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Jan. 18, 2020 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
51:09
A Really, Really Bad Case of Fascism

It's been a busy week in the world of politics and analysts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman needed an extra podcast to cover it all. Lev Parnas went on TV and spelled out the specifics of the Ukraine Shakedown, Republicans have all but admitted Trump's crimes, and the president is as unhinged and dangerous as ever. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I keep saying it's like a cultish environment being around President Trump.
So, I truly believed seeing different information that was handed to us at that time that Joe Biden was doing something illegal.
After analyzing all the evidence and sitting back and really, what's it called, understanding what's going on, I don't think Vice President Biden did anything wrong.
I think he was protecting our country and getting rid of probably a crooked Attorney General.
And guess what?
Sometimes the best defense is the so what defense, which is if everything the Democrats said is true, it's still not impeachable.
If everything Les Parnas has said is true, it's still not impeachable.
I mean, that's what this is about.
Resolute desk.
It's been there a long time.
A lot of presidents.
Some good, some not so good.
But you got a good one now.
Even though they're trying to impeach the son of a bitch.
Can you believe that?
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.
Hey everybody, welcome to the Muckrake podcast.
I am your co-host JJ Saxton.
I'm here with my co-host Nick Hausman.
We usually go once a week and talk about all the relevant things.
Occasionally we'll do an emergency podcast when there's breaking news and we have to talk about something.
We're here on a Friday taping because so much has happened in the past few days that we felt compelled to sit down and talk about it.
We have had Lev Parnas, one of the major players in the Ukrainian scandal, go on MSNBC after a trove of documents came out that showed Trump and the gang that couldn't shoot straight carrying out go on MSNBC after a trove of documents came out that showed Trump and the gang that couldn't shoot straight carrying out an Julie, we're going to talk about
Rudy Giuliani has reared his ugly head once more and also the Republicans have just gone full bore Sure, well you know what I'm thinking about this is, it seems like Nostradamus was a real person and his name was William Shakespeare.
where we are, Nick.
Not enough to talk about, but I assume we'll find a way.
Sure.
Well, you know, I'm thinking about this is it seems like Nostradamus was a real person and his name was William Shakespeare.
Because this is basically Henry V, you know, or kind of mixed with Macbeth.
Like there's a lot of stuff going on here, but you wouldn't believe it if you created a script for Hollywood of this because all these crazy characters and all the behavior.
But, you know, the thing that you just mentioned at the end of that was really what's key.
No one is denying the facts.
Right?
No one is disputing what actually happened.
And that's when you understand what guilty people do.
The Republicans and the way they're approaching this is what guilty people do.
And you're right, now that we hear their defense on Hannity and all these things is now going to be, yeah, he did it, so what?
The president's allowed to do that.
And this is the existential crisis that we exist in now.
So I talk a lot when I'm talking to students about writing and life.
I talk a lot about like the phenomenon of sort of becoming entranced by driving.
So like, you know, a person can drive and get behind the wheel of a car.
And if you drive for long enough, you sort of just get hypnotized by the road.
And you sort of forget that you're driving.
And you can just sort of like look up all of a sudden.
Hours have passed, right?
And you're just weaving through traffic.
And you're doing all these things.
And then there are these moments of existential terror.
Where all of a sudden you're like, oh my god, I'm driving this incredibly heavy piece of machinery.
And I'm going like 85 miles an hour and weaving through traffic.
And there's all kinds of other people doing it.
And you used to have this moment of terror.
This thing that we're talking about right now, which we talk about all the time, is we become numb to it.
We become desensitized by it.
I thought about this today.
So Rudy Giuliani, and nobody wants to talk about this, but Rudy Giuliani is having a late life breakdown.
His emotional life is falling apart.
I think this is a guy who likes to think of himself as like a hero and a mover and a shaker, which is one of the reasons why You know, he would go to Ukraine and do all this stuff because he thinks that he's like crusading and and trying to catch the bad guys in this case, Joseph Biden and Democrats or whatever.
And he has gotten sway over a president who is incompetent and also delusional.
And neither of them can tell truth from conspiracy theory.
We're going to talk a little bit about the excerpts from the new book, A Very Stable Genius, that show that not only is Donald Trump incompetent and not up to the presidency, but is dangerous and is unraveling mentally.
I had one of those existential moments of terror.
The terror to me, the driving part, is when you're not sure you're going to stop in time, 80 miles an hour and the car in front of you is slammed on its brakes, right?
That's the moment where the heart gets going and all those things.
The problem is, is that too many people, you know, are just going to swerve around it and keep going, it sounds like.
Well, right.
And, you know, you're talking about the moment of crisis, right?
There's a moment that suddenly reveals itself and it's a moment of crisis and it makes you snap back into reality.
And the problem here is that Donald Trump is our moment of crisis.
I mean, this is a person who should not be president of the United States and is really, really dangerous and unhinged.
And all of a sudden, the moment of terror, right?
We're going into impeachment next week.
The quote-unquote jurors have all been sworn in at this point.
I believe it starts on Tuesday.
And we're going to watch an impeachment process that supposedly is just going to be already figured out with Republicans.
I mean, they're just coming out and flagrantly saying, Reince Priebus was on Fox News last night on Hannity, and he said, you know what?
So what if everything the Democrats are saying are true?
He's committed these crimes.
He's done these things.
