8/13/25: Trump Floats Jobs Numbers Coverup, MSNBC Says No DC Crime

24:29We have uncertainty basically forever. Like whoever becomes a president, yeah, they get to do this whatever they want. Last thing before we move on. I am told, though, that as this moves up to the Supreme Court, that they are on very dicey territory. A couple of conservative court watchers have said that the court looks very skeptical, at least now so far, on the way the Trump administration will handle some of these tariffs. The Trump administration is trying to buckle it all under the purview of foreign policy, but they don't think it's going to pass legal scrutiny. Yeah, and emergency measures.

24:59And the same thing, we'll talk about this in the D block, the D.C. block as well. But yeah, and that's in another huge variable factoring into the uncertainty, because now you have to take into consideration when you're pricing markets, how the Supreme Court potentially will react in a decision like that. So the more the uncertainty goes on, obviously, the more we're likely to start seeing some of these like egg prices will go down, but coffee prices will jump these spotty indicators in reports if we get reports, if we start getting if we continue to get the data.

25:58Apple Vacations

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27:01Portland locations you know and love, and opening up about our creative process. How did any of this get made? Why do we think that was a good idea? We're ready to talk about it. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Kreisel, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song, a melody. Well, I thought he was going to write, I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that.

27:33Listen to Podlandia Ayo Rewatch on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

27:43This has been a story I've been watching. This is nerdy, but everybody stick with me. It's about NVIDIA. So the company I just mentioned earlier, they manufacture the most advanced AI chips. Obviously, that's what's made them a multi-trillion dollar company. I believe NVIDIA alone is worth more than the entire UK stock market, just for reference. Continues to boom. So there has been a lot of question over NVIDIA and being able to sell to China. Now, there's been a China kind of hawk contingent, including Steve Bannon and others, part of the MAGA movement, and actually a lot of former Trump administration officials from the first term who have heavily criticized NVIDIA, their CEO, Jensen Wang, and kind of cozying up to the CCP.

28:24NVIDIA sees it not as existential but as important to their future profit revenues to be able to sell their H20 chips, one of the kind of their bread and butter chip for a lot of AI processing. A lot of the more basic open source models run on this H20 trip as well as the ability to preserve the future sales into China as core to their business and to growing, right? So what Jensen has done is that he has heavily lobbied the Trump administration, including paying a million dollars to attend a Mar-a-Lago dinner, and now struck one of the most extraordinary business deals in American history where under the Trump administration, he will be allowed to sell these H20 chips to China.

29:07In exchange, he must cut 15 % of those sales to the U.S. government. An individual company must pay a portion to the U.S. government. Here's Trump confirming that deal at the White House. Let's take a listen. On China, your administration agreed to send the most advanced or advanced NVIDIA and AMD chips. No, obsolete. No. Obsolute. And then 15 % of the profits. You mean the 20s? No, obsolete. No. Obsolute. And then 15 % of the profits. You mean the 20s? No, no, that's this is an old chip that China already has. And I deal with Jensen, who is a great guy, and NVIDIA. The chip that we're talking about, the H20, it's an old chip.

29:56China already has it in a different form, different name, but they have it or they have a combination of two will make up for it and even then some. Now, Jensen also has, Jensen's a very brilliant guy, and Jensen also has a new chip, the Blackwell. Do you know what the Blackwell is? The Blackwell is super-duper advanced. I wouldn't make a deal with that, although it's possible I'd make a deal, a somewhat enhanced, in a negative way, Blackwell. In other words, take 30 % to 50 % off of it. But that's the latest and the greatest in the world. Nobody has it. They won't have it for five years. But the H20 is obsolete.

30:40You know, it's one of those things. But it still has a market. So I said, listen, I want 20 % if I'm going to prove this for you, for the country, for our country, for the U.S. I don't want it myself. You know, every time I say like, like 747, I want, I want, yeah, for the Air Force. So I just want it. So when I say I want 20, I want for the country. I only care about the country. I don't know if you know it. We will sometimes sell fighter jets to a country and we'll give them 20 % less than we have. All right. So just put this Wall Street Journal story up here. The details of this are so crazy.

31:18So with billions at risk, NVIDIA CEO buys his way out of the trade battle. So like I said, effectively what Jensen has done is he is allowing the feds – and by the way, it's not just NVIDIA. It's also AMD, by the way, which is run by his cousin, which is crazy that these two cousins of this family run the two of the largest chip manufacturers in the world. So Jensen and AMD, these two companies, are going to have to cut some 15%, maybe even 20, the full details are not yet available, to the government just of its chip sales to China in exchange for issuing export licenses. So basically, it's a pay-to-play model in China.

32:01Now, I mean, theoretically, I guess that's fine if it's applied across the board. But the process in which this all came about, as I said, effectively came down from Jensen desperately trying to get the Trump administration to lift export licenses of his sales to China. He has recently spent a lot of time in Beijing cozying up to the CCP. He's like, we're going to do everything we can to preserve our business here in China because the Chinese companies, a lot of these deep seek models and others are desperate for some of these H20 trips. But the point really beyond all of this is that all of it came about in the same way that Tim Cook brought that solid bar of gold to Donald Trump in the Oval Office, like basically providing offering to the great con.

32:44Paying tribute. Literally paying tribute to the great con. That's the way this is working. And they're like, well, in exchange for you being allowed to do business, you must cut a portion of revenue to the state. And look, again, it's fine if it was applied across the board. But the point being that there were significant geopolitical implications around this chip. Part of the reason why Americans, especially the more China hawks, wanted to stop the export of the H20 chip is it would not allow the continued development of these open source models, which became a major threat. And according to the AI companies, ours, a lot of the technology and others, was stolen from them.

