Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 5/19/25: Trump Backs Israel Assault, Biden Cancer Diagnosis, US Credit Downgrade, Trump Vs Walmart

Episode Date: May 19, 2025

Krystal and Emily discuss Trump greenlights Israel Gaza assault, Theo Von breaks down on Gaza genocide, Biden reveals cancer diagnosis, US credit rating downgraded, Trump tells Walmart not to raise prices, DOGE cuts betray MAGA, Republican budget bill.   Michael LaRosa: https://x.com/MichaelLaRosaDC TheLever: https://the.levernews.com/tax-revolt/   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.com   Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. Enter Camp Shame, an eight-part series examining the rise and fall of Camp Shane and the culture that fueled its decades-long success. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus.

So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? and subscribe today. his irresponsible son, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. They could lose their family and millions of dollars? Yep. Find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind Boy Sober, the movement that exploded in 2024.

You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy, but to me, Boy Sober is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it.

Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Sagar and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you,

please go to BreakingPoints.com, become a member today, and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad-free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at breakingpoints.com. Good morning, everybody. Happy Monday. Welcome to Breaking Points. Emily, good morning.

Good morning. Also, if people didn't watch the Friday show, they should go check out Sagar's baby. Little bit of news. Yeah, congratulations to Sagar, proud father of a baby girl. And there are pictures. So if you go to Sagar's Instagram, you can see the pictures.

Yeah, which I tried to pull up and failed on Friday. But in any case, you can go check those out for yourself. Priya June, which I think is a really beautiful name. So cute, too. Tiny, adorable. Adorable. Lots of hair. Lots of hair.

So we're just so happy for them. Yes, indeed. Meanwhile, you were suffering through our air traffic, nightmarish landscape here over the weekend. So my grandparents' 70th anniversary was this weekend in Wisconsin. Wow. 70th anniversary. Unbelievable. So that's 1955, I think.

Wow, congrats to them. God bless. Amazing. Yeah, so we were really excited to go, but the Reagan Airport was a complete mess on Friday. There was a storm that rolled through. The entire terminal basically had cancellations and delays. So we were at the airport for seven hours until like 3 a.m. early, early Saturday. So the reason I say that is if you have Memorial Day travel coming up, just be aware that our air traffic system, I mean, everyone is already kind of aware of this.

But I think, honestly, the problems at Newark are still, that's a problem that creates tangles throughout the entire country. It's such a big hub. So things are really rough. Well, and Newark has gotten a lot of the attention because they had those catastrophic failures where they actively lost radar and were just completely blind. But the shortage in air traffic controllers is, that's nationwide. It's a massive issue. Yes. And they blamed actually one of the American Air gate agents when she was making announcements that was, she was like, we just haven't had enough air traffic controllers. So, and that was at Reagan National. So I'm sure that's happening in other parts of the country too. Wow. Be careful if you have Memorial Day travel. It's rough out there.

Yeah. Plan to be in for the long haul, I guess, as well. Seriously. Yep. Yeah. A lot to get to in the show this morning. So there are some major developments out of Gaza amidst a completely apocalyptic ground invasion from Israel. They have agreed to let in some minimal amount of aid. So we'll break all of that. There's a lot of moving pieces going on in the region right there. And we also wanted to highlight for you, Theo Vaughn came out and, you know, said he made some comments, you know, very heartfelt about how he felt that he hadn't said enough about what he's describing as a genocide in Gaza, which I think is, to me, undeniable at this point. So I wanted to take a look at that and the way that public opinion in the U.S. overall has shifted with

regard to Israel and Palestine. President Biden, former President Biden, diagnosed with a very aggressive form of prostate cancer. We actually have a Biden insider who had already been booked to be on the show, Michael LaRosa. We've had him on before. He was Dr. Jill Biden's press secretary. And so he's been talking about, you know, what he saw inside of that world and trying to be candid about that. So, you know, interested to hear his reaction to this cancer diagnosis. And look, just to be frank, the timing of it raises a lot of eyebrows, especially the fact that it is so advanced. And this would be someone who would be seen medically, you know, would have been in the White House seeing the White House doctors and certainly would be subsequent to that as well. Yeah, absolutely. We actually have some,

a lot of doctors were weighing in after the diagnosis. And some, you know, we have, yeah, I think we have some information from a Yale professor who's a doctor. We're not talking cranks who are weighing in on the diagnosis of Biden and the timing of the diagnosis or at least the announcement of the diagnosis. So there's a lot to get to with that. Crystal Friday, Moody's agreed with the other analysts and finally downgraded the rating of the United States. Yeah, and I think the markets are down this morning because of it. So there's a lot there. There's some new comments from Trump and Secretary Besant with regard to Walmart saying they're going to raise prices. Trump says Walmart should eat the tariffs. So we'll see if they oblige. We also have our eyes on a horrific system of tornadoes that hit the Midwest, Kentucky and Missouri in particular. I think 26 people dead after that and questions about whether or not Doge may have impacted their ability to,

you know, alert people in the area rapidly enough. So we'll dig into all of that. And we're also going to have Arjun Singh of Lever News join us to talk about the history of the anti-tax movement, which is always relevant, but is particularly relevant right now as Republicans are trying to get this reconciliation bill passed. They just passed it on a committee actually late last night and obviously includes a giant tax cut for the rich again, even though public opinion has really turned on the concept of this sort of like overall trickle-down concept. There are huge majorities in both parties and and certainly with independents as well, at this point for raising taxes on the rich. So in any case, he's going to dig into the backstory of how we got to this moment. Yeah, we've got some fun clips and history to go through.

It'll be a really interesting segment, so stay tuned for that. Crystal, we'll be doing an AMA, that's right, as well. Yes. BreakingPoints.com, by the way, to get that subscription. If you can't get the subscription, we totally understand. Just make sure to subscribe on YouTube, leave comments, like the videos. It helps us. Yeah, helps us a lot. So thank you guys for all your support that you've shown.

And if you want to be part of that AMA Live, which we try to do every Monday or Tuesday, depending on how long the Monday show goes to go, but we got it on the schedule this week for Monday. Make sure you do that. And one more announcement before we jump in to what is going on in Gaza. Dave Smith is going to join me tomorrow as co-host.

So that should be fun. I already got a bunch of topics. You know, we'll dig into the latest on, you know, Ukraine. There's movement that I want to hear from him on. I actually want to get his take on this Epstein thing with both Bongino and Kash Patel being like, yeah, he killed himself. There's really nothing to see here. Bongino said yesterday, like, I've seen the file. He killed himself. I saw the whole file.

I noticed suicide looks like. The other one he said is that there's no there there in terms of any, like, Trump assassination conspiracies as well. Which is also absurd to think. I mean, the stuff going on with that assassination secret service, it's really something if that's where they're landing. Nothing to see here. Less than a year after it. Nothing to see here.

Yeah. In any case, it should be fun, so I'm looking forward to that. All right, let's get into some news that is quite grim, quite dire at this point. Let's go ahead and put A8 up on the screen here, guys. Israel has agreed to introduce what they're describing as a basic amount of food into Gaza in order to prevent famine, framing it as necessary to sustain the expansion of intense fighting to defeat Hamas. They have the full statement here from Bibi Netanyahu's office. This is from Dropsite. They say, on the recommendation of the IDF and out of the operational need to enable the expansion of the intense fighting to defeat Hamas, Israel will

introduce a basic amount of food to the population in order to ensure that a famine crisis does not develop in the Gaza Strip. Such a crisis would jeopardize the continuation of the Gideon Chariots operation to defeat Hamas. That is the new apocalyptic ground invasion that they are conducting. Israel will work to deny Hamas' ability to take control of the distribution of humanitarian aid to ensure that the aid does not reach Hamas terrorists. I also have Jeremy Scahill of Dropsite News, of course, tweeted, Netanyahu said Israel will allow some aid into Gaza because controversy over his starvation campaign is hindering implementation of his final solution. Quote, we're going to take control of all the Gaza Strip, and to do this, we need to do it in a way

that they won't stop us. Smotrich endorsed Netanyahu's temporary aid gimmick, saying it will allow the U.S. and other Israel allies to continue to provide us with an international umbrella of protection against the Security Council and the Hague Tribunal, and for us to continue to fight until victory. So, Emily, it sounds like they realized that the world was not maybe going to just stand by and let them before all of our eyes star somewhere around 2 million people left in the Gaza Strip. They also, and I'll show you some of these images later, they are starting to face some significant internal domestic pushback as well. There was a march to the border fence there with Gaza and attempts actually to cross that were, you know, of course, rebuffed by the Israeli police. But they were under enough pressure to feel like, okay, we at least need to allow some

token amount of food in. It's been over two months since any food, water, medicine has entered the strip. And we know that there have been children who are, I mean, children who are severely malnourished and some who have died as a result of the starvation policy. And just to, I mean, make this visual for everyone, we can go ahead and start rolling A2. This is a mashup of some footage of what we're seeing from the strip. So this was kids who were playing in the street in Gaza and an Israeli drone struck them. You can see here, obviously, wounded being carried. These are, you know, fires amidst the bombing and just chaos that you can see unfolding here, tents that caught fire. Here they're attempting to rescue someone from out underneath the rubble.

They haven't been allowed to have any heavy equipment in, so it's just all done by hand. Here is the destruction of an entire neighborhood. I believe this is in or near Rafa, a severely injured child that you see here with head and other wounds. People are once again trying to, looks like, carry their belongings, being forcibly displaced once again. And here's an overall view that you can see of the rubble and the destruction as people go ahead and, you know, try to flee to wherever may be safe. You know, Crystal, last week we were covering the internal conversation. We talked to Jeremy Scahill about this, but in Israel about whether or not USAID, and this is from the far right in Israel, whether or not USAID hampers them ultimately, if it's ultimately something

that holds back their efforts to prosecute the war in the way that they would want to. And that's an interesting context that as the famine was worsening and as they wanted to continue to go back in, we saw them saying, well, maybe without the U.S., without the money from the United States, without the resources from the United States, we wouldn't even have to have these conversations. We could just do whatever we wanted. And, you know, what we saw just in the last 24 hours, at least on the aid side, is that the pressure was successful for now. But this is Steve Witkoff. Right now, he's saying that he's not forcing Israel to end the war, according to officials. Crystal, that's where I'm most curious about what's happened over the weekend in particular.

We still don't have a ton of information. The Barack Ravid report on aid in Axios suggests that U.S. pressure was instrumental in getting the humanitarian aid back into Gaza. But we just, we don't know what's happening behind the scenes. But we have indications like from Steve Witkoff that they're not being as, let's say, privately intense as they at one point suggested that they would be. Well, and we should be clear about what this aid really entails. You know, Israel had gone to a number of humanitarian aid organizations with this plan of how they wanted to distribute aid, and they all effectively said, no, this would be unconscionable. It would violate our principles. You're putting civilians at risk. You're using food as a weapon of war. You know, even in the language that Bibi uses here,

he describes it as a basic amount of food. So basically, you know, we'll give you enough so that hopefully we don't have full-blown famine and people starving to death because we don't think the world would just sit by and watch that potentially. And maybe our own population even would not, you know, some portion of it would not sit back and watch that. But, you know, aid organizations rejected this as an outrageous way of going about things. There's also some scheme that's been cooked up with U.S. non-governmental organizations involving effectively U.S. mercenaries who are already arriving in Israel to be involved in this aid distribution, this basic amount of aid distribution. They did not take a vote in the

security cabinet because the expectation is that vote to allow in even this bare minimum of food would have failed. Smotrich and Ben-Gavir have been opposed to it. But again, their justification is if we want to finish the job in Gaza, then apparently we're going to have to allow in some amount of food. So that is the context in which this is happening. We have some comments, recent comments from Trump as well, about whether or not he's frustrated with Netanyahu and also, once again, reiterating his commitment to a full ethnic cleansing plan. This was in an interview with Brett Baer. Let's go ahead and take a listen to those comments. Obviously, the Israel Hamas and what's happening in Gaza is driving a lot.

How do you see that? Are you frustrated at all with Prime Minister Netanyahu? No, look, he's got a tough situation. You have to remember there was an October 7th that everyone forgets. It was one of the most violent days in the history of the world, not the Middle East, the world, when you look at the tapes. And the tapes are there for everyone to see. So he has that problem. That problem should have never happened. Now, if I were president,

that problem wouldn't have happened because Iran had no money. They were stone cold broke and they weren't giving money to Hamas. The situation in Gaza is going to come to an end soon. Gaza is a nasty place. It's been that way for years. I think it should become a free zone, you know, freedom. I call it a freedom zone. It should become a freedom zone. It doesn't work. Every 10 years they go back. They have Hamas. Everybody's being

killed all over the place. I mean, you ever see, you talk about crime stats. It's a nasty place. Are these people, these countries that you were just visiting, are they going to have to be a part of the solution? Well, they would be. They would be. I spoke to all three of them. They would absolutely be.

