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TRANSCRIPT

Jane Coaston: It’s Wednesday, December 3rd. I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day, the show thanking President Donald Trump for recognizing National Green Bean Casserole Day. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] And I just want to wish everybody a great holiday. We–

Jane Coaston: He said this on Tuesday. [music break] On today’s show, fetch the White House knee pads. It’s time for another Grovel Fest, or Trump cabinet meeting. And eight immigration judges in New York get fired for what I’m sure will turn out to be perfectly legitimate reasons. So let’s start with Donald Trump. As I’ve just mentioned, President Trump held a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, and when he wasn’t screaming about the evils of Somali immigrants or ranting about how Fox News business is fake news, he was falling asleep. Or as my grandmother would say, the president of the United States was resting his eyes during a cabinet meeting, a move I usually reserve for televised golf. Trump is old, and it shows. But in his second term in the White House, he’s not just old, he’s cloistered. After building his political career on massive rallies, he spent significantly more time this year on international travel and hanging out with billionaires, and significantly less time with the Americans who actually voted for him. Could that be why he spent way more energy focused on getting America psyched up for a war with Venezuela and building a new ballroom than pretty much anything his base supported him for? That’s the case Jonathan Lemire made in the Atlantic this week, in a piece entitled The Bubble Wrapped President. He’s a staff writer there and co-host of Morning Joe on MSNow. I spoke to Jonathan about what Trump’s growing isolation might mean for the midterms, the GOP, and the country. Jonathan, welcome to What a Day. 

Jonathan Lemire: I’m happy to be here. 

Jane Coaston: So it feels to me like Donald Trump is endemic and I can’t get rid of him and he is everywhere all the time, but that’s clearly not as true in some ways as it used to be. When did you first hear whispers that people close to the president felt like he might be too isolated or out of touch? 

Jonathan Lemire: He’s still, believe me, a dominant figure when it comes to our political and media landscape. But in terms of his physical location, he’s on the road far less than he used to be. So I’ve been hearing for some time, over the summer, is when I was told that he was going to go travel again. He was going to start campaigning in support of the one big beautiful bill, the Republican legislation that he signed into law on July fourth. And that didn’t come to pass. And I was sort of curious as to why. And basically what we found, my colleagues and I at The Atlantic found is that, you know, compared to the first year of his first term in in 2017, when he was on the road quite a bit and continued even having rallies very early on for his re election bid, this time, barely at all. He’s done some foreign travel, yes, but he hasn’t really gone across the United States. And in fact, in October, November, the only trips he made outside of Washington were to his own clubs, down to Mar-a-Lago. And people around him, advisors and Republicans are saying because he hasn’t been out there, that’s part of the reason why he’s lost his feel for what his voters really care about and they fear is leaving him out of touch. 

Jane Coaston: Now, being the president of the United States is an inherently isolating job. I still remember when Barack Obama was president and he took a walk across the mall and it was like an event and there was Secret Service everywhere. And I lived in DC at the time and it was like people were texting me, like the president is out on a walk. How uncommon is Trump’s more limited schedule? 

Jonathan Lemire: You are absolutely right. Every president lives in something of a bubble. That’s just due to the inherent nature of the White House, and as you say, the extreme security measures that come with the job. And certainly there are some Democrats who felt that President Biden, Trump’s predecessor, by the end of his term, also was in at least something of a political bubble where bad news, bad polls like weren’t reaching him. But this is new where where Trump is right now, because it’s not just the lack of travel. It’s a couple other factors too. First of all, this time around, unlike in his first term, he is surrounded simply by yes men and women. That’s by design. He didn’t want people in the building telling him no. He got tired of that the first time around. He’s always been, of course, in a real conservative MAGA news silo. But in this term, he’s not even on Twitter, where occasionally he’d be exposed to contrary views. Now he’s on Truth Social, a social media app he owns, and everyone there agrees with him. And he just seems to be focusing on things like the White House ballroom, let’s say, as opposed to what polls suggest Americans actually want him to focus on, like, say lowering prices. 

