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- [00:00]
Ryan Lizza
Foreign.
- [00:10]
Charlie Sykes
I'm Charlie Sykes. Welcome to this episode of to the Contrary podcast. It is the 100th day of the Trump administration. We got to 100 days. We'll talk about that a little bit later. But I am joined by my fellow Substack writer, Ryan Lizza, who recently left his job at Politico, where he served as the chief Washington correspondent since Trump 2019. And things have been interesting. First of all, welcome to the podcast, Ryan.
- [00:38]
Ryan Lizza
Hey, thanks for having me. Long time, long time listener, first time caller, I guess, is what you're supposed to say.
- [00:43]
Charlie Sykes
Excellent. Okay, so I want to start with Ryan Lizzo versus Politico, because this is, I am genuinely fascinated by this entire story. You wrote a piece that was, I think, kind of a mild media criticism of them, but talking about the difficulty of covering the Trump administration, the challenge that we all face, and how some outlets like Politico are perhaps not up to it. Okay, we're going to get back to that. They responded by demanding that you censor your article, that you pull down the entire 1800 word piece, which was remarkable to see a media outlet basically telling a reporter to shut up. So talk to me about this because this has been escalating, it feels, day by day by day.
- [01:34]
Ryan Lizza
Yeah, yeah. I mean, and frankly, you know, I didn't want the first week of Telus News, that's T E L O S dot news, to be, you know, overwhelmed with, with this, with this story. So the opening piece, yeah, you know, you know, it prevented me from covering a lot of other stuff I had planned to cover. So you're right. I wrote something 1800 words a week ago today, the initial post at Telus News, and it was mostly about Trump targeting Paul Weiss. It was mostly about how these lawyers and the law firm on their website erased their own history under pressure from the Trump administration. So a sort of, you know, side story to the big Trump attack on these law firms is just, you go look at their websites and see how they have just sort of, in this Orwellian fashion, cleaned up their own biographies. Their own biographies, their own history, their own celebration of certain parts of their history. And that's what a lot of the piece was about. And then, of course, much of the piece was about announcing what this new media company is that I started laying out what I think the problems are in political journalism and how in a small way, I hope Telus can serve as a model to do things a little bit better. In that 1800 word article, Politico was mentioned, incidentally, a couple of Times, in my view, in a respectful way. But certainly there was some respectful criticism of them and not the reporters there who are very close friends of mine who I think are doing very often excellent work, but the leadership. And I was just shocked that after that piece went up, I got these panicked phone calls from a lawyer at Politico and they left a garbled message. But what I was able to make out is that it had, first of all, the word violation. I thought, you know, nobody wants to hear, you know, someone say, oh, you violated something, and then you need to take it down immediately. And I thought, take what down? What is this about? And then 20 minutes later, I got a letter saying that the entire, that Politico is demanding that I erase from the Internet the entire article. So there was.
- [04:21]
Charlie Sykes
Because they thought it was disparaging to them. Right. And that they're saying that you have a non disparagement deal of some kind. So they're interpreting disparagement as any criticism, including larger criticism of the media in the age of Trump.
- [04:37]
Ryan Lizza
Well, that's what I thought. That's what blew me away. The more I thought about it is this was not, and look, frankly, someone I know at Politico and have worked with in the past. So this was not that person who reaching out in a sort of friendly manner saying, hey, we think that this line, this line, you know, let's go through this carefully. We think that these things are, you know, whatever their case was, I don't, I don't think they have a case even on that. But that would have been a conversation to have. They didn't do that. Instead, they just simply demanded, in this intimidating, bullying language, that the entire article be taken down, which frankly put them in the position of, you know, going to bat for the Trump administration, saying, you know, we want, you know, there's no carve outs here. You know, you're reporting on Paul Weiss and the introduction of your new publication. You know, obviously we have no beef with that. But that's not what they did. They asked for everything to come down well.
- [05:40]
Charlie Sykes
And this, this has, this has continued to escalate. The threats seem to be more pointed. I guess one of my questions is, why are they doing this? Because this does seem to be a perfect example of the Streisand effect. You write this piece, they could have just simply ignored it, said, hey, Ryan, you go on your way, we'll go on our way. Now, this has become a big controversy. Why are they, the corporate overlords of Politico, so anxious to do this, which again, calls way more attention now to, you know, you are a media outlet in an age in which the media is under threat, and yet you're spending a tremendous amount of your time and your social capital trying to kill a story. I mean, I want to stick with the hypocrisy there because, you know, for a lot of people in the media, I think one of the things we've learned is that, you know, despite all of their claims that they are the champions of democracy, you know, bottom line is they're businesses and they're going to behave like businesses and they don't care about, necessarily about, you know, having this kind of free flowing dialogue and reporting.
