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Trump’s Plans Are Getting Darker w/ Jim Acosta
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Oct 24, 2025Fast Politics w/ Molly Jong-Fast on YouTube
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Welcome to Fast Politics, Jim Acosta.
Hey, good to see you. Good to hear you.
We are alive. Another day in Trump's America.
Can you believe, like, let's take a moment to recount the week that the East Wing was demolished.
That Donald Trump said the American people should pay him $200 million, $264 million.
I can't remember exactly the number.
Bombed some fishermen in the Caribbean Sea.
What will he bulldoze next week?
That's right.
The federal government remains closed, all to prevent the American people from seeing the Epstein files.
Yes.
Good night, everybody.
That's a perfect synopsis.
Let's just go home.
That's it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you know I worked at the White House for seven and a half years covering Obama.
Before they pulled away your hard pass.
Remember that?
Before they pulled away my hard pass.
Sarah Sanders.
Isn't that quaint now?
Like,
just pulling away my hard pass is sort of like a Disney, you know,
after school special or something compared to what we're feeling about.
But no, I mean, you know, I have some reverence for the place.
I know that nobody does anymore, but I still do.
And
the fact that he could just go in and fucking raise the East Wing of
the White House without, you know, talking to anybody about it.
It's just like the perfect symbol of where we are right now as a country.
and people just need to understand this is going to get worse before it gets better.
He's unstable.
The people around him are either corrupt or enablers or both.
And, you know, this is this we're just heading towards the midterms.
And we all have to buckle up because I think this is going to get worse before he gets better.
And
his out of control behavior is going to get even more out of control
when he basically tries to stop us from all voting next year.
So, I mean, yes, you know, he's just said he will.
Just saying, like Mussolini, you have to be a little popular.
Like,
if you want to be an autocrat, you got to give the carrots. And what's
happening right now, the federal government is closed because Donald
Trump does not want to give more money for health care premiums, which
means because of tax cuts for very wealthy people, which means that all
of these people who voted for him are about to get kicked off their
health care.
They're about to not be able to afford to pay their premiums.
Right.
And I know that strategically, you and I've talked about this, the
Democrats have carved out a nice little strategy for themselves that,
you know, if they hold the Republicans over a barrel over these
Obamacare premiums, that they'll cry uncle at some point.
And maybe they will.
But maybe they won't.
There's
a part and maybe they won't. There's a part of me that wonders whether
it might make sense for at this point for folks to understand what it
feels like to touch the hot stove.
And I just, you know, I wonder when Donald Trump says, oh, these are Democrat programs.
So I, as you and I have talked about, I've been to tons of Trump rallies.
A lot of his people are on Medicare.
A lot of his people are on Medicaid.
A lot of his people are on Obamacare.
They may not fully understand that, but they are on Obamacare.
And
they're going to start to feel these premium increases that, you know,
as Marjorie Taylor Greene was saying about her own kids, maybe what
doubling or whatever for a lot of Americans.
And
I think that, you know, that there may be a scenario where some folks
are just going to have to get that sticker shock and understand like,
oh, yeah, this is important.
Look what's happening to the farmers in the Midwest where Trump is going to give billions of dollars to Argentina.
And now we're going to buy Argentinian beef because the price of beef is too high in this country.
And the cattle farmers are like, what the fuck?
We just voted you back into office and you're screwing us already.
Yes. And he is. And the answer is he's screwing you already.
People should have known this the first time and not done this the second time.
But here we are learning these lessons all over again.
And I mean, this is the other thing that I would say about where we are at this moment.
It's
that we one of the big problems about Trump 1.0 was that you could
never convince people that Trump was going to do what he said he was
going to do because he wasn't able to do them the last time.
And
I think that's a real. So talk about that. Well, I mean, I mean, when
he was running for reelection in 2020, I talked to one of his top
advisers who said, you know, if he gets back into the White House a
second time, it's going to be Trumpism on steroids.
