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Brad and Dan discuss a range of pressing issues under the Trump administration, focusing on the controversial 'Golden Visa' proposal. Donald Trump's plan would allow wealthy foreigners to purchase U.S. citizenship for $5 million, raising questions about who is deemed valuable in America. They talk about the broader implications of this policy, including its exclusionary stance towards asylum seekers, the elderly, and those on Medicaid. They also tackle Elon Musk's unprecedented influence over the executive branch, particularly through mass firings and the contracting of federal communications systems. The episode examines plans for mass deportation, including proposals involving military contractors and private mercenaries. Additionally, the hosts scrutinize the moral and ethical values underpinning these policies, comparing them to historical practices in Russia under Vladimir Putin.
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- Russian oligarch be eligible for a gold car? - Yeah, possibly.
Hey, I know some Russian oligarchs that are very nice people.
It's possible.
They're not quite as wealthy as they used to be.
They're not as wealthy as they used to be.
I think they can afford $5 million.
No, a lot of people are going to want to be in this country.
And they'll be able to work and provide jobs and build companies and pay taxes.
And I was going to announce it sometime next week, and I figured, why not?
We have a lot of cameras blazing right now.
We might as well do it now.
That is Donald Trump talking about Russian oligarchs and the possibility of them receiving a golden visa.
Paying $5 million for citizenship in the United States.
Today we talk about how the Golden Visa wraps into a comprehensive view put forth by the Trump administration regarding who is valuable and who is not.
The ways that if you're rich or beautiful, then you are somebody who has value in the United States.
And if you are not, if you're an asylum seeker, somebody fleeing violence, if you're an elderly person in a rural small town, if you're somebody who doesn't have millions of dollars, then you might be expendable.
All of this in the context of Elon Musk's running the first cabinet meeting of the Trump administration and reports about camps, mercenaries and private planes as the apparatus for mass deportation in the near future.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is Straight White American Jesus. and this is Straight White American Jesus.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi, here today with my distinguished co-host.
Distinguished, yes.
I am Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
A t-shirt with a place on it, Brad.
I just want to throw that out there.
What's the place?
I can't see it.
What's the place?
It's Colorado.
Okay, okay.
But the connection, right?
The state I grew up in, the state where my brother lives, right?
There's an organic connection, which I think is important.
Look, I remember when I lived in upstate New York, I missed California desperately, and I definitely wore some hat or something at some point that said California on it.
That makes sense to me.
Yeah.
That makes total sense to me.
You grew up in Colorado.
You have roots there.
You have a lot of nostalgia for Colorado.
I get it.
All right, people, if you don't want to hear about dodgeball and Dan's exploits, fast forward for like one minute.
So just hit the button on your podcast player that can allow you to fast forward.
For 30 seconds and hit it twice.
All right, Dan.
Volleyball, last night, how did it go?
Are you sore?
Did you pull any muscles?
So I haven't pulled a muscle yet, so that's good.
I've been exercising for the last few months, and I think that helps.
I'm always sore, because I'm by far the oldest person there or whatever.
But I think last week I said I'd firmly, I think, moved up into the mediocre category.
And this week I stepped back down into the poor category.
So we'll see.
We'll see how it goes.
But I didn't get stuck in the mud.
And I got stuck in the mud in the parking lot a couple weeks ago.
I feel less stupid because now they have that whole section of the parking lot blocked off and there are ruts everywhere, so I know that I was not the only person who got stuck in the mud.
We got 15 seconds.
There are people in the Discord worried that dodgeball you're playing is just a rerun of the bully-inspired, aggressive schoolyard dodgeball where people who don't really want to play get hit in the face.
Is that what's happening?
Just clear it up for everybody.
Ten seconds.
I did get hit in the face last night.
I can say that.
But no, it's actually really cool.
The people are all really cool.
There are people...
No, like, I full-on ate a dodgeball, like, in the face.
I'd like...
Yeah, yeah.
But nobody's bullying anybody.
Actually, everybody's been really, like, friendly and inviting.
There was another new person last night, and everybody's, like, cool and kind of explaining the rules and stuff.
I didn't like, you know.
I'm the same as most people.
It is like this...
I don't know, middle school flashback when you first show up and you don't know anybody.
You're just walking up to a bunch of strangers like, hey, can I play?
And like, you know, they've actually all been really inviting and it's cool and everybody's very loose.
And no, it's been very good.
And it's also not those rubber inflatable balls, which makes life distinctly friendlier than the dodgeballs that we got hit with on the playgrounds.
I feel like someday we're going to get like 5,000 words in the Atlantic that are like, how local dodgeball leagues have led to just a run on polyamorous relationships in rural communities.
I don't know.
I just feel like we're going to get like...
Like, all of these throuples explaining how they all met at Dodgeball and just like, yeah, it was nice.
Everyone was cool and we just, you know, it was like actual, like, not on the Bumble and, you know, I don't know.
The weird cultural, like, there's some weird cultural connection that you're like, oh, Dodgeball, who knew?
And then I, by then, will be old enough that I'll be a former Dodgeball community member and I can start a podcast about it as a former insider and reflect on it and we'll just keep going that direction.
It'll be awesome.
Ex-do.
You've listened to Exvangelical, now it's Exdo, Exdodgeball.
All right, we're done.
It's over now.
Okay, here we go.
Today, we're going to talk about Elon Musk holding his first cabinet meeting with his sidekick, Donald Trump.
We'll then jump into Trump's declaration yesterday that he's going to have a $5 million gold visa and what that means for the country.
We'll tie that all in together with...
Some of the proposals we're hearing about in terms of mass deportation and things that are already underway in terms of the Trump administration building camps outside of the United States in various locales and what that means in the near future.
