A Long Walk Ruined... By Another Assassination Attempt
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman have to discuss yet another assassination attempt on Donald Trump, this time at his golf course in Florida. They shift to the GOP's insistence on spreading lies about Springfield, Ohio and its Haitian residents before finishing on the salacious rumors surrounding Laura Loomer's position in the Trump campaign.
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Um, listen, I, we say this a lot because we live in very, very weird times.
Nick, the full breadth of things that we have to talk about today, like basically every segment that I'm looking at would be like a segment A by itself in like regular times, but like looking at them together, like it's almost mind bending.
I don't know.
I feel like they're all, like, D-segments in a normal time, because we should be talking about real things and policy.
We should be talking about actual policies.
Instead, we're talking about the decline of the United States of America in real time.
Hashtag good times.
Hashtag good times.
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Nick, we basically had a bunch of stories that we were going to get to today off the first segment.
Then yesterday, as I was cleaning, Uh, it turns out that there was a foiled, uh, alleged second assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
This took place at Trump International Golf Course in West Palm Beach.
Apparently, the Secret Service noticed a rifle sticking out of a bush along the course.
Trump was multiple holes away from it.
And for those of you who don't golf and don't take advantage of the links, that means he was far away from this.
There were shots fired.
This person ran away.
The alleged suspect.
The Secret Service eventually captured him.
This story is so strange in so many different ways and reveals so much about our current political climate.
But I am left with so many questions and so many concerns.
And also, Nick, it's not even that big of a deal in our current climate that there was an attempt to assassinate a presidential candidate.
Here we are.
Here we are!
You know, I would like to look at the training that the Secret Service gets.
I honestly would like to, at this point, after all these years and all these kind of mistakes that get made, you know, holes in the fence that he climbed through, I guess, to get in there.
Also, you know, that he got that as close as he ended up getting.
It's just, oh, he got away?
He got away.
He got away!
And I think, if I'm not mistaken, some random BiPAP sender got a picture of his license plate and that's what allowed him to put the... Is it a BOGO?
Is that what it is?
What do they call it?
Bolo.
A bolo.
That means, you know, on all points Bolton or something.
The cops, find this guy.
Bolo.
It wasn't a buy one, get one free.
That is true.
Right.
So anyway, so they had to rely on that.
And if not, the guy would probably still be a large in his insanity running around the country.
It's mind boggling that they can't be better than this.
So I, I have a lot of thoughts.
I've been, I've been sitting with this because this is one of those, I don't know how you feel about it.
Sometimes there are stories that have so many elements to it that they, they sort of capture my imagination and I try and figure them out.
You know what I mean?
So first things first, somebody even reached out to me and they said, why do you think that the secret service is having a hard time protecting Donald Trump?
And, you know, I think there's a lot of conspiracy theories, like maybe the Secret Service is part of the deep state and maybe they're trying to get Donald Trump killed.
No, that's not what's happening.
I think it's a combination of factors, Nick.
First of all, I think it's that law enforcement in this country is nowhere near as competent as people like to believe that it is.
The Secret Service has a long history of letting presidents get shot or shot at.
A reminder, Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts in like an 18-day period.
Okay.
Second of all, I think it has to do with culture.
We know that Donald Trump is not a serious person.
He doesn't take things seriously whatsoever.
He doesn't really prep for things.
He doesn't really get involved in things.
I think the culture of the Secret Service around him, probably that rubs off on them.
And I want to point something else out, too.
Like, I don't think he's very careful in terms of, like, how he travels and what he does.
Everyone knows he's going to be playing golf at one of his golf courses, right?
He's going to be out in the open doing this stuff.
So as a result, because he's running for president again, it's not like an ex-president who's just out in the world.
And on top of that, he's not being safe with what he's doing.
His rallies are absolute shitshows that aren't being taken seriously by the Secret Service or the police or basically anybody at these rallies.
I think that has made him incredibly vulnerable.
I think the Secret Service needs a long look at it, also to root out some of the right-wing extremists who are involved in it.
But I also think that there is part of the political climate and sort of what's been going on with it that I want to talk about in a second.
But I think that's at the heart of why this has happened.
That makes sense.
And we know that some of the right-wingers were upset.
Like, how did he know he was going to be golfing?
Because he's always golfing.
Yeah.
It's a Sunday after Sunday.
Like, of course he's going to be, you know, golfing on a Sunday when it was courses and they knew he was, you know, you know where he is, you know, he's in Florida.
So it's going to probably be at the golf course at his golf course.
But, uh, yeah, so all of these things, you really can see though, how easy it is for the conspiracies to start to spring up because of the, what is basically incompetence.
Right.
You know, don't forget JFK was was a conspiracy.
So even though there was incompetence, it's a conspiracy.
But so many other things are especially the last one, too.
It was just never ending cascade of incompetence that leads to a guy getting the shot off.
And then this time didn't get close.
Supposedly, they go from like one Well, I want to say a couple things off of that before I get into a larger thing.
First things first, Nick.
