The Chaser Report - Who’s Who In Trump’s New Zoo?

Episode Date: November 19, 2024

Dom is joined by Assoc Prof David Smith of the US Studies Centre at USYD and from the PEP podcast, to explain some of the cabinet picks Trump has made, and what he intends to do with people like Elon Musk, RFK Jr, and Matt Gaetz. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is the Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to the Chaser Report. Just Dom here today. And it's time to catch up on events in the US where an increasing number of former Fox News hosts are being appointed to Donald Trump's cabinet, where there are increasing concerns over attorney-general nominee and a person who's been investigated by a congressional commission into sex crimes

Matt Gates and talk us through all of this we have once again Special Professor David Smith from the US Study Centre at the University of Sydney Hello David Hi, thanks for having me back

Just as we speak More nominees have come down The pipeline from the US And we'll talk about those in a few moments Sean Duffy Former Fox Business host I think he's the third or fourth Former Fox person

Being tapped up to run the administration They may as well just join forces At this point But before we get into that I want to get your thoughts on why the result was not at all close, why we have now utter Trump dominance of not just the White House but the Senate and the House representatives

and what it all means. We'll get into that after this. So Dave, we talked a lot about how close the polls were. Shall we just never talk about polls again at this point? Donald Trump won every swing state, admittedly by fairly narrow margins, but it's probably fair to say that the pollsters didn't really read the room. Yeah, certainly the poll misses weren't that big in historical terms.

They were about two or three points. But the thing is, they were very uniform. So right across the board, across all of the swing states, and across the national vote as well, they missed by that same amount. So they weren't accurate, but they were consistent in how wrong they were. And they were wrong by a couple of points. I think that pulses will be heaving a sigh of relief that they're never going to have another election with Donald Trump again because they've been consistently more accurate in elections where Donald Trump isn't on the ballot, like in the mid-term elections.

What they'll be hoping is that this is a unique Donald Trump effect to do with the non-response bias around his supporters because he draws in so many people who are so disenchanted with politics that they would never respond to a poll in the first place. So he breaks the model. He does break the model. So it appears that over the course of three elections, pollsters never found a way to deal with that. They were certainly trying.

And we talked about this time around, they were waiting voters by who they had voted for last time to try to get a more even representation. But it still didn't work. So as tempting as it is to say, let's never look at polls again. and certainly I will enjoy not looking at polls for the next four years. They are probably going to be more accurate when Trump isn't on the ballot. Okay. So he's, as we've discussed with you and Chas before, fairly unique, really.

And I think also just in the fact that he's managed to come back after so many times when he seemed like he was absolutely in the wilderness in those heady days when Ron DeSantis was the preferred candidate of Murdoch and many others, he's absolutely back in the ascendancy. And why do you think it is then? that he won by so much and that really the Democrats have almost nothing. They're leaning in on their control of places like California and New York. But even in those states, the margins were narrower than they would have imagined. Yeah, looking at the overall result, Donald Trump didn't get that many more votes than he got last time around.

He's probably going to end up with a couple of million more, which is about equal to population growth in the US at that time. What is going to happen, though, is Harris is going to end up with 5 to 10 million fewer votes than Joe Biden. So the story is really just a collapse of the Democratic vote. And one that was fairly uniform across groups, a bit more pronounced in some groups than others, especially Latino men. But for the most part, you just saw Democrats not turning up. And for about one in 10 people who turned up for Biden, or one in nine, did not turn up for Harris. So that is the big picture there. And the way that I would read that is this was a referendum on the Biden administration.

And the verdict of the referendum was very clear. Harris couldn't separate herself from the Biden administration in the eyes of voters. And to be fair, she didn't really try to separate herself from the Biden administration. There was no way that she really could. She was vice president. When she said, there's nothing that she would have done differently. That was her honest answer. I mean, she was really part of this administration.

Yeah, she's been in the room. Yeah, even though I think she did a lot better than Biden would have done because there were so many concerns about Biden's age. Nonetheless, this was a referendum on the Biden administration. And the driving issue in that was the cost of living crisis. The cost of living crisis was something that has hit Americans a lot harder than most other economic indices would indicate. Historically, inflation isn't one of the big economic factors in elections, things like unemployment are much more important. But the inflation had been so severe over the last four years.

Adam 2 said basically the worst price shock since the 1970s. And because it have been so stubborn around the expenditures that are the most important and the most painful for people, food and rent, people just really experienced the economy very, very badly. No matter how good unemployment numbers were and how good things like GDP and the stock market were, people just couldn't afford to live. And, yeah, that factors, just judging by the exit polls, judging by the concerns that people listed in the exit polls, that trumped everything else. The two big issues that each side was pushing, abortion and immigration, were very distant, second, third, fourth issues to the economy. So, which is interesting because Trump thought that immigration was a more important issue than the economy. And he was talking about that a lot more than the economy. It didn't matter to him because Democrats were going to be the ones who got punished for the economy.

