MAGA Revolts Over Epstein List Reversal

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Welcome to Pod Save America.

I'm John Favreau.

I'm Tommy Vitor.

Love it is off this week, so I guess we're going to do our best to fill the 30 or 40 minutes of insight we typically get from him.

Wow.

Okay.

Apparently, you didn't like his joke about your Twitter habits when you were on vacation.

Look, it was a big piece of legislation.

It was.

It was a big, beautiful piece of it.

And my tweets did not matter.

I know.

As we have found out at all.

They did nothing.

Fortunately, we do have a lot lot to cover today.

We're going to talk about what's next for Trump's big shitty bill, now that it's a big shitty law.

Talk about ICE becoming bigger than most countries' militaries as part of the bill.

Elon Musk's new America Party.

Can't wait to join.

Launched on July 4th weekend.

It's like the Innovation Party.

It is.

Deep cut.

I was wondering who would make the Innovation Party joke first.

Me too.

It was you.

And MAGA World turning on Trump over the latest Jeffrey Epstein revelations or lack thereof,

I guess.

So we will dig into that as well.

We do want to start with the horrific floods that hit Kerr County, Texas over the weekend, which is a county just northwest of San Antonio.

As of late Monday afternoon, at least 89 people have died, including 27 campers and staff from Camp Mystic, which is an all-girl summer camp that was essentially washed away by the floods.

Many more people are missing as of right now.

It has been absolutely just gut-wrenching to see photos of these eight and nine-year-old girls who died, to hear their parents talk about them, to hear from the parents who are like just still at this moment looking for their kids.

It's just an unimaginable tragedy.

This is now one of the deadliest floods of the last century.

And this area of Texas, in particular, is one of the most dangerous regions in the country for floods.

So naturally, there have been plenty of questions about whether anything could have been done to get people out of harm's way earlier.

The Trump administration is getting criticism for the Doge cuts to the National Weather Service, the NWS, where 10% of the staff has been fired, including meteorologists, and two of the offices that now have vacancies are in the area of the flood.

The NWS has also had to delay weather balloon launches across the country, and those help forecast storms.

All that said, the National Weather Service did issue timely warnings about this flood.

The problem was that those warnings didn't get to the people who were in danger.

This is known as the last mile problem.

Apparently, Kirk County opted against investing in a flood warning system back in 2017 because they thought it was too expensive.

So Trump responded to some of the criticism over the weekend when he took questions from reporters at his golf club in New Jersey.

Here he is, accompanied by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

Are you investigating whether some of the cuts to the federal government left key vacancies at the National Weather Service or the emergency coordinates?

They did not.

They did.

I'll tell you,

if you look at that,

what a situation that all is.

And that was really the Biden setup.

That was not our setup.

But I wouldn't blame Biden for it either.

I would

just say this is a hundred-year catastrophe

and it's just so horrible to watch.

In light of the floods, do you think that the federal government needs to hire back any of the meteorologists who were fired in the last few months?

I wouldn't know that.

I really wouldn't.

I would think not.

Still planning to phase out FEMA?

Well, FEMA is

something we can talk about later.

But right now, they're busy working.

What the fuck is the water situation?

The water setup?

I could blame Biden, but I won't blame Biden, but I just did blame Biden.

I've found the political fighting over this pretty tough to stomach or really engage with.

you know you watch these interviews with some dad combing through like this rubble trying to find his kids and it's just like sort of all you can think about it does sound like what you said was right like the last mile problem getting the warnings to people who are in rural areas with no cell service in the middle of the night like that does sound like that was the broader problem than predicting the flood.

But I thought the letters in, or the questions in Chuck Schumer's letter were appropriate and important.

We can say that on Monday morning, Chuck Schumer sent a letter to the Inspector General at the Commerce Department demanding an investigation.

So that's the letter.

Yeah, like we need to asking in the letter.

Basically, if cuts to the National Weather Service slowed down things or put people at risk, I mean, that's an important question going forward.

I could have done without the

instant leap to blame, name your political opponent for this tragedy on Twitter.

I think that stuff's just gross.

Yeah.

I mean, I think, well, I think the really gross stuff was I saw some people be like, well, Texas, you voted for Trump, and this is what you get.

And you're like, we're Americans.

We're all Americans.

Don't do that shit.

I think that two things can be true.

The Doge cuts to the National Weather Service in this case had nothing to do with the tragedy.

You know, it seems like the National Weather Service, like I said, did send out a timely warning.

It just didn't get to people.

And that's, you know, not the Trump administration saying that.

That's independent meteorologists and experts have all said this.

But

it is true that we are now facing worsening climate disasters.

That's just a fact.

Whether or not you believe in climate change, it's still a fact.

You can look at the record.

It's like recorded now, which is like the hurricanes, floods, droughts, you name it,

they've been more frequent and more intense over the last couple of decades.

And so now, you know, we need to figure out what to do about that.

And there's two things you can do about it, aside from efforts to combat climate change.

But in the immediate, you can figure out how to prepare for these disasters and you can figure out how to respond to them.

On the preparation side, you know, you cut 10% of the national weather staff, a bunch of meteorologists.

Then you have meteorologists way before this hit saying like, we're about to head into a hurricane season where we can't predict storms as well.

And we're all flying blind here.

This is like really bad.

So it's horrible that they made those cuts.

And then on the other end, you know, Trump had been talking about getting rid of FEMA.

They installed a director at FEMA who told the FEMA staff when he got there that he wasn't aware that we had a hurricane season.

That seems bad.

Yeah, we probably should have thought twice about shooting down that Chinese balloon.

Could have used that thing.

That's right.

You know what I'm saying?

Now, back in February, the Trump administration fired hundreds of FEMA employees and they offered buyouts to hundreds more, maybe thousands more.

So yeah, they're definitely gutting FEMA.

They also rescinded grants that are designed to help communities prepare for climate disasters, which seems like a very bad idea.

They disbanded all all these FEMA advisory councils made up of actual professionals who understand disaster relief, and then they put in place new politicized entities in their stead.

And to your point, yeah, Trump now wants to get rid of FEMA after hurricane season.

He says, you know, he'll disperse those responsibilities to the states, but I have no confidence that'll happen.

And states don't have the same money.

They don't have the same resources to do it.

And they have finite resources, so they're going to put it to the things that are most acute political need for whoever that leader is.

And then, great, the big, big picture stuff is we're pulling out of Paris climate accords.

We are gutting tax credits for renewable energy in this big, beautiful bill

where Trump's doing everything he can to prioritize oil and gas and coal, which will exacerbate climate change.

And there's just Republicans can't seem to agree on the fact that this is exacerbating climate disasters in their communities as well.

And it's just, it's hard because when Doge was doing...

what Doge did, you know, there were almost too many cuts, too many stories, too many horrors to focus on any one of them.

But I remember the National Weather Service cuts.

I remember thinking that was crazy.

It seemed crazy.

And we didn't really talk much about it at the time.

And there was a bunch of like meteorologists who are usually not partisan types, like local meteorologists, some of them during their broadcasts being like, hey, by the way, usually I can tell you, there's this guy in Florida who's like, usually I can tell you when the hurricane's going to turn.

If it's going to turn, I actually can't tell you now.

We don't know.

And so, again, like we, you don't want to talk about it, you know, in the midst of tragedy, especially if it doesn't directly have to do with the tragedy.

But a couple of weeks from now,

who's going to be talking about the National Weather Service cuts?

I know.

It's hard because you don't want to be like Trump.

You don't want to be the guy who is literally attacking California elected officials for the LA fires while they were still burning.

That is disgusting.

