Risks of a Failing Political Project

I want to ask you a question. is Donald J. Trump rununning out of guys That is the best question, and it is a question that we have had a lot of cause to contemplate Andrew Edgar is the White House correspondent over the Bllward Usually you do not see you do not see presidents stacking up people withith quite this many different responsibilities Like theoke guysy Marco Rubio, right? I mean like that was, you know, historically, it's the mee. anyime that job opens up, Marco Rubio is going gonna get the job. Then then you had Sean Duffy, who is like in charge of the Department of Trportation, but then also for a little while in charge of NASA, just because I see this people with multiple jobs, things a couple of ways. They' arere the people who have A lot of hats that they're wearing And then there's this new crop of people The new crop of people are the folks who I would say were on like the JV team until recently and have just now been inducted into varsity. I'm talking about Bill Polty, who's been running the Federal Housing Finance Agency and was just Given the temporary director of National intelligence role, I'm talking about Todd Blanche, who was Trump's personal attorney and we're wandering around the Department of Justice, now like acting atttorney general, possibly attorney general Like it' There's a few of these guys where it's like, wow, you're just real u Pormers, you're around. Yeah, yeah. and they haven't all made it, right? There are a couple who have been sort of left by the wayside. peopleeople like Allena Haba or Lindsey Halligan, you know, someome of these people who he tried to get installed in sort of these functionary U S atttorney roles. But these are people who he installed in these second tier roles, like you suggest, and who have basically acquitted themselves really well for the president on the one metric that he cares the most about, which is delivering for him on all these specific things. I look at this sort of small group of people working with Trump in this moment And I feel like it makes sense if you look at where Trump's head is at Like, I don't know if you saw the president's appearance on Meet the press this weekend. Um What stuck out to me O than the fact that Donal Trump out of the interview It's just the fact that he is still so focused on riged elections election was. It was a dirty election. It's happening again right now in nowented' happening right now. The one moment that stood out to me in that department was when he was repeatedly asked by Kristen Welker What's his message to farmers right now during during all of this, you know, the crisis, the economic cris that's been prompted by the war in Iran has hit farmers very hard. And the interview is being done in front of like a tractor. Like it's clear what the focus is. They're in Wisconsin. There's the tractor, and you know, they're in like a metal shed. Yes, yes, ye, they're like a barn. But he didn't really want to even countenance the question. He just kept rolling back to the idea that she would ask it in the first place. L farmers love me, I love farmers. fararmers are gonna do great under me. fararmers have always done great under me. and just like the unwillingness to adjust the message to anything resembling like a win people back who might be getting sort of frustrated. And I think he kind of has built himself this cocoon where he can just keep playing the hits all the time The new guys who Donald Trump has chosen to call up into the big leagues here. Bill Polty Todd Blanche How un bored are they president's focus on stuff like election fraud, twenty twenty, all that. I think that the answer is extraordinarily on board Pulty is interesting because his first job in government, his first kind of real assignment in Trump world, was this relative backwater assignment, right? What has endeared Pultty to Trump has been the moonlighting freelancing he has done from that post, where he's basically said to himself, what does this enable me to do? I mean, when reporters asked Donald Trump why he chose Pulty last week He was like, oh, you might find out something about rigged elections And I was like, Is that normally the Director of National intntelligence's job? Yeah, I mean, the answer iss no To the extent that the intelligence community has played a significant role in looking at US elections over the last decade or so, it is all downstream from various investigations into foreign interference in our elections It's like in his mind, all of that other stuff about the threats that are out there and monitoring those and picking them up early. All of that is secondary to this concept of the intelligence community is this thing that gets on my nerves when it comes to domestic elections. And I think that they really did me dirty in twenty sixteen and immediately after What can I do now to put kind of a thumb on the scale in terms of the elections that we have had since then, in terms of the twenty twenty election, doing more more and more and more muck raking about that, and then as well with these elections that we have coming up in twenty twenty six Today on the show Lincoln had a cabinet of rivals Trump's got a cabinet of curiosities. Who are the latest drafts? and will they make it to the big leagues I'm Mary Harris. You're listening to what next? stick around We do some biographical work when we're talking about people like Bill Poltty and Todd Blanche. I feel like Pulty especially I hadn't heard a ton about before this elevation. And when I did, it was all you know, in the realm of his federal housing fininance addministration job. So let's just put him in some context. He's a construction Nppo baby, right? That's correct. Yeah, yeah. yeah. hisis grandfather started this company, made a bunch of money. He has not been in the family trade, but he has obviously benefited quite a lot from. He's been a hedge funder, basically. and he has used that his hedge funding to sort of fund a number