Pod Save America - Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?

Episode Date: January 28, 2025

Apparently, there's an opposition party in this country—but they've been awfully quiet lately. Meanwhile, Trump's immigration crackdown nearly sparks a trade war with Colombia, and back at home, he's doing battle with his own  federal government—from loyalty tests to gutting diversity programs to pausing cancer research. Jon, Lovett, and Tommy break down which of the moves are the most dangerous, which are just for show, and why Democrats don’t seem to know what to say about it all. Then, they make their pick for who should be the next DNC chair. Later, Tommy sits down with Dara Lind, Senior Fellow at the American Immigration Council, to break down what's going on with deportations and immigration policy—and why it's more important than ever to pay attention.

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That's simplysafe.com slash crooked. There's no safe like Simply Safe. How many days left? So many. 14, by 14, by 1399, is that it? We're in the 13s for sure. How many days? Are you asking the new China AI or the?

Inauguration day 2029. Seems like that should have just been something Google gave me the answer to. Google's broken. The Google AI. 14, oh. Gotta use ChatGPD for everything. Yeah, right, you're right.

You're right, I'm being stupid There won't be an inauguration day in 2020 JD 1454 454 days. I thought we were at 1406 When we were when we talked about that's election day. Oh, that's what I was that's the election day 14 Yeah, not a d4 till inauguration day. Nothing much happens between the election and the inauguration as we've found This is good content. We should use it for the show. All right. I think we're rolling.

Let's do it. Welcome to Pod Save America, I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Detor. On today's show, Trump is making good on his promise to go to war with the federal government. From loyalty screenings to dismantling diversity programs to pausing cancer research, we'll talk about which moves are more performative and which you should actually worry about. Democrats are finally beginning to talk and argue more openly about how to respond to

all this craziness. We'll go through what we think is productive, what's a waste of time, and how the race for DNC chair plays into all of it. Some news on that front. Stay tuned. Then, Dara Lind, longtime immigration journalist and now a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council stops by to talk to Tommy about what's really happening with deportations and immigration policy and why it matters. But first let's talk about the brief

skirmish our president got us into with the Colombian government on Sunday, one of our biggest allies in South America. Basically Trump tried to send a few military planes carrying deported migrants to Colombia. Colombia's leftist president Gustavo Petro, said not so fast. His country would stop accepting these flights until the US could guarantee a process where the migrants were treated with dignity.

Apparently, this was all in response to Trump's use of military aircraft for these transfers. Colombia has allowed hundreds of flights carrying deported migrants on civilian aircraft under the Biden administration. Trump was not too happy about this. So he announced that the US would be retaliating with a 25% tariff on all goods coming into the US

from Columbia, which would rise to 50% in one week. Just a reminder, we buy a lot of coffee, a lot of flowers, oil from Columbia. So that would likely mean higher prices on those things. Petro then threatened retaliatory tariffs of 25% on US goods imported to Columbia in a very long post where he also referred to Trump as a white slaver, said that he'd rather die than give in

and confessed that although he finds the US a bit boring, he does like Walt Whitman, Paul Simon and Noam Chomsky. It's an okay list. It's a good list, yeah. Yeah, and then on Sunday evening, he did give in. Yeah, yeah he did. White House press secretary, Caroline Levitt put out a statement saying Columbia had completely

backed down that the tariffs would be held, quote, in reserve and added, quote, "'Today's events make clear to the world "'that America is respected again.'" Levitt or Levitt. And included. No, no, no. Get her on the show, get her on.

Included a warning to all other countries not to make the same mistake. I think the Colombians did say we did get some promises for better conditions for the migrants coming back, but. They got nothing. They got nothing. What'd you guys make of this as a governing strategy, a foreign policy strategy, and a political strategy?

I mean, it's like classic Trump, right? He's the arsonist and the firefighter. You know, it's like, Petro's an interesting guy. He was a, he joined a Marxist guerrilla group as a teenager and then transitioned into politics. So he's not someone who's scared to fight. We all did crazy things as kids, you know? He had a good time.

Yeah, no, we were wild. Wild group this table. We had a bunch of mathletes. A couple left-wing gorillas right here. Yeah. Yeah. Something in my mentions I sometimes have. I do think Petro screwed up here, a gay Trump, a win.

He overreacted. I think he claims that there was a video. You don't think he should have named Chomsky? Well, there was a deportation flight to Brazil that went viral on social media where people were handcuffed. And then there was the news that the US is going to use military aircraft to fly a deportation flight to Brazil that went viral on social media where people were handcuffed. And then there was the news that the US is going to use military aircraft to fly these

deportation flights. And I think a couple of Latin America experts I talked to think that Petro decided he could pick a fight here and it would help him politically. And then when people in Colombia realized that this might mean economic damage from tariffs or no visas for them to travel to the US. They decided that was way worse, and he backtracked very, very quickly. But I do think broadly from Trump,

like, we're going to see a lot of this. Picking fights with Democrats or leftists on immigration, bullying small countries to get little wins, and then acting like that wasn't a strategy available to every US president ever, just to be a dick to Columbia. But ultimately I think it's counterproductive and it raises questions about the US as a long-term ally. The Chinese are already trying to capitalize on it.

So it's just stupid. Nerd shit from Tommy. Oh, they're gonna capitalize it? This was Trump at his bet. No, like when I saw it over, when I saw unfolding, when I saw the unfolding, what my honest first thought was, it was like, this couldn't have been scripted better for Trump if Trump hadn't paid this guy in Trump coins.

I thought that too, at the White House, they must've been like, are you fucking kidding me? This is awesome. Because trade wars, tariffs, a lot of what Trump is promising, it's much easier to promise as a candidate because in reality, there are terrible, terrible trade-offs. And by the way, there are also terrible trade-offs in having a capricious American president

like upending our reputation as a stable and safe ally. There is incredible value for Americans day to day and having a president that is seen as a reliable partner because yes, it may mean there are times we have to compromise and give with your partners, but you're a trading partner they can count on. You're a country they can count on. But he doesn't give a shit about any of that. So he gets this incredible, easy win, right? Obviously, I saw people on social media be like, our coffee is going to be more expensive.

But this is bullying. You can bully a small country because they need us more than we need them. He knew that from the jump. This guy caves. It's just another great news cycle for Donald Trump. I did see some people on social media, various social media platforms,

cheering on the Colombian president and quoting from his statement and being like, oh, he's throwing down with Trump and look at this, I'm here for this, this is great. And it's like, guys, let's not, this is not the way to respond to this. I do wanna talk about it in the context of like Trump using tariffs as a threat to get what he wants

from other countries, which, you know, this situation made me realize, oh, this is why he loves tariffs so much, because he, yeah, it's leverage. And he thinks he's gonna, this is how he's gonna get his foreign policy objectives achieved. According to Trump advisors who spoke to the Wall Street Journal, Trump is quote, very serious about hitting Mexico and Canada with 25% tariffs this Saturday, February 1st, even before any negotiations, just wants to hit him with the tariffs, just to prove that he's not bluffing, apparently.

The journal also reports that Mexico and Canada, quote, are quietly expressing confusion and bewilderment because they aren't even sure what Trump wants. What do you think's going on there? Have you ever seen the movie Marathon Man? No. In the movie Marathon Man, an evil Nazi dentist kidnaps Dustin Hoffman to demand answers.

And the movie is chilling and terrifying because Dustin Hoffman actually genuinely does not have the answers. He thinks he's part of this plot, but he's not. And that's what I thought about. That's what happened to Canada? Yeah, that's currently what's happening to Canada. Oh no, Justin Trudeau.

Yeah. Dustin Hoffman could be Trudeau in a movie. You see it? Yeah, a little shorter. Grow your hair out, get some lifts. Look enough like Castro. Yeah, you know, Castro. The journal story mentions also that Canada

has already pledged to spend nearly a billion dollars to harden its southern border with us, which is one of Trump's big demands. And then Claudia Sheinbaum, the new president of Mexico, has cracked down on migration through Mexico to our southern border and done a bunch of high profile drug seizures. So Trump is getting what he wants

from both of these presidents already. And I guess, and he's just gonna tariff them as a negotiating position. I guess my reactions to this were one, we probably shouldn't underestimate that there's a bunch of people in the White House that are bullies and assholes and wanna wield power for the sake of just showing

that they can and that could be what's happening here. Tell us what you explain, you know, not telling someone what you want from them before you punish a sovereign country. I also think it sounds like Trump is gonna try to renegotiate the USMCA agreement, which was what they called the renegotiated NAFTA. Yeah, which is just renegotiated by a horrible president.

