The MeidasTouch Podcast - Rep. Deluzio Discusses Fighting Back Against MAGA Madness

Episode Date: July 6, 2026

MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports on MAGA Mike Johnson panicking as his own party wants him fired as they revolted against him and forced him to shut down the House. 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 Cult Conversations: The Influence Continuum with Dr. Steve Hassan: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-influence-continuum-with-dr-steven-hassan The Weekend Show: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-weekend-show The Ken Harbaugh Show: https://meidasnews.com/tag/the-ken-harbaugh-show Majority 54: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/majority-54 On Democracy with FP Wellman: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/on-democracy-with-fpwellman Uncovered: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/maga-uncovered Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor,

free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. This spring, Denham gets a softer, lighter, update. Introducing Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg, a new fit that moves with you. It's everything you want denim to feel like for summer. Easy, breathable, and effortlessly cool. With a fit that creates natural movement and a wide leg that feels modern, not overwhelming. Plus, that signature, wait, for this price, moment. Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg. Here we go. Someone's already claiming this is our year. Someone else said that last year, too.

A round of Jamison, ginger, and lime arrives at a table. Smooth enough for kickoff, smooth enough for extra time. New friends pulling up a stool. Debates about whether that was a handball. Cheers rising like a roar around the room. Because match days are about the shared moments. How did Jameson to your match day lineup?

Jameson, it's what you bring. Please enjoy our products responsibly. If you want a $3,000 a month payday for life, what would you feel free to do? Take a long weekend, every weekend? Or try a bunch of new hobbies? Would you feel free to upgrade and listen ad-free? Don't worry, we get it.

Every $20 ticket could win you $3,000 a month for life and supports life-saving cancer research at the Princess Margaret. Feel free to buy your payday-for-life ticket today. Raffle number 155-2194. Please play responsibly. Before the next track starts, have you ever wondered, who are the people in my old family photos?

Or what brought them to Canada? With Ancestry, you can start finding answers. Start with a name and we'll guide you from there. For just 499, try our new 30-day Beginners Pass and uncover generations of family stories. No experience necessary. You've got questions? We've got Ancestors.

Offer ends July 22nd, 2026. Visit Ancestry.ca slash beginners for details. Terms apply. Magamai Johnson, the Republican Speaker of the House, is panicking as members of his own party want him out. They think that he is the... the worst speaker of the house ever, Maga Mike. As you know, shut down the House of Representatives until at least July 13th when there was a full-fledged

revolt in the past week and a half against Maga Mike's leadership. The Maga Republican extremists in the House blocked Maga Mike from passing a rule, as it's called, in order to keep Congress running. So Maga Mike panicked and he was like, okay, everybody go home until. July 13th. So Maga Mike shut down the House of Representatives until at least July 13th. And now we're hearing other Maga Republican leaders mock him for that and they're preparing. They see blood in the water for them to take over leadership when Maga Mike cost the Republicans, the House of Representatives in the midterm. So by way of example, you've got Maga Republican Congress member Jason Smith.

He went public with his criticism of Maga Micah. It wasn't just a criticism as Raw Story says. Mike Johnson was shamed by MAGA lawmakers over his leadership problems. Fix it or else. And this as the MAGA Republicans are in a full-fledged revolt against him. Let me show you what Jason Smith, MAGA Republican Congress member, he's like the number three top-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives. He went on state regime media Fox, and here's what he said.

He said, we don't need you recessing. Stop sending us home. You're making us all look dumb, Mag and Mike here playing this clip. Is there something more that Johnson can be doing here? Because out of the last seven speakers, Johnson has had the most failed rule votes at nine. Next behind him was Kevin McCarthy at three. And before that, there had not been a failed rule since, Dennis Hastert. Johnson's defense is always that he's got the slimmest majority in history,

but, you know, in the rule vote on the NDAA, the skinny version of the Save America bill failed last week. It's not like he was, you know, keeping members at home and twisting arms and having the president make phone calls. He sent you guys home. At what point does this become a leadership problem more than a function of a slim majority? You know, we do have a slim majority. I knew that going into the big beautiful bill. I knew I could only lose two votes in the House and three in the Senate. We only lost two in the House, three in the Senate. But we were able to thread that needle.