of these little projects that have been designed to sort of boost his political salience and political prominence. What kind of projects? Yeah, he had kind of a famous initiative to attack blight in Detroit. All of these sort of abandoned structures. He was going to go in and acquire them and knock down the structures and basically just deal with the blight. Sounds like something that makes sense if you do not live in Detroit Do you know what I mean? Like you probably don't want like people just knocking all your stuff down if you're living in Detroit I can't speak to the merits of it one way or another. I genuinely couldn't tell you whether or not it was a well founded or an ill conceived plan. but it was this sort of like publicity courting thing, right? And you can sort of track The the development of this because for a while, he's doing these sorts of things that are designed to kind of get written up in sort of traditional media and make a name for himself that way. And at a certain point, he turns a corner and he's like, why am I doing this when what I should be doing is going direct to the source and like trying to make fans for myself online? He would give away money, right? Yeah It's like if you followed him, you would be eligible for maybe winning some money from him. So he did this to kind of gin up support for himself That's right. He did that for a long time. Basically like, yeah, follow me, retweet me and I'm going I'm going you may win like one of my little lotteries to get an just a cash handout. And he builds himself a sort of online platform this way. He also becomes very active in a lot of these really niche kind of halfway conspiratorial internet subcommunities, like some of these meme stocks, Bedbath and Beyond being the most obvious one. There was like, if you remember the game stop. What was the term I feel like I have to stop you here because it's so wild like he became of this group of people who were convinced Bath and beyond. wasn't actually bankrupt and like they owned stock and they were like, it's gonna rise from the dead. and he was like a leader in this movement. Am I getting that right? Yes. So it's at this very strange moment a few years ago where the game stop meme stock thing has just happened. A ton of people made a bunch of money just by getting in like the same subreddit and hatching this plan It a short sell game stop. And there were a couple of these other meme stocks that were taking off right after that time. AMC made some retail investors some money at that time. Bedbath and Beyond is one that went badly. Bed Bath and Beyond was one where a lot of these guys just ended up. It didn't pan out at all. A lot of them were left holding the bag. but what was particularly notable about this is that after that stock went belly up and all these guys were left holding their worthless stock And he was like, I see what you guys have suffered. They really did you dirty, and we're gonna I'm gonna to help bring attention to this and rectify it. And this is just like kind of one example of the way that he was just kind of playing in these random internet communities But these guys would like get together and have conferences, right? Like the most notorious images, I've seen of Bill Pouoltty over the last week or two are images of him in this airport hangar where he's gotten together with a bunch of other people who believe What he's selling about Bedbath and Beyond stock Before he becomes apparent in the shot, a guy is hitting another guy with a green dildo And like eventually Bill Pulty is given a prize with pretty ridiculous like phrase on it because he became associated with the Taylor Swift song Only the Young that's on there, but it becomes like transmographied into like 's only the young, F's only the young. and I'm like What is even going on here? The levels of nonsense are crazy and then the levels of nonsense when you realize this guy is the acting director of National intelligence, really just blows your brain It really does kind of again, to circle back around where we're talking about before about Trump's guys, it kind of highlights how Insane in one sense, the bar is kind of high because you really do have to prove to Trump that you are going to Be with him no matter what If you are able to do that, it almost doesn't matter who you are or what path you took to get there. you can go you can literally drive yourself crazy just sort of like falling into these rabbit holes. My colleague Will Summer and I spent a lot of time on Reddit last week sending Bill Polty, Bedbath and beyond adjacent content back and forth to each other. I think I think that other than it just being insane and I think maybe hopefully we've made that point just insane that he was involved with this thing at all. The nexus of it to his being connected to Trump is basically he starts to sell himself to Trump as a guy who just gets people online gets Trump's online base and the way that these different communities all kind of glom ono MAGA and become kind of part of the whole thing. And from that point of view, I mean you can see that crop up even throughout his tenure here. It's always these memes and things that Pulte is sending Trump. Like he he's like Trump's, you know, base whisperer. That picture you' remember that picture of of Trump as Jesus Christ, healing a random guy. Yeah, one of the few things he like got into a little bit of trouble Yeah, that was a meme Bill Polty sent for no reason. It's just, I mean, it really is remarkable. and he gets in Trump's good books by being this guy, by being this guy who sort of understands Trump people on the internet. He has this housing pedigree, his grandfather's in construction. So that's enough to get him his first job and then he uses that first job to build up more and more social credit with the president by using the limited tools set at his disposal to go after his enemies And That's all he needs. Now he's the acting Director of National intntelligence