Is Elon a Drag on Trump?

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Speaker 1 Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Fabra.

Speaker 5 I'm Dan Pfeiffer.

Speaker 1 On today's show, the free speech warriors in the White House are kicking out media outlets that still call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of Mexico.

Speaker 1 Elon Musk holds an Oval Office press conference where he admits that he and the Dogebags haven't quite gotten everything right while breaking our government and our laws.

Speaker 1 And while they brag about finding a few billion in cuts, we'll take a look at the trillions that Republicans in Congress want to cut from the budget in order to help pay for their $4.5 trillion tax cut for people like Elon and Trump.

Speaker 1 Then Lovett sits down here in studio with Rohit Chopra, who Trump forced out as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau last week, so that banks and credit card companies can go back to screwing us.

Speaker 1 Great times. Great times.

Speaker 1 But first, big congrats to Bashar al-Assad and the measles for getting Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. confirmed as cabinet secretary.

Speaker 1 Big congrats to measles.

Speaker 1 In the end, every Republican senator but resistance hero Mitch McConnell voted yes on Gabbard and Kennedy. So rest assured that our health and national security are in good hands, Dan.

Speaker 1 Things also look good for Cash Patel, even though he was reportedly purging the FBI before even being confirmed.

Speaker 1 But the big news this week, at least according to a very excited President Trump, was his announcement of reciprocal tariffs. He said this was the big one.
This was the big one.

Speaker 1 He said, I had three great weeks, but this is the biggest one yet. He was asked about those tariffs after announcing them in the Oval Office.
and here's part of the presser.

Speaker 6 And prices could go up somewhat short term, but prices will also go down.

Speaker 7 Would you also direct agencies to study the impact they would have on prices in the U.S.?

Speaker 6 No, there's nothing to study. There's nothing to study.
It's going to go well. The United States is going to become a very, very strong

Speaker 6 economically country. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Prices could go up. Prices could go down.
There's nothing to study. Don't worry about it.
So

Speaker 1 an announcement that lots of shit we buy is about to be more expensive just a few days after we learn that inflation is rising again, the biggest one-month jump since August of 2023.

Speaker 1 What do you think, Dan? Promises made, promises kept?

Speaker 5 Yeah, it seems great. Seems like things are going exactly as planned.
I mean, it is noted that Trump went to the, at the convention, declared that the inflation crisis would end immediately.

Speaker 5 Inflation has gone up. He is doing things to raise prices.

Speaker 5 And that's even before we get into the potential impacts of his mass deportation plan, what a giant tax cut that overwhelmingly benefits corporations and the wealthy would do.

Speaker 5 And I think it is just worth, we're like living this in truly insane time.

Speaker 5 We're going to talk about a lot of the really insane, dangerous, and dumb things that are happening over the course of this podcast.

Speaker 5 But it's also possible that politics really hasn't changed that much.

Speaker 5 And Donald Trump simply won the presidency because people were really mad at the incumbent administration because prices were too high.

Speaker 5 And now Donald Trump is the incumbent administration and people are still mad the prices are too high.

Speaker 5 And instead of trying to address that, as he promised he would do, he is doing things that would actually exacerbate the crisis.

Speaker 5 And so we will find out soon enough whether political gravity is a thing that still exists.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, you mentioned that people still think that prices are too high.

Speaker 1 On Tuesday's show, we talked about the CBS poll that showed 66% of voters think that Trump is not doing enough to focus on prices.

Speaker 1 Echelon Insights, which is a Republican-run polling firm, they just came out with their latest poll poll right before we started recording.

Speaker 1 43% of voters said cost of living is either the biggest or second biggest issue facing the country. And the next closest issue was immigration at 29%

Speaker 1 and then political corruption at 23%. Seems like there's plenty of that these days.
But number one, 43% are still concerned about the cost of living. So no, it wasn't vibes.

Speaker 1 No, it wasn't just in people's heads. It was a real concern about prices throughout the Biden administration, a real concern about costs.

Speaker 1 And people are still concerned that Donald Trump is not focusing on costs.

Speaker 1 And now these reciprocal tariffs, which is basically any country that has levied a tariff on our goods, now we're levying tariffs on any goods that are imported from them.

Speaker 1 But again, tariffs are charged to the U.S. companies that are importing the goods.
And then the companies pass on the price increases to us.

Speaker 1 So we will be paying more. It's like someone said it's like we're shooting ourselves in the foot for other countries shooting themselves in the foot.
That's what a reciprocal tariff is.

Speaker 5 The other thing about this that is notable is because inflation went back up again, the Fed is now less likely to and highly unlikely to cut interest rates again, which we often treat interest rates and inflation as two separate but related things when they're actually for the voter the same thing, right?

Speaker 5 If interest rates stay up, credit credit cards are more expensive. Buying cars is more expensive.
Getting a home loan is more expensive. Your costs are more expensive.
You're locked into your homes.

Speaker 5 And so Trump, maybe he will just fire the Fed chair against the law. He will bully him into lowering interest rates.

Speaker 5 But in a world in which he is not demonstrating to the Fed that he is trying to bring down inflation, he is going to make his own situation worse because

Speaker 5 they're going to feel like Trump is an untrustworthy partner in this or an unreliable partner and are therefore going to keep interest rates high for a much longer period of time.

Speaker 1 And and again, you know, we're going to talk about the

Speaker 1 Congress moving, trying to move Trump's legislative agenda, which is just a giant tax cut. And that tax cut is not primarily for most people in this country who are concerned about inflation.

Speaker 1 Most of the tax cuts are going to billionaires, big corporations, the wealthiest people. And, you know, he's got his no tax on tips thing if that gets through.
That I guess is if you're

Speaker 1 if you're in the restaurant industry

Speaker 1 or if you get if you work on tips right anywhere um then that that helps you but there's nothing else in that in that agenda for for middle-class people in fact there's a lot of cuts coming to healthcare and education that are going to hurt middle class people something to watch certainly something to watch any comment on the confirmations on Gabbard and Kennedy going through I know you wrote a message box Thursday morning about what we can learn from the the Gabbard vote yeah I mean it is

Speaker 5 deeply alarming that we have an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist at the head of our healthcare system and a

Speaker 5 you know someone who has played footsie with uh bashar al-assad and putin and has also embraced all kinds of conspiracy theories in charge of our intelligence agencies like that is a just like if you had told people

Speaker 5 six months ago that that's how this was going to end, people would have laughed at you, right?

Speaker 5 People would have treated it as, you know, liberal, MSNBC, positive America hysteria to suggest such crazy things. And look, I just, I think as it relates relates to the Republican Party,

Speaker 5 and this is particularly true of the Gabbard confirmation, but also true of the RFK Jr.

Speaker 5 one as well, is that the fact that every Republican except Mitch McConnell voted for these folks is proof that the Republican Party as an independent entity is dead.

Speaker 5 It is now just a vehicle for Trump's whims and desires. They have no independent policy positions, right? They just confirmed someone.

Speaker 5 who spent most of their life being pro-choice to be in charge of the healthcare system.

Speaker 5 They just confirmed someone who is the closest person to Russia in the United States Congress when they were there to be the head of the intelligence agencies.

Speaker 5 And like this is different than when it was before. If you remember in 2017, the Republican House and Senate passed a bill to keep Trump from taking sanctions off of Russia.
Right.

Speaker 5 When in this in during the Biden administration, when a bunch of Trump's allies at the behest of Trump wanted to get rid of funding for Ukraine, it was the Republican Senate who stopped them.

Speaker 5 And now it's just like, we will do whatever they want. And even on foreign policy, the one place they had held the line over the years.

Speaker 5 And it's just like, this is the end of it, of the party as an actual entity that will survive Trump. And they gave it all up for nothing more than avoiding a primary challenge in the next election.

Speaker 5 Because that's how you know that that's what this is about, because Mitch McConnell is almost certainly retiring now.

Speaker 5 And so he's the only one who feels like he can vote his conscience without suffering the repercussions because he's immune from them

Speaker 1 i don't really get what murkowski and collins were doing on these though either they they their statements are basically like well i got assurances from them and they've put my you know that both nominees sort of like put our concerns to rest so i guess we'll just trust them and i guess that means that collins is maybe collins is worried about a primary challenge so i guess that means she's probably she's thinking about running again and not retiring though she could very well retire she's old enough and murkowski too like i just i i the credulousness

Speaker 1 None of them believe it.

Speaker 5 Not a single one of them believe.

Speaker 5 Like, maybe, like, Tommy Tuberville believes this bullshit, but if you gave Truth Serum to the Republican Senate caucus, overwhelmingly, they would say it was fucking insane to confirm Tulsi Gabbard for this job.