33:22Well, put A9 up there on the screen because what's important beyond all of this is that Chinese authorities have been talking out of two sides of their mouth. One is they're like, we want this H20 chip. It's critical for our industry. Second, though, just yesterday, they came out and they were like, hey, everybody, we need to stop using the NVIDIA H20 chip, quote, quote, particularly for government-related purposes because they don't even want the pretense of a vulnerability. So effectively what they're doing is they're playing us where they're like, yeah, we'll keep buying it for now. This is what they've done all the time.

34:01They're like, yeah, yeah, we'll keep buying it for now. We'll keep buying it for now. And at the same time, using the full hammer of the Chinese government to say that we're going to develop something new. So just to present the other side of the argument from a lot of people who defend selling age 20, they're like, well, we should keep selling it to them because if we don't, then they're going to just use something else and develop their own native AI chips and company. They're already doing it. Which feeds into their argument. I just showed you the evidence. They're already doing it no matter what because they're not stupid, unlike us.

34:30If they see even a single vulnerability, a critical one that could come down the road, like with all this trade uncertainty, they just solve it for themselves. They've done this with cars, they've done this with batteries, with minerals, refining, I mean, airplanes, now with the chips, which is really the only area technologically where they continue to kind of ride behind us. But they're pouring oceans of government-backed money into developing their alternatives and to try and be chip independent from America in the next four to five years. And so, I mean, the point then comes down to is like, well, if they're going to be independent, maybe make it a little complicated and difficult for them or at least negotiate some leverage here in the interim.

35:09But instead, we got this weird corrupt bargain between Jensen, AMD and the government. And, you know, again, for a lot of libertarians and people out there, they've always complained about crony capitalism. I mean, there's no better example than this. It's pure just like pay to play and fluffing the ego. That's a problem I have around it. It doesn't make any geopolitical or strategic sense either way. It should just make sense. You know, fine. If you want to let them sell it for the reasons I just said, yeah, well, we don't want them to develop their own domestic manufacturer. We want them to remain reliant on us.

35:43Okay. You know, well, we should still have some much more of a process. But that's not how this deal ended up coming about. No. That's the issue. No, it was completely pay to play. It was Jensen Wang cozying up to Trump and to others in the administration and getting basically what he wanted out of it. So Don Bacon, who I think did he, he has formally announced he's not running for re-election. I think so. Yeah, he's among the many China hawks that flipped out. So he said, we've got to realize we're in an intellectual war, a technology war with China, and we're in an AI competition. Having NVIDIA providing this tech to China is a mistake.

36:18He was on News Nation last night and said that. So it's Trump was like the great champion of a lot of the China hawks. Yes, that's true. Which is also hilarious for many reasons. We can talk about installing Elon Musk at the top of the government efficiency effort and all of Musk's various ties to China. We can talk about Trump's relationship with Xi Jinping. But the China hawks are in for such a wake up call to what Donald Trump actually thinks. And there's a non-zero chance, by the way, that the way Trump approaches China would be better than a president Mike Pompeo because, you know, it's not belligerent and warmongering.

37:02My issue. Yet. My issue around this is the lack of thought. And it's just all egotistical. That's that's my you know, like I said, if you want to ship it to him, fine. Do it for strategic sense. Make a case. But this is really just about – because the thing is it fits within the broader context of the way all the tech CEOs are approaching this. This is why Apple is making their fake announcement over$500 billion and presenting a solid bar of gold to Donald Trump. This is – who do you think Jensen learned all this from? He looked at Bezos and at Zuckerberg and at Sundar Pichai and all these other guys who have been doing business with Trump and they're like, OK, well, this is how I make sure that I get my exemption.

37:40You think Apple is freaking out? You know, yes, they're going to have to pay, I think, a billion dollars in tariff charges. But they could have been nuked overnight, you know, between China and India. They've gotten major exemptions from all of their tariffs. They basically have from day one. And then you'll recall, you know, in the early days, they were telling us, Howard Lutnick and others, how we're going to build iPhones here in America. That's evaporated, you know. It's like now it's like a single piece of the glass, like right here, you know, maybe come from Kentucky and depending on the phone, you know, that you get.

38:11and it pales in comparison to all of the investments that they remain making abroad. As long as though as they give them, I mean, I can think of Sam Altman, that whole Stargate thing,$500 billion. It's like, yeah, where's the money? Is it happening? As Elon said, they don't even have the money. It's true. It's absolutely ridiculous, the idea that they're going to be spending all of this. But as long as they get a press conference and they're sucking up to him, they basically just continue business as usual. That's the biggest problem. Do you remember the Foxconn deal in Trump 1.0? Yes, Foxconn, of course.

38:38It's a great example. Yeah, 100%. It all ends up, yeah, it's splashy public relations announcements and then doesn't necessarily pan out. Will that be the case with every single example? No, I think there's some anecdotes where we are seeing certain communities get good plants that are coming back. But it's too early to say if that's happening at scale and the indications are not universally positive to say the very least. Yes, that's right.

39:09The Summer Savings Event is here at Apple Vacations. It's the perfect time to bring everyone together for the getaway you've been dreaming about. Book between July 24th and August 27th and enjoy up to 55 % instant savings. From relaxing beach days to unforgettable moments with the people who matter most, your next vacation starts here. Travel through July 31st, 2027. Start your vacation today at AppleVacations.com or through your travel advisor. Apple Vacations, where your story starts. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. You know us, or rather, you know them. Tony and Candace, Nina and Lance, Spike, and yes, the chicken.