- [06:49]
Ryan Lizza
Well, you, you, you really hit it in terms of what we're witnessing in the Trump administration with, with the media. Right? The, you know, I've never been one of those people who was like, you know, media's owned by big corporations, so that therefore none of us can do our job without interference. But what has changed in the last hundred days is that Trump has state and the enormous regulatory powers of the state to go one by one to these behemoth companies who have very important business before the government and use that as pressure to get the people at the top to reach their hand into the newsrooms and meddle. And that's, you know, as, you know, Charlie, you know, that's new. That's, that's new. You could point, probably point to cases like that in history, but this is systematic. And it started with ABC News and then paying $15 million for this frivolous lawsuit against George Stephanopoulos. It was atrocious. And it's gone on with what's going on at CBS where, you know, you have folks in the Trump administration who are making things very painful for that company. And it's caused friction between 60 minutes, obviously in the corporate parent. And so I'm much more of one of those people now who thinks, damn, getting out of corporate media is much more important than I used to think. Independent media is much, much more important. Because if you're going to have a government that's guiding philosophy is to weaponize the state against the American public or at least its perceived enemies. It's not advantageous to work for a big company that is too entangled with the government.
- [08:39]
Charlie Sykes
Well, let's talk about some of the things that you wrote, you know, you're talking about again. We know Politico as well as other outlets, you said their style of political coverage is not meeting the unprecedented moment of democratic peril we're facing, he said, I know that sounds, you wrote, but I know that sounds dramatic. But the gap between what is actually happening in Washington and how it is being framed and reported would it became much too wide. Now, your moment of shock was, as you pointed out, the Paul Weiss story. But what exactly. Let's talk about how the media is covering Donald Trump, how they've handled, how they've navigated that first hundred days. So where have they fallen short? What should they be doing that you are not hearing them do?
- [09:24]
Ryan Lizza
Yeah. And the first thing always to say when you're doing any media criticism is the media is whatever. It's a lot of different things. And so it is important to be, be specific. For instance, I think the New York Times is doing some of the best work in the world. It's an absolutely essential news organization. I think it's a little scary that it actually doesn't have any robust competitors. But anyway, just, you know, I know a lot of people bash the Times. I just want to, I'm not, you know, I'm not one of those people. I try and be nuanced about what I think is working and isn't. But the, I think there are a lot of reporters who got into this business because we love politics. We love the campaigns and polling and ads and we love covering it as two roughly equal parties in competition with a set of rules that are followed. And it's really, really uncomfortable when all of that changes. And suddenly the government is basically the tip of a spear of an anti democratic movement. And that the overwhelming majority of what Americans need to worry about when it comes to politics and the government is about Trump and this political movement. Right.
- [10:54]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah.
- [10:54]
Ryan Lizza
And that's hard for a lot of people to wrap their head around who came up like I did in journalism as you know, this style of journalism where you're always looking to both sides, every issue I can't believe we're still talking about. He broke that model. He weaponized the way I put it. I did an interview with a nice reporter over at the Columbia Journalism Review today and the way I put it to him was like, you know, he's weaponized our conventions against us. Right. Our conventions of objectivity and the general and fairness. And we have to, I mean, the way I think about this and look, it's not easy to, you know, to put this in a bullet point list of here's how you have to do it from going forward. But instead of being beholden to these conventions which have served a purpose, will serve Certain purposes going forward, you should be beholden to the ideals of the profession, not the conventions, but the ideals. And most of us got into journalism for idealistic reasons and being forthright about the fact that journalism is American journalism, political journalism at its core, is about ensuring that our democracy survives. And, you know, what does that mean, though?
- [12:20]
Charlie Sykes
But so, I mean, so I agree with everything you're saying, but specifically, like, day by day, as people are commenting and reporting on the Trump administration, are you saying there should be more screaming headlines like, this is really bad? No, no, no. This is really, really bad. You have no fucking idea how bad this is.
- [12:41]
Ryan Lizza
You know, in some ways, I think that can backfire is the constant head on fire. You know, the key, I think, is you have to make editorial editors do that every day at every important institution. You just, you have to make judgments, and sometimes they're subjective judgments about framing. And you cannot treat everything as a, you know, as pure politics.
- [13:09]
Charlie Sykes
In other words, as horse race, necessarily.
- [13:12]
Ryan Lizza
Right. Because everything gets horse racist, Charlie. Because, so Donald Trump says, you know, my goal, my political goal. What's going.
- [13:18]
Charlie Sykes
To.
- [13:18]
Ryan Lizza
Cause, you know, what's going to make me successful is to, you know, you know, whatever crazy unconstitutional thing you want to, you know, want to throw out, if suddenly he sets that as a goal, the coverage can't be just judging whether he's, like, hit his metric or not. Like, and that is, there's so much of the coverage. You know, I see these headlines sometimes where it's like, you know, Donald Trump's next target is law firm, whatever. And it's all sort of covered in this way, you know, where you use his own.
- [13:55]
Charlie Sykes
It's pundit. It's pundit brain. Right? I mean, it's pundit brain. It's like the Reichstag fire a political plus or negative. How will this move the numbers actually, you know, some pundit going on saying, you know, the Reichstag fire will actually play to, you know, the, the NDSP's political strengths or whatever. It's like, wait, wait, wait, wait. No, we can't cover it that way. That's what you're saying, right?
- [14:20]
Ryan Lizza
Yeah, you've got, you've got pundits paid on CNN just to play that role, just to sort of make that argument with everything. And it's crazy. And there's this sense that that is somehow more fair and more helpful way of covering things. And, you know, that's. That you. So that's the, that's the problem. As, As I see it, you have to. And look, every. It's not going to be easy to do this because sometimes these things are subjective and sometimes your own biases can come in. But, but you have to center the fact that you care about this democracy. And being a journalist means being pro democracy, which, you know, is, you know, now that's considered partisan. It's, you know, it's considered partisan language to think of yourself that way. And I just think we have to like, wrap our head around that as reporters, and it's going to be a little uncomfortable.
