Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds, and a CBS Yougo poll finds fifty eight percent of Americans want Congress to block Trump's tariffs. We have such a great choke for you today the Atlantics and Applebaum stops by to explain that our authoritarian rise is actually happening faster than normal. Then we'll talk to former The Apprentice producer Darryl Silver about what we
can learn from what he saw working with Trump. Plus, we have a special bonus from our YouTube channel with the Levers Dave Sarota on how Democrats can use Trump's tariffs to win. But first the news Smike.
We have Dave Serota from The Lever on this podcast a little later and on our YouTube channel today and his news organization as a blockbuster story that Trump's irs pick was just enriched by tech schemers and that they paid down one hundred and thirty thousand dollars of his personal debt.
Yeah, I mean, look, this is happening all over the Trump administration, so none of us should be surprised. But this is a new document show that Billy Long. He was a member of Congress or Republican member of Congress. One hundred and thirty thousand dollars in personal debt was suddenly paid off by donors at a firm policed by the tax agency he lead. By the way, this Trump administration has been through a ton of different You'll be shocked to know this. IRS directors, this is the acting
head of the IRS is stepping down and retiring. It's just been like a cascade of resignations IRS chief Information Officer and by the way, twenty thousand IRS employees offered to resign because Trump has been trying to streamline the IRS and make it very tiny. So you should not be surprised. And look, this is like low key cleptocracy here.
Paying off the loans of the government agency that is supposed to monitor you political contributions is one of the many ways in which Trump's people grift off this administration.
Governor Gavin Newsom's California is now the first state to suit Trump on tariffs.
Yeah, let's talk about this Governor Gavin Newsom. He is a bad podcaster, but he is in some way as a good governor.
Have you ever heard of somebody starting a podcast and having their polls fall because of it.
Yes, it's so stupid. And again, I just want to just for one second, let's just go over this again with Newsom Gavin. If you're listening, I want to say one thing. You want to go on their podcasts. You don't want them to come on your podcast. You need to get in front of the audience that listens to Steve Bannon, not get Steve Bannon in front of your audience. You see what I'm saying. Go on Steve Bannon's podcast, don't have Steve Bannon go on your podcast. This is
how this works. This is the siloed media industrial complex. Go to them, don't bring them to you. Thank you, and good night. But yes, this is good. California is the fifth largest economy in the world. They will be absolutely, like all of us, completely fucked over by tariffs. I'm glad they're doing this. By the way, tariff's are a really good example of how stupid and bad this administration is. Right Like, they don't work, nobody wants them. They make
everything more expensive. They're not going to onshore manufacturing by making things more expensive. There does not like one plus two dozen equal seven thousand. So I am glad to see this. I wish that we would see, you know, the rage that people are having about the tariffs, about the like grad student disappearing right, that grad student is still in the Louisiana detention facility after having written it
opinion piece, right, So that stuff I would rather. I wish people would be a little more upset about that than the tariffs. But good for California. And you know, I think more importantly, I think there's a real chance that none of this, you know, this is going to stop the tariffs. Between this and the Supreme Court case, I actually think that will actually work, so good for them. And like with so many things Trump is trying to do, there is no legal standing for it.
Speaking of no legal standing, we used to have this bipartisan consensus that no one would ever ever contend that the sole due process thing is one of the things that makes America great. Well that's gone now because jad Vince says he's fine with the inevitable errors of due process.
Jd Vance has been shopping this all day on Twitter. He is like, we shouldn't have to process for illegals or for people who are non American citizens. By the way, I want to point out that this administration and these Republicans have for a while been saying that that people who are not in this country legally are not entitled to due process. And what we saw very clearly from the Supreme Court nine zero is that, in fact, no,
that's not true. So it is so JD Vance by the way, to have JD Vance being like, no, you know, the Supreme Court already said you can't do this, JD. So like, here's the deal. You don't get to do it, Like that's it. And again I think it's worth remembering like they are trying to do a lot of illegal stuff because they want to, and we need to push back and say n because no, no, no, no, this is not okay. This is not what any of us
should be doing. And he's wrong. The Supreme Court won't go along with this, and he's going to try because he's super sketchy, but just ignore it. He's wrong. It's not going to happen. Thank god we have the courts.
So, speaking of we have seen a very very big tide shift in the Democratic base, and there's a new poll from Harvard Center for American Political studies that shows that Democrats want the party to abandon this centrist approach. No more Liz Cheney being trot out. Yeah, they're going left.
So this is Harvard Center for American Political Studies. We have to caveat this because this makes you too happy. So I'm worried it's not totally legit. Anytime anything confirms our priors, we have to be a little suspicious.
Yes, But also anytime you see crowds that size all of a sudden, you start to wonder, right.
