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Sept. 21, 2021 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
01:00:37
Turns Out Trump Was Crazier Than We Thought

Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the bombshell reporting from Bob Woodward and Robert Costa's new book, detailing a mini-coup from JCOS Milley and Vice President Pence's ol' college try to overturn the election. To support the show and access additional content, including the weekly Weekender episode, become a patron at http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hey everybody, just a real quick note.
We got so excited about this topic today, so enraged by it, that we kind of just rolled through the fact that this was our 150th episode.
Wow.
It is.
Can't believe it.
You didn't have any gray hair in your beard when we started, Jared.
Now, that is a lie, but I will say that during the run of this show, I have gotten infinitely more gray.
And I look forward to just going completely gray and just absolutely losing my mind as we move forward.
We just want to say really, really quickly, thank you for your support.
We could not do this show without you.
You mean the world to us.
You have kept us sane and motivated and energized and hopeful while we've been covering Some of the most necessary, but also infuriating things.
Yeah, so I can't believe how amazing the community is over on Patreon as well.
Just a terrific community of people who want to come together and figure some things out.
Yeah, so, you know, if you've been dragging your feet on supporting the show over on Patreon, that's patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
What a time to do it!
150th episode!
Let's celebrate together!
Alright everybody, let's get to the show.
Don't forget, they have tough vaccine rules over at Fox News.
Over 90% of its employees are vaccinated.
As a company, Fox appears to be siding with Dr. Fauci over Mr. Ed.
It's very reasonable to expect now that if you are unvaccinated, you will get this virus.
It is just a matter of time.
It is impossible to live in this country now, unvaccinated, and escape getting infected.
Tell me what you think happened on January 6th at Congress.
They showed truckloads of people that they were bringing in for this.
It was all staged.
And that's how that started.
They even showed pictures of us on the news about these vehicles coming in with all these BLM people.
We don't even watch the news on TV.
We don't feel like that we are being told the truth.
And we find our truth in other ways, and I won't say what those other ways are, but I feel like we're not being told the truth because we're trying to be swayed in a direction that we know is not the right direction.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the McCrick Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates-Axton here, as always, with Nick Halsman.
Nick, we are Quickly approaching fall, the autumnal season, which means that we are beginning a rollout of one of my favorite moments of the year, which is when the big books start getting released, when we start putting things on the shelves, that way we can, you know, have it out there for the Christmas holiday season.
The good news is this year, 2021, we are now leaving the Trump presidency, which means we are going to get flooded With one book after another which explores the Trump presidency.
We've got a book coming out that shows that Melania Trump, I don't know, is a bad person.
Who cares?
She doesn't care.
No, she doesn't care.
Nobody cares.
Nobody wants this book.
I guess we can read it for gossip purposes.
I don't know.
But we have to start this episode talking about we're at this moment where some previews start coming out of these books and We've talked about it before on the podcast, where these books, these exclusives that are coming out, and Bob Woodward is the absolute king of this.
Nobody holds on to pertinent information like Bob Woodward, which we've discussed in the past.
And we have to talk about a couple of incredibly troubling Exposes that have come out from this new book that Bob Woodward is releasing with Robert Costa of the Washington Post.
I don't know about you, Nick.
With each one of these exclusives that previews the book and makes us want to go out and buy these, I go into new rages that I didn't know that I was capable of.
You gotta admire the hustle, man.
Here's the problem, though, and we've done this before, where some of the revelatory details in these books probably would have been helpful had we known them, like, when he found them out a little bit more, and then they put these in their pocket and saved them for these releases, and so it's one thing if it's a book on, you know, sports or something, where, oh, that's an explosive, but hey, This is like life and death kind of stuff here that they're withholding and that's where we get into this you know enragement I'd imagine right?
Yeah and you know the the bullshit that we're talking about here and you know you brought up life and death we're gonna talk about the coronavirus in a little bit and vaccinations.
This is one of those situations where infamously It was on the record that Donald Trump knew that the coronavirus was incredibly deadly, even as he went out in public and said that it was basically a flu.
It wasn't a big deal.
It was just going to disappear.
And that information got held until this entire situation got so screwed up and so turned around and so knotted that we have now reached a point where as of today, at least officially, because we have no idea how many people have died at this point.
that we have now reached a point where as of today, at least officially, because we have no idea how many people have died at this point, the tragedy of the coronavirus pandemic has now surpassed the Spanish flu pandemic in the United States.
All of that was avoidable if only this information would have come forward.
But you got to hold on to those sweet, sweet nuggets.
That way you can make the news and that way you can sell the books, right?
I mean, that's not an ethical problem at all, right?
Well, you know who you're talking to, right?
So somebody who makes their living off of, you know, advertisement and online and whatever.
It's So again, I don't want to, I'm not going to respect the hustle, but I certainly understand it.
But yes, it's a real problem.
By the way, can I bring this up right now?
As far as Woodward goes, I had read a really fascinating article over the weekend about a guy that had written a John Belushi biography that was commissioned by his wife much after the fact because the original biography that she had commissioned from Woodward
was so wrought with misunderstandings of the facts that they required a rewriting and this author actually walks us through how it's not like it's not factual what he reports in the book but it's his interpretation and his own bullshit stamp on these things that ultimately gives you the almost the exact opposite impression of what really happened and you have to be careful because he clearly does this with his books too
So there's a whole unreliable narrator aspect that might not really be out there in the open too much, but like kind of opened my eyes to that.
And so there's no question that there's, you know, in the service of explosiveness and selling books, you have to wonder just what he's, how he's twisting these quotes and these nuggets and information.
Yeah, so Bob Woodward is a really interesting case.
And, you know, what we're getting ready to talk about here in just a second is going to be one of those situations where we really start getting into some of the problematic stuff with Bob Woodward.
Of course, everybody knows that Woodward was part of the Washington Post investigation into what would eventually become known as Watergate.
