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April 14, 2020 - The Muckrake Political Podcast

51:10

The Committee To Reinfect America

Trump has named his "Committee to Reopen America" and, surprise!, it's full of his cronies and children. Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman digest this and another week full of crimes and scandals and address just how a criminally incompetent president can get away with it all Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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	I've been having many discussions with my team and top experts, and we're very close to completing a plan to open our country, hopefully even ahead of schedule.
	I'm going to put it very simply.
	The President of the United States has the authority to do What the President has the authority to do, which is very powerful.
	The President of the United States calls the shots.
	But I'm going to surround myself with the greatest minds, including the business of politics and reason, and we're going to make a decision, and hopefully it's going to be the right decision.
	You say, sir, what metrics you will use to make that decision?
	The metrics right here.
	Welcome everyone to the Muckrake Podcast.
	I'm your co-host Jared Yates-Sexton.
	I'm here with my co-host Nick Hausselman.
	As we have done for weeks now, we are still covering a crime against humanity with the coronavirus pandemic.
	We're gonna be discussing that today, but we're gonna open with a little treat.
	I'm really excited about this because it is April 13th, and we are recording this podcast.
	And right before we began recording, Donald Trump and the Trump administration rolled out the Council to Reopen America.
	Now we want to go on record, at least I do, I think my co-host Nick will join me in this, that all of this talk about reopening America is pretty irresponsible and it's not being handled in a humane, safe way.
	It's going to put a lot of lives in danger.
	But before we get into all of that, Nick has not seen the murderer's row that is the council to reopen America.
	The geniuses who are now in charge Wait, okay.
	So I haven't heard any of this yet.
	I've been really busy all morning.
	I haven't seen the announcement.
	But how did you know that my first question is, who is... There's a lot of things going on.
	It could be what or when.
	But my first question was who.
	How did you know that I was dying to find out who was on the council?
	So here's the thing, Nick.
	It is a top-notch team that is going to make sure that America is reopened in a safe, humane way.
	So I'm going to go down this list real fast.
	Our trusty co-host, Nick, has not seen this yet.
	So we're going to get an organic reaction in real time.
	And I am, you know, it's a rough time.
	You don't get a lot of treats.
	This is a treat.
	So let's go ahead and start.
	You're not going to say Vincent Price, are you?
	Oh man, he might actually do better on this.
	Alright, are you ready?
	Alright, I'm gonna start here.
	Robert Leitzer!
	That doesn't worry you too much.
	Let's keep going.
	Mark Meadows.
	Oh, our old friend.
	Mark Meadows is on there.
	Steve Mnuchin is on there.
	Do we even know what Mark Meadows is doing these days?
	Yeah, we're not sure.
	You know, I'll even throw this out there.
	It almost makes sense that Steve Mnuchin is on.
	I mean, he's not going to be competent and it's not going to lead to anything good, but it makes Since.
	Yeah, you know, there's some economic decisions to be made here.
	Well, let's make some more economic decisions with Wilbur Ross.
	Oh, yes.
	Who said that the pandemic would be good for American businesses.
	Well, yes, and upset some people listening to our podcast for pointing those things out.
	Yeah, there's that.
	We have three more and I'm going in order of enjoyment here.
	Next up, TV personality Larry Kudlow.
	Oh, our old friend Larry.
	But, but, but, but, but, but, Larry.
	Yeah, Larry, who told everyone that the market was strong and not at all to worry about the pandemic and to invest their money right before the market crashed.
	Oh, yeah.
	But let's not forget that he totally said he didn't say that later.
	Yeah, he didn't say that.
	Next up is our good friend, the man who is in charge of the government as we know it.
	I'm trying to remember.
	Oh, yeah, that's right.
	It is the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
	Yes, the bastion of competency.
	Well, the good news is, by his side, on the Council to Reopen America, that's right.
	Ivanka Trump.
	No, I was like, wait, is it Trump himself?
	He put Ivanka on that?
	Ivanka?
	Yeah.
	She and Jared Kushner and this murderer's row of morons and ghouls are going to be in charge of reopening America.
	Sooner than later, Nick.
	Remember, Ivanka single-handedly created 13 million jobs in the last three years.
	Okay, so take me into your mind.
	We're making an organic podcasting experience.
	How do you feel right now, knowing that your America, where your family resides and the people you care about, is being reopened by this motley crew of idiots?
	How do you feel right now?
	And by the way, with the background of being asked what will help him decide when to reopen the economy in America, Trump points to his forehead.
	And you know where I went, by the way, really quickly?
	I don't know if you remember.
	It's too macabre.
	My wife got mad at me.
	Can I say it anyway?
	I, I, this is a podcast.
	Okay.
	We say things.
	Yes.
	Well, after JFK assassination, they had his, uh, press secretary on and he points to his head in the very same exact spot explaining what happened, which is also part of the conspiracy because remember people arguing that it was in the back of his head and not, but nonetheless, that's where I went.
	I'm thinking the same kind of thing here.
	I don't know why, but hey, this is me.
	This is where the, let's get to know me a little bit more.
	I think it's almost impossible not to feel macabre and terrified as Donald Trump says he's not going to pay attention to experts or expertise or evidence and that he's going to rely on his brain, which we all know is addled and malfunctioning, to be what he depends on to open the government.
	Yes, we've been binge watching Westworld and his code is clearly corrupted.
	Now, here's how I feel though.
