Weekly Roundup: Elon Isn't King and So Many Other Reasons for Hope
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In the final SWAJ weekly roundup of the year, Brad and Dan discuss the motivations behind Donald Trump's actions and the shadow influence of Elon Musk. They highlight the ongoing struggle against the emerging oligarchy and emphasize the importance of hope and resilience in 2024. The episode covers topics such as political messaging, government shutdown threats, the consequences of Republican dysfunction, and the rise of diverse representatives in the coming Congress. Brad and Dan call for strategic action and finding joy as means of sustaining the fight for a better future.
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AXIS MUNDY AXIS MUNDY I think it's really important to explain to people the why.
Why is Donald Trump engaged in this relentless campaign to try to silence journalists, media companies, and his political opposition?
It's because he's trying to steal from you.
He and his friends are in charge of government because they want to rig the rules in order to make them even richer.
The billionaires that are in charge of this cabinet want to be multi-billionaires.
Donald Trump will never be satiated.
He wants to steal from ordinary Americans in order to make him and his Mar-a-Lago friends even richer.
And the reason that he wants to silence his critics and silence the media is that he doesn't want anybody to notice the kleptocracy that he is building.
Unless you tell that story, how does it impact you?
Because, I mean, does the average citizen really care about whether ABC News settles a lawsuit or not?
They do not know, but they do care.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I am Brad Onishi and here with my co-host on the last weekly roundup of the year and hopefully the most uplifting.
I feel like that was an unfair setup.
So I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College, here to be uplifting in what I'm sure everybody's feeling optimistic about in the next, say, month or so.
So I know where you're going with that, but we'll get into that.
But it's nice to be here, Brad.
I know that you are not excited about this, but I look out my window and it is currently snowing.
So for me, that's good news.
I want to just start by saying thanks to everyone who listens to this show and to other shows we do with Access Media Media.
We are fairly, not fairly, we're very close to crossing the 3 million downloads number for this year.
And just could not be more grateful to get to do this work and could not be more grateful to get to do it with you, Dan, and all the other people who've made it happen this year.
Scott Okamoto and Carrie Onishi and Leah Payne and Lloyd Barba and Sergio Gonzalez and Kevin Crow and Tiffany Wicks and so many others.
So all of you who contributed, thanks for being here.
Susanna Crockford, yeah, I feel like I'm giving an Emmy speech or something, but I'm just really thankful to everybody.
All of you in the Discord, Nathan in the Discord, who's our moderator, just people who are so helpful and so great.
So Alright, Dan and I made a decision earlier this week that we were going to do a weekly roundup entirely based on reasons for hope.
I am probably going to smuggle in my anger and ire about the President Elon Musk government shutdown.
So you probably will hear about it.
I'm going to spin that into good news, don't worry, and reasons for hope.
But I will warm it in.
We just heard at the top from Chris Murphy, Senator of Connecticut.
I'm going to expand on why I think Chris Murphy's providing little glimmers of hope, but Dan, we're going to ping-pong it today.
We didn't do our normal thing, which is prepare three stories with extensive research.
I'm not sure what your reasons for hope are, and then you're not sure what mine are.
I think they're probably going to overlap, but I'm going to just throw it to you first.
What is your first reason for hope as we go into 2024?
Actually, stop.
Subscribers, next week.
Bonus episode's coming.
If you're not a subscriber, you should subscribe now because we're going to have our bonus episode up Christmas week.
And if you need a break from family, if you've got a long drive, if you are just not somebody who's celebrating holidays, hopefully you can hang out with us on our bonus.
So I'm going to sneak that in.
All right, Dan.
Sorry.
It's all yours.
Take it away.
Well, I was going to say on your language of smuggling in, I acknowledge fully that it's maybe not the easiest time to find hope for a lot of folks.
So some of these are, you know, if you squint real hard and look, but I say this sort of philosophically, that's the purpose of hope.
Hope is different than like, I don't know, fact or knowledge or something like that.
My first one, and I think this ties into a lot of the things that you've already sort of hinted at, I think we'll have a lot to talk about here, but is I think the economic realities are settling in for the Trump and the GOP. We talked about this a little bit last roundup, but things like, you know, Trump walking back some of his economic claims being like, oh, it turns out inflation on groceries is hard to fix and who knows?
And I think it's hopeful for a number of reasons, and mine really all focus on politics.
But there's also a CNN article out this week noting, you know, just further polling and exit poll analysis and things like that that showed that a lot of the voters for Trump, so these are not the hardcore Trump voters.
These are not the MAGA faithful.
These are those people who swung over to Trump this time, and it does more and more appear that for them, things like immigration crime and most, you know, highest priority, the economy, were the things that they voted for.
But it noted that a lot of them still don't trust Trump.
They're not sure about his policies.
They don't think that he's a good guy.
They're really kind of rolling the dice on primarily the economic promises that were made.
And I think that those promises were never sustainable.
That's not just a Trump thing.
That's a candidate thing.
Candidates promise political things that often can't come about.
But what I think all that means is we'll see, but over time, especially if Democrats and others can keep it in front of people, I think that the realities confronting the GOP about exactly what presidents can or can't do to try to fix the economy is a reason for hope looking forward as Trump's not even in office yet and is already trying to roll back the expectations.
So that's my first sort of starting point for our discussion today.
Yeah, I want to jump in on this.
This is a reason for hope for me too.
Let's go to a WAPO poll from a day or two ago.
What do you support or oppose the Trump administration doing each of the following?
Using the US military to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.
42% support, 54% say no.
Firing FBI Director Christopher Wray, 40% say yes, 54% say no.
Having the Justice Department investigate Trump's political rivals, 38% say no, 68% say no, don't do that, don't investigate Trump's political rivals.
Issuing pardons for people convicted of crimes related to the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot.
32% yes, 66% no.
