Nick Hauselman hosts while Jared Yates Sexton joins from the road to break down a “deal” that looks a lot like capitulation, the promised-but-pointless ACA vote, and a wave of fake-elector pardons that clears the board for the authoritarian project. They talk weaponized investigations into Adam Schiff, the media’s selective silence on Trump’s health, and a Gilded Age cosplay at Mar-a-Lago while SNAP recipients twist in the wind. Also on the docket: 50-year mortgages that turn homeownership into a lifetime sentence and the trillion-dollar vibes coming from Musk’s payday. It’s shutdown brinkmanship, reality distortion, and class-war optics, all wrapped in one grim spectacle.
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I am Nick Halzman, co-host of the Muckrake podcast, and Jared D.H. Sexman is joining me from the road today.
So glad to have him here with us.
And we have a really busy show today.
So Jared, are you ready?
Are you ready to drive along with us?
Unfortunately, and apologies for audio quality.
I got called out for work again.
And that's good news, but at the same time, like it puts a little bit of strain on things.
But I trust my friend, my co-conspirator, Nick Houselman, to handle this thing.
It's good to be here today.
Terrific.
Well, we have a lot to talk about, Jared, and we'll start with ending the shutdown deal, if it is a deal or not, and the reaction to that.
Plus, fake electoral pardons and going after Adam Schiff celebrating Ritzy Parties at Mar-a-Lago.
Plus, Musk has gotten a hefty nice package from his company, Tesla.
So lots of things to discuss there.
And don't forget to become part of our Patreon would enable you to get a lot of great stuff like live shows we did last week, an amazing Discord and just connection with the community that is really worth being connected to by going over to patreon.com slash muckrake podcast.
And let's start with all this stuff going on about the government shutting down or not shutting down or being open.
What do you think?
Is this really going to be a deal?
Yeah, I think it is, Nick.
And I regret to inform everyone, I know they're going to be shocked, but the Democratic Party absolutely caved on this thing.
And as the news started to hit the wires, I expect very little out of Chuck Schumer.
I expect very little out of the corporate Democrats.
And somehow or another, I still got less than I expected.
They completely capitulated.
And Nick, I want to hear your thoughts on it, but I do want to make a point that they didn't stop the government shutdown.
They didn't come with this deal when 40 plus million Americans had their assistance cut off and didn't know where to get their food.
And they cut it off instead whenever air travel started getting disrupted.
And we're going to talk about the fallout from this and the backlash and how people are fed up with this shit.
But yeah, this is a really, really disgusting and craven thing.
And somehow or another, they keep topping themselves on exactly how much they debase themselves and how much they betray the American people.
It is a shocking even for them.
Well, you know, I think it wasn't just the air travel threatening and plus, you know, if it was the same timing as threatening the Nuka filibuster.
But you have to remember the Democrats just enjoyed a terrific week of a real big pushback at the ballot box.
So they should have been in a better position to hold strong on this negotiation.
And the thing that really bothers me, I had forgotten to say over the last several weeks was that, you know, the Republicans have been trying to hang the shutdown on the Democrats.
It's the Democrats shutdown.
It's their fault.
They're doing this.
And the Democrats' response, unless I missed it, should have been something like, okay, if that's, if it's our shutdown, that means that you need to come to us to negotiate something to end the shutdown.
And they never really turned it around on them in that way.
And there could have been a real opening there.
But you combine that with the fact that, yes, they were sitting in a perfect position here where they clearly, you know, what's going on across the country with ICE has turned many people against the GOP.
Why they would suddenly cave now makes zero sense politically to me.
Well, it's like watching the Harlem Globetrotters and wondering why the Washington generals don't steal the ball while they're putting on theatrics.
I mean, what you just laid out, and I want to go over a couple of things really quickly.
Nick, the deal that has been laid on the table, it literally gives the Republicans everything they want for the promise of a vote on ACA in December, which I don't know.
It's not like the Republicans have ever lied before.
And it's not like that thing is going to get passed.
So they basically handed over the entire deal the Republicans wanted.
And what you just said is correct.
They were in the perfect position with the elections that just took place with public opinion.
All public opinion lays this at the feet of the Republican Party and Donald Trump.
So then the question is, what's going on here?
And it really comes down to this.
They had the perfect position after the elections, but those elections didn't necessarily go the way the Democratic Party wanted them to go.
They should have used that as momentum building in order to demand, like you said, that the Republicans come over the line, which is 100% correct and what should have happened.
