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 Nancy Mace was caught on video locking lips with another woman. We have such a great show for you today, talking points memos. Josh Marshall stops by to preview a hint of the next Trump administration.
It's going to be a mess.
Then we'll talk to Rolling Stone's own Noah Shachman about Eric adams desperate plans to suck up to Trump and the mockery that has ensued.
But first the news Smiley, Well, get to talk about this fun fellow. RK Jr. I want to first ask you something, though. Did you ever take like those Sassy personality quizzes when we were teenagers.
Sassy and Jane, the two magazines that shaped both of our personalities.
It is true, you know, my high school girlfriend really loved giving me a personality to test to see if I was the one, and it turned out I was not. Anyway. RFK Junior I think also was a fan of these because he has a personality test. He's calling it an application to work under him at the HHS. It is psychotic.
Okay, so it's unclear where the test originated, but probably Jane Magazine, but it was like by Puff News and PUP can confirm they claim they can confirm the Trump team that Kennedy is using this to bet potential employees. One section reviewed by The Independent asks applicants to pick three or four moods.
Or attitudes that suit them.
By the way, this is so la, I require excessive admiration, I don't have much interest in a sexual experience.
With another person.
Super normal questions when one wants to work in the United States government. One option offers I believe in things many don't like, having a sixth sense, clairvoyance and telepathy. As an adolescent, I had bizarre fantasies or preoccupations. Our entire government is going to be filled with sociopaths when
this is over. Those things actually do seem to be criteria for schizotypal personality disorder and also, or perhaps instead, narcissistic personality disorder, laid out in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual otherwise known as the DSM fifth Edition.
What I really like is I really feel like RFK Junior The answers that he would like are much more different than with the Project twenty twenty five. Heritage Foundation philistines would like like when they're asking, like, if you believe that too much tax money goes to support ours? I think RFK loves an artist. I think he likes to have a groovy little retreat and then you know,
poetry something I could see him liking. But the philistines at the Heritage Foundation know, and I think this is a recipe for disaster of what freaks and weirdos are going to be mixing together in this and a minute.
So let's take a minute to sort of just talk about this. Heritage has a plan Project twenty twenty five. You got people like the one surviving Cooke brother, these Republican donors have a plan and it does not involve clairvoyance. It does not involve OURFK Junior at all. In fact, and I think there we're going to really see a collision course here pretty quickly. But what Jesse's talking about here is one of the options on this personality test is believe.
That too much money goes to support.
Artists, does not like poetry, and tries to avoid complex people.
I think this is going to be wild I'll.
Say so, it's almost gonna be as wild as when Robert F. Kennedy Junior goes to Warwi corn syrup.
Oh yes, let's talk about this because look, one of the totally fascinating and amazing things about URFK Junior, besides the fact that he's totally sold out to Magas, he's still at least ostensibly pretends to believe in these things.
So he wants to ban food coloring. He wants to ban well.
The food coloring already got banned this week by the Biden administration.
Well, good for the Biden deministration, but Kennedy does want to go further ban corn syrup, all sorts of different kind of You know, I think the VAX stuff is crazy, but certainly some of this stuff really aligns with my values, you know, corn syrup, chemicals and food, et cetera, et cetera.
I hear you're a big one on putting the cocaine back in Coca cola.
Yes, also want the cocaine and coca cola very good.
People in AI love cocaine and their joke.
So what's interesting here is that Kennedy, well also being anti vax, really does have some reasonable opinions, and he's going to run smack into Heritage Foundation and that crew because that crew does not want to make food healthier.
They do not want to remove preservatives, and in fact, a lot of them are sort of the factory farming types, and that you know, for example, like if you think about the Koch Brothers do plastics and paper products and a lot of stuff that's both bad for the environment and also leaches chemicals into farming.
So I think this is good.
We're going to see things really quickly collide here.
Yeah, top Trump downer Dick Euleen, who makes some of the most wasteful products.
