Transcript

LIVE: Trump COLLAPSES IT ALL as WORLD ON BRINK URGENT REPORT!!! | The Weekend Show

From MeidasTouch · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 1 h 2 min · 11,025 words · 107 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "LIVE: Trump COLLAPSES IT ALL as WORLD ON BRINK URGENT REPORT!!! | The Weekend Show", an episode of MeidasTouch published January 12, 2026 (1 h 2 min, about 11,025 words). It mentions 10 people, works and ideas, including Donald Trump, The Midnight Kingdom, Jared Yates Ston, American Rule, Department of Health and Human Services.

What this episode is about

The discussion explores the ramifications of Donald Trump's leadership, framing it as a departure from traditional neoliberalism towards a dictatorial regime, and examines the implications for the future of American politics and governance. Jared Yates Ston critiques the neoliberal order, suggesting it has become broken and calls for a re-evaluation of capitalist systems that prioritize profit over societal well-being.

Key takeaways

  • Neoliberalism isn't just an economic policy; it's capitalism's parasitic evolution, draining host countries dry.
  • Trickle-down economics is the grand illusion; wealth trickles up, leaving the middle and working class high and dry.
  • The rise of Trump exposes a broken trust, turning voters away from traditional parties and towards authoritarian promises.
  • America's imperial past is boomeranging back; our oppression of others is now reflected in our own democracy's decline.
  • In a world of oppressive capitalism, our wardrobes might be stitched together by unseen hands in dire conditions.

Who speaks in this episode?

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 10:00: Donald Trump, American Rule, Jared Yates Ston, The Midnight Kingdom
  2. – 20:00: Department of Health and Human Services, Donald Trump
  3. – 30:00: Donald Trump
  4. – 40:00: Donald Trump
  5. – 50:00: Donald Trump, David Rubin, Heritage Foundation, The Midnight Kingdom
  6. – 1:00:00: Donald Trump, Alexander Dugan, The Midnight Kingdom
  7. – 1:01:47: Jared Yates Ston

Notable quotes from "LIVE: Trump COLLAPSES IT ALL as WORLD ON BRINK URGENT REPORT!!! | The Weekend Show"

  • Former administration and certainly well, most administrations prior to Donald Trump kind of maintained the neoliberal order. But things have changed and Donald Trump has…
    about Donald Trump · at
  • They also come under the banner of cruelty. And I specifically want to mention the Department of Health and Human Services freezing all child care payments to all states and Trump saying states funds will be released only when states prove.
    about Department of Health and Human Services · at
  • These articles or you were making speeches, you were almost guaranteed to go work for the Heritage Foundation, to work for any number of these places. The point is this…
    about Heritage Foundation · at
  • Actually the name the Midnight Kingdom of the book was drawn from the writings of Alexander Dugan who was one of the main ideologues behind Vladimir Putin and remains one of…
    about Alexander Dugan · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Donald Trump — Person · 15 mentions · first at
  • Jared Yates Ston — Person · 2 mentions · first at
    Books including American Rule and The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis. Jared Yates Ston, welcome back to the Weekend Show.
  • David Rubin — Person · 1 mention · first at
    You have Ben Shapiro who wanted to be a screenwriter and was fa who was a failed screenwriter. You have David Rubin who wanted to be a comedian and failed one time after…
  • Alexander Dugan — Person · 1 mention · first at
  • Kia Starmer — Person · 1 mention

Books & papers

  • The Midnight Kingdom — Book · 3 mentions · first at
    And commentator of American culture and politics. He's the author of several books including American Rule and The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis. Jared Yates Ston, welcome back to the Weekend Show.
  • American Rule — Book · 1 mention · first at
    And commentator of American culture and politics. He's the author of several books including American Rule and The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis. Jared Yates Ston, welcome back to the Weekend Show.
  • The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis — Book · 1 mention

Companies & orgs

Full transcript with timestamps

It's Sunday, January 11, 2026. I'm Anthony Davis. Welcome to the Weekend Show, where we make the time to consider the news of the week. You can support my work and independent journalism at patreon.com/5minutnews. Our guest today is a celebrated writer and commentator of American culture and politics. He's the author of several books including American Rule and The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis. Jared Yates Ston, welcome back to the Weekend Show.

Good to see you, Anthony. Uh Jared, I think of you as my expert on neoliberalism, something that we've spoken about many times. And you often argue that the the status quo with the former administration and certainly uh well, most administrations prior to Donald Trump kind of maintained the neoliberal order. But things have changed and and Donald Trump has clearly exposed himself now as a a full-on dictatorship. Um the way in which he's conducting himself and his policies is very much now up there with dictators of history and and very tragic it is too.

But what does that mean for the former neoliberal order? And if Democrats were to win back the House in the midterms or even the presidency, if there's ever an election again, what does it mean for what clearly was broken as you describe in your writing that neol the neoliberal order was broken previously? So we don't want to go back to a broken system.

So what is the alternative? Well, it it starts with what neoliberalism actually represented. And I think a lot of people get this wrong, Anthony, because it's considered to be this Americanled effort to bring the globe underneath an economic system that would benefit the United States of America. And that's true to an extent, but I think it helps for people to think much more about capitalism almost as a paras a parasitical creature, right? That jumps from host to host and uses it with the host until it doesn't need the host anymore. And in the case of the United States of America uh as as the most powerful and richest country in the world, capitalism used it to create this larger system that came to encompass the entire globe. It changed all of trade.

It it affected the way democracy worked. It actually overrode democracy with a bunch of unelected representatives, unelected institutions that basically controlled everything around the world. And for a while it seemed like this would somehow or another lead to what some would refer to as Pax Americana which was an age of no more wars. You know, everybody was trading with everybody and this system was perfect. And of course, what did we give away in this? We gave away our jobs. We gave away our standard of living. And by the way, the wealthy became wealthier and wealthier. We had this mythology that trickle down economics was eventually going to lead to the riches coming from the wealthiest people all the way down to the rest of us. We all know that's a fiction now. And during the course of neoliberalism, tens of trillions of dollars were redistributed from the working and middle class. And the thing

is, Anthony, we all know this. We may not intellectually understand it, but we all feel it. That's why we have all these conspiracy theories. That's why you you hear about America being betrayed by the deep state, so to speak. And it's also why Trump got elected arguably.