39:45We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years, but today we're showing up as ourselves to tell you about Podlandia, AO Rewatch, our brand new podcast. Each week, we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia from the very beginning, breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters, revisiting the Portland locations you know and love, and opening up about our creative process. How did any of this get made? Why do we think that was a good idea? We're ready to talk about it. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Kreisel, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more.

40:24Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song, a melody. Well, I thought he was going to write, I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia Ayo Rewatch on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

41:04The definition of what is a movie has kind of changed anyway, too, right? What do you think it is now? It's images and words being spoken, captured by some sort of technology. Danny McBride. He loves Boba. Oh, that's fantastic. And you make it on, you make your own. That's great. I call him Taro Reed. That's a good name. They're all named after cast members of American Pie. Yeah. Oh, gotcha. I call, I don't, I never looked up if she was in this, but I call him Leachie Sobieski. Yeah, I don't think she was an American Pie, but I still like that. Haven't looked it up. Haven't looked it up. She was prominent around the same time.

41:39Then Mary Steenburgen. Why are you guys talking to me like, why are you talking so down to me that you think I don't understand your little play game? I just really am trying to set you up for success here. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're going to turn now to youth unemployment, underemployment. Let's go and put this up there on the screen. Very closely watched numbers, relying on the Bureau of Labor Statistics, so let's hope that they're right. But even according to the revisions, you can see here this chart. Quote, is a generational jobs crisis brewing?

42:17The underemployment rate for young adults in America is up sharply. So if you look after 2010, after the Great Recession, this is the story of like that lost generation, which really got screwed. Underemployment was up some 30 % at one point in 2010. Basically, it all stayed high all the way to 2015 when the jobs market started becoming a little bit better. It started to trend down very nicely back to 2000 levels until the COVID pandemic of 2020. Massive spike after that, actually even surpassing 2010. It came back down during the whole tight labor market era of 2021. But you're watching how very quickly, just in the last couple of years, it's ticked up.

43:00And now it's actually back to levels around 2009 before that massive explosion in 2010. It's something very closely to watch. You've got to ask why. What exactly is happening? And I think there's a lot of reasons for it. Number one is AI. This is at the high levels of the job market. We're going to talk about that. in a little bit. Number two is actually - It's at the low levels of - Yeah, it's funny. It's both at the low and high. More what I meant is it's impacting college graduates for entry-level work. But those are already people, they spent a lot of money on their education. They were probably going to be higher earners.

43:36But there's a big question too, at the lower levels, as to why that's not happening for the non-college graduate, people who are in trades or in others. Remember in 2021, they had a major explosion. But problem that we've seen right now is with the unemployment figures and others, we're seeing like a softening of underemployment for a lot of those people as well. And so when you combine it together, you kind of have potentially another lost generation post-COVID where just like in 2010, the elder millennials in particular, those who graduated in Ona, I mean, they were just destroyed. There's no even talk, like it's difficult to describe what it was like for a lot of those people.

44:13We're not there yet, but there are very troubling signs. And I think it goes to the shakiness of the overall labor market, especially for young people. Well, yeah, no. And I think that's a good point. And it also speaks to how much longer. So to some extent, if we look at the uncertainty that Trump says is strategically meant to show the United States has leverage, at a certain point, the uncertainty, the weight of the uncertainty on the economy starts to become even by his own explanation. So if we're taking him at face value and saying, And I agree with that. I do think the uncertainty creates some leverage to a point.

44:46No, for sure. But then the weight on the economy becomes so significant that it has effects like on unemployment for people who are coming out of college that you have to look at it and say, even by what your argument is here, that you're bringing jobs back. At a certain point, when does the bleeding stop? At a certain point, what is letting the blood just seep into the economy not worth what you're talking about anymore? At what point is a net cost by your argument? Totally. And this was actually really driven home at the technological level and especially with the general breaking of the American dream by this story.

45:25It's an amazing story. It's been gone viral for a number of reasons. Look at B2 up here on the screen. And the headline here is, quote, goodbye$165 ,000 tech jobs. Student coders seek work at Chipotle. Quote, as companies like Amazon and Microsoft lay off workers and embrace AI coding tools, computer science graduates say they are struggling to land tech jobs. I would add H-1B into this, by the way, because we talked previously, we did a segment here on the show about how Microsoft fired a bunch of workers and then applied for a bunch of H-1B visas. But the point is basically this pursuit of cheap labor, AI, and then also just a general softening of the overall market means that people like this woman who they profile here in the story are really getting screwed.

46:07So they lead off by basically talking about how this woman, Mansai Mishra, she is 21 years old. She grew up in California, graduated from Purdue with a degree in computer science, basically did everything right. You know, but, quote, after a year of job hunting for tech jobs and internships, she graduated in May without any job offer. The only company that even called me for an interview, she said, was Chipotle. Since the early 2010s, you know, they've talked about kind of the booms of how it was so awesome in 2014, 2015 to go work at Google and Facebook with all this free stuff and health cares, et cetera.

46:45But a lot of these AI programming tools basically have eliminated all of the original scut work that people like this were put into the pipeline for. And I'm not denigrating it because scut work is important. I did a lot of scut work after I graduated. That's what you do because you do it so that you're around. You do these basic menial tasks while you learn bigger skills and you get promoted up into the company. But at the beginning, they're like, well, we have everybody who has all the higher level skills already. we don't need to put any more people into the pipeline or pay them. We can just use our AI tools to basically eliminate 10 % to 15 % of our payroll.