	This has been a really, you know what it is?
	What we're doing right now with shelter-in-place and staying home and having everything shut down, that's a sort of a dry run because we're gonna be right back at it again come July, August, the way this is gonna play out.
	And maybe December and January or February or March.
	I mean, for anybody who hasn't been paying attention to this, I've been telling people this for a little while, and it's not always the most popular thing to tell people.
	The experts say this is going to be an 18-month rolling quarantine shutdown.
	And for these people, I mean, because what's going to happen, I wrote about this on The Mutt Creek, Trump is going to have his own Mission Accomplished moment, right?
	And for those who don't remember, George W. Bush landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln outside of San Diego, playing fighter pilot, even though, you know, that's right, he didn't go to the Vietnam War and all that good stuff.
	Yeah, and then he posed in front of a giant Mission Accomplished banner and said that we had won in Iraq.
	And then, the last I checked, people were still dying in Iraq and there was still madness over there and ISIS had come about.
	But the problem is that the American media latched onto that because they really do think about things like television shows and movies.
	I mean, these are the people who run the networks.
	They're going to treat this like it's a giant victory.
	Tens of thousands of Americans dying.
	And, by the way, the country will quote-unquote reopen, which will put the onus on the states.
	More people are going to die.
	And unfortunately, there's going to be a lot of people who die, and it's not even going to be noticed.
	That's what's happening, and we'll probably end up doing this again.
	Right.
	I just feel like everything will open up.
	People will start mixing among each other, whatever.
	They will infect each other.
	It'll come right back roaring.
	I mean, listen, once they get the vaccine, you have to make millions of these vaccines.
	That's going to take a long time, too.
	It's not like the day that it's invented and works, they can prove it works, everyone just gets it.
	So that's the other problem, not to mention who's really adversely being affected by this whole thing anyway.
	I don't know if you even want to get into that.
	No, I agree.
	And the thing that we really need to talk about, and this is the thing that's becoming abundantly clear, Donald Trump is not president to solve any problems.
	You know, he's not there to protect lives.
	I don't know, Nick, did you have a chance to look over the Red Dawn email story?
	I had this moment, and by the way, we're laughing about this Council to Reopen America, which is actually just the council to, you know, make sure that businesses, you know, make their marks.
	The Red Dawn email story, and people who haven't seen it, was a moment of blind rage for me.
	Because, you know, we keep having one story after another which shows not only malfeasance but like an active malfeasance.
	The Trump administration, if you want to call it that, it's actually just the illusion of a presidential administration, has committed crimes against humanity and has killed more Americans than we'll even know.
	We probably will never know how many Americans unnecessarily died in this whole thing.
	And it's becoming obvious that we don't have a president.
	We have a person who is bilking the country and sentencing Americans to die lonely, agonizing deaths.
	And it was a moment of blind rage.
	And the Red Dawn email story just brought it into full focus.
	And the fact that we're not in the streets right now, and the fact we can be in the streets right now, and it's not a bigger deal, is just really dispiriting and enraging.
	Right.
	And the Red Dawn email chain, by the way, which is simply leading experts nationally, sounding the alarm as early as the end of January.
	I think even maybe before that, really, in a way that basically what it identifies is that February was a complete lost month.
	They did nothing in February.
	And even just shutting down the border or shutting down the travel or doing a travel ban from China did not work at all.
	Half a million people were able to get in anyway after the outbreak.
	40,000 after the travel ban itself.
	And guess what?
	We now know that in New York, most of the infections come from Europe anyway.
	So it's, you know, he'll never ever, I don't even think he'll be able to contemplate what he did.
	He can't even get that far as to even one day be like, oh, my God, I don't believe what I just did there.
	That was a mistake.
	He'll never get to that point.
	But I'm not even sure that matters anyway because it's a question of are they going to have a 9-11 style commission to investigate this?
	And is anything going to happen anyway from this?
	You know, I read – I was working on my book, American Rule.
	I sat down and I read the 9-11 report.
	And because I'm a glutton for punishment, I then read the Senate report on torture.
	A lot of fun reading, let me tell you.
	And there are these big giant Books that go into these things and they lay everything out in black and white.
	And here's the thing about it, and I think that's a good comparison.
	They show you that the Bush administration knew that the possibility existed that there were going to be terror attacks.
	You know, you read all these experts who are in the intelligence community talking about the system blinking red.
	The Bush administration knew, or they should have known, you know, they were too busy doing other things.
	The torture reports make it clear that America engaged in fascistic behavior.
	But here's the true tragedy of time.
	Even if we were to have full 9-11 commission style reports on what happened, and even if all the facts came out, those two reports have basically just started gathering dust on library shelves.
	And people like us who pay attention to it talk about it and we know it and we traffic in it and we can scream until our vocal cords give out about it.
	But the true tragedy of American culture is that stuff like this happens and it just Dissipates like you know so much dust and and and that is a really frustrating thing to realize and think about is that Even if we do find out what happened here, and that's going to be a hard knot to unknot Like it's it's I don't even know what you do with it.
	You know.
	I mean.
	It's such a great tragedy and crime on such a great scale It's hard to even wrap your head around Sure, and more reports are coming out now about how they are getting the PPE and how it's being confiscated.
	And it is, it's an interesting, confusing state only because it's like, what I'm trying to do is almost give the government and Kushner and those guys the slight benefit of the doubt.