You don't want to be like him and claiming that he turned some valve in Northern California and thus saved all of us by allowing the water to flow down.

But it is beyond frustrating that the fires, extreme weather events, all of this is going to get worse because of Trump's climate policies.

And yet we can't seem to get people to tie the last two together.

I guess we just have to keep making the case.

And on the micro level, you know,

there's the 2017, Kerr County first, you know, thought about and then ultimately rejected this like warning system, right?

And part of that was because a couple of years earlier, there had been a flood, a deadly flood too.

And there's a county next door that actually did have this system in place and and this is a kind of system where you know right now you can get alerts on your phone but if you are out of cell phone range or it's the middle of the night like it was here

yeah you're having your phone off or you're gonna see like oh flash flood alert you know but they have things like they can have sirens like they do for tornadoes right they they have these systems they can do and this county right is you know was probably like i don't think taxpayers want to do that because you know no one especially sometimes in red states and red state officials like they don't want to pay for the things that you have to pay for because government's always inefficient and government's stupid.

But, like, you know what?

When we're going to be facing many more climate disasters and they're going to become more extreme, they're going to become more frequent.

Like, yeah, I think it's like time to make a case that investing in government preparedness and response is really fucking important.

Yeah, definitely.

It's a tragedy.

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All right, let's talk about Donald Trump's economic plan, which the Republican Congress passed and the president signed into law at a 4th of July ceremony at the White House that obviously included a B-2 bomber flyover.

The next big fight now will be overselling the wildly unpopular law to a very skeptical public, and it appears that the administration's primary strategy is to just keep lying just about what the law does, who it harms.

Scott Bessant was out on the Sunday shows peddling the bullshit that the only people affected by the trillion-dollar cut to Medicaid will be able-bodied adults who choose not to work, despite the fact that only 8%,

8% of Medicaid recipients fit this description.

Here's a clip of Bessant.

Putting a work requirement is,

by definition, a change to benefits.

There are no change in benefits.

There is a change in requirements to get the benefits.

Able-bodied Americans are not vulnerable Americans.

People can get off Medicaid and get a job that has good health care benefits.

It is a group of Democrats who unfortunately seem to think that poor people are stupid.

I don't think poor people are stupid.

I think they have agency.

To be fair, I think he thinks we're all stupid.

I think he does too.

He is really dishonest.

Not a very good messenger.

No.

I don't think I've really heard him talk that much.

He was terrible there.

I mean, the truth is, experts think 17 million people are going to lose their health insurance because of this bill.

Most of that is because they're going to use red tape and bureaucracy to undo a lot of the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, basically provisions that allowed the working poor to get Medicaid.

And they're just going to do it through red tape because they know that if you're on Medicaid and you're trying to cobble together a bunch of part-time jobs to pay the bills, it's going to be difficult to prove that you worked 80 hours that month or volunteered for 80 hours.

They also know most Medicaid recipients are already working.

And you mentioned the 92% stat.

The way that breaks down is two-thirds of adults age 19 to 64 on Medicaid are working.

This is according to a Kaiser Family Foundation study.

And then nearly three in 10 were not working because their caregivers are sick or have disabilities or are attending school.

And otherwise, they qualify for exemptions.

So that means, well, we're going to wring this much savings out of 8% of the expansion population.

No, what's going to happen is what happened in Arkansas when they put in place a policy like this, where 18,000 people lost coverage because of work requirements and there was no increase in employment because those people were already working.

They just got pushed out of the system because they couldn't do the bureaucracy.

Yeah, I just, it was the first time I caught this in that clip, is Scott Besson being like, I think people can get off Medicaid and get a job.

There's been this, you hear it from Besson, you hear it from Trump people, MAGA people, that they're like, everyone's sitting home collecting Medicaid benefits.

That's not how Medicaid works because you don't get a check.

It's not benefits.

You go to the hospital and you have health insurance.

You go see a doctor, you have health insurance.

And just like people who don't have Medicaid have health insurance,

it gets paid for when you go to the doctor, right?

Or sometimes you have to, you know, have a copay, which by the way, copays are going to be raised as part of this as well.

So it's not just the work requirements.

But like this idea that people are just sitting there collecting Medicaid benefits is not, it's just fucking ludicrous.

Makes no sense.

Apparently only 31% of the cuts, Steve Ratner had a piece about this in the New York Times.

Only 31% of the cuts to Medicaid are due to the work requirements.

So even if, even as unfair as it is that you just mentioned that, all the work requirements and how onerous they are and how they're going to result in a lot of people losing it, that's still only 31% of the trillion-dollar cut there.

So the rest of it is just Medicaid cuts that have nothing to do with work requirements.

Andy Lowry had a great piece about this in The Atlantic, and she made the point that other people have made, which is this is not really a work requirement, it's a work reporting requirement.

Exactly.

And it's the reporting that's the bullshit.

You think to yourself, okay, well, if you're working,

shouldn't you just, don't you just check a box and say, I'm working, and that's it?

It's like, no, no, no, you have to like create an ID and a login and then upload verification documents and you have to collect the documents.

And if you miss a call from a caseworker, you lose your health care.

And like, this is how this works.

The other state you mentioned, Arkansas, that has these requirements is Georgia has this.

Georgia pays, the states also, by the way, have to now set up and pay for these verification systems for Medicaid.

right so Georgia pays nine dollars in overhead for every one dollar it spends on care uh for its medicaid program just just to do the verification thing which again hasn't led to more people working and has just kicked people off the program and they're talking about this because they know it's popular like the again the kaiser family foundation did a poll 68 percent of voters supported medicaid work requirements as described by the house bill but once you'd informed them that the majority of medicaid recipients were already working and you explained to them sort of the risk of losing covert that we just talked about via bureaucracy,

the support for Medicaid work requirements dropped as low as 35%.

So a 33 point decrease in support for that policy when people really understand it.

The hard part is getting people to understand it.

So those are the work requirements, but obviously there was a lot more in the bill that passed.

I don't know.

I wasn't here last week, but I know, and I know you haven't got a chance to talk about the bill broadly yet since it passed, at least on this podcast.

What did you make of the bill now that you've had a few more days to digest like what's actually in it?

Yeah, I mean, it's sort of a combination of the worst of like Reaganomics, anti-social safety net with like old school, disgusting pork barrel politics.

Like, if you look at the tax cuts, here's some people who get, or people or entities who get a tax cut thanks to this big, beautiful bill.

The bill eliminates a $200 firearm registration fee when you purchase a gun silencer.

So, good news for you.

I know you're in the market.

That's crazy.

There's a tax break solely for Alaskan fishing boats and processing plants.

There's also a special deduction for Alaskan whaling boat captains.

So thank God we're finally helping other people killing whales.

There's a specific tax break for the venture capital industry that's going to cost the rest of us $17 billion.

$2 billion tax break for the rum industry.

Oil and gas industry gets exempted from paying the bare minimum 15% tax on big corporations.

If you're worth up to $30 million, you no longer have to pay the estate tax.

If you're a couple individuals, that's exempted up to $14 million.

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos get a special $1 billion provision that will allow them to sell tax-exempt bonds to build spaceports.

Very important.

What a great gift for Jeff Bezos at your wedding.

Yes.

Over the weekend where he spent $50 million to rent Venice.

Was it $50 million?

$50 million where they basically took over Venice and flew a bunch of private jets there, had a big wedding.

Like the split screen of that, because it's like most people in the country, like, I don't know, were they paying attention to the bill or were they paying attention to like all the pup culture entertainment coverage of the Bezos wedding?

Well, no, no one was paying attention to the bill because if you weren't staring at cable like we were, it was all Diddy coverage.