47:20And that's basically what's happening. They even point actually to a survey more recently. State schools, Maryland, Texas, Washington, these are decent colleges, as well as private universities, Cornell and Stanford. Many tech graduates, computer science graduates, said that they had applied to hundreds and in several cases, thousands of tech jobs at companies, nonprofits, and at government agencies. All of them were given coding assignments, many of these other things. Even with these month-long jobs quests, the vast majority of them, they either ended up ghosted, they didn't end up being hired.

47:53I actually did warn about this a few months ago after Liberation Day in April because I had heard for a lot of those people who were graduating in May that people were pulling their offers. This is like, sorry, we can't do it. The stock market is down. We can't make any major commitments. Now the summer is coming to an end. People are about to start going back to school in the next month or two. And if you think, like, that's devastating, you know, for people who graduated. They even say here that one individual who graduated in 2023 had applied for 5 ,762 tech jobs. Diligence resulted in 13 job interviews and no full-time offers.

48:28I mean, that is devastating. Later on, quote, he applied for a job at McDonald's to help cover expenses, was rejected for his lack of experience. has moved back to Shorewood, Oregon, and is now receiving unemployment benefits from previous. I mean, that's terrible, right? This is exactly the story from 2009. I remember hearing, reading about it, of people who, again, did everything right. There's even a lot of stories about the law school class of 2009. I was just going to say. Yeah. They had it made. Grad school and law school. They went in expecting to make$175 ,000 or whatever in 2008 money.

49:05They were going to be balling. Like when they graduated, they had offers at the banks or the major corporate law firms. By the time they were out, they were like, you're done. You have nothing. A lot of people had to move home. Some of them, it ended up working out okay. But it just created mass chaos and, of course, debt for a lot of these people. So look, the point I think in all of this is that it's at both levels of the economy. But if it starts getting so dicey at the higher level of labor, That is, again, these are people saddled statistically with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

49:38No promise to pay it off. And then you wonder why Zoran is happening or any of these other, you know, political effects of what youth unemployment look like in our economy. I just thought it was a really sad story when you look at it broadly. Yeah, it is. And I think those parallels are really important to point out. So I have this other headline. I should have added it to the rundown. But this is from last month. This is unfortunate. The headline here is Gen Z men with college degrees now have the same unemployment rate as non-grads, a sign that the higher education payoff is dead. Well, we've had plenty of those signs over the years.

50:08But this is I mean, that's not just a sign. That's your example that the higher education payoff is dead. It's not just a sign that it's going to happen. It's it's clearly the indication that it has happened. And so you then have this massive debt hangover. We saw it with millennials after the Great Recession that lasts into your 30s and 40s. Student loan debt, you're not able to pay it off because you were not making the money that you thought you would make when you took out the loans. And those jobs just don't exist. And so millennials, it looked like there was a trend of Gen Z getting married, potentially buying houses earlier after the pandemic.

50:46And actually what we could end up seeing from this is something similar to millennials, where they were getting married later than they said they wanted to. having children later than they said they wanted to. And all of this is just to say, we aren't only looking at costs on the economy. We're also looking at people's lives and happiness. And it's not just numbers on a page or on the screen. There are all kinds of cultural effects that come on with this that people remember vividly from the recession. And so if that's what we're looking at. And there's some really troubling signs. We kind of have already run the play.

51:25I think it's really devastating. The AI part of it, it has been overstated about mass job loss, but the layoffs are here. And we knew part of that was going to happen. Let's put B4, for example, on the screen. So this is about AI-driven layoffs shrinking the job market, specifically for recent graduates. So what they say, as I have said here, these entry-level roles are being hardest hit. Companies are automating tasks traditionally handled by the most junior staff. And at the same time, the broader job market is slowing, rising employment with recent graduates and with young tech workers. And even if you look at some of the Federal Reserve data, so there was some more recently data, I think it was from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

52:09And what they showed in the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta was a similar kind of softening of the overall job market. I'm trying to look specifically at the unemployment rate, but what they showed was that this software engineering and computer science degree in particular saw major changes just over the last couple of years. And it just makes it, again, where I've seen, you know, for examples, I'm trying to think about, oh yeah, I talked about one, somebody who I know who works in consulting. And they were like, well, when I came into consulting, you know, he's like 10 years into his career now, but he's like, Like my initial job was just note-taking and arranging minutes and all these other things.

52:48It sucks, but it's like that's how you, you know, start your climb up the ladder. He's like, we don't even need somebody to do that anymore. We just have Microsoft Teams, which has the, you know, OpenAI, ChatGPT, AI function or whatever built into it. It automates everything. It does summaries. And so we're just not giving offers, you know, to nearly the same number of people. Well, that sucks, you know, for a lot of people. Similarly, especially when they, quote, did everything right, and then they just get smacked initially by this mass social change. And I can definitely think at the white-collar level is where we're going to see the most impact in law, in consulting, in technology.

53:22But don't make a mistake to say that it's not coming for blue-collar workers as well. Like if you're a tradesman with a house skill, that's going to be one thing, but everyone talks about them. McDonald's kiosks, more automation, all those things. It just reduces the overall headcount that a lot of people need. Or it just means that the type of job you're going to get is not necessarily the one that is going to pay very much in the future or give you any upward mobility or advancement. Well, and trade shops also support admin roles that are going to be hit by AI as well. So, I mean, it's – yeah, that's significant.

