The Crypto Grift That Could Break America ft. Charlotte Howard
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Rise and shine, fever dreamers. Look alive, my friends. I'm V Spear. And I'm Sammy Sage. And this is American Fever Dream, presented by Betches News. The show that loves to watch when the girls are fighting on Twitter with popcorn in hand. And then loves to watch the people fighting about the phrase, the girls are fighting, and whether it's misogynistic. It's like, you are all so missing out.

Also, during Pride Month, we're not going to recognize the girls are fighting is a non-gendered term, meaning, yeah, like drag queens are fighting. Yeah, this is one of those things where it's just like...

It's like if you know where the phrase is from and if you know the tone with which the phrase is used, you know that it's not an insult to girls or women. It is just a tongue in cheek phrase. And we can have fun with phrases and we can say we can't have fun, actually. That's what I've learned from being on the Internet all this time, is that no matter what you say, there will be somebody who comes in and is like, actually, that's not true.

I'm disgusted with you. And I'm like, okay, look, I don't know. I guess I'm not woke. Well, you know, that person's probably having a lot of fun. They must get something out of it. I do wonder, like, what is it like in the day of a person who goes around just, like, looking for problems with, like...

basically like sort of like innocent people, right? Like so many times I'll see somebody get stitched and it's just like some random person who's not even a creator and they just were, got brave enough to make a TikTok one day and just say something. Maybe they said like some little thing, not like a blatantly terrible thing, but like some little thing that was outdated or stupid or cringe. And people are like, I can't believe you. And I'm like, oh my God, relax. You're such a fucking narc and a nerd. I'm sick of narcs and nerds.

The self-policing. We're over it. Right. There are enough real police. We don't need self-police. The virtue police are killing me this week. The thing is with that, I don't actually think that most people are those people are necessarily patrolling for something to pick on. They might just have a particular focus on something and they are feeling feisty. Their fingers are twitching. They need to make a comment. Yeah.

And then it feels like everyone's so annoying and everyone makes such annoying virtue signaling comments. But like, it probably was just that one really annoying person who was feeling like they needed to say something. Who are they? Let me tell you, because I'm remembering now who these people are. Like, when you would go to church as a kid, we're back on my cat. I didn't do that. Okay. But you would go to like CCD or church camp or something. And you would say like, heck, what?

Right. And then there's always that one fucking kid usually named, I'm sorry, typically named like Rebecca or Rachel or like something like that. Like the Jewish names. No, the biblical names. Esther. It was an Esther. The Jewish name. Okay. The Jewish Catholic, the Catholic girls with Jewish names. Okay. Fine. They're haters. Yeah. And then they'd be like, they'd be going to father like, Oh,

And I'm like, please. I doubt they said fucking V said this. No, they'd be like, father. V said heck. They'd be like, father, I don't want to be the one to tell you, but.

He said, heck, and also said Jesus. And I felt like it was in vain. I'm just saying. And I'm like, shut up and stop rolling your skirt, you whore. Anyway, I'm lit today. I haven't slept in three days on account of the L.A. coverage and all just the crazy shit that's happening and the way the mainstream media is just like absolutely missing the mark on how to cover this. I'm...

Yeah, I haven't slept. And now I'm punchy. Well, tell us because so we're recording this Monday morning, you know, with at risk of, you know, certain things developing and us having some very outdated takes. I think we should, you know, refrain from who knows what might happen. But what are you seeing? When you're listening to this today, remember that we were recording this how you felt yesterday. Okay.

Yes. Try to remember how you felt yesterday morning. OK, well, my first hot take is that I trust the United States Marines to not turn weapons on civilians. And I'm saying this because one of the things that Donald Trump does constantly is try and make these grandiose statements that are half-truths.

Half threats and half violent fantasies. So over the weekend, he said, I've got 500 Marines on standby, ready to go in and tamp down the crowds and like take back our city and all this stuff.

There are always at least 500 Marines ready to deploy in California. At Camp Pendleton, there are 42,000 Marines and sailors that are active duty. And at 29 Palms, which is the other Marine base near L.A., there are 800 active duty Marines who are ready to deploy. Moments notice. OK, so for him to say, I've got 500 ready to deploy made people think that he had 500 ready for this particular mission. That's not true.

Then I talked to my contact in the Marines and I was like, what are you guys feeling? And they're like, I swear an oath to the Constitution. That's all I'm going to say. And I'm like, OK, so would you go in? And they're like, look, the Marines are trained on things like riot control, crowd control and security. Now, if we were to go in, which we were, we're not.

