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It’s a Birthday Boys Weekender as Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman go from sugar highs to authoritarian lows, unpacking reports that Trump world is gaming out the Insurrection Act, the normalization of troops on American streets, and why the guardrails failed from Cheney’s unitary executive to the Supreme Court’s immunity blessing. They break down Gov. JB Pritzker’s blunt talk about Trump’s cognitive decline, the Senate’s oversight-as-reality-TV spectacle starring Pam Bondi, and the long arc of American strongman temptations from Adams to Nixon. Plus a quick detour into PTA’s latest thriller, spooky-season horror logic, and Nick’s looming travel apocalypse.
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Welcome to a weekender edition of the Muckwright Podcast.
Actually, a birthday boys edition.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I just had my birthday on Tuesday.
You're having yours on Saturday.
The weekender fits right in between those.
I was telling you, by the way, I'm talking Nick Alssman.
What am I doing?
Talking to Nick Houseman here.
The birthday boys are in the studio.
I told you before we started, I I was I was in the kitchen.
I've got my leftover birthday cake.
And one of my favorite things, Nick, is to just scrape a little bit of cake, just just to pirate a little bit of cake after the official cake ceremony.
I'm feeling it.
I've got I've got the power of sugar right now, Nick.
That's powerful, man.
Uh, if you don't eat a lot of sugar and you do, it's uh it's something exciting.
I guess I have to I I don't allow myself sugar, so when I have it, I'm just I'm ready to go.
Oh, I you know what it's funny.
You you make fun of me for my California eating, but um, I'm already generally a no sugar, no processed sugar, by the way.
I think it's what you mean, right?
I don't I don't know.
I come from the Midwest.
I don't think about what's processed or unprocessed.
I was putting it in.
I put I put it in my mouth hole and a swallow.
Right.
Well, uh yeah, it's it's remarkable how cloudy your mind is when you eat a lot of sugar, you don't even realize it.
Like my entire life was that way until I cut out sugar, and all of a sudden, like everything got sharper and clearer.
It was it was crazy.
Well, I mean, I feel I feel drunk on it.
So I've got that going for me.
Like it was it's incredible.
Just get you a couple of forkfuls and then go do your job.
See how that manifests itself.
All right.
So the birthday boys, we're gonna handle all of the stuff that is going on right now.
Before we do, a reminder to head over to Patreon.com slash muttcrake podcast.
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And we are due for a live show, aren't we?
We're doing you know what?
We haven't talked about this.
We should do a live show in the next week or two.
Sure, let's do it.
Yeah, well, shit, why not?
Yeah.
I'll be in Madison this weekend.
I'll be refreshed and then I'll come back and we'll do that.
Maybe next week.
I don't know, maybe next week or the week after.
We'll do a live show.
I love it.
All right, everybody.
So let's go ahead and start with the decline of American democracy.
Um, admits constant footage of overstepping by ICE and federal troops around the country in which the president of the United States of America has already declared war on the American people.
Reports are now leaking out, Nick, that uh Donald Trump is consider.
Well, he's not considering.
He he has nothing to do with any of the inner workings of any of this.
But the people behind Donald Trump are pushing very, very hard for him to invoke the insurrection act, which is an 1807 act that it gives the president sweeping powers and allows the military to basically run roughshod over the population.
But reports are that this is not just in the works, but that they are going over the particulars of how to make this happen and what could uh potentially happen.
Considering what's going on in the country right now, Nick, um, this is a really troubling development.
It really, really, really is.
And it's all like this notion of training that we had heard already, him wanting to train the troops.
Uh Mike Johnson even like reiterated that saying, Yeah, we we need to train them so that we can uh they'll do their job better.
Like, but what he doesn't understand is like the training he's talking about is sort of urban where warfare against protesters is really what it looks like they're building towards.
And uh I think we were way ahead of this when we're now hearing people like Governor Pritzker in Illinois saying that uh these troops are going to be used to prevent people from getting to the ballot box uh when it's on voting date.
And uh I have no doubt that they're gonna end up using a lot of this stuff to control streets, to control traffic and control the way anyone moves.
Um, because why else would you be calling for the industry insurrection act short of uh you know what it's supposed to be for?
And there's nothing that resembles what this is supposed to be for.
Yeah, and and to go ahead, and this is what we do, Nick.
We go from you know, present day to the past and back and giving context and moving around.
You know, this is another one of those instances of how the founders of this country, and a reminder for everyone who hasn't heard me say it before or hasn't read about this.
The founders, when they created the United States of America, they wanted to create a minoritarian system with you know democratic trappings.
We were given the veneer of choice.
We were given the veneer of representation.
There's a reason why the Senate didn't become directly elected until the 20th century.
And basically, the founders created a one party system.
It was the Federalist, as they ended up becoming known as, that controlled all the apparatus and all the means of power.
They were the ones who were being served by the government.
And in order to keep on to that control with the veneer of democracy, they had to allow authoritarian elements to be in place.
And so what happens at the turn of the 19th century, Nick, is that the Federalists were scared shitless going into something like the election of 1800, in which they believed that the Illuminati were taking over.
Eventually the Democratic Republicans, the Party of Jefferson take over.
And you have a power struggle at the very beginning, at the at the early stages of this government, where you have an apparatus that's created to be authoritarian, and it just keeps going back and forth.
And so now we have the potential for someone like a Donald Trump with a with a fascistic regime with the backing of a compliant and fascistic party.
You now have the opening for a president to take advantage of past sweeping powers in order to carry out a war against the American people and saying there's an insurrection when there is no insurrection.
There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to declare it at this point.
