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 even when Joe Rogan is coming out and saying, wait a second, there's something cruel and unusual and perverse about taking someone who you know is no gang member and hasn't violated the law and is here under legal protections and the asylum system, and you're shipping them off to El Salvador. Even Joe Rogan is saying something is wrong. with these folks.

Why were they given protected status, Tim? Because they were either fleeing a life-changing, cataclysmic earthquake that killed 300,000 Haitians in one shell swoop, or... they were fleeing political violence in Haiti, and they were able to prove that and determine that.

But I raised the Haiti thing for a reason, not just because I'm Haitian, but throughout Latin America. Here's the challenge. Right now, there is a mafia state in Haiti where gangs have basically taken over every aspect of governance in the country, and 90% of the weapons that are on the streets in Haiti that are threatening citizens, come from the United States, right?

So here we are, like taking protective status from a group of people who are vulnerable precisely because of the gun industry in America and the way we kind of look the other way in our parts as a river of death flows from the US, from Florida in particular, straight into Haiti, into the hands of gang members. But we absolve ourselves of that.

And instead we send people who are here under legal protection back into a conflict zone that we have helped to create and exacerbate the conditions for. It's just what's real.

Oh, my God. Now it's time. I remember that job.

Let's start with Governor Whitmer, and then let's go back out to your much bigger question, which I think would be the much more important one. So, on Gretchen Whitmer, if you live in Michigan, you want your governor... to be in direct conversation with the president of the United States. That is always a good thing. That is a necessary thing. We begin there.

Let's recognize, though, that one of the reasons why Governor Whitmer, who I just, I freaking love Governor Whitmer, the reason why she was challenged by many wasn't just because of the meeting.

But the speech that preceded the meeting, she gave an address where she talked about where we're at right now, and she was seen to be insufficiently critical of Donald Trump and the tariffs and all the stuff that you just delineated before in her address. So that's a part of this where people were like, wait a second, is she kind of acquiescing to a thing here? That's part of the challenge.

At the end of the day, even though you want your governor to be in conversation with the president, you want to have clarity on- who your governor is fighting for and what your governor is trying to solve for. And I think that wasn't altogether clear in the engagement that the governor had. And I'm going to be clear with you, Tim, like I'm a huge fan of the governor.

I had an opportunity during the last democratic convention to introduce her at this forum around the care economy. And she has been just a, just a bulwark on that issue and on new industrial policy and fighting for democracy and a woman's right to bow your tummy, all the things. So huge fan of the governors.

And she is one of the best narrators of the challenges and the opportunities that we have in the party. But that being said, she was caught in an awkward spot. And I think that she was caught in an awkward spot because there wasn't clarity on goal, mission, and what you're fighting for. And we need that clarity always. Now,

So I'm going to thread that a little differently, Tim, right? So there's no doubt that I have always been a kind of a partisan warrior. And I'm somebody who thinks, like Mike Tyson, that you have to get the first punch off and that changes everything inside of the ring. So I would agree with you on that. And I don't think that there's this binary thing between...

you know, being the party that lays out an art store for the future versus like fighting the proximate fight that we have in front of us right now. You need to be able to do everything everywhere all at once. You have to do everything except for play pasta, never play pasta that you can't do. Okay. But, Let me just say something in defense of government policy. You know what, Tim?

There's nothing wrong with us being caught listening for once. We haven't been caught listening. That was a big problem. We weren't caught listening on immigration. We weren't caught listening on cost of living. We weren't caught listening on a number of issues that people care profoundly about. We weren't caught listening on the housing crisis.

the middle class family have been faced with for many, many years now. So being caught listening is a good thing, but you kind of have to mobilize the lessons in a hurry. Like, all right, so what is it that we're hearing in real time? And who are the villains here in the story? And what are we doing to push back effectively against them?

So I do think that this is a moment for not to just be oppositional, but to be definitional about where we're trying to take the country forward. Is that right, though? Let me just challenge that for a second.

Mitch McConnell got lucky because let's be honest. Mitch McConnell said, we're going to do everything we can to make this guy fail. And they failed to do that. Last time I checked, Barack Obama got reelected. even though unemployment was near double digits at the time.

So, Mitch McConnell's enterprise was a failed enterprise, and then Republicans lucked up after that in 2016, where this savant who has this kind of negative charisma and a gift for the moment, like, comes in. And let's never forget, Tim, that before Donald Trump uh, subdues Hillary Clinton and democratic party. He had the first bring to heel institutional Republicans, never forget that.

So this, this moment is not a Mitch McConnell victory or a victory for all these folks who all have been kind of had to suck it up, uh, for the extreme wing of their party.

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