Judges Destroy Trump in Utter Ballroom Humiliation

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Judges Destroy Trump in Utter Ballroom Humiliation"

The Daily Beast Podcast
Host: Joanna Coles
Date: August 8, 2026

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Overview

In this episode, host Joanna Coles and executive editor Hugh Docherty unpack the stunning judicial ruling halting Donald Trump’s construction of a lavish White House ballroom. They deliver breaking news and scathing commentary about the legal, political, and historical ramifications of the ruling—and discuss the broader implications for Congress, Trump’s presidency, and the future of Democratic institutions. The episode also covers Todd Blanche's controversial attorney general confirmation, insiders' leaks, political maneuvering in Washington, and closes with a rich conversation on the future of higher education with Jeffrey Sonnenfeld.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Judges Halt Trump’s Ballroom Construction

• Breaking News (00:00–05:20):

  • Appeal judges in Washington, D.C. have ordered Donald Trump to stop building a gigantic East Wing ballroom at the White House.
  • The judges’ joint ruling emphasizes that "The White House is the people’s house. Congress exercises plenary control... Each president is a temporary tenant, not the owner." (04:27, Hugh Docherty quoting the ruling)
  • Trump's legal claim to unilaterally alter White House property is decisively rejected; future changes now require Congressional approval.

• Scathing Legal Rebuke (03:10–05:20):

  • The National Trust for Historic Preservation led the charge against Trump's renovation plans.
  • The appellate decision, mainly by Obama- and Biden-appointed judges (Millett and Garcia), outlines that Trump's actions contradict both law and precedent, referencing East Wing demolitions and historical appropriations post-1812 fire.

• Implications for Trump (09:08–10:32):

  • Trump could theoretically rush legislation through Congress—a logistical and political nightmare given the upcoming midterms and political climate.
  • Even if passed, new legislation could be reversed if Democrats regain control.

• Supreme Court Prospects (06:00–13:38):

  • Legal experts believe the current ruling would put originalist Supreme Court justices in a bind because it relies on historical precedent and construction of the “people’s house.”
  • The judges have "Supreme Court proofed it," leveraging history (e.g., Congressional appropriations for the White House repairs after 1812 and the construction of both wings) to block executive overreach.

Notable Quotes

• “Each president is a temporary tenant, not the owner of the White House and its executive residence. The president has no... constitutionally assigned authority over the property.”
  — Hugh Docherty, reading from the judgment (05:05)

• “There is no such thing as simple humility in the Trump plan... They are absolutely... going through history to say what happened between the White House and Congress.”
  — Hugh Docherty (07:38)

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2. Congress, Donors, and the Future of Trump’s Project

• The Donors’ Dilemma (11:06–12:08):

  • Even with funding from major corporations and wealthy individuals (Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Lockheed Martin, etc.), judges noted no president has ever demolished or rebuilt parts of the White House with private funds.
  • The future of the funds collected for the ballroom remains up in the air. Possibility: funds redirected to the Trump Library or other Trump ventures.

• Operational Chaos at the White House (12:50–13:25):

  • The West Wing is now a construction zone, causing significant disruption to White House staff.

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3. What’s Next: Supreme Court Shadow Docket and Political Maneuvering

• Supreme Court Emergency Path (13:40–17:21):

  • With SCOTUS on summer recess, emergency filings head to the “shadow docket.”
  • The court could extend stays, allowing construction to proceed, take no action (effectively upholding the ban), or pause construction until full hearings.

• Political Calculations (17:57–22:41):

  • Trump’s remaining option: pressure Congress to approve the ballroom before the midterms.
  • Judges warn the ruling covers the whole national park area: he can’t proceed with other controversial projects (the arch, helipad, or fairground on National Mall) without new Congressional authorization.

• Historical and Aesthetic Arguments (22:28–24:09):

  • The White House’s symbolic humility and symmetry, rooted in Pierre L’Enfant’s original design, sharply contrasts with Trump’s grandiose plans.
  • Judges reference King Louis XVI and Versailles as cautionary tales against "carbuncle" architecture.

Notable Quote

• “As King Charles would say, a monstrous carbuncle... completely knocks off any symmetry. And Washington... is a city built on symmetry.”
  — Joanna Coles (22:41)

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4. Todd Blanche Confirmed as Attorney General

• Blanche’s Contentious Confirmation (24:13–27:57):

  • Todd Blanche, characterized as Trump’s personal lawyer, is confirmed as Attorney General—but criticism abounds, especially from female GOP senators like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, and Epstein survivors.
  • Confirmation hinges on Senator Bill Cassidy’s reluctant support:
    • "Mr. Blanche is not perfect... but this choice is... between Mr. Blanche and another acting attorney general who may not run the department effectively under President Trump." (26:45, Hugh Docherty quoting Cassidy)

• Epstein Files & Survivor Pushback (27:57–29:04):

  • Blanche’s release of Epstein files, in a piecemeal way, raises public anxiety.

• Political Risk (29:31–31:25):

  • The fates of previous Trump AGs (e.g., Jeff Sessions, Bill Barr) hint Blanche may be quickly replaced or scapegoated if out of favor.

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5. White House Leaks, Political Downturn, and GOP Dynamics

• Leaking and Blame-Shifting (39:02–42:53):

  • White House staff and insiders are leaking negative stories as a means of distancing themselves from Trump’s failures, particularly regarding Iran and domestic policy.

• GOP Infighting and Succession Drama (47:32–54:10):

  • Tension between Trump and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, whom Trump views as an obstacle.
  • Corey Lewandowski rumored to primary Thune in South Dakota, with support from Kristi Noem, adding personal drama.
  • Speculation over Kristi Noem’s long-term ambitions, including a possible presidential run in 2028.

Notable Moment

• Lewandowski/Noem saga involving South Dakota “flying boudoir,” dog-shooting scandals, and potential run for Senate.
  (49:00–54:10)

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6. The State of the GOP Senate and Mitch McConnell’s Mysterious Absence

• Updates on Senate Figures (54:27–58:55):
  • Mitch McConnell’s secretive rehab stint sparks rumors and power plays.
  • Senator Thom Tillis’s upcoming tell-all memoir expected to critique Trump’s Cabinet over Trump himself (“He doesn’t blame Trump; he blames the Cabinet.” – 56:35)
  • Lighthearted speculation about McConnell’s alleged house-sharing with Tillis, including “Republican senatorial slumber parties.”

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7. The Trump “Squirrel” Hair Saga

• • Amusing discussion of Trump’s fluctuating hairpieces—likened to squirrels, foxes, or hamsters—underscoring how even presidential image is affected amid policy chaos.

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8. Special Segment: The Future of Higher Education with Jeffrey Sonnenfeld

(63:49–90:35)

• Resilience and Value of Higher Education (63:49–71:09):

  • Sonnenfeld asserts AI won’t replace the core educational value of universities—teaching students “how to think.”
  • Humanities and critical thinking skills poised for resurgence. Despite fewer 18-year-olds, elite university applications are up.

• Vocational vs. Liberal Education (70:24–73:33):

  • Upcoming expansion of vocational education is likely, but universities aren’t switching en masse—each serves a distinct societal role.

• Political Attacks & Institutional Resilience (73:33–79:25):

  • Trump’s attacks on Ivy League institutions hurt reputation but forced needed governance reforms at places like Penn, Columbia, and Harvard.
  • Universities face persistent political attacks, particularly targeting their DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) commitments.

• Administrative Bloat & AI’s Role (83:36–85:36):

  • Administrative staff growth is outpacing student/faculty growth; expectations that AI could help increase university efficiency and reduce costs.

• Media Literacy & Misinformation (86:07–87:44):

  • Sonnenfeld champions integrating media literacy at all educational levels to combat misinformation's threat to democracy.
  • Branded, trustworthy sources like the Daily Beast grow ever more important in the age of deep fakes and TikTok sensationalism.

• On Student Outcomes & Critical Thinking (88:17–91:35):

  • Sonnenfeld favors open-resource exams, arguing that good pedagogy can outpace AI-generated work by demanding lateral, creative thinking.
  • He closes on the need for education to remain dynamic and adaptive—never static like religion.

Notable Quotes

• “The AI brings you data, but it doesn’t make you think.”
  — Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (65:28)

• “If you’re concerned about the cost of higher education... schools who have those endowments... make education almost free—certainly without debt.”
  — Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (81:10)

• “Should parents send their kids into these ideological battlegrounds? Yes—if they’re interested in learning about ideas.”
  — Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (79:15)

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Memorable Moments & Humor

• “Bench slapping”—Joanna delighted by new legal vocabulary (04:23).
• House gossip: Construction chaos, “the squirrel on Trump’s head” (61:15), recurring Mitch McConnell “is he or isn’t he” absentee speculation (55:39), and playful asides on Capitol slumber parties and Ted Cruz (58:34).
• Meta-commentary on the absurdities and theatrics of U.S. politics: “It’s an audience of one.” (29:09)
• Sassy takes on institutional cowardice, insider leaks, and the spectacle of political posturing.

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Key Timestamps

• 00:00–05:20: Breaking news & judges' ruling on Trump’s ballroom
• 06:00–08:37: Historical context & originalist arguments
• 11:06–12:08: Donors & funding controversy
• 17:57–22:41: Congressional escape hatches & National Park implications
• 24:13–29:31: Todd Blanche’s AG confirmation drama
• 39:02–44:46: White House leaks & internal blame games
• 47:32–54:10: GOP succession drama—Thune, Lewandowski, Noem
• 54:27–58:55: Mitch McConnell’s absence & uncertain Senate math
• 61:15–62:38: Trump hair jokes
• 63:49–91:35: Education future segment with Jeffrey Sonnenfeld

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Conclusion

This episode delivers a whirlwind tour of high-stakes clashes inside and outside Washington—from the legal drubbing dealt to Trump’s ballroom ambitions, to political infighting and the pitfalls of personal ambition in the capital. The latter half probes the future and function of higher education in an AI age, making for a stimulating listen that couples serious substance with the Daily Beast’s trademark wit and insider edge.

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Transcript

[Hugh Docherty]

A really sensational turn this morning. This is genuine breaking news appeal. Judges have told Donald Trump he has to stop building his ballroom. They have absolutely torn apart all his case for building the ballroom. We're all familiar with the notorious teardown that he has executed on the East Wing.

[Joanna Coles]

House scathing. House scathing.

[Hugh Docherty]

Well, housegathing. I think this will go down as one of the. I believe they call them bench slappings in the law. They wrote jointly, the White House is the people's house.

[Donald Trump]

Yay.

[Hugh Docherty]

Congress exercises plenary control over the building and its surrounding land. Donald Trump, this is not your building. Each president is a temporary tenant, not the owner of the White House. The president has no and claims no constitutionally assigned authority over the property. If you want to build your ballroom, Donald Trump, you have to get constant Congress to vote for it.

[Joanna Coles]

The simple humility of the White House, which is literally the opposite of what Donald Trump is doing with it. I'm Joanna Coles. This is. Where else is it? It's the Daily Beast podcast and we have breaking news about the ballroom. Well, it's breaking right now, and I think you're going to like this news. We're also hearing about Todd Blanche. Is he. Isn't he, like, pulling the petals off a daisy? And the screaming match at Camp David. We have to talk about the squirrel on his head. And of course, fantastic news. Mitch McConnell is out of rehab. No, not that kind of rehab. You know, physical rehab. He's back. He's back. And Thom Tillis, it turns out, has been living in his basement. Who knew? Okay, Hugh Docherty is here, the executive editor, and he's going to ask you. Well, no, he's not. Well, you could do ask people to smash the subscription button and like the podcast and share it with your friends.

