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Jan. 12, 2024 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
21:04
The Law Is Malleable For Trump

This is a preview of our full episode that you can access over at http://Patreon.com/muckrakepodcast Become a member today and help us maintain our editorial independence as well as unlock a lot of special features like live shows and our private discord.  Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss a legal theory being floated by one of Trump's lawyers that makes him completely immune from crimes unless he's impeached. Good times. They then discuss Chris Christie's speech announcing the end of his political career, before dissecting the ramifications of Boeing cutting corners while building their airplanes.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hey, everybody.
Welcome to The Weekender.
I'm Joe J. Saxton.
Hey, Kallisman.
It's our first Weekender together in a long time.
It's the first Weekender of the year.
Think about that.
I've done Weekenders this year.
You have?
All right.
You've been running around the world, seeing sights, seeing things.
I have.
I have.
I've dipped my toe in a couple other countries, and I'm glad to be back, I think.
Well, I'm glad you're back, and I'm glad you're here for The Weekender.
We have a jam-packed show, everybody.
If you want to listen to the whole thing, patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
Also, Nick, this is one of the busiest weeks we've had at the Muckrake in a long time.
Last night, we covered the last GOP debate before Iowa.
It was a doozy, folks.
I recommend you go and listen to that one.
We talked about a lot of things.
Some things have changed.
I'm heading to Iowa.
Well, you're going to hear this on Friday, so I'll be leaving tomorrow, and hopefully I will not drive into a snowbank.
I'll be covering live from the Iowa caucus from Saturday until Monday.
We'll be doing exclusive shows, exclusive coverage.
You need to go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
You do.
I don't have anything else to add to that.
Yeah, and you are going to be talking to me as I am in like negative eight degree weather and you're going to be complaining about Los Angeles.
I will be very sympathetic.
I will apologize profusely for what you're dealing with and also thankful that you are giving us the kind of coverage that you cannot get anywhere else.
I absolutely.
And if you were here four years ago when we were doing this, like this is where it's at.
If you followed my coverage back in 2016, this is where it's at.
You know what I'm not looking forward to, Nick, besides going to my first Trump rally in eight years?
I don't know.
The food?
What?
No, the man, poor Iowa.
But Iowa's got some good food, actually.
And good beer, too.
No, I'm not looking forward to, because to survive in like negative degrees and in like a windchill of like negative 20 or below, Nick, you gotta dress in layers.
You gotta dress real warm.
And then when you go into the rallies, They're real hot.
The air is thick, it's musky, it's crowded, it's hot, but I will do it for you and for the Muckrake universe.
Everybody, we got a full show today, but we have to start, Nick, with Listen, what do we do on this show?
We document the ongoing radicalization among the American right and the deteriorating conditions in our political environment.
Nick, on Tuesday, in a federal appeals court hearing, Judge Florence Y. Penn was asking Trump lawyer D. John Sauer, I have the quote here, Nick, I'm just going to read it for people So they can hear this actual insanity.
Judge Pan said, quote, I asked you a yes or no question.
Could a president who ordered SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival who is not impeached, would he be subject to criminal prosecution?
And Mr. Sauer, in answering, said it was a yes.
That's right.
Trump and his legal team are now making the argument that the President of the United States of America has the legal authority to have his political rivals assassinated.
Now some people might roll their eyes at this and say this is obviously very stupid, and it is, but I remind people that the law is malleable and things are getting worse out there.
Well, this is just a culmination of what, like, Cheney had tried to start with the Bush administration way back in the day, where they were continually trying to make this an imperial presidency because they felt like since Watergate and since Nixon, the presidency had been neutered to some degree, despite being the most powerful position in the entire world, in the universe.
But it is disgusting, Jared.
This is really, really disgusting that they're going to seriously have like an illegal argument in court about this.
It's not enough to have Trump pretend, oh, I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue, yadda yadda.
That's rhetoric, yadda yadda.
But what he's trying to do in a serious-minded way just makes a mockery of our justice system.
By the way, did you see what Trump said today?
He was on the stand.
The judge is like, only if you keep it germane to the proceedings.
I'm sure he did.
I'm sure he kept it.
And so again, we don't have guardrails for this kind of thing.
Well, and you know, we'll get into the modern context of this, but we like to give a little bit of history.
You're exactly right.
What happened back in the 2000s with the Bush presidency at the urging of people like Dick Cheney, And I think we need to learn from that now, especially as Donald Trump is an avatar and a veneer for all of this.
