The Daily Beast Podcast - Zuck’s Secret Trump Rendezvous Before Big Policy Change

Episode Date: January 12, 2025

Multibillionaire Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with President-elect Donald Trump the day before he announced his company’s big fact check flip-flop, revealed Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma—further revealing how Silicon Valley’s tech elite is moving to align itself with the incoming Republican administration. “I really think we do need to really clock how bad this tech Republican collusion is,” said The New Abnormal co-host Andy Levy. Plus! Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, and also chair of the Senate Finance Committee, joins to talk about his new book, It Takes Chutzpah: How to Fight Fearlessly for Progressive Change. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. Senator Ron White and Senior Senator from Oregon and Chair of the Senate Finance Committee joins us to talk about his new book, It Takes Hudson, How to Fight Fearlessly for Progressive Change, and the bold strategy that Democrats need to tackle health care, housing, and tax reform.

But first, let's have some fun. Are you guys ready to listen to some clips? No, actually. Clips! It's a New Year's New Year's Clips. Oh, is it a New Year, New Year's? Is that what you just said that? Yeah, yeah.

So that's the bullshit I'm spittick. Oh, great. All right. Well, you're going to know I'm lying in like two seconds. So Senator Mark Wayne Mullen, a turn of phrase I really, really hate to say, is here with Betty Johnson. And let me tell you, here he's going to spill the goods on what's going on with Mark Zuckerberg changing meta's policy of fact checking. Mark met with President Trump the day before he made the announcement that they were going to. to change the way that they do censorship, essentially.

It's a big announcement that he made the other day. President Trump and him spoke about that. And Mark had been down to see the president several times already. Mark has actually reached out to me, text me a couple times. The guy's got into jih Tutsu real heavy. He wants me to come down there and roll with him. He wants to train. He actually wants to get in a cage and fight.

He said, I'd love for you to come down as far with me. Sometimes I think that'd be great to go down there and do that. So a lot of these people have changed because here's what I told the president, Trump, is that. Senator, you get a chance to kick Mark Zuckerberg's ass? Senator. Senator. I, what? This is the world we're living in.

Mark Zuckerberg going on with a $900,000 watch and talking about how I'm going to now endanger people by making sure that we never get involved in the stupidest things that happened in the fever swamp of his apps. I cannot take someone whose last name is Wayne Mullen seriously. Is the first name Mark Wayne or is it the last name Wayne Mullen? Oh, maybe it's money. Either way, it's fucking stupid. Like either way, it's dumb. And he looks like his name. Do you know what I'm saying?

And I don't care. Keep that in, cut it out. It's the truth. Are his parents Thomas Wayne and Martha Wien? Mm-mm. That's a Batman joke. Oh, oh, okay. My peeps will get it.

Okay. I'm glad. I'm glad somebody was going to get it. Regardless, I really think we do need to really clock how bad this tech Republican collusion is. And if we ever have the chance to do have power again, let there be a very, very stiff hand coming down on how these people behave. And I say nationalize them. Mm. Mm-mm-mm.

But then where would all the donors go? Yeah. It really is true. Some people I really don't care about, it's the donors. I do have bad news. We have more of these two fools talking this time. They're going to do a play-by-play on President Carter's funeral. Oh, my God.

Why, Jesse? Why? Right? I mean, the greatest political comeback of all times. And what you see right there is Barack Obama realizing it and realized that he kind of probably should kiss a ring because President Trump is the most popular man in the world and probably the most popular man in our lifetime around the world. And everybody recognizes that now. And the president sits in President Trump is setting in a good spot and he's very relaxed. I mean, I've seen a completely different side of him since November 6th, that he's very relaxed,

very happy and is willing to just kind of put bygones behind him and move forward. That's wonderful to see and to hear, and I know you're very close with the president. In what alternate fucking universe do they think that Donald Trump is popular around the world? Like literally, I just read headline after headline of every European world leader coming out in dismay over Donald Trump's fuckery and he has not even been inaugurated yet. Like the man is as popular as spoiled milk, like at a cereal factory. Like he is not. He's disgusting. And everyone knows it.

I'm annoyed that Barack Obama was even caught up like fucking giggling and doing whatever. And I have friends that are saying, oh, well, you know, maybe he just felt like he had to have decorum. Fucking Bush walked by him and Pence walked by him. Padded him on the stomach. Yeah, pat on his stomach. Like, it's just other people don't give him the time of day. So I was annoyed by seeing the images come out knowing that that was going to be. all of the clips that we're going to come out.