We're probably not, right? Because the JAG lawyers are saying that they can't find a constitutional argument for this right now. It's just not these 1992 race riots that are crazy. There's nothing crazy. So they can't find the justification for it. He's like, if we were to go in, we would go in

99% without deadly weapons. We would go in with riot shields, helmets, batons maybe, and we would be providing security to the detention centers that people are protesting outside of to ensure the free flow of vehicles to and from the center. We would be pushing back on things like if they tried to take the 101 freeway again, we would perhaps, you know, sort of cattle and push people out of these areas that are designated no protest areas. He's like, but the Marines are not going to fucking like

come in commando style from a helicopter. They're not going to emerge from the seas onto the shores of California and storm it like it's D-Day in Normandy. He's like, so the violent fantasy that's being projected by Fox News and Trump and some of MAGA is not in any way in line with the morals, ethics or responsibility or training of the United States Marines. And that would not happen. And I was like, you know what? I trust you. So that's my Monday take. OK, that's my Monday take.

And it pisses me off because all of these major networks were like, well, he's got 500 Marines. You are inflaming tensions. You are making people in L.A. feel like they need to arm up because the Marines are going to come in and take them. Don't do that shit, OK?

Well, what I think was happening was because it was pretty calm up until Sunday night, it was actually pretty calm. People kept posting like, why isn't the mainstream media covering this? And my feeling was like, because there haven't been significant developments. So they would just kind of so to continuously cover it would sort of feed the tension as well. And to your point about.

marines and the national guard which also seemed like they weren't looking to well i made a post about that i was like attention every picture you're seeing of the national guard they are at in a relaxed and disciplined pose yeah they are not arms up okay they are they're holding their jackets they're just standing there really even the lapd said that it was peaceful on saturday and that's the lapd yeah but but but

But I think part of this is all part of the strategy. And I'm not the first person to say this. Several people have pointed this out, that this is kind of what he wanted to do was find a pretext to maybe invoke the Insurrection Act. So he's doing this thing that he does where he knows he is going to cross some sort of might have to cross some sort of new Rubicon, whether it's accepting the election results, firing Jim Comey, firing Jay Powell. So he does this little thing where he toys with he's like a cacophony.

with a mouse that he's about to like play with and he's toying with it and he's like oh I'm not gonna do it I'll do it if it's an insurrection I don't know I don't know a lot of people are saying I should do it a lot of people were saying I already should have done it sir you should have invoked it lots of people are telling me you know he does that sort of playing with his food thing and then

I think that he is just very excited to have it. Or rather, Stephen Miller is very excited or both is very excited to have an excuse to grab onto something. And what what concerns me is that some of these protests look very,

some of the protesters look a bit inorganic to me. I simply do not believe that immigrants rights groups are going to be standing on top of cars, ordering Waymo's for the sake of burning them and carrying Mexican flags and like motorcycling them around. Like, I'm sorry, that is not an American protester. And we've seen this so many times. And I do think that eventually we're going to look back on several of these protests from this five year period and realize that

a great deal of them, maybe even 10 year period was inorganic. Well, like the guy who was throwing the rocks at the cars. And then you, you'll see the video all over TikTok of this man throwing rocks at the cars. But what you don't see is that was about three seconds. And then other protesters trying to make that person not throw rocks at the cars. So this is the thing. Real protesters tried to, yes. Everybody's got a narrative, but you're in Los Angeles. The people are protesting these, the

ice kidnappings and sweeps. Then you've got the Jeggings Chucks crew, I'm calling them, the like self-made Amazon agents who are out there and they're amped up. These people are...

i have a fantasy again they have a fantasy they don't have training or discipline and they have a fantasy of creating violence or being an authority or getting to punch somebody or shoot somebody the fact that they shot that australian reporter who was holding a microphone with a professional camera in front of her in the leg from close range

that is not a disciplined officer. That's not somebody who came from LAPD Sheriff's Office or the National Guard. That's somebody who's like some Yahoo in the middle who wants to do something. They want to do something. So I agree. I think it's, I'm really proud of LA for holding it down to the level that they have.

And we'll see what happens today. There's going to be, it's Monday. So today there are demonstrations demanding the release of David Huerta, who is the president of the largest labor union, SEIU. And he was picked up in one of these sweeps on Friday. He was injured while he was in detention and he's going to see a judge today. So that's going to be interesting. I think the release of David Huerta is going to be a really galvanizing moment for the crowd. And then we also have the city of Glendale

canceled their ICE detention center contract. They were like, look, we've been running the center since 2007. We're actually proud of this center. We offered phone calls, food. You could come in and you could inspect it. You could do whatever. But public perception shows that we don't want this anymore, that this is not a trustworthy thing. And Glendale is one of the safest cities in America. It's like a suburb of Los Angeles. It's just right there. Yeah, yeah.

And so they're like, look, we just canceled our ICE contract. Gavin Newsom, who was pissing me off, but he has his good moments. It's like, Trump, just come and arrest me. You want to do a big show? You need a little red meat for MAGA? Come arrest me and leave everybody alone. Like, this is stupid. And I think that's the kind of stuff that we need to be doing, which is calling out how absolutely just –

deranged the stable genius is and how unlikely it is that his threats will come true. States rights, y'all. States rights, y'all. V, can I tell you something I was thinking about this weekend? I would love that. So, you know how we always are talking shit about the Democrats? Yes.