And the crowds that sis you're talking about are the Bernie aoc rallies. A survey taken by Harvard Center for American Political Studies and Harris between April ninth and tenth found that seventy two percent of Democratic voters support politicians like Sanders and AOC who are calling on Democrats to adapt a more aggressive stance towards Trump and his administration, fight harder rather than leaders who are willing to compromise
with President Trump. So that's I think pretty important. I wouldn't say I think, Look, Jesse's very lefty, and I am leftyer than I was for a long time. But I do think this is really important. It is about taking a stand and pushing back. I would also add that this is AOC and Chris Murphy and all the politicians who have been standing up have raised millions of dollars.
They've had like the best quarter ever. So clearly voters like this, and they want this, and they want pushback and they want standing up, and they don't want you to bring Charlie Kirk on your podcast. That's for you, Governor Musing. And Applebaum is the author of Autocracy, Inc. The Dictators who want to run the world. Welcome back and Applebaum, thanks for having me. I'm so glad to have you because you predicted everything that was going to happen.
I'm sorry to telling you love everything. You wrote. This really brilliant book about cryptocracy and what that looks like in authoritarianism, and you just had a really smart op at about it. And so we've spent a lot of time thinking about what this presidency would look like. In some ways, it's worse. In some ways, it's not as bad. I mean, there are certain parts of it which I think are worse, but also there seems to be more weiggle room, if.
That makes sense, in the area of kleptocracy and corruption and conflicts of interest. This is about as bad as it could be. Yes, So I did write a book. It's called Autocracy, Inc. And it was about this network of dictators who don't share any ideology, but they have common interests, and they often have common financial interests, and they act out of their financial and political interests and not in the interests of their own countries when they
make decisions. When the book was published, which was last summer, a lot of people said, and will Trump be like that? And I said, let's wait and see. But I think that's a really precise description of what we're seeing. We're seeing an administration which is acting not in the interests of all Americans, but in the interest of very small groups and in some cases in the president's personal financial interest.
I just want you to tell us who those dictators are. That's Orbon and Bud and right, Yeah, the book.
The book was actually about Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela. Leaders of countries who where there are no checks and balances, where there's no rule of law, where the law is whatever the person in charge or the party in charge says it is right, and that's that was a that's the big difference, the important difference between those countries and liberal democracies. And I was also particularly interested in countries that were fighting against narratives of democracy and we're trying
to create an authoritarian narrative instead. And actually you can see ways in which this administration is also collaborating in that project, so taking apart American soft power and institutions
and that promoted democracy and so on. But I think the I think the shift in the direction of personalized rule without rule of law, seeking to undermine or go around the constitution, seeking to attacking the legal community, actually attacking law firms, directly, seeking to undermine courts, ignoring or mocking court decisions.
That is stuff that.
We know from the autocratic world. That's almost the definition of autocracy. You know, these are countries where people rule without any constraints. And it looks to me like this administration also wants to rule without any constraints.
Right, and things like for example, this is a bit neasy, but they're kicking out the wire services of the White House press pool.
Seaking the wire services out of the White House press pool, suing or using regulatory bodies to undermine the broadcast networks, issuing executive orders against law firms seeking to literally take over universities. I mean, the proposal for what they wanted to do to Harvard was actually there's no way Harvard could ever have accepted it. It was about giving the administration control over a faculty, hiring, courses, students, eventually acceptances,
all kinds of things that no institution could tolerate. So all those things are part of a project. And the project is eliminate any source of information or knowledge or expertise that can challenge the ruler, and eliminate any source of possible descent, any institutions or organizations that could transmit or communicate descent. These are tactics that we know from the autocratic world. This is how many autocrats came to power,
or it's what they do once they have power. Here, I have to say, I think maybe Americans don't realize the shift has happened here much faster than I have seen happen anywhere else. Usually it takes a long time. Like there's an expression boiling the frog. You know, you do a little, one little thing, and then another little thing, and then before the frog knows that the frog is boiled. This is much more aggressive, and of course it might
also therefore create a much more powerful counter reaction. The aim and the goals are clear. It's attack institutions, it's undermined the rule of law, eliminate sources of disagreement, and do so also as a way of fighting culture wars. So when the administration attacks Harvard or Columbia, the purpose isn't just legal. It's also part of a narrative game. We're pushing back against institutions that you don't like, or
that they think there are supporters don't like. There's an argument being made as well as these legal changes happening.
It's important to sort of mention that Columbia did the wrong thing, and the billionaires and the law firms that went along with that. You don't ever win by acquiescing. Will you talk about that? I mean, except with Putin, But you don't win Trump doing.
That with Putin.
Do so.
Note what happened to Columbia is something that everyone should pay attention to. Because Columbia tried to concede. Columbia tried
to go along with what the Straation wanted. It tried to it abolished some departments or it announced some kind of investigations and so on, and they thought that in exchange for doing that, that the administration would give them back their four hundred million dollars of federal scientific research funding, which by the way, has nothing to do with, you know, any of the political issues that Columbia was supposedly dealing with.
