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April 7, 2020 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
52:33
How Trump Chose Greed Over Humanity

The pandemic gets worse as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is now in an ICU, but meanwhile Donald Trump and Republicans are pushing a miracle drug like they're set to profit from its sales. Co-hosts Nick Hauselman and Jared Yates Sexton dissect the history leading up to this pandemic and how the ceaseless need to profit has put all of our lives in danger. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I was at a hospital the other night where I think there were actually a few coronavirus patients, and I shook hands with everybody.
You'll be pleased to know, and I continue to shake hands, and I think it's very important that we, you know... I've seen things that I sort of like, so what do I know?
I'm not a doctor.
I'm not a doctor, but I have common sense.
Could you also weigh in on this issue of hydroxychloroquine?
Fifteen times.
He's your medical expert, correct?
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm your co-host, Joe Jade Sexton, and I'm here with my favorite co-host, Nick Haussmann.
It is April 6th, 2020, as we are taping this.
The coronavirus pandemic keeps getting worse and worse.
The news of the moment, well, there's a lot of news of the moment.
When is there not?
Is that Joe Biden has apparently talked to Donald Trump on the phone about the coronavirus pandemic.
I'm sure that was a Interesting, productive conversation.
And British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been put in the ICU and apparently might be put on a ventilator, which does not bode well for his status.
Nick, this just keeps getting worse.
It is.
It gets worse.
And I don't want to, you know, there are people who I think factually need to point out that Boris Johnson has been quoted as saying, you know, he was continuing to shake hands and not observe social distancing.
And he even, there's even a soundbite out there of him saying he'd gone to visit a hospital and was shaking hands with people, including people that had the virus.
So the scariest part about all of that is that, you know, getting admitted to the ICU is not good at all.
Not good.
Diagnosis is terrible for that.
And if you go on a ventilator, I think we talked this before, the odds of surviving are somewhere around 40%, which is better than 0% because you're struggling to breathe and you're going to basically die.
But this is really grave news.
Yeah, you know, we've been talking about it now for a couple of weeks.
You know, it's one of the amazing things.
We've been talking about this for a couple of weeks and my idiot governor, Brian Kemp, you know, went out the other day and said that he didn't know that this could be passed around with asymptomatic people, which, you know, good job earning your salary there, Brian Kemp.
But we've been covering this for weeks, and we were talking about it in the very beginning, and the difference between the political world and the microbial world, and the fact that in the virus world, there's no spin, there's no PR, there's no such thing as a lie, there's only stark black and white reality.
And the really terrible thing about all this is you could have easily predicted this thing with Boris Johnson.
You know what I mean?
This is a person who is one of the most powerful people in the world.
He's an absolute fraud of a person.
And by the way, I just want to say that in order to get our morality bona fides out there, I hope he recovers.
I don't want anyone to die from this thing.
You know what I mean?
We keep hearing on right-wing TV, it's like, Oh, leftists are hoping that this kills a bunch of people and they're just gleeful about it.
There's no glee in this.
It's awful.
I hope he makes a full recovery.
But just watching his posturing and the way that he treated this whole thing, and the way that conservatives around the world, particularly this new type of conservative, the Boris Johnson, the Donald Trump, all these people, the way that they've treated it, it was so predictable.
It was so obvious what was going to happen here, and so preventable.
And undoubtedly, I mean, the behavior by these people has killed people in completely tragic, preventable ways.
It's just awful.
Right.
And it just continues to be supported how many different instances where they failed.
I mean, even now, they did an exhaustive research, I think it was the Times, about how many flights had flew in from China, even after the ban, and how there was such light screening going on, and hundreds of thousands of people poured into the country, certainly before and then after they put this travel ban that they've been touting so much.
So, it's just like, even the thing that they can hang their hat on, or they feel like they can hang their hat on, isn't anything that they can.
And I think the real question, it sort of hits me, is I think we can all acknowledge that under better circumstances and better management, this isn't going to stop.
They weren't going to completely eliminate this virus from attacking and doing the damage.
In fact, it might have been doing the damage it's doing now.
Okay?
It might.
But...
To have this shitshow every night of a whatever you want to call that on TV.
A shitshow.
Let's call it a shitshow.
It's a shitshow.
All right.
That I think that is what's making it really really bad because it's just it's just exposing the way that the method of the madness and the way the sausage is made.
And you know that that is what gives everyone so much trouble wrapping their head around this and following the right guidelines even.
Yeah, God, I just keep thinking.
I mean, everything that Donald Trump, and by the way, Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are cut from the same tree.
I mean, they're the exact same thing.
They're just showmen who have no business whatsoever being in politics, who have no respect for the truth or duty or responsibility whatsoever.
And these are people, it's telling, and this is why I keep talking to people about There's a reason why people like them are in charge of major countries at the exact same time.
You know what I mean?
There's like something that has happened in this world, across the liberal democratic spectrum, or what used to be the liberal democratic spectrum, that led to these incompetence The showman, these absolute boobs, getting in places of power.
And I would go so far as to say that we have seen, like you said, I think that's gracious to say that this could have been, might not have been different, but we've seen with South Korea, you know what I mean?
Like places that took this seriously.
And now we have, I mean, it's almost too much to keep up with.
And this is why I always talk about Trumpism and Putinism with the exact same thing.
It's really hard to nail down all of the lies and all of the ways this has been mismanaged.
We keep reading stories about the federal government selling its stockpile to private companies and then gouging states.
Which, by the way, I haven't taken a civics class recently, but that's not how it's supposed to work.
