2/10/25: Trump Approval Skyrockets, Republicans Sour On Elon, Trump Nukes CFPB, Dems Desperate To Win Back Billionaires, MAGA Copies Hillary Playbook
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How do people feel about Donald Trump? Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. From CBS News, this is the first major indications that we have right now in the United States. Our feeling about the Trump administration some 20 days in so far. Describing Donald Trump, the top answers. This is plus or minus 2.5% in terms of the margin of error.

Tough, 69%. Energetic, 63%. Focused, 60%. Effective, 58%. Let's go to the next one, please. Trump and the campaign promises, is he doing 70% quote, what he promised in the campaign? 30% different from what he promised. Now, the coup de grace, shall we? Let's go to the final one. Uh,

Trump overall job rating, 53% approved, 47% disapproved. He's got a positive approval rating, something literally unheard of whenever he was the previous president of the United States. And if you look at some of the individual options

or individual things that he has espoused and or is attempting to do. You're going to see some similar support, although there's very important divergence, which we will get to. So let's go to the next one. Trump administration's program to deport immigrants illegally in the United States, some 59% approved, 41% disapproved. Can we go to the next one, please? And here we have interesting numbers that Andrew Kuczynski flagged from YouGov. Trump is some plus

10% approval with voters under 30. Almost unheard of for Republicans. It definitely underscores the vibe shift, the whole idea of male voters. You could see, do you see that number there with male voters? It's astounding. U.S. trying to, now this is where the divergence comes into and this is where I'm going to get to.

Of all the things that Donald Trump, I unfortunately was not able to be here on Thursday to rage against this, has said that has concerned me most and what I think would destroy both this country and his presidency is this. U.S. trying to take over Gaza would be 13% good idea, 47% bad idea, 40% not sure depends. You really united the country on this one. To the 40%, I beg, I plead, get with the program. Get with...

the bad idea. There is not a single thing that Donald Trump has done this presidency that has not shocked, appalled, outraged, like incited me to like rage and potential violence if this were to happen. Then his insane proposal to take over Gaza, which he seems completely committed to. Let's go ahead and take him to listen to that, which he said yesterday on his way to the Super Bowl.

committed to buying and owning Gaza. As far as us rebuilding it, we may give it to other states in the Middle East to build sections of it. Other people may do it through our auspices. But we're committed to owning it, taking it, and making sure that Hamas doesn't move back. There's nothing to move back into. The place is a demolition site. It'll be, the remainder will be demolished. Everything's demolished.

I mean, you can't live in those buildings right now. They're very unsafe.

So we went from Trump the peacemaker ceasefire to we're not. It's so crazy. I thought that the worst thing that would happen is be like, all right, Israel can hand it over. I did not for one million years think, oh, we're actually going to be the ones who administer it. Now, Trump says we're not going to have a single troop on the ground. OK, good luck trying to own a piece of property without administering it. Something potentially like even worse and more outrageous is a

removing all, is the United States actually expelling all of these people instead of the Israelis? I mean, it's one thing, you know, these two people where they're going to ethnically cleanse them. It's like, all right, well that's on them. But this is like us not only complicit in shipping arms to facilitate it, but like actively participating. There's that. Um, I saw a tweet going around, uh, immediately after Trump said that, and I'm, this is not an endorsement, but it's like, uh,

that is going to incite more terrorism against the United States than like any potential thing an American president has done since the invasion of Iraq. Yeah. I'm like, okay, I'm not getting into a damn skyscraper anytime soon. I am beside myself over this and I'm beside myself over it because he's totally serious. And this is where the Trump

administrate. There is not a single thing that you could do that would not sink your presidency faster than the political administration of Gaza, than United States soldiers, service members putting their lives at risk, worse getting killed because of the

Israeli military's operation. I mean, there's nothing, there's not a single thing, solution to this crisis or whatever, that could be worse than what is being proposed here. Turning the Arab world against us, I mean, inciting terrorism, but at its absolute worst is

For some reason, Israel gets to destroy Gaza, and then we are the ones who have to pay for it, facilitate the ethnic—that they want to get rid of all of these. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that we would be where we are today. I am just—

thank God, hopefully the American people can speak out against it. I'll tell you this, if a single American soldier's foot in Gaza, I'm going to be out there as some Vietnam War hippie in the street. I'm not kidding. That is a complete red line. I think it should be for everybody. Did we not learn our lesson? And with Trump, this is where his arrogance, one of the things I predicted here on the show is every president who wins a popular vote, especially in their second term, they always overreach in some way. And it ends up back for

I would never have predicted that it would be this. But this is the, if you want a ticket to not only losing for a generation, destroying your legacy, Doge, now this would be a footnote to a disastrous middle war in the Middle East. So I just, I have nothing else to say about it.

It's insane. I could go on forever. Truly insane. It makes me want to lose my mind. Where is the anti-war coalition? I'm seeing people who I've known for 20 years who have spoken against neocons and saying, oh, we can happily administer war.

Am I losing my mind? I mean, what happened? I knew that the right and many others were craven whenever it came to Afghanistan, and they never really believed what they said. I didn't really believe that it was this bad that we were actually going to be on board. You know, imperialism through bullying like Greenland, I'm like fine with, but this is too much. It's like this is one of those where...

I mean, we've learned no lessons. It seems Trump is totally... He's serious. Like, it's one of those where something I have learned here with his second term, like, no, no, no, let's take him totally seriously. I appreciate you saying that because that's a lot of the cope I see is like, oh, well, it's just a negotiating position and he's not being serious. I'm like...

no, I don't know why you would. First of all, if he says, and he said it now repeatedly, you should take it seriously. And number two is to your point, like if we've learned anything in this second administration, it's like, no, even the wildest,

even things that he frankly never talked about on the campaign trail, are completely on the table. So, yeah, not a very popular move there, but one that he's in. And, you know, it seems like it comes from Kushner, who floated originally, like waterfront property, blah, blah, blah. And this is Trump's

like, deranged real estate brain. I think it's worse. Where he just sees, like, dollar signs and, you know, certainly doesn't care about the people there or what it would entail. But it's... I mean, it's disgusting. It's immoral. It's a catastrophe. It's just...

It is even worse than what I could have imagined. I never could have cooked something up like this. Trump would have done. And I think I had a pretty dire expectation of what his policy vis-a-vis Israel would be. This is actually worse. Yeah, I mean, and look, even granting Israel aid and all that, I mean, it wouldn't be super popular, but people wouldn't particularly care that much.

It's not going to be a deciding factor in the election or in the future. And it would definitely be something that people would pay attention to foreign policy. But this is one of those, again, nothing will sink you like an unpopular foreign war. And the craziest thing is even the most hardened neoconservatives who in Washington, not even they could have cooked up U.S. administration and takeover of Gaza. Not even they could have imagined such an audacious coup.

And I mean, did you, I'm sure you guys, Ryan, covered it. Did you see Bibi's face whenever Trump suggested? Even he appears to be taking it. He's like, wait, what? He's like, wait, I thought it was ours. I didn't think it was going to be yours. See, I don't buy this. Bibi looked totally happy to me. I don't know. He looked totally happy to me. You know why I think he's happy? Because now not only the two-state solution lip service is literally just dead. It's dead. Because now it doesn't even matter, right? It's a different universe of what. Now we're talking about, oh, if America doesn't own it, then Israel will own it.

But the idea of some Palestinian authority, like, this is fake. It's gone. It's gone. The question now is, like, all of this open, you know, talk of hitting Egypt and Jordan and all of these people with tariffs. And this is one of those where, look, this is serious shit. Like, they were talking about two-something million people. Jordan— Well, according to Trump, it's 1.7 or 1.8, which is also an admission that they've probably killed more like half a million Palestinians. I did not even think about that.

Yeah. That's crazy. Okay, so fine, 1.7 million. That would fundamentally change the ethnic makeup of Jordan and of Egypt. Why would they tolerate that? What have the Egyptians and the Jordanians told us from day one? 3.1 billion in aid to Egypt every year is not going to buy you their political subservience on this question, on something maybe Suez or whatever. It's a little bit different.

