Trump is Desperate and Desperation Makes Him Dangerous
Internal and public polls on both sides of the aisle show Donald Trump hurtling toward a potentially historic loss, but Trump and his cronies are trying every trick in the book, engaging in massive disinformation, and angling to subvert democracy. Jared Yates Sexton discusses what we know about the race and how this desperation puts us in more danger.
To support the show and unlock exclusive content, become a patron at http://www.patreon.com/muckrakepodcast
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I am Jared Yates Sexton, and our wonderful co-host Nick Halseman is still enjoying some much-deserved rest and relaxation as we prepare for the upcoming presidential election.
I hope that you have been able to find a little bit of rest and relaxation yourself.
If you're anything like me, this has been a bizarre time, a mixture of excitement at the possibility of being rid of Donald Trump as President of the United States of America, and also a sort of gnawing uncertainty
About what the election will look like, what the aftermath of the election will be, to what lengths Trump and the people around him will be willing to go in order to maintain their grip on power and possibly avoid prosecution.
You know, I had a great luck to be able to interview Mary Trump last week, and if you haven't already, check out that interview.
I thought it was pretty great the way she was able to Put into words her experience dealing with Donald Trump and the gaslighting and the trauma that we're all currently going through.
She had some really good insight in terms of how to battle against it and how to protect yourself and your mental health, which we talk about a lot on here and I talk about a lot on my bourbon talks on Sunday evenings.
This idea that we need to be there for each other.
We need to establish communities.
We need to pick each other up when we are failing and we need to be able to meet this thing head-on in a healthy vigorous manner because I have to tell you we are facing one of the greatest challenges probably of our lives.
In the past four years, of course, we've gone through unbelievable trauma and gaslighting and an intentional misleading and, you know, psychic and emotional abuse by the hands of the President of the United States of America and the Republican Party, which has turned into a fascistic movement of enablers.
So I go back and check out that interview with Mary Trump.
I think she had a lot of good advice, but Mary was talking to me before we started recording and she said something I thought, which was really interesting.
She said in regards to the 2020 election, she was having a hard time imagining the future beyond it.
Um, she was having a hard time thinking about what would happen.
If Donald Trump were to somehow or another win the election or subvert the election, but also what it would mean to be rid of him.
And this is something that I think a lot of us have been suffering from because Donald Trump has had such a stranglehold and a monopoly over the attention of the United States, but also our daily lives.
We can rarely get away from him when he isn't saying some crazy thing or some bizarre threat or laughing about possibly being president for the rest of his life or targeting some vulnerable population.
The idea of being free of him as president is Nearly unfathomable.
I think there's a sublime element to it.
The idea that if we could just be rid of him that maybe things might get better.
And I'm going to talk a little bit at the end of this podcast after we go through the news of the day and where things currently stand.
I'm going to talk a little bit about something that I've been trying to give voice to over the past few weeks, which is the need to imagine that future free of Donald Trump and to move beyond him and what that means and what it could mean for our future and what it could mean for human civilization as a whole.
But before we get to that point, what a United States without Donald Trump looks like and what a world looks like without Donald Trump as one of the most powerful individuals, we have to talk about where the election stands right now.
A quick update.
Apparently we're supposed to have a presidential debate on Thursday.
I have no idea why this would happen.
Donald Trump has been suffering from the coronavirus.
I don't think any of us believe anything that he or the administration or his flunky doctors tell us.
If I was Joe Biden, and if I was the people around Joe Biden, I would not agree to this debate.
And I don't think there's anything to be gained from having this debate.
We're not really Reaching out to undecideds.
I have to say that two weeks out from this election of all elections, if you don't know who you're voting for, then I don't know what to say to you anymore.
And I can't imagine that Joe Biden has any delusions about the possibility that there are Trump supporters out there who might necessarily cross the line.
I mean, this is a cult of personality.
They're not going to leave simply because Joe Biden has a better answer on a question about taxes.
There's nothing to be gained from this debate, particularly for Joe Biden.
He has outshined Trump in every step along the way in this general election.
