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Episode: The Organization Ready To Help Trump Override The Federal Gov't

Author: NPR
Duration: 00:47:01

Episode Shownotes

New York Times reporter Ken Bensinger says the America First Policy Institute, which has nearly 300 executive orders ready to be signed, would influence a Trump second term more than Project 2025.Also, John Powers reviews the movie A Real Pain.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_00
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00:00:18 Speaker_06
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's blueprint for a second Trump term, has gotten a lot of attention and criticism in the last few months.

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But our guest, Ken Benzinger, writes that a different organization, the America First Policy Institute, is poised to be far more influential in staffing and guiding a potential second Trump administration.

00:00:43 Speaker_06
In a story published last week, Benzinger and The Times' David Fahrenthold described training sessions the Institute held to help potential Trump staff deal with the mainstream media and overcome the resistance of, quote, federal bureaucrats.

00:00:57 Speaker_06
The story also traces the origins of the group to wealthy Texas conservatives bent on planning a second Trump term as early as 2020.

00:01:06 Speaker_06
Benzinger has also written about the Trump campaign's failure to commit to agreements and ethics rules required under federal law to start the process for planning a new administration.

00:01:17 Speaker_06
Ken Benzinger is a Pulitzer Prize finalist who joined The New York Times in 2022. He previously reported for the Wall Street Journal, Smart Money Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and BuzzFeed News. Well, Ken Benzinger, welcome to Fresh Air.

00:01:32 Speaker_06
Let's talk about the America First Policy Institute and how it's distinct from the Heritage Foundation, which produced Project 2025, which has gotten so much attention. How do these two groups differ?

00:01:44 Speaker_01
So these are two groups that are in some ways very similar, but they're kind of so similar that they end up being rivals rather than joining hands.

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Like the Heritage Foundation, which was founded in the 1970s, America First Policy Institute is a Washington, well, at least present in Washington, think tank that is dedicated to conservative policies.

00:02:08 Speaker_01
and currently is very aligned with the former Trump administration and its policies and the policy ideas of President Trump. It's a much newer group, however, though.

00:02:17 Speaker_01
It was only founded in late 2020, and it differs from Heritage in that it's much smaller and far lower profile. But when you boil down to its policy ideas, it's lined up in a lot of ways exactly the way you would see Heritage. Project 2025.

00:02:34 Speaker_01
And where they differ, uh, also is sort of, you know, obviously in the personnel and their relationship with the former administration of Donald Trump.

00:02:42 Speaker_01
The AFPI, as it's sometimes referred to, is staffed by many former Trump administration staffers, and, uh, has sort of a sole focus on satisfying the policy agenda of the former president.

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That's been key in some ways, I think, to, uh, the Institute's success because it is... so closely aligned to former President Trump's ideas and so in tune with the way he thinks a government should be run.

00:03:12 Speaker_06
Okay. Now, you're right that late this summer, the America First Policy Institute held training sessions in Washington to tell people how to work in a second Trump administration, people who want to work in them.

00:03:23 Speaker_06
What did you learn about what kind of information was offered in these trainings?

00:03:28 Speaker_01
Yeah, so I talked to some people who attended these trainings, and I talked to people who knew about them, and was shared on some of the materials that were presented to people.

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And in brief, kind of around, I would say early August, people started receiving invites to go to these sessions.

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And they were offered as one or three day sessions at the America First Policy Institute offices in Washington, which is on Pennsylvania Avenue right very close to the mall. They would come and basically be

00:03:57 Speaker_01
in these kind of workshop roundtable settings where they would talk to primarily former Trump administration officials about what it would be like to work in a second Trump administration.

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They talked about how to effectively do their jobs, how to deal with the media,

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how to deal with the different kinds of regulations that are there, but particularly the emphasis was on the idea that there needed to be massive reform in the civil service.

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So a huge focus of this was the idea that an incoming Republican administration would, from the outset, be at odds with the 2.3 million people who work in the federal government as career employees.

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and that their job would be to kind of override the collective will of all these employees and impose the agenda of the administration on the entire sort of federal bureaucracy.

00:04:47 Speaker_01
The overriding message was that these are essentially the enemies located inside the federal government.

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And this is what you would theoretically as an appointee or other employee of a new administration would have to do to confront these people and overcome any resistance they have to the agenda that you'd be seeking.

00:05:09 Speaker_01
All that was couched in language that we've become somewhat familiar with. This is, you know, framed as the swamp.

00:05:16 Speaker_01
And, you know, what we might have thought sometimes in the past that the kind of swamp that former President Trump would talk about, um, as lobbyists and that sort of thing, in this case, it's now re-centered entirely on what they think of as kind of, um, extreme leftist, as they call it, federal bureaucrats who have an anti-conservative left-wing agenda.

00:05:35 Speaker_01
That's how it's framed and that's the kind of... instruction, some might call it indoctrination, that they were handing out in these sessions. And the people who attended them got a chance to interact with these different government officials.

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Some of the people who attended them, by the way, are former Trump administration officials themselves.

00:05:52 Speaker_01
And some of them, I understand, were in fact authors of chapters of the well-known, perhaps notorious, Project 2025 policy agenda book, which is an interesting detail that some of the people who had worked on the 2025 book actually had been invited to attend these sessions.

00:06:09 Speaker_06
So did you hear stories about how federal bureaucrats had resisted the Trump agenda in the first term?

