Background Briefing: May 22, 2025
What Will the Senate Do With Trump’s Robin Hood In Reverse “Big, Beautiful Bill”?
We begin with the House passage of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” which has Wall Street and the Fed rattled calling for “fiscal discipline” as Trump’s economic madness blows up the debt making interest payment much higher than defense spending while driving investors away from the bond market which finances our debt. We will discuss how Trump’s economic madness will lead to social disintegration in a country awash with guns which any deranged assassin with tortured politics can use to kill young Israeli diplomats or almost kill a president. Joining us to discuss the Robin Hood in reverse bill that steals from the poor to make the richest even richer now before the Senate is Robert Johnson, the Executive Director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking who was Chief Economist of the US Senate Banking Committee and the US Senate Budget Committee.
Why the Democratic Party’s “Brahmin Left” Lost America’s Working Men and Women and How to Win Them Back
Then we examine why the class-blind “Brahmin Left” of the Democratic Party establishment lost the working man and woman to the Merchant Right in the form of a self-enriching con man whose MAGA populism has enticed a growing number of non-college-educated and minority Americans to vote against their interests. Joining us is Joan Williams, Distinguished Professor of Law and Hastings Foundation Chair emerita at the University of California College of Law San Francisco. An award-winning scholar of social inequality, her books include Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It and White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America. Her latest book, just out, is Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back and she has put together a quiz to determine how culturally elite you are.