The recent town halls were nothing but an excuse for Donald Trump to rage against the dying of the light.
There's no other way to put it.
Joe Biden came out, looked very presidential, seemed very, um, empathetic it was a good performance probably the best performance that he's had during the entire campaign so i have no idea why joe biden the democratic party or the campaign would agree to this debate but as long as they're having it thursday night supposedly is the last presidential debate if it occurs uh the muckrick podcast is going to cover it uh
For those of you who are interested in getting our exclusive reactions and analysis, you can go to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
That will unlock exclusive content.
The other night after the town halls, I hung out with some people and talked about My experience with the town hall format and how I thought that the candidates did.
But if there is a presidential debate, and I don't think there should be, you can be right there with us as we react to it and give our analysis.
So that's patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
But a little bit of inside information.
I guess I would say.
I'm hesitant to say inside information.
It's not like I'm on the inside of the Trump campaign.
But I can tell you that we have entered what I call the rats leaving the sinking ship phase of the Trump campaign.
You currently have a lot of people around Donald Trump, his strategists, the communications people, anybody who is in this campaign that isn't Donald Trump and doesn't have some sort of major financial stake in this thing.
They're starting to leak.
And the reason that they're starting to leak is that they don't want to be held responsible for the possibility of not just a lost election and not just a losing campaign.
But what could possibly end up being a historic loss?
So we have a lot of people right now who are leaking to media outlets and media members, myself included, that their internal polls show that Donald Trump doesn't have much of an avenue to actually winning the election right now.
2016, I think, to the Trump campaign seems like a lifetime ago.
We're talking about the possibility that they aren't even going to turn on the TV to see what Michigan or Wisconsin does.
Those states are gone, I think, and no poll that I've seen, whether internal or public, shows even the possibility of Trump breaking the so-called blue firewall again.
You know, it was likened in 2016 that Trump was drawing an inside straight, a poker term.
Well, the inside straight is out.
The best that he could manage at this point would maybe be a high pair or maybe a two pair if we're going to go really deep into this gambling metaphor.
But none of the polls show that happening.
The polls in Trump's world, and in Biden's world, and in the public arena, all show Joe Biden easily winning the election.
Now, I want to say this, because I take my responsibility as a person who comes to you and talks about this stuff, I take it very seriously.
All right, I don't like messing around with this.
I don't like giving out false hope.
So I will say that all the polls show Joe Biden handedly winning the election.
That doesn't mean we're out of the woods.
That doesn't mean that everything is fine.
It doesn't mean that Joe Biden will come in and become president and suddenly America will be returned to some of its former glory.
We're not going to get completely into that today because there's a lot of conversation to be had, particularly post-election, that the Muckrake Podcast is dedicated to.
So win, lose, or draw, we're hanging around after this election.
So don't worry about that.
You're still going to have us on Tuesday mornings to tell you what's going on behind the scenes, what history says, and what politics are actually taking place.
So don't worry about that.
But there is a larger conversation to be having right now.
And unfortunately, as always, our media is failing.
This seems like everything's baked.
Like everything is totally fine.
Biden's going to win this thing.
We're going to move forward.
But I want to point something out.
Trump and the people around him are growing increasingly desperate.
It's not just about winning the election, of course.
It's also about the possibility that they could be prosecuted for crimes and the possibility that a lot of these people who have been engaged in a giant project for political power don't want to give up their grip on that political power.
I would also be remiss if I didn't point out the fact that the Republican Party has embraced this dangerous fascism because it recognizes that its popularity and its electoral chances are diminishing by the day.
These people aren't going to simply throw up their hands and say, well, you won this time.
Good luck.
That's not how this thing is playing out.
And unfortunately, there is an entire system set up in order to subvert this election and take democracy away from the people.
Of course, the Republican Party have worked for years and years and years to disenfranchise people.
It can be as simple as purging someone from a voter roll.
And it can be as complicated as disinformation tactics.
They can take away polling sites.
They can make sure that you have to stand in a line for upwards of 10 hours to simply cast your vote, which you are guaranteed by the Constitution.
They're not going to give up easily.
