As Donald Trump and his enablers the Republicans continue this farcical half-serious coup, Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss how the complicated grift that is professional wrestling explains this slow-moving disaster, as well as what we should expect in the next few months.
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You turn on television, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID.
A plane goes down, 500 people dead, they don't talk about it.
COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID.
By the way, on November 4th, you won't hear about it anyway.
We have 11 million people in our country who have already had COVID.
We should tell them to celebrate.
We should tell them to throw away their masks, go to restaurants, live again, because these people are now immune.
Or does he honestly believe tonight that he still has a shot at changing enough votes out there that would allow him to keep the White House?
Oh, he certainly believes he still has a shot at this.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Muckrin Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates Saxton.
I'm here with Nick Halseman.
We have a lot to talk about.
I mean, there's an active coup going on in the United States of America.
You paused.
You know, I did.
I paused with my head.
Well, you know, coup, people had sort of been saying, maybe we shouldn't use that word.
I don't, you know, maybe we shouldn't speak French.
Coup d'etat.
It's a lazy coup, right?
That's what we're going to talk about today.
It's almost like a lazy river at your favorite theme park.
What is it?
What are the parts of it?
And we're going to break it down because I actually feel like most of the people out there, and shocker, are getting this thing completely wrong.
And they're covering it one way or another completely wrong.
We're going to get to that in a second.
Before we do, we just want to throw out a quick plug.
We took the week off from bonus content because I have to tell you the past couple of weeks have felt like lifetimes.
I've put some miles on the odometer.
But to let everybody know for our patrons, and if you want to become a patron go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast Nick and I are going to do one of our movie discussions where we break down movies, talk about the political ramifications, and get into some deeper topics that the movie starts us from.
Next week we are doing the one and the only Forrest Gump and we're not going to just be talking about wasn't it cool where Forrest played ping-pong or wasn't it cool when Forrest It will be.
across the country which we've got to talk about that that's totally ridiculous but we're going to break down the mythology of forrest gump the propagandiness of it and also i think we're going to have some disagreements so i think that will be an enjoy an enjoyable podcast it will be uh a That is patreon.com slash muckrigpodcast.
So I'm going to break down a theory that I've been floating around that I feel like kind of explains this whole thing.
But Nick, can you tell me what is your take about how this is unfolding?
What we're looking at right now?
What your takes are about this Trumpian coup that we're dealing with?
Well, I mean, if we're baking a cake here and we're putting the ingredients, I would say it's, you know, three parts, you know, just trying to raise money to either.
I think that Trump's going to take this money himself.
I know we've seen reports it's like they're using it for the debt of the Republican Party, whatever.
I just think he's figuring out how to take it himself.
He wants the money.
So that's really what most of this is, I think.
And the other part is just, you know, one part, his fragile ego, psyche, that can't handle a loss, and he's just kind of floundering around.
I actually feel, you know, Maggie Haberman reported today that he seems to understand the situation as well.
He's throwing, you know, random stuff, possibilities, but I think he understands it too.
So that made me actually feel good for the first time in maybe a couple days.
Well, so I, you know, we've been trying to explain Trump's mind for a while now.
And that's one of the reasons we've been able to predict a lot of what he was going to do is because you have to understand that Donald Trump at all times is both completely unhinged and a grifter.
And these things constantly move.
And by the way, he has the guts and the intuitive nature of a fascist.
Right, and when all these things come together they start combining for something.
Right now Trump is angling, and I wrote about this in the Daily Beast, he's angling to start some sort of competitor to Fox.
And he is already trying to maneuver his crowd away from Fox.
They're trying to push this idea that Fox cost him the election.
And so that's sort of the back end of it, right?
There's a possibility that he might...somebody's gonna pay him money for a book that somebody else is gonna write.
It's gonna be...it's gonna make us all so angry at some point when this gets announced.
And then he's gonna try and make this digital competitor to Fox News that he's already lining up in his sights and going after.
So I think Donald Trump understands that he has lost this election.
Like, I think that, and I also think that somebody like him is able to compartmentalize.
On one hand, I think he knows he lost the election.
And on the other hand, there's a part of him that will never be able to accept that he lost an election.
And those two things sort of battle it out from moment to moment.
But I was explaining this on Twitter and I wanted to get in depth on this thing.