Speaker 5 That it was ridiculously irresponsible to confirm R.F. K.
Jr. for this job.
They all believe that, but they won't do it.

Speaker 5 And what's, I think this is really interesting about Trump's brand of politics is normally,

Speaker 5 if you don't need the votes, and they weren't going to need every single Republican this time, you let people take a walk on a tough vote, right?

Speaker 5 Particularly someone like Susan Collins, who is in a blue state. Like give her a chance.
They don't need her vote to confirm either of these people.

Speaker 5 Let her vote the other way so she can show her, you know, her brand of independence or whatever else. But Trump does not do that.

Speaker 2 He makes you, everything's a loyalty test, right?

Speaker 5 You have to walk across the hot coals for him, even at your own.

Speaker 1 peril.

Speaker 5 And you do it because he is so vengeful. He's so petty that you don't even even know what he could do.
He and his allies could unleash upon you if you vote.

Speaker 5 And like that says just how sort of perverted the political incentive structure has become under Trump.

Speaker 1 Yeah. No, it's, I mean, this is what happens in authoritarian governments.
Like it's just exactly that, right? Like he's got the whole, the party belongs to him, and they are scared of him,

Speaker 1 scared of both like their professional careers. And in some cases, people are literally scared of death threats.
So, I mean, it's wild. wild.

Speaker 1 It was another big week for Chancellor Elon Musk, who held his first Oval Office press conference while two fidgety toddlers looked on impatiently, Elon's four-year-old son and his 78-year-old boss, Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 Elon droned on about Doge in

Speaker 1 a weird, rambling monologue that did include one newsworthy admission.

Speaker 8 Some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected. So nobody's going to bat a thousand.

Speaker 1 Oh, well, nevertheless, you know.

Speaker 1 And sure enough,

Speaker 1 sure enough, many things he has said over the last several weeks and months have been incorrect. Here's a real doozy from this week.

Speaker 1 The Justice Department had to admit in a court filing that one of Musk's Dogebags didn't just have read-only access to Treasury's payment system, but was accidentally given full access. Accidentally.

Speaker 1 So all this time

Speaker 1 that Elon and Doge were like, no, no, no, they only had read-only access, no big deal. And then the Justice Department, of course, believes that, and then they file in court.

Speaker 1 And then suddenly the Justice Department talks to Treasury, talks to Elon. Oh, shit.
Whoops. Our bad.

Speaker 1 So that happened. Doge is also, at least so far, having a rough go at it in court.
They've been kicked out of the Treasury payment system. The federal funding freeze has been temporarily blocked.

Speaker 1 And the gutting of USAID and the National Institutes of Health have been temporarily blocked as well. What did you make of Elon's weird oval presser and all the latest Doge news?

Speaker 5 I have so many questions about the press conference. So many questions.

Speaker 5 How did it happen? Why is he, like, why was he there? Why was his child there? Why was he dressed like that? Why was he wearing a hat? Yeah.

Speaker 1 And on a hat. And some sort of a matte.

Speaker 1 That's his Make America Great hat, but it's in the dark mega hat.

Speaker 5 Did you know because he replied to your tweet this morning?

Speaker 1 He did reply to my tweet. Yeah, I know.

Speaker 1 He's about the story that the State Department looked like they wanted to buy like a couple hundred million dollars worth of Tesla, armed Tesla trucks, but apparently it was a request made in the Biden administration and it was to armor maybe electric vehicles that they already had.

Speaker 1 But then someone in the State Department, once it was reported, changed it and erased Tesla. So they would get in trouble and just made it like the whole thing.

Speaker 1 But Elon wanted to tell me that it was fake news.

Speaker 5 so there you go well congratulations on reaching this uh boss level of clout you now have

Speaker 1 and unfortunately can't wait for uh catch patel to come crashing through the current doors down

Speaker 1 don't necessarily want to be on that radar screen but the key if you're a mole the key to not getting whacked is keeping your head in the hole so there you go

Speaker 5 so much for that i look i think the whole thing was ridiculous it was strange it was

Speaker 5 interminably long and incredibly awkward.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 5 I mean, it's just inc it just it is in many ways just sort of like a metaphor for what the Trump presidents have been.

Speaker 5 Trump is just sitting there quietly while Elon Musk holds court and sort of runs the government.

Speaker 1 Though, I will say, though, that he was sitting quietly, even like surprisingly quietly for Trump. But, you know, we've all watched Trump enough now for the last however many years, decade.

Speaker 1 He looked like alternately sort of annoyed and kind of like, come on, hurry it up. He had to like interject once in a while.
He's like, and tell them what you found. Tell them what your team found.

Speaker 1 Like, he was, you could tell. I don't know if Trump's going to let that happen again.

Speaker 5 No, he was, he was also trapped because he was sitting down.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 5 So it's like, he really was in this terrible position where he could not get up from where he was without. I guess, I mean, just it was very, it was like a strange thing.

Speaker 5 I like for people like you and I, we watched the whole thing. It seems like it should be a disaster for everyone involved.
Elon seems strange and weird and incorrect. And

Speaker 5 Trump, look, you know, Trump is being basically told to shush his mouth by

Speaker 5 a small child. All kinds of weird things are happening.
And it's like, ah, what a clown show.

Speaker 5 But I do, it's worth like just stepping back and recognizing that this does fit within Trump's strategy the first few weeks, which is just grab all the attention all the time.

Speaker 5 And this dominated attention. The cable news covered it the whole time, just went live for this whole thing.

Speaker 5 It led the network news that night.

Speaker 1 Now,

Speaker 5 no one should really give a a lot of shits about what leads the network news these days or goes live on cable,

Speaker 5 but more importantly, it became like a moment online. It was a thing that broke through.
It became this topic of conversation. It was immediately memeified.

Speaker 5 And there were all these memes going around about, you know, with Elon with his kid on his shoulders answering the questions. And I'm not sure to the extent that the public consumed any of it.

Speaker 5 And they're probably at most just like glancing by it or seeing moments on TikTok or Instagram or whatever else.

Speaker 5 It is just sort of like this political outsider who's such an outsider, he's dressed like a weirdo in the old office with his kid on his shoulders, defending his efforts to cut government and get rid of waste.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 that's not in itself totally bad.

Speaker 5 It's just, I just think as we look at all these things, it's just another reminder that in this day and age, the quantity of attention is more important than the quality.

Speaker 5 And this was a massive quantity of attention.

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Speaker 1 So, you know, you raise a debate that's been going around in Democratic circles, and it's like, what do people really think of Elon?

Speaker 1 And how do we talk about Doge and cutting government, knowing that people do want to

Speaker 1 get rid of government waste, but maybe what Elon's doing isn't so popular and he's not so popular. So I got some more data from Echelon on this right before we recorded.

Speaker 1 Trump's approval is at 52.46, right? So he is still above water. Elon's approval is 43.50.

Speaker 1 So he is underwater.

Speaker 1 They asked what you think about Elon's role in government right now.

Speaker 1 Only 40% approve, 51% disapprove. So that's underwater.
Then they asked two questions.

Speaker 1 One, Elon is right to try and fix broken DC bureaucracies that waste hundreds of billions of dollars and spend taxpayer money on radical ideologies that most Americans don't agree with.

Speaker 1 Agree or disagree? And it was 50 agree, 42 disagree.

Speaker 1 Then they did a statement, Elon is wrong to dismantle vital aid programs and other agencies when he wasn't elected and has no expertise in government.

Speaker 1 And people agree agree with that statement, 57, 43. And then they asked, which of those statements do you agree more with?

Speaker 1 And by 50 to 44, people agreed with Elon is wrong to be doing this and not right.

Speaker 1 So it's a, it's, you know, one indicator, one poll, but it's an early indicator that, like, A, it tells you, I think, how to talk about this.

Speaker 1 But B, that, you know, while people don't like bloated government and do like cutting waste,

Speaker 1 they are not super excited about the way that Elon has gone about it.

Speaker 5 The way I think to read that poll is that Elon is actually a drag on what would be an otherwise more popular effort.

Speaker 1 Yes, I agree.

Speaker 5 Because if you can only get to 50 on the idea of getting rid of bloat and waste in government because Elon's name's attached, it's because if you send the world's richest man into government who has billions of dollars in government contracts to manage federal spending, that seems pretty sketchy to just about any person.

Speaker 5 And so like, it's just

Speaker 5 there like there is a secondary debate about how much we focus on Elon, how much we focus on Trump. I think there's a real advantage in focusing on Elon.

Speaker 5 And I think I've been sort of playing with like a little,

Speaker 5 not a message per se, right? Not a slogan, but like a

Speaker 5 framework to think about how to describe what's happening in the Trump administration, particularly as it relates to Doge, because there is how you talk about this does matter somewhat.

