Brody Mullins and the Evolution of Media and Lobbying in Trump's Washington

[00:00:11] Welcome back to another episode of The Political Life. This is Maggie Mick with Multi-State and welcome back to another new season. We have reached the end of the spring legislative session season. New York is still in its final days, but we now have a budget and I am thrilled to be back talking about the political lives of so many folks around the country.

[00:00:35] And today I am thrilled and honored to have Brody Mullins, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and has his hands in so many interesting new ventures now. So I look forward to our conversation today and welcome, Brody, to The Political Life. Thanks for having me. This should be a lot of fun. Well, we always start with the first question. Where did you start your political life?

[00:01:02] My political life got started not far from where I am right now, which is in northwest Washington, D.C. I was born and raised in northwest Washington, D.C. For some reason at a young age, I decided I liked politics and reporting and writing and I don't know why. You know, D.C. is a company town, obviously, and our company is Washington and government.

[00:01:30] But my parents weren't necessarily political, maybe more than most. I mean, they both worked for the government because that's what you did in D.C. if you grew up. But they weren't in like partisan politics, although they were both Democrats. And I think they just had like the nightly news on every night and we got the Washington Post. I think maybe when I was trying to get to the sports section, I'd bump into a story or two about politics.

[00:01:53] I then started high school, maybe college, started liking, enjoying reading books about presidential campaigns and making the president in 1960 and what it takes about the 1988 presidential campaign. And through a family connection, I got what I call an internship at the Washington Bureau of the Wall Street Journal, which wasn't really an internship. It was more like me volunteering in high school. This is the summer of 1992.

[00:02:21] And my job was to do the clips. If people remember what the clips is, shows you like definitely a delineation in age, those who know clips and those who don't. But we did the clips, which means my job was to cut up the newspaper and cut out everyone's story and put it on an 8 1⁄2 by 11 sheet of paper and make a copy of it and deliver it to them. And they would put it in a file folder. And that was what the Internet became.

[00:02:47] And in doing that, I got to know the reporters and I got to know the stories and just sort of fell in love with it for some reason. You know, I was handing out these clips to like giants of political journalism at The Wall Street Journal, people like Jerry Seib and Al Hunt and Jackie Combs. And I just thought it was super cool. It was also the summer of 1993.

[00:03:14] No, summer of 1992, which was Bill Clinton's election, which is, you know, if you're young, whether you're Republican or Democrat, that was just a super exciting change election. Probably a lot like Obama in 2009, if you were of the right age, where, you know, here was this young, exciting Southern guy, played the saxophone, wore sunglasses, coming up against the Reagan-Bush, you know, entrenched machine that had been around for 12 years.

[00:03:42] And, you know, if you're 18, 12 years is your whole life, you know. So anyway, I wasn't necessarily a Democrat, but it was just fun and exciting back then. And I decided that I wanted to be a reporter and I wanted to be a reporter at The Wall Street Journal. And I probably spent the next 10 years using that as sort of my guiding light. Like, what do I do to get back in that place and get a job? And, you know, that was incredibly lucky that I knew at a young age what I wanted to do.

[00:04:06] But, you know, for anyone who's lucky enough to know what they want to do at a young age, it really helps you plan the right – your next moves because you know where you're going. Having said all that, my other brother, Luke, is a political reporter and he kind of had the opposite path. Like, he didn't know what he wanted to do and ended up in political journalism. So it's not like you have to know what you want in high school. There's many ways to get there. But anyway, that's how I became a reporter at The Wall Street Journal.

[00:04:32] And then so did you go back after school to The Wall Street Journal and that's where you got your first job? So good question. Back then, you know, life in every industry and everything in Washington has changed so much in the last couple of years. But the path back then was you could never get hired as a 20-year-old at The Wall Street Journal. You had to know what you were talking about. You had to be a veteran reporter. So the path was to get to The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or The LA Times.

