2025 in Review

00:00:01
Speaker 1: If you're a woman navigating life transitions like pregnancy, infertility, parenthood, menopause, or caring for aging parents, connecting with a licensed therapist is a great way to stay centered and find support. A therapist can help you navigate the hormonal shifts and life chapters that come standard with being female. Talkspace therapists are here to listen and help you process, gain insights, and develop coping strategies for whatever you're experiencing. Talkspace Virtual Therapy is covered by many insurance plans, and most insured members pay a fifteen dollars copay often less. No insurance, no problem. Now get eighty five dollars off of your first month with the promo code Katie when you go to talkspace dot com slash Katiecuric. Match with a licensed therapist today at talkspace dot com slash Katiecuric. We're wrapping up season twelve of Next Question by looking back at one of the craziest years ever. It's been almost impossible to process the NonStop news cycle, so our team decided to talk to some of the smartest people we know about how this country and the world has changed in almost every aspect of our lives, institutions have been weakened, norms have been violated, rights have been rolled back, and the world order rearranged. In other words, folks, it's been a real dumpster fire. But don't take it for me. Take it from these brainiacs who really know what they're talking about. Here are their takes on twenty twenty five, and in the meantime, Happy New Year everyone. New Yorker writer Susan Glasser has got to be one of the smartest people I know, so I spoke with her about this turbulent first year of President Trump's second term and what it means for our country. I'm with one of my favorite people on the planet, Susan Glasser, who of course writes for The New Yorker, but has been covering Washington politics in one form or another for many years. Not as long as I have, but for many years. And we're beginning a series called the Year in Review. How original, But there is so much to talk about in different spaces, and when we decided we wanted to focus a year in review on the Trump presidency, I couldn't think of a better person than Susan to review the last several months. I guess since his inauguration, and I want to get to the meat of a lot of things that have been done. But just as a follow up, Susan, do you think the velocity is intentional this kind of almost parapatetic way of running a country. Do you think it's intentional or do you think it is just the result of a very chaotic, sort of almost decentralized administration.

00:03:05
Speaker 2: I think both can be true. I don't see that as an either or. In a way, right, we're sort of like sucked inside the news cycle of the ADHD mind of the president. Right, so, in some sense, because he's insisted upon an extreme centralization of power, right, he is a classic you know, the management consultants will call him, you know, the the ultimate kind of process nightmare.

00:03:32
Speaker 3: Right.

00:03:32
Speaker 1: He's the you know, the hub and spoke system.

00:03:34
Speaker 2: He's the hub of every discussion, and in fact, it's the blowing up of the regular order process, especially AT's say, in the national security world that I'm most familiar with. That is one of the defining attributes of Donald Trump. You know, he's basically, you know, in the Obama or Biden administration, you would talk about the interagency process and then you would have you know, these recommendations, then you'd have a Deputies committee meeting, then you would have Principals committee meeting, then you would, you know, bring in the president. It is literally you know, what it reminds me of is my brief time when I was a foreign correspondent covering Afghanistan after the war and the Taliban were toppled, and basically the warlords this is how they governed. They would have a big ante room, you know, with a bunch of courtiers sitting around on couches waiting for their moment with the big man, and then people they would give audiences.

00:04:30
Speaker 1: And you know, Marco Rubio, this is literally what he does with his day.

00:04:34
Speaker 2: He doesn't work on the seventh floor of the Department Department of State like our normal secretaries of State. He's dual hated as National Security Advisor. But he's not even sitting in the famous corner office of the National Security Advisor that you know ever since Henry Kissinger. He's sitting on the couch in the Oval office, waiting for FaceTime with the boss and making sure trying to make sure that his rivals like JD. Vance or Steve Whitcoff aren't getting the time. I mean, this is what it's about. So partially when we.

00:05:04
Speaker 1: Experience it as this chaos, it's.

00:05:07
Speaker 2: Because we are actually being subjected to governing the United States through the chaotic, unstructured schedule of Donald Trump.

00:05:18
Speaker 1: It's fascinating and yet, you know, for better for worse, and I think most people watching this believe it's for worse. The number of things that they get done is pretty it's pretty staggering. And the fact that he appears to be so indefatigable Susan, I mean, he is jetting off here doing this, you know, dealing with you know, emission standards one second, dealing with Ukraine and Russia the next second. It's fascinating but also maddening to watch. And I'm curious what you've learned. And it is, as you mentioned, very different in this term than it was and the first, where there were these guardrails in the form of sort of people who weren't complete sycophants, and yes, people surrounding him, right, you know, you had General Mattis, you had Rex Tillerson, you had any number of people trying to kind of rain him in, if you will. But what have you learned about sort of how he's operating this. I mean, maybe this is a redundant question, but I'm just curious because he does seem to get a lot done.

00:06:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, Katie, I think these are really important questions. I wish we actually understood more about the dynamics of some of these decisions and decision making. I think part of the reason we don't is because of the lack of formal bureaucratic process, which, by the way, is the hallmark of modern industrialized states. I mean, you know, not to get all you know, political science y on us, but you know, you can go back to the late nineteenth century, early twentieth century and you know, Max Weber and understand that it's the orderly process that is the foundation of rule of law societies, right. And you know, what we're seeing here is something much closer to the personalist behavior of even an elected autocracy, right. And you know, a sort of oligarchy where it's direct access to the president rather than orderly process that dictate outcome. So you know, I mean, this is not unprecedented in world history. We ought to learn, you know, what to call it so that we can understand it.