Absolutely. It is because what he was able to do was he was able to give it a story, an easily digestible story. These people hurt you. I'm now going to hurt them, which is cathartic, right? And especially in a period of time in which you do feel intuitively and instinctually that the people who are elected are not taking care of you. And around the world, in order for this system to work, Anthony, people were being oppressed. And and you know, I I'll go ahead and lay my cards on the table. You and I both are probably wearing clothes right now that were made by people in poor countries who are in terrible working conditions in a situation so that you and I could afford to buy the things that we have.

Eventually, that's going to come back around to the host country. Eventually, at some point, the empire is going to suffer under the same things that happened to other people. What has occurred now is that neoliberalism was always going to give birth to authoritarian capitalism. Eventually, those people who were gaining all that redistributed wealth, the tens of trillions of dollars, they're not going to be on board with democracy, they don't want you and me and the people watching this to make decisions about what happens in this country. They want to get rid of that. They started out buying it and now they just want to get rid of it. So what's actually occurring right now is that neoliberalism is evolving into much more of what we see in Russia, which is where a bunch of wealthy oligarchs control all of the elections. They control all of the media. They control the economy, all of the resources. You might still have

elections, right? You you might go out every four years and Vladimir Putin will win, you know, 97% of the vote. But what they're trying to do at this point is what we have done to other countries, which is to subject America to the same authoritarianism that has happened around the world. And so basically, some people would call it the imperial boomerang. What we have done to other people is now being visited upon us. cost of living is always kind of at the heart of people's um frustration and hence their their votes often goes in a direction that they might not traditionally place it such as additional votes for Trump because he lied and said that he would deconstruct the deep state. Well, the deep state has turned out to be him now of course because it's it's just whoever's controlling the federal government. But how's it going to play out if what he was saying about, you know, the alternative to neoliberalism, although

not using that language, being him saving the world and saving America, but America becomes more expensive for consumers. Cost of living continues to rise. Wages do not keep up with inflation. They they remain stagnant as they are. And we're seeing it this month with health care obviously because of the failure to reinstate the Affordable Care Act subsidies. People's healthcare now has has gone through the roof. I mean these are real tangible expenses that people are having to deal with and now they know who to blame.

They do. And and I want to go ahead and say one thing uh first off, Anthony, which is the worst thing that could have happened to Donald Trump was being elected president again. Because once you are in power, you are responsible for what is happening. It's the easiest thing in the world to hang out in the gallery and say I would do this, I would do that, I would all the wars on the first day and everything would be fine and everybody would rejoice.

And what we're seeing right now in the crackup in the MAGA world and essentially what's happening there is an intraarty intramovement fight that is occurring over who is going to take over after Donald Trump, what MAGA is going to become. And it is based on the fact that when he's not in power, he can tell you that he's going to fix these things. And that is the that that is the amazing appeal in all of this is that Donald Trump was able to say the Democratic party wasn't saying it. The Republican party wasn't saying it. They were everybody was basically like things aren't great, but they're fine and things are going to get better. And he came out and said everything's terrible and I'm going to fix it. Which for a lot of people it was like oh finally somebody's saying it out loud. This is why Bernie Sanders, of course, gained a lot of popularity uh in this same time period. [snorts] Now, what we're

watching is a decision that has to be made, which is what is the future going to look like? We're only having basically a conversation between one group of people. The Democratic Party has become conservative because what are they what are they arguing and offering? We will save what remains, right? It's not like we're going to move forward. It's not like we're going to make expansions of protections and social programs. These things that have been destroyed, we'll keep what we what we still have. That's a conservative position. The Republican party is becoming more and more fascistic, which is are you white? Are you on our team?

We will protect you. We can't make all this other stuff better, but we can take care of you if you join with us and allow us to become rich and to become all powerful. So what has to happen now is somebody somewhere has to articulate a vision of the future that is hopeful and also addresses the material conditions which involves not just taking down neoliberalism but creating something different and the imagination just hasn't been there yet and so we haven't been having a political conversation that is based in any type of recognizable reality.

The cruelty though is the is the difference that I don't think people were quite prepared for. And the cruelty comes in many ways. The most obvious is obviously the abductions of people from the street and this desire to make America white again. That was a phrase that we kind of threw around in our analysis leading up to this this period. But the that is the reality now. they ran out of criminals to deport pretty early on last year and now they're just going to people of color. It genuinely is that if if he wants to, you know, remove 100 million people from the United States in some way, well, that's the demographically that's the number of people of color. It's no coincidence.

And so we are having to kind of force ourselves not to normalize this behavior because that's the real that would become the kind of when the dictatorship is complete is when people just fall in line and that's what's happened in Russia and in other countries where these these dictators claim that they can fix everything but it's behind a veil of extreme white supremacy and and nationalism which is not what America is. I mean America now and has been for the last 100 years a melting pot and and that is what Trump is trying to reverse.

Well I want to start you know there's a misnomer in all of this. Everyone always says well he wants to get rid of all of the immigrants. He has no interest in getting rid of all of the immigrants. What we have seen is actually and and if you actually look at the numbers, Anthony, he was far behind Joe Biden and Barack Obama in terms of deportations during all of this madness. What actually mattered in this case, and if you you've noticed, they've made carveouts for farmers. They've made carveouts for uh hospitality industries, all of that. What they've actually been doing with immigrants and with these ICE raids, it's it's it's a few different things. One, they want to create a permanent underclass. They want to get in on the business of loaning out immigrants on the cheap to the wealthy people. Our economy doesn't work if you get rid of all the immigrants. Why?

