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🗓️ 8 July 2025
⏱️ 4 minutes
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0:00.0 | I'm John. That's with my good colleague Elizabeth Peake, writing most recently a column |
0:08.0 | on Elon Musk's latest genius, which is to form a party called America Party. Gee, where this |
0:15.4 | idea of third party came from. Liz, what's joyful about Musk is it's beginning to resemble a Russian proverb I learned many |
0:23.0 | years ago. There's the right way. There's the wrong way. There's the Russian way. So amending it, |
0:29.2 | there's the right way, the wrong way, and there's Musk's way. Now, he is aiming to pick off a |
0:34.9 | couple of seats in the Senate and a couple of seats in the House, |
0:38.9 | maybe not for his own party, but to throw them to the other side. |
0:43.6 | That is credible, is he could do that. |
0:47.3 | That is what's worrisome, I think, is that it is credible. |
0:51.7 | He's got, excuse me, so much money. And as we saw in the latest |
0:56.3 | election, he's willing to spend it to get the outcome that he wants. And what he's talking about |
1:01.8 | is seven or eight, nine house seats, a couple of Senate seats. And, you know, John, the politics |
1:08.3 | of today are so evenly divided in our country that that actually could make a huge difference in terms of policy. |
1:15.9 | What isn't clear is what would he do with those seats? |
1:19.9 | In other words, are those candidates going to simply hold out, for example, if they were in place during the negotiation for the big, beautiful bill, |
1:29.4 | the reconciliation bill that just passed, would they have been the holdouts that demanded more |
1:35.0 | spending cuts? Because Elon Musk is all about, he says, he's all about the fact that our |
1:41.0 | debt is too high, our deficits are too high, and we're spending too much |
1:44.7 | money. And of course, having spent months of his life overseeing Doge, the Department of Government |
1:50.6 | Efficiency, and try to cut waste and fraud in the federal government, that's something you can |
1:56.6 | kind of point to and say, yeah, he really does think that. But on the other hand, what he really is, |
2:01.3 | I think, furious about is that having sacrificed and given so much to the Trump administration |
... |
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