Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: In this episode we react to the revelation that President Trump made over 2 billion in income that we know of at least in his first year back in office. And how an old quote from Lyndon Johnson, former President Lyndon Johnson, may explain Trump supporters indifference to his massive self dealing. And later on we discussed the recently released autopsy from 2024 for the Democratic Party following their loss in the presidential campaigns and the deep divisions that remain in the party that may be setting them up to fail or at least underperform in the upcoming midterm elections.
Hello, welcome to the Carl Legacy Podcast.
I'm James Keys and joining me today is a man whose wildest takes are frankly kind of off the wall. Tunde, Ogunlana Tunde, Are you ready to give us a thriller of a show?
[00:01:02] Speaker B: Yes, Mr. Michael Jackson, I can see those references. Let's have a show.
[00:01:06] Speaker A: All right. All right. Now before we get started, if you enjoy the show, I ask that you subscribe or like the show on YouTube or your podcast app. Doing so really helps the show out. Now we're recording on July 7, 2026 and Tunde is it's been recently reported that President Donald Trump disclosed over 2 billion in income in his first year back as the President.
Now many people have weighed in on this, but I know we discussed how this really seemed to illustrate a famous Lyndon Johnson quote, former President Lyndon Johnson, about what certain Americans may like from their leaders or prefer from their leaders. Specifically the quote was if you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Give him someone to look down on, he'll empty his pockets for you. And that's the end of the quote. So Tunde, looking at the just the massive amounts of, you know, what appear to be self dealing and conflicts of interest that go into how this income was made that we saw at the time, what stands out in the reporting of how much Trump has profited and also the reactions that we've seen.
[00:02:12] Speaker B: And I would say this James, a lot stands out.
What I think to me what's interesting is the inconsistency. That's really what stands out to me is that I would have had you asked me 10, 15 years ago, hey, what happened? What would the public, how would they react if a president was doing this in office? I definitely would think we would have a much different reaction by the general public.
And then I think of the last four years from just the prior administration living under in America while Joe Biden was president.
You know, There was a lot of those talks about the Biden crime family. There was a lot of criticism about his son, Hunter Biden, sitting on the board of a company in Ukraine, which, you know, obviously has its own story. And then I remember when he first got into office, his son, Hunter Biden was selling paintings for $500,000 a pop. And that looked bad. And I didn't like it. And that's my point. Like, I didn't like that and I don't like this. And so I feel like I'm pretty consistent. I'm just watching a whole bunch of Americans and people I know personally that were very upset when it was happening under someone else, and now that it's happening here to a scale that is, you know, was unimaginable, unimaginable at one time. But now it looks like obviously somebody figured out how to make it very profitable to be president of the United States.
So many people are so quiet. And so I'd say that that lack of consistency, James, to me is just what glares out to me.
[00:03:33] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I think, well, I look at that as the partisanship, you know, and I would be like, oh, yeah, Captain Obvious. Right. But the partisanship piece that. Because we'll say, okay, you know, people don't care. Actually, what we're talking about mainly is people who support Trump don't seem to be reacting to this in a way that they would react to it. Or I like to look at also their media messages, that their media messages would be telling them to react. If it was Joe Biden or if it was Hillary Clinton or something like that, they would be able to get all frothy, basically because of what they were being presented on a day to day basis. So you have that partisanship piece saying, oh, well, if it's my team doing it, then I'm not going to, you know, we'll look the other way or I'll endorse it even. And if it's the other team doing it, even if it's much less, we'll make the, you know, a huge deal about it. And I want to get into kind of how people may be or what allows people to reconcile this, that inconsistency itself. Just looking at the Trump supporters later on. But the Lyndon Johnson quote really hit me because I think that explains a lot of it. And it's not actually the first part. It's not actually the part about, you know, the lowest white man and the best colored man.
It was more about give them someone or give. It was about giving them Someone to look down on. And because I thought about it and the MAGA movement is kind of about giving people someone to look down on. It's about who's the real Americans. It's about, oh, you know, this is our stuff, taking our stuff back. And this is about us and all these other people. We're going to. We're going to treat, you mean, you know, like we're going to, you know, you're, you're rapists and all this other stuff. So it's a. The movement is in many respects about this psychological support to look down on people. So if Lyndon Johnson was right, that if you give people someone to look down upon, they'll empty their pockets for you, or this is less of an extension of that. Yes, there are a lot of people that lost money on these deals, like these crypto deals and stuff that Trump made a lot of money on. But him making money, if Lyndon Johnson's right, then the mentality what he is doing for them supersedes any amount of money that he can make for himself. And so it's almost like he cracked that code and say, okay, yeah, yeah, I will give you someone to look down upon, you know, quite literally from the Lyndon Johnson quote. And then I'm going to use this as an opportunity to stack my pockets. And this is also why I always push back when people say, oh, there's such an incompetent administration. Like, well, they've been very competent on lining their pockets, you know, like, they just don't. They're incompetent on the things they don't care about, about governing and stuff, because they're not there to govern. You know, they're there to line their pockets. And now we can see how successful that's been.
