What A Day - America At A Tipping Point

Episode Date: April 21, 2025

President Donald Trump still hasn’t hit the 100-day mark of his second term, but it feels like the country is already hitting some kind of inflection point. On Saturday, we saw a second day of mass protests against the Trump administration’s agenda. Massachusetts Democratic Gov. Maura Healy compared this moment to the start of the Revolutionary War, saying, ‘Our freedoms are once again under attack.’ Even New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks wrote about how it’s ‘time for a comprehensive national civic uprising.’ Amid all these proverbial alarm bells, it might seem a little perverse for some Democrats to advocate for a return to a kind of New Deal-era of politics, where more centralized power allowed the government to do big things. But that’s exactly the argument made in the new book 'Abundance.' Co-author Derek Thompson joins us to talk about how America can go back to building and inventing new things, and how Democrats can get people to trust the government again.And in headlines: The Supreme Court issued an emergency decision blocking more flights of alleged Venezuelan gang members to an El Salvador super prison, Vice President JD Vance got an audience with the Pope, and the Israeli military admitted to several “professional failures” when it killed 14 Gaza rescue workers and a U.N. staffer last month.Show Notes:Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/3kk4nyz8What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcastFollow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday

It's Monday, April 21st. I'm Erin Ryan in for Jane Costin and this is What A Day, the show that hopes you had a lovely weekend protesting, attending religious services, getting higher than Maureen Dowd on Colorado Edibles, or ideally, a combination of all three things. On today's show, the Supreme Court issues an emergency decision blocking more flights of alleged Venezuelan gang members to an El Salvador super prison. And Vice President JD Vance gets a lecture on Catholicism from the Vatican and an audience with his frenemy the Pope. Did he even say thank you, Holy Father, once? It was a good weekend for events that have nothing to do with the news.

Sometimes you just have to zone out and eat an entire chocolate bunny while watching your nieces and nephews fight over plastic eggs. And for music fans and influencers, it was the second weekend of Coachella. But if tuning out doesn't seem like the move, it was also a good weekend to make some noise about the unraveling of the American experiment. President Donald Trump still hasn't hit the 100-day mark of his presidency, but it feels like we're hitting some kind of inflection point. Maybe just the first of many to come. Because again, we're not even 100 days into this clusterfuck.

We're a little more than one Kardashian-Humphrey's marriage in. Ugh. On Saturday, we saw a second day of mass nationwide protests against the Trump administration's agenda. People hit the streets to demonstrate against Trump's tariffs, the firing of tens of thousands of federal workers, his anti-climate actions, funding cuts to universities that won't bend to his will,

and the deportations of migrants without any due process. In D.C., thousands marched in front of the White House. Trump must go now! Trump must go now! Trump must go now! Trump must go now! In Massachusetts, Democratic Governor Maura Healey compared this moment to the start of the Revolutionary War during a speech to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Concord on Saturday. We live in a moment when our freedoms are once again under attack,

including from the highest office in the land. We see things that would be familiar to our revolutionary predecessors. The silencing of critics, the disappearing of people from our streets, demands for unquestioning fealty. Due process is a foundational right. If it can be distorted for one, it can be lost for all. I wish that every time somebody from Massachusetts said something badass, that one dropkick Murphy's song would just start playing. Just imagine that it is in your head. It's not just the Democrats who are freaking out right now, either. Even David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist, wrote about how, quote, it's

time for a comprehensive national civic uprising to push back against Trump's assaults. He expanded on it during an interview with PBS NewsHour. Basically, if you're ahead of a law firm or a university, any of these institutions, you're dealing with administrations that's just about raw power. So the question you have to ask yourself is how do we amass power so they're not dividing us, so we're dividing them. And that is a mass uprising. Okay, David Brooks, strange bedfellows. And in the conservative magazine, The National Review, columnist Jeff Blehar wrote, quote, a test of the rule of law is coming, it must be opposed. National Review, welcome to the resistance, I guess. To be clear, these are scary times.

