Susan Davis
speaker
210 appearances
16 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Apr 2025
Susan Davis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
which is somehow take a lot of credit and grow the American economy, but single-handedly being the source of so much uncertainty that makes it very difficult to predict what's going to happen.
No longer unelected bureaucrats are going to be running things. And then later is like, and there's Elon Musk up there, an unelected bureaucrat making profound changes to the federal government. I'm sorry. I just had to I had to see the irony in that moment. Look, I think Musk is a singularly fascinating and powerful figure in American politics right now.
And I also thought it was notable that Trump very obviously gives him credit for running the Doge effort while at the same time his administration is arguing in court that that Musk isn't technically in charge of it. So, again, creating some murkiness there.
I also think that there were some of these moments in the speech tonight where Trump was effective at sort of rope-a-doping the Democratic Party on things that are much more popular within the public.
And when I say that, like I think back to when Biden did this at one point when he was giving an address in which he was kind of goading the Republican Party about cutting Social Security or Medicare and they started booing him down. And he was like, oh, great. You don't want to cut it. Like he had a moment.
And I think that when Trump was talking about particularly people like Lakin Riley and Democrats were not sort of responding to their families in the chamber, not cheering for the fact that people had been arrested. I think that that is an easy thing to cut and splice politically in a way that I think very much fits Donald Trump's political goals.
Look, I will say that one of the things I think Trump is doing that could hurt him politically is let's go back to the top, right? He says he believes he has a mandate. But reality is he won by a smaller margin than Joe Biden did or Barack Obama did before him. Like the mandate thing is very questionable. And I do think when Trump spends time talking about things like the U.S.
is going to welcome Greenland if they want to be part of our country, and we're going to take back Panama Canal. Like, I'm not sure that Trump won this election because American voters had some grand new idea of Manifest Destiny. I think that they wanted economic relief. And you could argue they wanted to put the brakes on what they saw as some leftward lurching in society of cultural issues.
But he can kind of talk about things that I think move the ball. And right now, when you're a president that's ultimately not that popular, right? that stuff's risky, where it looks like you're focusing on stuff that is not the reason why people elected you.
And I think he's on much firmer footing when he's talking about things like immigration and also talking about things like trying to lower energy prices or, you know, the cost of eggs.
Well, she's been, since she first arrived in Congress, I think seen as a bit of a rising star. And I think her choice has a lot of symbolism to it. She was first elected to the House in the 2018 midterm wave that was seen as a backlash towards the first term of the Trump presidency and part of a crop of women that were elected in that class.
And then in this most recent election, she won the Senate race in Michigan. And she won it narrowly, but she won in a state that Donald Trump carried as well. So I think that the Democratic Party, as they seek to find the right messengers and the right leaders right now.
Picking her tells you that that's the type of person that they're trying to appeal to, a Democrat that can win over Trump voters, because that was her path to election. And I thought it was pretty interesting because her speech was, I think, It felt shorter than a lot of the rebuttals. It felt more focused. And I think that, you know, we've talked about this before in the podcast.
These speeches can often be a bit of a jinx or become a parody. And I think she was successful in like not doing anything that seemed like it was obvious that it was going to be parodied on Saturday Night Live this weekend. I think she did a perfectly acceptable job for what the job is.
It was also very notable to me, especially in contrast to Trump's speech, where he really did focus on divisive social issues, particularly things like trans rights. And in the Democratic rebuttal, there was none of that.
She said she was going to focus on three fundamentals that the Democratic Party believes in, which is that the country was built on the middle class, that a strong national security is a good thing, and that our democracy is worth fighting for, which were probably the easiest focus group messages that you could argue about. to get through.
But it really leaned out from any of the divisive social stuff. And it also, to me, does say that the Democratic Party doesn't quite know how to re-engage on those issues, especially coming off of the 2024 election, in which many of them believe that they lost because the party was seen as too leftist center on some of these issues.
That's a great question. I did think it was kind of funny, too, where she had a line, I'm paraphrasing, where she said something like, just by the fact that you're watching this speech says you're an engaged citizen, which I think is probably true, which I thought was honestly pretty self-effacing and accurate. One of the things I think we're watching is
and we've seen a little bit of it percolating on social media, is what is actually happening back at home in the real world? And there has been some social media moments of Republican lawmakers being shouted down or having these contentious moments at town halls. How much of what is happening in Washington is actually creating a spark of anger or activism or support out in the country?
And I think Democrats at least believe, especially as conversations teeter around things like Medicaid and Social Security, that they have a real chance to make it a fight in the 2026 midterms. And I think if they're looking for a message, I think protecting things like that are going to be at the forefront of it.
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