This is a preview of the Patron-only Weekender episode. To gain full access to these episodes, as well as special post-event and live recordings, and to keep the show editorially independent and ad-free, head over to Patreon and become a subscriber today.
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the awful mistakes the Trump campaign is making down the stretch - from Musk announcing 2 trillion dollars worth of cuts to government spending, to telling Robert Kennedy Jr. that he'll be in charge of every health department to almost falling down while opening the door to a garbage truck. They also pull apart some of the scenarios that might happen after the election involving a deeply troubled Supreme Court.
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That is the last weekender can opening before the 2024 presidential election.
Jerry Yates Sexton, I'm here with my good friend Nick Hausman.
How you doing, buddy?
Is it a full moon for Halloween?
I believe so.
That's my understanding.
I think the full moon is on Friday, but we've got a near full moon tonight.
All right.
Well, then LaFrice come out at night.
I can't wait.
Something like that.
By the way, we're recording this on Thursday, October 31st.
So a belated happy Halloween to everybody.
A reminder next week on Tuesday, we'll have our regular episode on Tuesday.
Then Tuesday night, the night of the presidential election, we'll be going live at 9 p.m.
Eastern to go through results, analysis, reaction.
We'll be doing that for a while.
We hope that you will join us also to listen to this full episode.
And by the way, everybody...
This is a jam-packed episode today.
There's a lot that we're discussing and actually a lot of important points we want to make.
Patreon.com slash MyCraigPodcast.
Support the show, keep it editorially independent, ad-free, and also gain access to these episodes and also our live post-election analysis reaction.
You're going to want to come out and hang with us.
I think that it's going to be a crazy day and we're going to need each other to...
To huddle our yearning masses.
Are you going to watch cable news?
What's that?
Are you going to watch cable news?
Is that what you're going to do?
You're going to go into a presidential election with this much import and then watch cable news?
I can pretty much guarantee that that will probably be on the TV, maybe in the background.
I wasn't talking to you.
I was talking to the listeners.
Oh, well, listen, we are.
I am Spartacus.
We are the listeners.
We are Legion.
Well, everybody, we have a lot, lot, lot to get to.
Of course, on Tuesday, we did our election preview.
Some things have shifted from there.
There's some prevalent ideas that have started to move along.
I'm sure we'll talk about that as we go.
But we need to start with this lead story.
Which is that we've been following and reporting on Elon Musk not only buying the Donald Trump campaign and the MAGA movement, but also positioning himself to be in charge of the budget of the federal government.
Details have started to emerge around Musk's plan and his unelected, unaccountable position.
And it sounds like Musk is now dedicating himself to slashing at least two This would be devastating and catastrophic when it comes to aid programs, social safety net programs, government functioning and regulation, disaster relief, probably social security.
Hell of a thing to be coming out right before an election, and yet here we are.
If they don't hammer this as hard as they possibly can, the Democrats, over the next several days, then I give up with what they're doing and whatever is going on with the organization of that campaign.
Because, yeah, you can't just cut that much money.
And you have to imagine he's going to probably think, under the guise of efficiency, he wants to do it quickly.
And you cannot do that when you've had, because by the way, like there might be some things you can cut, right?
I'm sure there's some waste in there that you can get rid of.
But overnight, some of those services that people rely on for their lives will get taxed and there will be no thing to replace it.
There'll be no way to sort of help anybody get through that.
I mean, you didn't even talk about what Mike Johnson wants to do with Obamacare, which I'm sure we'll get to in a minute, but This is a guy who's a wealthy, rich asshole from an apartheid state.
You can take the kid out of the apartheid, but you can't take the apartheid out of him.
I submitted a suggestion for an ad in these last couple of days since this Elon Musk information has come out, which is...
You know, show what's happened at Tesla.
Show all of these cars that have gotten in these wrecks and killed people.
Show what's happened with SpaceX and, you know, when they've cut corners and then it's, you know, destroyed ecological situations and environments.
Show what happened to Twitter.
He took over Twitter and immediately started firing people and the website stopped working.
This is not a serious person.
And the idea that you can knock off a third of the federal budget.
In 2024, the budget was around $6 trillion.
The idea that you're going to cut $2 trillion of six and probably more than six, it's unacceptable.
And what we're talking about, it's not like we get into budgets and everything, Nick, but what we always lose sight of is that on the other side of budgets, which is sort of a very cold, calculated number, we're talking about human suffering.
We're talking about people going hungry.
We're talking about people losing their houses.
We're talking about people losing their health insurance.
And by the way, in the age of climate change, we're talking about people dying in floods in North Carolina, being displaced, having absolutely no help.
Social security?
That's supposed to be the third rail of American politics.
And if Kamala Harris and the Democrats don't hammer this over the next couple of days, there is some serious soul-searching that needs to happen.
Because if you allow this monster to get into that position without anyone ever voting for him one time, if you allow him to take over the federal government and do this, not only will the circumstances be dire, but there are even larger implications that we'll get to in just a but there are even larger implications that we'll get to in Like this is a four alarm fire.
The idea of Elon Musk being even this close to that much power.
I mean, yeah, and you can, by the way, pointing to Twitter, not even the functionality of it, you can point to the business side of it as well.
