Today, Explained - 100 days of payback

Episode Date: April 29, 2025

Vox's Andrew Prokop says retribution was one of the major themes of the first 100 days of Trump's second term. John Bolton, who had his security detail yanked, explains why he's not worried about fascism. This episode was produced by Devan Schwartz and Victoria Chamberlin, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Gabrielle Berbey, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram and Noel King. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Noel King, host of Today Explained, we're here at 100 Days of Trump Part 2. They say they like to flood the zone, and boy did the zone feel flooded. Can you remember everything? Oh my gosh. Liberation Day, backing off Liberation Day. Greenland? Canada? Ukraine, the Oval Office meeting with the yelling.

Thank you. The penny? They were going gonna get rid of the penny? I think I still see pennies. Showerheads. Showerheads. Immigration. Daylight savings, I think we still have that too. Deporting some people who are citizens.

Fighting with the courts. Withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords. Doge. Aid. Project Esther in anti-Semitism. Everything is computer. Going after Harvard. Rewriting history, you did a show on that.

Donald Trump said there are two genders. The Pope's funeral. Yep, the eggs are still pricey. A weird number of sig-hiles. Today I think we focus on one main theme. How about that? Yeah, which one? Revenge, Sean.

Revenge. Coming up on Today Explained. From early morning workouts that need a boost to late night drives that need vibes, a good playlist can help you make the most out of your everyday. And when it comes to everyday spending, you can count on the PC Insider's World Elite MasterCard to help you earn the most PC optimum points everywhere you shop. With the best playlists, you never miss a good song.

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Okay, Andrew, go ahead as always, give me your full name and tell me what you do. I'm Andrew Prokop, senior correspondent, Vox, covering politics. All right. So we're talking today because President Trump has now been in office for a thousand days. How would you say the first thousand days have gone?

Time flew. I didn't really realize that it was the year 2028, but. 100 days in, for clarity. What are the, what are sort of the big themes of the second Trump administration? I've been thinking about it as I try to rise above the day-to-day headlines and focus on the recurring stories, things where big things have happened already that have made a difference. I think there are really four stories of that nature so far. The first is the economy and tariffs. It's a big deal.

It's a big deal. This is the beginning of making America rich again. The second, I would say, is immigration, as Trump attempts to impose his mass deportation agenda, as he is making the U.S. a less welcoming place for foreigners generally. All sorts of big high profile battles and showdowns and we're probably just at the beginning of that.

I'd like to go a step further. I mean I say, I said it to Pam. I don't know what the laws are. We always have to obey the laws. But we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat. The third, I would say, is Elon Musk and Doge and this general agenda of kind of dismantling government, cutting government spending.

This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy. Firing federal workers. But the fourth, I think, and one in which in some ways is the most ominous, is what I view as Trump's agenda of retribution. I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution.

He has been more willing than any other president in recent memory to use the power of the federal government against people who he views as his political enemies or people who are viewed as being on the left. There's a strong argument that no one should be surprised by this because when President Trump was candidate Trump out on the campaign trail, he repeatedly said he was gonna go after people, places, things, institutions.

Is what we are seeing, I know you were watching that carefully, is what we are seeing, I know you were watching that carefully, is what we are seeing what Trump promised? Well, he said different things at different times. There were some moments, I remember one moment when he was on Fox News and the host was basically begging him to say, I'm not going to seek retribution

against my political enemies. My question is a very serious one. People are claiming you want retribution. People are claiming you want what has happened to you done to Democrats. Would you do that ever? Look, what's happened to me has never happened in this country before. And it has to stop because— Wait a minute.

I want to hear that again. It has to stop. Well, it does have to stop because we're a minute. I want to hear that again. It has to stop. Well, it does have to stop because we're not going to have a country... And if you're elected, what does that mean to find that? Look, what I've gone through, nobody's ever gone through. I'm a very legitimate person. I built a great business. And I think he has chosen pretty much a maximally aggressive course as compared to, you know, all of the possibilities that had

been expected as to how far he could go on this. If we focus at first just on Washington and on the mix of politicians and lobbyists, etc., who inhabit this place, who's Trump gone after? Well, he's gone after a lot of people involved with the Biden administration, you know, Biden himself, several of his top officials. The security detail for Anthony Fauci was terminated last night, sir. Do you have a comment? No, I think, you know, when you work for government, at some point your security detail comes off.