I think we should formalize it into a segment. I'm going to call it the Democrats mess tracker. But today I actually have some constructive advice for them because we keep giving criticism and we keep talking shit and I get it. We're frustrated. Everyone's frustrated. And I keep thinking back to that conversation about how that pollster surveyed focus groups about how they perceive the political parties and what animals they compare them to. Oh, right. Yeah. So instead of.

Coming up with shitty animals, they could be. I wanted to come up with a suggestion for them. And I have I have an answer. I think that the Democrats should reincarnate themselves as dogs. And here's why.

Not all dogs have these good qualities, but most people associate dogs with loyalty, compassion, energy, trainability, responsiveness to positive and negative feedback, which is how elected representatives should be in a democracy. You also...

Democrats get a lot of shit for being like too smart or too out of touch or too academic. But the thing is with a dog, you don't want a dumb dog. No one prefers a dumb dog. They want an intelligent dog because they're

They make you look like an idiot when you have a dumb dog. They're peeing all over your carpet. They're vaping during a community theater production of Beetlejuice. You don't want to reward that behavior. No, we don't. Dogs are also quite a reciprocal animal. Snuggles. You know, they don't just come around during election season when they want your votes. They're with you all the time. At the grocery store, on the airplane, with their fake emotional support certificates.

Yes. And I... Okay. At first, I thought, like, they should be something... Because the Republicans are tigers, lions, and bears. Okay. The Democrats were the deer in headlights. Yeah. I think that maybe a more community-oriented animal could be better. Yeah. Because... So first, I was thinking, like, you know, a flock of birds migrating in a V or a school of fish. I like a V. But that all feels...

not mammalian enough. You know what I mean? Like we need them to be animals. We need them to be animals. But I do think a key factor in Democrats as dogs is that there's a lot of variety between breeds and you have different dogs that have good qualities that draw different types of people.

And variance between dogs is seen as a good thing. No one's like, oh, I only want my dogs to be, we only want all dogs to be golden retrievers and act the same way. I mean, some might, but I think most people appreciate. What do you think would be the main dog of the Democrats?

Well, I think we're going to find out who wins the primary. Oh, and then we'll pick. I see. Okay. I kind of think like a bulldog. Well, that's, see, Yale's mascot is a bulldog. Roslyn High School's mascot was a bulldog. See, they represent, yeah, like toughness, but intelligence for sure. What if, what about like, I have dachshunds. You want a dachshund Democrat? I mean, that's. Maybe you want a dachshund running oversight or something, but you know, maybe you don't want a dachshund Democrat.

As the president. Maybe you want a Dachshund vice president. Well, no, I think you want a Dachshund secretary of state, maybe. And then I would also say, I think for vice president, King Charles Cavalier Spaniel. I do think King Charles Cavalier Spaniel is a very Republican coded dog, which does make the moderates feel safe. So for the centrists, we have King Charles Cavalier Spaniel. Exactly. And then what do we have for the main dog? You could have so many.

Maybe a golden retriever? No, you need a... The president needs to be a large dog that can't go on a plane. Yorkie could be like Secretary of Homeland Security. No, no, no, no, no. The Yorkie's like...

I know. Rottweiler's got to be like the secretary of defense or something. Oh, there we go. Yes. Okay. But you see, there's beauty in all the different dogs. And you don't feel like any of those dogs are going to do a shitty job at governing or responding to you. Oh, that would be great. Because most dogs are trainable, except for dumb dogs. Which we would keep them at home to be little yard dogs. Yes. The other thing is, those can be the rank and file house members. Yes.

The thing is, dogs also travel in a pack with a clear leader who they listen to. And that leader is protective. That leader takes up the back. That leader makes sure that they're all set and strong. Like an Australian shepherd dog. Yes, a herder, keeping everybody together. That would be like the whip. The majority whip would be like the Aussie. This is working out, Sammy. I love this dream. Also, just think of the AI art we could make.

Yeah. And think about, you know, what else is beautiful? This cost me $0 to come up with. I did not have to spend $20 million to ask men what they think of it. I came up with it in the shower. We got to stop asking men what they think. They don't know what they think. We should tell them what they think. You know what? Some of the best men in my life, right? My dad,

And basically my dad. If you were to ask my dad anything, what does he say? Oh, I don't know. What's your mom think? Men want women to tell them what to think. Why aren't we doing that in the government? We shouldn't be asking them what they think. We should be saying, hey, man.

How about chicken salad for dinner tonight? You love that. I'll make it for you. You just have to enjoy it. They want women who they are legally bound to by blood or marriage to tell them what to think, but they don't. But they only want it in a subtle way. They don't want to be instructed what to think. They want to be coddled into thinking. And they definitely don't want to be told what to think by someone online. True. True.

Oh, it reminds me of that musical number from my new favorite musical stuff's called Let Mother Vote. And it's it's a great song. Anyway, go listen to that. And then we'll be back with a cool guest. Just want to add one one more thing. Donald Trump famously hates dogs. So it all kind of trust a man who doesn't like dogs.

