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TRANSCRIPT

Jane Coaston: It’s Wednesday, January 7th, I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day, the show that says that if you’re suing McDonald’s because the McRib doesn’t actually contain rib, I have some truly worrying things to tell you about McDonald’s. [music break] On today’s show, President Donald Trump channels his inner Genghis Khan with hopes of conquering land that’s not his. And Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem tells Venezuelans in the U.S. everything’s fixed. You can go home now. It isn’t. But let’s start with President Trump. As you know, President Trump has never been exactly laser focused on the issues that matter most to the American people. Or as you can see from his remarks Tuesday at a retreat for House Republicans at the newly minted Trump Kennedy center. He’s also not laser focused on giving a speech in a way that makes sense to anyone. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] So, let me just finish up, because you know I weave, I love to weave. If you ever weave and don’t come back to the point, then that’s a problem. Then you say, but when you weave, and you go here, and boom, boom, boom, always coming back, then you’re in good shape. 

Jane Coaston: Sure. It’s been a strange 12 months for Trump. He won the 2024 election on a wave of economic discontent and responded by blowing up a wing of the White House, decimating foreign aid, and attempting to deport undocumented immigrants and political dissidents alike before deciding that what his second term really needed was military adventurism in South America. But since last summer, his poll numbers have declined and Democrats have been notching electoral victories in states like Florida, New York, Georgia, and Arizona. Some Republicans in Congress are hitting the exits, and others are starting to talk about life after Trump. But Trump sure seems busy. Too busy, I’d argue. Of course, there’s Venezuela and Greenland and Iran. And then there’s his and his administration’s almost constant presence online and in the media. While Congress is doing remarkably little, it feels like the Trump administration is doing a lot, even when it isn’t. So is Trump a lame duck now? As in, is his power and influence really declining? And is foreign policy his new safe space? To find out, I spoke to Jamelle Bouie. He’s a New York Times opinion columnist who writes about politics and American history. Jamelle, welcome to What a Day. 

Jamelle Bouie: Thank you for having me. 

Jane Coaston: You’ve been writing and talking a lot about this concept of Trump as a lame duck president, and that’s a term people have been using for a long time, but what do you mean by that? 

Jamelle Bouie: What I mean by that is Trump is basically on the decline in terms of his overall influence. You can see it in lots of little ways. Congress is mostly supine when it comes to Trump or Republicans in Congress, but there are places where they’ll do a little pushback. They don’t feel so obligated to do everything he asked them to do. You can see other political figures, other Republicans, beginning to clearly think about what a post-Trump world looks like. Marjorie Taylor Greene I think is the most high profile person, but this is clearly percolating and all of that just reflects the fact that you know he’s in his second year of his second term. His party suffered you know a big political defeat in the previous November’s elections. Its prospects for the upcoming elections this year aren’t looking great and the prospect of, oh, he’s going to be gone soon is clearly just in the air. And when your co-partisans are thinking in those terms and you’re the president, you’re a lame duck. 

Jane Coaston: It’s weird because it feels simultaneously like Trump is running amok in the White House, which is true. But he also hasn’t really been able to get a lot done politically. Like, he’s got the one big, beautiful bill. But beyond that, it’s like a lot of stuff that could be easily undone or less easily, but still undone by a Democratic president. 

Jamelle Bouie: I think that’s right. I mean, the kind of wanton destruction of the executive branch and the federal bureaucracy, although that’s been mostly accomplished through executive order because actual people have been fired, actual departments have been–

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Jamelle Bouie: –shut down, that is going to be harder to repair, right? That’s going to harder to bounce back from if there’s a democratic administration in the next, you know, 2029. So it’s sort of both and, right? Like he’s running amok, he’s doing things, things can be reversed, but like real effects are happening. 

Jane Coaston: Right. And I want to be clear, like, if you’ve been deported by this administration, he doesn’t feel like a lame duck. But–

Jamelle Bouie: Right right. 

Jane Coaston: How does having a lame-duck or ineffective leader in the White House, per the context we’ve given, how does that affect how the government actually runs? 