He's lost two-thirds of the revenue over a very short amount of time.
It's not like his business acumen is effective, necessarily.
Tesla stock has been suffering.
I know their cars are cheaper now than ever.
They've had to lower their prices because of sales.
You know, it's an endless stream.
And I think the more important thing about Musk, though, is that he exists in this world where he doesn't think that laws apply to him.
So he can feel the ability to just break whatever law and do whatever he wants with impunity, thinking that there isn't going to be any repercussions against that.
And there really kind of hasn't, right?
He sort of squeaked by in that same way that, you know, Trump has done.
So, that's the other problem.
And again, it worries me when a guy's in charge of a car company that's supposed to ensure safety, and he wants the cars to fart when they go backwards instead of actually having a sound that people would know is a huge thing coming at you that could kill you.
No, he's a narcissist who doesn't care at all what happens to other people.
And I want to talk about a realization that I've had, Nick.
And it's sort of a state of mind that I've had for a while.
Like, we've talked on this podcast, and I've written about extensively, how what is happening with the decline of the American Empire is as capitalism starts looking for another host, right?
It jumped from the British Empire to the United States of America.
And one of the things that is becoming very clear to me, Nick, and, you know, we've heard these reports of like economists saying Donald Trump's economic plans would be disastrous for the American economy.
And, you know, with with Musk's ideas of slashing two trillion dollars and on top of that, like this mass deportation idea, which would crater the American economy for a variety of reasons.
And at the very, very least plunges into a recession.
One of the things I'm starting to realize, and if you slash two trillion from the budget just willy nilly, that hurts the economy and also sends America into a tailspin in terms of like economic consequences.
It could lead to a recession.
It could lead to a depression.
And Nick, what I'm starting to understand is that that's what they want.
Like, they literally want to crater the American economy, first of all, to go ahead and put people in a position of precarity, to get rid of all of these programs, saying we can't afford them, we have to move forward, you're going to have to do with less and also have a lower standard of living.
But Nick, all this emphasis on cryptocurrency, this, like, push towards authoritarianism to try and accumulate more and more wealth in, you know, less and less hands...
It is becoming obvious that the entire Trump economic plan, this Musk economic plan, you name it, this is a demolition job.
And we'll talk more about what would happen within Trump's cabinet in just a second, and it's related.
But what we're actually talking about right now is the need to free capitalism from American control, including centralized sources like banks, And the Federal Reserve or whatever it is to get away from that so that it can move hosts and also you can go ahead and hurt the vast majority of the human population while enriching people like Elon Musk and his cronies in these authoritarian states.
That's what this is about.
It's not a plan.
It's a demolition job.
But the problem is that with capitalism in place, you could flip that and have your oligarchy and have your really wealthy people and help everybody else as well.
Oh, you could!
Sure.
Now, the thing that happened in 2008 with the housing crisis and the bubble and nobody was ever held accountable...
Basically, they want to do that again because it was a fire sale.
It allowed anybody who already had a bunch of money to get the best deals possible, and they probably are still benefiting to this day.
What is it now?
16 years later, because of all the great deals they got because of the economy cratered.
Why wouldn't they want to do that again every 15, 20 years?
And so they didn't continue building their wealth.
That's where it's at.
It's just so frustrating because even like with the deportation that Trump is now trying to say, And we have to talk about that for one second.
I'm curious your take.
We're seeing the numbers of what would happen to the economy itself if you deported people who are undocumented immigrants.
You'd have something worse than the Depression was in the 20s.
Couldn't work.
And so it's almost like that is another one of those things they want to have.
But do you think that Donald Trump is just saying that we're deporting everybody as a campaign bullshit promise?
Or do you think that, like, They're going to actually attempt to do this, which would cost a trillion dollars.
They'd have to triple or quadruple the force of ICE and whatever to get them out.
Like, do you really think that they would do that?
Or is this just a false campaign promise?
I think it's a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. We've talked about this.
Donald Trump doesn't understand what he's talking about.
Not only is he decaying in real time and dying in front of our eyes, and he'll say whatever he believes to be true.
He has no understanding of anything.
I do not think that it would be the mass deportation that's been laid out for us because, quite frankly, the people who fund Donald Trump and the entire MAGA movement, they don't want their workforce taken away.
We've talked about why this is a bullshit issue from the very beginning.
But I do think that if he were to get into office, what we would see is a show of oppression and cruelty.
We would see a lot of people hunted down.
We would see a lot of people deported.
But I think the people who would be carrying it out would do it as a display of force, a metaphor to basically strengthen the apartheid state that immigrants currently live in.
So no, I don't think it would be the plan as stated, but I do think that it would be something that looks like it, that would still hurt human beings, and it would also create a state of further oppression.
But no, I don't think Donald Trump understands any of this.
Alright, so it would be like a performance, like put on a show a little bit.
Oh, Nick, it's almost like trying to solve the border crisis by putting families in cages and separating them and forcibly sterilizing certain members of them, right?
Just to get the point across.
That you either play ball and you take cents on the dollar and you never organize and you never try and become a citizen or have rights or freedoms or protections, or you're going to end up in the cage.
Do you want to end up in the cage or do you want to do the work for cents on the dollar?
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