Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss Donald Trump's latest interview where he called Kristin Welker and boasted about his 3rd term in office. Oh, he also talked about attacking Iran if they don't sign a nuclear deal that they had already agreed to. They move on to Elon Musk's Cheesehead appearance in Wisconsin where he's trying to pay people to vote.
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Real fast, Nick, I just want to let everybody know that friend of the show, Sarah Kinzier, her new book, The Last American Road Trip, is coming out this week, and we're planning on holding a conversation Wednesday night at 8 p.m. Eastern.
People keep an eye out for that.
I think it'll be a good time, you know, as much as a good time as it is talking about authoritarianism.
But in the meantime, I'm here with my friend Nick.
Nick, how are you doing, bud?
I'm good.
Are you and Sarah going to be in the same place?
No, we're going to be zooming in through the interwebs.
Oh, okay, great.
Well, I can't wait for that link.
Yeah, well, what a modern time.
I can't wait for that link.
Yeah, it is.
That's way, isn't how the kids talk these days.
I think that's how, I think that's how the youth talk.
Talk about it.
Link me, Jared.
Yeah, shoot me that link, would ya?
A reminder, everybody, and I'll send out a reminder on Patreon about this thing, patreon.com slash mycraigpodcast.
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Nick, we got so much stuff to go over.
You know, we have ins and outs of the administration, the bullshit that they're trying to pull off, but we have to start.
with something that is like so normal but also insane at the exact same time.
On Sunday, in a truly bizarre move, President Donald Trump called in to meet the press host Kristen Welker.
You know, the enemy, the deep state.
We have to go through what he talked about in this conversation, which was aired.
They didn't tape the conversation.
Welker recounted The conversation, which is odd in its own right, but in this conversation, Trump told her that he is serious about serving a third term.
He's looking into strategy for it.
He is now continually refusing to rule out military force and taking over Greenland.
He's claiming, Nick, that he's pissed off at Vladimir Putin.
And he's really, really pissed off at Vladimir Putin for interrupting the ongoing peace plans with Ukraine.
Also, like always, talking about the possibility of striking Iran if they don't agree to a new nuclear deal.
Before we start, do you remember anything like this?
Do you remember a president calling a reporter and leading a show where the reporter just kind of recounted what the president said?
I'm trying to figure out how that all happened.
Me too!
Off the cuff, just dialed her number up and just started talking?
And then didn't know who answered?
I had a weird weekend with this because this happened.
You know, CNN had Alexander Dugan on for some reason.
I felt like I had a little bit of a break from reality with this shit.
I'm almost thinking it was a butt dial and he was talking to somebody else and she's just kind of listening the whole time about it.
Well, you know, Mike Waltz has already laid the blueprint for this, right?
He had somebody else's name with her phone number, you know, like they just happened to be in the wrong group chat is what's going on.
Yeah, I guess so.
And, you know, good for Welker, I guess, to maybe take some notes or something like that and be able to contemporaneously report on it.
You know, nothing will be like we've seen in the past.
That's exactly right.
And you know, we need to just accept that to a certain extent.
We need to accept that these things are going to happen while accepting that we need to change it back to or change it to something new, different than this.
Well, let's start by going through this list of things, because there's some notable stuff to talk about.
First things first, you and I have talked for years that if Donald Trump got a second term, he was going to want a third term.
And he was gonna want a fourth term.
And we didn't say that just from an emotional basis, although we understand this guy instinctually, his authoritarian nature.
But we thought this because he has said it multiple times, and the people around him have said it multiple times.
The reason this is notable, besides obvious reasons, Is Nick, he gave an example of what could potentially happen, which would include JD Vance becoming the president and then handing over power to Donald Trump.
He was then asked if there were other things that he wanted to talk about in terms of plans of how to do this.
And he said, no, but maintained apparently that there are lots of discussions about these things being put in motion and in action and being considered.
What's your reaction to hearing from Donald Trump specifically a plan that has been Well, I actually like it because it lets us really get ahead of the game a little bit because he can't keep his cards to his vest, right?
He constantly blurs out what he's trying to do.
I had to do some more research into it because it didn't make sense exactly how Welker was asking him how this works.
I think that that version of the plan is that Trump would run as vice president.
Vice VP.
Yep. And Vance would win, and then Vance steps down and vice president has succession rights to that.
But again, that doesn't still work, I don't believe.
Now we've seen Nixon be a vice president for two terms, and then run for president.
But he would not have been able to run had he won again, if he didn't win again, and then as like a vice president after that.
Well, okay.
So the bottom line is he wouldn't be able to assume the office as a third term.
I think it's pretty clear in the Constitution that that won't happen.
There's a lot to unpack here about how this stuff works.
And unfortunately, one of the parts of my job is sort of understanding future threats to democracy in order to create protections with democracy.
So here's what I think it would necessarily look like.
I think that they absolutely are thinking about whether or not He'd be the VP and then hand it over to him.
There are absolutely scholars who are being paid by billionaires and these think tanks and institutes are trying to do this.
