Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

June 23, 2020 - The Muckrake Political Podcast

56:08

When The Silent Majority Doesn’t Show Up

Trump's rally in Tulsa was a bust and left the president a demoralized mess. Is Trumpism in trouble and what are the chances he gets desperate and dangerous? Co-hosts Nick Hauselman and Jared Yates Sexton break down the news and warn that this thing is far from over. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Frankly, I think we're way ahead of ourselves, if you want to know the truth.
	We've done too good a job.
	Because every time we go out with 25 million tests, you're going to find more people.
	So then they say, oh, we have more cases in the United States.
	The reason we have more cases, because we do more testing than any other country by far.
	The Attorney General was taking the lead on this matter.
	He did come to the President and report to him when Mr. Berman decided not to leave.
	And at that point is when the President agreed with the decision of the Attorney General to fire Mr. Berman and to promote Mr. Clayton.
	So he was involved in it then?
	He was involved in the sign-off capacity.
	He was not.
	AG Barr was leading the way.
	But in the sign-off capacity, yes, the President was.
	Hey everybody, welcome to the McGregg Podcast.
	I'm your co-host Jared Yates-Saxton.
	As always, I'm here with my loyal co-host Nick Houselman.
	We're coming in this week on the heels of
	I mean, what can only be called a disappointing Donald Trump rally, the beginning of the Trump 2020 campaign in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which saw Donald Trump speaking to, I don't know, maybe a half full arena, rambling on for many, many, many minutes about his ability to walk down ramps and drink water from a glass, which we need to talk about.
	Yeah, it certainly felt like not just a loss, but like a demoralizing moment in Donald Trump's political career.
	What do you make of it, Nick?
	You know, it's funny because they're trying to explain how this all happened and there was this whole movement about the TikTok teens who were registering a lot and blowing the numbers up, which I think is true.
	I think that actually does have an effect, but it doesn't really explain why there weren't a lot more people there because There was unlimited RSVPs.
	So if these diehard Trumpists wanted to go, they could have gone, and they would have been part of the whole outdoor area if they wanted to.
	So I do feel like, you know, the warnings about COVID and the feelings that we have, aside from whatever tiny percentage of people who want to think that, you know, Jesus' blood is protecting them, really, I think, have a sense that this is not a safe thing to be doing at this point, especially in Oklahoma, especially in Tulsa.
	So, is that positive?
	I think it is.
	Yeah, I think the thing I walked away with a feeling is that the God Emperor has no clothes.
	You know, it was obvious that Donald Trump has no momentum whatsoever.
	I mean, you know, I joked about it in a post on The Muck Rake today.
	Like, he drank water and the crowd started cheering four more years.
	And the truth of it is, Nick, him drinking a glass of water might actually be his biggest achievement as President of the United States.
	There's nothing else that he's done.
	There's nothing else he's achieved outside of this criminal, you know, tax cut that was stealing money from the people.
	In terms of what happened and how it occurred, you know, like all politics, it's a little bit more nuanced than that.
	So, the TikTok teens, which sounds like a reboot of, like, the Muppet Babies.
	I love it.
	Like, greenlight that thing.
	Get it on TV.
	But the thing with these social media young people coming out and reserving tickets and these K-pop fans, they didn't necessarily keep people from coming to the rally.
	That was because even Donald Trump supporters understand that coronavirus can kill them, right?
	And on top of that, what it did was it exposed that Brad Parscale, who is the campaign chief for Trump, is a moron.
	Just a blathering moron who got online.
	I was talking about this last night on a live stream.
	He got online and bragged about, like, we've gotten a million ticket requests.
	Everyone's like, dude, you're getting trolled.
	You just hired expectations.
	And anybody who's ever been on campaign understands you lower expectations and then hurdle them.
	That way you have a victory in everything.
	But he's incompetent.
	Trump is incompetent.
	And what we saw here was we saw a duck dead in the water, is what it was.
	Like, this is a person who has no actual claim for re-election and Wanted to do this because he is addicted to attention and is a broken man.
	I mean he's gonna get people sick and It was a dangerous stunt and it failed.
	I mean all the way around it's just failure.
	He he stinks of failure Well, we should talk about Brad Parscale for a second, because I like that you brought him up in the sense that, yes, he violated all of the, you know, any kind of event planning business would tell you, yeah, you don't want to announce such huge crowds because you're going to turn out, you're going to depress turnout.
	People are like, oh, it's too crowded.
	I don't want to deal with getting through the lines.
	I'm not going to go.
	You want to make it seem like, oh, we're going to offer a special deal, like you might have a chance to meet the president if you come this way and all these different things, which they usually are pretty good at doing.
	They've also polluted the data set because if you remember he tweeted out saying that they he was bragging about this is not an event to him.
	This is not a movement.
	This is a serious an opportunity to take data and mine it and use it later, but he's completely that you're gonna have to throw out all that data.
	And I was reading someone who's in this business was saying, I hope that they can, you know, go back in time to remove it cleanly, unless it's already polluted.
	Now they're going to have a million, you know, these registrations, most of which are a lot of which are just garbage and are not people are going to want to market to.
	But the other thing I want to talk about with him is that, you know, he came out of nowhere with his little dinky website design company and was somehow the architect of the most sophisticated micro-targeting campaign we've ever seen before.
	And I do feel like, you know, if we're going to take at face value what you're saying as far as how an idiot he is, which it really does feel that way, there was no way in hell he ever could have pulled off what they said he did in 2016, which then completely just keeps lending credence to this notion that the Russians were the ones behind all of it.
	Well, let's start with the 2016 Trump campaign, which is actually one of the things that is really under-scrutinized.
	And we spend all of our time obsessed with Donald Trump as a culture and talking about him and parsing these things out and doing whatever.
	In the meantime, the story that doesn't get told and doesn't get examined is that the Trump 2016 campaign was a disaster in every way, shape, and form.
	They were terrible at running for president.
