Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds, and Donald Trump says Ukraine President Zelenski has a four percent approval rating when it is in fact over fifty percent. We have such a great show for you today. Media Matters, Angelo Kirasne stops by to talk about the missed opportunities when it comes to communicating
and fighting back against Trump's agenda. Then we'll talk to Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse about how the Senate can fight back against DOJE and Trump's many aggressions.
But first the news, SAMII. Another one of that crystal ball we had called actually Reading Project twenty twenty five. Another one of the prophecies has come true, Unified Executive theory.
I know, I'm shocked that everything Trump said he was going to do he's doing.
Just shocked by the way.
I want to point out vote did say during the election that he wouldn't actually do this stuff that he said he was going to do. So I think the big question is when they see him doing the stuff that he said he was going to do, will they rebel? And we don't know the president's new executive order will give him control over independent agencies. FYI, none of this is how it's supposed to work, testing a once fringe legal theory.
Lawsuits are sure to follow.
But again, remember this isn't about succeeding one hundred percent. This is about succeeding twenty percent. This is about succeeding ten percent. This is about changing the paradigm. This is
about moving the needle. The sweeping order, which claims to promote presidential supervision and control of the executive branch, which is not how any of this is supposed to work, would affect independent agencies like the Federal Election Committee, the Federal Communications Committee, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. So this would mean he would cont what's on the air, how the dollar works, trade security is the now. I mean, this would be a lot
more power. The order appears to be designed to test a once fringe legal theory dubbed the unitary executive theory. Again, the goal here is to get this the Supreme Court and have them sign off on it. It reflects the growing influence of Trump's budget chief, and we've talked about him a lot Russ Vatt, who has basically said that the president should be the boss and the Congress should basically just be a group of attractive people and not
have the power of the purse. The order is going to be swiftly met by a lot of legal challenges. But remember we have a very conservative Supreme Court. Three of the members were installed by Donald Trump. These regulatory agencies currently exercise substantial executive authority without sufficient accountability to the president. These are the ideas in this executive order. It's bad, hopefully will get struck down. It's very scary,
and again this is what we talked about. The order proceeds to outline how Vaught, the Director of the US Management and Budget, would supervise agencies in establishing performance standards and management objectives. So the idea here is that Russ Vaught and Donald Trump will run all of the other agencies. This is completely insane and not how any of this is supposed to work.
Yeah, and I'm provided back to August of twenty twenty four when Russ Fought was caught on a camera saying that when Trump said he has no ties to Project twenty five, it was a lie. Yeah, there we go. So, since we're one of the more crude podcasts out there, agree and titling, this next section does shit because the facts they're putting out our bunch of kin to talk shit. We have a wholey of total bullshit that they've been doing.
Elon Musk, Department of Government Efficiency claim to be saving eight billion dollars on termin eight contracts this week. But you will be shocked to know that these poly maths, what they meant.
Was eight million dollars. Reading is fundamental.
Team polymath The math part be jumbo shrip.
Yes, the error represents about fifteen percent of the total fifty five billion dollars that Doge has claimed it has made to date. Look, this is so insane. The inconsistency is in addition to the slew of contracts listed as having US savings of zero, Doge's accounting has called it into question, as Musk keeps claiming he has saved Americans tens of billions more. By the way, I just want to point out two things about Doge. One is that he's the richest man in the world. He could just
pay for all this stuff himself if he wanted. He could end world hunger, right, He could make every public school in America incredible. He could do all that stuff, but instead he wants to save taxpayers money. Why does he want to save taxpayers money. Why because he wants to cut taxes for him in his round.
I have some news for you. It seems like they've also done some other fuzzy math with this one hundred and fifty year olds who are collecting Social Security.
I know, shockingly, this was a great thing when I saw him doing it, because it was like, I thought, that can't possibly be right, and I thought, well, maybe it's right.
You know, he's Elon Musk, He's very smart. He's wrong.
So he claims that he's found rampant fraud in the Social Security administration. You'll remember he said that in the oval with Donald Trump.
There is no one.
Hundred and fifty year old collecting Social Security benefits.
It's just so crazy. The programmer.
Elon claimed the one hundred and fifty number was evidence of fraud. But it's actually a weird quirk of the Social Securities benefit system, which is written in Cobalt, which is a six year old programming language, which grids the Social Security database, and it just doesn't so one hundred and fifty is actually like ninety six right or a little bit less. So this is like the big question with Elon is he lying or is he just making a mistake.
I don't know.
I think it's that Jesse Waters quote that they know that once their shit ecosystem of media circles that the correction will be quieter than what they said.
Right, So it doesn't matter.