And then the Idaho murder case, like zero coverage was of this bill.

It was actually very depressing.

There's also a huge tax break for business owners and people who get paid through pass-through business entities like S-Corps and stuff.

That costs $800 billion.

So, yeah, I mean, mean, this thing is just like your classic special interest corporate tax break bill, along with the cruelest Medicaid cuts and then these just idiotic gutting of renewable energy companies.

Trump is

now has got to sell the bill.

You know, so he's got Besson out there and everyone else lying about the work requirement stuff.

They also, he's, of course, he's also enlisting the federal government in this whole effort, the propaganda campaign, which, you know, used to be something that violated some kind of law, and now we're just like, oh, whatever.

He had the Social Security Administration, supposed to be

just a bunch of civil servants and a nonpartisan entity, the Social Security Administration.

They sent an email to all Social Security beneficiaries, quote, celebrating the passage of the one big beautiful bill, a landmark piece of legislation that delivers long-awaited tax relief to millions of older Americans.

That, I guess, is referring to the provision that temporarily provides a $6,000 senior deduction, which is is meant to fulfill Trump's campaign promise to end taxes on Social Security, which the bill doesn't do, even though Trump and the White House keep saying it does.

Just stating as a fact that it does is a lie.

Yeah.

It's a lie.

Do you think shit like that works?

And just talk about the Social Security thing.

And then in general, like, how easy or difficult do you think it'll be for Trump to make this law popular using the bully pulpit and sort of, I guess, the entire federal government?

I mean, I wish I could scoff at like that social security email or have faith that people eventually learn that it's a lie when they get their tax bill.

But I always think back to how powerful it was for Trump to put his name on the stimulus checks and how much that stuck with people.

And just I worry that this was an official government communication that went to 71 million people.

71 million people got a total lie from the U.S.

government.

And like this policy, like so many policies in this bill, does nothing for the poorest seniors.

It'll help out ones that are wealthier.

So some challenges challenges for him in terms of selling this bill.

It's like the 2017 tax cuts were extended in this bill.

I would imagine that in 2018 or 19, people like saw that their tax bill went down.

That won't really be the case here if it's just an extension.

So, maybe that'll help us fight it.

It's useful that the Cato Institute is saying this is going to add $6 trillion in debt to the company.

Like, that's really bad, and it's going to cost us up to $1.9 trillion in debt servicing alone by like 2036.

It's nice to see, you know, voices you don't always see attacking Trump talking about this, but like Elon Musk being out there calling it a disaster, utterly insane and destructive.

Like that was a verbatim quote, I think is really helpful.

It does suck though, like in terms of just helping people feel the impact.

The no tax on tips provision, some of the things Trump really wants, they go into effect right away.

But the cuts to Medicaid are delayed a couple of years.

So we're going to have to help people understand how bad those are going to be before there are elections.

I think that

there's two parts to this, to the selling of this and how people feel about it, I think.

One is which narrative you buy about the bill, whether Trump's or what the Democrats are going to say, what we're all going to say.

And part of that is dependent on who makes the better case for some of the stuff that doesn't happen until later.

Then there's just...

You know, I was calling it his economic plan, which I kind of think we go back and forth.

I'm like, should we call it the bill, the beautiful bill, this bill, that bill?

But it's like, it's his economic plan, right?

And Trump and Republicans, they all went all in on it.

They said, this is our plan to, we, we ran for, Trump ran for president, Republicans ran for office to say they're going to bring down costs because everyone was very pissed about high costs.

And this is the plan to do that.

And so now in 2026, people can ask themselves, do I feel like I can afford things?

Again, do I think the prices are down?

Do I think that I can afford a house?

You spend $4 trillion

at a time of

high interest rates, high prices that haven't come down,

high costs that haven't come down, partly because he has just also levied a sales tax, essentially, with tariffs on everything we buy from all over the world.

Just as we recorded this today, he announced another like 25% tear.

He sent a letter to South Korea and Japan each telling them like, oh, I'm going to levy 25%

tariffs on both of your countries.

So

and there's going to be more, I guess Tunisia got a letter too.

Tunisia.

Tunisia got a letter.

Yeah.

There's going to be more of these now.

And so you're going to have people paying slightly higher taxes.

Well, it depends on the product on all the stuff they buy.

And

you have inflation that has come down, but you still have prices that are high.

Interest rates are not coming down anytime soon, which is why he's yelling at Jerome Powell and like threatening to fire him.

Right.

And so I think that you can make a case whether or not some of these provisions go into effect that like, hey, in 2026, are you happy with your cost cost of living?

Are you happy with like what you're able to afford?

If not, then like I thought Donald Trump was supposed to fucking fix it.

Yeah, I do think there's a lot of sort of like macroeconomic factors that will determine how people feel about him in 2026 and then hopefully not him, but maybe J.D.

Vance in 2028, right?

If inflation is still high, it is very, very bad for him.

And just in terms of like kind of feeling the impact on healthcare, you are starting to see reports of rural hospitals closing or not getting reopened.

I imagine we're going to see a lot of that because those rural hospitals are going to be the ones who are the most financially impacted by these changes.

And that's going to really impact people's lives.

If there's no hospital within 50 miles of you all of a sudden,

you can't live like that.

Yeah, and it's a good, that is happening now.

There's a New Times piece about a county in eastern North Carolina that's been trying to reopen their one hospital with Medicaid money, which they almost certainly won't be able to do now.

The key quote from a local real estate agent who's leading the charge said, quote, not having the hospital here is costing lives.

this is the most important thing for us one clinic in rural nebraska has already closed the guy who runs it said in a statement that the expected medicaid cuts are a reason why they're closing this is this is what i got in a fight with don bacon about because don bacon was like uh he's like it's a liberals hate work that's what he tweeted he goes liberals hate work that's why they're mad about the work requirements and i was like work requirements aside like stupid like your own someone in your own state is saying they're closing a hospital he's like that's a lot how how could you say the hospital is gonna close the cuts haven't even gone into effect yet the bill hasn't even passed.

And I was like, I'm not the one who said it.

It's the fucking Nebraskan who runs the rural county hospital.

And I think these stories are why, these stories of these rural hospitals closing, this is why, like before the bill passed, Republicans in Congress were saying stuff like this.

The White House has made a commitment.

The president said over and over and over, we're not going to touch Social Security,

Medicare, or Medicaid.

We've made the same commitment.

I am fully committed, and I'm leading legislation to make sure that, you know, whatever cuts take place in Washington, that Medicaid recipients don't bear the brunt of that.

I've been very clear.

I will not support cuts to eligible beneficiaries on Medicaid.

If during this budget reconciliation process, they're going to try to cut rural health care, I am not on board.

So much for that.

Tough quotes.

Tough quotes there from all those frontline Republicans.

So, you know, you mentioned some of the Medicaid cuts don't take effect until after the midterms.

Others don't hit until 2028.

How do you think that's going to affect Democrats' ability to make this an issue for voters in 2026?

Yeah, I mean, this is the hard part.

I mean, Priorities USA did some polling.

They found that half of Americans, nearly half, hadn't heard anything about the Big Beautiful bill, and only 8% of all Americans named Medicaid cuts as the detail of the bill they had heard about.

That suggests we have a big, big messaging challenge.

I just do think this is going to have to be, we just have to find a way to talk about this every single week.

The Democratic Party.

I mean, this has got to be relentless because Trump is going to try to make it about immigration and the ICE funding.

And you saw J.D.

Vance's tweets, right, about how actually the Medicaid cuts and all these, you know, renewable energy, that is immaterial, I think was the word he used.

