Rick Wilson, Daniella Ballou-Aares & Arelis Hernandez

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 Tucker Carlson is in Moscow hanging out with Vladimir Putin.

We have such a great show for you today.

Daniella Blueiras, the CEO of the New Leadership Project, joins us to talk about how they mobilize business leaders to protect democracy. Then we'll talk to the Washington Posts Areles Hernandez for a boots on the ground report from the Texas Mexico border. But first we have the host of the Enemy's List, the Lincoln Project's own Rick Wilson, who I would like to add will be joining me along

And here is Rick Wilson.

Welcome back to Fast Politics, Rick Wilson, it's a Monday, What the fuck man?

Welcome back, my friends to the show that never ends.

Ten thousand days from the general election, right, ten thousand years from the general.

It's rent but for political hell. I think the biggest things out of last week were the fact that there is a number that gags Donald Trump, and I'm happy for that number. I love that number.

Is eighty three million dollars.

Eighty three million dollars.

That's the number where Donald Trump stops to fameing you.

That's the number where even Donald Trump shuts his fucking mouth.

Which is kind of impressive because for Rudy Giuliani, there was no number.

It turned out the number did not exist. He just kept defaming.

Well, it turned out that Rudy Giuliani is going to be eating out of dumpsters at this rate because he didn't even try to make a deal. He didn't even try to conform his behavior.

And now he's in bankruptcy proceedings right.

He's in bankruptcy. Apparently he has about twenty five hundred bucks in the bank according to the filing in my Giuliani alumni network. It is bad, bad, and also awful.

What are they saying.

He's trying to hit anybody he can find up for money. He's desperate.

I mean, I feel like when you owe million dollar judgments like that, and not one million, but multiple.

Million dollar judgments, that's like more than a loane.

How do you wake up in the morning and go, hey, I'm going to call a friend of mine and ask for five or seven million dollars. But the person I talked to said Rudy was like, oh, yeah, I need twenty grand I presume.

In cat Jesus, it's so bad, you.

Know, Look he bought the ticket. He's taken the right. By the way, the other bankrupt enterprise just before you start, is the rn C is flat busted out.

Okay, So that's where I was going with this was money trouble the rn C. Now they're like anemic fundraising. The The problem is, from what I heard from a straight reporter, was that wealthy people are giving a Nicky Haley. Small dollar donors are giving to Donald Trump. No one is giving to the RNC.

Look, the RNC a couple of years ago noticed something. If their email fundraising appeals included the name Donald Trump, they got money. If they did not include the name Donald Trump and they got no money. The problem for them is that Trump is hounding away on these small dollar donors twenty emails a day. I must have your immediate donation, or the deep State wins, you know whatever, the crap is.

The real reason he needs that money is to pay his lawyers.

Yeah, he is not putting this into campaigning. This is going into legal fees. Now. The reason that they are being so shall we say, blunt with every one of the major donor types, is they need a lot of money. They need. I believe the technical term is a metric fuck.

Ton of money. I've heard of the metric book.

Yes, it's a different the imperial fuck ton. It's a totally different thing. Those are freedom units. But long story short, you've got a campaign that is not going to be able to go out there and go head to head with Joe Biden financially on TV. Now, look that matters less than it used to matter.

I think it matters though. You need money to win the presidency.

Yeah, we like money in campaigns. You gotta no bucks, no buck rogers, as they say. But the fundamental underpinning of this is that nothing Trump is doing right now is actually going into campaigning. He presumes that he will outgun Biden on earn media.

Which happened in twenty sixteen, but not in twenty twenty.

That is correct because now Donald Trump is a known quantity and it's much harder now, even for the gentry Republicans to say, oh, well, you know, is it a private meeting with Susie Wiles and she told me Trump's just And then Trump goes out and says, I'm not bullshitting. I want to put you fuckers in camps or whatever it is. Right, So, these major donors are going to finish with Nikki and they're gonna say for about a week and then they're going to all write a check.

Right, all right, I think that we should not wait for these people to have a crisis of conscience because it's not coming.

Oh no, but there was a fire sale on conscience a few years ago, and they're not exactly waking up in the morning and going, my god, what are the implications of me being a complete fucking, amoral shit back. They don't think about that any day ever.