00:07:34
Speaker 1: I guess is my view, Project twenty twenty five is the playbook guiding this Trump administration's agenda, and The Atlantic staff writer David Graham literally wrote the book on it. It's called The Project, and he came on the podcast earlier this year to talk about it. It was one of our most listened to episodes, so I invited him back to break down how much of that agenda is already in motion and what's coming next. I'm excited that our guest today is David Graham. David is the staff writer for the Atlantic, and he is also the author of a book called The Project. How Project twenty twenty five is Reshaping America, which came out earlier this year. Back in April, David and I sat down to talk about what exactly Project twenty twenty five is. And now, as part of our year and Review series, we're here to talk about what has happened and how much of Project twenty twenty five has been enacted. So let's talk about Project twenty twenty five and the tracker, which has been tracking all three hundred and nineteen objectives. The website says the administration has implemented about half of these in under a year, so tell us give us a progress report. Is this more or less than they hope to implement this year?

00:08:58
Speaker 4: I think they were hoping to get us more much as they could, but they have succeeded. It seemed well beyond what they.

00:09:03
Speaker 1: Expected they could do.

00:09:06
Speaker 4: And it's hard to sort of grasp it because the goals they have range from these little, minor mechanical goals to really sweeping things, you know, closing the Education Department, politicizing the Justice Department. So you see them working on all these different levels, and so think that number is accurate, but sort of it's helpful to put it in some context. The places where I think they've done less. I think some of their goals of for example, cracking down on abortion or changing labor laws, or encouraging you know, higher birth rates, those are places we haven't seen a lot of project progress. Rather, when you look at cutting environmental regulations or politicizing the Justice Department, taking over independent agencies, laying off civil servants, those are the places where I think they've had the greatest progress so far.

00:09:49
Speaker 1: So we should make it clear. I think David, the Project twenty twenty five isn't just coming out of the White House as you mentioned, it's the doj OMB, the FCC, the FTC. How have all these offices managed to kind of work together and catalyze these drastic changes over such a short period of time because it had to be pretty well orchestrated.

00:10:10
Speaker 4: No, that's right, and I think part of that is winning the right people from their perspective into jobs. So I think the Federal Communications Commission is a great example of this. It's an agency that is technically independent. You know, the officials are appointed by the President and approved by the Senate, and then it operates on its own. Historically, the head of the SEC is Brendan Carr, who wrote a chapter on the FCC four project twenty twenty five, and he is basically acting as an agent at the White House. So we've seen him, for example, threatening ABC famously in the case of Jimmy Kimmel and basically saying if you don't take him off the air, there will be serious consequences. We've seen him threatening CBS, demanding transcripts of interviews and sort of bullying them, threatening not to approve mergers. We see this potentially as a case as a matter again now with a Warner Brothers sale and so we can soon to see how that would work, and I think it's a preview. Just this week, the administration was at the Supreme Court arguing for the right basically to be able to fire any of the heads of these agencies. And if they succeed, which looks to most court watchers like they'll succeed at least on some level, they'll have the power to turn mainly these agencies into sort of functional political arms in exactly the same way at DJ we see how you know they're using federal prosecutions basically as a tool to punish political opponents. James, comey, Letitia James. You know, these are not prosecutions that make a lot of sense based on the marriage, but they do make a lot of sense if you're trying to punish your opponents and intimidate the opposition.

00:11:38
Speaker 1: They've gotten very little opposition to enacting this because Congress is basically rolled over. What impact would the mid terms, if in fact the Democrats win back the House, What impact will that have on implementing some of the things that Project twenty twenty five is recommending but have yet to take effect.

00:12:01
Speaker 4: You know, it's an interesting question what that would look like, and I think it's I'm supposed to try to wrap my head around it. You know, in many ways, what has made it difference is Congress has just done nothing and in the process has yielded a lot of these rights up to Trump, and where they push back is really on things that are about their very specific prerogatives, like the filibuster Center Republicans. When Trump said we should have Bollo as a failing buster. That's one place where you saw Center Republicans pushing back because many of them have been in the minority and they want to have that if they're ever in the minority again. But on policy issues you don't see that, And I think the result is many of these things are done, it's a little bit late to stop some of them. A democratic House would have a big effect on oversight. We get a lot more transparency, we would presumably see subpoenas. But so much what he's doing is not about legislation. You know, Republicans pass basically one huge piece of legislation and have done very little else because they've decided to go around Congress rather than using it to get the things they want done.

00:13:06
Speaker 1: Hi, everyone, it's Katie Couric. You know I'm always on the go between running my media company, hosting my podcast, and of course covering the news, and I know that to keep doing what I love, I need to start caring for what gets me there, my feet. That's why I decided to try the Good Feet stores personalized arch support system. I met with a Good Feet arch support specialist, and after a personalized fitting, I left the store with my three step system designed to improve comfort, balance and support. My feet, knees, and back are thanking me already. Visit goodfeet dot com to learn more, find the nearest store, or book your own free personalized fitting. I've known Richard for gulp nearly forty years. We first met in a grocery store line in Washington, d C. I tell the whole story in our latest Substack conversation, so make sure to check it out if you want him know more. Aside from being a good friend, he's also one of the most knowledgeable voices on foreign policy and led the Council on Foreign Relations for twenty years. I spoke to Richard about how President Trump is upending longstanding US foreign policy and how to make sense of a world that increasingly feels like it's spinning off its axis.

00:14:36
Speaker 5: There's eighty years of American foreign policy that this administration, if you will, inherited, and for most of those eighty years, even big parts of Trump one point zero, the foreign policy took place within certain boundaries or a football field, you'd say, within ten or twenty yards of midfield. This is a radical departure in many ways. Allies are no longer at the center of US foreign policy. The tariffs that were instituted don't distinguish between friends and foes. The emphasis on things economic haatie. Every other president said, if we have order in the world and stability, we have a functioning global trading and investment environment, we Americans are going to do. Okay. This is the first administration that doesn't care about any of those things. It's just focused very narrowly on deals, particularly on commercial deals. There's a lack of any interest whatsoever in participating in international institutions. There's no interest in promoting democracy or human rights. The president's gone out of his way to basically say, how how you treat your own citizens as your business, We're not in the business of telling you how to run your country. So it's kind of almost a hyper super realist, and I think you know what we've seen recently. We'll talk about it as a surprising emphasis on the Western hemisphere, a real hostility towards europe An unwillingness to support Ukraine, a real CosIng up to Russia and to some extent China. So so many of the things that we thought we could assume about American foreign policy simply don't hold for this administration. And one last thing, it's not isolationist. This administration has an international agenda. It's just quite radical, and it's radically different.

