David Sirota 0:00
From the Levers. Reader supported newsroom, this is lever time. I'm David Sirota. Donald Trump has mounted one of the most stunning political comebacks in American history. The big question is, what is he going to actually do now that he's back in power? So far, it looks like it might be one of the largest transfers of wealth from the American government into the hands of the richest men in the world, at least, that's probably what Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos expect, given that they'll be sitting with Trump at his inauguration. Trump's corruption and willingness to help the rich at the expense of everyone else is well documented, but many of his strongest supporters see something different in Him. Many voters who sent Trump back to the White House think that he's the opponent of the oligarchy, rather than its strongest ally. So today, on lever time, we're going to unpack that contradiction and take the temperature of Trump 2.0 My guests today are David dayen, the executive editor of The American Prospect, and Ryan Grim, co founder of drop site news. I sat down with both of them to see who's really got the power now that Trump is back in the White House. You Yeah.
So let's start with the cabinet confirmation hearings. You both, I assume, have been watching pieces of them. What do you think's been most notable about them is this sort of just pro forma spectacle, and there's not really going to be any real drama in terms of who's going to get confirmed. Where do you where do you come down on that? We'll start with with David Dan. I
David Dayen 1:50
think the more sketchy nominees, the ones that haven't really secured full support, have not actually had their confirmation hearing yet. People like RFK, people like Tulsi Gabbard, basically, in the last week before the Trump presidency, they put up, sort of the chip shots, the ones who are likely to be nominees and likely to be confirmed. I mean, the big one that was, I guess, a question, was Pete hegseth. You know, certainly we haven't seen anything to suggest that there would be any missteps, but we are getting a pretty clear picture of the views of these nominees. Everything from Chris Wright, who's going to be the energy secretary, a fracking executive, asked if he would, you know, reverse his comments on whether wildfires were all hype, literally in the shadow of Los Angeles burning. And he refused. He actually doubled down on those comments, whether you have Scott Bassen, the nominee for Treasury Secretary, being asked if he thinks that the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour should be raised. And he said, No, whether you have Pam Bondi, the nominee for attorney general, not agreeing to recuse herself from issues that the giant lobbying firm, Ballard partners that she worked for, worked on as long as she didn't personally work on the case. So I mean, I think we're getting a picture of a really right wing administration coming in that doesn't really seem too concerned about conflicts of interest.
David Sirota 3:33
Ryan Grim, your take on some of the nominees and whether you think there's going to be any drama, and what if anything we've learned that perhaps we didn't know before, or didn't presume before?
Ryan Grim 3:44
Yeah, I think it's worth kind of stepping back and thinking about, kind of the rise of populism over the last almost 10 years or so. And you know, the the left wing variant of populism, you know, is much easier to kind of understand and to think about, because it just says, Look, we all collectively have a common enemy, and that is the people who at the top, who are ripping us off. And if we come together, we can make a better world for ourselves, and we can throw these bums out and throw these bums in jail, like that's pretty straightforward, whereas right wing populism kind of starts from that same impulse, but because it is so heavily funded by some of those people at the top, and a lot of the people in it are the same kind of Goldwater, kind of like they own pretty big businesses, you know, not just one car dealer. They own, like eight car dealers, and they feel oppressed by bureaucrats and the government, rather than by plutocrats. You know, they don't want a war on plutocrats, because they're kind of allied with some of them. And so then you you immediately start channeling it in racial directions and towards migrants. That's step one. Is. And then oftentimes it devolves into anti semitism, because you've got conspiracy thinking that's that, because on the left, it's much simpler, like it's not a conspiracy, it's the all of the 1% together are pursuing their class interests against you. You don't need a conspiracy for that, but you do need it with right wing populism, because it's not the whole 1% there are good billionaires, right, like Elon Musk is a good one, and and you know, David Sacks is a good one, and Vivek was a good one until he
David Sirota 5:37
was completely, completely disappeared.
Ryan Grim 5:39
And so if those are good ones, then how you define the bad ones? And at first it's like, well, it's the elites, it's the it's the ones who are Democrats. But that's tricky, because lots of the you know, Trump supporting billionaires used to be Democrats, like five minutes ago. So you need something else. And so for a big portion of a strain of right wing populism, they'll go straight to anti semitism. And you're seeing that proliferate like wildly. And so when right wing populism comes into power and has to govern, it's going to go after immigrants. And there's no question and no division there, like they're going hardcore after immigrants. All of the nominees are agree on that they've got the horses. They've got the team in place that's going to do that. When it comes to going after the plutocrats, they're divided heavily. I think
David Dayen 6:31
the great stat that I heard is that if you are an American billionaire, you have a 2% chance of being in the Trump administration. How does that mean? Because there are only something like 800 American billionaires. Oh, I see, I see, and 13 of them are in those Trump administration, some, some number like that. And so if you are an American billionaire, you have a 2% chance of actually serving in the Trump administration.
