Trump’s First and Next 100 Days

The first few months of President Trump’s second term have been chaotic, to say the least. There have been an unprecedented number of executive actions that have triggered an equally impressive number lawsuits; a new government “department,” headed by the world's richest man and launched via executive order, that ousted nearly a quarter of a million government workers; and a global trade war. Trump and his cabinet have been crowing about these achievements, but his approval ratings for the first 100 days are abysmal — tied for last place, with himself. Kara speaks to three Washington insiders about what this all means for the next 100 days, whether we'll see rollbacks or more full steam ahead, what role Congress will play, and what the potential long-term fallout could be. Our guests are: Carol Leonnig, an investigative reporter at The Washington Post. She’s written three best-selling books, including two she co-authored about the first Trump presidency: A Very Stable Genius and I Alone Can Fix It. Ashley Parker, a staff writer at The Atlantic. Previously, Ashley spent eight years at The Washington Post, where she covered Trump’s first presidency, President Biden’s first two years in office, and the 2024 presidential campaign. Ben Terris, a Washington correspondent for New York Magazine. He is the author of The Big Break: The Gamblers, Party Animals, and True Believers Trying to Win in Washington While America Loses Its Mind and a former feature reporter covering national politics for The Washington Post. Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kara Swisher?

  Are you all exhausted? You must be.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  Like you, we all have kids, though. So it's hard. Like, is it Trump? Is it kids? Like, what is it?

• 0:17Kara Swisher?

  Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. President Trump has been on a media tour for the past week, talking up his first 100 days in office. I say talking them up, but he and his Republican acolytes are basically the only ones doing that. Trump's approval rates are in the toilet. On average, he's polling at about 43%. Compare that to the first 100-day rating for all US presidents dating back to Reagan. Trump is tied for last place with himself. Unfortunately, the reason is that he has spent the time unleashing chaos on the country. He signed an unprecedented slew of executive actions, immediately triggering multiple lawsuits.

• 0:57Kara Swisher?

  He sent Elon Musk and his Doge boys to run roughshod through government agencies, ousting nearly a quarter of a million government workers. He's launched a global trade war that has thrown the economy into a spiral, and he said he doesn't know if he really needs to uphold the Constitution. Also, nobody gets a doll. It's been a lot. Republicans have been sitting mostly on the sidelines, while Democrats have been wringing their hands but unable to do much. Dems are also not polling well. So what does this mean for the next 100 days? Will we see rollbacks or more full steam ahead? And what will the fallout be? My guests today are three Washington insiders who collectively have decades of experience reporting on national politics and the White House.

• 1:40Kara Swisher?

  Carol Lenick is an investigative reporter at The Washington Post. She's written three bestselling books, including two she co-authored about the first Trump presidency, and she's currently working on a book about Trump and the DOJ, which is coming out this fall. Ashley Parker is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Previously, Ashley spent eight years at The Washington Post, where she covered Trump's first presidency. She and her colleagues, Michael Scher and Jeff Goldberg, had a face-to-face interview with Trump in April after a very strange phone call. Finally, Ben Terris, Washington correspondent for New York Magazine. He is also a former feature reporter covering national politics for The Washington Post. And he just came out with a very long, pretty scathing story about Pennsylvania Senator

• 2:22Kara Swisher?

  John Fetterman, who has been one of the few Democrat centrists who seem to be ready to reach across the aisle. These three are all really clued in to what's happening behind the scenes in Washington, so this should be very interesting. Stay with us.

• 2:44Speaker 02

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• 4:53Kara Swisher?

  Ashley, Carol, Ben, thanks for coming on On. Thanks for having us.

• 4:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, thanks for having us. It'll be fun.

• 4:58Kara Swisher?

  Okay, well, we'll see. We've got a lot to talk about, all the chaos in DC over the past few months with Trump 2.0, obviously Elon and Doge, how things are impacting agencies like the DOJ and others, and what's going on in Congress. Washington writ large, I guess. And let's just start with over the weekend, because the activity levels are high, although some people feel it's distraction. Some people think it's just activity without productivity. So three things happened over the weekend. President Trump said he wants to put 100% tariff on all movies produced in foreign lands, because, quote, "The movie industry in America is dying a very fast death, and it's a national security threat." He also directed the Bureau of Prisons to rebuild and reopen Alcatraz to serve as a, quote, "symbol of law, order, and justice."

• 5:41Kara Swisher?

  And he also told NBC's Kristen Welker in a wide-ranging interview on Meet the Press that he didn't know, one of the things he said, I think the most notable, that he didn't know if every person in the US deserves due process. And when asked if he had to uphold the Constitution, he said, "I don't know." So I'd love each of you, starting with Carol and Ashley, then Ben, to talk about sort of what is happening here with all this activity.

• 6:06Speaker 05

  Well, you have a president who's really, in comparison to the first presidency, who's really unbound and unchained and has had, I have to say, an amazing batting average in the success of getting what he wants done by buffaloing it through. The things you mentioned, Cara, I think are so important because even though ultimately they're flimsy to us, right, Alcatraz may reopen, they're ultimately pretty small, but they're emblematic of a president who once used to bring up these ideas in the White House and Oval Office aides would shoot him down quietly. And now he is just saying it, doing it, and he rightfully feels that he's going to be

• 6:50Speaker 05

  able to succeed in, you know, a third to two-thirds of things that he tries, even though some of them are patently illegal.

• 6:58Kara Swisher?

  Okay. Ashley?

• 7:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, Carol's exactly right in the sense that in the first term of Trump, he was surrounded by people who, when he tried to do things, either would try to distract him the way you would a toddler, right, and just hope that he would forget about it, who would literally steal pieces of paper, as has been reported, off of his desk to make sure he didn't sign things by people who would tell him, here's why you can't do this, because it's against the law, or because there will be too much political blowback. And this time around, you know, we have a detail in our cover story in The Atlantic that says, a lot of people around him have this unofficial rule where if Trump says something twice, they do it. And again, we said, well, why twice?