Police using force to stop anti-Trump protests.
24% yes, 72% no.
Putting reporters in jail.
88% no.
88% no.
So, I think this reveals something that I have been on since the election.
I think others have been.
The Democrats have a messaging problem.
They have a media ecosystem problem.
They did not explain to enough American voters what Trump's agenda was and what it was going to do.
I want to illustrate that, Dan, with just an example from my own family.
Last night, my wife was talking to a family member who is a You know, holidays and you catch up with family around the holidays and who's doing what and who's traveling.
And that person said, you know, I didn't vote for Trump and I don't like Trump, but at least we're going to get the tariffs.
And my partner was like, well, I mean, do you know what the tariffs do?
I mean, we're all going to pay more for eggs and gas and everything if those tariffs are put into place.
And the person's response was, yeah, but at least we should have done it a long time ago and at least we're going to do it now.
And the sentiment I took away from that, Dan, was...
They feel like these tariffs are going to punish someone that needed to be punished, and that's why they're kind of for them.
And even when it was explained, this is going to hurt you, there was like a desire for some kind of punishment or blame or suffering on the part of somebody who'd done something wrong.
And the reason I bring that up is because if you actually explain what Trump wants to do and what he's going to do, A lot of people are going to say, oh, I didn't know that's what a tariff did.
I don't want to pay $20 for eggs.
And others are going to be like, oh, so, okay.
Well, I mean, at least we're punishing China.
And if you can keep them on the phone long enough, which my wife did, you can explain this actually isn't going to punish China at all in any real way or anyone else that the tariffs are put on.
Here's my point.
I'm just trying to piggyback on what you said.
Most people don't want the stuff Trump is threatening, and most people don't want the worst stuff he's threatening.
Whether it's mass deportations, whether it is putting reporters in jail, whether it is using the military on anti-Trump protests.
But you have to message it.
You have to reach people.
You have to tell them what he's doing, whether it's shutting down the government or whether it is You know, mass deportations or firing Chris Wray or whatever else.
Most people don't want what Trump is selling the problem.
Most people don't know what he's selling in any real way.
And that's part of why we're here.
So anyway, back to you.
Thoughts on this one or you want a new one?
Just one more thought on that that I think overarches a lot of this is I think a theme for me of a lot of things we're probably going to talk about today is the GOP overplaying their hand.
We've had this language of the mandate.
Trump won the popular vote.
We have a mandate.
And I double-checked this today.
According to the Associated Press, Trump actually didn't win a majority of the popular vote.
He won a plurality.
He won 49.9%.
Now, he won.
Don't get me wrong.
He won the popular vote.
He beat Kamala Harris by like one and a half percentage points or something like that.
He didn't get half of the popular vote.
That's as far from a mandate as I think you can get.
And just to put that in perspective, he beat Kamala Harris by 1.5%.
That's like saying that, you know what, Brad, I owe you a dollar.
How about I pay you 98 and a half cents instead?
Are you going to be like, oh my God, you're completely ripping me.
Like, you know, the point is one and a half percent is really small.
In American electoral politics right now, that's a decisive win.
But it's a small number overall.
And I think it highlights that because I think another piece of this, because I think you know this, everybody who hears me knows this.
I talk about it all the time.
I think what people believe oftentimes has a lot to do with how they feel about what they believe, how believing certain things makes them feel or what feels true, not what is backed up by facts and so forth.
As we talk about media ecosystems and all of this, the more people keep hearing this stuff about the American people spoke, the voters spoke, the mandate, the mandate, the mandate, I think that they actually, I think that they trust that, well, lots of people looked at what Trump is saying and it's all good stuff or he wouldn't have won the vote with such an overwhelming majority.
I think that's just another piece of it is to keep that in front of people.
He did not win by an overwhelming majority.
He won by a coin toss.
It's like a 50-50 chance.
And I think that that's a piece that sort of just stacks onto everything that you're talking about and sort of feeds into everything that we're looking at here.
And I think that it goes into the messaging.
The people who oppose Trump have got to get better at messaging and communicating with people.
I'm going to do that right now, and I'm going to say to anyone listening, and I assume 99% of you listening are anti-Trump, is this.
It is time to stop licking the wounds.
I know that's hard.
I know so many of you are tired.
I am tired, too.
The last month has been excruciating.
The last five weeks, six weeks, etc., As Dan just said, he didn't even win 50% of the popular vote.
If you add in the third party candidates and so on and so forth, he won 49.9%.
The 1.5% margin of victory is one of the smallest in American presidential election history.
Joe Biden won by three times that in what was considered a close race and something that was a nail-biter.
So there is no mandate.
There is no Goldwater v.
Johnson or George H.W. Bush beats Michael Dukakis situation here.
That's number one.
In the House of Representatives, we have a situation where Matt Gaetz resigned and was going to be Attorney General.
Now it looks like And I'm sure we're going to hear about this from Dan in a minute.
His ethics report is going to come out and his only job opportunity might be as a Newsmax host.
Elise Stefanik and Representative Waltz are going to be taking jobs in the administration.
Their seats will be vacant.
Representative Sparks, if anyone's keeping up on this story from Indiana, is doing some of the most bizarre things I've ever seen from a House of Representatives.
And that is saying that she will do everything to support Ramaswamy and Musk in their government efficiency initiative, but will not caucus with Republicans or take committee seats with the Republicans.
What that means is the Republican majority is now just about 216 to 215. It's one vote.
And this week, I did not think a reason for hope would come from a representative in Kentucky who is a Republican, but Thomas Massey, who's a moderate Republican, to be fair, as they exist these days, rare in the wild, he says, I honestly don't know why people up here are talking about tax cuts.
There's really no way to afford them.
What the hell?
We need to be cutting spending, not taxes.
