After one of the most wild weekends in modern history, Nick Hauselman and Jared Yates Sexton sort through the propaganda, discuss our sick narcissist of a president, the political fallout of this disaster, and how Mike Pence and the Republican machine might take advantage of the chaos. To support the podcast and unlock exclusive content, including live reaction and coverage of the upcoming vice-presidential debate, become a patron at http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast
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Can you tell us when he had his last negative test?
Was it Thursday?
Was it Wednesday?
Do you remember when he had his last negative test?
I don't want to go backwards.
He has experience as commander-in-chief.
He has experience as a businessman.
He has experience now fighting the coronavirus as an individual.
Those first-hand experiences, Joe Biden, he doesn't have those.
He doesn't know what it's like.
And one thing that's for certain, don't let it dominate you.
Don't be afraid of it.
You're gonna beat it.
And I know there's a risk, there's a danger, but that's okay.
And now I'm better, and maybe I'm immune.
I don't know.
Hi, everybody.
Welcome to the McCraig Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates Saxton.
I'm here with Nick Halseman.
Holy shit, we have a lot to talk about today.
I don't know if you've been paying attention, Nick, but the world is racing like mad towards a cliff.
There's a baby on the tracks.
Things are just unhinged right now.
So there is no end to the things we have to talk about today.
Before we get into that, just a couple things we need to put on your radar.
First, the one and only vice presidential debate is this Wednesday, which by the way is my birthday, which I cannot wait to spend my birthday with Nick and the Muckray community.
If you want to watch the debate with us, which by the way, that first presidential debate, well, probably the only presidential debate, unless they want to beam Trump in and figure something out.
It was a good time.
Well, good time's not the right way to put it.
It was terrible.
It was just awful.
But it was better I got to spend it with you in the Muckrake community.
So a reminder, if you want to watch the VP Debate, which by the way we're going to talk about a little bit today because I think it is extremely important, all you have to do is go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast, become a patron.
That way you get these exclusive episodes and watch-alongs.
Just putting that on your radar.
So much fun, considering we're in a setting that's not fun at all, for at least the presidential debate.
But we have it up on the screen.
We have us talking heads in the lower, so everybody can be synced up really nicely.
So it's a really great format for that, and I think everyone loved it when we did it.
Yeah, I think it turned out pretty well.
And again, I think this VP debate is going to be really, really important for reasons that we're going to talk about here in just a few minutes.
Yeah, I think so.
I think the VPs will loom large.
You know, just before we get into the whole Trump thing, I will just want to make it clear.
I am still really worried about Biden.
And I know he tested negative yesterday.
But, you know, he wasn't around and without masks on on that stage.
And, you know, we hadn't heard for over 24 hours the results of his test.
So I'm worried that, like, he's not out of the woods yet for what his exposure could have been.
Well, Nick, the word out on the street, if you have your ear to the ground in right-wing America, is that this was a biological terrorist attack against President Donald Trump, and that the Democrats, like, you know, seeded his microphone and his lectern with COVID.
So that's how that whole thing happened.
You've really seen that somewhere?
Oh, absolutely.
Yes.
100%.
There's a lot of talk about that.
I mean, there's really incredible stuff out there, I have to say.
You just have to know where to look for it.
Like, you know, there's the idea that the Democrats have done this, that the Chinese have done it, that This is God testing Donald Trump to show his resolve, to show that he is his chosen warrior.
It's a lot.
And by the way, we're burying the lead, everybody.
Donald Trump, right now, as of this taping, is currently at Walter Reed Medical Center because he has COVID-19.
He's sicker.
And by the way, just for the record, so everyone knows and we can remember this, I truly believe he's sick.
I truly believe that he has coronavirus.
I think it's telling that we're even arguing about whether or not that is a lie because of how much damage he's done to reality in totality.
But everyone that I've talked to in the Republican Party, on the left, on the right, in the White House, otherwise in the campaigns, they truly believe that Donald Trump is not just sick, but really, really sick.
And we have to talk about how much bullshit we had to wade through this weekend.
Right?
And that he's checking himself out, supposedly, here in a couple of hours for what I believe is a campaign ploy that could very likely cost his life and the lives of people around him.
So a lot of fun stuff we have to cover today.
Yeah, and if it doesn't cost him his life, it could very well cost him the election either way because another trip back to Walter Reed, politically, would be devastating.
