Political analysts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss Donald Trump's reckless warmongering with Iran, the administration's incoherent explanations, and how the Presidential Election of 2020 could not only unseat Trump but begin the process of healing the country. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| I think the president is making clear that the Democrats have been parroting Iranian talking points and almost taking the side of terrorists and those who were out to kill the Americans. | |
| Iran's hostilities substantially increased after the foolish Iran nuclear deal was signed, and they were given $150 billion, not to mention $1.8 billion in cash. | |
| The missiles fired last night at us and our allies were paid for with the funds made available by the last administration. | |
| The president didn't cite a specific piece of evidence. | |
| What he said is he probably, he believed... Are you saying there wasn't one? | |
| I didn't see one with regard to four embassies. | |
| What I'm saying is I share the president's view that probably my expectation was they were gonna go after our embassies. | |
| Let's go beyond the stale and tired narratives. | |
| Let's use historical context and alternative perspectives to fully comprehend. | |
| Let's dig deeper to tackle the news and bring a little order to these chaotic times. | |
| That's what your hosts Jared Yates-Sexton and Nick Hausselman will do. | |
| Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast. | |
| So, Jared, is your Spidey Sense tingling over any other threats to the United States by foreign powers today? | |
| Imminent or otherwise? | |
| Eminent. | |
| Eminent threats. | |
| Well, I mean, you know, because we're just going to go around and start wars all over the world based upon feelings and completely fabricated, non-existent reasons, you know, now that the Iran crisis is over and we're not going to have a giant war that could turn into a worldwide religious war, you know, we got to go out and find the next one, right? | |
| Yeah, well, it's again, evidence be damned, right? | |
| Who needs evidence anymore? | |
| Well, right. | |
| I mean, listen, I am so frustrated. | |
| I'm glad we're in here doing this podcast because the past couple of days, With the Trump administration. | |
| I mean, it's always frustrating. | |
| Let's just go ahead and get that out there. | |
| It's always just just infuriating. | |
| Of course, we haven't podcasted since the Iranian crisis was looming over the country. | |
| It seems like we had an imminent war at any moment simply because Donald Trump, you know, engaged in airstrikes that had absolutely no reason behind them. | |
| Since then, the base in Iraq was shelled. | |
| Thankfully, because Iran didn't want to go to war, there were no lives lost. | |
| It seemed like a moment of de-escalation where the United States and Iran could get away from this death spiral. | |
| And then since then, the Trump administration, one time after another, has proven that it had absolutely no reason to do any of this to endanger everybody, destabilize the region. | |
| And oh, by the way, hundreds of people died because Iran was at a state of war and shot down a plane. | |
| Well, let's unpack that for one second. | |
| I'm I'm curious your thoughts because a lot of people obviously want to blame Trump ultimately for that. | |
| What do you think? | |
| Yeah, Donald Trump invited Iran into a state of danger in play. | |
| I mean, he was escalating a problem with Iran to the point where Iran ended up and by the way, let me go ahead and say this. | |
| I think this is an important thing moving forward. | |
| I think everybody has to abandon old ideas about how to approach things like this. | |
| It is both possible and also what has happened here that the United States and Iran are both wrong in all of this. | |
| And I think that's one thing that our media and pundits and analysts are really bad at talking about. | |
| But the United States and Iran are both to blame for what has happened here. | |
| There's a lot of blood to go around and a lot of blame to go around. | |
| And Donald Trump absolutely deserves a lion's share of it. | |
| I mean, everything that we've seen come out in the news is he felt Like there was going to be a threat. | |
| At one point, it was one embassy that was going to be attacked. | |
| The next, it was four. | |
| And if my multiplication holds true, that means next step it's going to be 16, maybe? | |
| 20? | |
| Well, you know, this is just like Manchurian Candidate, the original, where the guy, the congressman in the beginning keeps yelling, I have a list of 100 congressmen who are communists. | |
| I have a list of 130. | |
| Like, the number keeps changing. | |
| And that was kind of a joke. | |
| That was a funny line in that movie. | |
| And it's no longer funny. | |
| Now, the other flip side of that is that Mark Esper goes on Face the Nation and tells everybody that there really wasn't any evidence of any of this. | |
| But that, again, the president felt like it, had some spidey sense that, well, you know, they didn't attack the embassy anyway. | |
| They had a demonstration. | |
| They breached the wall, I suppose, one of the walls. | |
| But then at one point, they just left. | |
| They acknowledged that the U.S. | |
| heard their upsetness, and then that was their job, and they went away. | |
| This didn't feel to me like hardened militia men attacking an embassy in Iraq. | |
| Yeah, we talked about that. | |
| I believe it was the episode before last that the breaching of the embassy was more or less a psychological operation to demonstrate that it could happen, that there was a vulnerability, and just to send a message. | |
| Iran never wanted a war here. | |
| Here's a question. | |
| ever intended to have a war here. | |
| And the idea and the way that they reacted to Trump's strike on Soleimani shows that they had no interest in a war, that they weren't planning any other attacks where they can, you know, planning on destabilizing United States rule in the region. | |
| Absolutely, they were. | |
| But Donald Trump escalated the thing because he is dangerous and imbalanced. | |
| Well, here's a question. | |
| Why wouldn't they just capture Soleimani? | |
| They had on their base in a friendly territory. | |
| They could have just captured him. | |
| Well, what an absurd thing all the way around. | |
| Like, we're still talking about this thing that was created completely out of whole cloth by a person who was looking for a distraction, who was given an option that he shouldn't have taken. | |
