The MeidasTouch Podcast - Rep. Pramila Jayapal Calls Out Trump’s Disaster Policies

Episode Date: July 12, 2025

MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas offers his opinion on insider trading taking place with Trump’s trade letters as Trump guts the SEC and Meiselas interviews Washington State Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal. 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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It was so easy to set up and they accept TRICARE. Therapy was going so well, my husband and I started seeing a couples therapist through Talkspace too. Talkspace works with most major insurers, including TRICARE. Match with a licensed therapist today at Talkspace.com slash military. Go to Talkspace.com slash military to get started today. That's Talkspace.com slash military. That's talkspace.com slash military. I want to focus on the corruption surrounding Donald Trump's taco Trump always chickens out or Donald Trump's fifth grade trade war letters that he's now calling deals that are

being sent to countries like Brazil where he's like, I don't like you. I'm going to put on a 50% tariff unless you release Jair Bolsonaro, who tried to do a coup against you. We've seen this when Donald Trump initially announced his tariffs against the world and what he called Liberation Day, but was really liquidation day. And even before that, the unusual trading activity on Wall Street that would take place surrounding these things.

And I know sometimes we can get distracted and how can't you when you take a look at a letter that Donald Trump is sending to Brazil with random things that are in caps. You need to stop a witch hunt immediately unlawful and blah, blah, blah. I don't even want to read letter. I've read it before but it basically, if you don't release Jair Bolsonaro for prosecution, we are going to increase the tariffs even more.

It's just it's just the worst. I want to focus, though, on what happened behind the scenes. Think this guy, Spencer Akimian, pointed it out so you could see it on the charts. And he said somebody frant front ran the Brazil Tariff News. So somebody bought a huge amount of the US dollar and shorted Brazil's currency at one thirty two p.m. The 50 percent tariff announcement came at four 19 p.m. At which point, it looks like the big trader exited his trade instantly.

And we're talking about a two point five percent currency trade, which are usually 10 to 20 times leverage. So really a 25% to 50% in less than three hours. The profit that's being made here. The same thing with the copper tariffs. You know, we see unusual activity there. As Hakimian says, I have a good reason to believe somebody knew the copper tariffs were coming and traded the news ahead of time and made an ungodly amount of profit.

Trump announced his new 50 percent copper tariff at 1258 p.m. But as my charting shows, the price of copper began spiking at 1256 p.m. It went up a full eight percent before Trump announced the copper tariffs. It's nearly impossible for this to have been coincident. Why would the price of copper just go up randomly minutes before Trump makes the announcement? It's common sense, unless somebody knows. Also, when it came to Donald Trump, when he did the liquidation day tariffs against the world and then he announced he was going to pause those tariffs.

I think this site, Unusual Whales, did a good job kind of laying out what it what it looks like. And he goes, I think people knew that this tariff pause was coming. And you can see on these these trading funds, they're called like spy and q q q one trades against the S&P one trades against NASDAQ. You're seeing people opening up these calls and engaging in unusual trading volumes that nobody would ever possibly do unless you knew there was going to be kind of a massive announcement that was going to be made.

We see this pattern over and over again. So I don't want to miss out on the corruption. But who's getting screwed here? The people are getting screwed. The people everywhere from Virginia to Washington State, from Texas to North Dakota, wherever. Americans are getting screwed. I wanna bring in Democratic Congresswoman Jaya Paul

from the state of Washington. It's great to have you here. And as Donald Trump sends these letters and people get caught in the drama and the distractions, behind the scenes, the rich are getting richer, the insiders know what's going on. I just think people are getting screwed, Congresswoman. Absolutely right. And here's the thing. This guy, Donald Trump, has gotten rid

of all the inspector generals. He's gotten rid of any entity that could actually crack down on the ethics violations, the corruption. And so you have so many things that are happening from the trading that you talked about to the outright use of the office of the president to make money, whether that's his luxury hotels that he promises to some foreign government, you know,

in return for something or whether it is even, I noticed that he is selling his own brand of perfumes now. It is, it's really at the end of the day, this whole concept of, oh, he's gonna drain the swamp. He is the swamp and he is doing everything he can to enrich himself. And you can see it in whatever financial returns we have access to. Obviously, he's not releasing everything. But the corruption is now throughout the government.

