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March 31, 2020 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
52:52
The Worst Possible Pandemic President

Donald Trump's handling of the pandemic continues to worsen as it exacerbates the worst parts of his personality. His lying. His narcissism and cruelty. Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman break down more enraging chapters in this enraging story and explain some of the more seemingly inexplicable aspects of this crisis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Time Text
Well, Mr. President, before you leave, one last question.
Could I ask you one last question?
How can we pray for you?
Well, I would love that.
I would love to say how the evangelical community, for the most part, have really been on my side, and it's always a great honor.
Well, the Bible is clear.
We need to pray for our leaders, and we are praying for you.
Many in this country are clinging to God right now, so thank you, Mr. President.
We have Monday night football type ratings.
Now, I didn't say that.
I have no idea what they are, in a sense.
But I know that the Times, they say it's all the news that's fit to print.
I say it's all the news that's not fit to print.
When they don't want the President of the United States to have a voice, you're not talking about democracy any longer.
You said it on Sean Hannity's Fox News.
You said... You know, why don't you people act... Let me ask you.
Why don't you act in a little more positive?
It's always trying to get you.
Get you, get you.
And you know what?
That's why nobody trusts the media anymore.
Hey everybody!
Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
My name is Nick Hauselman and I'm joined by my co-host, Jared Yates Sexton.
And we are up to almost 160,000 confirmed cases in the U.S.
of COVID-19.
And there's a lot of unrest and uneasiness going on out here.
We're going to extend our extreme social distancing until the end of April.
And Jared, how are you holding up?
I'm so angry.
I am sure there are people who are listening who feel this way, like when we started talking about this in this podcast, you know, it was this fear and anxiety of the people that I loved and the people who were vulnerable to this disease.
And, you know, the idea that they could possibly be hurt or exposed to it, particularly.
By social negligence and or incompetence by the government.
Like a lot of other people, I know people who have it.
I know people whose lives are endangered right now.
I'm just really frustrated and angry.
I watched yesterday, and we were talking before we started recording, Nick and I were, about How sick we are of talking about Donald Trump's press briefings.
But, you know, we're a hostage audience.
It's who we are as a country now.
We have to listen to this buffoon bullshit all day long.
And now he's in front of the world saying that... Oh, and this is the guy who, by the way, was like, I don't think we'll have any deaths, or maybe we'll have a couple deaths.
We'll take care of it.
Now him and the Republicans, Rush Limbaugh, and all of these craven jackals are ready to declare 100,000 to 200,000 deaths and possibly over a million cases as a victory, as some sort of testament to how competent and wonderful they are.
And they want patted on the back.
I could not be more sickened by this thing.
Well, there isn't any more of a Republican stance on the issue than to choose A path that isn't the absolute worst outcome, and then pat yourself on the back because of it.
That is so distinctly Republican, and that's exactly how they've rationalized all of these horrible mistakes they've made throughout the decades.
And when I saw that, again, it was just more of that same thing, where it's like, hey, we're not gonna have the absolute worst catastrophe of millions of deaths, so that's awesome, let's party on.
And it's, again, such a lack of humanity, Honestly, where it gets concerning and it makes you, I don't know, it makes me want to try and sort of distill, figure out what the root of this is and how does it start?
How do you get to the point where you don't treat people as humans?
Yeah, and you know, we're talking about 100,000 to 200,000 deaths.
And by the way, that's what the administration is saying, which tells us it could very likely be more, right?
I mean, it could.
That's where they're setting the table and hoping it doesn't go over.
It reminds me so much of the horror of watching the Iraq war unfold and watching this unnecessary misstep lead to just death and trauma and setbacks and the Bush administration getting up in front of podiums and being like, oh, everything would have been perfect if we wouldn't have had this insurgency that we created.
Right?
And you're exactly right.
And this is Republican.
This is something they do.
They create these crises and then they talk about how they are the only ones who can take care of it.
And I, for one, I mean, there's no way to overstate this.
Watching Donald Trump, a walking, talking corporate mascot of futility, getting in front of the world and bragging about 8.4 million people are watching his press briefings because we're all terrified and we want the president to be a leader and instead he gets up there and I just want to put this out there.
This should be in a time capsule.
This should be something that people if there is a future society look back on and they watch as I mean people are dying Nick.
They're dying really terrible deaths and the president is up there comparing his TV ratings to the Bachelor and Monday Night Football.
Like, can you imagine something more horrific?
I mean, that's nightmarish.
Well, by the way, if you watch the Fox News feed, they actually cut away, they might have even known he was, well, they probably did know he was going to mention this because he had tweeted about it earlier to a lot of ugly fanfare, ugly, you know, criticism.
And so they literally, as soon as he started talking about it, they recognized it and they cut away just to have a talking head on the side of the screen.
Tell everybody what they're watching, which is, you know, a press briefing by the president.
And you could see him string it out until he was finished talking, until the next question came up and they threw it back to the president.
So, is that a victory?
That at least Fox News recognizes how ridiculously horrible that is?
So, Fox News is an interesting case.
I don't know if you've seen this, but there's a lot of speculation right now that they have opened themselves up to lawsuits, wrongful death lawsuits, because they spread misinformation and downplayed this whole thing and talked about it like a hoax.
And, you know, we talked about this on an earlier podcast about how it's almost like a tobacco company that knows that it's killing its customers, but they do it anyway for short-term profit.
Well, instantaneously, they have just switched into this whole thing where all of a sudden they have decided that this has to be a dragon for Trump to slay, right?
This is a big giant task for him.
And just keeping this under a million deaths, and even if we get to a million, that's what people need to understand.
