How ‘Big and Beautiful’ is Trump’s Bill? (with Jamelle Bouie of NYT)

From the opinion pages https://www.nytimes.com/column/jamelle-bouie of The New York Times to his popular TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@jamellebouie?lang=en feed, Jamelle Bouie is a leading voice in American politics. This week, Bouie helps us sift through the inner workings of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” (4:38): its promise of prosperity for the middle class (8:44), the “moral economy” guiding the legislation (13:00), the projected losses in healthcare coverage across the country (18:07), particularly in right-leaning, rural communities (23:50), the GOP’s vision for the future (33:30), and how strict reporting requirements will put SNAP benefits at risk for millions (36:46). On the back-half, Bouie reflects on the ghost of Democrats past (43:35), campaign lessons from Zohran Mamdani’s bid for New York City mayor (46:18), the recent ICE raids sweeping Los Angeles (1:03:54), and the historical antecedents that help put this moment in American life in perspective (1:08:08). This episode was recorded at Spotify Studios. Thoughts or future guest ideas? Email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:21Sam Fragoso?

  This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Fragoso. Welcome to the show.

• 0:38Sam Fragoso?

  Today, journalist Jamel Bouie. Bouie joined the opinion pages of The New York Times back in 2019. Since then, he's carved out a pretty unique place for himself at the paper of record, publishing thoughtful, clear-headed columns in which he offers historical context for present-day events. He's also recently become an unlikely star on TikTok. At over 250,000 followers, recording from his home in Charlottesville, Virginia, Bouie is one of the few old-school newspaper journalists who has figured out how to translate his work into this new medium. And most remarkably, he's kind of done this without compromising

• 1:20Sam Fragoso?

  what he does so well on the page. In a media ecosystem that I think is full of brash personalities that favor style over substance, Bouie's voice, which is steeped in history, backed by rigorous research, has become increasingly refreshing. He's one of the few people I keep turning to in this moment, for this moment. And so this week, I invited him on the show to talk about the opening act of Trump's first year back in office, namely, this big, beautiful bill, which he signed into law on the Fourth of July. Now, I'm sure many of you have seen or read some of the reports and numbers that have come

• 2:03Sam Fragoso?

  from this bill, including from the Budget Lab at Yale, which projects a decrease of financial resources for households in the bottom 20% of the income distribution by about $700 a year. Meanwhile, it will, quote, "increase the resources of households in the top 0.1% by more than $100,000 annually."

• 2:27Sam Fragoso?

  A reverse Robin Hood, as many on the left have been calling it. But what does that actually look like? How did Yale's Budget Lab or the Congressional Budget Office arrive at these numbers? And most importantly, who are the actual people and communities behind these statistics? Who's going to bear the burden of this big, beautiful bill? That's a big part of what I discuss with Jamel this week. But we also talk about the recent ICE raids that have been sweeping Los Angeles, what he believes as the failure of the Democratic Party to meet the moment, what New York mayoral candidate Zoran Mondani can teach us about campaigning in the modern era, and the historical

• 3:12Sam Fragoso?

  antecedents that help put this moment in American life in context, which is something we could all use a whole lot more of in this moment. So with that, here is Jamel Bowie.

• 3:40Sam Fragoso?

  Jamel Bowie, welcome to the show.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 3:43Sam Fragoso?

  It's my understanding that you're on vacation this week.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah.

• 3:48Sam Fragoso?

  And so you are coming out of vacation retirement to come on to Talk Easy. Is that fair?

• 3:54Speaker 01

  That's right. The Gen Z era is called your two weeks of vacation or how much that they call it a mini retirement or something.

• 4:01Sam Fragoso?

  Are your wife and kids OK with you taking the time to talk American politics with me?

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Well, my kids are with my parents, actually. And so it's just my wife and I at the moment.

• 4:12Sam Fragoso?

  Have you blamed me already to her?

• 4:15Speaker 01

  I'm not even sure she's aware of what I'm doing at the moment. I think she's just sort of like, well, Jamel's talking to someone about politics.

• 4:24Sam Fragoso?

  Is that common, that she doesn't know what you're doing?

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's pretty standard. I don't think I've taken a vacation in years where I didn't do something approaching my actual day job, so it's fine.

• 4:35Sam Fragoso?

  OK, good. We'll try to have some fun with it. I want to start with President Trump's one big, beautiful bill. There's been a lot of scary numbers. And left-leaning allegies around what this piece of legislation portends. And the gap between how the left and the right see this bill, I don't think could be any larger. You have White House Secretary Caroline Levitt, who has said that the bill delivers "common sense agenda" that nearly 80 million Americans voted for: the largest middle-class tax cut in history, permanent border security, massive military funding,

• 5:14Sam Fragoso?

  and restoring fiscal sanity. The bill will usher in, quote, "the golden age of America." On the other end, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi wrote, "The Republicans' big, ugly bill is the biggest transfer of money in history to the wealthy and well-connected, paid for on the backs of everyday Americans. It is an immoral Robin Hood in reverse of bad economics." And now, I want to set aside the fact that wealthy and well-connected are precisely the terms I would use to describe Pelosi herself. The gulf between "golden age of America" and "biggest transfer of money in history to the wealthy" is pretty severe.

• 5:57Sam Fragoso?

  Having combed through this bill and your reporting, where does the truth land on the spectrum between those two responses?

• 6:06Speaker 01

  I'm inclined to say here that the truth doesn't really lie between the two responses, that the truth is pretty squarely on the side of those who see it as, first and foremost, a massive upwards transfer of wealth. The centerpiece of the bill is a continuation of the 2017 Trump tax cuts, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. And at the time, that was recognized as being primarily an upper-income tax cut, that the majority of the distributional benefits were going to go to the top 1%, top 10% of income earners, and specifically, people who earned income from investments, wealthy shareholders, wealthy heirs, those

• 6:47Speaker 01

  sorts of folks. And so, just by virtue of being a continuation of the 2017 tax cut, this, almost by definition, is this massive upwards redistribution of wealth. Now, part of the issue-- Is that this was done under a process called reconciliation where your 10-year budget window has to basically break even. You can't add to the deficit under the reconciliation process. It's sort of, that's sort of the give and take. That reconciliation allows you to pass big fiscal bills without the filibuster on just a simple majority, but when you pay for that figuratively by not being able to deficit spend, instead of pay for the continuation of these tax cuts, which are huge, these are huge upper income tax

• 7:29Speaker 01

  cuts, most of the distributional benefit in this case goes to the top one, top 10th of a percent of income earners. To pay for that, you have to cut from somewhere else. And so where they decided to cut from was Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. And the combination of those cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, as well as cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or food stamps, is that on the other end, for the lower income earners, for the bottom 10, 20, 30%, this ends up being a big tax increase of around, you know, an average $1,200, $1,300 a year. So the assessment of the bill that says it's a big transfer of wealth to the rich, I think it's just,

• 8:13Speaker 01

  it's just factual. This isn't what it does. Now, you can think that this is a good thing, right? Like, there are certainly people who look at this and say, yeah, this is how things ought to work. But the claim from the White House that this is somehow a grand, you know, middle-class tax cut is only true if you just ignore who gets most of it, right? Like, it's true in the sense that a middle-income family is going to get a very, very modest reduction in their tax burden.

• 8:43Sam Fragoso?

  So that reduction for middle-class families, what's the range of that? And do you not find it to be significant?

• 8:50Speaker 01

  We're talking about, for as if the median household, which is pulling in like, you know, $60,000, $70,000. We're talking annual tax cut of a couple hundred dollars, four or five hundred dollars. That compares, right, to the big cuts to Medicaid, which the White House and Republicans in Congress said those Medicaid cuts are just removing immigrants, undocumented immigrants, from Medicaid. But the issue is that federal Medicaid eligibility already excludes undocumented immigrants. So- What we know is that most of those cuts are being done through what's called administrative burdens, just like more paperwork, primarily is going to affect low-income, working-class citizens, about two-thirds of people who collect Medicaid are already working, right?