This is a reporter who has been credited in large part with bringing down an American president, which is the high watermark of American journalism, at least in the modern era.
Right.
And based on that, Woodward has basically not had to pay for his own dinner since the 1970s.
And on top of that, he's sort of built this cult of status around himself.
So basically, Every president elected post Nixon has a standing meeting with Woodward where Woodward comes in and basically talks to the president and writes one to four to eight books about that president.
And one of the things we keep finding is that he has all the access.
But it's that mentality that you were talking about earlier, that hustle, that continues to sort of haunt us.
And there's been stuff that Woodward has brought to the forefront, which has magnitude and importance, but a lot of the time, like you were saying, there are these conclusions that he draws, or what I would argue, and this is where we stand today, where he is so inundated With all this palace intrigue and all of the insider ideas that he witnesses some really fucked up shit.
And it's just like, oh, that's politics.
That's how this whole thing works.
And the things that we're going to talk about today are things honest to God.
And I and we talk about this a lot.
People should be losing sleep over.
These are massive moments in American history that Bob Woodward has just sort of folded into this book and is now releasing a little bit at a time in order to gen up book sales.
Absolutely.
And again, this is not just, you know, a riveting tale that he's a yarn that he's taking us through that's a fun romp through You know some ancient political times these are things that directly affect us right now and The revelations needed to come out like specifically and here's the thing obviously it's going we're gonna discuss how it paints Trump as a completely incompetent buffoon and in a mentally unstable and
Maybe it doesn't matter.
Like, maybe it didn't matter if it came out before the election.
Now, he lost the election anyway, right, on those things.
But I think at this point, maybe that's what he's feeling, is that I could have released these things and it wouldn't have mattered.
It wouldn't have changed the people who are, you know, deify him and their opinion of him.
And specifically, I'm not sure, do we want to, because we have to get into the COVID stuff, because of what Trump had led his constituents to believe as far as, you know, COVID and then the vaccines.
So but that's the real concern here is that we are in a situation where it probably doesn't even matter when presented with specific facts.
It's not going to change anyone's opinion or vote.
And, you know, in a way, we're going to talk about Donald Trump today, but we're not even talking about Donald Trump.
We're talking about existing problems in the United States of America.
The things that this show is going to get into today, Donald Trump is a player in them, right?
Because obviously he's a dangerous person.
But even post-Trump, the things that we're discussing today are incredibly dangerous and looming in an existential crisis.
And I know this is going to shock you, Nick, and I know this is going to shock the listeners at home.
So grab hold of your seat.
Make sure your seatbelt's on.
Make sure you're not, you know, racing through traffic.
Our media and our political class have no idea what in the hell is going on and no idea how to approach this stuff, no idea how to even comprehend it, and it has been turned into a spectacle.
It's been turned into an item to buy and take home and read and to reinforce whatever opinion you have while, and again this is Bob Woodward's sort of, you know, special power, Not drilling deeper than the surface and understanding what these moments we're getting ready to discuss actually reveal about this American moment in the crisis that we're in.
Exactly.
All again in the service of selling books.
In the service of selling books.
So we're gonna jump right into one of these things, and of course this was a release through CNN, and just to let everybody know, the way that this business structure works, right, is you get this book, you get all this insider access, you get people to speak on the record, you write the book, and then after you've written the book, you sit on it for a while, you let it incubate for a while until you get close enough to the release date of your book.
And again, Woodward and Acosta are releasing this book, Peril.
So what do you do at that point?
You start having your agent or you start having your salespeople sort of let go of little tidbits, right?
And you send them to major newspapers, you send them to media companies, you send them to people, and then they become a story.
And that story gets a lot of clicks, a lot of eyeballs, and the next thing you know, people want to read the book and it sells the book.
In this case, what ended up getting leaked before this book came out was that General Mark Milley, the Joint Chiefs chairman, who you might have heard his name come up a couple of times before.
The right had a field day because he said he wanted to understand white rage and of course they, you know, said he was a CRT general or whatever.
But after January 6th, this is what Woodward and Costa report in their book.
General Milley, deeply shaken by the assault of January 6th, was quote-unquote certain that Donald Trump had gone into a serious mental decline in the aftermath of the election.
Real fast, that's enough already for a major thing that maybe we should have heard about, we all suspected, but isn't it important for our leaders to probably say, you know what, we have a mad president on our hands?
Isn't that like a major, massive problem?
I mean right we knew this this wasn't this isn't the shocker right we knew this anyway but yes to have the Joint Chiefs of Staff like come out and say it probably I mean I don't know what you do with that again what's what picture that scenario they're not gonna invoke the 25th amendment right because they were trying to get it to do like that's the other thing is that leadership we've already learned that was trying to get the 25th amendment Yeah.
to come into action while everybody sort of sat on their thumbs and waited on leaders to do something.
You have a mad president.
And like Richard Nixon, it's funny, we're going to talk a little bit more about Nixon today.
Like Richard Nixon, wandering the halls of the White House, like drunk off his ass in the middle of a mental meltdown.
Yeah.
Don't forget the crying.
And don't forget the crying and getting on his knees and holding onto Henry Kissinger's lapels and asking While that's happening, Americans are at home sleeping as the President of the United States, who is vested with incredible power, could, let me check my notes, destroy all life on earth.
Right.
Well, you know, because you want to point out how bad the media is at covering all this.
I would say the government itself ...is a severe problem when we're talking about a person like this in the White House.
They did not really do a proper calculus of this, especially because a nuclear bomb did not exist back when they wrote the Constitution.
And so the entire process of the nuclear football, which they tried to shore up a little bit after the Nixon debacle, and by the way, just to make that clear, his Joint Chief of Staff also had a standing order that if anything comes in on missile orders, you better clear it through me first, especially if it's in the middle of the night.
Is that legal?
That's a coup, you know?
It's a coup!
What we are talking about today literally is a military coup.