• 7:42Speaker 01

  And, you know, a top advisor said, well, he does say some pretty crazy shit. But the difference is, the first time he says it, they say, okay, he said it once, we're thinking about it. And the second time, whether it's taking over the board of the Kennedy Center and appointing himself chair, or potentially ignoring due process, they simply find a way, if at all possible, to do it. And the other difference I see is that this time around, Trump has learned that a lot of these Democratic norms are sort of... Societal niceties, but there's nothing to prevent him from utterly, you know, as Carol said, buffaloing through them. And he has shown a willingness to sort of

• 8:24Speaker 01

  charge through any possible norm he thinks he can.

• 8:28Kara Swisher?

  Ben?

• 8:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I think his batting average may take a hit on some of these things. If he has a good batting average now, Alcatraz, for example, might, you know, lower that batting average. The idea that it could become a supermax prison again, the place where Sean Connery could, you know, take over in The Rock or whatever. I feel like the odds of that are pretty low. But so much of what he's doing does feel like the first time around, even though it is Trump 2.0 is different in a lot of ways. The idea of it being an attention economy that he controls, I think, is a big deal, right? If he's talking about things that get us talking, that get the people of America talking about what he's up to, I mean, other things can be done under the radar that we're not even aware of right now because we're talking about Alcatraz. And so I think that, you know, he just feels

• 9:11Speaker 06

  like he's winning if people are talking about him. And I think a lot of the people around him probably feel that way, too, because it allows them to do whatever it is they want to do without as much attention on it.

• 9:21Kara Swisher?

  So talk about that idea of distraction versus meaningful stuff like that, because a lot of it is, it's sort of the daily grievance of the day or the daily shock of the day. It's not exactly shock and awe, but it's sort of this, this look over here, kind of a jazz hands thing. Carol, you said this idea of distraction, is it an effective technique this time?

• 9:40Speaker 05

  I actually think he doesn't think he's trying to distract us. I don't think he thinks he's offering up his jazz hands, although I think that's a nice metaphor. Donald Trump is like, hey, I got a good idea. And the other day, I was able to do it, even though the Supreme Court said, I have to bring this guy back or facilitate bringing back Kilmar Albrejo Garcia, you know, so maybe I can open Alcatraz. Totally agree with Ben on the batting average, by the way. I don't think Trump's mode right now is distraction. He's like, wow, my flood the zone thing worked really well. A series of federal courts have been unable to bring me to heel. Some of the most, you know, powerful, and to be honest,

• 10:22Speaker 05

  well-moneyed institutions in our country, law firms in New York and DC, folded before the cards were even dealt and said, how much money do you want in pro bono for your causes that you care about, Donald Trump? That's a real dagger in the jugular of

• 10:42Speaker 05

  Not just law firms, but our legal system.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  But his team is very aware of the shock and awe element. Not always, but you know, take day one. It was explained to me that they said, look, we knew we were going to do a bunch of executive orders on immigration on day one. And if we had just done those and left it at that, all of the stories, all of the media narrative would have been, we're such horrible people, we're racist, we're separating families. But we did the immigration IOs. And then this person said, and bam, then we did the J six pardons. And on top of that, he gave his traditional inaugural address. He gave basically a second inaugural address at the congressional luncheon. He then held a big inauguration rally where he signed executive orders on stage.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  He then repaired to the Oval Office where he took more than 100 questions from the press. And then, by the way, he and Melania, her designer clothes that people wanted to spotlight, went out to the inaugural balls and their attitude was like, screw you. You have to choose which one of these you want to cover because you can't do it all. And they said that was very deliberate and the result of weeks of meticulous planning. That said, it is very easy to plan day one shock and awe when you have the entire transition to build up to it. Some of the shock and awe firehoseness we're seeing now is perhaps a bit more arbitrary and a result of a president who wants to do things and is doing them. Ben?

• 12:05Speaker 06

  Also, he has, I mean, you know, this is a topic that's close to home for everybody here, but there's kind of a hollowed out media environment right now. And so if there were, you know, 10 times as many journalists and as many journalism institutions that are covering Trump, there might be an ability to kind of cover all these things. But if he's going to do, you know, 500 executive orders and each one of them deserves coverage, there's just not enough space, there's not enough people to really cover it. And a lot of stuff can slip through. I mean, it was described to me once as, as like, if somebody shoots a bunch of rockets at the United States and only one of them is a nuke, but a thousand of them are coming at you, you kind of have to go and start shooting them all down, hoping that you're going to get the nuke. And maybe the big thing comes through.

• 12:50Speaker 06

  And so if, if they fire a thousand different executive orders or policy proposals out there, you know, it's unclear which of the big ones are going to get through.

• 13:00Kara Swisher?

  That's a really good point. So, so far, it's been 100 days. It feels like seven years at this point. I'd say there's superlatives, whether you're a supporter or a critic. In the Washington Post op-ed, Vice President J.D. Vance wrote, "President Donald Trump has accomplished more in his first 100 days than most administrations accomplish in four years." The New York Times editorial board wrote that Trump's first 100 days had done more damage to American democracy than anything else since the demise of Reconstruction. I'd love each of you to do your assessment of, is it success or demise or both? Carol, start.

• 13:33Speaker 05

  It's definitely both. You know, I mean, I said, and Ashley knows this because we covered him together the first time around, but I used to say, you know, what's going to be the most shocking thing that happens when we were in 1.0? And every day, the bar would rise and rise of what was the most shocking, right? I used to say as well then that it was just objectively true that he was attacking democracy. Well, now he is successfully pulling out the pillars under the pier of democracy, right? When you have got, I mean, not to harp on Albreger Garcia and the law firms, but when you have said

• 14:17Speaker 05

  to federal judges, you know, "So sorry, won't be able to do that, can't comply, can't answer your question." And when you say to law firms, you know, "We got a shakedown process right here, and this is what you're going to need to pay in order for me not to punish you." When you're able to successfully do that, you are gutting a key part of an adversarial justice system, legal system. And so, it's a total, from my perspective, huge success. And it is objective fact that there's damage. But you could talk more intelligently and someone else certainly more intelligently than me about the damage to our economy, which

• 14:59Speaker 05

  just from a personal standpoint, wow, stunning damage. And, and then, you know, the thing that John Kelly and Rex Tillerson-

• 15:08Kara Swisher?

