The Daily - Ring-Kissing, Lawsuits and a Looming Shutdown

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

Weeks before his inauguration, President-elect Donald J. Trump is pushing the federal government toward a shutdown, corporate titans are flocking to Mar-a-Lago to gain his favor and a major media company has capitulated to Trump’s legal strategy of suing those who cross him.The Times journalists Michael Barbaro, Maggie Haberman, Catie Edmondson and Andrew Ross Sorkin try to make sense of it all.Guest: Maggie Haberman, a senior political correspondent for The New York Times.Catie Edmondson, a congressional correspondent for The New York Times.Andrew Ross Sorkin, a columnist and the founder and editor-at-large of DealBook.Background reading: The government is lurching toward a shutdown after the House tanked Trump’s spending plan.The billionaire rivals Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are said to have dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro. This is The Daily. Donald Trump is now officially against passing the funding bill that would avoid a government shutdown four days before Christmas. Weeks before his inauguration, President-elect Trump is pushing the federal government toward a shutdown. Look at the list of CEOs who are either shelling out big money or meeting with Trump in person or both.

We're talking about CEOs from TikTok, Google, Apple, Netflix. The country's corporate titans are flocking tomorrow lago to curry Trump's favor. Today, ABC News agreed to give $15 million to Donald Trump's president. And a major media company has capitulated to Trump's legal strategy of suing those who cross him. To make sense of all of this, I gathered three of my colleagues, senior political correspondent Maggie Haberman, congressional reporter Katie Edmondson, and financial columnist and the founder of Dealbook, Andrew Ross Sorkin. It's Friday, December 20th.

Everyone, welcome to the Roundtable. Katie, Maggie, Andrew, thank you all for making time for us. Thank you for having us. Thanks, Michael. Thanks, Michael. Okay, let's jump right in. We are talking to the three of you at a very live news moment, 12.33 p.m. on Thursday, with a government shutdown looming. And I mentioned that timing because events could change after we tape.

There could, for example, be a deal to try to avert a shutdown. But I think shutdown is where we need to start this conversation. And unlike many of the threatened partial or full government shutdowns that have happened over the past couple of years, this one kind of came out of nowhere, right? Does that feel like an accurate statement? Who here wants to jump in? Katie? I can pick it up because I've been through many of these spending fights now and the last few of them have been fairly anticlimactic. They've made it through the Senate to President

Biden's desk really without much drama. And I think we generally had an idea that that was going to happen again this time. And of course, that's not what happened. Instead, when Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, unveiled the spending bill that he negotiated with Democrats, it included a litany of other measures, including $100 billion in disaster aid for the American Southeast. But it also had all of these other provisions

that were added to it. And so when this bill was unveiled, there was a wide swath of Republicans in the House who were furious with it. And then of course, we had Elon Musk weigh in and that really began sort of the final death rattle for this bill. Andrew, pick up where Katie leaves off. Elon Musk, not traditionally a participant in Congressional spending bill negotiations. Why is he involved and what exactly does he do?

This to me is the beginning of the movie that we've all been waiting to see and Wonder how the drama plays out which is to say that we've all seen Elon Musk around the table with President-elect Trump literally But we haven't really known, in fact, I think a lot of people have been skeptical about just how much power he may or may not have. Well, he used it and we saw it. Just describe what he did and what it ends up doing, and then Maggie, we'll get to how Trump responds to that. He took to Twitter, or I should say X, and said, this bill should not pass. Full stop. His partner in Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, Vivek Ramaswamy, also took to Twitter and to