Yeah, exactly.

So let me ask you here we are. We're in this kind of weird period. Nikki Haley. I mean, she's going to be out there, people are giving our money. She's gonna get shellacked in South Carolina. They'll explain to us why.

Well, look, South Carolina makes Ayowa look like a state full of lib tar cuck progressive communist Soro shields. South Carolina is the home of the dirtiest, lowest. And I want you to remember who's saying this to you right now. It's me.

The dirtiest, lowest, nastiest, scummiest, most fucking vicious, mean spirited, amoral, bottom feeding, scum sucking, cat killing scumbag politics in the country.

And I'm from Florida, which taught them how to do it right.

It's like, you know, Darth Vader watching the guy kill all the kids in Star Wars, like, oh easy, woe back there, pal. You know, it's just so crazily over the top. So Nicky's gonna go there. They're doing the Birther bullshit on her already. They're gonna run a brutal campaign. They're gonna say she's an adulteress and a furner and all this other crazy bullshit. And you know what's gonna happen. I'm just gonna win by thirty points or twenty points or whatever. Would I love for her to stay in

And you know I've written about this, and I think you've written about this too, which is this fantasy that Donald Trump somehow goes Okay, I'm not the nominee, That's fine, I'll just go away is insane. This man is running to stay out of jail, right, He's not running to be the nominee. He's running for his life, his livelihood, his family business.

There are two men in the world who know that if Trump doesn't win, their lives are absolutely fucked. One is Donald Trump. The other is Vladimir Putin. If Trump wins, Putin lives. If Trump doesn't, Putin dies, literally, he is going to die.

I don't think he's gonna die. That I think is hyperbolic.

No, they'll kill it, yeh no, no, no, no, he's no, he's fine. Now, he's not that fine. Trump needs to win to stay the fuck out of jail. And none of this, none of this works. If Trump loses all the bs falls apart, all the fundraising falls, apart all the ability to get six seven figure donations.

From right, nobody's paying for his lawyers if he's not the nomine.

And what you're going to see, I suspect when he is the nominee is there'll be a process of rapid naturation of the legal side and they will treat it much more seriously. They will not let Trump have another Elena Haba on the stage, because that worked out really well.

Obviously, Yeah she really, I mean, you know, such an interesting thing. You know, he found this lawyer who looked like a young Milania, very beautiful.

Single white female looking Milania.

Right.

Turns out that person not a great lawyer, and you put her against one of the best litigators in this country, a woman you know, argued the defensive marriage doma in front of the Supreme Court, and that really good lawyer eats her for fucking lunch.

Robbie. It was the equivalent of watching like a monster go out and tear the head off of somebody and kick it around like a soccer ball and drink from the spurting blood fountain of the neck. Because this was just.

Tear us out you really think.

I know, you're like, oh damn it, Grandpapa Rixton like terrible stories again.

Grand guy. Yet not yet, but it's true. I mean, that's a great point.

You know, we are here, we are Alena Habba by the way, supposedly, you know, when we had Robbie on the podcast, she was saying how uncomfortable it made her to watch Alena with the judge because she was not respectful with the judge, and that this judge, Caplin is a very strict judge.

Right as we look at this, it's absolutely typical of the sort of broader sense of Trump world and of Maga world today, and that world is contemptuous of expertise. Trump needed, as somebody said, some man or a woman who has spent a lot of time in court who is mental strong enough to say, shut up, Donald, stop doing that. Donald.

That's a Tom Nichols a kind of idea.

It is a Tom Nichols type take. But it's it's not wrong. Trump doesn't have anyone like that. He doesn't have anyone well, I mean he has Susie Wiles, yeah, but Susie's not involved in that part of the operational side. She's just in the campaign. I will say this with all respect, there will become a moment where Trump's ego. Remember there's always a good rule to follow with Trump,

You know, he does have more legal problems coming down the pike, like he has a ninety one criminal count.

Yeah. Well look, and again I've said this hundred times. I mean, it will not change a single MAGA vote even if he is in prison.

But doesn't matter. All the magas are not enough.

