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 President she has rejected Donald Trump's invite to the inauguration.
What are we even doing here?
The Boston Globe Sam Brody gets us up to speed with the weird twists inside of Congress, and there are a lot of them. Then we'll talk to Robert Faderici about Trump's many, many, many business conflicts of interest.
But first the news.
Bye you and I we often discussed that we think President Biden has largely been a very great president, but I'm really disappointed in one of these pardons he did. I was happy to see he gave clemency to Sway people, but this feels bad.
I started reading it and I thought, oh god, it's the Cars for Kids.
Whoever wrote that song should be in jails.
That person should be one eight hundred Cars for Kids. But this is actually kids for Cash, which he's a judge who accepted big kickbacks in order to exchange sentencing kids to a for profit prison, thus making the Cars for Kids videos seem good. Yes, over twenty five hundred children were impacted by these corrupt judges, and some of them ended up And you'll be not surprised to hear
this taking their own lives for profit prisons. Remember, for profit prison stock recently went up after Donald Trump got elected. So do with that information what you will. The sentence has demonstated a lot of people. The guy was, I don't know why this person should be pardoned.
They accepted two point one million in bribes.
Yeah, and mother of a kid who killed themselves said that the sentence was being shelved and said that it was deeply painful. Look, Donald Trump has certainly done worse, but the goal with pardons is too is for just is to enable justice to be done. That does not sound like what is happening here. So pretty dark moment in Biden world.
So, Molly, I kind of remember we made this documentary in the late spring, and we said, when Donald Trump says he doesn't know what Project twenty twenty five is, he's fucking lying like he always is, and I'm going to shock you.
He's confessed to the lie.
Now, I am just completely shocked that Donald Trump did exactly what we thought he would do. You'll remember that in July when Project twenty twenty five, when when somebody actually read what was in it and saw how unpopular it was. I mean, this is the thing about Project twenty twenty five, and again, it's a sort of schmorgas board.
I think since you and I have really done a lot of interviews about it, it's a kind of Schmorgasborg of all of the kind of wildly unpopular thing that Republicans and the Heritage Foundation have always wanted to do, things like cut Social Security, Medicare, make it impossible to send birth control pills, band pornography.
I mean, it's a wish list of the far right.
So Trump in July wrote on to Social I know nothing about Project twenty twenty five. For whatever reason, that was enough, and voters decided that he didn't.
I don't know. You know, the fact that people from his administration.
Worked on it, that the fact that there was so much crossover between Trump's administration and Project twenty twenty five.
Nobody managed to notice that. So there you go.
Well, on Thursday, Donald Trump was named for the second time Times Person of the Year, and in the interview, Trumps sotened his tone on Project twenty twenty five. You'll be shocked to hear and said, praise some of its ideas good stuff.
So many of us have long long been suspect of how willing the AI tech overlords we have are to costell trump sass, and turns out those of us who are weary of this have been proven correct.
Look, all tech wants is to not be regulated. They don't need a Republican to not regulate them. Democrats are more than happy to also not regulate them. Remember, Democrats had the Presidency and the Senate and they did not regulate tech, and they had the opportunity to What I think is happening here, which is something I don't want to say interesting because it's just awful.
But what is happening here is that people have.
Decided that they want to manipulate Trump, and they know that the way to manipulate Trump is to give him money and say he's great. And these are people who want Trump's large ass more than they want anything else. So, you know, for someone like Sam Altman, who really needs no regulation for AI and really needs to be able to do whatever the fuck he wants, a million dollars to Trump's inaugural fund and a your great is easy, right, because he doesn't care. I mean, he just wants a
positive regulatory environment and for Trump to like him. So this week we saw Bezos donate a million dollars, we saw Meta donate a million dollars, and we saw Sam Almon donate a million dollars. We're going to see more of this is this obeying in events. People are saying this obeg events. By the way, I want to say one thing about Timothy Schneider. There are many other ideas that he has besides obeying events. And I actually don't
know that this is obeyed events. I think this is trying to curry favor.
It seems to exceed it in my.