And then they didn't give it back. Instead they asked for more and they still haven't given them the four hundred million dollars. And the lesson is, you can you can do what they want. You can concede to what they want. They're going to demand more, you know, they will not They're not going to leave you alone. And I would say the same thing that these law firms who have made concessions to Trump and you know are trying to get along with them, and that that's going
to end badly too. Offering him some kind of deal or paying money to his family is as you know, as Amazon did when it when it invested forty million dollars in a documentary about Millennia. All of that will not build respect and safety. It will just make them ask for more. They'll just want more money, They'll want more payoffs, they'll want more concessions.
And I think what I think is so interesting here is that if you are a university, you can win if you just take them to court, because none of this is legal.
It is not legal to withhold federal funding you in exchange for unconstitutional requests to curve free speech. Note, as long as we still have some independent judges in this country, you know, Harvard will win that case.
With the exception of this sort of very few corrupt judges, the very few Eileen Cannons. Trump world has not had the time to put in cronies in the legal system, so they are rolling the dice and getting people like Judge Boseburg, who was appointed by both Obama and Bush and who does not believe he's in Hungary. So I think that is an important sort of backstop there is that you can be brave and know the courts will have your back.
Well, it's also the case that conservative judges for the last several decades have all been originalists. They're people who almost made a fetish of the Constitution. You know, I think you know a lot of legal cases have been argued. You know, what were the founders thinking in the eighteenth century when they wrote this or that you know this or that piece of it.
You know, even the conservative judges.
Are people who have, at least in their scholarship and in their work, have not been partisans in the crudest sense, but have been sticklers for an absolute orthdox interpretation of the rule of law. So there is some hope that conservative judges, when they see clear violations of the Constitution, will reject it.
Yeah, and I mean this nine zero response from the Supreme Court. I don't want to get all rosy eyed, because we are certainly in a lot of trouble here, but this nine zero response from the Supreme Court on that you can't get rid of due process, I think is meaningful.
I think it's meaningful too. It's also the very interesting if you saw the exchange in the Oval office when the bouqueta from El Salvador was there with President Trump, there was a little weird commentary about the nine O decision. And I think it was Stephen Miller, if I'm recollecting correctly, who said, oh, the nine decision was in our favor. In other words, they already feel the need to undermine the decision and to lie about it and to tell
a completely different story about it. And you can see Vance doing this as well in some of the propaganda that he's been putting out. So they're trying to create an alternate story. And it's really important that the courts, the media, and of course Republican politicians as well as democratic politicians hold them to reality. You know, they need to listen to what the court says, and they need to abide by what the court says.
The reason that it's been able to go so fast is because I think a lot of people in this country have not had to ever be brave, and it's a muscle that's sort of out of fashion right now. Do you think that two? Or why do you think that people have came in so many cases?
Maybe partly that it's maybe that there's no cultural memory of anything like this happening before, whereas there is in other countries, for example, in Brazil and South Korea, who both done a better job of pushing back against dictatorial presidents or presidents who are usurping too much power. You know, I also think there was a complacency here. You heard it during the election campaign. There was a complacency about what could happen. You know, there's an idea of American exceptionalism.
You know that we are a special country and we've had democracy for such a long time that none of this could happen to us, And I think people were just not mentally prepared for, you know, what was actually a very very well planned, you know, long thought about attack on specific institutions. I mean, there were one or two, there have to be said, there were one or two
pieces of this that were unique. I don't know of a previous case when an equivalent of DOGE went into a government and you know, a set of engineers went into a you know, a finance ministry or a treasury department and just shut off programs illegally and in such a way that nobody knew how to turn them back on again, which is a continuing problem. And all kinds of spheres of you know, in all kinds of ways. And so they did do some things that were new
in the world of you know, declining democracy. Yeah, but you know, but a lot of it was predictable and could have been predicted. I mean, the attacks on universities were predictable, and actually presidents of universities, some of whom I've spoken to, did know it was coming and have been thinking about it for a long time. And certainly the attacks on the media and the attempts to circumvent the rule of law, and certainly once let me just
return again to the cryptocracy. These are These are people who think that it's okay for the president to spend a weekend, then a weekend when the stock market is crashing, at his personal golf course and his Perersonal hotel where a golf tournament is being played that is sponsored by Saudi Arabia, and in attendance is the head of the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Company and the Sovereign Wealth Fund and
aram Code are also sponsors. The Saudi Oil Company and a series of other important Saudi business people are there, and they are paying money to the president's golf course and to the president's club, and nobody blinks an eye. That's a conflict of interest. You know that Saudi Arabia is a country that has a complex and relationship with the United States. It cares very much what our foreign policy is. And they are seeking to buy the president in a way that's not even secret. It's not like
they're bribing him. The names of the sponsors of the tournament are on billboards at Dorrall Golf Course and on websites. The practice of this administration is now to openly flaunt and enjoy conflicts of interests. I mean, Musk is another one. Doje has attacked and fired people at regulatory agencies that Musk's companies, and Musk now has to say in the running of other agencies who subsidize his companies. In other words, he is the beneficiary of the policies that he is
carrying out, the personal financial beneficiary. And that although you know, there have been rich people involved in US politics for a long time, and there have been lots of rich people in the cabinet in the past, I am I am unaware of anything this blatant. You know, where people with an actual interest in a government decision get to make that decision all by themselves.