Just why do we care that is a that is like an eight-car pileup right up ahead Right and and in the fact that the Republican Party would stand by in the middle of all this I mean the Lev Parnas interview was damning just absolutely damning and this impeachment that's coming up is a terrifying exercise in destroying democratic institutions We need to like snap back awake and in a hurry and realize like what's coming for us.
I Well, I'm anxious to see now that a couple days in what the polling is going to look like because I'd imagine it's going to have an effect.
And let's dip our toes into the Lev Parnas thing a little bit because a treasure trove of documents have been released now.
And so obviously they're going to attack him.
He's just like Michael Cohen who, oh, he's arrested.
He's just desperately trying to say anything to get out of it.
The problem is, is that it does feel like when people are in that situation, Knowing how devastating it would be to them if they're caught lying further.
They generally are, you know, they generally tell the truth.
So, you know, at the very least, a guy like Lev Parnas has receipts and he's brought a ton of them.
And so we'll get into how those got released in a little bit, but certainly there's a letter that was released out of this trove from Rudy Giuliani to President Zelensky.
Wanting to arrange a meeting and also basically making the connection between him representing Donald Trump as a personal lawyer.
And I love the fact that it sounds so strange and a president would say like, why would I meet with a personal lawyer of the President of the United States?
And then Rudy has to then explain it right away.
This is very common for a president to have a personal lawyer do all these different things and he wants this meeting.
And it ultimately gets cancelled because the wind gets out in the media and he doesn't do it, but what do you think this meeting was about?
I mean, carrying out a criminal conspiracy.
I mean, that's what all this is about.
And what you're talking about, I mean, and by the way, there's again, this is one of the reasons why we're even having this conversation is by the time we go to tape the next episode, like all of this stuff will have been supplanted by the next madness, right?
There's something probably that's already happened since we started taping.
And we have already jumped over the fact that it now seems, well it's proven, that Donald Trump and his cronies were stalking the U.S.
ambassador to Ukraine.
We're not sure if that stalking was to dig up dirt or there's been recent suspicions that there might have been physical threats against her and the possibility of really bad things happening to her.
But then Parnas goes on TV and and I just want to say this and I just want to get it out of the way because it pissed me off sitting there with an American flag on his lapel and and just all of these people who hide behind the flag and behind the symbol of it while you know undermining everything that it's supposedly about it just pisses me off in a level that I'm not comfortable with and so he goes on TV and he says that he would go into these meetings
And then he would get Rudy Giuliani on the phone to vouch for him and say, this man isn't just speaking for me, he's speaking for the President of the United States of America.
Lev Parnas, who no American knew before all of this, he wasn't elected to anything, he wasn't appointed to anything, he was a crony of a shadow government carrying out a criminal conspiracy.
That's it.
And the fact that we're having this conversation and we're not all outside screaming this at the sky, at like the top of our voices, is madness.
Right.
And the key here is that, you know, the so what argument gets blown up because you're like, okay, fine, if it really isn't so what, then send the State Department to do these meetings.
Send the people who are actually, it's their job to do this.
So, if he wants to have a private meeting with Zelensky to talk about certain things, and in the same time we know that they're already going to start to smear Yovanovitch, Ambassador Yovanovitch, you have to start to wonder, okay, they want her out, and one of the reasons is because she is well known as someone who's anti-corruption, and so what does an ambassador do when they're in a country?
They keep their eye on the government that they're in, the country they're in, and they can cause a lot of problems for that country by reporting back to the U.S.
And so when they see all these different versions of corruption or whatever, that's why they need to stop her from doing that, and they have to get her out.
So what I'm convinced, because we saw Lev Parnas say she was not in danger.
He didn't think she was in danger.
And he was actually trying to obscure the idea that maybe she was even being tailed.
It looks like she was tailed, but I think it was what you had said originally, which is they were probably trying to find some sort of dirt that they could get her on, make it look like You know, she was doing something illegal when it was probably just a picture of her, and whatever they do to that kind of stuff, and then just shanghai her out of there.
So that was probably what they were trying to do, and then replace them with a guy like, oh, someone who might have, you know, donated a million dollars to the campaign, who would just sort of rubber-stamp everything until he gets caught in Gordon Sondland.
So, you know, you start putting these pieces together, and even though it seems complicated when you start looking at all these different articles and all the different evidence, Once you can kind of process it and take a step back, it really isn't that complicated.
You know, get her out, get a guy in, let's start doing these deals.
And by the way, which would probably violate all of the sanctions against Russia because there's obviously Ukraine and Russia are very tightly around, especially with the gas.
So you think that these are all like, you know, we pull back out and it's money.
It's really about money and business and trying to scam as much as they can out of the government before they're voted out of office.
Yeah, I think that's, in a nutshell, exactly what was going on.
And I want to throw a couple things out there to add to that because these are things that, like, I've had to come to terms with because so much of this, it's not just craven and obvious, right?
Like, this whole conspiracy was out there in the open.
Rudy Giuliani was talking to reporters about going to Ukraine and trying to do this stuff.
Like, they're really, really incompetent people.
Like, the whole lot of them.
They're very, very bad at it.
And the fact that they have been successful, everything from Donald Trump getting arrested to Russian collusion to all of this stuff, it's been open and out there for everyone to connect the dots.
The fact that they've been able to get away from it is an indictment of where we are as a people.