00:06:17 Speaker_01
When you talk to people who worked in the first Trump administration, who are Republicans, who are familiar with that world, there is a general feeling that any of the policy goals that were not reached in the first term, any of the sort of difficulties had to do with personnel problems.

00:06:35 Speaker_01
And the personnel problems sort of have two flavors. One would be personnel that were appointed by former President Trump that, in their heart, were not loyal enough to him and didn't do exactly what he wanted them to do.

00:06:48 Speaker_01
And the second category are these career federal government employees who, in the State Department or the Department of Agriculture or all the other federal agencies, are not loyal to the president, they believe, but instead are loyal to their jobs or to what they believe is a left-wing agenda.

00:07:07 Speaker_01
So there are stories about specific kinds of legislation that either never passed or was never successful, about executive orders that were never carried out because, allegedly, either some Trump appointee refused to carry out the orders or, much more frequently in the rubric of the America First Policy Institute, because people sort of buried deep in the cogs of the machine kind of buried these things or threw sand in the gears and made it impossible

00:07:37 Speaker_01
to ever come true. It can seem like dry stuff, but the general thinking is that these people gummed up the works.

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And if it weren't for these two categories of opposition to the former president, not only would we have a radically different sort of country at this point, but also probably he never would have lost re-election in 2020.

00:07:58 Speaker_06
The America First Policy Institute has a policy book called the America First Agenda. One of the things as I understand it that it calls for is the elimination of civil service protection for government employees. Now this goes back decades.

00:08:13 Speaker_06
It's designed to ensure that people who are experts in their field in the government are not subject to political whims, that they can't be punished for not engaging in political work and that they must do their work fairly and objectively.

00:08:28 Speaker_06
What exactly does the America First agenda say about this? How does it accomplish it? What is it intended to do?

00:08:36 Speaker_01
Well, the federal government is a gigantic employer, right? I mean, it sort of has two divisions, I guess we could think of. We have the civil service and we have the military service. And they're, I think, roughly equivalent in size.

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It's a total of just over 4 million people who take paychecks from the federal government. And, you know, we think of the three branches of government. We think of the executive and we think of legislative and we think of judicial.

00:08:57 Speaker_01
By far, the largest would be the executive, which encompasses not just the White House, which is what we think about, but an enormous number of agencies that touch almost all of our lives pretty much every day, right?

00:09:08 Speaker_06
What exactly does the America First agenda say about this?

00:09:13 Speaker_01
So the America First Policy Institute, perhaps its most aggressive idea for a policy in a new Republican administration, is this concept of turning federal career employees into at-will hires.

00:09:28 Speaker_01
What that means is that they would lose a lot of the protections, if not all the protections, that they have, that they enjoy, that are supposed to shield them from political influence, that are supposed to protect them and allow them to do their job in a way that is not political, that is supposed to be neutral and unbiased.

00:09:43 Speaker_01
Currently, most federal employees, of which there are several million, are unionized, and it's a quite elaborate process to discipline and dismiss them.

00:09:53 Speaker_01
And if the Institute had its way, if it gets this through, all of these would instantly be the same as an employee, for example, at a Walmart or at a private institution where they don't have a contract, they don't have a union to protect them, and they can be dismissed basically for any reason.

00:10:09 Speaker_01
In fact,

00:10:10 Speaker_01
The policy book by America First Policy Institute calls for summary dismissal quote without appeal without the chance to appeal for it They would simply have to give someone notice in writing that they were no longer wanted in the administration

00:10:25 Speaker_01
And as long as it's for non-discriminatory reasons, that is to say, they couldn't fire them for their race or their religion or their ethnicity or their gender, as long as it doesn't fall underneath that umbrella, they could fire them for any reason.

00:10:37 Speaker_01
It doesn't have to be something sort of defensible in court. They could say, well, you believe For example, in climate change, you said so, and we as an administration do not share that view. Therefore, we don't want you here anymore. You're gone.

00:10:49 Speaker_01
Or someone could have a concept about what clean air is supposed to be and how many particles of one contaminant or another should be in the air.

00:10:57 Speaker_01
And if that doesn't jibe with what possible Trump administration would want, then the America First Policy Institute would say that those people should be summarily fired.

00:11:06 Speaker_06
Right, now this would be a huge change for career civil servants, career government employees. Can a president do that on his or her own? I mean, doesn't that require congressional action?

00:11:16 Speaker_01
We don't know. I mean, you would think it would require that.

00:11:18 Speaker_01
I think this would be the sort of thing that would be passed via executive order, most likely, unless one could also imagine a situation where if President Trump not only wins office, but also gains control of both houses of Congress, we've seen that the current composition of the Republican Congress is pretty ready to do what the president is asking for.

00:11:42 Speaker_01
And so it's not hard to imagine that situation having laws passed that would fundamentally change the composition of the federal civil service.

00:11:50 Speaker_01
But I think also the president and his people, and particularly at America First Policy Institute, believe that they could do this via executive order.

00:11:57 Speaker_01
almost certainly that would lead to lawsuits, and almost certainly that would very quickly, or maybe not so quickly, but would wind its way to the Supreme Court, which, as we've seen in lots of other rulings over the last couple years, with a 6-3 Republican-leaning majority, tends to be extremely sympathetic to the agenda of

00:12:17 Speaker_01
Former President Trump.

