MAGA Mike In Terror as Trump Takes Away his Job!!

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2:21Ben Meiselas:Say goodbye to your job, MAGA Mike Johnson, the worst Speaker of the House in American history. Frankly, a Speaker of the House in name only, a Trump sycophant. And MAGA Mike Johnson, MAGA leadership in both the House and in the Senate are panicking as they see the prospects of them losing their jobs increasing by the day as midterms approach. Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans are unable to cover up the Epstein files. I mean, they may be hiding 50 terabytes or so of documents, but the American people know that what's already been produced is utterly grotesque and horrific. And MAGA Mike and Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans can try to pretend that Donald Trump is vindicated.

3:12Ben Meiselas:But quite the contrary, what is said about him in those files is utterly disgusting and grotesque and horrible. And it shows a pedo protection racket, in my opinion, for this Epstein class right there. Then, of course, you have Donald Trump's tariffs against the world being struck down by the United States Supreme Court on Friday. And then what does Donald Trump immediately do? He unlawfully invokes another so-called tariff power from the Trade Act of 1974, Section 122. Donald Trump imposed 10 % tariffs on the entire world. And then he also revoked the exemption on de minimis tariffs, tariffing everybody who purchased these things now$800 or less.

4:01Ben Meiselas:vindictive, horrible, despicable. That sums up Trump and MAGA right now. Now, MAGA Mike Johnson posted the following message yesterday. He goes, no one can deny that president's use of tariffs has brought in billions of dollars and created immense leverage for America's trade strategy and for securing strong, reciprocal America first trade agreements with countries that had been taking advantage of American workers for decades. Congress and the administration will determine the best path forward in the coming weeks. You might want to read the Constitution there, Magamike. There's a little something called Article 1, Section 8, which talks about the power of taxation belongs to Congress.

4:49Ben Meiselas:You're supposed to zealously guard that as a co-equal branch of government. Maga Mike not behaved like the Duma in Russia for Vladimir Putin. But Maga Mike, this is why you are going to lose your job. This is why the Maga Republicans are going to lose their jobs in the midterms. And the voters are absolutely pissed. I mean, just take a listen to this Republican caller on C-SPAN yesterday who talks about Donald Trump's massive loss before the United States Supreme Court. Paul in Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey Republican. Paul, your reaction to the Supreme Court's decision on the president's tariff policies?

5:30Saikat Chakrabarti:Well, I'm delighted.

5:32Ben Meiselas:Tell us why. It's about time that President Trump was told that he just can't arbitrarily say that there's an emergency and I have to be the one to cure it. And I think that But I'm happy to see that it was a six to three decision. And it shows me that there is hope for the Supreme Court in the future. And we're hearing from small business owners like this across the country play this clip. The president just ruled that I mean, I'm seeing the Supreme Court just ruled that the president can no longer impose tariffs moving forward. How do you feel about this? Well, you know, I was bracing for the worst and to get that the ruling today was such a relief.

6:18Ben Meiselas:I'm nearly in tears and I'm shocked at how relieved I am. This is big. It's very big. That's fantastic. And as Harry Enten explains, Donald Trump is underwater on every single issue. his worst issue is the Epstein files, but on everything, whether it's inflation, foreign policy, the economy, tariffs, negative 60, negative 20, negative 20, negative 25, negative 39. Here, play this clip of Ari and here, play this clip. ABE, anything but Epstein. Take a look at Google searches for Epstein. In fact, in the month of February, it is higher than it's ever been. Up like a rocket, up 900 % versus a month ago.

6:56Ben Meiselas:And the top name associated with Googling for Epstein? Well, it is Donald Trump. What is the worst issue for Donald Trump of any of the major issues? Look, he's underwater on immigration, foreign policy, the economy, and tariffs. The Epstein case, though, is on another planet. Look at this. Negative 39 points. The Epstein case is not the story of the Trump administration, and Trump in particular, and Republicans at large, won in the news because it is a big political loser. I mean, here's the latest, a third American death linked to ice crackdown that was uncovered by Newsweek on the morning of March 15th, 2025.

7:35Ben Meiselas:You had another American citizen who was murdered by Donald Trump's Gestapo. They covered it up. And now we know yet again that the Trump regime, this is what they do. They cover up more killings, more murders of Americans and migrants. Just so, again, utterly despicable. San Antonio man was killed last year and they just try to cover it up. With all that going on as well, I just think that as I look to the midterms and people talk about blue wave, blue tsunami, is it going to happen? But I think that there is something bigger that potentially can happen, a bigger opportunity for the Democratic Party to be actually fighting for people, to be fighting for workers, to be fighting for equal rights and dignity and fair wages and housing and really stand for something, not just stand against Donald Trump and his despicable regime, which we need to do very forcefully, but to stand for something and to really give a vision.

8:37Ben Meiselas:And I actually think that vision is aligned with where the people are right now. And so I want to bring on a congressional candidate who's running in California's 11th congressional district. That's going to be Pelosi's old district, Shoycott Chakrabadi. And he, to me, is one of these candidates who doesn't just represent a potential way the Democrats take control of the House, because what does control mean if you don't do things with your control? Like MAGA Mike Johnson is the Speaker of the House. He doesn't do anything. He doesn't have control other than destroy things and answer to Donald Trump.

