The Bulwark Podcast - Jeffrey Goldberg and Catherine Rampell: The Un-American

Episode Date: October 23, 2024

Donald Trump doesn't share our values or our norms, and he wants the privilege of being able to shoot down Americans in the street. And former officials who worked in his administration are frightened about what he could do to the country. Meanwhile, all the Hitler talk drowns out any talk about Kamala's proposed policies, which are more popular than people realize. Jeffrey Goldberg and Catherine Rampell join Tim Miller. show notes: Goldberg's latest reporting on Trump's preoccupation with dictators The NYT's interview with John Kelly Rampell's piece on the popularity of Kamala's policies Rampell's piece on Flint, MI's baby bonus Rampell's piece about Trump losing his edge on the economy Bulwark piece on McKinley and tariffs

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Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Take off the mask with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp.com. Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We have a double dip today, Catherine Rampell in segment two, but first, the man of the

hour. He's back on the Bulldog podcast. It's the editor and chief of the Atlantic. His name is Jeffrey Goldberg. Chief Goldberg, how you doing? Good. How are you? I'm doing well.

I'm doing well. You have a article out today that is causing a stir. As we mentioned, the green room, some people are mad at you. Mostly some of the worst people on Twitter are mad at you. So it's kind of like that. Many of them are actually probably real. I think many of them are not. Yeah, many of them are real. It's like some are real in Russian, some are AI-bot.

Some are enjoying the fall in St. Petersburg, I think. Yeah. Do you know about Transnistria? Actually, I've been to Transnistria. Really? I have been to Transnistria. Yes. We've had a lot of Moldova talk in the pod this week.

We actually moved to real business. You have an article out last night. Yes. The headline is not subtle. Trump, I need the kind of generals that Hitler had. There's some subtle, something subtly amusing about the lack of historical knowledge there, but there's also something really alarming about it. The article gets into much more than that, and I want to kind of pull out what jumped out at me, but you've

been on this beat for a few years now, so I'm curious. This is kind of a confirmation about what we know of him, but what jumps out at you as being particularly relevant here in the last two weeks of the election? Look, I mean, the disdain, I report on a lot of different aspects, disdain for the military, disdain for the wounded warriors, disdain for military traditions, including the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which is pretty important thing, disdain for the role of the military in a democracy. That's probably the most important thing, right? Which is to say, Donald Trump emerges from, I don't want to say that he emerges from any

tradition because he doesn't know anything about the past. I think that's fair to say based on the long record and based on one particular thing in this piece. Pete Slauson Emerges from the Archie Bunker tradition. Jared Lies Well, Archie Bunker, I bet knew a lot more, honestly. What strikes me is that his impulses, because he doesn't have an ideology, he has impulses, right? His impulses, because he doesn't have an ideology as impulses, right? His impulses are all authoritarian, totalitarian, or fascistic, now the word of the moment. And the idea, I don't know, it's hard to get your mind around the idea that a former president, current candidate for president, actually would think on any number of levels that Hitler is a role model in some way or at least his administration the Hitler administration

Was a role model for the way one should organize government in particular the relationship between the chief executive and the military the generals my generals as Donald Trump's mine generals actually Generals exactly. I should have this piece translated into German, actually. So it's just astonishing. Look, we've known about his attitude toward service, toward the war dead, suckers and losers,

and all that. Finally got on-the-record confirmation from John Kelly about that, which was good. But it's this combination of authoritarian impulse and historical ignorance that allows this man, Donald Trump, to look to Hitler as a model of how he should be president. I can't even believe that those words are words I'm saying, but that's true. You know, he really thinks that, I mean, the funny part is, as you know, is that he extols Hitler's generals as listening to Hitler. Hitler's generals did two things that are relevant to this conversation.

One, they tried to kill Hitler repeatedly. Two, they lost. Right. As a person who doesn't like losers. Well, I guess at three, they did execute some, well, Jews and also extra legal orders. So, yeah, yes, yes, yes. I mean, I'm not, you know, I'm going to give Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt. Maybe that's not a great idea.

I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and say that I don't think that in his mind, he is thinking about the SS or the Gestapo when he's talking about Hitler's generals. I have a feeling he's talking more about just sort of wartime management and the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe and just a kind of martial obedience that he's seen in some movies, I guess. The relevant part for Donald Trump about German generals is not their execution of the final solution, at least those generals in the parts of the German

apparatus that did that were going down a rabbit hole, but obviously the Wehrmacht was also involved in that. I don't want to get into it, but you know, it's, this is complicated stuff. But I just, I think that his notion that they did what he said is hysterical because I've been in conversation with people about this. Fine, he doesn't read books, but there's a Tom Cruise movie about this for God's sakes.

He must have seen that on an airplane. I mean, I think most of his movie references are from, I guess a little bit earlier than that era, but I think probably seen it. To me, I think actually the most relevant, outside of just the alarming and the grotesque nature of just complimenting Hitler in any environment, you don't have to hand it to Hitler.

By the way, sorry to interrupt, but John Kelly's advice to him, which he told me about, was first of all, Mr. President, as an American president, you never say anything good about Hitler, right? You never say anything good about Hitler. And number two piece of advice is, because remember, remember Donald Trump asked John Kelly at one point, who were the good guys in World War One? And John Kelly said, Mr. President, remember, the good guys in any war are the people who

are on our side. And this leads to actually, well, now you've taken me to a different place. I'll get back to where I was going. Oh, sorry. No, but it's good. It gets to one of John Kelly's quotes. He had an interview at the New York Times as well that is out this morning. And in that interview, I think one of the things that jumped out at me from his quotes

was he's certainly the only president that has all but rejected what America is all about and what makes America America in terms of the constitution, in terms of our values. And to me like that is kind of what's, you know, what sums it up. Like whatever word you want to put on it, fascism or authoritarianism or all of this, those things tie together, right? Like the fact that he doesn't understand that the Americans were the good guys in World War I, like he doesn't understand the fundamental American values that have united every president, every major party presidential candidate before him.