There is another situation where J.D. Vance would run for president with the wink-wink, nudge-nudge understanding that Trump as his VP, or maybe even as an appointee, much like Elon Musk with Doge, that he would actually hold the power, right? And, you know, for all the people who are saying he can't do this, There's no way he can do this.
First of all, stop listening to anybody who simply says he can't do what he wants to do.
He will try and figure out a way to make it happen.
You have to create protections.
Nick, one of the reasons why I understand this strategy is because we've seen it before with one of his close personal friends, Vladimir Putin, who had two terms as president of Russia.
And in 2008, his friend Dmitry Medved, he went ahead and became president and then Vladimir Putin became prime minister.
And then they took a few years to do that.
And then Putin cycled back in.
That is an option.
Other options I think that are being considered here, because in order to change the amendment that was passed after FDR's terms, you would have to get two-thirds of Congress, two-thirds of the states, all those good things, right?
The other access point through this would be having the Supreme Court basically Revert that amendment and try and create some type of a lawsuit that would eventually give them the opportunity to say, no, he can go ahead and run again.
You name it.
But I think, I think all of these options are on the table and I think all of them are being studied at the moment.
I agree.
And there's other things too.
Like, you know, again, they could, they could try doing the thing where Trump becomes a speaker of the house and whoever wins steps down, whoever vice president steps down.
And then he assumes that again, because then that he's not elected.
And again, there is this notion of elected office, and if you're not elected to that position, then can you then take it?
But, you know, yeah, they ain't gonna change the laws.
I believe that Putin did a little law changing in the midst of all that to stay, if I'm not mistaken.
The law was eventually changed, yes.
Yeah, and you know, that doesn't seem to really happen, but I don't think that they care about the laws anymore.
Um, you know, certainly, uh, his immunity will make him not care much about staying within the law.
And then, you know, I suppose they say to themselves a lot for all these things that they're doing is that, well, we have control over all the Congress, so they would pass it for us eventually.
Why? Let's just get rid of all that red table.
Let's do what we need to do.
You know, I won't go to prison for it.
And, uh, you know, here we are.
Nick, congratulations.
You just inserted yourself successfully into the fascist mindset.
That is as boiled down, concentrated, fascistic mindset that I've heard.
Yeah, I've always felt a little fascistic if you ask me.
I don't know why.
Yeah, I don't see it.
I know this is a bit.
I don't see it.
I think the reason I want to bring this up is for a couple of purposes.
One, we have to move away from the people who simply say it's not allowed because we see what happens with that.
They figure out workarounds around it.
There's so much money, so much power, so much of the will that you just discussed that goes into this.
There are two ways to stop this from happening.
One is that we use collective action.
to fight back against this presidency now and to make it such an issue that Donald Trump cannot continue to be President of the United States in general.
That's one option.
The second option, and this, by the way, there are so many variables in this, Nick, because I don't know that 2026 is going to be a free and fair election for a variety of reasons that we'll get into a little bit here in a while, but 2028 is a lifetime away right now.
But what you can do is that you can push the Democratic Party and you can push the political paradigm in the country to create the necessary antibodies and defenses against this type of shit happening.
Like just sitting around and expecting guardrails to stop him.
I think we see where that's at.
Well, he's not going to be able to run.
He's going to be convicted.
He's going to go to jail.
This investigation is going to take care of it.
You have to be proactive.
And like you said earlier, I completely agree with you.
We're fortunate that he says this stuff out loud.
We're fortunate that he doesn't have enough discipline to hold his cards close to the chest, and that we have some insight into what it is that he actually wants to do.
And we've heard it from him for forever now.
You know, I was just thinking about this because everybody I talk to, when I ask everybody I know, what do you think the odds are of having a free and fair election in the midterms?
The authoritarian creep has so taken over this country that that's when you have to get really concerned about like where we're living and what we're going to end up doing here, right?
But I was just thinking about, and no one will give me more than, you know, 60-40 for a rigged election.
That's as good as I can get for a free or fair election and much less than that normally.
So what I'm thinking is, is that you need to have some sort of robust exit polling, you know, where you, that's, that's legit.
I mean, exit polling used to be like, you know, Completely legit.
Like, you know, no one's lying after they vote about who they voted for.
Generally, I think that those are pretty accurate.
They used to be.
Yeah, I mean, you can't load people up with sodium pentol, you know, like that's impossible, but it is different now.
Yeah. Right.
But if we had some version of a rigorous thing across all the battle ground states and whatever to make sure, like, and if you see some anomalies, at least there we can figure out where to attack and contest.
Maybe that's one of those guardrails that someone needs to be able to install.
Well, and just very quickly, because I know that there are Democratic strategists and politicians who listen to this podcast, and it just occurred to me based on what you just said that this is something that people can do.
Don't wait until 2026.
Right now, go ahead and make it an issue and say that we need international observers.
Yeah. We need people to come in from outside in order to keep...
And I...
George Soros is going to get mentioned in just a few minutes.