Because the wealthy people in this country and their corpor corporations rely on labor from undocumented immigrants. So, you can't get rid of all of those people. Instead, the government can round them up and then rent them out to the wealthy, which is a program that has been pushed for a while. The second part of this, Anthony, is that it is it basically creates a look and see what can happen attitude in the country. The reason why ICE has been so aggressive and so violent in what they've been doing. And by the way, they haven't really discerned between immigrants and and citizens, like we don't even know how many American citizens have been rounded up in this thing. We don't know how many people have died in custody. We don't know how many people are being tortured. We have no idea about any of this stuff. It turns into a building dark cloud that communicates something to it, you, me, and everybody watching

this, which is we can do this. We can get away with this. No one's going to stop us from doing this. So then you are given a choice, Anthony, and you talked about Russia and you talked about other countries that have fallen to authoritarianism. There are three choices that these dictators give you. One choice is that you stand up and you have the possibility of being crushed. You literally could be killed, tortured, disappeared. The second is you put on the armband and you march down Main Street and hopefully you gain some spoils out of it, right? And the third is keep your mouth shut, lock your door, close the blinds, and don't pay attention to how people are being hurt.

And unconsciously, everybody is being presented that choice now. And over time, Donald Trump's voice, the dictator's voice, the authoritarian's voice, it begins to affect how you think and how you act. So, what has happened over the past year is that that voice has gotten louder, that choice has gotten louder, and we're looking around trying to decide, is it worth it to fight this? We're we're more or less in a conditioning stage of dictatorship at this point. The the elements of this that aren't of racially motivated, uh, they also come under the banner of cruelty. And I specifically want to mention the Department of Health and Human Services freezing all child care payments to all states and and and Trump saying states funds will be released only when states prove they are being spent legitimately.

Um this kind of knee-jerk reaction is is retribution from Trump's perspective, [clears throat] but that really will affect people. the poor mainly. So is this less going forward about about race and more about control of the poor?

Well, I mean on on one hand I mentioned we don't know how many people have died in custody. We don't know how many people have died after USAD was torn apart. Yeah.

I mean estimates put it at hundreds of thousands. Right. Well, it's projected o over the next 20 years to be somewhere in the region of 12 to 15 million people. I mean a genocide of sorts.

The mind and the soul repels from that because what is actually occurring at this point and and you know perhaps we'll talk on it later. Something like the the Epstein scandal, what does it reveal? It reveals that the powerful will do awful things. They'll go places that you and I would not. Right? And what has occurred when it comes to funds? Fascism is organized crime. That's what it is. You know, we we get it lost with with uh military outfits and uniforms and big giant Nermberg rallies, but essentially what it is, it's a group of organized criminals. I mean, what did the Nazis and the fascists do whenever they took over a country? They would go in and steal their wealth, right? They would just, this is ours now. They would take it at gunpoint. When it happens here, what we are watching is a complete change, a revolution in terms of how funding is used in this country. [snorts] in if whether it's health and human

services and and as we're talking we don't know how many people at this point have whooping cough

whooping cough Anthony we don't we we've watched literally every agency that has ever been funded and created to help all of us live better lives to understand what weather is going to take place so that we can protect ourselves from storms you know what food we can eat whether we can breathe the air whether we can drink the water they are being plundered that's the entire point is that it is being turned into a survival of the fittest. And the survival of the fittest, it is not just eugenics. It's not as in like trying to choose who is better. It's a group of wealthy people who have come together. They are going to be fine, right? Their kids are going to go to college. They're going to have clean air. They're going to have clean water. They're going to be able to know where the storms are. It is the public good part of this that is being stolen away. And what you brought up with Minnesota, I think, should give a window

into this. you and I and anybody watching this, if we were and the the the child care thing is completely made up. It's a fabricated conspiracy theory that started on YouTube with a complet

That's right. It was a it was a right-wing YouTuber who basically went to a child care office um that mainly had Somalies in, but he went when it was closed and claimed that it it it was permanently closed.

Exactly. And it starts there. But all it does is it allows them to be cruel. Even if if you and I had power and somebody said, "Hey, something is happening.

Do you want to cut off all funding for child care in a state?" Even if the fraud was taking place, we would say, "No, no, we need to look into this,

right? We'll figure it out over time. That's wrong. We'll get this thing right." In this case, what we're actually dealing with is a group of gleeful abusers. They don't mind this. In fact, they're so miserable as human beings, the only joy that they actually get is making other people unhappy and suffer.

Yes. But it's the same with all departments though, isn't it? Because you know that that might be HHS, which ironically I'm sure they'll change the name of at some point. But, you know, education is another, and health is another. I mean, there is a massive flu outbreak, a super flu they're calling it. And of course, you know, they disbanded the kind of the the the group that made the selections on flu strains and not to mention COVID and measles and other things that are floating around too. So the deconstruction of all of these government departments that support and fund the public at large, that is the the abject cruelty that the that the that civilians are going to have to suffer and will recognize that it might now be too late to change it with their vote because as you alluded to earlier, you know, in in in Russia, they do have elections, but they are sham elections. And I have no doubt that

any time that Trump has spent with Putin privately, Putin has tipped him off as to how to stay in power. So, let's just talk about that for a moment because the ballroom is probably a good place to start with this. It's a it's a very big clue as to Trump's plans for the next 3 years. And he let slip accidentally the other week that that he wants to hold the inauguration in the ballroom. That's why it needs to be bigger. That's why it needs to have what he he calls droneproof roof. Um bulletproof windows. We're hearing that there is a a kind of bunker underneath that area which uh houses a lot of the the kind of technology.

This as I [snorts] see it and it sounds like science fiction, doesn't it? It sounds like, you know, a baddie in a Marvel movie. But he's basically building a fortress so that he can govern illegitimately and have an extra 90,000 square feet to do it from.

Yes. And I want to draw and one of the things Anthony I I hate about the United States of America is the lack of context in our analysis. We we we are a nation of amnesiacs. We forget everything. I I'm sure you saw a few years ago there was a craze that started taking place where all of the billionaires, all of the tech oligarchs, they all started buying islands or buying land in New Zealand

and they started building these doomsday, you know, bunkers. Well, they wanted to live on the water, some of them, didn't they? They were trying

Yeah. I'm I'm sure they wanted a view as the world was falling apart, right? And what this is, it's the evolution of gated neighborhoods, right? It used to be it'd be like, well, you make enough money, you move out of the city, and then you move into a nice gated neighborhood to keep out the riff raff, right?