00:12:18 Speaker_01
So I think there's a feeling of optimism among the people Advising the president on on a possible next administration that this is something that's achievable I think it's worth adding that it would be hard to imagine the degree of chaos.

00:12:32 Speaker_01
This would this would cause and And people who call themselves nonpartisan, who believe truly that they just want to be patriotic and protect the country, are very concerned about what this would mean for things like national security.

00:12:47 Speaker_01
Because there are a lot of people in the government working in these kinds of civil service jobs who are charged with protecting the country.

00:12:54 Speaker_01
And there's a fear that this kind of thing could lead to a lot of people leaving or getting fired and could potentially put the country at least temporarily at risk.

00:13:04 Speaker_06
I guess what's interesting about this to me is – I mean having covered government for a while is –

00:13:10 Speaker_06
When a new executive has a policy agenda and you say, we got to do this, and the staff that you tell to do this know that there's a whole raft of existing regulations that the specific initiative doesn't really conform to and you'd have to change those regulations and there's a process for that.

00:13:29 Speaker_06
Or that there have been court decisions which say you can't do what you think you want to do simply by ordering it. Did you hear discussion about that? Maybe it isn't just the people.

00:13:39 Speaker_06
Maybe we were making plans and orders that didn't conform to the existing structure and rules.

00:13:45 Speaker_01
What you're really talking about is sort of different philosophical understandings of how government is supposed to work.

00:13:51 Speaker_01
And it may be a very stubborn feeling among those around President Trump that everything that he wants or that the people close to him want just has to happen regardless of what existing laws or judicial precedents are out there.

00:14:05 Speaker_01
It's the feeling that these things just have to happen because you have a will for them to happen and never mind

00:14:10 Speaker_01
sort of the details and we certainly all remember examples from the Trump administration of times when the actual facts seemed irrelevant to people speaking for the administration famously when for example President Trump took out the sharpie to extend the path of a hurricane to fit the version of events that he wanted to be told I think that's a kind of a great metaphor for that kind of thinking you know the Noah that National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says this is where the hurricane

00:14:37 Speaker_01
is going to go and Trump just takes a sharpie and says, well, it's going to go over here too.

00:14:41 Speaker_01
And I think that kind of ethos applied also to understanding of everything down to like ag policy or to, you know, the administration of hydroelectric dams or whatever you could imagine that the federal government does.

00:14:53 Speaker_01
The feeling is that never mind sort of the rules, we're just going to do it.

00:14:56 Speaker_01
And when you think about what the plan of the ethos would be for a potential second administration, it basically involves bulldozing through a lot of that stuff, ignoring precedent, and just sort of, to use an overused metaphor, like a bull in a china shop.

00:15:12 Speaker_01
letting the pieces figure themselves out later. I think there is an additional feeling, which is that these things, these regulations, these rules, all this stuff are unnecessary.

00:15:23 Speaker_01
And if you actually poked at them, you would discover that they're only getting in the way and don't actually help with the administration of the country.

00:15:30 Speaker_01
There's certainly plenty of people, Dave, that would very strongly disagree with that and would cover their eyes in horror at the thought that the entire

00:15:39 Speaker_01
Government could grind to a halt but that's not the belief at the core of those who are trying to guide a second Trump administration They believe that there's a lot of rot and waste and and intransigence and they want that out So the America First Policy Institute gets rolling and it does what it does and the Heritage Foundation has been doing what it does Has Trump embraced the America First initiative?

00:16:01 Speaker_06
Does he favor it over heritage? What kind of relationship has there been?

00:16:05 Speaker_01
From the outset, this group makes it very clear that they want to ingratiate themselves to former President Trump. So it's notable that their very first fundraising gala in late 2021 is held at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump's private club in Florida.

00:16:20 Speaker_01
He's the keynote speaker at that event. And indeed, they would continue to have their galas every year since then at Mar-a-Lago, which is, among other things, a way to keep President in his mind and Also, frankly, to give him some money.

00:16:34 Speaker_01
When you don't get to have a gala at Mar-a-Lago for free, you pay a rent. And my colleague David Fahrenthold and I looked a bit into this and saw that they paid considerable amounts of money to the club for the right to have these events there.

00:16:47 Speaker_01
Trump responded and very early on seemed to have given his blessing to the America First Policy Institute.

00:16:53 Speaker_01
One of his outside fundraising groups gave a million dollars to the organization in its first year, and he has spoken at a number of events and hosted other kinds of fundraisers to raise money for them.

00:17:04 Speaker_01
Sort of very early on, he made it clear that he liked this group and was supportive of them.

00:17:08 Speaker_01
Um, there is one caveat, though, which is that he, late last year, began to express some frustration with the group, um, because he felt, as he sometimes does, that these groups were essentially taking money from him. This is a recurring theme.

00:17:22 Speaker_01
He feels that people are... If people raise money on things that are linked to him, that that money should go to him or to his different processes. And he decided that the term, America First, uh, which the group had taken,

00:17:34 Speaker_01
was kind of his term, and that they were, when they raised a dollar, it was a dollar that was rightfully his.

00:17:40 Speaker_01
So that created a little bit of a tension point between the two groups, because Trump somehow felt that what they did were really his efforts.

00:17:47 Speaker_01
They seem to have wrinkled that out, though, and I think the way they've done that is to, when he said, be quiet, they have been pretty quiet.

