Raging Moderates with Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov - MAGA in Turmoil: MTG Out, Mamdani In, and Major Legal Blow

Episode Date: November 26, 2025

Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov sit down and talk through these strange days for the MAGA movement, after former stalwart Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s abrupt resignation announcement, Trump’s praising of Zohran Mamdani and the dismissal of the case against former FBI Director James Comey. Plus, the latest on the Ukraine-Russia peace talks, and whether the Transportation Department’s new “civility campaign” can actually make holiday travel any less miserable. Follow Jessica Tarlov, @JessicaTarlov.  Follow Prof G, @profgalloway. Follow Raging Moderates, @RagingModeratesPod. Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@RagingModerates Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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We'd love to talk, business. Thanksgiving can be stressful, but if anyone can teach you how to cook a turkey, it's this guy. One year, I had to cook almost 80 turkeys. 80? Yeah, 80 turkeys. And that's not even counting the sides and the mash and the stuffing. And that was a light year. The year prior, I think it was 160 turkeys.

This week, Unexplained It to Me, we help with the turkey so you can worry about everything else. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Raging Moderates. I'm Scott Galloway. And I'm Jessica Taruliffe. You're awfully casual today. What's going on? Are you not on TV today? Well, not yet. It is the morning. I'm going to TV where I'll get fake eyelashes and a blazer. But when I showed up this morning, David said, oh, the hoodie's back. And I didn't know that the hoodie was a thing. But I guess there was a day a few weeks ago where we were both in hoodies and people enjoyed that.

So I don't know if you want to start doing matching outfits or where you want to go from here. But I'd be up for it if you want to coordinate. Yeah, I was doing the hoodie for a while. And then someone said I look like an aging skateboarder. And that just kind of ruined him. And now my kids are saying, stop trying to dress younger than you are. Like, everyone is all over. I'm in a fashion no man's land right now.

I don't. Men's fashion is tough, though. Like, Brian orders so much stuff. Yeah. And he sends most of it back or he actually returns it by. hand, I think, because he wants to get away from us a bit. And he's like, I'm just going to go out to return this to Madison, Wisconsin. Yeah. I mean, I let him go as far as flat iron, basically, to return things. But men's clothing, it's difficult because you guys are constantly trying to

convince yourself that something interesting is happening. And nothing is changing. It's like a little bit of a difference in your waist, you know, that it's like a highway. I mean, I say that as I'm wearing my mom jeans. But, you know, yesterday I walk in and he is trying on these corduroy pants, and then we have to talk for 10 minutes about, you know, men in corduroys. Like, let's get on with it, dude. Yeah, I have a uniform. I have rag and bone pants, a Brunello Cuccinelli top. Well, James first. Very nice uniform. We can't twin if I have to wear Brunello Cuccinelli. If you want to wear a Nike hoodie, we can do that. It's like butter. I mean, seriously. And then I wear a pair of on tennis shoes just to remind you.

everyone. I am still a douchebag at heart. And you're mobile. Yeah, and then Warby Parker glasses and I'm in a panor I watch, boom, I'm done. Oh, they're Warby Parker's. Yeah. Warby Parker does a great job. They do an amazing job. I was in Oliver People's this weekend, and I forgot how much actual glasses and sunglasses talk. Okay, enough of, enough of the... Oh, banter over? Raging Moderates meets Vogue. The spring lame issue. In today's episode of raging moderates, we're discussing the shifting currents inside of MAGA, the latest in Ukraine and Russia peace talks, and the Transportation Department's civility campaign ahead of the holidays. All right, let's get into it. Friday was one of the strangest and most revealing days in

MAGA world. Marjorie Taylor Green abruptly resigned after Trump branded her a traitor. While at the same time, Trump was smiling in the Oval Office with New York City Mayor-elect Zoran Amman Doni. That communist lunatic, according to Trump. He'd spent months attacking. Instead of a showdown, they traded compliments, leaving Maga World confused and in some cases furious. Then came a legal blow. A federal judge throughout the indictments against James Comey and the New York Attorney General Letitia James because Lindsay Halligan, the Trump-pick prosecutor told to go after them, wasn't legally serving as a U.S. attorney. Her lapsed appointment made the cases invalid. Jesus Christ. All this is happening as Democrats faced what James Carval called a brewing populist

revolt driven by rising costs. Mamdani, Spanberger, Cheryl, they won because voters ring about rent, groceries, housing. And if Carville was right, Trump cozing up to Mondani, while alienating his own base, only highlights a bigger truth. Today's economic frustration is swamping ideology, and both parties are scrambling to harness it. Just, Carville says Democrats have a second chance if they lean hard into economic populism. Does Mamdani's win and Trump's reaction to him reinforce that argument? so. I mean, this feels like a well-timed op-ed from Carville in the New York Times. But we've been talking about this for a while now. And, you know, the only color that matters to people is green. And we've

been seeing that fissure on the right where people are saying, I did not elect you to be flying all over the world trying to broker peace agreements. I elected you to be bringing down my grocery costs. And you are not doing that. I mean, it's regularly 65 to 70% of people saying that Donald Trump isn't focused enough on lowering costs. But, you know, if we're going to be the party that can find a way to represent ourselves as a whole unit, so the big tent from Mamdani to Spanberger around economic populism and Carville had a great line about an unmistakable platform of pure economic rage. first of all, shout out to the name of our podcast, because you've got to have rage in there. I think that that's a very good path forward. And, you know, Mamdani and Trump, according to the readouts and what they were saying, you know, bonded over a couple of things, the focus on affordability, but also on being political outsiders, which they both definitely were, right? The establishment was not interested in Trump and still to some degree isn't interested in Trump. And that was definitely the case with Mondani.

And this message of, we're working for you, not for them. Now when Trump says it, that's not true because he is the them and this. But the framing of us versus them, you see it out on the campaign trail. Like John Ossoff is doing it really well in Georgia, talking about corporate greed and how you have to push back. That's, you know, the fighting oligarchy tour with Bernie Sanders and AOC. It's all rooted in that. And getting spicy moderates to be able to talk with that level. of economic rage, I think, is a very good potion to have as we head into the midterms.