You cannot. Nope. So, all right. We'll be back. And we're going to bring out a very special guest, Charlotte Howard, the executive editor of The Economist and co-host of the Checks and Balances podcast. We'll see you in a minute. Welcome back. We are back with a new special friend. Sammy, tell us about our friend.

Charlotte Howard, the executive editor of The Economist and the co-host of the Checks and Balance podcast. And let me say, I watch you quite a bit on that mainstream media talking, you know, talking your expertise. You are just, you know, one of my guides these days because the economic situation is so

unprecedented. I think it's fair to say. It is a very weird time to be grounded in reality while the people who are guiding economic policy seem to be on some other planet. But yes. So can you just tell us what do you think is the most strange, unprecedented, anomalous thing that this that this administration is doing that

is really striking to you as someone who writes about economic news? Well, I think what's strange and not unpredictable, though, I mean, everything with the Trump administration is both expected and shocking in this weird blend of things. But

Politicians for decades have been talking about manufacturing and talking about places that have been left behind and how they're going to help places that have been left behind. And it hasn't really been paired with policy. It's always been rhetorical, not based in policy. And so what you see now from the Trump administration is a really dramatic effort to reshape the American economy in their telling policy.

in real time, very, very quickly. And I think that some of the problems that the Trump administration has pointed out are real problems. You know, there are people in the United States, and I spent the early part of my career based in the Midwest and covering parts of the Midwest, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, parts of the Farm Belt as well.

There are places that do need to be helped and policy needs to evolve. But I think about the Trump administration's policy kind of like looking at a car and having a flat tire and then just smashing in all the windows as a way to fix it. It doesn't make sense. So having across the board tariffs is

would hurt American manufacturers. The enormous amount of uncertainty that is brought by imposing deadlines, delaying deadlines, you know, coming up with sort of empty deals, that uncertainty is something that stifles investment as opposed to promoting it.

And at the same time, the Trump administration is passing, is advancing this extraordinarily irresponsible set of fiscal policies that would put America deeper in debt. And so I can talk more about how those two things are connected. But essentially, the Trump administration is experimenting on a huge scale with America's economy in a way that actually does damage to, you know, not just the stock market and investors, but to ordinary Americans, too. Can I?

Point out something about manufacturing from like my little town's point of view, right? So I grew up in this town, Derby, Connecticut, and it's right on the Housatonic River. And there we used to have BF Goodrich. We had inline plastics. We had the stained glass factory. We had the wiffle ball factory. All the wiffle balls in America come from my hometown. We had all this stuff, right? And then slowly...

Manufacturing obviously shut down. These were abandoned buildings. And now the way that this town has been revitalizing is to get rid of all those factories or put breweries into those factories or cool ass restaurants or like really cool mixed use housing and office buildings. Right. This idea of like bringing back manufacturing. I just don't see Youngstown, Ohio or Derby, Connecticut, you know,

building shit anymore. Like I don't see them building roller skates anymore, right? That's what my great grandpa did. He was like one of the roller skate builders in Torrington. We're not going to do that because the American dollar has made it nearly impossible to manufacture things domestically because it's so expensive to do it. And on top of that, a lot of these factories that he says he wants to revive aren't even useful anymore. They've become wedding venues or breweries or they've straight up been bulldozed down.

So when I hear people talk about like, oh, I'm going to revitalize manufacturing. I'm like, where, where are you going to put it? Like where, what house are you going to reopen? Now during the pandemic in Rochester, we reopened one of the flour mills because there was no flour anywhere, but that was like a temporary kind of like hokey hometown thing to do for a quick second. Can he revitalize manufacturing the way that people like the boomers remember their grandparents working in? Well,

Well, I think that that story that you told is actually really illustrative of why it is that manufacturing remains at the heart of some economic discussion, because it's not just about manufacturing. It's about manufacturing as a symbol of economic security for the middle class. Right. So people talk about manufacturing as the kind of key to bringing back a way of life and a type of economic security that they used to have no longer have.

So all across the country, you know, there are places that just have abandoned factories. There aren't enough people there to build the kind of breweries that you're, you know, citing in Connecticut. And so there is a legitimate debate to be had about how you help those kind of places move forward into the 21st century. The truth is that the type of manufacturing, if any manufacturing, that will come back has changed.

a lot of automation. So people are investing in factories that have really advanced robotics to help do this with a smaller workforce. And it's not going to be at a scale that is going to be a game changer for the millions of people who voted for President Trump, right. And so I think it's a myth. And it's a lie to say that we're going to bring manufacturing back at scale that will make a difference to this enormous cohort of people.

And in the meantime, the chaos that you're unleashing on the economy through, again, companies that don't know where to invest, how to invest because the policy is always changing, real higher prices for American consumers as the tariffs are imposed and they raise the cost of basic goods. You know, inflation helped get Donald Trump elected, but it may –

really, you know, there's a real risk of it rising while he's in the White House. So it's an incoherent set of policies, I think.

