As Tesla's losses mount, Elon Musk promises to step away from his work at DOGE and focus on his flailing car company. Trump and his top advisers flip-flop on China tariffs, even as Trump steers more cash into his own pocket by raffling off White House access to the top investors in his memecoin. Exclusive new polling shows Trump's weaknesses on immigration, even as the administration continues its crackdown and the courts push back. Jon and Dan discuss if Elon is gone for good or merely taking a sabbatical, whether DOGE will hold any sway without him, and how a high-profile exit from CBS's 60 Minutes is a troubling sign for media everywhere. Then, Jon and Dan sit down with Amanda Litman, the co-founder of Run For Something, to talk about her new book for Crooked Media Reads, When We’re in Charge, a brilliant guide for young people looking to get into leadership positions. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [email protected] and include the name of the podcast.
Chapter 1: Who are the hosts and guests on this episode?
And you're here for a bill signing in the Oval Office, right?
I'm here for the EO. Yeah, it's really exciting. No, we're just in town for a couple days to catch up with some people. I don't know. What do you think of D.C. since we haven't been here in a year? Seems more ominous, but maybe that's just my own.
I think that's in your head.
It is in my head.
You could walk around and not know that democracy is collapsing around you, like the Lincoln Memorial is still standing.
For now. For now. We haven't left yet. All right. On today's show, we're going to talk about Elon Musk, who is leaving the White House to spend more time with his ailing car company. We'll talk about what it means for his quest to break all the government services Americans rely on.
We'll also talk about Donald Trump's quest to make America poorer with his big dumb trade war and his quest to make himself richer with a new crypto scheme to literally sell dinners with Trump and White House tours to people who buy his meme coin. Shocking, but not really.
We've also got our hands on some exclusive new polling that lines up with a lot of other recent polls that show just how unpopular Trump's illegal deportations are with the public.
And then our good friend Amanda Lipman, the co-founder of Run for Something, comes by to talk about her new book for Crooked Media Reads, When We're in Charge, which is a fantastic guide for young people looking to get into leadership positions. But first, let's talk about the art of the deal, which hopefully all of you have read by now.
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Chapter 2: What is the current status of Trump's China tariff policy and trade war?
You got all that, Dan? One last kicker from this morning. A top Chinese official said there had been no talks and that the U.S. must cancel all of its tariffs if it wants a deal. He quoted a Chinese proverb. The person who tied the bell must untie it. Nice. Do you think Trump's going to untie the bell? And what do you make of all the back and forth?
I think Trump was asked again right before we were recording. about the chinese official who made those comments and he was like well there was a meeting this morning and maybe i'll reveal who it was at some point but there's a meeting so i think it's it's fake news the fake news the story about the fake news the fake news
Got it, got it, got it, got it. I have some questions about the Chinese proverb.
Yeah. How do you tie a bell?
Yeah. Well, I thought it was going to be the person who rings the bell to unring the bell, but you can't unring a bell, which is the whole point of the original saying.
I think they got to work on that. I think we should jack up the tariff a little more just for that.
It's also possible things have gotten lost in translation here. That's true. I mean, this is insanity, but it's also should be completely expected. Like this is what happens when you put in the White House a erratic older man who hasn't had a new idea since Cheers was on the air. And then he surrounds himself with a bunch of yahoos who view their only job is to make the Mad King happy. Yeah.
And so you end up with this pure chaos. And it is like there is no there is no coherent policy. There is no coherent ideology behind the policy. There is no consistency between on a minute to minute basis. Like we're recording this on Thursday afternoon, East Coast time.
By the time people listen to this on Friday morning, it's very possible and perhaps probable that there will be an entirely new position on terrorists with China by the time you listen to this.
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Chapter 3: How is the Trump meme coin scandal impacting White House access and corruption?
Elon made an appearance on the company's earnings call to offer his best guess as to why that might be and what happens now. Let's listen.
As some people know, there's been some blowback for the time that I've been spending in government with the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. But the large slug of work necessary to get the DOGE team in place and working in the government to get the financial house in order is mostly done. Next month,
may um my time allocation uh to doge will drop significantly i'll have to continue doing it for i think probably the remainder of the president's term just to make sure that the waste and fraud that we stop does not come roaring back trump was then asked about this in the oval office on wednesday night here's what he said
I can't speak more highly about any individual. He's an incredible guy. He's a brilliant guy. He's a wonderful person. I've seen him with his family. I've seen him with a lot of his children. He's got a lot of children. And he was a tremendous help, both in the campaign and in what he's done with
I also know that he was treated very unfairly by the, I guess you'd call it the public, by some of the public, not by all of it. He makes an incredible car, makes everything he does is good, but they took it out on Tesla, and I just thought it was so unfair.
