The MeidasTouch Podcast - Rep. Moskowitz on Trump Voter Betrayal

Episode Date: May 24, 2025

MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports on Donald Trump screwing over voters in red states by destroying FEMA and Meiselas speaks with Democratic Congressman Jared Moskowitz about the dangers on the horizon by Trump’s actions. 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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Conditions apply. Details online. If we can send missiles overseas, why can't we send money to help us? Arkansas, now Kentucky got hit this past weekend. My opinion is your priority is your home. Your priority is your home and the money should be reaching your states, but Donald Trump's FEMA is MIA and that shouldn't surprise us because Donald Trump has stated and his Homeland

Security Secretary, Cosplayer Doggiller, Kristi Noem, has also stated that they want to get rid of it. I mean, they've made those statements. They say they want to push it to the states that are not capable alone of handling these things. And we've seen with over 900 tornadoes that have touched down this year so far and disastrous storms in areas like Kentucky, in Illinois, in Missouri, in Arkansas, in Mississippi, and elsewhere, FEMA has been slow to react

if it's reacted at all. Also, you have FEMA rejecting supplemental assistance requests or just delaying it in states like Georgia, in North Carolina, across these areas that have been really, really harmed significantly. Now let me just show you this longer clip that CBS put together of other people who have been impacted in very bad ways by the Trump regime. We're talking about red states, purple state, blue state. It doesn't matter. We're Americans and FEMA should be working for us.

Here, play this clip. My double-wide mobile home was located right here. 68 days ago, a deadly tornado in Tyler town, Mississippi leveled Dorothy Yarbrough's home riding out a tornado in a double wide. It seems like a very scary experience. It was. It was. It happened so fast.

And the response from the federal disasteraster Agency, FEMA, has been slow. Typically, when a tornado destroys a town, someone like Yarborough applies for federal assistance, the president signs the declaration, and FEMA spends money to recover and rebuild. Yarborough has applied, but after 10 weeks, she's got nothing but a huge pile of debris and this camper. So this was donated by a church. This was a FEMA, right? Right, no, no, no, not FEMA.

Across the country, governors have 21 requests into the White House for emergency or disaster declarations. Two have been denied. The other 19, including Mississippi, are waiting for a decision. President Trump says he wants to get rid of FEMA altogether. Somebody's gonna have to help.

Patsy Pittman's family has owned this property for generations. She and her husband repaired their damaged home and farm buildings with their own personal insurance money and most of their life savings, 40 grand. We've applied. That's the last we've heard. But they say the president hasn't signed it. So how does that make you feel? A little disappointed. If we can send missiles overseas,

why can't we send money to help? We're also seeing headlines like this. Trump undermined Biden's FEMA in North Carolina. Now the cleaning, now the cleanup is lagging under Trump's watch after Trump spread all of these lies about what FEMA was doing in North Carolina and saying that they were prioritizing immigrants over people, which was, which was false. And we're seeing this play out across the country. Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, but I can't get much more Trump than that. She was getting her aid delayed. Let's bring in Democratic Congress member Jared Moskowitz who led emergency management in Florida

before becoming a member of Congress. This is an issue near and dear to your heart and you're out there raising these calls each and every day. First talk to us about what's happening, how big of a disaster this is. What are you doing, Congressman? No, first of all, Ben, thanks for talking about this. This is a big deal,

especially as we're getting into hurricane season. I mean, literally we're at the end of May. And let me start at the beginning, okay? The president was right that FEMA needed reform. He was right about that. The emergency management industry has right that FEMA needed reform. He was right about that. The emergency management industry has known FEMA's needed reforms. One of those reforms is that you gotta get FEMA

out of Homeland Security. Homeland has bastardized FEMA. They have used FEMA in ways that FEMA was not built for. And they turned FEMA into the grant agency for every other department in Homeland, which got FEMA off its core mission of response and recovery. And that's been well known. You talk to former administrators of FEMA, Democrat and Republican,

and they've all said the same thing, which is why I have a bill with Byron Donalds, of all people, who's running for governor endorsed by President Trump, to get FEMA out of Homeland. But that's not what they've done. What they've done and what the secretary has done, and I don't know if the secretary's even done this with the White House even knowing, okay, the secretary has taken something that needed help and she has completely broken it.