So, Dan, a couple days ago, Elon Musk held forth with the cabinet meeting.
I have some thoughts on this, but take us through the summary, the dynamics, and then we'll...
We'll try to make sense of what it means.
Yeah, so I want to start with a little bit of background to this that people will probably be aware of.
That earlier this week, Musk, through Doge, through whatever mechanisms, sent a mass email to basically all federal workers, and it's a lot of people, all the workers of all these different agencies, saying that they had to respond with a bullet-pointed email highlighting five things they'd done in their jobs over the prior week.
And it was this request, it was sort of like, prove to us that you're working, list five things that you've done.
And it also stated that failure to do so, I think, would be interpreted as a resignation.
And if people have paid attention, like when Musk took over X, what was then Twitter, really similar kinds of things to that.
You've talked about, you know, the Silicon Valley kind of model that's being used as Musk comes in here.
It created mass confusion, provoked backlash, even among some Trump administration officials, a lot of them.
So who are those officials?
They're going to be cabinet secretaries.
So that's going to be relevant.
The heads of some of these agencies advised people in their agencies that providing the information was voluntary, that they weren't required to do this.
On Monday, the Office of Personnel Management, so that's like the federal human resources, HR office, told workers that they could ignore the email.
Then on Tuesday, Musk offered, quote, another chance to respond and kind of restated the threat.
So on one hand, that's Musk reasserting his authority.
I think it's also a sign, though, that that...
The first email appeared to be pretty toothless, because as far as I know, there have not been mass firings for failures to do that.
The backlash was so intense that 21 people resigned from Doge in protest.
So even Musk's own people in that agency resigned in protest.
So why is all that relevant?
Because the rest of the week has seen an effort by Trump and Musk to kind of reassert Musk's authority.
And that brings us to Musk attending and really dominating Trump's first cabinet meeting.
And we already had an Oval Office address where the president kind of sat at the desk and turned it over to Musk.
And Musk, like, ran the thing.
And it was sort of like that 2.0.
A couple of things on this.
So this is a cabinet meeting because everybody knows the heads of the different agencies and sort of aspects of the executive branch.
Who are appointed by the president and all that are there.
And one of my thoughts, I mean, I didn't research this.
I don't know when first cabinet meetings happen, but I'm like, oh, this is the first cabinet meeting.
Trump's been president for a little while now, and this is the first time, their first cabinet meeting, that they've actually gotten those heads together and so forth.
And what does he do?
He brings in Musk, which is telling in its own, he's not officially a presidential advisor.
He's not a cabinet member.
He's not appointed to anything.
They've gone at pains to say that he's this weird kind of like special employee of the government and all this kind of stuff.
So despite all that, Trump essentially hands the meeting over to him.
As in the Oval Office, Trump sits at the table basically looking like tired and kind of buffoonish while Musk stands and sort of harangues everybody there and lectures them and says he's really nasty and dismissive about federal workers and things like that.
He defended, that is, Musk defended his email.
He spent his time, like I say, mocking federal workers.
He described the email as, quote, a pulse check and said that anyone with, quote, a heartbeat and neurons could complete it.
So, like, basically anybody who didn't is a moron.
They don't deserve to be there or whatever.
He also said, he gets into conspiratorial stuff, he said there were, quote, fictional individuals collecting paychecks.
End quote.
From the federal government that this is part of the fraud and so forth and that that's part of what this was aimed at.
No evidence, of course, provided for that.
He also stood and took press questions during the meeting.
And meanwhile, the press secretaries are just, or sorry, not press secretaries, the cabinet secretaries, they're just sitting there.
Them and Trump just sitting while Musk kind of does his Musk thing.
And then finally, injecting further confusion into the whole issue, Trump said that workers who didn't respond to the email, quote, are on the bubble.
End quote for firing.
So nobody knows exactly what that means.
They're not fired.
They're not safe, but they're on the bubble for firing.
So nobody knows exactly what that means.
Some takeaways here, and then I'll throw it over to you for your thoughts.
Number one, Musk is clearly the priority for Trump and Musk and what Musk is doing.
And we were talking before the show.
I don't know who's in the driver's seat.
If it's Musk driving Trump, Trump driving Musk.
If they're just kind of in lockstep and have some weird shared vision, whatever.
But that's clearly the priority.
Not the cabinet, not actual governance, but this is the priority.
And I think tied in with that is this kind of shock and awe effort that the Trump administration has had.
The priority has been the doge stuff and slashing federal jobs.
It's been executive orders.
It hasn't been governance.
It hasn't been, you know...
I think that's a thing to pay attention to, because that's going to last for a while, and that gives the kind of sugar high to MAGA Nation.
But I'm curious as we move further forward through this of how sustainable that is, because it's not going to be a two-year strategy until the midterms.
I think it also shows signs, and CNN had an article about this, that the Musk and Trump show could develop into a drag on the GOP. There are signs of this.
The fact that there were.
Cabinet secretaries who are pushing back on this directive, the fact that he has to come to the cabinet meeting and make this kind of show of force, I think, is significant.
We've talked about polling that shows that lots of Americans are not—this isn't popular with them.
They don't like Musk.
Even some Republican legislators are beginning to worry because, you know, people in their districts are getting cut in their jobs.
And so we'll see how that plays out.
But a lot of things, we could talk about the optics of it.
We could talk about the symbolism of it.
We could talk about a number of different things.
But those are some of the broad brushstrokes, some quick takeaways.
And I'll throw it over to you for what stood out to you about another weird, I guess it would be weird if it wasn't the Trump administration, kind of event.
Yeah, I think it is clear to me that Elon Musk is the one running the show.