	To think, OK, are they micromanaging to such a level that these states are not getting the PPE that they're ordering because of whether they're blue or they're red or how the governor has behaved to Trump?
	Because it seems a little bit micromanaging to some degree.
	Like there's a lot of moving pieces.
	How can they really have their finger on all of that?
	But what you did get from the reports this weekend was that they clearly are interested in the bottom line.
	They're not interested in having any kind of sense of urgency of who needs this stuff first.
	And they also wanted to make sure they gave the companies that are making this stuff huge leeway to make profits on these things versus actually serving the public.
	And that's one of the reasons why Trump was so reluctant to You know, force these companies, you know, in the Defense Production Act to actually make these things and save lives.
	Yeah, this whole thing has worked in waves.
	Trump wasn't interested in dealing with this in January.
	And by the way, like you read these reports now, they wanted to shut the country down in February.
	Just shut the country.
	Like we would have now been, you know, in quarantine for two and a half, going on two and a half months is what experts wanted.
	Um, Trump couldn't be bothered to think about it.
	And then on top of it, he didn't want to believe it because it would mean, you know, the economy taking a hit.
	He would have the blemish of the pandemic on his presidency.
	He was worried about his reelection campaign.
	And then that's why they kept trying.
	And then he kept hoping to, like, dodge a bullet.
	And that, like, it wouldn't be as bad as he thought it would.
	And, you know, that he could avoid it and downplay it.
	Now it's...
	Now it's so many different things.
	It's incompetence, but it's also malevolence, you know?
	It's just this... There have been crimes committed against humanity in the name of politics trying to make governors worship and, you know, contribute to your re-election campaign.
	I'm sure that Kushner is micromanaging everything and failing because... Oh, by the way, real fast, Nick, fact check.
	Is Jared Kushner an expert in any of this?
	No.
	No, he is a real estate person who has failed in real estate every time he's ever tried it.
	He's a child of wealth and privilege who has just, you know, basically burned every dollar that's ever been handed to him.
	He's not an expert, so he's probably ruined this whole thing.
	And meanwhile, the Trump administration has looked for every way possible to profit off of this thing.
	And in order to lie in their own pockets and to figure out how to make money off this.
	It's, again, it's like Bugojevic.
	It's like, I'm not going to give this thing away for free.
	It's worth a lot of money.
	I mean, it's like Cheney with Halliburton.
	It's like, just fill in the blanks all the way through from, you know, from Vietnam and then before.
	Maybe World War II, they weren't out and out corrupt and profiteering.
	Maybe.
	Okay, who knows?
	Do you know?
	Oh, no.
	There were a lot of profiteers.
	We don't have to get into the companies that were necessarily part of it, but let's just say some major American companies were working hand-in-hand with the Nazis during that time.
	Let's just say that if you want to look at it, look at it and walk around all day and pull out your hair and gnash your teeth.
	Well, that's okay.
	You can get a major airport aimed after you for all that in the nation's capital.
	Oh yeah, you don't know about Dulles?
	I'm well aware.
	I didn't know that we were going there on the Tuesday podcast.
	There was a nice brother duo we had there, but nonetheless.
	Oh, the Dulles brothers are two of the most dangerous American individuals that we've ever had, and we should just do a Dulles podcast at some point.
	I don't think anybody would listen.
	But it's incredibly important to talk about the Dulles brothers and just how much damage they did to America and the world because they are really way up there.
	But here's the concept you have to understand about that and it applies here in spades is that they believed that they were doing what was in the best interest of the country.
	The Republicans, and I said this before a lot, the Republicans believe that what their vision of America is is the only best way for this to move along and so by By any means necessary, are they going to do that?
	And, you throw in the little corruption, we didn't even scratch the surface about the corruption, but how ripe it is in all these different things means that, like, Trump and those guys are just gonna shrug and be like, what, this is how it's done.
	Why is this a big deal?
	Why do you think that, you know, getting our cronies in here involved, oh, and they're gonna do some front-running trading on these things while we're at it.
	I'll throw in some tweets, make sure the market moves and so you guys can do some short selling.
	Like all that stuff is just how it's been done.
	So I don't even know if they think it's illegal at this point.
	What are laws?
	I mean, you know, and that's the thing to go down this rabbit hole.
	First of all, I mean, the President of the United States is sitting around bragging about making deals with Putin and MBS and Saudi Arabia who, you know, murdered an American journalist in cold blood and dismembered him and then just was like, I don't know.
	Maybe I did.
	And now they're just making one deal after another.
	And that's the whole point, is these people look at laws as things that other people have to deal with.
	And that is the entire mindset of wealth, privilege, and white supremacy.
	It's the idea that laws are there to keep out the riffraff and to keep the people in order.
	I don't have to have that because I'm ordained by God.
	And to go to what you were saying, the Republican Party, There's a couple of things happening there.
	The Republican Party, in part, does believe that it is ordained by God and its interest is, you know, in simpatico with America's interest.
	There's another group of them that they're just hucksters.
	They have no interest in duty whatsoever, and they'll go out and say whatever they want and do whatever they want, and it's all about malleable ideology.
	Like, what we're seeing now with the Trump administration, and I wish people would wrap their heads around this, When democratic liberalism starts falling apart is when groups become malleable in their ideology and the way they look at laws and everything.
	To listen to the Trump administration talk one day, they would basically tell you federalism doesn't exist.
	Then the next day, and Trump does this in the same day.
	This happened two days at different times.