How many foiled assassination attempts do you think there were on Barack Obama?
time he moves.
So you're right.
It's hard.
It must be harder than maybe other presidents to protect.
Well, I want to say a couple of things off of that before I get into a larger thing.
First things first, Nick, how many foiled assassination attempts do you think there were on Barack Obama?
Well, I would tell you zero, but maybe we don't know.
Oh, there's way more than zero.
Like, it is a non-zero sum.
Like, do you want to count the guy that ran, like, hopped over the fence and got, like, half way?
No, I guarantee that there were so many assassination attempts that we don't know anything about.
I think every president probably gets that sort of, like, focus on them.
It just so happens that Donald Trump is out and about.
People know where he's at, what he's doing.
Also, as a person who golfs, I have to tell you, a golf course is an incredibly hard place to police.
Like, it is, you know, thousands of yards.
And for people who don't know this at home, a yard is three feet.
This is thousands and thousands of yards.
Like, and by the way, when you think about this, it seems cartoonish.
They notice the barrel of a rifle coming out of a bush.
Like, you know what I mean?
Like, it's a really absurd type situation.
Why am I picturing, like, the barrel sticking out and then, like, tied around it would be, like, the hobo's belongings in a... I'm picturing that.
I don't know why.
It's ridiculous.
And I want to point something out, Nick, about why this is so absurd.
And I want to start with a personal story of mine.
Back in 2016-2017, I had a bunch of weird occurrences.
And a lot of them came from right-wing supremacists, neo-Nazis, people who'd show up at my house, try and break in and hurt me, right?
I got stalked by these people.
Do you know who else harassed me?
Weird social media activated crazy people.
Like, I had a dude show up at my house who was just, like, out of his mind, who was, like, trying to be a part of the ecosystem.
The alleged shooter in this case, and by the way, you've probably heard on social media he's some sort of a left-wing weirdo, No.
He was originally a supporter of Donald Trump.
He moved his support over to Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy.
He had one issue and one issue only that he cared about, and it's Ukraine.
And Nick, I'm sure you heard this.
He was featured in multiple articles for multiple newspapers, magazines, news organizations.
And why?
Because they find weirdos.
Those people are always involved in all this stuff.
He was trying to get like thousands of supposed Afghan soldiers over to Ukraine.
This guy is, was LARPing as a NATSEC specialist, right?
He was going to go to Ukraine and fight kind of like, I don't know, Malcolm Nance, who has made an entire career off pretending to be some sort of a freedom fighter.
Meanwhile, he's been revealed as like this absolutely offensive, deranged person, right?
What has happened?
You mean the shooter?
No, I mean this is like a thing that people do in this environment.
Malcolm Nance is not a deranged whatever he described.
I would say that Malcolm Nance has revealed himself to be, we'll say interesting.
Okay, all right.
And has said an incredible amount of offensive things and has revealed himself, by the way, and we'll talk more about this later, as sort of a quote-unquote liberal neoconservative war hawk.
Right?
He wants to go to war.
He wants to have war games, all this stuff.
And as they've been brought into the hashtag resistance, this has grown up into a large, LARPing, opportunistic group.
This guy was part of it.
He is not well.
He believes himself to be some sort of a soldier.
Believed, probably, that he was doing this on behalf of Ukraine.
Like, a bunch of dumb bullshit, crazy bullshit, and this environment that is around us has cultivated this stuff, and now we have this thing happen because of the incompetence of the Secret Service, the incompetence of Donald Trump, the insane environment that Donald Trump has created, and on top of that, this big, giant, opportunistic environment that has just absolutely cooked people's brains.
Sure.
Well, and people's brains can be cooked as well, because even with JFK, for instance, to bring that back up again, you know, Lee Harvey Oswald was in a similar way, although verifiably in the Marines and whatever, and perhaps, you know, a CIA asset as it is, but he was unwell mentally.
Uh, they had other people who were also like patsy roles.
You can argue in other, you know, these people like the deep state loves these people.
So it sounds like a lot like that.
Well, then of course it must be, which actually then folds back nicely onto the GOP, which would be, they would say things like, well, I can imagine somebody stealing a mail-in ballot, changing it and sending it in, having it counted.
So therefore it happens, right?
Yeah, no, that's exactly right.
Yeah.
Yeah, I can imagine this guy, uh, being these things.
Oh, it really is part of his cover and all these things have been set up for that by the CIA, whatever.
And that's why they had to use him as a shooter, whatever.
And so therefore it is that way.
And, uh, the magical thinking continues.
It seriously is this.
You, you, Nick, it's almost like looking at like a stew, a really delicious stew and being like this, this just emerged from nowhere.
You don't even think about all the ingredients.
We have a gun culture in this country where anybody can get a military-grade weapon.
This guy apparently used, like, a modified AK-47.
Which, if I wanted to, when we were done with this, I could go buy one.
You know what I mean?
And just look at it, and play with it, and just have it around.
On top of it.
Wait a minute, Jared.
That's not exactly true.
You could only buy the semi-automatic version of an AK-47.