So I'm into it. Are you feeling economically ragey in your Brunello-Cuchinelli sweater? Yeah, look, for me, if you look at America over the last 50 years, the delta between the life that the middle class and the rich get to live is extraordinary. I think if the bottom 99 knew not how the 1% but the top, the 0.1% live, it just, the difference. in the life, we get to sequester. And this is one of the most dangerous things about the 0.1% is that now they have their own health care. They don't get insurance. They have their own concierge's medical systems. They don't deal with, what do they care if air traffic control is down? They have their own transportation. They have their own planes. They have their own

schools. Do they care that kids aren't learning? No, because, I mean, I'm going to give you a stat. I'm rambling here. But this just blew me away. average public school, $15,000 per student, public schools and poor neighborhoods, $10,000 per student. The average elite private school this year will spend $75,000 on every student. So, okay, let's take the Education Infrastructure in America, and with poor kids, let's spend $120,000 preparing them to be adults. Let's spend a million on the kids of rich people. Oh, and what do you know? The kids of rich people have lower rates of obesity.

insecurity, self-harm, much better trained for the world. I mean, just think about that. Think about, well, of course the children of rich people are just so much better set up. But anyways, the absolute focus on money now is so exceptional. If you're in Germany, you don't go to college, but you get maybe a little bit of vocational programming. You make 60, 70, 80,000 euros. Maybe your partner works is also in the middle stuff or whatever they call. in Stuttgart, you make 100 to 150,000 euros. You can get a nice apartment. You can go to a beer garden where there's trampolines, so there's something for everybody and have a pretty nice life. The life you lead in America, if you're rich, is better than anywhere in the world.

The life you now lead as a middle class American is probably, I would argue, well, is that true? It's probably better than most of the G7, but it's not great. And it's the delta that matters because people are constantly reminded of what the life is like for the talented people. And according to everybody, anyone can make it in America, which means if you don't, it's your fault. So I think economics are kind of everything in America. Money buys you everything, and an absence of money is especially harsh here. So as Carvel said, over and over, it's about the economy's stupid. Now, where the Democrats get it wrong, in my view, is they don't want to be honest with Americans. They want to say, I'm going to give you more money. I'm going

to try and buy your boats. That's not sustainable. And people don't believe it in the long term. You need more competition. You do need federally mandated minimum wage, but you need to break up big companies. You need to get rid of all tariffs and have free trade and say, folks, there's no quick fix here. But over several years, we're going to make structural changes that increase competition that force companies to bring down their prices. More competition, lower prices. full stop. So we're going to create a more competitive atmosphere. We're not going to have cronyism. We're not going to have the president divvying up companies. We're not going to have regulatory capture. For God's sakes, we're not going to impose 150% tariffs on China.

88% of your toys under the Christmas tree are from China. Here's an idea. Let's make them cheaper by taking the tariffs down and asking them to take our tariffs down such that we can expand our markets and sell more of our products. But be honest with the American people, this is going to take a while. These are structural changes, not me promising to put money in your pocket and take it out of someone else's. Yeah. Anyways, we need to have an adult conversation around what it actually means, what is required in our economy to make a competitive again and bring down prices.

Yeah, having skin in the game is a big part of this. I mean, the quickest route to being a political loser right now is to be the defenders of the status quo and the establishment party, which is the role the Democrats have fallen into over the last few cycles. And you see that and all of the focus group feedback. and surveys about what people think about the Democratic Party and the kind of words that they associate with it. But, you know, this idea of like billionaires shouldn't be allowed to exist or it's really about the top 1% of the 0.01% I think misses the boat on how much the average

American actually doesn't begrudge people their wealth. They just want to have access and opportunity themselves. And they're willing to work really hard for it. And I think that this kind of patronizing equity conversation has done so much to alienate people from the party when they're just saying, like, I don't care if you're in a G-wagon, I just want to be able to get my F-150 and go about my business. I like that. And I think that if we can tap into that and the candidates who we do have running, it's supposed to be a rehashing of the camo wave from 2018. seem to really get it. Obviously, Ruben Gallego is always out front, you know, being great about this and saying things like, you know, Latino men just want a big eff and truck too, right? Like, that's where we've got to go with this. But it's interesting. I don't know if you saw the New York Times is reporting that there's a new group amongst liberal Democratic senators. They're calling themselves the fight club. And Chris Van Hollen is in there. All the Chris's Chris Murphy, Tina Smith, Bernie, Elizabeth Warren. And they are not necessarily saying Chuck Schumer, you've got to go. But they're pushing back on the type of approach that we have heading into the midterms in the 2028 election, basically saying we need to embrace candidates that are willing to challenge corporate interests and the orthodoxy of the party.

And they're particularly concerned that Schumer, even though it's not been formally done, is backing Janet Mills in Maine, Haley Stevens in Michigan, Angie Craig in Minnesota. These are Senate seats that are up. And it's going to be really interesting to see the kind of fight beneath the surface that's going to be going on for the soul of the Democratic Party moving forward. And I think that it's even more powerful that these aren't calls for Chuck Schumer to step down. It's much more thoughtful than that, right? Like people that are trying to change the way the party really approaches doing politics and who we want to be on our mantle, right? who we want to send out there to say you want to know who the Democratic Party is, it's these types of people. And I don't know what Chuck Schumer is going to do about it, a strongly worded

letter or what happens. I mean, this just came out last night. But I was interested and happy to see it. I think also, and this loops to what you are saying, because you threw out a few proposals and we always feel like the folks that we talk to are short on proposals. I do believe that we need to have, like, a real fix for Obamacare, not just getting the subsidies continued. I don't did you see also, like, Trump was interested in extending them for two years and his caucus was like, no. And so now we're back into concepts of a plan from their side. And Steve Bannon was doing an interview and talking about how important AI is and that if the Republicans don't have a plan to protect working class Americans from AI, that they're going to suffer huge losses. And so I

I really want, like, an Obamacare plan and an AI plan not only to protect the working class, but also college graduates who are not going to be able to get their entry-level jobs and get on the ladder because they matter, too, in all of this. And I feel like Demons would be in a really good place if those two things were taken care of. Yeah, so the Fight Club, first off, that's great branding. Right? I'm kind of shocked. I feel like that probably came from Bernie's Camp, Fight Club. And as much as I love Bernie, I think it would be hugely beneficial for America if we age-gated. We age-gate, I'm an ageist. I don't think a 17-year-old should be allowed to join the military or drink alcohol at a public establishment. Is that true?