How do you think that the constant back and forth with what the policy will be, the we're going to impose the tariffs, now there's a pause, now we're going to negotiate. How do you think that impacts the actual reactions with our trading partners and the people in our own government and then obviously American consumers? Because my real concern is not just that he imposed these crazy tariffs. It's that he then walked them back and then made deals that aren't

really deals. And if I'm on the other side of that trade anywhere else in the world, my thought is not so much that...

I don't want to trade with America necessarily because of Trump. I don't want to trade with America because they can't get their shit together and just pick a lane of what they're going to do. And that's what seems so dangerous. Well, I think it's two parts, right? And I agree with you. So on the one hand for a company sitting, you know, making decisions about where to put their investments, you can't plan if you don't know what the policy is. So that's one. And so then you have companies that are delaying investment because they don't know what the policy is.

Now, the second part of what you said has to do with America's trading partners. How do they react to this? And you see this happening already, which is that they're making contingency plans. So no one is giving up on the American market. We have an enormous economy, obviously, and consumers who buy the world's goods. But there is increasing activity between other trading partners. So, you know, looking to other opportunities because the U.S. is less stable as a partner. And what that does is

is, I think, diminish America's role and influence economically, which is not good, which is bad for Americans. Well, how much of America's economic success do you think has been sort of default by that influence that maybe people don't see that that was actually sort of critical to how wealthy some people in this country have become? Well, I think that if you look, you know,

Before the election, the weird thing about the campaign rhetoric from the Trump administration versus the economic reality is that in the lead up to November, America's economy was the envy of the world. We were outperforming every single other rich country. And so this idea that America was being left behind and being laughed at and all that was just a fiction. Okay.

And so now you go from that, and we had an Economist cover back in October that a colleague of mine wrote a special report about why America's economy was doing so well. I encourage people to go back and read that. It had a wad of dollars like as a rocket ship going into space. And then by the spring, we had a cover story with Donald Trump standing on a wad of cash with a thing of gasoline, like about to set it on fire with the new fiscal outlook. And so you take one thing and then you just transform it into something completely different.

And to bring it back to the budget, which I'm fascinated by in the way that, you know, we can talk more about that. It's like watching a Real Housewives show between Musk and Donald Trump. But they are doing something with that budget, which is to dramatically expand the national debt, which America already was on a really uneven fiscal footing.

And so that raises the requirement that we continue to borrow money. And at the same time, we're making America less reliable as a borrower. And so in a way that was never the case before, you see trust declining in America as a place for foreigners to, you know, put their capital through buying U.S. government debt. And you see that in the value of the dollar. You see that in the performance of the bond market. And so you have these two things, one where you make it

more essential that America borrow money. And two, you're doing things that make the world say thanks, but no thanks. You know, there's... How fucked are we? How fucked are we? Just like straight up. So I... Scale of one to 10. Scale of one to 10 on fuckery. I think that... I'm weirdly an optimist because I think...

that there are enough people who on what time scale are you an optimist? So I think that Trump is going to I think that Republicans will get hammered in the midterms for all the obvious reasons. And part of that is playing out again with the budget bill, where you have a Republican constituency that is now built on the working class.

but they are passing policies that harm them, whether it's Medicaid cuts or rising inflation. So I don't see how that isn't a winning electoral strategy for the Republican Party. I think at some point there will be Republicans. I'm not sure there'll be the current Republicans in Congress, but at some point Republicans will realize that continuing to just fall in line behind President Trump's

is not something that will sustain them forever. I mean, the degree to which Congress is just a collection of absolute invertebrates in the past six months has been so striking, right? I mean, like, Trump is just taking responsibilities from them that are not rightly his. And they just say, okay, you know, go for it. Yes, sir. And I think at some point, there will be a set of politicians who will

you know, look around and not because necessarily they think it's the right thing as a matter of policy, but they think it's the right thing politically. I have no faith that people make decisions only on what's good policy. It's just about what's good politics, right? So I think at some point that calculus will change and that will be for the good of the rest of us. Well, that's my question when it comes to the deficit hawks in the Senate, particularly the Republicans who

It feels like that's one of those things that people kind of always bring up. But the question of how much it actually matters to them or means to them, they always seem to just kind of vote in the way that will ultimately increase the deficit anyway. Can you explain in layman's terms, why is the deficit being high a bad thing for normal people?

And is this just kind of like a political football that people bring out when it's convenient or if they don't if they want to extract concessions? Like, what is the actual implication for taxpayers when this debt balloons to the size that this bill would make it balloon to? There's so many ways I could answer that question, but I'll break it down into two parts, one short term and one short to medium term.