The president is trying to amass power in a way that is shaking our democratic norms to their very core. All of the proverbial alarm bells are ringing and ringing loudly. So given that, it might seem a little perverse for Democrats to also be having a bit of a sidebar about ways to give the government more power again. Not this government, no. But more broadly, returning to a kind of New Deal era of politics, give the government more power again? Not this government, no, but more broadly, returning to a kind of New Deal era of politics, when the government could take on big projects

and deliver on them. Last week, Jane spoke with Derek Thompson. He's a staff writer at The Atlantic and co-author of the very buzzy book, Abundance. It's all about how the country, and specifically the Democrats, have been standing in the way of progress and choosing scarcity when it comes to things like housing, transportation, and addressing climate change. But it's also about how we can still build the future we want. Here's their conversation. Derek, welcome to What A Day.

Great to be here. Thank you. So the thesis of your book is a pretty straightforward one. To have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need. Which simple enough, I think most Americans would generally agree with you. But the book is also about how we're not really doing that and how we've stopped building

and inventing the things we need. How did this start to fall apart in reality? What happened? I think something happened to the character of liberalism and to the style of building in America about 50, 60 years ago. I think if you look at America between the 1930s and 1950s, we built a ton of stuff.

We built roads, we built bridges and dams, Tennessee Valley Authority. The New Deal program was in many ways a program of building. And in the 1960s- We let Diego Rivera make some murals. We were just, everybody was doing everything. We were painting murals, yeah. We were doing it all, two dimensional, three dimensional. You name. Yeah, we were we were doing it all two-dimensional three-dimensional

You named the dimensions and we were building in them and then in the 1960s 1970s I think there were a series of changes zoning laws became much more common in American cities We had a revolution of environmental legislation Which made it more difficult to alter the physical environment and we just made it easier Legally speaking for neighbors to sue neighbors or for neighbors to sue neighbors, or for neighbors to sue the state, or for neighbors to sue businesses, or for people to sue basically anybody. We became a much more litigious culture. And when you put all of that together,

it just just made it very difficult to essentially alter the physical environment, whether you wanna build a house, or clean energy, or infrastructure, a bridge. I think those changes really date back to about the 1960s, 1970s. Among Democrats, you write about how the party has been taken over by an anti-growth mindset,

which might be surprising to some Democrats who view their party as advocating for progress. But if anyone who's listening lives in the blue state, you probably know what Derek is talking about. But can you explain a little further? Sure, my colleague, Yoni Applebaum, found this amazing study that makes the point about as well as anything I've ever found.

In California, if a city grows its progressive vote share by 10%, the number of houses permitted declines by 30%. It's a really awkward reality, but it seems to be like as cities become more progressive, they permit fewer houses. I think that there's a lot of people on the left who want to think of themselves as pro-progress and pro-growth. They want to put that sign in the front lawn that says, kindness is everything and no human being is illegal.

But that's their front lawn where they want people to read words. In their backyard where policy is made, they tend to block new housing and new energy and new infrastructure and new just about anything. And so one project of our book is to try to align what you could call sort of front yard language politics and backyard policies. California, as you mentioned, comes up a bunch in your book. How does the state epitomize the ways

the Democratic Party has become more obsessed with process over getting things done? You know, California is a state that has just so many blessings. It has two pillars of its economy and entertainment and software that might be, you know, the two things that are most synonymous with American innovation. It's a place where millions of Americans want to live, tens of millions of Americans do live. But it's also a place where we've created a set of rules in Los Angeles and San Francisco

that make it incredibly difficult to build new housing. And as a result, we essentially don't. The number of houses permitted in the state of California has basically declined decade over decade since the 1990s. And again, it's not just housing. Several decades ago, the state of California authorized more than $30 billion to build high-speed rail. Practically no high-speed rail has been built. It's because the state, which has not only made it legally onerous to build housing,

has also made it really legally onerous to build new infrastructure like high-speed rail. I want to dig in on housing a bit because I recently, I did the reverse. I moved from a red state, Utah, to the great state of California. Los Angeles is where we're based. Los Angeles is also home to nearly 50,000 unhoused people. But it's spending billions to solve its homelessness problem, to mixed results at best. How is that emblematic of the point that you're making in the group

about how we're choosing scarcity over abundance, despite good intentions? And I also want to mention one thing, which is you talk a lot about the groups, the groups that sometimes can get in the way unintentionally and intentionally of progress. Can you talk about that a little bit too? Sure. Let me talk about housing and then I'll talk a little bit about the groups. On housing, Ezra did some really fantastic reporting in San Francisco where there was an affordable housing project called Tehanan which was built.