00:16:30
Speaker 1: How would you compare the sort of approach in the second Trump term versus the first?

00:16:38
Speaker 5: A greater emphasis on business deals this time around, on commercial a continuation, but in a deepening of the embrace of authoritarians, be it in the Gulf or in Russia in particular, also to some extent in China. We haven't yet had North Korea, but just to give you one example, you had the love letters with North Korea last time. It was interesting that North Korea hasn't come in for any criticism. Again, a hostility towards allies. I think that's pretty pretty because a greater emphasis on the Western hemisphere, this time around, not interested in climate change. That was true, then, it's it's true now some similarities, but I think it's I think it's almost doubled down whatever the tendencies were the first time around. And I think a lot of that might also be because of who's around this president.

00:17:33
Speaker 1: I was going to ask. In many ways, I think people like General Mattis and McMaster and some of the foreign policy gurus that surrounded the president the first go round were frustrated, either got fired or left or spoke out against him. And he doesn't really have anyone who is that moderating force in the current administration.

00:17:59
Speaker 5: Does he He doesn't have that. He doesn't have a process. You know, Marco Rubio as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, I think is also the government archivist, and I don't know what else he does. But the process is almost all top down in this administration. From the President. You've got a special envoy for everything and everywhere, and Steve Witcoff.

00:18:22
Speaker 6: You have.

00:18:24
Speaker 5: Robin to his batman and Jared Kushner. Now this is almost like the president. There's a rejection of formal structures as a kind of improvisational quality to this, and a rejection of traditional advisors. I think the president felt people like Jim Mattis, John Bolton and others hmmed them in the first time around. So this is he wanted to have a foreign policy that really bears his signature and his personality.

00:18:58
Speaker 1: I handed this one over. Molner might go to when it comes to business and the economy. He spoke with Steve Rattner, CEO of will It Advisors and the economic analysts on Morning Joe about the state of the economy under President Trump. And yes, they covered the a word affordability.

00:19:18
Speaker 5: Where are we in the challenge of affordability?

00:19:20
Speaker 7: Because you know, as I was doing my homework for the call moments before this, I noticed, because I wouldn't know from shopping, but the price of eggs down seventy percent?

00:19:30
Speaker 1: Is that true?

00:19:31
Speaker 8: Yeah? But from a huge, big high. You know, eggs unrelated to any.

00:19:36
Speaker 7: Purell sorts of problems with with an Asian flu.

00:19:39
Speaker 8: And and all that why eggs was so high.

00:19:41
Speaker 7: Okay, so that's not because the administration did something wondrous and Americans canal afford eggs.

00:19:48
Speaker 8: No, there's nothing, And I'm I'm going to I'm trying to be and I will be very objective about this. There's nothing the administration has done that actually has made the inclition problem any easier or better, and there are some things they've done, like tariffs, that have made it worse. It's inflation is a problem, but you can deal with inflation if wages are going up fast enough. But they're not. And so if you look at the and this is not how people feel, but the facts are, if you look at the last three or four years, we actually did make some progress on affordability in terms of wages going up faster than prices this year, and this has to do partly with the fact that the unemployment rate has started to go up. Wages have not kept up with inflation. But the problem of affordability is a very deep problem. A lot of it is housing. We don't have enough housing, and therefore the price of housing is high, and the cost of your mortgage hasn't really come down a lot because interest rates are still certainly higher than they were before the period between the financial prices and COVID. So housing affordability is really terrible. And this is a deep structural problem that we're not really doing much to solve. But it's not gonna but it's not. It's not therefore getting solved.

00:21:20
Speaker 1: Nicole Foy is an incredible reporter pro Publica who wrote a piece about the number of US citizens who are being impacted by the Trump administration's ice raids. I spoke with her about what the hell has happened this year and why so many Americans are being treated like criminals. You found that more than one hundred and seventy US citizens had not only been detained but also quote dragged, tackled, beaten taste, and shot by immigration agents. Tell us a little bit about before I want to ask about how you were able to do all the research that led you to these numbers, But tell us a little bit about the conditions. Is this unusual or were many of these people treated this way?

00:22:13
Speaker 9: I think that there were many of the people that we wrote about and that whose stories we uncovered were treated this way. Certainly, not all, But I think one of the reasons that we wanted to emphasize that was because there was this kind of like idealized interaction with immigration agents that the administration, even the Supreme Court was positing. Was that you know, someone approaches you, they ask for your papers, if you have your passport on you or some other information proving your citizenship, you check it and you go on your way. Sure, that has absolutely happened to people. But the truth that we have seen playing out across the country is that some of these interactions have been incredibly violent as people have struggled to explain themselves or struggle to prove their citizenship. But also too, we were seeing a number of citizens who were being detained, not so much because immigration agents were doubting their citizenship, but because they were being accused of assaulting officers, of impeding investigations, of getting too close to officers, maybe at a protest, and it was really just again another natural consequence of these more immigration agents than usual are going into communities that have sometimes been very vocal about not wanting them there, and they have pushed back by filming, by following officers, and many of those people who were charged with assault, there's video evidence, there's even court cases. Some of those cases fell apart pretty quickly, but they were detained. They were held for days.

00:23:52
Speaker 1: Well, I wanted to know, I mean, is there an average number of days that I mean, what is the most egregious example of a US citizen and being detained and held by ice when they should not have been.