And
now what we're getting, we didn't get that because Joe Biden won in
2020. What we're getting now is Trumpism on steroids and crystal meth.
We're getting just sort of Trump unleashed, you know, every dark, you
know, horrible thing that's going on inside of him is just being
unleashed on all of us.
And it's manifesting itself at, oh, I'm just going to destroy a giant part of the White House complex.
And, you know, I tell people buckle up because I think there's you have to understand the way his mind works.
He thinks and he thinks out very devious schemes.
And then as soon as he's achieved one of those schemes, his mind is already working on the next one.
And
I would not be you look at these these renderings of what the ballroom
is going to look like compared to the rest of the White House.
It's 90,000 square foot compared to the White House executive residence itself is 55,000
if you exclude the east and west wings.
My guess is he already has in mind that he would like to demolish the west wing and rebuild
the west wing to look like the east wing.
And so you just have to understand this is how he works.
This is how the people around him work.
They will lie to the public and say, oh, no, it's not going to touch the existing building.
And then they'll blow it the fuck up.
And he's going to say, oh, that's all we're going to do.
We're just going to do the east wing.
And then guess what? The bulldozers are going to show up to knock down the West Wing.
This is just the new normal that we're in right now or the totally fucked up abnormal that we're in right now.
It's
just going to continue. And I think what we're building up to, in my
view, is we're building up to a massive voter revolt in 2026.
Yes, I think so.
And we can talk about that. And I think that is going to keep building up to a massive voter revolt in 2028.
You
know, one of the things that I'm glad you talked about here is that I
truly believe that that this is not I mean, he's the most unpopular he's
ever been.
Yes, ever. And there's a reason for that, because my man does not give a fuck.
I think that what happened was Trump 1.0 was a disaster for a lot of people.
But, you know, covid was an incredible kind of amnesiatic.
Right. It created a sort of amnesia. People were traumatized. They didn't remember.
They didn't know what happened. And then Biden made, I think, really the biggest mistake that
anyone has ever made in the messaging world, which is he really didn't do any interviews.
So everyone got mad. You know, the mainstream media was pissed at him. Everybody forgot that
he was president. People stopped caring about it. And then you and I mean, is that his?
There's
also something stupid that was going on in the media, and let's just
face it, where they felt this is where the both sides thing became so
toxic and poisonous.
Correct.
Where
it was like, well, we were so tough on Trump because he was an out of
control maniac by Democratic zealot and so on that we have to treat
Biden as, you know, this nefarious thing that's happening as well.
And he just wasn't.
Right. Exactly.
I
wanted to bring broadband to the masses and build new rail lines and,
you know, do things that like presidents in the 20th century did.
If
Joe Biden maybe made one big mistake, it was that he kind of acted like
a 20th century president in a world where Donald Trump and the
Republicans don't give a fuck.
And they're just going to try to ram everything down your throat.
And when you get pissed about it, they're just going to troll and taunt their way out of it.
And the Biden messaging machine was just way behind that curve.
oh yeah send them all to the hague i mean send that those that was the worst messaging and you
know i would say to them you guys like nobody knows what you're doing so nobody knows what
you're doing nobody knows what you're doing and and it was like i and and i do think like you cannot
you absolutely just can't you can't just sort of pray that people are going to be able to figure
what you're doing. Yeah. And this is where I have a beef with the media because Biden being old and
stumbling and stuttering or their messaging not being good or whatever the fuck that was going
wrong when Joe Biden was president, none of that measures up to what Donald Trump did in his first
term or the way his first term ended. And it doesn't measure up to the threat that he posed
during those four years when he was a disgraced ex-president of office. It doesn't measure.
So we've kind of gotten ourselves into, as my mother likes to say, you make your bed, you lie in it.
And I think that the press is now kind of getting their noses rubbed in it.
Let's talk about the Pentagon.
The Pentagon.