[Hugh Docherty]

Oh, Joanna, thank you for. Thank you for having me. I'm more than happy to say we love our subscribers. It's because of our subscribers that we are able to do independent journalism. So, please, if you have not already subscribed, hit that button. We are well over 700,000. We're heading for a million, thanks to Joanna's brilliance.

[Joanna Coles]

Oh, my brilliance. My brilliance.

[Hugh Docherty]

And if you are, you can also become a member and you can follow [e-mail] where we are updating things round the clock. But, Joanna, come on, let's get into it.

[Joanna Coles]

The ballroom. What the hell is happening?

[Hugh Docherty]

I have amazing. A really sensational turn this morning. This is genuine breaking news that appeal judges have told Donald Trump he has to stop building his Ballroom. They have absolutely torn apart all his case for building the ballroom. We're all familiar with the notorious teardown that he has executed on the east

[Joanna Coles]

wing and never forget, he demolished half of it in the middle of the night when people didn't know what was doing. And then they woke up and do you remember, people were taking pictures of it because they couldn't quite believe it. And then they erected a fence so people couldn't take pictures. You couldn't see anything. Please continue.

[Hugh Docherty]

Well, so this morning, this is a case, as people will remember. There has been a lot of litigation around this and various groups went to court. And the one that has led the way is the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States. They got in front of a George W. Bush appointed drug judge in D.C. judge Richard Leon, and he ruled that the ballroom should stop. But he didn't do. He stayed his order because he said it would be appealed.

[Joanna Coles]

So it was sort of temporarily suspended.

[Hugh Docherty]

It was. Well, it, in theory it was temporarily suspended, but he said if the White House wants to appeal, they can. And that would then go to an appeals Circuit in Washington, D.C. well, they did. It has. In the meantime, Trump has kept going with the building works. But this morning we now have a ruling from these appeal judges in Washington, D.C. and it is scathing and it is going to be. This is an explosion for Trump.

[Joanna Coles]

Okay, give me the scathing House scathing.

[Hugh Docherty]

Well, House gathing. I think this will go down as one of the, I believe they call them bench slappings in the law.

[Joanna Coles]

Bench slapping, I love that term. I've never heard it. Yes, bench slapping.

[Hugh Docherty]

The two judges. So this was a two one ruling, two judges, one strength in numbers. Strength in numbers. The one who didn't rule, the one who was in Trump's favorite, not surprisingly, was appointed by Donald J. Trump. But the other two are appointees from Obama and Biden. And they, Judge Millett and Judge Garcia. They wrote jointly. The White House is the people's House.

[Donald Trump]

Yay.

[Hugh Docherty]

Congress exercises plenary control over the building and its surrounding land. Donald Trump, this is not your building. This could not be a clearer, clearer judgment. They also tore apart. Each president is a temporary tenant, not the owner of the White House and its executive residence. The president has no and claims no constitutionally assigned authority over the property.

[Joanna Coles]

Does this mean that it can then go to Congress for a vote?

[Hugh Docherty]

Yes. So what they say is if you want to build your ballroom, Donald Trump, you have to get Congress to vote for it.

[Joanna Coles]

Right. Because he notoriously doesn't take any Notice of Congress goes round them or over them or ignores them entirely. Which is what he did with this demolition, right?

[Hugh Docherty]

Yes. And these, these judges, as I said, are Democratic, were appointed by Democratic presidents. And we know what's going to happen next. I don't want to spoil the ending here because we could save that for the end of the show, but let's skip to the ending. This is going to the Supreme Court and these judges have Supreme Court proofed it. We all know that the Supreme Court is in the grip of a 6, 3 conservative majority. And the conservative majority are originalists. They want to know what happened at the foundation of the Republic. What did the founders and the people immediately after understand was the case? About what? About what happened at the time. And those rulings have been hugely controversial. Dobbs, which tore up abortion rights, was in their telling, based on what the understanding of people in the 1770s, 1780s was about, whether you could expect a right and abortion. Similarly, gun rights. So these judges have said, have gone back in history and said this is the oldest public building in the District of Columbia. That it was that Columbia, the District of Columbia was designed by Pierre Longfong, we've all heard of him. The French born military genius and then architect who laid out Washington D.C. and they say that it was Long Fong, which I'm struggling to say. My French is not great.

[Joanna Coles]

Your Scottish is very good, Huey. Scottish is.

[Hugh Docherty]

I'm very, do you know, I'm very discreet about being Scottish. Joanna, I don't know how you knew that that was the case, but they say that he deliberately designed it so that the city was focused on the capital, which they call the gleaming palace of the people. To contrast it with the simple humility of the White House.

[Joanna Coles]

The simple humility of the White House, which is literally the opposite of what Donald Trump is doing with it. The nine, what is it, 90,000 foot ballroom, which is double the size of the rest of the White House.

[Hugh Docherty]

There is no such thing as simple humility in the Trump plan, in Trump. And they are absolutely. They then go through history to say what happened between the White House and Congress. And they point out that when the British, sorry, guys, our people attempted to burn down the White House, I should say in 1812, it was Congress that appropriated the money for the repairs. That's the biggest bit of building work, clearly, because, you know, rebuild, yes. Rebuilding work that we've seen. They then point out. We are aware of and we're aware. They then point out that Congress appropriated the money to build the East Wing and The West Wing. So it's pretty crystal clear what was the original understanding of people. What are originalists going to say that Congress decides? So put that in front of a conservative majority in the Supreme Court who believe in originalism. This is a really difficult one for Clarence Thomas and company to get out of.

[Joanna Coles]

And also, I suspect that they also, although I'm not quite sure why I'm saying this, but I think they probably also are appalled by what's happening, the Trumpification of the White House, which I think has shocked Republicans as well as Democrats. Yeah, but is there, before it goes to the Supreme Court, is there a way of Trump funneling this to Congress before he loses the House of Representatives, assuming he does in the midterms?

[Hugh Docherty]

Well, these judges have cast, kind of given him an escape hatch if he can make it work. But he has a slight flaw. First of all, he would have to get some legislation drawn up very, very quick, rushed through Congress, which is fueled up and gone for its vacation. The Senate wants to be out today. We're going to talk about that later.

[Joanna Coles]

Can't he call people back? He could ask an emergency.

[Hugh Docherty]

He could ask them to come back and say it's an emergency. Is it an emergency? That's a bit of a problem. Do you want a campaign ad if you're a vulnerable Republican saying he wouldn't vote for inflation busting measures, he wouldn't vote for this or that. But do you know what? He votes to give Trump a ballroom. So I don't think he's going to get support. But even if he does, he then has to get it through the Senate. That might be something that could be filibustered. Depends how he draws up this legislation. The appropriation of funds could just be a budget measure, but there's a whole, we just, you know, there's a whole can of worms here that's been opened

[Joanna Coles]

and he's running out of time.

[Hugh Docherty]

And he's running out of time. He is running against the clock. He has got until January, the start of January, to get his control, you know, his control of Congress to get this through. But after November, it's a lame duck session. And many of them may, and I say me, have experienced a blue wave and not really be much, you know, wanting to do Trump any favors.

[Joanna Coles]

Well, it's also possible that he could get the legislation, etcetera, through by January if he really sort of focuses. But then it can be undone. If the Democrats win Congress, also win the House.

[Hugh Docherty]

If the, if, if the Democrats win the House, they could maybe do something if they win the Senate. And you know, he's cooked in that situation. This is, this is a fascinating nightmare because it's, it's clear these judges have written an absolutely scathing judgment. They also deal with the strange fact that Donald Trump has repeatedly said that we are not paying for the ballroom.

[Joanna Coles]

Right.

[Hugh Docherty]

He's got donors.

[Joanna Coles]

Right.

[Hugh Docherty]

And I was just looking through the list of donors. I mean, talk about, I was going to say gold plated, but that's what the ballroom will be. But these donors are gold plated. Apple, Google, Mark Zuckerberg's meta, Jeff Bezos, Microsoft, Lockheed Martin, the defence contractor Caterpillar, who's huge manufacturer of defense material, among other things, and even a European based Indian billionaire who produces foreign steel is giving the steel all of that. These judges say, well, it doesn't really matter. We are aware of no instance in American history in which a president unilaterally and using privately collected funds, demolished substantial portions of the White House that Congress authorized to be built and American taxpayers paid for. So he can't just say, wow, I'm

[Donald Trump]

paying for a taxi.

[Hugh Docherty]

I've got the money, I don't need it, I don't need it.

[Joanna Coles]

So what's going to happen to that money, do we think?

[Hugh Docherty]

Well, who knows? I mean, this is. These judges make this point that they've never seen anything like this before. If a president gathers money for the White House and they say, well, you can't use that money, where's that money going? We don't know.

[Joanna Coles]

Well, I think we do know.

[Hugh Docherty]

Well, you may have suspicions, Joanna, you

[Joanna Coles]

might be going to the library, the Trump library, where the Qatari grift, Force one, your phrase is going to. Or is it?

[Hugh Docherty]

Or is it?

[Joanna Coles]

Or is it? Yeah, we don't know whether or not that's going to happen.

[Hugh Docherty]

A big tower in Miami is going to need some steel. So maybe Lakshmi Mittal, the steel tycoon, could give that. I don't know. It probably needs some computers.

[Joanna Coles]

This is an astonishing turn up for books because also the White House is currently a construction site and we've already seen that the helipad that they were putting down, Donald Trump suddenly pulled it up again and said it was sloping and he wants it to be. He wants the seal relayed.

[Hugh Docherty]

Yes.

[Joanna Coles]

So the entire place is in disarray. It must be hell on earth to work there and live there because it must be very noisy, possibly not in the middle of the. But incredibly noisy to work there with jackhammers going at all times. So work will Cease on the project.

[Hugh Docherty]

The Judges have given 14 days to the White House and said, you have 14 days to either stop the work or get this judgment overturned. So they've given the White House 14

[Joanna Coles]

days to go to the Supreme Court.

[Hugh Docherty]

14 days to go to the Supreme Court.

[Joanna Coles]

Now, aren't the Supreme Court. I mean, the Supreme Court takes longer holidays than almost everybody else. It's a little bit like academics. They just disappear for three months. I was shocked at how long their holidays were, actually. So aren't they already on vacation?

[Hugh Docherty]

Well, they're on vacation.

[Joanna Coles]

Clarence Thomas. Someone must have paid.

[Hugh Docherty]

He's in his rv. He's in his rv. If you've seen him, you know, if you've seen him out there, let us know and we can help get those papers.

[Joanna Coles]

So is it possible that they'll just say, well, we're not working through. I think they're back at the beginning of October.

[Hugh Docherty]

So they. They have this emergency system and it will go.

[Joanna Coles]

Is this the shadow docket?

[Hugh Docherty]

On the shadow docket, Right. And they will have to decide, are they dealing with it?

[Joanna Coles]

Can you imagine the phone calls they must have? You must. I mean, John Roberts, be careful what you wish for. Probably dreamed as a small child of being the Chief justice, and now he has.

[Hugh Docherty]

He was dressed in his robes, aged four.

[Joanna Coles]

You know it. You know it. He was parading round in his father's bathrobe saying, I'm the Chief Justice. What do you want to be when you grow up? Chief Justice. Here's my gavel. You know that. He was doing that from an early age. Now he has to deal with his absolute nightmare. He must be calling them. He must be calling the other. Just Brett Kavanaugh. Oh, my God, you can't believe what's happened.