[00:06:01] Speaker B: Yeah. No, man, this is. That's a very interesting direction you go, because it makes me think of that emotional state that we discussed some time ago, that the concept of transference, where a population will transfer its anger about its condition, like maybe, let's say example would be poverty or people in the working class not feeling like they're getting a fair shake.
But instead of focusing on those who control the levers of the system, so on and so forth, who seem to
[00:06:30] Speaker A: be benefiting from the system, that's not giving you a fair shake.
[00:06:33] Speaker B: Yeah, they are. But this is what I want to get into.
The way you bring it up, that look, downing the ability to look down on someone else, because that plays into some people's emotional need for a hierarchy and to be told where they stand in that hierarchy. And I think for a lot of people, unfortunately, the way that kind of, I guess things have played out in the last generation or two, this current president showed up at the right time in 2016 with the right type of populist message that for people who were upset at the system in general because they feel like the Bush administration had failed them with the wars in Iraq and all that, and they felt that kind of the Democrats, after Obama had gotten in, after the great financial crisis and remember, all of those.
[00:07:20] Speaker A: No, no.
[00:07:21] Speaker B: All of those things.
[00:07:21] Speaker A: You should not smash all that together. You had the first black president. You had the financial crisis, which was not dealt with in a way that realigned things, and that accounted for the fact that you had very wealthy people sending the economy into the tank. Like, that's a really good point. There were a lot of different factors that would have a lot of people dissatisfied about their place or the way they're being treated in the government. And transference would be a great way to deal with that, so to speak.
[00:07:51] Speaker B: Yeah. And so what this reminds me of as we're talking, this ability for the president and his family to be able to enrich themselves at the way that they have disclosed. That's the interesting thing, is that this isn't something that's a hit job from some side angle from someone that's an opponent of the president or the administration.
He personally follows the disclosure rules. So he disclosed how much money he made on trading stocks, crypto memes, all that stuff. And one of the things that stands out to me, James, why I started thinking of January 6 was because the crypto.
Just real quick, it's been. It's come out that almost 1 million people that invested in the crypto meme coin that the president put out himself lost a combined $3.8 billion.
But he and his family were, you know, made a lot of money.
Somewhere between 1 to 2 billion dollars, depending on how you look at fees versus profits and all that. So I'm gonna read a quote, James, because it comes from the White House, not the president himself. But it says a quote, President Trump proudly made the United States the crypto capital of the world. Close quote. Anna Kelly, a White House spokesman said in a statement to the New York Times after the president's annual report was made public on Tuesday. So this is after he disclosed how much money.
[00:09:12] Speaker A: End quote.
[00:09:13] Speaker B: All actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people.
So this is where it is becoming like a dictatorship, cult. Right.
We are being told by the administration, not just the President himself, but the scaffolding and the apparatus around him, the government itself now, that this is okay. And what reminds me of January 6th is, remember, there was this kind of plausible deniability. I saw the President at the time, speaking at the Ellipse at the Oval Office, saying, you gotta fight like hell. You gotta take your country back.
Like we're saying, creating this anger so that his base can transfer that anger to somewhere else, look down on someone else. And I'm feeling the same way here. The administration now is gaslighting all of us. They're going to tell us why we got to go look at Somalis, why we got to go let ICE harass people down here in South Florida, you know, all this kind of stuff, and why it's okay for him to get a $400 million plane and for the fare to be messed up and all this stuff, right?
[00:10:10] Speaker A: But what they.
[00:10:11] Speaker B: What they're trying to do is get us to not look at what I just read that they're telling us it's okay for him to grift off the American people.
[00:10:18] Speaker A: But see, I think that this is where we have a blind spot. Like you and myself, we are not charged up by the idea of having someone to look down upon. Like, so these.
We look at ICE as being, oh, man, you know, like, why are they. Why they got to treat people so bad? Like, okay, you want to do this deportation thing. Why does it have to be concentration camps and people disappearing for months? And why can't it just be okay? You want to get people out, keep black, send them to where they were?
[00:10:43] Speaker B: Like, but, yeah, send them back.
[00:10:45] Speaker A: And again, I'm not saying that's what I want to do. I'm just saying there's ways to do different things that can either be cruel or that can be humane. And so, but I'm looking at that. But that may be a feature, you know, like, that may be a part of. We need to allow the people who are sensitive to this messaging of, hey, I can look down on this person who. We need to get them charged up so that they. They don't Won't mind us making obscene amounts of money at the expense of the American people. And, I mean, it's crazy. When you put what you laid out together, it was like, hey, yeah, a million plus Americans lose money. Trump's family makes tons of money, and they come out and say, that's in the best interest of the American people.
[00:11:26] Speaker B: You know, look, it's literally a transfer of wealth. Right. Because it was a pump and dump.
[00:11:31] Speaker A: It was a pump and dump.
[00:11:31] Speaker B: Exactly. So people bought it and then they cashed in, took the money out and all those people lost money. So it's just like it would be illegal in another.
[00:11:40] Speaker A: Predatory in that sense. Exactly. But this goes into that idea that one of the tricks that Trump play has played and they've been very successful at is having it. So that his well being and him doing well is something that this is another way that it's transferred when he does well. A lot of his supporters feel good about that. That makes them feel good about America and make them feel good about themselves is to see him succeed, you know, so it, it in that sense.
