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- [00:00]
Mike Pesca
The Gist is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. Hi, it's Mike with a major announcement. It is not about the Gist. It is about something called the Gist List. So let me tell you, every day I construct the show by reading and listening and imbibing a tremendous amount of information. A lot of it doesn't make it onto the show, of course. So what do we do with that? What do we do with the effluvia, the jetsam, the sods, but also the odds. Enter the Gist List. Every day on Substack, I will be compiling the most interesting, important, maybe unfairly ignored stories that I look at and say, there's something there. You know, we must nurture that which is interesting in this world. Some of these stories do end up as segments. They all start off as ideas. We need ideas. The Gist list is designed to interest you, definitely. Not to waste your time to make you smarter. To see where I'm heading every day on the Gist, so head over to Mike Pesca dot substack dotcom today and every day to sign up for the Gist list. It's Wednesday, May 14, 2025. From Peach Fish Productions, it's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca. Headline, New York Times World Catholics don't see new Pope as a typical American. Well, I can understand that he has certain qualities that most other Americans don't have, like the papacy. He's the Pope. Demographically speaking, most other Americans aren't. Very few, statistically insignificant assortment of Americans are actually the Pope. So, yeah, he's his own man now. One thing that is more typical, more earthbound, less holy and exalted than you'd like is that the Pope, the former Robert Prevost, has a brother Lou. I'm doing. I'm doing New York, but it should be has a brother Lou. And Lou has opinions. Lou doesn't talk exactly like that. But Lou has put his opinions online. He says that anyone with a transgender child is a shitty parent. He says that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a drunken. Can I say the C word? I don't know if I can. I can. I choose not to. Lou didn't make such a choice. And he says that anti Trump Democrats should be arrested and tried for subversion and even treason against the usa. Okay. You know, that's in one context. The liturgy. That's in another context. I was already to be worried about Lou, the Pope's brother, Lou, how he might be the Billy Carter of the papacy, bringing it all down, selling it all a little bit. And then I listened to an interview by Piers Morgan, because if you really want to go and get the straight dope, you listen to Piers Morgan. And there was Lou. And first of all, Lou spoke of when he first had the knowledge that his brother would become Pope. And it was very touching and it was very human.
- [03:19]
Lou Prevost
That was me. I fell back. Oh, my God. That's my brother. My little brother just became Pope.
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David A. Graham
What.
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Lou Prevost
What's going on? I can't believe this. And that's when all my mind just went white blank. Explosions inside, outside, emotionally up and down.
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Mike Pesca
That was nice. And then they got to the issue at hand. Will. Well, you could hear Piers Morgan putting it to Lou, the Pope's brother, Louis. What about the wokeness?
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Lou Prevost
He's a communist, sympathetic, whatever. I don't. I don't see. Well, the suggestion is that your brother. It may be a touch on the woke side. I know you're pretty anti woke yourself. Can you confirm or deny that your little brother is woke? I don't know that I'd even go that far to say he's woke. I. I'll. He's probably much more liberal than I am, but that's us. And again, that's his position as a priest in the church, as part of the clergy.
