Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the latest in the January 6th Hearings and how the political landscape will be decided by its outcome. Will Merrick Garland actually prosecute Donald Trump? And will the rest of the GOP try to move on with other candidates in 2024? To support the show and access additional content, including the extra Weekender show every Friday and live-shows, become a patron at patreon.com/muckrakepodcast
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On the morning of January 6th, President Donald Trump's intention was to remain President of the United States despite the lawful outcome of the 2020 election and in violation of his constitutional obligation to relinquish power.
Over multiple months, Donald Trump oversaw and coordinated a sophisticated, seven-part plan to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power.
In our hearings, you will see evidence of each element of this plan.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Muckrag Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates Sexton, and I'm here, as always, with Nick Halseman.
We have so much to cover today, but we have to begin, of course, with the now very popular television show, the January 6th committee hearings.
We wondered last week in our Patreon exclusive of the first hearing, and that's over at patreon.com slash muckragpodcast, We wondered, will people watch?
Will people talk about it?
Will this hold the national attention?
Nick, we've got some answers on that while we have a lot more questions that are growing.
20 million people watched the primetime January 6th committee hearing.
Nick, check my figures on that.
That's a lot of people.
It's a lot of people.
I have a little context for you, if you like.
It's about the same amount of people that watched Kavanaugh's SCOTUS hearing.
So, you would have thought it'd be more, but that tells you... Here's the thing, a whole half of the country wasn't ever going to watch it anyway, right?
So, that's a pretty concentrated 20 million.
It might even be more impressive because of that.
Yeah, it's a really huge thing, and what we've already seen, and we're recording this as the second hearing is going, this is already turning into a ready-made, ready-to-package-and-consume political spectacle, which is what we talked about last week, that not only was it intended to be, but that it needed to be in order to move the needle a little bit
We are already just a couple of days removed from this thing, Nick, and what we're having a conversation about now is whether or not this committee and its findings are going to lead to an actual indictment of Donald Trump and his co-conspirators.
The numbers that we're seeing in terms of polls are huge.
A massive majority of Americans believe it's essential that we find out what has happened here, upwards of 70%.
It seems like the cultural conversation is turning towards whether or not Donald Trump should be charged with a crime here.
Now we have a friend of the pod, Steve Bannon, basically daring the Department of Justice to indict Donald Trump.
Trump won the presidency, and he is the legitimate president of the United States, and your guy's illegitimate, and the American people are awakening to that.
And we don't care what you have to say, and I dare Merrick Garland to take that crap there last night and try to indict Donald J. Trump.
We dare you, because we will impeach.
We're winning in November, and we're going to impeach you and everybody around you.
Screw the White House.
We're going to impeach you and everybody at DOJ.
So here we come to the question, will Donald Trump be indicted for his role in a conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States?
We're going to get to some of the public sort of wrestling with this, but before we do, Nick, what's your feeling on this?
If you had to say right now, is there anything coming down the pike?
I think the question could very well be who's going to get impeached first or indicted versus impeached.
Will Biden get impeached first by the Republican Congress or will Trump get indicted by any kind of Department of Justice?
That's an interesting race to see who gets that first.
Um, I kind of feel like, I mean, listen, if we want to look at the whole, like, Al Capone, you know, get him on tax evasion charges, right?
There are a couple things that are very clear that he violated as far as defrauding, you know, a national election.
Hey, the state of Georgia is still looking into the possibility for him pressuring officials.
Yeah, and then plus that with the pressuring of Pence, you know, a lot of lawyers out there, I'm a lawyer, I play one on TV, think that that's enough and that would probably be enough.
Again, we're just trying to get him off to the side so he can't run again.
I mean, that's not really the thing.
He needs to go to prison so no one else has to do this again.
But I do feel like it's maybe 50-50 that they're going to be able to charge him with something.
So you've got it at a coin flip at this point?
Well, I've seen a lot of very wealthy white men skate on a lot of charges, so I'm not particularly certain about that.
And I do have to tell you, the Department of Justice has decided to start wringing its hands in public, because apparently that's what Mary Garland and the people around him are good at.
I had wondered what they were good at.
Is he related to Susan Collins?
I'm not sure, but I do know that they share a certain strain of concern.
Yeah, they do.
So, like clockwork, and we talk about this on the podcast all the time, just to go ahead and pull the curtain back on how this stuff works.
Public figures and politicians really like to air their laundry out in articles, segments.
They like to basically float this kind of stuff to send messages, to send signals to people, basically to say, I understand that most Americans want Donald Trump to be indicted for his role in this thing.
We're thinking about it.
We're considering it.
We're concerned.
And like clockwork, this article, NBC News, by the way, has been carrying a lot of water for elected officials and political officials lately.
This has sort of become, in the last few months, the go-to place to start trafficking some of these stories.
This dropped in our laps.
This is by Ken Delanian.
Does the Justice Department want to charge Trump?
And let's go ahead and dive a little bit into this.
As my people would say, Nick, this is a spicy a meatball.
So this article begins, Liz Cheney's powerful remarks at Thursday night's January 6th congressional hearing on the insurrection at the U.S.
Capitol, which sounded a lot like a lawyer's opening statement at a criminal trial, will no shit, because it was, have renewed a debate in legal circles about whether the Justice Department could and should prosecute Donald Trump.
With a growing body of evidence that Cheney and others say points to criminal acts involving Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, Attorney General Merrick Garland may ultimately be faced with an excruciatingly difficult decision about whether prosecuting a former president is in the national interest.
I agree.
Yeah, it is an excruciating decision, but I do have to say who gives a shit if you make a decision if it's in the national interest?
Isn't your job to uphold the law?
Yes.
Oh, okay.
But does he want to then watch the country burn outside of his office building?
Well, let's have that conversation.
A person familiar with the matter told NBC News there have been conversations inside the Justice Department about the far-reaching implications of pursuing a case against Trump.
Should it come to that?
So far, No public evidence has surfaced that the former president has become a criminal target.
Quote unquote, we will follow the facts wherever they lead, Garland said in a speech at Harvard University's commencement ceremony.
Nick, I gotta tell you, you either have a legal code, you either have the rule of law, or you don't.
And I'm tired of living in a country where corporations are too big to fail, People are too big to be arrested and held accountable.
This is, this is really upsetting.
I got a question for you.
When Nixon was thrown out of office, remember his approval rating was still 25%, which is, you know, basically zero.
You can't go below 25 at this point, it seems like.