I think un-American is a great description of what we're talking about. Un-American in a deep level. Yeah, he's a flag hugger. Okay, I love the flag, you love the flag. But the flag is a symbol of deeper values. The flag is a symbol of ideas that are unique in the history of humankind. The flag is a symbol of the constitution, the rule of law, government accountability, democracy.

You know, you could hug it all you want, but he doesn't understand anything about what it means. And I think Kelly is right. The true novelty of Trump. Look, we've had good presidents, we've had bad presidents, we've had presidents who probably had authoritarian leanings, authoritarian impulses, people who abuse their power, obviously. They all at least were hypocritically. Right, they at least pretend.

They would at least pretend or attempt intermittently to adhere to what we would consider to be American democratic norms. Donald Trump just doesn't care. Yeah. I don't know how you divide it. He doesn't care or doesn't know. Kind of a distinction without a difference really. I mean, it doesn't matter when you're actually trying to run the country. The most interesting part of the piece for me, and there's a lot of different elements that you went into, how he lashes out at a dead

soldier's family, about the cost of the funeral, and there are a bunch of other reveals which we can talk about. But to me, the thing that ties the Hitler generals the most directly that tells us what a Donald Trump's second term would be like that is the most alarming thing was this section about how he's acting during the 2022 George Floyd protests. And he said, the Chinese generals would know what to do, according to former officials who described conversations referring to the leaders that carried out the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Can't you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something. When defense officials argued against Trump's desire, he screamed, according to witnesses, you're all fucking losers.

To me, that is what he means by the Hitler generals, and the Chinese generals. In the next term, I want people that are willing to shoot people that protest me. Look, he's praised Xi Jinping, who is the leader of the Chinese Communist Party and the leader of the People's Liberation Army, which of course is responsible for the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989, in which several hundred to several thousand, we don't know the true number, student protesters were gunned down in the center of Beijing. Americans are almost uniformly horrified by that.

But he extols, and I think he just did this in the last 24 hours, he extols Xi as a guy who rules with an iron fist. I mean, he literally used the term iron fist. You have a presidential candidate who is yearning to wield an iron fist. I understand the impulse toward power. People who run for president are automatically a little bit abnormal in the sense that they think they can do this, in the sense that they desire that level of power. People who run for president are automatically a little bit abnormal in the sense that they think they can do this, in the sense that they desire that level of power. I get all that, but underneath everything else I would make

this observation. He's telling us exactly what he admires. He's telling us exactly what he wants to do. He's telling us exactly how he would organize his administration. There are no secrets. There's no mystery here. This is not a what he means by that is X. He means he wants to have the right and the privilege of shooting down Americans in the street, period. There's no taking him seriously, but not literally. No, no. Yeah. When you talk to the sources of the story and obviously you talk to Kelly, who is now

becoming more public and others, I mean, clearly their sense of alarm is high. They saw it behind the scenes, right? And so they are probably the best positioned to determine how much of this is bluster, how much of this is real threat. Like when you're having those conversations, what is your sense for how high their threat level is? They're scared shitless. They're scared shitless.

I'm allowed to say that on your show, right? Yeah. Oh yeah. They're scared shitless. That's my three-word answer to you. Part of it, remember, is anybody who's crossed him publicly is in his gun sights. And I'm not, I'm even talking about, let's say secondary characters in this drama, generals like Stanley McChrystal and Bill McRaven member.

They have been critical from time to time. By the way, you know, really stone cold American warriors, obviously terrorist hunters, you know, serious guys, Donald Trump. And this is really fascinating. Donald Trump threatened to call them back to active duty. If you're a four star general, maybe three as well. Once you reach that level in the military, you are always called back a bull. If the president of the United States, the commander in chief decides that

he needs your services in a war, he can call you to active duty, no matter how old you are and Donald Trump literally talked about calling them back to active duty so that he could court martial them. Right? So I think everybody who's been in his orbit understands that. And you know, at that point, Mark Esper, the former Secretary of Defense who has come out against Donald Trump and Mark Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, both talked him off the ledge on that one.

But there won't be people like that the next time around to talk him off the ledge. You'll have the cash patels of the world who are encouraging this. So they are very frightened on a personal level, and they're very frightened. I shouldn't say they're frightened on a personal level. These are not 10 people who sort of get paralyzed by fear, but they believe that they will be targeted just as Donald Trump has promised to target a whole range of Democratic Party officials for instance. So that they have that on the personal level and then on the sort of structural level,

the national level, they fear that he will spend four years destroying the structures and institutions of government that allow us to be a reality-based democracy. And is there a sense that, I mean, obviously there are going to be cash patels, there are going to be hacks, but are there going to be careers that would want to go along with that? Are they just worried about the crisis or they just don't know? I just know there's a lot of bad potential outcomes and they don't want to live through them.

Look, you have the problem, I call this the problem of the colonels, right? You've got hundreds and hundreds of colonels, maybe thousands of colonels across the armed forces. From getting the colonel or captain in the Navy, from getting captain or colonel to general or admiral, it's a very, very, very narrow funnel. And there's incredible amount of effort deployed to winnow out all but the best, right? Sometimes you get in Mike Flynn gets through the funnel, but usually not.

So you could have a situation A, in which the wrong people quote unquote are moved through that funnel. But remember, if you're the commander in chief, you do get to pick who leads your armed services. By tradition, the secretary of defense makes a recommendation who should be the head of the army, who should be the head of the Air Force, and so on.