And it was not built with public money because as Ezra reported out, developers that take public financing find that there are so many riders on that financing, so many onerous requirements for exactly what kind of contractors you can work with and exactly what their wages can be and exactly who can build what parts of the house or parts of the apartment building, that essentially it becomes too difficult to build cheaply and on time. And in fact, it costs on average $700,000, $800,000 per affordable housing unit for these pieces to be added. That's way too expensive.

And so he talks about this place, Tehanan, which was built instead with private financing, came in closer to $400,000 per unit. That's still really, really expensive, but it was cheaper. That seems like a huge indictment, I think, of the degree to which public financing for public housing, what we now call social housing, which is below market housing, below market rent, is now just so difficult to build because of all the rules that we've created that essentially pour in progressive priority over progressive priority and make it really really hard to actually build the thing that you want to build.

One of the examples in your book is how in Los Angeles the city requires special air filtration systems for developments in your freeways. This is cited by an affordable housing consultant as one of the higher quality standards the city requires developers who receive public money to meet. And while you say in the book that this is a laudable goal, you also question whether it makes sense when regulations like these potentially stand in the way of actual people getting actual housing. People in affordable housing probably want clean air too.

How do you balance that? Yeah, it's a great, great question. The way that I think about it now is there's a difference between environmental regulations that are outcome-based versus process-based. So you can imagine environmental regulations that are outcome-based, that say regulate the sort of particle parts per million in the air or in the water or that regulate something like tailpipe emissions. I think those have been just objectively incredibly successful.

If you compare, you live in Los Angeles, if you compare the air in Los Angeles today versus the 1980s, much less the 1940s, where there was one day, I believe in 1943, where residents of LA woke up to air that was so thick that they thought that Japanese had launched a chemical attack in the city, obviously the Clean Air and Water Act of the late 1960s, 1970s have done incredible

things for the quality of our air and water. I see those as incredible successes of outcome-based regulation. But there's also elements of environmental regulation that were passed in this era, late 1960s, early 1970s, when a lot of these laws came online, like NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act, where under NEPA, for example, it's very easy for individuals or law firms to sue new apartment buildings or new solar plants or new wind turbine installations by saying, you need to do an environmental report to prove that this is good for the environment or won't harm the environment.

The average time of these environmental reviews these days is close to four and a half years. That's longer than World War II. You simply cannot build sufficient housing in America's most productive cities if every single time someone wants to add a house, they have to re-litigate World War II. It's just impossible. But I think much like we're seeing now with Republicans who have long campaigned on cutting the sides of the federal government and are now horrified by Elon Musk's indiscriminate slashing of

it, it's really easy to say we need fewer regulations and barriers to building things, but a lot harder to strip them away because there are reasons those regulations exist. So how do we speed up the process of building and inventing without repeating the harms and excesses of the past and also keeping the internal libertarian who lives inside me happy? I love this question and I definitely want to keep the internal libertarian who lives inside me happy? I love this question and I definitely want to keep your internal libertarian happy. So what several California senators like Scott Weiner

and Buffy Wicks are doing right now is trying to push through the California Senate a piece of legislation that I think takes this question very seriously. They're not trying to strip away the entire bulwark of environmental legislation that's responsible for keeping the air and the water clean. Instead, there's rules where they essentially waive certain urban housing projects from CEQA, which is the California version of NEPA. They're trying to find ways to accelerate permitting for clean energy

projects. I think those are ways of saying, let's think about the outcomes that we most want for a state like California. We want to make it easier to build housing in places like Los Angeles and San Francisco, and we want to make it faster, faster to build certain kinds of clean energy. I love that way of thinking about outcomes first and then how do we mold the regulations that we have to meet those outcomes. I was thinking about the release of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which I see as a moment in which people suddenly went like, we've been doing this thing and we have to stop doing it.