What is interesting about it, too, is that one of the things that you talked about on that article was that TikTok was one of the sponsors of that golf tournament. TikTok is so conflicted, but also the person who will decide TikTok's fate is Donald Trump, right yep.
And TikTok is directly paying him. I mean they are a sponsor of the tournament at his club. The club is he makes money off of it. The actions of TikTok or openly seeking to bribe are persuade the president that they would like to stay in business. That a website that collects vast amounts of data about Americans and may well be sharing it with the Chinese Communist Party, that website is seeking to win a regulatory decision through
influencing the president's personal financial decisions. Again, I can't state enough how far out of line this is with certainly the presidencies of the last century. Maybe if you go back to the nineteenth century and the Gilded Age, you'll find some similar level of conflict that I am not aware of any president who's been personally courted by companies and by foreign leaders who are also making financial contributions to his businesses.
Yeah, it is absolutely just one of the kind of most breson bits of self dealing that we've ever seen. Tell Us, if we want to stop the cryptocracy and the authoritarianism, what would you say are the mean things this sort of call to action?
Here two things in particular, Number one, the next elections by which I mean the midterms are unbelievably important. It is really important that the Democrats win both the House and the Senate, and it's also really important that they get they create a broad coalition to help them do it, hopefully including some Republicans or people are Trump voters, and it's very important that those elections be free and fair.
You know.
Again, in the list of things that Americans don't imagine, they probably don't imagine that it's possible to corrupt an American election.
But it is.
I mean, there are multiple, many scenarios you can imagine, and it's good that everybody prepares to.
Think about them.
I mean, without being hysterical or creating anxiety. Just think about whether there would be a you know, maybe they are going to be protests, maybe there would be a crackdown, maybe there would be a state of emergency, or maybe there would be changes to electoral laws that would affect who could vote. Just be prepared for that because it's extremely important that, you know, in a democracy, power is ultimately controlled in the by politicians in the political realm,
and we need some power. We need Congress to come back to playing its role of checking the president. You know, Congress, you know, Congress. Just to give one example, Congress could end this the tariff policy immediately if they wanted to. The tariff side. The tarts are also illegal. They're being carried out in violation of treaties the United States has signed on the basis of a kind of emergency law. That's bullshit, and Congress could block that and take back
tariff power. Now, in our system, Congress has the power of taxation and it controls the budget. They could take that back. They could end the role of DOGE, which is also acting illegally and ending programs and you know, and departments that have been agreed to by Congress, and you know, all those things could be brought to an end. It's really really important that these elections go well. I would also say, in the less political sphere, it's really
important to create broad coalitions. You know, it's so obvious to me that all of the law firms in this country need to be on the same side. I mean, it cannot be the case that Trump can pick them off one by one or do a special deal with Paul Weiss and then you know, and then attack wilmer Hale. Ultimately, it's not going to work for anybody. It has to be okay for law firms to defend whoever they want
and to have whatever clients they want. That's our tradition going back two centuries, and lawyers cannot allow that to be undermined. But the same is true of universities. You know, what would be really great would be not just for Harvard and MIT and a few very wealthy universities on the East Coast to be standing up, but for a coalition of universities who see the threat to one as a threat to all, to begin to speak in one voice.
There's been a little bit of that. There have been some group lawsuits, particularly against the cuts in biomedical research and healthcare spending, which have affected some universities disproportionately, but not everybody has joined them. I mean, there's one interesting exam University of Alabama. University of Alabama Medical School. At least until recently, it was the largest employer in the city Bingham. It's a really important institution. They will also
lose money from cuts to an age spending. So how about hearing from them? How about hearing from other Red state universities, from wider range of universities, All across the system. You know, we need some solidarity from universities, from law firms, from media. You know, the more they speak, you know, together, the harder it's going to be to undermine this. So I would start with those two things. You know, elections are important and our system. Elections are the main thing.
Don't forget about them or dismiss them or think we can solve this with lawsuits. You know, elections really matter. And then I think solidarity matters and coalitions matter.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Anna.
Thank you.
Darryl Silver is an author and producer of over a dozen television shows, including The Apprentice. Welcome to Fast Politics.
Daryl, thanks for having me.
So you produced The Apprentice. You were one of the people who started tell us about your relationship with the Apprentices.