And just because Trump is behind in the polls, and just because it looks like Joe Biden will win this election, doesn't mean that it will go off without a hitch.
We were talking for months about all of these things that Donald Trump had set in place in order to steal this election away.
They're not going to build this weapon and this machine and just forget about it.
The more that we talk about Joe Biden running away with this election, the more of a possibility there is that that machine and that weapon will be used.
Now, we got a little glimpse of this.
This whole Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, Hunter Biden laptop story that, by the way, it didn't just show up on a Breitbart.
It didn't just show up on like a random Twitter account.
This showed up in the New York Post.
And this story was not only flimsy from the very beginning.
This idea that some mysterious person brought in their laptop and it just hadn't happened to have a Biden Foundation or whatever sticker on it and then the person found emails.
It's the exact same story as the Clinton email story in 2016.
These people aren't particularly Competent.
They're not particularly talented.
And on top of that, so much of this is based on Russian disinformation campaigns that are oftentimes brilliant in their complexity and other times head-scratchingly stupid.
And it only took place, of course, because Rudy Giuliani, and we've talked about this on the podcast before, and I talked about this a little bit on my Bourbon Talk livestream last night, Rudy Giuliani's not well, and he has become a useful idiot for foreign intelligence.
He's willing to carry the water.
I mean, Donald Trump got impeached because of this Russian intelligence bullshit.
They have figured out that Rudy Giuliani will do literally anything that they want him to, and that Donald Trump will be right behind.
But here's a funny thing.
You'll notice that Donald Trump has not been pushing this narrative all that much.
It's been happening around him.
He sort of hasn't been dealing with it.
Meanwhile, there's a couple of other things that are floating around in this atmosphere.
And this is what I want to point out before it gets too bad and before we get to the election.
There's a couple of other stories that are floating.
One is there is like a QAnon sort of conspiracy idea.
Joe Biden, pedophilia, Hunter Biden, child porn, all this stuff.
This is starting to pick up in certain places.
It's picking up on social media.
It's picking up among the QAnon circles.
It's gaining a little bit of steam.
I don't know if you've seen the memes for this, but the people that I know who have been radicalized are starting to do it.
And I'm not even talking about the people who have been completely killed.
I'm talking about people who support Donald Trump and people who understand that Trump is in trouble.
I think they're getting desperate as well.
The third narrative that has started to go around, and by the way, I gained...
I was both enraged and also gained a lot of enjoyment from this.
Jon Voight, the washed up lunatic actor, released this video on social media where he said that Joe Biden is evil.
And he called on Jesus Christ and God to rise up and help Donald Trump in order to restore America as a heavenly nation.
For those of you who've been paying attention and listening to this podcast and reading my stuff, you know that this is pure cult of the Shining City bullshit.
That's all it is.
And Voight just voiced it in a way that I didn't even know it was possible anymore.
Like, you know, they usually play around with this stuff.
They'll make mentions of it.
They'll make allusions to it.
This thing was like the pure uncut stuff.
Like it was straight religious, it was talking more or less about satanic evil, and meanwhile we're talking about a veteran senator who was more or less a center, center left, center right, depending upon the issue, senator respected by everybody, vice president.
We're talking about a guy who is not a liberal democrat or a far left radical.
And Jon Voight and all these people are now talking about the possibility that Joe Biden is not only senile, but that he's evil, and that there's this major evil conspiracy that's just behind Joe Biden.
This is important.
Because this is something we're going to be dealing with for a while.
Again, win, lose, or draw.
Obviously, when Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, Donald Trump kept punching at her and using her as sort of a boogie woman that he could take on whenever he needed to.
This Joe Biden thing is going to be in the air whether he loses in November or if he wins.
This is going to be repetitive.
These three stories, or these three narratives, are comprising this new approach that Donald Trump will either take or discard.
It's like A or B testing.
Does this work or does this work?
At this point, is there going to be some sort of quote-unquote October surprise?
An email scandal or a Benghazi or whatever they can cook up because they're always trying to cook up these big giant conspiracies.
Is there something that will gain traction?