Yeah, So Trump just endorsed sweeping Medicaid cuts even though he said he wouldn't do that on the campaign trail.
Yeah, I'm shocked.
I am shocked that Donald Trump is doing all the stuff he said he would do.
I'm just shocked. Who could have seen this?
So basically, there are these budgets that are coming and in order to cut taxes so that Trump's enormous tax cut doesn't expire, they're going to have to cut Medicare.
They're going to have to cut Medicaid. He just said.
Basically, Trump said, the House and the Senator are doing a spectacular all Caps job before together as one unified, unbeatable team All Caps. Now that's actually not true because this setate has two bills. The House has one bill. It's been back and forth, but either way. This bill will cut two trillion dollars the budget, including eight hundred and eighty billion dollar cut to critical health programs, in order to pay for a tax cut for rich people.
You'll be shocked to hear that this is all a big scam to pay for tax cuts for rich people. Congratulations all of us, and.
We knew it was coming.
Angelo Kiasone is the CEO of Media Matters.
Welcome back to Fast Politics. Angelo, Thanks for having me.
I was just saying before this, I didn't even want to miss a minute of you talking about what's going on, because I just feel like there is so much going on and it's funny. You and I did so many podcasts this summer about like Project twenty twenty five and what it would look like if he won, and what it would mean to dismantle the federal government. And I remember thinking to myself, twenty one, Okay, he's going to dismantle the federal government.
I wonder how that's going to affect my life.
Like you know, I don't get disability checks, I don't get Social Security, but I do benefit from many many things the federal government does. It is super interesting to watch the way that they have done this, So talk to me about what it looks like.
Yeah, I'll just talk about with the personal and expand out because I said I went through a similar thing, right, which is obviously you care about other people, and that's a big point of it. But I think democrats and sometimes liberals feel bad about being selfish, and I think that's important. We should be a little selfish, like we should understand the stakes for ourselves and encourage others to do that.
And we should be able to message that because I think that one of the problems is there's a group of people who think, well, this will just affect poor people, which in itself is upsetting, but this is larger than that.
Yeah, And so for me the moment, it was really early, in the first couple of days, I think about how it affects me. My family has really really really high pink credic cancer rates, like extremely high, way off the charts. It's a very very high likely that I, either Io or my sister are going to get pank credit cancer. So I pay very close attention, weirdly to the paint credit cancer community. And I obviously thought, although they got to cut all the funding and that's going to be
terrible and it's going to slow things down. But there was a really specific moment the first couple of days of DOGE, after they started freezing all those payments and grants. There was a doctor who had been working on a big study for pank credit cancer. He was on an airplane on his way to California to do the final pro former meeting before his grant goes through for a really new treatment for stage through pank cretic cancer. On the plane that cancer the meeting, I mean, it was done.
It was just to check off the box thing before the money gets released and he gets to complete the study on the sort of this next phase of his treatment, and the whole thing got shut down. And that was the moment where I'm like, oh my god, this is like, you know, that's almost.
Invisible, but I could.
I felt it, I saw it, and I think that's something we should all do. And the reason why I say that is because when you think about it at scale, the enormity is too much to understand. It's like trying to have a conversation about the universe. You know, a million billion sons stolar.
Systems, Like what that's so big?
I don't know, and it's so it's hard, and I think people need to do need to think about it from that perspective, which is how is it going to affect me? And not just so they can get upset, But I think some of them actually needs to know so they can prepare. But I also think that's how they see that they have skin in the game and that there are some stakes here that requires some engagement now.
And the reason and I'm again I'm not a cockyde optimist about everything, but we should not lose sight of the fact that they have a very very very slim majority in the House some four votes, only four people like Leader jeffries Or I don't make it a habit of sort of like ripping on Democrats because I get that that's kind of an easy thing to do. And yeah, you know, it's like all right, but you know, he made it this comment last speak where he said, what do you want? What do you want me to do?
I have we have no leverage? What No, Actually, you do have leverage. That's the whole point. You have to find the leverage in tweak it. There's plenty of it, and one of the leverages is their small margin and that to me, was so frustrating because the leverage, in part is getting people to understand and connect those dots.
And the last thing I'll say on this, and I really am troubled by it, is that, you know, there was this thing with Democrats and the media to a degree over and over and over again during Trump's first term and then again in the interregnum period where they said, Okay, well, mother's going to take him down, you know, and now this special prosecutor is going to take him down.
And somebody's going to come and rescue us from this.
Yes, and now it's the course. All the courts are going to do it. You know, they're going to make sure no, you need to do it. The media is not the opposition party. The Democrats of the opposition party, and they need to act that way, and right now they're not. And that's the part that I think people are generally frustrated about it.