But eventually at some point, the Democratic Party, as their basis is in our political system, they have to be the quote unquote rational party.
And in this case, like the bottom line started getting fucked with.
10% of domestic flights started getting messed with.
The economy was getting messed with.
They had to come in and make this deal because they're not interested in playing hardball.
They have a role to play, which is to make things functional while the Republican Party makes it dysfunctional.
And they aren't happy about the fact that someone like Zo Ram Mondano just got elected.
So for the Democratic Party, it felt like a loss.
And it felt like the public in the base wanted them to play hardball, which they did.
And if they start expecting the Democratic Party to play hardball, they have to do a whole host of different things that they're not interested in doing.
You know, another thing I'm kicking myself for not bringing up, even though I meant to in the last couple episodes, was the way that the Democrats framed this battle was that anything short of the subsidies being paid for for ACA is a loss, right?
Like that's sort of the problem.
They put themselves in a situation where no matter what other deal they did to get the government open, short of having that ACA covered, would have looked weak and would have looked like a capitulation.
No, 100%.
And I mean, everything that's been going on here, like literally nothing in this favors the Republicans.
Nothing in this favors Donald Trump.
By the way, they were not going to nuke the filibuster.
The only thing that senators actually care about is keeping the filibuster because it's a check on small D Democratic energy.
That's the entire reason why the Senate works the way it does.
It's the only thing that they actually have allegiance to.
There was no reason whatsoever for them to fold at this moment, except for they needed to protect the bottom line.
That's it.
And I think it shows that they weren't interested in protecting 40 plus million people.
But the moment that the bottom line started getting fucked with in this thing, the Democrats had to come in as the rational lever of power.
Let's talk a little bit about the notion of this vote that they're supposedly going to promise, which again, they could promise whatever they like, the Republicans came.
And then promise all day long.
Yeah.
And so that's, that's not even like, that's not even a guarantee.
I don't even know what they're going to get out of that.
But we don't, it's not clear to me that that would pass because they're going to need to have 60 votes for that, I believe.
And so they would need, you know, Republicans to get on board.
But the Republican Party en masse just went to the Supreme Court to argue they do not want to pay people snap money.
So in what possible version of reality could we see that they'd be willing to vote in favor of subsidies for ACA, right?
And in that context, it really made no sense because they easily could have said, oh, we're going to be the party that's going to save snaps.
See, Democrats, they didn't want you to get the money, but we're the ones we're going to fund that.
Don't worry about it and take care of you.
They couldn't even do that, the Republicans.
They went to court to say, no, we're going to F these people who are poor and need assistance right away.
That doesn't make any sense to me.
And unless they were thinking that the people that follow them are so uninformed that they would just simply believe that the snap disappeared because it was the Democrats' fault.
You know what it reminds me of?
I was thinking about this the moment it came through.
It reminds me of how the Cuban missile crisis ended, Nick, which, you know, the United States and the Soviet Union found themselves in a standoff, right?
And neither side wanted to continue the standoff.
And eventually the U.S. is like, hey, we'll take these missiles out of Turkey.
And the USSR is like, oh, thank God you gave us a symbolic victory.
The Democrats wanted to come back to the table.
They wanted to reopen the government and they needed a symbolic victory.
And they were like, hey, look, we're going to have a vote on the ACA in December.
And like we keep saying, what in the world, who in the hell literally looks at anything the Republican Party has done for decades now that makes them trustworthy?
And by the way, Nick, I've lost count.
How many times have they tried to kill ACA at this point?
Why are they going to come to the table and vote on it in December, much less give it the votes necessary in order to fund it?
It makes no sense whatsoever.
And it just strikes me as something that the Democrats got to come back with: hey, look at this, because they don't have the nerve to continue to fight.
They don't want to hunker down.
They didn't want to take the win.
They literally, it feels like, you know, in this age of watching people get caught sports betting, it looks like people who are throwing the game because it's people throwing the game.
And if people are listening to this wondering, well, what are they supposed to do?
You know, the country was about to burn down and the travel is going to be terrible and all these things.
You know, I would suppose that the negotiation would have been, we will open the government or give you the votes to do that, but you got to fund ACA for a year or six months, even, right?
We got to make sure you extend ACA's subsidies through June of 2026, right?
Something like that.
You know, maybe they ask for a year, they get six months or get four months, whatever that is.
That would have at least been something that showed that they actually tried to do something versus just sort of like throwing their hands up and hoping that, you know, people don't get too mad at them.
Well, do you remember?
And by the way, we'll talk about the major fallout from this in a minute.
