Here's Where It Gets Interesting - A Stranger Saved My Husband’s Life, Why You Think the Way You Do, and Answers to Your Questions

Episode Date: November 10, 2025

A shocking phone call after a routine medical exam. Despite no symptoms, Sharon’s husband had advanced kidney disease and he would die without a transplant. She shares the deeply personal story of a stranger saving Chris’s life, and what it taught her about the selflessness of others. Plus, her fascinating conversation with Colin Woodard, author of Nations Apart, who goes back generations to explain why America is so polarized, and tells us what we can do about it.  And Sharon answers your most pressing questions: Will the U.S. take military action in Nigeria because of Christian persecution?  How can the richest country in the world be so much in debt?  Can government officials use taxpayer-funded websites for partisan attacks? If you’d like to submit a question, head to thepreamble.com/podcast – we’d love to hear from you there. And be sure to read our weekly magazine at ThePreamble.com – it’s free! Join the 350,000 people who still believe understanding is an act of hope. Credits: Host and Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Supervising Producer: Melanie Buck Parks Audio Producer: Craig Thompson To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

My husband was going to die, until a stranger who heard a podcast saved his life. More on that very personal story in a moment, but first, welcome to the preamble podcast. If you're new, each week you'll hear some of the most interesting stories from our weekly magazine, also called The Preamble. Today, I'm speaking with a fascinating guest for a short interview. Have you ever wondered why we feel the way we do about Hot Button issues? from gun control to abortion, where do those views come from? Author and historian Colin Woodard will tell us. Plus, I'll be answering your questions, like,

will the U.S. take military action in Nigeria because of Christian persecution? And how can the richest country in the world also be so much in debt? And finally, AI-generated videos trolling Democrats being posted by government officials. Are there rules against that? I'll explain. ahead. I'm Sharon McMahon, and this is the preamble podcast. Now back to our story. For some of us, our lives have a distinct before and after. A singular event so momentous that everything changes, who we were when the sun crested the horizon, is not the same person

whose head hits the pillow that night. In my family, that day was at the end of 2018. when my husband went to a yearly physical and got a panicked phone call a few hours later. Come back immediately, the nurse said. Something is very, very wrong with your blood work. It appeared without warning or provocation that my husband, Chris's kidneys, had decided to simply quit working. And most often when kidneys decide to take themselves offline, they can never be resurrected. it. Given the right conditions, a liver can regenerate itself. A bone will industriously fill in harmful cracks with new materials. But once your kidneys have stopped filtering waste, maintaining your

body's fluid levels, monitoring your electrolytes, converting vitamin D into its active form, telling your bones to make red blood cells, and keeping your blood pressure on the straight and narrow, they will most often never do those jobs again. There is but one solution. Get a new kidney. It's simple, but it's not easy. There are two paths to a kidney transplant. One is that after you've been approved to be a kidney recipient,

you wait, often many years, for your name to rise high enough on the transplant list to make you eligible for a transplant from a deceased donor. The other involves finding a living donor who is willing to give up one of their healthy kidneys so you can get one in return. Sometimes this is done via direct donation. Sally donates directly to Bob.

Other times, and many organ transplant centers will tell you this is their preferred method, a donor chain is initiated. Sally donates to Lisa. And in return, Lisa's son George donates to Bob. Donor chains allow multiple people to receive transplants on one day. Some donor chains have more than a dozen people involved in a complicated web of human interconnectedness that would boggle the minds of the people who came before us.

Imagine telling John and Abigail Adams when they became the first occupants of the White House in 1800 that 225 years in the future, men and women with precision instruments would remove fully functioning organs from healthy people, put them in a cooler, and load them into a hollow metal tube that flies through the air at hundreds of miles per hour, and then at their destination,

more physicians would sew the organs into the bodies of the sick, and at the end of the day, everyone, astonishingly, would live. For comparison, the Adams' daughter underwent a mastectomy at their home in Massachusetts without anesthesia. Shortly after Chris's stage five kids, kidney failure diagnosis, we sought treatment at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, among the best transplant centers in the world. Chris is perhaps one of the most selfless people you'll ever meet. Much of his enjoyment in life comes from helping others. He's spent countless hours volunteering for any number of untold things. The number of nonprofit boards Chris has served on is more than a dozen. The number of times a worker at a homeless shelter, food pantry, preschool that