I was just thinking about the Eulens.
Yeah, yeah, that's good. That's going to go real, real well with him, but his donations. Yeah yeah, I can't wait to see the shit show unfold. Yeah, so let's actually talk about these food dyes that were bad. You and I have actually done a segment on this while back, and yeah, it looks like there's some major milestones for chemical safety happening here.
This is actually really good.
Biden Harris administration is banning two cancer causing chemicals. It's a major milestone for chemical safety and it's this bipartisan Toxic Substance Control Act, and there's no to use any of these chemicals. So one is that causes liver cancer, kidney cancer, non Hodgkins lymphoma, and it is being phased out, and the other one is solvent in cleaning products. They're both going to be phased out unless Trump decides to bring them back, which, if we know Donald Trump, is
certainly well within the range of possibility. That said, if it does happen, Trump will probably have to fight with RFK Junior, which will be a completely fascinating and bizarre dynamic that none of us are coming.
Speaking of Donald Trump, yeah.
He's inheriting quite the economy from President Joe Biden, and much like what happened when he got an economy from Barack Obama. And I can't wait to see what he does with it. With these terroriffs, Yeah.
They're luckiest man in America otherwise known as Donald Trump, is now going to inherit an economy that should be pretty great. Inflation has dropped from nine point one in June twenty two to two point six percent. The economy includes a steady increase in jobs and arise in the stock market. This country has an absolute debt problem, and that's going to be a problem. But luckily Donald Trump will solve the federal debt by giving tax cuts to billionaires in corporation.
Can't wait.
Let me just tell you, counting the.
Days and also cutting Social Security and medicair, cutting food stamps will make up the shortfall.
Josh Marshall is the editor of Talking Points.
Memo.
Welcome back to Fast Politics.
Josh Marshall, thanks for having me.
Very You're welcome, very subdued. It may not be good.
No, I'm totally charged up. That was just me in like in whatever mode before you turn it on.
I'm totally ready.
Okay, good, well, let's go. It's so great election. Things went really good.
Yeah.
By the way, for two seconds, I was wrong about this election and spent all this time writing.
Pieces about how I was wrong and.
Sort of going on, you know, going to DC talking to members of Congress saying like I got this so wrong?
What did you see in You're you.
Know, like a full of apology tour mode.
Not quite, but you know, just sort of like what did I miss? How do I get this so wrong?
And what were the factors that got me making such bad decisions. I was like, everyone else is probably doing this too, you know what everyone else.
Was doing saying they were right all along, yes.
And then everyone else was wrong.
Yeah.
I mean it's one thing for people who are in I don't know, for lack of a better word, sort of like you know, kind of commentary, here's what's happening, here's what I think might happen next. And then there's the people who have like a kind of like an angle, right, an ideological angle, personnel angle, all this kind of stuff.
And to me, one of the worst things about when a group or coalition or whatever suffers a political defeat, the first reflex of most people is to say I was obviously right all along, thank you very much, thank you.
I was like, you know, I think I was wrong about this.
I was wrong about that, and literally everyone else is like, no, this person was wrong. I mean, like nobody is going to just say, well, maybe I had some priors, et cetera.
Et cetera.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, first of all, maybe it is an overhang of a mix of people responding to the twenty sixteen election and the many and very merited reckonings that society was going through after things that happened in twenty eighteen and nineteen and twenty twenty and so on and so forth. But we have sort of grafted in now about elections, this whole culture of reckonings. You got to have a reckoning, you know, like okay, like not totally. I mean, you know, some political party has to lose.
And one of the things that has been sort of foundational for me for as long as I've been thinking about politics is is that every losing campaign is run by idiots.
That is like doctrine, right, And.
People have a very hard time holding in their head or you know, kind of keeping in their mind at the same time that you can have run a really solid election and lose, and that's just a reality. So I don't know, I'm certainly this was a result I did not want. And what I would say is that I did find it unlikely that the polls would miss some Trump strength for the third time in a row. That did not seem likely to me. And frankly, I think there was good reasons to think it was not likely.