The press gets kicked out of the Pentagon.
They've got Michael Lindell.
And they have a new press corps.
It's the Pizzagate guy.
That guy.
I love that guy.
And there's Michael Lindell TV, right?
There's like MyPillow TV.
But also then there's there's pizza. There's Jack Posobiec.
Jack Posobiec, the Pizzagate guy. Yeah. Yeah. I love Jack Posobiec.
So, yeah. So and it's Brian Glenn in the Oval Office.
And,
you know, I'm just kind of way. And the way that the press this just
this past week has covered Trump bulldozing the east wing of the White
House has just been a colossal failure.
It has just been an abysmal failure in terms of coverage.
It has not met the moment for the last nine or 10 months.
It didn't meet it this past week.
And I think that is why people are gravitating to podcasts and independent media, new media, and so on.
They're just like, oh, I turn off the night and the news.
It's just sort of like.
It's also part of it is like.
Seriously.
Yeah.
You can't.
There is when one party no longer believes in democracy.
Yes.
And how do you say like one side is bad and the other side wants to give you glasses, wants insurance to pay for glasses?
Like, right.
I do think that the media is so small right now.
Like, I don't know where you get that reporting that you need in order to have checks and balances.
Like independent media is great.
I have a sub stack.
You have a sub stack.
You have a humongous sub stack.
I have a tiny, tiny sub stack.
Well, we're going to I'm going to just we're going to have a little I have a little.
But
but but the point is, like, there's a lot of great opinion stuff on
Substack, but like the reporting is expensive and it's expensive.
Now, I'm trying to do a little bit more of that. Like I went down to the White House this week.
I talked to people about the East Wing coming down. Did they chase you out of the park?
No, I mean, they they have basically locked down the park and cordoned off and put up so much construction.
Explain
what's happened. So the East Wing, the Treasury Department faces the
East Wing. And so people who are working in Treasury started posting
pictures of the demolition.
And then the Treasury Department said, we don't want our employees to send out any more pictures.
Right.
And,
you know, and then they did it anyway. And I mean, so what I did was I
kind of know the grounds and how they work and where the fences are and
the gaps in the fences and stuff.
So I knew I had to go to basically the south facing entrance of the Treasury Department.
And if you look through a little tiny crack in the fence and hold your iPhone 16 up.
It's like Moscow.
You can zoom in all the way and see the destruction of the East Wing.
So
that's what I did and talked to some folks down there about, you know,
it's kind of become a little bit of a dystopian tourist attraction,
Molly.
And
that they're like, just like regular Americans, tourists are on
vacation or going over there to look at the East Wing being torn down
and loaded onto dump trucks and carted out.
But they put up so much fencing and construction barriers and things around the project.
They've tried to make it very difficult for people to see what's happening.
But they forget the fact that, oh, there are people in the Treasury Department who take pictures.
There's a lady on Twitter last night who posted a picture.
She flew over her flight.
Yeah, I saw that.
It flew over and she put out this beautiful picture.
It's it's just so sad.
The whole goddamn East Wing is gone.
It's just dirt.
And more importantly than anything, it's not his house to destroy.
It's not his house to destroy.
I talked to a White House historian who was the chief historian for the White House Historical Society.
Yeah, that guy must be fucking.
Is he mad or is he sad?
He's so mad and sad.
He said he he calls himself this guy, Ed Lengel, calls himself a conservative.
and said that Thomas Jefferson would be ballistically insane over what Donald Trump has done and that
the founding fathers are getting smacked in the face because they did not want the White House to
be a palace. They didn't want it to be a symbol of the aristocracy. This is exactly what Donald
Trump holds up the pictures of President Liberace's ballroom. That's exactly what he's trying to pull
off and it's just not who we are and i think like people should think it is who we are at this point
it's i mean that's the difference between trump 1.0 and 2.0 is 1.0 is like this is not who we are
2.0 is like nope this is who we are well and and the fact that you have corporate sponsors like
their nascar you know racing cars google altria i mean you go through the list of the sponsors
pretty bad. Pretty sleazy. Pretty swampy. Coinbase. Coinbase. Coinbase. Crypto is like-
It's meta. Meta. Yeah. I mean, does it get more toxic? I mean, it's pretty disgusting.
