Trump’s Ukraine Fallout and Crypto Grift

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Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau.
I'm Jon Lovett. Tommy Vitor.
On today's show, we've got Elon Musk calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme on Joe Rogan, the same weekend Donald Trump announces he wants to spend our tax dollars on a strategic crypto reserve, which is definitely not a Ponzi scheme. No.
We also got new tariffs coming.

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Just as a bunch of new polls show that people actually don't think Trump's doing a great job bringing down inflation. And then, as Donald Trump prepares to give his big speech to Congress Tuesday night, we'll talk about the new debate on the left about how Democrats should be pushing on Trump and whether they should be pushing back at all.
but first guys we, we got to talk about the absolute shit show of an Oval Office meeting on Friday where Trump and J.D. Vance ganged up on Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, an ally whose country has been fighting off an invasion by Vladimir Putin, a brutal dictator who used to be our adversary.
Hopefully you all got a chance to hear the bonus episode Tommy and Ben did about this over the weekend. A lot has happened since then.
After Zelensky was basically kicked out of the White House because J.D. Vance didn't think he was sufficiently grateful for U.S.
support, didn't say thank you enough. Zelensky flew to London to meet with European leaders about negotiating a peace process that doesn't entail just giving Putin everything he wants.
Meanwhile, the Russians could not be happier. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Sunday that the Trump administration is, quote, rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations.
This largely aligns with our vision. Hard to argue with that after Axios reported that Trump was set to hold a meeting with J.D.
Vance, Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz to talk about the idea of cutting off American aid to Ukraine altogether. Waltz told Fox News, quote, the American people's patience is not unlimited.
Their wallets are not unlimited and our stockpiles and munitions are not unlimited. If you're wondering how Republicans are feeling about all this, especially previously pro-Ukraine Republicans, here's a sample of their reaction to Friday's blowup.
Millions of American hearts swelled with overflowing pride today to watch President Trump put Zelensky in his place. Instead of showing gratitude, he interrupted and berated his hosts.
Am I embarrassed about Trump? I have never been more proud of the president. I was very proud of J.D.
Vance. It's going to be Putin and President Trump and the people on our side that will end up making this decision for the future of Ukraine.
This is one of the great moments in the history of American diplomacy. Jesus.
That start and end with Stephen Miller? I think we know it's swell during that meeting, Stephen Miller.

Relax.

These real housewife fucking Luann wasn't grateful enough for the invitation.

Also, Donald Trump didn't give Ukraine really any aid,

and J.D. Vance voted against the supplemental spending bill for Ukraine aid.

So who are we thanking exactly? I love Tommy Tuberville there.

I'm assuming that was him who said,

yeah, it's going to be Trump, Putin, and everyone on our side deciding. It's like, what? What are we? Our side? Tommy, now that you've had more time to process what happened on Friday, do you have any other thoughts on the fallout and whether things have gotten better or worse since then? Yeah.
So I think in terms of Zelensky's efforts to get more support from the US or get some sort of security deal, you just mentioned a way where it got worse in the near term because it sounds like they're freezing an additional, they're freezing into more money that could be transferred over to Ukraine in terms of weapons stockpiles. But the bigger picture problem that Zelensky has is that Trump and J.D.
Vance just want a deal and they don't care about the substance of the deal. They don't care if the Russians end up occupying 20 percent of Ukrainian territory or if Ukraine is told that they can't have a real armed forces going forward.
So they're just kind of a sitting duck sitting there like Trump just wants a win in the Western press. Now, from Europe's perspective, I think maybe the meeting was clarifying and maybe that could help Zelensky because, you know, now there's all these reports that France and the UK are trying to pull together a European peacekeeping group that will give Zelensky a security guarantee after there is a peace deal.
And that's what he really wants. So I think like the challenge going into that meeting, now that I've thought about it more, is the US media tends to forget that all these foreign leaders who come in have their own political considerations.
And for Zelensky, like that meeting going really badly and getting in a fight was not good. But a worse outcome for him would have been getting bullied into taking a ceasefire deal that leaves them vulnerable going forward when Putin decides to break a ceasefire agreement that he cuts just to kind of make Trump happy.
And so it's a bit of a mixed bag. I don't know.
The hopeful version is maybe the Europeans will get their shit together finally and give Ukraine what they need. Love it.
What was your take on the meeting? There's been a lot of speculation that Trump and Vance plan to ambush Zelensky. Maggie Haberman and other journalists who cover the White House are reporting that the Trump people are saying it was spontaneous what do you think i have no idea i like part of this is just like none of this makes sense right like none of the none of like what they're saying aligns with what they're actually doing right like i'm trying to like separate like the meeting is disgusting right like this is fucking disgusting this is a guy flying from a war-torn country he basically saved saved his country in part by sheer force of personality and personal bravery.
He flies across the world to United States. Our ally up until three months ago, now he's trying to grovel for his country's life to sign a mineral deal.
That also doesn't make any sense. That doesn't include any security guarantees.
He's agreeing to do it because he's just trying to get through another day with Donald Trump and J.D. Vance's sitting there he's getting questions about why he's not wearing a fucking suit marjorie taylor green's boyfriend she trump apparently said to the press corps oh this guy dressed up today yeah she's talking that was before that was before the meeting and so like he's in a waking nightmare like the question i have is okay let's say all this played out behind the scenes right like not in not in front of the cameras, like take away the aesthetics of it.
It's like, you know, in the morning, Marco Rubio thought signing this mineral deal and ostensibly becoming more entwined with Ukraine was a good idea. By the afternoon, it's no longer a good idea.
And everything Trump is doing is making sense. There's all these sort of like post hoc rationalizations for Donald Trump, like even in the days that have followed, like you go like try to read about this meeting and it's people saying, is Trump abandoning the World War Two order for spheres of influence? Like, no, he's just a careening asshole.
And there's this whole intellectual framework like evolving around him to justify what he's saying. Like even Vance in the meeting, he says, we tried the pathway of Joe Biden of thumping our chest and pretending that the president of the United States's words matter more than the president of the United States's actions.
And so therefore we're capitulating completely in our actions, right? Like why does what follows from there, a kind of diplomacy in which the aggressor is ignored, right? Like, let's say they do want peace. They do want to deal at all costs.
Wouldn't that involve putting pressure on Vladimir Putin as well? Where is that? Like, you can't really make any sense around this because it's a bunch of people acting emotionally, trying to rationalize Donald Trump's various like ego driven, grievance driven, assumption driven foreign policy. And so we end up like having these serious conversations about these like fundamentally despicable and unserious people.
That was my reaction. yeah i Like, I don't think it was an ambush or planned.
I think what was planned is both Trump and J.D. Vance don't like or respect Zelensky that much because, as Tommy said, they just wanted to get a deal.
And I think they are just annoyed at the whole situation that they have to, like, go through all the motions here and they have to deal with him and treat him like he's an ally right or that like he's an equal partner or even a partner at all like i i don't know if you i'm sure you guys did this i'm sure you did this to me like i went back to the transcript and read it like so many times to see where it went off the rails because it all like it was going fine and then it was at times a little bit chummy even little yes and they're joking about their disagre. And it starts the bad part starts with the reporter asking Trump if he's too aligned with Putin, which is obviously a trigger for him.
Right. Like that's that's just going to set Trump off.
And like that couldn't be preplanned. Right.
And then Trump says, oh, you see the hatred he's got for Putin pointing to Zelensky. It's very tough for me to make a deal with that kind of hate.
He's got tremendous hatred. So like we start the meeting by Trump scolding the guy, keep in mind, scolding the guy that he had just called a dictator twice over the past couple of weeks.
We're like complaining about Zelensky not saying thank you. And Trump has called this guy a dictator twice.
So then he scolds him while he's sitting right there in the Oval Office for having too much hatred to do the deal. But then even Trump sort of like, you know, he's like, I just want to get a deal.
I'm aligned with Europe. I just want to get something done.
I got something. And the whole thing probably would have gone away then if fucking J.D.
Vance didn't jump in after Trump finished his answer. He was the chief arsonist.
No one asked J.D. Vance for a follow up answer on that.
J.D. Vance just jumped in after Trump went and did this whole thing where you said where he also just gets the whole timeline wrong.
He's's like, Putin invaded Ukraine after Joe Biden just tried to talk tough and didn't engage in diplomacy. So Zelensky's like, well, that's not the timeline.
Zelensky's basically like, yeah, well, he's been trying to invade the country and he's been at war with us since 2014. And then he also throws in, by the way, during the first answer, and God bless, now President Trump will stop him.
Right. Which was also nice.
I respect Maggie's reporting, but there were times where I felt like the headline was like this wasn't an ambush, and then the substance of the story didn't back that up. For example, Lindsey Graham is running around telling everyone that he told Zelensky not to take Trump's bait.
Well, if this wasn't a setup, then why would he be baited in the first place? And maybe that's an overly literal meeting. But like Trump's position is you have to come into the Oval Office.
You have to bow to my will. You cannot disagree with me even about points of fact.
And that's just not tenable for the leader of a country fighting for its existence. And so like ambush, not an ambush.
It was designed for domestic political consumption. Like J.D.
Vance's speech was his chance to finally talk in a big boy meeting and lead the headlines 41 days into the administration where Elon had been ahead of him every other day. And then Trump at the end says, well, I think it was good for the American people to hear all that and this will make for good TV.
And if you want to make this all a private discussion about the substance, don't have the fucking pool spray in there for 45 minutes. Yeah.
There's, there's one moment where, uh, where, uh, Zelensky calls him JD and then JD calls him Mr. President.
And so like, you feel like it's quite personal, but like none of this should be personal, right? Like it's not just about Trump calling him a dictator. The, the United States sided with with putin uh a week earlier at the u.n like these are supposed to be it's all like vans and even rubio like you go look we'll talk about rubio more in a minute but like these guys were all like the end of america's namby pamby soft emotional foreign policy is over we're doing hard-nosed decisions based on pure rationality.
And it's like, if that's the case, a fit of peak in a meeting shouldn't matter. Well, it shouldn't matter at all.
They are allowing this to be 100% personality driven. I liked David Zanger's piece on this, which is he's basically arguing that the overall goal here is that Trump wants to normalize relations with Russia.