Do you remember at the start of this as it was looking like there was going to be a shutdown?
People were like, well, maybe the Democrats will get the firing of Robert Kennedy Jr.
And they were like, oh, at least get that and maybe get some concessions when it comes to ICE or, you know, get this on ACA a year.
And like what you just brought up literally is such a better solution, one year of ACA and we'll revisit it later.
That at least has a little bit of something to it, as opposed to this.
And it comes down to Nick that if you actually want to win this battle, if you actually believe that Donald Trump is a despot and that he's ruining the government, shredding the Constitution, you have to be willing for things to get uncomfortable.
They were okay with 40 plus million people losing their assistance, but they weren't okay going into the holiday period and having people's travel disrupted and having the commerce disrupted.
That is the type of stuff that an actual resistance party would be willing to do in the face of a despot fascist president.
But the fact that they're not willing to do that, it communicates something else entirely.
And I hope people are ready to listen.
And I think that they finally are.
I mean, the indication of that would be what we saw in these elections last week, I would think, right?
And it should cause a lot of concern to the GOP.
And if it doesn't, it means that they are fully preparing to not allow free and fair elections to happen in 2026.
And I don't know.
I think you're on board with me on this one.
I'm kind of yelling this to the rafters and people kind of look at me funny when I talk about it in real life.
But I really feel like that's their plan.
Well, I mean, I don't think the Republicans plan on having free and fair elections in 26 or 28.
But I also think the Democrats still think those elections are going to happen.
But after what happened with Momdani and what's happening with the base and what's happening with polling numbers, they recognized that like if this fight got more extreme, if this fight, if like the actual stakes got larger and larger, people are going to demand more and more things.
They're going to want an actual political battle to take place.
And so as a result, the Democratic Party wanted to relieve some of that tension and some of that pressure because otherwise that revolt within the party, within the base, was going to continue.
But this is so poorly calculated because this is only going to add to the fervor at this point.
So the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have two different concerns going into 26 and 28.
The Republicans don't want the election and the Democrats don't want the party to move to the left.
And so that way, they basically have a joint interest in this.
And meanwhile, as the attack on our free and fair elections continues, part of that attack ends up being what Trump just did over the weekend.
And this is the kind of thing that's normally kind of buried on a Friday evening and they kind of did it on a Sunday.
This is now we're moving to the real taking out the trash day, I suppose.
And Trump ended up pardoning all the fake electors that were associated with 2020.
And I got to tell you, Jared, that hit me, hit me really hard.
You know, none of them were really, you know, being investigated criminally and impending trials for any of these people, even though there should have been.
So he's basically getting out ahead of all this stuff and clearing the board for people like Lyndon Giuliani's part of this and John Eastman.
We know all these names.
That hit me.
This was now really staring me in the face of like they're just now buttoning up every last bit of loose ends they needed to finish.
No, they absolutely are.
And this goes back to, I think, one of the biggest reoccurring themes of what we've been doing on this show and in our conversation, which is these people are serious.
They have designs to destroy democracy and to create an authoritarian reality.
And they've been doing it, which is why people are so pissed off at this point, because they've watched years of capitulation.
They've watched years of quizzling Democrats fuck around with this thing and play footsie with it and tell people that they see what's going on.
And meanwhile, what you just said is correct, which is they're moving all of the pieces into place.
We know it.
We've seen it.
We feel it.
We're not in denial of it.
And so we want somebody to fight back.
We want somebody to do something.
And the fact that they continue to punt on this thing and they continue to throw up their hands and say, I don't know what you want us to do, that tells me that we are facing an existential crisis, but we do not have representation in that crisis.
These people are very serious, but we're not dealing with serious people on the other side of the equation.
You know, I'm looking a little more closely at this list of people that he pardoned.
And Ron Johnson, I don't believe, is on this list.
Oh, that's interesting.
And if you don't remember, he was the guy that, like, I think personally walked over a set of fake electors, a fake slate that he was trying to submit it to Congress the day on January 5th or something like that.
And then threw his chief of staff, I'd believe, under the bus on that.
It's really fascinating because he should be implicated without question and should be getting that pardon as well.
So, you know, is there, I suspect I love to get a legal scholar on here to talk a little bit about the possibility of maybe there's non-federal charges that could still happen out of all that.
But, you know, I suppose I shouldn't be holding my breath.
Is that fair to say?
No, you shouldn't.
But the question is, why shouldn't you be holding your breath?
Like at this point, I don't know how else to say this.
