Andrew Prokop
speaker
268 appearances
9 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 15 Sep
Andrew Prokop’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
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.
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, you know, leave you open to that possibility. I'm not doing anything for you.
Elite universities were kind of in right wing thinking, were basically deemed of certain of Trump's top donors, the center of wokeness. Like 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.
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 agenda, 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 know, 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, OK, 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.
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 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 define like as to encompass all sorts of liberal or left leaning institutions, as well as the specific people and issues.
groups that had that ever run afoul of Donald Trump personally.
For more than half a century, the U.S. had a rule that said anyone that does business with the federal government, from Boeing to FedEx and Pfizer to Johns Hopkins, had to take affirmative action toward hiring people regardless of race, color or creed. On day one of his presidency, Donald Trump ended that rule.
As the U.S. exploded following the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, a loose coalition of highly online commentators, sub-stackers, and Twitter shitposters set their sights on eviscerating DEI policies. Then they won. Coming up on Today Explained, one of them speaks.
I'm Andrew Prokop, senior correspondent, Vox, covering politics.
You recently wrote for Vox that the Trump administration is making policy, making policy decisions based on ideas that took hold on Twitter. Say more about what you mean.
So one thing that's become very clear in the new Trump administration that is different from the first one is that the people calling the shots are are very, very online. That includes, of course, Elon Musk. It includes Vice President J.D. Vance. It includes Stephen Miller.
It includes a whole host of officials whose names we don't even know, but whose onlineness is evident in the policies that are being rolled out by this administration.
What are those policies?
There are all sorts of things, really kind of too many to name. A kind of silly one that just recently happened is that Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that she was going to unveil the Epstein files.
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