Weekender PREVIEW: Phantom Indictments, DeSantis in DeSpotlight, and Aliens?
This is a PREVIEW of the weekly Weekender podcast. On this episode, Friend of the Pod Pete Dominick stops by to fill in for Nick Hauselman. He and Jared Yates Sexton discuss the Donald Trump Indictment Watch, Ron DeSantis's shaky week in the spotlight, Joe Biden's sagging approval ratings, and a completely unexpected discussion about aliens and ghosts.
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Hey everybody, welcome to the Weekender Edition of the McCraig Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates Sexton.
I got some bad news for everybody.
Our beloved Nick Hausman is again out of the office.
He is running low on vacation days.
I'm a little bit concerned.
Here's the thing.
It is a jam-packed news day.
I wish I had somebody handsome.
I wish I had somebody intelligent.
I wish I had somebody funny and insightful.
I just, I'm pulling out my hair what little I have left.
If only a hero would come out of the mists.
Jared, Pete Dominick is here.
Pete Dominick!
Pete Dominick, stand up!
I mean, I'm none of those things.
I could have gotten you John Fuglesang or Dean Obidala's number.
I refuse.
What a surprise that you showed up in this Zoom chat.
I just saw this link to this Zoom and it just said, hey, come on over here for a good time.
And so I was like, I like a good time.
I clicked on it and there you were talking.
And I think this was meant to be.
I love it.
I am very, very aroused by this.
This is wonderful.
Surprise!
We have a wonderful weekender edition.
Everybody, run over to patreon.com slash my great podcast.
Sign up.
You want to listen to this.
I'm going to go ahead and tell you what's happening here.
At the end of this episode, I have already set up a trap in which Pete Dominick and I will talk about aliens.
We'll talk about UFOs.
I'm so jazzed about that.
Before that, we have to talk about approval ratings.
We got to talk about Ron DeSantis and Piers Morgan.
I'm sorry.
But here we have to start with this, Pete.
We were promised an indictment this week.
We were promised perp walks.
We were promised that Donald Trump was going to be held responsible for his crimes and his actions.
I've always taken a wait-and-see approach with this thing.
The developments that have taken place, we've had rumors that it was going to happen this week, that he was going to turn himself over on Friday.
Alvin Bragg, the district attorney in the case, has now come out and says that Trump leaked this entire thing in order to create a defense, probably raise money, and to rally Republicans for his cause.
Pete, I want to hear what you have to say about what you are seeing, what you're feeling about this entire situation.
As always, it feels fluid and weird.
Where are you on Trump indictment watch 2023?
Well, Lucy was holding that football, and I was like, oh hey, there's Lucy!
She's got the ball!
And so I ran... I'm gonna kick it so far this time!
I was like, this time I'm gonna kick it before she tries to pull it away and I ran full speed and I was on Twitter for hours.
I woke up in the middle of the night to check the news and social media and that's when I realized that she was gonna pull that ball away.
And of course, Lucy is Donald Trump and so when you said we were promised Did certain legal analysts play it up?
Fall for it, maybe?
Perhaps.
But it really was just him.
It wasn't anybody from the Manhattan DA's office.
The thing I was always wondering about was why was the NYPD giving notice to every normal Police officers, plainclothes police officers, were told to wear their uniforms that day.
And they were putting up barriers in Manhattan near the court.
So that was always a little bit weird to me.
Like, why did that happen?
I felt like that was a piece of evidence.
But you know, his plane never left.
It was him.
It was a grift.
It was trying to control the narrative.
It was trying to be talked about.
He's so good at that.
And he did it again, and he got us.
That's my general feeling.
Did you feel like, or did you fall for it, or did you feel like that they were people who were irresponsible in terms of their speculation?
Well, I want to point out, and I'm glad that you brought it up like this, because the media ecosystem that we have, it absolutely runs on Trump.
You know, it always has, you know, since he came on the scene and since he ran for president in 2016.
Like, it equals higher ratings, it equals more clicks, it equals more ad revenue, everything like that.
Like, things run better in terms of financial incentive whenever Trump is involved.
The fact that he poked his head up, he's had one of the worst presidential campaigns, let's put quotes around that, so far this time around.
He hasn't seemed particularly interested in it.
He has gone ahead and injected himself into the main media conversation.