serves low-income families or domestic violence organization has called Chris. Looking for a miracle and finding one on the other end of the phone would fill an encyclopedic volume. A pipe just burst, they might say. He would find a plumber to come fix it, often at no cost to the beleaguered organization. Another caller said, we didn't get a milk delivery this week because of the bad weather. Chris didn't hesitate to brave the conditions in his pickup and drop off whatever was needed to bridge the gap. He has personally raised more than $25 million for nonprofits, a feat I have yet to match. But I do hope the combined $38 million in funds raised between us is something the McMahon clan will be remembered for. side note after i finished this piece i went to vote on november fourth the election worker asked my name and then said are you married to chris i told her i was

what a wonderful guy she said we worked together on the united way food drive the timing of having just completed this story and having someone i didn't know immediately remark on chris's community service seemed too apropos to leave out Suffice it to say, Chris would never ask anyone for a kidney. The social worker in the transplant program cautioned us about jumping headlong into a scenario in which I would donate one of my kidneys directly to Chris, despite the fact that we share a blood type, which is one of the most crucial factors in determining what makes someone a match for organ transplantation. By the way, have I mentioned that Chris also has the special kind of blood that they can give to the most vulnerable patients like NICU babies, and that he has donated 20 gallons of his own blood over the years?

The social worker told us that recovery from an organ transplant is long and difficult. It requires near-daily hospital visits for many weeks, even after being discharged from an inpatient stay. Recovery for donors is much simpler than it is for recipients. They will allow you to be a donor only if you are exceptionally healthy to begin. with, so you are not recovering from both a surgery and an illness. And removing a kidney is much more simple than adding a four-in-one to the body of a sick patient while managing the dizzying cocktail of drugs that keeps the recipient alive. The medication management is so significant

that it requires specialty transplant-only pharmacists to provide appropriate care. Because both the donor and the recipient need care after the surgery, and we have four children who need parents. Both of us having surgery on the same day was less than ideal. If another option existed, they told us, we should pursue that instead. We lift the multi-day visit saying we would consider the options. Over the next year, Chris became sicker and weaker. He could never get warm, a side effect of the toxin buildup in your bloodstream. In the winter, he He would stand inches from our wood-burning stove, willing the heat to warm his bones. He couldn't keep food down.

By 6 p.m., he was asleep for the night. Other people in my family distressed at the thought of losing a beloved family member or the idea that our children would lose their father, went through the initial screening process to see if they could qualify as a match. Some were initially disqualified for a history of high blood pressure or kidney stones. for too many years as a smoker or other lifestyle issues that made them less than an ideal candidate. Others, like my own mother, didn't share a blood type with Chris and couldn't give him one of their kidneys, even if they wanted to. By early March 2020, I had made up my mind.

We would figure out the logistical issues of caring for the children if need be, and I would go through the highly involved process of being screened to be a direct donor. It involves a battery of extensive testing to satisfy the transplant board that your lifespan and quality of life are unlikely to be impacted by donation. Dozens of tubes of blood were siphoned from my arm. I underwent lengthy kidney function tests and a CT scan with contrast to get a good look at my anatomy. I had multiple cancer screenings like a mammogram and wore a blood pressure monitor overnight. At the end of three days of testing, I met with a nephrologist. You are extremely healthy, he told me. You are an ideal donor, except for one problem.

He pulled up my CT scan, revealing a two-millimeter kidney stone. It looked like a grain of salt. Have you ever had symptomatic kidney stones, he asked? I had not. He told me that many people have kidney stones, but they never become dislodged and try to make a painful exit from the premises. They can live there forever, or they can be absorbed by your body. But that grain of salt was disqualifying, at least for now. One thing I learned about organ donation is that you cannot simply say, well, I understand the risks and wish to proceed anyway. If for any reason the transplant center determines that you fall outside of their guidelines, they simply will not do the surgery.

