Transcript
Livy Dunn (0:01)
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Amber Ruffin (0:57)
Like, hey, that's your free speech and blah blah, blah. Because originally when I lost the White.
Joy Reid (1:02)
House correspondence, talk about how, how did they tell you? Did you get an email? Like, did what happened? How did you find out you were no longer doing it?
Amber Ruffin (1:08)
We like, you acted wild on a podcast and you lost White House correspondence center. I was like, yeah, man.
Joy Reid (1:15)
What did you say on the podcast?
Amber Ruffin (1:16)
Wild.
Joy Reid (1:32)
Hey, it's the B to the A, the s, the I Cs like, welcome to the Joy Reed Show. I am so excited to have you here. I've got my coffee cup ready to go and we've got a great interview with the hilarious and wonderful Amber Ruffin. And yes, I did ask her about that dinner and we're going to get to that shortly. But first, we begin with what I think is the question of the day in the year of our Lord 2025. And that question is what the actual. I'm sorry, Saints. I am so sorry for cussing on my first show. But seriously, I know that y' all are thinking it too. I mean, what is happening to this country? What's with these back and forth tariffs that have already wrecked our economy and that even the Rupert Murdoch Wall Street Journal says could put us in a recession, but that Trump can't even stick with for five minutes? It is so bad. Wall Street Bros have even coined the term taco trade, which stands for Trump always chickens out on tariffs. Now, thankfully, the courts are shooting down some of these tariffs for which he's now apparently beefing with Leonard Leo. The same Leonard Leo who built the right wing Supreme Court majority that yes, knocked down his big Ugly tariffs. I mean they're right wingers, they serve money. But who also gave him absolute immunity so he can crime at will. And yes, I know Jake Tapper and them are obsessed with Joe Biden, but Trump is unhinged, you have to admit it. And his brain clearly don't work good. The man cannot finish the sentence without slurring or his mind swerving into weird places, including ruminating on the man parts of a dead golfer. His latest rant was about the guy who built the segregated Levitt towns having trophy wives because you know, that matters to West Point grads. He is clearly negatively obsessed with Harvard, which leads me to wonder if maybe he didn't get into Harvard. I mean maybe the school wouldn't take a check from his tax dodging late father to let him in like Upenn did. I've also always wondered that about his friend Tuckhams. And sorry, who's even in charge at this point? While Trump is jet setting around the world accepting used luxury jets from countries he used to call terrorists and selling crypto meme coins to random rich people and maybe foreigners who get to have dinner with him and the presidential seal, I demand to know who is producing this insane reality show that we're stuck in. Also why are we paying for his golf trips and why why so many golf trips? Also is this creeper in charge? Or maybe his wife or chainsaw? And why are they always together? And doesn't chain Saw have like a dozen kids to take care of and ketamine bills to focus on? Maybe another electric car company to ruin? He clearly seems to be making bank on his fake agency Doge feeding our federal government into a wood chipper for much less savings than he promised and purchasing a second insane Donald Trump presidency has handed him even more government contract welfare than he had before plus a get out of investigations free card. Also, the regime is possibly forcing foreign countries to sign up for Starlink and punishing his former home country South Africa with 30% tariffs and by deep sixing USAID, the agency that helped end apartheid. So he's gotta be happy. Plus he'll soon have some new Afrikaner friends to hang out with in America. They claim to be refugee farmers who left their farms behind for some reason. By the way, while shredding the federal government hasn't saved us much money, it is jeopardizing Social Security and Medicaid so people aren't even sure they'll be able to retire or get health care. And I don't recall Trump running on any of that, as I recall, he, he ran on making things cost less, and last I checked, they cost more. Also, have you noticed that your student loan payments have started back up, including the collections that Biden paused. Also, am I the only one getting like 10 times more scam calls and texts? Why is there so much scamming? And why are people getting literally snatched off the streets by masked men, dragged into random vans and tossed into detainment for weeks sometimes, like it's 1930s Munich. Why is ice showing up at schools and restaurant kitchens and people's immigration hearings and arresting people who sometimes turn out to be US citizens, harassing people based on the color of their skin and locking them up sometimes hundreds of miles from their home cities without even a hearing, or even in foreign jails in El Salvador or now apparently in South Sudan. Sorry, why are any African or Central American or South American countries going along with this fascist madness? Do their leaders