And Ukraine is standing in the way of that.

Zelensky standing in the way of that.

So with that larger context, any meeting was like it could have gone better in terms of the theatrics of it.

But like it was always going to be Trump being like this guy is an impediment to normalization with Russia, which is what I want.

And it's like, why do we want to normalize things with Russia so much?

It's like a it's a it's a broken economy. It's like a wartime economy.
Now they just make artillery shells that they use to kill Ukrainians. But one sort of under discussed bizarre part of Trump's rant, because, you know, you also have to think about the original impeachment and how Zelensky was involved, right? Cause Trump called Zelensky and was trying to held up military into Ukraine in order to get dirt on Joe Biden.
But an under discussed sort of part of when Trump gets really mad is he starts ranting about the Mueller investigation. And he says, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me.
And then he said, and it came out of Hunter Biden's bathroom. Like, so none of this made sense, but he was talking about how like he and Vlad endured something terrible together.
Like somehow it was bad for Putin to have been perceived by the world as having handpicked the American president? Like they're blood brothers. It's actually really, really strange.
It's kind of like a Stockholm syndrome. Like this is the thing.
It's like usually like, why would the U.S. want to normalize relations with Russia? And again, this is why like this is none of this makes sense.
And like all these sort of pathetic weasels around Trump trying to make it make sense are obviously part of the problem.

It's like, no, of course not.

It's a failing petro state.

Well, right.

That it's like been depleted. It's like America.
It's so fucking pathetic that because of Donald Trump as a figure, a singular figure, we're now becoming a vassal state of this tiny, weak country. because like Donald Trump has these ego driven, like psychosexual personal issues with this one dictator who on his in his bones, he knows is so much tougher than

him.

And by the way, Zelensky too, right?

Like part of this resentment is that J.D. Vance and Donald Trump know that like Zelensky

is a stronger and tougher man than they are.

And you can just feel the seething kind of like weakness of these two human beings in

front of this actual leader.

He also, when he gets mad, when Trump gets mad, he just has like conspiracy Tourette's

Thank you. kind of like weakness of these two human beings in front of this actual leader uh he also when he gets mad when trump gets mad he just has like conspiracy tourettes and he just like goes through that's where that's where that came from like where he just went down the road of like uh putin russia gate hunter laptop bathroom video yeah he's just he just he doesn't know at that point yeah yeah uh he always got you the uh the this was the what do you always call the fbi people that were sleeping together struck struck and love yeah the the lovers he almost got to the lovers page and the love yeah adam i'm surprised he didn't mention adam schiff and sir do you know it was on hunter's laptop there's a lot of photos that you probably don't want to see there were a few incursions on there but i don't think it had anything to do with what we're talking about.
Five more seconds, he would have gone there. He would have gone there.
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Let's talk about Secretary of State Lil Marco Rubio for a minute, who looked not excited to be in that meeting. As a reminder, here's an example of what Rubio used to say on Ukraine and what he's saying now.
Look, Putin can't win no matter what. There always has to be a real, legitimate Ukrainian state that we have a relationship with.
And I don't know why we can't begin to openly say we will support them as long as they are willing to fight, even if it's an insurgency. Thoughts on Rubio? I've noticed this in all of the photos of Rubio in the context of these U.S.-Russia talks.
There were a bunch of photos that came out of Saudi Arabia with Rubio, Mike Waltz, Steve Witkoff are all there. And there's like Sergei Lavrov and the Russian delegation.
Rubio just has this thousand-yard stare in all of them. And I don't want to put him on the psychiatrist's couch, but I do think like you can tell he knows this is wrong because I do think it's fair to say, okay, after three years of the Biden policy, we got to a place where it was a permanent stalemate kind of, and a stalemate is not a strategy.
So let's not reemphasize diplomacy and try to end the war. But Rubio knows Zelensky is not a dictator and Putin is.
He knows who started the war and who didn't. He knows that Zelensky can't hold an election right now because a huge chunk of the country is living under Russian occupation.
Another big chunk has been displaced. Another big chunk is that the front line's fighting.
Like, how are they going to have people vote in free and fair elections in this context? And so he just looks like a guy who sold out all his beliefs to get the secretary of state job and now is like living with the consequences. And by the way, has no real power.
Well, and that's what he that's what he looks like in all these pictures. He does sound like he's trying to sell this new Marco Rubio and how he thinks.
I think we have a clip of him, what he says now. What specifically do you want to see President Zelensky apologize for? Well, apologize for turning this thing into the fiasco for him that it became because he found every opportunity to try to ukraine splain on every issue maybe zelinski doesn't want a peace deal he says he does but maybe he doesn't ukraine splain it the ukraine split like again it's like it it's so it's so emotional right like oh he he should have been – he should have shown better manners.
This fucking Emily Post bullshit. I went back and looked at Rubio's – the Senate confirmation speech that he gave.
And he says the post-war global order is not just obsolete. It's now a weapon being used against us, right? And this is him, again, trying to find a way to make sense of his involvement, right like i do think that like there is a critique of the way in which the bide administration like didn't want to lose but didn't want to win in a bunch of different ways all around the world and by the way like for decades about like an america that's just slowly watching china grow more and more powerful as we welcome them into the economic order which are things that he talks about right but like the other side of that is meant to be a stronger US, right? Like a more full-throated, less morally relativistic defense of our values, of our principles, right? Like some kind of a strategy.
But then you look at what's happening, it's like we're capitulating to Russia. And they're like, well, actually, it's because we're not going to worry about what's happening over there.
We're going to worry about what's happening in our own backyard. OK, but we're also basically threatening Canada with invasion, threatening Panama with invasion, throwing tariffs on our neighbors.
Like there's no logic to any of this. And Rubio, because he is just the fucking world's biggest weasel, is just trying to figure out what he can say day to day just to just say, get him into, I guess, a bed.
So I kind of think that there might be a logic to it can i give you my sure like i think that trump and look i don't think this is like he has trump has planned out everything and has been really thinking deep about this and writing it in his memoirs you know i think he he respects rich powerful ruthless leaders and it seems like he wants to carve up the world with Putin and Xi. And maybe you got your Kim Jong-uns in there or your BBs, anyone with nuclear weapons, right? He knows that if you have nuclear weapons, then you're pretty powerful.
And he knows they're bad guys. He knows they treat their people horribly.
He doesn't really care about that. He likes the idea that he can deal with a few what he views as tough leaders directly.
He thinks he's a great negotiator. He doesn't like the idea of the UN and NATO and places where you have all these voices in some countries that he doesn't think should have a seat at the table, an equal seat at the table with everyone else because they're weaker than the other countries because that's too democratic and he doesn't like democracy that much.
And the idea of him, this is like when he always brags when like Xi came to Mar-a-Lago and, you know, and then he gets to wine and dine him and impress him. And, you know, I'm good with Putin and Kim Jong-un likes me.
Like he, I think he loves a world where he can deal with a few tough bad guys he's a good negotiator