I think if we just look at the evidence in terms of what's happening with The federal government as a whole, the Oval Office press conference, the cabinet meeting, and the ways that he has become the public face of the Trump administration and all of its activity, whether it is firing federal workers, whether it is supposedly cutting spending, which is, there's so many studies out, we're not going to really go through them today.
There are so many reports out that show that the supposed...
Savings is the wrong word.
I hate myself for even using that word.
The supposed spending cuts to federal spending are actually wildly inflated, and they haven't even cut that much when it comes to the federal budget and federal spending.
Musk is, to me, the one in charge.
I think what he's doing is destroying the administrative branches of the government, bureaucracies and offices and bureaus that will really show up in terms of affecting people's lives in the coming months if they haven't felt him yet.
I think that him showing up at the cabinet meeting was not a matter of saving face because they're unpopular.
I think it was because this is a dominance move.
We had the first cabinet meeting and it was run by Elon Musk.
Dan, if you and I started a company and...
The first meeting, everyone who thought we were in charge and we brought in someone who doesn't have an official role in the company and was like, so-and-so is going to run the meeting.
Everybody would leave that meeting thinking, okay, so I guess Jennifer or Jeanette or Jeff is in charge, not Dan and Brad.
That's exactly what happened here.
In terms of just zooming out and the kind of importance here, I think there's a couple of things that we need to talk about.
One is something that happened 25 years ago.
And this is something that comes up in Jonathan Chait's article at The Atlantic this week, The Real Goal of the Trump Economy.
A quarter century ago, Vladimir Putin gathered 21 of Russia's top oligarchs in the Kremlin to let them know that he, not they, held power in Russia.
The young Russian president informed them that they could keep the wealth they'd amassed if they complied with his political goals.
Partnership with Putin held out the prospect of safety and even greater riches.
We've received confirmation attendee named Mikhail Khodorovsky said that the development of Russian business is one of the state's top priorities.
If you look at what happened in this cabinet meeting, you have the richest man in the world who clearly is the one running the executive branch for all intents and purposes.
Telling a room full of billionaires.
You comply with us.
You go with us.
You agree to do what we're doing, including the weird email, Dan, that you talked about that got sent to federal workers.
You'll be fine.
Who are the billionaires in that room?
Just to remind you, we're talking about Linda McMahon.
We're talking about Doug Burgum.
We're talking about Scott Besson.
We're talking about Howard Letnick.
We're talking about Kelly Loeffler.
We're talking about Jared Isaacman.
We're talking about a room full of oligarchs and others like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Marco Rubio, who have serious business interests and so on.
You're talking about Trump basically saying, as long as you get on with what Elon's up to and what I'm up to, you're going to be fine.
So yeah, he sent out a weird email.
You're going to get a lot of flack for it.
You're going to get a lot of pushback.
You're going to hear about it.
But what did Trump say if you go back and watch the video?
Is anyone upset with Elon?
I didn't think so.
And they're all just like smiling awkwardly.
I mean, you saw that, Dan?
I mean, it's one of these weird moments of like, does anybody want to like say that they're upset with Elon?
Do you?
Because, you know, go ahead if you want.
And Dan, you have to see this as what happened in Russia 25 years ago.
Is Vladimir Putin, after the fall of communism, basically said to the top 1% of Russians who had so much of the country's wealth, as long as you align with the state, you're going to not only be fine, you're going to do better than ever.
And that includes, in this case, Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos taking over the opinion section of the Washington Post.
It includes leaders of Google, leaders of Apple, leaders of industry everywhere.
If you get on board with us, the state, You will be fine.
There's this moment about a year ago, Dan, where Zuckerberg has dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and Trump had been claiming that Zuckerberg had rallied against him in the 2020 election, that he allowed moderation on Facebook and basically allowed the election to be stolen from him.
Here's a quote that Trump gave at some point during that process.
We are watching Zuckerberg closely, and if he does anything, quote, illegal, During the second term, he will spend the rest of his life in prison.
That's what's being presented, just like Putin 25 years ago.
If you get on board with Musk as a cabinet secretary, as a billionaire, as a billionaire cabinet secretary, you will do just fine, and you might even do better.
If not, you might go to jail, you might lose your business, you might lose your status, and so on.
Right.
Here's just something I'll shut up after this and throw it back to you.
But Jonathan Chait has a great, great paragraph here.
Trump's greatest advantage in this regard is that he has never professed adherence to any standard of fairness.
When he discusses his plans to regulate businesses or reward them with tax breaks, he does so in nakedly transactional terms.
The business community understands that every decision the federal government makes, the state, the regime, Whether it involves antitrust enforcement or taxation or criminal justice will be meted out on the basis of Trump's political and personal whims.
Trump does not even pretend otherwise because the pretense would undermine his power.
Dan, he is trying to be Putin.
He is trying to extract as much wealth from the country as he can to destroy any barriers, whether those are solicitors general, whether those are...
Lawyers in the top positions at the military, whether it's people who are part of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who got fired, whether it is anyone who works for the federal government that might stand in his way, and he is promising the 1%, as long as you're good with me, you're safe and you might do better.
But you better align with the state, you better bend the knee, you better be okay with Elon and what he's doing, or else.
This ties right into the next thing we're going to talk about, but, you know, other thoughts on this cabinet meeting and what it means with Elon and all that.
So I think all that's right.
I do think that there is a bit of a sense still that, you know, had this all gone more smoothly, I don't know if Musk has to be there, but you're right.
I mean, he's there.
He's asserting authority.
And when Trump says, anybody got a problem?
Like, I'm letting you out.
I'm just asking.
Here's your chance to say it.
