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Jared and Nick cover the latest Trump defense that he says requires Presidents to have absolute immunity to do their jobs. While he's not wrong, it's not to cover war crimes like past presidents, but to grift uncontrollably for self enrichment. They pivot to the New Hampshire primary and how it's Nikki Haley's last stand while Ron DeSantis bails for South Carolina. And they finish with a discussion about the latest events in the Middle East as tensions are high and hostilities are expanding.
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Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the Muckery Podcast.
That got foamy real fast, Nick.
Hi.
Sloppy.
Sloppy Weekender already.
Sloppy Weekender, everybody.
Thanks for tuning in.
A couple of house cleaning situations after I clean off all of this off of me.
We are going to be covering the New Hampshire GOP primary results next Tuesday.
That is for patrons.
Go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast to go ahead, come and join us.
I think the people who came and watched the Iowa thing had a good time, enjoyed having the community at least.
That will be Tuesday.
We'll announce the time later.
These things are always a little wonky.
Also, this is a full show, Nick.
We got to talk about the developing GOP situation.
We got to talk about a growing crisis in the Middle East, and we got to talk about artificial intelligence, I don't know, basically ruining everything.
And we got some viewer or listener questions.
So we got a whole show that people are going to want to listen to.
A real feel-good time.
Nick, there's no way to put lipstick on this pig.
The GOP primary is ugly, ugly, ugly.
As we talked about in our coverage of the Iowa primary, Donald Trump won it walking away with 51% of the vote in Iowa.
We're going to talk about DeSantis and Haley falling apart and basically giving up on this entire thing.
But as this is happening, Nick, and as people are starting to realize that Donald Trump will most likely be the nominee for the Republican Party, Trump has gotten bolder and bolder.
Nick, today on Truth Social Gab, whatever in the hell it is, the former president and future Republican nominee posted, quote, A president of the United States must have full immunity, without which it would be impossible for him or her to properly function.
Any mistake, even if well-intended, would be met with almost certain indictment by the opposing party at the term's end.
Even events that, quote, cross the line, must fall under total immunity, or it'll be years of trauma trying to determine good from bad.
There must be certainty.
Example, you can't stop police from doing the job of strong and effective crime prevention because you want to guard against the occasional rogue, cop, or bad apple.
Sometimes you just have to live with quote, great, but slightly imperfect.
All presidents must have complete and total presidential immunity or the authority and decisiveness of the president of the United States will be stripped and gone forever.
Nick, uh, this I'm going to go ahead and add to the growing evidence that Donald Trump and the people around him are absolutely obsessed with the legal theory that a president should be dictator.
Uh, and I, I don't like it.
I'll just start off by saying that I want to hear your reaction.
And unfortunately we got to get into this shit.
Two things you missed, I think, that are the biggest ones.
First of all, all caps.
It's all caps, so he's yelling at us.
And second of all, the last line you can't omit, because he goes, hopefully this will be an easy decision.
God bless the Supreme Court!
Exclamation point.
Now, you really want to tell me the Supreme Court is going to keep him on the ballot, is going to keep him off the ballot when that vote comes up?
I don't know.
Again, I think they probably will keep him on the ballot, but this is a dictatorial appeal.
We can break it down, what he's saying here.
I think even what he's saying about police is very, very telling.
What Donald Trump is now offering an electorate, an electorate that, by the way, is absolutely on board with this.
All of my research, all of my reportage from Iowa, everything we're seeing out of Iowa and the rest of the country, The Republicans who support Donald Trump are interested in a dictatorial presidency, and Donald Trump has been very open, and the people around him who are crafting his legal and political theories are very open.
What is on the table, Nick, is a dictatorship presidency.
You know, what I think is smart, though, is that he's echoing a familiar left talking point.
You know, and this is a mistake I think he made.
Instead of using the cops, he easily could have used several instances of former presidents who have done stuff, you know, with foreign policy, for instance, that easily could have gotten them indicted for war crimes, for instance, right?
I mean, you want to bring, can you mention one that we, you know, in the recent past that we might, you know, It's every president.
