Picture a guy, I don't know, fifty one, fifty two years old, worked a stamping line outside of Toledo, Ohio for twenty six years.
He made those steel brackets that hold your car's dashboard to the frame.
He voted for the man twice, wore the red hat, believed it.
The way you would believe a thing that you need to be true.
In March, his plant came out.
Cut a shift, not because nobody wants cars, but because the steel his plant buys got hit with a tariff.
And the parts his plant sells got hit with a counter tariff.
And somewhere in an office he will never see a spreadsheet decided that he was the cheapest thing to cut.
He is not in a recession.
That's the part that kind of frustrates me.
The official numbers say actually the economy is fine.
Inflation, it's fine.
Unemployment, basically fine.
He is standing inside a fine economy holding a pink slip.
Like a whole bunch of other people who are doing the same thing.
They're they're holding up not not a literal pink slip.
I don't think that many people get actual pink slips anymore, but they're unemployed.
They're searching for jobs on LinkedIn, they're talking about, you know, l about to to default on their mortgage and their and their kids.
aren't gonna have food in the in their their countertops and and and it's getting bad.
83,000 people.
That is how many manufacturing jobs people are just gone since this administration started.
Gone while the man on the television says manufacturing is roaring back.
And here's the thing about a lie that specific.
It doesn't feel like a lie to the people telling it.
It feels like a forecast, right?
Prosperity is just around the corner any day now.
He's still gonna hurt.
That's the whole episode right there.
This Trump regime is cracking, but it's still going to hurt.
Welcome back, friends and family.
This is The Overlap.
I am your host, Joshua.
This is a show where we talk about people and systems of power and labor and all of the things that matter to everyday Americans.
It's the things that the government should be focusing on, or things that the government's doing that they shouldn't really be focusing on.
But it's a place for you and it's a place for me, and I'm happy you're here.
So I'm recording this in July of 2026.
And I want to be careful about how I say this because it's easy to get like giddy, right?
And giddy and happy and joyful and literally dancing around the room makes you sloppy.
The Trump regime is coming apart.
You can feel it.
The coalition is fracturing, the donors are getting nervous, the MAGA true believers are.
Are quietly checking the price of gas and health care and groceries.
What an old-fashioned word.
And doing math they don't want to do out loud.
That's real.
That is happening right now.
And it's not the same thing as relief.
Because what nobody tells you about the end of a bad economic project, what nobody tells you about the end of a bad presidency.
Of a bad regime is that the falling apart doesn't undo the damage.
Right?
The falling apart is when the damage gets handed to you.
The people at the top, they structured this so that when it wobbles, it wobbles onto the guy in Toledo.
Not onto them.
Never onto them.
So that's today.
Not a victory lap.
a reckoning with what its ending actually costs and who pays for the ending.
Why now?
Because right now is the window where everyone wants to declare it over and move on.
I I feel it.
I I don't know if you do, but I keep thinking, man, God, there's no way that this can just keep going on like it's going on and happening as fast as it's happening.
I saw a a Facebook ad for a uh the Freedom Fuel Network.
It wasn't I guess it wasn't an ad so much, it was literally posted on the White House Facebook page that that showed, you know, opened up with a a an African American guy,
black guy talking thanking Trump because his co gas costs so much less and there apparently is this new Freedom Fuel Network and i i it's pretty disgusting.
Because it's not at all reflective of reality.
If you want that link, I'll I'll include it in the show notes.
But
We all wanna kinda move on, right?
I mean, we wanna go, God, I just uh k well if he would just uh, you know, succumb to his age or if he would just this and we could just move on from this.
And the truth is that's not really gonna happen.
There's a lot of people in place and there's a lot of of people in places that they never should have been that have broken things that are gonna be broken for for a decade at
least or more.
But
But moving on is exactly how the people who did this, the people who, as far as I'm concerned, are treasonous traitors to our country, they're gonna walk away from this
clean.
So let's go back to almost uh a hundred years first, right?
Because America has done this exact same thing before.
Same script, told a country the fundamentals were strong while the floor was already gone.
And then we come back to 2026 and the names and the numbers and the guy in Toledo.
So stay with me.
