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Emily Gee, senior vice president for Inclusive Growth at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, joins the podcast to talk about how President Donald Trump is harming the U.S. economy. Emily and Colin also discuss rising prices, how President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act guts Medicaid and food assistance, and the Trump administration’s efforts to conceal vital economic data simply because it does not like the numbers.

Transcript:

Colin Seeberger: Hey everyone. Welcome back to “The Tent,” your place for politics, policy, and progress. I’m your host, Colin Seeberger. The cost of living is top of mind for the American people and was one of the many issues that Donald Trump promised to address when he became president. But since taking office, he’s done the exact opposite.

Donald Trump’s agenda is pushing the economy toward a “Trump slump,” and he’s making it harder, not easier, for the American people to get by. With a report earlier this week confirming that inflation is actually trending up, and some recent poor jobs data, we wanted to dive into what’s really going on with the economy and how Trump’s policies are raising costs for American families.

Joining me to break it down is Emily Gee, our top health and economic policy expert here at CAP Action. And stick around after the interview for a moment of joy because folks, you may have heard, but we have some important Taylor Swift news to discuss.

Emily Gee is the senior vice president of Inclusive Growth here at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, where she oversees economic and health policy. She previously served as an economist at the Department of Health and Human Services and on the Council of Economic Advisors in the Obama White House.

Emily, welcome back to the show.

Emily Gee: Thanks for having me on the pod.

Seeberger: So we have so much to cover on the economic front, but really I just want to zoom out and start big picture. This week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the latest monthly data for the consumer price index (CPI), which is basically monthly consumer inflation data, which showed that prices are on the rise, rising 2.7 percent over the course of the last year. And we see within that, core inflation is increasing at an even higher rate. Notably, housing and medical costs were main contributors to these numbers.

Can you break down this inflation report for us and whether you think that we’re starting to see Trump’s economic agenda reflected in this data?

Gee: Sure. So as you said, inflation is increasing—Or prices are increasing, rather. The core inflation, I think, is a worrying sign that the core inflation—so that’s consumer prices minus energy and food cost—was up 3.1 percent.

Things are fairly steady for the overall CPI number, but when we combine that with other things happening in the economy, we’re starting to show some signs of weakness. The main one would be the weak jobs report that we got a couple weeks ago showing that the economy added just 73,000 jobs in July, far below expectations. And that was the weak job report that led Trump to fire the BLS commissioner.

So I think what we’re seeing is some signs of greater risk of stagflation. So that’s an economy in which you have high price increases but also weak job growth. And that puts the Fed in a challenging position, particularly when Trump keeps threatening higher tariffs and more tariffs.

Seeberger: Yeah, I mean, it has certainly been a chaotic implementation, to say the least.

And it’s impossible to talk about costs without touching on grocery prices. We know it’s a huge pain point for—I think I saw a poll out earlier this week that over 80 percent of Americans say that it is a significant, if not minor, pain point in their financial situation.

Things like coffee and beef were already getting more expensive. Now, they have reached all-time highs. And that’s before we’re starting to see Trump’s tariffs, more and more of those costs being born by consumers. And now, even prices on everyday goods like toilet paper or laundry detergent, soap, toothpaste—they’re all going up.

What should consumers expect over the course of the next few months? How have the tariffs played out to date in terms of—obviously we’re seeing some of these costs reflected in the prices that are being paid by consumers, but businesses have also picked up some of the tab here—how should we expect that that dynamic may change in the months ahead, if we don’t see a massive change in policy from the White House?

Gee: So there’s still a lot of uncertainty ahead, particularly because—we’ve all heard the term “TACO,” “Trump always chickens out” on the tariffs.

Seeberger: Yeah.

Gee: But they are on for a lot of goods in a lot of countries. And I think there’s major risks that we’ll see higher prices for a couple of reasons. One is that that he announced these tariffs on his “Liberation Day” back in April but then put them on a 90-day pause. And so those tariffs got put off.

Coffee’s a great example. You mentioned coffee, and that is not something that we’re going to be able to make in America because only less than 1 percent of it is grown—that’s Kona Coffee in Hawaii, which is delicious. But we’re not going to be able to grow our own coffee here.

Seeberger: Bananas, too.

Gee: Yep, there are goods that we just can’t make here. And so Yale Budget Lab estimates that consumers will end up paying about $2,400 more because of higher prices for imported goods over the year, once those tariffs take effect. And I think another reason, as you mentioned, Charmin says it’s going to be increasing the cost of toilet paper in the future. Tide plans to increase the cost of detergent.