And then on top of that like states will buy the property and and these PPE Materials and they'll arrive and then the federal government will seize them which The last time I checked I watched Goodfellas the other night and it seems very familiar Yeah, because this is organized crime and so we're watching a president who is an organized crime boss and a transparently incompetent one and But it just so happens that we live in a world that has been made to his advantage.
It's incredible and so infuriating on so many levels.
My governor in California, Gavin Newsom, has banded together with a number of states to finally be able to negotiate with power and strength to these companies to get PPE.
Almost like a United States of America is what you're saying.
Yeah!
He might as well just get everybody signed up, all the states signed up, and then at some point maybe we'll just stop listening to the White House.
By the way, Newsom should have been on a fast track to being the president in 2016, maybe even before that.
And, you know, of course, he had a little scandal with cheating on his wife or something way back in, like, 2004 or 2006.
Can you believe, in this time, that that would have been enough to sideline a guy for 12 years or whatever it was?
For a Democrat, yes.
What's that?
For a Democrat, yes.
For a Democrat, you know, fair enough.
And, you know, because he'll definitely be the frontrunner at some point for the presidential nomination, but here's a guy who is literally doing the president's job for him, and I'm, you know, you beat me to it as far as talking about what happens in Massachusetts and as far as, you know, it's literally on the dock, ready to be distributed, and they're, you said, seizing it.
That's a nice word for what they're doing.
That is.
And by the way, I'm glad that we're talking about Massachusetts because I want to give people like a quick little historical background on why we have a federal government.
For people who don't know why we have a federal government.
And by the way, I hope that Jared Kushner is listening because he doesn't understand what a federal government is and somehow or another he's in charge of it because he married Donald Trump's daughter.
It's wonderful.
So the reason we have a federal government, and people don't know this because it's not really taught that much in public education, everyone just pretends in 1776 we declared independence and we just suddenly had everything that we have now.
That's not what happened.
Over a decade went through and we were a confederacy of states and it was a mess.
Now, the big problem was that the states had no way of working together to achieve goals.
And then on top of that, there was a rebellion, Shays' Rebellion, that was almost another revolution.
And we can talk about Shays' Rebellion another time, because that is a really, really juicy steak that we need to bite into at some point, and all the things around it.
But basically, all of the states were like, you know what?
We need a centralized government that can take care of things that involve multiple states and the fate of all of us.
That's why we have a federal government.
Right now, we have a president who wants to control all of the power of an executive.
Well, pretending that there's not an executive branch.
And this is what happens with a person who has malleable ideology.
We talked about it before.
This is like how you get a tea party that says, we don't want you to spend tax dollars on social projects, but leave our social projects alone.
Right?
When it comes to us, we're socialists.
When it comes to people who have different color skin, like we are fiscally conservative and they can't have it.
That's what happens is the Republican Party has been infected with this malleable ideology.
Some would call it, you know, authoritarianism or fascism.
And it's a problem.
And oh, wait, racism.
Oh, yeah, that's right.
We can't get away with that.
Not saying what it is.
So yeah, we have a president who somehow or another is at the same time seizing power for the executive branch while pretending that the federal government doesn't exist.
And if that doesn't blow your mind like a scene out of Scanners, I don't know what's happening because it's the craziest thing and it's so predictable because that's who this person is and that's who this party is.
Is that what's happening between you and I now?
Is that you are now going to start using movie references like Scanners?
I can't let you horn in on everything just because you live out in California and you're going to premieres and you're meeting people and you got celebrities in your soccer leagues.
I can't let you have all the fun.
Well, you know, because it's Michael Ironside's, you know, probably his best role in Scanners.
Now, here's the thing that I like when you mentioned the fact that it took a decade for the United States to actually, like, get a constitution that would stuck and worked.
By the way, hold on, time out.
We have to throw this out there because people need to understand.
The Constitution was a coup.
James Madison basically was not supposed to write the Constitution, and he did, and everybody went along with it, and we pretend like it was legal.
It wasn't, but we have to put that out there because that's something we're going to talk about in the future, and we have to lay the groundwork, but yeah.
Yeah, well, maybe they'll write a, you know, a musical about it.
Okay.
So, you know, this is what reminded me of this because I had done some research into this way back in the early 2000s because when we invaded Iraq and we had promised, oh, we're going to install democracy and they're going to have voting.
It's going to be the most amazing thing and it won't take very long to do.
It was as if they had forgotten how long and how hard it was for us to be able to install a constitution in the context that the people in the United States at that time wanted the people that were there.
They wanted the government.
They wanted the military that was around them to be there and help them build this government versus what was happening in Iraq where nobody wanted them there.
And of course it wasn't going to work.
It probably still doesn't work now.
And they want us out desperately as it is.
So it's – who was in power then in the 2000s when they went into Iraq is the Republicans, the same people.
The only saving grace, because my head would explode like Scanner's three times over, if we still had guys like Wolfowitz and Brumsfeld, who are alive, but thank God haven't been brought back into the government, but we have their versions of them now, and it's the same shit they're talking about now as they were then, and we're no better for it all these years later.
Yeah, I don't know if you saw this.
I had to log off Twitter for a few hours because my white hot rage threatened to consume me and my house.
Somebody went and found Henry Kissinger and whatever.
Yeah, where he goes and hides and feeds off human misery.
And they had him write a column about the post-pandemic world and how it was shaking the order that he had created.
And it's just like, all of these people, and we gotta talk about this before we're all done, We right now are trusting the people who created the crisis we're in to fix the crisis, which is the most American thing other than apple pie and baseball.
