Bulwark Takes - Trump’s Truth Social Cash Grab Just Landed Him in Court | Receipts Live

Episode Date: August 14, 2026

Catherine Rampell and JVL discuss the Trump administration’s latest corruption controversies, including paid early access to Truth Social posts, the destruction of a shell-company ownership database, executive power, and the White House ballroom. Read more from Catherine: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trumps-gift-to-the-money-launderers-database-treasury

Hey, everyone. I'm Catherine Rampel, the economics editor at the Bullwork and the author of The Receipts Newsletter. And I am here with my buddy, JVL, to talk all things, economics, corruption, mostly corruption, honestly. I would say this week it's mostly corruption, but really like every week you could pull out, you know, 10 corruption scandals that in a previous administration would have been administration ending. But yes, we have lots of hot, juicy corruption for you. as well as if you stick around something equally as sexy, which is Broadway economics. JVL and I were just talking about a crime. And fiery death in a train accident.

And a fiery death in a train. There's lots of drama offstage when it comes to Broadway economics. So we'll talk a little bit about that. But JVL, it is great to see you. I wanted to start out by talking about this new lawsuit, suing. Trump and a few of his underlings over the scheme to sell early access to truth social posts. So for those who are not familiar, truth social, it's, you know, the shadow Twitter that, like, no one uses other than Donald Trump to post government announcements effectively about tariffs

and other major policy decisions and shit posting, you know, whatever AI slop as well. they have decided to sell early access because the company thinks that that's valuable to have, you know, access to Trump's tweets or bleats or whatever early. And there is now a lawsuit challenging that. It is filed under First Amendment and Fifth Amendment grounds. JBL, like, it seems to me that the issue here, I'm not a lawyer, but the issue here should not be so much about like free speech. I wish the legal theory were less about free speech and more about like just corruption. Like if there was some way to get them on blatant corruption selling of access as opposed to civil liberties. I'm curious if you have thoughts on this lawsuit.

Yeah. I mean, my thought is. is the same one I often have, which is that Donald Trump is an innovator in the field of corruption. And I think we ought to recognize and respect that. I first sort of had my eyes open to this when he started filing his defamation lawsuits against CBS and threatening ABC. And I realized, oh, this is what he's done is he's figured out how to legalize a shakedown, right? It isn't actually a lawsuit, it's that he wants a bribe from Paramount, and Paramount wants to pay him a bribe. But there isn't a legal way to do that. And he realized, sure, there is.

I'll just file a bullshit lawsuit. And then they'll settle with me. And it's contractually blessed. And everybody's precluded from ever talking about it again. That's an innovation. And it's an innovation that rule of law will have to catch up with. Another of his innovations is that he has looked to monetize the presidency in many ways. And there are a lot of obvious ways to monetize the presidency, things like no-bid contracts,

things like having your private business do deals with foreign governments who want things from the United States government. But that's easy, right? Anybody can do that. It is a true innovation for Trump to realize, huh, the way. Words of the president of the United States are very valuable. But as a president, I can't capture that value. That's not fair.

I'm the president. I should be able to capture that value. How could I do that? Oh, well, one way to do that is for me to communicate not through press releases or official communicates done by the government, but to communicate on a private platform that I own. And by doing that, he, I mean, first of all, we have a little bit of a public way. all the insider trading implications of this.

But secondly, he then is able to sell access to his communications as president to people in a way that he couldn't if he was issuing press releases from the White House. And I don't like, I feel like Anchorman, you know, you ate the whole wheel of cheese. I'm not even mad. I'm impressed. It's amazing. And it's a shakedown.

And it is probably valuable, at least as a head. If you're a firm and you've got 50 billion in assets under management or something, and all you're doing is being asked to pay $1.2 million a year so that you can, A, be on the good graces of the President of the United States, and B, so that maybe there is something actionable for your, you know, high-frequency trade algorithms to scrape and find out, that's $1.2 million, that's nothing. You spend that on, like, shrimp. Yeah, well, 1.2 million.

So just to clarify for those watching, that number comes from the fact that they are trying to charge or have charged $100,000 a month for early access to the Trump tweets, bleeds. And so, yes, that comes out to, you know, a little over a million dollars a year. And that's nothing. I mean, do you agree that this is like he's just monetized one of the functions of the office of the presidency? And again, this is one of those things that now we never had a law saying that the president can't do all of his official communications on a private platform that he owns and then sell access to it. Nobody ever thought to make that law. I mean, well, again, not a lawyer. Now we're going to have to have laws about that, aren't we?

