But can you explain their thinking there?

It's not MAGA Inc.'s strategy.

It's President Trump's strategy.

It's all President Trump.

He's dictating everything to his advisers.

You know, traditionally— Presidents do campaign during midterms, but they try and make it a choice.

That's their whole goal.

But what's your take on why the Trump campaign hasn't spent yet?

What else have you learned about how and why this is unfolding and what it means?

Well, the tensions between Driscoll and Hegseth have been long running and very well reported.

We've all known it for quite a while.

Our reporting shows that when Driscoll did go to the White House last week and spoke to the president about his plans to resign, the president was a little bit surprised by some of these tensions.

It wasn't clear that the president had been fully briefed on this, that he was um surprised by the turnover in the senior ranks in the pentagon now that said president trump is very happy by all the reporting i have with the job hegseth is doing with his performance of secretary of defense and president trump did want someone to come into the pentagon to sort of break the place in his second term and he's been very successful at that, Hegseth has, in sort of remaking it and making it so that, you know, it's a building, it's a bureaucracy that now very much answers to the president's whims on all kinds of issues through Pete Hegseth.

So it's not clear whether Driscoll's complaints to the president has changed the president's view of Hegseth or what's going on at the Pentagon, but it clearly was, you know, a clear marker to have, you know, someone more junior at the Pentagon come to the White House and tell the president directly about real concerns under Hegseth.

Michael, what does your reporting say about U.S. readiness, national security readiness, especially in the Army, based around what Driscoll is saying?

Yeah, I mean, this has also been something we've been reporting about for months.

What does this ad blitz say about the administration and how they're feeling about the election prospects, Michael, and the president's image?

Yeah, so there's a formula for midterm elections.

It's always a referendum on those in power.

So the in party, the people who hold the presidency, and if they also hold the House and the Senate, try their best to make it a choice, not a referendum, to basically put the opposing party in the spotlight, say, look, they're terrible and bad and have done all these awful things.

And if you give them back power, it'll be terrible.

And they're always fighting an uphill battle because...

Voters don't see it that way, and voters tend to just say, I'm happy or I'm pissed off.

How are they spending it, right? Sort of putting the president's TV ads aside, how are they currently spending that money? And will that have an effect, right? Will that matter?

[laughs]

... find something that he can educate in schools, and he came up with the idea of taking two lowercase Fs, turning them to embrace each other.

The top part of the F look like the whiskers of a catfish, and down by where the l- Fs criss-cross, put a little tail in there, and looks like the dot of the red fish, and it, it meant families forever.

Fishing's Future was born.

He then worked very closely with Texas Parks and Wildlife, and took their program, uh, with another gentleman by the name of Kevin Rich, and sent it off to Kansas to see, uh, how it would go there.

Fast-forward a few months, now they got 70 chapters across the United States.

And we do family education due or through family fish camps and chapters that want to do, share your passion with these families.

[laughs]

Mm-hmm.

Um, and, and, obviously he wants a big party, uh, in Washington, uh, [laughs] for the 4th of July.

Um, over the course of the first year of his presidency, those plans started to shift.

The, the, the Iowa State Fair idea just wasn't practical, so he basically took over, uh, a celebration on the National Mall that was being planned by the Smithsonian Institution and rebranded it the Great American State Fair.

Uh, and then he added a bunch of other branded events.

Uh, you know, that we had the UFC fight on his birthday a couple weeks ago.

We have an IndyCar race.

Mm-hmm.

So, Michael, this coincides almost to the day with the 10-year anniversary of Brexit.

Yeah.

Yeah, it does.

And there, you know, while Brexit doesn't explain the entirety of Keir Starmer's departure, it really is kind of the basis for helping you understand what has gone wrong in this country today.

over a decade, according to people who live here who have become so frustrated with politicians.

They were frustrated with conservative Tory politicians who were in power for 14 years, and they feel and felt like Keir Starmer didn't do a whole lot better to address the the kind of economic stagnation that the country has faced, the higher prices that they deal with every day in their lives, in the sense that for a lot of folks, you know, the services that they see around them, their health care, their education, the training, the basic things that they live with on a day-to-day basis have not gotten better.

And I think all of that was promised to have gotten better because of Brexit.

