Patrick Gaspard

speaker

119 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard 18 Dec

Patrick Gaspard’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.

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The Bulwark Daily · S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption · 10 Apr 2025 podcast

And as a result of that, they've been able to build and transport like 70,000 automobiles per year into the U.S. Companies like Volkswagen, BMW put plants in South Africa because they know that they can work through this trade relationship and contact with the U.S. It's benefited South African workers, but it's also benefited

benefited American consumers, but also American workers who are on this side of the supply chain. It's been good for both sides of the Atlantic.

So it is bizarre that both on the healthcare front and on the trade front, the relationship is basically fractured over this mismaking on the oppression of white South African farmers who now have been granted this special dispensation and asylum that none of them are using because they don't have the problem that Donald Trump is describing. It's bonkers, Tim.

That's a lengthy explanation, probably a little too lengthy here, but that's what's going on.

He's not. But you know what? Donald Trump is following and he's a savant of this. Donald Trump. And this is an interesting thing. When we when we get into the conversation of the you know, what's going on with Republicans and Democrats, it's kind of important to note that Donald Trump is a savant of the media ecosystem that we existed. He understood that.

In this era, there's a way that you can take the subtext and make it the text. And so on right-wing, fringe social media and what we used to call the dark web, which is not just the web, there was loads of foment around this issue and what was happening with Afrikaners in South Africa, what had happened to white farmers in Zimbabwe. And all this stuff about how the changing population in the U.S.

needed to be concerned about this, that farmers in Ohio and Iowa, et cetera, would start to see this kind of thing if we allowed for all the migrants to come into America to take the farm jobs, et cetera, and that they were going to replace white Americans in the heartland. This was like flourishing in the web.

So in that run-up to 2016 election, this guy was really clever at pulling together all the strands of really dark conspiracy theories on the extreme right, platforming them, censoring them, and figuring out how to kind of do a wink and a nod to it all throughout that campaign. So that's a fever that he picked up then that persists to this day. But you ask about Elon Musk.

There's an important element here for those of us who care about corruption, and a thing that we don't talk about here in the U.S., but that we talk about a lot in South Africa, the notion of state capture. Please understand that right as Donald Trump becomes president again, Elon Musk goes back to South Africa.

He has a meeting with the president of South Africa, Sir Raul Posa, and he tries to push on South Africa a deal around Starlink. So here you have a person who is influencing

Donald Trump's direction of travel and his foreign policy, of course, blowing up the government as we know it and blowing up our soft power footprint in USAID and basically punishing South Africa with the drawback that we have from PEPFAR, et cetera, at the same time that the same person who happens to be the richest person in the world is trying to convince the South African government that they should enter into a financial arrangement with him and his private enterprise, Starlink.

All of this stuff gets braided together in ways that we need to do a better job of interrogating and challenging the way Congressman Stephen Horsford, for instance, challenged the U.S. trade rep around whether or not market manipulation was happening. We have to call this stuff out and name it for the American people to be able to recognize it.

I saw that your interview yesterday with Catherine was great and spot on and touched on all the things. And it is important for us to kind of reiterate now that we didn't kind of go back to the normal. And even though the markets rallied for a couple of hours yesterday, the drops are still historic and precipitous.

And economists on the left and right in the center are waking up right now to the reality that's going to take some time to recover from this crisis.

And that 10% thing is a misnomer because we still have 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, on auto, and huge tariffs on... generic pharmaceuticals from India that's going to be hugely problematic for everybody in this country, particularly our seniors are going to be hit in a really pernicious way as a result of this. So all that said, on the economic front, really important, Tim.

But let's talk about that conversation that Steve Horsford had yesterday with the trade rep, as the trade rep is clearly finding out in real time that his boss has pulled the rug out from under him as he's like defending the indefensible. And Steve Horsford and many others say, well, what exactly is going on here?

Because we know that a few hours earlier in the day, Donald Trump, the president of the United States, is going on a social media platform and telling people, signaling, wink nod, now is a really good time to like go and buy. You know, buy low because something may happen that could make the prices run in the other direction. Does it like suggest a hint at insider trading?

It trumpets it like out loud, clearly what this person is saying. There's a psychology to markets and all this pricing is kind of like an emotional construct and that emotion is going up and down. And I'm capable of doing some things, as you well know. that can drive it in one direction or another.

And given that the president has a circle of internal advisors in the White House and external advisors who are overwhelmingly like billionaires who are involved in trading, who benefit directly from market fluctuations,

Everything that we know about this president, everything we know about a president who brings his daughter on to be a special advisor in the first term, and then she gets this preferential deal in China for her handbags during that first term, and all the other things that we can name as obvious points of corruption, it is next to near impossible to imagine that somebody who's turning the faucet on and off about the market isn't

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