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THE DAILY BLAST with Greg SargentTrump-Musk Fiasco Worsens, Exposing How Badly MAGA Voters Got Scammed
THE DAILY BLAST with Greg SargentTrump-Musk Fiasco Worsens, Exposing How Badly MAGA Voters Got Scammed
Trump-Musk Fiasco Worsens, Exposing How Badly MAGA Voters Got Scammed
Update: 2024-12-20
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As of this recording, lawmakers are still chaotically rushing to avoid a government shutdown. And one thing is already clear from this fiasco: Donald Trump will betray his voters very, very badly. Trump and Elon Musk killed a compromise bill, demanding deep spending cuts that would inflict real harm on Trump country, portending a lot more like this to come. (After we recorded, the House voted down the second government funding bill House Republicans advanced.) We chatted with Paul Waldman, the co-author of White Rural Rage. He explains why all this is happening, the tensions it reveals among Republicans, and how the Trump-Musk alliance looks poised to sell out MAGA voters.
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00:00:00
[music]
00:00:10
This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network.
00:00:16
I'm your host, Greg Sargent.
00:00:19
[music]
00:00:25
As of this recording, things are in full-blown chaos in Washington, D.C.
00:00:30
as lawmakers race to negotiate a spending bill to avoid a government shutdown.
00:00:34
But there are a couple things we can already conclude about the coming Donald Trump presidency.
00:00:40
One is that Trump is going to screw over his voters very badly, including rural voters.
00:00:45
We're already seeing the beginnings of that in this shutdown fight.
00:00:49
Another is that Trump is going to humiliate Mike Johnson mercilessly going forward, and Republicans are going to have one heck of a time trying to minister to the whims of Trump and Elon Musk,
00:01:00
which are already being revealed to be deeply dangerous and crazy.
00:01:04
We're chatting about this with Paul Waldman, who's the co-author with Tom Schaller of the book "White Rural Rage."
00:01:10
Good to have you on, Paul.
00:01:13
Thank you.
00:01:14
So to quickly catch people up, House Republicans thought they had negotiated a deal with Democrats to keep the government open.
00:01:21
But then Elon Musk attacked the bill spending, and then Trump opposed it.
00:01:25
Republicans then declared it dead because Trump and Musk are their masters.
00:01:29
As of this moment, House Republicans have a new deal which Trump endorsed.
00:01:34
A two-year extension of the debt limit until January, 2027.
00:01:38
A continuation of current government funding levels.
00:01:42
Extension of disaster aid in the Farm Bill and some other stuff.
00:01:45
Paul, I don't know what Democrats are going to do here, but it seems like they shouldn't support this because it just keeps the debt limit intact.
00:01:52
What do you think?
00:01:53
Yeah, Democrats have been talking about getting rid of the debt ceiling permanently for a long time.
00:01:59
And over the years, you and I have both written many articles explaining why it's a terrible thing to have.
00:02:07
This extra vote that needs to be taken in order to validate the spending that has already been allocated in order to satisfy this kind of archaic idea that you have to keep coming back again and again and again to allow the government to keep borrowing money.
00:02:27
All it is is a tool to create government shutdowns.
00:02:31
And Democrats have long thought we should just get rid of it.
00:02:36
There's only, I think, one other country in the world that has something anything like it.
00:02:38
And Republicans have been resistant to that because they like the idea that they can force these kinds of shutdowns and uses a tool maybe to extract spending cuts that would be difficult to get otherwise.
00:02:49
But now you have a situation where it almost seems like Donald Trump just kind of woke up yesterday and realized that the debt ceiling was going to be a problem for him.
00:02:58
Because he's going to be president and this could cause shutdowns that he would get blamed for.
00:03:04
So he is now demanded that they make a two-year suspension, not a permanent elimination of the debt ceiling, but two years, which would probably take him to the point where the Democrats will take back the House in the 2026 midterms and then maybe they can get the blame for that.
00:03:21
The problem at the moment is that Republicans have this razor-thin majority in the House and you have a group of people in the Republican caucus, some of whom are in the Freedom Caucus,
00:03:33
who are real serious anti-government ideologues.
00:03:37
They're not just Trump loyalists.
00:03:40
And I think that's an important distinction here because you have a lot of like far-right people in the Republican caucus who will do anything for Donald Trump.
00:03:47
And then you have a group of people, including Chip Roy from Texas, whom Trump now says he wants to find a primary challenger for, who are genuine committed, principled ideologues,
00:03:59
who say that they are never going to vote to increase the debt limit without serious spending cuts, that they want to see any time we get into one of these situations, they want to see the size of government brought down.