What matters to me. What I find very satisfactory in this moment is that Donald Trump, even if he never spends a day in jail, he's about to have his entire real estate empire ripped away from him because it's built on a foundation of fraud. He is going to lose all of that that stuffs over, and he is going to spend the rest of his life trying to pretend to be a billionaire and hustle around trying to pretend to be a billionaire when he's not. He's got nothing left and I am here for that.

So let's talk about some just retail politics that I'm not seeing a lot of discussion of. Filing deadlines were this week for a bunch of races Arizona. Looks like Carrie Lake does not have a lot of money. Looks like Kirsten Cinema has even less.

I mean, is this just Reuben goes to.

Have right now? It's rubens to have not. By saying that, I mean to also say, never ever, ever take anything at all.

For granted, especially in Arizona, Especially.

In Arizona, It's bad juju to take anything like that for granted. Don't do it. But the Lake brand, like a lot of other things, trump Ism doesn't scale as well as people think it does.

It almost never does.

If someone came in your house and acted the way Trump does and said the things Trump says, you'd go get the fuck out. You're insane. And if someone acted that way in the workplace, they'd be fired. All these things have added up to this sort of delusion on the part of a lot of these people that they can go out and run and pretend that they're Donald Trump and they're not not one of them.

Is there anyone who you can think of who has done trump Ism and hasn't underperformed at least? I mean, like I'm thinking of like JJB Vans you have a JD vance still ran like about ten points less than he should have considering was Ohio.

That's true, ten is as good as one if you're winning, right, I guess that's true. Or one is as good as ten if you're winning.

But that's like such a red state.

Have you seen anyone else like do trumpsm and make it work for them?

I'm thinking about it right now, and I don't really have another person who is in a competitive seat or state been able to pull that off. Even in congressional districts that are pretty red. There is a limitation of it. So they say the sort of ritualizings of I love Donald Trump, he is the savior in the light of my light in my heart. But they don't act like

Probably the most maga congressman is mac Gads.

Mac Gates is not a product Matt Gates, right, mac Gates.

R Plus thirty two or whatever the district.

Is, yeah, Florida's first district.

But he's also like Macates is both maga, but he's also like the son of a.

Very prominent Florida politics you know.

Yeh, a former client. Look, and his dad is his dad is worth you know, three hundred million dollars. So Matt has never had a problem in his life. But none of these places or people that would imitate Trump or trump Ism in the real world would survive. It just doesn't work that way. And that's actually that American should take that as a sort.

Of upbeat note, pretty good sign.

You know.

Look, there's always been this this sort of like baseline idea that America finds its way to back sort of a political homeostasis at some point. And the idea that Trump and trump Ism is as unpalatable to Americans as would be like if you took the squad and put them in a moderate Midwestern Democratic district. You know they wouldn't It wouldn't work. But Trump is so far out into the extreme ether it makes even sort of like the most noisy progressives look fairly normal in some ways.

I love you, but compare bearing this squad to Donald Trump is like get bearing Mussolini to the Fendi sisters.

What I said was that if you put the squad in a in a moderate district in anywhere but where they exist, they couldn't survive politically.

It's true, but it is like the construction is comparing the Fendi Sisters to Mussolini. I still love you, though I love you too. Daniella balu Eras is the CEO of the Leadership Now Project.

Welcome to Fast Politics, dan HeLa.

Thanks for having me.

It great to be here, great to have you so talk to us about what your organization is called and what it does.

Sure, my organization is the Leadership Now Project, and we have since twenty seventeen been organizing and mobilizing business leaders who are concerned with protecting American democracy.

And what does that? What does that mean? Like business leaders explain.

It means a couple of things in terms of actual who of who's involved. Since the start, we have had the thesis that there are plenty of members of the business community. I started the organization with fellow alumni from Harvard Business School, but we're worried about the state of democracy. And since then we've expanded across the country, and so we have many our alumni from business schools across the

So what does that look like?

I mean, how it's one thing to say you support democracy, but how do you actually support it?

Yeah, let me give you a couple of examples. So we had members across the country. They are members in their individual capacity. So if you think of organizations historically or that still exists, like the American Bar Association, American Medicalizations Association, organizations that have individual professionals who have a.

Perspective and a position.