• 9:32Speaker 01

  The administration says we're just gonna knock deadbeats off, but like, the population of working-age people who are able to work, who aren't disabled, who aren't caregivers, who aren't students, and who are on Medicaid is very, very small. So, most of this is gonna be administrative burdens on families with children who rely on Medicaid for their health insurance and their children's health insurance. So, maybe they get a tax cut, maybe they get like a small and modest tax cut. That pales in comparison to the value of the benefits they receive from Medicaid. And let's say you're not someone on Medicaid. Let's say you are someone, you get health insurance from your job, or your spouse gets health insurance from your job, you're making eighty, ninety thousand, a hundred thousand

• 10:16Speaker 01

  dollars a year, you get a couple hundred dollars a year, maybe you get, let's just say, let's, for the sake of argument, you're getting a thousand dollars a year in tax cuts, enough at the very least to, you know, pay for a new appliance if you need something. What happens when your parents hit retirement age and need home care? Well, Medicaid pays for that, in most cases. What if you lose your job, and you lose your health insurance? And it pushes your income down where, prior to the bill, you would have been eligible for Medicaid, and now you're not. What happens if you need to purchase health insurance on the federal exchanges under the Affordable Care Act, and we're no longer providing additional subsidies for that? So, that's out of reach as well, right?

• 11:00Speaker 01

  So, the point I'm making is that even if you can imagine a household that is getting more than a couple hundred dollars, you have to weigh that against what they're losing in benefits, whether that's benefits directly for themselves, whether that's a way that the federal social safety net helps make other aspects of your life, elder caregiving for younger people, makes that a little more, a little easier.

• 11:23Sam Fragoso?

  There is a deduction of up to twenty-five thousand dollars for people who work on tips, and there's also twelve thousand, five hundred dollar deduction for people who receive overtime. These seem to be the numbers. When Republicans are defending the bill that they turn to, that they say this is an indication that we are behind in working for the middle class.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  No tax on tips deduction, the $25,000 deduction, I believe is for reported income, right? Which is sort of like, that doesn't apply to that many people.

• 12:00Sam Fragoso?

  But somewhere less than 2% of workforce.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  In my mind, both of these supposed benefits exist for people who voted for the bill to say that they did it, and no one's going to ask any further questions about whether it even applies to anyone meaningful. But let's say that they do, and they get a couple hundred dollars. Well, someone making 100 times more than them is going to be pulling down 20 or 30 or 40 or $50,000 just in straight tax cuts. And that's before you get to all the beneficial tax changes that make it easier, if you are very wealthy, to either evade the IRS. And as a parenthetical, the administration is basically slashing IRS enforcement. So maybe you don't have to worry about that. You don't even have to work to evade anymore.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  And then secondarily, it makes it easier for you to pass your wealth down. So you don't really get taxed on that anymore either. And in the wash, it's like, yeah, you get pocket change, and they get some nice, clean stacks.

• 13:01Sam Fragoso?

  These feel to me, they're sort of cosmetic offerings. They're easy gestures to point to in a speech, but are not the bulk and substance of the bill, which you have said represents and is driven by a genuine ideological belief and a certain kind of, quote, "moral economy." So first, explain what you mean by "moral economy," and then break down what policies in this bill, especially when it comes to healthcare and SNAP, that are examples of this idea.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Moral economy is just a term that refers to how you understand the political economy of your society, how you think it ought to be based on sort of your underlying values. The moral economy of the left is that everyone who works ought to be able to enjoy some minimum standard of comfort irrespective of how hard they work, irrespective of what the job is, whatever. There's no, in their view, real connection between any of that and what you deserve. And then see that the dominant vision of moral economy on the political right, and I say among many, many Americans, is basically the opposite of that, that what's your level of comfort in life ought to be tied to the amount of effort you're putting forth. And if you aren't actively

• 14:20Speaker 01

  working to improve yourself, if you aren't actively working to get ahead in a profession, then maybe you don't deserve health insurance. Maybe health insurance, maybe affordable housing is something that is reserved for people who are going to work for it. And if you don't get it, then that's just your own fault. And I think a corollary to that, to get to the policy question, is it suggests, right, that the role of the state isn't at all to make up for market failures, to intervene for people who cannot achieve a certain level of comfort, but to basically affirm how things play out in the market. So if you succeed, and you make a lot of money, and you have a comfortable life, and the role of government

• 15:04Speaker 01

  is to say, good job, here's more. And if you are low income, if you are by this measure not a success, if you can't manage to achieve this level of comfort, then the role of the government is to say, all right, tough, work harder.

• 15:19Sam Fragoso?

  Hold on for a second. Like, in high school, you were on the debate team?

• 15:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:25Sam Fragoso?

  Now, if you were to make the case against the first part of what you said, the argument that quality of life should be commensurate with effort exerted, why do so many people wholeheartedly, full-throatedly believe that in this moment?

• 15:44Speaker 01

  The case against that is just that we don't live in a world of just desserts, right? Like that we all inherit, literally from our parents in some cases, maybe less literally in the sense that we live in a society and things are transmitted across generations. But we're all subject to unearned advantages of all kinds, of all kinds, right? Like, maybe you live in a racially stratified society and you have an unearned advantage of belonging to the dominant racial group. Maybe you live in a religiously stratified society and you have the unearned advantage of belonging to the religiously dominant group. Maybe you simply were endowed with unusual intelligence. Maybe you happen to be very good looking. Maybe you're very athletic, right? Like, we can go down the

• 16:24Speaker 01

  list of every single quality that you you have, and it has nothing to do with anything you've done. It's simply luck of the draw. And so, in my view, why should people's basic quality of life be structured by luck of the draw? This isn't saying everyone deserves like a mansion, right? What it is, is that like, everyone deserves a roof over their head, access to healthcare, access to food, like, the basics. And if you are, as most people are, motivated to get more beyond that, then more power to you. Go ahead. But if you either aren't motivated or not in circumstances that really allow you to to achieve the great heights that are possible in our society, I don't know

• 17:09Speaker 01

  why you should be punished for something that basically is not your fault. You've done nothing. And you can go further with this, right? Like, if you are driven to be ambitious, how much of that is a function of just the way you were raised? How much of that really is something that you are doing in like a concrete way, and not just like a product of a bunch of inputs over which you had no particular control? Like, if you want to really drill down, I think you land pretty quickly in a place where it's like, well, everything's arbitrary. And obviously, you can't, you can't really run a society like that. But by the way, you also can't run a campaign like that. A campaign like that. But you can't, you can't run a society like that. So you make concessions, right, to the idea that everyone has some amount of agency, and

• 17:54Speaker 01

  everyone is, has some degree of responsibility of where they end up. But that has to be balanced against the recognition that a lot of it is just pure, pure chance. It's just luck of the draw. Before the administration tries.

• 18:09Sam Fragoso?

  To get people to move on from this bill. I feel like it's worth holding the lasting effects that you've that you've been alluding to. Like what this legislation will reap. Here are some health insurance numbers by state. And these are projected totals that are made up of people either losing Medicaid or their Affordable Care Act coverage. In Texas, you have 1.2 million people poised to lose insurance. In Illinois, 500,000. New York, 889,000. California, 1.9. New Jersey, 291,796. Colorado, 196,000. Pennsylvania, 500,000.

• 18:51Sam Fragoso?

  In total, across the country, many estimate 12 million people will be uninsured almost immediately with another four to five million by the end of the year. Now, the bill does this by imposing tighter work and eligibility rules. You mentioned those earlier, that every six months, instead of once a year, able-bodied adults will have to prove 80 hours a month of work or volunteering to continue receiving coverage. Republicans argue these requirements are demanding the bare minimum from people. That the bill is designed mostly to improve the program's efficiency and to reduce, quote, "fraud and waste within the system." Do you think the state and quality of health coverage in this country

• 19:36Sam Fragoso?

  necessitated these kinds of reforms? Is there rampant fraud and waste that we're not talking about?

• 19:44Speaker 01

  A couple of things. The first, just on sort of a factual level, that the vast majority of Medicaid fraud and waste comes on the provider end, which makes sense. Like, how exactly, as a consumer, does one defraud health insurance? Are you like going to get vaccines every day? Like, how does that actually work? Like, are you getting procedures? You don't like elective surgeries? You don't need Medicaid doesn't really even cover those kind of procedures. What does that even look like? So I kind of think that the claim is nonsensical. And how they are trying to bridge the gap, how they're trying to make it seem sensical, is by presenting Medicaid as if it were welfare, as people remember from 30 years ago.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  So back in the 90s, when they were, quote unquote, reforming. Aid for families with dependent children, which is what people know as welfare, into a new program called Temporary Aid for Navy Families, which is much less generous. The trope was you had all these able-bodied people sitting around on their butts, not working, not doing anything. And they've similarly using that trope for Medicaid, but Medicaid is not a welfare program. It's a health insurance program. And so if you are sitting on your butt collecting Medicaid, you're just insured. And that doesn't, you still have to like pay your rent. You still have to buy food, right? Like there's, there's actually not, it doesn't do anything for you.