[00:12:09] Speaker B: Hold on, man, I'm sorry, Keep going. I want you to finish because I don't want to interrupt you.
[00:12:14] Speaker A: I just got something. So in that sense, that's what, that's the messaging again. Because I don't look at it like that. I look at it as being dissonance when someone says, oh, this is in the best interest of American people. But if some, some, the American people who feel good when Trump does well, yeah, him making $2 billion in a year, that is good for them because they're like, oh yeah, we won.
There's nobody won.
[00:12:38] Speaker B: That's why you gave me an epiphany, bro. Because as you're talking, it makes me realize this is the kind of locked in thing of our culture as it relates to race. I think what happens is the idea of looking down on others because it's America and the way we deal with humanity. Right. And our caste system here is this color thing the President was able is kind of for some people. Let me be very clear here. I'm not talking about all white Americans here, but I'm talking about the people who still in 2026 find themselves as members of the MAGA base and this kind of stuff and still supporting this. You've got to be broader than that.
[00:13:13] Speaker A: I don't think it's people that are sensitive to this kind of messaging.
I think some people are and then some people aren't as sensitive to this kind of messaging.
[00:13:20] Speaker B: Yeah, but I think to your point, you bring it up, which is the. Because so many Americans now have been radicalized with this idea that they're being replaced. Like we read that article that 40% of white Americans and the study showed thinks that the great replacement's real, he can convince them that as long as someone who looks like me and you doesn't appear to do as well, and they're supporting a guy who is, in a sense, grifting off the system that they've been radicalized to hate. Right.
[00:13:50] Speaker A: That.
[00:13:50] Speaker B: Then that's okay. And it's an interesting point, James, because they've been radicalized to hate their own country, their own government and all that, but yet he's fleecing off of them personally in a deal like that. This isn't him taking tax dollars, right? That 7 $1.776 billion slush fund he tried to create and all that.
This is him really saying, here's. Here's my meme coin. Buy it. These people put their own personal money in there, and then he, him and his kids siphon it away.
[00:14:17] Speaker A: So it's a.
[00:14:17] Speaker B: It's a real grift. It's a real misdirection by saying, all these bad guys over here going to get you. I'm the only one that can protect you. But on the flip side, I'm going to be cleaning it out. Your money here.
[00:14:28] Speaker A: Put your money here.
[00:14:29] Speaker B: That's the LBJ quote, right? Hell, he'll empty his pockets for you if you give him someone to look down on. That's a very. That's what I mean.
[00:14:36] Speaker A: That's just.
[00:14:37] Speaker B: Your comments made me realize a lot. They're like, whoa.
[00:14:39] Speaker A: Yeah, well, no, that's why, you know,
[00:14:41] Speaker B: LBJ was profound, actually.
[00:14:43] Speaker A: Really. They really hit that part. You know, like, to me, that's what really stood out when I first saw this. I'm like, oh, that's exactly what LBJ was talking about. You know, so now, just briefly, I do. You had touched on the inconsistency of it.
And I noted, you know, Trump has been quoted as saying that he realized that no one cared in terms of the conflict of interest and stuff like that. And this was from the first term, and he's talking about his base. You know, obviously, the people.
When you have these kind of conversations, you go in with the understanding that the people who don't support Trump, this doesn't move them because they already don't support Trump. But the more curious thing is that people who do support Trump, when this negative type of stuff comes out, or at least stuff that historically would be considered negative, this doesn't move them either. If you're already in the negative, then more negative isn't going to change you. But if you're in the positive, the thinking historically has been that negative might move you a little bit out of the positive, move you to neutral, or move you to flip your side. And so that it doesn't do that is the curious thing. So Trump that says no one cares, and let's say he's speaking about his base there, about conflicts of interest.
What happened with that? Because if you go to Nixon, for example, people did care. Now, everybody didn't. But enough people on both sides of the partisan divide cared that this guy was wilding out enough that he was threatened with impeachment, enough that he stepped down.
So what has happened here? I mean, is this like we did the book Stuart Stevens? It was all a lie? Is this just. It was all a lie that the Republican Party professed to care about this stuff in the 70s, or I guess you can't say in the 70s, because they did it in the 70s, but in the 80s and 90s and 2000s and they didn't. Or has the Republican voter or the Republican politician been changed in the modern media ecosystem or what have you?
[00:16:36] Speaker B: That's a very good question. Interesting. The last one about has the voter changed?
[00:16:43] Speaker A: Yeah. Was it always a lose or have people been changed, been people been radicalized already?
[00:16:49] Speaker B: I think I'll start there because if we look at, I mean, we're a little bit over a decade, but that, that famous 2012 Republican Party autopsy, right, where they were like, how come we're losing this? And that. And that was, you know, we should speak out to more voters, you know, get more, you know, diverse.
[00:17:07] Speaker A: Broaden our.