Segregation. Segregation. And what is occurring now as those tens of trillions of dollars that we've been talking about have been redistributed to the top, these people are becoming not just more increasingly more isolated, but you know what we're actually talking about here is a return to feudalism. What happened during the feudal age whenever you gained all of the money and the resources and you gained all of the power? You didn't live among the peasants. You didn't live among the knights. You built yourself a castle. And by the way, you put a mode in there and you had as much security as humanly possible. What we're talking about in all of this is this tech age uh evolution of the old feudal society. And you know, you you brought up storms, you brought up food, all of this stuff.

What happened during feudalism, Anthony? Like, did they understand storm fronts? Did they understand warm and cold fronts? Did they understand polar vortexes? No. These storms would hit and they would think it was judgment from God. That's a principle called mystification. And mystification is when you do not understand the logical facts behind why things are happening. It kind of helps during an age of global climate change when you're going to have more storms, more disasters, and more suffering. and dwindling resources. It helps if you are the people who have caused that for people not to know why it's happening.

Right? So for the rest of us who are not living in these bunkers, whether it's, you know, the east wing of the White House or wherever these people are jaunting off to in New Zealand or some island, the rest of us are not going to have the facts at our disposal. The you mentioned the super flu. It's a rumor and it's happening. Everybody knows that people are getting sick. We don't know why. the statistics aren't there. We're not being told how to take care of ourselves. And also, if you knew about that, you would need to do something about that. If all of these cuts had happened before CO, we wouldn't have known why. It would have been a modern plague. And to revisit the plague, Anthony, who got blamed for it?

Jews women minorities vulnerable populations. So as a result, you have a situation where the wealthy and the powerful as they mystify what's happening, they have to protect themselves while the rest of us have to f for ourselves. And we have all of these conspiracy theories, all of these alternate explanations, but it keeps the people who have power isolated and away from retribution.

But it also potentially culls a large proportion of of society, the people with the least. Trump has always been repelled by his base. He he'll happily shout at them from the comfort of a bulletproof podium, but he never gets in and amongst them. And and that's been the kind of the irony of this is that the brainwashing, the the cult that the people that support him, it is not a kind of reciprocal relationship. He's happy to take their last few dollars for merchandise and donations. And he's still doing that now. still grifting in in that way. But, you know, I started peddling this theory about 6 or 8 months ago. The idea that that the Trump regime wants people to die and the and that the value of life is is is minimal. And it seemed very harsh when I first started talking about it, but now we're starting to see it as a reality. And when he said out loud in the Oval Office talking about these missile strikes from drones

in the in the Caribbean Sea on Venezuelan boats, he seemed to relish saying, "Well, we're just going to kill them just dead." And it was like watching a a baddie in a movie with a with a very average script. And so, do you believe that this is kind of where it's headed? that this, you know, you mentioned eugenics earlier and and there is obviously a large aspect of this kind of white supremacy and this idea that the great replacement theory is something that these people take very seriously and they're trying to do something about it by culling large portions of the population.

Yes. And I I want to take this um for people who hear this and it sounds large and it sounds almost incomprehensible. I want to remind people that what we're talking about it scales from the small interpersonal all the way to the geopolitical. Right. And to to put this in into context, I I want to say first of all, capitalism incentivizes people behaving in sociopathic ways. Right. So, one of the reasons you and I are able to have conversations is because we trust each other. I'm not going to screw you over. You're not going to screw me over.

I think we've gotten to know each other over the years enough to where like I I trust you, Anthony Davis. Right. But we are incentivized to be out in the world and in our actions act like we're Donald Trump. He doesn't trust anybody. Nobody trusts him. Everybody who's in his inner circle, he will knife them. They will knife him if they get a chance. I I I said this back on January 20th. He probably should not stand next to an open window with JD Vance in the room. Right? And that sort of sociopathy, it trickles up. This is a weird thing. Uh for instance, I always think about I used to work at a university. I used to be a professor and as that university was growing I would go into the breakroom Anthony there'd be coffee made there would be treats there would be a brand new refrigerator the perks never we were hiring people we were growing right when the growth stagnated the coffee disappeared suddenly people

weren't being hired suddenly there weren't treats anymore and then as we started to shrink people had to be fired people had to be laid off people had to lose their jobs and the decision of higher up administrators to fire people, they do it in a sociopathic way. They don't think about how that person's going to feel, how it's going to affect them emotionally. When you get to the higher strata of power, the United States is in decline. That's the whole point of what I was talking about with neoliberalism. Capitalism expanded with us and now it's leaving us. It's going to go to China or bricks or some other new confilration unless things change.

As America declines, much like laying people off, people are going to have to die. People are not going to be able to do the things that they used to do, those perks that we used to have, including constitutional protections, including, you know, uh, uh, laws that protected people from discrimination, those things are going to go away the way that perks in the the uh, coffee room went away. So what you're talking about are the decisions that are being made once you reach the position of president of the United States of America. You are deciding on a daily basis how many people you are going to kill. And you have to do that cold-blooded and ruthlessly. It just so happens that Donald Trump is the perfect president or most imperfect president to be in a position of power as America declines in this way and as the wealthy.

And we could fix all of this if they were taxed, if we changed the laws. If we had actual democracy, we wouldn't need all of this. But that's a decision they're not willing to have. They would much rather they would rather kill people and lose people than to even move a couple of points in in terms of marginal taxation. Let's just talk about capitalism for a moment because, you know, we've alluded to what it what it kind of looks like now, but there is an alternative view which Bernie Sanders pedals and that is controlled capitalism. the idea that yes, you know, there there is this free movement of money and trade, but profit has to be limited in some areas. And ideally, I mean, I suppose the answer to it is that the very wealthy pay their fair share of tax because if that was the case, there would be enough money to have universal health care and and free education and and all of the things that

civilized nations celebrate, but in the US has been kind of left out of of of people's lives. Do you think that there will ever be or maybe this is a you know opportunity for the Democrats if they found their voice to talk about controlled capitalism in a way that doesn't make people think that the alternative to what Donald Trump is doing is some kind of socialist communist society. Well, I mean what Donald Trump basically is doing is would be crony communism or crony, you know, socialism, which is very