Don't get me wrong.
I understand they'll make conspiracy theories about it.
Well, guess what?
Nut up.
Like, don't worry that they're going to throw out conspiracy theories.
Go ahead and in 2025 say, we need international observers to come in and make sure that we have a free and fair election.
Speaking of the international community, Nick, the Greenland thing continues.
JD Vance took an absolutely ill-fated tour over to Greenland.
It was an abysmal failure.
Nobody wanted to talk to him.
They'd rather spit on him and watch it freeze.
Trump talking about not just that he thinks that they're going to get Greenland, but refusing to take the military option off the table.
I think that speaks volumes because I think if you and I were allowed unfettered access in the Pentagon right now, there is at least one office that is currently, like, talking about this.
And I guarantee that they have been tasked with putting together plans on exactly how the United States of America would take over Greenland.
We've been talking about this for at least the last two weeks and what that would end up looking like.
Greenland doesn't have a military presence from Denmark strong enough that would be able to propel or repel the American forces.
So they do a fake thing where they're doing some exercises in the strait around there and then they just land on Greenland.
They put the flag in there and say, what are you going to do about it?
Or you borrow a page out of Vladimir Putin's book and you have little green men who show up and you say, hey, here are people from Greenland who say that they need us here.
That's the other option.
Yeah, exactly.
Or, you know, or there's some sort of faked conflict that they have to go in and quell, right?
Again, just the same idea there where they're pretending that, like, people on Grimnir are actually fighting with each other.
I think that's one of the reasons Vance went.
For the record, I think he went to try and find loyalists within Greenland that they could somehow or another find connections with.
You would have a really hard time convincing me otherwise.
Well, I will say this.
It was pretty sad.
I was looking at the timestamps of the tweets.
We're on our way to Greenland.
Can't wait.
And then, like, literally maybe 90 minutes later, just visited Greenland.
It was amazing, right?
Like, they literally barely stepped down, got into a place to the military base.
Far away from any civilization, and then right back.
Because again, they couldn't find anywhere to go in Greenland that wouldn't be subjected to intense protests every step of the way.
So it's really worrisome.
I'm too thinking that if the United States wanted to get out of NATO, I don't think that the hoops they have to jump through are doable in terms of having Congress decide that.
I think it's the two-thirds vote, whatever that is.
But if they got kicked out of NATO, By having a military incursion on Greenland, which that would have to trigger that you'd be attacking an ally, you know, and then the EU would have to then join in and stand up for Greenland because they're in a pact themselves.
It's all frightening.
That kind of escalation all of a sudden with the wrong people we wouldn't want to be having a war with.
Imagine that.
We would basically be at war with Europe.
Yeah. Yeah, well, or daring them to go to war with us.
Which, I have two points on this subject before we move on to the next one, which is, first things first, the liberal world order is dead.
I talked about that when the meeting with Zelensky happened.
It made it abundantly clear how this was occurring.
The liberal world order, or the American empire, was based on the idea that free trade and economic interdependence was going to keep us away from tyrants taking over countries and intimidating people into, you know, giving them land and resources.
Well, guess what?
That's done.
That's over.
And it failed.
I want to make that clear again for all of these people who just said, hey, look what we have.
You really want to change things?
It failed.
You all were failures.
Period. End of sentence there.
Because what we're watching right now is the type of authoritarian intimidation is what it is.
And this expansion that's going to set off what could eventually lead to World War III is exactly what the liberal world order was supposed to have been constructed to stop.
The second part is this, and this again goes out to our listeners, Nick, because I want to pair these things with actionable pieces of advice.
If the United States of America attempts to annex Greenland, there is going to be a window of crisis.
You know what I mean?
Like, if they actually do it, there are going to be people who are going to be very disturbed by it and put off by it, and they're going to protest that.
But the possibility of annexing Greenland, like you said, it probably wouldn't take that long.
It would probably be the kind of thing that could maybe last upwards of a week, could probably take a couple of days.
And if you want to actually oppose things, you need to be organized in preparation for even the smallest windows, which means that if next week something shifts, and by the way, we got to talk about some stuff that's coming down the pike in the next couple of days.
If something shifts and all of a sudden the United States of America becomes aggressive, openly aggressive with Greenland, people need to be prepared with their co-workers and members of their community and organizations to meet that window because things change very, very quickly if you're not prepared for it.
I think what you're talking about is protesting, right?
Protests, walkouts.
Strikes, you name it.
Yes. Yeah, I would say that the neoliberalism that has failed, that you would describe, it doesn't have to be binary, right?
Where, okay, that failed, so we have to have authoritarianism.
That's exactly right.
That's the issue, I think, at heart here, is where there was ways that you can improve upon that, and then guess who's responsible for that?
Well, like you argue the Democrats, they're the ones who were supposed to on the margins be able to take steps to to improve the things like even like Obamacare, for instance, which has a lot of problematic issues that needed to be fixed and couldn't get addressed.