00:17:54 Speaker_06
You're right that the America First Policy Institute has already drafted nearly 300 executive orders ready for Trump to sign. I don't know if he saw them, but their policy agenda does include some distinct policy proposals.

00:18:10 Speaker_06
Do you want to share a few with us?

00:18:12 Speaker_01
Yeah, so probably the most important policy proposal by the America First Policy Institute is about changing civil service and how it works, but I think in a lot of other areas they have ideas as well.

00:18:23 Speaker_01
The Institute is very pro-petroleum and part of its agenda is encouraging more drilling and exploration. on federal lands. They want to open up new portions of federal lands for exploration.

00:18:36 Speaker_01
They also want to create a fast-track system for approving existing and new permits, requesting permission to drill and pump oil out of the ground and natural gas out of the ground.

00:18:47 Speaker_01
They also, on that point, want to continue building the Keystone Pipeline, which is something that President Biden halted. So that's one area.

00:18:56 Speaker_01
Another, for example, on reproductive rights and abortion, they want to change the way that women could get and seek abortions.

00:19:04 Speaker_01
They would want mandates requiring that every woman by law have supervised ultrasound before having an abortion, including what are called chemical or medication abortions.

00:19:14 Speaker_01
So they would require ultrasound and a waiting period after the ultrasound before being able to seek the abortion on that same track.

00:19:22 Speaker_01
They want to cut off federal funding to groups like Planned Parenthood that provide a range of health services far beyond just abortion. Gun control is another area. They are against red flag laws. Red flag laws are laws that

00:19:37 Speaker_01
are designed to allow state authorities and other kinds of authorities to potentially deny or restrict gun ownership for people with certain kinds of mental health issues or legal issues that make them a high-risk candidate for owning firearms.

00:19:51 Speaker_01
They've also indicated they would like to see reciprocity among all 50 states for things like concealed carry laws. So even though concealed carry is, in some states, extremely difficult, if not impossible, to get,

00:20:05 Speaker_01
they would like to see a regime in which, if you could get it in a state where it's relatively easy to get a concealed permit license, that would be all you would need to carry that weapon in a concealed manner in all 50 states.

00:20:18 Speaker_01
And, you know, there's a range of other kinds of policies, and it's pretty sweeping, tackling sort of all four corners of what we think of the responsibilities of government, from healthcare to foreign policy to economic policy to, you know, even agricultural policy.

00:20:31 Speaker_01
So it's a pretty... thoroughly well-thought-out plan.

00:20:35 Speaker_01
I should add that the America First Policy Institute's policy book is kind of a slim volume compared to the much more famous one from the Heritage Foundation, the Project 2025 book, and it does not get to the granular detail.

00:20:48 Speaker_01
Nonetheless, it does cover a significant amount of ground.

00:20:52 Speaker_06
Ken Benzinger is a political reporter for the New York Times. He'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.

00:21:02 Speaker_05
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00:21:14 Speaker_05
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00:21:25 Speaker_05
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00:22:57 Speaker_06
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. My guest is New York Times political reporter Ken Benzinger.

00:23:04 Speaker_06
He's written lately about the American First Policy Institute, a little-known group of Donald Trump supporters who stand to exert considerable influence over a Trump administration should he win the election.

00:23:16 Speaker_06
The group is distinct from the Heritage Foundation, which produced the controversial Plan 2025.

00:23:22 Speaker_06
Bensinger has also reported on the Trump campaign's refusal to sign agreements set in federal law to start the presidential transition process, a posture that could exempt the Trump team from ethics rules, fundraising restrictions, and disclosure requirements.

00:23:38 Speaker_06
We recorded our conversation yesterday.

00:23:41 Speaker_06
It's interesting though, the America First Policy Institute has that phrase, America First in its name, which was I believe the name that – of the movement championed by Charles Lindbergh back in the 30s to keep the United States out of World War II and which was also associated to some extent with pro-Nazi sentiments in the United States.

00:24:00 Speaker_06
Do you know if the folks behind this are aware of that or feel any need to distance themselves from that movement?

00:24:10 Speaker_01
I think it's with beggar belief to think that people involved in Trump's agenda and the people close to him are blind to that history of that phrase. We saw it in this past week that there was a big Trump rally in Madison Square Garden in New York.

00:24:24 Speaker_01
Well, there's an incredible amount of symbolism there. And that's, of course, because notoriously, there was a huge rally for fascists in New York City in 1939 in Madison Square Garden, where we saw

00:24:37 Speaker_01
a big crowd of people doing Nazi salutes and you saw on stage a giant illuminated image of George Washington flanked by two swastikas. It doesn't seem like an accident that the Trump administration decided to do its own event at MSG.

00:24:51 Speaker_01
People were going to obviously draw those connections. There's another event that comes to mind that's kind of like that, which is that one of the first rallies that Trump held

00:25:00 Speaker_01
In his campaign, when he began this current campaign season, was in Texas at the same site of the famous standoff between federal law enforcement and the Branch Davidians.

00:25:09 Speaker_01
He chose to have his first rally there in Texas on, I believe, the exact same day as that ended up in disaster, where the building burned to the ground and many people were killed. It's become a sort of a signal moment on the right.

00:25:23 Speaker_01
The people around Trump are very sensitive to the symbolic meaning of these kinds of things, and I don't think it's an accident that they adopted that term.