They must have done a study somewhere that, like, when you say, I have documents, you're not going to believe the blah, blah, blah that's going to prove.
They never produce these documents.
They never appear.
Rudy has been talking about this, all this, this whole time.
Nothing ever appears because they don't exist.
But the notion that you can say it that first time and it gets broadcast and the freaking media will just broadcast it out too exponentially, that will change people's minds who are already predicated to believe that stuff as it is.
So it's like they win anyway, like you know, It's almost like the brainwashing thing where the hidden suggestion gets into the brain right away and you never actually have to prove it.
Meanwhile, again, these documents are so damning.
And again, it also flips on the whole notion of they won't vote to have documents, they won't vote to have witnesses yet to this trial for the impeachment.
There's only one answer to why they wouldn't want to do that.
Well, never underestimate people who want to be important.
I think that's a really important thing with all of this.
I think Donald Trump is a great example of it, right?
This is a person who grew up with incredible wealth and power and privilege, who always felt left out.
And this is one of the reasons that has driven him throughout his entire career.
And Rudy Giuliani is the exact same way.
He wanted to be a mover and shaker.
He wanted to be important.
He wanted his name in the headlines, even though he couldn't get elected to anything.
With these people, everyone from Parnas down to Hyde, who is this weird new Coen Brothers-like character that is now in this story, who is apparently stalking this ambassador.
And I want to throw this out there.
What you just said is true.
They probably were stalking her in order to get damning evidence against her in some way or another to leverage against her, but these people who want to be important and they want to play big roles, they end up doing things sometimes that go off script and are dangerous, right?
Like, who knows where this thing could have ended up?
Who knows where this thing was eventually going?
But I want to throw this out there, and it goes off of what you were saying, and it was something that I've been struggling with and it finally manifested itself to me today, and that is this.
I've had a hard time with this impeachment thing, because I've been having a hard time wrapping my head around a couple of things, and that is this.
Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani, I'm not so sure if they can tell the difference between truth and conspiracy theory.
I really do believe Donald Trump is delusional, and I think he is projecting all of his problems with himself and his insecurities on Democrats and liberals and the media and all of that, and I think that he actually does believe that Democrats are evil and they're involved in these hideous, hideous conspiracies.
Now, my problem with that, when I made that connection, right, is whenever this Ukraine call surfaced, I was having a hard time for a couple of minutes thinking about the fact that Donald Trump might have actually believed that Joe Biden was involved in corruption in Ukraine, right?
And that he actually thought that he wanted to root it out and that it would actually not just root out corruption, but help him politically, right?
It was a twofer.
It was those two things.
But something came to my mind today, which is this.
Trump and Giuliani and all of these people who have been breaking international and domestic law...
They think everybody's breaking international and domestic law, right?
I'm doing it.
Everybody else is doing it.
That's one of the reasons I'm doing it.
The difference is, and this is what finally came clear to me today, is they did believe that Biden was corrupt and his kid was corrupt, but they didn't care.
They didn't want to root out corruption.
They just wanted to point out corruption in order to help themselves politically.
None of these meetings were about actual investigations.
None of these meetings were actually about rooting out corruption.
It was about pretending to root out corruption.
Because all of these people want to play games on two levels.
On the level where things actually happen in public, and on the other level which is where all of this corruption takes place.
And I truly believe that's what happened here.
Well, before our listeners might get confused and think that there actually was corruption involved in this, there was not.
The scheme, it sounds like, was make it up and give it to us.
By the way, and what the argument's going to be is, is just like the Steele dossier was a Russian intelligence op, they fed everything to Steele as a fake that would go back, which is like the dumbest argument as well, because look what happened to it.
No one ever used it, you know, because they recognized certain stuff was probably Russian propaganda being fed to him, and he also acknowledged that.
And there's other stuff that's been verified.
So this is their level there.
They go to Firtash and they say, OK, great, hey, you know, just make some stuff up, fashion some documents, whatever.
We'll just, you know, muddy the waters like we did with Clinton, and that's what we need.
And by the way, it's exactly what they need because this election is so precarious for them, especially because the numbers look like Biden would win.
So that's the other issue here.
It's not even like, oh, we got to point out the corruption to help us with our political campaign.
It's we need to make up the corruption to help us with our political campaign.
And that was so bungled as well because we're also dealing with, you know, Ukrainians over there who are not the brightest either, the ones that they're dealing with.
And so the whole thing just kind of falls apart.
They never get what they want.
And, you know, again, kudos to Ukraine for, you know, not quite capitulating, although they were, what, about a day from actually playing ball.
And it's important to point out that if it wasn't Biden, if at that point the Trump campaign and Trump administration thought that somebody else was his major opponent, it would have went and made up something else.
Right.
That's the whole thing.
They cannot win.
The Republican Party, and that goes back to Reince Priebus coming out and saying this stuff, and I've said this a few times, it has to be reiterated, the Republican Party cannot win democratically.
It is not in a place anymore where they can win.
They can't win the vote.
They can't win a popular vote.
And so they have to continue disenfranchising people.
They have to throw out misinformation.
They have to welcome foreign entanglements and foreign interference.
And they have to allow a fascistic authoritarian behavior.
That's just what's happening.
And they have to find a way, like Trump has no achievements.
He hasn't done anything.
There's nothing for him to go out and say, I did this and re-elect me so we can keep doing it.
I can tell you what he would say.
Oh sure, he has the best economy ever and he's really taken the fight to immigrants and all that.