First things first.
Nick, were you ever a professional wrestling fan?
You know, I can't say I was a fan.
I was aware of it.
Every once in a while, I'd turn on Honey Bee and watch Smash.
But I don't really, you know, I don't really know too much.
Ric Flair once walked into my high school.
I knew who he was, so that was exciting.
Later on, like in the late 80s, like 1990.
But yeah, so I knew that he goes, woo!
So I knew that.
So I know a little bit.
I know enough, I suppose, if you, you know.
Listen, the only reason that I understand this, and I want to be very clear because we're honest with our audience.
I am the type of guy who grew up as a child eating bologna and American cheese sandwiches.
Rooting for Hulk Hogan to take down the Iron Sheik and Andre the Giant.
That's the kind of childhood I had.
And, you know, I had a grandmother, a little tiny grandmother, who weighed about 60, 70 pounds, who would sit there and just chain smoke and tell me, well, most of the matches aren't real, but this one is.
You know, like that was the kind of life that I was leading back then.
And the only reason I understand this is because I have this deep cultural love of professional wrestling.
And over the years I got very fascinated by it.
And people, even people who don't like professional wrestling or think it's ridiculous, you need to understand a lot of the rhetorical stuff that goes on in it.
And so I want to give everyone a quick little dive into this.
In wrestling, which by the way is a total grift, You have a bunch of people who are pretending to have fights in front of people who pay to watch them have fights.
Right?
And by the way, if you and your competitor, who you talk backstage and talk about how you're going to have a match, and you talk backstage about how you're going to insult each other, if you do a good job, people will pay you more money to watch you fake fight.
Right?
That's called heat.
That's called trying to get an audience hot after this stuff.
Well, the grift of wrestling is divided up into what's called works and shoots.
A work is where you and I have a conversation.
It's like, I'm going to do this, you do that, and it's going to take their money.
Then, there is the rubes in the crowd.
We'll call them marks.
You know, like any con job, they are the marks.
They don't know what's going on.
They're like a chain-smoking grandma saying, that fight's real, right?
So that's who we're going to take their money.
Smarts are people who know that.
They know what the secret thing going on is, right?
Well, so something has happened in the past few years, in the past few decades, where all of a sudden because of the internet and because of rising media, wrestlers and their audiences, their audiences know it's fake.
Right?
They know that it's scripted.
But now they're really fascinated by how it's scripted.
They're really fascinated by what conversations are taking place to who's getting a push, who's winning a belt, who's winning the match, who's making the most money.
It's like palace intrigue.
Right?
Does this sound familiar, by the way?
Oh yeah.
Because now we're an entire nation, politically, we're an entire nation of pundits.
We all know that it's all fake.
We know that all the politicians are getting paid and they're getting their power.
And what we're concerned with is, well, Jared's on the inside right now.
Steve Bannon's being pushed away.
Giuliani just made his case.
Ivanka's in there doing this, right?
That palace intrigue is that next level stuff.
Well, Trump is a total grifter, and his entire time as a politician has been a work.
He's been pretending to be a populist.
He's been pretending to be for the people.
He doesn't give a shit for the people, right?
Well, what ends up happening is, in wrestling, even the competitors Are like backstage and they're like, I'm going to insult you and you're going to insult me and then we're going to fight.
Well, what happens when they're working with each other is occasionally they'll do a thing called working themselves into a shoot where suddenly the insults, something hits a little funny.
You know what I mean?
And all of a sudden one person gets mad at another person and all of a sudden it turns into a real thing.
Right now Donald Trump's saying that the election has been stolen.
It's a work.
He's trying to he's trying to get all the money that he possibly can from his supporters to pay off his debt and probably to try and launch this entire news organization which by the way like You want to get people away from Fox News?
Tell them Fox News helped steal the election.
Meanwhile, Republicans have to win the Georgia runoff.
Meanwhile, Republicans have to maintain the support of Trump supporters.
So what are they doing?
They're working the crowd, right?
They're saying, oh, I think this election was stolen.
Mitch McConnell doesn't think this election was stolen.
Ted Cruz doesn't think this election is stolen.
They're not stupid.
They're not falling for this Mark bullshit.
They're smart to it.
But guess what happens if this thing gains traction somehow or another?