And the president accepts the recommendation of the experts. This might not happen. My point is that in that vast pool of colonels, you could find people who will do your bidding. And by the way, there are always people, as we well know, who want to serve no matter what. They want the status, the power, the relevance, and so they will staff the main departments of the government. And there are also some people who believe that better me than someone else, right?

You're not going to have the quality level of Mattis, Kelly, Milley, etc, etc, etc. Gary Cohn. You're not going to have that level of quality because most people, you know, of quality, this is my impression, probably yours too, my impression is that people of quality understand that very few officials survive service in a Trump administration with their reputations intact. Okay. So, if the premise is that they're scared shitless, they're speaking out a little bit. You know, they've interviewed in the Times, I've talked to you.

They could do more. I mean, they have agency here, right? You know, I mean, there could be a press conference, could be a campaign event. They could talk to Brett Baer, where they might reach people that are more persuadable. They could come on this podcast. They could come on this podcast. They're all welcome on this podcast anytime. I open invite. I've invited H.R. McMaster. He declined, others. So yeah, I mean, plenty of opportunities, plenty of different places. That's the thing that I just have trouble balancing, right?

I'm scared shitless, I'm concerned that it's a fascist, he's the biggest threat in the country, and what I'm gonna do about it is I'll do one interview. I don't get that. Can you explain it to me? I get it. I do get it. Look, first of all, there is a, you know that there's a cost for this and not everybody, not everybody has the personal courage of a Liz Cheney, right?

Who's willing to just put it all out there on the line. But Liz Cheney is also a politician. Liz Cheney, Liz Cheney comes from a tradition in which you were involved in politics. I don't know. We had Sarah Matthews on the Republican Voters Against Trump bus tour last week. She's 29 years old. She blew up her career, was a deputy press secretary, doesn't have money for security, doesn't live in a comfortable house anywhere. You know what I mean? Yeah. No, no, no, no, no. I get all that. I do, look, these are guys who start at the age of 18, generally, either in West Point or at ROTC or as enlisted men. And it's drummed into their heads from 18 to 60.

The military is above and separate from politics, and you shouldn't get involved, and you shouldn't endorse. And countries in which generals get too involved in politics are not generally good countries I do credit these guys with having a lot of hesitation anxiety even about participating at that level, however I'll make your point which is especially for people like John Kelly Jim Mattis HR McMaster and so on. They did go into politics when they joined an administration.

John Kelly told the Times he's a retired general. And I'm like, actually not right. You're a retired chief of staff. That was your last job. Well, you're a retired DHS secretary. You're a retired DHS secretary. Look, I have a hard time being critical of these guys because I appreciate the culture and I appreciate

Their service. I also would Question. I mean you would know this better than I do but I would question Who it would move maybe I'm wrong. Maybe if you had Pence Maybe if you had a million master Mattis and Kelly Sitting up there, up there with 200 reporters and just going for two hours about, all it has to be is this is what I saw. I suppose from a razor thin margin toss up race type situation that we're in, you don't

have to move millions. You got to move 30,000 people in Wisconsin yeah I don't know I mean it's just beg we're just speculating I noticed the Times didn't ask him who he's voting for did you did you ask him I don't know who he's voting for and he wouldn't tell me I'm not gonna make any assumption well he's not gonna vote for Trump second vote for Trump we know that yeah I would bet it's between Kamala Harris and Kamala Harris but that's just yeah anything else in the story that jumped out at you before I leave you?

The Gallagher section I thought was really alarming as well. I mean, just again, just kind of Trump's mindset, thinking about how he thinks about his military is like, you all are just killers. What's the difference? You don't have to follow any rules. That's a terrible thing to say. He said it to Milley for context. He said to Milley that you all are just killers in defense of Eddie Gallagher who had committed

a war crime really and he wanted to pardon him and he was trying to justify it. But anyway. It's almost as if he doesn't understand that there's such a thing as a war crime. Right. And obviously our military, I mean, sometimes does not succeed in being, in carrying out only lawful acts, but not for lack of trying and not for lack of lawyers. Trump is saying, oh, you guys are just, you just killed for a living. So what's the difference if you desecrate the corpse of an Afghan?

Like, who cares? We like to think that we're different than other countries, that we don't act like Russia on the battlefield. But again, it's in that large category of things Donald Trump doesn't understand and may be incapable of understanding. The article again, Trump, I need the kind of generals that Hitler had. It's Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic. Thank you for popping on here last second. Obviously something we'll be continuing to cover here at the Bullwork and we'll be talking to you and your colleagues

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All right. And I'm here with Catherine Rampell. She's a syndicated opinion columnist at the Washington Post on economy and other issues. She's also an economic and political commentator for CNN and a special correspondent for the PBS NewsHour. She's been getting spicy with my buddy, Scott Jennings, on the cable panels. We'll get to that in a minute. But welcome back to the podcast. How you doing, Katherine? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. Happy to have you. We need to do a periodic economic check-in and you've been doing such good work lately and you had at the post this week, a little test that people were

taking. We'll put the link in the show notes here and people can go, you know, test out whether they're more aligned with Kamala Harris or Donald Trump on policy. I guess people listening to this podcast probably know the answer to that already, but it seems like you got some interesting results. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, what we did was we got a bunch of data

from YouGov, the polling organization that had run blind surveys effectively on like 130 different policies from either of the candidates or both of the candidates or in some cases neither of them, where basically they asked people to rate how much they agreed with them without knowing which candidate had proposed them. And then separately they asked people to evaluate the policies again, guessing which candidate had embraced them. And the results were super interesting. Among other top line findings,

we found that Kamala Harris's policy agenda is actually way more popular than Trump's. Again, in a blind test, people don't know who proposed what. So almost all of her policy agenda is above water. Majority of the population supports almost all of her ideas. For Trump, it's about half of his ideas have majority support, which is actually better than I expected.