Maybe 16. I don't think anyone under the age of 16 should be allowed social media. I think it makes sense that no one under the age of 35 should be able to run for president. I think it's 30 for Senate and 25 for Congress. I think at the age of 70, we give you a great. gold watch and tell you to go home. And I like the part of the party that is Senator Murphy, I don't know if Senator Klobuchar is in there, Senator Warren there, who we're talking about we need growth. We're for the economy. But the right type of capitalism is if a private company board

decides to give Elon Musk a trillion dollars if he creates $7 trillion in shareholder value, we're down with that. As long as we have the tax rates of the Reagan administration where we can afford to reinvest such that we have technology and infrastructure and education investments such that we create a lot of millionaires. But I think the Democrats need to stop, especially the Elizabeth Warren side of the party and to a lesser extent Sanders, their lambasting of billionaires really falls flat for me because while they have been in the Senate, during periods where we controlled the White House, the Congress, and the Senate, we have seen taxes go down on billionaires and corporations.

So are you not being truthful with us and get regulatory capture behind closed doors, or are you just ineffective? But I think that there's an opportunity for Democrats to say, we embrace capitalism, no more golden shares, no more socialism, no more buying stakes in Intel, but we embrace hardcore, full-body contact capitalism,

and we can't take companies like TikTok and carve it up and give it to our donors. I think there's an opportunity for them to raise or embrace capitalism in a growth agenda as opposed to lambasting billionaires. The majority of Americans, like you said, don't have a problem with billionaires. They just want to make sure they pay their fair share

and that the same investments and the same infrastructure that got these guys rich is there for them such that they have a shot. But I find that the far left, in my, probably my biggest criticism of the Democratic Party in general, they're much more concerned with rhetorical flourish, and posing for the virtue cameras

as opposed to actual policy that might actually impact the material and psychological well-being of Americans. It's like, okay, what is the plan to create an economy that is structurally more beneficial, more money coming from sharehold? There's always a tension between capital and labor.

Capital's been beating the shit out of labor for about 50 years, and corporate profits are in an all-time high, and wages as a percentage of GDP are at a 50-year low. That says that the, government needs to intervene and see if they can figure out a way to transfer more capital from shareholders to labor. There's always a tension. The tension is no longer a tension. It's an

absolute slaughter between capital and shareholders. And the Democratic Party could institute a number of policies, $25 an hour minimum wage. If you spend more than 300 times an average worker salary on CEO's compensation, he gets his own special tax rate, and that is an AMT of 60%. More taxes on share buyback. So people, companies are encouraged to invest more in plant property and equipment. There's some basic common sense solutions. I would still, the whole AI versus healthcare thing, I'm not sure people understand AI enough, and I'm not entirely confident that AI is going to have the destructive impact that people think they're going to have. I think you sound smarter when you're a catastrophist, and I'm guilty of this.

But I would propose a really big, bold solution and say, folks, health care is a fucking shit show. We're paying $13,000 versus $6,500 in every other modern economy per capita. Four out of five people don't like it. But there's this thing called Medicare that people actually like for people over the age of 65 that's delivered fairly efficiently. We're going to load eligibility for Medicare by two years. every year for the next 10 years, and then 72% of all medical expenses will be socialized and nationalized, and we're going to bring down the cost dramatically and increase the quality of

services. But here's the thing. The Democrats are the same whores as the Republicans, and they have pharmaceutical companies and hospital systems giving them money. But somebody needs to raise their hand and go, if you're really serious about deficit reduction in reducing the anxiety of the average American household, 40% of whom have medical or dental debt, we are, are going to, over the next 10 years, massively reduce the cost and the anxiety delivered by your U.S. health care system who have bought Washington. And I don't see that. I don't see any of them wanting to take on what Hillary tried in the 90s and failed. It's time. I think America is ready for someone to raise their hand and say, we need to nationalize or socialize

medicine, and this is how we're going to do it. I think the problem with it is that Democrats, think that, right, like that it would be a better world in which everybody had access to decent health care, but we're too honest about how difficult slash impossible it would be to actually effectuate that plan for 330 million Americans. Because the countries that have socialized medicine where it works, at least to a large degree, you still always have the rich that are going to go and get themselves their concierge health care, but are much smaller and less diverse than we are. and they also don't have the kind of corporate interests at play that we do. So, yes, everybody is a whore.

But you do see some moderate Dems or people who, you know, would fall into that bucket that do say we've got to get to Medicare for all. Like right now, we've got to fix the system that exists and that Obamacare and having some sort of public-private partnership is maybe the best that we can do with some reforms at this particular moment. But we got to dream big. And candidates and campaigns that are successful are the ones where, you put your values and your big broad dreams out there, right? And so people know who you are. They know what your values are. They know what you're working towards. And then, you know, you grow up and you're actually down in Washington and you see what is possible. And hopefully you can still make some big change. But you have to play within the bounds of, you know, of the field. I don't

know what I mean. Like, you got to grow up and you got to work with other people. And usually you have to broker some kind of deal. You know, I hate the fact that every big piece of legislation is just rammed through as fast as possible when everybody has control of all three chambers because that is a bad way to do the business of governing. I want to ask you about Marjorie Taylor Green. So she's out now. I'm not into conspiracy theories of like she's going to be mounting a presidential campaign.

I get it. She was upset that Trump said you can't run for Senate. But I think that she's really just emblematic of a lot of dissatisfaction that elected Republicans have at this moment. Like, whatever your choice of disagreement with the administration is, whether it's Epstein or it's about tariffs or whatever, you're seeing this. And Kevin McCarthy gave an interview last night. He was on with Jesse Waters. And he said that Marjorie Taylor Green is the canary in the coal mine. Congress better wake up because they're going to get a lot of people retiring.