And the military.
Right, which are starting to hate him, which we got to talk about in Very Stable Genius, which is incredible, by the way.
For those who ever read the excerpt of Very Stable Genius, I believe it was in the Washington Post.
People should read it.
But no, he has no achievements to actually hang his hat on.
The only thing Trump can say is, they want me gone, I'm out there for you, you want me on the front line of this war.
And that's all they can do, and he has to create criminals out of his opponents.
And that's the only thing he's able to do.
It's just the Hillary Clinton strategy over and over and over again.
And it doesn't matter if it's Biden, if it's Warden, if it's Buttigieg, if it's Sanders, he's going to make them a criminal in some way, shape, or form.
Right.
Oh, and by the way, sprinkle in a little war with Iran, perhaps, to, you know, bolster his chances as well, which they screwed that up, too, because, you know, listen, we already went over this about, like, who's to blame for the plane getting shot down, but it's not a win for him.
This whole interaction did not give him any boost, even, I don't even think, among his base.
I think everyone just sort of, at the very least, Scratch their head and was wondering what the heck's going on and you know again There's also talked about the timing of things when do when does he do these things and why?
You know when the why did he do the Iran thing and why not and it's also the same thing about the Lev Parnas thing Why does it come out now?
And what does that mean because remember what Lev Parnas was arrested in October, right?
Yes, getting ready to leave the country.
Getting ready to leave the country.
With a one-way ticket, and they seized everything.
So these documents that we are only now seeing in, let's see, November, December, three months later, were sitting in a room or on a hard drive somewhere in the Department of Justice, and they were kind of compelled to be released.
So my thought on this is that What they were hoping to do was keep this stuff buried long enough that the trial would have already happened knowing that McConnell was going to make it a sham of a three-day trial, which he might still try and do.
But I think it's impossible now.
It's all disgusting, by the way.
What we keep seeing is a bunch of people, and this is the sorry state of American politics, is everyone is always deciding the best maneuver for themselves that comes next.
Again, Lev Parnas who had to release all this stuff because he was arrested before he left the country and, you know, got away scot-free.
He had to release these documents, release them, the narrative changed and all of a sudden him and his lawyer start releasing like pictures of him and Trump and they're like we want to get on the record and tell the truth and put a flag you know lapel pin on and it's just this it's like a selling and a rebranding and we've seen that time again I mean John Bolton right now is is set up to make a ton of money on a book
To talk about what he's seen with Trump, which by the way is probably treasonous, dangerous stuff that he's seen.
And so he's going to turn it into a book instead of, I don't know, doing the right thing and telling the American people.
And it's obvious that John Bolton is going online and putting little seeds out there that are trying to get people excited about a book.
It's about profit.
It's about personal enrichment.
And that is the sad, sad legacy here is that American politics has turned into a place where the worst people go in order to make money.
They have no care whatsoever about society.
They don't care about pushing America forward.
All they're concerned with is the way to make money, and that's what we've seen here with this Ukraine scandal and with Donald Trump.
He's the embodiment of that.
Right.
And you also mentioned that people want to all be part of this.
They want to have their moment in the spotlight.
They want to get, they want to be able to climb off this.
And so, you know, we can't say that phrase without mentioning Devin Nunes, the next step.
Because remember, a few weeks ago, they found out that him and Parnas were talking to each other.
He just remembered!
He just remembered.
Just remembered.
Oh, yeah.
That Lev Parnas.
I thought you meant the other one that I didn't remember at all.
And, oh, we talked about some random things, blah, blah, blah, whatever.
And that's when you start realizing that the credibility is – I mean it's always been destroyed with him.
But like what was he even doing being involved in this?
OK?
Because clearly what Parnas – and again, we have to choose to believe Parnas.
Now, I will say this as far as the rehab of his image, because those pictures and whatever they were able to paint of him and his buddy seem like, you know, something out of a Coen Brothers movie, like complete, you know, inept, whatever.
He does at least come off as somewhat normal.
Right?
Like, you know, somewhat normal.
Clearly, like, you know, his priorities are a little bit out of whack as far as being an American and what is important.
But, again, a guy who gets caught up and wants to make money and whatever has certainly made a lot of money in a short period of time with these guys.
But I would choose to believe he's probably filling in Nunes with what he was doing as far as Yovanovitch and all these different things in Ukraine.
But he also said that he believed that Nunes already knew.
He was already briefed on these things.
So he's in the loop, and yet he's trying to pretend he has no idea who this guy is.
And by the way, so is Trump.
So at some point, there doesn't seem to be anything to stop these people from lying.
It doesn't hurt them at all, which is interesting to me.
Parnas said something really fascinating that stuck with me in that interview.
He mentioned Hyde, right?
And he mentioned that he had run across him a few times.
And he was basically like, and I want to point out, I don't know what the extent of the stalking of the ambassador was.
But it really felt like Parnas was trying to cover his tail on that, right?
That that might be, you know, it's damage control.
I was drunk.
Yeah.
Right.
I wasn't part of that.
I was part of this.
Those people are the criminals.
I was just doing this.
But he said that he kept running into Hyde at the Trump Hotel.
And I want to throw this out there, and it's something that has sort of always sort of been in my head, but it's not really been there, like in totality.
Like I've been to the Trump Hotel, right, in Washington DC.