We had done a similar or YouGov had done a similar, smaller scale version of this back when Biden was on the ballot, I want to say early summer. And in that case, almost all of Trump's policies were below water. So, so Trump did better, but still not as bad. He's added in a few kind of a few, a few gimmies, a few giveaways, you know, he's stealing from the democratic playbook a little bit here down the stretch. Yeah, like he's had sort of a panderpalooza recently or an Oprah-esque spirit, you know,

you get a tax cut and you get a tax cut and you get a tax cut. And so in fact, his most popular idea across his entire agenda was making social security benefits tax-free. So as an aside, just because an idea is popular his entire agenda was making social security benefits tax free. So as an aside, just because an idea is popular does not mean that it is a good meritorious idea, whether we're talking about social security benefits or other things that are making them

tax free anyway, or other things that I think are sort of politically, economically foolish, like tariffs pull relatively well. We can talk about that, I guess, later in the program. And I do not think that Trump's universal tariff idea is a good one for all sorts of reasons. So, you know, just because people like something doesn't mean that it is substantively meritorious. But if we're just talking about like what voters prefer, they are much more on board with Harris's agenda. And then we broke down policies by topic, by issue.

So like, there is a bunch of economic ideas and a bunch of health care ideas and a bunch of foreign policy ideas to see if there were relative strengths or weaknesses between the candidates. to see if there were relative strengths or weaknesses between the candidates. And in that case, Harris does best on pretty much everything. On the economy, immigration, and foreign policy, they're like roughly tied. But, you know, even things like crime, people vastly prefer Harris' agenda to Trump, which is pretty striking considering if you ask people in the abstract, which candidate do you trust more on crime or guns, they say Trump or, you know, a higher share say Trump. But then if you look at what, what ideas they like, they like Harris's, but part

of the problem is they don't know whose ideas are whose. Part of this is, is messaging and this gets more into my space. Like the Democrats, I've been saying for a while, the Democrats are scared. If they just ran on 90s democratic guns and crime policy, I feel like they would be in a pretty good position. Those are popular issues and they're, to steal your word, generally meritorious, you know?

So I feel like they've let themselves get defined by members of their coalition that maybe have policy ideas that aren't as popular. You may be right. I don't think that's the primary problem here for Harris. A lot of her ideas that pull super well are things like universal background checks, universal mental health and criminal background checks for guns, or having a national database to track police misconduct, or career training and substance abuse programs for former prisoners. Like, things that are, I don't know if exactly those versions were on the platform in the

90s, but like maybe you would consider them more liberal, I don't know, but they are not particularly salient in this election. High popularity, low salience. Yeah. I think that there are kind of two issues here. One is that Harris and her democratic surrogates have not done a great job communicating to the public what she stands for. And the examples that I just gave her ones that probably

If you looked at the data like people are relatively able to code those as democratic But a lot of her other ideas that people really like that are sort of more law and order ideas Maybe this is hearkening back to the 90s. Yeah, people don't realize are hers. So like her most popular Policy actually the most popular policy across our entire data set was a border security measure. It had to do with investing in new technology to detect fentanyl and other drugs at the border. I think 90% of registered voters liked that idea. But almost everybody thought it was Trump's, like, because it's border security, it's drugs, it's law and order, and so they associated with him, and she has

not been able to sort of escape the branding that Republicans have placed on her as like open borders, lawlessness, all that good stuff. It's not so much the ideas they're proposing, it's partly their ability to communicate them. And then frankly, I think a large reason for this failure of voters to understand who stands for what has to do with media coverage, it's

just that policy issues always get crowded out. Usually, they get subordinated to horse race coverage. That's this is always my complaint. I write primarily about policy. And like every election cycle, I'm like, why don't people care about the issues? And it's just, you know, that's what what gets covered is the polls. I think that's partly reflecting audience preferences. But it's also just like it's much easier for journalists to write about horse race than to write about the issues, especially if it's not your specialty.

Like if you're a political reporter, getting into the nitty gritty of the tax code or how insurance markets work or whatever, it's just like, it's hard and you don't have time to do it on deadline. So it's partly about that, that's an ever present issue and it's especially difficult to get policies onto the front page right now with Trump in the race. So like as an example, this project that we're talking about that I did with my

colleague, Yo-Yo Joe on what the candidate's policy agenda is and who stands for what and how little people know about it. I was going to talk about it on CNN last night and this morning. And Trump likes Nazis. Yes. And now Trump, you know, now everything is Trump, Trump and Nazis, which I'm not suggesting should not be covered. Right.

Like, like that's a very important headline. And all of the stuff that's come out from John Kelly is really damning and is important for the future of our Republic that voters know it. But it also means that it's another news cycle about Trump craziness and I guess there's some like tangential policy issues related like you don't want fascism but we're still not hearing about what his other policies are, let alone Kamala Harris and her ideas. So it's just been very difficult to get the

airtime to talk about this. And I think a lot of people blame voters, like you know voters say that they need to know more about Kamala Harris and how can they say that? Like isn't there more than enough information? And it's partly that the media doesn't really give it to them, or at least doesn't prioritize it. I saw a poll yesterday, Blueprint, those guys at Blueprint, we've done some coverage of their message testing polls, which I think are pretty good. And they were looking at 18 to 29 year old men, boys, we might call them, who don't know anything.

So if you have an 18 to 29 year old male in your life who's like on the fence, doesn't think there's any difference between the two candidates, this is a good quiz to send them, you know, like you say, you care about the policies, take the quiz, see how it turns out. Yes, I should say in addition to our findings about what other voters believe about the policies, our Washington Post piece, my piece with Yo-Yo, allows people to take a quiz so that they can see in a blind test

which candidate they align with more on what policies. Take the quiz, send it to the 18 to 29 year old male in your life who's deciding what to do in the election still. As far as specific policy issues, we can do that here. We can get serious. You wrote recently about a test policy in Flint that the Harris campaign is looking at taking nationwide, which is essentially just a direct cash transfer to families, people having newborns.

