Transcript: Trump-Musk Fiasco Shows How Badly MAGA Voters Got Scammed

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 19 episode of the
Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

As of this recording, things are in full-blown chaos in Washington, D.C., as lawmakers race to negotiate a spending bill to avoid a government shutdown. And already, there are a couple things we can conclude about the coming Donald Trump presidency. One is that Trump is going to screw over his voters very badly, including rural voters—we’re already seeing the beginnings of that in this shutdown fight. Another is that Trump is going to humiliate Mike Johnson mercilessly going forward, and Republicans are going to have one heck of a time trying to minister to the whims of Trump and Elon Musk, which are already being revealed to be deeply dangerous and crazy. We’re chatting about this with Paul Waldman, who’s the co-author with Tom Schaller of the book White Rural Rage. Good to have you on, Paul.

Paul Waldman: Thank you.

Sargent: To quickly catch people up, House Republicans thought they had negotiated a deal with Democrats to keep the government open, but then Elon Musk attacked the bill’s spending and then Trump opposed it. Republicans then declared it dead because Trump and Musk are their masters. As of this moment, House Republicans have a new deal which Trump endorsed: a two-year extension of the debt limit until January 2027, a continuation of current government funding levels, extension of disaster aid in the farm bill, and some other stuff. Paul, I don’t know what Democrats are going to do here, but it seems like they shouldn’t support this because it just keeps the debt limit intact. What do you think?

Waldman: Democrats have been talking about getting rid of the debt ceiling permanently for a long time. And over the years, you and I have both written many articles explaining why it’s a terrible thing to have this extra vote that needs to be taken in order to validate the spending that has already been allocated, in order to satisfy this archaic idea that you have to keep coming back again and again and again to allow the government to keep borrowing money. All it is is a tool to create government shutdowns. Democrats have long thought we should just get rid of it—there’s only one other country in the world that has anything like it—and Republicans have been resistant to that because they like the idea that they can force these shutdowns and use it as a tool to extract spending cuts that would be difficult to get otherwise.

Now, you have a situation where it almost seems like Donald Trump just woke up yesterday and realized that the debt ceiling was going to be a problem for him: He’s going to be president, and this could cause shutdowns that he would get blamed for. So he has now demanded that they make a two-year suspension. Not a permanent elimination of the debt ceiling but two years, which would probably take him to the point where the Democrats will take back the House in the 2026 midterms and maybe they can get the blame for that then.

The problem, at the moment, is that Republicans have this razor-thin majority in the House, and you have a group of people in the Republican caucus, some of whom are in the Freedom Caucus, who are real serious anti-government ideologues. They’re not just Trump loyalists—that’s an important distinction here because you have a lot of far-right people in the Republican caucus who will do anything for Donald Trump. You have a group of people, including Chip Roy from Texas, whom Trump now says he wants to find a primary challenger for, who are genuine, committed, principled ideologues who say that they are never going to vote to increase the debt limit without serious spending cuts, that any time we get into one of these situations they want to see the size of government brought down. They’re willing to shut down the government, even if it’s something that is damaging to Trump and the rest of their party. That’s what they’re dealing with right now.

Sargent: I want to talk about the early signs here that Trump is going to really screw over as voters. Trump and Musk killed the first deal, even though it included a lot of direct payments for farmers. The New York Times reports that lawmakers from rural areas were furious that Musk had killed the bill. Paul, your book is all about how rural voters stick with Trump, despite him being really terrible for their material interests. Now we’ve got Trump’s favorite billionaire directly shafting them in the name of spending cuts. Can you talk about this dynamic broadly?

Waldman: This is the essence of what rural politics has become. One of the arguments we make is that voters in rural areas keep electing Republicans and are represented by Republicans at all levels, from president all the way down to dogcatcher, and yet what they don’t give them is material improvements to their lives. They give them a lot of culture-war campaigning, and a lot of emotional satisfaction. That was what Donald Trump really gave them: the feeling that he hated the same people they hated, and he would basically be a weapon against the people they despise. Even if it didn’t change their lives for the better—it didn’t improve their education systems, their economic opportunities, their local infrastructure—it wasn’t as important as the emotional satisfaction that they got from Donald Trump.

Data is still coming in, but it looks like Trump got the votes of rural Americans, and especially rural whites, at about the same rate that he did four years ago. According to the best data that we have, he got about 71 percent of the votes of rural whites in 2020. He’ll probably do at least as well in 2024. And then he comes into office, and he starts talking about all these things that are not just not helpful to rural people but are actually going to be incredibly damaging.

