For Episode 24 of The Progress Pondcast (which is now available!), Brendan and I tried to have a glass half-full optimistic take on current events. But first we had to have a laugh at a local story, which is the adventures of “The Delco Pooper,” who has now thankfully been apprehended. Our highways and car hoods are safe one again, huzzah!
What else is there to raise our spirits? For one, there’s the spectacle of Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley writing in defense of Medicaid in the pages of the New York Times. I swear that if Bernie Sanders was listed as the author, you would not suspect anything was off. But, despite Hawley’s insistence that Trump opposes cuts to Medicaid, the president is so disengaged from and clueless about how Congress works that he waited until after the congressional Republicans adopted a budget reconciliation plan that requires nearly a trillion dollars in cuts from the program to act like something was wrong with the strategy for paying for his tax cuts for the rich. As a result, his entire legislative plan for 2025 is at risk of going down the drain, and public dissatisfaction with a failure to enact his plan will only be surpassed by public dissatisfaction if he somehow still succeeds.
The GOP is hopelessly divided on this issue, and they’re being whipsawed between their donors who want cuts and their base which doesn’t, but also expects them to support Trump. Take, for example, the predicament of Sen. John Cornyn of Texas who tries to be the adult in the room but finds as a reward that he’s on track to be crushed in a primary against lunatic Ken Paxton and lose his seat.
Brendan and I take a look at more issues of this type, like the decision to shut down FEMA as if the Republicans weren’t slaughtered for the inadequate federal response to Hurricane Katrina. And there’s the prospect of empty shelves as a result of Trump’s trade war, as if they’ve learned nothing from the empty shelves during the COVID-19 pandemic. Everywhere we look, we see signs of self-harm and political malpractice from the GOP that it likely to cause a major political backlash.
And there’s been a lot of political backlash recently against the Trumpy right. We’ve seen it in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Canada, Australia and Greenland. So, why not here?
There’s plenty in the new episode to make you smile, which is reason enough to give it a listen. You can find it on Spotify, YouTube, Amazon. Apple, I Heart Radio and elsewhere. Please drop in and give it a thumb’s up and become a subscriber, and please join us at Patreon and help us create future episodes that will lift your spirits.