People have been camping out, waiting for this thing, waiting for everything to take place.
The only reason I thought that there was a possibility it might happen is because, I think, like I keep saying, they're tired of him.
They want to be done with him.
They don't want him in the election.
If Trump would have went away to Mar-a-Lago and just hung out and ate hamburgers and hung out with professional golfers, I think we would be having a different conversation right now.
But this whole thing has been leading to this point where he keeps poking his head up, he keeps, you know, sort of injecting himself into the system and discourse.
I don't know if you saw this, but he's raised 1.5 million dollars since he said this.
He's raised literally over a million dollars for himself.
And you're right.
It's about grifting.
It's about gaining the attention.
And by the way, we're going to talk about DeSantis here in a second.
Trump re-sees the narrative around the Republican nomination this week.
Just to be clear, I'm asking you this.
You say Trump injects himself in everything and the media pays attention to it.
Two things can be true, right?
Like we could say we shouldn't be paying attention to This story or that story or that's clickbait, but he was the president United States and he's running again and he was impeached twice and led an insurrection and so It's a vicious circle.
It feeds itself.
But two things can be true in that.
I wish we didn't have to talk about it, but we do have to talk about it because he's still the leader.
Do you disagree with that?
Are you one of those?
I don't think you are.
We've talked about this.
That we should just ignore him and he'll go away?
Because I don't believe that that's realistic.
I don't either at all, and I've never believed that.
Listen, you and I, we crawl around the same spaces.
We see a lot of people who, first of all, they want to go ahead and they don't even want to say the name Donald Trump, right?
They want to pretend like that's done.
If you go ahead and take away his oxygen, he'll go away.
This is not a problem that's going to solve itself.
And by the way, like what we've watched over the past couple of days, and you know, I keep joking about this, that I have to hang out over at Truth Social.
Have you ever, have you ever even gone to truth social?
No.
No.
My browser doesn't allow for it.
It is so bad.
But it's like he's over there not just calling for protest and sort of like wink wink nudge nudging towards violence.
He's over there now calling Alvin Bragg, he's called him an animal.
An African American district attorney has called him an animal.
He's now said that he is bought and sold by George Soros and that he's doing the work of the devil.
Like this is shit that is just straight up calling for violence.
Well, he's basically said in about 50 different ways, black people funded by Jews are going to have me arrested.
You know, when you say it like that... Which is the name of my band.
When you say it like that, it doesn't sound great, does it?
No, I think that this is like one of those things that you actually can't turn away from.
But I do think that one of the things that we have to do, as in all things Trump, we have to stop expecting the system to take care of him.
We have to stop expecting this thing to just solve itself.
Because this whole thing, whether he's indicted or he's not, I don't think he's dropping out of this race.
I don't think he's going away.
And I think he's going to be competitive in the race one way or another, unless he's kept off that stage and he's kept off the ballot.
But I don't think our institutions are going to take care of it.
Do you?
Yeah, I do.
Okay.
I think there is a text message chain between Tish James, Fonny Willis in Georgia.
Tish James, AG in New York.
Fonny Willis, AG in Georgia.
The DA here in Manhattan.
At least the three of them are on it.
And they're all coordinating.
Maybe Jack Smith is on it.
And they're all coordinating.
I don't actually believe that at all, but it's a point to say that once one indictment drops, I mean, even the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit looks like it has a lot of potential.
That's the rape allegation.
And I just think they're all going to come down.
I think they all of them are going to come down on them, on him, and including the Department of Justice Special Prosecutor.
And I have always Always wrong.
But that's because I am this eternal optimist.
So I did not think he would get elected.
I didn't think he would get reelected.
I was very much an optimist about the midterms, and so I was close to that.
But you know, this is a prediction, but I do think that it's really hard for us to wait day after day, year after year, week after week.
Did that in the wrong order, but people know what I meant.
For some kind of indictment.
I get it, but I think that all of those cases, or at least several of them, probably most of them, are going to turn up indictments.
I'm not sure if that's what you mean by the system taking care of them, our institutions holding, but I think it is what you mean, and I think it will.
I hope you're right on that end.
And by the way, he'll run from prison.
And well, I mean, I've got a picture of Eugene V. Debs behind me.
I mean, he sort of cut his teeth on that.