I mean, they're really rich and really, really, really, even more than rich, they're good people. And they would help. So money's not even the problem. You've got to get countries to say yes, to take them. Look, these are people that want to be in the Middle East. They really want to be in the Middle East. They love the Middle East. I see that. There's a spirit for the Middle East. They didn't have to go to Sweden, Germany, these different countries.

They could have been home in the Middle East if somebody had the brains to build beautiful communities. You know, 1.9 million is a lot of people, but it's not a lot of people. He says they could be home in the Middle East. I'm sure Palestinians will tell you their home is in Palestine. In any case, there were reports as well about a plan to potentially ethnically cleanse Palestinians to Libya. We can put a four up on the screen after the report was published. Then they put out a denial saying this is untrue, but NBC News had given them a chance to comment. They didn't say anything. The Trump administration, NBC News says, is working on a plan to permanently relocate up

to 1 million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Libya. Five people with knowledge told NBC News the plan is under serious enough consideration. The administration has discussed it with Libya's leadership. Don't say which factions of Libya's leadership, because Libya is basically, you know, torn asunder thanks to our own foreign policy. In any case, they say in exchange for the resettling of Palestinians, the administration would potentially release to Libya billions of dollars in funds that the U.S. froze more than a decade ago, those three people said. So, you know, apparently there have been some conversations there. In addition, Trump, you know, has consistently reiterated that this is his ultimate goal. And one other note on his comments there, Emily, that I just think is, you know, worth considering.

He claims in that clip we just played that there are 1.9 million people in Gaza. That would indicate that, you know, some hundreds of thousands of people have been killed since, you know, post-October 7th. The original estimate prior to October 7th was 2.2 to 2.3 million people. So, you know, Dropsite pointing out that that means if his numbers are correct, and he said similar things before, too, by the way, that this campaign's already reduced the Palestinian population in Gaza by about 15 percent. Oh, my gosh. Well, speaking of the Trump administration, A6, this is a DropSite report noticing as well. So we'll put this in the context of what we were just talking about with Steve

Witkoff. This is the drop site report saying that, and this is from Jeremy, Steve Witkoff personally promised to lift the Gaza blockade in exchange for Adan Alexander. And so it is now May 19th. And what we've seen, as we mentioned just a couple of minutes ago, is indications to the contrary from Steve Witkoff that or that he's acting contrary to what Jeremy's reporting suggests he said that he was going to do. And, Crystal, with the humanitarian aid plan that you just laid out, this is for Witkoff, this is looking extremely bad. I mean, Trump puts so much of his projects and put so much of his hopes onto Steve Witkoff to get an end to this conflict. But to the point where, you know, you're telling one side of these negotiations, which is Hamas, that you're going to do something, you don't do it, and they just give up a huge piece of leverage for that, probably doesn't help your ability to continue negotiating in a way that's helpful to securing an end to the conflict.

Right. There or anywhere else. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you're Iran and you're looking at, Witkoff just told them, like, okay, you release this American-Israeli hostage and we will then, you know, we'll secure this aid relief. We're going to work and press for an end this aid relief. We're going to work and press for an end to the war. We're going to give you public credit. And there were a series of promises that were made. And then you just don't do it. How do you think that, you know, the Russians and

the Ukrainians are going to look at that? How do you think that the Iranians are going to look at that? How do you think that Hamas is going to look at that going forward, you know, if you do want to seek an end to this conflict. So it's, yeah, it's a huge deal in terms of his credibility when, as you put it, Emily, he has been put so central to all of these key high stakes negotiations. We'll cover with Dave Smith tomorrow. There's supposed to be a Trump-Putin phone call coming up in an attempt to, you know, to end that war. So in any case, you know, not only did he just like get this and the the the possible trajectory here, one possible reading of what the Trump administration has done here. And Michael Tracy said the same thing on his Twitter is basically like they got the last American and then they can just not really care anymore about what Bibi does going forward. And, you know, I think that's I think that's a real possibility of what we're seeing unfold. And especially when, again, everyone wants to know, well, what does Trump really want? What's he really thinking? Like he's told us multiple times what he really wants and

what he's really thinking. He wants this freedom zone, ethnic cleansing, beach development plan. That's what he wants. Now, will he be able to achieve that? That's kind of the only question. But to me, it's not really an open question anymore what Trump wants to see. He wants to see the removal of all Palestinians from Gaza and some sort of real estate development project that he can participate in going forward. And, you know, like I said, the only really outstanding question in terms of him is how committed he is to that and whether that's something that he can actually effectuate. It just, I mean, we talked about this when he announced his first plans for Mara Gaza or whatever it's being dubbed.

That it's a recipe for complete and total disaster. On top of the ethical considerations of what it would entail, you're also just going to end up worsening the radical rage at U.S. imperialism, Western imperialism for like the entire situation. People have fought for decades, literally for the land. And we don't even have to get into this, but it's so obviously just a recipe for even more, an even more explosive situation because people are not going to stop fighting for the land. And it doesn't just affect Palestine. It doesn't just affect people in the area. I mean, it's other groups spread throughout the entire region react to what happens in Gaza, react to what, I mean, just to the infamous Osama bin Laden letter, what does it cite? Well, it talks about Palestine. It's not some small issue

for a lot of America's adversaries. So it's just even on its own terms, a ridiculous idea that they seem to actually genuinely be pushing closer and closer to making the goal at the end stage of negotiations. So increasingly inside of Israel, there are protests that are not just about retrieving the hostages, securing a ceasefire to get the hostages back. They're starting to actually talk about Palestinians and the suffering of Palestinians. Now, I'm under no illusion based on the polling that this is anything approaching majority coalition in Israel. But this is really the first time we've seen any of that messaging at all, any concern for the lives of Palestinians being expressed in the protest movements that have been ongoing. So we can put these images up on the screen. You had a group of, I believe it's several hundred Israelis who marched towards the border with Gaza. Some of them are holding signs that said

Palestinian lives matter, which again, is just not something that we've seen in Israel. I mean, it's the sort of thing you could be, you know, censored for, arrested for. You can see one of those Palestinian Lives Matter signs there. And you had even attempt to, you know, directly approach that border fencing, which was rebuffed by the Israeli police there. But Emily, it is significant to me that even within Israel, and we've seen this, I mean, this, you know, Shael Ben-Ephraim, who we've had on the show as a liberal Zionist, who completely changed his mind about, he says, okay, you know what, the left is right, this is a genocide, and this is horrific. Now he's still committed to the

state of Israel. But, you know, I think he's one example of how some liberal Israelis have woken up to the horrors of the slaughter that is being committed in their names. And so in any case, even though it's a small number, I do think it's noteworthy that there's a care and concern for Palestinians here that we, at least I haven't seen in any of, evident in any of the protests up to this point. It's, I mean, I think it's very significant. And I think some of it also has to do with the, you know, the fact that there, it's more obvious now than ever before that this idea that the war and all of the destruction and death that it's wrought is not going to result in the end of Hamas. And I think that just sort of makes everything, it just, it makes clear what all of this was ultimately for and what it was

actually going to end in. So it's not a surprising development at all, but I have to imagine that some of it stems from that. Yeah, absolutely. I think you're right. Some of these things just have become undeniable at this point, undeniable at this point. One of those protesters actually spoke out about what his goals were and why he was there. Let's go ahead and take a listen to that. While our government, the Israeli government, launches another attack on Gaza, we are marching hundreds of people, Jews and Palestinians, from Sderot to the Gaza border with a demand to stop this assault on Gaza, to stop the horrible killing of innocent people and of children.

And we are demanding our government to sign a deal to assist fire and a hostage deal. We are here to say very, very clearly the Israeli public do not support this government. This war cannot go on. This war has nothing with our safety. It's only about annexation and building more settlements and transferring the Palestinians. And we would not let it happen. So he says what you were indicating there, like at this point, it's undeniable this war is just about annexation and settlements and transferring the Palestinians, as he says, effectively ethnic cleansing. So that's where things stand this morning in terms of Israel. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution.

But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and re-examining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long.

You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. This author writes, Hold up, so what are they going to do to get those millions back? That's so unfair. Well, the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago. Scandalous. But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time.

Oh my God. And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well, to hear the explosive finale,

listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be.

These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room.

You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We did want to share with you some comments from Theo Vaughn. He's been described as Trump's favorite podcaster. It was certainly important as part of the, like, bro podcast sphere that helped to get Trump elected. And he took, you know, a good several minutes on his show to effectively apologize for not saying more about Gaza and to, you know, express that he does believe that this is a genocide that's unfolding before all of our eyes. Let's go ahead and take a listen to a little bit of that. It feels to me, I don't know if I, it just, it feels to me like it's a genocide that's happening while we're alive here in front of our, in front of our lives. And I don't, sometimes I feel like I should say something. I'm not a geologist or geographer or anything like that, you know? So I don't know a lot of the, some of it I do know though. Like I know the basics of the issues over there, but for me, it's just like how I feel like you see all these photos of people, just children, women, people, body parts, just people like putting their kids back together.

And I just can't believe that we're watching that and that more isn't said about it. And so I'm not saying anyone else needs to say anything, but I think I'm just that more isn't said about it. Um, and so I'm not saying anyone else needs to say anything, but I think I'm just that more isn't said about it by me. So I just, uh, I want to be able to speak up about that, that I think we're watching probably like, you know, one of the sickest things that's ever happened. And, uh, and I'm sorry if I've kind of haven't said about it. I've tried to talk about it and learn about it, but I don't know. Maybe I just want to say something.

I don't even know what to do, and it's crazy because our country is also complicit in it. It's in it and has been for a long time, and it's just kind of interesting because then you just realize, oh, well, I'm just a, yeah, I'm a member of this country, but I'm just, what we want sometimes doesn't matter. That last part is interesting. We'll come back to that. Sometimes in this country, what you want just doesn't matter. Emily, what did you make of the significance of Theo Vaughn there? Well, so he just had dinner with Ivanka and Jared,

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Yeah, literally last week. Last week. And Jared Kushner, obviously the architect of the Abraham Accords. So I actually find this to be very significant. Joe Rogan has reacted to the war in similar ways. And I think, you know, I was reading yesterday, and I know you're going to talk to Dave Smith about this, but the New York Times had a big dive into the Heritage Foundation's Project Esther over the weekend. Which, shout out to Dropsite, reported on this like, what, a year ago? Yes. And Zateo as well. Yes. And, you know, it's basically like the plan that they put in front of the administration to go after students and to suppress speech. And as I was reading this story, you know, I know a lot of people at the Heritage Foundation kind of on both sides of the generational divide.

Some of the people who are more from the neoconservative version of the Republican Party and people who are in the new right MAGA world. And as I'm listening to Theo Vaughn, I'm thinking, hmm, this is going to be a real problem for the old neoconservative Republicans going forward because as much as it looks like Witkoff is pulling a fast one and not doing what he said to put pressure on Israel to get an end to the conflict. Increasingly, the younger voters in the Republican Party, but even younger staff, is just not on board with this anymore. And they're all listening to people like Theo Vaughn, Joe Rogan. They just have a completely different worldview when it comes to this particular issue. So as I was watching it,

that's what was going through my head that like this is going to this does resonate. This does move young people on the right. And it's that's that, you know, is not going to be easily blended with the old neoconservative approach to this for much longer. Yeah. I mean, I appreciate him saying this to his audience. I want to know if he's also saying it to Darren Ivanka when he's having dinner with them in a very friendly way. Like, if you're saying this is a genocide and then you're, I mean, he also just went, we can put this up on the screen, A10. He was in Qatar with Trump there. Theor Ravon riffs on drugs, disabilities, and homosexuality before Trump speaks at U.S. base in Qatar. So, I mean, this is someone who has

public power because he's very influential with a large group of young men. And so him using his voice on his platform matters a lot there. But he also has private power because Trump does attribute, you know, some of his electoral victory to people like Theo Vaughn. He's routinely described as Trump's favorite podcaster. Barron probably listens to Theo Vaughn if reports are correct. Yeah, that's right. That was the reporting that Barron was instrumental in putting them together. So he also has private power. And I think that's a real question is, OK, if you see this is a genocide, which I agree

with, and at this point, many other people do as well, not to mention international organizations as well. Like, okay, are you using the inside track that you have to exert pressure internally as well? So that would be my question. But I do think we can go ahead. Let's skip ahead to A12, to your point about the way that public opinion has shifted. Because, you know, it's this kind of dichotomy where at the same time that Israel is at its almost like most powerful, all the countries that's bombing and territory that it's annexing and, you know, on the verge of effectively a final solution in Gaza, the backing in the U.S. has taken a dramatic hit. I mean, not among elite elected politicians so much, but among the people.