I think keeping members out of Congress, you only get two. two years to be in the majority. And if the Democrats get you not to work every day for two months, that's losing two months of the majority. Punchball news reporting that Mike Johnson could even lose the gavel before we get to the midterms because of people dropping out and just saying, well, what is the point in doing this job, which we've been saying for a long time? So what are your thoughts about what's going on on the right? Well, someone said, I forget who it was, said that Trump has just treated them like trash. They can't even go home. They can't have town halls. And I still don't understand. I mean, when I look back on World War II or, you know, the

really dark moments in history, the thing that's most shocking is the enablers. The thing is most shocking is the U.S. government decided to turn away a ship of Jewish refugees, you know, knowing the dangers they face back in their homeland. The fact that so many Europeans that, you know, the French had lists ready to go of Jews in their country knowing what would happen to those people, it was the enablers. And Republicans right now, in my view, are just a giant blob of enablers. Yeah. You know, we have Senator Cassidy, who's a doctor, feeling like he needs to say that Kennedy lied to him.

And he knows as a doctor that vaccine saved millions of lives, but he doesn't actually want to fucking do anything about it than other than say, oh, I feel lied to. Well, that, okay, what's that going to do for the next outbreak of measles of rebellions? Like, do you actually have testicles or not? It's like, I love Republicans when they go on Bill Maher after they've left office. That's when they find their backbone. And you see just this giant blob of enablement. And I think a lot of them are sick of it. I get that.

And are saying, I love the idea that the gavel might be transferred to Leader Jeffries, like off cycle. But the one thing that really I just find. just so ridiculous, is any forgiveness, adulation, whitewashing of one of the most vile people to ever walk the halls of Congress, and that is Marjorie Taylor Green. And that we're so desperate for anything reasonable out of the Republican Party that doesn't feel like enablement. And I think she has been a leader on the Epstein Files. He deserves credit for that. But when she says, I can't be a part of this. It's like, well, let me get this.

Did the DOJ wake you up at 4 in the morning and raid your house like they did with National Security Advisor Bolton? Has the DOJ been weaponized against you illegally as they're doing with Senator Schiff? But you just can't take it anymore? Let's just quickly take a little walk down memory lane of Marjorie Taylor Green. She started her career by purchasing her father's general contracting company after stepping down. She became a CrossFit coach. In 2017, she began writing for American truth seekers, a conspiracy news site. In 2020, she ran on MAGA positions like gun rights, anti-vax, and anti-masking policies, and isolationism.

Once in Congress, MTG quickly became a national figure due to her inflammatory positions in social media posts. She has shown support for Q&ONN conspiracy theory. She endorsed the theory that Sandy Hook and other shootings were fake. She harassed and verbally abused some of the survivors of the Parkland shooting them, calling them crisis actors. She has endorsed using violence against Democrats. She agreed with multiple 9-11 conspiracies, including the theory that the attacks were orchestrated by the U.S. government. She claimed that Obama was a Muslim, attempting to open the borders up to a Muslim invasion. She said that representatives Omar and other representatives of the Muslim faith were not actually Congresspeople

because they took their oath on the Quran, not the Bible. Oh, and that the fires were caused, she didn't say Jewish space lasers. She said space lasers connected to the Rothschilds, which is a trope for anti-Semitic behavior. And meanwhile, she has made reportedly $24 million trading on non-public information, including buying Palantir three days before the committee she sits on, announced a $30 million government contract with Palantir. So in some, good fucking riddance. Yeah. And we're so desperate for anything resembling integrity or pushback that we laud Marjorie Taylor Green. She is vile. And the notion somehow that, you know, she did this for character integrity, someone told her she was going to lose and she's trying to figure out a way to reemerge, go into the swamp and come back, you know, Godzilla after a radioactive bomb.

this notion that she's just going to fade into the distance and spend more time with her family and that all of a sudden she's seen the light. I mean, this is, she's the problem, not the hero. And it just drives me insane that people are so drawn. We're so desperate for someone to say, oh, this is a bad idea or I don't agree with his policies. We're so desperate that we're willing to overlook, you know, the grossest of our enemies, of democracy, of civil behavior, of bigotry, of empathy for other special interest groups, because she's one of the few people on the Republican side that has ever spoken up against this guy. I find it, I'll stop there. What do you think Marjorie Taylor Green's going to do, Jess? I don't know, but we asked her to come on the podcast, and she has not said yes.

That's a shocker. So, and when she hears what you just said, I'm sure she's going to be dying to come on. I think our chances go. No, I'm in two minds about it. Like, yeah, fundamentally, I agree with you. I thought it was Jewish space lasers. I'm glad it was, you know, the more upscale version, just going after the Ross Childs. But, you know, also, like, if she sparks something in one other person who is on the fence about this or who really cares about the Epstein files and the cabal of pedophiles that are running the government or whatever, like, let it happen. And I just don't want to waste our time.

I'm not just talking about our podcast time because I actually like talking about this. But as a party, I don't want to spend too much energy on this. Like, I really want to fulfill our potential. You know, there are so many great people that are running for office or are in office already. And I want to show up at the midterms and in 2028 and win because we deserve. deserve it, not because we're not the other guy. Yeah. Ideas, not indignance.

Yeah, totally. And so stir up shit, Marjorie, that's cool. I'm sorry. I mean, the threats apparently against her and her children, quite extreme. That is scary and dangerous. You've actually apologized for your role in fomenting this kind of culture, but you should have known especially as a mother. Let me just say, sorry, I'm going to apologize.

I call bullshit. I bet you get more threats than Marjorie Taylor Green. Not in the last few weeks. I was out. But, no, plenty of people do not enjoy me and would like me not to exist anymore for sure. But, you know, she's part of the culture that has brought this on. It used to be notable when people would get threats. And now it's just like the price of doing business and speaking your mind in the political world.

