where are the boys where are the boys late as always well now that we're ruled by men um I guess you know we've been we've been put in our place Michelle just got to get used to it I guess so far I cannot recommend from New York Times opinion I'm Michelle cotle I'm Ross doit and this is matter of opinion our beloved Carlos is out this week which was so discombobulating that we felt moved to bring in two colleagues to fill his shoes That's What It Takes it's not enough not enough it's not enough it's
not enough sadly neither of us is an economist nor a Notre Dame football fan so nor a Notre Dame football fan but never fear we have drafted the truly brilliant combo Ross drum roll please for our guests um no I don't I don't have a I can't you can't even fake it that's just sad that was sad we have drafted the truly brilliant combo of David French and Lydia PA green friends welcome thank you so much for joining us this week thanks for having us great to be here all right so the mood here in
Washington has been I'm going to go with freaked out as president Trump and his BFF Elon bulldo across the federal government issuing executive orders issuing funding freezes jettisoning Federal workers targeting agencies for dismemberment so I thought today would be a great time to talk about resistance and whether we're seeing any so far how it looks different compared to Trump's first go around and what form it might take this time culturally and politically but me being me of course I want to start with politics so lyia let's pick on you would you be so kind as
to remind us what iCal resistance look like at the start of the first Trump Administration back when we were also young and innocent mere babes we knew so little so innocent so innocent um well look I think that early 2017 there was just an extraordinary ferment there were sort of two big moments that that come to mind for me one was the women's March which was you know a kind of Unforgettable sea of pink hats the the hats came of course from the quote unquote grab them by the line um from the Access Hollywood Video
that really inspired a lot of women to come out and say we reject this we don't want this style of politics to be running our country and the other big thing that that I personally found incredibly moving was you know people who rushed to airports and had really big protests against the so-called Muslim ban you know sort of put their bodies on the line to protest what was fundamentally I think a really racist policy uh that was promulgated by by Donald Trump the first time around so those are the two big ones that stuck out
to me I mean there were obviously the Democratic Leadership at that time looked a little bit different you know Chuck Schumer uh was still the the leader of the Democrats in the Senate but the mighty uh Nancy Pelosi was the Democratic leader in the house you saw the emergence of the squad these you know left members of Congress who I think got a ton of attention opposing uh Trump's policies the Muller investigation Russia gate all of those kinds of things you know and every night you an outrage on Rachel madow show and and other cable
news and it was just a sort of steady drum beat of resistance resistance resistance what that got us I think is something we can discuss uh but that's that's what it looked like to me you know I think one thing that strikes me about then is there was this sense that Trump was an accidental or illegitimate president in a way that you don't have it now in 2025 because he had lost the popular vote and then he won the election by kind of pulling this real inside straight with these Midwestern states to the point where
people would say wait this how did this happen it also felt accidental in the sense of coming after the Comey letter and then you had all of the information about Russian interference and so there was this sense at that moment that this guy is kind of a pretender president and so resistance flowed very easily from that whereas now he won the popular vote he didn't just draw some sort of inside straight in the Upper Midwest he won all of the Swing states there was almost no demographic or very few demographics where Democrats did better in
2024 than they did in 2020 it's just a different Beast entirely and so I think people are wrestling with oh this guy won in every way that you can win popular vote Electoral College swing States and it's just a completely different psychological phenomenon in my view than that initial response in 2016 2017 right I think David is absolutely right that from 2016 to 2020 there was a sense that there was a fundamental liberal or at least center-left majority in America that had been unfairly denied its rightful position of power and influence and so it just
made sense to say we just need to mobilize right the one last thing I'd add is that Trump's White House in the early days of and indeed throughout his presidency was filled with people who were not at all loyal to Donald Trump some of whom were just total opportunists some of whom were sort of you know respectable Republican figures who felt like they were there to manage the weird bizarre phenomenon of the Trump presidency but those people played a very important role a kind of feedback loop in driving the energy of the resistance by basically
leaking constantly about how crazy things were inside the Trump White House and so far I mean we're only a few weeks into his presidency you do have some leaks but clearly the team the teams that exist in the Trump White House this time have espra cor they have internal loyalty and cohesion and so whatever is going on and we can talk about what's actually going on because it's sort of an open question but whatever is going on in the kind of trumpy and attempt to remake the executive branch you know people aren't interested in just