Goldman Sachs put out an investor note earlier this week that said that to date, companies have been absorbing a lot of the costs, and so consumers have only been seeing about 22 percent of that tariff cost passed through. But they can only do that for so long. And so eventually, Goldman thinks that consumers might face as much as 67 percent.

Seeberger: Sixty-seven percent of the cost. So two-thirds of the cost of the tariff being passed on to consumers. That is staggering.

Gee: Yes. Businesses have been eating this to some extent, but they can only do that for so long. And I think it will also get worse because of things that you might see on the shelves at Target or Best Buy or whatever, or things that got imported earlier. They were on a container ship coming across the ocean months ago or maybe even a year ago. But now that consumers are going through the inventory, going through what they bought in advance of tariffs, they will need to pass on those higher import costs to consumers.

Seeberger: I think this entire phenomenon doesn’t just have huge economic implications. We know that the cost of living is a huge political factor in American politics at the moment, right? And we’ve seen a massive shift over the course of the last 10 months. CNN’s chief data analyst, Harry Enten, who aggregates polling, he had some numbers out earlier this week showing that in the matchup between former Vice President Harris and Donald Trump, Trump actually had a net +9 approval on the issue of inflation last year. But that now, the polling is showing that the public disapproves of his handling of inflation by 25 points. He’s underwater.

What do you think is driving those numbers, one? And then two, I’d be curious for your thoughts on whether you think that there’s actually a real political cost here for the president’s party. Obviously, we’ve got midterm elections just a quick 15 or so months away. Do you think that could be a real problem for them?

Gee: I think it is. I think to your first question, governing is hard. He owns the inflation numbers now, and he’s digging himself a deeper hole by slapping on tariffs left and right, increasing them, decreasing them, playing games with them. And consumers are going to feel the costs of that.

We’re seeing inflation is not cooling and could even get hotter. And so the consequences, I think, will be that at a time when people are already very sensitive, particularly about housing costs as a pain point, sensitive about costs for food, for health care, people are going to want plans from candidates that address affordability.

So I think we will see that play out in the midterms. We’ve already gotten a preview of that in the New York City mayor’s primary, right, where Mamdani ran on a platform of affordability. Not all those policies may be extrapolated to other parts of the country, but certainly I think that shows how much people care about prices and are worried about the cost of living.

Seeberger: Yeah, they’re stressed out. I mean, you’re totally right that Trump just seems dead set on making the situation even harder for himself politically through his actions. You talked about housing being a real stress factor for folks. Well, part of what’s driving those high housing costs for folks and what they have to pay every month are high interest rates, right?

It’s like Trump’s own tariff policies are actually the ones that are responsible for making it impossible or more difficult for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates because they have to weigh the uptrend that we see in inflation because of these tariffs against also stability in the job market as well. So you’re totally right that he seems dead set on making both policy and politics a more complicated problem for himself.

To that end, defenders of Trump’s tariffs often claim that they’re really just a bargaining tool to negotiate with other countries for better trade conditions. But despite Trump’s promise of a summer of deals, he hasn’t really finalized many of them. And it often seems that the deals that he does strike don’t actually put the U.S. in much better of a position than we were pre-tariffs. Can you explain some of these supposed deals and what they’re actually going to get us in return?

Gee: So these deals look like deals that we’ve seen from Trump’s past life as a businessman, right? A lot of bluster and not a lot of actual delivering. We did not see 90 deals in 90 days, unsurprisingly. A lot of what the White House is claiming are deals are actually frameworks for further negotiation.

We don’t know for sure exactly what’s in these deals because they haven’t released text of a lot of agreements. But I will say, some of the things that they’ve claimed they’ve gotten are pledges to buy U.S. oil and gas, pledges from Vietnam to buy agricultural exports. The problem is there’s not really a binding mechanism to make sure that these advanced purchase commitments are followed through on.

So it sounds good, but it’s not clear what’s going to happen. Trump’s tariffs were bad not only for those consumers like you and me, businesses who need to import component parts, but they’re also bad for exporters because U.S. companies are facing some anecdotes about boycotts among in foreign countries. The U.S. has faced some retaliatory tariffs and the up and down of tariffs. And I think the uncertainty is make it really hard for businesses to invest and make decisions about hiring or capital improvements.

Seeberger: So we’ve talked a lot about tariffs, but that’s of course not the only major economic policy that we’ve seen out of the second Trump term.