And of course, nobody's going to say anything.
But I want to circle back around to, like, the shock and awe nature of this, because I think that that's intentional.
And this is where I think, at some point in the shadowy past, and who knows if we'll ever know where that is, whenever Trump and Musk started talking about this, and whoever, you know, come up with the idea of Doge and whatever, it was this notion, like, what can we do?
Remember, you got the whole fantasy of the unified executive.
You've got the, we're going to come in and we're just going to do stuff.
We're just going to break things, you know, and...
Whether that's Musk coming along and introducing the idea of, you know what we can do with all these federal agencies, or it's Trump saying, we need to get rid of all the big federal whatever, and Musk is there, whatever.
They're kindred spirits in this, and Musk has the energy to do it.
And he's exactly the kind of guy that Trump wants to be, and has the inferiority complex to, and all of that.
So they come together and they do this.
And I think for me, what stands out early on here is that shock and awe thing.
We're going to focus on empowering this really non-governmental agency to destroy the executive branch and its functioning.
And we're going to do executive orders.
We're going to do things that don't require a legislature.
We're going to do things and try to move really fast so maybe we can bypass the courts or the courts are playing catch-up or the work is already done.
I don't know that this is accurate, but I had somebody tell me recently that these fired federal workers, that their personnel files are being deleted.
And so that even when they have to rehire them, or it turns out that they were people watching about nuclear safety or something, they don't have personnel files anymore.
They have to reconstruct all of that.
So even when you go to fix it, the damage is already done.
It's the kind of thing of like, well, you know, the court said that, but we've already done 85% of what we're going to do.
What I find interesting about all of that...
These are the same agencies that when the time comes, and I think it will come, when Trump's going to have to actually do presidential stuff, the numbers are going to catch up on job cuts.
The numbers are going to catch up on inflation.
And he's not going to have agencies to do anything with.
The same with those cabinet secretaries.
The reason they're pushing back is I don't care what they say to Congress about supporting Trump.
They don't want to have agencies that are like empty shells with no real power, right?
I think that there is a collision coming within the Trump administration between this shock and awe model, which is intended to do as much as you can, as fast as you can, to hit what I think they view as the low-hanging fruit, where we'll just make executive orders, we'll do these things that don't require any approval and so forth.
But at some point, a year in, 15 months in, 18 months in, when they have to actually do stuff, they're not going to have an apparatus to do that.
And I'm curious.
To see over time how that plays out and how it ties into what I think you're correctly identifying as this kind of oligarch strategy and so forth.
And I'm not the only one to note this.
There are lots of people that are saying that there doesn't seem to be, even in MAGA 2.0, a really coherent model beyond the first 100 days or the first six months or whatever it is.
So I think that's worth paying attention to as we watch these dynamics between...
The cabinet and the formal administrative systems of the executive branch.
And a government that at some point is going to have to actually govern and be more than one or two people.
Well, I want to stay on this, and I think it leads into what we're going to talk about here next with the golden visa.
So let's take a break.
And I got more comments in response to what you just said.
And the dynamic between Trump losing popularity, which is happening, and what's ahead for the country and what that means.
We'll be right back.
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Okay, Dan, I think a lot of people have probably heard about this already, but it's worth going through the kind of basic outlines and trying to figure out what this means.
So you've heard of a green card.
What is a golden visa?
I have to admit, the first thing I think of is Willy Wonka, but I wish it was that funny.
I know.
I know.
Yeah, so Trump, this week, basically what he said, and this is where it's going to tie into immigration, basically told everybody, like, yeah, the U.S. likes immigrants as long as they're rich, right?
As long as they're rich, powerful people, they're welcome to come in.
So he and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced a plan to offer a golden visa, a gold card that would give foreigners legal residency for $5 million.
Basically, you just get to pay.
For legal residency in the U.S. And it would replace an existing and very controversial visa program for investors.
And so here's something that Trump said.
And to me, there's so much to say about this.
He said, it's going to be giving you a green card privilege plus.
It's going to be a route to citizenship and wealthy people will be coming into our country.
Generally speaking, it will be people with money and people that create jobs.
And there are so many elements about this that I think stand out.
One is this weird notion of a green card privilege plus.
It sounds like, you know, if you have a Visa card, but then you get the platinum one, you get to go to like the airport lounge or something like that, as if there's this kind of consumer model there.
He talks about a route to citizenship, something that the GOP has traditionally opposed, routes to citizenship.
And when he said, generally speaking, it'll be people with money and people that create jobs, that simple assumption.
That everybody who's wealthy creates jobs, that they're all beneficial for the country, and so forth.
So this was the notion.
You'll essentially be able to pay $5 million, buy a green card, buy citizenship.
And then he also said, just to circle back around, he was asked about Russian oligarchs, Brad.
What about them?
And he said that they would possibly be able to apply.
And he said, and I kid listeners not, right?
He said, I know some Russian oligarchs that are very nice people.
And for those of us who remember the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and we remember Trump saying that there were, you know, very fine people on both sides, here he circles back around.
He says the quiet part out loud.
I've got a lot of takeaways on this, but that's the basic, you know, again, the broad contours of this.
People could pay $5 million, buy a green card, path to citizenship, and Trump sort of lets go that, like, the model he has here is the Russian oligarch.
There's so many things I want to say here.
There are visas available where if you come to the United States and open a business, you meet certain requirements, investments, and employing people that there is a pathway to permanent residency.
The difference that we have between that visa and what Trump is proposing is that you're contributing to the economy.
You're contributing to basically the American workforce, the American...
Business sector, whatever it may be.
So you're doing something, right?
You're coming to do something, and that means that you get a chance at permanent residency, perhaps.
