The (White) House Always Wins

This week on Bad Bets, we are mad, and with good reason. Trump’s family just spun a $5B crypto empire out of thin air, ICE is deporting honor students and firefighters mid-wildfire, and the Shanghai Summit is quietly rearranging the global order. We dig into why anger is rarely a primary emotion, how cruelty is the policy, and why Trump’s grift coin is more dangerous than Reddit memes suggest.
But it’s not all doomscrolling, there’s also Saquon Barkley’s ESPY-winning reverse hurdle, a community Robin Hood play, and a deep dive into why that Disney fox made a whole generation horny and liberal.

Because sometimes the only way to process despair is with outrage, sports highlights, and cartoon smirks.

🎧 Listen now.

Transcript

Sophie DeWitt (00:03.542)
You know how anger feels like it just explodes out of nowhere? Like it's a default setting. Most of the time, anger isn't actually a primary emotion. It's just sort of the smoke underneath the fire. There's grief underneath it. There's fear, there's helplessness, there's shame. I think anger a lot of times is like the armor you grab when the softer thing is too raw to touch. It's getting in a bar fight versus crying in the shower.

which is why this week I am fucking furious. And yeah, I could sit here and psychoanalyze myself, like what is underneath it? What wound is this poking? But honestly, I don't think I need therapy right now to explain why I'm pissed. It's politics. All right. Over Labor Day weekend, the Trump administration tried to deport more than 600 unaccompanied Guatemalan children. Their ages were 10 to 17.

despite most of them, if not all of them, having ongoing immigration cases. I think the fucking goddess, a judge named Sparkle, stopped it all for now. This is like the insane timeline that we're living in. Meanwhile, also over Labor Day, President Xi, winning the pool, hosted what was basically the world's least fun sleepover with Putin, Modi, Kim Jong-un, Iran, all the Central Asian bloc showed up.

It was the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit. The optics were very blunt. It was obviously a rebuke of US power and all of Trump's tariff tantrums. Beyond the insanely crazy photo ops, they cut deals on AI development, pipelines, sanction proofing their economies. And North Korea and Iran flaunted their roles as Putin's munitions suppliers, which love that for us.

Why is this not a great thing for the United States? Why does this matter? Losing India with Modi being there is a big deal. For decades, the US has banked on India being the demographic counterweight to China. And if Modi drifts towards Beijing and Moscow, that's over. Instead of siding with us on things like tech and defense and trade, India is aligning with some of America's biggest rivals.

Sophie DeWitt (02:26.638)
I also think this means that sanctions don't scare them anymore. If Russia, China, India, and Iran figure out how to trade in their own currencies and pool resources and then the US sanctions stop being the economic death sentence they used to be, that's a huge loss of leverage for us. There's also the AI issue. China is obviously racing to become the world's AI supplier if they sell chips and software and AI systems across

Asia, Africa and beyond, they don't just make money, they shape how billions of people interact with tech and data and even politics. All right, so a lot of people hear this, like the US is losing influence and they think, good, maybe we fucking deserve it. And honestly, me fucking too, but here's the rub. When we screw up, it does open up space for other powers and those global powers aren't necessarily building feminist co-ops and climate councils like China, Russia,

Iran, even parts of Modi's India, they aren't offering some utopian alternative. They oftentimes are offering surveillance states and fossil fuel feudalism and the kind of like order where dissent gets you jailed or disappeared. So rooting for the US isn't necessarily rah-rah patriotism in this case. It's about which flawed empire gives people more room to breathe. This is laughable right now, I know, but the US at its best.

and I know the bar is incredibly scarily low lately, still has some semblance of independent courts, has semi-functioning press, protest rights, the possibility of organizing and changing things. can't really try that as freely in Putin's Russia or Xi's China or Kim's North Korea. You will vanish oftentimes. Trump is really the enemy here because he collapses the difference. He takes America's worst instincts.

corruption, cruelty, minority rule, and makes them indistinguishable from the systems that we claim to oppose. He alienates allies. He coaxes up autocrats. He wants to be one. He sells out the economy for a grift coin and undermines the very tools, i.e. sanctions, alliances, tech leadership, that, however imperfectly, keep worse regimes in check. None of this matters to Trump, of course, because he hears about nothing but himself. You know the saying.

