Stuart Stevens & Mahmoud Khalil

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 Texas Attorney General, now Senate candidate, Ken Paxton, says the criticism that I let a child predator out after one day, well, guess what? They served 60 days. We have such a great show for you today. The Lincoln Project's own Stuart Stevens stops by to talk about Jack Smith's damning testimony to the Senate. Then we'll talk to Mahmoud Khalil about his new book, No Land to Stand On, Notes from Detention. But first, the news.

Jesse Cannon (0:41)

Molly, one of the things we talk about in this podcast a lot is the idea that we will know that something is going to happen. It hasn't happened yet in the Trump administration. But this is one of those things we knew was going to happen, is that he would take our tax dollars and make ads that just praise him up and down.

Molly Jong-Fast (1:01)

Yeah, the campaign ads. So this is Donald Trump taking tax dollars and using them for campaign ads. Like, you'll remember that there's this thing called the Hatch Act, which prevents people in office, like the Biden administration, from doing campaign stuff. Well, you know, on the taxpayer dime, that's what it was created for. Here, we have the Trump administration doing campaign ads on the taxpayer dime. Now, this is just so atrocious on every level. And remember, this is a president who has traded more stock trading than the members of Congress. More stock trading, right? I mean, he's grown his net worth to billions of dollars. He is, he has sort of, if you look up cliptocracy in the dictionary, there's a picture of him. And he is now, and he has this enormous pack called MAGA Inc. with hundreds of millions of dollars in it.

But he's using our taxpayer dollars to do ads. And again, like this, these are the people who said they were going to get waste, fraud and abuse out of government. Well, this is both waste, fraud and abuse.

Jesse Cannon (2:15)

I'll say so. So I find this personally to be one of the most egregious things.

We did a interview with Michael Lewis, the author, that's going to air later in the week, about all these different ways that Trump has cut off people in the government. And this is one of the most short sighted things as the education department is going to cut off student loans for people like social workers, and people who work in music and things like that, because they can't repay their student loans in the government's eyes.

Molly Jong-Fast (2:46)

It's both like stupid, but it's also part of what their plan is, right? Which is to make it, to sort of starve humanities, to make it so that people don't go into these jobs, that they don't get English majors, that they don't.

And so here's the idea, if your degree doesn't make enough money, you won't be able to get student loans. So the Education Department, which is run by a wrestling executive, Linda McMahon, you may remember her as being a person who could not win a Senate seat in Connecticut. Okay, that's what she's most famous for, and also helping her, you know, working at the wrestling firm, her husband, there's all sorts of stories about her husband.

Jesse Cannon (3:31)

If you were to think of wrestling and education as more polar things, is there a sport that you could think of that is less like education?

Molly Jong-Fast (3:39)

Well, I just think that what this shows is that Trump really does not care, right? He does not care about the Department of Education. If he could get rid of it today, he would. So the goal here is to, they're going to use the IRS data to determine student salaries four years after they graduate and compare to those in similar age who have high school diplomas, and if they feel that the college degree makes them more money, then they will let them use student loans. I mean, this is just, I know how they got here, which is they hate the humanities because they worry that humanities makes writers and people who can think for themselves and they hate that, so they want everyone to do business degrees. Again, it doesn't matter. You can do a humanities degree, go to law school and become a partner at a law firm and make as much money as anyone. I mean, this whole way of thinking is completely for cocktail, and I would like to say that this administration is completely for cocktail, so it makes a lot of sense.