But we're not talking about Canada trade war, Mexico trade war. This is a like political legitimacy question of the Jordanian and the Egyptian regimes that are in power. They can never accept this status quo. Same with the Saudis, the UAE. I mean, this is the perfect recipe for a complete alignment against the United States and the region for inciting terrorism. But I mean, again, worse, if you were just to think of it from our perspectives,

Why should an American soldier die for the political administration of Gaza? Why should we first also pay for it? So we facilitate the destruction and so we pay for the destruction and then we pay for the rebuilding? That's like some disaster capitalism meme that's out there. You can't even make, you know, that's like out of a book.

of Noam Chomsky's fantasy novel to create this entire situation. I've got to say, I'm very disappointed too in Steve Witkoff, who I genuinely had confidence in bringing about this ceasefire and all of that, but now even he appears to be backing this up. Yeah, but he used his trip to Gaza to justify this talk. And by the way, there's a

things that we've been predicting honestly from the beginning not that the US would own Gaza but that they would destroy it so much that then they say gosh no one could live there humanitarian thing to do to say well who paid for people out of there right and that's what Witkoff used his trip to Gaza to do I saw that to say it's so destroyed there's no people are going to the north and they're coming back because there's nothing there etc etc and I mean it's true

We did, you know, we did help the Israelis thoroughly destroy and demolish it. And I think the end goal always in the Israelis mind was so that they could have this moment of saying, and gosh, that's, you know, we just, we got to deal with moving these people out of this territory. It's a shame. You remember the Biden administration floated something not,

us taking it over, but also floated, hey, why don't we set up some tent cities in the desert? I was going to say, they did it in a more neoliberal way where they're like, well, us and the European Union will eventually... A coalition. A coalition of people will pay for the administration. It's like, well, okay, the net effect is the same. And I mean, I guess that's one of those where this was probably an end result in some administrative form, but to just say...

We're going to buy it and own it. I mean, the MAGA high IQ cope on this one is like, oh, he's negotiating. But I'm like, but negotiating to what end? I mean, no matter what, this is going to be bad for us, right? We don't need to negotiate because, like, we own these people, like the Israelis, you know. So, yeah.

Anyway, there's that. In addition, listen, I do want to just to go back quickly to the overall approval rating. I do think there's something to Elon Musk is a bit of a heat shield for Trump right now. Oh, that's an interesting theory. And this is part of why I have always thought that it is unlikely that there's going to be a severing in the near term of this relationship because they both get a lot. I mean, Elon gets everything that he wants.

And Trump, you know, Elon's taken a lot of the heat. Trump can kind of go. He's golfed like a million times already since he's been. He golfed with Tiger the other day. I think that was just yesterday. He was golfing with Tiger and Charlie Woods, talking about the live PGA merger deal, blah, blah, blah. Who's Charlie Woods? That's Tiger's son. Oh, okay. Yeah. Is he good? He is very good. Okay. Yeah, he's very good. In any case...

Trump gets to do whatever he wants and Elon's taking a lot of the heat. And, you know, so I think there's something to that. It's also worth pointing out that Biden at this time in his presidency had a plus 14 approval rating. So presidential honeymoons are also a real thing. Absolutely. I mean, look, it's early. It's only 20 days. Trump is much more of a polarizing figure and was elected in different circumstances. Yeah, for sure. So, I mean, I think, you know, you got to compare people to their context. So within the Trumpian context, who was literally president to have a positive approval rating is nuts.

I see danger for him in the Elon way. I see danger for him with Gaza. I think Gaza would most immediately sink him. Look at Afghanistan, you know, Afghanistan.

history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes, a disastrous foreign conflagration can sink you like no other, which is exactly what happened to Joe Biden. I mean, also look at Iraq with George W. Bush, which by the end of his presidency, what his approval rating was like in the 20s. Yes, I actually recently was talking with someone and they were like, man, the jubilance, the change. And I was like, guys, it's just too short. And this is where you, like, you just need to read a book.

George W. Bush. I mean, imagine 20 days in the George W. Bush administration, the second term. I would have been like, America is a evangelical Christian country. We are neoconservative. We are nation building. And by 18 months, we've tried to privatize social security. We have a

thousand dead soldiers and service members in Iraq. The American people blow out the midterms for the Democratic Party. Oh, and then to put a bow on it, we have the financial crisis and Barack Obama wins Indiana in 2008. So let's all take a step back and let's look at where the risk is. The other risk is with regard to

Yeah, that's what I was about to get to. Yeah, which is, you know, people still are like, we kind of like, did you do something about this whole price, high price situation? You don't really seem to have your eye on the ball there. If anything, with tariffs, it's probably going in the opposite direction. So we can put up on the screen the numbers, not enough focus on prices, 66%.

So a super majority say you gotta refocus your priorities here. Only 31% say it is the right amount. He got asked by Brett Baric yesterday in advance of the Super Bowl about when families are going to be able to feel prices going down. Let's take a listen to what Trump had to say. When do you think families will be able to feel prices going down, groceries, energy, or are you kind of saying to them,

Hang on, inflation may get worse until it gets better. No, I think we're gonna become a rich, look, we're not that rich right now. We owe $36 trillion. That's because we let all these nations take advantage of us. Same thing like 200 billion with Canada, we owe 300, we have a deficit with Mexico of $350 billion. I'm not gonna do that.

So no real answer there. And then shifts to tariffs, which again is part of I think people's – however you feel about the tariffs, part of people's concern about prices going up. And Wall Street Journal had a write-up. Now listen, Wall Street Journal is just like blanket against any tariffs whatsoever. So I think they do have an ideological interest. They do.

in writing up this piece. But the numbers that they cite here are real. We can put this up on the screen. They say the Trump bump in consumer confidence is already over. The mood of the American consumer is souring. They say that consumer sentiment fell about 5% in the University of Michigan's preliminary February survey of consumers to its lowest reading since July of 24. Expectations of inflation the year ahead also jumped from 3.3% in January to 4.3%

Apparently, that is a very significant, like to see a month over month increase of a full percentage point expectation in terms of inflation is quite significant. Americans are just like they are under Biden. They'll give you a chance, right? They'll give you like eight, nine months. And then if they feel like you're not doing anything,

then they're going to turn against you. So this is the danger for Donald Trump. This is also where I think Elon and them could be a danger as well, because the problem with the move fast and break things approach is it's fine in the interim when people are like, oh, it's, you know, they're like, oh, it's energetic. It's awesome. It's fun to watch. But, you know, right now, I think there's some Doge stuff going on with FEMA. And they're talking about that. It's like, look, you're only one. I didn't mention in my retrospective about Bush. Katrina is really what sank him.

If you go back and you look, you're only one national disaster away from the entire mood of the country souring and turning against you. This is like important differences, obviously, for that in the future. But if you have Doge who is, you know, it does something or cuts a program or like the FAA crash that we had earlier. Imagine if that crash was 20 months from now.

Right? I mean, you can imagine the media environment that that would have looked like. Previously, at that point, they were able to be like, oh, it's DEI. Now it's like, all right, well, you own this, buddy. Exactly. So it's 20 months. I mean, look, disasters don't wait for disasters don't just conveniently get timed. They can happen.

literally at any moment. So I think that's where the Elon Doge approach could really come back to bite them. A disastrous foreign conflict like Gaza, that would be, I mean, that's the ticket to a single digit approval rating. Just ask George H.W. Bush.

or George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Joe Biden, every single one of them who's cost their approval rating to this. So simple, okay, if that's the way that you wanna decide. And the other is if they feel that if there's a mismatch, so this gets to the Bush analogy of privatization of social security. So let's say Trump only does tariffs, but just stops carrying, only does tariffs and cost cutting or what doge stuff, forgets about inflation and stops bullying the Federal Reserve, which I think is important.

to try and... That part I'm fine with. He needs to bring that back. No, I'm saying, I'm like, listen, privatize this. Can we at least get on board with the coup of that? Let's march into the Federal Reserve. Let's take it over and let's bring it back under civilian administration. Let's drop the rates back to zero. But if you have a march of two years...

You've got all of this Doge tariff stuff going on. Prices either are raised, stay flat. I think that's a problem. If income, wages, and all that stuff doesn't start to go up, if gas remains relatively flat, that's where two years from now, when all you have is vibes of Doge and media chaos and all the others, that's when...

people really turned against Trump in 2008. By the way, don't forget all this is in the interim over the next 18 months, we're about to pass what? A massive tax cut re-extension. I mean, there might be some good things in there, but let's all be honest about what's going to happen. You're going to see the extension of a huge corporate tax cut

which was one of the worst days of the Trump presidency in 2017, if you go back and you look at his approval rating. So there are some serious red flags ahead for him. And it's very easy to sink yourself if you go in that direction. But the media environment has changed, so maybe things are different. I don't know.

Yeah, maybe. I mean, I still think people, you know, people are tuned into reality. So if their lives are not getting better and prices are high and we're getting entangled in more unwanted Middle Eastern wars, people are going to be like, yeah, you know, I'm not really down with this. And there's also just, there has been a swing back and forth backlash effect. Yes.

where people feel like the country's on the wrong track and they're not satisfied. And so I think the risks are pretty high for him. Also, the average mortgage rate right now in the United States is 6.97%. So if that doesn't go down anytime soon, that's just going to say, if you have four more years of this, people who are elder millennials, they're going to be almost what, like

nearing 50 and they're not going to be able to buy a house? That's too much, right? So you can think about some of the ways that can manifest itself politically. We always covered it here over the last several years. I still think that's a huge reason why it was successful in this election. Have you ever looked into the night sky and wondered who or what was flying around up there?

