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 an implan analysis report says Trump's policies could cost America twenty three billion in GDP if Taurus continue to stay away. We have such a great show for you today. The New Yorkers Evan Osno stops by to talk to us about the tech brolocar key and what can be done about their assault on democracy.
Then we'll talk to Randy Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who will spell out the cruel attacks against working people and Trump's big beautiful bill. But first the news, SAMII.
We were doing an interview the listeners will hear in a week or two about bitcoin. And as you were doing that, the headlines started to rise that Trump media plans to buy two point five billion of bitcoin. And I look Robinhood and it was just soaring through the roof that bitcoin price. What are you see in here?
So again Jesse's obsessed with bitcoin. Now, now this is Trump World one oh one, right, you know, buy sketchy things, make you know, say you're going to buy more stuff, Buy the dip. Remember Trump's tweet He's doing the same thing with tariffs that he's doing with bitcoin. I mean again, Okay, I'm going to read you the statement. First of all, Trump Media and Technology Group said on Tuesday, it's raising
two point five billion two by bitcoin. I want to emphasize the word said here, okay, because maybe but maybe they just said it. Okay, this is not a group of people for whom their word is something you can take to the bank. Now that said, I'm not even going to mention the name of the person who had a quote about this, because he's very litigious. But I am going to read the quote because it's very hilarious.
We view bitcoin as an apex instrument of financial freedom, and now Trump Media will hold cryptocurrency as a crucial part of our assets. Trump Media CEO, whose name cannot be said because of his litigious nature. The investment will help defend our company against harassment and discrimination by financial institutions, which plague many American and US firms. Okay, first of all Americans and US firms. All right, okay, we're not going to parse that, but we are going to say
that pretty interesting. Maybe they have two point five billion dollars to buy bitcoin. Maybe they don't. I would not take any one of these people at their words zoom in, because there's an axiom we're getting this is from axios. We're going to zoom in. Nunez says the strategy would provide opportunities for Trump media and areas like subscription payments
and a utility token. Really, who could have seen that Trump World would get so excited about a very sketchy cryptocurrency, which, by the way, cryptos sort of redundant cryptocurrency is sketchy. But it's nice to see that Trump World has continued its march to do what is possibly not what it's saying it's doing. Who knows, who can say? Who can say?
Speaking of lawsuits, yeah, well, basically each day, as I try to select some subjects that you may want to talk about, all I do is I just go, hmm, blizzard of lawsuits?
Which what should we discuss? And so today's one is that NPR is suing the Trump administration over their funding cuts from President Trump's stupid executive order.
Yes, so NPR National Public Radio doesn't even get that much money from the government. Probably could make up the shortfall, but I think it's really important to remember here you win in court. You win in court when you sue trump World, you win in court. You know why you win in court because what Trump World is doing is almost entirely illegal. There are occasionally times when they get away with it because it's a trumpy judge or because it ends up in front of Samuel Alito, but largely
all of this is completely an utterly sketch. So you should sue. And that's what's happening here NPR and these are local affiliates. It's suing the Trump administration. I want to point out this is a guy record low approval rating. People don't like this. He is crushing norms left and right, and so the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is going to
sue back, and good for them. Republicans have been targeting the portion of NPRS and PBS funding that is congressionally approved by the way it's approved by Congress, not by Trump. You know, this is another thing like Trump's executive orders tend to undermine the power of the purse right one of Congress is very few powers tend to be undermined by trump Ism. Now, publicans just go along with it because they don't care and because you know they'll do
anything Trump wants. But it's worth realizing that a lot of this stuff is actually not within Trump's powers.
Yeah, that sounds right. So the Trump administration has canceled Harvard's remaining federal contracts. One of the things we used to discuss a lot in this podcast back when this guy Ron DeSantis was really making a lot of headlines was the concept of performative moronics. Yes, I can't think of anything that fits that title more than this.
Ooh, performative moronics. That's a throwback to the first Trump administration.
I think I think that was more of our Biden era analysis a lot of the time, if I'm being honest.