Well, not a lawyer. But there are things like the Presidential Records Act. And I imagine. And I know, you know, it's cute. It's quaint. Or the Hatch Act, too, right? Or the Tooth Fairy. All of the above. On the point about how valuable this is. So Trump Media reported recently that more than 10 companies have signed up for this feed. And I was actually kind of surprised that the number was that low because I would have guessed that. aside from the like wanting to get in good with the president angle for why you might sign up for

this, I would have guessed that companies would sign up, as you say, as sort of as a hedge, sort of as protection in the sense that you don't want your competitors to have a millisecond earlier access to potentially market moving information that you don't have. So it's like you kind of have to pay up. So I was like, why is it only 10, let's say 11, as opposed to like every market participant. So I've been talking with people in the industry. And I've heard a couple of different things. One is that actually there are only a few companies

that really need like first mover information. And there are a lot of other companies that like, you know, obviously stock markets and things like that, move on jobs report and other information, tariff information, things like that. But who needs access to like the earliest, earliest, earliest version of that tweet, you know, via the social APIs, maybe smaller than I would

have guessed. Two is that they may have overplayed their hand that $100,000 actually is a lot of money for access to something like this that, like, maybe on the margin more valuable to you, or valuable at all. And three, is that there may be some legal risk for the companies here. Like this deal is not just stinky to us. It's a little stinky probably to the general councils at some of these Wall Street firms who are like, I don't know exactly if this violates an insider trading law, but it might. I don't know exactly if this violates a corruption law, but it might. And obviously those things are unlikely to get prosecuted under this administration,

but at some point there will be a new sheriff in town. And so companies are like, you know, may or may not be, you know, worth this amount of money and my general counsel doesn't really love it. We're going to pass. So, you know, this is what I've been trying to figure out like, why is there not greater demand for this? And I think that's part of it. That's not to say that the Trump Media Truth Social guys are not doing a really, really hard sell. I think we have some, some, some, um, some, quotes. So this is from a Bloomberg story last month about the pitches that firms were getting, which were just, promotional emails began circulating across Wall Street trading desks weeks ago, teasing a new product from Donald Trump's social media company. The note promised sub-second post data 24-7, including weekends and after hours, according to a message that Bloomberg saw, quote, a number of your peers are moving forward with this product. Act now.

Act now. Right, exactly. This car is going to be driven off the lot today. You better get it. And then they quote a portfolio manager at J.P. Morgan saying we are one truth, social post away from being up or down 5% every day. So they made a hard sell. I have been trying to get a copy of the pitch deck that was shown to companies.

I know that there were a lot of companies, or at least I further, there were a lot of companies that got the pitch, got a hard sell from, you know, people saying, like, nice company you got there. Be shame if something happened to it. I would love, if somebody out there who is watching this or listening to this has access to that, please reach out. We have an anonymous tips line, a confidential tips line. So I'd love to see, like, what was actually shared in these meetings. But anyway, I guess a lot of companies were like, maybe we'll sit this one out. And so it would be nice to think that these companies are making decisions for like moral reasons. They don't want to be complicit in the destruction of rule of law and the degradation of our

democracy and our White House. But, you know, it may actually be in their own self-interest to stay away from this thing. And I was actually, I don't know if heartened is the right word, But I was encouraged by the fact that Jamie Diamond, who is the CEO of J.P. Morgan, kind of made similar comments about why, at least at the time, this is a few months ago. I don't know if things have changed. J.P. Morgan had not donated, donated to the Trump ballroom. He made some comment to the effect of, like, well, you know, Trump may not always be in office. We're not really sure how future administrations made. feel about this. So I would love for the balance of incentives to move more toward that, that companies are like unwilling to criticize Trump. They're complicit in some of the corruption stuff because they think he's transactional and they can work with that. But I want them to be fearful about what comes after when he leaves office. Will someone hold them accountable for enabling this guy and potentially bribing this administration?

I don't know if that'll happen, but... Same sister. What did you say? I said same sister. Yeah. Look, I, to my mind, if America is serious about not winding up in this spot again, then the next administration needs to basically go around the pair of pliers and a blow torch and prosecute to the fullest extent of the law. anyone they can find who participated in lawbreaking

or was party to lawbreaking, both within the government and outside the government during this administration. And you just have to establish deterrence, right? Because if you don't, then the message is like, you know, we can kind of just get away with this. If we wind up with an intertational president, like we really do have to play ball.

And like this isn't say that you make up things, but you ought to be investigating. And if illegal stuff is happening, people ought to be held accountable for it, no matter how tic-and-tack it is. And, you know, a question for you, would you, what do you think the chances are that Trump would do something on truth social specifically designed to emphasize the value proposition of truth API? Do you think there's a 0.0% chance of that? I think there's like 150% chance of that. Okay. That they look, this administration in some ways like thrives on volatility,

both in the market sense and in the non-market sense, right? He wants to be seen as this madman who you can't read and he's this dynamic negotiator and deal maker and he's willing to blow everything up. And you see that in his behavior. when it comes to markets, right? That it is useful to have early access to this feed if there's a lot of turmoil. And Trump is changing his mind frequently about tariff rates, about military action and negotiations, about, you know, other weaponization of government or things like that, about immigration policy. The more volatile this administration is, which is a thing that,

like Trump constitutionally, not like U.S. Constitution, but like his persona, his affect, he already leans into. Anyway, the more volatility that he can create, the more valuable this product is. And I think 100% he is going to play up. Can I take it to a darker place than that even then? I count on you, too. If you're holding hands with me at the edge of the abyss, let's just jump off. So if I'm remembering correctly, the Truth API had a deal if you lock in for three years. I don't know if you remember this.