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Let's get to the Elon part because this is important too. It gets to some of the stuff we're talking about here. Let's put this poll up there on the screen. This was from The Economist and YouGov, and they did a poll of Republicans where they supported – they asked them in November of 2024 how much they wanted Elon to have influence in the Trump administration.

So at that time, post-election, they said they wanted Elon to, quote, have a lot of influence over the incoming Trump administration. 47%, 29% said a little, 12% said none at all. Now let's go to where we are today. In February, you have 26% a lot, 43% a little, 17% none at all. So a big shift from a lot to a little. This is difficult to parse. You know, it's kind of complicated.

in terms of all of that. But this is big questions too, in terms of like, what is fueling that and what even that really means. But there's some signs for some problems there for Elon and for Doge. Let's go to the next one. Let me just, before we jump to the next one, let me just also point out the numbers from there with regard to Democrats and independents. I mean, you can imagine Democrats were never super psyched about Elon having a lot of influence

in the Trump administration. But in November, you had 15% of Democrats and 26% of independents saying they wanted him to have a lot of influence. Overall, 13% of surveyed Americans want Musk to have a lot of influence on the Trump administration now. So at this point in time, whereas previously it was 15% of Democrats, 26% of independents saying they wanted him to have a lot, now it's only 6%.

percent of independents who say they want him to have a lot of influence. And if you take, you know, the entire American public together, only 13 percent say they want him to have a lot of influence. And, you know, I think there's just a natural reaction against like

the richest man on the planet, making all of these decisions about whether you get Social Security, whether your public school system gets funded, whether your Head Start has funding, whether your rural health clinic has funding, et cetera. There is a revulsion to that. And I think, you know, as he has aggressively asserted himself in ways that frankly went far beyond,

I always thought Doge would have teeth. I never thought it was some blue ribbon commission make work project. This has gone way beyond what I expected and is a piece of this that, you know, of the Trump administration that I really didn't factor in, you know, going in thinking about how this was all going to unfold. And so I do think there is a reaction against Doge.

that usurping of power from the dude that just got elected and the Congress, et cetera, and all consolidating power in the hands of this one. I think it's possible, but I'm still very skeptical of this theory. So I'll just say this. Politically, I have really had to force myself. Is the media being institutionally left-wing and the narratives of a lot of this stuff that have been able to shape? Think about the biggest slanderers

psyops of the election. Like, Brat Summer, fake, right? Tim Walsh, incredible candidate, fake. Such incredible with men, all that, fake. Beyonce, all this other stuff, not.

non-existent. When we think back through the election, even with the polls and other, childless cat ladies is going to sink them with women, fake. Springfield, Ohio, oh, that's going to nuke them. Nope, actually Springfield voted more for Trump. Puerto Rico, garbage gate, all of that, complete psyop on all of these. I still, I'm not sure I yet grasp

the lack of power the media has in shaping its narratives. So for example, in this question, the United States is in a constitutional crisis. They say agree 54%, disagree 27%. So people are like, see, people are turning against Elon. It's like, well, if you ask the average Joe on the street, is the United States in a constitutional crisis? And he says, yes. Is he talking about Elon or is he talking...

Is he talking about Mitch McConnell being like 99 years old and collapsing and having a stroke? Is he talking about – is he probably just evergreen agree because he doesn't like the way that the government is going? Yeah. I'm still just deeply skeptical that Americans are as tuned in. I think what I really learned from the election was that the power of these media narratives around childless cat ladies, around Haitians, about – I mean all of this, it just –

ended up being literally the opposite. I mean, so much of the institutional credibility from the Stelzer poll, all of these shibboleths that we all had in American politics were broken fundamentally. And I'm not talking about this from like, oh my God, this is amazing. But you're like, you really do have to look at it and be like, wow, wow.

I mean, really, when you think about all the things that people said that were going to sink Donald Trump, and they ended up having, if anything, a negligible or the opposite effect in the electorate, I'm just deeply skeptical about this Elon thing hitting home unless something like what you're saying materializes. So far, Social Security has not been touched, right? Getting access to Social Security? Okay. Even Medicare. It's like, well, if you get Medicare fraud—

It's great. Actually, there's some estimate of $50 billion in Medicare fraud. Will they properly do it? I don't know. That's not what they're doing, but yeah. I don't know. Listen, I have no idea. The question is— They're going to come after Rick Scott. Well, actually, we should go after Rick Scott. Absolutely. I totally agree with that. But they're not going to do that.

The question is how it materializes functionally and also how people experience these events really in their lives. And I really took away from the election that – because if you turn on CNN and all of that, there's all this Musk talk and all of this. I don't think it's bad because here we're talking – we're trying to predict the impact of stuff.

But really when you think back to that effect, it just didn't exist. So I'm skeptical of some of this stuff. I deeply am in terms of just even the polling. And I've had to learn that on immigration, mass deportation. I'm not going to be like, see, America's totally with this. I know how Americans are, right? The moment you see a little kid in a cage, it's like things can change a lot.

And they can change on a dime. So the vibe, the way that you experience and the way that you actually execute a lot of this stuff, I think that stuff matters the most. And so I'm not ready to make a call. Like Elon is dramatically unpopular. Elon is all this. All I can say is he's a risk. I know he has his own agenda. You know, analytically, I can see the ways that this could go wrong. But I could also see how it could be a pretty popular success. I don't think so. But, I mean, to be honest with you, like I –

to me is the least important point. You know, what we were discussing before, the reality of what he's doing and what it means for the country to me is the most important point. But, you know, the trend, the decline for Elon, he used to

popular. You know, people, oh, he's a genius. He's an inventor, blah, blah, blah. He made my electric car. I think it's awesome. I mean, a lot of liberals love this guy, right? I'm seeing a lot of bumper stickers on Teslas that are like, I bought this before we knew Elon was insane and things like that. But, you know, he had high approval ratings kind of across the board.

And ever since he really became a partisan figure, obviously his approval rating took a hit because that's just going to instantly lead you into this very tribal partisan mindset. And then since he's been so aggressively at the forefront of the Trump administration, it seems pretty clear his approval rating has continued to decline. I don't disagree on the constitutional crisis piece. Mm-hmm.

even though I do think it's pretty, you know, we're pretty clearly into a constitutional crisis, or at the very least, if they go forward with their threats to ignore court decisions, we will certainly be in a constitutional crisis. I think you would even agree with it at that point if that ultimately happens. But I do think that there's probably a lot of people who, you know, just like they're not happy with the government, and then it's just like, yes, it's a constitutional crisis. Sort of like, you know, on election night, there was like, what was your top issue? And one of them was...

preserving democracy or whatever. And there were a lot of Republicans who were like, we have to elect Donald Trump to preserve democracy because the election was stolen. And even, you know, with the constitutional crisis thing, even if I'm to read into it that people really are paying attention, et cetera. I mean, now you have, you had Elon, we showed the tweet earlier where he's calling a federal court, making a ruling, a judicial coup, right?

So they're also setting up language about how it's a constitutional crisis because the courts are overreaching and they're checking the legitimate power of the executive, et cetera, et cetera. The reason, though, why I depart from you in terms of like I don't again, I don't.

know that it matters that much whether it's popular or not, although we have seen some pushback work in some limited ways. But the way he's trying to consolidate power is to make your Democratic voice completely irrelevant. That is part of the project of installing a monarch and a CEO dictator. But the reason why I think it's going to be dramatically unpopular is because even if you take the Silicon Valley framing to move fast and break things, that means you're breaking things.

And the federal government does matter for people, you know, for planes not falling out of the sky and your local health clinic getting funded. Right now in Virginia, half of the rural health clinics that are particularly dependent on actually in rural like red parts of the state, like Southwestern Virginia, half of them are still lacking funding. Quite a number of them have had to shut down. Virginia's not the only state. Rhode Island, other states across the country still are lacking funding. You've had farmers who were depending on

deals that they had made with the federal government to finance certain investments in their farms. Those contracts have been at least paused. So they're on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars that they thought the federal government was going to participate in those costs for that upgrade.

And that's just like the small ball beginning of the situation. But the way he operates, if you just look at the way he operates at Twitter, if you look at the way he's operated at Tesla, at SpaceX, et cetera, things literally break. Rockets literally explode. Twitter is unable to host a Spaces with Ron DeSantis. And then the one with Trump has all sorts of audio issues and problems and sounds like shit as well.