But I think it's a really pretty straightforward story of what happened in the election. Yeah, the Financial Times had data where they looked at basically every reasonably mature democracy around the world. I can't remember the exact criteria, but it was at least 10 places that have had elections. And we know this has been the big year of elections. And in every single place, the incumbent party lost share. And apparently that's never happened before. There's been a uniform anti-incumbent vote. And this date dates back to the beginning of modern democracy, though.

And so that's a pretty clear message. And yes, interesting implications for Australia as well. But, yeah, look, Kamala Harris being as close as she seemed to be, I guess in hindsight was an illusion given the economic headwinds. Yeah. And in many ways, I think the campaigns didn't matter. The Democrats reached an astonishing number of voters. There was data from Gallup showing that they reached something like 40% of voters, where the historical norm is around 30%.

And that's about what Trump was, what the Trump campaign was reaching. So the Democratic campaign was much better resourced, much more professional, much better funded than the Republican campaign. I think we can agree that the Harris campaign was a huge improvement on the Biden campaign. And the Trump campaign, just after Harris became the nominee, seemed to lose all kind of discipline, much to the alarm of a lot of Trump's allies. But none of it mattered. I went to an American Political Science Association conference in August where there was one panel of people doing forecasts of the elections based on factors other than polls. And the most simple model was just looking at people's perceptions of the economy by state. and looking at Biden's approval rating.

And that got incredibly close to predicting what the popular vote was. Like that's 0.1.2%. So in other words, if you had not looked at the polls at all, if you hadn't looked at the campaigns at all, if you'd ignored all of the hope and joy that came out of the changeover from Biden to Harris, if you'd ignored all of the controversy about things that Trump and his surrogates said, and you had just focused on what people thought of the economy and what people thought of Biden,

that would have given you the most accurate prediction of the election. So this was definitely a year where the campaigns didn't really matter at all. Yeah, and a reminder, I guess, just how little some people engage with politics and view things with a lens of how things going for me. And poor old Alan Lickman, who was everywhere the historian with the keys to the White House, got it very wrong as a turn of us as well. I've got to say that. My favourite thing about the outcome of the election.

Yeah, the video The New York Times published with him, I think, was unintentionally funny in ways that he simply did not have the ability to understand. So the key to understanding irony is one he might want to work on before 28 or he may simply choose to retire. All right, so that's the big picture. Let's turn now to what Donald Trump wants to do. We'll take a quick break and then run our eyes over the cabinet because really things are looking pretty extreme in terms of what's about to happen. to the United States. The Chaser Report, news you can't trust.

Now, I guess Donald Trump could have chosen one of two paths here, having had such a stunning vindication, having been re-embraced very warmly by the American people, and really, you know, getting an exit from all of his legal troubles, or almost all of them, perhaps, he really is just basking in adulation. He can do whatever he wants now. He has the House and the Senate, largely compliant,

one imagines you can appoint almost whoever he wants to these roles in the cabinet to run the country for the next four years. And it seems as though revenge. And also the agenda of dismantling much of what has gone before seems to be top of mind. He's not pulling any punches. He is going hard to tear things down. And entire things like the Federal Education Department are apparently going to be dissolved under Donald Trump. So we're going to see a fairly extreme four years it looks like. As against that, David, we know that Donald Trump is not always great and actually following through on the things that he wants to do, he often talks a big game and nothing much happens.

What are you expecting based on the cabinet picks so far and talk us through some of the more interesting ones? Yeah, and I think long answer. Part of the big picture is it's very unusual to have a new president coming in who's only going to be there for four years. And Trump is planning to do everything very quickly. He's going to have to do it much quicker than four years, because at the end of a, you know, the last two years of a two-term president is a notorious lame duck period.

