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It's the Brianair Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Today marks two months of the Trump

administration, January 20th to March 20th. A New York Times article focuses on one of the big

picture ways to look at what the administration has been about trying to cripple the left,

aiming not to just implement policies that Trump voters, or at least Trump and his inner circle think are good for the country,

but also to do with the article calls hobble Democrats' ability to compete in elections

for years to come, also to financially hurt firms, law firms, that work on behalf of Democrats.

Shane Goldmacher, national political correspondent for the New York Times, wrote that article

and joins me now. We'll also touch on his recent piece about California's Democratic Governor

Gavin Newsom and MAGA leader, Steve B Bannon finding common ground over a few things,

including no tax cuts for the very rich and general suspicion of Elon Musk when Bannon was on Newsom's

podcast recently. Shane, thanks for joining us. Welcome to WNYC. Thanks for having me on. In your article, you acknowledge that

it's not unusual for partisans to push for investigations into political groups on the other side

of the aisle, but Trump and his team are defying the usual norms around that. Where would you

start to describe what they're doing that's new? Yeah, I think it's sort of pulling together all the things that are happening all at once and saying,

hey, these are some individual discrete actions, but put together they paint a pretty clear picture

of congressional Republicans and the Trump administration going after some of the most important core pieces of the democratic political infrastructure, the way that Democrats run elections.

I would probably start with the ongoing investigations into Act Blue, which is the company, website, firm, nonprofit, that processes almost every political contribution

in the country.

So they are investigating Act Blue, accusing it of wrongdoing.

They're investigating another tech firm that controls a number of important sort of tools

the Democrats use, both to organize events, one that some of your

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