and he looks at and they do all want like client states he's like putin putin wants ukraine putin

may want eastern europe he sees she wants taiwan and he's like well i better get some client states

of my own maybe i'll go after canada maybe i'll go after panama greenland like it feels like that's

his that's his vision of the world i don't know maybe i'm crazy i was trying to find this elon

musk tweet and i was scrolling for like 25 minutes because, God, all he does is tweet. But he tweeted, Zelensky wants a forever war, a never-ending graft, meat grinder.
This is evil. Like, the way they talk about this guy, these are Zelensky's people getting killed.
The Russians tried to murder him repeatedly in the early days of the war. They sent assassination teams to Zekiv to guy and he survived through bravery through you know really tough fighting uh by the ukrainians in those early days and it's just disgusting the way they talk about him but to your point john i mean like i i think there's some truth that like between 50 and 85 million people died in the second world war so the united states was like or the world came together it was like hey maybe we should set up some to prevent this from happening again.
That's why you have the UN that was designed to try to maintain global peace that led to the creation of NATO, which was to counter Soviet expansion and unchecked nationalism among some of the member states like Germany. Always got to keep an eye on Germany.
You do. And both institutions have a lot of flaws, and we can talk about those if you want.
But there hasn't been a war between a NATO member and Russia since. And no NATO member has been invaded by another country.
So it's been a pretty successful project. And I agree.
It does seem like Trump wants to go back to a time where the great powers divide the world up and they bully people and might is right. And I think the problem with that, there's a lot of problems with that logic, but what you're going to see is more militarism.
You're going to see more nationalism. You're going to see more development of nuclear weapons as a deterrent because of the U S nuclear umbrella is not going to protect us.
Like, I guess it's time to make one of my own. And so it's gangster diplomacy.
And you're already seeing Elon Musk tweeting about, he's talked about the spoils of battle when he's talking about doge cuts. But I do think he's applying that more broadly in like a really kind of, you know, old school in a bad way, way.
This is how Trump operates domestically. This is how Trump has operated in business his whole life, right? Like it doesn't, you don't have to have some grand theory of international order to just view the world as he does.
As like, there's people I think are tough and powerful and there's people I think are weak. And why should I give a shit about the weak people? I think what you're describing is like the end result of what happens when someone like Trump is just sort of emotionally, instinctively driven towards relationships with Russia and Putin with Xi.
That he like finds that easier and less of a headache. But like, where are the iPhones from? You know, like where are the chips from? Like all of this is like, the idea is like, oh, you're just going to carve up the world.
There's stuff moving across those lines already, right? Like the amount of chaos. Well, he's going to be like, yeah, I can deal with Xi directly.
I'll keep the iPhones coming. Yeah, sure.
Oh, I realize it's all bullshit, but I think he believes it. I think he hasn't thought about it.
And at worst, I think that it's a J.D. Vance view.
Like, I don't think it's just Trump. I actually think he now has an Elon and J.D.
Vance in like, I think he has a movement of people around him. And they're all, you know, they look to Orban.
They look to Hungary and they're like, this is the way. I think they look, I think they see, I mean, just take them at their word, like the UN, World Trade Organization, like these are institutions that have become sclerotic the same way they, and they don't see the benefits of or live in a kind of glib luxury of the security and stability these institutions provide while attacking what are genuine excesses and problems of working within those organizations.
And rather than doing the hard grinding work of reforming them, they want to burn them down. But we will live in the dangerous, kind of poor world that results when they're long gone.
And Donald Trump doesn't know better, but Marco Rubio knows better because he used to know, he used to say it out loud. Oh, for sure.
One even just even simpler explanation is Trump looks at a Russia or a China and sees a kleptocracy. And there are people who think that Vladimir Putin is the richest person in the world because basically at one point along the way, he went to all the Russian oligarchs and says, now you give me half or else you're falling out a very high window.
But is he happy? You can imagine a version of that where the state functions as just another means for Donald Trump to get paid. And we're already seeing some pieces of that.
And again, yeah, I completely agree. And in his mind, it's like, and I deserve that because I'm the one running everything.
And I got my other rich friend Putin over here, my other rich friend Xi, and they're tough guys too. Look how tough, how many times are you talking about how tough they they are but sometimes the way that i think the left has framed it is oh that that donald trump is like a supplicant to these guys or he's like a stooge for them and like that i think putin and she probably think that about trump but i think trump thinks they're his buddies they're all a bunch of tough guys you know standing across the globe together yeah this is why it's like look i you know the u.s sides with russia at the u.n against our ally and like how many people in the u.s actually know about that and how many people in the u.s actually care about that and by the way and notable that that orban and bb joined too in in the new club there in the that vote.
But I do think like some of this is like, you know, I was thinking about this before I recorded. It's like, you know, the democratic legitimacy of these institutions, right, like were in the post-World War II era came from Americans having a fear of the Soviet Union drilled into them by propaganda, but also the actual threat posed by the Soviet Union that people lived with every day.
And then the Cold War ends, and we kind of just continue with these institutions, never really making a kind of coherent argument for them, why they're important, why we're doing this, why we spend this money, right? We were resting on the kind of goodwill and legitimacy that came from generations before, and now Trump puts these things under attack. And in the same way, we're told it's a trap to talk about why USAID is a good thing.
We're now once again in the trap of trying to defend this order because it seems like what Trump and these guys are daring us to do is say, all right, fine, burn it down. We'll prove you right when everything is terrible.
Yeah. We're just out in the streets chanting,

rules-based order, rules-based order.

Yeah, I bet no one knows about the UN vote.

I mean, look, the UN Security Council

has been broken for a long time

because the Russians and Chinese veto whatever they want

and we veto any criticism in Israel

and nothing gets done, right?

It's been that way for a decade plus.

A UN General Assembly vote

is basically just kind of like a show of hands

of what you believe.

It's like a global roll call. And boy, did we show our hand in a new and scary way to the world i do wonder if the zolensky trump meeting will break through and i don't know hit people differently like i they did say slava ukraine at the oscars but for what is that is that worth anything no nothing bullying a man who's like trying to rescue 19 000 ukrainian children who were stolen kidnapped and taken to russia like i don't know that's that's pretty fucked up that's dark stuff i'm sure maga base thought it was awesome right of course we know that they've been saying that i agree to me like i think i i had some people text me who like are not you know political junkies like us and are just like that was so embarrassing embarrassing, awful, scary.
What the fuck is happening? You don't look tough. It's like a three-on-one fight.
And it's not about sending weapons or spending more money. It's just about treating a man with decency whose country has been massacred.
The casualty counts you see from the U.S. estimates are 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed, 100,000 wounded.
The Russian casualties are like double that. And so this war has been a catastrophe..
Like I'm all for trying to end it. We have to do it on terms that won't lead to a ceasefire that just reignites in a couple of years when the Russians have had time to reconstitute their forces.
And that's what Zelensky is worried about. Yeah, that's right.
All right. Turning to all the damage that Trump is doing here in America.
The AP reported last week that the Social Security Administration is preparing to lay off at least 7,000 people, close multiple field offices, and could get rid of up to half its workforce. Most of the agency's senior leadership is already gone.
Martin O'Malley, the former Maryland governor who ran the Social Security Administration under Biden, just told CNBC that with this level of cuts, quote, you're going to see the system collapse and an interruption of benefits within the next 30 to 90 days. People should start saving now.
We also find out what Doge master Elon Musk thinks about the program during his latest Joe Rogan appearance last weekend. Well, I mean, the government's one big permit scheme, if you ask me.
Yeah, well, you can tell me better than it. Social security is the biggest policy scheme of all time.
Seems like the task of making the 2026 campaign ads just got easier.

It's also just like, oh, social security is a Ponzi scheme.

It's just like late, mid, like mid 90s Republican talking points is like where we're at.

Like it's actually a Ponzi scheme.

The trust fund runs out in 2050.

The trust fund's always running out.

Yeah.

