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Inside Politics
How To Make America Healthy Again Movement Swung From RFK Jr. To Trump; Musk: Human Intelligence Being Replace By Machine Intelligence; Musk Trolls With NSFW Name Change On X; Galloway: Dems Should "Level Up" Young People Economically; Trump's New Title: Chair Of Kennedy Center For The Performing Arts. Aired 12:30-1p ET
Aired February 13, 2025 - 12:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
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[12:30:00]
CROWD: Let us in.
DANA BASH, CNN ANCHOR (voice-over): October 2024, Battle Creek, Michigan.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This is a monumental moment.
BASH (voice-over): An army of protesters delivered 400,000 petitions to Kellogg's headquarters, demanding the company make good on a pledge to remove artificial dyes from its food.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I'm here for the mom, all the moms who struggle to feed their children healthy food.
BASH (voice-over): The leader, Vani Hari, a food activist known as the Food Babe, who says cutting out the processed and fast food of her youth not only helped her shed weight, but curbed serious health struggles. She has a wellness brand and a massive online following.
VANI HARI, FOUNDER, FOOD BABE: I feel like my voice represents so many ordinary citizens, moms, and activists, and dads, and so many people across the United States that have just had enough.
BASH (voice-over): Hari volunteered for Barack Obama's presidential campaigns. She was a delegate at his 2012 convention, where she wrote Label GMOs on signs. She got disillusioned with politics and turned to activism, pressuring restaurants like Chick-fil-A and Subway to take some additives out of their food.
HARI: Why is it citizen activists like me and the people that follow me and all the grassroots movement holding these companies accountable, why isn't there anybody in Washington doing this?
BASH (voice-over): She and others, livid about the American food system, found common cause with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. CALLEY MEANS, SAFE FOOD ADVOCATE: There's, I think, a real hunger for politicians across the aisle to be targeting this voter anxiety about why are we getting so sick?
BASH (voice-over): Calley Means and his sister Casey are well-known leaders in the so-called MAHA, Make America Healthy Again movement.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR., UNITED STATES SECRETARY OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES: I got a call from a safe food advocate named Calley Means.
BASH (voice-over): He was a GOP Trump critic who turned supporter and helped broker the first call between Kennedy and then-candidate Donald Trump last summer.
KENNEDY: Don't you want a president that's going to make America healthy again?
CROWD: Yes.
BASH (voice-over): With that endorsement, the MAHA movement came with him.
STEVE BANNON, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: The kind of what I call red- pilled bombs, many of them that voted for Obama looking for change there. The MAHA movement, Make America Healthy Again. Bobby Kennedy is the leader of that movement. And that's why I thought it was absolutely urgent to get Bobby Kennedy across the finish line.
BASH (voice-over): Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior Obama aide, says Democratic leaders missed an opportunity.
DAN PFEIFFER, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: We're not living in the same social media internet spaces that a lot of the public is, where you have people talking about, you know, what to feed your kids, what chemicals to avoid, long before we even decided to run for president in 2024. RFK Jr. lives in those spaces.
BASH (voice-over): And when Trump nominated Kennedy for secretary of Health and Human Services, the MAHA network went to work.
SEN. BILL CASSIDY (R), LOUISIANA: I was getting hundreds of messages a day personally and thousands through the office.
BASH (voice-over): Despite serious misgivings about Kennedy, pushing conspiracy theories and regularly suggesting vaccines cause autism, which was scientifically debunked --
CASSIDY: I'm Mr. Cassidy.
BASH (voice-over): -- Republicans like Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy, a medical doctor, saved Kennedy's bid for HHS secretary.
CASSIDY: Vaccines save lives. They are safe. They do not cause autism. There are multiple studies that show this. Mr. Kennedy and the administration reached out seeking to reassure me regarding their commitment to protecting the public health benefit of vaccination. BASH: Are you completely confident that none of those theories that RFK Jr. has, and he's expressed many times over the years, will be part of America's public health, as he promised to Senator Cassidy?
MEANS: I am completely confident that Bobby Kennedy will come in with opinions and believe those opinions do not matter. Bobby Kennedy is coming in to institute a process.
BASH (voice-over): Expectations for Kennedy are extremely high among his supporters, who want him to crack down on the food and pharmaceutical industries. But in an anti-regulation Trump administration, can he?
BASH: The way that the Trump administration is proceeding is to loosen the reins of the way government regulates clean air, clean water. So why are you so confident that they will be the opposite when it comes to the food industry?
MEANS: This is not Bloomberg, Michelle Obama, nanny state, soda taxes. You've got foundational conflicts of interest in our scientific guidelines. So there's a very conservative point there that's not ideological and not against conservative principles, that we should just have accurate science.
And then number two is, we should stop subsidizing bad things.
[12:35:02]
And I know that many people on the left watching that can't stand Bobby Kennedy and stand President Trump, I know they resonate with something that's happening. I know they resonate that there's a strain that we're touching on childhood chronic disease.