The senators who, the Democratic veteran senators who made that video that has Pete Higgs, that's all hot and bothered. you know, threatening to court martial, Mark Kelly, you know, they're facing tons of threats for that. And you could, I understand what there could have been more specifics in it and talk exactly about, you know, which commands might be illegal and, you know, the conversations that you're having with junior officers who are saying that we're scared, that we're going to be asked to do X, Y, and Z things. I get all of that. I was not the director on the video. But if we get to a place we're exercising your First Amendment right and as people who served the country, you can't even say, remember what the Uniform Code of Military Justice asks of you

and you're going to end up with thousands of threats. Like, that's not, it's not a decent country anymore. It's not a good republic. It's not any of the things that we aspire to. And, yeah, just kind of it. It's a, I'm willing to take the discord, but Marjor Taylor Green still sucks. Yeah, it's, I mean, just you brought up this hullabaloo. over I'm a big fan of Senator Kelly and I just like who couldn't be that's the thing he's like one of the ones where you see Republicans that even like him look at his electoral record even look okay but I feel like his comms he he's very statesmanlike and shows a lot of grace but I really wish his comps department would just issue a one sentence response that I have served on land air

in space I'm not going to take a lecture from a guy who's a draft dodger about what orders are legal and not legal. And since we decided at the Nuremberg trials that I was just following orders is not an adequate defense, the military colleges teach our officers that they have an obligation to obey lawful orders, but they also have an obligation to disobey orders that are manifestly unlawful. If you give the order to kill all the children in a village, they have a lawful obligation to disobey those orders. Now, whether the people who felt they needed to remind, I feel like quite frankly that was bad timing and they didn't give their own servicemen enough credit, but what they said was 100% true. Yeah. It was like a PSA, basically.

Yeah, that's true. If your commanding officer orders you to burn a village, regardless of who it's going to kill, you are lawfully obliged to disobey. That's... That's taught in every military college. That's taught in basic training, I believe. We just don't give our armed services enough credit for the kind of moral discretion. They have to exercise and what is the place that has the least moral clarity in any situation, war. But that's just an enormous distraction. Let's move on to, let's talk about what do you think the Halligan ruling means for Trump's broader effort to prosecute his political adversaries? A little bump in the road, but it's always nice to see how incompetent they actually are.

Yeah. You know, I mean, first of all, if Bill Barr was the Attorney General, none of this would have happened at all. And you look at the Trump 1.0 teams, and they are, you know, top of the line, Avengers squad versus the C list or whatever we have at this point. It looks like Comey's indictment has run out the statute of limitations. It was five years on September 30th. Though some legal analysts say that the DOJ will get another six months to try this again, Tish James, they'll definitely refile it. But I think it shows actually how much pushback there is within our DOJ, not Pam Bondi or Todd Blanche level,

but the regular foot soldiers, no one is willing to take these cases, but also they're not willing to help. because I'm sure somebody in the Eastern District who's been there a long time or knows the law knew exactly what was going to happen and didn't say anything, right? They said, you go about your business. I'm going to be over here actually fighting crime. And the incompetence is staggering. It will be our saving grace, perhaps. Hopefully we can get to the midterms and have a good showing so that there's some degree of checks and balances and that their power is blunted a little bit. But it was a big egg on the face moment. for sure, for Halligan, our esteemed insurance attorney, but also for Pam Bondi. And I'm sure there was a lot of catch-up flying in the Oval when Trump saw that headline. It is, I don't think people recognize how bad this is for America, because your brand is the biggest invisible aircraft carrier, the perception or belief of what you will do if we do X. And America is the most well-recent, nation in the world, the most innovative, and the most violent. We are absolutely willing to

deliver violence to anywhere in the world if we see it as our interests. We also, above that are seen as competent and empathetic, that we want to promote American, you know, American Judeo-Christian values, whatever you want to call, that we do like to think we have a base of ethics. All of those things are the ultimate carrier strike force in forcing some level of decency or our interests in our allies and our interests around the world. The whole competence brand association is going out the window. We look like asses. So the president wants to go out.

We can't even, this guy can't even go after his political enemies without looking like a clown car. It ends up she's not even legally allowed to prosecute. I mean, it's just sort of, okay, these are the people who are going to develop a strategy, for ensuring that China does not do a soft or a hot war invasion of Taiwan. Those are the people that are figuring out our economy and our trade policy and our approach to innovation and regulation around AI. Like, okay, these people have their head up their ass. It's great that Comey got off right away, dismissed out of court.

Why? Because the current leadership keeps appointing village idiots to positions of power. And to think that that isn't happening up and down. the stack of the agencies that run our, the woman running our Department of Education, our Secretary of Education thought AI was A1 and didn't know what she was talking about. It is my favorite steak sauce. It's like, okay, that's the person you should figure out how we implement technology and the role of machine learning into schools. She thinks it's A1. And we have a Secretary of War

who's fat shaming. Okay, that's going to help us. Anyways, this is, the good thing, that might come out of this is the people you meet in government, a huge portion of the best and brightest, go to D.C. to work for little or no money. But that's why you saw, I'm sure, that Doge got cost cut at itself, and it ended up accomplishing absolutely nothing that it set out to do, just costing us billions of dollars. But in those exit interviews, the Doge kids were like, actually, government runs pretty well. And these people are pretty badass. You got to rehire all of them. We got to get them back in because it ends up that our air traffic controllers are pretty good at what they do. Let's take a quick break. Stay with us. Every day, the president faces

tough choices. We sat in the Oval Office and helped President Biden grapple with those decisions. Now we'll help you make sense of today's national security stories in our new podcast. This is the long game. I'm Jake Sullivan, President Biden's National Security Advisor. And I'm John Feiner. Biden's Deputy National Security Advisor. Each week, we'll explain the national security stories shaping our world and how presidents make those big decisions. New episodes drop every Friday. Search for The Long Game, wherever you get your podcasts.

From the Vox Media Podcast Network. Support for the show comes from New York Magazine's The Strategist. The Strategist helps people who want to shop the Internet smartly. Its editors are reporters, testers, and obsessives. You can think of them as your shopaholic friends who carry equally about function, value, innovation, and good taste. And their new feature, The Gift Scout, takes the best of their reporting and recommendations and uses it to surface gifts for the most hard to shop for people on your list. All you have to do is type in a description of that person, like your parent who swears they don't want anything, or your brother-in-law who's a tech junkie, or your niece with a sweet tooth. And the Gift Scout was scanned through all of the products they've written about and come up with.