The media is not the opposition party. They are meant to be narrating what's happening. Democrats are the opposition party, and they cannot be passive. I want to go back to what you're saying before. The grants are still not unfrozen, so even though the courts have said they must be unfrozen, they are still not unfrozen, and some are unfrozen, and drips and drabs are coming out. The chaos is in fact the point.
Yes, And what happens is because these are really big attractions. You know, thousands of employees here, you know, sixty billion dollars in grants there. You know, these things get lost and it's it is hard to understand. But it's also for things that are very important. And what I am concerned about so far is that these are really sympathetic things. They're not controversial things.
These are not the truth is on their side.
Right.
People want cancer research.
That's right.
There are hospitals right now, you know, and children's hospitals in particular got hit really hard by these freezes.
Children's cancer hospitals.
That's right.
Like there's sick kids. And I don't understand why we're not seeing that, and we're not seeing that because why, well, no one's doing anything asymmetrical to be there. You know, some Democratic senators are having a coffee clotch in their office every few days and saying, you know, and they talked to some person as a podcast and that they think they're doing new media. Go there, make the media. No, maybe the first time you go, they won't follow you. That's okay, go again.
The attitude that Democrats have and again is that they should get the same level of coverage as Trump, which in itself is self defeating.
Right.
One of the reasons why Trump gets so much coverage is two reasons. One is because he knows how to play the media, and two is because he participates with media. He's always leaking, he's always planning, he's always talking to people. So I was talking to someone from the Biden White House and I sent him the thing about the Hannity interview last night, and I said, you know, if Biden had been doing this the entire time, you guys would not be in the shit show you are.
And he said, yeah, that's.
A good idea. I'm trying to get them to go on podcasts. No, go on everything. Don't go on podcasts, go on everything all the time. The Hannity interview I'm talking about is yesterday Elon the first Buddy or perhaps the real President and Donald Trump did an interview where they both were like, no, he's so great, No, he is so great. They did they sat down with their friend John Hannity and did you know whatever an hour of PR and their people were like, everything is great.
By the way, I just want to.
Point out just I'm actually very animated about this.
That Republicans are trying to figure out how to pass these budget amendments and new budget, but Elon is just quietly like shiving the federal government. So he's fired all these people. He has no congressional approval to do that. And in the end, did they get rehired or does it not matter or I mean, talk me through that.
I mean, this was always part of the strategy. And this is why I think it is very fair to be frustrated with the Democrats, because they were very transparent about the plan here, which was to do so much so fast, so that it was overwhelming, and that even if a few things either get reinstated by force because of some legal thing or because they mess up and they have to rehire the people, which is a part and part of.
Right like with the nukes.
Yes, yeah, you'll still get the majority of what you wanted. And so the thing that I remind everyone about is that this is only phase one. All these determinations right now which feel very overwhelming, and they're gutting every so many parts of government, making them not functional or totally hollowing them out. This is only phase one and probationary employees, I think there's a misnomer. I think the media has done a very bad job and Democrats have also done
a very bad job here. Probationary employees are not just new hires. It's also people that have been there that got recently promoted or transferred to a different department, meaning experienced people, people that get rewarded. They also getting pushed out. The second wave will be all the schedule lef termination, So once they're done with the probationary ones, then they'll go through and reclassify another thirty to fifty thousand key
positions as political and then terminate them. And those are combined. Is a substantial sort of impact. And that doesn't even get into the other effects, which are grants and contracts and the chaos that will ensue, and the downstream effects of course on the economy and on individuals, on individual communities.
And this is.
Where I think it's important. Where the urgency comes from, and the reason why there's urgency now is that it's not just a cheap political trick. Oh, this is this is the way to get to him, you know, Hey, okay, yeah, this will help. This has political benefits, I suppose. But it's more important than that is that if Democrats are not able to successfully explain and connect the dots between the harms that people are experiencing and the actions that
the administration are taking. If they're not able to do that now once it reaches a fever pitch, because of the narrative dominance that Donald Trump has and the administration has, and their willingness to lie, all they're going to basically do is take all of that anger and frustration that exists out there and flip it around. They're going to say, well, we didn't need to do any of those things. That
was just malicious implementation. That was just Democrats and the deep state and the media sort of doing this to hurt you. So you need to give us more power so that we can fix it. And so they need to do this urgently so that they actually don't end up giving this sort of runaway administration more influence and more power when a lot of the harms of the of their actions even you know, start to materialize.
Yeah.
No, And I also think it's like even more than that, why are we here?
These things are not popular?