And yet here you know, and yet here we are.
You know.
It was a slight difference, but it was a difference, and you know, and here we are.
Yeah, I think that's really so exactly important. And I had the same sort of thing. I also do think we find ourselves in a moment like this selection.
What I think is interesting about this election is.
That Trump really did overperform. He was able to make the case to people. He was able to say, you're angry, I'm going to make things cheaper, with almost no evidence to support this idea at all. But like in twenty sixteen, and again you can say there are other factors, but in twenty sixteen, Republicans, you know, had like this forty or fifty seat majority in the House of Representatives, like
they really you know, they had state houses. I mean I remember being at events where people were talking through what had happened, and you know, they were I remember seeing a graphic of like Democrats not controlling any state, you know, just as like, like clearly everyone had just fucking dropped the ball when it came to state legislator, when it came to this, when it came to that, that's not what happened this time.
Not at all.
And you know, there was one of the many illustrious TPM alums out there is Brian Boiler who I'm sure many of your listeners are familiar with. And one thing that Brian said sometime in twenty sixteen I can't remember, and it stuck with me because I thought it was true at the time, and it ended up being truer than, you know, than one would have hoped. But that was that the twenty sixteen campaign and Hillary Clinton's role in
it was basically a single point of failure proposition. Everything was looking good, but if Hillary lost, suddenly things looked extremely bad because, as you said, Republicans not only controlled Congress but controlled it by sizable margins. They had spent the Obama years building up these, you know, huge majorities, far less contested than they should have been in state houses, and for all of those reasons, as you say, that is not none of those are the case right now.
And you know, as we know, elections are binary. You know, you can lose the presidency by one vote, and there can be stuff with the popular vote. In electoral college, only one person gets the pen, right, and that's where we are, and at least nominally it is that way in Congress. And that's this is why among the many reasons when we think about elections, there's the nature of an election, and there's the consequences of an election, and
the consequences of this election are pretty clear. He's president, and that is very bad, if there's anybody listening who's not pugged in on that front. But the election itself, yeah, yeah, the election itself, Democrats did quite well kind of almost everywhere else, right, It's important to remember that, not to kind of say, well, Donald Trump isn't totally president or
something like he's one hundred percent president. But you can also see that strength in other areas, and that is that's really important to understand for you know, following elections and the underlying strength that Trump has and that's why they've gone so hogwild with this you know, overwhelming double overwhelming landslide victory and there's never been anything like it, which is nonsense. And again it's not a matter of
seeing some silver law. The reason that's important is that his he he, You do not have a public out there that is like, go for it, bro, you know, eighty percent of the populations behind you.
It's not like that at all.
That and that is important for having some visibility into what's going to happen over the next couple of years.
It was a low turnout election, which also I feel like we don't necessarily talk about like if Harris had gotten the same numbers that Biden had gotten in twenty twenty, she would have won.
Yeah, well, certainly if she'd gotten the same number of votes.
I mean it, you know, I saw there was one one of these publications, maybe it was even ny con at times, if someone wrote a piece basically saying that you know, don't assume that you know, those twenty twenty Democrats, if they had shown up, would have voted for Kamala Harris, And to me, that goes without saying it just inasmuch as if they really wanted Kamala Harris to win, they would have showed up, right, I mean, that's sort of the point.
There's a reason.
I mean, we can infer a lot by the fact that they did not show up. And I think what we the proper thing to infer is they didn't care that much, which is pretty close to voting against right. So it's not like, you know, we can't go too far into inferring those numbers. However, this is why you need to keep your coalition on side and energized and all that stuff, and it wasn't.
So you know, she lost.
There's no getting around that. The oddity of this election is that you would have in most elections in history, you would have expected Republicans to maybe pick up twenty or thirty House seats to get closer to you know, maybe sort of fifty five Senate seats, maybe even a couple more because it translates over into house stuff, and it didn't. And that's odd and odd in an encouraging way for Democrats, not for Kamala Harris or Joe Biden, especially not for Joe Biden.
