The Chaser Report - The Trump 2.0 Forecast | PEP with Chas Licciardello & Melina Wicks

Episode Date: December 1, 2024

For the final PEP of 2024, where Chas is joined by Melina Wicks, David Smith, and John Barron. In this snippet, Chas and Melina predict what is going to happen over the next four years of Trump 2.0. More Chaser Report tomorrow!Listen to the full episode here — THE MEGA PEPMAS SPECIAL! PEP with Chas and Dr Dave & Melina Wicks AND JOHN BARRON!! (Ep 192, 29 Nov) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report. Dom here, I'm afraid we're once again a bit short-staffed. I am going to try and record some new episodes this week with a whole bunch of our favourite people. And indeed, we want to keep the pod going all the way until Christmas. So there will be at least a few episodes that are new every single week until then. so do check back. We will take the month of January off, as we usually do.

However, in the meantime, the good news is over at PEP, they have been producing so much content that it would be silly of us, really, not to feature some of it again. Yes, they've done a six hour, six hour Christmas special for PEP number 192, the final instalment for 2024, featuring Chaz, of course, Dave Smith, Melina Wicks, and they go through. recent cabinet appointments, long-term predictions and so on, there's even a special one-hour chat between Chas and John Barron about how their show Planet America got started. We have a clip

for you in which Chaz and Molina talk about how a second Trump administration could go down. That's what I've got in my notes. I don't know whether that means could unfold or means could go down, you know, in a flaming heap. I'm not really sure which of those things is. So there you go. Here's some of the six-hour episode of Pep. It's either a wonderful Christmas gift to all their loyal fans or grounds for an intervention. I'm honestly not sure which it is. Make up your own mind after this ad break. I'll catch you with a new episode very, very soon. Melena, how are you expecting Trump 2.0 to be different from Trump 1.0? It's very hard to predict because there's always.

a tension with Trump between him wanting to be a dictator. And I'm not saying he is a dictator. I'm just saying that impulse to just do whatever you want and not be bound by the rules around, you know, Congress and the courts and things of that nature and his desire to be liked, which is also well documented. And unlike in an actual dictatorship where the leader controls the media and is able to police thought and speech in the Qina thought, but speech in the community, people will react to his choices and he will learn of those reactions in the public. And so

I would expect him to try to do all the things that he's said he's going to do, but I would not expect him, well, not all them, but I would not expect him to be successful in a lot of them. And we will see once he starts getting a backlash, whether he starts to pull back on

some of these things. And you also do have these very competing visions where is Trump going to massively increased spending and tax cuts without any care of all towards a spiraling deficit, which he did not seem interested about in the campaign, or will he let Elon Musk cut two trillion dollars out of the budget and bring on the worst austerity since the Great Depression? Both of these things were discussed on the campaign trail, and we don't know for sure which

one is going to win out. One thing I do find interesting and why I suspect it will be more business as usual within the Trump context is you're not they're talking about massive cuts to the budget but not cutting anything from defense and if anything increasing defense spending I don't understand the point of America first and let's end all these foreign incursions and other countries if you're going to spend as much or more on the military you're not saving money no you're not if you're not cutting spending and I thought the whole logic of that was Let's not spend money fighting wars, which are expensive, and rebuilding countries we fought wars in, which is expensive, and use that money to rebuild communities

that have been devastated by the opioid crisis and manufacturing jobs going offshore. And there's not going to be any extra money if they don't cut defense spending or any other spending. So there's just a lot of contradictions in the kind of general discussions he has. But those kinds of key things, like I do think he'll try to bring in tariffs. Like we talked before about it's not going to happen. I think he's going to try. I think he wants to do that. I think he's going to try to do mass deportations.

There's a lot of things he'll try, but we'll see how many roadblocks he comes up against because there were a lot of things he wanted to do in his first term, and he also hit a lot of roadblocks in trying to execute those things. What do you think? Well, first of all, I'd respond on behalf of Team Trump on the question about the seeming contradiction between not-finding wars and beefing up your military. They would undoubtedly argue that by beefing up your military

costs a lot less than a war. And so they would say, yeah, sure, we're paying an extra, what, $200 billion maybe on defense per year. But how much does Afghanistan cost? Make it cost more than that. And so we're saving money by beefing up the military, scaring people not to take us on. That's what they'd say.