You have a real coup.
Right.
If this thing keeps going, or if you don't have a coup, you have a bunch of Marx who back in the old days, when the bad guy came to the ring, they would try and punch him as he walked down the crowd.
You have a bunch of Marx who think that they're in a civil war.
They think that they need to attack Democrats in order to save the country because this this con man keeps telling them that they're under attack.
So this idea of what this grift, how it works, is what we're watching play out now.
It's both real and fake.
It's both legitimate and a con at the exact same time.
Right.
And the danger being that the Marx could take over.
and actually affect, you know, become the monster.
It's almost like in the producers where, not to ruin this for anybody, but they create the worst show possible to have it tank and they get the insurance money, but instead it becomes a comedy and everyone loves it.
It becomes successful that way.
And they have no idea, like they had no conception of that when it started.
Here's one thing I wanted to throw out there, because when we start talking about professional wrestling and how it's fake or how it's not, I instantly remember, this is like 1984, 2020 episode, they interviewed some of these professional wrestlers and this guy John Stossel, and he's asking them, they're showing you how to do it, like they show how and he's asking them, they're showing you how to do it, like they show how he cut his forehead and then with a really thin razor so that it starts bleeding later in the match as if he got hit when I believe the phrase was, red is green.
Red means green, baby.
But at the end when he goes, is it fake, and they're in the bowels of a stadium, this dude hauls off and just hits him as hard as he can on the side of the head.
Knocks him down, he gets up, he does it again, saying, is this fake?
Now, I have to tell you, I think that that might have changed some hearts and minds for a little while.
People thinking, oh, you know what, maybe this really is real.
Look what he's willing to do and, you know, beat this poor reporter who I think, if I recall correctly, was complaining about his hearing not working real well because he boxed his ears to do that.
So that's another kind of interesting thing where that also is playing out to some degree here, too.
Well, okay.
Are you ready?
Because we're getting ready to go.
We're getting ready to go into... That was introductory level wrestling.
Let's go to moderate level wrestling, okay?
Now, remember the terms, right?
A work is a cooperative grift.
It's a lie that we're engaging in, right?
A shoot is real, right?
It's actually happening.
Like this is legitimate.
There are worked shoots.
So when the con men realize that the audience knows that it's fake and they find out that the audience is actually really sort of seduced by shoots.
So So there's an entire, so and at this point when we go up to the moderate level, we don't just have smarts who know what's going on and marks who have no idea.
We have what's called smarks.
who are people who know that wrestling is fake, but they think that fight right there is real.
That one's real.
That one's fake.
That one's fake.
That one's bullshit.
That's a real fight.
They're actually fighting.
And the wrestlers up their game.
And what ends up happening is they're in a reality within a reality.
I say this, by the way, as I'm looking at my calendar.
This weekend, Saturday in fact, there is a major march on Washington.
Do you know about this?
There's a major march on Washington, which is like, don't let them steal the election march.
And it's not Trump, and it's not the Republican Party, Nick.
It's all of the grifters underneath Trump.
It's all of the YouTube people.
It's all of the social media people.
It's all of these people who like, it's almost like Trump is like a shark.
You know the little fish that swim beneath the shark, right?
It's all of the people who have made their money from it.
They know the election wasn't stolen.
They know it.
They know full and well that there's not some computer program that did it and that the Sharpies didn't take it.
They know.
But what are they doing?
They're doing this entire grift in a worked shoot type situation to make themselves more prevalent, to make more money, and to keep the con going.
They know.
And by the way, who is the biggest smirk of them all?
A person like Alex Jones.
Alex Jones knew for years what he was peddling was conspiratorial bullshit.
Until what happened?
He stopped knowing.
And he just went with it.
And he just lived within it, right?
And all of a sudden he didn't know who he was anymore.
And he was lost in that reality.
This is really, really weird stuff.
But it explains who Donald Trump is, what Trumpism is, and what these followers are about.
They're lost in a reality that has absolutely nothing to do with our own.
And the grift just keeps going.
They're going to go with him to this network.
They're going to pay all of his debts.
They're going to continue treating him like he is the President of the United States of America.
They're lost in it.
They are just fundamentally lost in this reality that's been created.