Talk a little bit about the policy and what we've seen as far as the results and whether there is anything that could be scaled there. Yeah. So we already have at the national level, a child tax credit. It's been around for decades, usually with bipartisan support, although has become more partisan in recent years. And during the first year of Biden's administration, they expand, Democrats expanded it to make it refundable. Meaning that even if you have very low earnings or zero earnings, you can still get this essentially cash for having a child.

The expanded version expired, and Kamala Harris has said not only would she increase the existing level of the tax credit to be what it was under the American Rescue Plan. But in addition, she would give every family with a newborn $6,000 cash, refundable and maybe available in some kind of monthly installment or whatever, not just at tax time. So that's the idea. I was talking with people on the campaign, like, where did you come up with the $6,000 figure? Is it like based on some calculation of what it costs for a newborn baby, you know,

with the strollers and diapers or whatever? And I was told actually it was inspired by this program in Flint. Flint, Michigan is obviously not a place that would usually be used as a role model for good government policy. Right. We're not taking the pipes nationwide? We're not taking the Flint pipes nationwide? Yes. Yes. Although, Flint was the site of this major water crisis where lead was leaching into

the water, poisoning the residents, including children, and they ultimately have fixed most of it. And actually, while I was there in Flint to write about this other thing, this other, the baby bonus program, incidentally, the EPA rolled out a lead pipe replacement regulation nationwide. And so the people in Flint were like, yeah, we're so proud that our crisis means that, you know, this is hopefully not going to be an issue in other that this is hopefully not going to be an issue in other states. You don't want the same problem that Flint had, but maybe in some ways they've inspired better solutions in other places.

Flint, normally a poster child for government failure. In this particular case, actually the same woman who exposed the Flint-led water crisis a decade ago. Her name is Dr. Mona Hanna. She's the person who came up with this $6,000 baby bonus program. She's like incredible. She's one of the most charismatic people I've ever met. Everybody in town knows her as Dr. Mona and basically she's a pediatrician. She treats patients in Flint and she said for many years she was very frustrated by the fact that a lot of her patients various problems were related to public health issues and that like you know she'd see kids with breathing problems or asthma and

she's like, well, I think you just probably need like better living conditions but that costs money or poor nutrition you need better nutrition but that costs money. The way that she put it to me was she for a really long time she wished she had something in her doctor's bag that could just prescribe away poverty and so basically that's what she decided to do. She was presented with this grant opportunity to come up with a new program. And she said, what if we just like gave every family,

you know, not contingent on income, $6,000 on the occasion of having a baby. So they give expectant mothers $1,500 at 20 weeks. And then when the baby is born, people get, I guess it's $500 a month for the first year. So $6,000. And people can use it however they like. I guess in theory, they could use it to buy a flat screen TV

or whatever if they really wanted to. But in practice, I talked with a lot of moms in Flint and they're like, oh my God, babies are so expensive. You know, you have to get the stroller and the car seat and the diapers and the wipes and the formula bottles and whatever. So people can use it however they like, which, you know, some people like, and some people don't like. The traditional Milton Friedman version of this is like, would be much better to just

give people cash to do what they want with stuff. He was sort of a well-known proponent of a negative income tax or a basic income. Get the local bureaucrats out of the system. You got to go to some office in Flint, you got to wait in line and fill out paperwork and just cut all that out. Yes. And in Flint, it's to wait in line and fill out paperwork and just like just cut all that out. Yes, and in Flint it is very administratively light. So basically you have to prove that you live in Flint. You don't have to prove any level of income. Like I said, it's universal, but Flint is a very low income place. It's like it has, I think, the highest child poverty rate

in the nation or among the highest child poverty rates. So it's very, very low income. You're not going to see a lot of like billionaires getting the $6,000 baby bonus there. And the actual cash benefits are administered by GiveDirectly, which is a well-known global nonprofit that does cash transfers. So people get the money through a debit card, they get it through their direct deposit in their bank account, and then they use it as they like. It's early days They have I want to say like about a thousand families enrolled

But the early results of the program are promising They have lower rates of smoking in the third trimester for pregnant moms fewer cases of very low birth weight births and better nutritional access. And then they also asked people about sort of softer questions, more subjective things that you might not think of as like traditional metrics like do you feel loved? Do you feel respected? Do you have hope? And so you know I think the argument for those who are running this pilot is that this is not just about the material needs of these families, but it's also like about rethinking the social contract and that

you want people to feel like the community supports your decision to have a child and is supporting your ability to make ends meet. And so some of it's like this sort of traditional metrics like birth weight. Some of it's about how much do you trust government institutions, where again, in Flint in particular, people really do not trust government institutions and the healthcare system. So then the question is how much does any of this scale up to the country? Like I said, Kamala Harris, her campaign has sort of

used this as a template of sorts, or at least the baby bonus part, not the prenatal bonus part. And in terms of administrative likeness, keeping the bureaucrats out of your business and letting you spend the money as you see fit, that's obviously the same or very similar. One difference is that, again, Flint is a very low-income population relative to the rest of the country, whereas if you expanded this nationwide,

it would be available to lots of families higher up the income. It's basically the same eligibility criteria as the current child tax credit, which goes up, I think you can get the full amount up to $400,000 of income or something like that. I don't have the numbers in front of me, so somebody should check that before you make tax decisions. Well, I think the other good news about this is for the small percentage of pro-lifers who have demonstrated that they're motivated by the health and wellbeing of the child and not by hatred of women,

we could have the opening for a future compromise, the prenatal health cash. Absolutely. And that's so there's something there. And actually in Michigan, they are now expanding the program to a few other areas, including to some quite conservative areas in the Upper Peninsula.