- [04:13]
Mike Pesca
That's a nice answer. That's an answer that made me feel much better about the Pope, the Prevost family. I don't know America, the world discourse, even Piers Morgan, than all that. I have been reading about Lou. One other thing I've been reading about Lou that I'm not even sure if Lou knew is that his family is black or would be considered black under many laws in the United States for the history of the United States. So his maternal, the Pope and Lou Prevost's maternal grandparents were from New Orleans. And a census taker noted that the family, the Martinez is, were black because the grandfather was from Haiti, spelled with a Y. Whatever. Then future census takers counted them as white. So I figured. And then because they are actually of Creole ancestry, they moved to Chicago. It all becomes forgotten until they research it because of the Pope. I was wondering if the Prevosts even knew all of this, if Lou was the kind of guy would be going on about they're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats, only to find out he's Haitian. But I think maybe I shouldn't have had to worry so much. Many of those sentiments I do find loathsome, but I was first alerted to them by the press, and then I was influenced by an essay in Tina Brown substack. And what Tina Brown, the former editor of the New Yorker, wrote was, I don't want the papacy demystified in the way America demystifies everything with pedestrian anecdotes about how Rob, that's the Pope, used to cosplay as a priest. Geez, it was just like yesterday I was throwing him down the stairs. If holy awe is to be preserved, we don't need any undermining of papal mystique. Plus, America has enough global power as it is. Its cultural hegemony flattens the enigma of the sacred. That's good. Those are good words. I'm glad to have considered them. I think I totally disagree. What makes the Pope and the papacy mystical are the trappings thereof. The power is that all that grandeur, all that history, all that association with the mystical is embodied in a man, a common man, a flesh and blood man, a man who grew up rooting for the White Sox and having a rich family history typical of many Americans, and even, yes, having a brother with whom he disagrees when it comes to politics and yet still finds a connection. And I find this is not a lamentable thing. I, in fact, find this to be overall a salutary thing. And I also think it's a little more typical of Americans than the rest of the world might know. On the show today. I've got a good one today, a very good one. David A. Graham writes for the Atlantic. He's, he's one of those can't miss columnists. And he also has written a very concise but important book about Project 2025. So we give the whole show over to him. I asked him, and I think he appreciated these pretty probing questions, questions that challenge a few of the premises but also bring to light that David Graham's reporting bears paying attention to, because Project 2025 is, well, I'll read the title of the book, the project how Project 2025 is reshaping America. David A. Graham, up next.
- [07:47]
David A. Graham
Foreign.
- [07:54]
Mike Pesca
Doesn't Grow on Trees. Yeah, helpful, but what am I supposed to do with that? Is that actual financial advice? It's a cliche. It's also true, but it's not actionable. I'll tell you what, Green Light is sort of the correction to all of that. Green Light is a credit card and money app made for families that is a little more positive phrased in the affirmative, in fact oriented towards the affirmative to allow parents to send kids money and keep an eye on kids spending and savings and kids get to build confidence and get used to money. And the Green Light app also features a chores feature which parents like. Parents like. Now I'm not going to say manipulating but you know, linking the fact that if you get the money there are some things that you have to do, responsibilities. I kind of wish I had the whole technology or just the idea of the Greenlight app when I was a kid. And in fact our kids are a little old now. I kind of wish I started them on it a little earlier. Millions of kids and parents are already learning about money on Greenlight, the number one family finance and safety app. Start your risk free greenlight trial today at greenlight.com/the gist. That's greenlight.com/the gist gist to get started greenlight.com/the gist. David Graham has written a very useful little book about a very imposing, some would say dangerous document, Project 2025 that is the subject for each. The Heritage foundation project is called 2025. It's officially named Mandate for Leadership, the Conservative Promise 2025. And David Graham's book is the Project How Project 2025 is Reshaping America. Dave Graham's a staff writer for the Atlantic and his guide has been very useful to me. Welcome to the gist.
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David A. Graham
Thanks for having me.
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Mike Pesca
I read a lot about Project 2025. I didn't read it when it came out. I am of a couple minds about how applicable it is to what we're seeing and we're going to get into that. But let's start here. Give me two things that the administration has done that surprised even Trump watchers, but maybe didn't surprise you because you're an expert, you're a Project 2025 monk of sorts.
- [10:10]
David A. Graham
I think the way he's attacked universities, which is a very small part of Project 2025, but they talk about cutting out overhead for grants, going after the grants, going after accreditors, which we're seeing just now. Another one, I think so they'd have.
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Mike Pesca
The good game plan. Not just that, you know, he's upset with the university, is always prattling on about Columbia, that the game plan's right there.
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David A. Graham
Okay, here's how you can go about getting into universities. Yeah. Another example which is maybe not directly in There. But they talk about. There's something people keep asking me about is this idea that Department of Transportation would give grants based on the rate of marriage in a location. And that's not in there. But it did not surprise me as much as it surprised everyone else because so much of this document is focused around how we can encourage traditional families, encourage fatherhood and encourage marriage. And so I thought, oh yeah, that totally makes sense. That's right in line.