[00:05:01] You know, you had – or The Washington Post. You had to go work somewhere else. So I thought the idea was go to the San Diego Union-Tribune, get a job covering the Metro Beat, try to get a job at the political desk. Eventually, they send you to Washington to cover Congress. You do that for a while and then you try to jump over to The Wall Street Journal. So that's what I tried. I tried – I think I applied for, you know, 50 jobs around the country at The Seattle Times and The Chicago Sun Times and, you know, New Orleans, Picking, and all these places.

[00:05:30] And I got rejected everywhere. And I realized that, you know, there's so many jobs in D.C. that they weren't at The Washington Post, but they were at smaller trade publications. You know, as you know, every industry has a regulatory body that creates the rules and regulations for that industry. And there are oftentimes publications that are in the weeds on soil regulations or clean water or tailpipe emissions.

[00:05:57] Or in my case, I got to a place called Communications Daily that covered the Federal Communications Commission, which at the time was regulating cable and TV and phones. And literally, the biggest issue they were fighting about was what the difference between long-distance phone companies and local phone companies, if you remember that one.

[00:06:23] And so I got a job there making like $23,000 a year, and it was a great job because I treated the Federal Communications Commission as the White House or as Congress. And every single thing that a commissioner did or a speech they gave or a bureau chief, you know, put out a press release, you know, we'd cover it like it was the most important thing in the world. And as you know, like that's how you learn.

[00:07:12] It was a communications business. There were deregulatory efforts, again, with the long-distance companies and the phone companies. Anyway, these are sort of like maybe boring issues to look back on. But for me, it was fantastic. I'm covering these big... It was an innovative time for the industry. Yeah, the industry getting turned upside down. Literally, the internet's being created. Companies are going bankrupt. Companies are merging. AOL was the biggest company in the world. They created the internet, and they were going to dominate. You know, now they're gone. Do you still have the email address? I don't. Do you?

[00:07:41] Do you remember what yours was? My parents had mymullinsataol.com, and they might still have it, actually. And of course, it was the family email account, right? Mom and dad and me and my brothers all had mymullinsataol.com. Good one. Keeps the same.

[00:08:00] But the point is that there's now an inside path in journalism where you don't need to go to work at the Chicago Sun-Times or the Chicago Tribune. You know, you can go work for Politico or Punchbowl or Playbook or Axios and or Semaphore. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. Those are now the training grounds for future New York Times and Wall Street Journal and Washington Post reporters.

[00:08:30] And you go and cover some tiny little committee or subcommittee, and you become an expert, and you know how the world works, and you sort of move up in that way. So it's a very long way of saying I have always tried to move outside of D.C. and I've always failed, and I'm still stuck in D.C. But, you know, if you cover political journalism, this is the spot to be. This is where the media focuses. This is where the attention is. And there's just so many media jobs here that just don't exist in other capitals around the country.

[00:08:59] It's fascinating that you pursued a position outside of Washington only to get you back to your hometown. And then you didn't even have to go do it. Yeah, I guess there's two different answers than what I just said. One is that I thought that was the path. I thought that's what you had to do. And the other is that, you know, my goal was to get back here. And I didn't want to wake up one day and be 50 years old and be living a mile from where I grew up. And that's where I am. Yeah. That's where you are.

[00:09:29] Okay, so fast forward to when you got to the Wall Street Journal. How did you get that role? Was it the stepping stone? And what was the best story you think you ever wrote? Or was at least the most interesting to you to write? Yeah, so I had this lucky break where I knew I wanted to be a reporter. I knew I wanted to report at the Wall Street Journal.

[00:09:55] So I was able to sort of plan my steps to reach that goal. So I first worked for a place called Communications Daily, which I mentioned. And that got me into telecom issues. Then there was a publication called Congress Daily. Totally separate company. Later became National Journal. They covered everything that moved in Congress. And that was mainly committees and subcommittees. And all of a sudden, after a year and a half, I was an expert in communications policy.