Cutting cancer treatment for children, cutting the NIH, cutting the FDA, cutting air travel for ten hours this weekend. They had fired the people in charge of the nukes, Like this is stuff, and you know, like somebody was like more eggs less plane crashes, and that is honestly, that's better messaging than Donald Trump is Captain Chaos. I mean, that is,
oh my god, your eggs less plane crash. We should not have just fired the people at the CDC who study infectious diseases, Like we just had a pandemic and some of the hostility towards the pandemic, which again I understand they didn't like it, but stopping knowing about other pandemics will not prevent another pandemic. Like I feel like there's a fundamental sort of misunderstanding of how the world
works here. And even like one of the things you see when you're on X is like a lot of magas and probably some of those people are bots, but some of those people are real who are like celebrating cutting the federal government, and it's like, why are you celebrating waiting longer for a passport. Why are you celebrating making sure that the FDA has less inspections. Why are you, like explain to us what there is to celebrate there.
This is for tax cuts for very rich people, and I think that they don't understand why the federal government is being cut like that.
That's right. And a couple of things here, because well, this has always been a hobby horse of the writer, is that you try to, you know, dismantle government as much as possible. And we shouldn't confuse what's happening now with sort of like the standard right wing Oh, we just need to hollow out governments so we can actually
privatize those functions. I mean, that was honestly the dirty secret of Republicans fifteen years ago, is they wanted to hollow out governments that they could privatize the functions and fleece it more. Which I'm not celebrating, but it's like they still wanted to do most of the things. They just wanted to screw everybody in the process and get their friends richer. What's happening right now is not just
a transformation of government. It's that it's using the instruments of government to have a massive cultural change, and that everything else comes downstream from that. And so how we got here is basically a country that has been pickled in right wing misinformation and rage for three decades. You do that and you build a pretty rotten core that
can spread rot spreads. And you know, the weird thing is in all of this, and you talked about the unpopularity of some of these policies, and it's true, most of these things are deeply unpopular. It's not what Americans actually want. And the other thing, too, is that there's a lot of cruelty, you know, almost as you know it in the celebration, and that's been a feature and a shift of the fever swamps in recent years is
the bloodthirst. And you know, there's a reason why Trump announced his camp his reelection campaign in Wago, Texas, which it's a symbol of anti government attacks.
I just want to.
Add that there have been historically a lot of Republicans have done this. All of this rhymes maybe it rhymes with Jim Crow, maybe it rhymes with McCarthy maybe, but it all rhymes like America has. I mean, one of the I think the biggest mistakes in twenty seventeen that the narration of trumpsm did was they were saying, like, this is not who we.
Are, Like this is absolutely who we are.
That's right.
We had to grapple with that reality.
There's there's a lot of people that are like that.
And the one thing that is clear is that, aside from people not understanding this connective tissue because again the news media and the mediat larger are telling the story, but you need to have characters in it, and Democrats are a key part.
Of that and they're not helping you that.
The on part here, which is more visceral, is you know, there is something before I even before I think we get into the policy stuff, which is an important part of it, that there is something unsettling right now about what's happening. Even if you are sort of leaning conservative, watching sort of some of these figures, you know, Steven Miller screaming, the way that Musk and Trump are always together, the types of the things they're doing, there's something off
about it then uncomfortable. Even if you don't really know anything about politics, you can have a visceral reaction to that. You know, if if you were in a room and you had to sit at a table, you know, with your lunch tray. You know, you probably choose to sit at a table that had nobody at it, then one
that had Musk and Stephen Miller. You know, if you if you were in you know who they were right, because there's something off and I think a lot of people really feel that, and we shouldn't discount.
The significance of that.
There's a reason why people like that, and you know, are are having away at Musk as well. Part of it is self interest, but a lot of it is that it's true they are There is something off here, and I do think people can pick up on that, and we should not shy away from reminding people that, because I think it's important to get in the circle and say, wait before I tell you why you need to oppose this, but can we just agree that there's something uncomfortable.
And one of the best moments in the twenty twenty four cycle, which of course the consultant class shut down right away, was when Tim Walls said that these guys are weird.
That's right, And the reason why it resonated so well was not because of something specific about Tim Walls. It's that it resonated because people felt it. And this has been my critique of a lot of the communications broadly is that you can talk to people in one of three ways. You could talk to people's head, their heart, or their gut. And the majority of conservative thinking and right wing sort of nonsense is to people's guts. And that gets into your point about this is who we are.
They tap into that really deep core and give people a permission structure to behave in ways that maybe they feel very request about. That's why you sort of see this burst of energy from so many of these just reprehensible figures. But Democrats on balance don't really talk to people's gut. And I do think that when they said the weird thing, you know the consultant, people thought, oh, it's because he said a cute insult, so like, you know, we should do captain chaos because of prec no right.