53:53And it underscores to me the incredible urgency of having our pipeline from high school to college or to the job market is probably a better way to put it, adapt. And I don't know, Sagar. I mean, it's like we're still – it seems like we're still on autopilot and still doing the same thing over and over again. When you look at the consulting example, do I think it's probably better that a lot of people aren't going to be at McKinsey? Yeah, that's the funny thing. I do. Look, but it's real easy for me to say sitting here. Of course. It's not so easy to say to somebody who graduated with an expectation of actually getting a job.

54:28And where else do they go? Yeah, exactly. Where else are you going to go? Because what just happened is the bottom rung – and this is slightly different than the recession. The bottom rung of the ladder was kicked out, and you have no way to get to the middle rung, let alone to the top rung. So what do you do? I mean, seriously, what do you do? We're right now, it seems like, just continuing on the autopilot default of sending people through this normal college-to-white-collar job pipeline that it's changed so much. The rote reflex is outdated. Yeah. I totally agree. Okay, why don't we move on to D.C.?

55:07Let's see what's going on. Let's do it. Apple Vacations, where your story starts. The Summer Savings Event is here at Apple Vacations. It's the perfect time to bring everyone together for the getaway you've been dreaming about. Book between July 24th and August 27th and enjoy up to 55 % instant savings. From relaxing beach days to unforgettable moments with the people who matter most, your next vacation starts here. Travel through July 31st, 2027. Start your vacation today at AppleVacations.com or through your travel advisor. Apple Vacations, where your story starts. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here.

55:43You know us, or rather, you know them. Tony and Candace, Nina and Lance, Spike, and yes, the chicken. We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years, but today we're showing up as ourselves to tell you about Podlandia, AO Rewatch, our brand new podcast. Each week, we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia from the very beginning, breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters, revisiting the Portland locations you know and love, and opening up about our creative process. How did any of this get made? Why do we think that was a good idea? We're ready to talk about it.

56:16And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Kreisel, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song, a melody. Well, I thought he was going to write, I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia Ayo Rewatch on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook.

56:53Every episode, we're trying to help our guests improve their careers by mainly focusing on how they can help us improve our careers. The show is famously super accessible, so you can easily jump into any of our 650 episodes and understand what's going on. We recommend some of our recent episodes with Ben Stiller. The definition of what is a movie has kind of changed anyway, too, right? What do you think it is now? It's images and words being spoken, captured by some sort of technology. Danny McBride. He loves Boba. Oh, that's fantastic. And you make it on, you make your own. That's great. I call him Taro Reed.

57:28That's a good name. They're all named after cast members of American Pie. Yeah. Oh, gotcha. I call, I don't, I never looked up if she was in this, but I call him Leachie Sobieski. Yeah. I don't think she was in American Pie, but I still like that. Haven't looked it up. Haven't looked it up. She was prominent around the same time. Yeah. Then Mary Steenburgen. Why are you guys talking to me like, why are you talking so down? to me that you think I don't understand your little play game. I just really am trying to set you up for success here. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

58:05This morning, videos are rolling in of law enforcement taking to the streets of, so I could get this, Georgetown. So if you've been here to D.C., you know Georgetown is one of the more upscale neighborhoods, although it certainly had its problems. smash and grabs and all of that during the pandemic. So joining us to discuss all of this is Delano Squires. He is a research fellow over at the Heritage Foundation, but also somebody who has spent, unlike many conservatives, who are now frothing at the mouth to talk about all of this, and people on the left as well. We're going to get into that. Delano has put in a lot of time actually working in D.C.

58:39So Delano, first of all, thank you for coming. And secondly, Just tell people, give them a little background on your career working for D.C. before you ended up at Heritage. Yeah, so I worked in D.C. government for about 15 years, starting in 2007, always sort of in a public-facing arena. For most of that, I manage a technology program called Connect D.C., where we help low-income residents get access to technology. So that means I spend a lot of time in public housing. I've been to D.C. jail at least four times talking to guys who, as they were ready to transition back into the community, you know, doing a lot of stuff with senior citizens, with K-12 students.

59:19And then the last year I was in the Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which was a newly created office in the city. I think this was around 2020, 2021, obviously, you know, with everything around George Floyd and BLM riots. The city wanted to approach gun violence from sort of a public health perspective, and they pulled together people from all across district agencies. So I was there, again, 2021 into 2022, interfacing with residents, as they would call, complain about shootings and violence in their neighborhoods. That was during the spike in D.C. Yes, yes. One gentleman sent 10 videos from his security camera to the city capturing shootings in his neighborhood.

1:00:04I figured he lived in a house that cost at least$750 ,000. Right. So there were frustrations there from residents all across the city, you know, about shootings and gun violence. So it really showed me the difference between what the activist class says. You know, remember when they were on the defund the police train? And what residents, sometimes in the poorest parts of the city, were saying, which is we want more police on the street. Yeah, and I want to focus specifically on that, actually, because there's quite a bit of armchair quarterbacking going on. And even, frankly, even probably from us, right?

1:00:37I've lived in D.C. for 15 years. I lived in, you know, went to college in Foggy Bottom, which is, you know, where the State Department is. And Northwest Washington never lived really outside of that, which traditionally has always been kind of the home of lesser crime, although it did, you know, get quite a bit worse over like a 10-year period. So I'm curious because at the end of the day, that doesn't matter. It really matters for the permanent residents and particularly people in the poor areas. So I'm curious before we even get to some of the media reaction for your reaction to the way – first, the Trump administration's deployment, the conception behind it, and then how you have seen it played out now so far.