I don't remember this detail, but I trust you on it. This is, you know, you could pay monthly or you could lock in now for three years and get a discount. In all of your observations of the Trump family, have you ever known them to look at an opportunity to make money and then say, yeah, we don't need to do that. Have you ever seen that from the Trump? Because I have not. What are you talking about? He, Donald Trump pledged that he wouldn't take a salary. Wouldn't even take a salary, right. Is it crazy to think that why stand up a product like this if your intention is to voluntarily give up your family's grip on the Republican Party in two years.

Because that to me doesn't make any sense, right? This product loses all value the minute that Trump or a Trump family member is no longer the capo, tuti capo, or whatever the Italian phrase is of the Republican Party. And so the idea that like Donald Trump is just going to lay hands on J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio and pass the torch and exit public life. I'm sorry. That's a thing that would cost his family. family millions and millions and millions of dollars.

Why would he do that? This seems like a straw man. Who is making the argument that Donald Trump is going to go quietly into the night? And everybody tells me, oh, it's going to be over in two years. It'll be Rubio or Vance. And I'm the one saying, I don't know, like he says he's going to open the Kennedy Center in the summer of 2028. And he's selling Trump 2028 hats at the airport. And maybe somebody will stop him and the Supreme Court will say you can't do that.

But I don't know. There were four votes on the Supreme Court for ending birthright citizenship. It seems to me at least a coin flip that maybe they would. And he will try to stay in office. And if he can't do that, why wouldn't he have a family member as his stand in? Why wouldn't you go to Don Jr.? Right? This is everybody.

People tell me I'm insane for talking. I think there's a big spectrum. Rubio. I think there's a big, a wide spectrum between what's the Bible verse that George Washington cited about going under his own, sitting under his own vine and fig tree. Yes, his own vine and fig tree and, you know, leading his quiet post-presidential life. Exactly. You know, like George W. Bush. There's a big different, you know, there's a lot of.

of area between that and like refusing to leave office. I think, you know, I don't think that it's impossible that he refuses to leave office, but I think it's more likely that he just may, he thinks he will maintain his position as kingmaker and influencer, and that whoever he hands the torch to will still come to him for blessings. No. He's a New York mafia guy. he knows that you can't trust people unless they're in the family. You think he looks at J.D. Vance, Bdi-eyed little J.D. Vance, who has taken every position all the time over the last 10 years and thinks, yeah, I could trust him. He'll let me keep making money. He would never knife me in the bad.

I don't know that it's going to be J.D. Vance. You know, I think he's, he may try to place the crown on somebody. Anyway, that's a whole other conversation. But one thing that I did want to get into about this question of what happens post-Trump administration. And I believe there will be an era. By 2050, easy. We will be past this by 2050, no problem. Lucky us. Is that, you know, to your point about holding companies accountable for being complicit with this administration and breaking the law and otherwise engaging in illegal or on savory behavior, if you look at things that this administration has been doing, it is kind of trying to salt the earth. so that not only will it not enforce corruption laws and white-collar crime laws and pardon people who have already been convicted of such things, it is trying to prevent that future sheriff

who may come to town from prosecuting and investigating people too. So just as an example about that, my newsletter that published last night was about this gift to money launderers. There is a database that was created by Congress that requires shell companies to disclose who owns them, which seems like a pretty basic information. It's like you have to say, who owns the company, what their date of birth is, and how to contact them. Those are the basics. This was created by Congress under a bipartisan basis in 2021. Actually, in the January 1st, I think, is when it passed in the very, very final days.

Over his veto. Over his veto. Although, to be clear, it was part of this, it got rolled into this defense bill that he was probably vetoing for other reasons, including he didn't want to rename various military installations that had names of Confederate figureheads, didn't want to rename them. There were other things. I don't know that this was actually on his radar. But you are right, they passed it over his veto. If it wasn't on his radar then, it is certainly on his radar now. So this database, again, basically requires millions of companies to just say who owns them, these shell companies.

And the administration has decided we are not only going to violate that law by no longer requiring 99% of the companies that were supposed to be caught by this to disclose their information. We are actually going to torch the data that we have already collected so that future investigators cannot use this information about who owns these companies to follow the money, to pursue leads on, you know, I mentioned money laundering in the headline, but sex trafficking, terrorism. Like, there are a lot of reasons why shell company anonymity can be useful to criminals. There are plenty of legitimate reasons, to be clear, that someone might create a shell company. But shell companies, particularly like these Russian nesting dolls of shell companies where it's like you have a company that's registered in Delaware that has subsidiaries and the Cayman Islands and other tax havens, it makes it very difficult to trace ownership to figure out who is actually potentially committing a crime that this money is flowing through to support. So the administration is destroying this database, any information that is being collected.

And to be clear, this database, the information is confidential to the public. I can't access it. JBL and our audience can't access it. But law enforcement can. Only law enforcement in the Treasury Department. Yes. And state and local governments, you know, if they want to figure out, like, is a, I don't know, Colombian drug lord who, who, you know, bought real estate in Miami to clean their money, to shield their assets and launder their money.