Elon sort of like always seems like partly aware of and on board with the Trump policy agenda. Like no one in the White House wants him to call Social Security Ponzi scheme because boy, does it then go? It's hard to pivot from that to fighting for a $5 trillion tax cut for the richest people in the country, which is their primary objective this year.
I imagine they'll do whatever it takes to avoid Social Security benefit cuts because they know how unpopular it would be. But I also think they are some combo of idiots and liars all the time.
So people do need to be on alert for any story about retirees who couldn't get their benefits on time because that's, well, you lay off that many people at the social security administration, which I'm sure wasn't, uh, the, the model of, uh, efficiency before that. Yeah.
Yeah. You, you, you, you stuff, those social security checks gets paused.
You'll see a geezer insurrection that makes the fucking January 6th look like a PTA meeting. Oh, I remember, remember the Affordable Care Act, you know, Obama used to say, if you like your plan, you can keep it.
But then some plans were canceled because they didn't hit the mandatory requirements under the new ACA rules. And my wife's mother had a plan that got canceled.
And I remember having that conversation with her and, you know, she was able to get a new one and it was fine. It was probably overall better, but like, that was not a small thing.
That was not a blip in their feelings about the ACA or, uh, Rock Obama's standing for a little while. Yeah.
And, and to that point, people aren't going to, even if they don't cut benefits, like, Oh, we, we missed the, we missed all the checks for Wisconsin this month. Right.
Or, uh, sorry, everyone in Kansas, you're not getting, or like, like they, you do that for a month. It's mayhem.
The, yeah, the, again, it's like, I sound like a broken record, but like, you know, before social security, the poorest people in the country were old people and social security changed that forever. We live in a world that is different because social security lifted millions of people out of grinding poverty.
And like, you play with that for, you play with that for a week. And they showed their gratitude.
People's ability to feed themselves, to take care of themselves. And they showed their gratitude by voting for Donald Trump.
Yeah. At least the first time.
But like part of what you're making is just a basic government competence argument. And, you know, if suddenly a bunch of social security checks don't go out, that like shatters people's confidence in the US government in a way that I think is really hard to recover from.
Like again, the Affordable Care Act, the healthcare.gov rollout was more than just a website being broken for a while. It just fundamentally undercut people's faith in the administration to roll out and administer their healthcare, which is a very personal thing.
Social security field offices are not the driver of our national debt or deficit. These are tiny, tiny costs that provide basic services.
It's all fake. It's all bullshit.
We're going to take a quick break, but one announcement before we do that. The first State of the Union address of Trump's second term.
No, it's technically an address to a joint session of Congress. It's not State of the Union.
But whatever. Fucking nerds.
It's tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern.
We used to believe in things, have grammar and stuff. 6 p.m.
Pacific. One hour before that at 8 Eastern, 5 Pacific.
The three of us and Dan. Dan is back here again this week.
We make Dan fly down all the time. We'll be live streaming a preview of the speech on the Pod Save America YouTube channel.
We'll be talking about what we can expect from Trump and how Democrats should respond and talking to Democratic members who are there. We'll also be taking questions from Friends of the Pod subscribers.
It's going to be fun. It's going to be a great time.
Then at 9 Eastern, 6 Pacific, head over to the Friends of the Pod Discord for a subscriber only live, where you can process this freak show in real time with people who get it. No deranged Facebook uncles.
I don't know how we can promise that. No screaming into the void.
Just a space to vent, fact-check, remind each other that reality still matters. Wow.
I know. That's a lot to promise.
It's going to be some jokes about the speech. I did not write that.
You can tell. To ask us questions during the live stream and for access to the discord, sign up for friends of the pod.
Now at crooked.com slash friends. It's the best way to support crooked and everything we do.
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We cannot keep pretending that Donald Trump is an outlier when everyone else seems to be out there with him. But instead of feeling paralyzed, our job now is to pull what we've got and see what we can make happen.
Here at Assembly Required, we will continue to face each executive order, legislative policy, and news cycle, no matter how terrifying or absurd, by asking, what can we do to learn more about what's happening? What can we do to solve problems, however small? And how can we find the kind of hope that can sustain our work in difficult times? Listen to new episodes of Assembly Required every Thursday on Amazon Music. So same weekend Elon called Social Security a Ponzi scheme scheme trump announced a safer place to invest our tax dollars crypto he posted that in order to quote make sure the u.s is the crypto capital of the world he's creating a crypto strategic reserve that would stockpile five cryptocurrencies xrp solano cardano bitcoin and ethereum don't even know what half those things are.
Tommy, care to explain what this is all about? So the initial tweet said the reserve would include XRP, SOL, and ADA. That's Ripple, Solano, and Cardano.
And then he quote tweeted himself saying, of course, it'll also include Bitcoin and Ethereum. And that will matter in a second.
So this idea has been on the top of the crypto Bitcoin maximalist wishlist for a long time. Because if you own a lot of cryptocurrency early and then the US government pumps a lot of money into it, your Bitcoin is going to go up in price.
The main elected official pushing this idea has been Cynthia Loomis, a senator from Wyoming. I'm sure everyone here at this table is heard of.
Very well aware of Cynthia Loomis. she introduced the uh boosting innovation technology competitiveness through optimized investment nationwide or bitcoin bitcoin i was trying to i was trying to follow you as you're saying i'm like oh get it get it okay so you put out the bitcoin act the nambla act as love it called it at a conference in 2024 where trump also uh spoke her bill is basically she frames it as a way to bring down the debt which which makes no sense.
But the gist of it is the US government buys a million bitcoins, which is about 5% of total supply of bitcoins over a set period of time using existing treasury funds. They say it will be paid for by these existing treasury funds because it's like accounting gimmicks to make it sound like it's cost-free, but the money's fungible.
So for spending US government money on Bitcoin, you're not spending it on something. So obviously it's not free.
Well, it's only, it's only, and also it's only fungible if you consider it like a stable asset, like the fucking dollar, but it's not, it's a, it's a highly volatile, it's like, it's buying stock, it's buying stocks. Yeah.
So the reason I'm talking about this Loomis bill though, is because there's no details of whatever Trump's plan is beyond these tweets, except that the Loomis plan was just Bitcoin, while Trump's plan included those other cryptocurrencies like Ripple and Cardano, which are why a lot of Bitcoin advocates actually don't like what Trump rolled out, because those other currencies are like jokes. like no one uses ripple no one uses cardano solana is like a platform through which you you make other stuff off it like mean coins it's the idea that like if you are a bitcoin maximalist

and you believe that bitcoin is the new gold, okay, I guess you could argue for diversifying like our holdings of stuff, but like not for this other shit coins that no one ever uses. So the only argument for how those other currencies get into the mix here is because special interest lobbying and corruption.
And surprise, surprise, Trump had dinner with the CEO of Ripple in early January. He's now surrounded by these Silicon Valley guys with vested financial interests like David Sachs, the AI czar.
So he tweets this out, crypto prices spiked on Sunday about 10%. Now they're crashing down as we're recording this.
And I guess there's like a big White House crypto meeting on Friday. But like there's a good chance that this tweet was all it was.
It was just a chance to pump and dump. Oh my God.
If you're previously holding these chairs. Because a bunch of crypto news sites reported on someone making a 50 times levered bet on Bitcoin and ethereum on saturday only to cash it out for a 6.8 million dollar profit on sunday so must be nice what do you think guys clean out fortnox fill it with thumb drafts well i was gonna say what are we what are we stockpiling well this is the thing that's so fucking stupid it's not gold it's not like what are we it's not a by the way we're gonna run out it like yeah we have a strategic reserve we're gonna run out of the oil we're gonna run out of the fake money yeah look what if the government ran out of crypto what happens what happens nothing nothing happens we have stockpile some grass yeah it's the like it's so outrageous on its face also i know it's i know it's quaint now.
Something that should probably take an act of fucking Congress.

I think it would require one, yeah.

And even just the announcing of the specific currencies, again, if there was an actual

serious...

A strategic crypto reserve is the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard of.

It's not strategic.

It's not a reserve.

It's just a bank account that we'd be owning that we'd just put US dollars into, I guess, that and then some of one of the other rationales you'll hear is like well it will benefit taxpayers because taxpayers would then own a share of of cryptocurrency as it rises and like you know i like hate to be a small c conservative here there's a great way for taxpayers to benefit from cryptocurrency if they'd like they can buy cryptocurrency with their own fucking dollars exactly take the money in treasury that you're going to put in the in the reserve and uh hand out some tax cuts i don't know no i don't want a sovereign wealth fund i don't want any of this yeah yeah give everybody a gift card buy what a crypto you're want there's also no guarantee that bitcoin price will rise like if it was guaranteed to rise then like the way markets work is it would already be priced at that level, right?