He's basically saying, I'm not on board with more Trump tax cuts and the kind of bill that was put forward a couple days ago by basically Elon Musk and Donald Trump that got rid of a bunch of things, including $190 million for pediatric cancer research in order to make room for tax cuts and so on.
Here's the point.
The math in the House of Representatives does not look good for Mike Johnson, no matter how you look at it.
And the ability for that body of Congress to simply push through Trump's wishes is diminishing as we speak.
There is not a time to simply roll over and accept that Donald Trump is now king and there's just nothing that can be done.
I got more to say about that when it comes to Chris Murphy and others, but I just wanted to say one more thing, Dan, and I'll throw it to you on this.
A.B. Stoddard, writing at the Bulwark this week, says this.
Democrats don't need to wait until they elect a new party chair or agree in a unified message to talk about this stuff, meaning all the things Trump's already done.
They seem to be content to hunker down until they have more answers about why and how they lost so many of their former voters to Trump.
We get it.
They're in a hole they don't know how to dig out of.
Indulging their rage at President Biden feels righteous, and it is easier than confronting a triumphant Trump.
What voters need to hear from Democrats right now is not introspective screeds about what they have done wrong, but sharp responses to what Trump is doing wrong.
They want the opposition party to hold the president-elect to the promises he made.
That's exactly, I think, what you're saying, Dan, and that's exactly what I think should be happening as we speak.
Back to you.
And just, again, on that point, I will use an example.
My Denver Broncos choked away a game last night that they should have won.
And whenever teams, like, lose, right?
And this could be true of every sport.
You go up, like, whatever the next day of practice is, you go in and you get stuck, like, watching film and going over everything and looking at blown assignments and what didn't work.
And all of that's really important.
But guess what you do the next day, Brad?
You're planning for the next game.
You have to keep moving forward.
You can't just sort of keep looking back.
And I think that that's my metaphor and my analogy for where I think the Democrats are now.
We get it.
And yes, there's that whole class of Democratic advisors who want to make sure that they still have a job on election campaigns in two years.
And so they have a vested interest in trying to make sure that it wasn't them.
It wasn't their strategy.
It was somebody else's.
But for everybody else, cool, we get it.
We lost whatever.
It's time, as I think you're saying, to move forward, take advantage of the opportunities that are there.
And this brings me to this point, and maybe I'll throw it over to you.
We can just dive into the shutdown stuff, potential shutdown, is one of the reasons for hope is just the GOP dysfunction is still there.
Despite 2016, and we saw the GOP having the levers of power and not being able to do some of the things that I think we all thought on election night 2016 they were going to do.
I thought Obamacare was going to be history like day one of the Trump administration.
Here they are, as you say, and it would be interesting to talk about the strategy of having appointed some of the people in the House to the Trump administration, like how sort of antithetical to their own interests that was by weakening the House majority by appointing those people and so forth.
But we've seen it this week with everything falling apart in the House, GOP, conservatives opposing even everything Mike Johnson wants to do and some other Republicans opposing Trump's.
Proposals, the dysfunction of the DOGE, DOGE, or DOGGY, or whatever we want to call it, the Musk-Ramaswamy thing.
I think nobody has settled on how to pronounce the acronym and how that actually relates to anything going on in Washington and so forth.
This is like a gift to Democrats right now that they can exploit at present and I think in the future.
But they've got to do that, as you say, quit hunkering down.
They have to take advantage of the opportunity that's sort of being placed in front of them.
I think in ways that, you know, serve the American people, that serve the country.
But I think that that brings us a broader overarching, again, kind of reason for hope.
There was a lot of talk about this time around, will things be smoother for Trump?
He has better people in place, better policies in place.
They've been thinking about this.
And so far, we're still running into a lot of the patterns of dysfunction because this is a party that has built itself on chaos.
For the last 15 or 20 years, and we're seeing that in play.
And I think everything about the spending bill and the potential shutdown shows that, I think, maybe more clearly than anything else and ties in with the points that you're making right now about some of these folks in the House, the very small majority and all those kinds of things.
Let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about the shutdown.
And if there's any good news in the shutdown that is looming and may have already happened by the time you listen to this, be right back.
Okay, so this might be a tough one, Dan, for people listening to think, how is there any hope here?
And I'll...
I'll try to weave my way to it, and I'm sure you've got thoughts too.
This is from Katie Edmondson at the Washington Post, writing on December 19th.
The government lurched toward a shutdown after the House on Thursday rejected a hastily produced plan ordered up by President-elect Donald J. Trump to keep funding flowing, with dozens of Republicans defying his demand to pair the spending with a two-year suspension of the federal debt limit.
The vote sent Speaker Mike Johnson back to the drawing board ahead of Friday night deadline with no clear path to keeping the government open.
Right-wing lawmakers balked at increasing the government's borrowing limit, something many of them have long pledged not to do, without spending cuts to keep the debt from ballooning further.
They were joined by Democrats who savaged the GOP for bowing to Mr. Trump and reneging on a spending compromise Mr. Johnson had reached with them only days earlier.
So, for those of you who have not kept up with this or feel like this kind of stuff is just too wonky and detailed to keep up with, basically, there was a deal between Mike Johnson and the Democrats to keep the government open and to pass the bill.
That was then totally sabotaged by, it says, Katie Edmondson says here Donald J. Trump, but it was really sabotaged by Elon Musk Who posted something like 100 times on X talking about all the reasons that the bill was no good.
He made so many false claims about pay raises for congresspeople and other things that he said were government inefficiencies.
One of the things that Fox News complained about, Dan, was rebuilding the Francis Scott Key Bridge, which is like a key part of infrastructure in a major American city.
All of that to say, it really felt to a lot of people who pay attention to these kinds of things, like Elon Musk was the president-elect, his tweets and his other sabotaging led to the bill being abandoned, and then there was this new one put forward.