Our members are coming to this as individuals, but recognizing their interests, and that can happen in a couple of different ways. We have focused on first, what are systems that can make our democracy function better, So ending jerry managering, increasing voting access, having transparent campaign finance rules, those are

For our state.

That's good for attracting talent, and that's good for our business as a whole. And we've been doing in Wisconsin. Our members last year and the year before asked candidates like Governor Evers and Tim Michaels, who ran for governor in twenty twenty two to commit to certifying future elections regardless of the outcome, a pretty basic question. We would hope that every political candidate was willing to commit to that.

So there was some talk early on after Trump led an armed insurrection that corporations weren't going to donate to him. A lot of them have maybe not donated to him, but donated to you know, they said they weren't going to donate to Republicans who signed to try to overturn the twenty twenty election.

All of that has changed, largely.

Tell me some good news here, because it feels like, in my mind, a lot of corporations have really been quite cowardly and not really stood up for democracy.

So give us like a tiny bit of good news here.

One.

I think it is really important not to think about businesses business leaders as a modelis right if you look at we look at over time, what are the political orientation of MBAs. They're about half half Democrat Republican people. Look at how many say they support democracy, They're pretty moderate on both sides. It's seventy to eighty percent really

I think to the specific point of the business.

Response to the interaction and what has happened around supporting election deniers, I think what immediately happened around the election in twenty twenty, and we were very involved in this, that we were the first business organization to come out in October of twenty twenty and say we have to this election is legitimate, our processes are legitimate. We're going

So I don't have a great excuse for that.

I think that that is something that we were encouraging companies to really take a real look at in twenty twenty four as they make their decisions and the.

Risk that that creates.

But I do think it's important to recognize that the way companies and business leaders are engaged in the system is not just about you know one hundred and forty seven members of Congress and the twenty five hundred dollars checks that you know, a relatively limited set of companies in the big scheme of things. Right, it comes down to, I mean, what we know in this election, right. I mean, you're talking to people on this podcast every day about it is.

It's going to come.

Down to the conduct and mobilization in six states. You know, I was recently in Arizona. Eighty percent of the election administrators have quit. Yeah, there's intimidation all over the place, including of the particularly of the Republican election administrators, right, and business leaders standing up for those election administrators, helping fill the gap, and poll workers encouraging going out to vote publicly, standing against election deniers in this their state,

Is that happening?

Yeah?

And I mean that you know, as I mentioned, our members in Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Business Leaders for Democracy when they did this question neire to candidates to the governor givenatorial candidates and said will use sort of five future elections. They came out publicly, they endorsed Evers because he was supporting democracy.

They shot an.

Ad, It was viewed ten million times, It was covered all over the press, and it was a clear statement to voters and too many moderate voters that you know, this was an election that was first and formed about for our institutions and I think for business. You know, I've been disappointed by the narrative coming out of Davos.

Why don't you tell our listeners for those who are not completely tuned in what the narrative, the incredibly ridiculous narrative coming out of Davos.

Was, which I will say, I will attribute to a combination of the chat or the ara to Davos, and I think they're kind of overestimating how much there's a singular narrative. So I think the press is weaved it into like one narrative that everyone in Davos kind of

Right.

There might be a tax cut, which is insane, right, but yes, I'll be in Gitmo, so I won't get to see the tax cut. But yes, that's the idea.

I'm on the stand. It's you are.

It is this idea that corporate I mean, corporations are now people.

They are corporations serving their corporate interest.

Right, right.

But the people who made comments in Davos are people, right.

Those business leaders are.

Made out of comments that they have, from my perspective, a fear billit of latitude and how they frame this issue.

And so I think the.

The failure in that framing is that this election, first and foremost is about of law and institutions and about not what exactly what economic policy decision is.

Going to be made in the first month or year, et cetera.

Although I think there are many ways that Trump will be bad for trade, will be bad for many industries.

Well, the sixty percent tariff seems like it might be inflationary. Trump has been mulling private lily to advisors a sixty percent tariff on Chinese goods.

Yes, I mean there is all kinds of both bluster and like real policies that could be taken that would be bad economically. But I think this most important argument here is the question is will you be ever able to influence policy again, whether you.

