The MeidasTouch Podcast - Molly Jong-Fast reacts to Trump’s Attacks On Americans

Episode Date: May 24, 2025

MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports on 2017 JD Vance predicting that Trump’s policies would destroy the lives of his supporters and Meiselas interviews Molly Jong-Fast about Trump’s inhumane policies. Visit https://meidasplus.com for more! Remember to subscribe to ALL the MeidasTouch Network Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/meidastouch-podcast Legal AF: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/legal-af MissTrial: https://meidasnews.com/tag/miss-trial The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-politicsgirl-podcast The Influence Continuum: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-influence-continuum-with-dr-steven-hassan Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/mea-culpa-with-michael-cohen The Weekend Show: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-weekend-show Burn the Boats: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/burn-the-boats Majority 54: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/majority-54 Political Beatdown: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/political-beatdown On Democracy with FP Wellman: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/on-democracy-with-fpwellman Uncovered: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/maga-uncovered Coalition of the Sane: https://meidasnews.com/tag/coalition-of-the-sane Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Don't trust me. How about 2017 JD Vance play the clip? And as we've been talking about, this is not just a policy problem. There's obviously a significant issue of folks potentially losing access to their healthcare. But if you think of the political problem, folks have always asked, what is it

that's going to drive Donald Trump's voters away from him? Well, losing their health care may actually be the answer to that question. And unfortunately, the Republicans, who I think have been very smart and frankly correct in the fact that Obamacare hasn't solved a lot of the core problems of the American health care market, now own the problem.

They're going to learn very quickly, unless they craft a better bill, that it's not just enough of the American healthcare market now own the problem. They're gonna learn very quickly unless they craft a better bill, that it's not just enough to critique the bill that has failed in the past. You have to actually offer a better alternative. And we're gonna see if the Senate is able to actually put forward that alternative.

And Democrats have also been. We all know under the new GOP budget scam, 13, 14 million Americans are gonna lose their healthcare. They're gonna lose access to supplemental nutrition assistance program food stamps. They're going to lose access to programs that provide cost of living and rental assistance. But there's no longer regulation on silencers and silencers get tax exemption. So I guess silencers were a big winner also, of course, billionaires and oligarchs were a big winner, getting trillions of dollars in tax cuts

from stealing from the poor. Then you've got these like Trump officials like Janine Pirro making these like selfie videos of herself like Janine Pirro, that yes, the Fox host is now the top federal prosecutor in Washington, DC. And she's like making selfie videos, whining over water and that she has to pay $7 for what,

I don't even know what she's whining about, but let them eat cake, huh? Here, play this clip. Hi everyone, it's Judge Janine. I'm at the water cooler in the United States Attorney's Office in Washington, D.C. And you may recall that the United States gave something like $44 billion a year through USAID for things like dance classes in Wuhan, China,

and Sesame Street in Iraq. But here in the United States, in the United States Attorney's Office, where we prosecute crime on behalf of the victims, on behalf of the people who are targeted by That's what they're doing. delivered today. Today there was no water delivered to the United States. That's what they're doing. I mean, you just can't make this stuff up. And also, Donald Trump last Thursday had his meeting with his meme coin wallet holders. Most of them are from foreign countries. And here Donald Trump's press secretary, chief propagandist says, you're not gonna get to know who was there because this is his personal time. He's on personal time,

so we don't know the people who have paid millions of dollars to buy access here at Play This Club. You're welcome. Thanks for being here. Garrett, go ahead. Kelly, you guys are very proud of your record on transparency. I have two transparency related questions for you. On the president's dinner tonight, will the White House commit to making a list

of the attendees public so people can see who's paying for that kind of access to the president? Well, as you know, Garrett, this question has been raised with the president. I have also addressed the dinner tonight. The president is attending it in his personal time. It is not a White House dinner. It's not taking place here at the White House. But certainly I can raise that question and try to get you an answer for it.

