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June 19, 2020 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
47:59
As If We Needed MORE Reasons To Impeach Trump

With John Bolton finally cashing in with his book, revelations about Donald Trump's treasonous and impeachable behavior come to light. Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman go over the details and discuss the broken Republican Party. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Time Text
I think Putin thinks he can play him like a fiddle.
I think Putin is smart, tough.
I think he sees that he's not faced with a serious adversary here.
I don't think he's worried about Donald Trump.
It was another loss for the president in this newly conservative court.
Today's ruling was narrow, but for DACA recipients, it was momentous.
Hey everybody, welcome to the Muckery Podcast.
I'm your co-host Jared Yates-Saxton.
As always, I'm joined by my co-host Nick Halseman.
A lot happening today, as always.
As if there isn't a lot happening every day.
I'm still reeling, Nick, a little bit from Matt Gaetz announcing that he has a secret son that he's adopted.
I don't even know if we can talk about that.
It's so bizarre and head-shakingly weird.
Wait, wait.
You're not secretly raising a 19-year-old kid from Cuba that came here illegally?
You know, we've got to dance around this thing very, very easily and quietly.
It is all so weird, and the Republican Party is such a disaster.
But we've got to talk about the fact.
So this week has been the blitz week for John Bolton's Inside the Room Memoir, which, you know, before we talk about any of this stuff, we just have to say straight out that John Bolton decided to make money off of a book as opposed to serve the country, which is one of the more disgusting phenomenon that we've seen in recent history.
Well, it's only if you think that having asked the President Xi of China to help him win an election is impeachable or not.
If you think that that is, then yes, he was not a patriot in any sense of the word.
And it doesn't even sound like he's going to benefit from sales.
I think you might know obviously more about this than me.
He probably just gets his paycheck right ahead of time and just kind of writes whatever he wants to write.
He'll get an advance, which this is the really disgusting part about all of this.
All right.
And let's just let's pull the curtain back a little bit.
OK.
And before we get into what Bolton has alleged, we have to talk about this really gross and insidious palace intrigue industry that has just ballooned up around Trump.
Right.
And we've talked about it before.
How Trump drives so many profits, right?
Because people are terrified of him.
He creates chaos.
Everybody wants to know who in the White House is against who, who hates who now, who's working against who, who's going to be fired, all that stuff.
But meanwhile, there has been this boom for publishing everything from Anonymous, which is just one of the most like
Impotent gestures towards a critique of the president that we've ever seen to you know to now this Bolton thing where Bolton obviously like He angled to get more money for his book and more publicity for his book by flirting with the idea of testifying before Congress during the impeachment hearings and saying listen, I've seen some really terrible things from this president and
And instead of doing that, which anybody who is a patriot or has a conscience or is a basic human being would do, John Bolton used that probably to get more of an advance or to gin up more excitement about his book, which it's now coming out.
And by the way, John Bolton is a special type of asshole.
John Bolton, who by the way, wants to go to World War Three every moment of every day, Also has the temerity within his book to blame the Democratic Party for not investigating Donald Trump enough, which basically says, how dare you not ask me to say this before my book came out.
We find out in the book that Donald Trump begged President Xi from China to help him win reelection, which I don't know where I'm from.
Nick, but that is a treasonous activity, it's unbecoming of a president, and it's an impeachable action.
Okay, but let's just put it this way.
A lot of senators don't agree with you, right?
They simply don't agree that what he did with Ukraine and, you know, which is the same thing he did with China and, you know, because it's unseemly and you're not supposed to be acting in your own self-interest when you're dealing with foreign policy and I get it, you know, but But let's just not forget, but here, can I just hijack this for a second, because that's not the worst revelation we have from what his interaction with President Xi was.
The worst interaction is that he basically said, yeah, go ahead and throw Uyghurs into concentration camps.
You know, that's totally appropriate what you're doing.
That, to me, was probably what Bolton would have felt like mostly would have been the kind of thing that they would have liked to have known in the impeachment process.
Yeah, so let's set the scene for people who maybe haven't read the articles or the excerpts yet.
Donald Trump gets on the phone with the President of China.
And by the way, I would be remiss if I didn't bring this up.
The Republican Party has spent the last three decades, if not the last five decades, claiming that they are the party that will stand up to other countries and they're the strong party, right?
They will never let an American flag touch the ground, right?
Donald Trump pleaded like a coward with the president of China.
Told him that he could be the greatest president or leader of China in 300 years.
Which, by the way, totally throws out the 57-page memo that the Republican Party is using to attack China and try and win re-election.
He begs China to buy a bunch of soybeans to help him with farmers in the American Midwest.
Who, by the way, probably are currently suffering from coronavirus.
And probably hate Donald Trump in general anyway, like everybody else right now.
So he grovels for him to help him win re-election.
And in the midst of all of this, and by the way, this reveals who Donald Trump actually is, right?
