Catherine Rampell on The End of The Shutdown

The Al Franken Podcast

Government, Progressive, Politics, Senate, Liberal, Senator, Minnesota, Franken, News, Saturday Night Live, Comedy, Snl

4.6 • 7.7K Ratings

🗓️ 16 November 2025

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

After 43 days, the longest government shutdown in American history has finally ended. We're joined by Catherine Rampell from The Bulwark and MSNBC to talk about how it finally came to a close and why a lot of Democrats are mad at their party. Catherine details how the Trump administration used the shutdown as an excuse to inflict as much pain as possible on SNAP recipients. Not only did the administration go to court to stop SNAP payments, they also punished any stores that might have tried to help them with discounts. As always, the cruelty is the point.

Trump’s promise to fix the economy was one of the biggest reasons he was re-elected, but prices are higher on nearly everything around the country. Trump's approach is to lie about affordability while Americans struggle with economic anxiety. All the while, he's flopping around on his tariff policies, creating more and more chaos and confusion.

Plus, the average age of first time homebuyers is now 40 years old and the Trump administration has floated the idea of a 50-year mortgage plan. Catherine explains why that could be disastrous for would-be homeowners.

READ Catherine in The Bulwark: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/how-the-supreme-court-could-save-christmas-trump-tariffs

WATCH Catherine on MSNBC's The Weekend Primetime: https://www.msnbc.com/weekend-primetime

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, everybody, we got a great one today.
0:07.1	You know, for a change.
0:09.3	Catherine Rampel joins me again.
0:11.8	Here to four, Catherine was an op-ed columnist for the Washington Post, but left the post,
0:18.2	and is now with the Bullwork and co-host of MSNBC's weekend primetime show.
0:25.6	Catherine writes a lot about the economy, and we discuss a shutdown and terrorists.
0:31.4	We touch on Epstein, but we recorded this on Wednesday, and a lot, of course, has happened since.
0:39.5	The White House, of course, is in crisis.
0:43.1	The Epstein emails are so damning, especially the one where Epstein writes that Trump knew what was going on.
0:53.1	It was an email he wrote to himself that I don't think is getting enough attention.
0:58.7	This from the Washington Post.
1:01.8	Trump knew of it and came to my house many times during that period, Epstein wrote,
1:07.9	in an email to himself on February 1st, 2019, several months before he was
1:13.8	arrested on sex trafficking and killed himself in jail. He never got a massage. So that's bad news
1:22.6	for Trump. Trump knew of it is bad. He never got a massage is good for Trump.
1:30.6	I think press secretary Caroline Levitt kind of stepped in it.
1:35.7	She said this.
1:37.5	Jeffrey Epstein was a member at Maralago until President Trump kicked him out because Jeffrey Epstein was a pedophile and he was a creep.
1:45.7	Okay. If you knew the guy was a pedophile, he probably should have said something, you know,
1:54.8	to the authorities. I mean, even if the guy was your best friend for 10 years, you really got to say something.
2:04.3	It's a pretty desperate situation for Trump. Representative Adelita Grahalva was sworn in on
2:12.2	Wednesday and they got the final signature on the discharge petition to release the Epstein files.
	...

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