You know you're describing Marlon Brando probably toward the end of his life because he inhabited so many characters as the method actor he kind of forgot who he was and that became personified in Apocalypse Now to reference another movie where him playing Kurtz at the end he was supposed to be a soldier who represented America but at that point was so far deep into the jungle
Had no idea who he really was and what side he was supposed to be fighting for and whether or not he was even an American, which also has interesting parallels to what's going on now, because what we want to try and do in the podcast a lot of times is get into the mind of the typical Trump voter, and they're the ones who have been ping-ponged around for so much.
Again, this is just like we had said last time when, you know, President Nixon had a huge coterie of people who didn't who thought he was set up by the CIA, you know, when he got kicked out of out of office.
And it's set up the same way now, but a lot more.
I mean, it's infinitely more than anything Nixon had, the kind of support that Trump now has.
And I think it's, you know, they set up these hotlines for the fraud.
Right.
And I have to imagine 25 percent are trolls like people calling in.
I saw them on Twitter.
They're hilarious.
Right.
and they're calling in.
and they're describing this most ridiculous thing.
But a lot of them are probably legitimate real people who we had some people have to recant when they actually were interviewed and the investigation happened, which is really embarrassing to some degree.
I don't know if those incidences will actually wake anybody up, though.
If you were to tell them, oh my God, that post office worker totally said that they were backdating ballots.
And if you were to tell them, no, no, no, he recanted.
Oh, the deep state got to him, Nick.
Yeah.
The deep state got to him.
Yeah.
By the way, even the guy himself went on Project Veritas to say, oh yeah, they totally double-talked me into doing this.
But then when you actually hear the whole interview, the interviewees were like, you need a lawyer.
You should have a lawyer here.
Are you sure you don't want one?
Are you sure you're of sound mind and this is your decision to make?
We're not telling you to write this?
And he's like, yeah, no, this is me.
Don't worry about it.
I didn't really hear that.
So it's a mess and it's embarrassing, but that kind of shame doesn't really exist.
It's certainly at the top level with Trump or McConnell.
And that's what's really scary about these kind of people is because they feel no shame, like they probably literally have that whatever that mental disability is where you simply cannot feel shame.
It puts them in situations where they're willing to just burn the whole thing down and they don't have any ethical standards or moral compass to run by.
And this is what we get.
Well, I want to make one more link here.
The most famous wrestler of all time in the modern era is Hulk Hogan.
Right?
And, you know, Hulk Hogan has been disgraced.
Obviously, he got caught on camera using a racial slur.
And one of the things that is really interesting about a person like Hulk Hogan is, and by the way, Hulk Hogan is not his real name.
His real name is Terry Beaulieu, right?
And for Hulk Hogan to hear him talk, he doesn't really understand that there are two people involved.
With the character of Hulk Hogan.
Like, he's just become Hulk Hogan, right?
He's not Terry Bollea anymore.
And you'll hear him tell stories.
And when he tells stories, he will contradict himself within seconds of his stories.
And he'll lie.
And he'll lie about things that could have possibly been true.
And he just makes up scenarios in his head that are part of the mythology of Hulk Hogan.
Well, who does that sound like?
That's Donald Trump.
Donald Trump makes a- and think about the things you hear from Donald Trump.
It's like, oh, people are telling me.
Somebody just came up to me the other day.
Very strong man.
Had tears in his eyes.
I bet he's never cried in his entire life.
And it's like, no, that never happened.
That's made up completely.
But as you're saying it, he's making up the reality that he's living in.
And like all these con artists, and like you were just saying with like an actor, you get lost in the role.
And that's not just actors, and it's not just con men.
That's also human beings.
We play roles.
And that's one of the things that we're not comfortable talking about is we're always trying to play something out in the public sphere.
All these Trump supporters, can you imagine if most of them just said, yes, Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump, and he was totally rejected, and Donald Trump has lost his bid for re-election, and we now live in a country where Joseph Biden will be my new legitimate president.
That is a major, major, major rejection of the identity that they've been playing in the public sphere now for years.
That doesn't work.
It's a cognitive dissonance that just gets flushed out, and this is why the call to Trump continues.
It's faith.
Yeah, well, the new whining or whatever the crisis that they're going through now is, this is all about how for four years they've been taking this shit from all these liberal commie pinko bastards, you know, and then in the culmination of all this, this accusations and all these different things is a rigged election, a fraudulent election.