So, they could have prosecuted Nixon, we would not have had civil war, is that right?
Yes.
Okay, why?
The particular moment in time, and with Nixon's numbers where they were, as well as the Republican Party, and this is something that we try to remind the audience of constantly, which is Nixon resigned not because he had a flash of conscience.
It's because the Republican Party came to him and said, sir, it's time to go.
And they were ready to stand off to the side and say, listen, he needs to go.
Hopefully we can move past this.
There was no Fox News.
There was no right-wing propaganda spear out there in order to twist this thing and turn it into a situation.
So no, I don't think if Nixon would have been prosecuted, a civil war would have broke out.
Right, okay.
So, and it has to do with approval ratings, right?
There's enough people in this country that still believe what all of Trump's lies that would take up arms, right?
That is the real fear and I'm sure the Department of Justice has even more information than we do about the real threat of that.
Well, I think whether or not they have information for it or not is a different question.
Whether or not they are so timid that they're terrified of it is a different thing.
Right.
Right.
I mean, listen, Garland has shown time and time again that he is a pretty Standard type of attorney general.
He's not particularly interested in getting involved in these types of things.
People have brought up troubling elements of his resume and connections that he has.
We've talked about it ad nauseum on this show.
Nobody wants to charge a former president because the moment you charge a former president with any crime, I mean, the whole Jenga tower starts coming down because you can't be president without committing crimes, basically.
I think there is a reason to be concerned.
I'm going to read this quote, and this is from Barbara McQuaid, who is an NBC legal analyst and a former U.S.
attorney.
Filing criminal charges against Trump in connection with his efforts to overturn the election, quote unquote, will very likely spark civil unrest and maybe even civil war.
But, she said, I think not charging is even worse because not charging means you failed to hold someone criminally accountable who tried to subvert our democracy.
I'll say this, Nick.
I think it is likely to spark civil unrest.
I do.
I kind of feel like we're at the point where you've got to let those chips fall where they may.
I hate to say that.
I know that people would be hurt.
I know that it could be a really bad combustible situation.
You cannot let this go.
I mean, I agree.
Again, we're worried about the next guy coming in following the playbook who's much less addled than Trump, right?
That's the real fear because that's where you get into the Damien Oman 3 version of our United States, right?
It's all for you, Ron DeSantis!
It's all for you!
Right.
It's number three, right, where he runs for president?
I think it is, right?
Maybe four or three?
If you think that I, if I followed the Omen movie series all the way to number three, you are wrong, my friend.
Oh, wow.
It's pretty amazing.
There might be some, like, nudity that a teenage Nikki Houselman was really into, but I gotta tell you, there's a fascinating political thing.
We could watch that movie, whichever one is, where he becomes president or tries to become president.
Could we do it?
Here's the thing I found interesting.
Let's just pretend for a second because you know with the hearings there's all sorts of crossover talking about this and we're talking about the prosecution.
Don't you find it striking that we hear so much of Barr going to the White House to have discussions with Donald Trump?
And what I'm saying specifically is that Isn't it your understanding, as far as I understood the government function, that the White House and the Department of Justice need to be pretty clearly separated?
Yeah.
Okay.
So imagine if this was Trump in the White House now and they're discussing Biden and whatever he had been doing.
Do you think that Trump would bring the AG over to his office and demand that Biden would get prosecuted for whatever he thinks he might have done?
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
And we know this because he said this, he would do this to Hillary Clinton, right?
He said it constantly.
Right.
So imagine that, because my only question now is, are you advocating for perhaps some influence by Biden on Mayor Garland?
No!
As a matter of fact, listen, okay, this comes from the article.
I'm glad you brought this up.
So let me read you a quick passage from this article and I'll answer your question.
Okay.
The Justice Department by tradition makes criminal charging decisions independent of the President.
which of course they are talking to the Department of Justice.
They're probably talking to Merrick Garland, right?
Because this is what you do.
You talk on background, you fill them in, and they go ahead and they give the narrative to everybody.
So here we are.
The Justice Department, by tradition, makes criminal charging decisions independent of the president.
By the way, by tradition?
Yeah.
By tradition?
No.
How about, you always need to.
But in cases that implicate, for example, American diplomacy or national security, the executive branch can and does weigh in.
Biden would have the legal authority to make the final decision about whether to prosecute.
First of all, before we move forward, no.
No.
Let's not have Biden or any other political An elected official give the go-ahead to prosecute a former president for trying to overthrow the government.
Let's not do that.
Did I miss that sentence?
Wow.
I don't think I realize he does have the legal authority to make that final decision.
That's interesting to me.
Oh, God.
One of the people they're talking to, that's a fascinating question.
It feels to me that the president would have to weigh in.
We were talking about this monumental decision.
Biden was elected, not Garland.
At some point this becomes a policy question, not strictly a legal one.
Bullshit!
It's a legal question.
Keep this within the ramifications of the law.
McQuaid, who was earlier talking in the article, it would be a terrible idea.
I think you cannot loop in the president.
You can give him a heads up, but I don't think you consult him.
That undermines the idea of an independent Justice Department.
Amen!
Thank God somebody said it.
We don't need to live in a country where the president is having the former president indicted and prosecuted.
Let's stay away from that shit.
Absolutely.
I mean, I agree.
I feel like they need to be completely independent.
Although it's funny because in a different kind of kangaroo banana republic, the Justice Department could become all-powerful as well and start prosecuting everybody without any way to interfere either.
You know, this is a delicate balance we're here, this experiment that we're trying.
You're telling me, man.
That's what's at stake.
In a banana republic, Trump would have either been dead or on house arrest at this point.
I mean, that's what we're literally talking about.
Well, actually, that's not true.
In a banana republic, Trump would be wearing a military uniform, making sure that his rivals were either dead.
He'd still be in the White House, is what you're saying.
No, he'd still be in the White House.
That's exactly right.
This is absolutely insane.
And I just want to point out, like this is one of those articles that just sort of floats through the milieu of the American political environment.
This is the Department of Justice sending signals out to journalists, to politicos, to other politicians that says, hey, we're paying attention.
We're thinking about it.
Here's what we're wrapping our heads around.
Basically, they are telegraphing the fact that they kind of are saying we're waiting on someone to give us a cue.
And I got to tell you, man, That's troubling.
And Merrick Garland is not an effective attorney general.
And this is also, and I hate to say it, it's indicative of a lot of the Biden administration.