00:24:05
Speaker 9: I think one of the most egregious examples was a young man in California who he was one of more than twenty Americans that we found at the time who had been held for several days without for at least a day without being able to contact their lawyer, their loved ones even knew where they were. A young man named George read This, who was a security guard at a large marijuana farm that was raided this summer in California. He was trying to get to work, got caught up in the protest, and even though he approached officers, was asking for help, where do I put my car? Like I'm just trying to work, I'm not part of the protest. He in front of cameras, was pepper sprayed, window of his car was broken, he was dragged out of his car, and then he essentially disappeared. I learned about him like many in America learned about him, when his sister appeared on TV the next day begging crying for information, saying, we saw what happened to him, and he's disappeared. We have no idea what happened to him. He had managed to call his wife on his Apple watch and say, hey, Ice picked me up, and of course they had no idea what that meant. He was a US citizen and.

00:25:09
Speaker 1: He was Agilia who works with me, just wrote he's a combat army bet yes he is.

00:25:14
Speaker 9: And his car says Iraq combat veteran on it as well. So he he disappeared. He was he was taken into the federal detention center for several days. He was not given access to a lawyer, He was never told what he was charged with, and he was eventually, after being kept in isolation, not being allowed to shower or even get sufficient medical attention for you know that pepper spray was still burning his hands, he was released without charges, and he says without an apology. They never told him what he was charged with until later months later, actually, the Department of Homes Homeland Security spokesperson tweeted out that he had been arrested because of allegations of assault. That was months later and after he had been pretty prominently sharing his story everywhere.

00:26:03
Speaker 1: The allegations of sabb is this an example of what you're talking about, where like an ICE agent comes in and somebody is in the area and maybe protesting them or yelling at them.

00:26:15
Speaker 9: Yeah, I think sometimes these were happening at protests or people who were you know, sometimes like seeing their neighbor being arrested, or they're loved looking arrest and they got involved. But many times now, in many of the cases, I have tracked people who very clearly there was some sort of doubt about their citizenship. That's you know, there was a young woman in downtown Los Angeles who said that her name was Andrew Velez and she was being dropped off for work and suddenly was detained, and they said they immediately began asking her about her citizenship and did you speak English? Assuming she didn't speak English, but they charged her with assaulting an officer.

00:26:53
Speaker 1: That was even even if she didn't assault an officer, they're kind of trying to take sort of arrest them under false pretenses.

00:27:02
Speaker 9: Well, yeah, I mean, I definitely can't speculate ye for why, but I mean, that's honestly one of the reasons why when we were trying to decide, like what cases do we include, is like why when we're tracking these numbers of citizens attained, it became increasingly difficult for me to determine between whether someone was arrested because of questions about their citizenship or because of allegations of assaulting an officer, because they blended together, especially in many of these chaotic circumstances, and because inevitably, many times after a widely publicized arrest had gone viral, devernminent Homeland Security would come back and say, like, we don't arrest citizens for immigration enforcement. That person was assaulting an officer.

00:27:45
Speaker 1: Even if the kind of you can see how some like ice agents would descend on somebody, they're a US citizen. It's a natural thing to be like, you know, get away from me, to kind of you know, do that, and that could be I think interpreted as assaulting an officer who knows, right.

00:28:05
Speaker 9: Yeah, I mean, I also think too that we're saying more and more DHS officials claiming that filming or following agents is assaulting or impeding an investigation. That it is absolutely legal to film immigration officials, but there have been many cases where those like that seems to be why people have been detained. It is because they were following as part of a neighborhood watch group or just filming something that was happening right in front of them.

00:28:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, and as you said, that's legal, but they're being arrested for it. I discover Jessica Neurik through her Instagram, where she's become a clear, evidence based voice cutting through a lot of nutrition and health misinformation. She's a registered dietitian with a doctorate in nutrition science, and I've been so impressed by the works he's done pushing back on this administration's anti science claims. We talked about the MAHA movement led by Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Junior and the real public health consequences we're already seen unfold. We are talking about the year in government, the year in politics, the year in foreign policy, and we wanted to invite you, Jessica, to cover the year in public health. I think so much has happened, it's really difficult to keep up with everything that is going on. Let's talk about what RFKS accomplished or what he's done. We should point out that he now oversees all major health agencies in this country, the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration ANDIH, the National Institutes of Health and others. So I'm curious what you think about the things that he has put in place, and what really sticks out in your mind about the steps he's taken this year.

00:30:03
Speaker 10: Yeah, I mean what really stands out is RFK Junior was has been a threat to public health for a very long time. He's been, you know, really loud in the anti vaccine space for a couple of decades, and so a lot of people in public health were very aware of him as he was coming out when he was running as a president or for president on the Democratic side, and then when he switched over was running as an independent I think, and then was and then when he partnered with Trump, and I think the fear was always that he would come in and he would really kind of like bring those anti vaccine views to you know, the highest public health agency in the world. And that's exactly what we've seen happen, you know, this entire thing. When he was going through his confirmation with Bil Cassidy, Senator Bilcasidy, he was the deciding vote, and he said he got a bunch of concessions from RFK Junior that he would do a number of things, and we've seen him do the exact opposite of every concession. Vilcacidy listed and so I think that's that was definitely the thing coming into this that we knew was was at risk, and certainly that's panned out as well. But you know, what we've seen really is just this erosion of trust that I think is is happening because we're really platforming a lot of anti science and pseudoscientific viewpoints, and you know, he's come in and he completely you know, did away with all of ASIP and uh, the the immunization you know, our our agency or our our group that kind of reviews immunization policy, and he's inserted lots of people who you know, are his anti vaccine buddies or he had in his book and things like that. So I think I think the CDC and vaccine stuff is probably where he's doing the most damage. But in terms of like all of HHS and the Trump administration, because we have to remember, we can't just look at our FK Junior by himself. He partnered with this at particular administration, and so what we're seeing are just cuts across all of these agencies. We're seeing huge losses and personnel and scientists and staff, and we're seeing huge funding cuts for research and funding cuts at the FDA and for the food program, and you know, certainly at the CDC and in Trump's twenty twenty six budget, we're seeing them slashing budgets. I mean they're they're he's asking for I think a fifty five percent cut to well a fifty percent cut maybe to the CDC, of forty percent cut to the NIH. I mean, the NIH is our premier research institution doing scientific research, so it doesn't really make sense to cut that by forty percent.