A mini coup, but it's a coup, and yes.
A mini coup!
Okay, so to go ahead, we've already sort of spoiled the story a little bit.
This is from the book.
In response to Donald Trump's mental well-being and meltdown, General Milley took extraordinary action and called a secret meeting in his Pentagon office on January 8th, two days after January 6th, to review the process for military action, including launching nuclear weapons.
Speaking to senior military officials in charge of the National Military Command Center, the Pentagon's war room, Milley instructed them not to take orders from anyone unless he was involved.
Quote-unquote, this is what Millie told Woodward and Costa.
No matter what you are told, you do the procedure.
You do the process.
And I'm part of the procedure.
I mean, for real.
And for people who don't know this, and I'm sorry to cause concern, we want to get the facts straight, we want to give background, we want to give context.
People need to understand, there is one individual In the United States of America, who has the power to call on a nuclear strike, that is the President of the United States of America.
There's a reason why that happened.
It's because the decision was made that the ability to launch a nuclear strike would be in civilian hands, not in the military's hands.
And in this case, what Milley did, literally, is he took that decision from its constitutional place and placed it Upon himself.
One man did that just based on what he decided.
Right.
Now, let's just say this.
This wasn't in secret.
This was in front of the entire staff and the call he made to China as well, which is getting a lot of... He called China!
Yes.
He called China.
And by the way, real fast, before you go forward, because I know what you're getting ready to say.
Before you move forward, we need to point this out.
Listen, I don't want Donald Trump to have control of nuclear weapons.
I don't think that Donald Trump was fit to have nuclear weapons.
My problem isn't with that.
My problem is that the military of the United States of America took power unconstitutionally in a mini-coup.
Well, but over and over again.
This is not the only time.
We heard all the time when the guy's like, yeah, we're not going to do any of that, whatever Trump had laid out.
But I can also see why Milley was so concerned because look at the facts.
The facts of the matter were that the president inspired an attempted coup on his own terms and an attempt to take over the government.
There's now a few more weeks before he actually has to give up power, which it's unclear if he's going to do that because he's not recognizing the election as legitimate.
So every major power in the world had to have been panicked that he was going to do something because that was the next logical step.
Luckily, logic isn't the kind of thing that happens with Trump and people around him.
But the next logical step in all this would have been, yes, some sort of military strike to then seize control of the country under the guise of, well, we're in the middle of a military conflict.
I cannot hand over power.
I must see this through.
And there have been times when that probably would have been somewhat of a compelling argument if the guy wasn't insane, batshit crazy.
And by the way, that brings us to the looming problem.
And there are a few of them.
First and foremost, and this is just a side thing, our media and political class have just sort of shrugged their shoulders at this whole thing.
The Republican Party and the right have said that it was problematic that he called China, which, to be honest, It was a little weird and a little problematic.
That's the smallest of the issues.
The real issues here are that the president of the United States has a unilateral power to end life on Earth.
That is a problem, and it's been a problem from the very beginning.
This is a leftover from the Cold War.
This was the idea that Russia was going to flood America with missiles, and you couldn't waste any time.
The American president had to have the ability to immediately either retaliate or launch a strike, right?
The fact that the president of the United States, which by the way Donald Trump was, like the fact that they have that unilateral power, that's a problem.
The second major thing in all of this is that our military should not be able to do this shit.
They shouldn't be in a position where they can suddenly come in and then unilaterally take it away.
We have agreements, we have laws, we have a constitution, we have things that are supposed to happen and things that aren't supposed to happen.
If you think that it's good that there are some quote-unquote adults in the military who will take care of something, I have to tell you that one of the ways that countries like the United States of America falls, military coups.
They look at the entire thing and they say, you know what, your leaders aren't working, your political class isn't working, society isn't working.
You know what you need?
You need military rule.
And that's something that happens time and time again.
This, and this is a scientific term, So I want people to know this.
This is what we refer to as a clusterfuck.
Right.
Well, you know, the irony is that what we're worried about with the military taking over and doing these things is that they're going to launch a missile and be incredibly hawkish and their essence is going to be polluted and whatever, you know, from Dr. Strangelove.
So the idea that they were actually the doves here Is probably the only thing that gives a lot of these people like Tom Nichols who you know is is the the Cold War guru He was actually you know unwilling to criticize Millie for doing this because he recognizes that the insane the version of Dr. Strangelove in this thing would be that it's not that Peter Sellers is the insane guy trying to launch the missiles in the middle of the war room You know
It's weird because what we now know, having happened, was it didn't seem like that was on the agenda, right?
Trump was never, his focus was domestically trying to overturn this election and get into the Supreme Court, right?
That was his whole thing, it seems like.
And thank God that was really what the ultimate plan seemed to be.
It doesn't make it any better.
But that doesn't, there doesn't seem to be evidence that that was going to be the next step of like somehow escalating into a war, right?
Am I crazy?
No, the whole thing with Trump, and this is one of the things that we were incredibly lucky with, is that Donald Trump is a coward, an absolute coward.
There were all these moments of saber rattling.
I mean, we forget this.
I mean, that was a long presidency, man.
Like, that was an exhaustingly long, busy, dysfunctional presidency.
He marched us up to the point of the nuclear brink with North Korea.
There was a weekend I remember very specifically where it really felt like, oh my God, Donald Trump is a bad man at the controls.
Look what he's doing.
And the problem was that, well, I guess it wasn't a problem.
We're lucky.
Trump has always been a coward.
That's the whole thing.
He didn't want to start a war.
He didn't want to lead into whatever.
And it's probably not because he didn't want to.
It's that he didn't want responsibility for it.
He's just a straight-up coward.
But in this situation, it truly doesn't matter if it's Donald Trump.
It doesn't matter if it's Gomer Pyle.
It doesn't matter if it's a dog with a birthday hat on that's behind the controls.
They, by constitutional laws and by the laws of the land, are supposed to have control over the nuclear arsenal.