America is spending more on interest payments for its debt than it spends on defense. So just think about that for a second. America's entire, you know, military complex with all of the things we're doing all over the world with rising threats in dealing with China, the threat of China seizing Taiwan, you know, potential, always potential escalation in the Middle East is

an aggressive Russia I mean just think about all the things that we're doing so more than everything we spend on that we spend on you know paying down our our our interest payments on debt um and so it just becomes so it's like for for an average person it's like if they had such a high credit card balance that their interest charges were higher than the balance itself is that equivalent um

It's more like their payments on interest were larger than their payments on their mortgage. Like, you know, it was more expensive for them to pay interest on their credit card payments than it would be to buy a house, let's say, to break it down in that way. And then the other threat, which is not one –

that anyone would have even considered in the realm of possibility is that America actually could not be able to, you know, service its debt if people, other countries, other investors, buyers, stop buying American debt. So if you think about the scale of problems that politicians normally deal with, like COVID, like the financial crisis, the response to those problems was to spend money.

So you pass a really big bill. You try to juice up the economy. We're going to spend money on this. We're going to spend money on that. We're going to dole out cash, et cetera. That's easy for politicians to do. The type of crisis I'm describing would require them to cut.

How do you cut on a massive scale? Congress is bad at that, really, really bad. Okay. And it would cause enormous pain for the American people who've come to rely on different programs. So, you know, one debt is becoming more expensive to neither the political nor economic system are equipped to deal with actual, an actual fiscal crisis.

So what would happen if they had to deal with it? This kind of depressing talk has stunned you both into silence. Yeah.

What would happen? It would be bad. It would be bad. And so therefore... Like what would someone, you know, a mom in Tennessee experience if that happens? They would experience programs on which they have come to depend being slashed in a more dramatic way than they had ever considered. So already, you know, take an example in the current budget bill of a cut that they're considering, but this would be on a much bigger scale if there was a real fiscal crisis. Yeah.

But in order to pay for Trump's tax cuts, the extension of the tax cuts that he passed in 2017,

There are all kinds of measures in there that would be cut. One of them is to Medicaid. So Obamacare, I was covering health care back when Obamacare was being rolled out. And you had this thing where all states were deciding, do we take advantage of this amazing offer to expand Medicaid to a greater share of our population, Medicaid being the program for the poor? And so they raised the income limits. And the federal government said, you know, we'll help you, state X, pay for this expansion in health care.

And 40 states took up that offer, have since taken up that offer. And guess what? Republican states, because this is something that their constituents want. And the current budget bill would dramatically shrink that. OK, so it would go back in a dramatic way. So fewer people would have health insurance coverage through Medicaid, this this federal state program.

Now, if there was a real fiscal crisis, you can imagine that, but on steroids. At what point could it be so terrible that it can't exist? Or, you know, like would they, not everybody could be kicked off their mortgage and be homeless. Not everybody could be turned away from every hospital. At some point they'd have to be like, like what, what would fit? Obviously people would die. Obviously there'd be horrible hunger and all kinds of terrible things. But at what point would,

How bad, I guess, would it get? Like, is there another country that went through something like this that we could look to and say, hey, we don't want to be like that? Is it like Russia? Is it Hungary? Like, they have authoritarian leadership that has...

But I guess they didn't financially bankrupt the people with the authoritarianism. I would say, I mean, it is helpful to be this nihilistic and it's not in some ways. Right. So, I mean, yeah, we don't want to be Argentina and, you know, have a total runaway inflation or have a government that, you know, is plainly incompetent and no one wants to lend to. Right. Yeah.

So I don't think this is the most likely outcome, but the Trump administration is toying with it in a way that would have previously been completely unfathomable. Unthinkable. Completely unthinkable. I mean, the man bankrupted a casino, so I'm not fucking surprised. Right. But maybe we move on to a different topic.

Okay, so instead of being wrapped up in the chaos of this fucking madman as we continue to be, earlier in the program, we were talking about what's going on in LA. And I was saying that Trump lies so astronomically by telling half-truths about the way that the military works or who's paying for all of these ice sweeps and whatnot. What's your take on the situation in Los Angeles right now? So I think...

In Trump's second term, his agenda from the beginning was to just go around and picking as many fights as he could to test the limits of his power and expand it. And so you have seen this in all kinds of arenas. So with Congress, Congress said, you know, sure, go ahead, do what you want to do, right? Yeah.

With the courts, there are different fights that are playing out at a different pace, right? You have, in some instances, courts pushing back. There are a number of cases that are going to escalate, I think, to the Supreme Court.

in his war with universities, again, some capitulation, but Harvard really fighting back. Yeah, Harvard. Same with law firms, right? And so I think that his agenda here is kind of mixed in terms of this expansion of power and these fights that he's picking. But where it was always clear that there was the greatest potential for real incendiary action was with his fights with cities. And these are cities and states that are run by Democrats, right?

Throughout his political life, since, you know, as a born and bred New Yorker himself, right, but he has cast these cities as cesspools and war zones, and places that are misrun.