• 21:09Sam Fragoso?

  Now, Jamel, you're forgetting this, this important fact, which is that you have people sitting on their couch, thinking they could injure themselves.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Right, of course, yes.

• 21:17Sam Fragoso?

  And be covered.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  But the fact, I mean, because of this fact, that like Medicaid is not a program that you kind of just sit on and collect benefits. Most adults who are on Medicaid, who are either not disabled, not seniors in like nursing care, or not themselves caregivers, which is work, right? Most adults who are on Medicaid, you don't fall under those categories, which is basically everyone else. They work. They work a regular job. And what states that have attempted work requirements have found, New Hampshire recently had an experiment in Medicaid work requirements. What they found was in addition to not really catching any fraud or whatever, the most likely outcome is that people who would otherwise be eligible

• 22:03Speaker 01

  for Medicaid don't get it, because it's actually hard to keep up with even that kind of program requirement. It's hard to prove that you've been working 80 hours. If you ask me to prove that I've been working exactly 80 hours a month, I have a hard time. I don't clock in. I don't have a time card.

• 22:21Sam Fragoso?

  And by the way, I want to add, you're welcome to submit this tape at the end of the month.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  And this counts. This will count for 1/80th of my, of my necessary reporting requirement. So it's, it's actually kind of hard to prove that you're, you're working the requisite hours. And maybe you have to go to, you know, a social security office. What's their closing? They're closing those offices. They're de-staffing the civil service. So you have to go to an office and wait. For a couple hours to prove that you've been working. And this may jeopardize, you don't have time for this. Maybe you have kids, like this may jeopardize your ability to do that. So you don't do it and you lose your coverage and they know that, like they know that. That's what I find so offensive about this. Like, don't piss on me and tell me it's raining, right?

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Like, just say you're cutting Medicaid. This isn't improving the program, isn't making it more efficient. If anything, a bunch of people losing their health insurance, but people being people still needing medical care will end up driving up cost of medical care across the board because they will still go into emergency rooms. So end up utilizing the most expensive forms of care. So if anything, this will make the system far less efficient than it was. But what it does do is it frees up a bunch of money to cut taxes for people making the top incomes in the country for frankly, the president's rich buddies.

• 23:45Sam Fragoso?

  But the rich buddies are not the people that got him elected. And frankly, Medicaid and SNAP are huge factors in rural communities, communities that overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump. When Republicans promised to immiserate their voters, you said, and give their money to the rich, a lot of Americans say, I don't believe them. Why?

• 24:11Speaker 01

  That's a, that's a complicated answer. You know, Republican lawmakers have never been especially shy about their intentions of cutting these programs. This has been like a dream of Republican lawmakers for decades.

• 24:23Sam Fragoso?

  What's the dream? So sorry, explain the dream to me.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  The dream is just like rolling back the, the social insurance state to where it was before the New Deal.

• 24:33Sam Fragoso?

  And that of all the dreams to have, why that one?

• 24:37Speaker 01

  Because I think conservatives view.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  Social state, the administrative state, this large federal government as unfairly meddling in the liberty of people who have great wealth and have lots of property, captains of industry. And the federal government acting both as a regulator, telling what these people can and cannot do, but also providing some basic level of comfort, which means that if you're a laborer, you can say no, right? Like, if you know that you have access to health insurance, regardless, if you know that you have access to generous unemployment benefits, to food stamps, to whatever, then in the labor market, you can say to someone offering poverty wages, no, I don't want

• 25:25Speaker 01

  that. I'll wait for something better.

• 25:28Sam Fragoso?

  Is this the dream of conservative politicians? Or the voters that put them there? Because there's something not lining up and it is being brought forth.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:37Sam Fragoso?

  By this bill in a way that, by all accounts, every day on the New York Times op ed pages, of which you contribute, it is called historically bad, it's called dangerous, it's called, as you say, a promise to immiserate their voters. So what the hell is being missed here?

• 25:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, what you might call the lawmaker class and conservative intellectuals are at cross purposes with the actual voters. And there was a time when it wasn't this dramatic, when you, like, the core voters for Republican politicians actually want, like, substantively, this agenda. But these days, most Republican voters don't want this. And in fact, Trump campaigned, right, on not touching Medicaid, on not touching Social Security, and not touching Medicare. In fact, part of the claim, the argument that both of, or all three of Trump's campaigns, has been this group of people, defined racially.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  Is unfairly taking benefits that rightfully go to you. So we're going to keep the programs and just make sure the benefits go to you. And so when, you know, when Carolyn Levitt, the White House Press Secretary, says the Americans voted for this agenda, I'm not sure that they did. I'm not sure that the American to put Trump back in the White House voted for massive Medicaid cuts or massive ACA cuts or massive SNAP cuts. I think what they voted for was some idea that the people that they don't like, who they believe are unfairly taking benefits are going to be punished. Part of the issue here is that in the same way that there is no big category of like criminal immigrants, there is no big category of like undocumented immigrants for anyone, like unfairly taking programs, resources that like that doesn't exist.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  And so if you're going to say we're going to cut waste, fraud and abuse, like the only place there is to cut is for the stuff that goes for the kinds of people who are voting for you. The other thing I'll say, and this relates to your first question, which is like, why, you know, what's going on with how these programs are perceived? It's one of the consistent findings in social science that Americans view programs from the government in like racialized terms, that when you say welfare, the image that emerges in people's head is of like a low income black woman. And Americans view programs in racialized terms, and then they don't like the idea

• 27:54Speaker 01

  benefits going to people who they deem undeserving on kind of a racial basis.

• 28:02Sam Fragoso?

  Even if those same people, those same white people in rural communities that you're talking about, even if they themselves are receiving the exact same benefits that they detest others receiving.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  Well, this is, this is the interesting thing. It's always been the case that like the majority, like most recipients of government benefits are white, like just, it's a numbers game, right? And so just, just a pure numbers game, there are more white Americans than everyone else. They're going to be the ones collecting most of these benefits. So there's, there's a couple of things happening here. One is some degree of basically, I deserve it, but they don't, right? Like, well, I'm getting this and it's because I'm deserving, but they're not deserving. Imagine a rural county in, in wherever, let's say one in Virginia. Let's say Nelson County down the street from me, um, which is like 70, 30 Trump, I think, maybe 75, 25 Trump, like a heavily Trump area.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Now you can look at that and you can say, well, that means, you know, every, every adult who voted or three quarters of every adult who voted in this district in the census tract supports Trump. But that's not true. We have to look at the, the composition of eligible voters. Look at the competition of people who registered and then who actually voted. And which, which I'll drill down in is that the people who are voting aren't necessarily the people who are collecting the benefits from the federal government. They might be people who don't collect benefits. And when they think of the people they think of as undeserving or that they resent, they're thinking of like their neighbors who might well be white people and they're voting against them.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  And so what it all, I guess, washes out to is you have all these contradictions within the Republican coalition. You have a lot of blue collar voters voting for Republicans who collect these benefits. You have a lot of upper income voters in the same areas voting for Republicans, but they're resenting the blue collar voters for them for Republicans. You have Republican lawmakers who have this sort of ideological desire to cut these programs, but also rely on votes from both groups of people. And now they've, they've just cut, they've just cut these programs in a major way.

• 30:12Sam Fragoso?

  But, but that doesn't speak to your quote because you said, when Republicans promise to immiserate their voters and give money to the rich, a lot of Americans say, I don't believe them.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 30:25Sam Fragoso?

  Why?

• 30:27Speaker 01

  I think it's a hard thing to believe for a bunch of reasons. One of them is that I think it just sounds crazy to people. Back in 2012, this is a very infamous focus group. This is focus group and it was a Democratic focus group. And it was basically sort of like putting forth the Romney, Ryan, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, the Republican nominee for president, vice president that year, their economic plans, which for big Medicaid cuts, big Medicare cuts, repealing the Affordable Care Act, you know, social security reform, like all sorts of big cuts. And they put them in front of participants and the people in the focus group didn't believe they were real. And they didn't believe they were real because they were like, this is too crazy. Like, why would anyone do this?