- [10:55]
Mike Pesca
Right, right. It tells you about the natalism and how important that is in the movement. I'll give you another one. We know he's very angry at dei. We know that DEI or anti wokeism, very animating force of his movement. And even people not in his movement, people just wanted to vote for him. But the idea that they would say start suing law firms based on private law firms based on diversity initiatives by claiming that what you're really doing is discriminating against white. That's a Project 2025 game plan too.
- [11:27]
David A. Graham
That's right. There's a. Throughout the text there's this idea of first of all, you know, that there's reverse discrimination, that wokeism has infiltrated all of these things and that the way to, to fight that is not to get rid of every institution but to change the way it works. So to reorient EEOC around anti white discrimination, for example.
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Mike Pesca
So did this part happen? You write that one big innovation was to create a sort of shadow government ready to plug into the executive branch.
- [11:51]
David A. Graham
I think we've seen parts of it and we haven't seen all of it. So when we see Russell vote going to the Office of Management and Budget after having written a big chapter of this and helped guide it, that's an example of how that's working. When we see the dozens of executive orders and how they line up closely with what's in Project 2025, we see that happening. The question is what happens with a lot of this staffing? And it's going to be people who we don't know, who aren't bold faced names, people who aren't in the name in the news a lot, but political appointees at lower levels. And I think that's going to determine how effective some of these departmental level changes are. And it's gonna be very hard to track. It's not going to happen quickly. And it's good. They're gonna have to get in place, get sort of into the flow of things and then start doing that. And so that's something I'm watching for in the Next three to six months of the administration.
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Mike Pesca
Yeah. And I want to compliment your book on not over interpreting Project 2025 or not thinking that it explains all. You know, it's not the holy text, for instance, but it offers insight. So I'll ask a few questions on that. One is, yes, the architects of Project 2025 serves as some sort of farm system or breeding ground for Trump administration officials. But then again, they were in the first Trump administration. Russell Vogt was right. John Ratcliffe was. So it is true that a lot of the authors of Project 2025, even if they hadn't put pen to paper, would be exactly who is in Trump's orbit and who do you think of to staff the administration? Right, right.
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David A. Graham
That's exactly right. And, you know, in many cases, what they lay out here is a consequence of their experiences in the first administration and wanting to not fall into the same traps that they felt like they did the first time.
- [13:25]
Mike Pesca
So another question I had is every administration, you talk about this during the Reagan administration, there were blueprints for leaderships, and they were followed. And it was interesting to know where he was coming from. But lately, what's happening is the world has gotten a bit more conspiratorial, is that opponents of an administration will say, this is the text that explains it, Saul Alinsky's guide to guide to protesters, for instance. And it's not always accurate, but there's probably some worth in reading it. This is more explicit. Right. This wasn't something that existed years ago that we could say, oh, this is what guides Trump. This is more of here's a guide for Trump. And it does seem like he's using the guide. But at the same time, isn't it the case that the Heritage foundation knows that it's. It's within a coalition? And so what they want to do is elevate their position within the coalition by writing some things down. And if things come to pass that they wrote down, it will look like they're powerful and they're driving the coalition. But what could also be happening is they're just the first ones to write down at length and brand the. The thing that Trump would do anyway.
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David A. Graham
I think there's some truth to that. I mean, a lot of these ideas are very much in the coalition, and they have competitors, you know, America First Policy Institute, places like this that are working in the same way and produce documents that are kind of similar. I think there's a couple things that set this apart. One is they thought very carefully, to the point of sort of elevating their place in the coalition. When they started this, they wanted to gather people from across basically all of the maga, or even maga. Curious. Right? So there are people involved who are not necessarily Trump loyalists, but for example, are on the same page on tariffs. And they're people who are from a range of conservative think tanks. So they want to get all these people in one place and that helps to kind of co opt at the movement and make them the center. And the other thing I think they do well and that has helped their effectiveness compared to the way a lot of these documents work, is they thought a lot not only about what they wanted to do, but how they wanted to do it and laying out the methods for making these things stick.