  Previous Trump administration official.

• 15:09Speaker 05

  Yes. Secretary of Defense Mattis, these people tried to convince Trump over and over again that there is a reason we have allies in Europe. That's the other amazing damage. Europe is just like, okay, give up. You're not with us anymore. We can't trust you. That loss of that alliance, we don't know what the ramifications are going to be of that, but that's enormous damage. How much has Five Eyes told us about terror plots that are aimed our way that we may not know about anymore before they happen?

• 15:42Speaker 01

  So two things. I think, you know, if it's positive or negative, some of this is a Rorschach test, right? He's certainly like the, I would argue, the most consequential president of the 21st century, and people can decide for themselves if those consequences are positive or negative damage or success. But, you know, when Carol mentioned sort of the end of these traditional Western alliances with Europe, one thing I am struck by, and it doesn't just apply to NATO and the Europeans, but his first term Trump, everybody, the Europeans, the tech billionaires, et cetera, the law firms, the media organizations, they treated it correctly or incorrectly as an

• 16:27Speaker 01

  aberration, that he had won, it was kind of a fluke, Hillary was a bad candidate. I went on Biden's first trip with him. They, Biden sort of went around to Europe and said, America is back. And people thought Trump would be this blip in this aberration that would be in the rear view mirror. And now, even though despite what Trump says, he currently cannot run for a third term, there is a sense among, again, our European allies, but just look, I mean, Carrie, you know this better than anyone, the way these, you know, tech oligarchs have caved, there is a sense that Trump is here to stay. And people are making calculations based on that, not just Trump, but that Trumpism. And there is no sense that the United States, for instance, with NATO or traditional alliances,

• 17:12Speaker 01

  can be counted on to return to what you would have traditionally thought was the role the United States played in the world, whether it's A third Trump term, you know, some sort of Trump MAGA successor, a very populist Democrat, and everyone in the United States and elsewhere are making their calculations based on that, which is totally different than first term.

• 17:34Kara Swisher?

  That's a good point, Ben.

• 17:36Speaker 06

  I also think that it's really hard to know what's going to count as a success and what's going to count as a failure at this moment, and that sometimes great successes could lead to the biggest failures, right? If Trump feels emboldened to start sending people, you know, out of this country into prisons without due process, and it feels like a success to him in the moment because it's what he thinks his base wants him to do, it's also possible that America looks at it and says, this is too much, this is unconstitutional, we can't tolerate this, and it could become his undoing, right? We just don't know. And so 100 days is important for a lot of reasons, but for me, it's just too early to be able to say what seems like he's being successful doing and what's going to end up, you know, hurting him in the long run.

• 18:19Kara Swisher?

  That's a fair point. So, Ashley, you and your colleague, Michael Scherer, and your boss, Atlantic's editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, interviewed Trump in the Oval Office. Before that, you guys actually got him on the phone. Here's what he said, let's play it.

• 18:31Speaker 07

  The first time I had two things to do, run the country and survive. I had all these crooked guys, you know? And the second time, I run the country and the world, because, you know, the world, I'm trying to save.

• 18:42Kara Swisher?

  Talk a little bit about this interview. How do you think Trump's saving the world mentality is playing out so far in the administration? Because that seemed like one of the more truthful things he seemed to think. I don't think it's true, but he seemed to believe it.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  I mean, we agreed that that quote was incredibly telling. We put it on the cover, that quote from him. And I think it's revealing in ways he may not have intended. I mean, I'm struck by the first part of, you know, running the country and surviving, because that's really what it was. It was survival, and we sort of realized... In post the 2020 election, post J6, he's in the political wilderness. He ultimately comes back. And our takeaway from that was that all of these would be vampire slayers. And by that, I mean the Democrats, certainly the media critics, the court cases, you could argue, you know, the felony charges, his Republican primary rivals,

• 19:37Speaker 01

  the Republicans trying to stop him, the never Trumpers, everything. In failing to drive a stake directly through his heart, they only made him stronger. And so he comes back to office feeling emboldened, feeling more confident, feeling that he can bend reality and existence to his will, understanding that he can, you know, shatter these democratic norms. So that's the first part of the quote. I think the second part, he talks about running the world. I sort of view that more as forcing the world to react to him. I think we described it as like, you know, a DJ in a booth adjusting tariffs like knobs. And, you know, the crowd goes one way and then the music changes and the crowd goes another, you know? And the world is certainly reacting to him.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  And same with NATO and same with the Europeans and same with these countries who are figuring out, you know, if they want to take in deportees. But I don't know that he is running it so much as forcing everyone to scramble to his whims.

• 20:37Kara Swisher?

  So Carol, you co-wrote two books about Trump's first stint in office, "A Very Stable Genius" and "I Alone Can Fix It", two of his favorite things. You're working on another one about Trump and the DOJ specifically. No spoilers, but how does that, what we've been seeing align with you saw the first time and where does it differ?

• 20:53Speaker 05

  Yeah. You know, writing about the Justice Department in this book is really about writing about the rule of law and like how Trump tried to manipulate essentially the Department of Justice to his political and personal goals the first time around. Sometimes he was successful, many times he was not. Because Bill Barr, of all people, I know he has a lot of critics. On the left and in the middle, but Bill Barr, of all people, said, no, we're not doing that. I'm not investigating so and so because you don't like them and consider them a political enemy. You know, every other day, Trump was calling Barr and asking him to investigate Comey,

• 21:34Speaker 05

  to indict Andrew McCabe, who was a deputy FBI director, the first person to authorize an FBI investigation into Donald Trump personally, into whether or not he was obstructing the Russia probe criminally. And, you know, the second part of the book is like, what happened with that investigation under Joe Biden? And then finally, now, to answer your question about comparing, what we're watching is Trump's incredible success at accomplishing exactly what he wanted to do the first time around and was barred from.

