Today in Politics — Explainer

[0:00] Now, you have a lot of questions about what's going on, and I hope to get to them. I mean, [0:04] I always say I can't get to all of them because I'm always sure I'm going to miss some. There's [0:08] a lot to cover today. But I feel like you have to start from a very obvious place today. And that is [0:18] that the President of the United States is crumbling before our eyes. At the same time, [0:26] the ideology that led us to President Donald Trump is also crumbling. And that's a lot, a lot to [0:38] grapple with. Because let me actually start with what to me is the symbol of this. I hope that you [0:49] all did not see this and that you're actually doing something else other than reading the news [0:53] these days. But this afternoon, Trump actually posted on his social media platform, a video [1:04] of the Davy Crockett theme song from 1955 to 1956. It's a little bit odd. The Davy Crockett was not [1:17] actually a TV show. It was a three and then a five series, sort of mini series from Disney in 55, 56, [1:25] which would have been about when Trump was nine years old. And it really took off, you know, [1:31] it really captured people's imagination. And he posted this video. And then he wrote on the video, [1:43] Davy Crockett, obviously a distant relative of Jasmine Crockett, and a very high IQ frontiersman, [1:52] would be proud of the legacy that he began long ago, and especially Jasmine's great success as a politician [2:01] from the great state of Texas, President Donald J. Trump. Now, of course, Jasmine Crockett is a [2:08] representative from the state of Texas, prosecutor, incredibly smart woman, that Trump likes to needle. [2:14] But this is the president of the United States of America. The world is reeling from the shock of raising [2:26] oil prices, rising oil prices because of Trump's completely misguided attack on Iran on February 28th. [2:36] American inflation is rising. The stock market is incredibly unsettled. I'll talk about all this stuff. [2:46] There's, he fired today his attorney general. Things are falling apart everywhere. And what does he do? [2:56] But he goes on social media and tries to pick a fight with a Democratic representative from Texas [3:03] by using a meme from the 1950s. The man is lost. The man is lost. And that's the story. [3:14] That is the story above everything else. It's all coming to a crisis in the next, you know, several [3:24] weeks anyway, because Trump is not okay. So that's the big story. That's above everything else. And [3:33] that's really important to remember as I go through the still huge stories, but the stories that you have [3:39] to fit under, we have a president who's not okay. And this is, you know, often every morning I, or midday [3:47] after I've read the news, I try and think about what is today's story? Like if I were writing about this [3:53] in 150 years, what's the story? And the story above all has to be that the president of the United States [4:02] is in real trouble with his mental acuity. That, that, that's the big story. However, that also coincides [4:13] with the reality that I think we're seeing now, that the ideology that the movement conservatives, [4:22] and I'll explain that again in a second, put in place in the United States, really from the 1950s on, [4:29] but taking off in the 1980s and the 1990s is crumbling at the same time that Trump is. [4:36] And that does a number of things. It opens up, I mean, it, we're watching stuff implode around us, [4:43] but it also opens up great possibilities. So let me start with what I mean now by the implosion of the [4:51] ideology of movement conservatism. After the new deal in that, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the [4:59] Democrats in Congress begin to put in place in the 1930s, in 1933, to combat the Great Depression, [5:05] that new deal government does a number of things. It regulates business, it provides a basic social [5:12] safety net, it promotes infrastructure, it protects civil rights, and it underpins an international order [5:19] that will try to prevent World War III. But after it, beginning really in 1936, but it's definitely [5:26] taking off after World War II ends in 1945, a number of groups that don't like this new government [5:34] begin to take a stand against it. And those new groups are really characterized by three factions. [5:41] One are Republican businessmen who do not want taxes, and they do not want regulation on their [5:46] business. They think this is a real intrusion on their freedom. There's also the Southern, [5:52] especially, but racists across the country, former Southern Democrats who don't like the idea of [5:58] creating an economic system and a social system in which Black Americans and Brown Americans will [6:04] be on a level playing field with white Americans. And then there are the traditionalist religious [6:10] figures who don't like the idea that the federal government is taking on the role of the church and of the [6:17] father, of the man of the house, because it might allow women to be equal to men as well. [6:25] So these three groups really begin to organize, especially after the Brown versus Board of Education [6:31] decision of 1954, in