That's what that's why it makes sense to them, because this was this had always been this way from the very beginning, spied on the campaign, tried to steal it from the deep state, from a duly elected man who should have just easily been president.
And, you know, the weird thing about it is they're kind of conflating, you know, whether or not we thought Russia was a hoax or not.
The voters themselves, we're not in charge of these investigations.
This is like the FBI doing the investigation on Mueller.
And yet when you hear them talking about it now, trying to throw it back in our faces, it's like all of you were attacking us relentlessly for supporting Trump.
And as a result, that's why this is now a fraudulent election.
Those two things are cause and effect.
And that's never going to change.
That's very powerful to them.
And I get it.
And by the way, if any of you Trump supporters out there feel like we vilified you for supporting Trump for four years, good!
Great!
You should feel vilified.
But when you have that poor me mindset, it's very easy to simply go to, oh, it's a fraudulent election and he's right and I'm never going to believe it otherwise.
And that's what's going to damage our elections forever going forward.
Well, there's a lot of stuff that's happening there because it's perceived persecution is what it is.
And we're talking about an almost exclusively white support base, right?
And one of the tenets of white supremacy is perceived persecution.
The idea that even though you control the means of power and wealth in a country, you somehow or another are a victim.
Right?
And you see it in all these polls where it's like, who faces more racism, white people or black people?
And they're like, oh, white people.
White people, absolutely.
It's an insane thing, you know, that they do.
And then on top of that, the double whammy is evangelical white identity Christianity, right?
Which there's the martyrdom baked into that religion.
The idea that, you know, somebody's always coming after you.
Somebody is always in a conspiracy with Satan, and they're always trying to hurt you, and they're trying to take your guns, and their whole society, by the way, this devilish society, right, is trying to push, you know, secular ideas, and, you know, LGBTQ ideas, and abortion, and all this stuff, and they're trying to isolate you and take away your power.
It is that double whammy, and on top of it, All of these conspiracy theories, the New World Order, the Deep State, QAnon, all of it is about that perceived persecution which creates that circle for them.
And if you think that perceived persecution isn't at the heart of Trumpism and emerging fascism in this country, look at what is happening with Fox News right now.
Fox News has been turned into an agent of the Deep State because they called Arizona So now all of a sudden it's just like, oh no, they're traitors.
They're absolutely traitors.
By the way, real fast, just to harken back to what I was saying about wrestling, Fox News is fake news.
Well, except for Hannity and Tucker and Laura, it's the same thing.
It's the grift within the grift within the grift.
But the perceived persecution, it is just... I have been calling it a cult this whole time.
It's a cult.
The numbers are narrowing and the circle is tightening.
Ask me how I know how the ratings at Fox News have been doing during the daytime these days.
How are they?
I mean, Trump is tweeting about it.
He doesn't say anything about COVID.
He starts tweeting about how bad the ratings are at Fox.
And the big all caps tweet he had today, which is always exciting when it's all caps, is the craziest conspiracy of them all, where millions of ballots were stolen.
Millions.
Millions.
Where is this reported?
At OANN.
So this is the new place of choice where he's going to be turning into more.
Again, I'm not even sure how he does it because again, I tried to find it.
I can find it on YouTube, but it's very sparse even on their channel.
They don't always post, I think, everything that they have, all their content.
Somewhere out there, some cable stations, or some cable companies must have it on TV.
So he's watching that now, and that's what's going to be really interesting because in theory that's what he's going to buy out, right?
Or he'll just, I guess, create his own one or Newsmax.
It seems like why waste time screwing around?
Just buy one of these out there and just take it over yourself.
Well, so the actual logistics of what's going to happen in terms of Trump TV or whatever it ends up being called, the problem here is that Donald Trump doesn't want to spend his own money.
ever You know what I mean?
Like there's just no way.
I would not be shocked.
I really would not be shocked if all of these emails, and by the way, I would be remiss if I didn't bring this up because we are a honest podcast.
We are.
We just are.
The amount of emails that Donald Trump has been sending out or the Trump campaign has been sending out fundraising is only matched by the amount of emails being sent out by Democrats.
That's the only thing, and I think that we all know this, and I want to point this out, and this is something people should be reading.