Is that a cautionary tale for what we're about to experience going forward?

So was there anything in America 250's actual programming that supports that charge?

No. They've never done anything to apologize for America.

The whole effort is very patriotic.

What they have done is pushed back against the president basically applying himself to these events.

The real breaking point comes last year in July.

Trump goes to Iowa to the state fairgrounds to announce that he's going to have the great American state fair now, not in Iowa, but in Washington, D.C. a year on.

And in that same speech, he says of Democrats in Congress, I hate them.

And so what's the issue around that? Why is the Trump team criticizing the spending on that? And is it a legitimate complaint?

So who is behind those plans, and what did they envision?

You gotta go back in history.

You, you referenced about 10 years.

In 2016, Congress passes a law that says we're gonna plan, uh, for a big celebration in 10 years, sort of a repeat of the 1976 celebrations, if any of your listeners are old enough to remember those, um, uh, for the 200th anniversary, and they've been planning ever since.

And so there were tons of events that were, that were put together.

I mean, there, like, a bunch of these are still definitely happening.

There's gonna be a ball drop on the night of July 3rd in, in Times Square.

And so what's the issue around that? Why, why is the Trump team criticizing the spending on that, and is it a legitimate complaint?

Are we not being aggressive enough with radiation therapy? Should we use dose intensification like SBRT?

Yeah.

So that's a great point and certainly the hot topic in radiation treatment for pancreatic cancer.

So I guess to start, a lot of people do use these synonymously.

So dose escalation and SBRT.

Technically, you can do one without the other and vice versa.

So some of the original dose escalation data from Sloan Kettering, they actually did 25 fractions of radiation and just pushed the dose really high in those 25 fractions.

So I guess that leads perfectly to the next question is how do you choose between the two? And what does, obviously, if you say the field is moving more towards SBRT, is that because you have better local control? Is it better survivability, et cetera?

Um, can you just tell me what you were trying to get at?

Yeah.

So I was at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

I've been going, you know, for many, many years now, uh, a couple Saturdays ago when there was this attempted assassination attempt, um, and, and I spent some time afterwards reading up on this person who's alleged to have done it, reading the manifesto, uh, reading the social media accounts that are ascribed to him, and, and I was struck by them.

I was struck by how much they sounded like the stuff I read every day, uh, after I post a story.

You know, I post a story, I'll put it on Blue Sky, I'll put it on X or Twitter.

Uh, you know, we have comments on The Atlantic, and I'll, and I'll, and I'll sort of take in how people are receiving that story.Uh, and, and for, I mean, decades now, I've been watching this machine work, and what tends to happen is, you know, a complicated, nuanced, you know, 2 to 5,000-word story is turned into a headline, which is then retweeted by somebody else, uh, who then basically responds to it by amping up the outrage, uh, about that headline and removing the nuance about that headline.

But in the absence of that, if, if Trump is coming at people with bite-size inflammatory actions, how do you convince the public to take a step back? I don't, I don't see how that happens right now.

Can you just tell me what you were trying to get at?

Yeah, so I was at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.

I've been going for many, many years now, a couple of Saturdays ago when there was this attempted assassination attempt.

And I spent some time afterwards reading up on this person who's alleged to have done it, reading the manifesto, reading the social media accounts that are ascribed to him.

And I was struck by them.

I was struck by how much they sounded like the stuff I read every day after I post a story.

And I post a story, I'll put it on Blue Sky, I'll put it on X or Twitter.

But in the absence of that, if Trump is coming at people with bite sized inflammatory actions, How do you convince the public to take a step back? I don't I don't see how that happens right now.

[laughs] Okay.

Because you have to understand the whole of Trump's psychology, the whole history of Trump.

Like, the whole history of Trump has been one in which self-aggrandizement, making himself the best, the prettiest, the biggest, the, you know, most successful, all those things, has been his ticket to everything.

So, so he has always at every step of his career been about self-aggrandizement, about making himself the best of any situation he's in, and he happens to be President of the United States right now.

And as we write in the piece, he's in his you only live once moment, his YOLO time.

Everyone around him says he's very aware that his life is not gonna go on forever, that his presidency is not gonna go on forever, that he's trying to do as much as possible.