I absolutely agree.
I want to ask you this, Nick.
I want to see, through the haze of bullshit and propaganda this week, how did doctors coming out, lying about oxygen, lying about treatment, like obfuscating the truth at every single turn, how was that for you?
What was your experience wading through one of the craziest weekends in recent American history?
Well, you know, in California, in LA, it's like over 90 degrees.
The air quality was horrible.
So we were stuck inside all weekend long and watching this.
And my wife, doctor, you know, we were having kind of a good old time with this because it was so ridiculous and so nonsensical from a therapeutic standpoint or from a treatment standpoint.
And just the fact that the doctor can come out in front of all these reporters to tell everybody about the state of the president and then say, well, HIPAA, I can't tell you anything, even though I'm out here to tell you whatever I'm supposed to tell you.
And I don't even think HIPAA applies to a President of the United States.
Because we need to know what his state is at any moment in time.
He's not a regular person.
That's why we need to know his taxes.
Unlike a regular citizen, you know, it has to be revealed.
But it was so farcical and so nonsensical because nothing he was saying added up.
And I think the doctor clearly knows this too.
We did get a chance to understand the difference between a DO and a medical doctor.
And I don't want to shit on any DOs here because they can be very, very good.
But, you know, the implication tends to be that if you are a DO practicing medicine, it's probably because you didn't, like, get into medical school.
And that's interesting to me, to some degree.
You can learn a lot, you know, wherever you go.
But, you know, that's who's out front here.
And he, with his little asides and his little grins and all this aw shuck stuff, you know, he's telling us that he would not be a very good poker player at all.
He was piss poor in his role.
And I'm not even talking about his decision to sling propaganda at the American people.
Just to set the scene, when they announced that they were going to do the press conference about Trump's condition, I didn't expect much from it.
You know what I mean?
I was like, they're not going to say very much or whatever.
And so I just kind of put it on my phone and I went to take a shower and I put my phone up so I could hear what they were saying and I was just half paying attention.
And then when they said, has the president had oxygen?
He said, no, the president has not had oxygen today.
Nick, I screamed.
I screamed!
Because, you know, as soon as he said that, it was so obvious what the game was, right?
And then somebody's like, excuse me, not today, but has the president had oxygen?
And the answer was, no, today he has not needed oxygen.
It happened three times, right?
To the point where he had to come out yesterday, Sunday, and say, well, I actually, the reason that I said that is because I wanted to reflect the upbeat mindset of Donald Trump.
Now, there's, go ahead.
Well, it was actually a little bit more like he didn't want to cause a downward spiral in Trump's reaction to COVID-19 based on some sort of negative words that came out of his mouth 500 feet away from him outside.
As if COVID likes to react to like words that are spoken by somebody.
It reminds me of Ghostbusters 2.
I don't know if you remember in Ghostbusters 2, but it's where they get all the slime from the sewers, and the slime reacts however, like, you know, if you play, like, happy music, the slime becomes positive.
And if you're, like, if you yell at it, it becomes angry.
That's how coronavirus is.
And so, by the way, a funny little aside, That doctor basically told Americans, like, shut up you whiny babies who have died of coronavirus.
You should have had a better attitude.
Which, by the way, really works with that whole cult thing, doesn't it?
Because it's almost like going back to the Shining City cult.
You all didn't believe enough and you weren't positive enough so you died.
This whole idea that for whatever reason the way what you say about a person's condition like changes it and by the way like there are things that we tell each other when we're when we're sick and we're at the doctor.
You know what I mean?
Like we try and keep our spirits up when we try and have a good disposition.
This is the president's physician, Nick.
Like, the fact that everyone around him gets... Why are you yelling at me?
Everybody around Trump gets drawn into this bullshit alternate reality.
And by the way, like you said, his condition is our business.
Supposedly, the way this whole thing works, he's supposed to be our employee, right?
I mean, he's our president.
He's our representative.
Also, Trump's condition is affecting national security.
Like, there isn't a nation in the world right now who isn't having a conversation about how to use Trump's condition to their advantage.
It puts us at risk.
It absolutely does.
And we have a right to know about it.
Meanwhile, Nick, we're getting videos of a Trump who doesn't have on his orange bronzer, by the way.
He doesn't have honest face paint.
And then there's these moments where he's signing blank documents.
He's hard at work.
Two pictures taken within ten seconds of one another.