It could be literally everyone in America except for Trump, and it would be a success, It's always going to be a great victory for him as the greatest president of all time, slaying the coronavirus pandemic.
And now all of a sudden you have this other thing.
So like with Rush Limbaugh came out today, and he has been calling this a common cold.
He's, you know, he's completely downplayed it as a hoax and a cold.
Today he came out and said, oh, it's pneumonia times 10.
And I've never said anything but that.
So we just have this cult of personality that continues to change the reality around Donald Trump and the reality around this pandemic.
It's been putting everybody at risk.
And it's all about political maneuvering and putting all these things into place.
And this is the other disease that has taken heart in America.
That's how we get Donald Trump.
That's how we get to this moment.
Everything after it and everything that we're dealing with right now is part of that.
And we have to realize there's something Really really wrong here that that has led to this and has has created this panic in this crisis and in the way that we have it Right.
Well, I think that it's the notion that if you take a position on something, you don't want to be wrong.
And so you naturally... I don't want to be wrong.
What?
I don't want to be wrong.
Do you want to be wrong?
No.
And so I'm now going to double down and triple down.
And we see this in every facet.
We see this in sports.
We see it everywhere, where you will, to the death, not lose your position or not cede your position in the face of facts.
And I almost feel like part of what the cult of Trump was built upon was, you know, game recognizing game.
They recognize that they have that same trait that Trump does and that's what binds them to him in a way that he's a fighter or he's telling it real when it really is what they're responding to is this notion of Just doubling and tripling down on some statement they want to make and some belief that they have versus the actual facts.
It does remind me a little bit of, I don't know if you ever saw the movie Hardball, not Hardball, the movie is Moneyball.
Did you see the movie about Moneyball?
Oh yeah, great book as well.
Everyone listening should read Moneyball.
That's a great book.
And there's a fantastic scene where all these old scouts are sitting there criticizing a player.
His girlfriend is ugly.
That means he's not good because he doesn't have confidence.
And you can see Brad Pitt just staring in disbelief because what they know is there's math involved here that will yield a winning team.
And they've been for decades and centuries Completely miscalculating all these things based on some sort of weird feelings and biases.
So I feel like that's what he's been able to develop here.
And by the way, what's the elephant in the room at this point right now is this notion of hydroxychloroquine and zinc in a z-pack actually like alleviating symptoms and supposedly curing people.
Yeah, there's a lot happening with all of that.
Everyone who tries to explain Trump based on one thing, they keep looking for a silver bullet theory.
And every time you look for one thing, you're missing the entire picture, which is, this is an intricate, giant knot.
It's a bunch of different things that have come together to create this moment.
And a big part of it has to do with the fact that You have this idea of American exceptionalism, and you hear it every time Trump talks about it, right?
We will defeat it because we are America, and that's what we do, and that's who we are.
And actually, what we're watching right now is the complete disintegration of the idea of American exceptionalism.
We're not chosen by God.
We're not deigned to be some sort of holy empire that is forwarding and ushering in history.
We're a country that can make mistakes.
And when we start looking at American exceptionalism as some sort of Overarching solution to problems that we have to actually take care of.
I was looking at this thing a few minutes ago.
It's the chart, right?
It's where the confirmed cases are and where we are with the trajectory.
We're off the chart.
You want to talk about American exceptionalism?
We're literally off the chart right now.
Like, there's a line where it ends and we have crossed it.
And this idea of American exceptionalism has to do with the idea that you don't apologize.
You do what you need to do.
You are pragmatic.
And it's because you have right on your side no matter what it is that you do.
And that's the essence of Trumpism.
Trumpism is the idea that we don't need to look at history, we don't need to look at ourselves, we don't need to reconsider what we think that we know even though science and history and experts tell us otherwise.
Numbers!
So one of the things that you have And I'm sure there are people who are listening who have seen this, and I've certainly seen it in my community.
As I go for walks or I go for drives, I notice these big parties, right?
And a lot of it has to do with youthful exuberance.
A lot of it has to do with the fact that I'm young and I could never get sick, even though we know now that it's killing 20-year-olds, 30-year-olds, all of them.
And you also have this other thing, which is like the toxic masculinity part of it, which is like, I'm too strong to be taken down by a virus, right?
But then you also have this other idea, which is, this is a ridiculous anecdote, but I'll tell it anyway.
There was somebody in my neighborhood, a whole group of kids, who were like sitting out in front of their house in an inflatable pool, listening to Lee Greenwood's God Bless the USA.
That's a message!
Do you know what I mean?
It's like, screw this virus, I'm an American, I'm stronger than it.
But that whole mindset doesn't work.
We talk about this every week now, which is that spin and propaganda don't work at the microbial level.
They just don't.
They're not real.
They're just things to make people think they're states of mind.
But this thing you're talking about, the never apologizing, the never admitting you're wrong, I mean, that's the essence of Trumpism.
Right?
It's the idea that you never have to do that, you are completely within yourself at all times, and you are completely justified in whatever you think.
Now, we do need to mention that Liberty University comes back, you know, Falwell says, hey, everybody, we're going to have school because God's protecting us from this virus.
No less than 12 people inside of a week get it, basically.
And now everyone's scattered off of that campus.
But like, they dip their toe in, you know, pandemic parties.
Let's all just get it and we'll get through it.
Like, I believe Trump called it like a cowboy will ride through the plains or whatever he meant.
But can we give him a little bit of credit?
Because he extended the social distancing through April?
No.
Okay.
No, we can't.
We can't.
We can't give him credit for that.
Like, it's one of those things where, like, you know, I've been thinking about this a lot.