Okay.
There are other countries that do this.
There are places where there's the so-called golden visa, whether that's Portugal or Ireland or whatever.
And we can talk about what happens in those places and why those things are there.
But I think what strikes me...
About the Golden Visa idea is that we have a president who is saying to anybody in the world, if you are rich, as you just said, Dan, you are welcome here.
And you can pay to play.
And what Trump is banking on is that if you all want me to boil down Trump's plan, like in 10 seconds, it is destroy...
All of the federal government's infrastructure.
Create direct pathways for Trump to enrich himself.
And then do things like offer golden visas and other pay-to-play schemes such that whether it's the Trump meme coin, whether it is like people donating to his campaign, all of the revenue streams from the top 1%, it's like a mob boss.
He gets a little piece.
Of everybody's income.
You know, if you're in the mob and somebody brings in income, you've got to kick how much percentage upwards.
That is Trump's plan.
So if you're an oligarch, a Russian oligarch, and you want your golden visa approved, Dan, yeah, you pay the official $5 million, but there might be some other money that is funneled other places that eventually reach the boss and so on and so forth.
That's the plan.
Now, the thing that I think...
What is worth keeping in mind as we envision the golden visa idea is twofold.
One, other people have pointed this out.
This is a scheme rife for money laundering, right?
If you are a Russian oligarch and you want to hide money, people have been saying this for years.
There was a lot of activity around this on 2018. Coming to the United States.
To buy real estate, to buy condos, to buy units in Trump Tower, this is a great way to stash your dirty money.
So this is a pathway for that to happen, period.
Other people have pointed that out.
But the other thing is that, and we'll get to more of this in a minute, is that the administration with one hand is saying, if you're rich, you're welcome.
And it is saying to everyone else, You may not be welcome.
So that could be people who have sought asylum here, okay?
So I just want to point out something that we really haven't talked about on this show all that much, and that is Trump is exporting people to a Panama hotel.
I mean, this came out February 18th.
It's by a group of writers at the New York Times, and it discusses how many, many people arrived at the United States seeking asylum.
They were here trying to find a political home because of violence or famine or other things in their home countries.
When they asked for asylum, they were stripped of their passports, their cell phones, locked in a hotel, barred from seeing lawyers and told they would soon be sent to a makeshift camp near the Panamanian jungle.
So basically, the Trump administration has worked with the Panamanian government to set up what is called a hotel.
It sounds like a camp where those seeking asylum are being held.
One person tried to commit suicide there.
And this is kind of a place where if you are seeking asylum in the United States and you don't have $5 million, you will be exported to the Panamanian jungle to a holding facility.
And who knows what happens to you from there?
I want to point out another aspect of what happened this week, and that is the Republican House, controlled house, passed their budget, which included all the overtures of cutting Medicaid.
There are plans, there are ways in there that Medicaid can be reduced significantly, as well as many other things.
Medicaid, Dan, is a program that helps those in health situations that are dire.
It helps them find assistance.
It is healthcare for people who are the most vulnerable in our country.
It is healthcare for those who are in need of help and assistance.
There's also threats in there about Medicare and the idea that Medicare is for people who don't deserve it.
I'm going to read something from someone called the Bronze Age Pervert, and some of you don't know who that is, and you're like, what did Brad just say?
Some of you do know who that is, and you know that the Bronze Age Pervert is a pen name for an enormously popular right-wing manosphere.
Paleo-masculine person who's kind of in line with Andrew Tate, but more intellectually resonant with Curtis Yarvin or some of the others in the, like, manosphere we've talked about so often on this show.
Bronze Age Perfect writes the other day, There are entire towns in America where the whole economy is old people on Medicare, payments, and a few service shops, eateries supported by that income.
I love what Doge is doing because it will starve the left NGO funding and basically get the people who are on Medicare living in these small towns all over America out of our lives because they won't be able to survive.
Somebody responds to this.
It's a hard truth to deal with, but there are many people alive who would not otherwise be without subsidy.
It's dark to save, but we have a nation to save, and I'm prepared to watch the elderly starve to save our youth.
When I think of the Golden Visa, I think of a president who is saying, if you are rich, you're welcome.
If you are Melania and you're young and beautiful, you're welcome.
You can come here as an immigrant.
If you are not, if you're seeking asylum because there is violence in your home country, there is no food in your home country.
If you're an unaccompanied minor who has come across the border.
If you are an elderly person in small-town America, if you are on Medicaid because you have a dire medical situation or you need ongoing help, sorry, we don't want you.
You're a suck on our system.
You're a parasite.
You're part of the parasite class.
That's what Elon Musk says.
The golden visa to me, Dan, is so, so misguided.
Because it illuminates the cruelty.
We don't want the elderly, the vulnerable, or the sick.
Screw you, Statue of Liberty.
We want to be Putin's Russia, where only the oligarchs and those they deem worthy can survive.
So just a couple more thoughts to pick up on some of the themes that you're highlighting here.
First is, as you mentioned, what I call that controversial visa program for investors, and you highlighted some aspects of what that was.
Notice the shift here, right?
The GOP has, since at least Reagan and Reaganomics, always had this notion that people who create businesses and build the economy and so forth should have special benefits and that that's what really drives things.
They provide jobs and so on and so forth.
Fine.
GOP orthodoxy.
But then note the shift here with what Trump said is, generally speaking, people with money and people that create jobs, it's just the easy assertion that if one has money, one is somehow helping the economy.
The Russian oligarchs are not creating lots of Russian jobs.
They're not driving the Russian economy.
They're hoarding their money and their wealth for their own benefit.
It's the same as the American oligarchs.