And I think he's, if he goes hard, he may well lose the House next time, yeah. Yeah, and so he's aware he's got two years of having this pliant, loyal Congress. I think some of his nominee picks are basically loyalty tests for the Senate. like I how far can I push you nominating someone like Matt Gates that makes absolutely no sense I mean so Matt Gates attorney general yes he wants the justice department to be basically a legal weapon for him no no David David he's he's it's a pick against the weaponization that happened under Joe Biden he's restoring law and order I'm sure I read that somewhere and so But Matt Gates is certainly someone who's complained a lot about the Justice Department,

and Trump said he's put him there to reform the Justice Department, but plenty of people complained a lot about the Justice Department and would have some much greater idea of how to do it. The Matt Gates' pick is really, really strange. I mean, if he had put someone like Ted Cruz or Ron DeSantis there, those are people who are equally hostile to the Justice Department and probably could have dismantled it quite effectively. Matt Gates, on the other hand, who he's a really, really fringe member of the House of Representatives

or not anymore. He is absolutely hated by the Republican Party. His most notable act as a member of the House of Representatives was to bring down Kevin McCarthy, the Republican Speaker. So a lot of Republicans just don't trust him at all. People might remember the very, very long time it took to choose a speaker after the midterms. And that was all Matt Gates. He was hated for his loutish behaviour on the floor of the House of Representatives,

like going up to other members of the House of Representatives and showing them nudes on his phone. And on top of all of that, he's being investigated by the House Ethics Committee for sex with minors, sex trafficking and illicit drug use. Now, because he's just resigned from the House of Representatives, there's some doubt over whether the report is ever going to come out. the House Ethics Committee only has jurisdiction over members of the House and he's not one anymore. But I was doing a little bit of research this morning and I was finding there is actually a precedent for the House Committee to release a report into someone who's resigned. Please tell me it's George Santos. It's not George Santos. It's a pity.

It goes back to 1987, a Tennessee representative called Bill Boner. Fantastic. Bill Boner had some rather unsavory relations with controversy. tractors. And while that was being investigated, Bill Boner resigned to run for mayor of Nashville, which he achieved. But he was rather a disaster as mayor of Nashville, Bill Boner, especially when he appeared on the grand old Opry TV show with a woman with whom he was clearly in a relationship, in fact, was engaged to, but was not his wife, who was someone he was married to. So that's the story of Bill Boner, who might provide a

precedent for the House Ethics Committee to actually release its report into Matt Gates. But I almost see that as, why would Trump do this? It is almost like he's basically challenging the Senate. And he has said that if the Senate's not going to get his confirmations through quickly, then he'll demand recess appointments. So that would be demanding that the House, that the Senate majority leader, the new Senate Majority Leader, John Boone, actually call a Senate recess so that he can use this procedure of recess appointments to get his appointments through

without cabinet approval and they would only be there for two years but that suits trump fine it's you mean without senate approval not cabinet approval so yeah sorry without senate approval um because it's these two years that he needs so not just mac gates the other one who's going to have a lot of trouble getting through is robert kennedy uh which is not shocked to hear you say that. Which is another pick, which was purely for political expediency. This is the payoff for Kennedy supporting him. So Kennedy, of course, is being tapped for health and human services, despite the fact he really wants to set public health back about 50 years. Not only is he very skeptical about vaccines, he wants to get rid of fluoride in drinking water, which is widely considered one of the

greatest achievements in public health in public dentistry. Yes, there are concerns. Yes, there are concerns that if you put in twice the safe amount, that could lead to IQ loss. But I would have thought the solution to that is only to put in the safe amount rather than run twice the safe amount. Anyway, a lot of Republicans are pretty spooked by his positions on public health. And also by the fact that he's a Democrat, that he's a Kennedy. So that could also pose problems. We need to keep in mind, these appointees would need 53, well, sorry, would need 50 votes to get through. They don't need to clear the filibuster threshold. Republicans have currently 53 in the Senate as well as the potentially tying vote of Vice President J.D. Vance.

So they would, yeah, they would need 50 votes. So that means it would take four Republicans to defeat any of these nominations. And there are a couple who presumably won't. I mean, what's the name? The Senator from Alaska is not going to vote for any of these people, is she? No, no, not either of those. Yeah, Lisa McCowski, Cullons from Maine. They would probably also have concerns about Pete Hegseth, who's been nominated for Secretary of Defense. Now, so Pete Hegseth is a Fox News host. He was, he served in the military for most of this century, was deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan, then in the National Guard.

Flames he was denied a position in the National Guard detail that was supposed to guard Joe Biden's inauguration because he has a Jerusalem cross tattoo and the Army's too woke for that these days. Right. So then he became a Fox News host and wrote a book about how the army is too woke. And for people who view military wokeness as the single biggest threat to America's national security, well, Pete Hegseth is your man. This is his entire issue.

So that's why he's been tapped. However, last week the Trump team was caught by surprise when they found out that there was a sexual assault allegation against Pete Hegseth, which Pete Hegseth did. dealt with by paying the complainant a lot of money while denying wrongdoing. So that could be a bit of a wrinkle in this. I think he actually otherwise would have got through, but that could be a bit of a problem. I mean, this is why there are confirmation hearings in theory and why they don't just have free assessments.