People weren't responding to the insult. They were responding to the fact that it tapped into their core. They felt it too. And I think broadly, speaking to me, that's the important part is to connect with a whole bunch of people that I would connect with on just say hey, we at least gree there's something weird about this, right, uncomfortable and unsettling.
It's uneasy.
And then beyond that is to actually get people to think a little more selfishly about how this is going to affect them, and then to not similar inpotency, to recognize that there is such a very thin political margin and we should we should make some noise about it, right.
I mean that is a thing too, like, well, we're cooked. There's nothing we can do, you know. And the truth is most of the country does not like this. A lot of the people who voted for Donald Trump didn't think he was going to do the stuff he said he.
Was going to do.
We know this because we'd talked to voters and you would say, you know, he's going to do this, and they'd say, oh, no, he's not going to do that.
That would be terrible. So like he's doing that.
He is doing the stuff that these voters, these trumpy voters, said he wasn't going to do because they thought it would be bad.
Yeah, And that's you know, that's the point too, is that their coalition is you know, very volerable. You know, they they organized and built power on what used to be considered the fringes. What they pulled together is something that is deeply vulnerable, and being able to identify those betrayals and fracture points and fissures is significant. And I think on balance, liberals, Democrats, the media are doing a good job of like not making the right feel like, oh,
they're owning us. I don't think we're stepping on any of the bear traps that we have in the past. But the leadership is frozen. That is a problem because I think there's this idea that maybe we'll wait it out, or there'll be a catalyzing moment or people will see it, and that is ridiculous.
And I also think ultimately, like there is a bravery issue here, Like I understand that if you're a Democrat who ran for office forty years ago, you thought you'd be fighting against Bob Dole and not Donald Trump, right, you didn't think they're be like a group, you know, a group text filled with MAGA influencers tweeting out you know how to attack you. But here we are, man like,
this is where we are. So if you don't want to fight for democratic values, I mean, I think of this as a very easy moment in American life, right, there's not a lot of nuance.
Right.
There have been moments, especially in politics, where you had to take a real nuanced look, you've had to say things that maybe would make people upset. You'd had to. But this is not that there's no nuance here. It's just a question of being brave and a lot of these people are not up for it, which is fine, but then they need to go because this job, it's not the Supreme Court.
A couple things on the bravery front.
One, I totally agree, and I feel at firsthand, right, I mean, I'm under horrible and how from Musk and Twitter and all these threats from goverment officials and people that now have govermt officials that a few years ago are writing media figures and you have to have a stiff spine. I understand why others may feel the sensitivity there, because, in a weird way, while solid seems like a through
line on the left, it's not true. Fear and vulnerability tend to make people on the left duck and cover. Why so many people ran away from the repro movement. We could go back twenty years ago and be like, look, we should even more than that when they started to target abortion providers that used to be inside hospitals so they can get the clinics to be standalone, so that then they could divide and conquer. Right, that should have been the moment. Like liberals have a tough time with
this concept of solidarity when they're under pressure. It's just it's fear, and I appreciate that, but this is it. There is it is too as you know, it's a clear choice. And to that point about bravery and consideration, the part that I think is a little bit of a connective issues that I think it's just about thirty percent of the federal workforce is veterans.
Yeah, and they're all getting fired.
Yes.
If we think about the types of people that you know, we always talk to me and they get the board airplanes early, right, and we always talk about them, and we thank them for their support, and we make all these cultural nons to them, right, And I think that at minimument democrats, if they don't feel like they should do it for themselves at least, I don't want to say, hide behind, but at least stand behind the thing that you're always popping up as an example of heroism and
support and that should be an easy story for them to tell because so many veterans are being affected by this too. And I understand the fear, but you know, I mean, I do only have all these lines. We only think to fear is fear itself, Like we all have all these historical touchstones. None of this is new. It's literally history repeating itself. Just you're the cheat codes, and I feel like one of the cheat codes is not to succumbent to that fear.
And also that a little bit.
Of courage is extremely contagious and we need some of that.
Yes, correct, I think that's exactly right. Thank you, Angela, Thank you.
Sheldon white House is the junior senator from the state of Rhode Island. Welcome back to Fast Politics, Senator Sheldon white House.
Thank you so much. I'm very glad to be on with you.
Project twenty twenty five is here. It's real.
Today Trump signed an executive order that's going to try to get to the Supreme Court, likely to test unitary executive theory.
It's so annoying. But tell us where you are with us.