Jamelle Bouie: This is interesting and this is something I’ve been trying to grapple with because Trump as a president is infamously inattentive to what is happening in his White House and his administration. You could go as far as say that he kind of just doesn’t care that much. If it doesn’t involve something that’s directly aggrandizing for him, he doesn’t really pay much attention to it. And so what seems to be happening and my reading is that the business of the White House, the business of the government is really being conducted by his deputies and by a couple of people in particular, Russell Vought, Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, and Marco Rubio. And they’re really the driving force behind what the Trump administration is doing in its various areas. I would describe this as being the product of a weak president. And I need people to understand that when I say that, I’m not talking about effects. I mean, this feels like a truism, but it is a political job. It is a job about managing both your party’s agenda, your own interest in the larger political situation. And a president who’s checked out kind of can’t do that. And so I think what we’re witnessing, right, and the Venezuela thing, I think is a perfect example, is the president is going along with the agendas of the people that he’s kind of delegated the business of government to. Those people with agendas do not care about the political impact of what they’re doing. They just care about accomplishing their agendas and the president goes along with it and it turns out either to be highly controversial or unpopular or inconclusive and then the president is left with both a substantive and a political mess as a result. 

Jane Coaston: Right. And I think that that actually goes directly to Venezuela, where this is definitely Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s time to shine. But it’s interesting how President Trump has been very checked into what’s going on in other countries this term. He keeps talking about how he’s ended a bunch of wars that he hasn’t ended, and at least two of them aren’t actually wars. Why do you think Trump is so focused on the rest of the world in his second term?

Jamelle Bouie: Well, this is a very classic thing that happens in presidents. They have a much wider leeway in foreign affairs, both in terms of what has come to be recognized as the powers of the presidency and in terms of Congress having largely checked out of active management of American foreign policy. So because the president could do a lot on the world stage, presidents who are facing domestic challenges, whose agendas have run aground in Congress. And in this case, the president doesn’t really have a domestic agenda anymore. They turn their attention abroad. Now for Trump, who is also thinking about his legacy, it seems to mean some kind of territorial acquisition, hence the obsession with Greenland. Hence earlier in this term, the discussions about making Canada the 51st state. I think he sees his domestic frustration, which sounds like I’m talking about a lifetime movie, but um I think he sees his domestic agenda problems, better phrasing, as a reason to turn his attention to the world at large. But again, he still maintains this kind of zero-sum, dog-eat-dog-world worldview. And so even there, it’s wrecking existing things and then making these like big aggressive pushes for, in this case, territory. 

Jane Coaston: It’s been interesting because you and I are around about the same age, and so I can’t get over the parallel to the lead up to and the beginnings of the Iraq war, where like kind of the messaging coming from everybody else in the administration is very similar to what we heard from, say, Donald Rumsfeld. But the difference is that back then, I feel like the government at least put together a dishonest but somewhat coherent message to the American people about why we were doing this and that it was like we were a force for good. And this time it’s as if Donald Trump is just as cynical as like the most angry, hardened leftist where it’s like, this is all about oil, but he’s like it’s all about oil and that’s awesome. What do you think? 

Jamelle Bouie: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. I mean, I don’t want to hand it to the Bush administration, but it is the—

Jane Coaston: No, no, let’s be very clear. This is not a pro W Bush podcast. 

Jamelle Bouie: It is worth saying that the Bush administration did try to sell the war. They did try and make a case. They tied the war to an event that happened right, 9/11. They were like, we have to stop Saddam Hussein from giving WMD to terrorists. They made a claim about kind of the United States’ role as like a beacon of democracies, and trying to evoke the legacy of the Second World War in an effort to make this case. They made a legal case. They went to Congress and said, we need your authorization to do this. All these things. So it was part of a process. Even if the case was built on uh a house of lies, or at least at least dishonesty, they still felt the need to make a case to the American people. This has not happened whatsoever. Where there’s been no effort to explain this, to tie this into national interest in any kind of way. They’ve completely jettisoned any talk of democratization or spreading freedom. They don’t care about that whatsoever. They are pretty explicitly saying they think that the role of the United States as a superpower ought to be kind of the neighborhood bully, right? Who can take whatever they want, doesn’t have to offer any justifications for it, and use it for the benefit of their own people. Now, I mean, even if you buy that frame or that argument or whatever, it’s sort of hard to figure out what the benefit is for the American public of any kind of stake in Venezuela or Greenland, right? And accordingly, when you ask voters and ask Americans what they think about this stuff, they’re like, we don’t like it. 