Yeah, so this is really stupid, but it's also I want to point out, just shows how little runway they have here. So Trump administration will eliminate the remaining one hundred million in federal contracts with Harvard University. They are saying, Okay, so what are they going to do. They're going to cut a lot of use federal contracts. First of all, they're not going to be able to do it. Number one, they are not going to be able to legally This is so fucking dicey. The other thing is like, let's
just think this through. Okay, So this is stuff like training feople. This is stuff like science stuff right, like during cancer or stuff happening in the labs. What are you gonna do. You're gonna move that lab work to the Heritage Foundation. They don't have any labs at the Heritage Foundation. You know you have these world class scientists. No, no, we don't want the world class scientists. We're gonna we're gonna go and throw away all this research and we're
gonna start doing research. You know what at Hillsdale College. There's no medical school at Hillsdale College. Okay, that's not how it works. What Charlie Kirk is gonna take over. You're gonna have Turning Point USA labs, right, you have PhD mds like Charlie Kirk doing this is the stupidest fucking thing ever. To reiterate how stupid this is. This is one of these things where we are literally we're
just throwing away scientific advances somebody, not somebody. A lot of us are going to get cancer, right, and little more than a third of all Americans will get cancer or some form of cancer, and we will have doctors who say to us, you know, we have some great studies on this, but we're still, you know, maybe four or five years behind. We're four or five years from getting to a place where we can cure this. Four or five years. That's the Trump administration, that's the second
Trump administration. There will be people who die because we have lost four or five years of scientific advancements because of COVID and Donald Trump and RFK Junior and people who don't who just literally want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. So it is so painful for me as someone who is not a scientist. It's such a tragedy. It's like we are burning the library at Alexandria. We are cutting our noses off despite our faces. We're
doing our on purpose. It's not even an accident, right, we are literally it is fall of the Roman Empire, and we're doing it to ourselves. There are a lot of reasons how we got here, and I just hope that like Canada and Europe and China and all those other countries are going to pick up these scientists and keep the work going because you know, we are in a climate rasis, We are in a really perilous moment
in all different ways. Microplastics, cancer, you know, clusters. I mean, just we are as sort of free apocalyptic America and a lot of this end. If you don't think there are more pandemics coming, I don't know what to tell you. It's a very dark moment in American life.
Yeah, speaking of darkness in America, there's a cloud over the Pentagon. It's shaped kind of like a buggy beer that's been frozen.
No, I'm kidding. Yeah, definitely, definitely, we love it.
So there's this fellow Pete hegg Sith the controversy with him. You could pretty much set your watch to it at this point that there will be an article about some nefarious thing happening, some serious fuckery happening in under his purview.
Yeah, so let's talk about this. Look, you put a guy like Pete Hegseth in this job, and I know you're going to be shocked to hear, but my man does not know how to do nearly anything, and that in itself not necessarily. No, it's bad. So he's running the dog. I was going to say it wasn't bad, but it is really bad. He's running the DODA. Trump has had many scandals now that are completely disqualifying, right, heg Seth has had just scandal after scandal, like the
wife on the signal Chat. Remember when they added this signal chat, there was a bunch of stuff with the wife, with the brother, anti nepotism stuff. I mean, just like continual problems with this guy. So now he's fired three people, and again Trump advisors lose confidence in Pentagon leak investigation. Hegseth used to justify firing of three top aides. So that sounds as if Trump advisors think Pete hegg Seth weekend Fox News host former, he's not doing it anymore
right now, though he may be back soon. I wonder if he gets fired from his job, if he ends up going back to the weekend, or if they like bump him up to the weekday.
Here's my guess. He takes Judge box of wines place on the five.
Ooh.
From head of the DoD to panelists on the five, jess A guitarl Off.
Put my bet from my crypto ortings on polymarket right now.