Like we can sit here every week and we can talk about whether or not this person is a fascist or an authoritarian.
He tells the president of China that he would support the construction of concentration camps.
Right?
In order to win power.
That's who he is.
And by the way, the other thing you didn't even mention because there's so many competing anecdotes from Bolton's book.
He says, he tells China that they should construct concentration camps.
He also says about journalists that they should be imprisoned and possibly executed.
And what we see is that Trump's rhetoric and the things he says out in public are real.
That's who he is.
It's not about taking him, you know, not literally or whatever these people try and make up.
He's a fascist.
He's a legitimate fascist.
Oh, I mean, it gets worse.
I mean, it doesn't even get worse.
It just gets more of the same because we certainly, you know, hear the stuff like, you know, is Finland part of Russia?
That's just dumb.
And then, you know, we have the, he doesn't know if I mean, it reminds us of, like, OK, here's our alert for movie reference.
Remember in Die Hard, it's that asshole on the news who's trying to say Helsinki, Finland, or Helsinki, Sweden.
That's how dumb he is.
He doesn't know that Britain has nuclear weapons, that they're a nuclear power.
But it's not even as bad as he asked an aide.
He talked to Theresa May about that directly and basically asked her whether or not they were.
It's just not his job.
He's not up for it.
He shouldn't be doing this job.
He should not be representing us in any form of the thing.
That's why we have the 25th Amendment and that's why we have impeachment.
It's frightening.
But again, let me ask you this, Jared.
If all these things came out, if they called witnesses in the sham of the impeachment trial, would this have mattered?
Probably not.
There's more.
I think there's more.
By the way, we're going to say he tacitly approved concentration camps in China.
Do we have to rewrite FDR's history now?
Because we probably do, don't we?
I mean, this is one of those things.
And by the way, I'm so glad you said that because we need to understand that like...
Him talking about concentration camps is in a long line of American and Western civilized history of doing these kinds of things, right?
Again, say it all the time.
Donald Trump is not the disease.
He's the symptom, period.
This is a long line of behaviors like this that have led to a point of moral decay and rot and democratic rot in the United States.
What you just said is right.
If this stuff came out and John Bolton, I, for people who maybe don't follow politics that closely, John Bolton is one of the most Republican Republicans that you can find.
I mean, this person, when he wasn't serving in administrations, literally trying to start World War III.
And that's not a joke.
That's not an exaggeration.
Like, he wants it.
He wants it so bad that he can't stand it.
He would go on TV, like every night on Fox News, and be like their paragon of what a Republican was.
Him standing up in the Senate and saying these things or during whatever trial, it wouldn't have mattered.
It wouldn't have mattered!
And that right there, in a nutshell, is how far gone we are.
The Republican Party is done.
There's no bringing them back.
There's no pulling them back from the edge of the abyss.
This is a group of people who can look at a person, and by the way, how many of them have come out opposed to Trump in the past couple days?
None.
He pushed, he begged the President of China, which by the way the entire Republican Party is supposed to be at war with right now, right?
Their entire election strategy for 2020 is to say that China is evil and should be opposed and possibly go to war against.
Their leader, Donald Trump, begged at his feet and told him he was the best leader in Chinese history, and then begged him to help him win re-election, and on top of that, gave him tacit approval for concentration camps.
This party's done.
It's just, it's done.
There's no pulling them back from the edge.
I don't know if you saw what Joe Biden said just now before we went out to air and went to record, but he basically connects the appeasement of China in this desire for a deal to the people who have all died from COVID-19 because he was so afraid of offending them and wanted to keep this deal together in the February.
It kind of explains why they didn't do anything and weren't harsh.
And by the way, we have all these clips of Donald Trump praising China for a while.
all around this thing.
And so now we realize that, okay, he's trying to praise him because he wants a deal, but we kind of realize he was so sycophantic to President Xi, you know, and just like he was from a position of weakness in this whole thing.
That's what's so galling.
But you know what, Jared?
That isn't what was the impeachable offense here because there's more.
We haven't even gotten to the Turkey conversation.
But you want to say on China for a second?
I want to say this about China.
And listen, I've been thinking about this a lot.
So when I was writing my last book, American Rule, I was dealing with this thought.
And it's something I think that we've all suspected, but this has really crystallized.
We're not the world's foremost superpower anymore.
China has held our chips for a long time.
You know what I mean?
They took over the financial hegemony that we used to occupy.
They've held our debt for so long, it's crazy.
And on top of that, they have been the main power in terms of the globalist economy, right?
They're pumping out goods.
They're the ones that are constantly saving the money and gathering power and consolidating power.
This has crystallized something that I think a lot of people were afraid of for a very long time, which is that America lost in this race.
You know what I mean?
Like, we're watching China run up ahead of us.
And watching Donald Trump, who's all America first, make America great again, whatever.