[00:17:08] Speaker B: Start speaking to more diverse. Yeah, broaden our tent, all that kind of stuff. And it was, remember Paul Ryan and John Boehner and those kind of guys in the party. Right. And it's interesting, by 2016, the debase, the voters nominated a guy who was the antithesis of what the party establishment thought that, that, that the party needed. Now, I'm not here to argue whether the party was right at the time or whatever. What I am saying, though, is you brought something up earlier which I didn't, you know, not my intent to focus on. And I don't want to sit here and get too much into this, but I think we all know that, you know, Obama's presence, just as a human being in that position, did disturb some people in this country in a way that I think I didn't predict. So I do think that the president, current President Trump, was very effective with birtherism, along with Fox News and other parts of our culture, to radicalize a certain amount of enough Americans, maybe it's not a majority, but maybe 30% or 20% of Americans that are very vocal, very passionate show up to all the Primaries show up to the stuff that kind of matters, to tack that party a little bit further to the right in how they saw the country and inviting in candidates who were a lot more open about their bigotry. And I think that's it. It's not, it's undeniable, looking back now at 2026, looking back over the last 10 to 15 years, that those type of emotions were stoked and maybe they were embers burning when you and I were kids. And now a bit of a brush fire has developed. Right?
[00:18:56] Speaker A: We'll see. But I think that predates Trump. This is where I've said this to you before, offline, but this is where Trump got in front of the parade. That was already happening in the right wing media.
And so basically it was being stoked already. To me, I think what this evidence is, it's not quite, it was all a lie and it's not quite pure radicalization.
But I think, I don't think that, or I want to say this correctly, or at least in the most accurate way, most people are not inherently principled would be my opinion on that. Like, so people can be principled, particularly if being principled is being reinforced around them a lot. You know, so if you look at the Nixon piece, the mainstream media reinforced the idea of, hey, as Americans, we're about rule of law. Just because this guy's president doesn't mean he can run up in hotel rooms and searching for these things and all this other stuff, or use the government for personal reasons, or all this type of stuff that was being reinforced into people's minds all the time. And so that would be affecting people who didn't support Nixon and also people who did. And so I think what we're seeing here is that if most people aren't inherently principled, then if you have actually what's being reinforced to them, something going to kind of the areas of, hey, let's not be principled, hey, let's just be biased on our side, you know, kind of like the darker side of some of these. If you're trying to build a democracy, trying to build rule of law, trying to go to that stuff, then I think people can be moved to that, you know, so whether it wasn't, some of it was a lie, clearly. I think as far as the belief that these types of, that, you know, the Biden crime family, and we can't have people in office trying to leverage their, you know, their, their power in order to make more money and all this other kind of stuff, but in some of it was the radicalization, but kind of in between and where I think it really stands is that with large scale media you can move people. And this is, you know, this is the idea of propaganda anyway. I mean, I'm not saying anything that is, you know, completely groundbreaking. The reason you have propaganda would be on a large scale to change people's either change their principles or make them less fixed in what their principles are. And so I think that's what we've observed basically, is that this malleable nature of most people is, at least when we're looking at the Republican Party, it has been molded into a kind of worldview or thought process where this kind of stuff is okay, at least with respect to Donald Trump. So, any thoughts before we get out of here?
[00:21:34] Speaker B: I think, yeah, I think we need to be prepared that this is probably going to just continue to get worse for people, I'd say, like you and I, who feel like us that, that, that we don't necessarily want to live in a country where everyone's totally radicalized and scared of everything, you know, looking like squirrels are constantly looking at every shadow.
Because I, my concern is, James, is that as the dissonance continues, you know, a lot of people, there's a lot of emotional, you know, people have put in their emotions for over a decade into one man and into this kind of, like you said, this party and this kind of ideas.
And I think that as people continue to see the reality that this was a big grift and a mystery and is maybe the greatest confidence man in the history of the world, you know what I mean?
I just think that, yeah, exactly the scale of it. I think there's going to be more cognitive dissonance solved by transference. I think we're going to have people becoming more angry at the immigrants and the quote, unquote, outsiders, people trying to like you say, who's a real American, who's not people wanting more people to look down on. We need to be prepared for that because they're going to feel angry that they were either angry that they were taken advantage of by the people that they trusted and won't know how to deal with those emotions, or B, they just will choose not to see that reality and continue to choose the emotional off ramp of hating someone else. And you know, we, as I close I'll say this, we referred to something in the past conversations as ritualistic killings.
And those were lynchings of blacks in the south in the early 20th century. And if you think of that time, remember that was one of the highest imbalances.
That was the height of the Gilded age, the early 20th century, and a lot of those poor white folks in Appalachia and those coal towns, basically, the way that they took. They transferred their anger was to go to the black part of town, grab a dude out of his house in the middle of the night, drag him, put him up on a tree, and kill him. And that was a way that they had a release, you know, because that's the poverty and the imbalance. They could see the guy who owned the coal mine and the town and all that making all this money. They could see all this, and they felt powerless. And that powerlessness was turned to anger and violence and transferred onto the weaker group, somebody they could look down on. So I think we need to be prepared. Maybe it won't happen exactly the same way. I'm not trying to be alarmist in that way, but I don't think we should assume if Trump gets off the stage that this sentiment and this need to transfer anger to a lesser group will end well.