And so much of, I think, progressive ideology over the last 40 years has been about one person standing up for institutions to get them to stop doing something. How do you think Democrats, especially right now, especially moving forward, are going to be able to counter Republicans who are winning right now the fight over what the political order looks like, but also get people to trust a government. What would an abundance campaign look like in 2028 after this and after about 40 to 50 years of you can't trust the government, you have to stand up to the government, you have to stand up to the state because the state can't do good things.

Yeah, I mean look, I think it's very easy to distinguish between a model of government that can't get shit done and a model of government that only does shit, right? That's the legacy of the Democratic Party and the modern Republican Party from a certain point of view, right? A government that gets shit done, that's different. Getting shit done, I think, is a really, really core part of abundance, government that actually works. To your point, there's no question it is responsible for any government to identify the poisons

that exist in the atmosphere or in their local environments. But housing isn't a poison, and solar energy isn't a poison, and wind power isn't a poison. And if the laws that we have in the books are as effective at stopping industries from giving nearby residents cancer as they are at stopping the construction of affordable housing over parking lots in San Francisco, then what you have is a problem of government processes that are as good at stopping bad projects as they are at stopping good projects. And what we're trying to say is a smart government should be able to smartly distinguish between good and bad, and it should have different rules that allow for good outcomes versus

bad ones. Derek, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you. That was Jayden's interview with Derek Thompson, staff writer at The Atlantic and co-author of the new book, Abundance. We'll get to more of the news in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads.

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And the man he's talking about is Kilmar Obrego-Garcia, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador last month. Van Hollen traveled there last week to check up on Obrego-Garcia in prison. At first, the Senator was denied entry, but they did eventually meet. Van Hollen told ABC News on Sunday that he'd spoken to Obrego-Garcia at a hotel last week. He told me about the trauma he had been experiencing, both in terms of the abduction

and the fact that he was originally sent to CICAT, which is this notorious prison. Yeah, we've seen the image. He told me how much he missed his wife and his kids. He specifically mentioned his 5-year-old boy, who has autism, because that boy had been in the car with him when U.S. agents had stopped them and handcuffed him and then taken him away.

According to Van Hollen, Abrego Garcia has been transferred to another detention facility where he's in isolation. Van Hollen's visit drew criticism from the usual suspects. President Trump wrote on Truth Social Friday that the senator looked like a, quote, fool. But even some Republicans can't deny that Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador because of an administrative error. Here's Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana on Meet the Press Sunday.

This was a screw up. Mr. Garcia was not supposed to be sent to El Salvador. He was sent to El Salvador. See how simple that is? The Supreme Court has ordered Trump officials to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return to the US. But despite little evidence, the administration maintains Abrego Garcia

is an MS-13 gang member, even though he hasn't been charged with a crime. As for Van Hollen, he says the Trump administration should, quote, put up or shut up in court. The Supreme Court issued an emergency order Saturday that temporarily blocks the Trump administration from deporting a group of Venezuelan migrants under the Alien Enemies Act. There's been a lot of back and forth over this, so here are the basics. In March, Trump sent more than 200 Venezuelan and Salvadoran migrants to a notorious prison

in El Salvador under the act, alleging that they were gang members or terrorists. Lawsuits followed. The issue made it all the way up to the Supreme Court. Then earlier this month, the justices ruled that the administration could deport Venezuelan migrants accused of being, quote, alien enemies. But, and here's the key detail, the government has to give those migrants notice and due process.

The ACLU says it got wind that the administration was about to deport another wave of Venezuelan migrants from an immigration center in Texas. Like, soon. And without, of course, notice or due process. The court put a stop to any such sendoff until, quote, further order of this court. Conservative justices and best buddy, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented. Alito argued the justices acted, quote, hastily

and prematurely without allowing lower courts to hear the case. Alito also seemed pretty whiny over the fact that he had to work past his bedtime, writing that the high court decided this case, quote, literally in the middle of the night. Yes, because God forbid a dude with guaranteed employment and benefits for life and the power to grant or deny millions of migrants their civil rights has to work a late shift every once in a while.

I know you've not been feeling great, but it's good to see you in better health. That is the most straightforward sentence ever, and he still made it sound weird. Vice President JD Vance met with Pope Francis in Rome on Easter Sunday. Their exchange lasted just a few minutes. Vance wished the Holy Father well on his recovery from a series of health issues back in February, including double pneumonia. Pray for you every day. Bless you.