telling Politico in the New York Times all about how horrifying it is on the regular well and they also don't really need to right because Elon Musk is just tweeting it out uh we're feeding us Aid into the into the wood chipper right there there is a kind of radical transparency uh we're just seeing it all unfold and you didn't need a leak to say that he wanted to invade Gaza and displace the population see to me that's very Trump 1.0 that is more like Trump comes out and says something that sounds crazy and everyone
covers it like it's a normal policy announcement that to me is is more a flashback to the old school the old you can't change him entirely particularly when it comes to real estate development so you know the first Trump Administration yeah everybody saw as a fluke an accident an unintended consequence this time this is who we are this is this is what America chose so to the extent that there is organized resistance happening where is it coming from what shape is it taking well I think we're seeing a few different things um you know the
the response out of the gate was you know I think a little bit muted um and I think it's really only over the past few days that you've started to see a much more concerted and organized um political resistance uh Ross's home state senator Chris Murphy has been kind of everywhere all at once uh wall toall speaking about uh the billionaires who have your social security number and how they're going to take your money and and give themselves tax cuts you know you're starting to see the beginnings of some political resistance from the Democrats but
it feels embryonic and quite early how much they can actually do to stop the Train the you know sort of freight train that is Elon Musk in particular I think remains to be seen there's also I think been a flurry of lawsuits uh but those will take time they always do um yeah I mean that's my question which is that there's a limited amount that the Democrats can do in Congress they don't have the numbers they can try to slow things down they can log Jam a few things but a lot of this is going
to take place in the courts which we saw plenty off happening in the first Trump Administration but David where do you see this expanding and going yeah I mean to me the only early effective resistance is going to be in courtrooms look this is just basic stuff if you don't have the house and you don't have the Senate you're very much like where the Republicans were say in 2009 early 09 but Obama had that filibuster proof majority for a little while wow so Republicans were really just prone on the floor in many ways and all
they could do at that time was just sort of say all we are is a permanent no and then they got out there and they whipped up the Grassroots and the tea party started to take off and by 2010 all of that sort of filibuster proof majority is just gone the other thing is one of the things that I think was learned a lesson learned from 2017 to 2021 was giant Street protests don't necessarily work out to Trump's detriment right um that a big movement of social unrest is not necessarily something that energizes and galvanizes
the rest of the American people against Donald Trump and so in many ways the political SL protest side of resistance to Trump is just much less viable now and the lawyers though I will say have not been taken by surprise by any of this and so even as there's a lot of concern about what is it that we're doing politically culturally which we can talk more about what can be done but basically everything that can be done legally is being done and already there are some legal results I mean the birthright citizenship order has been
blocked some of the defunding has been blocked all of the necessary lawsuits have been filed and now we're in that condition where we're going to see does this particular part of the system hold or does it not just to weigh in real quick on the question of protest I mean I think there are two things going on one is I think people are scared honestly you know the guy who's in charge of the Pentagon is an absolute Trump loyalist who I think would it seems would not hesitate to deploy serious violence against American citizens if
they were to take to the streets um why do you think that what's the evidence that he would deploy violence against peaceful protesters that's a fairly extreme claim well I mean I he doesn't seem to have a whole lot of restraint when it comes to being willing to do things that uh that Donald Trump wants and Donald Trump is the you know when the Looting starts the shooting starts president are we talking about looting or are we talking about peaceful protest well I think that's in the eye of the beholder but you know I mean
it's worth remembering that the resistance to Biden was January 6th right a giant violent deadly Riot on the capital and Trump of course was able to turn that to his Advantage ultimately and pardon everyone involved but the question of what legitimate protest looks like I think you have a lot of people in the United States who perhaps would like to go to the streets and protest but are frankly just kind of scared I'm also going to jump in and just throw it out that I think a lot of people are exhausted I mean I think