Jane Coaston: This sounds a little bit like um there’s this old Russian saying, if only the little father knew, that if only the czar knew what was going on, he would change everything. And this sounds kind of like if the president knew what his constituents wanted or were saying, he’d be making different choices. But it doesn’t really feel like Trump is very concerned with what anyone else wants. Like he wanted to blow up the East Wing, he wants to maybe go to war with Venezuela. How much is this reflective of a change in Trump? And how much of this is reflective of just who Trump is? 

Jonathan Lemire: My sense of it is a little bit of both, because again, in his first term and in those four years out of power, he always did seem concerned with what his base wants. He would do like wild about faces on policy positions because he wanted to make sure he kept his base happy. A good example. At the end of his first term, he certainly downplayed the severity of the COVID pandemic quite a bit. But at the same time, he and his administration pushed forward Operation Warp Speed and got the vaccine through in record time. And there was a moment where Trump was pretty proud of that. And in fact, he did a speaking tour in 2021. He held a couple of events where he bragged about the vaccines. But what happened? He got booed. He got booed by his crowd, which at that point had been conditioned to thinking the COVID pandemic was mostly a hoax. So what did Trump do? He no longer talked about the vaccine. So there have been moments where he’s been responsive to the will of the people, if you will, the will of at least his supporters. But you’re also right to say that particularly this term, he seems far less interested in that. 

Jane Coaston: One of the big things the president is not doing is hitting the campaign trail for other party members. At best, he’s showing up in virtual rallies to support Republican candidates or literally showing up on someone’s cell phone. And something we’ve seen in each midterm during which he’s been president is that if he’s not on the ballot, his voters don’t turn out. 

Jonathan Lemire: That’s right. 

Jane Coaston: But if he shows up at rallies, he can basically say, like, I picked this person. This is who should run. What does that mean for down ballot Republican candidates to not have him there? And does that mean that they’re starting to think of life beyond him? 

Jonathan Lemire: So I think it’s a it’s a good question. Because again, much like he was allegedly gonna do some barnstorming over the summer for the legislation. There were tentative plans for him to hit the campaign trail at least a little bit this fall for you know in Virginia and New Jersey. That also didn’t come to pass, nor to the special election in Tennessee, where an appearance there might have guaranteed a lopsided Republican win. Um. Republicans are, you know, generic ballot tests losing significantly to Democrats right now. But they still feel like Trump’s presence on the trail would help, I’m told, and I reported for the piece, that there are plans to get him out the road again next year for the midterms. We’ll see if he follows through. He did aggressively campaign back in 2018. Didn’t help. Republicans still lost a lot of that, but they think him being out there would at least give them a better chance to get their voters to the polls. 

Jane Coaston: Instead, outside of the usual trips to his golf clubs or Mar-a-Lago, he’s mainly been traveling to see his rich friends in New York or making trips abroad. Why do you think he’s turned his focus overseas? 

Jonathan Lemire: It’s a couple of things. First of all, you’re right to highlight just the company he’s keeping right now, where it is, it is wealthy business people, it is, you know, tech leaders, people who have a lot of money and also want things from him. And he I’ve been told he really like enjoys having that sway and power over people, you know, who are fabulously wealthy, because that is by many measure how Trump gages whether he respects someone or not might be the size of their their bank account. As for the foreign policy stuff, it’s two parts. Now, first of all, this is something that’s not unusual for a second-term president. Their ability to get things done domestically shrinks, particularly as midterms approach and people start looking towards the next presidential election. Presidents have a lot more leeway, they have a lot more unilateral power when it comes to foreign policy. So that in that case, Trump is not so different than others that have come before him. But as I think you know, he is obsessed with the idea of a Nobel Peace Prize. He believes he’s been wrongly not given one to this point. And that’s been his focus as well, really on overseas matters, whether it’s the Middle East or Russia, Ukraine or any of the other six, seven, eight, depending on the day, conflicts he claims he has solved. 

Jane Coaston: I’m curious what does it mean for the Republican Party if the president who is currently so disconnected from his own voters can’t reconnect with his voters where they’re at? 