Who let that get renegotiated? It's Donald Trump. It's Trump's deal. And I think they're mad about it because they feel like, I don't think Jared Kushner got that much out of that deal. And then finally, it's probably not a coincidence that we're talking about Trump messing with leftist and liberal governments in Columbia, Mexico, in Canada.

In Canada in particular, Trump is trying to soften up the liberal party as much as he can, because they have an election. My serious reaction to all this is, yeah, it'd probably be good if the Canadians knew what we wanted. It would also be good if America knew what we wanted as well, because the question I have around

what Trump has promised to do, we'll talk about it later, there's a lot of places where Trump has hit the ground and just started putting in place big policy changes, but actually hasn't really done that on tariffs. He's promising an announcement on tariffs as soon as February one, and he's threatening big tariffs on China, on Mexico, on Canada, on Russia. More sanctions on Russia too.

And then you dig into it and it's like, well, you want to support American car manufacturing. One problem with that is a lot of parts that are involved in manufacturing cars in America come from Canada and come from Mexico. How will that impact our ability to make cars in the United States? There are very real implications and the details really matter and we don't have any of them.

And so the broader question is, is he going to, whatever he announces on February 1st, if he announces anything at all, is it a big show with targeted tariffs, more like what we saw in the first term, or is he serious? And I just think we don't know. My reaction is I wonder what's gonna happen

when someone calls his bluff, says like, all right, let's do it. They'll like tariff us and then we're gonna do retaliatory tariffs. And Trump's bet is the political pain that he will face here from all of us having to pay higher prices, because that's who will pay for a trade war, us, will be not as great as the political pain faced by the other leaders at home for the higher prices and the economic

damage that they'll have to deal with from the trade war. And that maybe the political pain here that he'll face will be short-lived because eventually those other countries will give in because they're probably smaller countries or at least have a smaller economy because most countries in the world do, right? Or the people just wanted to see him fight. They don't necessarily care about the impact.

It's also given to what, right? Like this is like tariff, taking off tariffs that aren't in place. Whatever weird thing he asks for, right? Like who is like tariff, taking off tariffs that aren't in place. Whatever weird thing he asks for, right? Like who knows what he's gonna ask for, but I think he just, it's just a show, it's a show of strength. But I do think like, I think at some point

when you start pushing, you know, all of these allies and countries around, you start like beating the shit out of them on tariffs, like you're gonna like push them into the arms of China, into the arms of like other countries. Like it just, at some point losing a bunch of allies is gonna come back to bite you in the ass. It is the type of thing for Trump that like, yeah,

maybe not short term, short term, maybe everyone be like, oh, this is funny. He like won a new cycle against Columbia, right? But like, you know, at some point you're gonna need those allies. You're beating up Columbia. You're gonna try to annex Panama. You're gonna try to steal Greenland.

I mean, people are gonna notice this stuff. They don't love it. You know who's gonna notice it? The Chinese. And then I just, long-term, my question through all this is how bad do the impacts of what Trump is doing on America have to be to overcome the advantages he has in how news is distributed and received, right?

And how much his team will be on his side to argue that either things aren't happening or they're not his fault or whatever it may be. I mean, that's gonna be limited by people paying higher prices, right? If suddenly this gets out of control with one of these countries and people start paying a lot more

for whatever good is affected by the tariff, then it doesn't really, it matters less what the media environment is. Right, and you know- As we just find out over the last four years. And beyond tariffs, right? Like, you know, everyone's like, how's this gonna help the price of eggs?

They're killing tens of millions of chickens now. That's hard, like, there's a real, there's a genuine bird flu crisis unfolding that is gonna affect prices. And like, Donald Trump is president, he owns these things. Yeah, well, we also pulled out of the World Health Organization and can't even work with

the World Health Organization anymore. So one of the things that we're not gonna get anymore is alerts from around the world about the developing avian flu pandemic in other countries. Well, the good news is we're the epicenter. Yeah, well, as it mutates, that's how you get, you get memos from other countries and you get alerts, and we're not gonna get those anymore. So.

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Carolina and inspecting the fire damage in California, a trip where he floated eliminating FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. On Saturday, he held a thank you rally in Las Vegas, where he congratulated himself and the MAGA faithful on everything they were accomplishing together, including notably this. I signed an order that will end all of the lawless diversity, equity, and inclusion nonsense all across the government and the private sector. We abolished 60 years of prejudice and hatred with the signing of one order, all approved by the United States Supreme Court. We're allowed to do it because we are now

in a merit-based world. We're a merit-based country. Just feels so merit-based. I feel it every day. I just see the press releases come out of this White House and I think that's the fucking best. You know? At the keyboards.

All those billionaires sitting behind them, all merit-based. So that seems to be a reference to both the Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action in 2023 in college admissions, and Trump's promise to eradicate diversity equity inclusion programs, also known as DEI, wherever they exist,

but especially in the federal government. On Monday, Trump signed more of these anti-DEI executive orders, this time targeted at the military, which is now led by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who squeaked by in a Senate vote where JD Vance had to break the tie on Friday night. Those EOs included one that looks like it will ban transgender Americans from serving in the military based on military readiness. This is according to the New York Post.

Dan and I went through some of the executive orders from the first week on Friday's show, but there's some other moves we should mention. On Friday night, Trump also fired more than a dozen inspectors general. Those are independent watchdogs whose job it is to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in government agencies. He has frozen most foreign aid,

even aid in the process of being handed out, with the notable exception of military aid to Israel and Egypt. He also said of Gaza that we should, quote, clean out the whole thing and have Gazans move to Egypt and Jordan. Trump also put a pause on all travel communication and meetings at the National Institutes of Health, including grant review panels that greenlight funding for critical research into cancer and deadly diseases. Though apparently the acting NIH director sent an email today and a memo trying to clear

things up said that clinical trials are still ongoing and that the restrictions don't apply to clinical trial participants or purchasing supplies for ongoing research. But there's some confusion among researchers over what that means. So there's a lot of just mayhem going on at the NIH. Was this incompetence? Were they trying to put a pause on this? No one knows, but I guess it was a really rough week for NIH researchers who were doing everything from looking into cancer research and all kinds of other diseases, and they had to sort of pause everything during this chaos. And the CDC, as I just mentioned, has also been ordered to stop working

with the World Health Organization, which we pulled out of thanks to Donald Trump. Trump also fired or reassigned hundreds of government officials and is making others take MAGA loyalty tests in order to keep their jobs. A bunch of people who did not pass the loyalty test, all the people involved in investigating him

for both January 6th and the classified documents case in the Department of Justice. They were all fired just today on Monday. You think it would be that hard to just make it through one episode of Gutfeld? Is that the test? Your eyes just pried open like clockwork orange. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Tommy passed the loyalty test through a Jesse Waters interview. Look at that, that bone structure. Me and Jesse. He's a Hex-Sep guy, this guy. Get on that team. You can sneak Tommy in. What's, where to begin?

What's most alarming to you guys of all that? Oh, we're ranking, we're choosing our favorites. Just something that's stuck out at you. When you read it all, something was like, ugh. So when you look at the, there's a great episode of Strict Screening about some of these orders that you should listen to, but what jumped out at me

and what they talked about as well is they're calling a DI, it's obviously going much further than that. People have talked about that. It's going deep into just the rules that have been in place since Lyndon Johnson to protect basic civil rights. It's going after civil rights rules.

There's an EO that was about federal contracting and making sure there's no discrimination in federal contracting that was signed by Lyndon Johnson that was part of the Equal Opportunity Employment Act. But what really jumped out is the ways in which it is empowering government agencies to, and by the way, private citizens, to go after private companies that may have DEI policies.

Because if you're going gonna become a federal contractor, you have to assent to certain statements in these EOs that could make you liable, and it's gonna make a lot of these companies afraid that their diversity policies run afoul of this. They're a government contractor, a private citizen can claim this is an abuse of the federal contracting system, which they're legally allowed to do.

And it's another example of trying to kind of, it's a part of an ideological trend, right? It has to do with the same as like the don't say gay bill in Florida, which is you empower private citizens to be a watchdog and you basically try to intimidate private individuals, private companies for fear of being sued and dragged into court. The bounty law in Texas, there's just other examples of this and they're implementing that now in these federal contracting rules. I think why the Supreme Court affirmative action ruling

comes into play here too, is that some of these companies that are now sort of rolling back DEI programs are, and have been concerned for a little while since the Supreme Court decision, which was about universities and colleges and admissions process, that maybe their policies run afoul of the Supreme Court decision. And now Trump doing this only strengthens that.