Did you read about this firm, I think it's called Mothership, that got just tons and tons and tons of money from Democratic campaigns, and this was the group that handled the advertising and outreach?
Did you read about this?
No.
This was the group, and I'm sure everybody who's listening has gotten one of these emails.
Bad news.
We're losing.
We're running out of money!
We're falling behind.
And you know all these emails that got, and basically it was to get money to be put into this institution.
We're not talking about the Democratic Party.
We're talking about a bunch of communication strategists who are dealing one another, right?
And by the way, they're about to make tens of millions, if not a hundred million dollars or more from these Georgia special elections.
So this is a giant industry that is disgusting.
But back to my point, I would not be shocked if Donald Trump has his supporters start paying money to him and say something like, we have to find a new place to go.
We've got to find a new network.
If you believe that, here's a fund to donate to.
Here's a political action group to pay for.
And I would not be shocked if he starts getting donations in order to buy this thing from his supporters.
Well, it's a lot like the evangelicals who are flying around in these private jets and having these really lavish lifestyles for the same exact reason.
And they also preach in the same way where, just like the all caps, we're about to be bankrupt, or we're going out of business, or all those things.
Do you know what the original one was?
What?
The original one, I don't know if you remember this, but it was, if I don't raise $10 million by the end of the week, God will strike me dead!
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, and it works.
That's what's scary about it.
Like, these emails from Nigeria don't get written and sent over here asking for money if nobody ever clicked on it and tried to do it.
And yet, people do.
And that's why they continue to do these things.
It's really, really, really scary.
Can I share one funny thing I wanted to... I mentioned on Twitter today, but I just wanted to share about OANN that I noticed today when I was watching one of their videos.
I have to make this clear because I want to be on the record because we like giving people facts.
It was Oral Roberts.
I was trying to get his head in my mind.
He told his viewers if he didn't receive $8 million in three months, God would kill him.
Nick, do you think that worked?
Do you think that worked?
It definitely worked.
Because he received $9 million.
Wow.
I'm going to try that.
I will, I mean, maybe we should go ahead and just, maybe we're in the wrong business.
Maybe grifting is the right business, but go on.
Yeah, listen, I watched House of Games recently and was, you know, enthralled by that and how easy it was for them too.
So, okay, I'm watching OANN and they're doing a report on, somebody embedded it into a tweet, and they're doing a report on COVID, COVID research, and they're talking about a specific scientist.
They cut to the picture of the scientist.
It's literally Dave from 2001 Space Odyssey, still from the movie.
And probably no one even knew or noticed or whatever.
And I'm like, how can this be the news of choice for the United States President when they are literally so bad at that, they couldn't even fake a better picture of a scientist still from a movie.
You know, and I just had to relive the whole scene when he's shutting down Hal.
And, you know, don't do that, Dave.
I just love that.
I want people to understand this.
We've now watched four years of Fox News just bathing Donald Trump's boots with their tongues.
I mean, just talking about how strong he is, his endurance, just absolutely laundering everything that he has done.
Here's something to think about.
That's not enough for him.
That's not enough.
He wants more and he needs more.
Think about the fact that Fox News is more restricted by journalistic ethics than these contenders.
Oh yeah.
Than OAN and Newsmax.
Because if you watch a segment on either one of these shows, they're bad, Nick.
I mean, they don't even approach journalism.
Think about how much worse it's going to be than what Fox News has been.
You know, and speaking of Fox News, you know, we're seeing a lot of these cross-cutting of what pundits said on the right in 2016 about the election versus what they're saying now and how, you know, the liberals need to accept the results and there isn't any fraud and he's, you know, whatever.
Which, I'm not sure anybody was really out there in the streets crying foul on the votes.
I mean, I know we were upset that Trump won and all that stuff.
But you go and they show Kayleigh McEnany's spots on Fox News.
Remember back then when she was just a contributor to Fox News.
But it's so obvious when you watch those spots that she was just auditioning to get hired by Trump.
She knew that Trump watched this all the time and she knew she could.
So I don't know what her role would be.
Because you need to have a name for a role of someone who's trying to get hired and is also in on it but not quite hired yet by them.
And we saw this a number of times on Fox News.
Katie McFarlane was one of these.
Bill Barr's audition memo was another.