Jonathan Lemire: There have been so few moments where Republicans in either Trump term have been really willing to defy him. And certainly the six first seven or eight months of this term, he had lockstep complete loyalty, other than like Thomas Massie and Rand Paul. That’s changing. We have seen Republicans, even some of the the true MAGA believers defy him on Jeffrey Epstein. We have seen the Senate refuse to consider throwing out the filibuster. We right now have bipartisan questions about the boat strike in Venezuela, the so-called double tap that the administration and Secretary of Defense Hegseth is under a lot of scrutiny for. These are starting to add up, where Republicans are saying, well, look, you know, Donald Trump has been the dominant figure in our party, and frankly, all of our entire politics for the last decade. But particularly when next midterms arrive, and that’s now 11 months away, he officially will be a lame duck. Now, we don’t know how Trump’s gonna respond to that. There’s still open questions as to whether or not he’ll willingly leave power. But for Republicans, they have to start thinking about what a post-Trump future will look like. 

Jane Coaston: Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me. 

Jonathan Lemire: My pleasure. Happy to do it again. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Jonathan Lemire, staff writer at The Atlantic and co-host of Morning Joe on MSNow. We’ve linked to his piece in the show notes. We’ll get to more of the news in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]

[AD BREAK] 

Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today. 

[sung] Headlines. 

[clip of Kristi Noem] Sir, you made it through hurricane season without a hurricane.

[clip of President Donald Trump] Yeah. 

[clip of Kristi Noem] And so FEMA, FEMA, even you kept the hurricanes away, so [?] we appreciate that. 

Jane Coaston: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem thanked Trump for keeping hurricanes away during yet another one of his perfectly normal cabinet meetings on Tuesday, where everyone went around the table showering him with praise. In a CYA mission during the meeting, Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth deflected blame for the decision to kill the survivors of a military strike on an alleged drug smuggling boat in the Caribbean this September. A decision everyone denied ever happened like ten seconds ago. Though he also had this to say about those responsible for bringing drugs to the US. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] And hundreds of thousands of people a year died. And we’re taking those son of a bitches out. 

Jane Coaston: Words you never thought you’d hear from the president of the United States in a cabinet meeting, or publicly, ever. The Trump administration fired eight immigration judges in New York on Monday. More than a hundred of the roughly 700 total immigration judges in the country have been fired or pushed out since the start of Trump’s second term, despite the fact that there is a backlog of almost four million cases in immigration court. Also on Monday, former immigration judge Tania Nemer, from Ohio filed a lawsuit against the administration. Nemer was part of a wave of firings in February. Her suit claims that she was discriminated against based on her sex, national origin, and political affiliation. Nemer is a woman, a dual citizen of the US and Lebanon, and at one point in her career, unsuccessfully ran for office as a Democrat. At the same time as immigration judges are being fired en masse, the Department of Homeland Security is recruiting something they’re calling, quote, “deportation judges.” DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin posted on social media last week that the jobs can be fully remote, with a salary of as much as $207,000. I would hope your soul could go for a little more cash, honestly. Michigan Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin posted on Monday some of the threats her office has received since President Trump called for several Democratic lawmakers to be put to death for treason on Truth Social. And just a warning that what you’re about to hear is pretty graphic. 

[clip of unknown threatening person 1] I can eat popcorn while I watch you get executed for treason. God, I’m gonna pray for that. Yeah. TikTok. 

[clip of unknown threatening person 2] I hope you get fucking murdered. I wanna see you murdered on TV. 

[clip of unknown threatening person 3] But I do pray that you die today, along with everybody in your family. 

Jane Coaston: Somehow, those are some of the least violent calls in the video. This is all happening because back in November, Senator Slotkin and five other Democrats, who have all served in the military and intelligence communities, posted a video reminding current service members that they have a responsibility to disobey illegal orders. No big deal, right? It’s literally part of the oath they’ve already taken. But for Trump, it was a big deal. On Truth Social, he called the video, quote, “seditious behavior, punishable by death,” and shared a post calling for the lawmakers to be hanged. Another Senator, Mark Kelly from Arizona, is now being investigated by the Pentagon for quote, “serious allegations of misconduct.” The White House and Congressional Republicans have since walked Trump’s statements back, but Trump has left the posts up. Because of course he has. 

[clip of Brooke Rollins] Twenty-one states, including California, New York, and Minnesota, the blue states, continue to say no. So as of next week, we have begun and will begin to stop moving federal funds into those states until they comply. 