the first time around there was this sense that if if you could just explain how bad Trump was you could make some sort of difference and be done with him and here we are people spent years protesting and bringing stuff to and we wound up with another Trump term and I think people are completely perplexed and Gob smacked even more than those who are actually afraid to get out there I mean I will just say I think that the the resistance to Trump was in fact very effective at doing what it set out to do
in the first couple years of his administration which is make it really really hard for him to run an effective White House and to mobilize certain kinds of moderate sentiment against him I think there's a big difference between the kinds of protests that you got under covid conditions in the summer of 2020 when you did have riots and looting and the kind of protests that mostly characterized the early days of H Administration I I think the the reasonable critique of the resistance is that it did not fully set up the Democrats to understand the larger
situation that that they were in in the sense that it was sort of motivated by this sense of like you know we we actually won and you know we don't have to deal with the deeper appeal of populism um but I don't think it was ineffective at like snarling up Washington and the Trump Administration in 2017 and 2018 I think it did succeed in that in doing that it depended on both public opinion being broadly anti-trump which it is not now and on Trump and His White House not having capacities that they do in fact
have now so you need in effect before you can get a successful model of resistance of any kind you need public opinion to move I think at least somewhat from where it is right now I I don't think resistance is the way to move public opinion so much as if public opinion moves resistance becomes a more viable strategy David you're very vigorously nodding where do you yes I am nodding I think Ross is right about public opinion full stop I also think that prior to the 2024 election the Democrats had a lot of reasons to
believe that they were sort of still in this majority position because in 2018 they take back the house in 2020 they take back the White House and they take back the Senate so that by the end of Trump's first term he's the first president since Hoover that in the the four a single four-year term had lost control of all of the elected branches government so then 2022 rolls around and its peak inflation this is when inflation was really really bad and Democrats outperformed expectation so there was a lot of reason for Democrats flowing into 2024
to sort of still have this sense that it's a closely divided country but it's still we still are in that majority position but then the polls kept showing Trump winning they just kept doing it Trump is polling better at this cycle that he did previously in 2016 and 2020 and he'd always outperformed his polls and so Democrats were left with really a hope that this time when we're polling Trump this time we got it right and then the torpedo below the waterline and my view was I still to this day do not think Democrats understand
how much the Biden White House blunted the character argument against Trump by its own conduct and its own concealment of the president's material degradation of his condition and a lot of Americans saw that and saw for what it was which was supremely dishonest bordering on dangerous and then to turn around and say we're the team that is going to preserve integrity and Norms I just feel like the Democratic party may not still recognize that that did not land with the American public so you throw all of that into a big cocktail shaker and you come
up with this poison blend for the party and now they are in a very tricky position and don't seem to know what to do I mean you have a shift among Democratic electeds where this time around you have you know Elizabeth Warren isn't exactly a moderate bipartisan let's all play nice together with the other team person but she like many Senate Democrats are saying what we need to do is work on areas of cooperation that the kind of tone of the resistance has come down at least among Democratic electeds for now and it remains to
be seen kind of how they are going to play with the Trump Administration or how long they can continue with that I think we can already see though that that's not going to be the issue for them I mean the the Trump Administration is clearly very very interested in rewriting the the rules of presidential control of over the Executive Branch at the very least that is sort of top priority and Congressional Democrats are just not going to be deeply involved in that that is going to be an issue ultimately for the courts secondarily you know
the Trump Administration may want to push the envelope in terms of like you know whether it's spends money that Congress has appropriated there Congress is involved as sort of a political agent but there too it all you know it also pushes towards the courts and I don't think it makes like if I were giving advice to Democrats I would not say that it really matters one way or another how bipartisan they act I I don't think that's no no I'm I'm just saying this is the position that they find themselves in they don't know what
to do well they're looking for TR they they need Trump or the Republicans to do something that is genuinely unpopular like right now the Democratic line of argument is nobody elected Elon Musk but in fact Donald Trump spent the last two months of the election campaigning with Elon Musk saying Elon musk is the smartest man in the world I'm going to turn him loose on government waste and fraud so guess what the public did sort of vote for Elon Musk to do something about government waste and fraud so you need him to do something that