Yeah, can you talk to me about what it looks like with this question of what happens next with like protecting the norms and institutions, because that's the thing I think about so much, right, Like Trump, you know, he's trying to sell that he has a mandate whatever, but you know he doesn't really care, right, I mean, he just basically does what he wants. So it feels like this is going to be a game of inches again, like just trying desperately to get Republicans to do their jobs.
Is that your take? I mean, what do you think?
I think that's basically right?
You know, we don't know what limits they are going to try to push. They could try to push all of them at once. You know, one constraint on Donald Trump is energy. He tends to and this is you know, I'm kind of a compatriot of his in this sense. A little hard time focusing me too, Yeah, on any one thing for very long, and that is a constraint.
So but you know, big picture, I do think it will be a game of it, and one that at least at the beginning that the good guys will be losing more inches than they're.
Gaining, but still a game of inches.
You said one thing about, you know, kind of trying to get Republicans to do their jobs. I actually and maybe this is a cock guide optimism.
You sound like you're about to engage in cock guide optimism.
No, no, it's actually something. It's actually something a little different. When I think about a Susan Collins or a Joni Ernst, a Senator till Us down in North Carolina, I don't want to be trying to get them to do their job. I want people in those states and around the country to be saying, give it your all, because we cannot wait to run against you in twenty twenty six, So load yourself down with absolutely as many as many crazy
votes because we we can't wait. You know, begging is not a great thing in life, but begging is not a great thing in politics. That's why they call it begging when you're not coming from a position of strength.
And in twenty six we'll see Susan Collins will be up again, and so well.
Tom tell Us, Tom Tillis, and I believe is earnstuff in twenty twenty six.
I think she is as such, maybe she is.
In any case, I'm sure a lot of people are thinking,
good luck, that's Iowa. You know, there was that whole kind of thing we got into a few weeks ago about that largely was discussed in terms of trans politics, but there was that article by Adam Gentilsen in you know, a Times column, and one thing he said in that piece, which I think was to me was the really important piece is super majority thinking is you need to have one part of your brain not just thinking how you get to fifty one percent, but how you get to
fifty eight percent? Right, and very tall order winning a Senate seat in Iowa. But you are not going to get to supermajorities without thinking about tall orders and thinking in advance what you're going to do over the next two years in that state to make that a possibility, likelihood, but a possibility. That is the kind of advanced thinking
you start to do. You know, there's that scene in Apollo thirteen that I think about a lot, when they have just found out that they have this wrecked spacecraft, what like three hundred thousand miles away halfway to the moon and they need to figure out how to fix it.
It's a crazy situation, but that's where they are. And they dump out that box right where they have the tubes and a couple gaskets and stuff, and like, this is the stuff they have in the think, this is what we have to work with, and this is kind of where we are, and sort of like we need a box for Iowa, and we need a box for Main and we need a box for North Carolina. And you need people thinking of you know, because tariffs are not great for farmers.
Right.
The point is this is a corollary of the fifty state strategy.
What do you need to start doing now to make it possible you actually.
Win back the Senate in twenty twenty six, because you know, you lose every game you don't show up for. But on the other point, with Joni Earnst, with that in mind, I want her to kind of like, you know, just chain herself to Donald Trump because I want as many as many terrifhotes to run some candidate's going to run against her in twenty twenty six.
And like Susan.
Collins, I don't want anybody begging Susan Collins because that's like, that's not dignified.
We know who she is. So say, Susan, go for it. You're innerle outwater, Susan. We can't wait.
The one thing that I would say is when we talk about protecting norms and institutions, for example, like Cash Patel, right, nobody needs to protect norms and institutions from Marco Rubio.
Right.
You may not love him, but he's not going to turn the secretary of State.
I mean, you don't even have to protect the weight machine from Marco Roup exactly.
