Arthur, if we, if we think back to those days, uh, where he was the underdog, has it sort of flipped it? And is Trump and his mon- now with a deep chest and running ads paid for by the American taxpayer, is it flipped? Is it the money doesn't matter like it did before?

We have seen examples of money not moving the needle, uh, the way we thought it would.

I, I think Ken Paxton in Texas is one example, uh, where the, where there, there have, uh...

Off the top of my head, I haven't [laughs] got the numbers for you, but there's been multiple examples where the money advantage in the last few months didn't move the needle in favor of a Republican candidate in a few different races.

And it's, uh, you know, the, the, the idea that money will automatically garner an advantage is, is another one of those assumptions we can't make.

Uh, Republicans do have a significant money advantage that Democrats have been worrying about.

Um, but Demo- Democrats are like really giddy when you talk to them.

Are we in a different moment for the Democrats on these culture wars that they're just gonna push back in a way that they, that they haven't before?

Do you think that this new strategy of trying to, as Bessent says, have the w- the strongest economic sanctions possible, you know, mixed with, um, mixed with their ongoing strategy, uh, uh, is going to actually work? That any of this is, is working?

So we've actually been doing the sanctions for quite some time, uh, and that's exactly what Donald Trump himself said did not work.

That's the reason he said we're gonna go to war.

And, uh, I mean, the blockade is a new element of it, but it's only in response to Iran disallowing shipping out of the Strait of Hormuz, which is a huge political problem.

And I, I think the, th- this reflects the reality that they just don't have the ability to sustain this war without depleting missiles, which is a, a potential risk for the military and the US and other, uh, military scenarios.

And so it's, it's just not really working out that well.

I think that that's the picture we're getting from these different pieces of news.

And the president, just like he is in other areas, whether it's birthright citizenship, whether it's, uh, his attempts to fire the Fed, uh, chair, Governor Lisa Cook, um, that when the courts tell him no, he says, "No, I'm gonna do it again in another way."

What's the takeaway there?

there?Um, you know, I think, uh, uh, one takeaway is that there is still a lot of local state issues that matter.

I mean, part of the story in Michigan is a Michigan story about how, you know, and, and the individuals involved here, right? El-Sayed versus Haley Stevens.

And if you kind of go down race by race, you see different wrinkles.

Um, we saw, once again, the power of people with national security credentials being powerful.

I do think there is a general sentiment across the country among Democrats, including here in Michigan, and why it was close, one of the reasons it was close.

Democrats wanna win.

And Tillis yesterday, as you've pointed out in your piece, admitted weaponization is maybe a little bit more intense in the Trump administration, but he expressed some hope that Blanche himself will, quote, "bend the curve of this absurdity." What, what does this tell you about this Republican Party, that even those scorned senators who raised serious objections to Blanche's confirmation have now come around and they're pushing him through in the end?

Can you explain just sort of what your understanding of this immunity means?

So, yeah, the slush fund came out first.

And everybody was outraged.

And then the next day, Blanche issued this order saying Donald Trump, his family members, affiliates of his businesses, none of them can be have any tax enforcement against them forever based on any tax returns they'd filed to that point.

Which, if you're Donald Trump and the Trump Organization, and you have a massive, ongoing audit that's been talked about for years, and reportedly could cost you as much as $100 million in a single adverse decision by the IRS, this is a huge deal.

It's unprecedented.

It's just as wild and never done before as the anti-weaponization fund.

Why am I wrong?

Is there anything Cornyn has said he needs to see from DOJ that would be satisfactory?

Cornyn is not making a specific demand.

You know, today he said he wanted it in writing, and it...

You know what, it's actually not clear if he wants some further statement from Blanche or if he means he wants Blanche to put an, put out an order superseding the old one or countermanding the old one, 'cause these are basically Blanche orders that created, uh, these, these, uh, this pot of money and this settlement for Donald Trump.

So it's, it's...

Maybe he wants Bl- Blanche to take some more official action than simply, you know, reiterating what he's said before.

But he has resisted putting this in writing, uh, I think perhaps until now, because the, there, there was a, a lawsuit in court, and the Justice Department fought it saying, "We're not...