- [15:31]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. So the coalition has. There's a couple things in the Project 2025 document that the administration doesn't seem to be signing up for. I'm thinking of abortion and free trade. You write a lot about free trade because Heritage's view of free trade has changed over the years. And they claim to be sort of a big tent on free trade. But are they really?
- [15:57]
David A. Graham
Well, it's interesting. They can't. They usually try to come down in one place. You know, they want to have a single position. And in this case, you can see the seams of the movement because instead of having a single chapter on trademark, they have competing chapters. One is by Peter Navarro, who obviously was in the first Trump administration, is now in there again and is a leading proponent of tariffs. And the other one's by Kent Lassman, who leads the Competitive Enterprise Institute. And it's just like, tariffs are a terrible idea. It's cost Americans this much money. Here's why. These are a very bad idea. And I think it's striking to see these things in here because it's not. I mean, I had this idea that everything was in lockstep before I had read it. And it's interesting to see where there are these disagreements and where, you know, the Trump philosophy has and has not managed to co opt all parts of the conservative movement.
- [16:39]
Mike Pesca
Right. And I think what's happened there is to explain the history of the Heritage foundation, it's the conservative part of the Republican Party. And as the Republican Party became just indistinguishable from the conservative part, there was Heritage in those ideas. At the core of conservatism, maybe libertarians were a little bit different. There are others, but Heritage was very much what conservatism was through the Reagan years, the Bush years, et cetera. And then it all began to fracture. And then as conservatism defined itself, I'm sorry, as Republicanism defines itself around Trump. They're smart guys, they're political operators. They know even though we inheritage have never stood for it, and even though our DNA is to be against tariffs, they let Peter Navarro write a chapter because they understand that Republicanism is Trumpism. I mean, that's how I interpret it.
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David A. Graham
I think that's right. I mean, they have certain things that are very sacrosanct. I think they're very, you know, there is a real unity around, for example, this sort of social vision. And other than that, they can be flexible on things and they've seen a way to, I mean, co opt Trump seems maybe a little bit too cynical, but there's a symbiosis. They get something out of it and he gets something out of it. But they're thinking past Trump. And so they, the things that are, you know, beyond negotiation, they put in and the things that they can negotiate, like tariffs, they'll negotiate.
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Mike Pesca
So tell me about abortion. The Project 2025 and the Heritage foundation has a very clear opinion on abortion and they want it to be banned, they say, after six weeks. But they also will make noises about how we know today in America you're not going to get that ban enacted. Trump has a different inclination. I think it's smarter politically. I think it's more in line with the average voter who would possibly be tempted to vote with, with him. How does Project 2025 or the people behind it now reconcile that difference that they actually have with Trump and where his thinking is?
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David A. Graham
I think this is a place where they lay out their philosophy, but they are also aware of what's possible. And there are other places like this. I mean, they also want to abolish the Fed. And I think they don't think that's going to happen.
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Mike Pesca
Yeah, but I do think Trump wants to abolish the.
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David A. Graham
That's true.
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Mike Pesca
Whereas I don't think Trump wants to actually illegalize abortion.
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David A. Graham
Yeah, I think that's right. But I also think, you know, abortion is really important to them. And so they lay out how they would like to do, do it. And it's, you know, they see this like a lot of people in the pro life movement. I think, you know, they understand that getting over Roe, getting Roe overturn, getting over that hump was a big thing. And from there there's going to be a little bit more incremental growth. And so they lay out things, you know, they would like a national ban. But short of that, they would like to withdraw FDA approval for abortion drugs. They'd like to make it hard to send them through the mail or illegal to send them through the mail. They would like to track prescriptions across state lines and track abortions. So they have these ways to try to just tighten things in small ways that don't that fall short of a ban and can maybe be done more through regulatory action than through a major Supreme Court decision or through Congress.