We love What's the medicine, Nick?
protecting particularly Republicans who created crises to then go and fix the problem.
And I'll tell you what they do.
And here's the thing.
Trump is an outlier in his presentation.
He is not an outlier in what he's doing.
If he was more competent, we wouldn't even be having this conversation in the media the way we do and people losing their minds.
Trump going out and selling, what's the medicine, Nick?
Hydroxychloroquine.
I feel like every time somebody says that out in the wild, Donald Trump, like, hears a cha-ching somehow or another because he is absolutely profiting from selling this snake oil miracle cure to the American people.
By the way, it would help to know his finances, right?
To know whether or not the President of the United States is benefiting from hawking a miracle cure that his own experts have to throw him away from the mic and say, hey, that's not proven.
The tests haven't come back.
Because now he is selling An illusory cure to a disease that is exacerbated by his own failures and the failures of the Republican Party over the last 40 years.
It's amazing.
Do you know who makes that drug, Jared?
Do you know?
Novartis.
OK.
Does that name sound familiar?
Because it might.
Because if you might remember, before Michael Cohen, the private lawyer of Donald Trump, went to prison, he was charging for access to the White House, princely sums.
And guess what?
Novartis was one of those companies that paid him $1.2 million for a very short time to have his services.
Now, that's just kind of conjecture, and that's sort of, you know, conspiracy mongering.
No, it's not conjecture!
That's a conjecture!
If that's true, that's true!
That's insane!
Right.
So, there's tangential connections here, as it is.
So, you have to wonder how that is all playing out.
Because, of course, you know, the shares in Novartis would definitely be spiking right now.
But, you know, it's even worse than that, Jerry.
Let's just pretend that he doesn't have shares.
Okay?
Let's pretend that they didn't pay him to do this and push it.
They've now bought up millions upon millions of doses of this drug.
And guess who can't get it now?
Death.
the people who actually need it for their specific ailments that are not related to the coronavirus.
Meanwhile, the president of the AMA comes on.
And when Trump says, what have you got to lose by taking it?
Her answer is your life or even your vision.
People are going blind from this, taking this now.
It's one of the side effects.
And we've known that for a long time.
So that is where we're at with all of these things is, Independent of any kind of monetary benefit that corruption might be yielding, we're having a shortage of this thing for people who also really need it.
So what's fun about all that is that apparently Rudy Giuliani is also pushing this whole thing.
So we're taping this actually at 5.23 on a Monday afternoon which means that he is either in Ukraine having been drinking for the past eight hours or he's in a Trump bar somewhere smoking a cigar and you know committing insider trading and probably light treason.
And trying to keep his eyes from opening it so wide every so often.
Oh, man.
By the way, I love that one of the subplots of America's decline in the face of a pandemic is that Rudy Giuliani is having a late life crisis and that we're all suffering for it.
But so Giuliani is pushing this.
Apparently Flynn is pushing it.
And these guys, it's like, again, it's like for anybody who's ever been in this situation, it's like being in a hotel bar or a nice bar in a city.
And you hear a bunch of just disgusting creeps in cheap suits sitting around insider trading and talking about whatever laws they've broken that day and whatever laws they're planning on breaking tomorrow.
But it's the government.
Do you know what I mean?
It's not even just a bunch of creeps at like a, you know, a P.F.
Chang's.
It's our government.
And undoubtedly, so Trump either is profiting from this, which he probably is.
I mean, Donald Trump Jr.
is probably in on Everything that these people have done or he's on every call where they're breaking these laws Either he's in on it and he's profiting from it or before he goes outside Somebody gives him a call and he's just like oh, yeah, I'm an idiot.
I'll just repeat whatever somebody says to me I mean, that's how dire this thing is.
It's not even hyperbolic.
That's not even like a fever dream You know reenactment that's like legitimately what's happening in the government right now.
That's what's happening in the face of a pandemic And Matthew Gertz, who's online, what is he?
He's the guy that kind of goes through and is able to connect when Trump is watching Fox News and he'll see the tweets and he'll be able to connect the timing.
So he's done an interesting thing where he's been able to trace that a lot of the hydroxychloroquine ideology came from Fox and then Trump watches it and then he pushes it.
Wait, Donald Trump gets ideas from Fox News?
That is a cable news channel.
That's bizarre, Nick.
I don't know if that's true.
That just, that sounds frightening.
Yeah, I want some good old-fashioned, the vice president gives the news the idea and then it comes back to the president and they could say that the mainstream media is who came up with the idea.
I want that back.
We're talking about the Iraq War, people.
We're talking about the Iraq war right now.
You know, I want that to come back and Scooter Libby to be, you know, thrown under the bus for that.
But this is the other way.
Like somehow, I don't know exactly what the origin is because a lot of this stuff does seem to originate more from Fox News first.
And then it permits.
So you have to imagine there's advisors and people who are jostling for Trump's attention.
And they're clearly leaking things to Fox News or giving them information knowing that that's the better way to get to him than anything else.
Yeah, I wrote about this today on The Muckrake.
The medicine cure-all miracle drug lie, it breaks down to this, and this is how you need to understand Trump, the right-wing media, and Republicans, Fox News, all of it.
They're either profiting from it, They either believe in it because they think it's some sort of godsend or it's a dragon that they can chase.
You know what I mean?
Like the Republican Party for 40 years now has completely abdicated any actual responsibility for taking on problems.
If there's a problem in America, they create a problem that they can solve.