1928, Herbert Hoover accepts the Republican nomination and he says a sentence that should be carved somewhere as a warning.
He says We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of.
Of any land.
Now, this was Herbert Hoover, right?
This wasn't our current president.
So I can't hear like stand but hear these words in his voice when I read these out loud.
Nearer to the final triumph over poverty in 1928, one year before everything fell into the ocean.
And the thing is, I I don't think that Herbert Hoover was lying.
Not exactly.
I mean, if you were if you were standing where Hoover stood, the numbers were beautiful.
Beautiful.
The stock market had gone up.
Something like 300% across the 20s.
A 300% return in 10 years is something that even the the the smallest.
stockbroker would feel.
Even the smallest four hundred three B or four one K would would definitely feel.
There were more millionaires than there had ever been, right?
The men writing the reports were the men holding the stock.
And from up there, whew, final triumph over poverty.
You could almost see it.
But if you go down to the ground, right, the the place where where people work, the American farmer had been in a depression the entire decade.
Crop prices collapsed after World War I.
And just kind of never came back.
Half the country was rural, and half of that half was quietly going under the entire time the market was breaking records.
Wages for working people had gone basically flat while productivity doubled.
All that new wealth, right?
All those those millionaires, they they went up.
It didn't spread, it concentrated.
Now let's meet a new man that you you've probably heard of.
Andrew Mellon, Treasury Secretary under three presidents, one of the richest human beings in the country.
And he ran the United States Treasury like it was a subsidiary of his own fortune.
He cut the top tax rate from seventy something percent down to twenty five, told everyone that the benefits were
Would trickle down to the working man.
What does this sound like?
We've heard this before.
Literally, this is the before.
And when the crash finally came in nineteen twenty nine, then the whole illusion, the mirage lit up in flames.
And do you know what Mellon's advice was?
He said, and this is documented, he said, liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers.
Those are his words.
Purge the rottenness out of the system.
People will work harder, live a more moral life.
Uh l rewind that if you need to.
But the the richest man in the room was watching regular people lose everything, and his prescription is that they needed it.
That was the the somehow the the cure was suffering.
That was the medicine for this disease.
And that it would somehow make them more moral.
That's not economic policy.
Sounds more like theology, and I know a thing or two about that.
And it's it's the oldest one we've got.
The idea that when people up top win, that's the market being being intelligent, being wise, being smart.
And then when the people down below lose, well, that's just the market teaching them a lesson.
And Hoover kept saying it right up until the end of this.
Prosperity's just around the corner.
He said it so many times that it actually became a joke.
People put it on signs in the the Hoover V Hoovervilles.
The they were shanty towns, if you if you haven't heard the Hooverville or don't remember it from your American history class.
They were shanty towns full of men his corner prosperity forgot.
His his prosperity gospel was that prosperity is just around the corner and that corner never came.
Because the people who could have turned it, it decided that the herding was good for you.
And here's the through line, and you should hold on to this because we're about to watch it happen again in real time.
You can run an economy that looks amazing, especially spectacular from the top, but is quietly dying at the bottom for years and decades.
Years.
Like the and the men at the top, they're they're never gonna see this because they have arranged their entire life with a beautiful golden parachute.
So that they never have to, and when it breaks, they will tell you it broke because you weren't tough enough.
That's the machine in today's episode.
So let's let's fast forward to the twenty twenty six model, almost a hundred years later.
Okay, the numbers.
And let's do this carefully because this is kind of unfortunately the boring part, the numbers are where the propaganda lives.
And if you only look at the top line, it looks survivable.
Inflation at the end of twenty twenty five was around two point seven percent.
Which is actually a hair lower than the two point nine it was when Biden walked out the door.
Unemployment in January was four point three.
It was four point one before.
So the administration goes on television and says, look, stable, steady, we fixed it.
And here's the thing that they don't say.
Stable at what?
And we're look at the research of a economist named Gerald Epstein.
Not not the Epstein you're thinking of, a completely different Epstein, one of the the serious macro economists.
And he he said some things that that kind of stuck with me.
He said that this economy is mostly a continuation.
Of the last economy, but with a big tilt to the top.
A tilt to the top.
That's the phrase.