If we don't realize this was a problem, and by the way, the left and the right are both celebrating this in certain ways.
You're exactly right.
Tom Nichols loves this shit because he is a militarist.
That's who he is.
You have a lot of these old cold warriors who love the idea of the military taking control.
You know, they wish Eisenhower would walk in that door and just, you know, bring it.
bring everybody into discipline.
You have people on the left who are like, oh my God, thank God the military.
And you have people, by the way, on the left, who earlier in Trump's presidency, they wanted a coup.
They literally wanted a military coup.
They wanted the military to come in and take control of all of that.
Meanwhile, what is QAnon about?
What is this current moment about?
When liberal democracy reaches a point of crisis, that's when the military and a military coup are pushed to the forefront.
That's why we're talking about this.
That's why something like this would happen.
I know people think that Milley was being a hero, but this pushed us another step closer to, I'm sorry, a really problematic point.
Well I'll rely on you in the history aspect to flesh this out a little bit but like the thing that is not being discussed or is not creating an issue enough is is this issue of and I believe in the 80s it was an issue like in the debates and you would hear about you know theoretical uh you know what would you do in this situation with the button right in front of you and the football open and ready to go um that has that has not been an issue for a long time and after this kind of thing if it's reported enough and people Yep.
understand the gravity of this this should be the first or second issue that we bring up for any president going forward especially in this climate that we have now where we are the superpower of the world and it should you know the answer by the way should be we'll never have a first strike you know you know what i mean that that That's off the table.
We'll never do that.
And no one talks about it, and we don't know the frame of mind.
I have a feeling if you had asked Trump about this in the elections in 2016, he would have said some of the most batshit crazy things, because we know he likes nukes, and he's always wondering why you can't use them for various reasons.
And he probably would have said, now again, did it matter?
Is it going to turn the right against him at all?
You know, probably not.
That's what's so scary.
There's such a cult of personality at this point that, like, they're going to welcome the death.
They're going to welcome whatever God's will is for them.
Great.
If it's COVID or if it's a nuclear war, there's a lack of value of life.
And then you throw... I mean, listen, we talk about this a lot of time.
We know this because they want to protect, you know, abortion or they want to get rid of abortion rights, but then they have no desire to actually protect people after they're born.
It's a shit show.
I think that's the... what was the scientific term that you used a little while ago?
Clusterfuck.
Yes, that's what it is.
Yeah, this is another military term.
This is snafu, which is situation nominal all fucked up.
That's what this whole thing is.
Wait, nominal?
I thought it was situation normal.
I always thought it was nominal.
Oh, wait.
Well, you know what?
Is nominal the same as nominal?
You check that out.
You check that out.
Well, I dropped some knowledge.
I'll drop some history here.
Well, you check that out.
We need to make sure that we are factual and we're getting everything right.
So, basically with nuclear weapons, of course, nuclear weapons were the big topic during the Cold War because we had to have mutually assured destruction with Russia.
We obviously had an arms race.
And all conversations sort of revolved around the ability to wage total war and, you know, leave the planet a smoking cinder, right?
Eventually what ends up happening though, of course, is that as the Cold War comes to an end, I mean, those weapons didn't go anywhere.
You know, they're still in silos everywhere, but we just learned to stop thinking about them.
We learned to stop thinking about the possibility that the United States of America can end life on Earth multiple times.
But, you know, when you get to something like, you know, we brought up Nixon wandering the halls having an emotional breakdown, we should have had a conversation then.
You know what I mean?
And by the way, the revelation that Nixon was wandering around the hallways and that there was a small military coup, you know who revealed that?
Woodward and Bernstein, in a book that came out and sold a bunch of copies.
So eventually, we get into the post-Cold War era, where we're not talking about nuclear weapons.
I have to tell you right now, the W. Bush administration kept their eyes pretty close on the idea of tactical nukes.
Like, that was the thing that they talked about.
Quite a bit and a thing that was discussed quite a bit.
Of course, Americans talked about wiping out Arab countries, wiping out the Middle East with this stuff.
And then, of course, when Donald Trump was running for president, he loved talking about nuclear weapons.
He loved talking about the possibility of, you know, what was it that he was saying earlier on?
It was like fire and fury, right?
Like that.
That was the big giant.
He loved talking about the fact that he had these military weapons.
We have to have a conversation about this.
Like, yes, they're in silos.
Yes, we have nuclear submarines out here.
All of these things are true.
We have to pay attention to this.
And this was a news dump!
This flamed up for like a day and we talked about it and now we're on to the next one.
We can't even focus on this.
And what we're literally talking about is the possibility of a military coup and the fact that these weapons, there's no real chain of command with them.
It's one person, who by the way can be Donald Trump, or who comes next?
Right and we've talked a lot about the possibility of it being some sort of a veteran or being some type of military Hardliner which feels like where the Republican Party is going next we need to get this thing under control.
It is a legitimate Existential threat that we need to look at you know And we have to then discuss what was happening with what Trump was trying to actively do as well, which is revelations from this book involving Pence and here's the thing I'll say You know it's bad, and the word bad is not the right word.
You know it's titanically horrible when you have to rely on Dan Quayle to be the voice of knowledge and reason in the room.
And that is what happened.
Now, of course, Dan Quayle is the former vice president from Indiana, so I suppose it makes sense that another Vice President from Indiana would call upon him and ask him.
But the idea that we had to have Dan Quayle talk Mike Pence off the ledge, really what we have to figure out in my mind is whether or not Pence is just doing the old college try because his boss told him to figure this stuff out, or was he earnestly really trying to figure out a procedural way to stop this election and maintain power?
So this isn't, by the way, it is situation nominal.
Well, we're both right.
Yeah, I think it can be both.
Wikipedia has it as situation normal but then it also says it is a well-known example of a military acronym slang.
The original military was status nominal.
Status nominal.
So it's status nominal or situation normal?