Speaker 5 But is to focus is to center the like the two themes of the Trump presidency to date are chaos and corruption.

Speaker 5 and i think if you the way to get into the doge stuff is yes talk about all the vital programs that are being and be specific about what they are but it's also just pure fucking chaos right there's a story i think it was in the times about this school that's been has this federal grant to get a get new school buses and they've they're like they've made four of the five payments but they didn't withdraw the fifth payment before trump was sworn in and now they can't get the school bus yeah this is now they're gonna have to now they're gonna have to pay out of their own budget for the school buses even though they were promised the money and now they can't hire the new teachers they need it It's just like, you know, just a very close friend of mine who works in education, just

Speaker 5 doing consulting for school districts. A bunch of her, you know, these are like long-term grants.

Speaker 5 So they've been working with these school districts on like teacher accreditation and teacher training for years, just all gone two days ago, just in the middle of the program, right?

Speaker 5 Just like they're working through, like you're halfway through. It's one thing to stop new money from going out the door, right?

Speaker 5 Or looking at not, I don't mean like the fifth of the seven payments, but to say, here are the new grant applications that have come in since Trump was president, or it is time to renew the grant.

Speaker 5 And then you can, you, the voters voted for you, you can put a, put within all legal frameworks, your ideological framework on what kind of grant should get approved, but to stop things in the middle, right?

Speaker 5 I mean, you guys talked a lot about what's happening to the folks in USAI, USAID who just, but just, it's pure chaos. It's wrecking chaos in people's lives.

Speaker 5 And then you have the fact that you have on top of of that, the world's richest man doing it while he is cutting agencies that are regulating his businesses

Speaker 5 is just like that. That is what everyone hates about politics, right? It is the cynicism that drove many of them to vote for Trump.

Speaker 5 And it can be the cynicism that caused in the rightfully well-earned cynicism about government in this case that causes them to go the other direction.

Speaker 1 Well, and to your point about like Elon being a drag on Doge or on the effort, Echelon did like a battery of approval, disapproval on various public figures and agencies.

Speaker 1 The least popular in the whole list was Elon, by the way, which is great. Doge was at 39.33 approve, disapprove.
So like slightly above water for Doge, but Elon was very much underwater.

Speaker 1 And then even USAID was 39.28 approve. And so I know everyone says that everyone hates foreign aid and it's bad and stuff like that, but I do think that it's been in the news.

Speaker 1 My guess would be it has been in the news so much that

Speaker 1 people are sort of hearing stories about

Speaker 1 the humanitarian assistance that's gotten cut. And it's not as unpopular as foreign aid might usually be in a poll.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it's reflexive partisanship, right? This is

Speaker 5 the same impulse that caused in 2017 Democrats to become huge fans of the New York Times has caused us to become huge fans of USAID.

Speaker 1 It's like Trump's against it.

Speaker 5 It must be good.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And I would say, actually, in the long run, for the world,

Speaker 5 one half of America's two parties becoming full-throated advocates for humanitarian assistance is more valuable than subsidizing Wordle acquisitions at the New York Times.

Speaker 1 Why is that harsh?

Speaker 1 I just like that you really swerve to hit that. That was what I

Speaker 1 enjoyed.

Speaker 5 I didn't even plan that. That was just like came naturally to me.

Speaker 1 I don't know why.

Speaker 1 Before we move on from Elon, did you see that weird-ass photo of Elon? So, Prime Minister Modi of India is in DC.

Speaker 1 I think he's like doing a presser with Trump probably after. Yeah, he's doing a lot.

Speaker 5 He's doing, he's got a meeting with bilateral Trump today.

Speaker 1 He also, though, met with Elon Musk, and there's a picture of Elon shaking his hand, sitting down shaking his hand like Elon's the fucking president.

Speaker 1 And then it's also very funny because like when you zoom out, it looks like a traditional bylaw with like all of Modi's staffers and officials from India on one side.

Speaker 1 And then on the other side, it's just like a couple kids, Elon's, a couple of Elon's several of Elon's kids, yes.

Speaker 5 There was this funny line in one of the stories.

Speaker 5 It was like, Modi had this, you know, obviously all of his staff, and it said, Elon was only accompanied by this woman who's a longtime lieutenant and the mother of three of his children.

Speaker 5 So it's like, that's who came.

Speaker 1 It's also just, and Trump has asked about it in the

Speaker 1 press conference that he, that he did. And they're like, oh, do you know Elon met with Modi? And he's like,

Speaker 1 no, no, I'm not really aware. And he's like, well, do you know why I met with him? He's like, well, I assume he assume he wants to do business in India.

Speaker 1 Like, do you know about what he's like, hey, he had no clue. He was like, yeah, I assume he wants to do business.

Speaker 5 I would really like some real reporting, you know, especially if it came from those Wordle people I just unfairly attacked, but about how the meeting came to be, right?

Speaker 5 It had, when you look at the picture, that is the classic State Department setup. for a bilateral meeting.

Speaker 5 If the Secretary of State is traveling abroad or even

Speaker 5 a more a lower government official

Speaker 5 is traveling abroad as an official representative of something, it's always that, right? It's the flags, the chairs, the handshake. And so was that said, like who booked that? Who talked to Modi?

Speaker 5 Who in the White House signed off on it?

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 5 this is small pennies, but I assume that's all State Department stuff that was put together for that meeting. Right.
Like, just how did that happen? And just the fact that

Speaker 5 Trump just acknowledged in that Q q a that elon was doing this because he wants to do business in india which he definitely does and that trump had no problem with elon using his special government employee status to get meetings with foreign leaders in places where he wanted to do business like that gets to the like we just did the chaos part of the equation i wanted to get to this is the corruption part it's just unbelievable it's like hey he's elon musk so he gets to meet with all the people that president trump gets to meet with only for him it's purely financial

Speaker 5 there's this uh it really is like present white house fantasy camp

Speaker 5 you know it's like these people there's those people who pay like a ton of money to go to duke uh basket basketball program like grown grown adults and like put on the uniform and they run out through camera and they go to a practice with coach k back in the day and it's like this is the same thing like he spent a quarter of a billion dollars of his own money and he gets to play pretend president with some actual real authorities for as as long as he wants and he gets to break government and he gets to make sure that his friends and his allies, I mean, this is Trump's thing, his companies, everyone's friends, allies, ideological allies,

Speaker 1 they get stuff, right? They're taken care of for now. And then everyone else, yeah, go fuck yourselves.

Speaker 1 One outlet that was not in attendance at the Oval Office Presser or any White House press availabilities this week, the Associated Press. Why?

Speaker 1 Because the AP refuses to use Trump's preferred name for the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America, even though the body of water doesn't belong to America.

Speaker 1 The AP put out a statement on Tuesday calling the ban alarming and a plain violation of the First Amendment. This comes after Trump's lawsuits against ABC and CBS.

Speaker 1 And as Trump's new FCC commissioner, Brendan Carr, has launched investigations into NPR, PBS, and now NBC Universal for, of course, DEI.

Speaker 1 Carr said in a statement on Wednesday, I would encourage any business that wants the FCC to approve a deal to end any invidious forms of DEI discrimination with all deliberate speed.

Speaker 1 I don't know if I've never heard the word invidious before. Have you?

Speaker 1 I mean, it's kind of an awkward thing to say. Oh,

Speaker 1 was it a Wordle?

Speaker 5 Too many letters for Wordle.

Speaker 5 I have heard it, but I certainly couldn't spell it, and I'm not sure. I could maybe win a multiple choice question on what it means, but

Speaker 5 kudos to Brendan Carr for using it.

Speaker 1 And kudos to him for nothing else.

Speaker 1 What do you make of all this?

Speaker 1 The AP thing, the FCC investigations? I mean, you know,

Speaker 1 they went after a local radio station in your hometown here, San Francisco, just for reporting on ICE RAIDs. It is very scary.

Speaker 5 It is quite scary. This is in all of the major...
Supreme Court cases on free speech over the years, the ultimate time when the reasons they ultimately put real limits on what the government can do,

Speaker 5 whether it's it's on New York Times versus Sullivan, whether it's on the Online Decency Act, whether it's stuff that was done

Speaker 5 in the anti-communist push at points in our history, is because government action has a chilling effect on free speech. And that's exactly what's happening with the San Francisco radio station.

Speaker 5 Because the government has unlimited power and unlimited money. So if you're a local radio station, a local newspaper, an individual, you know, reporter,

Speaker 5 who just

Speaker 5 has their own newsletter or whatever else.

Speaker 5 You have to think very carefully about what you say and what you do, because if you become one of the targets of one of these attacks, you don't have the resources to fight back.

Speaker 5 You will be bankrupted in this process.

