourced people. I trust, the people who say things in public. It's a very public facing business and whoever is able to just dominate the space. People are listening, are reading news in. Yeah, I just assume they're going to they're either going to win. Most of the time they're going to win or we're going to be talking about when they want until, until they lose. And maybe those aren't contradictory ideas. So I just, yeah, I don't think there will be members of the administration who resent Elon overriding them. But what are the consequences if you've been confirmed in the Cabinet? You don't. You have that job unless Donald Trump wants you to, unless John Trump fires you, you resign. You get criticism in the Washington Post, the New York Times, cnn. As a conservative, you love that. You don't care. Who cares if those media criticize you. So I think they're very robust against the sort of internal fighting that might be a problem before. And the final thing I'd say is this happened all the time in Joe Biden's administration. There were clashes between different factions there and it was a very tight administration where these happened. And it didn't really affect who staffed the administration. They just stayed in power and got what they wanted. Once you were in the White House, in the Eisenhower Building, in the eob, et cetera, you can just do things, you really can. Until you are stopped by a court or until the president says this is bad, stop doing it, you're fired.

[Isaac Saul]

We'll be right back after this quick commercial break.

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[Isaac Stahl]

A couple more questions. I know you've got to run. I'm curious, I guess, first of all, related to this being a public facing business and, you know, the people who are talking about this stuff directly in public tend to win out in a lot of ways. I'm curious maybe what kinds of discrepancies you're seeing between the public facing messaging and what you're hearing in private off the record right now, you know, in this administration is are there any issues in particular where you're seeing some distance between the, the public messaging and what people are kind of expressing? I mean, something that comes to mind for me is probably tariffs, an issue that I think Republicans for a long time have been pretty opposed to. And I see a lot of Republicans in Trump's orbit kind of holding their nose on them. I don't know if there's anything that kind of stands out to you in some of your reporting and experience on the Hill right now.

[Dave Weigel]

Yeah, you've identified a real source of frustration to people and to reporters that very well sourced reporters will tell you when they talk to Republicans privately they don't want this, but then they'll vote for it. When some of the more controversial Trump nominees were getting the votes, Democrats say Republicans privately don't want to do this, but they're scared of Trump. And people, Gabe Sherman did one of these for Vanny Fair will say, well, here's the pressure they're getting the public pressure. They're afraid for their lies, literally. They're afraid of a primary challenge. Elon will spend the money. And that's generally as an answer to your question, I care less about what they say in private than what they do publicly. It's important to know what, what the lobbying is behind the scenes to the extent you can pull it out. That's the utility of being a reporter, especially in the Senate where you can't just FOIA and say what happened in that meeting. You need to go around the edges and find out from people what happened and confirm it with enough sources to know that it did. But I'd never found that very compelling because one, Trump, again, this happened over a long time in 2017, did not have a party built in his image and now he does. So you don't have that many Republicans who behind the scenes are unhappy with what he's doing. Two, what is the difference between voting for something and resenting it? And voting for something and being happy about it, you still voted for it. And so we talked today and this morning, Republicans were defending it was kind of a funny moment because the Republicans have, their House Republicans have their usual post meeting press conference. J.D. vance had come to meet with them and they talked about how they're gonna pass the crowd. And the Dow is dropping steadily as they talk, not because of them, but I do think drops 200 points during their long speeches about what their agenda is. And one of the questions from another reporter is about the stock market. And Mike Johnson's answer is, well, what Trump is doing is basically like a billiards game where you hit the balls as hard as you can and they scatter them. Then you start to try to put them in the holes. And he very weird analogy. I was stuck on it because the other four talk about this. But if Johnson has some secret issue with that, I don't care because the public position is that it's great and that breaking up the racked balls is awesome and we should do more of it. And that's my position. I'm not saying reporters who have better sources than me and know some Republicans who behind the scenes are unhappy, they're not doing their jobs badly. I'm just saying that I don't think it matters because they'll talk to a well sourced reporter and then vote the other way. Well, that reporter knows they're a hypocrite. But what was the point of it? What was the point of them talking to you? I've come to think that their real position is what they're saying publicly often, and their fake position is what they're telling your reporters that their reporter stays in the loop.

[Isaac Stahl]

Interesting. Well, one last question before I let you go. I mean, I know from following your reporting, you know, some of my favorite stuff you've done has come when you've been traveling the country, you know, doing election reporting and election season, talking to voters, following Democratic Republican politicians as they campaign across the country. I guess I'm curious for your read on one of the debates I'm seeing publicly right now, which is I'm seeing this one kind of blob of people make the argument publicly that, you know, we're watching the stock market fall. The, the inflation price issue is not being resolved or meaningfully addressed right now. And Trump is basically fumbling the ball on the core issue that won in the election, which was economic angst. And another side that's sort of making the case that they're getting everything they voted for. With Trump, he's doing all the things he promised. He's, you know, rolling the grenade into the building, laying people off kind of Burning the system down. A lot of Trump voters who are really excited about that. I'd be interested to hear kind of how you view the reception his first two months is getting from the people who put him into office so far. And whether you feel like Republican Trump voters or independent voters who cast ballots for for Trump are feeling like they're getting what they voted for right now.