He's like...
And then the drive-by.
Like, that is like crazy Kim Jong-un bullshit, Nick.
Like, I don't know about you, but this weekend for me was equal parts batshit insane, but also at other moments, like, it's the thing you have to laugh at or else you'll lose your mind.
You know what I mean?
Like how laughter is sort of like a release mechanism of tension and fear.
Like, this was off the rails.
Well, the new one today, I'm assuming you saw part of the press conference or all of it today with the doctor.
You know, everybody wants to know when his last negative test was, which should be simple because they keep saying for the last six, seven months, he gets tested every day.
Now, when we first saw how the PCR test, which goes way up in that nose, you knew that Trump would never do that.
And yet he had come out like in March or whatever it was, saying, oh, I did it.
And like, you could tell he had no idea how to describe what it was like.
He hadn't done it.
So, you know, they clearly, so I'm not sure, I'm not willing to go with this whole conspiracy that he didn't ever get, or he got tested, they knew about it like before the debate, anything like that.
I just simply think they don't test him ever.
And I think they say, you know what, everybody else around him is tested, and we, oh, we make sure that no one gets too close to him, that's all we need, we don't have to worry about him then.
I'm pretty sure that's the more reasonable explanation for that, but it does put into question, now that we know about Hope Hicks and that timeline, There is all sorts of weird, even today, it doesn't quite add up as to when he got tested, when he found out, when he went to this, you know, asking for money at Bedminster's thing, and when he had a rally before that.
It is all so, interestingly, nonsensical that, you know what I'm doing right now?
I got like a bingo card up with names on it, waiting for the next guy who's gonna get it, because we got, and then he finally got it, because there's no way she wasn't gonna get it.
I got Bill Barr next up.
Loeffler would be interesting.
Ron Johnson said he's going to wear a space suit if he asks you to vote for the Supreme Court vote.
Just to get in there.
Which, again, they're talking about letting people who are sick with COVID into the chamber.
Zoom on in, baby.
Zoom in or go to the chamber.
So you think McConnell's going to change the rules to allow a Zoom for a vote?
I mean, okay, just to go ahead and preview what I'm getting ready to bring up, which by the way, I truly and honestly believe is the biggest story that no one's talking about.
And we'll get to that in just a second.
I truly believe that the Republican Party right now recognizes it's like that ring that they've been chasing for years, which is total domination of the judiciary and the political ongoings of the United States of America.
It's like right there, they can touch it.
You know what I mean?
Like it's just within their grasp.
They're not going to let something like this stop them.
I mean, if it means that members die in the chamber as they vote, Okay.
To confirm the nominee.
They're going to make it happen one way or another.
That's the only certainty in all of this is that the Republican Party and its members are not going to blink about any of this.
Promise me this.
The Dow Jones surged 500 points on news that he's leaving the hospital.
Promise me that it will drop 1,000 points as soon as he has to rush back again.
Because remember, this disease makes you think you're doing better early on.
And after about the 5, 7, 8, 10 days, and then it kicks your ass.
I have no doubt that Trump will get his ass kicked.
And I guess the question is, are they going to hide it?
Are they just going to keep him in the White House and try and treat him?
But if he gets back to where he was when he's got low blood oxygen levels, he's going to have to go back to the hospital.
Anyway, promise me that we're going to see the Dow Jones drop because you control it, right?
Somebody controls it.
It might as well be you.
Well, I'm the deep state operative.
So, you know, we all have a button that we can press that makes it go up or down like a hot air balloon.
That's what the deep state is.
I picture it more like a light switch, but okay.
You know that would make more sense, but the deep state is all about just absolute unnecessary efficiency, right?
Like we yeah, we're really here's the thing about us deep staters.
We are all powerful.
But man, we're just so incompetent at the exact same time.
Like, we're leaving clues in movies, you know?
You can't watch Captain America without coming across our most nefarious plans, right?
So, first of all, the stock market is just going to go up and up and up unless somebody proposes socialized medicine or something that would actually help people.
Like, it's just a money-making machine.
Here's what I want people to understand about Trump checking himself out of the hospital.
He's a gambler.
This is what he does.
He just throws shit at the wall and hopes that something sticks.
And he never does!
He's a total failure.
I mean, he's done this and everything that he's ever done, business-wise, politically, it's always failed.
I've talked to a handful of doctors over the past couple of days.