00:04:11
And they're willing to shut down the government, even if it's something that is damaging to Trump and the rest of their party.
00:04:18
So that's what they're dealing with right now.
00:04:20
I want to talk about the early signs here that Trump is going to really screw over his voters.
00:04:25
Trump and Musk killed the first deal, even though it included a lot of direct payments for farmers, and the New York Times reports that lawmakers from rural areas were furious that Musk had killed the bill.
00:04:38
Paul, your book is all about how rural voters stick with Trump despite him being really terrible for their material interests.
00:04:45
Now we've got Trump's favorite billionaire directly shafting them in the name of spending cuts.
00:04:51
Can you talk about this dynamic broadly?
00:04:54
Yeah, this is sort of the essence of what rural politics has become.
00:04:58
One of the arguments we make is that voters in rural areas keep electing Republicans and are represented by Republicans at all levels from president all the way down to dog catcher.
00:05:09
And yet what they don't give them is kind of material improvements to their lives.
00:05:16
They give them a lot of culture war campaigning and a lot of kind of emotional satisfaction.
00:05:22
And that was what don't Trump really gave them the feeling that he hated the same people they hated and he would basically be a weapon against the kind of people they despise.
00:05:33
And even if it didn't change their lives for the better, it didn't improve their education systems, it didn't improve their economic opportunities, it didn't improve their local infrastructure, that wasn't as important as the kind of emotional satisfaction that they got from Donald Trump.
00:05:48
And so now it looks like we're still good data is still coming in, but it looks like he got the votes of rural Americans and especially rural whites at about the same rate that he did four years ago.
00:05:59
According to the best data that we have, he got about 71% of the votes of rural whites in 2020 in 2020.
00:06:07
And they'll probably do at least as well in 2024.
00:06:10
And then he comes in office and he starts talking about all these things that are not just not helpful to rural people, but are actually going to be incredibly damaging.
00:06:17
Like for instance, he says he wants to privatize the US Postal Service.
00:06:21
Well, who benefits most from the Postal Service the way it is now?
00:06:25
It's rural people.
00:06:26
He's talking about promoting school vouchers, which don't benefit rural people at all because they just don't have private schools where they live.
00:06:33
Mass deportation, that is going to have a devastating effect on a lot of rural communities, not just because the farmers themselves are employing a lot of undocumented people to pick crops in the fields,
00:06:45
but because those communities where they're living, those people are spending money, the cuts to Medicaid that Republicans are contemplating, that is devastating to rural communities because there have been hundreds of rural hospitals that have closed in recent years,
00:06:59
and they absolutely depend on Medicaid funding in order to stay alive.
00:07:02
Then you have the tariffs.
00:07:04
This is another thing that is going to be really damaging.
00:07:07
We saw this last time when he was president, you know, the story that he tells about the tariffs that he put on is that he put on always tariffs, and we took in all this money from the tariffs.
00:07:16
Well, do you know where the money from the tariffs went?
00:07:18
It went to repay farmers because as a result of the tariffs that he put on China, China responded by cutting off its imports of American agricultural products.
00:07:28
And that resulted in billions of dollars of losses for American farmers, and so the Trump administration took the money that was being brought in by the tariffs, which is being paid by American consumers,
00:07:40
and basically passed it right back to the farmers to bail them out.
00:07:43
That's where according to one study, 92% of the revenues and the tariffs that he put on just went back into bailouts for farmers, so we're going to go back into that cycle again.
00:07:54
So you have all of these ways in which his Trump's most adoring voters are going to get screwed over by the policies when they thought that he was just going to come back in and make America great again and make eggs cheap.
00:08:06
Well, it actually could even be worse if you think about Elon Musk's role in all this.
00:08:11
You mentioned that you guys found in the writing of your book that Trump had essentially offered rural voters this kind of cultural comfort,
00:08:22
I guess you might call it.
00:08:23
Somehow Elon Musk has now become a champion, a cultural champion for mega voters too, and I'm just not sure how that happened.
00:08:32
And with Musk being given all this influence over spending, it seems like it's almost profoundly insulting if you really think about it.
00:08:40
My initial thought was that Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, the panel he's got, was just going to be a plaything for him with no real influence, but now it's not so clear, right?
00:08:50
It looks like his drive for serious cuts is going to be taken more seriously.
00:08:54
And as you say, those voters are the losers from these types of spending cuts.
00:09:00
On what planet is Elon Musk a warrior for these people?
00:09:05
How on earth could they come to see him that way?
00:09:09
I think a lot of it has to do with this sort of fundamental orientation against institutions and establishment power, and people have a lot of anger at not just the government,
00:09:21
but other kinds of established institutions, news media, big business.