Because that's how guarantees work.

I mean, so none of this makes sense. You could come along, create a new cryptocurrency that displaces Bitcoin.
All of our holdings go to zero. Also, the U.S.
government holding a ton of cryptocurrency or Bitcoin is completely antithetical to like the libertarian anti-government roots of these cryptocurrencies. Yeah, I thought the whole reason we're doing crypto and the blockchain is because we don't

trust central governments and banks around the world. And we want like, what was that whole thing? And also, also, if the US government suddenly has massive holdings of bitcoins, that's stuck.
Because if the US announces that we're selling off our bitcoins, suddenly the price of bitcoins will fucking plummet. Some of these currencies that Trump is talking about buying, if the U.S.
has any meaningful stake in it, we own a huge share of the global supply of these coins. You know, like with these Trump mean coins, right? All these people that put money into it, they can only get that money out if somebody is willing to buy it at that price.
Now, Trump makes money on the transaction fees. And if you want, you could probably, you know, show your crypto wallet to Trump and say, look, I'm going to your fucking coins, you know, just to get a great deal out of it.
So what this is, is like this first is there so many there's like so many. It's like a Russian nesting doll of corruption.
Trump made this. Trump has these allies who are in the crypto business.
He's doing a huge favor for them. Trump himself is making a ton of money off of crypto, right? And so he wants to have crypto succeed.
And on top of all of that, you have this now, this legitimated scheme where foreign leaders and governments and anybody who wants a government contract can basically put money virtually directly into Donald Trump's pocket. It's untraceable, but you can still show him.
You can prove it to him. Do you think after Trump and Elon and the Doge boys go to Fort Knox to check out the gold, they'll check out the...
It feels like the Doge should kind of check out the crypto reserve if it ever gets off the ground. That's a good place for Doge.
I don't know where this came from. Well, now I'm starting to understand where it's coming from because basically they're trying to equate having a holding,

like a reserve of crypto

to having a reserve of gold

and they're trying to make the argument

that gold is somehow

just as insecure or dangerous

or a risky asset to hold

as these digital mining bucks.

Yeah, don't trust anything

except that which makes us money.

Well, to your point,

a strategic oil reserve makes sense

because you're going to need to use oil.

You could make a similar argument.

You could make the argument with with crypto that you could make with gold like look in a pinch we can't eat gold right it's only as value because for thousands of years it is that value but bitcoin's around for like 15 years they could just disappear and no one would know yeah like i i i don't care about the gold at fort knox but i like the it's not like you have oil because in an, if suddenly oil supplies are cut off by our adversaries or there's a price or whatever, you need oil to have the economy function. There's other strategic helium reserve because it's fun to use at parties.
But there's lots of – but you have a reserve of something that you need in an emergency. Right.
And crypto is not what you need. Also, long-term, cryptocurrency will undercut the use of the dollar as the world's reserve currency, which long story short, gives us a ton of power and influence.
And on the corruption part, I mean, I had this really smart reporter on named Zeke Fox on the February 26th episode of Pod Save the World. And I called him today just to like check back in on this.
There's this guy named Justin Sun, who is a, you heard of him? Yeah crypto entrepreneur he bought 75 million dollars worth of trump's world liberty financial tokens this is a certain uh crypto asset where the trump family gets 75 of the profits from that coin so there's a right off the top he just gets a rip of 75 uh percent uh the sec just paused its case against justin sun they're investigating him for basically fraud yeah if you go fraud. Yeah.
They must have just woken up one day and decided they didn't have a case. If you go to the World Liberty website, it's just Donald Trump on the front.
He is called their chief crypto advocate. His sons are ambassadors in other fake roles.
By the way, the SEC also paused a lawsuit against Binance. It stopped an enforcement action against Coinbase.
They are stopping the SEC's crackdown that was led by Gary Gensler under the Biden administration. So basically, they are removing any brakes.
They're removing any guardrails, any transparency. They're going to make it basically impossible to detect fraud, to detect corruption.
That is the plan. That is, they're just bringing more efficiency to government.
Oh, did you see Eric Trump tweeted, uh, buy the dip on Tuesday? Yeah. And then this announcement happened Sunday? Hmm.
I wonder if he was in a position to know something about the Bitcoin price. Um, can we talk about Doge? Please, I'd love to hear about Doge.
They are, uh, they're not batting a thousand these days. Uh, the Times has a truly humiliating story about Doge taking credit for saving $53 million, supposedly, by ending a Coast Guard contract that lapsed 20 years ago and was only ever worth $144,000.
Yeah, cry me a river. Tons of examples like that.
Justin Timberlake's on for that era. Go on.
There's a lot of examples like that. They're just all over the place.
Some of them, they're correcting their mistakes, but they keep mistaking millions for billions. They're saying billions when they're actually cutting millions.
It's a mess. Yeah, they claim to have saved $8 billion on a DEI program for ICE when, in fact, it was an $8 million program.
Yes, so this is what's happening there. We also got word that Trump fired one of the last remaining career officials at USAID, Nicholas Enrich, who just wrote a series of memos to sound the alarm that despite Marco Rubio's promise to unfreeze all life-saving humanitarian assistance, the agency was, quote, never actually given the opportunity to implement life-saving humanitarian assistance thanks to Doge canceling contracts, blocking payment systems, and just putting a bunch of obstacles in the way of getting the money out the door.

Enrich projected another 166,000 deaths per year from malaria, another 200,000 children per year paralyzed with polio, more than 28,000 new cases of deadly diseases like Ebola and Marburg each year, and another million children per year who won't be treated for severe acute malnutrition, which often kills them. So on this last point, I saw the CNN story over the weekend about this company in Georgia.
What they do is they make this peanut paste and they give this peanut paste like full of vitamins and nutrients. And they basically give this little packet to a child who's suffering from severe acute malnutrition and they can survive.
It's this like miracle thing. USAID has been handing it out for years and years and years.
the company that produces this had like enough peanut paste for 400,000 kids to save 400,000 kids ready to go right on it. They said like, uh, from the American people, USAID, all in these packets ready to go.
The United States government had already purchased them $10 million. We already paid for this and was informed by Doge that the contract was canceled.
And the guy's like, I have all this peanut paste now that's just going to go to waste. I can't, I can't send it anywhere because it's got USAID all over it.
They told me not to do it and that's it. So now all these kids aren't going to get the life-saving nutrition.
So I see this thing. I get really annoyed.
I tweet about it. And I was like, I tweet about Elon doing this with not even saving us money,