Come on.
But I mean and Pam BONDI, you know, not the sharpest, but she certainly will be fine. But the question is like Cash Patel, will Cash Patel eroade norms?
I mean it seems very likely.
It's an absolute given.
I mean he's promising to yeah, and.
I mean, look, these things tend to be harder to do. Talk is cheap.
This is one of the reasons I like Adamkinzinger's response to like, oh, we're going to jail the jan six committee, people like bring it on, dude, Like, okay, let's let's see bro because the problem we have I think in a lot of cases, and yes, things could get terrible, things could get terrible, and some things will get terrible, and it's possible that all things will get terrible. But terrible is often harder than it seems on paper, just as doing good things are a lot harder then it
seems on paper. And what I think the opponents of Donald Trump often end up living within the space created by his threats, which basically means that he can, you know, occupy a lot of ground with talk. There is this you know, balance that people have to maintain between. On the one hand, it's not a matter of pie in the sky thinking or everything's going to be fine, but
it's saying yeah, that's bad. I'm going to think it's real when I actually see you doing it, not when you're mouthing off to Kirsten Welker or something.
You know, it's funny.
I mean, I was just talking to Mark Ollias about this idea that it is like very important to stand up to bullies. I'm thinking of myself as like not very brave because I'm very cowardly.
But that would get you there.
It would do it.
But you know, with my grandfather, like he went to jail, refused to name names, went to jail, there's something about having that as a precedent where you're kind of like, like, you know, obviously none of us want to go to jail, but like you kind of were like, oh, you know, you can do stuff like that. He wasn't so brave either. I mean, you know, I knew him. He was complicated. You kind of like you have to like suspend your disbelief almost to believe in yourself as a brave person.
Yeah.
I mean, look, there's or at least I do.
For one thing, there's physical bravery and moral there's you know, physical courage and moral courage and not the same thing. And you know, one of the things they say is that you know kind of well it's to extreme. An example,
everybody's probably capable of more than they think. And it's important to take things one step at a time, because what is absolutely true is that talk is cheap, and you cannot know anything about Donald Trump's, you know, kind of fifty years in the public eye without knowing that most of him is talk and most of what he gets is based on talk. And so especially with him, you want to say, I want to see what's going to be on the table besides talk, because I'm skeptical
that you've got a lot more than talk. And that's not the same as saying everything's going to be fine, because he's got a lot of power now, he has people who will do things on his behalf. But it's never a good thing to be over odd. Even if you're going to go down in flames. It's good to not be over awed while it's happening.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
John, thank you, thank you, thank you, Molly.
Noah Shackman is a contributor to Rolling Stone and a former editor in chief of Rolling Stone and The Daily Beast. Welcome back to Fast Politics, Noah Shackman, Hi, we got to talk about our city. I'm going to pay you the picture here last week I'm on television with your friend and mine worst mayor of New York He says, we know who it is, right, and he even said that later on PIXE.
Eleven, we know who it is, but we're not going to say because we don't want to give him the heads up. You think the mayor knew who it was?
Sure seems to conflict with existing reporting that the person was discovered. This guy, Luigi Menjoni, was discovered at the last minute. Now it's possible the mayor knew something we didn't, or it's possible that you know the mayor's writing this reporting is wrong. However, the mayor sometimes I don't mean to shock you, Molly, I don't mean to shock you fast policy ticks nation, But the Mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, is not always the most truthful individual.
What what.
One of the things I love about our mayor is that he's both always late for everything and also says insane things like shees is like Heroin.
He said that he also counseled parents to look for cocaine in their children's Teddy Bears and backpacks. That video is amazing, Yeah, it's incredible. He's also talked about the magic crystals underneath the New York City. He's quite a guy.
Explain to us what is happening right now in New York City.
They've caught Luigi, probably through no fault of their own. I want you to give us, like the mayor is still under federal indictment, where do his legal troubles find him?
Right now?