Yes, Jessin to Tarlaf, Pete hagg Seth coming to you is certainly possible. I would never bet against you, Jesse, but I think either way, there's something rotten in the state of Denmark. Right, We've got Trump advisors losing confidence, by the way, and I want to point out these guys love to leak. One of the hallmarks of Trump one point zero was just continual leaking. Right, you had
everyone in the world leaking to everyone. So Trump advisors losing confidence makes me think that they think that the legal wire tap may not have been true. Again, there's a lot to parson this thing, but I think that there's a real question about when does when does Trump world start losing confidence? In Pete hexp. So Trump's big thing is he doesn't like firing people this time because like Rachel Mattow had that whole wall people he had fired,
so clearly some things do in fact breakthrough. So he just moves everyone around. So remember Mike Walls was a National security advisor. Now he's his body man and also cook at mar A Lago. I'm kidding, obviously, and that's what we're seeing here. So he Seth will probably be running hod Or on the five. Eventually we'll see what happens. Obviously, never a great Evan Osnos is a writer at The New Yorker and the author of Behals and Have Yachts. Welcome to past politics, Evan.
Osnos, Thank you, Molly junk Fast.
We're you know, very excited to have you.
I'm very excited to be here.
Have books coming out in June. Yes, yours is a memoir. No, I'm just.
Kidding a loop. Should we do that? Do you want to swop on?
I'll talk about your book and memoir? So, uh, the book is called The Have and the Have Yachts? Have I butchered the title? Or now?
No, you you got it exactly right. And it's uh, it is with my debt to both Hemingway, who wrote to Have and Have Not, and then the other guy who got there first. So it is an idea that is that resigns in our consciousness. But I think it is a unique artifact of our time, the haves and aviats.
It's so wild to me to watch this cycle of backlash to backlash to backlash, right like financial inequality, push back, some degree of making right or a little bit of a change, and then a reelection of Trump. Explain what the fuck is going on?
Well, you hit on the exact issue that interests me, which is that Americans have an almost uniquely complex and ambivalent relationship to big money to wealth. I mean it is we are both at some moments cynical about it and then fundamentally still aspirational. And I mean this is not like an abstract idea. There was a Harris poll last year that showed that sixty percent of Americans believe that billionaires are making the country less fair, and sixty
percent of Americans want to become billionaires themselves. It is very often it's the same people who have this oscillation of instincts, and I think you see that in our politics where we are tugged back and forth. But I think what it obscures, frankly, and this is really the core of what interested me, was that we are living through utterly unprecedented times when it comes to the sheer
scale and speed with which these fortunes have accumulated. If I can just give you one stat it is that as recently as ten years ago, there was nobody on the planet who had one hundred billion dollars. The idea of a cent to billionaire was a non thing. There are now at least fifteen people who do and to give you, I mean take Elon Musk as an example. I mean, at the beginning of Trump's first term, he had about ten billion dollars. Today, as everybody knows, he
has four hundred billion dollars. And if you talk to people who are scholars of not just scholars of the recent period, archaeologists who look at inequality back to the Neolithic period, they will tell you that it is very hard to find in a period that is anything like what we're living through now. As somebody said to me, the people who built the pyramids, we're living in a less unequal society.
So I want to get to the fall of the Roman Empire because it's my fall of the Roman Empire. There's a lot of joking that goes around that this is a similar moment in America. You know that American history that we history rhymes and we are in a moment where the center cannot hold right, that there's just too much inequality that we have, you know, And again maybe it's this idea of the printing press. You know, the technology has catapulted us into a kind of dark ages,
you know, a kind of brought time period. But but do you I mean, is that your take on this, I mean, what do you think, what do you think about the instability?
Well, I think that the Roman analogy is more than casually important, Like it is more than just that we sometimes throw up our hands and say God, it feels like the fall a Rum. The great scholar of Rome, the late scholar Ramsay McMullin at Yale, was once asked he'd written acres on the subject of the fall of Rome, and he said, well, if you really ask me to boil this down, he says, the fall of Rum took five hundred years, but it can be distilled into three words.