	You know, it was whenever I talked to the people when I was covering the campaign in 2016 Everybody involved would tell me like this is a total shit show No one has any idea who's in charge at any given time and and they did all these things wrong So actually the the the ground game so to speak didn't exist like in and this is like one of those weird things right is You would go around with the campaign and you go to these towns that were considered like Trump towns, right?
	And there were no Trump signs.
	And by that I mean like yard signs.
	You know what I mean?
	And like campaign materials.
	What you would find is that people who supported Trump would make their own.
	Right?
	They would like put up a like a thing in their yard where they would make their own Trump sign because the campaign couldn't get it to them.
	What actually happened with the 2016 campaign was a confluence of things.
	It was the collusion that you're talking about.
	It was data mining and you know all of these Really bizarre violations of privacy and personal information.
	And then on top of it, it was a cultural movement of rage that pushed Donald Trump over the finish line.
	It's not like this guy's the genius that everybody makes him out to be.
	He's not playing five-dimensional chess.
	He's eating the chess pieces is what's happening.
	And what you just said is exactly right.
	This Trump campaign right now doesn't work because what they need is They need a figurehead like Hillary Clinton to go after.
	And if you watch the rally, anybody who's listening watch the rally, the people there could not get up for hating.
	Joe Biden.
	They were bored about Joe Biden.
	And the entire campaign message is, well, Joe Biden just is slipping a little bit and the liberals are using him.
	Well, what's that?
	Like the cultural rage that got Trump elected in 2016 was Hillary Clinton, misogynist hate, and 30 years of conservative propaganda.
	And, you know, that whole like deep state, you know, bullshit.
	Well, what happened is, you've seen now, they don't necessarily have the cultural rage to push him over the finish line anymore.
	They just had four years of an exorcism of cultural rage.
	They can't get angry about a country that they've had control over, and so it's just dead in the water.
	I mean, it's just a total debacle.
	I think of the, I don't know if we talked about this before, but the Republican platform, which they are so lazy, they won't even rewrite it.
	They copy and paste it!
	But it's kind of apropos because it directly criticizes the administration, which is themselves at this point.
	And so it's kind of like when you do a parody, like a movie that's supposed to be spoofing another kind of movie, and it becomes the movie that you're trying to spoof.
	And, you know, ultimately they've become the administration that they've been trying to, like, rage against in a lot of ways.
	Certainly to enough people now where that's what we get result is, is this, you know, low turnout.
	Because it still feels like this.
	And again, I hate to get into the feeling, the anecdotal notion, but there are a lot of people in America who don't want to believe that this coronavirus thing is a real serious threat.
	That would impede them from going to Tulsa and actually going to the rally.
	So, in my mind, you know, what this is saying overall is that, you know, his base is eroding.
	It is getting smaller.
	It is contracting.
	It might be a little bit on the margins, but it is contracting enough where the fear becomes is what is he going to do to try and reclaim those fringes and, you know, win by the squeakiest of margins like he did in 2016?
	We've talked about it on this podcast a lot.
	Fascism is a response to the perceived loss of power, right?
	It's a person or group that holds power that feels like they are losing power.
	This all has to do with the perception that white people are losing power and that, you know, like there's an ascending class and demographics are changing, which they are.
	I mean, the perception Bears out and in this case what you have is you have an authoritarian who's president who I said this last night too.
	I don't think that he is so afraid of actually losing an election.
	He's worried about being publicly shamed and possibly facing prosecution.
	I think those are actually the two motivating factors that he has.
	He doesn't want to be perceived as a loser and he doesn't want to go to jail.
	Well, those two things are enough to make him desperate.
	And if you listen, and there was a weird thing that happened too in the rally.
	I went to a lot of Trump rallies and watched a lot of Trump rallies in 2016.
	He never, ever acknowledged the possibility that he might lose.
	The only time that he ever brought it up is he would talk about the election being rigged, right, or stolen.
	On Saturday, he said a lot about Americans might do something stupid at the ballot box in November, which is like a weird beginning of the thought, right?
	Well, what's he going to do?
	What he started doing last night is talking about animals and thugs and the people in the streets who are going to take things over.
	He mentioned the Second Amendment multiple times.
	So this is not-- the conversation we're having is not saying that Donald Trump is cooked and everything's done and go ahead and, you know, buy your champagne and get ready for a victory party.
	This is more about where we are right now in late June, the fact that this campaign is failing.
	And the more desperate they get, I think the more dangerous they get.
	I think that's borne out throughout his presidency.
	And I unfortunately, I think that's what we're going to see bear out here.
	Sure.
	But the only problem that this administration has is that they're so dumb and inept that they can't pull off this stuff properly.
	Case in point, what happened with Berman at the SDNY on Friday, which did not have to happen at all in any way, shape, or form of the sequence that they allowed it to do it.
	And you'd like to think that Barr, which we could go into even a historical attack on Barr and why he should be impeached and just throw him in prison while we're at it.
	But I would have thought that William Barr would have been a lot better at this than he's being.
	And he's made a series of mistakes for the last couple weeks.
	And luckily, I guess, for the people on the other side, because of their ineptitude, and it's just stupid, They're going there.
	It's gonna be a it won't be a very easy way for them to detonate whatever next bunch of Corruption they want to be able to pull off or you know sway the audience They what the way they want them to because there's there really aren't great at this So I may be the only person talking right now and listening to the podcast who would be interested in reading a book about the history of Attorney Generals and you know the United States of America this chapter Would be just insane.
	Right?
	I mean, Bill Barr is operating as Attorney General as someone who is destroying the rule of law for everyone and turning it into a weapon against a few.
	And what people need to understand, and I don't think that they necessarily do, because our myths about authoritarianism are all screwed up.
	Our myths about authoritarianism tell us that authoritarians are strong men who get things done, right?
	They get results, but the way that they get them are kind of ugly, right?
	We do that because we've had a lot of dictators on our payroll, you know what I mean?
	The real truth is that cults of authoritarianism are inherently inept, right?
	The reason they're authoritarians is because they can't get things done unless they like break rules and intimidate people and kill and suppress.
	Bill Barr and Donald Trump, when you get in that small little inner circle, they are so certain that they can get away with their things that they don't cover their tracks.