What really matters is getting all these migrants out of the country and somehow that's going to have an economic benefit.

That's what they want to talk about.

We have to make sure people understand the reality.

I also think, you know, we mentioned the rural hospitals closing down.

Part of this is he owns the healthcare system now, right?

Just like we owned the healthcare system when we passed the Affordable Care Act.

And even though something would happen in healthcare, you know, costs would go up or premiums would go up and everyone would blame Obamacare.

And we'd be like, no, this actually was, that wasn't Obamacare.

This hasn't been implemented yet.

And like, people like, I don't fucking care what they're saying.

They blame you in charge.

So when bad things happen, and some of them, by the way, like these rural hospitals closing, will be because of the law.

ACA premiums,

which, you know, one of the things that happened, you've mentioned this on the show before, the ACA subsidies that that people were getting to bring down their premiums or to help them pay for insurance on the exchanges, they were not extended.

So those ACA premiums, Excels reported this, will probably increase by more than 7.5% on average starting in January.

Talk about inflation.

So that's like January of 2026.

So that's like a big talking point.

And actually, that probably affects

a lot more midterm voters, fortunately, than some of the people who were on Medicaid that'll lose their Medicaid much later.

And a bunch of hospitals will be doing what those two hospitals we just mentioned do.

And a bunch of states are going to have to start making budget decisions about Medicaid sooner rather than later.

And so that's going to start bringing all these effects in a little bit earlier.

But I do think that we just have to make them own everything about healthcare and everything about the economy.

There's also a couple of things, other things we haven't talked about in this bill, like the snap cuts.

People snap people, most people don't know what snap is, but it's food assistance.

There was a politico story I saw.

It says, food banks aren't ready to handle all the people who will now need them so we're cutting food assistance for a bunch of people food assistance just like people are going to go hungry and so they're going to have to turn to fucking food banks and now food banks aren't going to have the capacity to help people some of these nonprofit organizations have estimated that six to nine billion meals will be eliminated wow and much like the rural hospitals grocery stores in low-income rural areas they rely on money from people who have food assistance.

You see it advertised.

Yeah.

And so if they lose that money, then some of those grocery stores they're worried could now close as well.

Trevor Burrus

This bill is just so cruel on the merits.

And I also think that there are changes, at least in the House version of the bill, that disaggregated eligibility for SNAP and Medicaid.

Like some say it's you just sort of had to apply for one and you were eligible for both and they split that up to make it just harder to get food or harder to get health care.

So everything about this is just like bureaucratic cruelty, which it does speak to why the votes around the bill, you saw a lot of agonized Republicans.

They all voted for it, but a lot of people like on the merits, this thing was just awful.

No one really

no one is excited about this except like Trump and the biggest sycophants there.

Yeah, and like, you know, big industries.

It's also a bill that really sort of robs from future generations.

Because I just thought about this with the senior provision, the $6,000 senior deduction, which, as you pointed out, doesn't even go to the poorest seniors.

But for kids, for young people, especially like, you know, Trump did so well with Gen Z in this election, college loans are going to become more expensive, right?

Because they cut college loans.

So the typical loan recipient with a college degree and an annual income of $80,000 is going to have to pay $3,000 more per year now.

So this is like, so we're giving seniors, wealthier seniors are going to get like a little bit of a tax deduction that only lasts until 2028.

But people just starting out looking for jobs are going to to be paying more on college loans.

And it'll also make Social Security insolvent a couple of years earlier.

Yes.

So, and then, of course, adding to the debt means that

our children and grandchildren are going to end up paying higher interest rates and have to pay this off later.

It's bad.

One good piece of news is that our friends at Vote Save America are launching a really cool new program on candidate recruitment for local offices.

We'll have more on the details of that a bit later in the show, but it seems pretty clear that we need more people fired up and running for office.

Any other ideas before we move off of this on how Democrats can keep this bill in people's minds over the next 16 months?

I just, I'm very cognizant of the fact that like it seems like a big deal now.

Even if the midterms were this November,

we're sitting here, what, it's July, this November, it would be hard to like keep people remembering this.

We have 16 months to make this election about this bill.

Yeah, it's going to be very difficult.

I mean, first of all, I just want to say on this candidate recruitment idea, A midterm election like this is a really big opportunity, I think, for Democrats.

We need candidates running at every level for every single office.

The odds are there will be headwinds for Trump and the Republican Party.

The odds are we'll win elections we might not otherwise be competitive in.

So if you're thinking about running, check out Votes of America site and consider this being the year you do it because it's really, really, really important.

I just think, you know, yes, in 60 months, God knows what we'll be talking about, right?

There could be a war, there could be a terrorist attack, there could be who knows what.

I do think just continuing to highlight the stories we talked about, the community hospitals closing, the individuals who get hurt, the people who lost their food stamps or their coverage, like personalizing this kind of wonky policy story is going to be the key and just doing events and talking about this.

Like Democrats have been great over the last few months about doing town halls in Republican districts.

That's a great way to make sure that some of those constituents at least are hearing about these terrible votes.

I hope Democrats are going to every one of the like targeted districts all the time and talking about this bill and just kind of pounding it.

Yeah.

And I think the one thing we have going for us is, you know, you're trying to flip the house.

These are district level campaigns.

So,

you know, the problem that we run into in presidential elections is there's a whole bunch of voters who just don't pay much attention and it's hard to reach them because they're not following the news.

You know, you're running a campaign in a house district.

You could reach a lot more people.

And so I think, you know,

Voice of America has the list, but this is the list of people we were trying to get everyone to call like you know David Valadeo in California who has you know more Medicaid recipients in his district than anyone else in the country and also by the way is is represents a lot of farmers people in the agriculture industry who are getting deported

So I think whoever runs against whoever ends up running against David Valadeo that's a that's a pretty pretty solid campaign you can run there.

Yeah, so Hocking Jeffries office put out some specific stats on the impact district by district.

David Valdeo, they estimate 65,000 people would lose access to health care from this bill.

60,000 households could lose access to food assistance, and then 3,600 energy jobs could be lost.

So that's pretty specific about the bill and the district and worth just hammering.

Yeah.

And I do think, like you said, every piece of bad news directly related to this bill or not, whether it's with the economy, healthcare, we still have the doge cuts that are taking effects and stuff like that.

Like you just, we just got to make them own it from now until the midterms.

So we mentioned earlier that Vote Save America is launching a drive to recruit candidates for local races.

Here's the deal.

This is a pilot program that they're launching, trying to recruit candidates from our audiences in Arizona, North Carolina, and Texas.

We mean you.

You.

This is

a program where we are hoping that some of you who listen to this, who live in Arizona, North Carolina, and Texas think, you know what?

I should run for office.

And it doesn't have to be House, Senate.

Yeah, you don't have to run against Texas.

You can run for school board, city council, county commissioner, town clerk, state legislature.

Like we, there's hundreds, maybe even thousands of races where no Democrat runs.

Look, 2026, we hope will be a big year for Democrats.

We hope there are headwinds for Donald Trump.

We hope we win a lot of races.

And if we're not running in places, we can't win.

So we're hoping you will consider taking this next step.

The team picked Arizona, North Carolina, and Texas because these are three states that, you know, they're purple states.

Texas is always out there, as we're hoping that we can turn.

But look,

if we want to have a majority in this country, majority in the Senate, if we want to have a majority in Electoral College, if we want to actually just build power in these states, these are three states that we have to flip.

And flipping them is not just like on the presidential level or on the Senate level.

Like it starts by winning these local races.

And to win these local races, we need good candidates.