Just look at these numbers, the way that negative views of Israel have risen in the U.S. So first of all, for maybe the first time ever, majority of U.S. adults, majority have a negative view of the state of Israel. So they were asked, yes, this is a question of, they were asked if they have an unfavorable view of Israel, straight up. That goes from 42% in 2022 to 53% in 2025. That's right. That's right. And Republicans are still the group that has the largest, you know, favorable proportion. But look at that generational divide that Emily was pointing to. So now you have a majority of Republicans between 18 and 49,

so not even that particularly young, 50% now say they have an unfavorable view. Man, those boomer Republicans, though, they love them some Israel. They have barely budged. Look at those, I mean, the number, the generational divide is more than half. So 23, only 23% of 50 plus Republicans

have an unfavorable view of Israel. And it's, as Crystal said, 50% of ages 18 to 49. I bet if you just did 18 to 24, that number would be even higher. I have no doubt. No doubt about that. And these are all people in one party. And granted, it's not what people go to the polls and vote based on, but it does create a permission structure for politicians to act in various ways. So when you look at those numbers, at some point that has to change the way Republican

politicians approach the issue, you would think. But that's what Theo Vaughn gets to at the end of his moment there where he says it feels like there's nothing. It feels like what we want doesn't really matter. And if you look at the Democratic numbers there, you know, you see a huge shift where now you've got 69 percent of Democrats and lean Dems overall with an unfavorable view and a much, much smaller generational divide. So 71 percent of 18 to 49 year olds, 66 percent of 50 plus. And those 50 plus in the Democratic Party, that is the group that has moved the most. Because it used to be just if you're of an older generation, like Joe Biden, you support Israel and you really don't think too much about it. And that has shifted dramatically. And, yeah, I mean, I actually do think that this issue is important electorally.

I think it's going to be quite significant in the Democratic primary in 2028. I think it will be a litmus test in the Democratic primary in 2028. And I also think, you know, I mean, this is it speaks to the the hypocrisies of America first when you're claiming like, OK, we're just going to focus on U.S. interests, and yet you're still funding this genocide with our, you know, with our tax dollars, shipping all this money and weapons and diplomatic support to Israel to do whatever the hell Israel wants to do. So there's a, there is an electoral hypocrisy there that also, I think, you know, it's, I don't think it will be insignificant. Not that it's going to be everybody's number one issue. But when we talk to those AOC Trump voters, a lot of them actually

did bring up Ukraine and Israel and, you know, a sense of dissatisfaction with Biden and Harris on those issues in particular. So I don't want to downplay it either. And for a lot of working class voters, you look at that actually as a material kitchen table concern for yourself, because it makes you angry that you're struggling in no small part in some cases because of the way the government has structured the economy, because of the way the government spends its money. And you see all of this funding going to foreign conflicts, in many cases, no end in sight. And politicians who seem to care more about a foreign country than they do this one. A hundred percent. So, yeah, I mean, I think this is also, and this is something that I don't think those older neoconservative, actually I should say Republicans and Democrats have grappled with yet,

is the post-imperial era of America's approach to the Middle East. So for generations that grew up amidst the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, that looking at Israel post that, post October 7th, I think it's actually just a very different dynamic. And, you know, we could go back and have conversations about historical Israel and, you know, the last hundred years of history in Israel, if not longer. But there's definitely, this is a new chapter in American relationship, like post-October 7th is a new chapter in America's relationship with Israel. And in a sense, I think for a lot of people, it's come across as much more egregious, as a different version, or a changed version, I shouldn't say different,

but a changed version of Israel that's engaging in negotiations with the U.S. and that is having these back and forth with U.S. power. So, I mean, I think that's one thing that just has not been understood very well is this is, Israel is in a different position these days. Well, and one of the most, going back to Theo Vaughn's comments, one of the most potent arguments that pro-Israel people have made in the past is, well, you don't understand the history is too complicated. So just stay out of it. Just let us worry about it. You don't worry about it. Just trust us that you're on the right side. It's all good. It's good versus bad, right? Like there's always this very Manichean, dark and light, good and bad. And what they don't understand is now with social media, you can see everything. Right. And so I think that that like, like that worked really well on liberals for a long time

of like, well, the history is just really complicated and you don't understand. And now because those images are so undeniable, it has sort of overcome this unwillingness to engage with it where it's like, okay, maybe I don't need to know 100 years of history. Maybe I can have my own moral judgment about what's being done right now today in the present with my tax dollars and as the world watches. Ryan and I fell into a long conversation on an episode a few months ago about how what happened to Shireen Abu Akhla was a sort of changing moment for me. And part of that was because you could piece together so many different social media, so much different evidence from social media. And all these different angles of video, all of these different movements were captured on iPhone cameras or smartphone cameras. And when you're able to

see so much different pieces of the puzzle, you can put it together in ways that gives the propaganda a lot less power. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think also coming at a time when trust in mainstream media has never been lower, their ability to manufacture consent is vastly diminished, certainly within the Republican Party, but increasingly within the Democratic Party as well. There was one more thing we wanted to get to here, which, again, I think is kind of a sign of the times, which is Bernie Sanders on the most mainstream shows you could get with Stephen Colbert late night, and calling out directly the influence of AIPAC specifically in politics as the reason why Democrats are unable to break with the consensus with regard to Israel. Let's go ahead and take a listen to what Bernie had to say. But on the Democratic side, this is what we've got to deal with. I happen to believe that what is going on in Gaza right now is horrific, that we are seeing children right now as we speak starving to death, massive malnutrition.

Your fellow Vermonter, Ben of Ben and Jerry's, was actually at one of the hearings, I believe, you were at yesterday and was dragged out when he was making that protest. But why do you think more Democrats are not speaking up on that issue? Money? Yeah, of course. If you speak up on that issue, you'll have super PACs like AIPAC going after you in the same way Elon Musk goes after Republicans. There you go.

Calling out AIPAC directly. Two applause on, I still want to call it the Colbert Rapport, how old I am. But anyway. I wish. I wish too. I mean, that would be amazing. That was the peak. He was at his height of his powers then. I mean, absolutely. There'll never be anything like the Colbert Rapport again. But yeah, I think it's a good point. It's just we see all kinds of anecdotal evidence and then the polling numbers bears it out that just the U.S. public has shifted on this. And it's I think part of it is fatigue and disillusionment with American empire post Iraq and Afghanistan and a sort of a sense of cynicism about what's possible,

what the American empire can accomplish in bringing peace to the Middle East as opposed to focusing back at home and I'm not going to open up the can of worms that is that debate right now but I think that is the sense that so many people have on top of what they've seen over the course of the last several years and in this case again with seemingly no end in sight I mean every time it feels like there's a light at the end of the tunnel it goes away it fades so yeah people are just sick of it. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left.

In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long.

You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John.

Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily it's your not the father week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes, My father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. Now I find out he's trying to give it to his irresponsible son instead, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back.

Hold up. So what are they going to do to get those millions back? That's so unfair. Well, the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago. Scandalous. But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time. Oh my God.

And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well, to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator,

and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times it's far from what I originally intended it to be.

These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now.

Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, let's go ahead and turn to this huge domestic news. We can put this up on the screen. So Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer. I'll read you this. Last week, President Joe Biden was seen for a new finding of a prostate nodule after experiencing increasing urinary symptoms. On Friday, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer characterized by a Gleason score of 9, grade group 5, with metastasis to the bone.

While this represents a more aggressive form of the disease, the cancer appears to be hormone sensitive, which allows for effective management. The president and his family are reviewing treatment options with his physicians. You can put the next piece up on the screen. This is from Ken Klippenstein pulled some research about the five-year survival rate for this form of metastasized prostate cancer, which has metastasized to the bone. He says the study found a five-year survival rate of 32 percent. Joe Biden also, you know, relatively elderly at this point as well, which doesn't help for the survival rate chances. And, you know, this comes, Emily, of course, at a time when there has been a lot of focus on who knew what and when with regard to Joe Biden's mental decline over the course of his presidency and even potentially before his presidency, something we've certainly been talking about since before his presidency.

So a lot of questions raised about the timing of this announcement given the advanced state of the cancer. So to address all of these things and tell us what he saw when he was deep inside of Biden world, we're going to be joined by Michael LaRosa. He is the former press secretary to Dr. Jill Biden, and he's been speaking out about some of what he saw while he was on the inside. Joining us now in studio is Michael LaRosa, former press secretary for Dr. Jill Biden. Good to see you, Michael. Good to see you, too. Thanks for having me here. Yeah, of course. So before we jump into all of this, including the cancer diagnosis and, you know, the mental decline and what people knew at the time,

just lay out for our audience, like, what was your role? How close were you with the Bidens? How often did you see the former president? Those sorts of things that we sort of have a baseline. Sure. So, you know, I was not I was actually considered more of a an outsider. And the Bidens did not take many outsiders into their at least into their bubble, the traveling bubble on the 2020 campaign. So I started with them as their as Dr. Biden's traveling press secretary, starting in 2019. So I traveled everywhere with her throughout the Democratic primary,

stayed with her through the general election in the same position, and then went to the White House as her chief spokesperson, special assistant to President Biden, and also primary traveling spokesperson for the First Lady. So we traveled to about 18 countries, 38 states, and 75 cities in that first, you know, two years of the White House when I was there. Spent a lot of, because our, you know, what they call the traveling bubble was very small. And that's COVID era, too. So probably particularly. COVID era, yes, it was like that prior to COVID.

There was his traveling bubble, our traveling bubble. staying close physically together, living together in Wilmington, because we tried to keep the Bidens around the same people consistently in a smaller group as well. But that smaller group was really the group that spent the most time with both Bidens, whether it was in Wilmington, Rehoboth, or Camp David. They left the White House most weeks. So what was your reaction to the news yesterday of Joe Biden's cancer diagnosis? It was, you know, human, right? Sad, heartbreaking. Trying to learn more about how bad it is and, you know, how long the treatments can get him him um obviously he's 82 so uh things when you're diagnosed i guess i'm not a doctor but i imagine that when you get diagnosed with a cancer like that that metastasizes to bones that it's not good uh but just praying i think i have been thinking a lot

about dr biden and i saw the picture that they posted this morning with Willow, their cat, who I have a special relationship with because I watched her for the first year of the White House. So it made me, it choked me up a little bit to see the three of them. But yeah, I'm just thinking a lot about them today. So this has raised a lot of questions for people about, you know, this comes in the context of questions about the cover-up of his decline. This is, unfortunately, a very aggressive and advanced stage of disease, apparently. And so we can put B3 up on the screen. You know, it's a lot of people on the right who are saying, is this really when they got the diagnosis or is this actually time to come out

now? But this is someone, what, a doctor from Yale? Is a Yale professor. Was also raising questions. It's inconceivable that this was not being followed before he left the presidency. Gleason, grade nine, would have had an elevated PSA level. That's like something that would show up in a blood test, I'm understanding, for some time before this diagnosis. He must have had a PSA test numerous times before. This is odd. I wish him well, and I hope he has an opportunity for maximizing his quality of life. Given what you saw of the way that the Bidens operated, can you assure people that this diagnosis was just made now and that there wasn't some longer term cover up of an earlier cancer diagnosis? No, I can't assure you that. I saw Zeke Emanuel on Morning Joe for the first

20 minutes of Morning Joe basically say the same exact thing. University of Penn doctor, I think, I believe he's an oncologist. I'll have to go back and check. I thought he was. Now again, I'm just repeating what I observed and heard this morning, which is that it would be very unusual, according to Zeke Emanuel, who was on this morning, that Gleason level nine would not have been found much earlier. He said that generally, you know, he may have not have had these PSA tests after 70 years old. However, the three other presidents, I believe it was Obama, Bush and Trump, who did have these PSA tests when they were in the White House, according to their medical results. But Biden did not. So, look, there's questions and I understand why there's questions. And I think it was

BBC journalist Katty Kaye, who was on today, who's also said on this topic, you know, given the conversation we are having about trust right now, this does raise questions. And they're saying that I am just observing and listening and hearing. But given your experience with them and the way that they operated, you're effectively saying you wouldn't put it past them to have hit a cancer diagnosis for some amount of time. I've always wanted to always give them the benefit of the doubt. And my experience when I was there was it was hard. It was very hard. Their natural instincts. And I'm not talking about Joe and Jill Biden. OK, I want to be clear. I'm talking about the people that they listened to, the people in that inner

circle, in that insular bubble. You're talking about Donalyn, Rashadi, his sister. More about the people who were safeguarding their privacy constantly, which sometimes took the sort of North Star to political decisions. So it sounds like there's an inner circle, which you were a part of, and then an inner circle within that inner circle. And I think that's something that Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson are reporting in Original Sin is that. But I also wonder to what extent that's a kind of cope. And I want to get your thoughts on that, that it gives some people the ability to sort of say, well, we were, you know, there was this privacy circle that was being like, they were circling the wagons around what may have actually been happening. What's your take on that? I mean,

was it, is it real that maybe it was Joe Biden, Jill Biden, and Hunter Biden, Valor, like what is that? Who would have been keeping it so that even people like yourself weren't thinking, oh my gosh, this is out of control, unless you were thinking that. It's hard to say. It's a matter of timing. What period are you particularly referring to

like at the end because that's what the book suggests that it happens after yeah 2022 right under stuff to me that's hard to believe and i left right after 2022 so did you see it so that and i've always been consistent by the way i should preface this by saying no he never ever gave me a moment's pause i was i went on fox News, Jesse Waters, the night of the debate to say, look, he's going to run circles around anybody on his record, on policy, on the other guy's record. My concern was the performative aspect of debating and showmanship. Did he prepare with a studio light? Did he prepare in a—was he prepared for the unexpected against Donald Trump? That's why it's not like debating a different or a traditional kind of Republican.