| Everybody in the administration is completely baffled by this thing. | |
| Nobody was told about it. | |
| There was no preparation because we have a dangerous person as president. | |
| And now, by the way, I just want to point out my bone to pick in all of this, not just the idea that we have to pick a side, which we're going to talk about how the Republican Party has decided to just go full-blown McCarthy and claim that the Democrats are traitors and We'll talk about that in a minute. | |
| But let's also talk about the fact that in this whole situation, Trump goes out and gives this speech. | |
| And it was after the attack on Iraq, after Iran shells the base and purposefully doesn't kill anybody. | |
| And everybody's like, is Trump going to deescalate? | |
| And he goes out and he gives the most batshit speech. | |
| I would say in American history, but there's a lot of them built up at this point, three years into the Trump presidency. | |
| He goes out. | |
| He warns of future escalation. | |
| He warns of bringing NATO in the region, which by the way, if you want to see escalation, you want to see like worldwide religious war, bring NATO in. | |
| He actually went so far as to claim that Obama had given money to Iran that was then used to kill Americans, which is treason for those keeping track at home. | |
| He then revealed the existence of secret weapons that were classified before he began speaking. | |
| The entire time he slurred, had trouble breathing, he had no idea what he was talking about. | |
| He goes off the air and American media immediately is like, well there you have it, de-escalation, what a calm speech from the President of the United States. | |
| And now, all of a sudden, it's like the Iranian crisis never ever happened. | |
| Right. | |
| What a messed up culture we have right now. | |
| Well, I will say in the news and the media the last several days, the focus has been on this imminent threat and whether or not there really was one. | |
| So they're kind of sticking to that a little bit but, you know, certainly the brink or not brink of war with them is gone away. | |
| That was probably never really a thing. | |
| By the way, like, kudos to the Iranians for their response, right? | |
| Like, it could have been worse. | |
| And maybe this also indicates to me, because I think in the past I've had some serious doubts about how much control they really do have over all their proxies. | |
| And, you know, that's what you've got to worry about is some of these rogue, you know, militias or loose groupings of military people could do their own attacks wherever they want across any part of the world and they're affiliated with Iran. | |
| So maybe that also is indicative of the fact that they have control, they can put out that all points bulletin and then people will have to listen to them and not attack if they say so. | |
| Well, well, first off, um, the, the, the Iranian response in one hand, and again, we gotta be nuanced about all of this. | |
| On one hand, the shelling response to the base in Iraq was measured. | |
| On the other hand, that exact night, they, they blew a Ukrainian aircraft out of the sky and killed, um, you know, over a hundred people from around the world, which by the way, like, Our president created a situation where innocent people on an airliner were blown out of the sky. | |
| That was Trump's creation. | |
| And I understand the Iranians made the mistake of destroying this airliner. | |
| Well, they say it's a mistake, but I understand the Iranians made the mistake of destroying this airliner. | |
| Donald Trump put that in play. | |
| Let's not be wrong. | |
| Both sides are wrong in this. | |
| The other thing with it, and you're exactly right, a lot of these proxies around the world that Iran deals with are death cults. | |
| Like, there are a lot of them that are obsessed with the idea of creating a religious war, this apocalyptic battle between the United States, which they consider Crusader armies, and themselves. | |
| A lot of these groups are looking for that. | |
| ISIS is looking for that. | |
| Al Qaeda was looking for that. | |
| A lot of these proxy groups are offshoots of all of that. | |
| Donald Trump has given them ammunition to recruit. | |
| He has given them reason to radicalize and he's given them a state of play where where a rogue person could go out one person could go out right now and like Archduke Ferdinand could set off. | |
| A chain reaction that could lead to a ton of death and destruction. | |
| And meanwhile, everyone's just like, well, did Trump win here? | |
| Like, I understand it was kind of unorthodox and it was kind of unpredictable, but did Trump win here? | |
| Like, he played his hand. | |
| Like, how screwed up is our worldview where that's... People died. | |
| People were shot out of the sky and we're talking about whether or not he won. | |
| Well, let's answer that question, because out of all this, in direct response, well, Iran is resuming their nuclear weapons capabilities, and Iraq voted, you know, unanimously for the U.S. | |
| to leave. | |
| They literally, as a sovereign country, want the United States out of their country. | |
| You can't just ignore that, and what is the response by the U.S.? | |
| They're like, oh, that's cute, that's nice, we'll come back and we're gonna continue to talk about what we can do to, you know, to remain in your country. | |
| There's a word for that. | |
| It's called Occupier. | |
| It is exactly what has stirred up the Middle East for so long and wanted people to kill Americans. | |
| It's because we're there. | |
| Now Iran has never really demonstrated a desire to attack America anywhere but the Middle East. | |
| So I don't even know if we have to be concerned necessarily of a terrorist attack on our own soil. | |
| But the idea that we were going to say, oh, we're going to stay in Iraq like that just because we want to, we're now becoming that, well, maybe we always were, but we're giving them so much more fuel to fan these flames of hatred, and we're losing that soft power every day. | |
| There's no way you can consider this any amount of a win for Trump. | |
| Well, let's talk about soft power. | |
| How do our allies feel right now after this strike that took place in Iraq? | |
| Not great. | |
| No. | |
| Wait, do you think that NATO was really going to come and get involved in a war in Iran? | |
| They don't agree with what's going on anyway, so Trump couldn't even mention them. | |
| But, you know, they all perked up and were like, what? | |
| We're not going to do anything. | |
| We're not going to participate in that. | |