The unitary executive theory was what was floated out and about.
This is one of those special projects that is brought up by all of these right-wing quote-unquote judicial scholars.
You know, you're Christopher Hughes.
And what had happened, Nick, and it's something that we've covered on this podcast, Going back into Nixon, and then of course into Ford, and then Carter, and then even into Reagan in a different iteration, you had a presidency that was depowered particularly by neoliberalism.
The market and capitalism started taking control much more over political matters on the trajectory of the country.
Then, of course, in the 2000s, the Bush presidency, again at the urging of someone like a Dick Cheney, who was in the office, of course, when this was happening with Gerald Ford, they started pushing for this stuff because they thought that they could take control of it.
Neoconservatives wanted to go ahead and take the engine of neoliberalism and rising authoritarianism and put it to good use, Nick, to make the world safe for American-style democracy and markets.
So they cooked up this entire idea.
The president can do whatever the president wants, which, for the record, is one of the reasons we have a presidency the way that we do.
We want somebody who can make the decisions and really not be held accountable.
Which is why I said for years, Nick, that Trump would not be held accountable for his crimes unless he became useless to the system.
And we find ourselves here.
Donald Trump doesn't think about this.
Donald Trump isn't sitting around studying this legal theory.
You have a lot of people like Sauer and other right-wing scholars who see an opportunity to go ahead and twist and pervert whatever the system has to go ahead and create a power-mad presidency or a right-wing institutional regime.
They want that.
It's not about Donald Trump.
But what happens, Nick, is that Donald Trump doesn't have any scruples.
He doesn't care.
He's not going to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hey, now, let's calm down.
He obviously wants this.
He is a battering ram to try and push this stuff.
And I remind people, the law is malleable.
We have created institutions in this country that are dangerous, undemocratic, and they threaten democracy writ large.
This is how you get to this point where you can make these types of arguments that you can go out and assassinate people.
And, Nick, it changes the environment in which our politics operates.
Well, and also here's the thing, we know that like Dick Cheney, I think we're pretty sure he doesn't like Trump, right?
He doesn't want Trump to be re-elected.
Liz is also on board.
A lot of those people from that era are probably appalled by Trump, but what they've created in the situation that allows him to become this imperial president, they're okay with that, like you just said, as long as it's someone that they like.
That's right, exactly.
That's what's so gross about this.
They didn't realize while they were doing that and while we were pushing back against that, that all you're doing is waiting for someone like Trump to come along and take even more advantage of what you're trying to set up.
This is one of the reasons why, back during Barack Obama's presidency, I said to everybody, this war on terror shit is going to bite us in the ass.
Like, growing this big, giant military-industrial-global complex, giving these people this type of power, leaving it unchecked, like, you can't sit there and be like, uh, he's our guy, everything's gonna be fine, you know?
There's a Donald Trump waiting right around the corner.
There's a George W. Bush waiting right around the corner.
And if you take a look at what's actually happening now, Nick, our entire structure, and it's always been authoritarian to a certain extent, it's always been elitist and white supremacist and anti-democratic, minoritarian, it's always had these elements.
It can be changed.
Like, we are creating fertile ground for this type of activity to really start to carry out some frightening circumstances.
This doesn't just happen willy-nilly.
They don't just get in a courtroom with a federal appeals judge and start saying this shit.
This is legal theory that they are trying to pass, and what's more, Nick, they can get that across the finish line.
You know, it kind of reminds me as well of like, OK, like the Democrats will do something like Obamacare, for instance, and the Republicans are scream, you know, bloody murder of how bad it is.
So the idea would be that we can get something in place that begins to help people and then we can over time fix it and make it better and better and better.
Where the Republicans just want to just eliminate it with nothing else to replace, right?
So that's how they exist in the same space.
So it kind of reminds me of the same thing here, where they almost like, you know, in their zeal to maintain whatever status quo they had had originally for all these years, will ultimately just destroy the system itself.
And they don't realize that, right?
That's what's so frustrating about this whole thing.
They don't have any kind of Foresight or long-term vision on this kind of stuff and and you know say what you want about the other side which you know is ineffectual at times and You know it but at the very least they've shown Some ability or some desire to try and want to actually help people which is what we talked about last night Which is what the point of the government is what the what or what the government should be?
And that's a big debate as well.
So it just it just reeks of a party like you said last night that is dying and The only way it's sustainable long term is if it does manage to wrest control of all the levers of power and go ahead and fix things to keep itself.
I do want to point this out, though.
Long term, there is no plan.
