Charlie Sykes & Rosebud Baker

**Molly Jong-Fast** (0:00)
Hi, I'm Molly Jong-Fast, and this is Fast Politics, where we discuss the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. And at Sporter Chief, Greg Bovino spoke alongside neo-Nazis at a pro-fascism summit.
We have such a great show for you today. To The Contraries, Charlie Sykes steps by to talk about Trump wanting out of Iran and his slush fund. Then we'll talk to comedian Rosebud Baker about how Trump has changed America and her new memoir, Half-Faked. But first, the news.

**Charlie Sykes** (0:34)
So, Molly, Senator John Thune is worried about Donald Trump's obsession with revenge. It's like poetry to me. Just amazing.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (0:43)
I actually think that John Thune is more worried about Donald Trump's Marie Antoinette style renovations of the District of Columbia. Because every time that Susie Wilds says, we're going to keep Donald Trump laser focused on affordability, Donald Trump comes out and talks about the ballroom remodel, or the slush fund, or the reflecting pool, or the triumphal arch, or the giant amphitheater that he's building behind the White House, or the East Wing, or the want, want, want, or the Kennedy Center. I mean, Donald Trump does not seem focused on making things cheaper for the American people.

**Charlie Sykes** (1:35)
Yeah, I have to say, remember that quote he had where he said, I don't think about the American people?

**Molly Jong-Fast** (1:40)
He doesn't think about the midterms.

**Charlie Sykes** (1:42)
Well, he said that too. There was the other thing is like he doesn't think about the gas and the prices and affordability. You know, it's really rigs true in his actions every single day.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (1:52)
Yeah, so Donald Trump laser focused on not to you.

**Charlie Sykes** (1:57)
Molly, Elon Musk in Goals. He's been widely marked for years. He says, by 2026, we're going to fucking Pluto and all these ridiculous things. He didn't actually say Pluto, but you know, I'm using a little hyperbole here. So the New York Times decided to count his goals and how many he actually hit. How bad do you think it went?

**Molly Jong-Fast** (2:16)
This is such a good piece from the New York Times. Good for them.
It's the kind of like thing that you just have to, you have to have a lot of reporters around to be able to do, especially in such a bad breaking news environment, but it's kind of God's work here. So Elon Musk has laid out 602 goals. We counted how many he's hit. And in case you're wondering, he basically is just full of shit, but it's nice to see it laid out like this. So of the 600 goals that Mr. Musk has made, he's achieved what he said he would about 19 percent of the time. And about 35 percent of the time, he was late, sometimes by years, or did not deliver on the goals. 33 percent of the time, the companies did not provide a public update, so who knows, and 13 percent are just never happening. And I mean, the thing that's interesting about this is that Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and also Donald Trump's mega-donor, is working on this enormous SpaceX IPO that will make him a trillionaire likely, and will certainly make him significantly richer. And part of the Elon Musk mystique is that he says stuff, you know, we're going to live on Mars, we're going to do this, we're going to do that. He says stuff that will never happen. He is able to sort of just promise things that are undeliverable. And, you know, again, the question is, like, you know, he muses about universal basic income and then changes his mind. He has ideas and then flips. So, again, like, I think it's important when you think about him. It's funny because I think of, like, remember how he's like, I'm going to build hyper loops from Manhattan to DC in 25 minutes. You know, he would say he was going to do these things in order to try to, like, distract from Amtrak doing them. You know, he's a very smart liar. And some of the stuff he says is actually really thought out.

**Charlie Sykes** (4:17)
Yeah. So one of the fun things about MAGA is, you know, always be grifting. And Mike Flynn, one of the great, great, great grifters of the America First MAGA movement, is not putting America first because he's now registered as a foreign agent.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (4:33)
Yeah. Again, interesting that a lot of these people are not what they say they are. So basically, this far-right blogger posted a Foreign Agents Registration Act for Monday that was dated October 2025 and stated that Donald Trump's former national security advisor was now making $100,000 per month from the Republic of Caspia, which is part of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It's run by an ally of Vladimir Putin. That's probably all you need to know there. But these people are all connected to Trump and Putin and authoritarian regimes.