| I'm so glad you brought that up because the idea... | |
| Oh man watching that thing is so frustrating like sometimes I'll not watch Trump speak for like a few days and then I'll watch a speech and I just get a new kind of pissed off all over again. | |
| I'm just like this is just unbelievable. | |
| He talks about NATO one moment. | |
| He'll get on this big thing. | |
| There's like NATO owes us a bunch of money and NATO sucks. | |
| And then the next thing you know, he's like, well, I'm going to call NATO. | |
| And it's like, did you remember what NATO was like? | |
| And you look at the people around him. | |
| It's like there were never conversations about bringing NATO in. | |
| It was an empty threat that never had anything to do with anything. | |
| So we have all these allies that Trump didn't tell that he was going to carry out this strike. | |
| He did not. | |
| I mean, Boris Johnson, who's basically like one of Trump's lackeys, came out publicly and was like, I'm pissed off about this. | |
| I wasn't told. | |
| Canada, one of our best allies in every alliance that we've basically ever had where we went to war. | |
| We just, I want to say it was over 60 Canadians were killed in that airline crash. | |
| They're pissed off and I'll tell you what, outside of America and America is obsessed with us versus them. | |
| Everything is the USA versus everyone else and we're always in the right. | |
| We're always benevolent and God's chosen country. | |
| Everybody else in the world is looking at this and they're like, you know what the US is wrong and Iran is wrong And and I'll tell you what Canada is not just blaming Iran. | |
| They're blaming us So if we ever have another situation if we ever have another crisis and and we will we've lost trust in And we lose trust every day with this person. | |
| It's not a win. | |
| And people who think in wins and losses are so nearsighted and shortsighted on how this whole thing works and what the consequences are. | |
| And it just drives me insane to watch this. | |
| Yes, all in the name of getting some judges appointed and, you know, some sort of notion of taxes. | |
| You know, let's talk about the lies, though, because, you know, some of the things that defend them, you know, is when they say, like, what the attacks on Obama were like, that he gave them all this money that ultimately became the funding of terrorism. | |
| And it's an outright lie at this point because it's been reported on so much. | |
| When he says that we gave them $150 billion, like, in cash, It's a lie and he knows it's a lie because the money that we gave back was Iran's money. | |
| It was their money to begin with. | |
| So the money that was sitting there that we weren't paying them back for all these years was gaining interest that we were gonna have to pay them. | |
| There was a lot of money then. | |
| So to be able to hammer out a deal with Iran for just the nuclear weapon capabilities and eliminating that and then letting that releasing that money that we never it wasn't our money wasn't taxpayer money to begin with that was actually a shrewd deal to get them to do we needed to do so there it's just like You know, all politicians lie is sort of what the people who support Trump say, but you're talking about the kind of lies that deeply affect national security. | |
| It's not even like polling lying. | |
| But I want to push back on that a little bit, because you're exactly right. | |
| The Iranian deal and the money that we sent them, everything you just said is right, but it's also very complicated and nuanced. | |
| I don't want to make the mistake of saying that Trump understands he's lying all the time. | |
| Because I don't know that he understands. | |
| That's the other thing. | |
| That speech that he gave was not just crazy and unhinged and dangerous, and this has been proven time and again whenever he gets out and he speaks on important things. | |
| He has no idea what's going on. | |
| I mean, this is a person who is not just completely in over his head. | |
| He's lost. | |
| And it isn't well and is deteriorating and getting worse by the day. | |
| And you're exactly right. | |
| I don't know if he knows it's a lie. | |
| Maybe he does. | |
| But I really, truly believe that we have a president who thinks that the former president was treasonous. | |
| Like, you know, it was like the thing that he did with birtherism. | |
| Everyone's like, ooh, this was a shrewd thing that he did, you know, giving himself capital with Fox News and conservatives. | |
| It's like, no, he's a paranoid dude who doesn't understand things. | |
| So I kind of wonder, and again about nuance, I kind of wonder if sometimes he knows it's a lie and sometimes he doesn't. | |
| Because I'll tell you today, and I wanted to talk about this, Trump has just taken to trying to prosecute the 2020 election by saying that the Democrats are traitors. | |
| Like today, in a really, really, I mean, he had quite a morning. | |
| I'll just throw that out there. | |
| He was tweeting out hate speech. | |
| He tweeted out pictures of dead bodies. | |
| He retweeted a Photoshop picture of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, the leading Democrats, in Muslim garb and insinuated that they were terrorists and that they were helping Iran. | |
| And I looked at that and I was just like, I don't think that the President of the United States of America understands how wrong and dangerous and disgusting this is. | |
| Like, I think that's truly how he views the world. | |
| If anybody disagrees with him, I think he thinks that they are inherently evil, which I think is the disease at the heart of the Republican Party. | |
| Well, I think also he's sitting around the residence or the Oval Office. | |
| He's got guys like Stephen Miller and probably only a couple other people who are of that ilk, and they're the ones who I think are feeding this. | |
| And they're probably just hanging out, having Fox News on in the background, and they're just kind of shooting the shit. | |
| You know, I really feel like that's one of the things that's building up in this thing, and so you kind of develop these facts out of that, you know, out of this sort of, you know, a few of these really horrible people in a room together who aren't well-read. | |
| I mean, Stephen Miller, even, I wouldn't give him the benefit of, like, having any sense of intelligence, really. | |
| It's very myopic. | |
| And so that is what's kind of dangerous there, because he's not being briefed, he doesn't get these in-depth briefings from a lot of other agencies now. | |