Poor Tesla. Tesla. Tesla. Note the past tense there. He was a tremendous help. We also learned that Elon and Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary, apparently got into a shouting match recently outside the Oval about who would run the IRS because Scott Besson wanted a competent, experienced professional to run the IRS.
And Elon wanted the random quote unquote whistleblower that yelled something about Hunter Biden and some scandal that I can barely remember at this point. who was just some like mid-level flunky. He wanted him to run the IRS. So they fought about that outside the Oval. At one point, Elon called Besant a Soros agent. So welcome. Welcome to the club, Scott.
First of all, how much of Tesla's problems, sorry, Tesla's problems are attributable to the blowback that Trump was talking about? And what other factors were in play? In other words, did we, the woke mob, just score a big win?
Yes, the big win for the book, Bob. Tesla probably has four problems. The first is the guy who runs the company has been doing everything but run the company for a while now, usually a problem. Two, it's hard to know how much the political blowback impacted sales, but just common sense is... The customer base for Tesla is generally well-to-do climate-conscious liberals.
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Chapter 4: Why is Elon Musk stepping away from his government role at DOGE?
And you can look at reports of this all over the world. People have already died because of this. More people will die because of medicine that we took away and food that we took away that cost pennies a day. Pennies a day. So this is Elon Musk's Doge legacy. Pretty good, huh? Yeah, not great. Did you see Steve Bannon was out with a statement on this? Oh, no. What did he say?
Elon Musk should be required to submit a certified inventory of all the fraud and waste he found while in government, and there should be full disclosure of any non-governmental entities to have obtained sensitive federal data through Doge. Sounds like a Democratic member of Congress. That's right. Steve Bannon. I agree. I agree with Steve Bannon.
All right, clip that, Elijah.
Let's get a certified inventory of all the fraud and waste because it's also supposed to be the most transparent administration in history. Yes, of course. And they put everything on the Doge website only except when they don't. So good job at Doge, Elon.
We really need an Elon Doge in memoriam. That's a good idea.
God damn it. That would be good. Does anyone do content around here? Elijah's just posting over here. That's right.
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Chapter 5: What is the impact of Tesla's financial struggles on Elon Musk and the EV market?
get at least online, obviously, but that like two things can be true at once. And just because immigration is a good issue for Trump doesn't mean that no matter what he does around immigration, it's going to be popular.
Yeah. It's we, we all lost our mind on the politics of immigration from like 2022 until now.
Yeah. Are you really like 2016 on? No, I think in the.
During the Trump era, all we had to do in the first Trump 1.0, all we had to do was point out that what Trump was doing was bad and cruel and stupid and counterproductive. And we actually quite effective that like I was looking at the polling today. Trump was underwater on immigration for almost every single day of his first term.
I'm sorry, I think the reaction from Democrats in the 2020 primary to the prior four years was an example of misreading what the anger about Trump on immigration was all about.
Yes, 100%. But for a long time, we had a very good message on immigration, which was... border security, keep people safe, have a path to citizenship for people who have been here a long time, are a part of the community, have them go to the back of the line, pay back taxes, whatever. There was a method that tested for that to this day.
Are you saying we're a nation of immigrants and a nation of loss? There's Barack Obama's message.
Well, I mean, that position still to this day gets majority support. And when we constrain the image only to the way in which Trump wants to talk about it, I think what we did wrong, and I think it's still keeping a lot of people from talking about this in the right way, is we really accepted Trump's premise.
This is something Trump and the right-wing media did very successfully, which is they took legitimate issues around chaos at the border of migrants coming here seeking asylum and turned it into an invasion by MS-13 in Trinidad and Tobago. They turned it into this idea that there was this wave of crime from migrants and undocumented immigrants that you were unsafe for them because of this.
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Chapter 6: How effective has Elon Musk's work at the Department of Government Efficiency been?
On Tuesday, the longtime executive producer of 60 Minutes, Bill Owens, announced that he's stepping down, saying he can't run the show independently anymore. This comes, of course, after Trump called again for CBS to lose its broadcast license over some recent segments on 60 Minutes. And after he filed a $20 billion lawsuit against CBS for the way the show edited its interview with Kamala Harris.
And CBS News' parent company, Paramount, which is trying to close a major merger, is talking about settling. How big of a deal do you think this is?