But he also has a lot of pride in, you know, being the enforcer that is going to do good for these cities. And I spent seven hours with him in Madison Square Garden. I'm not sure if either of you were there when he did his rally in New York. And it was this amazing thing because he won an enormous share of New York, right? I mean, it was over a quarter of the population in Queens voted for him. The other two, you know, unthinkable shares of voters in the Bronx. I went to a rally on Long Island and they were so pumped. Yeah. Because no one ever comes here, but they were...

It was wild.

have, you know, normal people who go out into the street and can get worked up together. And then you have Trump now coming in and taunting, you know, actively taunting. And he's looking for this fight. And I think that it will, we can talk about immigration policy and the degree to which his plan for immigration is or is not, you know, at all reasonable. But we should see this for what it is, which is him picking a fight

and looking to play the role of enforcer in kind of a theatrical way, but that has really dangerous implications. I think one of the things that's fascinating about the clashes in LA is the language from Stephen Miller, who's an immigration hawk within Trump's administration. And he's talking about this as an invasion and an insurrection, right? And I think this points to a problem for Democrats. So

Democrats have wanted to bill Trump as the danger to America. And Trump wants to say the danger to America is migrants and hella cities and China and, you know, that America is really under attack.

And I think the Democrats get so focused rightly on the danger that Trump poses to the country through various acts, as we've discussed, that they don't cast themselves as the party that's going to fix anything. Like immigration as a problem is a problem that Democrats need to deal with. And I think Biden learned that way too late.

China is a problem that Democrats need to deal with America's relationship with China. So you could go on and on down the list. And I think Trump's skill is creating this vortex where Democrats can't do anything except respond to him. And Democrats' task now, going into the midterms and going into the next presidential election, is how do we come up with a coherent strategy

set of policies that are not too complicated that explain why we are the grownups in the room and can help this country work better rather than it just being a question of Trump is the enemy or from Trump's, you know, Trump's argument in the converse is that we're being invaded and under, under attack. You know, so it's about reframing this discussion about danger and Democrats haven't figured out how to do that. That's a hot tip. They should. Have you seen any sign of where that's worked? No,

Where that's worked. I think that there are some Democrats and I'll point to the one because I don't want to curse other Democrats by mentioning them. But I think that Jared Polis in Colorado, he's just a guy who's running a state and doing it in practical grown up way.

And I think that's where Democrats need to shine, that this is all a circus and it's bad for America and it's not just theater. It is having real damage and you need to have grownups running the country. We got to go back to calling them weird. It was working for Tim Walls, I think. And it wasn't the calling them weird that was the thing. It was the idea that this sort of like dad-like figure would look at something they did and be like,

Now, that's not cool, boys. We don't want to act like that. And it made sense, right? So I agree. I think it's that the Democrats channeled the way people actually felt about something for a second in the words that people actually feel in their heads. And that's quite rare because they're usually like having the thought and then translating it through the consultant machine and then delivering it maybe at a place no one's going to see and no one thinks they do anything. But when you just say what you think, it's very refreshing. Yeah.

Well, that's what Trump does, by the way. I mean, his main appeal is that he's authentic.

I hear. I hear that he's authentic. So, yeah. Great. He is authentic in a weird way, despite lying. He's an authentic liar. Oh, man. Where's Melania? That's what I need to know. What's the cost-benefit analysis there? Did you read her book? No, I did not read her book. I'm going to send you... I wrote a review of her book because I knew it would give me a lot of pleasure to do so. Oh, I'll read your review. Okay. I want to hear her review. Yeah. It was an amazing...

I mean, as someone who I'm a writer, that's my job is to write words. To have that many words convey such little meaning actually is like really amazing as a feat. It's an amazing. I mean, it had some classic lines, just some classic lines like driving is like a parody, right? And yeah, yeah.

Well, it's unintentional parody, which is the best form of political memoir. Like what were some of her hot takes? I mean, she goes back and forth between...

You know, she's quite clear on her love for Baron, which is sweet. I mean, yes. And she talks. Everything is in soft focus, kind of like her photographs. So she'll talk about 2020 and George Floyd, but never mention him. Right. Or she will give little pearls of wisdom that.

You read them once and it seems like it makes sense, but then you read them again and it just dissolves into thin air. Did you see her entrance at the RNC where she didn't say anything? And they had the classical music? Yes. I actually thought that was well staged. It was. It was a good show. It was like an ice dancer. It was. The whole arena. I was there. The whole arena was twinkling. I mean, she looked amazing. She does. And...

Yeah. She hates her now. And I love that. But it works. They're kind of soulmates in a way. You think so? I kind of do. Like, think how well this all works for everybody involved. She gets whatever she wants. That's true. Hey, girls gotta eat, like my grandma says.

Last quickfire question. What's up with the Saudis and the Qatari money? That freak you out? You mean as a matter of corruption? Yeah, now he's asking Qatar to give him money to fix up the Kennedy Center and add some more gold decor in there or something.