And by the way, that's the entirety of how Putinism works.
Just, you know, putting that out there for everyone.
It's sort of where they got the inspiration from it in the first place.
But, you know, if all of a sudden, I don't know, if Iran causes a problem and Iran, I don't know, bombs something, if you're Reagan, maybe you go after, you know, Qaddafi.
You know?
Or, if you're George H.W.
Bush, and you need something to work on Soviet Russia with in order to get an American economic order, maybe you take Saddam Hussein, who you've worked with for years, by the way, you call him Adolf Hitler, and then you fight a war, and you fight him as he uses weapons that the United States of America sold him.
Or, if you're the son of Bush, You know, you just go ahead and you make up a story about Saddam Hussein because you want a bulkhead of freedom in the Middle East and then you go over there and you kill him and then you destroy the order over there and you lead to ISIS and all that good stuff.
That's the Republican Party.
That's what they do.
They find a problem that they can't solve and they find a diversionary tactic.
In this, it's a miracle drug.
Now, we don't even have to worry about sending out ventilators, Nick.
We don't even have to worry about sending out masks and gloves.
This thing's going to be done in, you know, real fast because that drug works and it's just going to cure everything and everything will be fine.
Don't worry about it.
Okay, which brings us to the way that we're struggling now to actually accurately gauge how many deaths we have by this virus, okay?
Now, because remember, now, because the new thing we talked about last time was, you know, there are people who are dying with the disease versus dying from it.
And we really need to parse that.
It's really important because we've got to keep these numbers down.
And that is where we're getting, I don't want to get into conspiracy stuff, but it really feels like the slow response and the refusal to use WHO's testing In the very beginning was simply because Trump did not want the numbers to go up.
I don't think that's a conspiracy.
I don't think that's a conspiracy at all.
I think that is just historical fact at this point.
Okay, so that that is crazy.
Now, okay, if you take that, this will hit me earlier today.
It's almost like they're going to try and make this might happen.
They might actually try to somehow spin this that with these 100,000 deaths or 200,000 deaths, it's actually going to open up More jobs for the survivors to then move into.
Oh yeah!
Oh, I thought you were going to yell at me for a second.
No, that's in every meeting room in America right now.
No, no, no.
You know, we've been doing this podcast long enough, Nick.
You've started to get in these people's minds.
Here's the thing.
In every corporate meeting room, I just want you to picture every nondescript, windowed corporate conference room.
They're all having conversations about streamlining.
They're having conversations about how they got rid of people that they couldn't have done otherwise.
They didn't even take a PR hit for laying off people because everyone has to lay off people.
So it's not even in the news.
It doesn't even hurt their shares.
And they are primed.
And this is the thing.
They're all saying this.
They're saying something along the lines of a positive post-pandemic outlook.
That's exactly what all these people are having a conversation about.
And this is what Trump is saying.
And if you listen to Trump, he'll tell you.
He says, when the dying is over, the economy is going to take off like a rocket ship.
He says it in almost so many words.
That is exactly the mindset that these people have.
And I don't know about you.
I have been really shocked.
by the commercials of the companies that are getting the quick turnaround on this thing.
Do you know what I mean?
Where they're like, oh, here at Pizza Hut, well, I hope Pizza Hut doesn't want to sponsor the show, but you know, here at Pizza Hut, we're concerned about your COVID-19 situation.
Let us do the cooking and you stay safe.
Everybody looks at it and they say, and this is the corporate mindset, right?
Make lemonade out of lemons.
It's like, well, yeah, hundreds of thousands of people are going to die, but we need to look at our bottom line and we need to figure out how to sell that to people.
And that is, unfortunately, the corporate mindset and why we're in the situation that we are.
You're exactly right.
That's the conversation that they're having.
Right now.
As a brief aside, I had written a screenplay long ago, a fake documentary about a small town with two funeral homes.
And in one scene was a boardroom meeting about how they can increase business.
And the suggestion comes up, well, we could just kill some people, right?
That's how we'll have more funerals.
And this is, in some weird twisted way, how this is playing out.
I have this weird memory of thinking that actually happened where they discovered that there was a funeral home that was doing something like that to get more business.
And it's, hey, it's capitalism everybody!
This is capitalism.
Having states fight each other for the drags of whatever PPE is left is capitalism.
It's how they think it should be run.
It absolutely is.
And let's throw this out there too.
Because the administration is pushing most of its resources to states in the South, It's a tax on liberal America.
Yeah.
It really is because that's where the money in the country is.
It's a giant shift and redistribution of wealth.
That's exactly what's happening and it's terrible and it's monstrous and it's murderous but that's what's happening.
Well we didn't talk about that.
I guess we did mention it earlier in the last pod but you know this notion that Florida And Kentucky are getting 100% plus what they're requisitioning for as far as PPE for some reason.
And other states, Michigan is not, when the governor is complaining openly, Illinois is complaining openly about the federal response.
I guess we have to say that that's not a conspiracy conjecture either at this point.
Now, my only thing I have a hard time wrapping my head around is, you know, can Donald Trump really call FEMA and tell them, you know, hey, confiscate the Massachusetts' orders at the dock and send them over to Kentucky?
I mean, can he do that?
I assume he can, and it also doesn't hurt that he has stalked his entire pseudo-administration.
And by the way, I just want to make that clear.
I was making this point today.
It's not a real presidential administration, right?
It's an anti-presidential administration.
This isn't a group of people who are solving problems.
They're there to destroy government, and they are just doing a damn good job.