Like the next policy or not.

Are we going to be at the end of real democracy in this country where institutions and policies are debated and fought out in different interests. You know, we might not love exactly which interests have more influenced or not, but ultimately, even in its imperfection, our system is about

And we also did an amicist brief.

Which seems pretty obvious, but a lot of Republicans don't believe that, which is bizarre, continue to say.

Yeah, yeah, well yeah.

And this is another place where the framing does not make sense of removing constitutional checks and balances the system, which again are the like four of democracy rate and protects everyone, I mean.

Including business.

And we didn't amachus brief on Disney's case against Governor DeSantis on you know, free speech grounds and also you know, the lack of constitutionality of political retribution against a company for them exercising free speech as Disney did in the case in Florida on LGBT rights, and that I think the scale of behind the scenes political retribution or threats of political retribution and then the public examples like Disney are very significant.

I mean, we hear about it all the time, and it's at it's at the state level.

It's threatening a company if you say anything we don't like, here's the three things we're going to do on your regulation on the regulatory side to a degree. I mean, you know, you could argue politics has never exactly been the most clean of political systems anywhere, but it has

Exactly what can our listeners do to support your organization and also just to support democracy as all.

Absolutely, And I mean I think one just one other comment on Davos and the commentary there and this commentary that business has come to terms with Trump. I really think that is not helpful because business and business leaders, whether it's the Fortune five hundred or at a state level across different industries, is just are just not monolithic.

Here and there's no reason we can't do more.

And I think one of the you know, lessons from I find Tim Snyder's work The Yell Historians so instructive and his on iranny, you know, his twenty steps of how to kind of resist autocracy. The first one is don't obey in advance if there's bluster around you know, oh, we're scared.

That Donald tweet.

Donald Trump might tweet against us, or there might be you know, threats of retaliatory regulation, et cetera. What autocrats depend on is you taking action before they even do anything. So I think that kind of reminder to everyone, like, you know, don't change the way you're operating in your business or in life just because you're fear of what might happen later, because that increases the chance that happens later.

What are we going to do publicly.

How do we work with other civic groups, How do we make it unacceptable for threats? For election administrators that can have a lot of power, you don't need to have, like you know, all the leaders in your state or city involved, you can you can move, which I think is going to be so important in the next nine months. And then I you know, I think a basic thing that any leader of an organization can do also is give time out for voting, you know, make sure that everyone's aware of all.

Of the ways to engage.

We have such a desperate need for poll workers, for instance, because so many are quittings. So I think just supporting that engagement, et cetera. I'll say one last thing on the point of what can people do? Mali, I see that we both grew up in New York.

I was in Brooklyn mostly before Brooklyn was cool, maybe a gritty cool.

I was reflecting on how the former president was so present in the press and around the time that you and I were both young, and you would have lots of Donalds in and Evada press and publicity, and how that seemed kind of farcical at the time, and how it seems anything but that now, but I do think New Yorkers I feel an extra obligation to be part of addressing these threats to democracy since it's kind of a.

Home we created him. Yes, yes, thank you so much, Daniella.

That was great, great to connect.

Arelis Hernandez is a correspondent for The Washington Post.

Welcome to Fast Politics at our alis.

Happy to be here. Thank you.

He wrote this incredible piece on the border.

I am so conflicted because I want to cover the border because there's a humanitarian crisis going on there. But it feels to me that the way it's being covered as a political crisis when in fact it's really a humanitarian crisis.

What is it like so right now, actually, crossings have plummeted. I'm actually an Eagle Pass right now, and you know there's some activity down the river, but right now there's sort of in a stasis. I can describe to you Shelby Park for example, of this riverfront park here in Eagle Pass, it has quite a bit of sort of

One of the things you what about in this pieces, you talked about how you know there are soldiers there. There's a whole sort of security industrial complex booming in the town of Eagle Pass.

Right, Yes, I mean on normal date is right when you don't have the State of Texas and the National Guard occupying a city municipal park, there is tons of federal law enforcement and border control that are here regularly controlling.

Right, I want you to talk about.

Because one of the things that was so moved with your piece was about how this is really a dangerous cross.

I mean, people die doing.