They did find this shooting suspect, and I think there was a fair amount of good police work done here. I mean, look, they had to scrub through hours and hours and thousands of hours of footage to get decent pictures of the guy, and those decent pictures wound up shogging the memory of this McDonald's guy in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and that's how he was caught. So I mean, I wouldn't say, like, you know, look, the NYPD threw everything
at it. Not all of it worked. The majority of it didn't work, but some of it did, and it eventually led to this guy getting caught. Look, I thought once it had come out that this guy had left New York and was in the wind, I figured he was gone forever. So I mean, I guess I'm a little pleasantly surprised that he was caught. That's my two
cents about police work. But look, and now, in terms of the mayor, who himself is the target of not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, but six separate investigations, I should say, the mayor and his inner circle, five of them federal that we know of, and one
local that we know of. You know, he is still very much an object of interest to a lot of investigators, both for his financial dealings in his various campaigns, his relationships to members of or emissaries of various foreign governments, and also because it seems like a lot of his top deputies engaged in some behavior that sure seems like they may have been on the take. So you know, he's still got a significant amount of legal exposure himself.
Right, But he is not resigning. In fact, he seems as if he is just going to malign our justice system instead of resigning.
So walk me through what happens next.
Right, Well, so first, just a little bit of context for those listeners west of the Hudson River. The mayor when he was indicted basically for illegal campaign donations for some bribery, you know, like you do, he said, that it was all retaliation for him not going along with the Biden administration's immigration plan.
I mean that doesn't even mean anything, right, because what was the Biden administration's deportation plan?
Right? Right?
Well?
No, I mean he was basically he was an early critic of Biden on immigration, and his implication was that this was somehow retaliation. There's no evidence, by the way to back that up his theory of the case. Shall we say, he doubled down on it when Hunter Biden received a pardon, and he said, see, everybody now agrees that the Biden Justice Department is politicized and therefore is politicized against me, and therefore if Hunter Biden got a parton,
so should I. That's what he's been saying. It has not been lost on Politico's left and right that a lot of his rhetoric seems to echo more and more the rhetoric of our incoming president, mister Trump, and by all observers seem to think that the mayor is angling for a pardon. The people who think that he is angling for a pardon include Donald J. Trump himself, our friend,
friend of the pods. When SUP saying, and I did a story last week for Rolling Stone about how Trump and the members of his inner circle have been laughing about how hard a quote unquote thirsty. Eric Adams is campaigning for a pardon, and at one point suggested that perhaps the mayor would start wearing a Maga hat to his press conferences. So far, that has not happened.
Amazing. Eventually he's going to go to corn, right.
I don't think it's clear what's going to happen yet. He's got a trial scheduled for April twenty first. Currently, his lawyer, Alex Spiro, who was Elon Musk's lawyer. His lawyer wants to actually move the trial date up to the first of April or thereabouts. And then what's going to happen with his other investigations I think is very unclear,
very very unclear. Trump has named a new attorney for the Southern District of New York who's actually, by Trump standards, are relatively straight shooting, and so it's entirely possible the cases go on. It's entirely possible that this one case goes on, but that all the other investigations kind of go away. It's really unclear at this moment. Eric Adams
is like top person is a woman named Ingrid. Ingrid Marton herself has been the target of federal investigators, and after she had her phone seized in the fall, she went on the radio call in show of her defense attorney, as one does, as one does, and she said on that show that while they may have done some crime, it wasn't merely to the scale that should be investigated.
I love that.
So her defense was like, we only crimed a little.
I mean, who among us?
Yes?
Go on that defense attorney is now rumored to be named as the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York for Brooklyn. So good times.
Yeah, just like politically for a minute, the mayor is running for reelection.
Next year, correct, as a Democrat.
So far he's going to have this trial. He will either get convicted or get a pardon. Do you think he's going.
To run again?
Oh yeah, yeah, he's definitely.
Oh interesting.