[00:24:15] Speaker A: Yeah, because it's been deemed to be profitable at this point.
[00:24:18] Speaker B: So now, I didn't even think about that part, but you're right.
[00:24:22] Speaker A: I would go algorithm. Actually, you're usually our glass half empty guy at least half of the time, but that was pretty good.
[00:24:29] Speaker B: I thought I fulfilled my role there.
[00:24:31] Speaker A: No, but I would go a little further, actually.
[00:24:34] Speaker B: Oh, wow, you're going to empty the glass all the way.
[00:24:36] Speaker A: Well, not necessarily, but I guess this is going to be some green shoots, but it's going to be presented in a way that sounds bad, I have to say. It has to get worse. Because the only way it gets better is for the rest of society to be like, all right, hold up. This is way too much. You know, once it becomes way too much and society says, okay, hey, we need a little more decorum. We need a little more political correctness. We. All these things that we're still ebbing away from.
[00:25:02] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Everyone decided they didn't want.
[00:25:04] Speaker A: Once the rest of society says, no, no, you guys, this is too much. We can't have you guys angry and breaking stuff all the time.
You know, then until that happens, then there is nothing to kind of pull us out of this.
Absent some transcendent, you know, leader that could pull us in another direction, which you can't. You don't bank on that.
You don't bank on, oh, yeah, there's some rock star will come and save us, you know, from everything. But, you know, I think that that's kind of, you know, the situation we're in. So. But I think we can wrap this topic from there. We appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode of Call. Like I see it, we'll have a second part to today's discussion as well, so please join us for that as well. And until then, I'm James Keys.
[00:25:42] Speaker B: I'm Tunde Wanlana.
[00:25:43] Speaker A: All right. We'll talk soon.
All right. Welcome back to the Call like I See it podcast. I'm James Keys here with Tunde, Ogo and Lana. We're looking right now at the recently released Democratic or the 2024 election Democratic autopsy report that was it was withheld for a long time and then finally released. And it's the DNC has said that it's not complete and so forth that they don't stand behind it. But it was an analysis that was done looking at Kamala Harris and how she lost and what was wrong with the Democratic Party in 2024.
So with this this has been talked about around a lot. But I want to get from you, Tunde, what stands out in the autopsy to you as far as either what's in there, what's not in there, so forth?
[00:26:31] Speaker B: Yeah, I'd say what stands out to me is what I feel is a bit of a dissonance between I would say what the voters appear to want in terms of Democratic based voters, the party to focus on generally, and what the party elites feel that they should be messaging and talking about.
So that to me stands out a lot because I think that's irreconcilable, which I know we'll get into in this conversation.
[00:26:59] Speaker A: What's the base want to or what are the things that you think the base want and what are the things that you think the elites don't want to touch on or they would rather talk about.
[00:27:08] Speaker B: It's interesting. Some of it actually reminds me a bit I know in the first part we talked a little bit about the Republican Party's 2012 autopsy. So kind of similar about broadening the tent. And in here I'll read a bit just from some of my notes. Rebuild support among working class voters, rural voters, middle America and Southern states, which is interesting. They want to grow that tent, which I think is very fair observation of the party and the focus messaging more on cost of living, jobs, housing, healthcare, public safety. And it appeared to me that in the 24 campaign they had a candidate who did try and focus on that, but then seems to have been steered away from that by the consultants and that's when she was gaining steam. And an interesting thing talking about we got to talk about grocery prices and if I get win, I'll try and put caps on it and all that. Now what's interesting is messaging. I remember at that time her opponents began to say, well, she's gonna do Soviet style price controls. And that messaging was effective. So there is something to be said about the inability of the Democratic Party to somehow message better. But to me, just to finish off, I guess without me starting to have the whole show by myself, I just figure that's the big standout half of
[00:28:28] Speaker A: the show can be about yourself.
Just give me the other half.
[00:28:33] Speaker B: Yeah, no, no, let's not go there because I will take that half.
I'll actually just start talking about me. That'll be that. You don't tell me, you know, I'll go there.
[00:28:44] Speaker A: No, that's good, that's good.
[00:28:45] Speaker B: It won't be about the DNC anymore. You know what I'm doing for the rest of the day.
[00:28:49] Speaker A: No, no, I think that' what was missing and the effort. I really agree with you as far as the effort to steer away.
The Democratic establishment seems to want to steer away from kitchen table issues and wants to try to make things about identity and so forth. Also another thing that the report, the autopsy doesn't mention, which seems to me to be it's the same people that were making decisions then that are making decisions now. Autopsy doesn't mention Gaza or Israel, which created a real divide within the party. There's two areas, I think that you have a real divide in the party. One is on the economic side and that's evidenced by the rise of the democratic socialist people.
The self proclaimed socialists that are out winning primaries or that win the mayor of New York job, win the job for mayor of New York.
And these are self proclaimed socialists either on par with a Bernie Sanders or further than that.
And that you have the establishment or the more moderate Democrats that are made uncomfortable by that. So you have that schism.