• 31:11Speaker 01

  The plan was to get people's opinions on these things, but the challenge into being, well, how do we even persuade the participants that like this is a real stuff they're looking at?

• 31:20Sam Fragoso?

  It was so crazy that they couldn't even begin to form an opinion.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Right. And I think, you know, there are many overlapping cliches that you learn about American politics. One of the big ones is that the two sides have the same goals and just like different ways of going about it.

• 31:36Sam Fragoso?

  And you don't believe that?

• 31:37Speaker 01

  I don't think that's true. I think it's like demonstrably wrong. What we, I think what we've been talking about demonstrates the extent to which it's wrong. One side's goal is to maintain like maximum autonomy for private industry and private business and owners of capital. And the other side wants to, you know, moderate the failings of a market society.

• 31:59Sam Fragoso?

  So when it swings back around to Republican voters, once you get past the focus group, if you can even get past that, what are the other reasons?

• 32:08Speaker 01

  So there's disbelief, I think. There is kind of a rational calculation based off of the last 15 years of gridlock in Washington. It's been really hard for 15 years for politicians to do much of anything because of, you know, structural conditions in American politics, because of, you know, particular rules and procedures in the legislatures, like all kinds of reasons. And so what that means if you're a voter is that for 15 years, you've been hearing promises of you're going to someone's can do X, Y, or Z. And then it doesn't happen. Maybe someone tries to do it and it's blocked. Maybe someone tries to do it and a court strikes it down. Whatever reason, you're just someone who, you know, you vote every two years and you don't pay much more attention beyond that.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  So then, when someone like me says they are going to cut your benefits, rationally almost, you say, well, I don't think that's really going to happen. And if you are relatively economically comfortable, or you're not feeling the kind of like economic stress, economic discomfort, then you might say, even if there's a chance, there's these other things I care about too. And I'm going to vote for that reason. And again, I'm not really sure it's going to happen in the first place. And so then, when Trump actually does do something that harms you and affects you, you're kind of shocked by it because that just wasn't part of your calculation of voting in the first place.

• 33:30Sam Fragoso?

  Before we move on to the Democratic Party, I just want folks to hear explicitly what promises were made during last year's Republican National Convention. This is J.D. Vance in Milwaukee on the campaign trail.

• 33:45Speaker 02

  We've heard about villains and their victims. I've talked a lot about that, but let me tell you about the future. President Trump's vision is so simple and yet so powerful. We're done, ladies and gentlemen. Catering to Wall Street, we'll commit to the working man.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  We're done importing foreign labor. We're going to fight for American citizens and their good jobs and their good wages.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  We're done sacrificing supply chains to unlimited global trade and we're going to stamp more and more products with that beautiful label, "Made in the USA."

• 34:42Sam Fragoso?

  Given this big, beautiful bill, given the historic nature of it and the consequences and the effects that it's going to have for years and decades to come, when you hear that from Vance, where does it land with you this week?

• 34:57Speaker 01

  It lands to me as just rhetoric in the most literal sense of the term. It's just sort of, it's just kind of empty words. We're gonna, we're gonna return to the working man, we're gonna care about Main Street. It's like, no, you're not. Like, this, this bill is very much not for the working man, not for Main Street. All this talk about making Washington work for regular people was plainly not true. I would say that it was evidently not true in the moment. It's, it's clear to me at the very least that you're not looking at any set of policies that are going to benefit ordinary working people, whether

• 35:39Speaker 01

  that's from this bill, whether that is from the Trump Department of Labor, the administration's basically been trying to gut the National Labor Relations Board, you know, Trump appointees on the NLRB have been very favorable, as they were in the previous administration, to the interest of employers. You know, you can kind of just go down the line, right? Like, if the, the administration has basically stopped enforcing civil rights law and employment discrimination law, and that's, those are working issues. They're issues for working people. Like, if you were getting sexually harassed on the job, that makes it harder for you to do your job. It jeopardizes your ability to stay employed. If you're experiencing racism on the job, it jeopardizes your ability to be employed. It makes it harder to be

• 36:24Speaker 01

  on the job. I'm not sure that when J.D. Vance is waxing about working people, he's necessarily thinking of the kind of people who might need the protections of civil rights law in their, in their workplaces. But I think one should understand... Those sorts of things as being working class issues as much as issues of wages and benefits.

• 36:45Sam Fragoso?

  I suspect he's also not thinking about the people that are going to lose SNAP benefits, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, basically food stamps. Again, just so people have the numbers. In Texas, 800,000 people will either lose some, if not all, SNAP benefits. In New York, over 1 million. In California, over 5 million. In New Jersey, 800,000. In Illinois, 360,000. In Massachusetts, 175,000. In Pennsylvania, 144,000. Again, the Trump administration has upped the work requirements, similar to healthcare, to receive these benefits. And the last point of the bill I want to hit, these requirements, it's not explicitly

• 37:30Sam Fragoso?

  eliminating healthcare coverage or SNAP benefits. It's designed, to me, seems to be to make it increasingly difficult, as you alluded to earlier, to receive the benefits. The aim is to bury people in the thing most people hate the most, which is paperwork. Applications and proof of income documents that you will have to submit over and over and over again until you make a mistake on that document. Maybe you don't send it in on time. Maybe you've checked the wrong box. Maybe you forget to dot your i's or cross your t's. Like, this, to me, this approach, it feels completely in line with how Trump has ran his businesses outside of the Oval Office.

• 38:14Sam Fragoso?

  He is notorious for burying his opposition in paperwork. Lawsuits, counter lawsuits, none of which have any intention of going to court. The aim is to paralyze the opposition until they finally submit and settle. You've seen that most recently this week with Paramount's $16 million settlement with Trump. And in this new, big, beautiful bill, I feel like that philosophy is rearing its head again. Is that wrong?

• 38:45Speaker 01

  No, I think that's absolutely right. I think it's a really perceptive point that this is, yeah, this is how Trump treats contractors and the like, and it's treating people the same way. And it's going to have the same effect. Eventually, you're just going to give up because you don't want to bother.

• 38:58Sam Fragoso?

  What to do with that? Because we've seen even Paramount, who has no shortage of lawyers, mind you, has just given him $16 million in a settlement. Staff at 60 Minutes, one of the most prized news institutions this country has ever created, walking away from the show. If Paramount can't fight back, how the hell are they going to do it?

• 39:22Speaker 01

  I think this is ultimately going to be a task for civil society groups. It's going to be a task for nonprofits and the like, who can work with recipients to help do this paperwork, localities, to work with recipients to help do this paperwork. It's going to have to be like an actual push to make sure that people don't fall through the cracks. Unfortunately, whether you'll be able to access to that kind of help is going to depend on where you live. And so what was once something closer to an entitlement is no longer going to be that way. But I do think it points the way forward for future reformers, which is not just to make the programs more generous, but to just make it easier to collect them, to reduce the burdens and make it as automatic as possible. Ideally, if you register to vote,

• 40:07Speaker 01

  then someone should be looking to see if you're eligible for Medicaid or food stamps or what have you. If you're eligible for food stamps, someone should be looking to see if you've registered to vote, right? Like, it should be sort of a web of things that are connected to each other.

• 40:19Sam Fragoso?

  All right, well, after the break, I want to talk about the Democratic Party and whether it's starting to remake itself in the aftermath of this bill. We'll be right back with Jamelle Bouie.

• 40:42Sam Fragoso?

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• 43:29Sam Fragoso?

  All right, coming back. In March this year, when the government was heading towards a shutdown, Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, broke with the party and backed a Republican bill to avoid it. He said at the time that he did so because Democrats need to be the adults in the room. Come July, there are many reports that the top-line Democrats are saying, this bill is going to lead a path to win back voters in the midterms. The bill is bad, but the end justifies the means. As a reporter who worked in Washington and who continues to write and report on the Democratic Party, how are potential Democratic voters in this moment, when the news feels like an onslaught every day, how are they supposed to make sense of it? Like, where are they supposed to find, and to whom should they

• 44:13Sam Fragoso?

  turn to, to find the message of the Democratic Party?

• 44:16Speaker 01

  I think one of the challenges Democrats have right now is that there's no way for them to get their message directly to the voters, right? Like, it's-- Democrats themselves rely on the traditional press, which is, I think, not wise to do, to get their message out. They rely on traditional methods of distribution. And in a world where they have to contend with it for attention from other, you know, from their political opponents, from other people in the society, what it means is that, like, none of this is actually getting down to the voters. Democrats can actively work to strip out the worst amendments in this bill, which they did in the Senate. Does anyone outside of, like, Washington journalist circles hear about it? Not really.