The stringent rules are there to protect donors and recipients, but they probably screen out people like me who've never had an issue with symptomatic kidney stones and would likely be just fine. I was set home to be on an anti-kidney stone diet to see if it would dissolve. Turns out many of the things I ate and drank regularly, leafy greens, dark chocolate, almonds, black tea can contribute to the formation of stones. Cut them out for three months, they told me, and come back for a recheck. By now, you've already heard the rumble of the train barreling toward us. March 11th, 2020, when COVID was officially declared a pandemic, and when elective surgeries like transplants were shut down. Before any vaccines or treatments for COVID existed, as many as one-third of patients with advanced kidney failure died if they caught the

virus. Another large percentage lost their transplanted organs. Our instructions were to do absolutely everything we could not to catch it while waiting for what was next. That meant even our healthy children who would likely recover fully if they were infected still had to go out of their way not to be an asymptomatic carrier and pass it on to their dad who was growing more ill by the day. We spent months watching Netflix and getting groceries delivered. Our oldest son who had a job moved in with a friend so that he could continue working. In July 2020, we got a phone call from the transplant center. A match had been found as part of a donor chain. If my mom would be willing to donate one of her kidneys to a stranger in Wisconsin, then Chris could get one from a

stranger in Texas. My mom, as it turned out, had better kidneys than a woman half her age. And the donor Chris would be receiving from was about as ideal a match as one could get. Chris is six foot five. And one factor transplant programs consider is whether an organ is reasonably sized for a recipient. While the kidney of a four foot 11 woman might not be automatically excluded, they would prefer to transplant kidneys that. that are about the size your body needs. My mother insisted that she very much wanted to donate her kidney, despite my protestations, that she did not need to do this.

What greater gift can I give my grandchildren than prolonging the life of their father? She asked. The wheels moved quickly from there. The date was set for three weeks later, and on the morning of the donor chain surgery, the kidney of a 26-year-old electrician was put on a Southwest Airlines flight bound for Minnesota

and the kidney of a nearly 63-year-old woman, my mother, was sent to someone in Wisconsin whose identity we have yet to learn. Magnus, the nickname Chris, gave his donor kidney, began working as soon as the transplant surgeon, hooked up the blood supply. Chris just had his five-year post-transplant visit, and his doctors say, it's not possible for him to have had a better outcome. His single-functioning kidney given to him, altruistically, by a man who heard a podcast about organ donation, now performs as well as the two kidneys of his same age peers.

My mother's remaining kidney has grown in capacity, admirably picking up the slack for her former partner. Despite the fact that she only has one left, her kidney function runs laps around that of some of her friends who still have both of theirs. Yes, we are constantly surrounded by bad news on the health care front. insurance costs are through the roof, and Americans still have unequal access to quality care. Wait times for doctors are long, and federal health research has been mortally wounded.

But every day, men and women piloting hollow metal tubes at 32,000 feet above a rock orbiting a star, are carrying something truly extraordinary. A kidney, skillfully removed by the hands of a surgeon, hurtling towards a new destiny inside the body of someone whose life it will save. Up next, my interview with Colin Woodard. He's going to explain just why we think the way we do. And here's a hint. It has a lot to do with where you're from, and it's not just about the way you were raised. When news first breaks, it's everywhere. In the headlines on TV, all over social media, in your push notifications. It's like a storm.

But the coverage leaves you feeling unsatisfied. Well, that's where we come in. I'm Megna Chakrabardi, host of On Point. We ask the questions that still need answers. We analyze the meaning behind the news and why it matters to your life. We equip you with the knowledge you need to face. the next news storm. On Point is clarity when it counts. Subscribe today, wherever you get your podcasts.

What's the world is Von Miller, Super Bowl MVP, chicken farmer, and now host of Free Range. This is a show where I go off the field and off the script. We're talking what's hot in music, film, trending news, and everything blowing up your feet. If you love football, you'll feel it home. But if you're here for the vibes, the internet deep doves, the conversation, this is your podcast. Join me every Wednesday, follow and listen to Free Range with me, Vaughn Miller, everywhere you get your podcast. My guest this week is Colin Woodard. Colin is a New York Times bestselling author, historian, and award-winning journalist who

leads the Nationhood Lab at Sauvea, Virginia University. His newest book, I am so excited about this, is called Nations Apart. And it takes a fascinating look at how America's regional cultures have shaped and sometimes divided the country as we know it today. This is an extremely eye-opening conversation. I have mentioned Colin Woodard's work dozens of times as being very transformational in my understanding of American history. I'm excited to share this with you today. This helps make sense of a lot of the cultural tensions we're seeing right now. So let's dive in.