And for people who think it isn't, all you have to do is look at how much of their income actually goes back into the businesses and things like that and whatever.
Billionaires are in it to make money.
That's what they're there for.
They are not there to create jobs or to drive economic growth unless it makes money.
And the two don't always happen.
So I think it's important to note that aspect, right?
That this is just wealth.
With the assumption that somehow it has a positive social benefit, and this is already a departure from this GOP orthodoxy.
But the other one that I think you're getting at when you start looking at the budget, you start looking at the stuff about Medicaid, you start looking at the stuff about Medicare, is the assumption, and I think that this may sound weird to people, is that the rich are moral.
They are moral because they are rich.
They are good people because they are rich.
And for people who say, well, that sounds ridiculous.
Number one, there is social science data that shows huge numbers of Americans believe that if people are poor, it's because they are immoral.
They're bad people.
They're lazy.
They don't work hard.
You know, whatever.
So if you are rich, by definition, you must be a moral person.
But you've talked about this for years.
Other people on the show have talked about this for years.
You get the prosperity gospel strand of Christian nationalism that says, if you are rich, you are blessed by God.
You get a longer history of the linkages of Christianity, especially Protestantism and capitalism and all that sort of stuff, and the notion that if you are rich, number one, you're a productive person.
I would challenge that.
I think a lot of rich people don't actually do very much to get rich.
That you work hard, you're thrifty, you're whatever, you are embodying what good, Christian, hardworking Protestants are supposed to be, and God has blessed you for it.
There's a deep theological and moral dimension to this as well that goes unquestioned, and I think this is part of the amorality, the non-morality of Trump, who just always assumes that if people are powerful and wealthy, they are good.
And that is why every time a powerful man is accused of sexual assault, it's dismissed of, well, he's a very good person, how could he be?
Or the oligarchs, a lot of them are really good people.
It's because of an assumption that wealth equals morality.
And again, that can sound crazy to people because it's a ridiculous notion and people can be like, well, that can't possibly be the kind of connection.
But there are linkages here to be made with deep roots in Christianity.
With contemporary articulations of that in the prosperity gospel, with popular attitudes about wealth and poverty, with generations now of GOP orthodoxy that can metastasize into this view.
And so when people look at this and they say, well, what if really bad people are going to launder money or they're going to come in or they're going to get green cards?
They can't be bad people for Trump because they are rich.
It is that simple.
A town full of retirees and elderly people who have Medicare, they're not good.
They're lazy.
They're bad.
And if we need to just let them all die, well, that's what we can do because they don't have money.
They have no social value.
They have no worth.
They have no moral worth of their own.
And I think that that's a real and deep and distressing element of this that's going on.
I think it reflects real core beliefs and values on the right.
Perfect example this week is Andrew Tate and his brother are supposedly on their way to the United States if they're not here already.
Andrew Tate is, of course, the influencer, the former MMA fighter who is widely known as a kind of figurehead of toxic masculine culture, has been accused of sex trafficking in Romania.
And is one of those people that if you are the parent of a teenage boy, you hope for dear life that your son does not come across the videos and content of Andrew Tate because what he teaches about women and patriarchy and assault and sex is some of the most disgusting stuff out there.
Dan, he's on his way back to the United States, and he is rich.
He has money.
So he's the perfect example of what you just said.
I want to make one or two more points about this before we go to break.
One of them is about Elon Musk himself.
And so there is a chance, going back to things we've talked about over the last couple of weeks with issues with airplanes and flight safety, there's been more of those issues in the past couple of days, that Starlink could replace Verizon as the contractor with the FAA. It's a $2 billion contract.
And here's what Elon Musk said a couple days ago.
To be clear here, the Verizon communications system to air traffic control is breaking down very rapidly.
The FAA assessment is single-digit months to catastrophic failure, putting air traveler safety at serious risk.
Why am I bringing that up right now?
Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is giving himself government contracts like Putin would.
He's giving himself a government...
Like, this is the guy...
Who is firing people by doing keyword searches and seeing if the words diversity are in your job title and just firing you.
This is the guy who's making it such that you can't go camping this summer at a national park because there's no more rangers there.
And people can just go in and litter and destroy the national parks.
This is the guy who's sending emails to everyone who works for the federal government saying, tell me five things you did or you're fired.
I mean, Dan, I have talked to people who I know from D.C. and Northern Virginia.
I have talked to people who work in these areas.
This caused widespread panic.
If you got an email from the richest man in the world who said, tell me what you did last week or you're fired, what are you supposed to do?
How are you supposed to respond to that?
And yet he's like, actually, I'm going to need to give myself a billion-dollar contract to run the FAA and its system.
Because supposedly, and I don't have any evidence of this, the current one is breaking down.
And what a must supporter said is, this is a move that would bring faster, safer, and more reliable air traffic control services.
What it?
Like all the people you fired who are overseeing Ebola research and prevention and tried to hire back?
Like all the people you fired looking over the nuclear arsenal and tried to bring back?
Like all the people in all those places that you fired by way of like AI and mass emails and like, hey, we deleted, as you just said, Dan, their files, so we don't know who they were.
Hey, if you're one of those people, can you just like give us a call because we fired you on accident and deleted your entire file?
You're telling me that's the guy that's going to get us faster, safer, and more reliable air traffic control services?
You mean the guy who runs Tesla and whose cars are being banned all over Europe because the self-driving and automated features?
Are not up to par and standard for European countries?
You mean that guy?
Cool.
The rich just get richer.
The rich are moral.
The rich are good.
The rich we should revere and deify.
The rich we should praise.
And the rest of you, your grandmother who lives in Galesburg, Illinois, or Bend, Oregon, or Portland, Maine, your grandmother who...