TikTok, after having read 1,500 plus pages of the bill and said, this bill should not pass. Hmm. For the reasons Katie suggested that suddenly it's larded up with stuff? Because of exactly how much it was larded up with stuff, specifically pointing out that Congress was effectively giving itself a pay raise for the first time in 14 years. They were going to be paying for part of the stadium that the commanders, the Washington commanders,

were playing in. I mean, there was what they call pork in this bill. And Elon Musk said, no, Moss, we're not doing this. And Trump said, we're not doing this. Maggie, who's leading who by the nose here? I mean, Elon Musk does all that stuff. What does the president elect to? Donald Trump does not need goosing or juicing to be against this particular bill, at least publicly. The question is not which one of them got the other riled up,

they clearly got each other riled up. The question is what did Trump actually know about what was in this bill before this all started? There are things in this bill that he wasn't going to like and that I think should have been pretty clear to Mike Johnson. So Elon Musk and Donald Trump were going to, I think, both arrive

at this place pretty naturally. This is not one following the other. And now Trump is very dramatically taking the lead and gave a bunch of interviews to television reporters on Thursday morning saying various versions of why this bill shouldn't exist and why maybe Mike Johnson shouldn't be the speaker if he can't push through what Trump wants Okay. So Katie once Trump publicly agrees with Elon Musk. This is a bad bill. It should be blown up go back to the drawing board What actually happens in the house that brings us to this point where it seems like we might actually have a government shutdown as of? to night at midnight or so. Well, I think it was pretty clear that this particular piece of legislation was on life

support once Elon started tweeting, frankly. We heard from Republicans who were whipping votes on this, that they knew that they were hemorrhaging votes every time Elon tweeted. So when Trump weighs in, it basically pushes this bill that was sort of on the edge, just over the cliff. And Republicans realize that that is not going to be a viable option. And Speaker Johnson is trying to figure out what is a package they can put forward that has the votes to pass that is going to be able to placate these, you know, widely divergent factions within his conference that we've talked so much about. And a real problem for him is that Trump added another stipulation, which is he said, also, I need Republicans in this funding package to lift the debt ceiling, to suspend the debt

ceiling, because that is a fight I do not want to have on my watch. He actually says in his statement something to the effect of raising the debt ceiling is never great, but if we're going to do it, let's do it on Biden's watch. Explicitly. So suddenly on top of blowing up a bill that he and Elon Musk think are inconsistent with his efforts to make government smaller, he's suddenly now asking Congress to increase the debt ceiling, which is not very Republican and not very government efficient, right Andrew? And do it not on his watch, because it's not consistent with what he thinks of as a self-image, but on the current president's watch. But K.D. Republicans hate voting for raising the debt ceiling and Dems aren't going to give them a win right now, I suspect, because

they don't want to give Donald Trump a win. Does that equal deadlock and therefore shut down? Well, this is where the math gets really complicated, right? As you pointed out, there are a number of Republicans who have said they do not want to vote for a debt ceiling increase at all. There are a number of Republicans who have said that they'll vote for a debt ceiling increase, but only if it's paired with sweeping spending cuts, which again is not going to happen on the watch of a Democratic controlled Senate and White House.

And so then it does become a question of, is there a block of those ultra conservative Republicans who are willing to walk the plank because it is what President-elect Trump has demanded? And I think it's also an open question, is there a small group of Democrats, maybe particularly those in tough districts who just went through a bruising reelection, who maybe want to show off their bipartisan bona fides by saying, you know, I will work with Republicans

to avert a shutdown before the holidays. I don't know what the answer is yet. We still have to figure that out. To the degree that we think this is Elon Musk's first real exercise of raw power, even if Trump might have eventually gotten there, are we now witnessing the risk of empowering whimsical billionaires in the way that Trump is starting to do? So Rand Paul this morning suggested that Elon Musk should become the speaker of the House. You laugh, but I think to some extent he was serious with that suggestion.

By the way, you don't apparently have to be elected to that role, interestingly enough. So to the Elon Musk piece of it real quick, I do think this was the first demonstration of his quote unquote power in a true political sense in that for a very long time he has made lots of proclamations on X but has mostly been screaming into the wind. But now he clearly has the ear of the president-elect. But more importantly, he's able to take that and the power of being able to galvanize this entire community behind him, I think changes the dynamic. And so I do think this is sort of that first demonstration. What that really means, I don't think we really know. But, you know, we've all talked about, you know, will he be able to do things? Is it just on the margins that he'll be able to do things?