It's a lot of people who are sitting around saying, well, somebody else is going to figure this thing out and we'll do our part when we are part of it.
This sucks.
You know, what can happen really is that they pull a Mueller.
And rather than do any kind of recommendations for what they should do, they just simply say, eh, here you go, whatever, maybe you'll impeach the guy, I don't know.
Well, for a second, Nick, I gotta tell you, my heart kind of skipped a beat.
I thought you were gonna suggest that they put Robert Mueller in charge.
I was like, no, please, please, no, don't.
Yeah, no, he just retired, by the way.
That popped up in my timeline.
Congrats, Robert Miller, on a hell of a career, my man.
Yeah, he deserves to sit by a beach and drink a pina colada, I think.
He deserves something.
Right.
And listen, for the past stuff, but the Mueller report, yeah, I mean, the fact that he chickened out and didn't refer is ridiculous.
And by the way, Merrick Garland can easily live in that same headspace and be the same way where it's like, well, we've got like five pretty ironclad cases of obstruction of justice or fraud.
They've got like seven conspiracy charges that they can bring against Trump.
Yeah, and like, but you know, who's to say what the Office of Legal, you know, Opinion has and so I don't know, you know, and then and then yeah, then the president Biden can't step in and be like, you know, you must charge him.
Man, it ends up become man.
This is so frustrating the idea that we're living in this.
Democratic Republic that is on the verge of absolute ruin, and everyone's just kind of looking around at each other like, I don't know, are you gonna do something about this?
Are you gonna, or maybe not, I guess?
Yeah.
I don't know.
It's frightening.
And again, it's all because, well, listen, Trump deserves to be prosecuted, but it's really about, you know, and by the way, we get in this conversation all the time.
If he goes to prison and he gets indicted up the wazoo and serves the rest of his life in prison, is that going to stop DeSantis from doing the same exact thing?
Well, and I, so just to go ahead and preview later on the show, we're going to have a segment where we're talking about the fact that there are a lot of Republicans right now looking at 2024.
And they are thinking about a life after Trump.
And there is something happening here.
And I don't know if you feel it.
This is something that we sort of talked about a little bit last week, getting ready for the hearings and then watching the initial hearing.
There is a feeling that a lot of people within the Republican Party, they know that they can't come out and say Trump should be prosecuted.
They can't come out and say that I'm anti-Trump.
They still have to court that base.
There are a lot of people in that party right now who are ready to move on beyond Donald Trump.
And in all of this, a big question has to become, and this I think splits this question, civil unrest, civil war.
I don't think prosecuting Donald Trump will lead to civil war.
I think it will lead to some disturbances and some radicalization, but also maybe the effect could be negated a little bit if some of these Republicans are starting to feel like they want to move beyond him.
And so you got to look at like your Cheney, your Kinsinger, you know what I mean?
You go down the line, you start to wonder how many Republicans are ready to turn that page.
Yeah, well, I mean, listen, there's no lack of Republicans who are bloodthirsty, you know, power mongering, you know, whatever, you know, people just need detention, right?
So that's going to happen either way.
I mean, listen, if we have to fucking listen to Tom Cotton campaign, I'm going to throw my computer out the window.
I can't, I can't do it.
I just, I can't do it.
But, but, you know, we're getting a little glimpse into maybe why Liz Cheney, listen, I want to give her a lot of respect.
What she's doing is terrific and how she's laying this out and she's whatever, but come on.
She knows she's going to be on the screen in front of 20 million Americans at any one time sounding powerful and sounding, you know, standing up to Trump.
You know, I think she's already booked a trip to Iowa at some point in the next week, right?
So keep your eye on that one.
So, you know, there's got to be a little bit of cynicism there as far as what her motivations were for doing what she did.
We're going to talk a little bit about that trip to Iowa and some other conspicuous trips to New Hampshire by some other people here in just a minute.
But one of the things that I think Cheney is taking advantage of, like a lot of other elected officials right now, is a vacuum of public leadership.
Biden, of course, we talked about this, I think it was last week, we talked about how he sort of left a really big gap for senators to sort of negotiate their own stuff, to find their own paths, and then, you know, he'd say he'd sign it.
We've also seen in the past few days that Democratic and Republican senators have On principle, made an agreement on gun safety, gun control, whatever we want to call it.
We've heard about this compromise, which was led on the Democratic side by Chris Murphy and on the Republican side by John Cornyn.
This is a thing, by the way, that is probably going to pass, probably going to get signed.
Biden will get no credit for it whatsoever.
I mean, and listen, we need to go down what the specifics are of this in order to get everyone up to speed.
What happened?
Get the information out there.
And then we'll talk about our reactions to it, our concerns with it, where it looks like it's working, where it's not.
This is a compromise.
It's going to include upwards of 10 Republican senators, which means that this is going to pass the filibuster.
This will probably end up passing.
The details of this compromise as it's come out, there are going to be incentives for states Thank you, Washington, DC.
I think we, speaking of semantics, we've moved from calling them red flag laws to crisis intervention laws.
Thank you, Washington, D.C., undefeated in semantics. - Yeah, crisis intervention orders, you know, which seems even more like interface and whatever, but hey, I'll take it.
We've got investments for mental health programs.
We've got money for suicide prevention programs.
We've got money for quote-unquote school security.
Get your fences!
Get your guns!
Get your armed quote-unquote resource officers, or as I like to call them, police officers.
Get rid of some doors.
Knock those doors the hell out.
I'm so anti-door I can't stand it.
We've also got, I actually think this is one of the best parts about The Compromise, there are some initiatives in there to get rid of the ability for domestic violence to get those people away from guns.
We're also talking about possible separate background checks for buyers under 21 years of age.
Just before we get into the pros and the cons, what are your initial thoughts on this thing?
I mean, listen, it's unprecedented.
They haven't done anything for 30 years on this, and it's perfectly appropriate for people that want to celebrate, like, the absolute bare minimum thing that they could maybe kind of do to inch something that probably won't really prevent mass shootings anyway, but hey, let's pat ourselves on the back.
So, here's the thing, and Nick, Scale of 1 to 10, how cynical am I about modern politics?
You know, is there a higher number?
Or do I just stop at 10?
There are 15.
Yeah.
I'll say this, there's some stuff in here that'll probably save some lives.
I mean, really.
Like, listen, the separate background checks for the people under 21 is an absolute bullshit compromise.
It's probably going to keep a couple of troubled people from getting a hold of guns.
And God knows how many people that might save.