Now, you can argue that there might maybe Obama ran out of time and we haven't really, you know, and then I don't know if Biden, you know, even tried at that point.
So that that's part of the issue.
And then you can the law on the list of those kind of things where they didn't try and address, you know, even if it was a little bit by baby steps to To get Obamacare a little bit better and a little bit easier for people to use and not as expensive would have gone a long way.
And that never happened after that.
It's the equivalent of a homeowner watching their self-wired house catch on fire and it loses power long enough for the electrical fire to go out.
And then they're like, well, we just need to, you know, fix a couple of things.
No, you need to rewire it.
Right. You need to do something different.
And the Democratic Party has to admit that they played a role in this, as opposed to saying, we'll go back to the good old days.
The good old days brought you here.
And they were never good old days.
Yeah. Unfortunately, that's exactly what Musk is saying right now when he's looking at all the code of all the systems in the government.
We have to rip this out and redo it.
And again, that is right.
Well, that's the equivalent of hiring like an unlicensed electrician to come in and rewire your home and you go out for lunch and you come home and he's like, this is where I live now.
Right? You don't have a home anymore.
Speaking of people who are kicking people out of their homes, Nick, Donald Trump is so pissed off at Vladimir Putin.
He's so mad at Vladimir Putin.
Also, in other breaking news, Hulk Hogan is so mad at Macho Man Randy Savage, and he's going to get his WWF title back.
And they're going to have a showdown over it, I promise you.
This is real this time.
Donald Trump is very, very pissed off at Vladimir Putin.
Well, I'm still reeling over Macho Man Savage.
Does he still wrestle?
Macho Man Randy Savage is dead, my friend.
I'm sorry to deliver this news.
So who is Hulk Hogan going to wrestle?
Well, I was just using a reference that most people would understand.
Oh, I don't see it.
That's how, that's how I don't understand.
That's okay.
You don't have to, all you need to understand is that the, when the wrestlers are fighting, they're not actually fighting.
Oh, okay.
I, you know, I, I took, I was so literal.
I'm like, Oh, listen, the only thing I know about Hulk Hogan is that his name was Thunder Lips in Rocky three.
That's about as far as I go.
So anyway.
All right.
Yes. Uh, yes, they got to make it look real, right?
They got to do a little, what is red is green, right?
Jared? Yep.
Yep. Yep.
So yeah.
Well, and the truth is, and this is, I love that, for the record, this conversation with Kristen Welker, like, there is enough proof that, like, even though Donald Trump isn't functioning correctly and doesn't actually know what's going on, some of the talking points that he's being fed are there for a purpose.
Like, right now, the negotiations that are taking place with the Ukraine war actually are set to give Russia every single oil thing that they want.
Every piece of land, every remuneration, every piece of oil and resource that they could possibly want out of this.
So what is this?
And Trump says it's because he doesn't want Putin out there attacking Ukraine, he doesn't want Putin disparaging Vladimir Zelensky.
Trump disparaged Vladimir Zelensky enough for everybody.
This is good cop, bad cop.
That's all it is.
It's trying to bring Zelensky to the table in order to pass the peace treaty that Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump want.
And so this is, it's just simple triangulation.
Well, I even think that, you know, Trump floated the idea that, you know what, Putin's going to have to take the whole country and then drop the hammer, right?
I think the dirty little secret is he couldn't do that if he wanted to.
And I think anybody, from a military standpoint, you can't look at anything, at the Russian incursion into Ukraine as anything other than an abject failure, as an embarrassment.
Right? The Russian army compared to the Ukrainian army is, you know, so overwhelming and all they can end up doing is catching, you know, the 10% on the edge and the margins, maybe 15% of the country in three years.
I think that tells you a lot.
And I think that that's what the cover that Putin now needs from Trump is to somehow hide that fact that they're not a military power like that anymore.
And maybe they weren't ever really that great of a military power anyway.
Afghanistan is a lot harder in the late seventies and at that moment to take over.
But Um, but this is, this is an embarrassment militarily.
Like the fact that they can't do it means that I don't know if they have that much hope.
It's short of obviously the horrible notion of, you know, using nuclear weapons.
I mean, I think that they've improved militarily.
We've seen that in the timeline of this war.
This is one of the side effects of the United States of America trying to turn this into a meat grinder type situation.
Like it turns out militaries actually get better with time and with practice.
And as this as this war started, the Russian military was pretty decrepit and pretty rusty.
And now they've sort of gotten themselves into playing shape to borrow some sports parlance, you know.
Oh, but it's more like their drone work has gotten better.
Well, their drone work and the militaristic aspects of this are complicated, but it comes down to this, which is they want to get this peace treaty over the finish line.
And they want the United States and Russia to and with You know, if that wasn't true, and if he was actually pissed at Vladimir Putin, we wouldn't have this leaked memo from the Pentagon, which shows us that when Pete Hegseth said that the United States of America would not defend Europe against Russia, that he was like walking out, he got over his skis.
It turns out the Pentagon has that on the record, which is that they have no intention whatsoever in helping Europe if Russia actually does attack them.