Most of them think he has pneumonia right now.
Which, by the way, is like sort of the beginning of the end if you're dealing with COVID, right?
I don't know if he's going to get better.
And by the way, I want to go on the record saying this.
I hope he does.
I hope he survives.
I hope he gets beaten in the election.
And I do hope that he is held responsible for his crimes.
I also don't want the people who actually care about him, including his youngest son, to have to experience losing their father like this.
That would be awful.
So I'm not one of those people who's like praying for this thing to go badly.
But the chances are going up that he is removing himself from the hospital right now.
It's a gamble to try and win re-election and try and keep one step ahead of his consequences.
And his chances of surviving this thing are going down because he can't be restrained from making these decisions.
Him going out and doing that drive-around?
He probably infected people.
He probably infected Secret Service members, chauffeurs, all of the hospital staff.
Like, this is a person who... And by the way, you brought up the timetable.
We don't know.
We don't have a clue.
Like, there's a real possibility.
We've heard that his doctor, of course, just misstated, Nick.
He just misstated 72 hours.
Are you kidding me?
And then we find out that he actually did test positive earlier on Thursday and just told everybody that he hadn't even had a test yet and waited until later.
Like, that's the problem here is we don't even know the extent of the cruelty and the sociopathic tendencies that this president has done.
And it just gets worse and worse and worse.
And unfortunately, this is what happens when you elect somebody like this.
Or rather, somebody like this steals an election and ends up in a place of power.
This is what happens.
And this is, by the way, late-stage Soviet Russia.
This is an authoritarian country with an inept authoritarian.
They lie about all this stuff.
They put up all this propaganda.
This is what it feels like.
Kim Jong-un just did this where his sister was hanging around for a while because we weren't sure if he was still alive.
Propped up by a stick!
Now here's the thing about why the pneumonia comes up is because the doctor wouldn't address anything about the pulmonary health at all and yet he's willing to give us other clues about how he's doing and And it would be certainly very easy for him to say, yeah, as long as they're fine.
But they won't say that.
And so that is the big red flag.
And so your doctor friends are exactly right about that.
That's why you have to be worried because the only thing we got was some cryptic sentence about how they look to be as expected.
Now, we don't know what Trump's health history is.
He might already have issues with breathing and with his lungs as it is.
So, he might have adult onset diabetes.
You know what I mean?
All these different comorbidities we don't know about that he probably does have that, you know, has been lied about all these years.
It's a real problem.
And the biggest issue here, I think, is that it's a conflict of interest because even though he's a doctor and he's bound by the Hippocratic Oath, he's also in the service.
And the president is the commander in chief.
So he is also bound to follow orders that the president makes him do.
And I think that probably supersedes whatever he might ethically be bound to medically.
And that's where we're at.
That's why it's a horrible situation that this doctor should never have been in.
Well, and it's not like the presidents of the United States of America have ever hidden their medical conditions in the past.
It's not like Woodrow Wilson suffered a series of debilitating strokes and left his wife to be the de facto authoritarian president of the United States of America, and not even members of his own staff knew.
It's not like JFK was on every medication under the sun.
It's not like FDR hid his inability to walk from America.
And it's not like Ronald Wilson Reagan didn't spend the last couple of years of his presidency not knowing where he was.
Hey, give Ike some credit though.
Because he did tell everybody.
Or at the end, he wanted to make sure everybody did know.
So hey, I think it all ends up being like, okay, Make America Great Again, that whole time frame, it wasn't great.
Well, he said some stuff that ended up being pretty good.
Well, no, absolutely.
And this is one of those things where, I don't know, like, if you think about it, what are the stats that we've heard about any of this?
We've only gotten one stat, and that was the President's oxygen levels have dropped sharply twice.
Hey, it wasn't low 80s.
Hey, it wasn't low 80s.
How republican of an answer is that?
Well, and by the way, just to let everybody know what it wasn't low 80s means, is undoubtedly they had a meeting that they were like, what is low 80s?
It's 80... 81...
0.3?
0.3!
Right?
And they definitely did!
Like, it's the obfuscation in the way that they do it.
This is one of those things I think people need to figure out because we talk about this all the time.
Fascists and authoritarians, they play games with reality until you question literally everything.
We spent days wondering whether or not this guy had faked having COVID for strategic purposes.