So I came on at Concept. I was brought on literally the day I came on. I had to sign my contract before I could even told what the show was. Wow, Yeah, what did you think it was?
Well?
I didn't know, but I was a big fan of Survivor at the time. But Conrad Riggs, who is Mark Burnett's number two, hired me and I signed my contract and they said Okay, what's the show, and they said, it's Survivor in the City and the winner gets to
be Donald Trump's prince for a year. I was then ushered into a room of like twenty some odd people who literally like signed the contract learned that walked into a room, was introduced as one of the creative guys on the show who will be developing the show for Mark Burnett, and the line was Survivor in the City winner gives me Donald Trump's apprentice for a year, and you need to figure out the format of the show
before the network asks us. So I literally came on at Concept and when I went into that first meeting, I had just learned thirty seconds ago what the show was about. So I took out my little read book that I brought with me for notes and I still have it today. I created like probably half a dozen tasks that wound up getting in the show, in formats
that wanted getting the show, including lemonade stand. While we were going around introducing ourselves in the room, I'm feverishly writing because I'm about to be asked, like what my ideas are that I just learned thirty seconds ago. So that's literally where I came on and then I did that for the first three seasons, and I was a producer on the first three seasons of the show.
Did anyone ever become an apprentice to him?
For a year afterward, I was in La doing this, and that was all kind of happening in New York. Although in season two and three I was on the set.
In season one, there was a limited amount of us that actually went to the set, and so like, after all this happened, like we really weren't involved with that, because the whole show took on a mind of its own so quickly, it became such a big hit that it was like we were rushed back into season two and three, Like we weren't paying attention to what happened to season one. So I guess they did work for him. I mean, I think Bill worked in Chicago or something,
But like, we weren't involved in that. Really, we weren't tracking that at all.
In some ways, the Apprentice was as much a part of the origin story of Donald Trump as Donald Trump was, right well.
It validated him. It took a guy who had, you know, ruined a lot of businesses. You know, he had bankrupt a lot of businesses and struggled in a lot of his real estate career. And then we validated him. We convinced America and the world that he was a business genius, you know. And that's what it did. It gave him some validation.
True or not.
You guys wrote it sort of without him. Was he involved in the writing of it.
It was not involved at all. What happened is is like we developed the show. We would create the tasks, the format and all that, and then he was brought in. If you actually look at the show, he's not in the show that much. So at the beginning he'll say like here I am at Macy's, or here I am at this place, or here I'm at home depot, and then he disappears for the most of the show. And on an occasion he would show up in the middle of the show, but not every episode. And then he
would obviously come to the boardroom at the end. And what would happen at the end of the show is like we'd be sitting in the control room and there'd be a lot of producers stand around him and we
would download him on what happened during the week. I forget the other two people's name, but the people who work for him, they would pop in here and there and they would give him a download too, and then based on that information, he would go into the boardroom and he would you know, make his decisions.
So did you get the sense when you were working on it that he was good at business or now?
I did not. I wasn't involved in his day to day businesses. I didn't see it. But what surprised me, which is like everybody talks about Trump's lies, is that being in the middle of this, we would hear his lies that didn't need to be lies. I remember once he would he said like, we're the number one show in the history of the network, and we were laughing. We're like, we're an absolute hit show. We're doing fantastic,
like on all metrics or a smash hit. And he would still have to get on camera and lie about it. And we were constantly like laughing at it, like why is he telling all these lies?
Did you feel like you couldn't trust him?
I mean, it wasn't matter trust and you remember he wasn't around that much, so it wasn't like, you know, Donald Trump wasn't giving us any direction. You know, Jay Beanstalk was our showrunner and he was really in charge of it, and Mark wasn't really there for the most part, and so it was like, you know, we were just We're just a TV show, you know, that's it. We're just we're just making TV. And a lot of a lot of people always ask me, They're like, you know,
why didn't you do something? Why why don't you say something? And I'm always like, the guy was a real estate guy who thought he would become a president.
You know, did you feel like he was smart? No, that's interesting. I mean, as simple as that, what led you to think that. Let me break it out. There's two different kinds of smarts. There's street smarts and then there's smart. There's no question he's street smart. He proves it every day.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
His superpower is that he can convince whoever he's standing in front of that he's going to do for them what they want. Whatever your dream come true is. He will promise you within an hour, he'll promise that there's going to be clean coal to coal miners and then environmentalists, that he's going to be the best environmental president ever, and he'll do that. He'll do that without even thinking,
without even skipping a bee. Yeah, you know, And that's his superpower, is that he's able to do that without a conscience in my opinion.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, in your set and of like the experience of making television like that, do you think it helped him create the sort of skill set that he has.
Now, No, I don't think he has a skill set.
But you know, the skill set of like getting people to believe stuff.
