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 Ken Martin has been elected the new DNC chair. We have such a great show for you today the Lincoln Projects. Rick Wilson stops by to talk about Trump's many assaults on.
The rule of law.
Then we'll talk to author Thomas Frank about why Democrats fear embracing populism.
But first the news mally tariffs.
It's tariff time, baby. We're going to crush the market to own the libs.
So Donald Trump on Saturday, because there's no weekend in how he said he was going to enact these tariffs, signing Steve tariffs twenty five percent Mexico Canada, ten percent are China, and then of course a little less on the crew because Donald Trump loves oil. Ten percent on the fuel. He acknowledged what economists, members of Congress, and some of his old aides have said, Americans will find themselves paying the cost.
I love this.
He posted a non truth social this will be the Golden age of America.
Explanation point.
Will there be some pain question mark Yes, maybe and maybe not. Explanation point again the message, which appeared an hour before Trump arrived in his West Palm Beach, Florida golf club for the second day in a row. Because when you're crashing the economy, it's important.
To make sure you can play golf.
He's serious about fulfilling his campaign promise to end a legal migration by making everything more expensive.
Listen that blue You don't understand how it sells in America because you don't drink molly. But let me tell you, we're really going to be upset about this Canadian teriff for ex sports.
It's so stupid.
It's so stupid, it doesn't.
Even make any sense.
But you know what does make sense is that hedge funds are betting billions that the market's going to crash on Monday. When you're listening to his podcast, just don't go look at your stocks because they're going to be down. And look, maybe here's the amazing thing about this, Donald Trump.
If you look at the stock market.
Tomorrow morning, when you're on your way to go play golf, you can just cancel the tariffs and then the market will bounce back. This person is one of the few people in a position to be.
Able to do this.
In January, right before Donald Trump took office, Investor's placed ten times more bets on the US stock market falling than equivalent bets. So they were shorting the market. You know why they were shorting the market because we have a lunatic as a president.
Yeah, it's almost like for months people have been begging him to reconsider the stupidity.
But it's also just I mean, markets really hate uncertainty. Donald Trump is really unpredictable and uncertain.
And look, the other thing is, as much as.
People were mad at Biden for not doing enough for inflation, one of the things he did was he didn't do wildly inflationary things like making everything more expensive, which we're about to see.
How that goes.
I think the thirty five dollars egg prices in Los Angeles right now would like a word.
I mean, it's just really bad.
So may we know One of the things that these Heritage Foundation types and Republicans have longs to do is take a torch to the Education Department.
We don't the flames are here.
They do want to dissolve the Department of Education. You know why because Jimmy Carter started it and part of Trump's thing is that he wants to get rid of everything Jimmy Carter did, so that's everything from the Department of Education to FEMA. But this is actually a McCarthy ish witch hunt for people who have ever ever attended
a diversity training event. So several employees began receiving leave notices late Friday and reported them to their local union president at the American Federation of Government Employees, which, by the way, that guy's real busy right nowsically trying to figure out whoever has gone to a DEI training could end up being fired. Now, I think it's important to realize that literally everyone has been doing DEI training. This is not it wasn't even an opt in or opt
out thing. People just did it. So, just like Trump has fired people in the FBI who slow walked the January sixth investigation, people who were white conservative men who thought the whole thing was silly, but still maybe prosecuted
one or two cases, those people got fired. Well, now we have federal employees in the Department of Education, many of whom may actually not even be liberals or even for a DEI or even for diversity, some of which could be huge racists, and those people will be fired too. So I just want to point out like at every point this is like taking a sledgehammer to something that you know, I think weeding people out because of their ideology is is not how the federal government is supposed work.
But even if you were to do that, that's not what's happening here. What's happening here is just chaos. And again this will of course end up being litigated to the hilt, but more than anything, it's also just a question of just such a stupid way to go about things, and we're going to see more of that.
So Maley with the tariffs, of course, Mexico and Canada are actually fighting back. I think particularly some of Canada's strategy around this is pretty interesting.