1:01:15We've only had one day. Yeah. But there's been a lot of show of force, right? Yes. So what do you think so far? Definitely. And I'll say this. Not only did I live in D.C. for 15 years, but I worked in D.C. for 15 years. I lived in D.C. for five years. in Northeast DC and North 7 with my wife and our kids. So let me put my cards on the table. I was in favor of Operation Legend in the first Trump term that married federal resources, so ATF, DOJ, DEA, and took those resources into a handful of cities. I think it was eight cities across the country to address violent street crime. I supported that.

1:01:53In fact, I said, if I was advising the president, I would talk about that five times as much as the first step back. So I'm not opposed to sort of federal involvement in addressing local crime, generally speaking. I think the takeover, the fact that it was sort of precipitated by obviously the incident involving the Dolch staffer, to me feels somewhat disjointed because it's not that, oh, there have been 45 minors. under the age of 18 who've been shot and killed in D.C. over the last two years. We're marshalling federal resources to address that. It's been, I think, a lot of the complaints, oftentimes for people who don't actually live in the city, that have been driving the narrative.

1:02:38That sort of rubs me the wrong way, but, I mean, if it leads to better results for the residents and for people who work in the city and for people who visit the city, then I'm all for it. But the show of force, and again, I've seen a few videos, you know, ATF agents walking around Georgetown. Yeah, right. Or the National Mall. This is hard to explain because for most people on television or like House of Cards, they're like, oh, it's the National Mall. I'm like, nobody who lives, it's like Times Square. Nobody lives, I haven't been there in five years, okay? I have no reason to go. What are you doing down there?

1:03:12Okay, all right. Other than exercise, like there's no reason to go down there. It's a place for tourists and for visitors. That's fine. And hey, they need to be safe as well. But there is no crime there either, okay? And there hasn't been for many years. Yeah. Generally speaking, and I think that's what people, a lot of people don't think about when they think about D.C. They think about the mall and the Capitol and the White House and the Mint. But this is a city of 700 ,000 people in eight wards, you know, spread out across four different quadrants. And the violent crime tends to be clustered in a handful of neighborhoods, particularly the homicides and the shootings.

1:03:43Yes. 60 % happened, you know, east of the Anacostia River in Ward 7 and Ward 8. The poorest parts of the city, the most disproportionately black parts of the city and other parts of the city. Again, you may have certainly assaults, robbery, carjacking that sort of spread out a little bit more. But it's not it's not the same as what you get sort of east of the river. So if if the federal resources were being used to address crime in the highest crime parts of D.C., I think that would be something different. And in fact, two years ago, Councilmember Trayon White, who represents Ward 8. Once again.

1:04:20Yeah. Once again, called for the National Guard in August. I think that request was ultimately, you know, declined. But it's not to say that there aren't city leaders who have brought this issue up. But obviously, what you hear from the left is that, well, crime, violent crime is on a steep decline. And while that may be the case, even including homicides and shootings, the question is, okay, where were we starting? from. Like I grew up in New York in 19, call it 92, there were 2 ,500 murders in New York. Now they're about in a given year, 375 to 420, which obviously is a steep decline from, from the 1990s, but it's still, you're talking about concentrated areas where that is part of the local rhythm, like the everyday rhythm of life is hearing gunshots and, and knowing somebody and including children who get shot and killed in the streets.

1:05:16Well, that's exactly what I want to focus on, because the Washington Post, before this was hyperpolarized because Trump took it on, did a couple of months ago, a sweeping investigation into the spike in truancy. And it's significant. I mean, it's still not back down below pandemic levels. It was already high before the pandemic. Huge problem. We've seen the, like, quote, teen takeovers of Navy Yard three, four times just in the last couple of months, where if people haven't, if you're not a local, you probably haven't seen the footage or the images from it, but it's literally hundreds of teenagers who go into like the lobbies of apartment buildings or shooting Roman candles at the windows during the 4th of July, but actually like creating a situation where the cops could not control the streets because they were totally overrun, basically.

1:06:02So that to me, if I look at the truancy, I look at what Donald Trump is doing with the show of force, Delano, it's what you were saying. What is going to address the kind of root cause? So basically, my question for you is, I actually think the show of force can probably do something. I think pushing the Metropolitan Police Department here to do something probably will make them better and will force them to finally confront some of their own failures. The statistics are being debated right now. There's a police commander who was suspended. This is C4. We can put it on the screen for cooking the books.

1:06:39The police union says the books are being cooked. It's hard to know exactly what the numbers are. But all that to say, is there, I mean, it seems like there's just a lot more that the Trump administration could be doing that's not sending people in net gators and bulletproof vests onto the National Mall. And let me say this because, you know, I want to be fair to the Bowser administration, right? Mayor Bowser, to her credit, and I think she's on her third term now, to her credit, is not Bill de Blasio. I don't think she uttered the words defund the police one time in 2020. Now, I will be critical in this sense, I think she caved to the BLM activists by making Black Lives Matter Plaza, which I saw as somewhat of a troll towards President Trump in 2020.

1:07:23Totally. And they hate her anyway, right? Partly because she is pro-police. So I think the city has tried to do a lot to address gun violence. and, again, spent millions of dollars on resources to try to bring these numbers down, and they have come down. But from my perspective, and just given the things that I research in terms of family structure, the stuff about truancy and chronic absentee is a wild issue nationwide. When you have schools, high schools in D.C., where the chronic absentee, the truancy rate is like 90%. It's insane. That is first and foremost a problem with the family. Right.