just like not sending this stuff out. We already paid for it.
And it's Saturday night. It's Saturday night.
Yeah. I did.
It was right before I saw you on Saturday night. And I was on the way.
I tweeted and then I got home and I'm in bed and I was like, oh, oh, he responded. My phone wasn't blowing up that night.
I was home alone. You were home alone.
You were home alone. And so Elad responded and he called me dollar store John Favreau and said, I'm an imbecilic propagandist who lies to score cheap political points.
And then he said, that said, I will investigate this. So he's got you dead to rights.
All right. He's still figuring out the comment card thing.
he's like and we'll fix it if so and so then the next so i decide you know it's it's late at night had a few drinks i'm not going to reply now so i just went to bed well it was that was smart right woke up in the morning he has replied again and he was like the contract has been reinstated it was already reinstated last week they should get the payment uh uh soon. And then he lists the company.
I'm like, what company is that? It's another peanut paste company in Rhode Island that he had also canceled a contract to. And so I wrote back to him like, actually, that's great, but the company was in Georgia.
It was at CNN. It was this company.
And then later Sunday night, MJ Lee at CNN, who broke the original story about the Georgia company, was like, I just got a call from the guy in the Georgia company. And he said it was the contract was reinstated just minutes ago.
So so then. Oh, my God.
So this morning, Elon was like, he said he replies to me again. And he was like, so just so you know, it wasn't because of the legacy media or or Kmart favs.
He got upgraded. He upgraded me.
Is Kmart better than Dollar Store? Yeah. Well, I had said that I would at least want to be target John Favreau in my reply to him because I thought I would, you know.
So now it's like a will-there-won't-there thing with these two. I was trying to be constructive.
Sounds basically bigly for Taylor. How do you tweet this much from a K-hole? Yeah, exactly.
And he was like, it wasn't that. It was just we just needed a brief pause and no one has died yet.
And what I said in the Oval about Ebola protection was right. That was it was it is turned back on and it just takes a while for the money to go through all the systems.
Meanwhile, as he's tweeting this, I'm looking at this guy from USAID who just left and right in a memo like, no, Rubio gave all these waivers to-saving assistants and no none of them could be implemented the yeah the the the no one has died is like not the defense you like it's like if you're out there being like i i want to reassure everyone no one has yet died as far as i know as far as i know you know like first of all great first of all great posting by the way great posting my new year's resolution really coming in handy remember when you i were like when he said his resolution was post more and we like scoffed because like why what's the point paid for itself i mean paid for itself also i've been pivoting to tiktok because i'm just trying to reach people where they're at yeah i'm doing a late 40s and honestly don't let anyone tell you it's not going great it's going good good. It's going good.
43 is the year of vertical video. But like, I know, I know.
I was trying to be nice. Wow.
I thought we were in the same generation. But like, we go back to Elon in the cabinet meeting where he was, where he spoke to the cabinet before anyone else got a chance to speak.
And he said, you know, I'm really support. You know, I'm here to support you.
But the reason we're doing this is because we're in an emergency and we have to cut. If we want to hit my goal of 1.x trillion dollars of cuts, we've got to cut $4 billion a day.
That's the only way to do it. You got to cut $4 billion a day.
I do just, just exposing how that is stupid at every level. First of all, actually, you don't have to cut $4 billion a day.
You don't have to scramble through the agencies finding little bits to cut every day. If you have a goal for a giant budget cut you want to make, you can propose it through Congress and you can do it.
And by the way, go even one step further. Let's say you don't want to do it that way.
You just said you have all these cabinet secretaries. Go to the cabinet secretaries and say, I need this.
I need a proposal for this many cuts by this date. And I know it's going to be hard and I'm going to be driving you guys every day and I'm going to be meeting with you.
But you tell me what we can cut. But no, one fucking adult tech bro cannot oversee these cuts across every layer of our government.
It's going to lead to kids fucking dying. Well, and this, you know, I had a friend asked me reading about all this and he was like, well, but he's like, no, isn't it possible that there is a lot of waste that we can get rid of there and that we also want to send out life-saving assistance? Like, wow, isn't both right? And I'm like, here's, if they wanted to do that that they could have audited usa id they could have used their the authority that they have to trim where they could and they could have then sent congress a list which they control a list of cuts a list of uh layoffs that they wanted to do they could have done all that if the whole thing was about efficiency i mean pete hegseth remember when he got to the department and was like, I want to cut the workforce by 8% at the department.

So send me ideas for this

by whatever.

I'm not saying that

Pete Hegseth's strategic.

I'm always talking about him.

I saw that and I was like,

well, if you want to cut your agency,

that's one way to do it.

Just like put out a goal.

What they have done,

this is not what they were doing

at USAID.

Just, would you say 200,000

more kids getting polio? Yeah. I mean, look, we eradicated smallpox off the face of the earth.
Like the next goal was to eradicate polio. And I think it was only found in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
And the fact that it's now going to resurge because of these cuts, like Jesus Christ, what a hit to humanity. On the USAID money generally, I do think like people are going to die.
There are going to be refugee camps in Sudan where they're going to run out of food. Babies are going to die.
There's going to be people we've been giving AIDS medicines under the PEPFAR program. That'll be gone in months.
Now there's going to be, I personally think that that is cruel and morally wrong and damaging towards standing in the world in the longterm as a nation. But let's say your view on this is the United States can't feed every starving person anywhere, everywhere, and we can't be the world's policemen.
Then you say to them, okay, what about programs that help people that we actively harmed as a nation, right? Early on in this process, we talked about the freeze on foreign aid, stopping programs that clean up unexploded bombs that the United States dropped on Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia. If we don't clean those up, little kids pick them up, their arms get blown off, they get killed, they're going to die.
The New York Times recently had a story about a doge cut that cut off funding to a program that provides the most meager amount of support to people who are severely disabled because of Agent Orange. Because the United States dropped Agent Orange on their villages during the Vietnam War, and then people who lived there had kids who had these severe disabilities.
Now we're cutting off loans to these people? Like, that's the reality of what's happening. It's like, you know what? We are the richest country on Earth in the history of the Earth.
And we are not... Elon Musk is worth $ worth 400 billion dollars okay this is not like hey middle class family in ohio uh we're gonna we gotta raise your taxes to help feed starving people in some other country like we have billionaires running all over this country and we're talking about 25 cent fucking peanut packets and malaria nets and and hiv medication which is now pretty cheap now that we've had.
Like, what are we talking about right now? We can't fucking afford this. And by the way, the end result of this is not reducing the deficit by whatever trillion dollar goal Elon has set.
They want to take that money. They want to put 100 billion of it into a crypto reserve and they want to take the rest and they want to divvy it out to Elon Musk and all these people through a gigantic tax cut for the rich.
And by the way, all the cuts Elon was making would never, even if he were to hit his goals, which he can't because he's doing this in such a chaotic and terrible way, even if he did, it would be obliterated by the cost of the tax cuts, which is why they have to go even further and look to cut Medicaid or look to cut Social Security or whatever they're going to do to try to pay for these giant tax cuts. So none of this results in any kind of tangible benefit for

actual American citizens, right? And by the way, none of this was part of like, this was not the

core of their campaign. They campaigned to lower the cost of goods.
We are getting a dismantling

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We cannot keep pretending that Donald Trump is an outlier when everyone else seems to be out there with him.

But instead of feeling paralyzed,

our job now is to pull what we've got and see what we can make happen.

Here at Assembly Required,

we will continue to face each executive order,

legislative policy, and news cycle,

no matter how terrifying or absurd,

by asking, what can we do

to learn more about what's happening? What can we do to learn more about what's

happening?

What can we do to solve problems, however small?

And how can we find the kind of hope that can sustain our work in difficult times?