We've had all these leaders.
His shamelessness and his fear and his pandering has only made it clear that we're not the power that we thought that we were.
And that things have sort of fallen apart.
And I think that's something that people really need to come to grips with because it helps you understand where we are and where we're going.
But you're absolutely right.
There's a lot more, so.
Well, just to add on to that, and I'm no economist, but I was speaking with somebody in the business yesterday about it, and the notion that, you know, 30-year bonds are what we sell to finance our debt.
And at some point, those 30 years will expire, and then, you know, technically, we owe that money back, or we try and restructure and refinance and sell more.
Well, it's easy for China to say, well, we're not going to buy any more of those.
You know, we've already gained enough of what we need in the global economy.
We don't need to rely on that.
And that's a real problem, because that's when you start to see bankruptcy.
Like, the actual government would be bankrupt.
We would be raided.
We'd lose our rating in the world as an economic power.
I mean, that's when we always talk about, you hear these Republicans talk about, oh, you're going to make your grandkids pay for that.
We can't let them do that.
At some point, and it probably will be in our lifetimes, those grandkids will be us, or our kids, and it could be an absolute catastrophe.
And you throw in the fact that we have a guy like him in the White House now, you have to pray nothing happens in the next few months and that he gets out.
We really pride ourselves on this podcast with giving people some historical perspective and ideas of how these things work.
If people want to know how something like this would look, if it actually came to fruition, because it wouldn't just be...
It wouldn't just be an automatic bankruptcy.
Like we're not talking about like Weimar Republic here, right?
What people need to do is go back and look at the New York City financial crisis in the 1970s and take a look at what happens whenever a major power suddenly is not able to pay their bills and nobody is willing to come in and buy those bonds anymore.
And what ends up happening is you give away all of your political leverage and personal leverage To banks and an outside influence, whether it's China or international corporations and banks.
And what ends up happening is just absolutely devastating austerity, which we're in right now, right?
We have austerity right now.
It can get a lot worse.
And if somebody like Trump has been doing this, I just saw it today, man.
Record deficits.
RECORD deficits.
Because the Republican Party isn't actually fiscally conservative.
It's only fiscally conservative whenever the government is under control by Democrats.
That's it.
The rest of the time, spend money however you want.
And that's been everybody from Reagan, whose entire gospel is on fiscal conservatism, to, you know, all the Bushes, yadda yadda yadda, and Trump.
Well, one thing that people need to realize is it can get a lot worse.
And whenever you lose that spot in a hegemony, like there are consequences and the country suffers.
And what Trump is doing is not only kowtowing politically and symbolically, but he's actually making us less safe and basically getting rid of our future in order to try and score political points with people like China and Turkey.
You know, I used to say any politician that would go into the Rust Belt and promise that they're gonna bring back the factories, they should just be shot.
Or they should just be handcuffed and carried away, okay?
That should be the thing, because that's clearly a political thing that will never really happen.
That's now changed, where I feel like any other politician who wants to say that tax cuts will pay for themselves, that's the big watchword for me now, where I'm like, they just should be arrested and thrown in prison.
Well, I'm going to throw this out there because, on one hand, you're right about the tax part.
Like, they're not worried about tax paying for itself, right?
Because those cuts, it's propaganda and it's paying back their donors.
The industrialization of America, and this is something that I think people have had a really hard time wrapping their heads around.
I want people to think about globalism and the way that the global economy works, right?
Where are the factories in the world right now, Nick?
They're in China.
And?
Mexico.
Right.
They're in what you would call the second or the third world, right?
They're in places wherever workers are not being paid for their labor, right?
Where workers are being exploited.
So here's what I want people to understand.
This thing constantly shifts.
It's like musical chairs, right?
There's always a chair being taken out whenever they turn on, you know, the music and everyone goes around them a couple times and then someone has to grab a chair and you take out another one.
What we're talking about and what you're getting into here is a new world order where America goes down a level and suddenly the industry does come back.
But here's when the industry comes back to America.
It's when you get rid of minimum wage.
It's when you get rid of OSHA standards.
When you get rid of EPA standards.
And that's what people like Trump are actually trying to do.
So when they say we're going to bring industry back, yes, it's a hollow promise.
But if the promise came true, what they're actually doing is downshifting America As a secondary power, and so these people are totally for that.
And by the way, the Republican Party has been for that.
That's why they fight minimum wage.
That's why they keep it low is so that they can eventually eradicate it completely.
And with that education and any and all standards.
Well, you know, a reminder here that we're on YouTube as well, and you can see me nodding my head furiously as you're... And me taking a drink because it's sad and terrifying.
Yes, sponsored by.
So don't forget to, you know, if even a quarter of you guys went over there and subscribed to our YouTube channel, that would just be unbelievable and amazing, so head over there if you can.
That was really, really well said.
