Transcript of Brian Tyler Cohen On Fighting Back against Trump Corruption

Donald Trump is losing control as it's increasingly clear that the national financial data that gets released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other agencies within the Trump regime seem to be a lot like Donald Trump's personal finances. They seem to basically be fake, inflated, and deflated, and I think the American people are starting to understand what's going on. And there were a lot of people saying, ah, you know, you could still trust the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they're gonna still be accurate. I really— under the Trump regime, sorry, because this data that we see is raising massive red flags. And I just tend to trust the consumer sentiment where consumers, the people, kind of like the people I talk to who feel that right now things are worse than during the Great Depression, the worst consumer surveys, like, basically in the history of the surveys. That seems to be where most people are right now and not what the Trump regime is putting out there. Also, the Trump keeps putting out all of these massive revisions, which they said, oh, we're never going to do these revisions on jobs numbers. But it turns out that even when you get like a bad job print, it's actually much worse than that.

And you find out a few months later. I want to bring in Brian Tyler Cohen, the author of the new book as well, The Day After: How to Wield Power in a Post-Trump World, to go over this data with me. Brian, let's just go through some of this data together. Then I got questions for you. So you take a look at this over here. The Kobielasi letter reports this. Since the start of 2025, US job numbers have now been revised down in 14 out of 17 months by a total job loss of 710,000 jobs. So the May and April jobs numbers were, were revised down by a total of 74,000. And those job numbers were not good to begin with. That's the largest 2-month downward revision since December. April jobs were revised down by 31,000 to 148,000. May jobs revised down by 43,000 to 129,000 jobs. This means 41,000 or so jobs have been revised out of previously reported data on average in each period per month at this point. So if we apply this average to the 57,000 June nonfarm payrolls, it would imply just 15,000 jobs were added last month, and then it's even going down from there.

So you learn all of that. I'll give you another data point as well, Brian Tyler Cohen. You take a look at the Strait of Hormuz right now, where the Trump regime says at this point things look as good as they did before the war started. We're setting records, record amounts of oil. And you know, you have an independent entity like Kpler, they say Hormuz recovery remains very fragile. Tanker tracker Kpler recorded 34, 48, and 38 crossings of the Strait of Hormuz over the last 3 days against a pre-war average of 125 to 140 daily. The data undercuts the claim by a US official to Bloomberg this week that oil flows through the strait have surpassed 10 million barrels per day, with the US military support driving a shipping surge. Kpler's figures show that actually It's roughly 5 million barrels of oil exiting the strait daily on average in June, half of the officials claim from the Trump regime and a quarter of the roughly 20 million barrels per day that transited before the war. Now, Brian, this also seems a lot like what went down between the United States and China, where Donald Trump was bragging, look, I got them to buy 13 million metric tons of soybeans.

When under former President Biden, we even think about that. It was 26 million metric tons. So Trump was bragging about half., but then when we found the real number, it was probably half of what Trump was bragging about. So now he's bragging and boasting. In reality, the truth is we're doing about a quarter of that. And that's kind of the theme with all of this, Brian. And you know, your book, "The Day After: How to Wield Power in a Post-Trump World," which everybody's gotta go and make sure you order right now, you know, you talk about what Democrats can do to wield power. Frankly, anybody, I mean, my own view is, What can people do to wield power with this level of fraud taking place, Brian?

I mean, at this point, here's what I think is really important, because we do need a forward-looking agenda. We need to take care of healthcare in this country and make sure everybody has access to healthcare. I argue in the book for Medicare for All. We need to confront climate change. We need to make sure that, you know, that we're focusing on reforming our election laws, making sure that everybody has the right to vote. But at the same time, I make the argument that you can't do any of this and still have a functioning democracy if you don't hold people to account for the corruption that they're engaging in right now. Like, we have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. So people are seeing this. They're seeing the overt corruption, whether it's shorting the stock market on a daily basis. You know, obviously Donald Trump's financial disclosure form, which has, you know, I think it's 927 pages long. For comparison, Joe Biden's was 11 pages long. Shows the amount of trades that he's done, which directly correlate to when he's giving speeches that impact the very things that he's trading on.