	At one point he's like, well the federal government isn't really supposed to do anything here.
	Governors, you better get ready for this reopening because if people die it's on you.
	The next moment he tweets out, oh I'm the president and I have the ultimate say.
	So it's this idea of when I want to be the federal government, I want all-powerful, I have it, but when it means that I have to take responsibility, throw it out and you have it.
	That's malleable ideology and that malleable ideology leads to the crumbling of democratic institutions.
	Well let me add on to that idea because not only is he now telling all the states that you need to get your own shit to save your own people in the hospitals, but then when they actually order it and it's on its way to being delivered, Oh, I guarantee it does.
	I guarantee it does.
	to divvy it up however they want to.
	The only thing I can't figure out right now is if that confiscated material gets resold. - Oh, I guarantee it does.
	I guarantee it does. - So the states are buying it, they've already contracted it, and all of a sudden they're like, "Sorry, we can't give it to you, "the FEMA's stepping in." So I'm assuming that money is gone, like they paid that money, and then who knows, these companies are supposedly allowed to have 40% of that being resold However, they want to sell the companies So it's really confusing because there's this 40 40 20, you know, I'm sure Jared Kushner love this notion Oh, I can use these numbers like we can divvy up 100% in three different ways.
	It'd be really exciting and sound great and Yeah, but to me it just sounds like it's a real corrupt way to profit off of just people dying and also to, in a really cynical way, try and make sure that they can win the election in November because the states that are really important to them feel like the government is actually stepping in to do stuff and all the blue states aren't.
	But it doesn't matter because they're not going to get those votes anyway.
	And that's a huge thing that we need to talk about because then that gets into the voting.
	Oh, you mean genocide?
	Genocide.
	Oh, we're talking about genocide and crimes against humanity.
	By the way, I just want to point out for everyone who's listening, this is one of those things, like, we are so deep in madness right now.
	We're 20 minutes into this podcast, and what Nick just broached is one of the most obscene, blatant crimes against humanity by a president, like, in recent history, if not all of American history.
	The fact that there are so many of these crimes, and they're so egregious, and they're so awful, and they get lost.
	Do you know?
	Like, the story about them seizing life-saving supplies, and probably reselling them, who the hell knows?
	That isn't even the headline every single day.
	The fact that Trump has said out loud that he's playing politics with these things.
	I don't know if you saw it, but in Colorado, he basically didn't listen to the governor of Colorado, and then it was like, oh, the senator of Colorado, the Republican senator, wanted these supplies, so I'm sending them.
	And, you know, the implicit thing is you better re-elect them or whatever.
	It's garbage and it's criminal and it's genocide and it's a crime against humanity.
	And I'm only laughing because only in an insane nation can all of this shit happen and it's not the headline.
	That should be in the giant New York Times war font.
	And it's a betrayal.
	But it also is not going to disqualify him from winning in November.
	No, of course not.
	It would actually help him.
	Yeah.
	You know, by the way, you want to talk about tossing things on the fire.
	He's been firing inspectors general all over the place.
	The guy who's in charge of making sure the bailout money is delivered properly is gone.
	Who else did he just get rid of?
	Somebody else.
	Now I'm blanking.
	Another inspector general.
	Well, who can keep track?
	It's multiple inspector generals.
	The one who had anything to do with the whistleblower situation.
	Oh my god.
	Which, by the way, feels like decades ago.
	Yeah, it was two months.
	I just want to point out real fast, in the middle of all of this...
	It is demoralizing and back-breaking to talk about this stuff.
	It really, really is.
	And that's by design.
	That's what happens with authoritarians.
	They break your will.
	And over time, so much stuff happens, and so much crime happens, and so much corruption happens, that at some point, you are supposed to just look down at your shoes and be like, fine, commit your crimes, just let me live.
	And then eventually, they won't let you live.
	That's what ends up happening and it's by design and that that is what we're watching here And the fact that so much of this stuff is just going through the filter and not catching I it should concern everybody like this is this is like really horrific stuff, right?
	And meanwhile, you have like Fox News, who now they've done 180.
	You know, Mike Wallace is now, who has never been a real Fox News guy.
	You know, he is getting shredded by Trump on Twitter.
	You know, by the way, he actually tried to, does Donald Trump know that Mike Wallace, or sorry, that Chris Wallace's father is Mike Wallace?
	Because I don't even know if he realizes that.
	Sometimes I doubt whether or not Donald Trump has object permanence.
	Did I say Mike Wallace to begin with instead of Chris?
	And by the way, I'm so glad that you brought this up.
	This is something that like isn't even getting discussed.
	Have you ever, just real fast, this is off the cuff, have you ever watched OAIN?
	You know, I don't even know how I would.
	It's not on TV, is it?
	Oh, I assume it's probably everywhere right now.
	Yeah, I assume that Trump is... Just go look at the President's Twitter account.
	I assume that he's tweeted out a live link to it.
	This is something really giant that people need to talk about, which is Fox News is a literal propaganda arm for Donald Trump.
	Like, that is their entire corporate ethos, is to treat him like an infallible, worshipful deity.
	And that's not even enough for Trump.
	The fact they're even talking about the pandemic right now, he's like, well y'all should really be checking out OAN.
	And by the way, OAN is out there.
	They are trying really hard to get Donald Trump to go to literal war with China.
	And these are people, like at least Fox News, when they call the Clintons murderers, they're like, some people say.