So was he prepared for that kind of thing? And remember, we were always used to him showing up on game day, especially like we beat Trump the last two debates. He showed up at the State of the Union. And if you think about it from that inner circle's mind with everything, going back to 1987, which it was the most and first scarring experience in politics that they had. Joe Biden to them and the way they think and the way they make decisions is that Joe Biden is underestimated. Joe Biden always defies gravity in the face of people who doubt him. So you have to keep that in mind. That's how they make very big decisions. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often

unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment

and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily it's your not the father week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes, My father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us.

Now I find out he's trying to give it to his irresponsible son instead, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. So what are they going to do to get those millions back? That's so unfair. Well, the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago. Scandalous. But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time. Oh my god. And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret even if that means destroying her husband's

family in the process. So, do they get the millions of dollars back or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well, to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. VoiceOver is

about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves.

Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. One of the big pieces of information we just got is the Her audio was just released. And we've got a couple of moments here. The first one is with regard to the central question with regard to that was these classified documents. And he appears sort of confused about, you know, exactly what they were, why they were there, etc. Let's go ahead and take a listen to that was these classified documents. And he appears sort of confused about, you know, exactly what they were, why they were there, et cetera. Let's go ahead and take a listen to that.

Were you aware that you had kept it after your term as vice president? Did you know that you had it? I don't know that I knew, but it wouldn't have, it wouldn't sound like I I was trying to think about. The reason I ask is it's been written about. Bob Woodward wrote about it in one of his books. Jules Winkover wrote about it in his biography of you. So that's the reason I ask, is if it was something that you wanted to hang on to because it was going to be the subject of reporting.

I don't think it was going to be the subject of reporting or his I don't know if it was going to be the subject of reporting, but I guess I wanted to hang on to it just for posterity's sake. I mean, this was my position on Afghanistan. Mr. President, I'm sorry to interrupt. No, I'm sorry. Anyway, that's what I wanted to do. It had nothing to do with Afghanistan. Okay, that answered my question.

And Mark, just really quickly, I promise it will be brief. I just really would like to avoid, for the purpose of a clean record getting into speculative areas when the president responded and said I don't recall intending to keep this memo you then said well you know might you have thought it was important to keep whatever he said well I guess I I could his recollection as I understand it is he does not recall specifically intending to keep this memo after he left the vice presidency. And I want that to be I want these questions to be as clearly answered and recorded on the transcript as possible. I think we should take a break. And probably even more significant was the audio that was released regarding his confusion of when his son, Beau, passed away,

and also when he was in the vice presidency and being confused about the years when he was serving in which office. Let's go ahead and take a listen to that. I Yes, sir. Remember, in this time frame, my son has either been deployed or is dying. One month ago died. I don't know, May 30th. 2015. In 2015 he had died. I think it was 2015. I think it was 2015.

I'm not sure the month, sir, but I think that was it. Yeah. not sure the months are, but I think it was. That's right, Mr. President. And what's happened in the meantime is that as Trump gets elected in November of 2017. 2016. 16. 2016. 16, 2016. All right. So, why not 2017? That's when you left office.

I'm wondering if it's a good time to take a break. No, let me just keep going to get it done. Was this your experience of President Biden at this time? And that's 2023. Yeah. And I was not I wasn't there then. But part of that, a couple of things, just observing and listening, hearing how he's responding to answers that are put to him or questions that are put to him in a context that is in private. Slowly, yes.

Oftentimes that could be representative. That was accurate of what I saw. That it was slowly processing or that he was – you could ask him a question. He'd think about it for a little bit and then answer. So, but I don't know what, if that is a reflective of decline or not, because I only knew him as an older man, right? I met him in 19. And so that was consistent for what, from what I knew. So it's hard for me to say that was a, like, was he messing up dates? Sure. Yeah, he was. But I don't know how much that is mental decline and age. I just don't know. What's interesting from the Tapper Thompson book excerpts is that it seems from maybe the donor perspective and the insider perspective, it became sort of the scuttlebutt that people were a bit concerned after 2022 was roughly where they draw the line.

Was that your experience that people started to privately talk about it? Oh, yes. Yes, that was. In June of 2022, we started to do some fundraising, prospecting, start to sort of build out what would be the sort of mechanism or operation for a potential super PAC for the reelect. And when we were going around and meeting with donors around the country, I mean, there were donors who came up to the first lady and thanked her for all of the saving democracy,

restoring institutions. But part of his legacy can also be passing the torch and turning it over to an open democratic process that can be part of his democracy legacy. So no, they were hearing from people who were, and that particular donor, the one that I recall, specifically asked her not to do this, that her family has sacrificed enough. Please don't do this. And it was in a very large room with a lot of people. It was not open to the press. But there was a senior age, the first lady, who then went back and said, would that answer be different if you knew he was running against Trump? Because I think the mindset in Biden world was that

Biden can do this if it's going to be Trump. He's the only one that beats Trump. That was the argument, that he was the only one who had beaten Trump. And so that donor immediately said, of course not. I don't want either of them to be 78 or older and running for president. He said, I don't want my doctor, my surgeon or my pilot to be 82 either. So no, they were hearing this. But all of that, if you understand the Bidens and their mindset, again, if you go back to like and understand what happened in 87 when they were pushed out very

publicly and in a humiliating way, it was not they were only going to double down ever if they read op-eds or if they saw people on the news or people like that who were recommending that he shouldn't and can't. Because in their experience and what we experienced during the primary and the first couple years of the White House, it was basically Joe has defied gravity. Joe always beats expectations, and there's always the doubting class. How do you reconcile that the public was able to have a better understanding of where he was in his decline than someone who was on the inside such as yourself? Well, I mean, even when I, on the outside, was always, you know, I always knew they were running for reelection. That was always the plan since the transition. So the talk about, like, building a bridge to the next generation.

I mean, he did sort of, I mean, he did all but say it was going to be one term. Yeah. Well, yeah. And he never intended that. And he implied that, you know, he was a bridge to the next generation. Right. He didn't say when that bridge would be. It was when when he was finished. And no, there I was never under. It was let's just put it this way. It was made very clear to me when I raised the issue behind closed doors.

You know, something like I think I said, oh, well, we're not actually running for reelection. So what does it matter? And somebody, you know, immediately, you know, you know, dropped the hammer on me and said, why wouldn't he be running? Of course, we're running for reelection. This is a after, this is a second term thing we're going to do. This is an after the reelect. The culture and the tone was always that he was running for reelection. And our response publicly was nobody runs for four terms or for four years. It's always you run for president for eight years. And there's a lot of speculation and especially people on the right look at Dr. Jill Biden. And I'm sure you've heard this and say, yeah, it's cruel that she was propping up her husband and there was a briefing late in his term

that I think she took the helm of and people were saying that it was some type of big power grab. Yeah, you have to separate reality from rhetoric. Was she propping him up? No, but was she certainly undeterred and as driven to defy the doubters? Of course she was because she believed in him.

But she had her own life. Like she had her own career. She continued her own career. She can't stand politics. to be president again or to continue being president, she'd be the first person in her convertible headed to the beach and would never have a reason to come back to Washington because she didn't really use her platform. And, you know, I we used to fight about this all the time. But like she wasn't she didn't have her own agenda there. She didn't use her office to sort of pursue a policy agenda or whip votes the way many first ladies have done for

their initiatives. She did not do that. She didn't want to do that. Our office was essentially a continued version of the campaign. It was a permanent campaign surrogate operation, which means that we were integrated with the West Wing as, for better or for worse, we were very integrated in the West Wing. And she always had a seat at the table because our representatives were there. But because we considered ourselves and they considered us a partner in going out and selling to the American people his vision, his goals, his agenda, the American Rescue Plan, the infrastructure, the, sorry, the... Chipsack.

Well, chipsack, but we were kind of leading the effort for vaccinations all over the country at that time and for the first year generally. So I considered it what you would call sort of an event-driven operation that was very coordinated and very integrated into the West Wing. Let me get your response to, Beto O'Rourke had some very strong comments with the Pod Save guys recently that I want to get your reaction to. Let's go ahead and take a listen. This is B7, guys. Let's go ahead and take a listen. Just to be clear, Biden should not have run again. And to be even more clear, he failed this country in the most

important job that he had. In fact, the entire rationale for his presidency the first time and the rationale he tried to sell us on for his attempt to run for reelection, only I can stop Donald Trump. And he failed to do that. And it's not just you and me, but our kids and grandkids and the generations that follow that might have to pay the price for this. We might very well lose the greatest country that this world has ever known. And it might be in part because of the decision that Biden and those around him made to run for re-election instead of having an open primary where the greatest talent that the Democratic Party can muster could be on that stage to have a competition of ideas and track record and vision. I think that credibility problem is going to persist up until when Democrats say we fucked up and we made a terrible mistake. So he says he failed this country.

I think the current president is a fascist. I think I'll leave Emily out of this. I suspect that you agree with that assessment. I mean, do you think that? I don't, but go ahead. You think Beto's right? Yeah, I don't disagree with anything Beto said. And look, I said to the New York Times, Peter Baker, in an article in February 2024, when Biden was still in, that this is a gamble that you are, that they are taking because they believe that only they can do this and that his legacy, and this was more of an article about, I think his legacy or it was, you know, the pressures that they were facing. And yeah, damn right, there's pressure because his legacy, and I hope, I assumed they knew this in

February of 2024 when I gave this quote, but that his legacy was going to be defined on whether he wins or loses to Donald Trump. And that running was taking ahead of his time on. We're not talking about those things. unpleasant for the family to sort of reconcile the legacy that historians and the news media are and Democrats are going to be writing in the short term because of the decisions that they made. Do you have any personal regrets about how you handled or, you know, you didn't speak up? No, because I was speaking up in after I left, at least throughout 2023. And the way I spoke up, and the way I spoke up was he needs to be his own advocate. When I saw the disengagement, when I saw that they were giving up opportunities like Kristen Welker's first Sunday show, Meet the Press, I tweeted, all right, we can't, if we're going to lose the news cycle,

we can't complain that they cover Trump for the entire weekend and all the news he makes because we are turning it down. Or the Super Bowl interview. Or not doing press conferences and press avails. But did you think that was because he couldn't do it? Because he wasn't up to it? I didn't know. Or did you think he thought it was just a bad strategy? Actually, I thought it was a bad strategy. I didn't know and I didn't care because I knew for three years, by that point, we were running no matter what. And as a student of history, I know, like, okay. I even said out loud that it was a mistake to mess around with the primary calendar

because it looks like we're scared. It looks like we have something to hide. And we don't need to mess with the primary calendar. It does him a disservice. All of these things I was saying, I'm from ground zero of the swing district and a swing state in Pennsylvania 7 that we lost. And it was the one of two counties that flipped from Obama to Trump to Biden to Trump. Reaganomics is what killed Bethlehem Steel. At least that's what the people of Allentown and Bethlehem believe.