The domestic violence prevention thing is incredible, thank God.
I'm glad that mental health programs are getting money, but because Republicans are a part of this, it will turn into a punitive, carceral-type situation.
Also, by the way, Nick, I don't know if you noticed, no guns were banned in this.
No stocks were banned.
Nothing was taken away.
Basically, this is a laundry list of things that Republicans wanted to do.
That's the truth.
Yeah, so and your point being that it was only like the Republicans like, we'll do this and that's it and take it or leave it and you're not going to get us to move anywhere else and the Democrats are like, okay, fine, we'll take it.
And notice, and the thing that the big headliner in all of this, the red flags or crisis intervention things, it's not a national law.
It's not a national program.
It's another incentive program that will offer to give money to states if they go ahead and pass these things.
Will red states pass it, Nick?
Probably not.
Well, maybe a couple.
Yeah, I mean, maybe a couple of like leaning purple red states, but most of them are not going to.
This is the compromise that happens when, as we've talked about, Nick, Power at the federal level is just absolutely neutered.
It's been completely knocked down in order to bring it down to the state level.
This is the type of compromise the Republicans can get away with without suffering real political damage, although I'm sure they'll be primaried by NRA, wild-eyed, insane people.
But this is – it's not enough.
To pretend like it's enough is insulting to the people who have died and the people who will die in these mass shootings.
It's something, but it's also just the absolute barest minimum that can be done.
Yeah, I mean, the red flag laws you talked about before, they're temporary, so it doesn't really mean a lot anyhow.
And that's really frustrating.
I am encouraged to see the mental health thing.
I'm kind of curious to see how that's going to actually manifest itself in real help for people.
You think it might be more disputative, but I would hope that they could figure out another way to treat people who need serious help.
Listen, it would be great if I had any faith that the Republicans were serious about mental health.
In all of this, I mean, listen, you can't talk about any of this without drilling down further and talking about the socioeconomic causes of all of this.
We can talk about mental health, you talk about mental illness, so much of it has to do with the strain that a culture like this puts on people.
What happens when you're exploiting people, when you're working them too hard?
I'm sorry, we live in a country right now where there's no real vision for the future.
That's crushing.
And when that happens, people suffer and society suffers.
We can talk about mental health, but that's actually just taking care of a side effect of a larger problem that none of these people want to even begin touching.
And that's this whole thing in a nutshell.
It's a lot of larger problems that nobody really wants to put their skin on the line in and really go to bat for.
And as a result, you get a compromise that maybe will do a little bit of good, but it's not going to take on the problem proper.
Right.
I get the sense that, like, young kids and young teenagers probably don't really see a future because of climate change.
Yeah.
And let's just, if you play that out a little bit, like, we're not going to have a real civil society once it becomes clear that the environment is going to fail.
Right?
Like, it'll become a lawless, you know, Wild West kind of a thing.
I would imagine once we realize, oh shit, we're not gonna have any water a few years from now. - I'll say this, that vision doesn't have to be true.
We can decide that it isn't true.
We can pick a different future.
We're still technically, scientifically, in that zone where we can change course.
The problem is that our leadership and representation, that they are either bought and sold by, you know, fossil fuel or these special interests, gun lobbies, you name it, corporations, that they can't offer an alternative view.
And all of this is, it's literally like, Nick, I don't know if you've ever had like an old beat up car.
In your life?
You ever had that?
I used to have this really beat up Pontiac Grand Am.
It was black and it had a skunk stripe.
You know what I mean?
Where the pain had started to fade?
Okay, yeah.
Yeah.
Man, let me tell you something about that car.
That car broke down every couple of months.
And you'd take it to the mechanic and you'd be like, hey, what does it need?
And the mechanic would go down the list and basically say you need a new car.
And then you'd say, okay, I appreciate that.
What does it need to get back on the road today?
Right.
And he'd be like, well, we can do this, but it's just going to break down in a month.
It's like, yeah, let's do that.
That's great.
Yeah.
That's what this is.
It's a bunch of Band-Aids on larger problems.
And this, I'm sorry, but this is two political parties understanding that they have to do something because public outrage is getting too large.
Jared, you just made me realize that I'm a Pontiac Grand Am.
God damn it.
I would like to be, like, you know, a Flamborghini or something, but I am a Pontiac Grand Am.
So, just get me on that, you know, on the road just for another month.
What do I got to take?
What pills do I have to take?
Anything, please.
Yeah, I hear you.
And, you know, The climate thing, we don't have to take a tangent on that, but it's like, it is interesting because it does, it's a haul over the entire process here that you're kind of waiting for.
Now, so is like the market and our economic situation as it is with inflation too, because this is going to be a thing.
Here's the thing, people don't want to be inconvenienced.
And I think that's a big motivation for politicians because they realize if you ask them to do something about the climate, use less water, it's an inconvenience.
They get mad they won't vote for you.
They want to hear you say as a politician, you can use as much water as you want, you can just say whatever you want to say.
Use more water!
Yeah, right.
There's more water.
Don't worry about... You know what?
We're the United States of fucking America.
You're gonna get more water.
Yeah, so at some point that's what happened, right?
That's one of the big fractures was that, you know, because there are a number of people in this country that are willing to do things to save the environment or to help people with health care or to just treat people better and call them how other people would like to be called and described.
And then there's another section of the country that can't be bothered and doesn't want to be inconvenienced by anything.
At all.
For anything.
Gas and food, whatever we're talking about.
I'm not calling somebody by a pronoun that I don't want to call them by.
So that's probably the crux of where we are and the question is how many are on one side versus how many on the other side and then where do they live?
In which district?
I was talking about this.
I was doing this Recording for my Substack before the January 6th hearing, and I was talking about this, where a large part of the American problem is exactly that.
The compromise that we've made to not have a better future, because to have a better future means that you take chances, right?
It means that you change things, that you go down a path.
And why do you go down the path?
You go down a path because a leader convinces you it's in your best interest to take chances.
Now, one of the problems that we have right now is that we have two major political parties in this country.
Neither one of them is interested in big changes.
Well, actually, that's not true.
That's not true.
The Republican Party is starting to make big change propositions.
It just so happens that they're like horrific and anti-democratic and theocratic and dangerous, right?
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has become the party of basically being like, hey, listen, we're dealing with a few bad apples here.
Donald Trump, right?
Pay no attention to the people who funded this, who made sure that all this stuff happened.
If we can just get rid of him, don't worry, everybody.