Last month, President Trump signed into law the Big Beautiful Bill Act, as he likes to call it. I’d say that it’s a big, beautiful betrayal, personally. We got some new data out this week from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which showed not only do taxpayers at the lowest end of the income ladder end up seeing a net loss of resources under this bill—and also simultaneously see those at the very top reaping huge, huge benefits—but we know that simultaneously a lot of people are going to lose their health care. A lot of people are going to lose their food assistance.

Can you break down what the bill means for folks and how these budget cuts will negatively affect Americans and their pocketbooks?

Gee: Sure. So overall, this big, terrible bill, the bottom line is that it’s a massive transfer of wealth from working families to the richest. The tax provisions of it are largely to the benefit of the wealthy, extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act provisions that were expiring. But at the same time, it also makes huge cuts to basic needs programs that Americans rely on to put food on the table and to have health care. It makes the biggest cuts in history to the Medicaid program and also to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

And so as a result, we’re going to see about 10 million more people uninsured according to Congressional Budget Office, and that’s on top of people who lose insurance because of Trump administration actions and the expiration of enhanced subsidies for the Affordable Care Act. And it’s also going to increase the deficit, which means over the long run, families who need to borrow, businesses who need to borrow, are going to see higher interest rates. So for a family taking out a mortgage in year 2030, that means thousands more in mortgage costs because of interest.

Seeberger: That’s a lot to have to swallow given the fact that people are already stressed out by the high cost of housing. I know in June, housing prices in the country hit an all-time high under this president. I am curious to get your take on the fact that over the course of the last several years, we have seen that low-income Americans had been seeing some of the largest wage gains. But a new report out from The Wall Street Journal this week showed that that’s started to completely get turned on its head. Low-income workers are seeing smaller gains than those at the top of the income spectrum.

Combined with the tax changes that you just mentioned, what do you think that this means for, big picture, the strength of America’s middle class? Are you worried about low- and middle-income families slipping further and further behind? Especially if wages stay low, as—before we had started seeing some of these wage gains, it had been a very long time before people were really enjoying a significant increase in pay.

Gee: So this is a bill that will deeply increase inequality. We were already on a trajectory where middle-class folks feel like it’s hard to get ahead and hard to gain a foothold. And this bill—or it’s law now—just gives huge tax breaks to the wealthy.

And what’s more is we know the economy goes through cycles of boom and bust. And when times are tough—where people individually fall on hard times, they lose a job, they get laid off, might have to step out of the workforce to care for a family member—that’s why we have programs like SNAP and Medicaid, so that when people need help, they can get help.

And what the Republican majority just did is gutted those programs. It made it harder to get on them with work requirements. And we know from experience that work requirements also entrap people who are aren’t able to get that paperwork done but otherwise would be eligible for programs.

Seeberger: You talked about some of the changes that the Trump administration is overseeing in the Affordable Care Act. I know you were an economist in the Obama Department of Health and Human Services. One of the things that we’ve seen recently is KFF put out a report a few weeks ago showing that because congressional Republicans and the president have refused to take action, voted against extending some of the enhanced premium tax credits that have helped lower the cost of health insurance over the course of the past few years—by allowing those to expire and go away, they’re projecting—because of both that policy change as well as the president’s tariffs—that premiums next year for health insurance and the individual market are going to skyrocket an average of 18 percent, which is more than double the amount that was forecasted last year in terms of the price increase for 2025.

So what do you think this says about the health of the health care system? And is there anything that the federal government or local and state governments can do to help protect people’s access to health care?

Gee: Yeah, so this is another affordability issue. I think health care is another big-ticket item that really weighs heavily on families’ budgets.

And so what the Affordable Care Act was designed to do is give lower- and middle-income families a protection, of making sure that for those who have to buy health insurance on their own through Obamacare or health insurance marketplaces, that that amount will remain affordable.

And so what we’re seeing, what you referred to, is the insurers are starting to file their rates for 2026. People will sign up in the fall for those plans, and then they have the coverage in 2026. And insurers are feeling squeezed from rising medical costs, GLP-1s like Ozempic are being used more. There’s consolidation in the health care system that gives big health systems the ability to hike up their rates for care. And that filters through to the premiums. And so you’re going to see be seeing higher cost for health insurance.

But the even bigger sticker shock that a lot of people who buy coverage on their own are going to see is because this one big terrible bill didn’t extend those premium subsidies, people who get subsidies in the marketplace are going to see it get less help than they used to. So under the Biden administration, there were a couple laws that gave enhanced subsidies to low-income people. Also made subsidies available for more middle-income families. Those will expire. And so, for example, a 60-year-old couple who makes just a threshold, that family of two could see $15,000 more in premium costs if they wanted to keep their plan

Seeberger: 15,000?

