What A Day - Trump Loyalists Get Cabinet Prizes

Episode Date: November 12, 2024

The incoming Trump Administration 2.0 is starting to take shape. And as expected, it’s a Democrat’s worst nightmare. President-elect Donald Trump is expected to name Stephen Miller, an immigration hardliner with white nationalist views, to be his deputy chief of staff. He also officially announced his picks for ‘border czar,’ EPA director and U.N. ambassador, all of them in line with his repeated promise to appoint loyalists that will help him bend the government to his whims. Zack Beauchamp, senior correspondent for Vox and author of the book “The Reactionary Spirit,” explains what Trump's picks mean for the continual functioning of our democracy.And in headlines: President Biden’s lead adviser for international climate policy shared strong words about Trump at an annual U.N. climate change conference, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris made their first joint appearance since the election at a Veterans Day event, and abolitionist Harriet Tubman was posthumously awarded the rank of one-star Brigadier General in the Maryland National Guard.Show Notes:Check out Zac's reporting – www.vox.com/authors/zack-beauchampSubscribe 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 Tuesday, November 12th. I'm Jane Coaston, and this is What A Day, the show where we're watching the new Mission Impossible trailer on a loop just to feel something. You know, if Tom Cruise just jumps off of an even taller building, I think that'll fix everything. On today's show, world leaders brace themselves for climate policy under Trump, and Harriet Tubman gets a special recognition. Just not the $20 bill we're still waiting for.

Let's get into it. The incoming Trump administration, 2.0, is starting to take shape, and as expected, it's the Democrats' worst nightmare. President-elect Trump is expected to name Stephen Miller, a right-wing nativist with white nationalist views, to be his deputy chief of staff. Trump hasn't officially made the announcement, but Vice President-elect JD Vant seemed to confirm it on Twitter Monday.

Miller was a senior advisor during Trump's first term and was one of the architects of the 2018 policy to separate parents from their children at the border. He's still the same immigration hardliner as evidenced by his speech at that infamous Madison Square Garden rally before the election. Who's gonna stand up and say the cartels are gone, the criminal migrants are gone, the gangs are gone, America is for Americans and Americans only? Gross. In appointments that Trump did officially announce, he's picked Tom Homan, his former acting immigration and customs enforcement director, to be his new border czar. In a true social post,

Trump said Homan will be in charge of quote, all deportation of illegal aliens back to their country of origin. Homan said as much during an interview on Fox and Friends on Monday in this exchange with co-host Steve Doocy. I know you don't want to give away the whole game book, but you do have deportations, mass workplace stuff planned, any other kind of category of deportations of interest? Look, as the president said on stage many times, which I agree with 100%, this could be the same as what was there in the first administration, which is just a hell of a lot more of them. Also on Monday, Trump named former New York congressman Lee Zeldin to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Zeldin was one of the members of Congress who refused to certify the 2020 election results. His experience with environmental policy is slim, but he told Fox News the emphasis will be more on what's good for business. Through the EPA, we have the ability to pursue energy

dominance, to be able to make the United States the artificial intelligence capital of the world, to bring back American jobs to the auto industry, and so much more. But hey, Zeldin and Trump insist we'll still have clean water and air. Sure. And for his first cabinet-level appointment, Trump has picked New York Representative Elise Stefanik to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. She was one of Trump's impeachment defenders in 2019 and also refused to certify the 2020 election. She and Zeldin will need Senate confirmation for their job, though Republicans will have the majority, so there's no reason to suggest they won't get it. So yeah, it's bleak. But it's also pretty in line with what Trump promised over and over again, to appoint loyalists

to key positions that will help him bend the government to his whims in a way he couldn't in his first term. Democratic norms be damned. So for what all that means for the country, I spoke with Zach Beecham. He's a senior correspondent for Vox, where he covers challenges to democracy. He's also the author of the book, The Reactionary Spirit, How America's Most Insidious Political Traditions Swept the World. Zach, welcome to Whatta Day.

Hey, Jane. It's good to talk to you here. So I think a lot of people, a lot of liberals, a lot of people on the left, are trying to comfort themselves with the idea that we survived four years of Trump before, it will suck and we'll be annoyed all the time, but we can do it again. You're not buying that. Why? So, look, I want to be clear. I think we can survive four years of Trump.