Did you see the Trump team set up like an email account where you can snitch on whatever, entities, companies, whatever. In fact, you're encouraged to. That are still promoting DEI, but now it's getting mass spammed with just nonsense and bullshit. Porn. Love it. Yeah. That's great. More of that. DEIA truth at OPM.

A is accessibility as well. Some it's DEI and some it's DEIA. Disabled workers catches fucking strays. Jesus. It's also, it's like, you have to, they are now, a lot of people on the right, including a lot of people in the Trump administration, you know, they've started to like,

it's a slippery slope on how they're defining DEI now. Now it's like, oh, that the head of the Coast Guard is a woman, and she's too focused on DEI. Get her out of there. Well, they hated that, they hated that California lesbian fire chief until she started making fun of Mayor Bass, and then they were like, we're back in. That's, yeah, exactly.

Stop, don't bring up the lesbian fire chiefs. That's something we agree with, so everybody chill out. The US military though is a good example of an organization that needs an effective DEI program, because if you look at across the US military, the proportion of black service members, it's well over represents the total US population, but they are wildly underrepresented

at the general officer level, especially like the three star, four star level. It's extremely white and extremely male at the very top. And that's because of overt racism in some cases or just like structural problems or cultural challenges in other cases and should be fixed and could be fixed. But like Tom Cotton is mad that an army unit had to read a Robin D Angelo book one time and they are just like throwing out the entire program and the result is we're not allowed to teach people about the Tuskegee Airmen anymore for like 24 hours.

It's just a stupid overreach. Yeah. Well, maybe no more Robin DiAngelo books is probably. It's just like, it's like, this is, but this is. You throw them at the enemy. It is clear that in workplaces, in government, um, that, um, people of color and women are just have not been represented because of historic racism and structural inequality, right, that we have

faced for decades and decades. And then I think what happened is a lot of these DEI programs not only sort of focused on making sure that there were diverse workforces and that we're focusing on diversity in hiring and pay and promotion, but also these like unconscious bias training programs, which I think is what rubbed quite a few people the wrong way who aren't just mega. For sure. It's just the proportion of time spent on those programs

in the US military compared to everything else they're doing is zero. And this is just a wild overreach. No, and that's, well, that's like Chris Ruffo and all those assholes, they decided to highlight all that stuff. And so that made people think the DEI is that and not just trying to have equitable workforces,

which we've wanted to have for a long, long time and have it. You see this, right? Like they banned DEI, then all of a sudden the Tuskegee Airmen are out of some training. Air force training. Yeah, we should explain that a little bit because you just kind of mentioned it quickly,

but it's the Tuskegee Airmen. Because of the just let's eliminate all DEI, there was a directive sent out that people that people in the military could no longer even learn about the Tuskegee Airmen or other groups of underrepresented people who have done like, you know, heroic things in the military. World War II heroes. World War II heroes, right. There's also the women Air Force service pilots or the WASPs and that video was gone for a while too.

And then after like 24 hours, everyone was like, oh, I guess that's okay to teach. I guess we could bring that back. First of all, when I saw WASPs, it's like they've banned teaching about WASPs. Like I thought those weren't minorities. I thought this is America. You can't teach about Tommy.

Finally Tommy's hit hard. Tommy's taken out of the training video. Talking about catching strays. Over and over again, like you see these executive orders are political documents. They are not written to govern. So you have this, so they put out this overreaching rule

and nobody really knows exactly how to implement it. They're afraid of getting on the wrong side and getting drawn into Trump's evil eye. You see this rule about nobody at the NIH being allowed to communicate. Like, does that mean we can't pay our bills? Does that mean we have to stop research? Like, no, no, no, no, no.

And it's all kind of, now, is it intended to make people feel intimidated and unsure? Is it just incompetence? It doesn't really matter. It shows a lack of care. It's effectlessness. But importantly, I think the effect is that it's gonna make people feel,

like here's the long-term, it may be invisible to most Americans in the short term, but long-term, this is gonna bite us in the ass because who's gonna wanna work in government now? Who's gonna wanna work in the federal government? And not like women are gonna feel like they're not included, people of color are gonna feel like they're not included, you know, black people, Latino people, like this is gonna go. But also like there are people

at every level of federal government who are being fired right now, who are experts in their field, but because they're not MAGA loyalists, they can't work in the federal government. Who's gonna want to work at the National Institute of Health? Like a lot of these people, they can go get private sector jobs, pay them a lot of money. Like who's gonna work? We're gonna hollow out the federal government now, which a lot of, you know, I realize a lot of voters think,

eh, federal government, what does it do for me? It's big and bloated and wasteful and blah, blah, blah. These are people who are like funding, these are people who are doing like important research, medical research. These are people with the lawyers at the Department of Justice. There was some, there was, there's a program

where people out of law school were getting like really good law school students in their third year at law school, got all these, they had got grants and they had jobs in the Department of Justice. And they just froze all of those jobs. And like all those people are out of work now. I saw a doctor talking about this on social media

and I found it really like heartbreaking, which he said, you know, if you have a member of your family who has a very serious illness that they may not survive and you're at the doctor's office and you're saying you have to try something, you have to try something, isn't there anything you can do? And it was like the anything you can do, the last ditch thing you can try are the kinds of research

that happened at the National Institutes of Health. And then you, and like Trump doesn't care about that. These people don't care about that. They just want to destroy these institutions. Like even the trans ban, like I remember when the first trans ban for military service went out. And at the time it just talks about how much things have changed.

Everyone was outraged in part because it was done so haphazardly. It was just issued. It wasn't clear how it was gonna be implemented. It wasn't sure what it would mean for current service members. You look at this document that they've put out and it's still not clear what they're talking about, right?

Because they say, oh, the military will no longer, for readiness you can't have people who are in transition. And oh, by the way, you can't use the pronouns of your choice, but what about service members who transitioned long ago and have been serving their country with distinction this entire time. Is it because they're using the wrong pronouns? What if they use the pronouns that you demand for them? Are they allowed to stay? How does this get implemented? They don't care. They don't care what this does because they

don't care about service. They don't care about these basic values. And so they throw us all, they throw these soldiers to the wolves because they're ideologically inconvenient. Yeah, it's just broad. They're just sweeping everything off the table. They're freezing all foreign aid except for things that directly support Israel's security. Well, that means that you know the Times had a piece over the weekend about how the the State Department office that funds the cleanup of unexploded bombs all over the world now has to cease operations. So what happens usually when you have a cluster munition and 10% of it doesn't go off, it's called a dud, they just sit around and you know who finds them?

Little kids. And they pick them up and they fucking play with them because they look interesting and they blow off their arm. And that's who's going to get hurt by these programs. And it's like, why did we need to pause on the cleanup of unexploded ordinance? Like there's no ideological viewpoint on that. It's crazy.

How about everything we're funding overseas for like helping with disease and HIV and all this. Oh yeah, the PEPFAR is just frozen. Just frozen. One of the most successful Republican initiatives ever. Who knows, you know, it's early and maybe this all gets started back up and the pause ends in like a couple of weeks, but what was this for, right?

We're just gonna hurt a bunch of people in the meantime? No, it was, oh God, I forget what it was. Some US Senator found out that like some tiny fraction of money, like six grand out of like tens of billions of dollars was used for abortion services. And I think that led them to just unravel the entire program. It's crazy.

Apparently they just put all the top officials at USAID on leave. Just got rid of all of them. Like career people, not even political appointees. Yeah, it was Jim Risch of Idaho figured out that something like $4,100 had been spent by the government in Mozambique on abortions. That money was all refunded, but they've put the entire PEPFAR program in jeopardy. Yeah. So we were going to pick out the worst, but it's pretty much all of them. It's pretty, it's pretty bad. It's pretty bad. The war on the government. It's so frustrating and infuriating

because I do think this is a hard one to break through to most people, right? Like, you know, in the, what's going to be most effective to talk about politically pile, right? Like his war on the federal government, I don't think is gonna be high up there, but it is extremely damaging. And again, next time there's a pandemic, what's gonna happen? What's gonna happen?

Yeah, I love it. Or some other crisis or some other disaster where we need the federal government to protect Americans. PODTAPE America is brought to you by Uplift Desk. Physiotherapy, chiropractors, massage therapy, they're all places you turn when you need them, but going to these appointments every few months may not give you the ultimate results you're looking for when it comes to your well-being. It takes daily, even hourly opportunities to move your body to make the biggest difference. Well, Uplift Desk can help you prioritize movement

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["Democrats"] Apparently there is another political party in this country. They're known as the Democrats. Yeah. Democrats. That's right. I've never heard it said. Though we haven't. We haven't. I've read it.

