Tom, he did say in an interview recently that he was going to give a uniting speech. So should he? Is it time that he changed his tone and becomes this kind of kinder, gentler vision of himself? Sure.

I think he would be well advised to parlay his popular vote victory and his winning of all these, you know, pretty significant electoral college mandate, 312 electoral votes in this day and age into something more than what he did last time. I'm going to fix this. I'm the guy. And so I think he'd be better served to start talking about we as the people and restoring America and all that. But listen, you know, people thought that we were going to get the kinder, gentler Donald Trump after his near death experience in Butler, Pennsylvania, when he gave a speech at the RNC, and that lasted for about 11 minutes. And then he did 44 minutes, you know, sort of standard, some speech, fire and brimstone. So I don't know what his plans are, but I do think he would be well advised to really try and provide an uplifting, forward-looking message about, you know, where he's going to, what he hopes to achieve over the next four years, what he hopes to do for the country, that we're all in this together instead of what he did last which was, as Carl said, pretty dark and pretty singular and in some ways sort of backward looking.

Yeah. You know what I'm going to be watching for? I want to see if he stays on script or on teleprompter because, you know, you remind me, Tom, and we were all there at the Republican convention in Milwaukee last summer where he came out to make this speech. And again, yeah, like you were saying, it was like, you know, people expected sort of this new, improved or kinder and gentler Donald Trump. And it did. It lasted about seven or eight minutes. And then sort of got the feeling that he read the room, thought he was losing his audience a little bit, and then just went like, you know, full on old fashioned Trump. I'm just wondering whether he'll do that. And now that he's inside Carl, will he have the discipline to keep it short? Because when he's inside at these, you know, he's used to talking for three hours. So Andy, it's the first thing I thought of. I thought, oh, no, because if he's outside,

he's cold. Right. Then he's not going to go on like Fidel Castro. You know, I often mention Fidel Castro-linked speeches, but Castro lived in Cuba. It was okay. The weather there is always nice. But the other part to what you said, Andy, I hadn't thought of this, but now that you mentioned it, the other hazard is that he's gonna be inside and it's gonna seem less formal. It's not going to be this big inaugural address where you're facing the mall. You know, he might start riffing like he did at the Alph Smith dinner or something, because he's going to be indoors. He'll want the crowd with him. But the crowd, you know, if there was one thing I would tell the president, if I was on his staff before he walked out to the lectern on inauguration days, that's not the audience, Mr president that's not the audience the audience is the 50 million americans at home we're watching on television that's the audience yeah

you know i'm a broken record on this and i'm with you i always think that politicians the good ones understand that and you if you watch you know a clinton or an obama they somehow are able to play to both the room and the audience at home. And other politicians just don't understand that they're the real audiences out there at the other side of that television camera. Well,

the best guy who understood that was Reagan. Well, yeah, he'd grown up in television. Yeah. Trump's

a television guy, too, though. But Andy, to your point, I mean, I was on the floor of the of the RNC and I was watching the teleprompter, looking at Trump and watching to see. And there was a very specific moment. He sort of gave this very intimate beginning and recitation of what happened in Butler. But there was a moment where he just simply stopped and and stopped reading what was what was written for him because he felt like he had lost the room. And for Trump, it's all about that visceral reaction and connection to the audience in, you know, the live audience, if you will. And, you know, it didn't come across that same way on TV, but he certainly felt like he'd lost the room. And so he went in a different direction.

Tom, it's an interesting cast of mine that you think, I'm losing the room. I need to bring Hannibal Lecter into this conversation. We'll see. You know, we should have a drinking

game. And it's

noon. It's a little early. A little

day drinking is sometimes appropriate.

He would not mention Hannibal Lecter in an inaugural address, would he, Andy? Well,

I don't know. I don't know if I'm going to put that on my bingo card. They're eating the cats. They're eating the dogs. Tom, what do you make of the guest list? I mean, both the people who are coming and the people who aren't, there'll be a lot of tech oligarchs there. That's our new term for them, I guess, or not all of our term, but that's the term of the day. And there'll be some people who won't be there, including Michelle Obama and Nancy Pelosi.

Well, I mean, I don't know that I'm surprised by the last two. But look, we talked about this yesterday. And this is a different environment, a different atmosphere for Trump. I mean, when he came in in 2016, 2017 for inauguration, there were protests and there was, you know, protesting in the street. There was the entire sort of left wing sort of lost their minds. And it was this idea that he didn't deserve to be president. It was he was not legitimate and they were going to resist. That was it. The resistance formed immediately, completely different this time. And so there aren't the protests, there isn't the resistance. And by the way, Trump has won over a bunch of folks who were either against him last time or weren't for him necessarily, but now have expressed either verbally or through financial commitments to his inaugural or whatever, support for him. And I think that's what makes this really fascinating and why it is such an opportunity for him this time around to take a different path than he did in 2017. It's a completely different environment. And if he recognizes that and he gives the proper speech with the proper tone, I mean, it could really help him in the first couple of months of his administration.

Andy, I don't know why Pelosi isn't going, but I think Michelle Obama should be there. And, you know, she gave a very tough speech at the Chicago Convention, the Democratic Convention, about Donald Trump and why voting for him was a bad idea. And she tried to rally people and she did some events. She campaigned hard for Kamala Harris. And she was apparently bitterly disappointed that Kamala Harris lost. But to me, she should be there. She was a very popular first lady. I thought she was a great first lady. I liked her. And to her friends or critics or some of the left-wing people in our profession who would say, oh, how can she do that? Is that hypocritical? No, it's not hypocritical. She had an easy answer for that. She could say, I'm a hopeful person, I'm an optimistic person, and I hope Donald Trump proves me wrong. And she's the former for say, I kind of think she should be there. Would

skipping the inaugural be, would you characterize that as going low, Carl? For

those of our listeners or viewers who don't know that reference.

Oh, our audience knows that reference. Please, come on. You're listening to this show. You know it.

I don't know if it's going low, but it is not going high.

Well, Carl, I want to get your take on one more thing, which is that the entertainment for the inaugural, they've been announced. Here are some of the performers. Carrie Underwood, Lee Greenwood, Christopher Macchio, who's the classical singer who comes uh he's been in a lot of trump rallies jason aldeen and the village people and um i'm just wondering what you make culturally of the idea that the village people have emerged as the sort of band for Donald Trump. Well, they're kind of the Fleetwood Mac of Donald Trump. I know. I guess it's because of the Trump dance, right, Tom? It is.