Worked hard all their life and is now on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, whatever it may be.
Hardworking Americans who, no fault of their own, are on disability.
Whatever it is, they're expendable.
You don't matter.
You can go to hell because your life is expendable.
And you know this just starts to sound, Dan, like we're kind of okay preparing you for mass atrocities.
We're trying to convince you.
That when you see the mass deaths of the old, the vulnerable, the queer, the disabled, the asylum seeker, they deserve it.
We're trying to prepare you for that.
That is what the regime's trying to do.
That's what I see, at least.
Final thoughts here, then we can take a break and talk about immigration and deportation.
No, I think it's all accurate.
I just, as you say...
Preparing for the atrocities in that turn.
And I think it also shows how...
I don't know how to articulate this exactly.
How focused this is on immediacy.
I mean, you've got people talking about letting the old die.
And you're like, dude, someday you're going to be old.
Like, you know, it's not a sustainable model.
And I think that that's the key.
I think that's part of it.
There's no aim at sustaining anything here.
It is, as you're saying, to funnel money.
Musk is going to get richer.
Regardless of what happens, regardless of what happens with Doge or whatever, he will have made a lot of money off of it.
Trump will have made a lot of money off of it.
I don't think either one of them care about five years from now, ten years from now, other than, did I make more money?
Did I help create a space where wealthy people who I revere, who I think are good because they are wealthy, made more money, and everything else can just literally go to hell.
And I think that that's...
A key part of the strategy.
I think for them, it's a feature, not a bug.
If we wanted to use that metaphor, I think it's really key to keep that in front of us as we watch how this is unfolding.
Well, I want to bring up something along those lines.
Think about how many Russians, Dan, have died in the invasion of Ukraine.
And think about Putin directing that invasion and trying to convince...
The country, that those deaths were necessary.
But I'm looking at a piece from six days ago at BBC News that says this, over 95,000 people fighting for Russia's military have now died as the war in Ukraine enters a fourth year.
And you can say, well, Putin, doesn't he care about those young Russian men losing their lives?
And I don't know that he does because I don't think he looks at them as having much value.
I use that example because that's what I'm saying.
When you start to hear about people not having access to medical care because the NIH is not being funded and the university hospitals are shutting down, when people have their Social Security cut and folks who are retired have to move in with their kids, when people on Medicaid have nowhere to go and are dying in the richest country on Earth at rates higher than they are now.
Think about the fact that Putin's willing to send in hundreds of thousands of Russians to die in an effort to recapture Ukraine unprovoked.
And the Trump administration and Elon Musk are going to have the same feeling about people they don't think matter.
And, you know, there's one more quote from Jonathan Chait's article at The Atlantic this week I want to read.
Trump has never believed in the invisible hand, in leaving people alone to pursue self-interest in a free market, in letting market forces allocate capital and arbitrate any given company success or failure.
Nor does he even believe in traditional mercantilist protection.
He believes, like Putin, in political control of the economy's commanding heights.
Success for those executives and companies who please him, failure for those who don't.
Dan, I've said it for months.
They don't want to govern.
It's that they're responsible for the well-being of Americans, for the flourishing of Americans, for the safety of Americans, for the health of Americans, for the success of Americans.
They just want to rule.
There's a difference.
And that's to me where we're at.
Let's take a break.
We'll come back and talk about immigration and deportation plans.
Okay, Dan, piece at Politico this week by Dasha Burns and Maya Ward.
I'll quote, a group of prominent military contractors, including former Blackwater CEO Eric Prince, has pitched the Trump White House on a proposal to carry out mass deportations through a network of processing camps on military bases, a private fleet of 100 planes, and a, quote, small army of private citizens empowered to make arrests.
The blueprint laid out in a 26-page document Donald Trump's advisors received before the inauguration has an estimated price tag of $25 billion.
So there is, just to be clear, we don't have any indication from the Trump administration that they're going to pursue this proposal.
We don't have any indication that this is the way they will go.
What we do know is that mass deportation is on the agenda for the Trump administration.
We know...
All the economists have told us this.
Mass deportation would destroy the economy.
Dan, there is a report this week out of Atlanta that the United States GDP contracted last quarter.
Like, it did not grow, it did not expand, that it contracted because of what's going on with Trump and Doge and Elon Musk.
If you take 10 million people out of this economy and the work they do, that will continue.
And the country will be far off, at least for the 99%.
Nonetheless, there's this proposal to spend $25 billion on processing camps, a private fleet of 100 planes, and private citizens, mercenaries.
That's what that means.
Mercenaries.
Okay?
Now, it's led by Prince, another billionaire.
Eric Prince is the brother of Betsy DeVos, the leader of Blackwater, which is rebranded like four times.
Is another oligarch, shall we say, and who's been around for decades.
I bring this up, Dan, because this is kind of what we should probably expect here going forward.
We should expect there to be golden visas for the richest people in the world.
And for you, undocumented immigrant, asylum seeker.
Anybody who's immigrated to the country, you can expect there to be camps, mercenaries, black shirts, deportation planes, and forces that are going to take you to places like the Panamanian jungle, and who knows what will happen to you there, or to Guantanamo Bay.
We don't know what's going to happen, but what we do know is about five days ago, the Trump administration, we learned from Reuters and others, is directing immigration agents to track down hundreds of thousands of migrant children who entered the United States without their parents, expanding the president's mass deportation effort, according to an internal memo reviewed by Reuters.
ICE outlines an unprecedented push to target migrant children who crossed the border illegally as unaccompanied minors.
so let's just spell it out If your parents were killed in El Salvador, By the government or other extra government forces, whoever it may be.