Yeah.
First of all, they're, yeah, make it worse for red states. So Canada is going to target red states. They're going to target red state exports, things like orange juice that comes from Florida and liquor that comes from Kentucky, and they're going to go after the things that will actually hurt Trump voters.
Yeah, and now Trump is saying that he'll raise the tariffs even more on Canada if they try to do things like this as usual in this era, the stupidity just keeps being a race to the bottom.
Correct.
Rick Wilson is the founder of the Lincoln Project and the host of the Enemy's List. Welcome back to Fast Politics, Rick Wilson.
Hello, Molly John Fast. Welcome to the forty second month of the second Trump presidency.
We're closing in on two weeks.
Yes, indeed, but it.
Does not feel like two weeks, does it.
You know, they promised that they were going to flood the zone with shit, and I think it's important to emphasize the with shit part.
You Know.
What I'm struck by, as someone who who has done a lot of research on Project twenty twenty five is like, what we did that documentary on it?
Wait? What project?
What? Yeah?
Exactly Trump's talking to do that. He said he wasn't, He.
Said he wouldn't.
But when we got involved in covering it in July and interviewing all the people who were academics to talk about it, one of the things I was struck by was just how it was like a laundry list of everything everyone who's conservative I had ever wanted.
So it was like, you know, make life harder.
For LGBTQ people were going to do this, We're going to do that, But the central focus this sort of unraveling of the federal government at breakneck speeds. I did not realize how much DOGE would be a part of trying to dismantle the federal government.
And it's really something.
I think it's important to understand that there are three factions inside of the Trump universe right now, and they're working together for the moment. There are the political arsonists who believe you have to not only reform government or shrink it, but.
Kill it right and that's who That's.
The russ Voughts. That's probably the majority of the coalition right now. There are the rologarchs and the kleptocrats, and I put Elon in kind of both camps, who want to take control of the systems in the government that will make them more rich. You know, call me crazy, but a guy who receives billions and millions and billions of dollars of taxpayer money every year having control over the system that hays people who get billions of dollars of taxpayer money every year is a little bit of
a conflict. Call me crazy and Finally, there's the what I call the faith based weirdo community who want to reorganize American society along biblical lines and all this.
Stuff we want to bring about the rapture.
They are so hot for the rapture. But all of these groups right now are working somewhat together. Oh and there's a tiny fraction of the normies who just want their tax bill.
Cut, right. I mean, I think that the voters are more like that.
Some but a lot of them also are these revolutionary types who believe that, you know, things like the Agency for International Development is a Satanic cabal, right.
I mean, not a lot of them, but that's the base. That's the base.
Yeah, it's not a lot, but it is a meaningful part of the basis what I call the catalog of imaginary demons.
Yeah, and I think that.
Right now we have one overwhelming piece of fact evidence right now, overwhelming piece of data about this world, and that is that President Musk is the single dominant force.
As you point out, we did not some people did not anticipate the doge, which is just Elon by the way, and his minions, that they would be running and breaking into government computer systems that today they'd be at the State Department, an agency for international development, trying to get into classified records for which they have zero clearance.
Right, and we're not elected to do more importantly.
Right, as somebody said the to day, if Barack Obama had said to George Soros and his team go rifle through all the payment systems and government records in the government, what would the reaction on Fox be? Nuclear war?
Right?
This is the kind of thing.
If Democrats did a fifteenth of this, they would all end up there would be a mutiny. But the thing is Democrats would never do this, nor would they do the things that they should do that would counter this, which is basically how we got here.
I was on an email chain and I kind of lost my mind with somebody this morning. And I don't really do that a lot. I don't really go are you fucking kidding me? Very frequently to allies. But this very good intention person is arguing to me, Oh, man, come on, we can just get him on the economy. Now, he's going to screw up the economy and we'll talk about how we're good for working people. And all I could think of was, are you ef thing kidding me?
