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Weird Project 2025 Secret Training Video: Working with Congress [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2024-08-19  

This is not a training video. It is two Trumpist White House apparatchiks having a meandering, pointless, almost contentless conversation, interspersed with a few bits of irrelevant canned Wrong-Wing propaganda. Most Kossacks cannot actually listen to such meshugas for more than a few minutes, but evidently the Heritage target audience does not have that impediment to being made stupider than when they began.

Project 2025 Private Training Video: Working With Congress

This is a training video, plucked at random from YouTube.

Lifting and Carrying Workplace Safety Training Video 2010 - Manual Handling Safety Care

It has a point and a very specific purpose, and hews to a script that makes the point in a number of planned ways. There is an entire industry devoted to making such videos, but The Heritage Foundation, in a fit of Dunning-Krugeritis, does not even acknowledge that it exists, much less hire anyone who knows anything about the business.

They don’t like schoolteachers, football coaches, college professors, or military Drill Instructors, either.

Annotated Transcript

0:17 Hi. My name is Hugh Fike. I'm the current Director of Government Relations at the Conservative Partnership Institute

CPI brags

Where Conservatives Go To Win AT CPI, WE TRAIN, EQUIP, AND UNITE CONSERVATIVE LEADERS IN WASHINGTON AND ACROSS THE COUNTRY. No, actually they don’t, if this is a fair sample of their work.

and I worked in the Office of Management and Budget in the Executive Office of the President doing Legislative Affairs uh on the House side, and I'm joined by my friend and former colleague James Braid. 0:33 Hi. I'm James. I've worked in various uh senior roles on Capitol Hill uh I worked with Hugh in the administration in Legislative Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget specifically handling Appropriations. Currently I I serve as the Legislative Director for Senator JD Vance.

Uh-oh. Well, thank you, fair warning then. At least he is not on the Trump/Vance campaign staff.

As you read through the advice given below, think about how it applies to working with Vance. Or Boebert, MTG, Chip Roy, Mike Johnson…

0:50 and we're here to talk about Congressional relations with the administration. Essentially it's going to be a Legislative Affairs 101.

No, that turns out not to be the case, as you will see.

We begin with stock propaganda, included in many of these videos: a set of quotations from previous Presidents.

1:00 [Reagan] In the eyes of many in the world world this every 4-year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.

One that we will make sure never to permit again.

1:07 [Trump] In America we understand that a nation is only living as long as it is striving. 1:17 [JFK] Only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. 1:27 [FDR] This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive, and will prosper.

Thanks for praising the New Deal, but why are you doing that?

1:34 [Reagan] Whether we go forward together with courage or turn back to policies that weakened our economy, 🤦🏿‍♂️ diminished our leadership in the world, 🤦‍♂️ America's future will be in your hands. 🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️ 1:50 [Music] 1:58 Let's kind of get into it I I'll just sort of uh surface kind of the top topline understanding of how I think about the Hill from a theoretical perspective. 🤡 2:07 The Hill is a mechanism for information processing

Dis-information, Your Majesty means, of course, on your side. 🎩 Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit

So we have all these preferences, all these different issues, all these different um policies that are happening in the United States and uh how do we make them into a coherent legal document that actually can can maybe do some uh 😂👉good for the people of the United States👈😂 2:30 Well we have this huge machinery uh called Capitol Hill which is you know includes the procedure right you might think of that as the software by which the computer runs.

Malware?

2:40 You might think of uh members of Congress as the individual decision-making nodes. 2:44 what we do in the executive branch in legislative affairs is serve as the surface area between the decision makers in the executive branch and the decision makers in Congress in hopes of pushing 😂👉 information and persuasive policies 👈😂 out there so that we can influence the operation of that that machine and that's what we're going to talk about today. 3:01 Some of the basic strategies that we need to pursue in order to ensure that the president's agenda uh is considered as favorably as humanly possible on Capitol Hill… 3:12 yeah I think about it if you get into a legislative affairs job that you basically have three marching orders one you got to have staff relationships

two you got to have good principal relationships

and three you ultimately need to know what the issues that the members care about. 3:41 So speaking specifically to staff relationships if you're on the beachhead team [during the botched transition from Obama to Trump]... uh you know I didn't serve on the beachhead team but everybody that did say you're if you're changing administrations if you're basically switching from a you know from a conservative to a liberal Administration

Boys?! I say, Boys! You’ve lost the thread here. It’s supposed to be the transition from Biden to Trump II.

You're not going to be left with the tools or you're not going to have the lists of things that you're going to need absolutely need

Oh, don’t worry about that. Your goons threw all of that away the last few times.

