The question of the first hundred days, let's turn to that. What are you both looking for? What do you think is going to happen? What do you think is realistic? What do you think, if anything, is more bluster than actual policy? We'll start with Dave Dayen. There

are two tracks to this, right? So one is what Trump is going to do himself with a flurry of executive orders and actions. And then the second is what Congress is going to do to forward Trump's agenda. Actually, both in some ways are up in the air, but the legislative stuff is much more up in the air because Republicans can't decide even what they're going to decide. So they haven't figured out how they are going to go forward. They basically have three or four big issues that they want to tackle. One is money for the border. Second, and really for deportations. Second is energy stuff, opening up the country, basically the drilling. Third is dealing with the end of the Trump tax cuts. And then to a lesser extent, there's some defense hawks that actually want to increase the military budget right now, even as they have this directive to lower spending. And how all of those play together, is it all in one bill that everything I just talked about ends up getting in there? Or are they going to do it in stages? That hasn't been figured out, and it kind of has to be figured out now because the way that you get around the filibusters through a process called budget reconciliation, and to do budget reconciliation, you need to essentially set in place the terms for it now. You have to pass a budget resolution that says, this is what we're going to do. This is what it's going to contain. Details come later. And then we move forward. And the Senate wants to do it in a two-stage process. And the House wants to do it in a one-stage process. And they have to agree. So there's a real problem with figuring out the circumstances, the procedures for how they're going to pass their agenda. On the executive actions, it's much more clear they're going to do a bunch of splashy executive orders that give the appearance of forward motion, some on things that aren't going to matter as much. But there is a lot of potential for infighting and gridlock within Congress, frustrating the ability to get anything done. Ryan

Grimm, again, first hundred days. And there are some foreign policy questions. I mean, is the war in Ukraine going to end? Is the ceasefire going to hold? I mean, DropSite focuses a lot on foreign policy, national security. Anything to add on those?

Yeah, Ukraine is a good point. A lot of people in Trump's orbit have been pushing to wrap that thing up and basically just draw the lines wherever they are and call it a day. And so we'll see. the, you know, the security establishment, what Trump calls the deep state is deeply hostile to that idea. But we'll, so we'll see, you know, this is round two of Trump first, the security establishments. We'll see if he's, he's learned anything and whether he has, you know, people in place like this guy, Elbridge Colby, who's kind of running policy over at the Pentagon, Peteete hegseth you know wants to wrap this up but he's not doesn't doesn't strike me as necessarily the most kind of uh effective bureaucratic operator so you know it's not it's not the guy that you'd want leading the charge for reform of like an institution the size of the pentagon but you know that's what they went with because he's on fox news and trump loves to move people from fox news into his into his government. Yeah, and then in 42 days, you may see it blow up again in Israel. We'll see. At the same time, it's possible he could try to start signing another Iran nuclear deal. The thing he didn't like about the nuclear deal was, one, there were people in the Republican Party that wanted it ended. But more importantly, it was called the Obama nuclear deal. And so he wanted to, now it could be the Trump nuclear

deal. And I think he'd be totally fine with that. There's another side to this, though, when you're talking about foreign policy, and that is Trump's recent kind of lunge towards McKinley-style manifest destiny imperialism, talking about Greenland and acquiring Greenland for a player to be named later, and the Panama Canal, and what I think is a joke, but maybe, you know, jokes sometimes change to making a vassal state out of Canada. I think that there's a ton of appeal for Trump on that, just from one sense that it creates a new set of enemies. It creates a new set of provocations that he can supply to his base. And, you know, there are some geopolitical reasons, both for the Panama Canal, but with respect to China, it could be a move preferatory to a deal that says, you know, we'll take our sphere of influence and you take yours. You go ahead with Taiwan, the South China Sea, and we take the Panama Canal into our sphere. There are rare earth minerals and other natural resources in the Greenland part of the equation. But I don't know. The MAGA world kind of grew up around more

of a paleoconservative isolationism. And this isn't that. It almost feels like an apology for stepping back from war. Like, okay, I'm going to send a whole lot of weapons and I'm not going to do the wars and all the killing, but I'm definitely doing the imperial thing. We're going to take Greenland. We're even going to take Canada. We're going to take Panama. And it's like, how about this? Does this satisfy your lust for American greatness? You

know, and it actually strikes me as a little bit Reagan-ish in a certain sense in that Ronald Reagan, I mean, there were a couple of flashpoints, proxy wars under the Reagan administration, you know, Central America and the like, and not to downplay those, but those are relatively small proxy war conflagrations. They weren't, you know, the nation at war, but also Reagan talked a huge game on, you know, nuclear buildup. Obviously the Cold War was going on. There was sort of a tough talking military posture that, I mean, Reagan had described as peace through strength. Right. And I think, I feel like Trump. It's actually

the reverse of Roosevelt's talk quietly and use a big stick. It's like talk loudly, but use a really little stick. Exactly.