He has stalked the entire administration with sycophants who are terrified of him.
They just, they'll do whatever he wants, and on top of that, not only are they terrified of him, But it's been so instilled that you you see these interviews and he might listening I'm sure has seen these you see these palace intrigue stories about the White House and about the administration right and everyone's like well You know what Trump wants and you don't want to upset him so you have to tiptoe around, you know, talking about Russia.
You have to tiptoe about talking about the election.
Or you don't mention it at all and you make sure that you don't because it might lead to, you know, funds being taken from your organization or from your wing of government.
It is a giant, sycophantic, dysfunctional administration that does not work the way people think.
And the media and pundits and experts can't wrap their head around that.
They still want to explain this as if it's an actual government.
It's not.
It's a crime organization.
It's 100% a front for these people to loot And take all of our resources and pretend that they're solving problems and never even touch them.
That's why when people ask me, they're like, oh, is he ever going to build the wall?
It's like, he never intended to build the wall, right?
That was never an actual thing.
It's just rhetoric.
It's snake oil to sell people and make them look over there while you're doing this over here.
It's all been diversionary and it's always been diversionary.
Well, to get back to that mob imagery we're talking about here, we had Jerry Kushner come out there and get into a battle with the media about what the stockpile means, the federal stockpile, which again addresses this notion of having the states, they're like, the federal government is only a backup, is what Trump keeps saying, which is his way of saying, we don't have to do anything to help anybody.
Meanwhile, Jared Kushner says the stockpile is ours.
Donald Trump says it is ours, not theirs, meaning not the state's.
And I've been trying to figure out what he means.
I kind of think he pictures like, let's just pretend there was a, God forbid, a nuclear attack, right?
And there's only like 40 minutes before everyone, all hell breaks loose.
So you have like the I don't know, a few thousand people who are in the federal government who are all near the White House.
They all hustle in there and they get all the food, they get all the whatever, right?
And I kind of feel like that's what he's picturing here, where these government workers are going to get sick and they're the ones who are going to need the ventilators.
I don't know what else he's talking about.
Can you help me, Jared?
I think that's part of it, but I also think, so like, okay, so again, this is the thing, putting ourselves in the mindset of these monsters, right?
It's a hard thing to do, but follow me.
So when I say a state needs ventilators, right?
What you and I hear is, we need to get that medical device to that state to save somebody's life, right?
And maybe it won't save their life, but it gives them the best chance of saving their lives, okay?
That's what you and I think and hear.
They look at it and they say, and by the way, I don't know how much a ventilator cost.
I'm not particularly sure.
It's like $20,000 to $50,000.
Okay, so $20,000 to $50,000, right?
When they look at it, they see $20,000 to $50,000.
And during a crisis, it's not $20,000 to $50,000.
It's whatever they want to pay you, baby.
It's whatever that state feels like they need to pay you.
And so as a result, these people are always thinking about money.
That's all they can do.
That's the entire way that they are wired.
It goes back to that corporate mindset.
It's like, oh, we have X number of ventilators, which equals Y number of dollars, right?
And so it's both they want to be protected and that they want to make money off this thing.
It's like Rob Blagojevich, who is my governor for a hot minute.
Like, it was like when he tried to sell Obama's Senate seat, and he said, I've got this thing, and I'm not going to give it away for free.
There is a mindset and a worldview that works that way.
And some people are like that, and other people aren't.
And the people who aren't, it's really hard to wrap our heads around it and wire ourselves that way to even see through those eyes.
Donald Trump is a broken human being.
And if you got in his mind, it would be Like a space alien.
It would be so foreign and alien to us the way that he views the world.
It would be horrific.
I mean, it really would.
It would be a horror show to see through his eyes.
Oh, well, let's talk about that because, you know, in September, the United States, the government, dissolved a program that was designed to send scientists over to where?
China.
China, I believe.
Yes, to research and study pandemics.
To have their finger on the pulse of how these things spread and what we can do to prevent them.
Now, that's not even talking about the National Security Council's program that was dissolved by him as well, of all the scientists.
So you're mixing a lot of things together.
How you just described him as far as the money goes is one thing.
And then you have a guy who has the power of positive thinking, and so he can never plan for any contingencies because he refuses to even acknowledge that there is an emergency.
And you have these programs that would have directly limited the amount of damage that this thing has done so far.
And what's the worst part about it all is that he can then go on TV every day and lie about all these things.
He even lied recently when they asked him about the NSC group that they had dissolved.
And he said that was fake news, never happened.
And he's allowed to do that and people, I'm on Twitter, people believe that.
And even though we have all the news, they never denied it.
He already acknowledged it months before that he did that, thinking, oh, well, we'll hire everybody back if we need them.
Like, again, another CEO mindset.
Well, we can't have this wasting all this money because they're not really doing anything tangible right now.
But if we do need them, oh, yeah, we'll hire them all back right away.
We'll get them all to quit their jobs wherever they are and move all the way back.
By the way, I didn't even mention what they did, how they fired all the people in the Department of Agriculture.
Science, all these things are mixed together.
This notion of what he's learning and spitting out about hydroxychloroquine is the same idea.
Where he doesn't even believe science, he won't let Dr. Fauci answer a question anymore about it.
It's unbelievable how a perfect storm this is.
Let's go down that rabbit hole.
Let's actually talk about...
I'm so glad you got down this route.
Because this is something I feel like...
I'm hot too.
I feel like this is something that our podcast can talk about other podcasts aren't going to.