These guys have already taken away working people from the Democrats by calling the Democrats satanic, pedophile satanists every day. And the Democrats think they're going to sit across the table. And this person said to me, in good faith, you know, our focus groups keep telling us that voters want us to work together. And I'm like, so you're gonna let them fuck you in public and then fuck your mother and your dog in public and humiliate you.
Yeah. So one of the things I was struck by.
And again I think there's way too much talking about strategizing and not enough just actually doing stuff.
But one of the things I was stripped by was the Justin Trudeau.
Was explaining how tariffs work in a really clear way that I had not heard any of the Democrats, do you know. He said like, Donald Trump is going to punish us. But then he started speaking to Americans and He's like, and here's what he's that's going to.
Do to you.
And and I think that some of it was this fundamental like I didn't know that there were a lot of products like car parts that would come to Canada go back, go back again.
You know that that will go.
Back and forth, you know, four or five times, and so you know, they these things will be impossible to teariff Mutually.
Beneficial trade between the United States and Canada and between the United States and Mexico has been one of the most fundamental economic facts that has helped all three countries meaningfully. This crap Trump's spewing out today, Oh, we're subsilois Canada. No, Donald, we really don't. All of it comes down to a fundamental misread and misunderstanding of modern economics. If Trump had any macroeconomic thinkers on his staff, they would say, oh, God,
tariffs are a disaster. You have to stop this. You know, everybody was sort of like, oh, Steve Bissona seems very normal. The Treasury Secretary seems like a normy. He should be good. And now what is he doing? I mean, I'm looking right now on my screen. The world is shorting American markets for tomorrow. The stock Mark's going to open tomorrow or today? Is when this is being heard with a blood bath?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And these people they understand that Donald Trump has a wrong and dumb approach to this, but they are too afraid to say Donald, this is wrong and dumb.
Well, they don't want to get fired.
Well, they would be fired, that's true.
Yeah, agreed, And I also think that this incredible story. Now we have Mayor Pete talking about Pete Buddhadage talking about how a lot of air traffic controllers were actually offered by it. Right, So even though there weren't necessarily though you know, there's a real crisis getting enough air traffic controllers, but a bunch of air traffic controllers got those, you know, got something similar to the emails right, the fork in the road email.
The quick now get till August, or will fire you and you'll get nothing.
Right.
So watching that, you know, that's another thing. I mean, the whole idea of mate, you'll make the government more efficient. It will happen the way that Elon made X more efficient, which means that all of these services that made it a place you wanted to go will disappear.
I want people to understand very clearly that Elon is looking for sort of b s, you know, splashy, fox friendly cuts that he'll be able to say, oh, well, we did this because we had to cut this program at aid for Lutheran Social Search that's FAD five million dollars a.
Year today's Elon enemy is Lutherans.
In case you wondering, those perdicious Lutherans are the problem. Here's my point on this though, and I think it's really important we understand this. The Lutherans are the rounding error of a fraction of a fraction of a deminimous amount of trivial spare change money. If you really wanted to cut trillions of dollars, as Elon claims he wants to do, you have to go for the big things. You have to go for Social Security, you have to
go for Medicare, you have to go for Medicaid. And luckily, now that Elon Musk is in charge of all those payment systems, he can start cut. This is what makes me crazy about this right now.
Who is a person who made billions of dollars on government subsidies?
Yeah, and then let's let's be very real and very clear. Elon Musk is a welfare queen. He produces pretty rockets, which I really like, and his company receives billions of dollars of federal subsidies.
Yeah, billions of dollars billion, way more than US Aid does.
And I think right, order of magnitude right, and.
I think that it's also worth remembering. So basically Trump doesn't understand soft power, right, he doesn't understand why you give money to AID organizations.