For instance, he says he wants to privatize the U.S. Postal Service. Well, who benefits most from the postal service the way it is now? It’s rural people. He’s talking about promoting school vouchers, which don’t benefit rural people at all because they just don’t have private schools where they live. Mass deportation is going to have a devastating effect on a lot of rural communities; not just because the farmers themselves are employing a lot of undocumented people to pick crops in the fields, but because those people are spending money in those communities where they’re living. The cuts to Medicaid that Republicans are contemplating? That is devastating to rural communities because there have been hundreds of rural hospitals that have closed in recent years, and they absolutely depend on Medicaid funding in order to stay alive.

Then you have the tariffs. This is another thing that is going to be really damaging. We saw this last time when he was president. The story that he tells about the tariffs that he put on is he put on all these tariffs and we took in all this money from the tariffs. Well, do you know where the money from the tariffs went? It went to repay farmers because as a result of the tariffs that he put on China, China responded by cutting off its imports of American agricultural products. That resulted in billions of dollars of losses for American farmers. So the Trump administration took the money that was being brought in by the tariffs, which is being paid by American consumers, and basically passed it right back to the farmers to bail them out. According to one study, 92 percent of the revenues in the tariffs that he put on just went back into bailouts for former.

We’re going to go back into that cycle again. You have all of these ways in which Trump’s most adoring voters are going to get screwed over by the policies, when they thought that he was just going to come back in and make America great again and make eggs cheap.

Sargent: Well, it actually could even be worse if you think about Elon Musk’s role in all this. You mentioned that you guys found, in the writing of your book, that Trump had essentially offered rural voters this cultural comfort. Somehow, Elon Musk has now become a cultural champion for MAGA voters too. I’m just not sure how that happened. And with Musk being given all this influence over spending, it’s almost profoundly insulting if you really think about it. My initial thought was that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was just going to be a plaything for him with no real influence, but now it’s not so clear. It looks like his drive for serious cuts is going to be taken more seriously. And as you say, those voters are the losers from these types of spending cuts. On what planet is Elon Musk a warrior for these people? How on earth could they come to see him that way?

Waldman: A lot of it has to do with this fundamental orientation against institutions and establishment power. People have a lot of anger at not just the government, but other established institutions like news media, big business. There’s a lot of free-floating anger at the establishment. And looking at a figure like Musk, it looks like the establishment hates him. He’s so disruptive and erratic in his way, and he insults people all the time. He has some of that same characteristic that Trump has: He pisses people off, and he looks like he’s just changing everything willy-nilly.

If your feeling about all the established institutions, including government, is that they just need to be torn apart and made uncomfortable, then you can look at him and say, He seems like he’s a hero. He seems like he’s on my side. But where the rubber actually meets the road, things get a little more complicated because the people who feel that actually depend on government in a lot of different ways.

Musk comes out during the campaign and says, I think we could cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. And when people who know what they’re talking about actually look at the federal budget, they say, Well, if you set aside Social Security and Medicare, which Trump had claimed he’s not going to touch, and you set aside military spending, which Trump and Republicans want to increase, and veterans benefits, which he says he’s not going to cut, the $2 trillion cut means eliminating basically everything else that the government does. And if you like driving on roads and having a border and having national parks and money for schools and all of these things? Well, it turns out that if you want to cut the amount that Musk says he wants to cut, then you’re going to have to eliminate all those things.

It may not happen, but all of a sudden now, he’s taking away things that people really depend on. A lot of the ideology—this is especially true in rural America—is that people don’t want to see what government does for them. They want to believe that everything that they have in their lives is because of their own efforts, and that they are independent and self-reliant. This is very much a part of the rural ethos especially. The people who live in rural areas believe I’m connected to the material world, I know how to fix my car, I know how to fix my house. I don’t need government to tell me what to do.

That may be true in some ways, but it’s also true that a lot of those programs, like Medicaid and Social Security, are used at higher levels in rural areas. They are more dependent. There are 400 separate programs within the federal government that are specifically targeted at rural areas. So in a lot of ways, rural Americans are more dependent on government. Once you start taking stuff away, that’s when they’re going to finally notice that this is actually a problem for them; that it’s not just about Elon Musk being cool and tweeting a bunch of stuff that gets the swells and the people in Washington angry; that this actually has material consequences for them.