not have any sense of solidarity with the very people of the global south that the Trump regime is attacking? Has anyone called the Hague? You did see that the same right wing Supreme Court, the majority who Trump was screaming at on his busted social media just cleared the way for the regime to expel half a million Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Haitians and Cubans by allowing these monsters to revoke their humanitarian parole, Right? All to get to Trump's magic number of the biggest mass deportation in history, which they failed at so far. Lots of dramatic arrests, but Biden deportation numbers and we can't have that. Justice Jackson was right to condemn it as allowing the government to do what it wants to do regardlessrendering constraints of law irrelevant and unleashing devastation in the process. She's almost too eloquent for the kind of rot being unleashed by the Leonard Leo gang that she's forced to serve with. And do these guys even see their shadows? Why is the United States of America bowing to the maniacal hatreds of people like them and pushing that hatred as policy, when for decades we've been the ones condemning countries like Cuba and Venezuela and Haiti and Nicaragua for being brutal and unsafe, while also pushing policies that keep them brutal and unsafe? So what now all of a sudden we're not autocratic regime fighting anymore? All the Venezuelans and Cubans could just go back home now that we're an autocracy too. Has anyone told right wing Cuban and Venezuelan Trump loving South Florida? Since when do Republicans hate Venezuelans and Cubans? Oh yeah, that's right. They're the ones here in the kinds of numbers that can up the deportation rate so they're expendable regardless of how Republican their American families vote. I mean, we already knew how Trump and MAGA feel about Haitians under the Trump regime. The United States is now the country that's deporting not just exiles in danger of persecution if they go back, but also kids with cancer. We are the country that's defunding aids, medicine and other badly needed treatments around the world, which will make people die and make their families justifiably blame America. We are the country where brown and black children are afraid to go to school for fear they'll be snatched or that their parents will be dragged off by ICE before they get home to have a snack and do their homework. We are the country where you can get arrested, detained and deported for writing an op ed that the government doesn't like it's giving Russia. And where restaurant kitchens and farm fields and construction sites are emptying because dishwashers and cooks and farm workers and carpenters are afraid to go to work. I am thoroughly convinced that Stephen Miller and Tom Homan and Donald Trump would have deported Jesus and slept like babies afterwards, especially after they realized that he was brown and the fake exile himself, Marco Rubio, whose family came here under no duress from the very country he now proudly helps to ship his brothers and sisters back to. And that the media used to gush was the Latino Obama has turned out to be the Latino Clarence Thomas instead. What do these people think our economy is going to look like if they get the millions of brown people gone that they're salivating for? Do they really, honestly think that they can stop the clock on that 2042 estimated date when the US no longer has a white majority? If they do, they're not really that good at math. And while we're at it, why is this administration saying that they can ignore the courts and the Constitution and the right to habeas corpus, meaning an actual hearing before you get sent to jail? Trump got hearings for his crimes, including his 88 count felony and the sexual abuse case that E. Jean Carroll filed and won. If hearings and trials were good enough for him, why aren't they good enough for everyone else? And then there are the people that the regime does plan to put on trial. For instance, they arrested a Congresswoman Lamonica McIver for the apparent crime of daring to do oversight over a private prison that's holding the migrants Homan and Miller are salivating to deport. And for the further apparent crime of being in the way of ICE agents who were shoving an elder congresswoman while arresting the sitting mayor of Newark. Odd that these are three African Americans. And I am sure that is completely coincidental. Trump is so desperate to paint an insurrection on anyone other than the violent MAGA horde that attacked our Capitol on January 6, 2021, when he tried illegally to stay in office after getting whooped by Joe Biden. He has turned the whole Justice Department, and I have to say that in scare quotes, into a revenge machine. Any law firm, any Justice Department lawyer, any, anyone who tried to hold him to account ever, must be subjected to legal persecution. It's got everyone so shook, news organizations are bending the knee. And that is truly scary. This while he's pardoning not just the insurrectionists, even the most violent ones, but also every crook and scammer from reality TV and apparently from hip hop lore. Gotta feed black MAGA too, I guess. And maybe also anyone willing to pay