00:32:40
Speaker 1: To unpack the year in pardons, I turned to someone who knows the system from the inside, former DOJ pardoner attorney Liz Oyer. Together we walked through some of Trump's most controversial pardons and the broader implications for democracy and the rule of law. Let's start with the beginning of the year, because this is a year in review in pardons, and we have to, I think, start with Joe Biden's preemptive January pardons, including members of his family, Hunter Biden, doctor Anthony Fauci, Mark Milly, and the members of Congress who served on the January sixth committee. You said that those January pardons quote laid the groundwork for Trump's abuse of the pardon power. Do you think that Trump that some of Trump's overkill in the pardons department was the result of these preemptive pardons, or do you think one had anything to do with the other.

00:33:39
Speaker 11: I think that the pardons that Biden granted on the way out the door made Trump feel like he was entitled to abuse the pardon power in new and unprecedented ways. No president before Joe Biden has really used preemptive pardons to pardon people for crimes that have not even been charged. But by on his way out the door, I mean, he pardoned five members of his family in addition to the pardon of his son Hunter. And the appearance that it creates is this idea that it's okay for the president to use the pardon power for personal gain to benefit his family. And I think that Trump is sort of leveraging that perception of unfairness and self dealing to do things that are far far worse, far worse in quantity and quality than what Biden did. But he's using it as a justification, and he's actually got some traction with some sectors of the public in trying to rationalize what he's doing in terms of what Biden did when I talk about the corrupt abuses of the pardon power by Donald Trump, the question that I get all the time is, well, what about Biden's pardons? People will say to me, you know, my mega family members. Whenever I bring up the pardons, they say, well, Biden did the same thing, and it's not the same thing. But to make people understand that it's not the same thing, I think we have to acknowledge that what Biden did was very unusual, and in my opinion, it was not well advised. It's certainly not something that I would have recommended that he do.

00:35:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, you answer my question. Was it appropriate for Joe Biden to do that? On the other hand, you know, they were after people like Anthony Fauci and Mark Milly and the people who served on the January sixth committee, So you know, I think you're right. It's set the stage perhaps for Donald Trump. But did some of these people, in your view, deserve protecting.

00:35:37
Speaker 11: Well, the problem with protecting them in advance is Biden's basically sending the message that he doesn't trust the justice system to reach the right result in these cases, and that's not, in this environment a helpful message to be sending to the American public. Donald Trump now is doing everything in his power to bend the justice system to his will. And I think the idea that Biden sort of messaged at the end of his presidency that he didn't believe the justice system would be good enough to sort out what's right and what's wrong in these prosecutions and to exonerate those who committed no crimes, made it easier for Trump's to fuel this narrative that the justice system really should be used however the president wants it to be.

00:36:19
Speaker 1: And the last one we're going to talk about is the former president of Hondurasjan Orlando Hernandez, which really incensed a lot of people because of his history of exporting drugs to the United States, specifically cocaine. I think, can you talk about that? And I think the juxtaposition of blowing up boats in the Caribbean ostensibly a foot full of drugs headed to the United States and pardoning the former president of Honduras just seemed so incongruous.

00:36:49
Speaker 11: I don't think there is one single person in this country, including Trump's White House spokesperson Carolin Levitt, who can can incredibly reconcile the pardon of one Orlando, Orlando Hernandez, with what's happening with blowing the boats out of the water in the Caribbean right now, It makes absolutely no sense. Hernandez was a major drug trafficker. He was a drug boss. Essentially, he was running his country as a narco state, accepting millions of dollars in bribes from drug traffickers, and was responsible for transporting over five hundred tons of cocaine into the United States. So the idea that Donald Trump is giving him a full pardon, he was sentenced by the way to forty five years in prison, and he'd only served about a year of that sentence. The idea that he's out of prison and getting a full pardon while Trump is blowing boats out of the water supposedly to stop drugs from coming into the United States, It truly is irreconcilable. And we have not heard any plausibly credible explanation from anyone in the White House about why he did that.

00:37:56
Speaker 1: If you're a woman navigating life transitions like pregnant see infertility, parenthood, menopause, or caring for aging parents, connecting with a licensed therapist is a great way to stay centered and find support. A therapist can help you navigate the hormonal shifts and life chapters that come standard with being female. Talkspace therapists are here to listen and help you process, gain insights, and develop coping strategies for whatever you're experiencing. Talkspace Virtual therapy is covered by many insurance plans, and most insured members pay a fifteen dollars copay often less. No insurance, no problem. Now get eighty five dollars off of your first month with the promo code Katie when you go to talkspace dot com slash Katiecuric. Match with a licensed therapist today at talkspace dot com slash Katiecuric. Jessica Valente is a writer, activist, and the author of the sub stack Abortion every Day. We talked about the rollback of reproductive rights in this country and the very real, chilling consequences women are already facing. Three years after Dodd, we're seeing what many people are describing as the tale of two countries. Bloom states expanding access to abortion, red states finding new ways to restrict it. So how would you describe the state of reproductive rights in this country right now?

00:39:37
Speaker 6: It's a hard question because there's so much to talk about, but I think the most important thing to know is that, you know, we're a little over three years out since the end of Robi Wade. The abortion rate hasn't gone down at all, zero percent. In fact, the number of abortions is going up. What has increased, though, is suffering maternal mortality, pregnancy complications like sepsis, infant mortality, right, And so I think for me that is always the biggest takeaway that despite all of the harm that these laws are causing, they're not even doing what they spent fifty years planning to do, which is reduce the abortion rate.

00:40:17
Speaker 3: And I think what we're.