Or is it going to be this QAnon-friendly child abuse scandal that has, I mean, there's not even the beginnings of a shred of anything.
This is completely made up whole cloth.
Or is it going to be this Jon Voight, this is a battle for good and evil.
And I have to say, This has been the case with Donald Trump for a long time.
There's a reason why Alex Jones and the conspiracy right was so close to the Trump campaign in 2016.
They spent so much time trying out these narratives in the conspiracy realm to see if they had any juice.
To see if anybody was going to be willing to believe this stuff and if it was going to catch fire in social media or if maybe it was going to cost Hillary Clinton a point or two.
It was an incredible testing ground for them.
The problem here is that we're really late in the situation and they are grasping at straws.
At this point, it's not just A, B, or C testing.
It's trying everything out all at once.
It's like trying to drive over a bridge as you're creating it.
They don't really know what they're doing.
And they're failing and flailing.
That only leaves one option.
If they're not able to flood the zone with shit as Steve Bannon always talked about and always planned.
If somehow or another that's not catching ground.
Because, by the way, they've gotten worse.
They've gotten a lot worse.
Worse.
And on top of that, that sort of mealy reality, that reality that was sort of deconstructed and sort of like turned into a weapon by Trump, it created fertile ground for things like QAnon.
They moved beyond Trump.
They moved beyond that flooding the zone with shit and it allowed other malevolent actors to create these larger situations or different situations.
So what happens if you can't win using the dirty tricks?
Well, I don't know about you, but I've played enough board games with people who don't like losing.
What you do is you flip the game board.
I would not be shocked at this point if Donald Trump simply either declares victory in November or Says that this wasn't a free and fair election.
I demand a recount.
I demand something.
I demand a lawsuit.
Something along those lines.
I really don't believe at this point that that won't happen in some way shape or form.
I talked about this a little bit that there is sort of A perfect scenario, a Goldilocks scenario, so to speak, that is out there.
It's in play, which is the possibility that Joe Biden runs the table against Donald Trump.
And by the way, we're talking about states right now, in play, that are crazy.
We're talking about Iowa, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Arizona.
The possibility of a big, giant, landslide win by Joe Biden.
The best case scenario at this point is that Trump is so destroyed by it and so personally offended by it that he turns to a sour grapes type situation.
I didn't want to be president of you losers anyway.
Take this presidency and shove it.
I don't want to even do it.
And at that point we basically have a president... I mean there's a possibility he could resign before his term is even up.
I could see that where he gets blown out in November and resigns at the beginning of December and Mike Pence basically serves as president for a month.
I wouldn't be shocked by that.
Would you be shocked by that?
But the question is how do we prepare for the alternative?
What do we do with the possibility that Donald Trump will not accept the election?
Well, we have a couple things going on right now, and I want to point these out.
And this is something that we need to keep in mind.
As Donald Trump flails, and as the members of his campaign are starting to leak these problematic stories and lay the blame with him and everybody else in his employ, we also have a couple of Republicans who are starting to move away from Trump.
Now, it's not a lot of them, because at this point the entire party should have abandoned him.
There should have been a Nixon moment where Goldwater and the other luminaries of the GOP go in and say, Mr. President, it's time.
But you do have a couple.
John Cornyn has started telling stories in the press about how he pushed back against Trump and how he wasn't totally involved in Trump's agenda and maybe he had problems with him from the very start.
Of course, Ben Sasse has been vocal recently.
So they're not defections.
They're flirtations.
And that's something to keep in mind here.
Because if we have a Republican president who loses in Iowa, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, and Arizona, and doesn't even take a moment to think about Michigan or Wisconsin, and maybe Pennsylvania is just completely out of the picture, By the way, there's Texas as well.
I mean, like, if Texas and Georgia moves over to the Democratic side, and these are possibilities, not necessarily for this election, but moving forward, the Republican Party has to take a look in the mirror and realize, at long damn last, that they don't have an electoral base.
What they have is a cement block tied around their ankles.
There's no possible way for them to make a nationalist, pluralist, populist appeal for as long as they are tethered to white supremacy, which is what they are.