him. Why is all this happening? Trump has made such a joke of our government. There are more Regulars from the 90s era, Oprah Winfrey show and Fox in his cabinet than actual experts at anything. I mean, no black people are allowed to have jobs, but these people. I mean, do you ever just sit back, just sit back and take in and wrap your mind around the fact that RFK Jr and Dr. Oz are in charge of our health care? I mean, we're all going to die of the measles. Podcast stars are running the FBI and national intel. The guy from the real world is in charge of aviation. Just honk if you're afraid to fly. The Attorney General mainly does FOX hits all day while maybe signing off on investigating companies for hiring too many black people. And earth to maga. The rest of the world does not fear Trump or respect him. They are laughing at him or rolling their eyes and trying to figure out how they can begin to get by without America. By the way, is the Signal Chat guy sober? You know, the signal chat guy from Fox? I pray that he's sober, because Trump can't seem to decide if he wants to buy Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal or launch three separate wars to steal them. And he would be in charge. And God help everyone in Gaza, because he's clearly going to let them all die so he can, what, build a Trump resort on their charred remains? Does Bibi get a timeshare in this genocidal madness? And also, why is the evidence that black people, women and gays ever existed in the military, science or US History being deleted from government records? Actually, I think we all know the Answer to that one. Bottom line, what really seems to be clear is that Donald Trump is definitely in charge of the casting, because these clowns that he has in charge are his people. But what's not clear to me is that he is actually running the country. He and his grimy adult children seem to be spending most of their time enriching themselves in a way that makes Hunter Biden look like a legitimate saint. While every insane right wing ideologue is picking off pieces of the Trump presidency to build their own personal versions of the Handmaid's Tale, it's every kooky right wing conspiracy theorist, grifter, and crypto AI entrepreneur for himself. Everybody gets a chance to ride the Trump train and get rich off the public dime. And that does lead me back to the question of why, why, why are they doing all of this? Is it that Republicans just hate multiracial modern America so much that they've decided to burn it to the ground? Like the ancestors torched the Nottoway plantation in Louisiana, or maybe they've seen secret intel that the world is soon going to end for real, so they've decided to just strip the US for parts and move with Elon to Mars. Honestly, I kind of wish they'd just go already. The just sheer chaos that these people are unleashing may seem random, but to tell you the truth, I don't think it is. I have always liked to say that when a lot of wild stories are being thrown at you, the way that you look at them, or the way to look at them is as one big story with many chaotic parts. So just ask yourself, why allow this much chaos to surround the White House? Who gains from it other than Elon and the other South African and American billionaires who were scoring all the contracts? When I look at this mess from the standpoint of the history of this country, it seems to me that what's happening with Trump and his band of misfits is the same thing that the very rich have been trying to do since before this country was even a country. Because the reality is, this country did not start out as a democracy. It started out as an oligarchy with a small number of very rich European men, mostly big plantation owners running everything, and poor European settlers, small farmers and indentured workers alongside enslaved Africans forming the labor force, while indigenous people basically got wiped out by germs and got their land stolen thanks to guns. And we remained pretty much an oligarchy until the Civil War overturned the slave system and Reconstruction gave black Americans a taste of Freedom and a chance at political power in the American dream. That was 12 years of relatively stable multiracial democracy. But it was put down violently in 1877 after the Union troops left the South. And the Republican party at that time switched from abolition to backing the super rich men whose fortunes were made not by being plantation owners, but by being the industrialists who powered the union side in the Civil War. America basically traded a planter aristocracy for a railroad and steel mill version. Just think for a minute about the Gilded Age. The super rich at that time, the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Vanderbilts, the Morgans, they lived almost as well as European kings. And because they were new money from steel mills and railroads and oil fields, they wouldn't have even been in the King's court in Europe. But here they lived large, while the average steel worker or shirt factory worker often died poor and young, if they were even an adult to begin with. And these new oligarchs amassed that wealth and left it to their heirs, tax free. Meanwhile, black farm