And I love that notion.
That's what could happen to us because we'll be forced to do that.
But also in the context of what you're saying, the regulations.
You can say, oh, they'll never get rid of OSHA.
Well, listen, they're continually attacking regulations every week trying to get rid of more and more of them.
So it's not hard to make that a stretch.
So yes, I feel like that's a real concern.
But the Turkey thing, because I don't want to forget this point before we get too far, would be that if he didn't see any of the Bolton stuff, or didn't see it carefully, the one thing that would have ended up getting him impeached, I think, is, you know, when you talk about Ukraine, China, and then what he did with Turkey, which he promised Erdogan that he would get a Justice Department investigation into sanctions, make it go away, when he got his own people into the Justice Department, because he had the Obama people in at the time.
Well, that's just, again, remember I told you how refreshing it is to kind of hear Republicans just being out in the open now with their corruption?
And it's like, because he knows these are recorded and could get out.
To hear Trump say that, and to say that, oh, we're going to be able to control the Department of Justice, It breaks every norm.
That's the one thing.
The Justice Department and the White House were separate.
You were never supposed to talk to them and never have any crossover and any influence.
And even the appearance of influence.
And yet here we are.
I don't want to hear Eric Holder Obama because they did it right.
But nonetheless, that would be the impeachable offense, if anything.
And I could see why Bolton's pissed at the Democrats, but then again, it's like, well, he didn't say anything and they didn't find out about it, so here we are.
But like that to me was what made me fall off my chair when I read that. - Have you noticed that the liberal democracies that have traditionally been America's allies, that Trump has insulted them every step along the way and ruined our relationships and treaties with them, And meanwhile, who does he continually give comfort to?
Russia?
Telling them that he'll get rid of any and all, you know, problems there.
Turkey?
And then you have Saudi Arabia and of course like I mean who can forget the romance with Kim Jong-un, right?
And then on top of that like bringing over Netanyahu to give him some sort of a boost while he's under investigation.
Here's the thing.
I don't think people get.
And we say this a lot on this podcast.
People think that tomorrow will look like today.
They always believe that.
And that America... And by the way, we were on the right side of two conflicts.
We were on the right side in World War I. We were on the right side in World War II.
Guess what?
Shit has shifted.
Really quickly.
Like, I just want people to imagine, like, just as a thought experiment, and maybe this will surprise some people with the answer that they give.
Imagine that there is a world crisis that emerges tomorrow, and all of a sudden, all of the countries of the world start taking sides.
It's like a kickball game, right?
All of a sudden, they go over here, they go over here.
Where do we go right now?
Right?
Because people don't understand this, that Trump has so shifted the Overton window and the identity of America, we're not going to end up on the right side.
And it's all because authoritarians stick together.
They recognize each other.
They see each other at these, either a conference or whether or not it's like a tête-à-tête, and they see each other and they're like, I recognize in you something in me, right?
We are alone on the world stage and here we are.
It's the reason why, you know, he speaks out with Brazil.
It's why, you know, he talks constantly about these other authoritarians.
He has shifted the identity of America on the world stage.
And what you just talked about is not only a perversion of the law, It's a perversion of the identity of America.
It literally is taking America and dragging it, kicking and screaming, in a direction I don't think most people recognize.
And that's, like, really terrifying.
Well, let's get it down to what America is supposed to be.
It's supposed to represent the will of the people.
And when a vast majority of the people want a certain thing or a certain way of progression to happen, and you have people in the White House who think that they know better, That is when you end up getting authoritarianism.
So this goes into the heart of what's happening with DACA right now, and in the results of what the Supreme Court of the United States just handed out, if you didn't see that.
They were able to protect DACA for now, and only by the Trump administration's extreme ineptitude and extreme disorganization, they can't get rid of this executive order that Obama put in.
Right now, I have to stress that, because it would have been kind of simple if they had done a couple, jumped through a couple hoops to do this properly.
So, to me, it's actually interesting.
If you take it at face value that, okay, he's got people around him who are in charge of bringing these cases up, right, who are probably smart and know the law.
In theory, maybe, is this their way of trying to do their own checks and balances where they can now shrug and say, oh, look, the Supreme Court won't let us do it because we, you know, we didn't do these things.
You told me, Mr. Trump, President Trump, you told us that we had to just do it.
Is this their way of somehow protecting things that nine out of ten Americans want in terms of DACA?
Well, first things first.
Another hat tip to John Roberts.
Which is just, it's incredible how this one individual, and again, not to say that John Roberts is right on everything or that he should be some sort of savior or hero, but this is a person who obviously understands that to be a jurist on the Supreme Court means that you should judge things impartially.
It's really incredible.
And in the long run, there are probably two things from the George W. Bush presidency that are going to be honorable.
One is the fact that George W. Bush spent a lot of the time after 9-11 saying that not all Muslims were terrorists or radicals, which was actually a really brave thing that he did.