Oh, well, I couldn't do a lot of damage with that, could I?
So people are allowed to go out and get this stuff.
This guy is LARPing and has been LARPing for years now as some sort of national security military expert.
He got that in his mind.
He thought he was going to go out and do an operation.
Nick, he camped overnight.
Do you know who else camps overnight in cramped spaces for hours waiting on a shot?
A military sniper.
He believed he was a military sniper carrying out an operation.
So you take a bunch of unwell people in an environment of guns, in an environment of conspiracy theories and constant bubbling bullshit.
This is what happens.
This is the end result.
You take all the ingredients, you put it into some water and you heat it up.
You're going to have a stew.
It didn't just appear out of nowhere.
Absolutely.
And then you mix that again with the ineffectual notion of the Secret Service.
I actually missed that tidbit where he must have snuck in ahead of time, overnight, to get his position.
So he was smart enough to do that, but then he couldn't figure out how to keep the barrel rifle from sticking out of a bush.
Oh my god, it's so stupid.
It's just so stupid and so awful.
And by the way, Nick, you're a student of history and you know about these weird things.
Who are the people who usually kill presidents?
Weirdos!
They're, they're absolutely.
Well, okay.
You were fixated on JFK.
That's a completely different thing.
A couple of people that actually killed the president.
I mean, what's not a president.
It's almost always a weirdo who wants to do something like impress Jodie Foster.
Right.
Like, so he was probably the poster child for that.
Yes.
Oh, absolutely!
I think that's what's happened.
I mean, all of it, even going back, and by the way, I want to bring up Bethel, Pennsylvania.
I don't know if you remember this.
Donald Trump was shot at in Bethel, Pennsylvania in July.
And notice what's happening, Nick.
We have this environment where this shit is just happening all the time now.
We talked about it back when Shinzo Abe in Japan was killed.
We had another assassination attempt.
As things start to get worse and worse, and as that water starts to boil, you're going to have crazy people, especially in an environment that is polarized, radicalized, and filled with guns.
They're going to do stuff like this.
They're going to find a reason to do it, and they're going to find something to express themselves through violence.
That is the end result.
That's what happens.
And I mean, not to bring up a whole like, you know, guns and, you know, people, you know, guns don't kill people.
Sorry, people do.
But the notion of, so he's got, there's mental illness in his past, like documented.
And so either he bought a gun, right, or he's illegally, Or, which would be, in Florida, legal.
There would be nothing for him to, even if he had a record of mental illness that you can easily verify, would not prevent him from getting a gun, right?
Trump had gotten rid of guardrails for that.
But, like, a lot of the right will say, well, then, you know, what, you think that people just buy guns legally all the time?
They'll get it illegally, and they'll still get it.
And that, to them, means why have any more legislation that could tighten that up?
Because God forbid anybody, well, if there's a law, clearly people aren't going to try and break it.
Never, right?
No, no one will never break a law that we have on the books.
So why have, why strengthen any of these laws?
That's the thinking too, that is so frustrating.
And I think it's also intellectually dishonest.
It's not really what they're saying.
It's such horseshit.
Speaking of horseshit, Nick, we gotta go back to Springfield, Ohio.
On the Weekender Edition last Friday, we broke down the whole Haitians are eating the neighborhood pets conspiracy theory slander, blood libel, more or less.
Well, guess what?
That entire horseshit narrative, it's leading to results, Nick.
And what have we seen over the past few days?
Since the GOP and the Republican ticket have been pushing these things, including in the presidential debate, we're seeing numerous bomb threats and threats of violence that are being communicated to schools, hospitals.
We're seeing Haitian immigrants being subjected to Threats of violence.
They're having their property and homes defaced.
It's already turning into a situation that is getting worse and worse.
And to make matters worse, let's listen to friend of the pod JD Vance on State of the Union with Dana Bash.
The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes.
But it wasn't just the memes.
If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do, Dana.
You just said that you're creating a story.
We ought to be talking about public policy.
I want to hear the end of this, because I know that's the soundbite we heard.
Sorry, you just said that you're creating the story.
What's that, Dana?
You just said that this is a story that you've created.
So the eating dog food casting is not accurate.
Dana, it comes from first-hand accounts from my constituents.
I say that we're creating a story, meaning we're creating the American media focusing on it.
Okay, so it's important, right, to have a complete context of that.
I gotta say, real fast, and we'll get into what's actually happened.
Nick, have you ever had a conversation with someone, and you're talking to them, and you're interacting with them, maybe you're sharing some anecdotes with each other, and then they look at you and you have a moment where you get a chill that runs through your body and you think, I think I might be talking to a psychopath right now.
Yeah, a serial killer, for sure.
Like, I might be talking to somebody who is, like, on a completely different wavelength.
That clip, I think, is, like, one of the most instructive clips I've ever seen of JD Vance.
Like, to watch him not only interact with someone pushing back against him, and by the way, he hates women, so he hates the Dana Bash's challenging him.
But for him to be like, what's the problem here?
Yes, we are creating stories in order to manipulate you.
