All Episodes
May 12, 2023 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
15:53
Trump Town Hall Of Shame

To listen to the full episode, go to http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast and become a patron. This gets you an additional episode every week, but also supports the show, keeping it commercial free and editorially independent. Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman go in depth on what Donald Trump was saying during his appearance on CNN and why it was an event in the first place. Then they analyze Tucker Carlson's announcement that he's going to broadcast his new show on Twitter before wrapping up with an indictment of Congressman George Santos on a law that he helped co-sponsor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome to the Weekender Edition of our podcast.
I'm J.D.
It's nice to have you here with Nick Hausman.
Nick, we have a lot to talk about today.
I'm so sick to death of talking about Donald Trump.
And now it looks like we're going to have to talk a lot about Donald Trump.
And I'm sick of it.
I'm already frustrated.
I'm already pissed off.
I feel my soul curdling like so much milk.
If you want, I can always get a couple episodes from about four years ago and just play those back.
I don't know if anyone will notice.
I have the worst sense of deja vu imaginable.
And watching... and we'll get into this thing.
Man, we have a jam-packed weekend.
George Santos got charged with multiple maladies.
We gotta talk about that.
We gotta talk about Tucker Carlson going to Twitter, which has its own implications.
But listen, we have to do this.
We gotta talk about this.
If you want to hear us talk about all this, and you should because we're going to cover this the way other people don't, go to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast, become a subscriber, and support this show the way it should be supported.
Nick, last night, we're recording this on Thursday, May 11th, I sat on my couch.
I had a good meal.
I ordered some food in.
I felt good about my meal.
I had a taco salad.
That is the best thing that happened to me last night as I turned on CNN's damned, dirty town hall with Donald Trump.
This was right on the heels, of course, of another thing that we have to talk about, which is writer E. Jean Carroll winning her suit against Donald Trump.
He was found guilty of defaming her and sexually abusing her in order to pay $5 million to her.
Nick, most networks, if they cared about democracy, wouldn't have Donald Trump on them, but also most networks might, I don't know, blink after such a judgment was handed down.
Instead, CNN invited Donald Trump to come on and say what Ever in the hell it was he wanted to say.
But I don't get it.
I don't know, understand the criticism of that because of course they would do it.
They're going to get the ratings.
They want to do it.
Chris Licht is now in charge of CNN and I'm sure he's amongst that ilk of people.
So I don't get it.
I mean, of course it makes perfect sense to me that they would do that.
They're there to make money.
In fact, in other circumstances, if they had done it differently, it would have been good because you could have called him out on some of the lies he did.
I mean, they come so fast and so furious, it's kind of not easy to, but you feel like you're going through a time warp again, we're reliving.
Imagine what it's like in this guy's brain.
This guy's brain turns over like a hamster on a wheel, right?
The same things over and over again.
It must be what hell is like to be Donald Trump.
I swear to you, there's no other way to describe it.
You know, there's so much that we have to get into.
By the way, Licht, who is a complete abomination as head of CNN and is obviously pushing the network so far right that it's almost unrecognizable.
Which, by the way, is a terrible business strategy.
No one on the right wing is going to start watching CNN.
Well, okay.
Oh, okay.
Well, here's the thing.
They're looking at, like, Fox, and, you know, there's a lot of money to be made from that side, right?
But here's a caveat, is a guy like Tucker Carlson was not making them a lot of money, I don't think, right, from the advertising.
Am I safe in saying that?
No, not unless you were Mike Lindell with MyPillowMoney.
Right.
So yeah, that's an interesting example, only because there must be numbers, there must be data.
Again, I'm looking at this as a purely analytical thing and not a journalistic thing.
We're going to get into the business of why this happened, because there's a reason why this took place.
And by the way, Licht talked about it and got into it and has some self-aggrandizing bullshit that we're going to dive into.
For this particular situation, they chose Caitlin Collins.
Caitlin Collins, by the way, it was like trying to watch a person frantically hold on to the bumper of a speeding car.
Like one of those old practical effects in 1970s Hollywood with a stunt person like being swung around, tried so hard at every instance to point out every piece of misinformation and every lie that Donald Trump uttered, which is impossible.
There is no strategy for actually doing this, nor would it make a difference in the first place.
It also doesn't help that Caitlin Collins has a, shall we say, complicated history of, I don't know, Pushing things like demographic change and white replacement theory light.
This was not a great new bet for a new personality at CNN.
She's going to get her own show now, by the way.