You know, we had before Biden left office, he was giving out all these pardons, and now they don't give a shit about those pardons at all, right?
They do not care about any of the pardons that Biden gave out.
Why in the world, if what is happening is happening, and it is, why aren't we hearing a drumbeat of people who are saying, we don't care about these pardons?
We don't care about decorum.
We're going to prosecute these people.
Like, the game has changed.
So why aren't we hearing, number one, abolish ICE?
I don't know why we're not hearing enough of that.
Number two, I don't know why we're not hearing that the people who've been committing these crimes and these human rights abuses, why they're not going to be held accountable.
And three, I don't know why we're not hearing, hey, we're going to go after the people who tried to overthrow the government in 2020.
Like the only thing that that tells me is that the people who we're supposed to believe are there to protect us and head this thing off, they have no interest in doing it.
And I haven't seen anything that has disabused me of that notion.
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute, Jared.
We talked about this over the weekend and there was this reporting and I was asking you about it, whether it was credible.
But just to give you an idea of where that the right is on prosecuting what happened in 2020, protecting our democracy, they believe that they identified someone who was the bomber who planted the bombs on January 6th or January 5th, the night of, right?
That very strange FBI investigation that seemed to have lots of evidence, but never could figure out who that was who's walking around in a hoodie and a mask, right?
And the right is now in the, you know, in the background, has been, you know, getting all excited about this, where they seem to think it's somebody who was working for the Capitol Police and who's now working for the CIA or the FBI.
It gets pretty wild, but there's their smoking gun.
And this is the part of it where when you add that with the pardons, not that the timing is related or not, but like it's, you can see how this would get the gears going in people's minds and wanting to continue to support Trump and to support this notion that we have to make sure that these elections are guarded closely because these deep state and Democrats are trying to overturn it every step of the way.
Well, and what you're talking about is the slow changing of reality.
And at this point, it's not slow.
It's very, very quick.
And you'll notice that all of the big questions of the right-wing conspiracy theories, they're all being answered at this point, right?
Like who is behind the George Floyd protest?
Who is behind the 2020 election?
Oh, it's George Soros.
It's all of these groups, all of the people that are now being investigated by the Trump administration.
And so it's no longer lip service.
It's using the power of government and using the power of the state to literally twist reality.
And the one thing that I said, and I think it was, I don't know, six months ago, I said on this show, what most made me afraid was the idea that they were going to start fabricating evidence.
And so on one hand, you're seeing people being pardoned.
And on the other hand, you're starting to see the fabrication of not just reality, but the evidence that is going to go ahead and streamline and normalize political prosecutions and political persecutions.
And so it's not a coincidence that all these things are happening at the exact same time as those pieces on the board are being solidified, which makes it all the more important to have an actual resistance against this thing.
Absolutely.
And that actually brings us to the fact that they're going to continue to try and persecute their political enemies, which is what everybody had warned about.
And, you know, again, it's not intellectually honest when you try and say, well, that's what the Democrats did to Trump because Trump was caught red-handed.
He was convicted by a jury of his peers.
I mean, these are all this evidence against him.
But when someone like Adam Schiff, and it sounds like what you're hearing in the background, I know there's been there was a reporting earlier about Adam Schiff being a target of investigation for criminal prosecution.
And that might be coming to a head now, where they're going to, the pressure now on Bondi to bring a case is perhaps imminent, you know, to have a sitting United States senator being investigated like this.
Meanwhile, Ron Johnson should be, by the way, for what he did before, but it is kind of frightening that the game plan they're trying to do is another one of these mortgage fraud things.
Or perhaps they were so mad that he used a metaphor talking about Trump during the impeachment trial that they're just going to try and say he was, it wasn't the metaphor that he was sort of lying in front of Congress.
The straws they're grasping at are quite long and quite thin.
Yeah, and I mean, they're going to go after everybody.
I mean, ask John Bolton, you know, ask Jack Smith.
Anybody who at all was involved in any of this is going to be prosecuted.
And I keep saying, like, I don't think there's any end to this.
I think Barack Obama undoubtedly has had multiple meetings about how he would defend himself or whether or not he's in actual danger.
Like, they're not going to stop.
There is no way to make this thing stop unless you make it stop.
It's not going to somehow or another exhaust itself.
Trump isn't going to have a change of heart and become president.
They're going to go after everybody who is even tangentially related to any of this stuff.
And it goes back to what you just said, which is that Donald Trump was caught completely and utterly guilty of multiple felonies.