Why are you even asking me about this?
That, and I study J.D.
Vance, and I've studied J.D.
Vance for years, and I hate the living hell out of J.D.
Vance.
That clip, that gives me the chills, man.
That gives me the...
That was a lot.
Especially when he goes, Dana.
Like, whoa.
Now he's like, he's gripping the knife underneath the table.
But here's the thing.
Springfield's been kind of on a downturn for a long time.
This has not been a prosperous community for years.
And so to have Haitians come in, invited to take jobs that they don't seem to want to take.
And then, you know, capitalism, you know, happens.
It's fascinating to me that he will then sort of say, well, I've heard my constituents telling me these things.
We know that Ground Zero for this was a Facebook post by a woman who has since recanted in a very earnest way, feels terrible about what it was, built out of racism and out of hatred for the other and all sorts of issues that I'm sure they're having in their own lives that then get projected.
And that's what made this all take off.
I still have yet to see any constituents in Ohio that, when you see these interviews, say that they have seen anything directly.
It's the sisters, brothers, cousins, friend on the other side of town that heard about these things.
And it's really just, I am racist, I don't like the other people, and I'm just gonna say, I've heard about voodoo, so they must be doing it here.
I mean, that's how bad it is.
And then they're recycling it, which is even more disgusting.
But this goes back to, like, Dick Cheney recycling his own bullshit through the media and then spitting it back out.
Yeah, they're creating their own reality.
Thanks a lot, Turd Blossom Karl Rove.
I want to say a couple things, too, on this, Nick.
You wanna know the wild thing here?
Those Haitians?
They are also J.D.
Vance's constituents.
He represents them.
Right.
So this is a senator who is literally putting the people that he represents, he's putting their literal lives in danger.
And while we're on the subject, man, I hope for J.D.
Vance's sake that the Trump campaign wins the presidential election, because the idea of him getting reelected after this shit, That's pretty incredible.
Like, if you want to question someone's political instincts, and of course, he'll just go get a job with Peter Thiel and, you know, basically be his little puppet.
He's more than happy with all that.
But Nick, they're going to get somebody killed.
That's what's going to happen here.
They are literally playing a political game.
And I know people are like, oh, I've been seeing this lately.
Oh, they're trying to distract from this, you know, Ohio senatorial candidate scandal.
No, they're just reacting to this stuff.
If it helps with that, it helps with it.
The way the GOP works is it takes advantage of homegrown controversies and then expands on them and just uses them without any consideration of what it does to people.
Imagine all of the Haitian children who are being subjected to this.
Who are supposed to go to school with constant bomb threats, wondering why people are looking at them the way they are.
And then meanwhile, Trump and Vance are doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on this.
You have the New York Post.
I don't know if you saw this, Nick.
They are literally Reporting on traffic accidents that involve Haitians at this point.
That's like front page news if there's like a fender bender that involves Haitians.
And what are they doing at this point?
They are creating an environment that they think will be useful for them politically and caring not for a second about the lives that it's putting at risk, which has been their MO from the very beginning as this authoritarian push has taken over.
And I'm glad you brought up Cheney.
The dear friend of the Democratic Party at this point, this is exactly what the Bush campaign did.
This is what the Bush administration did.
This is what Republicans have been doing forever.
It's just turned up to 11 now, and it's literally going to get people hurt and killed.
Well, I mean, you know, it must be a novel idea for a racist to use another race and their driving ability as a thing to insult people with, right?
Like, you know, it's just it's the same thing going on and on over and over again.
We're stuck in this society where Trump has unleashed this kind of stuff, right?
This used to be the kind of thing you couldn't say anymore.
You'd get in trouble if you said it out loud.
And by the way, nobody gets in trouble if you say it out loud anymore, but they'll complain bitterly that they are being yelled at, whatever, when it's like, well, you're saying it.
What do you want?
You're not being silenced.
And meanwhile, they're just preying on these things.
It is so disgusting.
And again, there isn't any political calculation of this really at all.
I can see this just simply being a thing where they were, how about this, mortified about what happened with the debate and they need to be able to say in the news and be in front of it.
That's part of it as well.
But I would think that they believe they almost probably believe that these are true.
They want it to be true, sadly.
But the standards you're supposed to have, especially as a politician going on national TV, would be not to hear hearsay and then regurgitate it like it's fact.
That's the problem that we're going through.
And we've had that all the way through Bill Barr when he was Attorney General doing that.
So it's like, there should be standards.
And then these people on TV should cut them off and kick them off right away.
By the way, we were talking about this before I started recording, Dana Bash is tired of this.
She has not been the most like sort of like aggressive journalist that we've ever seen, but the antipathy that she has for JD Vance and his entire thing is it could power a small town.
How much she hates him.
And you're right.
This is not acceptable.
They have been using coded language and rhetoric for forever in order to go after people of color.
They've done it for forever.
They hide behind talking about crime or whatever, and this right now...
This is, like, one of the most, like, pure, like, undistilled pieces of white supremacist paranoia and racist fear-mongering and scapegoating that I've ever seen.
