The MeidasTouch Podcast
The MeidasTouch Podcast

Brian Tyler Cohen On Fighting Back against Trump Corruption

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MeidasTouch founder Ben Meiselas is joined by Brian Tyler Cohen, author of the new book The Day After, for a conversation about the growing disconnect between Donald Trump’s claims about the economy a...

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Donald Trump is losing control as it's increasingly clear that the National F...

data that gets released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other agencies within the Trump regime seem to be a lot like Donald Trump's personal finances.

They seem to basically be fake and flated and deflated and I think the American people are

starting to understand what's going on. And there were a lot of people saying, ah, you know, you could still trust the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they're going to still be accurate. I really under the Trump regime, sorry, because this data that we see is raising massive red flags. And I tend to trust the consumer sentiment where consumers, the people, kind of like the people I talk to who feel that right now, things are worse than during the Great Depression,

the worse consumer surveys, like basically in the history of the surveys, that seems to be where most people are right now and not with the Trump regime is putting out there, also the Trump

regime keeps putting out all of these massive revisions, which they said, oh, we're never going

to do these revisions on jobs numbers. But it turns out that even when you get like a bad job print,

it's actually much worse than that and you find out a few months later, I want to bring in Brian

Tyler Cohen, the author of the new book as well, the day after how to wield power in a post-Trump world to go over this data with me Brian, let's just go through some of this data together, then I got questions for you. So you take a list of this over here, the Colby Lassi Letter reports this. Since the start of 2025, US job numbers have now been revised down in 14 out of 17 months by a total job loss of 710,000 jobs. So the May and April jobs numbers were revised

down by a total of 74,000 and those job numbers were not good to begin with. That's the largest two-month downward revision since December. April jobs were revised down by 31,000 to 148,000, May jobs are revised down by 43,000 to 129,000 jobs. This means 41,000 or so jobs have been revised out of previously reported data on average in each period per month at this point. So if we apply this average to the 57,000 June non-farm payrolls, it would imply just 15,000 jobs were added last month,

and then it's even going down from there. So you learn all of that. I'll give you another data point as well, Brian Tyler Cohen. You take a look at the straightive hormones right now where the Trump regime says, at this point, things look as good as they did before the war started. We're setting records, record amounts of oil, and you know, you have an independent entity like Kepler. They say hormone, hormones recovery remains very fragile. Tinker, tracker,

Kepler, record and 34, 48, and 38 crossings of the straightive hormones over the last three days against a pre-war average of 125 to 140 daily. The data undercuts the claim by a U.S. official

to Bloomberg this week that oil flows through the straight have surpassed 10 million barrels per day

with the U.S. military support driving a shipping search. Kepler's figure show that actually, it's roughly 5 million barrels of oil exiting the straight daily on average in June. Half of the officials claim from the Trump regime and a quarter of the roughly 20 million barrels per day that transited before the war. Now, Brian, this also seems a lot like what went down between the United States and China where Donald Trump was bragging, look, I got them to buy

13 million metric tons of soybeans. When under former president Biden, we even think about that. It was 26 million metric tons. So, Trump was bragging about half, but then when we found the real number, it was probably half of what Trump was bragging about. So, now he's bragging

and boasting in reality, the truth is we're doing about a quarter of that. And that's kind of

the theme with all of this Brian. And, you know, your book the day after how to wield power and a post-Trump world, which everybody's got to go and make sure you order right now. You know, you talk about what Democrats can do to wield power frankly. I mean, my own views, what can people do to wield power with this level of fraud taken place, Brian?

I mean, at this point, here's what I think is really important because we do need

of a forward-looking agenda. We need to take care of healthcare in this country and make sure everybody has access to healthcare. I argue in the book for Medicare for all, we need to confront climate change. We need to make sure that, you know, that we're focusing on reforming our election laws, making sure that everybody has the right to vote. But at the same time, I make the argument that you can't do any of this and still have a functioning democracy.

If you don't hold people to account for the corruption that they're engaging in right now, like we have to be able to walk and shoot them at the same time. So people are seeing this.