But yeah, I mean, on Mac Gates, there's two women have come forward this morning saying that he paid them for sex. So there's lots more going on there. But there are quite a lot of odd sort of flotsam and jetson members. of the new cabinet. There's, I mean, another former Democrat in Tulsi Gabbard. What's her job again? She's a national security advisor or something?

National intelligence. National intelligence. Director of national intelligence, that's right. And be fair to say that intelligence has not been the highlight of her career in several respects. No, and she's another one who might have trouble getting through. Not only is she anathema to national security-minded. Republicans, because among other things, she went and met with Bashar al-Assad. She's perceived as being unnecessarily close to Putin.

I mean, she was very critical of various wars fought in the Middle East, which has now become an orthodox position. But, yeah, Republicans are going to have a problem with her, and as well as the fact that she was a Democrat. So she became a very effective proxy for Trump. But nonetheless, I think the Democrats are going to have a little bit of trouble getting through. I was also quite surprised.

I mean, Matt Gates was the most surprising one, but I was also surprised to see the remarkable political comeback of Christy Knoem, who was last scene shooting her dog in the face and bragging about it in a memoir. And that is widely considered to have cost her the vice presidential role,

but Trump's brought her back as director of Homeland Security. Which is ironic on so many levels. a bit like Matt Gates and the Justice Department. I mean, unless there's a dog invasion imminent, she also doesn't have much experience with this stuff, right? I mean, it seems as though most of the people who are picked, or many of them have very little experience in knowing how these departments work,

but are just there to either achieve a particular political end or basically just to throw bombs. It feels like a little bit like a watch-it-or-burn approach to restaffing Washington, D.C. Absolutely. And that brings us to somebody who is not a cabinet-level. level appointment, but is nonetheless taking shape as the most important person in Trump's administration, apart from Trump, which is Elon Musk. So he's been tasked with finding $2 trillion to cut from the federal budget, which is a difficult to ask, given that only $1.9 billion of the

federal budget is discretionary spending. The other $4 billion or so is stuff that is legally locked in. So cutting that, that would be cutting things like Medicare, Social Security. That would require significant changes to the law to actually do it. You can't just cut it from the cabinet. What are the ideal on Musk understands that complexity at all? Yeah, and especially like a lot of that $1.9 trillion is defense spending, which presumably will be, you know, it's usually the one area of Republicans won't go near. So it'll be interesting to see what Musk comes up.

with. He has criticized the government as being absolutely full of waste and fact that needs to be cut. Personally, I don't think that the guy who spent $44 billion on Twitter is the wisest guardian of his own money, let alone other people's money. I mean, he is renowned for cutting as the, you know, the first step to everything. He cut two-thirds of the Twitter workforce, which is one of the things that broke features of Twitter that is still broken to this day. You know, he said there will be temporary hardship as a result. I wouldn't necessarily call it temporary. So that, but I mean, that gives you an idea of what the big agenda here is. And in many respects, for all the ways in which we talk about Trump as being different and this radical

break with the Republican Party, this is a very old conservative. dream. This is basically dismantling the new deal, dismantling the, or even going back further than that, so the Woodrow Wilson administrative state, just dismantling it all to make as much room as possible for business tyrants like Elon Musk and other local tyrants to do whatever they want. It's a very, very old Republican program in that sense. Trump probably feels he's got a lot more latitude than anybody else because he's really only there for one term. He doesn't have to worry about getting reelected. And as you say, he is driven by vengeance. And he's driven by a sense that everything was frustrated last time around because he didn't have the right people in place.

So certainly everybody that he's put into these positions will be unquestioningly loyal to him and he'll hope that Congress is the same way. But as I've mentioned before, and this is also, related to plans to fire lower level civil servants as well on max. Yes, you can replace everyone who might have resisted your plans and put a yes man in his place. That doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be easier for you to do anything because doing things in government is still very hard. It requires coordinating the collective action of thousands of people and it requires doing it within the boundaries of the law, putting completely inexperienced people in charge of departments, and then probably firing a lot of other people in those departments who know how

government actually works and who know how to actually achieve things. That's potentially a recipe for chaos and not for the good type for Trump. This is potentially a recipe for complete stasis and inertia and stuckness and actually continuation of the status quo. No, the deep state will defeat Trump once again. But David, isn't this the point of Project 2025 that at least there's been some thinking about how to overcome this stuff and explain how to gut government in a way that at least has a chance of not being overturned in court? Yeah, but once again, they are recruiting people who are very inexperienced with all of it. And they are, you know, part of it is on the legal side, yes, they want to recruit lawyers.

who are not afraid of the career consequences of breaking the law, who are attracted to fringe legal theories. Stuff still has to go through the courts, though. And even with all of Trump's federal judiciary appointments, Biden made a lot of federal judiciary appointments as well, so did Obama. And we've seen in the past that even Trump's own appointees often aren't prepared to actually go along with blatantly illegal stuff.