And one of the biggest things that Vote Save America heard from all the partner organizations organizations they worked with in these states after 2024 is that there's just a lack of candidate quality across the whole ecosystem.

And we just need more candidates to run.

And that's where all you come in.

And this is how you recruit talent.

I mean, this is how we build the base of the Democratic Party.

You run for these small offices, school board, city council, et cetera, and you get good at the job.

And you learn and you build a political base and supporters and learn how to fundraise and do all the things that are required to take the next step.

And those are the future leaders of the party in the country.

So we hope you'll consider taking the plunge.

You've knocked doors, you volunteered, you've donated.

Why not run for office?

Why not run for office?

I think it's easier than you think.

And you will feel like, you know, we both know many people who've run for office and some have won and some have lost, but all of them, like the experience is really meaningful.

And I think a lot of people believe it's easier than they thought it would be to get started.

It's pretty grueling once you do it, but it

it's the best, most effective way to get involved.

And this isn't just Vodesave America saying, go do it.

They have great partners on the ground in these states who have identified the races that need candidates.

And they are ready, these organizations, to help you run for office.

So you can learn about the program and sign up at votesaveamerica.com slash run.

If you're interested, you'll be paired with partner organizations in your state, and they will help you figure out the next steps.

The program launches today, July 8th.

And I think, Tommy, you're hosting a kickoff call with some of these partner organizations on July 16th.

Damn right.

So sign up soon.

Yeah, sign up.

Listen to Tommy on July 16th.

Check it out.

And again, if you're interested, vote saveamerica.com slash run to learn more.

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How hard is it to kill a planet?

Maybe all it takes is a little drilling, some mining, and a whole lot of carbon pumped into the atmosphere.

When you see what's left, it starts to look like a crime scene.

Are we really safe?

Is our water safe?

You destroyed our town.

And crimes like that, they don't just happen.

We call things accidents.

There is no accident.

This was 100%

preventable.

They're the result of choices by people.

Ruthless oil tycoons, corrupt politicians, even organized crime.

These are the stories we need to be telling about our changing planet.

Stories of scams, murders, and cover-ups that are about us and the things we're doing to either protect the Earth or destroy it.

Follow Lawless Planet wherever you get your podcasts.

You can listen to new episodes of Lawless Planet early and ad-free right now in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

One part of the bill we haven't talked about as much is the $170 billion it spends to supercharge Trump's mass deportation regime.

ICE will now become the country's largest federal law enforcement agency, bigger than the FBI, bigger than the DEA.

Stephen Miller gets to hire 10,000 new ICE agents that he's basically responsible for.

They basically report to him since Christian Ohm is like, you know, just the face of the Department of Homeland Security, but Miller's really the boss.

Yeah.

And

same thing is true, I guess, with the Department of Justice.

Jason Zenguly has a whole piece about Stephen Miller in the New York Times, where everyone's saying that he's the real power center, that all these cabinet secretaries, they're just sort of there to go on TV.

Miller gets to hire 10,000 new ICE agents.

They're going to build enough new detention centers to hold more than 100,000 people.

ICE's new budget will be larger than most of the world's militaries, including Israel's.

The idea that we're going to have ICE that has a bigger budget than the IDF is

a little scary.

Yeah.

It's pretty scary.

And this is all so that they can hit Stephen Miller's goal of 1 million deportations per year, which they're trying to reach by arresting every immigrant they can find, even people without criminal records, even people who are here legally.

This is certainly what some Trump voters wanted, but not all of them.

Here's one prominent Trump supporter from a few days ago.

It's insane.

We were told there would be no, well, there's two things that are insane.

One is the targeting of migrant workers, not cartel members, not gang members, not

drug dealers, just construction workers showing up in construction sites and raiding them.

Gardeners.

Yeah.

Like, really?

That, of course, was Joe Rogan.

I love it.

On a recent episode of his podcast.

So I know Democrats haven't been talking as much about this part of the bill because the Medicaid cuts and the tax cuts for the rich are much more unpopular, at least according to the polls.

I still think it's maybe the most alarming part of the new law.

What do you think?

It's terrifying.

I mean, the idea of this just sort of like hybrid militarized police force running through our cities, it's very scary.

I also think, I think there's a real real opportunity to talk about ICE agents wearing masks.

I think blue states need to pass laws requiring ICE agents to show their faces, to show proper ID.

I would love to force a big fight over that because, like, who, who disagrees with that idea?

Yeah.

But I also think

there was early on, Democrats were very

unsteady.

when talking about immigration.

I just think they have to understand that the ground has shifted a bit.

Like Pew just had a big survey last month on a bunch of immigration stuff that was useful.

54% of voters disapprove of increasing ICE raids on workplaces.

60% of Americans oppose suspending most asylum applications.

59% oppose ending TPS for immigrants who fled war or natural disasters.

65% of the country says there should be a way for immigrants to stay in the country legally if they are meeting certain requirements.

And 61% of Americans disapprove of sending immigrants to prison in El Salvador.

So the original fight we're having about this that everyone was worried about, like, oh no, should we be talking about Kilmar Obrego Garcia or these Venezuelan men who were sent to El Salvador?

Like a vast majority of the country thinks that's fucked up and wrong and shouldn't happen.

I don't know if we're seeing this more just because we live in Los Angeles, but the videos of these ICE raids that.

See one today?

Yeah.

Which one?

There's one in California in Los Angeles.

Oh, at MacArthur Park, I think.

Yeah, I guess Karen Bass went down there too.

I think so.

But like, there's nothing Karen Bass can do, right?

She's there to witness it, but there's nothing else you can do.

They're hitting up all the car washes.

And there's these, these people who've worked there for like 20, 30 years.

They're just grabbing them.

And, and it's, it's the masks, like you said.

It's also the, they're in plain clothes often.

Uh, they're always in unmarked vehicles almost.

My Instagram feed is filled with these videos.

My TikTok feed is filled with these videos.

And, you know, I always double-check them too to see if they're, you know, if they're real or not.

Are you worried about that?

But most of them are from like local news broadcasts, which, by the way, like I do, you know, you go on social media and you, as you and I do a lot, tweet about this and you get a bunch of like MAGA crazies that are like, this is what we voted for to the poll numbers that you just mentioned.

People who are home watching the local news, which is some news, sometimes that's the only news people are getting.

They're not paying attention to nationalists.

They're just watching their local news are seeing these raids all the time.

And I bet that they're fucking terrified.

Yeah.

I mean, like the stories of the guy who got the shit kicked out of them,

I think it was in San Diego and three of his sons served in the Marines.

I mean, stories like that offend everyone.

The number of people I know and know of here in Los Angeles who are, they're documented.

They're legal residents.

They may not be citizens, but they're legal residents and they are canceling plans, afraid to leave the house,

afraid to go to work.

Afraid to go to student graduations.

Afraid to go to graduations because of this is

wild.

That is the real story of these raids.

It is communities communities being terrorized, mostly Latino communities.

And Trump wants us to be brave law enforcement agents versus the sanctuary cities who oppose them and coddle criminals.

The reality is very, very different.

It is people going to Home Depot, kicking the shit out of people who may or may not be undocumented.

There's been some really high-profile mistakes.

I think we just have to constantly lift up those examples and talk about them.

And I think the truly scary thing about this is

on the arrest side, you know, it's like warrantless arrests with, you know, guys with masks on and their arms, stuff like that.

But then on the judicial side, it's not like a real judicial system half the time, right?

Like they're thrown in detention centers.

Just lost.

