Transcript: Trump Rages at GOP Bill Fiasco as Elon Admits It’s a Scam

Sargent: Yeah. Speaking of that, we should clarify that Trump is just lying in saying they’ll only cut waste, fraud, and abuse. The bill would cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid and potentially knock 10 million off coverage. But I think what this shows also is that Trump has to simultaneously say it’s an enormous spending cut to hide the fact that it balloons the deficit in order to make the rich richer while also saying he isn’t touching Medicaid because that screws his own voters, right? So the only way out for them is to define those cuts to the safety net as merely cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. I think that’s going to be the route out for Republicans here, especially the Senate ones who seem to have a twinge of conscience about the Medicaid cuts. They’ll just tell themselves and the world that all they’re cutting is waste, fraud, and abuse, and they’ll accept the cuts to Medicaid. And that’s how we’ll get out of this. But I think Trump laid the whole scam bare in one tweet there.

Shephard: Yeah. Along those lines, too, this is the fundamental lie of the whole operation, which is that Trump has broken with this 50-year conservative consensus around cutting the welfare state—or you could say 100-year post–New Deal Republican Party opposition to any entitlement spending; that he will somehow preserve the things that people like while getting rid of all of that awful waste, fraud, and abuse. It’s one reason why I think he’s such a powerful figure among low-information voters: He projects this vision of the federal government that everybody wants back to them, that it’s rife with corruption and fraud, and that if you just got rid of all of that you could keep all the good stuff and reduce the budget deficit. And that’s a huge lie. I think ascribing good faith motives to Elon Musk is not necessarily always a great way to proceed. I don’t entirely understand what he’s doing here—he probably is just lashing out. But at the same time, he has inadvertently really pulled back the curtain on the sham of this entire operation.

Sargent: Yes, but without admitting a key component of the scam, which is that it’s really shaped around tax cuts for the rich, right? What Elon Musk is doing is pushing his own scam in which the only driver of deficits is runaway government spending and not tax cuts for the wealthy. Musk actually does harbor a pretty seriously plutocratic vision of what he wants the state to be, which is bankroll genius projects like his and just cut loose the global poor by ending USAID. And I think he would probably like to end Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, although I don’t know that for sure. He’s pushing his own ruse, his own bamboozlement—and yet at the same time, because he’s admitting that the bill balloons the deficit, which he’s doing for his own reasons to make the case that spending is bad, he actually unmasks the scam that Trump and Mike Johnson are pushing.