We haven't heard much from them lately. Politico had a good piece about how much more low key the resistance to Trump is this time around. It noted that almost none of the top early contenders for the 2028 Democratic nomination had put out statements about the January 6 pardons or Elon Musk's salute, whatever it was. Lots of quotes in the story, mostly from anonymous strategists, great, about how Democrats are quote rudderless and over-learning their lessons. In general, there is still a lot of backward looking recriminations about what we did wrong in last year's election as evidenced by this viral clip of Stephen A Smith on Bill Maher the other night. Let's listen. Here's the deal The man was impeached twice. He was convicted on 34 felony camps and the American people still said

He's closer to normal than what we exactly left. That's what they say. He's closer to normal Why because something that pertains when you talk about the transgender community, for example, and you're talking about the issues that pertain to less than 1% of the population, the Democratic Party came, of course, as if that was a priority more so than the other issues. And so he comes into office. Now you're talking about childbirth, citizenship, and what have you. He knows that's not going to pass the mustard, but he knows that he made that promise. So when he shows up week one on Capitol Hill, and he says, this is what we're going to do

through an executive order, even though it's going to be shot down through the courts and what have you, he's saying, I kept my promise. A lot of other things that he's going to point to that he's going to try to do, I kept my promise. Then you turn around and you look at the left and you say, what promises did you keep? Now, you might know the answer to that. I'm certainly not questioning your knowledge about that at all. What I'm saying is, what resonated with the voter? What voter

out there can look at the Democratic Party at this moment in time and say there's a voice for us, somebody that speaks for us, that goes up on Capitol Hill and fights the fights that we want them fighting on our behalf. They didn't do that. And that's why they're behind the home and that man is back into the White House and they want to sit up there and talk. You look at the networks right now, they're talking the hall and that man is back in the white house and they want to sit up until you look at the network right now to talk about it look at this is the latest look at him here he goes again when you know what he goes again means

he's doing what he said he was going to do he promised you he was going to do these things he walked in the office week one of exactly what he's doing and he said y'all do something about it and we could try to do something about it he's looking at them now now they're concerned about these issues. Were they talking about that during the campaign? Hell no. That's really it.

So what'd you guys think of Stephen A's argument there? I get why this went viral. I get that it resonates on an emotional level for some people because we're all mad at Democrats because we got our asses kicked and we're mad about the election and we're mad about Joe Biden. But he's just so wrong on so many different levels.

I mean, Republicans, Democrats didn't make the whole election about trans rights. Republicans ran tens of millions of dollars of attack ads on TV attacking Kamala Harris on this issue. That's why it was salient. And then Stephen A's- Well, because of what she said. In 2019, not in 2024.

And then Stephen A's definition of Trump keeping his promise is putting forward an executive order on birthright citizenship that he knows will get struck down in court. That is not how Joe Biden was judged. Like when Biden put forward a student loan forgiveness plan and it got struck down by a Republican Supreme Court, everyone got mad at Joe Biden and said he was feckless. Like I'm not here to make excuses for Democrats or Biden

or Harris or say the campaign was good, but it's like, it's a 50-50 electorate. There was an anti-incumbent wave. Trump is not delivering for the American people in some profound way right now. It's just all vibes. And I get the vibes and the anger driving them, but it's just like, he points to Ro Khanna,

is like, you might know all the details of the things Joe Biden promised and did deliver on. I didn't bother to Google them. And it's just like, he's like, he points to Ro Khanna's like, you might know all the details of the things Joe Biden promised and did deliver on. I didn't bother to Google them. And it's just like, come on, man. Yeah, it's so frustrating, right? Because you see that clip and you're like, well, let's break it down, right? Let's explain all the ways that this is wrong, right?

All the ways in which actually Joe Biden delivered on a lot of his promises. And Donald Trump is going to, and has all, Donald Trump failed in his first term on virtually every promise that he made other than cutting taxes for the richest people. That Joe Biden had more deportations while he was president than Donald Trump had

while he was president, right? There's a lot of ways to break it down. What was interesting to me about the clip is like, you see like a kind of conventional wisdom kind of taking hold in real time, and you see like this kind of, this, like Bill Ma Maher says, exactly. And the whole audience applauds.

And I've tried to think like, if Kamala Harris had won, like what is the list of big executive orders she could have signed in the first day that would have had like rapturous applause? It was like, she's fucking doing it. She's delivering on what she said she's gonna do. It's happening, it's happening. And like, that's not to say that like,

that part of that is just the failures of incumbency, right? Well, I was gonna say, it would feel different because she would have taken office not after four years of the other party. You just unravel what the other guy just did. That's what all these EOs are. And there was a little bit of that when Biden won, right? And then remember the first week Biden did a bunch of-

I got back in Paris, whee! There was a- And boy, did that make a difference. We fixed it, but- No fires. But the a- And boy, did that make a difference. Yeah, fixed it, but- No fires. But the reason I bring that up is only to say, yes, it is different when you're trying to run

to replace someone in your own party versus replace someone in the opposite party. But I think back to 2006, and I remember all the Democrats campaigning for the House, and they had their checklist of the things that they were gonna do if they won, and the things that were gonna stop it. The anti-corruption measures, raising the minimum wage.

There's a whole list of simple to understand policies. And like forget, yes, look, we asked, we have asked and answered, we paid in blood for Joe Biden giving up the bully pulpit. Like, yes, now we're talking about all these Democrats kind of overthinking, like, how are we gonna respond to this? Let's get out the abacus and like move the beads around to figure out the perfect response.

And I can't possibly start speaking until I know exactly what my overall vision is for the future of the country. And it's like, is that the lesson you draw from the last four years? Get the fuck out there. Get out there, start responding, tell the truth. How about that? Like you're asked about what you think

about the January 6th pardons, tell us what you think of them. You're worried about what's happening at the National Institutes of Health, tell us what you're thinking about it. You don't leave the field and build some playbook for how to respond and defeat Donald Trump. You get out there and you start doing it.

You see what works, you see what doesn't. That whole piece was just a bunch of people kind of trying to like, we're gonna crack the code finally at long last. Oh, the political piece. Yeah, the political piece was just all about how we're gonna crack this fucking code. And it's like, guys, everybody's applauding

Stephen A. Smith for this rant of basically easy to refute nonsense. Where are we? Here's what I found frustrating about the Stephen A. Smith thing is it sort of pulls you in and your first instinct is to tick off all the reasons it's wrong, right? Like you were saying, because you wanna defend, right?

And then suddenly you find yourself like defending Joe Biden's record for four years, which by the way, there was a lot of good things. We've said this and also saying things like, guess what? Joe Biden didn't really, couldn't really control inflation, right? That was, you know, and also Republicans picked out a bunch of culture and identity issues that yes,

Democrats gave them some ammo on, but they get more attention in this information environment, culture and identity issues, than the fights that we wanna pick as Democrats, right? So you can explain away why this happened, and yet that perception is real about the party. And so you don't wanna just be like, running against the perception that's there.

And so like, I don't know, all you can say to Stephen Suthis is like, you know what, yeah, we want, people want Democrats, people don't want excuses, they want to Stephen A. Smith is like, you know what? Yeah, we want, people want Democrats. People don't want excuses. They want politicians who are gonna actually go out there and fight for them and like, and give a damn and look like they give a shit

and not look like they are reading. I said this on Friday's pause Dan's line, but like reading the fucking stage directions already. I feel like sometimes giving messaging advice to Democrats is like giving fucking kids matches. You know, it's like, you say something about like inflation and the cost of living, and suddenly they're all out there being like,

that's not gonna do anything to lower the price of eggs. It's like, come on, make it fucking believable, guys. It's not believable right now. No one is out there thinking that Donald Trump was gonna lower the price of eggs or lower the cost of everything after a fucking week. I think that what was annoying about some of the statements you guys talked about was, you're right, you don't have to combine the cost of everything after a fucking week. I think that what was annoying about some of the statements you guys talked about was you don't have to combine

the cost of eggs and January 6 pardons. It's bad to pardon insurrectionists that beat up cops. What I think I found so annoying about Stephen A's kind of the end of his rant is he was criticizing Democrats for criticizing Trump or trying to block Trump or being an opposition party. And it's like in 2008 when Barack Obama won 365 electoral votes, did the Republicans just like lay down arms

and give up? No, they filibustered every single thing we did. That's the role of an opposition party. You're gonna disagree with the president and you're gonna talk about it. And he like makes them sound like they're just out there carping when the reality is that they're not really actually saying much.

