STEPHANIE RUHLE (MSNBC HOST): Well it's not what they say, Joe. The issue is what they do. You can start with the housing crisis, right, and J.D. Vance out there talking about what Wall Street robber barons did and how they hurt the country and caused that housing bubble to burst, and people losing their homes and losing their businesses. But there's no connection to Donald Trump's policies. Because it was Wall Street predatory lending. But what happened when Donald Trump became president? He wanted to wipe out the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He's all about loving payday lending. Steve Mnuchin, his treasury secretary, became supremely wealthy because he profited off that bubble bursting.
Yesterday, my flight out here, I took a commercial Delta flight and I sat next to a hedge fund manager named John Paulson who raised $45 million for Donald Trump back in April. You know why he's so rich? Because he shorted subprime. So the issue that blew my mind last night is that J.D. Vance stood on that stage, and he could have talked about things that he believes in, like a national abortion ban. He believes in it. That he thinks gutting Medicare and Social Security, that's what we need to do to get back to financial sanity. He's all about Project 2025.
He could have talked about those things, but he didn't. He talked about things that were wholly untrue, like how Donald Trump, what he's done for wages, how he's going to bring jobs back, how Joe Biden is buying energy from other places. Under Joe Biden, we're producing more oil than any president ever. So my head scratcher goes back to what you all were talking about in the last segment with Jeff, how on Earth is this rhetoric matching the policies they put forward? It's simply not.