And so the entire point is that they have an alliance, and in this case, it helps Vladimir Putin, and it helps Donald Trump if he pretends like he's pissed off at Vladimir Putin.
Exactly. Exactly.
Well put.
And you know, and we've already seen this notion of wanting to not defend Europe when the Montenegro statement that Trump had years ago, where he's like, what, we're going to protect them if they get attacked?
I think that's the country he talked about.
And it was like, the answer is yes, you are going to protect them because that is the deal.
That is the rule.
Not now.
Not now.
Because the liberal world order is dead.
Right. And again, I think they realize that, you know, it's like that movie, uh, was it Last Action Hero?
What's the movie where the guy comes off the screen into the real world?
It's Last Action Hero.
I like that movie.
He goes, I just killed a man.
And then someone's like, ah, shut up over there.
Whatever. It was like, you know, that's what they realized.
It's like, there isn't anybody that's going to come and lock them up or hold them accountable.
And, uh, I don't even think if the Democrats did what we want them to do in terms of getting all Taking a lot of umbrage.
I don't think that does much anyway, you know?
I would like to find out.
I would like to find out if that held any weight.
Also, just quickly, because there's not a lot to discuss with it, Nick, do you want to fill the people in on the historical context of Donald Trump saying that Iran needs to sign a nuclear deal or else he's going to strike them with everything the United States have?
Do you just want to give that a little bit of context very quickly?
Well, was there ever a deal?
Once upon a time, Jerry.
Oh, okay.
All right.
We had a president that did a deal with Iran that limited their ability to create nuclear weapons.
And in fact, it was pretty successful.
And if you want to talk to Hawks, either in Israel or, Well, And this might sound really familiar to you, Jared, but people would be gnashing their teeth and writhing their hands the whole time saying, oh, they've got it.
Two weeks from now, they're going to have a bomb.
Three weeks from now, don't worry.
And not only was there never any evidence of that, there was evidence to the contrary, that they were following it because sanctions were being lessened and making people in Iran's life better because of it.
And for all we know now, they do have weapons, or they're almost, now they probably are two weeks away from having a weapon.
Oh, I, no, they're not.
It's all, that whole thing is a whole myth and that's just been something cooked up for geopolitical purposes.
But Nick, I think that this thing, this idea, how, if you had to guess, how long has it been since the military-industrial complex has wanted to level Tehran?
How long would you put that number at?
Well, are we going to do 9-11?
Is that long enough?
I would go back to the 1970s.
Yeah, when it fell originally, absolutely.
Yeah, like with the Iran hostage crisis, they wanted to level Tehran.
But they've been, I'm sorry, but our military and the hawks, the neoconservatives and everybody associated, even some of the liberal hawks, they have been so horny for hitting Iran for the last 20 years.
It's all they can think about.
They've wanted it and wanted it and wanted it.
I think that this is an olive branch towards the military based on everything that we've been seeing with Trump trying to restructure them, with Musk potentially getting a briefing on Chinese war plans, all of this stuff.
I think that that is always the thing where it's like, hey, yeah, we're pulling some shit, but hey, You'll get to take out Tehran.
Don't worry about it.
It's coming, guys.
Just keep getting ready for it.
I mean, with the amount of mistakes that they're making, like, with Musk involved, you know, the possibility of, like, whoops, we just sent, you know, 100 Tomahawk missiles by accident.
We were, like, coding something the wrong way, you know?
And they would probably even explain it that way.
The whoopsie-doopsie doctrine is real, I think.
The what doctrine?
The whoopsie-doopsie doctrine.
Oh, we didn't mean to take Tehran out.
We'll fix it.
We'll fix it right away.
Yeah, sorry about that, guys.
Something happened with our AI.
It hallucinated something.
Sorry. But that's what we're moving towards.
And again, people will die and suffer for that.
And it used to be, whatever you were working on in certain areas of government, there are no mistakes.
You cannot make a mistake.
Have a mistake with these things.
Social Security, we cannot screw this up.
The people are dependent on this stuff.
Any kind of defense.
And here we are with this guy who just wants to break shit and doesn't give a crap and hopefully makes it work if he rushes it enough.
The children are running this thing and it's really frustrating.
Yeah, the absolutely sociopathic, cruel children.
Speaking of cruel child number one, Elon Musk is asserting himself in another situation.
In this case, it's the Wisconsin Supreme Court election that is scheduled to take place on Tuesday.
as you listen to this.
He has stepped in on behalf of Brad Schimmel, who is trying to change the balance of the court to affect absentee ballots and elections in a swing state moving forward.
He has gone so far as to spend a ton of money there.
He went to Wisconsin.
We're getting ready to watch a clip here in just a second.
He went to Wisconsin at a rally where, Nick, he handed out two big, giant ceremonial checks that reported.
Reportedly, we're for a million dollars a piece, which last time I checked should be illegal and is illegal.
But, you know, he ran across a little bit of pushback at this rally because people fucking hate him.