[Hugh Docherty]

Poor Brett. I mean, he was just, like, planning a kegger. I don't know, Right.

[Joanna Coles]

Planning a kegger with his friends. Clarence Thomas was off in his rv. Yeah, exactly. Amy Komi Barrett was probably writing another book or fostering or adopting another child.

[Hugh Docherty]

Samuel Alito was putting up a flag the wrong way around, and his wife is, you know, saying, people are busy. They're busy, right?

[Joanna Coles]

And they're probably out making speeches and getting paid for their speeches, allowed to freelance.

[Hugh Docherty]

The summers are often a time that these Supreme Court justices are off, you know, talking about their work, talking about what they do.

[Joanna Coles]

They're off supplementing their income. What do they get paid? Nearly half a million dollars. And they're off supplementing their income.

[Hugh Docherty]

Who would Not, Joanna, if there was three, if you would set Your own vacation? I don't know. I mean, can we speak about this afterwards?

[Joanna Coles]

We cannot speak about it afterwards. Hueyn, what are we doing in the studio when the Supreme Court have disappeared? We could be in RVs too, but this is.

[Hugh Docherty]

They will have to decide immediately. Do they say they could? Because obviously they have options. The Supreme Court has options. When they get this application, they could say, oh, we'll extend this stay. That will allow Donald Trump to keep demolishing and keep building.

[Joanna Coles]

Because they probably want to take on board the practical nature of this too. Right. Because surely it's more vulnerable, the White House when half of it's not that.

[Hugh Docherty]

I mean, yeah, it seems crazy. And the argument that Trump is putting forward is this is all about national security. Now, again, we've said things that are national security.

[Joanna Coles]

Hughie, you're being unfair. You're being unfair. It's national security to be able to have a big party. It is. You want to have big parties in bulletproof rooms. The President loves entertaining. He loves his Mar a Lago style events. He's created this huge ballroom to have big state dinners. You know, that's national security.

[Hugh Docherty]

I knew I could rely on you, Joanna, to get a party into national security.

[Joanna Coles]

Hell yeah. Hell, yeah.

[Hugh Docherty]

He's also going to put on top a drone port.

[Joanna Coles]

A drone port. And also in the bunker, is there a military grade hospital for him?

[Hugh Docherty]

Yes. Which means he wouldn't need to go anywhere else for hospital.

[Joanna Coles]

Well, he could have had Mitch there. He could have offered Mitch healthcare on the premises of the White House so that they could ensure he was gonna get better just in time to vote for Todd Blanche. Yes. Well, okay, so let's just, let's finish off with scotus. So SCOTUS is going to get emergency calls from John Roberts saying, oh, you'll never guess what the President's done. Now we all have to get together

[Hugh Docherty]

and they'll be like, they'll be going through their list and go. And he'll go, no, it's number five on that list. The other four things he's still. You were thinking he's going to do that are really bad. He's not done those yet. But it's the ballroom, so they have to decide are they going to allow ballroom building to keep going. And when you allow the building to keep going, well, that's kind of a judgment, isn't it? You're kind of giving Trump a win. Are they going to say, we will let the appeal what they could do the most, you know, sort of cowardly I guess way of doing this would be to say just do nothing. And if they don't take the case,

[Joanna Coles]

which is what happened with his previous with the. What was that? I mean, they've made so many judgments, but what was the one where they refused to take it? The E. Jean Carroll case, By refusing

[Hugh Docherty]

to take a Jean Carroll, then they ruled against him, but without doing it in public, which is the opportunity they have here. So they could refuse to take this case, or they could say, you have to pause the building and we will consider it in full. Now, nobody who's any knowledge of the Constitution, all that sort of thing, are looking at this this morning. And I'm not claiming personal knowledge of the Constitution here. These are, you know, everybody's looking at this ruling, is saying this is a pretty strong ruling. It's strong constitutional grounds that these judges have cited. And it's a big problematic area for whoever is Donald Trump's Attorney general to get this.

[Joanna Coles]

To get this through. He doesn't have an attorney general yet. We'll come on to that in a minute. But can you also imagine being the first architect who in theory was fired by Donald Trump from it, but I think probably resigned from the job, who must just be. I mean, he must have given the biggest exhale. Thank God I walked away from this project. And poor Shalom Baroness, who we have encouraged her to write to. Yes. Who tried, I think, very hard to actually back out of the project once he realized what a nightmare the whole thing was, was then rolled out by the White House, sort of pushed out there to talk about it endlessly, to sort of reinforce the fact that he now had to take on this project. I cannot imagine being a contractor on it. I can't imagine being the architect on it. And I can't imagine working in the White House amid all the jackhammering. Yeah.

[Hugh Docherty]

And the other thing worth saying about this is these judges, again, cleverly have pointed out where the White House is. It is in a national park. And this is a national park, of course, that Donald Trump has been tearing up. Not just the White House. He's rebuilding Lafayette Park. We have seen what he has done elsewhere. The UFC on the South Lawn destroyed

[Joanna Coles]

the grass of the South Lawn, which was then being put back together, I think, free of charge by. Was it Miracle Grow?

[Hugh Docherty]

Miracle Grow, yes.

[Joanna Coles]

Well, I like Miracle Gro, so I think it will grow very fast is all I'm saying.

[Hugh Docherty]

But the guy in the ads isn't Scottish, by the way.

[Joanna Coles]

Oh, does he pretend to be Scottish?

[Hugh Docherty]

He's actually Norwegian. But anyway, okay, he's appropriating my accent. And if you need a miracle, grow, Scott, I'm here. Don't have any grass at home, but, you know, but the, they are pointing out where it is and they're saying, you can't tear any of this up. That's a whole load of his projects. They're saying he has to have Congress to get any of his projects done. That's the arch as well, folks. It's the South Lawn helipad. It's putting a fair on the National Mall. It's regressing all the national parks in Washington D.C. this is a really far reaching ruling for the thing that Trump is obsessed about.

[Joanna Coles]

What about the reflecting pool? Is that included in this?

[Hugh Docherty]

Yes, it is, actually.

[Joanna Coles]

Go on.

[Hugh Docherty]

It's a national park, so it's in this national park. And if he wants, he can't just spend money on it.

[Joanna Coles]

Right. And we know that that was the result of the reason it didn't work was it was the result of shoddy contractors. Yes, because Jeanine Pirro, his own U.S. attorney in D.C. made that very clear when she tugged her bag to the White House to show him the fake evidence she'd been presented by the Department of the Interior.

[Hugh Docherty]

The other person, by the way, in this, we should say, is the national parks are under the Interior Secretary, Doug Burgum. He has been at Trump's side through all of this. And if you're Doug Burgum to date, it's not what you want on your, you know, the first line of your New York Times obituary is shaping up here as the man who ruined Washington

[Joanna Coles]

D.C. doug Burgum, the man who ruined Washington D.C. i once sat behind Doug Burgam at a conference and Howard Lutnick came on the screen. He was joining us remotely. And Doug Bergen was frantically taking pictures of Howard Lutnick and sending it to someone. I don't know, I just thought, oh, interior ministers, they're just like the rest of us.

[Hugh Docherty]

Interior secretaries.

[Joanna Coles]

Interior secretaries, I always call them ministers instead of secretaries. One Britishism. I can't. I can't lose.

[Hugh Docherty]

So you have lost burning. We have both lost our Britishisms of burning the White House. So you are safe.

[Joanna Coles]

We have, we care about the White House and I don't want it to be Trumpified. I mean, my issue with it is just aesthetically, it's so weird to lump on an enormous, as King Charles would say, carbuncle, a monstrous carbuncle.

[Hugh Docherty]

I bet you can impersonate him as well.

[Joanna Coles]

I Think I can actually. I think he said it was a monstrous carbuncle. This was when he was talking about an extension that was going to be put onto the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. Full view of Nelson and Nelson's column. And in fact, he won King Charles, he was Prince Charles at the time, a fan of classical architecture, and he got that project kicked off and there was a whole to do among architects in the UK about it. But he would see this, and I think rightly so, as a monstrous carbuncle on the side of the White House, which completely knocks off any symmetry. And Washington, as we know, as you've talked about, is a city built on symmetry.

[Hugh Docherty]

And you know, the amazing, the amazing name dropping that these judges have done of Pierre Longthorn.

[Joanna Coles]

Well, they've obviously known that Donald Trump was going to go to town on them personally. I'm sure they're already being doxed by him.

[Hugh Docherty]

Well, they have also, I will say, they have made a very knowing reference. They have quoted a book about the history of Pierre Longfell and the quote from the book that they have used on the very first page of their judgment. So you can't miss it, is, is all about the Sun. King Louis XVI pointed where the king's bedroom was placed on the central axis of Versailles, enshrining the rule of divine right transferred via primogeniture. Here, in Longfaung's plan, the home of Congress took center stage. Now, who liked Versailles?

[Joanna Coles]

Right? Of course. Of course, yes. How interesting. Well, good for them.

[Hugh Docherty]

Yeah, I think these guys know how to trick it.

[Joanna Coles]

Historically.

[Hugh Docherty]

Yes.

[Joanna Coles]

Okay.

[Hugh Docherty]

Well, Todd Blanche, we are living through history and now we're at Todd Blanche straight from the Sun King.

[Joanna Coles]

Well, Todd Blanche is going to be the person that eventually figures out how they manoeuvre around this.

[Hugh Docherty]

This just went.

[Joanna Coles]

Or is he.

[Hugh Docherty]

I think he is. Joanna. Again, we have a news. We have a morning at the Daily Beast of breaking news. These are the top two stories in our site right now. And the news is that Todd Blanche looks like he's going to get confirmed, courtesy of Senator Bill Cassidy.

[Joanna Coles]

Oh, Bill Cassidy, who pretended that he was going to grill RFK Jr about vaccines and then voted for him. And then RFK Jr did what he wanted to do with vaccines anyway, which was to restrict people's access to them, which is why we now have, and I like to say this, every opportunity I can, more cases of measles in the US in the first six months of this year than we've had in the first 24 years of this millennium. That is RFK Jr's legacy.

[Hugh Docherty]

Well, that's Bill Cassidy, and that is Bill Cassidy's legacy.

[Joanna Coles]

And he got primaried.

[Hugh Docherty]

He was primaried.

[Joanna Coles]

And he's also leaving like John Cornyn. So these men are like sort of paper tigers. They pretend to roar against Todd Blanche and bluster and say, well, I need to be convinced that the slush fund is not going ahead. I need it on paper. And guess who's actually voted against them? It's the women. Now, admittedly, one of them is Susan Collins, who she's trying to save her own skin up there in Maine. But also Lisa Murkowski from Alaska, who's not up for reelection this time round and is like, no, Tob Blanche is not a good guy. I don't want any further politicization of the Justice Department.

[Hugh Docherty]

She was very robust about weaponization and saying, this is weaponization, and you can't trust Todd Blanche. But Bill Cassidy, now, that meant that when. When both the female senators said no, Bill Cassidy was the one vote, that nobody knew what he was going to do. Well, there's two votes, in fact. One was Mitch McConnell.

[Joanna Coles]

Right.

[Hugh Docherty]

But Bill Cassidy was, you know, around and findable, and people wanted to know how he would vote. And he has said this morning he has given his justification just before we started this broadcast or this podcast, I should say. And it's incredible. He says, Mr. Blanche is not perfect. I think we'd established that.