| So it's really just a bunch of racist white guys hanging around, just shooting the shit, and then he's just spewing it out in his speeches. | |
| Yeah, and I think that's part of the feedback loop that has caused the problems that we're in right now. | |
| So for instance, Trump tweeted that out today, this picture of Pelosi and Schumer, and insinuated that they were traitors. | |
| Later on Fox News reacting to that, because this is how the feedback loop in the echo chamber works. | |
| Stephanie Grisham said on Fox News, trying to explain that picture, Well, thank God that she's not the press secretary. | |
| that Democrats are parroting Iranian talking points and almost taking the side of terrorists and those who are out to kill Americans. - Well, thank God that she's not the press secretary. | |
| Oh, wait. | |
| Right. | |
| So she's on there, on Fox News, delivering this talking point. | |
| And I think you're exactly right. | |
| It starts in like a fevered, paranoid dream. | |
| And then he puts it out there and Fox News has to react to it. | |
| And by the way, his intuition, if you want to call it that, I would call it his fever and his sickness, is exactly set up and working directly with what Fox News wants to do. | |
| Right. | |
| Fox News has been dedicated to creating an alternate reality where the person watching it feels like that they are faultless and perfect and on the side of the good that they have God on their side and everybody against them is not acting in good faith because they're evil and satanic and criminal. | |
| And that's exactly what's happening here. | |
| And this is where we're going. | |
| Like this crisis that Trump created to try and distract from his impeachment is now going to be one of the main talking points of the 2020 presidential campaign. | |
| And it doesn't matter who gets the nomination. | |
| It doesn't matter what Senate race or congressional race it is. | |
| They are going to paint Democrats as treasonous. | |
| Okay, how about this? | |
| If there wasn't an imminent threat, And we've already seen reporting now that he was he and no one's really declined or disputing this, that he felt like he had to do the strike on Iran or on Soleimani because he needed to shore up support from Republican senators. | |
| So if this imminent attack is a lie, basically, then the only other explanation for it is that he did it to distract from the impeachment. | |
| I think that I think it's all of it. | |
| I think it's all of it. | |
| I think every time you look at the Republican Party, like, I invite people to imagine the Republican Party as a car that is in such bad dish repair and there are no parts left for it anymore that they're just putting whatever works together to make that car drive. | |
| Because the Republican Party has no path to electoral success anymore besides, like, fascist ideology of like fixing elections, disenfranchising people, gerrymandering. | |
| And their base is so small and so thrown together that they have to serve, I don't know, six or seven different masters. | |
| And you're exactly right. | |
| Everything's about that impeachment, right? | |
| Everything's about saving his vote, distracting from impeachment, you know, trying to serve evangelicals at the same time, who, by the way, a lot of them Are the other side of that coin of the death cults who are looking for the apocalyptic battle, right? | |
| So you have all of these different constituencies that come together, and nothing ever makes sense. | |
| That's why the administration can't tell you why they did it, is because there's no underlying reason. | |
| There's multiple reasons that don't make any sense whatsoever, and when you combine them, they only sound worse. | |
| Well, let's talk about the impeachment, too, because there's some interesting happenings now. | |
| It does seem like Pelosi is going to send the articles of impeachment to the Senate this week. | |
| It kind of feels like that's what's happening. | |
| And it also kind of feels like maybe her arm got twisted by, you know, Lindsey Graham was going to try and change the rules to force them to either... or to hold a hearing without the actual articles being sent over or some ridiculousness. | |
| And of course the Republican talking line now is that she was, you know, utter ridiculousness what she did. | |
| But it does feel like it's a win. | |
| I think what Trump doesn't understand is that the impeachment doesn't go away, right? | |
| He's impeached forever now. | |
| It'll always be a stain on his presidency. | |
| I mean, maybe short of a major war, like these distractions aren't going to keep it out of the news, right? | |
| Like he's not going to be able to stop that from being a big thing, a big talking point from now until the election, either way. | |
| So I feel like by Nancy Pelosi extending this for any amount of time is a win for the Democrats. | |
| The impeachment is going to be a television spectacle. | |
| And that's the way these things work. | |
| Americans love these big spectacles of political crisis. | |
| I mean, we get up for that. | |
| We show up for it. | |
| We watch it. | |
| We're obsessed with it. | |
| I don't know how long it's going to last. | |
| I don't know what it's going to look like, but it's going to gather a bunch of attention. | |
| And I have to tell you that if any of the people that Republicans have kept from testifying and Trump have kept from testifying, if any of them get any sort of a chance to speak their minds and tell the truth, like this thing could turn into a calamity for him. | |
| But, yeah, I think that they are doing everything in their power to obfuscate it and distract from it and work against it. | |
| And I don't know where it's going and I don't know what it's going to look like, but there's a lot of that happening here. | |
| Let me tap into your connections to the Republicans and your feeling of how they respond to certain questions, because I'm curious what they what would what would McConnell, what would Graham and any other Republicans say when faced with the video footage of them in 1999. | |
| Insisting that they must have witnesses, they must have documents presented in a court of a trial of an impeachment on Bill Clinton, and they're the exact opposite now. | |
| I'm wondering what that argument is that says it's okay to, you know, completely flip and be the other way and not want witnesses or not want documents. | |
| Winning or losing. | |
| It's very simple. | |
| I mean, it's a very craven idea here and a very craven way to look at the world, which is, I'll do whatever I have to do to win. | |
| And that's what the Republican Party is about. | |