David Sirota 6:59
So one out of every 50 is one out of every 50 billion in America are in the Trump administration. Okay, well, let's, let's take a pause then, and before we go on about where we're going to be, heading into Joe Biden's farewell address about oligarchy today,
Joe Biden 7:19
an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. We see the consequences all across America, and we seen it before, more than a century ago, but the American people stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trust. They didn't punish the wealthy. Just made the wealthy pay that by play, by the rules everybody else had. Workers want rights to earn their fair share.
David Sirota 7:59
My take is the first thing that comes to mind is the hot dog guy. You know, we're all looking for the guy who did this, which isn't actually completely fair. I think it's more fair about like Old Joe Biden, like Senator Joe Biden, senator from NBN a Joe Biden, because I do think as president, he's done some anti oligarchy kinds of things, the CFPB, the FTC, the DOJ, antitrust division, parts of the Department of Labor, right? But I do think, like the guy who's 50 years, 50 plus years, working around, often in service of oligarchy, now decrying oligarchy, and the oligarchy, as you just described, it even more pronounced under under the incoming Trump administration. But I think the more charitable view, and I want both of your takes on this, I think a more charitable view, if you want to have a more charitable view, is look the military industrial complex. Speech was delivered by a general, like a guy whose whole career was being in the military industrial complex. I think a more charitable take on Biden is a guy who's an incredible swamp creature. His last words in the public stage are, the swamp is bad, and we can see through the contradiction and see the truth of it. That's how I that's part of how I take it. And it's not to like, valorize Joe Biden, I just wonder how you take it. And I think the the additional question would also be, why did it take him so long to start saying this kind of stuff based on what we're living in, where oligarchy is so is so obvious, Ryan. These
Ryan Grim 9:42
are his friends. You know, these are his donors. Like he was preparing for a presidential campaign in which he wanted oligarchs to shovel money into and then Kamala Harris was running a three month campaign that raised a billion and a half dollars, a huge amount of that from regular people, by the way. Yeah, which, which really gives, like, if there is any hope that, like, it's, it's the fact that regular people can now combine to put in absolutely enormous sums that doesn't, I don't, I don't have, I don't know, the complete breakdown, there was obviously lots of oligarch money that that was sloshed in, in there with it. And yeah, as I think it was, Scott Besson responded to the oligarchy charge and noted that Joe Biden was recently pinning the Medal of Honor around the necks of people that he's calling oligarchs. So right, not the noose. The actual Medal of Honor is going
David Sirota 10:37
right. So like, how do we take Biden's farewell address this, you know, I mean, it wasn't that fiery. There were, like, a couple of mentions of oligarchy, but it was certainly, certainly notable. And I feel like they saw this as his military industrial complex speech, if you will. If you
David Dayen 10:55
just look on the level of personal wealth. I mean, FDR was absolutely a traitor to his class, and someone who would comfortably sit within the moniker of oligarch doing all these things. I mean, I think you have to look at what Biden said fully in the context of that Dwight Eisenhower speech, in the sense of, I want to make a big moment like the Dwight Eisenhower speech. I mean, I think there is something very cloying about it, that this is, you know, I'm in a farewell dress. I'm supposed to make some big comment that, you know, everyone's going to remember, because this tape is accessible 20, 3040, years from now. And so now in the documentary about the rise of the oligarchy, they can point to this two minutes, and Biden can and his estate can look fondly upon it his presidential library. I don't really take much into it. The same week that he made this speech, he issued an executive order on data centers that forces the departments of energy and defense to give public land to the very tech oligarchs, the very tech industrial complex that he is calling out in this speech. You know, these things are done for political purposes. Look, I mean, we ran a we ran a big essay in the prospect on on Biden's economic agenda. I think it's important to hear these things, and I think it's important to hear from the individual himself about what he thinks about these things. But I do think there are clear motives here when it comes to this farewell address.
Ryan Grim 12:34
Yeah, and you do have, like, MSNBC talks about oligarchy now, like there does seem to be a kind of reckoning with it on the on the center left, a month because,
David Dayen 12:45
because they can attribute it to Trump, I mean, and Elon Musk this, it's now comfortable territory, because there, there isn't a Democrat in power who is cozying up.