Gee: This is going to be huge for people who are just on the cusp of getting financial help.

Seeberger: Yeah. And a lot of people, they can’t just not go without health insurance, right?

Gee: Yeah. That market is meant for people who don’t qualify for public programs.

Seeberger: Yeah.

Gee: Don’t get health insurance through work. And so it’s going to hit people who are older and out of the workforce. It’s going to hit people who are entrepreneurs, who don’t get work-based health insurance—

Seeberger: Yeah.

Gee: —or people who might be between jobs.

Seeberger: Yeah. I mean, that is a staggering sum. It is also a sum that I imagine might inspire a lot of political backlash, potentially. I mean, how does a lawmaker face a constituent who’s saying, like, “Hey, you voted to take away my financial help to buy health insurance, and now I’ve got to pay $15,000 more a year?” That seems like not good politics to me.

Gee: And it was a problem that we all saw coming because we knew they were going to expire at the end of this year, and Congress did nothing about it.

Seeberger: Sheesh. So you mentioned the sluggish jobs data that we got earlier this month at the beginning of our chat, averaging 35,000 jobs a month over the course of the last three months, after we got some of the latest revisions to some of the jobs data. The president, in response, ended up firing the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after those jobs numbers were released.

And I think that has really caused a lot of Americans to question the health of the economy, right? If this is his response to the data is to say, “Hey, you can’t trust it,” or, “you don’t need this anymore,” and, “I need to put a lackey in there to make sure everything is on the up and up,” I think that doesn’t sit well with a lot of Americans. But I also know that there are huge economic implications for the integrity and consistent reporting of jobs data, inflation data, etc.

What do you think this move means for the reliability of the data that we get from the federal government? And what else should people be looking to, to stay informed about the health of the economy against what could be some choppy waters in the months ahead?

I saw the president earlier this week tapped a new person for the job. Do you have any insights on whether we can be trusting that they’re going to handle their job with integrity?

Gee: So I’ll say, this story is one of the most deeply troubling things that’s happened this month. So the Bureau of Labor Statistics is one of the federal agencies that’s responsible for not just the jobs information, but we talked about the inflation information earlier, too. They do a lot. They’re sort of the gold standard for a lot of economic data, and that’s what we rely on to make policy decisions. Businesses, consumers, families use that information to make investment decisions: Is now a good time to buy a mortgage or expand my hiring?

Seeberger: Make a job change, right?

Gee: Yes. And so Trump didn’t like what he saw in the jobs numbers, and if you don’t like how the game’s going, the better thing to do would be change the strategy and not fire the scorekeeper, but that’s exactly what he did.

So he fired Erika McEntarfer, and now he wants to put in EJ Antoni, who’s a chief economist at the Heritage Foundation—the folks who brought you Project 2025, for those of you who are fans of that terrible blueprint.

Seeberger: That we are not here.

Gee: No. No, not at all. And so he’s putting in someone who’s going to be a hack, a lackey, who even conservative economists had have said is partisan, completely unqualified. I will say, Heritage is not disqualifying. Bill Beach, who was BLS commissioner during Trump’s first term, was someone who really respected the integrity of the institution and knew how important that data are and was able to do the job in a nonpartisan way. The functioning of the Trump administration, as well as the whole economy, depends on having that reliable data, as do businesses, as do households.

And so I think you can play out some consequences of what might happen if you can no longer rely on a steady stream of reliable data from agencies like BLS. One is that policy decisions are harder to make when you’re in an environment where you don’t have full information about the economy and where it’s heading.

Businesses, I think large ones, large corporations will be able to gather some data on their own, but that puts smaller players at disadvantage. If you’re a small entrepreneur, a small business, you’re not going to have the same kind of information that a BlackRock or a JP Morgan is able to gather. There are some private surveys—you asked about other data sources, private surveys like ADP’s payroll survey that gives you some insights into the jobs numbers, but they don’t have the data collection authority or resources that a place like BLS does. And so you’re going to get a lot noisier data and also this uneven playing field for businesses.

Seeberger: We’ve seen a lot of change from this administration, taking stances that would typically have inspired mass hysteria from traditional laissez-faire, traditional Republican line of thinkers.

This week, we saw the president announce that he is going to take 15 percent of the profits of some key semiconductor companies in this country who are exporting some of their chips to China. I am curious for your thoughts on, would Democrats have ever been able to get away with something like this before Donald Trump landed on the scene?