Saying anything, yeah. Trans issues keep coming up and then people are like, it's 1% of the population, it's 1% of the population. Yeah, it's a tiny group of people that are scared to go to the bathroom at the airport. And like the Republicans have made trans issues the center of our politics. But I will say like, you know, John made the point,

well, it's based on something she said in 2019. But I do think it's more than that. And it is a larger credibility issue, right? Like if Democrats had more credibility broadly with the American people on the big issues, the economy, on like the cost of living, on education, on healthcare, whatever it is. If Democrats had earned credibility,

if they were seen as fighters, as champions, for the people we need to be fighters and champions for, there would be more space to say, and you know what, we may not agree on trans issues, you may not be where I'm at yet, but I'm gonna fight for trans people every goddamn day. And this has been the case for decades. This used to be the case with abortion, right?

When abortion was, when the pro-choice position was not as popular as it is now, and there were Democrats who would be in red or rural districts, and they'd say to— Sherrod Brown always would tell stories like this. He would tell you about guns, right? He has a story in Ohio where he was talking to these people, and they're like, you know,

well, I don't like your position on guns, right? I think, you know, I want to keep my gun, but I like you because you're for me, and you've been fighting like hell for me, you know? And so, like, you're absolutely right about that. It's like right now, it is overthinking every single thing. And I want to just, and I think like sometimes we, you know, let's do what we say people should do, which is like,

we're like, let's explain why that's bad, right? Like we say that all the time, oh, you sound like you're reading from a message document. You sound like you're reading from a message document. Why is that so bad? Well, it's because if people don't believe you when you are talking about the economy or issues they really care about,

because you sound like you're reading from a script, you sound like you sound like a normal politician, they're not gonna come along with you when you disagree. They're not gonna trust you when you see things a different way. I also think that part of the whole price of eggs thing is Democrats aren't saying what we want Trump to do or what we would do.

And when they spent four years attacking Joe Biden for all kinds of bullshit, Democrats aren't saying what we want Trump to do or what we would do. And when they spent four years attacking Joe Biden for all kinds of bullshit, they would say things that I didn't believe, like Trump would say, I'm going to do tariffs and that's going to fix those. I'm going to drill, drill, drill. We cannot go around for the next year just saying that did not lower the price of eggs. That is not fucking sufficient. And you know why it's not sufficient?

Because people aren't going to believe it, because it's not believable to just go around saying that all the time. Like have a, have a story you tell about what working people are facing in this country, what we should do for working people, how we're going to make sure that everyone who works and actually like pay their bills and chill like have a whole fucking story about it. It just sounds bitchy.

It does. It's like people are just not stupid. He's been president in a week. You know, it's going to take a minute. I, like, I have a little more sympathy for Democrats. He just took office. We's been president in a week. It's gonna take a minute. I have a little more sympathy for Democrats. He just took office. We're probably not hearing,

Pat Ryan did a bunch of Twitter threads, talked to Playbook over the weekends, Congressman from New York, saying some smart, thoughtful, interesting things, good framing, good focus. People are saying the right thing. There's just no leader. There's no megaphone.

Nobody's getting picked up. No one's getting heard. It's just the Trump show all day, every day. But there's also not a lot of emotion, you know? Like I have seen Democrats, you know, or you give like a floor speech in the Senate that's not going anywhere. Or you're doing a video where you're talking

about why this is, it's like, even the, it was interesting, even the way the Politico story was framed, how it's like they didn't, Democrats didn't do statements on the Elon Musk thing or the J-6 pardons because they connected those both. And I'm like, those are nothing alike. One matters and one doesn't. That's what I was, that's-

The Elon Musk thing, it's like, we're gonna say you did a Nazi salute. He's gonna say, no, I didn't. The conversation dies there. It's like, you're gonna win the great debate about whether he did the Nazi salute or not. And then what happens is he goes away, he disappears. Talk about his AFD rally, that's a lot more relevant.

Also, I just saw a time story. The Trump administration has instructed organizations in other countries to stop dispersing HIV medications purchased with USAID, even if the drugs have already been obtained and are sitting in local clinics. What are we doing? Atul Gawande, who led the health programs for USAID, he tweeted this long thread about all the consequences

of both freezing foreign aid from a health perspective and having the CDC not work with the World Health Organization, and that was part of that. I was trying to remember. But this is just PEPFAR. PEPFAR saved 25 million lives. It's crazy.

And we're letting these drugs just sit on a shelf? Yeah. I do wanna say, the January 6th pardons though, not speaking about that is crazy to me because most importantly, it's obvious, they are dangerous and that they give right wing extremists a green light to go commit political violence even against law enforcement because hey, Trump's got their back, right? But they're also extremely unpopular, even if you just want to be political about it,

they're unpopular. So why wouldn't you go out to the microphone somewhere and be outraged about that? And then I know that I'm glad all the Democrats are signed on to a resolution condemning the pardoning for the J-6. It's like, it's Monday. It's a week after this happened. What were you doing guys? There's an insurrectionist that was already arrested

on gun charges before recorded today. Jokes aside, there was one killed in an incident with police resisting. These are dangerous people. Forget politics, forget ideology. Donald Trump released 1,600 people, many of whom are very dangerous and they're out there being arrested

and causing mayhem right now. The QAnon shaman tweeted, "'Time to go buy some guns.'" Well, also, when they had this story this morning about the resolution, every Senate Democrat had signed on except John Fetterman. And at first there was a lot of criticism. And I was like, what the fuck, what's wrong with him? He's not, he's not signing onto this.

So then he signed on and so it was fine. And then someone asked John Fetterman, I guess, just, just a couple hours ago. Why didn't you sign on at first? He's like, no, no, no, I was out. Look, he was like, I've been against pardons for January 6th insurrection is forever. I've been on record. He goes, but I do think what pardons for January 6th insurrectionists forever. I've been on record, he goes. But I do think what we need is another performative,

more performance art, where we pass another resolution. That'll really get him. And it's like, yeah, OK. OK, buddy, your life is performance art. You wear shorts and hoodies to the Senate floor to send a message. Come on. But I do get where it's like, I would rather have Democrats

have gone to the mic the morning after it happened with the J-6 thing and like all of them with Capitol police officers, with everyone else and like shown some real emotion than I would an official resolution that passed. Well, I just think it's very easy to do both. Yeah, I think the problem though is it's like, really what you're saying is not,

so therefore our strategy should be to look for opportunities to show emotion. And really what we're saying is like, what we want- And it's reading the stage directions. Just fucking do it. Well, right, what we want is somebody who sees this happening unfolding

and is like, fuck, I gotta get out there. Yes! This is terrible. Yes! I'm gonna go to the microphones and bring some people out. Is that too much to ask? Is that too much to ask? And you know what, let's get, hey, get a couple of Capitol Police officers to stand behind me because this is so outrageous.

I'm furious. Not everything has to be planned, perfect, thought out. Just go fucking do stuff, guys. And, you know, forget it. It's just, ugh. I feel like we probably hammered this point a little. Okay. We're just.

No, no, no. I'm just laughing. I do think one of the other very funny things that I just want to bring up before we go is CNN did a story on this and they talked about how this was all in the, uh, and they, they had this meeting in the Senate Democratic caucus about how to go viral and the media environment, all that. And the CNN story said, one of the, they called this a bright spots,

the Democrats highlighted according to a source familiar was a viral video from the pandemic of Mark Warner making a tuna melt in his kitchen that led to the lawmaker being cheered and jeered by people who questioned his culinary leanings. That was the bright spot. That's the Senate. Going back to 2020, we're like, hey, remember when Warner had that viral tuna video or grilled

cheese tuna melt video? It was a warm tuna. That's where we're at. That's the bright spot. The bright spot is hot kitchen tuna. Well, it was such a badly made tuna sandwich. It was a microwave, right? Wasn't it a microwave tuna melt?

He did such a bad job making this thing that people got excited about it. So all these questions loom especially large in the DNC chair race. DNC members will vote for the new chair on Saturday. As you all know, we here at the show, big Ben Wickler fans and supporters for a long time. We've talked about in this pod a million times, but we wanted to talk to any of the candidates who wanted to come on. I interviewed Ken Martin and Ben. Dan interviewed Fazz Shakir

on a Friday show. I personally think all three of them would make great DNC chairs, but maybe, unsurprisingly, we were almost impressed with Ben's vision and his plans. And maybe we're all just hopelessly biased because we have known him and worked with him now since basically we've started this podcast. But even putting that aside, I think Wisconsin was the most Republican leaning blue wall state in 2020, the third most Republican leaning swing state of all in 2020 after Arizona and Georgia. Everyone was worried about it in 2024, because it's very rural, non-college educated state, it ended up to the left of the national vote. That means that Kamala Harris did worse in the national popular vote than she did in Wisconsin.