| I would actually say that if you were, and I kind of miss, well, I don't kind of miss, I miss them all the time, Jon Stewart's daily show. | |
| And, you know, Stewart had this sort of air to him where he could get Republicans to come on and then confront them with these things. | |
| And he had, like, a weird knack for that that doesn't really exist anymore. | |
| And he had a good way of holding them to task for it. | |
| And I think he actually, like, I think he took up a lot of real estate in Republican minds and sort of kept them not honest, but at least worried about video evidence coming out. | |
| I think now, if they were confronted by it, they would just grin. | |
| Because it's obvious what's happening. | |
| It's become a game, and it's become about trench warfare. | |
| You do what you have to do to win and move on. | |
| So Lindsey Graham and McConnell are not going to really acknowledge either way that they flipped or whatever. | |
| But is there an effect on the electorate? | |
| Will their supporters see an issue with that? | |
| Or will it be enough of a thing when it comes time for them to run for their Senate races? | |
| And their opponents are running against them, and there are some of these Republicans, perhaps, who are now, you know, since they're never Trumpers, you know, are not, don't want to be part of the Republican Party anymore. | |
| Like, I don't know, I wonder if that will have any effect, especially if, is this the endgame Pelosi is playing, where she knows they're going to have a rushed trial, they're not going to do any of these things, it's going to be a sham, and that will ultimately hurt them, knowing when, you know, the people who are going to vote are saying that that was a sham, and I don't agree with that, and I'm not going to give them my vote anymore. | |
| Well, we talked. | |
| Man, time anymore just doesn't feel real. | |
| I don't know. | |
| Maybe it was four years ago that we talked. | |
| I don't have a clue. | |
| But Republicans, especially the ones who are on the fringe of Trumpism, have started to move away from him in a lot of different ways. | |
| But I will tell you, I've been keeping... | |
| The pulse of those voters very, very closely lately. | |
| And one thing that I keep hearing, which keeps coming up and it surprises me, is a lot of them at this point, it's almost like a game of chess. | |
| They're willing to sacrifice Trump for Pence. | |
| And they feel like the Trump experiment is reaching its logical conclusion, and he has served his utility. | |
| And they look at this thing, and they'll tell you, they're like, well, I don't think he should be removed from office. | |
| But if he was, I don't think it would be that bad. | |
| Because we'd get Mike Pence, and then, you know, we'd get past all this, you know, BS of Trump. | |
| So yeah, there's a lot of them who are saying that at this point. | |
| I have to tell you, and we talked about this again, maybe it was a week ago, maybe it was three years ago. | |
| The Republicans have a choice here. | |
| They are going into 2020 and, you know, if the best hand that they have is to call Democrats treasonous, I mean, they're going to win over hardliners, but there's a lot of people who are tired of this crap and a lot of people who are looking to get through all of it and find some actual solutions. | |
| I mean, you know, it's like a flip of a coin. | |
| Maybe they'll win and maybe they'll hold their power or maybe they'll be wiped out. | |
| You know, it felt like that. | |
| I mean, listen, it felt like they should have been wiped out in 2016. | |
| And I guess the founding fathers, I suppose, couldn't have conceived of Fox News, I suppose is where we're at, because I'm sure they would tell you now, oh, don't worry about it, because when it comes time for an election, that is when you're gonna be able to straighten all this out. | |
| And it doesn't feel that way, even still. | |
| Even though all the polls and all the numbers now look to me like, you know, Trump has no way of winning an election. | |
| It doesn't seem at all possible. | |
| And we said that again in 2016 before, but it feels that way again. | |
| But I don't feel it. | |
| Here, let's go back to our feelings, shall we? | |
| I don't feel it. | |
| It doesn't feel good at all. | |
| And it still feels like he's got a real good control of the Electoral College. | |
| Well, to start, I think the Founding Fathers could absolutely understand the ideology of Fox News. | |
| Because when you actually look at how the country was founded, you know, Madison constructed this government with the idea that we would never have parties. | |
| And the reason he thought that we wouldn't have parties is because you would have a ruling class and then you'd have everybody underneath them. | |
| And the ruling class would all be on the same page, which is profit and power and control. | |
| That, you know, within 10 years was completely gone and the Federalists were running roughshod over the country, but that's a different thing altogether. | |
| Their newspapers and their media outlets were completely partisan based, but the partisanship was towards the ruling class and the wealthy. | |
| Right. | |
| So they would understand the idea that the media would be able to control all this stuff. | |
| They wouldn't understand the technology, obviously. | |
| But this is one of the problems with America is that we have created a situation where Fox News and Trump and this Republican Party can exist. | |
| And, you know, people always say, well, the founding fathers wouldn't know what's going on. | |
| It's like, well, no, you have one of the richest white men in charge of the country, which is exactly what they thought would happen. | |
| But they thought the meritocracy would keep playing out. | |
| That's the difference. | |
| Yeah, and I don't think it got that different for a long, long time. | |
| I mean, let's not forget how they picked who was going to run for president in each party. | |
| They didn't have primaries until recently. | |
| They basically got into a back room and kind of picked somebody, okay, you're going to run for president this year. | |
| I mean, that's sort of how they did it. | |
| So we kind of had that framework anyway up until, I've got to say, the first primary we had in the Democratic-Republican race was like the The major overhaul came in the early 1970s where the Democrats opened up their primaries. | |
| They started letting more and more people in. | |