	OAN is like, Hillary Clinton killed five people today before breakfast.
	These are extremists.
	And Donald Trump has been pushing them really hard.
	And here's what happens, and people need to be ready for this.
	Somebody tweeted at me when I was talking about this the other day.
	They were like, well, what happens if Fox News turns on Trump?
	That's not what's going to happen.
	Fox News is going to compete with OAN.
	And OAN is going to ratchet it up.
	And you're going to have two extremist right-wing media companies vying for Trump's affection.
	Which, by the way, is what authoritarians do.
	They pit their sycophants against each other.
	They love it.
	They get off on that shit, man.
	That's their favorite thing in the world.
	And we are going to see in the middle of a pandemic, and by the way this is something else we need to talk about, with pandemics, economic crises, fascism grows and grows and grows and grows, you want to get two extremist right-wing media networks vying for the president's attention in the middle of all that?
	That's a recipe for a nightmarish scenario.
	Yeah.
	Well, also, speaking of the firing stuff, he also quote-tweeted something that was basically calling for the firing of Tony Fauci, Dr. Fauci, the one person that we need.
	And, you know, because, by the way, he even said, hey, you know, had we done stuff in February like we were calling for, we would have, everyone knows that would have saved lives.
	But it was really, there was so much blowback to that early on that wasn't going to happen.
	Basically, it's paraphrasing what he said.
	I'm amazed he's still in this position right now after saying that.
	I am too, and I'm even more amazed.
	I was looking for it.
	The Trump administration responded to inquiries about this, which, by the way, what you talked about was retweeted by Trump, right?
	I mean, who, by the way, has been retweeting some really choice stuff.
	It's been QAnon stuff.
	It's been anti-Fauci stuff.
	It's been this OAN garbage.
	He's the one who brought this up on his Twitter.
	And so the administration is like, how dare you bring this up?
	Fake outrage is amazing!
	There's like, whoever would ever bring this up into the public experience, like, your man just did it.
	Like, that's who did it.
	It's incredible hypocrisy.
	And, you know, I think Trump likes keeping them around as a lapdog.
	I really do.
	And I just want to put this out there.
	With Fauci.
	I just want to remind everyone, and I know this isn't going to be popular, but need said, I need to remind everyone who is sharing all these memes of Robert Mueller dressed up as Captain America and Superman and Batman and this idea that any one individual within the system is going to save us from any of this.
	It doesn't work, and it doesn't happen.
	Fauci's there to try and do the best that he possibly can.
	He's not gonna bring down the system.
	He's not gonna all of a sudden stand up and say what needs to be said.
	And even if he did, Nick, it wouldn't matter.
	Trump would just, you know, yell at him and get rid of it, and it would be over the next day.
	That's not how any of this works.
	We can't wait for, like, Superman to show up and save us.
	Right.
	And by the way, this connects to Chris Wallace because he asked his Fox News panel about basically that report and the Fox News... Can we use the word correspondent?
	I don't know if we're allowed to with this because it was... Boot lickers.
	From now on, the Fox News boot lickers.
	Yeah, Chris Wallace is like, well, so what do you think about this report where they could have done all this stuff at least four weeks earlier?
	And the lady base is like, well, I don't know about that, but China was the one who did all this stuff, and they were intentionally withholding all this information from us.
	China, China, China.
	It was amazing because you were supposed to actually offer some counterbalance or some information and some factual stuff instead of just some random spewing of word salad.
	All you have to do is watch that for Fox News.
	All of that's in a nutshell.
	So it really is frightening because if we don't recognize the past, we can't improve.
	We can't fix these things.
	And, you know, the interesting thing about the Obama administration was they're getting a lot of crap from Trump and everybody about how they left this national stockpile so depleted.
	And if you do go through all the different pandemics and crises they had to deal with almost every year throughout his administration, it's like no surprise that they kind of got to the end there with a little bit of a low stockpile.
	But then, you add on the fact that they had all these other fail-safes in place to help mitigate all these things going into the future.
	And the Trump administration simply, one by one, dismantled all of them and ignored the rest.
	Yeah, the stockpile question and the pandemic question.
	We don't talk about how we got to this point.
	One of my biggest disappointments so far has been that We talk about the pandemic, and we talk about coronavirus, and we talk about what has happened and where we've fallen short.
	We don't talk about how we got here, right?
	The Afghanistan War and the Iraq War cost us trillions of dollars.
	Trillions of dollars.
	Trillions of dollars that could have been used for, I don't know, infrastructure, education, and, oh that's right, healthcare.
	There's a reason why, and if you read the history of this, all of the administrations have been concerned about it before Trump.
	It started with Clinton.
	Clinton, it turns out, read a novel about pandemics and just lost his mind.
	It was like, we gotta do something about it.
	George W. Bush got all pumped up about it.
	Obama read a book about it, got all pumped up about it.
	But guess what?
	There's no money, right?
	Or you get told there's no money.
	We're in austerity.
	We got wars going on.
	How could we ever pay for anything like this?
	So we should have been leading the way.
	Like this thing should have been caught dead to rights.
	We should have been prepared for it.
	Our stockpile should have been there.
	Our hospitals should have been updated.
	Our medical staff should have been ready.
	And it just so happens that we've been living in austerity measures for decades now.
	And in this thing, he says it was, you know, whatever Trump says, it's a decrepit system or whatever.
	Like, sure, but it didn't just happen.