[Joanna Coles]

I think Mr. Blanche would admit that.

[Hugh Docherty]

But this choice is not between perfection and Mr. Blanche. It is between Mr. Blanche and another acting attorney general who may not run the department effectively under President Trump and who, indeed may not be as good as Mr. Blanche. So he basically said, oh, well, if it's not Todd Blanche, Trump could come up with somebody even worse. So I've got to vote for Todd Blanche.

[Joanna Coles]

So this is better the devil you know.

[Hugh Docherty]

Better the devil you know.

[Joanna Coles]

Wow.

[Hugh Docherty]

It's an extraordinary piece of maneuvering, ballet dancing, confusion. It will, however, give John Thune, the leader of the Senate leader, the majority Senate majority leader, the ability to confirm Todd Blanche. And I should say this is going to be something that a lot of people are, you know, very concerned about. And the particular group of people that are affected by this, of course, are the Epstein survivors. They had asked to meet with Cassidy. They'd asked to meet with Cassidy's staff because they say that Todd Blanche is not a fit and proper person to be the Attorney general.

[Joanna Coles]

Well, and of course, his releasing of the Epstein files and that of Pam Bondi is one of the reasons that people feel so, well, just anxious about him getting the job because it was just in a very weird piecemeal way, there's 3,3 million files still to drop, which have not yet been released.

[Hugh Docherty]

And I think we're almost certain to hear from the Epstein survivors about their disappointment. And, you know, they were very public. They wanted to meet with Bill Cassidy and he didn't listen to them and instead came up with this Friday morning justification.

[Joanna Coles]

Right. You say disappointment, I think fury. I think they are furious. And when they did eventually get to meet Todd Blanche, because you'll remember during the confirmation hearings, there was a whole group of them in the room, and people asked, in particular the Democratic senator from Rhode island asked if he would meet the victims. Eventually he agreed after the hearings were over. And apparently one of the first things he said to them when they were in his office was, well, get on with it. Yes. I mean, so rude. Yeah.

[Hugh Docherty]

You know, Todd Blanche is not trying to win a public relations war here. Quite clearly.

[Joanna Coles]

It's an audience of one.

[Hugh Docherty]

It's an audience of one. He could not afford to go give away any sense of weakness to Donald Trump, his former client. Let's just remember his former client.

[Joanna Coles]

Well, as he said when he was in the chair and when John Kennedy, the Republican senator from Louisiana, said to him, are you a friend of Mr. Trump? He said, I am Mr. Trump's lawyer.

[Hugh Docherty]

Yes.

[Joanna Coles]

I am the president's lawyer.

[Hugh Docherty]

And here we are. He's going to be the attorney general. He's got a packed inbox. What you're going to do about making my ballroom work. Congratulations, djt. Probably first email he's getting this morning.

[Joanna Coles]

Again, be careful what you wish for. You know, there is Todd Blanche. He's stuck in a kind of, you know, middling position as a perfectly acceptable lawyer in a white shoe law firm in New York. He's reaching for the brass ring and he doesn't know that it's going to cost his soul.

[Hugh Docherty]

It's a high price that people pay to reach the very top, isn't it, Joanna?

[Joanna Coles]

Well, who knows?

[Hugh Docherty]

Can somebody help us out? What's the price? We don't know.

[Joanna Coles]

Well, we do know. I mean, I think Donald Trump's first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, is the perfect predecessor for Todd Blanche to look at here. Donald Trump only saves himself.

[Hugh Docherty]

Yes.

[Joanna Coles]

Right. Jeff Sessions, who's senator in Alabama, agrees to be his attorney general. Probably absolutely thrilled. He's reached for his brass ring very quickly, has to recuse himself because of the Russia investigation because it turned out that during the campaign, he'd met the Russian ambassador and not told anybody. Odd, but still. And also, why would the Russian ambassador. Right. Who among us. But why would the Russian ambassador want to meet Jeff Sessions, the senator from. Well, I GUESS He's a U.S. senator, but the senator from Alabama recuses himself. Trump never forgives him, gets rid of him after about 18 months. And when Jeff Sessions tries to go back and reengage and get elected again as the senator from Alabama, Trump endorses his opponent. I mean, Trump trashes Jeff Sessions, who's barely recovered. Who's barely recovered.

[Hugh Docherty]

And interestingly, Bill Cassidy said that he consulted with the final attorney general under Trump's second term, Bill Barr. And this was basically Bill Barr's advice that you probably should do this because the alternative's worse. Bill Barr, he refused to go along with the election lies, and Trump trashed him in public. So I don't know what advice he might have for Todd Blanche, but his advice for Bill Cassidy seems to not have mentioned, oh, by the way, Bill, Trump's going to trash you anyway. We know what's going to happen now. He's not going to express any gratitude for this.

[Joanna Coles]

Well, the other thing that's interesting, too, is Todd Blanche going to be asked to deny lots of the election results in November as we hit the midterms. I mean, we saw this morning that Trump himself, in an interview with Punchbowl News, basically said that he knew that the Republicans were going to lose the House.

[Hugh Docherty]

Yes. And in fact, we have that clip, and it is very telling.

[Donald Trump]

And they're asking this question, and I've had some great polls recently, real polls, but they're great polls. If I don't run, will those people go out and vote? And that's the one thing I can't. I'm going to ask them to, but I'm just watching guys like you, and you're very talented people. The question is, will they vote? Because a lot of them are very angry at Republicans. To be honest with you, I don't know. I mean, they're angry at Republicans, but they're not angry. Why? They're not angry at me, but they are angry at Republicans.

[Hugh Docherty]

Everyone's always angry.

[Jeffrey Sonnenfeld]

And there are some.

[Joanna Coles]

Why would they be angry at Republicans and not angry at him? Especially now he's got us stuck in this quagmire of a war in Iran.

[Hugh Docherty]

It's funny that you asked that, Joanna, because I've, you know, searched, searched for that answer this morning as we were discussing it with our colleagues, with Dave Gardner, our brilliant D.C. correspondent. We can't think of any reason that would, any rational reason that would support that, except that Trump cannot be blamed for anything.

[Joanna Coles]

Right. And he lives in his own world. I mean, if you're Donald Trump and you're provided with good news all the time by Natalie Hart, the young blonde woman who sticks to his side. And as Michael Wolf pointed out in all or Nothing, the Secret Service were anxious about her being a security risk because she, you know, had so much proximity to the President. She's supplying him with a never ending torrent of good news and comments that he's getting on Truth Social from some of his more delusional posts.

[Hugh Docherty]

Well, we just did a hint of that in this clip. When he says real poles, the real poles are really bad. The real poles are scraping further down. When he says real poles, he obviously means the bogus affection from the outer fringes that you just hinted at.

[Joanna Coles]

I think he means maypoles, those things that people dance around in the UK to celebrate the spring solstice.

[Hugh Docherty]

Although I think if Trump was talking about poles that people dance around, oh,

[Joanna Coles]

it would be stripper poles. That's a good, good segue, Hugh. Good segue.

[Hugh Docherty]

Just to go back to this, the sense of he knows, he knows, you heard it, that there's a blue wave coming and it is inescapable. We have had this morning again, this has been a big day of breaking news. One of the other big breaking news stories this morning was about jobs. And the president is basically in these elections. It's basically a referendum on the economy. Is the economy working for you? Well, this morning the economy lost 23,000 jobs in the last month. The expectations from analysts were that it was going to be above going to be 85,000 new jobs were going to be created. Instead, we lost 23,000. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics had to revise down the number of jobs they said had been created in May and June. So the economy isn't working. That's what people we know vote on. You were speaking to James Carville this week.

[Jeffrey Sonnenfeld]

It's the economy.

[Hugh Docherty]

It's the economy, stupid.

[Joanna Coles]

And prices are going up and mortgage rates are the highest.

[Hugh Docherty]

People cannot move and cannot buy.

[Joanna Coles]

People cannot move and cannot buy. And that's reinforced every day. People are in their houses when they're too small, when they long to move to a different school area. And they're stuck.

[Hugh Docherty]

Yes.

[Joanna Coles]

And I think people feel stuck. People feel stuck when they're filling their car and they think, ugh, I can't afford to take the family out to dinner on Friday night now because this is just too much. All the small treats people are beginning to cut from their lives just to cover the basics. And that has an impact on the quality of life, too.

[Hugh Docherty]

And you just heard Trump talk about these people, that the people that voted for him might not vote for the Republicans. Well, there's a pretty good reason in all you've just said there, Joanna, why they might not vote for the Republicans because they don't feel better off. The Republicans themselves, the weird MAGA fringes were falling out this week. About $20 burritos and $20. That's a lot of money for a burrito.

[Joanna Coles]

Well, that's two hours work.

[Donald Trump]

Yeah.

[Joanna Coles]

You know, if you're on minimum wage, that's two hours work.

[Hugh Docherty]

Depends what state you're on. You're in many states. Yeah, that might even be above 2 hours minimum wage work in some states. This economy, we heard boasts this week from Scott Besant, Treasury Secretary, that the economy was really roaring. People were feeling the Trump bump that we don't want.

[Joanna Coles]

Well, his friends are. Scott Besant and his billionaire friends are feeling this, I think, I mean, from that point of view. I don't think Scott Besant's out there testing the people. I think he's calling his friends who run big private equity companies or the people that he was hanging out before Donald Trump chose him to be Treasury Secretary. And I don't think he's talking to, as we used to say in Britain, the common man.

[Hugh Docherty]

No, he's.

[Joanna Coles]

His friends are roaring because the market's roaring.

[Hugh Docherty]

And the markets went up again a bit this morning, kind of level pegging on the Dow, but they didn't go down. You would think 100,000 fewer jobs than you were expecting. That's bad news. That's really bad news for people who need jobs. That's really bad news for people who are negotiating their wages. That's really bad news everywhere except on Wall street because the analysts believe that interest rates are going to get cut and that puts the markets up. So that's the reality in Donald Trump's mind and the people he speaks to, in Scott Besant's mind, the people he speaks to and the polls, the real polls, not the Trump real polls, but the actual real polls say exactly the opposite. Which brings us to the blue wave that Trump is predicting for himself.

[Joanna Coles]

Well, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, you know, I have no particular truck with, but, you know, her daughters came to her and said, we cannot afford healthcare. Our Subsidies have been taken away by the big beautiful bill.

[Hugh Docherty]

Yes.

[Joanna Coles]

We've then gone into Iran in a war that we can't seem to get rid of. Billions of dollars spent in a completely unnecessary war that Trump was warned against doing because the Iranians would have the opportunity to take over the Strait of Hormuz, something they had fantasized about doing. Americans had never given them the opportunity to do it because every previous president had said, oh, no, we're not opening that can of worms. And Donald Trump, high from Venezuela, thinks he can go into a completely different situation and figure it out.

[Hugh Docherty]

And the other thing that this, this actually ties straight back to the ballroom because there are, as we have discussed quite a few times, the White House is leaking. The White House isn't this unified. We're all winning group of people that we had at the start of this administration. There are leaks coming out everywhere. People are whispering about Trump, about being delusional, about the failings. They're whispering to anybody that will listen, who would not listen to that.

[Joanna Coles]

Well, and I think it's possible that Donald Trump himself is leaking.

[Hugh Docherty]

Well, I think there's very little doubt about that.