It's all about bringing people together. I truly, truly believe that we have to figure out what a team is. We don't need to be recessing when we hit a bump on the road. We need to have a conference meeting, go, and hash it out, fix the problem. And that's what Speaker Banner, Speaker McCarthy, Speaker Ryan would do. And I strongly insist that let's get the job done for the American people. And I think that you'll see that.

With less than 30 seconds. So that was on state regime media earlier. And then thereafter, Maga Mike goes on. And Maga Mike just goes right out of Donald Trump's playbook. And Maga Mike's like, okay, okay, okay. I hear what he's saying. But folks, we're just. dealing with communists right now. We're dealing with Mom Donnie and people like that have killed.

Hundreds of millions of people have died because of the beliefs of people like Mom Donnie. What the hell are you talking about? Rent stabilization boards, not raising rent for two years, the horror. Giving people free health care, universal health care, single payer. The horror. Making sure that all Americans receive education that they deserve what the horror to make sure that Americans can afford rent, can live the American dream, can afford to buy and own their homes, the horror to make sure that there can be universal pre-K, to make sure that there can be universal childcare. Oh my God, is this what they're really asking for, to make sure that people can work with dignity and get paid, not just a minimum wage that is not enough to afford the basics of their life,

but to be able to actually live a thriving life, have people get paid a wage with dignity, the horror. Here's what Maga Mike has to say. Let's play it. Mom Donnie got elected in New York. I've been out on the campaign trail country wide across coast to coast, every swing district, the blue states, red states saying the same thing. There are many Mamdani's popping up, running for Congress around the country, and you better be very serious about this. This is a serious threat to our whole system of government. These are Marxists. It's communism, socialism.

Those are deviations of Marxism begins with the opposite premise of America, and it is a serious threat to us. These people want to say, they're saying it out loud, they want to abolish all borders, they want to abolish all prisons, they want to defund the police, they want to abolish the U.S. Senate. They want to pack the Supreme Court. They want the government to take over control of all production. This is communism, and it has led to the murder of innocent people, tens of millions of them in the 20th century alone. We have to fight this. We're no longer just in an election cycle.

We were saying it was common sense versus crazy. Now it's common sense versus communism, and everybody needs to wake up. And then you have Mag and Mike say, okay, okay, okay. But here's what we're going to do. We're going to come up with a reconciliation package. It's going to be big. It's going to be beautiful. It's going to be irresistible to Republicans.

And this way, we're going to do this voter suppression. Everybody's going to be happy with Maga Mike, and we're going to suppress people's votes because, yeah, Donald Trump doesn't give a shit. Donald Trump doesn't care about affordability when it comes to housing. He hasn't even signed that housing bill. Donald Trump doesn't care about health care. He'll just lie and say, your health care prices are down 800%. Just make up numbers.

But when it comes to, you know, voter suppression, that's what we're going to focus on. Why? Because these people are losers. They have loser fascist ideas. People like Maga Mike and Donald Trump are not patriots. They hate America. They hate you. They hate this country. All they want to do is take and take and take and steal and cheat and commit crimes. That's what they want to do. Here's what Maga Mike has to say. Let's play it. What we're planning to do is send over a bill that would be irresistible for any Republican. Really incredible. a piece of legislation that will get the job done, meaning that we will continue to increase affordability. We will reduce fraud, waste, and abuse in government, and we'll secure elections. Every Republican would vote for that, if packaged correctly, and that's what we're planning to do right now.

All right. So that's where Save America Act is going to move to the Senate is probably through that plan. I want to bring in right now. I want to bring in Democratic Congress member Chris Deluzio from Pennsylvania, true patriot. Let me bring in Congress member Deluzio. I interviewed him just. before. Let me bring in the interview I just did with Congress member Deluzio from Pennsylvania. Bring it in. I want to bring in Congress member Chris Deluzio from Pennsylvania, Congressman. Great to see it. You know, these economic reports that are coming in are very dire. I mean, we're seeing no job creation, revisions from prior job reports, you know, showing that even when there were bad job reports in the past, it's even worse than we expected, you know,

in prior months, you know, when Donald Trump's out there saying, this is the golden age, he's got his national economic advisor, Kevin Hassett saying, hope is right around the corner. The stage is set for the, and it's always right around the corner. And you know what's going to happen. As they keep on crashing this thing, they're just going to then find their target to blame and say, we were about to do it. We were so close.