Speaker 5 And then on the other end, you have this with the FCC, with the threat about DEI from Brendan Carr, NVIDIA or not, is you have all of these businesses, these large corporate entities of which journalism is usually usually a money-losing part of it, or a, or it's not, at least not a part of their revenue future.

Speaker 5 And they are making decisions about the larger company that's affecting the journalism of the entity there.

Speaker 5 And that, you know, we, there is this whole thing about whether Paramount, which has a merger before the FCC, is going to settle this ridiculous lawsuit.

Speaker 5 uh for 60 minutes just as a way to ensure that they can get their merger green lit by the fcc FCC.

Speaker 5 It's like it's the leaders. And then, and then just, sorry, the other thing I say is just like that is very, very real.

Speaker 5 I'm always torn, like, it is insane that the White House is so petty that they're not going to let the AP in because they won't give Trump's fake name to something real.

Speaker 5 You know, and it's like, is that, you know, it's sort of like we, the way, and sometimes the press overstates or overreacts to smaller things and claims it's in a free speech.

Speaker 5 Like the way people treated a Barack Obama not doing enough press conferences was, or not taking enough questions on the rope line as,

Speaker 5 you know, the end of the end of the free press,

Speaker 5 you know, or when Jim Acosta lost his White House badge briefly. But these things, like doing, trying to bully the AP has an impact on what others will do.
And I think it's, it is quite concerning.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, just look at how many times Donald Trump, since he's become president again, has gone and taken questions from the press, right? Which is a lot of times.

Speaker 1 And in some of those instances, instances, and we've talked about them on the show, people have asked a challenging question or a critical question of Trump.

Speaker 1 Like, if you get to the point where they kick out the AP, they kick out all the legacy media outlets or all the outlets that they think might ask difficult questions, and all you get is just fawning questions from Newsmax and OAN and, you know, the ruthless podcast and all the other fucking idiots that they let into the briefing room now.

Speaker 1 If that's all the questions that we get, then it's going to just sound like North Korean television.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it's like this is like a longer conversation about the differences between press access and press freedom. Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 5 And, you know, and I think Caroline Levitt, the Trump press secretary, said the AP doesn't have a right to cover these events.

Speaker 5 Right. Because ultimately what the freedom of the press is about is the government cannot stop you from printing what you want to print.
Right.

Speaker 5 But it is, it, like, democracy suffers when there is not press access.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 5 Right. There is less transparency, there's less scrutiny.

Speaker 5 And, you know, we've already saw this in the Pentagon, where it's not that Pete Hakeseth is keeping out the mainstream press, but he has kicked the mainstream press out of their offices and allowed a bunch of ideological allies to come in and sit and cover those places.

Speaker 5 And that's just, it's all like you, this is the same thing, the point you made earlier: this is what happens in authoritarian regimes.

Speaker 5 Like it is slowly over time, the very tired metaphor of the frog getting boiled, but the water is boiling, and you can see it happening.

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Speaker 1 Let's talk about Congress, which apparently is still a branch of government, I guess.

Speaker 1 Republicans have begun their attempt to pass Trump's legislative agenda, and the cuts they want make what Doge is doing seem like couch money.

Speaker 1 The House's budget proposal would cut at least $1.5 trillion in health care, education, food assistance, and other spending in order to help pay for a small portion of the $4.5 trillion Republicans want to spend on tax cuts, which would mostly benefit the biggest companies and billionaires like Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and most of the cabinet.

Speaker 1 And since they're not paying for all those tax cuts, they also want to raise the debt limit by $4 trillion.

Speaker 1 This seems like it should be a huge political problem for Trump and the Republicans. But what do you think, and how do you think Democrats should make sure that's the case?

Speaker 5 It is a huge political problem for Trump and the Republicans. This is the

Speaker 5 exact rhythm of Republican governance since Reagan.

Speaker 5 Run on reducing the deficit and government being too large, getting in office, and then having to actually make the cuts, and having the public turn on you very quickly for doing so, getting booted out, getting Democrats in office, rinse, repeat.

Speaker 5 And, you know, I think this is, and for Trump, this is particularly dangerous because unlike all those other Republicans, he didn't run on any of this. Like, that was one thing Elon kept saying in the

Speaker 5 weird

Speaker 5 Oval Office Presser was: the public voted for this, public voted for this. The public did not vote for this.
This is not what Trump ran on. He did not run on cutting spending.
He ran as

Speaker 5 Pat Buchanan and he's now governing like Paul Ryan. Like, this is exactly, this is, he has lost touch with what he's not a populist anymore.
This is not a populist agenda.

Speaker 5 This is very unpopular stuff. And let's just take Medicaid, for instance.
Navigator Research had a poll out in late January.

Speaker 5 81%

Speaker 5 of voters oppose cuts to Medicaid.

Speaker 5 75% of Republicans oppose cuts to Medicaid. This is incredibly unpopular stuff.
And then you get to all the other spending cuts, right? You're looking at $800 billion in cuts to Medicaid.

Speaker 5 That is cuts to healthcare, cuts to nursing home. It cuts to children's health care.
That is a huge deal that will be felt by huge swaths of the population.

Speaker 5 And then after that, even if they did that, then they have to cut billions and billions and billions more from all the stuff that what Elon's doing is small.

Speaker 5 potatoes compared to this right you're going to have to slash food safety slash medical research slash public education, slash emergency response to natural disasters, all of those things.

Speaker 5 We've seen this happen every single time. And they want to eliminate the Department of Education, something Donald Trump just reiterated he wanted to do.

Speaker 5 And that is so unpopular, huge majorities oppose it. And we've seen this before.
After Newt Gingrich took power in 1994, the Republicans had the majority.

Speaker 5 They tried to eliminate the Department of Education. They got in a huge fight with Bill Clinton about it.
Bill Clinton won that fight. The Republicans lost it so bad that when George W.

Speaker 5 Bush ran for president in 2000, he ran on increasing education funding. Like it is so infinite.
This is such politically toxic stuff. And this is where Trump's honeymoon ends.

Speaker 5 Because right now he's out there just signing the things he wants, saying the things he wants to do.

Speaker 5 But now, if he wants to actually do something, he has to get in the fucking muck with Congress to do this stuff. And it's incredibly unpopular.

Speaker 5 And as we know also painfully well, once you start doing difficult legislative stuff with Congress,

Speaker 5 you lose the post-election machine and you start looking pretty weak and pretty much like a typical politician.

Speaker 1 So I

Speaker 1 think I agree with all that. I want

Speaker 1 all that to be true. The things that worry me this time around that I think the advantages that Trump has that

Speaker 1 Republicans didn't have in the past is, number one, the information environment now favors them in a huge way.

Speaker 1 And so we can all be screaming about all these cuts that we're seeing in numbers and look at this in the budget and it's crazy, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1 And he's going to be out there being like, well, what are you talking about? I'm giving everyone a tax cut.

Speaker 1 And I have this, you know, he's got some small provision here and there, like they might close the carried interest loophole.

Speaker 1 Or they saw something like, you know, they're going to take away tax breaks from billionaire sports team owners, you know, like flashy stuff that gets attention, right? That like breaks through.

Speaker 1 And, you know, on Med, they're going to say, we're not going to touch Medicare and Social Security like he promised.

Speaker 1 And then on Medicaid, all we want to do is just just add a work requirement don't we think that people should who get health care from the government if they're able to work should work what what's what's so crazy about that that can't get you the numbers he needs though no I know I know but I'm just I do think that fighting this is going to be difficult and also really important to make this about

Speaker 1 I think people who are going to be hurt by these cuts and not just the numbers.

Speaker 1 And also, you know, I wouldn't underestimate, like, it's obviously difficult once you get to Congress and you have to deal with Congress.

Speaker 1 That's true for every president, but, and they have a very narrow majority, Republicans, but also they have proven themselves to do whatever he wants and not oppose him on almost anything so far.

Speaker 1 So I do wonder about, you know, some of the troublemakers in the Republican House, like the Freedom Caucus and some of those people, like I wonder if they'll behave this time around just because their guys in charge in the White House and they want to show unity and get something done.

Speaker 1 I don't know. What do you think?

Speaker 5 Yeah, so let's just, so I guess there's two separate questions. I'll take the second one first, which is, can they pass this? Yeah, they absolutely can.
It's not going to be easy.

Speaker 5 It'd be incredibly messy. And it may end up where the Senate has to go first.
And then the Republicans are put in this position to just like eat it or have Trump's.

Speaker 1 agenda fail.

Speaker 5 And I think that that's probably more likely.

Speaker 5 I mean, the House Republicans have not passed some sort of consequential budget measure without Democratic help in in other than sort of the fake debt ceiling thing that Krav McCarthy did.

Speaker 5 I think that might be the only one in like a decade. Like they always need Democrats because they cannot agree on this stuff.
But push comes to shove.

