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

benefiting in some way directly from that manipulation and isn't indicating to his cohort, this is what I'm going to do 30 minutes from now or an hour from now, and therefore you ought to make a set of trades based on this. It is impossible to believe that of this president and those who are around him.

Yeah, I did catch that. I'm so happy that you kind of unpacked that so clearly for the audience. You said, Tim, that it may be impossible to prove this. I don't think it's impossible to prove it at all.

No, no, no, no, no, but here's the thing. Here's the thing. This is the same administration that recklessly used a signal chat on a national security matter to declare war and then invited a reporter on it. You can trust that these folk have paper trails, they've got digital footprints that are a mile long on everything that they're doing because in addition to being corrupt,

They're also incompetent. And so this stuff will come out. And at some point after 2026, I am confident that Democrats are going to have the gavel back in their hands and in Congress. And that's going to compel a number of investigations around all of this stuff. So things are going to eventually, you know, truth crushed to the earth will rise again on Wi-Fi.

So we're going to we're going to find out some things. The question is, how do we litigate it? How do we narrate it in a way that folks can be repulsed by it and act? accordingly. So it is a very, very real thing. And these are, you know, we're living in a moment of state capture, which I just didn't think that I'd ever be saying about the United States of America.

Tim, so I'd say this, the thing that is the most alarming to me is the thing that's also the most encouraging. Strange thing to say. But the level of state capture, how oligarchy is working in this moment, the fact that we have an

unelected individual who also happens to be the wealthiest person on earth, who also happens to have built his wealth along the spine of government investments from the Pentagon, from the Department of Energy, etc., That person is now determining budgetary outcomes for the very same departments that contract with him. It's astonishing.

And that individual gets to pick winners or losers in the EV sector that, again, he personally benefits from. The fact that this is happening in broad daylight, and the fact that this individual, Elon Musk, is allowed to just kind of hold forth in cabinet meetings and in the Oval Office in a way that

Again, it's not pushed into, it's not interrogated from mainstream Republican leadership is, I think, the most astonishing and the most shocking thing to me. I mean, the very first time that Donald Trump calls Zelensky in the Ukraine after he's elected Elon Musk is in that conversation. He's part of that meeting.

Elon Musk, who provides Starlink resources to the Ukraine military, is making governing calls about this stuff. So the extent of state capture and the kind of naked transparency of it and the fact that it is not being...

interrogated, questioned in any way whatsoever from institutional Republicans, for me, is the most frightening, shocking thing that I worry has now become a new normal that doesn't get rolled back easily at all, irrespective of who's in office.

But why I say that's the most encouraging thing, you know, through our C4 at the Center for American Progress, we've just done tons of polling and lots of research on this. And it's been extraordinary to see for people like me who've always tried to raise the questions about big money in politics and who've got no traction on it.

It's been astonishing to see the reaction that we're seeing from average Americans, not just from Democrats, but self-identified Republicans as well, who are saying that they are concerned. about corruption in government. They are concerned about who's actually in control and running things. Elon Musk is underwater across the board in a way that says there's real salience to these issues.

And that I think really matters. There is a consciousness that's being developed for the American people about this issue. And I think we all got to figure out as political actors, the language that we need in order to like create real campaigns and more momentum to push back against this stuff. It's rapacious.

Oh, man, Tim, you know, I know you're sympathetic and you're empathetic about this. And it was extraordinarily painful to watch, you know, good people in Springfield, Ohio, who were being caricatured in the most ugly way by J.D. Vance and Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and so many others.

Hardworking folk who went to Springfield precisely because there's been a 20 percent drop in the population there last 15 years. And there were jobs that were going wanting. And the Republican governor invited them into the state to kind of do their part for the community. And they revitalized these communities. And to see them attack that way was extraordinary. So yes, my parents are from Haiti.

I was born in the Congo because of My father is somebody who stood up for the notion of democracy and free and fair elections in Haiti at a time when, you know, the Givayer regime was in, at a time when the U.S. was not making good on its rhetoric of protecting democracy, but was actually supporting the dictatorship there.

And my father and hundreds of other Haitians intellectuals had to leave the country because their lives were at risk because they were fighting for democracy. I ended up teaching in the Congo. I was born in the Congo. We eventually immigrated to the U.S. I feel very strongly about that.

This being a space that is inviting that America's prosperity grows because of that invitation to the most enterprising people on the planet, the hardest working people on the planet who come here to make a way when there is no way. And Republicans and Democrats alike have always leaned into that ethos and that story of America. So it is astonishing to see green card holders

who are coming back into the U.S. from work overseas and they're being strip searched at our airports. It's astonishing to see young people who dare to use their voices in the First Amendment spirit of the U.S. being stopped in the streets and, you know, taken into custody and deported as a consequence, even though they've broken no law in the nation. These are shocking things to see.

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