Rep. Pramila Jayapal Calls Out Trump’s Disaster Policies

0:00Ben Meiselas:This podcast is supported by Anthropic, the public benefit corporation behind Claude. Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way. Because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai slash Spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai slash Spotify. With summer coming to an end, you're going to be spending more time indoors. Get your home ready and save up to 50 % off custom window treatments during the Labor Day Mega Sale at Blinds.com. From room darkening to light filtering shades, finding the perfect fit is easy.

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1:59Ben Meiselas:what's happening inside your body. PreNuvo's whole body scan screens for hundreds of conditions, including many solid tumors as early as stage one, all in under an hour. And now you can go beyond imaging with 80 plus blood biomarkers that help complete the picture. This Labor Day, save$300 off your scan when you book at prenuvo.com. That's P-R-E-N-U-V-O.com. Save$300 now through September 8th at prenuvo.com. Terms and conditions apply. I want to focus on the corruption surrounding Donald Trump's taco. Trump always chickens out or Donald Trump's fifth grade trade war letters that he's now calling deals that are being sent to countries like Brazil, where he's like, I don't like you.

2:45Ben Meiselas:I'm going to put on a 50 percent tariff unless you release Jair Bolsonaro, who tried to do a coup against you. We've seen this when Donald Trump initially announced his tariffs against the world on what he called liberation day, but was really liquidation day. And even before that, the unusual trading activity on wall street that would take place surrounding these things. And I know sometimes we can get distracted and how can't you, when you take a look at a letter that Donald Trump is sending to Brazil with random things that are in caps, you need to stop a witch immediately unlawful and blah, blah, blah.

3:25Ben Meiselas:I don't even want to read the letter. I've read it before, but it basically says, if you don't release Jair Bolsonaro for prosecution, we are going to increase the tariffs even more. It's just the worst. I want to focus though on what happened behind the scenes. I think this guy, Spencer Hakimian pointed it out. You could see it on the charts. And he said, somebody front ran the Brazil tariff news. So somebody bought a huge amount of the US dollar and shorted Brazil's currency at 1.32 PM. The 50 % tariff announcement came at 4.19 PM, at which point it looks like the big trader exited his trade instantly.

4:03Ben Meiselas:And we're talking about a 2.5 % currency trade, which are usually 10 to 20 times leverage. So really a 25 % to 50 % in less than three hours, a profit that's being made here. The same thing with the copper tariffs, We see unusual activity there. As Hakimian says, I have a good reason to believe somebody knew the copper tariffs were coming and traded the news ahead of time and made an ungodly amount of profit. Trump announced his new 50 % copper tariff at 12.58 p.m. But as my charting shows, the price of copper began spiking at 12.56 p.m. It went up a full 8 % before Trump announced the copper tariffs.

4:44Ben Meiselas:It's nearly impossible for this to have been coincident. Why would the price of copper just go up randomly minutes before Trump makes the announcement? It's common sense, unless somebody knows. Also, when it came to Donald Trump, when he did the liquidation day tariffs against the world, and then he announced he was going to pause those tariffs. I think this site, Unusual Whales, did a good job kind of laying out what it looks like. And he goes, I think people knew that this tariff pause was coming. And you can see on these trading funds, they're called like SPY and QQQ, one trades against the S &P, one trades against NASDAQ.

5:24Ben Meiselas:You're seeing people opening up these calls and engaging in unusual trading volumes that nobody would ever possibly do unless you knew there was going to be kind of a massive announcement that was going to be made. We see this pattern over and over again. So I don't want to miss out on the corruption. But who's getting screwed here? The people are getting screwed. The people everywhere from Virginia to Washington State, from Texas to North Dakota, wherever, Americans are getting screwed. I want to bring in Democratic Congresswoman Jayapal from the state of Washington. It's great to have you here.

6:05Ben Meiselas:And, you know, as Donald Trump sends these letters and people get caught in the drama and the distractions behind the scenes, the rich are getting richer. The insiders know what's going on. I just think people are getting screwed, Congresswoman. Absolutely right. And here's the thing. This guy, Donald Trump, has gotten rid of all the inspector generals. He's gotten rid of any entity that could actually crack down on the ethics violations, the corruption. And so you have so many things that are happening from the trading that you talked about to the outright use of the office of the president to make money, Whether that's his luxury hotels that he promises to some foreign government, you know, in return for something, or whether it is even I noticed that he is selling his own brand of perfumes now.