[00:10:22] And they needed a reporter to cover the House Energy and Commerce Committee. And so I didn't know anything about, at the time, banking or energy or electricity. But I knew tech. I don't think it was called tech back then. I knew telecommunications. And so that got me in the door. And then all of a sudden, I had to learn energy policy and environmental policy and financial services and some health care. And so I sort of broadened my scope.

[00:10:51] And in covering that committee and its various subcommittees, I'm covering business issues. You know, I'm not covering, you know, Bill Clinton and whatever he's doing with gay marriage and social issues and gun law. It's all electricity deregulation and these telecom companies fighting each other again over long distance and local and cable companies fighting and broadcasters.

[00:11:15] And I realized that all these big issues, you know, you could you can dive in and talk to the members of Congress and talk to their staff. But you'd also talk to lobbyists. And lobbyists are paid to know everything about what's happening at a committee. So I realized if I made friends with the lobbyists and promised them I wasn't going to screw them over by, you know, publishing their name or writing a bad story about them, that they would share information with me and I would share information with them.

[00:11:43] I talked to a member of Congress who would say, hey, we're going to send a letter to, you know, Comcast. I'm making up a company and holding a hearing about, you know, retransmission rights or some issue. And I would tell the lobbyists and all of a sudden I was a value to the lobbyist and they would share information with me. And all of a sudden I realized that lobbyists are incredible sources of information because they're paid to be reporters. Essentially, you know, as you know, a lot of people think a lobbyist goes up there and is constantly asking people to do things for them. It's really more about sharing information.

[00:12:11] It's an intelligence agent. Exactly. And that's what reporters are, except that our intelligence goes, you know, out in a publication and yours goes to clients. But it's very, very similar. And so I realized it's sort of a symbiotic relationship. And then by covering lobbying, I'm sorry, by getting to know lobbyists, I then started writing about the lobbying industry. It turned out that the committees that I covered dealt with most big policy fights.

[00:12:39] So all of a sudden, you know, electricity companies are fighting against each other and, you know, AT&T fighting against the local phone companies was a perennial issue. And those were huge issues where there's lots of money being spent, lots of lobbyists being hired. So then I started to figure out, well, let's write about what lobbyists they're hiring. Let's write about the campaign donations they're giving. And all of that information is public and very easy to find even back then.

[00:13:05] And so those made for great stories, you know, how what industry is spending the most money? What industry used to spend a lot of money, but it's not? What who are these tech companies, Google and Facebook and Amazon? What are they doing and why are they spending all this money? And oh, look, they're gaining all this influence. And now they're starting to compete, you know, with AT&T and with Verizon.

[00:13:24] So covering those big industry fights just sort of taught me how to write about business issues and really how businesses use Washington or work with the regulatory system in Washington.

[00:13:39] And a revelation I had in there at some point was that as a kid, you think, or as a young reporter or somebody who doesn't know much about Washington or influence, you think it's sort of the government creates a rule and companies hire lobbyists to block it. Or, you know, the environmental groups are pushing a regulation and they're fighting against the oil companies. But it's much more complex than that.

[00:14:04] And there's so many companies and industries that are sort of using Washington to create barriers or rules or barriers of entry or create new regulations to gain an advantage or to take a regulation and try to shape it in a way that helps them at the – and hurts a competitor. And those were just – the word game is not the right word.

[00:14:26] But they were fun games for me to follow as a reporter because all of a sudden everyone sort of – you know, companies are fighting out in the marketplace, but they're also fighting it out in the D.C. environment. And I was the one covering that. And really no one else was. I mean the journal would cover business issues and the Washington Post would not. And the New York Times, every time the New York Times wrote about lobbyists, it was like look at these terrible lobbyists giving these campaign donations and, you know, getting in – you know, trying to buy influence. But to me it was like industry against industry and companies.

[00:14:56] And you were writing about the chess game too. Exactly. And that's just so much more fun for me is to try to figure out – because also they're not – as you know, it's not necessarily partisan issues. It wasn't that all Republicans are with the companies and all the Democrats are with the environmentalists. We had John Dingell. Remember, John Dingell was fighting for the Detroit automakers against the environmentalists and the Sierra Club. And on electricity issues, it was the rural members against the urban members. It didn't matter if they were Republican or Democrat.

