This is a preview of the Patron-only Weekender episode. To gain full access to these episodes, as well as special post-event and live recordings, and to keep the show editorially independent and ad-free, head over to Patreon and become a subscriber today.
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the signals from the department of justice indicating all of Trump's legal woes wil magically go away. It gets better as it turns out all the Republicans were lying about Project 2025 - as they fully intend to implement the plan. And the finger pointing on the Democrats' side has begun, with plenty of blame to go around.
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Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the Buckwright Podcast.
I'm Jerry G. Saxton.
I'm here with Nick Halseman.
Nick, it has been a week.
Is there anything about the relief or the release of anxiety over the last year of sort of uncertainty that it's now, that there's no more, that's not there.
We now know what's happening and maybe we can kind of Get some emotional equilibrium out of this?
I am incredibly motivated and directed.
Okay.
Like I am, I'm really, but again, we talked about this a little bit on the emergency podcast.
I'm built a little bit different.
Yeah.
Like this kind of thing like shifts me into a different gear.
So I am just like, yeah, I'm ready to do the work.
So for me, I think there is a little bit of relief to know.
Yeah.
Right.
And I'm ready to go.
I'm just hoping we can kind of just get through this very quickly.
Just get through the next four years and be done with it.
I got bad news for you, Nick.
These four years are not going to go quick.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I was even texting you earlier thinking, like, what if they just had won in 2020?
We could have gotten it all over in one shot and then move on.
But I suspect I know where you're heading with that line of thinking, and I think that I'm not going Yeah, I don't think so either.
Everybody, we have a lot to talk about today.
And I just want to say, first of all, for people who are listening to the preview, it's patreon.com slash mycraigpodcast.
Nick, a lot of people have been subscribing.
A lot of people have been reaching out.
And I just want to say, first of all, again, thank you for your trust.
And the second thing about it, and Nick, I think this is something that you and I should talk about here at the beginning of this.
I think the reason why people are trusting us is because we've been honest about this and because we have actually talked about what's been going on, meeting it where it is.
And we take that seriously.
And the work that we have been doing will continue.
This is a really, really hard time.
I am dedicated to both chronicling and explaining what's going on.
But also, I want to talk more about what we can do.
And I want to talk more about where we can start to fix things and make inroads.
But I just want to say thank you for the people who have put their trust in us.
It has meant the world.
Absolutely.
And just the value of having a community and have people say the things that maybe everyone is thinking and that makes it feel like we're all in this together.
But I am certainly on board with coming up with actionable things that we can do to fight this, to make sure that people are getting a fair shake, to make people stay positive as much as they possibly can through this.
Because it will be rough.
And we're going to have to say things that are rough and hard and not easy to listen to.
But we'll get through it together.
Yeah, we do not want to pander to people.
And that has been our burden to bear.
And also, I think one of the great, you know, joys of this is just being honest about it.
And so what do we have to turn to in this episode of The Weekender?
Of course, we talked about Donald Trump winning the 2024 election.
We got into that in the emergency episode yesterday, if you haven't listened to it yet, or I suppose that'd be Wednesday when we put that out.
We need to talk about some of the moving pieces that have happened here.
We have to begin!
With the Department of Justice, the Department of Justice has begun the process of ending two federal cases against Donald Trump due to their inability to prosecute a sitting president.
This includes, of course, the January 6th case with Special Counsel Jack Smith, which basically is now trying to wrap up its lawsuit.
It is not the easiest thing in the world, but looks like he got away with it, Nick.
Looks like he got away with it.
Oh, he got away with it.
And you were right.
I give you credit for predicting that.
Although I don't know if I would have been able to say, well, he's getting away with it because he's going to win again.
That didn't feel like that like six months ago.
But it does remain to be seen what's going to happen with the New York case that he's already been convicted of and what the sentence is going to be.
But I suspect that it won't be much of that either because...
He won't serve it.
Unless they say they want to send him to prison, he will not go.
They will get it to the Supreme Court, and guess what they'll say?
Yeah, and a reminder, in case it got forgotten in all of this, the Supreme Court has already said that a president, under their approval, has blanket immunity from prosecution.
Donald Trump is supposed to be sentenced on November 26th.
And basically his legal team right now is already pushing for that to either be delayed indefinitely, which means it'll never actually happen, or to have the entire case dismissed.
A reminder, he was found guilty in a court of law.
And what we might actually see here is that a person found guilty of a crime might have that crime taken away because they became president of the United States of America.
I want to say that again.
A human being, a citizen of the United States of America was convicted of a crime and that conviction might be gotten rid of because he was elected president of the United States of America.
Nick, what we have here is yet another moment of creeping authoritarianism.
We have talked about how the legal system is rigged for the benefit of white, wealthy men.
Well, guess what?
What we're watching now is a corruption that has always been there, becoming more and more overt.
And in authoritarian societies, autocratic societies, one of the major points of it is to take the legal system and make it apparent and flaunt it And here we are.
We are now watching him skate completely free of all of the consequences of the multitude of crimes and federal crimes that he has committed.
Sure.
I mean, add to the list.