• 22:10Kara Swisher?

  So Ben, I'm going to switch to the people that should, another group that should stop him is Congress, right? And you spent most of your time in Trump's first term reporting on Capitol Hill. This is a very different Congress with Republican loyalists. It feels like they're all in, even if, and there's been very little pushback, if any. Talk a little bit about this because off the record, I don't even cover Capitol Hill. And anytime I run into a Republican, they go out of their way to tell me they don't like him, or they don't agree with them, or something else. But in public, it's quite a different story. And in actual practice, really, which I think is the only thing that matters.

• 22:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's true that not everybody who pretends to love Donald Trump loves him as much as they claim to. But I also do think that now, more than ever, there are true believers in Donald Trump. I mean, when I covered the first administration, it was almost like, it felt like all of them were kind of play acting. And you could, you know, it wasn't really hard to get somebody off the record or on background to kind of trash the president and, you know, wink, wink, this is what I actually feel. But you get it, you know, politics is politics. We got to play this game. That still exists, for sure. Honestly, now, there are more people in Washington who came to Washington, born

• 23:24Speaker 06

  in this Donald Trump MAGA Republican identity kind of, you know, miasma, like this is their identity through and through. And so there are people who truly love him. And I think that is a big difference, right? So it means that when there are moments where controversial things are happening, you have both the bulwark of Republicans who love him and Republicans who are too afraid to say that they don't love him. And that combination is really stronger even than just the Republicans who have to play act. I did a profile for the Washington Post last year about this guy Sergio Gore. This is not about Congress, but this is about the administration and how it's stocked.

• 24:05Speaker 06

  And Sergio Gore, speaking of DJs, is this kind of weird Republican figure who DJs MAGA parties. He officiated Matt Gaetz's wedding. He's very close with Don Trump Jr. And his job in this administration is to head up the Office of Personnel. And he led this team that would take 4,000 some odd people and stalk them into the government. And there were loyalty tests. And one of the things that he would ask people was like, where were you on January 8th? Where were you, you know, where were you on January 7th? Like, not just January 6th, but the next day when a lot of people fled Donald Trump, if people were still with him, those people have a good chance in the government to get these jobs. And if they weren't, they have to at least explain why they weren't with him and how

• 24:50Speaker 06

  they, you know, found Jesus. And so the government, you know, through and through is stocked with people who have passed these kind of loyalty tests in Congress, in the House, in the Senate, in the administration. And that's sort of Trump's superpower right now.

• 25:03Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

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• 28:24Kara Swisher?

  Okay, so, speaking of loyalists, the top one is, of course, the world's richest man, Elon Musk, who I unfortunately have to talk about a lot. I'm getting a little tired of it. He's leaving for a little bit, so that's a good thing for Kara Swisher. But Elon Musk and Doge have obviously been a huge new factor in the early administration so far. I don't know what's going to be going forward. We'll talk about that in a second. But Ashley, you co-authored a piece about the Doge guys taking over in an unprecedented blitz back in February, and you quoted technologists speculating that Musk was creating a data lake for AI tools. I have said since the jump that this wasn't about cutting budgets, it was about a massive data grab. It's the only thing that made sense, and obviously from the numbers, they don't, they seem to be costing us money, not saving us money, so far.

• 29:07Kara Swisher?

  So, talk a little bit about that, and his role, right? Before and going forward.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  I was going to say, we're at an interesting moment with Elon and Doge, because, you know, it seems like Elon is sort of slowly on his way out, or of waning influence. And that the question is, does Doge exist without Elon? And my thought is, not really, because Doge is kind of everything and nothing, right? Like, they have this huge purview, but then they come in and they take credit for things that have nothing to do with them, and they upend things in a way that annoy, you know, sort of, not necessarily the president, but just about everyone else around him. But, you know, part of this idea was that they could come in and sort of use data and

• 29:54Speaker 01

  technology and AI to streamline all of these government inefficiencies. And the truth is, anyone would tell you, Democrats included, the federal government is wildly inefficient, and there are potentially a lot of areas for improvement and streamlining, et cetera. But, the challenge is that Elon and just about every single person he brought in have no experience with the government whatsoever.

• 30:22Kara Swisher?

  Kara, one of it, what is about this, also lawlessness, of going in and just taking the chainsaw, all the visions of this is...

• 30:29Speaker 01

  Somewhat illegal, what they have been doing, and they've been facing enormous headwinds in courts and losing quite a bit. I think the purpose was for Trump being able to brag about cutting waste. How do you look at this tenure, which seems to be over, or maybe you don't think that's the case?

• 30:46Speaker 05

  I agree with Ashley in one way. I think it's a lot less powerful an institution. Institution is the wrong word. Entity, parasite, without Elon, sort of, every other day in the Oval, you know, bringing out the chainsaw or wearing his tech support shirt, you know, to show who's holding up the flag there. I agree with you that the data vacuuming seems to have been the primary goal. The other two were the good PR. So that PR was was super successful in some echo chambers of America, but actually not really successful for taxpayers.

• 31:26Speaker 05

  The second goal was clearly to deploy the data for finding immigrants. You know, why are we going to go and get the postal inspection service, get all their data, and make sure that we can find the legal and illegal immigrants that we have records for? Why is it that we're going to go to Social Security Administration? Again, it was like, how do we utilize this material for our policy goals or the president's agenda? And showing his campaign base that he's delivering and he's getting rid of these dangerous people that are stealing our jobs. That data vacuuming is no doubt, and that data mining is no doubt still continuing,

• 32:09Speaker 05

  whether Elon is minding the store at Tesla or not. And what we just don't know, and I'm not going to pretend that I do, we just don't know the ways in which that will be deployed as time goes on. And, you know, because there was a Starlink now associated with and installed somewhere in the White House chain of internet protocol, there's a way for it to all very carefully leave the building.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  But I think back to Ben's point of like, some of the successes may end up being the greatest failures, right? Like, everyone loves to hate faceless, nameless government bureaucrats, right? Then there's the effect that they're actual, real people, and a lot of these agencies are housed out in the States and in communities, so there may be a little blowback when, you know. People at the VA are fired, or people who work for the National Park Service, who live in your neighborhood, lose their jobs. But I think the bigger thing is when you're gutting these agencies, you don't know what crises a government is going to encounter two, three, four years down the road. And when we turn around and there's a supply chain issue, or there's a missing piece of HHS that is crucial for this particular new virus, you know,

• 33:16Speaker 01

  that by the time we realize, then it is potentially too late.