[Joanna Coles]

No one calls more journalists than himself. I discussed with Michael Wolff on Inside Trump's Head on Thursday, the fact that there was this piece suggesting that Pete Hegseth had convinced Trump that going into Iran would be easy. So the White House pushing, as we know, Donald Trump has done, pushed Pete Hegseth to be the face of the war, giving him someone to blame if it were to go wrong. And of course, it has gone wrong. The Iranians know it's gone wrong. The Iranians know we have an election coming and they are going to make it as uncomfortable for Donald Trump as they possibly can.

[Hugh Docherty]

Yes. And we saw, we learned again from these leaks this week about this furious confrontation at Camp David between Trump and Exith. Now, I should say everybody involved has denied it. It's only fair to include their denials. But then Trump undercut the denial by saying this was a treasonous leak. It's not a treasonous leak. If it's not true, it's not true.

[Joanna Coles]

Exactly. Right.

[Hugh Docherty]

Bit of a problem there.

[Joanna Coles]

And again, I hate to say it because I discussed this with Michael on Inside Trump's Head also, but this is exactly what the royal family do. And exactly, I mean, this is straight out of Princess Diana's playbook and it's one of my sort of favorite stories about her. And of course, we all remember the Andrew Morton book where she gave him tape after tape after of her talking about the nightmare of being married to then Prince Charles, now King Charles. And people say, when the book came out, saying, this is absolute nonsense, it's outrageous. Andrew Morton should be arrested. Diana was the source of the bit. And this is what happens. And I think if you're outside the media, you don't always understand that people leak stories ostensibly against themselves. They then come out, as Diana would do. She would come out and say, I'm going to sue. This is outrageous. You've destroyed my life. She was the source. And unless you're in the media fielding the different sources coming at you with their version of the story, it's sometimes mind blowing to believe that people do this. But that's what politics is at its finest. And what you see is the people who are the arch manipulators. We've all had calls from people and they're calling to put their side of the story out because they know someone else is briefing against them. Lindsey Graham, the late Lindsey Graham was possibly one of the best people at doing this. He was busy sucking up to Trump on the one hand, and then frantically giving anti Trump stories to journalists on the other.

[Hugh Docherty]

Well, there's every, you know, there's every motivation for everybody to leak now and at the start of this administration because it's failing. Because it's failing. Because it's failing. I mean, the latest leak this morning is about the ballroom and about the creation of a new reality in D.C. that's covered in gold. And it's from a Trump insider who describes this as. He concentrates on the hobbies that distract from the terrible polling numbers. And calling these things hobbies is deliberately belittling. It will get back to Trump. He'll be annoyed. But these people want that out there so that they are not blamed by the other Republicans for all these problems.

[Joanna Coles]

Well, and also half the cabinet are thinking about their own future. And are they going to run? Like, how does. If Pete Hegseth is blamed for the war, how does he run? When does he separate himself? J.D. vance already separated himself. The one message that comes out of Regime Change, the best selling book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, is that J.D. vance did not support the war. He was the real one that did not support the war. And he wants to be able to separate himself. So when he runs, he's got a differentiation. And we all remember that terrible moment for Kamala Harris when she's on the View and people say, what would you have done differently to Joe Biden? And she doesn't differentiate herself she can't separate from him because she's too close to him. And she's not, frankly, she wasn't quick enough on her feet to come up with something that would have given her. Some would have separated.

[Hugh Docherty]

Yes. And it's obvious that J.D. vance's lizard brain has kicked in here and he knows when he goes on the View to answer that question that he has an answer. He's going to say, I was very public about my views on the war. I had to go along with it. But it wasn't me, it was Pete, it was Marco. It was anybody else who's running, and it certainly wasn't me.

[Joanna Coles]

And then he does the thing about I have to be loyal to the president, so it's my job to try and execute it as best I can. I had to go and try and negotiate a ceasefire in Iran.

[Hugh Docherty]

I was trying for a ceasefire.

[Joanna Coles]

Right. But in fact, it wasn't something that I actually agree.

[Hugh Docherty]

And it was Pete who pushed it. It was Marco who pushed it. It was the deep state who pushed it. He'll find people. But this is really, we are in a crystal ball situation here that we can see from these leaks what's going to be talked about in two years time around this time. Two years time, It'll start sooner than that. I think.

[Joanna Coles]

It's already begun.

[Hugh Docherty]

It's already begun.

[Joanna Coles]

Right. The lame duckery is completely evident. And actually, James Carville, who we interviewed on the Daily Beast podcast this week, was very thoughtful about this when he said that Trump will not know what's hit him when he loses Congress, assuming he does, assuming he loses the House of Representatives. It's just power evaporates and everybody moves to who is the new center of power.

[Hugh Docherty]

Well, we do actually have a bit of a clue about what Trump is thinking from this interview with Punchbowl this morning.

[Joanna Coles]

Okay.

[Hugh Docherty]

And we are going to play that clip because I think you're going to be interested in it, Joanna.

[Joanna Coles]

Okay, let's hear it. Let's hear it.

[Jeffrey Sonnenfeld]

Do you want Thune to serve another term as leader? Do you think? Would you support him?

[Donald Trump]

Well, I don't want to get into that necessarily, but why?

[Hugh Docherty]

A lot of people are thinking about it.

[Jeffrey Sonnenfeld]

This is a big issue.

[Donald Trump]

I get along with him. It's unfortunate that he doesn't have the vote.

[Joanna Coles]

Does he get on with John Thune?

[Hugh Docherty]

So I know, Joanna, Republican leader of

[Joanna Coles]

the Senate whose granite Jordan should run for president because he looks from central casting. I don't think Donald Trump knows what to do with John Thune because He is central casting. And I'm sure Trump looks and thinks he should be president, not me. Except he's not.

[Hugh Docherty]

Doesn't have the votes. We just heard.

[Joanna Coles]

Doesn't have the votes, intriguingly.

[Hugh Docherty]

Well, we know. We now know from that that Trump has some insight into what will happen when he. If he loses both the House and the Senate, he knows that there's going to be a lot of things going against him. Also, in that interview, he completely reversed himself on Hakeem Jeffries.

[Joanna Coles]

Right. Hakim Jeffries, who he said he couldn't remember. He didn't know who he was.

[Hugh Docherty]

Didn't know who he was. Called him low IQ and called him a thug, which is clearly racially coded.

[Joanna Coles]

They posted on Truth Social a picture of him with a sombrero.

[Hugh Docherty]

Yes. And then a series of memes of him and Chuck Schumer as a mariachi band to try to claim that they were flooding the country with, you know, with immigrants. We all get the idea, but suddenly, oh, no, no, no. He's a nice guy.

[Joanna Coles]

Great guy, great guy. I could do business with him.

[Hugh Docherty]

And of course, you know, this is Trump back in his New York ways. He'll do business with anybody. But that's not how this is going to work. This is a Democratic Party that is battered. It's troubled. But if Hakeem Jeffries is the man in the Speaker's chair, all that sense of this party being in crisis is going to be much, much less obvious. And Donald Trump's going to have to do business with him. But Hakeem Jeffries get to set the terms, nice guy or not. We will wait and see. But here we have some insight from Trump about what he thinks is going to happen. Now, the reason I highlight John Thune is because he obviously wants rid of John Thune. He hates him. There's no love lost.

[Joanna Coles]

Right. They hate each other.

[Hugh Docherty]

You couldn't get more different.

[Joanna Coles]

Right. And also, John Thune has been the blocker to Trump, desperately trying to get his Save America.

[Hugh Docherty]

Exactly. And John Thune says, we're not going to block the thief filibuster. We don't have the votes to blow up the filibuster. He is putting himself in the way for his caucus behind him. There are more people in that group that don't want to blow up the filibuster than admit to it.

[Joanna Coles]

And there are people that don't want to give into the Save America act, too. And they don't want Donald Trump to have his own way, and they are holding out. Now, I Think.

[Hugh Docherty]

And they're doing it until they win,

[Joanna Coles]

of course, because they're terrified of being primaried.

[Hugh Docherty]

But the primary is the intriguing thing because you won't believe this, Joanna, but John Thune might face a primary. You might have to go and register in South Dakota to help prop it up.

[Joanna Coles]

I would do that. I like John Thune. I don't know why I like him. I like him because he's just more presidential than. I don't like his policies, but I like this kind of look.

[Hugh Docherty]

It is an absolutely jaw dropping development as to who might primary John Thune. It is Corey Lewandowski.

[Joanna Coles]

Corey Lewandowski, the alleged lover of Kristi Noem?

[Hugh Docherty]

Yes. Kristi Noem is the former governor, of course, of South Dakota. She still has a house there. She is divorcing Brian Noem, her husband,

[Joanna Coles]

who got caught in an unfortunate bimbocation.

[Hugh Docherty]

Remember the bimbofication?

[Joanna Coles]

We do. In fact, I bought some pink balloons into the studio to tell Michael about it because he'd never heard Michael Wolfe. He'd never heard of bimbofication.

[Hugh Docherty]

I don't think. Anyway, I hadn't. I mean, I don't know about you, Joanna, but it was all news to me when I read about it. Cosmo's an open minded place.

[Joanna Coles]

Actually, even at Cosmo, I don't think we'd come across men sticking balloons up their sweaters and pretending they were big breasted bimbos. No, that was a strange one. But who knows, you know, there's a place for everybody.

[Hugh Docherty]

Kristi Norm is divorcing Brian Gnom and she and Corey Lewandowski, who must miss the plane.

[Joanna Coles]

Do you remember they were flying around the Department of Homeland Security's plane?

[Hugh Docherty]

Yes.

[Joanna Coles]

And that must have been fun. They had their own room, apparently. It was very swish. We did a lot of reports.

[Hugh Docherty]

In fact, the photographs on screen right now, for those who are watching on YouTube, this is the flying boudoir.

[Joanna Coles]

Right. And of course he was actually spotted by a Daily Beast reporter taking out the trash for from her apartment one Sunday evening in D.C. i think he was. Which may have been the first thing that triggered people to the fact that they were more than advising each other.

[Hugh Docherty]

Yes. And he continues to deny that he is married. He's a father of four, He's a family in New Hampshire.

[Joanna Coles]

But he has a troubled history with women.

[Hugh Docherty]

He has a troubled history with women. He had a public fight with his former lover Hope Hicks in front of the Trump tower back in 2016, which, I mean, that's an eon ago. There have been other stories about him.

[Joanna Coles]

A reporter complained against him because he'd sort of grabbed her.

[Hugh Docherty]

Yes, there was an allegation of sexual harassment at a fundraiser back at the end of the first Trump administration. There's been allegations. The reason I mentioned that he has denied this affair is that he is now threatening to primary John Thune in South Dakota, where he does not live. What else would bring him to South Dakota? An intriguing question, Corey, if you want to get in touch. I know we've asked for comment from you at the Daily Beast, but police aren't there.

[Joanna Coles]

Well, Kristi Noem has a farm there where she once famously shot her dog, Cricket, a puppy, in fact. Yes, she's staying in South Dakota because she has to look after the farm, which I'm assuming in the divorce she gets most of. Cause I think it was in her family when they got married. So Corey's looking for a reason to spend more time in South Dakota, and John Thune's seat might be it. And I'm assuming he might get Trump's endorsement over John Thune.

[Hugh Docherty]

I think that's very much what he's, what he's thinking here, that this endorsement is available. I mean, we just heard from the President himself. That is not somebody who's going to endorse John Thune if he can avoid it.