Although that wasn't Fox.
But either way, it was so stunning to me to watch this stuff.
Not for the hypocrisy, but for how blatant it was that they're just simply auditioning.
Yeah, and there's a lot of money and power in this.
I mean, this is a grift that works.
And not only does it work, it was an insidious and an ingenious grift, what has been done here.
And it's very important that we point this out.
Remember how I was talking about, like, you have the grift and then you have the grift upon the grift, right?
The Republican Party and Fox News has been pulling this grift for decades.
They've been saying that liberals are socialists and they're coming to get your guns and they're, you know, they're traitors and they're un-American, all this.
Think about what Trump did starting in the summer of 2015.
He came out and he said, Oh, Republicans are liars.
They don't tell you the truth and Fox News doesn't tell you the truth.
I'm the one who will tell you the truth.
And all of a sudden they were like, Oh yeah, whatever your truth is, let's go with that.
It's the grift upon the grift.
Those other guys are fun.
That fight's fake.
That fight's fake.
That fight's real.
Right there.
And it's the exact same thing.
The grift evolves upon the grift.
And we have reached the point where the grift is about to become as full-blown evolved as one can possibly be.
I mean, we are getting ready to watch the birth of an anti-presidency.
We're getting ready to watch the birth of a mythology that the American presidency was stolen.
We're getting ready to watch the birth of literal, literal, literal, literal propaganda.
Like not even like pretending to be a news station.
Propaganda that's going to be beamed out around the world for God knows how long and God knows what to what effect.
You know where I thought you were going with this when you're talking about him maybe like taking over or creating Trump TV or whatever.
I almost thought you were going to say well he's just going to create his own government.
Like he's just going to create a parallel shadow government spurred on by these rallies, which, you know, by the way, that could also be the grift, right?
We're going to start – we're going to pass laws and we're going to do all this stuff, right?
And then all of a sudden like enough people kind of get involved and they just start to follow those laws.
And they literally do create their own country, their own government.
I don't know what you'd call it.
That is another thing that'd be really scary because what if he's like joking off the cuff and says certain shit that would be like, oh, let's have a law against people wearing blue shirts, right?
And the next thing you know, they never wear another blue shirt for the rest of their lives or whatever.
And then they start beating up people wearing blue shirts.
I don't know.
But like, that's the kind of thing that could also take hold.
And I would not be surprised.
Well, so real fast before we go off that end, and by the way, it really frightens me that we've been pretty right on all of this stuff and now we're talking about this.
I'm glad that you said shadow government because on Monday I wanted to announce that Vice TV is going to start running the documentary miniseries that I'm a part of.
Called, while the rest of us die, Shadow Government.
It's going to be airing on VICE starting this coming Monday the 16th, I believe at 9pm.
It's voiced by Jeffrey Wright.
He's everywhere, by the way.
He's what the kids call hot.
He's hot.
But off of what you were saying, I really want to take this to the logical next step because what you brought up is a great point.
You're going to have this Trumpism that's still going to be the head of the party, right?
It's still going to be the direction of the party.
You don't think that all of his decrees, which by the way are going to be completely divorced from any consequences, There's no vote to be had about whether or not he's doing a good job, right?
There's no ethics office to say he's doing anything wrong.
So they're going to be issuing decrees.
He'll probably talk every single night and say what he thinks should happen.
And by the way, it's like Rush Limbaugh.
Rush Limbaugh has never had consequences about what he's pushed.
It just so happened to push the Republican Party further and further right and into the madness.
Donald Trump will probably come out and put out these decrees.
You don't think that Republican lawmakers and Republican legislatures won't be held up to the task of conforming to Trump's decrees when he has no responsibility whatsoever?
That's exactly what's going to happen in the Republican Party.
And it's going to go further right.
Like, this thing is not over.
We kept saying this.
Defeating him in the election was only the beginning of a much larger battle.
And the battle is even beyond defeating Trumpism.
It's about what do we want the country to be outside of Trumpism?
We still have to wipe the map of Trumpism.
It's going to be a problem we're going to be dealing with for the rest of our lives.
Right.
Now, we heard Michael Cohen say what we've been saying before, which is that come Christmastime, he'll probably go to Mar-a-Lago and just stay there and never come back and just ignore that the election ever happened.