This whole, like, I'm gonna open it up by Easter thing.
Right?
Right.
Which we've talked about and I've written about it being part of this like appeal to evangelicals and the cult of Shining City as I've called it.
It's also one of those things where like who knows who got in Trump's ear?
Do you know what I mean?
Like it was whoever went out and did it and then he went out and he did it again.
He was saying last night that this might go until June.
I follow the news.
It's part of my job.
It's part of my career.
I can't tell you what the official policy of the United States government is right now on how this whole thing works.
Like you said, they're not going to relax this thing, but he might... Okay, so right now it's 5.08 on a Monday.
He's probably in front of a microphone right now, completely contradicting himself.
hurting himself giving himself a pat on the back who has any idea what he's saying today how he's contradicted himself and I agree I'm glad that he's not going to say let's all go to church tomorrow or something but I mean this whole thing I this is his fault and this is his failure and and this if this were a sane rational functional world that I mean this would this should be the first line in a man's obituary Absolutely, absolutely.
It's crazy, you know, how we even got to this far.
And what's going to hurt him in the election, in the polls, which he loves to talk about, is this notion... If we have an election.
If we have the election.
If we have an election.
Are these edits that they can now put together of his own words, saying how it was nothing, it was nothing, we're going to be done with this after 15 people, all these different things.
And then here's another huge spike in deaths.
So we're gonna, that's what, and by the way, if I recall correctly, the Trump administration tried to put a cease and desist order on one of these ads that just pointed out what he had said in his own words, as if they were gonna somehow pull like FEC licenses or something.
Yeah, but he denied it yesterday.
He was presented with an actual quote of what he said on the Sean Hannity Show, which, and again, we haven't even gotten into it today.
That's how maddening all this is.
The President of the United States went on the Sean Hannity Show on Fox News and basically admitted that he wanted to commit genocide, which we gotta talk about and we gotta flesh this thing out.
It's something we should talk about.
He was presented with his actual quotes and then denied them because that's who he is, right?
It goes back to what we talked about with like the reality distortion field of people like Trump.
He will deny anything that he doesn't feel is true and just will not move away from it.
It's exactly what you were talking about.
The inability to apologize or feel shame.
I mean, that's who he is.
I mean, at least he's got some semblance of like, it was bad to say, so I need to deny it, versus at least just owning it completely and being like, yeah, I effing said they should all die or whatever that is.
You know, but again, I feel like, am I an apologist now?
I feel like I'm trying to provide excuses for Trump and his behavior and what he's saying.
You know, by the way, the underlying thing about all this really quickly is that it's the attack on the media.
These are the interactions that he, I assume he likes to have.
And, you know, if we're wondering why so many deaths are happening and people weren't listening to what was going on, it was because he has fomented this whole notion of you can't listen to the mainstream media and what they are reporting is just alarmist when it turns out they were right.
Yeah, they were right all along.
I just want to put this into context.
The head of Hungary today passed emergency powers that give him all-encompassing dictatorial powers.
Which, by the way, is where this whole thing always goes.
Authoritarians who get into power, they make crises worse.
They scapegoat vulnerable populations.
They talk about conspiracies, which by the way, Trump has said on multiple occasions that the press is happy about this, that liberals are happy about this.
They've probably undermined him.
So that's where that whole thing goes.
Also, Chinese people are part of it.
Yada, yada, yada.
So they scapegoat these conspiracies and then they say, you know what?
This crisis that I've created, I could fix it if you gave me more power.
And then usually society gives them power because societies are sick or else they wouldn't give authoritarians power in the first place.
So that's one thing that we we gotta put on the board is that that happened in Hungary today and people need to be vigilant and understand that that could happen here.
The next thing and I gotta say this.
I'm sorry, if anybody's in a... well, you're not in a car, you're at home.
You're probably cleaning your house or pacing around from anxiety and terror and fear right now.
In the possibility that you're hanging around with your kid, put earmuffs on.
I'm so fucking sick of talking about fucking Donald Trump.
You know what I mean?
Like, we have to.
We absolutely have to talk about the fact that we have this mega-laminiacal Unstable incompetent Idiot in in charge who who has so many lives in his hands and who by the way I don't think he understands that he's basically talking about genocide.
You know what I mean?
It's one of those things I don't think he gets up and like, you know a 1920 silent movie villain is like very excited about killing people But he's talking about actual genocide and he's gonna lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths if not millions before this thing is over I don't think he understands that I'm so Fucking angry that we have this person in charge and that we're at his whims.
Do you know what I mean?
Like it's just it's one of those things where it's like you watch him talk about this and you're like come on just do the right thing once or even just a tenth of the right thing and then he gets up and talks about ratings and he gets up and talks about You know, how he's the victim, and how hard it is for billionaires, and all this stuff.
And it's just like, I hate it.
I hate that this person is in charge at this moment.
And I know everybody else feels that way too, but you have to say it.
I'm just so fucking sick of this guy.
Well, what you're also not saying is that there's always the shade of, this is Obama's fault.
And so, you know, and you can't ever explain this to the people who want to agree with that, but that's always tinged with racism.
Oh, a hundred percent.
And that won't get through when you try and explain that because then you're racist for pointing out the racism.
But that is also as galling as anything just because there's just no growth.
There's no self-reflection.
There's no notion of then actually doing the right thing or improving on what you're doing.
All he's done was stop travel from China about three weeks too late.
Right, and that was part of this whole thing where he's like, we have to have strong borders, right?
Because it's always about the other coming and infecting us.
That's why we need a strong southern border.
Even though, I'll tell you what, nobody wants to come in from Mexico right now.
Because we are the epicenter in the world.