Listen to new episodes of Assembly Required every Thursday on Amazon Music. effect on Tuesday.
He backed off these tariffs at the last minute once before, so who knows if he'll do it again. Who knows why he changed his mind, but either way, stock market had the worst day of the year on Monday, and a lot of shit is about to get very expensive.
Unless, of course, you're listening to this Tuesday morning and he backed off last minute again. According to Bloomberg, for example, car prices alone would increase by $12,000 if the tariffs go through at the levels Trump is promising.
This comes as the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's estimate now predicts the economy to shrink by 2.8% this quarter. And a wave of new polling from CBS, Marist, CNN shows that people think that Trump is not doing enough to focus on the economy and inflation.
His approval rating keeps dropping, but the weakest spot is economy and inflation, which is ironic because those used to be his strongest issues. It sure seems like a lot of flashing red lights for the Trump administration that they're just ignoring.
Do you think they don't know, don't care? Do you think they think it's just temporary? I mean, this is what they want to do. That's just theory of the case.
This is economic vision as you throw up all these tariffs and somehow that will ultimately rebuild domestic manufacturing or our ability to produce goods. But it just feels very unlikely.
And we're going to put in these tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and they're going to retaliate. The Canadians have talked about 25% tariffs on $30 billion worth of goods, of US products, and then that might expand to 85 billion more.
And they're talking about ag products, consumer goods, liquor. I think they're targeting Republican districts, so like bourbon appliances.
And Mexico has not been public about their retaliations, but they're preparing them. And so you made the point like the auto sectors are so entwined between the U.S.
and Canada and Mexico. And I don't know how that's going to work.
Mexico and Canada account for 70% of U.S. crude oil imports.
So gas prices could go up. And also we're talking about trade agreements that like Jared Kushner negotiated.
The USMCA was the updated NAFTA that Trump, like it was one of the things Trump talked about as a primary accomplishment in the first term. Yeah, and there was a, when he was first talking about the tariffs a couple of weeks ago, he got, he said, I look at these deals and I'm like, who negotiated these deals? You did.
These are your deals. These are your deals.
He wants to squeeze our allies. He wants to squeeze them and, and get a better deal out of them and just keep squeezing them and squeezing them until they become the 51st, 52nd, 53rd, 54th state.
I really think that that's, this is part of it. The, I'm sure that's right.
Yeah. I was war against canada to to just beat them into submission and he's stupid because like you said it's it's gonna hurt us and well so so far it's backfiring i mean his his ostensible political allies are the conservative parties up there this guy pierre polyev and he still might be the next uh canadian prime minister but justin trudeau's polling was like rock bottom he He stepped back.
They did this thing where they, it's called proroguing parliament, where basically the liberal party is now going to figure out its new leader. And that person will then become the prime minister when they go back into session in like a couple of weeks.
And the liberal party's polling numbers because of Trump's attacks have gone way back up. Like they're, he is rallying support and you're seeing Canadians booing the national anthem and all this sort of the Canadian nationalism and it's just, it's not working.
He might be, you know, Trump might lead to a resurgence of the center left all over the world except here, I guess. That'd be cool.
Yeah. Well, here we've already been sort of beaten to a bloody pulp.
But the, yeah, like the, I was thinking about just sort of Trump as this negotiator, right? And like, it's kind of an old thought at this point that he'd be richer today if he had just taken his inheritance and put it in the S&P, right? Because he's just not a very good businessman. And like, you kind of see in how he is president, why he was such a bad businessman, which is he just, he can't think long-term.
He can't think strategically. And so like- It's very short-term.
You know, you look at like tariffs and you say, all right, your goal was to build up domestic manufacturing and you want tariffs to be, are one lever in doing that, right? Well, some of the things you're tariffing, right? It would take a decade to build a steel plant, right? Take a decade to improve our capacity in whatever it might be, refining oil, whatever. Like putting on the tariff doesn't result in that at all.
We're actually completely dependent on Canada and Mexico for a lot of parts, a lot of supplies, a lot of materials. And so all of this is so, it's just not, it's a strategic.
It's just a guy who had an idea about what makes an economy. You put on the tariffs, the manufacturing comes back.
And maybe there's some very raw sense in which that's on some level true. But in the meantime, there's just a decade of pain of economic stagnation.
And then the question is, if that does come, right? Like, you know, we're going to talk about the Democrats and I believe that's how you pronounce it. But like we, like what happens when we move from things could get really bad to things are really bad.
And right. Like, how does that change Trump? And then how does that change how the American people feel about our response? Well, Democrats are continuing to workshop their response strategy in public, as we like to do.
Great. One spicy take on this came last week from the raging Cajun himself, James Carville, who wrote in a New York Times op ed, quote, with no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government.

It's time for Democrats. raging Cajun himself, James Carville, who wrote in a New York Times op-ed, quote, with no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government,

it's time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party. Roll over and play dead.
Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight

and make the American people miss us. Unsurprisingly, actual elected Democrats have

thoughts on this. Here's Bernie Sanders on Meet the Press this Sunday.
The problem is the Democrats have been playing dead for too many years. I don't think you play dead.
I think you stand up for the working class of this country and make the point. 13 of the people that he nominated to head agencies are billionaires.
Their greed is uncontrollable. We've got to fight back.
That's what these trips to Wisconsin and Michigan will be about. Just right down the middle for Bernie.
Yeah. She's sort of like, oh, what a question.
Should Democrats fight or give up? Bernie, what do you think? What do you guys think about Carville's prescription? So first of all, so when I was reading it, I sort of like asked myself a question before I got to the answer. And the question was, does a strategic retreat mean we help them fund the government or does strategic retreat mean we don't help them fund the government? That's a good question.
And like so and then you kind of get to it. He says, like, actually, we should hang back for a while.
It's not totally clear, but like kind of come in at the last minute when they've already shown themselves to be terrible and failures and chaotic and then come into the last second and say what we stand for and help reopen the government, for example. And it sort of gets at, I think, the problem here, which is I think when you talk about like, should the Democrats fight or should they retreat in an abstraction? Like, I don't really know how you like act on this.
Right. Like he's doing terrible things.
Should Chris Murphy not go to the floor and talk about them? Yeah. Like, it should be like, like, I have no, I have no comment on the dismantling of NATO.
Like, that's just not how it works. So I don't think that's what James meant.
No, of course not. And so like, what I took it to mean is like kind of a sensationalistic way of saying Democrats have to be strategic.
But like all in all, where I land after reading it, it's like, I I don't I don't know what we get by hanging back. It's not like we get credits later when we speak more forcefully for the times we were quiet earlier on.
Yeah, I just think that Trump is the most relentless messenger in the history of politics. And I think we can't let him talk in a vacuum or else like he's going to pin every failure on Democrats and some not insignificant part of the electorate will think that egg prices are high because of Gaza protesters and Barnard.
You know what I mean? And so that's not true. And as far as I know, that is not true.
The Jews. And I do think just the Jews.
I think you're right. Love it.
Like it's smarter to talk about these fights around a specific thing like the budget. But I do think we have an opportunity there to drive a message that's really strong, which is that Donald Trump is allowing this

unelected, unwell billionaire to break the US government so that he could pretend it's going

to save enough money to pay for a $5 trillion tax cut for the richest people in the country.

I think that's a good story. We have a good villain in Elon Musk.
But we're not going to

win this fight with like op-eds and MSNBC hits. It's going to be a volume game on social media, platforms, and local press.
But I do think part of this has been seeing us on Chris Hayes lately, I guess. And the points we're making there.
I do think we have to have a motivation. We have to have a story with an enemy.
And we have to have an alternative. Yes.
You know that's what yeah let's get to that the alternative there is a long tradition in politics and i think this is both parties do this which is like when you know your opposition is fucking up you just stand back and if you put out an alternative then the opposition you know then the other party is just going to start taking shots at your alternative and then people aren't going to like your alternative and blah blah blah and why don't why don't you just stand back and i i get the reasoning behind that but i also think that we are at a moment now where people are so cynical about politics tired beat down and unimpressed with the democratic party to say it nicely like we have the party has one of the worst approval ratings it's had had ever. And I think it is incumbent upon Democrats right now more than ever to like offer a vision, offer an alternative, say what we would do differently.
I don't think we need to like, you know, have a blizzard of policy plans out there at all. But I think we need to, as we critique Trump, like lay out how we would govern differently, how we treat people differently, what our vision of the country looks like, what our vision of the world looks like.
Like, I don't know. I mean, look, we've tried, well, we're not Trump and we're not MAGA a couple times now.
It didn't work in 2016. It barely worked in 2020.
It didn't work in 2024. It might work in 2026 because it's a midterm electorate, but like, we got to think about 2028 here.
And we also got to think about just expanding the map in general because we're never going to win this like going the way we are. We're not going to control the Senate with the states we have.
The Electoral College could shift and we're going to need to like pick up more states. And like we're just going to have to compete in tough places, which means you're going to have to give people an alternative.
Yeah. I mean, Trump, like before the election, Trump went to New York and said, I'm going to win New York.
And obviously that was ridiculous. But you had a Republican politician saying, I can foresee a day where we win in this state.
Right. And like, it's similar, honestly, to like the kind of managed decline globally.
It's like there's sort of like a managed decline to the Democratic brand. Like, oh, we just we'll we can't win a state like Wyoming.
We can't win in a state like Nebraska, even though in those states, minimum wage bills, union bills, marijuana bills, abortion bills, they pass. Right.
And so that tells you that there's this big delta between what people actually want in their lives and the Democratic brand. And we won't make that brand better.
We won't fix it by being silent. Now, I what I what I do think is also true is we won't fix it by just being kind of like whiners on the sidelines.
And I think that's the point he makes that did resonate with me, which is like Democrats are powerless. It sucks.
We're telling the truth about Trump. He's fucking terrible.
But we've been saying it for years. And by the way, the part of the problem is we were warning for years about how bad it could get.
It is now as bad as it could get. And it's no longer a warning.
But it sounds like what people have heard before. That is not our fault.
That is a collective problem with our democracy, a weakness Donald Trump exposes. But it is the reality of like, and which is why I think where you get to is like, we just need to offer an alternative.
We need to offer something that isn't about Trump. And like, I am even open to some of the more kind of like kooky ideas of like, of people saying this is what our cabinet would be doing right now, right? Like, I'm like, shadow cabinet i'm not against you you're all i'm not against it i'm not against the shadow cabinet join the labor party so spelling it with an o-u i'm i'm up for trump yeah sure sure sure i do think like what it is i agree that we shouldn't over promise and pick fights that give people the impression that we have power we don't have right because that is that is a that is a problem too is you're like're going to fight, fight, fight, fight, fight.
We're going to stop and we're going to stop them. And then it's like, obviously we knew we couldn't stop them because we don't have the votes for X or Y, right? So I agree that it's important not to overpromise, but I still think you need to fight when you can and just be honest about what power we have and what power we don't.
So Trump people are going to break some parts of the government and people are going to get hurt and they have to understand why that happened. Yes.
So we've talked about the stuff, but there's another thing that's going to happen. So in 2020, Congress passed a bunch of tax credits to make Affordable Care Act plans more affordable.
Those were extended through 2025. Those are going to expire.
And if they are not reauthorized, you're going to see a bunch of middle class people see like serious premium increases.