Like, she's going to be in primetime.
Congratulations.
Can't wait to see how that whole thing works out.
Donald Trump was welcomed onto the stage in New Hampshire.
The crowd was stocked with MAGA diehards, which I wondered.
Before this thing started, I thought that maybe this would be an instance in which Donald Trump, as the old head of the Republican Party, would go into New Hampshire and he would face some hard questions from this audience that they might test him and ask him about substantive things.
Nick, that is not what happened.
That is not what happened at all.
He was greeted by a bunch of supporters who hooted, hollered, laughed.
We'll talk more about that in just a second.
This was an absolute disgrace.
And I want to point something out.
You couldn't be more right.
Not only has Trump gotten more offensive, not only has Trump lost any of the scruples or any of the hesitancy that he used to have, it's shocking that as this man has gotten older, his bad habits have hardened and worsened.
His ability to understand what is going on, his ability to answer a question, stay within even the realms of what the question was asked or what the topic was or even to comprehend what it was, this is not a well person.
You couldn't be more right.
This was not only an offensive demagogue, this was a person who is incapable of being president from a mental acuity standpoint.
Oh, I will throw this out there.
I did stumble across... Is Mehdi Hassan a friend of the Breakdown?
A friend of the podcast?
I think he is.
Absolutely.
Mehdi is absolutely a friend of the pod.
So he had a nice little thread that's discussing what they could have done in preparation for what we knew he was going to say.
Because remember, none of this is new.
This is all the same recycled bullshit we had heard for years.
So they could have had a multimedia presentation ready to go.
Okay, you didn't say that you asked for more votes.
Here's the audio tape from that you had on the on the call all sorts of things like that.
They could have just said okay.
Now, why are you saying that when here it is now?
Probably wouldn't matter he would simply say I he might even just say I didn't say that even though they heard or that's not what I meant but at the very least it would have been a little bit more illuminating than again what we got to hear from here which is just the greatest hits of the same bullshit he's been saying the whole time so yeah I don't think it's a I don't know how much it sullied the establishment of our journalistic integrity or not, but it did get bad.
There's no question that we can get specifically about other things, because you know what?
Scratch what I said.
There was a little bit of new stuff, right?
He did have to respond to E. Jean Carroll in that case, and we got a little bit more of a glimpse into what was going on in the adult brain of his.
Yeah, I will agree to disagree.
I think, one, it did sully journalism even further than where it was.
And by the way, like, it was over here on live support, like, holding on to dear life.
Like, CNN exposed itself for being what it is and what it has been and what it is becoming a worse version of.
And we'll talk again in a minute about what Chris Licht has said and has revealed from that.
Also, there are some things that made news from this.
There's analysis that we need to talk about, which is Donald Trump right now, the nomination for the Republican Party is his to lose.
Like, Donald Trump can become the GOP nominee, and Donald Trump can win the presidency.
That can happen, and we have to talk about that larger part.
But we did also see some things get furthered here.
And I want to go ahead, Nick, and have you play this first clip as he's being asked about January 6th and the people involved in January 6th.
My question to you is, will you pardon the January 6th rioters who were convicted of federal offenses?
I am inclined to pardon many of them.
I can't say for every single one because a couple of them, probably they got out of control.
You know, when you look at Antifa, what they've done to Portland, and if you look at Antifa, look at what they've done to Minneapolis and so many other, so many other places.
Look at what they did to Seattle and BLM.
BLM.
Many people were killed.
These people.
God, so what we have here already, and by the way, later on, he was asked to clarify, Nick, which was, he was asked, would you also go ahead and pardon some of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys?
And he's like, absolutely.
There's good people over there who, you know, have been aligned.
There were insinuations, of course, that this was some sort of a federal setup.
He denied that anything had gone wrong.
He actually said that it was a beautiful day.
All that.
He praised himself.
Shocker of shockers.
This was a moment in which the relationship between Trump and the paramilitaries in the far right just absolutely solidified even further.
Why would they not fight for him now?
Why would they not, you know, absolutely spill some blood in order to get Donald Trump in as president when you would have the stamp of approval and also the power of the presidency on your side?
This was a further tightening of that relationship.
For sure.
So what he's signaling is, yeah, go ahead.
Do all those things.
We won't hold you accountable for it.
We heard in Texas just recently where one of the guys who drove into a BLM protest and then was acquitted immediately, basically.
Actually, did that even go through?