Speaker 5 We should like, it's very possible that they will put aside anything they possibly care about to help Trump. So we should assume that.
So it's like, how do you win the fight? Right.

Speaker 5 And you're 100% right. This is not the media environment in which Democrats had previously succeeded in these fights at all.
Because we were, there's one thing the press loves.

Speaker 5 It's like stories about cuts right what are the you know what's going to go away what are the specifics let's interview the people who are going to lose their program and particularly in a world especially when bill clinton did this where with a very very robust regional press like it is death for republicans they're like doing local stand-ups outside the nursery home that's going to close without medicaid funding right that kills them none of that exists anymore and so we're going to have to be deft and strategic and loud in a way in which our party has been unable to do so at any point in recent history.

Speaker 5 So that is hard, but can, but we have the political high side and we have the better story to tell. So it is possible to do it.

Speaker 5 The most important thing here is to, there are two important things message-wise. One,

Speaker 5 be very specific about what is being cut, right? Don't, even though Medicaid actually has a quite popular brand, don't just say Medicaid, talk about specifically what Medicaid funds, right?

Speaker 5 Children's health care, nursing homes, right? Prescription drugs, you know, all of that. Like be specific.
When you get to the other cuts, be incredibly specific about what they are, right?

Speaker 5 There's a lot of language guidance we can get to when these cuts actually happen about how to talk about education cuts and things like that. But to connect it, why are they doing these cuts?

Speaker 5 To pay for tax cuts for huge corporations and rich people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump. That is why.
And again, like,

Speaker 1 everything has got to be a story and we've got to attach people to it, whether it's the cuts or whether it's the tax cuts.

Speaker 1 And we should have like which companies are going to be benefiting, how much they're going to get into the tax cut, how many billions they're going to get into tax cut, which billionaires are going to benefit, and then which people are going to be hurt and how they're going to be hurt across all the different kinds of spending areas, whether it's education, whether it's healthcare, whether it's food, whatever it may be.

Speaker 1 Like, we just have to be very vivid and detailed in order to like break through in this environment. Like, fewer numbers, more stories, more people on everything that we do around

Speaker 1 this fight, I think. Yeah, that's right.
Okay, before we get to Lovitt's interview with Rohit Chopra, it's time for a new segment. We're calling, wait, did that really happen?

Speaker 1 Just three quick, hard-to-believe, holy shit, are you serious clips from this week that you may or may not have missed. First up,

Speaker 1 the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the nation's cultural center right here,

Speaker 1 has a new board. And a new chairman.
Let's listen.

Speaker 6 So we took over the Kennedy Center. We didn't like what they were showing.

Speaker 11 It's a very exciting development.

Speaker 11 It's going to be great. I think we're going to do something very special.
It got very wokey. I think we're going to make it hot.
We made the presidency hot, so this should be easy.

Speaker 1 We're going to make it hot. Just like the presidency.

Speaker 1 It was getting too wokey. Why was the Kennedy Center too wokey?

Speaker 1 He was saying something like no more drag shows. Were there drag shows at the Kennedy Center? That would surprise me.

Speaker 5 I don't know, but it's like this is.

Speaker 1 It's so funny that he fires the whole board and the chairman, and he makes, he names himself chairman, and then he puts a post-out that's like, congratulations, Donald J. Trump is the new chairman.

Speaker 1 Like, oh, wow. How did you get that? How'd you finagle that one?

Speaker 5 It is. I love it.
Made this point on Twitter, but on the day we find out that inflation is going up, Donald Trump appoints himself programming opera program director.

Speaker 1 I like that he also, he originally put Rick Grinnell as the acting director, Rick Rinnell, who some people thought was going to get Secretary of State. Man, what a consolation prize.

Speaker 1 Temporary acting director of the fucking Kennedy Center. Or maybe he's the permanent director.
Maybe Trump's the chairman. I don't know.

Speaker 5 I couldn't keep track. Trump is the chairman of the board, and Rick Rinnell, as of the last time I looked at the internet, was the interim.

Speaker 1 director. He's still got it.
Oh, congrats to Ronnie.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, as of like, I wouldn't say I'm tracking the story as closely as, I don't know, the Medicaid cuts or Elon Musk, but at one point, he was the interim director.

Speaker 1 I think Lee Greenwood's on the board. I think obviously

Speaker 1 Fouch Vance. I think they got a whole, they got a whole, Susie Wiles, White House Chief of Staff.
It's just going to be some great entertainment there. I mean,

Speaker 5 the whole point of the Kennedy Center board was to raise money for the Kennedy Center.

Speaker 5 The chair of the board was David Rubinstein, the incredibly wealthy private equity hedge fund guy who owns, he's so rich, he owns a copy of the Constitution, I think.

Speaker 5 So when you get rid of him, like, is Donald Trump going to raise that money and give that money?

Speaker 1 No, I think Donald Trump just wants to, he just wants to be a host, right? This is like the whole thing of this president.

Speaker 1 He just wants to have a lot of shows at the Kennedy Center that are extremely tacky, and he gets to go on stage and welcome everybody.

Speaker 1 Like, he's just, like, it's just, you know, it's an apprentice thing.

Speaker 5 Well, I think he never went to Kennedy Center honors when he was president, I think.

Speaker 5 Because I think he knew he would be made fun of by everyone because it's all the comedians. And so this is just a way.

Speaker 5 If he can't be invited to the club, he's going to just buy the clubhouse.

Speaker 1 Good luck, buddy. Good luck.
Next up, the Kennedy Center's new chairman welcomes the anti-vax Kennedy in his cabinet with a brand new health conspiracy of his own.

Speaker 6 Well, I feel sorry for Mitch. He's not equipped mentally.
He wasn't equipped 10 years ago mentally, in my opinion. He'd let the Republican Party go to hell.

Speaker 6 If I didn't come along, the Republican Party wouldn't even exist right now.

Speaker 5 He had polio, obviously.

Speaker 6 I don't know anything about it. He had polio.
He had polio.

Speaker 5 Are you doubting that he had polio?

Speaker 6 I have no idea if he had polio. All I can tell you about him is that he shouldn't have been a leader.
He knows that.

Speaker 6 He voted against Bobby. He votes against almost everything now.
He's a very bitter guy.

Speaker 1 Donald Trump is a Mitch McConnell polio truther.

Speaker 5 Of course he is.

Speaker 1 Mitch McCullough. McConnell, who voted against RFK Jr.
and explained why it was partly because he had childhood polio and he thinks that the, you know,

Speaker 1 Kennedy's stance on vaccines is just outrageous and he couldn't do it. And Donald Trump is like, oh, he had polio.
Oh, really? Oh, yeah. I don't know anything about that.
Prove it.

Speaker 1 Prove you had polio. Prove you had polio.

Speaker 1 That is just fucking wild. Unbelievable.
Unbelievable.

Speaker 1 I hope all the Mitch McConnell lackeys out there that have become

Speaker 1 full MAGA bros are

Speaker 1 all happy about that one. I'm sure they are.

Speaker 5 Now Mitch McConnell doesn't have the authority and power in Congress to

Speaker 1 hook up all their lobbying clients.

Speaker 5 They've dropped him like a dirty sock.

Speaker 1 Embarrassing, totally embarrassing. And finally, I saved the best for last.
Georgia Congressman Buddy Carter gets in on the hot new trend of renaming places we don't own.

Speaker 1 The bizarre bill has been introduced in Congress to allow the United States to acquire Greenland and rename it Red, White, and Blue Land.

Speaker 1 The bill was presented by Republican lawmaker Earl Buddy Carter from Georgia. It's the stupidest fucking people.

Speaker 1 We are, we are, our country is being run by the stupidest fucking people.

Speaker 5 I learned about this directly from you this morning at our production meeting, and I laughed so hard. I mean, that it hurt my gut.

Speaker 1 Well, it happened earlier in the week, and I made a quick note to myself in my to-do list that just said, don't forget Greenland on Buzz of America.

Speaker 1 Because it just sort of went under the radar, as it should have. And there's a lot of other important things.

Speaker 1 And who the, you know, some fucking backbench congressman from Georgia, Republican Yahoo, decided to do it. But wow, red, white, and blue land.
Okay.

Speaker 5 It is, like, this is obviously Freedom Fries type stuff.

Speaker 5 But if you ever just want to just have an interesting experience, find a much younger person and try to explain to them the time in American history 20 years ago when we renamed all of our French fries Freedom Fries because France would not follow us into a really stupid and losing war.

Speaker 1 Honestly, it's not going to sound so shocking to them now if they have paid attention to the news in the last several years. They'll think, oh, well, that seems quaint.

Speaker 5 Well, then, actually, if you hear that story, then everything that's happened since probably makes a lot more sense to you.