And there have been Republican pro-life lawmakers who are very much behind it. So I agree. I think, as I said, the child tax credit in general historically had a lot of bipartisan support. I think there is an opportunity for more conservative pro-lifers to put their money where their mouth is, so to speak, and say, we actually want to make it easier for people to raise kids, not just force them to have birth, but like actually be supportive of the babies that result from that birth. And giving people cash to help them pay for diapers or whatever,

whatever they see fit when the baby is born is a really great way to demonstrate that at the national level. I think, you know, the jury's still out on, on how much actual investment for Republican senators and congressmen will make in this. I think that's a very judicious and kind way to put it. This message comes from BetterHelp. Can you think of a time when you didn't feel like you could be yourself?

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your first month. That's betterhelp.com. Landlord telling you to just put on another sweater when your apartment is below 21 degrees? Are they suggesting you can just put a bucket under a leak in your ceiling? That's not good enough. Your Toronto apartment should be safe and well maintained. If it isn't, and your landlord isn't responding to maintenance requests, Rent Safe TO can help. Learn more at toronto.ca slash rentsafeTO. I want to talk about a different article that you've written recently, well, several, about

how the economy is doing, to use your phrase, spectacularly well, you know, we could go through all the stats. I don't know how much value is in that. The more interesting thing I want to get from you, since you've kind of followed this stuff day to day more closely than I do, I do think that like, there is a lack of appreciation for like the expectations beat on the economic landing here. And then occasionally like Joe Biden likes to tweet about it.

And maybe that was just kind of a, you know, the fallout from his, you know, communications failings, but like just a remarkable, you know, results for where the economy is right now versus where all the experts thought it would be 12, 18, 24 months ago. So I will start my answer by with the caveat that catrafactuals are really hard and they're especially hard to communicate to the public. Like telling people, well, it could have been worse. Just trust me is not always the most convincing. We could have had hyperinflation.

Yes, exactly. I could have had a depression. So it is a really hard thing to communicate, but you were absolutely right that catrafactuals not always the most convincing. We could have had hyperinflation. Yes, exactly. I could, you know. Could have had a depression. So it is a really hard thing to communicate, but you were absolutely right that the economy has beaten like all expectations in the sense that we are not only doing better than had been projected a year or so ago when there had been widespread fears of recession. Not just among Republicans wishing for a bad economy to make the election harder for Democrats.

I feel like there's this, like people on the left are like, oh, you know, it was just all of this propaganda telling you that the economy was going to fail to help Trump or whatever. That's not true. Wall Street analysts whose job it is to get forecasts right were predicting overwhelmingly recession not very long ago. And with good reason, usually when there is a period of high inflation in American history or recent history anyway, it has been followed by a recession. That did not happen. Knock on wood, it will not happen anytime soon. I think because of some judicious decisions by the Federal Reserve, which they largely don't get credit for also among people on the left.

Pete That is not true here. We have a little Jerome Powell, if we win this election, is going to be in a little sculpture garden with Mark Cuban and Liz Cheney. We're crowdfunding for it right now. Okay. Yeah, it's funny. It's like Jay Powell seems to be sort of a villain among a lot of progressives, which I don't understand. It's like, if we get a soft landing, yes, he should get a Medal of Honor award, any event. So not only did we escape that fate so far, we're actually doing better as an economy than had even been predicted before the recession happened, before the pandemic happened, I should say. So if you look at where the Congressional Budget Office or the International Monetary Fund thought the US economy would be in 2024 when they made their forecasts in like

January of 2020. We have more jobs in the higher output in higher wages than had been forecast which is unusual and bizarre because obviously we went through this horrible pandemic recession which you would think we would still have some scars from. The rest of the world basically does. We don't. And you can debate why that is, and I think the answer is not quite clear, but either way we're doing very well. American exceptionalism, I think, is the answer. I guess. The rest of the world has also had, the rest of the developed world, I should say, has had more exposure to the war in Ukraine and a bunch of other things. We're doing a lot better than had been forecast and on almost every metric things look very good,

except for the one which is I know a little bit like asking other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln about inflation? Inflation has cooled a lot. It was obviously quite high. In much of the rest of the developed world, it was higher. It has been higher, again, partly because of the war in Ukraine. But either way, it was painful in the United States. It has cooled a lot. I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about the general public about what is supposed to happen to prices now. Economists are looking for price growth to slow. So that means prices don't go up as quickly now as they did a couple of years ago.

The general public has been looking for prices to fall. That's a different thing, right? That's like the best way to analogize this maybe is as a car, right? The car is gonna continue moving forward. It's gonna move forward more slowly. It's gonna decelerate. It's not gonna move backwards, which is a really tricky concept to get people to understand. Just like counterfactuals are hard, you know, understanding price growth and price levels is also really hard too. So people are still ticked off about the fact that, you know, a night out costs a lot more, you know, a night out at a restaurant costs a lot more than it used to.

The grocery bill costs more than it used to. Now, of course, over time, like everything costs more than it used to 10 years ago course, over time, like everything costs more than it used to 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 50 years ago, more or less with some exceptions, like actually for flat screen TVs. But basically the price level goes up. It's just that people have more time to acclimate to prices going up than has been the case in the last few years. So I think people are still reasonably frustrated

and ticked off that they were like going to the grocery store and they were, it's still relatively fresh in their mind how much milk used to cost or how much a pound of beef used to cost. And they just need to get used to it. And I think part of the reason you may have seen some improvement in consumer sentiment

in sort of the softer measures of how people feel about the economy is that they're just getting used to it. Which is going to happen eventually. Again, price growth has slowed, wages are outpacing price growth and that's been the case for over a year now. So people aren't like, you know, super enthusiastic about the economy, but I think they're less pissed off. And I think among other things,

that means the gap between consumer views of the economy and those like more traditional metrics is shrinking, but also it's probably going to be less of a problem for the incumbent party. I don't think the economy is ever going to be like a winning issue for Kamala Harris, but it may be less of a problem than it has been. Okay. We need to close with our friend Scott Jennings. I guess we have two Scott Jennings items. My former colleague, he gets really, he gets a little testy.