I think there's a fair chance that even if he loses the Democratic primary, which is pretty early, I think it's in June. Yeah, I think there's some chance he runs as an independent.
What do you think happens here? Like, does the trial happen? Sooner rather than later. Sketch out what you think the timetable looks like, and make as many guesses as you want, because if you're wrong, I promised to not remind you about it one hundred times.
Yeah.
Look, at the risk of being a bad pundit, I don't want to predict too much, but I will say that, like the trial is set for late April, it could move up to early April. Then there's a primary not that long afterwards in June. But here's the thing. There's a bunch of people running in that primary, which is very unusual for New York to have a sitting mayor challenge like this. But a lot of them have very
similar politics. They're all to the left of them, and a lot of them, I would say, are absolute people you would want to hang out with, have a beer with. But a lot of them are relatively inexperienced, unknown right, and relatively unknown outside of their core districts. So it is entirely possible that Adams could win a Democratic primary. However, there is a couple of other heavyweight candidates that seem to be looming in the shadows, the heaviest of which is former governor of New York.
Andrew Cuomoll, Yes has an independent expenditures fund already going right, I think so, yes, But.
Put this right, him raising money would not be an issue. It would not be an issue. I would also note that he recently appointed himself or got appointed to be somehow like some lawyer representing Benjamin Nette and Yahoo in some kind of international campaign. And I know that he has told associates that quote, the Blacks and the Jews will be behind him if he rumps as a member
of one of those two groups. I have a big old question mark over my head about But Quamo still is a lot of people have a lot of affection for him. Some people think that he was drummed out of office unfairly. Some people think that his way handled himself during COVID, with what he's been accused of covering up deaths and many many deaths and nursing homes, wasn't that bad. And the leadership and stood up to Trump during that time.
And you know, he will have ready access to capital, both financial and political, and so he would be really, really formidable. And so we could wind up in New York with something like the political equivalent of the Iran Iraq war with Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo running against one another.
So hard to pick aside.
Yeah, it does seem as if there's a likely scenario, and in some way, and I'd love you to talk about this, it feels like the reelection of Donald Trump has somehow made this scenario are likely.
Eric Adams would certainly say that's the case. And Eric Adams would, I think, note that there are large parts of the black and Hispanic communities of New York that are much less culturally liberal than white Democrats of New York, and that those people are going to support him, and that he is constantly railing on progressives and the left. He is trying to paint himself as somebody who can reach out to that, you know, thirty percent or so
of New Yorkers who voted for Donald Trump. I just need to note that like this is still a overwhelmingly democratic, overwhelmingly left leaning town. Really, what he's hoping for is to hold on to a base of support in a very contested primary that has many many contenders.
Let's talk for a minute about how when we look at this kind of like the now next year, if Trump two point zero is at all like Trump one point zero.
There's going to be a lot of him fighting with governors. Already, a lot.
Of ambitious governors have taken this as sort of like this is an opportunity to rise the public stage. Gavin, of course, is having meetings about how to push back against use federalism to protect its citizens of California. Talk to me about Kathy Hokel and how you see this playing there right?
I would say the governor of New York, Kathy Okle, who's from Buffalo's from western New York, not from New York City, hasn't shown nearly the same appetite as some other governors to try to fight Trump or to take him on. Several progressive lawmakers here had asked for a special session of the state legislature to try to enact some measures to keep trump Ism at day. That didn't happen,
as it is happening in some other states. I'd also say, perhaps more importantly, is that Eric Adams is showing no inclination to want to fight Trump. If anything, he is looking for ways to seek out common ground with Trump, especially on the migrant and immigration issue, and I believe he's set to meet with Trump's incoming borders or that
guy home and on Thursday. And so he has shown a real willingness to want to work with Trump on this, where interestingly, some members of his own administration have been like, absolutely not, We're not going to cooperate. But Adams himself has shown himself to be really open to it. That could have a huge impact on tens, if not hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers lives. Look remember three million New Yorkers were born abroad, and of that three million,
one million or not US citizens. So one out of every eight is not a US citizen.