This all the time. In fact, I was with a shared deputy yesterday and we were talking through His job for a long time was just to respond to the remains of migrants dubbed floaters, because if you drown in the river, it takes a couple of days for your body to inflate and float up to the surface of the river. He handled two hundred and twenty five bodies

So one of the things you read about in this piece is the town of Eagle Pass. The people around there have a lot of mixed feelings about immigration and these people coming over the border.

Yeah, so Eagle Pass is technically part of Tony gonzalezis a Republican his district. This is a place where people are mostly voting Democrat, but are very conservative or at least extremely moderate, and they're facing this in different ways. For example, if you're a local firefighter, you're experiencing the trauma of having to respond to migrant rescues all the time.

And that's I.

Think a really important point here, because Biden had asked for all this border money and Republicans had said no, And then there was a border bill which nobody's seen but is probably not going to make anyone happy. Until you have legislation, Biden can't really executive order his way out of those as much as Republicans pretend to want

Right exactly. I mean they're literally in the middle in every single way and dimension of this particular humanitarian issue. And you know, folks are trying to sort of figure out a way that they can be a part of the conversation, whether at the state or the federal level. I mean, if you ask regular folks in egal past, they won't blame the governor for stepping in the way

Right exactly.

And it's complicated because a lot of these people are new immigrants.

Right, And I mean you've got all kinds of different sort of family dynamics in the borderlands. In some cases, there are folks who've been here since you know, Spanish were here in this region and this was still Mexico. And then you have people who, yeah, who are one or two generations removed from having migrated themselves or their families are still on the other side in Piados Negadas who are in mixed status families, so again like they

Right.

My perception is with the government sort of not being able to manage this in a way that makes sense.

Right, what happens to people when they come over? How does it go?

So there is no straight script for what happens to a person when they cross the river step on US soil. Maybe as for asylums or coming to relief and going to border patrol custing, there are a couple of things that can happen, and it all depends on what country you come from who you are, like male or female child,

I feel like the politics of this have gotten so removed from the actual experience of people can you talk a little bit about what these people have done by the time they gotten to Ego Pass, like what their trip looks like.

Yes, I can give you sort of what the stereotypical and again it really varies from migrant to migrant, depending on a nationality and their economic resources. Frankly, but in recent years a lot of migration has been coming through South America, particularly Venescuela, in some cases Cuba and Nicaragua.

There are people coming from places also that you would not expect, right, Can you talk about that?

Yes, I've talked to particularly folks who run in geos in this sector of the border that have seen folks from Vietnam, from Senegal, from Marisha, from Syria in some cases, or Russians. You know, people have gotten the message and you know, cartails and criminal organizations have will We've spread that message that if you are seeking this kind of protection or you just want to make the trip to the USA, this is the way to go.

This is a people problem more than it is a stuff problem.

Right, I think so, right, Yeah, yeah.

I mean I'm just saying, like the fentanyl is not flowing over this border, right, These people don't have anything with them, is what I'm.

Trying to get to.

Oh, yeah, this is this is a human smuggling, human exploitation, and human migration situation.

Yeah.

That there's folks that who are bringing drugs, absolutely, but they're for the most part, they're not amongst the surrenderers.

Right.

The large majority of people that you see in images.

And the people who are bringing drugs are probably coming through ports.

Of entry, yes, and in vehicles and people who work for organizations and not how to do this work.

Yes, right, So if you were a good faith actor, which I'm not sure Republicans are, you are seeing firsthand what the issues are.

In your mind. I know this is like kind of.

Unfair as you're straight journalist, but like, what are your sense of how if you were.

The president you would solve this problem. I'm sorry to ask you this question.

But I'm just curious if you have solves that you've seen because you're.

There, I'm going to sort of relay what folks who live here has been trying to advance for a long time. There are a bunch of influential business people and political years out here who have advanced some of these solutions have gotten nowhere the conversation in Congress. So we're talking about specifically aligning migration to labor needs in the United States.

Yeah, so you're basically saying that a better funded federal government would be able to handle this crisis, and in fact, it may have been created by a Republican party that wants the federal government to fail.

You don't have to agree with that.

Yeah, yeah, I mean there's a debate or in that space about that.