I think some of this is Elon and a lot of these weirdos do understand how important those things are to American soft power. If you're the Chinese and the Russians watching USAID get dismantled, watching a way that the United States can go into other countries in Africa, in Asia and Latin America and South America and show our best selves our foes, our competitors, and our foes hate that kind of thing. They would much rather it be about who can the Chinese roll into the Central African
Republic and bribe? Who can the Russians roll into meandmar and bribe? They would much rather it be that kind of world. And Elon and his calling it a criminal or organization, we really are going to come to a moment here. You can decide if you think it's a criminal organization or not if your review the books, But we're going to come to a moment here where it is a statutory, implemented government agency, it is in law.
At some point, the Democrats in Congress will stand the fuck up, call up the guys at Future Forward or are still sitting on one hundred million dollars, and say, hire every fucking lawyer in America. We're going to court. Hire them all. We're going to court, because right now, the idea that we're going to sort of like hope that somebody maybe sort of steps up and defends the institutions is clearly not happening.
Explain this a little better, you would like that to happen.
Absolutely, we need to fight this battle, even if you lose it in the Supreme Court, and I don't think you will, by the bye, I don't think you will lose this in the Supreme Court. Taking it to court slows down the chaos, and they need as much chaos in as short a period of time as they can possibly wrangle. That idea that we're just going to sit here and let them do all these things is mistaken, and it's also something that the Democrats have to do
in Congress itself. Right No, they have told on with every lobbyist in Washington, because a lot of lobbyists are like, oh, well, you know this, it's going to be okay, we'll work it out. We'll bribe Trump. They need to basically start saying, play some hardball, stop everything. If Mitch McConnell was a Democrat right now, do you think this and it would be rolling over like it is for Trump's nominees. If Mitch McConnell was a Democrat.
No, certainly not.
When the market's open tomorrow and the creator what happens.
Next, Well, I think Trump will try to first break the markets to his will right and say it's a conspiracy by the globalist elites. But you know, I don't think that it really is going to hold up, and Elon is going to try to continue doing all this stuff. Look, these guys are Elon is like a sieve for data right now. His people are stealing American government day wholesale. He wants this to go as long as he can.
We need to see the American financial community figure out that the pain that Trump is trying to inflict is fundamentally going to blow back on us. At the end of the day. Canada and Mexico will take some damage, Okay, you know what they will. They'll take some damage, but at the end of the day, the damage here will be even greater. And we need the markets to understand that fast sooner than later.
I think they do, and I think they do.
I mean, we've seen that right now as we're recording this on Sunday afternoon, the Dow is down almost four hundred points in the pre market trading, and the SMP is down about thirty three points in the pre market trading, and Nasdaq is down as well, about thirty five points. I think we're not going to have a pretty day tomorrow because one thing markets want is rationality, consistency, predictability, and right now I don't see a lot of predictability in this system we're looking at.
Yes, I think Democrats are not doing enough, not loud enough, not clear enough about what they should be doing to stop this. And also again the drum beat should be this, you did not vote for Elon Musk. You did not vote to give him your data. You did not vote for him to control the payments. But the other thing that I do think is good about this moment is Donald Trump is not Justice Roberts, right, He is not. He is not Justice John Roberts. He is just as
Sam Alito. He is burning the whole fucking place down.
Whatever pissed him off in this world. He wants it to die.
Right, And so the last two weeks it's very hard to point to something that wasn't insane.
And now the idea that they're going to go, you know, it's.
Very hard to say. And I also think the warring fractions. Steve Bannen has not is not giving Elon a pass by any stretch of the imagination. If anything, he's after him more.
Steve right now is having a weird moment because he's aroused by the burning down of the government and the arson, but he hates Elon because he knows that Elon is doing this.
Look all the.
Boom bait Elon's throwing out about wokeness and all that craft that they're purging out of the computer systems and everything. What it really is about is Elon becoming a trillionaire and Elon deploying his money and power against anybody that gets in his way. It's why Susie Wiles, the great and powerful Susie Wiles, has absolutely failed to check Elon's power.
She's not even trying anymore. So President Musk is running wild, and Steve Bannon is now like the guy who's like, I didn't want to go to the problem with you anyway.