If it's Wikipedia, you know it's right.
Sure!
Listen, Wikipedia is a very important part of our, you know, discourse.
I actually, you know what, I completely agree.
As a person who does research on books, I have to tell you that it's come in handy from time to time.
Now, in terms of what you just referenced, this is yet another little morsel that got thrown out by Woodward and Costa's publicity team.
And who knows if more is coming?
You know what I mean?
Like, they've got all this stuff down here.
And in this case, what has emerged, and this is another situation where we've got to take a look at this and understand that Donald Trump played a role in this, but that's not the end of it.
In their book, they have talked to people and they have found out that Trump had urged Mike Pence, his vice president, over and over and over again to cast out, and this is from the book, cast out on electors to send the decision in the 2020 election, and of course this was on January 6th, to send the decision to the House of Representatives where, because the vote would be taken by state delegation, Trump could also win.
Now, that's one thing.
That's bad enough to know that there actually was documented pressure of the Vice President of the United States by the President of the United States to try and overturn the election.
And that's the 14th Amendment.
That's actually in the Constitution, believe it or not.
So let's, hey, let's find out what happened after Pence said that he couldn't do it.
He said that he had found no respectable lawyer, no matter how impeccably right-wing in their interpretation of the Constitution, who would say he did.
Which, before we move even a step further, what if he had?
What if he had?
Because I have to tell you, there are a lot of lawyers out there who make up a lot of shit.
Really?
Which, by the way, is kind of what they do when they get in government.
They figure out how to color outside the lines and how to make law malleable.
So what if Mike Pence had found somebody?
So that's one question.
And then Donald Trump gestured at some of his supporters, and this is on January 6th, 2021.
He gestured at some of his supporters already gathered and shouting outside the White House.
And he said, well, what if these people say you do have that power?
He literally insinuated that the mob of January 6th would work, Chilling.
Really.
Mike Pence if he wanted to overthrow the election.
And this is a very mob boss type thing.
Trump didn't come out and say it.
He didn't say that the mob is going to come in and it will support you.
But if Mike Pence would have said, you know what, that sounds like a good idea, we would have had an actual coup being carried out by the president and the vice president of the United States of America.
Frightening, chilling, really, right?
Can I take a quick personal moment?
I don't like to do this very often, but I want to do it.
We fucking told everybody.
We told them.
We told them what was happening.
They called us hysterical.
They said it's ridiculous.
Move on or whatever.
We told them.
We told them that this was a possibility and that this was what happened.
That aside, I'll come back into objective reporting mode.
I want to point out Donald Trump has made it apparent that a president of the United States with no respect for the law whatsoever, no respect for our democratic institutions, no respect for the will of the people, can go ahead and create a situation where they can try and take over the presidency and overturn an election.
That's what this showed.
That's what we learned and that's what this tells us.
Right.
He had no...
He couldn't understand why Pence wouldn't just go in there while they're counting, which is supposed to be just a figurehead position where you just say, thanks guys, here are the votes.
He couldn't understand why Pence wouldn't just go in there and say, nope, I do not recognize these votes, we'll go back to the states.
And that is part of the procedural part of this, too.
It is a problem.
I mean, I think what we're saying is that the Constitution needs an editor.
Someone needs to go back in here and just tidy up a lot of the language in here and make this work better if we want to have a functioning democracy.
Primarily because the other thing that you were saying way ahead of the game was that we – what we understand now is that the GOP will not accept any results of any election that goes against them going forward.
Because of this.
Remember, the first coup never works, right?
It's the second and the third one that's going to actually work because they have now whipped everybody into a frenzy about the nature of the votes themselves.
And you're going to be able to get more and more people to agree.
I mean, listen, did you see the Ted Koppel thing from this weekend?
Ted Koppel, where was he?
He's on a bus somewhere with some old people.
Where was he?
What state was this?
Do you remember?
I don't know where he was.
But here's what was so disarming about it.
Even my dad brought it up this morning.
It's possible that the image that we all have of the crazies out there are the people that we saw on January 6th.
The Easy, the Cosplay, Proud Boy people.
Those are the people who are the insane, you know, whatever.
But when you see mom, pa, and grandma and grandpa You know, in their Sunday best sitting on a, you know, in very calmly, you know, arguing that the vote in 2020 was a sham and that all these dead people were voting.
That's really, really, really horrifying.
That hits you in the face.
You realize these are real, normal people who are believing this shit.
And that's what their intent is.
So they've damaged the democracy to the point where we need to kind of shore all these things up and make all the language much more clear because they're going to do this again.
Yeah, I want to make very clear one of the sort of ideas or theories that is sort of always operating in the background of what I'm talking about.
You know, when I'm talking about the dangers of people like Donald Trump or the dangers of the Republican Party and the emerging authoritarianism of the right, a lot of what I'm talking about is what we could call vanguardism.
Right?
And this is the idea.
So going back to the idea of lawyers, one of the reasons that we have lawyers is so that people who are educated in law can get in a room and argue about what the law says.
Right?
What the law means.
And why?
Because the law is an artificial construct.
It's something that we made up and it changes all the time.
And by the way, Not only does it change all the time, it changes radically.
Because reality changes radically.
Like, I was doing research the other day, and man, to read about the Supreme Court decisions that created an apartheid state in the United States of America, with Jim Crow, with all these disenfranchising situations, things that we're seeing reconstructed now.
You have to recognize, yes, it's like this right here, but with a couple of years and with things happening, it changes.
And all of a sudden the law changes, and all of a sudden reality starts changing.
Vanguards are people who sort of lead the way, or they sort of give an example of what you can do.
Right?
So, meanwhile, you and I are still living in the reality of September 2021, right?
Meanwhile, a vanguard can come along, a person, a party, a movement, and they can start saying, hey, you know what?
September 2022 can look a whole lot different from September 2021.
Here are the ways.
And all of a sudden, you're like, oh, I like that.