I got a little testy with Sarah Longwell. I got a little testy with you. I don't know if there's any trends there that we could notice, but I wanted to play one clip of an exchange you guys had after Donald Trump's McDonald's stunt. Let's take a listen. I think it's an unfair attack on Trump, this minimum wage worker issue. McDonald's is not the only employer in America. You know that, right? Like there are lots of other service jobs. I'm sorry, am I arguing that they are? But shouldn't he be able to answer the question? You sat here and attacked him for attacking minimum wage workers because he went to McDonald's.

And I just wanted to point out how wrong you are. She did not do that. I didn't attack him for going to McDonald's. I attacked him for his actual record, which is bad for the workers of McDonald's. The reason you're sitting here is because he went to McDonald's. The reason I'm sitting here is because I write on economic policy and I know something about the economic policy. I guess this is where I need to be clear. She's sitting here because she actually knows things about economic policy.

Did you? You had another one with IVF. You're fighting a good fight in there, but give us a little behind the scenes. What's happening? So what's happening here? I think, I like Scott actually. I feel like a lot of people after that exchange sent me a bunch of notes like, yeah, beat that guy down. I'm like, no, I like Scott. I think he, you know, he sticks pretty closely to the party talking points

and that's part of his job, you know, as a Republican strategist type, as a surrogate on CNN. I don't really begrudge him for that. It's a little weird to be a surrogate for somebody that you didn't like. Yes. And thought that you were, I can go back and play some old clips of Scott or any, like 95% of these people talking about how awful Donald Trump is, but anyway. Yes. I mean, you'll have to talk with him about how much he embraces Trump now

versus, you know, as being a loyal foot soldier. I don't know. I haven't asked. It is doing well for a speaking piece. I know you're an economics reporter, so I don't know if that's part of your remit or part of your beat, but it is helping on that front. I will say, I think that one broader takeaway from that exchange is that, you know, how I was saying earlier that policy issues get crowded out by other shiny objects.

Yes, this is a great point. Yes. So, I mean, shiny objects is almost too dismissive for like the Trump Nazi stuff, but I would put Trump's McDonald's stunt in that category, right? You're trying to talk about minimum wage, this actual issue that's infecting the workers, and instead you get in this kind of like optics argument, right? I think what Scott was trying to say, to give him the benefit of the doubt, I think he was saying like we're here to talk about his

his McDonald's stunt, you're here to comment on the McDonald's done My view of my role on these shows among other places other venues is Not so much to talk about the stunt but to talk about how that fits in or contradicts The actual things that the candidates stand for and as I said, you didn't play it But I said, you know Kamala Harris has done similar stunts in the past. I mean, you can call it a stunt or you can call it like camaraderie with a working man or whatever. Like it's a tried and true tradition for politicians to do one of these,

like work a day in the life of a common man, you know, traditional voter. Sure, sure, sure. Somebody doing a menial job, whatever. Yeah. But usually then when you get doing a menial job, whatever. Yeah, but usually then when you get asked a question about like, and then Trump is like, ask the question about the minimum wage and like, and what these workers' lives are like, and he just has no substantive answer at all. It's just like, words.

Right. So that was the context for that exchange as well. So you know, the setup for that topic on the show was Trump did this stunt. People want to talk about this stunt. Scott's point was like, oh, why are Democrats so mad about Trump doing this stunt? And I was trying to say, I don't care that he did this stunt. I think this was like the most normal thing that Trump has done in months, you know, way more normal to like do a photo op at McDonald's than to praise Nazi generals or like give a tax break to everyone who comes

into your peripheral vision. But I care much more about how the optics of this fit into what he's actually proposed. So I mentioned, you know, he hasn't, he won't say whether, actually at that McDonald's stunt he was asked about his support for raising minimum wage and he would not say, he would not answer in past context. He has been, you know, more clearly opposed to it. Minimum wage for those listening hasn't been raised since 2009. He also cut funding for OSHA, which is the regulatory agency that does workplace safety inspections, which will affect the lives of McDonald's workers, of course.

And under Trump, likewise, his National Labor Relations Board made it harder to hold McDonald's accountable if their franchisees commit wage theft, et cetera. So I was talking about all of that and Scott was saying, well, none of that has to do with like this McDonald's stunt. And I was saying, yes, it does. And my role is to talk about it because I cover economic policy. So that's, that's my more charitable explanation for what happened.

Yeah. Oh, I'm glad we got to have it all out. I don't really know about this is, I guess, not really your business. And I guess I'm quasi-worked for a competitor, not that I really care, but I'm an MSNBC analyst. But the new CNN thing, it has been good for viral clips, but these five-person panels are not particularly conducive to having extended conversations about OSHA

and the impact on McDonald's workers. I wouldn't say. Yeah. It can be hard to get that in. Yeah. All right. We already talked to Jeffrey Goldberg about his story about John Kelly, but I wanted to play, again, Scott talking about it last night, but also in the context of something that

you've written about lately as a Jewish person, as a Jewish columnist about about kind of these questions about invoking Hitler and how appropriate it is or how inappropriate it is in the context of Trump. But let's listen to Jennings one more time. I think, first of all, I don't know John Kelly, but I agree. I think he's an honorable person. His family and his son certainly made the ultimate sacrifice for the country. So he certainly earned an opinion here. And he's earned earned an opinion here.