Opinion, right, I mean, I think this is a manipulative play for an autocrat. I think it's clear that these companies are not going to stand up for anyone's rights. But I also think like this is the sort of the gamble they're making is if they give Trump money and suck up to him, then Trump will do what they want. Now, look that may happen. They've had that experience. I mean, by the way, this is like not a partisan thing, right, I mean, tech, you know, lobbyists exist
so that they can get to politicians. Right, Lobbyists don't exist for any other reason. They exist to lobby. So this is like.
A sort of very garish lobbying.
The question is, in my mind, is Donald Trump is so incredibly unreliable. You know, there's the low level grift and then there's all sorts of other kind of desires.
In Trump world.
I don't know that this is necessarily the straight line that these companies think it is, but we will see, right. I mean, we paid the ticket and now we take the ride.
Speaking of taking the ride, I'm really looking forward to going back to pulio being abundant in America. Since Robert F kN a Junior's lawyer, has asked the FDA to revoke the approval of the polio vaccine.
So this guy, Aaron Surrey, is specialized in vaccine lawsuits and he is RFK Juniors. He's been helping him vet candidates for HSS because in this insane world we're living in, RFK is going to be picking federal health officials for the incoming Trump administration. This lawyer partitions the government to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine, which obviously polio
not good. I'm no doctor, He also petitioned to seek a pause in the distribution of thirteen other vaccines ones that have done He wanted to get rid of the COVID vaccine mandates. I just want to pause for a second and talk about the second. A lot of times you'll see people say like, make polio grade again, and you'll say, well, that's hyperbole.
They don't actually want to make polio grade again.
No, no, they actually want to get rid of the polio vaccine.
And if you think about that.
What that will look like, what it will mean to have to live in a country where children get polio again, not because there is no vaccine, but because the people in the federal government don't understand how vaccines work. It will just be a certain kind of America that we have never ever ever experienced, or at least not for a long time. Sam Brody is a national political reporter at the Boston Globe. Welcome back to Fast Politics, Sambrody.
Thanks for having me. It's great to be back.
I want to talk about the fact that yesterday at two o'clock the Senate went home for the weekend.
Yeah, they sure did. I was there.
Yeah, it was a Thursday.
They had a slate of judges to confirm what the fuck is going on.
It's a good question. People might be like, wait, it's Thursday, it's two pm. Most people work a full five day week. What does the Senate do? What is the Senate doing? And this is one of the like immutable laws of Washington, like unless the government is literally about to shut down, even in some cases, they'll skip down pretty close to that deadline. But that's another thing. Unless there is an enormous urgent crisis. The Senate three point five day weekend
has become a sacri saint concept. And you might be looking at the dwindling calendar here for Democrats to confirm judges and other you know, important positions and go. Maybe they should stick around, But this is the way it works. The members get they get cranky if they're in Washington too long. I get it, it's not always the best place to be. And you know, I think Schumer's pointed to a lot of you know, pretty legitimate progress on that front. But yeah, if you keep them in, they get cranky.
Now they still have judges to fucking confirm. Let's talk about that.
No, they do, they do. You have to double check me on this one. I haven't seen any kind of definitive statement from Schumer on how they're approaching the endgame here, because come January third, the flip of Congress will be in effect, and I've not heard anything to indicate that they're even considering keeping or eating into the traditional holiday break whatsoever. I mean, they're slated to be done the Thursday before the week of Christmas and not return, believe
until it's swearing into the new Congress. So it's really, you know, this last week before Christmas that they can really do anything unless they're going to alter the schedule. I know that they've had to withdraw some nominations for lack of support. I think at a certain point, you know, they have done a lot, and they could do more by staying in. But you know, it's one of these
perennial things. Even members of the president's own party, our no outgoing president's own party, do not really want to eat into their Christmas break to get however, many more judges. The thing is is that Republicans can also pull procedural levers to make that process much much slower if they want to do it. The thing about the Senate is that it is unlike the House, and the House majority rules they can run rough shot over the minority and
just kind of do whatever they want. The Senate kind of operates on this very delicate balance between the majority and the minority, and as long as they're kind of, you know, going within the rules of the road, normally speaking, they let things proceed at a normal pace. But if the minority gets mad at something the majority is doing, so they keep them in over holidays, they can say, okay, well we're not going to there's all these levers head.
They can ultimate things go very very very slow. They can't stop things, generally speaking, if there is a will in the majority to do it, but they can make it go a lot slower. So I don't know how many they could confirm if they were to stay in, they certainly could confirm at least what And there are those who say, wait, that's what we should be doing.