And then the Democrats, and then this person. So how do we deal with it when people in your district and across this country are suffering? And they are, right? People in Pennsylvania and Western Pennsylvania all over are getting hammered by high prices. Gas, yes, the place you see every day and Donald Trump's starting the Iran war has driven up gas prices tremendously. They're still north of $4 a gallon in my part of the world. It wasn't just the war in Iran. He started that made life more expensive, right?

He started all these trade wars that had been pounding small businesses, especially pounding farmers, I go on and on and has done nothing, frankly, to address this heavy consolidation of industries, this like corporate monopolization of economy, even the very weak action that the DOJ and the Trump administration took on the meatpackers. What's he talking about the meatpackers? Beef has gone up tremendously in cost, and there is heavy, heavy consolidation, and the Trump administration did nothing about it. So we see this roll up It might be private equity. It might be just overwhelming corporate power.

We see it squeeze people on prices, kill small businesses. I mean, we're all paying for it, whether you're in Pennsylvania or anywhere else. Donald Trump has made so much of this worse. The scale of his grift and self-enrichment, you know, and I believe criminality while the American people is suffering is the scale is so big. I think that's what he's relying on, hoping that people just can't even comprehend these numbers. I mean, people can understand, wow, you did 10 trades and you manipulated markets during this period of time. 21,000 trades, 22,000 trades during one year. I mean, you're talking about 80 to 100 trades every single day and timed around critical events where there were either.

their kind of, you know, massive, you know, massive tanking of the economy or, you know, buying dips when the economy, you know, when you had the market rising, you know, and then the crypto ventures, you know, bringing in the foreign money to world liberty financial and just seeing all that. I mean, how, how do you talk to your constituents about that? Because, you know, what Trump will do, the pivot is, you know, politics is corrupt in general. You know, there's corruption here, there's corruption there. They did it. We did it. Everybody does it. This is on such a different level, though, that it is beyond comprehension. This corruption and the level of corruption from Trump and people around him is unprecedented. I mean, $1.4 billion through crypto ventures alone should

just shock your conscience and it does. I think the reporting is that he and his family took in north of $2 billion analyzing these financial disclosures. And as you said, it's true. crypto schemes, it's foreign government and foreign government-backed business deals. It's the stock trades. I mean, look, when I'm doing stuff, it could be a town hall, whatever. And I talk about corruption. I talk about banning members of Congress and people like the president from trading stocks. You know, the folks, even with the MAGA hats are clapping along because they're right. This is corrupt stuff. It should gross you out. And by the way, the corruption comes at a cost. because when you are defrauding people, when you are engaged in these pay-to-play schemes,

it doesn't just have no victim. It erodes trust on our whole system. And there's somebody else the other side of that trade, especially this meme coin scheme. And these are supporters and deep believers in Donald Trump who he just took money from in this scheme. It's just nasty stuff. Right. I mean, when you look at what his crypto ventures earned, it looks like earned. $2 plus billion, then you look at the people who bought into it, they lost $2 billion.

By the way, it doesn't have to be that way. I mean, if you were going to do a venture, people would think, okay, you know what, I'm in a business. I have shareholders. I have stakeholders. My job as a fiduciary is to create shareholder. Even if you thought in those terms, you know, yes, the leadership can make money. That's no one's saying the leadership can't make money,

but it should be based upon bringing everybody along for the ride. And to me, it's a perfect analog to what's happening in this country where Trump has viewed the country as a zero sum game. I believe he didn't want to sign the housing bill, because he believes if we give new people housing, we're taking away housing from the private equity firms and we're harming people to help people. And everything I think he just sees through the lens

if we're gonna help the American people, we then must be hurting my rich oligarch friends. And my friends, the oligarchs, me, my family, we've only made money our life when we take from other people. I mean, you look at those, the charts of the Trump investments, how he does versus his investors or how he does versus the people who buy the meme coins. It looks like the US economy. It's that case-shaped thing that everybody talks about where he's made all the money and

everybody's lost all the money. Yeah. And look, as I say, Doing this, fine, you're a private business person, okay. You're not. You're the president. You occupy the highest office in the land. You have access to so many levers of power that you can abuse that you are abusing to enrich yourselves at the public's expense, right? The kind of information, even a member of Congress learns, we see members of Congress abuse that power and trade stock.

