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Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman break down Donald Trump’s primetime White House address, a rambling, xenophobic meltdown delivered with approval ratings stuck in the mid-30s and no plan to fix anything. They unpack the familiar routine, blame immigrants, lie about affordability, pretend a war crime is leadership, and hope yelling louder somehow changes reality. From the $1,776 military stunt and growing unrest inside the ranks, to Susie Wiles torching her own boss in Vanity Fair, Bongino bailing on the FBI, Democrats burying their 2024 autopsy, and CBS debasing itself for Bari Weiss, it’s a portrait of institutions collapsing in real time while everyone involved pretends this is normal.
Welcome to the weekender edition of McCrink podcast.
Jerry J. Sexton here with Nick Houseman.
Nick, how you doing, bud?
I'm good, but you're supposed to be drinking some sort of more relaxing beverage as far as I'm concerned.
No, we need a Red Bull today.
We're running low on the energy.
Wow.
All right.
Well, this is the sacrifice I make for the show.
I'm going to feel terrible later.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, hey, listen, whatever it takes, man.
I don't know how it is for you.
Like this ramp up to the holiday season, this period of time, not to mention other things that are taking place outside of the quote unquote holiday season.
It's beat the hell out of me.
I don't know how you're doing.
I don't know how you're feeling.
This Holly Jolly locomotive is careening.
I'm devastated that I won't be able to buy 37 gifts for my child.
Well, they can have one or two dolls.
I'm sure they'll be happy with that.
Maybe a pencil.
They'll have to learn.
I think it's going to have to learn how to play with a paper bag is what he's going to do with Christmas.
You know what?
I think that builds character.
I think I learned how to have more imagination because my toys weren't as good.
Absolutely.
I mean, listen, I'd be giving out a carton of cigarettes too if I could.
Smoke them up, Johnny.
Smoke them while you got them.
That's, I mean, that is where we are in this country.
That is maybe the most accurate portrayal of where the United States of America is.
How about you?
I'm so tired.
I'm so tired.
Everybody, what we're going to talk about and why we're.
We got a whole lot to get to.
Before we get there, a reminder, head over to patreon.com slash my craigpodcast.
Listen, if you're listening to the preview of this, I mean, this thing is, we're loaded to the gills.
We've got everything from Trump's primetime address.
Susie Wiles getting wild over at Vanity Fair.
Dan Bongino is leaving the FBI.
Man, I, for one, am going to miss him.
The Democrats, they're not going to release the 2024 presidential campaign autopsy.
I wonder why.
Plenty to talk about there.
And of course, the disaster at CBS News with Barry Weiss interviewing Erica Kirk.
I can't believe it didn't work, Nick.
Can't believe that's not something people wanted.
It's a matter of perspective, I suppose.
It didn't work for you.
Well, it didn't work.
I mean, it worked for maybe the 12 people who watched it.
Ah, okay.
So there's a way to measure that?
There's a way to measure that.
And we will talk about that as well as Barry Weiss's future plans at CBS.
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Nick, we have to start with the Wednesday night prime time address from the White House by President Donald Trump.
Rumors were flying left and right.
What was this going to be?
There was a possibility Tucker Carlson floated out there that he was going to declare war with Venezuela.
But it turns out that the president of the United States of America, facing historically low approval ratings and just basically hating the United States of America, wanted to yell at us for a while.
Didn't mention Venezuela, by the way.
That was impressive.
Yeah, it was.
I mean, he was much more like focused on trying to hit his 15-minute mark.
And as a result, it was an unhinge rant.
So yeah, maybe there wasn't room for Venezuela in there.
I guess not.
But I always, I thought they're going to stop, you know, featuring these things and giving him the primetime error.
I thought that was supposed to happen.
I don't know, but as somebody who tuned in live to see what it was, and maybe you didn't, because a lot of people who listen to this show, they don't watch this stuff.
They depend on us to cover it.
Maybe you want a little bit of a bite, a little bit of a taste, a little bit of an appetizer in terms of what Trump sounded like in his primetime address.
Here's that for you.
I think we should call it maybe a little bit of a bump, if you will.
Here we go.
A little bit of a bump.
been driving up housing costs was the colossal border invasion.
We have never been invaded.
This is the worst thing that, frankly, in my opinion, the worst thing that the Biden administration did to our country is the invasion at the border.
The last administration and their allies in Congress brought in millions and millions of migrants and gave them taxpayer-funded housing while your rent and housing costs skyrocketed.
Over 60% of growth in the rental market came from foreign migrants.
At the same time, illegal aliens stole American jobs and flooded emergency rooms, getting free health care and education paid for by you, the American taxpayer.
They also increased the cost of law enforcement by numbers so high that they are not even to be mentioned for the first time.