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without falling into the trap of buying things I don't actually need. Learn about values-based spending, the tools that help you spot fake discounts, and why I use Black Friday for gift shopping instead of treating myself. Get ready to win the Black Friday game on your own terms. Listen to wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com slash your rich BFF. Welcome back. There's major movement on Ukraine today. A U.S. official says Kyiv has essentially agreed to a peace deal with Russia, just minor details left, even as Zelensky insists there's still more work to do. The talks are happening in Abu Dhabi where U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is meeting with Russian officials. Ukraine's negotiators say they've

reached a common understanding on the core terms that are now looking to Europe and potentially as Olensky visit to Washington to finalize it. But Moscow's warning, it could reject any deal if the U.S. changes what it thought was agreed to at the Alaska summit. Jess, I have absolutely no sense for this. Can you give us what you think is the likelihood or the real politic of this on the ground?

What's going on here? I don't want to be Debbie Downer, but I feel like I've seen this movie before. And, you know, Russia saying, oh, I thought we agreed to the deal in Moscow. where they got Trump saying basically whatever you want and here's our best stake was not a deal that Zelensky was going to take. And remember it was the five alarm fire that weekend where all of the NATO leaders had to fly into the U.S. while Putin went directly to meet with President

Xi and everyone's alliances were very clear. So, yeah, is it a good thing that there is some deal that Ukraine feels at least vaguely comfortable with that we, are supportive of as well, sure, is it a good thing that that 28-point plan that came out a few days ago, which even a sitting U.S. Senator thought was written by the Russians is now off the table and we're down to, I think it's like 19 or 20 points. But, you know, Moscow, it's weird. Like, on some level, they have no chips, no control in all of this. And then on another level, they have all of the control in the world because they have to agree to something. And they have not, since this war started four years ago and they illegally invaded a sovereign nation, they

have not bent at all on any of the things that they're asking for. And it feels like we're on a never-ending merry-go-round, except we're losing lives every day that this happened. And I understand there was no ceasefire in it. But I do think that it matters a lot, that while there's this quote-unquote breakthrough going on, that Moscow last night was still launching strikes into Kyiv, killed seven Ukrainians, and they're hitting energy infrastructure. Like, they're basically saying, like, here's my middle finger, and it's in the form of a drone strike. And so, you know, I want to be hopeful. But I do think, I don't, it's not like a gossipy, salacious thing necessarily, but the sub-story of this that the Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is the one over there negotiating,

I think is meaningful. Because, you know, you have Pete Heggsett. at home rage tweeting at Mark Kelly, while the Secretary of the Army is the one sitting in Geneva and in the UAE trying to hammer out the details of this. And Dan Dreskell, I don't know if you remember back to Signalgate. He was the one that was kind of talked about as that he could replace Pete Hacks as if Pete had to go for sharing our confidential classified war plans on an open chat and with a journalist. So I kind of have eyes on that story. and Dan Driscoll is a very close ally of J.D. Vance's, which sharing his worldview is complicated for me, but this idea that maybe there's a bit of a subversive thing happening with Hegseth, I think is an interesting facet.

Are you optimistic? Are you going to be glass-half-full on the potential peace plan? I see this is no win because I understand that people want to end a war, but the terms I've seen are just such non-starters. It's basically, all right, you've won. It's how much land you take. and they have to demilitarize in Ukraine and give up any aspirations to be part of NATO. And my sense is it's unlikely the deal goes through because I think this is only emboldens Putin to think we're winning the war and that coming to the table with this lopsided deal towards us only means that the Ukrainians are losing support in the West, the fact they would even entertain this deal and dismiss it out of hand. I think it only emboldens him. And, you know,

The best way to end a war is to win it. And wars end when one of two things happen. One is a victor or there's a stalemate. And neither of those that's happening right now, because what is essentially happening is the Russians, and we don't like to admit this, are making slow grinding progress every day. It's slow. It's coming at a huge price or taking a huge toll on them, but they are gaining land slowly but surely. And so what is their incentive to stop unless we were to say, we're going to double the support to Ukraine. We're going to give them long-range flamingo and Tomahawk missiles, and we are going to wipe out your energy infrastructure.

And you're basically going to have an economy that's going to collapse. And when an economy collapses, you know, get ready. There's going to be quite a few of you who fall out of windows. I think what's being proposed here is a bad piece, and all it results in, in three, five, ten years, Putin says, I know, I'd really like some of Poland. I think we need to take Finland back. We have a NATO member stay with a 600-mile border. We've tested Article 5.

It hasn't been triggered when we fly drones, Napoleon and Finland. Now, we need to take Finland back. And so anytime you appease a murderous autocrat in Europe, it just does not end well. And I think Rubio believes that's what we should do, but he's much more interested in being president in getting Trump's endorsement

than any sort of long-term geopolitical strategy, or maintaining what I thought were his principles or the principles of the GOP. So regardless of what happens here, I think we've already lost. I think this is a huge defeat for the West. It's, okay, give them everything they want. There are a couple of bones at Ukraine

to pretend they got something, and this will only result in more death and disability, and, you know, we're saying to a bully, okay, fine, you win, you win. and we're essentially, in some ways, giving a green light, I think, to Xi to invade Taiwan by saying that the West can be worn down by an invading army if it starts to cost a lot of money, and we aren't even willing to put a boot on the ground. So I'm a bit of a warhawk on this. I think we should massively double down and start going after their energy infrastructure and bring them to the negotiations table from a position of strength. Yeah, I think it also sends a signal about the negotiating teams because, you know, you were more reticent about the quote-unquote peace deal that came out of the Middle East that Jerry Kushner and Steve Whitkoff negotiated. I was saying it's definitely a hostage deal, and we should be thankful that all the living hostages have been returned.

I think there are still three bodies that need to come back. But whether this turns into a peace deal remains to be seen. and so far it's not looking particularly peaceful. So if you have a guy like Steve Whitkoff who, frankly, one of these regions would be more than enough of a job, let alone he's supposed to be the deal master for every conflict that we have across the globe. I think these other nations, especially our adversaries, are aware of the fact that we are too tired and understaffed to be doing this properly. And Whitkoff saying in an interview that he thinks like Putin's not a bad guy and that he was telling him the truth, just shows, you know, how outmaneuvered he already has been and not up to the job. Because even if you just read on Wikipedia what a KGB agent is like, you would know that Vladimir Putin has not been upfront with you about literally anything that's been said. All right. With that, we'll take another break.