So, I want you to think about what you were talking about with the scientists that they fired, right?
Who went out and got other jobs.
Well, if you're not working for the government in order to fight pandemics and take things on like that, and you're a scientist, where do you go, Nick?
Labs.
Labs?
For who?
I don't know.
You tell me.
Pharmaceutical companies.
Okay, yeah.
Right?
So all of a sudden you go to pharmaceutical companies, who by the way are going to pay a whole hell of a lot money than the government.
Right?
All of a sudden you start looking around the corporate world and all of a sudden you start realizing they've been hiring some of the best and the brightest scientists in the world.
Right?
And by the way, like energy scientists, people who could be working on alternative energy or finding, you know, some sort of like new energy breakthrough that could lead to I don't know, a complete revolution of society.
All of a sudden, they're working for oil companies, gas companies, petroleum companies.
All of a sudden, they're being kept from making these breakthroughs.
The same thing happens with these health professionals.
Some of them are going to go ahead and they're going to work on pandemics and the public good.
Others are just going to go over and work on medicine, which, by the way, people who don't know this, a lot of medicine is about treating things that could have been prevented in the first place.
The money is not in preventing problems.
The money is in treating existing problems.
And that's the way that all these companies have always worked.
So we could be in a situation where something like a novel coronavirus, we could have not only a better healthcare system, we could have better medicine.
Right?
We could have gone ahead and gotten ready for something like this.
But the mindset of people like Ronald Reagan, George H.W.
Bush, George W. Bush, Republicans, and Trump is that, well, we haven't had a pandemic in a century.
Why do we need to keep spending money on this?
Get rid of them.
What are we paying these people for?
And all it does is it opens the door for something like this.
And so we have had decades Decades of misdirection and mismanagement that has led us to this point, and we can't talk about that.
Matter of fact, I don't know if... I tend to stay away from the news right now, particularly cable news, because a lot of it is just sort of... There's no other way to put it.
It's disaster porn in a lot of ways.
You know what I mean?
It's just panicking, and it's really, really bad with the graphics and all this stuff.
Some of it's really good.
There's a lot of good educational stuff on there, but a lot of it's hard.
But we can't talk on these shows and on our news and in our articles about where this came from.
We can't talk about the larger societal, historical, political things that have led us to this moment.
This was all preventable.
Every last bit of this was preventable.
And that's the problem is we just can't even recognize what we did wrong so we can figure out what we can do right.
Let's just revisit for a second, and really well said, but I want to revisit what you're talking about as far as the scientists when they go to work for the drug companies, for instance, and they make a handsome living doing that.
Sure.
And meanwhile, then those companies will cry that they can't lower the cost of drugs because all the R&D is so expensive and all the infrastructure they built out to have to come up with new drugs is so expensive that they don't have enough money to then lower the cost of drugs.
And so that is another one of those that they create the market that then allows them to have higher prices.
The other issue here is we see is that if you look at the countries that have really gotten this under control and had the least amount of effect, like South Korea is probably the best example, they have terrific universal health care.
That is the key here.
It really is.
And we heard Anthony Fauci in the very beginning, when they asked him, he's like, you know, how hard would it be just to be able to go directly to the place to get tested, versus having to go to your doctor, the doctor has to order the test, and they have to go to this other place, and they do it, they send it back to the doctor.
That's insane that you have to do that in the time of an epidemic.
He even acknowledged that in the beginning.
I don't think he's allowed to say that now.
But he said, is that the way it should go?
Absolutely.
Is that how it is now?
No, it cannot work that way, the way we have our system.
And so that's the other thing.
Out of all these horrible tragedies that we keep having, nothing gets done.
Which is another reason why I would think that across the board it's why the Bernie Bros and why even the Trump people want these guys in power because they do feel like it's gonna eventually just tear it all down and destroy it.
But we need to have a method to that.
There needs to be some sort of bridge where people don't die like this in between getting to these two places.
There's a thing that's been happening.
So there's a couple ways this thing can go.
And unfortunately, America has a long history of getting these things wrong, but occasionally we get it right.
Spain right now is negotiating universal pay and, you know, the guarantee of jobs and health care and all this stuff.
It's really some exciting stuff that might come from it in Spain.
But we also have other countries like Hungary.
Right that has now become the first dictatorship in the European Union, which if that doesn't blow your mind it should it absolutely should and America teeters on the brink and America is particularly in danger because America is very bad at forgetting what is happening and forgetting what lessons they need to learn from their problems.
You know, this is the solution that's being pandered to us.
By the way, where are all those Walmart testing centers?
Whatever happened to that?
Remember we were supposed to drive on down to our local Walmart and get tested?
Oh, what about that Google website they promised us?
Oh man, what about all that?
Okay, which by the way... Who was in charge of that?
Oh, it was Jared Kushner and a firm that is related to Jared Kushner was supposed to build that thing.
A lot of fun.
Jared, my 12-year-old son could have built the website that they were describing, by the way.
Oh, man, is it... It's really infuriating, Nick.
There's so much blame.
But by the way, speaking of blame...
Decades and decades and decades of Republicans fighting and corporations fighting every health care reform, even conservative health care reform, because they didn't want to lose political battles.
And I hope those people, you know, I hope they're safe and I hope they're healthy, but I hope to God they're having a really hard time sleeping at night.
Because there's so much blood to go around, to so many hands, and it belongs there too.
It just belongs there.
Absolutely it does.
On their hands, on Trump hands, on so, so many hands.
