Donald Trump is impeached. Again. Meanwhile, the GOP is divided between distancing themselves from the man they used for years and a contingent who are embracing him even closer. In this week’s Weekender bonus show, Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman sort through the news and madness. To become a patreon subscriber to listen to the full episode, click HERE: http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| Hey everybody! | |
| Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast. | |
| I'm Nick Hauselmann and this is an announcement to let you know that we are going to be doing a new series called The Weekender over on Patreon that will appear every Friday. | |
| And this is a little sneak preview so you can get a handle on what it's like and why you'd want to go over there. | |
| And join the Patreon and be part of that community, which has been incredible and amazing. | |
| A lot of people there and a lot of great conversations. | |
| So, here it is. | |
| Check it out. | |
| And feel free to check out the actual Patreon as well at patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast. | |
| Hey, everybody. | |
| Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast, the Weekender Edition. | |
| Things are nuts, man. | |
| Things are just nuts. | |
| It has been another week. | |
| We have watched, just a quick run through, we have watched Donald John Trump become the first president in the history of the United States of America who has been impeached twice, Nick, twice, two times, not one, twice, two times impeached, including the largest bipartisan vote, | |
| Including a smattering of Republicans, including Liz Cheney, who's along for the ride at this point. | |
| Mitch McConnell has signaled that he's okay with convicting Donald Trump. | |
| It does not sound like this is going to get done before the inauguration, something that we need to talk about. | |
| But meanwhile, by the way, the threat completely persists. | |
| It seems like members of Congress were probably complicit in the coup attempt. | |
| How are you doing, Nick? | |
| How are you processing all this? | |
| I'm doing great. | |
| I do think that McConnell is full of shit. | |
| I think he's only doing this to hold it over Trump for the next seven days to keep him in line, just to kind of keep him from doing anything else crazy, which I don't know is possible anyway. | |
| But I feel that McConnell will certainly vote against an impeachment after he's out of office or whatever. | |
| But then again, Right. | |
| There is this distant notion that after they convict him, they can then vote to not allow him to ever run for office again. | |
| Right. | |
| And I don't believe they can do that unless he's convicted. | |
| So I suspect that that carrot at the other end of the conviction or the other end of the trial would could be enough for these senators. | |
| It's going to take a lot, though. | |
| They need, what, like 17, 18 Senators to actually do that. | |
| But man, how nice would that be if at least that many collectively said, we don't want this anymore. | |
| We'll figure out other ways to win if we're Republicans. | |
| I don't know what those other ways are, but it would be really nice for them to get to that point. | |
| Do you really feel like they would, though? | |
| No. | |
| Not at all? | |
| No, I don't. | |
| And I hate to say that, but no, I don't think we're actually going to get to the votes to convict him. | |
| We're going to have a lot of Republicans who are going to make a big spectacle out of considering it, which, you know, they didn't really do the first time. | |
| You know, they were just, yeah. | |
| They're very concerned, Nick. | |
| This is the sound, by the way, of everyone who's listening. | |
| This is just the sound of wringing of hands, the champing of nails. | |
| Yeah, they're going to talk about it. | |
| They're going to think about it. | |
| There will be a handful of them that will join Mitt Romney this time. | |
| At least we'll have that. | |
| But no, you're exactly right. | |
| Everybody, and you know, we've been at this long enough, you know, it's Lucy with the football man. | |
| Everybody's like, Mitch McConnell has grown a conscience. | |
| He's done with it. | |
| He hasn't grown a conscience, like Twitter and all these other big tech companies that profited off of Donald Trump and squeezed him for everything he was worth, and then all of a sudden, this is too much. | |
| He's off. | |
| He's done. | |
| We're a week before he's done. | |
| There's a reason why Mitch McConnell's playing this game. | |
| He's trying to get back all the corporate donors, and a lot of Republicans are very interested in making sure that the corporate donors, and by the way, for the record, Nick, Those corporate donors are going to come back. | |
| They're not going to completely eschew politics, and they're not going to not give their money to the Republican Party. | |
| They scored a public relations bonanza with this, where people are like, that is a good company. | |
| I assume they're out for the right thing. | |
| But no, this thing is not going to work out the way that we want it to. | |