You can go to Fuddruckers every night.
You know, you are an American, you have the right to just waste as much water as you possibly want, you know, run as much electricity as you possibly want, and gas, go down to Fuddruckers, go to the Fuddruckers across the street from the Fuddruckers, right?
And that's the deal in America, which is, you can go to the store and buy whatever you want, except for the fact that that's starting to break down, right?
You can live a life that you can pay no attention to what's going on in politics, what's happening in society, You can have a consumer paradise as long as you don't trouble for change.
And there's something in our brains that is very terrified of the prospect of change.
I might have to give something up.
You know what I mean?
Like, I could lose something in that change.
And right now, the only party that's making an argument for actual change is the Republican Party.
It just so happens that their argument is for handing everything back over to white, wealthy, evangelical men and getting rid of democracy.
And that's not a path we should be going down.
Right.
And then any kind of negative repercussions from that change are the fault of Democrats.
You're going to make us do all these things that you don't like and that probably are bad for the country.
But it'll be your fault because we had to because you wanted, you know, trans people to have rights or something like that.
I don't know.
No, you're going to destroy society and culture and it's going to degenerate because you want to do those things and we have to save it from this big deal.
This is one of the reasons and I'm glad that you brought up the market.
You know, this is something Nick, I mean, we've been warning about this for over a year now.
Listen, did it look good at a moment, the economy?
Yes, it did.
But the way that capitalism works is it's going to overheat, it's going to reach the point where its inherent contradictions are going to start crunching down.
We're seeing that now.
We are essentially in a bear market.
At this point, to the point where nobody really wants to invest in things, and it's not a safe thing to put your money into.
Right now, the Fed, which is supposed to, again, be the wizard behind the curtain, has a choice, which is either inflation, which I don't know about you, Nick, but I think I speak for myself and the rest of our listeners, it's beating the shit out of me.
Going to the store right now is awful.
It is.
It really is.
But here's the thing about the credit card notion, right?
And this has been the case for a long, long time, even with gas prices.
When you use that credit card and not cash, you kind of just sort of, it doesn't feel real at all to you, right?
Well, Nick, that's part of the thing that's kept America going, the idea of debt.
Is the thing that like kept our market circulating and everybody thought it was going to be a miracle.
But the problem is when that debt starts going up because people are trying to take care of things like inflation and they're trying to make up for the money that they don't have because they're getting exploited.
I got to tell you at some point that doesn't work anymore.
Yeah.
And how do you know this, Jared?
I know this because history has shown it multiple times.
Yeah.
In my lifetime, I've seen it.
In your lifetime, you've seen this happen.
And the problem in all of this, and this next thing we have to talk about, which which Nick has already previewed, is really, really important.
Right now, despite the fact that we have a sitting president of the United States of America who's in his first term and is eligible for another term, we are now looking at 2024 in a way that most political operatives are considering it an open primary.
They more or less, and we talked about how the January 6 hearings were going to give Biden a chance to change the narrative.
Guess what?
The Democratic strategist in that class is not going to let him change the narrative.
They have come after him hard, and they have tried to undermine this thing constantly.
And because of everything that you and I are talking about, Nick, The next couple of years are going to be weird and tough because there's no movement forward.
There's no like change that's on the horizon.
I got to tell you, I think Biden is in for a couple of tough years.
Yeah, I'm actually going on my I'm selling some of my portfolio right now.
I literally just decided that.
Hold on a second, I've got to liquidate.
I've got to go.
Well, I mean, because we were wondering, we needed the cash or something, and it's like, well, do we really want to take it out of that IRA or whatever?
I'm like, yeah, because it's probably going to continue going down.
Let's just do it now before we lose any more money.
You know what I mean?
Like, that's where we're looking at.
I mean, I told you, I had this friend of mine who's a crazy guy, and he's kind of a quant.
I had a dream about him last night, too.
This is what's, before I even knew that the market was going to be down 700 points, is that, you know, this could be a bear market for, like, the rest of our lifetimes.
And no one believes it because it has that's never happened before but like you know nothing nothing we've seen in the last six years ever happened before and and the one thing we always say is it's you know the economy gets the president gets way too much credit and way too much blame there's not a lot they can do because the only thing you can do to come to combat inflation is to raise interest rates and well I'm now I'm not an economist but I play one on a podcast so Raising with interest rates, I believe, is a real big countermeasure to that, and that's going to happen.
But by the way, maybe then I can actually save a little money in a bank account for once, if that ever happens.
So one of the problems in all of this, and we're going to get to this article here in a second, which has, I got to tell you, Nick, it's one of the most New York Times articles ever.
As somebody who's published in the New York Times, worked with these editors, I got to tell you, this is one of the most Quintessential New York Times headlines ever.
Should Biden run in 2024?
Democratic whispers of no start to rise.
So they get to tell you what they think.
They get to tell you what the reality of it is, but they get to hide behind.
We're just asking questions, you know?
So when we're talking about this, when we're talking about the presidency, the president of the United States of America right now in 2024 or in Jesus Lord, I'm already jumping forward here in 2022.
Has basically been turned into a glorified mascot.
There's not much that they can do at this point.
They're pinned in by political forces.
The federal level has been restricted.
Special interests basically rule politics in the United States of America.
They are kind of on the sideline.
It's almost at this point along the same notion of being the Prime Minister of Canada.
You know what I mean?
It's just another cog in a machine.
And the thing is, it doesn't have to be.
The presidency changes, it waxes, it wanes.
I mean, George W. Bush, based on Cheney, you know, Papa Cheney, basically tried to turn himself into an emperor at one point and had overreaching power.
But it's almost like, to go ahead and put this in terms maybe some people could understand, Nick, like in basketball, if a regular player, like, shows their ass and is just kind of a jerk, Like, everybody says, oh, shut up, go away, right?
If you're a bench warmer, just shut up and leave everyone alone.
If you become a major star and you're indispensable and everybody's talking about you, all of a sudden, you can say whatever you want and people have to move around you and change things, correct?
Yeah, yeah.
I didn't think it would be LeBron, you know, slandering around this podcast, but okay.
But you get to a certain point where you make yourself an indispensable part of the conversation and the discourse, And suddenly you can make things happen.
Has Joe Biden done that?
No, absolutely not.
Not at all?
But by the way, the only solution here, he has to run again in 2024.
Right?
Take me down that road.
Okay, who else is going to run?
The country, unfortunately, will not elect a gay man as a president and Pete Buttigieg.