And so in order to even move forward, they now have to go ahead and completely switch reality or else it will actually affect their grip on power.
Absolutely.
And it's just, you know, when you keep feeding the machine, right?
That's, you know, the outrage machine that was originally fed by things like the abortion issue, which they got rid of.
So they don't have that anymore, right?
Trans issues.
This is just another example when you say of just like what they need to do to continue to feed the beast.
It is, okay, now it's going to be corruption on the Democratic side.
Whatever they can do to continue to keep this going and to keep the distraction going, they will.
You know, I'm trying to kind of figure out, can we get ahead of this, Jerry?
Like, who is next?
You know, I know the list had come out in that DM that he meant to send to Bondi privately.
But after Jack Smith and after James and after Schiff, is it Jon Stewart?
Like, who is he going to go after next?
Well, I mean, we just saw it a couple of days ago.
It's Seth Myers.
I mean, literally, the point of fascism is that it cannot become sustainable.
There's no way whatsoever for it to reach a point where it's like, hey, we've reached a homeostasis.
We're now fine.
It is something that will devour every single quote-unquote enemy that it has.
Then it will start on anybody that like seems like an enemy.
And that includes its own collaborators and conspirators.
There's nothing about this that is constructive.
All of it is based on fuel for destruction.
And that is why this thing has to basically be chased away from power and any sort of influence whatsoever, because there is nothing about this that will ever slow down or will ever get better.
It will only pick up speed over time.
And also what's making it worse is that we continue to see these very public displays of wealth by the Trump administration, right?
He's going to, you know, in the midst of a shutdown, people don't know where they're going to be able to get snap money.
He is jetting down to Mar-a-Lago, having a great Gatsby party, like I think we talked about a little bit.
And I just saw another thing where they had Lee Greenwood playing and they were doing some synchronized swimming in the pool while they're all standing around in tuxedos.
This has to resemble, at the very least, 1788 in France, would you say?
Yeah, and I will say, you know, as someone who used to, you know, teach the humanities at a college level, like it's incredible that they think that the Gatsby thing wasn't a cautionary tale.
You know, like the illiteracy here is incredible.
But what you're seeing, unfortunately, is the natural escalation of intentional and historic inequality.
Eventually, it's going to reach the point.
And by the way, I don't know if you saw this, Nick.
Trump is now floating the idea of 50-year mortgages.
50 years.
The entire point is you're supposed to be able to buy a house and then enjoy your life later on.
The housing crisis and the affordability crisis has gotten so bad that now we're talking about people literally paying off their house their entire lives.
Like that tension between those two things, you brought up France in the 18th century.
Like those energies, that's the reason why there is such a disconnect between the Democratic Party and its base, because people want something to be done and they don't care at this point if it's considered radical.
And I don't think that we're going to be looking at things like Luigi Mangioni here in a little while and saying like, oh, that was so extreme, because that's going to become commonplace.
The more that they push this issue and the more that the inequality grows, the worse the tension grows.
That's where those revolutions come from.
That's where those class wars come from.
Well, you know, the 50-year mortgage is an interesting thing because there's no doubt in my mind that people who would have normally in other eras been able to ultimately pay off that mortgage after 30 years, they've been borrowing on the mortgage itself, get HELOCs, all sorts of leverage to get more, you know, because the economy has been hurting so many different people.
You have to mention that there are going to be a lot more people who get to that 30th year and cannot afford to pay the rest of it off.
So suddenly I'm thinking, well, maybe 50 years is a necessary thing because of that.
Well, I mean, I know people who literally right now, like 30, 35 years after buying their house, owe more on their house than what they bought it for in the first place.
After 30 years?
Wow.
After 30 years, because they have been forced to continually refinance, because again, our debt is so saturated because the amount of money it takes to live like to the standard of living in the United States of America.
I want to say the last thing is $200,000 a year.
And if you look at the median income and you look at where wages are going and on top of that, the threat of automation and AI, you name it, like that thing is moving away and the debt keeps getting more and more saturated.
The feelings that we have in this country, whether it's the conspiracy theories or the radicalism or whatever it is, that isn't an expression of the feeling that people have that they're not even actually able to articulate.
And the fact that they don't have someone articulating that other than the far right, it creates this polarization that is threatening to tear us apart at this point.
I agree.
It's not good.
And that's the problem that makes me worried about that.
Yeah, as that, the gap between wealthy and middle and lower class continues to grow, which I think it's fairly proven in the history of our country is when that gap is smaller, things work a lot better and the country functions a lot better.