00:40:18
Speaker 6: Seeing from conservatives is a lot of pushback to try to fix their pr because of that problem. Everything that they're doing right now is about abortion pills, because abortion pills are the primary way that people are able to get care in spite of state bands. And so I'm just trying to track as closely as I can what those attacks look like, the ways that we can defend ourselves from them, and the ways that we can try at least a little bit to reduce some of that suffering that these laws are causing.

00:40:50
Speaker 1: We've also seen reports of women being investigated or prosecuted, even prosecuted after miscarriages or pregnancy complications. Can you describe the criminalization of pregnancy that we're seeing and who is the most vulnerable.

00:41:07
Speaker 6: Yeah. What's incredible about this is that this is the one thing that Republicans and anti abortion activists said for years that they would never do. That, they never wanted to punish women, they never wanted to arrest women. And we warned for just as many years that that's exactly what was going to happen if you criminalize abortion, if you make something illegal, people will be criminalized. And that's what we're seeing, a lot of the stories that we're covering, as you said, are miscarriage patients. Generally, what happens and it's sort of a depressing way to come about a story. But I'll see a headline in a local newspaper that says an infant was dumped in a dumpster, an infant was trashed, a woman was arrested for putting her infant in the dumpster. We go and we get the police records, and inevitably it is a woman who had a miscarriage at fifteen or sixteen weeks who did.

00:41:54
Speaker 1: What you're supposed to do when you have a miscarriage.

00:41:56
Speaker 6: You flush, you throw the pregnancy remains away, very very normal, right, And police decide to arrest them instead because in these states the fetus has personhood, and so they're charging them with crimes like abuse of a corpse or failure to report a death right. They're not going after them for abortion. They're finding a way around that and charging them with seemingly unrelated crimes. I think for so long we've been sort of tricked into believing that the country is split on abortion.

00:42:28
Speaker 1: It's not.

00:42:29
Speaker 6: We're talking about a tiny minority of you know, extremist legislators of powerful funders who are behind this effort to impose their will on the vast majority of Americans who do not want these bands. And so it is part of this broader conservative movement that's an acting project twenty twenty five. And I've got to say, one of the things that I'm most worried about, I'm not just worried about meth persona and abortion medication. I'm worried about birth control because this is something that they have been making headway on. They have been using the same shipping away approach that they did with abortion to make birth control less and less available. They've defunded all, you know, planned parenthood, They've defunded reproductive healthcare clinics. They're giving lots of taxpayer dollars and state funding to crisis pregnancy centers, saying that crisis pregnancy centers can replace those clinics, even though these are not real medical clinics and they can't and won't prescribe birth control. And so that is the other thing that I'm really trying to pay close attention to that I don't think we're talking about enough.

00:43:37
Speaker 1: And to what end is this part of projecting twenty twenty five's efforts to get women to have more babies, to have more white Christian nationalist babies. Yes, one hundred percent, hundred percent, it's all.

00:43:49
Speaker 6: I don't think that you can separate the attacks on reproductive rights, the attacks on abortion rights and birth control, from this desire to get women out of the public sphere, to force them back into the home, to push them in the domestic sphere.

00:44:03
Speaker 1: It's the same reason that they that same.

00:44:05
Speaker 6: Group of powerful people are pushing this you know, online tradwife conservative agenda that we're seeing everywhere. It's the same reason they're seeding disinformation about birth control. It's the same reason they're paying health influencers to say that birth control is dangerous and bad for you. You know, any young woman who spends any amount of time on a social media site, I'm sure has come across a video saying that you'll feel better about yourself if you don't take birth control.

00:44:33
Speaker 1: It's all connected. It's been a volatile year in media, to say the least, So I spoke with Puck co founder John Kelly to break it all down, from the wave of mergers and megadeals reshaping Hollywood and journalism to the seismic shift in the media landscape. This is my friend, John Kelly. John is the co founder and editor in chief of Puck, which is a really great publication, a digital publication that covers sort of the intersection of media, technology, public policy, increasingly broadening its aperture to include things like arts and culture and foreign affairs. How's that? Am I good pr person? John? What I wanted to really go over with John Kelly everyone is the year in media, because it's really been a shit show for media this year in so many ways. And I titled this conversation the Year Media Died. I think that was sort of being facetious, But it has not been a particularly good year for the press and the idea of it being a free press. And I'm not talking about Barry Weiss's substack, which we'll discuss in a moment, but overall, how would you describe the year for media organizations everywhere? Understanding John, by the way, the very term media has been redefined.

00:46:01
Speaker 3: I certainly understand your cynicism when I zoom out and look at the industry, though, I think that we're in this very uncomfortable in between phase between the sort of unbundling of the old world in various industries and a rebundling companies like mine and companies like subside and companies like Kittie Kirk Media. I'll play a role in that. Obviously, when Trump retook the White House, we knew that there were going to be new rules. I think you're all probably surprised that there'd be some sort of like you know, compromise style payouts that were required to settle litigation or to get deals done. And we're ending the year with what is going to be the largest M and a deal of the year. Whichever way Warner Brothers Discovery goes to the Ellisons or Netflix, this looks like it's gonna be one hundred billion dollar maybe plus deal. But I'm optimistic that there are enough green shoots here that we're gonna be able to sort of see what this industry looks like in the next couple of years. But there's no doubt that you're questioning, right, it's messy now. It's hard to reach as many people as it used to be. There is less regulation, and there are a lot more bad actors in the system.

00:47:14
Speaker 1: Well, let's talk about the Warner Brothers stuff, because you know, many people are bemoaning this consolidation, John saying it's back for creatives. It's bad for the economy of show business if you will, that there are going to be fewer buyers and it's actually going to really hurt the industry. What's your take on that.