Speaker 1 Telling you,

Speaker 1 what is he going to rename Europe?

Speaker 1 He's going to rename Europe like East America. Is that what it's going to be?

Speaker 5 We are recording this before the Trump Modi press conference, and I've been wondering whether there's a chance Trump's going to announce in there he's going to start calling India Indiana.

Speaker 1 At least, at the very least, the Indiana Ocean. Yeah,

Speaker 5 the Indiana Ocean. That's right.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's all of it. He's kind of, everything is America.
Everything is something about America and the world now.

Speaker 5 Still waiting for him to discover New Mexico.

Speaker 1 New Mexico. Watch out.

Speaker 1 Okay, when we come back from the break, you're going to hear Lovett's conversation with Rohit Chopra, the now former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, about why Trump and Elon are so hell-bent on closing the agency.

Speaker 1 Two quick things before that. If you're wondering just how we let billionaires hijack the government, government, tune into the newest episode of Assembly Required.

Speaker 1 This week, Stacey Abrams talks with Wired editor Leah Fager about Elon and Doge's grip on the treasury. Then strict scrutinies Kate Shaw joins to talk about the legality of it all.

Speaker 1 Listen to Assembly Required wherever you get your podcasts or on YouTube.

Speaker 1 Also, this month, Vote Save America's anxiety relief program is donating to black-led organizations and candidates of color, including Kimberly Pope Adams, who's running for a Virginia State House seat this year, a prime opportunity to expand the Democrats' one-seat majority.

Speaker 1 Here's how the anxiety relief program works: you set up a recurring donation at any amount that feels right for you, and Vote Save America will use it to build progressive power in 2025 and beyond.

Speaker 1 Go to votesaveamerica.com/slash donate to donate now, paid for by Vote Save America, votesaveamerica.com, not authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. When we come back, Rohit Chopra.

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Speaker 9 What is the secret to making great toast?

Speaker 10 Oh, you're just going to go in with the hard-hitting questions.

Speaker 9 I'm Dan Pashman from The Sporkful. We like to say it's not for foodies, it's for eaters.
We use food to learn about culture, history, and science.

Speaker 9 There was the time we looked into allegations of discrimination at bon appetite, or when I spent three years inventing a new pasta shape.

Speaker 5 It's a complex noodle that you've put together.

Speaker 9 Every episode of The Sporkful, you're going to learn something, feel something, and laugh. The Sporkful, get it wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 3 Joining us now, he was until being fired by the Trump administration a little over a week ago, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Rowit Shopro. Welcome to Pod Save America.

Speaker 2 Thanks so much for having me.

Speaker 3 So weird week for you, I imagine. You're fired on a Saturday, I believe.
I was. And what was the rest of that day like?

Speaker 2 You know, in some ways, it was pretty clarifying that we have big issues that we're going to have to deal with, including agencies that this administration may want to destroy and defund.

Speaker 3 So two weeks before the election, the CFPB put out a rule to protect consumer privacy that led to praise by the Republican chair of the Financial Services Committee in the House,

Speaker 3 a foe of the CFPB for a long, long time foe, somebody who was, when the agency was first proposed, got into an argument with Elizabeth Warren before the agency even existed, and she was the creative founder of it.

Speaker 3 There was a moment where people thought, you know what, Republicans are actually going to become populists. Republicans are going to become anti-big tech.

Speaker 3 And now, because of what the administration is doing, there's a bunch of regulations that would have reined in big tech on hold, specifically on hold at the CFPB.

Speaker 3 Can you talk about the like long-term impact of this Republican antipathy towards CFPB? And then how does that fit in with at least their public posture of claiming to be these economic populists?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think that when you really boil it down, what you see is that most of the things that the CFPB works on are not particularly sexy in some ways.

Speaker 2 Are your medical bills that are showing up on your credit reports, you know, the fees that you're paying on your bank account,

Speaker 2 how much you're paying for a mortgage or auto loan. And really what we did in these past few years was prosecute some of the biggest corporations in the country for cheating people repeatedly.

Speaker 2 So obviously the CFPB's work is pretty popular. It doesn't matter what your political affiliation is.
The only place it is unpopular is with lobbyists and politicians in Washington.

Speaker 2 And it seems pretty obvious to me that big tech giants who are increasingly entering banking and payments do not want anyone looking under the hood and do not want to follow the laws of our land.

Speaker 2 So I think that's really the big question is, are we in a moment where they are going to defund the police over Wall Street and Silicon Valley, or are they actually going to stand up for people and lower their costs?

Speaker 2 And I think it's looking more and more like the people are going to get the short end of the stick on this.

Speaker 3 Let's just talk actually about the like kind of the specifics here. What happens when, I mean, CFBB is in the middle of a bunch of investigations.

Speaker 3 There's a bunch of ongoing, very important investigations going on right now. What happens if those are just stopped in their tracks?

Speaker 2 Yeah, that would be a big wet kiss to a lot of the defendants who want to get off scot free. There is active courtroom battles right now on many of the cases we have filed.
We sued J.P.

Speaker 2 Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America for their role in fraud on Zell.

Speaker 2 We've sued the nation's biggest pawn lender for cheating military families. We've sued one of the nation's biggest subprime auto lenders

Speaker 2 for their misdeeds. And the list really goes on and on.
There's also advanced investigations against big Wall Street firms and big tech firms that that means that that will just stop.

Speaker 2 And it means that

Speaker 2 we will not be able to get justice and money for the people who have been harmed by that. Aaron Powell,

Speaker 3 Trump just announced the replacement, your replacement, somebody that was at the FDIC.

Speaker 3 Now,

Speaker 3 is there any hope that once that person's in place, some of these investigations can get unpaused, or does the leader not matter when there's such a

Speaker 3 when you have

Speaker 3 the Doge boys scrambling around the basement?

Speaker 2 I have no clue. I mean, it's all a mystery as to what would happen.
But ultimately, I think you'll see a Senate confirmation process. I've been through two of them.
You get,

Speaker 1 they're hard.

Speaker 2 And I think you'll see a lot of questions as to whether or not the law enforcement mission of the CFPB is going to actually,

Speaker 2 actually be fulfilled.

Speaker 3 I think people, certainly listeners, have heard about the various successes of the CFPB of clawing money back.

Speaker 3 What is one of the most like just shocking and egregious kinds of fraud you've seen? Not from, I think, people who, just for lack of a better term, expect it from payday lenders.

Speaker 3 They expect it from sort of skeezy financial institutions, but from big blue chip companies that are supposed to be respectable.

Speaker 3 What's the most disgusting or outrageous thing you guys were able to find and stuff?

Speaker 2 I mean, I could go for a whole hour on this.

Speaker 2 We've seen everything. We've actually seen

Speaker 2 people charge fees, one of them, a paper statement fee where the company didn't even print anything or mail anything. Those are small.

Speaker 2 They're egregious, but you know, maybe it's not going to affect someone's financial life that much. The thing that I think is so high stakes actually relates more to healthcare.

Speaker 2 You have so many people, whether it's an emergency room visit or they have a chronic condition, whatever it may be, they deal with this slew of paperwork and bills where they're covered by insurance and get stuck in this doom loop between the insurance company, the provider, the facility, the long list of players.

Speaker 2 And you know what happens?

Speaker 2 Their medical bill gets parked on their credit report.

Speaker 2 And all of a sudden, they can't pass maybe even employment verification checks or can't get an apartment, can't get a loan because of a sickness that they've had and for a bill that they do not even owe.

Speaker 2 And I think a lot of people are sick and tired that these credit reporting conglomerates, Experian,

Speaker 2 TransUnion, and Equifax have so much power over what happens in our financial life. And in some cases, don't take the basic steps to make sure that the information on your credit report is real.

Speaker 2 Allowing people to put phantom debt or park it on the credit report as a means to coerce you into paying a bill you don't owe, I think is absolutely egregious.

Speaker 2 The CFPB finalized a rule to ban that practice. And I hope that it actually takes effect.

Speaker 3 And those rules, obviously, I think the future is unknown here, but like telling people to stay home, trying to gut the agency, are some of these rules still going to keep moving forward

Speaker 1 passively?

Speaker 3 Or does it require, are they able, are they, by sending people home, are they stopping those rules right now?

Speaker 2 Well, someone needs to enforce those rules, but we also have seen reporting that they've instructed the staff to try and delay them

Speaker 2 to make sure that they never see

Speaker 2 reality.

Speaker 2 Or maybe if the CFPB has been sued by these big industry players to stop it, maybe they just won't defend against that. So to me, I think

Speaker 3 it just makes your blood just boil.

Speaker 2 But that's why this matters so much is that maybe it's small, this issue of a credit report, but for somebody who's dealing with it in the moment, it is a big, big deal.