which they say, listen, this government that's doing all this stuff, [6:37] that's got social security, and that is putting in roads, and that is building schools, and that, [6:43] you know, built the wind brakes across the West. And, you know, this government that's doing all [6:52] this stuff, this New Deal government, is essentially a form of socialism. And the way that you should [6:58] think about it is that it's destroying American freedom and American liberty. And we need to replace [7:04] that with this idea of individual freedom that is represented by the American cowboy, or by the [7:11] American Westerner, by somebody, say, like Davy Crockett, right? Remember, I said 1955, 1956, for that [7:19] miniseries. The idea that they that they were trying to push was a myth, the idea that a real American [7:28] needed nothing from the government, and really only just wanted to be left alone. And that was never the [7:32] case. I'm not going to go into the whole history of the West and the Cowboys now. But just you'll need in this [7:37] point to accept that that's really just a myth. But they kept insisting that this was the way to get [7:43] America back to this great, you know, independence and freedom. And this world that they fantasized [7:49] was a great world. It was the world that had led, of course, to the Great Depression and to a number [7:54] of world wars. But they liked that idea that they would be able to run their businesses however they [8:00] wanted and make as much money as they wanted. And that this was really the key to being an American. [8:06] Well, that idea has always been really sort of a rhetoric that would enable Republicans, [8:12] as those people arguing for that, that faction arguing for that sort of took over the Republican [8:19] Party. The people initially arguing for it called themselves movement conservatives, movement because [8:25] they were a political movement and conservatives because they wanted to go back to the world of the [8:30] before the New Deal, even all the way back to the 1918, I'm sorry, the 1890s. But they argued that was [8:37] what it really meant to be an American. And they argued that. But the reality was that while people [8:45] like Ronald Reagan embraced that and cut taxes and George W. Bush cut taxes and now Donald Trump has cut [8:52] taxes dramatically, while they talked about it, they did recognize that the American people actually [8:58] liked Social Security. They liked the Environmental Protection Agency. They liked clean air. They liked [9:05] rising wages. They liked better working conditions. Those were things that the American people really, [9:12] really liked. So they didn't, they talked about it. And they certainly suggested that the government [9:18] actually doing things for people helped racial, religious, and gender minorities. But the reality was [9:26] that for a lot of people, you could embrace that rhetoric, but you wouldn't actually lose Social [9:31] Security, for example, or Medicare, or the things that you cared about. Now, Trump is in office and with [9:38] the Department of Government Efficiency, and now with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, [9:43] Russell Vogt, you're seeing that government actually be decimated, actually crumble as they are trying to make [9:53] that rhetoric become reality. So you saw this really clearly in the 1950s and the 1960s, when you had [10:04] movement conservatives like Barry Goldwater, who ran for president in 1964, saying, listen, the government [10:10] can't do things like help farmers or help laborers, or certainly can't help black Americans, because that [10:16] will intrude on freedom and on liberty. So that all of that, if you want things like protection of civil [10:26] rights or whatever, that belongs to the states. Of course, the reality is the states weren't protecting [10:30] civil rights, but that's where all that activity belongs. And again, you're seeing Trump now try and [10:39] put that world into place. So for example, yesterday, at an Easter reception lunch, he said he had told the [10:48] Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vogt, and I quote, don't send any money for daycare, [10:54] because the United States can't take care of daycare. That has to be up to a state. We can't [11:00] take care of daycare. We're a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We're [11:06] fighting wars. We can't take care of daycare. You got to let a state take care of daycare, and they [11:12] should pay for it too. They should pay. They have to raise their taxes, but they should pay for it. And we [11:17] could lower our taxes a little bit to them to make up. But we, it's not possible for us to take care of [11:24] daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can't [11:31] do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing, military protection. This is straight out [11:39] of the 1950s. It is straight out of the language of the 1950s and the 1960s. The idea that we have to [11:46] get rid of all the federal programs that actually work for people, and instead use any money that we [11:52] have solely for building up the military. And yet, in the midst of all this, we're seeing that the [12:01] American people don't want that kind of a government, and that that kind of a government, by virtue of the [12:07] fact it requires making Congress less and less and less powerful, and the president more and more and [12:12] more powerful, has given us a country that cannot function. So what do I mean by that? First of all, [12:19] you're seeing the fact that the American people won't put up with it in places like the federal [12:26] budget. So in 2026, coming up for the 2026 budget, Trump asked for a budget that dramatically increased [12:33] the size of the military, but tried to pay at least for some of it by cutting back on domestic [12:40] programs. And Congress simply said, no, we're not going to do that. So the Democrats didn't get the [12:45] funding that they wanted to increase in a number of Democratic programs. But at the same time, [12:50] they didn't get the cuts that they wanted. Except, of course, in that one big, beautiful bill act that [12:57] the Republicans forced through on July 4th of 2025, which had, for example, dramatic cuts to Medicaid, [13:06] and that we are now facing across the country, just as opponents said, the high risk, there are 400 [13:17] hospitals across the country that are at high risk of closing, which is 400 hospitals. Now, as a [13:29] Congress critter pointed out, to build a modern hospital costs about $100 million. We're spending [13:37] more than $1 billion a day in Iran. Now, you can do that math as well as I can. That's about 10 [13:44] hospitals a day that we are not building in order to put that money into Trump's war in Iran. And my [13:53] take on it is this is not going to fly. Trump is expected to release his 2027 budget tomorrow, and [14:00] he's expected to ask for the same sorts of things, a huge boost in the amount of money going to the [14:07] military with cuts to domestic programs. I'm guessing that a number of us are going to be [14:12] speaking up to say, hey, you know what, the fact that the statistics are out in the in Maine, for [14:17] example, it has a, you know, for labor and delivery it for hospitals that have labor and delivery [14:25] units, the average drive to get to one in the state of Maine is 45 minutes. You know, that's, [14:33] that's really not okay, if you are expecting to have safe maternal and child care in your states 45 [14:42] minutes is an eternity, to get to a labor and delivery unit, guessing people are going to push [14:48] back on that. But we're seeing the places in which this ideology is crumbling in other places as well, [14:54] because one of the key aspects of it has been the idea of getting rid of people of color. And you've seen [15:02] this with the Department of Homeland Security and under Trump, sweeping up migrants, the ones who [15:09] are here legally, as well as the ones who are here without documentation, and as well as American [15:15] citizens. And that is now increasingly sort of blowing up in Trump's face. First of all, the American [15:21] people don't like the idea of losing their black and brown neighbors, turns out. And it also today [15:28] has shown up in a couple of places. First of all, in the fact that, do you remember the man from the [15:39] refugee from Myanmar, whom Border Patrol agents dropped off at a coffee shop? And by the way, I keep not using [15:49] the name of that, because I try not to use names of people who get dragged into stories without them [15:54] wanting to be. The coffee shop at which the man was dropped off was closed. It just happened to be [15:59] their parking lot. So that's why I kind of try not to drag people's names in if they didn't really have [16:07] anything to do with it. It feels like then people will associate that particular chain with this death, [16:13] and they had nothing to do with it at all. Anyway, this man, the Neural Amin Shah Alam, was visually impaired. [16:24] He was virtually blind, and he did not speak English, and he did not have a cell phone that he could use, [16:31] and they dropped him off in February in Buffalo, New York, at a coffee shop, and he was found dead five [16:39] days later. That death has been ruled by the medical examiner as a homicide. And Border Patrol, [16:47] the Border Patrol and, no, Customs and Border Protection, which is the parent agency for Border [16:55] Patrol, has said, you know, we had nothing to do with it. He died after he was out of our custody. [17:03] This was not our problem. But the medical examiner has said it's a homicide, which suggests that there [17:08] are going now to be at least some guardrails up around the stuff that is happening under this [17:15] administration. But you also saw it today in a story in Wired. And by the way, Wired and 404 Media [17:22] are doing really great work in technology stories these days. But Wired had a story about the Border Patrol [17:33] Tactical Unit, or BORTAC, out of Fort Bliss, and its sister unit, Border Patrol Search, Trauma, and Rescue, [17:40] BORSTAR. And those were units that in the past had been used for high-risk warrants, desert rescues, [17:49] conflicts with drug cartels, and manhunts. And under former director of the Border Patrol, one of the [17:57] directors of Border Patrol, Greg Bovino, they are the ones who got