And the fact, I mean, Trump the other day was asked about it.
They said, do you have anything to say about the bomb threats in this town?
And what did he say?
I've just heard things about what's going on, like, with the immigrants hurting animals.
And it's like, what are we doing here?
Like, this is so far beyond the pale, and it has just gotten to the point, and Nick, I want to ask a question here.
Where does it stop?
You know, because it's not going to stop here.
It's only going to increase.
We've seen them accuse their political rivals of being satanic pedophiles.
We've seen them, you know, totally embrace anti-semitism until it was politically expedient for them to say, no, we're actually the ones who support Jewish people.
Now we're seeing them, like, blame immigrants for killing animals.
Like, and it's just, it's just escalated to the point where like, even I am like, man, where, where exactly is this going?
Because it's, it's going to, it's going to increase.
There's no way around that.
Sure.
And the thing that I think about is, is where is it going?
So they're going to obviously like, is there a non-white group of people in America that they haven't quite attacked yet?
Because obviously there's this fertile ground for them.
So you have to imagine.
And by the way, I think where it ends up is white people.
There was going to be something.
Well, they've already gone after white people.
I mean, you have gone after gay people, trans people, women, you know, they'll go after anybody that they possibly can.
Right.
Yeah.
So maybe like they've gone after Indian Americans, they've gone after Haitians, they've gone after certainly black people in general.
They've gone after Jews.
Arab Americans.
Arab Americans.
Asian Americans.
I mean, there's nobody away from them.
Yeah, I'm trying, I mean there's got to be like people from like the Netherlands, like they haven't gone after those people though.
I mean it literally is going to like it's going to go from you know eating eating pets to we'll get back to sacrificial things like you know killing more killing of children I assume that's where this is going to go but eventually Nick there's going to be a tragedy and they're just going to be like who could have ever imagined and this country is just so evil like they're not going to take responsibility for it and it's just going to grow and grow and grow.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, they figured out something.
Yeah, they figured out something, all right.
Yeah.
Well, speaking of this terrible, terrible conspiracy theory and racist fear-mongering rumor, Nick, we gotta update the Laura Loomer segment that we did last week.
Really?
So, let's be clear about something.
When we talked about that story, the fact that Laura Loomer was having a fight with Marjorie Taylor Greene and was spending a lot of time advising the Trump campaign, you and I, who take our jobs very seriously and we think about what we say, we danced around some stuff last week because we didn't want to feed into it and now it's a full-blown story.
There is a growing suspicion, and it's considered an open secret among DC politicos and strategists, and I'll talk more about that in a second, that Laura Loomer, the 30-ish-year-old right-wing conspiracy theorist and one of the most outrageous, disgusting people imaginable, That all of her time around Donald Trump might have a more salacious element to it.
We need to talk about how this story has developed, but let's hear what Donald Trump has to say about good old Miss Laura Loomer.
Well, I don't know what they would say.
this relationship with Laura Loomer? - Well, I don't know what they would say.
Laura's been a supporter of mine, just like a lot of people are supporters, and she's been a supporter of mine.
She speaks very positively of the campaign.
I'm not sure why you asked that question, but Laura's a supporter.
I don't control Laura.
Laura has to say what she wants.
She's a free spirit.
Well, I don't know.
I mean, look, I can't tell Laura what to do.
Laura's a supporter.
I have a lot of supporters.
So I don't know what exactly you're referring to.
That's okay.
Yeah, please.
So she's a free spirit.
That's an interesting thing to say about part of your campaign staff.
What has happened, Nick, in the past few days?
is that this has gone from innuendo and sort of like tongue-in-cheek, wink-wink, nod-nod, nudge-nudge stuff, to politicos and insiders talking about it openly.
I haven't been on a call since last Friday that hasn't involved somebody wondering whether or not Trump and Loomer are going to be involved in an emerging sex scandal.
I don't know.
We're talking about alleged stuff here, but it is interesting and disgusting.
Interesting and disgusting might be the title of this pod.
Yes, I think the thing about Trump, the big tell for him is when he plays dumb.
So he suddenly... Well, I mean, he is dumb, but when he plays dumb, it's a whole different ballgame.
Yeah, and that tells you that it's everything you need to know.
And it's actually exactly what Kavanaugh did as well when they were asking him about if he knew anybody at the law firm of Katzowitz, whatever.
And he's like, I don't know.
What's that firm again?
Like, who is the name?
And anyway, this is the same idea, almost like Loomer, that's her name.
She just supports, she says nice things to me and whatever.
But we've seen some photos that have come out, too, with them together.
And in a reminiscence of those pictures and video that came out of Monica Lewinsky alongside Bill Clinton, being a little bit sort of touchy-feely, and it looked, you know, and it looks okay, but you know, with the context we found out later, it's like, okay.
This looks a lot like that, but probably worse, because she is much more connected to him, body to body.
And it looks bad.
I just simply would not be surprised if, yes, they were doing those things.
But you know what the worst part about that is?