And the defining fact of this term has been he's doing things that are not politically rational.

Mm-hmm.

Yes

... was right afterwards in the briefing room where he says, "This wasn't about the press.

This was about the First Amendment.

This is about the rights of free speech." It's a tricky relationship.

It is adversarial, but it's also true that our job is to build relationships with the people the American people elect.

We build relationships of trust with these people so we can get information from them so that we can deliver it to the American people.

And so the fact that we socialize with them or go to events with them, I mean, that is the job of reporting.

But it feels like there's a little bit of a message being sent here from the fringes of society in going after really symbolic figures.

effort

to lobby Congress to do massive tens of billions of dollars in funding for new federal security service, mostly through ICE, some through Customs and Border Patrol, that would run a deportation program the president had talked about.

It was expected that there would be pushback to that.

Furthermore, Miller had been there in the first term when you'd had protests, in some cases riots, over the George Floyd killing.

And so Miller was part of this effort to basically reimagine what the federal government's police force would be doing in the United States until this presidency happened.

federal authorities were very selective in how they interfered in streets and cities all around the country.

And that has changed.

And what is your sense of the endgame for Miller?

What was his perception of the concerns people have about the intervention itself?

Yeah, I asked him, I said, you know, I remember the 2016 campaign.

I remember you talking about regime change being a bad thing, about nation building being a bad thing, about we should focus on the home front.

And his answer was, when it comes to Venezuela, I don't care what you call it, this is a good thing.

Total... dismissal of his past position.

I asked him whether this was a hemispheric issue, whether the fact that Venezuela was in our hemisphere made it different from Iraq.

He said, no, it's a country by country thing.

That doesn't mean we stop looking at it as a civil war, even as there's this obviously cultural divide about it still.

Okay, fine.

So I think Trump comes later.

Uh, yeah, I don't know who Trump would play in this.

Um, but there was always ...

I mean, so B- Bobby Kennedy Sr. raised his kids in a sort of classic machismo literature, you know, reading Gunga Din and, and heroic tales and, you know, "You should go out and adventure in the woods." And, you know, Bobby Kennedy was known for taking these long hikes and, and things like that, and, uh, uh, his son inherits all of this, um, but then is, is hit with these enormous traumas, like losing his father, his mother ha- has 11 children.

Uh, he's basically unparented for a while, and he falls deeply and very quickly into hard drug use, like, not just, you know, marijuana or something like that, but hard, heavy drug use at, at the age of 15.

Um, and his heroic tale is diverted.

Part of the deal.

Can we start on the news? This change in language about vaccines and autism, do you think a line on the CDC website can have real-world consequences for public health?

I, I think as part of a broader effort that, that Kennedy is undertaking, absolutely.

Um, this is actually something we talked about.

I, I met with him, you know, six or seven hours over months and at the end, he was really focused on this question of vaccines do not cause autism.

During his confirmation, Bill Cassidy, who was the deciding vote to get him into the HHS secretary job, made him promise not to remove that line from the website.

He believed then, he believes now that the line is false.

The reason he believes it's false is because while there are a number of, just like you read, high-quality studies of thimerosal, an additive to vaccines, and of MMR vaccines, which is a vaccine that's usually given after the first year of life, um, and autism, and there's more recent studies about aluminum, which is a, another adjuvant that's added to vaccines, and autism, that have not found a correlate- a correlation.

Michael, do you get into any financial incentives that RFK Jr. might have while he points at others?

Can we start on the news? This change in language about vaccines and autism, do you think a line on the CDC website can have real-world consequences for public health?

I think as part of a broader effort that Kennedy is undertaking, absolutely.

This is actually something we talked about.

I met with him six or seven hours over months.

And at the end, he was really focused on this question of vaccines do not cause autism.

During his confirmation, Bill Cassidy, who was the deciding vote to get him into the HHS secretary job, made him promise not to remove that line from the website.

He believed then, he believes now that the line is false.

That was fascinating, Michael, right?

Does he believe in the same health ideas as Kennedy?

Well, so I report my piece.

The Tylenol example is an interesting one.

When Kennedy came to Trump initially about that Tylenol study, he said, we have to be nuanced about this.