And I’m curious also for your thoughts on, are there things that Democrats should learn about ways that they can better meet people’s economic anxieties given some of the just massive shifts that we’ve seen in, I guess, what is now American federal economic policy making coming out of the executive branch? And if so, what might those be?

Gee: Yeah. There are a lot of double standards going on in this administration. Thinking about the Nvidia carve out, we’ve seen other cases in the tariffs where he’s carved out certain industries. I think suspicious patterns in stocks and the timing of tariffs.

Seeberger: Oh, yes, that.

Gee: It’s crony capitalism. It’s the New York mafia machine at work.

Seeberger: Yeah.

Gee: But I do think there are some lessons for hitting the ground running. Trump one, it seemed like there was a lot of incompetence, a lot of bad policy, a lot of racist policy, unfair policy, but they were a little bit more bumbling. I think this time they have been laser-focused on getting Project 2025 policies implemented.

So I think there’s something to learn about the speed at which you work. Thinking about all the different tools you have to leverage in order to get things done. I mean, one tool, for example, that the Biden administration used to some extent, that I think both administrations used during COVID-19 to help address some of the supply chain problems, is the Defense Production Act.

But thinking about, are there vulnerabilities that we have where we need certain supplies to do housing or to have food, to keep medicines running, that we could use from the Defense Production Act or similar authorities?

Seeberger: One last question for you. This administration, we have seen—we’ve talked in recent weeks about this on the pod—but we have seen make massive cuts to scientific research.

We have seen them also undermining not immigration writ large—specifically legal immigration pathways to this country. A number of the leading companies in this country were started by people who immigrated to this country legally.

I’m curious for your take as an economist, how concerned should people be about the changes that the president has made, both to our continued support for, or lack thereof, for investing in scientific research, the changes that he’s making to legal immigration pathways—just how big of a challenge is or could this be for the country in the years and decades that come?

Gee: So I think a lot of what the Trump institution has done to attack science funding could have decades of implications. A lot of the technology that we use for your computer, to basically having computers in our pockets with iPhones, from medicines—those don’t start out as immediately viable—

Seeberger: Profitable?

Gee: —profitable things, right? It takes years or decades of basic science in order to build the foundations for what might someday become a vaccine or treatment for cancer or become a way to have computers run faster.

And so when you’re cutting this basic research or research for the sake of research, of scientific breakthroughs, that’s not something where companies are going to fill the gap because they may not be able to profit from the gains from it. Those might be decades down the road.

So this is what economists would call an externality, where you need public policy intervention to solve that. Later stages, companies will do experimental research and development to be able to bring those things to market. But it is research at NIH, it is NSF grants that are creating the seeds for it to be tomorrow’s innovations and things that will increase productivity.

Seeberger: Well there’s going to be huge things on the horizon as these tariffs continue to bite, as we keep tabs on the jobs data. So we may have to have you back on again soon, Emily, to help break some of this down for us. But always appreciate your insights and expertise. Thanks so much for joining us on “The Tent.”

Gee: Thank you, Colin.

[Musical transition]

Seeberger: All right, folks, that’s going to do it for us this week. Please go back and check out previous episodes.

Here to break down some of the most important events of the week is our in-house showgirl, supervising producer, traveling Taylor correspondent Kelly McCoy is here with us.

Kelly McCoy: Hey, showgirls.

Seeberger: So Kelly, there’s been a little bit of news this week.

McCoy: Has there?

Seeberger: Yeah. You may have caught, but one Taylor Alison Swift announced that she’s going to be releasing her 12th album.

McCoy: Woo!

Seeberger: “The Life of a Showgirl.”

McCoy: And we learned—was it, 12:12 on August 12? Yes?

Seeberger: At 12:12 AM on August 12.

McCoy: Yes.

Seeberger: That’s when we got the news. So how are we feeling? Any predictions? I know it’s not out yet. We don’t have a set list, a track list. We don’t have too much beyond the green-orange lock that we have seen to date at the time of this recording.

I know there is going to be another big podcast interview that comes out this week on “New Heights” with Jason Kelce and Travis Kelce, with one Taylor Swift being a very highly anticipated guest. But any predictions for what we may see with this album?

McCoy: They probably will have a few more listeners, I suppose, than we will hear on “The Tent.” But depending on how this conversation goes—

Seeberger: We’ll let it slide.

McCoy: Yeah. I don’t think my feet have been touching the floor in the past 24 hours. I forgot what Taylor mania feels like, and I am here for it. After the past six months that we’ve had—

Seeberger: yes.