Right. And and we should just say the job he eventually got head of the federal Housing F fininance aggency. He used it to investigate Lishia James, to investigate Adam Schiff, people who Donald Trump had railed against for a long time, investiging them all for mortgage fraud with these allegations that reallyally Yes. Aurg end up allegations. L I don't think one of them has been proven to be fair or accurate, right? Nothing has come of them. Nothing has come of them. That's correct. Yeah So here we are. Palty is the director of National intntelligence, at least temporarily Rus Does he have access to All of the goodies right now. Like just because Donald Trump waved his magic wand and said you're director of National intelligence for a little bit Does that mean he gets all of the sensitive intelligence information the president gets, including the presresident's daily brief He just has that now. There's stuff that only the president has that, you know, Poltty doesn't just have Automatically, But he is, you know he does have a top secret clearance. you know, he does have access by way of his job now to all of the raw intel that all of these agencies are pulling in. There was a little bit of a wrinkle. It might have been a little harder for the president to put him in, but for the fact that he already was confirmed by the Senate to the post that he's in now, right running running H sorry, I always some over this FHFA federal housing finance agency. And because he's already a Senate confirmed guy, it is easier now to install him in this other role that would otherwise require Senate confirmation for a couple hundred days. But yes, I mean, and again, like this is what we were talking about just a minute ago, this is one of these moments where you have a set of procedures or a set of institutions that have had these critics like the intelligence community and its's intntel vacuuming operations, the fact that it can do so much of that without a ton of direct oversight, without constantly going back to judges for warrants and these sorts of things These things that have had critics for a long time But most of the criticisms are sort of abstract. It's like, well, isn't it possible that this could be abused in this way? And shouldn't we care about that? And a lot of people do, But it really does sharpen these critiques it does when it goes from, isn't it possible that these could be abused to, well, look who's in there now? Isn't it likely that it's going to be abused? Isn't it possible that it's being abused right now as we sit here And talk about these things. Very possible, I' say, complete clown has accessed all this. Yes. And so this has really sharpened, particularly Democrats, obviously, Democrats, you know, scrutiny of and concern over these exact intelligence gathering authorities that Bill Polty is now the MAGA beneficiary of. And we should say like Donald Trump has talked a little bit to the Wall Street Journal in particular about what he wants Bill Polty to do in this role. He' hes said basically I want him to slim down which is interesting because my understanding also from the journal is that the office of the DNI has actually already lost a ton of stuff, likeike half of its stuff. So it's wild to me that Donald Trump is like, yep, want to keep getting rid of stauff there. He said, like, I want to basically run the Linda McMahon Department of Education playaybook here U And he's also basically said you're less shackled if you're in an acting role. Make of that what you will. And, you know he may be looking into election stuff for me. I mean, I haven't done the math, but two hundred days, I think that gets us to the mid tterms, doesn't it? Yeah, in early next year, I believe And is not like we should make a fine point of this. This is not abstract possible stuff. I mean, even under the last director of National intntelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, she was down at the Georgia elections facility. Yeah, she was she was completely sidelined from a lot of the stuff that is actually ordinarily the DNI's role. She was she was basically cut out of most foreign policy planning at a couple of crucial policy moments for Iran, for Venezuela. But what Trump did have her doing was hairring after a lot of this other stuff, a lot of the stuff that Trump particularly seems to think the role of DNI is for, which is usling up dirt on his political enemies and in particular trying to relitigate some of these claims about twenty sixteen Russia investigation and twenty twenty election. And yes, she was very famously down at that Fulton County raid when the FBI went into a Fulton County election office and seized a bunch of twenty twenty ballots and paraphernalia and other things. Now you get her out of there and you get this guy in who Even if he even if the president did want him in the Venezuela or the Iran briefing or whver, like, what would he say? He has zero zero to say on any of that All he has, literally the only thing he brings to the table is his willingness to do this domestic side of things, again, with this giant platter of surveillance, you know information that the government, not just the stuff that they're pulling in now, but just all the stuff they have been pulling in, right? to rake through that and find anything politically useful for the president That's why he's there You said, u Donald Trump does not seem interested in making Bill Poltty permanent in this director of National I intelligence role I kind of ask you though Why not I' just go for it Why not just go for it? Well, he could, right? I mean, when I say he doesn't seem interested, all I mean is that he said he won't. And you can take that however far you want to with Donald Trump, right? The big obstacle for Bill Poulty becoming the ual director of national intelligence isn't Donal Trump right? It's Rublican Senate. They've got fifty three senators. If they lose four of them, which would basically be Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Bill