Bonus: SchadenFriday: Spewing Bile and Susie Wiles
What Next
Slate Podcasts
4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 19 December 2025
⏱️ 7 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Is the president falling into the very trap that launched him back into office by telling people the economy is actually great when they say it isn’t? Is this partially ballroom’d White House as chaotic as its detractors—and Trump’s chief of staff—say it is?Â
Guest: Ben Jacobs, political reporter based in Washingon.
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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Happy Friday Slatesters. Welcome back to another edition of Shoutin Friday. These are our Slate Plus |
| 0:07.8 | exclusive conversations for when we need to not just report the news, but laugh at it. And I realize |
| 0:16.9 | I said this during our last episode of Shoutin Friday, but I really, really needed a break this week. |
| 0:23.2 | Because you know the week is off to a bad start when there is a mass shooting and then you open your news alerts and realize there's been another one. |
| 0:34.8 | And that is to say nothing about the death of Rob Reiner and his wife, truly |
| 0:39.3 | horrifying situations all, which with seemingly more depressing details coming out every day. |
| 0:47.5 | That said, today we are going to hit pause on those stories, take a small break. |
| 0:56.1 | We're going to talk about karma. |
| 0:59.9 | Karma for people who could use a little karmic comeuppance. |
| 1:04.5 | And this week I've brought on Ben Jacobs. |
| 1:07.4 | He's a contributing writer at a number of outlets, including Slate.com. Ben, welcome to |
| 1:12.6 | what next? Thanks for having me. Okay, so Ben, there's a lot to shout on Friday about today. |
| 1:19.9 | Like, we could talk about all sorts of things. There was this Vanity Fair article about the |
| 1:24.8 | West Wing that included a lot of crazy, unflattering photos of the |
| 1:29.6 | people steering this president, some unexpected on the record comments from Trump's inner |
| 1:34.4 | circle. We could talk about how Republicans have been promising to fix health care all month long |
| 1:39.3 | and seem to have really been incapable of getting anything done, especially this week. But personally, |
| 1:47.6 | I think the most shout-in-fridiest thing happening right now revolves around the economy, |
| 1:53.1 | because I think you could argue, and you will disagree with me if you think I'm wrong. |
| 1:56.9 | Donald Trump may have been elected because he said he was going to fix this economy, |
| 2:00.6 | and it seems like the American people have really caught in dawn to the fact that perhaps Donald Trump may have been elected because he said he was going to fix this economy. |
| 2:07.0 | And it seems like the American people have really caught in dawn to the fact that perhaps he is not doing that. |
... |
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