And yet the Trump administration seems completely intent on separating that and making that gap as wide as possible.
And again, I don't want to be alarmist, but it's like, it just feels like we're heading to something where you will be rewarded by having more money than almost anybody in the world because of the resources being so used and abused, there won't be any left.
You'd have to have a trillion dollars to be able to even survive the impending collapse or whatever that's going to be that we're going to see.
Well, and they're just trying to pump it to keep it going for as long as humanly possible while collapsing it.
I mean, even Trump has been talking about a $2,000 tariffs rebate or whatever the hell it is, which is just pumping money into the economy, but not the amount of money that it's costing people.
So it's just kind of trying to keep, it's almost like keeping a body on life support, even though the body is failing.
Because what you just brought up about the middle and the working classes not being able to get ahead, the fact is that the contradictions of capitalism demand.
that eventually at some point it won't work because there's not money and wealth being circulated.
So eventually at some point, there isn't anybody who can buy the products.
There aren't anybody who can buy the services.
And so eventually it will destroy itself.
And that's where we're heading.
And historically, this has always been the case.
It just so happens that we've got a front row seat for it right now.
But the people who are profiting from this, and by the way, you brought up a trillion dollars.
I mean, Elon Musk just got approved for a supposed trillion dollar package of Tesla.
Like it can't be made more apparent what's going on and where this thing is going, but it's up to the people to recognize what it is and where it's going and take some actual action before it gets to that point.
Because the people who are in charge, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the oligarchs, you name it, they're not going to stop.
There's no way for them to stop.
There's no actual sort of incentive for them to stop at this point.
It's on for the people to recognize exactly what's happening.
And capitalism pretty much guarantees we'll have 24 million people on SNAP.
You know, that's why that program exists, because there's going to have to be losers when you have winners in capitalism, right?
There's going to have to be a whole class of people that simply will never be able to really afford to live in this country.
And because we're the wealthiest country in the history of modern civilization, that's all the more reason why we should be helping those people because there is that money to be able to do that.
And then meanwhile, what the damage they're doing to the economy, the people who think that they want a humming economy and everything work well, by doing what they're doing with immigration is going to do more damage to that and to the revenue that they would have normally seen that to no tariff will ever be able to replace.
That $2,000 you mentioned is simply the money that they illegally collected with tariffs, which it kind of looks like, by the way, that the courts are finally going to determine that Trump cannot do this in a non-state of emergency.
And that it might even be possible that the Trump administration will actually acknowledge that and follow the court's orders, despite hearing JD Vance going on all the shows prepping everybody to think that they won't follow court orders when that doesn't suit them.
Well, yeah, and I don't have any faith that they necessarily will, but the damage is already done.
And what you just brought up with SNAP, SNAP was originally put in place in order to try and mitigate like a system that was rigged and didn't work.
It has turned into that life support that we've been talking about.
Like it's literally been used as corporate welfare so that corporations don't have to pay their employees enough.
And then the government will go ahead and subsidize whatever the corporations are paying.
That was done not out of the kindness of people's hearts.
That was done to keep the circulation of American capitalism moving.
That's the life support.
The fact that they're trying to take that away.
And by the way, like I'll be, I'll be shocked when those snap payments actually go out.
I will.
Or if they don't try and kill them or trim the rolls.
But eventually at some point, if you're not going to have that life support that is causing the circulation, then shit's just going to stop working, which is where all this goes.
And all of the indicators are right now in our economy that everything is unstable.
Everything is on the verge of collapse.
And these people keep monkeying around with it on behalf of the wealth and oligarchical classes.
It's going to fall apart because that's what those things were put in place in the first place to try and mitigate and keep this thing moving.
I can't, I mean, I've been hearing that these, you know, different malls and different department stores are ghost towns because people, especially in LA, are afraid to go out and people in Chicago are afraid to go out and what's going on with what ICE is doing.
And so they're intentionally basically torpedoing this economy for whatever reason.
And I almost wonder if, you know, when the skill, when the federal court ruled that the government was going to have to pay the snap before it got to the Supreme Court and the GOP challenged that, I wonder if that's what kind of forced these moderate Democrats, if you want to call them, to come to the table where they realize, oh, shit, they're not going to follow the court orders anyway.
I think we're going to have to do some sort of agreement.
I don't know.
I didn't see enough from the Democratic Party to really believe that they gave a shit about SNAP, to be honest with you.
I mean, the vast majority of the people who actually talked about it, it was the citizens who have come together.