	It's like a kid learning to do math.
	You've got to show your work, man.
	And they don't.
	With Bill Barr, he truly believes that he's carrying out the work
	of like a benevolent all-knowing omnipotent god and as a result anything that he does is beyond question and it will work out because he has this all-knowing omnipotent god on his side and then what happens is you have this person who just stands up and says no that's a lie and all of a sudden the entire world is like what in the hell is going on here like what what is happening at the department of justice what's happening at the white house and then they do a thing and again i want to highlight this is what an authoritarian society does
	Donald Trump immediately says, I had nothing to do with this.
	I don't know.
	That's Bill Barr's thing.
	Bill Barr's like, oh, it's Donald Trump.
	He said this.
	And then immediately Donald Trump fired the guy.
	And what happens is, in authoritarian society, it's never anybody's fault, Nick.
	It's just something that happened.
	and you can't track down how it happened or what somebody did and so the blame just sort of circles around until it dissipates like so much smoke and that's what happened in this case the guy made it very clear and it was almost like it's almost like you know it was night in America and he shot up a flare and everyone's like what the hell was that and it like really drew eyes onto this thing and made it clear what was happening
	Well, let's pull this apart because what happened on Friday was Bill Barr meets with Jeffrey Bergman, the United States Attorney for SCNY, the premier prosecutorial outfit we have in the country.
	Wait, what's he working on, Nick?
	What's he doing?
	What's he up to?
	That office is one of the bulwarks against Donald Trump's criminal regime.
	Period.
	Turkey and violating sanctions with them in Iran.
	He's investigating-- well, Trump.
	He's really investigating Trump.
	And he put Michael Cohen behind bars.
	So here's the problem.
	He's one of the-- that office is one of the bulwarks against Donald Trump's criminal regime, period.
	People don't understand it, but that is like the outpost that is trying to fight this thing.
	And Bob Mueller pretty much put all of the cars into SDNY, basically, is what he pretty much did.
	He punted enough things to them.
	We probably maybe shouldn't have, but maybe he, maybe Barr, ended that investigation earlier than we all know.
	And either way, but, so a couple things.
	First of all, you know, the Department of Justice should never be in such cahoots with the White House as it is now.
	It's a tool.
	Not even the appearance.
	And this is sort of the foundation of what a republic is or what democracy is.
	And what the authoritarianism and governments look like are when the Department of Justice does the bidding of the president.
	And that's exactly what's happening now.
	It's a tool.
	Yes.
	So let's get back to it on Friday night's.
	So here's the weird thing is Barr meets with Berman and says, hey, well, here's three other jobs you can have.
	One's even a step up if you want to take it.
	Berman's like, no, I'm good.
	I like what I'm doing now.
	So he just put, it's just a press release saying that Jeffrey Berman resigns.
	Now, Jeffrey Berman doesn't know this.
	He hadn't heard about this, and so if you saw his response, it was pretty much a double-fingered salute right back to him, saying, I hadn't heard about me resigning until I saw some press release, and I'm not going anywhere, because I got to make sure that these... And by the way, you can read in the code here, he's like, I have to make sure that these cases are, you know, are overseen properly.
	Which is interesting, because when he first was appointed, it was a little bit of a concern that he was going to be a Trump guy, just like Barr was.
	And I think it's probably a two-lane highway.
	If you get hired by this administration, you might end up falling into it like Barr does, or you might end up finding some sort of patriotism and notion of what ethics are, and that's kind of what Berman did.
	Or Donald Trump is bored one day and feeling bad about himself, and he throws you under the bus and laughs at your bones being broken.
	I mean, like, this is what happens.
	I mean, like, when you get in cahoots, when you are cahooted with these people, bad things happen.
	Sure.
	And you get hip-pocketed.
	He saves these for when he needs them to change the narration for something else.
	But this one, the timing is interesting because Bolton's book came out and had just illustrated it.
	We talked about it last time, but, you know, the one thing that seemed to, you know, make my Spidey sense tingle is...
	is the notion that Turkey was violating the sanctions against Iran and that we have Trump saying to Erdogan, "I'm going to get the people out of the SDNY and put my own people in.
	We'll get that whole case to go away," which I had said in the last podcast was the impeachable offense.
	That was one, which also leads me to wonder, where is the readout of this call?
	Did they bury this call in that same server It's not supposed to be reserved for calls like this, with the one they did for Ukraine's call, and even the President Xi's call with China.
	I want to see these readouts.
	They're going to have to subpoena those.
	They need to get those out.
	We need to see Trump's words and read them.
	I really want to make sure, because obviously if that happens, that puts so much more validity to what Bolton's written for everything.
	Isn't it odd?
	And listen, I'm not going to draw conclusions here, and I say that meaning I'm going to draw conclusions.
	Isn't it weird that since Trump took the oath of office in 2017, he has poisoned every alliance and treaty and relationship that we have made and constructed with other liberal democracies around the world
	While going out and assuring Russia, which by the way, you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist, this is all on the record, by assuring Russia that, you know, he would get rid of restrictions against them by, oh yeah, that's right, covering for the murder of a United States journalist from Saudi Arabia, and then engaging in God knows what kind of blood money with them.
	Go into North Korea and flirting with Kim Jong-un and just openly, like, lusting after state-run propaganda and the ability to kill your enemies.
	Covering for Turkey and backdoor dealing with them constantly.
	Trying to dig up, you know, election interference in countries like Ukraine.
	And then on top of it, it's just like every single authoritarian in the world has gotten his approval and tacit agreement on whatever they want to do.
	It's almost like, Nick, and again, God, I don't want to draw conclusions.
	Go to it.
	It's almost like this person is a fascist authoritarian who, by the way, told China to build concentration camps.
	But that's neither here nor there.
	It's almost like he is a fascist authoritarian who has changed the alignment of the world order and made America on the wrong side of history.
	And what you just talked about, it's the... I understand there's some people who probably are rolling their eyes and they're like, why are we talking about a prosecutor right now?
	And why are we getting into the nuts and bolts of it?
	This is how the peanut butter gets made.