Yeah, we've strayed pretty far from the doctrine where, you know, because remember the whole point about the United States The soft power that we were able to engender across the world was really important to keeping, you know, national security intact, really.
It's not like all the missiles and all the fierce fighting that we have.
It's the idea that people like us and aspire to be us and recognize how, like, there was ethical stuff going on in our government.
That was always sort of a real big part of what made America, oh God, I'm not going to say it, but what people looked up to in America.
And now, because of these policies, and it's the same thing with Boris Johnson, because I don't, we kind of left that piece out, you know, Boris Johnson swept to power on Brexit, you know, and the same kind of thing that Trump was doing with the wall and keeping these foreigners who are weighing us down, the rapists and the murderers, he kind of, they played the same kind of thing there, only more like with Muslims in the UK, but the point being, That when we are in a position where we help people across the world, that's when we get help back.
And now what we're seeing is, you know, he's threatening 3M, and I get it, I understand why he's threatening 3M to stop sending masks out to other countries that are ordering it, right?
Against America First.
Well, what he doesn't realize is that Canada could be like, fine, we're not going to send you the pulp that you need to then make the material for the masks themselves either.
And then they're in a stalemate, you know.
And meanwhile, Canada could probably get them somewhere else.
And we're fucked.
So it's, you know, it's the same thing where we continually shoot ourselves in the head multiple times in the same day.
And it's really frustrating.
No, it's... When you look at it initially, it seems really inexplicable and just bewildering.
I mean, this is not the way a sane nation should behave, you know?
And the truth is, we're not a sane nation.
What you were talking about in the hard power, soft power thing, that is what held the world order in place for a very long time.
And by the way, I have my problems with it.
If anybody's interested in reading about my problems, my new book, American Rule, gets into this stuff.
On one hand, we were a force for democracy.
On the other hand, we relied on a whole lot of dictators and a whole lot of fascists that we kept on a payroll, including Saddam Hussein, who's already made a cameo in this podcast.
But the problem is that the American veneer has just, it's not just worn thin, it's completely evaporated.
There's a really good article today I recommend to people.
It was written by Ben Rhodes of the Obama administration.
It's not September 12th anymore.
We're no longer in the post 9-11 era.
We're in a new era, the pandemic era.
The post 9-11 era destroyed any remaining idea of American exceptionalism and American inherent goodness.
It made very clear the things that we did that were wrong.
And while we continued waving the flag and beating our chest and talking about the red, white and blue and all this shit, we just made it obvious for the world that we were more than willing to do some really toxic, awful murder stuff.
And now, I mean, we're going to come out of this pandemic.
We're going to be wounded.
I mean, we really are.
We're going to be wounded as a country financially.
We're going to be wounded.
Our psyche, the trauma we're going through right now is incredible.
You know, like our society is.
And there's no telling where it's going to lead.
I mean, what Trump is going to do.
There's no reason why countries should believe that we're suddenly going to be a leader again.
You know, there's no reason why countries should take American lead on things.
The reason why is because we already went through this.
In 2008, Barack Obama had to go around the world and back again to try and re-establish everything you just talked about.
And so now you're talking about 12 years later, we're in the same position.
Let's pretend that Biden wins.
And now his right-hand man is going to have to try and do the same kind of thing again?
And these countries are going to believe it?
I don't see how that's going to happen.
You're talking about 20, 30 years of having to do over and over again good deeds to try and convince anybody that we're coming from a good place.
But that also requires, again, an overhaul of the actual government itself to really prove it at this point.
And I don't know if that's going to happen.
I mean, that's whiplash.
You know, if you're watching America from the outside.
And I talk to a lot of people around the world, and I get a lot of interview requests from other countries.
And they basically, they get me on and they're like, what is going on?
We thought America was different.
What is happening?
And the whole point is, they really do want to believe, because it's the best myth out there.
Is the idea that America can do good things and marshal power towards good and democracy.
Even if we do all these wrong things, there's still like the hope that we can somehow or another embody something really amazing.
And now you look at it and what you're talking about has so many.
Everything that you just mentioned is so hard to do, even if we get a chance to do it.
I am today.
Again, it's April 6th.
I doubt more than ever that we're going to have elections in November.
I mean, if you look at what the Republicans are doing right now about mail-in votes, if you have any belief that they are going to somehow or another let that happen, I don't know what to tell you.
Donald Trump is going to... this thing is going to get really bad in the next couple weeks.
Who knows what Trump is going to do.
We have to have an election.
We have to have Donald Trump accept that he gets defeated, if he could be defeated.
And on top of that, you have to hope that Joe Biden can recreate what Barack Obama did.
Barack Obama was a once-in-a-generation unifier orator, you know?
And like, nothing against Joe Biden, and I have my problems with Biden, but like, to believe that he's suddenly going to do the thing that Obama did?
And Obama had a lot of forces working on his behalf, and a lot of reasons why people bought into what he did.
So you're talking about a lot of what-ifs.
And by the way, that's not to sit here and be fatalist.
Like, I have to have hope that this thing is going to get better.
But it is a tall order.
It's a massive order.
Well, it gets better overnight if and when Trump loses the election.
But again, all these things have to happen before then.
And by the way, you know, to talk about the facade of what America stands for and what people used to think it was, I mean, you have to know, don't look any further than the stock market today.
We are on the eve of what will be the worst week of this whole pandemic.
We're seeing unemployment shoot through the roof.
I don't know if you've seen these, the graphs that are automated or they're not, they're animated.
And so you watch 80s and 90s and all this up and down, up and down.