Are you surprised that the weaponization fund is, like, the, it seems to be so central to the GOP concerns, and not the Epste- the handling of the Epstein files?

What was that about?

Well, [laughs] that's what, uh, that's what April McLean [laughs] Delaney told me.

She says David Trone is a bored billionaire, uh, like he's got nothing to do with his time, so he's, uh, spending all his money trying to get back into politics.

And, and she said he's basically bitter that he lost the Senate race.

So he lo- he lost the seat because he, he didn't run for reelection to this seat when he had it because he wanted to be the Democratic senator for, for Maryland.

But Angela Alsobrooks won that primary after it had looked like he was ahead, and, uh, a bunch of Maryland Democrats endorsed Alsobrooks in the race.

And so McLean Delaney is saying that he's now on a revenge tour against everybody who endorsed against him.

What have been the issues that have been highlighted in the ads and in the debates between these two candidates?

Overall, though, can I just ask how this message that the gas prices are worth it is playing out even just within the GOP on day 70 of this conflict?

conflict?Oh, this is not good.

Uh, the whole theory of the Trump presidency during his campaign was, "I will make prices go down." He's done the exact opposite on the one thing that people are most annoyed by and s- and see almost as frequently as food prices.

Um, Republicans are not very critical of the president.

This week has definitely showed he still has strong control over the Republican Party, but this week also saw a House Republican named Tom Barrett, who is not, like, one of the moderate ones really, introducing a new Iran war resolution to curtail the war, to set limits on what's going on, to prevent troops from being deployed, and he said in a statement, "We have to, uh, learn...

If, if we don't learn the mistakes of our past wars, then we're doomed to repeat them." I mean, obviously that is what's happening here.

This is exactly like, politically, the, the Iraq war that Donald Trump had said was so stupid, and it's...

Arthur, what role did Trump play here?

Arthur, why are we hearing so many say, though, that this is big tech's big tobacco moment?

Well, these big cases in California and New Mexico are just two of dozens of lawsuits that are pending, that are similar, that show through investigations and through other stuff in the public record that these websites are basically like digital Jeffrey Epsteins, and they funnel harmful content to children.

They, they connect people who shouldn't be connected, uh, and the victories show how you can win.

So there's gonna be more and more cases, uh, potentially mass settlements, uh, potentially Congress stepping in.

I don't know if lawmakers at this point would want to try to preempt the state laws that are being used in these cases, but there are a bunch of bills that would do so that have a lot of support and other bills that do not that would, uh, institute federal laws to clamp down on it.

So the-- so basically, these social media apps are gonna have to change because what they're doing is not working.

It's getting them sued, and it's costing them money.

[laughs]

Um, Arthur, do we know anything more about the possibility of American troop deployment? To be fair, is this just Democrats spinning a, a worst-case scenario, or are they actually hearing in classified briefings that this is on the table?

I don't think they told him that in the briefing this week, but the most important thing is that senior officials from Trump down have been asked if this will happen, and they're not ruling it out.

And Marco Rubio even alluded to the possibility of in order to totally eradicate the nuclear program, somebody has to go in there and actually take stuff.

He didn't say that would have to be US troops, but clearly that's one of the ways it would happen.

And since they've not said, uh, you know, what we're in this war for exactly, and there's no clear way out, it's just so obviously another unlearned lesson from our past wars.

They're just, they're just not into avoiding the mistakes of those past wars i-i-in the way that they've conducted this one so far.

Right.

And there are some questions about this person's credibility.

It left me puzzled about who he really is and wondering if he is capable of such control at other times." So first, Arthur, what did the President set out to do last night, and did he achieve it?

Well, there was a lot of pressure on him, like you said, to be different and reset the political situation he's in, which is he's not popular and everyone thinks Republicans are gonna get crushed in the midterms, and then he'll wind up getting impeached by a Democratic House.

He's-- I was surprised that so many people expected him to be different from who he is.

We're very familiar with him after ten or more years, and he gave the same sort of speech that he always gives.

Uh, and a nod to what the, the, uh, the listener said, he did use his subdued voice, but we've heard that before.