	This is how you do this.
	They are literally sticking their noses into situations they shouldn't.
	You just said a while ago, you're like, the Department of Justice should not be working with a president like this.
	They shouldn't be working together at all.
	They're supposed to be completely separate and instead you have Bill Barr running around as like a de facto like vice president with legal powers.
	It's bizarre and and you can't fully understand how bad this is until you understand what happens down that road.
	You're exactly right.
	This has everything to do with Giuliani, Ukraine, this has to do with election interference, Turkey, It's so much disgusting, rotten matter that you have to understand how we get here to understand where we're going.
	So we're good.
	So we're good.
	I mean, I'm old enough to remember that William Barr traipsed around the world meeting with heads of our allies trying to find dirt that would discredit the Mueller Report, of which he found nothing.
	Wasted all that time and money probably just to, you know, make it look good for the boss.
	This is who we're dealing with and, you know, there are people who want to say that Barr ends up being more dangerous than Trump.
	And that might be true.
	I mean, listen, you gotta, hey, listen, these are some nice people we could talk about.
	You got Barr, McConnell, you know, Graham.
	But, you know, there's some guys who are vying for that top spot alongside Trump.
	And this is the question I have, I guess, is how close are they at this point?
	I think the election in November solidifies the authoritarianism that they're looking for, don't you think?
	Well, again, to go back to what I was saying about the rallies, Donald Trump has a natural advantage in that the Electoral College, which was built into our government as a means to advantage slave states and authoritarian rule, Uh, it gives him a natural advantage in any contest.
	He could still win.
	And God knows that, uh, I mean, they are not above, you know, stealing an election.
	They're just not.
	Somebody said last night, I did a live stream, which I've been doing on Sundays.
	Somebody asked, they were like, who do you think will be the GOP candidate in 2024?
	Right?
	Like who's the next person on the block?
	And what I said really scared me because I believe it, which is if Donald Trump wins re-election and survives to 2024, I think it's Donald Trump.
	I think that's what happens in this whole case.
	Or you start seeing, you know, the ascendance of somebody like a junior or one of those people.
	People need to understand.
	Authoritarians get in power, they don't leave willingly.
	They don't just get up and go and say, good job everybody, what a great campaign.
	Like the idea that he's just going to accept defeat, I don't know how to wrap my head around that idea.
	And then on top of it, the idea that he wins A president in their second term just acts.
	You know what I mean?
	Like, they'll throw stuff at a wall and see what happens.
	And this guy in particular.
	I mean, if he wins, uh, yeah.
	It's gonna be a wild ride.
	And I think your instincts are exactly right on that.
	I mean, people like Barr.
	Barr's not going anywhere.
	You know, Pompeo's not going anywhere.
	This whole creep group is just, they're gonna do as much damage as they possibly can.
	And remember, you know, there's only five months before the election.
	It makes no sense to like wholesale just replace the SDNY, the head of the SDNY.
	Unless they're on the verge, right, of getting somewhere.
	and announcing something.
	Now, luckily, they went to the right succession at this point where the deputy is going to take over, Strauss, versus what they wanted to do was have the state attorney from New Jersey take over, which violates the law because he's not within 20 miles of the SDNY in and of itself.
	That's how stupid they were.
	They couldn't even nominate a guy that would be eligible anyway.
	And then the guy they want to nominate for the process has never been a prosecutor.
	So they're trying to tell us.
	Now, again, maybe a lot of the people who support Trump simply don't care or don't want to understand these things.
	But you cannot appoint a non-prosecutor to the most prestigious, most important district we have for prosecutions in the country.
	It makes no sense.
	But by the way, neither does appointing so many of their judges who either don't have experience as judges or are so poorly rated that they should never be anywhere near this nomination process.
	This is the other thing.
	So this is all like five fingers on a hand, right?
	A lot of these moving parts all ended up getting connected and that is another reason why, yes, I feel like This election ends up being about that.
	And if they win the election, then I would fear within the next four years, what you've been warning about will happen.
	And I don't know about what's going to happen about how they react to losing the election, but I am certain that they will call into question the veracity of the results based on mail-in voting.
	There's no question in my mind there will be some shouting about that and how loud it will be is unclear.
	It's already started.
	I mean, today, today, which is, you know, that's the other thing, is like...
	You ever see movies with like there's like a mad king or a mad emperor you know or like somebody who's like starting to lose it and like there's like these moments where like they just say something and everybody in the room just sort of looks at each other and then it like goes on a beat.
	I'm really enjoying the part of Trump where he just randomly hits you know his caps lock and just says presidential harassment out of nowhere or truth and today it was the claim Was that foreign countries are going to print up mail-in ballots?
	Like, where the hell did that come from?
	What does that have to do with anything?
	And one of the things I'm trying to get to here is what you just said, you just spoke a lot of sense.
	You just spoke a lot of logic about how people should operate and how governments should operate.
	You're bringing logic into a completely illogical situation.
	I mean, they have no interest in putting people who are qualified in any of these things.
	There's a reason why every member of the cabinet, it's like the Bizarro Superman of the cabinet.
	It's like, oh wait, you hate the EPA?
	You are now in charge.
	Congratulations.
	Destroy it.
	These people are not about actual functional government.
	And I will say, and you just said, why would they do it and when did they choose to do it?
	I don't know.
	Like, maybe they have a case that's pending.
	I'm not one of those people who's like, oh, there's sealed indictments that are gonna come out, you know, a real QAnon moment.
	I think it also has to do with the fact that the Trump administration has a smokescreen right now.
	They could possibly do it right before the rally.
	The things that they've been doing during the pandemic, expecting no one to pay attention to, they've been operating behind the scenes constantly to just... I mean, they stole... God, what was it?
	Half a trillion dollars?
	Is that what it ended up being?
	Half a trillion in terms of aid and stuff that they won't even talk about where it went?
	Oh, right.
	You know, and just move that around.
	They won't go on the record and say what that's about.
	You know, they eliminate people, they fire people.
	They're just, they're constantly pushing this stuff in the dark.