Outside of taking control of everything and basically getting richer and more powerful, there's no other plan.
All of these movements, whether it's a fascist movement, an authoritarian movement, it doesn't matter if it's actual fascist, if it's Nazis, if it's crypto-fascist, these are suicide cults, Nick.
They truly believe that everything that they're doing is completely lorded over by God, right?
And by the way, I don't know Sauer.
I don't have any experience with Sour, but I can tell you, like dollars to donuts, that most of the people making arguments like this believe that the American legal system is divine and that it should be white Christian, right?
That's what a lot of these people argue.
It's the way they go ahead and make these arguments for themselves.
So as a result, they don't need to understand where this stuff is going.
They don't need to understand what eventually it's going to lead to.
You know, you look again at Nazism.
It was a self-destructive movement.
It didn't work.
You know like it actually the only reason it quote-unquote worked and people talk about trains running on time is because they lied and and they killed people in order to like you know fudge the numbers which we'll get into that in a later segment but Nick this is opening the door to the type of ideas and the type of destruction that I really don't think that people have wrapped their heads around.
To go ahead and argue, just by arguing this in a federal court, just by going ahead and arguing this in public, you are making the case for an interpretation of the presidency that is a dictatorship.
And I want to, in a related story Nick, I told you about this I think last night, Mediaite has gotten this new report that Roger Stone, who going back to the Nixon era, one of his rat fuckers, was apparently recorded in 2020 telling his friend Sal Greco that he wanted to murder Eric Swalwell and Jerry Nadler.
He is not the first person who has said that violence might be necessary in order to quote-unquote turn things around in this country.
He's not the first Republican who believes that people are going to have to die in order to, you know, get their plans across the finish line.
This change in philosophy, saying these things, bringing it up in court, it only makes it more, not just possible, but it makes it more inevitable that we're going to get to the point where Killings, attacks, threats, you name it, that these things are going to not just become regular occurrences, they're going to start becoming acceptable parts of our political environment.
Jared, have you ever seen the movie Strangers on a Train?
I have, yes.
You know, so the basic gist of it is these two guys are on a train, they're talking shit to each other, right?
And one guy's like, yeah, I'd kill my wife.
I'll kill her for you and you'll kill this person for me.
And then he's like, yeah, okay, whatever.
And then they leave the train and then guess what?
The crazy guy kills the person he says they were going to do, like this packet that they made.
And so if it wasn't Roger Stone, the one guy who's going to talk shit in the bar, wherever they are, and be able to say, oh, it wasn't me, I didn't say it.
By the way, he's claiming AI faked his voice, which is another problem, because not only can that happen, that is a legitimate concern, but now you can say you didn't say something anytime you want.
Right?
And that was so ridiculous.
So, you know, I can easily picture a guy like Roger Stone.
We all know who this guy is.
He's the swinging, you know, rat fucker from the Nixon administration.
You know, he probably talks about killing people every day.
You know, so it would carry a little bit more weight with me if it was someone like Mitch McConnell, I don't know, someone like that saying it.
But nonetheless, those kind of things happen where the next thing you know, Swalwell does have an attempt on his life.
Right?
You told me.
What do you mean?
I thought you wanted us to do this.
And then Roger Silk and then say, oh, I didn't really mean it.
But these guys need to go away.
He was convicted for a very good reason.
And then, you know, Trump gets to commute his sentence.
He never serves any time and continues to do his bullshit.
So I would this would not be a weekender episode if I didn't go ahead and mention that my first experience with strangers on the train was throw mama from the train, which is not as good of a movie as strangers on the train.
I'll just say that.
But you know, you're you're right.
Roger Stone.
is the type of figure who used to be on the absolute outskirts of American politics.
He was very useful for someone like a Richard Nixon and the people around him, right?
They had a lot of these people, your G. Gordon Liddies, right?
Like the true believers who were more than willing to do the really ugly shit.
You know, in order to get the sausage made.
Well, guess what?
Stone did this in 2020.
He's ahead of the curve, you know, and there's a reason.
Like, he doesn't have any scruples either.
He's just like Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, Nick, I've said this before, but I want to reiterate it in this context.
The people around this country, the Trump supporters, who are literally murdering people, who are going in and carrying out mass shootings, who are sending bombs to Democrats and CNN or whatever, The thing is they're portrayed as lone nuts, Nick, and our media has no desire whatsoever to connect the dots and say this is part of the larger problem in this country.
Those people heard the quiet part loud, right?
