The Daily Beast Podcast - This is What Trump is Really Planning for America

Episode Date: June 1, 2025

Joanna Coles welcomes back David Rothkopf, the seasoned national security expert and former Clinton official, for a no-holds-barred analysis of the Democrats' curious case of Trump envy. Rothkopf breaks it down into two camps: the mild, who admire Trump’s decisiveness (however impulsive), and the dangerous, who want to emulate his ruthless authoritarian swagger wholesale. He warns that Democrats risk losing their identity—and their base—by chasing "neoliberal" Wall Street donors and selling their authenticity to the top bidder. Rothkopf also weighs in on Gavin Newsom’s podcast pivot and why being “Trump-lite” might just be the fastest way to burn out in both politics and entertainment. Follow @djrothkopf for his latest bold takes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Joanna Coles. This is the Daily Beast podcast. I'm the chief content officer of The Daily Beast. And today we're talking to my favorite political columnist, David Roscock. He's got a brilliant column this week about how Democrats are suffering from what he calls Trump envy, which is their envy of how he uses power and their envy, obviously, of actual power. So let's get straight into it. Before we do, I want to remind you that David was the former editor of foreign policy. And he was also, a senior official in the Clinton administration, so he spends a lot of time talking to dominant Democrats. David, you've written two excellent pieces for The Beast in the last week. One was about the enormous number of words we need to describe. I think what you described as the shit show in D.C. And in the way that Eskimos have many words for Snow, we now need a lot of words for what's happening in D.C. But you also... wrote a very interesting column, spilling a secret that is being discussed in D.C., can you reveal

what it is, please? I think among a lot of Democrats, even Democrats who are extremely alienated by Trump's, you know, extra legal and worse behavior, there is a little bit of Trump envy. And one of the reasons is that politics is about winning, and he won the last time around. But there's two kinds of Trump envy. One is mild. and it's fairly benign. Maybe he's doing some things every once in a while that are worth noting, acknowledging,

because we can learn something from it. The other form of Trump envy is dangerous, and you see that a lot on cable news shows where there are consultants who are essentially trying to say, we've got to be more like Trump. We have to become Trump-light, and we have to sort of turn our back

on the base of the Democratic Party, the principles of the Democratic Party. And maybe even this week, and perhaps you've noticed this story, maybe even we need our own Joe Rogan, you know, that there's this kind of $20 million project to cook up a Democrat. Well, I think Gavin Newsom's trying to do that with his podcast, isn't he? He's interviewed Joe Rogan. He's having people on from the opposite side of the aisle to create conversation. And I think as he's looking to, either run for national government or at least figure out a future post-governorship. I think he's looking to go into entertainment. Well, you know, good luck. Good luck with going into entertainment. I think what he's done is

ended his chances of being a leader of the Democratic Party because that's one thing to say, well, we need to hear from the other side. It's another thing to cozy up to them, to embrace them, to want to be like them. And that's where Newsome is. He's, gone too far. Okay, hold on, hold on. I want to unpack that in a minute, but you said you divided the envy, you divided the Trump enviers into two groups. There's the ones with mild envy, and then there's the ones with dangerous envy. Let's talk about the ones with mild envy first. What are they saying about what Trump is actually doing right? Well, so I've sat with, for example,

very senior people who are in the Biden administration on the national security side or the international economic side, and some of them have said things like Trump's decisive. We, you know, we would get bogged down in these long internal discussions and we would sort of sweat everything through. Now, of course, they realize that decisive is sometimes impulsive and sometimes it leads to bad decisions. And sometimes he just changes his mind. I mean, yes, he's decisive, but it feels like it's frequently performative decisions. Well, yeah, but, you know, part of the reason Trump is president, and there are some reasons, is that people feel like he's a decision maker. He gets in there.

He gets things done. You know, he's strong. And Democrats feel like they're perceived as taking to their feigning couches every time anything goes a little bit wrong, worrying things through, having lots and lots of meetings, producing lots and lots of white papers. Right. Lots of process, obsessed with process, right? Well, yeah, exactly.