And here's how the guy handled it.
The federal government.
Like, shocking, really.
It's insane.
Yeah. It's really wild.
So... I mean, it was inevitable that at least a few Soros operatives would be in the audience.
Give my regards to George!
Say hi to George, Robbie.
USA! USA!
USA! USA!
Man, he sucks.
What is your reaction to Musk inserting himself in this situation and his big thing right now, which is anytime he comes across any type of pushback or protest, he's obviously blaming George Soros and the so-called Deep State.
Yeah, well, first of all, I don't know if you saw this, but the winner of the million dollar check, one of them, this is a guy named Nicholas Jacobs.
Have you seen this?
No. Looks a lot like the Nicholas Jacobs that happened to be chairman of Wisconsin College Republicans.
Makes you wonder.
You know, if that really was a gift to somebody, or are they just using operatives here to receive, uh, you know, the big written out check?
Yeah. Yeah.
That's how that, that's what's going on here.
Um, you know, I thought we went over this.
I thought the first time he tried doing the payment stuff that that was illegal and he had to stop doing that.
Um, I guess not.
Someone has to hold him accountable for it to technically be illegal.
Yeah, well, they're looking into it, apparently, Jared.
So maybe a couple of weeks from now after the election's over, we'll hear something.
Well, of course they're paid.
I'm like, really?
Great. They give us some evidence why they're paid.
He goes, yeah, they'd show up at my house at 8 o'clock on the dot for seven straight months every Saturday, and then at 9-0-1, they'd leave.
Every Saturday.
And I'm like, oh, really?
Yeah, that's evidence of paid things in the sense that You know that that's not what happened, and you know they didn't just leave and not even look at their watch and either, you know, whatever, but that's not evidence.
So anyway, it's gross.
It's horrible.
If it wasn't Soros, then it would be somebody else.
And then I don't know if you can then point to the whole anti-Semitism thing, but you know, we know what they're trying to say when they use that.
Yeah, I mean, and you said it's old.
It's not just old, it's ancient.
I mean, this is the easiest thing in the world for these right-wing assholes, is to simply say the only reason why this is happening is because of the protocols of Elders of Zion.
I would respect Elon more if he simply said, have you read the protocols of the Elders of Zion?
You know what I mean?
Instead of dressing it up.
And for the record, with all of this, let's point something out, Nick.
The Republicans and MAGA are cheering on and worshipping a foreign-born billionaire who is inserting himself into every political situation that he possibly can.
He's paying people to do things.
He's taking power.
He is the power behind the president.
Also, this is the same guy who, like, wants to put chips in people's brains.
And that is the cocktail of what they believe George Soros to be.
Like that's that's what they think that the deep state shadowy cabals are.
And the entire thing is that they just wanted their own version of it.
That's the whole thing.
They just wanted their own version of what they believe George Soros to be.
And this is the easiest thing in the world.
And we said this multiple times.
People said, oh, when Trump gets in power, well, you know, they'll have to handle their own mistakes and all the pushback.
No, this is what they're going to do.
This is the only thing that they have to do, which is to blame these anti-semitic tropes.
That's it.
It's the quickest thing.
It's the quickest cheat code that it is.
And meanwhile, they were just waiting around for their own version of it the entire time.
Oh, well, I need to hear Musk get all upset and like almost weepy about, you know, Tim Walz making- Oh, so upset!
You know, but he doesn't understand why anybody might be upset at him.
Right. And it's like the list is so long.
I mean, I'll just start and stop at the fact that he has eliminated people's jobs for no cause across the entire government, hundreds of thousands of these jobs now.
And he doesn't know why people would protest him and protest Tesla.
You know, and by the way, we haven't really talked about this for a little while.
I think, you know, Tesla is really having, you know, once you get the brand, the Scarlet Letter on you, like as a business, good luck with that because we know that, you know, Two quarters in a row of real problematic sales could doom no matter how good the business is.
That's about it.
And I don't know if he can handle much more than that.
And here he is ruining his brand on purpose by doing this stuff.
Now he's talking about getting out of Doge.
I don't know if you saw that.
Supposedly, they're going to be finished in a few months or whatever.
But, you know, he did this.
He has no idea he did this.
Or he does, but can't admit it.
I don't know what it is, but these kind of people should not be in power.
Well, poor baby.
Yeah. Remember, Nick, it all started because he wasn't called into a meeting with all the auto manufacturers.
He was so sad.
And now he's so sad that Tim Waltz, the mad, the bad man, said something bad about him.
So, so sad.
If I had a million dollars that he's giving out in Washington, if I had my own million dollars, I would bet that he would have been angry that he was not in the chat, the group chat.
I think that's fair, and Nick, if you got that big novelty check, I would bet dollars to donuts that you aren't going to actually be able to cash that thing.
Like, these people, if there's anything they enjoy more than destroying democracy and lining their own pockets, it's screwing people over.
I, without a doubt, I would not be, you know, if you get the regular size check, you better cash it right away.
You better, you better cash that thing immediately.