Then the other rumors kind of come out about Trump's sexual appetite and what his predilections are, or his peccadilloes.
And that's worse.
I'm sorry I've had it.
I'm glad I could do that, so you don't have to.
But I've seen it, and I cannot see it.
I don't want to.
I want to say a couple of things because I think it's important for context.
Quite frankly, I don't care what consenting adults do as long as they don't hurt people.
You know, I actually think America has been way too puritanical in the way that they look at these things.
You know, Gary Hart could not be reached for comment.
You know, I think there are problems when you look at things like what Bill Clinton has been accused of.
That is one thing versus another.
I do think it's important when you talk about this through a couple of lenses, Nick.
One, Donald Trump is treated as a messiah among white evangelicals.
So, you know, we just need to go ahead and mention that in the point that this won't affect anything.
They didn't care that he was found in a court of law to have paid off Stormy Daniels.
They don't care that he has philandered his entire life.
So that right there is an interesting thing that we have to look at.
The other thing that we need to take a look at, Nick, is the fact that this probably wouldn't do anything.
Even if it came out, this probably would not affect his vote numbers going into November.
And everybody's looking for a silver bullet, whether it's a prosecution, whether it's a lie, whether it's this, it's that.
I just want to point out, going back to what we talked about with the Haitian thing and even the assassination thing, We live in such a weird environment now that the things that we used to think were going to affect politics really aren't going to.
And this right here, even if he came out tomorrow and said, yeah, me and Laura have been having a lot of fun together, it probably would not affect the race in November.
Well, then the real question is, and by the way, I'm not even sure it's Gary Hart couldn't be reached for comment, it's like 1984 couldn't be reached for comment, you know what I mean?
That's sort of what it is, where that era is what used to derail people's campaigns.
But as far as this goes, yeah, again, listen, love works in mysterious ways.
The question is, are there the 10,000 people in Pennsylvania?
Are there a bunch of those people that will be swayed by this and be turned off enough or not able to abstain?
Maybe that's the thing.
This race will end up being so close in certain states that there could be something to this.
There could be something enough that would hurt him a little bit.
But again, it's hard to even say that credibly after surviving the Access Hollywood tape.
Yeah, I mean, that's the thing, I think.
And by the way, that came out on my birthday back in 2016.
I will never forget that.
Like, that was a weird day.
I had a hurricane hit, power went out, and I thought Trump was done.
I thought it was over.
Of course, we know now that didn't really do anything.
Honestly, it just let us know who he was and how he behaved, and we went from there.
And I think that's something to remember in all of this, that we have passed into a new era of politics.
It truly doesn't matter.
This person has broken it all open, showed us that norms and expectations absolutely do not matter.
And I mean, and Donald Trump was a great revealer in that, like he showed us that the world that we thought we lived in was illusory.
You know what I mean?
It wasn't real to begin with.
It was sort of a, it was a pageant.
It was basically, and like you say all the time, Nick, and I think this was like one of the more trenchant things you've said, it was always that people had shame and they said, I'm sorry, and then they moved on from it.
You know, then, like, the moment that you stop doing that, the moment it reveals that, like, all of this has been make-believe, and what's most important, Nick?
Power.
That's it.
That's the only thing that actually matters to a lot of the people who are involved in this, is whether or not they're able to gain control of power.
I'm kind of curious, because I rely on you on the Christian interpretation of stuff, is, you know, it's a notion of going to get your, what's it called again?
You go to the priest and you get, you go in the little thing and then you tell them your... Confession?
Confession.
It's the idea of a confession, that same connection, it's like you say it and then you're done.
You're like, you're absolved.
You're absolved.
So I can now the shame it kind of goes away too.
I can sort of just sort of cast that off in the same way and not have it affect me and not have any shame and then move on from there.
Well, we don't need to go into the Reformation and the mechanics of sin and absolution.
But I will say, when it comes to that, it is the idea, like really truly, the idea of Christianity, when you boil it down to its essence, is the idea that you can be forgiven for what you have done, which is a lot different from Old Testament sort of ideas, right?
In which there's an angry God who basically dangles you over a fiery pit.
Well, you know, if you really want to take a look at it like this, it's more about how this stuff is weaponized.
Like, morals and ethics, when it comes to, like, modern Christianity, it's actually about being able to use that as a weapon and cudgel against the people you don't like.
You can say, well, you're not moral enough, you're not pure enough, and so we reject you, and you are therefore outcast.
You're not allowed to have something.
But I mean, really?
Donald Trump, Nick, is more like Jimmy Swagger.
And if people remember, Jimmy Swagger tearfully on television had to admit, you know, his crimes against the church.
You know, you look at all these people, Baker, you know, like you look at what they've done and it has been this thing where there is a hypocrisy at the heart of this because what matters?
Money and power.
And if the person can get you money and power, then it really doesn't matter what they do.
And then all of a sudden, they'll call you a divine agent, which means like, yeah, they killed a bunch of people.
They hurt a bunch of people.
They went against the word of God, but they certainly got us power and wealth.
That's the one thing that actually matters.