It's Donald Trump. It's also members of Congress who are trading. And you know that I've got a bill that I'm working on, a bipartisan bill that we hope to introduce soon on banning members of Congress from trading stocks. I mean, the American people should just know that we are working for them, not for our pocketbooks. And so I'm hopeful that we will get this to the floor.

And once it gets to the floor, I believe it'll pass. Let's talk about how Donald Trump's trade war against the world though, and even the threats against Canada, 51st state, we're going to take you over. We have a huge Canadian following the maple Midas here on the Midas touch. The totality though, but it's everything too. How he attacks Japan,

how he attacks South Korea. How is that impacting the state of Washington? How is it affecting your district and perhaps even more broadly? I mean, the tariffs are crazy. They have no logic to them. In the letter that he sent to Bolsonaro, you probably saw he quoted incorrect information. He said that we have a trade deficit with Brazil. That's not accurate. Lula responded and said, no, that's not true. If you want to do 50% tariffs on Brazil, we'll do 50% tariffs back. And guess what?

American manufacturers who export into Brazil are going to be hurt by this. In my district, we have a lot of manufacturing, we have a lot of trade with all over Asia actually. And so these tariffs are having a massive effect. I mean, you can see it in small ways with the price of apparel or food stuffs, but also in big ways with Boeing manufacturing is here. Obviously, we have a lot of tech here, and so all of the chips and all of the uncertainty is really affecting the district.

It's affecting small businesses in particular, and consumers are seeing their prices go up every day. And some of it is being absorbed by the manufacturers who are hoping that this is another taco situation where Trump is gonna chicken out and these tariffs aren't gonna go into effect. But his MO is always create a problem where there isn't one, act like you're solving it,

but have no solution at the end to whatever the problem you said was there in the beginning. So this is not a good way to do tariffs at all. And there's no investment in domestic manufacturing. That's what we did as Democrats with the Inflation Reduction Act. You don't see him, Ben, trying to do anything to actually incentivize copper manufacturing here in the United States or anything else. I want to talk about immigration,

large immigrant population in your district. I live in Los Angeles where there are, you see the ICE raids that are here, vendors, Home Depots, parking lots. They put the ICE agents through MacArthur Park. It looked like an army was invading. So they did that Hollywood stunt, but it has real-world implications.

I mean, a lot of the immigrant community here aren't going to church, they're not working out, they're hiding, they're very afraid here. Meanwhile, ICE posts things like this, like their social media is like just trying to troll and terrorize migrants. My body is a machine that turns ICE funding into mass

deportations, fire up the deportation planes exclamation point. They also post these videos of like, looks like an army going into like the swap meet. And they put on their equipment, they got their huge assault weapons heading into heading into the family swap meet. It's like, all right, tough guys, what's going on in your district? What are you doing about it? That's exactly what's happening in our district. Do not like LA,

but we are seeing ICE agents, you know, try to come to courts. That stopped for a while because we had a lot of protections here in Washington State, but certainly farm workers, all of Eastern Washington, Central Washington. I was just out in Spokane and I met with the Growers League and, you know, farmers are terrified, workers are terrified, people aren't showing up to work. Yesterday, I was at a food bank in my district talking about the snap cuts,

the horrible snap cuts and Medicaid cuts. And they told me that people are not even showing up to Head Start where they get their food. They not even showing up to Head Start, where they get their food. They're not showing up to the food banks because they're afraid. And it's not just undocumented immigrants. It is people of all legal statuses. It's undocumented immigrants who have been here for 20 years,

no crimes committed. And all of the research and the data shows that ICE is not picking up the so-called worst of the worst, which is what Trump promised. He's going after immigrants of all legal statuses, including U.S. citizens, legal permanent residents. It's a complete terrorizing of the immigrant community. You know, but there's a lot of serious things going on right now, but it just feels like we're living in a Ponzi scheme.