We have to be careful.

You know, there could be a correlation between Tylenol and autism.

It's not a proven correlation.

Clearly, clearly, this conversation, you want me to be on the record saying something negative.

Mm-hmm.

I asked him about it.

I said, "Is that true?" He said, "Well, I don't really contest it." Um, uh, and, and so the, the...

It is true that he has, uh, sort of separated himself from the family, but it's also true that he had...

He's on a quest.

There's a, there's a, like, fervor to his effort to reclaim what I, what I describe or what he described as a sort of hero's journey that he was sort of born into that just doesn't exist for most people generally, but even for other people in his family.

Um, there's something-... ferocious about his desire to claim, uh, the birthright that was lost to him.

What, what do you want people to take out of this story? What will they think about Kennedy afterwards that they didn't understand before?

We should be rooting out disloyal people the way we, at one point, were trying to root out communists.

Yeah, I mean, if you go back to the Red Scare, and it wasn't just McCarthy.

She tweeted yesterday that we need to bring back the House Un-American Affairs Committee, which preceded a lot of what McCarthy was doing, going after people in Hollywood as well.

There was a similarity in method, right? The idea behind the Red Scare is if you could find a past association, something they had said, someone they were friends with, someone they defended.

That was enough to prove communist sympathies, and once you prove communist sympathies, they were disqualified from government service.

So I think there's something like that here.

I mean, Loomer's gone after people simply because they've, in the first term, done something that Trump didn't like, even if it was totally within bounds of their job.

Do you think Loomer could eventually see some kind of similar backlash to that?

Do you see an indication that this crass kind of blame game is actually getting purchase with the American public?

The thing that will decide that is not what he says or how people digest his latest interview.

What's gonna decide that is the economy.

And, and we're coming out of a quarter where the economy shrunk, and the definition of a recession is two quarters in a row, usually, that causes a recession.

And there's a lot of people predicting we're gonna have another shrinking economy going forward.

We're a long way from...

I mean, if you wanna chart the peak of, you call it hubris or spirit, you know, the animal spirits of the Trump's second term, it would probably be the day before he announced those tariffs.

(laughs)

incorrect.Right.

There's a quote, uh, often ascribed to Andy Warhol, I have no idea if he actually said it, that, that, "Perception precedes reality." Uh, and I think that is sort of a cor- I mean, Donald Trump is a promoter.

He's a salesman.

That's what he does.

That's what salesmen do.

They convince you of the value of something and then that makes that thing valuable.

It's not that the thing was valuable to begin with.

I know he's proud that he's got a bigger majority and a bigger coalition now, but where that, the what- the r- what the basis is for thinking that what Trump ha- really has his eyes on is changing the fundamental ideological orientation of American politics after he leaves office?

I- is there any amount of financial chaos that would convince him to reverse course?

Well, I think that's an open question.

I, I think that answer though is consistent with what he told us last week, because w- we asked him a similar question, "Could the markets move you to pull back further from your tariff policy if, if they crashed or if there was a real signal in the bond markets that people are moving away from the dollar?" And he said then, "No, that's not gonna be a factor.

I mean, you pay attention to the markets, but that's not a factor." Now, that's what he says.

If you go back a few weeks, he introduced this very dramatic tariff policy, the bond started to go a little haywire, and the, and the stock market collapsed about 20% and he did pull back.

So, I think that he's in, he's in the middle of a negotiating process right now with the world, and I think he's trying to project a very strong negotiating position.

But whether he would withstand that and whether his party could withstand it with the-

Michael, what are you hearing about all of these replacements?

Can you talk about how that thinking is infusing his approach?

yeah i mean if you remember back during the campaign democrats would argue that uh...

there would be no uh... boundaries on a second trump term and be very different than the first and turns out they may have even been understating it uh... you know trump overcame something that really no no leader has overcome before.

If you go back to the days after January 6th, where you have multiple Republicans voting to convict him in the Senate, you have, you know, most of the party, corporate America cutting him off, social networks cutting him off.

He was able to come back to power.

And I think that experience, which is really what we tried to explore in this story, informs the boldness with which he is governing now.

He really doesn't see many boundaries to going after people he perceived to be his enemies.

But how is it playing out?