[Joanna Coles]

So just to be clear, is this, he would be primaried in 2026.

[Hugh Docherty]

Yes. John Thune. Sorry, no, in 2028. John Thune.

[Joanna Coles]

So what this is, is it's a threat to John.

[Hugh Docherty]

It's a hanging dagger.

[Joanna Coles]

Do not do what I want. You will be primaried, possibly by Corey or maybe other people, maybe others. Does Kristi Noem herself?

[Hugh Docherty]

Well, it's actually not. It's way within the realms of possibility. Kristi Noem had ambitions to be vice president. You will remember that she pretty much admitted that in her book. She thinks that she is up for higher office. At the moment. All she is is special envoy to the Shield of the Americas, which we follow closely at the Daily Beast. But why not? Everybody gets up and thinks, good morning.

[Joanna Coles]

Well, and also she did spend.

[Hugh Docherty]

Madam President.

[Joanna Coles]

Right. She did spend quarter of a billion dollars on an ad campaign, in theory, to warn off would be illegal immigrants from coming here because they would be caught, thrown in jail and shipped back to where they came from. But in fact, I think, as once again, John Kennedy from Louisiana pointed out. Did the President know you'd spent this money? No, of course not. Even though she said that he did, because really, this was an ad campaign for Christina. And she's also, I think, looking to 20, 28 and thinking it's time for a woman president. I've got great hair extensions. I spend a lot of time spending, you know, getting my teeth done. I could be central casting for the first female president. Why don't I take a run at it?

[Hugh Docherty]

I think that is a very, it's actually a very serious possibility. I'll just say this is a sort of vibe measure which is possible to make. Our readership at the Daily Beast are fascinated by Kristi Noem. They continue to be engaged in stories on her. Now, I don't think our readers are anything other than fair minded observers of the political scene on social media. Kristi Noemi remains a popular figure in the maga.

[Joanna Coles]

Right.

[Hugh Docherty]

The engagement on Kristi Noem posts and Kristi Noem tweets and all that sort of thing is way higher than anyone else. J.T. vance, Marco Rubio, forget it. Kristi Noem gets engagement. And you know, that's where Donald Trump kind of rose from. So the sense in which this is somebody that has some of the things that would be helpful to run for president as a Republican. Oh, absolutely. I think. Mark your calendar and we could see Senator Lewandowski and President Noem.

[Jeffrey Sonnenfeld]

Ugh.

[Hugh Docherty]

That's a bold prediction.

[Joanna Coles]

What a way to go into the weekend.

[Hugh Docherty]

Well, you've missed one thing, though. They were talking about the Senate. The Senate's makeup course will change in the new year, but the Senate's makeup has been changing pretty rapidly just in the last few weeks.

[Joanna Coles]

Because I know what you're going to say.

[Hugh Docherty]

Mitch McConnell.

[Joanna Coles]

Mitch McConnell is out of rehab.

[Hugh Docherty]

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

[Joanna Coles]

Well, that's very good news for the senator and his wife. I'm glad they're out of rehab because that's a horrid place to spend 53 days.

[Hugh Docherty]

Yes.

[Joanna Coles]

Despite the fact you didn't really tell us what was going on, did you? And even the governor of Kentucky, the mild mannered Andy Beshear, rose to his full power to demand to know what was going on. And even actually other senators was saying Republican senators, even Republican senators, what's happening with Mitch McConnell? And we know there's no love lost between Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump, but Mitch McConnell doesn't appear well enough, as far as we know, to actually be counted as a vote for Todd Blanche.

[Hugh Docherty]

Well, interestingly, there's a big sigh of relief being breathed everywhere in the Republican Party and Capitol and in the White House, because if Bill Cassidy had gone the other direction, then there was an Available vote that would have got you to 50. 50. And then a tie break by JD Vance. And that available vote was Mitch McConnell. And. Well, is he capable of voting? We don't know. We still don't know.

[Joanna Coles]

Well, we still haven't had video proof.

[Hugh Docherty]

No, absolutely no video proof at all.

[Joanna Coles]

It's fine.

[Hugh Docherty]

His detail is outside his house. It was outside the hospital, now it's outside the house that we have to take in good faith as proof that he is in fact there. We also have the word of his tenant.

[Joanna Coles]

The word of his tenant. And a very bizarre also outgoing retiring Senator Bomb Tillis, you say, Tom. I don't know why he's got the H in there, although I rather like the H in there. Thom Phillis.

[Hugh Docherty]

There's a lot of H's in my name. It's borrowed.

[Joanna Coles]

North Carolina. Right.

[Hugh Docherty]

North Carolina.

[Joanna Coles]

Very conservative senator who's just had enough is retiring former management consultant.

[Hugh Docherty]

Yes.

[Joanna Coles]

He's going off to make more money because he's only 66.

[Hugh Docherty]

Yes. And he's writing a book, so stay tuned.

[Joanna Coles]

He's writing a book. This is supposed to be a tell all.

[Hugh Docherty]

Memoir. Memoir. Tom's tell.

[Joanna Coles]

All right. And really about how obsequious and ineffective several members of the Cabinet have been.

[Hugh Docherty]

He has been a really public enemy of these, of these Cabinet members. He doesn't blame Trump, he blames the Cabinet. Now, of course, others might say who created the Cabinet, Donald Trump. But Thom Taylor gives Donald Trump a pass often and says, oh, it's all the Cabinet members.

[Joanna Coles]

Well, and he says that he's writing the book because he really wants the Republicans to win the House of Representatives. So this book is supportive of the fact that Republicans are still great, but just the current Cabinet is not doing enough.

[Hugh Docherty]

Yes.

[Joanna Coles]

I'm actually kind of going to read that book.

[Hugh Docherty]

Oh. I think however it's written, it's going to be fascinating because it's fascinating either for what it says or what it doesn't say.

[Joanna Coles]

Right. And insider accounts are always interesting.

[Hugh Docherty]

What we really want from him as an insider account of being Mitch McConnell's tenant, he's in the carriage house round the back for which he pays the tenant. See?

[Joanna Coles]

Right. For which he pays 50,000 a year.

[Hugh Docherty]

Possibly. We don't. We know that in the previous year it was rented out, it made $50,000 for Mitch McConnell because he has to declare these sources of income. So we would assume that it's the same. I don't know if he's giving discounts for friends, which possible. But it's a very Strange tale for.

[Joanna Coles]

I mean, perhaps they have sort of potlucks together where Tom scampers up the stairs to Mitch, or at least when Mitch was in residence there and healthy and says, hey, what should we have tonight? And they sit and discuss things.

[Hugh Docherty]

But you know, in this image of they're both wearing pajamas and like sort of.

[Joanna Coles]

Oh, they're having a slumber party. Yeah, a Republican senatorial slumber party, I think.

[Hugh Docherty]

And they're like, oh, who should we invite over? John Thune. No, don't invite John Thune.

[Joanna Coles]

No, no, I think they would be invited John Thune because John Thew. I mean, don't forget Mitch McConnell mentored John Thune.

[Hugh Docherty]

That's true. I think you're right. They would have John Thune.

[Joanna Coles]

How can we trip Trump up? How can we cost Trump Ted Cruz? No, I don't think anybody likes Ted Cruz, do they?

[Hugh Docherty]

I believe, I think he's a loner.

[Donald Trump]

I think he's a loner.

[Joanna Coles]

Ted Cruz.

[Hugh Docherty]

I believe that is known. Yes. Yeah.

[Joanna Coles]

He's not a party guy. He's not a slumber party guy.

[Hugh Docherty]

I can't see him at a slumber party.

[Donald Trump]

No.

[Hugh Docherty]

Interesting. Interesting question. We can see him. The Daily Beast, of course, found him on vacation in Athens.

[Joanna Coles]

That's right.

[Hugh Docherty]

When Texas was being flooded. So, you know, it might not be a slumber party.

[Joanna Coles]

Oh, we know the guy likes holiday, remember? Didn't he go to Mexico?

[Hugh Docherty]

Mexico, yeah.

[Joanna Coles]

He's the guy that likes. He's hanging out with. Exactly. He's a global traveler. Have bag, will travel largely out of my state of Texas.

[Hugh Docherty]

Always ready to head.

[Joanna Coles]

Always ready to head.

[Hugh Docherty]

And I just say, just to put, you know, to finish our discussion about Mitch at the Daily Beast, we have our brilliant graphic supremo, Elizabeth Brockway calculated. What does 53 days mean in other units? We all know the Scaramucci, the unit of time, right?

[Joanna Coles]

11 days. 11 days.

[Hugh Docherty]

He was missing for 5.3 Scaramucci's. We will remember Liz Truss, who was the British Prime Minister who couldn't outlast a lettuce, Right?

[Joanna Coles]

That's right. The Star newspaper had a lettuce ahead of lettuce, which they just ran a live video on and just said which will last longer. Liz Truss as Prime minister or this head of lettuce? And that it was lettuce. Iceberg lettuce.

[Hugh Docherty]

It was. That's true. Nobody risked. Nobody risked it. 1.08 Liz Trusses.

[Joanna Coles]

Yeah.

[Hugh Docherty]

And among the other metrics, I thought

[Joanna Coles]

this was bad taste, but I did take the point. The Titan submersible. The search for the Titan submersible.

[Hugh Docherty]

Well, we all remember how long that search seemed and how desperate it seemed. Desperate.

[Joanna Coles]

Desperately hoping they would find people in there.

[Hugh Docherty]

And I'll just point out that there was a search and there has been a search from Mitch McConnell, and I don't think it's actually over, this search. Joanna. I'll just say stay tuned to the Daily Beast. We are still reporting on what's the truth about Mitch McConnell? Because we don't have any videos.

[Joanna Coles]

We still don't know. We know people have talked to him, which is what people say. I've spoken to Mitch McConnell. We don't know if Mitch McConnell spoke back.

[Hugh Docherty]

Yes.

[Joanna Coles]

We don't know if Mitch McCann spoke back.

[Hugh Docherty]

We do not.

[Joanna Coles]

We do know that something very odd, and we have reported on this extensively, was going on on top of Donald Trump's head. Now, what was it? I don't know. I thought it looked like a squirrel. Other people have said, no, no, it was a fox. A few people have said hamster, which I also thought initially, at the beginning, it was a different colour to his normal hair. So that was on Wednesday. By Thursday, it was back to normal. Which is a sort of translucent colour.

[Hugh Docherty]

Yes.

[Joanna Coles]

Often with a kind of slight layer of purple, which I recognise because occasionally if I wash my hair with a purple shampoo, I get that translucent purple.

[Hugh Docherty]

A warning for us all.

[Joanna Coles]

A blue plate special, I think, or blue rinse. I think it's called the blue rinse, hence the blue.

[Hugh Docherty]

Yes, it was quite a remarkable, remarkable hair week. And I know you discussed this with Michael Wolfe and he gave a brilliantly insightful guide into what's going on up there.

[Joanna Coles]

And each hair is based with enormous care. My concern is it just needs fire retardant. That thing looks like it would go up within a hundred yards of a match being struck. It's just like, oh, my goodness.

[Hugh Docherty]

Which makes it even crazier that there's building works going on around the corner from the Oval Office and electrical always open sparks, flames, welding.

[Joanna Coles]

Don't go near it. Don't go near it.

[Hugh Docherty]

Those judges are doing him a favour.

[Joanna Coles]

Well, they need to build the hospital as fast as possible in case he gets scalp burns.