6:58it is it's really at the end of the day this whole concept of oh he's going to drain the swamp he is the swamp and he is doing everything he can to enrich himself and you can see it in whatever financial returns we have access to obviously he's not he's not releasing everything but the corruption is now throughout the government it's Donald Trump it's also members of Congress who are trading. And you know that I've got a bill that I'm working on, a bipartisan bill that we hope to introduce soon on banning members of Congress from trading stocks. I mean, the American people should just know that we are working for them, not for our pocketbooks.

7:43And so I'm hopeful that we will get this to the floor. And once it gets to the floor, I believe it'll pass.

7:50Ben Meiselas:Let's talk about how Donald Trump's trade war against the world, though, and, you know, Even the threats against Canada, 51st state, we're going to take you over. We have a huge Canadian following the Maple Midas here on the Midas Touch. Now, the totality, though, but it's everything to how he attacks Japan, how he attacks South Korea. How is that impacting the state of Washington? How is it affecting your district and perhaps even more broadly? I mean, the tariffs are crazy. They have no logic to them. In the letter that he sent to Bolsonaro, you probably saw he quoted incorrect information. He said that we have a trade deficit with Brazil.

8:31That's not accurate. Lula responded and said, no, that's not true. If you want to do 50 percent tariffs on Brazil, we'll do 50 percent tariffs back. And guess what? American manufacturers who export into Brazil are going to be hurt by this. In my district, we have a lot of manufacturing. We have a lot of trade with all over Asia, actually. And so these tariffs are having a massive effect. I mean, you can see it in small ways with the price of apparel or foodstuffs, but also in big ways with Boeing manufacturing is here. Obviously, we have a lot of tech here. And so all of the chips and all of the uncertainty is really affecting the district.

9:17It's affecting small businesses in particular, and consumers are seeing their prices go up every day. And some of it is being absorbed by the manufacturers who are hoping that this is another taco situation where Trump is going to chicken out and these tariffs aren't going to go into effect. But his MO is always create a problem where there isn't one, act like you're solving it, but have no solution at the end to whatever the problem you said was there in the beginning. So this is not a good way to do tariffs at all. And there's no investment in domestic manufacturing. That's what we did as Democrats with the Inflation Reduction Act.

9:57You don't see him, Ben, trying to do anything to actually incentivize copper manufacturing here in the United States or anything else.

10:06Ben Meiselas:I want to talk about immigration, large immigrant population in your district. I live in Los Angeles where there are, you know, you see the ICE raids that are here, vendors, Home Depots, parking lots. They put the ICE agents through MacArthur Park. It looked like an army was invading. So they did that Hollywood stunt. But it has real world implications. I mean, a lot of the immigrant community here isn't going to church. They're not working out. They're hiding. They're very afraid here. Meanwhile, ICE posts things like like this, like their social media is like just trying to troll and terrorize migrants.

10:44Ben Meiselas:My body is a machine that turns ICE funding into mass deportations. Fire up the deportation planes! Exclamation point. They also post these videos of like looks like an army going into like the swap meet and they put on their equipment. They got their huge assault weapons heading into heading into the family swap meet. It's like, all right, tough guys. What's going on in your district? What are you doing about it? That's exactly what's happening in our district, too. Not like L.A., but we are seeing ICE agents, you know, try to come to courts. That stopped for a while because we had a lot of protections here in Washington state, but certainly farm workers, all of eastern Washington, central Washington.

11:28I was just out in Spokane and I met with the Growers League and, you know, farmers are terrified. Workers are terrified. People aren't showing up to work. Yesterday, I was at a food bank in my district talking about the snap cuts, the horrible snap cuts and Medicaid cuts. And they told me that people are not even showing up to Head Start where they get their food. They're not showing up to the food banks because they're afraid. And it's not just undocumented immigrants. It is people of all legal statuses. It's undocumented immigrants who have been here for 20 years, no crimes committed. And all of the research and the data shows that ICE is not picking up the so-called worst of the worst, which is what Trump promised.

12:13He's going after immigrants of all legal statuses, including U.S. citizens, legal permanent residents. It's a complete terrorizing of the immigrant community.

12:25Ben Meiselas:You know, but there's a lot of serious things going on right now, but it just feels like we're living in a Ponzi scheme. It feels it feels like he goes out there. He makes up numbers. I mean, he literally he posted something that says 100 percent of all new jobs created come from Americans. And look what we've done. A hundred percent. I'm like, where are you even getting these numbers from? You've got Howard Lutnick and you've got Brooke Rollins, the secretary of agriculture, and you've got the secretary of labor out there just saying a whole bunch of things that you look at. You're like, those aren't the facts.