• 45:00Sam Fragoso?

  If you were Chuck Schumer or Hakeem Jeffries, what are they to do?

• 45:05Speaker 01

  I mean, my advice would be to do as much as possible to get attention in as non-traditional ways as that might require. When Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland went down to El Salvador to see whether he could meet with Kilmar Braga Garcia, the man who was mistakenly renditioned to a prison down there, that was the kind of attention grabbing act that really did get a message across. And in my view, Schumer, Jeffries, Democratic leadership, has not only been just unwilling to do that kind of attention grabbing action, but seems to just not have any faith in their ability

• 45:48Speaker 01

  to seize control of a narrative, to set the terms of a conversation, to persuade, to act as sort of like a dominant force. They seem just very reactive. And this, this approach to the bill, we're just gonna wait, we're gonna wait for this bill to do our work for us. It's very reactive. And I firmly believe that like in politics, if you're just waiting for things to benefit you, you're ultimately not gonna, you're not gonna win, you're gonna lose.

• 46:14Sam Fragoso?

  Well, the Democrat getting the most attention in this moment is, of course, Zoran Mandani, the 33 year old running for mayor in New York City. Like you, he has gotten very good at social media. You are on TikTok now. From his campaign, do you think the Democrats are learning the right lessons? Because even at this moment, Schumer and Jeffries have not backed Mom Donnie.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  I don't know if Democrats are gonna learn the right lessons. And I think part of that is because they see the lessons as entangled up in Mom Donnie's politics. They're like, well, this guy, you know, he says he's a democratic socialist, he's on the left. Not only can we, there's nothing to learn from that, but that's actively hostile to what we're trying to do, right? We're trying to win these centrist districts. I would say in response to that, that like, you can actually kind of separate at least somewhat the substantive agenda from like, the political approach. And the political approach of first kind of constantly being out there and like, constantly being open and not really trying to manage your interactions with the public for the sake of creating kind of organic moment with the public is very effective.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  The constant and relentless focus on people's lived and ordinary needs is important. But also, you'll note that Mamdani does not do that by sacrificing one group or another. His sort of whole approach to meeting people where they are is more additive than subtractive.

• 47:47Speaker 03

  Our democracy has been attacked from within. For too long, New Yorkers have strained to find a leader who represents us, who puts us first. And we have been betrayed time and again. And when we no longer believe in our democracy, it only becomes easier for people like Donald Trump to convince us of his worth, for billionaires to convince us that they must always lead. As FDR said, "Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations, not because the people dislike democracy,

• 48:28Speaker 03

  but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and weakness. In desperation, they chose to sacrifice liberty in the hope of getting something to eat. New York, if we have made one thing clear over these past months, it is that we need not choose between the two.

• 49:01Speaker 03

  We can be free, and we can be fed.

• 49:09Speaker 03

  We can demand what we deserve. And I pledge to you that we will remake this great city, not in my image, but in the image of every New Yorker who has only known struggle. In our New York, the power belongs to the people.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  There's a lot to draw from that as well for Democrats. I think if you are a centrist Democrat, you can look at the Mondani campaign and see lots of things you can adopt for yourself, tailored to your own particular circumstances and voters. And I'm not sure that the Schumers and the Jeffreys and the various Democratic leadership figures can quite see that.

• 49:53Sam Fragoso?

  Speaking of groups, The New York Times published a report that Mondani, when he was a high school senior, in his application to Columbia, when asked to identify his race, checked Asian, but also Black or African American. Now, The New York Times ran this story based on an anonymous source. It had not amended that piece. It has not offered any kind of retraction. Did The Times run this piece because many of its readers, elite, white, college educated, are still hyper fixated with race-conscious college admissions, even after affirmative action has been effectively ended?

• 50:30Speaker 01

  You know, I can't really speculate on why The Times ran the piece. I can say that it is certainly true that there is a non-trivial portion of the readership that is basically obsessed with the idea of race-conscious college admissions. For whatever reason, it's catnip to them. They love to read about it. And for those people, this is a story that seems to confirm their worst ideas of how college admissions work. Even though Mondani wasn't admitted into Columbia, that's what's been kind of funny to me about this whole story. It's sort of, look at this.

• 51:11Sam Fragoso?

  It didn't even work.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  It didn't work, right? If that was the intent, it didn't work. I think there's evidence to suggest that wasn't the intent, that it was a good faith effort to kind of make sense of his identity on a form that isn't really conducive to that.

• 51:26Sam Fragoso?

  But it's funny, though, because you're saying there's a set of readers at The New York Times that are obsessed with this subject.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  This is just my speculation.

• 51:34Sam Fragoso?

  Yes, and it's a speculation based and born on the facts, but sure. They would say that the Democratic Party has an obsession with wokeness, with identity politics, with gender. As the Democratic Party begins to rebuild itself or remake itself, where have you landed on how the party should talk about language and wokeness and all those things that people claim the Democrats are obsessed with?

• 52:05Speaker 01

  One of my views here is that I think that the claim that the Democratic Party, like the actual institutional Democratic Party and the people elected to serve in positions as Democrats, that claim that they're obsessed with language and quote unquote wokeness, I find actually not very persuasive on just like a factual level. It's like I'm always asking, like, point me to the Democrats, the actual Democratic politicians who are going around talking about toxic masculinity or intersectionality or using Latinx. Like, show them to me. I tend to think that when people are complaining about the Democrats, there is much referring to things happening in the culture that aren't really related to the party itself,

• 52:50Speaker 01

  but are considered to be part of the same maybe cultural formation.

• 52:54Sam Fragoso?

  What do you mean by that?

• 52:55Speaker 01

  So like, if you're scrolling on TikTok and you see someone who's like openly liberal going on about, I'll just use toxic masculinity as another example here, toxic masculinity. I think there are a lot of people who are going to associate that with the Democratic Party, even if that person is not a Democrat and has no formal association with the Democratic Party, right? Like, there's no connection there, but they're going to associate it with the Democratic Party. And kind of bolstering that is that there is this whole right-wing media ecosystem that explicitly works to find examples of people who might be on the cultural extremes, on the cultural left, and then elevate them as emblematic of the entire Democratic Party.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  My sort of sense here... Is that the first and foremost, the thing you do is like to focus on material things, concrete things for people, like programs to help people, people's actual concerns, like go to people, find out what their concerns are and focus on those. As I kind of alluded to earlier, part of this is going to have to be building some sort of media ecosystem to like, get the message to the people who need to hear it to push back against kind of the, the actual, you know, right wing media ecosystem does a very good job of caricaturing what the Democrats do, who the Democrats are, so on, so forth.

• 54:17Sam Fragoso?

  You, you, you've been reaching young people by creating these TikToks. And you recently told the Colby Echo, the difference between students now versus when you were in college is that students now are quote, more thoughtful, more open minded and more open to difference. When people talk about Gen Z and Gen Alpha, that's not usually the description we find.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:42Sam Fragoso?

  These are people Democrats are gonna have to win either back or over.

• 54:47Speaker 01

  I'll just say in my experience, I do spend a bunch of time around college students, either teaching or, you know, lecturing or what have you. And in my experience, like the college students I have spent time around have been smart and interesting and generous and broad minded. And first and foremost, sort of like, you know, wanting to understand more about the world. If there's anything that really distinguishes these younger voters from maybe, you know, I'm, I'm in my 30s, right? From older millennials, it's that there's a real hunger for authenticity in politicians for a sense that they're not being pandered to, for a sense that the people who they're voting for actually believe something.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  I think, you know, Mamdani did extremely well with young men, part of, you know, there's been the conversation with how Democrats win back young men. And I really think that like, his success is just that he seems genuine. And that's something for, if, if for Democrats trying to win young people back, genuineness, earnestness, a sense that, that you're a real person who is trying to do good and not just trying to like move up the ladder, goes a long way.

• 55:57Sam Fragoso?

  Which critiques of the Democratic Party do you think will be woven into its renewal?