1:08:05Yeah. And part of the issue and I address this and I would bring this up periodically even when I was in the city is like, OK, we have 12, 13, 14, 15 year olds carjacking people, shooting people. But the first adults that come up for an accountability check are the mayor, the police chief and the school superintendent. that is completely out of order. So what I would love to hear an elected official say is something to the effect of, look, we're doing everything we can to address crime, but it is not our responsibility to parent your children. That's your job. Because if you can't control them, how would you expect me to control them?

1:08:43They live in your house. They're under your rules. I would hope at some point, some mayor, somewhere, some police chief, somewhere, would say something to that effect. and galvanize the community to take responsibility for their children, our children, in ways that help address some of these issues. Because it can't just be root causes being a euphemism for more spending on the library, 24-hour rec center, you know, just keeping kids busy 24-7. Which, again, look, I know what it's like. Yeah, not a horrible thing, but not going to solve the problem. But that is, let me say it this way. we do not apply that same framework when it's other types of crimes.

1:09:26I've never heard a Democrat or progressive say, man, you know, if only those, uh, you know, uh, Klan members had more, more jobs and economic opportunity in 1940s, maybe they wouldn't have terrorized black neighborhoods. No, nobody says that. They only do it when it comes to urban crime and when it comes to low income black populations. And, and I believe people have more agency in that than that, but they have to be called up and activated to do what needs to be done. Well, at the same time, and I appreciate this. This is actually more of a nuanced conversation. We're not sitting here fluffing the Trump administration.

1:09:59We're like, yeah, there's some major issues happening. But we're not going to sit here and gaslight everybody and say there's no problem. But that's unfortunately what a lot of the media has done on this. So here we have MSNBC's Simone Sanders. Let's take a listen. We'll get your reaction. That it is perceived violence amplified by some actual real acts of violence. But the way I've heard D.C. being described this morning is like it's a city under siege, like it's a dangerous place, clutching your pearls. You've got to keep your bag under your dress when you leave the house. And that's that's just not true.

1:10:30What we are talking about, though, is these instances of juvenile crime. But my concern is that the president is using instances of juvenile crime in the city of Washington, D.C., as a pretext for what I would describe as his authoritarian overreach. When you walk down the streets of Georgetown, you don't see a police officer on every corner, but you don't feel unsafe. So what is it about talking about places like Southeast D.C., right, Ward 8, if you will, that people say, well, we need more officers to make us safe? I think we have to rethink what safety means in America. All right. So this this is why the pretext of this matters.

1:11:06Right. So she said when you walk down the streets of Georgetown, again, the richest neighborhood, probably statistically the richest neighborhood in all of Washington, D.C., you don't see a cop on every corner. Now apparently you do because the Trump administration is out there. They don't need to be there. There's nothing going on. But that is a level of not just like paternalism, but also of denial, which just completely absconds the entire problem. Right. And my frustration when I see that is these are the same people that claim that they speak for the black community. Right. Now, again, most of the homicides, I mean, when I worked in the Office of Gun Violence Prevention every morning, we would start with a call from the assistant police chief going through the contact shootings the last 24 or 72 hours if you're coming off a weekend.

1:11:51Every, I mean, 99 % of the time, young black male, young black male, young black male. But when Simone Sanders and Roland Martin and other people in sort of the aristocracy, right, the sort of black progressive elites, when they talk, they are only interested in mobilizing federal resources. If you're investigating, you know, what you think is a noose in a NASCAR garage with Bubba Wallace, if you're investigating Jussie Smollett, if Joe Biden is saying that the greatest threat to America is white domestic terrorism, then they'll say we need the federal government to marshal all of its resources to address these problems.

1:12:28So they are more concerned with fake hate crimes than real street crimes. And the reason is because for the left and the right, the primary role that the black community plays within sort of the criminal justice ecosystem is often victims of a racist system and not victims of violent crime. And that's why people like Simone Sanders can say with a straight face, oh, you know, it's not that bad. And why are there more police in Southeast than there are in Georgetown? Well, that's where the shootings occur. Yeah. Right? That is where the shootings occur. So when I see that type of thing, it frustrates me deeply.

1:13:04I'll give you a quick story. When I was still in D.C., there was an activist. he went by the name C-Web, who had been tracking homicides just in his neighborhood, over by the convention center, right? Since the 1990s. He had a brick wall full of names and faces of guys who had been shot and killed, just in that sort of two block radius. And he told me part of the reason he does it is because he mentors some of these guys' children, and these are some of the only photos and videos that they've ever seen of their father. So he had been doing it 20 plus years. So when I hear, again, these sort of, you know, pundits trying to sweep these issues under the rug, it frustrates me deeply.

1:13:48Well, then let's talk about this 30-year – so this is a new talking point. D.C. violent crime is at a 30-year low. Now, first of all, as you just said, the police commanders are on investigation for Juke in the stat. So who knows whether that's even true. But at the context that you've laid out, we still have a lot of murders compared to New York. I believe it's the highest in the entire United States or one of the highest among U.S. cities at a per capita basis. And even then, just focusing on murders does not address quality of life crime. I've always talked about this with San Francisco. San Francisco doesn't have a ton of murders.

1:14:23Go visit. It's not nice. Why is it not nice? Car crime, property theft, heroin, drug addiction everywhere. So just contextualize, I think, what it means for the D.C. resident and for others for what the problem is at a crime level, at a quality of life level. And then what does a solution actually look like? Because, look, the show of force and the activists and all that, that's going to happen no matter what. But people here, if you actually want to know what you could do about it, what do you think? Yeah, I mean, I think you raise a good point, right? The quality of life stuff is separate and related, but separate from the violent crime.