	It's not like Obama rolled out of bed one day and he's like, man, let's just destroy the healthcare system.
	This whole thing is a result of years, and by the way, also decades of fighting science and experts.
	Right?
	There's a reason why people don't trust experts in science anymore.
	It's by design.
	And the Republican Party and their corporate benefactors wanted to destroy science and education.
	And they did.
	And that's how we ended up where we're at.
	You know, when they're doing all these bailout packages, and they're just printing money, you know, and we said this before, maybe a few episodes ago, it's like, the next time you hear, oh, we don't have any money, sorry, we can't do any of these things, it's like, fuck you!
	I tell you.
	Drop of a hat, you can sort of just print trillions of dollars if you need them for whatever.
	Meanwhile, by the way, I had said this, I believe, and now all of a sudden it came into being, where some of the Democratic Congress people are proposing an idea, which is what they should have done in the first place was, anybody making up to $100,000 will pay you for three months to stay at home.
	That should have been what happened in February.
	Stay at home.
	We will pay you your entire salary for three months, which is still going to be a lot less than what they're going to end up wasting just on the wasted corruption part of it.
	And that way we can ensure, because by the way, you have a lot of people who are like these libertarians or, you know, religious people who don't want to be told what to do and stay inside.
	How many church services were there yesterday?
	Probably thousands, right?
	Way too many.
	But I think it would resonate with them if you're like, wait, oh, you'll give me my salary for three months as long as I just stay home?
	They might actually have done that.
	That might have spoken volumes to people.
	But instead, here we are.
	Now they're trying to propose this.
	It won't even go into effect, even if it does go for another month or two.
	It's too late.
	It's remarkable.
	And we're still going to end up crying poor for all the important things that they're going to need to prevent this from happening in the future.
	The other industrialized nations of the world are either giving people like 80 to 70 percent of their salaries to stay home and be safe.
	We offered a one time, I think a loan, by the way, no one has explained yet whether or not it's a loan towards our taxes or whether or not it's just free money.
	Also, there's no telling how we're going to get it and when we're going to get it.
	And as long as the boy wonder, Jared Kushner is on it.
	Wow, that's gonna work.
	Nobody has any clue It's all a farce.
	It's all a total total farce and and I I hate to be the the harbinger of bad news But this is what America is.
	It is a broken system that wasn't ready for this thing and is Unworried about actually addressing it and what you just said about keeping people home from work like if they do reopen America this wonder team gets on it and Do you think that millionaires and billionaires and CEOs and and uh you know all these people do you think they're going to work?
	No!
	That anybody who is sufficiently middle class, white collar, and up doesn't have to go to work.
	They're telecommuting right now.
	We're talking about getting people out who don't believe in science and who are going to endanger themselves.
	We're going to We're going to sacrifice people is what's going to happen.
	And these people, and I keep calling them ghouls, they're ghouls.
	They're more than happy to make that happen.
	Yeah.
	Period.
	Yeah.
	And I kind of just want to pivot this because we mentioned voting as well.
	And if there's ever a chance for people in those situations to have a voice and actually affect change, they're now out now trying to prevent this from happening.
	Because obviously when you have a lot of people huddling up in voting areas, now we had it, we saw it in Wisconsin, they forced these people to go to like five voting polling places that would have had 150 at the time.
	And people are going to die from that.
	But this is like we had said this before, I think, in the last episode.
	This is a precursor to what's going to happen in November.
	And I just started looking into this as far as the historical context because you have to remember after the Civil War, this country was not equal at all.
	And black people, especially in the South, really did not have any rights.
	And it was almost like dictated in the Constitution itself.
	It took until the 60s until we had the Voting Rights Act to finally, at least on paper, have some notion of having a fair and free elections.
	And we still don't have those, but at least it was on paper, like in some sort of version of a law.
	But we had 77 years of Jim Crow before that.
	And we're only 45 years since the Voting Rights Act.
	So we're still like, you know, Donald Trump grew up in an era where people were still being disenfranchised legally.
	Yeah, and the Voting Rights Act has been attacked and dissected over and over and over again by people saying that we don't need it anymore and it's obsolete, which is just, it's criminal.
	And it's always been criminal.
	And so we need to talk about a larger part of this thing.
	And again, I hate to be the harbinger of this thing.
	The United States Postal Service is in real trouble.
	Real giant trouble.
	And by the way, people who don't know this need to understand that it's not organic trouble.
	It's not like the Postal Service doesn't make money and, you know, isn't a viable quote-unquote business.
	It's because Republicans kneecapped them.
	They passed a law that said that they have to insure and pay all future pensions, which is not something that anybody has to do outside of them.
	They hate the Postal Service and they want it privatized and real fast.
	Let's say that somehow or another through hook or crook we end up with mail-in voting in November, which is what needs to happen.
	Republicans aren't going to let it happen, but let's say it happens.
	Let's say the Postal Service gets destroyed.
	Here are some hard facts that people aren't talking about.
	So like, let's say instead of the Postal Service we go to UPS or FedEx or Amazon.
	It won't be Amazon because Trump hates Bezos, but you know what I'm saying.
	So let's say that we have a privatized company.
	Guess a couple of differences.
	One, they can set their own prices.
	They can make you pay whatever it is, which by the way sort of looks a little bit like a poll tax, doesn't it?
	It starts to feel a little bit like you have to have an amount of money in order to carry out a vote.