3:58 So one of your first priorities uh is to obviously work with uh you know the administration to figure out what the priorities of the uh agency or the part of the administration you're in um but then start developing lists of members um that include staff members for the equities or the things that are uh are necessarily going to be important to your day-to-day job.

No, NO, NO! Project 2025 plainly states that you are going to throw away all of the Deep Staters and all of their eeevul plans on Day One, and only talk to each other about what to do.

4:22 and so what you want to do is immediately start creating lists of the Committees on Capitol Hill both on the House and the Senate that uh that are going to be important for um direct legislative jurisdiction over over your agency's areas.

I thought that was supposed to be done long, long ago.

4:35 Um, then you need to start doing individual meetings with them putting a face to a name that's really important um and then you need to have U make sure you have the right contact information. 4:43 These are in sometimes very quick uh moving um decisions and they are quick moving and that you need to be able to directly communicate with those people not just via email but be able to pick up the phone and call people because things move very quickly. 4:58 And in the administration I found found that you don't always have the most amount of time to be able to prep or give uh members or their staff heads up um but you need to do that right after the thing is announced um so that's staff relationships.

That’s it? Well, I can’t say that I mind these thousands of promised apparatchiks basically having no instructions to, you know, actually DO anything about dismantling the Constitution.

5:13 Talk to me a little bit about what it means to have um good principal-member uh relationships and that you you directly engaging with the uh members that are either on the committee or important to your principal [our staffer’s bosses]. 5:24 One of the things I would say that is a little bit of of a of a surprise I think to people who encounter Congress for the first time is that each individual Hill office is a small business unto itself.

538 fiefdoms is the usual description.

5:38 They have different cultures they have different relationships between staff and they have different decision-making structures and those structures are entirely idiosyncratic. 5:44 You can probably take a guess that the chief of staff is going to be an important decision maker but often you know a Legislative Assistant might be the key decision making person in the area that you're looking to work on. Right. 5:58 And so I think to your point about about we come in and we don't have the infrastructure built and we're not going to get the infrastructure and we have to build the infrastructure on the fly. 6:07 I think the absolute core aspect of that that infrastructure is segmentation.You've got to come in and understand relationships that are important and vital to form immediately and those those categories of people are going to be the authorizing committee for your agency the appropriating subcommittee for your agency and then the full committee on Appropriations as well as any other authorizing committees because often jurisdiction is spread uh throughout uh different committees but you've got to really have those relationships locked down 6:40 Now in many cases when you're a legislative affairs person you might actually have a direct relationship with the principal but your principal your cabinet secretary your under secretary is also a really big gun and those are the kind of people that members want to get to know members want to have um that relationship 6:56 And I I think you hit on such a great point about these relationships. First of all like I think we overestimate and we think of uh lobbying as this kind of super complicated thing where you have to be chummy and and have drinks with people and and and like be best friends with Congressional staff in order to achieve stuff.

No, you just have to show up with your prepared disinformation, and be able to suggest where various wads of campaign cash will come from, nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

7:16 Actually in order to get most of the benefit out of a relationship you just need to know that person you just need to have that introductory meeting you need to have an introductory meeting without an ask. 7:25 So it's just like, “Hey I'm James, I'm Hugh, I you know this is what we do.” If I'm ever messing your stuff up, and then get that cell phone number. I think what the point you made is so important. 7:35 A lot of times we're dealing with a huge aperture [?] policy we don't have time to monitor every piece of political development throughout that that that legislative process. 7:43 So sometimes you end up jammed and that's when your cell phone number and your introductory meeting pay dividends because you can have that frictionless conversation with the decision maker that you need, 7:54 and so that's really really key is just segment and then get yourself in the door face to face with these guys make sure they have your cell and you have you have their cell, absolutely critical and and you know really that's a lot of it. 8:09 once you're there that's when you can think about strategy that's when you can think about all these different things but that basic introduction is really the foundation of um uh how we approach things

But I thought—No thinking!!