That's the irony of it, isn't it? Well, it's actually very funny because as China ascends and as it starts to overtake the United States of America, America's starting to look more and more like China with preferred businesses and like centralized control. And of course, China is not actually communistic. It's actually a merging of authoritarian capitalism and communism,

right? But if you actually take a look at where we're at, I I think there are two answers to the questions you asked. One is the Democratic Party will not change until it moves away from its its corporate donors and its corporate strategist. I I think what people don't understand, and if you don't believe me, go look at the main strategist and consultants who ran the Kla Harris campaign and every other. If they're not running a campaign, Anthony, they're working for a corporation

which pays them more. And then they go in and they run a a campaign and weirdly enough it's a pro-c corporate campaign, right? Because they're actually being paid by these corporations. So if the and I think in this year, in the upcoming year, we're going to see a war between progressives, leftist, and corporate Democrats because there's too much money on the line. There's too much power to be had. the the corporate Democrats, they they are so beholden to their corporate donors and maintaining the status quo and they are neoliberals by the way to go bring this thing full circle, right? That they're not going to give up that power and that money so easily. But candidates like Zoron Mdani, who knows what Alexandria Kaziac Cortez is going to do. I believe Bernie Sanders is probably closer to the end of his career than the beginning. That is going to be an intraarty war. But the question here, whether or not something will

change, that's the biggest question of all. But, you know, it's not just about controlling it. It's not just about taxation. You look at the booms in the bust. We we're looking at a stock market right now that is basically a game of hot potato where you have six or seven major tech firms that are just throwing $40 billion back and forth trying to keep AI afloat. We have an economy that is an absolute bubble. The only thing getting built right now are data centers.

Mhm. And the check is going to come due at some point. And if they're not bailed out, it will literally destroy our economy. So every time that they destroy the economy because it's not controlled, there's an opportunity to retrofit it, to change it, to reform it. I think that's going to be the question going forward. The question is who is going to answer the question? And right now, over the course of the next year, I think we're going to see a fight over who answers that question. Do you think there are people in Trump's orbit who care what happens to the people?

Because, you know, my my fear is that, you know, many of these characters that are running the operation are are the they're sociopaths. And so the more we learn about them and it it seems that Trump is pretty handsoff, you know, he's obsessed with the ballroom and the the arc to Trump and everything else. But but the people as we've seen through various exposees recently, not least that Vanity Fair article interview with Susie Wilds, chief of staff last year, that it really is just a handful of people that have all the power. None of them have been elected and they are they have the sociopathic and psychopathic tendencies.

They are far-right nationalists and they really don't care for the for the value of life. And so the idea that they would even think, well, you need a certain number of immigrants in the system to make the system work, I don't know that they would even go there at all. they because there is this argument that well you know these are jobs that white people should be doing and America is for Americans and Americans only to quote Steven Miller and so [clears throat] my worry is that there aren't really any economists or experts who are providing the intelligence that is necessary

to actually hold the economy together. And aside from what you said or including what you said about the the stock market, we are headed for a massive recession, collapse, whatever you choose to call it because there isn't that attention to detail.

Yeah. And and I want to start because that that is an excellent question that I think adds to an understanding of exactly what's going on. I'll start with a statement which is the right-wing is a psychosexual disaster. They do not these are not well people. And you know, we're coming off the holidays, Anthony, and I'm sure a lot of people were spending time with their family or friends or co-workers, and I I'm sure that they had a feeling at some point they would listen to someone talking, they're like, "Oh, he is a mess. He he does not understand himself. He is saying a lot of things. There's a lot of like narcissistic arrandisement, but also self-pity and a mess." The rightwing is animated by a a deep deep self-loathing.

They do not like themselves. They consider themselves failures. They grew up in in abusive environments and as a result, you said earlier that Donald Trump doesn't seem to like his supporters. Well, yeah, someone who hates themselves is not going to like anyone who adores them and worships them. That is the the animating influence here. I think in his circle, you have many people who have no idea what's going on and they are using drugs and substances and arandisement to try and sort of blunt the way that they feel. I think Steven Miller sleeps like a baby because I believe he is a sociopath and I think he enjoys and knows what it is that he's doing. The frightening thing here is that a lot of these people are really just mascots.

Pete Hexth does not know what's going on in the Pentagon. It's the equivalent of looking at Ronald McDonald and thinking that he runs the McDonald's corporation, right? He he's out there, he's doing the dance or whatever. the wealthy uh and their think tanks and their institutes. They are the ones uh people of course have heard of uh project 2025 that was built by a group of very serious very intelligent people who knew what they were doing. They knew why these laws were being passed which was to help their wealthy benefactors. The Trump administration aside from some of Trump's strange pecadillos and things that he does are basically run through those things. And that's the way Republican politics have been since Ronald Reagan. It's literally been that way for almost a half a century. But now you're talking about the economy. The neoliberals who created this economy, they don't look at actual facts,

Anthony. It's a religion to them. It's a faith. Eventually, all these things are going to work out. Meanwhile, the people who are actually diagnosing this are saying this has been faulty. It looks like past economies which are booms and bust and they fall apart all the time. So you basically at this point you have a bunch of crooks who are unhealthy and unserious in charge of everything. The only thing that they have in common is gleeful cruelty and the ability uh to just be self- serving and sociopathic as we've been talking about. A group of people who don't care what happens as long as their bank books get larger and larger and then you have a system that they've built that is heading towards disaster and none of them are actually worried about that disaster. Sounds bad if you talk about it.

Yeah. Um, there are some contradictions in this kind of gallery of curios, not least Steven Miller, who himself is a descendant of of immigrant Jews. And you know, you you just assume because we naturally compartmentalize people and we just assume that people kind of go the way of their ancestry that that you know, he would be the last person to be the architect of this these mass deportations and and treating people, you know, this the nazification of of of deportations. The New Republic published last month an article entitled Inside Steven Miller's dark plot to build a a MAGA terror state. But what was most interesting and I'll just quote it said Steven Miller's ancestors first arrived in the United States in 1903. A man called Wolf Lib Glosser disembarked at Ellis Island after leaving behind his hometown of Antipole, a small town in the part of the Russian Empire that is now Bellarus. He was fleeing a life

marked by anti-Jewish pograms and forced conscription. And he quickly set out trying to raise more money to bring over relatives. And what's very interesting is it was actually Steven Miller's grandmother that wrote a book and the New Republic has actually kind of published it on their website that describes the journey of the family and it is fascinating reading and and feels completely weird to obviously read it. But the the book is called A Precious Legacy. Lewis Glosser and Bessie Greenberg Glosser 1854 to 1929. and is it is the story of of their of their journey, including images of the Holland America ship that brought them across the Atlantic.