Fewer had more. The growth of radical inequality in both political and economic power is such a large and encompassing fact of our lives that it's almost like climate change in the sense that you can go through the day without thinking about it, remembering periodically, oh, yeah, this is happening, and it probably will change the world I live in, But you can lose sight of it. And there are these moments, these little dramatic indications, these moments when it
comes into our lives. And I think that the Musk Trump joint venture is one of those times when we have been suddenly aware of what the windfall in economics has meant for our politics and our political culture.
Elon Musk started out as pretty popular talk us through his devolution.
Yeah, I think he would be the first person to in some ways acknowledge that he was caught unaware by the collapse of his relationship with most of the public. I mean he was until not long ago. If you lined up a group of college students, you would very often hear them say he is somebody who gives us
inspiration about what this country can be. And his level of seclusion from actually the public, from real live experience, as indicated by things like him saying that as many of us have heard that the greatest flaw of Western civilization is empathy, or describing social Security as a Ponzi scheme. There are really a tell about how far his life had become really divorced, in a kind of lunar way
from the lives of most other human beings. And I think this is a theme that runs through my book because over and over again I would find myself in places that I know quite well. I mean like Greenwich, Connecticut, which is where I grew up, is a place that has historically been kind of in some sense connected to but also disconnected from the rest of the country by
the forces of wealth. But in recent years, and Musk is just the most dramatic illustration of this, that the building of walls, both literally around people's estates but also psychologically and emotionally and culturally has become so profound that we are now living in an arrangement that is much closer to what it was like in This is not an extravagant analogy, but like medieval Europe, there's a reason why people build castles. They built castles to defend themselves
and their property against others. And Elon Musk is a living, breathing demonstration of what happens when you think that you understand how other people live and you don't.
So interesting because I think that's completely right. And I also wonder how much Elon Musk is is a function of not having anyone around you who has ever told you the truth.
Oh, completely right. I mean, this is the great risk for authoritarians, either in private business or in public office, is that you become so insulated and comfortable. It's like this kind of amniotic fluid of agreement around you that nobody who disagrees with you, stays very long, and as a result you make actually sometimes terrible mistakes. This is what's known as authoritarian backlash, and it's where you misjudge
the public mood. You know, if you're the Shaw of Iran, you host a giant party to celebrate your leadership a few months before the revolution rises up and removes you. And that's the pattern. And I think it's because there's nobody around who can say it. I'll give you one
other fascinating example. I wrote a profile that's in this book of Mark Zuckerberg when he was in the period of kind of coming to terms with his vast new powers, and he had gone you'll remember Molly on this like kind of weird tour of the United States where he was going out and wanting to meet people and people, and it was kind of it got mocked because, as people put at the time, they said, this really looks like a man who has landed or a person who
has landed on this planet and is like, bring your humans to me. I will see them, and I will meet them, and we will eat their things. And then and somebody who had worked for him told me, look, the reality was when he was on this tour. We could all see that this was really not going to work, and it looked, it looked kind of ridiculous, but there was nobody around him who could and would tell him that, right, right, right right, authoritarian backlash.
So is it a question to keep going with this theory? Putin's war with Ukraine is that? Is that the same?
Very much so. Putin is the paradigmatic example of what the scholars call a sultanistic oligarch, which is a wonderful term actually, and a sultanistic oligarch is somebody who is essentially agreed upon by the other elites or the other oligarchs in a society to let one among them rule, and it's because they all benefit from that. But the danger of becoming a sultanistic oligarch is that kind of seclusion and that kind of absence of any sort of
critical thinking and judgment around you. And so everybody begins to say to you, well, it seems like invading Ukraine
is a brilliant strategic move, sir. And you know, we all saw those images of the of the boardroom where the oligarchs and the and the leaders of the intelligence community in Moscow were being briefed on this plan and there was up warrious applause, and that is a it's you know, it's a lesson that I think goes beyond just talking about our president or the Russian president or it is really like a deep lesson in the problem of becoming too far ahead, too far isolated, and becoming
too sure. To quote Kendrick Lamar, that you deserve it all. It's a risk it'll blow up on you.