9:15Ben Meiselas:So, Shoikot, it's great to have you here. I want to go over your background in a bit, but I want to start by saying I think there's a bigger opportunity and lots of people see hope in you and a number of other candidates across this country as representing that.

9:28Saikat Chakrabarti:Yeah, I absolutely agree. I think what people are looking for right now is, yes, in the short term, we do need people who are going to stand up and fight this authoritarian regime that is taking control of our country and they want Democrats with real fight. But beyond that, it's about what do we do after that? We can't go back to a pre-Trump status quo because that's what got us Trump. The economy, as it was before, wasn't working. People were working longer and longer hours to afford less and less. And so people want some sort of bold, sweeping change. And I believe right now we're in our New Deal moment.

10:00Saikat Chakrabarti:We're at the point where we have to envision a new society, one that puts working people first. And it's all really coming to a head. I mean, with a combination of like the Epstein files coming out, showing how there is this cabal of wealthy elite pedophiles running the world, which is absurd, but it's true, it seems like. But at the same time, you have AI popping up and these tech oligarchs and crypto billionaires gobbling up more and more of the wealth in our society and trying to create a permanent underclass. People do not want this Mad Max dystopian future. And I think we as Democrats have to offer the alternative for how do we actually create something way better than what we had before out of the carnage that we see right now.

10:37Ben Meiselas:You saw this, right? You were, for everyone who doesn't know, you were AOC's campaign manager. You were her chief of staff through about 2019. Then you ran new consensus. So you've been embedded in these types of campaigns, speaking to people, seeing on the front lines what it's like. And it's just so fascinating to me. And this is what Senator Sanders always says to me when he comes on the show, is he goes, Ben, the biggest issues out there are the ones that are being least discussed in the media, but most discussed by the people. Like if you go to a fight, the oligarchy rally, if I go to a rally, you'll hear what the people are saying.

11:15Ben Meiselas:It's just fascinating. This is where, you know, our network came along. I'm like, but we realize that everybody's actually talking about these things, not to these things. And so the people are out there saying these things at your rally, their fear of AI, their hatred of these data centers popping up and stealing their energy. You know, these fears are out there and we and I think we got to channel it and harness it in a way that provides solutions. Yeah.

11:40Saikat Chakrabarti:And I think the thing that the Democrats often miss is these fears and challenges. People recognize that they're huge. They're these big country defining era defining problems. And often the Democratic Party wants to try to figure out how to triangulate and say the exact right thing to different populations. but what people are really craving and this is what I'm seeing in my campaign is people want to hear ideas that are as big as the problems that that you want to tackle so you know when it comes to something like AI the regulations that politicians I mean most politicians aren't even talking about other than Bernie Sanders but the regulations most politicians are proposing everyone knows they're way too small and they're not going to tackle this challenge of something that might wipe out half of all our jobs or wipe out humanity itself right so we have to be talking about the future of the country in a way that scales.

12:28Saikat Chakrabarti:And I think it honestly is forcing this bigger conversation about what is our country for? What is our economy for? What are the values we have as a nation? The right actually has that conversation. They have their view of what direction to take this country. And I think on the Democratic side, we don't grapple with those larger philosophical questions, but we have to present big ideas, bold ideas. And that's something that the party sometimes just seems too scared to do.

12:51Ben Meiselas:I think right now with everything we're seeing, as you mentioned, with the Epstein files, seeing the sex trafficking ring, but seeing the cover up and the cabal and all of these, you know, all of these people in the files with Epstein as the middleman playing, you know, basically master of the universe and whether it's propping up a Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, leading Brexit in the UK, knowing about the annexation of Crimea beforehand, seemingly insider trading on crypto and proposing crypto strategies to Vladimir Putin. You know, these people were puppeteering behind the scenes the destruction that frankly led to Trump.

13:35Ben Meiselas:But viewing it just as Trump to me is myopic and is small. I mean, this is manifest, frankly, internationally with Nigel Farage, with Orban in Hungary, with Malay in Argentina. There are broader forces to me that are sweeping the world and broader forces need to exist to fight back against it. Otherwise, I'm like, you're bringing a butter knife to an F-35 fight if you think that petty domestic politics are going to be the solution to these authoritarian goals. Yeah.

14:10Saikat Chakrabarti:And I think it was showing very clearly from the Epstein files is there is an Epstein class, you know, and they are the ones that are the problem. It's really not progressives versus moderates or even left versus right at the people level. It is the bigger problem is this class of people who are trying to run everything, trying to take control, consolidate power, allying with the oligarchs in our country. and then there's the rest of us who are trying to fight back against that and the rest of it people hate this i mean this is why the trump administration is trying to avoid everything about the epstein files right now um but frankly you know other than a few democrats and people like roe kanna and you know tom massey on the republican side a lot of democrats are kind of avoiding it as well because they're worried about some of their own who might be in those files i think we have to have accountability across the board there's going to be a big reset i think this is going to be the question of our time of do we hold rich and powerful people accountable when they do heinous, heinous crimes or do we not?