And he's earned a political opinion, but I think, like everything else with Donald Trump, opinions vary, whether you're coming out of the military or the private sector or government or anything else. And I agree that two weeks before an election will cause some people to look at this in a jaundiced way, like, you know, you're trying to drop this here at the end, and there will be people who don't believe it, there will be people who refute it,

and Donald Trump himself also refutes it. I would just humbly submit to Mr. Kelly that if he's worried about Hitler, and he's worried about fascism, he ought to pick up the newspaper. There's thousands of Hitlers running around this country right now, running around college campuses,

running around New York City, chasing Jewish people around, blocking their access on college campuses. If you're worried about Hitler and you're talking about Donald Trump, maybe open your eyes and take in what's happening on the American left in this country. So those are the Hitler's on the way. So, Catherine, two-point question.

Are you more concerned about fascism coming from the Republican nominee for president who's tied in the polls or from a college sophomore at Columbia? And Part two, what do you just think about the broader kind of discourse around Trump's rhetoric on own Hitler and issues such as this? I'm pretty much against Hitler in any form. I know that's a really controversial take. Don't think it's great when there's anti-Semitism on the left or the right. And I've had it targeted at me from both directions in the past week, among other weeks of my life. Same, I'm not even Jewish.

That's just the gift that Elon Musk has given us on Twitter now where it's just totally free to make those kinds of stories. Actually, there are some Jewish Millers out there. I know, yeah, that must be it or something. I don't know about that. Just like my face. I don't know. You're in the media and we control it all.

Yeah, I went to GW too. Who knows? And I'm in the media. There are a lot of potential clues there, but no, I'm Gentile for all my trolls. Yeah. So, not good. However, yeah, I'm much less worried about a college student who is not given the office of leader of the free world

and commander in chief of our military espousing anti-Semitic comments. Again, don't like it, but much more worried about someone who is a major party candidate for president who potentially has all of the powers of the state at his disposal and has beyond that seemingly deliberately echoed a lot of the Hitler rhetoric. Like I wrote about this a few weeks ago but as a columnist, a political pundit, whatever you want to call me, I never want to be the one tripping Godwin's law.

Godwin's law is this idea that as an internet conversation goes on, the probability that someone invokes Hitler or the Nazis approaches one, everything devolves into, oh, well, if you disagree with me, you're just, if you disagree with me, you're just a Nazi. Like you don't want to be part of that rhetorical problem. However, it has become sort of inescapable with Trump. Like even before this thing came out from Jeffrey Goldberg, where Trump literally praised German Nazis as being super loyal, which is sort of funny in a way for other

reasons, because they were notoriously not loyal, which is sort of funny in a way for other reasons, because they were notoriously not loyal, but also they were Nazis. So either loyalty or not, probably don't want to hold them up as role models. But I wrote a few weeks ago about like his use of the word vermin to describe his political enemies, his descriptions of immigrants and other disfavored groups as people who

were not only coming to eat your pets but rape and murder your daughters, and lots of other things that as someone whose ancestors fled pogroms are very troubling. As I put in that piece, I don't know that he and Vance, JD Vance are like deliberately trying to start a pogrom against, for example, Haitian immigrants in Springfield, but if they were, I don't know what they would be doing differently. And so that is very troubling and upsetting.

And even if you are an undergrad at you know name a random liberal arts school in America and you're doing your encampments to to criticize Zionists or whatever like you're not gonna have the ability to rally millions of Americans behind you to you to put in danger the people you were demonizing. It was interesting at the time also when I wrote this that Vance was saying that Democrats, by calling Trump a fascist, were causing political violence. Meanwhile, I denounced political violence in any way, shape, or form, but of course, Trump does have this

coterie of Secret Service agents around him at all times. They're saying much more inflammatory things about very vulnerable immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, among other places who of course do not have that level of protection. So anyway, this was all very upsetting to me at the time. And I wrote about it then. And I remember hearing a lot, getting a lot of pushback, like, oh, you're part of the problem. Meanwhile, a few weeks later, of course, Trump is praising Rommel. Yeah. No matter how low that you think an accusation could be about Donald Trump, you'll always meet it. And in the spirit of your media criticism that we can't get into serious

policy issues, we don't have enough time to talk about things such as this, I did not get to the McKinley Tariff. So if people want to learn, that's okay, we don't have time. If people want to learn more, there's an amazing bulwark article today about how Trump, it's called Trump Loves the 1890s, but he's clueless about them. That tells you what actually happened with the McKinley Tariff. We'll put it in the show notes. Go check it out. Thank you so much to Catherine Rampel. After the election, we're going to do tariffs.

We're going to do OSHA. We're going to just, we're just going to nerd out. All right. I can't wait. All right. Thanks so much to Jeffrey Goldberg for his intrepid critical reporting in the Atlantic and thanks to Katherine Rampell for Taking the fight to Scott Jennings for educating us on the economic policies

We'll be back tomorrow with a friend of the pod. See y'all then About this fascist group thing Evil men with racist views Spreading all across the land Don't just sit there on your ass And let that funky chain dance Brothers, sisters, shoot your best We don't need this fascist group thing Brothers, sisters We don't need that fascist group thing. Curb us, sisters, we don't need that fascist group thing.

Curb us, sisters, we don't need that fascist group thing. This we will repeat itself, crisis point we're near the hour. Counter-files will do no good, pop you as I fill your pot It'll prove that funky stuff

It's not for you and me, girl No, no, no, no Europe's in a happy land No, no, no, no They've had their fascist group hanged Brothers, sisters We don't need the fascist group hanged Brothers, sisters The Bulldog Podcast is produced by Katy Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.