I completely misjudged Doggie. Yes, I thought that was the place where the Trump's chief of staff had figured out to put these two eccentric billionaires like the Toddler pen where they could think deep thoughts about government reform, but they had no power whatsoever. They weren't decision makers of any kind. And then ramas Fani got the boot, and then Musk left alone, burst out of the doggy pen
and started rampaging through the government. And you see, first of all, just massive destruction with no logic to it, just trying to break whatever stuff they can. You see a mad rush to try to stay ahead of the courts because what they're doing is illegal and they know it,
so they're rushing forward. And you see, given the chech billionaires who were with Trump at the inauguration and favorite seating out of his own cabinet, given that they live off of data, that data is immensely valuable to them.
It's the coin of their realm. The fact that their pal Elon Musk is rummaging his muskrats around in our data systems and potentially leaving tax data, healthcare data, social security data available to big data interests is an alarming, alarming prospect that has not at all been ruled out.
Yeah, I don't understand he won't even sort of give us an answer as to what he's doing in there.
Right, Oh, I mean, it's all as vague as can be. Frankly, they won't even accurately describe who he works for and whether he's running the muskrats in the doggy pen, or like how that is all working. It's at this point just a huge destructive mess. If you remember the Cat in the Hat, Yeah, remember that book. Yes, and Thing one,
Thing two come in and up the house. Musk and his little muskrats are like a whole fleet of Things one and Thing two is running about the government, destroying as much as they think they can get away with. I think with the theory that at some point the cat and the Hat drives in his machine and puts it all back together, or maybe they just leave.
It wrecked, broken, because that supports Project twenty twenty five, the idea of dismantling the federal government.
If you reduce the federal government, you make it less expensive and less helpful to people, and with less funds blowing through it, that opens up the all important space for tax cuts for millionaires right.
And privatization of what little is left of the federal government. You serve with these people in the Senate, You've known them for a million years. Are you surprised that nobody has a spine to stand up to like a cash patal who will totally weaponize the department?
Yeah, I mean it's obvious he has said, so why would you not believe him?
He's working on him right now.
He fired a couple of people while he's not even in there yet.
Yeah. And the Attorney General Pambondi has already allowed the department to be weaponized to do, for instance, a fake grand jury investigation in order to be able to assert that Biden funding at the EPA is somehow potentially criminal or fraudulent, and you need to get a seizure order to prevent it from being distributed to the groups and
the states to whom it's already been legally obligated. She's completely had her little sidekick Bovi's back on that, which has led to yet another career senior DOJ person doing a noisy exit and a resignation to protest the corruption. Yes, you're right, something has happened. There's been a general spinal evaporation among Republican senators.
You have very few levers, right except screaming about what's happening and narrating it because otherwise, you know, there is no mainstream media anymore. There are very few options for anyone, right, and they're narrating this cutting medicaid. I mean you saw, I mean, you have seen their two bills. The Lindsey Graham budget is cuts medicaid. I mean, talk to me about the budget that they want to pass.
By the way, So.
They're passing a budget even though they are unconstitutionally shredding the federal government with just this guy wasn't elected.
Yeah, what they're doing is the reconciliation process. It's not so much the budget. It goes through the Budget Committee, but what it is is a reconciliation bill. And what's important about reconciliation is that by law, it's the one thing that can go through the Senate with only fifty votes, the majority can drive it through. That's how we passed
the Inflation and Reduction Act. We drove that through, and we did that to deal with climate change and to provide like a boost to the clean energy sector and make the transition that will keep the world safe. We weren't taking care of ourselves. Most of the jobs went to red states. We did it for a good purpose.
They're coming in and they're doing it to slash and crash through the federal government in order to fund more tax cuts for billionaires who already pay preposterously low tax rates if they pay any taxes at all.
You know, there's so many places in these bills where they're just cutting tax cuts or wealthy people cutting corporate taxes. None of this is popular, but for whatever reason, they're able to message it as popular.
Well, at the moment, none of it is real. You know, at this age in the Senate budget process, all that's being voted out of the Budget Committee is an instruction to the actual authorized committees how much money they're supposed to either save or add. But there's no policy component. It's just numbers. You can deduce from those numbers what they're coming after. That's why people are talking about a forty percent cut to medicate. It's the deduction you draw
from what they and their House colleagues are doing. But the real hit comes when the instructions to the committee are responded to by the committees and the actual legislative language comes back and an actual bill passes into law and it's there that you see for sure exactly how much they want to cut Medicaid, whether they're going to attack social security, you know what the actual array is of cuts that they're using to fund the billionaire x breaks.
And that's where it really is going to get painful for Republicans who have huge Medicaid footprints in their states, for things like childbirth, for things like granny in the nursing home, for things like your cousin's opioid addiction, and if you're going to slash through that, it's really really painful. For now, it's just a lot of happy talk and politics, but it's about to get really real and really ugly for them.