He's gone after people who are involved in sort of the legal resistance against Trump or were involved in the cases that were about investigating or indicting Trump. But he's also gone after some of his own people or people who used to be some of his people. They all made a lot of money. They can hire their own security too. Then there's the case of Mike Pompeo, who was Trump's secretary of state in his first term. He seemed to be in line for another top appointment as recently as perhaps October 2024. But somehow, people behind the scenes convinced Trump that Pompeo was somehow against him. And then suddenly during the transition and at the beginning of the administration,

we see these personal public attacks on Pompeo and then yanking his security details. A top aide associated with Pompeo, Brian Hook, as well. Someone who was on Trump's State Department transition team before suddenly being kind of penalized by Trump's retaliation. So he's really sort of used it, you know, against Democrats, against his critics, but also people on his own side who he feels like stepped out of line in some way, or demonstrated insufficient loyalty. -♪ Piano music playing, Mike Pompeo and Brian Hook are very interesting because the security detail for them would appear to matter.

These are both men that have had threats to their lives. They both worked on Iran. How unusual is what Trump did when he said no more security protection for you guys, even though there seem to be credible threats on your lives? Oh, this is extremely unusual. It's unprecedented as far as I know. It's extremely petty. The justification that they give is, oh, this is expensive and we don't want to fund it.

But I mean, that's just silly. It's a rounding error in expense. It's just like a personal form of payback that's like, hey, if you step one toe out of line, I'm not going to make sure that a hostile foreign power doesn't assassinate you. I'm going to leave you open to that possibility. I'm not doing anything for you. Let's move on to the colleges, universities, Columbia, Harvard, et cetera.

We've covered on the show how Trump has gone after them. What is Trump's rationale for going after these colleges, which seem to fall mainly in the category of elite? Elite universities were kind of in right-wing thinking, were basically deemed of certain of Trump's top donors. The center of wokeness, they were what unleashed wokeness on society. Right-wing activists like Christopher Ruffo

want to really kind of smash the universities. But of course, the public universities under left-wing bureaucratic rule are hostile to open inquiry, hostile to civic debate. To really go after, as we've seen Harvard, and this belief that the universities are the power centers of the left, and if you can take away their research funding, if you can threaten their tax-exempt status, if you can threaten all kinds of other consequences, you will

force them to behave in ways that are more accommodating to the right. He seems to understand that for some percentage of the population, it's going to feel really good that he's going after Harvard. He talks less about his campaign of revenge on law firms. Again, these are elite law firms in Washington, DC and other urban centers. What is Trump doing to them? So this is more related to kind of the prosecutions and investigations of Donald Trump,

which often involved certain people who either used to be or are at these law firms. And so I think he has some resentment about that. And then there's also, again, there's this right-wing activist agenda as well, where they argue that, oh, there's this right-wing activist agenda as well, where they argue that, oh, these big law firms are kind of in their own way centers of progressive activism as well in what's known as the pro bono work that they offer to do for various causes.

So you have this Trump effort to kind of punish these big law firms. And as we saw in universities as well, of kind of deals or agreements in which they say, oh, okay, we will do these things differently. We will pledge this amount of pro bono work or money to these causes that Trump likes and so on. Yeah, you said earlier that a lot of this is unprecedented. And I wonder, presidents can do a lot legally. They have a lot of this is unprecedented and I wonder, presidents can do a lot legally. They have a lot of leeway, even things that look a lot like revenge.

How much of this is in the purview of what a president is allowed to do, but maybe ordinarily doesn't, for reasons of self-control? And how much is actually testing the power of what the executive branch is allowed to do? The president can do a lot of things that, with his authority, that he perhaps, due to older notions of decorum or fairness or ethics that seem out of date in this administration, that he would not have previously done. But they're also just doing a lot of stuff that seems completely illegal.

And so why not both? They're pursuing both and they're going to see what sticks because they fundamentally view politics and the purpose of government as about punishing their enemies, and which in this case they've defined so broadly as to encompass all sorts of liberal or left-leaning institutions as well as the specific people and groups that had that ever run afoul of Donald Trump personally. Vox's Andrew Procop. Sean Rommersfurm, you're up next.