And in the new one put forward, as Sarah Posner So helpfully set on blue sky just yesterday, the Republicans cut funding for pediatric cancer research by $190 million.
They took funding away from fixing the opioid crisis.
They took funding away from pandemic preparedness.
And all so President Musk and Vice President Trump can get their massive tax cuts and immiserate the Americans they lie about caring about.
Elon Musk, in this whole tweet storm that he had going on, basically agreed with people who said, look, the government may shut down for a month and that's no problem.
He also said that no bills should be passed until January 20th when Donald Trump is president.
What that means is that the government would shut down and that service people and TSA agents and so many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many other federal employees would go into the holidays without assurance of their paycheck and may not get paid for who knows how long. many other federal employees would go into the holidays without When the government shut down a few years ago, Dan, estimates are that the U.S. economy lost $3 billion as a result because it takes a lot to turn it off and turn it back on again.
Why is any of this good news?
I want to be very clear.
I do not want the government to shut down.
And because, for a lot of reasons, one of them is I'm thinking about all those...
All those Americans who go to work every day and are public servants are doing things that make this country run.
And the only silver lining in the way I'm going to sort of spin this as good news is that people, I think, are starting slowly to recognize what this is.
The richest man in the world who has moved into Mar-a-Lago acting like some sort of Elon Rasputin Who seemingly bought the presidency with his $250 million contribution.
Is running what appears to be a shadow government and basically leading the charge.
Now, what that's led to, Dan, is an overwhelming amount of people saying that Elon Musk is president-elect and Donald Trump's an old man just doing what the tech baron says to do.
Donald Trump sent out a statement by way of Carolyn Leavitt yesterday saying, Donald Trump is the leader of the Republican Party.
Don't forget it, basically.
Yeah.
This may be a moment, Dan, and I'll shut up here, but I'll throw it to you.
But this may be a moment where, A, you can start to build what I talked about building last week.
That this is going to be four years of oligarchy versus the people.
Of the richest man in the world telling everyday Americans, it's totally okay if you don't get paid for a month.
Because I have government contracts that I need to care about and, more importantly, we want the tax cuts and we actually don't care if you eat or if you have money for the holidays or if you can save or if you can afford your rent.
We don't care.
I'm the richest man in the world sitting next to another rich guy and we're surrounded by billionaires in a cabinet and we don't care about you.
And this is what Chris Murphy said in a clip on the news the other day, and I want to play a clip right now, Dan, if you don't mind, of him in Congress yesterday talking about what is happening right before us.
Let's play that clip.
Mr. President, I'm on the floor today to talk to my colleagues about something that is happening right in front of our eyes.
It's a set of events that aren't random.
They're connected to one another.
That threaten to destroy this country that we love.
Everybody can see it, but for some reason, maybe the exhaustion of the aftermath of a brutal election, maybe the distraction of the Christmas season, maybe just an instinct to flee instead of fight.
There are far too many people that are denying to themselves what they are seeing.
What is happening right now?
Donald Trump and his billionaire advisors are unfolding for the country in real time a plan to transition this country from a democracy to a restrictive oligarchy, where political opposition is silenced, where the media isn't free, and where government just exists to enrich a small cabal of elites that surrounds the man in charge.
I think it's really important that we lay out what's happening here because this is how a democracy vanishes.
But I think it's also equally important to talk about why Donald Trump and Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and all of his billionaire friends are engaged in this very coordinated early attack, even before he's sworn in, to try to intimidate his political opposition and bully the press.
And the reason they are doing this, the reason that they are trying to suppress dissent is because they are preparing to steal from us.
Donald Trump and his billionaire buddies want to be in charge of government so that they can make themselves more wealthy at our expense.
They want government contracts.
They want to privatize.
They want government programs.
They want to get bigger regulatory breaks.
They want lower taxes.
Donald Trump and his billionaire cronies want government to serve them.
But they know the only way they get away with that is if no one holds them accountable.
So in order to steal from us, they have to silence political opposition, intimidate activists into submission and try to get the press to fold.
If they do that, then they can get away with using government as a mechanism to enrich themselves.
The thing I appreciate about Chris Murphy there, Dan, is he's calling it out.
He's, look, this is what's happening right in front of us.
A move from democracy to oligarchy.
Dan, I think that is a winning message.
I think if you can find the way over the next six months to basically say, there is 1% of this country, and look at them, they're all in power.
Do you think they care about you?
What are they doing to help you?
How are they making your life better?
They're not.
And if they shut the government down, it's going to be like exhibit A. Damn, even before Trump swears in, he might do something that is so hurtful to so many Americans.
Where is the ecosystem to make it plain to folks that's what's happening?
I got more thoughts on this, but what do you think?
So a couple here.
One is I think everything you say about the oligarchy point is true in the messaging.
I think it's also a way to get leverage on Trump.
We all know that Trump's an egomaniac.
Imagine what happens if it can become enough of the discourse that he's a puppet for Musk.
If that makes it to Trump enough, Trump doesn't like that.
And then what happens?
What happens if that relationship fractures because he becomes convinced that people think what I think they actually think and I think is actually going on, that he is just...
A mouthpiece for Elon Musk.
I think that this is also a place to strategically try to insert that into the MAGA mechanism and see what it does.
I think the other piece of this is we're also seeing a little bit of desperation on the part of Trump talking about the shutdown and stuff.
I think he tweeted something out or put it on Truth Social or whatever.
I'm not sure what platform it was now that he's using that again.
But he made this statement about how, you know, if this shutdown happens, it happens under Biden, it's a Democratic problem, like trying to get it to stick to the Democrats.
I see, again, real downside to the shutdown, real people, okay?
I'm not trying to downplay that, but if we're talking about the politics of it, I don't see any upside for Republicans in doing this when we just talked about all the people who voted for Trump because they want their pocketbooks to be better than they were.
They want prices to come down.