That's one thing when you're running a company. It's another thing when you're running the government. So even by his own description of what he's doing here, it's going to require—

It's going to lead to things breaking that are important to people. And I do think there will be tremendous backlash against that. Now, whether that backlash matters or not, to me, is more of the open question. I think you might—listen, I think the risk is there. It's still an open—if they're smart, what you do is you just keep it on CFPB, USAID, Medicare fraud. If a single check gets stopped, that's when there's going to be problems.

If old people don't get their health care, if old people don't... That's already happening. I mean, these health clinics are already shuttered. Well, then, actually, let's get to a bigger political point. I mean, maybe we'll talk about this with CFPB, but let's be honest here, right? A lot of the people who were being affected voted red. Are they really going to blame Trump and Elon, or are they going to blame Democrats? Like, are they actually going to make the dots? I'm skeptical, personally, in terms of the way that politics has changed. And just think about the media environment that people swim in.

Do we have Thomas Frank's book here? I think we used to. I mean, what's the matter with Kansas? I mean, I understand how leftists see it. It's also a diagnosis for literally how the playbook of all of this has happened. I encourage people to go out and read it. This is kind of my monologue about the way that even like the changes of the CFPB

are being ushered in under, like, a culture war agenda. And, you know, it's similar to what, like, similar to what liberals did with, like, instead of lifting wages, we're going to just, you know, have a diversity statement or have, you know... Land acknowledgments. Yeah, land acknowledgments and these sorts of things, or we're going to pass a resolution affirming the Equal Rights Amendment, you know, women's rights or whatever. What the hell was that? I wish we covered that more. But, yeah, I mean, I'll save this for my monologue, but that's exactly...

effectively the playbook here as well. Have you ever looked into the night sky and wondered who or what was flying around up there? We've seen planes, helicopters, hot air balloons, and birds. But what if there's something else, something much more ominous that appears under the cover of night, silent, unseen, watching?

They may be right above your car late one night as you cruise down the road or look like mysterious lights hovering above your home.

Or are they? We used the word drone because it was comfortable to other people. One minute it was there and one minute it wasn't. Oh, that is beyond creepy. Do you feel like this drone was targeting you specifically? Yes, absolutely. Listen to Obscurem, Invasion of the Drones, on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Some people won't give you the real talk on drugs, but it's time we know the facts. Fentanyl is often laced into illicit drugs and used to make fake versions of prescription pills.

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Yellowstone fans, step into the Yellowstone universe. Our family legacy is this ranch. When I'm protected, I live my life. Hosted by Bobby Bones, the official Yellowstone podcast takes you deeper into the franchise that's captivated millions worldwide.

Explore untold behind-the-scenes stories, exclusive cast interviews, and in-depth discussions about the themes and legacy of Yellowstone. You know, the first stunts to settle this valley fighting was all they knew. Whether you're a longtime fan or new to the ranch... Welcome to the Yellowstone. Bobby Bones has everything you need to stay connected to the Yellowstone phenomenon. I look forward to it.

Listen to the official Yellowstone podcast now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's go to work.

Speaking of all of this, there has been the latest in the Trump administration's war on the administrative state. Let's go and put this up there on the screen. Russ Vought, who is the OMB director, has said, quote,

So Russ Vought is the OMB director, but he's also the acting CFPB director.

And what this does is it's an effective way to backdoor shut down the government. CFPB has been the subject of insane amounts of litigation over the last decade or so. So this is the way that they have been able to become the acting director, even though it's an independent agency. Stopping requests for funding is the only legal way to be able to get around some of this, although we'll get to, in fact, how that will progress later.

Let's put this up there on the screen. There was a latest direction here from Russ Vought, which said that directed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau staff to, quote, issue no rules, suspend the effective dates of all final rules, and cease any new investigations. So, I mean, you don't appropriate any more funding, and then you also don't – you don't appropriate more funding, and they also tell them not to do anything. This is crazy.

kind of what the Trump administration tried to do last time, Crystal, with the establishment of, God, I'm blanking on his name right now, the acting chief is Mick Mulvaney. There it is, Mick Mulvaney. They also made him the acting CFPB director. There was huge amounts of litigation. I think it was a Supreme Court case happened in CFPB as well that gets to this whole independent agency versus an executive, part of the executive agency. And Justice Thomas wrote the majority opinion. That's right. Seven to two decision that it was in fact constitutional. That it was a constitutional agency.

That does not stop people from saying it's unconstitutional, which we'll get to in a little bit. But this is one of those where it, look, I think we can all be honest here about who is the most, who is the happiest to see CFPB gone. And it is the crypto industry. Now, you could judge for yourself as to why that is. You know, Crystal, obviously, you're very skeptical of crypto. What they say is the Marc Andreessen line and others is that it effectively stifles

competition by forcing these crypto and fintech companies to comply with all of these, according to them, onerous financial regulations, which make it impossible for them to do business. So the CFPB and the SEC have been the two regulatory twins that have really stopped people like Meta, Twitter,

all these fintech companies from being able to move into the legitimate financial system and to compete against them. They claim that they're better. You can judge again for yourself for how all of it is. But that is the main ask

that they had coming into this. There were three things: CFPB, FTC, SEC. And they've gotten all of them. They've gotten all of them. And so, I mean, just to zoom out, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau set up after the financial crash to, I mean, it's in the name, to try to protect consumers. And they've returned some $21 billion to consumers who have been defrauded and scammed in various ways.

It actually has quite a relatively small budget and has been a fantastic return on investment in terms of taxpayer dollars, although it's not even really technically taxpayer dollars because it's funded by the Treasury. But whatever, it's been a fantastic return on investment in terms of providing value to consumers. Stoller had a great post yesterday.

about the CFPB and, and what this means going forward. And he points out some of the things that, you know, may have interacted with your life in a way that, um, is, is relatively meaningful. He says, let's start with some of the small stuff they do rules against excessive overdraft fees. That's going to be gone rule capping credit card, late fees that's gone oversight of debt collectors and payday lenders. No more an honest site to compare credit card products likely gone. Um,

In 2023, CFPB said big banks can't charge junk fees for basic customer service, things like being able to check your money in your own account. The reason isn't just that it's nice, but the big banks themselves were unable to offer basic information like who owned mortgages prior to 2008. That's gone too. Another rule put forward recently is the mortgage servicers can't garner excessive fees when they foreclose, which is an incentive to foreclose rather than working out loans. So all of that is going to be gone. Anybody who's had an issue with their bank or with

the crypto, Coinbase, whoever, you can go to, you used to be able to file a complaint with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and oftentimes they would handle it and you would get your money returned to you. Actually, Kyle was a victim to a sort of scam run by his bank, and he didn't even file a complaint or anything, and they just reached out and said, "Hey, you were a victim of this scam. Here's some money back to repay you for what happened here."

So that's what this agency is. It's no accident that Marc Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg both go on Joe Rogan's podcast and they frame their opposite. First of all, they just lie about what CFPB does debanking conservatives like quite the opposite. Rohit Chopra, the previous director of the CFPB, was opposed to debanking based on political reasons. He took heat from liberals for staking out that position. So it's quite the contrary.

Zuckerberg tried to claim that like, oh, they went after me from the CFPB because of my bucking them on COVID censorship. Also, you know, completely made up fiction. But they tried to cloak their opposition to CFPB in these conservative cultural critiques because they knew that the argument of like, we just don't really want to be regulated was not going to fly.

Now, Elon has a particular interest in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is what Sagar was alluding to. So Elon wants Twitter to be the everything app. He just struck a deal actually with Visa to incorporate payment processing into

And that would have meant that the CFPB was very likely to, you know, designate him as I think they call it like a larger payment provider or something like that. And he would have been subject to these regulations. So he specifically has a personal financial interest at stake.

and goal that he wants to accomplish in gutting the CFPB. And so that is what is now being accomplished. The budget has been zeroed out. Now, Russ Vogt does point out, they do have a fairly decent reserve, and the budget is not all that big to start with. So they have the funds to be able to operate for a time, but the staff has been told to stay home. This is subject now also to a lawsuit by the union representing the workers at the CFPB.

And most importantly, Russ Vota said, any investigations you're doing, any enforcement, any new rulemaking, like basically whatever you were doing to try to check and keep financial fraud and scams in check, you need to stop doing that. So all of that activity is effectively halted. Elon himself tweeted out RIP CFPB. And it was kind of interesting, the response. So you can see Elon there at the top saying that. And some of his comments,

Reply guys who are normally on board with what he was doing were like, but wait a second I actually kind of like this agency so out to nuance bro. He loves the show by the way He watches every episode. So he says what's wrong with the CFPB? They actually got consumers wins and he tweeted a linked or not only but a screenshot because links are highly discouraged on Twitter CFPB announces a return of 1.8 billion dollars in illegal junk fees to 4.3 million Americans harmed in a massive credit repair

pair scheme. Another person, I saw this one shared a lot, says, what is the deal with the CFPB? I'm genuinely curious, Elon. As a normal guy, can you please respond and tell me? I assumed it was created for our protection. I've used the CFPB after my bank was giving me the runaround. I had a bunch of fraud charges. They wouldn't refund me after telling me they found them as fraudulent.