They were the first people who picked up on this, who were like, oh, I think Donald Trump and the Republicans want us to carry out things like this.
They were right in that regard.
They heard the narrative.
They heard what they believed.
Meanwhile, Nick, it's now being reported that special counsel Jack Smith was the victim of an attempted swatting on Christmas Day.
For those listening who don't know what a swatting is, and I've had one myself, they are not great.
Basically, someone calls the police, creates a scenario in which the police show up at your house, and the hope, Nick, is that the police go ahead and murder you while they show up at your house.
Apparently, some Donald Trump supporter called the police and said that Jack Smith had shot his wife, creating a situation where the police were supposed to show up at his house and kill him.
Jack Smith is not the first anti-Trump or Trump rival who has had this.
In fact, plenty of judges, plenty of investigators, plenty of people that Trump has put the spotlight on have dealt with this.
This is an ongoing problem and it's not going to just instantly get better.
We're not going to wake up one day and suddenly everyone's going to come to their senses.
This is endemic of what is going on in this country right now.
Uh, yeah.
And again, it all leads to the notion of, like, who would ever want to do these roles anymore going forward?
Who would want to be on a school board at this point?
Oh my God.
Any rational person who would, you know, do good work, who would want to do that?
Who would want to run for office at this point?
That's what's so frightening about all of this.
And, you know, a lot of times the answer we're getting now are the people who want to bilk the government for their own personal ends, which is what Trump did the entire time.
And that seems to be OK with people or they don't believe it or they just that's the most weird thing about it is when you can kind of show with with that with evidence that Trump was manipulating his office, you know, to enrich himself.
It's almost like people expected him to do that.
Like, what else are they supposed to do?
They don't make that much money.
They're going to I mean, whatever they're doing.
And now we have a situation where Trump before he didn't want to lose the election because of his legal peril.
And now it's like his motivation to win again is to erase the legal peril that he's in now.
Yeah, and to completely change the legal system so that he will never be bothered by it and is also granted almost unstoppable amounts of power.
That's what they're going for.
This isn't hysteria, Nick.
This isn't a bunch of liberals, anti-Trumpers getting themselves all worked up, suffering from anti-Trump derangement syndrome, whatever it is that people were throwing around for a long time.
And by the way, all the cool kids at school were like, oh, it's so funny that you're getting all upset about this, or you think that he's going to try and stay in office, or overthrow the election, or that things are going to get worse over time.
All those people who wanted to seem like they were way too cool and above this, all of us who were telling you what was going on were crazy people.
That's the literal lay of the land right now.
That's literally what we've watched happen.
Everything has been very obvious, and all you have to do is look at it and read the materials.
This stuff doesn't just come out of nowhere.
This stuff has been cooked up for years.
Millions, if not billions of dollars have been spent not only overtaking our judiciary, Nick, But creating legal strains and theories that would go ahead and legitimize this and turn this into a weapon that could be used by the Republican Party on behalf of their donors and the oligarchs who fund them.
This shit is just being cultivated daily.
This isn't derangement.
This isn't hysteria.
This is what's actually happening.
The only problem when you try and bring that up, and why it sounds hysterical, is because in that moment, on that day, the government is not in peril of falling into authoritarianism, right?
When Trump began to destroy these norms, and we would sound an alarm, everyone would say, and rightfully so, that week, oh, don't worry, you're sounding crazy, because it's not going to happen, but once those machinations begin, You know, here we are now, what is it?
Eight years since he came down the ladder, the golden escalator.
And, um, and, and, you know, it has metastasized and progressed to a point where we're a lot closer than we were.
And now, you know, and even then those people still won't say, Oh, geez, I don't realize it.
Cause they're going to only say that once it happens and it's over and we can't do anything about it anymore.
I can't.
Then they're going to hit themselves and said they could have had a V8.
But that's the problem is that some of those people just can't get there quickly enough.
And now we're if it's enough people, then then we have a real problem on our hands with the government.
Listen, this is going to be very unpopular.
I think the idea of a V8 is really gross.
I can't I can't do it.
What is it again?
It's like tomato juice.
Yeah, I like tomatoes, but I would not want to drink tomato juice.
No, I get that people love their Bloody Marys.
It's not for me.
Nick, on the subject of Trump's trampling of democratic norms and threatening the country and everything that we should hold dear, We're approaching the Iowa caucuses again go to patreon.com slash my great podcast to listen to our GOP debate post show analysis and also basically our preview for what we think is going to happen in Iowa where we see these things happening, but we had a surprise.
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.
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