Pod Save America - What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition

Episode Date: December 24, 2024

In this free preview of Crooked's Friends of the Pod subscription show "Inside 2024," (subscribe here) Dan Pfeiffer, Alyssa Mastromonaco, and Caroline Reston dive deep into the history and drama of presidential transitions, break down the latest moves from President-Elect Trump’s transition team, and share some behind-the-scenes stories from their early days as fresh-faced staffers in the 2008 Obama White HouseFor a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.For more exclusive content, and to support Crooked's mission of building independent progressive media, subscribe now at crooked.com/friends or through the Pod Save America feed on Apple Podcasts.We’re offering 25% off new annual Friends of the Pod subscriptions for a limited time only, through January 1st. A Friends of the Pod subscription is the single best way to help Crooked Media continue our mission of building a progressive, independent media company. Plus get access to ad-free episodes, exclusive bonus content, a Discord community, and more. Sign up today at crooked.com/friends or through the Pod Save America feed on Apple Podcasts.

Hey everyone, we're out for the holiday break. What you're about to hear is an episode from one of our Friends of the Pods subscriber shows. Subscribers get shows like this, ad-free Pods Save America, and much more. Subscribing to Friends of the Pod is the best way to directly support crookedoked Media as we build a counterweight to the right-wing media machine. Right now is your last chance to get 25% off new annual subscriptions. Just head to crooked.com slash friends or subscribe directly to the Pod Save America feed on Apple Podcasts. So enjoy this episode and please consider signing up. Welcome back to Inside 2024. I'm Alyssa Mastromonico.

And I'm Dan Pfeiffer. Buddy, is it still Inside 2024? What are we going to call it in 2025? Are we allowed Inside again? Maybe it's just outside. Yes, outside the country 2025. Outside the country 2025. Wait, before we get started, I have to give you a little fun fact. Oh, please. Do you realize as we sit here and record today,

we are older than Barack Obama was when he became president? Well, gee, thanks, Alyssa. That's great. That's exactly what I needed during the holiday season. Yes, I'm well aware of that. At least we're the same age. I'm doing it to myself too. Do you know what?

What? Between us, we host like five podcasts. How many podcasts did Barack Obama host when he was 47? Zero. None. Okay, so we're thriving. He's ahead of us in some ways and we're ahead of him in other ways, it's fine.

Well, but it's December. We're winding down for the holidays in theory, and it's time to rest and recharge. But alas, we are knee deep in a presidential transition period straight out of the upside down world. So Dan, we're two old vets of the process. Caroline wrote that. We both served on the transition committee in the Obama years.

So we have some valuable insight to impart on this very abnormal moment. So today we're talking about just that. Also here to moderate this conversation, definitely not an old vet of anything, is producer Caroline Reston. Did she write that too? No, I wrote that. Okay. I didn't see that you wrote that. I mean, I've been here six years. I'm like that too? No, I wrote that. Okay. I didn't see that you wrote that.

I mean, I've been here six years. I'm like an old vet. When I tinker with the outline, I tinker with the outline. Also, I just want to point out that Obama, post being a president, gone into podcasting. So he kind of is following in your footsteps. You can shut up now. That's exactly how he sees it too.

No, I mean, he did. Definitely. So you were both part of the Obama transition committee. What does that mean? What were your roles? What did you do? Tell me all about it. I was the communications director for the transition,

which meant that during the campaign itself, I had sort of a second half job, which was to begin thinking about how we staffed the transition, what kind of resources we would have, how we would think about communicating with the public after we won, which was a terrible job. I hated even spending, I was so superstitious, I hated spending any moments thinking about what would happen if Barack Obama would win when he had not yet won. And once the election was over and Obama became the president-elect, I went to Washington a couple of days after the election and was in charge of the messaging and the transition, which really counted to

helping coordinate how we responded to reporter questions about what the president-elect was going to do and mostly rolling out all of his nominees, the cabinet secretaries, the new White House staff, the people who are going to serve on the Federal Reserve Board, that sort of stuff, how we rolled them out, what kind of press events we did, what we said about them, how we responded to attacks on them. And so it was sort of just like a, it was sort of just very, it was very similar to my communications director job

on the campaign, but focused on what the administration would look like when he actually took office in two months. So I actually, I was on the transition. The transition for us was split between Chicago and Washington, DC. And so Barack Obama, then President-elect Obama, and Michelle and the girls, they were staying in Chicago until the holidays because girls were still in school.