Within a week, I had my money back. So explain to me how this doesn't benefit us as American citizens. This one just really baffles me. And I'd love an actual explanation. So the, you know, people were not fully on board with this. Another person said, yeah, not on board with this one, unless you bring some pretty damning evidence as to why. So there you go. Some of the pushback there. Do consumers not need to be protected? Question mark. Yes. So, I mean, look, for those who are shocked by this,

Sorry. Like, you're an idiot. I don't want to be too voter-shaming and all this, but there is an element where some people pretend to be surprised by some of the moves that Trump has made. Like, were you not paying attention, dude? Like, were you just not? Like, did you not have your eyes open? I get annoyed. It's pretty clear what was going to happen this entire time. This one I would say yes. Yeah. But, I mean, there are a lot of things happening, like, for example, taking over Gaza. Yeah.

Okay, but that's fair to be crazy about. Taking over Canada, Panama, like none of these things were actually...

Run on so I I have shared the same sentiment in some regards of like well What did you think was gonna happen like this is literally what he ran on? But you know it's not like Trump was going around at rallies like and we're gonna get rid of the protections for consumers and allow banks to scam you so People put a lot of trust in Elon like a lot of these guys think this guy is really great and brilliant You know have deluded themselves into thinking that the richest man on the planet is really looking out for their interest rather than his own interest and

He's not. He's looking out for his own interests. Yeah, well, I mean, at a certain point, too, with these tech guys, it's like they were pretty naked about what they wanted.

the whole time. I could have told you literally eight months ago exactly what all three of these agencies. All you have to do is read the news for any of this. And as I said previously, but crypto in particular being very happy about this, put this up there on the screen. Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase says, "100% the right call. CFPB is unconstitutional on the face of it. Even if it wasn't, it should be deleted as we already have the DOJ to prosecute fraud."

and many other financial services regulators. It's an activist organization that has done enormous harm to the country. He got community noted there. You can decide for yourself whether it's, or decide for yourself if that indicates a vibe on the platform. The community note was what you said, Justice Thomas writing for the majority, that it is constitutional. This is the type of thing from Trump and others that makes me sad because it relates to what we were just talking about with Virginia. And you were like, oh, but these Virginians, I'm like, look,

I see no evidence that, you know, scamming people, taking away their money, cutting programs or any of that, when you're inside of the bubble, has any effect on voter behavior. I wish it were otherwise, but I don't see any political evidence for it. Well, until— I think people want to be scammed. I'm being serious. Like this Dave Portnoy thing, you sent that video, remember, of him?

talking about the pump and dump shit coin and how enamored he's obviously is with the Trump meme coin and all that and how there's zero outrage from most people on the right who talk about corruption and all that. I,

But look at the voters. The voters and then the people who support Trump, they like it. I'm mystified by the way that people can twist themselves into knots to just say like, oh, this is total or just have like blind amnesia around these. Because it's not just partisanship. It's not about elites. It's about the actual voters themselves. If you ask them about any of these Trump things, they feel nothing.

They're not angry. They'll find an excuse. They don't care. Or they'll say that you're lying to them. And I just don't know what to say at a certain point. Like the CFPB thing, I predict not one iota of pushback. Not one iota from Republican voters.

So, I mean, what's the point? Agree. Agree. But yeah, I mean, but the point is the substance of what it actually, of the fact that getting rid of this agency makes people's lives worse, makes them more open to fraud. And Stoller makes this point. It's not like, so previously, it's not like there weren't laws against fraud before the financial crash, but the, the,

the prioritization of that was very low with these various agencies that were tasked with enforcing it. And so the idea behind this agency is, okay, we're going to put it under one agency where it's really like their number one priority is going to be looking out for the little guy, making sure that if they are scammed, that they are repaid, that there's some fines levied, like that this is our top priority and our focus. So it's going to be important. So now all of that function is consolidated here. So when you get rid of that enforcement mechanism,

from this agency, it no longer exists in these other places. It's just gone. So you're actually in a worse place than you were before the financial crash with regard to enforcement of these particular things. So you're going to see a flourishing of scams and fraud perpetrated on people because there is no one. It's not even the fox guarding the hen house. There's just no one guarding the hen house now. There's

There's nothing there. And the other thing that he points out, which is relevant to your point, is like, you know, when Glass-Steagall, which separated out, you know, kept the investing and financial speculation part of banking separate from like the main like customer focused, OK, we make a deposit type of banking.

When Glass-Steagall was ended, no, there wasn't a huge public backlash to that. But that action directly, along with other things, leads to a massive financial catastrophe.

So it has a huge impact outside of what the, you know, initial public response was. And of course, ultimately, there was a huge, I mean, this was one of the seminal events in terms of our lifetimes that helped to shape these, you know, this populist right and populist left movements and all of the anger in the country. I mean, this is still reverberating to this day. So,

I think there is very likely to be significant fallout here. And, you know, I'll just one more quote from Stoller because he really, you know, he focuses on this and I think he put it quite well. He says he sees destroying the Bureau as a strategic error.

He says the banks were already losing to Silicon Valley. Now they're at a regulatory disadvantage to boot. More fundamentally, the shutdown breaks a basic deal. He says he worked in the House during the great financial crisis. The arrangement was the banks would accept some mild oversight by the CFPB, and in return, they'd get a multi-trillion dollar bailout and make excessive profits.

I didn't like that deal. Encourage the member I worked for to vote against it, but it was forced on liberals by Barack Obama. It was an egregiously terrible choice, one that liberals couldn't acknowledge because then they'd have to admit a whole lot of uncomfortable truths, notably that Wall Street is a malevolent force. But he's effectively saying, like, now that deal is broken. Like, the minimal oversight that they accepted was—

has been stripped away. And so now they can just run rampant with their fraud of variety of kinds, including crypto fraud, et cetera. If you're running one of these payment processors on Twitter or elsewhere, now you can take people's funds that they deposit with you. You can do what Sam Begman-Fried was doing and invest it in all kinds of high-risk crypto schemes. There's no cop on the beat to really stop you from doing any of that. And the potential fallout from that is truly catastrophic.

It may not show up. You know, some small ball things that are really important to like the credit card late fees and the junk fees and those sorts of things, not having medical debt appear on your credit reports. That was something the Biden administration was putting in place. That's going to be gone now. Like there's an immediate impact. But the deeper impact

The deeper fear is what this kind of bubble and crash this could ultimately contribute to. And then, you know, also with regard to Doge and Elon and whatever, like it's also example number one of the way this is not about some like populists. We're going to root out waste, fraud and abuse, blah, blah, blah.

The CFPB is proof positive that this is about them consolidating power and organizing the government in a way that is going to be friendly to them, their friends, and their interests, and not necessarily you. But there's some good lessons there for the left there in terms of technocratic neoliberalism and that devil's bargain that was made in 2008. That led to the fallout, the breakup of the Democratic coalition and of the rise of the Trump movement and obviously his now popular vote election, which is trying to put—

I'm also honestly skeptical of Stoller's analysis. I'm not so sure that it leads to the Democrats being like, "We're never gonna give you CFPB again, "'cause we're about to talk with Hakeem Jeffries "and all that, or about Hakeem Jeffries, "about how their theory of government and all that "looks in the future." You might be right.

But, you know, it's been almost 20 years since the financial crisis. It's been 16 years or so, 17, right, since the crash. And has really anything changed with respect to Too Big to Fail? Most people either don't remember or, you know, they don't really understand the legacy impact of that. So I don't disagree. But how long did it take between the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the financial crisis? Glass-Steagall happened under the Clinton administration, I want to say. Maybe it was 98. I don't know.

I think it might not be. So it took about a decade for something like that to materialize. 99. I'm an idiot. Less than a decade. I apologize. So yeah, but it was about nine years or so for the global financial crisis to get kicked off in 2008. And if there's a similar lag time, what does politics look like in that moment? I genuinely have no idea. But I'm not so confident in the Stoller analysis that some Bernie-style revolution will happen.

in terms of, oh, the banks, like, you guys are never going to get your bailout again, right? In terms of the way that the Democratic Party is currently trending. Now, I'm not saying the Republicans are going to be better. I'm not saying that at all. But I'm just not so confident that there's this elite recognition of what has really happened here in terms of the failure of the Obama project. This is something Irami and Zed Jelani have both been talking about a lot lately. I think it's very interesting from their perspective.