It's like, oh, so ahead of the holidays, what you're going to do is hurt real federal employees and so forth.
And I just don't see any meaningful way that for regular people, this sticks to the Democrats.
Like, that's the downside for the Republicans.
You've been talking about mandates ever since November.
You've been talking about how the people have spoken.
You've been talking about how irrelevant the Democrats are.
And, you know, who is even thinking about Biden at this point?
Nobody is.
He's beyond a lame duck.
So I think that's another piece of this that ties in with that oligarch sort of I think there's a chance here for a kind of feedback loop, again, before Trump even formally comes into office, that can do a lot of damage to the credibility of all these calls about the mandate and everything else that I think is so problematic.
Yeah, and I think that one of the biggest things that is a history for Trump is breaking up with people that become his best friend.
The first Trump administration recycled through so many figures and so many spokespeople, so many advisors, so many whoever's.
I think a lot of people don't believe that Trump and Musk can actually stay married here for the next four years.
The questions that abound are like, why does Trump need Musk?
Is Trump married to Musk because of money?
Because Musk has a way to...
He has some hold on Trump that we don't know about.
I think there's just a lot of questions there.
But Elon Musk is not the president.
And I think the Democrats, I think people on social media, I think people in the press are starting to say to folks, did you elect this man?
You didn't.
And I think, as you say, Donald Trump may find himself enough of a narcissist to jettison Musk simply in those grounds.
Now, I will say, I know we're supposed to be sticking to hope.
This is going to sound very strange, Dan, and I'm not sure that everyone's going to agree with me or understand what I'm trying to get across here because I may not say it the right way.
I got to be really careful how I say this because I'm going to say words that I don't think I want to say.
I think that Donald Trump showed signs on the campaign trail of being less of a politician than he was before.
And you're like, well, don't be an ageist.
And I'm going to say, I'm not being an ageist.
What I'm saying is I'm pointing to a specific man and his specific performances in public.
The man stood for 40 minutes on a stage and just sang songs or at least danced to them while people thought he was going to give a speech.
I think it would be best, Dan, if Trump was actually the Trump we've come to know, and those are the words that I can't believe I'm saying.
Why would I say that?
Because that Trump is so much of a narcissist that he will not allow Elon Musk to be the shadow president.
He will not give up the spotlight.
He will not like sharing this whole thing with Musk.
If Donald Trump is a shell of himself and under the influence of advisors because he no longer has the capacity to basically be the big boss, as they call it, Then we may be in a situation where unexpectedly Elon Musk can basically be the shadow ruler and Trump won't stand up to him in the ways that Trump from 2016 or 2020 would have.
And again, now I'm saying words that I hate and I don't really...
I don't really...
I'm going to have to go get some soap and wash my mouthwash and the whole thing.
I'm just saying it would be better for us somehow if Trump is enough still of himself To get rid of Musk in the next two, three months, which might happen.
Because if he's not, if he's just a shadow of himself and he is simply, shadow's the wrong word, if he is just a shell of himself, then the likes of Musk and others might have the ability to run things while just appeasing a man who wants to look good on TV and bask in his presidency.
I want to say one more thing about Musk, but any thoughts on that?
Did I say that right?
Does that make sense?
Do I sound like a crazy person?
Are people going to email us and say, I'm never listening to this show again because Brad's lost his mind, or what do you think?
No, I think what I hear you saying, excuse me, if I can use an old phrase, part of it is the devil you know kind of thing.
We know who and what Trump is.
But I think I understand what you're saying, that if Trump is diminished enough that he just lets this person operate as the puppet master, then that's a whole other set of problems.
It's a whole other complexity.
If you have somebody who's unelected basically calling the shots, For the president.
And I hear the concerns.
I think we'll see how it goes.
Because I think that Trump...
I agree with you about stuff on the campaign trail.
I agree about some of the ambiguities now.
I think it feels like Trump vacillates right now from just settling in to what people like Musk are kind of having him do.
There was a lot of talk about Trump and Musk talking for a long time before Musk sent out these tweets.
And so the questions about sort of Who's clearing what with whom and where do they originate and so forth?
But then you get these other times when, for lack of a better term, the more robust, muscular, narcissistic Trump seems to reemerge.
And I think it's a real situation worth watching.
He will be the oldest person ever inaugurated as president next month.
And I, with you, I'm not making a general statement about people of a certain age.
I'm making a statement about this guy and things that we've seen.
I think that it bears watching.
I don't know where it goes.
I don't think any of us know for sure, but I think it does bear watching.
If you listen to the show, if you read my writing, you know that I've been on this train for a long time that says what might scare me more than even Trump.
I don't even know what words I'm saying anymore, Dan, because if you know me, you know that I think Trump is a dire threat to this republic.
Let me just give a little bit of history because I'm going to try to make sense of what I'm saying here.
When Mike Pence was the running mate, what I saw in Mike Pence was an old school Reaganite Christian nationalism that I understood very clearly.
And I don't like it.
It is dangerous.
Mike Pence as governor of Indiana did so much harm to so many people.
If he ever took over as president, my thought is Mike Pence is going to be damaging to the country in the way that Reagan was and George W. Bush were.
But he has a sense of shame and propriety, and he wants the legacy of being the next Reagan.
When J.D. Vance was picked, and I went on all of my story time about J.D. Vance this summer, for those of you who listen to that, I knew that we had somebody who was way more radical than Mike Pence and somebody that would be under the influence of people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
Somebody who would be under the influence of Kevin Roberts, Project 2025 publisher at the Heritage Foundation.
Someone who would be under the influence of post-liberal philosophers who think the Constitution should be scrapped.
What I'm trying to say here is I know we're supposed to be doing hope It would somehow be better if Trump still had the wherewithal to get rid of the palace interlopers and try to beat Trump, the most inefficient and incompetent president of modern history.