I mean, we're back to the white supremacist Hootanandi hour.
I mean, it is some of the most racist stuff you'll ever hear.
And here's the thing, Nick.
This address.
Do you have a printer in your house?
That is the strangest thing that you would ask me on a day like today, having just wrestled with it for an hour the other day.
You just wrestled with your printer the other day.
I did.
I did.
Because how a printer works is it doesn't work, correct?
Rarely, right?
One of the worst pieces of technology that we have as a species.
You agree?
Yeah, probably.
It just doesn't work.
It stops.
You'll do the thing you're supposed to do.
And at some point, Nick, if you're trying to make that printer work and you reach your capacity, you ever give it a nice swat on the side?
Oh, yeah.
When they turn around on us and attack, I'm going to be on top of the list of people.
Yeah, right.
It's just like, damn it, this isn't working.
Why aren't you working?
That's what's happening right now with Trump.
Nothing is working.
The economy is in the shitter.
Why?
Because he, like, personally, on the behest of the wealth and oligarchical classes, destroyed it, right?
The people aren't happy about affordability.
He tells everyone who will listen that affordability is a hoax.
It turns out that like even the people who support you and are your cultish like followers, they want to be able to afford things in order to live.
Meanwhile, he's talking about going to war with Venezuela.
Everybody knows he's in the Epstein files.
All of these things are happening.
He can't get the thing to work.
So what happened?
He decided to go out in front of America and slap the printer a couple of times and see if 36% approval could suddenly become 63% approval.
And I'm not a math scientist, but I can tell you that 36% doesn't automatically become 63% because you scream at people.
Well, a lot of red meat in that little soundbite we had, though, really trying to chum the waters for whoever's out there that used to support him.
Because, I mean, here's the thing, like, and I think that there's a turnaround here because, you know, if you have any amount of empathy at all in your body, you're probably going to be able to look at this and say, okay, the kids that are coming across the border, let's just say like that, you know, and it's not, it was not this number they're saying, they don't really have a choice when they get here, right?
They're just here.
Educating them seems like the bottom of the barrel that we could possibly do, right?
I mean, it's a very, we could give them some education.
Like, okay, they're already here.
They didn't have a choice.
What are we going to do?
But, you know, the emergency room is some sort of sweet siren song to a lot of people out there, as we've all had an experience probably of waiting for a while in an emergency room, but that probably has nothing to do with the fact that where anyone happened to be from at that moment when you're there.
But that's a big one.
And they'd love to be able to build that up into this big boogeyman.
And it's just, it's just, it's frustratingly gross, I suppose would be the phrase.
Yeah, it is because it's the only thing that he's got.
It's the only thing that he's ever had when he's been running for president.
He has no answers for anything that is going on in the world.
It was just he figured out that he could be the most xenophobic and racist and sexist person imaginable and blame it on other people.
And everyone would be like, yeah, that's who we can blame it on.
Well, whatever happened to like, we're supposed to be forward thinking and you're not supposed to like go look back all the time.
And like even, even if it was a chance to shit on your opponent, like you didn't necessarily need to do that because you need to make sure that they're all listening to what you're planning forward.
Right.
And like he.
doesn't do that.
And I suppose, would you argue that it worked for him for a long time?
So that's why he doesn't change.
I mean, it's worked because the neoliberal order has failed is why.
Because they didn't have any sort of an answer that could even like be a rejoinder to that.
But eventually, it's just like his first term, Nick.
Eventually, you reach a point in which it just doesn't work.
Like he doesn't know what he's doing.
The only thing he's doing is he's intentionally demolishing things on behalf of his wealthy benefactors.
It helps them, but they are in the vast, vast minority.
That's why they don't want elections anymore because they don't want to have to deal with the repercussions.
And in the meantime, they have this asshole who will go out there and again, keep slapping the printer because one time, maybe two times, it's made the printer work.
Ah, there you go.
That's all they've got is intermittent reinforcement.
They've got no other plans whatsoever.
Yeah.
And then speaking of the plan, I'm not sure we even wedges into the rundown, but they're trying to push this new version of healthcare, right?
As the healthcare is about to expire.
And they're asking him about it.
And he seems to be oblivious to this notion that everyone's premiums are going to skyrocket.
And they will.
20 million people's premiums are going to skyrocket because the government will stop subsidizing that.
And I have to tell you, it was sort of a creative workaround to not having national healthcare is, okay, we'll subsidize a lot of that and make it a little bit more affordable.
And I can tell you right now, what they want in the concept of the plan, and again, they can't even lie and say they have the plan, right?
They're still going with the concepts of the plan or whatever, is the notion of having an HSA where they're going to give people some money and then they're going to be able to spend it on their own healthcare.
I got to tell you, that will lead to millions upon millions of people who will simply go uninsured again.
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