8:21 then I would also maintain your record keeping right uh 8:25 I think it's really important to come in with a robust understanding of what we what we're trying to do what you have done for a particular decision maker and what you want to do um as well as different interactions different asks that they have. Like that that record keeping is really going to stand you in good stead because what it serves as is the basis of strategy. Right. 8:45 You know we do the basics. We get, we get in the door, we talk to these people, whatever, then we build a strategy. Right. And so you want to talk a little bit about how you think about… 8:54 So we talked a little bit about staff relationships. Maybe how you think about, once we have kind of the basic relational sort of architecture of our particular position, it could be the Commerce Department, the EPA, how do we proceed then in the generation of kind of a legislative strategy based on those relationships 9:23 Yeah. No matter what agency or or sub agency or what part of the administration is, if you have an adversarial Congress

But the published plan was—NO!

you can almost assure that your boss at some point is going to get brought before the committee so you want to be able to delineate what members uh your boss need to meet with um ahead of those committee hearings or ahead of those questions, um... 9:43 So that you're able to one, make sure that favorable questions are asked, and two, potentially um uh you know head off any questions that might be uh you know hard for your boss to answer or for the administration to navigate.

Why are they admitting this, when they have all of the answers right in the Big Red Book?

9:57 Um, and I think having that uh member-member, principal to principal relationship is going to be really important to make sure that they know that it's not just the administration's uh you know goals to to help advance what's going on in the Hill but it's also the members, in members’ direct interest that there are a lot of things in their district or in their state that are really important in that agency 10:21 and so being able to help them advance their priorities um is something that they want, and they want to have a closeness with the with the administration in a way that um shows that they're doing work that they're able to accomplish things but ultimately that they're able to tackle some of the things that might be important for their for their district or state. 10:37 Well since you brought it up, let's talk let's talk hearing preparation just a little bit. Briefly I think that's a core aspect of of some of like you know some agencies have a pretty heavy hearing tempo others don't. 10:48 Um, what are some of the key elements? You know you've you've done this with a number of different Administration officials, murder boards, the rhythm of a hearing… How do you think about maybe setting that up? 10:59 Yeah. So you want to make sure that um you have a bead on um who the who your opponents in Congress might be. So those are going to be people probably um you know who don't share the administration's values or your boss's values um and and get a sense for what they've asked in the past of these types of hearings, 11:16 because a lot of these hearings happen um you know Administration to Administration year to year so you get a pretty good sense of what they might ask so you do a little opposition research um and but then you want to setup um you know a murder board. 11:27 So basically um make sure that your uh principal is as prepared for the hearing or prepared for an interview as possible. 11:35 So you're creating basically a list um of charges and responses based off of those uh off your opposition research. So then you want to work with uh your allies on the committee or allies um in the Congress on saying these are the things that we are likely to be asked. 11:50 These might be good follow-up questions to ask um but also if I get jammed on a question you know give me some time rehabilitate the witness. 12:00 Give me some time to respond that isn't directly going to suck up um a question from you um and then ultimately it looks like maybe doing meetings beforehand… 12:07 So bringing people into the room saying here's where we're at and getting actual answers to their questions about what they may have so they're able to better understand the subject matter…

Ah. Actual answers. Really?

and I think that's a really important point, the rhythm of the hearing. Right. 12:17 I mean I haven't testified in front of Congress. I don't I don't know if you have. I don't think you have, 12:26 but like you know there's a a fundamental difference between getting beat down for 5 minutes and then uh getting a break for 5 minutes versus getting hit continuously with hostile questioning, 12:34 and so you know getting to that rhythm and and and getting members there right like a lot of you know we were talking about the subcommittee level or or or otherwise. 12:40 You know members aren't, you know your members might not want to come to a hearing that's deliberately crafted by the uh opponents of the the presidential Administration. 12:51 uh like they you know they don't they don't particularly focus on on the issue set that that that this is this is set up to beat you down with. It's not something that's very favorable to the Administration, 13:00 but if the if the members of Congress who defend you aren't going to be in the room you're going to have a long long morning. 13:05 So yeah that's that's an extremely important point, because of the way that you alternate between one side and the other and asking questions, if there aren't uh a stream or there aren't members um there to defend you then you're going to be just inundated with hostile questions and so being able to get that break and answer questions about the subject matter from friendly uh members is really important. 13:29 [Text overlay] PRINCIPAL RELATIONSHIPS: CONGRESSIONAL TESTIMONY & HEARINGS If you have an adversarial Congress, you can almost guarantee your boss will be brought before a Congressional committee.

Prior to a hearing or testimony, meet with members and staff to Suggest questions for committee members to ask your principal that highlight the work of the member and the agency/administration. Prepare for more difficult questions that might be tougher to navigate. Ensure members will be present. It is extremely important to have members on your side to give your principal a break from hostile questioning.