Like, who owns that LLC that condo in Miami is being held under? Local law enforcement may be interested in that as well. They can't use it either, or at least they're supposed to be able to use it, but now the data is all being destroyed. So, you know, these kinds of things, they kind of go under the radar. They are, again, not as overt and sexy and seemingly existential as some of the more gothic horrors visit upon people, immigrants and U.S. citizens alike, under this administration. But they're really, really bad. And they basically create permission for bad guys to continue doing bad things in perpetuity. That's my fear here.

That that like truth and reconciliation process, JVL, that you said you hope comes after this, it will be undermined by actions like this to hollow out the administrative state and to take away tools that they may have used to crack down on criminals, whether they were criminals who were in cahoots with the administration or criminals who were, you know, being told to roam home free under this administration. That's what I'm really worried about. And I don't really know what the solution is. Like, again, Congress created this database. It's, it's required under the law. They're just ignoring it. Well, I mean, the solution is for American voters to not be decadent people who are not worthy of their democracy. I mean, that's the solution. The solution is the character of the American people has to change.

To be clear, I did not say that I hope that we would have these reforms. I said that if we wanted to avoid being in this place again, we would need to have them. Yeah. I would, I bet a hundred bucks we won't get them and we will be back in this place again because this is the character of the American people. They don't care. I want to talk a little bit about this and I want to mesh it to another story. And this piece you did was so good.

And I've been so happy to see it blowing up. If you haven't, if you're not subscribed to Catherine's receipt's newsletter, go get on that thing. It's so good. New York Times has a piece today about what ICE had did in Minnesota following the killing of Alex Prattie. And four days after Alex Prattie was executed, that's just what happened. He was on the ground on his back and the bunch of guys just shot him in the back a bunch of times. It isn't just that the people who executed him weren't investigated or held accountable. It's much worse than that.

What happened was the administration embarked on a series of incredibly aggressive investigations against people in Minneapolis and Minnesota who had been trying to hold ICE accountable. And so they were, I mean, you have to read the near time story. They were just throwing resources at this. They were investigating trade unions and churches. And they had people showing up to where, you know, meetings were being held at churches, going around, taking down license plates of the cars that were there, then finding out who the cars belonged to, then looking up their social media histories, then getting a photo dossier of them. So they could, I mean, this is unbelievably invasive stuff. And this is similar, what you wrote about.

So in the early days of the Trump administration, we had Trump pardoning a bunch of people and saying we're not going to enforce laws. And that's like one thing. That's like not investigating the people who killed Prattie. But going in, oh, also we're going to destroy the database, though. That's the next step. That's the next level. And we have talked about regular order in the legal system a fair amount over the last two years. regular order is the presumption that, there's presumption by judges, that if an officer of the court

on the government's side tells you something, you can accept what they have said to you at face value and you don't have to go through the entire proof process every time. And so if you order the government to do X and the government comes back to you and says to the judge, yes, we've done X, you can accept that. You don't need to have the government bring 15 witnesses and boxes of evidence to prove to you that they have, in fact, done X. And regular order is basically broken down. That's one thing. Judges across the country are beginning to realize this and understand that they can't trust agents of the government in court.

But we're getting now what Chris Grider on Substack, Law Dork is his substack. It's very good. because we're getting the beginnings of something closer to irregular order, where it's not simply the case that you can't trust that the government might not do what it is saying, but you should probably start assuming that the government is actively working contrary to what the rule of law would say. And that is what destroying this database is, right? It isn't just, we aren't going to enforce law X because we think white-collar criminals are just fine.

And there's no problem if you're scamming people with crypto or something like that. Delightful. That's Trump's favorite company. Right. This is different than that. And it's everywhere. It's in Treasury and it's, you know, with this database, it's with DHS investigating in, you know, union. members for, you know, following ice vans around and stuff like that. And I just, if we don't get

a really aggressive, I mean, after Watergate, there were a lot of, and really during Watergate, too, a lot of reforms basically where the American legislators looked up and said, shit, a bunch of this was on the honor system. We didn't write down that you can't do this. We need to stop. We need to write it down. And those post-Watergate reforms really worked for a good 40 years or so, 35 years. If we don't get post-Trump reforms designed to really aggressively lay down markers on all this stuff that everybody just assumed you could do on the honor system, we're just going to be back here again. And spoiler, I think we're going to be back here again. Yeah.

Thank you for coming to make that talk. One of my fears is that rather than going in that direction of realizing that we need to codify the norms that we had taken for granted to impose, reimpose rule of law, that you see a greater appetite for the more authoritarian fears, potentially from both sort of like the, the, the horseshoe of the left and the right, wanting someone who's like, well, Donald Trump just freaking knock down the ballroom. Why can't the president just wipe out student debt, just as an example? Why can't they just move fast and break things?

Rather than focusing on rebuilding, codifying norms, institutions, and having checks and balances. Like, I do worry that there's going to be a little bit of apat, a little bit more appetite. And you see that actually in some of the polling data. From, again, including on the left, this appetite for like someone who's just going to come in and burn it all down or like, you know, the more charitable way to describe it would be like, you know, clearing out the red tape or the cobwebs and like getting things done because some of that procedural stuff is annoying and stupid. And I think that's part of the reason why some of the things that Donald Trump does, including with like, maybe even including with, you know, knocking down the ballroom have gotten some sympathy from the public. It's like, well, Washington is too slow and permitting is too slow and things like that.