Ryan Grim 13:00
And the sad thing is that curious, that's the fact that Elon Musk and Donald Trump are such unique figures, it's harder to identify them specifically as oligarchs. Like they are rich people with power, but because they have these dominant, like, I said, sweet, generous, like, personalities. It kind of obscures it to a lot of people,
David Sirota 13:25
yeah, oligarch, there is, like, an implication of kind of faceless man.
Ryan Grim 13:31
They are not faceless. These are mine to garden the curtain. No, they're
David Sirota 13:35
like, Yeah, well, but
David Dayen 13:37
I mean, I think maybe that's the point that that that Biden or his speech writer was making that this is out in the open now, right, right, that it doesn't have to be faceless. We're going to see a dais at the inaugural with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg sitting together as the new Tiktok guy, right? Is sworn in and the Tick Tock guy, yeah, but you put those, just those three people together, it's a trillion dollars in wealth three people. That is as much as the bottom 50% of America in terms of personal wealth. And that is the difference. It's not faceless. It really is back to JP Morgan and Jay Gould and that kind of conception of it. So moving
David Sirota 14:25
forward Trump's inauguration, we're going to be hearing the speech soon. We're recording this before the speech. One thing that's that's come up in this, I guess transition period, is obviously the Hamas Israel ceasefire, with Trump being credited for brokering it, or at least his his people brokering it, Ryan the what's the latest status as of this recording on that ceasefire deal? What role did. Trump people have in brokering this, versus the Biden people have in brokering this. And
Ryan Grim 15:07
so the latest is that the Netanyahu finally sent the ceasefire deal to the Knesset. The Knesset approved it. I mean, a bunch of different layers here. He, you know, he's been publicly saying basically that the terms of the deal don't mean what the kind of plain Hebrew Arabic and English meanings you would derive from them mean, and that he's suggesting that he's going to violate the ceasefire after phase one. So that'll mean that after the first round of hostages are released, and there's a 42 day pause that he intends to ramp up the war again, which would then mean that the rest of the hostage exchanges wouldn't take place. We'll see if he can get away with that, whether or not Trump is okay with that, because that might end up actually being embarrassing to Trump. But I do think it's totally reasonable to say that the Trump administration pressure played a role here. Israeli media says that this was the first time the Israeli government felt pressured. Secretary Blinken Biden, the US media claim that Hamas had been the obstacle the entire time. Yet Hamas has been publicly saying that they were willing to do this deal. This is the same deal Hamas agreed to in May. And it also raised the question, if Hamas was the obstacle. Why did putting pressure on Israel get the deal?
David Dayen 16:24
Yeah. I mean, I think Joe Biden coming out and saying, This is the same deal that I told the American people about in April. It's actually a total indictment of Joe Biden. I mean, the fact that that we had this framework in place for eight months, and he couldn't seal it tells you everything you need to know about who the obstacle was and what the circumstances were for the eventual acceptance, at least, of phase one, which is, it does seem clear that that's all with that we've got committed to here. I mean,
Ryan Grim 16:59
if your single issue, or if you're like, you know, primary issue was getting this to stop, I think that it's fair to say that if Harris had won, we would not be where we are right now, like that, we would not have a ceasefire deal in place now, like we were just saying, the ceasefire deal might fall apart in 42 days, but you know what we're hearing from the Palestinian side is that they understand that, like they're not done, they're not stupid. They know the history better than we do, and they understand that in 42 days, this may blow up, but people cannot take it anymore, like they are beyond their their physical and, more importantly, almost kind of spiritual, like limits, like people are inside Gaza are like at each other's throats. Families are tearing each other apart. Friends are turning on each other. It's like it's just absolute, you know, madness and mayhem, like just going through that and that. They just needed a break. So even if it's just a break and it restarts, they needed that So, but yeah, if that, if that was the only thing, or or the main thing that you cared about, I think you're Vin you are vindicated. Because I it, I don't see how Harris, by pursuing the exact same thing Biden was doing, would have overcome all of this objection that you're seeing from Netanyahu to finishing this deal, the question
David Sirota 18:19
of the first 100 days. Let's turn to that. What are you both looking for? What do you think's going to happen? What do you think's realistic? What do you think, if anything is more bluster than actual policy? We'll start with Dave Dan. There
David Dayen 18:36