• 56:04Speaker 01

  It's an interesting question. So to my mind, the critiques that make the most sense are that the Democratic Party is entirely too committed to a policy agenda that tinkers around the edges and is still a bit too afraid of embracing broad, simple, but effective kind of slogans, gesturing towards policies that are easy to understand to people. One thing I think is of note about the Mumdani campaign is that whatever you think of the policies, you know, free buses, rent control, city-owned groceries, those are simple and

• 56:45Speaker 01

  easy to understand. You can say them, you don't need to do a bunch of explanation. And that simplicity and clarity, I think, is a real asset when you're campaigning. And I think that the Democratic Party, broadly speaking, needs to be looking for ideas and policies that fit into that. No more tax credits for, you know, if you are X, Y, and Z, you get a tax credit, no more of that. I think that what voters, what Democratic voters are looking for, and this shows up in the polling, is less ideological and more attitudinal. They want people who are going to visibly fight and be aggressive and stand up for them and treat their opponents as people to be beaten and not as like wayward

• 57:29Speaker 01

  friends. I think there's a lot of frustration with the way the Democratic leaders are constantly talking about bipartisanship and looking for ways to say, you know, we gotta work with our Republican friends and allies. And I think Democratic voters want to hear Democratic politicians say, no, we think that the Republicans are wrong and we want to beat them. Honestly, everything, I think that's the thing that's going to mark the next sort of generation of Democratic politicians. And you already kind of see it, right? You already kind of see it with AOC, with Pete Buttigieg even, who, for all of his, you know, he has a very calm demeanor, is very forthright about being an opponent of the Republicans and not someone

• 58:13Speaker 01

  trying to pull them back to some kind of bipartisan fantasy.

• 58:19Sam Fragoso?

  Basically, you want the Democrats to join the WWE.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  I want the Democrats to behave like an opposition party. I want them to behave like not, not junior partners in government, but an opposition party that recognizes that their job in this moment is not to look for ways to help the Republicans govern, but their job is to look for ways to remove the Republicans from power.

• 58:46Sam Fragoso?

  Do you think, as some of your colleagues at The Times have suggested, that the Mondani win signals the beginning of the end of the old Democratic Party guard?

• 58:59Speaker 01

  I don't know if I feel confident saying it necessarily means the end of the old guard. But I think what it does mean is that younger Democrats, more progressive Democrats, people with like disagreements with the old guard are not going to wait their turns. They're going to try to seize power and authority for themselves. If that means running in an open primary, they're going to do that. If it means primarying, you know, existing incumbents, they're going to do that. But I think that what the 2024 election, I think, demonstrated for a lot of younger people and younger Democrats, and not even, you know, some of their friends who are younger, but just who are a bit outside of the, of the leadership, is that the people in charge just aren't fit for the moment. They're not

• 59:44Speaker 01

  fit for the kind of political combat that might be necessary. And so if they won't leave, then they'll have to be forced out.

• 59:52Sam Fragoso?

  And for better or worse, we are in a reality television moment.

• 59:57Speaker 01

  I, I just, I don't see the reality TV era of politics as all that much different from how politics used to be in this country. It's interesting to read about, say, 19th century American politics, which is rambunctious and chaotic and violent in a way that would shock the sensibilities of everyone in politics today. Like,

• 1:00:21Sam Fragoso?

  You think there's not enough beefing?

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  I mean, I, I do think there's not enough beefing. I think they kind of like stayed And gentlemanly like politics of that like a Biden grew up with, right? In Congress of the last half century is like a bit of an aberration. And that in, in reality, American politics is generally quite chaotic and rambunctious and divisive and polarized. I kind of see that this moment as being kind of a return, obviously with new kinds of technologies, with new kinds of political forces, but like a return to the kinds of the ways of politics were in the past. And I'm not sure that's something to be afraid of.

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  I think it's something to embrace, embrace the fact that democratic mass politics, which are ultimately about speaking in the public and to the public, are going to demand more performance than simply going on a Sunday show and giving some talking points.

• 1:01:19Sam Fragoso?

  I think that's, you know, when you're saying that, like, like, I'm thinking about all the people listening to this right now, and they're going, Jamel, I'm, I'm so tired of fighting.

• 1:01:31Sam Fragoso?

  Like, the idea of, hey, we need to enter an era of more fighting is really daunting and almost unfathomable. And maybe the distinction is, we need to fight less. Like, we, the voters, the concerned citizens, need to fight less. And the people we have hired and elected to represent us need to fight more. I think we have done enough fighting. I think it is their time to actually represent the constituents and their aggression that got them elected in the first place.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  I think there, there's some of that. I think that there needs to be more kind of like performance on part of elected officials. But I would take this a different path. I think that what ordinary people need to do is less following politics like it's a sport and like it's entertainment and like it's, you know, that kind of thing. So I think there needs to be less what political scientists call political hobbyism. And more active engagement in actual politics. Right.

• 1:02:36Sam Fragoso?

  Which is what you're doing in Charlottesville.

• 1:02:37Speaker 01

  Which is some of what I do in Charlottesville. Right. But it means sort of getting actively engaged in your local community and civic associations. It means during campaign time, if you have the will and wherewithal, volunteer to be a poll worker. It means if you are trying, if you want to see someone elected in your district for whatever office it is, like maybe try to gather people together to talk about it, but like actually in real life, engagement in political life, more of that, which I think does a great job of connecting people to outcomes and less treating politics as a hobby, treating politics as mainly a thing to consume.

• 1:03:19Sam Fragoso?

  All right, after one more quick break, Act Three with Jamelle Bowie.

• 1:03:50Sam Fragoso?

  Bringing it back around to the summer in America and the ICE raids have continued under this administration. How do you see these raids as an extension of this Republican worldview?

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  I mean, I see, I see the raids as representing some kind of view of like just desserts, right? That, oh, these people did this the wrong way. They deserve to be punished for it. I see them also just kind of an expression of gratuitous cruelty. I mean, you can do immigration enforcement. You don't have to have guys with the long rifles and masks, you know, breaking down doors, kidnapping people off the streets. Like you can do this without trying to cause terror. And the desire to cause terror to me seems to be downstream of just sort of like a basic kind of sadism among the folks who are most enthusiastic for this kind of thing.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  But I do think that so much of it, and this is just comes from my experience, just observation, also just talking to people who are more supportive of these things than I am, a sense that, oh, well, they, they came in the wrong way and so they kind of deserve whatever's coming to them. And to that, I would just say, who determines what is the right way, the wrong way is the state? And if they determine that what was previously the right way is now the wrong way, then you're at their mercy.

• 1:05:17Sam Fragoso?

  But the punishment you're talking about is very selective. Like even when it comes to immigrants, you're seeing these scenes on TV play out in California. But after California, the largest populations of undocumented immigrants are in Texas and in Florida. If the goal is to remove, quote, illegal immigrants from the country, why are we not seeing ICE raids in those two states? Is the goal actually to remove violent offenders who did not come here, quote, the right way? Or has the policy in some way narrowed to focus on illegal immigrants in democratic run states and cities?

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  I mean, I think it's very much the latter. I, I think you should see this mass deportation plan as less about actually removing, you know, Dangerous people from the country, part because practically speaking, that population doesn't really exist. I mean,

• 1:06:18Sam Fragoso?

  You don't think that population exists or you think it is hard to unearth?

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  I think, I mean, I think in literal terms, there aren't that many people, right? There's simply, there simply are not, when you, if the big circle of undocumented immigrants, undocumented immigrants with like criminal offenses that, you know, you can easily deport. That's not a big population of people. To, to, to really remove all of them would require the kind of police and detective work that ICE is actually not equipped to do whatsoever. So there's, there's practical considerations. I think you're right to note that this is being targeted at democratic run cities and states. And I think it's because the, the mass deportation is an excuse for the militarization and expansion of this, this kind of

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  security force that will then be used in this to intimidate, right? So you have, you know, you have ICE and CBP, Customs and Border Patrol rolling up on a park in Los Angeles, which serves no purpose other than to intimidate. It's like, it's the, it's the action of an occupying force. And so if you don't, if, if the president doesn't feel you need to be occupied, then they're not going to be there. But if he does, then this force exists to be able to exert that kind of authority. And though we didn't go to talk about it, the big, beautiful bill allocates tens of billions of dollars to ICE, making it, if the funding all the way goes through over 10 years, that they do all the hiring that they say they're going to do, would make ICE not just the largest

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  single law enforcement agency in the country, but like comparable to most other countries militaries in size.

• 1:07:51Sam Fragoso?