- [15:17]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah. I mean, you wrote this struck me, you wrote, a friend of mine who served in Iraq once tried to explain to me how psychologically disorienting warfare can be for soldiers the first time they're in full scale combat. It's so horrific, so unlike any human experience, that the initial instinct is to deny that what's happening is actually happening. And that is the psychology that has seized many newsrooms, law firms, and other elite institutions in Washington. Four months. I mean, you do get that sense of complete discombobulation, complete disorientation. How do we deal with this? And, you know, the default setting is to go back and like, let's cover this like it's a normal presidency, a normal time. Right. Because that's all we know.
- [16:02]
Ryan Lizza
You know, the easier way to say it is just being in denial because it's really uncomfortable, especially for a lot of reporters to wrap their heads around what is actually going on. You know, I admit, personally, sort of wrestling with this, you know, as I've watched the Trump administration unfold, you know, and I didn't write about this, but I remember, you know, in the early days reading some very, you know, learned scholars about who study democracy and, you know, you know, the names. Yeah. And these people were using language that was so much more worrisome than anything that was in the sort of mainstream political reporting. And I just thought at time it.
- [16:55]
Charlie Sykes
Felt over the top gap.
- [16:58]
Ryan Lizza
Yeah, maybe it did, but I thought so our coverage is not reflecting what some of the people who actually study this stuff. And the gap was really, really w. And I'm not saying everything that, you know, Timothy Snyder said was gospel, but we should be taking that stuff very, very seriously. And, you know, for me, it was thinking through that and being more interested in that debate and how you could cover what's going on through a little bit more through that prism, rather than a kind of, you know, brain de horse race journalism. And it's not to say that that other stuff doesn't exist, isn't out there. You you will find plenty of examples and plenty of articles and conversations about some of the stuff that I'm saying is generally missing.
- [18:01]
Charlie Sykes
Right?
- [18:02]
Ryan Lizza
It's, you know, it's, it's not, it's not absent, but it needs to be more at the, the forefront. So of coverage.
- [18:11]
Charlie Sykes
Well, you tell a story that I actually found genuinely shocking before the election, that you had a podcast at Politico and that you recorded a podcast with one of the most important voices. I think somebody who really, really gets this, my friend Jonathan Rauch, who described what the danger of a Trump administration would be like. And that podcast never ran and you published it, you downloaded it in your new publication, Telos News. And obviously that also touched a nerve for the folks in Politico. You got another letter, right? You got another threat because you posted that. So tell me, first of all, what happened with that podcast? How can a voice like Jonathan Rauch talking to Politico before the presidential election not be deemed worthy of running?
- [19:00]
Ryan Lizza
You know, it's a really interesting question and I don't think there's a smoking gun here. You know, partly it's my, you know, I should probably, it's my own fault for not pushing. But to me, when I think about, like, why didn't this ever run? I think the sense at a place like Politico is just that it's, it's considered partisan. It's this whole hour long conversation about, you know, basically by someone laying out in detail how Trump's anti Democratic agenda is likely to unfold. And, you know, the more I thought about it, I understand. The question I was trying to wrestle with in resurfacing that interview is why is it when we cover politics that this isn't, this doesn't like, fit in, you know, like, why doesn't this fit into the political conversation?
- [20:02]
Charlie Sykes
Well, that feels like a smoking gun to me. No, that feels like, you know, as an illustration of what you're talking about here, you have a powerful respective voice, raising exactly the issues that you were describing, framing it exactly the way that we needed to frame it, and yet somehow it didn't fit into the model of what they were doing at Politico. This seems to sort of encapsulate your whole critique, right? Is that we're covering it as a horse race and then there are these voices out there saying, no, it is about this. And somehow that didn't fit the model.
- [20:37]
Ryan Lizza
And it's a mindset rather than a, you know, we're suppressing this to help Donald Trump. It's more Just a general kind of vibe, you know what I mean? Charlie and I think that we spend so much time, and I don't disagree with this criticism, but we spend so much time wrestling with why Biden's health issues, his mental, his mental acuity. You know, I don't think it's just age, but you know, what we saw in this, what we saw in the debate, basically, you know, why wasn't that covered more? Why didn't people really get to the bottom of that? I think that's a, I think that's a legitimate criticism for a lot of news. Yeah, but we don't spend as much time talking about why. What's going on right now, which was laid out in quite a bit of detail, is no secret about what, you know, Trump, Trump didn't hide this. Why don't we spend as much time on that, on that issue and wrestling with it on a, on a daily basis?
- [21:35]
Charlie Sykes
Excellent point. Now, I, I'm gonna confess a certain amount of naivete because I have just so much bandwidth of all the things to pay attention to. Actually, I just went to a used bookstore and bought a book of essays by Saul Bellow, which, by the way, is titled There is Simply Too Much to Think about. That seems like, wow. Yeah, there is too much to think about all the time. But one of the things that I didn't fully understand until your fight with Politico escalated, as you pointed out, Politico is run by. How do you pronounce his name? Matthias.