And there are times where that, you know, caught. up and haunted the Biden. I mean, look at Gaza. How many times did Bibi Netanyahu have to abuse the trust of Biden? How many times do they have to violate international law? And the U.S. never changed its position. I'm not saying Trump's position on Gaza is particularly good. But, you know, when Bibi Netanyahu starts to irritate him as he did prior to this trip to the Middle East, Trump said, I'm not going to go see it. But to what extent is the envy of Trump, apparent ability to make a decision, a result of just a translucent former president, that Biden just seemed to be a will of the wisp by the end of it?

Well, you know, I was in the Clinton administration that I know it seems like the Hoover administration of many people, but, you know, I was in the Clinton administration. And there was nothing Clinton-like better than long seminary meetings. And Obama, too, and Hillary Clinton's campaign was famous for drafting lengthy white papers. And there's something good about that. There's something good about thinking things true and understanding their consequences. Yeah, absolutely. But the point is there is a middle ground and maybe some of these people are saying, no, we have to be a little bit more decisive.

We have to move a little bit more quickly. Not like a drunken sailor like Trump, but in a kind of, you know, sort of halfway ground where you think it through and then you act, where you don't overthink it. And I think, you know, that's healthy. Another area that's healthy, and this does reflect back on the Biden thing to some extent, is that Trump often for the completely wrong reasons, but he gives a sense of strength. He gives a sense of, I'm doing this. If you get in my way, you're going to get into trouble. And not only did that not come through with some Democrats, and you didn't get a sense of there was a direction and it was going to get done. But when people, the Democratic Party spoke out against the president, there were never any consequences. Well, you know, Trump's a mob boss. You don't want a mob boss. You don't want to think that people are going to end up at the bottom of the East River with concrete overshoes. But on the other hand, with Trump, you want, or with a leader, you want a sense if somebody's going to keep their party in line. Did you have that with Bill Clinton? Didn't you have that with Barack Obama?

Sometimes you did. You know, when Rahm Emanuel was the White House Chiefs of, he was famous for coming down on people hard. So there were some people who did it, and there were some people who didn't do it. Right. So Alam Emanuel is now talking about looking out of the... Is that a phone alarm or is it an actual alarm? I don't want you to burn alive as you're doing this podcast. No, I'm in Knoxville, Tennessee, and that was apparently a tornado.

It was a tornado alert. Okay, that's very exciting. It should make the rest of the podcast really interesting. If you go full Dorothy on us and whizz out of the rhythm, we'll know what's happened to. Please redo your introduction in a more elegiacic way. All right. So I'm just going back to Rahm Emanuel, who was, of course, the enforcer, known as Obama's enforcer. This week seemed to imply that he's going to be running for president.

He's looked out over the array of democratic potential candidates and decided to put himself in the middle of them. Is that going to be to work? I thought he'd lost a lot of weight, bringing my own personal obsession about the fact that everybody is on GLP1s. I thought he was showing signs that he was. Well, first of all, let me disabuse you of your GLP1 theory. Rob Emmanuel was actually a ballet dancer before he went into politics. You're right. And he is a fitness freak who loves, in fact, long cycling trips.

Oh, okay. Yeah. So I think he comes by that naturally. Look, do I think Rahm Emanuel is going to be the next Democratic candidate? I don't know. Do I think he is, however, in some respects, that kind of voice that cuts through it, no bullshit. Let's get the party in line. I do.

And I think the one thing that really always bugs me about consultants is they're like. like, well, we're going to triangulate. And if you end up with a position over here or over there, Trump should be getting people past that. But Trump should have people recognizing that you've got to speak from your heart. You've got to speak from, admittedly, Trump's a maniac. So I don't, I'm not saying. I don't think Trump speak from his heart either, right?

I mean, there's no coherence to what he says. He flip-flops all the time. But he plays a strong white man, which to a lot of people is very. very reassuring, and it's an authority figure that people feel they can respond to. Right, but there is also no filter. And with Democrats, there are too many filters. I was a very strong Kamala Harris supporter. I think Kamala Harris might be a great candidate.

