This is a preview of The Weekender edition of the Muckrake Podcast. Please go to our Patreon to gain access to the regular Weekender episodes on Fridays.
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the sad departure of Elon Musk from government, as he'd apparently had enough corruption for one political cycle. We also got a glimpse of how lonely and dysfunctional the male population is, particularly when the Democrats want to fund a $20 million study on them. Even Don Bongino is having a rough go of it. It also turns out that Qatari plane wasn't a free gift to Trump after all. Go figure.
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Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the McCranked Podcast.
I'm Jerry Dave Sexton.
I'm still very sick.
But guess what, everybody?
We got good news.
The boys, they're back in town.
Me, Nick Houselman, doing the podcast.
How you doing, brother?
I'm doing.
I'm doing.
I'm just, you know, hanging in there looking forward to a little break after the playoffs are ending and then I can focus completely full-time on politics.
I'm sorry.
I know, I know.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry about that.
It just vacillates between what it is and what it isn't.
I'm so happy.
This is the, like, Nick and I haven't talked for about a week.
I'm so excited.
We get a little bit of bro time.
And to talk about the bros, we got to talk about men who aren't doing well.
They're doing badly, Nick.
They're doing badly, and I understand it, you know?
Well, I wouldn't have too much empathy for the boys that we're talking about who aren't doing well.
Okay.
But, I mean, we have to figure that out because there's a lot of nuance into who they're talking about, who they have to target, what age is, what, you know, everything.
All of that stuff, and we will get to it in full.
We have a full, big, spicy episode for you today.
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But Nick, we have to start with big news.
Put it up in giant neon lights.
Oh my God, the entire paradigm has changed.
Elon Musk has announced that he is officially stepping away from his role in the Trump administration.
As we have been covering, his entire empire is financially in trouble at this point.
Tesla is still on fire.
He says that he has done and spent enough on politics, and as he's walking out the door, he criticizes the quote-unquote big, beautiful bill as hurting Doge.
The long national nightmare is over.
We no longer have Elon Musk to kick around.
I have to imagine that there are parties in the street.
There's nothing at all to be concerned about here.
Oh, well, you know, his job is done, Jared.
That's right.
He's done.
He did his job.
He did his job.
And let's not forget what his job was.
I think that's the key.
His job was to dismantle any of the government agencies that were investigating his companies.
That's a chunk of it.
Yeah.
And although I guess the NTSB is still doing the Tesla stuff, which is, thank goodness, they're still looking into crashes that happen with cars.
But USAID and all sorts of things like that dismantled to get out of its way.
And then obviously the more concerning thing is the big red lights flashing are that he went through every agency and amassed some sort of database that has all of our information in one place now.
Yeah, this is...
You know, Musk, he's done enough.
Yes, he's done enough, which is that he and his goons went into every federal agency slashing everything that they possibly could, getting rid of anything even approaching aid or social programs.
Probably went ahead and set a ticking time bomb in Social Security and every other thing that helps any individual in the country.
And by the way, what's that he's carrying, Nick?
It's not his carry-on to his private jet.
It's literally almost every bit of data that the federal government has at its disposal.
All of the systems are basically under his control.
And so, yeah, he doesn't really have to be there anymore.
And now he can go ahead and take a symbolic step back.
You know what, Nick?
This whole, like, oh, the Big Beautiful Bill is hurting Doge.
Again, I'm thinking back to childhood Jared Yates Sexton watching Macho Man Randy Savage talk about how he's going to fight Jake the Snake Roberts on Saturday Night Main Event.
And he's got Jake the Snake's number.
You better believe we're feuding and we're not together.
This entire thing, it's just a symbolic gesture.
He's going back to take care of business and basically working from home.
To run the federal government and the people around him and the people that are on his payroll and the people who are his goons, they're going to continue to do what they do.
And meanwhile, the press is just like, he's gone!
We don't have to worry about this thing anymore.