- [22:10]
Ryan Lizza
Matthias Dobner.
- [22:11]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, Matthias Dobner, a conservative German billionaire and the CEO. The CEO of Axel Springer. And I guess I knew these names, but this is a Berlin based media empire. And this is going back to the whole thing that, okay, Politico is very respected player, but now it's part of an international corporate conglomerate. And you have another one more billionaire who's got his own personal agenda here and you've called him out on, on that.
- [22:45]
Ryan Lizza
Yeah, I think, I don't, you know, I don't know Matias very well. You know, I sat with him at the White House correspondence dinner last year. You know, he was at my table. It's under quite a bit of pressure to make sure we had some good guests that could entertain him. And look, I, I, I have told people that I never saw evidence when I was at Politico once. The, you know, we would always just refer to them as the Germans. You know, once, once the Germans took over, I didn't, I never saw evidence of any ideological meddling. But it's Something that all of us were on guard about. Because in Germany, Matthias is very, you know, his tabloid is very well known for being, you know, politically involved in pushing things this way or that way. He's known in Germany as the Rupert Murdoch of Germany. He's a very powerful and influential figure in German politics. So naturally, if you work for someone like that, you wonder, is he going to export that model to the United States? And I think if you want to look for some worrying signs, you can point to some comments. A comment he made recently talking about JD's forgetting the word he used, but saying something very Inspiring, inspiring about J.D. vance's speech that I did not find inspiring. And, you know, that was after, I'll tell you why that stung a little bit for people who work there is because that was after the Trump administration had really gone after Politico and its reporters. Trump called it a left wing rag. He made up this ridiculous conspiracy thing about Politico being funded by USAID because a lot of government agencies pay for political subscriptions. And so people, they were feeling really under attack. And I think in those moments, you're really looking for editorial leadership, corporate ownership to make sure they have your back. And my view of what you want in those moments is, is not a hint of giving in to the administration because they smell weakness and they will take another mile and they will come right back at you. So in those moments, even if it makes you seem a little, you know, too hot or too partisan, you, you know, you got to punch right back. And I was looking for those signs and I didn't, I'll be very honest, I didn't see them. And I was very disappointed. I thought it was very regrettable that Politico sent one of our great reporters, Dasha Burns, to CPAC to do an onstage interview. And, you know, my view of CPAC is that it has become just a sewer of media bashing and, you know, right wing conspiracies. And it's very important and fine to cover cpac, but I don't think you want your brand as a news organization to be associated with it in that way, to put someone on stage in a sort of, you know, kind of in more, more endorsement like thing. And I remember last year we had a reporter who was invited to CPAC in 2024 and they were told, no, you know, don't. We don't, you know, we don't do that. And so I thought it was a bad look to make that change. And especially after there was this, you know, fisticuffs with the Trump administration.
- [26:38]
Charlie Sykes
You've mentioned that there are folks who are still at Politico, your former colleagues, who are at least quietly, you know, reaching out to you that are embarrassed by the fact that Politico is actually trying to censor you and to bully you. And by the way, I think that that's exactly what they're trying to do. So give me a sense of, you know, I think we're seeing this in all of these institutions, in these newsrooms where there are people who are trying to do their jobs, trying to, you know, you know, maintain some sort of, you know, their own integrity. But so what has the reaction been inside Politico to this rather escalating fight between you and the, those guys?
- [27:17]
Ryan Lizza
Yeah, I mean, I tell you, obviously I talk to my colleagues over there all the time and, you know, they've been very glued to this, to this thing, because it's so unusual. I saw a lot of those folks this weekend at various events in Washington. And, you know, where the rubber, where the rubber meets the road is that, you know, a lot of my colleagues are paid subscribers now to tell US News, which I think is sort of the ultimate endorsement. But I don't want to characterize every single person. Obviously there's some mixed views, but there is a general sense that a news organization should not be asking a journalist to remove entire 1800 word articles over incidental criticism, even if they believe it's, that they have a, a legitimate legal reason about a line or two. It's just crazy to ask for the whole scale deletion of an article and then in the ensuing debate, additional requests for the deletion of additional articles, and that the whole thing is just in general a bad look.
- [28:33]
Charlie Sykes
Well, and you wrote that you were giving political. Okay, I'm sorry, the, Go, go, go back to this. The, the, the letters from the lawyers have become increasingly aggressive and they're saying you've given Politico no choice but to sue you. You have mentioned in your articles, though, you're, you're all on your own, right? You have no say. You're, you've, you're working without a net right now. Big organization owned by a billionaire that decides to sue you, take you to court. I mean, aren't you concerned they will vapor, they will vaporize you, right? I mean, how, how, how big is the threat? I mean, how dangerous is the threat? They could, they could look if they.