Right, there are a lot of most people in the federal government, though a lot they're in places that they probably should not be, and some of them have SUPRISD.
Which is within one hundred mile radius of Washington, DC.
Right, But I mean, are there checks and balances for the hat No?
No, because right now Trump is now aware that every single one of these people that is out there trying to get into classified data systems like they're doing at the State Department right now, trying to get into skiffs as Elon Musk tried to do today. Elon Musk doesn't have a security clearance. Guys, he was denied a security clearance because he is a ketamine addict and a weirdo.
Well, we don't know why he has denied it. Let's not consued here.
Ok. Yeah, then, as someone who had a security clearance, I can tell you that if you're a ketemine adict and a weirdo, they won't give you a security clearance. So but long story short, all of this, to my mind, is still about the financial incentives for Elon and the billionaire class. They really, really really want to control of these government monetary systems and payment systems and everything else, because you see what Elon's already doing, Like government agencies
are now posting only to Twitter their information at press releases. Yeah, how is that not Elon Musk receiving a government benefit and a molument of a contract without any sort of of propriety. Well, I mean, I know, propriety is like low on their checklist, right anyway, Right.
Rick Wilson, thank you for joining us.
You are welcome as always. I will talk to you again next time.
Thomas Frank is the author of books like What's the Matter with Kansas and The People Know? Welcome back to Fast Politics, Thomas.
Frank, Well, thank you for having me.
Jesse and I are big fans of yours, so whenever we get an opportunity to have you on, we're.
Both like, oh my god, we're your people. So I'm hoping you wrote a really.
Smart topic in the New York Times which you described the moment you knew that Trump was going to win again. Would you explain to us what happened there and how you got to that thought process.
Well, look, I mean I could also have said I understood all of this stuff was going to happen when I was back in high school. There's just been a recurring theme of my of my entire life. You know, it just goes on and on and on. What's the matter with Kansas came out twenty years ago. It never ends. I've been looking back over, you know a lot of the sort of the raw material of the Democratic Party's downfall of the last Oh jeez, is it fifty years?
Yeah?
Yeah, since sixty eight is the sort of the was the moment when it all changed?
Why is sixty eight the high water mark in your mind? They started losing working voter.
They lost the election that year, and it was close, right, It wasn't like, it wasn't a blowout. Everybody thought that Hubert Humphrey was going to go down in a landslide, but it turned out to Richard Nixon. It turned out to be fairly close. But it nevertheless convinced the Democratic Party. Their failure that year convinced the Democratic Party that they had to change course, you know, that they had to undertake this like self examination and become something very different.
And they did it deliberately. Well, it was. There was a reform at called the McGovern Commission, but they've been basically doing that ever since, right, constantly, constantly isay.
What went wrong? What do we have to do differently?
I mean, so for you know, I was fifteen when Ronald Reagan got elected, and it's just been one self examination after another since then. But what's amusing about it is that all of these self examinations, and sometimes they're very liberal.
Right.
We think of George McGovern as being very very liberal, and then we think of the Democratic Leadership Council where Bill Clinton came out of. We think of them as being more centrist or even conservative, But they all lead to they all take the party in the same direction no matter where they come from, right, which is why the catchphrase is that the New Deal has to end. Right, That's what they would always say when I was young, we have to stop being the party of the New Deal.
And they would come up with different reasons for that, and they'd come up with different, you know, ideas for how to what should succeed the New Deal Democrats, but it basically always wound up being we need to become the party of highly educated professionals, you know, affluent white
collar suburbanites. Always so, whether it's liberals pushing this change or whether it's conservatives pushing this change, and whether they're doing it in the name of nineteen sixties style, you know, enlightenment, existential enlightenment, or whether they're doing it in the name of globalism, war, globalization. I'm thinking of Clinton's faction here, globalization and technology and you know, the Internet and all
that stuff. Whether they're doing it in the name of the one or whether they're doing it the name of the other, it's always it's always wind's up being the same goddamn thing. It's really fascinating, but it's not intentional.