And you know, the operation that Ben built was a huge part of that. So if we were voting members of the DNC, which they will probably never make us, he would get our vote. But what do you guys wanna add? Siren, Pod Save America endorsement. No.

No. Add the siren in post. Woo woo woo. First of all, I also like was, just based on our conversation, I also just think all three of them had very smart things to say in the conversations that you had with them on Pod Save America.

In particular, I thought Faz talking about what it means for the Democratic Party to look like it's fighting for people and was very smart and like regardless of who's the DNC chair, I think that is really important and kind of goes and it actually fits a lot with what Ben was talking about as well and what we've been talking about that it's not just about the right words

or the right message, it's about picking the right fights, it's about breaking through and figuring how to do that in this messy and noisy environment. But like we talked about this a long time that if we could duplicate Ben Wickler and put him in all 50 states, we'd be much better for it. And I think we've felt this personally just over the years of going to Wisconsin

that Wisconsin was this warning about what could, this omen for what could happen in the country when a group of radicalized Republicans try to do unpopular things and strip away democratic accountability for it. And as you said in your interview, that they've been kind of on the edge of a cliff this entire time, but what's been exciting,

having gone to Wisconsin starting when we first did the show all these years later, is watching them slowly build this operation and figure out how to respond to that kind of a threat and do it in a way that's successful. And like, there are so many lessons from what Ben has done in Wisconsin way that's successful. And like, there are so many lessons from what Ben has done in Wisconsin that are valuable nationally. Yeah, I mean, we're biased.

I met Ben in 2006, so it's like, I had nothing against anyone else in the race. But I think one thing that we've all noticed about Ben is he has no off switch. You're getting texts from him 24 seven, 365 days a year about races big and small across Wisconsin. And he was able to raise money and awareness and build a state party organization that was always doing work, always organizing, always building and trying to get power back.

And they started from a serious deficit in Wisconsin. And that doesn't mean they won every race, but that's not a fair expectation. But they didn't sit out any races. And I think like, that's the kind of mindset you want at the DNC. And it's also just a vibe and a tenor and a tone. Ben, we went to lots of events and organizing sessions with him and trainings. He's always preaching an inclusive, empowering

form of politics that I think would help out the party and translate well to the DNC and make people want to be a part of the Democratic Party. So I think he'd be great at it. All right, well. and you know what? If you're listening and you're a DNC member and you're going to be voting and you like Ben or you think that Ben should be the chair,

then I think it's probably helping us last week to go public and making it probably more helpful than us because we're not voting. Yeah, and probably this turned off a few people. No doubt. I think hopefully net positive. Hopefully net positive. Hopefully net positive.

But if you're out there listening and you're thinking the same thing, you know, go with Ben, go with Ben. After the break, you're gonna hear Tommy's conversation with Dara Lind of the American Immigration Council. But two quick things before we do that, latest episode of Assembly Required. Stacey Abrams is joined by strict scrutiny's Melissa Murray

to dissect the impact of Trump's sweeping executive orders from renaming Denali to ending birthright citizenship and what we can all do to protect our democracy. New episodes of Assembly Required drop every Thursday. Find them wherever you get your podcasts or on YouTube. Also, we're out with our first post-election episode of Polar Coaster, Dan's subscriber only show. In this episode, Dan takes a look at the early polling from Trump's return to office, unpacks the chaos that got us here,

and tackles listeners' questions. To access this exclusive subscriber series, enjoy ad-free episodes of Pod Save America and more. Subscribe now at cricket.com slash friends or directly on Apple podcasts. When we come back, darlin'. POTS of America is brought to you by Fatty 15. That was my nickname in high school. I did that same joke last grade.

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So the Trump administration has been firing off executive orders left and right. Many of them seem extremely consequential. Some are glorified press releases, but many of the more consequential seeming EOs focus on immigration policy, which is why I am so excited to have Dara Lind on with me today. She's a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, an immigration policy expert, an excellent journalist. Dara, welcome to the show. Thank you. It is, I mean, I can't say it's great to be on, right? But it's like, it's certainly the kind of moment that people with my expertise are in demand, I guess. Yeah, yeah, very much so, because it is quite confusing.

And we're gonna talk through some of the complexity and uncertainty of this moment, especially when it comes to immigration. So first question is just big picture. I mean, what do you think are the most important things that Trump has done so far when it comes to immigration policy? I think that the most salient thing,

and this is not just the day one executive orders, it's a lot of stuff that has come out since then in the form of like departmental or agency memos or just in what people are seeing on the ground, is a really aggressive ramp up of interior enforcement against people who have been living in the United States, many of whom were given some form of protections under the Biden administration. We know that the Trump administration has changed regulations so that anyone

who is apprehended anywhere in the US who cannot prove to an immigration agent's satisfaction that they've been here for more than two years could be deported without a court hearing, huge change. We know that they are making an effort to strip parole protections from people who came under the Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan parole programs, other Biden parole programs when they encounter them. Not that we don't know how broad that's going to be, but that those people will be considered vulnerable for deportation and that there might be efforts

to take people who are in immigration court, close the immigration court case and try to deport them without a court hearing. And we know that they're stepping up the use of agents from other agencies, whether that's DEA, ATF, that they're stepping up the use of military assets, including planes. And so given that most of the

biggest impediments to like deporting 11 million people were not legal, but logistical, that kind of force multiplier could be a very big difference in how many people they're ultimately able to deport. I want to ask you about that logistical point because you wrote in this great Times Up Ed after the election, but before inauguration that the largest constraint on mass deportation is logistical and that deporting 1 million people per year would cost an annual average of $88 billion. Can you kind of unpack those logistics for us and explain whether you think there's kind of anything in that insight that opponents of Trump's immigration policy could use to fight it? Sure, absolutely. So there are essentially four major steps that are generally taken

to take somebody who is in the US without authorization and move them to being somebody who's been deported. The first is arresting them. The second is finding somewhere to keep them in custody, given that this administration doesn't particularly like releasing people pending, you know, their court hearings or pending for their action. There's the court case itself, which, you know, they're trying to kind of abridge by using this expedited removal provision more aggressively, but like, you know, so that's kind of an optional one. And then four, you have to physically deport them. You have to have the seat on the plane and you have to have a country that's willing to accept them. So even if you look at what they've done

over the last week and say, okay, in general, they're really trying to get rid of this third stage of the process wherever possible, that still leaves arrest, detention and deportation. So, you know, the more agents they have on the ground who are not just ICE agents, but other agencies that are being tasked with immigration enforcement, and the more they're able to enlist state and local police to do immigration enforcement, the easier the first one gets. The more they're able to build

temporary facilities, especially using military money under the emergency declaration that was one of the day one executive orders, the easier the second of those is. And the more that they can both use military planes and bully other countries, and we saw some of this over the weekend with a, you know, a standoff, a very brief standoff with the country of Columbia over the use of military flights to deport Colombian nationals, the more they can bully other countries to take back military planes or to take back a lot of ICE air flights, the easier the deportation part of that is.

So those are kind of where I'm seeing the big variables right now. But ultimately, all of those are still resources. And even if you're tapping the DOD budget for a lot of things, Congress still has to, at a certain point, you know, you're going to either run out of ICE budget or Congress is going to have to appropriate in the future, the kind of money they anticipate that you're going to be running a Department of Defense that is also engaged in immigration enforcement. And so while in the short term, they're acting really, really aggressively, how long they can keep this up is going to depend on

whether Congress is writing them a blank check or whether they're going to start asking questions about just how much can be spent on it. And just your point four, I think, like we don't have the best relations with Venezuela, for example. There are a lot of folks who have left Venezuela over the past decade or so and made their way north to the United States. What happens if Venezuela just says, no, American C-17s will never set down in our territory? I mean, do we have to get to a point where we're like having to coerce that militarily? Is that what Trump is threatening here?