| And that's frustrating, but thank God they impeached him and did the right thing. | |
| The Democrats needed to do it. | |
| A lot of them were a little worried about it. | |
| Maybe we should do this. | |
| Maybe we shouldn't do it. | |
| They did the right thing. | |
| It turned out the right way. | |
| Congratulations. | |
| Right. | |
| It's just a little bit disgusting that they gave the Republican House members this megaphone to lay out some ridiculous... I mean, the mental gymnastics that they're going through is really outstanding and crazy, amazingly crazy, how they could still stay on this side of the fence or his side of the fence. | |
| In the name of, like, healing the country, we must just ignore all these things. | |
| Yeah, but wait, some of them Some of them were very concerned about healing and unity, Nick. | |
| Some were... some just... I don't think it's the right thing to inflame these people. | |
| By the way, a lot of these are the ones who are like, uh, if we don't crack down on all civil liberties, the terrorists will have won. | |
| And now they're like, oh wait, have you seen our base? | |
| They're crazy as shit. | |
| You do not want to upset them. | |
| Did you see what they did to the Capitol? | |
| Like, you do not want to poke that bear. | |
| Then there was another group of people. | |
| Did you watch all this? | |
| Did you tune in for the impeachment? | |
| Well, here's the thing. | |
| I watched some of it, listened to some of it, and here's the key. | |
| Because it was so condensed, they only had like 30 seconds at a time to speak. | |
| That's how they should do it all the time. | |
| It was, like, awesome. | |
| Even the people at Spooch viewing the horrible shit, because it was so concise, it was like, this is what they should be doing. | |
| Otherwise, it is just a soapbox for these people to mouth off for five minutes at a time. | |
| So I did. | |
| I did see these things, and yes. | |
| I haven't heard someone use the phrase mouth off in so long. | |
| I feel like I got transported back into the 1990s, early 2000s. | |
| Thank you for that. | |
| You're welcome. | |
| But did you hear Gates? | |
| Did you hear his spiel? | |
| Did I hear his spiel? | |
| No, tell me what he said. | |
| Oh, well, everything. | |
| The whole point is that there were some Republicans who want to distance themselves from Trump because the party has to do a dance, right? | |
| They have to be very careful about what they do because they got to keep Trump's base home, even though Trump's base wants to literally murder them. | |
| Literally wants to murder them. | |
| By the way, when I say murder, I mean drag them out of their homes in front of an angry mob and hang them. | |
| They still have to appeal to them. | |
| They still have to keep them home. | |
| They still have to keep them fundraising and voting for them. | |
| Those people are like, well, we don't like this, but in the name of unity, we need to move on. | |
| But then there's this new Trump caucus and Matt Gaetz is like at the head of that caucus, man. | |
| He was just like, the election was stolen, this is about Hunter Biden, it's the fake news media including Fox News, he's talking about Black Lives Matter protests, which by the way just to refresh everyone's memory and this was the story you and I were reporting, | |
| The violence that everyone is now saying that happened at Black Lives Matter, which is the exact same as a horde of people trying to carry off a coup attempt at the Capitol, the violence at the BLM protests were carried out by the same people who tried to carry out a coup who were trying to blend in and were trying to inflame tensions and also change the narrative. | |
| Meanwhile, though, it doesn't matter for Gates, it doesn't matter for people like him, and this entire, by the way, group of people in the Republican Party who decided to deal with inflamed tensions by carrying guns into the Capitol, going around metal detectors, | |
| Pushing around Capitol Police and they are all in man They're in and it was so demoralizing and infuriating and just absolutely telling of where we're going now Here's the thing though because the a lot of the violence we saw for the Black Lives Matter stuff over the over the summer Was caused by the cops I would have wholeheartedly welcomed that kind of violence at the Capitol if they would have done it. | |
| Because when you see, and by the way, they're going to uncover exactly why the police presence was so tepid. | |
| I'm not sure that's the right word, but it's whatever it was, completely ineffectual. | |
| Nick, they were taking selfies with these people. | |
| They were directing them to offices. | |
| They were wearing their hats and displaying their flags. | |
| A couple of people have already been suspended for playing a role in this. | |
| Not to mention, by the way, that there were off-duty cops all throughout this thing. | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| I mean, there's a retired fireman who's now arrested because he threw, ironically, a fire extinguisher at the heads of some of these cops. | |