And you have to figure out a way to sell Americans on, like, there are good procedures. get rid of the... Yeah, I know. You don't want a president who is like all-powerful and who can just, I don't know, executive order his way to whatever agenda the American people has appetite for. You know, you do want the world's greatest deliberative body

or whatever involved in some of this decision-making. even though it's been very, very broken. And I don't really know how we get to that point where, like, there's a model for government that actually delivers things that people want with this checks and balances system that doesn't just like... That even though there's a process

and it can be annoying, that it's like how you sell people on the usefulness of that rather than the, like, you know, Hulk smash, Godzilla, whatever metaphor you want to use. the president comes in and can just like give you what you want. And I'm a little worried that that's where the country is heading, this sort of like impatience with the establishment not delivering, creating an appetite for a more powerful executive.

I just want a more powerful executive who does the things that comport with my political views, not the other side's political views. Yeah. I mean, so I have some good news for you on this front, which is that I promise you that this Supreme Court will rediscover all the limits to executive power. The minute the president is not the whole point. So even if a Democratic president,

even if President Assov were to come in and try to like, you know, just executive power his way to whatever his heart desires, believe me, the keen legal minds and the Supreme Court will, they will rediscover the limits to executive power. Yeah. I,

I, I, I, so this is, Pete Buttigieg, love the guy, right? Who doesn't love a good mayor Pete? His answer on this to Tim when he was on Tim's show. And Tim asked him a version of this question,

which is like, how do you square the executive power problem, right? Yeah. Because undoing a bunch of the stuff of Trump is going to require the exercise of a lot of executive power. It'll require legislation as well, but there will be some things that will be done not through legislation. And people's like, we need, we need the executive to be both stronger and weaker. And it should be stronger on the good things.

And then he said, you know, like, and weaker on the bad things, he listed it. And I, I think Pete is great. And I think he speaks. I am willing to grant that Pete is operating in total good faith. I don't think he's trying to hide the football. I just think that that circle can be squared in the way that maybe it can. He's very clever. But I don't think that that circle can be squared.

And I don't think that there is any appetite or significant constituency for like reform. And, you know, I think there's going to be a big constituency for expanding healthcare access. I think there will be a big constituency for trying to attack housing costs. I wrote about housing costs yesterday. Boy, one of the worst performing newsletters I've ever read. button. Oh. Really? Yeah. But you had burrito in the title, right? People did not like that. Oh. But I just, and honestly, if you get a president to Ossov or something like that, I can just tell you right now, I will be shocked if they come out and say, yeah, we got to, we got to reform all of these things that God is to a bad place because the received wisdom will be, that's backward looking. You can't litigate the past. You've got to. be forward looking. You got to talk about things that impact people's real lives. You know,

kitchen table issues. That's how you lead America. That's how you got to be popular to be able to do things and to be popular. You have to go. And I just, I don't know, like Joe Biden tried that. He had a pretty good economy for all but 13 or 14 months of his presidency, but we're in the middle of it. He did a bunch of bipartisan legislating. He passed bipartisan bills on gun reform and reforming the electoral college and infrastructure investment and pumped money into red states and kept the unemployment rate below 4% the entire time, got a soft landing on the inflationary growth that we had, had real wages outstripping inflation before he left office, and people hated it. People did not. People were like, ah, I don't like this. So the problem is we need better.

Americans, and I don't know what the answer to that is. Oh, well, create a new civics curriculum or something. I would quibble with some. Yeah, okay. Do you disagree? Do you know? Do you think there's a political constituency for like real reform of government authority? No, no, no, I agree with that.

I agree with that part. Some of the data points on the Biden economy, I think I, I think I would quibble with a little bit more, but whatever, it sort of depends on how you measure things. I do want to get to... But he was wildly unpopular. Pardon? So he was wildly unpopular. Oh, yes, yes, yes.

Yeah, this is the... Absolutely. Although, Trump is even less popular, as I understand it. So I don't know. I don't know what that means. People will see as the antidote to all of this. But in the meantime, we mentioned briefly before the ballroom. And speaking of the Supreme Court may be reigning in executive power or

or letting it bloom. There is actually a news this morning that the Supreme Court or Donald Trump has petitioned the Supreme Court to let him continue building his ballroom. And, you know, I do wonder, do you think like a young, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, Brett Kavanaugh, Justice Society, 1-L, like dreamed of the day. he could help the president build a ballroom. That's really what I want to know. How do the Supreme Court Justice's personally feel about their role about all of this? But just so the audience knows, let me pull up some of this. So the Trump administration asked the court on Friday to clear the way

for it to complete the White House ballroom. The U.S. Solicitor General told the justices in an emergency filing. Emergency. An emergency. Emergency. Yes, everything is an emergency. That's a spending work on the project threatens national security and the safety of our dear president, his family and executive branch staff. Work on the project is currently scheduled to stop on the 21st of August unless the Supreme Court intervenes. And actually, I want to pull up some fun little factoid from this filing, which says that, the work is 65% complete. 65% complete. Wow. You know, Donald Trump is a man who knows how to build stuff, clearly.