Have you ever looked into the night sky and wondered who or what was flying around up there? We've seen planes, helicopters, hot air balloons, and birds. But what if there's something else? Something much more ominous that appears under the cover of night? Silent. Unseen. Watching.

They may be right above your car late one night as you cruise down the road or look like mysterious lights hovering above your home.

Drones. Or are they? We used the word drone because it was comfortable to other people. One minute it was there and one minute it wasn't. Oh, that is beyond creepy. Do you feel like this drone was targeting you specifically? Yes, absolutely. Listen to Obscurem, Invasion of the Drones, on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When I smoke weed, I get lost in the music. I like to isolate each instrument. The rhythmic bass, the harmonies on the piano, the sticky melody. Hey, hey, careful babe, there's someone crossing the street. Sorry, I didn't see him there.

If you feel different, you drive different. Don't drive high. It's dangerous and illegal everywhere. A message from NHTSA and the Ad Council. Everyone's forgotten who runs this valley. Time to remind them. Yellowstone fans, step into the Yellowstone universe. Our family legacy is this ranch. When I'm protected, I live my life.

Hosted by Bobby Bones, the official Yellowstone podcast takes you deeper into the franchise that's captivated millions worldwide. Explore untold behind-the-scenes stories, exclusive cast interviews, and in-depth discussions about the themes and legacy of Yellowstone. You know, the first stunts to settle this valley fighting was all they knew.

Whether you're a longtime fan or new to the ranch. Welcome to the Yellowstone. Bobby Bones has everything you need to stay connected to the Yellowstone phenomenon. I look forward to it. Listen to the official Yellowstone podcast now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's go to work.

All right. Well, let's talk about those Democrats, shall we? Hakeem Jeffries, of course, is I mean, they're leaderless effectively at this point. Even if you ask them, like, who's the leader of the Democratic Party, they'll all be like, I don't know. But Hakeem Jeffries is the top Democrat in the House. And he was asked, you know, their phones are ringing off the hook with Democratic base voters who are like, what are you doing? Where is the resistance? Like,

There was a video that came out last week of all of these Democratic members of Congress going to the Department of Education and wanting entry. There's one dude standing in their way, and they're just like, oh, I guess we can't go in there. I mean, and so what are they going to do if there's such frustration that they seem to be asleep at the switch? And so in any case, Hakeem Jeffries gets asked about this dynamic and effect was like, well, what could we really do? Let's take a listen. I'm trying to figure out what leverage we actually have.

What leverage do we have? They control the House, the Senate, and the presidency. It's their government.

What leverage do we have? So there you go. What levers do we have? I mean, I love I do love and I think it was Ken that pointed this out on Twitter, how when Democrats have control of the House, Senate and the presidency, it's like the Republicans are this immovable obstacle that they can't possibly get anything done. And when Republicans are in that situation, suddenly like, oh, they can just, you know, run roughshod and do whatever they whatever they. Yeah. I mean, I think that the learn I don't

I don't know. I really am still really skeptical of this Democratic resistance because it just feels like a very elite media project right now. Like, it feels like the neurotic liberals who read the New York Times are very outraged, the bureaucrats, Washington. But that's a question, too, of like, what is the Democratic base?

What do they actually want here? I mean, what would a bunch of silly Maxwell Frosts charging into the Democratic Education do? I mean, to what end? Create a media spectacle. I mean, that's the thing is like your only tool and lever is attention. That is your only tool and lever, really. And that is the failure of the Democratic Party is they do not understand outside of like literally AOC and Bernie. They do not understand. Does AOC really understand it though?

it though? I mean, is her style of politics really going to be like her fly, you know, going on Instagram live calling Elon a Nazi? Like, do we really believe that that's a effective political strategy? I don't, I think he just looks silly. I think you look like a college liberal. Well, let me say at least she is doing something, but yeah, in terms of, in terms of understanding the attention economy. Yes. I think she and Bernie are kind of the only two that truly do. And Bernie is impressed the hell. I mean, his man is really old and he's still out there with like

with, I think, some of the best messaging coming from the Democratic Party. But yeah, that's your only real lever and protest. And I would just say, like, I had all kinds of problems with the flavor of the Democratic resistance back in 2016. You know, I rushed a gate. I was a critic of, et cetera, et cetera. But ultimately, in some ways, it did work. They...

We were talking about Trump's approval rating. They were able to keep his approval rating suppressed and under a majority the entire time. Yep. They did very well in the midterms. He lost in 2020. So there's been this among elite elected Democrats. There's this assumption of like, oh, well, we you know, we tried this like all all in Trump resistance and it didn't work. And it's like, well, but.

At least it did do something like clearly just sitting back and letting it all unfold. And I think one of them said, like, letting him punch himself out is not going to do anything. And I think it's foolish. So I think that there's two problems.

One of them is they don't understand the attention economy and how that is your major lever for pushback and generating doing what you can to contribute to a genuine grassroots revolt, which, again, there is there is something happening here because the level of calls that they're getting at the Senate, 1600 a minute, is off the charts.

Normie Democratic, like the, you know, local Democratic voters are disgusted with the party and the fact that that is very different. You know, these people were like heroes to them previously. MSNBC was heroic to them, et cetera. That is all broken and gone. So in any case, that is,

the best thing that they have available to them. But the other problem, which gets to the Politico tear sheet that we can put up on the screen, is that, you know, really what they need to do is make an argument against oligarchy, make an argument against an Elon Musk and his billionaire buddies running the government. And that is going to require a choosing, a true, like, which side are you on kind of a moment. And you have leaders in the Democratic Party, like Hakeem Jeffries, who instead say,

is trying to go to Silicon Valley and mend fences with the billionaires who happen to be, and not the 100 billion, the mere 100 millionaires that happen to be on the Democratic side of the ledger. So he met quietly, they say, with more than 150 Silicon Valley-based donors last week in California, early step in Democrats' efforts to repair relationships

With a once deep blue constituency, the meet and greet in Tony Los Altos Hills comes at a precarious moment for Democrats in the tech world, which has lurched rightward in the second Trump era. World's wealthiest tech mogul is upending Washington. Democratic leaders are facing criticism from their own base for their halting response. Jeffries, meanwhile, was on the West Coast seemingly trying to avoid the next Elon Musk. Let's put this next quote up on the screen. This is kind of like the money quote, so to speak.

So he says there's significant fear that these tech folks who've been with us for a long time will say, F it, we're going with the other guys, said a major Democratic donor advisor. These donors are also pissed watching former and current colleagues have unlimited unchecked power and getting richer off of this and dared not.

Democrats are trying to mend fences and they're also trying to keep them in the tent, according to this individual. So, you know, let's go ahead actually to the Nate Silver piece because I thought he broke this. This is D4. He actually broke this down pretty well. It's like you –

They need a billionaire strategy. It could be pro-capitalism or anti-oligarch, but the middle ground won't persuade voters. And the middle ground is kind of where the Biden administration was because they did things that were genuinely adversarial that this class of people hated. And the Wall Street people hated.

hated and were pissed off. The antitrust stuff was really adversarial. It was very unpopular among wealthy people. The aggressive enforcement at the CFPB, aggressive enforcement at the National Labor Relations Board, all of these things were deeply unpopular with billionaires.

But rather than doing the FDR, like, and I welcome their hatred and embracing that as your identity as like, we're going after these guys. They tried to do like what Hakeem Jeffries is doing here. Like, wow, we really, we still like you. We still want you in the tent. We're going to do these various cultural things that maybe you like, et cetera, et cetera. And that approach is not going to work.

So Nate Silver is 100 percent right that this middle ground of what he describes separating the world into naughty and nice billionaires, which is what the new chair of the Democratic National Committee, which he floated as the appropriate approach here, that is not going to cut it. And if you're actually going to push back against this movement and the Elon takeover and Trumpism in general, you are going to have to.

make a choice. You are going to have to either basically capitulate to that or you're going to have to burn some bridges with the donor class and they do not seem ready to make that choice. Well, I don't think it's structurally possible. The Democratic Party is the party of elite, white, educated liberals and elderly black people.

Like, that's basically it. So, okay, so if we look at the elite white educated liberals, these are NIMBY-style process elite institution-worshipping neurotic master's degree holders who make –

approximately $200,000 to $300,000 per year. They love, like Reid Hoffman and all these other people, to the extent they hate Elon, it's because of, I don't even know, it's not because of CFPB, should we put it that way? They hate him for being a traitor to their class or culturally right or whatever. Even a lot of these...

Silicon Valley donors, I mean, if you look at the things that they care the most about, it's going to be literally DEI and like transgender issues. That's part of the reason the party has become the way it is. So how can you turn against oligarchy? I mean, if you don't have the voter base to sustain it, those people don't culturally trust you. Can you roll back 20 years of cultural left direction? I don't think so.