	So yeah, I don't know why they did it and when they did it, why they did it, when they did it.
	But all I know is it's about consolidating power.
	And eliminating the possibility of consequence.
	That's the only thing you can know for sure.
	Right.
	And they're packaging in this weird, like, 80s, terrible, like, RoboCop kind of a movie, where he's this comedian.
	And how can you, how can this comedian guy be such a nefarious figure on top of our government?
	And it's like, listen, if he wants to be a comedian, like, he should just do that.
	Let him just, you know, get him out of there.
	Let him, by the way, if he loses and he's not arrested the next day, which he should be, I guarantee you he'll probably still have rallies.
	He'll probably still go on tour and do these things because he loves it so much.
	And he's not even, that's the problem.
	He's not even a good comedian.
	He's not even, he's no, he's not even good.
	I mean, he makes Buddy Hackett, you know, I mean, Buddy Hackett deserves a lot of respect, but he makes those kind of borscht belt guys look like, you know, the highbrow, you know, Uh, comedians that we've had in the past.
	I can't say Woody Allen, but, you know, those kind of guys.
	Right?
	He's persona non grata.
	Nonetheless, actually, Woody Allen and him, there's probably some simpatico there.
	So nonetheless, that's the problem we have.
	But, you know, in the midst of all this, we do get to get the id.
	We do get to get, like, the direct line into the brain and some of the truth that will come out.
	And we got some of this in a bit that he thought he was doing that was funny.
	He tells us that he wanted to slow down testing so that the numbers would not go up and then somehow in a weird way make him look bad.
	Yeah, so the first thing about what you just said is exactly right.
	And it occurred to me, and it hadn't occurred to me until Saturday, watching this.
	First of all, watching Trump, you have to realize he's a really pitiful man.
	Just like the saddest, most broken man.
	And it occurred to me when he was doing his whole water thing and the ramp thing, which he talked about for 30 minutes, it was obvious that it's the kind of story that like you or me or our listeners would tell among friends or tell among family, right?
	Something where people are trading anecdotes and stories.
	Well, he doesn't have Family and friends and people that he's close to.
	He has to go in front of a rally with a couple of thousand of people who don't know him.
	Right?
	And he loves that.
	That's what it's all about.
	It's this addiction that he has.
	Which, by the way, is probably going to spread coronavirus among his supporters and probably take a few lives.
	But we don't need to talk about that right now.
	What you just brought up, and he said this during the rally, he thought he was being so funny.
	Like, he really did.
	And he said, you know, like, we've done too many tests and that the numbers go up because we're doing such a good job testing.
	Which is such an Orwellian line that this administration has been pushing.
	Right.
	You know, the press secretary did it today.
	It's like, well, the numbers are actually proof that we're doing our jobs well.
	So congrats.
	He said in this in an anecdotal manner, he said, I just said to staff, slow the testing down, please.
	Which, by the way, would mean that Americans would not Find out that they had possibly a deadly disease, right?
	And it could possibly spread and get worse.
	At best, that is a problematic statement.
	At worst, that's killing the American people for your own political purposes.
	Well, then the administration comes out and says, oh, it was obviously a joke.
	Like, I mean, because it was hilarious, Nick.
	I mean, like it was so funny, like everybody, you know, fell over, gripping their sides, laughing at how funny coronavirus is.
	122,000 people dead that we know of.
	And then he did an interview today where, like, this is part of the inadequacy that we were talking about.
	He talks to Scripps, and Scripps is like, did you order that?
	Like, your administration says you didn't.
	And he said, if we did slow it down, we wouldn't show nearly as many cases.
	Which is what he says.
	He can't even get on the party line, which is one of the reasons the 2016 campaign was such a disaster.
	So, did he order less testing and damn people to lonely, agonizing deaths?
	Or, is that what he finds funny?
	And either way, by the way, is damning.
	But I think he ordered the slowdown of tests.
	I think that he is incapable of not expressing the truth in that regard.
	Well, there's a concept here about wanting to limit the number of sick and dead, right?
	That would reflect poorly on him.
	That concept has been around for a long time.
	In fact, we know this because he told it to us when he was in Atlanta in the CDC.
	And he said, I do not want that ship to land because the numbers will suddenly go up, and then in the parentheses, and I will look bad, or whatever he thinks that's going to make him look like.
	So we know that this is already his MO from the beginning.
	So there's no doubt in my mind that you filter in that with this information, like in the February moments when they weren't doing any testing, they weren't doing anything.
	He was praising China because he wanted this deal with them.
	And he was also begging them to help him get elected.
	So imagine that.
	Imagine you're trying to do a deal with a country, you're trying to play hardball, but then you're also begging them to buy more of your products so that you can then win the election.
	You know, that's how broken, and he's like Willy Loman.
	He is, but real fast, something you just said actually connected in my head for the first time, and it's bizarre.
	Like, it's really, really bizarre.
	Wait, wait.
	Something I said is bizarre.
	No no no it's something that I had it didn't connect the dots but the way that you said it just brought it to fruition.
	So you know how like all these people talk about the deep state and how there's like all these cabals and there's like secret meetings where like the powerful are talking about oppressing people and how to consolidate power and stay in power.
	That's exactly what he did when he talked to Xi Jinping.
	He said, oh absolutely put your people in concentration camps, but you and I will help each other to maintain power.
	Like it's everything that he is... I mean obviously we know he projects this stuff, but it's never been more black and white than what you just said.
	What we found out is while he's out there like rallying against them, We have on the record now explicit proof that the conspiracy that he has been using for political purposes is a conspiracy that he's trying to create.
	Like he's actively on phone calls trying to carry out the conspiracy that he's out there like banging a podium about.
	Which is just, I think, I think I knew that but I haven't been able to put it in those specific terms yet.
	Like that's, that's bizarre and terrifying and dangerous.
	I mean, that could be the title of this podcast.
	Bizarre, terrifying, and dangerous.
	That is everything in a nutshell.
	I mean, here's the thing about that I just want to talk about, because what it says to me, and it actually connects to, remember when I listened to only Breitbart and Fox News and OANN for three days?