Cassidy, and Tom Tillis, if you lose all four of those, he can't be confirmed. And a lot of these people have made a lot of noises about Bill Polty in particular. They do not think he should be confirmed for this role The question is whether, I mean, Trump could call their bluff. He did that on a lot of nominees last year. Also, Trump has just always leaned on this active role very hard. I think he sort of resents the fact that he has to go to the Senate to get these guys installed at all. I mean, that the way that's the way it works, but they have the administration has taken really creative paths in a number of different times and places to short circuit that process and to keep these guys you know installed a in a Trump's say only way for as long as possible across a whole lot of different roles. And so even if P didn't face a very difficult path to Senate confirmation. You might still see the president trying this here, but that is the primary obstacle U back afterfter a quick break This is maybe a good transition to Todd Blanche because this is another temporary appointment. he's acting attorney genereneral. Although Trump has said he now wants to make him permanent attorney general And he is certainly facing pushback. in the Senate So maybe justust remind us who Todd Blch is. Like we did a show on him a little while back And I was reading it. I was like, oh yeah, this guy was like a registered Democrat till not that long ago. He was pretty respected within the government and he worked know for a local prosecutor's office And then he took this turny and he became Donald Trump's personal attorney. So who's Todd Blanch. Yeah, I mean, you've hit a lot of the key points right there, But I think I think one of the main things is that he's not just a guy who becomes Trump's personal attorney. There's this subclass of these attorneys who have worked for Donald Trump who who see him as like, oh, maybe this guy's going to be my meal ticket from now on He has very much made himself an extension of the president's id. He has very much made the investigations in his justice deepartment an extension of the president's id, all of his sort of filings and his press releases and these things. He's like channeling the truth social style. And he has made himself in the president's mind another one of these guys that the president can trust. He's done this most recently with this slush fund, quote unquote, The one point eight billion dollar Yes fund, this agreement, which now seems like it's you know, maybe not going to happen, but it's all because of Blinch's word, he hasn't signed anything, right? So it's like there's there's no official confirmation the thing is off But he eventually did go to Congress and say like, okay, fine, it's dead. but Maybe Yeah, these are kind of the two major moments that Blanche has stepped forward, right? One was last year when he was still working as the deputy to then attttorney General Pam Bondi during the Epstein files, Buha that was not going away for the president at that time. he was the one who went down, interviewed Galane Maxwell, kind of felt her out as a possible, like, can we get Galane to step forward and give some narrative of the EpSein investigation That exonerates Trump theoretically. or at least gives everybody else somebody else to go hirring off and get some of the pressure off of our guy. That was one moment. And then the other moment is this one right now with Bondi out of the way. He has been the guy who has been signing all of the official documentation for the Justice Department's implementation of this quote unquote anti weaponization slush fund for Trump allies. Well, and most importantly, the second part of the agreement, which is the thing that gives Donald Trump immunity for tax stuff and his family. So it's like, and that was really like signed by Blanche. So you know, he's become the face of this whole agreement and the whole mess around it Yeah, yeah. and you gestured toward this just a minute ago. Right now, the only reason anybody has to think that this thing is off is because Blanche went before Congress last week and basically said, yeah, you know, we don't have any plans to move forward with this. It's over. It's done with. Meanwhile, you still have the president out here beinging like, I love that this thing happened. Yeah, how good of an idea it is. Now he still thinks it should go forward and all these sorts of things. But but so Blanche is going to presumably need to actually be confirmed at some point here, right? He is he is and you're going to run into the same issue, right? You're going to run into the same issue as with Polty where you have these this same group of Republican senators who are really steamed about this anti weaponization fund, by the way, not just these this small group of senators. I mean, the All the reporting that came out of The Senate Republican sort of mood when this thing was first announced was like, you got you just have to be kidding with the stuff this guy keeps trying to make us swallow Trump is already sort of at a low eb in terms of Senate Republicans patience for him because he keeps picking fights with pretty Trumpy sitting senators and getting them to lose their primary fights because he' like, I forget this, I don't want like a pretty trrumpy establishment guy. I want some Maga fire breather in there. And like when once he starts doing that, All of the other sort of pretty trumpy guys in there start being like, wait a minute This sort of violates the terms of our longstanding agreement that we have had that we're all just gonna to swallow everything we might otherwise say about you and give you all of our political support forever. And in exchange, you won't primary us, right? And so like that's all been happening. And then he now tries to get them to sign off on a billion dollars for his ballroom and this one point eight billion dollars slush fund. And it really is like They're starting to lose