Jane Coaston: On Tuesday, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the Trump administration’s intent to once again politicize the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. The administration is now threatening to cut off SNAP payments in most Democratic-led states starting next week, unless those states turn over detailed personal records on aid recipients. Specifically, names and immigration status. According to Rollins, the data is needed to root out fraud. The administration first requested the information in February. So far, Republican-led states have complied with the data request while Democratic ones are battling it out in court. To put it lightly, SNAP has faced unusual political pressure this year. Like the expanded work requirements to participate in SNAP tucked inside Trump’s big Republican spending law debacled disaster adventure. And then there was the longest government shutdown ever that delayed some SNAP payments last month as Trump held the program hostage. It’s almost as if Trump doesn’t care about SNAP and its recipients at all. Mighty strange for a president who cares so much about affordability. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] Affordability is a hoax that was started by Democrats who caused the problem of pricing. 

Jane Coaston: Is that so? And that’s the news. [music break] One more thing. As I’ve mentioned before, FBI director Kash Patel doesn’t want to be FBI director. He wants to watch hockey and mixed martial arts fights and his girlfriend’s country music concerts. He does not want to fight crime or something. On Monday, Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Murphy told CNN pretty much what I’ve been saying for months. 

[clip of Senator Chris Murphy] Well, we’ve probably never seen a an FBI director care so little about his job as Kash Patel. He does seem to be spending most of his time gallivanting around the country, visiting his girlfriend, going on golf trips with his buddies, um getting as close to the MAGA celebrity world as is humanly possible. And he’s racking up all these huge bills on us, the taxpayers, right? These are ordinary average Americans, plumbers, teachers, um pipe fitters who are paying the bills for his celebrity lifestyle. 

Jane Coaston: Senator Murphy was discussing an investigation by House Democrats into Patel’s use of a private plane owned by the FBI for private use. Namely, to watch his girlfriend sing at a concert at Penn State University. And then there’s Patel’s use of an FBI SWAT unit to protect that same girlfriend. But a new report prepared for the Senate and House Judiciary Committees by active duty and retired FBI agents shows all of that is the least of Patel’s problems. As detailed by the New York Post, the report states that Patel, quote, “has neither the breadth of experience nor the bearing an FBI director needs to be successful,” adding that his ego and thin skin have left the agency, quote, “internally paralyzed by fear.” Take, for example, the time that Patel flew to Utah the day after Charlie Kirk’s murder, but refused to leave the plane because he didn’t have an FBI raid jacket. According to the report, FBI special agents working to solve Kirk’s shooting had to stop what they were doing to find an FBI raid jacket that would fit Patel, and allegedly borrowed one from a female agent. Then he got mad because it didn’t have Velcro patches on the arms. So members of an FBI SWAT team took the patches off their own jackets and gave them to Patel, who then finally left the plane. Not my words. This is what the report says. It also says Patel ordered polygraphs to find internal critics, and the report also notes that FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino is viewed as, quote, “something of a clown by the people working for him.” Many of the people quoted in the report make sure to point out that they are loyal Trump supporters. But Patel and Bongino have pushed them to their limit. So maybe it would be best if Kash Patel focused on what he loves most, watching hockey and MMA fights and his girlfriend’s country music concerts. Not running the FBI. [music break]. 

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Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review. Think of a Virginia raccoon who broke into a liquor store and got absolutely hammered, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading, and not just about how a quote, “very intoxicated raccoon” was found sleeping soundly in the liquor store’s bathroom after breaking at least two dozen bottles of alcoholic beverages and consuming a whole lot of their contents, like me. What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston and according to Hanover County Animal Protection and Shelter, the raccoon had a few hours of sleep and then quote, “He was safely released back to the wild, hopefully having learned that breaking and entering is not the answer.” [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producers are Emily Fohr and Chris Allport. Our video editor is Joseph Dutra. Our video producer is Johanna Case. We had production help today from Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Caitlin Plummer, Tyler Hill, and Ethan Oberman. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our senior vice president of News and Politics is Adriene Hill. We had help today from the Associated Press. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]

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