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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman talk about a social media post from the White House depicting Donald Trump as king with the caption: Love Live The King! And he's not far from that stature as he continues an assault on our Democracy while demonizing Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy by quoting literal Russian propaganda. While some Republicans seem to be unsure of their support for this latest wave, most members of the GOP are falling in line for fear of political and/or violent retribution.
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Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the McGregor Podcast.
I'm Jerry D. Sexton.
I'm talking to Nick Halseman, who is in a business center at a hotel.
I am.
Probably the only person in this room for weeks at a time.
That used to be the lifeline of American commerce, and now it's where political podcasters and pundits go when they're on the road chasing their dreams.
Well, hey, my dad still prints out his boarding pass when he gets on a plane.
I love your dad so much.
Now I'm going to be thinking about him printing out his boarding pass every time I get a boarding pass.
I'm very excited about that.
Awesome.
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Nick, in the...
That is the Donald Trump political presidential experience.
There are things that happen every now and then that still...
The White House has also released a meme that...
Pictures Donald Trump wearing a crown along with the words, long live the king.
This type of stuff is what we have talked about in terms of what Trump wants and what the Republican Party and particularly MAGA has wanted from him.
But seeing this in such stark terms, quite frankly, was stunning.
It wasn't.
I mean, we've seen them share, leaders of the party share all sorts of very, very violent memes across social media, and they love it.
They love the troll.
They think, oh, we're just joking, right?
And I just keep wanting the response to be like, great, then, you know, why don't you go on the road for a two-drink minimum and spend your time entertaining people?
Like, if that's what you really want to do, then great.
They tried and they failed a lot of them.
Oh, well, listen, if you want to talk about the quality of the comedy, then we can have a whole show on that.
But it really is, you know, this is supposed to be a serious endeavor run by adults who are mature.
And instead, there's a childlike, right?
A childlike bullying.
But bullying isn't even the right word.
It's an immature and sort of sadistic model they're running on, personality-wise.
And it's dragging us all down into the abyss.
Yeah, it's not great.
And what you just said, the key word there is stunted.
I mean, watching these people at any given moment, it's watching children and adult bodies engaging in things that they should know better than.
And one of the things I wanted to zero in on here, because number one, you know, this...
It launched an incredible number of responses.
We had seen Donald Trump traipse around the king-dictator type thing.
We've seen him talk about being elected president for the rest of his life and then Donald Trump Jr. being elected.
We've seen him lust after the type of dictatorial power that Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un has.
We know all of this.
But what I want to talk about is that stuntedness that you're discussing among the right.
And a lot of people are responding and saying, we already fought one war to get rid of kings in this country.
Well, we need a little bit of context of why this type of stuff is thrilling for them and why they're excited for it.
First things first, not everybody fought against the monarchy.
A lot of people within the United States of America Really wanted to stick with the monarchy.
A lot of them didn't even get involved in the thing.
Like, if you actually look at the numbers, it's like 30% actually sort of rose up against the monarchy, and a lot of others stuck with it.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, there were a lot of loyalists, for sure.
So, like, Paul Revere's next-door neighbor or whatever was fighting for the Redcoats?
There were probably a lot of people who heard Paul Revere, and they were like, shut up.
You need to calm it down.
I'm busy doing whatever the equivalent of watching Modern Family was.
Well, is there a significance to the 30% number because it kind of resembles the MAGA number in this country?
Well, I think that when you actually take a look, and this is what I'm talking about, when you actually take a look at humanity in general, there are larger swans of people who are more interested in an authoritarian figure.
That's the entire point because you brought up the stuntedness, right?
One thing that a lot of these people are interested in, and we talked about this back when Tucker Carlson did that really perverted daddy's home and you're going to get a really bad spanking.
A lot of these people are looking for a father figure, an authoritarian father figure, which, by the way, is the entire basis of a king, right?
It's a heavenly father on the face of the earth.
They're looking for a dominant figure like Donald Trump to come in, which is what he's giving people.
And he's causing unbelievable amounts of harm, but there is an emotional catharsis there for some people.
