Breaking News from Pod Save America - Elon Musk Turns On Trump In New Interview

Episode Date: May 28, 2025

Tommy Vietor and Jon Favreau discuss Elon Musk turning on Donald Trump in new interview. Photos courtesy of AP Photo Archive Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You talking to me? Kayak, got that right. One sweet, melty bite of a Hershey's bar, and suddenly I'm right back sitting on the front porch with my grandmother on a slow summer afternoon. She doesn't say much, just breaks the bar in half and hands me a piece. I open my mouth to say whatever a nine-year-old wants to say. And she replies with a low, listen. So we sat there, listening. That was the first time I learned that quiet can feel full.

Hershey's. It's your happy place. We got to breaking news this morning, John. Elon Musk, the now deposed king of the Doge bags, has turned on Donald Trump. Let's watch a clip. So, you know, I was like disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decrease it. And I reminds the work that the Doge team is doing. I actually thought that when this big, beautiful bill came along.

I mean, like, everything he's done on Doge gets wiped out in the first year. I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful. But I don't know if it could be both. My personal opinion. That's what she said, Elon. What Elon is mad about is that according to the Congressional Budget Office, neither. Neither.

The bill Republicans are moving through Congress would increase the federal deficit by $3.8 trillion over the next decade, trillion with a T. But that increase is not because of increased spending. is because guys like Elon are getting massive tax cut while the government simultaneously throws millions of people off of Medicaid and also cuts programs like SNAP. Yeah, I mean, Elon started at, first of all, Elon wanted Doge to cut $2 trillion, then he wanted to cut $1 trillion,

and ended up, he's saying it cut $175 billion, other reporters have dug into it and don't think it's that much, but whatever, let's give him 175. I'm going to dig into it in a minute. Okay, great, yeah, right, all right, all right. it could end up costing more than, it could have costing money, partly because, speaking of tax cuts, they gutted the IRS, and so a lot of rich tax cheats can continue cheating on their taxes

because there's no more enforcement on that. But what Doge did do is led to a bunch of children in Africa dying, more cases of HIV, delayed treatments to cancer patients in the United States, weather forecasting has closed down in different parts of the United States, the country. FEMA grants have been cut. 80,000 plus VA employees are going to lose their job. So a lot of damage, not a lot of savings from Doge. Yeah, I want to dig into Doge in a second, but it's also worth highlighting, like, as this bill moves through Congress, we are at $36 trillion worth of debt for the first time ever interest payments on the national debt exceeded the entire

Pentagon budget. Our debt to GDP ratio is over 120% in growing. So it's going to lead to increase borrowing costs for the U.S. government. And then for people like us who are trying to pay off a home loan, credit card bill, a car loan, whatever. And also, the Penn Wharton School budget model found that the House GOP bill will only add 0.5% to GDP over the next 10 years. We're not going to grow our way out of this mess. It's just not going to happen. There's no supply-side economics bullshit here. No. And the biggest problem with the whole bill in terms of the deficit and in terms of fairness is the tax cuts. Yeah. Right? It's a trillion dollars of the tax cuts are going just to people, just to millionaires and billionaires.

It's crazy. A trillion. So you talk about what it's adding to the deficit, you could take a trillion off right there just by telling rich people they don't get more tax cuts. People over millions of dollars. And look, in terms of cutting from the budget, if you want to, what you just pointed out with the debt, we spend most of our money on, the government spends most money on defense, Medicare, Social Security. Not even Medicaid. Medicaid's a fairly efficient run program, which is getting also cut in this. bill, but Medicare Social Security defense spending, and none of those are getting touched.

In fact, they're increasing defense spending. And again, the only way you can get out of, the only way you get out of this deficit or start paying out some of this debt is by not just not cutting taxes for the super rich, but raising taxes on the super rich, which Elon doesn't want to do. Trump has floated and then decided to back off. It's ridiculous. Yeah, they have to build this stupid Golden Dome missile defense system, which will absolutely not worse. work but will cost billions of billions of dollars. So back to Doge. So you're right. So Elon started saying he's going to save $2 trillion. He revised that down to $1 trillion in savings of 2026. And then in April he announced that Doge has only saved $150 billion. So about 15% of his stated goal. But even

that number is bullshit because according to a New York Times analysis, there's no identifying details for $92 billion of the claim savings. So 60% of their total, we just kind of don't know what they're referencing. But when you dig into some of the specifics they claim, they are just bullshit. For example, Doge claimed $1.9 billion in savings from a canceled IRS contract that had been canceled when Joe Biden was president. They claimed to have saved $1.75 billion by canceling a grant to a vaccine nonprofit, but the vaccine nonprofit said, actually, we got our money. We got paid in full. And then there's more complicated lies. For example, Doge said they saved $2.9 billion by canceling a contract for a shelter in West Texas to house migrant children who'd cross the border alone.

But to get to that aggregate cost, you have to assume that the government would renew the contract for this shelter every three years and that it was going to hold hundreds of kids every day from 2023 to 2028. But the shelters are basically empty because the border has been shut down. So according to the times in reality, this contract saved 27 million in 2026, which is 1% of what Doge claimed his savings. Here's what drives me nuts about this. Like you say you're running Doge, you walk into the government. There's a lot of shit in the government that seems inefficient, outdated, could be modernized, room for savings, you start going through stuff.

He knows, the Doge team should know how much they're going to save from all this stuff. They should know where most of the spending is and that it's not where they were looking. And like the only two excuses for why they're not saying that now are like dishonesty or dipshittery. Oh, speaking of dipshittery, but you don't think this clip from CPAC

suggested a thoughtful measured approach to the budget and deficit? This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy. Chainsaw! I love that clip. The second chainsaw? Chainsaw! Ketamine is a hell of a drug.