Colin, it's great to see you again. Thanks for being here. Likewise. Thanks for having me back. You know, I have recommended your book American Nations probably hundreds of times by this point. People are probably tired of hearing me talk about it. I have said so many times we've done podcasts, even a source for a story, we've written in the preamble. People are probably sick of hearing me talk about how much American nations influenced my understanding of American history and also about where we are in the modern day.

So, listen, I am really excited to be able to share nations apart with everybody. They can start hearing me talk about a new and different Colin Woodard book. Yeah, we've refilled the water trough. Yeah. Okay, let's talk first of all about the premise that underscores both of these books, which is that there is not just one American nation, that there are actually many and that those are based on historic migration patterns. But you can say it much more eloquently than I can. So please share. There's never been one America, but several.

And indeed, they have properties of almost like stateless nations, regional cultures that have been with us since the beginning of colonization. And the distinctions between them trace back in almost all cases to the differences between the rival colonial projects that formed on the eastern and southwestern edges of what's now the United States. And those were colonies that did not expect to be in a country together. They were founded by people with completely different ethnographic and political and sociological and religious characteristics. They had different ideas that the society they were going to create. They were settled at different times, sometimes by people from different empires. So, you know, there was very little in common between, say, the early Puritans who settled New England, who believed that they were chosen by God.

They were covenanted people like the Old Testament Hebrews, and they were supposed to go on a mission to, you know, create a Calvinist utopia as they understood it in the New World. world and that they would be punished or rewarded as a group. So the individual could mess things up. What's important is the mission and our shared institutions and were people doing something. Compare that with, you know, another English colony founded in roughly the same time period in the Chesapeake area and the leadership from the 1640s onward were the second, third, fourth, fifth, six sons of the big English manorial gentry families. In other words, not the firstborn ones who'd get the manner at home, who would inherit it, but the ones who wouldn't. And suddenly with the discovery of the new world, they could imagine, oh, I could go there

and create a new manner myself. So they were all coming to reproduce what already existed in the English countryside, you know, like Lord Grantham, you know, Downton Abbey kind of arrangement. Problem was that in the new world, there was no one who was going to stick around and play the role of the peasants and the serfs. So they tried first with indentured servants and then seeing the example of the English West Indies and the deep southern colon. those spawned, they switched to a full-on race-based slave system. But that gave you that bizarre collision of enlightened gentlemen with their education and their natural rights ideas presiding over slave plantations, like fast forward to the early republic, Washington, and Madison and

Jefferson and so on. So those two societies, imagine being in the same country together. They're completely different orientations. One's worried about individuals rising up and becoming tyrants or aristocrats. The other is formally an aristocratic society. And then you had a Dutch settled area around New York City that was like a commercial city-state, you know, global trading place and Scots, Irish, and other people from the war-torn borderlands of Britain going into the back country of what I call Greater Appalachia who were all about individual liberty and personal autonomy and they don't trust institutions and they got to protect your kithinkin yourself. So they all also colonized mutually exclusive areas of the United States through

the 1830s, what became the United States, in sort of rival settlement patterns. And then if you know those settlement patterns, which don't follow state boundaries, or often international boundaries, you can see that mapped, say, at a county level. You can see it reflected as the great tectonic plates of our society and almost everything, from election results to COVID-19 vaccination rates, FICO credit scores, obesity, disability, per capita gun deaths, and so on. So that's the paradigm. I want to talk a little bit more about what does this mean for us today? Let's say we accept the premise that, like, yes, America's migration patterns are continuing to influence us in really significant ways today, as you said, right down to the county level, we can track