Now, that being said, he's also a war criminal and just destroyed America.
The second thing is John Roberts.
The fact that John Roberts can stand in front of that court in front of an ideological movement and say, no, we're going to judge these cases based on their merit is pretty incredible.
And it feels It feels weird because it's like a nostalgic thing, right?
Like it feels like a, um, oh what's the one with Jimmy Stewart?
Uh, Mr. Smith goes to Washington, right?
It feels like some sort of nobility or patriotism or duty that doesn't really exist anymore.
Well, the thing with DACA and the thing with all of this is Trump is like a velociraptor, man.
He's just trying to find the weak parts in the fence and he'll do whatever he can.
I mean, we've said it before, he's not looking to build a wall.
There's no wall.
And you know, unfortunately, Nick, I watched Sean Hannity last night.
Oh, how'd that go?
Because I am nothing if not masochistic.
In what I do with my time and you know I watched Trump go on there and first of all he claimed that Rayshard Brooks was shot the day before yesterday, which is madness.
What is time?
What is time?
And then that he had heard that maybe he had had a gun which nobody has said which you know maybe he should take a nap and see what's going on.
But one thing that I have noticed in all of this is he keeps talking about the wall as if it exists.
It doesn't exist.
It's not actually a project.
Getting rid of DACA, I think he would have been happy with, but like you said, it was sloppily prepared.
It's not what they care about.
It's about the projection of quote-unquote wins, and it's even a win that it lost.
It shows, you know, conservative America that they're under siege and that they're, you know, they're in danger.
So even that is a win for him.
Like, what they're actually worried about is deconstructing government and, you know, like, maintaining white supremacy.
That's what they're worried about.
Well, I'm old enough to remember that he said he would rubber stamp approval of any bill that came to his desk on DACA.
And if you—Lindsey O—sorry, Lady G and Dick Durbin got together and put together a bipartisan bill that he said he would sign.
And do you remember who came in here and put the kibosh on it?
His own chief of fucking staff, John Kelly, with a couple of, um, I believe it was, like, Mark Meadows or some of those assholes behind him, went in there and, like, you know, it's weird.
They probably, like, fed him the Adderall, right?
And then they kind of put an arm around his neck and just kind of whisper in his ear to make him change his mind.
And he's like, oh, that's not what I wanted.
We're not doing that.
We're not doing DACA anymore.
They had it!
They had a deal!
It was, like, ready to go!
He said it on live frickin' TV!
He would sign it as soon as it got to his desk.
No questions asked.
And then John Kelly has to come in here, who now we want to uphold as the guy who's telling the truth now because he was there and he was saying some bad stuff about Trump.
I mean, the whole thing is so ridiculous and will go down as such a stain on our history.
I'm going to be embarrassed to have to talk about living through this.
That was one of the hottest takes that you've had in the history of this podcast.
That was just, that was like zero to 60.
That was incredible.
What part of it was a hot take though?
All of it.
I mean, you hit up the Lindsey Graham stuff.
I mean, Unnecessary Profanity.
It was lovely.
I think I speak for our entire audience, but that was very good.
One of the things we got to look at here is the fact that we've constructed a situation, and you and I were talking about it before we started, you know, taping this thing.
We've created this just absolutely destructive system of executive orders, which, what the hell are they, right?
They're actually like, they've given the executive branch so much power that it doesn't deserve, and has absolutely destroyed the concept of checks and balances.
I mean, what we've seen that has grown over the past couple of decades, and it all starts, by the way, like most things with Ronald Reagan, But, you know, we've seen this thing grow and grow and grow and grow to the point where the executive branch has grown so large and overly powerful, and particularly George W. Bush, you know, poured some fertilizer on that, right?
It has created this really screwed up system that doesn't really have anything to do with the Constitution.
It doesn't have anything to do with how this government is supposed to work.
And we would be remiss if we didn't mention the fact That both parties engaged in this.
This was not, it might have been a Republican creation, but the Democrats have engaged in it as well.
And both of the parties have sort of acted within faith that they would never get a Donald Trump.
Right, it was just like, well, whoever wins the presidency will obviously be competent and not dangerous.
And so as a result, we ended up with Donald Trump and everyone's like, oh shit, that's right.
This was probably a construction we shouldn't have done in the first place and it needs.
It needs toward down the whole thing altogether.
You know, I did a deep dive into the history of executive orders, and it was interesting, because we've had them since the beginning.
George Washington had them, you know.
I think the first, like, 120, 130 years, there were a few thousand.
And then, since then, there's, like, been 13,000, 14,000 of them, and they exploded.
And certainly, we set records as we go along.
I don't know if I want to blame Obama.
Because Obama got in a situation, now here's the problem, they had a super majority in the Senate and they had the Congress, so that was frustrating because they actually had the moment for a couple years there where they had control, but once they lost control of that, what was Obama supposed to do?