is unpopular and attack it not just assume that saying Elon Musk isn't the elected president will suffice well I think that that you're right Ross that as long as there are not felt material consequences there's not going to be a a real kind of popular resistance right I mean I I don't think people thought that they were voting for Elon Musk to uh do to the federal government what he did to Twitter I I I just really don't believe that um because I just don't think people were paying that level of attention and they made
the mistake of not reading the uh fantastic book about what Milan musk did to Twitter uh written by our colleagues uh character limit which I recommend to our audience but I do think that the sort of the moment that you start to have real material consequences to some of this slash andb burn wrecking ball tactics you know people are going to be angry and uh there will be a political response but that's going to take time you know the other thing that I'll say is that you know there's been a lot of kind of Monday
morning quarterbacking you know there was a big piece in Politico saying oh you know the Democrats are are taking the bait by defending usaid Americans hate usaid they think that you know we give way too much money to people abroad and things like that and I yes sure I I believe that I personally you know am am much more familiar with the left critiques of usaid and the work that it's done around the world but um but I do sometimes sometimes they're now the same critique that's true Ross that's true Hors horseshoe yes absolutely but
I think that there is this kind of over analysis of every minute move that will sort of fail to capture the fact that people who took a chance on Trump who weren't part of the hardcore magga base these are people who don't follow the news very closely right like we saw that in the polling again and again that these are people who weren't necessarily deeply ideologically committed to the ideas that Trump was putting out there but we're willing to give a chance to someone who they saw as a real change agent the question is how
much change do people actually want you talk about a federal government that employs 3 million people if a company that employed three million people laid off you know 20% of its staff like that would be a huge economic problem for the United States right because workers are not just people who accept paychecks they're also people who spend money so they're going to be knock on effects to this but it's going to take time and how uh Democrats either make hay of that or don't I think is is an open question you know when I look
at this Ross is right there's a difference between what's popular and unpopular versus what's constitutional and unconstitutional and those are not the same things and in fact quite often the Constitution intentionally acts as a break on majoritarianism it create structures establish as civil liberties that are a break on majoritarianism that operate as a restri restraint on sort of unilateral executive Authority even when unilateral executive Authority is very popular and so part of this if you're going to get out there and you're going to say what Donald Trump is doing is as Ross said remaking a
vision a constitutional vision of the presidency I don't think there's much dispute about that the only real question is how far is he willing to go to do it but when you talk about that that is a very difficult to mobilize public opinion you're not going to get them fired up about the Imp AC it's it's very very difficult well you are well you are if the issue is the Trump White House started trying to use impoundment to stop payments for popular programs right absolutely you would get people mobilized you're not going to get people
mobilized over how the empowerment act applies to usaid right so it doesn't matter if he blows through constitutional stuff unless it's something that people feel at home you need as a matter of popular opinion there's two ways it matters it matters politically if he does something where the actual act itself is unpopular and then it matters politically if he gets in a public fight with the Supreme Court but until you have you know if the Supreme Court issued a ruling and Donald Trump decided he wasn't going to obey it among other things in addition to
a constitutional crisis that would be a really big political opportunity for Democrats but you actually have to run the Machinery to to the point of getting an adverse ruling before that becomes political very conservative Supreme Court which frankly would help add to its credibility right I mean if they ruled against Trump you know and it's a 63 court on the conservative side then that makes it I think a lot harder for him to claim partisanship David do you feel optimistic about some of that I do I do so the the now I've been fully on
the record I had disagreements with the immunity ruling I do not think the immunity ruling was consistent with the originalism of the court I had problems with the 14th Amendment ruling on the same grounds but as a general matter it's just an empirical fact that the Supreme Court has rejected Trump and Maga arguments just again and again and again even Democrats arguing in front of majority Republican nominated courts have done better than Trump did so I do think there is absolutely reason to think that the courts will uphold the basic constitutional structure and in fact
there's even more reason now to think so because some of the decisions that a lot of my friends to my left really don't like like the OSHA vaccine case or the ler bright which overruled the Chevron Doctrine actually had the effect of really restricting executive autonomy yep and and so right now we're going into Trump is exerting the most executive autonomy we've seen in the modern era at the same time that as a matter of constitutional Doctrine our presidents have less executive autonomy as a matter of law than any time in the month modern era