We need to explain to them as Democrats why their premiums are going up.

Otherwise, it might just happen in a vacuum.

And people are going to think, oh, actually, government health care sucks.

It's Trump.

Trump will say Obamacare sucks.

Yeah.

Or Obamacare sucks.

No, it's explained that because the Democrats in Congress passed these enhanced tax credits

for the Affordable Care Act.

We need a better name from them, by the way. And Democrat and the Republican Party.
It's actually expanded premium support, Tommy. Thank you.
That's even worse. And Republicans let them lapse.
Yeah. No, I mean, look, I do think that the budget fight is the fight.
For sure. But I also, I'm already like, we're heading into the budget fight, and I'm already feeling like the most popular testing message is just coming right back up and everyone's just going to be like tax cuts for billionaires to cut your health care and it's the right message but I think we have to be creative in the way we talk about it like we just can't sound like we have sounded like the last 20 years so it is the right argument it's you know what I'm saying when I say the right message that doesn't necessarily mean the right words you know i know i know it's hard can't you feel it already i know it's well it's hard right because it's like part of it is like you need to be doing two things right you actually do need to use the messages that resonate with people because we're in a short-term fight and you're trying to make the argument that resonates with people but at the same time we're trying to make up for what is like ultimately like a huge credibility gap like we warned the country for several several elections in a row about how dangerous Donald Trump was.
It was very, very clear. People did not, not enough people believed us, not enough people cared.
Either we didn't reach them or if we did, they didn't take it at face value. And so that like requires like a deeper, you just start telling a deeper story about what you believe about the world.
And it's going to challenge people's assumptions. It's not going to be exactly what they expect to hear from you.
Yeah. Or, I mean, Tommy, you've made this joke many times, which is like Democrats have been using the line.
We're going to stop tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas. And we're going to give those tax breaks to companies who create jobs in America for 20 years more.
And so like, is that one of the best polling testing lines? Yeah, I bet it is. And I bet when about it they'll be like yeah i really like that like it's not just polls people people but then work hard and play by the rules if you say it for 20 years and it doesn't happen and you just keep saying the same line it's not going to land well one thing that i think uh insulates trump from a lot of criticism is people think well he's rich he's not trying to make more money because somehow people have gotten it in their heads that billionaires don't always want more money.
And that's how you become a billionaire. I think we need to undercut that by exposing the reality.
For example, the Washington Post reported that Elon Musk and his businesses have received at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits. We need to lift that up as he's slashing things through a doge or advocating for a 4.5 trillion dollar tax cut for the richest people in the world like that that's the kind of stuff i think where there's an enemy and it's newsworthy and it's new and it's interesting i think we can sell that everything the tech oligarchs have done in the last 10 years does not suggest that they do not care about their wealth well there's yeah these people cannot get enough and it's fucking and it's fucking sick.
But like, I don't know, this is where I kind of come back. Like, I see what Carvel's getting at, right? Because like, what he's saying is like, we kind of need to step back from the daily grind to figure out what we mean and what we stand for.
And I guess like where I land is like, there's a lot of different Democrats that need to do a lot of different things. We need the people out there fighting every single day.
Like the days of like everybody driving towards one single message are probably over. There's like maybe a core message we're driving, but there's like a bunch of different access points to it.
And some people like Jasmine Crockett are going to be better at just sort of like going for the fucking jugular. And some people are going to be a bit more academic, like a Pete Buttigieg, but also in a really effective way.
Like there's just like, there's going to be a bunch of different ways to talk about this. And then you've got your Gen Xers pivoting to vertical video and TikTok.
Right. I reject that.
And I think you're doing a great job. You're the doge of this podcast with all your fucking falsehoods in this episode.
Yeah. But yeah, no, I think like, we have to remember it's a party.
A list is not a message, right? We have to tell a story. It's gotta be, there is like a lot of work we have to do as a party like there's a bit of a reboot of like who we like you say who is trump what is he people are like i don't know he wants to make america great again sounds stupid we used to make fun of it but like boy is that simple and effective we don't need a slogan but we need people to think like democrats are like they believe this they stand for that they fight for this like we need to read stronger at home more respected in the world and opportunity for all in bottom up middle out strength plus experience equals change change the like middle out bottom up this is like like like this mega mega mega mega mega w stands for wrong john but uh that's a old deep cut but like this is like bill maher left so we didn't really get into it but it's like everybody in the like when you make the argument, was it as sexually charged as it felt? I mean, I came, but like you made like sexy.
Don't push me. Don't push me.
You came, he left. Yeah.
You don't think 69 exists? What are we doing right now, Bill? But, but like little treat for all of you who stayed for an hour 20.

We're having a great time.

We're having a great time.

But the,

uh,

the,

uh,

like this idea that like,

ah,

you know,

once you've made the argument and they don't want to push back in the

argument,

it's like,

Oh,

you're going to cost Democrats elections for 20 years with this pro

trans stuff.

And it's like,

Donald Trump put a pro choice environmental lawyer at the head of

the department of health and human services, because he had built up so much trust and credibility with his base.

And he has so much power within his party that he had the space to operate, to challenge orthodoxies in a bunch of different ways, both before he became president and after. and like as a democratic party to tommy's point like we need to have a core set of beliefs of

values that are so clear so that makes so much sense to people that you then have the space

to kind of like take to to challenge people on an issue they may not be agree with you yet right to actually lead i'm just i'm laughing because i thought about like on the democratic side and i was like kamala harris did three events one day with liz cheney and we're still hearing about how it was that's what caused the end of the election but i actually honestly i know she didn't even say like you think she was like barnstorming with Liz Cheney and we're still hearing about how it was. That's what caused the end of the election.
But I actually honestly, I know she didn't even say like, you think she was like barnstorming with Liz Cheney and like promising her a cabinet seat. We're going to.
Yeah. Honestly, it's more like what if Kamala Harris said, I'm going to make Mike Pence my secretary of health and human services.
Could you imagine it? But like, why is that so inconceivable? It's because honestly, Kamala Harris, the most work she had to do was not just proved. She had to prove to every single group of people what she believed in.
Right. She had no she had no trust with the left.
She had no trust with the center. She was starting from fucking scratch.
Well, on the other side of it, too, just to prove I'm not a just a Liz Cheney fan, you know, AOC, one of the best messengers in the party. And we couldn't even get her.
We couldn't even get her a ranking member. slot on the oversight committee.
When you have a talent like Connolly, when you have a once-in-a-generation communicator like Connolly just waiting in the wings. I do think that there's a lesson from the RFK thing where, look, he's a terrible person.
I would not want him part of the Democratic coalition. Great op-ed on measles, though.
I don't think it was a mistake for Kamala Harris not to cut a deal with him or whatever. whatever remember that was kind of a narrative but republicans they will let anyone into the tent including him and they saw donald trump correctly saw that rfk over through uh decades of misleading and you know sort of uh being emotionally manipulative to people who had been had children with disabilities etc had built this constituency and built trust with a community that was pretty significant.
And they saw the value of this kind of wellness to anti-vax, to MAGA, to MAHA pipeline, and they were willing to go for it. And I just, I don't know.
It's not a good example. It's not something I'd like to emulate.
But that openness and willingness to bring people into the tent is something. It sounds like what you're saying is we need a Joe Rogan of the left.
Of the right. We need a 69.
All right. We're going to end this thing now.
That's our show for today. Reminder that we're going to be live streaming our preview of Trump's address to the joint session tonight at 8 p.m.
Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific.
We'll have a bonus reaction show in your feed tomorrow morning. Talk to you all then.
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We'll be right back. editor, and Adrian Hill is our executive producer.
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Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer with audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis.

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