Because the Republicans said out loud, again this is the beginning of them refreshingly being honest, was they said, we are not going to let Obama get anything done in Congress, and so he had no choice at that point, DACA being one of them, is to be able to get any legislation through.
You bring up a really good point, and I think this is an important moment for our listeners to sort of grasp.
Which is, eras in America feel like runaway trains.
They gather a momentum all of their own, right?
So like when we look at presidents, we look at somebody like George W. Bush, right?
And then we move to Obama.
And we think that like the moment that a president like comes in and assumes power that all of a sudden everything resets.
And that's not true.
That's not how America works.
That's not how politics works.
That's not how the presidency works.
W. Bush's policies and a lot of the operation carried over into the Obama administration, right?
Everything from executive power to our defense structure.
I mean, one of the things that ends up happening, if you listen to former Obama staffers and advisors, they call it, like, the blob.
Right.
Which is like where like national security just sort of does its own thing.
And a president is there to every now and then sign a thing.
And then, you know, there's a drone attack here, a drone attack there.
And they'll figure it out legally afterwards.
Well, that was the runaway momentum of post 9-11 America.
Right?
That was the Bush administration going into Obama's administration.
And you're exactly right.
Obama played the same hardball that Bush had played in every way, shape, and form.
Like, it just so happens to have been the center-left, left version of that thing.
So we've had a runaway momentum going on for years.
And that's why Trump, I think, is really important for the way we look at this moment.
You can look at Trump and you're like, oh my god, all these things are problematic.
You know what I mean?
A president shouldn't be able to do this stuff.
But a president has been able to do this stuff for a very long time.
These are problems that we haven't addressed and these are problems that we haven't really gotten down into why they happened and why they're problematic.
Sure.
Now the other precedent being set here is that it kind of sounds like executive orders from previous administrations are very hard to walk back.
And that's a scary thing because anything that Trump puts in that we want to walk back later after he's out of office might be hard too because they can use that case that just happened decided today as precedent.
But either way, I would hope that any other administration would be better and smarter because one of the things that Roberts pointed out was that they have no other-- it's sort of like the same argument about getting rid of Obamacare.
It's like they don't have any other health care plan.
So it's extremely dangerous for you to just rip that thing down and not have any proof of anything else to replace it right away.
And it's the same thing with DACA.
He felt it would be patently unfair to simply the next day, which would basically happen.
Which actually is an interesting question, or an interesting comparison, because let's compare what Obama did with his majority in Congress the first two years, and what Trump did the first two years when they got done.
Are you old enough to remember what happened the first two years of Obama, when he had control of the Senate? - I'm so old at this point, Nick.
I am just ancient at this point in American history. - Okay, you know, it's easy, 'cause his name is part of the big monumental thing that they passed, They're able to get millions and millions of people coverage of healthcare.
What did Trump get done when he had control of all this stuff?
The only thing they could possibly get done is a tax cut for the fucking rich people that put us into the deficits that we are in now.
That's all he did.
And he had control.
And all I did was complain about how they didn't have control over this stuff.
And now that they don't, now we're really not getting anything done.
So it's a real problem.
And again, if you want to see any light at the end of the tunnel, it's that this will eventually have to force us to deal with the balance of power better.
And they're going to have to figure out better ways, I would hope, to get away from the status quo and figure out how to fix the executive order issue as well.
Because again, you're like you said, it's just too much power to have for someone, especially like Trump, who No, it's really scary, actually, what we've done with the presidency.
You know, I hope that that's true.
Like, I talk to a lot of people about Donald Trump as being like a Rosetta Stone.
Like, his ineptitude and cruelty and danger, I think, makes very clear a lot of the systemic problems in this country.
Right?
Like, it's just so obvious how terrible this person is.
Like, you have to start questioning the meritocracy.
You have to start questioning the party system.
You have to question white supremacy.
You have to question all these things.
I sit here and I think a lot.
And again, I'm trying not to prognosticate, but I'm trying to come up with Possibilities, right?
So, like, what happens after Trump?
Like, is there a possibility that we might end up in a different age where all of a sudden it's about reform and trying to make sure that these things don't happen?
That's a possibility.
There is another possibility, and we talked actually, I think it was on the last podcast, about what the best case scenario for Biden is, which is that Biden becomes an LBJ-like figure who gets pulled left by a counterculture movement such as Black Lives Matter.
That's, I think, the best case scenario.
Another scenario is that a Biden presidency is a remedial presidency.
It's just about repairing the damage of four years of Donald Trump.
Actually sounds like a great scenario.
Do you know what I mean?
It actually just like four years or possibly eight years of just trying to walk back the damage.
And if we even get there at this point, I think you have to count that as a win.
You know, even if it's not like major, major reform and a restructuring of how everything works, which would be wonderful.