• 33:21Kara Swisher?

  I always initially called Elon a heat shield for the president. He's such a showman that that's where people, right reporters would focus. The lack of pushback from Congress on Doge, at least none of the Republicans did, although lately they seem to have been more vocal about it. Democrats have, some of them joined, but now are making fun of it. From all polling, it looks like nobody likes Elon Musk, and that it didn't particularly work well with the general populace. How are people in Congress looking at this now?

• 33:51Speaker 06

  Sure, I mean, Democrats, like all things, aren't quite sure how to deal with any of this, right? There's not like one unified theory about it. You see some members of Congress going out on an anti-oligarchy tour, and then other members of Congress are like, why are we using the term oligarchy? Everybody has to Google that just to know what it means. And then it becomes a big fight about, are we picking the right fights? And then the fights become all within the Democratic Party as opposed to against the people they actually want to fight about. So I think that Democrats have realized that Elon Musk is unpopular, and that what he's up to is broadly unpopular, but they're not quite sure how to fight it. I mean, as Ashley pointed out, the kind of unnamed bureaucrat is not a particularly popular figure.

• 34:35Speaker 06

  And so when members of Congress go out and they fight for the federal workforce, I'm not sure that's particularly effective, because a lot of people in the country are like, what's the federal workforce? A bunch of bureaucrats who sit around, you know, taking money off the taxpayer dime without doing any real work? What has the government done for me lately, right? But trying to point out what can actually be done. I mean, the same thing happened with foreign aid. I mean, foreign aid is hugely important and not that expensive, but it's also a really hard thing to rally the American public around, right? You can't, it's a hard thing to say, let's go fight for USAID, when not many people necessarily know exactly what it's doing, and they have this idea in their mind that 10% of the government funding goes to USAID, when it's like this minuscule amount that actually goes there.

• 35:20Kara Swisher?

  So one of the pieces you just wrote was this huge piece in New York Magazine about Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, who was trying to be, it was a scathing piece. Fetterman clearly has other issues he's dealing with right now. A lot of it that was most upsetting was about his personal issues. But talk about, because he was one of the few Democrats who went down to Mar-a-Lago after the election. He was initially a fan of Elon Musk, and then he blasted him for trying to access IRS data. But talk about, he's been one of the players in this widening rift inside the Democratic Party.

• 35:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, he's sort of a maverick type, I guess is what he would want to refer to himself as. He is one of the people who said, stop using the term oligarchy. People have to Google it. So it's a good transition to him. I think he basically sees himself as the Democrat willing to criticize his own party. The guy who's willing to go to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Donald Trump because he was elected, Donald Trump was elected. Donald Trump was elected in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania went for him. Pennsylvania also obviously went for John Fetterman. Fetterman feels like, you know, if he represents this state when he shares voters with the president, the least he could do is go down and have a conversation with them. Isn't that a nice, simple idea of what democracy is supposed to be? I think

• 36:36Speaker 06

  a lot of people who voted for him feel like he's no longer exactly the person that they thought they were voting for. Sure, he's always been a maverick. He's always kind of stood out on his own on certain issues. But it does feel like he's putting his finger in the eye of the Democratic Party more than people might have guessed. He still votes with Democrats most of the time. But his rhetoric, his language, and the way that he talks about his own party does feel like he is a major part of the rift and experiencing one himself.

• 37:08Kara Swisher?

  Ashley, would you talk a little bit about this? Because, you know, it's been mentioned Bernie Sanders and AOC have been on their fighting oligarchy tour. Michigan Senator Alyssa Otkin, who had co-authored bipartisan legislation with Fetterman, by the way, apparently doesn't like that term either. She's telling Democrats not to be weak and woke and to, quote, "fucking retake the flag," which is an interesting way to say it. Which of these visions is going to be successful? Because one of the things that's notable is as low as Donald Trump's polls are, and they're quite low, Democrats are lower. And this should be an opportunity for Democrats, the way it has been, say, for the Canadian Liberal Party. First, Ashley, and then Carol.

• 37:48Speaker 01

  I think we don't know yet, right? Because we don't know yet because Democrats don't know yet. And part of that is natural. When you lose an election cycle, there's always soul searching. And often even that soul searching is not what you think it will be. I mean, I'm old enough to remember Mitt Romney losing and the Republican autopsy about how the Republican Party had to be a kinder, gentler, more inclusive party that welcomed immigrants. And out of that came Donald Trump, right? So the soul searching phase yields all types and surprises. But what I think we're seeing in very different ways are the seedlings of these different philosophies and discussions in the Democratic Party.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  You know, it's not just Fetterman. I think of Gavin Newsom, you know, starting his own podcast where he sort of has these MAGA folks on. You know, Pete Buttigieg has done a bit of that. One thing I find funny, more as like a riff story than a real political answer, is all these Democrats dropping F-bombs as if like that's simply all it takes. But I do think one thing-

• 38:55Kara Swisher?

  They are.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  I know. It's like the talking points went out, you know, and you can just see how uncomfortable some of them are with it. And the truth is, Trump can't, you know, ask little Marco, right? Trump can't be replicated. Only Trump is Trump. But to me, again, I just think at the end of the day, and this has always been true, but I think now in this era with social media is true or still, is like the preeminent thing of whoever emerges, whatever philosophy, whatever attributes and policy positions, I just think that what Donald Trump showed us is that, among other things, authenticity is king. And any successful Democrat will need to be authentic.

• 39:38Kara Swisher?