So to wrap your economy in Bidenomics and take credit, wrap your name around inflation and an unsettled economy. I wrote this in an op-ed and they hated it. They were furious that I was trying to at least say you have to show, not tell. You can't be a candidate and run for president and try to run out the clock. It's just not going to work. It's not going to work, especially against a candidate like Donald Trump, who embraces the media, who is confident enough to go and say,

go anywhere and talk to anyone. And they attacked me. They smeared me. They planted stories about me. They were terrible to me. It paid a personal price for speaking out. Did I speak out about his age? No, I did not speak about his age because, again, my experience was that I never had that issue with him. My issue was what they clearly decided was a choice not to engage with voters, not to engage with the media and the public in the way that you do when you run for re-election. And I was seeing the same polls you're talking about. None of those polls changed. The polls in 2022 and 2023 were saying at least three-fourths of our voters did not want him to run again.

People and Democrats were speaking through the polls. I saw that, I said that, and I would say things that would make them very angry. Like, we loved polls four years ago, because when we were running for an entire year, about 200, I went and looked it up, 251 out of 256 public polls had us ahead. And we loved polls then. So I really hated that my old teammates were denying polls, denying data, denying the journalism out there, denying the inflation numbers. It made me angry because you're supposed to at least try to see your flaws and your vulnerabilities in real life for what they are, and then try to confront them and change them. And they wouldn't do any of that. It was undermining the media, trashing the media, trashing the Times, trashing the journal.

And I didn't get it. They ran scared. Well, these were the things I had a problem with. And these were the things that ultimately cost me a lot of close friendships and probably my relationship with them. But the other thing that they didn't like that I'll go ahead and say to you guys is they didn't like I was joining the effort to help their son. The Bidens loved it. I was the only public advocate for their son because I hated the idea of children being weaponized or families of politicians being weaponized. And I saw what it did to the Bidens in real life, 19 and 20, and through the White House. And the people in that White House, who called me disloyal,

were throwing their son under the bus constantly. Nobody was using the bully pulpit to fight back against Comer and Jim Jordan. They weren't doing anything. They weren't fighting back to help Hunter. I was. I was out there. But the White House did not want a a they want a distance from Hunter, which is why, you know, Hunter fired Anita Dunn's husband and brought in his own knife fighter, Abby Lowell. And they didn't like that. They didn't like that we were being aggressive in defending their son, in defending Hunter and trying to set up a legal defense fund for him, which by the way, George Bush 41's donors did for his son who cost the American people a lot more money than Hunter Biden. My last question is on family. It's, you know, I look at Joe Biden. I wonder if he was in a place where he could be trusted to make the decision about whether he can run again.

If he was like sort of had his faculties about him in order to say, I'm running for reelection. Who was telling him or was it him? From your understanding, is that he wanted to run again. And so, as you said, Jill Biden was all in as long as. But was he in a position to competently say, I want to run again and then have the people who love him say, oh, yes, this is a good idea? Or should people have stepped in and said, you're not well. I don't want to dodge your questions, but you're correct that he did think that. Again, I do not know whether.

Again, there's a difference between covering up age and mental decline, and I have no idea behind the scenes whether he was—there's a cognitive issue. What I will say is— But we did see it in front of the scene in the debate. Yes. We ended up seeing—yeah. But what we saw, we don't know because none of us are medical doctors, right? So we can't say—what we can say is something was wrong. Something was not right.

Going back to the point where if you can't perform as a candidate, you can't be running. Yeah. Because you can be president, but there's a difference between running for president and running the country. So who do you blame? So here's the thing. They were one of the smartest strategists in Democratic politics. I'm talking about a pollster who has a lot of Democratic candidates as clients and governors, senators.

John Anzalone was our chief pollster in 2020 and 2019, a Biden guy since 1987. He was iced out after 2022 because he. By who? The team. Who's the team? It's Anita Dunn, Mike Donilon. I don't know about the others. Dr. Biden? I don't know. She would not make a decision like that. But the other ones would be the ones to say, all right, he cannot be showing the president this data because John was actually sending us monthly data and polling updates in the first year on, you know, where where the party was, where the country was, the mood of the country on inflation, things like that, before the Virginia gubernatorial.

And in 2022, they just iced mouth. John was never even told he was going to be not with us in 2024. The other person. They didn't like the numbers. They didn't like the numbers. And Steve Shale, another one who ran President Obama's state operation in Florida, not once but twice, ran the draft Biden movement in 2015, was doing analysis and he was doing surveys and polling. He gave a, in June of 2022, he also provided the boss data that wasn't looking good about 2024 and what we needed to do to fix that. And at that point, he was iced out. Never even invited to the White House in four years. Well, Michael, thank you so much for coming by,

sharing your experience. Sorry for the over-talking. No, no, no. There's a lot to talk about in this and there's a lot of different facets. I love them. I love Joe and Jill Biden and I love the family, but I do think they were done a disservice

by the people around them. And I hope they can start making adjustments to some of the advice that they've been getting. All right. Michael LaRosa, thank you. You're welcome. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a

miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia

that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily it's your not the father week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes, my father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. Now I find out he's trying to give it to his irresponsible son instead.

But I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. So what are they going to do to get those millions back? That's so unfair. Well, the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago. Scandalous. But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time. Oh my God. And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family in the process.

So do they get the millions of dollars back or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well, to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, the movement that exploded in 2024. VoiceOver is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other.

It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now.

Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever down, I believe. But the Moody's U.S. credit downgrade, as Bloomberg says, quote, sets the stage for a jolt to the trading week. Big tech stocks go from a safe bet to a question mark. Now, they also say, quote, traders are bracing for a rocky start to the week after the U.S. was stripped of its last top credit rating. Now, just zooming in on that last top credit rating, Moody's was the last to formally make this decision. And they cited, quote, mounting concern about debt as it knocked the country's score down a notch. Scott Bessant called the move a, quote, lagging indicator. So they're once again kind of trying

to point the finger back at Joe Biden. And he was on Meet the Press. We have some clips of that. So just yesterday, Scott Bessant was asked by Kristen Welker to comment on it. Let's go ahead and take a listen to C2. Does the president's tax bill need to do more to address the nation's debt and deficit? Well, Kristen, first of all, I think that Moody's is a lagging indicator. I think that's what everyone thinks of credit agencies. Larry Summers and I don't agree on everything, but he said that when they downgraded the U.S. in 2011. So it's a lagging indicator. And just like Sean Duffy said with our air traffic control system, we didn't get here in the past 100 days. It's the Biden administration and the spending that we have seen over the past four

years. We inherited 6.7% deficit to GDP, the highest when we weren't in a recession, not in a war. And we are determined to bring the spending down and grow the economy. Fair enough. Why is it appropriate for the president to accept a $400 million jet from Qatar? Well, it's not the president accepted to be the United States government. And Senator Mullins said this weekend that the talks had actually begun under the Biden administration. The President Trump has brought back trillions of investments in the United States. Every stop we made that the enthusiasm in Saudi Arabia, in Qatar,

in the United Arab Emirates to invest in the United States. That they wanna push more and more the funds here. And if we go back to your initial question on the Moody's downgrade, who cares? Qatar doesn't, Saudi doesn't, UAE doesn't. They're all pushing money in. They've made 10-year investment plans. All right, so we can go ahead and put the next element up on the screen as well. Consumer sentiment, this is from CNBC, slides to second lowest on record as inflation expectations jump after tariffs. So Besson, on the one hand, is correct. Biden era spending was really,

really high. And it's possible that Moody's, if they're citing concerns about debt, is still reacting to those heightened levels of spending. But if that is the case, they should, we're going to talk about this later in the show, be fairly concerned about the reconciliation bill that is about to explode the debt as it makes its way through the Republican-controlled Congress, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, the Republican-controlled Senate. Their own party is, you know, waving kind of the red flag about that problem, and it's not going well. So it's also possible that Moody's is looking at that and saying, holy smokes, tariffs needed even by the Trump administration's own admission, some form of industrial policy that is now hinging on the Republicans' ability to lose no more than two votes.

If everyone is there and voting, they can only lose two votes to get this bill passed. And if it's a deficit- deficit exploding bill, if it has industrial policy, we're still not completely sure about that. But I think to some extent, Besson is probably correct that it's a lagging indicator. The U.S. economy has been in rough shape for a long time, but also the forecast is incredibly uncertain because of Trump administration policies, again, by their own admission. They're in the middle of a sort of laboratory style experiment at the moment. And there are a lot of uncertainties in the months ahead. Crystal, what did you make of this? And do you agree that it's to some extent a lagging indicator? I mean, somewhat. These things build on each

other. But to me, it's like an indictment. It's the final indictment of Doge, too, because, you know, Doge was supposed to solve. We're going to find all this. We're going to cut two trillion dollars. It'll be all good. You know, I'm not a deficit hawk. However, I will say if we do have the world move away from the U.S. and the dollar as the world reserve currency, then we are going to have a problem with debt. I mean, this is, you know, the flight to safety of treasury bonds, like the fact that the whole world looks to us to buy our debt and, you know, to use dollars as the global reserve currency, you know, the base of basically every international transaction. Yeah, if the world moves away

from that, we are going to have to reckon with some of these things. So number one, like Doge, obviously total and complete failure. Number two, the House budget resolution that just passed through, you're talking about some $4 to $5 trillion in deficit increase because of these massive tax cuts for the rich. So if this is something you really have a concern about, then they're running a million miles in the wrong direction and did in the first Trump administration as well. So it's just as much a lacking indicator of his first administration, where they also gave massive expensive tax cuts as it is the, you know, the COVID era spending,

which was absolutely essential to keeping Americans afloat during a very rough time through no fault of their own. So, you know, I think it's, in a lot of ways, it is a real indictment of the direction and what has already been done in this Trump administration, just judging by their own goals and standards of what they claimed they wanted to set out to accomplish. And then I do think it also, you know, in terms of the world moving away from the U.S. as like the central essential nation, and this incredible privilege that we've had being at the center of the global financial system, you know, this is another sort of, this is another knock on us as being the place, the center of everything, the center of the world. And this just puts us a little bit more in the direction of a post-U.S. world order. And to the question of the lagging indicator,

when we put that CNBC tear sheet up on the screen, one of the quotes from it is the index of consumer sentiment dropped from 50.8 down from 52.2 in April. In the preliminary reading for May, that is the second lowest reading on record behind June 2022. That gets to particularly the last five months in the Trump. I mean, really, it's post-Liberation Day, post-April 2nd. But that gets to, you know, the fact that, Moody's aside, it gets to the fact that the uncertainty in the Trump era economy, which again, even by their own admission is part of their plan, is affecting the economy in and of itself. Like, it's kind of meta, but if you're going to create an uncertainty that will actually, if you're going to create uncertainty as leverage, it's going to have an immediate effect on the economy. Also, I mean, the tariffs were supposed to make us rich.

What happened to that? I'm feeling liberated. What happened to that? Crystal, I guess you're not feeling liberated. But some of us are feeling liberated. Yeah. Well, congratulations to you, Em. Thank you.

There was one other piece of this that I actually wanted to hear your thoughts on. That part where Besson's like, well, why should we care? Kusher doesn't care. The UAE doesn't care. Saudi Arabia doesn't care. It's like, wow. And it reminded me of something actually Ro Khanna has been really going after them for, which again, is the distance between the America First rhetoric and the reality of this administration. Setting up this massive AI data center in UAE versus we were told, oh, well, this is all these jobs of the future. We're going to be here in the U.S. and, you know, as a core part of the America First project.

And yet here we are. Instead, they're going to be in the UAE, apparently. Yeah, I thought that was a great point from Roe. He was making it over the weekend. I mean, them saying hedging their bets with these Gulf countries, it's actually like kind of frightening for I mean, who knows what happens with the next president? The Trump administration can do whatever the Trump administration does for three years, potentially, and then things can change. But it's quite a way to go about it.