Yeah. So, yeah, there are certainly big plans to gut everything. everything and change everything, as you say, getting rid of entire departments like education, that again is not new. That was a Republican dream. Many Republicans were disappointed that Ronald Reagan didn't do that. They thought that Reagan was going to get rid of it. So, yeah, we will see how far he can get with this in four years or in two years. And finally, David, the things that he can do, though, there are a whole bunch of things he can do via executive order that you can just get on with.

We know that tariffs are one of them, but also the forced deportations, the mass deportations that have been long threatened by Donald Trump. I mean, there are people who on the 20th of January and shortly thereafter are going to be experiencing some pretty extreme consequences from his election, aren't there? Yeah, there will be. And I think it's going to be very cruel and very damaging and devastating to entire communities. Still, though, he can order things by executive order. He's still got to have people and resources to do them.

The mass deportation of 11 million people, which is promising, the department in charge of that has 21,000 employees, which is ICE. I know that he said he's going to use the military to do this as well. He will also face legal obstacles to that. As far as tariffs go, he was able to implement a lot of tariffs against China basically as national security measures, the kinds of really wide-ranging tariffs that he's got planned may actually require congressional cooperation. And he may find that there's some resistance to that as well. Certainly one of the things he'll be able to do pretty easily is just

rolling back environmental regulations. This has become part of the general theater of changes of government in the United States, that Republicans roll back whatever environmental regulations Democrats have put in place. Then when Democrats come back, they put them back into place. But Trump is not immune from the same problem that every president going back to Clinton has had, which is it's really difficult to get things through Congress. And if you really want to achieve big changes, you have to do it through Congress. One of the very few big successful pieces of legislation over the last 30 years was the Affordable Care Act, which was done through Congress, took a very long time, was very hard, required all kinds of concessions,

but has had a significant impact on Americans' lives and is now a very popular piece of legislation. The biggest and most long-lasting thing that Trump actually did in his first presidency was getting corporate tax cuts through Congress. The biggest things that Biden achieved in his presidency were right at the beginning. They were the, you know, the massive infrastructure and and spending packages. Now, all of those things were done at the beginning of people's presidencies. If Trump is going to do,

you know, he's going to do anything like that through Congress, he's going to need to do it at the beginning. Because even within that two-year period, he's going to lose Republican members. I mean, he's going to lose the loyalty of Republican members. At the moment, Trump's plans don't seem to involve Congress

at all. They just seem to be, how much can I do through executive action. I think even with this very pliant team that he's assembled around him, there are real limits to what any president can do with executive action. So there you go. The sclerotic Washington DC is likely to limit him again

and we know his sort of personal erraticness will probably also play a part in that. And I guess we just spare a thought for Kamala Harris, hold up in the naval observatory and apparently ordering a very large amount of Uberites to get through the day. Yes, and speaking of which there's this photo circulating of on Trump's private jet,

Robert Kennedy, along with Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and various members of the Trump family, all eating McDonald's. And Donald Trump Jr. tweeted this out saying, Make America healthy again starts tomorrow. So like that's great. They're already bullying and humiliating one of Trump's cabinet appointees.

This is because RFK Jr. came out. I knew this was going to happen because he came out and said, oh, it's poison. Trump serves poison to everyone that, McDonald's. So you have some public health ideas, which are actually reasonable. He's against highly processed foods and so on. So there are a few things that actually makes sense. His specific complaint about McDonald's, though, is that they use seed oil in cooking fries. And he's like, back when I was a boy, they used tallow fat. And that was a lot healthier.

Now, I do not have the nutritional knowledge to know whether that's true or not. Doesn't matter nor is he. I'm sure that my English ancestors would have agreed with that, though. I think that they would cooked chips in the same pot of lard for generations. So, yeah, maybe that's what he wants to take. Well, perhaps that's why he strapped all the dead animals to the front of his car to get the tallow fat or something like that. It's going to be a very bumpy ride.

It's going to be fascinating. David, thank you for talking us through the next phase. How much can he do will be the big question for four years, I guess. Thanks for somebody. David Smith, there from the US Study Centre at the University of Sydney. Joining us once again, we're part of the Iconclass Network. Catch you next time.