And I feel like Trump, I feel like, and maybe I'm, maybe I'm, you know, wishful thinking, or I'm hoping, you know, we're not going to get into some, another huge war, but it feels like Trump doesn't necessarily want to be in a giant war, but also believes one way to keep us out of wars is to, is to, yeah, like, like have all this bravado about whether it's, you know, I'm taking Greenland, I'm taking the Panama Canal, right? I feel like, you know, I'm going to push the button on North Korea. I feel like it's part of kind of a strategy, right?

Yeah, he's internalized kind of the madman theory, like the Nixon theory that if you're just crazy enough that you can sort of make the rest of the world cower. The problem is, is similar to what you were talking about earlier, there are a lot of new madmen, right? I mean, there's the urbanization of the rest of the world is going to make it a little bit more difficult to just be the madman and expect the institutionalist to, you know, back off.

Yeah, I mean, I worry about the madman theory or the bravado theory of foreign policy running into a game of chicken, right? That some other Trumpish person and a leader in another country, somehow there becomes a nobody can back away from something because everyone is posturing and nobody knows how to save face. And then what happens with, you know, Trump's coalition. And that's a good segue to his coalition. One of the questions that's on, I think, a lot of people's minds is this weird coalition. He's got all these Silicon Valley venture capitalists on one side and then people like Steve Bannon on the other side. And these are, I mean, they're more than just not natural allies. In some cases, they seem like adversaries. Bannon saying, we got to get Musk out of the White House. What direction do you both see this administration taking? And how does this administration manage that coalition? And do you think it's going to fracture? Dave Dayen, we'll start with you. I think

it's going to be very difficult to hold that together. And we saw a flare up of this, over H-1B visas at the end of December, where Musk and Ramaswamy were essentially praising those things and not too subtly saying that American workers were lazy and unable to fulfill these jobs, like the strivers of foreigners who come to the United States and innovate. And this just really set a lot of people in MAGA world on fire. That's not going away. I mean, Bannon is getting louder and louder and louder. Talked about why do we have these South Africans who, you know, dealt with apartheid? Why are they involved in our country? You know, you would think just because of the history of Trump that to a certain extent, all of these cabinet nominees are going to be gone, you know, before long. They're going to wear out their welcome with Donald Trump. But Elon Musk seems like the kind of guy who Trump actually can't eject. He's the Jared Kushner of this term, that he actually can't get rid of him because he has too much money, he has too big a megaphone, and he's too willing to use that money in politics. So there's going to be this tension there between the MAGA base that will eventually tire of Musk and want to get rid of him and Trump's instinct to not piss off the richest man in the world who could come after him afterwards. So it's a real chaos agent into this entire term of office.

And the new thing with Musk his control of the media. Right. And his control of the media through Twitter, and particularly the conservative media, and his willingness to use it. You know, out of the H-1B fight that Dave's talking about, he demonetized kind of Laura Loomer, which was ironic becauseura loomer was like representative of how the woke twitter cracked down on conservative speech and so it wasn't as if kind of the new bosses came in and came after the same kinds of people that in several cases they came after literally the same people and so uh it was her and a bunch and a bunch of other conservative activists who were saying no, like, you know, they were there on the Bannon side of this argument. And so every conservative operative and media figure who is working today is dependent on the whims of a very whimsical and vindictive man who is very much willing to use his power against very small people. The question then becomes, if the grassroots kind of MAGA world decides that they really do want an existential fight in the way that Bannon wants it with Musk to eject him, what's the platform and how do they actually organize that? Because Twitter is their main organizing forum. So that's not going to work. When he is so willing to just press the button on you, and everybody knows that. And we've never had that I can think of a political figure like that, who controls not just the most amount of wealth in the entire world, has a literal government position, and also can single-handedly take out all of his critics on the most important media platforms.