I just think it's going to be a lot worse than it was last time. And I think the big reason is that Trump is way more organized than he was the last time around and not just like more organized than he was the last time around. And not just like more organized in the sense of having a better staff and a clearer vision of what's happening. It's that he wants something specific, right? He's always had these kind of

general anti-democratic tendencies and they started to come out during his administration, obviously most notably on January 6th. But even before then, right, he issued an executive order called Schedule F that would have allowed him to fire a large chunk of the professional civil service. He left office before that could be implemented.

Now, one of the first things he's going to do when he returns is reimplement Schedule F. And he's going to do so because he's promised throughout the campaign to his supporters that I am your retribution, like Batman talking about being vengeance, and now he's in a position to go through the entirety of the American political system to try to bend the thing to his will. And he really wants to after being indicted four times.

LW – You've written that Hungary and its authoritarian leader Viktor Orban have created a blueprint for transforming a democracy into an autocracy. What did that blueprint look like in Hungary? So Hungary is different from the United States in some important ways, but also there's some similarities here that really matter, right? So in 2010, Orban took power as the result of an economic downturn, poor situation going on and the incumbent party being generally pretty unpopular. And he did so with a huge mandate.

We're talking like two thirds of the seats in Hungary's parliament, which is enough under their system to rewrite the constitution in its entirety. That was very bad for the Hungarian political system because what Orbán did, he was really, really angry about having been forced out of power about eight years prior and was doing everything he could to make sure he never lost again. So he rewrote the constitution, started changing laws

to make sure that his people were in key positions throughout government, getting authority into politically connected hands who could then use their positions of power to ensure that different forms of resistance to new authoritarian rules could no longer be effective. And that's the thing to me that sort of sends alarm bells ringing when you think about the parallels between the United States and Hungary. Because Trump's plan to restaff the federal government and get his people in all the right places bears a worrying resemblance to what Orban and people like him have done in other countries. We've talked about this before. Something that's been so interesting is that there's a host of people on the American right, among them Tucker Carlson, who have long admired Orban, despite the fact that Hungary, as you've mentioned,

has a very different societal context. And a lot of Hungary's efforts to, say, raise the birth rate or do a host of things that traditional right-wing people in America want America to do haven't worked. And so what do you think that tells us about not just this era, but also kind of the American right right now, that the person that they most admire is a leader of a country

that is like very different from ours? And I mean, in a weaker position in a lot of ways, right? Like the Hungarian economy is not doing well under Orbán. It has negligible military and international political power. As a society, it's not like on most objective metrics, it's not doing that great. But what Orban has done, and I think what makes him the envy of a lot of conservatives, not just in the United States, but across Europe too, is that he has broken his domestic political opposition. Conservatives here are motivated in large part by their antipathy to liberalism.

Many of these different conservatives have different ideas about what it means to be a conservative or what it means to be on the right. But what stitches the Trump coalition together, at least when we're talking internal factional politics, is that they really, really, really, really resent that liberals have positions of power and that liberalism has in some ways been the dominant ideology in the United States, and they want to destroy that. And they really want to destroy the liberal elites who they think are smug and insufferable. And what Orbán has done, if nothing else, is crushed Hungary's liberal elites. He seized control of universities, the media says what he wants it to say, major corporations

are primarily either owned by he and his friends or forced to toe the government line in a variety of different ways and certainly never do anything close to issuing press releases that would criticize the government. Conservative values define nationalist religious values, define increasingly the curricula in schools. So he's won the culture war, right? And winning the culture war is so important to people on the right that they see Orban as this shining model despite not only his policy failures, but his rank authoritarian governing style and the fact that those authoritarian means were integral to winning the culture war victories. Right? Like that's how he did it. He crushed the left by crushing them more subtly than sending

troops into their houses. Yeah. He didn't win a debate on YouTube with them. Yeah. Yeah. It's not 10 times Viktor Orban owned the left. That's not what was happening here. It was the exercise of political power and often very subtle, but still repressive ways to get people in line. So how could we see that here in a second Trump term? And what would it look like here if it were possible? So there obviously are major institutional differences, right? Hungary's not a federal system. So everything is government-wise is done by the national government or localities, which makes it a lot easier for you to seize control over all different things like election administration at the federal level.