We're going to be him and Obama smiling together. Yeah, that was, as the kids say, a bad look, I think, for Obama. But to get back to, you know, this whole most popular man, an American most popular man in the world thing, this is sort of like, this is the Big Lie Part 2. And the Big Lie Part 1 was that Trump won in 2020. And the big lie part 2 is that 2024 was a landslide. Yep.

And, you know, they've been pushing this since Election Day, basically. And, you know, Trump saying over and over again that he's won the biggest victory in, you know, the history of America, basically, and just other similarly nonsensical things are just being parroted by the right, as always, because they are as beta as it gets to use their own terminology. And that's what he's doing here. And he's trying to make it seem like Trump has a mandate because he's just look at how popular he is. He won the biggest last. which, you know, again, he didn't, but they keep saying it over and over again. And people who, it's bad enough that the MAGA idiots believe it, there are people who should know better, who I've seen parroting it. So to me, that's what that's what that is, that's what that's all about. So the one thing I will say, he's definitely not popular in the world, but I was dismayed to see that in the pupil, he's the most popular he's ever been. And here's a thing the three of us regularly discuss that I tend to come down on that I trust the Democrats strategy a little bit more

than you two. Here's where I'm going to go with you two and say, this is a fucking failure of the Democrats that he is at all popular. And they should have spent every minute since this election was decided making sure that they tar and feather him because this is an atrocity. Now, granted, I think that number is going to fall like nothing we've seen before. Sure. You mean like a fall like our democracy. Well, it might go in sync together. I'm like swathes diving, but that's a different story.

I think that's absolutely right. And that's why Obama's sitting there and laughing with him is not great. Well, speaking of, here we have brain genius, Fox News, Jesse Waters. He's going to tell you guys the real stuff about this economy,

what's really going on. You guys better listen. Biden's handing Trump a fiscal ticking time bomb and it's threatening to blow up at any minute. A two trillion dollar deficit that's freaking out the bond market. Trump's coming in ready to rewire the last four years. Is that your friend, Andy? Me? Yeah. J. Dub. Isn't that what you call? Yeah, yeah, that's what I call. Yeah, we hang out at the frat house together a lot. A lot of beer pong. A lot of beer pong, a lot of quarters, a lot of casual sexual harassment, you know. Deflating women's tires. Just what bro.

do. That is kind of what Bruce is too. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Didn't Donald Trump add, I'm sorry, maybe I lost count, but wasn't it $7 trillion that he added after his first administration? 8.8 trillion. Oh, okay. So Donald Trump in his first term added $8.8 trillion to the deficit. And Jesse Waters over there is mumbling what now? Ugh. You know what? I don't care. Dumbest person on cable news. I just think it's funny because obviously these people see where these tariffs are heading. Yep. And they're trying to get the soil nice and ripe for these people to say, oh yeah, it was definitely not Trump's economic policies that crashed the economy. It was a ticking time bomb. Brandon left him.

That Brandon left him. Yeah. That really healthy economy and skirting it's skirting off a fucking. recession and lowering inflation and yeah and lowering prescription drug costs canceling student loan debt yeah yeah he definitely left him a fucking sewer Ron Wyden is the senior senator from the great state of Oregon and the chair of the Senate Finance Committee and I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that he's beloved by defenders of privacy rights by opponents of the surveillance state and by proponents of internet freedom along with many other fans of civil liberties What an inflationary introduction. I think it's all true.

The Senator is also the author of a new book. It Takes Hutzpah, How to Fight Fearlessly for Progressive Change Out This Week. He joins me now. Senator, thanks so much for being here. Appreciate it. So talk to me about Hutzpah. In the book, you say that it's the only tool you've had at your disposal throughout your 52 years in public life. What do you mean by that?