So all of this is happening in plain sight. We're watching the Trump family get rich hand over fist. We're watching, uh, uh, the Pentagon give loans to Don Jr., for example, to the tune of like $620 million for companies that he just invested in 5 minutes ago. So these people are making so much money. The grift and graft and corruption is so overt. If we want anybody to have any faith in a true constitutional republic, a real law and order system, then that has to mean we hold people to account for the criminality and corruption that they're engaging in right now. So we cannot do what we did during the Biden era where you lean on somebody like Merrick Garland who decided to prevent the optics of politicization and allow Donald Trump and Republicans to get away with all the crimes that they engaged in because God forbid we look politicized because you look at this now, the system that we're in right now where it almost feels like crime is legal on a daily basis. We wouldn't be here if there was any deterrent effect, but there was no deterrent effect for these people.

And so now the lesson that they learned is I can get away with it so long as I'm powerful enough.

You know, the concept of the big lie was coined by Adolf Hitler in his 1925 book Mein Kampf. And Donald Trump's first wife, Ivana, said that that was a book that Donald Trump, you know, kept near and dear to him. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, said, if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. You know, with the colossal nature of his lies that are, you know, the algae is put in there by algae crooks and they threw the algae in. You know, it sounds so farcical versus, you know, it sounds so out there that at first, you know, and this is a pattern, people treat it like, ah, whatever. But then he keeps on saying it. Then Fox repeats it over and over again. And before you know it, he gave his MAGA cult base a hook and they believe it and they go, got it. I guess that's the case. You know, the numbers of his fraud, the numbers when we're talking about hundreds of billions and billions and trillions, it's hard for people to even kind of process it. You know, I think people can process, got it, you know, $100, $1,000.

But when you're talking about the scope of some of these things that the Trump regime is doing, and then you're talking about like the schemes that he's involved in by buying these, you know, different funds and this and that, and this gets shifted over there, that I just think, you know, it overwhelms people. How do we— what do you think about that? How do we deal with that?

Look, I think, I think it's such a great question, but I think all we have to do is look at look at the numbers that we're dealing with here. I mean, when, when Republicans and Trump specifically vilify SNAP recipients, for example, they are making like an anemic amount of money to be able to put some modicum of food on the table. When we're talking about Medicaid recipients, these are the poorest Americans who are able to get the bare minimum of health care in this country. And, you know, their Medicaid has been cut by, by to the tune of, you know, 17 million Americans have fewer, have less health care than they did before. ACA recipients, 24 million Americans, and we saw 4 of them lost their healthcare altogether because they couldn't afford to renew when those prices went up, um, after Republicans refused to extend those subsidies. So we see Republicans vilify people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder in this country for using the scraps that were available to them. But then you turn your attention to the amount of money that Donald Trump is either pocketing himself, you know, his net worth increased from $2.4 billion to $6.3 billion.

That is insane. I think the only person that made more money than Donald Trump is like Elon Musk and maybe a few of, of Trump's other donors at the top. But like, this is a massive amount of money. So for him to, to make that much money personally, and then you add on top of that the amount of money that's been squandered on the reflecting pool, the amount of money that's been squandered on retrofitting Donald Trump's personal jet that was gifted to him from Qatar, the amount of money that was squandered on the ballroom, which was supposed to be paid for by private donations and suddenly isn't, the amount of money that's been squandered on Trump's military parade, on this, uh, Great American State Fair that can just serve as this propaganda outlet for Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. I mean, on issue after issue after issue, we are lighting millions or billions of dollars on fire so that Trump can engage in these vanity projects if he's not just taking the money himself. And these people have the audacity to vilify people who are just trying to get by in this country. The very people, by the way, who Trump appealed to when he was on the campaign trail talking about the price of housing and rent and groceries and eggs.

Now those people are being left high and dry. They're being vilified while Republicans and Trump and his family are consolidating more wealth, more power, more money than ever before.