I mean that's like sometimes it is, but a lot of times it's not right. What we're talking about here is the Democratic Party's inability to connect with the working class, or let me rephrase that, the Democratic Party's loss of some of the working class, despite the fact that they have policies that are much more favorable to the working class or even to the middle class.
I mean, look at poor Joe Biden. He did some truly decent things. He was the first president to ever march on a union line. Yeah, in a picket line, yell.
And then his vice president was not able to be was not endorsed by unions.
Like I mean, that was insane. There's something really tragic about the whole thing. I don't really want to pick on on Joe Biden here is not able to defend himself. He had there was a neo Rooseveltian side to him that I really liked. But he was also there, you know, at the same time, had a lot of these very typical neoliberal democrats in his administration who are pushing the other way. So maybe this is a really Washingtonian thing. I don't think it is, but maybe it is. He
was really good on anti trust. What he did on anti trust is like that's I've been calling for that for decades, and I was overjoyed that he did these things.
The case for Lena and the fact that no one explained to the American people, I.
Mean, oh, Harris didn't even mention it. It didn't even come up. Biden was doing some pretty you know, revolutionary things. Well, I mean, that's that's the wrong word, but no, but it's true revolutionary is the way. We didn't even talk about it at the convention. And certainly Harriston once her campaign got rolling, all that stuff really fell away. You know, she's out there embracing the Chinese and all this stuff.
Yeah, Biden had really good policy, really bad pr I mean, ultimately could not transmit the policy, but.
Not across the board. Now, there's plenty of areas in which Biden failed. Okay, so talk to me about that. Well, it's foreign policy. This is this is catastrophic. It's too little,
too late in a lot of ways. You know. The handful of things about what he was doing that I really really appreciated, never went far enough to be felt by ordinary Americans or to be felt, you know, in a way that that caused them to, you know, come around to this poor guy, Joe, And I'm sorry, I just feel I feel like I feel like there's a tragedy here, you know.
Right, No, for sure, I mean I feel very interested in sort of figuring out what went wrong in the hopes of not repeating it, you know what I mean.
Yeah, I liked Biden. Fine.
I think he did some very cool legislation that we would not have had otherwise, right, Like, you know what I mean, Like the stuff, the antitrust stuff I thought was really good.
The Chips and Sciences Act was really good. Yeah. No, his infrastructure spending that's going to you watch what happens, Trump is going to reap all the all the gains of that. Well, this is okay, So this is a lot of this is they phased that stuff in really slowly. I don't know why Democrats always do things like that,
but they do. And it drives me crazy. And can I just say, Mollie, one of the things that is, I just want to get this out there because otherwise I'll forget and I want It just burns me up so much. When Obama was president. You remember, in Obama's second term, I was writing for Salon dot com at the time. Obama wouldn't he wasn't doing anything. He wouldn't do anything in his second term, and it was it was absolutely maddening to people like me, and his defenders
made the most outrageous excuses for it. There was this whole line that he used to come across and from the you know, the pundit core here in Washington, d C. Where they'd say the presidency isn't isn't a very powerful office. They used to use this phrase, you know, to demand that Obama do anything. Was what they called the green Lantern theory of the presidency, where he was magical and this made me so angry. Do you remember this? And
he made me so angry. I called a bunch of my policy wonk friends and said, what could Obama do without Congress? Like, really, give me five really momentous things that he could do. And we came up with them and I wrote the essay. One of them, by the way, was antitrust.
Right.
That doesn't require Congress. The laws are already on the books. You know, he just has to order his attorney general to you know, start doing it. Well, bum didn't do any of them, of course, of the things that I came up with, But it just burns me up that as a party, Democrats are committed to this idea of presidential powerlessness as a party, and then the Republicans are Republicans. Look at what Trump has done in one week.
It is crazy when we look at this trumpy kind of presidential power question. I want you to talk to us more about what Democrats can do because the thing that keeps me up at night, right, is this really a lot of policy that's popular. Is the party that wants to give people free healthcare is losing the people who get the free healthcare.