Yeah, you know, it's waste, fraud, and abuse became the new trans, the new abortion, the new, you know, phrase that people want to use to try and dunk on the lives or create, you know, the anger they need against the other party.
I wonder, though, if that was actually anything that gained any traction from people, because doesn't it kind of feel like they've already saturated it?
They've gotten everybody that's willing to believe the lies, and I don't know if they're able to expand that anymore.
Do you think that they're like waste fraud and abuse should be one of those red meat things.
Oh my God, we're going to add so many more people to your side when you start pointing it out.
But I don't know.
I feel like it rang so hollow so clearly that it was not nearly as successful as they thought I'm not in the habit of giving out free political and communication advice to the far right that's trying to destroy the country.
But if I would have been consulted going into the second Trump administration, I would have said, hey, maybe you don't have the world's wealthiest man by the side of the president as he's going after waste and fraud and abuse.
I'm putting big scare quotes around that.
It was clumsy.
It was stupid.
And it was transparent.
And yeah, it gave a bunch of people like the story that they needed to deal with their cognitive dissonance.
The MAGA adherents, the MAGA acolytes, they bought into this hook, line, and sinker.
And that's what they needed to do.
And now we're seeing even sort of like the trace.
Remnants of this, Nick, as this quote-unquote big, beautiful bill, is going to slash Medicaid, one of the landmark achievements of the 20th century.
And they're saying, well, we're not actually slashing Medicaid.
We're getting rid of the people who are fraudsters.
We're getting rid of the people who are using this who shouldn't be on it.
So it's still working to an extent.
But what Musk was able to do behind the scenes where you and I and everyone else could not see what he was doing, that's going to be the lasting disastrous legacy of this.
All of the rhetoric around it and all of the sort of like communication touchstones, those of us who know that this is bullshit, we saw through the bullshit.
Do you think that had the Wisconsin Supreme Court race gone better or gone in the favor of the Republicans that was backed so robustly by Musk, do you think he'd be gone now?
If that had gone the way they wanted it to?
You know, that question, I think, is important, but I think it's also the equivalent of asking whether or not my little chaiweenie dog would sprout wings and take off into the sky, because Elon Musk has the favorability of black lung.
You know what I mean?
Like, he is so disgusting and so repellent that every time that he tried to put his thumb on the scale in any way, shape, or form, people are just like, no, you're disgusting.
I don't want anything to do with you.
I don't even know what I'm voting for, but I'm voting against you.
Well, and my other point with that would be is he's kind of leaving under the guise of the status that he has with the government requires you can only work for 120 days, right?
Whatever that is.
Listen, Nick, I do want to say they adhere to guidelines and rules.
Right, that's what I'm saying.
So at some point, how could that possibly be that they would ever adhere to anything like that?
That would just be a thing that would be so easy for them, and they'd get so much satisfaction out of calling against that rule.
So it's interesting.
And he does appear to be sad, deeply troubled by how people don't like him.
It's affected him.
Have you seen this new interview he's doing?
I'm glad you brought that up because that is part of the larger issue that we have to talk about here.
He is sad, Nick.
And do you know why?
Because he's a sad individual.
And he thought that, like, he would be, if he made everybody follow him on the planet Earth on a social media platform and look at his shit worst posts, that somehow or another he would become popular.
And what else has he done?
What all of these other asshole men have done, which is, like, rebrand himself, turn himself into something else.
Like, he's obviously not comfortable with himself.
He's obviously not well.
And that sadness.
That's part of that right-wing authoritarian condition, which is these people don't like themselves, and they make it everybody else's problem, and that's what Elon Musk has done.
And it's not just that he's not popular and people don't like him and people absolutely detest him.
It's the fact that, like, he hates a child of his because they're trans, and, like, that is what sent him down the base, you know, sort of Ed's Lord area.
Like, this is not a well person, and the things that he has done in this capacity and with all this power and all this money.
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