  So if you say fuck, you have to mean fuck, essentially?

• 39:41Speaker 01

  Yes. Like, yes, if you say fuck, you have to be able to own that fuck, you know? And if you don't, that's fine, too. But then like have your more demure, prudish, social, online media presence that is authentic to you.

• 39:56Kara Swisher?

  Carol, care to comment on the fuckery? Go ahead.

• 39:59Speaker 05

  I was just thinking about a source who said to me, you know, he uses the F word a lot in the Oval. And I'm like, I'm aware.

• 40:08Speaker 05

  I'm familiar with that.

• 40:11Speaker 05

  To your question, you know, the midterms are going to lean towards the Democrats one way or another. How dramatically they help Democrats will be based on something Ben and Ashley have referred to, which is the consequence. Like, are there going to be some planes that fly out of the sky and drop? Because we got rid of a bunch of air traffic controllers? Is there going to be another outbreak of measles that's going to spread across multiple states? Are the tariffs going to eventually, instead of wiping out initially 20% of our economic value on the street? Is it going to start to actually erode the value of the US dollar? Which is what got Trump to stop the tariffs? If those, if any of those and any other iteration of those starts to happen,

• 40:55Speaker 05

  you can see people peeling away already in very small ways.

• 40:59Kara Swisher?

  So retribution is a key word here. And we've already seen this. Trump has ordered investigations of Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs, two aides in his first chamber criticizing him. He's also ordered the DOJ to launch investigations into main Democratic fundraising platform, ActBlue.

• 41:14Kara Swisher?

  Talk a little bit about that.

• 41:15Speaker 05

  You know, I'm so glad you asked it, Kara, because I was thinking about, in the second book that Phil Rucker and I wrote, we talked about the revenge tour. You know, Trump comes back from the impeachment and he's like, everybody's going to pay. And not everybody paid, you know, he tried his darndest to remove especially inspectors general, who he blamed for, you know, this bizarre and potentially illegal phone call that he had with Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukrainian president, in which he said, yeah, I don't care. Just, just say you're investigating the Biden family. Well, it's not legal or appropriate for a US citizen to ask a foreign government to investigate an American citizen, but that's what Trump asked for. He wanted inspectors general who helped bring this to Congress

• 42:00Speaker 05

  and ultimately bring it to the public to pay. What's different now? He wiped out inspectors general upon arriving in office. CF gone. So his revenge for it, just on that one little measurement, has been, you know, extremely successful.

• 42:19Kara Swisher?

  Meaning oversight is eliminated.

• 42:20Speaker 05

  Eliminated, right. Like if you're a whistleblower today, let's just pretend for a minute you're a government employee and you know something about profiteering on crypto. Who are you going to go to safely to tell them you know who inside the White House is profiteering? Congress? There's not going to be a hearing. Inspectors general? No more to knock on the door of. How are you going to be protected? Because if you come to me, I promise you I'll protect your confidentiality and we'll write a story about it. But your legal protection is so much stronger if you go to Congress or the inspector general at the same time or around the same time.

• 42:58Kara Swisher?

  So Ashley Trump launched the ActBlue investigation right after he told you that his desire for retribution was coming from others, not him. I'm guessing that did not surprise you. What do you make of this? What are you hearing from the administration? Are these investigations having a chilling effect?

• 43:13Speaker 01

  I mean, it was a fascinating moment in the interview. The thing that prompts the exchange is Jeff Goldberg sort of says like, look, you've returned to power, right? You've returned to power and you won all seven swing states and you won the popular vote and you are back here and you are more objectively powerful than ever. Again, Rorschach test, good or bad, but more like, why can't you just let the 2020 election go and move on? And A, Trump can't. But B, he says, look, there's two schools of people. There's the people who think, you know, I won and I should just focus on making the country great. And the second group that thinks I won and I should focus on making the country great. But I also, I have to take revenge. I can't let this stuff happen. And Trump says, believe it or not, I'm in the first group. I just want to make America great. And Jeff says, you know what? I don't believe it.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  And then we literally are filing to get this story up and make it to press because the interview came together after it had closed. And we realized in real time, he has just again sought revenge on ActBlue. I mean, Carol made points about what is so concerning in, for instance, the whistleblower government accountability community. But one thing I think of, you mentioned the Chris Krebs investigation.

• 44:19Kara Swisher?

  Chris, he was head of CISA. And he said the election wasn't still.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  Yes, to me, that is, that one stands out the most because Chris Krebs's crime was performing his job and acknowledging objective reality. We now have a president who is punishing people and seeking revenge for them not being a political enemy, which again, to be clear, still unacceptable, but for literally saying like, these facts are the facts and Joe Biden won.

• 44:53Kara Swisher?

  So, and implications?

• 44:56Speaker 01

  Well, I think when, I mean, I think it can get pretty dystopian pretty quickly if we have a president who is going to use the power of the presidency to punish people for the mere crime of acknowledging reality.

• 45:10Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

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• 47:42Kara Swisher?

  I want to finish up talking about the next 100 days, or the next couple hundred days, for Doge cuts to actually go into effect. These executive orders do not cut it. Republicans in Congress need to codify them, put them in the budget. Trump came out with his budget proposal last week. White House officials called it a joint project with Doge, $1.7 trillion in total, over $1 trillion of which will go to defense. That would be a 13% increase, increases to DHS, border security, and $1 billion for Mars exploration. I wonder who wants to go to Mars? And honestly, I think that would be money well spent to send them there, myself. But, on the other hand, $163 billion in cuts that would eliminate programs for education, health, housing, climate initiatives. It cuts the National Science Foundation budget in half, about 40% from the National Institutes

• 48:27Kara Swisher?

  of Health, eliminates funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, NPR, PBS, the National Endowment for the Arts. President Biden had that old saw, "Show me your budget and I'll show you what you value." All of you, what does this say and what would it mean for the country? Carol, why don't you start first, and then Ashley and Ben?

• 48:45Speaker 05

  Someone just mentioned to me in passing, like, half of the EPA budget is...