There's a long list of things, even obstruction of justice, that had been laid out very clearly and had been waiting for him the second he left office.
And, of course, nothing happened to that.
And so now we can do all the think pieces we want about how Merrick Garland had never intended to prosecute him for any of those until he decided to start running again.
And obviously Trump timed his announcement to the running for the 2024 election so that it would run out of time.
You know, and I suppose he was a positive frame of mind.
He felt like he could still win, which he did.
So that was a really important thing where had Merrick Garland, in theory, on day one began the proceedings, it's possible.
And by the way, that might have changed everything in terms of who got which judges got which cases.
And it might have changed the trajectory of everything.
And Trump would have been able to have been prosecuted and they would have finished all those way before the election ever started.
So, you know, I hope Merrick Garland is going to is going to have a nice long vacation and then spend time with his family and have a great life.
Yes.
Yeah, Mary Garland's tenure as Attorney General has been one of the more upsetting and disgusting tenures that we have seen.
And that includes Bill Barr, who is right up there with him.
I don't know how else to say this.
I want to make sure, Nick, that as we do this work over the next four years, I want to dedicate ourselves to another thing, which is never, ever becoming immune to how disgusting this is.
Right?
Like, we're literally talking about a person who has been convicted of a crime who has been charged with dozens of crimes.
And those crimes are simply going to go away because we have a system in the United States of America that privileges this office and people of his particular class.
And we cannot let ourselves become desensitized to that.
Part of this project, the authoritarian project, is to desensitize us to it.
For us to not call it what it is and to simply shrug our shoulders and say, that's the way things are.
That's what happens in autocratic societies.
You give up hope that these things will actually be carried out.
And I told you from the beginning, I didn't think that he was going to suffer any consequences for many of these things, save for maybe some, you know, financial penalties, which is what happens when corporations and the wealthy get caught.
You know, they get a slap on the wrist, but they ultimately get rewarded for what they've done.
And I hate that that is what ended up happening.
I want to understand it.
I don't want to be surprised by it, but I want to retain my repulsion to it.
The fact that it bothers me and the fact that it angers me.
I think we should have a safe word then for this to remind us to stay on track when that happens.
And I nominate the word Kissinger.
Let's use that.
Yeah, that's a good one.
Yeah, and that one we'll always remember.
But as long as you have, you know, people like David Brooks and you bring his work onto the show, we will always remember the atrocities that have occurred in our society.
Yeah, just a content warning.
We will have a quote from David Brooks later.
Yeah, this trigger warning.
Now, you know, the other thing that's really interesting about all of this is that what we have to wrap our hands around is how much different the government will run going forward.
That's right.
So whatever your vision of the Department of Justice is or was is going to be wildly different because you are going to have an apparatus of the White House doing whatever bidding Trump wants them to do.
And if he wants to abuse that, and remember, we're not supposed to do that.
We're supposed to be a separation.
There will be none.
Zero.
Matt Whitaker, I think, was even mentioned again.
The people he's talking about bringing in again, they forgot about who he was.
He ran the Department of Justice for about a minute after Jeff Sessions was ousted.
He was a guy who was selling toilets.
What was he doing?
He was doing something kind of crazy before that.
But that goes by the way.
It's not DOJ. It's the CDC and all the health systems as well.
It's the Fed.
Don't think that all of a sudden the money and the way we run our economy is going to be separate like it's supposed to be.
That'll be completely in cahoots with whatever Trump wants.
And it will benefit Trump in his pocket directly and all of his cronies.
They'll probably use it as inside information for trading.
So this is what people wanted, I guess.
This is what's going to happen.
So we have to kind of get our heads around just how much that will change.
It might not be right in our face day to day, but it'll be really profound.
Well, it's already in our face day by day.
And one of the things that I want to say as we're continuing to cover this, because we still have things that are already shifting.
You know, we're recording this on Thursday, November 7th.
It's been two days since this asshole was elected as president.
And what is happening already?
It's not just what the Republican Party and the Trumpists are doing.
It's the fact, and I want to make this very, very clear, Nick, we are watching the system prepare itself to change for Donald Trump, to welcome him into it.
That is one thing that we have to discuss because it is a slippery slope.
And before we get into the rest of it, I want to remind everybody, we've seen this already.
We've already seen this movie play.
We already know the beats of it, right?
We already know that when someone is elected president, it doesn't matter if they're a fascist, it doesn't matter if they're incompetent, if they're a criminal, the system will go ahead and shape itself around him because it's the illusion of legitimacy, right?
He has to be welcomed in, right?
He has to become a legitimate president, or else you have to question the legitimacy of the system.
So what are we seeing take place?
First of all, this guy is now getting away with all these crimes.
Second of all, we're starting to see drumbeats that are taking off.
And I'm getting ready to read you a quote from From the National Review.
And by the way, Nick, the National Review, a reminder, what did they have to say about Donald Trump?
Were they pro-Trump or were they never-Trumpers?
Oh, the National Review I think is really pro-Trump, right?
Well, they were, well, it depends on when you find them.
They've also been never-Trumpers who say that he isn't actually conservative and you need to oppose Donald Trump.
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