Speaker 2 You know, maybe that one single overdraft fee doesn't matter to a person, but for somebody who got hit with four fees rather than one, it can send them on a treadmill of debt.

Speaker 2 Maybe one student loan payment being misallocated is not a big deal, but when they screw up your entire loan so that you don't get to qualify for a public service cancellation, that's a big deal.

Speaker 2 It's just, it's the, like the,

Speaker 3 you know, we're in this moment where, you know, oh, Democrats are falling into a trap of defending institutions.

Speaker 3 And it's like, man, this is, I know people don't believe government works for them, but I think a lot of that is people have no fucking idea that this is happening.

Speaker 3 And like, this to me is like, if there's anything that you would want your government to do, it is to have a consumer watchdog empowered with enough force and might to actually take on these institutions and win.

Speaker 3 It's an extraordinary story of government at its best. And I'm glad to hear you still think there's value in telling that story right now.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And I hear every day we would get thousands of people who would file complaints with us on our website.
And what was great is it didn't go into some black hole.

Speaker 2 We actually sent it to the company and told the company, respond.

Speaker 1 And without really

Speaker 2 any resources at all, other than the tech that we created, people every day were getting refunds. They were getting their credit report fixed.
Sometimes they saved their home or their car.

Speaker 2 And for those individuals, you hear,

Speaker 2 I I read the letters that they would send about finally they felt like their government was doing something that they really benefited from.

Speaker 2 And I think that's just so important that we demonstrate we don't do this just because there's some acronym that maybe people won't remember.

Speaker 2 We do it because we want to give people power and dignity in their life. And I think that's exactly what the CFPB has done for so many.

Speaker 3 Well, I called the CFPB helpline before we recorded, and I called it during business hours, and it is no longer open. Right now, that number leads to go straight to voicemail.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 they are trying to stop people from having that experience, which I think tells you a lot.

Speaker 2 Well, that sounds like censorship to me.

Speaker 3 So nine days before Elon's Doge initiative got into the CFPB, Musk made a deal with Visa to add a digital wallet feature to X as part of a broader plan to turn it into an everything app.

Speaker 3 It seems like a lot of inspiration is being drawn from these Chinese super apps. There's WeChat, there's Alipay.

Speaker 3 And I want to get your sense on what the dangers are there, especially if there isn't an

Speaker 1 active CFPB.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so I think everyone realizes there is a totally different way that we pay for things now. When we go in the store, we tap.
Online, it's different. There's a whole set of new choices.

Speaker 2 But here's what's really

Speaker 2 shifting.

Speaker 2 The more and more that tech companies and big financial firms know about our purchase history, know our transaction history, know our location, know our friends and social networking, the more and more we are going to creep into a world where there aren't price tags for goods, but instead we're going to have surveillance-based personal pricing based on our mood, based on what we're searching for.

Speaker 2 And you see a lot of big companies, Google, Facebook wanted to create its own currency, in fact. And now we're seeing how even X, even Twitter wants to be a way that you can move money and pay.

Speaker 2 And there's enormous value in all of that. And you know, I don't know.
I cannot, I have no idea if Doge is there to snoop.

Speaker 2 or to find out what its competitors are up to, to find out the plans that other companies have. I just don't know, but certainly that is something that many are worried about.

Speaker 3 So this would be, like, just so people understand, like, what's so bad about that, right? Like, what's so bad about having like surge pricing for pizza?

Speaker 3 Or like, Google knows that, uh, Google knows based on my mood or whether or not I've had an edible how much I want. this takeout right now.

Speaker 3 Like what, what's the negative consequence of having these companies with this level of access to data?

Speaker 2 Well, I certainly think that for those of us who have serious medical diagnoses, when we're targeted or charged different prices because they know we need certain medication or they know we need certain medical supplies, or for teenagers who are maybe in a rough place personally, being able to target them with certain information or to be able to extract from them from older adults who might be lonely, I think actually the price tag is probably one of the best consumer protections we have out there.

Speaker 2 And when we individualize every single price, we're setting ourselves up for an economy that I don't think we want.

Speaker 2 I've long been worried about people who call for an Uber or Lyft and late at night that maybe

Speaker 2 a woman calling a ride share is getting a higher price than a male in the same exact place or that there are ways to discriminate based on our personal characteristics.

Speaker 2 And I also don't think that we want these big companies knowing everything that goes on in our life before we are about to purchase something.

Speaker 3 This is why they were afraid of you. You know, Mark Zuckerberg in a recent interview, he did this kind of aweshucks routine about like, it was so weird.
All of a sudden, CFPB was looking into

Speaker 3 Facebook, which doesn't make sense because we're not a bank. And he kind of implies that what if he suggests that it might have been political in some way.

Speaker 3 You talked about the fact that they were introducing a currency, which would obviously be a reason for them to be

Speaker 3 looked at. But like

Speaker 3 beyond that,

Speaker 3 why would CFPB need to be a watchdog when it's supposed to be a consumer financial protection agency?

Speaker 1 Why would it have to go after Facebook?

Speaker 2 We're supposed to police banking, lending, and payments.

Speaker 2 And when companies like Facebook are creating their own currency, and fortunately it got killed, but you see more of these big giants lurching into lending and payments, it's not the CFPB expanding into tech.

Speaker 2 It's these companies expanding into the core work that we do.

Speaker 2 So it is true that Google actually sued us because we were asking questions or wanted to ask questions about how they were handling people's money and their data.

Speaker 2 So I think that this is really about power, is that there are certain companies who feel that they should not have to follow the laws that our Congress passes, that they are somehow special, that there is an exemption for fancy technology.

Speaker 2 But I think we as people should want a lot of technological progress, but not if it comes at the expense of our dignity, our democracy, and frankly, fairness in our economy.

Speaker 3 And like you've been accused of being anti-tech or, you know, sort of anti-capitalist or whatever it may be because of this position, but you were a McKinsey person.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's funny. I think it's, I actually think most business people

Speaker 2 want there to be some rule of law.

Speaker 3 Well, that's what I was going to say. Like, presumably, these companies would like to compete on a level playing field in which they don't have to be in a kind of race to find the most kind of

Speaker 3 invasive forms of data monitoring or the most kind of rapacious kind of pricing.

Speaker 3 Presumably some of these companies would be interested in having a clear set of rules that they know allows them to compete without having to do these kinds of things.

Speaker 2 Actually, I really feel for all the businesses out there

Speaker 2 who sometimes think that they're chumps because they're following the law, especially small players, while big giants can break the law with impunity, pay a fine, and move on.

Speaker 2 I mean, you asked about Facebook. When I was an FTC commissioner, Facebook was embroiled in a scandal related to Cambridge Analytica.
It had flagrantly violated an FTC law enforcement order.

Speaker 2 And what happened was that they paid billions of dollars so that Mark Zuckerberg and other executives could get an immunity clause in the settlement.

Speaker 2 And I actually think most people, it's not just everyday citizens, it's even business owners, are asking themselves, how do these big CEOs seem to always get off scot-free?

Speaker 2 You know, after the financial crisis, John, it felt like there was absolutely no accountability. Millions of people lost their home, but barely any executives were held accountable.

Speaker 2 In fact, their companies were bailed out and they got bigger. And I think that's just fundamentally wrong.

Speaker 3 Are there any lessons you have from being at CFVB? You know, there's a way in which right now, I I think it feels a little bit like,

Speaker 3 oh, Democrats are, we didn't know you could just dispatch your favorite billionaire into the bowels of every agency and start slashing and burning things that you don't like.

Speaker 3 Obviously, we have this very difficult challenge, the classic challenge of we are trying to defend democracy.

Speaker 3 And one of the ways we're trying to do that is to demonstrate why the rules are important, which means we're following rules that the other side doesn't. And we're trying to defend the game.

Speaker 3 And you can't defend the game while breaking the rules because then you're no longer playing the game.

Speaker 3 But are there ways in which, looking back, you think, man, if I knew how bad this was going to be, I would have pushed harder here. I would have fought this harder.

Speaker 3 We were a little too conciliatory here. We were trying to reach compromise with the Republicans there.

Speaker 3 Are there any places like that where you look back and think the lesson for me here is we should have gone harder?

Speaker 2 Well, you always have some regrets. And I think when it comes down to it,

Speaker 2 there is so much abuse of power by some of the biggest powerful companies, and it takes a lot of effort to stand up to that and prosecute that when they violate the law.

Speaker 2 And we could always use more energy from the public to unearth that fraud. So, yeah, I mean, look, at the end of the day, we always made sure that we were following every law, and we did.

Speaker 2 And I don't regret any of that. I think we cannot have a strong society if individuals feel that they can just sidestep the the laws of the land.