When we kind of look at these stories of immigration and Ellis Island obviously is that is that kind of flash point where you know the the the poor immigrants were taken and they were the ones who were interrogated and checked for health. the wealthy ones who were in the cabins upstairs, they were allowed to continue straight into the United States without question. But when we look at these stories and the story of of America being built through immigration and slavery, of course, we we would think that these stories will be enduring and everlasting as the country evolves.

But this really is an expose of radicalization because, you know, for those who take an interest in in in Steven Miller, as unfortunate as that sentence sounds, he was radicalized, you know, in a in a Santa Monica University, he is somebody who went from this this story and this ancestry to becoming the polar opposite and and and and now being at the nucleus of abject cruelty. Do you think people can really understand how humanity can is so flawed in that way? Because you know to understand a little bit about the flaws of humanity opens the door to understanding Trump and understanding Hegathth and understanding Miller. [snorts]

There is so much there. I mean I I will start you know Steven Miller I I've studied him because I because of who I am. I'm endlessly fascinated by authoritarianism. I want to understand why the people do what they do. And I think a really good uh analog to Steven Miller would be someone like Nick Fuentes. And and and people have probably heard rumblings of his name. He is a neo-Nazi who is gaining popularity. He has millions upon millions of followers. He's one of the most influential right-wing thinkers right now. He is a 20-some year old uh partially Hispanic man. And there are other questions about his proclivities, but we don't need to get into all of that.

And he was invited to Mara Lago for dinner. He went to Mara Lago actually met with Donald Trump. And this is a person who talks about white supremacy, right? And and you know, we've seen people like Candace Owens who have done this as well, who is a black commentator. We we've seen the the GOP is filled with gay men who are against gay rights, right? And all of that has to do with what I talked about earlier. First of all, there is the the self-loathing aspect of it, right? That is definitely playing a role in all of this, but there's also a financial incentive that comes in. I had mentioned the wealthy and their think tanks and their institutes. God knows how many magazines and websites and blogs that they run.

[snorts] If you look at Steven Miller, Anthony, Steven Miller like gained notoriety in right-wing circles at a very young age. And [snorts] the reason is because he was audacious. He was openly hateful. He he would say things that other people wouldn't say, much like Nick Fuentes. Now, the reason why Nick Fuentes is so popular is because he saw where the boundary was and he went beyond it and it served a market need. What happens within the right-wing circle and I saw it personally. I I worked uh for a while as a college newspaper opinion editor. And I'll tell you something, rightwing columnist, conservative columnist, they got jobs pretty easy. Anthony, because there was a pipeline set up to reward them financially. If you were like writing these articles or you were making speeches, you were almost guaranteed to go work for the Heritage Foundation, to work for any number of these places. The

point is this, there's a self-loathing aspect of it, but then it's such an easier road. And if you'll notice something about the rightwing, there's something interesting about it. Anthony, you have Ben Shapiro who wanted to be a screenwriter and was fa who was a failed screenwriter. You have David Rubin who wanted to be a comedian and failed one time after another and actually I I don't need to talk about a German painter who you know was turned down from his art school. It is a lot of people who wanted to do other things and then basically feel rejected by society like Donald Trump felt rejected by polite New York society and wanted to be a musical producer and a movie producer which is very fascinating now but it's a lot of people and their agrievement and the financial incentives they come together the self-loathing comes together and the next thing you know you have people who are literally trying to

hurt people who look like themselves which is one of the reasons why we see often the right-wing will talk about wanting to protect children and then they'll be discovered with child abuse materials or they'll be discovered hurting children. It's a projection of what they don't like about themselves that they are taking out on the rest of the world and there's an entire giant financial structure that is in place that helps them do that.

What you're describing is also presented in the entertainment business where you know Trump renames [clears throat] the the Kennedy Center in his name. He decides to become the chairman. he decides to be the host of the show and he never seemed more happy or relaxed than wearing a tuxedo and and standing at the lectern and introducing these awards. It was agony to watch and but that I think is off the back of his frustration that he's never won an Oscar or he's never been welcomed into the arts. And and there's I've always found it fascinating that that Republicans like don't do the arts. There is this you know there is this real kind of separation between that kind of conservative mindset uh and nationalist mindset versus the arts which is traditionally so integrated one of the first industries to kind of welcome people who who didn't fit that kind of normal mold. So do you think that this

kind of payback is presenting itself not just with the deportation of immigrants, cruelty to people, removal of of of child care funding, but also when it comes to the entertainment business, too.

I'll tell you something, Anthony. I when I was writing The Midnight Kingdom, I was researching the intellectual roots of Nazism. And do you know what I found almost to a person the the the forebears of the Nazi ideology and the the Nazi worldview? They were all failed professors. They were all professors who were very very sure of themselves. They, you know, they had the giant egos and then they were passed over for a position or they were passed over for tenure. And what did they do? They lashed out at society and they [snorts] created the underpinnings of a philosophy.

So there's there's always a grievance. It's a it's a grievance. And what I I'll put it in a personal sort of idea. Who is the most dangerous person in the United States of America, it is an insecure white man who has been rejected, right? Whether it's for a date or it's for a job or or for it's whatever. These are people who are unable to look at themselves and wonder why they've done this. Actually, Ben Shapiro is a great example since he he took over, you know, this major post in the right wing. He has all the money in the world behind him, right? And he started to produce movies, right? They were like, "We're going to have a Hollywood of our own." They are terrible.

Yeah, they're literally terrible movies. They are not well written there. None of this right-wing comedy doesn't work because it's grievance. It's cruelty. The the thing doesn't actually happen there. And you look at Donald Trump, it's it's actually it's Shakespeareanly tragic. He He doesn't want this job. He I I sometimes I I I go into a panic, Anthony. I think about being president of the United States of America and not reading the briefing materials.

Yeah. They they they've had to create fake Fox News segments to give him information in order to do the job. Right. He doesn't want to he doesn't want to study. He doesn't want to know what's going on. He falls asleep in meetings. He looks more miserable than ever while he is as president. The only time that he's happy is the ceremonial place, right?