And Crystal, I really want to move on to this post from Donald Trump, and I also just kind of want to inject it straight into my veins. This is C4. This is a true social post from Trump, and I also just kind of want to inject it straight into my veins. This is C4. This is a true social post from Trump where he said, Walmart should stop trying to blame tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain. Walmart made billions of dollars last year, far more than expected. Between Walmart and China, they should, as is said, quote, eat the tariffs. As one says. As is said, the popular phrase. Popular say, eat the tariffs, all caps. As one says. As is said, the popular phrase, eat the tariffs. And not charge valued customers anything, all caps. I'll be watching and so will your customers. The reason I say I wanted to inject this into my vein, Crystal, is this is how I generally feel about

most things that get passed down to consumers from these corporations. It drives me completely insane. They never pass it down to their workers. And then they're doing all kinds of stupid stuff like buybacks and whatever else. But it's actually, I think, a really fantastic point. But the problem for Trump, obviously, is he's not really doing anything to force them to not pass the costs down. And there are all kinds of carrots and sticks that can be used as part of an industrial policy. So that aside, I do want to say,

I mean, according to Business Insider, I'm sorry, according to the AFL-CIO, which tracks CEO pay, Walmart's CEO is the highest paid CEO in all of retail, which is not surprising at all, but took home a cool $27 million last year. And again, if you're looking, Target CEO, by the way, that was down to $19 million. Costco, $16 million. I mean, this is an incredibly high level of CEO pay. The ratio to worker pay is not great, obviously,

either. And that stuff actually does drive me absolutely insane that we just say, you know, instead of maybe reshoring, eating some costs, whatever, they insist on paying their executives at completely unpatriotic, unethical levels. And it is absolutely bananas. So on the one hand, yeah, I think Donald Trump is absolutely 1000% correct on this question. On the other hand, there has to be a series of carrots and sticks. Well, and listen, corporations are going to corporation. They're going to do their capital. It's the free market, baby. Yeah. And you're not doing anything to your point to make that not be the case. But also, watch me here defend Walmart. When you're talking about a 30% tariff, their profit margins are not 30%. Like you can't just eat that. There is inevitably going to be some amount of that,

even if they eat some of it and they can eat some of it. This is a very profitable corporation. Don't get me wrong. And they pay their CEO an insane amount. All of those things are absolutely true. They don't have a 30% profit margin. So if many of their goods are coming from China or parts coming from China and being assembled here, et cetera, then what you're going to end up with is, yes, some costs getting passed on to consumers. Or the other alternative is some costs getting passed on to the small businesses that are selling those goods to Walmart? And that's actually where a lot of the squeeze is going to come. Remember, we talked about this lady who has her, like, busy baby mat thing that she finally got into Walmart.

Small business, you know, based here in America. She wanted to make her product in America. It was literally impossible, so she made it in China. And, you know, it was the only place where she could really go and get what she needed for this very specialized product. She gets her product picked up by Walmart. Well, that's at a set contracted price. So and Walmart, I think, weren't they the ones that put out the thing that were like, we're not accepting price increases. Sorry, with regard to tariffs.

So it's going to be people like her who get completely screwed, who are locked into this contract at this price that is now completely unattainable. Now, 30% tariff is better than the 145% tariff that it was, but that is still a dramatic increase in costs. And, you know, I don't know the specifics for her business, but for many small and medium business owners, that will completely put them under. So that's the actual reality that you're talking about here in terms of who is going to, quote unquote, eat the tariffs. Yeah. And again, like it's Donald Trump knows who or how Walmart is going to handle this. Like he knows exactly that they can't. The CEO pay thing is an interesting glimpse into all of this. Like it's

not just one company. Like, Walmart couldn't just stop paying this guy. It's like 20 million of this is tied up in stock awards annually. So, like, they can't do that. He could choose to be a decent human being and pass some of those, some of his salary on to workers and not, you know, hike prices. Like, he could choose to do that. But the entire system is not going to fix itself because the Walmart, because, first of all, Walmart in and of itself reacts as Donald Trump wants them. And singling out Walmart, by the way, means that he's trying to take away some of the market advantage for them and that their competitors can do differently.

So it's an incredibly fragile ecosystem that he's working with here. And you can't just expect one person or one retail chain, even as massive as it is, to do those sorts of things. But CEO pay, I mean, these guys, if you want to find a CEO, they're all making stupid, stupid money. And so you have to pay them competitively. The thing to do is just to create a culture of shame around that level of intake. And especially when it's the ratio, like that should be so incredibly shameful. The idea that you would be taking home this type of money and then hiking prices on consumers because there's an attempt to actually resource the manufacturing and those like that's that should be shameful. And so I think Trump is trying to do some version

of that. But it's it's it's pretty hard for him, especially when they're doing their tax cut bill. Yeah, they're about to cut corporate taxes. Best in school is to take it from 21 to 15 percent. It's a really mixed messaging situation for the administration. That's about the most positive thing I think you could possibly say about it. But yes, I'm in favor of creating culture of shame, regrowing a culture of shame around this and many other things besides, because I think shamelessness is one of the sort of like key values of MAGA world and Trump. We're actually going to talk about this and the tax block. So stick around. And we're going to talk about how it was created and how it sort of was grown and on the right and how that took off. So that's actually a good tie in to that segment. Let's listen to C6. This is Donald

Trump talking about the return of those arbitrary tariffs. Go ahead, roll it. We just reached a fantastic trade deal, as you know, with the United Kingdom, which was wonderful. And we have another big one that we just reached with China. China deals a very big deal. It's in the process of continuing to be formed. But they wanted to make that deal very badly. And we have at the same time 150 countries that want to make a deal, but you're not able to see that many countries. So at a certain point over the next two to three weeks, I think Scott and Howard will be sending letters out, essentially telling people, it would be very fair, but we'll be telling people what they'll be paying to do business in the United States. So essentially be paying to be doing business in the United States. I guess you could say they could appeal it.

But for the most part, I think we're going to be very fair. But it's not possible to meet the number of people that want to see us. But this was coming to UAE was very important. Coming to Saudi Arabia and Qatar was very important to me because of personal relationships that I had maybe more than anything else. So, yeah, that was Trump in the UAE. Now, this is— The personal relationships part was interesting, too, there at the end of like, yeah, I probably went there because I just—I like these guys. They were going to give me some business deals, so.

Yeah, and he also—him also saying we aren't—we don't have the ability to meet with all of the people that want to meet with us. That's something we were told that they did have the ability to do during Liberation Day. 90 deals in 90 days. Remember? Wasn't that the goal? It's no problem whatsoever. This is the greatest dealmaker of all time. And he's going to put on a master class for all of us.

They're teasing what, like 18 deals that they say they have? Something like that over the course of this week that they're planning to get to the bottom of. Yeah, I mean, it sounds like what they're doing right there is lowering expectations for that not coming to fruition. And maybe they'll get a few key deals, UK, India, maybe Japan. Like maybe they will get a few things that they can point to and say, listen, this is we put the screws to everyone. But it sounds like they're actually not getting the response that they want from other countries and are lowering expectations. And other countries looked at what China did, which is basically nothing and win.

Yeah, that's true. And they're like, well, why should we come on bended knee when we've got a model here in what the Chinese were able to pull off? Now, not every country has, no other country really, has as much sort of power in these negotiations as the Chinese do. But I do think that that was a learning and a model and a lesson for other countries that make it less likely that you're going to be able to strike all of these deals that we were promised going in. And Scott Besson was pressed on, okay, well, so if you're going to just sort of like figure out whatever the tariff rate is without going through these negotiations, what level are we looking at?

And he said effectively, well, I guess we'll go back to the Liberation Day rates. So the chart, you know, with the penguins and all of that and 50% on Lesotho and all of that, apparently, that's coming back. So let's take a listen to Treasury Secretary Scott Besson. Mr. Secretary, does that effectively mean that these negotiations with other countries are over? And how high should they expect tariffs to go, above 10%? This means that they're not negotiating in good faith. They are going to get a letter saying, here is the rate.

So I would expect that everyone would come and negotiate in good faith. You expect that rate though that you would slap on any country that you think is not negotiating in good faith to be above 10%? Well, I think that it would be the April 2nd level. Some countries were at 10%, some were substantially higher. So back to Liberation Day, Emily. Well, that's why, so what was this? Yeah, it was last week.

I think it was last Monday. I just like was not willing to call Trump's China tariff move a capitulation quite yet because I'm like, I think they still don't know what's happening. Like there's still they don't really have a strategy here. Their strategy is still just like let people come to us and do ad hoc, have a kind of ad hoc approach to putting the screws to other countries and getting, like, they don't have levels that they want to see other countries get to. They just want to sort of negotiate some of these non-trade barriers and like the non-tariff trade barriers and all of this stuff. And I think that's what we're seeing from that Trump clip and this Besson clip is just that they're feeling like they're not getting good enough deals. And so

they're going back to threatening April 2nd levels. I mean, it's just completely unpredictable, which is not what they need right now at all. They need some type of certainty. At this point, they need to have a lot of deals inked that look good, that look pretty, that people can be confident that that's where the level is going to be going forward, that people can be, even if they think it's too high and it's not going to be great for the United States, at the end of the day, they can say, this is what it's going to look like. And we can make investments accordingly. The bill is a disaster for them right now in the House. And well, it's not even over at the Senate side yet, but like that's already choppy. So if they're even able to pass that is an open question. And despite, or on top of that, they now don't have, like they're going

away from clarity on these questions and they might need to, to get good deals. Are those investment tax credits even in this bill? Do we know? Yes. They are. Yeah, they're in the bill, but I don't know, like that could change. I mean, that could change when it gets to the Senate. It's the whole reconciliation process. Right is so, so, so uncertain. You're throwing things in, taking them out at the last minute to make these deals. So who knows if they stick around? You know, the other—the reason why I felt comfortable calling it a capitulation and still do is in the context of China, the initial rhetoric for Trump was so maximalist about like, I don't even know why we have overseas supply chains. And they were talking about a total

decoupling from China. And backing off of that unilaterally without getting anything really in exchange, I mean, really, truly nothing in exchange from China other than, oh, they'll talk to us about fentanyl. That, I think, is fair to call a capitulation. They realized they could not take this immediate maximalist approach to China specifically and be able to survive what the stock and the bond markets and the domestic political situation and all of that was going to throw at them. Now, I think it's fair to say, and I felt this as well, that doesn't mean that Trump is done with tariffs.

I was going to say, I think it could still change. Well, and first of all, I mean, 30%, like, I just, we got a level set here. If we had gotten 30%, if there had never been the 145%, and just out of the gates what was announced was 30%, we would all be like, holy shit. You'll be freaking out. That is a gigantic tariff. Yeah, 100%. That's like Smoot-Hawley-level style tariff.

It's a massive tax increase on working-class people. Like, it is an extraordinary economic, political event. And, as I've also been saying, Trump loves tariffs because they give him all of this unilateral power. And we've learned more about that since the Liberation Day and what they've been using, some of the things that he's been using that leverage in order to accomplish. And actually, one of the key things is apparently to help out his buddy Elon Musk with Starlink, you know, they've been using the State Department has been using the tariffs as sort of a, you know, mob boss tactic to get countries that were reluctant to take up Starlink to go ahead and, you know, accept to have licenses for this product. So, you know, I don't think that he's done with tariffs

because if there's one thing we've seen in Trump 2.0, it is all about him consolidating as much power as he can in his own hands and in the hands of the executive. And tariffs are a key part of that story that allows him to, you know, all the businesses have to come to him, all the countries have to come to him, something that he can use as a carrot, as a stick, etc.

And that's why I think we're far from finished with the tariff conversation. Yeah, absolutely. And your point about the 30% level. I mean, when Oren Kass and American Compass proposed that 10% global tariff, there was a massive freakout. And now that looks like sweet relief to the markets and to the corporate class. Well, what was inflation at its peak under Biden with COVID? It never hit 10%. And so if you're talking, if you are talking about 10% around the world, you know, it may not be exactly 10% inflation that you're going to experience, but it's going to be a significant amount. I mean, that is a dramatic economic event, just 10% across the board,

let alone 30% here and 50% there and, you know, what they contemplated on April 2nd, and apparently are still contemplating going back to. And it's possible we look back at this moment and, you know, over the course of the last two plus months, I mean, it's been so crazy. You never know how this stuff ages because they're so ad hoc about this. And again, I think they see that as part of the leverage that it's creating uncertainty. And other countries, to your point, have to kind of come on bended knee. And that's sort of what they're saying here is Trump and the UAE in that clip we rolled was saying, we don't even have time to meet with all of you. You want to trade with us, but we don't even have time to talk to you. Like, that's how powerful we are. And of course, I think we could look back on this and be like,

this was just a moment where they were, you know, feeling uncertain about the deals. They felt like they weren't getting enough deals. And because they flexed like this, everyone ended up coming back and, you know, making better deals, whatever. But that's just really not the trajectory, again, of the last like six weeks. We're just, how many weeks into, yeah, like six, seven weeks into post-Liberation Day world. And there aren't a lot of deals coming to fruition. There's scattershot ones. And I think some of them are like actually good changes, the way that it's looking with the UK. It looks like a decent step. It looks like a step in the right direction roughly.

But this was worldwide essentially. And also it's not like, I mean, whether you think that the U.K. deal is marginally better than the status quo or not, it's not like this was a game changer. No, no, no, no, no. It's worth all of this, you know. No, not, no, no, no. It's all of this, you know? No, not at all. And that's the thing. It's like you just need to see, I mean, you would need to see a lot more than what's been seen so far. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left.

In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and re-examining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus.

So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily it's your not the father week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes, My father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. Now I find out he's trying to give it to his irresponsible son instead, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back.

Hold up. So what are they going to do to get those millions back? That's so unfair. Well, the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago. Scandalous. But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time. Oh my God.