I have to tell you, I hope that that's correct, because a united front on this thing is one of the only ways it happens.
One individual, I gotta tell you, I still think that Mary Garland should have been out front on this.
I think that should have happened at the very beginning.
I think you have federal protection going.
This whole thing, by the way, was a shot across the bow.
It was Trump saying, listen, if you try and hold me accountable and if you and if it's like whether it's in New York or whether it's in Georgia or whatever, like you are going to have hell come down around you.
You're going to have to deal with this.
You're going to have to put up the barricades.
You're going to have to deal with probably lone wolves, which I think has actually been One of the mistakes in the coverage of this, people are like, oh, the crowds aren't showing up in New York.
Well, yeah, the Trump people aren't in New York.
There are some Trump people in New York, but most of the people around here who are going to show up at these protests and cause problems are around the country.
Every time that Trump says something about an institution, every time he says something about an individual, like they either get harassed or somebody shows up at a federal building, you know, with an AR-15 and tries to shoot it up, or they send out a bunch of, you know, Not every time.
And he's getting less power.
I that has happened and it will probably continue to happen.
And it's been horrible for all the people that it certainly has happened to.
But I think he's to some extent done.
I think he's lost so much of his power.
And I understand.
It's a little lazy to me.
It's a lot easier to take down a guy who fucking crashed through a window and there's a video of him and he doesn't have a powerful lawyer than it is to take down Roger Stone.
It just is.
It's a little lazy to me.
It's a lot easier to take down a guy who fucking crashed through a window and there's a video of him and he doesn't have a powerful lawyer than it is to take down Roger Stone.
It just is.
It's harder.
It's much, much harder for there to be a case.
You have to have these grand juries.
So I think that that's not necessarily fair.
But what I think is there's a chilling effect to the insurrection.
These people that have been arrested People are watching.
They saw what happened.
The January 6th committee hearings were effective.
There are still people who will be dangerous.
They will do bad things.
But I think a lot of people don't want to risk their lives or their livelihoods or their families for Donald Trump.
I think that they don't.
Increasingly.
Increasingly.
And I'm trying to have as much nuance as I can, but that's what I feel.
Well, I think what you just brought up is an interesting point because It really depends.
And I think January 6th, again, was one of those moments where we kind of got the lay of the land.
Who is willing to break into the Capitol, right?
Who is willing to go in and get shot?
Like, the two groups that were there that were definitely ready for it were the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, and the QAnon people, right?
Because they truly believe that they're revolutionaries.
And that is actually one of the things that has been weird about the ascent of Trump and his entire reign has been there is a part of it that is a grift and an illusion, right?
He'll go, I'm fighting for you.
I'm building the wall.
I'm doing all these things.
We're going to, you know, drain the swamp.
Meanwhile, what are you doing?
You're actually building the swamp up.
You're actually going ahead and bringing in this corruption.
But there are some people who are true believers who are off in their own land, right?
They've gone down the rabbit hole.
They've taken the pill, whatever you want to say about them.
Those people are inherently dangerous.
The question is how many people come to believe that they are part of a revolutionary movement?
Because you have to make a decision.
You're exactly right, which is, am I willing to go out today and die for Donald fucking Trump?
And there are some people, but that's the question is how many of them are there and how many of them actually buy into this thing to that extent.
That's a great point.
I think though we get lost.
In the kind of PTSD of what we saw on January 6th and worrying that it could happen again, I certainly did after 9-11.
I thought, you know, I was there in New York that day and I thought we were on borrowed time every single day I was in that city, which is every day for years after that.
I was like, when are we, when is this going to happen again?
I think we feel that way to some extent about January 6th.
When are they going to rush the Capitol or storm a state Capitol again?
And I think that that's important to talk about, and I think the violence is the most disconcerting part.
But I would love to shift the conversation now or most of the time to, as you have covered quite a bit, the actual policies and legislations that are being passed in red states throughout the country, because it's possible we could have more violence.
We will.
There will be more.
Soft target attacks on synagogues and churches and individuals and black folks in grocery stores.
It's not over.
It's it's horrifying.
And that's why we talk about it.
But I think that the policies that are being passed and the arguments that are being made in the Republican run House, they won't get anything through the Senate, much less to Joe Biden.
But I really do think that the consequences that we're seeing in the states that you've lived in and covered