So I was split between Chicago and D.C. And I, with Pfeiffer, worked on— This is actually—here's one of our funniest transition stories. So like Pfeiffer said, we did a lot of the coordination around the cabinet secretary rollouts. They did not happen on Twitter as they do this time around. We actually had events where everyone would fly in and stand with the president for the most part and be announced and he would have met with them and he'd come out and be like, I just met with my economic team and here's who they are. But one time things move so fast and furious on the transition that one of my deputies, Lizzie, called Stephen Chu, who was going to be Secretary of Energy to coordinate

his travel. And when she called him, he goes, I guess I got the job. So we had, it is, it is fast and furious, but yes, so I oversaw everything that the president-elect was doing, both in DC, Chicago when he traveled, and then also, Pfeiffer and I were both, even though they're separate entities, there was the inaugural committee. And we both had a lot of visibility into that too, because you can't have an inauguration that's off message or poorly organized. I mean, I feel like you can now. I mean, I guess so. Yeah, we thought, there's a lot of things we thought you couldn't have an inauguration that's off message or poorly organized. I mean, I feel like you can now. I mean, I guess so.

There's a lot of things we thought you couldn't do that you absolutely can do. We held ourselves to a high standard, you know? I love that the way we used to announce cabinet picks was like a debutante ball and not just like on Twitter. I mean, people really don't understand how few resources there are on a transition committee. Like, Fyber was in DC, so I'm not sure if he saw the same level of it.

But where I was, because President Obama was there most of the time, we had Secretary Clinton, then Senator Clinton was coming to see President Obama. And he's like, can we get her some juice or something? And it required going to Bed Bath & Beyond to buy a pitcher and then go to the Whole Foods to buy the apple juice. And then one of us had to take the pitcher home at night and wash it. And when he started, it was Peter Orszag's birthday,

who was gonna be our director of OMB. He's like, we should make him a cake, which meant one of us made him a cake. So those were very different times. When John McCain was coming to see President Obama after the election, he flew out to Chicago. There was no car service to pick him up. There was a nice guy named Ted Scioto who picked him up McDonald's on the way so he could eat. It's rough and tumble. It is not a fancy... The taxpayers are getting their money's worth through that process.

Wow. That's kind of sad. Well, that's an important difference, right? Is that there is taxpayer money allocated for transitions. We use that money, and so essentially, we all became government employees the day after the election. And therefore, we had a whole bunch of rules we had to follow, like what you could spend money on, what you can't spend money on.

And Trump is not doing that. He is funding his transition through private, mostly secret money. And so they can do lots of things we could not do. And we had to follow a bunch of rules that they don't have to follow, including ethics requirements. Is that legal? Yes.

All right. It's basically, in exchange for the taxpayer funds, you follow government rules. If you don't take the taxpayer funds, you don't have to follow those rules. Work smarter, not harder. I mean, if we could have announced those cabinet bids on Twitter, we probably should have. Would have been so much easier. So you're talking about how previously before even winning the election,

you are already prepping, even though you feel like it's bad juju. Okay, you won. What is happening the next day? It is hell on earth. Horrible. Horrible. Howard Wolfson, who worked for Hillary Clinton,

described presidential campaigns as a pie eating contest where the prize is more pie. And that's exactly what it is, right? Where it's you. We won, we had a victory celebration late into the night. And then several of us, myself and all this included, had to come to the office at like 9 a.m. the morning after the election to meet with our new boss,

Rahm Emanuel. It was like 7.30, 8 a.m. Yeah, it was just, and then you're just like, you're working. For the people who were going to work on the transition, you went, which includes basically the sort of the senior staff of the campaign, you went right to work on your new job.