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Mike Pesca
And does Trump, because it's in Project 2025, is he more likely or has he been following those smaller things?
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David A. Graham
He has not. And this is, I think, another really interesting cleavage where, like Trump, Project 2025 is not Trump and vice versa. There's a lot of overlap, but they're not the same. He has this very pragmatic approach to it. I think his approach to, you know, overturning Roe was pragmatic too. He saw a real political gain and he went for it. And then he, when he'd gotten what he wanted from that, he backed off a little bit. And we saw that in the campaign. When we talk about the low level staffers and people coming in and taking over these departments, that's where I think they're more likely to have success in the long term as they can sort of ratchet these things through the rulemaking process. But, you know, Trump also appointed Roger F. Kennedy Jr. To lead HHS. His view on abortion is a little bit vague and tough to track. It's certainly not his main cause. And so they can't really rely on a secretary to be the one pushing it.
- [20:20]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. So maybe it's the case that Trump just, even if he was a big attention to detail guy, can only pay attention to so many details as a president. I don't think he is a big attention to detail guy. So maybe the hope from them is, yeah, we're not going to get a cabinet secretary who is in charge of abortion who's exactly aligned with us. But there's a whole bunch of things that the apparatus, the deep state, their version of the administrative state can do. And we might get that. But you're saying right now they're not getting that.
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David A. Graham
I don't see it so far.
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Mike Pesca
Yeah. That's fair. So you also write that here, his quote, I think it's quote. Recognizing that their pool of loyalists had little or no actual government experience, Project 2025 organizers created a series of 30 to 90 minute video courses and in person trainings. Participants could earn certificates and topics like the Administrative state, which, ooh, to have such a certificate on the wall and essentially a crash, a crash course and smashing the system has. Is that for show? Has that been effective? The people who took the 30 minute videos are now better positioned to smash the state.
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David A. Graham
It's a little bit hard to track. I am curious about it and I think we're going to see that as we see the sort of, the quality of staffers, who they attract. I think it's a smart idea. I think the idea is based on a real problem they identified. And as much as there is frustration at, you know, bureaucrats in this and in rhetoric from Trump people, Paul Dan's one of the big architects here in Russell Vote have just real vitriol about the political appointees in the first administration. You know, they think they were George W. Bush holdovers or they were lazy or they were there for self glorification. And that was one of the real problems with Trump's first administration. It meant he couldn't get things done that he wanted to. So I think they're right that like staffing the administration with people who are actually on board is going to make you a lot more effective. You know, the videos are an interesting mix match. I haven't watched all of them, but you get some things that are.
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Mike Pesca
Do you have their certificate though?
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David A. Graham
I don't have a certificate, no. Some of them are really like straightforward and they're full of the sort of things that anybody who's gonna go into the government needs to know, you know, like basics on like, here's what a public record is, here's where you need to pay attention to public records laws. So some of this stuff is kind of boring and probably helpful for people who are getting in if they're actually effective. I think we'll see that in the, you know, two year timeframe, but we won't know yet.
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Mike Pesca
So accepting what you said, and I appreciate at the beginning your insight about, for instance, how exactly they'd go about trying to, trying to dismantle some of the power of the universities. So that's something that comes right from the project. And I talked about DEI, but I still do wonder that if the Project 2025 never existed and Trump were acting exactly as he acts now in a world where it does exist, what would be confusing us, do you think? What would we be asking? Why is he doing this particular thing? Because I do think everything he's doing is pretty consistent with who he is absent this document and this idea behind the document.
- [23:20]
David A. Graham
You know, the things that have I think been most surprising and weirdest in the administration are the ones and again, I'm coming at this from having been immersed in Project 2025 are the ones that sort of come out of nowhere. So it's, you know, Greenland, it's taking over Canada, which are not there. And they seem to just sort of flow from his impulses.
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Mike Pesca
And it's not in Project 2025, the Greenland thing?
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David A. Graham
No, no.
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Mike Pesca
Do you think it aligns with what the Heritage foundation wants, separated from the fact that it wants what Trump wants?