Now, in reality, I'm not sure that's actually true. I think what I just said is not true. I mean, this was the question without notice that you've asked me, so I haven't got the numbers in front of me, but I'm pretty sure Afghanistan didn't cost $200 billion a year. It went for a long time, but overall it cost trillions of dollars, but over 20 years. Yeah, I don't know how it works out economically,

but that is what they would argue at the very least. In terms of what I'm expecting from Trump in 2.0, I think that obviously they've spent a long time I'm trying to think about what went wrong in their first four years and to try and work around it. But something else has happened since then, which I don't think they necessarily predicted. Well, they could have predicted it, but they might not have,

which is the Supreme Court's changed the game. I'm sure that they would have, after the first term, they would have gone, well, we didn't get much done. And we got some tax cuts. We didn't do much else. We got held up in the courts over and over and over again. Let's just do a whole bunch of agency actions and executive actions and just get them right this time, let's not screw them up.

That's all you need to do. That's what they might have been thinking. The Supreme Court in the last six months just completely just pulled the tablecloth from that strategy because all those cases I talked about, the four cases I talked about in my Supreme Court special where I've told my half, I've forgotten what they're all called now, but yeah, the regulations cases essentially, making it almost impossible for the executive to do much with regulations, without legislation, that's going to apply to Trump. And he's going to be the first person who gets screwed by that, unless the Supreme Court's about

to become massive hypocrites, which they might. Don't want to rule that out. But if they're, not, then Trump's about to start trying to do a bunch of things, and he's going to get spoiled by the Supreme Court. So my prediction is he is very angry about the Supreme Court in the next four years and he doesn't do much. So that's my first prediction. My second prediction, I'd said this to John, but I'll say it to you, I think the whole thing is going to go a lot quicker than people think. Right now, he seems all powerful, but I think that they're going to spend a large proportion of the first year trying to get those tax cuts passed because they're going to be hard. I'll get to them in a second. They are going to be hard passing those tax cuts

because quite frankly, I don't know where they're going to find the trillions of dollars. They're going to need to get that through reconciliation. Because remember with reconciliation, you need to make a balance in the 10-year window. So, like, they have five, four, five trillion dollars worth of tax cuts they're trying to pass. Where's the four to five trillion dollars coming from? Like, to try and balance that in the window. And the Democrats are not going to give them any help. I boldly predicted Democrats suddenly become massive deficit warriors when, like pointing at Trump going, we can't afford this. He's trying to give tax cuts to the rich. We're we can't afford this?

Like, I predict this. In particular, it just seems obvious to me that the looming deadline on Social Security and Medicare is going to become a thing in the next four years. The fact that every single projection says the next term, not this one, the next term is when the party ends. That's when they run out of trust fund.

You can't tell me that's not going to become part of the debate over the next four years. Where they're going to say, you're trying to pass $4 trillion worth of tax cuts, you're going to end social security. You are going to be responsible for the end of social security. It's just so obvious that they're going to use that argument. And so that's going to make the deficit much more of an issue,

which means it's be harder for him to pass these tax cuts over Republicans who've spent the last decades trying to act like they care about fiscal responsibility. And they don't want to be saying like an hypocrite. He'll get them through. I don't think he's going to get all of them through. But it's going to take up most of the year. And so after that's over, what's he got left? It's going to be not very long before.

we're into midterms. The Democrats are, I think, almost certainly going to win the midterms. And then we're into... Win the House, right? Yeah, yeah. Sorry, be clear. Yes, I'm talking to the House. No, I don't think they're going going to win the Senate for a while. And then we're... And then that's the end of Trump's administration, essentially. As soon as Democrats take the Congress, that is it. And we're already competing for the primaries. Well, that's what I was going to say. I'm interested to see what happens in two years when,

as you say, the primary start, because we, that is different. We haven't seen Trump in a lame duck period before, because at the end of his first term, he was running again. In two years time, everyone's sort of speculating what's going to happen in four years. Will he, you know, will he leave office peacefully and all this stuff? But we're going to know before then, because we're going to see whether he participates in helping to select the next Republican nominee. We're going to see people publicly vying to replace him. Yep.