And I have to tell you that like the bar and the lobby at Trump Hotel is this weird Mos Eisley Bizarre alternate universe where all of these wannabe big shots, like Seb Gorka is hanging out there on like a Tuesday, right?
All of these wannabe political big shots, people who want to be part of politics and movers and shakers and they want to be like powerful people, they hang out there.
Right, because they gain something from Trump's aura.
Because Trump is an outsider who doesn't know a lot of politicians, and so he brings in like a weird collection of misfit toys.
And so you can be a nobody, and part of the alt-right was like that.
They would hang out at Trump's hotel all the time and hopefully run into Donald Trump Jr.
and get like an Instagram.
It's a craven cult of personality.
And and Parnas was part of that Hyde was part of that Giuliani's part of that It's just a big collection of people who are desperate and insecure about themselves who want to be a part of everything Which is what Trump is anyway, and it's a corrupting influence and Parnas bringing that up I thought was really really fascinating because it is this weird alternate universe of Where American politics is just being chopped up, destroyed, liquefied, and then branded as something else.
And it's pure poison.
There's no doubt about it.
It is pure poison.
Well, you know, that's also the notion of, I'm glad you brought up Donald Trump Jr., because in this whole, the big framework here was like, yeah, get Yovanovitch out of there so she's not overseeing corruption anymore, so we can be corrupt as much as we want.
Well, Donald Trump Jr.
tweets that out, saying, ugh, can you believe how horrible this person is?
We've got to get her out.
And that was, like, I don't know, March?
It was way early in the process.
And what that shows to me is just how deep-seated this plot was.
It does cover—so if you're going to say, like, Mike Pence knew about this, and if you want to say that Mike Pompeo knew about that, that all seems to make sense, because what's Jr.
doing being involved in these meetings, then?
I know Jr.
is now complaining because Because of their supposed ban on any foreign deals, he's got nothing to do.
So he starts campaigning for his dad and being involved in that because there's nothing else for him to do.
So he is involved.
If he's in those meetings, then there's no doubt in my mind all the other principles are.
And by the way, Parnas started to throw those guys into the bus too.
I know Pence was mentioned.
I know that Pompeo was.
He brought up Pence a lot. - Like, Pince's name was all over this thing.
And Michael Pence's true talent in politics, because the guy isn't particularly talented.
He's not charismatic.
He's not good at retail politics.
He doesn't have a great understanding of minutia.
He's not a policy guy.
He's not a wonk.
Mike Pence's talent is to be a chameleon and to be a person who can just be very very quiet and never really get noticed in what he's doing right and and and things just happen to fall down around him and then he's still standing again the The Very Stable Genius excerpt talks really well.
I thought it did a great job of explaining how he was like a wax figure in a museum while Trump was embarrassing himself and basically abusing our military leaders.
And Mike Pence has managed here to walk through hurricane after hurricane and never get wet.
And it's a really incredible thing because we're sitting here and we've already, I mean, my God, Nick, we've now In a hurried fashion, like survey fashion, we've gone over roughly eight or nine major stories of the week.
We haven't talked about the fact that the sitting Vice President of the United States was either in on the Ukraine conspiracy or was used as a pawn in it.
Like, what are the other?
I mean, there's no other explanation.
Either he got dirty in it or he's so oblivious that he doesn't know what's going on.
Both those things should terrify everybody, by the way.
Right.
And to fill that in, you know, they were getting the framework of a deal where Ukraine was going to announce an investigation into Biden, and then Pence is going to go for the inauguration.
And as soon as there was a little moment of doubt on the Ukrainian side about how this is all going to go down, within 24 hours they cancel Mike Pence's trip.
Now, Mike Pence, the wax figure he is, could in theory have just been like, because Trump would say, you're not going, and he could just say, OK.
But you'd have to imagine he would say, why am I not going, right?
Or maybe Trump would even tell him, you know, because Trump tells everybody everything.
So that's where we start to realize that, yeah, he is deeply involved because most likely it certainly is reasonable to assume that he would understand why he didn't go and how he was being used in that capacity.
And we already saw him struggle mightily to answer questions about this whole thing a few weeks ago, or maybe a month now, who knows how long it was ago, which indicates to me, you know, that his underwear is damp.
Well, sorry, I don't know where that came from.
No, it's the Friday podcast, that's how this goes.
You know, you said Trump says everything.
I just remembered three associated stories from all of this that haven't even gotten mentioned in any of it, right?
Trump admitted in a live Fox News interview that the United States military has been paid as mercenaries and that he wants that to be how the United States military operates, which every Democratic candidate across the country should be playing that quote.
To people whose children are being put in harm's way because he's getting money from different countries, right?
He tells everyone that.
He also says in a meeting that has just been reported that he doesn't know why American companies can't bribe foreign governments in order to get favorable contracts or contracts.
That's where I'm standing.
That's a pretty problematic idea.
I mean, that's a pretty terrifying idea.
I mean, it's advocating crime openly, right?
I mean, that's what that is.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Well, again, this is the cynicism that we see from the Republicans who want to defend him when they say all politicians lie, all politicians are corrupt.
So Trump is just another one of these same types.
Now, the problem is, A, we've never seen it in the presidential office.
There's usually some sort of, you know, the office, the pressure of the office, and the fact that there are two other branches of government that are supposed to keep him in check like that.
You don't see it.
And normally, if it's a congressman or a senator, yeah, it generally gets found out and then they get roasted and thrown out of office.