No, he was doing that already if you spent any time with him at all, Like he made the grips feel good about themselves as well as the guy on the street. He wanted to be liked. He had this gift of gab. Again, I think it's his superpower, is that he is. You know, people always asked me, would you think of Donald Trump? He was a really nice guy when we were there. I just, you know, I just don't think he should be a dog catcher. But he was charming and he was friendly, and he was
always he was nice to us. I didn't I didn't have a bad thing to say about him. From a personal standpoint.
I think it's really important that when we talk about him, we separate like how he is, how he is there's a reason that a plurality of Americans voted for him twice. And you know, he is a wildly successful politician. That's part of how we got here again. And he's able to do something that other Republicans are not. So I think that learning this stuff is actually really relevant and important.
You know, you compare it to like the people who convince suicide bombers to kill themselves with seventy two virgins. If you pound enough time into people's head and they believe you, they'll do anything for you, including voting against their best interests. I mean, look at farmers today, Look at all the people losing jobs. Look at the immigrants who voted for him. I mean, like they're all getting shellacked right now. He convinced them against all their better judgment.
You look at cities right now that are losing education funding and all the red states that they can't afford to lose any of it, and they're losing all and it's all because he convinced them that this was best for him. That's his genius. I mean, that's his genius.
And you saw that even in the boardroom.
I'll tell you what I saw in the boardroom. That was interesting, Like we would give him the download of what happened during the episode, it'd be obvious, like Molly did this and so and so did this, and like it would be obvious he obviously made all the decisions what he wanted to do and who he wanted to fire.
But every once in a while, somebody who was like a tangential person in the task or whatever said something he didn't like and he would just go, you're fired, and you'd be like, and you'd hear the control room everybody would freeze, because there was it was always like a like an order with which things were supposed to happen to lead up to the firing. And sometimes he would go out of order and he would just fire somebody way before we got all the bites that we needed,
and you would be like, what just happened? Why did he fire that person? Like that person had nothing to do with the downfall of the team or something like that, And so you know, you look at somebody who's just it's just not logical, and which is what we're seeing today, is like he's doing all these things that aren't logical and you're just like, why is.
He doing them?
And he's got his people who go on camera and like he knows what he's doing. He's playing you know, you know, four level chests and you're just like, he's not.
But that's really an interesting thing you're talking about there, because that is what we see today, right, We see that kind of like unpredictable for the tariffs. I mean, like he sort of gets is it. You think it's emotional on some level or just.
Angry if you want to go down to like the most basic level. My opinion is that everything he does is either to benefit Donald Trump or to protect Donald Trump, and he really doesn't care about the rest. Had not he been trying to stay out of jail, who knows if he would have even run. If not that he was getting actually shellacked in his businesses and losing money, he wouldn't be pulling all these grifts that he's doing
now to raise money. Whether it's whether it's shoes, or whether it's the coin, or whether it's all of these things. It's really all Donald Trump's centric. It's not about the country, it's not about really anything. It's about how he gets what he needs.
In my opinion, yeah, oh yeah, let's talk about this bill Maher thing because Bill Maher went tomorrow Laga the Winter White House to see Donald Trump. Can you explain to us your take on that what you think happened there.
Look, I've been watching Bill Maher for years, and I think Bill Maher is a smart guy. It wasn't as much that Bill Maher went there and met with him. It's that when he came out, he was like, he's not you know, basically his line is and I'd have to look it up and the thing I wrote, but he's like, he wasn't the crazy person that he saw on TV every day. He was like a nice, normal person, you know. He was charming, he was all these things.
And it's like, yeah, most dictators and tyrants historically when you sit with them, were nice guys, but then they went and did all this crazy shit that destroyed the world. And basically Trump's inherent thing is he wants people to love him. He really wants to be loved. He wants people like him, he wants people love him. He wants to feel like the big macher, you know, and and
if you give him that, he loves it. So Bill Mark came to meet him at the White House and like sat with him, and it was a nice meeting and with Kid Rock and I believe the guy from usc was.
There a beautiful piece of chocolate cake.
Maybe yeah, exactly, And so like he's gonna be charming, just like he was charming with us, and he's charming with everybody. And then you leave and you go like, well he was a charming guy. This charming guy like just sent all these people to a death camp in Salvador. It's like, yeah, he was nice, but what does that mean? And in since Bill Maher had that as like his first line out to the public, it was like, are
you joking? Like are you just wiping all the things that he's doing and you see he's doing just because he was nice to you at a dinner. It's like it's madness and it's what Trump does and it's how he lulls people into this.
But it's interesting because it's like, and you probably relate to this too, Like I meet people sometimes a lot of times they're very nice to me. Does that mean they're going to be nice to everyone? Maybe not? Right, Like Bill obviously has a real place in Donald Trump's mind, so of course, like why would he be mean to Bill? Right?