pulled into things like the assault [18:05] on the apartment complex in Chicago. And the level of the violence they employed was extraordinary. [18:17] And what was an interesting part of the Wired story is that it was possible for journalists from Wired [18:24] to identify individual agents who were part of that assault on the apartment complex in Chicago. [18:35] Well, why does that matter? That matters because one of the things that the administration has [18:41] tried very hard to do all along is make it impossible to identify who individual actors are, [18:47] so that it would not be possible for the legal system to catch up with them. Even now, it's hard, [18:52] for example, to figure out who's doing what on things like the attempt to rebuild the East Wing [18:58] of the White House with this ballroom Trump wants. A judge just said, listen, you're not telling me [19:06] who's actually overseeing this. They keep sort of doing a shell game so that it's not possible to [19:13] figure out who's in charge. Well, it actually turns out, in the case of at least some of these BORTAC [19:20] and BORSTAR agents, Wired journalists, were able to figure out exactly who was doing what, [19:27] which should down the road mean that they can be brought to accountability for that. [19:32] So you're seeing that attempt to clear out Black and brown Americans finally running up against, [19:41] first of all, popular opinion. We knew that. But now also against the legal system in ways that [19:48] will perhaps bring certain people to justice, but also will make those people who are still engaged [19:57] in that activity and that behavior perhaps more concerned that they are going to face [20:04] charges going forward. So you're seeing it crumble there, but you're also seeing it crumble in a huge way [20:10] over Trump's attack on Iran on February 28th. So that attack, of course, Trump keeps saying no one [20:18] had any idea that Iran would go ahead and attack its neighbors. But of course, everybody knew that [20:24] that's exactly what's going to happen. Even I knew that was going to happen. And this is not at all my [20:29] area of expertise. Why did we know that? Because if you've been paying any attention to any of the [20:35] discussions about Iran and its nuclear capabilities and the Strait of Hormuz, you knew that what played [20:43] out was pretty much what people said was going to play out. And this morning, Mika Brzezinski had a [20:49] clip of her father saying, who was a major figure in foreign policy, saying exactly that 12 years before, [20:58] basically laying out exactly what was going to happen. Iran has launched control of the Strait of [21:04] Hormuz. And it's letting some countries through and not others. And Trump basically has said, [21:12] somebody else needs to fix this because I can. And he's trying to suggest other people have to do it, [21:19] and that nobody had any idea that he was going to be kicking a hornet's nest and so on. And this is just, [21:24] I'm not going to use the word, but this is just an F up, right? This is just, you know, this was just [21:31] stupid beyond belief. So what happened yesterday was that Trump told everybody he was going to be [21:38] giving this big speech at nine o'clock. And many people expected to hear many different things [21:44] in that speech. I know I was listening for two things that I didn't want to hear at all. But when [21:51] the speech actually happened, it was 19 minutes long. And Trump essentially repeated what he has [21:59] been throwing onto social media. It sounds like if there was a big thing he was going to say, [22:04] they pulled it at the last minute. And he appeared just completely unhinged. He looked old. He [22:15] had a very hard time speaking, it seemed. He had nothing new to say. And what was interesting about it [22:24] about the speech was that while he was talking, futures in the stock market just fell off a cliff [22:31] and the price of oil bumped up. While he was talking, while he was supposed to be, you know, [22:37] comforting everybody about the fact he had a great plan, it was clear he has no plan at all. [22:44] And finally, it appears that those people who are themselves making predictions about [22:52] the economy going forward said, ho doggies, we're in trouble here. That's why you, that's why I [22:59] watch the stock market. I don't play in the stock market or anything. I watched the stock market, [23:02] the stock market, which you can't even say. I watched the stock market to see how those people [23:09] who are essentially betting on the economy, which by the way, doesn't mean people at the bottom. [23:16] It means what they think is going to happen with the growth of the economy. Who that helps is a very [23:22] different question. But I watch it to see how they react. And the fact that they reacted the way they [23:29] did basically said they are finally aware that there's a problem. That doesn't mean the stock market's [23:35] not going to go up on occasion because you can make money by sort of shorting and longing and [23:41] all that sort of stuff. But when that went down the way it did when he was talking, that said, [23:48] they know we have a big problem. And the big problem is