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Jamelle Bouie: Either we don’t like it or we don’t really understand it. Um.

Jane Coaston: Yeah, and I think that that goes actually to something. Um. I’ve been really struck by the idea of how focused this administration is on content creation. They want to create content. They constantly are posting all the time, especially the Department of Homeland Security, which apparently has been taken over by the worst people on like 8chan. But it’s interesting to me that even the content generation is not aimed at convincing voters who are more worried about their finances and are trying to figure out what any of this has to do with affordability. They’re going after like the same podcasters who love them anyway. 

Jamelle Bouie: You’re right to note that sort of like the memes coming out of the administration, out of this part of Homeland Security, are all highly self-referential for a particular kind of in-group. And the idea that the White House has any responsibility to the broader public, that their victory in 2024, it wasn’t like a massive, MAGA-cultural victory. It was people were really angry about inflation, and so they elected Trump to bring back 2019. That doesn’t seem to dawn on anyone in the administration. 

Jane Coaston: We are, somehow, not even a quarter of the way through Trump’s term. In your view, what can we expect from him moving forward at home and abroad, given that I don’t think they’re going to pull out of this spiral anytime soon? 

Jamelle Bouie: Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I [laugh]on Saturday when I woke up and saw the news that we had kidnapped Maduro. I was sort of like, oh, okay, I guess, you know, the year has officially started. And I have I have no sense of what this administration has planned for this year. I don’t think they do. I think they’re likely going to be very responsive. They’re going to struggling desperately to reverse their political fortunes. And I have to expect they’re going make some effort to try to subvert the upcoming midterm elections however they can. I’m generally quite skeptical of their ability to do this, but they’re gonna try something under the recognition that if Democrats win control of either or both houses of Congress, it’s going to bring things to an abrupt halt. So I don’t I don’t really know what’s going to happen. I do think that it’s gonna be a year of political desperation for the administration. Having said that, there will be the UFC cage match marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. So I mean, we have that to look forward to. 

Jane Coaston: You know. 

Jamelle Bouie: But other than some mixed martial arts in honor of the Founding Fathers, I don’t really know what we got in store. 

Jane Coaston: Now I’m thinking about which founding father would be the best at mixed martial arts. I’m gonna contemplate that for the rest of the day. Jamelle, thank you so much for joining me. 

Jamelle Bouie: Thank you for having me. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with New York Times opinion columnist, Jamelle Bouie. 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]

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

[sung] Headlines. 

[clip of Kristi Noem] Every individual that was under TPS has the opportunity to apply for refugee status and that evaluation will look forward, but we need to make sure that our programs actually mean something and that we’re following the law. 