| The guy who did it. | |
| Was it true? | |
| It's true, yeah. | |
| A retired fireman. | |
| Wow. | |
| He got arrested. | |
| They found him. | |
| Listen, technology is great. | |
| They found the clip, they identified who he was, and now he's arrested. | |
| But, I mean, listen, at some point you're like, well, yeah, why aren't they willing to just beat the shit out of these people like they did over the summer? | |
| And why didn't they have more of these cops? | |
| But yeah, it was a great thread I saw on Twitter from someone who was there, who was documenting everything, who had been to all the other The Black Lives Matter protests all summer long and like they couldn't express how different the response was by the police and by the people in charge. | |
| To the point where even the cops that were there were just milling around a lot of the time and no sense of urgency at all. | |
| Obviously there were cops inside that were battling, you know, whatever, fist to fist, whatever that's, you know, within an inch of their lives. | |
| So we did have a few of those people. | |
| And then we obviously have Eugene Goodman, who thankfully went the other way and saved people from going to the right, which would have been into the chambers of the Senate. | |
| Uh, but other than that, it's across the board. | |
| It's really startling when you look at it that way. | |
| We're going to find out, I think, eventually, when they have, you know, numerous investigations of this, like they did for Benghazi. | |
| But you know what? | |
| Here's the one thing, I don't think we made it clear in the last one. | |
| We made fun of the Benghazi, like, thank, you know, at least they did those investigations. | |
| What I didn't point out then, I need to point out now and make it really, really clear was, The Benghazi was never about Benghazi, right? | |
| No. | |
| It was always about trying to screw Hillary Clinton's campaign chances, which, by the way, they did. | |
| It worked perfectly because they wouldn't have found out about the emails had it not been for the 13th investigation into Benghazi. | |
| There is no similar equivalent here, and not to say that the Democrats would do it anyway, but nonetheless, someone is going to have to go to prison for not doing their job. | |
| Multiple people. | |
| And by the way, we haven't even... I love that we are in such weird ass accelerated times that we can talk for minutes on a podcast and still miss out on things that would be the largest story of a decade any other time. | |
| It now appears pretty obvious and by the way like this is like not just outlets are reporting this but like the right like insurgents are reporting this which is that this wasn't just a bunch of people who got there. | |
| They were paid for and organized and trained by some of the wealthiest Republican and corporate donors on the right. | |
| They got a bunch of people there in order to get them whipped up, to make them angry, and to make a point out of this thing. | |
| Which, by the way, just this is exactly like the Koch brothers creating the Tea Party movement and using conspiracy theories and white supremacist paranoia in order to get tax cuts and deregulate the government. | |
| On top of that, the call was coming from inside the house, Nick. | |
| Like, there were apparently Apparently, Republican Congress people who gave them a reconnaissance tour, who told them where to go. | |
| It looks like, and I've looked at it from every angle, I've considered this over and over and over again. | |
| Shining star of the Congress, Lauren Boebert, by the way, who, you know, looking back on how she got to Congress, her entire campaign was, I'll carry a gun to Congress. | |
| They can't stop me from carrying a gun to Congress. | |
| Congratulations, Lauren. | |
| You realized your campaign promise. | |
| You carried a gun to Congress, but also carried a phone in which it looked like she was giving directions to the right-wing mob. | |
| And on top of that, it's not like this was out of nowhere. | |
| People had trained for this. | |
| They had the schematics. | |
| of the Capitol. | |
| They knew where they were going. | |
| They knew how they were doing it. | |
| A lot of these people were ex-military, ex-law enforcement, white supremacists, white terrorists. | |
| This is such a massive, massive scandal that is, it's just a festering boil, Nick. | |
| And it's not, it's not going to get figured out anytime soon. | |
| And I have to tell you that the news media, you've seen this, there will be a moment like two years from now where there will be like some jaw-dropping like announcement or discovery. | |
| And everyone will be like, what the hell? | |
| And then, you know, most people won't even pay attention to it. | |
| You know, it's like everything that we found out about Bush in Afghanistan, and Bush with Iraq, and Bush with 9-11, and it'll just drop, and it's so frustrating to have witnessed something of this magnitude, and this large of a problem, and to know that it's going to be forever before we get to the bottom of just how insidious this thing was. | |
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