If your parents were killed by cartels in Mexico and you as a 13-year-old make the trek across the border to the richest country in the world where you are just trying to get safe and find a home, you are not welcome and we will use the government's power and reach and money to track you down and send you somewhere else.
Now, we can talk about all of the debates about immigration, legal, not legal, policies, the ways that the Democrats have moved right for the last 30 years on immigration to try to appease the supposed moderates, whatever.
But you are not welcome here, 13-year-old child seeking safety from militias, cartels, or civil wars.
But if you've got $5 million as an oligarch...
And who cares how you made that money?
If you are Andrew Tate, and we know how you made that money, and we know what you've done in terms of abuse and other allegations made against you when it comes to sex trafficking, you are welcome here.
Come on in.
You can come into the city on a hill.
But if you are escaping violence, if you are escaping murder, if you're escaping famine, You have no place at this end, period.
I don't know what's going to happen.
I don't know if the Trump administration is going to accept Eric Prince's proposal, but I think we should expect something along these lines.
Thoughts on this, Dan?
I want to tie this together with the previous segment, actually.
You know, the question of value.
So Putin sends potentially hundreds of thousands of Russians to die.
Doesn't he care about these young Russian lives?
Don't we care about unaccompanied minors and so forth?
And the answer is no, because it ties into money again.
This comes back around into the golden visa.
I think from the Putin perspective, if those soldiers were worth something, they actually wouldn't be in the military.
If they were from families of the oligarchs and others, they wouldn't have to be in the military.
They would be valuable.
So the ones that are in the military are just expendable pieces.
If these migrants had value, In the Trump administration, they'd be able to pay the $5 million for a golden visa, and we wouldn't have to be talking about asylum seekers.
They could just get on a plane and fly here and write their big check and be welcomed in.
They don't have value if they can't do that.
It's the same thing with wealthy people who can pay for healthcare just out of pocket.
They're never going to have a problem.
So they don't need Medicare.
They don't need Medicaid.
They don't need those things.
And so they have value, and the people who don't, don't.
And I think it really is impossible to overstate.
How much this notion of which humans are valued, which humans have value within this right-wing ideology, and I think that's a piece that just cuts across everything we're talking about today for me, is this scale that people don't have value because they're people.
They have value if they have money.
And if they have money, they are people who matter, and if they don't, they aren't.
Period.
Full stop.
And we could draw the parallels with Russia or any number of other places, but we see it very much at work here with the Trump administration.
So that's just a theme that I see over and over and over as we talk about this today, is which people have value, which people are inherently valuable, and which ones are simply expendable and simply something to be used and destroyed.
All right, let's go to Reasons for Hope.
What is your reason for hope this week, Dan?
So mine was this economic blackout today as we're recording.
A guy named John Schwartz, who's a mindfulness and meditation facilitator, had this kind of thing that he started, I think, on Instagram, encouraging people to avoid spending at major retailers like Amazon and Walmart and places like that for 24 hours.
The idea being just to send a signal and so forth.
He said he had only modest hopes for this, but his video calling for the boycott was shared over 700,000 times on Instagram.
It was viewed by 8.5 million people.
A lot of celebrities pushed it and so forth.
What I think about this, we talk about all this today, I think it's largely symbolic.
It's not going to bring Amazon or Beza to his knees.
It's not going to bring Facebook into line.
It's not going to stop corporate greed.
But I think what it symbolizes is something hopeful.
And I think it does symbolize real.
Deep and widespread dissatisfaction among ordinary Americans about all the things that we're talking about around the sense that they don't matter, that they don't have a place, that the oligarchs don't accept them.
And so I found hope in that, not just the proposal, but the way that it kind of caught on with people and what I think that that could symbolize moving forward.
Some folks are talking about this in our Discord.
There is some signs that there are billionaires who are not going to get on board with the Elon Musk situation.
There's some signs that Jeff Bezos is trying to kind of covertly turn the tide.
There's stories coming out about IVF. There's stories coming out about ways that people feel betrayed by the Trump administration.
You are seeing more and more people wake up to this.
Egg prices are set to get even higher than they are now because of various shortages.
The question is, as people start to see their lives change because of everything we've talked about today in the previous months, will there be a chance for elections that matter?
Will there be a chance in the midterms or other places for things that matter?
And we'll have to see.
We will have to see.
But the public opinion is going to change.
I mean, you're going to see.
Incredibly bad numbers.
You're going to see GDP numbers that are terrible.
You're going to see job numbers that are terrible.
There's a lot of federal workers who voted for Trump that are like, why did you fire me?
This doesn't make any sense.
The world is changing around us.
And I know, Dan, you and I and a lot of people on Discord are kind of political junkies, and we've known this for months.
There's a lot of people who don't live that way who are starting to realize how much this country is changing.
The question is, What are we going to do about it?
And what can be done about it in the time ahead of us?
All right, y'all.
We'll leave it there.
I want to say thank you to all of our subscribers, all of you who've listened to One Nation Indivisible with Andrew Seidel, all of you who've made the jump to be financial contributors to what we do.
We're an independent network and show, and we are able to do what we do because of you.
So thank you for your help.
Thank you to all of you who listen.
And make this show something that we've done for over 800 episodes now.
Could not be more thankful to have a reason to talk to Dan Miller every week about his dodgeball game and everything else.
We'll be back next week.
I have an interview on the Idaho Blackshirts dragging a woman out of a town hall meeting.
We'll have It's in the Code and the Weekly Roundup.
And wait, there's more, Dan.
And wait, there's more.
On Thursday, we'll debut Spirit and Power with Leah Payne on charismatic Christianity in American public life.
Be talking about the prosperity gospel, something that's come up a lot today.