Right?
You want to talk about getting rid of immigration, there you go.
And it was all about putting the onus on another.
That's the only reason why he did the quote-unquote right thing, which wasn't even the right thing.
It should have happened before.
He has messed this whole thing up every step along the way and he's done nothing but blame Obama, Chinese people, liberals, and the media.
And I mean, God knows what's happening now and what's gonna happen tomorrow because this thing just keeps getting worse and worse and worse.
It's a nightmare.
Oh wait, he was a humanitarian in February.
He shipped millions of pieces of PPE to China.
Oh wait, not to American states or anything like that?
It was to China?
That's bizarre.
I wonder how that happened.
I wonder how that happened.
By the way, one of the things that we can't do, and this is the thing, my anger towards Donald Trump and this whole establishment right now is just Off the charts, right with our trajectory of infections.
We can't talk about how weird and sordid and bizarrely malevolent all of this seems.
We're trying to be a responsible podcast.
We're not trying to sit here and push forward theories or whatever, but if you wanted to, It feels so weird and it feels so odd and it feels so intentionally incompetent.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, it just feels so bizarre in every single way.
And I have conversations with people and this is stuff you can never talk about out in public.
But it just feels so intentional and awful.
And then you look at this buffoon, this idiot, and you just try to wrap your head around it and you can't.
And we gotta talk about how we got here.
We got to talk about how we even how how how we get to this point and you know I'd be interested to hear what you had to say.
I wrote about this today on the the muckrake about How there was this moment in the 1970s with Jimmy Carter, where I think we had a split, right?
It's almost like we had two roads that we could go down.
And for people listening, I wish that they would go and they would listen to the so-called malaise speech.
I wish that they would go and listen.
The crisis and confidence speech.
It was in July of 1976, I believe.
And it's Jimmy Carter talking to the country during stagnation and during all of these different problems.
And it might be 75 now that I'm thinking about it.
And he basically says, you know, they keep asking me to leave.
It was 79.
79.
Oh, OK.
Toward the end of his... OK.
Man, dates are hard sometimes.
So... Well, you weren't even alive.
Yeah, there you go.
I was.
It's collective consciousness, right?
So Carter gets up and he says, Americans are asking me to lead and here's what he had to say to America.
The problem with America is Americans and that we need to look in the mirror and reconsider who we are and that we need to start to embrace an idea of community and togetherness and find worth and things beyond wealth and privilege and power.
And he says, if we don't, And this blew me away.
I've seen this thing like five or six times while I'm writing my book and I watched it again today and he says something.
He goes, if we continue down this path of fragmentation where we're fighting each other for everything, right, and everything's a fight and everything's a spectacle and everything is fake, we're going to end up at a point of chaos and immobility.
And that hit me today.
You know what I mean?
Like, nothing has hit me like that in a long time.
And I'd be interested to hear what you have to say.
How you feel about that.
Well, it's an interesting time because, you know, the whole context of, like, the mid-70s and the late-70s is coming out of the 60s, and the progression that we came out of fighting the, you know, what you could argue what Eisenhower called, you know, the military-industrial complex, but it also just represented sort of the man, right?
A technocracy.
Yes, the 60s had upheaval.
Now suddenly the caste system didn't exist like it did before.
And this notion of like how we treat our elders, all these different things were sort of in flux and crisis.
But then you have to toss in Watergate.
Then you got to toss in, let's see, what else happened?
Well, after Watergate, then the president getting kicked out of office.
What else?
There is the actual stagflation of the 70s brought on by like how OPEC dealt with oil pricing and really crippled the entire world, you know, without Carter being involved in that directly.
But so here's the thing.
We go from a moment where I think it was earlier.
I think it was like 69-70 where we had a chance to really turn this country into a different direction.
You even had a guy like Nixon establish the EPA.
You had him establish OSHA.
So these are kind of really progressive things from a Republican president who ultimately gets thrown out of office for being so corrupt.
So, it's kind of a fascinating idea to figure out, well, how do we radically change from that and become completely lose sense of community and lose sense of helping each other to I, me, mine, I'm going to get whatever I can.
And you have to kind of point to the economy being really bad during that time, long gas lines and all sorts of stuff like that, that sort of must have hardened people.
And also, maybe there was a backlash to the hippie movement, And it would appeal just to those same Fox users now, Fox viewers now, who are those drug addled kids and they ended up washing out and not making anything of their lives.
And all those things mixed together and then you get a president who actually cares about the country and Reagan can sweep in off of that.
Yeah, Ronald Wilson Reagan, who comes in, and here's the thing that people need to understand.
The Reagan that you know, and the Reagan that you've heard lionized and mythologized on television, and by the way, it's not just Fox News.
It's like if you turn on CNN Retrospectives, the 1980s.
They're just like, Reagan was, you know, this great president and sweeping change.
No, he was an absentee president.
He was ignorant.
He had no idea what he was doing at any given time.
He was an actor.
And he treated the presidency like an actor.
And he was a front for conservative movements like the Heritage Foundation and all of these think tanks that basically were like, you know what, Ronnie?
You're not concerned with this.
We'll take care of it.
Don't worry about it.
It sounds familiar.
It does, a little bit, right?
So then, Ronald Reagan gets up, and after this speech, which, by the way, Americans did not handle the crisis and confidence speech well.
That's why it's been called the malaise speech, because the United States President talked honestly to them.
He said, we need to reconsider who we are and how we behave, and it'll be better.
He lectured America, and by the way, we deserved a lecture.
That's the whole thing.
We actually needed straight talk, a A fundamentally honest and mature conversation.