00:25:31 Speaker_01
America First comes to represent a very, I think, nativist kind of attitude that's at odds with what we think of as traditional conservatism. But traditional conservatism is kind of de passé these days.

00:25:42 Speaker_01
What's trendy on the right is this America First idea that we should not be involved in foreign things, that we shouldn't

00:25:48 Speaker_01
send our money overseas, that we should try to close the borders and keep America for itself and never mind the rest of the world.

00:25:55 Speaker_01
So I think while Trump administration people push back at any ideas that they're fascist and hate that term, understandably, they do share a lot of the ideas that we saw so many years ago.

00:26:07 Speaker_06
It's worth remembering that when details of Project 2025 produced by the Heritage Foundation became public and people began criticizing it, Donald Trump disowned it. He said he didn't know what it was. He hadn't really read it.

00:26:19 Speaker_06
He didn't agree with it at all. It sounds as if this group, the American First Policy Institute, which has maybe a better connection to the Trump organization, has a lot of the same ideas.

00:26:36 Speaker_01
Yeah, there's a lot of overlap. I would probably agree with people who say that Project 2025, in some areas, has an even more ambitious agenda. It's probably, in a couple points, more sweeping and more aggressive.

00:26:48 Speaker_01
But there is a huge amount of overlap in terms of their policy goals. And that's not a surprise, because they're both sort of modeled after what was seen as Trump's agenda in his first administration.

00:26:59 Speaker_01
And that's kind of the starting point, and the things that they have grew out of those ideas. Where America First Policy Institute, I think, really stands out compared to Project 2025 is in being low profile.

00:27:12 Speaker_01
They made a choice well over a year ago to keep quiet, to motor along without making a lot of noise and not drawing attention to themselves. And that's been, I think, really critical to their success.

00:27:24 Speaker_01
I think Project 2025 thought that it wanted the whole world to sort of know what its agenda was and draw as much attention to it as possible. hold all kinds of high-profile events to promote that. And that turned out to be a strategic mistake.

00:27:38 Speaker_01
President Trump, he generally likes to be the center of the show and likes to be the one seen to be driving the bus and takes not particularly kindly to groups that want a bit of that spotlight. And whether fairly or not,

00:27:52 Speaker_01
he began to feel it seems that Project 2025 was getting too much spotlight, was making too much noise, and was becoming kind of an annoying sort of gnat flying in his ear and distracting him from what he wanted to do.

00:28:04 Speaker_01
America First Policy Institute was quieter. And as a result, it seems like they've sort of coasted into a spot that perhaps could have been occupied by Project 2025 until a few months ago. I think it's important to note that the political season.

00:28:19 Speaker_01
And to some degree, the Democratic Party also played a role in that, which is that Trump's desire to have Project 2025 and other groups keep relatively quiet, you know, kind of was prescient because when Project 2025 started making noise, the Democrats picked up on it.

00:28:34 Speaker_01
And they have made Project 2025 a cornerstone of their messaging about

00:28:40 Speaker_01
the race and have made extreme efforts, I would say, very strong efforts to try to tie President Trump to it over and over again, which is why he has protests that he knows nothing about it.

00:28:50 Speaker_01
Well, it's a bit ludicrous to imagine he knows nothing about it. There's, you know, endless numbers of ties between him and people who have worked on Project 2025 and photographs of him with the head of heritage and all this stuff.

00:29:02 Speaker_01
it makes it very clear he has a connection. But what he's really saying is, I no longer want anything to do with it.

00:29:06 Speaker_01
And in his kind of rhetoric, he'll say, I never heard of it, because that's kind of his way of saying, I washed my hands of this thing. And to this day, the Democratic Party continues to hammer Trump on Project 2025.

00:29:20 Speaker_01
If you turn on the television, whether you're in a swing state or not right now, you're going to see ads from the Democratic Party and from political action committees supporting it that tie Trump to Project 2025. Meanwhile,

00:29:32 Speaker_01
No one is doing ads about the America First Policy Institute. No one's talking about this group that actually is basically involved in running the transition and creating the policy agenda for next term.

00:29:42 Speaker_06
We need to take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Ken Benzinger. He is a political reporter for The New York Times. We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is fresh air.

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00:30:56 Speaker_06
This is Fresh Air and we're speaking with Ken Benzinger.

00:30:58 Speaker_06
He is a political reporter for The New York Times who's written recently about some little-known players making plans to influence a second term in the Trump White House should Trump win election.

00:31:10 Speaker_06
Now there's also a formal transition process described in federal law. I didn't know this.

00:31:16 Speaker_06
There was a presidential transition act passed in 1963, amended several times, and you've written about how the Trump campaign has really not engaged in the process that's defined in federal law.

00:31:28 Speaker_06
First of all, just in a general sense, what do these federal laws expect campaigns to do months before the election to prepare for a transition?

00:31:38 Speaker_01
The Presidential Transition Act, or sometimes in really wonky circles called the PTA, is a law that was originally created in the 60s, as you mentioned, because it dawned on people that this transition thing was very complicated and hard to do and needed people to be working on it ahead of time.

00:31:51 Speaker_01
And the goal was to set deadlines for doing certain things and ultimately to provide resources to transition teams so they could make it possible.