So, this is the big difference here.
Well, right, right, right.
And I just remembered what the third thing was because, again, everything gets covered and buried in all of this.
Sure, there's tons of corruption in politics, and there always has been.
We're talking about corruption personified.
One of the biggest stories that got no traction whatsoever this week is that there are rumors out there and allegations that Donald Trump was telling members of the Mar-a-Lago Country Club about the Iranian strike so they could profit off of it via the stock market.
Yes.
Elizabeth Warren was calling for an investigation in that.
Now, listen, the very idea that that could even happen and all of the other things, which are, by the way, it all goes back to money, right?
It's all money.
Like, none of this is about politics.
Politics is a front.
This is a post-political administration that has no interest in pushing society forward or making lives better for people.
It's all about power and consolidation, which, by the way, it's a little bit of a coincidence that all this stuff is happening.
We're having a constitutional crisis that's soaking up all the the oxygen in the room as Vladimir Putin liquidated the government of Russia and is apparently engineering a way to become leader for life.
But, you know, I'm sure that's just a coincidence.
And then we have a president who his entire thought is how to enrich himself.
It never, ever comes into the equation how to help America.
And all of this stuff gets lost in it because of the storm of this stuff.
Right.
And no matter what you want to say about, like, you know, Democrat versus Republican, because we're already kind of beyond that, you know, generally, in a very general sense, many of the policies that you see brought up and defended by Democrats Tend to have a earnest desire to help their constituents.
You know, now it might be a drain on the economy, it might be a drain on the budget, but it generally is some notion of we need to help people more.
And so if you want to argue, like, what about is, I mean, it's really hard to do that because, you know, it does seem clear that there is one side that is a little bit more focused on actually trying to do what they're supposed to do.
And that's, But it doesn't matter.
It doesn't ring true.
When you listen to the Republicans talk on Fox News, it is simply these vicious Democrats who are willing to do anything they can possibly do to destroy what we have, this nice thing we have going.
And that is actually probably a little bit true.
The vicious part's not true, but certainly what they have going, which is this oligarchy in the making, is what at least someone's hopefully trying to stop.
Personally, I think continuing to call these people Republicans is a misnomer.
Because the Republican Party, and again, I don't consider myself a Democrat.
I understand that both sides of a political argument can have opinions that differ about how to move forward.
And when you have two honest, good faith sides, you can find compromise.
The problem is that one of the political parties has been taken over over the past few decades by a really, really bad case of fascism.
That's all this is.
It's a group of people who don't actually have principles.
We were talking before the podcast, a little bit going over our notes, And you had said something along the lines of it's almost socialism for these people who hate socialism.
Well, they're not anti-socialism.
They're not anti-helping people.
They're not anti-big government.
They're not anti-programs, right?
They're not anti-debt.
They're anti-debt when the other side is going to create a debt.
They're anti-big government when the other party is in power.
They're not interested in actual politics.
That's why I keep saying post-politics.
These people aren't interested in a way to move forward.
They're not interested in helping people.
They're interested in consolidating power.
And that's why they're dangerous.
When we keep calling them Republicans, and we keep treating them like this is the party of Lincoln, or this is the party of Teddy Roosevelt, or whatever people want to say, it's bullshit.
It's not the same thing.
This party has transformed into something different.
There are Republicans who left the party when they realized what Donald Trump was, right?
There are people, and they're not necessarily right on the issues either, but they had good faith policy ideas and philosophy.
They were wrong on a lot of them, but they weren't this.
This is a masquerade.
This is a false front.
It is an oligarchial fascist movement That's it!
And that's what it comes down to.
Right, and it feels like what we mentioned in the last pod is that there's a great majority of the people who do support them who are willing to kind of ignore all of that to get the judges, to get the things that don't really, really end up, I mean, okay, well, judges could mean something, you know, for a long time, but judges get the taxes lower, get a look at the economy, how well that's going, and, you know, military spending.
You know what I mean?
Those are their things.
Oh, and maybe like, you know, pro-life, you know, which is judges.
So, you're talking about, like, they have these handful of things, and again, they couldn't care less about anything else.
They're the ones driving the car and have no sense of what's happening around them.
Meanwhile, it's an apocalypse of zombies, you know, running by them and banging on the windows, and they got the windows up, the radio blaring, and their foot on the pedal, and they don't see anything.
Yeah, and it's all built in their idea of, you know, identity.
It's who they think they are.
Like, it's really hard for a group of people who have supported a political party most of their lives.
I mean, you know, you gotta think there are Republicans who, you know, they grew up in households that had, like, you know, Republican banners and stuff like that, and pins, and they would go to Republican mixers, and they would, you know, they knew their local Republican congressperson.
And they worked for them and you know, it was the they identify as Republicans It's really hard to suddenly realize that the party you were involved with for the majority of your life And you put in time and energy and all of that It's hard to to come to terms with the fact that it's turned into a fascistic movement Like that's a hard thing to hear and a hard thing to look at and so so many people are in denial about it that and again that a lot of them are the people I've talked to Right?
They're the people who tell me that they don't like Trump, but they believe in it.
And it's because they still see the world in Democrat and Republican, red and blue, left and right.
But that's not what we're dealing with now.
We're dealing with the real world over here that is looking at Trump and the people around him and his treasons and his crimes.
And they're like, my God, this is horrifying.