patience and the ways in which it is it is showing up are first of all, in a couple of failed attempts to actually block that weaponization fund from going into effect, but now more more threateningly to continue to bottle up some of these real lick spittle type appointments if they do ever come up for a Senate vote Yeah. I mean I got to ask if Tod Blanche was for some kind of if Congress was weighing in now on Todd Blanche, where do you think it would land? And I ask that because you have Tom Tillis, who says he's waiting for Blanche to condemn the january sixth insurrection. You have John Fetterman, who's mad about the slush fund. It just seems like It wouldn't go so great for this guy If you were going to put a gun to my head right now and say like they're voting, predict it. I would probably land somewhere on you get just enough Republican defections to not kel haul the appointment. you have to bring in JD Vance to break a fif thousand fifty tie or something like that. But again, mean This is a guy who in a past world would have been confirmed very easily because he would have been seen as a person who had, like you were gesturing at before, this sort of like preree existing professional career that he would be one of these guys that like isn't going constantly be causing Senate Republicans headaches unlike many of the other people. That's what's wild about this, but he's spent the last like two or three years just like bes smirching his reputation. He just has shown himself and he has had to hustle. This is another thing Trump likes about these guys. He likes these guys who he feels like they had to come in and work really hard to win him over. They had to grovel twice as hard as other people would have, right? and just do do more than like I don't know, Marjorie Taylor Greene would have to do in order to in order to make sure they have proved to the president that they're his guy. And the stuff that Blanche has done, all of this stuff since Bondy went out while he's been basically publicly auditioning for this job, you have to see it in light of that where he has been working so hard to convince the president he's the guy that he should want in the position permanently that he has actually jeopardized his own path to getting there by pissing off these Senate Republicans. It's not just Todd Blanche. Bill Pulty who is director of National intntelligence temporarily, this has gotten Congress thinking about Section seven hundred and two of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, FISA, the fact that they have signed off on giving someone in this role so much access to warrantless wiretaps, stuff like that. And so there's a deadline this Friday for them to decide like how much we still believe in that. I mean, there are always there have always been these concerns. You are always going to lose some Democrats and some Republicans whenever FISA seven hundred two s came up for reauthorization. But it's just what all the reporting suggests we're likely to see now is Democrats pulling out en masse from reauthorizing that program in a way that we just haven't seen before I mean, this is just we were talking about before, right? Is it's just like there's always been these concerns about these powers, but it just it hits different when it's not just Couldn't some faceless intntel chief abuse this stuff? and it's couldn't that guy abuse it? Couldn't Bill Polty get in there and abuse it Big picture question Good or bad that Donald Trump seems to be running out of guys That is That is such an interesting question. I want to say bad in some respects because they 'cause they're messier now. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Like the left behinds are like Messy Yes. There are two things that he's running, right? He's running the country and he's running his political project Right? And as from where I'm sitting, it is a good thing if the political project starts to have the engine seize up and the tires fall off and all of these sorts of things. All of that is to the good. The problem is he's also running the country and these are the guys he has in place to do that as well. It is not necessarily a good thing for him to blow up the entire possibility of us gathering intelligence on people who might wish us harm abroad. I would like to know if there are people abroad who are plotting terrorist attacks on the United States right now. I think it would be good to get that information early. And the fact that the president and the people he has running these institutions seem bent on turning this thing into this inward focused operation that just sort of muck rakes on the president's domestic political opponents. and so much so that that the enterprise might kind of fall apart entirely, that we've lost a lot of of our Intel people, that more might leave, some might quit, some might get fired. These authorizations might just not get through in any form again, like not just, you know forget reforms. We might just not have these surveillance authorities you know, going forward, the country is not necessarily safer off. It's certainly not safer off. I'll go further than not necessarily. It is certainly not safer or better off for all of this stuff happening. So it's hard to do just one good or one bad about it, but it's all really unfortunate. Maybe we could just say that unfortunately would be the worst I'll shake with you on that. Andrew, thank you so much for coming on the show. Had a great time. Thanks. Re appreciate it. Andrew Egar is the White House correspondent over the Bulwork And that's our show. What Next is produced by Rob Gunther, Evan Campbell, Madeeline Ducharm, and Patrick Fort. Kay Josburn is the senior supervising producer of What Next and What Next TVD Yilo Bell is the executive producer of podcasts here at Slate. Ben Richmond is our senior director of podcast operations and I'm Mary Harris. Go track me down on a bllue sky, say, Hey, I'm atatt Mary Harris. Thanks for listening. Cet you back here