	Our new audience, because we've got, our audience is growing.
	If you have not heard the episode where Nick, how many days was it?
	Over three, like three and a half days.
	You spent three and a half days listening to nothing but far-right media.
	That is an episode you should go and listen to.
	It's incredibly relevant.
	Again, tip of the hat.
	Well, what I gleaned from that was that there was no acceptance that there was any possibility of asymptomatic transmission.
	And when you hear Trump mocking all these extra tests because he's like, oh, the young people who are not affected.
	That's what he says.
	Young people are not affected.
	And he doesn't recognize the notion of when you might have it, you might be spreading it for days without having any symptoms at all, which is obviously the need, why we need to test.
	Probably the most important reason.
	And that is the big disconnect that they've been the most successful in in dealing with this, is they've convinced Republicans, and I would almost say capital R Republicans, or however many there are that really fall in line to this, because even the ones who don't like Trump necessarily, are believing that there simply is, if you don't have a fever and you're bleeding out of your eyeballs, you're not going to give this virus to anybody.
	And once you accept that, it's really easy to follow along with everything else they're doing and how they're treating the virus and why they might think he's doing a good job.
	Yeah, and the way that he presents it, because that has been the company line, right?
	And if you actually listen to what Trump says, he says, we shouldn't be testing because it makes me and America look bad.
	And every time he says it makes America look bad, it's about himself and maintaining power.
	So that's exactly why he says we shouldn't be testing.
	And meanwhile, he keeps saying that young people aren't affected.
	Well, first of all, like, the average age of death lately has been going down.
	Like, like, it's getting to young people.
	Second of all, if you actually read reports and you go beyond whatever surface level understanding Trump has, and it's obvious that he hasn't done any research on this and he hasn't done any reading on it, it wrecks people.
	Like we're like, I don't know if people saw it, but like there was a double lung transplant.
	I believe it was last week of the week before and it was made necessary because if you get this and you have a bad enough case of it, it doesn't matter how old you are or what shape you're in.
	It will destroy your lungs and there are all kinds of doctors right now who are coming out and they're saying, listen, you don't understand what this is going to do to people in the future.
	It's going to lower their lifespans.
	In the future, it's going to lead to chronic problems.
	It's going to lead to more and more lung transplants and more of these procedures.
	And it's obvious he doesn't get that and doesn't care.
	Doesn't give a shit like that's who he is.
	He has no ability whatsoever to care for other people and what he's been doing is like a virus in and of itself.
	He is spewing so much disinformation and it's just continuing to fester and fester with with his supporters and I listen.
	The coronavirus right now is still going strong.
	We were talking about it before we started recording about like what that means and how it's working or whatever.
	It's June 22nd as we're taping this.
	I live in Southeast Georgia and let me tell you what, it is hellaciously hot out, right?
	We've talked about the possibility that it might, you know, swoon in the summer and come back in the fall.
	We're still in a first wave and this first wave isn't going to break.
	We're not going to have the... I think when we first started talking about this on the podcast, We talked about the possibility that maybe in the summer we might have like a quick renaissance of civilization where we go out and see each other and like we're like well maybe we'll have to like quarantine again in the fall.
	This is ongoing.
	It's ongoing and it's because of a lack of leadership and a total rejection of any responsibility or understanding by Donald Trump.
	This is this is his legacy and it's one of the reasons why he's having a hard time finding any sort of momentum for his campaign.
	He talked about this before as well, why he thought it could just wash over the country and just kind of get through it that way.
	And again, you have to believe him when you hear him say certain things.
	He's telling us right out in the open what he wants and how he wants this to happen.
	And my fear had always been that, and we've already seen this, the slight rebound of the economy when everything opens up.
	And then when it has to shut down again, and it really sort of feels like it's going to, that's like the last death rattle where you go into complete cardiac arrest for the economy.
	I talked to a couple friends who are in the economy business, and they were all very impressed by what the government has done to prop it up and avoid disaster.
	And that all well may be true.
	I suppose we've avoided the absolute Capital D disaster but I can't help but shake the feeling doesn't shake that we are on the again on the precipice and it hasn't gone the other way it's simply sort of flatline for right now and there's only one direction this can go once the rest of those stores that were hopefully opening up or started open up have to close one more time and then we have more deaths the only solace I can take I don't know I guess if you had seen or not there was some reporting over the weekend that they're getting better at treating
	this virus to the sense that people aren't going to die as much.
	Deaths seem to be lowering to some degree.
	Now, you can argue that it's because it's more testing and there's more younger people who are getting it.
	And the younger people don't die as often anyway.
	But there seems to be some notion of using steroids to treat this better.
	I mean listen that makes sense Our medical community is smart enough event after several months of just complete and utter ineptitude, which is sort of what it was They'll figure something out.
	So it looks like there's you know that plus, you know, I What is the death mortality rate?
	It's 95% where you survive.
	It's 5% or something like that, right?
	4 or 5, 7%.
	So I'm at the point now, honestly, Jared, where I'm like, why can't I just be one of those 93% that's going to survive?
	I honestly feel like that at this point.
	It's been so long, and we've been cooped up.
	And if I'm feeling that, you can only imagine how a lot more people are feeling.
	But it's like, you know, why can't I just be one of those people?
	Now, what you said was right.
	It shreds your lungs.
	Even if you survive, you might have permanent damage for the rest of your life.
	So I shouldn't be saying that, but I have a feeling that there's clearly a big push for that, and that's what Trump is capitalizing on.
	And I want to throw this out there.
	One of the things that we're doing, and this is why, this is why the pandemic has worked the way that it has and why it's been such a tragedy.
	Right now we're talking about this from like a helicopter level, right?
	Looking down on it and saying numbers here, numbers there.
	What we're not talking about is reports that nursing homes are taking their people who might possibly die in their businesses and rolling them into the streets and taking them to homeless shelters.
	We're not talking about particularly people of color who are being evicted from their homes.
	And as they're being evicted from their homes, not only did their mortality rates go up, but the possibility that they might be exposed to coronavirus goes up as well.