I mean, I love meta because they don't give a fuck, right? They make tobacco companies
look like children's charities. Basically, yes. A factoid for people to keep in mind,
The
existing executive mansion of the White House, excluding the east and
west wings, is about 55,000 square feet. The ballroom is 90,000 square
feet. This is going to look like, you know, a back to the future to
Biff, whatever his name was, monstrosity. And I mean, there are already
folks who are saying the next Democratic president gets in there, if
we're allowed to have one again, should just tear the fucking thing
down.
And
I also think like it's not you know, we have to just assume that we are
going to have free and fair elections and that we are going to fight to
preserve our American democracy.
And this will be a very sad blip on the radar screen of what's happening.
But
I do think like there we're going to need to have a real we're going to
have need to have a real come to Jesus moment about like
anti-corruption legislation.
And, you know, it's got to be a post-Nixion type era where we just passed laws to prevent
a lot of this.
But on steroids.
On steroids.
Yeah.
No, I mean, when Steve Bannon is saying things like, well, he's just going to run again.
And the lady with The Economist goes, but isn't that violating the spirit of the 22nd Amendment?
No, it's violating the goddamn Amendment.
Yes.
Not even the spirit.
But, you know, like Steve Bannon is saying that because, of course, Steve Bannon is.
If Steve Bannon wasn't saying that, you'd be worried.
Well,
that's like Steve Bannon knows that the only thing worse for Trump than
being a danger to the Constitution, which he doesn't give a fuck about,
is being a lame duck.
And so these guys do not want you to think he's a lame duck.
But I'm telling you, he will be 83 years old.
Not all he will be.
So this time he was the oldest person ever to be president at 79.
So now he's going to run again and he will be four years older than the oldest person ever to be president.
I tell people, though, Fidel Castro lived into his 90s.
You know what I mean?
So, like, you know.
But it doesn't.
But, you know, it's not up to him.
Evil has a long shelf life, sadly.
It's not up to him.
It's not up to him.
It's not up to him.
It's up to us, the American people.
And, like, we have our norms and institutions and we have to keep going.
And
that's what you were saying earlier, like be optimistic. And I, you
know, I'm optimistic too, because I think that Donald Trump, as he went
out with a bang last time, is going to go out with a boom this time. And
he is going to get people so pissed off and so fired up that we will
see a voters revolt in this country. And you just have to hold out hope
for that.
No,
I mean, I think we're there. It's just a question of like, do we we
need to make sure those people get to the polls free, fair, safe
elections?
Absolutely.
And that's what we're going to see. But I'm telling you, we are in
like, you know, one point out was like we're in historic times.
Two point out is like we're in fucking whatever this is, man.
Yeah. No, I mean, this is like, you know, this is the Mad Max sequel of our democracy.
And we are going to have to.
Thunderdome time.
You know, Fury Road, we're going to have to drive through the bad guys.
Yeah.
And fight the bad guys and get past the bad guys to get to the green place.
And I just, you know, I think that people need to steel themselves for what is likely to be a long struggle.
And
he is going to, and he's already beginning to do this, become very
desperate and try to concoct ways to prevent what he knows is coming
from happening.
Yeah. Yeah. No, he doesn't want to face an investigation because he knows that he's going to go to jail, just like Elon Musk.
The mush.
So all in on this presidency because he knew that otherwise he'd be in big trouble.
And we still haven't seen the Epstein files, by the way.
I'm just going to say, like, you know, that thing's on the horizon, too.
Yeah, correct.
Jim Acosta.
Good to see you.
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