And it says by now it has passed the point where major changes to that designer feasible. Matt, can we pull up a photo of what this project looks like? Yeah, does that look like 65% complete? Like, you know, I'm not a structural engineer. I'm not an architect. But to me, this kind of looks like a hole in the ground and not something that I would describe as two-thirds done. I mean, it depends on how deep it goes.

How many stories down does it go? Okay. I refers to say that that is 65% complete. Yeah. I don't know. There's no turning back is what the filing says. There's no turning back. You can't make any changes.

It's just impossible. It's impossible. The laws of physics. wouldn't permit any changes to it. You couldn't, you know, you couldn't knock any of that stuff down with a hammer if you tried. I look at this and it just makes me angry

and it shouldn't because it doesn't matter. So what? He's built himself a ballroom. He's going to slap his name on it. Great. I think President Nosoff should knock that fucking thing down on day one. Because we've established

that the president of the United States can do anything. he wants to all of official Washington without asking anybody's permission. So he stood it up. We could knock it down. This is like the extent to which it is free. Like we are not a great economy. We are losing a war.

And the president is rushing to the Supreme Court to fight about his ballroom while going to a lower court to fight about putting his name back onto the Kennedy. Center. I don't know if you saw that. He wants to, he's been told he can't name the Kennedy Center after himself. And so he wants to put in big letters on the building after the name of the Kennedy Center restored and renovated by President Donald J. Trump because that's a thing that people do normally over the course of renovations. They often note on the side of a building in big gold letters who authorized the renovation of it. And that's a thing. That's going to go to court too.

But again, it just goes back to like, people don't care. And if there isn't massive public backlash over this stuff, and spoiler, there isn't. His numbers are down because gas is expensive again. That's all. Well, I think they're related, actually. I think the split screen of Donald Trump fixated on his ballroom and getting rich off of unsavory characters buying his crypto, all of those things about, you know, the literally gilded life that he leads in contrast with Americans struggling with higher prices and a stagnant job market and

things like that, I think actually one heightens the other. So I do agree with you that people are mostly pissed off that it costs a lot more money to fill up their tank. But they're more resentful of the fact that Donald Trump is so obsessed with putting his name on things and super gluing golden stuff around the Oval Office rather than focused on their problems. And in fact, some of the things that he's doing to aggrandize himself actually worsened their problems like going into this war of choice. It's not that a president couldn't walk in chew gum. Like maybe some future president can also redecorate the Oval Office and peel off all of the, you know, the whatever spray-painted Home Depot decals and things like that while, I don't know, like expanding the safety net and restoring the Medicaid cuts and whatever else. I think in theory they could be doing both things.

In practice, this president has no interest in that. And then, of course, he is worsening some of these problems through the war, through the tariffs, potentially through the deportations, which have not only a humanitarian cost, but potentially an economic cost as well. So all of those things, I think, are additive. And probably it would be useful for Democrats to run on all of the above. Do they care about the norms? I don't know. But maybe they care about some of the corruption insofar as it. it calls into focus what Donald Trump does care about. He's getting rich and you're getting poor, that kind of thing. I hear what you're saying. And I, yes, yes. But do a thought exercise with me. Transport yourself to October of 2016 and the world we live in.

And the, you know, we have the Access Hollywood tape has just come out. And I hop out of a Dolorian and I say, hey, Catherine, listen, so actually he's going to be president. And then there's going to be a global pandemic, which kills a million Americans. He'll lose reelection. He'll attempt an actual violent coup, like where he sends an armed mob to the Capitol and, like, people get shot. And then he gets reelected the next year. And he loses, he starts a war with Iran. loses it, loses control of the strait of Hormuz.

And unemployment is up and, you know, oil prices are up and inflation is up. And he's running around doing all. He's putting the, I show you a picture of the Oval Office looking like the fucking Uday and Kusei presidential palace ballroom and all this stuff. And I say, and his approval rating is at 36. would you say like 36 see that's really bad or would you have said 36 he's not a 15 what are you talking about because I can tell you what my reaction in October 2016 would have been I would have said how could he possibly be a 36% that's insane yeah um it is higher than it should be pardon we are boiled frogs yes the frog the frog has the frog has has been boiled, yes, many times over boiled and sauteed and every other kind of cooked. I think

that is absolutely the case. I think it is heartening that he seems to be losing at least some of his supporters. And there's going to be that diehard base that supports him no matter what in the proverbial he can shoot everyone on, shoot anyone or everyone on Fifth Avenue and they will stand by him. But the, you know, the inflation, the, the war, the Epstein files, I think that those are all sort of starting to chip away at some of his support. Again, I think the real question is what comes after and what are the lessons that we learn. I do think he's going to limp out of office with everybody hating him, including some people who were in his own base, but not everyone. And the question is what succeeds all of this and how do we

DJ DJ. Yeah. Anyway, we are close to finish, and I did promise that we would talk Broadway. So let's make a hard turn here and talk a little bit about Broadway and the economics of Broadway. Because while we were setting up for this live stream, JVL was telling this fantastic story about the Schubert brothers. The reason we're talking about this, by the way, is that Ari Emanuel's entertainment company is going to acquire a bunch of Broadway theaters and a bunch of West End theaters.