I don't know. But you always got the sense that she was trying to figure out, as with Hillary Clinton, what the right answer to the question was. Well, and that if she didn't give the right answer, she was going to be scolded or ridiculed or possibly canceled, you felt her sense of anxiety on the, stage. Right. And similarly with Tim Walsh, actually. Right. And this is where I think, you know, a little bit of healthy, thoughtful, not over the top Trump envy, that may not be a bad thing. Let's get authentic politics. Why is AOC so popular? Nobody thinks she's reading from a white

paper. She's speaking from the heart. Why did Bernie Sanders? Why does J.B. Pritzker? Why is Jasmine Crockett? Why is even Gretchen Widmer, who, you know, got a little too close to the the son there when she was in the Oval Office. But, you know, she is a 62% approval rating in Michigan. Why? Because she's Gretchen Widmer. She's big Gretch. You get what you see there. And that's what we need is we need authenticity, because as John Gilgud or Lawrence Olivier or somebody once said about acting, you know, once you can fake that, you've got it made. The authenticity, being truthful, speaking from the heart, is something that. that resonates with voters.

Well, there's a lot of complaints in AOC's community that actually she spends too much time on her oligarchy tour and not enough time spending attention to her actual constituents. But let's discuss that in another podcast. All right, so we've analyzed the mild envy, which is the ability to appear as a strong person full of convictions. And even though I would argue that Donald Trump's convictions

are completely inauthentic, nevertheless, he plays a character that people respond to. Let's talk about what you framed as the dangerous envy, where Democrats go too far to copy what the Trump administration is doing. Well, look, I mean, too far is anything that gets you to be actually like Trump. You're right. His only convictions are criminal convictions. But other, other than, you know, that, you know, he's a pathological liar. He's a racist. He's a misogynist. He's, you know, wants to support our enemies overseas. You know, he's a terrible guy who was trying to gut the Constitution.

So getting anywhere too close to any of those things is bad. But there is this kind of mode among some Democrats to use Trump to say, oh, no, we must move to the center. We must be more like Trump. We need to be neoliberals again. What are they doing? I'll tell you what they're really doing. Let's be honest here.

What they're really drawing is trying to get up close to that kind of Jewish. juicy, juicy, neoliberal donor money. They want guys on Wall Street who try to pick winners in both parties, guys in the corporate community, to say, oh, yeah, this guy gets it. Let's put some money on him. Let's find a candidate that is going to move them to the right. And just the last thing is, you can tell because, you know, they're like, woke is weak. Woke isn't weak. That's buying into the Republican, the MAGA perspective, being tolerant and compassionate is strong. That's what's made the country great. But lots of people think that actually Woke is intolerant and it's not strong and it's

scoldy and it cancels people. Well, by lots of people, if you mean MAGA, you're right, because that's the message they're sending. I mean the voters, David, who very clearly voted against Woke. Well, there was a, no, first of all, they didn't very clearly vote against anything. Okay, Trump won a small amount by a small margin and the vast majority of people or a significant majority of people didn't vote. So let's not turn Trump's victory into, you know, a referendum on what the United States feels on everything.

It's also not pretend that woke issues and the culture issues didn't have an impact because they clearly did. People are tired of being told they can't say anything they want. They're frightened of being counsel. Okay, but is that really what they meant or is what they really mean by woke when they take one issue, transgender athletes and athletics, what they really mean is we want white people to be in charge. That's what they really mean when they're saying they're anti-woke.

They want men to be in charge. They want trad wives. They want to turn the clock back. And their campaign against woke is like their campaign. campaign against affirmative action is like their campaign against universities that have too many liberal professors. It's a campaign against 100 years of American progress. They've just cleverly wrapped it in this thing where you can say, well, the Democrats went too far. Okay, maybe some Democrats went too far. But Brown versus Board of Education wasn't too far.

Of course not. Of course not. But the fact they went too far is precisely surely what was underpinning what you just said about Carmelah Harris, who you liked as a candidate, nevertheless, always feeling as if she was about to say the wrong thing, that she was nervous of not saying the right thing. And that's about the woke culture. That's about people being frightened of being cancelled. Now, that's about Democrats trying to win an election and, you know, not alienate parts of their base. And, you know, it's too calculated by half, and it is bad news, and it needs to be moved beyond. But I think the answer there is to, unlike Trump, have real convictions about the things

that Democrats have long believed, inclusive country, creating opportunity, being strong, being patriotic in a healthy way. Those things are the kind of things Republicans attack as well, but they're not woke. They're sensible. All right. So give me your thoughts then on Gavin Newsom. Last night I had dinner with two very prominent people in the entertainment business. They had both started listening to Gavin Newsom's podcast and come around to him, having

thought that he was never going to stand a chance. I was surprised at how pro-Gavin Newsom for president they were. Well, you know, maybe the Democratic Party needs to distance itself from very prominent people in the entertaining Christmas. That's never going to happen. They love those celebs. George Clooney had a seminal role in the last election. Well, he did, but, you know. Dems love them celebs, even though the voters don't care. Yeah, but Gavin Newsom is a shapeshifting chameleon who once was involved with Kimberly Guilford. You know, think about it. I loved your moment when you said that you thought him starting to interview Trump as on his podcast was actually an attempt to win Kimberley back.