He said he was going to acquit the guy.
immediately or as soon as the verdict came out, which was clearly he had planned to go there.
He had planned to injure people.
And then that's what happened.
So I kill people.
So, yes, this is what is really, really concerning.
I think he called the police officer or the Capitol police officer that shot Ashley Babbitt a thug and using those as a racially charged term at the very least.
So, you know, I suppose maybe we just need to be reminded that this is what's going on and how bad he is because it's been a little bit over a while.
But, you know, again, nothing, nothing new here yet.
Well, and before we get into what I think is one of the lowest moments in American political history, and I don't say that lightly, Nick, doesn't it feel weird to have this like brought to us again.
You know what I mean?
Like, you know, it's been a while.
Donald Trump has been hanging out at Mar-a-Lago.
He's at a couple of rallies.
There's been no reason whatsoever to watch these rallies or really listen to them.
Obviously we do because we're sickos and that's our job.
But like, isn't it strange to see him in his element, like really, really getting into the For me, like, I don't know how you felt absorbing it.
I felt ill.
I felt literally nauseous listening to him talk and experiencing him again.
I mean, there's always a legitimization of this, but we've already gone through that.
He's already been in the White House.
He's kind of, that's been established.
All the norms have been destroyed already, but I hear you.
There is that residual dread from just the voice itself and hearing him.
It's also frustrating because, you know, he, by the way, What he was saying is ridiculous, but he certainly doesn't sound as addled as he did when he was in the White House.
He definitely felt like he was prepared for this in some weird way, right?
Like he had these points, he was able to recite them, and he probably even believes what he's saying at this point.
But I guess I was expecting a little bit more...
I mean, I get it.
The rambling, what you would say, would be, OK, how are we getting on to BLM?
We're talking about, you know, the rioters.
He can't even stay on that.
Right.
But that is that is the preparation.
That's what he's doing on purpose.
And I thought, like, from that standpoint, if you want to look at it from his point of view, like he probably felt like he did an awesome job.
Well, listening to him talk about Ukraine was one of the more painful things of all of this.
Like, I mean, literally hearing him talk about how, well, first of all, he says that he would end the Ukraine war in one day.
Like that, that, that, and which is such a Trumpian thing, right?
Like everyone else is such an idiot.
This stuff is so easy and he could take care of it.
Meanwhile, he's tap dancing around calling Vladimir Putin a war criminal.
He's tap dancing around saying, like, does he think that, you know, does he want Ukraine to win the war?
Meanwhile, his grip on any of the facts of the situation, and like, obviously, what he does is he relies on stereotypes and archetypes, right?
There's nothing real there.
There's no meat on the bone.
There's no policy understanding.
And by the way, one of the best of all time, and you know this as well as I do, Bill Clinton Was one of the best of all time when it came to policy specifics, right?
Like, that was sort of the thing that he could do outside of retail politics.
He could tell you numbers, he could sit there and recite these things left and right.
Trump has no ability for it.
Which is why, by the way, and I'm glad you brought this up, he seemed even worse in the White House.
Which was, he was being inundated consistently by information that he had no interest in taking in, And instead relied on these old, stale ideas of the world that were, like, from the 1980s and early 1990s, and also his own narrative of what role he played in things.
It just so happens that in this case we have a very large, complicated situation that Donald Trump couldn't even begin faking his way through.
Which is when this stuff gets really, really frustrating.
Well, let's talk about that for a second, because he loved to do the thing where, you know, NATO is not paying their share or the European Union is not paying their share.
So he's he has numbers.
I don't even know if anybody verified those numbers, how much we've spent in Ukraine versus how much the European Union has spent, you know, all combined, which is a lot less.
We know that.
But think about what he's saying, because I think what he thinks is he'd come in and he would just force Ukraine to capitulate.
Right.
That's that's his ending of the war.
He would let Russia just take over the entire country.
Now, he also then says he wants them to pay the same amount of money that we've paid.
Do you realize how much more Ukraine could fight back and then actually make it a completely fair fight if the European Union would give him all that money that he's asking for?
That's the thing that I don't think he even can conceptualize or any idea how stupid he sounds when he does that.
But basically, yeah, he's advocating for Ukraine to be so well equipped and so well funded that they would actually have a fighting chance of beating Russia.
In this case.
You've been listening to the free part of this episode.
If you'd like to hear the rest of this great conversation, head over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast and subscribe for lots more additional content including a Discord server and live shows.
We'd really appreciate it if you could give it a try.
Export Selection