- [29:16]
Ryan Lizza
Wanted, if they wanted to spend money. I mean, just, I, I, it's funny you say this, Charlie, because Ironically, tomorrow I have a very long piece coming out about a six year battle I had with Devin Nunes who sued me for defamation. And I remember that. Yeah. And so that case, that case only wrapped up, believe it or not, that the end of that case officially is today. And I'll explain why in this piece tomorrow. And it's why I've waited until tomorrow to run this. But you know, I know what it's like to go through litigation by someone who's got a lot of money and can make your life miserable. It's not fun. You could do a lot of damage. You can force people to spend a lot of money, you can tie them up with all sorts of frivolous requests if you really want to do it. So I, you know, I take this, I take the threat pretty seriously, but my alternative was to absolutely eviscerate my own journalistic integrity on the first day of launching this new venture, which obviously would have been insane. So I'm not going to delete articles. I just think it's so anti Democratic, anti free speech and the way they went about it without any kind of conversation, without any kind of, you know, it's just these conclusory arguments. You must, we demand you take this down right away. That's nuts. And no self respecting journalists would do that. So they, you know, they, they wrote me on Friday saying I leave them with no choice but to sue, pursue litigation. They left me with no choice. And so, you know, we'll see where it ends up. I'm not going to be bullied by this. I'm not going to take this mater. And if they think that the best thing to do is to sue me and enter into litigation, then I'm prepared to defend myself vigorously and successfully.
- [31:35]
Charlie Sykes
Good for you. Okay, so let's switch gears to what you do best and what you got into this profession to do, which is to do a little bit of news analysis. It's the 100 day mark. What are your major takeaways? I'm sort of overwhelmed with, with trying to categorize all the different things that have happened. I would say this, however, that anyone who was really shocked by what Trump has tried to do was not paying attention last year because he was very clear what he was going to do. And we were warned over and over and over again. But I'm willing to say the speed and the scope and the determination has really been remarkable. I think for me, the biggest surprise was the lack going back to our, what we've been discussing has been the lack of real resistance, the number of institutions that rolled over to him. That surprised me. What Trump did was predictable. The collapse of much of the opposition or the people, the institutions, the guardrails, whatever you want to say that you counted on. That was a little breathtaking. That was a lot breathtaking.
- [32:44]
Ryan Lizza
Unbelievable. I think, still hard to wrap my head around what media organizations did, we already mentioned abc, what the universities like Columbia did, and what some of these law firms, which I don't know, I guess I don't know as much about big law firms as I thought I did. But at the end of the day, if you had asked me, you know, and I've been involved in enough litigation to know some of the great, some great lawyers who. And I just can't believe that, you know, officers of the court would roll over so easily. I just, you know, made me realize I just don't have that culture.
- [33:26]
Charlie Sykes
You and I had the same reaction to all of that. I felt like, am I just a little stuck on this? I just, I cannot believe these gigantic law firms, these billion dollar law firms cutting these deals where they're basically putting themselves into receivership to Donald Trump, I mean, the humiliation of it, the, the bad, the bad judgment. But it was this sense that resistance is futile and that, that's one of the themes of the first hundred days, right? That so many institutions decided he was unstoppable, that there was just too much power, and that he would destroy you if you did not bend the knee.
- [34:00]
Ryan Lizza
And it's scary to be on the other side of those things. I mean, you know, just, just to go back to this piece that's coming out tomorrow, that's, that's one of the, that's what this piece is about is, you know, when Devin Nunes sued me, he was chairman of the Intelligence Committee, and the litigation went on for years. Eventually he became CEO of the parent company of Truth Social. But all sorts of key political actors in the MAGA movement eventually became part of this litigation. And so it gave me just a little bit of a sense of what it's like to be targeted. You know, like when we talk about the weaponization of government, it gave me a close up view of that. So as I've watched this unfold in the last hundred days, I sort of thought about this six year process and I thought, you know what, you know, that's what I saw this, I saw them testing this out. You know, in the last six or seven years, when folks like Nunes and a lawyer he used named Steven Biss launched a well funded campaign against the media to use the courts and if they could get to it, the discovery process to target reporters and journalistic institutions around the country. And it, you know, it sort of.
- [35:17]
Charlie Sykes
Made them realize the win to win. Right. I mean, they don't need to win the case to drain you. Right. I mean, the process is the punishment 100%, Charlie.
- [35:27]
Ryan Lizza
Absolutely. Because these guys didn't win anything and all their cases got thrown out. I'm not, I'm not at least the, the ones I'm talking about with Nunes and this, I'm not aware of a single one of them that actually made it to trial. There's one that's still going on with, with msnbc, that's, that's in, in later stages. We'll see where that, where that ends up. But you're absolutely right. I had to sit for two eight hour depositions. I spent tons of time, you know, handing over very sensitive personal things. I had to fight and to go to court to, to make sure that Devin Nunes didn't get my tax return. We got his though. I didn't personally get them, but the lawyers did. And it's just a draining process. And you know what it does, Charlie, as a journalist, and it made it uncomfortable at Politico because I remember I was on CNN one time and Devin Nunes came up and I remember the host stopping at a certain point and saying, just in the spirit of full disclosure, you're being sued by Devin Nunes right now. And that's all that's true. And that's the point. The point is you go after the people who are covering you aggressively and you create a conflict and you create a conflict of interest that didn't exist before. So if they write something you don't like in the future, you can say, oh, well, you know, they're doing that because, you know, we're in litigation and that's part of it. So it's your time, it's to tarnish your reputation with Nunes because you can say pretty much anything you want in a court filing. You can't. The speech privilege in court filings is almost absolute. You can say some really crazy stuff that if you said it on the courtroom steps, you could easily be sued for defamation. But if you put it in a court filing, it's privileged, it's protected. And so they do that. And then as we, as reporters, we're protected when we write about stuff that's in court filings. So they weaponize the discovery process and that privilege process to Smear all sorts of journalists. So that was my experience, and I'm going to write about that tomorrow. Sorry to jump the gun. And I realized that this is like, this is the most important characteristic of the first hundred days is taking over the state and using it against people Trump thinks are critics. Like, that is the story and everything else is really interesting. But to me, that is the core philosophy here that, you know, and that's why I started Telus. That's the subject that we want to cover as aggressively as possible.