I believe what you're gonna see is this summer, the secretary has turned FEMA into the Newark airport. I think you're gonna see it fail in ways we don't yet know. And it's just amazing to watch Arkansas, who had met the thresholds that are mandated in the Stafford Act, not get their declaration. And let me explain, in emergency management, time, it's all about time.

It's all about going quickly. In fact, that's what the president said. He wanted to speed up FEMA, yet the secretary has made everything slower. Nothing is more efficient. Remember Doge Department of Government Efficiency. They forgot the E piece. Efficiency. FEMA is not more efficient. No, it's not more efficient. In fact, it's not a single thing that is working more efficiently. But FEMA has lost 30 percent of its workforce. OK, a lot of these were senior people knew what they were doing. You got regional offices that are empty and they're delaying declarations.

Delaying declarations means that states aren't gonna spend money, right? Locals aren't gonna spend money. These are fiscally constrained areas. They don't have it. I mean, I said to the speaker and to Steve Scalise and to others, like you guys know this without FEMA, if Louisiana gets hit by, you know, a category four storm,

okay, from the Gulf, the Gulf, your state goes bankrupt without FEMA. Mississippi goes bankrupt. Alabama goes bankrupt. So when you're watching those people who are saying they're not getting any help, it's because the states don't have the money. The cities don't have the money and they rely on FEMA. And they're supposed to be getting what's called individual assistance, which we want

to try to speed up the process. That's what they're waiting on. And because there's no declaration, they can't get individual assistance. So there will be towns that will look like that, who won't get rebuilt without FEMA. And when we get into hurricane season, usually they get what's called a pre-landfall declaration. As the storm's approaching, because we know how the track is going to be, we give them a pre-landfall deck, which allows you to move ice, water, power generation, life health safety, swift water rescue,

and lets the state and locals know that they're gonna get reimbursed. These local governments won't spend any money in Florida. And look, Florida has the best emergency management department in the country, but we rely on the money, right? So that we can go move our logistics. And if the state is worried that that money is not coming, if they're worried that that is gonna get delayed,

you're gonna have state legislatures weighing in on, what can we do that? Can we do this? And so this is not what many people thought when we heard about reform and making FEMA faster and shrinking the department to get it to focus on response recovery. What the secretary has done right now

has been totally counterintuitive. And she's exposed the president, by the way, if I'm being honest. She has exposed the president because we're gonna get into the hurricane season and we're gonna see FEMA fail in ways that we've never seen before. And the president's gonna be like,

well, we knew it needed reform. Yeah, but the secretary, Mr. President, has broken FEMA in ways that it's gonna expose you in red states if they don't get lucky. If we don't get lucky in hurricane season, and we have a bad hurricane season, right? If we get bad storms, we get an F4 tornado in one of these red states.

I mean, the president's gonna have an apartment that doesn't work. Congressman, as the former head of emergency management in Florida dealing with disaster relief at a state level, you know this more than anyone. So when you said that FEMA is gonna fail in a way that we've never seen before based on the way the Trump administration

has been handling things so far, does that mean mass casualty events that can otherwise be avoided? Listen, the FEMA's main course, right, is to support the operations locally down at the state and down at the local level. It's always been their deal, getting the resources down. We want to speed that up. The faster you get resources down, the faster the folks on the ground, the state and local can move. So if FEMA is delaying stuff, and by the way, all grants right now are paused in FEMA. I don't know if you know this. They've paused all grants, things that

were, you know, have previous declarations, previous presidential declarations. And the secretary has no authority in the Stafford Act or in the Homeland Act, which was passed after Katrina. She has no authority to put blanket pauses on these things. In fact, they contemplated that in these acts and it's strictly prohibited. There are criteria which you could do that, and you're supposed to be given due process to appeal that. None of that is going on.