That's like on steroids for what the president and people around them can do. And a bunch of ways you just pointed out, they're doing. doing it. They're not shy about it and they're making lots of money just like pigs at the trough, man, ripping off the public here. You know, you talk about, you know, who this Trump regime is looking out for the right-wing oligarchs, private equity. You know, one of the things that we've seen, when I'm not doing my distouched network, I'm a sports law professor and I talk about this in my class where you now have private equity trying to kind of gobble up rights to children sports to kids sports and kids sports leagues. And, you know, for people who are like, you know,

well, you know, there's so much to focus on right now, should we be focusing on these, you know, vulture practices in Kig sports? I say yes, because it's also symptomatic of a broader issue. If the private equity is going after your child's little league, it tells you that there's nothing off limits in where they're going to try to take away the American dream and take away the refuge that we have in family and fund in order to extract profits. And I know you're fighting against that. Talk about it. Yeah, I introduced this Let Kids Play Act with Senator Murphy and some others to get private equity and vulture investors out of youth sports. And let's start with the problem. They have turned youth sports into a luxury item. Think about that. In America, sports are

supposed to be the great equalizer. Every kid should be able to show up on a field, on a court, whatever, and have their shot. You'll learn about discipline and hard work. I'm from a place where we bleed black and gold in Western Pennsylvania. Sports matters to us. They matter all over the country. But man, they have rolled up so many different parts of youth sports. They've jacked up the cost for families. This is now like a $40 billion industry making money off of parents who want their kids to play. So we go right at some of these nasty practices in the bill. We're trying to kick out these vulture investors. Remember, this isn't just like some other part of the economy.

We're talking about youth sports where there is a good and there's an interest here that is bigger than just making money. Kids having a shot to play matters for society. It matters for the country. And I see these vulture investors, I think they should have nothing to do and be nowhere near making money off the backs of kids. Chris, I know you're running for reelection right now as well. Talk to us, though, about what you're seeing in your district and what you're seeing in Pennsylvania. And if you're seeing the vibe shift that appears to be kind of taking place, you know, from my vantage point, but I never want to, I just spoke with someone out in Iowa. I just spoke with someone out in Indiana, you know, and they're saying, you know, we've never seen anything, you know, like it.

I mean, you know, Pennsylvania, Commonwealth, view generally purple, very swing state. What are you, are you seeing, I mean, you saw what went down in 2024. Are you seeing differences right now? What do you see? Yeah, Pennsylvanians have turned against Donald Trump. His numbers are imploding. But let me be clear about something. That does not automatically translate to Democrats are going to win.

It's an opportunity. I'm going to say this as a guy who Donald Trump threatened to imprison and to call for my hanging, just opposing Trump is not enough. Democrats have to seize this moment to frankly restore the American dream. I mean, people are tired of getting ripped off and working hard and their life doesn't line up to what their hard work should give them, should earn them. And I think this is a chance because Donald Trump has failed so remarkably for Democrats to, frankly, dream bigger than just meeting this affordability crisis. We've got to put juice back in the American dream to build out a good life for people to make hard work pay off. And this is a real opportunity to do that, given his failure. So I sense the voters have turned against Donald Trump.

They've turned against these Republicans who are so weak in doing whatever he wants. Democrats have to offer more. And I see so many of us in that economic fight, but it's a moment for us to seize it. Congressman Deluzio, appreciate you coming on, as always, and appreciate the great work you're doing. And I think it'll be enlightening to a lot of our viewers, what's going on. I mean, I'm sure a lot of them know what's happening in kids' sports like that, but, you know, they should really look into it because it is a horrific, horrific practice. And then, you know, what happens next?

Then these private equities want these tax breaks relating to it and they want exemptions because now they're saying, look, we're doing it in the public. The slippery slope kind of continues, right, of how they then want to use children as kind of but as kind of cludgeon against other taxes and things like that. Yeah, and thanks for having me on, man. All right, everybody hit subscribe. Let's get to 7 million subscribers. Want to stay plugged in?

Become a subscriber to our substack at Midasplus.com. You'll get daily recaps from Ron Filipkowski, add free episodes of our podcast, and more exclusive content only available at Midasplus.com.