[00:15:28] So I'm sort of speaking to the chess game. Like how do you – who's on whose team is often much more about what district they represent, not are they Republican or Democrat. And that created even more fun stories. You know, these strange bedfellows. Why is Billy Tozan and John Dingell working together against Ed Markey? And I don't remember who the other guy was. But, you know, there's all these fascinating fights. And I guess to get back to the beginning, you know, most reporters cover bills in the House and Senate floor.

[00:15:55] And it's Republicans against Democrats fighting over social issues or, you know, gun regulations. And to me, that was boring or maybe obvious or like you kind of – it's one team against the other team. And it's a fight to the death. And the business issues covering lobbying and what lobbyists do was far more interesting to me. Well, and they always say, I mean, at least in state policy work, like 90% of the issues are bipartisan.

[00:16:22] 10% are the social issues that come down to the partisan divide. But the 90% that are bipartisan is how they got there through the chess game because it is usually regulatory business in nature and not the social temperature. It's so fascinating you say that because I agree 100% because I focus on just business issues and I ignore the social issues because the business issues are sort of my specialty.

[00:16:47] And if you – or my expertise – and when you look at business issues, there's a lot of areas where you see Republicans and Democrats coming together. You see Elizabeth Warren working time and time again with Josh Hawley and now Elizabeth Warren working with Donald Trump. You think like, wow, these parties are really coming together. But that's because I'm ignoring the social issues. Once you get the social issues back and you're like, oh, well, Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley would never form a party together. They would never get together.

[00:17:13] This is just sort of a short-term alliance on business issues, which is how Congress and legislating work. But there is a real realignment going on on business issues and the influence of big companies where Republicans and Democrats are much more aligned – sorry, some Republicans and some Democrats are much more aligned than they used to be. And I'll give you a great example because I see that this happens all the time now.

[00:17:41] I know nothing about transportation and railroads because I didn't cover those issues growing up. But there's a huge railroad merger going on right now. And the railroad industry is incredibly powerful. They've obviously been around since the – for more than 100 years.

[00:17:58] And there's been a bill for the last couple sessions of Congress where Democrats are trying to regulate railroads at the federal level to require railroads to have two engineers on staff at all times. This bill, no surprise, is heavily supported by the unions because it would be more unionized members. And it's heavily supported by Democrats, no surprise. And it's opposed by Republicans, no surprise.

[00:18:25] But in the last couple years, J.D. Vance, the vice president, has made it a priority of his after the derailment in East Palestine when he was a senator. So J.D. Vance has been pushing these railroad regulations. Last week, he got Donald Trump to agree with him. So now Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are pushing to regulate the railroads working with Democrats and labor unions. I mean this is like an amazing thing. And this happens on issue after issue after issue.

[00:18:53] Wall Street for my entire life has been very close with the Republicans until Donald Trump said, hey, I'm going to cap credit card interest rates. And then Wall Street said, wait a second. That's what Elizabeth Warren wants to do. And it turns out he does want to – she does want to do that. So she's working with Donald Trump on that. Time and time again, we see these extremes of the parties coming together. And it just makes covering these issues so much more fascinating than ever before. I was just at the Democratic AG meeting in Milwaukee.

[00:19:22] And one of the spiciest sessions I've ever seen was the unions speaking about the alignment and the partnership on the AI Data Center builds. Oh, wow. Democratic AG's response to that, their concerns around that. It was a very memorable day yesterday. That's amazing. But to your point about bedfellows and how they come together under kind of this populist fervor, but also business interests, you know, aligning in different ways. But you just touched on something you talked about in your new newsletter.

[00:19:51] And I do want to get to the kind of cadre of new ventures that you are currently undertaking. But I think before we go there, we have to go to the wolves of K Street because I think that that is where the accumulation of all of this chess, you know, chess observation was the writing of that book. And I do think that you tell me if that was kind of the turn to where you are now. Yeah, 100%. So, yeah, I guess we're sort of going backwards a little bit in the chronology.