First of all, I wanted to write a very different book. You know, most books that are written by Congress critters, really have a kind of regular kind of you can follow it easily kind of frame. I mean, they usually spend a fair amount of time bragging, talking about all the great things they've done. Then there's a section where their friends are urging them to run for president. They feigned its interest, but that's a big part of section two. And then the third is basically telling them about their exploratory committee. And if you want to, you can support them at the exploratory committee at 20 different sites. And what I wanted to do was write a book about something that I've been interested

for a long time, and that is being bolder, being more nervy, being more audacious. And as I looked at it, you know, Hutzpah is basically the indispensable instrument for doing that and also being part of what we'd use called Taccunalam, which is perfecting the world. So I'm excited about the chance, particularly now when people are looking for more than blah kind of political discussions to really get in to some approaches that are going to empower people. I mean, I'm giving you an example. Something came up the last few days. After you get through the holidays, very often people come back to work in January and they want to ask for promotions and they want to ask for raises. There have been some recent studies with respect to women on those issues and women go, well, I'm not sure I ought to be

asking, maybe I ought to just wait a little bit, and I'm going to have some people who are going to say, ah, that's exactly the kind of issue where if you have some Hutzpah, you can get a promotion, you can get an opportunity to get additional money to pay for essentials and support your family. Those are the kinds of things we're going to talk about so that whether you're in government, whether you're a small business person, whether you're in health care, you can use Hutzp to better your life in the world. One of the things that you talk about in the book that I think is very important, you say Donald Trump demonstrates how you can use a malicious imitation of chutzpah for evil ends.

I thought that was so important, and you say it also of other Republicans, because it's so easy to simply say, well, Donald Trump has a lot of chutzpah, so maybe chutzpah ain't so great. Well, I just basically say, look, the rabbinical literature makes it very clear that there are two kinds of chutzpah. There's chutzpah, as I said, that helps you perfect the world, and I gave some examples. And the one that, I mean, everybody remembers is Donald Trump essentially said that he could shoot people on a busy street in Manhattan and they would still support him. And I think something like that warps the whole notion of being self-confident and really is trying to use influence and audaciousness for something that really is not good for American. And so those kinds of examples certainly abound with Donald Trump and looking at the book.

The message of the book is obviously universal, but it is very much, I thought, a Jewish book. And you mentioned earlier that one of the things you talk about a lot in the book is Tikhan Olam. Explain what that is and why it's so important to you. Well, that's Judaism and its best. It's perfecting the world. And it's really the flip side on this whole question of, you know, Hutzp, what's the Hutz before? I come down strongly, and that's why I like good chutzpah and bad hutzpah if I'm on a show, and people are just starting to get familiar with the issue is, you know, good chutzpah,

and we've had so many examples of it in terms of American life. In fact, I think it would be fair to say, guys, that much of what is good in America, to a great extent, was promoted by hutzp. I mean, people like Abe Lincoln, for example, what a majestic force he was in terms of standing up in terms of for equal rights and fighting slavery. Founding fathers would be another example. You know, going after the Brits, there'd be Martin Luther King. We've got the King birthday coming up.

Those are all examples of Hutzpah at its best perfecting the world. And it's the kind of Hutzpah that I want people to embrace and not these examples of bad hutzpah that I outline in the book. So you have in the book, you have 12 rules of Hutzpah. And obviously, we don't have time to get into all of them. But can you pick out a handful that you think you'll be relying? on the most in the coming years. I feel like the very first rule is if you want to make change, you've got to make noise. I feel like that definitely applies with its sort of echoes of the late

John Lewis's never ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble. John Lewis said it better than anybody. And making noise is also consistent with using the noise to generate, you know, change. And that's why I've got rules like never miss an unexpected moment. For example, the $600 a week that we got for unemployed folks during the COVID kind of period, we found the weakness that we weren't expecting in the Trump administration's arguments. They said, oh, there's no examples of sending checks out this way. We basically just went online with our phones and came up with some examples. And Steve Mnuchin basically didn't know how to oppose it.

Scalia, who's as conservative as his late father was, basically didn't know how to do it. And we got that billions and billions of dollars worth of people who we wanted to make sure didn't make their family sick and they could still support them and pay the rent and groceries. So talk about some of the other rules that you have. I'm just looking at them. Here's another one that's very topical. Just yesterday, the Biden administration finalized my clean energy tax credit rules. And these rules made up the biggest investment in fighting climate change in American history. We'd had 50 years worth of gridlock, no cap and trade, no carbon pricing, no nothing. And what I did after cap and trade went down in 2010, you couldn't even get a hearing in the Senate. I started working on some fresh approaches.