And we have yet to begin understanding, and this is weird, Nick, what does he give people?
He gives people the freedom of being unfree.
And quite frankly, being free is a difficult thing.
It's a task for an adult.
And a lot of people who have that stunted nature, they greet this happily because what do they want?
They want someone like him to come in and quote-unquote put things to right and sort of take charge.
I suppose they also want to have somebody come in and tell them what to do and tell them what to think.
Because I guess you're right, it is confusing and it does take a lot of energy, mental energy, to discern what is truth, what is reality.
It is a lot easier.
It's a lot easier to throw away stuff in the garbage instead of having to recycle things.
It's a lot easier to just run my sprinkler system throughout the whole summer and keep my grass green instead of maybe conserving some because there's a drought.
It's just the easier path across all these different things that leads to this.
And I suppose we were lucky until now that there hasn't been anybody else to take advantage of this desire.
I mean, no one who was craven enough to do it.
To be a president whose White House thinks it's a good idea to publish something that portrays the president as a king.
And while we're bringing this up, and I wanted to have a discussion with you, I've been watching since this happened.
It's been about 24 hours since this thing got posted.
You have not seen the majority of Democratic leaders messaging against this.
It's the easiest thing in the world to go against.
America is built on the mythology of taking down a king.
This is a person who is going outside the law and doing whatever he wants without any accountability.
Like, there is a natural ability to push back against this thing.
And the fact that we haven't seen this latched on in terms of a messaging thing, I think it reveals something not just about the Democratic Party.
But it reveals something about what Donald Trump senses and what the people around him sense, which is that a lot of people want this.
And on top of this, the opposition is not interested in throwing punches and or counterattacking at this point.
You know, they might just be throwing up their hands saying, we told you this all during the campaign, right?
Yeah, what's I going to get you?
Right.
Nothing, you know.
And because remember, Hillary did the same thing.
She outlaid the whole thing during her campaign and it all came true.
You know, I guess what's disturbing about this is that, you know, Trump is now, the things that he's feeding the people that want this so badly are, is such straight Russian propaganda, unfettered, mainlined, and that's, it's now completely and utterly transparent.
You know, I feel like I saw somebody in Europe tweeting, like, at least he's honest now.
Like, he's not hiding the fact that they're going to try and destroy Europe, basically.
Like, the people in Europe's complaint was that American presidents in the past had kind of, like, paid lip service to this notion that we're all part of the same team, and they never would undermine all sorts of agreements that they would have in trade deals.
But here's a guy who's finally actually going to try and destroy us and tell us he's trying to destroy us.
But that's the same thing we've seen with MAGA. It's like, oh, he's a straight shooter.
He's finally telling people, like, you know, really what he's saying.
It's just, I don't understand how to combat this very easily because...
You know, every time you want to bring it up, you just lost the next election.
That's what the right will say.
And it's startling, and I don't know how we break this fever.
Well, and you know, what you just brought up in terms of Europe being quote-unquote relieved that at least he's telling the truth.
I wrote an article about this on my dispatches from a collapsing state this week, which is what Trump is now doing with Ukraine and what he's doing with Russia.
And by the way, in the meetings with Russia, they've been very open about it.
They're not talking about Russia taking responsibility.
They're talking about joint business opportunities.
How much money they're going to make from this.
Meanwhile, Trump has now called Vladimir Zelensky a dictator, right?
And blaming him for the invasion of Ukraine.
And actually what's happening here, and I think this is one of the reasons, going back to the King meme, is that, you know, for a long time America's been doing this shit.
We've been playing footsie with authoritarianism, whether it's going around the world during the war on terror and killing over 4 million people and displacing 38 million people, throwing people into black sites and torturing them and infringing on their rights or having Guantanamo Bay or all of the different sort of like behind the scenes dealing and exploitation.
It created a neurosis in America.
A lot of people, and I think where this thing broke, Nick, I think it was around Palestine.
I think it was around what Israel was doing in Palestine, where you had a bunch of Democrats who were like, well, we don't like this, but, you know, Joe Biden is trying to keep it going, and he's trying to make this work, and it'd be a whole lot worse if he wasn't in there, all that.