That makes sense.
Okay, yeah, things can change that way.
Oh, it is possible to change reality.
Donald Trump, as buffoonish, incompetent and laughable as he was, and by the way, both of the stories we're talking about today, you'll notice they both present a danger, but they are both held back by how incompetent and cowardly and ridiculous Donald Trump is.
But his sort of recklessness, it made it apparent to the Republican Party and all the people involved, oh, you can get away with that.
Oh, so like if you get called out for sexually assaulting somebody, you can still run for president.
Oh, you can, you can rip off the government for millions upon millions of dollars and you don't even have to say you're sorry, right?
You can go ahead and say that a white supremacist group that destroys a town is full of good people.
The Republican Party looked at it and they were like, you know, it's like one of those things where you're watching it through your hands and you're like, oh God, oh, oh, he, he got away with that.
Oh, okay, so the lines weren't where we thought they were.
Everything that we're talking about today has made it apparent to everyone who follows after him that reality was not what they thought it was, and the limits aren't what they thought they were.
That makes it possible, again, for September 2022 to look a hell of a lot different from September 21.
You know, this ties in directly with what, you know, voters, the GOP voters do not like the GOP's answer to the coronavirus.
There was a tweet by Harry Enten who spends all of his time looking at, you know, he's kind of like the Kornacki of the New York Times or whatever he is now, or CNN, whatever he works for now.
And he seems a little bit confused.
Why is it that the Republicans continue to hold these same coronavirus positions despite it being horribly unpopular to their constituents?
And the confusion is understandable until you realize that We have gerrymandering and so this is what's so dangerous about what we've done and it touches upon what you just discussed was that they only need to kowtow to a tiny fragment of this country.
And last time I checked that's not how a democracy is supposed to work.
You're not supposed to be able to be, you know, held hostage by how small this really is.
And that's what I think is part of, as the reality is setting in, that it's really the limits that we had and the norms that were in place, you know, don't exist anymore.
Well, then we also then realize is that, Jesus Christ, there's hardly anybody in this party, in that side of the party, that is that crazy.
And yet they are going to decide the platform of the Republican Party and ultimately win the elections for them.
And it's those people who are, again like we talked about, these people who think that the elections are being stolen.
They'll never trust another one again if it doesn't go in their favor.
And that is why you kind of have to wait for them to die off.
Before you can get back to another equilibrium, but they're going to have kids and they teach their kids.
And it's like, that's why it's really hard to picture that that, you know, September of 2026, where we finally all put our hands around each other across America and get democracy working again.
That's not a bad slogan, by the way.
That's not bad.
Get democracy working again.
That's not bad.
That's not a bad slogan.
Yeah, get that on a bumper sticker.
Well, you know, it's funny you bring up the kids thing.
It's almost like that's why the CRT outrage took place and that's why we need to get people in school boards.
Because we need to make sure that the kids who are going through school are being indoctrinated and being taught a different reality that works for the Republican Party and the right.
They don't plan on winning elections.
If they can, they'll win them.
You know what I mean?
They'll give them, as you said earlier, the old college try.
But there's a problem within the Republican Party.
And the problem is, and we've talked about this at length, the Southern strategy, starting in the 1960s and moving through today, You have two polar opposite groups of people working with each other.
You have pro-business, pro-millionaire, pro-billionaire, libertarian Republicans.
Most of them, by the way, who went to places like Harvard and Yale, right?
And by the way, that includes people like Ted Cruz, right?
Like a lot of that sort of quote-unquote intellectual establishment Republicans.
And based on the Southern strategy, which is just racist dog whistling, and at this point it's just open racism, you have created a reactionary base, right?
They want two different things.
They don't work together well.
The only thing that they have in common is white supremacy and like a fear of the other.
That's all they have in common.
They can't win elections because this group over here wants them to, you know, ban abortion in Texas.
They want them to build a wall.
They want them to do a bunch of bullshit that isn't popular.
All this anti-vaccine stuff.
Like the vast majority of Americans want people to get vaccinated so we can get moving on with our lives.
Ted Cruz is vaccinated.
You know, like all of these people are vaccinated.
Meanwhile, they'll win elections if they can, but they continue to lose voters because they alienate them with their disgusting nativism and racism and sexism.
And then, if they can't do that, they'll either gerrymander it, so they actually can win, but based on these sort of like created situations, or they'll just steal the vote.
And if that doesn't work, they'll say that the election was stolen, and then they'll just take power for themselves, because we've now seen that that's a possibility.
There's a reason why people like Tucker Carlson are going to Hungary.
Hungary and Viktor Orban are vanguards of where this shit is going.
They are making it possible.
So we talked about how Tucker had said, you know, we're going to end up electing a fascist because the left is going to make us do it.
It's going to be your fault that we had to go fascist.
Guess what?
It's a very distinctly Republican argument.
And we are now seeing that with the coronavirus.
And Breitbart, of all places, had a fascinating take on this at the end of last week.
I'll just read from this because I can't synopsize it.
You have to hear it right from the page.
I love that you were pulling this article up before we started taping, and you were like, I don't want to go to Breitbart.
I don't want to have to pull this up.
But I have it in front of me, and I'm worried.
You know how you get that screen burned into your computer?
I can't keep it on the computer too long because it's going to burn in my computer.
I just feel immediately like when I go to Breitbart.com, which unfortunately I have to do research, it just feels like Steve Bannon's on me.
Do you know what I mean?
Like all of a sudden I look up and I'm wearing two polos and I look like I haven't slept in eight days.
Yeah.
Okay, here's what it says.
The organized left is deliberately putting unvaccinated Trump supporters in an impossible position where they can either not get a life-saving vaccine or can feel like cucks caving to the ugliest, smuggest bullies in the world.
Time out!
That does not say that.
It does.
It does.
It's a screenshot.
First of all, before you move forward, and I'm going to have you read that sentence again because that is chef's kiss.