They're seeing the overt corruption, whether it's shorting the stock market o...

You know, obviously Donald Trump's financial disclosure form, which has, you know, I think it's

nine hundred and twenty seven pages long for a comparison. Joe Biden's was eleven pages long,

shows the amount of trades that he's done, which directly correlate to when he's giving speeches that impact the very things that he's trading on. So all of this is happening in plain sight. We're watching the Trump family get rich hand over fist. We're watching the Pentagon

give loans to Don Jr. for example, to the tune of like six hundred and twenty million dollars

for companies that he just invested in five minutes ago. So these people are making so much money. The grift and graft in corruption is so overt. If we want anybody to have any faith in a true constitutional republic, a real long order system, then that has to mean. We hold people to account for the criminality and corruption that they're engaging in right now. So we cannot do what we did during the Biden era where you lean on somebody like Merrick Carland,

who decided to prevent the optics of politicization and allow Donald Trump and Republicans to get away with all the crimes they engaged in because God forbid, we look politicized because you look at this now, the system that we're in right now. We're almost feels like crime is legal on a daily basis. We wouldn't be here if there was any deterrent effect. But there was no deterrent effect for these people. And so now the lesson that they learned is I can get away with it so long

is I'm powerful enough. You know, the concept of the big lie was coined by eight off Hitler in

his 1925 book, Mine, Kempf and Donald Trump's first wife Ivana said that that was a book that Donald Trump, you know, kept near and dear to him. Joseph Gobel's Hitler's propaganda minister said, if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it, you know, with the colossal nature of his lies that are, you know, the algae is put in there by algae crux and they, and they threw the algae in, you know, it sounds so bicycle versus, you know,

that it sounds so out there that at first, you know, and this is a pattern, people treat it like, "Ah, whatever." But then he keeps on saying it, then Fox repeats it over and over again. And before you know it, he gave his magical cold base a hook and they believe it and they go, "God, I guess that's the case." You know, the numbers of his fraud, the numbers when we're talking about hundreds of billions and billions and trillions, it's hard for people to even kind of process it, you know,

I think people can process, got it, you know, $100 a thousand dollars. But when you're talking about

the scope of some of these things that the Trump regime is doing and then you're talking about like the schemes that he's involved in by buying these, you know, different funds and this and that, and this gets shifted over there, that I just think, you know, it overwhelms people. How do you think about that? How do we deal with that? Look, I think it's such a great question, but I think all we have to do is look at the numbers that we're dealing with here. I mean, when Republicans

in Trump specifically vilify snap recipients, for example, they are making an anemic amount of money to be able to put some modicum of food on the table. When we're talking about Medicaid recipients, these are the poorest Americans who are able to get the bare minimum of health care in this country. And, you know, their Medicaid has been cut by, by, to the tune of, you know,

a 17 million Americans have, you have less health care than they did before, ACA recipients,

24 million Americans, and we saw four of them lost their health care altogether because they couldn't afford to renew when those prices went up after Republicans refused to extend those subsidies. So we see Republicans vilify people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder in this country for using the scraps that were available to them. But then you turn your attention to the amount of money that Donald Trump is either pocketing himself, you know, his net worth

increased from $2.4 billion to $6.3 billion. That is insane. I think the only person that made

more money, Donald Trump is like Elon Musk, and maybe a few of Trump's other donors at the top. But like, this is a massive amount of money. So for him to, to make that much money personally, and then you add on top of that, the amount of money that's been squandered on the reflecting pool, the amount of money that's been squandered on retrofitting Donald Trump's personal jet that was gifted to him from Qatar, the amount of money that was squandered on the ballroom, which was supposed

to be paid for by private donations and suddenly isn't the amount of money that's been squandered on Trump's military parade on this great American state fair that can just serve as this propaganda outlet for Donald Trump and the magamovment. I mean, on issue after issue, after issue, we are lighting millions or billions of dollars on fire so that Trump can engage in these vanity projects if he's not just taking the money himself, and these people have the

Audacity to vilify people who are just trying to get buy in this country.