Okay, and on the Qatari aircraft, Air Force has said they're gonna classify. Let's bring in Molly Jungfast, friend of the Midas Touch Network. And Molly actually gave the introduction to the Webby Award that we won. It was a beautiful introduction. Thank you, Molly.

Molly, been a writer, you've been covering different administrations. What I just showed you, let them eat cake, huh? Let them eat cake. You know what's so interesting about this administration is at every point, they're sort of rediscovering government. Like they're learning how government works. You know, Judge Pirro, Judge Janine, Judge Box of Wine, as she's called, she has this,

you know, here she is, go, you know, learning about government. It's not fancy, right? There is money that's spent for foreign aid. I mean, I thought that was bizarre, very specious, you know, that somehow millions of dollars of foreign aid should be sort of spent on government workers. And the funny thing that government workers offices, what I think is the funniest part of this whole thing is that these people actually, they do in fact, like they made this whole case to their people that somehow government workers were making all this money and government was filled with fraud, waste and abuse. And here is Judge Pierrot scowing like, oh, actually there's not even bottled water here.

So it turns out the federal government is not as fancy as a Fox News green room. You talk about the people who are gonna be hit the hardest from this budget bill or frankly everything that Trump does, you know, the people who feel, we all are feeling pain. But it's often people even in the red states though, who are dependent on Medicaid, who are dependent on food stamps, who are dependent,

not to say it's just unique to that, but if you look at it, yet the propaganda, whether it's the racism, the propaganda, the hate, you know, the lies seem to still kind of permeate. Don't get me wrong, we're seeing polls right now showing that Donald Trump's the least popular at this point in presidential history, but still his support, depending on poll to poll, is 37% to 42%. That's still a lot of millions of people who are suffering who vote for this guy. Well, with the structure, it's a question of the structure. So a lot of these blue states have high state taxes. When you have a high state tax, it means you get more money from the state. If you have a lower state tax, you have to get more money from

the federal government. And those red states are the states with the lower state taxes. So they get more money from the federal government. What does Donald Trump want to do? What does the big, beautiful bill do? It actually cuts federal services for a lot of states, I mean, cuts federal services broadly across the board, but the people are going to be affected the harshest are going to be people who live in red states. For example, Trump World is obsessed with getting rid of the Department of Education.

They're doing this because they're sort of obsessed with Carter and Carter created the Department of Education. So there's a feeling that if they could just get rid of the Department of Education, then they can, you know. But the things that the Department of Education do, right, Pell Grants, that's college for kids who can't afford it. Title I, that's money for schools that don't have any money.

These are things that are really help the poorest of us and why the federal government sort of exists there, the social safety net. And what Trump did in his second term was he was able to get sort of lower information voters to get out and vote for him. And they were, you know, people who didn't necessarily vote. They're not even lower information. That is true, but they're also these low-frequency voters. That's why the polling is always so off for Trump is because he gets

people who don't vote to vote for him. But the problem is a lot of those people who don't vote tend to be people who really are, who benefit from the federal government as well they should, a lot of them. You know, one of the most disturbing things about this big, beautiful bill, and look, this bill is going to go to the Senate It's going to get totally changed But one of the things that's the most upsetting about it This really is this bill is set up to make good a lot of Trump's campaign promises Many of which are I think pretty undoable like no tax on tips. How are you gonna say? What's a tip?

What's not a tip? How are you gonna you know, make it so that people can't just say everything I do is a tip now? I mean, it's, I'm not sure how you can structure that. But more importantly, what you're seeing now is these, it's just these Republicans are going after the people who put them in office. And a great example of this is the SNAP benefit. So this will be the largest cut to food assistance, I think in history, I think that I had read it

was in history. And I mean, it'll be a seismic shift in the way we give money to children. It will mean more healthy, more hungry children. This it will mean more hungry children. This cut will mean more hungry children. Important to mention that this bill also grows the deficit. So it both cuts services for poor children, more hungry children, and also more government debt.