Every president has enjoyed this type of immunity.
Let's not be unclear about that.
To be president, as I've said on this show, and it's not a popular thing to say out loud, but it doesn't make it less true.
When you are elected president, you are elected president in order to enjoy ungodly powers and almost complete immunity from the law and consequences.
What has changed here is that Donald Trump saying this out loud and arguing for a muscular, immune presidency, we're not just talking about the normal business of the presidency.
We're talking about a radically changed structure.
That's the problem here.
Absolutely.
And so I think that he could have framed that better to actually even make a better point of all this, because again, a lot of these presidents have enjoyed this kind of immunity.
Generally, in my mind, it is foreign policy things.
It is like torture and bombing of other countries and those kind of things that were illegal, that they're not held to account.
But this is obviously what he's trying to do is say, I want to be able to grift and I want to be able to do, you know, basically that, right?
I want you to fascinate my political opponents.
He has said as much.
Okay, fair enough, that too.
You know, and also prosecute them willy-nilly while he's in office as well.
And also sweep under the rug any other potential crimes he's committed that have already been in the works.
So, I found that that was, I mean, he doesn't have the smartest people behind him, so they don't make the most compelling case.
Why do you think he chose, of all the things to use, as an example, why did he choose the cops?
Well, he chose the cops because as the quote-unquote candidate of law and order.
And Nick, I don't want to be flippant about this.
I've received a lot of emails.
I've received a lot of people who have reached out.
And I want to say, first of all, and we need to talk about it.
You and I talked about it before we started recording.
What happened in Iowa and what is taking shape in this country right now is grim.
It's a grim situation.
We feel it.
We see it.
We are.
We're in the shit.
We're in the shit that you and I and a lot of other people have warned about for years.
We told everybody if nothing changes, if we don't take a different route, we're going to end up in a really, really bad situation.
I've had people reach out and say, what is the silver lining right now?
Are you still optimistic?
I am.
I think things are eventually going to get better.
But Nick, I want to be honest.
You know, we laugh on this show.
You have to.
Otherwise, we would spend an hour crying every episode.
Like, I am worried about my safety.
I am worried about the safety of the people that I love.
I am worried about, like, the crushing of dissension in this country.
I am very worried about Trump and the people behind him crushing any opposition, you know, by creating this muscular presidency.
By the way, we've had that before.
We've had presidencies that have gone after enemies, that have deported people, that have absolutely encroached on civil liberties.
We've never had it this expressly put.
You know what I mean?
We've never had it as, hey, give me your vote and I will go out and jail critics, I will go out and jail the opposition, I will go ahead and use whatever power you give me aggressively and muscularly to do this shit.
This is rough, and I think everybody feels it right now.
Maybe it's not appropriate that we're talking about this on The Weekender, which is usually a little bit lighter, a little bit looser, but it doesn't make it less true.
We are entering into a very, very, very serious time, and I think it would be inauthentic if we didn't talk about it.
I agree.
And let's deconstruct that a little bit because there is a bit of a, you know, the concern that you're expressing out of the results from Iowa.
I'm kind of curious.
He won by 30 points and then Haley finished two points behind DeSantis.
We're not surprised by this.
True or false?
Yes or no?
We're not surprised that he won.
First of all, we know that was going to happen, right?
We're not surprised that he won.
I said it on our post-Iowa coverage.
Nick, I do feel like Trump drew a royal flush on this one.
And we'll talk about what's going on with DeSantis and Haley because more or less we're watching the collapse of any opposition to Donald Trump right now.
We'll get into the specifics of that in a minute.
The way Iowa played out, it was such that it could not have happened better for him.
Our media and pundits and other people wanted to deny that fact.
They want to be like, oh, turnout was low.
Nick, it was negative 30 degrees in Iowa.
I was there.
It was deathly cold.
Like, even if there would have been giant turnout, it would have held like this.
I don't know if Haley would have beat DeSantis.
There's a possibility for it, and maybe it would have changed.
This is a, like, we're going to be covering New Hampshire next week.
He's probably going to win New Hampshire.