by the way, who Trump appealed to when he was on the campaign trail talking about the price of housing

and rent and groceries and eggs. Now, those people are being left high and dry. They're being vilified while Republicans and Trump and his family are consolidating more wealth, more power, more money than ever before. And just so disgusting because just a very basic understanding of how Medicaid works. It's not like people are making it rain by requesting medical treatment and medical services for themselves. The Medicaid recipient is somebody who would be going to a doctor

to ask for help and where the fraud takes place when it does. And it's been prosecuted before our people like Senator Rick Scott from Florida, people who are running these kind of, you know, these corporate boiler rooms, they're making their the ones enriching themselves by creating

fake patients that don't exist or overbilling for services that weren't provided. It's not happening

at the level of a human being who needs to get a treatment and a surgery where you have to show

a verifiable surgery of this is what I got. I mean, it's just something to me so basic like that, but they'll just repeat it all of the time that they're all these group of people, you know, and often the attack now is direct that a lot of young people I've noticed, you know, too, you know, it's like, you know, and at these young, they're sitting around playing video games, collecting all that Medicaid money at this point. It's like, I don't know. What are you talking about?

Well, so you have to recognize that while Republicans are accusing everybody else of engaging in all of this elusive fraud, they haven't brought any convictions forward. Like the federal government, the same federal government that's claiming that all of this fraud is just proliferating across the country. Notice that they aren't convicting anybody of the exact crimes they claim are rampant. And this isn't just Medicaid. I mean, everything that the Trump administration claims

is right with fraud, fraud, waste, and abuse. There haven't been convictions or indictments on any of this stuff. They claim that the elections are constantly stolen. Every election they don't win is an election that was stolen from them. And yet, there is nobody convicted for engaging in this elusive fraud that apparently resulted in a stolen election. So, you know, this is a talking point that they'll engage in. They know that it's red meat for a very undersurring base. But look,

that base also has to pay prices at the grocery store. That base also has to pay their utility bills. That base also needs healthcare. And they're going to realize, in short order, if they haven't realized already, that the same problems that Donald Trump swore he would fix and Republicans swore they would fix when they won in 2024 have not only not been solved, but have been exacerbated under this administration. Yeah, I was looking at his approval and Pennsylvania, for example,

it's 29 percent, you know, and when it's on issues like inflation, it's like 18 percent. And

you're seeing it. And it makes sense because, I mean, that was what he exploited. Joe Biden was supposed to be public enemy number one because of his, because of him presiding over a high inflation environment. He left office when inflation was 3 percent. It's 4.2 percent. So, it's 33 percent higher than it was when the biggest offender of inflation left office. And so, what does that say for Trump? Thank you, everybody. I want you to go get this book right now. After this

ends, on July 4th, we can let's get it the day after how to wield power in a post-Trump world. Brian Tyler Cohen, Brian, anything else people should know about the book, though, as well. I know, you know, you're doing some cool things in terms of, you know, where some of the money goes to. Yes, I'm glad I'm glad you asked that. Thank you. So, I work with Mark Elias, who is as big a hero

for democracy as you could possibly have. He's engaged in, I think, 83 or 84 lawsuits right now

against Republicans or the Trump administration itself. And he has a 501c3 called the free election fund. And that supports the free election fund, supports litigation for voting rights cases, the pro-democracy cases, you name it. That fund is supported by outside folks. And so, I decided along with my editor and my publisher. So, all three of us are going to donate proceeds from every single book sold to the free election fund. So, I thought it was important not just to talk

the talk, but to walk the walk here. And so, if we have the opportunity to get some eyes on, what I think is a good blueprint for Democrats to learn how to fight, moving forward. Some of that money should also go to the fight right now. So, again, every, every book sold is going to mean a portion of the proceeds go to the free election fund from now until the end of the pre-order period. So, if you order between now and July 13th, we'll do a big donation for that fund.

And I think that's going to be especially important as we watch Republicans continue to undermine

democracy, voting rights on a daily basis. Everybody, go get a copy of the book. Here it is,

The day after how to wield power and oppose Trump world by Bryan Tyler Cohen.

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