Sargent: Ron Brownstein got at this very well on a piece he wrote recently where he said Trump is about to betray his rural supporters. The way he put it, and you’re making this point as well, is that throughout the last three elections, Trump’s messaging resonated strongly in rural communities because a lot of it is all about hostility to racial and cultural change. Now on this second Trump term, we’re going to have a more stringent test of whether that cultural and racial affinity that rural voters have with Trump will actually sustain itself. We’re looking at a level of attack on their material interests from people like Musk, if he gets his way, that goes significantly further than anything he was able to do during his first term, don’t you think?

Waldman: Yeah. A lot of that comes from the fact that Trump has a much more specific and well articulated and well thought-out policy agenda this time around. When he came into office last time, he didn’t think he was going to win. It was a scramble, and a lot of people in the Republican establishment who would normally move into a Republican administration didn’t come with him, so he had a collection of people who didn’t really know what they were doing. That meant that, in a lot of cases, he just didn’t really get very much done.

This time around, that’s not the case. We spent a lot of time talking about Project 2025. Whether or not each one of the specifics in there gets put into effect, the point is that the people he’s bringing with him now, they actually do know what they’re doing and they have thought about this and they do have a very specific policy agenda. You and I may think it’s an extraordinarily damaging one, but it’s likely that they’re going to do a lot more of the things that they want to do, and they’re going to be successful in those policy terms. For a lot of Americans, that’s going to mean real damage, in ways that they hadn’t really thought of before.

Sargent: I want to add to that Paul, because the fact that Trump has come in with a more detailed agenda is also a reflection of the collection of people who have had more time to really plan for a second Trump term. As you say, the Project 2025 people, this collection of ideologues out there is saying to themselves, My God, Trump is the best demagogue we have seen in many decades. He can convince his voters of anything. So let’s come up with a whole bunch of things that we can try to glom onto Trump and see if we can get them through. That’s what we’re really seeing here, right?

Waldman: I think so. We’re still going to be dealing with a similar situation to before in that Trump has very few of his own policy preferences. He’s very much open to influence from what he sees in the news every day, what somebody tells him. So a lot of those people who have their own particular agenda, they’re just trying to follow in his wake, not make him too mad, get him to, even in a lot of cases, not even notice what they’re doing. That’s going to be true within all of the federal agencies.

For instance, most of the time, Trump is not going to care what happens at the Environmental Protection Agency, so there could be a lot of policy changes that come about there that could result in higher pollution in a lot of places, including a lot of rural places. And Trump neither knows nor cares what’s actually happening there—that has to do with some particular agenda of the people who are there who have been thinking about this for a long time, as you said. He’s going to be just dipping into policy wherever he sees that there’s something that catches his attention or creates a scandal that he finds embarrassing, but a lot of the time, he’s just going to float above it. There’s going to be much more intense activity going on at all the different agencies of the federal government in ways that they’re going to really harm people.

Sargent: And throw in there the volatility of Elon Musk. Right now, Musk is essentially threatening to primary Republicans who don’t support whatever it is constitutes the agenda that day, I guess. In the case of this spending deal that was just killed, Elon Musk basically killed it. Anne Applebaum had an amazing tweet where she said, “I spent the day talking to Europeans and no one can think of any precedent for what Musk just did to the U.S. Congress. There’s no businessman with that much power, the power to stop a routine spending bill anywhere else in the democratic world.” That’s remarkable stuff. By all indications, Trump isn’t really going to get in Musk’s way? It all strikes me as a recipe for an absolute policy catastrophe for Trump’s voters.

Waldman: We’ve known for a long time that if Trump doesn’t like what a Republican politician does, he can say, I want to see them primary, and that could be the end of their career. And that’s just about loyalty to him. But Elon Musk, turns out, may be able to do exactly the same thing for his own agenda, which might or may not be exactly the same as Trump’s. He spent $277 million, according to reports we’ve gotten, in the 2024 election. It’s stunning—I don’t know if anybody’s ever spent that much before—the fact that a billionaire can come in and put that much money into a campaign to get his favorite president elected. And he has now over $400 billion. That’s nothing to him.

He can mount primaries against anybody he wants, and that’s going to become something that is going to seep into the awareness of more and more Republicans; that if you make him angry, regardless of whether it’s something that Donald Trump cares about, for whatever reason, Musk can say, Well, you’re in the House of Representatives? I think I’ll just toss $20 million into a campaign to get you booted, and that’s going to be the end of your career. They are all going to understand that. And we don’t know exactly where his agenda is going to diverge from Trump’s or where there are going to be things that Elon Musk cares about that Trump doesn’t really care about, but [we know] that he is willing to invest money to keep members of Congress in line.