And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back, or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well, to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever thought about going voiceover?

I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a

relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to Boy Sober on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's go ahead and turn to this extreme weather that we saw with horrific deadly consequences in the middle of the country, Kentucky and Missouri in particular, really hard hit by this strong line of tornadoes and storms.

We can put some images up on the screen here. 26 people are dead after these tornadoes hit in those two states. Here's some footage from USA Today. They say deadly tornadoes leave a trail of destruction in Kentucky. There you actually see the tornado itself. They say this is Scott County, Missouri. This is terrifying. Part of an apartment building just blows apart like it's made of absolutely nothing. We've got some of the aftermath here. I'm not sure if this is Kentucky or Missouri. I think this is in Kentucky, but I'm not 100% sure. But you can see just the level of devastation. And this is in London, Kentucky. Looks like it was a small airport there. You can see the debris and wreckage of some of those small planes that were just absolutely torn apart. And,

you know, this obviously is really significant in and of itself, just given the loss of lives, at least 26 people dead that we know of at this point. But it also has raised some real questions about the impacts of Doge cuts and whether there was sufficient warning given or whether more lives could have been saved if the relevant weather office there, which had experienced these cuts, had been fully staffed. Ryan Hall, who's a fantastic weather YouTuber, Kyle's a big weather guy, he watches him all the time on YouTube, was astonished that there hadn't been sufficient warnings put out at the time as he was covering this live. Let's go ahead and take a listen to a little of what he had to say. What we're talking about here is a big deal. I am so

surprised that we don't have an upgraded warning from the National Weather Service. Some of the things that I do want to mention is I'm pretty sure this is the National Weather Service in Jackson, Kentucky, my local National Weather Service here. This is one of the places that's understaffed right now. I don't know if you guys have been following the news, big layoffs across National Weather Service and stuff like that. That might be a result of a problem that we're having there. If so, that's crazy. That's crazy. We're about to have a large tornado go through a very populated area with much less warning than what there should be as a result of that. Guys, all I can tell you right now is if you know anybody in Somerset, call them. Call them right now and let them know what's going on. I'm not kidding. This is a big deal. This is a huge

deal. We've got a massive tornado about to slam through Oak Hill, Bourbon, and Ferguson here. And he was absolutely right in the dire nature of those warnings. That Kentucky weather office, they say, scrambles for staffing as severe storms bear down. New York Times write up here, Washington Post had a write-up as well. National Weather Service office in eastern Kentucky was scrambling to cover the overnight forecast on Friday as these tornadoes were moving through much of the eastern U.S. According to the union that represents the department's meteorologist, Tom Fahey, the legislative director for that union, was one of four that no longer had a permanent overnight forecaster after hundreds of people left the agency as a result of cuts ordered by the Department of Government Efficiency.

Mr. Fahey said on Friday that because of the threat for flooding, hail, and tornadoes facing eastern Kentucky, the West Weather Service had to find forecasting help for that office. A spokeswoman for the Weather Service said the Jackson office would be relying on nearby offices for support throughout the weekend. So, Emily, that's, you know, the lay of the land here. Now, I will say that the government is claiming, no, this did not impact. They were able to fully staff. They were able to have the coverage that they need. But, you know, it certainly raises questions whether lives could have been saved if this office had been fully staffed and not subject

to those doge cuts. I mean, there should be an investigation. And I think it's crazy, Crystal. I mean, this always happens with tornadoes. You lived in Kentucky briefly, didn't you? I did, yeah. Yeah, so you know this. Whenever there's a snowstorm in New York, I actually, like when I used to teach students, I would use this as an example. Whenever there's a snowstorm in New York, it's national news for days. A tornado can rip through the heartland, kill 28 people, and it's a blip on the national news radar because most of the newsrooms are in New York. They're in D.C. They're in L.A. And the gutting of local media means that there are just a few newsrooms that are kind of concentrated in big cities like St. Louis, for example. They're out the Midwest, but the main producers and editors and everything aren't there.

And so, I mean, this is getting to the bottom of whether or not these cuts actually may have actually resulted in a loss of life. I really hope that national media is sending people, is paying attention to the local media, is sending people out to get to the bottom of this, because it's a hugely significant story. And it's one of those things that when you look at Elon Musk and the way he's been parading around with the chainsaw at CPAC, for example, that Melee gifted him, it's never been funny, right? It's not, it's, it's not funny. It's 80% of federal workers are outside of DC. And I say that as somebody who loves the idea, like in theory of Doge. Um, but like you're, you're actually playing with people's lives and, uh, it'd be one thing if the Trump administration had tapped someone like Russ Vogt, like a type of like policy person to do it. But they went with Elon as the figurehead of it,

and it just gave the whole project this sense of, what's the right word for it? Like, I don't know if casualness is the right word, but... Haphazard, yeah. Yeah, this sense that, like, and he has openly said that his strategy involves mass firings, and then if you realize you need to bring people back, then you bring people back.

Like, he said that's the way to do it, basically, is that, like, you learn who's essential after you fire them. On a nationwide scale, I mean, we're talking about one of the biggest countries in the world, one of the biggest countries that has ever existed, this massive piece of land with a huge population. That's a really, really, really, really, really dangerous game. And that is obvious to everyone. So I'm really curious. I mean, maybe it turns out that, you know, they were, they came in overnight and they staffed up because they realized these storms were going to be bad and this would have happened no matter what. Maybe that turns out to be the case. But when you juxtapose it with National Weather Service cuts and Elon Musk parading around with a chainsaw. It's a pretty bad look. Yeah. Well, and here's what I would say, too, is I do think some of the cuts were just completely

haphazard. But even with Russ Vought, Project 2025 took direct aim at NOAA. And there is an ideological project on the right that would like to see some of this weather tracking privatized so that we don't all, you know, Ryan Hall and everybody else who wants access to the data doesn't get access to the data. You have to pay for it. There is an ideological agenda behind it as well. So it's not just random that these offices get hit with cuts and the National Weather Service gets hit with cuts and, you know, NOAA overall gets hit with cuts. There is also an ideological project behind it. And this is the fallout from

that project or demonstrates what the potential for the fallout could be from that project. There are a lot of things the government does that, you know, actually are effective that we just don't think about, you know, like, they do track the weather very effectively. It takes a lot of resources. It takes a lot of resources. It takes a lot of people. It takes, you know, these weather balloons going up, which also have been cut significantly. But actually, they do have done a pretty good job at that. And that is now being put at risk.

We see it also, you know, with the air traffic controllers and the horrific situation, you know, with the FAA. Again, this is something that is a life or death issue that we really depend on the federal government for. And when it doesn't function, when it does function, you don't think about it too much. When it doesn't function, suddenly it becomes really front of mind if you want to, you know, go somewhere for Memorial Day weekend and be able to actually, you know, get where you're going and not be terrified of what's going to happen when you're trying to land. And there's another, let's go ahead and put this FEMA piece up on the screen because this is, you know, connected, obviously. You have a newly appointed head of FEMA. And Trump has been-

FEMA is a mess. Like, a mess right now. I think everyone, yeah. And like, I think anyone who's been associated with FEMA would have said, going into this administration, there were things that needed to be resolved. Trump has an ideological agenda against FEMA at all. He thinks this should be basically dismantled and it should all be sent to the states. Now, if you have a minor weather disaster, states may have sufficient funds and resources to handle it. When you're talking about increasing extreme weather events year after year after year, you need the federal government just for, you know, resources sake to be able to assist. And states do not have the capability to be able to respond. So this is coming, you know, there was some leaked information coming out of FEMA that the newly appointed head says the agency does not yet have a fully formed disaster

response plan going into hurricane season. I'll read you a little bit of this. David Richardson, who previously served as a senior official at DHS, does not have a background in emergency management, told staff he would share a hurricane plan with Kristi Noem after he completes it late next week. He said Thursday he's 80 to 85 percent done with the plan. Agency is already months behind schedule in its preparations for the hurricane season, which starts June 1, and is expected to have above normal activity. Richardson said in a recent meeting, though FEMA staff that clarifying the intent of the president, who has called for terminating the agency, was a challenge in preparing a strategy for hurricane season, according to a video recording of the meeting

that was viewed by the Wall Street Journal. And there was another wild quote in here, Emily. He was apparently asked during this town hall meeting if the will of the president or the well-being of Americans was more important. And he responded, I think those two things are essentially the same. So this is a, you know, this is a Trump loyalist, yes man, whatever. And FEMA is dramatically behind in preparing for the impending hurricane season. Yeah. The Reuters headline three days ago, staff losses and low morale are derailing FEMA hurricane preparations, internal document says. And then there's another headline. This is two days ago as well. Trump's firing a FEMA director unsettles GOP senators.

And the Republicans made a big deal, rightfully so, of the FEMA response after the hurricanes. Helene, yeah. After Helene, North Carolina, South Carolina last fall. That was, I mean, reasonable.

Everyone was right to be outraged about the FEMA response there. Um, so if, if the FEMA response to these tornadoes, which have now killed what 28 people, um, is lacking, Trump is going to hear from the senators in those states, Republican senators in those states. He's going to hear from, um, the governors in those states, Republican governors in those states. And what's interesting, Crystal, is that's the type of thing that will start to change the permission structure for Doge and for massive cuts if Republicans are saying the way you were going about these cuts are worse than just continuing to spend at the same level. Yeah. Which is not impossible, by the way. That's the thing. Like,

you can, again, like, I support the idea of Doge in theory. And I would say, like, in some cases, these cuts are, like, they, you can still end up, when you're making cuts that are necessary, or that I think are necessary from a perspective of, like, just a more limited government perspective, you look at it and you say, the cuts themselves can be worse than the alternative, the status quo, because they're done in a way that is cruel. And one thing I wanted to mention is if you are in D.C., you don't understand how important the emergency warning systems are for tornadoes and saving lives because people rely on them to make a judgment about where to go, what to do. Do they get out of the soccer carpool and go home right away? Is it that serious? Or are they upending, you know, everyone's routine for something that's not serious at all? The warnings are important to that if you live in the Midwest or in the South or in an area with tornadoes. And if you don't understand that and you're just saying we will fire people, then we will learn and rehire anybody who's necessary.

People get caught and fall through the cracks and tragedy happens. And some of his strongest supporters, like in terms of states, have already been impacted by the denial of FEMA assistance. So flooding in West Virginia, FEMA denied assistance for windstorm damage in Washington, not a Trump state. But FEMA staff said there's no longer a clear process for assessing assistance requests from states. They're concerned disaster victims aren't getting the help they need. In Arkansas, they were initially denied funds. But Sarah Huckabee Sanders is now the governor of Arkansas. So she was able to go to Trump and say, please, we need these funds. And eventually they were able to, they relented.

But if you don't happen to have a personal relationship with apparently our sovereign monarch now, then you, you know, then your residents are going to get screwed. Including, you know, in a state like West Virginia, which I covered here, that flooding was apocalyptic. It's the worst they've ever seen. The level of disaster. And it hit the poorest part of an already poor state, which has been screwed over and left behind, you know, many times over. And so denied assistance for flooding there is, you know, it honestly to me, it shocks the conscience. But this is the direction that they have gone in. And they put in just, you know, a Trump sycophant at the head of this agency who was apparently unprepared for the hurricane season. So, you know, it's very it's unsettling. It's very unsettling to see things that were previously taken for granted.

And again, not to say FEMA was great or perfect. We've all seen, you know, what happened with Katrina. We saw the inadequacy of a response in Helene, et cetera. But once again, you're taking something that needed work and you are eliminating it entirely or making it vastly worse. And I think, you know, this is an indication of potential things to come. Yeah, with a tone of flippancy and, you know, joviality. Like it's just all a chainsaw game, which is probably why Elon Musk has sort of stepped into the background because they realized. He's quiet lately. It wasn't. Yeah.

He's devoting his time to reprogramming Grok to talk about white genocide and deny the Holocaust, apparently, is what he's spending his time doing now. He's got all kinds of stuff to do. Yeah. Busy man, Crystal. Let's move on to the, this is going to be so interesting. I'm really excited about it. Arjun Singh, who joins us to talk about the history of how Republicans became an anti-tax party, fundamentalist anti-tax party, and what that means for today. So, guys, Trump's big, beautiful bill cleared an important hurdle in the House. I can put this up on the screen. The tax and immigration bill clears hurdle after late-night vote. It had previously failed in committee in a

late night vote. It was able to pass after some Republican dissenters just voted present so it could make it out of committee. All of that is a long way of saying this bill still has a long way to go before it actually is effectuated into law. But at the center of this bill is a big old tax cut for the rich, doubling down on Trump's key priority and accomplishment from his first administration. So joining us now to discuss how the Republican Party became this anti-tax juggernaut is Arjun Singh with Lever News.