This is not the margins. Through executive actions and the like? or is it through, you know, will he actually be able to persuade Congress to do things? Well, this is actually a persuasion, if you will, of Congress to do something. So I think this is sort of the first example that we're all watching and trying to understand. I have the question, Maggie, of whether Trump assumes that because he's not yet president a shutdown if it happens for all the reasons that he wants it to now happen won't be something he gets blamed for.

Is that true? And is that actually pretty reasonable political thinking at this moment? Right. I mean look, I think it is true that he, that is what he thinks. Whether he's right or not, Michael, I mean, you know, Trump forced a shutdown when he was president, and he was pretty surprised that he ended up getting blamed for it. But Trump doesn't suffer a ton of durable blame. I think that most voters are fairly tuned out right now. If there's a shutdown and people are not getting paid, they are going to blame, in part, they'll blame president Biden-ish, but really they're

going to blame the house Republicans because that's who's going to take the fall and Trump will just point it back to them. I don't think it's going to have a meaningful difference. I don't think it's helpful though, for Republicans who are entering with unified control, Congress, Senate, the White House, just as they did in 2017, to begin this way with this kind of chaos. Is there a world in which Trump benefits from this because he's really just delivering on what he said throughout the campaign he's going to do?

The whole point of having Doge was to carry out the promise of making government smaller and being really disruptive. What is more disruptive than before you're even president? Disrupting business as usual. A bill that's supposed to keep the government running that funds a pay raise from members of Congress, which I doubt most Americans want, or a stadium for the commanders, which I doubt most Americans think Congress should be doing. So is this a very early and wise reading of the room by Trump that's going to work out pretty well for him potentially? I don't know.

I don't think the promise was 20 days of a shutdown. Right? Agreed. I think that most people would agree that there's probably a lot of inefficiency in our government that would be rooted out that the American people would love to see. I don't know that having a shutdown, which, you know, the shutdown in 2018 that Maggie referred to as partial shutdown, this would be a full shutdown unless Congress passed some sort of interim measure, right?

Was the promise having the troops furloughed? Was the promise having government services TSA over the holidays furloughed? I don't really think that was the pledge, right? The pledge was we are going to take everything you hate about government and get rid of it, not we're going to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We are going to get to a point where Trump has been doing a lot of promises made, promises kept, but the promises made, promises kept so far are about the kinds of appointees he

wants to make or his vows of trying to curtail the media and so forth and so on. Those are not things that impact voters' daily lives. And to Katie's point, once we start getting to whether people's daily lives are impacted positively or not by him, that's what his presidency will ride or die on. You know, Trump never publicly talked about true hardship in terms of what his policies would create. However, his new partner in crime, what his policies would create. However, his new partner in crime, Elon Musk, actually did. Elon Musk took to X and said, if we follow through these policies, there will be temporary hardship.

Used the word hardship, interestingly. I paid attention to it. I don't know if most voters were paying attention to it. But for a lot of the policies that we're all talking about, the president wanting to enact, it is almost impossible to believe that they can be enacted without actually some form of temporary hardship. Now Elon Musk and President-elect Trump would suggest to you that there is temporary hardship now and it's a better world on the other side.

But there's a real question about how politically palatable it is for the American public to go through, quote, temporary hardship. We're going to take a break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about how all of this, I think, connects to a much larger phenomenon, which is just how bound up this second Trump presidency already has become not just with Elon Musk But with all of corporate America, so we'll be right back Andrew, what preceded this shutdown drama was a week in which corporate titans, one by one, from tech to Wall Street media, have started to really pay homage to President-elect Trump. And I've come to think of this as a kind of great genuflection.

Can you just give us a description of what that has looked like, the scale of it? And then I know, Maggie, you have lots of perspective on that as well from your reporting at Morillago. Well, look, most of corporate America going into this election, in truth, was not a supporter of President Trump. This was a book, you would call it, if you can't beat them, join them. And so you have many of the top 20 companies in America, CEO of Amazon, CEO of Google, Alphabet, Apple, the list is extensive. And all of them are going to Mar-a-Lago in truth to kiss the ring.

