Hosts Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan react to Republican losses in the midterms, a clip of Senator John Kennedy, and the party's ties to Christian nationalism and corporate donors. They argue that Republicans stick with Donald Trump despite electoral setbacks, and they debate whether evangelical voting trends signal a shift.
The episode then turns to proposed SNAP cuts, the claim that tariff revenue could fund food assistance, and Fox News coverage of Democratic investigations. Listeners get the hosts' critical perspective on these stories, along with the opposing arguments they reference, though many claims discussed are opinions or unverified allegations.
In this episode Angie Sullivan, Jennifer Welch
This episode's transcript on Republican midterm losses and Christian nationalism was made with HappyScribe technology that converts audio to text.
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All right, Republicans are still dealing with the blue Nami cope, and I have to say, I really enjoy it. It's, it's, it's something that I, I really enjoy. It's fun to win, it sucks losing, um, and we've certainly been as Democrats—my God, have I been on the losing side before?—but Republicans like Senator John Kennedy, and just to remind everyone, he's the one who grilled Kash Patel about Kash Patel's policy of lifting, uh, restrictions on people who have engaged in pedophilia—I'm not pedophilic, I'm sorry—bestiality.
Bestiality.
Bestiality to be able to be FBI agents. Like, why did you get into bestiality? But anyway, here's Senator Kennedy reckoning with their party's midterm loss. Enjoy play the clip.
Man washes his hands after he urinates. A wise man doesn't urinate on his hands. We need to stop urinating on our hands.
I'm like, this is the fucking floor of Congress. What? That's a United States senator. Like, it defies logic. It's insane. It's just, why are we talking about peeing on our hands? What, what is going on? It, it, it, it's such a clown show.
Yeah.
It's such a clown show.
Well, and I look at that and I think, okay, he's got it. They really screwed up. They have done things that the American people have repudiated, both in supporting Donald Trump and as a congressional body. So stop. Turn around. Screech the car. U-turn. And, but they're not. Even after they've seen so many of their colleagues lose their jobs, they are still riding with Donald Trump. I don't know if they lack survival skills.
I don't know if they lack political instincts. I don't know if they're scared of Donald Trump. But in my estimation, they should be far more concerned about their constituents. They're still not breaking from Trump after he primary them. Except for Thomas Massie. It defies, it actually defies logic, how these people behave.
But when you, when you really talk about the elephant in the room, it doesn't. And the elephant in the room is Trump's impolite and Trump's uncivilized and Trump has dementia. But Trump has just pulled the mask off of the Republican Party. The Republican Party is the party of corporations and by corporations. The Republican Party is the party of prostitution politics on steroids, and it always has been. Trump's just impolite and more embarrassing about it. When you had a Ronald Reagan or you had a George W. Bush, George W.
Bush was kind of embarrassing, not as bad as Donald Trump. The policies are not that different. This is who the Republican Party is. And when you factor in Fox News, uh, and just the daily dehumanization and the scapegoating of marginalized groups and that rot that that is injected into culture, this, this, these are Republicans. There's really no change here. These people, the Supreme Court, uh, Donald Trump, everything's a shakedown from the American taxpayer.
Blame a scapegoat. Shift the money to these poor white men, these victims. Everybody's so hard on them. And so when, when we, when we, the elephant's in the room with us, but we have to immediately talk about it. These people are prostitutes. They will not break with Donald Trump because they were broken before they joined him. They were broken before they married him. They were broken when they decided, I'm taking this corporate PAC money and I don't care about the American people or the trajectory of the United States government or putting restrictions on, uh, uh, these, these corporations that are fleecing their workers.
They were broken before they arrived at him. So to expect a broken person to all of a sudden find Jesus and break up with him, the joke's on us because this is a party of just broken, broken, broken people. And as we move along, let's check and see how the Freedom Caucus is handling this. Play the clip.
Bill on his throne. He's not surprised by any of this. And if we as a nation turn back to him and seek him and we bring that back into the halls of Congress, I do believe God will bless this group. God will bless our party and God will continue to bless this country. So.