It'll blow and that's what we're saying. So what we saw with Elon I just want to get back to Elon for a minute, because he is the most pertinent right now in our American political world, is that his polling went down. His the numbers at Tesla's prophets were down seventy one percent. Who even knew that could happen? At a company, right they sold well? I saw reporting
that they sold seven thousand cars in Europe. I mean, okay, do you think that these kind of come to Jesus moments where you see that the emperor really has no clothes? Do you think they influence the zeitgeist or do you think they're just sort of I mean, what, you know, the question we all have all the time is what breaks through.
Yeah, I think there's no question that this leaves a scar on the public mood. It's not just on Elon Musk individually. I think this is really important because when you try to understand essentially, like where does this lead Molly, which is you know, the question we're all trying to figure out, which is what happens when you have the Musk era, Where does that go? Where does that take
a country? We actually have a useful, almost hauntingly useful model, which is the end of the nineteenth century the beginning of the twentieth century in this country, which is that you know, that was a time when you had these tycoons, the robber barons as they were called during the Gilded Age, who were very in many ways Musk Like. I mean, you know Jay Gould, who was the Wall Street Titan.
Twain used to say, look, Americans have always have always revered money, but Jay Gould made them meal down and worship it. And in many ways, Musk is the modern
incarnation of that. And what we saw in that period in the late nineteenth century was that there were these acts of just cartoonish extravagance, cartoonish sort of self indulgence, the equivalent of having the many things that Musk has accumulated for himself, most significantly perhaps his family arrangement, which looks sultanistic in so many ways that in the at the end of the nineteenth century, you had people hosting parties, for instance, in New York City in a ballroom in Manhattan,
where they brought horses into the court into the ballroom and they ate on horseback and drank champagne out of
the saddle bags. And the country, regular Americans, we're hearing about this, reading about it in the newspapers, and it was accumulating to the point of a breaking point where people would say, we we just we can't go on like this, And that's what you had that It's really what gave way to the birth of the progressive era and then ultimately to the New Deal, was this recognition on the part of the public and ultimately on some of the elites, people like Teddy Roosevelt and then later
Franklin Roosevelt, that this just you can't go on this way or the country won't hold. I think that Musk is pretty proficient at reading ultimately his role in the culture, and he'll figure out a way to kind of, you know, get himself back in I don't have any doubt about that he'll find a way to rebuild some cultural cachet
which is now so very much in remission. But ultimately, I think that the bigger impact is really on that constant oscillation that we started with between fascination and revulsion with giant wealth. And he has almost single handedly pushed the United States away from capitalism.
Ooh, that's interesting. Imagine being so rich that you turn Americans off of capitalism.
That's the pattern. That's history. It tells us, it happens, and it takes ultimately other people to say to the elon Musks of the world, if you carry on this way, this system which has been ultimately so rewarding for them, is going to be is going to lose.
Its public basis of support. Are you surprised that the oligarchs of this moment aren't more philanthropic. You think about Bill Gates with this comment that he made about Mosque, where he said, this is a register in the world taking away from the poorest children in the world. Talk to me about that.
Yeah, it's been quite noticeable in the philanthropy community. You hear about this generational Really there's been a kind of generational split, which is that the early generation of mega wealth of the latter half of the twentieth century and early twenty first century, principally Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, or the iconic figures that they made.
Larger the Waltons.
Yeah, they and they did large. They made a point in a sense to make to put themselves in the tradition of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, who believed you had to give some of your fortune or in Gates and Buffett's case, the lion's share of your fortune back to the public through philanthropy. And there has been this real shift though since then. Really it's sort of started in the last ten years or so where and
this is not me making up making an abstraction. The data is quite clear on this that the amount of money that people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are giving to philanthropy is just simply much less than their predecessors, like Buffetting Gates were. And what's the reason for this is that there is a theory that's become popular in Silicon Valley, which is that essentially your greatest act of philanthropy, putting that in quotes is your business.
You know, it's as much high on your own supply gone.
I mean, that's you know, Musk's view is, as he said at one point, the greatest gift I can give to humanity is tesla, to which others might say, but you know what about a Musk foundation? And I've watched it happen just over the last ten years. This is a real shift.