- [38:27]
Charlie Sykes
No, and I mean, and also when you're talking about litigation, the, just the incredible cost, the amount of money. But what we're seeing now, I think is the leverage of government power and private attacks. So it can be a two front war. I think the worst is yet to come. You know, for example, you know, with, with, with, with Paramount or these, these lawsuits. You have a private lawsuit from Donald Trump for billions of dollars for some bullshit thing. But then you also have the FCC threatening, so you have government threats as well as this private. And again, people go, I don't want to put up with all this. One of the failures, I think, really good point deal dealing with, dealing with the Trump, the Trump phenomenon, the Trump wave. The Trump regime has been the failure of imagination. Not imagining what could they do? How bad could it get? What levers of power will they use? And you think about it. You want to talk about, you know, journalists being nerds, I'm going to, I'm going to nerd out on you just a little bit, because last night, just take a break from politics. I was watching, went back and watched the first season of Andor, you know, about the fire in the Republic. Okay.
- [39:38]
Ryan Lizza
And was that a Star wars spinoff?
- [39:40]
Charlie Sykes
Yes, it's very, very well done. But they're tight. You want to sort of see a fascist regime and the building of a resistance. But the thing that struck me was the ways. Two things. Number one, the way they manipulate public opinion through propaganda, but also the technology they had for monitoring, you know, monitoring potential opposition. Now we're done with Andor.
- [40:04]
Ryan Lizza
What I think we sometimes wonder how they did it.
- [40:08]
Charlie Sykes
Well, the failure of imagination is that whatever they did is nothing compared to what we. The capacity of government and private entities to monitor private citizens. When you see confidential data from the IRS possibly being breached, when you see if those seals are broken, what could possibly. In terms of our most dystopian sense of what can the government know about you? You said you successfully were able to keep Devin Nunes from getting your tax Returns. But you could imagine a private, public oligarchy that would have access to so much more than just your tax returns right now. I mean, the world that exists in this, that I'm holding up my phone is beyond belief. So part of this resistance against the, you know, private public attacks on. On freedom and independence is we need to realize how bad it could actually get in the hands of people who have no principles, no ethics, no limits. Now there's. There's my paranoid moment for the day.
- [41:20]
Ryan Lizza
If you're preaching to the choir. This is something I've thought about because I spent six years with Devin Nunes in litigation. I. You know, the level of intellectual honesty in a lot of the filings that I saw was. Was. Was not high. And his best friend is now the director of the FBI.
- [41:41]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah.
- [41:43]
Ryan Lizza
So, you know, that's something that I've definitely taken note of. And, you know, it's. What. Not to go back to the political thing, because I'm sick of talking about it. But it's also what frustrates me a little bit that they've sucked me in, you know, that they've sucked me to, you know, because I think journalists in general are feeling a little. A little vulnerable. Right. And, you know, we've got enough stuff to worry about without, like, you know, a former employer news organization, you know, messing with you and making things more. More difficult at this moment.
- [42:18]
Charlie Sykes
At this moment, with all the threats that are out there, with all of the issues, everything at stake that they would choose. I know. I agree with you, but you've raised a number of issues. I mean, it's like with Cash Patel as. And, you know, talking about the first 100 days, even 200 days ago, if you and I would have gone through a list of the Trump cabinet members, you would have thought it was a joke or it was a parody. You know, it's like, okay, I'll raise you. Pesh Patel is going to be the FBI director. And you might say, no, no, no. Tulsi Gabbard's going to be the. Aha. Okay. Who can come up with more absurd. And yet here we are. So if an FBI agent comes to my door, do I talk to them? Do I cooperate with them? Do I treat the. Do I give the government the benefit of the doubt that I might have years ago? I don't know. Who can you trust?
- [43:06]
Ryan Lizza
I can answer that question for you, Charlotte. If an FBI agent comes to your door, you very politely tell him the name of your lawyer, and they can start there.
- [43:16]
Charlie Sykes
Well, exactly. And I You know, this would be true of virtually every single agency. So we're having to confront questions that we've never had to confront before. And I wrote my Substack newsletter today on the question, well, what would you do if ICE agents come to your place of business here in Milwaukee? We had a sitting judge arrested in the courthouse because she wouldn't cooperate necessarily do what the ICE agents wanted. Well, you know, if you're a doctor, if you're, if you're a teacher, if you're a principal, if you're an academic, you might have to confront that somebody coming to you and saying, you know, what moral political choice are you going to make now? Are you going to turn that migrant over? Are you going to cooperate with us? You can turn that migrant over. Because if you don't do what we tell you to do, there's a potential that we're going to arrest you and charge you with felonies. And I cannot remember a time in my life where I. So many Americans, including I'm going to put myself in this list, is actually fearful of their government, that the government can do something to me because of something I think or say or do that is not strictly illegal. But, you know, again, this is the failure of imagination in the past. And so going back to your coverage, if you cover this as if it's just sort of like, hey, let's cover this presidency the way we covered the second term of the Clinton presidency, you're kind of missing the story here, right? You're missing, you're missing the line here.