Uh, he did avoid taking the bait when Democrats were heckling him, but he did that at his speech to a joint session of Congress last year as well.

I think the only things that were different, uh, were that, um, like he, like he's done in past big speeches i- in the House chamber, he had awards to give out to American heroes or athletes or military service members, and he rattled off a, a couple token policy ideas that he said Congress ought to do this.

I just think that's one of the wildest things about that, but anyway, go on.

Phil from Indianapolis wants to know the connection between inflation under Biden and Trump and the $4 trillion spent to keep the economy running during the COVID lockdowns.

This is a really smart question.

Everyone focuses on the trillion-dollar bill that Joe Biden signed into law when he was president which was the last of three COVID relief measures that gave people checks.

The checks were probably the highest profile and biggest components of these bills, and all together it was, it was, uh, 4 trillion or even more and, uh, there were supply chain problems that, uh, caused scarcity of certain items throughout the economy, uh, and that pushed up inflation and then people had a lot of money.... to spend because of these checks and also extra unemployment insurance and bigger SNAP benefits.

And so, there is more demand at the same time as less supply and so that also contributed to inflation, the extra money did.

Uh, and economists debate how much the extra money was to blame versus how much it was the supply restrictions.

But it was definitely a combination of those two things.

Arthur, do we know what documents will and will not be included in this release?

I was gonna say, Democrats have said, "We're not gonna reopen the government unless there's some resolution on these, uh, expiring enhanced Obamacare subsidies." As SNAP is close now to basically expiring, what are the legislative attempts, not the legal attempts, to, uh, get those benefits back into law, even if the government is or remains shut down?

Yeah, so- and so this week, Democrats in the House and on the Senate side introduced SNAP-only bills just to, just to save SNAP.

And also Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican in the Senate, had a SNAP bill as well.

These aren't being done at the leader level, so it's not like the party's strategy.... uh, and the democrat in the Senate, Ben Ray Luján from New Mexico, tried to get unanimous consent, meaning like no vote, just approve my SNAP bill, and John Thune, the majority leader, came out and blocked him and ma- and made a big show out of it in saying, essentially, "You guys are just trying to make the shutdown easier on yourselves by mitigating this one harm when really you have a responsibility to fund the whole government." So, the- the politics of this are really mixed up.

Usually Republicans...

You know, the Republicans actually spent all year (laughs) saying this program coddles, uh, single adults who play video games all day, and they cut it.

They're kicking millions of people off the program over the next 10 years.

What happens for, like, real human beings who depend on SNAP?

Am I missing something?

No, you're right.

Res- rescissions, it just, it doesn't get on TV.

Uh, if you're here talking to them a lot, it do- it does come up a lot, and it is, it is one of their, uh, s- one of their main side justifications for what they're doing.

It's not just that Republicans, you know, do the, did a funding deal in March and then on partisan basis undid it.

The administration also unilaterally undid several billion dollars in foreign aid funding.

So-

Can I suggest something? S- can you just go around and ask Republican senators, like, if you were, uh, in the, uh, on the, if the shoe were on the other foot and the Democratic OMB was just canceling projects and rescinding funds, like, wouldn't you not vote for an appropriations? I would be very curious to know, like, how they rationalize that.

Now, National Guardsmen are not allowed to make arrests, but by federal officials that are here.

Uh, the White House announced on Wednesday that there had been 100 arrests since August 7th, which was last week, the previous week, and this was a milestone they were clearly looking for.

Now that, that, this gets into the, uh, vagaries of what's actually going on because these are not arrests that were made exclusively by federal law enforcement.

These are arrests that are made, uh, with federal law enforcement helping local police, and so it's a mix, and they don't break down who's doing what.

I asked the DC police how many arrests they had made in that time, and it was more than 400, and you look at the same time period last year, it was more than 300.

So there's lots of arrests happening, but you can't really say who's doing them all 'cause we're not being told or whether it would be more than you'd see in regular times.

My, my inclination is to say that there are more arrests and that more are happening as a result of this increased federal, uh, police presence.

Go ahead.