But there's still levers in the American system that you can pull if you're president. So recently I spent a lot of time reporting on a part of the Justice Department, the Civil Rights Division, that's designed to secure the rights, particularly of socially marginalized groups. With just a little bit of clever lawyering, it can be used to push those groups further to the margins. For example, Trump's deputy aide, Stephen Miller, has promised to go after anti-white discrimination. And anti-white discrimination is, of course,

code for any kind of program designed to redress long-term structural discrimination inside the United States. And that is a way of using law to go after your cultural opponents coercively. And there's persecution of lower level election administrators at the state level. That's in project 2025 in its section on the justice department. And another example is trying to use various different education level litigation powers and regulatory powers to try to force universities into let's say like Orban did, getting rid of gender studies departments. So I mean, really there's a whole smorgasbord of policies here, right?

Lots and lots of different ones. The question is, how far is Trump and the people he appoints to key positions willing to go if they really want to sort of follow the urbanist playbook? You also write, though, that no country at America's level of political economic development has ever collapsed into authoritarianism. Hungary is again, closest example, but as you've mentioned, it's not a perfect analog. And I've been thinking about this a lot, this unusual situation in which his coalition contains a bunch of entities that hate one another.

And Trump will have slim majorities in the House and Senate. Is there some reason for some optimism or at least not just abject despair? Yes. You know, I really think so. Like I don't mean this conversation and these warnings to be like, everything is going to be terrible. You should move out of the country. It's all going down.

No, it's not. It's not like that. Rather, it's that there is a clear and established playbook you need to be watching for. But the fact that you can watch for it and organize around it is proof that things are actually still at a pretty decent level in the United States. One thing that happened in Hungary is people didn't understand at the time where things were going. The opposition wasn't prepared to rally and try to stop what Orban was doing.

The people wasn't cognizant that this was a thing that could happen in a country like theirs, which had actually recently transitioned from communist regime and looked like a very vibrant success story for all the world, like a fully established, consolidated democracy. The United States has seen this happen in Hungary and we've seen similar playbooks tried out in countries like Israel and India and Poland and Brazil. And we know that it can be stopped as it was recently in Poland and Brazil. So there's lessons to learn from now

and there's a deeper understanding what the nature of the threat is, which Hungarians didn't have back in 2010. Zach, it's always a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you, Jane. It's good to see you again. That was my conversation with Zach Beecham, senior correspondent for Vox and author of

the book, The Reactionary Spirit. We'll get to more of the news in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, and share with your friends. We'll be back after some ads. And now, the news. Headlines. In January, we're going to inaugurate a president whose relationship to climate change is captured by the words, hopes and fossil fuels. John Podesta, President Biden's lead advisor for international climate policy, addressed

world leaders gathered in Baku, Azerbaijan for COP29 on Monday, with strong words about the president-elect in the wake of his victory. The annual United Nations Conference is dedicated to addressing the climate crisis. And this year, new concerns have emerged as the president-elect has said he will pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement again, as he did in 2017. Podesta and his fellow U.S. delegates are elected to make any financial commitment to the proposed climate solutions at COP29, knowing this could be the last time the U.S. sends a delegation to the conference at all.

But Podesta made clear to the attendees that the climate crisis is bigger than Trump and that the work must continue. Setbacks are unavoidable, but giving up is unforgivable. This is not the end of our fight for a cleaner, safer planet. Facts are still facts. Science is still science. Trump's election is a big overshadowing force at COP29, but delegates must also confront their failure to honor the pledge they made at last year's conference to finally ditch

fossil fuels. COP29 will conclude at the end of next week. Israel's Foreign Minister Gideon Sarr said on Monday that there has been quote-unquote certain progress toward the ceasefire with Hezbollah, but leaders of the Lebanese militant groups say they have not received any proposal for a truce. It's been a little over a month since Israel formally launched its offensive against Hezbollah. An Israeli airstrike killed 54 people and wounded more than 56 others in northern Lebanon on Sunday, and Israel's defense forces issued immediate evacuation orders to villages in southern Lebanon on Monday, signaling plans of further escalation. According to Lebanon's health ministry, this brings the death toll in the country to over 3,200

since the start of Israel's war on neighboring Gaza last year. More than 14,000 others have been wounded in that time. A representative from the UN will arrive in Lebanon today to continue talks for a ceasefire over the next few days. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris made their first joint appearance since the election on Monday to observe Veterans Day at Arlington National Cemetery. The two laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