  If it all goes through, it will add $75 billion

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:55Sam Fragoso?

  towards ICE operations, which will help them build more immigrant detention centers and hire more agents. The design of the bill and ICE does seem to be around how to punish people quickly, painfully, and as frequently as possible. And there was always nationalistic underpinnings to the GOP's immigration policy. But just this week, Vice President Vance said what I would refer to as the quiet part out loud, out for all of us to hear. And I thought we would play a bit of a speech he gave, I think in Claremont.

• 1:08:39Speaker 04

  It's hard to become neighbors with your fellow citizens when your own government keeps on importing new neighbors every single year at a record number. But even so, if you were to ask yourself in 2025 what an American is, I hate to say it, very few of our leaders actually have a good answer. Is it purely agreement with the credal principles of America? I know the Claremont Institute is dedicated to the founding vision of the United States of America. It's a beautiful and wonderful founding vision, but it's not enough by itself. If you think about it, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let's

• 1:09:19Speaker 04

  say, of the Declaration of Independence, that's a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time. What do I mean by that? Well, first of all, it would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Must we admit all of them tomorrow? If you follow that logic of America as a purely credal nation, America purely as an idea, that is where it would lead you. But at the same time, that answer would also reject a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists, even though those very Americans had their ancestors

• 1:10:02Speaker 04

  fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. And I happen to think that it's absurd, and the modern left seems dedicated to doing this, to saying, "You don't belong in America unless you agree with progressive liberalism in 2025." I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don't belong.

• 1:10:30Sam Fragoso?

  What do you make of that?

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  A couple of things. You know, as someone who's listened to a lot of Vance speaking, there's a familiar construction here, which is to put forth like the most absurd and like caricatured version of what your opponent thinks or says, and then say, well, I think that that's unreasonable. And it's like, yeah, it would be unreasonable if the claim anyone were making that it's like, unless you are the specific flavor of progressive left winger, then you are un-American. But good thing, no one says that, that the claim actually being made is that there are a set of American values embodied by our founding documents, Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Reconstruction Amendments,

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  right? There, there are a set of values embodied in these things that, you know, give us a good sense of what constitutes American-ness and what doesn't. And what they suggest is an America that does not have tiers of citizenship, hierarchies of value among citizens, one in which there is a general presumption towards equality for everyone who belongs. And that who belongs is a broad and expansive category that is actually inclusive of a lot of people who aren't quote unquote, native to the country. So that's the claim. And it's like, it's so interesting to me that Vance anchors this claim on this connection to the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, which, you know, the

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  cliche is that it's the other Revolutionary War, these two wars that are constitutive parts of what the modern United States is. But I don't think that when he envisions this, you know, hypothetical American who's being told that they're an extremist despite their heritage, I don't think they're envisioning, right, the descendants of the black colonials who fought in the revolution, or the descendants of the 200,000 free black men who fought in the Civil War under the Union banner. I, if you were to ask J D Vance, do those people have the right to say, who counts?

• 1:12:35Sam Fragoso?

  And do, and do the people who descend?

• 1:12:37Speaker 01

  Right. I don't know what Vance would say. Something tells me that he doesn't have them in mind. But the final thing about this.

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  Is that Vance is he's a Republican, he belongs to the Republican Party. And the origin point of the Republican Party is the political struggle against slavery in the 1850s. And the Republican Party is formed by men and women explicitly on the foundation that the Constitution of the United States ought to embody the broad and universalistic vision of the Declaration of Independence. Like that, that is the point. The crusade against slavery for the first generation of Republicans, who include the men who wrote the 13th and 14th and 15th Amendments, who prosecuted the Civil War, prosecuted Reconstruction.

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  The specific vision was one of a broad and more inclusive and egalitarian American society in which people can pursue whatever they want to pursue to their, to the best of their ability. There's this wonderful line that Lincoln has in a letter, I believe it's 1858, where he, it's at the, at the conclusion of the letter, he's talking about how he's so frustrated by the know nothings, which are the anti-immigrant nativists of the day. And Lincoln, and I'm paraphrasing, says, right now, the Declaration reads, all men are created equal. Under the know nothings, first reads, all men are created equal except Catholics. Then it's going to say, all men are created equal except Negroes.

• 1:14:09Speaker 01

  And he ends it by saying, I would rather live in a place where they make no pretense of liberties, so I can take my despotism without the base alloy of hypocrisy. And whenever I read that, I think of Vance. I think of Vance as someone who's repudiating his actual political heritage in the Republican Party in favor of something that Lincoln himself said, this is not what we're about. Right? Vance wants tiers of citizenship. Vance wants to cut and slice and narrow the scope of who gets to be an American on this basis of blood and soil. And Vance's vision, if you had an ancestor who fought for the Confederacy, who fought to dissolve the Union for the sake of slavery, you have a greater claim to being able

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  Able to say who is, you know, who belongs than someone who says, I believe in the America of the Declaration of Independence. I believe in the America of Frederick Douglass. I believe in the America of Abraham Lincoln. And that America says that people who are trying to exclude broad swaths from this country are un-American. Vance would say that, no, you have no right to the neo-confederate whose ancestor fought in the Civil War for the Confederacy. And I just think that's ridiculous. I think it's absurd. And I think that that riff, I know Vance seems to think of it as being, you know, this weighty and consequential thing. He's waiting for applause at the end of that, at the end of that clip. But I hear that. And I think this is someone who's

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  not particularly intellectually serious, who on his own terms, it doesn't work. And then, once you begin to drill down, it's just like, it's nonsense.

• 1:15:45Sam Fragoso?

  May I ask you, do you think, when people hear that clip from Vance, do you think people on the right go, well, that seems very far away from me. He's not talking about me exactly, or someone I know exactly. There's a distance, there's a safe distance that they can keep from the increasingly authoritarian actions of their elected officials.

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  I think there's probably a feeling of distance. I think that, you know, Vance's formulation is in part designed to create that distance, in part designed for a listener to ask themselves, well, you know, I, I am not on the progressive left, and I am not telling, calling people extremists, and I am not part of this group who's, who's outside the boundaries that are sketched by Vance. And so I have nothing to worry about. But the thing about sketching boundaries, and to bring this back to, you know, the first generation of Republicans, the thing about sketching boundaries is that they can always expand. You know, part of why, for example,

• 1:16:52Speaker 01

  The authors of the 14th Amendment wanted to include birthright citizenship and wanted it to be as clear cut and broad as they could make it is precisely out of the recognition, driven by their experience with rulings like Dred Scott and their experience in the Civil War and their just experience in the slave system, that once you start drawing boundaries, saying these people belong and these people don't, it's hard to say where that actually ends. Maybe it doesn't end. Maybe it keeps, maybe the, the, the circle keeps getting smaller and more and more people are excluded. That was part of what Lincoln's point was with that earlier quote I referenced, but that's the truth of the matter. And so even

• 1:17:34Speaker 01

  if you feel that you are not a part of who Vance is talking about, who is targeted, the fact is that once you give anyone the authority to begin shrinking the circle of belonging, it's only a matter of time before you find yourself outside of it as well.

• 1:17:56Sam Fragoso?

  This is, this all sounds reminiscent. To bring it back to where we began, it reminds me of this passage from the book Public Opinion, which Walter Lippman published back in 1922. And it is a pretty tough, but even handed critique of democratic governance. And I thought maybe you could read from some of that before we go.

• 1:18:18Speaker 01

  I'm going to give you some brief context. So in this passage in Public Opinion, Lippman is writing on a chapter about the relationship between a political leadership and the people who might follow them and the kinds of ways that those people's views might bear on the leader, but also the way the leader's views and actions shape the behavior of the public, the kind of dialectic of the two. And so in this passage, here's what Lippman writes, "The incidence of policy determines the relation between leader and following. If those whom he needs in his plan are remote from the place where the action takes place, if the results are hidden or postponed, if the individual obligations are indirect or not

• 1:18:58Speaker 01

  yet due, above all, if assent is an exercise of some pleasurable emotion, the leader is likely to have a free hand. Those programs are immediately most popular, like prohibition among teetotalers, which do not at once impinge upon the private habits of the followers." That is one great reason why governments have such a free hand in foreign affairs. Most of the frictions between two states involve a series of obscure and long-winded contentions, occasionally on the frontier, but far more often in regions about which school geographies have supplied no precise ideas. So I think, actually, I think it's pretty straightforward, despite the early 20th century language.