00:09:25
There's a lot of sort of free floating anger at the establishment, and you look at a figure like Musk, and it looks like the establishment hates him.
00:09:34
He's so disruptive and erratic in his way, and he insults people all the time, and he has some of that same kind of characteristic that Trump has,
00:09:45
that he pisses people off, and he looks like he's just changing everything really nilly.
00:09:50
And if you're feeling about all of the established institutions, including government, is that they just need to be torn apart and made uncomfortable, then you can look at him and say,
00:10:02
"Oh, he seems like he's a hero.
00:10:04
He seems like he's on my side."
00:10:05
But then where the rubber actually meets the road, things get a little more complicated, because it turns out that the people who feel that way actually depend on government in a lot of different ways.
00:10:15
So you know, Musk comes out during the campaign and says, "Oh, I think we could cut $2 trillion from the federal budget."
00:10:22
And when people actually look at the federal budget who know what they're talking about, they say, "Well, if you set aside social security and Medicare, which Trump had claimed he's not going to touch, and you set aside military spending,
00:10:33
which Trump and Republicans want to increase, and maybe veterans benefits, which he says he's not going to cut."
00:10:38
The $2 trillion, that means you eliminate basically everything else that the government does.
00:10:43
And if you like driving on roads, and you like having a border, and you like having national parks, and you like money for schools, and all of these things.
00:10:53
Oh, well, it turns out that if you want to cut the amount that Musk says he wants to cut, then you're going to have to eliminate all those things.
00:10:59
It may not happen, but all of a sudden now, he's taking away things that people really depend on.
00:11:04
And a lot of the ideology, and I think this is especially true in rural America, is that people believe that they don't want to see what government does for them.
00:11:14
They want to believe that everything that they have in their lives is because of their own efforts, and that they are independent and self-reliant, and this is very much a part of the rural ethos especially.
00:11:23
The people who live in rural areas believe, "You know, I'm connected to the material world.
00:11:28
I know how to fix my car.
00:11:29
I know how to fix my house.
00:11:31
I don't need government to tell me what to do."
00:11:33
And that may be true in some ways, but it's also true that a lot of those programs, like Medicaid and Social Security, are used at higher levels in rural areas.
00:11:43
And they are more dependent.
00:11:44
They're 400 separate programs within the federal government that are specifically targeted at rural areas.
00:11:49
So in a lot of ways, rural Americans are more dependent on government.
00:11:52
And once you start taking stuff away, that's when they're going to finally notice that this is actually a problem for them.
00:11:59
That it's not just about, you know, Elon Musk being cool, and you know, tweeting a bunch of stuff that gets the swells and the people in Washington angry,
00:12:09
that this actually has material consequences for them.
00:12:12
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00:12:22
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00:13:14
I mean, God at this very well on a piece he wrote recently where he said Trump is about to betray his rural supporters, the way he put it, and I think you're making this point as well.
00:13:23
He said throughout the last three elections, Trump's messaging resonated strongly in rural communities because a lot of it is all about hostility to racial and cultural change.
00:13:34
Now in this second Trump term, I think we're going to have a more stringent test of whether that kind of cultural and racial, I don't know, affinity that rural voters have with Trump will actually sustain itself because we're looking at,
00:13:51
I think, a level of attack on their material interests from people like Musk, if he gets his way, that I think goes significantly further than anything he was able to do.
00:14:03
During his first term, don't you think?
00:14:06
Yeah, and a lot of that comes from the fact that Trump has a much more specific and well articulated and well thought out policy agenda this time around.
00:14:16
You know, when he came into office last time, he didn't think he was going to win, and it was kind of a scramble, and a lot of people in the Republican establishment who would normally move into a Republican administration didn't come with him,
00:14:29
so he had kind of a collection of people who didn't really know what they were doing.
00:14:32
And that meant that in a lot of cases, he just didn't really get very much done, and this time around, that's not the case.
00:14:40
I mean, we spent a lot of time talking about Project 2025, whether or not each one of the specifics in there gets put into effect.
00:14:49
The point is that the people he's bringing with him now, they actually do know what they're doing, and they have thought about this, and they do have a very specific policy agenda.
00:14:56
You know, you and I may think it's an extraordinarily damaging one, but it's likely that they're going to do a lot more of the things that they want to do, and they're going to be successful in those kind of policy turns.
00:15:06
And for a lot of Americans, that's going to mean real damage, and maybe in ways that they hadn't really thought of before.