	This is a rolling disaster in every way shape and form and what you just said about like feeling cooped up and and and like you know with all due respect and affection it's kind of crazy right it's like well whatever I guess this is I'm gonna go out and live in this thing.
	That's what drives people to bars.
	That's what drives people out and about to restaurants.
	That's what drives people to go to, oh, I don't know, half full Trump rallies in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
	I think everybody's feeling that because this is really hard.
	This is, I mean, we're not used to this.
	We're not built for this.
	And I think it's making people, and I guarantee you, if Donald Trump wasn't president, if somebody else was in charge, it wouldn't feel like this.
	Because one of the things that Americans do is they think that they're not affected by outside things in terms of like psychology and influence.
	The president changes how the world feels because they're so ever-present and their message is constantly going.
	His lack of leadership and lack of consistent information or messaging makes all of us feel insane.
	And makes, like, life go up and down and, oh, this week it might be getting better, next week all of a sudden everything's on fire.
	It's all because of him.
	Which, again, there are plenty of reasons not to vote for him and to vote against him in November.
	You know, number one, he's an unhinged madman who shouldn't be president and, you know, he could possibly plunge us into an authoritarian nightmare.
	The other thing is, we need something like leadership.
	Something.
	And we're not getting it from him.
	We're not getting it from a lot of our governors.
	We're definitely not getting it for Congress.
	We need something better.
	That's period.
	We just need something better.
	Absolutely.
	I mean, I would have held, I was talking to somebody this weekend about how they didn't vote for Obama.
	And I told him, I said, you know, I would have held that really against you for voting for McCain or for Romney.
	But I got to tell you, I would take any, both of them in a heartbeat.
	You know what I mean?
	I would have taken any of those guys over what we have now and would take anybody else from the Republican Party at this point too, sadly enough.
	But yes, the only focus we need to have right now is he needs to get out.
	But I said this to Walter Schaub, you know, who was the ethics czar before they forced him out.
	I think he was saying the same thing.
	They have to prosecute.
	When he is out of office, they have to prosecute Trump.
	We have to have some way, because I know that Ford had said the country needs to heal and move on, and we're not going to prosecute Nixon.
	And that might as well have been true because the Vietnam War was still so fresh.
	But this thing, we need to thwart this kind of behavior from happening at any other time in the rest of the future of this republic.
	We have to punish him to the fullest extent of the law.
	Otherwise, it will happen again, and it will be even worse.
	If he is not punished, what it tells future people, and listen, this is dire, but I only say it because it's true.
	There are plenty of people who are studying how Trump is operated to understand how they can carry out their own business, right?
	If Trump is not prosecuted, and if Trump is not held responsible, what it tells all future politicians is that you can turn government into a clearinghouse of corruption, which is what Trump has done.
	And if that isn't enough, and what you just said about Donald Trump is exactly right.
	He's the worst possible president that you can have.
	He, I mean, like if you went into a lab and tried to create the worst possible president, you couldn't get to this, right?
	Because, and that's the thing.
	I think that people actually make the mistake.
	They think that you would need to find somebody with like intelligence, but have the ability to manipulate and be shrewd.
	What actually makes him so dangerous Is the fact that he doesn't have that intelligence or that inquisitive nature, right?
	It's, it's, it's, he's a madman, right?
	Who has no interest, and again, going back to coronavirus, he has no interest in understanding things with any sort of nuance or any sort of information to them.
	And so as a result, you're going to have people following him who are going to reverse engineer what he's done to try and carry out ideologies, which is one of the things.
	Trump's only ideology is the empowerment of self and profit.
	That's it.
	He doesn't care about anything else.
	He doesn't think about anything else.
	There are people out there who are more than willing to reverse engineer this thing and carry out really, really dark fantasies and really, really dark ideology.
	So you're exactly right.
	He needs to be punished.
	It needs to be called to account.
	And that's that's just the end of it.
	But what you're describing are the people who are watching this would do all those things, and worse, but under the sheen of a normal-looking president.
	They're not going to rage-tweet.
	They're not going to have these rallies where they say these horrible, racist things.
	They're going to be the opposite.
	They're going to say the nice things.
	They're going to make it sound like they're bringing everyone together.
	That's what my biggest fear is, because there are enough malleable people on the other side who would be really swayed.
	And you know what?
	There are probably Democrats and progressives who could be swayed, too, by that kind of nefariousness.
	And that's what really makes me worried.
	And then again, it's like, maybe that's how politics has been the whole time.
	All politicians lie.
	They say these things.
	I mean, listen, Jimmy Carter probably was the only president we've ever had that really, I honestly feel, was earnest in his desire to help his constituents.
	You know what I mean?
	I feel like he was the last guy.
	Bill Clinton took Jimmy Carter and took Reagan and then put his sheen on it, which was nice.
	But he certainly had those issues.
	You could even criticize Obama for a lot of his policies, which were sort of Republican recycled stuff, too.
	But But Carter, to me, was like the last guy.
	And look what happened to him.
	And so I don't even know if we'd ever get back to something like that.
	But man, that sounds pretty nice.
	Yeah, we've talked a lot about Carter and that fact and the idea that he didn't present the presidency that people wanted, right?
	He wouldn't have mature conversations with people.
	I think up to this point you've seen presidents who have been earnest, but the question is whether or not that earnestness gets put within a machine of control and manipulation, right?
	Donald Trump I don't, you know, I would have to go back through.
	Donald Trump has to be a really special case in terms of a president who doesn't even begin to understand the concept of patriotism.
	You know, like, there's not even, like, the ability for him to think about that.
	You know, like, even going back through, like, I'll sit here and I'll argue for a couple hours and lose every one of our podcast listeners talking about how George W. Bush was a war criminal and, like, a dangerous entity.
	But I think when he laid his head down at night he thought that he was being patriotic and good for America or whatever.
	I think that that's been a through line.
	This is a person who has always viewed America and this is one of the reasons he hasn't been able to do anything and hasn't been able to help us.
	He's always viewed America through the lens of what can America do for me.
	It has nothing to do with what can I do for America.
	America is just an idea for him.