not only the Strait of Hormuz, [23:53] it's the president of the United States. But that wasn't the end of what was going on, [23:58] what has been going on today with Iran. So one of the things that jumps out is that today, [24:08] 40 other countries led by France and Britain got together to try and negotiate some way forward [24:19] about the Strait of Hormuz. And you know what country wasn't invited? The United States of America. [24:26] America. That's a big deal. That's a really big deal. But basically, they're saying, you know, [24:32] we tried to work with Trump when you reelected him. But we're not even going to try anymore. [24:38] The we can't work with this, we're going to have to find out a different way to manage our affairs [24:44] without the United States of America. And that's, in a way healthy, because if you've ever dealt with [24:51] somebody like Trump, you know that you really can't deal with them, you have to figure out how to go [24:55] around them. But the fact it's the United States of America and we are being excluded from something [25:00] as huge as this is a blow to the United States and to its international standing. But we're not done yet, [25:10] even. And that's that this afternoon, Pete Hegseth, who's all in on this war against Iran, [25:20] Pete Hegseth fired the Army Chief of Staff, General Randy George. And the Army Chief of Staff is the [25:29] highest ranking officer in the U.S. Army. In this case, he serves as the principal military advisor [25:38] to the Secretary of the Navy, which means that that person oversees planning, strategy, training, [25:48] and policy, and serves as a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And the Joint Chiefs of Staff is [25:54] the body of military leaders. And in the middle of a war, Hegseth fired him immediately. As in like, [26:06] not we're going to have a period of transition here. Thank you for your service. Don't let the [26:10] door hit you on the way out. This is not the portrait of a man who is stable there either, [26:17] right? He's been talking about his war in Iran as being a holy war, a Christian holy war. And of course, [26:26] this is a holy week for Christians in the non-Orthodox tradition, I think. I'm not great [26:35] on religious celebrations. But we've just had Palm Sunday, and I think tomorrow is Good Friday, [26:47] and Easter is Saturday, Sunday, Sunday. So if you are in that tradition, and you are expecting great [27:00] things, I don't like that Hegseth just fired the Army Chief of Staff, just saying, in the middle of a [27:06] war. All right, so you have all of that going on, but I'm not done yet. The other big story, of course, [27:15] course, is that today, Trump fired Pam Bondi, the Attorney General. Now, Pam Bondi is a loyalist, [27:26] big time. She was the Attorney General of Florida when Trump was down there, and when much of the [27:33] Epstein stuff was going on. And she appears to have done a number of things that upset Trump. The first [27:41] thing, I'm sorry, I got to say this, is that she's a woman. So we've lost now Kristi Noem. Remember, [27:49] I said to you, I thought that we would start to lose cabinet people, and that I didn't think [27:54] he would let Bondi go, because Bondi knows too much. But then I said, oh, but she's a woman, [27:58] so that may make her next. I said this one today, if I were Tulsi Gabbard, I wouldn't buy milk with [28:06] anything longer than about a 10-day date on it at this point. So partly, she's an easy person for [28:15] him to throw under the bus. But she also really botched the whole Epstein files things last summer, [28:21] by the way. Remember, making that a bigger deal than Trump thought it should be. And she said, [28:27] oh, I'm going to give out all these new files. And she gave everybody who showed up big binders, [28:32] and then it turned out there was nothing new in them. And then she said, there's no list. And then she [28:36] said, we're not going to let the files go. And she basically managed to pump it up. There would [28:42] have been more ways to make it less obvious that they were hiding them than she employed. But in [28:47] any case, so she did that. She also has worked very hard to be a loyalist, but in the distribution of [28:57] materials to the House Judiciary Committee, a few weeks ago, I think I've lost track of time, [29:05] in the files that the Department of Justice gave to the House Judiciary Committee in order essentially [29:12] to permit them to smear Jack Smith. Jamie Raskin, the representative from Maryland, [29:18] found a document that from prosecutors, from Jack Smith prosecutors, that suggested not only that Trump [29:27] had retained highly classified documents, some so highly classified, only six people had access to them, [29:33] including the President of the United States, but also that he had kept those documents for his [29:40] business interests. And Jamie Raskin put two and two together and said, well, his business interests, [29:47] you know, what was he doing at the time that he appears to have been handling these documents? [29:53] He was working with the Saudis both on his golf, some golf deal, and also in a major real estate deal. [30:01] And one of the documents that