- [44:41]
Ryan Lizza
That's that, that's it. That's where the warfare analogy comes, comes in what you just described, that kind of fear that, you know, people could be afraid of that and it could be totally misplaced because nothing like that's going on. But the fact that we're having conversations like that and the fear is very well founded based on what we witnessed the last hundred days. You know, that's where, like, you know, when you. You have to snap out of the denial and be like, oh, shit, I'm actually, you know, I'm actually in combat here. Like, you know, it's. It's this, you know, this, this. This is real.
- [45:15]
Charlie Sykes
And you're actually on a plane to El Salvador. Yeah.
- [45:20]
Ryan Lizza
And like, that's. I think that's. It's really hard to. It is, you know, just to step. Take a step back from the, from the media bashing. It is hard to constantly and regularly explain to people what the stakes are, especially to normal people who just don't either really like Donald Trump and don't think that they'll have anything to worry about here or think everything he's doing is just fine. Explaining the stakes is difficult. This is why I think Trump's big mistake is probably his biggest mistake is what he did with tariffs and how he just tanked his approval rating by tanking, by possibly tanking the economy, but at least meddling with it in a way that a lot of people said, wait a second, this is not what I signed up for. Because as you know Charlie better than most people out there, if you want to be like a 2025 authoritarian, there's a playbook, right? And you keep the public on your. By making sure the economy is humming along. Right. Very hard to turn things into North Korea in most countries these days. Right. But if you want to do the Orban model, if you want to do the Putin model, you make sure that it doesn't cost people economically.
- [46:48]
Charlie Sykes
Right?
- [46:48]
Ryan Lizza
You can get away with all kinds of shit if you make people's lives a little bit better than the fully Democratic predecessors.
- [46:58]
Charlie Sykes
As long as the 401ks were fat and happy, he could have gotten away with a lot. Interesting that when the 401k starts shrinking, people become interested in a lot of other issues. I have to say that the most surprising number that I've seen, and I think it was from the New York Times Siena poll, was that his ranking, not only is he underwater on immigration, which is his key issue, but also his handling of the story of the Maryland man, Abrego Garcia, who was rendition.
- [47:27]
Ryan Lizza
People get it.
- [47:28]
Charlie Sykes
Well, because all the smart people were telling us, all the horse race pundits were telling us that, no, no, no, don't talk about this because this is Donald Trump's strength. The public actually likes it. It turns out that defying the Supreme Court is not popular. People get it.
- [47:44]
Ryan Lizza
Yeah, it's interesting because I probably would have bought that political argument that you're criticizing there. And I do wonder how much it just how much it changes the view of a politician or the view of Trump to take the specific case here when the tariff just meltdown was suddenly front and center for everyone. And does that start to bleed into all the other issues? And do people start to think like, huh, wait a second, maybe I should start listening to these annoying people who are always criticizing Donald Trump about this other stuff? You know, maybe there's something there. I know it's hard to untangle those things, but a little bit like the Afghanistan moment in Biden's first year, I was always, frankly, was always very surprised at how clear the data was that.
- [48:39]
Charlie Sykes
That was like a very, you know.
- [48:41]
Ryan Lizza
That was like a hurricane for him that, you know, arguably he didn't really recover from and, you know, fundamentally changed the way a lot of sort of voters who don't pay that much attention to politics but liked Biden over Trump because of the chaos of that first Trump term. And, you know, that maybe that's what we're, maybe that's what we're seeing here. And it is bleeding into those other issues and people, critics of Trump are getting a fairer hearing on some of this other stuff. Or Charlie, maybe it's just that, like, the American people don't like, you know, sending people to gulags.
- [49:21]
Charlie Sykes
Well, you know, this is actually an interesting point because there are a lot of the people who have these, you know, the pundit playbook, who see everything that Trump does as part of this four dimensional chess that he's distracting. So, and I, you know, you watch the guy long enough, you kind of understand why he does certain things that he does. And clearly he was trying to distract from one story or another. You had the gulags. Maybe he was using the gulag story to distract from the economy. But as you're pointing out, maybe it's not working that way. Maybe they are bleeding into one another. That the playbook that used to be we're going to get you to talk about A as opposed to B isn't quite working now. People are going, well, yeah, maybe we ought to rethink all that because that doesn't make any sense to me. And suddenly, see, this is one of the differences of Trump 2.0, as you know, is the Trump 1.0. Until you got the COVID epidemic, it didn't really affect people's lives or people at home. Stuff that was happening right now, everything they're doing is affecting every community, every state. There's the list of institutions. People are seeing the stories, the human cost much more dramatically than in Trump 1.0. And amazingly, for those of us who watch this, it does seem to be hurting Trump's numbers. Something does matter.