	Number two, and this is a really frightening thing that people need to start opening up their heads for, the United States Postal Service, you have an expectation of privacy.
	They do not look at your packages or your letters.
	If you have a privatized system, you do not have a right to privacy with these people.
	It's not the same thing.
	And if we go into a private system, God knows where that leads us because the United States Postal Service is supposed to be what binds us as a society.
	This is a really frightening moment and people need to start looking at the chessboard because they're moving.
	These things are moving and we're all in danger.
	Also, the other context is, what do all those people that work for the Post Office do if you suddenly make it privatized?
	That's half a million people that work for the Post Office.
	And again, like you said, it's only because they're kneecapped with this ridiculous pension requirement.
	They actually do make money, and the Amazon stuff that Amazon uses for the Post Office to deliver these packages that Trump is always criticizing, that actually is lucrative for the Post Office.
	It's a good deal for everybody.
	And I agree, I couldn't agree with you more on that one.
	And I just don't understand why Trump is allowed, I mean, listen, he's the president, that's the problem, but somehow he's allowed to stick with a straight face in front of all these cameras, conjure up these images of people That's not bad.
	said it in a living room he said thousands of people i don't know how big your living room is jared i i can't get more than about 15 in my living room i don't know about you wow that's living nicely in california that's not bad and you know and stuffing envelopes as if there are like these forged fake envelopes that exist beyond the actual ones that go to each individual voter that you can't you can't you can't make people vote their own votes
	we can't even get people to turn out for elections on to cast their own ballot much less engage in voter fraud That's not true.
	By the way, you want to add a little bit more salt to this?
	Do you know who a large portion of the United States Postal Service, do you know who their employees are, a large portion?
	No.
	Veterans.
	Veterans.
	They employ an unbelievable amount of veterans, which by the way, part of the reason why we're not going to fund these people is because those people fought in wars that took up all of our money and now they get home and we're going to leave them high and dry, which it's not like America has a history of that.
	Oh, that's right.
	America always does that.
	It's Lucy and the football.
	We're going to take care of our veterans, our heroes, and then we're not.
	And we're going to do this and America is great and it could never whatever.
	It's just garbage.
	It's just all enraging garbage.
	Yeah and meanwhile Trump gets to keep he keeps saying how he he got this law passed for the VA or they can see their own doctors which is something that Obama did and he just renewed and he knows that he's lying you know but it sounds good.
	I just watched Born on the Fourth of July actually I watched like the first I don't know 45 minutes of it.
	Have you seen it?
	Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, I read the book in high school.
	We studied it and stuff.
	And I had to turn it off only because it just, in stark black and white terms, it's a color movie, but it just shows you how the care was so poor, the medical care for veterans and wounded soldiers.
	It's something out of a horror film.
	And maybe it's gotten a little bit better in the interim, but without question, it's like, You know, that's the one thing.
	Like, I never served.
	I don't think I'd ever really want to serve, honestly.
	I just don't, you know, the risk of being sent into a war is something I would never really want to participate in.
	But the people that are willing to do that, for whatever reason, and a lot of them are generally just, I need to get out of my circumstance, right?
	I want to go to college.
	I want to, you know, this will be my chance.
	You know, the idea that people would sacrifice that and get treated this way is as horrific as anything else that Trump has done.
	Yeah, and there's a couple things that happened there.
	First of all, I just want to point out that it's really interesting, right, that in all of the cases that we're talking about, the one combining factor in all of this is that poor people who have no other recourse are getting the raw end of the deal.
	And they're being sent to be murdered, whether or not it is to go fight in a war or to go participate in the reopened America, you know, that the president's daughter and son-in-law are in charge of.
	The other thing, and just to put this, because we like to get a little historical context in all of this.
	People should go and take a look at Ronald Reagan's re-envisioning of the Vietnam War, which is a really important thing in American history, which is that he based a lot of his campaign on the idea that America betrayed its veterans by, you know, protesting against the war as opposed to, you know, questioning its leaders.
	Uh, and in the 1980s, and this is, um, so while I was doing research in my book, American Rule, I started finding, like, all these newspaper articles about, like, these parades that cities would throw for veterans in the 1980s.
	That was, like, years after Vietnam had ended, but it was like, we're so sorry that, you know, we didn't support you the way we should.
	You know, star-spangled things or whatever.
	Turns out Donald Trump was at a lot of these things, which was really fun.
	Actually, you'll enjoy this.
	I'll send you a PDF of it later.
	A New York Times article about one of these Vietnam-era, or not Vietnam-era, but Vietnam parades in the 1980s.
	It's on the front page and it's all about, you know, making the record right and showing our veterans we support them.
	Donald Trump finds a way to get quoted in it.
	And guess what one of the articles on the paper is?
	It's about Rupert Murdoch buying another couple of TV stations in America and, you know, really making sure that he's able to have control over our media.
	Anyway, but the long story short is, immediately after those parades and maybe even during them, Ronald Reagan, who uses all of these veterans as political props, I know this is going to shock you, Nick.
	I know any listener who pays attention is going to be shocked by this.
	He, uh, you know, cut their benefits and left them out to dry.
	Now, I know, isn't it shocking?
	Because they make useful props and then once they're out of the public eye, they screw them and screw them and screw them.
	And that's what this is about.
	And that's what we're watching right now is an illusion.
	This is what America is.
	and an illusion of action.
	And behind it, it's all about money and it's all about screwing these people.