workers who stayed in the south lived little better than they and their parents did during slavery, because again, the planter class was trying to stay as rich as possible, which meant low wages and brutal, brutal social repression. And those who fled north found themselves fighting discrimination and fierce ethnic competition with immigrants over jobs and places to live. And even those who made money and built successful communities had to keep an eye out for Klan gangs eager to burn those communities to the ground or lynch any black man, woman or child or who made them mad. Same for Chinese and Jewish immigrants and Irish and Italian Catholics. Always one good eye out for the Klan, who resented the presence of all these non WASPs. But the rich industrialists, they took full advantage of the abundant labor. What did they care about the social issues? It was all about the Benjamins. Sure, they had to deal with a few nasty recessions here and there and some labor strikes. And you know, in those cases, they basically just let their security or local police deal with it by shooting people. So mostly good times. Good times. And then came the great 20th century, or if you're conservative, the horrible 20th century whose reforms that helped working people made rich people very unhappy. Starting with the 1913 income tax under otherwise horrible Woodrow Wilson, which the super rich have been fighting ever since. The 20th century is called the American century for good reason, because a whole bunch of Americans who had almost no rights before 1900 got lots of rights after. That includes laborers of all races who were increasingly unionized. It included the end of child labor and the right of white Women to vote in 1919, black women took decades longer. The New Deal, which was the reaction to the damaging oligarchic economic policies of successive Republican presidents. Then came the first and the second World wars that pulled white women into the workforce. After that second one, baby, they never really went back. And FDR's new deal, which began to level the economic playing field between the rich and the rest. You see where I'm going. World War II left Europe in shambles, but it left America full of cash and confidence. By the 1950s, there was a relatively flat distance between the CEO class and the working class, mainly because the top incremental tax rate was north of like 90%. The average white guy could have a normal non college job and also a fishing home in the mountains and a boat. His wife could have a new refrigerator and an automatic vacuum cleaner and probably day drink herself into a stupor wondering why she was so bored. In the decades that followed, we switched from being a primarily industrial society that built trains, planes and automobiles, but also electronics and televisions and radios and refrigerators, to a consumer economy that mostly bought those things and had to compete with Asian countries and eventually Europe, especially for the cars. By the 1980s, and even more so in the 1990s, our economy was really driven by consumption and on low prices for imported goods. Economists call this era the great 20th century, the great flattening. And along with those expanded economic opportunities and broad prosperity, the 20th century brought another major shift in the culture towards greater racial and gender, social equality, racial integration. Hard fought and ugly, but it largely happened. More visibility and equality for LGBTQ people. And hell, by the early 21st century, we even got a black president and damn near had a woman twice. It certainly wasn't perfect, but we became modern. And modern ain't so good for oligarchs. What we are seeing in all of this chaos is a fight to repeal the 20th century. Sam Alito may be the most viciously vocal about hating that century, but trust me, a lot of them on the right do. Have you read Project 2025? It should be called Project 1825. But the far right has a problem and it is this. How do you get a modern society to give back all the advancements? Americans who've gotten used to letting the invisible undocumented people do all the hard work in the factories and the fields, while our economy mostly runs on consumption, on buying those cheap imported goods and enjoying relative prosperity. Even our poor folks often have cell phones. How do you get people to go back to a time when working Class people often died poor, uneducated and sick with only whatever they could scrimp together and save on their own for retirement. No social safety net, relying on religious charities to eat while the super rich left their fortunes again to their heirs untaxed. How do we get people to go back to the Gilded Age? How do you get people to go back to labor having few or no rights, women having few or no rights even over their own bodies, dying of sepsis because they're having a miscarriage or being thrown into prison for having an abortion, or doctors too afraid to treat them? Black folks and brown folks being openly discriminated against when looking for jobs, education or opportunities or grants. Children living unvaccinated with no protections against the measles, the mumps or Covid people just doing their own