Jane Coaston: On Sunday, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said on Fox News that Venezuelans losing temporary protected status could apply for refugee status. But then on Monday, the Department of Homeland Security said people can only get refugee status before they enter the country, according to a statement from DHS received by notice. So if you’re befuddled, join the club. The confusion comes after the administration ended temporary legal protections in October that had allowed many Venezuelan immigrants to live and work in the U.S. due to economic collapse and human rights abuses under former president Nicolás Maduro. But asylum, the pathway typically used by migrants already in the U.S., isn’t currently available. A December policy memo ordered a pause on all asylum applications from Venezuela. This says, armed militias controlled by the Venezuelan government are traversing the country, stopping to search cars and demanding to see people’s social media accounts to find any anti-Maduro posts. In a statement, a U. S. citizenship and Immigration Services spokesperson said, quote, “President Trump’s decisive action to remove Maduro marks a turning point for Venezuelans. Now they can return to the country they love and rebuild its future.” Again, did I mention the armed roving militias? For people who fled political collapse, the White House’s reassurance boils down to, trust us, regime removal always works out. Yesterday we told you that Minnesota Democratic Governor and former Vice Presidential Candidate Tim Walz announced he’s dropping his re-election bid. The decision comes after weeks of mounting criticism over his handling of a welfare fraud scandal, a case Trump has repeatedly weaponized to make racist attacks against Somali immigrants, many of whom were among those charged. So Walz’s choice to drop out of the race should quench Trump’s bloodlust, right? Wrong. In response to a welfare fraud investigation, the Trump administration has rolled out a large-scale immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, because of course they did. It wouldn’t be the first time. Trump instigated an immigration and customs enforcement operation in Minneapolis late last year. This time around, border patrol agents are expected to join in. In a memo to The Hill, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin claims the DHS, quote, “already made more than a thousand arrests of murderers, rapists, pedophiles, and gang members.” Seems legit. While McLaughlin didn’t confirm the total number of agents deployed in the memo, multiple news outlets who spoke with unnamed officials report a total number of around 2,000. For a president who’s handed out executive clemency to a record number of white-collar criminals, Trump seems strangely outraged by this one fraud case. Something tells me that his favorite part of the phrase white- collar crime is the white part. The Trump administration is planning to freeze $10 billion in funding to five states, according to multiple outlets. The states? All blue. The funds? They’re meant for child care and social services. The decision to freeze the funding comes as Minnesota deals with the fallout from a welfare fraud scandal. California, Colorado, New York, and Illinois are also being targeted. A Health and Human Services spokesperson said in a statement, quote, “Democrat-led states and governors have been complicit in allowing massive amounts of fraud to occur under their watch.” And Trump wrote on Truth Social Tuesday that the fraud investigation in California has started and that it’s quote, “more corrupt than Minnesota, if that’s possible.” But as of right now, the administration has not cited evidence of the alleged widespread welfare fraud in the additional states. Stunning. Trump yearns for something cold and frigid, and no, I’m not talking about Melania. I’m talking about Greenland, which also wants nothing to do with him. Trump attempted to justify his obsession Sunday on Air Force One, claiming U.S. Ownership of Greenland was necessary to combat security threats from the likes of China and Russia. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper that it is the formal position of the administration that Greenland should be part of the United States. The Dr. Evil look and sound alike dodged questions about military action in the country. 

[clip of CNN’s Jake Tapper] Can you say that military action against Greenland is off the table? 

[clip of Stephen Miller] What do you mean military action against Greenland? The the, Greenland has a population of 30,000 people, Jake. The real question is, by what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland? What is the basis of their territorial claim? What is their basis of having Greenland as a colony of Denmark? 

Jane Coaston: Denmark has ruled Greenland for nearly 300 years, a status the US formally recognized in 1916 in exchange for acquiring the Danish West Indies, which became the US Virgin Islands, and also, Stephen, you don’t care about that at all anyway. So is Greenland really at risk? Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen thinks so. On Monday, she said a US attack on a NATO ally would end, quote, “The international community as we know it,” democratic rules of the game, NATO the world’s strongest defensive alliance. All of that would collapse. France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the UK made a joint statement defending Greenland’s sovereignty, noting the territory is self-governing, Danish, and part of NATO. Basically, a polite but unmistakable nope. But don’t worry. Secretary of State Marco Rubio reportedly told lawmakers on Monday that there’s no immediate plan to invade Greenland. They just want to buy it, which is very different. Will any of this stop Trump from doing something if he wanted to. Probably not. Consent isn’t exactly one of his strong suits. And that’s the news. [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, happy birthday to America’s 13th president, Millard Fillmore, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading, and not just about how you may be thinking, there’s absolutely nothing interesting you could tell me about Millard Fillmore and au contraire, because Millard Fillmore was our last president to be neither a Democrat nor a Republican, and former President Harry Truman described him as a, quote, “weak, trivial thumb twadler,” like me. What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston and this show loves a lot of things. But presidential trivia is way up there. [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 producer is Caitlin Plummer. Our video editor is Joseph Dutra. Our video producer is Johanna Case. We had production help today from Ethan Oberman, Greg Walters, and Matt Berg. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our senior vice president of news and politics is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Kyle Murdock and Jordan Cantor. We had help today from the Associated Press. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. 

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