Kamala Harris has just looked ineffectual.
I have no confidence she would win.
Harris has already been running fundraisers.
And not just fundraisers, but in South Carolina, which we covered last week, was the place that changed the entire narrative for Joe Biden running for the presidency in 2020.
Like, we are already starting to see this.
Listen, we've already got a run of people, let me go down this list real fast, of potential candidates, are you ready? - Yeah. - Okay, tell me, do you like movie Groundhog Day, Nick?
I'm not sure I hold it up as high as a lot of people do, but I definitely enjoyed it.
Okay, here are the people being named as possible rivals for Biden or replacements in 2024.
Senators Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Cory Booker of New Jersey.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Beto O'Rourke.
Nick, it's the exact same 2020 field!
That's it.
It's the exact same field.
Yeah.
Did that field set the world on fire, by the way?
Well, no, but and again, why did Biden suddenly in South Carolina take control of the race?
Because Obama and Cliver came in and basically changed the entire narrative and tenor of the thing.
And why did they do that?
They did it because nobody had a possibility of beating Bernie Sanders and then beating Donald Trump.
People don't talk about this enough.
Cliver and Obama literally went out to the Democratic field and said, hey, y'all need to drop out and get behind Joe Biden.
That's the only way to make this thing happen.
That's what changed the race in 2020.
And they weren't lying.
And they were not lying.
So, yeah, cut to 2024.
I mean, listen, Kamala is only running if Biden says you can run.
Has that ever happened before where a vice president tries to Sidestep into a primary?
I don't think so.
You know what, Nick?
We're in whole new territory.
We've got presidents trying to get their vice presidents hung.
So, I mean, we don't know where that's going.
Yeah.
So, and I agree because, again, the only reason why we chose Biden was because we needed to get Trump out of there, right?
We just needed him gone.
It didn't matter necessarily, but whoever we knew was going to win the most votes to get him out of there, that's what we needed to do.
And by the way, the country needed to break an all-time record for votes to do it.
Even though it was kind of a landslide nationally, every one of those votes counted.
So you can't have anything close in 2024 because it's like Trump's gonna win it.
So let's jump in the should Biden run 2024 Democratic whispers of no start to rise.
A reminder by the way, Everybody knows that right now Biden is trying to change the narrative.
Biden basically went out in public with a giant sign that said, about to start to change the narrative.
And this is basically a grasp to pull him back.
Again, remember, these stories are always about changing perception, going after each other's narratives, trying to send signals.
Listen to this opening.
Oh, this is tough.
Midway through the 2020 primary season, many Democratic lawmakers and party officials are venting their frustrations with President Biden's struggle to advance the bulk of his agenda, doubting his ability to rescue the party from a predicted midterm trouncing and increasingly viewing him as an anchor that should be cut loose in 2024.
Ow!
Yes.
You know what I'm thinking of?
There's a funny Monty Python sketch where he's trying to sell an albatross to the crowd at the Hollywood Bowl.
This is an albatross, yes.
Do you really believe that, though?
Do you think that he's an anchor that's pulling everybody down to the bottom of the ocean?
No, I don't think that's the problem.
I think it's the fact that the Democratic Party doesn't have a message.
Okay.
The Democratic Party's anchor is that it allows the Republican Party to define it.
And spends all of its time denying what the Republican Party says while never replacing it with any other message.
They basically don't have a platform other than saying, guess what, the Republicans are awful.
We're not going to do what they do.
Right.
That's it.
Yeah.
Instead of saying something like, you know what, we need to shore up our voting laws.
Yes.
You know, and we know what, we got to shore up our gun laws.
You know, it would be really easy, wouldn't it?
Nick, think about this.
Have you ever been in like, I don't know if you had roommates, I don't know what you were doing in your time in the Midwest, you have roommates or you go out on your vacation with people, you're living in a house, you look around and it's an absolute stye, right?
It needs to be cleaned, the dishes need washed, the floors need swept, you look around and somebody has to say, We need to fix this.
So let's fix it.
And it gets an energy going and you do all of it.
This is the problem right now.
Exactly what you're saying.
Momentum can be built by shoring up voting rights.
Momentum can be built by helping people who need help.
It can be built by coming up with an agenda that has larger aspirations.
And that's just not happening at this moment.
Does it seem to you because you know for a long time for decades and decades certainly you know when Biden was in it was still fit and vim and vigor what's the whatever that he still had that you know it was the it was the independents right that was the group that they needed to to capture to win these elections and so they would cater to them.
I mean, in this day and age, I wonder if that's even a thing anymore.
I mean, you know, I used to imagine in 2004, how could you be undecided as late as October of 2004?
And that was a thing, right?
People were undecided.
They had to figure this out between Bush and, gosh, I just was talking about it.
Gore.
What?
Gore.
No, no, before, you know.
Oh, Kerry.
Kerry, thank you.
Yeah.
I can't believe that that's still a voting bloc that's worth going after, right?
Well, so the problem in all of this is that, like, so many people have gotten so tired of politics because one, it doesn't do anything for them.
Right.
They have the understanding that most politicians are full of shit, which by the way, guilty.
They are mostly full of shit.
That the entire thing is rigged against them for wealthy people.
That's exactly right.
A lot of those people, and I want to be very honest about this because we need to be honest if we're going to actually move forward and make this better, a lot of those people who weren't going out to vote, the only people who have turned them on in years, Barack Obama back in 2008, and then Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in 2016.
And those were the people who got to some of those people who weren't interested in voting, and it was because they came in a way that was different.
They talked about issues differently.
They talked about actually shifting around economics.
By the way, Donald Trump was absolutely lying when he said all of that, but he said it, which is something that a lot of politicians simply have no desire to do at this point.
You know, the difference with Trump, in my mind, was he turned it into a game.
They're a team that you want to cheer for, right?
And maybe that was always that way, but it just feels like the people he activated that hadn't participated because they didn't think politics did anything for them, what it does for them now, nothing tangible, right?
They're not going to get any benefit from the government, like, you know, now versus then, having voted for Trump and have him in office, but they have something that they can Cheer for, and dunk on people with, and lure that over, and troll.
That's sort of, I think, what they've done, right?
And that's given people, that's powerful.
We had Nick Harmony on the show talking about what the effect of being that way is on the brain.
And when you understand that scientifically, which Trump doesn't understand it from an academic standpoint, but he viscerally can understand that reaction, this is what you get, right?