are two tracks to this, right? So one is what Trump is going to do himself with a flurry of executive orders and actions, and then the second is what Congress is going to do to forward Trump's agenda. Actually, both, in some ways, are up in the air, but the legislative stuff is much more up in the air, because Republicans can't decide even what they're going to decide. So they haven't figured out how they are going to go forward. They basically have three or four big issues that they want to tackle. One is money for the border. Second and really for deportations. Second is energy stuff opening up the country, basically to drilling. Third is dealing with the end of the Trump tax cuts. And then, to a lesser extent, there's some defense hawks that actually want to increase the military budget right now, even as they have this directive to lower spending, and how all of those play together. Is it all in one bill that everything I just talked about ends up getting in there? Or are they going to do it in stages? That hasn't been figured out, and it kind of has to be figured out now, because the way that you get around the filibusters through a process. Process called budget reconciliation. And to do budget reconciliation, you need to essentially set in place the terms for it. Now you have to pass a budget resolution that says, This is what we're going to do. This is what it's going to contain. Details come later, and then we move forward, and the Senate wants to do it in a two stage process, and the House wants to do it in a one stage process, and they have to agree. So there's a real problem with figuring out the circumstances, the procedures for how they're going to pass their agenda on the executive actions, it's much more clear they're going to, you know, do a bunch of splashy executive orders that give the appearance of forward motion, some on things that aren't going to matter as much. But there is a lot of potential for infighting and gridlock within Congress, frustrating the ability to get anything
David Sirota 20:59
done. Ryan Grim, again, first 100 days, and there are some foreign policy questions. I mean, is the war in Ukraine going to end? Is the cease fire going to hold? I mean, you drop site focuses a lot on foreign policy, national security, anything to add on those? Yeah,
Ryan Grim 21:16
Ukraine is a good point. A lot of people in Trump's orbit have been pushing to wrap that thing up and basically just draw the lines wherever they are and call it a day. And so we'll see. You know, the security establishment, what Trump calls the deep state, is deeply hostile to that idea. But we'll so we'll see. You know, this is round two of Trump, first the security establishments. We'll see if he's, he's learned anything, and whether he has, you know, people in place, like this guy, Elbridge Colby, who's kind of running policy over at the Pentagon, Pete hegseth, you know, wants to wrap this up, but he's not, doesn't, doesn't strike me as necessarily the most kind of, uh, effective bureaucratic operator. So, you know, it's not, it's not the guy that you want leading the charge for reform of like an institution the size of the Pentagon. But, you know, that's what they went with, because he's on Fox News, and Trump loves to move people from Fox News into his into his government. Yeah. And then in, in 42 days, you may see, you know, they blow up again. And in, in Israel, we'll, we'll see at the same time. You know, it's possible he could try to start signing another Iran nuclear deal. Like, the thing he didn't like about the nuclear deal was one, you know, there were people in the Republican Party that wanted it ended, but more importantly, it was called the Obama nuclear deal. And so he wanted, now it could be the Trump nuclear deal, and I think he'd be totally fine with that.
David Dayen 22:46
There's another side to this, though, when you're talking about foreign policy, and then that is Trump's recent kind of lunge towards McKinley style, manifest destiny, imperialism, talking about Greenland and acquiring Greenland for a player being named later, and the Panama Canal and what I think is a joke, but maybe, you know, jokes sometimes change to making a vassal state out of Canada. I think that there's a ton of appeal for Trump on that just from one sense that it creates a new set of enemies, it creates a new set of provocations that he can supply to his base. And, you know, there are some geopolitical reasons, both for the Panama Canal with respect to China, could be a move preparatory to a deal that says, you know, we'll take our sphere of influence, and you take yours, you go ahead with Taiwan, the South China Sea, and we take the Panama Canal into our sphere. There are rare earth minerals and other natural resources in the Greenland part of the equation. But I don't know, the Maga world kind of grew up around more of a paleoconservative isolationism. And this isn't that. It
Ryan Grim 24:06
almost feels like an apology for stepping back from war. Like, okay, I'm, I'm not going to set up a lot of weapons, and I'm not going to do the wars and all the killing, but I'm definitely doing the Imperial thing. We're going to take Greenland, we're going to we're even going to take Canada? We're going to take Panama. And it's like, how about this? Does this satisfy your lust for American greatness,
David Sirota 24:26
you know? And it actually strikes me as a little bit Reagan ish, in a certain sense, in that Ronald Reagan. I mean, there were a couple of flash points, proxy wars under the Reagan administration, you know, Central America and the like. And not to downplay those, but those are relatively small proxy war conflagrations. They weren't, you know, the nation at war. But also, Reagan talked a huge game on, you know, nuclear build up. Obviously, the cold war was going on. There was sort of a tough talking military posture. Here that, I mean, Reagan had described as peace through strength, right? And I think I feel like Trump. It's
Ryan Grim 25:06
just the reverse of Roosevelt's, talk quietly and use a big stick. It's like talk loudly, but use a really little stick
David Sirota 25:11
Exactly. And I feel like Trump. I feel like and maybe I'm, maybe I'm, you know, wishful thinking, or I'm hoping, you know, we're not going to get into some another huge war. But it feels like Trump doesn't necessarily want to be in a giant war, but also believes one way to keep us out of wars is to, is to, yeah, like, like, have all this bravado about whether it's, you know, I'm taking Greenland, I'm taking the Panama Canal, right? I feel like, you know, I'm gonna push the button on North Korea. I feel like it's part of title strategy.