And so yes, Ben, at the end of the day, if these resources come slower, it could mean more deaths and it could mean towns are gonna suffer, people are gonna suffer. And it's not gonna save any money in the long term because the longer it takes for resources to down, I think the more expensive it gets to do some of these things.

You know, it's a segue into talking about this disaster budget because FEMA was completely under attack in this disaster budget bill. There's a lot of things that we've highlighted here that makes this bill very dangerous. It's attack on Medicaid. It's attack on Medicare, we're learning. Although silencers and suppressors, they were the big winners along with the billionaires. Don't forget the tanning beds. Come on. They had a tax cut in there for tanning beds finally taking us into the golden age. You have unique observational perspectives on all sorts of things, but particularly this budget bill reflecting on that you and I are recording this on a Friday.

This video is going to drop on Friday. What do you make of it? Where do we go from here? So, I mean, listen, they did everything they said they were going to do. We told you that they were going to do it and they were saying, oh no, we're not going to cut Medicaid. The president said, oh no, we're not going to touch Medicaid. Well, they did. The house cut it by $700 billion. It's going to take money away from the most needy, the bottom 10% and give it to the top 10% in the tax cuts. Don't listen to me. That's literally what the CBO has said. That is what third party folks have said. And even worse, it's going to add all

of this to the debt, $3 trillion a year. You got Thomas Massey saying that he thinks it's going to add $20 trillion to the debt, right? You're seeing the bond market going down, which is how we float our economy when we sell those bonds to other countries. The yields on that are going up because no one wants to buy our debt. The stock market's down today. He goes, you guess what? We're back to tariffs.

Thought the president learned his lesson. Didn't. Now we're raising tariffs on the EU and on Apple again and so, you know this this is You know, unfortunately what happens when you lose elections elections have consequences and they have all of government They have no breaks. They're drunk with power Okay, and the only way we're gonna send a message to them The only way we're gonna be able to put brakes on this and stop this is to make Hakeem Jeffries speaker. President Trump is fully in charge.

There is no bot. They all caved. Everybody caved as we knew they would. OK, nobody stood up on the principles that they've yelled and screamed when Democrats are in charge. Those are all gone out the window. They have no more principles. They can't talk to us about that.

They can't talk to us about spending money. They did everything they claim they didn't wanna do. And it's gonna hurt a lot of people in the bottom 10%. You know, look, I think that what's going on with FEMA is unfortunately gonna be the biggest story of this summer and in hurricane season. So I'm using this platform every day,

just warning as many people as we can get ahead in front of, I know this is not the sexiest issue to talk about right now, but I just- Well, that's usually what happens in emergency management, right? We don't talk about it when you don't need it. And then as soon as you need it, that's when we get the function, but if it doesn't work,

and that's why I'm raising the alarm now. I'm not raising the alarm, Ben, because look, you're talking to a Democrat who worked for a Republican in Florida. Emergency management is supposed to be nonpartisan because it affects Americans, okay? And so look, I'm out there, you know, trying to put this on the radar of the president

and the people in the West Wing. I'm trying to sound the alarm now while we have a couple of months, maybe to kind of fix some of the damage that has gone on in homeland. But if we get into September with the way things are now, okay, and we don't get lucky, and we do have storms and Noah is calling for an above average hurricane season, 60% chance of that, I am deeply concerned about what is going to go on in some of these states. We're seeing it already with these tornadoes. I'm real worried. And so, you know,

the only thing I can do is tell people what I know, how I look at it. I'm trying to do it in a nonpartisan way. I'm trying to just give them the truth. Okay. That's why I'm saying, yes, the president was right that FEMA needed reform But that's not what the secretary has done what the secretary has done She took something I needed help and she has just destroyed it Congressmember Musk which thanks for joining us as always. Thank you everybody hit subscribe Let's get to five million subscribers Can't get enough Midas check out the Midas plus sub stack for ad free articles reports podcasts daily recaps from Ron million subscribers.