The biggest company in the world has been making the same product since 1993. GPUs, graphics, processing units, or chips. It was niche at first. If you were a really serious gamer back in like 1998, you'd be buying one of NVIDIA's graphics cards. Invita. And putting that into your high-powered gaming computer. In 2025, NVIDIA is still making chips, but now those chips are more advanced, and they're being sold to people who are training AI models, your clods and your chat GPTs.

AI has become such a big part of the American economy that the entire stock market can swing on whether NVIDIA releases a good earnings report or a bad one. Meanwhile, President Trump has developed a work bromance with NVIDIA's co-founder and CEO Jensen Wong. This is a smart cookie. Traveling with Wong to exotic locales and involving the CEO in foreign policy calls. That's on Today Explain. Today Explained every weekday, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back before we go. As the holiday travel rush kicks off and with Thanksgiving shaping up to be the busiest in 15 years, the Department of Transportation is trying something unexpected. AAA says 73 million Americans will travel and 6 million will fly. And the Department of Transportation has decided that it's now the time to launch a new civility campaign called,

the golden age of travel starts with you. Basically asking Americans to dress nice or be polite, help fellow passengers, and say please and thank you. It comes after a 400% spike in unruly passenger incident since 2019, everything from drunk outbursts to full-on fights. But critics say the campaign ignores the bigger issues, shrinking seats, chronic delays, and fly-rides programs, and the Department of Transportation quietly scrapped. Let's watch a bit from the video they put out. Things aren't what they used to be. Some would call it the golden age of travel. Let's bring civility and manners back.

Ask yourself, are you helping her pregnant woman put her bag in the overhead bin? Are you dressing with respect? Are you keeping control of your children? Are you saying thank you to your flight attendants and your pilots? Are you saying please and thank you in general? The golden age of travel begins with you. I'm not completely mad at this because I did grow up in an environment where we got dressed up to go and fly and thought that being a flight attendant was an important and real career. And, you know, it was a time of handing out wings to little kids and that that felt so exciting and that you paid attention when the seatbelt sign came on and all of these things.

But you can only make that ad when air travel is working. Like, that's the cherry on top, right? But if the entire Sunday is actually just shit sludge, you cannot be leaning into civility. You should be leaning into efficiency and fairness. I mean, the rollbacks of the Biden-era policy is on compensating passengers is one of the most blatant forms of crony capitalism or corruption, whatever you want to call it, that we've seen. And I would like to see more people wearing nice outfits at the airport. I would like to see less fights, but there is a reason that this is happening. Part of it is that everyone is on their phone and, like, teetering on the edge of just having an explosion all the time.

But the real point is we don't have air traffic controllers. Nothing works properly. And this just falls flat or like a big fucking joke. Do you wear Cuccinelli to the airport, too? Well, you don't even go to the airport. You fly by yourself with your dog. So I don't know how to say this without, I do fly commercial occasionally. I'm sorry.

Yeah, I know. Poor me, right. It's rough out there for us who wear a Nike sweatshers. Yeah, just 10 years ago, I was flying coach, like most people, running my own business and was trying to set a good example. God, I hated that. Glad we moved on. Well, but it's gotten near unbearable for everybody. The average seat pitch, the distance between the back of one seat and the back of the next is dropped from 35 inches in 2011 to 31 inches.

I mean, you go on, you occasionally get on, I flew EasyJet, or one of these, or flew spirit. I've flown some of these just a couple of years ago. Yeah. I remember thinking, like, you do feel like cattle. You're so crowded. You're in a tube and there's turbulence. You know, it feels like you're about to have a mental health episode. And my TikTok algorithm has figured out that I want to watch people who refuse to get out of their cars after being pulled over by a cop who eventually shatters the window and pulls them out.

a Sora AI-generated caricature of someone, a chiropractor, basically busting a person in half, or someone really passenger who's clearly, I think, having a mental health episode, start screaming profanities of people and taking swings of people and spitting at them, and then you see the air marshal, wherever it is, come in and haul them off the plane. I do hearken back, my dad, when he would come visit me, would show up in a suit and a tie. He would put on, you know, born in the Depression, he'd put on a suit and a tie and a hat, like, to travel. That's how we saw it. And I do think we all have a role.

I think it's a good message in trying to be especially civil when you're in a crowded space like that, when things can escalate so quickly. But a lot of it, to your point, is if you're going to have an absence of regulation where you don't make the investments in infrastructure or you don't force companies to maintain a certain level of service. such that you can transfer more and more money from consumers to shareholders. It kind of goes back to the same thing. There needs to be a certain level, a minimum standard, that will cost shareholders money, but create better service in a lack of, like, just terrible, unbearable situations. These companies, as long as they're allowed to

and can develop monopoly power around certain routes, which they're able to do, some airlines in Europe started charging you to use the bathroom. And if you'll let them do that, they'll do it. And, yeah, they put non-economic costs on the flight attendants through the front lines of having to constantly apologize to everybody, but we're putting consumers in what feel like near inhuman environments. Airlines have been printing money lately.

We're not forcing them to have certain minimum standards and have consumer rights that if your flight is delayed eight or 12 hours because you decided not to, you know, because you're not maintaining a certain level of maintenance or whatever it might be, If you can't figure out a way not to have these types of delays, you have to compensate the passengers for their time. Fairly basic regulation, the friendly skies will get less and less friendly. You know, people are just really struggling.