• 1:19:38Speaker 01

  What Limbitt is saying, in short, is that you, it's easier to do things as a leader when the people who follow you aren't going to be affected by it whatsoever, or if the possible effects are so abstract that no one is ever going to consider them. And so the example he gives of free hand in foreign affairs makes sense. If you are talking about negotiations with some country most people have never even heard of, then you can do so without very much constraints on your actions. Or the other example he gives is prohibition and teetotalers. Teetotalers, they don't drink. And so they're like, yeah, of course, prohibition sounds great, not going to affect me. But the corollary, or the flip side of that, the converse, is also true, that when people

• 1:20:21Speaker 01

  are actually affected by something, they care much more about what the person in charge is doing, and it limits the freedom of action of the leader. And to bring it to Republicans and Trump and such, I think that there is a bit of a misunderstanding of the position here. I think that both Republicans think that their voters aren't going to really be all that affected by the things they're doing. But I think voters as well are maybe a little mistaken about their distance from what is being done. So they're willing to give a free hand now because they don't think they're going to be affected. I think they will be affected, and that when it becomes clear that they are, that free hand is going to become more of a tight fist.

• 1:21:04Sam Fragoso?

  You've said in the past that you don't believe most Americans are interested in MAGA autocracy. Do you think is the effects and consequences of these bills unfold, that that will be increasingly true? Or do you think it may actually strengthen those who do want MAGA autocracy?

• 1:21:24Speaker 01

  I think that'll become increasingly true. I think it's true of happening already. The president is unpopular on most issues. His approval rating basically is on the steady decline. I think that Especially if there was just some tariff actions recently, if if the tariffs continue to, you know, do damage to the economy, cause a slowdown, cause higher unemployment. I mean, all these things are going to affect the president's standing. Now, the question is, he doesn't seem all that committed to acting within the bounds of his legal authority. And so, losing political support isn't necessarily going to change his behavior, but it may provide

• 1:22:06Speaker 01

  the fuel for the kind of electoral backlash that can change his behavior. And that just all remains to be seen. But I do think that first, that at least the critical voters in last year's election were basically voting for like cheaper household goods and groceries and a sense of a growing economy, and I'm not sure they're really going to get either, in that most voters voted in Donald Trump, but they supported him, thinking that the status quo of American democracy would mostly be all right. And I don't think that people voted for, voted to have a king.

• 1:22:42Sam Fragoso?

  As we go, I'm curious about your role as a journalist, because frequently on social media, including Blue Sky, especially on Blue Sky, there are people that come to you and disparage the New York Times. You can imagine the critiques from the Republicans, but the Democrats will say to you, you know, Jamel, you shouldn't work for the New York Times because of its coverage of Israel-Palestine. The Times is, quote, "a fascistic tool that's leading people to Trump. It's neoliberalist propaganda." And this is a consistent bit of criticism that is thrown at you, often by left-leaning readers, commentators, et cetera.

• 1:23:25Sam Fragoso?

  Do you see any value in their critiques?

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  Do I see any value in their critiques? I mean, to the extent that they can pinpoint real problems with the times and its actions at times, I don't necessarily disagree with them. Like, I think my broad perspective here is that having an opinion spot at the New York Times, which is the, you know, most influential new, like, daily newspaper in the country that has an enormous readership, that is a readership that quite broad, that includes

• 1:24:10Speaker 01

  many, many, many, you know, normal, ordinary liberals, not really people you'd find, you know, posting all the time online, but people who pop in to read about what's going on. Having an opportunity to write about progressive politics, to write about US history, to offer important historical contexts, to provide different ways of thinking about events happening is, that's an incredible opportunity, and I don't think one should give it up lightly. The space isn't going to go away, right? Like, it's not gonna, if I, if I leave the Times, the place doesn't, like, collapse, right? They just find someone else. And I would frankly rather be the one with the space than someone else, just for the

• 1:24:55Speaker 01

  ability to reach and educate large numbers of readers. I'll give an example. I did an interview with an author, as it occurred to me, is about his new biography of Charles Sumner, who was a Massachusetts senator from 1851 to 1874, and was a kind of an integral part of the fight against slavery and of Reconstruction, like, a really important figure in those decades. And we sent it out in my newsletter, and huge numbers of people read it. It was, it was, it was one of the most popular things over the weekend at the New York Times, one of the most emailed things at the New York Times. And it's like, do I want to give up that? Like, I, I think, I think reading about Sumner was, is important. There are lots of important lessons there, lots of important lessons that you can use

• 1:25:37Speaker 01

  for the present, and the ability to put that in the world, I just, I think it's valuable.

• 1:25:45Speaker 01

  As for my role, I kind of was alluding to it there. I see my role primarily as someone who can, who's afforded the ability to read a lot and talk to people and learn and to use that to help other people, readers, whomever, viewers on my TikTok, whoever it is, to understand both what's happening, but also to understand that like they're not powerless to do anything about it. That's, that's why I find myself writing so much about antislavery and abolition. Could it's such a great example in our history of people who faced truly insurmountable odds, but were able to make headway in progress.

• 1:26:24Sam Fragoso?

  I will say, and this is probably why I'm asking you this and we're closing on it, like of all the people in this space, and we've had many of them on the show, you do seem like the most well-adjusted of the bunch. And you seem not, you don't seem particularly mentally drained in a way that I think many people listening to this are really worn down and feel trapped and scared and afraid and angry about what is happening. And you seem level-headed, not drowned by this moment.

• 1:27:05Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, some of that is just like chemical balance, you know, like this disposition, and I have no real control over it.

• 1:27:14Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, but the question is, are you on antidepressants?

• 1:27:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:27:18Sam Fragoso?

  This is you without antidepressants?

• 1:27:21Speaker 01

  Yes, I am completely unmedicated.

• 1:27:23Sam Fragoso?

  What does your wife think about that?

• 1:27:26Speaker 01

  Pictures casually perturbed by it.

• 1:27:30Speaker 01

  I think some of it is, it's not that like I'm not angry or frustrated or even like worried about like things that are happening, but it's that, are those useful emotions to like?

• 1:27:44Speaker 01

  To indulge. I'm not sure that they are. I have kids and the lesson we try to drill into our kids is that like, it's important to feel what you feel. That's you shouldn't shy away from it, but you can't let it completely control you. If you're angry, it's okay to be angry, but it's not okay to be mean to people. Right. If you, if you are sad, it's okay to be sad, but we have to talk and discuss these things. And in the same for, for me, you know, if I'm angry about something, it's happening in the world and I can deny that I'm angry, but I'm also going to think, well, how, how can I make this useful in terms of the job that I'm doing?

• 1:28:27Sam Fragoso?

  Well, as always, your clear headedness is incredibly useful in this moment. And I just want to thank you again for all the time today on your vacation, no less.

• 1:28:39Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me. It's been a real pleasure.

• 1:28:41Sam Fragoso?

  Jamel Bowie, take care.

• 1:29:41Sam Fragoso?

  And that's our show. If you enjoyed today's episode with Jamel, be sure to share it on social media, tag us at Talk Easy Pod. If you want to go above and beyond, you can leave us a review on Apple. Give us five stars on Spotify. All of it really does help us continue making the program each and every Sunday. I want to give a special thanks this week to Brian Savelson, David Villar and Cory Attan. I also want to thank our guests, Jamel and Putney. If you're interested in reading or watching some of Jamel's work, visit our website at TalkEasyPod.com. For more episodes like this one, I'd recommend Ested Herndon, Gia Tolentino and Ezra Klein.

• 1:30:25Sam Fragoso?

  To hear those and more Lemonada podcasts, listen on Apple, Spotify, wherever you like to listen. You can also subscribe to Lemonada Premium for exclusive bonus content and ad free listening. Just hit the subscribe button on Apple or head to LemonadaPremium.com. Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Reebok. Our executive producer is Janix Bravo. Today's talk was edited by Matt Sasaki and Chris Hines. It was mixed by Andrew Vastola. It was recorded out of Spotify Studios in Los Angeles. Our music, as always, is by Dylan Peck. Original illustrations by Chris Shannoy. Research assistance this week comes from Kiki Giorgio. This episode was made in partnership with the good people at Lemonada Media.

• 1:31:09Sam Fragoso?

  And I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you for listening to Talk Easy. I'll see you back here next Sunday with a brand new episode. Until then, stay safe and so long.

• 1:31:33Speaker 05

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