Who do you got? We got actually someone who was a victim of President Trump's retribution season. I don't think he got mentioned in your conversation with Andrew, but former ambassador John Bolton, who also lost his security clearance

on day one. We're going to hear from him, Noel. Support for today's show comes from Upwork. Enough with Downwork, it's time for Upwork. Just like their name suggests, they want you to be able to up your level of work. Because as a small business owner, you wanna be able to grow your business.

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Join me, Kenny Beecham, for new episodes of Small Ball throughout the playoffs. Don't miss Small Ball with Kenny Beecham, new episodes dropping through the playoffs, available on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Today Explain is back and here's the reason I wanted to hear from John Bolton today. Bolton served in the first Trump administration as a national security advisor. He served alongside former Chief of Staff John Kelly, who last October told the New York Times that he thinks Donald Trump is a fascist. Well, looking at the definition of fascism, it's a far-right, authoritarian, ultra-nationalist

political ideology movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized hypocrisy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy. So certainly in my experience, those are the types of things that he thinks will work better in terms of running America. But when John Bolton was asked about John Kelly's assessment, he basically said Trump's too dumb to be a fascist. I wanted to ask him if he still feels that way a hundred days into Trump too. I mean, I don't disagree with John Kelly on his assessment about what Trump does and what's

wrong with it. But to be a fascist, you have to think in at least some conceptual level, which Trump never does. Trump is a problem without that label. He has caused a lot of damage. He did in his first term. He will in his second term. I just don't like to get lost in the bumper sticker argument rather than arguing about substance. I would say, I don't think John Kelly disagrees with me on that. So you would quibble with the term fascist because it's just, what, simplistic or it's a slogan? It's too far above Trump's capabilities. I mean, he just, he has no philosophy.

He has in the national security space, he has no grand strategy. He doesn't do policy as we conventionally understand that term. This is difficult to accept, I know, it was difficult for me to accept that anybody could be so totally transactional, so totally focused on what's in it for him. But that's Trump. There are plenty of people around him with problematic philosophies, people who do have the ability to think at a more conceptual level. But what they say may ultimately

be reflected in certain Trump decisions, but it's not because he shares their worldview or anything like that. What was your impression of his approach, if not something leaning towards fascism or authoritarianism when you were in his administration the first go-round? Well, I think he wants to be the center of attention. I think that's probably his principal motivating factor. I think his approach was once described by Charles Krauthammer very well, and Krauthammer said it to me, but I think he said it publicly on any number of occasions, that he began by thinking Trump was an 11-year-old.

But he realized after a close evaluation that he was about 10 years off, Trump's really a one-year-old who just sees everything in the world and asks the question, what's in this for me? As somebody else who, I don't remember the the name observed that Trump doesn't have ideas, he has reactions. And I think that's also an important insight. So in my book, I said, if you took all of his decisions in his first term, they'd be like a big archipelago of dots.

A lot of the dots I agreed with. But if you try to connect the dots, you're welcome to it. Trump himself couldn't connect the dots. What have you thought of the first 100 days of the second administration so far? Well, I think it's even more incoherent. But what you're seeing in public now that many people find surprising, I think, is what many of us who were in the first term saw in private, but that he never said in public.

A lot of these ideas have been kicking around. I think, obviously, they spent the four years in exile at Mar-a-Lago planning. Their first 100 days, much more was accomplished from Trump's point of view than in his first 100 days in the first term. I'm not sure though that history will record that after this burst of activity in the first hundred days, there's much more follow-up. I think Trump will get bogged down in a lot of subsidiary issues that happen to catch his attention. For example, he's now chairman of the board of the Kennedy Center.

And I can think of nothing more important than for a man who knows so much about buildings and the hospitality industry, to spend a little time on the question of the rugs at the Kennedy Center, the carpeting, the curtains and the stages. I mean, I think really some high level attention is required for that.

And I think if really, I get his ear, I could get him over at the Kennedy Center for a day a week for the next several months. I think you're getting at something that I'm constantly struck by, which is while this seems like a serious administration with serious ideas of Project 2025, what have you, there's also all of these distractions

that make this seem like a bit of a clown car. The Doge firings and then hiring back of nuclear safety personnel. The infamous Houthi PC small group chat. The tariffs, no tariffs, tariffs, just kidding, no tariffs. I saw someone say, I wonder if the fall of the Roman Empire was this stupid.

