Well, let's go to this uh we'll come back to this and we'll let's talk about um Russ Vote, director of the office uh of management and budget.

Um here I want you to listen to Senator Mike Lee and then Speaker Johnson discussing Russ vote and what he's aiming for.

Russ Vote the OM director has been dreaming about this moment preparing this moment since puberty.

Russ Vote has a plan and that plan is going to succeed in empowering further empowering Trump.

This is going to be the Democrat's worst nightmare.

Russ takes no pleasure in this.

Russ wants to see a smaller, more efficient, more lean, effective federal government as we do, but he doesn't want people to lose jobs.

He doesn't want to do that.

But he he has that's his responsibility.

I can only speak for myself.

Look, puberty was a long time ago for me, but I remember when I was undergoing puberty, I wanted to slash the workforce at Medicare and Medicaid.

Myself personally, I know that was that was my big thing.

Um, but all right.

So, so, so this is a guy who wrote who was a key architect of project 2025.

Um, something that was disavowed by the president during the campaign and now he's embracing it again.

Um, Andrew, I'll stay with you uh just for a minute.

Um, Russ Vote, what what is motivating him here?

And I guess the pertinent question is how important is he actually in this drama?

He's he's really a central player, probably the central player in the executive branch aside from the president himself.

He has an immense amount of power and Senator Lee is correct that this is something that Mike that that um Russ vote has wanted to do for a very long time.

He was Can you adjudicate?

Is he getting pleasure from it or is he not getting pleasure from it?

I think he's definitely gettin.. from it because I think we've seen even before the shutdown they were cancelling projects.

They were rescending funding, right?

And that's part of what Democrats are saying in response to this, you know, this this targeting of blue states is that yes, it's bad, but he's been doing it whether we're in a shutdown or not.

And that is part of actually what's motivating Democrats to fight harder right now because their whole view right now is why would we vote to fund the government?

They say, some of them say it's Trump's government, which is being so lawless and doing so many terrible things.

And then they're going back on these deals that we strike here on Capitol Hill.

I mean, we haven't seen that before where there's a bipartisan deal reached on Capitol Hill and the administration just completely either ignores it or tries to rip it apart.

Right.

Ashley, who is Rose Vote?

What does he want?

I I mean, he wants, as I mentioned in at the beginning, sort of the deconstruction of the administrative state of the federal bureaucracy.

What is his what are the ideological roots of this?

He's I mean, he's incredibly conservative.

He worked in Trump's first admin.

So there's there are some people including Steven Miller, but there are not actually a ton of people who worked in the first Trump administration and then came back for a second tour of duty.

But Russ Vote is one of them.

Uh and he came back like the president himself sort of stronger, bolder, more empowered, um more creative with his interpretations of laws and what's acceptable than ever.

And he used his those vote faster and furious.

Yes.

Yeah.

and .. power um to to basically create this document that you mentioned called Project 2025 that it's it's a dense dense policy document that is sort of his wheelhouse his actual policy and it it tells sort of all the ways you can first of all just utterly minimize the government, tear away at it, tear it down um and use it to push through deeply conservative priorities.

And I also based on my reporting agree with Senator Lee that this is squarely in his erogynous zone and that when he said what he wants to do I mean to use a phrase that was popularized by one of our colleagues at the Atlantic cruelty is the point.

Now that was in reference to Donald Trump but Russo also he he said I want to terrorize the federal bureaucrats.

So some of these choices these the fork in the road email of should you choose to basically resign or risk losing your job.

Uh I mean the way these things were structured uh were deeply humiliating and devastating and financially devastating to hundreds thousands of people and that was an intentional choice by people like Russ vote and there's I ju.. to what you said is where this comes from.

There's been this philosophy called a unitary executive that conservatives have been pushing very quietly on the fringes for decades but Russ vote is a huge believer of that and what that is is a massive expansive expansion of the president of the powers of the president and weakening the other branches of government and the administrative state.

Let me ask a dumb question to if you want to expand the power of the presidency, why would you fire everyone who works in the executive branch?

Well, I Well, it's a good question, but I think I reco.. spokesman.

Well, Trump and Russ.. the idea of expanding power within the executive branch.

They are not necessarily aligned about what you do with that power.

Russ Vote wants to get rid of these bureaucrats.

He wants to fire people.

He wants people to to be out of their jobs.

Trump not necessarily in favor of the of all of that all the time.

He knows that there's going to be blowback.

And I think what you've heard from Speaker Mike Johnson was some of the political maneuvering saying, you know, maybe we shouldn't be so gung-ho about firing thousands of people, Americans who work for the government who generally are, you know, pled or seen in a sympathetic light because of the people who, you know, make sure that security social security checks go out and make sure that the government is working the way that it it's supposed to.

Those people losing their jobs is not necessarily a political benefit for a a president who cers calls himself a populist.

And so there is a little bit of misalignment there.

We did see Russ Vote and Donald Trump meet on Thursday and they talked about, you know, potentially getting rid of certain agencies or cutting certain uh people from the government.

We didn't see a big announcement right after that meeting.

It's a sign that maybe there's a little bit of dis disagreement there and Trump may not be ready to pull the trigger on what Russ Vote wants to do, which is use this government shutdown to get rid of thousands of bureaucrac.

The question is for both parties, what's the what's the end goal apart from not being blamed for something bad that happens in the next couple of weeks?

Well, I think the the goal for for Republicans right now is to a reopen the government and get the sort of political or in their view maintain the political upper hand over Democrats because they truly they are truly very comfortable.

I think Leanne can speak to this too.

They are extremely comfortable in their position right now.

Like they're like they're saying essentially like you have to reopen the government right now.