And by the way, they have a fealty to the richest and the wealthiest people in the country.
You can't win elections like that.
And you can't win elections like that, particularly now, unless you simply rely on barely squeaking by on the Electoral College.
Well, places like Georgia and Arizona and Texas, shifting demographically, shuts the door on that.
So the Republican Party understands, or maybe they do, I mean there's some who obviously don't, I mean some of these people are just diving into the abyss and filling their lungs up with it.
But some of them understand that the electoral door is shutting.
They understand that Trumpism could possibly die or at least suffer a major blow in November.
Because I don't think Trumpism is going to go away.
I think one way or another we're going to be dealing with this shit for a long time.
But I think that they understand that the base that maybe they thought was there is starting to erode.
So here's the question.
What's going to happen if Trump tries to flip the game board and says, I don't play games that I lose.
They're unfair.
I demand a recount.
I demand a new election.
I demand an investigation.
I demand a lawsuit.
You and I need to be ready to protest this.
One of the things that was revealed, and has been true for a very long time, it's been true for generations but we've forgotten it, but something that the Black Lives Matter protest revealed to us is when we engage in mass protest, when we engage in sustained mass protest, there is no way that the narrative of the country does not coalesce around that movement.
If we simply sit here and accept it, if Donald Trump flips the game board and this anti-democratic machine that he's created turns on and there's simply a yawn?
Well, I don't know what to tell you.
I don't know what America looks like after that.
You have to be ready to protest for what is right and you have to be ready to protest against what is wrong.
There are Republicans who understand that things are shifting.
There would not be these public turns against Trump or testings of Trump.
This shows that they understand that something is in the air and that something is shifting.
And it's not just shifting now, it's shifting in a permanent way.
When everybody gets out in the streets, when everybody says with one solid voice, no.
There's some shit I will not eat and this is it.
When that happens, first of all, the media has to go along with that.
Yeah, they play footsie with Trump.
They make money off of Trump.
But I have to tell you that they'll make a lot of money and get a lot of retweets and likes and viewers and clicks and shares and all those things that they want with a big national crisis and a big dictatorial president trying to hold on to power.
That's a story that they'll tell.
There's an economic incentive for them to tell that story.
It's compelling.
It's anxious-making.
It's frightening.
They'll tell that story.
Well, there are people on the right, and we've seen them.
They've defected over to the Democratic Party, or they've sort of, like, started to hover around there with the gravity, with the Lincoln Project people and all these people.
I think there are people on the right who will understand that or have understood that who will coalesce behind opposition to this.
But we have to be prepared because they're not just going to do it.
The problem is if people are going to be in the streets, we have to be the people in the streets.
So you need to be prepared on election night for literally anything.
Hopefully, and by the way, the Muckrate podcast is going to be having an exclusive watch along of the election results.
Hopefully analysis and reaction to what will be a landslide victory for Joe Biden.
But we have to be prepared for anything on election night.
Hopefully we'll hang out and it'll be great and we'll, you know, we'll be able to think about what the future looks like and what that means.
But we also have to be prepared at a moment's notice to do what is right and to do what is necessary.
And that is mass protest, mass action.
So that's something to keep on your radar.
But I will say, before we finish this up, And we'll be talking about this a lot more, but again, I want to get this idea in people's heads.
What does the future look like post-Trump?
We have to stop basing our entire reality and political structure around one person and in opposition to one person.
It is not enough to be against Donald Trump.
Yes, that is a political decision, but that's not a political mission simply to beat somebody in an election.
Trump is a symptom.
He's not a disease.
So here's the question.
What do you want the world to look like?
What projects do you want the world to look like?
Or do you want to determine the future of the world, I should say?
What do you want in terms of a better life?
Do we want a world where people are treated with basic human decency?
Do we want a world where we're not treated as if we're simply replaceable cogs in a machine?
Do we want to get rid of things like independent contractors in which these big giant corporations are able to pull in all of the profits without giving away any benefits?
Do we want to live in a country where Amy Coney Barrett and a conservative Supreme Court puts us all at constant risk?