And by the way, congratulations to the American citizens for showing up, donating to food pantries, animal shelters, women shelters, you name it.
Like those are the people who have cared about it.
The only politicians who have really talked about it are a handful of progressive Democrats and people like Josh Hawley.
Like I don't know if that's what motivated the Democratic Party, but if that was, they waited a few days to get in on this action.
And they didn't really start doing anything until the airline and airline commerce got interrupted.
So I have my questions about it.
And I haven't seen enough evidence that that had anything to do with their decision.
Well, what does that mean for someone like Chuck Schumer then?
I mean, is he going to survive this?
I mean, I don't think there's anything to survive.
I don't know that there is either.
I really, I feel like Nancy Pelosi announcing her retirement, it makes it very clear that Chuck Schumer is going to have to go.
But then again, Nick, and I'd be interested to hear what you have to say.
He feels to me like someone who's going to die in his office.
And I don't feel like he's going to give up the keys to that office.
And so it's on the American people to primary him.
And at this point, I'll make it very clear.
I think every single Democrat who caved on this should be primaried.
And quite frankly, I think every Democrat should be primaried.
I think that's where we are in this process.
We need to have a come to Jesus moment in which some of these people actually have to look at the realization that they might lose their jobs because of this and they deserve to.
Yeah.
And it looks like Schumer is serving through 2028.
So that's not anytime soon.
And if I'm not, if I'm reading this list right.
So, but there certainly is a brewing call for him to step down, certainly as Senate leader.
And perhaps, I mean, you know, at this point, if he wanted to step down from the Senate and just kind of, you know, convalesce in his older age, I would have no problem with that.
Go and hang out with your imaginary friends.
You know what I mean?
Like, this is so absurd that this person, not only is he not up for the fight, he's not on our side.
And it's time, and I really do think people are realizing it.
I think the reaction and the backlash to what's been going on has been so massive that I'm not, I don't see, unless somebody doesn't step up to primary him, I don't see him staying there because I just, I feel like the reaction to this has, and by the way, I think it is, I justified.
I think people deserve to be pissed off about this.
And I think people should be tired of this.
Yeah.
I mean, listen, he's quote unquote only 74 right now, about to be 75.
And, you know, as we've seen with Trump and we've seen with Biden and whatever, these guys don't have a problem going into their 80s doing this stuff.
And we've seen the other, you know, of Heinstein and whatnot.
Oh, my God, Grassley.
I mean, we've got these people who really should just be, you know, retired and living, you know, their, their, their best lives.
I mean, you know, does Schumer get it?
I don't think he does.
Right.
And I think the only thing that he sees is controlling the Democratic Party from its left flank, making sure that the corporate donors are happy, and also his, you know, constant allegiance to like this Israel thing, which feels like it's become his crusade.
And in all of that, like, I don't see anything that he is doing that even amounts to a facade of leadership.
Like this guy is going to go down in history as the guy who fell asleep at the wheel while fascism took over.
And I think that has become obvious to everyone, except for Chuck Schumer.
Yeah.
And using the imagery of him falling asleep at the wheel is a good one because I think we'd be remiss if we didn't talk a little bit about what Trump was doing in the White House over the weekend or on Friday with these, you know, while guys like Mehmet Oz were speaking and he literally was asleep.
Did you see that?
Yeah, I did.
And I think, quite frankly, I think if you don't see it at this point, you're a cultist.
I don't know how else to put it.
Not only is he falling asleep, but he's sitting there while people are passing out and falling on the floor.
Like this is not a well person.
And, you know, if the Democrats can't take advantage of the fact that he is not just depleted, but he is like decaying in real time, and they can't take a political win or political advantage or political momentum, then they deserve to lose and they deserve to go away.
Right.
And are they worried?
Oh, well, what about Biden?
Fine.
Biden also.
Thank God he's gone.
Biden, you know, needs, is convalescing because he shouldn't have been in office in the first place.
So I have a, that's an easy conversation to have.
And I got to be honest with you, Jared, knowing how I would behave, if I was sitting in a chair and Mehmet Oz was droning on, I would have fallen asleep faster than Trump.
So I don't even want to make it seem like that's the worst part.
The other thing, though, is that when you see him falling asleep and we know that there's the health issues, you know, if you're going to also try and say that he didn't have a stroke and that they're treating him for that, then I am, you know, there's a cult going on in your brain as well on that, because it seems clear to me that he's completely failing in health and should also be, you know, retired and, you know, convalescing in some hospital room.
And you brought up the both sidesism with Biden.