And just so disgusting because just a very basic understanding of how Medicaid works. It's not like people are making it rain by requesting medical treatment and medical services for themselves. The Medicaid recipient is somebody who would be going to a doctor to ask for help. And where the fraud takes place, when it does, and it's been prosecuted before, are people like Senator Rick Scott from Florida, people who are running these kind of, you know, uh, these corporate boiler rooms. They're making money. They're the ones enriching themselves by creating fake patients that don't exist, or overbilling for services that weren't provided. It's not happening at the level of a human being who needs to get a treatment and a surgery where you have to show a verifiable surgery of this is— this is what I got. I mean, it's just something to me so basic like that, but they'll just repeat it all of the time that there are all these group of people, you know, and often the attack now is directed at a lot of young people. I've noticed, you know, too, you know, it's like, you know, and it's these young— they're just sitting around playing video games, collecting all that Medicaid money at this point.

It's like, what? What are you talking about?

Well, so you have to recognize that while Republicans are accusing everybody else of engaging in all of this elusive fraud, they haven't brought any convictions forward. Like the federal government, the same federal government that's claiming that all of this fraud is just proliferating across the country. Notice that they aren't convicting anybody of the exact crimes they claim are rampant. And this isn't just Medicaid. I mean, everything that the Trump administration claims is rife with fraud, fraud, waste and abuse. There haven't been convictions or indictments on any of this stuff. They claim that the, the, the elections are constantly stolen. Every election they don't win is an election that was stolen from them. And yet there is nobody convicted for engaging in this elusive fraud that apparently resulted in a stolen election. So, you know, this is a talking point that they'll engage in. They know that it's red meat, red meat for a very undiscerning base. But look, that base also has to pay prices at the grocery store. That base also has to pay their utility bills. That base also needs healthcare. And they're going to realize in short order, if they haven't realized already, that the same problems that Donald Trump swore he would fix and Republicans swore they would fix when they won in 2024 have not only not been solved, but, but have been exacerbated under this administration.

Yeah, I was looking at his approval in Pennsylvania, for example. It's 29%, you know, and when you— yeah, and when it's on issues like inflation, it's like 18%. And, You're seeing that.

And it makes sense because, I mean, that was what he exploited. Joe Biden was supposed to be public enemy number one because of his— because of him presiding over a high inflation environment. He left office when inflation was 3%. It's 4.2%. So it's 33% higher than it was when the biggest offender of inflation left office. And so what does that say for Trump?

I agree. Everybody, I want you to go get this book right now after this ends on July 4th weekend. Let's get it the day after. How to Wield Power in a Post-Trump World. Brian Tyler Cohen. Brian, anything else people should know about the book, though, as well? I know, you know, you're doing some cool things in terms of, you know, where some of the money goes to.

Yes, I'm glad. I'm glad you asked that. Thank you. So I work with Marc Elias, who is as big a hero for democracy as you could possibly have. He's engaged in, I think, 83 or 84 lawsuits right now against Republicans or the Trump administration itself. And he has a 501 called the Free Election Fund, and that supports— the Free Election Fund supports litigation for voting rights cases, pro-democracy cases, you name it. That fund is supported by outside folks. And so I decided, along with my editor and my publisher, so all three of us are going to donate proceeds from every single book sold to the Free Election Fund. So I thought it was important not just to talk the talk but to walk the walk here. And so if we have the opportunity to get some eyes on what I think is a good blueprint for Democrats to learn how to fight, we've moving forward. Some of that money should also go to the fight right now. So again, every, every book sold is going to mean a portion of the proceeds go to the Free Election Fund from now until the end of the preorder period.

So if you order between now and July 13th, we'll do a big donation for that fund. And, and I think that's going to be especially important as we watch Republicans continue to undermine democracy, voting rights on a daily basis.

Everybody go get a copy of the book. Here it is, The Day After: How to Wield Power in a Post-Trump World by Brian Tyler Cohen. Thanks, Brian.

Thanks, Ben.

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