it appears he has told a ghostwriter that he had was plans, [30:09] was U.S. military plans for a strike on Iran. So Jamie Raskin said, we need to have answers to this now. And I'm sure that was something that Trump didn't want to have come up. [30:19] So, you know, right now, the suggestion is that Pam Bondi's deputy attorney general, [30:27] Todd Blanche, is going to take over her spot. Remember, Todd Blanche was Trump's personal attorney. [30:35] And he was the one who talked to Ghislaine Maxwell. And after talking to Ghislaine Maxwell, [30:42] she's all of a sudden got that incredibly cushy position at the, you know, the cushy imprisonment [30:50] at what is essentially a prison camp, you know, not in our term of prison camp, but it's a much nicer and [30:59] and less secure prison than she was at before. And one to which a sexual predator should not have been [31:06] transferred according to law. But she was. That was Todd Blanche. So you got Trump changing his attorney [31:13] general right now. And you also, of course, now have Pam Bondi sort of at loose. And she, as you asked [31:22] about, is scheduled to testify on April 14th before the House Oversight and Reform Committee. And you asked [31:31] if she is still going to do that, I'm certain, certain that the expectation is that that subpoena [31:38] will no longer hold because she is no longer employed by the Department of Justice. But [31:47] immediately Maxwell Frost of the Oversight and Reform Committee, he's a representative from Florida, [31:53] came out and said, Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, we're still going to want her to testify. So I expect to see a big [31:58] fight there. And I'm sure that neither she nor the administration wants her under oath in front of [32:05] that oversight committee, because the they're there. The reason they want to talk to her is to talk about [32:11] the Department of Justice's release of the Epstein files and their or rather not release of the Epstein [32:17] files. So that's another place where things are out there. And that, of course, means that the Epstein [32:22] files are still out there. And those are also only heating up. So what we have here [32:29] is this period of, you know, you're kind of watching things all fall apart at once. And it's, [32:37] God, in some ways, it feels Shakespearean. That being said, these are extraordinarily dangerous times [32:45] for the United States of America, especially, but also for the world. And the many places in which we [32:52] are not helping in this moment, and some places where we are actively hurting [32:56] people, countries, there's a lot going on. All of that being said, now's the time to keep pushing, [33:06] because all of these cards are in the air. And how they come down really will be up to us. [33:13] Now you did ask for, oh, I'm sorry, there's one more piece I forgot to put in here. How do we know [33:19] that the American people don't like this system that Trump is trying to usher in? You can tell that [33:25] really dramatically today with House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican of Louisiana, [33:31] backing off from the far right's demands not to pass the Senate bill to fund the Department of [33:39] Homeland Security, but not to fund ICE and Border Patrol. Johnson backed down on that today. The [33:45] House will pass that measure. And they will try and pass funding for ICE and Border Patrol through a [33:53] budget reconciliation bill that only needs Republican votes. But they're not coming back to do that. [33:57] That won't happen until the week of April 13, I believe. All right. So you asked one other big [34:06] question. And that is, in all of this going on, because you've also got, you know, I just did the [34:15] high points here. I mean, there's also so much going on. How do you know who's telling the truth? [34:20] That's a fabulous question. And I just want to suggest to you some of the things I look for. [34:27] The very first thing is, if somebody wants you to do something immediately, that is, [34:32] if they're trying to make you mad, or they're trying to make you turn against somebody or say [34:38] something you normally wouldn't or whatever, or by the way, well, I can tell you how I know this, [34:43] don't trust them. That's not to say that they're not right. Maybe they are. But I learned this in [34:48] the years that I taught at MIT. And this is in the years when the internet was starting and you were [34:53] really starting to see a lot of scams. And MIT always said to us, if they're trying to make you [35:00] do something quickly, give them your passwords, take money out of the bank, you know, re-up your [35:09] subscription, any of these things, if they want you to do it right now, what they're trying to do is [35:14] they're trying to get you to act before you think. Never, never, never do something under that sort [35:22] of pressure. Unless, of course, your house is on fire and someone's saying, you need to get out right [35:26] now. And there's, you can see flames, right? But if somebody is trying to get you to go fly off the [35:34] handle, don't trust them. Now, it doesn't always work, by the way. So yesterday, when I saw that [35:40] speech