Ryan Grim 25:41
Yeah, he's
David Dayen 25:42
internalized kind of the madman theory, like the Nixon theory, that if you're just crazy enough that you can sort of make the rest of the world cower The problem is, is similar to what you were talking about earlier. There are a lot of new Mad Men right there. There's there's the urbanization of the rest of the world is going to make it a little bit more difficult to just be the madman and expect the Institutionalists to, you know, back off. Yeah.
David Sirota 26:11
I mean, I worry about the madman theory, or the bravado theory of foreign policy running into a game of chicken, right? That some other trumpish person and a leader in another in another country, somehow we there becomes a nobody can back away from something, because everyone is posturing and nobody knows how to save face. And then what happens with with, you know, Trump's coalition, and that's a good segue to to his coalition. One of the questions that's on, I think a lot of people's minds, is this weird coalition. He's got all these Silicon Valley venture capitalists on one side, and then people like Steve Bannon on the other side. And these are, I mean, they're more than just not natural allies. In some cases, they seem like adversaries. Bannon saying, We got to get Musk out of the White House. What direction do you see? You both see this administration taking, and how does this administration manage that coalition? And do you think it's going to fracture? Dave Dane, we'll
David Dayen 27:11
start with you. I think it's going to be very difficult to hold that together. And we saw a flare up of this right over h, 1b, visas, right at the end of December where musk and Ramaswamy were essentially praising those things and not too subtly, saying that American workers were lazy and unable to fulfill these jobs, like the strivers of foreigners who come to the United States and innovate. And this just really set a lot of people in Maga world on fire. That's not going away. I mean, Bannon is getting louder and louder and louder talked about, why do we have these South Africans who, you know, dealt with apartheid? Why are they involved in our country? You know, you would think just because of the history of Trump, that to a certain extent, all of these Cabinet nominees are going to be gone. You know, before long, they're going to wear out their welcome with Donald Trump. But Elon Musk seems like the kind of guy who who Trump actually can't eject. He's the Jared Kushner of this term that he actually can't get rid of him because he has too much money, he has too big a megaphone, and he's too willing to use that money in politics. So there's going to be this tension there between the Maga base that will eventually tire of musk and want to get rid of them, and Trump's instinct to not piss off the richest man in the world who could come after him afterwards. So it's a real chaos agent into this entire, entire term of office. And
Ryan Grim 28:51
the new thing with Musk is his control of the media, right? And his control of the media through Twitter and particularly the conservative media and his and his willingness to use it, you know, out of the h 1b fight that Dave's talking about, he demonetized kind of Laura Loomer, which was ironic, because Laura Loomer was like representative of how the woke Twitter cracked down on conservative speech. And so it wasn't as if kind of the new bosses came in and came after the same kinds of people, that in several cases, they came after literally the same people. And so it was her and a bunch and a bunch of other conservative activists who were saying no, like, you know, they were, they were on the Bannon side of this argument. And so every conservative operative and media figure who is working today is dependent on the whims of a very whimsical and vindictive man who is very much willing to use his power against very small people. The question then becomes, if the grassroots kind of mag a world. Decides they that they really do want an existential fight in the way that Bannon wants it with Musk to eject him. What's the platform and where? How do they actually organize that? Because, like, Twitter is their main organizing forum, so that's not gonna work. He when He is so willing to just press the button on you, and everybody knows that, and we've never had that. I can think of a political figure like that who controls not just the most amount of wealth in the entire world as a literal government position, and also can, single handedly, take out all of his critics on the most important media platform.
David Sirota 30:52
After the break, I'll continue my conversation with Ryan and David. We'll be right back. You.