It feels like he goes out there, he makes up numbers. I mean, he literally, he posted something that says, 100% of all new jobs created come from Americans. And look what we've done, 100%. I'm like, where are you even getting these numbers? You know, from you've got Howard Lutnick, and you've got Brooke Rollins, the late the Secretary of Agriculture, and you've got the Secretary of Labor out there just saying a whole bunch of

things that you look at, you're like, those aren't the facts. But like, there seems to be this, I don't know if it's just that at the at the cable news level or whatever, that is it's all right. But like, it's not all right. And the question is, is like, when's it all in any Ponzi scheme? It has an end. And that's what I'm kind of worried about, because you see the ports, the ships aren't coming in the same way they used to be coming in.

You see the factories are not filled with the people we see here in California. The farms aren't filled with the same. So when is it all going to catch up? And then does Donald Trump just try to find his fall guy the way he did with the faucians as they did it? They did it. Blame the deep state. Americans have to feel the effects.

They have to feel the way that they're losing healthcare, the way that their prices on groceries keep going up, the way that we end up in more wars and isolate America from the rest of the world. They've got to feel that there's no jobs, that in fact, instead of job creation, the Big Bad Betrayal Bill is going to lose us at least a million jobs in the United States. And I think that you're seeing this now starting to come through with the tariffs, with immigration

actually, which is one of our tougher issues. You're seeing people starting to say one in 10 Americans now knows of somebody who's been picked up that they personally know that should not have been picked up. And so I think it's got to trickle down. We've got to do a really strong job of messaging, not only what we're against, but also what we're for. And affordability is a big part of this, right? The tariffs are driving up prices.

Corruption is stripping people of things that they legitimately deserve to pad the pockets of the millionaires and the billionaires and Donald Trump and his family. And so we've got to continually make our case, not only for what's wrong, but how we're gonna fix it. And I think that's gonna be the job between now and the next election. We can still roll some of this back, Ben,

but I don't wanna sugarcoat it. It's gonna be very difficult to rebuild a lot of the destruction that's been done to the agencies, whether it's FEMA and NOAA or, you know, any, literally any agency from education to Health and Human Services. Finally, Congresswoman, I always like to ask this question when I have people like Jan here,

because oftentimes, you know, the news host has their series of questions, but there may be an issue that's always on your mind that I'm not thinking of that you're closer to. We have a huge platform here, almost six million subscribers. Is there anything that you think isn't getting enough attention that you want to bring people's attention to? Yeah, I just wrote a, you know,

there's so many things in the big bad betrayal bill. I just wrote an op-ed about this scam, talk about a Ponzi scheme, the scam on no tax on tips, supposedly Donald Trump's no tax on tips policy, and how what is in the big bad betrayal bill is really a scam because first of all, you got to file taxes to get any benefit and most tipped workers are not filing taxes, about a third are not filing taxes.

And then on top of that, it's a $25,000 cap. So the way it's done, and finally, I mean, there are lots of things wrong with it, but it expires in two years. So all of the things that are supposed to be for working people expire in two or three years and everything that is where the millionaires and the billionaires are permanent and I think we have to keep pointing out to people that they're lying about what you're gonna get and I think that's true in so many ways, but the no tax on tips policy is one I think that has not gotten a lot of attention and It's gonna be used to try and sell the big bad betrayal bill, but it's a scam.

Sounds like Donald Trump's past with scams. The no tax on tips is a scam. The no tax on social security just doesn't even exist. They just made that up and they keep posting. But they sent a letter out to all of us. I mean, I got one saying that there's gonna be this massive boon, and they use social security to send a letter out with lies. You're absolutely right.

Congresswoman Jaipal, please come back. Thanks for being on. Thanks, Ben. Everybody hit subscribe. Let's get to six million subscribers. ever. Check out our new Truth Over Lies collection at store.mitustouch.com. All 100% USA Union made.