They think of it as practical. They don't think of it as hypocritical. Back in 2016, I think a lot of CEOs didn't go down to Mar-a-Lago because they were skittish. They were skittish in part because their employees were skittish. They were skittish in part because I think the country broadly was truly skittish. That's not to suggest the country isn't broadly skittish today, but I think they see Trump as somebody who likes the relationship. And it's almost in opposition to President Biden who did not take the meeting. President Biden was not meeting with CEOs in America,

didn't want to meet with CEOs in America, wanted to meet with union leaders in America, but not CEOs. And so they all see this as an opportunity to effectively get in front of the President and hope, not that they can persuade him of something today, but that as the debate over tariffs goes on, for example, that they will be able to make a call later. And if you're Tim Cook at Apple and you're worried about tariffs in China where you manufacture

a majority of your iPhones, you're hoping that you're going to be able to pick up the phone and call him in a couple of months and say, you know what, I have an idea about creating a carve out for, you know, a certain type of electronics product from a certain region in China. And we can come up with an explanation for why that particular area won't have the same tariff as other parts of China. Right. That's what's going on here. Maggie, I want to play a brief clip of how Donald Trump has been experiencing this ring

kissing that Andrew has just described. He was asked about it and this is what he said. One of the big differences between the first term and the first term, everybody was fighting me. In this term, everybody wants to be my friend. I don't know. My personality changed or something. Maggie.

So this is like the purest form of delight Trump could have, is all of these wealthiest people in the world, Bezos, Elon Musk, a bunch of tech leaders coming and seeking his favor. And it's not just tech leaders, Michael. He had Justin Trudeau troop down to Mar-a-Lago, only to be called a governor by Trump who was describing Canada as the 51st state right this is different than what Trump's 2016

inauguration and lead-up in his transition was like Trump was also facing an investigation at the time and to whether his campaign had ties to Russians and Russia had according to the intelligence community meddled in the 2016 election to try to hurt Hillary Clinton. And so all of that made a different atmosphere. But Trump likes nothing more than a convert. And all of these tech leaders are showing that they have seen the value and wisdom of

what he has been saying. And Michael, his 2016 win was entirely unexpected and it was also pretty close. This was pretty decisive. And it's really hard for people to keep describing him as a fluke. He's not the interregnum Joe Biden was. Biden the aberration, Trump the second term president.

Correct. Just thinking about where we started this conversation with a shutdown, these executives, Andrew, who are currying Trump's favor, who are showing up at Mar-a-Lago for dinner, when they see someone like Elon Musk do what he just did, do they think to themselves, oh, look, we really can have tons of influence here. Wow. We can genuinely change policy

if we get in early enough and then make the call later on. You know, I think Tim Cook is actually a great example of it. Through Trump's first term, Tim Cook clearly created a relationship with Trump and as a result stayed out of the crosshairs despite all of the back and forth with China and everything else. And so I think there is a view that he is persuadable.

He is transactional. And if you can create a relationship with him, at least you will have the opportunity. It's not clear that all these CEOs are going to succeed at whatever they're asking for, but they're getting a seat at the table. And from a practical perspective, that's all they can ask for today. Now, I think they also worry about what happens later.

But I think the view is, we'll worry when we have to worry. But for now, we're going to try to befriend this person. Maggie? It is a fact. Donald Trump is a very transactional person. He's pretty open about that fact. He's what people in New York used to call a deals guy. So that is how he views the world.