So I want you to talk about impoundment because part of what's happening here. They are like about fifteen things happening at once. But one of the things is that Elon Musk, you know, he's firing ten of a workforce. He can't fire so probably and the courts have stopped him to some extent, or they will, but when it comes to impoundment, So for example, I'm thinking of these NIH funds.
There are these NIH funds.
Elon had this brilliant plan that he was going to cut the indirect expenditure to fifteen percent because he's never written a scientific grant.
So why does he care. Let's just cut it to five percent. And now this money a court said that they had.
To unfreeze it, but now the money is maybe still not being released.
Yeah, so two things. First, they're going through what I call the fog bank exercise, in which nobody will actually say no to distributing the funds, because a hard no from a named official is something that you can attach a court order to and say, oh, okay, no, you're in violation because you said no. So instead of saying no, they've retreated behind a fog bank where they don't answer phone calls, don't answer emails, say that they don't know yet.
It's all just confusion and no answer. But the guys from Moscow Central who are in all these agencies that are controlling this, are telling people the money does not go out, the money does not go out, and they're hiding in the fog bank from the judicial repercussion of breaking the law, which is what they're actually doing. But I think courts are going to catch onto that pretty quickly, and so we'll have to fight our way through the
fog bank to impoundment. Impoundment. There's actually been a law passed on that saying you can't do it, and if you want to, you've got to come to Congress first with thirty days noticing here's what we intend to do with respect to the funds that Congress under its Article one Constitutional authority said, need to go here. They are going to do as much impoundment as they can. The President has said that he thinks the law is unconstitutional and that he has this right, never mind Article one
of the Constitution. Russell Vote, who is the kind of crank who's in charge of the Office of Management and Budget and is making these decisions, and said, well, I think it's unconstitutional too, and by the way, I'm going to do with the President and my lawyer say is the right thing to do, which brings us to his lawyer, who is a character named Mark Paoletta, who has written in a tweet impound baby, impound And if you don't know who Mark Paoletta is, you might recognize the painting
that was done of the billionaire Harlan Crowe. Oh Yes, with Justice Clarence Thomas and the court fixer Leonard Leo all sitting around of Harland Crowe's estate giving justice Thomas Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. The other guy in that painting is Mark Paoletto. So he's been like in this whole court capture scheme neck deep all along. Now
he's switched over to the counsel to the Omb. So the fix is really in on the executive branch taking over the Article one function of it belongs to the people and to Congress.
And Russ Vought I think it's important to mention here authored chapter of Project twenty twenty five.
He's one of the prime authors of twenty twenty five, and he.
Is a person who is pushing unitary executive theory. So I just wonder when we talk about this, the thing that keeps me up at night more than the cuts is the slashing and sort of giving up on that. This crew does not give a fuck about the constitution, clearly not.
Yeah, so what what can you guys do?
Well? Immediately, litigation matters. Although it takes a little bit of time compared to having Thing one, Thing two up to like Thing five hundred smashing and smashing all around the government. We are winning in essentially every single case that's brought before the courts because it is so obviously illegal. These are not close cases, it's really obvious. They're just racing ahead of how quickly a court can respond. Eventually
the court process catches up. So that's one thing. The second is to keep public pressure on because at some point Republicans are going to have to grow a spine. They've learned a tragic lesson when they stood up, one by one and put their heads above the parapet to express concerns about these defective Trump nominees, that they got slaughtered by Trump's political hit men, that they got threatened by Musk with millions to be spent against them.
Right, I mean Jony Earnst, remember Jony Earnst? Oh yeah, and tail us.
Yeah. What I call the flying monkeys of the Maga right wing are the people who threatened anonymously on the Internet to kill your children and stuff. That whole thing falls in on you. And if you're the one person, every single one of them got down to one has caved. But let's say it's nine of them. Let's say it's ten of them, and they quietly go to their leader, John Thune and say you've got to tell the White House that this has to stop. We can't vote for this.
They can't really torture ten of them that way. And at some point there's going to be a group resistance that forms, but it's going to form in response to public pressure in their states, which is why it's important to be talking about first how regular people are going to be hurt by things like slashing medicaid, and second behind essentially every curtain is a corrupt interest. The corruption just runs entirely through the whole operation.
Yeah, that's a really good point, and I think that when you say that, it's definitely true that this group can because there are people like I've seen Seasan Collins and Lisa Murkowski complaining about that all of this stuff that's frozen in their states. And I mean the irony with Murkowski is that Alaska is, you know, a hugely wealthy state that needs federal money but also makes you know,
pays in so to see them getting screwed. I want you to talk for a minute about why Thune is actually not Mike Johnson.