But even if it gets to the point where like we stanch the bleeding and we try and figure out a way forward, that's something.
I would take that at this point.
But I'm old enough to remember that we already did that in 2008.
We already did that.
We had to do the exact same thing and it wasn't, I mean, a little bit of a different scenario because it was more like our standing in the world versus our standing in our own country.
But it's so frustrating to have to even contemplate that we're right back where we started again eight years after that.
Or sorry, whatever it is, 2008, 12 years.
But here's the thing about all that is, you know, Things wouldn't change overnight, right?
If we got Biden in and everyone rallied around Black Lives Matter, it's because we have children in this country.
And those children are being raised and being taught by the adults who follow Trump, right?
And so it just continues.
Now maybe you start to peel people off slowly on the margins as we move forward into the future, but that's what's so frustrating is that they're being indoctrinated into this stuff.
I at first thought you were going to turn this into a Matt Gaetz segment but I'm glad that we didn't do that because it is just so weird and I'm still trying to wrap my head around it.
I will say this, and this is a conversation that I don't think a lot of people want to have.
We've touched on it a little bit, which is that even after Nixon resigned in disgrace and, you know, became the most disgraced president probably in American history, there were still people who walked around saying that Nixon got a raw deal and that Nixon didn't do anything that anybody else did and yada yada yada.
Trumpism isn't going away.
Like, even if we have an election and even if he gets beat and even if he accepts defeat, it's not going away.
White supremacy isn't going away.
And it's not enough to simply say, You know, that's the thing that really frustrates me.
And I understand the need for hope.
And I understand when people will say, we just need to be better to each other.
You know what I mean?
Like when they're like, let's just decide to be better with each other, which is great.
We should.
But it doesn't get rid of the systemic problems that we actually have.
And we need to not only be talking about how to defeat Donald Trump in 2020, We need to talk about making the country better while also figuring out a way to sort of disarm the bomb of white supremacist paranoia and also fascism.
Because it's there, right?
And I think there are ways to do it.
I have theories on it.
I could pontificate about this for a couple hours on the podcast, but I think we have to we have to walk and chew gum at the same time, which unfortunately this country is not great at.
I think we have to look at what this country is about.
Like I mentioned earlier, we're supposed to govern from the majority, what the majority wants to do.
And all the progressive ideas and progressive things we want to have instituted in this country are supported by the majority of this country, for the most part.
That's what's so frustrating, is that these are fringe.
These are all fringe groups that don't amount to more than 30-35% of what the electorate would want.
And yet they control the entire thing.
That's what's so frustrating when you have conversations with people on that side and how they, again, they're so convinced that their version of what America needs is so much better and they're willing to do anything they can, corrupt or not, to get there because you'll see when we get there how much better it will be.
But the bottom line is it's supposed to reflect what the majority will wants.
The silent majority that they all talk about and they don't honor that and that's the most frustrating thing is because we do live in the country I think that we want to live in or we do live in amongst people enough people who want to live the way we want to live we just can't seem to rest enough control over the government to make those things happen.
Well, it doesn't help that the Electoral College was put in place to help ignorant, racist slaveholders, right?
I mean, that's a big chunk of this thing.
The other part about it, and you know what?
I'm choosing to be hopeful.
I would love if after the phenomenon of Trumpism, suddenly members of our media, it's like they wake up after a bender and they're like, Oh my God, what have I done?
Do you know what I mean?
They're like, oh my god, who have I hurt?
What have I done?
I have to rectify this.
I'm going to be better now.
I would love that.
I would love it if they beat the addiction to Donald Trump and Trumpism.
Because what you just said is true.
At most, and you said 35, that's probably even more than the number.
You know what I mean?
Like, that's probably a high estimate.
But like, let's say it's 35.
Let's say it's 30% of the nation actually believes this stuff.
It's treated like it's 50.
It's treated like it's a legitimate belief.
And meanwhile, the rest of us are sitting around and we're like, what the hell is this?
Like, this is so delusional.
You know, again, I've joked a couple times on this podcast about, like, Matt Katz.
Like, They're not well.
It's not like we're watching a party engaged in delusional self-destruction that's drawing the rest of us into it.
My hope, like what you're talking about, is the idea that maybe we get on the other side of this thing and maybe all of a sudden it's like, my God, what was that?
And we get better, but that's also a large task.
We have to...
We have to do the work, which again is why the protests are so hopeful.
When people realize they have power, they win.
And if people keep hammering away at this thing, it gets better.
Again, what's the number?
73% believe now that there's white supremacy in a systemic nature in America?
That's massive.
Oh, how about the number that support Black Lives Matter is well over 50%?
Oh, way over.
So, I mean, it's, we're there, we're moving there.
It's like everything should be going according to plan, which actually makes me want to ask you this question.