about Trump saying, you know, we don't have money for daycare or Medicare or Medicaid, [35:46] we have to fight use our money to fight wars. I honest to God thought that was false. Yesterday was [35:52] April Fool's Day. And I thought somebody had put something together to make him look like an [35:57] idiot, because who would say that? It was not. It turned out to be true. But I needed to see it [36:03] in a number of reputable places before I believed that it was true. Same thing, by the way, with the [36:09] Davy Crockett stuff today. I actually went and checked to see with my own eyes that it was on [36:15] Truth Social, and it is, or at least it was when I checked. All right, so that's one way you can tell [36:20] if someone's telling the truth. If they want you to do something real fast, don't trust it. It's not to say [36:25] they're lying to you, but make sure you take a breath and you think about it first. Here's [36:30] another thing that I always look for. Are people behaving like people do? That is, if somebody [36:38] suggests to you, either somebody you like or somebody you hate is doing something that is [36:44] really way off the mean, wait a minute, take a look, find other people saying stuff. You know, [36:53] so let me, I'm going to make something up. So if somebody, like for me, if I saw some politician [37:01] I like has introduced a bill to raise taxes on millionaires and put back in place the tax brackets [37:11] of the 1950s, I would be like, yay. But I would also be like, sounds a little bit off what politicians [37:21] are saying nowadays. Another great example of that, Sharia law. I always think about the screaming [37:29] you got that the left was going to bring Sharia law to Oklahoma. I used to live in Oklahoma. [37:35] Nobody was bringing Sharia law to Oklahoma, let me tell you. You got to dig into that and see what's [37:42] really going on and what you would have discovered is something very, very different. So I always look [37:47] to see, are people sort of behaving normally or is there something weird? Here's another one for you. [37:54] I just saw somebody just sent me this afternoon, an AI fake of apparently me and buddy and boy did [38:02] they butcher buddy's face on an airplane. And I am dressed in a dress and pearls. Now, if you know [38:13] anything about me, you know that I have worn a dress and pearls exactly once in my life. And it [38:21] wasn't on no airplane, it was at my wedding. They have taken a wedding picture and they've plopped me [38:27] in a plane next to buddy in a suit. And let me tell you, a buddy in a suit is not a common thing [38:32] either. If somebody is behaving or appearing in a way that doesn't look like them, doesn't sound like [38:39] them, take a second look and back off of that a little bit. Third, are people behaving in character? [38:51] Like if all of a sudden you see, you know, I don't know, Trump rescuing a baby from an oncoming train, [38:59] are you going to be like, wait a minute, that doesn't sound like him? Or if you see a report [39:04] that some politician has done something absolutely outrageous when they're generally pretty [39:12] milk toast, maybe not trust that so much either. Again, always just, just look and make sure it [39:18] appears in a reputable place. And I get questions about this all the time. Somebody has seen something [39:24] on Facebook and is this real? And the easy answer to that is look and see if it has been reported by [39:32] a reputable outlet. It doesn't mean that it's an outlet you follow or that you like, but you're [39:37] almost certainly not going to get a wackadoodle story appearing in the New York Times or the Washington [39:43] Post or the Wall Street Journal or the Chicago Tribune. You know, they, they will, will look [39:49] into those stories before they print them and you don't have to subscribe to them. Just Google the, [39:55] the topic. And if everything you see coming up is the epic times and the, you know, all these right [40:02] wing papers, it's not a real story. And, and I don't really have time to go into the construction of [40:07] right wing papers, but there is a form of, it's a form of AI slop called pink slime. And pink slime [40:15] is when you have web crawlers that create stories that sound kind of real by, by pulling from other [40:22] stories and they put them all together. And those stories then end up circulating really widely on [40:27] social media. We have one in Maine. I can't forget, remember the name of it, so I'm not going to give it [40:32] to you, but I see this all the time when they have managed to pull together a bunch of different [40:37] stories and kind of nail them together in a way that sort of sounds like there's a story. And if [40:42] you're not reading carefully, it sounds outrageous and, and the, the bottom line is it's not true. [40:48] So that's another way to look for it. And then the other thing is to look for people you trust. And, [40:53] and that doesn't mean necessarily that they're never wrong. And it doesn't mean that you accept [40:58] everything you say as gospel. It means that you know where they're coming from. So you can read what [41:05] they have to say and you can say, oh, you know, that