And, you know, eventually you can get a lawyer and you can get into court or whatever, but they're just, you know, Alligator Alcatraz, they're just like building, they have the National Guard now helping to like run the immigration judicial system and these quasi-judicial system and Alligator Alcatraz and some of these fucking detention centers.

It's wild yeah the alligator alcatraz thing is just so weird i mean the way republicans are sort of like fetishizing it too do you see like that fucking creep benny johnson second time we mentioned him on the show showing off his alligator alcatraz merch and then trump was joking with reporters that uh if you escape you need to learn to run in a zigzag fashion so you don't get eaten by an alligator and again it's like laura lumer i think you you brought that yeah laura loomer um essentially tweeted like 65 million more to go, which is the aggregate number of Latinos in this country.

So

more to go about like alligators eating them.

Yeah, suggesting we should send them all to jail and then have them eaten.

And like less than 10% of people arrested or booked by ICE are accused of violent crimes.

It's suggesting that they should go to a prison where they get eaten by an alligator.

Like, I think most people are just like, what the fuck?

What are you talking about?

And, you know, obviously we've already...

We're seeing the dangers of giving Stephen Miller and ICE this much power.

On Monday, the Department of Justice told Judge Paula Zinnis that if Kilmar Obrego-Garcia gets released on bond in his criminal case in Tennessee, they will deport him to a third country, which the Supreme Court officially cleared the way for them to do in a pair of recent rulings, one of which allowed the administration to send eight men to South Sudan, even though only one of them is from there.

So now the floodgates are open to deporting people to third countries.

And a third country, by the way, is a country that's not your country.

So you're deported from the United States, not to the country where you came from, but to just somewhere you probably have never been before.

So that can happen now.

Last week in a court filing, Abrego Garcia's lawyers also alleged that he was subject to severe beatings and psychological torture during his time in El Salvador's Seacot megaprison.

And the administration also just made another 50,000 legal residents eligible for deportation by terminating temporary protected status for Honduran and Nicaraguan immigrants.

This is status.

They've had temporary protected status for those two countries since 1999.

Yeah, these people have been here for decades.

The administration seems to think shipping people off to foreign torture prisons and war-torn countries they've never been to will deter other immigrants from coming here illegally.

That might be true.

Certainly, border crossings have almost completely stopped.

But what happens when people from Honduras or Nicaragua or Venezuela or Haiti, who've been here legally for years,

get their temporary protected status revoked and end up in Seacot or South Sudan or one of these countries?

Or Alligator Alcatraz.

Yeah, I mean, I just, quickly on the Sudan thing, South Sudan became a country in 2011.

Within like two years, the country descended to civil war.

There was like a fragile ceasefire power-sharing agreement in 2018.

But then in 2023, there was a civil war in Sudan, their neighbor to the north.

So that led to an exodus of refugees and fighting and like inter-tribal and ethnic warfare.

And basically, in 2025, there was a political crisis and clashes between the government and opposition forces that led the UN peacekeeping mission there to warn that they were on the brink of a full-scale civil war.

And we're just sending migrants who have no connection to South Sudan to a country where they know no one, have no opportunity, where 10 million people are on the brink of starvation, where it's about to descend into civil war.

Why?

To scare a few more people from going up like the Darien gap?

And that would be horrific enough, you know?

But now, because they are stripping people of their temporary protected status, right?

So people who have been here, like I said, 1999.

So they have, they're working here, they're living here, they have families here, they know no other country.

So what happens to them when they get rounded up by ICE?

Maybe they go to Alligator Alcatraz.

Maybe they go to some other detention center.

Maybe they get deported to Seacot.

Maybe they get deported to South Sudan.

We don't know because it's all a fucking black box once ICE gets you, right?

Like the idea that we're just going to, just going to do this now and send these people to these fucking torture prisons, the document that Brego Garcia's lawyers filed to describe what he's been going through in Seacott, like turned my stomach.

It's horrifying.

I mean, he arrives and he's told, welcome to Zakot.

Whoever enters here doesn't leave.

He was forced to strip naked.

He had his head shaved.

We've seen those images.

And then when he wasn't putting on his clothes fast enough, they were beating him.

They made him kneel for nine hours from 9 p.m.

to 6 a.m.

If you fell over from exhaustion, you were then beaten.

You were denied bathroom access.

So he soiled himself.

He lost 31 pounds in two weeks.

He said you could hear gang members in other cells like violently harming each other and no one did anything.

And remember, again, CBS News reviewed

the backgrounds of all these men sent to El Salvador.

75% of them had no criminal record in the U.S.

or in Venezuela or anywhere else.

These are just people who got swept up into the system.

I don't know if you saw that in the filing to Judge Zennis, the Department of Justice has now gone back to acknowledging that they mistakenly

sent Obrego Garcia there, which flies in the face of everything that Stephen Miller and Pam Bondi and Christy Noam are trying, and Trump, I guess, too, if he knows the fucking details, which it doesn't seem like he does, are trying to spin because they have to make a Brego Garcia a monster.

And to your point about South Sudan, they were very quick to say, oh, the eight people that we sent to South Sudan were the worst of the worst.

And they had like their rap sheets and it's like, you know, child rapist and murder and stuff like that.

And sure, some of the people that they're rounding up and that they're sending to people have committed horrific crimes, right?

But

if they admit publicly that Obrego Garcia was just caught up mistakenly and sent to Seacot Space, then everyone's going to start saying, well, what about Andre Hernandez?

It just unravels all.

What about everyone else?

And then suddenly we're like, oh, now we're sending people to these torture dungeons to deal with what he just dealt with, what you just read about.

And all they've done is either, I don't know, overstayed a visa or tried to come to the country for a better life or had temporary protected status.

Right.

And remember, you know, Nayabukele, the president of El Salvador, he cut this deal to accept these men down in El Salvador because in part he wanted to get back a bunch of hardened senior MS-13 leaders who were being prosecuted in New York and who could provide evidence about his government's deals with the gangs.

So he wanted to get those guys back so they couldn't be, you know, testify against him.

So that's the background of this whole thing.

Meanwhile, our president is so stupid that he thought Abrego Garcia had the letters MS and the numbers 13 tattooed on his hand when it was like the worst Photoshop MS paint job you've ever seen.

Meanwhile,

according to this filing by Obreco Garcia,

they separated out prisoners with gang tattoos and put them them in one cell and everybody else in another.

He was in the non-gang tattoo cell.

And in fact, one of the guards told him, your tattoos are fine.

Like, they know this guy is not a gang member.

It's only our moron president who seems to think he literally had MS-13 written on his hand.

Did you see how Bukele responded to the filing?

No.

So Bukele responded to this by posting a video of Obrego Garcia in his cell

in the prison that they transferred him to.

Because remember when Van Holland went down, they had transferred Regal Garcia from Seacott to another prison.

And at the time, by the way, everyone had reported, oh, this prison is a better prison with better conditions.

I think Van Holland said that once he went down there.

So they have videos of him in there, and they have a video of him watching TV.

They have a TV on and he's fully clothed and he doesn't have a uniform on.

He's just wearing his clothes and he's like sitting with Van Holland for a drink.

And so, and all these fucking MAGA people, they're just buying it.

They're like, see, or, or they're just in on the lie.

I guess.

Either or.

But like, yeah, so they're trying to just make it a propaganda thing.

They're like, oh, no, no, he's fine.

He's just lying in this court filing.

But it's like, yeah, we know that's a different fucking prison.

These are the same idiots who believed it when Bukele's thugs put margaritas in front of Obrego Garcia and Van Holland, right?

Like he's a clown.

He's a marketer.

Like, this is how he rose to power.

He's just good at PR and all this bullshit.