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David A. Graham
You know, I think on foreign policy, they are in some ways a little bit more Trumpist than Trump. Like, they really absorbed the first, first Trump administration. Like, we're going to retrench, we're looking inward. We shouldn't be as involved in the world. We can't be the world's policeman. But we need to have a we need to really focus on China. And that's like an economic project and a cultural project and a military project. And that's one of the things that I think is weird about the way Trump has gone about tariffs and a difference. You know, in Navarro's chapter, he says we need to have tariffs because we need to take on China. We need to target them really aggressively. China is such a threat, and instead they've been tariffing everybody. And I think that undermines solidarity in taking on China. But they just, they don't care a lot about the rest of the world, except insofar as they want to make sure that we're ready to take on China.
- [24:34]
Mike Pesca
So I want to ask you about the administrative state, which is the phrase they use when they're speaking maybe to an audience that might have, you know, 25% people who went to grad school in it, when they're talking to an audience that might have 50% of people who only graduated high school, they'll say, say deep state. They say deep state on a lot of their documents. It's pretty much the same thing. But let's really steel man this. If you are an Ezra Klein DEREK Thompson Atlanta Colleague, abundance agenda person, and you say there is a lot of waste in government, there needs to be reform, there is scleroticism that prevents abundance, would you not think that the administrative state, and we understand that it's a phrase that conservatives use and they use it and they wield it in ways that maybe aren't the most, that adhere to reality the most. But if really getting to abundance and cutting through a lot of the bureaucracy, that even these kind of well or well Intentioned liberals want to cut through. What's wrong with that? What's wrong with looking at this power of the administrative state and saying, yeah, there is a lot that's powerful and, and unless we do something about it, nothing's going to get done?
- [25:49]
David A. Graham
Yeah, there are a bunch of places where they, I think, lay out a diagnosis that is really convincing and the prescription is less persuasive. And this is one of them.
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Mike Pesca
That's something Trump does, is he's great at. He puts his finger on a problem and then offers solutions that would make it ten times worse.
- [26:06]
David A. Graham
Yeah, well, so like one of these is they say, you know, Congress is broken, Congress can't pass a budget. You know, it's, they've yielded all this power to the executive branch. This is a huge failure. I don't think you could find a political scientist of any party who would disagree with that, much less. You couldn't find a congressman of any party who would disagree with that. But if the answer is then to seize more power for the executive branch, I'm not sure. It doesn't seem to add up. And I think the same is true in places where they talk about the administrative state. There are a lot of really persuasive critiques of the size of government, of the speed of government, you know, bloat, too many laws, too many rules in place in general, like just reluctant to get things done. I think the problem is, one problem is if you are simply laying people off willy nilly, you're not going to be doing it in a targeted way. And I think that's a problem with the way Doge has gone about this. Another problem is if you lay off people, you may say that people are, you know, the merit system is not functioning well. But if you get rid of the merit system, you bring people on largely on the basis of political loyalty or entirely on the basis of political loyalty. You're going to get people who are more responsive to the president, but you're not going to get people who are necessarily providing better services. Those are, I think, where the cleavages come.
- [27:12]
Mike Pesca
And we'll be back in just a minute with more of David A. Graham of the Atlantic. We're back with David A. Graham, author of the Project. And let's start with a critique of the Trump administration. What they've been doing with Doge, and the critique is this. It's not the actual case that they wish to combat the administrative state. What they really want to do is not diminish the role of government, but it's to change and transform government to be only loyal to Donald Trump. They don't want to have a robust apparatus, not for cost saving or any other consideration, but they just want to use this entire DOGE project as a means to put in a system that punishes Trump's enemies and rewards Trump's loyalists. Do you think that's true?