There was no break. The best night of your life to the worst. Yeah, it's truly a terrible morning. for the senior staff of the campaign, you went right to work on your new job. There was no break. I'd never been more tired. The best night of your life to the worst. Yeah, it's truly a terrible morning. And it's just pure chaos. But the other thing that's really hard about it is that, for example, Pfeiffer and I had worked together at that point,

side by side for two full years. And now there are just all these new people flooding in. And as Pfeiffer will attest, I don't like you until I like you. So that was a very hard time for me. Yeah, it is. That's an important point, which is, as like some of us on the campaign

would dip in and out of the transition because we were gonna take jobs in the transition if we won, but separate from the campaign, there was an entire operation run by other people, staff by people we don't know, working out of an office in DC who are putting together binders of staff names and cabinet secretaries and doing research on them

and thinking about what executive orders you would do in the first hundred days, just like an entire policy brain trust that we never spoke with, never saw. And then the day after the election, you're like, meet your new colleagues. And I was like, no. Yeah, I was always like, no.

I think what you guys are talking about is something I actually didn't know existed, which is the Presidential Transition Act of 1963, which requires GSA to provide office-based administrative support to the president-elect. So looking at like the Biden administration right now, like when does the new president elect start to get looped in?

Like how does that whole like literal transition process start and like, how does that work? When is Trump getting clued in to what's going on? After they become the nominee. Mm-hmm. If they won. Oh wow. So after you become the nominee, you are officially a nominee, which happens after the nominee. If they won. So after you become the nominee, you are officially a nominee,

which happens after the convention. Then you now get access to this government transition funding, which most people, Biden, Trump last time, they take advantage of it. So they open an office that is run by the General Services Administration, which is sort of the government administrative arm, and you hire a bunch of staff, they get a bunch of volunteer policy people, they all start working. And then periodically during the campaign, the candidate,

and hopefully President-elect, will get briefed on here's the names we're thinking about if you win, because you're going to have to move quickly. And so they kind of will be like, yes, yes, no, no, ask me about this again, if we win, sort of stuff. And then same for of will be like, yes, yes, no, no, ask me about this again if we win sort of stuff. And then same for some staff like us who would be like, these are the things you have to be thinking about. We're gonna have to hire these people to work on the transition. Are you okay with these people?

How should we staff it? How many jobs should we hold open for people who are currently on the campaign to work on the transition until January 20th on inauguration day. Are nominees being told that the Syrian regime is on the brink? Like top national security information when they're the nominee? Yes, you start getting classified briefing. You can start getting classified briefings as the nominee from the CIA.

It's essentially a dumbed down version of the presidential daily brief. Yeah. So what happened, and I learned this more, I sort of was clued into this more in 2012 when as deputy chief of staff, I actually ran the internal sort of transition process. So we were sitting in the White House, but I still had to reach out to the Romney team, onboard them. There was a, there's a small handful of people around, so there were a small number of people around Mitt Romney who were submitted for

security clearance so that they could be with Mitt Romney if and when he received any of these briefings. And you just get them all, you get them all briefed up. So it's, it's the, it's the nominee, plus I'd say a small handful of people who all have access to a sort of maybe slightly diluted presidential daily brief. But when we were the nominee and headed into the financial crisis, the Bush team was actually really good about looping in

Obama and McCain on everything that they were thinking and talking about in the days leading up to the election around the financial crisis. In 2009, the Obama administration was coming into a huge recession. And I know we talked a little bit, you were just talking about how the outgoing administration has to loop in the incoming administration. But when something like a huge economic crisis is happening, what does that look like? I imagine you need to hit the ground running. What are the things you're doing day one when you're the nominee on something like that?