I mean. The most incredible part of this is that The New York Times had a lot of reporting on the Musk Foundation where they were getting in trouble for not giving away what they are required by law to give away.
Totally true, I mean, and I felt the most interesting revealing detailing the Times reporting on Musk's philanthropies. One of the recipients of his philanthropic foundation in the early years was actually to a school that was located in his own house, in which five of the fourteen students were his own children.
Yes, many people are saying doing things for your kids is not actually philanthropy, or when you are the richest man in the world, we're laughing about this, but really we are laughing to keep from crying because it's so dark. I wonder if you could talk about are there any I have to talk about this, because otherwise I'll go insane. There anything you're seeing when you in this store of the haves and the have yat about some kind of positive move towards So let's talk about that.
Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that, because there are some good news things that should be recognized and cultivated and celebrated, which is that there are some people who have really gone through a bit of a process over the last ten or fifteen years with the rise of Trump in our politics, that has made them say that they recognize that the country is, on some level on an unsustainable cour There is this organization called the Patriotic Millionaires, which
I write about in this new piece in the New Yorker, in which these are folks who have thrived in the current disposition of power, the meaning that the tax code that benefits them they have benefited from. But they are in fact some of the people who are standing up and saying, really, this is about taxes and wages. It's not complicated. They say, look, if you if wages had kept up with gains in productivity, if wages had kept up with the growth in the economy, wages today would
be much higher than they were before. And you know, there's one guy in particular who I'm thinking of named John Driscoll, who was the CEO of a big healthcare company who realized that, look, there is no way in which I can expect to have a successful business if the people who work for me are sleeping in their cars at night. And so, and what's the encouraging thing here too, is Molly that this is like any kind of culture. Culture moves, and sometimes it moves even faster
than we expect. And so right now it feels as if we're in the season of plunder. We're in the season of the oligarchs who are exploiting this president to benefit themselves as much as they can. But it also can move fast, and we've seen it once before. We saw it in nineteen thirteen when you had the rise of elites in this country who recognized that to protect the country's future, you had to reign in excesses and abuses.
And we're beginning to see some of that. And I think that the size of the I'll just mention one other thing, which is that the size of the protests that Bernie Sanders has been getting this summer. Are really remarkable because I interviewed a bunch of people at protests at the Bernie Sanders rallies, and to a person, they had never been to one before. These are not diehard
Bernie bros. These are people in some cases, in a few cases actually people who are quite sympathetic to Republican arguments who said, I didn't vote for this, I didn't vote for what Trump is doing and what we know from history. If there's one thing that listeners can take away who are trying to figure out, what do we do as a people now to protect this country, the
answer is it is sustained public pressure. Sustained public pressure that it matters to use your voice and to get up and say no, this is not right, this is not fair, and this is not sustainable.
Randy Weiningarden is the president of the American Federation of Teachers and the author of the upcoming book Why Fascist Spear Teachers. Welcome back to Fast Politics, Randy Winingarten. So we're in this insane moment in American life. The houses out, the senators out there is the big beautiful bill. It both grows the deficit and cuts, food stamps for children. Trump administration is at war with poor kids in every which way. You are the head of the American Teachers Federation,
you are in it. Talk to us.
So you know, a budget is your priorities. And what you can see in that big, ugly bill is that it is big, but it is pretty ugly. Is the Trump administration's priorities, which is to keep the tax cuts that they did in twenty seventeen, including most particularly, to prefer the millionaires and the billionaires in this country and let them keep all the wealth that they grew over all this time, and to as actually give everybody else
trinkets or a trickle down effect. So they've given everybody something little except for people who make under fifty thousand dollars who may actually have to pay more taxes. And that's the second point I want to do. So one, they really really prefer the billionaires and the millionaires. But the second thing they do is really really really cruel because they're taking out, especially everything that created innovation in the country, everything that helped in terms of climate control.