00:32:00 Speaker_01
And as the law stands now, the government offers all kinds of services to incoming administrations and to actually candidates before the election as well to try to guide that transition.

00:32:11 Speaker_01
And in exchange for that, it sets certain deadlines that they have to meet to get those services. So the government will offer campaigns, transition team, office space, tech support, email servers, letterhead, that sort of thing, as well as money.

00:32:26 Speaker_01
And all they have to do to get that is to sign these memorandum of understanding to show that they're on board with the plan. And there are deadlines to sign these memoranda of, I believe, September 1st and October 1st are the two primary ones.

00:32:39 Speaker_01
And once you sign those, you get all this access. It's really important also that you sign them because you need to be able to begin communicating with the different agencies, getting national security briefings, that sort of thing.

00:32:52 Speaker_01
And all that is contingent upon signing these memoranda. The Kamala Harris transition has duly signed all the necessary paperwork and has shown itself ready to comply with the law, even though, of course, it's sort of a hybrid situation because the

00:33:08 Speaker_01
Kamala Harris is currently a part of the administration, so she's already sort of at least got one foot in that game. But she has signed it and is playing along. The Trump transition has taken a completely different tack.

00:33:18 Speaker_01
They have refused to sign either of the memoranda of understanding they're supposed to, and they've blown past both deadlines.

00:33:26 Speaker_06
Now I gather that doing that would require the campaign to adhere to certain ethical restrictions and fundraising limits, right?

00:33:33 Speaker_01
Yeah, that's right. When you sign these documents, you're agreeing to comply with certain things. And so one of them, for example, is you have to agree to disclose how much money you raise for the transition project. and who is giving you the money.

00:33:47 Speaker_01
And you have to agree to a limit of no more than $5,000 of donations per donor. Transition fundraising is this kind of funny little place in the world of fundraising. It is not unlike campaign contributions or presidential inauguration fundraising.

00:34:02 Speaker_01
It is not regulated by the Federal Elections Commission. In fact, the only place that regulates it is the General Services Administration, which puts these limits on it if you sign the document.

00:34:11 Speaker_01
But in a way that no one anticipated, the Trump transition is refusing to sign the document that would require to comply with that.

00:34:19 Speaker_01
And what that means and what people close to the transition have told me is that they feel they can raise as much money as they want from individuals and that they never have to share who gave them money.

00:34:31 Speaker_01
And I should add that really, I misspoke when I said individuals because it could also be from organization, institutions, private companies and in fact foreign entities.

00:34:40 Speaker_01
It is truly a dark pool of money that if the incoming Trump administration doesn't sign it, no one will ever basically ever know how much money came in and who it came from. So that's one piece.

00:34:51 Speaker_01
The other piece is the ethics code in order to get access to government agencies and to get national security clearance and all that sort of thing.

00:35:00 Speaker_01
Incoming transition teams are required to create an ethics code that they write and that they sign and they show to the current White House to make sure it conforms with federal law about what the ethics code should say.

00:35:13 Speaker_01
And that's supposed to prevent conflicts of interest. It's supposed to make sure that when people are getting access to these federal agencies, they don't trade off the information they're being shown. They don't use that for personal gain.

00:35:25 Speaker_01
They don't, you know, share that with lobbyists or use that for lobbying purposes of their own.

00:35:30 Speaker_01
You can sort of imagine what it would be like if someone opens all the secret books of every federal agency and all the secret information and protected information they contain, how people who are not scrupulous could trade off that information.

00:35:44 Speaker_01
The Trump transition has actually developed its own ethics code, but it has not been accepted or not been submitted in a way that is acceptable to the current administration and has not been posted online as law requires.

00:35:58 Speaker_01
Ethics experts I've talked to have said that in part that might be because it doesn't comply with the law, that the ethics code proposed by Trump's transition simply falls short of what is required in terms of ethical safeguards and that it is

00:36:12 Speaker_01
very inadequate in terms of protecting against conflicts of interest.

00:36:16 Speaker_06
Wow. So what does the Trump campaign have to say about this?

00:36:20 Speaker_01
So the Trump transition has issued a statement, they gave me a statement, I think they gave it to others as well, but they fully intend to sign the memorandums of understanding and that they intend to get the ethics code through and that they intend to get access to all the agencies

00:36:35 Speaker_01
and to do what's necessary to make sure there's a smooth transition. But that was weeks and weeks ago, and they still haven't signed anything.

00:36:44 Speaker_01
Sources inside the federal government tell me that they have really tried hard to come to an agreement with the Trump transition to get them to sign what's required, and that it's basically gotten them almost nowhere.

00:36:57 Speaker_01
And some people think that the strategy might be from the Trump transition is to do nothing until after the election. If they lose, well, perhaps it's a moot.

00:37:06 Speaker_01
And if they win, their leverage over the Biden administration, which would be outgoing at that point, would be huge because essentially you can imagine a giant game of chicken where the incoming Trump

00:37:18 Speaker_01
administration would say, look, if you care about national security and you care about a smooth transition so that the country is safe, you're going to find a way to play ball with us and dare them to refuse to accept whatever terms the incoming Trump administration desires.

00:37:34 Speaker_01
Essentially, we're going to give you a watered-down ethics code and you can take it or leave it.

00:37:39 Speaker_06
From what you're saying, it sounds as if, if this agreement is not set, then the Trump team could raise money in any amounts from large donors, from corporations, even foreign entities and not have to report it.

