Tangle - PREVIEW - The Sunday Podcast: Isaac and Ari talk about Trump's cabinet nominees, DOGE, and Jake Paul v Mike Tyson.

Episode Date: November 17, 2024

On today's episode, Isaac and Ari discuss the recent political appointments made by President Trump, particularly on the controversial nomination of Matt Gaetz for Attorney General. They explore the implications of these nominations, the political strategies behind them, and the reactions from various political commentators. They also talk about military spending and the potential consequences of reforming the Department of Defense and the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight. And, as always, the Airing of Grievances.Ad-free podcasts are here!Many listeners have been asking for an ad-free version of this podcast that they could subscribe to — and we finally launched it. You can go to tanglemedia.supercast.com to sign up!Check out Episode 8 of our podcast series, The Undecideds. Please give us a 5-star rating and leave a comment!You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Jon Lall. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Will Kaback, Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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or renewing a mortgage, many Canadians are finding it hard to focus with housing costs on their minds. For free tools and resources to help you manage your home finances and clear your head, visit Canada.ca slash It Pays to to know a message from the government of Canada. All right. Coming up, the media still doesn't understand Donald Trump. And I can't believe it.

I stand up for the military and we spend way too much time talking about Jake Paul and Mike Tyson fighting each other. You guys are going to enjoy this one. From executive producer, Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. And welcome to the Tangle Podcast, the place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking and a little bit of my take.

I'm your host, Isaac Saul, here with Tangle managing editor Ari Weitzman. And we are in the middle of a hurricane of appointees from the president-elect and the new incoming Trump White House. Ari, how are you doing, man? Well, when it rains, it pours, Isaac. So maybe we're in the eye of the storm now, but we'll probably be getting plenty of more news about different appointees. I think this was the plan from Jump, is to try to get these position staff so we can keep hearing about it. And hopefully we'll be hearing mostly from you about it today because as you could probably

hear my voice is rough. I'm going to do my best, but getting through it. Yeah, I'm glad this is tonight or today and not tomorrow because it's Thursday night as we're sitting here recording and there's a massive, a gigantic, unbelievably important football game happening tonight. And I'm expecting to not have a voice tomorrow morning from screaming at my TV. So, yeah, you can't go back to back losses, man. You got to get off, get up off the mat. I just, I hate the entire city of Philadelphia today. I love this place, but I hate it. I hate all the Eagles fans. I walked to work today wearing my commander's jersey,

just looking for a fight, inviting it. And I really, really need them to win this game or else I'm going to have a really bad weekend. And I'm going to hear so much from my Eagles fan friends who are insufferable every season. I think putting negative energy out there into the city of Philadelphia is as Philadelphia as you could possibly be. So you're doing the right thing. Yeah, doing the right thing. All right. There's a ton to cover. And I think we've obviously talked a little bit about this in our newsletter and a little bit on the podcast today. I want to start with just, I'm not sure the best way to frame it, maybe the continued inability for smart, prominent, left of center people in the political

world to misunderstand or their continued inability to understand Donald Trump in a way that is just kind of mind boggling to me. So as we talked about today, Trump nominated three people who I think are deeply unqualified to hold the post they were nominated for, for different reasons. One of them, maybe the one that has caused the most kind of slack jaw, oh my God, is Matt Gaetz, the representative from Florida who got nominated for attorney general. Pete Hicks at the Fox News hosts who's being nominated for Secretary of Defense is a former combat veteran, you know, has things that Trump typically loves like prestigious schools on his resume.

I think he went to Harvard and Princeton. I think there's a case you can make, I'm going to talk about this in a little bit, that maybe you want somebody like him to come shake things up, whatever. Tulsi Gabbard, I don't even know what to say. I respect elements of her and I think she's ideologically kind of a heterodox and she was willing to buck and leave the party when she felt like her values no longer aligned. I appreciate all

of that. I do not think she's a particularly serious person. And the idea that she's going to be leading the, you know, being the director of national intelligence is odd to me. I don't believe a lot of the left wing and in some cases, right wing talking points that she's like some secret Russian agent. I think she's a normie American who got a little bit radicalized going down the internet rabbit hole. But I also think that like there's enough people who are qualified, who have access to information I don't, that express real genuine kind of measured fears about her motivations to be the person she is politically, that I worry about her running the national intelligence community. Not at all enthusiastic about her. Matt Gaetz is the big one though,

in the sense that he's the one that I think just sort of blew everybody's top off. He's not qualified for the job, which is fine. We talked about this in our newsletter today, you know, the classic example that I'm sure we'll hear a lot from Republicans and, you know, I think rightfully so is like, is like, JFK nominated his 35 year old brother who had never tried a court case to be attorney general. And Bobby Kennedy was actually a pretty good attorney general. He did a lot of stuff that today was and is supported by people from across the political spectrum, including, but not limited to prosecuting the Teamsters, going after the Ku Klux Klan. I mean, he had what a lot of people believe was a successful tenure.