13:07Ben Meiselas:But like there seems to be this. I don't know if it's just that at the at the cable news level or whatever. That is it's all right. But like it's not all right. And the question is, is like, when's it all in any Ponzi scheme? It has an end. And that's what I'm kind of worried about, because you see the ports, the ships aren't coming in the same way they used to be coming in. You see the factories are not filled with the people we see here in California. The farms aren't filled with the same. So when is it all going to catch up? And then does Donald Trump just try to find his fall guy the way he did with the Fauci?

13:41Ben Meiselas:They did it. They did it. Blame the deep state. Americans have to feel the effects. They have to feel the way that they're losing health care, the way that their prices on groceries keep going up, the way that we end up in more wars and isolate America from the rest of the world. They've got to feel that there's no jobs, that, in fact, instead of job creation, the big bad betrayal bill is going to lose us at least a million jobs in the United States. And I think that you're seeing this now starting to come through with the tariffs, with immigration, actually, which is one of our tougher issues.

14:19You're seeing people starting to say one in 10 Americans now knows of somebody who's been picked up that they personally know that should not have been picked up. And so I think it's got to trickle down. We've got to do a really strong job of messaging not only what we're against, but also what we're for. and affordability is a big part of this, right? The tariffs are driving up prices. Corruption is stripping people of things that they legitimately deserve to pad the pockets of the millionaires and the billionaires and Donald Trump and his family. And so we've got to continually make our case, not only for what's wrong, but how we're going to fix it.

15:00And I think that's going to be the job between now and the next election. We can still roll some of this back, Ben, But I don't want to sugarcoat it. It's going to be very difficult to rebuild a lot of the destruction that's been done to the agencies, whether it's FEMA and NOAA or, you know, any literally any agency from education to health and human services.

15:24Ben Meiselas:Finally, Congresswoman, I always like to ask this question when I have people like you on here, because oftentimes, you know, the news host has their series of questions. But there may be an issue that's always on your mind that I'm not thinking of that you're closer to. We have a huge platform here, almost six million subscribers. Is there anything that you think isn't getting enough attention that you want to bring people's attention to? Yeah, I just wrote a you know, there's so many things in the Big Bad Betrayal Bill. Well, I just wrote an op-ed about this scam. Talk about a Ponzi scheme, the scam on no tax on tips, supposedly Donald Trump's no tax on tips policy, and how what is in the big bad betrayal bill is really a scam.

16:06Because first of all, you've got to file taxes to get any benefit. And most tipped workers are not filing taxes. About a third are not filing taxes. And then on top of that, it's a$25 ,000 cap. So the way it's done, and finally, I mean, there are lots of things wrong with it, but it expires in two years. So all of the things that are supposed to be for working people expire in two or three years, and everything that is for the millionaires and the billionaires are permanent. And I think we have to keep pointing out to people that they're lying about what you're going to get. And I think that's true in so many ways.

16:42But the no tax on tips policy is one I think that has not gotten a lot of attention. And it's going to be used to try and sell the big bad betrayal bill. But it's a scam.

16:53Ben Meiselas:Sounds like Donald Trump's past with scams. The no tax on tips is a scam. The no tax on Social Security just doesn't even exist. They just made that up. They sent a letter out to all of us. I mean, I got one, you know, saying that there's going to be this massive boon. And they use Social Security to send a letter out with lies. You're absolutely right. Congresswoman Jaipal, please come back. Thanks for being on. Thanks, Ben. Everybody hit subscribe. Let's get to 6 million subscribers. The truth is more important than ever. Check out our new Truth Over Lies collection at store.midastouch.com. All 100 % USA Union made.

17:39Ben Meiselas:With summer coming to an end, you're going to be spending more time indoors. Get your home ready and save up to 50 % off custom window treatments during the Labor Day mega sale at Blinds.com. From room darkening to light filtering shades, finding the perfect fit is easy. Get free samples, expert design help, and professional measure and install services. or DIY with confidence and support every step of the way. Shop up to 50 % off site-wide plus huge savings on doorbusters right now during the Labor Day mega sale at blinds.com. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for$15 a month is back.

18:18Ben Meiselas:So I thought it would be fun if we made$15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three months,$90 for six months, or$180 for 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms. What if you can see what's happening inside your body? PreNuvo's whole body scan screens for hundreds of conditions, including many solid tumors, as early as stage one, all in under an hour.

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