So how why explain only a few of them really want to do the free health care thing. That's a Bernie Elizabeth Warren.
You have one party that's encouraging Medicaid expansion, you have one party that wants to gut it, and yet the people on Medicaid don't want to vote for So what make it make sense?
Make it make sense? As though you just ye, sorry, oh Mollie, have you ever did you ever call the wrong guy? Now I'm kidding. I'm like the one guy who probably can I can take a swing at this, and I would say first of all, that the Democrats aren't. The most important thing is that what you just identified would be. It would be like, really awesome if we had a traditional middle class oriented party of the left
in America that was fighting for things like that. And I think such a party would with the right leadership, would be kicking ass all over the place at this very moment. But the perception that people have and it's not I mean, you know the words the liberal elite. They've been hanging this label on the Democrats since the days of Richard Nixon, and they've been doing it very successfully. This is what what's the matter with Kansas was about the thing that keeps me up at night and makes
me so angry. Is the way that democrats. This is such a big subject here, but they walk right into it. They walk right into it again and again and again, and they can't see how they might be perceived as an elite. You know, it's incredibly obvious, but they can't see it, and they walk into it again and again and again. Did I ever tell you about the neighborhood I grew up in in Kansas City. It's in Johnson County, Kansas, you know, right over the border from Missouri. It was very,
very affluent. The Frank family wasn't well to do, but nevertheless we lived there. But there's some weird flute. We happened to live there among these people. And so my playmates when I was a kid were the ruling class of Kansas City. They owned the place, They owned the banks, they owned the industries, they owned you know whatever, they advertising agencies, they owned the place. They and they owned the state. It was theirs. And they were all Republicans.
When I was a kid, I thought these were the most Republican people I would ever meet. They loved Bob Dole, you know, you used to when I would go to vote back in well, I was in college and I was I was by then, I was voting for Democrats. You would go to the polling place and they had this you know that you'd give them your name and they had this thick rent out of all the Republicans in the neighborhood, and then the Democrats were a single
page right right. But that was in the eighties, and I was there for you know, I don't have any connection with the place anymore. We find my parents died, We sold the house and I moved out, you know, I moved all my stuff out actually just last year. But I was there for the election of twenty twenty. I was there with my elderly father. It was COVID time and I was I was, you know, keeping him healthy and safe.
You know.
I also took the opportunity to check up on what, you know, our neighbors were doing, whose yard signs they had, and the neighbor the neighborhood was converted to the Democratic Party. Is the most incredible thing I ever saw. This is the ruling elite of that part of the world. And Biden won every precinct and Hillary did quite well there too. In twenty sixteen, although I wasn't there to at the time to check on it. But this is happening all
over America. The highly educated in the Affling, yes, but rich people whose wealth is associated with education, so rich people who like have inherited, or rich people who own the local buick dealership, if such things still exist, those people still tend to be Republicans. But our neighbors back in Mission Hills were you know, yeah, they became Democrats. It's the most shocking thing I ever saw. I spent my life making fun of Republicans. Yeah, no, no, no, it's true. And look what happened.
What you're talking about is a democratic party that cannot connect with populism, despite the fact that there has a word populist values. So well, you talk about in that essay, and what you talk about a lot is this idea that the Democrats are doing things to alienate the populist voter.
So talk about that. This is, by the way, one of my perennial subjects. The people who mate who invented the word populism were guys from Kansas, and they were what we would now think of as a left wing party. I mean, they didn't use terms like left and right back then. But that's what they were, and you know, they were a farmer labor party. They of merged or got co opted by, or went into the Democratic Party. Beginning in the eighteen nineties, the Democratic Party became the
more left of the two parties. Now, this didn't work out. It took years for it to work itself out fully. And it wasn't until you know, Franklin Roosevelt that that was established that the Democratic Party was a left. But the Democratic Party has They are the natural bearers of the populist tradition in this country, and yet the right wing has swiped that from them. This is what I've
written about my whole life. I mean, I'm trying to, by the way, just so you know, I'm trying to get away from this subject now and not write about it anymore because it's become I just can't keep saying the same thing over and over again. But the right wing has stolen this from them, and there is no better example than Donald Trump. Well, because it wins, because that's the bath to success.