Speaker 3 Aaron Ross Powell So one aspect of CFPB that's hard to measure is where it has had an impact by scaring institutions preemptively

Speaker 3 from doing shady stuff with fees,

Speaker 3 misleading rules, interest rates, whatever it may be.

Speaker 3 What are you worried about right now that like you know banks that are that some of these that are like kind of raptors testing the fences, what is the next iteration of consumer abuses that you're worried about?

Speaker 2 Well, you know,

Speaker 2 it's really interesting. When I got actually to both the FTC and the CFPB,

Speaker 2 it really was so clear to me that

Speaker 2 it was asleep at the wheel. I mean, we saw so much crime against consumers that really it was almost a catch and release policy.
You find them and you let them go.

Speaker 2 And I do think that just having

Speaker 2 someone who is a watchdog, it actually does scare off some of the worst, worst abuses against people.

Speaker 2 And this is why I really do think that corporate law enforcement, where people can actually stop those abuses, it doesn't just, it's not just the tens of billions of dollars we've gotten back for people, but we have stopped market abuses like we saw in the financial crisis that destroyed trillions of wealth,

Speaker 2 and led to so many people losing their homes. And look, John, you ask, like,

Speaker 2 what are we learning from this moment? I do think that there are sometimes places where we need to say openly, this part of government isn't working. That was certainly true in the start of the CFPB.

Speaker 2 We actually shut down a corrupt and failed agency called the Office of Thrift Supervision and created a new one.

Speaker 3 I remember when the letters came down off the building.

Speaker 2 Yeah, And I do think sometimes we got to find places that aren't working and shut them down.

Speaker 2 But when we do it, it's because we are doing it to serve people better, not to serve the powerful even more.

Speaker 3 Are there ways you're worried about AI being used to harm consumers in a way that the CFPB could have protected against or could protect against in the future?

Speaker 2 Well, one thing that we have not really reined in enough is

Speaker 2 the explosion of chatbots. And now, when you are struggling with something, it is very hard to talk to someone to fix it.
You're often speaking to a chatbot.

Speaker 2 The CFPB, when I was there, we did a study of these chatbots that banks use, and they all had

Speaker 2 these human-like names. For example, Bank of America called their chatbot Erica.

Speaker 2 And you ask, you say to them, Something is wrong. This is not my

Speaker 2 I did not make this charge.

Speaker 2 My payment wasn't processed

Speaker 1 right.

Speaker 2 And sometimes you just want to get things fixed. And instead, you feel like you're in a doom loop with the chat bot where you're saying something and they're saying the same thing back to you.

Speaker 2 We also really worry about AI being used to

Speaker 2 impersonate people. A lot of older adults in our country are getting

Speaker 2 very realistic texts, calls that are mimicking the voices of their loved ones.

Speaker 2 And I think that that's a place where there's a lot we can do with technological progress to make life better, but we should not delude ourselves that it can also be used as a weapon and it can also be used as a tool by foreign nations that are seeking to do our people harm.

Speaker 3 When Elon Musk posted delete CFPB on social media, he he replied to someone, and it is an unfortunate reality of our current dystopia that I have to describe in detail the post of this unelected billionaire.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 he said with such generosity, CFPB has done a non-zero amount of good or something to that effect.

Speaker 3 Have you considered trying to reach out to him? Have you reached out to him? Have you spoken to him about this?

Speaker 3 And if you did or could, what would you want to convey?

Speaker 2 Well, I guess my view is that I don't think any of us should be groveling to billionaires to save our country.

Speaker 2 We should believe that people control our country. And I think we should be worried that when there is a click of CEOs that seem to call the shots.

Speaker 2 And frankly, I do think that that's part of the problems that not only

Speaker 2 that everyone is worried about when it it comes to the massive mismatch in power.

Speaker 2 It's why I think so many of us are huge fans of Lena Kahn and all the work she has done to really challenge that power. And I think that that is going to be something that we have to continue to do.

Speaker 2 We shouldn't be asking these individuals for permission. They are not our elected officials.

Speaker 3 Well, you could just help the fuck off.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 2 look, it's very clear that there are individuals who have an agenda,

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 they're going to pursue that, and it's going to take us to make sure that people are following the law and

Speaker 2 we're using our own voices and our own power.

Speaker 3 You're not giving me an inch on this.

Speaker 1 Well, look, I mean,

Speaker 2 do I like what he says about the CFPB? No, but I don't think we should be saying, you know, he may have his own motives for this, but it's up to us to make sure that we can rein that power in.

Speaker 2 Not ask them to just be nice.

Speaker 3 Well, for sure. It's a pretty worrying time for people at the agency.
What's your message?

Speaker 3 It's a group of dedicated, nonpartisan people who are there to kind of protect the interests of consumers. It's returned an extraordinary amount of money to consumers.

Speaker 3 It's hard to come up with a better example of government that is currently being lied about and undermined by this unelected clique.

Speaker 3 There are people in that agency that are worried about, people have been fired, they're worried about being fired, they don't know whether or not the right thing to do for their families is to try to stay and fight or leave if there is some kind of an offer to get out.

Speaker 3 What is your message to the people at your former agency?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 look at people all across our government.

Speaker 2 There are people who specialize in certain roles. Some of them prosecute terrorism.

Speaker 2 You can't really do do that in the private sector. There are just some things that are done for the public's sake.

Speaker 2 And I think that this is a moment where it's really hard to tell them what they should do because they have to really live their life. And I always encourage them to serve as long as you possibly can.

Speaker 2 But look, this is a real moment for everybody who is trying to serve the public. I think that it

Speaker 2 it forces all of us to reflect on how do we talk about those who serve the public.

Speaker 2 I can tell you a lot of people who work at the CFPB can make a lot more money if they were in the private sector.

Speaker 2 And many of them choose to do that work because they believe that people shouldn't be treated.

Speaker 2 poorly by a bank or a mortgage company or a student lender because it's about people's personal dignity and they believe it so deeply.

Speaker 3 After you crack down on ITT Technical Institute for its illegal recruiting tactics, the former chief executive called you an economic terrorist who should be sent to Guantanamo Bay for about a decade of RR, which should include an aggressive regimen of water sports.

Speaker 3 So, what is your favorite water sport?

Speaker 2 I

Speaker 2 sometimes in this business, there will be CEOs that threaten you,

Speaker 2 that hire hire people to follow you. And it's pretty damn scary, but we just got to keep going

Speaker 2 because we know that these

Speaker 2 individuals clearly feel that the law doesn't apply to them and that their answer when we ask questions is to tell people that or to fundamentally threaten their lives.

Speaker 5 And I think it's pretty disgusting.

Speaker 3 You know, you just had this period of time.

Speaker 3 You ran this agency that has been, that has survived

Speaker 3 from its inception, a concerted effort by major financial interests, lobbyists, right-wing conservatives, Republicans to destroy it. First of all, they tried to make it so it couldn't exist.

Speaker 3 They wouldn't let Elizabeth Warren run it from the jump.

Speaker 3 They have lied about it from the beginning, claiming it's a sludge fund, which is a lie, claiming it's trying to debank conservatives, which is a lie, right?

Speaker 2 Actually, exactly the opposite. We put into place policies to block that, and the bank lobby sued us for it.

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, what right now do you see as the most hopeful path for the CFPB to survive

Speaker 3 until

Speaker 3 a time in which we can put a

Speaker 3 leader in charge of it who believes in it?

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, it's really what the public says and

Speaker 2 does and calls their members about what they protest um

Speaker 2 we need everyone's voices and i i you know john i think a lot of people including many people who probably listen they probably feel pretty fatigued they feel beat down

Speaker 2 they feel like this is such a chaotic moment and they just need a break And I understand that.

Speaker 2 I know how that can feel. But I also feel feel like it's so important to remember why we love this place, this country.
And part of it is because we can fight back and

Speaker 2 really make sure that we do not lose the things that are so important. And I just think that's really important to remember, even when times are really tough.

Speaker 3 And I just think it's really impressive that you simply will not acknowledge how maybe cathartic it could be to tell Elon Musk to go fuck himself.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 2 even if it is, I think that I'm not going to dignify any individual billionaire and

Speaker 2 what they want to dictate about our country because the whole

Speaker 2 game of why this country is better is because we're not supposed to allow that to happen. We fought hard for one person to have one vote.

Speaker 2 We fought hard to make sure that we weren't being controlled by royalty. And that's maybe some of those lessons applied today, too.

Speaker 3 Rohit Chopra, thank you so much for your time.

Speaker 2 Thanks so much, John.

Speaker 1 That's our show for today. Thanks to Rohit Chopra for joining us here in LA.
We will be back with a new show on Tuesday. Bye, everybody.
Bye, everyone.

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