[00:20:19] So I jumped ahead by mistake. Like, I never really – so I covered lobbying for a long time and found it interesting, as we've discussed. And friends of mine were like, hey, you should write a book about this. And I always thought, like, you know, writing a book sounds so daunting and intimidating. And I never wanted to do it. And then in 2015, a prominent young Democratic lobbyist was found dead on a golf course outside of Washington, D.C.

[00:20:48] And I started looking into him and eventually wrote a story about – a front-page story about him in the Wall Street Journal. And I, after that, was – got tons of phone calls from Hollywood agents and movie producers and book agents and book publishers who said, like, hey, this has got to be, you know, a book or a movie or something like that. So I teamed up with my brother, Luke, who was a reporter at the time.

[00:21:15] And just because, you know, writing a book by myself just seemed kind of boring or, you know, intimidating. And having a partner, someone who could help but also keep you motivated seemed like a good idea. So we started looking into this book that was really about this guy, but how this – the tragic story, the rise and fall of this young lobbyist who was found dead on a golf course. And all the money he made and all the money he spent in his fabulous story.

[00:21:43] And then we got a book deal with Simon & Schuster, and the top editor who was our editor said, okay, well, what's the book about? And we said, well, it's about this guy. And he was like – or she was like, no, no, it's not about this guy. Go tell us what – go find the story. So we spent about a year talking to lobbyists, trade association unions, Democrats, trying to figure out, like, what – is there a broader story? What does this guy's story mean? What does it tell us?

[00:22:13] And what it turned out is that I had always thought – you learn in high school and college about the – in the 1880s or 1800s, you know, the railroad barons and J.P. Morgan and the Rockefellers and Standard Oil and whatnot and all those big companies. And then you look right now, there's all these big companies.

[00:22:35] And I just assume that in that 100-year period, these big companies had lots of political influence and power over government and society and the economy. And it turned out that was not true at all, that after we had the big monopolies of 100 years ago, which we called trusts, we created the antitrust laws and regulations. And we moved to the New Deal. Say it again? After the Gilded Age. Exactly.

[00:23:02] And after the Gilded Age, though, we moved to the progressive era where people said, hey, we don't like this system. And that's when we created the antitrust rules. And then we moved to the New Deal. And then 50 years later to the Great Society or 40 years later. And from that period, for that maybe 100-year period, 90-year period, companies had very little influence in Washington. Industries didn't really lobby Washington. Industries thought their job was to run their companies and to compete in the marketplace.

[00:23:30] And during that time, consumer groups and environmentalists and civil rights groups and labor unions spent a lot of time pushing the government to grow bigger and bigger and bigger and create all these new rules and regulations for industry. And in the 1970s, during our Jimmy Carter recession, everything changed. Companies said, whoa, I'm spending all this money on rules and regulations and the government has all this influence and I'm not making money because it's a recession.

[00:23:58] And companies decided to do what any smart business person would do is invest in fixing their problem. And their problem was Washington. So in the 1970s, companies started hiring lobbyists, making campaign donations, starting political action committees, moving offices to D.C. Creating trade associations. So our story was how companies from the 1970s to now built their influence machine. And then a subtext that is sort of how the machine changed.

[00:24:26] You know, it went from, I think, almost everyone in the world not listening to your podcast think that the smoke-filled room lobbying is how lobbying works. And, you know, that absolutely did work before the 1970s and maybe sometimes in the 80s and 90s. But that type of relationship lobbying where you give the campaign check or the bag of cash and you get a favor in return, you know, does not exist anymore. And what lobbying is, as you know, is grassroots.

[00:24:51] It's motivating reaching out to business owners, to local employers, to regular Americans and getting them to help advocate for a company or an industry. And that is modern. And that's what's dedicated apparatus work. Exactly. And our book was basically about that, like how we moved from the fat cat, smoke-filled room relationship lobbying in the 1970s to what you just described. And I think most people just don't know that that's how lobbying or advocacy works.