Because then we wouldn't be at the whim of the richest man in the world using Twitter slash X as his mouthpiece to basically express the policies he wants.
And here's why Musk is scary.
There's a hundred reasons.
He's basically threatened to primary any House of Representatives member on the Republican side who doesn't go along with the Trump agenda.
And he has the money to do it.
So if that divorce happens, that's a good thing.
Let me read you one piece here, Dan, from a book called The Contrarian.
It's a biography of Peter Thiel by Max Schafkin.
And it's on page 66.
This goes back to the time when Peter Thiel, who started PayPal, merged his company with Elon Musk, who ran a similar company, surprise, surprise, called X.
And they were trying to avoid bankruptcy and keep their companies going in the early 2000s.
The partnership had been compelling to investors who put another $100 million in venture capital into the combined operation that spring.
But it proved to be awkward interpersonally.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel had trouble relating to each other.
So if you know anything about Peter Thiel, Dan, he's an overachieving Stanford graduate who many take to be as one of the most ruthless and competitive people ever to be part of Silicon Valley's investing class.
What did they know about Musk then?
Musk, it says on page 67, according to Peter Thiel, is a fraud and a braggart.
Okay?
Now here's a little story that exemplifies that.
One day, while Peter Thiel was riding an Elon's $1 million McLaren to a meeting with Mike Moritz at Sequoia, Elon, attempting to show off the car's acceleration, crashed the car into an embankment on Sand Hill Road, sending the McLaren flying into the air.
The car was totaled.
As they walked away from the wreck, Elon told Peter, You know, I had read all those stories about people who made money and bought sports cars and crashed them, but I knew it would never happen to me, so I didn't get any insurance.
I don't know what that story tells you, Dan, but all of the ideas we have about Musk as having a persona of somebody who moves too fast, who breaks things, who is more of a braggart and a fraud than he is anything else, Makes me think that it would be really good news if Trump and Musk broke up.
All right.
I have somehow taken us down a road leading to something that sounds like not hope.
So I'm going to stop.
Do you have any more comments on this before we go to a break?
And I'm going to then get off the mic and allow you to uplift our spirits as we try to keep going here because I've probably ruined everything.
All right.
I'll just circle back around that language of not having insurance, I think, is telling.
Why are the oligarchs willing to scrap things like pediatric cancer care and basic safety net issues and things like that?
Because they're rich enough that they don't need any of that.
If their kids ever have cancer...
Pandemic response?
Yeah, all of that.
They can just pay out of pocket for anything.
There's literally nothing in the world that they cannot purchase or buy.
The rest of us need insurance.
The rest of us need safeguards.
The rest of us need that.
And again, I think that that's the kind of message, that's the kind of anecdote or story that I think could resonate with a lot of people.
So I think it's just such a telling example.
It almost sounds like we're safer if we work together and build a net that can catch and reinforce our lives when we deal with the universal sufferings and vulnerabilities of being human beings.
That's what it almost sounds like to me, Dan.
That instead of having billionaires run everything, we might just work together to build a net.
That holds in place a fabric where we all have the basic needs that we need.
I don't know.
Housing and food and medical care and education.
And we might live in a society that is less violent, less unequal, less full of pain if we did that.
I don't know.
I sound...
I sound crazy right now.
I don't know.
I woke up, thought I was in Norway, thought I was in Costa Rica, thought I was in New Zealand.
I apologize, everybody.
Let's take a break.
We'll come back and talk more hope.
Be right back.
All right, Dan.
Set us on the right course.
I ruined everything.
Give us some hope.
Give us a shot in the arm.
What do you got?
Maybe a minor one, maybe after the fact, but I think it's one that'll make all of us feel good, is that apparently the ethics panel votes to release the Gates ethics report.
Sort of under the radar, he pulls his name from consideration and so forth.
But maybe in a double in this, I skimmed this quickly.
If I'm getting some of the details wrong, maybe you can correct me.
I know that others will.
But he's also now threatening to do this stuff where anybody in the House who's had settlements for sexual harassment that will all be made public and things like that, all of which I'd be in favor of.
I'm all for transparency when it comes to things like sexual misconduct among elected leaders and so forth.
That, I think, was not something that I expected to happen after everything that happened with Gates.
And so the notion that that report could be made public, and yeah, maybe it could actually lead to more government transparency on these issues, were things that I did take as signs of hope this week that are not directly related to Trump and don't necessarily rely on GOP dysfunction.
I have thoughts about Matt Gaetz, and I'm starting to feel it a little bit.
So, I feel like I got past the warm-up stage of my workout, and I'm ready just to, you know, bench press.
Not 400 pounds like Dan Miller, more, you know, bench press the bar or whatever I can do.
Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice, famously said, and I know a bunch of you out there already know this quote, the light of day is the best disinfectant.
And there's takeaways from the Gates investigation, Dan, because they investigated him.
They opened an ethics inquiry into him.
And it's so easy these days to say, what's the point?
What's the point?
Why even try?
Why even try to keep people accountable?
Why even try to have an ethics code at the Supreme Court?
Why even try to do investigations that make a difference?
And Matt Gaetz is no longer in Congress, Stan.
That is a good thing, period.
Just full stop.
He's no longer a congressperson.
He put his name in for AG. That didn't happen very quickly.
And now we're going to learn all the terrible things about him.
And the best he's going to do is either be on Newsmax or go start some Twitter show a la Tucker Carlson.
He's going to have a YouTube channel.
The meteoric rise of Matt Gaetz is no longer.
And he may make a comeback, whatever.
I'm just saying, this makes a difference.
And it's again a plea to the Democrats.
It's again a plea to the opposition party.
It is again a plea to everybody to stop licking the wounds and say, we have ways in this large and big and overwhelming American government and society.
To not just let ourselves slide willy-nilly into some kind of autocracy and President Elon Musk oligarchy and austerity hellscape.