things like how do people feel about this issue, this issue, this issue, and trace that back to original migration patterns from hundreds of years ago. You know, the United States is undergoing a relatively profound shift when it comes to things like immigration, like migration patterns. What does this have to do with us today when we're seeing migration from Central America and other parts of the world in very different ways than we did 250 years ago? You know, nations apart took the American Nations paradigm and, yeah, tracks all of this. I run a project at a university research center where we use American nations to crunch data and analyze all sorts of things. And that's all populating nations apart, showing how these centuries-old patterns affect life today. And yeah, one of the really interesting things is how could it be that these centuries-old colonists could still be affecting things,

given that we have internal migration, mass media, mass retailing, mass immigration. Certainly these things would have gone away or diluted the effects of these early settles. But no, the data shows that if anything, the differences between the regions are getting larger, which is intriguing. Now, immigration we dug into quite a bit. We looked at where did those immigrants go? because census takers asked every single person in the 1900 census, hey, you're foreign born or not? And so we have the actual results.

And so we map them by county, what's the per capita foreign born, and then sorted it by the regional cultures. And the results were pretty staggering. Where you and I are from this sort of Yankeedom, which is kind of like the Greater New England cultural space in the sense that the Puritans and their descendants laid down the hard drive in our zone, you know, it was approaching 30% foreign born. So was the Pacific coastal strip also, you know, in the 30s, the area, the Dutch settled area around what's now New York City, similar.

The Midlands also 25%. The southwest, same thing, the interior west, same thing. Three cultures, you call them the southern ones, the area around the Chesapeake zone, the tidewater, the deep south and greater Appalachia, which extends all the way up into the lower Great Lake states. Those three regions were 1% foreign-born, or 3% in greater Appalachia's case. case, a 30-fold difference. In other words, that whole process didn't happen in those three regions. There weren't foreigners. Protestant America didn't have a reckoning. And today, fast forward, and you look at a map of the dominant religion in each county today, and there's a giant Southern Baptist zone that matches almost perfectly those three regional cultures. Why? Because that's where

the Great Wave immigrants didn't go. So that actually created a bigger difference between ideas of identity and belonging and who could be an American because of immigration, because the immigrants were maldistributed across the map. That has knock-on effects and everything right down to the prevalence of Christian nationalism, an idea that can only find purchase in that same region of the country where you could look around today and say, yeah, everyone's evangelical Protestant here, right? Whereas in Maine or Minnesota or almost all the rest of the country, one would look around and say, well, if that's God's plan, it's not turning out. very well, right? Because for 10 generations, evangelical Protestants haven't been dominant or maybe

never have been dominant. So yeah, and there's other stories we could talk about with internal migration and the rest that counterintuitively actually increase the differences because the different phenomenon didn't affect the regions the same way. I want to understand a little bit more about what this means for us in this moment in history. At a time when data demonstrates that Perhaps we are actually not more divided politically, but we actually just hate each other more. I didn't just make that up. The actual political positions of the two different sides, you know, this sort of political split between right and left that the United States seems very fond of, the actual positions are not farther apart than they used to be.

We just loathe the people who are not on our side with a more intense fervor than we did 30 years ago. or even 20 years ago, there is not actually this massive political divide. And if you do polling and you don't attach a tribal ID to it by saying, okay, well, Republicans think we should have X. What is your opinion on that? That's automatically going to trigger somebody's deep tribal identification of like, well, I don't like the Republican, so I disagree. Or I identify as a Republican. So if that's what they want, I'm going to get on board with that. If you remove that and you say, what do you think about policy X? Should we have, you universal background checks on guns to make sure that domestic violence perpetrators are not being able to just go to a gun store and buy one and walk out the same day. Most people are like, yeah, that's a good idea. Let's not let people get shot in schools. Let's not let, you know, the intimate partners be the victim of violence. So when you remove those tribal IDs, what is happening in the large percentage of the population is actually not that different. We just really hate the tribal IDs. I don't know if I would say that it's a new way, but it's different than it was a few decades ago. What does this mean for Americans today? Are we hopelessly divided? Is there no way to bridge any of these gaps?