| So it's like very recently that we've even had this notion of like oh you can pick who's gonna run for president because otherwise it would have been these guys smoking cigars in the back room sort of manipulating the whole thing to begin with. | |
| And by the way there are people right now And there's been a deluge of articles and I just want to say this because this is you know This is our podcast I get to say shit like this, right? | |
| I cannot tell you how much it pisses me off that the response people have had to Donald Trump is to say yeah We probably need to get rid of primaries and go back to smoky rooms like the control of the Anglo-Saxon elites was like pretty great which is just Garbage. | |
| Garbage. | |
| Well, by the way, if that was the case, though, still, then Trump never would have gotten nominated. | |
| So who knows? | |
| But, you know, because they were trying to get rid of him the whole time. | |
| But that brings me to an interesting point because I was online on Twitter engaging with a Trump person. | |
| And I kind of was trying to be very respectful and have a conversation to figure out, you know, a little bit more behind what's going on. | |
| And I wanted to share with you some of the mindset because, you know, when you hear it from a guy like that written out this way when he says it, it does sound kind of reasonable. | |
| And so the first thing he said was in response to, you know, something about, you know, why do you support him? | |
| He goes, well, he's done exactly what he said he'd do. | |
| Can I ask you a question? | |
| That guy blocked you, correct? | |
| but military strong, works for me. | |
| And then he goes, here's the thing. | |
| I don't give a crap about Trump. | |
| I voted for him because of what he was willing to protect. | |
| Conservative judges, strong military, pro-life. | |
| Couldn't care less about what he says or tweets. | |
| I don't vote for people, I vote for issues. | |
| - Can I ask you a question? | |
| That guy blocked you, correct? - He did. | |
| - Okay, that's sociopathic reasoning. | |
| I'll just throw that out there. | |
| I actually think that this is an interesting conversation that we can have. | |
| I think when you start looking at politics and you start taking the humanity out of it, and the thing that I always pound the desk about is game theory, which is if I do this, I win. | |
| If I do this, maybe I win going back and forth, but I don't want to let you win. | |
| And that makes me win. | |
| Um, when we start strategizing it out. | |
| So what that guy just said is I don't care if Trump is racist and discriminatory and puts people in cages or starts wars. | |
| As long as I don't have to pay higher taxes or I don't have to pay taxes or you know my issues when I think that's a really deadly sort of a mindset to get into all of a sudden people become expendable and right now in this country there are people who are dying earlier than they should. | |
| They're having less fulfilling lives, they're miserable, and they can't get health care, they can't get education, and their kids are damned to worse lives than they had simply because that guy thinks it's okay for his issues to win because you have an authoritarian demagogue in power. | |
| That's my take on it. | |
| Yeah, I know, and it always goes down to like, yeah, like, is it really that worth it? | |
| I mean, because what we, America is what we choose to believe it is, right? | |
| And it never is what we, you know, it's always an aspirational. | |
| And so that is why you have to be very vigilant about how these people behave. | |
| And again, it's that same cynical notion of, oh, well, they all lie, whatever. | |
| But you know what? | |
| I want pro-life, so that's what I'm going to vote for him. | |
| But at some point, like a lot of, at least in the past, when you lied or you got into trouble, like there were some serious consequences. | |
| And there aren't any more. | |
| And that's what's really the destructive part of this, is that they're going to get away with this. | |
| And at least since Nixon, and probably since Nixon, because they did get away with a lot of this stuff in the past, you would think that that would be the case. | |
| They're going to get, with the reporting that we have and that kind of stuff, they would be held to task. | |
| Of course, you look at the last several, since Nixon, it's all Republican presidents that have these horrible scandals. | |
| And by the way, like Iran-Contra never affected Reagan. | |
| It should have been his Watergate. | |
| It wasn't. | |
| And then you have George W. Bush getting us into Iraq with trumped-up evidence of WMD. | |
| And these are major, major things. | |
| issues that cost lives, change the future of the country forever. | |
| And now they're not getting held accountable to it. | |
| Which again, it goes back to your whole point where you've been saying since we started this, is that this isn't about Trump. | |
| Trump is simply a symptom. - So let's take winning and losing out of the equation. | |
| And so let's talk about the guy that you read that tweet from. | |
| Okay. | |
| So let's say that he... I don't want to assume what this guy's voted for or who this guy's voted for. | |
| Everything you just brought up, if he supported it or didn't support it, if those things hadn't have happened, if we didn't have a culture of war and militarism, if we didn't have a military-industrial complex, that soaked up all of the money that we could be using for infrastructure and health care and education and the betterment of lives, I guarantee that that person, even if he thought he was losing, his life would be better. | |
| And that's the point here, is if you take winning and losing out of it, so I'll just throw this out there, a completely off-the-cuff manifesto that I never expected to talk about on here, right? | |
| If I had my ideal country, if the country worked the way that I wanted it to, you would have a respect for people. | |
| Everyone could live their own lives and not be infringed upon by outsiders who want to control their bodies and their love lives and their pursuit of happiness. | |
| But at the same time, it's not like, it's not like if you told me tomorrow that, like, we're gonna round up the Christians and we're gonna put conservatives away and we're gonna silence them. | |
| I would just, I'd be horrified. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| Like, just because we're opposed politically doesn't mean that I don't want you to have a better life or I don't want you to have human dignity. | |
| And the idea that I can win while you lose, that's not how a society works. | |
| These people think that they're winning but they're losing. | |