But we have to believe it makes a difference.
And so, they did an ethics investigation into him.
He's no longer in Congress.
He's not going to be AG. And it looks like he's going to be a kind of third-rate OAN anchor, you know, at some point.
And so, this makes a big difference.
It points to the fact that do not give up on holding Pete Hegseth accountable.
Pete Hegseth does not need to be Secretary of Defense.
It is not a foregone conclusion.
It does not have to happen.
It does not have to happen that Kash Patel is the FBI director.
It does not have to happen.
I said this at our events.
It is not a zero-sum game.
You fight, and you fight, and you fight, and sometimes what you want happens and sometimes it doesn't.
But if you don't fight at all, then the game's not even being played.
And what we know is that the billionaires are built to just crowd in and destroy the fabric of our society and our social safety net and our lives So they can take as much as they want.
What did Chris Murphy say?
And I really loved what Chris Murphy did.
He said something that I've been trying to say and I feel like is so clear.
Why is Donald Trump doing these things?
Why is Elon Musk doing these things?
They want to steal from you.
They want to take things that are yours as a citizen and a taxpayer.
Social Security.
Education for your kids.
Research to figure out how to stop cancer.
Ways to prepare for the next pandemic.
Hey, parents, do you all remember the pandemic when your kids were at home eight hours a day online doing school?
Was that the worst couple years you've had in the last, like, how long?
Do you remember the pandemic when we couldn't see our loved ones at the holidays?
Do you think we should prepare for that again?
I do.
I think it'd be good if next time that happened, we were a little bit more ready, that we didn't see a million people in our country die.
That we didn't have a situation where the president was on TV saying, hey, just inject light into their lungs and maybe that'll cure it.
I'd love that.
He's stealing from you.
He's stealing your way of life.
He's stealing your quality of life.
Because these guys can never get enough.
They can never be satisfied.
Elon Musk is the richest man in the world and he still somehow wants what you have.
I'm not up for that.
And I don't want what Elon Musk has.
I want a life that's full of meaning and community and togetherness.
I sound like a Hallmark card.
I just want to make meaning out of the couple decades this wind sack of flesh I have walking around on this earth is sentient.
That's all I want.
And I just want to do that with people like Dan Miller.
Go get a drink once in a while.
Tell some jokes.
See what's out there in the world.
Take a hike.
These guys want everything you have anymore.
And they won't be satisfied until they take it from you.
So, yeah, Matt Gaetz, take a walk.
And you know what, Elon Musk?
Sorry, we're not going to let you be president.
All right, Dan, I'm lathered up now.
I got two more hours in me now.
I can run through walls.
I feel like I drank the pre-workout, six shots of espresso.
I took the wrong pill or something.
I'm ready.
Let's get hopeful now.
I'm on a roll.
Who needs...
Who needs a Hallmark card?
I'll write anything you need.
I don't know about the Hallmark card, but the next t-shirt is clearly Sentient Windsax Unite.
So, like, you know, that's clearly what you call it.
Sentient Windsax?
Yep.
Dan, you're a heavy metal fan, and you're trying to tell me there's no goddamn band called Sentient Windsax?
There probably is.
There's gotta be a heavy metal band.
In Japan or Norway or Finland, name Sentient Windsax.
Come on.
What I know is that right now, everybody just hit pause and they're all on Spotify, like, searching to see if that comes up anywhere.
In all seriousness, I think a point that you're making here about these ways in is, if we want to think about it this way...
People talk about, you know, in battlefields, asymmetric warfare.
When you're up against a bigger force and it's better equipped and has better capabilities and so forth, you have to find alternative ways of combating it.
And that's where we are.
We lost the election.
People who oppose Trump lost the election.
They lost both houses of Congress.
Many of the big levers of power are gone, but there are still lots and lots and lots of ways and pathways in If politics is not just about You know, winning elections, if it's about, as you say, the social fabric, if it's about the common good, there are lots of ways of aiming at that and working toward that.
There are lots of ways, whether it's speeches, whether it is the turbulence that is coming up for people like Hegseth and other cabinet picks and keeping that in front of people.
This is another reason for hope that I've mentioned before.
Whether it's non-Trump states that are working on lots of ways of trying to blunt the force of some of the things that he's going to do, trying to protect policies that they think are important, trying to protect abortion access for people who don't have it.
My state has a program, a grassroots program working to help trans-identified people relocate from places where they can't get health care to Massachusetts.
Things like this.
There are a lot of ways to continue fighting that fight, and they're all real and they're all important.
I think that that's where this really, really stands out, is to not be so lost or despondent in the, we lost the big election, we lost some of the big things, that we just sort of give in to despair and stop all of those ways in and all those mechanisms that can have real effects that we just sort of give in to despair and stop all of those ways in and all those Thank you.
Thank you.
I agree.
All right.
We're almost out of time.
I want to give you some reasons for hope that we've talked about in the past, but our I think upon us as we think about what will happen in the new year.
So when it comes to our next Congress, here's what we've got going on.
We have U.S. Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester will be in the Senate and the first black person from Delaware to represent...
Oh my God, I'm too worked up.
Here we go.
I'm going to get it right.
U.S. Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester will be The first woman and the first black person to represent Delaware in the Senate.
That's a good thing.
Angela, also Brooks, Maryland, state's first black senator.
We will have two black women in the Senate.
Two out of 100 senators will be black women.
North Dakota, Julie Fedorchak, will be in the House in the state's at-large district.
We've already talked about Sarah McBride, first openly transgender person elected to the House of Representatives, and there's already been so much to happen with Representative McBride's coming to DC. Julie Johnson will be the first out LGBTQ person to win a federal election in Texas.
Emily Randall will be the first out LGBTQ person elected to Congress from Washington State.
Suha Subramanyam will be the first Indian American elected to Congress from Virginia.