Why would Bill come out with the first line that he say be complimentary towards Trump? That's the crazy thing. It's like, tell us what you discussed, tell us how he responds to all the things he's doing. Give us, give us an insight into policy. That's what I want to know, and not that he was nice to you and you guys had a nice dinner. Like nobody gives a shit that you guys had a nice dinner.
Well, it's also just like, there are things that you could find out about Trump that would be quite useful for all of us, right, that would make sense?
That would You've seen Trump being interviewed by a lot of people. He gives very little true information when he's doing when he's doing an interview, I mean, the guy, if you ask him a direct question that he doesn't like it just pretends is if that question was never asks and starts talking about some other thing.
By the way, that's a New York rich people thing, because I've had other people do it to me before, and I'll be like, am I going crazy because I just asked you a question about something totally and they just talk about something else. It's like brilliant gas lighting.
Well, you know what he's been doing. I mean, if you look what he's been doing in the White House meetings, Like he had all the press in there the other day and they asked him directly about kill mar Abrego Garcia, and like he was like, that's a rude question, and then he went off on some tangent. It's like, that's
the question we all want to know. So he's smart enough not to answer the questions that he doesn't want to answer, which is frankly as opposed to the very very very friendly media every question.
Right, right, No, that's a really good point. And I think that, you know, that is instructive in a lot of ways. So he's a creature of reality television. What do you think it was in this show that made him so appealing to the world.
I think people look at Donald Trump and see him as an everyman and think I could be that man, Like I could that could be me, you know, and then they like that he says things for a large portion of our population. He's willing to say the things that a lot of people aren't willing to say. And he's like, oh my god, he'll say things that I would like to say. He gives a certain portion of our public the right to say things that normally you wouldn't say out loud. And on the TV show, I mean,
he was likable, he was funny, he was friendly. You know, he made big decisions. You saw him in you know, this is how the rich live. You know, we love to see behind the curtain of how rich people live. And you saw it. And by the way, the show was super entertaining. I mean, there's no doubt about it. Like when we first developed the show and we'd be sitting around talking about business tasks, we would say it to ourselves, like, is anybody gonna want to watch this
at all? And they didn't watch it for the business tasks. They watched it because Trump was so charismatic. And yeah, there was great drama with the two teams and whatnot, but like, you know, that's really what it was. So when when the show became a massive hit, we sat around and we were like, we're genius. Is like, we never thought a million years it was going to be this mashion it was. When we came back, were like, we weren't just as surprised as everybody else that it
was like this big hit. But because of his personality. That's what it was.
So you think ultimately that sort of ability to make everyone like him was what did it?
Who's a politician who was a football.
Coach, Tommy Tuberville.
How is Tommy Tuberville like in government? You know what I mean? But it's because people loved the guy. They loved him for his coaching, they loved the things he had to say, They love he was outspoken. And now he's running a state. You know, he's one of the
heads of a state. I mean, it's no different when you look at any celebrity who really, inherently you don't think would be in government, has no experience in government, doesn't understand clear, simple policies how they get to these positions. The same thing with Trump. There's always a time in our society where everybody wants an outsider. We don't want an insider. We don't want somebody who actually knows how
to run the government. If we could just get this genius businessman to run this business of America, like, everything will be great, even though the two skill sets have nothing to do with one another. And that's what he convinced people, and that's what then people wanted. That twice Thank you, Darren, thank you.
And now we have a clip from our YouTube channel with Dave Serota from The Lever, who also is the creator of the podcast The master Plan and the screenplay author of the movie Don't Look Up. Welcome Too Fast Politics.
David, thank you, thanks for having me.
So you and I are like absolutely on the same page today. We both wrote our columns. You wrote your column in the Guardian. I wrote my common Vanity fair about exactly the same thing, which is where I think the smart money is in the Democratic Party right now. So I want you to explain to our listeners why you think that Trump's tariffs are a winner for deams.
I think they're a winner for a particular kind of dem I think obviously the tariffs creating chaos for the economy is bad for the incumbent party and probably structurally, I guess, politically good for the opposition party. I mean, I think it's bad for really every unless you're a billionaire, and.
Even then.
A lot of ye billionaire.
Yeah, good point. So I think there's a way for Democrats to be criticizing the kinds of tariffs, the kinds of trade policies Trump is putting into effect. Uh, there's a very strong argument that they're so broad, they're so inconsistent, they're so sort of hap has there's no indication to suggest they're going to achieve anything that Trump says they
are right. If you're trying to reshore American jobs that have been offshore, for example, you probably want to put in tariffs that have a timetable for implementation to give industries a chance to rebuild and make capital investments, rebuild
factories in the United States that really hasn't happened. If you want to get companies to make giant capital investments in the United States, you probably want to show that the policies you're putting into place are permanent and stable, rather than waking up every six hours and saying, oh, we're going to do this exemption or that exemption. How
is any business supposed to invest in that. So the point is that the Democrats have a really good argument to make that these tariffs are going to harm the working class and America in general. Now one caveat. I think if the Democrats take that to its extreme and say all industrial policy, all tariffs are bad, that the
NAFTA trade paradigm and the China free trade paradigm. All of that is good, then I think they walk into a trap that Trump wants them to walk into, and I think there's evidence that parts of the party don't really understand the trap that Trump is trying to lay for them.
