Luke Broadwater
speaker
94 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 22 May
Luke Broadwater’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah. Two of the, uh, I guess we could call them characters in the book, were Steve Bannon and Russell Vogt, who now are wielding even more influence in the Trump administration. And we document in this book how they were able to sort of dictate how things were happening on Capitol Hill through their allies in the House Republicans and also through their influence, especially on Bannon's podcast.
He was able to text directly with members and acted in some cases like a stage parent, sort of coaching them on how to approach certain situations to get the most MAGA outcome.
I mean, it looks to me like they are embracing Elon Musk and his mission very much so. Each chamber has set up its own doge caucus, and they are trying to implement his cuts into their various spending plans. When he comes to Capitol Hill— He gave out his private cell phone number to members. He has tried to court people individually. And he's posing for pictures.
But Elon Musk, his polling is much lower than Donald Trump's. The public at large does not feel the same way they feel about Trump as they do with Elon Musk. And Democrats, I believe, are focusing in on him as perhaps their best target. He wasn't elected. He's extremely rich. They know that there's a lot of populist anger against the wealthy.
And so if the richest man in the world who has all these contracts with the federal government is coming in slashing the jobs of, you know, regular workers, and there are, you know, federal workers not just in D.C. but all over the country, you know, you can see how that could be a potent political weapon for Democrats to wield. Yeah.
I think that that is one of the very salient points that you've made. As Elon Musk and Doge are cutting small agencies and saving pennies on the dollar, the House Republicans are planning to extend these tax cuts and they're planning to raise the debt by $4 trillion.
And so there's a bit of discordant notes within the Republican Party about how much they actually care about the debt because the bigger actions they're taking are going to increase the debt. And one could see dismantling the Department of Education and dismantling USAID and
and laying off probationary workers as, you know, very, very small dollar figures compared to the amount of debt that they are going to be increasing. And so, you know, I don't know how Republican voters process that. It seems that many care about the debt when it's under a Democrat but don't care when it's under a Republican. But this Congress is planning to raise the debt significantly.
And in the book, we take you inside the room for a private one-on-one meeting between Marjorie Taylor Greene and Mike Johnson as she's trying to kick him out as speaker and he's trying to fund Ukraine. And the showdown between these two is pretty incredible. So I would encourage people when they get the book to read that chapter.
It's kind of gross, but they get paid $177,000, which I think to most people sounds like a lot of money. But D.C., it's extremely expensive to live in D.C., and then you have a family back home and probably a house or a mortgage or at least an apartment back home. And so you have two residences, and it becomes kind of untenable for them to deal on one salary unless you're independently wealthy.
Which a lot of them are. Yeah, a lot of the members of Congress and a lot of the senators are extremely wealthy. But if you're somebody like AOC or somebody else who comes from smaller means, it does become quite difficult.
Thank you.
Hi. Thanks for having me.
You're right. There's been a lot of concern since the start of the Trump administration about what would happen when or if the president began to disregard judicial rulings. And I would say this weekend was the starkest example to date of the president pushing the boundaries against the federal judiciary. And we saw the executive branch battling it out in court with the judiciary.
And it's really reached a fever pitch here in Washington. And it all concerns the deportation of about 200 migrants from Venezuela to El Salvador.
Well, for a long time, the Trump administration has wanted to deport people from the country faster and more aggressively than what was happening under the Biden administration. And the Trump administration has succeeded in doing that to a large extent. But it's not been fast enough for what President Trump and his top allies want to see. So they have been...
Sort of combing through old laws, old statutes to try to figure out how they can get more people out of the country as quickly as possible without so many judges and reviews and hearings standing in their way. And so. On Friday, the president takes an extraordinary step.
He signs an executive order in which he invokes wartime powers from the 1700s called the Alien Enemies Act, which is really supposed to apply to a time of war. Mm-hmm. He claims the United States is being invaded and the order targets a criminal gang from Venezuela.
And using this authority, he argues he is able to bypass the normal system of judicial review and deport hundreds of migrants to holding cells in El Salvador.
That's absolutely right. What's happened here is the United States has struck a deal with the government of El Salvador to ship migrants that the United States doesn't want in the country to El Salvador to jail cells there. That is an extraordinary step. And then on top of that, it isn't announced. the border is kept under wraps.
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