• 48:52Speaker 05

  Toast in the current federal budget. But what Trump doesn't do is spell out which programs, right? So what's going to happen at Congress? They're going to have to be the ones to decide? That sounds, seems to me intriguing because Trump then, what will he get? The great PR benefit? I have the expenses at the EPA. But who decided which things we're not going to do? Are we not going to check homes for lead poisoning for children anymore? Who, who decided that? Ashley?

• 49:23Speaker 01

  So there was actually a time, I was quite good at math. That time is no longer. But I'm just kind of obsessed with the idea that the math doesn't add up. When you talk about the number, the amount of cuts they're promising to do, the increases to the defense budget, and then the fact that Trump himself has made clear that he will not touch entitlements in any way, shape or form. Like, you just can't do it. And I think that will be where the rubber meets the road with this bill. Ben?

• 49:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I just think that, you know, when you have this number and you're making cuts and you get to, you know, put out a press release saying we made this many cuts, you know, maybe you get some credit for it. Maybe people, you know, love you for it or whatever. But just to echo what everyone's kind of saying here, there will be moments where those cuts affect people. I mean, you think about FEMA, right? Now we live in a, in an era where there's more hurricanes than we've ever had and weather is weirder than ever. And, you know, George W. Bush's entire presidency was kind of defined for a while by the inability to respond to Katrina. I mean, it just, it's scary to think about that we could be one event away from everyone being reminded, oh, this is why we put money into the government.

• 50:36Speaker 06

  And it's scary because people will have horrible things happen and there won't be a good response. And then, I don't know. I mean, the politics of that get very complicated because then Republicans can say, look, the government can't even respond to these things, even if part of the reason why they're not responding well is because of the hollowing out of the government.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  And even if you're fighting over whose fault it was that the ambulance didn't arrive, like, at the end of the day, the ambulance didn't arrive. And that's the problem.

• 51:00Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 51:01Kara Swisher?

  I want to finish up with two more questions. I'd like to know what each of you, or you each focus on different things, but what you think is the most important thing going forward. But before that, one of the tried marks of Trump's first term was incredibly high turnover rate. You guys covered this really well, of his senior level positions. So far, there's been less of that. National Security Advisor Mike Walz finally got the boot, I guess, or he got a promotion, whatever they want to call it. This was connected to him adding your boss, Ashley, Atlantic's editor in chief, Jeff Goldberg, to that Signal group about the US attack on Yemen. How do you characterize, in the areas you cover, why this is so stable in some ways? Or is it just a precursor for someone else to go? Pete Hegseth, Kristi

• 51:42Kara Swisher?

  Noem. But if he's surrounded himself by loyalists, why move anybody? You know, in his mind, for example, Carol, Pam Bondi's doing a great job.

• 51:51Speaker 05

  Yeah. Pam Bondi, you know, is all over Fox News and viral TikToks and Reels. Reels for people my age, TikToks for my children. Talking about how Donald Trump's the best president that's ever lived. In his DOJ visit, which broke a lot of norms, she basically said, you're the boss. You're my boss. That lack of independence of these agencies to actually be able to sort of speak truth to him and give him counsel and tell him why this is probably not cool to investigate your enemies without a factual predicate, without any evidence that they actually engaged in a crime. That is the huge difference here.

• 52:34Speaker 05

  And by the way, on the Hegseth piece, if I may, watching, obviously, this amazing Signal Gate story, great scoop, definitely defined the news for some time. It is amazing to me that Walz is the person that drew Trump's ire in that, because while he definitely added an inappropriate person to a discussion of classified national defense information, the person who put Secure national defense information on to the availability of this non-secure device, whether or not Jeff Goldberg was on it or not, the person who did that was Pete Hegseth.

• 53:15Speaker 05

  And then he did it again with his wife and his brother, struggling to see how they should have that national defense information under the Espionage Act, which Trump was indicted for in 2023. You know, very similar fact pattern here.

• 53:32Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, doesn't think it's a big deal, would be my guess, doesn't think it's a big deal. Ashley, you've written about how the cabinet is cosplaying. This is a cabinet he seems to like. You don't see a lot of people leaving. You would imagine Hegseth would be pushed out for that.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was interesting. We asked him, our interview was kind of at this moment where there had been a lot of bad fact sets about Pete Hegseth. And when we asked, and Trump is not someone who sort of admits mistakes or culpability very easily, but it's sort of for him, it was revealing that he said, look, I had a talk with Pete. It was a positive talk, but I had a talk with Pete, and I think he's going to get his act together. It sort of reminded me of a parent trying to get a wayward child in line, which for Trump to say to, you know, a media outlet was striking. I think, you know, two things. I'm interested in, the first 100 days of Trump felt incredibly different from the first term.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  And Signal Gate was the first real moment that kind of reminded me of the clown car chaos of Trump 1.0. But it has not been the only one since. And so that's something I'm keeping an eye on, that dynamic. You could argue that tariffs had a fact pattern that was very similar to Trump 1.0, Trump doing something that some of his advisors truly thought was a good idea, that a lot of his advisors privately thought was a bad idea, the kind of behind the scenes lobbying, the lobbying through Fox News, and then the claiming that this was all the art of the deal and, you know, the brilliant negotiator all along, which it wasn't.

• 55:05Kara Swisher?

  I think what I said this weekend on Bill Maher, it's he's not playing 3D chess, he's just eating the pieces.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, exactly. And so that's kind of something I'm keeping an eye out for as well.

• 55:16Kara Swisher?

  Okay, Ben?

• 55:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, I just think what's the lesson that Trump has learned from the last, you know, eight years and Ashley and Michael covered it so well in their in their story of the Atlantic. It's basically just if you stick around forever, eventually you can outlast even the worst things. And so if nobody could cancel Donald Trump after he had been, you know, indicted on, you know, eight zillion crimes, and he could come back and become president because he just outlasted the people who were out to get him in his mind, why can't that be the case for his for his cabinet as well? I mean, sure, there was a lot of attention on Signal Gate and people are still talking about it today and they may talk about it forever. But also, there's not a

• 56:02Kara Swisher?