And that's the only way to rally those people is to get them hooked on That adrenaline of just putting libs down and dunking on them and drinking their tears, whatever else they like to do.
Yeah, and real fast, speaking of getting on teams, I want to read a quick quote from this article because I really like to let people know about what's happening behind the scenes, how these types of things work.
This is from that New York Times piece that basically is trying to send a message to Joe Biden that you need to leave.
To send to the Democratic Party that everybody within the Democratic Party wants him to leave, which more or less is like a starter's pistol in the air that's like, go and find your candidate.
Go and find your person.
You said leave and not lead.
Yeah, leave.
OK.
They're they're ready for Biden to basically become a lame duck before November of 2022.
That's what we're talking about.
So this is from it, quote unquote, The presidency is a monstrously taxing job, and the stark reality is the president would be closer to 90 than 80 at the end of a second term, and that would be a major issue, said David Axelrod, the chief strategist for Barack Obama's two winning presidential campaigns.
Quote unquote, Biden doesn't get the credit he deserves for steering the country through the worst of the pandemic, passing historic legislation, pulling the NATO alliance together against Russian aggression and restoring decency and decorum to the White House.
Mr. Axelrod added.
Here, here.
Right.
And part of the reason he doesn't is performative.
He looks his age and isn't as agile in front of a camera as he once was.
And this has fed a narrative about competence that isn't rooted in reality.
So I want to point out what Axelrod is doing here.
One, he's going ahead and paying DAP to Joe Biden.
Right.
He's doing that because he's a political strategist who, by the way, is probably interested in finding his own horse for the horse race in 2024.
He's going to find a younger candidate.
My guess is he's probably already in conversation with either Harris or Buttigieg.
That's the probability.
My guess as of right now is probably Buttigieg, because I think Buttigieg is in tight with the Obama world crowd.
I mean, Buttigieg more or less wants to be Obama.
I mean, that's that's more or less his whole MO.
So what is Axelrod doing?
He's laying the foundation for a narrative in which Joe Biden becomes a torchbearer who hands the torch over to a younger person.
It's not his fault, right?
It's a hard job and people have this perception about him, but maybe it's time for him to go.
Axelrod is in the New York Times right now setting up a path where Joe Biden will leave and he will go with another candidate.
He's jockeying for position.
That's what these articles are about.
They don't just appear completely out of nowhere.
It's about trying to get your own agenda across.
Right, and it's funny because when you watch the hearings and you're seeing all the video of Jared Kushner and all the different people in the campaign, no one is going to say anything negative to your face.
- No. - Everyone is gonna be very positive and very nice to you, and then as soon as you leave, that is what politics is, right?
They're gonna try and backstab you and destroy you as much as they possibly can to get them a leg up.
And that's sort of what Axelrod is doing here as well.
And there's no question that he's already, you know, he's in the talks, he's had the whispers, he's whatever it is, he knows what he's doing.
You can't get to the New York Times without having some framework of what he thinks is gonna happen in 2024.
So that's what politics is, right?
You can be the best at what you're doing in whatever job you have in the White House, but someone else wants that job and they're going to undermine you every single day.
And these political people are going to undermine you every single day they can.
But to your face, they're going to be really nice to you.
And that's what's so tricky about all this.
That's exactly right.
And so, over the exact same thing, speaking of the January 6th hearings, I mean, you said it yourself, Liz Cheney is right there, square in front of the camera, and is, to be honest, because of the attention paid to this thing, almost like the de facto leader of the United States right now.
That's true.
As Biden is kept from the cameras, either intentionally or unintentionally, you have these people who fill the vacuums.
Joe Manchin's done it.
We're looking at Liz Cheney doing it.
Now, with this, we're also hearing that over on the Republican side, we're starting to see a field of potential candidates come out.
There are more than 15.
At this point, who have already built foundations in Iowa, New Hampshire, they've got the PAC structures, they've got the campaign structures that they're building up.
I'm going to go through this list real fast, Nick, of people who have either said that they're thinking about running, or the people around them have already confirmed.
Just be careful, because I've heard that if you read all these names in a row too quickly, then Beetlejuice comes out.
So just be careful how you read these.
I've heard that a tax cut for the wealthy gets passed if you read all of these.
Okay, so I'm going to go through the list real fast before we wrap this show up.
I want to get the initial thoughts on this, and I want to point out that in all of this reporting people have said that it's really notable that Trump has not cleared the field yet.
Because if Trump was going to be the main candidate, Then that would mean that some of these people, particularly on the periphery, wouldn't even consider getting in, particularly with their relationships with Trump.
He still leads in the polls, but I gotta tell you, the number of people here tells me, and the personnel on the list tells me, that some people think that Trump either might not run or might not be able to run in 2024.
Fair?
Fair.
Okay, so I'm gonna go through the list and let's give our initial thoughts.
Mike Pence.
Yes, six pence, none the richer.
I gotta tell you, I've said this on a previous episode, a Mike Pence run for the presidency in 2024 might very well be the comedy that we all deserve.
I mean, I don't know, I thought you were going to say it might be the saddest thing we've ever seen, but okay.
He is absolutely loathed by the Republican Party to the point where people tried to hang him.
Yeah, yeah.
That's incredible.
And you know what they say is comedy is just tragedy plus time.
So there it is.
Can you imagine?
You're in the bowels of the Capitol on January 6th, right?
All hell's breaking loose above.
Like, some Secret Service person is like, codename, Whole Milk.
They're saying they want to hang you.
And in the back of your just absolute, like, idiot mind, you're like, I'm gonna run for the presidency.
Yeah.
That's incredible.
Tom Cotton.
Tommy.
Dummy.
Just an absolute fascist in waiting.
Yeah.
And Harvard, right?
He's Harvard educated?
I believe that's right.
Do you think he has any shot of being president of the United States?
You know, listen, I will give him a better shot than Ted Cruz.
But that's, I mean, you're talking about in the single digits here.
Man, he's got the charisma of watching a loved one suffer.
I mean, he just does not have that aspect of it.
I mean, if there's some sort of a Weimar Republic coup, you know, like the Reichstag burns down, like, I don't know, maybe Tom Cotton could make some sort of a candidacy, but I don't see it, right?
Yeah, and he's Harvard Law School and Harvard, Harvard.
Yeah, Tim Scott, just not even going to make a dent in this, right?
Oh my God, what is he doing?
What's Chris Christie doing trying to put together a structure?
How many times are we going to run this thing back?