Isn't it hard to imagine a world where Mitch McConnell doesn't confirm all the judges he possibly can.
Yeah, I mean, look, Democrats are staring down a at least two potentially for or longer minority stretch in the Senate. It is unclear when they will be back in the majority in the Senate and they can win back the presidency in four years. But if you don't have a Senate that's going to confirm your nominees for judge ships,
that's going to get really hard. I do think that in McConnell and Conservatives have put a huge emphasis on judges, and I should say that Democrats They've confirmed a ton of judges during Biden's presidency, so it's not as if they're coming into this stretch having dragged their feet, you know. And Schumer has spiked the football a number of times
on the number of judges that they fulfilled. But yeah, look, I mean there are some who say that Democrats are looking at as indefinite a minority period in the Senate as they have seen. I mean, they lost the majority remember in twenty fourteen, and it took them until twenty twenty one to get back. It's going to be tough for them to do it in twenty twenty six.
There's really not many pickup opportunities.
No, there's main in North Carolina which are not easy, and they'll have to defend some seats. And because the Republicans fled Pennsylvania there to give them fifty three. Even if they won both me in North Carolina, they wouldn't necessarily, you know, they'd still have to win another. So it's tough, and so yeah, I think it is it's a little bit legitimate question to say, you know, what would what would McConnell do in the last ten days of being in control of the Senate.
I saw McConnell give a floor speech this week where he was furious at two judges for unretiring.
Yeah, he seems like he is.
Not going quietly into that good night.
No, he definitely is not. And this is his thing. I mean, he really was the architect of the modern, you know, present day conservative strategy as it relates to the judiciary, one that you know, Trump and his people picked up. I mean, that was really the most long lasting impact of the first Trump term, all due respect to the tax cut built, but McConnell and Trump's partnership to stock a ton of young conservatives on the federal bench. I mean, and that was all that's on McConnell. You know,
Trump isn't going into office. They came about how he's going to get you know, some good young lawyers in on the like fifth circuit. That's that's McConnell. And you know, yeah, him kind of continuing to police the way Democrats are doing this going out for then retirement stuff again, thinks he has no control over but yeah, you're totally right.
He is not going to let this one go. And I do think that that's a point in favor of Okay, say Democrats were going to charge through the holiday break and try and confirm as many judges as they could. They could confirm some, you know that if they if they did it and had the will to do so. But that's the kind of move that McConnell will counter back. He will, he will meet that ante. And he's not, you know, in charge. You know, the transition is happening. But he's as good a manager of how you slow
things down on the floors as well as anyone. I mean, this guy, you know, has led the party for such a long time, and you better believe when it comes to judges, this is the thing that they are going to bring their a game to to try and slow down as much as possible. But it is a legitimate question.
You know.
I saw an act of this group I think was indivisible. They dropped off sleep bags to the offices of Democratic senators this week, saying, you know, let's lock some time here, let's sleep in your office, let's get as much done. And so I think this is one of those things where.
You see a huge gulf between the activist class of the Democratic Party that is very anxious, that is worried about what the next two four six years are going to bring and want to see some action from their Democratic sangers on this.
Speaking of how fucked we all are, can you explain to us what's happening with this confirmation battle that has begne with Trump's cabinet nominees.
Yeah, anywhere you want to start on that, I'm.
Man start with Pete hagg Seth.
I think we're going to be talking about this nomination for a long time in a lot of ways, because, you know, a week and a half ago, I think most people you might have talked to you on the hill or in the lobbying world or just whatever, would have said, you know, hag Seth has done. He's got the drip trip of stories. We're seeing reports that Trump is considering Ron de Santis, of all people, to take
his place it's like deathwatch. You know, his time is about to run out, and then he kind of pulls a mini Cabanaugh and under the you know, lights from the cameras on Capitol Hill in the hallway as he's going into a meeting, says, I'm not answering to the media. I answered to Trump, I answer to the senators. I'm going to see this through. And you know, that fight apparently got Trump to buy in again on that nomination. And now they've mobilized, you know, the MAGA kind of
influencer space and the act of this space. They are going to just totally crush anyone who even expresses like mild skepticism or caution about he sets nomination. I think they have understood, and I'm a little surprised it took them this long that no one wants to be primaried, that folks like Joni Ernst are worried about this, and that if they can bring the full force of the MAGA movement to there to get someone they want through, And I wouldn't be shocked at this point if HEXP
got confirmed. Now the obviats, we don't know what's going to come out in some of these FBI background checks. We don't know what these hearings are going to look like necessarily, but he's completely turned things around. And that's in large part because of his own defiance, but also the Mago movement king in and saying we are actually going to ruin any Republican centator that goes against us on this.