And then you have the Trump people who are like, No, we're in the right and everybody else is evil.
That's not politics.
That is an actual Civil War and Idean philosophy.
And that's where we are.
Or, I mean, there might be a third group who's just simply saying, who cares about that?
Versus like, are you in the right?
It's like, who cares?
Now, speaking of Never Trumpers, you know, we had heard that story about Rex Tillerson calling Trump a fucking moron.
And I don't know if we'd ever heard why or how, what the context of that was.
Well, guess what?
We now know because of what you mentioned a little bit earlier in this book that's going to come out on Wednesday, Tuesday, which I already pre-ordered.
And it's going to detail this meeting he had with all the joint chiefs of staff about-- and it was a meeting designed to help educate him because he was so clearly ignorant about anything outside of the country.
He's ignorant about anything inside the country, too.
So-- but out of all that, he ends up haranguing them and calling them losers, you know, and among other things.
And that was what Tillerson, who's, you know, his brother and his father both served in the military, and got him so riled up.
And so, you know, when he talks about being in favor of the military, and you hear things like that come out, and then you hear him so cavalierly sending out troops to wherever he wants them to go now, these things don't all add up.
The only thing that adds up is that he's, there's, you know, we haven't even talked about this at all, and we've gotten almost through the whole podcast, is that This all just seems like subservience to Putin.
Yeah.
And I think that was one of the first things it was, you know, in the rundown of the book, which is he was more interested in meeting with Vladimir Putin than anything else.
Right.
And I think there's I think there's a possibility in all of this.
So I just want to throw this out there because this is a developing thought that is is part of it.
Right.
So I was on the Russian collusion story starting in the summer of 2016 when people were reaching out to me from the Trump campaign saying something weird is going on here.
Right.
And it was very odd that there was obviously like work between and messaging and getting on the same page.
If people want to go and look at the statements the Trump campaign made after Paul Manafort came on, that is a really, really damning indictment of them.
There's a real possibility that even if Trump wasn't involved in like an actual organized conspiracy with Russia, and there are certainly times that the campaign was.
I mean, Manafort handed over polling data, there was conversations back and forth, messaging, signaling, meetings, all of those things happened.
But even if you want to give them the benefit of the doubt, you have a president in charge of this country, Who has no understanding of history.
I mean part of the things that came out was like he didn't understand Pearl Harbor.
Obviously, he doesn't understand the war.
He doesn't have a knowledge of anything because he's so ignorant and proud of his ignorance because he believes that he is incredibly intelligent, right?
He knows everything.
He doesn't need to educate himself.
He's probably read like two books.
Or he did know, but in his state of cognitive decline, he doesn't know anymore.
It's gone.
And so this is a person who doesn't understand anything.
He goes in with a bunch of military commanders and then dresses them down, calls them, you know, babies, I believe at one point, and says he doesn't want to go to war with them.
And all of these people are just sitting around a table and they're like, this guy is so stupid and belligerent and ridiculous.
And they know how bad it is.
And again, Rex Tillerson is like the one person who like steps up and says something and then eventually gets fired for it, more or less.
And you have, you get this idea that like the government is being run by a really dangerous person whose natural instinct is corruption and authoritarianism, right?
This is a guy who's into Putin because Putin's who he wants to be.
I mean, that's just how it is.
And Putin's helping him and so he wants to help Putin.
He has no interest in helping this country.
This person has never sacrificed anything.
He has no idea of duty in his entire life.
And it's all been about personal enrichment and empowerment.
And this is a guy, I mean, he's the worst possible president we could have ever had.
I mean, that or whoever learns from him and then, you know, like acts out on their actual principles and strategies.
But yeah, this is really bad.
Well, you know, what I responded to when I first heard about him wanting to meet with Putin so badly before the inauguration, even, was that he was like, holy shit, they actually pulled it off.
Yeah.
Because, you know, listen, I don't think it's that unreasonable to picture a scenario where they were meeting with the Russians, and the evidence is already there, and the Russians were probably saying, yeah, we're going to take care of this.
We know how to do this.
Cambridge Analytica, all these different things.
And they're like, yeah, sure, whatever.
We're down 10 points to the week to go.
We're never going to win this.
So, I kind of, my reaction to that was like, oh my god, they won, and he's like, get me in front of Putin, and now what?
Because some of this stuff is going to come out, we've got to figure out what their strategy is here, we've got to meet.
So, all of those things seem to, you know, bolster this notion, especially when you have these other meetings that are now known between them, and he's confiscating the notes, and he's, or not having any note takers at all.
You know, or these things that are reported to, reported by the Russian media, and not ours, about meetings he's having in the Oval Office with Russians.
It's, it just, there's not a lot of other explanations besides that.
And if you're gonna go out on Hannity or on Fox News and scream like this Russian hoax thing, well, you know, you just lose a lot of credibility.
There's just, you know what I mean?
You have to at least acknowledge that this seems a little bit strange, at the very least.
Well, I was really frustrated.
And again, going back to 2016, when I was reporting what I was hearing from people, like, all of a sudden, I felt like a lot of pressure from media outlets to never, ever talk about it.
And that, you know, this is a story that we're not interested in detailing.
And it's just based on a lot of conjecture and conspiracy theory.
And we don't want to put ourselves on the line there.
And then immediately he gets elected and all this stuff starts coming out and they're like, oh, this is a story that we need to talk about, which I still have misgivings about.