| People who are voting for Trump Left and right are actually losing. | |
| And I will say this, even the people who understand Trump and they understand white nationalism and fascism and authoritarianism, these are deeply unhappy people who are for that stuff because they're unwell and they need help. | |
| Right. | |
| And so their voting and quote unquote winning is actually still losing. | |
| This authoritarianism and fascism and ideology is so poisonous for everybody that even while you're winning elections or you're rolling over democratic institutions, you are losing. | |
| I mean, he thinks that his taxes were cut. | |
| And as far as I can tell, unless this guy was a multi-millionaire. | |
| A CEO. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I mean, who knows? | |
| Maybe he is. | |
| He's on Twitter or whatever. | |
| But I don't know. | |
| My feeling is he wasn't. | |
| He didn't get his taxes cut. | |
| My 10-year-old niece had asked me the difference between conservatives and progressives or whatever you want, liberals. | |
| And I told her that liberals think that the government should help people. | |
| And conservatives think that people should help themselves. | |
| I don't even think that's what it is anymore. | |
| Okay. | |
| I think it's actually shifted. | |
| I think that's what it used to be. | |
| I think that used to be a very apt description of what liberals and conservatives are. | |
| And this was about a year ago. | |
| Well, I think what we've actually seen, and this is actually, I was doing research on this and it kind of blew my mind, I think what's actually happening with Republicans and conservatives is they're not even conservative anymore. | |
| They're running up deficits left and right, they're throwing out socialist programs to help people, but it's a certain group of people. | |
| Now, and I wouldn't call them conservatives, I would say that Trumpists are a group of people who claim that they're conservatives, but what they're actually conservative about is people that they don't like or people they consider their enemies using funds and power to help people that they don't like or don't look like them. | |
| And they want to use those funds and power to help themselves and people who look like them. | |
| In this case, white people or primarily cisgender white people. | |
| And I think that that has changed because of the ideology. | |
| That's what we saw with the Tea Party. | |
| Oh yeah. | |
| Right. | |
| Tea Party came out. | |
| It's like we're for limited government, but don't touch my benefits. | |
| And you shouldn't be giving out stuff over here. | |
| But you know what? | |
| They are all for Trump giving out money to these farmers. | |
| Trump for. | |
| Oh, my God. | |
| In the first month Trump was in office, he's going out and he's helping one factory in Indiana that ended up leaving anyway. | |
| That's picking winners and losers, which is the exact opposite of conservative ideology. | |
| I think you're exactly right. | |
| It used to be liberal and conservative. | |
| And now it's just all of us who are like, oh, we were playing a game and you're off here doing your own thing that is all about selfish needs. | |
| But I think you're right. | |
| I think that's what it used to be. | |
| But I think it's evolved to a really bizarre thing. | |
| Well, and then the next layer of that is that a lot of people, like even if you're white and you have nothing, you're born into complete poverty, you are still more advantaged than any other person. | |
| And if you're a man, then you're even more advantaged than anybody else in the country. | |
| And it might not feel that way. | |
| Your life might not be going the way you want it to go. | |
| But regardless, the inability to recognize anybody or have empathy or, you know, to see life from another point of view is really another interesting factor here. | |
| Because, of course, you don't have a job? | |
| Then you go move and find the job somewhere, you know? | |
| And it's like, you don't have a... What's wrong? | |
| Of course you need voter ID to vote, you know? | |
| Just go down to the DMV, get yourself a license, and then you'll go vote. | |
| What's the problem? | |
| And the sheer inability to understand other people's plight from either if it's socioeconomic or if it's race or gender is, I think, a real key here that they'll never overcome, which is strange only because it seems like in school, at least I grew up in Chicago, which is, I guess, somewhat liberal, but you would think that in school you're raised to learn that at an early age. | |
| And I suppose, you know, it gets overridden by, you know, your parents or something. | |
| But, you know, that's a real key here that I feel like is going to be almost impossible to overcome. | |
| So I grew up in a dirt poor family in rural Indiana and I have to tell you one of the things that leads me to sadness and anger more than anything else in all of this is my family and the people around them and the people in my community. | |
| These are people who have Nothing. | |
| They're very, very poor. | |
| Their lives are beset by medical problems, lack of education because they can't afford it, their jobs are going away, they don't know how they're going to pay their rent, and they have been manipulated into voting completely against their own interests because their prejudices and their ignorance has been used against them. | |
| And that's what we're talking about here is there's a group of people who right now are supporting a party with cult-like, religious-like devotion. | |
| They're supporting a party that has always been for the wealthy. | |
| And has been for trickle-down economics, which by the way, in my community, you know what that led to? | |
| Walmart closing down every single store. | |
| It led to the wealthy getting wealthier and the poor getting poorer. | |
| But they keep hitting the same notes, which is the only thing the Republican Party has anymore. | |
| They have one play, and that's to play to white nationalism and white supremacy. | |
| And to tell these people, you know what? | |
| Maybe we're not going to help you financially, and maybe we're not going to get any jobs for you, and maybe you're never going to have health care, and you're never going to have education, and your lives are going to be shorter and more miserable, but you're going to still be part of a white supremacist nation. | |
| And that puts you here over these people over here. | |
| And that's the only card the Republican Party has anymore. | |
| I say it all the time, and it's not rhetoric. | |