The media narrative has turned around, but he still has to sit through hearings.
Yeah, that's right, and that's the big X factor here, and that's why I'm reluctant to say that this is the week he turned it around. I think if he's able to get through these hearings without any more bombshells or you know, embarrassing moments, one thing that I would point out, I mean, we've focused a lot for good reason. I mean, we in the press and commentators have focused on his own misconduct. But it remains the case that, you know, from a nuts and bolts perspective, that stuff aside.
Even if it didn't exist, Senators would have serious questions about this guy's preparedness and ability to lead the Department of Defense, which has two million people, is responsible for keeping the country safe. And Hegseth has taught in wars, so he has military experience, but compared to people who held this job in the past, has way less of
a sense of how the Pentagon works. I wouldn't be shocked if there were several kind of embarrassing moments, if he trips up on things that someone in his shoes as a nominee would really be expected to know. And those are the kind of things that can really damage a nomination. I mean, you know, again, he's got a lot to answer for on the personal side, very very serious things. Can he answer the questions on a policy level that's going to make some of these folks feel
okay about supporting him? Again, remember these defense hawks on the Republican side, they're going to be asking a lot of these questions. Those could be some big moments.
Right in my mind, the scarier candidate is actually Cash Fatal.
Yeah, and I think that a lot of Democratic senators would agree. The thing about the Pentagon is, you know, the leader of the Pentagon is obviously an extremely important position, but it is such a massive bureaucracy. And the FBI is also a large bureaucracy, but that's also that's a smaller agency and has a ton of power to execute kind of precisely what Trump is six sedd on when it comes to retribution, the deep stai, cleaning out law enforcement,
getting back his enemies. And I do think that, you know, this is a dynamic that many have observed. But you know, Gates, while he was in kind of covered for some of the other nominees that were questionable, hag Seth is doing the same. I think senators are looking at this saying, I can't be against all of his people. I can't be against Pulci Gabbard and Pete Haig Sceth and RFK and Cash Battel. They're going to have to pick their moments, if they pick any moments at all, which I think
is a big is a big if. But I've been noting that, you know, Cash Hotel has started to make the rounds very established Republicans, you know, people like John Cornyn, who is you know, not considered a MAGA person, but is considered someone vulnerable to a primary. He's out there talking about how great his meeting with Cash Battel is. I think that is as good an indicator as any as where his nomination is going.
So what does that mean? You say, and Cash Hotel's going to make it through.
I would be surprised if he didn't. At this point, you never know what can happen. And again, these hearings are going to be really important. Even in this day and age. I don't think you can undervalue the impact of big moments at hearings. We still remember when nominees trip up over things or they you know, kind of look stupid, and so those those moments are totally possible. But I think in a way that Hegset doesn't. Patel animates the MAGA right in just a really unique way.
Right. He's their guy.
Yeah, he is one of them, And I think I would be curious what a ranking I guess from the MAGA side of the kind of their most essential cabinet people if they had to pick one or two to get it, and guaranteed who would they pick. I think Cash Hotel would be on that list because he represents you know, the whole Trump ethos when it comes to deep state everything. I mean, this is the guy and this is what the bass is animated out that the core part of the MAGA base is not you know,
animated about inflation. They're they're animated about getting someone in like cash Battel in there to go after Trump's enemies and sort of get retribution on on the last you know, what they see is the last four years of persecution of Trump.
Do you think cash Battel will go after Trump's enemies?
It's is it hyperbole or is do you think it's real?
And also do you think he can make that case like to the American people?
It's complicated. I mean I think that will he want to do. I mean, there's been a lot of great reporting on cash Battel and you know his role in the first Trump administration, his willingness to kind of do whatever it was that Trump felt was necessary to do. I think at any rate, they start with, you know, he said that, you know, we're going to turn the FBI into a museum of the deep state on day one.