00:47:41
Speaker 3: I think it's inarguable. Either way this goes, there's going to be a significant amount of trauma. Right. There are two options here. One is that the Ellison's sort of Elison family trust buys this company whole, which means the movie studio Hboho ACX and this legacy cable business for about thirty bucks or so a share, which is you know, NELLI one hundred billion dollars all in, maybe just more than that I'm doing back at the envelopmap. The alternative is that Netflix just buys the studios streaming business, and the cable business kind of goes out to see as its own public company, similar to what NBCU did with Verse Ender or sand which is now the home to like MS now and others. So in these scenarios, there's gonna be a lot of trauma. It's not like that the Elsons would buy this to just let this operate as is. And I think the Ellisons have the the the knock among the creative community on there for their bid is that it would probably take what is five legacy studios down to four, right, but you'd see Werner Brothers Studio and Paramount Studio effectively mergered cin you know, synergized pro format. There'd be a loss of jobs and for creatives, your places to sell things, you know, if your places to sell shows, your places to sell movie ideas. And I understand the tragedy, and that tragedy on the Netflix side, is there is a real fear that the leadership of that company will just honor these theatrical contracts until they, you know, to the point that they have to, and then beyond that they'll sort of bleed the theatrical community, and which no one wants to see. I understand both sides of this, but I also I think take us a slightly less sentimental view. I started my career as renocating the magazine business, where we saw just extraordinary and unending change, and we realized that you couldn't blame a person for what was happening. It wasn't like it was the new house's fault or the hearst's fault or the management of timing. This was the behavior of people, you know, speaking for themselves, and hollywoo. It is a historic business. It is going to change. I have young kids. They're watching everything on YouTube. I don't see a world and wait in which they watch as many multi hour feature films as we did when we were kids. The business of entertainment is changing, and whichever way this goes is going to be a huge joelt. But I just don't think there's any other alternatives.

00:50:31
Speaker 1: Scan Dahal, that's one way of describing twenty twenty five because there were so many of them. Fortunately for us, I have a modern day Dorothy Parker on speed dial, the one and only Tina Brown. It's been Halloween every day, she told me. So we covered it all, the royal family drama, the Epstein culprits and survivors, Gallaine Maxwell's strange upbringing, and the transformation of storied media brands to Trump propaganda arms. It has kind of been the year from hell, hasn't it.

00:51:03
Speaker 12: It totally has. It's been Halloween every day. I mean, you just sort of open your eyes with the mounting dread begins, like what are we going to see now? And we know, we know, we all went through that first time that Trump was president, actually, but this time it's just been so many a confluence of so many things.

00:51:23
Speaker 8: You know.

00:51:23
Speaker 1: It's it's politics, it's it's crime.

00:51:25
Speaker 12: It's it's you know, the menace of kind of the rising terror of like jobs disappearing from AI. It's it's it's scandals every way you look.

00:51:37
Speaker 1: It's I mean, it's just been a monster of a year. No, really, it's really hard to keep up and to process all these stories. And of course there's a method to their madness. This is by design, don't you think? Definitely?

00:51:51
Speaker 12: Well, I mean I was thinking actually yesterday that that even on the Epstein case works, which has really been the stickiest scandal. I mean, I have all the scandald scandals that have kind of been in on the Epstein one is the one that has just like been this adhesive, you know, thing that just refuses to go away. Actually, the decision, now, you know, to release all the emails has actually kind of achieved something that I don't even know that Trump fully wanted, but it's happened just as he always plans. We've been overwhelmed, so suddenly you get this huge trove of stuff that just comes at you, and most of it is just complete, sort of just the garbage of somebody's email box. So I mean, now that is becoming just sort of lost in the drafts.

00:52:29
Speaker 1: Can you imagine any world in which Donald Trump would pardon Glen Maxwell or do you think now that the Epstein files are coming out, that he's he's better off with her remaining in prison.

00:52:47
Speaker 12: Well, I think I think he could pardon her, actually, because I think that on his way out, I don't think he's going to care.

00:52:52
Speaker 1: Why would he?

00:52:53
Speaker 12: You know, I don't think that Donald Trump is going to sit there thinking my legacy with Magar or whatever. And I think that once he's done, he's done. I don't think that, you know, he'll ever think about Maga again. I mean, he's been amassing his own war chest, his huge grift that he's been doing, you know that he's been assembling his horde of gold. And I think on the way out, he'll pardon whoever he feels like pardoning. And it could be that he decides that Jelaine has had enough and that he wants to partner. It could be that somebody in his circle lobbits to partner her, you know, because as we're saying, I mean, I think it was Roger Stone that got him to pardon this Hon Durham.

00:53:34
Speaker 1: Right drug dealer president. Yeah.

00:53:38
Speaker 12: I mean it's like it's like for him, this pardon power is like getting someone into a club or whatever. It's sure, you know I'll do that for you. You know you'll owe me, or I'm doing that because I owe you. I think that is the way he operates. So you know, the jury is out on whether she'll get out. I think she might. I think he might think that better that she really in his debt for that then is they're perhaps looking for things to sell, as it were, to the next administration. So my guess is yes, if you ask me now, I would say yes, your partner.

00:54:12
Speaker 1: While we're on the subject of the royals, I can't not ask you about the continued chili relationship between Harry and William and if you think that is ever going to be mended. I mean I read stuff about it all the time, if you know, pops up, which shows you I'm clicking on too many royal stories. But you know, I never know quite what to believe, what the situation is. Where do you see that relationship as it stands right now? And then I want to ask you about Megan Markle, But first that I mean it's very frosty.

00:54:45
Speaker 12: I mean, I you know, if you think about it this way, I mean, all through that childhood they had this great bond which was only they knew how awful it was essentially to be in the royal cage, having gone through the Dianact tragedy, the appalling after Martha, the Diana tragedy, the you know, hounded and by the press and every butler and servant writing a book and all of that. So what they had was a bond, which is like I can trust you, you can trust me. And then of all people to betray William, of all the people to know to write a book that was like full of horribly painful revelation, it.