Do we want to live in a country that continues to deny things like climate change and the pandemic and does nothing for them?
Do you think that we deserve health care?
Do you think that we deserve to live free of fear of one major catastrophic illness ruining our lives and depleting everything that we've built up and everything that we've earned?
Do you want to live in an America where fascists can't gain traction anymore?
And that we understand that fascism is a natural side effect of this American mythology of exceptionalism?
These are things we have to talk about.
Because it's not enough to simply get rid of Donald Trump.
That's a start.
So again, I want to challenge you.
Make a list.
What do you want the world to look like?
What do you think a fairer, realer, more human world looks like?
What do you think that people should be guaranteed?
What do you think the government should do for people?
Because I have to tell you right now, the United States government has nothing to offer you besides violence.
They're not going to help you if a hurricane hits your city.
They're not going to help you if a wildfire burns down an entire coast.
We're heading towards a major, major Major environmental crisis.
What do you think it should look like when that crisis hits?
How do we try to avoid it?
But if it hits, how should we handle that?
Should we have a system where we're putting vulnerable people in makeshift prisons and forcing them to have hysterectomies?
And don't you think that that's only the beginning of what is possible if we don't stop this and stop it now?
So that's my challenge.
Start thinking about this.
Joe Biden, President in January of 2021.
God, let's hope so.
But what should that look like?
It's not enough to simply say that that makes everything better.
That suddenly, because Trump isn't President of the United States, that suddenly America is great again.
Because I have to tell you, that mindset is exactly what fueled Trumpism.
It's time to stop settling For metaphorical, symbolic victories.
It's not enough to be right.
What do you want to do with power?
What do you want the world to look like?
How do you want the world to feel?
How do you want your life to be different?
These are things that we need to consider, and these are the issues that we're going to be covering after November, win, lose, or draw.
Because we're either going to be looking at a future where we can determine what our lives and what our worlds feel like, Or we're going to be fighting a final battle against fascism.
Those are the choices.
I would much rather talk about the former.
I would much rather talk about what I want the world to look like and how I think the world could be better, as opposed to fighting tooth and nail down to our last person against rising fascism.
Because I have to tell you, with all of the elements that we have in play, Right now with depleting resources, environmental collapse, with all of, and by the way, neofascism growing around the world, we are tiptoeing up to something really ugly.
And if we don't stop it before we get to that something ugly, it's going to be bad.
So now's the time to start offering an alternative vision, because these people have a vision for what the future should look like.
The future to them, to Donald Trump, to Bill Barr, to Amy Coney Barrett, to all of these people, the future looks like the past.
Particularly a white supremacist, aristocratic past.
They want to re-establish oppression.
They want to re-establish control.
Because they understand that they're not going to win elections anymore.
And they're not going to control culture unless they do it by force.
That's their vision for the future.
It is a radical, fundamentalist view of the future.
We need to create our own idea for what the future looks like.
A competing idea.
Because the people who determine the future are the people who have a vision for it.
So start thinking.
What do you want the future to look like?
All right, so that's going to do it for this episode of the Mock Wreck Podcast.
Thank you, everybody, for listening.
I really hope that you're doing well.
I hope you're taking care of yourself.
I hope you have energy.
If you don't, take a day off.
Somebody else, that's the whole point of solidarity, is having trust that somebody else will pick up things if you're not there to do it.
And we have to start trusting each other, and we have to start gaining that solidarity mindset.
So I hope that you're doing well.
I hope that this podcast finds you well.
As always, we are so thankful for your support.
Again, if you want to become a patron of the show, go over to patreon.com slash mukrekpodcast.
Thursday night, if we have a debate, which again, there's no reason for them to have a debate at all.
But if they have a debate, yeah, we'll be watching that thing live, reacting to it.
And you can join us by becoming a patron at patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
A quick plug, just a reminder that my book, American Rule, How Nations Conquered the World But Failed Its People, is still out there in the world.
I appreciate all the kind words and all the support.
If you haven't had a chance, go pick it up and learn a little bit.