You know, it's amazing how intertwined, uh, Republican economic policy is with Christian nationalism. Because what he said, if we do this, the blessings will trickle down upon us. What do Republicans say? If we're, if we're nice to these CEOs, if we're nice to these corporations, the job creators, wealth will trickle down. How the messaging of Christian nationalists and, and people that want just capitalism on steroids, how synced up they are is just so incredible.
And you see how they are not strange bedfellows, but rather incredibly comfortable bedfellows. Furthermore, if you look at Bible-belts states that submit everything to God, those are the bottom 10 states in the country. So just the data just disproves everything he said.
Well, and you know, interestingly enough, I don't like religion and politics. I, I don't like it at all. What we have here is we have these Republicans that are Christian nationalists. We're going to use the Bible to punish people. We're going to use the Bible to hurt people. And now you have senators coming in, uh, Senator-elect Hamilton from Kansas, Talarico from Texas, and they bring a, if we are Christians, we have to help people.
And it, it's such the mirror that I think has been lacking, although I want it out all together, good or bad. I just want to help people because it's the right thing to do. I don't want it to be religious. But I, I am interested to see how that dynamic works. When you have these people coming in and say, how, how are you using the Bible? Because this is actually what the teachings are. And so I'm, I'm looking towards that. And I'm just going to say it again. I said it about the Josh Hawley fasting for a whole hour because for the election.
If, if your actions moving forward to save the Republican Party is to wait for the trickle-down blessings from God, good. Keep doing it. Because it is obviously not a strategy that works. We've seen it with gun violence. If all it took was prayers, we wouldn't have school shootings, but we do. So as a strategy, I like it.
I completely agree. And when you look at the, uh, numbers of third-age people age 30 and under, the one thing the Republican Party and, uh, the white evangelical Christian movement have are declining numbers. They're unable to recruit people. And so I share everything you just said. Um, I, I believe that, uh, a secular state is the best state. Um, but the Christians like Talarico or Andy Beshear that are able to show them the moral failings of their faith and how they weaponize their faith to be mean to people, I think that's an important language to have.
And for Democrats to jump in that, because the Republicans have just run rampant.
Yes.
And weaponizing Christianity, the worst forms of it, particularly white evangelicals, the only group, by the way, that moved towards Trump in the midterms. Every other group went away from Trump, except for white Christian evangelicals became more MAGA. What an indictment on that movement. Um, all right. So moving along here, oh, let me just say this. The congressman who just said that, uh, his name is Eli Crane from Arizona's second congressional district.
Uh, he beat his Democratic opponent by one point in a Trump plus 15 district.
Wow.
Yeah. All right. So the same Christians that were there, they go out and do this, pop this up. The Trump administration on Tuesday moved to kick millions of people from SNAP, commonly known as food stamps, and other government assistance programs for vulnerable families, according to a new proposed rule by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. You know what I want to headline? I want to say the, uh, government has decided to kick these corporations off of the corporate welfare tit and we are going to tax their wealth and we're making Exxon and we're making Apple and we're making Amazon pay taxes and we're also charging Amazon a huge infrastructure fee because the public is sick of them, uh, uh, uh, skirting the system.
I'm ready for that headline instead of we're going to be mean to the poorest people in the country and then transfer everything to the wealthiest assholes in the country.
No, I completely agree. And another headline I'd like to see is, and maybe I'm just living in fantasy land because I know Trump is lying, but Trump is talking about over and over. We get, we've gotten so much money from Venezuela. We've gotten so much money from Iran. We've got so much money from the tariffs. Why isn't somebody saying, then use that money for poor people and hungry people? Six million people, according to that article, are going to be kicked off food assistance. Two million little kids that go to school and get a hot meal for free will no longer get a hot meal for free.
And you, you turn around the Department of Agriculture saying, well, you know, people have lost trust that actually that the people getting it are the people that deserve it. Well, who started that message? Where's the data? It's not there. And, and so I want somebody to say, with all this fucking money, I mean, if I recall, there's, there's, you just go into a room and there's tariff money sitting all over those shelves. Help the American people. And I, I suspect we're not doing that because that tariff money and that money from Venezuela and all the money we have from Iran, number one, it's a lie.