- [50:42]
Ryan Lizza
Yeah, he's not, you know, he's not Superman. And you're right because there's been so much work in the, you know, I've been meaning to write, to write about this. And we're so Trump focused and we're so focused on this as it's all Trump. It's all Trump. A lot of the worst shit that's going on Right now, in the last hundred days, comes right out of the fevered imaginations of some of the most MAGA Republicans, especially in the House. And as you know, there's been an entire movement that has tried to put the meat on the bone of this instinctual Trumpism that came along in 2015 and 2016. And there's been a lot of hard work at Heritage and other places. The attacks on the universities. I mean, House Republicans, they had a lot of fun going after Columbia, wrapped everything in an effort to fight antisemitism, and they laid out this plan to go after the universities. Right. So this is a Republican Party now that is sort of adopted the sort of weaponization of the government as a model.
- [52:05]
Charlie Sykes
So.
- [52:08]
Ryan Lizza
It'S not just Trump anymore, by any means.
- [52:11]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, I mean, you know, Rush vote. Unlike Elon, Musk does seem to know what he's doing. I mean, he seems to have had a plan and he's executing it. And by the way, we haven't heard much from Elon lately, have we?
- [52:23]
Ryan Lizza
He's been very quiet. He's been very quiet ever since the Wisconsin election. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, you know, funny thing about Elon is if you are. I own a Tesla, and I used to be one of these Tesla fanboys back in the day, and I, I realized that Elon was an absolute fraud years ago just from being watching Tesla up. If you watched Elon over the years as the, you know, running Tesla, you would realize what a complete bullshit artist the guy was. And the way that he promised this and that, you know, his cars would be flying across the country in six more months if you just paid this amount. And anyway, so that. I think those of us who were, who were conned by a lot of his Tesla marketing saw a long time ago that this guy was not to be trusted.
- [53:18]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah. But the bullshit finally caught up with him, didn't it? I guess. Or at least politically. So that. That bromance appears to be done. I mean, 100 days. Is that it? Are we done with. Are we done with Elon Musk?
- [53:32]
Ryan Lizza
Yeah, I feel like that's one that everyone predicted because no relation.
- [53:35]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, that's.
- [53:36]
Ryan Lizza
We know enough about Trump to know that a relationship like that cannot survive. And, you know, I feel like everyone who confidently predicted that is, Is. Is. Is feeling okay, but I don't know, Charlie, he might just have gone. Gone quiet. So I. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not so sure.
- [53:58]
Charlie Sykes
Well, you know, when you're the world's richest man, you can you can take a break and come back. But he's, he's busy with the, what, 40 kids or whatever he's got. I mean, the, it's, you know, inseminating the whole planet so that you can repopulate Mars is like time consuming. I mean, that's like, come on. You know.
- [54:14]
Ryan Lizza
But first you got to make sure that the federal government can in no way help that, has no resources to help that mission in any way. That's the one thing that just. I don't really get, Elon's ideological commitment to just torching everything. I still don't quite understand that. I mean, but the thing that I found when I really put my tinfoil hat on in these first hundred days, the thing that I have found really, really interesting and tried to sort of understand is something you alluded to before in terms of government data and surveillance. Because the Doge effort was so laser focused on government data, there was a point where they made the CIO of every government agent, the Chief Information Officer, a traditionally bureaucratic professional. They turned that into a position that was political appointees because Elon was having so much trouble getting access to these systems. And if you read some of the interesting academics on this who were really, really worried when he started going department by department, agency to agency, really, really trying to get access to the data, you know, that the, you know, the logical conclusion of that could be something really, really scary. Right? Like, very. We built. You know, this is where the libertarians have a really good point. They had a point of saying, of saying, told you so. You might, you know, you never know who's going to be in power and what they're going to do with all that stuff. And so that, to me, is still one of the more undercovered stories of.
- [56:10]
Charlie Sykes
I agree.
- [56:11]
Ryan Lizza
Was this just a wrecking ball approach or was there a more thought out plan here when it comes to consolidating access to data?
- [56:24]
Charlie Sykes
And we may not know the fallout from that. Four years. I mean, the reality is everything. Yeah.
- [56:29]
Ryan Lizza
And sometimes, you know, sometimes I think you sound crazy talking about this stuff.
- [56:33]
Charlie Sykes
I know, I know, I know, I know.
- [56:35]
Ryan Lizza
And you know, I had someone, I was a driver the other day, we were having a conversation, and I hate to be the cliched, annoying Washington person who's citing a taxi driver or an Uber driver, but really, you know, it was just such a telling example because a very reasonable guy who, who said something like, well, I think the tanking of the economy is part of the whole thing because he wants to declare martial law after that. And you have really crazy conversations like that these days. And I think there was a point where I would have quietly gotten out of the cab and politely told this guy have a great day. And it's not my reaction anymore. And that's the place we're in right now.
- [57:24]
Charlie Sykes
Well, you're thinking, well now I'm sorry that, that that's a bit crazy or is it? I mean you just don't. Ryan Lizza, thank you so much. Ryan Lizza, former chief Washington correspondent for Politico but now is the CEO CIO.
- [57:39]
Ryan Lizza
Whatever.
- [57:42]
Charlie Sykes
Telos news which you can find on Substack. Thanks so much for joining me today. Appreciate it very much.
- [57:47]
Ryan Lizza
It's a pleasure, Charlie. Really, really great conversation. Thank you.
- [57:50]
Charlie Sykes
And thank you all for joining me on this episode of to the Contrary. You know why we do this? Because more than ever we need to remind ourselves that we are not the reason.