What does this mean for the union? Is the union going to hold, Colin? Yeah, I mean, these divides have always been with us. We're just not at different times haven't been as conscious of them. I mean, in the Civil War period, everyone was conscious of them. People are really conscious of them now because the stakes are. everything, really. So one can reconcile the divides. You have to understand what are the divides and why are we divided? If there's values-based differences between these regional cultures at a broad

level, understanding what they are with each other understanding what they are, that creates the possibility of negotiating, oh, you think of it this way, we think of it that way, maybe we can overlap it. And it also creates the ability for people trying to improve the situation to have better strategies to do so. In the gun control example you mentioned, if you think policy X would improve the situation, if you're trying to advocate for that policy in greater Appalachia, where it's about individual freedom, you're going to protect your kith. And you've got to say, hey, if you do policy X, it will help you protect your family. And in the Yankee zone, you have to say doing policy X will make our community safer. And if you reverse those approaches, they're not

going to work as well in each place. So, I mean, it's things like that that are valuable. in the intel. But ultimately, yeah, we need to be coming together, especially around what this country is for. What's its purpose? Who belongs? And where are we supposed to be going? Because the choice now is that classic eternal struggle between the American experiment is defined by the Declaration, or we're going to devolve into a blood and soil, this master ethnicity of the real Americans and all the rest of you have limited rights or need to stand down or go away in a diverse country that can only be implemented through authoritarianism. So it's a battle between essentially democracy and some form of dictatorship. And most people, we know, don't want the dictatorship part.

We were polling people on the best possible versions of those two storylines, roughly 60, 30 across the board in favor of the sort of declarations values and head-to-head matchups that transcended most demographics, you know, gender, income, generation, region, race. 63% of independents favored the civic version, 79% if I remember right, of Democrats, and 45% of both Republicans and people who said they voted for Trump in 2020. In other words, nearly half of Trump's own voters prefer the declaration a side-to-side matchup. But we need to have a language to talk about the country that seven, 70% of us want to see happen and get better at articulating that. The tribes for this big

struggle are not Democrats versus Republicans, liberals versus conservatives. It's the American experiment versus blood and soil autocracy. And I think if you can create a framework where people understand that and can articulate the values and the Declaration and where we want to go in that story, that's going to be the most important element to us getting through this and getting back on the track of trying to achieve the country that was envisioned in the Declaration and that Lincoln at Gettysburg charged us to make sure did not perish from the earth. Well, we try a lot of other things. So why not actually try to see where a different cultural group in America, a different nation, as you refer to them, where they're coming from, because

information is power and understanding the types of values that motivate and animate a different group, a group other than yours, actually can help you become much more persuasive in your own ideas and values. And that's really what topocracy is. It's about persuading other people to the rightness of your policy position so that we can implement that for the common good. So, Colin, thanks so much for being here. I appreciate you. I appreciate your work. And I will, of course, hope to see you again. Thanks so much. Each week I answer your questions. This week, I'm tackling religious persecution in Nigeria and what the Trump administration is going to do about it. Plus, trolling videos and posts coming straight from the U.S. government. Can they

really do that? Up next. All right, question number one from you this week. Is the United States going to take military action in Nigeria because of Christian persecution? Here's happening. Donald Trump has threatened military action in Nigeria. He said the U.S. could go in, quote, quote, guns ablazing to wipe out what he called Islamic terrorists targeting Christians. He also told the Pentagon to prepare for possible action. On Truth Social, he said, quote, if we attack, it will be fast, vicious, and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our cherished Christians. Warning, the Nigerian government better move fast.

The president also confirmed the possibility of military intervention aboard Air Force. 1. Do you envisage U.S. on the ground? It could be. I mean, a lot of things are envisage a lot of things. They're killing record numbers of

Christians in Nigeria. They're killing the Christians. And killing them in very large numbers. It's not going to allow that to happen. Here's the context. Nigeria is Africa's most populous country with roughly equal numbers of Christians and Muslims.