[Hugh Docherty]

Oh, yes, well, they might. Is that a procedure that's going to be at this military hospital?

[Joanna Coles]

Who knows?

[Hugh Docherty]

Supplements.

[Joanna Coles]

Scalp supplements.

[Hugh Docherty]

If we find out, Joanna, we will be back to report.

[Joanna Coles]

We will. And I do remember that Jeffrey Epstein told Michael Wolf that Donald Trump had a scalp reduction. Once he understood that he was going bald, he had A scalp reduction which I'm assuming makes the hair transplant or whatever the weave is going on more effective. Less space to cover.

[Hugh Docherty]

Well, he's got so much space to cover now. He's got an east wing.

[Joanna Coles]

He's got an east wing. He's got an entire east wing. Good luck to the architect. I'm so excited to share with you now the conversation I had with Jeffrey Sonnenfeld. He is the senior Associate Dean for Leadership Studies at the Yale School of Management. And this is the final installment of our America 250 series produced in partnership with PMI US, US businesses of Philip Morris International as part of its year long initiative to celebrate and accelerate American innovation and reinvention. We're looking ahead to the next 250 years of America reacting directly to your comments. And Geoffrey and I had a fascinating conversation about the future of education. Let's dive right in. Geoffrey, one of the questions I bet you get a lot, and I know friends of mine ask all the time, is is there any point still sending kids to college in the age of AI? What is the future of AI in education?

[Jeffrey Sonnenfeld]

No, absolutely. The universities do not have a monopoly on repositories of knowledge and AI. This is a bit of a, of a mystique right now where every university to recruit students thinks they have to brand them as AI certified somehow and they come out of the factory and that we don't have, you know, departments that are departments of AI, Electrical Engineering, the computer science, applied math. These are not AI degrees, they're foundational. It's like having to know how a bubble memory worked 50 years ago to use a telephone. You don't need to know that level of technical details.

[Joanna Coles]

Right?

[Jeffrey Sonnenfeld]

But there's new programming, new software coming out all the time and that's where the, the AI advantage is. And schools right now are trying to act like they somehow have some intellectual departments that are the AI branded departments. It's just not the case. But we do teach you how to think, which is very important, how to ask questions. And it's something which I know is very important to you as somebody who's been a big champion of the, of the humanities as well, is asking the right questions. And that's really where the university makes a difference.

[Joanna Coles]

So this is very interesting because Dick Costello came on this very interview series two weeks ago and said he thought that AI spelled the end of thinking and that the problem was it was so much easier to use AI than it was actually to think your way through a complex problem. Why would anybody bother to Try. Do you think a college education is going to remain as valid as it has been?

[Jeffrey Sonnenfeld]

The old cliche about taking a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Yes, the AI brings you data, but it doesn't make you think. As opposed to make you drink. There's a Something just came out today in Business Insider, if it's okay to mention them, is a very interesting study of executive recruiters saying, oh, we can replace much of what we do with AI and they found out they can't get people to accept the position because it's the relationship that matters. Matching the person with the culture and the company and the character and the personality, the backgrounds. And so that an electronic matching doesn't really make the chemistry happen and you know, a dating app, it doesn't. It doesn't make the couple work. It sort of brings parties together. So no, I think there's, it's tremendous value added. Value added. The real concern right now is 70% of college presidents have told us just recently that they are worried that they don't know how to prepare students for AI. And, and an equal number tell us that they're most worried not about them getting pink slips later in their career, but just getting that first job. Ironically, some of the hardest students to place right now are computer science students, even harder than humanities students. Software jobs, coders are disappearing.

[Joanna Coles]

Right.

[Jeffrey Sonnenfeld]

So a lot of the advice that we were often giving people to somehow chase this, you know, this golden fleece of technology to be your solution for a great life, great career, that's not quite it. But learning how to think is the role of the university, and that's where there still is a great value added. Universities are, you know, to this nation, are one of the few sectors where we have a positive trade balance. You name all the major developments, whether or not it's in life sciences and MRNA or anything having to do with, you know, cryptocurrency or the cloud or, or of course, AI itself, it comes from the university at the root. That's where it makes the big difference. So if you want to be on that frontier, that's great, but there are an awful lot of people that will be needed in skilled trade positions. I will not be changing the way a plumber or electrician or many auto mechanics that are have their job enhanced with AI tools. They're still fundamentally there to have to actually put their hands on the equipment and make a difference. And if you're not oriented towards wanting to get into that of a, you know, a knowledge based field then that you don't need to go off. And not everybody needs to go to college. No, but those who do, we still see there's a giant advantage and, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars in terms of a difference of, of, of wealth over a period of time. But it's also what a college brings you in terms of quality of life for perspective and cultural views and things like that, that there's a certain enrichment in how you, you look at the life you lead.

[Joanna Coles]

Do you think the humanities are going to reassert themselves as value add in college? Because to your point, it feels like everybody's been driven towards computer studies and tech degrees and, you know, simply the pleasure of reading and the power of reading has been overlooked. And the classics, I mean, are the classics going to come back?

[Jeffrey Sonnenfeld]

I think there's a real surge of it. We see that a lot of studies that have been taking a look at the value of liberal arts education, we've seen a surge of interest. Now there is.

[Joanna Coles]

What is the surgery is that actually people applying to do the courses, people

[Jeffrey Sonnenfeld]

wanting to take the courses and realizing that perspective matters and makes a difference. And it isn't simple technical formulas that are going to lead to the ideal career and the ideal life. There are vocational schools, and that's quite valuable. But most universities aren't set up as a vocational school. They are set up to teach people how to think. And that's, you know, we've seen that just in the last five years, 64 colleges and universities shut down and 64, 64, 16, just in New England. And that has led to questions about the endowments, that how the money is spent and what's available there, and that the pressure on them. But it is something having to do with the, as they call it, the demographic cliff is that we've seen a 15% drop in kids that are 18 years old, that are college age. And just in the Northeast, we've had a 7% drop in people applying to schools. But at the same time, with all that doom and gloom, we've seen that the great schools, the really top schools, we've seen a 20% surge in applications there. So there are people moving towards Ivy Leagues, people moving towards liberal arts, people moving towards places that are not necessarily looking at a higher education as a vocational school. The vocational schools are great. We need more of them. And as a fork in the road as people make a choice. But the people who are electing to go into higher education are moving towards fields where it's something to do with perspective, as Opposed to tool driven.

[Joanna Coles]

So are you expecting a new series of vocational colleges to come into being then? I mean, where do people get this vocational training? I mean, I know in, you know, in Europe, you're much more likely to get this kind of training on the job. Plumbers have apprentices, electricians have apprentices. It's a very different sort of system there and here because universities are such profitable places for the most part, obviously not the 16 that just closed down in New England, but for the most part they are profit centers. Do you think that are colleges, are universities more likely to offer shorter vocational training courses?

[Jeffrey Sonnenfeld]

No, it's supposed to. I don't believe so. I believe, you, Honor, it's going to be a second category that we'll see a growth of vocational schools and schools that will be in a different path that people take. So if you're going into higher education, there had been such a premium in the 1960s and into 70s, pushing a lot of people towards higher education that maybe shouldn't have gone there. So in addition to the baby boom leading to expansion of a number of campuses, we also saw there is a societal pressure, a cultural pressure for somehow getting a college degree. Well, that wasn't necessary for all. And it's led to some of the blowback. We've seen that. We have seen that people who had a great deal of respect for higher education, we've seen it fall from numbers in the 60s to now numbers in the high 30s, that it has fallen in part because too many people were pushed in that direction where it didn't make sense for them. We also have had an anti intellectual tradition, as you know, since Richard Hofstadter, the historian reminded us of this. Since the late 40s and 1950s, there always has been about 20% of the United States that has an intellectual sense, a populist sense of wanting to attack institutions and not to politicize our discussion. But we do see that the MAGA movement has been attacking, as populists will, any institution from religion to the justice system to the military. And education has been another victim of MAGA attacks on institution life. And so that's why some have worried a little bit about it. But there's a little bit of a blaming of the victim there when we've seen some fall off in trust in higher education due to political attacks that see higher education as a threat.

[Joanna Coles]

So one of the first things Donald Trump did when he came into office in his second administration was to go after Harvard. And one of his most effective tools was having Harvard Alum go after their old, their old college. Has there been an impact on the Ivy League with the MAGA attack on it and in particular Donald Trump, who seemed so proud to have gone to Wharton. I mean he went to Fordham first, but then he transferred to Wharton and he talks constantly about having gone to the Ivy League himself. His kids also went there. What has been the impact?

[Jeffrey Sonnenfeld]

Well, the. There certainly are some questions raised about that are fair questions to ask about some of the governance practices of universities. There were some issues having to do with what the research focus is in some universities when it comes to Wharton in particular. I was just on a panel yesterday with their dean who is excellent. Erica James, the dean at Wharton. We couldn't offer her enough to leak whatever Donald Trump's transcript was.

[Joanna Coles]

Oh, I'm longing to read his transcript.

[Jeffrey Sonnenfeld]

No, but we probably could guess that it was not going to be Rhodes Scholar material. However, there were governance practices at his old alma mater at University of Pennsylvania. Their governance practices at Harvard before under Claudine, Gay issues about the integrity of her research, but also just about the way student tolerance was on campus and the orientation of some of the faculty. They're fair questions to ask, however, to try to because there is questions of anti Islamic or anti Semitic sentiments. Does that mean there isn't a way to address it without shutting down your IT research and shutting down your cancer research and your Alzheimer's studies and things? It was the old proverbial sledgehammer to kill a gnat. And as it turns out, those universities, Penn, Columbia, especially Harvard, did a fantastic job of changing their governance, made it much more transparent. They changed out the leadership of those schools and they brought in people that did a much, much better job. But they're still being punished for it. We saw that Donald Trump has attacked 64 universities in the spring of last year. But and they came out unfortunately, as we saw many professions from the clergy to CEOs that have become cowardly to speak out. And this notion of institutional neutrality, which is a cover for cowardice, it's something that was created. You'll hear this first. It's not been discussed anywhere in any media. It was a political ruse at the University of Chicago is the Berkeley Free Speech movement was in 1964-1965, which was speaking out on civil rights and speaking out against the war in Vietnam. University of California, Berkeley stopped all that discussion on campus that we can't have political demonstrations on campus which led to the Berkeley Free Speech movement challenging it. The president, the chancellor of Berkeley, who became the president of the University of California. Clark Kerr championed that. They came out with something called the Muscatine Report. English professor Charles Muscatine. As soon as that report came out, Ronald Reagan was elected governor in California. The first thing he did as governor in January of 1967 was to fire Clark Kerr, who said I leave here much the way I came, fired with enthusiasm. He was a great leader. But then what Chicago did was very nervous. Chicago president Charles Beadle, who is a geneticist and just didn't want to get involved in this, put this law professor Harry Calvin in charge of a commission that did a rushed study that said, oh, we don't get involved in politics at all. It was a complete political response and saying, oh, universities shouldn't take positions. In fact, that's how it's interpreted. But even the Kelvin Report says in the middle of it, unless the values of the university are at risk so they should speak out. So we use that despite these trustees two years ago telling their. A year and a half ago now telling their presidents not to speak out because universities should not have particular positions. They should be a home for all positions, which is nonsense. We got. We got 700 college and university presidents to defy their trustees and fire back angry joint letters at the White House. And you know what happened with that kind of collective action. It stopped all these edicts out of the Oval Office against higher education. Stopped much the way we saw when Mark Carney to make a huge inferential leap here. Mark Carney is the Prime Minister of Canada and we saw the EU and the UK over this Greenland nonsense finally get courage and bark back. Trump moved on is that they need collective action and the voice of universities is very important. They need to defend themselves on research fronts. There's some crazy stuff that happens and you can see we just as I was just at a conference for the Academy of Management in terms of what we focus on in my own field, what we focus on maybe in higher education in general, you could see that almost every study in all these different fields from history to political science to English literature dei. I have to admit it's like most of the papers presented in this summer's conferences are on DEI regarding. Well, what are the things could they do? Well just looking at a management school.