Principal to principal meetings also serve as an opportunity to highlight how the agency’s work directly affects the member’s constituency. 13:39 Um know so kind of progressing into the third point, knowing the members um that are aligned with your administration's issues, how do you go about knowing those how would you go about researching them? Obviously there's a a congressional track record within Congress. 13:53 If there's not a track record, if they've not been in Congress, so how do you be able to identify those issues so that you know your agency or your sub agency or whatever part of the administration is does something in that member's kind of interest area that you're able to you know to push it to them and have them echo and support and and come out and endorse what you've done.

How do you get into Congress without a track record in state government or business, or at least a campaign?

14:11 So this is this notion of issue uptake which is such an important issue like how like and it really is one of the trickier aspects of legislative affairs which is we are trying to find uh what in a former uh life you and I would call a champion, right, 14:27 we're trying to to to to find a champion who's not merely going to support an Administration policy when he has a decision point directly in front of him but to actually advocate in advance that Administration priority. 14:38 That's tough, but what you need going back to the segmentation is a pretty good psychographic profile of how members tell themselves stories about their careers um and you know I think probably you know obviously there's some of the the clear ones. 14:53 congress.gov. If the member has decided to introduce a bill on it that's the most costly thing a member can do from a time, staff, and political perspective in terms of position taking. 15:03 Well, that means they're probably pretty interested in the subject matter and if you have an administration initiative that's orthogonal right maybe it's about government waste maybe it's about deregulation maybe it's about uh you know restoring American Energy, 15:17 they happen to be you know a big proponent of that, and it's about nuclear energy, they're big proponent of nuclear energy, that's going to be, you're going to be pushing on an open door. 15:23 So doing that psychographic profile, I would also strongly advise anybody to, look, get the Almanac of American Politics, the latest version, spend the 85 bucks. Uh it is incredible. It will give you an understanding of the geography both political and social and human of every member of Congress every governor and every Senator it is incredible. 15:41 And from that you can start to build out uh what your targets are and what you what you think might be best. 15:48 Um, the other thing is, you know, you gotta at that point, right, so uptake is is a heavier ask than vote, so that's when you get your principal in there. That's when you do a little star star power... Right. 15:58 You get the you get the secretary, you get the administrator, you get the director over there and say, “Hey we'd really like to do this”, which will show the the uh member or the senator that the administration is committed to this policy and therefore if they do perceive this policy they can expect to receive actual backing as opposed to merely a thank you from the staff, which I would love it to be a gracious sufficiency, is often insufficient for uh members of Congress. 16:22 So yeah, and one one area that I found major success in was especially if they had a long track record was just going back through old press releases you know digital digital communications has not always been a real thing and so the standard of uh press releases and sort of old school uh Communications um has only you know it's only the last handful of years really changed, 16:44 so if they've been in Congress for a lengthy period of time going back you're going to find most amount of information in old press releases.

How many dinosaurs are there then, incongruous?

16:51 This is absolutely maybe the best tip. Like if you walk out of here with nothing understand that you may understand what a member cares about about what he issues press releases on on a very rapid clip. 17:01 Everything else is built on top of that, and like those press releases will tell you immediately what they care about. They will tell you how they think about an issue,

What they claim to think, you mean. We’re talking about practiced liars, here.

It’s like the old German joke.

God gave the German people three great gifts: Honesty, intelligence, and Nazism. But there was a catch—nobody could have more than two of them. If you were intelligent and a Nazi, you couldn’t be honest.

If you were honest and a Nazi, you couldn’t be intelligent.

If you were honest and intelligent, you couldn’t be a Nazi.

These days, of course, the honest and intelligent Republicans are all becoming Never-Trumpers.

Right um and uh uh just totally invaluable in terms of in terms—there is no better member evaluation tool out there than the media tab of a members congress.gov website, uh uh in terms of time investment versus output, 17:24 and so go through that, know those, I think that's absolutely like really critical kind of congressional lore. Yeah and they will tell you what they're trying to do. 17:33 Yeah, they will tell what they care about. Those are communicated because they want people in their District, that they want people in the media to know, um and uh in similar fashion they most members will issue like a weekly or a monthly newsletter, 17:46 and those are going to communicate even more deliberately about um what it is in either the district or what it is in the Congress that they're doing, um and a lot of that stuff can pop up over August recess. 17:55 And can you talk a little bit about why that might be important so members are receiving and being barraged by a constant stream of information? Right. 18:05 And so they, unlike normal sort of people who are who don't have to do this, members are constantly forced to make permanent irrevocable decisions about what they think about politics or policies. Right. 18:15 So like you and I will not have not voted… Right. but you vote as a member and you are like sort of permanently liable for that vote throughout the entire recorded span of the American Republic so they are constantly kind of on the lookout for real information about what a particular decision actually means, 18:36 and so during recess um in a lot of cases they'll be home and when people bring stuff up to them directly they pay attention, 18:40 and so you know, if you can find a way to get information uh emitted to to members when they're in their districts in addition to from like key local decision makers or whatever that's really going to change uh a member's political calculus in a way that a merely DC lobbying can't. 19:05 They listen to their districts. They listen to the to their local papers. They they listen to those things, and they they find that information very real and very persuasive. And even if it's not persuasive, it changes the political calculus. 19:19 And so uh thinking about how you can, you know, maybe influence a member in in the district or show that an issue affects the district is really really important. 19:26 I think that's a good segue to something that is a a key advantage. You got a lot of deficiencies in uh the administration.