00:37:54 Speaker_06
I mean that's certainly very different from campaign finance rules. What was the experience when Trump won the first time? The federal law was in place then too. What happened then?

00:38:05 Speaker_01
So in 2016, the Trump campaign hired Chris Christie to run its transition, the former governor of New Jersey. And by all accounts, it was a very well run transition up until election day of 2016 when Trump won.

00:38:19 Speaker_01
And almost immediately, Trump fired Chris Christie and brought in a new transition regime. And that transition regime had a very different concept of

00:38:29 Speaker_01
what transition was supposed to be, and immediately began sort of discarding all the work that had been done by Christie and the people working with him. And interestingly, that was a point of tension.

00:38:38 Speaker_01
It was another one of those moments where Donald Trump thought that someone was raising money in his name, which he often called stealing his money, and one of the reasons he was angry at Christie for running the transition.

00:38:48 Speaker_01
Of course, Christie was raising the money because transitions are hard and complicated and do require a lot of staffing and travel and all that sort of expensive stuff, and so that money was needed.

00:38:58 Speaker_01
Trump saw it as his money and wanted Christie's hands off it.

00:39:01 Speaker_01
One of the things that's important to know about transitions is that it's somewhat hard to raise money for a transition before the election because who wants to give money for an uncertain bet, but it's quite easy to raise money for a transition after election because everyone wants to curry favor with the incoming administration, just the same way we see with inauguration funds.

00:39:18 Speaker_01
But inauguration funds require a lot more disclosure. And this stuff, even when they comply with the law, only requires a notation of how much money the individual is donating and has that $5,000 cap.

00:39:30 Speaker_01
You can imagine if there's no cap and no disclosure, instead of a $5,000 donation, you could imagine a lobbyist, for example, giving $20 million. Why not? If that'll buy you access and favor with the president.

00:39:42 Speaker_01
And there is very little guidance on how the money is supposed to be spent. In theory, it's supposed to be spent on the transition, but no one really knows if there's any limits on how the money could be spent or where it could go.

00:39:53 Speaker_01
The transition is set up as a 501c4 charity, which is a politically oriented nonprofit organization under IRS rules. And for example, that money instead could be spent on advocating for other candidates. It could be spent to pay off debts of campaigns.

00:40:08 Speaker_01
There's all kinds of other ways. that money could be spent that have nothing to do with presidential transition.

00:40:14 Speaker_06
One other thing that was an issue in the Trump administration from time to time were background checks. That's part of the transition process, right? To vet people that are gonna have access to important information.

00:40:26 Speaker_06
How's that working with the Trump campaign?

00:40:29 Speaker_01
Well, the Trump transition, of course, is not participating in the formal transition process yet. At some point, they're going to have to do something. They're going to have to get access to government agencies and to get national security briefings.

00:40:40 Speaker_01
And to do that, they need to get security clearance.

00:40:42 Speaker_01
And traditionally, the way that's done is with FBI investigations of each person, the FBI vets candidates and make sure they don't have conflicts of interest or other problems that should prevent them from getting security clearance.

00:40:54 Speaker_01
But my colleagues, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, recently discovered that people close to Trump are proposing a new system that would essentially cut the FBI out of the process and instead have sort of private firms, law firms or security firms, do the vetting for them and allow that process to be sufficient to gain national security clearance.

00:41:18 Speaker_01
And this might reflect some of the problems that we saw in the first Trump administration, where people close to the president had problems getting security clearance because of potential conflicts or because of their vast behavior.

00:41:29 Speaker_01
And it slowed things down and got in the way of what President Trump wanted. And under this system, essentially, the Trump team would call the shots on who gets national security clearance.

00:41:41 Speaker_01
And people who observe that are extremely worried about that because

00:41:45 Speaker_01
They think it could set the table for really malign actors or people with real conflicts and problems to get access to the most closely guarded secrets in the government and truly could put the country at risk and, you know, even essentially sell those positions to the highest bidder through kind of quid pro quo arrangements.

00:42:07 Speaker_01
It is a very concerning thing.

00:42:08 Speaker_01
I want to be clear, this has not been approved, this has not been formally proposed by the Trump transition or by Donald Trump, but it is clear that people close to him are whispering in his ear that this would be a good idea.

00:42:23 Speaker_06
Well, Ken Benzinger, thanks so much for speaking with us. Thank you so much for having me, Dave. Ken Benzinger is a political reporter for The New York Times.

00:42:33 Speaker_06
Coming up, John Powers reviews the new film A Real Pain, a comic drama starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin. This is Fresh Air.

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00:43:51 Speaker_06
This is fresh air. A Real Pain is a new comic drama written and directed by actor Jesse Eisenberg.

00:43:58 Speaker_06
It's the story of two cousins, played by Eisenberg and Succession's Kieran Culkin, who take a tour of Poland to honor the memory of their Holocaust survivor grandmother.

00:44:08 Speaker_06
Our critic-at-large John Powers says the movie, which opens this week, isn't just incredibly entertaining, it's one of the best movies he's seen about coming to terms with the past. Here's John.

00:44:20 Speaker_03
We live in an era of ceaseless, shocking normalization. Things that were once thought beyond the pale—today's political discourse, say, or TV ads for ED—are now accepted as routine.