so this is a we have a collision here people people have go ahead Lydia I was just going to say I mean he's also got the the third branch of government Congress right I mean he's got a republican majority both in the house and the Senate that seems completely supine right I mean just just totally totally ready to be walked over well except he has three votes he's got a like three vote majority in the house so yes it's in a way it's supine but it's a very very fragile and vulnerable majority and frankly he's
got a very thin majority and also not an overall majority um you know in terms of the of the final popular vote but my point was that's all the more reason that you know the Roberts Court as much as we can still call it the Roberts Court given the way that things have been going in terms of decisions um you know protecting the the power and the role of the court in the American constitutional order I think is extremely important uh specifically to John Roberts so I think that that that's another argument in David's favor
but I think though that liberals especially need to be realistic about what we're saying here right which is that there are bunch of things that the Trump Administration could do or might be playing around with doing that the Supreme Court is likely to rebuke but there is also a lot of room for executive activity within the executive branch itself that the court is probably just not going to touch right so you see people saying like oh you know Elon Musk doesn't have the proper deputization to see certain things in the treasury Department right I mean
fundamentally Elon Musk works for the president of the United States the president of the United States runs the Executive Branch if he wants Elon Musk to see treasury payment plans it's probably it's going to happen and similarly like with usaid can the president just stop spending money that Congress has appropriated on foreign aid I think the Supreme Court would say no can the president restructure usaid in a profound way yes he probably can right so that's I think that's important that there is there is going to be running for a aggressive executive here but this
is I think where you come back to politics right which is that you know you think about what is the grand Coalition that United behind Donald Trump it is a very you know surprisingly diverse Coalition it was supposed to be something sort of fundamentally different than the traditional Republican base and I think that what we're seeing right now is a a kind of a return to sort of fundamentals right I mean what Elon Musk is doing is in in some ways what he appears to be doing is fulfilling the grover norquist fantasy right of of
turning government into something so small that you can you can drown it in a bathtub and I think that the question is going to be is politically is that is that going to work for the Coalition that Donald Trump has built and I that's an open question I don't know I think ultimately it depends I think it doesn't work again it doesn't work if you are actually cutting large popular programs that the Trump base and swing voters really like and support if what you're doing is dismantling the structure of Grant making at a bunch of
federal agencies that the entire Republican electorate in all its varied forms thinks favors liberals and progressives then that's going to be fine the Coalition is going to be totally happy with that okay we're going to take a quick break but we'll be right back so stick with us so I want to swivel us away from the legal World a little bit back to more along the lines of political or popular resistance and how we see that playing out David you want to kind of jump in and start us off with this yeah picking up on
one of Ross's threads when things get unpopular is where the Democrats are going to have their opportunity and you could see that emerging in the Tariff battle that has been postponed put on pause with Canada and Mexico because here you had the possibility of the 25% tariffs this has been sold to sort of Trump's voters is is all upside there's no real downside and all of a sudden you begin to see the stock market tanking and then boom you have this deal right this deal which is you know trumpeted by Trump is some giant Victory
but a lot of it is like Mexico and Canada saying well here's what we were doing and Trump's like okay great problem solved but that was very instructive because look it's Trump has a lot you know there are a lot of limitations that he has that are quite obvious but I think it's time to recognize now that the guy's got some pretty good political instincts and one of those political instincts is that you know if I'm going to Ken uh through the system like in that John malany sketch a horse in a hospital then the
one thing I can't do is tip over the stock market right because that's where I start to lose my freedom of action and I think that goes back to what Ross was saying is that there are things there are points where Trump's actions start to actually really filter into the broader World outside the universe of of political you know hobbyists and those who follow politics closely and one of those things is a stock market crash and look how quickly we went from here come the tariffs here come the tariffs here come the tariffs to some