So the thing is, first of all, I don't think you're right about what the normie Democratic base wants. Like they are appalled. What do they want? They are appalled by what's going on here. They want to preserve the country. They want some basic wage increases. They want to preserve their institutions, which they're in charge of. I think you underestimate, too, how much the economic precarity has creeped up

to middle class, upper middle class people where it's not just the sort of traditional working class that feels that level of precarity. I also would say you very much overestimate where we are in terms of the realignment. Trump narrowly won voters under, what was it, $100,000.

he didn't even win a majority of the vote. He won the popular vote, but he did not even get to 50%. So you still have plenty of working class voters within the Democratic base coalition. So there's no doubt that the Democratic base is appalled at what they see unfolding under Trumpism. That piece is not a question to me whatsoever.

And the Democrats have to, to your point, they have to regain some of those working class voters who voted for Trump this time around. They have to bring them back into the coalition. And if you're actually going to do that, I think you have to make a stand against Trump.

Elon and oligarch control and you have to have credibility with regard to burning the bridges with your own donor class. Now, where I see the more structural problem is that people like Hakeem Jeffries, like Hakeem Jeffries is not in this position because he's such a like

brilliant visionary, whatever politician, he's there because he can raise a lot of money. Nancy Pelosi, who does have some skills at least, you know, but she, her main hold on power was because she was an absolutely prolific fundraiser. The vast majority of Democratic candidates are not there because there was like a grassroots well of support for them. There's a few of them that, that, you know, could genuinely be said are the case. But by and large, the game that you had to play to get to power in the Democratic Party is almost

all about sucking up to the type of people that Hakeem Jeffries is sucking up to. So as a party that has self-selected for that group of people who has these connections and whose primary skill set is raising money, are they going to cut off their own individual, like politician to politician, are they going to cut off their own sorts of power? And that's where I think the real structural problem ultimately comes in,

Because if this was how you got into whatever position of power you have, you're not going to be really particularly amenable to completely changing course and orienting the party in a different way. I think you're completely correct. I think it's a bidirectional problem, though, because it does get point taken, etc. But who is the center of gravity of elite democratic thought? Ezra Klein, right? Nate Silver, like people who work in NGOs, the New York Times op-ed page.

If you look at that center of gravity, it's not one that's ultimately going to be consistent with an anti-oligarchy strategy. That's one that's really uncomfortable. I actually think your point about economic precarity at the middle class and upper middle class is important because part of the blackpilling of the upper middle class has been very interesting to watch. It's actually also part of how you have this more elite turn against the Democratic Party because they're also bleeding some voters.

in that category, which leads to people like Bill Ackman and all these, I'm not saying they're in that category, but I'm saying that that creates a permission structure for like white people who make 200 grand who are like grill dads or whatever to say, okay, screw the Democrats, even though traditionally they had been. Whoever is left,

are people who are like really into cultural liberalism on top of the Democratic Party coalition, which raises a lot of money from these same people. And I don't think that they have that credibility yet because to do so, you'd have to burn down everything that you've ever stood for. You'd have to both shove this like cultural BS to the side.

pretend that you have never said any of the things that you have. And you would have to base, like how could you revamp your entire fundraising structure? I mean, you talked about this with the Bernie guys, but Bernie bros are just Trump voters now. So can you win them back? I'm genuinely skeptical. I feel like once you have lost

credibility with people on, because it's a long burn period that the way that this happened, that they would so quickly be able to turn. I think that the way that the Democrats can win again is to drive up their suburban margins and then convince younger Hispanic voters

Hispanic and black voters to come back into the fold and vote for them. And that's really the coalition, at least in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, that remains where their deficit was, on top, obviously, of white working class voters. But I'm not sure that those people are ever coming back. So I just think it's a very, very tough structural problem.

I don't know how you could get out of this Gordian knot when you've elected the DNC person that you have, the good billionaire person. It's not possible. Well, to be honest with you, though, what's interesting is, even though that dude did say that thing, the reason he got picked is...

instead of Ben Wickler. They're both state party chairs, both from like... He's Minnesota, right? Right. One is Minnesota and the other one was Wisconsin. So Ken Martin, the one that got elected, is Minnesota. Actually, what tanked Wickler's campaign is that he was seen as being too close to billionaires. So he was backed by Reid Hoffman.

And he really had all the energy behind, you know, when Emily and Ryan interviewed him here, it was very much thought, oh, this is going to be the guy. And because he was perceived as being too close to the donor class, that's why he lost. And actually, Nate talks about this here, but I also talked to Marianne about this as well, who also was involved in the DNC chair race. So she really saw it from the inside. And that was what really caused people to turn on him. Hmm.

So even at the, you know, DNC, like these are insiders. They're not like all wealthy people, but they're just like local Democratic Party chairs and whatever. They saw that as a real liability and a real problem for him, which was very interesting to me. That is really interesting. I didn't know that. Yeah. But back to the point of like, you know, people who are not learning less and whatever. But D3 up on the screen. So Senator Ruben Gallego.

has apparently he benefited to the tune of $10 million in his Senate campaign from crypto campaign contributions. And lo and behold, he's now the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Subcommittee overseeing digital assets, i.e. crypto, and is now hosting a luxury retreat with Marc Andreessen, who obviously one of crypto industry's biggest investors and cheerleaders.

And guess one of the featured speakers at this event, too, was Matt Iglesias, which was kind of hilarious to me. No way. That's too good. Yeah. Matt, what are you doing, bro? You got plenty of money in that sub stack. Please tell me you're not taking speaking fees. Oh, God. He claims he wasn't paid to attend. Oh, really? Okay, all right, fine. They're just old buddies, whatever. But, you know, the crypto industry is an important force. They...

really made an example of Katie Porter, who had been adversarial towards them, one of them regulated under the SEC and whatever, and they dropped millions of dollars on her in her race, and she lost. And that was meant to, and it did, send a signal to anyone else who...

who had thoughts of being adversarial and looking seriously at enforcement and regulation of the crypto industry that you better sit down and shut up. And so even though some of the thought was that there would be a crackdown after SBF was exposed and all of that nonsense, actually, they just got smarter. They put more money into politics. Crypto industry is now one of the biggest contributors to political campaigns. Well, that's true too. Bitcoin literally went from like 30K to 100K in that time.

And so now at this point, you know, you've got Democrats and Republicans, Gallego very much in their pocket, all kinds of other bipartisan officials very much in their pocket, them getting their way at CFPB, et cetera. And so, you know, it's quite noteworthy to have Gallego at this luxury retreat with Marc Andreessen. Amusing, but also remember Gallego is a star, right? People have already floated him as, you know, he won in Arizona. Didn't he have the biggest point spread of any senator?

For a Democrat who won? You might be right. Yeah. No, oh, for one who won. Yeah. I think Tester probably did of like point spread overall. Sherrod Brown, I think, was second. But in terms of those who won, it might have been Gallego. I mean, that's crazy because what did Trump win Arizona by? Four or five points. And then I think Gallego also won it by a few points as well. So it's almost an eight, ten point spread. You know what Kyrsten Sinema is up to now? What? Sitting on the board of some crypto bullshit. No way.

- Yeah, it's too good, too good. See, I would've thought she would've joined, what was it? What did she nuke? The Carried Interest Loophole? - Yes. - Yeah, so I would've thought she would've become a venture capitalist. - She might be doing that too, I don't know. But I do know one of the things she's doing is she sits on some crypto board now. - Just too good, too good. - Congratulations. - Just as we predicted here on the show. - Have you ever looked into the night sky and wondered who or what was flying around up there?

We've seen planes, helicopters, hot air balloons, and birds. But what if there's something else? Something much more ominous that appears under the cover of night. Silent. Unseen. Watching. They may be right above your car late one night as you cruise down the road or look like mysterious lights hovering above your home.

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Listen to the official Yellowstone podcast now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's go to work. Hey guys, we're going to cover Stephen A. Smith tomorrow. Want to make sure that the show goes out on time. So Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, if we broke up the big banks tomorrow, and I will, if they deserve it, if they pose a systemic risk, I will. Would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community?

Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight? Would that solve our problem with voting rights and Republicans who are trying to strip them away from people of color, the elderly and the young? Would that give us a real shot at making sure that our political system works better because we get rid of gerrymandering and redistricting and all of the gimmicks that states use to give these Republicans safe seats so they can continue to tear down the progress we've made in America?

I'm the only candidate who will take on every barrier to progress. I'm the only candidate who has a record of taking on those barriers. A candidate who will stand with every single fight, no matter how hard it is or how long it takes.