We're not quite to that point yet because immigration law doesn't technically require you to deport somebody to the country where they came from. And this is where the diplomatic aspect of this gets very complicated and very important. Um, in the, in the recent past under the Trump and Biden administrations, Mexico has agreed to accept some non-Mexicans, whether that's temporarily while they await court hearings in the United States under the Remain in Mexico program, which the Trump administration is now trying to restart, or whether that's actually taking people who are essentially being deported but deported to Mexico. Whether and how many people they're willing to accept in that is going to be a very important

variable because it's so much easier to deport people back to Mexico than it is to fly them other places. You know, it's just so much cheaper that not only is that going to be a help on the logistical end, but also as you mentioned, for countries like Venezuela, where it's not really foreseeable that you're going to have some kind of breakthrough where the Maduro government is going to like say, yes, this is awesome. We love the US now. Having other places you can return them to starts to become a really important variable. We've already heard rumors that the government of El Salvador is very gung-ho about signing an agreement with the United States that will allow people to be deported to El Salvador who aren't from El Salvador. That sort of thing.

Of course. You know, The more options that they have, the easier it's going to be for them to get around the recalcitrance of any one country. Soterios Johnson Of course, Buckeye is willing to take whatever number of people Trump wants to send to El Salvador. It seems to me that a lot of what's happened so far is PR and for show, right? I mean, I think the Trump administration is talking about the number of deportations over the weekend that may or may not be all that much above kind of the average you might have seen in terms of total deportations under the Biden administration. I suspect part

of it also is they want to pick fights with like Democrats in liberal cities. I mean, what kind of strategies do you think these progressives can take to push back that doesn't play into this sort of PR effort, but actually is impactful for people in communities that are being harmed? So I tend to think about this as like a coordinate plane, right? One axis is how likely is this to get a lot of headlines, to generate a lot of B-roll, that kind of thing. The other axis is how much does it increase scope? How much does it make it easier for them to put more people into the process and move them through the process? And you're right,

a lot of the things, things like putting out a press release every single day can imply that more is being changed than actually is. That said, one of the reasons that we're not really seeing movement on the numbers yet is because some of the authorities they're tapping into haven't really, you know, scaled, like they haven't really been able to make plans for what does an ICE raid look like when everybody's getting put into expedited removal proceedings, that sort of thing. So I think that the biggest reason that picking fights with blue cities is, you know, it's a big PR showdown

is because in jurisdictions that don't have a lot of local cooperation with federal law enforcement, where like, if they call up the city and say, you've got to give us the addresses of everybody you know, who doesn't have legal immigration status in cities that have laws requiring that information not to be shared. It's a lot harder for them to arrest people, to identify who is removable and take them into custody. And so when they have these big raids on blue cities in the past, what we've seen is the numbers of actual arrestees they get out of them

are very low. The biggest impact is in terms of freaking people out, getting people to not leave their homes, to not go to school, that sort of thing, which is a real harm. But it does mean that in kind of holding the line on lack of cooperation and lack of information sharing and certainly not offering like state and local resources to help with immigration enforcement,

that the amount of money that's being spent and time that's being spent is going to be greater proportionally than the number of people who they are getting out of it who can then be arrested and deported, which means that those resources are then being taken from other things. Right, right, because a lot of the cooperation you've seen in the past

has been federal officials going to local, state, and county jails, right? And then picking people up there for deportation. One other element of this is Trump is trying to end birthright citizenship. So that would end the practice of giving automatic citizenship to the US born kids of undocumented immigrant parents or to the kids of foreign workers or students.

So I think it's important to note that that latter category is people here legally. When I talk with smart lawyers about the birthright citizenship EO, they say this is clearly unconstitutional, but if it gets to the Supreme Court, like God help us. Does that sort of jive with your sense? I mean, I have a general rule

against engaging in Supreme Court punditry because I do think that to a certain extent, the law is whatever the judges say the law is and heaven forbid they take that, they like actually seize the reins of that power. But I do agree that I think that the way that this executive order was done, which is just saying, as far as we're concerned, this is not who birthright citizenship applies to. And

we're not going to be honoring the citizenship of anyone who was born in the US under you know, to these two parents who like have these particular, you know, this lack of status or temporary status after February 19th, that that is, we've already seen one preliminary ruling against it. I would be very surprised if it goes into effect as planned, you know, like in a few weeks. That's not to say that the Supreme Court won't ultimately rule in favor of the administration on this one, but like it is worth noting that this is, there's a pretty explicit century-old Supreme Court precedent that even if the, you know, the parents of the child cannot become U.S. citizens, the child is still a citizen of the United States. And so they would be,

The child is still a citizen of the United States. And so they would be there. It's not really a reasonable people have disagreed on this for decades kind of situation. It's it is an effort to innovate the law in a particular direction. And so there's reason to believe that the Supreme Court is going to be a little more skeptical of this than they would be of other Trump administration policies. Yeah, I mean, you mentioned there was this one ruling already from a judge who I believe was a Reagan appointee. He said, I've been on the bench for over four decades.

I can't remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order. Yeah, he was steamed. And you know, the other thing about that case is the plaintiffs were extremely ready to file a complaint and the administration, despite the fact that it was, you know, that it was their government filed all of three pages and replied that were basically nah-ah. So like, they're not doing at least so far, they're not doing a tremendously robust job of if they truly believe this is what the law says, they're not doing the most aggressive, like the best job of showing up in court and saying that.

Got it. Got it. Congress is also getting in on the act here. So they just passed a piece of legislation called the Lake and Riley Act, passed on a bipartisan basis. The bill got 64 yes votes in the Senate, 263 yes votes in the House, including 46 Democrats in the House. Can you give us just like a quick overview of what the Lake and Riley Act does? Sure. So there are two totally like fairly separate parts of the law

that are one of which is kind of it is it expands immigration enforcement in a way that's that Congress often acts to expand immigration enforcement and one of which is totally unprecedented and could be very, could unfold in very unpredictable ways. The first is that the Lake and Riley Act requires that the federal government expeditiously take into custody anybody who is arrested or charged with or convicted of a certain set of crimes, including theft charges.

Now that, by saying you don't have to be convicted, you can just be like accused essentially, certainly does raise due process concerns. There are also prioritization concerns. Like if you're saying that somebody, that there's somebody in custody in rural Georgia and you have to get in your patrol car and go immediately to go get that person, there are other enforcement actions you could be engaging in.

But the other part of Lake and Riley says that states can sue the federal government to force the federal government to deport somebody who they've chosen not to execute a final order of deportation against, to detain somebody, or to stop visas for a category of visa or a country. If they, if the country is, if they believe the country is being recalcitrant and accepting deportees. So, because that there is on the books, you know, the federal government has the power to take sanctions. And so if the federal government isn't taking these sanctions, like the thing we're all thinking about is, okay, so what is stopping Ken Paxton from suing, you know, the federal government to force it to stop

issuing H-1B visas to China because China doesn't take every deportation, as many, quite as many deportees as the U S might like there. That that's kind of a, it's real real wild card and we don't know how it's going to play out yet, but it certainly adds an interesting wrinkle to the dispute that we know is going on within the Trump administration over H-1B and high-skilled visas generally, because if the Trump administration goes in a more dovish direction than say the Bannon wing would like, they now have this legal tool that they can use to try to stop them. Yeah, just to dig in on those two sort of pieces. I mean, look, I'm not a lawyer, but I thought that undocumented people had due process rights under the Fifth and the

Fourteenth Amendment. This bill says if you're just accused of basically petty shoplifting, you can be deported. I mean, that does not seem like due process to me. Am I wrong? The fundamental thing you have to remember about immigration law is that deportation is not a criminal penalty. It is a civil penalty. And it's one you incur potentially simply by being in the US without authorization. You don't have to have committed any crime or anything else in order to be deportable. So what this does is say, this person's already deportable by getting arrested, they're now an enforcement priority, which is not something that you really have a due process claim against. Now, if you're not in fact removable, you can try to get yourself out of ICE custody.