Sophie DeWitt (04:48.787)
Don't bet more than you can afford to lose unless you're Trump, then just bet America. After cozying up to Putin and letting us fall behind in the world in terms of intellectual power, health, safety, security, like the Trump family got $5 billion richer on Monday. Let me repeat that. Five Billy with a B, that's a big boy Billy, billion dollars richer on Monday from crypto deals alone.

the family has amassed more wealth with this crypto Bitcoin scheme since Trump has been in office this time around, just this time around, than all of his real estate holdings in his lifetime. He courted the crypto industry after claiming it seemed like a scam. He now profits immensely from that sector that he was shitting on. So if you hadn't read about this, here's what's happening. The Trump family decided to take

the old sort of Trump hotel model of like pay for access to us. And they just ported it straight through onto the blockchain. They launched, I believe, a crypto firm called World Liberty Financial with a token, I don't even fucking, dollar WLFI. It's supposedly worth around $5 billion on paper. That instantly makes it the family's most valuable asset, bigger than their decades old real estate empire. All right.

Now normally when politicians make money while in office, they at least try to be sneaky about it. Think Nancy Pelosi. With Trump, he's just doing it out in the open. He's literally setting crypto policy at the same time that his kids are cashing in on it. This is not just a conflict of interest. It is like the entire conflictual playbook. The way it works is simple in my understanding. Enforcement cases against major crypto players, Coinbase, I think Binance is another one.

They have been significantly dropped or delayed under Trump. This is why so many crypto bros love him. Meanwhile, those same companies are suddenly in business with the Trumps. They're helping prop up the stable coin. Crypto.com is partnering with Trump Media. Justin Sun, the guy behind Tron, invested $75 million in the Trump coin. And not long after, his SEC case was quietly shelved. Imagine that.

Sophie DeWitt (07:11.629)
It's like every time you hand them money, the cops just stop showing up. Because I guess that's what happens when you're a fucking felon. And if you're thinking, oh, who cares? Or like the Democrats were super limp dick on crypto, I agree. But if the coin collapses, people lose their shirts. And that's like crypto, maybe. That's the problem. Economists are already warning that if that or any of the other Trump backed projects crash and fall out, they could bleed into regular finance. Banks, pensions.

retirement funds, which means if this thing blows up, which we just don't know, it's not just Reddit traders taking the hit, it's taxpayers. The irony here is that Republicans spent years screaming about Hunter Biden's paintings as if like his bad wall watercolors were going to destabilize the global economy. Meanwhile, Trump and his sons had bought a casino chip worth like billions while their dad holds the rule book. The scale isn't even comparable.

So why, my friends, is this a bad bet? It's not just because speculation. It's speculation backed by presidential power. It's deregulation written by the people cashing the checks. It's foreign investors having access to him. Political donations and meme coins all braided together into the biggest, tackiest rug pull in American fucking history. And yeah, I know that crypto bros love risk, but this isn't risk. This is your dad dealing the blackjack hand.

stacking the deck and then handing himself the bailout when it all goes bust. At this point, the Trump family isn't running a presidency. They're running like a blackjack table at Atlantic City, because the house always wins, and the house is the White House. So my bad bet for this week is that by next week, Donald Trump will say something even dumber than calling the Epstein survivors a hoax, which he did this week.

Give it seven days, we'll be debating whether like child trafficking is just a deep state plot against Mar-a-Lago's brunch service or whatever the fuck, that's the bet. He will outstupid himself publicly, place your chips accordingly. I am so fucking fed up with this man.

Sophie DeWitt (09:17.953)
The other reason that it has been just an insanely hard week to deal with this, not only is he becoming so much wealthier, but he is ruining so many more people's lives this week, is just a nightmare in terms of ICE news. It's part of a long and ugly bet that America has already placed. Jacob Soboroff had done some really incredible reporting on this. He wrote a book called Separated, and it shows how Trump's

first zero tolerance policy during the first administration. It wasn't some paperwork mix up. It was designed on purpose to tear children from their parents as punishment for even asking for asylum. And in that book, Sobroff walks us through secret memos and whistleblowers and his own time inside detention centers, cages full of toddlers crying themselves hoarse while their parents were shipped off and deported without them. Reunification was made practically impossible.

by design or incompetency. can't quite tell. The cruelty was the policy. And that's the playbook ICE is still running off of today because Stephen fucking Miller is in charge, who is essentially a white supremacist. And he looks just like a little white bean.

So when you hear about this week's deportations, don't think of them as an isolated headline. Think of them as a sequel to the horror story we already know too well. And never forget that Trump himself is a convicted felon, that he's married to an immigrant and has an anchor baby. The story that you should be paying attention to this week, Nori Santay Ramos, she was 17 years old, an honor student.

a track athlete, a rising senior. She grew up in the United States. She is barely fluent in Spanish. She did what she was supposed to do with her mother. They showed up for their scheduled immigration check-in. And what happened? She and her mom were detained on the spot and deported to Guatemala within days. No judge, no hearing, no chance to fight it. Just gone. This is not about crime or gangs or some national security threat. This is a kid, a child, who literally did everything right.