Her transformation to Maga is quite extraordinary. How you go from Gavin Newsom to Don Jr. I do not know. Well, it's just, it's a moth to the flame, right? She wants to be where. But what is the flame? The flame is going to burden you. She just wants to be wherever she thinks it's light and hot.

You know, she wants to be. Well, she's going to Greece now. It's ambassador. So she's going to be in the right place. Well, good luck with that. But having said that, Gavin Newsom is one who's going too far, who's meeting with people who are racist, who's promoting agendas that are MAGA agendas.

And it's one thing to be open. It's one thing to be Gretchen Whitmer and to say, here's what needs to be done in Michigan in order to be responsive to the people of Michigan and to be authentic in that way. He just seems to me to be a fraud. I've met him once or twice, and I came away with, this guy was too slick by half. Ronald Reagan came from being governor of California.

He was slick. He also had great hair. I do think it's... Great hair? You will go for all that hair product? I hope no Democrat ever runs with that much hair product. I think it'd be great for the hair products business. I mean, Donald Trump is good for the hair products business, right?

He's figured out you cannot have a bald president in this day and age. But that's not even his hair. It's like a chipmunk on his head. What's the one on with Donald Trump? It's like a confection. I actually think it might be edible, his hair. But if you got near to it and licked it, it would be like that golden sugar, sponge sugar.

Really? Maybe or maybe it would leave your tongue eating. That's the most disgusting idea. Eating Donald Trump's hair will end. Licking. I just said licking. Look at the data on this podcast. It'll end here with licking Donald Trump.

Trump's hair, and it should, frankly. I thought that or you're going to get spun out of the room in the tornado because I can hear the rain. It could happen. And if the last thought I have on this earth is licking Donald Trump's hair, I will come back and haunt you. So you think Gavin Newsom genuinely doesn't have a chance here? He's too slick.

He's too attractive. He's too much hair. He's got a chance because Donald Trump is president. And that means anybody can win an election in the United States. And we've never picked the best person for the job. We always reflect some underlying social change. But here's my theory about 2026 and 2028. And that is, the consultants don't matter.

The politicians themselves don't even matter. What matters is Donald Trump and this administration are going to cause pain in the lives of tens of millions of Americans. And they're going to go to PTA meetings. They're going to go to local townhawps. they're going to talk to their neighbors at barbecues and say, I lost my job because of Donald Trump. I lost my health care coverage because of Donald Trump. I lost my ability to get the operation.

I was hoping to get at the VA because of Donald Trump. And that will defeat him because his policies are terrible. And at the end of the day, according to the United States Constitution, but also in reality, the top job in the U.S. government is voter. The president works for the voter. Trump doesn't real get this, but he is all of our employees, right? He is our employee and the people who are going to be alienated by these terrible policies are the ones who are going to tip the direction of the election.

David, hold that thought. I want to come back to it, but we just need to break for some messages from our beloved sponsors. Big thank you to our sponsors, and we're back now with David Rothkopf. So how come Donald Trump still has the Republican Party in his thrall? Because there are Republicans, congressmen and senators out there who agree with you, who know that a lot of these policies are going to hit their own constituents very badly. And yet they are unable to say no to Donald Trump. I don't know.

To me it's a little bit like an airplane or maybe a house in a tornado, you know, Dorothy getting spun up and the pieces of the house start flying off. And one moment, it looks like a house, and then a couple moments later, it doesn't look like a house anymore, right? So look at the Republican Party. Elon left, and Elon said, I'm not going to spend any more money on politics. Okay, that's a piece coming off of the airplane because he was the biggest single donor last time around, right? And he said he didn't like the big, beautiful bill, right? Right.