I think all of that pales in comparison to his crypto stuff. Oh, so what's the crypto stuff? I see. I don't have money, so I don't worry about things like crypto or the stock market. It's not about whether you're in crypto. It's about the scale at which he can enrich himself and his family through their investments in crypto. We had a really great cover on this by my colleague Mike Bird a few weeks ago that I would encourage people to go back and

and read and our podcast checks and balance did a podcast on it too. But the, uh, it used to be that corruption was about giving money to secure power for presidents. You'd give you, you're trying to get access to them by making sure that they're reelected. And what's weird about crypto is it's so much more flagrant than that is that you can invest in crypto or, you know,

He can actually I think it was I don't want to misspeak. It was I think it was Abu Dhabi. There's a new vehicle that includes some of the Trump family's crypto holdings. But it's not about helping him secure power. It's just about making them really rich. So you're kind of breaking down that middleman. And so I think.

the scale at which Trump's holdings, I mean, his crypto holdings are way bigger than all of his other assets, according to my colleagues analysis. So that's where I think people, it's a little more complicated than like, oh, the Qataris bought a plane, but it's worth diving into because the nature of how people are trying to buy influence with the Trump administration through some of these deals is fascinating.

Yeah, I see it as very much like it's not the plane itself or any one particular payment that's made to him. It's the fact that he's open and his family is open for all these payments all the time from anyone who will give them to them. And that is so much more of a danger to have going on for the next four years at least.

But aren't people losing money on the Trump mean coins and stuff? Or that's like, that's the grip for the average person. And that's separate from the big boy game he's playing with like other people. Well, he's put all these people in place of financial regulators that are from the crypto industry, right? So he has the power through regulation to help the crypto industry grow.

And by doing so, he raises the value of his own. I do think there are some politicians, you know, governors, Governor Polis in Colorado, you know, there are people around who are sane people who are doing sane things. And I don't want to name too many of them because as soon as I do, they announce that they're retiring. Like this is a thing that happens. Don't. No, I know. I'm not going to tell you who I like. Normal people say I'm fed up with this or another challenge from a MAGA person.

But I do think they are good. Or they want to go spend time with their grandkids. What a crazy idea. But there are reasonable people who are, I think, grownups who could help right the ship. It just is looking a little choppy. Could the next president just cancel crypto and bankrupt Trump? No, I don't think you want to cancel it. I mean, you don't want to kill an industry altogether. You just don't want to have blatant conflicts of interest between the people who financially benefit and the people who are setting the policy. Yeah.

Just one more quick thing on crypto. How do you think they should attempt to regulate it? Or do you think it's not regulatable and it should just be considered a security? Well, if it was considered a security, it would be. You could regulate it. So you could have rules that are...

Along the suite of financial regulation, you could have rules that are pretty sensible that have to do with rules around banks and crypto and, again, securities rules that's applied to crypto. And there is some legislation that is not actually totally bonkers, right, that members of both parties are interested in. It's just Trump has actually made his own case harder because he's turned this into –

an industry that seems to be entirely entangled with his own personal, you know, political and financial interests. And so then it becomes, uh,

We don't have to talk about the merits of crypto in general, but it becomes more soiled. I mean, I do think that Trump, who himself voiced skepticism of crypto just a few years ago, it is the ultimate Trump vehicle, right? Because he was never that successful. I mean, he had medium success as a real estate developer, right? But it's not like he was one of America's all-time great businessmen. But his singular talent is...

declaring things to be true and then convincing people that they are true. Right. And so that's kind of what crypto is about. Like you say it has value with the NFTs too. With saying that the Marines or commandos are going to drop into L.A. out of helicopters. Like it's all the stuff that's not true until other people believe it and make it true for them. It's so annoying. Well, thank you. Trump is crypto. Trump is crypto.

Thank you for being here and sharing with us this slightly depressing episode, but educational. We need to know about these things, right? Yes. And your show...

much more positive. We're just in a little bit. I was saying earlier, my niece gets red frown faces or green smile faces at school every single day. And when she gets like three red faces, she decides, well, I'm just going to be bad for the whole day because it's over now. And that's how I feel about today. We started by covering like the LA stuff and like all of this horrible stuff. And now we're kind of like, okay, today's episode is red frowns, but we had to know about it. But your show has a lot of green smiles. Tell us about your show and where people can find you. Uh,

our show has green smiles. I don't know that anyone has ever described it that way, but I'm going to take it. Um,

My show is called Checks and Balance. It's a weekly show. It comes out on Friday. It's with two of my colleagues from The Economist, John Priddo and Idris Kalloun. Each week we talk about one issue in more detail so that we can actually discuss it as opposed to just saying a few quick things and moving on to the next subject. So I mentioned a show we did recently on crypto. We have shows on American foreign policy that draw on the expertise of our colleagues around the world. I hope you listen. Enjoy it.

Awesome. Well, we will check it out. And until next time, I'm V Spear. And I'm Sammy Sage. And this is American Beaver Dream. Good night.