They're using education funding as a piggy bank for the rich, a new tax shelter for vouchers, and then they take a hatchet to student loans, to nutrition aid, and to healthcare for the middle class and the poor. And now they're lying about it like Johnson is saying, oh, no, this is just about waste and abuse, when it essentially we'll take fourteen million people off of healthcare and make it impossible for families under the poverty line to feed
their kids. So if you hear my anger, and then they sneak in things like stopping the courts from enforcing their orders.
As that was amazing. Let's go back to Mike Johnson for a minute, because one of the things that Mike Johnson actually said was that he said it was that work requirements were actually they have a moral component. These will be work requirements for snap benefits. They will mean that if you have a child over seven years old, if you are not working, you cannot qualify for nutrition assistance.
Talk us through what that looks like. So level of cruelty to their own voters is shocking to me. It's essentially trying to find ways already the people who voted for Trump, essentially aside from the people who have always been for him. Let's say the net delta difference between that decided the selection was the couch and the people who made up their mind in the last few days. They voted for a better life for themselves. Most of not all of those folks are working really hard and
are trying to make ends meet. So when you say to somebody who has a seven year old kid that you're not going to feed them anymore because their parents are not working, or their one parent is not working exactly at the job you want them to work at. Maybe they're working off the books because they can't make it. Yes, that's wrong. Maybe there are a thousand other reasons, like they're taking care of their elderly parents and they can't be at work and take care of their elderly parents
at the same time. To actually do that and starve children like that, it's cruel, it's inhuman.
So what are we going to do.
We're going to now take our AI surveillance and start using it for every single family in America to make that decision. How dare Mike Johnson decide what is moral and what isn't moral from the state that actually is now saying that no termination of pregnancy through abortion is legal or not? Yes, sorry, I am just It's like, really, how is all of a sudden we are our country that used to believe in freedom of religion. Now it's getting closer and closer to a handsmade tail kind of
oation here. How dare you tell somebody that they can't get snap benefits for their kids, that a kid who is older than seven is no longer dependent. It's my boggling to me how cruel it is.
It is very cool. One of the things that the Republicans are trying to do is push back against medicaid expansion, right, and Medicaid expansion is humongous and largely has benefited red states right. In fact, I mean Snap too. You know, if they are able to get these cuts through, they will mean that at least twenty five percent of children will be affected in states like Louisiana and West Virginia,
very red states. But with the issue with the Medicaid expansion, your grandma's in a nursing home, she's coming to go live with you, right, or she's going on the street. Right. They're going to be closing nursing homes. They're going to be closing rural hospitals. The Medicaid expansion question it is wildly unpopular. I mean, the polling shows that like eighty four percent of Americans want either the same or more Medicaid.
So I think part of the problem and this is actually a real problem for the Democratic Party and one that the Democrats have not solved. Frankly, it's a problem for truth, which is, yes, the Medicaid cuts in this bill are terribly unpopular, but people actually have to see
them to believe them. Unfortunately, in America right now, disinformation and misinformation reign supreme, and where people get their information and what information people get has really become really problematic because people are getting a steady diet of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation. You can make a decision, for example, about whether you want trickle down or not, whether you want tax cuts for the wealthy or not, or whether you want a social service net.
That is a.
Legitimate question that you can raise in the United States and America in terms of economic policy. But if you don't actually know the truth, if you don't actually know what's in the bill, if somebody can get away and say, oh no, this is really not a Medicaid cut when it in fact is, that's part of the problem. And what the Democrats have not been able to do is they do not have the information. You know, assume for a second they are telling the truth. People don't know it,
people don't hear it. So yes, the Medicaid cuts are really unpopular. Frankly, all of the snap overhaul nutrition overhaul will be really unpopular too. Think about we're going to go back to lunch shaming in schools about who can get a lunch and who can't get a lunch. We
were supposed to solve that housing crisis. We're supposed to try to get the minimum wage raised to a living wage, and now what's happening is we're seeing even more cutbacks to the safety net and it's going to hurt for and work in class folk.