All of a sudden, it's just, it dwarfs- It like goes to the moon.
Yeah, it literally to the moon is how much higher it is in the last two weeks than it has been ever for the last 40 years.
And yet the stock market's up to 1600 points today.
Why would that happen, Nick?
You know, I worked on this.
I worked on the mercantile exchange in the 80s.
And when you're down there, this was back when they actually had a floor and the guys, you know, like Ferris Bueller and they're trading and they're signaling all that shit.
I mean, you know, you got the sense it's like, here's like a hundred dudes that are controlling the fate of the entire market just sitting in a pit somewhere.
Why would they feel good going into a week where hundreds of thousands of people might die and the economy has been cratering?
Oh yeah, that's right, because it presents opportunity.
Right.
And because the stock market is an inhuman machine that doesn't reward anything that helps people.
It actually feeds off human misery.
That's just the truth of the matter.
And that isn't hyperbolic.
It is exactly what it is.
And it's monstrous.
It's just monstrous.
Let's not forget, by the end of this week, it could be down another 5,000 points.
So it could equally just be like, ah, today I feel real.
You know what?
It's a lot like how Trump treats his worth.
Hey, today I don't feel so good.
I'm gonna sell and it's gonna go all the way down.
Ah, I feel good today.
That's how fickle this stupid thing is and it's ridiculous.
And by the way, it's also how easy manipulatable it is and how easy it is to become so corrupt at doing this.
You know, Loeffler shouldn't be in the Senate seat for more than one more minute today before getting thrown out for what she's done.
And yet nothing's gonna happen to her.
She's the one who is not only dumping stocks that were related to this, but now it turned out she's buying stocks in companies that were making these masks.
So it's crazy.
The whole stock market thing is crazy.
It doesn't match reality.
And meanwhile, nobody who makes less than, you know, anybody who's middle class or older doesn't even really use the stock market anyway.
It's like this fake toy that rich people get to play with and never have to give up.
Well, it's like a multiplier, right?
It's all a confidence game.
And we've talked about that on this podcast.
It's not real.
It's just, you know, how rich people feel about the economy.
And if they feel good about the economy, the economy goes up.
And by the way, if something like... And this is really how huge of a problem this is.
If they push legislation that will actually help people and won't help the stock market, the stock market will go down as judgment on that legislation, which is why when you keep hearing about proposed legislation, it's about capital gains, right?
It's about massive corporate relief.
It's about helping.
Yeah, it's all of that stuff.
And here's the truth, and this is one of the bigger things that we need to recognize and we have to hit on all the time.
The stock market is a bomb.
It's just a bomb that we are all strapped to, and we have to dismantle it, and we have to do something else.
And we can figure out a way that people can still be multi-millionaires, hundred millionaires.
We could maybe even have a couple of billionaires.
But we have to change everything.
And we have to dismantle this bomb completely.
Because it's going to kill us all.
All I can see right now is the end of Dr. Strangelove with Slim Pickens straddling the bomb and riding it like a cowboy down into the explosion.
And then, you know, beautiful music while we're seeing slow-mo footage of these explosions.
But you're right, as far as the cyclical nature of this, how it's constantly doing this.
And what's frustrating is that the people that get screwed are the poor people, and the rich people, no matter what happens with that market, do really well.
Completely.
And by the way, I think Dr. Strangelove is absolutely required viewing right now.
And the reason it's required viewing is it's all about game theory and how it's ruined everything in this country and how it's created, you know, it's made people act, not act like fascists.
I mean, they are basically fascist and everything, but name, right?
It's like that scene in it where he's like, yeah, we might get our hair bust, but we'll win.
This is all preventable.
None of the things that we're going through needed to happen.
None of the things need to continue happening.
We can make things change.
We choose not to.
It's madness.
This is the madness of crowds playing out.
And if we get out of this, and if there's a history that has anything approaching objectivity, it's going to show us as being a country that went insane.
This is an insane moment.
Yes.
And if you do watch Dr. Strangelove, just understand that it's Peter Sellers playing multiple roles.
And you might not realize it at the time because he is that good.
But yeah, I'm going to watch it tonight because it will just serve to remind us of how prescient it really is and how important it is that we need to be aware of these things.
So it's not even that we want to shit on the government or shit on the United States and be all these and love it or leave it bullshit.
It simply is we need to have the perspective of where we went and where we were and where we're going If we're going to have any change here.
And even then, it's monumental.
I don't know if we're going to... The titanic effort to do that is... I don't know if it's even overcomable, but we'll see.
But we need to have that kind of perspective.
It's worth it just to watch him and watch Peter Sellers have his arguments as the President of the United States with the Premier of Russia and go back and forth.
It's hilarious and macabre and frightening all at once.
Yeah, we need to do an episode on game theory and faux nuclear war and all of those monsters and technocracy and how it got us here.
We have to get Tom Nichols on for that one.
There you go, not bad.
So we'll do that on a future episode.
Catch Us, we do a couple episodes every week.
We'll drop a new episode on Friday.
And as events require, unfortunately we're in a really Busy, kind of an awful cycle, and we'll continue to try and give you some perspective and idea of what's going on that other people aren't touching on.
A reminder, we can use all of the likes and subscriptions we can get.
We have really appreciated all the interactions lately.
People reaching out, people telling other people, more subscribers, more listens.
We really, really appreciate you and, you know, we couldn't do this if it weren't for you, so please take an active role in that.
On social media, I am at jysexton.
Nick is at canyouhearmesmh.
Until next time everybody, stay safe and wash those hands.
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