If I was writing a book, which I am not, about the death- You can announce it here if you want. I mean, you do have a publishing arm, so maybe we should talk. No. If I was writing a book about the death of the traditional objective media that dominated the 20th century and the first part of the 21st century, the lead anecdote would be what just happened with Bill Owens at 60 Minutes.
60 Minutes is the flagship news show in America. so known for tough accountability journalism that if you worked at a company or a government agency and a 60 Minutes producer called you, you wet your pants. It meant you were in big trouble. And the fact that now even 60 Minutes is being brought to heel by its corporate overlords means-
The entire model of big media owned by big corporations cannot function. There is an inherent and irreconcilable tension between companies with business before the federal government owning media companies trying to hold that federal government accountable. This is the end of an era where we are right now.
And again, it's like, I mean, Sherry Redstone, who runs the Paramount, you know, trying to close a merger, so maybe it's just all about money for her, right? Maybe she just wants a deal. But I think it is for other media companies that can, for other people in media, for these colleges, for the law firms, like, people should fight. Because
I think that all of the people that have capitulated so far are going to look, they're not going to be like, oh, that was smart. They got away early. It's going to look bad.
And if you, and again, just we were talking about the polling, like some of these media companies, if you ask people, oh, should the government be able to sue media companies into oblivion or threaten them or pull their licenses because they said things that our ruler, Donald Trump, doesn't care for, That's not fucking popular. No one's going to think that's a good idea.
Yeah, there was very explicit polling on colleges and museums that shows that what Donald Trump is using federal funding as leverage is quite a popular, even with Republicans. But what is going on here is just, it's important to understand that there was a time in which CBS was a huge part of the revenue at Paramount, CBS News in particular. That is not true anymore. Right?
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Chapter 7: What does new polling reveal about public opinion on Trump's immigration policies?
Welcome back to the pod. Congrats on the new book.
Thank you.
It's called When We're in Charge, The Next Generation's Guide to Leadership. We're also psyched you chose to do it with Crooked Media Reads because we've all been big fans of yours for a long time.
I am so excited to talk about it, and it feels so right for this moment.
Yes, it does. Well, so I want to spend time on the book. I thought we could start by checking in on Run for Something, which is the organization you launched after the first Trump administration with the goal of recruiting, training, helping younger candidates run for office. down ballot races all over the country.
I'll admit that I was worried that after all the despair and fear that accompanied Trump's second win, you guys would have a tougher time finding candidates to run. That hasn't happened.
No, and I will admit I shared that concern. But since Trump won in November, we have had 41,000 young people all across the country raise their hands to say they want to run. Our overall pipeline has exceeded 200,000. That means 20% of the people who have ever signed up with Run for Something to say they want to run for office have come to us in the last five months.
And how does that compare to the first?
So in the first two years of Trump's first term, we had 30,000 people sign up. So we've already exceeded that. It is more people than I ever could have imagined. Like our goal for 2025 was 50,000. We're going to cross that in like a month.
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Chapter 8: What are the political implications of Trump’s immigration enforcement and public opinion?
you know, this, you touched on this, this, your book is largely about this, but the debate about the generational divide of the democratic party has been brewing for a long time. Um, it's obviously picked up pace since this election, since, uh, Biden's the end of Biden's presidency. How do you think about generational split? Is it, is it really age or is it style too? Right.
We obviously have folks like Bernie Sanders who, uh, is much older but is very popular with young people and probably campaigns and talks about politics in a way that makes young people excited. So talk to me a little bit about that split and where you think it's going.
Obviously, no generation is a monolith. We have seen older leaders like Senator Sanders rise to the occasion and really prove they can fight and communicate in this moment. That being said, I don't think it's a coincidence that many of the folks who have risen up, who have shown their backbone, and who have proven they can communicate about that fight in this moment are some of the younger leaders.
And I would say it is both age, sort of, you know, millennials and Gen Z folks. We'll give younger Gen X a little bit of credit here.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
But it is also like people whose political awakening has been since Trump. Like people who first got into politics post-2015, 2016, who have a very clear-eyed understanding of who the Republican Party is. It is not Judge W. Bush's Republican Party. It's not John McCain's. It's not Mitt Romney's.
It is Trump's and they know who the opponent is and that these are not good faith partners in governance. And because they're comfortable online, like I like to joke, these are candidates and electeds who run their own Instagram accounts, which is pretty unusual. They understand how to express that in this moment.
How do you think this next generation of leaders should be responding to Trump 2.0? Like how do we end what you've called the bad boomer leadership that's taken over the Democratic Party?
You know, I think it's a couple things. I think, again, being clear-eyed about who the Republican Party is and who they are not. I think being willing to channel whatever it is they're really mad about and communicate it.
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