Welcome to The Beat. I'm Ari Melbert, and tonight NBC's Jacob Soberoff will join us with his reporting on Trump's mass deportation plans, past and the near future potentially with his new documentary.

And by the end of the hour, I've told you we're doing a lot of different things here in this holiday season.

Well, what says Merry Christmas like none other than Snoop Dog, who will be here,

you'll hear from him by the end of the hour. But we begin with the billionaires. Unelected,

largely unaccountable billionaires are getting special access to this incoming Trump administration

and Senate Republicans and others. At the same time that the Republican Party

actually just did something politically that was a big deal. They built and grew their support

among working class, sometimes called blue collar Americans. And so this is an important story

where politically the Republicans had good news. You could see that in the exit polls. We covered this

economy election from election night on. But that political step was by all accounts, Republican,

voters, observers, supposed to be matched by some sort of delivery mechanism for those working

class Americans. So keep that in mind as you look at scenes like this,

as the world's richest man, Elon Musk, makes this sort of big kind of heroes welcome entrance

into the buildings and around the Capitol and the Senate because he's holding private meetings

with top Republicans. You could also see he's joined by a very

successful, very wealthy businessman, Vivek Ramoswami, MAGA figures that are heading up a group

outside the government that's literally named after a commercial product that one of them's involved

in that they say will help improve the government. So the self-dealing, in a sense, has already begun

when it comes to branding. And they want to do enormous cuts as much as hundreds or even $500 billion out of the

annual budget if they could get Congress to agree. It was unclear how they would do this and what

services or programs might be slashed for Americans in states, red, blue, and in between,

and certainly in those working crafts areas where Republicans did improve their vote totals.

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