Republican Bernie Moreno will be the first Latino senator from Ohio.
Not a fan of Bernie Moreno.
I think that's great.
I think it's good to have that diversity.
But Bernie Moreno, we're not endorsing you.
So don't call me.
Someone I am fond of is that U.S. Representative Andy Kim will be the senator from New Jersey.
Andy Kim was on his hands and knees cleaning the Capitol after the rioters left and will be the first Korean American to be elected to the U.S. Senate.
First Asian American from New Jersey to be elected to that role.
Josh Stein, first elected Jewish governor of North Carolina, and North Carolina is an important state, and there's a lot happening there.
I could go on.
Dan, you just talked about the big elections.
There are ways that the country's diversity and the country's populace is being represented across the country.
It's easy to lose sight of that.
There's a lot of things to fight.
There's a lot of things to be worried about, but give us one more reason for hope here and we'll have a more thing I want to talk about and then we'll go from there.
Yeah, so this is maybe less of a reason for hope than maybe an affirmation of something I've been saying since the election.
But I feel like as we sort of come into this and we come into the holiday season, which I know for a lot of folks is a very mixed bag at best about what that means.
But I think it's important to keep it in front of us of just reaching for joy, remembering to take the time to find those things.
And I think those people around us that bring real joy, that give us meaning.
I mean, you talk about community, you talk about people who are meaningful to us and a social net and all that sort of stuff.
I think that's real.
And I think that we just have to be conscious and intentional in reaching for that and constructing that and leaning into that, because I think that's what keeps us hopeful as we move through these times.
So I think that's maybe my, I don't know, year end reflection or something, if I could offer one again, as we kind of come into this time.
It's just, I think I've said before, but I really believe it more and more each day at That's a practice we have to actively cultivate.
It's not something that just happens.
We can't depend on the circumstances around us to make that happen.
I think it's a practice we have to develop it just like we would our workout routine or anything else.
And so that's my, I don't know, as I say, not a reason for hope, but I think maybe a mechanism of hope that we need to just continue to cultivate as we move forward.
I recently watched the Station Eleven series.
Station Eleven's a book by Emily St. John Mandel, who has written a bunch of great books.
I've read three or four of her books in the last few months here, the recommendation of a friend.
And I read Station Eleven a while back and finally watched the TV series and finally watched the TV series.
I almost turned it off because I didn't think it was faithful to the book.
People told me I should watch it, so I stuck with it.
And there's a little adaptation of some of the stuff in the book in the series.
So this is not totally from the book, but it's certainly true to the spirit of the book.
But I wrote this down, and I think it's actually pretty hopeful going into next year.
I remember damage, then escape, then adrift in the strangest galaxy for a long time.
But it's safe now.
I've found it again, my home.
I have found you nine times before, maybe ten, and I'll find you again.
And I love that verse because it talks about trauma and damage and hurt.
And then escape.
And then adrift in the strangest galaxy for a long time.
Dan, we are in a strange galaxy right now.
We are in a strange, strange galaxy.
Every time I read the news, I'm just like, okay, cool.
RFK again, huh?
Talking about how we should lead, you know, lizard brains every day to get our B12 up.
Thanks a lot.
But it's safe now.
I found it again, my home.
And I think that's the hope you're talking about.
And what I like about this verse is it doesn't make home out to be a permanent place where you're never in flux or you're never vulnerable.
I feel like home is a place where you feel connection and joy.
If hope means desire, why else do we hope except for desire for connection and joy?
When we actually invest in joy, as you say, we're investing in the thing that we desire more of in the future and more of for more people in the future.
So joy is not selfish.
Joy is not acquiescence.
Joy is not escapism.
Joy is actually investment in the kind of life we want for ourselves and every person.
In the future.
And it says, I've found it again my home.
I have found you nine times before, maybe ten, and I'll find you again.
And I think that speaks to the fact that we all know what it's like to not feel like we're at home.
Like we're not safe.
Like we're not where we should be.
We're not in a place that feels like we can be ourselves.
But it's possible to find it again.
And we found it nine times and we'll find it a tenth.
And that's just, man, that's just what we're going to be doing in 2025, you know?
There's going to be a strange galaxy, and it's going to feel unsafe in ways that are really hard and brutal.
But we're going to find home again, and that doesn't mean some Pax Americana mythical, you know, American prosperity BS. It means we're going to find places of connection and safety and joy, and we're going to keep fighting for those.
And when people try to take them away, we're going to find them again.
And that, I think, is something to really hold on to.
Alright, Dan.
I'm not going to tell you what I got you for Christmas, but it has a lot of pockets.
And...
Yeah.
I'd like you to invent a line of embargo pants, not cargo pants, just as a way of resistance.
You know what I'm saying?
You know what I mean?
Just think about that idea, if you can.
And I'm going to call my brother, see if we can't get an acapella group going called Sentient Wind Sacks.
All right, y'all.
Last roundup of the year.
We love all of you.
If you're a subscriber, thank you so much.
Couldn't do it without you.
If you just are listening, we appreciate you so, so much.
We did about 3 million downloads this year, Dan, which is something that I'll always just be so happy and thankful for.
I'm thankful for everything that's happened this year and for all the people that helped us make it happen.
We're going to be here 2025, and we're going to fight like hell, and we hope you will too.
We're also going to laugh and try to, in some ways, enjoy being We're good to go.
Just to echo what you're saying, we're here and we're still going to be here.
I'm telling you what, right now, I'm feeling like on Christmas Day, I'm going to get a little weird.
I don't know how many Coke Zeros it's going to be, but it's going to be maybe two, maybe three.
I don't know what's going to happen.
What are you going to drink on Christmas Day?
Probably not Coke Zero.
I'll leave it at that.
Actually, I hope.
I have hope of a good scotch as a Christmas gift, so hopefully I'll be sipping a little bit of that.