[00:25:21] And so that's an amazing story. And the story of the rise of corporate influence, I think, is an amazing story. And it's all told within the story of this guy, Evan Morris, and multiple other really interesting lobbyists about how Washington changed. And jumping back to where we were before. And then what's amazing is the book came out two years ago, and now everything's changed again. Yes. Or it's changing again.

[00:25:43] And so I wouldn't say that everything we wrote before was wrong because it's still true that this is how companies created this tremendous influence apparatus and machine. But now that's going away. I mean, one of the things that companies did most effectively was realize, hey, Republicans might be with us, but in order to get things done, we need Democrats also.

[00:26:01] And they created a bipartisan center, bipartisan pro-business center in D.C. that for 50 years supported pro-business policy like easy immigration, free trade, lower taxes, less regulation. I mean, that's what companies want. And all of a sudden, that pro-business center is being strained.

[00:26:23] And I said all of a sudden, but both parties have been anti-free trade now for 10 years, back to the 2016 election when Bernie Sanders came out against free trade, Donald Trump came out against free trade, and then Hillary Clinton came out against free trade. I mean, Hillary Clinton is the establishment. Those free trade bills were Bill Clinton's free trade agreements. And immigration. I grew up with the Republican Party and the Democratic Party saying, hey, welcome, come on in.

[00:26:52] Not exactly open border, but if you want to come to America, we're going to take you. And that's something the industry wanted because the industry wants cheaper labor. And that's just gone, right? I mean, the Republican Party is the opposite of welcoming to immigrants right now. And that's the Republican Party that's supposed to be the Republican Party of business. Well, not anymore. So anyway, all these things that have changed in the last two years and there's more of them just make for an incredibly exciting and scary time to be following Washington.

[00:27:23] And working in it, too. Like, how do you keep changing your craft to keep up with the politics of the day? Yeah. And, you know, everything is changing in Washington today. The Republican Party is changing. The Democratic Party is changing. The way government powers held is changing. The media is changing. And advocacy is changing. And in your space, all the changes in advocacy just in the last two years are stunning.

[00:27:49] Again, it's sort of a slow trend from the inside game to the outside game. And now it's influencers. And it's branding. As in, the lobbying world, the advocacy world, to me, was always like a behind-the-scenes, you know, helping out your client, putting them in the right direction, getting the right arguments, but never being named in the paper and never being named in publicity. Now advocates have to be brands.

[00:28:17] Your brand and your persona matters more and more. And I don't know if that's a Donald Trump thing. I just don't know. But Trump likes talking to people, to big, important people. Maybe that's why the advocates need to be more front and center and more aggressive and more known. I don't know. The point is that this is a whole thing that you should listen to last year. Well, and that's why when we spoke a few months ago, you know, and you were just launching the deciders.

[00:28:44] And I want you to talk about the deciders and all the other new media approaches you're taking. But I really asked the question, has the city changed? Has the town changed where we are going to talk about ourselves? And I said, that will be the biggest long-term question for your new venture because you launched it with Jeff Miller, who just had always been behind the scenes. But he stepped forward into the spotlight. And I just found it fascinating.

[00:29:10] So maybe that's the answer because honestly, I'm still trying to figure out why he came on the show. I know he really liked it. I know he did great. I know we loved having him on. And it was great that he had all these sort of secrets and tricks and tactics and strategies that he just told us. The white shirt. I mean, I just never forget about learning how to dress. Right. It was all just so cool. But I still don't know why did he come on the show. And maybe it was because he got to be out there.

[00:29:39] I mean, I've known the name Jeff Miller for a long time because I cover lobbying. But I had never met him. I honestly didn't know what he looked like. Like, you know, every time you read a story about him in the New York Times or the Washington Post, it's, you know, he's a bad guy because he's got this influence and he's raising this money. So did he come on the show because he wants to help create his brand or enhance his brand? Or I don't know. I feel like your platform, though, is meeting the moment of the industry, the profession changing.