- [28:15]
David A. Graham
I don't think that's entirely true. I don't think it's totally false. There's a little bit of a both, and there are certainly places where they want to change. Change civil service positions to political ones and make them more responsive, you know, and. And they feel, and I think this is a sincere view based in their read of the Constitution, that independent agencies like, you know, the FTC or the FCC or the CFPB are a constitutional abomination. They should be responsive to the president. It's outrageous that they don't. They exist in this weird area, and we can't have things like that. They need to respond. But they also do want to actually shutter things. I mean, they want to cut payrolls in a lot of these departments. They want to close the Education Department, although they do want to move some of those things to other places. So I, you know, I don't. I don't think it's an either or. I do think that they would like to politicize areas of the government that are not now political in the same way.
- [29:04]
Mike Pesca
Do you think the most important way to understand the difference between the Klein Thompson idea of bureaucracy and what's getting in the way of abundance and the Project 2025 administrative state critique is that it's on a continuum, and the project 2025 people care so much and they're willing to go overboard. Or is it something else?
- [29:26]
David A. Graham
You know, I think what a lot of the abundance folks are looking for is measurable outcomes in terms of, you know, number of houses built or number of regulations. There are these. These quantifiable things they want and they're trying.
- [29:38]
Mike Pesca
So what you're putting your finger on is. No, the big difference is they're defining progress differently.
- [29:43]
David A. Graham
Yeah. But I also think that, yeah, I think they have a less. Their vision is not so much the structure of society. And I think what Russell Vod is interested in is the structure of society. And so change in government is with an eye towards changing the way we interact less than the way we, you know, where we live specifically, or the cost of living.
- [30:00]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, right. So the Klein Thompson people would say, well, regulating the rivers and streams in the epa, that's important, but you go too far. You can't get abundance. Whereas Russell Vote would say not important. I think in fact antithetical to what we want. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I don't know if that's a continuum argument or of a different kind. And I think it's a little similar to immigration. To me. I, I'm not quite sure if they are going back to the administrative state thing. You know, I just, I sigh and I say, this is what Doge is doing. What Trump is doing is more than excessive, it's really terrible. It's setting back society. It's much more harm than good. But I can't point to a playbook that the abundance agenda people can say, well, this works. It just hasn't worked as well. Seems theoretical from the abundance agenda people. And so you wonder, unless you come in with some maniac with a chainsaw at a conference, are you really going to get anything done? So let's just put.
- [31:03]
David A. Graham
Yeah. And one reason I think Musk has been so effective is his, he, he has moved so quickly. There is no, you know, to sort of, there's no procedure. Just do it. Just like take care of it.
- [31:12]
Mike Pesca
You can't fight procedure. You can't fight red tape with, you know, purple tape.
- [31:15]
David A. Graham
Right. And people say, you know, Washington always wins. And what they have done is they've made it harder for Washington to win by acting so quickly. And now you start to see maybe Washington pushing back and I'll be curious to see who wins. But I think they've moved the, you know, they changed the baseline effectively and that's something that's going to be permanent.
- [31:31]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. So I was analogizing that to immigration, where you could make the argument, look, the Trumpists want immigration to go down. And Biden said, and actually achieved only in the last few months or year of it, his administration, immigration going down. So maybe you can make the argument it's a continuum or the Trump people are more dedicated to it and so they're willing to make more mistakes along the way to get the desired outcome. I don't think that's a fair description of what is really going on with the Trump agenda. I think they want a whole lot more people out of the country than the Biden or really any Democrat or even a lot of conservatives want to. So I think that's different. Does Project 2025 reflect that?
- [32:14]
David A. Graham
I think that's right. And I think, you know, they reflect a little bit of the Stephen Miller view that the problem is not just illegal immigration. Like we want to get, you know, we want to reduce that. We want to close the borders, but we also want to reduce legal immigration. They want to slash the number of visas, they want to slash student visa visas. They want to just make it harder to come into the country overall. It is very inward looking in that way. And that's not something you get from Democrats. You know, the Democrats would say maybe we have to fight illegal immigration because it's a political problem, but we don't really want to talk about it. We're embarrassed to talk about it. And we think that immigration makes the country stronger and we want to bring people in through channels like student visas or H1B visas, for example.