And you guys have a new podcast series out called Tax Revolt, which tracks the history of the anti-tax movement. So great to see you, Arjun. Yes, thank you for having me. Yeah, of course. So we can put E2 up on the screen. That's just the logo. So you guys can see here's Tax Revolt. We've got four part series. And let's go ahead and take a listen to a little bit of the trailer to set

this up for everybody. All taxes are bad. The power to tax is the power to destroy. Some are worse than others. We have a new revolution against the tax, tax, tax, spend, spend, spend. The mindset of diehard tax cutters has dominated politics since the 1980s. And today, cutting taxes is practically a religious mandate in conservative politics. And government agencies like the IRS are partisan battlegrounds. The dream in America is not to make the rich poor. The dream is to make the poor rich. The era of big government is over. Don't hurt the top. And if you're going to fight rich people, you're going to lose. From the landmark California tax revolt to Trump's latest push to cut taxes for the rich, this movement claimed to fight for the average American, but really deepened inequality and

helped the rich get richer. This is the story of how a small but powerful movement reshaped our economy, weakened our democracy, and left the government scrambling to serve the people it was meant to protect. But that's not the way the world is, guys. Do you want to sit there and scream and holler and hate rich people and lose every election? It is time for a wealth tax in America. You'll lose everything. If you don't lose the election, you'll lose the country. So I like the description there of tax cutting as an almost religious mandate. Yes. Because at this point, you have a broad national coalition, really quite bipartisan at the grassroots level,

in favor of taxing the rich more. And yet you still have the Republican Party going in the polar opposite direction. Yeah. And one of the funny things that we actually talk about in the series is that when you get to the 1980s, when Reaganomics is becoming very popular, Democrats vote for Reagan's bills, Tip O'Neill's Speaker of the House, Reagan's got these Democratic legislatures. And part of the reason the Democrats are on board with it is they hear from their own constituents how upsetting it is to see how easy it is to game the tax code. They're saying that our rich friends who have fancy accountants can do all these loopholes. The tax code is so complex now. Why don't we get any relief just because we have to pay our taxes like suckers?

And the Democratic response was, you're right. The tax code is too easy to game. And so we'll bring down your tax rates. And they tried to, you know, fix some of the loopholes. But as we know through history, the winners of all of that was the business community and corporate interests who managed to bring everybody's taxes down and also take their taxes down to the point that some billionaires don't even pay taxes. They pay negative taxes. They earn from government subsidies. Unbelievable. Well, yeah, let's keep pulling at this thread of religion actually because this is what

on the right, we're seeing what on the right is the fading of what's called fusionism, which is the three-legged stool, Frank Meyer, the whole thing basically is it combines limited government, social conservatism, and neoconservatism. And that's completely falling apart at this moment. Maybe it'll reconstruct. But at this point, it's really difficult for the Republican Party to maintain that coalition. So as you went back through history, can you maybe tell us a little bit about what it was like as the Milton Friedman wing coalesced with the social conservatives and the neoconservatives. It's such an interesting marriage, especially between neoconservatives and Milton Friedman types,

because the Reagan era saw massive spending on defense. And at the same time, there was this mandate for tax cuts. It's sort of similar to what we see people talking about right now. Absolutely. I'm so glad that you distilled that like that, because that is one of the most fascinating things that I came out from the series is that the Republican coalition is kind of a Frankenstein monster of different groups that have made alliances with each other. But when it comes down to it, do end up being on different ends of the issues. So when we start in the 1970s, you have the post Watergate era and you have stagflation happening, high unemployment and high inflation. You want to say uninflation, which I think is what everybody wishes was happening.

But no, you had stagflation, which was the worst of the worst. And so you had an economic crisis. You had people actually seeing real pain paying their taxes because their money was getting cheaper and cheaper by the day. And what you see enter in that is different groups of conservatives trying to take advantage of that. So you have the people from the business community who say, listen, let's just knock down the whole tax code. Free market capitalism, this is the way everyone's going to prosper. That would be kind of like the art laughers who we heard in the trailer just now, the godfather of supply-side economics. We'll take them at kind of face value that if this is what they believe, they believe that low taxation will lead to so much prosperity.

You don't really need a government to play the role of an administrative state. Those people find alliances with another group of conservatives who are seeing integration happening, who are seeing changing social values, and they're seeing a Democratic Party in a government that they feel is becoming too tolerant of women and minorities and that a lot of the white working class people are being left behind. And in our first episode, we talk about Howard Jarvis in California. In 1978, he gets this ballot proposition on there that says, let's just cap the property tax.

And he messages both of those things. Isn't the government bloated? Aren't the bureaucrats overpaid? Aren't your taxes too high? And he would also say to certain people, should your taxes pay for school integration? Should your taxes pay for a social educational system that is slowly moving away from you? And he merges these two things together. And we talk about Newt Gingrich the same year, 1978. That's when he wins his election to Congress. He sees the potency of the practicality of telling people, you don't have to pay as much anymore. A lot of people vibe with that message. But he sees an undercurrent of people who are starting to view the federal government as something that they should be opposed to, that's an enemy to them. In the 1970s, Jimmy Carter's IRS was withholding tax-exempt status from schools that refused to

integrate, violating court orders. In this period, 1978, Gingrich, but also people like Howard Jefferson in California, that started the anti-IRS movement, which they said the tax collectors are a tool of an ideologically driven government. Your taxes going to them is helping an ideological battle, not just funding kind of the base social services that were pretty popular and that a lot of Republicans agreed with too. Because like you said, Republicans like George Herbert Walker Bush and Ronald Reagan wanted strong military. They wanted more spending on defense. So they wanted government to do things. They just didn't like the intrusion of government on the tax code, certainly taking big businesses' profits.

And so that's kind of what the series leads up to. And by the 1990s, when Newt Gingrich gets into office, the movement of conservatives has become so fractured that the Pat Buchanananan hard proto-Trump conservatives, now they have a lot more influence over this party. And they're saying Ronald Reagan's too moderate because he compromised with Democrats. And George Bush is, of course, way too moderate because he would even consider raising taxes. And they see Newt Gingrich shut down the government and they say this is what we're all about, aggression, hostility. And the movement takes a hard turn to the right right there. And it's not to say that the entire Republican Party believes like this.

I think that the Republican Civil War is still happening right now. But that is how this tax issue then morphs into what we see right now, which is you have whole anti-government forces, people who saw Waco and Oklahoma City saying, you know what? The government is taking away our rights and it is a frightening force. And if our taxes defund the government, more power to that. And that's, by the way, Grover Norquist, who we interviewed in our last episode. He's that faction of the conservative movement. Art Laffer, who we heard in the trailer, is the other side, which he says low taxes equals prosperity. But he'll message all these kind of pro-government values. Oh, interesting. Yeah. No coincidence, by the way, that happened during the fall of the Soviet Union. Just that timeline is in the early 90s. Yeah, that's a fantastic point. And

so sort of bring us to today. I mean, on the one hand, again, this $4 trillion tax cut for the rich, centerpiece of the Trump agenda. He sort of floated like, oh, maybe I won't cut taxes as much on the millionaires. But then he backed off of that immediately when it became clear that he'd actually have to exert some pressure to get that to happen. He wasn't all that interested in doing it to start with. On the other hand, you know, in the time period that you're covering, they really were on the offense. They felt very confident in their messaging. Now you can see from Steve Bannon and others that they realize this, if they're going to really position themselves as this populist party, this is a little bit of a problem for them. They're at odds with their own voters, let alone the national conversation.

So kind of where is the anti-tax movement today? I think the anti-tax movement is still very powerful because of things like Elon Musk and Doge. And that is that they are taking the rhetoric that the government's a hostile action and dialing it up to 11. And as we talk about in the series, when you message that rhetoric in an era where people are already dissatisfied with their government, they feel let down by it and they're frustrated, you can get people who initially were pro-government agreeing with you that the government is doing negative things. I think the biggest- DEI is a big part of that.

DEI is a big part of that. I think the big thing that the Steve Bannon thing is trying to do is he's trying to mimic more language of the progressive left and the left wing and hoping that left wing allies will also say, hey, isn't this the future? We should be no taxation on everybody else, but putting some taxes on the wealthy. And I think that the anti-tax movement is realizing the Republican Party was never a good vehicle if that was the kind of politics that you wanted to espouse. The more progressive Bernie Sanders style of politics vibes a little bit more with that. So the anti-tax movement is still clearly very strong because Trump himself got scared by his

own statement of putting taxes on multimillionaires. And I think the quickness with which he kind of pulled that back and even his Trump, his true social post where he was like, I'll put the taxes on there, but if they don't want to, I'll still be okay with it. It might be a good idea. You can see his hesitancy at how powerful the entrenched interests that run the party really are. And that's the struggle for the Trump administration. He's tried to tilt his base towards the populist working class base, which was the democratic base for a long time. And he's seeing why Democrats politically found favor when they would raise taxes on the wealthy. That was their base. So that's the base he wants to have. But the party is still dictated by the entrenched corporate interests. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the problem for Grover.

Spent decades. He spent decades on this like anti-tax, you know, hard line. Yeah. Crusade. And he bullied everyone into signing. I shouldn't say bullied. I mean, everyone was doing it willingly. He was quite the bully, though, from what it sounds like. Oh, yeah, he could be a bully. But when, you know, they have an opportunity to do a big tax bill in 2017, and Paul Ryan saying, we're going to get your taxes down to a postcard, it's going to look like something like a flat tax. Well, that never happens, because the corporate interests need there to be significant tax rates still to fund defense spending, to fund all that other corporate welfare. And that's what Grover Norquist and the

anti-tax crusaders, who genuinely do believe in limited government and extremely limited taxes, they've ended up sort of being the vehicle for corporate interests to continue the welfare spigot. Yeah, the flat tax debate is really interesting to me because I will say that when I sat down with Grover Norquist, there are people on the anti-tax side who seem to genuinely believe just a complicated tax code is bad.

Yeah, that's what I believe. It will lead to people gaming the system, which it completely has. And it's unfair to people who don't have the means or the knowledge base to understand what all the complicated tax code means. And I think that's why tax cutting a flat tax became a really salient message, which is that if you're trying to live your life, you have your full-time job, you have your family. And if someone says to you, do you just want to pay a simple tax code and know that

the code is fair, that your neighbor who's an accountant who knows the system is paying less just because they have that knowledge base. That's a really powerful message. But again, the flat rate cutters, and a lot of them like to talk about Ronald Reagan. They're like, Ronald Reagan was our hero. He was going to do that. But everybody else made the tax code more complicated. Well, the story of Republican politics and arguably Democratic politics too is that the powerful interests, whenever you offer a tax cut, are going to be able to find what they can do. They used to call the hallway outside of the Senate budget writing room in the 80s Gucci Gulch because Bob Dole came out and he saw all the tax lobbyists wearing Gucci

shoes and suits and he would say it's Gucci to Gucci in the hallway right now. Gucci to Gucci in the hallway. Yeah. And that's who wrote the 1986 tax cut bill. Oh, there you go. That says it all right there. Tell people where they can find the series and take a listen. So you can find it wherever you get your podcasts. Our website is levernews.com. And if you search Tax Revolt in your podcast players and Lever Time, you will find our podcast. Fantastic. Good to see you. Thank you so much. Yeah, you too. Thanks for having me. Yeah, our pleasure. All right, guys, that does it for us. Fantastic. Good to see you. Thank you so much. Yeah, you too. Thanks for having me. Yeah, our pleasure. All right, guys, that does it for us. We are going to do an AMA Live today.

So if you want to be part of future AMAs, make sure to sign up at BreakingPoints.com. I will see you back here with Dave Smith tomorrow and then we'll go from there. Emily, fun always? I'll see it too because I'm going to be watching. Oh, there you go. That'll be fun.

I always watch you and Ryan too, just so you know. You watch everything. I do. I do. I genuinely like, I learn and I'm a fan. So. I mean, how can you not learn from Ryan? The man is just a font of wisdom. Infinite. There is a lot. There is a lot going on in that brain, isn't there? Well, he'll be here on Wednesday. Dave is in tomorrow. Can't wait to see it. Yep. Sounds good. All right, guys, have a great day. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John, who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily it's you're not the father week on the OK Storytime podcast. So we'll find out soon. This author writes, my father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth

millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. He's trying to give it to his irresponsible son. But I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. They could lose their family and millions of dollars. Yep. Find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. Enter Camp Shame, an eight-part series examining the rise and fall of Camp Shane and the culture that fueled its decades-long success.

You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy, but to me, voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now.

Let me hear it. Listen to voiceover on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.