[00:30:09] And you just met it. So you said that a month ago, and I didn't realize that until now, that our timing, which was lucky, not anything that we saw. I think it is meeting the moment. At a time when people need to be out there more and more, and it's another factor here, the media is in turmoil. All media attention is focused on Donald Trump.

[00:30:37] All anyone wants to talk about Donald Trump, like members of Congress can't get on TV. So advocates definitely can't. We had Suzanne Clark on U.S. Chamber of Commerce, maybe probably, you know, the most important business advocate in the world. She had never done a long-form sit-down interview. And I don't think that was because people were asking her and she's saying no. I think no one cares because everything is about Donald Trump.

[00:31:00] And so if someone like that can't find a platform to get out and talk about issues that matter to her and her membership and her brand and her success and how she leads and how she thinks, you know, you're not going to get on anywhere else. So I think our timing was perfect where we're creating this weekly platform for people to talk about themselves, about their brands, about their companies, how they got there, what their personal story is. How are they adjusting to all these changes that we talked about?

[00:31:31] Because no one really knows the answers. I mean, we can sit – you and I can sit here and speculate and say, well, here's a good tactic or there's a good tactic or this is not working or that's not working. We don't really know yet. It's still so early. You know, for example, a great tactic for the first year of Donald Trump seemed to be if Donald Trump attacks your company, put your head in it and hope it goes away. Hope that issue goes away. That worked for a little while.

[00:31:56] And now all of a sudden companies and industries are saying, well, maybe that doesn't work because he keeps punching us. So, you know, there may be now an area where companies need to be more forceful in fighting back against Trump. And maybe a way of doing that is to be more public, to be more front-facing. And that's another big change.

[00:32:18] The Public Affairs Council just released some of its annual findings and it said that the public is asking for – and I think you wrote about this, you reported on it in your weekly newsletter. That they are seeking companies to step back into the arena. I think that there was whiplash coming out of the pandemic because everything got so personal in the pandemic and so companies retreated.

[00:32:41] And then you had the president reemerge for a second term, experiencing kind of that Twitter, you know, thrashing that would happen to specific companies. And again, everyone is just waiting to kind of go back in, is my read on it. I think – again, this is – you know, I find this to be such a fascinating time because there was a playbook that worked for 40 or 50 years or a playbook at least that people relied on.

[00:33:11] Because Republicans and Democrats sort of played within the 40-yard line so everything is sort of moving generally in the right direction. And that playbook is now being torn up by Trump. So we just don't know. I mean, I would think you're not doing your job as a trade association if you're not standing up to Trump and saying, hey, I disagree with this, that what you are proposing, Mr. President, is not good for business and I represent business. At the same time, if you say that, he tends to attack you. So maybe the idea is to be quiet.

[00:33:39] But then if everyone's quiet, he gets to do whatever he wants and business seems complicit with what he's doing. So it's just such a fascinating time because the new playbook is unknown and being written right now. Yep. Well, talk about your new playbook. You have two podcasts. You've got The Deciders. You're doing 533 that I think just launched last week. Yes. I mean, I don't know how you find time to sleep. But kind of go through kind of your new approach to how to cover Washington. Yeah.

[00:34:06] So another big change in D.C. is the change in the media. And Trump has taken all this power and attention to the White House. And the media, the mainstream media has followed him there. You know, if you're CNN and MSNBC, you're bashing Trump all the time. If you're Fox, you're just, you know, praising him all the time. And there's not much attention for anything else.

[00:34:32] So I started one show called The Deciders, which is a 30-minute sort of sit-down, long-form, television-like, television-quality interview. It's like a 60-minute show talking to the top advocates in D.C., talking to Mike Summers, the head of the American Petroleum Institute, or Drew Maloney, the head of the electric utility industry, or Suzanne Clark, as I mentioned, at the Chamber of Commerce.