And but, you know, he is moving away from that a little bit. Last night, Trump went after, or this is, we're recording this on Friday, but he, you know, He went after the Federalist Society and said Leonard Leo was a sleaze bag and so forth. And it shows Trump is sort of moving on to the post-election part of his career. But do you think saying that the head of the Federalist Society is the sleazeback isn't going to have a consequence, that piece is going to come off of this thing? You know, you had, of all people, Josh Hawley, saying he didn't like parts of this bill. So he is pulling away gradually between now. Is he pulling away or is that actually him pretending that he's stronger than he really is?

Again, performative. I don't know. But what I do know is this. At some point, and Trump is desperately trying to fight this, but at some point, people are going to realize he's a lame duck. He will never run again. He is not the candidate in 2020. I sure hope that Democrats realize that sooner or rather than like, because all these Democrats are like, well, this is how you got to run against Donald Trump. But you're not going to.

going to be running against Donald. All right, hold that thought. As you said, we're recording this on a Friday. Elon Musk announced this week that he was firing himself after firing tens of millions of government workers. Should the Democrats be using Elon either bringing him into the party, using the ex-platform and using his money and being utterly cynical about it, or should they be using the fact that he came out against the big beautiful bill and he's had enough of politics and he's not going

spend any more money in it as an indication of exactly what's wrong with Donald Trump's second administration. The latter, certainly. Democrats are getting mileage out of Elon Musk, thanks to Elon Musk. Stick with it, right? Doge was a disaster. I think you have a piece in the beast by David Gardner giving him an F as his grade. As his grade, yes. And I think that was a generous grade. Because not only did not achieve any goals of savings. I think net net we're going to discover that actually the costs of government went up because of what he did. He caused chaos. He alienated people in and out of the government. Now we're having stories in the New York Times, which are just mind-blowing, literally and figuratively stories about the amount of drugs he takes, about his ketamine addiction.

That story is breaking as we're recording this, that he's had all sorts of medical problems because of his drug taking. Yes, right. I don't know. His bladder problem? I don't know. That's a symptom of ketamine, actually, of taking too much ketamine. Well, you know, I mean, we're not going into the stories that broke yesterday about the thruple

between Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, and Stephen Miller's wife, who is leaving the government to work with Musk on an idea. Musk is a disaster. He's a disaster in Tesla. the basics rockets are blowing up, stock prices are going down. Just if Democrats want to use Musk, just say Musk. Everybody knows what it means. It's bad news.

It was a bad choice. It was catering to the wrong people. And it's an example of Trump's government by four and of billionaires that sends the message to everybody that it's not good for government. it's not good for average people. It's not good for the budget. It's not good for America's standing in the world. So just show them.

Let's report the facts. The rest will take care of itself. Well, that's what we're trying to do in The Beast, over-report the facts, and underreact because the facts speak for themselves. Exactly. All right. So, David, final question. If you are putting money on it right now, and I know this is fantasy politics, but he

Who do you see emerging? I mean, one of the things that people do keep saying about the Democratic parties, there is no leader. There's no one to coalesce around. There's no one who seems to be able to effectively match Trump ego for ego in a way that you were sort of talking about earlier on in the podcast. Who do you see emerging? Well, first of all, Trump's not going to be the candidate. And secondly, they need to start now, right? They do need to start. And they need to start. And they need to start now for a number of reasons. One, that's how long it takes to put together a presidential campaign in this country. Two, Trump is doing so much destruction that one of the things the Democrats are going to have to think about in advance is how do you rebuild? And you can't

rebuild by just saying we're going to go back to Joe Biden times. You have to actually have a new vision for what the government looks like. But here's the thing. Doing a search for a leader isn't going to produce the leader. What's going to produce the leader is the leader leading. That's why people, People like AOC, people like J.V. Prescott, people like Jasmine Crockett, people like Gretchen Whitmer, people who stand up and are heard Jamie Raskin. You know, people go out, they stand up, they're heard, and people say, yeah, I want more of that. I think decisive in all of this is going to be what happens in a year and a half. Because in a year and a half, in all likelihood, assuming they haven't sort of cooked the books and we don't ever have a fair election again,

the Democrats are going to win the midterms, they're going to take over the House. They might take over the Senate. What's going to happen when they take over the House? There are going to be all sorts of investigations and hearings and reveals of big Trump crimes. Sometimes those kind of activities produce stars. And so we'll have to look at that and see whether it produces a star. I think ultimately the candidate that's going to be strongest will be a governor, won't be from the Beltway, won't be somebody from central casting like Gavin Newsom. It'll be somebody who seems authentic and strong and compassionate and in all the best sense of the word, somebody who's focusing on tolerance, growth, strength, opportunity, and leadership. Could that be a J.B. Pritzker? Maybe.