That is wild.
Yeah, that's true. It's I think the number is something like forty five percent or more of New Yorkers. English is not the first language spoken at home. Wow, We're not only a nation of immigrants, Molly where city of immigrants. And I'm not saying in the distant past, you know, when our relatives moved to Brooklyn to the Lower East Side,
but you know it's happening right now. And I was talking to one state lawmaker in Queens and she was talking about how her you know a lot of her constituents are afraid to even meet her in her district office already for fear of ice coming to get them. And Trump isn't even in office yet. They're already scared. They're already staying at home. And I have grave concerns that, like the fear and the isolation is only going to increase come January twenty.
Yeah, that sounds like a perfect storm. Do you think there's anyone who can protect like? So, the mayor is in the tank for Trump, the governor is, she's quite cowardly.
So is there anyone who can protect this people of the city? I mean, will Tis James do it?
I'm not as familiar with the mechanics of state and city government in that way, but I will say that, like, look in general, right, this is a city that has valued immigrants for you know, hundreds of years literally, and I think the prospect of breaking up families and mass is going to be much much more challenging than the
Trump is portray it as. And honestly, I'm not one hundred percent sure that they're not just involved in some giant scare campaign and that they're trying to get people to you know, like to use the old Mitt Romney term self deport exactly what they're going to do, I think is very unclear. I mean, obviously there'll be some workplace raids and stuff like that after that. I think it's very unclear. And look, it's very unclear whether in
New York's cops will cooperate. You know, our new police commissioner seems like a very rational person who's going to stick to the letter of the law, which is, you know, basically.
Not just a good t ish yes.
Yeah, And even the mayor has some of his most sendiary comments, like when he said that the Constitution was for Americans only.
My favorite love that guy, I want to mess Yeah.
Yeah, he walked that back a couple of days later. So I think there's gonna be a lot of political pressure for him to you know, stick to the letter of the law and not to assist in some mass deportation.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Noah, Yeah, no problem, no moment, Jessy Canon, So Molly, you know when we have moments of fuckery now, I almost will say that at least for a temporary time, for as short lived as it may be.
I think we're gonna have to have doze editions because we've talked in our opening segument about shit shows and collisions of egos and things that are going to go. Well this fuckery right here, My god, what are you seeing?
Yeah, by the way, like, never in our lifetime have we known someone who has made so many bad jokes. But because no one's ever told that his jokes are bad, because he's the richest man in the world, he believes his.
Jokes are good.
Like, there's a real case here for keeping honest people around you who are like, oh, that joke, isn't that funny?
Champ.
So, Donald Trump has these two Vivik and Elon, and they basically so Will Trump knows that cutting social security of medicare, those are like the third rail of American politics. You will be very unsurprised to find out that the two billionaires, who are neither elected nor in the federal government.
They want to do.
They are very excited to target and cut social security of medicare. Look, this is wildly unpopular. They're going to have real trouble doing this, and we'll see, but they are signaling that they are super interested in trying. We'll see how the optics of the richest person in the world. You know, just one other thing, you know, there's been this hell Care shooter, Luigi who shot the CEO of United Healthcare, and well, all of us agree that nobody should have.
You know, killing people is bad. I think that's fair to say.
Other people who booed Jon Stewart on his show what he said that the other night don't agree.
But the point here is that there is a lot of anger around health insurance and all the other ways that the American people are getting fucked. And you know, they voted for Trump because they thought Trump would make things cheaper, because I guess they didn't remember the last time he was president. But the point here is that you got a really angry group of people. The American
people are fucking pissed. And I think that having the richest person in the world take away what little the government gives them, which they have paid into the system so they are actually entitled to it. I think that's going to be real unpopular. So we can tune back in for that.
I think if people are worried about how much people hate rich people right now, I think that that's only going to encourage it more.
Yeah, me too.
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