Like the media was correct to talk about Biden's health and acuity.
Why aren't they talking about Trump's?
Like, why is that not happening?
And it's not happening because he serves the bottom line that all of these corporations want.
And as long as he does that, they're going to give him the air of legitimacy.
They're going to give him the sane washing.
They'll do all of it because they're not interested in moving away from this agenda right now until it messes with their bottom line, which is why you will see articles that are critical of him and his economic policy.
That's the only time.
But when he's doing what they want him to do, they're simply not going to question it.
I mean, part of me also thinks that is because he is already so always, he's always out ahead of this.
He keeps talking about how his mental acuity is great, right?
So he's sort of like sucking up the oxygen on that subject in a way that he's not like necessarily even avoiding it.
It makes him look ridiculous when he keeps talking about the test he takes, which is something that you do for only dementia patients.
But do you think that that, I think that has to be part of it, right?
Because he's out in front of it.
Well, I think he, like a lot of other people, like malignant narcissists, they have a reality distortion field.
He's able to change whatever he wants at any given time and he forces the people around him who are bootlickers to go ahead and just sort of, you know, gravitate towards it, which is what he has done from the very beginning.
And quite frankly, going back to the Democrats, going back to the media, going back to the wealth class and corporations, he has made apparent, and we should be very grateful, he has made very apparent where allegiances lie and priorities lie.
And in what we're talking about with his health right now, it's the exact same as what we're seeing with the shutdown.
Every one of these moments is an opportunity to gain clarity and see what's actually going on.
And Trump, luckily enough, and Musk and all these other assholes are so good at making it readily apparent exactly what's happening.
Absolutely.
And, you know, I don't think that this world should ever have had anybody who has a trillion dollars of wealth.
It just seems to be obscene.
I think you cap that at how many billions would you cap it at?
I have a problem with millionaires, but if you wanted to quibble about that, we could talk about it.
A cool billion is too much then.
Maybe we'll stay there.
Oh my God.
Billionaires are policy failures.
That's one of the only memes and ongoing things I agree with.
There shouldn't be anyone worth a billion dollars.
Yeah.
And to see Musk, you know, he was trying to get out ahead of that too and sort of explain why he deserves it is all manner of mental gymnastics that didn't think anybody was flexible enough to have.
So it is troubling.
And again, I can't help but picture him needing all that money to bore out a gigantic civilization inside of a mountain that he'll be able to safely live in after the event.
Well, I mean, it's not a coincidence that all these people are putting together doomsday scenarios.
Yeah.
Then they're trying to gain as many resources as they possibly can and as much wealth as they possibly can heading into what they know is a collapse.
This situation is heading towards collapse if something doesn't change.
And they are all preparing for it, which I think is an indictment of them.
And it doesn't have to be a collapse of like nuclear war.
It doesn't have to be a collapse of any kind of climate change, dramatic action.
It could be the people turning on the upper class and the elite class, right?
And just saying, we're not going to deal with anymore.
We're going in there.
We're taking back, you know, some of this wealth.
And they feel like they need to have a way to protect that, you know, and have their own private armies and whatnot.
So it is that's those are all scenarios that seem plausible to me.
100%.
And that's why they're all investing in personal security.
I mean, we didn't even talk about it, but Barry Weiss over at CBS at this point, I think $16,000 daily for her security.
Like we talked about how as it's like airline boarding.
Some people get economy, some people get, you know, premium.
And at this point, where we're going, as things get worse, people are going to pay more and more for protection from the people who are suffering.
And that is what they're banking on.
But I'll tell you this, if it gives anybody hope, that doesn't work out.
Eventually, at some point, there is a reaction to this shit.
And, you know, let's wrap this up with a fuck Barry Weiss.
And she clearly does not need that much security.
She's not that important.
No.
And by the way, if you're going around with that much security, you're doing something wrong.
Right, right.
And no question.
So, well, well, Jerry, I'm glad you can join us from the road and really break some of these things down.
It's really important.
And you have to stay tuned for our weekender show on Friday.
I believe I'm doing that solo.
Yeah, you're taking care of it.
Unfortunately, I'll be out on business, but it's going to be in good hands.
And for everybody, head over to patreon.com slash mycreypodcast.
It supports the show, keeps us ad-free, editorially independent, which is more important than ever.
We appreciate all of your support.
It means the absolute world to us.
Absolutely.
And I will definitely have a good guest as well.
So make sure you stay tuned for our Friday show.
And then we'll be back together again in the normal studio environs next week.