Could that be an AOC? Probably not. Maybe. Because she's out there. And she is actually leading that. Whatever people may say, the reason we're talking about her is she's out there and she's leading. Could it be Wes Moore of Maryland? Could it be Gretchen Whitmer? Could it be Josh Shapiro? Could it be Andy Bashir? There are a lot of people out there. It could be one of the.

Could it be Kamala Harris if she just sort of learns for her past experience? It could be. I don't know. But it's going to be somebody who stands up, doesn't follow the party line, speaks from the heart, is willing to break a few eggs in making the omelet, I was willing to piss a few people off. They can't appear to be captive to the consultants.

And one of the things they've got to do, and I just beg everybody to do this, is stop getting cornered by labels. This is the left. This is progressive. This is centrist. All that stuff doesn't matter anymore. Every single issue that you think of as a progressive issue, fairer taxes, taking care of the climate, sensible gun control regulation, health care for everybody, every single issue is supported by 75 to 80% of Americans. If I gave you the list of issues, you would say those are progressive left.

There are actually mainstream majority issues in this country. What does that mean for Democrats? Own it. Own the issue. Oat 75% of Americans support fairer taxes, more taxes on the rich, more safety net for people who are in need of support, better schools, not killing our universities, not dumbing down our high schools, sensible gun control regulation, caring about climate, not gutting our national parks and putting pipelines wherever there's a tree. So those are the things that are supported by most people.

Own that. Lead that. Speak to the needs of the people, but make sure it seems like because it actually does come from your heart. Well, said. Well, let's hope some people are listening. David, it was Harvard's graduation this week. We know that Trump has created an enemy in Harvard. What are your thoughts about how Harvard should react? Well, I think Harvard has begun to react in the right way, you know,

because they're standing up to him. They hesitated a little bit at first, but they're standing up to him now because they realize that what he is doing is not, you know, waging a war. against anti-Semitism. It has nothing to do with anti-Semitism or waging a war against DEI, even though DEI is fundamentally a good thing. What he's doing is he's trying to, as he is doing across the government, chill free expression in our society, undermine the First Amendment to our Constitution, and he's doing it by attacking Harvard, attacking other universities, attacking the Kennedy Center, attacking research studies that use the word climate or that

use the word trans, you know, even if it means trans fats, which has happened. You know, people have done a study on trans fats. He wouldn't want trans fats because he eats a lot of fast food. No, yeah, no, no. And all I can say is may he continue to eat as many trans fats as he possibly can consume? But, you know, Harvard has stood up to this, and I think they're going to win, going after the school that has produced the most, you know, judges and the most lawyers and the best ones is not the clever anti-elite play that he thinks it is because there are laws

and they can't go after them. But some of what he is doing is also so profoundly destructive that we don't even fully realize the consequence. I'll take something else from this past week. Marco Rubio, who's, you know, three weeks ago we would have said is a wet noodle who's getting ahead because he's a wet noodle. But now he's really part of the inner menacing cabal at the same. center of this administration, said, we're going to go after Chinese visas. We're not going to

give visas to Chinese students. Well, I got news from Marco Rubio. There are studies that show that among America's advanced AI researchers, 40 percent have their undergraduate degree from a Chinese university. What that means if you don't let these Chinese students in the U.S. where they come here to do well and stay, is we are going to gut our ability to compete on the most important new technologies of tomorrow. But, you know, it's worse in that in some respects because they've also announced that what they're going to do is they're going to screen the social media activity of people applying for these visas, which led one Chinese guy in the internet to say, I am now realizing that my social media presence is being scrutinizing.