Richardson, she's always a little bit out there [41:11] on taxes or whatever it is that you, you, you know, where I stand on it. So you can calibrate [41:18] and you can say, okay, if she's talking about taxes, I know in my life, I kind of take a step [41:23] back from that. Or I feel like she's not moving far enough, but I know where she stands. And that's how [41:29] I am with virtually everybody. I read, I know where their real strengths are and what I consider [41:35] to be weaknesses. That doesn't mean they're not right. And I am, it just means that I can calibrate [41:41] and I can say, okay, if I'm going to read this person, I know this person is in, in my estimation, [41:50] a little bit too ready to attribute malice to this group of people. So when I read that person, [41:58] I can back off a little bit on that. And in, and for that, I'm afraid you just got to do a lot of [42:04] your own reading. Although I really should put together a list for people of the people that I [42:09] read and how I calibrate. But when you do that, you will find there are a number of people that you [42:13] really, really, really want to know more from. And that, that doesn't necessarily mean that you [42:18] necessarily agree with them, but you think they're smart and you think they tell you stories that you [42:22] need to hear. And, uh, there are a number of people like that, that I read every single thing [42:28] they write, even if I need to adjust it in my mind, because I know they're really smart and [42:35] they're going to force me to think. Um, even if like, and I'm not going to use a name here, [42:39] there's one person I always read that I think is a little dark for me. And in my head, I argue with [42:45] that person, but I don't let anything go by that that person writes because I have to think when I [42:51] read that person. So how do you know if somebody is, is lying to you in real life is kind of the [42:59] same rule you apply. When you think about journalism, you know, your friends, you know, [43:04] the people you work with, you know, which ones you can say, all right, if he says it's going to be [43:10] done tomorrow, that means it's going to be done in five days. And you know, the ones who say, [43:15] if that one tells me it's going to be done in three days, it's going to be on my desk this afternoon. [43:20] You know how to judge those things in your personal lives. You can do that as well in [43:29] the media and in politics because people are just people and they are especially in those fields, [43:38] just doing the best they can to, to, to move the ball forward in whatever way that looks like. [43:43] So it's not really a huge mystery. One of the things I try and do is I try and demystify those worlds. [43:50] So that, so that you feel like you're more comfortable in them. But it's an important [43:54] question right now as we try and figure out what comes next. So I'm glad that somebody asked that. [44:00] And I hope that helps a little bit. I will say that when you, one of the reasons I put notes in [44:09] when I write letters every night is because I feel like you must know, first of all, that many of us are [44:14] in this business of knowledge production. And also that there is accountability for it. So that if [44:20] somebody steers me really wrong, you know where I got it and you can argue with it. And that's, [44:27] that's important to me because I, again, get comments every night saying you were wrong on [44:31] this point. And I can say, okay, well, here's where I got it. Where is the delta between what [44:36] you are telling me and what this person was telling me? And why was my assessment of that person, [44:42] at least in your eyes, incorrect? So we're all in this business of figuring stuff out together. [44:52] And that's sort of the, the way that I try and do it. So as I say, a lot going on these days and it's, [44:59] it's, it's, it's, it's, it's frightening for sure, as always. And there's a lot going on, [45:07] but it's a weird, weird, weird time to be watching a president that is this out of control and watching [45:20] at the same time. I mean, I think you can probably imagine a world in which there are, [45:25] our guardrails and the Congress is humming along fine. The Supreme court's humming along fine. [45:29] The economy is humming along fine and we're not at war. And so the president's a little loopy. [45:34] Well, you know, we'll just make a joke and look the other way. In this case, we have a president [45:39] who is in trouble at the same time, all of those guardrails are crumbling as well. And what that does, [45:48] I think is it requires us to reinforce the guardrails, real guardrails that we care about. [45:56] And that's going to be our task. I think going forward as, as the president gets more and more [46:03] erratic again, hold people to account here, hold your electeds to account that they are responsible [46:09] for this Republicans, especially for enabling this man and that we want our guardrails back in place. [46:17] And, and also using that pressure to, to help move needles for things like the protection of the [46:29] right to vote and for, you know, fairer taxes and for greater equality and so on. [46:35] And, and so on.