Sophie DeWitt (11:26.709)
and the system punished her for it because of her skin color. Not even her nationality, her fucking skin color. Why is this so horrible? Number one, it's just a human rights violation. But number two, the courthouse should never be a trap. What are you doing if you're encouraging people to show up for these legal appointments where they're going through the system?

and you snatch them out of their lives and deport them without any due process. If you tell people to follow the rules and then fucking arrest them for following the rules, you don't have immigration enforcement. You have entrapment. Number two, ICE doesn't just enforce policy. It's starting to shape these sentiments and this policy. Jacob Soboroff covered this in his book. It isn't random. What happens when you give a federal agency unchecked power to detain, disappear, and deport without oversight is

dangerous and bad for all of us. And number three, that means there's no firewall between politics and cruelty. Trump has promised to be the deportation president. showing us exactly what that looks like. Kids pulled out of classrooms, families yanked out of communities, entire lives unraveled in the name of fucking law and order, the law and order president. The bigger risk here is...

If you don't pay attention, ICE can take a straight A student out of school and ship her to a country she barely knows. They have set a precedent that no one's safety is guaranteed by doing the right thing. That corrodes trust in the legal system for everyone, immigrant or not. This isn't just about one girl, it's about the message. The state can disappear you and nobody will stop it. America is not a safe space. ICE is making us crueller, it's destabilizing families, it's eroding trust in the courts.

It's turning bureaucracy into brutality. It's the worst kind of gamble. It's taking away our human dignity. And again, as I will say, in every single fucking podcast, if you were not brought here, if you were your ancestors were not brought here forcefully or you are not a Native American at some point, we were all immigrants and come from immigrant families. It's fucking wild. Meanwhile, there were firefighters.

Sophie DeWitt (13:44.406)
in Washington state helping contain a 9,000 acre blaze in the Olympic National Forest, border patrol agents rolled in, lined up the crews, asked for IDs, and arrested two contracted firefighters right there on site. What the actual fuck? As Chris Hayes says, it's insane. It's asinine. It's fucking stupid. It's fucking crazy. Arresting firefighters in the middle of a wildfire response, that's what's happening in the United States? There's no spark of logic in it, and it's so insane and infuriating. OK.

So instead of me like ranting and yelling about this forever and ever and ever and buying crop tops that say fuck ice and just blabbing to my poor friends weekly about this, what are we gonna fucking do? We're gonna donate our time, our money, our attention and our resources. If you have extra money to spare, the Immigrant Legal Resource Center is a place that you can donate your money. The National Immigration Justice Center.

You need to contact your representatives. need to signal boost every single fucking story about this shit. You need to be loud and bold and proud about this. There are community trainings where people can become community watchdogs if you can speak Spanish, provide translation services for people, go get trained to stand outside of a Home Depot and read someone their rights as they're getting yanked away in a van, all right? This is why I will never stop talking about this. Okay.

Yeah, start a podcast. It'll be fun and lighthearted and all about pop culture. I'm going to calm down. I'm going to calm down. OK. The transition point I'm at right now, I'm going to be happy thinking about big guys throwing pigskin around, smashing things with wood, jumping over things. I'm talking about sports, baby. Toss me the rock. OK. My tiny treat, big take this week. If you don't know who Saquon Barkley is.

It's fine. didn't either until last year, but the ESPYs every year, which is like, you know, the Grammys for sports people. It's like the Oscars. It's like the Tonys. It's like the best of the best. They decide which professional athlete wins play of the year. Saquon Barkley won this year. And my tiny treat big take is that he very much did deserve to win. It's not really a controversial take.

Sophie DeWitt (16:06.049)
But holy fucking God, we have to shout this out. I love people that are insanely good at their shit. And I love watching them do the shit that they're insanely good at. Like we live in an era of goats. Michael Phelps, Marina Williams. I'm naming all female athletes. think the women's US soccer team. Simone Biles, like every moment in her gymnastics life was absolutely insane. So let me just set the scene and lay this out for you.

Because you need to know the whole story. 2024 NFL season, we're talking football here, okay? The Eagles versus the Jags. I think it was like week nine. It's third and six. The Eagles are down. It was the second quarter. Saquon Barkley takes the handoff. He starts going one way down the field. He sees that Delaney is clogged. And then he just, doop, doop, doop, doop, reverses direction as one does, right?

Here's the part that's like literally insane. He flips around mid stride. He literally hurdles himself up and over a defender, but he does it fucking backward. Not like a normal track hurdle, not like up, up, up and up. No, he's going one way, plants, turns around, goes the other way. And in that chaos just like springs backward over a cornerback.