He's probably going to walk through New Hampshire.
South Carolina, you go down the list.
It is a stacked deck at this point.
So, okay, so a major win for him in Iowa, but he won 51-21.
What was the number he would have won that would have made us feel a little bit better about this?
Is he only won 40%?
Like, what number do you think that would have been?
If it would have been under 50%, it still wouldn't have felt great.
But if he would have finished under 50%, and by the way, if he would have finished within 20 points if you would finish within 15 points of opposition like maybe we could start talking about the Republican Party not saving itself.
I've called it terminally ill, but we could have talked about but this is a full-throated Uh, uh, coronation of Trump is what it is.
It's, it's, this isn't a contest.
It's a coronation.
Fair enough.
But so, but again, maybe it's, is it only like five points would have shifted a little bit more towards feeling a little bit better about the situation.
But, uh, I don't, I don't think so.
I mean, we already know he's going to win the nomination.
That's not the issue.
I suppose you could take Sal as the fact that, you know, an incumbent like him, I guess we're going to call him an incumbent basically.
Right.
He is a pseudo incumbent.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so, you know, someone like him should be winning by huge margins, right?
There shouldn't be really any opposition.
So that's all, you know, something, but I suppose you're right.
I mean, you know, New Hampshire is not going to suddenly find Nikki Haley, DeSantis dropping out of New Hampshire, basically.
We're not going to see Nikki Haley get to 33 points, 33%.
I don't know.
I mean, listen, it's hard to predict this shit.
We knew he was going to win Iowa, right?
Like, who even knows?
New Hampshire's weird and strange, and our political process is strange.
The feeling now, and this isn't just you and me doing this podcast, it's not just, you know, people who have their fingers on the pulse of this stuff.
World leaders.
I mean, Davos had their get-together.
Everybody, that's all they said is they were like, I think Donald Trump very well could be the next president of the United States.
And we could be looking at a very dangerous situation unfolding over the next five years, if not longer.
I mean, we're even talking, Nick, for those who aren't paying attention, like, he's very seriously considering Tucker Carlson as his vice president.
Donald Trump Jr.
is now talking about running in 2028 if Donald Trump isn't going to run for re-election if he wins.
Like, things are starting to coagulate in a way.
Yeah, Nick, you have this.
You have, unfortunately, this clip of Donald Trump Jr.
Why don't you go ahead and play this?
Ron DeSantis.
I asked him that question over the summer, and he didn't rule it out.
Could you see Ron DeSantis?
It's horrid.
People do that.
I would do whatever I could to make sure it wasn't Nikki Haley, but Ron DeSantis?
You're never going to rule out someone that is a leading contender.
It doesn't mean that's who you go with.
If I could see other people, that would be great.
I'd love to see J.D.
Vance.
I'd love to see Tucker Carlson.
I'd love to see people who are just In alignment as well as aggressive.
You actually need a fighter.
The Republicans in Washington D.C.
are weak.
You can have the House, the Senate, and they'll still roll over.
Don, is your dad serious about Tucker Carlson?
Are those rumors serious?
I would imagine that clearly it would be on the table, right?
I mean, they're very friendly.
I think they agree on virtually all of these things.
They certainly agree on stopping the never-ending wars.
And so, you know, I would love to see that happen.
And, you know, that would certainly be a contender.
For anyone wondering who that was, that was a clearly yacked out of his mind Donald Trump Jr.
Yeah, you act as a medical term, I think, right?
Yeah, I believe that's a medical term when somebody ingests too much of a substance, allegedly.
This is tough, man.
Like, I don't want to bullshit people.
Like, Nick, we've entered a new phase of things.
I don't know how else to say it.
And listen, I know that that's not popular.
I wish we were Mueller, she wrote.
I wish we could sit here and tell people like Terry Canfield, oh, the system's totally got this thing under control.
Maybe I'm talking outside of school here, but that's neither here nor there.
I'm pissed off and I'm angry that we've gotten to this point.
I don't want to dress this up and tell people that this isn't as serious as it is.
It is that serious.
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