There's a good video going around right now from a woman who had been an evangelical Trump supporter and then woke up and understood what was really happening.
And she explained exactly why people in her group would support Trump despite his behavior.
And it was like, I guess the baseline, what she was sort of saying is like, once you accept that he was chosen by God, however that you get there, then everything else is off the table.
Everything else is just Satan literally trying to get you to change your mind about Trump.
That's really what the prism becomes.
And that makes sense, right?
That kind of explains a lot of the people who are willing to ignore all this stuff, who are deeply religious people, to support him.
Because the baseline for them is simply that God has touched him, that's already a given, and nothing else can change that.
Well, that's the bastardization of religion in general, and it's not just Christianity, it's across the board.
Like, it goes back to what we talk about, Nick, which is, why do J.D.
Vance and other religious radicals always talk about using Christianity and God's will as some sort of a marker against democracy?
Democracy, you gotta count the votes.
And whoever wins, they're the ones who have power.
In an illiberal democracy, or what they call a Christian democracy, Victor Orban could tell you a lot about this, basically it says, I know that God is on my side, so whatever I do is right, right?
It's righteous persecution, whatever I do to the people who are against me, because they're satanic.
It takes you beyond empirical evidence, and it just gives you the ability to say, I know what I'm doing is right.
By the way, Nick, speaking of extremists, I have to mention this on this story before we move forward, which is, and real fast, you agree that even if it came out that this was happening, it wouldn't change much, right?
You agree on this?
I don't know.
I want to, I want to, I want to think that it could change enough people's minds that, you know, maybe on the margins, you know, if it's, if it's a, you know, several thousand votes in all these states, I like to think it maybe would have a little effect, but, but, you know, I probably not.
So on this note, Nick, a couple of things that I'm very interested in all sort of loop together and like a quick little anecdote.
Milo Yiannopoulos, who was a right wing absolute bigot and hate monger who then took over the Kanye West for president ticket and is just an all around awful person.
He has splintered away from Laura Loomer, who he used to be close with.
I'm very fascinated by right-wing schisms.
I've talked about this.
I think I talked about it last week a little bit.
Milo has gone after Laura Loomer really hard, saying that she told him personally that she had had relations with Donald Trump.
He said not only are the allegations true, but that he supposedly talked to Laura Loomer's father and that she had been subject to two forced mental institutionalizations.
Now, that on its frame, and we can't really believe much of what Milo says, but here's a question for you, Nick.
Going off the first story about the recent foiled assassination attempt of Donald Trump by the Secret Service, if this is a person who has had to be institutionalized twice, and we don't know, this is alleged by Milo, we don't know if it's true or not, but if it turns out that that is true, Nick, I have a question for you.
How in the hell Is a person like Laura Loomer, if that allegation is true, how is she allowed to be so close to Donald Trump constantly?
That tells me that within MAGA, and I think this is an institutional problem, that there are tons of people who are not being vetted, who are not being looked at, whether it's foreign nationals who are trying to bribe him or to influence him, or people who are potentially dangerous, and we've seen he hangs out with felons all the time, What is happening over there where literally anybody can gain access to this guy?
How does this happen except for what I said earlier, which is a cultural problem within the orbit of Donald Trump that extends out to a Secret Service?
Why is it cultural?
Isn't it just Donald Trump himself?
That is the problem.
He is a guy who they have to listen to, right?
He has the final say.
Although, interestingly enough, do you believe the story that he wanted to go to the Capitol?
No, that would mean he would have to walk.
Oh, you mean, did he try and grab the wheel and do whatever?
Oh, I don't know.
There's so much like hearsay about everything that Donald Trump has ever done.
Because there's an example where, okay, he should be able to tell the Secret Service where he wants to go and they should have to take him.
But they completely didn't do that.
And so here it would be like, yes, sir.
Like, not that the Secret Service, it's not their jurisdiction.
I mean, they're there to protect him, but I would probably say, yes, this woman is unstable and she's had a history or whatever, then, you know, she can't be allowed in whatever, but he's demanding that.
And obviously the other answer could very well be that if she is granting him sexual favors or whatever that is.
Then he's going to want her around.
And that overrides everything else.
But either way, there's no question that the right and the people in his orbit are wringing their hands.
That's not even the right word.
They most certainly are.
They're losing their minds over this.
Went into a froth over this because of this.
And there's only a few answers as to why she continues to be around.
And, you know, it would be nice.
It would be a little bit of chef's kiss if she ended up being an albatross around his neck and cause a problem enough to affect votes.
But, you know, we'll see.
She is such a wild card in all of this.
Like, not only did she go after Marjorie Taylor Greene, not only did she post a bunch of like offensively racist stuff against Kamala Harris, You know, she spread one conspiracy theory after another.
Nick, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that after Lindsey Graham questioned her participation in Trump's administration, she openly questioned his sexuality, which is like one of the big, major sort of things in Washington, D.C.
That is so strange that she's a major advisor to the GOP's presidential candidate going after Lindsey Graham like that.
It's absolutely wild.