Were the Bush folks like nice to you? Extremely, extremely. The Bush, I don't think that we could have been any luckier in our transition than how the Bush folks handled it. And they had told me in some of my transition meetings that in some ways it was kind of informed by how they came into office in 2000, which was different and a little contentious and, you know, maybe not the jolliest of transitions after, you know, the Supreme Court decided the election. But I found, and I'll let Pfeiffer speak to the financial crisis because to just show how organized or whatever the Obama campaign was, the economy was not my bag and so I did not pick it up.

I had to watch the movie Too Big to Fail to totally understand the financial crisis. Pfeiffer would have a better sense of that. Yeah. I mean, Alyssa's right. The Bush people took real pride in having a real transition. And she's right, Bush's transition was not great for a couple of reasons, but mainly he didn't get to start doing the transition for 37 days

after the election because of the recount in Florida. And then there are some reports, some of which have turned out to be apocryphal about some tension between the Clinton folks and the Bush folks after the election. But Bush did take real pride in it. And they were very, everything we asked for, they were very helpful. They all, everyone whose job we were about to take, spent plenty of time

with us, meeting with us and talking about how to do the job so we hit the ground running, but it was especially important because we're existing in the middle of this financial crisis. And it's important to understand that George Bush was basically, had been a lame duck president for about a year and a half at that point, like fully lame duck. His approval rating was sub 30. He didn't really have the juice to get anything done. He'd kind of, because he was such a political albatross around the Republican nominees campaign,

he basically had disappeared. So it's not dissimilar for how Biden had been sort of absent throughout this whole campaign, because him being in public was not seen by the nominee as helpful. So Obama sort of had to become president and for all intents and purposes on day one as president-elect,

because Bush wanted to pass a bunch of legislation to respond to the financial crisis, and he could not do it on his own. He did not have the juice to do it. So Obama had to take a real role in lobbying members of both parties to vote for bills. He had to begin writing legislation so that he could submit,

he could release his economic stimulus bill before he even took office. And so that was one of the hardest transition was we were having to do a normal transition to prepare for all the normal things you would do and hire all the right people and have your first week of events and be president at the same time during an absolute crisis with no margin of error because of the history making nature of Obama's election, because of his relative Washingtonian experience. If you one fuck up and it could damage his presidency for a year.

You can describe the transition most succinctly, I think, as just when the chickens come home to roost, like just across the board. You're so much more stressed because by the time we got the campaign, it was incredibly stressful, but we've been on it for two years and it's what we did. Like we were campaign people, we knew how to do it.

And now you have a totally different job. The stakes are much higher. You're navigating different, like a different culture, a different set of objectives with a bunch of people you've never met before. Like we had the most closely knit campaign. There was maybe 10 to 12 people who had worked together for two years.

We loved each other. We made all the decisions together. We trusted Obama. Obama trusted us. And all of a sudden you have all these new people, which we needed them, right? They had experience we didn't have. We needed them.

But it was hard. I remember my first day of the transition, I walk in, I've been the communication director on that campaign, I'd been there on day one with Alyssa and Favs and Tommy, and we had just won this presidential election. I walk in the transition and my name's not on the list. Can't even get in the building. And all these people whose names I only knew

because they worked for people who ran against Barack Obama in the primary just buzzing through with their IDs. Instead of there waiting for someone to come get me. Like the kid, it was just so demoralizing. When I say the chickens come home to roost, it's everything. It is like, Pfeiffer and I were the heads of our departments on the campaign, which meant that, you know, for me, I probably had a hundred and some full-time employees. I had 500 part-time employees.

Every single one wants a job. But meanwhile, we're like, well, do we even have jobs yet? Because like, there's a lot of faith, you know, you're like, oh, I'm just going to start on the transition, but you haven't been given your job in the White House yet. And so you're a little bit on, you know, pins and needles. And to Viver's point, you know, we had this thing on the campaign called the block schedule, which is like the Bible.