And when I settled on, and the New York Times had a piece on it, a long piece, in fact, just in the last couple of days, was really to promote science and innovation. Nobody knows what the big carbon reducers are going to be 30 years from now. So let's say that we're going to have a. an approach that's technologically innovative, technologically neutral, and will encourage a variety of different sources. And we call that playing the long game, not just going in for a short, quick hit. There's a rule that I found really interesting where you say compromise isn't about horse trading bad ideas for each other. It's about blending good ideas together into a hole that's

better than the sum of its parts. And I found that really interesting because all too often in Washington, compromise does seem to be between maybe a good idea and a bad idea and you add up with an idea that's, you know, somewhere in the middle. Yeah, what we're trying to say is bipartisanship is not about taking each other's lousy ideas. Anybody can do that and get dressed up in a dark suit and go out and say, look at us. We're bipartisan. I mean, what we need to do is have principled bipartisanship, which is based on, you know, good ideas and not just people's being verbally bipartisan, but really mostly looking for ideological trophies rather than good deeds that help people. The very last of your 12 rules is political capital doesn't earn

interest and is worth nothing if you don't spend it. Yeah, the example that we use in the book is President Obama invited me to the Oval Office to talk with him on the third day of his first term because I've really specialized in health. And as I look back on it, I think that if he had spent some of his political capital. You know, early on, we could have had a bipartisan, you know, package, and we could have had universal coverage. And Americans who weren't on Medicare and the military would have coverage like their member of Congress. Yeah, that's an absolutely perfect example. The book is utterly delightful. And as you say, it's very, very much different from most of the books that senators or Congress people write. And in fact, rather than it being sort of a stealth

call for people to support you for president, you very, very clearly and strongly say, You ain't interested. I say I'm the Senate's designated driver. I think I'm the only one who is verbally announced that I am not running for president. So what I'll do is let everybody run around the presidential racetrack, and I'll be available to take the intoxicated folks home if it doesn't work out, and they want to get back to work. But we've got big challenges.

I mean, you're asking about what's ahead. I mean, the tax system is something that works incredibly well for the people. people at the very top, to a great extent if you're a billionaire, you can pay what you want when you want to. Well, the firefighter and the nurse pay taxes with every, you know, paycheck. And I'm trying to change that. And I think that relates to the rule guys, because you asked about some of them where I see my job is stopping bad ideas and advancing good ideas. And that's what I'm working on. Yeah, that's great. I want to ask you about some things that are in the news these days. Just after New Year's, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that the

Federal Communications Commission lacks the authority to issue net neutrality rules. What do you think this is going to mean going forward? I think it warps the vision of what the Internet ought to look like. And, you know, I showed up in the United States Senate when only Pat Leahy knew how to use a computer. And I didn't act like I had all the answers and the like. But, you know, I went out and started asking questions. I wrote the digital signatures law with Republicans. Republicans and Democrats, the Internet tax, non-discrimination acts that you get treated fairly when you're shopping online. And this decision, and by the way, you know, Trump's new nominee is, you know, clearly supportive of unraveling, you know, net neutrality. This is the point.

You know, what we ought to have in America is after you pay your Internet access fee, everybody gets treated the same. You get to go where you want, when you want, how you want. And basically what these people on the far right want to do is set up lanes of privilege to get fast-track services, extra services for people, you know, who have deep pockets. And I'm going to fight that as long as I'm in public life because I think this is a fundamental aspect of speech in the First Amendment. And I want everybody to have a chance to be heard. That's great. I want to ask you about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. You, Chris Cox in the House, were the authors of this.

And it has led to people referring to you guys as sort of the fathers of the, or the creators, almost, of the modern internet. Section 230 is constantly under assault, often by people who either don't understand what it does or pretend not to understand what it does. Do you think these attacks are going to become even more blatant under Trump 2.0? The first thing I want everybody to understand that the philosophical issue is, are you going to give people with, modest financial assets, a chance to be heard online. And what we set out to do from the very beginning is give voices to those people. I, for example, I'm not convinced that Me Too or the Black Lives Matter could have gotten off the ground without something like Section 230. And the big guys, big tech, they'll always be able to take care of themselves. They'll always have deep pockets.