Well, do you know what she's also angling for, apparently?
She wants to be press secretary.
Yes!
Now imagine that!
In front of all the press and she's the one in charge.
That's supposedly what she's angling for in all this too.
Because obviously everyone needs something.
She wants to get something out of this.
Because I really do not love...
This is an absolutely wild story.
I for one am just I'm fascinated and repulsed by it.
And I also think it's incredibly telling.
Very quickly, Nick, I just want to talk about something very, very fast, because we've been talking about MAGA and this entire sort of like chaotic, putrid cesspool of an environment.
I've noticed recently this trend that a lot of liberal, resistance, pro-Kamala Harris accounts and people have been repurposing MAGA memes from the 2016 era.
We've seen a lot of these old videos that have been, like, redone and reduxed in order to now fit Kamala Harris that used to be all about Donald Trump, you know, the old things where it was like Donald Trump is part of the Avengers with all of these, like, right-wing MAGA assholes.
On top of that, we just saw this weekend footage of a truck parade, which looked like a MAGA truck parade, with big, giant, weird flags flying, and people are celebrating this.
I'm really off-put by this, and I just want to put this out there as, like, sort of a bookmark for us to talk about this in the future, because I think we're watching something weird happen, and I think it behooves us to at least make note of it.
Yeah, I mean, there's a little bit of a spicy, you know, get getting back at the people for something, uh, how do you like them apples kind of thing?
Um, you know, the, the, the flags weren't pictures of a Kamala in, you know, with huge muscles and, or flying through the air, whatever.
Oh, just wait, they're coming.
Those are coming.
Well, fair enough.
But like, you know, the flies I saw were simply just, you know, understated, you know, walls, Harris, uh, together, you know, what you'd normally see as a, As a campaign poster on a flag, I suppose, but, um, I don't know.
I don't think I have the same reaction as you do to that, but, um, I suppose you're just thinking that it's just lowering the, the, the, the debate into the mud more.
No, I think it's a marker of a change that's happening in our politics.
And I think that something you just brought up is important.
You said that it's fun, right?
Like, like it's, it's, it's like getting back at them.
Yeah.
I think that's part of what it is.
Donald Trump's original campaign for president, and everything since then, has been a troll job.
And one of the reasons why so many people have gotten on board with MAGA is because they wanted to trigger libs, right?
They wanted to upset people.
They wanted to, like, put, you know, rub their faces in memes and all of that.
I'm starting to think that the liberal contingent is really starting to, like, understand the joy of that.
And I think what's being constructed around Kamala Harris, whether she's intending to do it or not, is another sort of a... it's vibes, is what it is.
It's, I want to get behind something that makes me feel the way that people feel about Donald Trump in MAGA.
And I think that doesn't just lower debate, I think that lowers political culture.
Which is, again, about power and struggling for power and antagonizing for power.
This type of thing, it feels like pseudo-organizing and pseudo-action.
And what it's actually doing is just making people feel like, yeah, that feels good.
I like that.
And I think that that is actually a note of something that's happening in our politics.
I mean, fair enough.
There's a reminiscence to some degree, I believe, if I'm not mistaken, when John McCain gave the thumbs down to the vote to repeal the American Affordable Care Act, there was going to be a bunch of cheering in the Senate area.
And if I'm not mistaken, Chuck Schumer had to run over there angrily, tell everyone to shut up and don't cheer.
That's the exact thing I'm doing.
But there's the idea that even in the Senate, which is supposed to be these Well, and we saw it.
people who are very high-minded and appropriately acting, they were wanting to sort of dunk on the other side too in certain instances.
So I guess I could see that, you know, permitting that and becoming bad.
You're right.
Nothing really good comes out of a back and forth like that as it escalates.
Well, and we saw it, I think it originated with the whole dark Brandon thing, where they started taking pictures of Joe Biden and editing them to make them look like these sort of like edgelord things that they did with Donald Trump.
I think a lot of people want their own manga.
I think that's what it is, because it seems like it's more fun than caring about legislation and activity and action.
And I think it's just turning into a fandom.
And I think that that should cause people a little bit of a pause.
Yeah, I mean, counterpoint, you know, to quote the great Spalding Gray, the late great Spalding Gray, you know, to name something is to take away its power.
And so to sort of put it back and take it back, you're kind of trying to minimize it and then sort of dispel it more as it becomes less impactful, I think.
I think there's an argument to be made.
I just don't want Blue Maga to actually be a thing.
Right.
No, I hear you.
I mean, because then all of a sudden, next thing you know, they're the ones with the, you know, the uniforms out in the streets, you know, whatever it's doing.
I stay away from that, but I do think a cult of personality has already been constructed and like watching the sort of tropes fall around.
It concerns me.
I'm just putting a pin in that for us to watch for it.
That's it.
All right, everybody, that's going to do it for today's episode.
We're going to come back for The Weekender on Friday.
A reminder, go to patreon.com slash Mike Craig podcast, support the show, gain access to all the exclusive content, episodes, all that good stuff.
If you need us before then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