Yours or ours?

19:34 it's a difficult job, very difficult job, and so lobbying is a hard job, and doing it well is even harder. 19:40 One of the core advantages you have is your ability to produce information. Right. So August is a particularly critical time to apply and deploy that information, but you know you have the horde of careers [career officials, that is] available to you that work work essentially for you, depending on the division. 19:58 You know, real information about how government programs are actually working is often quite difficult to acquire. Like who, how much, how it's working… 20:03 Iou can get all that stuff, you can get it correctly, and you can get it out to sort of influence the information space. So understanding how your career staff and your your pol—your other policy divisions are like producing information and understanding how you can frame the terms of that debate, like how much money is being spent, how much money has been spent on a particular thing, 20:28 that's very difficult to acquire for an outside observer but you can choose and pick uh that information uh uh because you have access to that to that information fashioning power which is so powerful. 20:41 [Text overlay] KNOW THE MEMBER’S ISSUES In legislative affairs, you are trying to find a champion to not only support the administration’s priorities when the decision is in front of them, but to proactively advocate and advance those priorities.

Have a running list of major priorities for each member. Resources to use: Congress.gov (especially the media tab). The latest version of The Almanac of American Politics. All press releases from the member’s office. The member’s weekly or monthly newsletter.

Find a way to highlight how the agency’s work is directly affecting the member’s constituency. 20:52 I think, in in particular, knowing um (and as we kind of wrap up here) knowing um what you talked about, knowing what your uh powers are, Right. Knowing how and what levers you have and when to pull them um that's not always communicated from one administration to the next. 21:08 So um if you do get a job you should try to find the person most aligned with you who had the job prior to you. Go meet with them. Go talk to them. Ask them, hey should I uh should I go meet with anybody else? Like get to know the people and ask them what it is that they didn't know when they showed up that that you would like to know. 21:24 and so um just in conclusion, um you know I think you know staff relationships obviously matter. Principal relationships really matter and knowing the issues uh that of the members with direct activities on the on the committees or um that are directly interested in your agency or sub agency's uh you know um bucket of of issues are is really important. 21:45 I don't know if you had any closing thoughts 21:48 Yeah so I'll just I'll just make two two two uh points as expeditiously as I can. Number one, part of the the the difficulty and core of of being an effective legislative affairs staffer is understanding what you have actually have to accomplish on a particular Administration policy initiative. 22:06 yoYu know, if you can do it solely through executive action that means you need to protect the executive action you don't have to go out there and and um uh pass a law. Right. 22:18 And so what you do need to do is prevent an executive action that could be politically unpopular in the Congress by preventing the junction of Republicans and Democrats. 22:26 Right. That's that's when I mean the Congress is the Article One branch. The executive branch in modern times is more powerful, but Congress unified will beat you, and so you need to prevent the effectuation of that Junction. That's really important. 22:39 So thinking through that is is is key. You know, if you want to, if you need to pass a bill, you need to get—I don't know $500 million for something—well that's going to have to get passed through the Congress and Congress requires bipartisan action for the most part. 22:53 If you're if you're trying to beat a filibuster at 60, um, and so calibrating your investment, calibrating the the expectations of your team um is really important. 23:07 And then finally I would just say, you know, there's an old adage in Washington: uh friends come and go but enemies are forever. Very heady stuff. 23:12 Leading the administration's position on Capitol Hill: Don't Be a Jerk.

Too late.

Always maintain your relationships. It's always better to to to not burn somebody and so that's the thought I would I would definitely leave with. 23:24 Don't be too aggressive. Be firm, be tough in the service of the President's agenda but but do not be a jerk.

👆👆😂😂👆👆

23:31 Yeah that's a great point to end on. James, thank you for uh this discussion and hopefully it's fruitful those uh watching. Absolutely. 23:37 Thank you.

I will leave you with this.

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy—that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

John Kenneth Galbraith

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