The other one is, that's a big one. I mean there's, there's a lot, lots of types of things, you know, but the other big one seems to be Gaza and Israel and the either unflinching, unquestioned support for Israel no matter what they do, or whether or not we need to actually look at this more rationally and say, okay, you know, like can we ask everyone to be better? Particularly if you're killing people, killing citizens and everything like that. And then also even further saying, oh no, no, I'm totally with Gaza. So there's a range there that it seems like the Democratic Party itself is having a hard time reconciling within its walls on where the party should be coming down on this stuff. And there's other issues in terms of how much you lean into social issues, identity issues and so forth. But I think the big ones are the economic and then the foreign policy specific with Israel and Gaza and the party in 2024. And in this autopsy does not seem to have reconciled either one of those, you know. And so that to me is what's really what stands out about the autopsy is that the divisions that one of which it taught, it does mention, the other one it doesn't mention mention. It doesn't seem to have any ideas or plans as far as how to deal with that now. Anyway, now I have thoughts and plans on how to deal with that. But, you know, I definitely want to kick it back to you as far as, you know, what, what I said and also where you have going forward from that, because I know you had a lot that you had mentioned to me about, specifically about the financial side.
[00:31:23] Speaker B: Yeah, I think part of, well, from the financial side would be, I mean, I think we can't ignore Citizens United and the ability of money being treated as speech in American politics, which I think, you know, 200 years from now someone will probably look back and say, yeah, who thought that was a good idea? Because now that unlimited money is allowed in politics.
They say that in the autopsy it said that KAMALA Harris raised $1 billion last year. But James, I looked it up. The total amount spent in the 2024 election was 16 billion. And that's the numbers that I guess we know about.
And that's because there's a lot of dark money allowed and all that. So can the American population, 100 million people given 20 bucks or whatever, compete with a trillionaire and a guy who at the time was a multi hundred billionaire given $300 million of his own money a couple months before a campaign and making a big announcement and who owns major media platforms like is that fair? Right. And there's for 100 years and in the environment you and I grew up, that was not fair. And now it is fair. And so now for Democrats, where it says focus messaging, more on cost of living, jobs, housing, health care, public safety, again, that requires governance that we would have seen in the New Deal or something like that, not the governance that allows, you know, that's constantly about tax cuts and about making people like me better Off. So that's kind of to me, where I see the issue here is that the Democrats constituency is billionaires, but they're
[00:32:55] Speaker A: going to constituency of the Democratic establishment, you mean?
[00:32:59] Speaker B: Yeah, correct. That's what I mean is that they raise money from building. I mean, a lot of people don't know this. Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have a PAC that supports Democratic primary candidates. And as of March me reading it, in March of this year, it had already spent $36 million in congressional primaries. So my point is, is that I'm not saying anything against Elon Musk or Peter Thiel. What I'm saying is they seem to be the mindsets that aren't aligned with the Democratic base and how they see the world.
Well, but do Democratic voters know that those guys are over there picking primary candidates in the Democratic Party because they're wealthy enough to.
[00:33:35] Speaker A: Well, yeah, I mean, that's the. I think that's a part of it for sure. I mean, I think though that the issue that you run into with the Democratic Party, we historically at least, we've all pretty much accepted the idea that power corrupts and then absolute power corrupts absolutely. But the power corrupts part is a big part of this as well, or is not. It's not just the absolute power that you jump to the Democratic Party, their incentive structures are all wrong in terms of structurally, they based how much power you have in the within the party, based on how long you've been there, how long you've been in office, if you're talking about in congressional stuff, and also how good of a fundraiser you are.
So that naturally disconnects you from the Democratic base completely. Because how big, how good of a fundraiser you are, essentially it means that how flexible are your principles, unless your principles are money, then you have to have very flexible principles to be a good fundraiser. Because for this person, you got to have this message this person, you got to have that message and so forth. So that broadens you out and then open to open the bigger dollars, so to speak, you got to get, you got to talk to the bigger money. And the bigger money has different priorities than the Democratic base as, as it's laid out in this autopsy and as we've seen over time.
The other thing I think is that I'd say my generation of Democrats, and I'm looking at it from the Gen X, which is myself, and then also late Gen X, but then also the baby boomers, I think, lack conviction on economic policy.
They don't believe that.