I'm not sure that's that's going to happen. What I do think is that we'll probably start to see subtle shifts within, you know, within the FBI in terms of you know, how are they policing decisions within the agency, personnel decision and what are people's backgrounds. I don't think we're going to see anything super external in the early going and look, I mean I think that if Patel is smart and we may see, look, you might meet
with some Democrats on the Judiciary Committee. It I means the case that Trump has talked a lot about crime, Fennel, like, the FBI is a law enforcement agency. So I think that Patel has not been full fire breather during this process. If he's if he's smart, and perhaps this is part of the reason why he's able to win over people like Cornin or at least give those senators cover to back him. Is he's talking about you know, what does
that BEI going to do about fentanyl? What are they going to do about kind of more sort of straight up crime issues that affect people? And frankly that Trump is going to need like he looks like he did something on right. This was a big reason a lot of people voted for Trump, and I don't think that's lost on them.
Yeah, it just is so incredibly bleak.
So who else do you think of Trump's nominees are going to like, I mean, who else could you see not getting through?
So I think at this point I think back off often in this process too. You know, Senator Tom Cotton tweeted, I think was last week or the week before. And Cotton is in GOP leadership now, very influential in both the establishment Republican space and the Trump Republican space, so he's worth paying attention to what he says. And he said, I expect all of Donald Trump's nominees will get confirmed by the Republican Senate. And I view that as like a laying down the gauntlet, like you got to confirm
all of them. You know that this is the standard. You don't get to pick and choose or go whatever. And of course senators are very independent, They're going to make their own decision, but that is furthering the expectation that they're all gonna get confirmed. And I think that just raises the bar for any Republican Senator to vote no on any of these folks. And what I think that will result in is them thinking that the person
is just personally so disqualifying. You know that their record or whatever it is, you know, for example, of hegseat, if you feel that he is not capable of running the Department of Defense, or you feel he's unethical or whatever it may be, that you vote against. Gabard is another one. Toul See Gabbard. I think that is. You know,
she's nominated to be the director of National Intelligence. There's been some interesting reporting coming out for some of her early meetings of Republican senators that they are not very impressed with her grasp of the issues, not necessarily what you want or somebody who's in charge of running the
nation's you know, seventeen intelligence agencies. So in those situations, you could see perhaps Republicans saying the stakes are so high that I have to vote no. But look, I think in a prior time, I just did a piece on Trump's nominee for Labor secretary. Not as important to the national security as some of these other things, but he nominated a Republican congresswoman who actually supports unions. She has endorsed the pro Act, which is the most important
kind of wabor legislation of modern times. Unions like her. I talked to a bunch of labor leaders who are like, you know what, Yeah, she's she's pretty good. Republicans a lot of them really don't like her views. The Wall Street Journal editorials has gone like a on a mini crusade against this nominee, And you could think in a prior time. Oh man, this is kind of queen a policy disagreement for senators to go after, not like is
this person qualified to do the job. But I think someone like her Lori Chavez Dreemer probably has an easier time in this environment. And I would think despite policy disagreements, that she would have an easier time getting confirmed because it's not so about you know, basic questions about whether she can do the job.
Well, Oh, Sam Brody, thank you for joining us.
Of course, thank you so much for having me back.
Robert Faderici is an investigative reporter at Pro PUBLICA.
Welcome to Fast Politics.
Robert, thank you for having me.
Everything you write about your beat is about to become pretty much the most important beat of all the beats.
So explain to us what you do and sort of how you got here.
So several months ago we made a bet that Trump media and truth Social would become very important. Peer Social had sort of been thought about as a joke, sort of a Twitter clone, not a very serious thing, but it has become a meme stock. And what that means is it now valued in the billions. It makes up a majority of Donald Trump's net worth. And we figured that if the first presidency, was any indication he would not meaningfully divest if he became president again, and all
of that has sort of played out now. So it is the most important asset Donald Trump has. There's no indication that he's going to be divesting. In fact, he has said he is not selling his shares. And what that means is he's got all sorts of conflicts of interest going into his next presidency. Last time around, a lot of hay was made about several million dollars he made from foreign dignitaries and domestic political groups, from his
hotels and real estate interests. You know, the conflicts of interest from Trump Media and truth Social are going to eclipse that. We're talking business deals with. You know, in one case, a major GOP donor that's already happened. We've already reported on that people who want to make him wealthier can buy up shares and drive the share price up.