Vatican officials also gifted Vance some Catholic drip, a tie, and a few rosaries. They gave the vice president some chocolate Easter eggs for his kids, too. These are for your children. Okay, thank you. It was all very chill, but this comes after Vance met with Vatican officials privately on Saturday where the conversation seems to have been a bit more testy. Vance's office claims the group discussed their Catholic faith and, quote, President Trump's commitment to restoring world peace. But the Vatican characterized

the chat as a quote, exchange of opinions about immigration and foreign policy. This sounds pretty on par with the public back and forth on the issue. Vance and the Vatican have been in a sort of Catholic diva off over Trump's immigration crackdown. The Pope came out against Trump's proposed mass deportations of migrants right before he took office in January, saying it would be a, quote, disgrace if the president went through with it. Vance has previously justified Trump's America First agenda with the little-known medieval Catholic concept of Ordo Amoris. That's Latin for order of love. There's this old school, and I think it's a very Christian concept, by the way, that

you love your family and then you love family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world. My dude has been a Catholic for like six years, and he is trying to go to the place where Catholicism is made and explain to them that they are doing Catholicism wrong. He's got the vibe of like first day in your freshman year philosophy class. Guy raises their hand with five minutes left and tries to correct the professor. Always. Francis pushed back on this in a letter to US bishops in February, insisting that Ordo Amoris is

actually achieved by, quote, meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all without exception. The Israeli military said Sunday that it made several professional failures when it killed 14 Gaza rescue workers and a UN staffer last month. This is the event where Israeli soldiers fired on an ambulance, a fire truck, and a passing UN vehicle in the dead of night. The bodies and even the vehicles were buried nearby. The incident drew outrage from the UN and beyond. Here's Dylan Winder, a UN observer for the Red Cross and Red Crescent, speaking at a press conference earlier this month.

Even in the most complex conflict zones there are rules. These rules of international humanitarian law could not be clearer. Civilians must be protected. Humanitarians must be protected. Health services must be protected. The Israeli military had initially claimed the victims had acted suspiciously and that the vehicles were not showing emergency lights, though a video released by the Red Crescent showed otherwise. The Israel Defense Force's statement Sunday says the soldiers had several quote operational misunderstandings and there was a quote breach of orders. The The Israel Defense Forces statement Sunday says the soldiers had several, quote, operational misunderstandings and there was a, quote, breach of orders.

The military says it's putting the commander on leave for those mistakes and for filing an incomplete report. As for the mass grave, the Israeli government says there was no cover-up. Soldiers were moved and covered the bodies in vehicles, quote, in preparation for civilian evacuation. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu didn't mention the findings in a major video address he gave on Saturday. In fact, he vowed to give the military more support, not less. Here he is speaking through an interpreter. I would like to strengthen the soldiers and commanders. I've instructed the

IEDF to act aggressively, to react aggressively. We are in a war of resurrection, the war of seven fronts, and there are very heavy prices to pay in this war. Netanyahu added that Israel has no choice but to continue its war until it reaches victory. And that's the news. Before we go, under the second Trump administration, LGBTQ people are under attack. And this year, pride isn't just a reason to get drunk during the day. It's life or death. So grab a join or die t-shirt or sticker from the Crooked Store. The design is a nod to the famous historical political cartoon, so

you can spread the message of queer resistance while you sweat it out at WeHo Pride or wherever else the day takes you. Plus, there's something so satisfying about turning one of Pete Hegseth's tattoos into a pride symbol. Head to crooked.com slash store to shop now. That's all for today. If you liked the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, put away your big dumb Coachella hat until next year and tell your friends to listen.

And if you're into reading and not just about how the White House now says the ransom letter it sent to Harvard earlier this month was quote, unauthorized and shouldn't have been sent, like me, What A Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Erin Ryan and please send me your favorite recipes for leftover peeps. What A Day is a production of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producers are Raven Yamamoto and Emily Four. Our producer is Michelle Eloy.

We had production help today from Shauna Lee, Johanna Case, Joseph Dutra, and Greg Walters. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our executive producer is Adrian Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Giliard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.