It's these moral and ethical contradictions, and they cause attention in people.
And unfortunately, what Donald Trump has enabled people to do is to engage in their worst instincts.
It's the equivalent of someone trying to stop using a drug.
And someone's like, hey, you used to be so much more fun when you use that drug.
Let's use a lot of drugs and go on a bender.
And it sort of gets rid of that shame and that guilt that's been going on and just sort of encourages the worst possible thing.
And around it, what we're seeing, Right.
And once they get people on their side, then they can accuse the others, their opponents, of what they're doing.
Which is the things that he's saying now about Ukraine, how they started it, and that Zelensky is the real dictator here.
It's pure Russian propaganda.
And then Putin goes on their news and starts saying, well, finally, Trump is getting the real information from the real intelligence here.
And there isn't anybody else reporting this.
Trump is trying to say that Zelensky, the reason why he's a dictator is because there's no elections, which their constitution denies elections during a war, which is what they're in right now.
It's the constitutional thing he's supposed to do.
They also say that his approval rating is 4 percent.
And there is only one source for that approval rating report.
Wait, is it the guy who has an approval rating of 98 percent?
Yeah, exactly.
It's Pravda, whatever or TASS, whatever their official publication is these days in Russia.
So, you know, it's like you could argue somehow that, oh, Trump is getting the real joke.
But it's like the problem here is that there isn't there isn't there's only one source for this information, and that is that is Putin directly.
And so...
You know, we're already down this rabbit hole here where we, I've been saying this for months and we described it last time, is the axis is now us.
We are the axis of evil across the world.
And I think about 1930s Germany because, you know, he's now talking about wanting to expand the United States and sort of have more of a conquest.
And is it safe to say that Mein Kampf plays some role in Trump's life?
Well, I think, and again, I don't think Donald Trump has ever actually read a book cover to cover, including his own.
But I do think instinctually, again, I think he's an instinctual fascist.
I think it's about bringing glory to himself and reckless aggression.
And one of the things that we're seeing around this, Nick, is it's become so blatant.
And there's no denying it at this point.
If you are in denial about who Donald Trump and what MAGA is and what Elon Musk is doing, you haven't been paying attention.
And so what we're seeing around this, and there's a whole list of these things that are popping up, and I want to remind people, I keep saying I know that this is frustrating and scary, but there is building backlash.
Right?
Because you can't do all of this stuff without there becoming some sort of an equal reaction to it.
We're seeing a lot of these things start to pop up.
So, for instance, we're recording this on Thursday, February 20th.
Kash Patel was just confirmed as the director of the FBI, which is a horrific thing.
Just a reminder, they got everybody that they wanted outside of Matt Gaetz, who pissed off so many Republicans he couldn't get confirmed.
So that goes in.
Meanwhile, Republicans are a little bit feeling weird about that, even though he got confirmed.
Meanwhile, we're starting to see Republican members, including right-wing talk show host Mark Levin, calling MAGA un-American and calling him out for getting close with Vladimir Putin against Ukraine.
We're seeing Jesse Waters.
And it's incredible that I'm saying this.
Jesse Waters going live on Fox News because a friend of his, a veteran, got laid off by Doge and saying, quote, Like, can you please become less callous?
Then we start seeing these leaks that are being leaked over to Gabriel Sherman over at Vanity Fair.
The GEO members are, quote-unquote, scared shitless.
They're afraid that Elon Musk is going to primary him.
Some of them are worried about political violence.
It appears that January 6th has sent a definitive message.
So what we're actually seeing right now, and do not get me wrong, it doesn't mean the Republican Party is going to come to his senses or the fever is going to break.
Even in the halls where you would not expect some type of pushback, and we'll talk about Mitch McConnell's retirement here in just a minute, even in some of the halls where you wouldn't expect pushback and backlash, we're starting to see just a little glimpse of these things that lets us know that what Trump is carrying out and the decisions that him and the people around him have made, that there is the beginnings of a backlash.
It doesn't mean the Republican Party is going to fix this thing, but it is a telling signal.
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