But then all of a sudden Ronald Reagan stands up with a flag and, you know, an eagle on his shoulder and he's just like, we don't have anything to apologize for ever where Americans were perfect.
Oh, can I just add on to that?
Because remember, not only was the Malay speech really widely criticized by Carter, but what was what's more prevalent in a lot of people's minds now remembering was he asked people in America to put on a sweater Oh.
Sacrifice.
Which by the way, there is a real link between asking Americans to turn down their thermostats and asking Americans to stay in their house so they don't kill people.
You know what I mean?
It's just the slightest bit of sacrifice.
And that's what Reagan and people like him were about.
They were saying, you never have to sacrifice anything ever.
You never have to think about community.
You never have to consider who you are and question where you're from.
And that's how we get to Donald Trump.
We go through an era of, no, you compete with everybody and everybody is your enemy.
And as a result, we don't have a health care system.
We don't have infrastructure.
We're unprepared for literally everything.
And then we end up with Donald Trump, who, by the way, It's just another iteration of Ronald Reagan, except for Reagan knew when to give it over to experts because he wasn't interested.
And Donald Trump is afraid of experts because he is terminally insecure.
And so as a result, you have this cycle that has been created, and we end up in this point that is just an absolute nightmare.
I mean, there's no other way to put it.
Like, this is a postmodern nightmare.
What makes it worse, though, is that from Reaganomics was the beginning of the huge divide between the wealthy and the middle and lower classes.
And that divide has never gotten any closer than when it was under Carter, and it continually gets farther and farther.
So now, when you have a month or two months where you can't work, So many people in the country can simply not afford to miss that.
They don't have any savings.
They're completely in debt.
And it's never going to get better.
And it's because of the system.
It's not because, you know, this woman who's been a waitress in New York for 25 years and busted her ass and put two kids through school and has to help her parents and all these different things for her life.
It's not because she did anything wrong.
It's because the system is built this way.
Oh, but Nick, God is in the system.
That's the problem, is what you just said makes a lot of sense if you don't factor in the idea that the Almighty God controls the economy and that when people are poor it means that they are sinful or devilish or they don't deserve the love of God in the economy.
Which is what that cult believes.
And I keep calling it the Cult of the Shining Sid because it's elements of both, like, the religious cult of Jerry Falwell, neo-confederate preachers, and also Ronald Reagan's hyper-capitalism, and, you know, all of that stuff comes together, and that's why you have evangelicals who support Trump.
Well, now all of a sudden they're looking at this whole thing, and you're exactly right.
This is no one's fault.
Right?
That we know of.
Like, this thing is a naturally occurring pandemic that has been caused by things like deforestation and the growth of human society and hyper-capitalism and globalism.
Those things brought it together.
But New York City citizens didn't do anything wrong.
Right?
There's no personal failing.
on their part.
There's no reason why they have to have refrigerated trucks carrying out bodies.
There's no reason why they're living in this current horror, this current hell.
And instead, you have people who are being riled up who belong, and going back to what we were talking about with people shaking hands and going into places and not dealing with this thing, they truly believe they're gods chosen and that he'll protect them.
And that God basically decides who gets a plague and who dies.
And anybody who's listening, who's heard this before, it's like, oh, it's God's will.
It's God's way, right?
You'll go when he decides.
Those types of things.
It's the idea that all of this, including the economy and pandemics and human society, is controlled by an omnipotent God.
It just so happens.
And you can believe that, by the way.
That's totally fine if you want to believe that.
These people believe it's a racist, white supremacist, capitalistic God.
It is a weird thing that they worship and it's a weird situation we're in.
Wow, I'm trying to think of what do evangelicals do and how do they rationalize all the horrible things that do happen in the world to people who they would consider good.
What's that rationalization?
Yeah, so that's the weird thing, right?
Like when you start actually talking about the origin of evil, then all of a sudden it becomes, oh, there's a spiritual warfare.
So like one of the things that I keep saying, and I'm trying to keep people apprised of this, but if you're not in it and you don't see it, it sounds so weird.
The memes and the post right now are all about how coronavirus is, it depends on the situation, right?
And that's the malleable thinking.
It goes back to the cult-like idea that we were talking about.
If it's happening in New York City, It's a it's a plague from God on the wicked if it's happening at home and it takes one of us.
Oh, that's Satan.
You know what?
I mean, it's the one or the other and it's all about these.
So basically people have been kept from any understanding of history or politics and you know, they've kept been kept ignorant of all these things that lead to where they are.
And so they're told conspiracy theories and these religious myths that try and make it easier to understand their fed disinformation.
And they grow up in it.
And when you grow up in it, you don't know that there's anything outside of it.
And all of a sudden, it just becomes a cult-like mentality.
It's really awful.
And this pandemic is just, I mean, it's bringing it to the forefront.
It really is.
I agree.
And by the way, Trump is speaking now, so I can't wait to hear what he's saying.
Great.
I can't wait.
Helpful.
I'm sure it's helpful, Nick.
I'm sure everything he's saying right now is the right thing and helpful and will save lives.
I'm just so glad that he's on the job.
Well, I do want to point out that there is an insatiable desire for Republicans to identify presidents who are worse than the ones that they support.
And so, and that's where Carter comes in, right?
And if you look at the accomplishments, because I remember hearing about this in the early 2000s, shitting on Carter to no end.
And I grew up, I was young, but I remember him being president.
And I went and did some research into it.
It was like, you know, do you realize that he was the guy that negotiated the lasting peace between Israel and Egypt?
Oh, yeah.
You know, that's like the one piece of peace that's actually sort of stayed somewhat stable.