by two governments by the Chinese government and the U.S. American. And that is, that's where we are right now. We have an authoritarian state. Harvard's the target. But I think at the end of the day, Trump's going to wish he picked a different target. We had a report in The Beast this week that said another of the reasons that Trump is going after Harvard is because he applied and he got rejected. You got to hope that he got rejected because, you know, despite the fact that he had some

money. This is a guy who is an academic failure who apparently didn't even do the work that he was supposed to do it. Penn didn't take his own SATs and whatever. He went as an undergrad to Wharton. He went to Fordham first and then he went as an undergrad to Wharton. But that's why I said Penn. Penn, Penn, Wharton. It's all the same. Right. But significant that he didn't get an MBA from Wharton business school. So he talks as if he did, but actually he went as an undergrad. That's the only reason I raise it. No, no, well, that's absolutely true. I also understand that Barron didn't get into Harvard. But, you know, a lot of the guys around Trump, you know, if you ever want to David. Well, Jared Koshner went to Harvard, famously went to Harvard. Yeah. And a lot of the people

around Trump and at senior levels in the Republican Party went to Harvard. And frankly, that's an indictment of Harvard that is more damning than anything that Trump's going to come up with. Well, and I think a lot of them went to the business school, right, or the law school, which is slightly different to going to Harvard undergrad. If we're really passing it here. You have really picked up. I've really paid it. Sub-currents of Eastern U.S. elitism. That's absolutely right. How could I not?

I'm originally British. No, no, because everybody I know who ever went to Harvard, you know, first of all, they try not to mention it. They try to be very subtle about it. They say things like, oh, I'm a Boston Red Sox fan. And it's like, you, what? Are you there? Yeah. Right.

Right. And it's like that's just their way of saying, oh, yeah. Well, where'd you go to school? I went school in Cambridge. Right. Oh. Oh, you went school in. But then if you say, well, I went to Harvard business.

school or I went to Harvard Law School. They'll go, yes, I went to the college. Yeah. I went to undergraduate, you know, and you're right. There is a certain form of snobbery there. The thing I, can I just point out, the thing that I really find amusing is when people go on those weak management courses, week-long management courses at Harvard Business School, and then when you look at their LinkedIn profile, it's the first thing you read.

It says Harvard Business School. And you're like, oh, interesting. I wouldn't have plugged you. I wouldn't have thought of you as someone at Harvard Business School. Yeah, no, same is true at the Harvard Business School. extension programs and like, you know, fisheries or whatever. It's a luxury brand, as Scott Galloway would say. Well, but, you know, I think, and a serious point about that, if the United States makes

it hard for students to come here, not only are we not going to get students, we're not going to get scientists, we're going to lose competitiveness. But a lot of these brands are going to up themselves and disconnect geographically. And they'll have universities. I mean, you know, there's NYU in Abu Dhabi. There's an NYU in China. Right. You're going to start to see more of these universities locate themselves overseas because

people want the brand. And if they can't come to the U.S., they won't come to the U.S. And some point, somebody's going to say, hey, we want them to come here. That makes us a stronger country. But, you know, Trump. And the president of China's daughter was, her undergraduate degree was from Harvard. I mean, Nelskevel pointed this out in a column she did last week. And she had...

Who also went to Harvard? Let's be true. You know... Nell also went to Harvard. So she... And she's been very dogged about reporting. She did excellent reporting about the protests there last year. But her point was that she'd assumed that the most important American brands in the world were probably McDonald's or Subway sandwich.

And in fact, it turned out to be Harvard. And the idea that you take America's most popular brand and diminish it as Trump has done is, is bewildering. There will be a Harvard long after there is a Trump. There will be respect for Harvard for centuries into the future. People will do everything in their power

to forget that Trump ever existed. David Rothcob, thank you very much. Always fun to talk to you. And let's do it again soon, please. Anytime, you're the boss. I'll be here when you need. In my dreams, I'm the boss, David, in my dreams. I felt that we ended on a note of

optimism there, which is a good thing given the drama around American politics at the moment. But David has such wisdom. He's worked in an administration. He understands the actual difficulty of administering government policies. And I love talking to him. If you have been, thank you for listening. Feel free to subscribe to the Daily Bee. Subscribe to this podcast. And please leave us a comment. We really read them. I mean, we got 5,000 comments and counting for Michael Wolf's last podcast. And the writers read us. the comments too. And it does help us think about what else you want to hear about. And I love the mini threads of conversations that go on within the commentary. So have a good week. And of course,

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