It's everything Barack Obama's gonna do. And I was in the transition office and this woman who, I'm gonna say her name because I love her today, but at the time I almost had a stroke, Mona Sutfin, who was deputy chief of staff for policy, goes rolling through with the block schedule and it's all marked up with her handwriting and she's like,

Rom wanted me to take a whack at the first 100 days. I was like, 100 days or what? That is my job, can't give me my schedule back. It was, and the thing is, the thing that was so hard for me is that Pfeiffer and I were not in the same office. So I couldn't go in his office, close the door and be like, buddy, you're not gonna believe what happened. I'd like secretly call him from the bathroom in the Chicago transition.

Does anyone give you a tour or do you just kind of like waltz in and figure it out? You waltz in. It's like, make no mistake. It's sort of prison-like. Like if you think about the DMV, that's kind of what it's like. So in 2020, when Biden was president-elect, Trump and his administration famously stonewalled the transition. What does that even mean? What are the stakes for stonewalling an incoming presidency? And what literally are they doing to stop

the transfer of information? Historically, vetting is part of the transition. It is, you know, you need your papers, you need to submit them, they need to be vetted by the FBI and other people. You're learning, I mean, the one thing that Biden had to leg up on is that he and several of his closest advisors

had been in the White House for eight years as vice president. So a lot of the things that we kind of suffered from or would have suffered from in 2008 and nine, had we not been given the access that we kind of suffered from, or would have suffered from in 2008 and 2009, had we not been given the access that we got, weren't as catastrophic for him. But they still just slow everything down in a world where you still only have what, like 60 days, buddy, like ish to transition, give or take? I mean, here's where it matters, right?

In a normal transition, immediately after the election, the president-elect and the incumbent president sign a memorandum of understanding, and then teams go into all the individual agencies, and they look at the org chart, they look at the policy that's happening, they understand the budget, so they can begin to make decisions about staffing

and policy happening on day one. This is most important on national security because there are a whole set of things happening, intelligence, operations happening that are ongoing and they don't stop on January 20th because a new president is coming in. You have to know what is happening and be able to jump in on day one. And like to know what ongoing threats to the country are that you have to be prepared for. And none of that stuff got to happen for the Biden-Trump transition because Trump was trying to steal the election up through January 6th. And there probably, as Alyssa points out, if there was ever any incoming administration

that could best navigate that, it was the Biden administration because of his experience. And he was coming back only four years after leaving. So government had changed, but not so much that it was impossible to fathom. So they were able to come back. Everything was further complicated by COVID at that time. The fact that people weren't going to be in work, that all the senior staff meetings and the White House, the White House were happening from home, or people in the same building but not in the same room. So they had a very complicated, even if Trump had not been an insurrectionist asshole, they would have been a very complicated transition. So he made it much harder.

So is Biden and his team just not getting information during that time? Basically none. You know, I want to ask this question earlier, but I saw that Trump was at the reopening of Notre Dame in Paris and had a meeting with Macron, the president of France, and the Ukrainian president Zelensky. Is that normal for an incoming president to be meeting with other world leaders? And is Biden ever clued in on what they're talking about because they had a closed door meeting?

I don't know what mechanism would inform Biden of what they talked about. I'm sure all the surveillance equipment. Probably. Well, the Chinese may have. Yeah, the Chinese may have. They're always with us. They might have given a little parting gift.

Like here's a summary of the extra, the off label conversation that they had. But no, in general, Caroline, most of the foreign relations leader to leader contact is pretty ceremonial, I guess, during the transition and by design because nominees and presidents elect aren't supposed to be conducting foreign policy until they're president. So when you come into office, almost every foreign leader on the planet calls up and wants to talk to you. And then you, with the help of 30 members of the National Security Council, figure out which order you reply to those calls in and how you set them, because you don't

want to offend people. And there's a lot of, a lot of considerations that go into the order in which you return the call. Who is Obama's first call? UK maybe? It's got to be the British. Yeah, it's got to be the UK. I would imagine it was the UK. Our former mommies.