And of course, they're going to be all sorts of people that are going to say, oh, they're sneaking in arms for the PLO through Egypt, whatever.
But at the very least, on the surface of like one government to another, that's been pretty stable.
Panama Canal, SALT 2 talks.
It's like everything he did was was sort of based on helping people and actually believing that.
So of course he's not going to serve more than one term, you know.
And of course they screwed him on the October, the original, well I don't know if it's the original October of Surprise anymore, but on the Iran hostage release thing, which seems pretty, you know about that, right?
Wait, are we talking about the fact that the Ronald Reagan campaign sabotaged the release of U.S.
hostages until after the election?
Yeah, that's something we don't like to talk about.
We also, going back to Nixon, and this was fun, we don't like talking about the fact that Nixon sabotaged peace talks in Vietnam, which ensured that thousands of Americans died.
And by the way, thousands upon thousands of Vietnamese people as well.
Well, and Nixon might have been part of the JFK assassination.
There it is!
We'll get there someday.
So here's how I liken it, and for anyone who's listening who enjoys sports at all, and even those who don't, try and wrap your head around this a little bit.
It's like the steroids era in baseball.
I want people to think about all of these baseball players who use steroids, performance enhancing drugs, right?
And their numbers were better and their careers were more impressive and they either went into the Hall of Fame or they've been denied the Hall of Fame because of steroid era stuff.
There's so many people who didn't use steroids whose numbers probably weren't as impressive as the other people.
Jimmy Carter was an honest broker.
He went into the presidency thinking that the presidency was about honest, good faith leadership.
That Americans were ready to have conversations about bigger things.
That they were mature.
That they wanted to have nuanced conversations and debates.
Here's the problem.
America has not been ready for that for a long time.
We've been hidden behind the simplified explanations and rhetoric and propaganda and that's why Ronald Reagan destroyed him.
It's because Jimmy Carter went in expecting to be an actual leader as a president and didn't understand that Americans were looking for a mascot.
And that's what they got.
And that's what we have now.
That's the problem.
But the problem is now, and I want people to imagine this, it's like going to a charity event where McDonald's is handing over a big giant check To a charity?
And Ronald McDonald is just an actor, right?
It's just a guy hired to dress up as Ronald McDonald and hand over the check.
He's not actually Ronald McDonald.
It's like the guy playing Ronald McDonald at the check ceremony starts giving out advice.
You know what I mean?
And he starts telling people how to do things, and everyone's like, dude, I understand why you're dressed up as Ronald McDonald, but you're not even actually Ronald McDonald, and if you were Ronald McDonald, you shouldn't be giving out advice anyway.
You're a clown.
That's who Donald Trump is.
He is a fake human being who believes that his fakeness is real, who shouldn't be in the job in the first place, but his fakeness keeps him in delusion and keeps him from being able to handle the situation.
He's a clown.
Here's a quote from five minutes ago.
Are you ready?
Oh no!
Hold on.
Hold on.
I understand dead air on a podcast is bad.
Let me steal myself.
Okay.
Quote.
My hair is blowing around and it's mine.
End quote.
So this is where he's coming from in these trying times where he's supposed to assure us that he's in charge and knows what he's doing and he is just out of the blue talking about how his hair is real because it's blowing around and he might look weird.
Do you know whose hair isn't blown around?
People who are in hospitals right now dying agonizing deaths while their family members aren't able to visit them.
Right.
And while he is questioning whether or not the people in the hospitals are like doing a mob deal of selling all this equipment out the back door.
You know, because he can't even fathom that you're only supposed to use H95 masks once per patient.
And if you do the math in just a couple hospitals, it's real easy to get to 200,000 a day, which is what he couldn't even understand when they needed so many.
It's insane.
And by the way, now he's pushing chloroquine.
He's pushing N95 masks that you can somehow sterilize again and again.
By the way, that might not be the worst idea if they have a machine for that, but still.
I think the point of that is that they simply don't, they were caught off guard, they gave away a lot of this stuff, and they can't get it made.
How about this?
When they triumph in Michigan, they're going to start making ventilators.
And in 100 days, they'll have 30,000 ventilators.
I got news for you, Jared.
In 30 days, it's going to be too late.
It's going to be too late.
And by the way, I'm glad you brought up Michigan.
Because the governor of Michigan, which by the way for people who missed it because there's so much going on it's hard to catch everything, the governor of Michigan has criticized Trump for his inability to help Michigan.
He called her a half-wit.
Right.
Yeah, and then took on General Motors.
The thing that we haven't talked about, and I've been talking about this a lot, I mean, we have a president who has been targeting states that didn't vote for him, governors that aren't quote-unquote grateful enough.
I've been saying it to everyone who will listen, it's genocide.
We're gonna be talking about this a lot more on this podcast.
I have to assume because he can't help it.
He's an authoritarian who doesn't understand what he's doing.
There are things that he understands.
There are crimes that he understands.
I don't think he understands that holding back life-saving supplies to political quote-unquote opponents is genocide, but it is.
Undoubtedly, if Michigan even creates these masks, and they're gonna be late to the party with them anyway, because I mean we're gonna see a lot of people die, He'll probably screw that up because that's who he is.
You know what I mean?
He'll figure out a way to step in and screw that up in order to make a personal vendetta and he'll lead to more deaths.
I'm just, I'm so frustrated.
You're going to make me have to be an apologist for Trump again, okay?
Let's play devil's advocate for a second here because remember it's FEMA is now in charge of dispensing all these things and let's just pretend, well let's just not forget that he wants to run the country like a business.
And I think you're slowly or very quickly realizing, or you should have, that you cannot.
These are lives.
