Weekender PREVIEW: Confessions, Corruption, and Cage Matches
Nick Hauselman is out and about, so Jared Yates Sexton is solo and diving into the news. And what a lot of news there is, including Donald Trump's disastrous Fox News interview, the further corruption of the Supreme Court and...Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg possibly fighting in a cage match?
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It's Jared Yates Sexton, here with the patron-exclusive Weekender Edition of the MuttGregg Podcast, to go ahead and listen to the whole thing.
And by the way, man, this is a...
Really, really full show.
We got to talk about Donald Trump going on Fox News, confessing to felonies left and right.
Fox News going after him hard.
We have to talk about Samuel Alito and the further corruption of the Supreme Court.
We got to talk about Hunter Biden pleading guilty.
To a couple of crimes.
We gotta talk about Andrew Tate being arrested.
We gotta talk about Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg thinking about having a cage fight?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know what's going on.
But okay.
Anyway, you need to go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast and become a subscriber to the show to support the Muckrake Podcast, to support me and Nick Halseman and this endeavor as we move into The 2024 presidential election where we are going to offer you coverage, insight, and analysis that I gotta tell you, you're not gonna find anywhere else.
That's patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
For everyone who is a subscriber supporting this show, thank you.
Seriously, thank you.
It means so much to us and we feel the love and we love you right back.
Nick Halsman is out today.
Getting a little bit of deserved R&R.
I think R&R.
Yeah, rest, relaxation.
I am helming the desk, as it were.
I'm actually at a desk, so I can say that.
Sitting here looking at all of these stories.
They're all fascinating in their own way.
And yeah, you're going to hang out with me for a little bit as I just sort of dive into this and ramble into your ears.
How's that for a deal?
So let's go ahead and start with the cable news segment that everyone has been talking about over the past few days.
Donald Trump went on Fox News and sat down with Bret Baier in what can only be described as a completely and utterly disastrous segment.
This is the second time that Trump has appeared on Fox News in the last month or so.
He was also on Sean Hannity's show, the flagship bearer of Fox News, which is absolutely doing terribly.
As predicted, I believe I had that one because Sean Hannity is not compelling and isn't really the person who should be helming that spot.
But that's enough media criticism.
This is the second time again that Trump has been on Fox News within the last few weeks, which has broken a spell in which Trump was pretty much persona non grata on Fox News.
He was talked about almost in passing.
They would talk obviously about the deep state conspiracy, the big lie, all of this stuff.
But it was known that Rupert Murdoch, and we found this out in the discovery of the Dominion voting case, that Murdoch wanted to make Trump a non-entity at Fox News.
He was done with him.
The upper crust at Fox News was tired of him.
They were ready to be free of him, not have anything to do with him.
The New York Post started going after him.
All of these associated properties basically were like, we're done with Donald Trump.
And it's just, that's it.
We're moving on.
And one of the things that I've been warning about for a while now Is that the Republican Party and the Republican establishment was absolutely champing at the bit to get the MAGA group under their control.
A reminder, they did not want Donald Trump to be the nominee in 2016, and he essentially tamed them into his own state propaganda apparatus.
But they wanted to go ahead and take that faux populist movement that Trump had brought together, the Make America Great Again movement, And to bring it under reign of the Republican establishment.
If that meant Ron DeSantis, it meant Ron DeSantis.
If it meant somebody else, it meant somebody else.
But it was time to take the party back from the rabble.
That was the entire purpose of this current iteration of Fox News and the Republican Party.
This is delicate business.
It's a lot like that game, Operation.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I was really bad at Operation when you had the patient board with the buzzing if you hit the side as you were taking out bones.
Really morbid game now that we're talking about it.
Still sting a little bit about the fact that I'm not good at it.
I wasn't good at that.
I wasn't good at Scrabble, which was weird because I'm a writer and you would think with language I'd be able to do it, but I'm terrible at Scrabble.
Operation, Scrabble.
Good at other games.
Pretty good at Monopoly.
Pretty good at Battleship.
Now that we're talking about it.
Operation.
Scrabble.
Pretty bad.
Good at Yahtzee.
I don't think that's a board game.
Technically.
But I was good at Yahtzee.
I like Yahtzee, actually.
I heard some people talking trash about Yahtzee the other day.
Love it.
Thrilla minute game.
Anyway.
But something has changed.
And the reason that Trump is coming back onto Fox News is not necessarily in order to support him.
More or less, it's actually to bury him.
And Trump has decided that he'll go wherever he's asked at this point, including CNN, as we all witnessed, unfortunately.
But Fox News brought Trump on with Bret Baier to more or less go ahead and make sure that the bleeding that has taken place from this documents case, this federal indictment against him, to make sure that he was going to bleed some more.
I have to tell you, Bret Baier has shown himself over the years to be a pretty dogged journalist.
That doesn't mean that he doesn't have his ideological preferences.
It doesn't mean that he doesn't have his biases, because he absolutely does, and I'm sorry, but you do not cash a check that says Fox News Inc.
without having your biases.