Probably as the Ed McMahon check used to get in the mails back in the day, right?
That used to piss my family off, man.
There for a while, they really fell for those.
What was it for?
What was that again?
That was a publisher's clearinghouse.
Clearinghouse, that's right.
Yeah. Yeah, you may have already won a million dollars.
Speaking of bad money, Nick, there's a lot happening this week financially.
The stock market is in a continued slide for a variety of reasons, including Trump leveling tariffs against foreign car manufacturers, which is going to raise prices everywhere, even though he got on a call and asked them very nicely not to raise their prices.
But there are two big things that are happening this week that people listening to the show need to be aware of.
On Wednesday, April 2nd, Trump has declared it, quote, Liberation Day, in which America will remove itself from the international economic order of globalism, will level God knows how many tariffs and basically, you know, ruin Everything in the process of what has been built.
You know, I have different thoughts on that.
We can talk about that, but also Nick on April 4th.
Two days later, that is when the new jobs and economic report drops.
And this has the potential to be a big one with the stock market already in a slide, with people already talking about the possibility of not just recession, but possibly something even larger.
And with what we know about not Trump, but the oligarchs around him and what their designs are.
How do you feel about these things coming out in the same week?
It feels significant.
Well, it does, but also I'm worried that Clarence Beaks will be in charge of the jobs report.
There it is.
And we won't actually get one that is accurate.
There it is.
And it might be a lot rosier.
Now, that's been the, you know, the other side of the aisle has always accused whoever's in power of that when it looked rosier than they wanted it to be.
So there's already the precedent of, oh, the jobs report is not, but here, so here we are.
They easily can manipulate that to make it look a lot better than it is.
You know, I think that the Biden administration tried to do that to some degree as they were leading to the election.
And we know nobody felt it.
So it never didn't make sense.
It wasn't making anybody feel better.
So hopefully that'll be the case if that's if that's what happens.
But again, all this is room for massive fuckery on the Trump administration's part.
I mean, they have already talked about how they plan on cooking this thing.
Yeah. And, you know, it's one of those things where like you can cook a meal, but if the ingredients are bad, that meal We've already seen how erratic he is.
He gets excited about big days like this.
This could be a massive swing with the economy.
And I think what I'm going to be looking for is how the markets react to the job report, even if it's cooked.
Because deep down, like the CEOs, the traders, all of them, they know what's behind.
The economic report.
They know what's behind what could be possibly cooked up.
They understand that this recession again could be the best case scenario in all of it.
And what's dawning on them, Nick, and we'll talk about this a little bit more in just a second.
What's dawning on them is that the motivations that the oligarchs have, particularly the tech oligarchs, is different from what they have.
They are suddenly realizing that their purposes and their destinations and their agendas do not work together.
Because what are they interested in?
You could roll back globalism.
That could happen.
And I would make the argument that you need to.
You need to do that with a plan.
You do need to, you know, re-industrialize the United States of America.
But doing it so haphazardly is going to lead to some really ugly places, and it's simply going to create a crisis that these people can take advantage of through unregulated labor, through more and more exploitation of not just workers and families, but children, and By the way, they have this crypto idea that they're not shy about.
They're, again, hint, hint, nudge, nudge in the fact that they want to get off the dollar and move towards a cryptocurrency that they would control and that they would have dominion over.
You know, that's interesting, and I'm curious, I'm going on an idea here.
So, when FDR instituted the New Deal to get us out of the Depression, it was part of it, I know World War II really helped as well, but it created a lot of jobs in the government, right?
So suddenly we had a big workforce, a federal workforce, so you had dependable jobs that would be there.
In some weird way, did that ultimately doom the industrialization of the country?
Well, it kind of did, but it didn't have to.
You know, like, you put people together in an industrial project.
Like, what was the new deal?
It was not just creating the bureaucracy of the new federal government.
It was creating a jobs plan that would have people go out and electrify parts of the country to, you know, lay down some industrial sort of ties.
It didn't have to be like that.
The problem is that labor got screwed over.
They weren't brought into the process.
The World War II, by the way, helped with all of that.
The Red Scare that followed went ahead and dismantled basically everything that was put in place to be built upon.
It could have been different, but what happened after the war was that the political will wasn't there, with FDR having died, with the Democrats actually moving their emphasis over towards the military-industrial complex.
Instead of waging war against the Soviet Union and pushing Yeah, because the other thing was, J.D. Vance had a really disparaging remarks against the Democrats about, like, you know, free trade, like NAFTA, basically, as if this was the downfall where we're here now.
But that's pretending as if the industrialization or the industrial complex, or The industrial background of America had been dead by the 70s, right?
All of those little, those small towns that had relied on those great jobs for all those years, by the late 70s, those were already gone, right?
So... A chunk of them, yeah.
To start to embrace free trade across North America, it wasn't a bad idea because the reality on the ground had been decades of stagnation.
Well, speaking of stagnation, there's a word that is suddenly being uttered in quite a few circles.