I thought it was, to be frank, a load of shit that they let this happen.
I think the media in this country and the political establishment didn't want to believe it was true, and so they gave him a lot of cover to do a lot of things.
Well, that's where we are now, too.
This whole situation, what we're talking about, it's not, you know, it's not an isolated incident.
Like, if one thing happened and we weren't being overwhelmed by everything, we might be sufficiently terrified by what's happening.
And like, this is madness.
But I have to tell you, people are still trying to lend him credibility when there is sufficient and overwhelming proof that he should not have credibility, he should not be trusted, and he's a danger to the country.
I mean, and again, we just taped it in the last podcast.
We were nearly in the middle of a giant war just a few days ago.
And now all of a sudden, like, you barely hear the word Iran.
Why don't you think he made a big deal of potentially, it sounds like some people did get injured, some Americans got injured on that attack.
Why doesn't he make a big deal about that?
By the way, I'm glad you brought that up because we almost didn't talk about that.
There were Americans injured in an escalation that Trump caused.
And then, other people were killed.
And that's one of the reasons is, this isn't a person, I mean, I think he knows that if you talk about it too long, it's a damning story of him.
And if, you know, it's just like, wow, I got out of that situation.
We're not going to have war.
I'm done.
Okay, fine.
Good.
Move on to the next one.
I mean, it's one of the... And also, I don't think he's strategic.
I don't think he ever, ever thinks about, you know, what would actually be good and what wouldn't.
He just jumps from one thing to the other.
And I mean, he tweeted, I want to say it was yesterday.
Maybe it was this morning.
I can't keep track of days with this guy.
He tweeted out, I just got impeached.
And it's like, no man, you didn't.
Like, you've been impeached for a little while.
Delivering of documents doesn't mean you just got impeached.
And I know that it's funny and we all laugh about it, but we have to stop laughing.
We as a country, we have to start treating this like the crisis it is.
Oh, he is definitely treating it like a joke and a hoax and all these different things.
We saw him standing in front of the LSU, I guess, who won the championship.
Is it LSU?
Is that right?
LSU won, yeah.
And he's got a full stand-up mode.
It was ridiculous.
I mean, he's just not a president.
Let him be a stand-up.
He'd be a really bad one, but let him do that.
But the one thing that was telling was there was a line he had in there that said something to the fact that some of those players are going to go to the Oval Office to hang out and take pictures or whatever.
And then he kind of quickly corrected himself and said, well, and everybody's going to come.
So I'm sensing that There's a lot of players on that team who are going to refuse to go and be part of anything besides showing solidarity as a team in front of that podium.
And then anything else they're not going to do.
Which I think is good.
I'm waiting for that report to come out too.
I suspect that's going to be part of it.
So, again, this is not widespread support of him.
Right?
It doesn't represent a huge swath of the country, which, you know, you want to be able to say, OK, good, we're not going in the wrong direction.
But it's I guess it really comes down to where those people are in the country.
I'm glad you said that, too, because it's not a huge swath.
I mean, he's underwater in so many states now.
I mean, America is overwhelming, not just in favor of impeachment, but removal from office.
I mean, those numbers are bad.
And everybody, I think, who isn't in Trump's tank is just totally, totally understanding that he's a problem and needs to go.
Well, I'm really upset that the media continues to treat this like it's a country divided.
It's not.
It's not 50-50 like they like to treat it.
Which, by the way, they're doing in part because we're coming up on an election and so they want to treat it like a horse race.
And for those who aren't aware and maybe don't follow this stuff as closely, I can tell you every election is treated like a horse race.
You go up, you go down, you go up, you go down.
It's the same story every time because it maximizes anxiety and it keeps people addicted to news feeds.
This is not a 50-50 split and the continued treatment of that is a really dangerous thing because people need to understand this is not a popular president.
This is not a popular movement.
The only reason he's president is because of the Electoral College.
And we just gotta keep that in mind.
And I just want to say thank you to everybody for tuning in.
We had to do this.
Right?
We had to do this.
Yes.
Too much to say.
Too much to go over.
There's too much.
And we would have got to Monday.
And again, I'm sure in the time that we've been chatting here that something major and catastrophic has happened.
Isn't that weird?
Living in a time where it's just like you do something for a minute and you're just like, what did I miss?
There had to have been everything.
I wonder, this is one of the reasons why I'm having a lot of trouble working these days.
I cannot just sort of get the motivation to really get a lot of good work done efficiently.
And I think it's eating at me.
I think it's eating at a lot of people.
Oh, man, people are suffering with it.
And I will say, and just to, you know, pat ourselves on the back for a hot minute, I think that's the antidote to a lot of that is just getting deeply involved in projects and learning and thinking.
And when you do, it's the antidote to people like Trump who subsist on, you know, keeping people at the surface and addicted to this stuff and just continually churning.
But we're really, really glad you continue to tune in.
We've been getting really amazing feedback, feeling really good about that, and we're really, really grateful, especially as times are really, really dire and hard.
So keep that up.
Please keep sharing us on social media.
Please like, subscribe, share, all that good stuff.
All of it really, really does help.
We're going to be back next week.
We're going to talk more leading up to the primaries and the caucuses.
Hopefully the country doesn't explode in the next couple days.
If it does, we'll be here.
We'll do another one, I guess.
And thank you again for listening.
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