What’s different about this is that it is so direct. We’re not talking about a guy who has a lot of money, giving a million dollars to a super PAC to get low taxes. This is the world’s richest man, who now seems like he can if he wants, and he does appear to want it, have a stranglehold on the federal government, on what Congress decides to do and decides not to do, and is able to pick up the phone and tell Donald Trump what policies he wants. And Trump will do it, because most of the time he just likes to be in Musk’s favor and wants to have this relationship with him. We’ve never, certainly in modern history [I’m not a historian, but it seems like in all of American history] had one rich individual who had the control over the federal government that it looks like Elon Musk is poised to have.

Sargent: But Paul, you’re forgetting something. Elon Musk lives rent free in your head and mine. So that’s a big win for rural America, right?

Waldman: [laughs] Yeah, they’re not going to get anything from him.

Sargent: We’ll be angry, right? We’ll be upset.

Waldman: That is true. Especially having co-written a book called White Rural Rage, I’m sure that there are a certain number of rural Americans who, if I am mad, can feel like they’ve gotten something out of that. But it’s not going to do much to improve their lives, just as Trump didn’t. He told people in coal country that all the coal jobs were going to come back. They didn’t. He promises material things, even if what he’s really giving them is something emotional, but the deep and abiding difficulties that people in rural America have did not get any better during Trump’s first term, and they’re not going to get any better in Trump’s second.

Sargent: We should absolutely be clear that we think that Democrats really have to do a better job of explaining to rural Americans what the agenda of the Democratic Party is, and why it’s better for them. And [Democrats] maybe have to come up with a more populous set of policies as well to appeal to rural Americans. You and I aren’t of the view, I don’t think, that rural Americans owe their votes to Democrats. We agree that Democrats have to do a better job of appealing to them. It’s just hard to look at this situation with Musk and Trump and see why on earth they would feel good about what’s coming.

Waldman: Yeah. One of the things that we say in our book at the end is that at the very least, if rural people don’t want to vote for Democrats, they should get themselves better Republicans. The Democrats have been told over and over again that what you need to do in order to appeal to rural Americans is to go there and listen and be respectful and understand people’s problems. That’s all well and good, but it is necessary but not sufficient. The other part of it that they haven’t done a good enough job of going to rural America and telling people why the Republican Party is screwing them. That’s the thing that Democrats are really reluctant to do. They’re so busy being respectful and listening that they’re not making a strong case to say, You are being taken to the cleaners by the people who you keep reelecting, who keep coming to you every two years or every four years and saying, “Don’t you hate those liberals up in the cities?”

And then nothing gets better in your community. Your schools don’t get any better. Your roads don’t get any better. You don’t have any better access to health care. And it’s the people you elect who you have to hold accountable for that. Even if they’re all going to be Republicans, you have to make sure you get Republicans who will actually do something for you.

Sargent: And that can coexist with a stronger case from Democrats for why Democratic policies will be better, and can coexist with a new agenda from Democratic politicians that is even more economically populist, more pro-worker, more pro-reformist, right?

Waldman: Absolutely. Look, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, especially over the last four years, did a lot of stuff that was specifically aimed at rural communities. They sent a lot of infrastructure funding their way. There was a lot of broadband funding—and that’s a big problem in rural America, not having sufficient access to broadband. That has all kinds of effects. They put a lot of money, billions of dollars, that are going to be spooled out over the next few years, and that Trump will probably take credit for. They did a lot of things that were specifically aimed at trying to improve the lives of rural Americans. They didn’t get credit for it. They didn’t get any votes for it. But you can still keep trying to make that case and keep explaining to people.

It’s going to be easier if you’re in those communities more. And it’s true that Democrats have abandoned, to a large extent, doing politics in a lot of big swaths of rural America—but that allowed Republicans to abandon them, too, because they don’t have to work either. If they know that they’re going to get 80 percent of the votes in a particular county, Republicans don’t bother campaigning because they’ve got it sewn up. So you have to make them work for it.

Sargent: And I’m not sure where this government spending fight is going to end up. By the time people listen to this, it may be either resolved or a whole lot more chaotic, I don’t know. One thing we do know is that that dynamic is not going to be changing anytime soon under Trump and Musk.

Waldman: Absolutely not. This is going to be a tumultuous four years, to say the least.

Sargent: Paul Waldman, thanks so much for coming on with us, man. It was good to talk to you.

Waldman: Thanks a lot, Greg.

Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.