	It's like a slogan you can sell used cars with.
	I don't know.
	Get people into a Taj Mahal casino that you ruin and lose all of your money in.
	Right?
	This guy is all about this marketing idea that has nothing to do with taking care of other people or moving us forward.
	And that's why he has no interest in fighting a thing like a pandemic.
	No interest at all.
	Well, the W that you bring up, I'm glad you brought him up because he was one of the guys who kind of began the notion of the presidential daily brief and not really wanting to listen to it and hear it.
	They kind of had a hard time keeping him focused on that.
	So that reminds me, because certainly it's what we hear about Trump, and it makes this weird connection in my mind where when I was teaching, like I taught English for a year in high school and I did the name game where we'd all sit in a circle and you had to say your name and say the person next to you's name and then your name and then the next person to say the first three names and your name.
	And I would always be able to predict almost certainly, almost 100%, what the grade would be based on their performance in that name game circle thing, right?
	Because you could see there's focus, there's memorization, there's all those things.
	I almost feel like we could do the same thing with a presidential daily brief.
	And they should have these things while they're running and have them and just monitor how they react and how they can comprehend people giving them briefs.
	Because if you can't even do that, then you can't do the presidency.
	But I think it's also about empathy too.
	Like when Donald Trump gets a briefing, and let me tell you, I'm an academic, I'm a professor, I have been Oh, Nick, I've been in some meetings.
	You know what I mean?
	Like, I've been in meetings that have went on hours beyond where they needed to go.
	I have sat through some stuff.
	But you know what?
	The moment that my mind has ever started to wonder, I remind myself of, like, my students.
	I remind myself of the people that I work with.
	And that I have a responsibility to be present and know what's going on because I have a responsibility to other people, right?
	I might miss something that could help me or help others.
	Donald Trump has no interest in that because he just wants to get to the business of being Donald Trump.
	He has no interest in protecting us.
	He has no interest whatsoever in taking care of our problems.
	There's a reason why he hasn't even tried.
	We have a person who thought being president would be like a ceremonial position.
	You know, like a mascot who came out and maybe shook a couple of hands or whatever and then danced.
	He has no interest in the actual thing.
	Which, by the way, makes it all the more tragic.
	He's campaigning for a job that he doesn't want to continue doing.
	Like, he's miserable.
	If you look at him, he's a literal miserable human being.
	The only good part about this is that he's addicted to attention.
	And anybody who knows anything about drugs know that they have a law of diminishing return.
	Right?
	He loves becoming like the sole focus of America.
	That's the best part of it for him.
	He hates being in these meetings.
	He hates having to sit through briefings.
	He hates having to think about this stuff.
	And so he doesn't.
	He doesn't even want this job.
	But the reason that he keeps campaigning is he doesn't want to be humiliated publicly, and he doesn't want to get prosecuted.
	And that brings us back to these rallies.
	He can't even get up for the job because he hates the job.
	He literally hates the job.
	And just like addicts of all stripes and shapes and sizes, it's not enough.
	It continues to not be enough.
	So whatever attention he's getting from the public, he needs more and more, and it has to continue to rise.
	So that's why it was kind of delightful to see such a horrible turnout.
	They did a flyby.
	Air Force One, hey, President Trump, you're going to see all these people rallying around.
	And they get there, and they fly around and let them see.
	And there's nobody outside.
	They had to break down the outside stage because there was nobody there to watch it.
	They couldn't get enough people to go inside to fill half the damn stadium.
	So it only makes me worried because I think being on this side of the administration, you want to see him suffer.
	You don't want to have to see him continually win, whatever he thinks winning is.
	But the fear has to be that these are the moments that will push him to do something even more outrageous that will compromise our national security.
	That's the real fear.
	Well, and something just occurred to me that, again, hasn't occurred to me until right now.
	What Donald Trump wants to be is an ex-president.
	You know, like a person who like comes out and shakes hands and takes pictures and everyone calls him Mr. President.
	And then he goes over and does whatever.
	And like maybe he gives like an unhinged speech that, you know, CNN talks about for two minutes.
	That's what he really wants right and I'm sure that if somebody came up to him and it was like there's no shame in losing an election you won't be a public pariah and you wouldn't be prosecuted like he would probably go ahead and Let Mike Pence, you know, campaign for 2020.
	I actually think that would be true, but he's also been a criminal this entire time.
	And going back to what you just said, that fear, he's more than willing to take America to the point of the abyss.
	I mean, we saw that with the Bible stunt.
	We've seen it with his rhetoric.
	We've seen him inspire terrorism.
	We've seen him, you know, lead us to the brink of World War III just for posturing.
	Like, multiple times now.
	So yeah, it's like a really Shakespearean thing.
	If Donald Trump knew what was good for him, which he doesn't, because if he did he wouldn't be Donald Trump, right?
	A broken shell of a man.
	If he knew what was good for him, he would just go become an ex-president.
	Because that's what he wants.
	He wants to hang out at the golf course and shake hands.
	But the truth is that like whatever is broken in him, which is pretty much everything, keeps pushing him to go after something that he doesn't even want.
	He has to know deep down he's terrible at it, and he has no interest in continuing to do it.
	So it's a really bizarre Shakespearean thing.
	So.
	All right, well, we have jumped around and rolled around in Donald Trump's mind for long enough for today, I gotta tell you.
	Thank you, as always, for coming and hanging out with us.
	We really, really appreciate your support.
	It's been so really, really gratifying and lovely lately.
	A lot of comments, a lot of shares, all that stuff.
	We've appreciated you reaching out.
	As always, what we need, and people keep asking how to help out, Keep sharing, keep liking, keep commenting, subscribing, rating, all that good stuff.
	It actually helps us and it has helped us build a huge audience.
	That word of mouth stuff and the algorithm stuff actually does help.
	And thank you again for hanging out.
	We appreciate it so much.
	Until next time, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
	SMH.
	You can find me at J.Y.
	Sexton.
	We'll be back, hopefully not having to do any emergency things and talking about big things.
	We'll be back on Friday.
	Until then,

▲