I think the final question is really about Trump and populism. What do you think of the idea that Trump is a populist, potentially a trust busting kind of of a populist, or at least not hostile to the idea of antitrust. I think what I'm getting at is, do you expect any overlap at all with the Biden administration in things like the Ticketmaster lawsuit or suing to break up Google or anything like that? I there's been a lot of talk about how different Trump is from Biden, but is there any continuity here? Yeah,
Ryan Grim 31:42
Dan, why don't you tell you that? Because some of these DOJ cases started with the Trump administration, right?
David Dayen 31:48
Yeah, that's true. The Google case that is heading towards a remedy phase started under the Trump administration. The Facebook case, which is going to trial this spring at the FTC against the FTC started under the Trump administration. The new incoming FTC chair looks like we'll have a posture. It's very, very different from Lina Khan, but might hang on to some of the tech cases, although the reason that Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are on that dais is to get those cases thrown out. I mean, that's that's the reason I think this populism brand is going to get very tarnished by having these impossibly wealthy folks dictating policy. It's one thing to have them in the government and just running the conservative playbook. I mean, there were certainly rich people in the first Trump administration, and that was fine, I think, to Maga that that, you know, it was low taxes and deregulation, and that's kind of what they wanted. And they wanted, you know, just sort of some sort of cultural signpost that, you know, their priorities were being listened to, and that that was good enough for them. Certainly, you know mass deportation is the way that they can cover this in the second term, but it's going to be too hard to ignore Jeff Bezos sitting on the sidelines, Elon Musk, having an office in the executive office building. Mark Zuckerberg, changing his entire posture, and maybe the Facebook case getting thrown out as a result, that's going to be hard to reconcile. It's going to be much harder to reconcile than sort of no name billionaires that happen to be running the Interior Department or something like that. So that's, I think, where the rubber meets the road for this.
Ryan Grim 33:36
Yeah, and they're so clearly trying to do the old school playbook of getting angry people to ignore the thing they're angry about by giving them something different. And it's rare that it's all in the exact same person. Like, usually there's a movement of people that are running that play. But like, in this case, Zuckerberg going on Joe Rogan, who's becoming this guy that you just go to and confess all your sins, and then you get this, like populist absolution. He tells him, like, Oh, I'm with you when it comes to censorship. The government really wanted to crack down on on on on posts around COVID. And you know, we did a little gentle pushing back, and all of a sudden, then we started getting investigated by the government, trying to convince people that, exactly like you said, these cases that have been brought against Facebook are actually just a vindictive government that wants to, you know, stop you from learning the truth about ivermectin. And I think there's a limit to how much people are willing to believe that, but the limit is very high. Like I think that you I think they can ride that for a pretty long time. And
David Dayen 34:39
one of the reason that it's high is because we're talking about people that own the communications medium. You know, there was this interview that Ross Douthat did with Marc Andreessen, and he was basically saying that, look, people kind of like Medicare, they like Social Security, they like these programs, and you're going to have a hard time turning people around on. And basically what Andreessen said is, we have the communications medium. We can show people what they're really like, what these programs are really like, and that's inevitably going to end up being this, this massive propaganda, which we've already seen. You know, one of the famous things that happened in the last month is Elon Musk called out this woman who was working at the USDA on diversification. Now it was actually diversification of crops, so that you know, if one crop has a bad year, that you have other things in your basket that you can sell. But he decided it was a dei thing, and he posted her name. He's like, this person's going to be out of the job. And basically, his base bought it. And so, you know, it's not that hard to pull the wool over people's eyes, especially if you have control of, sort of the means of communication. And so that's going to be, I think, the challenge for Democrats to, you know, defend these very popular, long standing programs from these obvious bad faith attacks that are going to come on in the next few years.
Ryan Grim 36:10
We must have crop equity. The Biden administration insisting that the corn stop growing higher than the wheat. Outrageous, uh.
David Sirota 36:19
Dave Dan of the American Prospect, Ryan Grim of drop site, thank you so much for your insights. Thank you for taking time with us today. Thank you, most importantly for all of your great reporting. I'm sure we will be checking in with you frequently and soon as the new Trump administration launches, thanks to both of you. You got
Ryan Grim 36:37
it. Looking forward to it. Thank you.
David Sirota 36:43
Thanks for listening to another episode of lever time. This episode was produced by Arjun Singh with editing support from Joel Warner and Lucy Dean Stockton. Our theme music is composed by Nick Campbell. We'll be back later this week with another episode of lever time.