So I'm not questioning the Matt Gaetz thing because he's inexperienced, though he is, and I would prefer it with somebody with more and different experience. I question it because is and I would prefer it with somebody with more and different experience. I question it because the guy is like an ethical vacuum. I don't really know how to say it. I know there are people who probably support him and love him because he supports Trump who listened to this podcast. That's fine. I think he actually is a really fantastic surrogate for Trump. I think a lot of liberals imagine Matt Gaetz walking around with a clown nose on or something. The guy is not a clown. He's smart. He's incredibly articulate. Someone who's prosecuting the conservative case on issues as a member of the House Judiciary Committee

has been extremely effective. You can go watch a 20 minute interrogation that he levels against Merrick Garland in a congressional hearing from a few months ago. He is very good at what he does and I think he's a very smart guy. I do not think he's an idiot. I don't think he's an idiot. I don't think he's a clown. I think that he has a well-known

reputation for being deeply unethical in lots of different ways. And a lot of conservatives say that. And a lot of people who work in DC say it on the record, and many, many more of them say it off the record. And I'll just say that, that like, you can throw a rock randomly and hit somebody who has a story about Matt Gaetz doing something really gross and sleazy during his time in Congress. And I know there are these allegations against him about, you know, underage girls and drug use and parties and all this stuff. I'll just say based on everything I know that I've read on the record and heard off the record, I would not be surprised at all

if many of those allegations are true. I don't trust him, not even one bit, but I don't not understand, I'm not incapable of understanding why he was picked. And it seems like a lot of people are. And that's kind of what I want to talk about a little bit. It's just like this narrative that I'm seeing bubbling up from a lot of really smart people.

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A message from the government of Canada. I'm going to read something from Ezra Klein who, what do you say about Ezra Klein? I listen to Ezra Klein's podcast. I think he is really tapped into democratic politics and he's a former policy reporter and he is really, really good on public policy. I think he gets stuff wrong pretty regularly about just sort of like the narrative and the culture of the country and where we are. I think he's detached and divorced from realities about America, but he's an incredibly good policy reporter. And he is, in my view, someone who is really, really well connected in the democratic movement and is incredibly influential there. And I think played a not insignificant role in Joe Biden dropping out

of the presidential race this year because of his position that that was the right thing to do and how he articulated it and how many influential people trust and listen to him as a voice. He's a titan of thought in the center and center left of the US. Absolutely. He said, the Gates domination is so off the wall that I half believe he's sacrificial. So Senate Republicans will get an easier time confirming all the other questionable picks having shown their independence by icing Gates." And then this narrative just sort of took off in the kind of punditry world.

And I saw so many smart people saying one of two things. One, that Gates resigned from Congress to avoid the results of this ethics probe coming out. So the context there is, we found out that a house ethics committee was about to release a report on all these allegations, not just sexual misconduct stuff, but it sounds like genuine corruption and mishandling of campaign funds

to various things, ethics violations. And because Gates resigned, the committee can no longer release that report to the public because they don't have jurisdiction over him. So the narrative goes, Gates resigned to protect himself from this ethics report. Trump's going to appoint him knowing that he's not going to get confirmed. And then he gets this graceful exit from Congress and he'll probably pick up some other lobbying job or like a non-Senate confirmed job in the Trump administration. I think this is all preposterous. And I think it is hilarious that this is what some people think is going on.

I don't really know. I'm going to try to put this as clearly as I possibly can. Donald Trump was elected in 2016 and was immediately the subject of an FBI investigation. The Department of Justice basically probing his entire campaign and him. Allegations that he was a Russian asset, that he was going to Moscow and peeing on hookers. And I mean, literally, like everything from the most sorted to the most fantastical, just like literally right-hand man for Putin. And this is a Russian takeover of US government.