The leverages hold like they hold very, very steady while underneath them the money slides uphill and the costs slide down onto you.
Because the average doesn't feel the tariffs.
You do.
Peter Navarro is back running the tariff religion and tariffs are just a tax.
They've always been a tax, right?
It's a tax you pay at the the the cash register that doesn't show up with a word the word tax on it.
Howard Lutnick, uh you might have seen him looking like a giant douchebag over at the Department of Commerce, defending it like it's somehow like genius and that that
manufacturing number I gave you at the top, the the 83,000 jobs gone.
That's not despite the tariffs, that is the tariffs.
You tax the steel a factory buys and
And the factory just makes less stuff.
And the factory, because they're making less stuff, they need less people.
That's not that complicated.
That was predictable.
It was predicted, right?
And then the debt.
This is this is this this should scare you.
And and it's the one that nobody really, you know, puts on their campaign bylines.
The Congressional Budget Office, supposed to be nonpartisan, they do the math.
The annual deficit is running around one point nine trillion dollars right now, and their projection has it climbing three point one trillion by twenty thirty six.
Federal debt held by the public going from about one hundred and one percent of the whole economy up toward one hundred and twenty percent.
Our debt is currently greater than our whole economy by one percent, and it's gonna go up by nineteen more percent.
You want to know the last time when it was even close to that high?
1946.
The year after we finished fighting the entire Second World War.
We are running up World War debt levels, and there is no world war.
Where did it go?
Up.
It went up.
I mean, that's probably not surprising if you're listening to this podcast, but tax cuts tilted to the top.
Same as Mellon, same playbook.
A hundred years later, same exact move.
So who decides this, right?
That's the question Will usually makes me answer, so I'll answer it for him.
It's not a mystery.
It's it's Navarro on trade.
It's Lutnick at commerce selling it.
It's the tax writers who make sure the cuts landed up top.
It's a health secretary Kennedy Junior gutting the infrastructure that keeps.
Ordinary people from getting wiped out by one bad diagnosis.
Named people, real jobs, real signatures on real documents, and the tell, the real tell is the confidence numbers.
Only about a quarter of Americans, twenty five percent believe they will ever improve their standard of living that they currently have.
Lowest that survey's been since they started asking it in nineteen eighty seven.
Nearly seventy percent of our country thinks the American dream is dead.
Done.
That's not a feeling, right?
Like that's a measurement.
We can know that.
The people living in this economy have already filed their review, and it's not five stars.
And it's the the guy in Toledo's review.
He's still gonna hurt and he already knows it, and the number proves that he's right.
Take a breath.
I might need one too.
And let me bring it back to the ground because trillion is a word that has really sort of stopped meaning anything.
Like i i it's just a number, and like the number keeps going up.
It's probably what a million dollars felt like in nineteen twenty nine.
Because we now have a a trillionaire, one trillion.
Uh one point nine or something like that, but uh anyway.
Think about what a tilt to the top actually is when it lands on a kitchen table.
It's a retired couple, both worked their whole lives, who did everything the country told them to, saved, owned the house, and now the property tax and the insurance and the
grocery bill have quietly eaten the buffer they spent forty years building.
And the tariff on everything imported means the fixed income.
Doesn't stretch to the end of the month anymore.
They're not poor on paper.
They're fine, right?
They're they're inside this beautiful burgeoning economy.
And they're rationing like normal things.
Like toilet paper over prescription medications.
It's it's a woman who runs a small boutique shop.
She buys her inventory from overseas because it's the only place that they make.
Things anymore and she watched her costs jump the day that tariff hit, and now she looks like the bad guy because she has to raise prices.
Her customers are pissed off at her, not at the people who wrote the policy, but that's kind of the design behind it.
The anger gets pushed downhill the same as that cost.
You get mad at the shop owner, you get mad at the at the Toledo plant for cutting the shift, but you never.
Get to be mad at the spreadsheet because you never get to see the spreadsheet.
And it's the guy from the top of the show.
Let me get back to him.
He voted for it twice.
He had the big red hat.
And I don't want to do the easy thing here, right?
The thing where I just dunk on him.
Ha ha, you did this to yourself, because that's kind of melon talking.
That's liquidate the farmer.