What we need to do is see where they obfuscate the truth and what that means, right?
In this case, he's pretty sick.
And the fact that he's going to check himself out and the fact that he's sending out these propaganda videos and these pictures, you need to see what it's trying to make up for.
And it's the fact that we have a president who's really sick.
And by the way, not only really sick, but has infected multiple people.
Unbelievable amounts of private citizens, probably.
You know, at his rallies and at his fundraiser.
The people around him, people working for him, Secret Service, his chauffeurs, his staff.
God knows.
And by the way, he's going back to the White House.
Like, can you imagine working at the White House and knowing that the President of the United States, who is really, really sick and also highly contagious, is coming back and suddenly that's something you have to deal with because of a re-election?
Well, we already know there's a bunch of people in the White House who are also tested positive.
They won't release anybody or numbers, which is also ridiculous.
We also know that a lot of people who aren't tested positive yet are really pissed because they've gotten no information, no guidance, no nothing.
They haven't done any of the contract tracing that they said they were going to do, the contact tracing.
Now, here's the other thing that's interesting.
He's also on steroids.
And when you talk to any doctor who is not a quack, they'll tell you that you don't, you're not supposed to get steroids unless you are having difficulty breathing on oxygen.
Now we do know that it happened twice but he's going to remain on steroids.
We also know that there are some pretty severe side effects you can get from having steroids, a lot of them mental.
He's already on the way down from that as it is so now you're giving him drugs unsupervised in a hospital where that could conceivably affect the way he processes things And a lot of really bad outcomes can happen mentally out of this thing.
Do you want to know what he's saying?
His last tweet as he's packing... Space Force!
Space Force.
Oh, first of all, that was ridiculous.
He must have done 20 tweets of his platform, I suppose.
Hey, they didn't write a platform for the Republican Convention, so he did a series of tweets as the platform.
He did.
Wait, real fast, can I ask you a question just for posterity?
Go ahead.
Don't you think it's weird that the president is telling everyone and their brother to take hydroxychloroquine?
Don't you think it's weird that that hasn't shown up on his charts and that's not what he's been taking?
It's almost like he had a financial and a political incentive to push a drug that killed people but didn't see fit to use it himself.
Isn't that odd?
By the way, the answer by the doctor is also a bit odd too.
He said he went through some stuff.
He read some literature and then we decided it wasn't worth it.
That's what he said.
It's the craziest thing.
The guy is dancing around.
He should be on Dancing with the Stars, this Dr. Conley guy.
They should all be in jail.
Dancing with the Stars in jail.
That's probably the next season.
Maybe they can have a talent show.
Maybe they can have a jail talent show.
Because I have to tell you, this whole crew It is the gang that couldn't shoot straight, but somehow or another started an authoritarian movement.
It's really incredible.
I would watch to see, you know, Trump dance with an inmate in a federal penitentiary.
But he says, he's feeling really good, which by the way is all pumped up by steroids.
You actually feel like a superhero if you take steroids, if you haven't ever done that before.
Your aches and pains, all that goes away, you know, as long as it's not having side effects in your brain.
But he says, he says, don't be afraid of COVID.
That's the big sentence he buries in the middle of the tweet.
And he also had a video about this a little bit, too.
Now you're hearing some of the other people who are saying, man, look at our dear leader.
He's beaten COVID.
He's got to face it head on and take it on like a champ.
It's this toxic masculinity, which I think you know a little bit about, Jared.
That is a it's seeping into this where a it's almost like what I found funny is that that there's a notion that you're a failure if you get COVID right and certainly we know Trump's family would consider its sickness a failure which is why he has to get out of the hospital but real fast on that note isn't it weird that It's almost like this disease that has mostly and over-affected people of color.
Isn't it weird that they're getting sick with it?
It's also their fault that they are not economically more advanced or that they don't have more money and wealth and power.
It's almost like this whole thing smacks of white patriarchal supremacy, but that's just me!
That's just me.
And that's a great, great point.
I'm glad you mentioned that because let's just say he gets out of this without, this is the worst of it, and he recovers.
With his muscles, Nick.
His big, giant Trump muscles.
He takes it on.
He wrestles COVID to the ground and just stands over it and flexes for everyone.
I agree.
What if that happens?
Yes.
And with whatever treatments he's got, which by the way, one was wildly experimental.
Only 300 people had had actually this thing.
There's no literature on it at all.