And I would just urge them, there's a mass opportunity in society to support the Trump administration on this sector.
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BASH: Coming up, a no holds barred conversation about Elon Musk with the co-host of the Pivot podcast. Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway are here next.
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[12:40:07]
ELON MUSK, TESLA CEO: Human intelligence will be a very small fraction of total intelligence. And digital intelligence will be more than 99 percent of all intelligence in the future. So hopefully the computers are nice to us.
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BASH: What motivates the man who hopes the computers are nice to us and is actively trying to replace humans who work for the federal government with computers? Well, who better to talk to than two plugged into Musk world for years, Kara Swisher, the host of the podcast on and co-host of Pivot and the other Pivot co-host Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at NYU and the host of another podcast, the Prof G Pod.
OK, before we start, thank you so much for being here, but I just want to fact check something. Musk --
KARA SWISHER, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Sure.
BASH: -- called you cruel and deceitful human beings. I know you both.
SWISHER: Yes.
BASH: You are neither.
SWISHER: Yes.
BASH: So fact check false. So let's get that out of the way. Oh, you want to disagree with me?
SWISHER: OK. All right, we're a little mean. He said we were mean and that's not inaccurate. Correct. Scott, don't you think?
SCOTT GALLOWAY, CO-HOST, "PIVOT": I mean-ish (ph).
SWISHER: Mean-ish.
BASH: Mean, adjacent. OK. But let's talk about why he called you this. And it's because --
SWISHER: Yes.
BASH: -- you all -- you get it. You understand Elon Musk. You understand the world from which he comes and everything that goes in between. Kara, you obviously met him when he was not Elon Musk. He was just Elon Musk.
You don't believe that he is working as Donald Trump's wrecking ball out of a sense of altruism or even loyalty to Trump. What do you believe he's getting out of this deal? What does he want?
SWISHER: Well, I think he wants influence. He kind of likes that idea. I think he has some ideas in his head about the way the world should be, and he has the means to do it. And I think he's enjoying himself. I think this interests him.
He's always been someone who gets quickly bored. And I think this is an interesting problem for him. And that's being charitable in that regard. And I do think in his self-interest, there's all kinds of things that are happening, including the state department just announcing it was going to -- I don't know if they announced it, it was in the line item that they were buying $400 million of Cybertrucks. So he just has self-interest all over the place, getting rid of inspector generals, investigations, et cetera. BASH: Yes. Cybertrucks, part of Tesla, which somehow didn't make the chopping block.
Scott, you have been sounding the alarm about what Musk is up to, but you also call -- one of my favorite terms that you use, you say that we are following weapons of mass distraction. Elaborate.
GALLOWAY: Well, and corporations do this. Let's not talk about self- harming our teen girls. Let's talk about gender balance in the workplace. This is the ultimate strategy. The gulf of distraction is how I would call most of this stuff.
There are three things that Musk wants here. One money, two money, and three money. His net worth has gone up by about $150 billion, despite the fact Tesla sales are crashing between 20 percent and 70 percent across Europe, down 15 percent year on year in China, because the market soberly predicts, unfortunately, that we're now in a full kleptocracy.
And the shareholder value is a function of proximity to a corrupt president. This is about money. Notice how they just fired the inspector general who was investigating Musk. This is not -- everything the Tech Brothers do can be reverse engineered to one thing, and that is Benjamin's.
BASH: You both talked about Musk in the context of the unified CEO theory. Can you explain what that means, Kara --
SWISHER: Sure.
BASH: -- and what does it mean for his takeover of government?
SWISHER: Well, the idea that they know best. It's the -- you know, a dictator is another word for it. Essentially, most corporations are run by a compelling CEO. And sometimes, in the case of tech companies, they have complete control. Like at Facebook, for example, you -- or Meta, you cannot fire Mark Zuckerberg.
He has total control over the company via the way he's organized the stock. And so the idea is that there's a single CEO who decides things. It's also sort of founder mode, that they get to make changes, they get to wreck things, and it's for the good of everybody.
And so it's an idea that we should have a strong -- it's very similar to what's happening with the presidency. There should be a stronger president rather than the other co-equal branches. It shouldn't be quite that equal. In fact, the executives should have more power. And that's something that's been growing in politics for a long time.
BASH: And Kara, I do have to ask about a change in his Twitter handle, which I noted very deadpan earlier this week, which of course, you know, played right into the fact that he wants to make us all laugh like we're seven-year-old boys. I have a young voice, so maybe I get the humor.
I guess I'm not going to repeat the HB handle, but talk about that vis-a-vis his personality, Elon's personality.
[12:45:07]
SWISHER: I think the seven-year-old is charitable. I mean, one of the things that he has is he loves dank memes and jokes. And he loves to make jokes himself and then laugh at his own jokes.