| The Republican Party is terminally ill and it is riddled with this disease that should kill it. | |
| It should go away. | |
| We should have a conservative revival of another group of people that actually has principles and ethos. | |
| They don't. | |
| They simply don't. | |
| They have one play left and they keep playing it and they keep ruining democratic institutions because democracy doesn't work for them. | |
| And they keep playing the one card with these people and the people unfortunately don't know that they're being played. | |
| And that's how you end up voting for an incompetent faux billionaire who has no idea of anything and has no concern with who you are. | |
| And that's how you end up becoming religiously and cultishly devoted to this person. | |
| Right. | |
| I think what we need is someone that can convince most of the population, if not everybody in the country, that when everybody does well, everyone will do better. | |
| When you can create policies that everybody can benefit from, that's when you see real growth in the economy and real growth in a lot of these things. | |
| That's when you stop seeing people homeless. | |
| And that's when you stop seeing mental illness being ignored. | |
| That's when you stop seeing so many issues with immigration. | |
| Those are the moments when the country is really going in the right direction and working. | |
| And meanwhile, and that's the other thing is, you know, the question I want to ask people who want to support Trump because of those policies, it's like, but he's tearing down any sense of working together ever again. | |
| You know with constantly insulting it constantly burning these bridges and so he's probably polluted the entire generation now who like can we ever envision you know Republicans and Democrats ever kind of coming back together and trying to work on things McCain Feingold like that's never gonna happen again the way this is going so that is where I would think that some rational people even if they you know don't like Trump like his policies would have to at least acknowledge | |
| With some self-reflection that that is what is so damning and yet they don't either despite the fact that I don't believe that their lives are probably any better than they were short of unless you were a CEO. | |
| Well, what gives me hope? | |
| And one thing I enjoy about the 2020 edition of the Muckrake podcast is we're trying to have hope, Nick. | |
| I'm making a concerted effort. | |
| One thing that gives me hope or a couple things that give me hope are, first of all, a lot of these people that we're talking about, and people don't get it because when they hear this, they're like, there's no way that's true. | |
| A lot of these people voted for Barack Obama. | |
| And they voted for Barack Obama for a plurality of reasons. | |
| He talked to people about jobs. | |
| He talked to people about, you know, trying to make the best of the economy. | |
| And a lot of them actually, and these are people who a lot of them are prejudiced and ignorant and racist, they don't want to believe that they are prejudiced, racist, and ignorant, right? | |
| They wanted to give an African-American man a chance. | |
| And so maybe they are ignorant, maybe they are racist and prejudiced, but they want to believe that they're not. | |
| And so, you know, if they want to believe that they're not, there is still hope that somebody can come around and talk to them. | |
| And one thing that we do in this country, and it's American history is littered with this and it's one of our biggest problems. | |
| We make the mistake of thinking that tomorrow will look like today and that today is how the future is always going to be and nothing will ever change. | |
| I have hope that, and the president plays a big part in this, The President of the United States changes the way we look at politics and the world around us, and it can be in big, drastic ways, and it can be in tiny, tiny little ways. | |
| Trump is a big way, right? | |
| We're all at war with each other right now, and there's no way that we could ever, ever come together and work on stuff. | |
| Well, all it takes is someone to come along, change the conversation. | |
| In this case, I think it has to be economic. | |
| I think we have to have someone who comes out and says, you know what, we have a really, really unfair neoliberal order that everyone's miserable under, and it doesn't serve anybody except for the extremely, obscenely rich. | |
| And you know, there are Democrats out there who are making that message. | |
| There's a lot of politicians who are making that message. | |
| There's a possibility that that could take hold and we can look at places like Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. | |
| And I'll tell you this, Indiana, where I'm from, they voted for Barack Obama. | |
| And there is a possibility that we can get past all this stuff. | |
| And I talk about it all the time. | |
| I think people are tired of the Trump battles. | |
| I think they're tired of the cultural wars that Trump creates. | |
| And I think there's a possibility that we could see a sea change in this country. | |
| But it's got to come from those issues and the rest of it. | |
| I think once everybody starts feeling like we're in it together, I think that we can start to start to understand how we're connected versus how we're divided. | |
| And once we realize that the rising tide lifts all boats, I think things get better. | |
| Amen, brother! | |
| All right, so I think that's as good of a time to end as any. | |
| We are really grateful, as always, that you're listening on here. | |
| I know Nick and I were talking earlier about how we're so happy to be having conversations with people, and people seem to be enjoying the podcast. | |
| Please, please, please keep reaching out to us. | |
| Share this podcast. | |
| Let people know that we're talking about things from a different point of view, going a little bit more in-depth and questioning more things. | |
| Share us on social media. | |
| We're on iTunes. | |
| I think we're on Stitcher. | |
| Are we on Stitcher, Nick? | |
| We should be everywhere. | |
| I think we're everywhere. | |
| So share us wherever. | |
| Rate us. | |
| Subscribe. | |
| We're going to be doing a special broadcast during the election, so please make sure and subscribe. | |
| That way, I don't know, you'll wake up in the morning and you'll be like, hey, we're talking about something. | |
| That's exciting. | |
| Until next time next week, I am at J.Y. | |
| Sexton. | |
| Nick is at Can You Hear Me? | |
| SMH. | |
| Thank you as always. | |
| We are so, so appreciative. |