I hope like some of the Bitcoin people that cut deals with him early on, because like El Salvador kind of really exploded onto the map a few years ago.

Bukele decided to really embrace Bitcoin and he wanted to make it like this crypto future city.

And he talked about like building an entire Bitcoin city powered by volcano, like the dumbest shit you've ever heard in your life.

But all these Silicon Valley idiots embraced him.

And I hope they're doing a little bit of soul searching on this.

I have been watching that.

And,

you know, they're basically pissed about two things, three things

in Trump 2.0 now.

Texas.

Yeah, right.

No, the debt, the deficit in terms of the bill, and tariffs, and this immigration stuff is actually bothering some of them.

Some of them like it, but some like, you know, you see like some of the all-in guys are like, I don't know about this.

This is bad.

Because those morons had Trump on their show and they thought they baited him into saying that like tech founders or like foreign students who are really high performing, who get diplomas in the United States, would then get a pathway to citizenship.

And of course, he just told them whatever they wanted to hear.

Yeah.

And I know you and Levitt mentioned this on

last Tuesday's show, but the denaturalization thing now is another big fucking flag that there is this, you know, fucking provision in a law left over from the Joe McCarthy era where now they can take citizens, United States citizens who became citizens and put them through denaturalization proceedings.

And yeah, do I think like that ends up at the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court's like, this is fucked up?

I don't know.

I'd like to hope so, but we have, you know, Alien Enemies Act is proof that we have these really dumb fucking old laws on the books and the court's job is to interpret the law and they could be like, I don't know.

I have no confidence in the courts anymore.

Not the Supreme Court.

Yeah, it's really scary.

And, you know,

it was very clear early on that they decided to go after pro-Palestine protesters as kind of a test to see how much they could curtail free speech and intimidate opponents.

And it was pretty effective.

Just to wrap this up, like, I do think I realize, you know, you could poll this a million different ways.

And you pointed out how the polling has changed on immigration.

But like, yes, let's talk about the Medicaid cuts.

Yes, absolutely talk about tax cuts for the rich.

Like, those are at the top of the list.

But just from a pure, I think it's the right thing to do, obviously.

We're obviously outraged by all the deportations and the immigration stuff.

But just from, if you just wanted to be purely political about it, people seeing their communities torn apart because masked men are just like raiding their workplaces and ripping their colleagues away and disappearing them somewhere.

Like, that's going to be fucking unpopular.

That is worth talking about from now until the midterm.

I agree.

Also, there's 483 days until the midterms.

We're going to talk about a lot of stuff, everybody.

And I just, in 18, you know, we've talked about how immigration has gone back and forth.

In 18, talking about immigration worked.

It was, Trump was very, child separate, family separation was very unpopular.

The caravan bullshit didn't work for him, you know?

So I just think it's a different,

immigration is a catch-all for a lot of different shit and people feel differently about different aspects of it.

What he is doing is not popular.

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How hard is it to kill a planet?

Maybe all it takes is a little drilling, some mining, and a whole lot of carbon pumped into the atmosphere.

When you see what's left, it starts to look like a crime scene.

Are we really safe?

Is our water safe?

You destroyed our camp.

And crimes like that, they don't just happen.

We call things accidents.

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This was 100%

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They're the result of choices by people.

Ruthless oil tycoons, corrupt politicians, even organized crime.

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All right, one last consequence of the president's bill passing that we have to talk about.

The big, beautiful breakup between Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

Over the weekend, Elon claimed on Twitter to have launched his new political party, the America Party, which he had vowed to do if the bill passed.

He apparently had not filed any paperwork for the new party as of Saturday afternoon, surprise, surprise.

But he did say it would be active in elections next year.

On Sunday, Trump responded in typical fashion.

Let's listen.

I think it's ridiculous to start a third party.

We have a tremendous success with the Republican Party.

The Democrats have lost their way, but it's always been a two-party system.

And I think starting a third party just adds to confusion.

It really seems to have been developed for two parties.

Third parties have never worked, so he can have fun with it, but I think it's ridiculous.

Adds to confusion.

What is this third thing?

Trump also wrote a long screet on Truth Social that opened with the sentence, I am saddened to watch Elon Musk go completely off the rails, essentially becoming a train wreck over the past five weeks.

He's not wrong.

I know.

What's your current assessment of Elon's power in exile?

Rising, falling?

I mean, gutted, right?

He's burned every bridge he had in the White House.

I'm sure there's elected officials that would love to take his call still because they want his money, like J.D.

Vance or Speaker Johnson, but it doesn't seem like he's very popular with Trump.

And then, like, Tesla's stock price goes down every time he picks a fight with Trump.

SpaceX and Starlink are still extremely dependent on government contracts.

Like, Tesla doesn't, a lot of the revenue isn't selling cars.

A lot of it is selling regulatory tax credits that are designed to encourage automakers to make low-emission vehicles.

That money is going to dry up over time because other automakers are going to make more EVs and things that,

and they won't need to purchase the credits.

But also, Trump could fuck with them there.

So he's in a bad spot, I think.

He also has no juice.

Did he get a single?

Republican to vote against the bill after he was like, you're all going to get primaried if you vote against the bill.

The Freedom Caucus, they all folded.

No Chip Roy, none of them.

None of them listened to Elon.

Elon made zero difference during any of the debate.

Yeah, I

yeah, I was looking at it.

I asked Chris Murphy about that, hoping for a little hope and like told him about it in real time.

He's like, come on, man, we just did that.

Like, no one cares what Elon Musk thinks anymore.

It's just, what do you think about the third-party maneuver?

Do you think

this has ever going to happen?

He's so full of shit.

I don't believe it for a second.

Like, spraying...

$300 million on pro-Trump ads in Pennsylvania or whatever and like jumping up and down like an idiot at rallies.

Like, that's that's easy.

That's fun.

Building a political party from the from scratch, that's hard.

That's a slog.

You're talking about ballot access and creating, you know, rules and bylaws and policy positions and this and that.

Like, I don't think he's got the time or attention for this.

It's just like every other fucking tech billionaire who thinks they could run the government better than every other politician.

And then sure enough, as soon as you get into it, you're like, oh, this is a little more complicated than I thought.

Just like when Elon did Doge and all of a sudden left Doge being like, oh, it was much harder to cut government than I thought.

He's going to realize that creating a fucking political party is pretty hard because it's not a national thing.

It's state by state.

So every state has their own rules.

Like you said, he still hasn't filed with the FEC.

But like the state level regulations can be really burdensome.

They're burdensome even for the third parties that are on the ballots that we see.

The Green Party, the Libertarian Party, like they still have to get access every election cycle to RFK.

Exactly, right?

Like in Georgia, apparently, that's got one of the stricter laws.

You need 27,000 signatures per district if you're running for Congress.

And so no third-party candidate has been on the ballot in Georgia since 1985 because it's so difficult.

So like the idea that Elon Musk is going to spend, forget about the money, the time, and

like have a political platform and a program that appeals to enough people.

I just don't see it.

Also, like he's, let's be honest, he's not creating a party.

He's trying to create a cult of personality.

And who is Elon Musk currently appealing to?

Like, he's burning all the MAGA people now.

All the liberals hate him.

They're putting like stickers on their Teslas that's saying, like, I bought this before you went crazy.

Like, I guess like you're seeing exactly who you'd expect to kind of be like, sign me up for this, like, you scaramucci, you know, kind of like the rich sort of squishy middle centrist, you know, low-tax rich guys.

But yeah, it's like the people who are, it was like the Howard Schultz party, remember?

Yeah, exactly.

Remember Howard Schultz flirting with this?