And that's going to take different forms. We're going to see does that mean... One of them will be Vance. Yeah. Part of his administration. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah.

And it'll be in the wake of presumably, just not even you're counting against Trump, but just the way these sort of cyclical patterns work, presumably a backlash in the midterms. So you would expect that, you know, people tend to turn on the incumbent president around time of the midterns. They're disappointed. And so you would expect just using history as a guide, Trump to be not at his most popular at that point in time. So then all the Republicans who do want to run for president for the next cycle,

have to deal with, you know, are you trying to make yourself more or less independent from him? Are you, like, going and kissing the ring to try and get his endorsement to, you know, and like Trump is kingmaker still, or are people trying to distance themselves to increase their chances of being electable in a general? I don't know. It's going to depend on everything that happens in the next two years, but it is going to have a big impact on the last two years. Yeah. I think as well, it's probably a relatively easy prediction to make that Trump will not enjoy seating the spotlight to anybody else and there's going to be attention there and that's going to play out in interesting ways that affect the last two years of his presidency.

I genuinely think his presidency is effectively over by about October 26. I think there's just going to be all this year after that. And by the way, on the tax cuts, I just, this just occurred to me myself, there is a very real chance. I'm not saying certainty, but there is a very real chance that J.D. Vance is going to be called in to be the. balancing vote, like the casting vote on the tax cuts. There could be 50-50 in the Senate.

And J.D. Vance has to make the call when J.D. Vance is against the tax cuts. Because J.D. Vance doesn't want huge tax cuts on the rich. Remember, he's the Mr. Populist guy. He's the one that wants the child tax credit. He's the one who wants welfare for the middle class. That's what J.D. Vance is going to run on in 2020. That way, that he's going to be, he's going to be running this populist message that

we're giving too much to the rich and we're not giving enough to the poor and to the middle class and to the families and he's going to have to make a choice about what he wants to run on in 2028 potentially and it's going to be down on him potentially to decide whether the tax cuts ride or die which would be really a really interesting situation yes his journey over the next two to four years is going to be interesting to watch I think because yeah as you say He has a choice to make as to whether he's going to be slavishly loyal to Trump, which is going to make it harder to win a general election after Trump, because you would expect, again, just going by regular cycles, Democrats,

to have the sort of head start in that race, or is he going to be slavishly loyal to Trump to increase his chances of winning the primary? Because any sign of him trying to distance himself from Trump, and I would not expect Trump to be gracious about it. Some presidents, even more normal presidents do this very, very reluctantly, but usually a president in an incumbent party will say, go ahead. If you need to distance yourself from me, do it. But honestly, like, even then, like, there was reported lots of tension between Clinton and Gore in that race. And you can tell that Harris knew that

she couldn't get away with distancing herself from Biden, because otherwise, I'm sure she would have. She's smart enough to know that it would have benefited her unless she suspected that Biden and his people would create a backlash and be leaking against her and criticizing her if she did So presidents at the best of time don't like to see their underlings, you know, criticizing them publicly, and Trump obviously times a million. So J.D. Vance is already in an awkward position. And I mean, you always have to look at the history of, you know, people who, ambitious people who enter Trump's orbit thinking it's going to advance their career don't usually come out

better for it. They're zero for infinity so far. Like, you either end up ultimately finding something that's a bridge too far for you and saying no. And that's what everyone judges you are. In the case of, say, Mike Pence, where Trump supporters ended up wanting to hang him, literally. Or you're a picture of loyalty, like say Rudy Giuliani, and you end up bankrupt and maybe going to jail. And so I think every single day of Trump's second term, J.D. Vance will be thinking, how will this affect my chances? in 2028.

Every single thing that comes across his desk, every conversation he's involved in, that's what he's going to be thinking about. Yeah. And so he will be interesting to watch to see how he's reacting and responding in these moments. JD Vance is a smart man. He's a very ambitious man, but I think a lot of people overestimate their ability. Everyone goes in there thinking that they're going to control Trump.

Yeah, they'll ride the tiger. Yeah. And Trump is like America's bad boyfriend, I think. Everyone gets into bed with him thinking. they're going to change him and he changes them yeah no that's that's a great call