Um, Bret Baier went after him.
Hard.
And watching Trump attempt to navigate that pressure It showed not only that he is incapable of doing it, but that he's even lost his old ability to do it.
Even under sort of the right focus type of pressure, he folded like a wet paper bag.
Bayer drummed him.
And it makes what happened on CNN just that much more obscene.
And what we watched on Fox News Was the furtherance of what I've been talking about in terms of Fox and the Republicans and that entire establishment being ready to be done with Donald Trump.
This was not a softball interview.
And I think Trump probably expected something different than this because he faltered.
Bad.
We're going to listen to a couple of clips from this interview here in just a second, but this doesn't even give the entire picture of what a disaster this was.
It was so bad that even MAGA loyalists have come out of the woodwork to say, yeah, I don't think he probably should have done that interview.
I mean, there are moments where he is so contradicted and his contradictions are so showcased.
That any person watching this with an open mind and without their own particular biases would walk away understanding that this person should not be President of the United States ever, much less again.
It was really, really rough.
Bayer forced him on every issue, including his proposed executing of drug dealers, his statements constantly that he picks the best people, there was a laundry list I don't think there's any other way to put it.
him within his administration who he has either criticized terribly and or have have rebutted him completely and said that you know they they don't believe in him and they think he's dangerous what else he is what else happened from this interview that we're going to look at is um wild this first clip here um i don't think there's any other way to put it
this is a confession of a felony on live television I don't want to dwell on it, but according to the indictment, you were here at Bedminster on July 21st, 2021, after you're no longer president, and you were recorded saying that you had a document detailing a plan of attack on another country that was prepared by the U.S.
military for you when you were president.
The Iran attack plan.
You remember that?
Ready?
You were recorded.
It wasn't a document.
OK.
I had lots of paper.
I had copies of newspaper articles.
I had copies of magazines.
I had copies of everything.
This is specifically a quote.
You're quoted on the recording saying the document was secret, adding that you could have declassified it while you were president, but quote, now I can't.
You know this is still secret, highly confidential.
And the indictment cites the recording and the testimony from people in the room saying you showed it to people there that day.
So you say on this tape that you You can't declassify it, so why have it?
When I said that I couldn't declassify it now, that's because I wasn't president.
I never made any bones about that.
When I'm not president, I can't declassify it.
That's what you said.
You didn't declassify it.
I said no, no.
I said I couldn't declassify it.
You could have declassified it.
There was no document.
That was a massive amount of papers and everything else talking about Iran and other things.
And it may have been held up or may not, but that was not a document.
I didn't have a document per se.
There was nothing to declassify.
These were newspaper stories, magazine stories, and articles.
I'm just saying what the indictment says.
The recording and the people in the room who testified... These people are very dishonest people.
They're thugs.
They're thugs.
If you look at what they've done to other people, what they've done and overturned in the U.S.
Supreme Court, these are thugs.
The suggestion was that you wanted this as evidence that the military, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Milley, had preemptively sent you plans for a possible attack on Iran and that you didn't order that to happen.
That's the suggestion.
I never ordered it to happen, no.
But that's why you wanted the document.
I don't think I've ever seen a document from Millie.
Millie, frankly, was incompetent.
The last one I'd want to attack with as my leader would be Millie.
That I can tell you.
What Trump displays here is, I don't know how to say it.
It's going to be troubling.
There is an inability to make this work.
You know, as I've been covering Trump over the past few years, I talk a lot about these contradictions and inconsistencies that the right-wing brain has to hold together at any given time.
Confronted here, there's no movement around this.
Trump can go ahead and say that he had magazine articles or he had this.
And by the way, if that is your argument, it's really piss poor because people who were at the table are going to testify that he held up a top-secret document.
Now that doesn't mean he's not going to be able to slither his way out of this thing.
But by going ahead and admitting that he knows that he can't just declassify these things, like he is going ahead and laying for himself a really difficult, logical Position.
And I gotta tell you, Bret Baier there holds his feet to the fire.
It's really incredible to watch him do this because Baier doesn't let up.
There isn't even a semblance Of making sure that he can't wiggle out of this thing.
Like, Fox News, at the very very least for Republicans, always allows them sort of an escape hatch.
Something that they can go ahead and get out of.
You know, the NBC version of this is Chuck Todd's, well, I'm sure we'll have this discussion moving forward, or I'm sure this discussion will continue.
This, in this case, is Brett Baer simply saying no.
And we have to recognize that what's happening here is that Fox News is airing to an entire universe of Trump supporters the unvarnished truth.
Many of them probably had not heard of this recording yet.
Most of them probably didn't know that it existed.
All of a sudden now it is on the quote-unquote Fox News record.
People see this, they know what has happened, and they see that Donald Trump has no explanation with any amount of coherence.
Sure, Fox News is going to lose some people as it moves away from Donald Trump, but they're gonna keep a lot of them too.
There's brand loyalty there.
And Trump can't keep up.
Trump should not have taken this interview.
But now that he has, I mean, let's watch Bret Baier once more holding his feet to the fire.