What is this organized left that they're speaking of?
What is the organized left?
It's Twitter.
Is that what it is?
It's me and all the other blue check marks?
Because I have to tell you, if there's one thing in the world that the left is not, it's organized.
Right.
Oh yeah.
And by the way, just to put a pin on the point you made in the very beginning about how many people have died, it's over a million.
If you want to add the excess deaths, which is, by the way, how they did the flu back in 1917, 1918.
So we're way past whatever numbers we had for the flu back then, because they included excess deaths in those numbers.
This is terrible.
Yeah.
By the way, in the book, I am currently around World War I. Would it shock you that during the Spanish flu, there were people making money off of telling people not to wear masks?
Would that shock you?
Oh, haven't we all seen those pictures of the anti-maskers back then?
Oh my god.
But they were probably more fringe because less people fucking died!
Oh my god, can you read that sentence again?
I want to let it wash over me.
Okay, because there's more.
This is the bullet point of this article.
There's a couple paragraphs.
The organized left is deliberately putting unvaccinated Trump supporters in an impossible position where they can either not get a life-saving vaccine or can feel like cucks caving to the ugliest, smuggest bullies in the world.
Right?
So, you know, it's like heads I win, tails you lose.
This is what they're saying.
Do you ever think about how much of our modern society and how much of our modern political moment is based on people who are on social media and Twitter too much and they're just talking about each other?
They're not even talking about an actual shared reality.
They're talking about people owning each other like on social media.
That's all this is.
It's feelings.
It's feelings, right?
It's like Bill Barr saying it's a matter of logic that if you send mail-in ballots in, they're going to be all fraudulent.
No, there's this entire group of people right now who are flooding their relatives' inboxes and text messages with anti-vax bullshit, killing grandma, killing their parents, killing everybody around them.
And they're like, I'm not going to let the libs own me on Twitter.
I mean, that's legitimately what we're talking about.
Well, here, it gets worse.
Are you ready?
Are you sitting down?
In other words, I sincerely believe the organized left is doing everything in its power to convince Trump supporters not to get the life-saving Trump vaccine.
I'm sorry, but people willing to drone strike seven children who And who are eager to unleash terrorists like Antifa and Black Lives Matter into our cities are sociopaths.
The left's morality is guided only by that which furthers their fascist agenda.
And so using reverse psychology to trick Trump supporters not to get a life-saving vaccine is, to them, a moral good.
The more of us who die, the better.
As if this is some sort of... Oh, by the way, this is as ridiculous as a strategy of letting people into the country so that 20 years from now, when they have, I guess, kids that will be illegitimate kids to them, are then, you know, automatically citizens.
They're all going to, like, to a man and a woman, vote Democratic.
It is frightening how unrational this is, right?
This is cuckoo stuff.
Cuckoo shit, man.
Do you remember when this pandemic started and Jared Kushner and Donald Trump agreed that it would be best to let Democrat-led states just absolutely suffer under the pandemic and it would hurt them politically?
Do you remember that?
I do.
I do.
It's all fucking projection.
Here's what they seem to have understood.
By the way, I have another thing for you about this.
Can I just go on the record, by the way?
The left doesn't want people to get drone-striked.
Maybe there are liberals.
Maybe there are people who are center-left, center-center-right.
I think it's an absolute shame that we drone striked a bunch of people in Afghanistan who are planning on coming here.
I think that the drone strike entire project has been disgusting and an embarrassment.
That's not the left.
I just love that they just always condense all of those people around.
It's incredible to me.
Right.
Now, but here's the thing.
What Kushner seemed to understand, if not like, you know, in a solid thought, some sort of inherently was that because what we now know here is that the the let's see the death rate in GOP counties is nine times higher than it is in blue counties.
Okay, does that make sense?
Well, it happened because they thought, for whatever reason, it was just going to burn out blue communities.
And like I was telling everybody in the beginning of this thing, it's going to go into what we would call Republican communities, because these are the communities, like the ones I grew up in, where health care is non-existent, people have been flooded with disinformation, and it's going to eat those communities up, which is exactly what's happened.
And we've been pulling out our hair for decades now, wondering why so many people are willing to vote for a party that clearly does not have their interests in mind at all.
And here's the ultimate reason why they shouldn't, and they're not going to change their votes.
They are not going to sit there for a second and say, you know what?
Maybe had they taken it more seriously and instituted better guidelines and better mandates, we wouldn't have died so much in our counties.
That's not going to happen, right, Jared?
There's no way, at this point, when you combine the two things I read and that stat, you realize that it's like they're going to dig in and they're going to die.
I'm going to die and it's going to be your fault, you know, and I win.
Like, that's where we are.
It's not even going to be a notion of, well, shit, maybe I should stop voting for this party because they're killing all of us.
It's never going to get there.
Listen, we haven't talked about this on this podcast.
I truly believe this, and I brought up people posting, people talking on social media, people getting in flame wars back and forth.
One of the things that happens, and this is a thing that's happening with the Republican Party, Trump supporters, and the right right now.
There are a lot of people who are dying because they want to prove that they believe what they've been saying.
Because so much of what happens on the internet is people saying they believe something and it's actually just sort of posing.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, oh yeah, like this is what I believe and then meanwhile they're hypocrites and they're just sort of projecting this thing.
This happens, by the way, with terrorism.
There are tons of people who have like, you know, anti-imperial ideas and they're like, oh, I would take down infidels or whatever it is that they would say.
And then it's like, oh, okay, we'll go out and hurt somebody.
And they're like, well, I'm not going to do that.
Right.
And then meanwhile, over here, you have a lot of people who are like, I'm going to prove that I'm legitimate and that I believe what it is.
I'm willing to die for what I believe.
That's what's happening in a large part with the Republican Party, Trump supporters on the right now.
These are people who have been told by Donald Trump and other Republicans, who, by the way, are all vaccinated.