And that really hit for me. But at the same time, you've got the campaign of retribution we've spoken about. You've got defying court orders and challenging the judiciary. You've got the silencing of speech left and right, the First Amendment. I mean, when you see these constitutional infringements, are you worried for the state of the republic? I don't think Trump is an existential threat.

I think our institutions are a lot stronger than him. Not so much the fall of the Roman Empire, but the fall of the Roman Republic began with Sulla and then Pompey and then Catiline and then Julius Caesar. And I'll tell you, Donald Trump is none of those four. Thank goodness. So I think we will survive. i think uh... many of the things you mentioned uh... he has singled out by executive order for example chris crabs the former head of the cyber security and infrastructure bureau at uh... department of homeland security in his first term for prosecution because he dared to say that the twenty twenty election was

relative was was safe and and free from interference in cyberspace, which Trump didn't want to believe. He singled out a fellow named Miles Taylor, who had been chief of staff to the secretary of Homeland Security. These are actions by a president with no predicate for a criminal investigation that I think are very threatening. But I think you've got to evaluate all this, and there are many more, you've named some, we could name others.

That's Trump making the first move. And he's done all this, as you say, in the first 100 days. He's done it in Trump time, because he stays up until two in the morning, he does, he's constantly active. The judicial system obviously doesn't normally react with such speed. So Trump makes his headline and then moves on to something else. And the real question is what has followed up? And I think if we come back in a couple of years, we'll see a lot of the effort of the

first 100 days just in ashes because the courts will have held, I believe they will, I think they are fully independent. I'm not worried about that. i think that is the ultimate check uh... it obviously will cost people money for attorneys fees and time and aggravation and concern but i think a lot of these efforts will fail and they will set precedence that will make it even harder for future president to try this kind of thing i'm hoping for example that

on tariffs not directly what you're asking about, but I hope, you know, it was 95 years since the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, which were an act of monumental stupidity in 1930. I think history will record that Trump-Vance tariffs is another monumental act of stupidity, and hopefully it'll be another 95-year long lesson. So from that perspective, a lot of what has happened in the first 100 days, we have to say is incomplete, because while Trump has moved his pawn to King four, the rest of the system is still reacting.

You of course, I believe have worked under four presidential administrations, from Reagan to George H.W. Bush to George W. Bush, to of course, President Trump. Does that, you know, historical long view that you personally possess, you know, work to your advantage in these trying times of ours? Well, you know, we've suffered a lot worse in this country.

We did have a civil war, where over 600,000 soldiers died of one cause or another, and the country moved on. So I'm not underestimating the problems that Trump is causing. I just think it's important to bring as many people along on the proposition that this is unacceptable. And I think sometimes, you know, using the rhetoric that says this is existential turns people off and uh... i i'm looking to convince as many people as possible that this is an aberration

in american politics that it's not sustainable and particularly in the republican party that the beginning in twenty twenty six certainly in twenty twenty eight we've got to move on from since. Since you were looking ahead to the 2028 election, let me ask you quickly before we go about the 2024 election. I believe you said you wouldn't vote for either candidate and that you would write in a true conservative like Dick Cheney. Of course, Dick Cheney went on to endorse Kamala Harris. Did that change your mind when you were in the the voting booth there?

Yeah, absolutely. I voted for Mike Pence. Justice for Mike Pence. Who did his job according to the Constitution on January the 6th, 2021. Are you hoping he's going to run in 2028? I don't know what he wants to do. America owes Mike Pence a big debt of gratitude, a lot that happened during the Trump administration. Maybe I should say a lot that didn't happen during the first term of the Trump presidency You can attribute to him and I hope he's not he's not looking for publicity

But I hope he's kept careful notes of everything he did for posterity to know well No one's ever said that on this show before sir. I appreciate you bring that to light. Thank you for your time ambassador Bolton Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. ["The Bolton Pack"] John Bolton of The Bolton Pack, Noelle. Wonderful to hear from him. Today's episode was produced by Devin Schwartz and Victoria Chamberlain.

We were mixed by Andrea Christensdorter and Patrick Boyd. Amina El-Sadi is our editor. Laura Bullard and Gabrielle Burbae were on The Facts. I'm Noelle King. Sean Rameshwaram. Today Explained. you