00:15:13
I want to add to that, Paul, because the fact that Trump has come in with a more detailed agenda is also a reflection of the kind of collection of people who have had more time to really plan for a second Trump term.
00:15:28
As you say, the Project 2025 people, this collection of ideologues out there is saying to themselves, my God, Trump is the best demagogue we have seen in many decades,
00:15:41
he can convince his voters of anything.
00:15:44
So, you know, let's come up with a whole bunch of things that we can try to glom onto Trump and see if we can get him through, and that's what we're really seeing here,
00:15:54
right?
00:15:55
Yeah, I think so, and we're still going to be dealing with a similar situation to before in that Trump has very few of his own policy preferences,
00:16:05
and he's very much open to influence from what he sees in the news every day, what somebody tells him.
00:16:12
And so, I think a lot of those people who have their own particular agenda, they're just kind of trying to sort of follow in his wake, now make him too mad, get him to maybe even in a lot of cases not even notice what they're doing.
00:16:27
I think that's going to be true within all of the federal agencies, you know, most of the time, Trump is not going to care what happens at the Environmental Protection Agency.
00:16:36
And so, there could be a lot of policy changes that come about there, for instance, that could result in higher pollution in a lot of places, including a lot of rural places, and Trump neither knows nor cares what's actually happening there.
00:16:49
And so, that has to do with some particular agenda of the people who are there who have been thinking about this for a long time, as you said.
00:16:55
And so, you know, he's going to be just sort of dipping into policy wherever he sees that there is something that kind of catches his attention or creates a scandal that he finds embarrassing.
00:17:07
But a lot of the time, he's just kind of float going to float above it, but there's going to be much more intense activity going on at all the different agencies as a federal government in ways that are going to really harm people.
00:17:19
And throw in there the volatility of Elon Musk.
00:17:24
Right now, Musk is essentially threatening to primary Republicans who don't support whatever it is constitutes the agenda that day,
00:17:35
I guess.
00:17:36
I mean, in the case of this spending deal that was just killed, Elon Musk basically killed it.
00:17:43
And Applebaum had an amazing tweet where she said, "I spent the day talking to Europeans and no one can think of any precedent for what Musk just did to the US Congress.
00:17:53
There's no business man with that much power, the power to stop a routine spending bill anywhere else in the democratic world."
00:17:59
That's remarkable stuff.
00:18:01
And by all indications, Trump isn't really going to get in Musk's way.
00:18:07
It all strikes me as a recipe for an absolute policy catastrophe for Trump's voters.
00:18:14
Yeah, we've known for a long time if Trump doesn't like what a Republican politician does, he can say, "I want to see them primary, that could be the end of their career."
00:18:24
And that's just about loyalty to him.
00:18:26
But Elon Musk, it turns out, maybe able to do exactly the same thing for his own agenda, which might or may not be exactly the same as Trump.
00:18:35
I mean, he spent $277 million, according to the reports we've gotten in the 2024 election.
00:18:41
It's stunning.
00:18:42
I don't know if anybody's ever spent that much before.
00:18:45
The fact that a billionaire can come in and put that much money into a campaign to get his favorite president elected.
00:18:52
And he has, you know, now over $400 billion, that's nothing to him.
00:18:59
And so he can mount primaries against anybody he wants.
00:19:01
And I think that's going to become something that is going to seep into the awareness of more and more Republicans, that if you make him angry, regardless of whether it's something that Donald Trump cares about.
00:19:12
For whatever reason, Musk can say, "Oh, well, you're in the House of Representatives.
00:19:17
I think I'll just toss $20 million into a campaign to get you booted.
00:19:21
And that's going to be the end of your career."
00:19:23
They are all going to understand that.
00:19:26
And we don't know exactly where his agenda is going to diverge from Trump's or where there are going to be things that Elon Musk cares about that Trump doesn't really care about, but that he is willing to invest money to keep members of Congress in line.
00:19:41
But he is clear, I think that in this, I think I think what's different about this is that it is so direct.
00:19:51
You know, we're not talking about a guy who has a lot of money, giving a million dollars to a super PAC to kind of get low taxes.
00:19:58
This is the world's richest man who now seems like he can if he wants and he does appear to want it, have a stranglehold on the federal government,
00:20:08
on what Congress decides to do and decides not to do, and is able to pick up the phone and tell Donald Trump what policies he wants and Trump will do it, because most of the time he just likes to be in Musk's favor and wants to have this relationship with him.
00:20:27
We've never, I think, certainly in modern history, I'm not a historian, but it seems like maybe in all of American history had one rich individual who had the kind of control over the federal government that it looks like Elon Musk is poised to have.