McCoy: —here in Washington D.C., this is perhaps the best news I’ve heard in 2025, to say the least. I’m excited for what seems to be like a more “Reputation” sounding—

Seeberger: A little pop-y, maybe?

McCoy: Yes.

Seeberger: Yeah.

McCoy: —new album, given some of the folks that are we think might be behind this album, given the playlist that she shared on Spotify.

Seeberger: Yeah?

McCoy: We love Jack Antonoff, but I am not sad about a more pop-y, “Reputation”-style sounding album.

Seeberger: No, I’m a “1989” fan myself.

McCoy: Yes?

Seeberger: “Lover” fan. So bring it on. I’m ready to go. I also think the little stars in the TS logo, I feel like are pop inspired.

McCoy: Mm-hmm.

Seeberger: So we will see what we end up getting. I also have been living for the freelance Taylor correspondents who are popping up all over the internet this week.

McCoy: What, Colin, what are you talking about?

Seeberger: But yeah, following along with everybody’s conspiracies and predictions has given me such life this week.

Are you predicting any interesting collabs, any surprises with this album? “Tortured Poets Department” (TTPD), we got a whole deluxe version with basically double the tracks just a few hours after it was released. What do you expect?

McCoy: So I think I saw somewhere it’s allegedly 12 tracks on the “first album,” quote-unquote, and there’s 10 tracks on a deluxe album. So we’re going to have a lot of Taylor listening to do, which I am delighted about.

My spicy take is, perhaps, that I hope that there is a touch more editing than there was for TTPD. Loved TTPD, but if you compare it to some of her other albums, I feel like her lyrics, particularly during the pandemic era, were just out of control.

So lots of new Taylor songs to listen to. Lots of people speculating about whether Sabrina Carpenter is going to have a place in this album. I’m sure you’ve seen—

Seeberger: Yeah, I saw her on the, I think it was, the 10th or 12th Instagram post picture.

McCoy: Yep. Of course she was. And when she came—I can’t remember which city it was, that Sabrina came out and performed with Taylor. But she’s, of course, wearing white in that concert, and Taylor is wearing orange.

Seeberger: Orange.

McCoy: The amount of Easter eggs. I’m sure you’ve seen the “Anti-Hero” music video that everyone’s calling back, where Taylor’s running around in orange and green. I think I saw someone who said we should all be thankful that Taylor is a pop star and not a serial killer because the amount of dedication she has to dropping all these little Easter eggs has kept me very, very busy these past 24 hours.

Seeberger: Her team is incredible. I don’t know how they do it, but they do. And, Kelly, if things don’t work out in policy and politics, maybe her team might have a need for somebody to help her getting some TV bookings or podcast bookings.

McCoy: So, Colin, this is a weird thing to say at my place of employment.

Seeberger: Yeah.

McCoy: But a girl can dream. The problem is Tree Paine, who is Taylor Swift’s publicist who has this cult following of her own—me at the lead—I think she knows where the nukes are. That is, I think, one of the most powerful women in America.

And listen, Tree, I will give you my phone number. My email address you can find on CAP’s website. I am here, honey. So let me know if you ever need some support.

Seeberger: Well you heard it here, folks. Kelly, we’re not letting you go anywhere. Thank you for joining Taylor in reclaiming orange from the president this week. And folks, I know you are, like us, highly anticipating this album release. And if not, well, that’s unfortunate for you.

McCoy: Sorry you have a bad taste.

Seeberger: Yes. And with that, take care of yourselves, and we’ll talk to you next week.

McCoy: Bye, showgirls!

[Musical transition]

Seeberger: “The Tent” is a podcast from the Center for American Progress Action Fund. It’s hosted by me, Colin Seeberger. Muggs Leone is our digital producer. Kelly McCoy is our supervising producer. Mishka Espey is our booking producer. Hai Phan, Olivia Mowry and Toni Pandolfo are our video team.

You can find us on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The positions of American Progress, and our policy experts, are independent, and the findings and conclusions presented are those of American Progress alone. American Progress would like to acknowledge the many generous supporters who make our work possible.

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Associate Director, Media Relations

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Executive Assistant

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Senior Director, Creative

Olivia Mowry

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Explore The Series

Politics. Policy. Progress. All under one big tent. Produced by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, “The Tent” is an award-winning weekly news and politics podcast hosted by Colin Seeberger. Listen each Thursday for episodes exploring the stories that matter to progressives.

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