But why can't Democrat keep it? What are they doing to alienate the voters they need?
Well, there's a lot of things. You know. I went to both conventions last year on behalf of a French newspaper. They sent me there. One of the most remarkable speeches at the Republican convention, by the way, Donald Trump's speech was. I was down on the floor. I was within twenty yards of Trump. He was very boring. Can you Amy, isn't that amazed? On and on and on, and he was quite boring. Yeah, always, well, I remember in sixteen he was more he was slightly more exciting, but whatever.
You know, who was interesting was Vance. JD.
Vance.
It's like they instructed him, JD. You're going to be our populist guy this time around. You're going to carry the populis banner. And he went out there in his speech and he blamed the Democrats for NAFTA. That's fair, right, that was Bill Clinton who got that done. But in fact NAFTA was negotiated by Republicans, by George Bush Senior, by Ronald Reagan's government. But he blamed the Democrats for NAFTA. He blamed the Democrats, I believe, yeah, for the bank bailouts.
I don't have my notes on this. And then he blamed the Democrats for the Iraq war. Yeah really, yes, Well he blamed Biden for voting for it. I mean, he did vote for it, I know, But this is a Republican convention.
It's like, there's a guy called George Bush. I just got to tell you about this guy, George Bush. There's a guy called Dick Cheney. I just got to remind you. And here's the Democrats go out and embrace Dick Cheney.
There's you know, there's a lot of reasons why the Democrats have done this to themselves, and a lot of it is you take a guy like Bill Clinton, who really did so much to move the Democratic Party to the right back in the nineteen nineties, and he thought he was doing it because of the sort of you know, grand global sweeping forces of historical change, and he was bringing the Party of the Left into step with modernity.
That's really what he thought. If you're unless you're like even more cynical than me, that's what Bill Clinton was trying to do. So though he sincerely thought he was doing a good thing, doing the right thing, when he signed off on NAFTA, when he deregulated banks, when he ended welfare, and he intended to advertize social security too. He didn't get around to that. But you know this
is these are all the kind of things. Yeah, these are no kidding, that's you know, having elderly parents, you know, you you wake up and thank God for Franklin D.
Roosevelt every day.
Yeah, Tomas, frank thank you so much for coming out.
We're done. I'm just getting looked up here.
It's twenty minutes, baby, We're at twenty two minutes.
Can I make one last point, though, please do, please do the really cynical take. So I said, that's the earnest take. The cynical take is that Democrats like being the party of the rich. You look at their Look at their presidential libraries over the years. Harry Truman's, which is in Kansas City or a suburb of Kens City, very modest, one story building. It cost him a little over a million dollars to build in the nineteen fifties or whatever. Look at Barack Obama's, like Chike can't structure.
They're putting up right now in the South side of Chicago. That's the difference. And that's the it's fun being the party of let's be really blunt, it's fun being the party of.
The Rich interesting, Thomas Frank, thank you, you got it.
Molly anytime, no moment pactly, Jesse Cannon, Molly Junk Fast.
So I have to say, I don't know about you, but the amount of techs I got about Elon and his goons getting access to the US Treasury payment system and now the skiff all weekend, it's just been a long weekend of me was going.
I wish I could not have to think about him. Yeah.
So Elon, he got into the federal payment system that pays out government money, and now he is looking around in there under the guise of government efficiency.
He's tweeting about it.
He's shutting down illegal payments to quote unquote legal payments right to organizations. He's posting stuff online. I mean, it's just exactly what you thought it would be. It's a very unstable kid in a candy shop.
Yeah, and it's not feel feeling good about what damage she can inflict.
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,