They have no idea if it works or not.
But I'm sure someone's like, hey, you got to try this.
I've heard about this in some random place in America.
But that is the point, is that here he is.
He's going to tout it like, oh, it's no big deal.
You can overcome it.
No problem.
Power of positive thinking.
Don't let it dominate your lives.
Yeah.
It's a VIP treatment.
It's a VIP treatment nobody in the country gets.
And as a result, they're the ones who are going to die and suffer greatly because of that.
But the point of this whole thing is, is that most people feel like they're getting better after about five or six or seven days.
They're like, Oh my God, I think I've got this beat.
And then It takes a turn.
So, we need to wait until Friday of this week, Saturday, Sunday.
That's when you're going to have to start seeing.
Now, he's almost out of the woods.
Dr. Conley said, if he can get through tomorrow and feeling okay, we're going to feel, we think he's out of the woods.
That is malpractice because no doctor in their right mind would ever, looking at the data we already have publicly, would ever say that, oh, after, let's see, when's his first symptoms?
Let's just say it was Friday, but it probably was a little earlier.
No, they said he was having symptoms on Wednesday.
Oh, I missed that.
Okay.
So Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.
So he's on day six right now.
He could easily crash by the end of this week.
And it would be a pattern that almost everybody I've known and studied and read about would follow.
Why would he be any different?
I don't think he would.
And especially with his age.
So that is the real horrible thing about this.
And then also, they want this to happen.
This is the way of cleansing and getting rid of the poor people.
Yeah, yeah, and I'll go ahead and I think this is a good point to bring this up.
I think it's the story that no one's talking about because part of the problem with our media and the way that all of this is treated, this spectacle, this narrative, is I think everybody now thinks that because Donald Trump got sick, that suddenly every problem that we had with the election just went that suddenly every problem that we had with the election just Amazing.
Because the boss just isn't there to press the button to start up the doomsday machine, right?
Like, well, Donald Trump got sick, so I guess our ballots will be fine and all that constitutional crisis will go away.
It's not going away.
And here is the thing that no one's talking about.
It's not like Donald Trump is the person who necessarily constructed it.
He's the person that gave the go-ahead as people were in his ear telling him how to construct this anti-election-disruption-stealing machine.
It was Republicans.
It was dominionist.
It was white supremacist.
Do you think for a second that they're going to pause if Donald Trump is gravely ill or, heaven forbid, passes away from the coronavirus?
They have a guy in Mike Pence.
And we've talked about this.
Mike Pence has a superpower.
Mike Pence's superpower is to be around everything, but never get the shit on him.
Right?
It came close with Flynn.
That was the moment where he sort of tripped up a little bit.
But he's always in the back of the room.
He's always the one who plays respectability politics, right?
He's always the one who's sort of above the fray.
He also, by the way, believes that he's been chosen by God to be within a heartbeat of the presidency.
You think for a second that the Republicans are just going to let this thing slip away and they're just going to be like, yeah, we're going to lose in 2020.
We'll figure it out in 2024.
Good luck, Joe Biden.
Hell no, that's not what's going to happen.
What we're going to see tomorrow night, or tomorrow night, good lord, I guess it would be when people hear this.
On Wednesday at the VP debate, we are going to look at a president in waiting.
Mike Pence has been waiting for this moment his entire life.
He, by the way, he can never get elected president on his own merits, right?
He's in a position, and it's the ideal position for Mike Pence, he can get all of the benefits of Donald Trump, all of the inroads that he's made, all of the destruction that he's wreaked against Democratic institutions, all of the strongman authoritarian bullshit that everyone hates, without the gaffes, without the scandals, without the gaffes, without the scandals, without all those problems.
And he can come in as the respectable Republican who can just come in and be like, I'll unite the country and I'll take over.
And a lot of those Republicans, including people who, I don't know, have pretended to be Democrats or supporting Democrats for a while for financial profit, Those people will come home to roost, man.
They're going to have the judiciary.
There's a possibility that they could maintain the executive.
They understand what Trump has done.
They could reverse engineer it.
There's a threat looming here.
And we have our eye on Donald Trump.
It's like magic tricks.
It's always about misdirection.
Everyone's concerned about the buffoon who won't lay in bed and get better.
There are people behind him who are more than willing to let him expire or become incapacitated and take over where he's left behind.
Right.