So you cannot make this an open market where states are bidding against each other for life-saving pieces of equipment.
That's the issue.
This should have been nationalized from the beginning and then dispersed properly.
So the only issue you have is, okay, if FEMA's in charge of dispersing the ventilators and dispersing masks, You know, is it possible that Trump could go to them directly and say, hey, you know, don't give any to Michigan or give them, you know, whatever that formula is, make sure you put your thumb on it for Michigan and for California, whatever else, and make it harder for them.
You think that's what's happening?
Absolutely.
There's nobody in this government right now that Donald Trump hasn't put in power because they are sycophants.
They are terrified of him.
And that's the other problem.
It's not just that he's incompetent.
It's that he's incompetent and active.
Do you know what I mean?
Like there's no department.
He's vindictive and active.
And so there's not a department like, you know, these things are rolling in.
I mean, it's like Florida has been getting, I believe it was three times the amount of things that they needed while Colorado and Massachusetts and New York and Michigan are in trouble.
The Michigan thing is simply because their governor talked back to him.
That's it.
The other states are because they didn't give him electoral votes.
Yeah, I think FEMA, FEMA kisses his feet and licks his boots and they do what he wants and they do everything that they can.
You read all of these insider palace drama things and every single one of them is basically like, oh, they're very worried about making Donald Trump upset.
You know, they're just really mad that he's gonna, or really worried that he's gonna yell at them or tweet at them.
God forbid!
He might tweet at them, Nick.
He might write 280 characters and hit tweet.
You know what I mean?
And yeah, I do.
I think there's every possibility that he is directing these people to deny life-saving supplies.
I completely think that's a real possibility.
I mean, I guess you stated facts as far as these states are getting materials and these states are not.
There's obviously a reason why and it certainly sounds reasonable that at some point through the chain That is being influenced for some reason.
I I did see some articles where there's some formula that they created It's supposed to be based on need But you're right.
It doesn't it's not matching the need and there's simply no reason now the Florida thing You know it will be Because they had all the beaches open and they had all these people who were violating social distancing.
So, I would say at the end of this week you're going to see a spike in Florida like we're on the way to Italy.
Well, we're going to see a spike in middle America too.
And it's already started.
I mean, I come from rural Indiana.
Those cases are starting to pile up and those hospitals aren't ready.
You know, anybody who's ever been in a rural hospital knows that this is not going to be great.
And every, you know, and it's like, you know, small towns, my, my small town has one place where everybody goes and that's Walmart.
You know what I mean?
And if it, and if it gets into Walmart and it spreads and all of a sudden you have a crisis, one of the things that we're going to see, and this brings out the absolute worst in, in people, we're going to see a situation where you're going to have middle America and the coast and the cities.
They're all going to be in trouble pretty much at the same time.
And then all of a sudden we have to start talking about where resources go, and then all of a sudden we have to start talking about decisions about who lives and dies.
And I don't know if you saw it, but it was widely circulated, I believe yesterday, Alabama's guidelines are like positively eugenic.
They're just like people with, you know, like birth defects and people with like, you know, problem brain injuries and stuff.
These are people who are not high up on their like list of people to resuscitate and take care of.
What's going to happen?
And we keep talking about it here in the next couple days, next couple days.
Right now it's horrific.
It's going to get more horrific.
It just is.
And New York City is a preview of what America is going to look like in the next couple of weeks.
And it's going to bring out some really bad stuff.
And I'm telling you, the flaws in Donald Trump, all of them, are being exacerbated.
They're all worse right now because of this situation.
Without question.
I mean, I can't even add to that.
I mean, the one thing that just jumped in my head while I'm listening to you talk about that is, I don't know if you saw at the end of his, he was on Fox and Friends for, oh, an hour straight.
And at the end, what's her name, Ainsley, whatever her lady's name is, she asks Trump with a straight face, how can we pray for you, Mr. President?
And he didn't even really answer the question.
I don't think he gets that.
He doesn't even understand how to answer that one.
But like, getting back to the evangelical notion, it's like, there's some notion of we have to pray for this guy, in a way, and because he deserves it, or something.
I don't even know what to make of that.
Yeah, it's this idea, and Fox News has been the quiet guardian of all this stuff, right?
It's been this idea that being an American is all about being involved and not just unquestioning patriotism, but also Being in this place where it's also like a religion, right?
It's a civic religion.
And he doesn't get it.
He does not understand it.
The only thing Donald Trump understands, I've talked about this, is he understands the religion of the self, right?
It's the power of positive thinking, that type of thing.
But on Fox News, You're going to see more and more of this.
I mean, you're going to see them talk about the religious nature of it, American exceptionalism, Trump as a vessel of God's will.
That's just what they're going to do, and that's where this thing's going to happen.
And it's going to get worse and worse.
I mean, the conspiracies are going to mount up.
They're going to talk about evil.
They're going to talk about traitors in America.
It's going to get really ugly.
That's just the truth.
And you see Nancy Pelosi kind of, you know, call him out a bit on what he's been saying, the misinformation, and then Trump just uses the most ridiculous terms to classify her.
But it's that exceptionalism.
It's an interesting backdrop.
If you can wrap your mind about what we talked about the last 40 minutes or so, then it makes sense, like, how taking a knee during the national anthem could be such a horrific sight to these people.
Yeah, I mean, they truly see it as the march of evil.
I mean, that's what this thing is to them.
Every time that they see America questioned, and I was looking at my book today, the one that's coming out in September, and one of the things that I found in my research is like, when they were working on Reagan's campaign, they even said in strategy memos, they were like, we have to make Reagan the embodiment of America.
So if anybody questions Reagan, they question America.