And he's he's a realtor. You know, he he flips properties. So that's why he was happy when he was on the roof of the White House kind of scoping out how his construction project was going to go.

Exactly. It's it's red it literally it's the happiest he's been has been redecorating the Oval Office.

Right. And the whole point of this and and it is you have to laugh at it or else you would you would cry.

Yeah. This man who doesn't want to be president and by the way wants all the attention in the world. He's the most famous human being in the world now and it's still not enough,

right? And there was a moment and and I would invite people to remember this um when he received this fake FIFA Peace Prize. And I actually think this was an incredibly important moment. He wanted the Nobel Peace Prize, right? For no reason. He didn't earn it. He He just wanted it because Obama had it and he wanted it for himself. FIFA makes up this award which is a fax. It's a it's a bribe. It's flattery trying to get something out of him. He's given the award and he's like, "Oh, that's great." He got what he wanted. He didn't want it within seconds of having it. And who is suffering because of this? You, me, everyone watching it, everyone around the world. We're dealing with people who are they're empty. They have a hole inside of themselves that they're trying and and we do it. I Everybody does it.

We're we're always trying to fill it whether it's with money or accomplishments or, you know, uh

food, food, relationships, drugs, whatever it is. We're trying to fill this hole.

And I actually think we've been given a great gift by Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Peter Teal, all these people.

They have all of the money and all the power in the world and they're miserable. They are so unhappy. And [snorts] I think it's instructive. We talked about neoliberalism. The lie we've been told all along is if we worked hard enough, we would climb up the ladder and we would have happiness. And what's been revealed? That ladder doesn't exist. And even if you got up that ladder, you wouldn't be happy. And that tells us that there's something spiritual and and and internal that has to change because these people, they are miserable and they're taking their misery out on us like every bully and every abuser who has ever existed.

There are a couple of positive things that have happened recently that we can kind of I suppose take advantage of in this moment. The the climb down from the attempts to impose federal troops in law enforcement roles on Democratic run cities. Um Trump was ending his deployments from Los Angeles and Chicago and Portland. Is this that he's, you know, that the courts have finally kind of put enough pressure on him that he does abide by these court rulings or is there a more sinister plan further down the road that we haven't yet seen? Because it felt like a small win to hear him kind of lie about redeployment, but actually it was very much a withdrawal.

I think a few things are happening here. one uh in studying authoritarianism and fascism I've learned that there there's waxing and waning moments and I'm sure over the past year if people will sit and think about how it's felt there were moments starting with the inauguration and all of those executive orders it just felt like we were being pummeled right a real blitzkrieg feeling just having our faces shoved in the dirt over and over and then there were moments where it was like oh he's weak he's vulnerable like this is not inevitable and it goes back and forth this feels like one of the moments of weakness It has to do with the economy. It has to do with the Epstein files. It has to do with some of these rulings. That doesn't mean that it's going to stop. We're going to see a renewed vigor. I think the second part of it as well, I don't think it's a coincidence that these troops are being withdrawn as the

Pentagon's rapid response military team is going online. And this is something where hundreds if not thousands of members of the military are being prepared to go to anywhere in the country in which there is unrest or protest. I think that that was supposed to go online in January, probably be perfected by March. I I think that that is going to be in place for a lot of civil unrest. I think this year is probably going to be a year of rage because people don't handle being treated like this very well and eventually there will be a flash point that leads to some sort of civil unrest.

So I think it's in preparation of that next stage of state level oppression. Unfortunately,

well, even Marjorie Taylor Green has been talking about withdrawing labor and the idea that that you know that the protest should come in in the form of a of a halt of of of work. I mean, these are extreme measures. My fear though is that Trump will use these as an opportunity to double down on on the on the militarization of of policing. Let's just talk because we have to finish soon. I want to talk about the expanding um of Trumpism into Europe because we're we're learning through various things happened over the last year, not least uh Hegth's NATO speech and then you had Vance's speech at the security conference in Munich that really put the cat amongst the pigeons in in in amongst European leaders and and now Trump is using the types of language that are really worrying.

Frederick Murs, for example, in in in Germany and and that that former Atlantic alliance that [snorts] is clearly kind of going to become a thing of the past whereby he's saying that that these countries are, you know, that they're not deserving of the support of America because of their stance on immigration and that he wants to not just make America white again, but Europe white again and this farright nationalist thinking is now embedding itself in international security relationships as well. This is this is you know you mentioned Hitler earlier. I mean this to me is the you know that that kind of plan to to grow this this movement way beyond the borders of America.

Well and I think it's ironic I'll start in your neck of the woods in the United Kingdom. Uh here Starmer is is rolling out one anti-immigrant thing after another.

Yeah. And and so you're actually seeing liberals who are doing what the right-wing wants them to do when it comes to immigration. But it's never enough because they have to create a straw man enemy so that they continue moving towards the right. I think anyone who has actually studied the history of something like a World War II, you recognize it's not as simple as one man gave a speech, he invaded a country, and everything went from there. In fact, leading up to World War II, every single liberal democracy had a moment of rising fascism. The United States had uh Nazi sympathizers and fascists and authoritarians trying to gain power. On top of that, you had someone as famous as Charles Lindberg who was trying to ally us with with the Nazis. Also, Henry Ford, the richest person, the Elon Musk of the moment. In Great Britain, you had uh fascists who were trying to gain control there. uh France had a January

6- like riot that like eventually led to Vichi France in which the the fascists took over. We are at a moment I brought up earlier capitalism jumping from host to host and if America is being eclipsed if China, Russia, bricks or something else is going to take over those changes in who controls sort of the global order they don't happen peacefully. Usually there's usually some sort of a conflration. Uh people don't think about the fact that great uh World War II happened because Nazi Germany wanted to upset the British world order that was in place. It wanted to take its quote unquote rifle place. That was also why World War I happened. It was about trying to overtake a global order. There are weird squishy moments before those confilrations in which each country is trying to figure out which side it's on.

Effectively, the United States of America is being governed by the equivalent of if Charles Lindberg would have been in charge right before World War II. Luckily, he never ran for president. He never gained power. But we have a Charles Lindberg like character who is in charge, only probably less effective and less competent than Charles Lindberg.