Violence has been rising, mostly in northern Nigeria, where Boko Haram and other armed groups operate. You might remember Boko Haram as the group that kidnapped nearly 300 schoolgirls about a decade ago. To this day, dozens are still being held captive. Both Christians and Muslims have been victims of the violence in Nigeria. After Trump instructed the Pentagon to prepare for possible military action, a spokesman for Nigeria's president said, quote, we are shocked that President Trump is mulling an invasion of our country. He added that Nigeria's government is actively working to protect all citizens. Trump has also labeled

Nigeria a CPC, a country of particular concern under the U.S. International Religious Freedom Act. That gives him legal authority to apply sanctions or take other actions if the Nigerian government fails to act. Being named a CPC isn't just symbolic because under the law, it means a country is accused of particularly severe violations of religious freedom, a designation that can trigger things like diplomatic censure or sanctions or aid restrictions unless the president issues a waiver for those. We, of course, don't know if Trump's threats are a way to pressure Nigeria or if he really intends to put boots on the ground. Under the law, the administration is supposed to consult with the Nigerian government and brief Congress within 90 days if it plans to take any action

under that law. But in practice, Trump has often skipped steps like these. He's previously ordered multiple lethal strikes, including against suspected cartel boats near Venezuela, without notifying Congress first. So the next several months will be crucial. That's when the administration must decide whether to follow the law's consultation process or move ahead on its own. Meanwhile, Nigerians and international observers will be watching closely to see how the rhetoric matches actually. or doesn't? Let's get to our next question. How can we be the richest country in the world and still be the most in debt? It's an idea that does not make sense. I do understand that. And that is because we too often associate the United States's finances with personal finances.

And the two are not the same. If you were an individual and you made $10 million one year, but you were $30 million in debt, you actually would not have that large of a net worth. And so when we think about it in those terms, we think, well, the United States cannot be that rich and also be that in debt. But it's important to remember that personal finance is not the same as the finances of a government. It is a paradox. I get it. So let's get into it.

First, the United States economy is massive. It's over $29 trillion in total output. in 2024. That gives us, obviously, an enormous amount of wealth, innovation, global influence, but at the same time, we borrow heavily. And that borrowing is not just because we like to spend more money on things like White House Christmas Decor. It's also driven by long-term commitments to Social Security. And Medicare, it includes emergency spending during crises like recessions or pandemics, military operations, and also, yes, interest on previous debt. In short, borrowing has become a way to fund both day-to-day government operations and also these big, unavoidable costs, without suddenly raising taxes or cutting programs.

Right now, the national debt is about $38 trillion. But who do we owe all that money to? Did you grow up believing that the United States owed the country of China, billions of dollars, and that at any moment China would call us up and call in their debt and the United States would be ruined? that was a very common thing that children were taught in the 80s and 90s, apparently, that it's not a fact. Some of the money for the debt we owe ourselves, actually, and I know it's weird to think about, like, how do we owe debt to ourselves? It comes from borrowing from the Social Security Trust Fund. The rest is owed to investors, both in the United States and abroad, including American banks, businesses, and foreign governments. When the federal government needs to borrow,

It does not call up a bank and say, hello, Chase, can we borrow $38 trillion? No. What it does is sell treasury securities at a slight discount and promises to pay them back at full value later. So it's a little bit like saying, if you give me $10 today, next week when I get paid, I'll give you $12. That's essentially what we're doing. The system allows the government to cover current spending without immediately raising taxes, which is a difficult process in the United States, and it also gives investors a safe place to park their money. Buying United States Treasury Securities is seen as a very safe investment because the United States has never missed a debt payment. Very good chance that if you buy a treasury bond, you are going to get your money back with the interest that you were promised.

Here's the catch. While the U.S. economy keeps growing, so does our debt. And our debt actually is projected to rise even higher over the next decade. And that's because the government runs large deficits, meaning it spends more than it collects in taxes. Now, there are a lot of reasons for this. Some of it has to do with the fact that we do a bad job of actually collecting the taxes that are owed. Americans underpay their taxes by hundreds of billions of dollars every year. And we don't have time to get into why that is today, but that is just the truth of the matter. And there is also a tradeoff when it comes to government spending. When the government spends money, even when it's borrowing money in a deficit, that money circulates through all of the economy, stimulates economic growth. And some of that then flows back to the government in the form of taxes on businesses and individuals. There is a problem, of course. What if we just keep spending? Eventually, it's possible that our debt, could grow so high that we're unable to make our debt payments. Our debt payments would crowd out

our other priorities and our spending would be so focused on making debt payments that we would be unable to pay for things like Medicare or Social Security. So there are potential repercussions to going too significantly into debt. But hopefully that helps you understand how the United States can be such a rich country. We're measuring wealth by GDP, gross domestic product, everything that we are producing, buying, selling in the United States in one year. That's the largest economy on earth. But that is a separate thing than the United States government debt. And let's get to our final question.