Arthur, as we think about what kind of tax breaks the bill proposes, who are they actually benefiting? A member of the 1A Tax Club writes, "How is the Trump Administration justifying these tax breaks for the wealthy?"

So the, the tax breaks are for everybody who pays income taxes, which is not everybody in the US.

I think, uh, just, uh, lots of people pay no income tax and only pay, uh, federal payroll taxes.

But if they didn't pass this bill at the end of the year because the last tax bill they passed was not permanent, it had an expiration date, all income tax rates would go up and that would hurt the economy in the short term.

And so they can say, "We are extending everybody's lower income tax rates," but just because of the way progressive taxation works, it's the higher earners who benefit the most, who have the largest improvement in their after-tax income relative to letting these expire.

And there's also some really big time stuff, like they, they make permanent an, an extension of the estate tax, which is essentially an inheritance tax, and only the very, very richest heirs and heiresses in the country really benefit from that.

Arthur, what can you tell us big picture?

Big picture, I think the $45 billion for detention centers tells you a lot, and there's lots more for border personnel and not more for immigration courts and judges.

So what did the House do, uh, in their version, and what did the Senate do in its version?

So Republicans have always wanted to kill SNAP, basically, but they can't ever do it 'cause everyone likes it, and they're not usually working in budget reconciliation.

But this time, they are, and they have these, you know, $4 trillion in tax cuts.

So SNAP, uh, went along with Medicaid in the pool of things they wanted to raid to help offset the cost of the taxes.

So, uh, there are a bunch of provisions in there, but the big one was to make states have to pay a share of the costs of SNAP benefits.

Right.

That's big money, $100 billion across the country, so any state's gonna have potentially hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars that it would be on the hook for under this proposal.

It would give states a strong incentive to trim enrollment, which would in turn reduce federal spending on SNAP, uh, by a large amount, and that, the House proposal would have every state do this automatically, and the Senate proposal would only do it for states that have high error rates, which is high rates of improperly overpaying SNAP recipients-

One of our listeners writes, "I have heard that some or all of the Medicaid cuts approved by the House of Representatives would not take place until several years into the future, possibly to deflect blame, uh, for them to a future administration, and that one of the last-minute compromises was to make them effective a little sooner." So the question is when would the Medicaid cuts kick in?

This is, this listener is so smart.

This was one of the big, uh, controversies among Republicans.

They, the, some of the biggest cuts to Medicaid are through work requirements and more frequent eligibility checks, and they had planned......

For those to start in 2029.

Exactly right, so that the Trump Administration wouldn't get the blame.

The right-wingers in the House said, "We are hiding the ball and also leaving money on the table by not starting these sooner." And so they moved it up to start at the end of next year, right after the midterm elections.

Arthur, what does the U.S. Institute of Peace do? Why was it targeted by the Trump administration?

Yeah.

They have always had totally irreconcilable policy priorities from different members of the conference, and they've papered over that by saying, "Just vote for it.

We'll fix it later.

Just vote for it.

We'll fix it later." And so, they've been through a series of procedural votes that got them to this point, but now they wanna pass the bill next week, and they can no longer say, "We'll fix it later."

Yeah.

... "I don't wanna, I don't wanna vote for this thing until it's got Trump's blessing, it's got the Senate's blessing.

I don't wanna take this pointless vote if I'm not getting the things I'm asking for and then have it blow up anyway." But the House does not have the leverage to get the Senate's blessing on this, and there's no doubt that if they do pass a slightly modified version of what they've got right now, if they do pass it in the House, the Senate won't accept it, and they'll wind up in a negotiation with them too.

I made the mistake of doing that.

Yeah, that's all you can say because the volatility is coming straight from President Trump himself, and there is no strategy to these tariffs.

The idea that it's designed to boost manufacturing is an after-the-fact justification because he just does it because he can, 'cause Congress has given him this power.

I spoke to a Cabinet official from his first administration, Ryan Zinke, the interior secretary, and he said, "It's personal power.

Congress can't stop him.

Courts can't stop him.

He's doing it because he can." The idea that you're gonna bring back manufacturing by protecting domestic industries from foreign imports is valid.

They were appointed by Trump in his first term, Arthur, so why are they being targeted now?