And that word is stagflation, which we'll talk about and give a little bit of context to.
But here is the President of the United States of America, who is currently carrying out the demolition of the American economy on behalf of his oligarchical puppet masters.
Here's that great mind reacting to being asked about stagflation.
Is that something that you're worried about given the impact of your efforts to readjust the economy?
I haven't heard that term in years.
I don't know anything about it.
This country is going to be more successful than it ever was.
It's going to boom.
We're going to have boom down USA.
We're going to boom.
Nick, how do you feel about standing on the precipice of an economic collapse and the President of the United States of America openly admits that he doesn't know what stagflation is?
Yeah, I mean, that's what he also does.
I haven't heard about that.
You know, that's that gets him out of the I mean, talking about it.
I mean, he must know we must remember late 70s stagflation, but maybe not what it was.
I was at the point like he has that word in his brain somewhere.
Yeah, it's it's it's in there, right?
But it's gotten coded with so much Big Mac grease that it just it doesn't come to the forefront.
And for people who don't know, stagflation is an economic phenomenon that took place in the 1970s.
This in the 1970s was the opening that allowed neoliberalism to take over.
And we talked about this in our Jimmy Carter documentary, in which we talked about the economic problems were this thing that the economist had no idea how it could happen.
They just looked up and suddenly it was like this thing that they were stewards of.
They didn't understand how it came to be.
And the answer was to go ahead and cut as much regulation as possible, to cut as much federal spending as possible, particularly to social safety programs.
And this was the womb, stagflation in the 1970s, late 1970s, early 1980s, was the womb that eventually gave birth to neoliberalism, which has been the consensus that took over after the New Deal that you and I were talking about.
Absolutely. And so here we are, right back into it again, and maybe worse.
It seems like this is because it's intentional, right?
There weren't terrorists looming over the country back then that would have energized the stagflation as well.
It was rooted more in oil prices and oil scarcity.
So this is a scary thing.
And you know what?
It kind of even talks more to the greater idea of what's happening with authoritarianism here, because You know, when we've seen authoritarianism take control, it's generally been in third world countries, you know, in South America, right?
Well, so-called second and third world countries, because they've been aided by the United States.
Okay, which is important to mention, right?
But the reason why I'm bringing it up in that context is because this is the first time you've had, like, quote-unquote, a first world country Like America.
I guess the point is America, which did stand for the opposite of authoritarianism, becoming authoritarian.
That's what's probably the most scary thing about all of this and what probably will send shockwaves across the entire world.
This is not going to be limited.
The effects are limited to just the country that they're taking over, right?
We've seen so-called first world countries come close to, I mean, obviously Germany and Italy and Russia have all succumbed to it.
But we've also seen people get close to it, right?
We've seen the United States of America get close to it.
It took FDR and the New Deal and a huge coalition of the willing in order to push back against it.
Same thing in Great Britain, you know, France fell because of military invasion, but there was already elements of it that were brewing there and welcomed it.
And what we're actually talking about here is creating a crisis that goes ahead and creates the pretext for what they want to do anyway.
That's the entire point of it.
And so when it actually comes to stagflation, like that is where moderates and also capitalists who have like a faith-like belief in capitalism, like this is the part of it.
And once you sort of reach that, you're like, well, that other road's not open, so we gotta go down this road.
It's not a good road, but we'll go ahead and go down it.
So there is a definitive possibility that not only are we watching stagflation come back and exert itself, and I've talked to some economic experts who are like, no, it's not just a theory.
This is what's going on right now, and it's for a variety of different reasons.
Not to mention, Nick, That the industries that drive the United States of America, which is the beating heart of global capital, they don't really work anymore.
They have become monopolies that don't actually create innovations.
We talked, I think, in the last episode about how artificial intelligence is their last possible project, basically, and it doesn't work.
So they need the government to basically require people to use it, which is one of the reasons why Doge and Musk are doing what they're doing.
But it reaches an impasse.
is what it is.
And so we saw a window.
I would make the argument that the 1980s on were soft authoritarians.
Like they were people who were basically going after all these things and almost ruling by decree using the consensus.
I think what we're watching now is another window that is opening in order for this thing to sort of kick it up a notch and go into the next level.
Yeah, I agree.
And AI, you know, the more I'm using it, the more I realize how unreliable it is.
Uh, yeah, it's not.
It's not good.
I think there are things that it does, but I think that, like, we need to recognize that this is not what it's being advertised as.
It's not, you know, the product that's being sold to us.
It's basically, in part, they have reached the end of their road and they need government assistance in order to, you know, push this thing and require it.
All right, everybody.
We will be back with the Weekender Edition on Friday.
A reminder to go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast in order to get that full episode.
If you're already listening to the previews, come along, support us, keep us growing.
We need you at this moment.
Also, again, Wednesday night, 8 p.m. Eastern, I'll be talking with Sarah Kinzier.
Keep a lookout for those links.
In the meantime, you can find Nick on Blue Sky at Nick Halsman and me at J.Y. Sexton.