First, I want to just go back to what you were saying, seventy percent of Americans believe the tariffs are going to be bad for the economy on the short term. You don't get seventy percent of Americans who agree on anything. Those are incredible numbers, and I think that that should
be sort of the foundation of all of this. But the thing that I think will likely do the best for the opposition party, which Democrats need to be, is the haphazardous and the way that none of this has been thought out, which is what we write so like for example, and I want to get into this, the reshoring reshoring manufacturing is like one of the goals here, right, restoring manufacturing. But you can't reshore manufacturing just by making things more expensive. Chips and Science had a goal of
reshoring manufacturing. Really like reshoring these high paying manufacturing jobs, which are chips. A chips assembly line is a much better job than a Sneaker's assembly line, and that was the thinking here, but because they could not articulate it, it got lost. And so now here we have Trump trying to do the same thing, but because there's no there's never any sort of thinking behind anything, we're here instead.
That's a really good point. The Biden administration, it got the policy actually right that Biden. That Biden used targeted tariffs on specific industries as part of a coordinated industrial policy. For instance, the Chips Act, as you mentioned, which which invests actually uses money resources to invest the Inflation Reduction Act, which uses tax credits and other investment tools along with
targeted tariffs. And we saw manufacturing jobs start to come back in the United States and factory investments start to be made by the way, many of which were made in red states, in Republican states. The problem was, as you allude to, the Biden administration never sold it. They never made it part of their political pitch to the country.
Kamala Harris didn't, the Democratic Party didn't. And now you have a situation where Trump is trying to take the political themes of reshoring American jobs, brand it to himself, but with a completely unacceptable, reckless and haphazard policy. And again, I think the Democrats have a story to tell about how the hap has ears of Trump's policy is imperiling
the country. But I think they could make a political mistake by allowing Trump to brand them once again as he did in twenty sixteen, to brand them as the party of NAFTA style trade policy.
Right.
I think this has been forgotten. There are large swaths of this country that used to be democratic regions, democratic strongholds, that were hollowed out by so called free trade deals NAFTA, China, p and tr And I think that is a very real issue, that is a very authentic concern for those communities that went through that and that continue to go through that. And I think if the Democrats sort of scoff at that grievance, they play into what Trump wants
them to do. And here's the other polling number that I think has been forgotten that while the public is opposed to Trump's tariff policy, on the actual policy merits for the first time in generations, At the same time, the Republicans have evened the playing field on the question of who cares about you? That question in polling, who most cares about you. For the first time really in modern polling history, the Republican Party has now pulled even
with Democrats. So my theory here is, and I would speculate that what's going on here is that large, you know, majorities of the country are like, hey, Trump is not handling the is not managing the economy, right, he doesn't know what he's doing with these tariffs. The tariffs are going to be bad for me. On the policy, it's clear, but hey, you know, he's also talking about this issue trade and tariffs and reshoring jobs and what happened to America.
And so even if we don't think he's right on the policy, he's at least talking about this issue that very few politicians have wanted to talk about, which shows where the perception is is that he's on our side. And I think that is that's the dichotomy that we're in. Obviously I don't think he's on our side, but my point is is that that's the tension here.
To hear more of that segment, head over to our YouTube channel No More Perfectly Jesse Cannon, Small.
Junk fast Man. You know, when we started to hear Trump years ago talk about which hunts against him. We kind of knew if he got back into power, exactly what he be doing and what he's doing James here is exactly what we suspected.
Yeah, so he is going to do a fake investigation of her. So he basically, according to a letter obtained by the euro Post, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch and is Donald Trump's favorite outlet because he still lives in the nineties, she launched a civil fraud case again
Trump and his business empire in twenty twenty two. So now this US Attorney General Pam Bondi is alleging that James falsified records in twenty twenty three to secure home loans on a property in Norfolk, Virginia that she said was her principal residence while still serving in her role in New York. This is while James is announcing a new investigation into the President over accusations of insider trading.
The accusations arose in the wake of his u turn on the Reciprocal Theraists last week, after the program's unraveling inspired a panic on Wall Street. Writing to Bondy and her deputy Todd Blanche, who you will remember as Donald Trump's defense lawyer. Miss James was the sitting Attorney General of New York and is required by a low to have her primary residents in the state of New York, even though her mortgage application lists her intent to have
the Norfolk, Virginia property as her primary home. Is like going after someone for a crime that includes not filing a form. Right, but this is what they do. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.