That's you needed the suffering to become moral, and I'm just not going to do it.
Here's what I think is actually true about that guy.
I don't think he was stupid.
I think he was lied to by professional con artists because somebody looked him in the eye and
promised him the factory was coming home.
The good job was coming back.
Prosperity was just around the corner, and he wanted it so bad that he handed them everything.
And now that the corner has yet to come again, the shift is gone, the people who lied to him are already writing books about how it really wasn't their fault.
He got robbed.
He got robbed by the exact same men who are doing it to you now and are gonna walk away
calling it a market correction, a bull run.
Or bear run, I don't I don't know marketing terms.
And the fact that he cheered it while it happened does not make it less of a robbery.
It just makes it kind of sadder.
So to pull this thread all the way through, because that's the part that actually matters more than any single number, nineteen twenty eight, the final triumph over poverty.
Twenty twenty six, stable and ready, we fixed it.
It's the same sentence.
It's just dressed up a little differently.
And both of them are true from exactly one seat in the house the seat at the very top.
The seat where the money pooled.
And let me tell you, Donald Trump's family has profited about nineteen billion dollars.
Babilon dollars since Donald Trump has taken office the second time.
The pattern is not that these men are stupid or that they're uniquely evil.
I mean, and don't get me wrong, there are uniquely evil people that voted for this man.
We saw Patriot Front march on Washington just a couple of days ago.
The pattern is that we keep building economies with a one way valve in them.
Prosperity flows up easily and never comes back down.
I think they call it a check valve.
And when the thing finally strains, when it cracks, the crack always opens directly over the heads of the people who had the least to do with actually causing it.
Mellon knew that, and he said it out loud liquidate labor.
He wasn't being cruel for fun.
He was describing his inbuilt safety feature.
The machine protects the top by sacrificing the bottom.
That's not a bug.
That's the point.
So here's what you should take out of this today.
And the thing uh kind of underneath the the clickbait title, and I don't know if the title's that clickbait, it's pretty accurate, but the regime falling apart is not the good
news.
Hear me.
It's not bad news either.
Get out.
Get them all out.
As far as I'm concerned, they should all go to trial for treason and plead their case before.
A judge, but maybe not the Supreme Court judges.
But the falling apart is this dangerous, incredibly unsafe window.
Because a collapsing project spends its last bit of effort, its last strength doing one thing above everything.
It's making sure the bill lands on you and not them.
The looting is the heaviest on the way out the door.
Anything that's not nailed down they're grabbing and taking with them, including those gaudy home depot gold decorations in the Oval Office.
It's always been this way.
The last act of a rigged system is arranging who takes the fall.
That guy in Toledo, he's still gonna hurt.
You're still gonna hurt.
But after the hat comes off, after that man on television is gone, after the whole rotten thing is just a chapter in a book, the plant doesn't unclose.
The eighty three thousand jobs don't just unvanish.
The debt that they ran up in your name comes due in your kid's paycheck.
For the next thirty years.
That's the part that outlives the regime.
That's the part where they're counting on you to forget it the second that it's over because well we've we've moved on.
And they're counting on you to forget the second that it's over.
Don't forget that part, right?
That's that's kind of the whole ask behind behind this episode today.
Don't let the ending clean that ledger.
Alright, so usually at the close we give you kind of something to think about, something to to ponder over.
Um so so here's what I want you to to start noticing and and paying attention to.
Closer than you're when you're watching, you know, mm Real Housewives or whatever you guys watch when you're when you're not uh working.
Watch where the losses get assigned on the way out.
That's the that's kind of the game now.
I mean it don't make it a drinking game because you don't have the liver for it.
When this thing finishes cracking, there's gonna be a very organized, very well funded effort to write the story as a natural disaster.
A storm nobody could have seen.
Watch for the words market correction.
Watch for structural headwinds.
Watch for it wasn't the policy, it was the timing.
Every one of these phrases is a man in an expensive coat handing you his bill.
And the single most absurd thing in this whole story, the thing that tells you everything, is that we are carrying debt at levels this country last saw in nineteen forty six.
After a world war.
We fought no war.
Well, he said it wasn't a war.
Iran, that is.
And it's still not done.