It's like, we need some, well, it used to be we need someone who's like financially, you know, moderate on economics and centrist financially, but like socially liberal.

But Elon Musk isn't even socially liberal anymore.

He's not socially liberal.

And he's sort of, I mean,

the defining image of his time at Doge is him waving around a chainsaw on stage.

Like no one thinks he's kind of got all his marbles at this point.

Has he made it possible to kill like

thousands and millions of poor children all over the world.

So I don't, I don't.

Now, he did say that it might just be a few districts, right?

Like Like if it's a close, it's a close House race and close Senate race, maybe he picks one or two candidates to primary, a Republican who voted for the bill in a couple districts.

I don't know if that's maybe you can have a party in just one or two states that works, but I still think he loses interest in this.

Yeah, I just think it's a stupid strategy.

If you want to

do it primary, though, is it just to like piss off Trump?

Yeah, that's not at all clear.

Yeah.

And Trump will punish him, right?

Like Trump has been quite clear.

I will punish you if you do this.

So

denaturalize him.

Put up or shut up, buddy.

Remember, he's going to, yeah, I forgot the whole cycle.

I guess I was gone.

He was going to deport Elon.

Yeah, well, banana strike.

He's going to look into it.

Yeah, he's going to look into deporting Elon Musk.

So

he's going to doge Elon.

Maybe the surest sign of how punchy Elon's feeling came in the form of a tweet.

At 1.02 a.m.

on Monday, Elon's post featured an image of a digital countdown clock reading zero across the board and labeled the official Jeffrey Epstein pedophile arrest counter.

I didn't know that was a thing.

Elon added the caption, what's the time?

Oh, look, it's no one has been arrested o'clock again.

Elon, of course, tweeted during the initial breakup that Trump hasn't released the Epstein files because Trump himself is in the Epstein files.

The likely trigger for this post was the news that Trump's FBI and DOJ have determined that there is no Jeffrey Epstein client list.

There's no evidence that Epstein blackmailed any of his very prominent friends.

like Donald Trump.

And there's no evidence that Epstein was the victim of a murder and cover-up.

MAGA influencers haven't been taking this this well, partly because back in February, Attorney General Pam Bondi told Fox News that Epstein's client list was, quote, sitting on my desk right now to review.

Here's how Caroline Levitt tried to explain away the misconception to Fox News's Peter Doocy during Monday's press briefing.

So what happened to the Epstein client list that the Attorney General said she had on her desk?

Well, I think if you go back and look at what the Attorney General said in that interview, which was on your network on Fox News, she was saying the entirety of all of the paperwork, all of the paper in relation to Jeffrey Epstein's crimes.

That's what the Attorney General was referring to, and I'll let her speak for that.

Well, this should put all the conspiracies to rest, don't you think?

Not going to cut it.

John and I did a long YouTube exclusive on the Pod Save America account where we dug into just this for about 15 minutes.

If you want a lot more detail, I highly recommend it.

Also, subscribe to Pod Save America on YouTube because we're trying to build a democratic counterbalance to all the right-wing garbage you find on YouTube when you search political news.

But I have to say, I watched a bunch of right-wing podcasts and media today.

I watched a lot of Alex Jones, and they are melting down.

They are losing their minds.

I think this is one that stays.

I think so.

Sticks with them.

Because it's not going to go away.

This is still a thing that they claim to care deeply about because they think that it would lead to the taking down of some evil satanic cabal of Democrats led by Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Clinton, blah, blah, blah.

But like Alex Jones, like he sort of built an audience and a career off of this.

He's not going to let this go just because Trump says so.

I mean, they certainly didn't when Dan Bongino and Cash Patel first said Epstein didn't,

that Epstein did kill himself like a month or two ago.

Like that just poured gas on the fire.

Yeah, they are really upset.

I mean, Alex Jones referred it to the DOJ committing sepuku, which is jamming a sword into your stomach and then up into your heart.

And

it's, you know, he weaves this like crazy conspiracy theory about how actually Trump is using this to neutralize the deep states so they don't kill him.

And now he can really go.

It's insane.

But

it's not going over well.

It is not going over well on the far right.

I realize it's not funny because at the heart of this is a horrific scandal.

You know, Jeffrey Epstein did horrible, horrible things.

But these fucking idiots who have been pushing this conspiracy theory for however many years, and it was always...

a little bit ridiculous to think that Jeffrey Epstein would sort of document all the people he was blackmailing on a list and just kind of keep it in his pocket, waiting for the day where if he was somehow murdered and covered up, that someone would be able to reveal the list and that it wouldn't leak until then, until Donald Trump ascended back into the White House and gave the okay.

But, like, you know, and of course, of course, even when they get their own conspiracy theorists in positions of power, the most power you could have, running the federal government, running federal law enforcement agencies, even when they get there and say, no, by the way,

there's nothing here,

it's still not going to convince them.

Trump is always the strong man who can take care of everything, but also the victim of the deep state when anything goes wrong.

And it drives me absolutely insane.

I mean, the conspiracy.

You got to stay a victim.

Grievance politics requires that you're always the victim, even if you have all the power humanly possible.

All the power in the world.

I mean, the conspiracy, the Epstein's ties with people in power have always been hiding in plain sight.

Like in a 2017 interview with Michael Wolfe, Jeffrey Epstein claimed that at one point he was Trump's closest friend.

Trump's first Secretary of Labor, Alex Acosta, is the guy who gave Epstein the sweetheart deal back in the late 2000s that allowed him to basically serve almost no time and do a six-day week work release and get immunity from future prosecution.

And so like the lawyers for Epstein were Alan Dershowitz, Trump's good buddy, who was Ken Starr.

It's like the conspiracy is right there.

Like this is a terrible human being who victimized like a thousand young women, got away with murder because he was rich and powerful and connected.

And that is the story.

It's not, I mean, as far as we know, it is not that he's like secretly working for the Mossad and MI6 and the CIA and the deep state somehow is running this prosecution.

Like, sorry, guys, it's just not, it's not as interesting as that.

I want Alex Jones and all those people to know that.

The list is probably still out there.

I mean, I think they probably think it is.

I would not give up.

Good luck luck finding it people

donald trump promised you he'd release it and jd vance said it was uh very important to do and also hold caroline levitt's feet to the fire next time you go into that briefing room you're one of those bloggers or those whatever fucking the lunatics they got there keep asking her this don't don't let up i do think the professional class like the alex joneses they'll figure out a way to move on but there will be a lot of regular people who went down a rabbit hole about Jeffrey Epstein.

They probably truly believe that there's a cabal of like evil pedophiles in charge of the world and the fact that Donald Trump is not doing anything about it.

How do you let go of that?

Let me tell you, those people aren't so regular anymore.

That's our show for today.

I will be back on Friday with a new show with a special guest host since Dan's going to be on vacation.

I'm going to be talking with MSNBC's Alex Wagner.

So talk to you all then.

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How hard is it to kill a planet?

Maybe all it takes is a little drilling, some mining, and a whole lot of carbon pumped into the atmosphere.

When you see what's left, it starts to look like a crime scene.

Are we really safe?

Is our water safe?

You destroyed our top.

And crimes like that, they don't just happen.

We call things accidents.

There is no accident.

This was 100%

preventable.

They're the result of choices by people.

Ruthless oil tycoons, corrupt politicians, even organized crime.

These are the stories we need to be telling about our changing planet.

Stories of scams, murders, and cover-ups that are about us and the things we're doing to either protect the Earth or destroy it.

Follow Lawless Planet wherever you get your podcasts.

You can listen to new episodes of Lawless Planet early and ad-free right now in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

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