And then all the people who work for him laugh at him, and therefore he thinks he's funny. And he's not funny. He's sometimes funny, I guess. I never thought so. But he likes to do this. He likes to engage in sort of these juvenile little pranks.
And when he's not doing that, he likes to insult people. And all kidding aside, we don't mind being called these names, but it's -- a 53-year-old man does not do this, I mean, or this one does. And so, he just like, this is what he likes. He likes to slag people. I guess it's part of video game culture or something, but I find it unusual for someone of his age to be such a juvenile.
BASH: Scott, let's talk about what can be done for people who don't agree with what is happening at the behest of and the leadership of Elon Musk. You recommended -- I was listening to your podcast last week, and you recommended Democrats should put up more of a fight and go down to these federal agencies, bang on the doors, demand access.
Well, maybe they were listening. They did that. They've gone to USAID, the Department of Education. It hasn't had much of an impact. So what now?
GALLOWAY: Yes, Dana, I was wrong because it looked more like a senior's home on a council Jell-O night. It just wasn't optically a good moment for us. In terms of what we should do is be more optimistic and future-looking.
Tax holiday for 20 to 30-year-olds, 10 million new homes built in the next 10 years. Take the cohort that is 24 percent less wealthy than they were 40 years ago, people under the age of 40, versus 70-year- olds who are 72 percent wealthier and level up young people.
UBI for industries or people affected by AI. Lower Medicare coverage two years a year for the next 20 years and move to nationalized health care that provides more access and lower costs. And also go a bit to the dark side.
Draw up legislation. And once we get control of the branches of government, at some point, which we will, that removes the security detail of former advisers to the president. It decides we're renaming space as American space and potentially seizing all invaders in space, including the 51 percent of satellites owned by SpaceX.
Stop, encourage consumers to not engage with T-Mobile or United who are doing deals with SpaceX. When I get an Uber alert saying your Tesla Model S is on the way, I cancel and say I don't ride in Teslas.
In sum, the Democratic Party needs to be the party --
BASH: So from the consumer point of view.
SWISHER: Yes.
GALLOWAY: The Democratic Party needs to be moved away from being the party of waving their cane at a building outside of it to the party of big ideas and not -- around.
SWISHER: Yes. So one of the things Scott was talking about is true. I mean, I like Jell-O, so I think we should always protest when Jell-O is taken away from us. But one of the issues that they have is they've got to -- it doesn't work just to insult these people.
A certain portion of people love Elon Musk. They love President Trump. And so by telling them they're stupid doesn't really work, and it doesn't give hope to anybody else. So you have to be, you know, proactively saying what you're for, while at the same time pointing out how ridiculous -- how backward they are, you know, in -- and mentioning egg prices and things like that.
But telling people what you're going to do always is a better way to do it. And Musk and Trump do this even though they're not doing anything, right? They're not -- they feel forward even if they're not forward. All they're doing is slashing and burning.
You have to appeal to the hope of people and what you're actively going to do, and at the same time not put up with this nonsense.
BASH: Kara and Scott, I can tell how angry you are, Scott, with the word that you just used.
SWISHER: Jell-O. Jell-O.
BASH: Thank you. You have so many jobs, such busy lives. Thank you for squeezing it in. Come back soon.
GALLOWAY: They're just by the enemies we've made, Donna -- Dana, excuse me.
SWISHER: Yes.
BASH: FDR, FDR.
SWISHER: Nice. Nice.
BASH: Coming up, Donald Trump is forging ahead with his -- what he calls his war on woke, by taking a new top job at an iconic American cultural institution. We have some details after the break.
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[12:53:53]
BASH: The president of the United States is adding a new title to his resume, chair of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Trump's handpicked board elected him to the job yesterday. It's the first time a president has held it, and that's after he removed board members appointed by the Democrats, replacing them with loyalists and supporters from the second lady, Usha Vance, to his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, to a longtime aide who makes his media content, Dan Scavino.
The executive director at the Kennedy Center is now Ric Grenell, a former ambassador who, let's just say, is quite active and quite personal on social media. Trump says the two share a vision for a, quote, "golden age of American arts".
So what does that mean for the storied arts institution? My colleague Jake Tapper obtained audio of now chairman Trump talking by phone with his new board.
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DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: It got very wokey, and some people were not happy with it, and some people refused to go, and we're not going to have that. We're going to have something that will be very, very exciting, and we'll do things both physically and in every other way to make the building look even better.
I think we're going to make it hot. We made the presidency hot, so this should be easy.
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[12:55:14]
BASH: Now, icons of the arts like Shonda Rhimes, Ben Folds, and Renee Fleming are all stepping down from the roles at that iconic institution. Fleming shared a statement with me, which said, in part, quote, "I've treasured the bipartisan support for this institution as a beacon of America at our best. I hope the Kennedy Center continues to flourish and serve the passionate and diverse audience in our nation's capital and across the country".
Thank you so much for joining Inside Politics today. CNN News Central starts after the break.