... as crazy to me. This is thought fo- thought as long, long thought as the third rail of politics, and they're just like, "Let's take a hold of it." Um, you have a piece up, uh, about another, uh, Social Security Administration episode. Uh, this one involves, uh, the acting commissioner, a man named Leland Dudek. He, uh... And we'll get to him 'cause he's truly a character, uh, a kind of underappreciated character in the Trump world, uh, 2.0. But, um, the backstory here is that there was some fight with, uh, the governor of Maine, Janet Mills, who was also in a fight with Donald Trump over, uh, transgender athletes. But this one involved, um, policy changes at Social Security. What is the backstory here?

So, you know about how Janet Mills was in that fight with Donald Trump in February at the White House. All the governors were there, and he's like, "We're gonna get transgender athletes out of girls' sports." And Maine wasn't on board with that. He singled her out, and she said, "Well, I'll see you in court." And so he then said, "Well, we're gonna cut off federal funding to Maine," which, you know, you can't really do for that reason anyway. A- that's the background. Uh, one day, Maine announced that instead of checking a box when you have a kid in order to get the Social Security number, you're gonna have to go to the field office. Instead of doing this at the hospital when you're filling out the birth certificate paperwork and just say, "Yes, I request a number." Because the Social Security Administration had canceled the enumeration at birth contract, you now have to make a- another trip to a, a government off-

You tell me. Well, you go on. You tell the story. It's your story. (laughs)

Right. So, uh, I, I asked him right away, "Are you fighting with Janet Mills because she had a spat with Trump?" They didn't say. But last night, uh, on, on Tuesday night, I should say, Dudek had a press call where they were announcing their new rule for you have to come in, you can't use the phone for these different transactions. And he took questions from reporters, so I asked him, "Why'd you cancel that contract in Maine?" And he said, "I screwed up. It was a mistake. Uh, I, I didn't know what it was. I fully take responsibility." I said, "Yes, but are you sure that you weren't mad at Janet Mills, that the Janet Mills fight with Donald Trump had nothing to do with it?" And he said, being a very communicative and transparent person, "I was upset with the governor."

Arthur, who's in charge? The five-points email justify your existence came out. Then several federal agencies, including leaders aligned with Donald Trump, like Kash Patel at the FBI, and others, email their employees to say, "Don't respond. You don't have to respond." There is this ping-pong back and forth, "Respond. You don't have to respond." OPM says, "You don't have to respond." The president says, "Well, they're on a bubble. They might be fake. They should respond." Who is in charge? What is this process?

This is called chaos. Nobody's in charge of this because Elon Musk had this weird idea inspired by a Truth Social post from the president on Saturday, and then the Office of Personnel Management put it into action, and then rescinded it on Monday, and then sent another memo late Monday saying, "Actually, maybe it's on." So the, uh, the indecision is throughout the bureaucracy. I mean, I think it's pretty clear that even if they did say, "You'd have to follow this," it'd get totally snagged in courts, just like everything else they're doing. But we're being basically governed by posts on the internet from a guy who owns, like, six companies that he's fully involved with, seemingly, and, and himself posts, like, 100 times a day. So it's, it's full chaos.

There are an estimated 82 million Americans who rely on Medicaid for their healthcare needs in addition to other programs. It is a gigantic program that helps people in every county and every precinct across this country. Now, Arthur, we mentioned that the House budget bill is just a blueprint. There's a long process here. What happens next?

The Senate has to adopt this blueprint and then, uh, like Eva said, the committees of jurisdiction receive instructions to actually write the legislation that cuts the programs and delivers the savings. Like Schumer said, they need to partially offset the cost of their tax cuts with, uh, domestic spending cuts. And it's clear that Medicaid will be part of it. Uh, and, uh, that is really where the rubber will meet the road. And we'll see if the moderates who don't want Medicaid cuts can be placated by some other assurance 'cause this time they were told, "Eh, don't worry about it. Yada, yada, yada. 'We're only getting fraud.'" Uh, I think there's nobody who knows about Medicaid who thinks that's plausible considering the sum of money that they're, they're supposed to go at.