Catherine Rampell: Who Are the Socialists Now?

The Bulwark Podcast

The Bulwark

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 8.9K Ratings

🗓️ 31 October 2025

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s hard to find a better example of seizing the means of production than our government seizing an equity stake in a company—which Trump keeps doing over and over again. And what do the diehard Republican capitalists have to say about all this socializing of the private sector? Nothing, of course. But they definitely were up in arms over Bill Kristol saying he’d probably vote for Mamdani if he still lived in NYC, and that voting for Cuomo was ridiculous. Plus, the crypto-based bribery of Trump and his family is flourishing, SNAP cuts and Head Start closures will have a big impact on rural areas, businesses have been trying to find ways to lower their tariff burden since Trump won last November, and the potential ties between recent layoffs and the AI arms race.

The Bulwark’s Catherine Rampell joins Tim Miller for the Halloween weekend pod.
show notes

Transcript

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0:00.0	Happy Halloween alone, welcome to the Bullwark podcast.
0:16.0	I'm your host, Tim Miller.
0:17.3	Couldn't be more excited to welcome a former syndicated opinion columnist of the Washington
0:21.9	Post, but she'll be joining us at the Bull Work next week as an economics editor and writing a weekly
0:27.1	newsletter called Receipt. She's also a co-host of MSNBC's The Weekend Prime Time and a new mom,
0:33.3	lots happening for Catherine Rampel. Welcome aboard, Catherine. Great to be here.
0:38.3	We're former Republicans, so we are, we're working you before you're getting paid.
0:42.7	You start November 1. I was like, I want, I'm sorry, it's a Saturday. So I'm making
0:48.4	work a day early. Off of maternity leave, the whole thing. I'm very excited to start. So it's all right. I'll do some pro bono work for you. We're pumped to have you. For the people who don't know, Catherine Rampel, can you give us a little, you know, just first date penny tour of your life? Of my life. Yeah, sure. You know, I just had a couple highlights. I don't know. How did you become an economics editor?
1:12.8	So I knew I wanted to be a journalist from a very, very wee age, which turns out to be an advantage in a shrinking industry.
1:22.5	So I did the journalism thing, internships and whatnot, like starting in high school.
1:29.0	I ended up in economics journalism because I worked for an economist in college, Alan Kruger, who passed away
1:36.0	a few years ago. And when there was an opening at the New York Times in 2008 for someone to like start an economics blog. There were not that many people
1:47.9	in journalism who knew about econ. I was about a year out of school. I had done a, you know, a couple of
1:54.4	different jobs and various internships prior to that. But somebody at the Times got my name from this guy I used to work for and said,
2:03.4	you might want to check out my former RA. She knows something about econ, which turned out to be
2:07.8	really advantageous, given that the sky was falling 2008, for those who may not remember,
2:15.6	was the middle of the financial crisis.
2:20.8	So, yeah, good time to know about economics.
2:23.2	That's always the story with journalism, right?
2:27.2	That it's like when the world is going to hell on your beat,
2:28.9	it's really good for your career.
	...

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