00:55:24
Speaker 4: Was Harry, you know.

00:55:25
Speaker 12: I mean, I think for William it was like just a taboo for him that that he broke that I think he really shattered him. Actually, I think he found it a very shatteringly personally painful thing that he went through.

00:55:38
Speaker 1: And you know, on.

00:55:40
Speaker 12: Top of everything else of just sort of Harry just kind of like splitting off to the sunshine and all the rest of it. I mean, he's just I think for William it's just too much, you know, to damn. And whether or not he will ever sort of look back and say, well, let buy God's big GUIDs, I don't know.

00:55:58
Speaker 1: I mean, William is quite a he's.

00:55:59
Speaker 8: A very very.

00:56:02
Speaker 12: By his book guy. Yeah, he's a by the book guy. You know, he's not a guy who's he's by the book. He doesn't forgive easily. If you get on the wrong side of William, you can expect to stay there, you know, is what I hear. And so I don't know. I think that I think Harry just wants to mend the fence with his father. I think he's kind of given up on his brother. But and what about that. Do you see that happening? I do actually in the personal sense, But I don't really see it happening in the sense that that that that his father will turn around and say, now, come welcome back and start doing all these royal appearances. I think his father cares too much about the monarchy himself. He's he's he's not a mara of Harry's abandonment of his duty.

00:56:46
Speaker 7: You know.

00:56:46
Speaker 12: I think he feels I think he'll always love him as a son. But I think that he cares enough about the institution to think it's going to go wrong, you know. Again, so I would be very surprised if he does come back into the fold in that sense.

00:57:03
Speaker 1: What do you think of sort of not only CBS but ABC also and and putting jim you know, Jimmy Kimmel off the air for a period of time and paying Trump and somebody said, where's all this? Where are these millions of dollars going? I mean, Is it to the Trump Library, Is it to the east you know this ballroom?

00:57:25
Speaker 12: Who knows? I think it's I think I think it's a grotesque development. I think good because I think it's disgusting. I think it's disgusting. I think what you're seeing is naked shakedowns. And to my absolute disgust, media bosses who should know far better and have some i mean respect for journalistic ethic as it were really proving they have. They don't care at all. They're proving that this is about paying off again. It's like, give him a check. It's a rounding era as far as we're concerned, I mean, you know, as far as the mighty Disney Company is concerned. I mean, ABC is of so little importance compared to their other massive concerns. And it's the same with CBS. I mean that the Ellisons want to get hold of paramount. I mean it's nothing to them, so there's no fight, and journalism is just thrown out of the bus. And the worst aspect of this stuff that's happening now, you know, it's often called lawfare, where you're committing sort of like threats and acts of warfare through the threats of legal action, which is not just about oh, we may lose, it's just about the expense. I mean, the amount of money that you can rack up in making somebody defend these lawsuits. It's making these mighty journalistic companies very very timid. You know, it's making the lawyers run all over the companies and say you can't publish that, don't publish that. We don't want to get right. And it's not just in TV, it's publishing houses, magazine companies, you know, audio companies. They're all terrified of any kind of controversy that's going to get Trump's attention because they know it means they're going to have to pay up. And if they don't pay up, they'll be trashed, they'll be be abused, they'll find themselves in some hideous social media you know situation, they'll get fired. I mean, this is a very dangerous development just for journalism because you know, we're we're becoming cold.

00:59:31
Speaker 1: What's like state run television. I mean it's insane. And do you think that these concessions and these pay to play type things, and we want to do this business deal, so we're going to pay you and we're not going to criticize you because we don't want you to f up our business deals. Do you think it's going to make these entities even less relevant than they're already becoming because they won't really stand for anything. Absolutely no.

00:59:59
Speaker 12: I think that they are putting on a suicide vest if they if in a long term, if they capitulate like this, absolutely they will weaken the institutions. They will make people legitimately feel they can't be trusted because they're not asking the tough questions, or they're you know, they're too fearful to publish or to put something on the air. I think there it's a disastrously self destructive mood. But I'm just baffled at the cravenness that's kind of crept into the psyche.

01:00:28
Speaker 1: It seems of great institutions. Thanks for listening everyone. If you have a question for me, a subject you want us to cover, or you want to share your thoughts about how you navigate this crazy world, reach out send me a DM on Instagram. I would love to hear from you. Next Question is a production of iHeartMedia and Katie Kiric Media. The executive producers are Me, Katie Kirk, and Courtney Litz. Our supervising producer is Ryan Martz, and our producers are Adriana Fazio and Meredith Barnes. Julian Weller composed our theme music. For more information about today's episode, or to sign up for my newsletter, wake Up Call, go to the description in the podcast app, or visit us at Katiecuric dot com. You can also find me on Instagram and all my social media channels. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hi everyone, it's Katiekuric. You know I'm always on the go between running my media company, hosting my podcast, and of course covering the news, and I know that to keep doing what I love, I need to start caring for what gets me there, my feet. That's why I decided to try the Good Feet stores personalized arch support system. I met with a Good Feet arch support specialist and after a personalized fitting, I left the store with my three step system designed to improve comfort, balance and support. My feet. Knees and back are thanking me already. Visit goodfeet dot com to learn more, find the nearest store, or book your own free, personalized fitting. If you're a woman navigating life transitions like pregnancy, infertility, parenthood, menopause, or caring for aging parents, connecting with a licensed therapist is a great way to stay centered and find support. A therapist can help you navigate the hormonal shifts and life chapters that come standard with being female. Talkspace therapists are here to listen and help you process, gain insights, and develop coping strategies for whatever you're experiencing. Talkspace Virtual therapy is covered by many insurance plans, and most insured members pay a fifteen dollars copay, often less Asurant's no problem. Now get eighty five dollars off of your first month with the promo code Ktie when you go to talkspace dot com slash Katiecuric. Match with a licensed therapist today at talkspace dot com slash Katiecuric