They don't truly in their heart of hearts believe, unlike somebody like I would say Elizabeth Warren who would be at a contra to this example, they don't believe that an economic system that is based on, let's say New Deal principles actually can deliver a healthy economy where all boats can rise. And so it's very difficult for them to get out full throated and push for economic policies that would again, I'll say more New Deal style policies that push for it full throat. It's almost like a meek way to push for it all. We got to be nice to people. We got to give some people, some, some, you know, like more, more money here, more money there. And, and that lack of conviction comes through. Like I don't think they believe that their pop, the stuff they're pushing from an economic standpoint, I don't think that they think it would work. You know, when, when you got Kamala Harris out here talking about we're going to do tax credits for families and stuff that's Republican light stuff from the 80s like oh, so they, they made it cool for you to say that then. But they're not talking stuff that oh, what we got to do is we've got to work with the top tax bracket, we got to work with the corporate tax bracket, we got to make sure that people who work hard can earn a living enough to live a middle class lifestyle. They're not talking about that kind of stuff. And that opens the door, actually I'll get to the second part of this. That opens the door for the socialists, so to speak, because they're the only ones in the Democratic Party who have any conviction that they have an idea that could work from an economic policy standpoint. So some of it definitely is that the Democratic leadership is in the pocket of investors, but some of it is, is that they don't, they think the only stuff that works are the stuff that the Republicans talk about. And the irony of all ironies with that is that the stuff that Republicans talk about has never worked. The New Deal stuff actually did work for 20, 30 years. The Republican stuff, the trickle down stuff, that's never worked. It's always relied on endless government borrowing in order to sustain anything. Always. And so to me it's the irony of ironies is that the people whose system doesn't work has never been shown to work, have infinite conviction on it. And the people whose system did work is like they're, they're tepid and meek, you know, so, but it's, there's a lot going on there. You know, so I don't, I don't want to dominate the conversation. Go ahead.
[00:37:20] Speaker B: I do want to get lost cause second.
[00:37:22] Speaker A: But go ahead.
[00:37:22] Speaker B: Well, but it's, it's a, it's a different version of the lost cause. Right. Like that's a cultural reality that history that happened was conveniently just changed and overlooked. And a lot of people wanted to believe that. Right. And so it just became the way that people saw the situation from the Civil War. I think this is similar, James, that people want to believe in trickle down economics and growth and all that.
It wasn't cool to be a New Deal type of person in the 80s, 90s, 2000s.
And I think that's where we get into what happened in the Democratic Party as relates around the Clinton era. Right. In the 90s where you get the deregulation, beginning of the real deregulation of the financial sector with stuff like the repeal of the Glass Steagall act and things that we don't have time to get into in this discussion. But I think that's what happened is that.
[00:38:18] Speaker A: Well, it was a point. But let me throw this real quick. Just because some people seem to value the way that the economic system was in the 1950s, you know, but they, they're like the tradwife people. But they think the cause was something different. They think that the economics were good because women were at home. It's like, no, you idiot, the economics were good because of the way the system was set up, not because women were.
[00:38:41] Speaker B: That's what I mean.
[00:38:42] Speaker A: Like, but, but they, that's why we don't have that time period. And finally like, oh yeah, if we could just get back to that time period. They just don't know what brought us to that time period.
[00:38:51] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that this is where, going back to the autopsy thing where I think the Democratic Party is gonna shoot itself in the face again in this midterm election, probably in fourth.
[00:39:03] Speaker A: Let me set this up before we go into this part because we've seen a tension within the Democratic Party and I'd say 2026, but also 2025, this rising tension. And it seems to stem from the rise of a younger generation or younger generation of politicians, the millennials, the Gen Zs who do, many of them, not all of them, but many of them do have conviction as far as an economic idea, an economic system. And a lot of them, not all of them, but a lot of them will self identify as socialists.
And so this now and then, this on top of the fact you still have the schism with respect to Israel and Gaza that exists.
So do you think that there's any chance for the party to come up with any kind of coherent message, as you know, from a party standpoint? What does the party stand for other than, hey, Trump, bad, ice bad, you know, like, do they have any other. Any other thing that they're going to be able to come together on in the midterm elections, which is coming up this year?
[00:40:05] Speaker B: The answer is no. Nothing that I think will be effective. That's my point. I mean, they'll find something, but I think it'll just backfire. And I'll explain why, I think. Because the conversation we're having here is interesting. Like, I'm going back, I'm looking at this note here of the cost of living, jobs, housing, all the things that people say they want. And you make a great point, because I know there's so many people in the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, all that, that seem so scared of these socialists like Madani and all this. And I think you're right, in the end is like it was when we did the show on Oppenheimer and what was going on in the 20s and 30s in America. Socialism and communism were very popular in the United states in the 1930s and the 1920s for the same reason they're gaining popularity again. Think about it, James. They weren't popular when me and you were kids in the 80s and 90s because there was a healthy equilibrium within the working class and the upper class.
[00:40:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:40:53] Speaker B: And now there's not again. So it's. Again, it's the same thing. That's why I'm convinced now the socialists
[00:40:58] Speaker A: are a signal that there's a problem,
[00:41:00] Speaker B: you know, like, like since, since the French Revolution and that famous Marie Antoinette quote, let them eat cake and they revolted and threw them the monarchy out of power.
Kind of this last 300 years. It's the same cycle in these large societies, which is there's a certain small group of people with a bunch of wealth.
There's a larger group of people that got the society needs to figure out what they're about.
When the people with a lot of wealth understand the game and they're not too piggish about it and allow the bottom and the working class to eat a bit. The society tends to hum along and when they don't, usually it breaks itself apart. And I think that's the concern I have, James, is that because of Citizens United and the real constituency of the democratic elites who they go get money from is the Same who the Republicans get money from. The difference is the Republican Party doesn't pretend that it's about the working class in that way because they just give their base people to go hate. And that's enough emotionally, that the base wants the Democrats. What they're going to do, James, is, and I think I sent you the headline I was complaining about, which is their strategy already they're talking about is to, is to now focus on the ICE rates.