You know, when you do this, it's either because you know you're not going to win, but you're just getting yourself in the conversation, like Swalwell, for instance, did it, you know, to get himself, you know, for the future.
Well, you know, he's already passed that, you know, so that's not happening, but he's probably angling to become another, you know, consultant or campaign manager or whatever again, right?
I think it would be really hilarious if Chris Christie just ends up becoming, like, the transition officer for somebody.
It's an expensive way, though, to get that job every time, but hey.
I'll give you a real quick three people who will not be the next President of the United States of America.
Larry Hogan, Nikki Haley, and Rick Scott.
Yeah, and Rick Scott again.
Like, what are you doing?
Scaring children.
Listen, the amount of narcissism it takes to think that you could be President of the United States is astounding.
But for some of these people, it's like, what a bunch of misplaced narcissism.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, I got I got a worse one for you.
Speaking of narcissism, Mike Pompeo.
Yeah, he's been angling since the day he got that job in the Pentagon.
Pentagon?
No.
Where does the Secretary of State live or work?
That's a great question.
You know, whatever building that is.
Dammit.
Who wants Mike Pompeo to be President of the United States besides Mike Pompeo and maybe like a couple people who know him?
And his wife.
Oh, and he's just like an absolute crazed, evangelical, theocratic asshole.
And again, no charisma.
Like, just one of the most annoying human beings in public circles in forever.
Who thinks that he can run for anything?
Nee, we remind you, like, there's an NPR reporter who was interviewing him about Ukraine, and then he's like, show me where Ukraine is on a map.
And like, she's like, yeah, it's right there.
And he's like, Well, I knew that too.
Foggy Bottom, by the way.
Here's the real damage.
We have to listen to this guy pretend for a few months until he drops out.
My prediction is if Mike Pompeo runs for the nomination, We're going to see him in one debate, and then there's going to be one of those undercard debates, and he's going to be on it, and then that's going to be the end of his candid essay.
Yeah, that's a good prediction for sure.
Ted Cruz, run it back again!
Yes, Rafi.
I'll tell you what, when you literally have been told by everybody in your family and circles that you are the next messiah, you can't stop running for president.
Yeah, but there's got to be people in his family that also say, hey Ted, you know, you're kind of an asshole.
There's got to be those people in his, I hope in his family, someone, maybe his dad, somebody has to slap him across the face and tell him.
No, his dad is basically just absolutely grifting on telling people he's the second coming of Christ.
Oh, okay.
Well, listen, if you can't get your dad to say that about you, then who can?
Yeah, who can?
Alright, so next to last, this is something we actually have to talk about.
Liz Cheney.
Listen, I don't think there's an even remote possibility that Liz Cheney could win the nomination of the Republican Party, but I want to say two things about it.
If she were to mount a serious campaign and gain any traction whatsoever, the way that our media would fawn over her would be disgusting.
Like, they would absolutely pave over all of her troubling positions.
They would paint her as a hero.
It would never, never end.
Second of all, I just, I don't even see a possible reality where that comes true.
I don't think that there is any room whatsoever There is this fever dream idea, Biden is part of it, the idea that the Republican Party will wake up from whatever they want to believe this is, that they'll come to their senses, that their consciences will come over.
It's not going to happen.
It's just not going to happen.
Here's an interesting scenario, however.
First of all, they go to the hearing.
It continues to be really impressive and is the face of the whole thing.
They refer Trump gets indicted, like, you know, and she still becomes, she's the face of, like, putting this evil scourge to bed, whatever, and then maybe she runs as independent.
I mean, that is a possibility and basically runs as a spoiler at that point, right?
Yeah.
You know, because she's kind of a spoiler right now, maybe she would do that and, you know, that's all they need.
That would take down anybody running in the Republican Party.
That's an interesting thought.
And we wrap this up with the, outside of Donald Trump, the assumed frontrunner, Ronnie Donnie DeSantis.
I think we all know at this point how dangerous this person is, his ability to create an autocratic situation around himself, embrace this authoritarian stuff.
Also, while we're on the subject, Nick, did you see the DeSantis flotilla down in Florida?
Are you describing a bunch of boats in the water in support of him?
Yes, I am supporting a bunch of boats in the water in support of him.
I gotta tell you, a couple years ago, Those same people were flying Trump flags and sinking each other down.
Yeah, right.
Well, no, but this year they're complaining about the gas prices as they drive a vehicle that gets no miles to the gallon.
They're rip-ass and up and down the coast.
Florida, we salute you.
Never, ever change, and by that I mean please change.
Please, dear God, change.
I will say, though, I think DeSantis is growing around himself a movement of both Trumpian MAGA people, but also a lot of Republicans that we've talked about who are quote-unquote serious people who want to destroy liberal democracy.
I think he's really, really gaining some, I think, troubling momentum.
You know, I just typed in, how much has DeSantis raised for a presidential run?
And it says he's raised $100 million for his Florida re-election race.
This is in April of 2022.
That's a lot of money.
Especially for a governor's race.
I know Florida's a big state, but geez Louise.
Well, they know that his re-election in Florida, he needs to run up the score.
He needs to have a massive, decisive victory that gives him the momentum going in.
That's always been the governor thing.
And what it tells you is if he can raise that much money now, this early before the race, he'd be able to raise a lot of money to run for the president in 2024.
We keep covering that there are a lot of people who know that Trump is an absolute moron and buffoon, and they used him for their anti-democratic ideas, their authoritarian ideas for, you know, furthering their wealth and their power.
Those same people are going to open up their checkbooks for Ron DeSantis in a way that is going to make your head spin.
I mean, he is the godsend to those people.
Although you argue that with Trump, they knew they could control him because he didn't give a shit about anything.
They can't control DeSantis, but he's going to be on board with everything they want anyway.
So it doesn't matter, I guess, at that point.
It's the same results, but the younger, better looking guy.
And speaking of, our media is going to be eating out of the palm of his hand.
They're going to be more than happy to launder him as an anti-Trump, a post-Trump, a reasonable Republican, you name it.
I think the easy money's on him at this point if it's not Trump, right?
Absolutely.
All right, on that note, we're going to get out of here.
Thank you, everybody, for listening and your support.
You're wonderful.
A reminder that we will be back on Friday with our additional bonus weekender episode.
If you want access to that and all the other additional goodies, including the Muckrake community, which if you're not a part of, you should be, all you gotta do is go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
If you need us before then, you can find Nick at CanHearMeSMH.