We are not going to negotiate on any of these side issues until that happens.

which again reminds you of the posture that Democratic leaders had during previous shutdowns.

Democrats on the other hand, you saw Chuck Schumer as recently as a few hours ago here saying that he believes that public pressure will build on Republicans to eventually allow a deal on these Obamacare premium uh um uh tax credits.

And and and frankly, Schumer is right.

He's he's right in the sense that Republicans know that this is a political vulnerability for them.

At the same time, there's very little support for extending that policy within the House Republican Conference and the Senate Republican Conference.

The only way you actually get a deal and get Republicans to support something like that is for Donald Trump to pick up the phone and call them.

And which, by the way, he's shown he's been able to do in the past.

Why has every single Republican in the House of Representative House of Representatives this year voted for a CR, for example?

There are Republicans who said in the past, those same Republicans, over my dead body, will I vote for a CR or a stop gap funding bill, they voted for it because Donald Trump told them to.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Uh what is.. structurally incapable of quote unquote winning in the sense that they don't control Congress and they don't control uh the White House and obviously the Supreme Court doesn't generally lean in their direction.

Put that aside for a minute.

Um why are they doing this?

Um well they are actually relatively comfortable in their position too.

Their base is happy.

Their base is happy.

They are returning the issue.

They're returning the conversation to an issue that is good for them.

Healthcare is like the one remaining issue that Democrats are still popular with voters on.

This is very reminiscent of 2018, a midterm election which was focused in large part over Obamacare after Republicans tried to repeal it, failed, etc., etc.

Um, and so this is getting them to an issue.

It's interesting.

Obamacare is kind of popular.

It is.

It is popular.

I mean, we that was not always an assumption.

And it's popular also beca.. help from the government to pay for it too with these tax subsidies, which is central to this debate.

Um and so there's multiple.

So there's that.

Um the party is for the first time in quite a while we've seen United on a message.

They usually have been so bad at message discipline talking about you know cost of living, uh immigration, the border, climate change, all sorts of things.

And so the party feels very good right now that they are in a spot.

You look at all of the polling, there hasn't been a lot, but there's been three or four polls that have come out on who is to be blamed for a government shutdown.

And in every single poll, Republicans are currently being blamed right now.

And so is they, you know, Democratic sources tell me that they are watching the polling extremely closely.

Democratic groups have polling coming out of their own turn of their own twice a week now.

And once those numbers start to crater for Democrats, we might see a shift.

But right now they feel good.

Uh it's also important to to know that Democrats are also looking at how Trump is weaponizing the shutdown against their constituents.

I talked to Senator Mike Warner or Mark Warner earlier uh this week and he talked about how right now his constituents, he's from Virginia, a lot of his constituents are federal workers.

He said, "Right now, they're telling him to keep fighting, but he didn't know if in two weeks, three weeks, if this government shutdown goes on and they don't get their paychecks, if they're going to still want him to fight and hold the line on this government shutdown."

So, they are watching to see the various projects that are being taken away, the people who are potentially going to be laid off, and whether or not they they think that that this fight is worthy.

Um, I want to shift the conversation to push-ups and situps for a moment.

I I uh I want to talk about the extraordinary meeting.

It's hard to believe that this was also this week extraordinary meeting that the secretary of defense uh which he calls himself secretary of war though Congress has not approved that uh change yet uh Pete Hex had with basically the entire uh core of generals and admirals.

Let's watch uh one of uh one moment from his speech uh to the to that group.

If the Secretary of War can do regular hard PT, so can every member of our joint force.

Frankly, it's tiring to look out at combat formations or really any formation and see fat troops.

Likewise, it's completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon and leading commands around the country and the world.

It's a bad look.

There's nothing wrong with physically fit generals and admirals and high grooming standards.

Correct.

Why was this so controversial?

Well, he in what essentially could have been communicated via an email or perhaps a secure video conference call or maybe a tweet, he used tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to fly in top military brillions, millions maybe, who who arguably should have been in their theaters in case something happened to fat shame them, among other things.

Well, okay.

I see you have an opinion on that.

It's red meat for conservatives, too.

What he just said.

I mean, like the the conservative cultural right.

I mean, they they eat this stuff up.

They love this.

I talked to a Republican senator this past week who said, you know, he joked that basically, we've been trying to get explanations out of him for legal justifications for these strikes on on drug cartel boats off off of Venezuela.

Um, but he's going there and giving speeches like this instead.

I mean, it's it's about how are you using your time, right?

Right... also important to remember that Pete Hegsth is a former Fox News personality.

He does not have a lot of military uh philosophy background.

And so he's focusing on the thing that he can, physics and and the physical look of things and the optics.

And he serves a president who cares about people looking like they come out of central casting.

And so he's playing to the president's strengths.

He's also playing to his own strengths, maybe trying to cover up some of his own weaknesses.

speaking before three and four star generals, he may have a little bit of insecurity there and focusing on something that he can talk about, which is, you know, I can do push-ups and I can do pull-ups as opposed to talking about the intricacies of war.

That may be an area where he feels a little bit more comfortable.

Leanne, last word to you.

I I mean, is is does this performance and again, you have to separate some of the aspects of it out.

Of course, physical fitness is important.

Of course, grooming standards are important, but to Ashley's point, it did seem like a strange cause to gather the nation's top military leaders together.

Does this does this undermine his uh position with the generals and the admirals?

You know, my colleague Julia Yafi had a great piece about this where she spoke to current and former members of the military who who said, "Look, this was this is fine a fine message, but this is not the priority of the military right now.

There's a lot of issues to deal with."

Um, we're going to have to leave it there for now.

I I do want to get back to this subject because his his leadership of the secret of the department is fascinating.