[Dave Weigel]

They'Re overall happy with what they're getting. I was mentioning how Republicans are adjusting to the stock prices falling, Dow falling, et cetera, because they really are coming up with some explanations in real time. One that I've seen from a few of them. Tommy Tuberville from Alabama, more kind of commentators on Newsmax is, well, the people who care about stock prices like this are the elites. The working class voters who voted for Trump don't have their pensions or salaries tied up in stock prices. And this maybe is a good rebuttal when Democrats say we're doing everything in the service of billionaires. But I do think it's important. The thing about Trump that no candidate has really repeated successfully is that he just will promise things during the campaign that he can't do that. The math doesn't add up. For in 2016, he promised to cut taxes and balance the budget. He did the opposite. And he has a lot of voters who, without being stupid, just because what they're paying attention to is a little bit more haphazard than your news junkie scrolling all the time, just assume he's gonna do some stuff because he did it before. And so one thing you'd find talking to Trump voters in 2024, not all of them, but the ones who came on more recently, one, they wanted him to close the border. And close the border is a very succinct phrase. It means lots of things, but generally no more people who are not citizens coming into the country. That means asylum seekers, people just crossing the border spot, et cetera. They're very happy with that. There are no Trump voters who are saying he's not doing enough to close the border. They're happy that he did. That's even I talked about what fills the news cycle. Democrats are not talking about that every day. They are not going down to detention centers and crying and yelling about migrants and asylum seekers. They have lost that one. Trump has won that argument for now. And by for now, I mean it could be four years. I think when Democrats run for president, 2028, a question will be do you want to let asylum seekers back into the country? Do you want to give temporary Productive status to Haitians again, et cetera. For now, Trump wiped that away. His voters are very happy. The other economic side of it, the Trump premise is that you can undo six, I mean domestic, for like 80 years of post World War II American global hegemony, 25 years of trade with China, since we give it permanent trade status, undo that, bring jobs back to America and there'll be temporary pain. But after a year, after two years, people are going to notice, wow. Instead of my car being built in Canada or Mexico or China, it's being built in Michigan or Ohio. Wow. Instead of these medication coming from Taiwan, it's coming from here. Instead of these computer chips coming from Taiwan, they're coming here. This was something that Joe Biden was doing in a more, I'd say, structured way. Chats and chips act, infrastructure bill, et cetera. The point of the tariffs right now is indeed to sell forward. Toyota, for example. Toyota builds a lot of RAV fours in Canada. It is to tell Toyota, hey, you'd make more money if you move your RAV4 plants to America. And that is consistent with what he ran on. What Trump voters wanted for years. That's what Ross Perot voters wanted 30 years ago. However, Trump sold it in the campaign as a zero cost proposition that you could do that and it would work immediately. He would bring prices back down to the 2019 levels immediately. He'd bring gas prices back down to $2, which they were only during the COVID period when demand for gas collapsed for the reasons we all know you weren't driving to work. That's why that he would bring down food prices, that he'd bring down housing prices. One of Vance's premises was that housing prices would decrease because you deport enough illegal immigrants that instead of them living in some housing space, Americans could buy cheaper housing space, houses. Now, these are ideas that could be implemented that could work in a way that the Brookings Institution, et cetera, don't think will happen. But they're not immediate. And that is the conflict of what did Trump say he could do right away versus what is going to cause pain? This shift, right this week, literally of Republicans saying, well, we all agree there's going to be a transition and some pain. That's not what he said. Trump did not have rallies where he said, it's going to suck for six months. That's going to be good. Reagan said more of that when he ran 1880. Because I think voters understood, okay, well, you need to make some tough decisions to break the back of inflation I get it. Trump was promising completely reorienting the economy and cutting taxes and lowering prices with no cost to anyone. It reminds me of this great FDR speech when he's running for reelection in 1936 where Republicans were saying they were going to protect the New Deal, but they were going to cut taxes. And you can go look up the speech, cross my heart and hope to die, you can find FDR speech. He just makes fun of that. They're going to do all the same things. They're going to do them better and the doing of them will cost nobody, will not cost anybody anything. This was a laugh line for FDR because obviously that can't happen, but it wasn't for Donald Trump. And Democrats have been, I wouldn't say stuck because they want to be there. They've been in a different rhetorical and policy place saying, gosh, if we propose an idea, we need to explain how this is going to pass. We need to explain how it's costed. Reporters will ask how we're going to pay for it. We really be better be ready if we have a tax benefit, how it's going to, how it's going to be, how it can be funded because we might lose some of our fiscal hawk members over it. And Trump did not. This is why I think Trump is so exciting. One of many reasons why Trump is so exciting to conservatives is because he doesn't do that. He doesn't say that you need to make trade offs. That's awesome. In a campaign, that is the best way to campaign if people will believe it. It is hard to govern that way. He will either miraculously get all that stuff done without trade offs and it's just already not happened. Maybe if he's lucky we're done with him or he will fail. And that's the position where Democrats are in is saying we don't think this is going to work. It's going to fail. We'll come back in when it fails.

[Isaac Stahl]

Dave Weigel, he is a politics reporter at Semaphore. You can keep up with his work there or follow him on Twitter at Dave Weigel. Dave, thanks so much for the time and I appreciate you coming on.

[Dave Weigel]

Oh, awesome. It was really good to be here.

[Isaac Saul]

Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by John Wall. The script is edited by our managing editor, Ari Weitzman, Will K Back, Bailey Saul and Sean Brady. The logo for our podcast was designed by Magdalena Bova, who is also our social media manager. Music for the podcast was Produced by Diet75. And if you're looking for more from Tangle, Please go to readtangle.com and check out our website.

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