- [32:55]
Mike Pesca
So knowing what you know about Project 2025, what initiatives or what levers haven't they pulled yet? What's coming down the pike?
- [33:03]
David A. Graham
I'm curious to see where things go on the kind of social agenda. I'm also curious to see how things go on immigration or on environment rather. I think that's a really big area that has gotten slowly, it's getting attention. So we've seen cuts to noaa, we've seen cuts to the epa, but there's a goal to make, you know, basically all climate research and climate regulation go away to the extent they can let business kind of self regulate and encourage a lot of oil and gas drilling. And some of those things I think are easier than others. I mean, it's easy to imagine slashing a lot of regulation. They have tried to put up oil and gas leases in Alaska, for example, with relatively little success. So I'm curious to see whether that works. I'm also curious to see how their labor agenda works. And I think you have a lot of people on the left who treat the idea of a pro labor GOP as an oxymoron or a cynical maneuver. And reading through their proposals for the Labor Department, I don't think that's true. I mean, they're certainly not, you know, this is not LBJ's Democratic Party, but I think there are attempts to figure out how to put some more power in workers hands and to give workers better working conditions and to, to improve, you know, industrial, the industrial base. Those things haven't really happened yet. And I think some of Trump's economic agenda will get in the way, but they are important parts of the ideological package.
- [34:20]
Mike Pesca
Having steeped yourself in Project 2025, did you come away with more respect for any of the authors or the document itself?
- [34:28]
David A. Graham
I think so, on some levels, yeah. No, I think definitely. I mean, I think When I had read bits and pieces, I would read specific parts when I was working on a story about a specific part. But reading the whole thing, I was impressed by how serious it was, how comprehensive it was, how deeply they'd thought about it, and in some cases, how sincere the authors were in trying to think through problems that I think other conservatives have not always really taken seriously. And I felt like they were taking it seriously here. You know, I also thought it was a more radical document in a not necessarily pejorative sense, but perhaps in a pejorative sense than I had understood because it was so much aimed at a whole of government and whole of society, innovation, reform. So I think it's, you know, the way it was talked about in the campaign, I thought was a little bit superficial, and I was probably part of this, but I think it's much more interesting than I had understood.
- [35:18]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. One critique during the first administration of Trump, and it was an apt critique, was he's dissolute, he's easily distracted. He'd rather have the. He'd rather have the photo op than the actual change. He can't stick to anything. All right, this is a corrective to that. You happy?
- [35:34]
David A. Graham
Right? Exactly.
- [35:35]
Mike Pesca
And finally, among the people in his circle, or just everyone vying for power, the different warring factions, maybe they're warring less than the first time around. Are the project 2025 people in good stead?
- [35:50]
David A. Graham
I think they are. I mean, you see Russell Vote working very effectively at Ombre, and I think he has forged a really effective alliance with Elon also. And for him, I think Doge is a tool, it's a vessel. They're doing their thing using different methods maybe than Vogt had intended, but it's going to achieve something. And when Musk gets bored, or Trump gets bored with Musk and he leaves, that's still going to set Project 2025 up for what they want to do. And meanwhile, you have Vote churning out memos, churning out directives from OMB and working through his allies and other agencies. So, you know, it's awfully early to make final predictions, but at this moment, I think they're well entrenched, and I think they're making a lot of progress towards their goals.
- [36:28]
Mike Pesca
David Graham is staff writer for the Atlantic. He is one of the primary authors of their excellent newsletter and his latest book, and I swear it's a short book, in fact, in terms of ratio of text to understand a document and the original document, it's one of the greatest ones out there, and it's called the project How 2025 is Reshaping America. Thank you, David.
- [36:49]
David A. Graham
Thank you.
- [36:54]
Mike Pesca
That's it for today's show. Cory War produces the gist. Michelle Pesk is CBSO of Peach Fish Productions. Astra Green runs our Social. Kathleen Sykes runs the gist list. And Leo Baum just runs around in circles doing all sorts of things like making spreadsheets improve G Peru duparu. And thanks for listening, Sam.