[00:34:59] And then I sort of realized that members of Congress also aren't getting any media attention. With all the attention on Trump, and even committee and subcommittee chairs can't get any attention for big legislation that they're moving or introducing. And there's lots of things happening on Congress behind the scenes. So we created this show called 535. It's 535.news. And the idea is we're going to cover Congress.

[00:35:26] We're going to have a live television show from the Canon caucus room, which is – or sorry, Canon Rotunda, which is a great platform that's free to the public and reporters. So we just go there and set up cameras every morning. And we interview members of Congress in 10- or 20-minute interviews all day long about what they want to talk about, what they're introducing, what they're pushing. And so last week we had – or a couple weeks ago, Congress passed a big bipartisan housing bill.

[00:35:56] And I had an interview with Shannon McGann, who's a top advocate for the National Association of Realtors, who really cares about this housing bill. So perfect timing. She's talking about what does this bill do? How is it different from the Senate bill? What is the White House doing on this? You know, how is it this bill is so bipartisan? The next day there was a hearing or the day before there was a markup on the crypto bill in the Senate. So let's get people from the crypto space, including Coinbase, to come talk live on TV about the markup as it's going on.

[00:36:24] Looks like Democrats are getting on board. This will make the bill bipartisan. Does that mean it'll make it easier to get a Senate floor vote? Then there was a hearing on prediction market trading and sports betting. Let's bring on the people from those industries. So it's kind of like a live living and breathing show about all the stuff that Congress is doing that's getting zero attention. And that's not C-SPAN. It's not C-SPAN. It's the other side of the building. C-SPAN is focused on the floor. You're focused on the building.

[00:36:54] Everyone that's working in the building. Exactly. And as you know, in working on industry legislation, once something comes to the floor, it's cooked. It's done. Things very rarely come to the floor and fail. All the work is in committees and subcommittees. And that's what we're following. Yeah. Well, it's an incredible myriad of offerings.

[00:37:20] And again, I don't know how you're finding time to sleep, parent, all the things. Well, I'm going to end with one final question. You've been in that town a really long time. Who is the most interesting leader and what was the lesson that you took from that leader, whether they're elected, lobbyist, journalist, that you would pass on to our audience?

[00:37:48] I think the most interesting leader right now, and not someone who's necessarily a mentor to me, but the most interesting person in politics right now, I think, is J.D. Vance. And that is because he is a real leader in this populist Republican movement. And I think he shows that the changes in the Republican Party are not about Donald Trump and are here to stay.

[00:38:11] And for our book, I interviewed him a couple of times when he was just a U.S. senator from Ohio, freshman senator, and not getting that much attention. And I was interested in learning more about populists and what makes them tick and what motivates them. And is it all just politics or do they really care? And I spoke to Vance about this, and he just gave me some fascinating insights into how a populist thinks, which is really how the Republican Party is changing.

[00:38:40] And my main takeaway from our conversation is that he said that the Republican Party has always existed to protect individual liberty. And to me, that's how the Republican Party has been for 50 or 100 years. You're protecting individuals from the influence or strength of the government. Republicans are trying to push the government away from individuals, allowing individuals to make their own choices.

[00:39:06] But now he said that Republicans still exist to protect individual liberty. But so many companies have gotten so big and so influential that part of the job of Republicans, of populist Republicans, is to guard the individual liberty against the incursions from big companies. And that's like a fascinating way of seeing how the party is changing. And there's more and more Republicans, like Josh Hawley, who we mentioned, who agree with that.

[00:39:33] And that's making for this anti-corporate movement within the Republican Party that I just find is just so fascinating to watch. Yeah. I mean, you nailed it. The individual liberty as part of the core of the Republican Party. Interesting. Well, I didn't nail it. It was J.D. Vance. I'm just seeing you. You're reporting it out as a good journalist. Thank you. Well, Brody, it's been a pleasure to have you on. Thank you for being our season opener. I wish you all the best.

[00:40:03] It's an exciting 2026 for you. And I look forward to watching you on all the shows. Thank you for everything that you're doing for your profession, my profession and Washington at large. Well, thanks so much. It was a great conversation. I appreciate it.