	And it's really disgusting all the way around. - Right.
	And it's again, this is what America is.
	This is what's been happening for the entire history of our country.
	And so the Make America Great movement has always rung a little bit hollow for a lot of reasons.
	And this is definitely one of them as well.
	It's because there's this just desire for all these white guys to want to go back to when the laws didn't really ever apply.
	And if people from back, you know, slave owners magically came back to this time frame, they look like, oh, they'd be like, they probably would feel comforted now that we've gone three years of this, knowing that like a president could behave like this and not have anything happen to him.
	In fact, it could get reelected.
	I mean, listen to it.
	Look at the face of this thing.
	The primary motivation that Trump has for getting re-elected is so that he can avoid prison.
	Right.
	He doesn't get elected.
	That's way up there.
	He will get he will probably get tried and probably go to prison for obstruction of justice.
	It seems pretty clear.
	So he has to win like that.
	That's his only primary motivation.
	It's insane.
	And, you know, and here we are.
	And, you know, meanwhile, what Trump has also been doing, destroying any kind of notion of bipartisanship and then also turning it on his face and then saying you are making it partisan is it's it's.
	I don't know how you wrap things up necessarily during all of this because I don't know how other people are feeling.
	and the podcast in such dire straits.
	It's not.
	You know, here's the thing.
	I don't know how you wrap things up necessarily during all of this because I don't know how other people are feeling.
	The past few days have been, oh, Nick, they have pissed me off on a level that's really hard.
	Like, I know a lot of people right now who are sick and loved ones who are sick, and I'm sure our listeners do, too.
	And by the way, a quick little, you know, note.
	If anybody listening to this podcast has lost people, you know, our thoughts and condolences, because this is straight garbage and so awful and tragic.
	But it is It is one of those things where I think a lot about, I don't want these assholes to win.
	Do you know what I mean?
	In a lot of ways, and the thing that gets me out of bed sometimes, is just being like, I do not want to hand the country over to these monsters.
	And that is a... Sometimes you have to operate out of spite when you're dealing with people like this.
	Yeah.
	And by the way, here's the thing.
	Everyone on the other side is saying the same thing.
	Right?
	They're entrenched.
	They're dug in.
	Here's the thing.
	I wonder.
	I was saying this up until recently, until the pandemic.
	I kept saying that however bad we feel about Trump, however angry we feel, that was matched for the eight years that Obama was in the presidency from the other side.
	Worse!
	They probably felt worse about Obama than we did about Trump, up until maybe the epidemic.
	And I'm really trying to wonder now if it really felt this bad, because it feels bad, right?
	You watch these press conferences and you really get concerned more than I had ever had before in this presidency.
	And I really wonder if that was matched when they were watching Obama.
	Well, Obama's presidency, and this is a big topic, but Obama's presidency as the first black president was an affront to their idea of how the world worked, right?
	Like, even us who are opposed to Trump and critics of Trump, we understand that people like Trump win and, you know, prosper.
	They fail their way up.
	We know that, right?
	We know the meritocracy is rigged in a lot of different ways.
	So I think for them, their anger was more of a A cultural racial anger which I assume ran incredibly hot.
	This is one of those things where it's like I understand that the world is not always fair but you have to expect at some point that this shit has to stop.
	Like with each new scandal and each new crime and and each piece of new evidence you have to keep hoping that eventually enough is enough because the shit has to stop.
	It does.
	And I think that there's that silent majority, or I don't even know the majority anymore, that used to say, like, during the W years, oh, don't worry, they're going to figure it out.
	It's just a temporary thing, and then it'll swing back the other way.
	And, you know, you can argue it kind of did, at least when Obama won twice.
	But, you know, here we are.
	And it gets dangerous after enough time, enough years, and enough people, like the millennials themselves, I mean, their entire, Lifetime has been shaped by such ridiculous tragedy and corruption that, you know, that's really what I'm more worried about.
	There's a huge swath of America here that are now, like, in their 30s, you know, you, who don't know a lot, much more, it's different besides post-9-11.
	That's frightening to me.
	Uh, and that's how we lose the grip on what we hope that America can come back to, at least even a little bit.
	I mean, Joe Biden, what does he represent?
	I guess some swing back to, like, you know, I don't even know.
	Does he, I guess some sort of version of competent government?
	Maybe some sort of slightly less corrupt government?
	I don't even know anymore.
	That's a longer podcast, I think.
	I mean, you know, at this point, I said this the other night, Biden was never my top candidate for the Democratic nomination.
	But I will break my hand, you know, hitting the screen to vote for him in November.
	Just having a criminal kleptocrat president in charge.
	I mean, again, we started this podcast with me reading off the list of the The council to reopen America, which is, you know, two Trump family members and a bunch of people who have been wrong about literally everything.
	We got to have something better and we got to figure our way out and we have to we have a lot of work to do.
	But I think that's the important thing is to have some hope, even if it's just out of spite to get rid of these.
	Terrible monsters.
	But we thank you, as always, for listening.
	We know you're going through a lot and coming here and talking about this important stuff.
	We just really appreciate you doing that and people are reaching out, sharing, subscribing, liking, commenting, rating, all those podcast things.
	We're very, very thankful, and we depend on that as we grow, and we are growing, and we appreciate everything.
	So, as always, I am Jared Yates Sexton, Nick Halseman, who you can find at Can You Hear Me?
	SMH.
	I am at J.Y.
	Sexton.

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