Yes. But thanks Caroline. But it should, for the most part, it is usually kept to that. You know, phone call, look forward to working with you, see on the backside, you know, onward. This has been just a unique situation because Trump was having some of these conversations during the campaign. Yeah.

But like Obama did, and like, if we're being fair, Obama did go meet with world leaders as the candidate. We went on a foreign trip. We sat down with all these world leaders. As a US Senator. As a US Senator, yes. As a US Senator. As a US Senator, yes. As a US Senator.

Yes, and the potential next president of the United States. But Trump, because he was a recent former president, was talking to people like Netanyahu during the campaign. And so this, like I know it is unusual that he is doing this. It is probably low on the list of outrages of the Trump transition so far, but it is probably low on the list of outrages of the Trump transition so far. But it is definitely unusual. It's not super weird that he went to Notre Dame and saw Macron

there. Like that's not, it's not. But the closed door meeting that happened after is. It kind of depends on what's said. But it's like to what end, right? Like what is the worst thing that's happened? He's also been president before, so I think that's maybe a little bit different. It wouldn't be unusual if Trump hate was not, it's not unusual for a former president to travel to another country

and meet with a sitting world leader. Like that is not- That's a good point. I would say that's like kind of the perk of being the president-elect. It's like, you know what? I'm gonna go to Greece and meet with the princess. So looking now at president-elect

and his transitional team, it is helmed by Linda McMahon. By the way, I've been really loving looking at her old videos of getting body slammed. Nothing like a half Nelson to scream, I'm ready to serve. What should the Trump administration and their transition team be focusing on right now? I'm not convinced that they're not focused. They're like they're doing this. A lot of the same things we were doing. They are rolling out nominees.

They're doing it differently. They're definitely not vetting their nominees in advance. That's something we spend a lot of time doing to make sure that we knew all of the thing, the problems before you put them out. And even when you do a great job of that, you will miss some they are doing. They're basically picking people almost at random for some of these jobs. Shooting them out of t-shirt guns. And they don't really seem to care about qualifications

because they think they're gonna be able to get everyone through the Senate. And they very well may be right. But there's definitely an operation that's happening that's thinking of and drafting, according to all the reporting executive orders they're gonna issue on day one, what they're working with the speaker of the House and the incoming majority leader of the Senate about what their

legislative strategy is going to be. Are they going to do taxes first, border first, both at the same time? And so they're kind of doing those same things. They'll seem to be doing it super competently or super responsibly, but it's not like they're they are doing the things that you're supposed to be doing. Just the outcomes seem quite dangerous and poorly thought out. Yeah, it's really interesting watching it

from the difference from 2016. I feel like this, this time it's feeling much more like politics as usual. Like it just seems more formal, like they have their shit together, even though it's like math, it's like a small bandaid on chaos that's underneath. I think it's, I say, I kind of dispute that

because last time he really did pick people who we hated, but were theoretically qualified for their jobs, for the most part, right? Like he got H.R. McMaster to be the national security advisor. Rex Tillerson, like I'm not picking the CEO of Exxon to do something, but that's a serious, that's a person with serious credentials, right? This time he's picking Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabb. Like his picks are fucking bananas. But what I think has happened is everyone's perspective eight years later about like how you do things has changed.

I remember right after the election, I was in DC and I went in and saw Obama and Trump had just won. So, and we were talking and he said that he had just met with his national security team, I think he had done a call to a world leader or something. And he said, I guess we're going to find out if all this prep work and briefing really matters or not. And it clearly does, right? It clearly does, but because of the like the dumb fuckery that was so much of Trump's first term,

but just like some of the formal ways in which we do it, like if Obama in 2008 had just started announcing cabinet secretaries via email, which is how you would do it back then, people would think that was insane. But like some of the, and some of it is fine that it's changed, but it's like our