fake deal like fake deal that is in by no way going to like end fenel coming into the United States and then Here Comes Here Comes the stock market Russia look pained no no I think that's right except even there I think probably Trump's critics and Skeptics could go one step further and say Yes presume that Trump extracted at most minor concessions from Canada and and Mexico he did also impose tariffs on China and everyone said initially oh you know the tariffs on China are smaller than the tariffs on our allies you know this is
crazy but in fact pretty obviously Trump went in assuming that the tariffs on our allies would be taken away in exchange for minor concessions while the tariffs on China presumably remain in some form so from the point of view of people in his administration who think you know fairly seriously about tariff policy this is sort of a win you use tariffs as sort of a blunt instrument of diplomacy with your allies and you know remove them as soon as you get what you want and meanwhile you use them as an actual instrument of policy against
China That's not just a horse in a hospital that is in fact policymaking and the more that liberals and wouldbe resistors recognize that there is going to be actual policymaking the better position they'll be to understand their own situation I think well perhaps right but I mean I think as I was saying earlier I think that one of the things that we might find is that this ends up up being an actually quite sort of ordinary traditional Conservative Republican Administration in a lot of ways right where the focus is really on deep cuts to government
spending and giving huge tax breaks to rich people and I think that that's sort of where the rubber meets the road if you've built this Coalition that includes you know people who are in labor unions or people who have you know children with with special needs or people who you know people who have like who actually need government in some way which is uh hello basically all of us because we live in a complex diverse Multicultural Society we live in a society yeah I mean with all apologies to to Margaret Thatcher I think that that's
where I think the the very real political problems are going to come and in some ways I think the best strategy for the Democrats is to in some ways wait for those things to start to happen and say look Paul Paul Ryan economics is back this is the old Republican party that you all remember U you know I mean the one thing I will say is they' got to stop saying bigars my God please don't use that term it's just like it's it's awful they should not say Brar Democrats have a language problem but my
bigger my bigger concern is that they are going to do a little bit of what they did in the first Trump term which is missed this opportunity to do some soul searching about what it is that they really stand for and what kind of Coalition they want to build as opposed to just picking things that Trump's done to pick apart right Democrats obviously have lost the public trust they have no idea what they've done wrong they need to find their way back and that's going to require something more than just standing up and going oh
look Trump's doing something horrible here and horrible there or or just like the Republicans post 2012 right like it may just require a day of XM right like I mean it may require an extraordinary personality like Donald Trump on the left uh the mark the Mark Cuban scenario I mean you know I I'm largely agree with Lydia I think that the big political weakness of this Trump Administration is going to be if the Republican Congress passes incredibly steep spending cuts in order to pay for big tax cuts that's a traditional Republican position that tends to
be unpopular that could be again I think it would be smart for Democrats in the house not to offer any votes to you know to Mike Johnson to make anything that looks remotely like that happen and just forc him with his very thin majority to own whatever the house passes but then in terms of the soul searching it's just having lived through this as a conservative in the Obama era it really is just hard to do soul searching at least until you get to your next presidential primary right like we just witnessed the spectacle of
the votes for the leadership of the DNC which to my mind was a spectacle of you know identity politics and absurdity run a muck right and lots of liberal Soul Searchers were sort of in agony over that but like it's hard to escape from that until you have people actually competing to be the leader of the party and you're not going to get that for a little while and Democrats do have to sort of accept they're not going to have a new identity until they have a contest for leadership and they're not going to have
a contest for leadership until after the next midterm and the only way they win the next midterm is probably with a negative anti-trump agenda well and also be careful about who you Embrace in this organic process of rising stars and resistance figures and all of this you know I can remember Michael aan for president baby come on come on that was Ross why did you see you saw exactly where I was going second convicted felon president David there is this tendency to sort of be caught up in the social media cycle Embrace Rising Stars Embrace
sort of these figures that really kind of come up in Niche fights and capture imagination in very specific spaces and then they just get pushed and thrown out there and that's all part of the problem I also think that the Democrats have a have a a very real issue in this sense that a lot of the conversation that we talk about is like how can they change messaging what are the different talking points who are the different figures that presumes that they're a pool of Voters out there who are really following Democratic messaging and really