Or they question America's inherent, you know, goodness and godliness.
And that's what they've done, is if you start to question this, if you say the president has failed, or the president is leading to more deaths, or the president has somehow or another hurt America, what you're saying is, I don't believe in God, and I don't believe in everything about America, and I'm an apostate.
You know what I mean?
I'm a traitor and I'm an apostate and so as a result you either deserve death or excommunicated and that's that's how these cults work.
Yeah, I'll never forget the day that I was with somebody in my family and I said, you know, this is again early 2000s and I said, you know, the Reagan administration, that was when the divide between the upper class and middle class got so wide and never got closer since then.
And this person just stormed out of the room in the biggest huff of anger I've ever seen.
And again, it was that same thing you just mentioned.
how dare you portray Ronald Reagan anything but this beacon on a shining hill?
And I had no idea that was even controversial to say because, again, it was just math.
You could see the numbers of income and quality of life for different classes.
It's on paper.
But, man, it was startling.
Not to get too deep in it because we're getting ready to wrap this thing up, but it's like pointing out contradictions in religious texts.
Right.
You know, it's like when this lionized idea of Reagan is a complete myth.
I mean, he wasn't actually religious.
He was spiritual.
He was into occult stuff.
He wasn't into small government.
His government was huge.
Huge the deficits they ran up were massive the only thing he was in favor of was cutting social entitlements to people We've talked about it before in this podcast people that he labeled welfare queens and things like that.
It was cultural warfare It had nothing to do with what we actually think about Reagan.
He wasn't actually professional in the office.
He was an actor He didn't understand what was going on.
He was a boob and And so, like, all of these things that we talk about Reagan are complete myths, and they're also religious myths.
It's the exact same thing as religion.
It just so happens to be a civic belief.
And that's what keeps up Trump.
That's what keeps up Reagan.
That's what keeps up the Republican Party.
Yes, Mike Lindell, the pillow guy, has now just quickly spoken.
I'll wrap this up.
He says, quote, this is on the podium standing next to Trump in this, you know, press conference.
Wait, timeout, timeout.
The pillow guy.
The Pillow Guy.
Mike Lindell.
What's the Pillow Guy?
I don't know.
I think he's the guy who makes pillows in that whatever company that is.
So it's not capital T, capital P, capital G, Pillow Guy.
It's a guy who makes pillows?
I believe that's what he does, yes.
Oh, so is he in charge?
Is he in charge of the pandemic now?
The Pillow Guy?
He will be after you hear what he said, which was, quote, God gave us grace on November 8th, 2016.
We all know that date.
No, he didn't!
To change the course we were on.
This is exactly what you're saying.
He must have heard you.
God had been taken out of our schools and lives.
A nation had turned its back on God.
I encourage you to use this time at home to get back in the Word.
Read our Bible." This is just a racist dog whistle against Obama if I've ever heard one.
Nick!
Alright, take us home, John.
Hold on.
Just, no, just let me... Let me sit here for a minute.
I just... I just... I... I...
You know, it's like every day just brings these new fresh horrors and this new fresh hell.
You know what we need to do?
We need to do a live show and just react to his press conference in real time.
I couldn't.
I couldn't do it because the amount of pacing and yelling at the walls that I do is incredible.
I'm gonna have to get off here after we're done and go listen to this crap and go write about this crap and try and tell people about The Call of the Shining City.
And meanwhile, you have The Pillow Guy telling us that we need to go and repent.
Which, by the way, just a brief little idea of what I'm getting ready to talk about.
This is Confederate stuff.
That's what happened whenever Confederate armies lost battles, is you would have Confederate preachers, like the Pillow Guy, telling you that you need to go out in the street and humiliate yourself because an angry racist god was testing your faith.
So now we have the Pillow Guy.
He's the CEO of MyPillow, Inc.
My pillow.
Are they good pillows?
Yeah, why he's up there.
Yeah, again, do they do they want to sponsor the podcast?
I assume they sponsor podcast.
Is that a thing?
I, you know, Nick, I'm so I'm so prematurely angry right now that I have to talk about this bullshit and try and tell people about this cult.
Okay, good.
Good.
I'm glad I'm glad the country's in good hands.
This is a good place to leave off on a podcast.
You know, I'm seeing a quote on Twitter saying, once the MyPillow guy appears at a briefing, it is no longer a briefing.
That's wonderful.
I'm very, I'm very excited about having to go online and scream at people about the call.
Yeah, well, and we never even talked about, like, you know, the markets and who's benefiting from that, because, you know, that's that's going to be the big reveal at some point, too.
I'm so happy.
All right, good talk.
Hey everybody, thank you for coming along to a great podcast.
I can't believe the pillow guy, the pillow guy, MyPillowInc just got up.
I hope he's in charge.
I hope he's the pandemic czar now.
I hope that him and Mike Pence are in charge of a generational pandemic, and I hope that's what's happening.
I hope he puts out a special edition pandemic pillow.
I hope that's what this is about.
I bet Trump is invested deep in this guy.
Okay, so thank you everyone for listening to the Muckrake Podcast.
We're going to be back later in the week because we can't look away from this thing and we're all inside because we have a completely incompetent, dangerous president.
I am Jared Yates Sexton.
My co-host is Nick Hausman, who you can find at canyouhearmesmh.
You can find me at jysexton.
Continue liking, rating, sharing the podcast.
Our audience is growing because you're telling people about it.
You have to tell people about it, and it helps everybody you tell every time you share, every rating, every subscription.
All of it.
We're gaining steam because this is a good place to come and talk about important things and give some context behind headlines.
We really, really appreciate you so much.
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