expectations for what is acceptable conduct from Donald Trump have been so lowered because we're comparing it to Trump of 16, not the previous 44 presidents. This is a great time for me to ask this question that I've been dying to talk to you both about. RFK, I don't know if you guys saw this story, it was reported that there is a job application process that is asking some batshit questions. Let me give you one example. This is per the independent. One section asks applicants to pick three or more attitudes that suit them as such. Quote, I require excessive admiration or I quote, I don't have that much interest in having a sexual experience with another person. Another was I believe in many things. Others don't like having a sixth sense clairvoyance and

telepathy. And as an adolescent, I had bizarre fantasies or preoccupations. Is this normal? Are these the job applications to work for the administration? It is so wild. I had to read it many times. Something like this can't be true, but it is. I have no recollection of what our job application was. No, we didn't, because these are for the cabinet. Oh, these are people who are going to be in the cabinet.

Yes, these are his applications. But I still don't think Kathleen Sebelius was digging into these kinds of thought starters. Yeah, it's bananas. Okay, so that's not normal. What is a difficult question you are asked? No, Caroline, that's not normal. Well, I don't know. Okay, I've never worked for the government. It's fair to ask. We don't even know if there were questionnaires when we were in the office. They just kind of vet you? We just got vetted.

I think people submit resumes. Submit resumes for their open position. There was a website with open positions and people submitted resumes. Or you just submitted your resumes and then people sort of sorted those resumes to positions. Okay, here's my last question for you guys

before we wrap up. And this is honestly something I've been thinking throughout. Is there a petty part of you deep down inside that wishes the Biden administration was just like, fuck you, I'm not telling you anything, I'm going to stonewall this, like doing exactly what Trump did to Biden back in 2020? The risk you run by being the person who doesn't offer a productive transition is that if something bad happens, it can blow back on you. So I think that giving people the keys to the car is just generally the right thing

to do. There's some petty history here. George, famously, I think it turned out when this was truly investigated, it wasn't true, whether all these reports that when Bush came into the White House, George W. Bush came into the White House, that the Clinton people had removed W's from the keywords. W's, yeah. I always thought that was still true. I think there may have been one or two examples, but it turns out, think afterwards we learned that there was a lot

of bullshit there, unsurprisingly. I think the way to resist Trump is not to do something big and loud in the beginning. It's that the people who work in the government have to be very smart and quiet about how they do it and try to do what they can to protect the things they need protecting, delay the things that need to be delayed. But look, I am as petty as they come, right? I would be, so the fact that I'm going to say this runs against type, but I think Trump is going to, if Trump is going to blow up on his own, we don't want to give him something easy to blame. Like the Biden staff being petty or not.

We're like, let's give him every opportunity to succeed, and then when he fails, that's on him, as opposed to like an easy, let's not give him an easy scapegoat. So I, the Biden administration is doing what they can to do the transition the right way, and I think they should absolutely do that. That's the right thing to do from just a general,

like point of government's public service, but politically in the end, it's also the right thing to do. So because if and when, and it's more likely when than if Trump fails, Trump has no one to blame but himself. Real quick before we wrap this segment, just wanna let everybody including listeners know that the W's were in fact, according to ABC News,

the springs under the W's were removed off of keyboards in the Eisenhower executive office building, but not in the West Wing. That's okay. This, if anyone in the Biden administration is listening to this, hide all the remotes. Like that's a very innocuous, petty thing you can do is hide them.

Even better than them, even better. Switch them. Yes. It's gonna be the wrong room. So you think you have a remote, but you cannot figure out why it doesn't work. Exactly. Or take the phone, like the little thing that says what, like when we got into the White

House, there's just a, right after the inauguration, there's a Post-It note with your name on the door and then a Post-It note with your phone number on the phone. Switch all the Post-It notes. That's fun too. No one knows how to call anyone. Cosign all of these petty measures. Thanks for listening. Alyssa and I stuck around to do a Q&A from subscribers, so to hear that and much more,

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