home experiments to try to cure deadly diseases that were dealt with decades ago. What if more of them come back? Are we so gone on conspiracy theories and reality TV that we'll just go along with it, with stripping ourselves of everything modern and go back to a pre 20th century age just so a handful of super wealthy right wing ideologues don't have to see drag queens or hear Spanish in public? How do you get Americans to go back to give up the benefits of health care, a decent retirement, unionized labor, women's rights, gay rights, civil rights? How do you go back to racial and gender hierarchy when whole generations of us have grown up without it? Well, it helps to make people afraid, make them feel destabilized and exhausted and keep them that way all the time. Especially the people that you're trying to suppress. The civil servants, the artists, the academics, the left, the journalists, the women, even the corporations, the people that might dare to protest, make them afraid to resist. That's how authoritarianism and fascism always work. It also helps to have an entertainer in the most visible political positions, someone charismatic who can rally the loyalists and keep them happy and entertained while their pockets are getting picked. And that is where Donald Trump and his clown posse come in. What does the Salvadoran version of Trump call himself? He calls himself the world's coolest dictator. The Argentinian version, Milei, a character the Hungarian version performs at conservative conventions like cpac. And of course there's Putin. He wrestles bears. So entertaining. The strongman model is pretty much all the same. And they always get really conveniently mega rich and they do not leave office. If you want to understand why Republicans who, let's be honest, mainly despise Donald Trump and say so on background to reporters Tolerate everything he does, including his blatant corruption, his destruction of their party's moral integrity, his twisting of American Christianity into a mockery of itself, his gross immorality, his blatant lawlessness, even his designs on becoming a king. Why do they let him do all of that? Well, it's because he and his cult of personality allows them to do something that this party, the Republicans who switched again from abolition to greed during the Gilded Age, abandoning their former legacy to get in with the super rich. It enables them to get a majority of white Americans who became affixed to the party due to their broad opposition to racial change, to get them and a small number of non white American working class people to willingly give up everything that was gained in the 20th century and allow the oligarchy to be great again. And to get us back there, the people Republicans serve, these elite, extravagantly wealthy men and women, these billionaires are willing to toss democracy literally in the trash heap and go straight past oligarchy to authoritarianism, even fascism, in order to ensure that they will never be taxed or regulated again, or that anything will stand in the way of their unlimited wealth. These people are waging war against everything that defined America in the American century. Cultural pluralism, women's rights, civil rights, even integration and a try for racial equality. And they are pushing hard and fast to drag America backwards to the time before the 20th century, to the Gilded Age, when apparently America was great because it was extremely unequal. They've got five, sometimes six Supreme Court justices in the bag and Clarence works for tips and trips. There's also a media ecosystem that they've got firmly in hand to keep the base on message and angry at all times, and also entertained the Trump chaos that is designed to entertain his people. The cruel arrests and degradation of immigrants, their demonization, that is the secret sauce designed to get millions of Americans to cheer for the cruelty and play ball. Because those are the people to blame. Those are the people to hate, even as they themselves maybe lose everything. And letting Trump grift, well, that is designed to keep him happy and distracted, guaping up bitcoin cash and ordering his minions at the DOJ to investigate and arrest anyone who makes him mad or whoever investigated him for his actual crimes, which his cult of personality will never even believe he committed. And while he and his family are grifting and corrupting and revenging so he can become America's Putin, and while his base get to eat religious zeal instead of affordable bread with a so called return to a Christian nation where the gays and the trans will be punished and the Bible will be read in school. You know, between mass shootings and girls marry as teens and start pumping out the babies for the for the American workforce and women shut up and cook dinner and behave and the brown immigrants get hurt. They get herded, tossed into concentration camps, maybe even killed or all pure entertainment for the base. While a lot of that is screaming across your TV screen and your laptop and your phone till you literally feel like you're going out of your mind. The billionaires are erasing everything you gained and putting every penny into their own pockets.