But the ineptitude of this is because they could have done this already with the impeachment.
They could have all said, you know what, Pence has a much better chance of winning this election than Trump did.
And that's what they should have said.
You were on that when no one else was.
Yeah.
And they should have done it.
And by the way, it would have been horrible because Pence is as bad as Trump.
He's no better.
And yet they didn't do that.
And now you almost think that, yes, they're here to hope that he gets so incapacitated or dies that they can put Pence in.
The 20th Amendment, remember, I had an interesting podcast about that.
I listened to it last night about it.
You know, when you get installed as a temporary president like that, it is temporary.
It doesn't really apply going forward.
It's very complicated and there's not a lot of clarity here.
But, you know, I think Trump would need to die for Pence to completely be able to slide in that spot.
Because here's the thing, I mentioned it to you before we recorded.
What happens if Trump is incapacitated, the election goes off, and then Pence kind of like, you know, assumes the presidency, I suppose.
But then Trump gets better.
Is he supposed to step down again and let Trump take over again?
Like, probably, but it's a real interesting question here.
There's a lot of questions that are up in the air and it's really frustrating because I think that's the last thing anybody wants is to have it even more unknown and more disorganized as it is.
Are you ready for what's going to happen if they invoke the 25th Amendment, take power away from Trump while he's incapacitated and he heals?
Is taking off your glasses the equivalent of taking off your jacket?
No, I'm setting a scene.
This is for people... I'm going to try with the voice because I am a Hoosier.
I come from Indiana.
I'm going to try and do my best Mike Pence.
But this is also a special thing for the people watching on YouTube, watching the video version of this podcast.
Are you ready?
Just imagine it's 2021.
I am President Mike Pence as Donald Trump has just left a hospital on his own volition and is raging to an array of microphones About how power was stolen from him.
Are you ready?
I'm gonna narrow my eyes because that's what Pence does, right?
Because he gets really serious.
I just think it's really sad.
I just think it's really sad.
He's a great man.
Great man.
That illness would take it from him like it has.
But we have a job to do.
And we're gonna do that job.
Set.
Scene.
Done.
Move forward.
Good luck, MAGA people.
Kiss our asses.
You gave us power.
You were rubes that we played from the very beginning.
You got out of control.
You were Frankenstein's monster.
We never wanted you to get control of the party in the first place.
Goodbye.
Bye-bye.
You lose.
That's what would happen.
And here's the thing about that, which is the scariest thing of all.
If they maintain the presidency and the Senate, they will forever change every rule to prevent the Democrats from winning again.
And that would mean that the will of the people would not ever be reflected again in a regular democracy.
Which, by the way, I'll just bring this up, if you want to protect the next firewall against that would be state legislatures.
That would be the only hope, and I think you'd end up seeing Democrats congregating even more so in certain areas of the country to be able to have local governments around.
If you want to support your local legislatures to help flip them back to blue, a really great friend of mine, Mara Marks, has created a fundraiser for that called swingleft.org.
That is swing.org and you can donate any amount of money for state legislatures to help them maintain a democratic control at that level, which is going to be, you know, as important as anything, because I'm telling you like either, either California is going to have to secede from the union or, or we'll leave the country at some point, because I don't know how else to rectify what, what, where we live and what the government's going to be doing to the people if they maintain power.
It's a really, really important pursuit and a really, really important project, but you jumped all over everything and you didn't tell me how good my Mike Pence was.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Because I'm actually really proud.
That was pretty good!
It was good.
I was right there with you.
I was so there with you that I just sort of was lost.
It was pretty... There's a Hoosierdom that has to come out.
But no, I absolutely agree.
The swing left thing is necessary.
And we have to...
It's the saddest thing, man.
It's what we've been watching all weekend with this Trump circus, and that's absolutely what it is.
Everyone's so obsessed with Donald Trump that they forget that there's politics beyond Donald Trump.
There are other races.
There are other fights.
We have to talk about what we're going to do beyond Donald Trump.
Just because the guy gets sick, because he ends up in the hospital... By the way, our media, I don't know if you noticed it, our media like went into bootlicking mode until that doctor came out.
They're like, oh, let's just hope and pray this president is able to really heal and come back and lead the country and maybe he'll learn something and turn over a new leaf.
Donald Trump isn't going to learn anything.
He's not going to turn over a new leaf.
He's incapable of it.