before the president gave remarks to an audience of veterans and their families. Biden was emotional as he spoke about the experience of veterans from World War II to the messy withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. So last time I will stand here at Arlington as commander in chief, for the greatest honor of my life to lead you, to serve you, to care for you, to defend you, just as you defended us generation after generation after generation. The president also announced an expansion to cancers covered by the Department of Veterans Affairs to include those caused by breathing toxic smoke from

burning trash bits on military bases, a phenomenon which he believes is responsible for the death of his son, Bo, in 2015. And in other Veterans Day news, the abolitionist and actual American hero, Harriet Tubman, was posthumously awarded the rank of One Star Brigadier General in the Maryland National Guard on Thursday. The honor was accepted by Tubman's great-great-great-grandniece. Tubman is best known for escaping slavery, helping to establish the Underground Railroad, and becoming a major figure in the movement to abolish slavery. But she was also the first woman to oversee American military action during a time

of war. Fun and interesting fact, she served as a scout, spy, and nurse for the Union Army during the Civil War, and led 150 black soldiers on a raid in Comahee, South Carolina. Major General Janine L. Burkhead presented the award. Burkhead is a two-star general herself and grew up hearing stories about Tubman as a general. She spoke to reporters from a local CBS affiliate on Monday about the historical significance of Tubman's military service. She was able to go behind enemy lines, get information to free hundreds of people during raids at

Comahee. All of those things were seminal, I think, in our nation's history to lead us where we are today. And that's the news. One more thing. Do you remember drain the swamp? Sure you do. Back in 2017, Donald Trump, and more importantly, the people who loudly supported him, argued that only he could get lobbyists and big business out of Washington and restore the power to the good working people of America, provided that they were Republicans. Well, the swamp is now in charge and very excited

about it. Let's start with the lobbyists. You know, the people who get paid to go to DC and cajole official Washington into doing things that make the companies paying them happy. Susie Wiles, Trump's campaign manager and now chief of staff, worked as a lobbyist on behalf of the tobacco industry. And multiple people within Trump's inner circle, like former aide Kellyanne Conway, were lobbyists on behalf of TikTok. Which could have something to do with his sudden embrace of the platform after repeatedly

threatening to ban it. And then there are the billionaires. First and foremost, Elon Musk, the world's richest man, who became about 26 billion dollars richer the day after the election as the share price of Tesla rose. And then there's Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who got 7 billion dollars richer last Wednesday. I know the election feels like it ended 10 years ago and not last week, but Trump talked way less about draining the swamp this election. The Washington Post found that he barely even used the phrase on true social. Instead, he chose to fundraise with lobbyists directly and promised big oil executives that if they just gave him a billion dollars, he would do pretty much whatever they wanted

him to do on environmental policy. There's a story about Trump's rise and his electoral success that seems to be pretty popular with some people. One on which he's standing up for working families and standing against the evil elites stealing all our money and spending it all on themselves. But it's just so clear that that was never true. What Trump is doing is making rich people richer. That's it.

That's why his biggest supporters are always like, the guy who owns your town's Toyota dealership. The people who own multiple boats and go to Destin twice a year and send their kids to the University of Dayton or the University of Colorado. Sure, they didn't go to college, so they brag about how they're just working-class blue-collar workers rooted in the common truth of American life. But they're rich. They're really, really rich. And now they're just gonna get richer. ["The Daily Show Theme"]

Before we go, over on Crooked's legal podcast, Trick Scrutiny, hosts and constitutional law professors Leah, Kate, and Melissa are breaking down what last week's election means for the future of the Supreme and state courts. Look, I didn't go to law school, but I did watch like 20 years of Law and Order, and it turns out that that's not the same. That's why I love this show, because it helps me make sense of how the legal system works, and I don't have to learn about torts. It's smart, funny, and focuses on how the issues we all care about could be impacted by the courts in 2025 without feeling like homework.

Subscribe to Strict Scrutiny wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube. That's all for today. If you liked the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, dust off all your favorite ways to call Stephen Miller a sniveling rat-faced asshole and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading, and not just about all the terrible billionaires who are somehow already getting even richer under Trump, like me, what a day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Jane Coaston.

And good lord, there are a lot of trash people in this incoming administration. What a day is the production of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producer is Raven Yamamoto. Our producer is Michelle Eloy. We had production help today from Tyler Hill, Johanna Case, Joseph Dutra, Greg Walters, and Julia Clare. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison,

and our executive producer is Adrian Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gileard and Kashaka. you