But there is no rubble.
Nobody stormed a beach.
This isn't Normandy.
We handed a a a top tax cut to the richest people in our entire nation.
That's the punchline, right?
That's the whole shitty story in one number.
So so three things, and none of them are call your senator.
I'm not gonna tell you to call your senator anymore.
I I don't know about you, but my senator's office knows me by name, and all I ever get is the form letters.
So don't I mean I guess you could you could vote you could donate to a nonprofit about it.
Maybe maybe that'll help you feel better.
But I I don't know many people who have the money to donate to anything right now except the causes most close to them.
One, learn to read a tariff on a receipt.
Like really do it.
Pick one thing you buy every week and track its price to put a name on the reason that it moved.
And when you see the tax they hid, stop being mad at the shop owner.
That's the real radicalization.
No, don't get me wrong.
You should be mad at the big guys.
You should be mad at Walmart, which apparently I don't know, Trump has done some weird under the ground under the table handshake deal with Walmart to lower the price of ground
beef.
So apparently you won't be eating steak, you won't be eating fish, you won't be eating, you know, pork fingers or or w w chicken.
You're gonna be eating ground beef because that's what you deserve, I guess.
But it is they're lowering the price of that.
So don't you don't have to feel sorry for Walmart.
Walmart's probably one of the worst corporations in the history of humanity.
Despite what the Waltons have done for the world.
But get radical about it.
It's boring.
It's a spreadsheet on your fridge.
I'm sorry.
But that's that's just notice.
Notice how much things cost for yourself.
There is a CPI that keeps track of this, but now it's run by a department that has loyalty to one person and it's not you.
Two I I'm I'm kinda hesitant to say this because I I've gone no contact with at least one of my parents over this very thing.
But maybe find a Toledo guy in your life.
Maybe not somebody who has the direct ability to hurt you like a parent or a sibling that you've you've not talked to.
But think about a person in your life who wore the hat, right?
And don't gloat, don't don't try to convert that person.
Just be the person who was right.
And didn't pay them back for being wrong.
Because the men who lied to him are counting on you to treat him like garbage, which is gonna push him back right into their arms for the next election out of pure spite.
Deny them that.
That's tactical, not sweet.
As much as that might hurt, I I mean it and it gosh, the even thinking about it, I'm just like, I don't know.
Cause I think about these people and and they're hard to deal with.
But there are people who've been quiet about their support.
They haven't said anything, but now they're starting to speak up.
Uh I am a member of the subreddit uh Leopards Eating Faces.
And I see it all the time and sure I get a good joke at it, but these are real people too.
And the truth is I want national health care for them too.
I want reasonable food costs for them too.
I want their access to fresh foods and fruits and vegetables and healthcare and and reasonable jobs and and income.
that matters.
But the people that are doing that are unions.
I hate to mention it.
I hate to say it again, but but labor, organized labor is what produces those things.
Um so, you know, be nice.
Um do your best not to gloat.
It's difficult sometimes.
Also, this week I want you to write down uh like w with a pen.
Uh there's a little bump on your your finger, your middle finger that everybody
In the millennial gen millennial and before generation has where we we've written with pens for our whole lives.
Um bone spur or something, but write down their names.
Vaught, Navarro, Lutnik, the tax writers, the policy disruptors before the memoirs come out and and clean it all up, right?
Memory is the one thing that they can't tariff, and they are coming for that too.
This regime is failing.
Good.
But it's still gonna hurt a lot of people.
It's gonna hurt a lot of people like you, and it's gonna hurt a lot of people like me, and it's gonna hurt a whole lot of people that aren't like you and me.
And they hope you'll just let them walk away from it.
And let's not do that.
I'm Joshua.
This has been the overlap.
Um, yeah, you can find us at FOF.foundation, check us out on Apple Podcasts.
we're also available on Spotify, or you can go to our website and find your platform of choice there.
We're also on Blue Sky and Mastodon and a couple other of other things, so you can you can check us out there as well.
Um
Yeah, hopefully we'll be back with us sometime soon.
Take care of that guy in Toledo, even if he doesn't deserve it yet.
Take care of your friends and and your family as well, comrades.
Signing off.
Bye.