It's going to require some regulatory approval. You know, maybe because of the size of the merger acquisition, I'm not entirely sure. But JVL and I are both like totally fascinated by Broadway economics or lack thereof. So tell people your story that you were sharing with me about the insanity of the Schubert family. So the Schubert family is one of the main drivers of modern Broadway, as we know it. And what people may not understand is that Broadway is really just a real estate play. And basically always has been the Schubert's began in Syracuse, New York. immigrants from, I think, Lithuania.

Maybe somebody will check me on that. Is Lithuania, Latvia? One of those places. And they start off in Syracuse and start buying up small venues. And basically they act like a cartel. And so they realize that as they start accumulating more and more places, they can force performers and acts to only book it with them. And they do very anti-competitive behavior.

But this is, you know, this is how things went back then. And they are the ones who wind up taking on big chunks of the Midtown Manhattan area known as the theater district, which is what we think of when we say Broadway. And what people who don't obsess over this may not know is that a Broadway play is a legal term of art. And it refers to a production, which is, Kathy, you probably know this off the top of your head, takes place between two streets. I forget what the bottom and the top one is. And at a theater that's over 500 seat capacity.

Yes, I was going to say. It's two of those. It has two components to it. So the theater has to be between these two and then the theater has to be over, I think it's 500 seats. I think it's 500. I think $400. I think $4.99 is the cutoff for off Broadway, which again is not really. a geographic.

Right. And these are legal terms of arts because they then go on to help define union pay rates and pay scales for the people who work at these theaters. Anyway, all of this is the Schubert family themselves

are absolutely fascinating. And so there are three brothers. It was Lee, who's the oldest, Sam and Jacob. Sam was the smart one. And he was the guy who was really the brains behind all of this. And he dies in 1905 in an absolutely spectacular way.

He is taking a train to Pittsburgh. And the train he's on throws up a spark or collides. I forget the exact details of this with another train, a freight train, which has a bunch of dynamite on it. And so there's a huge fireball and explosion and he's horribly injured and he dies the next morning. and that his two brothers who hate each other spend the rest of their lives running the Schubert company from separate offices like four blocks apart maybe in New York City and they refuse to communicate except in writing. Like they just they won't talk to each other, but they're both running the same company. It's fast.

Anyway. And then when when the two of them die eventually, there's all sorts of crazy inheritance stuff and the story. The economics of Broadway are utterly fascinating. And you know a little bit about the production side of this, Catherine, because so the way Broadway productions work is you have to get backers, right? Somebody has an idea for a show and they have to get backers and the backers always lose money. Right? I mean, you know, it's basically philanthropy. Yes.

And a lot of it is small dollars. Somebody comes in and says, I'll give you 15 grand or I'll give you 100. grand or something like that. It's not really like movies where somebody will put in 30 million or something like that. That's not really how these things work. And then you get invited to go to opening night and all of that. You know, the rule of thumb used to be that I think only one of every three Broadway shows made back. It's an initial investment. I think it's lower than that now, in part because it's gotten a lot more expensive to produce on Broadway. All of the inflationary stuff that affects normal people affects Broadway.

to, you know, the cost of the wood and other materials for the set and the energy costs, all of those things got more expensive and the contracts got more expensive. And so it's like even a show that sells out all the time still may fail spectacularly financially anyway. Like there was an example recently with this revival adaptation of cats called Jellicle ball. Yeah, you loved it. I did. I really loved it.

And I didn't expect to because I don't particularly like cats. But it was fantastic. It was very joyful and wonderful. And it had a, when I went, it had a full house. Was it gelical? Was it gelical? It was. It was.

It was. It was an adaptation with the cats were not cats. They were participating in ballroom. the genre from like the 80s and 90s in New York for the trans and other LGBT community which is like dress up anyway it's if you've ever seen Paris is burning it was basically it was that it was that but with the music of Andrew Lloyd Weber and the poems of T.S. Eliot Anyway, it was delightful. It didn't make a lot of sense. Cats never does. But it was a really joyful experience. It sold very well, as I understand it, still had to close, closed very

recently, because the economics on Broadway just don't make sense, especially for a show with a big cast like that one did. The shows that have been more successful recently, I think, tend to be like a two-hander, you know, where it's like two celebrities. And it's a, it's not the big spectacle that people often associate with a Broadway musical in particular. you know, with a chorus and an orchestra and all of that. It's just a play with a couple of people who can have the household name quality who can pull on an audience. You get like Jeff Bridges and Michelle Williams or something on.

Yeah. That show will sell. Right. Those are the things that all do well, which is unfortunate because there's like a whole wealth of other kinds of theater out there that I wish would do better that could survive commercially. And I do wonder how this news about Ari Emanuel's group buying these theaters, how that'll reshape the industry, because there'll be a little more vertical integration there potentially. You know, Ari Emanuel is mostly known as like this big Hollywood player

and probably has access to a lot of intellectual property and connections that are maybe useful for franchising. I don't know. I don't know how it's going to turn out. Let me pitch you something. Yeah. You know, Ari also is one of the masterminds behind TKO Sports and their purchase of the WWF. WWF, the musical. I would see that. I would see that. W.W.F.W.S., sorry. themed restaurant in Times Square. I don't know if you remember that. No. When was this? That was a real thing. thing that happened in the 1990s. Huh.