What drives me crazy about Elon and the guys of his ilk is that they are always the victims. Like, Elon whined to the Washington Post that Doche became the whipping boy in Washington, that people were being mean to Teslas. But, like, he was the one who did that. He was the one who called USAID a criminal organization and bragged about feeding it into the wood chipper. Yeah. Right?

He was the guy who decided to structure a system that abruptly canceled contracts to prevent Ebola from coming to the U.S. or to safeguard our nuclear weapons or thought it was fun and funny to get rid of PEPFAR and make it so little kids don't have AIDS drugs or that kids in Yemen and Sudan and other conflict zones are now starving to death. Like that was, he enjoyed it. Ficked with the Social Security Office so that people like couldn't get their calls answered. would have had to go, they had to walk all the changes to Social Security back because people were like up in arms and it wasn't saving any money and it wasn't making anything more efficient. Do not piss off old people with time on their hands. So he says this to CBS and then Stephen Miller responds on Twitter and is like, hey, here's the thing. Doge, the budget reconciliation bill, the big beautiful bill, it can really only go after mandatory spending, which is Medicaid entitlements, defense spending, all that kind of stuff, which all that kind of stuff, which all.

only did it was touch Medicaid. And we're going to have to have a separate bill to codify some of the doge cuts. And then Mike Johnson piles on with Steve Miller and he's like, yes, no, Elon has done amazing work. We're going to have another bill that we're going to send to caught that the White host is hopefully going to send to codify the doge cuts. So it turns out the White House is supposed to send a bill of $9 billion worth of cuts. Now, if you remember, keep in tracking home, it was Elon's claiming $175 billion, $9 billion in cuts, which is, is 0.24% of the $3.8 trillion that this bill is going to add to the deficit. So $9 billion in cuts that they're going to try to send to Congress.

But those cuts are basically NPR, PBS, and foreign aid. Okay, good. Yeah, well, just an absolute abject failure. Now, Donald Trump was asked about Elon's comments during a press conference earlier today, where it's hanging out with just Janine Perot. I think it was her, what her nomination. Yeah, we got. She's in. She's the new Ed Martin. He had a surprisingly normal response. Let's watch.

Mr. President, Elon Musk, in a television interview, criticized the one big, beautiful bill saying he was disappointed it didn't cut enough essentially that undercut the Doge efforts. What's your reaction to that? Well, the reactions, a lot of things. Number one, we have to get a lot of votes. We can't be cutting, you know, we need to get a lot of support. It's very big. It's the big beautiful bill.

But the beautiful is because of all of the things we have. The biggest thing being, I would say, the level of tax cutting that we're going to be doing. We're going to make people really be able to, we'll have one of the, we'll have the lowest tax rate we've ever had in the history of our country. Remember, we have zero Democrat votes because they're bad people. There's something wrong with them. That means we have to get almost all Republican votes. And I think we're very close to doing that.

I was just watching Judge Chenin and waiting for her to lift up like a scorpion bowl, like seven straws in it. It's like, take a big sip. I want at least three more hosts of the five to be in the cabinet. Well, Gutfelds. Yeah, Gutfeld. Help them out. Let's get Gutfeld up there.

Let's get him in the briefing room after Caroline Levitt's done. A few problems with what Trump said there, even though it did sound very normal. The lowest tax rate in history, that is the problem. That is basically, how do you respond to Elon Musk saying this bill does nothing to do the deficit? He's like, well, the taxes are really low. It's like, first of all, they're super low for rich people. the average person is getting like a couple hundred dollars so that you can have $3.8 trillion added to the deficit

Medicaid cut, food assistance cut. Lowest, the lower 20, 40% of people are probably going to lose money. You're going to have higher costs. And we're forgetting everyone gets to pay tariffs. Right, good point. Yeah. So there will be some money coming into the treasury,

but that will be basically a sales tax that hits working class, middle class, poorer people, way harder than it does the rich people who are going to get a trillion dollars in tax cuts. Also, this is a less important complaint, but reporters, you don't have to call it the big, beautiful bill. Why do we repeat his branding on everything? It's very annoying. It's like making everyone call it the Gulf of America.

It's like, I'm going to do this, and now you're all going to call it something stupid and look stupid and sound stupid doing it. Probably, I mean, I guess reporters said, like, billed back better and all this shit, but at least that was, I think, the actual name of the legislation. It was. It was. Did you see that, here the one reporter say people on Wall Street, or using the term taco to talk about your trade war. And Trump's like, Taco? And he goes, Trump always chickens out on the tariffs.

And he got so angry. He did not like being told he chickened out. And he was like, that was the meanest question. How could you say that? So Taco. Taco. Doesn't like to be called chicken. This was a fun quote from a guy named Nat Malchus at AEI talking about the way Doge is claiming savings.

He said, quote, it's like if your kid drops out of college and you tell your wife, whoa, we save money in medical school. That doesn't make any sense. That's the same idea. That's very good. That was funny. That was good. That was good.

It's nice to see Elon back doing what he loves. Yeah. With his rockets. Creshing cars. Blowing up cars and rockets. I mean, he's in some trouble. I mean, you know, look, Tesla's stock price has nothing to do with their actual revenue. But I did see that China's biggest car producer, I think, B.D, just cut prices by 34%.

So they're trying, like, going for the kill shot on Tesla in Europe, the Middle East, and China. So tough. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy. Yeah, well, that's it for us. Thanks for watching this Pod Save America YouTube exclusive. If you want to help us out, please subscribe to Pod Save America on YouTube. The right wing is killing us on YouTube. The Daily Wire has got like 7 million followers.

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