Editor’s Note: In the wake of President Donald Trump’s address to Congress, Liberty Nation News Editor-in-Chief Mark Angelides and Senior Political Analyst Tim Donner broke down the highs and the lows of the historic event. This conversation first appeared on Liberty Nation Radio. You can watch or listen to the full show here.
Mark Angelides: So, Tim, it really was quite an auspicious day. You and I both traipsed through Donald Trump's speech to Congress. I thought it was excellent. And I know that the social media world has blown up with very divided, very contentious views on either side of that. And the media machine tends to be setting its own narrative. But what was your overall takeaway from the hour-and-40-minute speech?
I actually think that along those lines, that of the many points that he made, I think it was very helpful for him to go through the millions of people who are supposedly receiving social security that are in the social security database who obviously are no longer alive, if they ever were.
Because this is one of the points that the Democrats have been trying to make to the American people: Trump is out after your social security. But when people see how the system is being drawn down by payments to people who don't exist, I think it makes them understand why they're going after the social security database, the social security trust fund that it draws from, supposedly, even though it's drained by Congress all the time.
Sure. I thought that was particularly helpful.
Mark: I'd love to come back to you on that for a second, because we're not 100% positive that everybody who's on that database is claiming actual funds, but it's admitted by everybody that there is fraud within the social security database. And if, as the critics of DOGE say, Pete Buttigieg being one of them, saying that these are just people that are in the system, it doesn't mean they're claiming the actual funds.
And my question is somebody who is 200-plus years old, they weren't around at the start date, social security wasn't around. So the input has also been either messed up so stupendously – which seems highly unlikely that there'd be a hundred-plus thousand people over the age of 150 years old because that would entail some really serious data entry problems – or there is some kind of fraud taking place because otherwise these people wouldn't be in the system because the system didn't exist 150 years ago.
Tim: No, it didn't. It didn't. It didn't even exist 100 years ago. And I think what's effective here, is what Elon Musk actually said, which is that when the government cuts a check, that's it! I have met some people who object to social security and they won't accept their social security checks. But they can't send it back to the government and have it go back into a general fund. Once a check is cut by the government, that's it. The money is spent. And it's not like a bank account where you can get a credit in return for that debit.
And I think it's emblematic of how incredibly out of control this federal bureaucracy has become as he listed with all the absurd boondoggles that are being paid for by the federal government. And by doing that, too, he is, as I wrote in a column on Liberty Nation, he's forcing the Democrats to defend the indefensible
Trump Sells Oversight
Mark: Yes, it's funny to see people arguing against the idea that there should be some oversight on how things are done, because even if you don't believe that social security checks are being cut for people who don't exist – obviously comedians would make the joke that “we can't cut these because those are our voters,” that's just what a comedian would say – but the system is clearly broken. Otherwise, there wouldn't be all of these names in there or people who were born 250 years ago, they wouldn't be in there if the system wasn't broken.
And that brings us to another point about what DOGE has been doing. They've discovered, I think it's roughly $4 trillion, according to an interview Elon Musk did with Joe Rogan, roughly $4 trillion. It doesn't have the fields filled in on where this money went, so they can't say that it's not being wasted. If they don't know where it's gone – and the fact is if it hasn't been filled in that doesn't automatically make it criminal or fraudulent, but if we don't know where $4 trillion in funds have gone, because it hasn't put a line item name next to it, they can't say definitively that hasn't just been sent to pay for turning more mice "transgender” as Donald Trump noted in his address. Although he may have meant “transgenic.”
Tim: Or some transgender boondoggles or affecting school outcomes in obscure countries in Africa and Asia, a couple of which he mentioned, and he rightfully said, the president, nobody's even heard of that nation.
Mark: You're referring to Lesotho, I believe.
Tim: Which I actually hadn't heard of either, even peripherally. But I think the point that he's making here is that the federal bureaucracy has no incentive to spend money responsibly. They're so distant, so removed from the average taxpayer, that there's not going to be any accountability in the Swamp. Because nobody can pinpoint who's responsible for this expenditure or not.
Donald Trump is the first one to come along and actually treat those expenditures like it's from his own bank account. And I think this is something that is really going to change the course of history. It's going to change the course of the federal government and how it operates because, of course, you'll only be in office for four years, but no president is going to be able to come in and follow him by saying we need to re-establish the LGBTQ+ funding for Central American countries. Nobody's going to be able to make that statement or make that claim because you'll notice that the Democrats do not defend a single one of these boondoggles. These illegitimate expenditures.
What they do is they attack the process. That's all they can do. And once Trump revealed in his quasi-State of the Union address what some of these expenditures were, people were on board to the tune of about three-quarters (77%). The American people are fully supportive of what the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, is doing.
To check out the full show, click here.