And what money we have is in dark places that are going to be really, really hard to find because this administration is so corrupt. And we're going to find that the American taxpayers really don't have that much money based on what Trump's saying because A, he took it, or B, it never existed in the first place. And that's kind of my opinion and my suspicion once we get oversight going. That's what we're going to find.
And I would just say this, and this is really important that we always know the opposition. If they had all the money and they were flush, they would still not be charitable to poor people because their, is it, theirs is a game of politics where they scapegoat and demonize. And that didn't start with Trump. This is a Republican tradition to call those that, uh, uh, are not wealthy, lazy, and, um, sucking off the government tit when the real parasites, the real parasites in this country right now are the billionaire class.
They have government contracts paid for by Americans that have no choice but to pay their taxes. It, it is not an option for your everyday American citizen to pay taxes. And then last article here is a clip from Fox News, friends of the show. Um, and they're panicking about Democratic investigations. Let's play the clip. Check in on our friends.
Republicans failed at their job. They failed at oversight. They failed at getting the agenda of President Trump through. And now the shoe's on the other foot. And it's going to hurt really, really bad for the next two years. We need to learn to fight like the Democrats because what you just played are is a fight and they're ready to take it to the president.
I love that they think that the Democrats are just such big fighters. Now they're are. Garcia and Raskin are, are ted up and they are ready to go. But, um, I, I love this, friends of the show, Fox, Jesse, our favorite. Uh, I love them. Um, I love this content. I'm here for it.
I love the false power because they have all the confidence in the world of the fighters, but I certainly am concerned about it. You know, here's the thing on Fox News, you know, the Republicans failed at, at, at oversight and all that. She goes on about how they didn't do enough investigations into the Biden administration. The Biden administration, despite being called a crime family, was not committing crimes. You know, I mean, we've got Trump posting, when I took me all the way back in my deep dive, he sent a truth social to Pam Bondi about indicting people that were.
He's deleted it since.
And then deleted it since and then acted like, oh yeah, I meant to send that on truth social. And you're saying that oversight's a problem? Like, shut the fuck up. It makes me so mad.
Yeah, but you have to understand what they're doing here. You, you can't project that somehow they're good faith actors. They know that there was no Biden crime family. The people that know, know, but they then immediately propagandize because every accusation is a confession. They know that they are the criminals. And so that's the game. And the game is they use this propaganda to Fox News, the dumbest audience in America, uh, friends of the show, uh, uh, the dumbest audience in America because they are aware that Fox News had to pay $1 billion for lying to their audience and they pull up every day, lie more, bring it to me, inject it into my veins.
And so these lies work. There are people that know it's bullshit. They know it's bullshit. Hunter smoked crack with hookers. He's been on my show and admitted it's been on his laptop. It's been everywhere. All right. Have you seen this recent video of Don Jr. talking about defending Russell Brand? Nobody in his face clearly fucked up out of his mind. Nobody in his family thinks we got to take him to drop him off at Betty Ford in one of these private planes we've bought because we've been grifting in the White House to the tune of billions of dollars. No, they just live in a world of propaganda.
Uh, Fox News in the, it will be studied as put in the same lens as Russian state TV or North Korean state TV, but that made billions and billions and billions of dollars. And again, they're also on a suicide mission because they are endorsing fascism, which will ultimately come for them as well. They might be the last one that they come for. They might come for more of the, you know, MS Now stations first, but it's just such a failed, uh, business model.
But these people are just broken. They're completely inherently broken. And for all of that, we're so patriotic and we love America. They're not. It's just all of it is a jet stream of bullshit. They are bad faith actors and, and we just have to call it as such. There's no expectation for any of these people to do the right thing. They support Donald Trump. Right.
You know, I mean, it's just.
For 10 years.
Yeah. Yeah. All right. That's all we have. Make sure you're subscribed here on YouTube. Become a member to get some extra content. Join us on Substack. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and order my book, Not Today Fascist, and we'll be back later with more news.
Christian nationalists in the government are scared of accountability.
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