Then when the doctors came out, suddenly the media was like, how dare you lie to us like this?
And there was a moment where they were like, yeah, we're not going to deal with this.
This is bullshit.
But we have to understand that this entire spectacle is not politics.
There's more behind this.
And the Republicans are not going to roll over and simply punt on an election because Donald Trump got sick.
They're not going to give up all the machinery that they've constructed.
There's too many Dominionists, too many white supremacists, too many hypercapitalists to give up on this entire project simply because Donald Trump got COVID.
And by the way, the rest of them got COVID too because they wouldn't stop hugging each other.
If you watch that video, by the way, it's like a horror movie.
Wait, which video?
Outside of Barrett's.
Yeah.
The one after Barrett is announced and everyone's like hugging one another and basically rubbing each other with saliva.
Oh my god!
Yeah, but it was worse inside.
They had the private party and they were all in the small room gathered in there together.
That's why Loeffler, she was there.
Barr was there.
That's why they're on the top of my bingo card right now.
And Barr ain't gonna make it, man.
If Barr gets it...
He ain't gonna make it.
I'm sorry to say.
He can't possibly be in any position to withstand it.
Nick, they've got God on their side.
God is backing their plans for a theocratic America.
Don't you worry about them.
Ye of little faith, Nick Hausserman.
The Republican Party is backed by God and they are on a mission from God.
I've got this.
If Trump does not fall back and have a lot of problems going on the rest of this week, I might start believing that.
I don't know about you.
I want to get off the merry-go-round.
I'm tired.
I'm just so sick of this bullshit.
And here's the thing.
It's October 5th, man.
Like, it's not going to calm down.
You know what I mean?
Like, it's just not going to calm down.
And now Trump's even more desperate.
Again, he's a gambler.
He wants to push all of his chips on the table.
God knows if he's going to survive this, if he's going to heal from it.
He's going to try everything.
And it's just going to get worse.
And we're going to see this person become more and more desperate.
And I think we just have to keep our eyes on the prize because it is...
It's going to get dizzying and it's going to get really weird.
Oh, and you haven't even mentioned the fact that COVID will most likely come back, roaring back across the country as well.
It's starting to do that.
We follow Europe, which Europe's having big problems now.
So yeah, I would stop the world.
I want to get off.
It's without question how I feel as well.
And I don't know what to do.
It's going to get worse.
We're going to have to, I have a feeling we're going to record an emergency pod between now and the debate.
You mean tomorrow?
Tomorrow, Tuesday.
Today, when people are listening to it.
Yeah.
There's an alternate reality.
We already had to trash one.
Yeah, we already had to trash one.
I had to show up in my robe and you had to record at like 6.30 in the morning for that shit.
I kind of feel like there's a reality out there.
It's like that perfect hurricane map that we saw a couple weeks ago that had like 18 hurricanes all in a line, like a belt.
It kind of feels like there's a reality where we have a month straight where every day we have to do an emergency podcast.
I kind of feel like that's in play somehow or another.
But in the meantime, we're going to be here Wednesday night at 8.30 over on patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
Good news on that front!
We about have a Discord server about ready to go up, which means that you can interact with other Muckrake fans.
The community is growing by leaps and bounds.
I think it's a pretty good community.
People are really enjoying being able to chat with each other.
Head on over there, patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
That way you can join in on our live exclusive coverage of the VP debate.
Like I was saying, I think when Mike Pence comes on that stage, man, he's coming on as a potential future president.
He knows this is his moment and he's going to come out swinging.
And I think his performance is going to tell us a lot about where his mind is and where the mind of the Republican Party is.
No doubt.
Although, yeah.
But he'll still be as obsequious as possible to praise the dear leader and make it seem that way.
But that's what he's good at.
He's got that faraway stare.
There you go.
Let me see it one more time.
Yeah.
I gotta get the glasses.
Right.
And you feel like he's really listening and he's really caring and meanwhile he fucking just tries to drink the water the same exact time that Trump does.
It just goes over his shoulder.
So that is Wednesday night.
If you want exclusive access to that, again, it's patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
If you want to make a difference, that is swingleft.org.
Yep.
This fight is not going to end simply because Donald Trump got sick.
If you need us until next time, you can find Nick over at Can You Hear Me?
SMH.
You can find me at J.Y.
Sexton.
We hope, like hell, we're not going to have to do an emergency podcast.