It's funny because it's like we spend so much time handwriting about Democrats losing working people, but here are Republicans having won them, now trying to hurt them. Yeah.
I mean, I give Josh Holly a lot of credit when he says, no, don't make these cuts, and you know these cuts are going to hurt people. But that's why I was astounded Johnson the Speaker wouldn't even be honest about what they did. Yeah, but that's because they're trying to hide it. And our goal, our job has to be tell the truth about what these cuts do and the impact they'll have.
So let's talk about that. Eventually these cuts are going maybe they won't be brought as broadly, but there will be some level of cuts. And I wonder if Republicans are just in denial, like, eventually this will hurt the people that they just started winning, right.
I think that they'll try to blame it on somebody else. I agree with you, these cuts are unpopular. They will hurt people, and the question is why are they doing it? And they're doing it. I mean, look, Republicans say they care about the debt, and they're raising the debt six trillion dollars. So they're doing these cuts because they care more about preserved having the huge maximalist wealth of the people who were the winners from the last tax cut.
If you think about income inequality, it's you know, significantly higher today than it was in twenty seventeen. So they, you know, they care about that. That's who their constituency is, and that's what they care about. And I think they probably, I mean, they probably believe that they can sell anybody anything, so that people are not they can blame other people on it. And that's why our job is to actually
tell the truth and say what's in it. And frankly, our job is also something else, which is we have to show a different future and a better future. So for example, I'm very much.
Into let's actually have working class tax cut, Let's have cost of living insulation here, let's do what the patriotic millionaires have a really great proposal.
Let's make that front street. Let's actually then also show like where's the money for career tech ed? Donald Trump, you say that you are you care about creating pathways for jobs for others. So where's the pathway for career tech ed? Why do you cut that money too? Why don't you actually increase that funding. Don't tell me that Harvard should get rid of their funds so you can put in trade schools. Why don't you fund career tech ed instead of cutting Harvard and instead of cutting the
Department of Education. Where's the big push for workforce pathways in other ways? So we should actually be fighting for not just critiquing them, which we need to do, but we should be fighting for the things that working class folks need, which is good jobs, affordable housing, affordable health, health care, and decent retirement. And this is the stuff that Americans want.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Randy, thank you, thank you.
Be welcome.
No second, Jesse Cannon, Molly, I'm going to really shock you here.
After someone's mother attended a one million dollar dinner for mister Trump, there was a pardon exchanged. Who would have thunk it.
No, I can't believe it. I'm shocked. It's a great story from the New York Times. Ken Vogel unblocked me on Twitter. Ken Vogel, this is the Ken Vogel and block Molly john fest On x challenge. So this is a great story. This guy who worked for his mother. His mother had a sort of nursing homeie thing. His mother had been raising money for Trump for a long time. They had been appealing for pardons for a long time. But you know what put him over the top. You're
going to be shocked, shocked to hear this. By the way, his mother was also involved in this Project Veritas thing where they tried to buy Ashley Biden's diary. Everything is so bad. American politics is so disgusting, right, they tried to buy Ashley Biden's diary in order to hurt Joe Biden by because this was publicizing her addiction, because she was an addict. I mean, this is like, imagine, this is so bad. This is like the world's darkest Cohen
Brothers movie. So anyway, eventually they got this pardon. Because, by the way, there's also a great story of a two million dollar yacht, which I'm not going to get into right now. I do think it is funny though, that between twenty sixteen and twenty nineteen, this guy withheld more than ten million dollars from the paychecks of nurses, doctors, and others who worked at his facilities, under the pretext of using it for their Social Security, Medicare and federal
income tax. But you know what he did instead of using it to pay there withholding taxes, he spent two million dollars on a yacht he paid for travel and purchases, and high end retailers including Broger of Goodman and Cardia charged with thirteen counts of tax crimes. But our tax crimes really crimes. If you support Donald Trump, many people
are saying they are not, So what happens. The mother goes to a Trump fundraiser that is a million dollar a plated fundraiser, and then he cuts the Barden great stuff. That's what it is. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday to hear the best minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.