On the part of some people who are reaching out to him, there is clearly a fear that he is going to use what levers of power he has to try to enforce. Against them. Against them. But there is a belief that it is more helpful to them to have a relationship with him than not. And it's not an entirely new attitude, Michael. There were actually a lot of people who had that attitude in the first term. The difference between Trump 1 and Trump 2 is that some of the, and I noticed this in

just talking to voters, frankly, some of the stigma of backing Trump has abated a bit, the social stigma. And so I think that a lot of these CEOs who were concerned about backlash from their consumers are far less worried now. That's interesting, especially when you consider that one of the things that happened between then 2016 and now is January 6th, and yet you're saying less stigma. The favor occurring that has stood out to many of us in the news media over the past week, I think quite logically

because we're somewhat self-absorbed, is the ring kissing from media companies. And you mentioned Jeff Bezos going down there, the owner of the Washington Post. Well what happened several weeks before the election, of course, was that at Jeff Bezos' request, the Washington Post pulled, hell didn't run, an editorial that was going to be endorsing Kamala Harris for president. That happened at the LA Times as well. And there's this concept emerging, a fear within the media that some major media companies are beginning to engage in something that has been dubbed anticipatory obedience.

And it's in that context that we get ABC News making a pretty consequential decision to settle a defamation lawsuit filed by Trump, which seemed too many to be a capitulation to Trump's efforts to intimidate the news media. Can you just meditate on that all for just a minute, Andrew? I have so many thoughts if you'd indulge me for a moment. Please.

So it is very factual that during the first Trump term, Amazon was targeted by Trump in part because Trump was unhappy with Bezos' ownership of the Washington Post. Coverage from the Post, yeah. That's just an empirical situation and they demonstratively were targeted by the president over and over and over again. Bezos also owns Blue Origin, which by the way is going to compete with SpaceX, has enormous billions of dollars in government contracts. And so Jeff Bezos, and he said this quite publicly, as an owner of The Post, is quite

conflicted. And- I think he's literally said, I'm in some ways the worst person to own this newspaper. From a perception perspective, if optics are how you're considering this, he was very open that he believes that he's probably not the best owner in that context. He will tell you, he told me at the Dealbook Summit, that he believed he was making a principal decision about the decision not to endorse a candidate. And also accepted that the timing of it was terrible.

I don't know. You're going to have to decide whether you want to believe him or not. On the Disney story, or I or not on the Disney story, or I should say on the ABC story. Well, that was a Freudian slip perhaps because ABC is owned by Disney. Disney is a major corporation that might not want to be in Trump's crosshairs. So I think it's actually much more complicated than it's being portrayed by some. I think Andrew is correct about the complexities here.

This was a case where George Stephanopoulos on ABC News in a segment with Nancy Mace, who is a congresswoman and a sexual assault survivor, Stephanopoulos in his segment said multiple times that Trump had been found liable for rape by a jury. This was after Trump was found liable for sexual abuse in a civil suit. E. Jean Carroll, a New York writer, had accused him of rape decades earlier, but the jury did not find him liable for rape. They did for sexual abuse. The Trump team asked for a correction.

They didn't get a correction. And then they filed suit in Florida. And so the Trump case, which was filed with a judge who was allowing it to move forward, alleged that Trump had suffered damage to his reputation from the statements that Stephanopoulos had made and that Stephanopoulos had gotten it wrong. Got it. So, Andrew, given what Maggie just said, essentially that Stephanopoulos made an on-air error and

that ABC didn't then correct it and this case is moving forward, back to you saying this is complicated and perhaps should be disentangled from anything related to, you know, for example, Bezos holding an editorial back. I think they're very different situations because the truth is that I think that as Disney and ABC looked at this case, they saw depositions that were going to have to be taken that were likely going to get into the public that might have had unattractive facts. The media is clearly under a lot of scrutiny. And I think even if you thought that ABC would, quote unquote, win the case...

On the law. On the law, there was a potential that they would even lose the case in the public mind. And perhaps alienate many of their viewers who thought, why can't you just admit you screwed up? That, plus if they actually lost the case and then were to try to appeal the case, they would have to appeal the case to the Supreme Court. Now think about the Supreme Court for a second, 6-3, right?

In terms of the politics of that court. You could potentially undermine what's called New York Times versus Sullivan. Famous First Amendment case. 1964, which granted effectively the press enormous, almost expansive, what's the word? Protection against libel when it involves a public figure. That's what we're talking about.