They'll be able to buy as much damn content as they could possibly want. What we sought to do, And it's still what 230 is all about is stand up for those people who don't have deep pockets and ought to have a right to be heard. And we're going to have some of these same issues as it relates to AI, you know, Center Booker and Congresswoman Yvette Clark and I have introduced the algorithm accountability act. Part of what we're trying to do is we have all these grandiose ideas about AI. We want to protect people's health care and jobs and education. Yeah, no, that's fantastic. And I just, it just strikes me, though, that every time Section 230 is brought up, by someone who doesn't like it, they don't seem to even understand what it does, or they

pretend they don't understand what it does. That is, that's true. And, you know, part of this is I try to get people to listen. I said, you know, look, this is not that complicated. We basically said this was about individual responsibility. The person who puts up the content is liable for what they have posted. They are the one who's taking personal responsibility. You can't commit crimes and this kind of thing.

And once you talk about that, people begin to see, okay, there's a difference between a website and, you know, publisher and the content, you know, people and the like. So I think we'll have another debate about that, I'm sure, in the next Congress. And I'm going to continue to try to say this is always about two things. One, personal responsibility in terms of, you know, posting and the like and making sure the voices of people who don't have a lot of dough in their pocket get heard. So back in April of last year, the Senate passed the protecting Americans for. from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, better known as the quote-unquote TikTok band. The act would force the Chinese company that owns TikTok, a company named BiteDance, to sell that platform or TikTok would be banned in the U.S.

This is going to the Supreme Court as we are taping this, I think tomorrow. You voted against this bill, didn't you? Yeah. And I want to make sure these voices get heard. In other words, we're talking about whether TikTok should be American, talking about whether we should have it. I'm in favor of the widest array of voices that we can possibly have. In particular, I come back to what I just said about Section 230 and said, you know, I want to hold individuals personally responsible if they're advocating criminal activity and the like.

And if they're not, I want to make sure that there's a lot of opportunity for people of modest means to be successful. And, you know, we've seen careers built around those voices. And, you know, let's see what the court, you know, ends up doing. But, you know, I want to, I want to have a chance to, and the young people come to my town hall meetings, and they also were glad you're sticking up for making sure that one way or another we're going to have this as a option. And I'm going into this home stretch debate that way. Absolutely. Switching topics a little bit. A few days ago, the House passed the Lake and Riley Act, which among other things requires the Department of Homeland Security to detain non-US nationals who have been arrested for theft-related crimes. That's arrested, not convicted.

It goes to the Senate now. The ACLU says that if it's passed, it'll strengthen Trump's hand in unleashing mass deportations on our communities. But there are some Democrats who are lining up to support it. Where do you stand on this? Well, here's where we are, and I'm actually going to be going to the floor in a little bit to kind of work through it. At the end of the year, we had a Democratic and a Republican effort to work out a immigration bill that came to the floor and we would have a real debate and there would be votes on it up or down. And Donald Trump basically came in, barked and the whole thing kind of vanished. So we didn't even have a chance to debate. One of the things that I'm concerned about is if we just say we're not going to debate,

you know, we're going to repeat this again and again and again. We're never going to get down to working these issues out. Now, do I disagree? with a number of these issues that Donald Trump is advocating in this? Absolutely. Do I want to get on the debate? I think it's a prerequisite. And for those of us who all through the campaign season talked about Donald Trump contributing significantly to this mess by not giving us a chance, basically barked, and then all of a sudden we didn't have a debate. So stay tuned. And I think that there's going to be a lot more discussion on it. I certainly, apropos of your question, if there was a bill on final passage with the kind of practice you just described, I would never vote for it. Good to know.

I only have like a minute left. So my last question to you is, do you worry that the Democratic Party is not up for the challenge of the next four or four plus years? I'm concerned that we understand how important it is to set aside business as usual and be bolder, and particularly on areas like health care and housing and the kinds of priorities that you and I are talking about. I think that the challenge is in areas like taxes, we're going to have to take on some big special interest groups. And they're going to be trying to supercharge what they got in 2017, which was disproportionate share of the goodies. We got to block it. And then I got ideas for being bold and taking us to a much better future that gives everybody in America the chance to get ahead, underlying everybody, not just the

people at the top. The book is It Takes Chutzpah How to Fight Fearlessly for Progressive Change. It is out on Tuesday. Senator Ron Wyden, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate your time. Looking forward to doing it again. Take good care. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of the new abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder. Want more great listens? Check out our comments. comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at thedailybeast.com slash podcasts.

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