15:10Saikat Chakrabarti:And if the answer to that is no, I do think that's an existential threat to our democracy and our way of being our entire system. We have to have the rule of law for everybody. And this is going to be one of the deciding cases for it.

15:21Ben Meiselas:You know, I saw protests at town halls regarding data centers in Trump country, Oklahoma, yesterday. I saw, you know, and frankly, across the country, we're seeing as people want to put either these data centers or frankly, even the ICE detention centers. I mean, you start to get a not in my backyard moment, even from kind of the Trumpers. And so you have this don't do that here, but also the kind of abundance argument also of why are you why are you putting stuff in here that takes and leeches and destroys when really you could be doing this stuff is is is built. You know, what I always like to say on the show, what I loved about your campaign is I love campaigns.

16:14Ben Meiselas:And to me, you know, one of the things that I think about your campaign is just the word imagine. Like, imagine a world where dot, dot, dot, instead of having ICE and Border Patrol masked agents going around torturing and terrorizing individuals and those destroying industry, taking away and firing and crushing those exact same resources were harnessed to build housing. and all and rather than seeing masked agents, we saw new houses developing and services being provided to homeless people, you know, and house people like to me. Imagine that Trump would be super popular and anyone who does that would be super popular.

16:52Saikat Chakrabarti:Yeah. I mean, we've basically have created a federal jobs program to terrorize people through ice. Right. But what if we use that instead to actually develop things, build things people want? I mean, this is the same thing when it comes to our foreign policy, right? Where we are spending, you know, we had a$900 billion defense budget that just passed a few months ago and about 115 Democrats voted for that, by the way. And we are spending all this money on dropping bombs in other countries and doing these endless wars. But no one wants that. If you do the look of the polling, only about 3 % of Democrats and only 16 % of Republicans want a larger defense budget because that argument of we could be spending all this money and all these resources developing our own means of making a living that really works.

17:35Saikat Chakrabarti:But when it comes to AI and the data centers, you're absolutely right. It's a completely bipartisan issue, both on the data centers themselves and the energy they're gobbling up and how it's driving up people's home and energy prices. But the larger question here of right now we have this technology that might be wiping out half of our jobs and basically determining the future of our society. Why should a handful of tech CEOs get to determine that future? Why should they have all that power? And it's a technology that fundamentally was trained off of the sum product of human labor, of the things we produce.

18:11Saikat Chakrabarti:That's how these LLMs get trained. So I believe that we should have an ownership stake on it. We as a people, democracy, should be able to determine the future of our country, not just a few tech oligarchs. And that is a message that I think the vast majority of people agree with, Democrat and Republican. They do not like the idea of a small cabal of powerful people determining the fates for everybody else.

18:36Ben Meiselas:So when people know about your background, they know about AOC, they know about some of the organizations you've run, but also you were in tech before. I mean, you started a company, Mockingbird. You were one of the first engineers at Stripe, but you didn't fall into this. You didn't go the way of some of the tech bros right now who have used their wealth and their resources to destroy and harm. And so I'm just interested kind of in your reflection on that moment because you don't have to go the way of these kind of tech bros who, you know, by the way, you know, what do they used to say? Like, like, yeah, they want to brag that they have F you money or whatever, but they just have to do whatever Donald Trump tells them to do.

19:24Ben Meiselas:And now their legacies are like hard hurting people. So talk to us a little bit about that for people just to know what your background is as well, if they haven't heard your story.

19:33Saikat Chakrabarti:Yeah, I honestly don't understand how you go down that route. I mean, I didn't come from money. I grew up middle class in Texas, going to public schools. And my parents, frankly, grew up quite poor. They were from India. And my dad was a refugee during partition in India, which was a terrible event where they cut the country up along religious lines. So he grew up with his family at 12. This tiny one-bedroom apartment, often having no idea where his next meal would come from. But he came to this country with literally$8 in his pocket, was able to achieve the American dream, got a job and a single income, got me that middle-class life.

20:07Saikat Chakrabarti:So when I came out of San Francisco, as you mentioned, I worked in Silicon Valley. I was an early engineer at Stripe. I was the second engineer there. And just because I was in the right place at the right time, I ended up making a lot of money from that. And that was a radicalizing experience because I don't come from money. and I got this insight into just how inequality works in our society where the rich can keep getting richer without ever lifting a finger while everybody else just struggles to hang on. And yeah, I mean, I worked hard at Stripe. I'm proud of the stuff I did, but I didn't work harder than a teacher or a nurse or the janitors cleaning our offices did every single day.

20:41Saikat Chakrabarti:I just hit the startup lottery. And in an economy like that, where either you hit the lottery and you can have it all or you'll never be able to afford a home or a secure retirement, that's fundamentally broken. That is a broken system. And I believe it's a threat to our entire way of being. If we can't get to a country where 40 honest hours of work a week is able to forge you a life, then our country is doomed. So that's frankly why I quit the tech industry. I mean, I worked with some of the people that are now in this oligarch class, running companies like OpenAI. I saw their vision of the future and it's not the vision of the future that I want anything to be a part of.