  Repercussion.

• 56:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's no repercussion. There's not an outcry in the streets for him to be removed. Republicans aren't asking for it. Democrats are going to call for everybody to be removed. In Trump's mind, I can just imagine him thinking, yeah, let's just, you know, why admit defeat and let's just keep going.

• 56:17Kara Swisher?

  Keep going. Carol, what would you say your most important thing you're focused in on?

• 56:21Speaker 05

  You know, there was a feature in his effort to get universities, law firms, other institutions that are supposed to be independent. DOJ is supposed to be independent. It's not the same, but it is supposed to be, you know, a city on a hill within our government. All this pressure on these institutions to bend to him and his will and his wishes. I want to see what the result of that is. I want to see how our country, as sources have warned me, moves and migrates more towards a Russian mold than an American one.

• 57:01Kara Swisher?

  All right. So that leads into the last question, which I think works perfectly. Ashley wrote that there was Gulag humor in Washington, speaking of Russia, feels like gallows humor right now. Last week, the New York Times editor put together a how to guide for defeating the power grab. Each of you finishing up, who or what do you think, if anything, will slow this down? And what is the role of journalists in doing this? And what is the role of politicians in doing it? Because it seems like mistake after mistake is made and they just keep, as Carol said, barreling through. Let's have Ben start and then Ashley and then Carol finish up.

• 57:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, as trite as it sounds, I think politics actually is a big part of this year. You know, if journalists keep calling it out, people keep seeing it, politicians keep talking about it. You know, it's 100 days into the first term here, and so there's not going to be a lot of pushback, you know, against them that they feel. But as you get closer to a midterm election, every single member of Congress who's worried about their own skin might have a different way of thinking about things and talking about things and voting on things. As we get closer to 2028, as whoever is running, whether it's Trump for a third term, even though he says he won't, or somebody else, there's a possibility that they start realizing that this, the outcry and the way that they're acting has repercussions that could negatively affect them. Everybody really just sees how it affects

• 58:24Speaker 06

  them personally in Washington. It's kind of pathetic, but I think that might end up being, you know, the only way that things change.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  Ashley? So I have two answers. One, which is a little bit of an unknown, but I think is the Supreme Court. It was interesting. In both of our conversations with the president for this story, we asked him, would you respect, would you abide by a Supreme Court ruling? And both times, he was unequivocal. And he said, yes. He said, you can't not listen to the Supreme Court. You have to listen to them. That said, he also, it was revealing, because he also has a belief that his justices, he would say my justices, so those he appointed, will ultimately, at the end of the day, when push comes to shove, rule in his favor, because that is what has happened historically. You know, he said, basically, I'm going to listen to the court. And he says, but I always win on appeal, right? I got immunity on appeal. So I think there's a world in which the Supreme Court can play an important role, but I also

• 59:16Speaker 01

  think we won't really know how he will actually react until they rule against him on something major. Which they have. Yes, but I think there are more major issues that will be coming up in the coming months. That's number one. And then two, kind of back to what Ben said, I just also think reality and vibes, right? I mean, Biden, at the end of the day, Lost on the economy in many ways. And it was vibes because as I covered and everyone covered, a lot of the quote unquote "actual economic indicators" were quite good. But the vibes that you were stuck in the house, if you were lucky enough to own a house in the first place, that you were stuck in the house you had bought because interest rates had gone up and now you couldn't afford to move, that was a vibe. The fact that milk, eggs, gas, all of these things cost more money.

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  Something I do now that a lot of people do is instead of just going to one grocery store, you get as much of the stuff as you can at the cheaper grocery store and then you make a second trip just to get those items that that grocery store doesn't have. Or if maybe the seafood is a little better, somewhere more expensive, you might be willing to pay it. But that is a vibe thing. When you go grocery shopping, and Trump himself has started talking about, which is fascinating, a holiday season where kids don't maybe get as many gifts. The holiday seasons are a tough time for a lot of families that you plan for and you save for. And if it becomes an area where people feel like this economy isn't working for me, those are the things that have real political ramifications.

• 1:00:44Kara Swisher?

  It's the only thing I agree with him. No one deserves 30 dolls, but we have too many dolls at my house. But I don't agree with him. Carol, why don't you finish up?

• 1:00:51Speaker 05

  We'll have to ask you later how many markers are in your house as well, how many colored pencils. You know, Trump got a visit from Bill Barr in March of 2020, in which Barr told him privately, "I had this vibe with George H.W. Bush in 92. He was going to go down. He was going to lose. And I have that vibe about you now." I don't think Barr actually used the word vibe, but he said, "I feel like you are, you're going to lose this election if you don't do something differently." What was he losing the election over? People thought his response to COVID was insanely chaotic. And I think that the... You asked the question, who changes this dynamic?

• 1:01:35Speaker 05

  Journalists do what they always do. We report unflinchingly, factually, on what's happening in real time. But voters are the ones who are going to decide what happens here. And maybe that's in the midterms very soon. And they're going to decide it based on consequences. Does a crisis come down the pike? Do expensive groceries push people to the edge? Do tariffs leave a bunch of retirees who supported Trump feeling like, "Well, I guess I can't actually pay my way. And I'm going to have to rely on my children for a few more years because of these tariffs." You know, it's that kind of consequence slash crisis and whether or not that unfolds.

• 1:02:13Kara Swisher?

  Great. I really appreciate it. Thank you. How substantive.

• 1:02:16Speaker 06

  Thank you so much.

• 1:02:17Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 1:02:17Kara Swisher?

  Thank you.

• 1:02:21Kara Swisher?

  On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castor-Russell, Kateri Yokum, Dave Shaw, Megan Burney, Megan Cunane, and Kalen Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Emile Klein and Eamon Whalen. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Aruda. And our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you own your own authentic fuckery. If not, stop buffaloing through. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.

• 1:03:08Speaker 02

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• 1:03:53Speaker 10

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• 1:04:20Speaker 11

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