And early 2000s, I think. It was part of like the Julian. Wait, so did they like wrestle while you were dining? No, it was just like Planet Hollywood. It was like Planet Hollywood or Hard Rock Cafe. It was like, look at all the stuff we've got. Maybe you'll meet a celebrity. Look, it's Rikishi.

It wasn't like dinner theater. No. Can you tell the people about the, uh, the interesting, um, intellectual property that's about to come into the public domain? Oh, sure. It's a Broadway talk. You people sign up for Broadway talks, so sit down and deal with it.

Sorry, you're going to get stuck with it. Actually, I think it already did come into the public domain. It's the little engine that could. So every year, at the beginning of the year, some old property, most of which are not that valuable, but some of which do have a big following, comes into the public domain, which means anybody can use it and make money off of it. And this year, the little engine that could is one of those entities.

And so there's been a bit of a race, as I understand it, to create like a children's musical with the little engine that could as its source material. So, and like multiple artists are probably working or I know are working to adapt it, because there's potentially some money there. Like if you are a theater writer and you're trying to get productions produced, your plays produced, writing children's theater is not the most prestigious thing,

but it can provide a reliable paycheck. Like if your version of Little Engine that could ends up in the Samuel French catalog of plays so that little productions around the country, country, regional theaters, touring productions, decide that they are going to pay you for the rights for that version of the Little Engine that could. You get a check for $3,000 a month every month. Yeah, it can be a very stable paycheck.

So there's a bit of a race going on with a little engine that could. And I was talking with a friend who's working. I think I can. Yes. Jazz hands. I was talking with a friend about this and he was saying that there's some debate over whether the Little Engine is male or female, because I guess there's no gender identifier.

I mean, that's the joy of the play. You can do stunt casting with either gender. Like any, you just find an influencer or a movie star who's willing to play the Little Engine. It just doubles your opportunity to get a famous name cast in it to attract people to the theater. Yeah. There was actually a similar race over IP

that came into the public domain recently with the Great Gatsby. I forget exactly when that entered the public domain. It was a few years ago. And there were these two dueling productions, musical adaptations of the Great Gatsby. There was one at A.R.T. The one with Eva Noblazada won.

Yes. Jeremy. Jeremy. What's his name? Jeremy Jordan. I love Jeremy Jordan. So there were two productions. What I had heard was that the one that got its act together faster,

literally, I guess. that made it to Broadway is the worst one. That's the one with Eva Nabilisada, who's not... We liked it. Pardon? We liked it just fine. We saw it before it's at the Broadway. We saw it and it was still in rehearsals out here in the jurors.

Oh, cool. Cool. Well, I haven't seen it. I heard the other one was better, but I haven't seen either. So anyway, so, like, there's real money on the line for these kinds of things. And, yeah, it's fun to watch, you know, this... Oh, and I see, oh, Matt, our producer says, Florence Welch wrote the music for the better one.

Wow. In reference to- Boy, Matt, we got to bring you on camera to do this next time we do. Be the ART production, he says. I will just say this. I don't have a lot of regrets in life. That's not true. I'm full of regret.

But one of my big ones, I would say a top 100 regret in JVL's, life is that I never got to see Spider-Man turn out the dark. Oh, God, you miss nothing. Because it's never coming back. It'll never be staged again. It's impossible to stage. It's not the kind of thing that you couldn't. You couldn't even stage it with like a prison cast.

And yet it's... Maybe in Seacott. It was here. It's gone now. It had all sort of like, Reeve Carney was like every 30-year-old Broadway guy now was had some piece in that because they hired everybody they could

because they kept hurting and injuring their Spider-Men and just running through the not like, they had like 40 understudies on that show or something like that because people kept getting hurt and I always wanted to see it

never got the chance and I never will. I don't even think there's a recording of it. That's the thing that's magical about the earth. I'm sure there is. There has to be. All of these things get documented. I mean, I don't know

that it's going to appear on PBS anytime. soon, but all of these things get documented. And there was so much money behind that spectacular failure that I'm sure somebody... Did she... Did she direct it to? Yeah. Look at us. I'm trying to remember.

It's a couple of Broadway kids. Yeah, I'm trying to... I thought she might have gotten ejected at some point. Of course. Because it was such a... And you two did the score, wasn't it? Like a U2 score as well. Yeah.

If you're listening to this, if you're one of the five people still listening to this, If you have access to a bootleg of the Spider-Man turn out the dark, get in touch with us. Leave a comment. I want to hear from you. Or if you saw it when it was still in its original run, I want to know all about it. All right. On that happy note, thanks everyone for sticking with us. The few of you who are still listening to our Broadway talk, and I hope you got some nice, nutritious information on that and corruption.

Thanks so much. And thanks to my pal JVL for more information, for more fun corruption coverage and maybe the occasional Broadway Diddy. Please make sure to like, subscribe to our YouTube feed to The Bullwork at Substack. And we will see you later.