There's been pure speculation, but you know that Elon Musk could swoop in and have X buy truth Social, which would essentially realize this paper wealth for Donald Trump.
Let's pause for a second. Explain to our listeners. We have very savvy listeners, but we also have some listeners who might not completely understand Donald Trump, and Elon Musk is a bit like this too, right, though at a different scale. A lot of his wealth is actually not liquid, right, it's the stock.
Isn't there a lock up for it too?
The lockup is up, so he could sell the shares today. Of course, you know, once word gets out that he's selling shares, that will drive the share price down. He has said he's not going to do that. There are other ways he could realize it too, which would also result in disclosure.
So other ways he could realize it would be using it as collateral for something else exactly, and that would have to be disclosed publicly because it's a publicly traded company.
Yes, and because of he is a very large shareholder, he's a majority shareholder. That should be disclosed publicly if it happens.
But people who own the stock, that is not a public disclosure.
If you own less than a certain threshold, which could still be a very large amount.
So the worry here I want to get into is one you don't know who's giving Donald Trump money via this company, which is explained to our listeners why the value of his company is so preposterous.
It seems as though people have essentially been buying up the stock as a proxy for Donald Trump's political fortunes. We saw that kind of thing. When there were good developments for Trump during the campaign, the share price would often go up. When there were bad developments, the share price would go down. It's sort of disconnected from economic reality. The revenue of this company is almost nonexistent. There's no reason it should be worth billions of dollars by traditional metrics.
But like AMC and other meme stocks, it has blown up and that has made Donald Trump much much wealthier.
But it's not real wealth. So even though it's wealth, it's not actual as wealth. So can you sort of explain to us why this is such a conflict besides the fact that it's an opportunity to give a future president money.
Let me give you a good example, you know, from one of our past stories. So the company put out a disclosure about a new streaming deal it it got involved in. And the two entities that were part of that deal, you know, we talked to people no one had ever heard of him, and so we dug deeper on both of them, and one of them is owned or controlled by a major GOP donor in Louisiana. This is a person, you know, He's an energy magnet. He
has vast lobbying interests during a second Trump administration. He personally lobbied the first Trump administration and got concession. So now not only is he a major GOP donor and a Trump donor, but he is literally in business with Donald Trump. And if he needs something, if he wants something during a second Trump administration, will he have a benefit over your average person?
Yeah.
Absolutely, Talk to us about sort of the other Trump has wall.
Street is I was reading in the New York Times this morning.
Wall Street is incredibly excited about another Trump admin You write about ways in which wealthy people are able to avoid paying taxes, able to sort of win against the little guy. Talk to us about some of the opportunities you think Wall Street will have here.
The most significant legislative achievement of the first time around was TCJA, the tax bill that reduced the tax burdens dramatically for wealthy people. Many parts of that are up for renewal during the next Trump administration, and so if those elements are renewed, that it's going to be a huge benefit for wealthy people. And then he has promised
to reverse course on crypto regulation. He is nominated someone or he's going to nominate someone to lead the SEC who has a very different view on crypto and how much it should be regulated.
Which is not at all, right, which.
Is very little. And interestingly, again all roads lead back to Trump Media. It was recently reported that Trump Media is in talks to acquire a crypto exchange company. So in more than one way, the president is going to be in the crypto business himself, as his administration deregulates crypto.
So talk about what you're going to be watching in this admin where there are opportunities for corruption or things that you think could be misused theoretically at least.
So you know, our latest story this is this is the first time that a president is going to be a majority shareholder of a publicly traded company. So essentially Donald Trump is going to select the chairman of the SEC who is essentially going to be the main regulator of his own company. And we talked to current and former SEC officials and we asked them, do you think the SEC is going to aggressively regulate the President's company and largely they had serious doubts that the SEC would
be up to the task. We actually, through our reporting discovered an instance of Trump media for a long time now making a potential material misrepresentation about truth social the kind of thing that the SEC would potentially go after. And with Trump coming into the office and choosing the SEC chairman, there are real doubts about whether the SEC
will go after that kind of thing. That matters in a narrow sense, right, but it also matters in a larger sense in that part of the reason the American economy is the americano is because there is faith that is well regulated. If there start to be doubts that companies connected to the president says ally, it's like Elon, Musk and Tesla, which make up a much larger share of the market, are not being properly regulated. There may be short term benefits for those companies, but long term,
are they going to get loans? Will people want to invest in them? It could potentially affect the confidence in the American markets, which should have bad effects for everyone.