They turned his life inside out, upside down. And to be clear, I think Trump invited some of this on himself by bringing people like Paul Manafort who were genuinely corrupt kleptocrats in his campaign. But it happened. Then he left office in 2020 and immediately became the subject of DOJ investigations by the Biden administration.

The classified documents case, he brought on himself. The January 6th case, I think you could make a very strong argument, was a sort of Frankenstein of US law and in many ways, Jack Smith was reaching in ways that he really shouldn't have. And that's probably why we didn't get a trial or any kind of determination on Trump's guilt before the election.

But regardless of what you think, like, the last eight years of his life have been made hell by the Department of Justice. He didn't pick Gates because he's some sacrificial lamb that he's gonna feed to the wolves. He picked Gates because he's some sacrificial lamb that he's going to feed to the wolves. He picked Gates because he's been the subject of what he believes is this corrupt deep state that has tried to destroy his life and his presidency.

This is not complicated. He could not be clearer about his view that he's the subject of a witch hunt, that these are the most corrupt, nasty, gross, disgusting people in the world, that the deep state tried to take him down. They tried to kill him. They tried to assassinate him. They tried to put him in jail. They failed. He won the presidency. Gates is a grenade and Trump pulled the pin and he's rolling it into the DOJ. He does not care in and he's rolling it into the DOJ. He does not care about Gates's qualifications. He doesn't care about his ethics probe.

He doesn't care about giving Gates like a nice exit. Donald Trump cares about giving Matt Gates, a nice exit from Congress. Give me a break. None of that matters to him. He doesn't care about any of that stuff. He wants to blow the thing up. People think he's, it's like the same thing we did

during his first term, like 4D chess, like what's Trump's move? Who's he really gonna pick for AG? It's not chess. He's literally telling you his move. He's doing it in the open. He's saying, bring it. He's testing the boundaries.

He wants to see what senators are loyal to him and who aren't. And if he can, he's going to appoint Matt Gaetz. And that would be like an incredible coup for him. He would have somebody leading a department that has traditionally been independent from the executive branch with a complete and total loyalist who owes his entire career to him. I mean, there's nothing better for Trump than that outcome. So I can't wrap my head around why people are having trouble, like maybe because that is scary to people like Ezra Klein, and they don't want to believe that.

But it's like, what are you missing? Like, how are you professional at this? And you still can't see what is so obvious to me, which is like, this is Trump's governing style for better or for worse. Sometimes it's great and I love it. Sometimes it's not. And this is one of the times I don't love it. But like Gates is the blunt force object to go over there and smash heads.

This is not 4D chess. Like, please wake up. I think the, so I've got two places where I think I can jump in here and think of things from the viewpoint of the only way I can make sense of this pick of Matt Gaetz for AG is that there's some sort of secret back move. So I'm with you. First of all, that I think the primary goal of nominating Matt Gaetz for AG is so Matt Gaetz can be the AG.

He's definitely a loyalist. He has a law degree. He has been a member of the US House of Representatives. He's a hardliner. He's been in the House Freedom Caucus visibly and supported Trump. He's a pick that Trump would want in that office for sure. I think the place where it gets confusing, two places, first of all, Trump sort of opened this round of nominations with saying, we need recess appointments. Something we talked about in the newsletter today on Thursday.

It's this concept of recess appointments. What is it as a strategy? How does it work? And one of the basic mechanisms at play here of in order to avoid a Senate confirmation for high-level appointments to the executive branch like attorney general, you can do that by getting the Senate to go on recess and then appointing your nominee while they're on recess. So that avoids the confirmation. However, in order to do that, the Senate has to be in recess for at least 10 days and any

recess the Senate wants to call for more than three days is subject to an up-down approval of the majority of the Senate as well as the majority of the House. And if this recess appointment thing is seen as Trump's strategy, that means any call to recess in the Senate is going to be seen in the Senate is seen in the house as a sort of omnibus Do you want to approve of all of these nominees? Yes? No vote in which case the house where Matt Gaetz isn't the most popular person I think it's fair to say he wouldn't probably have the votes to be confirmed by the House. Since this is a de facto sort of confirmation yes-no in the House, if they want to prove the Senate's recess,

that probably wouldn't pass. If you're in the position of a person like Ezra Klein or somebody who's an informed political pundit and you're on the sidelines looking at this, you're thinking, all right, so that's not going to work. Why would would you do it? And you're trying to come up with answers that make sense to you. I think the answer that makes the most sense is Trump's playing every strategy at once. I think that's a thing that he's done before is to say, we need reassess appointments because that's one way for me to get my agenda, but also we need Senate confirmations. And I'm going to be doing – I'm going to be talking about Matt Gaetz on one hand, but I'm also going to be talking about Tulsi Gabbard on the other and I'm going to