Mm-hmm. And so there's a question. Do you want to go through that entire process and potentially either lose in the public mind or lose in court and then potentially really lose on behalf of, frankly, all of journalism or do you want to settle? Got it. That would be the defensive description of why Disney or ABC did that. I think, Andrew, you're making a persuasive case here that we shouldn't put all these

things in one bucket. They're not entirely the same, especially the ABC defamation lawsuit. But no matter how you slice it, this has to be seen as a victory for Donald Trump, getting ABC News to settle a lawsuit and give him, I think, $15 million for his future presidential museum and I think another million dollars for his legal fees. So to all three of you, just to kind of close this conversation out, if you are Donald Trump, taking all of this in,

the ability to trigger the explosion of a government spending bill when you're not even president, all of these CEOs who were once so skeptical coming down to have dinner with you, to get into your good graces Getting a major news organization to settle a defamation lawsuit, which almost never happens. This is starting to feel like an exceptionally Empowering stretch of time for Donald Trump. It's certainly the earliest days Michael of the pre

second Trump term Have been really solid for him. It's about as good as it as it could have been. You know, at the same time he is coming in when there are various crises across the world and consumer prices are still high and so he faces a lot of challenges and he has made a number of significant promises that he is going to have to eventually make good on in order for voters to feel as if things are moving along. But for now, yes, this is what he always thought it was going to be in 2016 when he won, and

it never was. And that's very clear in almost all of his actions right now. Katie, when it comes to Congress, I mean, he has to feel very good about his ability to command obedience. Yeah. has to feel very good about his ability to command obedience. Yeah, I mean, as Maggie said, I think this was what he expected. His relationship with Republican leaders on the Hill was going to be like. You have McConnell leaving Senate Republican leadership,

who is often a foil for him on the Hill. You have in Mike Johnson someone who has really tied his own political future to Trump's. At the same time, what was his big success this week? It was blowing something up. And that is what he has always been successful at doing on the Hill. But when it comes to the dawn of his second term, there's going to be a lot of building that actually has to happen, a lot of consensus building that has to happen if he wants to

pass one or two even major tax bills. And that is going to be extraordinarily difficult. And I am going to be very curious to see if he's able to use his power to actually put something together as opposed to just tearing it down. Andrew, the last word goes to you. This is about the heights of power. This is demonstration of raw power. Now it might be raw power in the context of a honeymoon,

but he now has power, obviously, in the White House. He has power in the Senate. He has power in Congress, and he has power within the industry. And as a collection, walking into the inauguration, he clearly is feeling that sense of power. Once he's in the job, it may get more challenging. It usually does. Okay, well, Maggie, Katie, Andrew, thank you all for your time. I really appreciate it.

Thank you. Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Michael. On Thursday night, the House voted down a last-minute proposal endorsed by President-elect Trump to keep the government open past Friday. Despite Trump's support, dozens of conservative Republicans opposed the plan, and nearly all House Democrats voted against it. There is now no clear path to avoiding a shutdown later tonight.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Thursday, a French court convicted the ex-husband of Giselle Pellico and dozens of other men of raping her in a case that has shocked France and transformed Pellico into a feminist icon. Her husband, Dominique Pellico, received the maximum sentence of 20 years. The rest of the men were given sentences mostly ranging from 6 to 9 years. and to be able to seize debates that are held. I have never regretted this decision. After the verdicts were delivered,

Giselle Pellico said that she was proud of her decision to open the trial up to the public and hoped that the outcome of the case might lead to a future in which men and women could live in harmony. A reminder, you can catch a new episode of The Interview right here tomorrow. David Marchese speaks with Jonathan Rumi about playing Jesus on the popular TV show The Chosen and the responses that Rumi gets from the show's fans. I recognize that when I come out and people react the way they do,

and people yell out, Jesus! They're seeing me as the face of the guy that they've had this response to while experiencing the show. And psychologically they know I'm not Jesus, but they feel they want me to be the next best thing. Today's episode was produced by Diana Wynn and Shannon Lynn. It was edited by Brendan Klinkenberg and Paige Cowitt, contains original music by Pat McCusker and Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansferk of Wonderly.

That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Bobarro. See you on Monday.