[00:42:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:42:11] Speaker B: And I was, and I was saying to myself, so that has nothing to do with cost of living, jobs, housing or health care. That's not going to, you know, matter to working class voters, rural voters, middle America or Southern states. That's all the stuff that the.
[00:42:23] Speaker A: It's not that it won't matter. It just won't matter enough.
That's not. Those aren't the things that they're making their decisions based on, according to most of the polling and research that's being seen and also the results that we've seen. You know, like, if you want to make it about.
[00:42:35] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, I want to say this, though, because of the psychology, James. I think a lot of Democrats and the Democrat leaning people don't understand this. By them pointing out that ICE is doing this.
They don't understand because they're projecting how they feel about it. They don't understand a lot of Americans. That's going to remind a lot of Americans. Oh, yeah, that's what I like about Trump.
You know what I mean?
[00:42:54] Speaker A: Like, not just that, because those aren't necessarily the people.
[00:42:56] Speaker B: He's getting these people out of my country that I don't like, but that's,
[00:43:00] Speaker A: that's not necessarily the people they're trying to reach. It's just that that may not, it's
[00:43:03] Speaker B: not about them reaching them. They might motivate those people to get out of the.
[00:43:07] Speaker A: Might be different groups of people. I don't think that that necessarily is the reason why you don't talk about that stuff. That just may not be the thing that gets somebody off their couch, you know, who's like, all right, well, yeah, that's bad. I don't agree with that. But. Oh, well. But if you're out here talking kitchen table issues, that might be the stuff that gets them off their couch. I mean, and I think that, I think that the, what we're seeing now, actually, and I'm glad you brought up the 30s, because I think it's, it's really similar that there was a schism in the Democratic Party then between. You had the Socialists. And then how far was you had the Dixiecrats then too? So that was a little different. But nonetheless, what the New Deal Democrats did was bridge the gap.
A lot of people don't know this, but the socialists in the 30s and so forth were mad about the New Deal because the New Deal took a lot of their stuff. Not all of it though. Not it wasn't punitive enough to the wealth class, but it took a lot of their stuff that were designed to spread the wealth a little bit more, to allow everybody to benefit from the growth of the economy.
The New Deal kind of stole the socialist thunder, which is why the socialists got marginalized for a long time after that. So as the Democrats have moved away from the New Deal, that's what has empowered the socialists at this point. Now the socialists now say, oh okay. And I'm not saying this is calculated amongst people that are 80 years old, but I'm saying that as the Democrats have become more Republican light from an economic messaging standpoint, that's created the lane for the socialists again because the party itself has abandoned this ethos of we're trying to design an economic system that works for all, not just tax credits, which again, that's 1980s Reagan stuff, you know, like. And so when that becomes what the democratic establishment is about, about, we should not be surprised when you have the rise of the socialists. And if the Democratic establishment doesn't want these socialists run around, which by just for full disclosure, I'm not afraid of socialists. I think that socialists do a very bad job of. I think they need to recognize that the name, the word socialist has a negative connotation in America. And you see, even if you are a socialist, you shouldn't run around calling yourself a socialist. You know, you have a bunch of reactionaries in the Republican Party and they don't go around calling themselves reactionaries. They call themselves nice neat conservatives. You know, call themselves conservatives cuz they know if they out there telling people what they really were, people would be afraid of it. So what you call yourself, and we did show years ago talking about these labels and how you can use the labels to your advantage or disadvantage. But nonetheless the socialists rise because the democratic establishment left. They went somewhere else, you know, on the coats, coattails of Citizens United or whatever it is, they went somewhere else. Their economic messaging and economic policy has become disconnected from what was most successful. And just remember the Democratic Party post New Deal controlled the house for like 40 something years straight.
You know, so this again stuff that's been proven to work versus all this spect speculative stuff that is like, oh, we can do this, we can do that. So I think that the 10 now the tension with Gaza, I think, is just going to be.
That's a more difficult piece because it's a different part of the world, which I don't think Americans all appreciate all the complexities of. And so for us to try to hash all that out over here, you know, thousands and thousands of miles away with selective reporting, we all only get certain, you know, reporting on, oh, well, this is going on. This is going on. And it's like, well, everybody's kind of only getting the stuff that supports what they already think. So it's just a difficult thing to build unity on because we're not close enough to it to really have.
I don't think there should be a lot more humility in terms of looking at that from the lack of the understanding that the information you don't have.
Now, obviously that's not a characteristic that's common in people, though, but the economic one should be a bridge that should be able to be made whether it will be in time for the midterms. I think you're right. It's probably too short of a time period, but that's the answer. How you get or whether you can get there is the question.
[00:47:10] Speaker B: So we'll see.
[00:47:11] Speaker A: Yeah, we'll see. So. But yeah, I think we'll wrap this show from there. We appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode of Call. Like I see it, if you didn't check it, check part one as well.
Until next time, I'm James Keys.
[00:47:22] Speaker B: I'm Tunde Romana.
[00:47:23] Speaker A: All right, we'll talk soon.