Can federal agencies use taxpayer-funded websites and emails to blame a political party for a government shutdown? The short answer is probably not, but it is anyway. Here's what's happening. The Trump administration has been sending messages from multiple federal agencies. saying Democrats are responsible for the shutdown. Housing and Urban Development's website even has a big red banner claiming the radical left in Congress shut down the government, while the Department of Justice website says Democrats have shut down the government. Employees at agencies like labor and health and human services were also given template language to use in their out-of-office

messages repeating this talking point. Enter the Hatch Act, which was passed in 1939. It's a law that limits political activity by government employees. The idea is that civil servants, which is the overwhelming majority of government employees, should be nonpartisan on the job. They shouldn't use their positions or the government's resources to support or attack a political party or a candidate. And that includes emails, websites, and official announcements. A video released during the Biden administration by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which enforces the Hatch Act, said, this about the law. The Hatch Act prohibits employees from engaging in political activity while they are

on duty, including teleworking and official union time, in a federal room or building, wearing an official uniform or insignia, or using a government-owned or lease vehicle. Here's why it matters. Using federal resources to push a political message could break the law. That's taxpayer money being used to take sides in a political fight. Think of it this way. If during the last election, President Biden had directed all of these government agencies to put anti-Trump messages on their website. Do not vote for Donald Trump. Donald Trump is X, Y, and Z terrible things. People would have been up in arms about that.

We would have been angry that our taxpayer money was being used to push political messages when the people who work at the Social Security Administration are there to help all Americans. This is not the Social Security Administration for Democrats or Republicans. this is meant to help everybody, and we have taken pains as a government to ensure that the civil service, which again is the overwhelming majority of government employees, serves all Americans, not just Americans of a certain political persuasion. It also protects the employees from being pressured to pick a side, and it makes sure that citizens get fair treatment no matter what their politics are. Imagine going down to the Social Security office and they

check your voter registration and say, oh, you're a Republican, sorry, the Biden administration won't help you. That's ridiculous. And the opposite is also true. We wouldn't want the Trump administration doing that to Democrat. Even if there's no election happening at that moment, ethics experts say that these messages that are being displayed on websites cross the line because they are there to try to influence Congress and public opinion. Complaints about this have already been filed with the Office of Special Counsel. In most cases, penalties for violations of the Hatch Act can include things like fines, suspension, or removal from office, but when the White House itself is involved, enforcement becomes quite complicated. Violations by White House officials or political appointees

are referred to the president for action, which means that there might not be any real consequences at all. That's why these situations are so tricky. The law is there to keep government employees impartial, but when top officials are part of the messaging, the usual enforcement mechanisms don't always operate the same way. So even if a law is clearly being broken, holding people accountable can be nearly impossible in practice. So yes, the Hatch Act exists for a reason and ethics experts say this kind of messaging could be a clear violation. But the big takeaway here is that taxpayer-funded government resources are supposed to serve everyone, not be used for partisan political battles.

If you'd like to submit a question, head to the preamble.com slash podcast. We'd love to hear from you there. And be sure to read our weekly magazine at the preamble.com. It's free. And here is your personal invitation to join 350,000 people who still believe understanding is an act of hope. This week we're looking at why it's so hard to find a doctor, how medical breakthroughs are leading to revolutionary treatments for rare diseases, and why drug prices are so much higher in the United States than overseas. I'm your host and executive producer Sharon McMahon. If you enjoyed this show, please like, share, and subscribe these things help podcasters out so much.

Our supervising producer is Melanie Buck Parks, and our audio producer is Craig Thompson. I'll see you again soon. Thank you.