People are just, it's like, Jesus Christ, I'm working so fucking hard. I finally got off work. I barely have the money for this flight. I'm trying to get home maybe to see my parents who are sick. And I have to sit in a middle seat. I have no room. You know, maybe I forgot to take my medication this morning. morning, and I just lose my shit. And I hate having phones everywhere because, granted, while it's

fun to see a Karen be doxed when she makes these racist stupid statements in a grocery store, I do feel like a lot of this is just mental health episodes on parade for our own entertainment. Also, we've talked about this before, but in America, the level of care with which people who work at airports, especially for the airlines, treat folks that are traveling with kids or with disabilities pales in comparison to Europe by like a cajillion fold. Like flying around Europe with children is a pleasure. Like everybody understands that this is more complicated. They, you know, really want to make sure that you're all sitting together, which also saves other people from having to sit with your little people or with you and a little person when your other little person is on the

other side. Anyway, we don't do a lot of things that other countries have shown us can work to make this experience better. And it feels, again, like, I don't want to say that Secretary Duffy inherited a perfect situation at all. That's clearly not the case. We knew about some of these problems during the Biden administration and even before, but it doesn't feel like they're taking any sort of decisive action to address the problems. And you're totally right, the mental health breakdowns that go on there, where a vacation is not even a vacation and people desperately do need a break from their lives. Also, airports are like highway robbery. They are so expensive. I don't know how people do it, frankly. Like, you're going to buy a $10 bottle of water.

And it's not going to make you feel better if you're wearing a nice outfit. Yeah, I just, I occasionally get anxious on planes, and I just think it's hilarious when the captain says, we know you have a choice in airlines. I'm like, most of these people had no choice and had to sell a kidney to take this flight. Or I feel like turbulence is sort of God's way of saying, you weren't anxious enough, let me help you. And when I flew back on, what was it, American Airlines from L.A. to London, and for the first two hours, it was just a ton of turbulence. And it was so, I mean, we're not supposed to be up there. the bottom line and our instincts haven't caught up to the notion that it's actually the safest form of air travel. But if you wanted, again, if you wanted big structural solutions and big

ideas, I think a candidate could run on any one of these ideas. We are the wealthiest nation in the world across the eastern and western seaboard. We are going to have the most efficient advanced high-speed rail in the world. You want to talk about, I can get on, I take the Eurostar from St. Pancras to Gardnerd in Paris. It's two and a half hours. Your stress and cortisol levels are a fraction. You get on a train, and it's just like, oh, you just like exhale. It's nice.

It's easy through the countryside. Your instincts aren't freaking out going, no, you're not supposed to. We have run really fast before, so trains just feel like we're running a little too fast, but it's not like, no, you're not supposed to skirt along the surface of the atmosphere at seven tons of the speed of sound. You're going to die soon. and that's what your instincts are telling you. We need a massive investment of infrastructure.

The Europeans for their ability to get snatched a fee from the jobs of victory economically over and over, they get trains right. They're like, okay, how come I can't get to D.C. in two hours on a nice train? How come I can't get to, I mean, there's the bright line in Florida, but it just strikes me that that's one way.

we would substantially decrease the pressure on the transportation infrastructure, signal innovation, make people's lives nicer, big, bold ideas, not some guy telling people to act more civil on airline. We'll see. I hope it works. I hope it works. I sat next to Barbara Eden on a flight. My first job at Morgan Stanley, I sat next to I dream a genie. And I was supposed to sit next to Giselle Bunchin.

and a family asked me if they could trade seats with me and then I was in like 3A and then Giselli came and sat down on 3B and I wanted to kill myself for giving up my seat. I could have been Mr. Bunchin just...

I mean, maybe. Do you have any great flight stories? Great flight stories? Not really. Okay. I have another really good one. Do you remember, so in 1987, No, I don't remember. I was three. I know. Thank you. Thank you. I know you're very young. I'm very old.

No, but. No, I get it. I get it. I get it. All right. So I was my first, like, recruiting tour, went to Stanford to recruit students to be in the analyst program of Morgan Stanley. Went with my friend, Don Larson. And we're giving the speech about Morgan Stanley. Someone walks in and says, as Don here. And Don's father had had had a heart episode. Oh, no. Because we, on the way to the airport, I am terrible with directions. And we didn't have GPS back then, or Waymo. And we got off on Sepulveda coming from downtown L.A., and I banged her right. And Don followed me in his convertible rabbit. Should have known.

That was a poor taste that said a lot of negative things about Don. But anyways, convertible rabbit. And he finally caught up to me and said, you're going the wrong way. Turned around, bombed L.A.X. And we walked up, and the plane was pulling away. And so the plane pulled away, missed the flight. No problem. L.A. San Francisco, a ton of flights won an hour later. So fast forward, Don's father's had a heart incident. It ends up that the flight we miss. Do you remember the flight where a disgruntled employee shot the pilots and the plane went down over Central California? No, but I feel like I should. No, but I know things that happened when I was young or didn't exist yet. This was a seminal incident in aviation because from that point forward, employees.

had to go through metal detectors. Up until that point, employees just showed their identification. They didn't have to go through metal detectors, and this disgruntled employee got on this flight, went to the pilots, shot the pilots, plane goes down, everyone on board dead. Pacific Southwest Airlines flight, 1771. There you go. I remember it like it was yesterday. We were supposed to be, Don and I were on that flight. And we missed it. So now when I get lost, I'm like, no problem. Anyways, the story gets weirder. I thought, does anyone I know, I know, I think I'm on this flight. I'm like, no. And then, of course, my friend, David Frey, who I'm staying with, calls my mom and tells her I was on the flight. Oh, great. And so a few hours later, I have to call my mom, and my mom has friends over mourning my death. And I call, and my mom answers. And she says, hold on, and she made me speak to her friend because she thought she was hallucinating. And anyways, I do not mind taking a wrong turn and occasionally missing a plane because I,

Don Larson knows me as life because of my inability to follow or understand directions. Anyways, that's my airline story. It has nothing to do with the subject at hand. No, but I'm sure you were addressed nicely. All right. Before we go, we're working on an end-of-year mailbag episode to answer some of your burning questions on all things politics. Send us a 15-second voice recording to raging moderates of Propggymedia.com, and we might include yours. That's all for this episode. Thank you for listening to Raging Moderates. Have a good week, Jess. And don't. Happy Thanksgiving.

Yeah, likewise. I'm thankful for you and your fantastic contribution here and your friendship and your talent and your resilience and giving them hell on the five. Scott. All right. And also, don't be afraid to occasionally take the wrong turn. You just never know what good or bad things you might avoid. Could save your life. That's right. Thank you.