But yes, I mean it seems like the government, if it had enough money to address this problem, could solve it or at least make it better.

I think there is some sense of that. Maybe it isn't a question of more money, but more targeted and efficient use of that money towards the kinds of commons and solution bringing ideas that borderlanders again have advanced for years.

Yeah, now that these numbers are down a little bit, do you think that why the numbers are down are because Mexico is sort of doing more remain in Mexico stuff.

Remain in Mexico is a totally different sort of paradigm, but in terms of they are doing more enforcement, they are keeping migrants from getting to the river or the desert line. So like you know, they're not in some cases not issuing tickets to ride buses that would be headed Norris or they're pulling off them off with trains, those kind of enforcement actions.

So that is why it's happening.

It's part of the reason.

Yes, right.

Do you think that if there were really a clear path to citizenship that that would slow these illegal crossings.

That's a great question. Part of the issue is that you're combating a criminal international criminal organizations that are incredibly sophisticated and have been known to adapt very quickly to whatever the problems of changes of the border are, and they'll figure out how to make money. But I think if you make it safer, if you make it clearer, if there are clear expectations for what happens when I enter this process, then you know, you could potentially create

We need to be idealistic, especially when it comes to we have this tight labor market. We have this you know, we are not keeping up growing our population. This is my opinion now, and I'm on the opinion space, so I can say this, these are people we need in this country.

It's just a question of how to be able to get them here.

And to be clear, like I mean, they're not thinking that all of these folks are exactly what the United States needs. I think there is very much from business leaders at least, this sense that we should match the skills that some of these folks, if they have, you know, special skills to the labor needs in the United States.

Thank you so much, Arellis for taking the time with us.

It's my pleasure happy to shed light on some of this stuff.

In a moment, and so so let me ask you, do you have a moment of fuckery, Rick Wilson.

My moment of fuckery is every one of these assholes in MAGA universe who are still ship talking and down talking the American economy because at this point they can't deny that Joe Biden's economy is so good and so strong and growing stronger by the day. We've got record wage growth for the first time in fifty five years, we've got record job growth, we've got record energy production. Prices are coming down faster than they went up. We've got gas prices under three bucks a gallon everywhere in

So and men, that was an incredible yeah.

Wasn't it. So that's my moment of fucker. He is all these people down talking the American economy right now, when, by god, you know, at some point just some basic reality check on these people. I know how too much it irritates them. But here we are.

It is so insane to me that you know, look, it's exactly what Trump said. He wants the economy to creator, he wants there to be a recession. He doesn't want to be Herbert Hoover, right, remember that.

Ah, yeah, he knows what's going on.

Well, he sort of knows what's going on.

Well, no, but he does see that there's a very difficult case to be made to pretend that the economy is somehow this dark and perilous place. Now, it's really hard to do that now.

And so he's going to prevent legislation for the border in the hopes that that will provide him enough to make a theory of the case that that will give him something to run it. Because right now the economy is good, inflation is going down. There are so many sort of wins in this Biden economy political at this morning, which I am going to just read you a tiny bit of because it's such an incredible little thing that

Of American women.

Oh yeah, sad, we.

Can get birth control, gun violence prevention, and gun safety get a boost.

I know that's something near and dear to your heart.

Renewable power is the number two source of electricity in the United States, and climbing. Did you know that I did not know that? I did know that preventing discriminatory mortgage lending.

He did that.

He sweeping cracked down on junk fees and overdraft charges, forcing Chinese companies to open their books. I me in preventing another January sixth. I mean my man building armies of drones to counter China that I have mixed feelings about the drones. Nations, farms, get big bucks to go climb.

It's smart. I mean. Biden scrabs Trump's paint scheme for Air Force one.

Here's the thing. The economy that Donald Trump fantasizes about in his head is Joe Biden's economy. The economy donald Trump pretended he was delivering for America is actually the economy Joe Biden has built. And all the Trump stuff was always a Potemkin village. It was always a sort of illusion to make his own himself happy. It was always sort of like, you know, maga porn, and Biden's delivered. So people that criticize that, they are in my moment

That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to hear the best minds in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you toward what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again thanks for listening.