Yeah, it's hard to not see how regulation has I mean, if you think about what happened with Boeing, right, I mean regulation is actually quite a good thing, largely, or at least in my mind.
Yeah, I mean it's it's always you know, you've got to find the sort of happy medium, right, you want to regulate enough but not too much.
Eric Trump, he's actually in Abu dhah Bay at a bigcoin conference.
What does that sort of say.
When the president and his family have foreign business interests? It creates conflicts of interest when you're also the person who's in charge of shaping American foreign policy. That's why you don't want those kinds of foreign financial entanglements. And it's you know, that's one example, the one you mentioned. You've also got, you know, Jared Kushner who has I think it's hundreds of millions of dollars in fees his
fund largely from the Saudis. You know, we found an instance several months ago of representatives for Trump media going to North Macedonia and meeting with the prime minister there to talk potential business. What does that mean for US foreign policy as it relates to North Macedonia. So yeah, typically that's why we want to see the president, meanfully the best from his these kinds of financial interests, particularly
foreign financial foreign related financial interests. It doesn't appear we're gonna see that this time around.
Yeah, is there any kind of accountability? Is there any chance to do that?
If the SEC and the DOJ fail to properly enforce securities laws as it relates to Trump media or anything else, there is always the potential that state authorities, which Donald Trump has no control over, could swoop in. We've actually surfaced one example already of that. The New York AG, according to a source of ours and some records we reviewed, has begun probing a matter related to Trump media. We may see more of that kind of thing in the coming years.
There is a sense that Kryptocrats have won, for lack of a better word, Is there any chance that they won't kind of become the free for all that it looks like it's going to be.
I've learned that my ability to predict is quite poor. I do know that at Pro Publica we plan to aggressively and fairly cover this, and so at the very least we hope that you know, if there are abuses of power, we will be informing the public about them.
That is a really important point.
And I'm just wondering if you can kind of explain how why it's so important, if that makes any sense.
Yeah, for there to be any hope of real accountability, you need investigative reporting. This job is very hard, you know. Abuses of power are typically not out in the open. Sometimes during the first Trump administration they obviously were, but they're often not, and the work of trying to untangle what happened or is happening is often extremely complicated. You will have one idea of what happened, and then you'll dig deeper, and your idea will shift, and you'll dig
even deeper and it'll shift again. You'll reach out to the people who you believe are abusing their power and they'll explain some things to you that you didn't previously realize. And so it's a process and you need people who are experts at doing this kind of work to do it fairly and thoroughly. I mean, Elon Musk has been on Twitter saying you are the media now, and I'm
all for citizen journalism. I think it has value, but you need trained, experienced experts to be doing the work also, because it's not easy work and it's not straightforward, and you won't get up a fair and thorough product if you have just anyone doing it.
Yeah, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you, thank you for having me.
No moment, Jesse.
Cannon, Molly.
We can kind of say this episode had a theme of well, we knew that was going to happen, and sure enough, Texas is filing a lawsuit against out of state abortion practices.
It's not good.
I mean, we saw this coming a mile away. We saw this coming a mile away. We said they're.
Going to ban abortion pills, and everyone said, you're crazy. And I want to point out, this is the thing that makes me so crazy about this is that we had all of these voters who voted to codify.
Abortion in their state constitution and still voted for Trump.
You guys, they're not going to fucking codify abortion in their state constitution. Republicans, We've seen this in Florida before. We've seen them refuse to enact these ballot measures once they've happened. Remember, in Florida, we had felons who were re enfranchised.
That was the ballot initiative, and.
Instead of enacting that, Florida government added more sort of poll taxes to make it harder for felons to vote. So you think that people, I mean Florida, the abortion ballot is shift in pass, but in some of these states it did. And if you don't think these people are going to ban abortion, you are out of your mind. We are in find Out Territory and it's really a bummer. 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.