That was Hillary Clinton in February of 2016, desperately trying to block the class-based juggernaut of the Bernie Sanders movement from ascending to power. That little riff was essentially the playbook. Use identity politics and culture war to posture as being the real progressive, while smearing Bernie and his supporters as secret sexists and bigots. All in order to accomplish the ultimate goal of protecting corporate power.

Sad to say, it worked. Hillary beat Bernie, an agenda of woke virtue signaling took over the Democratic Party, accelerating its decline with workers, and the one movement that actually cared about fighting oligarchs on behalf of the 99% was, by and large, vanquished. Perhaps the most perfect distillation of this use of wokeism to protect corporate power was when a union buster for REI opened up their anti-worker meeting with a land acknowledgement and pronouns.

Progressive cultural posturing would be offered as a substitute for and distraction from actually checking the billionaire class. Now, this playbook is not unique to corporate Democrats and has never been. In fact, it is being deployed with overwhelming success right now against the right, some elements of which had flirted with a break from Reagan conservatism. Some factions had flirted with union rights, antitrust enforcement, lifting wages, protecting safety net programs.

The TLDR is this, though, to my populist right friends. Y'all are being played. In the same way liberals traded away a minimum wage hike for Nancy Pelosi kneeling in kente cloth, you are trading away an antitrust agenda for an executive order taking pronouns off of passports. Elites are ushering in an oligarch agenda under the guise of culture war. And this is The Playbook.

They will feed you culture war scraps while they eat the whole universe. And it's happening now at a pace we have literally never seen before. Oligarchs are lying to your face.

telling you that the agencies that police their scams and fraud are actually "woke" and so deserving of dismantling. That ending DEI requires stripping your local public school of funds and privatizing weather data collection. That the few politicians like Bernie and Warren who have actually taken a principled stand against the corrupting influence of big money in politics are really bought and paid for, so their stances, which challenge corporate power, could be disregarded.

The real fraud in the federal budget can be found in imaginary Gaza condoms instead of juicy billion-dollar contracts and tax havens where the billionaires hide their cash.

Now, let me ask you a simple math question. Which do you think is more important to the federal budget deficit? Politico pro subscriptions at USAID or the fact that Tesla pays a grand total of zero dollars in federal taxes in spite of billions of dollars in profit? They're tricking you. It's a scam. And sad to say, it's working.

Now, one of the most brazen examples of this scam was perpetrated by successive oligarchs on the Joe Rogan Show. First, Marc Andreessen came by to lie to Joe's audience that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was actually an evil plot by Elizabeth Warren to debank conservatives. Let's take a listen to a little of that. So, for example, we have this thing called the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, CFPB, which is sort of Elizabeth Warren's personal agency that she gets to control. And it's an independent agency that just gets to run and do whatever it wants, right? And if you read the Constitution, like there is no such thing as an independent agency anymore.

And yet there it is. What does her agency do? Whatever she wants. What does it do though? Basically, terrorize financial institutions, prevent new competition, new startups that want to compete with the big banks. Oh, yeah. How so? Just by terrorizing anybody who tries to do anything new in financial services. Can you give me an example? You know, debanking.

This is where a lot of the debanking comes from is these agencies. So debanking is when you as either a person or your company are literally kicked out of the banking system. Like they did to Kanye. Exactly. Like they did to Kanye. My partner Ben's father has been debanked. Really? We had an employee. For what? For having the wrong politics. For saying unacceptable things. Under current banking regulations. Okay, here's a great thing. Under current banking regulations, after all the reforms of the last 20 years, there's now a category called a politically exposed person.

And if you are a pep, you are required by financial regulators to kick them off of your – to kick them out of your bank. You're not allowed to have them. What if you're politically on the left? That's fine. No. Really? Because they're not politically exposed. So no one on the left gets debanked? I have not heard of a single instance of anyone on the left getting debanked. Can you tell me what the person that you know did, what they said that got them debanked? Oh, well, I mean David Horowitz is a right-wing. He's pro-Trump. I mean he said all kinds of things. He's been very anti-Islamic terrorism. He's been very worried about immigration, all these things.

None of that is remotely true. This agency is one of the best expenditures in the entire federal budget as it fights against scams. It's actually returned billions of dollars to regular people who've been tricked and robbed by elites.

So you can imagine why elites would like to see it eliminated. Specifically, Andreessen, Elon Musk and co. are upset that the CFPB was regulating fintech, trying to make sure that online payment processors can't take your money and gamble it on crypto or other harebrained schemes. But you can't just tell people that this agency gets in the way of your scam. So instead, what do they do? They Trojan horse an oligarch agenda through some culture war bullshit.

Mark Zuckerberg was up next, also stopping by Rogan's pod to advance more lies about an agency that has served as a check on his power as well. He pretended like the CFPB took aim at him because he stood up to Biden COVID censorship. Again, complete and total nonsense. It's worth noting that Zuckerberg was a Democrat like five seconds ago, using all kinds of woke virtue signaling to paint himself as some sort of a progressive ally when that wasn't.

was the most expedient path to protecting his power, it is nothing for him to switch teams and use the same playbook of throwing out culture war red meat to cover for a pro-oligarch agenda. It is literally the same playbook, just tickling the right-wing cultural erogenous zones instead of the liberal ones.

How has this worked out for all of them? Beautifully. Chef's kiss. Elon announced a war on the CFPB with this particular tweet. Now that agency is effectively dead. The new head announced he wanted a $0 budget for the year that all new rulemaking and investigation should cease, and the workforce was told not to show up this week. Victory for the fintech robber barons who want to fleece you.

This also means that rules such as ones promulgated under Biden, which would have kept medical debt off of credit reports, have been halted, unlikely to return. CFPB has cracked down on junk fees, gone after predatory payday lenders, checked abusive practices by debt collectors, stopped foreclosure abuses against veterans with VA loans, and a lot more. Now, all over.

Do you see how this works, though? In a world that made sense, the interest of the 99.9% would routinely prevail over those at the top 0.1%. So those at the tippy top, what do they do?

They rig the game. They lie to you. They confuse you about who your real allies are and who your real adversaries are. An executive order on girls in sports that applies to maybe a few dozen girls in the entire country is no substitute for your ability to organize and have a voice in your own workplace. But they are systematically destroying the National Labor Relations Board.

Kristi Noem running around playing dress-up like Ice Barbie is not worth giving up on breaking up tech monopolies and keeping them from automating your job out of existence. But Trump is propping up the AI overlords who openly brag about making all of humanity irrelevant. Now, some of you have been genuinely convinced that the richest man on Earth, who is rapidly consolidating power solely in his own hands, is engaged in some sort of a populist project for the people. Please do not be a fool.

Here's the truth of the bargain that is being offered to the right right now. You will get to own the libs and Elon will get to own the country.

This man wants to put chips in all our brains, for God's sake. Like, let's be serious for a second. Allow me to quote from Steve Bannon on this particular point about Elon and on the philosophy of these particular tech oligarchs. He said to the New York Times, quote, Now, here's the point. In

In techno-feudalism, you are just a digital serf. Your value as a human being, as someone built and made in the image and likeness of God and endowed with the life spirit of the Holy Spirit, they don't consider that. Everything is digital to them. They are, at the end of the day, transhumanists. And what is transhumanist?

Transhumanist is somebody who sees homo sapien here and homo sapien plus on the other side of what they call the singularity. And that's why they're all rushing, whether it's artificial intelligence, regenerative robots, quantum computing, advanced chip design, CRISPR, biotech, all of it, to come to this point of which the oligarchs are going to lead that revolution. This is taking us back a millennium to feudalism. Their business model is based upon that. That's Steve Bannon saying that.

Now, if Elon and Co. told you that their goal was to make you a digital serf and themselves CEO kings of the world, I don't think a whole lot of people are going to sign up for that project. So they cloak it in wokeness, gender ideology, some other real or imagined liberal excess, or simply in the delight of making liberals squeal. I beg you, please keep your eye on the ball. The stakes here are too high.

The best way to own the libs would be to learn from their mistakes. To not get distracted by a bunch of surface-level culture war obfuscation that lets billionaires empty the vault. To not give away your country for a few anti-woke baubles. Do not let yourself get played. And Sagar, I know you took a look at what's going on. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com.

Okay, great show for everybody tomorrow. Thank you all for watching. We love you, and we'll see you then. What would you do if mysterious drones appeared over your hometown? I started asking questions. What do you remember happening on that night of December 16th? It actually rotated around our house, looking as if it was peering in each window of our home. I'm Gabe Lenners. From Imagine, iHeart Podcasts, and Lenners Entertainment, listen to Obscure On.

Invasion of the Drones, wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Hey, it's Alec Baldwin. This past season on my podcast, Here's the Thing, I spoke with more actors, musicians, policymakers, and so many other fascinating people like writer and actor Dan Aykroyd.

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