00:20:42
But Paul, you're forgetting something, Elon Musk lives rent-free in your head and mine.
00:20:48
So that's a big win for rural America, right?
00:20:52
Yeah, they're not going to get anything from him.
00:20:57
And, you know, they'll be able to, you know, we'll be angry, right?
00:21:00
We'll be upset.
00:21:02
That is true.
00:21:03
That just especially having written co-written a book called White Rural Rage, I'm sure that there are a certain number of rural Americans who, if I am mad, can feel like they've gotten something out of that.
00:21:14
But it's not going to do much to improve their lives, just as Trump didn't.
00:21:18
You know, he told people in coal country that all the coal jobs were going to come back.
00:21:23
They didn't, you know, he promises material things, even if what he's really giving them is something emotional.
00:21:30
But, you know, the deep and abiding difficulties that people in rural America have not gotten, did not get any better during Trump's first term, and they're not going to get any better in Trump's second term.
00:21:41
I just think we should absolutely be clear that we think that Democrats really have to do a better job of explaining to rural Americans what the agenda of the Democratic Party is and why it's better for them.
00:21:59
And maybe have to come up with a more populous set of policies as well to appeal to rural Americans.
00:22:06
You and I aren't of the view.
00:22:08
I don't think that rural Americans owe their votes to Democrats.
00:22:13
We agree.
00:22:14
Democrats have to do a better job of appealing to them.
00:22:17
It's just that it's hard to look at this situation with musk and Trump and see why on earth they would feel good about what's coming.
00:22:28
Yeah, and, you know, one of the things that we say in our book at the end is that at the very least, if rural people, maybe they don't want to vote for Democrats, they should get themselves better Republicans.
00:22:38
But I think that the Democrats have decided that they've been told over and over again what you need to do in order to appeal to rural Americans is to go there and listen and be respectful and understand people's problems.
00:22:51
And that's all well and good, but it is necessary, but not sufficient.
00:22:55
The other part of it that they haven't done a good enough job is of is going to rural America and telling people why the Republican Party is screwing them.
00:23:04
And that's the thing that Democrats are really reluctant to do.
00:23:07
They're so busy being respectful and listening that they're not making a strong case to say you are being taken to the cleaners by the people who you keep re-electing,
00:23:18
who keep coming to you.
00:23:19
Every two years or every four years and saying don't you hate those liberals up in the cities and then nothing gets better in your community, your schools don't get any better, your roads don't get any better,
00:23:29
you don't have any better access to health care.
00:23:31
And it's the people you elect, you have to hold accountable for that.
00:23:34
Even if they're all going to be Republicans, you have to make sure you get Republicans who will actually do something for you.
00:23:40
Yeah, and that can coexist with a stronger case from Democrats for why Democratic policies will be better and can coexist with a new agenda from Democratic politicians that is even more economically populist,
00:23:56
more pro worker, more pro reformist, right?
00:24:02
Absolutely.
00:24:03
And you know, look, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, especially over the last four years, they did a lot of stuff that was specifically aimed at rural communities.
00:24:14
They sent a lot of infrastructure funding their way.
00:24:17
There is a lot of broadband funding and that's a big problem in rural America is not having sufficient access to broadband that has all kinds of effects.
00:24:25
They put a lot of money, billions of dollars that are going to be spooled out over the next few years and that Trump will probably take credit for.
00:24:32
They did a lot of things that were specifically aimed at trying to improve the lives of rural Americans.
00:24:38
They didn't get credit for it.
00:24:39
They didn't get any votes for it.
00:24:41
But you can still keep trying to make that case and keep explaining to people.
00:24:47
It's going to be easier if you're in those communities more and it's true that Democrats have abandoned to a large extent doing politics in a lot of big swaths of rural America.
00:24:58
But that allowed Republicans to abandon them too because they don't have to work either.
00:25:02
If they know that they're going to get 80% of the votes in a particular county, Republicans don't bother campaigning because they've got it sewn up.
00:25:09
And so you have to make them work for it.
00:25:12
And I'm not sure where this government spending fight is going to end up by the time people listen to this, it may be either resolved or a whole lot more chaotic.
00:25:21
I don't know.
00:25:22
But one thing we do know is that that dynamic is not going to be changing anytime soon under Trump and Musk.
00:25:29
Absolutely not.
00:25:31
So I think that this is going to be a tumultuous four years to say the least.
00:25:38
Paul Walden, thanks so much for coming on with us, man.
00:25:41
It was good to talk to you.
00:25:43
Thanks a lot, Greg.
00:25:45
You've been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent.
00:25:50
The Daily Blast is a new Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler on the DSR Network.
00:25:57
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