Well, first of all, he has a very different constituency in the Senate. They don't all have an election coming up. They're on a six year cycle. Some just got elected, some are never going to run again, so it's hard to frighten them with political retribution. And an individual senator has far more ways to foul things up in the Senate than an individual member of Congress does. So Congress
is much much, much more tribal than the Senate. Granted, we've moved a lot towards being as tribal as the House, but the House is still more tribal. And even in that environment, they're still having trouble trying to figure out how they're going to do the budget stuff. But what Pone has is a lot of important individual senators who are chairs of important committees that he needs to get things out of. And if they really want to make
life hard for him, they can do that. But I think his key role here is as a fairly calm, sober and respected member of the Senate. He's the person to whom they can come ten or twelve strong and say we want to be doing appropriations again. This guy can't go through and wreck everything. You can't keep sending us these patently disqualified and outrageous, badly behaved nominees and expect us to keep doing this or whatever the thing is. But clearly, if you're a one off and you put
one head above the parapet, they come after you. But if you're ten or twelve, that's where I think John has a chance to be a break on the runaway doggie train.
Have you talked at all, because it seems like there's something interesting happening with Mitch McConnell.
Yeah, And that's strange. It's like, after all these years, he suddenly got a conscience.
Well, and I also feel like, you know, he knows he only has two more years left in the Senate, and he knows that trump Ism will ultimately survive him. And you know, you guys don't do this job because it's so lucrative. You do it because it's about this larger governing zeitgeist or whatever. And so I wonder if you think there's something happening there.
There clearly is. Some of these nominees just hit his gag reflex, which I didn't actually know he had, but they obviously did. And I think the test coming up is going to be Ukraine. Trump's flat out lies right now about Ukraine that match perfectly with Putin's flat out lies about Ukraine signal two things. One, Trump Russia was not a hoax. Trump Russia was real, always was real, still is real, and is going to continue to be real. But also it really annoys McConnell because McConnell was pretty
sturdy on Ukraine. I just got back from the Munich Security Conference with a whole bunch of Republican centers, very strong, very supportive of Ukraine. So what's coming up on Ukraine is going to be the first real test of whether like ten or twelve can get together and say, hey, you're on the wrong side of this, and we're going to put some kind of a check on your ability to lie about what is going on, sell Ukraine down the river and rob it of its assets for the benefit of and putin JD.
Vance really shocked that group in Munich with his talk. It was very much outside of the political norm you served with Vans in the Senate. He's obviously very smart, where he's written books, He's you know, was never Trump.
But what do you sort of think is going on there?
I think that particularly in the wake of Trump having said very bluntly that JD. Vans is not his successor there is a whole group of people around Trump who are desperately trying to suck up to him, suck up to the people around him who influence him. They're fighting for primacy. And in my view, that speech, which absolutely bombed, the only speech that got a colder reception ever was Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign minister, when he spoke there.
He bombed like that because they weren't the audience. There was an audience of one, and that audience of one was Trump and trying to appeal to all of his eccentricities and sort of venalities. That's what I think was going on there. The problem is that in the real world, NATO matters, the Atlantic Alliance matters. Putin is actually a murderous and aggressive tyrant who actually is in another country,
you know, bombing children's hospitals and slaughtering families. And to not deal with any of that, or deal with in the way that degrades all of that is really harmful. This isn't just fun and games any longer. This isn't just political posturing and sucking up. Real words have real consequences. Once your Vice President.
Yeah, thank you, thank you, thank you. Senator White, house so important and interesting.
Good to be with you. Remember, always look behind the curtain for the corruption. It's always going to be there no moment.
Jesse Cannon by John Fast.
So I was driving through to work this morning in Midtown Manhattan paid congestion pricing since I know I should. By the time I left Manhattan, I had seen that our King had saved us from congestion pricing.
Yes, King, that is correct, Donald Trump, who then tweeted that King Donald would save us from congestion pricing. We have First, he's installed this puppet mayor, right who's not a real mayor and who basically serves at the pleasure of Tom Holman, the head of Ice, and now here we are that Trump is now going to make sure that congestion pricing.
He has no jurisdiction over in New York City.
I mean New York City's federalism for me, but not federalism for thee.
Yeah. The thing I just keep thinking about, too, is that Eric Adams, at the time this recording, had not made a statement about it. Why is that money not allowed to no been in court all day?
Yeah, he's also not allowed to do you think he's allowed to go against the guy's keeping him out of jail.
No.
No, I figured he'd make a statement and say this is base, this rules. I figured something was coming, but no, he's in court.
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