be talking about Hegseth for SecDev and we're going to be moving on so fast that it's going to be the next thing, the next thing, maybe one of them sticks, maybe one of them doesn't. I think it's that bull rush strategy, not this like, I'm going to set up my move and advance strategy. So I think I understand where the point of view is coming from, but I think that's where the miss is. And the second thing that I'm thinking about there is you also want to consider, we're thinking about this from Trump's point of view, but I think you also want to consider Matt Gaetz's point of view. Because very, very clearly, Matt Gaetz does get something out of being nominated right now. He gets to resign from the House that by some time

with this report not being released to the public. And that's something that obviously benefits him. I don't think that Trump is having that be part of his calculus here too much. Maybe Gaetz asked and maybe Trump's like, yeah, I will nominate you now. I don't know. Maybe that happened hard to say but I think you could say that's Gates's motivation and if gates is looking at the writing on the wall and he sees maybe I'm not gonna win That's fine with me. We'll go on to the next pick. I can understand that so those two things kind of make sense to me in it You know, I get where it's coming from. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. I mean, I think that, again, for Matt Gaid, this is genuinely, like, I mean, calling it best case scenario for him is the understatement of the year.

Like he was probably not going to lose his house seat anytime soon, but all indications are this ethics report was going to be damning. We've seen Republicans vote people like George Santos out of Congress amid ethics reports like this, or ethics reports that had some weight to them. some weight to them. I just like, yeah, it's nutty to me that he's a few votes away from this role. I really don't know what the Senate's going to do for whatever it's worth. I think Collins Murkowski are almost certainly no votes. Senator John Cornyn I saw today saying things that made it sound like he was a no vote, though I'd be a little bit surprised if he stuck to that.

And that's three right there. So you've got like a tiebreaker already. The Oklahoma senator whose name is escaping me right now for some reason, who very famously went on CNN and described Matt Gaetz showing him videos of women he had sex with and talking about snorting erectile dysfunction drugs or something and staying up all night. This guy clearly hated Gates and spoke to the press about this stuff because he hated him.

Someone like that. Mark Wayne Mullen, yeah. Yeah, Mark Wayne Mullen, sorry, thank you. Someone like that is just, there are just people like that who are in the Senate, who you don't think about as being swing votes on this issue that I think are gonna try and win them over. Hilariously, I saw Lindsey Graham do this unbelievable post on X, just basically talking about how consistent he's been throughout his career,

which is the funniest thing ever. He is the most inconsistent, maybe biggest flip-flopper in all of Congress. And his loyalty to Trump is like exhibit A in that. But just, yeah, it's saying that, you know, he's probably going to rubber stamp all of Trump's nominees because that's what he does in nomination processes for any president, which is just like, no, that's not what you do. You haven't done that. And I can't believe, yeah, he, he had a quote. I actually should pull it up.

He had an incredible line about how he described his, uh, his career. I have strived to be consistent over the arc of time is a real thing that Lindsey Graham said. Um, I just, That's very poetic. It's so good. I know you could react this way to a lot of politicians, but Lindsey Graham, especially speaking about himself that way is just so rich to me. It's kind of hard to put in a word. Anyway, I don't know what's going to happen. If I was a betting man, I would bet that he's not going to get confirmed, but I could see a world where a lot of these senators don't want to start a fight with Trump before he even gets into office.

I'm not going to read it though. I'm tempted to read from it. I'm not going to, but I'm tempted to read from it, I'm not going to, but I'm tempted to read from it, is this Ben Dominic piece in his sub stack, The Transom, which gave me pause mostly because Ben Dominic is somebody who is, you know, he was co-founder of The Federalist, he was editor-at-large with Spectator World, two very, very influential hubs of conservative thought. He published a newsletter. The headline of it is, Matt Gaetz is a vile sex pest and any senator who votes for him owns that. The subhead is, crush some Viagra and pour the Red Bull in your veins.