The European leaders though have taken their sweet Mary time to realize that Trump is as dangerous as that and they have tried to appease him. I mean, you mentioned Kia Starmmer. I mean, the invitation for a state visit and meeting the king and that whole thing was so embarrassing [clears throat]

and and for those of us who know who Donald Trump really is, it it was bowing down to a fascist dictator in all but name. And so I I think that obviously the I mentioned the German uh chancellor, you know, he there is obviously a kind of historical trauma for the Germans that that you know that many others don't have. But the French leader certainly feels it and and and others. But Trump thinks he can pick out Italy and Hungary and and countries that have already fallen to the far right to break up the European Union. But that's also Putin's plan. And we haven't really mentioned Putin, but so many of these strands link back to the Kremlin. And and for you know my projection of this analysis always seems to end up with uh the the repositioning of the world order where Canada joins with the European Union. The United States aligns with Russia and China is a kind of you know a floating superpower. Is that how you see

this ending up? I see that as a possibility. I don't think I don't think it's a coincidence. And you just brought up Canada aligning with Europe. I don't think it's a a coincidence that he's been talking about invading Canada.

Yeah. Because what happens in a world war, it isn't just two countries from different parts meet on a battlefield. The countries that are the aggressors start to take over their neighboring countries. They start to gain as much as they possibly can. I also I look when I was writing the Midnight Kingdom actually the the the name the Midnight Kingdom of the book was drawn from the writings of Alexander Dugan who was one of the main ideologues behind Vladimir Putin and remains one of the main ideologues and he said and he predicted all of this. He said it would reach the point in which the American global neoliberal order was going to reach a breaking point. And what are they going to do? They're going to use divisions.

They're going to use religion, nationalism, white supremacy, patriarchal supremacy, whatever it is, they're going to use that to exacerbate tensions. And then we're going to go into a period of uh authoritarian isolation in which places like the United States and Russia and China, they have their spheres of influence and they'll withdraw within themselves and then they'll come in and they'll fight it out. And weirdly enough, Anthony, that has worked. And I want to give one quick anecdote and why I think it has worked so far. In 2017, I went to the inauguration, Donald Trump's first inauguration. And immediately after it, I was involved in a riot. There were people who were protesting. It was it was a wild scene. I got away from there.

I f I found myself at a bar and I found myself sitting next to a representative from a NATO nation. And he was deep in the cups. Let's just say that. And we had a conversation and he said that he had been in meetings for days about Donald Trump and what he would eventually do to NATO. And what he told me was that several people in the meetings knew exactly who Donald Trump was and what would happen to NATO, but the higher-ups were in denial. They thought that they could handle him. They thought they could manage him and that eventually he would come around and nothing would change. The problem is that leadership around the world in liberal democracies have been slow to realize what's going on and their main directive and their main instinct is to become more right-wing.

Yeah. To become more nationalistic, to become more white supremacist, to become more isolationist. And so what has occurred is what that person told me in 2017 deep in the cups. They many of them knew it was coming. We talk we've been talking about this for a decade now. Several people are late to the party because they were in denial. They didn't believe that something would actually change. And so the only way I guess they feel that they can meet in the middle is by leaning further to the right. But the lesson I would say if we were giving advice to the Democratic party in the US right now is to take a leaf out of Zoran Mandani's book and lean left and and and to really you know go full woke because to me that's the antidote to this period of this deconstruction period of cruelty and and racism is is to really go back to the the kind grassroots of what community and humanity actually looks like.

I completely agree. And and if you actually look at the polls, I I've been talking about what I call the the fake polarization of America because what do we hear? We're more divided than ever. It's more divided since the Civil War. If you actually look at the issues, the most controversial issues, it's a it's a it's a plurality of people. It's 60 to 80% who all agree on the direction of the country. And the direction should be to the left.

Yes, the vast majority of Americans actually believe that. We don't have a party in this country that represents that. The Democratic Party is absolutely terrified. What do we see post 2024? Who caused who who caused the the the loss in the election? The groups. It was black people who were organizing. It was gay and trans people. Is people talking about taxing the rich? No study has shown that to be true. Not a one. And that delusion and that denial is all based on not wanting to lose power and influence. It's not wanting to do the thing that everybody wants them to do.

And several of these people are willing to lose the country in democracy as opposed to trying something new. So I actually believe it's going to be an intraarty struggle this year. And I think I think the base or the vast majority of American people are tired of this. And so I think we're going to see the tension not just between the Democratic and Republican parties, but among the American people who are going to demand that somebody changes something.

Okay. Um I like that. It's an optimistic place to to end. Uh for now, Jared Yates Ston, thanks for joining the Weekend Show.

Anthony, my friend, thank you. I'm Anthony Davis. Don't forget to support me and independent journalism at patreon.com/5minutnews. You can find me on Substack, theAnthony Davis, and you can join the 5-minute news YouTube channel. I'll come back next Sunday with a brand new special guest and more factual news to discuss on the 5minute news weekend show with Midas Touch.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "LIVE: Trump COLLAPSES IT ALL as WORLD ON BRINK URGENT REPORT!!! | The Weekend Show"?

Anthony Davis (Host), Jared Yates Ston (Guest).

What is "LIVE: Trump COLLAPSES IT ALL as WORLD ON BRINK URGENT REPORT!!! | The Weekend Show" about?

The discussion explores the ramifications of Donald Trump's leadership, framing it as a departure from traditional neoliberalism towards a dictatorial regime, and examines the implications for the future of American politics and governance. Jared Yates Ston critiques the neoliberal order, suggesting it has become broken and calls for a re-evaluation of capitalist systems that prioritize profit…

What is mentioned in this MeidasTouch episode?

10 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Donald Trump, The Midnight Kingdom, Jared Yates Ston, American Rule, Department of Health and Human Services, Heritage Foundation. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "LIVE: Trump COLLAPSES IT ALL as WORLD ON BRINK URGENT REPORT!!! | The Weekend Show"?

The episode runs 1 h 2 min; the transcript is about 11,025 words in 107 timestamped sections.

More from MeidasTouch

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 24, 2026.