[Joanna Coles]

Well, why would DEI dominate the academic conference agenda? Is that as a result, is that a reaction to MAGA or is it

[Jeffrey Sonnenfeld]

just it had been going down that trend? For example, if we take a look at what the my own field of management, 26,000 management professors getting together for A conference we could have looked at.

[Joanna Coles]

What is that called? There must be a funny collective noun for 26,000.

[Jeffrey Sonnenfeld]

Talking at each other. We talk at each other. It's called the Academy of Management Global Scholars. If you put together everybody studying corporate governance, turnaround management, corporate culture, change management, recruiting, hiring, things you think you'd study at a business school, it still doesn't equal what has been the papers that are in dei. Sometimes the balance, just demography is very important, but other things need to be studied too. So universities need to wrestle with how do you get the right balance and what's studied, what's researched. But right now, the Secretary of education.

[Joanna Coles]

Crazy that DEI comes out as 28% and global competitiveness and geoeconomics comes out as 6%. 6.

[Jeffrey Sonnenfeld]

Isn't that at a business for business scholarship. Now, you're the first person to see this data. We just ran it for you today. And it's going through what, 10,000 papers that just came out this weekend. And look at the focus. So we need to maybe address the balance. That doesn't mean that we kill it with a sledgehammer. We don't need the federal government to tell us what to study or who should be admitted to school by using holistic criteria. We need diverse cultural components to be on a college campus to learn from each other as long as they meet merit criteria. But right now, the Secretary of Education just yesterday came out with a statement saying we need. If universities are going to get funded by the federal government, they have to buy into these criteria about what's studied, who's hired, who's admitted to be students in the school. And that's just wrong. There are problems to address, just like there were with anti Semitism or anti Islamist Islamophobia or whatever. These things have to be addressed or plagiarism in school. You can address them by good governance practices. You don't need the federal government to have some tyrant telling us what's permissible and what's not. So the universities have become a convenient target. So your opening question. Should parents send their kids into cauldrons of ideological battlegrounds? Yes. Still keep sending them. If they're interested in learning about ideas, if they're interested in learning about vocational trades and tools, then go down that path. Everybody doesn't have to go off, you know, to become an AI engineer or whatever.

[Joanna Coles]

We've got questions from viewers. One person here is saying the entire university system stopped being about education 20 years ago. It's now a hedge fund attached to luxury real estate.

[Jeffrey Sonnenfeld]

You know, People love to say that for everybody, from Groucho Marx in I Think It Was Horse Feathers was his movie, right through Rodney Dangerfield doing Back to School is. The pomposity of higher education is a very seductive target. People love to go after it. Just like we have seen, though, the military or the Justice Department or the clergy or any institution under attack these days. Universities get attacked very quickly. But that's really nonsense. Is we saw also this week a spate of lawsuits that went up that were against university trustees who were tapping into that supposed hedge fund to try to keep their schools alive to use that money for operating funds. But that money was specified for particular causes, for particular types of research. So they don't have the flexibility and the freedom legally to divert that into anything. But if you're concerned about the cost of higher education, what the schools who have those endowments that has those hedge funds, they're making education either almost free or certainly without. There isn't anybody that goes to an elite school, that goes to an Ivy League school or a liberal arts school. They should be leaving with any debt. Now, that's a huge change. That's because these endowments keep the tuition down. If you look at the sticker price on schools, it looks like, wow, that's a lot of money for tuition. It's perfectly. McKinsey just finished a study on this. You know, the first to hear about this too. So timely. It's brand new.

[Joanna Coles]

Good. Well, we like to hear it.

[Jeffrey Sonnenfeld]

McKinsey just showed that, in fact, it's kept pace with the cost of living. That has not gone higher than inflation has gone the cost of higher education. But on top of that, that's just the sticker price. What actually people pay, it's less than inflation. And also in student debt, it's lower than it's been in 15 years. The magnitude of student debt. But that's not the popular reality. People get caught on these things because it is a sort of a glib, catchy way to attack a university is to call it a hedge fund. Because who likes hedge funds these days?

[Joanna Coles]

Well, that's true. Although I will say, as a parent who's put two sons through college, it is very expensive, and it's much more expensive here than it is in Europe. In Germany, you can go to university free. In England, it's a third of the price that it is here.

[Jeffrey Sonnenfeld]

Well, we do have administrative bloat that's become an issue. Many studies seem to suggest that we increase at great schools, we seem to increase the student body, incrementally and we increase the faculty size arithmetically and staff grows up geometrically. Anybody who's hired to be a doer one day a week later, two weeks later, becomes a manager of three other doers. Nothing gets sunsetted in universities. So in terms of the role of AI, we have challenges for what we do in the classroom, challenges for how we calibrate what's original work. That's, you know, it's not stolen, distilled, as we say. We don't say plagiarism anymore. We say distilled.

[Donald Trump]

Oh, you do.

[Joanna Coles]

Distilled.

[Jeffrey Sonnenfeld]

Well, that's what the techies use at night now when they steal from each other's platforms. And we're worried about AI's consequence for jobs, for early career. We also need to think what AI means for the back room of bringing efficiency into university. It should be freeing up more time. So I have to admit that's a very good point and a very good question. The cost still could be lower when we take a look at what happens in Europe. And yet this is the sector where the productivity here towers the scientific output in terms of Nobel Prizes. The flow of students here is not from here to Europe for the most part, or Asia, but it's to the United States is that this is a huge. And by the way, the people who tend to achieve don't have to have gone to ivy league schools. 81% of the 300 largest tech founders, 81% didn't go to Ivy or Ivy plus schools. Is that what we see? Is that people who just graduated college, whatever kind of college, it made a difference. But then there are plenty of people like Michael Dell or Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates that didn't graduate college at all. They started college, got the ideas, and then just left to launch their businesses.

[Joanna Coles]

Right. Although they all went to Ivy League colleges, it wasn't. I mean, the ultimate trophy is to go to an Ivy League college and then leave it and not get the degree, right?

[Jeffrey Sonnenfeld]

Well, for those guys, they did. Yeah.

[Joanna Coles]

All right, so. So let me take you on to another point, which I. I love this comment. We need to make media literacy mandatory in every single grade. Today's kids get their news from TikTok influences and deep fakes. If we don't teach them how to spot misinformation, democracy is completely doomed. Thoughts?

[Jeffrey Sonnenfeld]

Oh, thoughts. I love that question so much that this microphone warning here, I reach over and hug you. Maybe I'll do it anyway. Is because that kind of bookends an early question you had. We talked about flight to quality in terms of institutions. This has to do with flight to quality in terms of information more broadly is why does the Daily Beast, and I don't mean to be pandering, do so? Well, as people have come to trust what it represents, as opposed to things that just seem to be coming and going on people's blogs out there, is that it is branded content that you can trust. And what we're seeing with the confluence of so much information is how do you break through it? Well, this is one of the reasons that Donald Trump is the sultan of insult, as we've talked about earlier. He does that to break through the kaleidoscope of information out there. He gets attention by insulting people. How do you get through in a more reasonable way with information you can trust that it's not just offending people to get attention is to have branded sources. And that's where you need media. That's not just sort of people inventing something on TikTok. Putting it out there and getting caught up in an echo chamber of referencing branded media really matters. It's going to become only more and more important. I think, you know, Steve Brill's work, Of course, with NewsGuard is very important for helping to brand sources because what it says is what is from Daily Beast, what's from the New York Times, what's from the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal that could be trusted and then some. We all make mistakes, but they correct it too.

[Joanna Coles]

Okay, good. Well, I like that answer. All right, so a question.

[Jeffrey Sonnenfeld]

The only answer you liked.

[Joanna Coles]

No, I liked other ones too. All right.

[Jeffrey Sonnenfeld]

We've been talking for an hour and a half.

[Joanna Coles]

Two and a half hours, Jeffrey. Two and a half hours. All of the essays and homework kids submit now are just written by ChatGPT. They aren't learning how to think critically or write anymore. How do we even fix this? And then another question. I think AI in the classroom can actually be helpful if we use it to take away the busy work and let teachers actually teach students in a one on one ratio.

[Jeffrey Sonnenfeld]

I have an editor for another magazine that I write for. If I knew you better, and we were just talking off the record, I'd tell you it's Fortune magazine who uses AI a lot to edit material. And he's admitted to me he's the business editor for Fortune, which you would think, what else is there in Fortune? But there is apparently other things he said. It's that my work defies AI editing. And I'm very, very proud of that is that if you're putting together with a truly different approach, which what universities should do is to help you not just source information, but to find unusual patterns. With lateral thinking, yeah, there's a lot of good analytic vertical thinking, but then there is lateral thinking, which is finding relationships between seemingly unrelated things that a really good paper should come up with. I tell my students at final exams you could use whatever you want, open book, computer, AI, whatever you want. And I'm not concerned because I just know that I'm going to give them questions. It would just be impossible for a sane person to think of those questions. For a rational thinking system to be able to put those pieces together. It's going to be often. Not to give it away for next year's exams, but sometimes there'll be a strong personal component to answering a question, comparing it to panels we've had in class and readings we've had, and if it's the right kind of. And breaking news events. It's impossible to have so many different types of inputs that could be integrated in a way that, that was created that moment for that student to do that. Any AI model could be trained to give that back to you. Yeah. If you are going in for a radiology exam, radiologists perhaps are in, are in trouble because there's a certain repetitive pattern of looking for what the broken bone is or what the organ is that's malfunctioning. CT scan or something like that is. I can see that there are areas. But if it's something that's truly novel, the human body is not that novel. We have perhaps some new dread diseases and viruses that come along, but for the most part, finding systemic problems is not going to be novel. But if we create novel information, those papers should be not. They should not be a problem.

[Joanna Coles]

So let me ask you something then. Final question. Do you think your students are better educated now than they were 15 years ago?

[Jeffrey Sonnenfeld]

Well, you know, we've had a problem in higher education for a long time. If you go back 80 years and to the Baltimore sun, somebody in your line of work, H.L. mencken, said, Great old universities like my own tend to teach living languages as if they were dead and dead languages as if they're alive. We have had this problem for a long time. And it's not an AI issue. It's not technological disruption. It's not the disparagement of higher education. It is to not think of education as a religion. Religions have a stable static quality to them. Education needs to keep learning and growing. But like any profession, we can get lazy and just put it on cruise control. So I think that's such a poignant close. Thank you.

[Joanna Coles]

Thank you again to Jeffrey Sonnenfeld from the Yale School of Management for joining me. And thank you if you have been for watching. Don't forget you can subscribe to the Daily Beast, smash the subscription button wherever you get your podcasts. And a big thank you to our production team, John Romero, Brian Murray, Rachel Passer, Heather Passaro, and Neil Rosenhaus. So the good news is we have so many beebeast tier members now there are too many names to read out and we really appreciate your support.