1:14:57You know, as you said, I mean, they're porch pirates. So if you go on Ring in the community, it's like, okay, another package is stolen. It's the carjackings, right? It's the assaults. Sometimes it's just the intimidation. It's the homelessness. It's the vagrancy. These are things that frustrate people, and these are things that drive people away and make them move to Virginia or Maryland. I think addressing each of the issues comprehensively makes sense, but each of them has their own set of root causes. Again, with the youth crime, parents have to be held to account. I'm not saying that they have to be arrested, but I mean, a mayor or police chief can at least start by talking about the importance of family as it relates to addressing this particular issue.

1:15:45Some of the other stuff, I might be more radical than most. That's fine. Lay it out. Let's hear it. I have, and certain ideas I only talk about with my wife. Yeah. I'm like, look, I would be open to at least putting the idea on the table of rounding up known gang members and saying, look, guys, if you guys are hellbent on hurting each other, we'll go somewhere else where you can do that. You can sign the waivers. You can you can have the whatever level of force you all agree to. We can have it out. But we're not going to allow you to terrorize this neighborhood. where three-year-olds and toddlers and senior citizens are the ones who get caught in a crossfire because you guys, one, have no respect for yourself.

1:16:31I mean, you're talking about The Wire. This is season three of The Wire. It's season now in Anacostia. Right. So I would be open to that, right? Might not pass a legal muster, but I'd at least be open to the idea. And I think, again, I'm fine with the zero tolerance policy for vagrancy and some of these other quality of life crimes. I know a lot of people don't like that, but I think law-abiding, tax-paying citizens have a right to live in neighborhoods that are clean and orderly. And getting there is not always going to feel comfortable. Like I saw one of the videos that was circling yesterday, you know, you had some federal agents look like they're walking through an alley.

1:17:07They come up on, you know, a group of, might've been two or three young black men. And, you know, hey guys, you have your ID. Now, most people don't carry ID when they're, you know, on their porch. it was a very respectful interaction. You know, the federal officer was basically explaining what this initiative was. But I've seen many that aren't nearly as respectful. And that needs to be exactly. This is where the nuance comes in. And part of my concern is that you have conservatives talking about life in blue cities the way liberals talk about life in the Deep South. I think that's very smart.

1:17:43Right? And what it does is it conditions not just a sense of fear, which I felt palpably when I was driving my family from D.C. to Texas through Mississippi and saying, oh my gosh, what if I get stopped in the sun downtown? That'd have been conditioned in me. I grew up in New York. I don't know anything about Mississippi. But I don't want families who are coming here from Iowa, Wisconsin, to think as soon as I step off the Greyhound or the Amtrak, that I'm gonna get mugged and murdered. Greyhound, that might happen. Well, Greyhound. No, I'm not on the Greyhound. But it's not just the fear that it conditions, but it makes it easier to say these are not real Americans like us.

1:18:19I understand. And we're willing to do whatever it takes to sort of make this problem go away. And so this is my last question because one of the things that Simone Sanders gets at is the age-old debate between the sort of presence of law enforcement and whether or not crime is going to go down because you have more cops in the street with stop and frisk or whatever it is, broken windows. All of these, I mean, the progressive left basically tried their experiment as backlash to those policies in San Francisco and Oakland. And the experiment has been a failure to the point where even its own proponents have walked back.

1:18:54Muriel Bowser here in D.C. gave in to a lot of progressing policing policy ideas and walked some of them back. She's even walking back the sanctuary status now as well to the extent that she kind of can. So is there, though, a risk? I mean, just Steele and Manning, the way that we and probably all three of us think about this. is there a risk that a militarized police force, which a lot of like libertarian leaning conservatives already don't like, is there a risk that that makes the problem worse in any way? Or is it is it only going to, from your perspective, help? I don't see it making the problem worse.

1:19:31That doesn't mean that it'll necessarily help. Again, one of the things I liked about Operation Legend, again, back in the first Trump term, is that they were using it wasn't just to show a force on the streets. It was the intelligence. It was the prosecution that was getting, you know, not just bad guys, but murderers off the street. So if federal resources were used sort of to help in investigations, closing cases, I think that's a lot different than just the show of force and having agents on the street. Particularly just walking around with their hands in their pockets, you know, in Georgetown or Navy Yard.

1:20:05So I don't I don't think it'll necessarily make it worse. That doesn't mean it'll make it better. One of the things that I've often said is, look, people like Simone Sanders and other folks on the left are very much pro-police. They either live in gated communities or they have security guards or they pay for private security. The only people who I legitimately believe are open to the police going away are guys who are in the streets. So whether you're a street gang, organized crime, or you're related to someone or friends with someone who handles their own business in the streets. Everybody else, from noise complaints to if a homeless person is sitting on your front porch.

1:20:47911, can you? So I don't believe this notion that they don't think that police matter. It takes more than just police on the streets because, I mean, criminals are not smart in the sense that they're engaging in dangerous activities. but they're smart enough to know, okay, we know the police surge between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. When the sun goes down, they go home, we come out, and we terrorize the streets. So I think a lot of it is about the coordination. And when I was in D.C., they would say this frequently, that D.C. is resource rich but coordination poor. When you add the federal layer on top of that, that could make the problem worse in that no one knows exactly what it is that they're supposed to be doing.

1:21:28But I think there's a potential to make it better if, again, those federal resources, the advanced technology, more prosecutors can help close cases and bring some level of closure to victims and their families. Well, I really appreciate joining us, man. I really learned a lot and I hope the audience found it helpful. So thank you for joining us. We appreciate it. Thank you.

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