I don't know how it manages to both do two of the things you don't want and, you know, starve children and also grow the deficit. But it does. And look, by the way, the bond market isn't happy. You know, the bond market is sort of the last thing we have putting Trump in check. And it's foreign investors saying, like, is the US credit good or bad? Do we even really want to be in this thing? And the bond market is freaked out by this as well it should be because this is a budget of sort of It's just a very you know It's it shows a certain lack of responsibility

That the Republican Party doesn't they are not worried about the deficit and they're also not worried about serving children Which these are two things they should be worried about. A lack of responsibility is Trump being Trumpy, right? You go back and just look at everything this guy's done in his life. When he went into Atlantic City with daddy's money, three casinos he bought right next to each other and everybody's saying the amount of debt you're taking on with three of your own casinos that are going to compete against each other, you're taking on with three of your own casinos that are going to compete against each other, you're going to cannibalize your own casinos.

So you may have this flashy opening with Michael Jackson and fake gold plated this, you're going to bankrupt it. What does Trump do? Threatens the whistleblowers, they get fired, they sue him, he settled at least with one big prominent case. The Atlantic City casinos go bankrupt over and over again. He makes money, but the contractors there and the workers lost their life savings

and Atlantic City was destroyed. And we see this with a lot of his endeavors. And now he's doing this with the United States of America. Now, one of the things that I've talked about to combat all of this is I try to say, let's not get too political and let's focus on the people. Now, one of the things that I've talked about to combat all of this is I try to say, let's not get too political and let's focus on the people. I said, politics has a way of gamifying humanity and people.

And sometimes you just have to listen and hear the life stories of just what people are going through. And every dot, comma, period, red line of a budget bill is actually impacting families, and all families have stories to tell, which is why I find it interesting also

that your latest book is a personal memoir. It's a daughter's memoir where you, at this moment, wanna tell a story about just your own family. You call it How to Lose Your Mother, a Daughter's Memoir. It's a great book, and I just think that what's important about this is that we have to always reflect on, we all have unique and interesting family dynamics with complexities and drama and love and all of these issues.

And not to use a cliche, but nothing gold can stay. We're all here for a fleeting moment of time with our families, and we just want what's best for them as we struggle through complex worlds. So I wonder if you wrote this book also now because of kind of the uncertainty. I guess I should just ask you rather than telling my hypothesis for why you write it. Why now for a book like this? So, you know, my generation is, and I think it may also be your generation, we're Generation X.

We're young Generation X. So, like at the very tail end of the generation. But we are a generation that has, we are the least written about, the least, you know, people don't, aren't really interested in us, but we are this generation that really does, it really does just sort of, we have this moment where we have children and parents,

we're taking care of children and parents. And I wanted to write about this experience of being in this sandwich generation and having, and having, I'm going to, yeah, and having to care, here it is, it's very beautiful, having to care for your parents and also your children. And I was glad that I got to write it. And, you know, I also wanted to talk about sort

of what it's like to have a spouse who has cancer. My husband had cancer, though he is fine. But I got to write about that, and that was really clarifying. And it's funny because now, you know, Joe Biden just had this terrible metastatic cancer diagnosis. And I write, you know, almost a third, actually even more than a third of Americans will get diagnosed

with cancer in their lifetime. That's a humongous group. And so I write a lot about how to be able. It's not a political book, but, you know, in the fact that science is political and and these things are all political, but it's it's really about this kind of how to talk to the people around you and take care of them. Molly Jungfest, everybody, check out the book, and I appreciate you sharing this heartfelt story,

How to Lose Your Mother, A Daughter's Memoir. It's available wherever books are sold. And thanks for taking the time to chat with us through some of the ways this Trump policies are impacting families across the country. And for everybody who knows, I'm making a hard pitch for Molly to join the Midas Touch Network,, I'm making a hard pitch for Molly to join the Midas Touch Network. So I'm just putting it out there.

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