Right.
All of them are vaccinated.
Fox News is all vaccinated.
Donald Trump probably got, civilian-wise, the first vaccine in the United States of America.
He was probably the very first civilian, post-trials or whatever you want to say, to get vaccinated.
Tucker Carlson's vaccinated.
Fox News has a vaccine mandate in order to go into the building you have to be vaccinated.
All those people are vaccinated.
These people have been sold a bullshit bill of goods by these people, and they want to prove that they believe it, even though they know that those people are lying to them, and as a result, they're willing to die to prove that they're hardcore, that they are the real true believers.
They are sacrificing their lives to prove a point.
Like that's actually in a lot of cases what's happening here.
All right, I know we're getting long in the tooth here, but I do want to bring up something that's related to this.
Do you remember when McCain was having a town hall and that old hag or whatever you want to call that crazy lady who tried to say that Obama was a Muslim?
And you remember what McCain's response was?
No, he's a fine man who loves his family, loves America.
Yeah, right.
I really want to believe that that had some effect.
That would have tamped down some of that.
I don't know if that lady even would have been like, oh, really?
Oh, OK.
Then we'll find some other reason to hate him because lots of racism and stuff that they wanted to.
But I wonder if that's the kind of what leadership looks like and what we need.
Trump did.
Trump did that.
help all these things right uh would that you know get a mask on if trump had said that this is serious like would that have mattered trump did well did that yeah right well yeah later he just did that like weeks ago and they booed him yeah yeah they booed him Well, Jared, you really should just talk to your doctor.
I can't tell you anything else besides just talk to your doctor.
By the way, there isn't a doctor who's licensed in this America that would tell you not to take the vaccine.
And if they do, they should lose their license.
Man, I don't know.
I've met some doctors.
I've met some doctors who have some thoughts on things.
I have to tell you, I think at this point, I think going back to what we were just talking about, I think Trump and Kushner deciding to let the blue states and blue communities suffer under the pandemic, that and Donald Trump, like it was back whenever he didn't want to let that cruise ship dock.
Do you remember that?
And he's like, I want to keep the numbers where they are.
In his mind, if he had people die of coronavirus, it would reflect badly on him and that would hurt his ability to get reelected.
When he made those decisions, when him and Kushner came together and made a decision basically to carry out a genocidal type murder that they should both be indicted for and held for, I think when that happened and then they started creating this alternate reality, the ghost was out of the bag.
You know what I mean?
At that point there wasn't anything to do because the whole point here is people are going out and they're trying to show that they're the loudest.
They're trying to show that they believe the most and that they are the most ideologically pure.
This is what happens with radicalization.
Because at this point, even Donald Trump telling them to get vaccinated, it's the only time I've heard Donald Trump booed by his supporters.
The one time where he basically, well, he pushed against orthodoxy, right?
You know, it's like a priest coming out and being like, I don't know, maybe Jesus wasn't the son of God.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
You're trying to unseat my entire reality.
But you're right.
It might have made a difference in the beginning.
And we just would have had, it might have been a situation where the anti-vaccine people would have been like flat earthers.
You know what I mean?
Like 1% of the population and everybody kind of looked at them like they were kooky.
And God knows how many lives that would have saved.
But at this point, it's orthodoxy.
That's written down in the book of, well, I was going to say book of life, but it's book of death.
Yeah yeah and it's like I want to do my own research and there's some wonderful memes by the way out there now about what my own research is versus experts and you know and by the way this is the other problem is what they did to the CDC caused like you know relatively educated people to then doubt what's going on now when for The entire existence of the CDC, they were the gold standard of honesty and competency.
You were going to listen to whatever they told you because these are people who are dedicated to their jobs and have no vested interests other than to help the community and keep people safe and healthy.
And now, think about where we are.
Guys like Fauci, who's not part of CDC, but certainly represents the government in that sense.
What are these things they have for Fauci?
He's a death threat and they think he's a killer himself.
That's the other thing that I never would have thought in my lifetime we would have gotten to.
The WHO and the CDC are these evil people who don't want to help anybody.
Well, and go ahead and bring this thing around full circle.
I'll say one thing.
The whole thing with masks, and I think the original problem was that we got rid of all of our industry and Trump and Kushner and the people around them completely bungled the ability to get masks in the country.
And so we were told not to get masks and that we should leave them to medical professionals.
And immediately everyone's like, okay, I heard one thing.
But to go ahead and bring it full circle to what we started with, our media messed this whole thing up.
They have a complete inability to actually communicate things of substance.
And even now, and I don't know if it's this way for you, even while I'm trying to get accurate, up-to-date information based on what's happening right now with the Delta variant, it's all over the place.
It's all over the place.
It's one contradictory thing after another.
And meanwhile, while I'm looking at the fact, we're over 2,000 deaths a day, by the way, right now.
We're still getting articles from these outlets that are like, oh, things are getting better.
How are you going to travel?
What are you going to do?
And it's like, you're just selling people false hope.
You're just trying to get clicks, and you're trying to make money off of being the one outlet that gives people hope, and then suddenly everybody does, and suddenly we have misinformation.
It has been an embarrassment, and we've been turned into a culture that not only are our realities torn apart, but our ability to understand information or focus is just absolutely wrecked.
I don't know.
It pisses me off, man.
The Woodward-Costa thing, just every time I think about it, I could boil water with my anger.
Really?
Well, one thing we didn't do, because all of the Woodward and the rationale for why they're holding all this stuff to make the money and get publicity and all that stuff, well, it didn't inspire us to mention that, you know, we have a Patreon.
That, uh, everyone else should probably click on too in the same, in that name.
Which by the way, keeps us from doing a bunch of dumb shit that these people do.
Right.
You know what I mean?
Like selling sensationalism and profiting off of false hope.
Uh, if you want to support the show, keep us ad free, keep us editorially independent, which is what allows us to have conversations like the one we had today.
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