But it's almost like he can just continue being president because if he continues to do his rallies, and watches TV all day and tweets, there's no difference between that and what he was doing the last four years.
So in his addled mind, he could simply be like, yeah, we're just taking a bit of a pause until 2024.
And which, as soon as that happens, as soon as he announces, and I think it's pretty clear that he's going to, that just ends anybody else's candidacy on the Republican side.
They won't run.
They can't run.
They'll get demolished.
They know that Trump would be too strong.
Now, something could happen in between then where, like, you know, well, Trump could lose his mind and literally, you know, have to be committed because his dementia takes over.
But, you know, he could get arrested and actually prosecuted and then have a record.
I'm pretty sure you can't run for president with a record like that.
So those two things could happen.
So that's why it's almost imperative that they got to put this guy away.
for X amount of time.
But the point stands.
Without those two things happening, the presidency continues for him.
He gets to live in this same thing with even less, like, yeah, less consequences, less stress or pressure to do stuff, of which he He doesn't have to live in Washington, D.C.
He doesn't have to have meetings.
He doesn't have to get briefings.
everybody left and right, no matter who he wants to, to keep himself A, in the news, and then B, to keep the pressure on those guys to conform to him.
It's almost a win-win for him if you think about it.
And that's kind of depressing, actually.
- It's the perfect job.
- Yeah.
- It's the perfect job.
He doesn't have to live in Washington, D.C.
He doesn't have to have meetings.
He doesn't have to get briefings.
He doesn't have to work at all. - He doesn't have to share any of the money now.
He can do his own fundraising and it goes right to him!
It goes right to him.
And then meanwhile, everywhere he goes, they treat him like he's still the president.
They play Hail to the Chief.
They completely grovel at his feet.
He'll still have rallies.
There's no way the rallies are going to stop.
I'm shocked there hasn't already been one.
I'm shocked.
The rallies are not going to stop.
And here's the thing, and I say this because we need to understand it.
And I know that it is depressing on a certain extent, but we can't lie about this thing.
We have to be prepared for it.
Yes, we can say, I'm not going to pay attention to Donald Trump anymore.
You may be done with Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is not done with you.
And Donald Trump is not done with the United States of America.
I agree with you.
I think his shadow is going to loom over all of this for the next few years.
We have to.
And by the way, that means that we have to do the hard work of proving ourselves and showing that we can make the country better and the world better.
And then in 2024, I don't think he'll run again, but I think he'll play kingmaker for someone else.
And I think the Republican Party is just going to keep creeping deeper and deeper into this stuff and working themselves into a shoot.
Which, by the way, while I'm thinking about it, that's what happened with the Tea Party.
That whole thing was totally bullshit.
And then they worked themselves into a shoot.
That's how you get Matt Getz, who I think right now is recovering from coronavirus.
You know, like, you end up with the dumbest, most corrupt, most fascistic party imaginable.
I can't add to that.
Yeah.
So here's hoping, knock on wood again, as we always do at the end of the week, that we don't have to do an emergency podcast with some sort of emergency or whatever.
Nah, we're good.
We're totally fine.
I think we're going to beat this thing.
I think we're going to beat this thing, but it's just going to be so much work.
It really, really is.
But I believe in us.
I believe in you, the listener.
We're going to come back next week.
And again, if you haven't already, sign up as a patron over at patreon.com slash muckrickpodcast.
You can unlock exclusive material, including next week's episode where we dive deep into Forrest Gump.
Run, Forrest!
Wow.
I love you, Gen A.
Wow.
We're going to talk about Forrest Gump and the mythology at the heart of it.
Again, I think we're going to have some disagreements on this movie.
We were talking about it before we started recording.
Yeah.
I think we will.
By the way, I'm really cool because my mom gave me the book in 1986 when it came out.
So I was way ahead of Forrest Gump before it became this, you know, feature Hollywood film or hit Hollywood, whatever they call it in the book now.
So yeah, we'll have some things to discuss.
Yeah, we're gonna dive into that, talk about the politics behind it, the mythology making.
I think it's done some real damage to American culture.
Oh, okay.
So we'll have a good conversation about that.
That means it's not a fun movie, but it's done some real damage.
But until next time, you can find Nick over at CanYouHearMesMitch.