looking at Democratic public figures and really examining whether the Democrats are responsive to their needs when they're the reality is a bunch of this election was decided by people who pay so little attention to politics so little attention so if I'm a democratic strategist I'm looking at a lot of the numbers that I saw before the election which was all the people who followed politics closely Harris was winning them by a pretty large margin all of the people who don't follow politics at all or very much at all Trump was winning those people by a
pretty large margin so you know what if you're telling me that I just need a messaging change if a messaging change falls in the forest and no one hears it does it make a sound I mean everything circles back to this main point of what are the conditions on the ground and the felt needs of the American people and if Trump can't deliver on that the reality is that the Democrats could win again without changing a darn thing but we'd be back in the same cycle we've been in for 20 years where neither party has
solved the problem that the American people are asking them to solve and so we've had more lead changes it's like a NBA basketball game with 18 different lead changes where no one has really been able to Surge into a lead because they're not actually meeting the needs of the bulk of the voters all right we're going to have to leave it there but you you know we're going to do this again and again I can feel it so we're going to take a break now and when we come back we're going to go hot cold
and finally it is time for hot cold is my favorite so who's got it for me this week I I have been designated you have been deputized and I am so into this like I'm so into this there are moments you know where were you in the Berlin wallf you know for example watching it and and highrise DOR at libcom University like uh what were you doing during LeBron's LeBron's Block in 2016 in game seven there you lost me yeah yeah yeah the Luca donic trade to Los Angeles and exchange for Anthony Davis is I'm
going to remember where I was what I was doing for the rest of my life biggest blockbuster trade in modern sports history and it was such a big deal that I I have this fun class I teach with under of under at my alma moer and I started my whole class with a 20-minute discussion of the breakdown of the Luca deal and so I'm here for it it's incredible and how do the Lakers keep doing this okay I've got to ask because I texted my 21-year-old basketball obsessed son and his ruling is stupidest trade in
history for the Mavericks can someone explain this to me I'm sorry I explain it to me like I'm five I love going to sporting events I do not follow Sports Luca is a 25-year-old star for the Dallas Mavericks who's 25 and is already a five-time first team all NBA player Anthony Davis I believe is 31 or so he's a star he's a top 10 player Luca's a top three and so Luca is going to be the face of the one of the faces of the NBA arguably for the next 10 to 15 years incredible player
just incredible traded for this older star who's not as good who's got a long health history and the reason allegedly from Dallas is they were on the verge of having to give Luca a huge extension but they don't like his conditioning they don't like that he likes to drink beer they think he might be injury prone I'm not making this up they think he might be a little hotheaded and meanwhile I'm sitting there going if Luca wants to come to my team I will put a case of PBR at the end of the bench I
will give him Zen nicotine pouches in game like however you want to live your life Luca just get on that court and the other thing that's so fascinating is Luca and Anthony Davis were apparently traded without any knowledge it was happening nobody else in the lead was happening so it's a shocker on its own terms double shocker because nobody knew this was going down rash being very quiet do you have a thought no I mean I I've I've I'm more baseball and football than basketball so I've only followed it in the sort of secondary way
who are the other throwin in the deal oh that's you you ask a great question well uh they sent Anthony Davis Max Christie in a 2029 first round draft pick and it's sent in in exchange for uh LC donic Maxi kleber and Marie Morris so there's no like Blue Chip Prospect thrown in to this okay normally when you have this it's a a huge huge player and then draft pick after draft pick after draft pick after no that's not the way this F all right Lydia is that is that clear to you before we go
I feel clear as mud but I mean it I guess the lesson is uh you know the perfect is the enemy of the good that's very deep for this well is this is there a connection here because aren't the Mavericks owned um by the by the adelon family oh Ross if you want me to they used to be owned they used to be well I mentioned Mark Cuban future Democratic nominee for president earlier he was the owner now they're owned by the adson family uh which includes Miriam adelen you know famous Donald Trump donor supporters
of Israel so there is a political angle um but I have nothing more to add because we're this off before bra Springs and Aliens we'll do a crossover with Bill Simmons I didn't bring aliens we need more aliens we'll do an entire episode with aliens if you two will come back soon 100% all right guys have an excellent weekend thank you take care great to see you bye byee thanks for joining our conversation give matter of a opinion a follow on your favorite podcast app and leave us a nice review while you're there to let
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