I'll just say, I don't know that I've ever read a piece published by a prominent journalist or pundit about a sitting member of Congress that is as aggressive and like over the top critical as this piece by Ben Dominic. It's a jarring read. And I think he might be right, is the crazy part is like, I think maybe he's just having the chutzpah to say the thing that's real that a lot of people know, which is that like,

maybe this guy is kind of like a sleazy, low key sex offender pretty much based on the reporting we have about him. Again, Ben Dominic is way to my right. He is as conservative as it gets. I was just shocked that he published this piece because I think there's a really decent chance Matt Gaetz is the next attorney general. I'm sure it's going to piss off a lot of people in conservative politics that he did this, but he's speaking his truth and yeah, it caught my attention. So I don't know. Any other Gaetz stuff you want to- I mean, let's remember that we're

sitting here in mid-November. These confirmation hearings aren't going to be held for another two months. So Matt Gaetz has the sort of Sauron eye of the liberal press on him at the moment, as well as the various floodlights like Ben Dominic and the Tangle Newses, what have you, of the world focused on him for the moment. But in two months, we're going to be talking about, oh yeah, Gaetz has some baggage. And that'll just be the way he's referred to. Gaetz has some baggage. And that'll just be the way he's referred to. Gates has some baggage. If he gets to the confirmation hearing and we're gonna be thinking about a dozen other posts

because it's gonna be fire hose season when it gets to January and confirmation time. And I can't even predict what other things are gonna be in the spotlight and national attention by then. And there's a good chance that this dies away. And there's an equally good chance, I think, and I'm curious to hear what you think about this, that that ethics probe report gets leaked between now and then.

If that happens, I think you can say goodbye to the prospect of Matt Gaetz as an AG. It just, I know people have boldly made claims about this is the end of this politician before and nothing's come to light, especially in Trump world. But I think that just probably with the reputation already suspect would be a bridge too far. And it could break either way as far as I'm concerned. I would be absolutely shocked if the ethics report does not get leaked. I would be absolutely shocked if the ethics report does not get leaked. Right. I would be surprised if it doesn't get leaked today. I think there's almost a guarantee that

we have it or at least the fundamentals of it in the coming couple of weeks. And maybe whoever has it holds onto it until right before the confirmation hearing. But like, yeah, they are going to get their hands on that because if they don't, like if they don't, then it'll come out during or right after the confirmation hearing. And that'll be really bad for Republicans. And they're going to want to know exactly who they're voting for. So yeah, I mean, the house ethics committee leaks like a sieve and yeah, it's bad. So it'll be out sometime soon. Um, speaking of, yeah, there's sort of like a, there's sort of a, a subplot here that's pretty funny, which is we went into this week not

knowing who the new Senate majority leader is going to be. It turned out to be John Thune. There was a huge campaign on Twitter and in online Republican conservative Trump maga world circles, Elon Musk, Vivek, Charlie Kirk, whatever, to push Rick Scott. He got eliminated in the first round of voting. They, everybody in that world was most worried about John Thune. It's a secret ballot, Republicans don't care about what people on Twitter think. It's like, it was so funny to me that this was the narrative that Rick Scott was going to somehow come

out of this. Senator Thune has the experience. He is well regarded. He's liked among his colleagues. He was up, and that's just how this stuff works in Congress. So it was not surprising to me at all that he won the selection to be Senate Majority Leader. I saw today that Shelley Moore Capito from West Virginia, she refused to say whether

she'd support Matt Gaetz for Attorney General. When asked by Politico, she said no comment. Asked by Fox, she said he'll have to go through the Senate process. Hey everybody, this is John, executive producer of YouTube and podcast content and co-host of The Daily Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this preview of our Sunday podcast with Ari and Isaac. We are now offering this podcast exclusively to our premium podcast members, along with our ad-free daily podcasts, Friday editions, in-depth interviews, upcoming new podcast series, bonus content, and much more. If you want to receive all that and give your support to help us grow Tangle Media, please head over to tanglemedia.supercast.com

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all of our premium offerings with you. We'll be right back here tomorrow. For Isaac and the rest of the crew, this is John Wall signing off. Have a great day, y'all. Take care. Peace. Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul,

and edited and engineered by John Wall. The script is edited by our managing editor Ari Weitzman, Will K. Back, Bailey Saul, and Sean Brady. The logo for our podcast was designed by Magdalena Bacopa, who is also our social media manager. The music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. If you're looking for more from Tangle, please go to reetangle.com and check out our website. Whether renting, renewing a mortgage, or considering buying a home, everybody has housing costs on their minds. For free tools and resources to help you manage your home finances, visit Canada.ca slash it pays to know. A message from the Government of Canada.