00:44:35 Speaker_03
These days, it no longer seems bizarre that there's an industry devoted to taking tourists to Holocaust sites, with fancy food and hotels as part of the package. One person who clearly finds this kind of tourism odd is Jesse Eisenberg.

00:44:51 Speaker_03
Indeed, such a tour forms the spine of A Real Pain, a quietly thrilling movie that he wrote, directed, and co-stars in.

00:44:59 Speaker_03
Following two cousins on a Jewish heritage tour of Poland, Eisenberg uses this cockeyed version of a road movie to tell a funny, moving, casually profound story about family, friendship, the weight of the Jewish past, the weight of everyone's past, and the different ways one deals with suffering.

00:45:18 Speaker_03
Eisenberg plays David Kaplan, a prosperous married ad salesman who's taking this Polish tour with his cousin Benji. That's Kieran Culkin, a wounded soul with whom he was once quite close.

00:45:31 Speaker_03
They plan to end their trip by visiting the hometown of their recently deceased grandmother, who escaped from one of the camps.

00:45:38 Speaker_03
But first, under the eyes of a well-meaning Gentile British guide, an excellent Will Sharp, they join a small group that includes a melancholy divorcee, played by Jennifer Gray, and a Tootsie survivor of the Rwandan genocide.

00:45:52 Speaker_03
That's Curse Egeowon, who's converted to Judaism.

00:45:56 Speaker_03
As the group visits graveyards and memorials, heading toward the Majdanek death camp, David and Benji josh around, kvetch, reminisce about the past, smoke dope on Warsaw rooftops, and try to figure out a relationship that's changed over the years.

00:46:11 Speaker_03
Where Eisenberg's David is stressed and responsible, Culkin's Benji is a sort of Lenny-Bruce-style manic-depressive, who can get everyone laughing with his sunny, profane directness, then thunderclap into emotional darkness.

00:46:25 Speaker_03
David envies Benji for his truth-telling panache. Benji envies David for having a wife and son to love him. Here, over dinner, David starts telling the group about their grandmother, prompting an unhappy response from Benji.

00:46:41 Speaker_02
You know, Grandma never pitied herself. In fact, she always told me she was grateful for her struggle.

00:46:46 Speaker_03
Well, that's just it. What she endured, that gave her hope, right?

00:46:50 Speaker_02
Yes. In fact, she used to tell me that, like, you know, first-generation immigrants work some, like, menial job. You know, they drive cabs, they deliver food.

00:46:57 Speaker_02
Second generation, they go to good schools and they become, like, you know, a doctor or a lawyer or whatever. And the third generation lives in their mother's basement and smokes pot all day. She said that?

00:47:13 Speaker_02
I think she was, like, just speaking generally about, like, the immigrant experience. I lived in my mom's basement. She was just talking about immigrants. Okay. That's all.

00:47:19 Speaker_03
Yeah. A Real Pain is an almost perfect little film whose tiny flaws make it more human. It's never preeningly artful. But artful it is, sharply written and directed with a delicate feel for ambivalence and ambiguity. There's no cheap emotion in it.

00:47:38 Speaker_03
The scene when Benji and David reach their grandmother's house is a gem of shifting emotional and historical overtones. And the stars are just terrific, playing nifty riffs on two familiar types.

00:47:50 Speaker_03
Eisenberg shines as an anxious good guy who, caught up in work in his own head, has trouble seeing and emotionally engaging with those who are unhappy, partly because they make him feel guilty.

00:48:02 Speaker_03
Although David may actually learn more on their trip than his cousin, Benji is the flashier part, and Eisenberg generously gives it to his co-star.

00:48:11 Speaker_03
As his Roman Roy in succession made clear, Calkin knows how to make us enjoy and have sympathy for the pinball machine flamboyance of damaged men.

00:48:22 Speaker_03
His Benji may be mired in emotional distress, yet he still sees the sadness behind other people's eyes and refuses to pretend it's not there.

00:48:31 Speaker_03
Even as he leads the group to pose comically on the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto, David keeps an uneasily respectful distance, Benji's also the tour member who explodes when they travel first class on a Polish train, given the meaning of trains in Jewish history.

00:48:48 Speaker_03
People can't go around being happy all the time, he snaps. Although it's filled with great jokes, A Real Pain tackles something big and hard.

00:48:57 Speaker_03
It explores how we confront pain, an inescapable reality that ranges from the epic horror of industrial murder that guts David and Benji at the death camp, to our own personal losses that are no less real because they aren't as historically vast as the Holocaust.

00:49:14 Speaker_03
With the lightest of touches, Eisenberg's stunning film got me thinking about the different ways we deal with suffering, both past and present. Should we simply get on with life, as David often seems to?

00:49:28 Speaker_03
Or should we take that pain into ourselves, as does Benjy? Or is there a way to somehow do both?

00:49:36 Speaker_06
John Powers reviewed the new movie, A Real Pain. On tomorrow's show, how foreign powers, including Russia and Iran, are developing new ways to manipulate American voters.

00:49:47 Speaker_06
We'll talk with David Kirkpatrick of The New Yorker about a new government group created to combat foreign influence, how it decides what to tell the public, and concerns that its warnings can backfire. I hope you can join us.

00:50:14 Speaker_06
To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director is Audrey Bentham. Our engineer is Adam Staniszewski.

00:50:28 Speaker_06
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00:50:43 Speaker_06
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