And yes, of course there are due process concerns in the sense of you're saying this person's a priority because you're classifying them as a criminal. They're not, you know, that, that, but they're not concerns that are legally actionable. God, that's terrible. Part two, I mean, so like the attorney general in Oklahoma can tell Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, that he's no longer allowed to issue visas

to a random country because, I don't know, it helps this attorney general in Oklahoma politically to demand that the federal government, even the Trump government be tougher on immigrants. That seems completely unworkable. It absolutely could be unworkable. This was originally part of the bill when it was introduced under the last Congress,

which is to say under the Biden administration, which might go some way in indicating why it was added to the bill to begin with. I think that the assumption to a certain extent is that, you know, state AGs are going to not necessarily want to embarrass members of their own party. But I think the other part of the assumption is that judges are not necessarily going to be super eager to weigh in on this stuff. Judges tend to have a pretty narrow construal of like this sort of their ability to weigh in on this sort of thing. And so that that would, you know, I think that there's a certain kind of adults in the room understanding that this that would prevent it from being too entirely disruptive. I don't know that that's merited, but I think we'll see what combination

of kind of political pressures and judicial professional pressures exist to check this. You're gonna give it to liberal attorney generals in blue states just suing the state department over nothing for fun. I also saw that I said the bill would cost 26 billion to implement in the first year. So back to your resourcing and logistics question, it seems wildly difficult to do this

without, I guess, an appropriation of new money. Well, so the way that usually ICE has operated over the last several years is they keep spending the money, which is usually faster than they're budgeted to spend it. And then they write Congress letters of increasing alarm of tone saying, if you don't give us more money before the end of the fiscal year in a supplemental, we're gonna have to start releasing criminals. And usually Congress says, fine, fine,

here's the money you asked for in the supplemental. Okay, so you mentioned also temporary protected status. On the way out the door, President Biden granted an extension of temporary protected status, or TPS, to nearly a million immigrants from Venezuela, El Salvador, Ukraine, and Sudan, which should protect them from deportation through, I think, the fall of 2026. I know the Trump administration is not a big fan of TPS or lots of, you know, pathways of legal immigration, can they just rescind that extension? Or what do you think happens to TPS?

This is where we get into some really uncharted territory, both legally and policy-wise. Because the Trump administration said in one of its executive orders that it is going to review grants of TPS given under Biden. So we don't know whether that means they're going to say that some of these, you know, 11th hour TPS grants shouldn't have been issued to begin with and try to argue that they shouldn't be forced to honor them or not. That's something that's not clear.

We don't know what happens to people who have applications for TPS, who, you know, if you were paroled in under the CHNV, Cuban Haitian Nicaraguan Venezuelan Parole Program, but you were here as a Venezuelan when the Venezuela TPS extension was issued and you've applied, what is that, you know, can you be removed once your parole expires, even though you have this pending application? Are they going to try to do that? There are so many open questions about this and it's really, it's concerning because frankly, a lot of these are folks who are not the most tapped in to, you know, they're like to high information news sources anyway.

And so the uncertainty that they're facing and the potential legal complexity of what they're facing is really difficult to predict. But we really, we absolutely could be seeing a pretty aggressive clob back front on TPS. And, you know, it's just going to depend on what they decide to announce from here and how much effort they're willing to spend on the USCIS side and sending individualized no thank you, you don't have status anymore notifications and defending it in court. Man, I mean, I just, just to underscore how cruel it would be to start sending people back to Sudan, which has been in the middle of the horrific civil war for well over a year now. There's accusations of genocide against the rebel forces and even some of the Sudanese armed forces.

I think half the country is at risk of starvation, millions of people being displaced. I mean, the idea that you would just put someone on a plane back to Khartoum right now is just like unthinkable from a moral level. Yeah, and this is, I mean, it's worth underscoring, even though we've been discussing it, that there is a difference between saying that somebody is legally vulnerable to deportation and actually taking the effort to deport them. And with TPS,

you know, it is there, there is a certain extent to which the Trump administration has made it pretty clear that people who arrived under Biden are in their crosshairs. But in general, it is not necessarily true that somebody who had legal status and is going to have it sunset is going to become a target, but even just putting them in that pool puts them more at risk. And it also makes it harder for them to plan their lives with TPS in particular, because so many of these people have had, you know, so many of these countries have had TPS for years and decades. These are people who have been making their lives in 18 to 24 month increments to begin with. And now you're giving even that assurance away from them. So it's a fairly profound change for the circumstances in which these people are living. Yeah, absolutely. Do you think, is it now kind of all about enforcement

and the kind of memos to agencies about how to implement these policies? Are you expecting more executive orders and major policy changes? We just don't know. We absolutely do not know. When Russ Vogt got caught on a hot mic last year, well, it wasn't a hot mic,

it was essentially a sting operation. The now again, head of OMB who was running Project 2025, he said that there were a lot of things that they were working on that were very close hold, that they weren't putting in Project 2025, a lot of memos and policy guidance that they were pre-drafting. And so we just don't know what the volume of those is. We've continued to see things going out that almost certainly were developed before inauguration because it would just be a tremendous amount of effort to get them done after that,

but we don't know how much there is. And it is, you know, there are some things in the executive orders that kind of hint at future action. There is, for example, one executive order that says that within 90 days, there should be a review of whether the Insurrection Act is necessary to invoke. So that is something that they've actually flagged could be coming. But for the most part, the MO of this administration is and was during the end of the first term, defined places in federal law that can be used to ramp up immigration enforcement that have kind of lain dormant for decades.

So we don't know how many of those other places they've found. The one thing I just haven't heard much about is any kind of increased penalties or scrutiny of employers versus individuals. I mean, for a long time, that was kind of the approach of a lot of immigration policy, right? Which is to make it really hard for people to work by punishing their employers if they hired undocumented people.

But I don't feel like I'm hearing much about that. The primary way that they would be going about this would be just engaging in enforcement. Usually when there are large-scale workplace raids, those are associated with some form of, you know, prosecution or sanction or something against the employer who they're raiding. You know, that's a kind of stochastic thing, right? You're not, like, you're not auditing an entire sector. And so the extent to which it's going to really shape employer behavior is unclear. But yeah, the biggest

tool, the biggest thing that kind of hasn't been done on employer sanctions is legislative. It's mandatory nationwide, you verify. And that has not been as much of a priority of this generation of immigration restrictionism as it was like a decade ago, in part because there are employers who are willing to stay quiet even as it becomes harder for them to hire people legally. But if you try to go after their workforce, then, or if you try to prevent them from hiring anyone who doesn't have authorization, then they'll get mad at you. So, you know, I think it's still to be seen. It's certainly not a rhetorical priority for them unless you start talking about the economic benefits of immigration, in which case they start talking about how exploitative employers

are. But there hasn't been a whole lot of effort to make it, you know, for example, Department of Labor priority to go after employers for exploiting unauthorized labor. Got it. I mean, just finally on the politics, I mean, curious how you think or why you think the politics on immigration policy changed so much over, I don't know, let's say the past decade or so. I don't know if it was just generally more migration, Biden's policies, like the relentless busing from states like Texas to blue states.

What's your big picture sense of that? I think that, you know, for one thing, there the thermostatic effect, you know, like a public opinion swinging in favor of immigrants under Trump and then swinging against under Biden is really, really hard to, it's hard to overstate and it's also hard to disentangle anything else from that kind of basic, oh, the government is doing some things I don't like, I'm going to make this more salient. In general, immigration isn't salient

for a whole lot of people. And so they're very, it's very easy to kind of swing them from one direction to the other based on opposition to who's in office, based on, you know, seeing b-roll of people coming in, that sort of thing. I don't think that, I think it's kind of not clear whether what we're seeing is an increase in the number of people who are really, really activated against unauthorized immigration or against immigration generally, or whether what we're seeing is the culmination of the fact that this is the signature policy issue of the man who's been the standard bearer of the Republican Party for a decade. And so anyone who's affiliated with the Republican Party has decided that this is

a more important issue to them. But I think the other side of this is a lot of people who were in solidly blue jurisdictions saw strains on state and local governments responding to recent arrivals. And so we're forced, you know, I think, I think we're like, put in a space where they were considering that actually there was a certain amount of zero sum trade off between investing in people who are already here and investing in new arrivals and the Biden administration by kind of not doing a whole lot to ensure that new arrivals were coming in an undisruptive way didn't necessarily help with this. But you know, whether that was something that's going to like really change a whole lot of people's opinions permanently

or whether it was a reaction to a moment under an administration that is no longer in office is something that remains to be seen. Yeah, very good point. Well, Dara, thank you so much for coming on the show. Final final question. You got the band back together with your old crew from the weeds with Ezra Klein and Matthew Glacius the other day on Ezra's podcast. Is there any chance of a comeback tour where you hit a few kind of the nerdiest cities? You know, we could sell out some stadiums.

I am entirely on board with this. Okay. If and only if we can at least start talking to a venue in Stockholm. Okay. Because if I have to talk about Swedish administrative data one more time without being in Sweden to do it, it's going to be very upsetting. I'm not even sure what you're referencing and I love that. We're gonna leave it there, that is perfect.

Dara, thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it and talk to you soon. Thank you, yeah. Yeah. That's our show for today. Thanks to Dara Lynn for coming by and Dan and I will be back with a new show on Friday. Bye everyone.

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