If Hillary Clinton was president, or you know what, any otherbody, anybody else is president, would we still have today the governor of Omaha announce that any business that enforces masks will get zero money from him?
Of Nebraska?
What did I say?
The governor of Nebraska, forgive me, the Omaha World Herald was reporting it.
Would it matter?
Would he still say that regardless of who was president?
You know, let's tiptoe into alternate reality.
It's the Friday show.
It's the Friday show.
Let's tiptoe into alternate reality.
If Hillary Clinton was president during the time of the pandemic, It would be madness.
I mean, like, it would be, I mean, the New World Order QAnon pandemic bullshit would just be turned up by, like, a tenth degree.
There'd be even less people wearing masks.
I mean, I would have to assume there would probably be violence in terms of shutdown, protest, and all of that stuff.
I mean, what we're getting ready to watch, when is it?
Trump's got to rally, what, tomorrow?
Is that right?
Trump's got to rally tomorrow in Tulsa.
Or did it move to Saturday because they were somewhat, because his two black friends told him to move it?
That's right.
Okay, so I guess it's Saturday is when it's going to be.
This is going to be a raucous.
sort of counter-revolutionary moment.
I mean, it's going to be a lot of pent-up aggression and frustration that's going to be released.
So do you believe a million people requested tickets?
No, because a bunch of leftists went out and got those in order to try and sabotage it, which gave him a PR victory.
And the other fear that I have, and I was talking about this, I recorded an episode of the Trumpcast.
I think one of the things that really frightens me is the possibility that the protest movement will show up at the rally.
And we could see, do you remember the rally in Chicago in 2016?
Where Trump was going to speak, but it just was so violent that the city shut it down?
Sure.
I'm terrified of that.
I'm really scared that that's going to happen this weekend.
And you know, if it does, we'll probably get on here and do an emergency podcast and talk about it.
Which I hope, knock on wood, it's not true.
But this whole thing, it's a powder keg man.
It's all primed to explode and this feels like one of those moments where it could happen.
I agree, and it's especially because the protests have continued to sustain, you know, every other day.
Yeah, they're still happening!
They're still happening.
They're not being covered, but they're still happening.
Yeah, it's a lot of people, you know, that are marching still.
So, it's really a movement.
This is now a movement.
It's official, right?
You can't really just say it's a bunch of people for a week or so.
It's not burning out.
Like, here's how you know it's not burning out, because Trump says it is.
Did you read that article?
I'm like, oh, it's just a few people for a few days and then they're done.
No, no, this is not.
This is a movement.
And although it also reminds me of what he said about it.
He, again, is saying that COVID-19 is drifting away right now.
We have Pence lying that it's also gone away.
Did you read that article?
Did you read the op-ed in the Wall Street Journal?
Pence, you know, I don't subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, so I don't get to see their behind-the-paywall bullshit. - I did it.
I think it was like my one free article.
For those who haven't seen it, there's no other way to put this.
There's no way to underscore this.
It was grade-A bullshit.
Like, I am shocked that he could type it out while, you know, licking a boot.
It was incredible.
And on top of that, it's like, we all know it.
We know that coronavirus is running wild right now.
I want to say I just saw...
I want to say it's in Florida.
Like there they only have like 25% of their hospital beds left unoccupied.
You know, you're in all this anecdotal material about people left or right.
The numbers are skyrocketing.
And meanwhile, the country is just pretending that's nothing happening.
And then the administration is just go on and do it.
And meanwhile, though, here's bringing it back full circle.
Did you see that they're making like the rally attendees sign a waiver?
That they will not sue if they get coronavirus?
Like, you cannot come up with more contradictory, hypocritical bullshit than that.
Oh, it's the most horrible thing of all time.
And you know what?
They're gonna find 20,000 people.
They'll find way more than that who would be willing to sign it because A, either they don't believe in it or they just figure they won't get it.
And if they do, it'll be the flu.
Yeah, so here's hoping that we're not going to come in here this weekend after some sort of tragedy for an emergency podcast.
We hope you're all staying safe and good.
We will be back next week.
Again, hopefully we don't have to come back in here.
I love it when we don't have to record an emergency podcast.
Well, and nobody go out and try to invade Venezuela because it's cool.
Oh, John Bolton.
I'm not going to read this book, but my God, he brought the notes, man.
So everyone, we will be back next week.
And in the meantime, people keep asking, what can you do for this podcast?
And we, you know, we don't have Patreon.
We're not looking for donations.
But I can tell you, honest to God, and I know it sounds tertiary and it doesn't sound like it would help at all, but liking and subscribing and commenting on our stuff helps tremendously.
This podcast is growing like wildfire and we appreciate it so much and we appreciate you and all the hard work you've done in helping to build this thing.
So thank you so much.
In the meantime, if you want to follow Nick, you can find him at CanYouHearMeSMH.
You can find me at J.Y.
Sexton.
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