The dude decides to try to square up and suddenly Saquon is sailing over his head. Can you imagine looking up and just seeing ass and legs pointed the opposite direction? The crazy part is after that maneuver, he lands. He doesn't even break his stride. And I think he converted to a first down. He kept the drive alive. The crowd went insane. Even there's amazing footage on the sideline of his teammates being like, what the fuck?

That was the most athletic shit I've ever seen. Like the Jags were looking around like, nah man, like that's not legal. Like you can't do that. I think the Eagles ended up winning that game 28-3. Saquon had a good game. had two touchdowns, a bunch of yardage. I think he led the lead in rushing that year. So career highs across the board, offensive player of the year. But this one play, that's unforgettable. It's the thing that everyone remembers and rightfully so. All right.

Sophie DeWitt (18:25.037)
His coach said it was straight up like the best play he's ever seen. Yeah, like no one has seen anything like it. Kids everywhere are going to be like in the backyard pulling hamstrings trying to copy it. I don't think anyone is ever going to be able to like really recreate it. Yeah. So that reverse hurdle just won in the ESPYs for best play. And then Saquon was put on the cover of like Madden's 2026 cover. You know, you've done something nuts when EA Sports is like, yeah, we're putting you on the box, baby. Let's go.

Yeah, so, you know, was like, wasn't a glitch. It happened in real life. Super athletic shit. We love it. Okay. Yeah, that's a little fun, Diddley. I feel so much brain rot. I just like, can't even stop thinking about the ice shit. But yeah, take one little hurdle. You should YouTube it. You should YouTube it and then go to the Immigrant Coalition Fund. Okay, before I wrap up, because we need to talk about some more lighthearted, good cultural shit on this podcast.

and no one else has sent me relationship questions and probably because I didn't answer the first one. But if you wanna, you should hit me up and we're gonna have a drunk history soon, I promise. Yeah, slide into those DMs. Okay, before I wrap, we have a friend who is acting in a community play called Sherwood. It's about Robin Hood. I'm like dying for there to be a good live action.

Robin Hood remake Men in Tights was a great comedy. I never saw the Taron Eagerton live action because I don't know. He was he was good in that one British film where he like fucked the girl in the ass at the end. Spoiler. Sorry. It was so good. So like disarming and perfect. But I just he's not my Robin Hood. OK, so just refused to watch it. But you know, the Disney Robin Hood, the one with the Fox. I was obsessed with that movie, like watched it over and over the music.

fire. Ooh, lolly, ooh, lolly, ooh, lolly. It's been stuck in my head since I was six. The whistling, the little rooster playing the banjo, it's perfect. Robin Hood himself, he was a sly fox. Literally. Sorry I had to. He had that smirk. He was smooth. He was stealing from the wretching image of the poor. And then he like slides that ring right off of Prince John's back finger, cold blooded. It's cooler than anything I've ever seen Batman do.

Sophie DeWitt (20:48.543)
I was obsessed with this movie when I was younger. I'm just sitting there as a kid like, whoa, like this is politics. This is romance. This is how you live. Like Robin's hot, made Marion's cool, but graceful. And the Sheriff of Nottingham is like the exact blueprint for every dude you ever hated at work or at a bar you come to find out. That was an awakening for me. Like Robin Hood in that movie wasn't just stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. He was like.

suave and rebellious and completely hot in a way that a cartoon fox has no business being. Like, if you're a millennial and you're weirdly into banter and morally righteous outlaws, I think that this is why. Right? It was a political education. Made Marians literally choosing love over the crown. Solidarity, baby, over status. That's fucking radical. That sex and politics bundled into a G-rated film. Okay, Disney, I see you. It taught us everything.

redistribution of wealth is sexy, rebellion is righteous, and love should feel like you're sneaking around in the Sherwood forest with a fox in tides. You know, that tyranny should be mocked. taught us that there's love that's always tied with rebellion. I already say that? There's a man in green tides that can still be hotter than half of Congress. So yeah, Robin Hood wasn't just a cartoon to me. It was my first crush. Made you horny, and it made you want to unionize. And honestly...

What more do you want from art? I don't think I've recovered fully. Redistribution of wealth, hot. Outlaw romance and forests and emerald green, hotter. It's perfect. Yeah, so if anyone's up in Santa Rosa, go see the play. It's running like next weekend through the end of September. It's called Sherwood. And then someone like get a little high with me and rewatch Robin Hood. Or maybe I just need to be alone and watch it. Okay, I'll see you next week.