But because those powers are there and because they were never restrained, we are now looking at the possibility of this being the next step in the authoritarian takeover.
Right.
And I wonder at this point if the boy who cried wolf stuff is going to actually kick in eventually.
We were so worried the first administration that as they're saying all these lies, they would solidify in the right wing followers' brains and it's never to be, you know, chiseled out of there as and taken as facts.
Um, you know, the the images coming out of Portland, which is where he's really focused on right now, are of um what's the uh what's the dinosaur uh name?
It's a frog.
Yeah, a frog, and well, there's a frog, it's there is a dinosaur, there's a frog, there's a lot of different characters dancing in the street.
Yeah.
And so, I mean, that's the extent of you know the two block radius of where they are protesting outside of uh one of the federal buildings.
Um, and so you know, it's possible they're showing him footage from BLM or from some other time earlier, like years ago in Portland when there was a little bit more, a little bit more violent, you know, clashes between authority and and protesters.
But again, um, they're treating protesters and the rhetoric that's coming out now is they're treating them like they are insurrectionists.
And just to give you some more historical context, you know, like Nixon never even considered using this act.
Um, and you would argue like what he was seeing outside his window from the White House was infinitely worse than anything we had really seen.
Uh probably I mean, I think what we ended up seeing when he wanted uh protesters shot in uh you know in the in the legs and they were using uh tear gas in the park, Lafayette Park, whatever.
Maybe that's what was close to what Nixon had seen every day, right?
Or like every week.
So if he's not if Nixon's I'm gonna get close to calling the insurrection act, then I mean, I don't know where we are now, but this is this is the kind of 25th amendment kind of shit that they need to involve.
I mean, everything you just said is so true.
Because on one hand, this is literally an and it's been a theme of a lot of the conversations we've been having lately, particularly with these invasions of American cities.
It's a violent paranoid fantasy.
It has no relationship whatsoever to uh what's actually happening.
And and you know, that there's to give it context also, Nick, the the video you you talked about, like with like the dinosaur and the frog, like they're shooting them with less than lethal ammunition at this point.
You're seeing these videos that are coming out of like people protesting and like getting shot in the face.
They're not attacking anybody.
Priests, priests, which by the way, happened.
It didn't just happen, but now it's being circulated as if it happened, right?
So a lot of what's happening in social media and things being out of context, what you said about Trump is exactly right.
You have a mad tyrant who has gotten confused.
We'll talk more about that in just a second, who is living in this alternative reality.
But the issue here, Nick, is that none of these tools should Be at this person's disposal.
These tools should not be at a president's disposal at all.
Do I think that they're going to invoke it?
I mean, why wouldn't they?
Right.
There, there's not going to be any actual pushback outside of like small D Democratic populist pushback.
They don't care about that.
So it's a tool that they're capable of using.
They're using every tool that they possibly can.
Do I think they will?
I think it's likely that they will.
But like let's say that we get lucky and they don't actually invoke the insurrection act, Nick.
Shouldn't this be another moment where we look at all of this and we say presidents should not have all this power?
And the two party system that is supposed to restrain them, this supposed tension between the different branches of government.
This doesn't work.
And eventually, like down the line, as conditions deteriorate, you should not be able to have a situation where this could take place.
This is the exact I mean, if it were to happen, would it be out of character?
Absolutely.
Would it be disturbing?
Yes.
But it's another instance in a long line of like a president being able to declare war without the approval of Congress.
Like it's one of these things after another that tell us in the future, when we're past this thing, we gotta change some shit.
We gotta say, no, this should not be available and this should not be able to be invoked.
Pure I've got even more context.
I was just thinking about this because we don't have to think back very long to a time when Dick Cheney was the vice president of the uh United States, and he would we know that he would lament over the lack of power that the president really had.
Now, has anything fundamentally changed in terms of the way the government is run and the powers that the president has between then and now?
I mean the Unitarian executive theory, which is what Cheney and the neocons around him wanted, they sort of forced it into being.
Right, but but they changed the paradigm.
Right.
The way the legal and the laws have been intertwined, like there really isn't a fundamental difference between then and now.
So imagine Well, I will say the Supreme Court has said that the president can break any law whatsoever if he doesn't in official capacity.
That that that has changed.
And by the way, and that would probably be the argument for what's driving a lot of this, I guess.
And they're all gonna uh try and uh ride in the coattails of Trump saying, Well, he's immune, so I he's telling me what to do, I gotta do what he tells me to do.
So I'm immune.
Um, but other than that, it's almost like you know, they did they could have done the same thing, right?
Now I know that the in in the reality of that would have been okay, supreme court would have pushed back and there would have been some guardrails, I suppose.
But um, if you have somebody like Dick Cheney complaining about Nanana power, and you're and you realize that it's that Trump is actually doing what you know what probably he would have had.
Now you know it's a scary situation.
No, it is, and and you know, for more context, Nick.
In that time period where Dick Cheney and the neocons were pushing for unitarian executive theory.
Did it just happen, or was it a bipartisan push by the Republicans and Democrats that gave the president more power?
I mean, are you talking about 9/11 kind of that?
After 9-11, yes, it was bipartisan.
Suppose they they were so afraid to say anything about anything security-wise that yeah, they were willing to do it.
They were just like, go ahead and run with it.
And and and by the way, something you just said, and Nick, this is one of the reasons I love that we have these conversations.
You just put something into perspective that is really fucking wild.
Like, I studied this stuff, I study the history of it, and I I didn't until you said that, it didn't come into focus for me.
There's a thing called the Fuhrer Principle, and I unfortunately I had to read a lot of Carl Schmidt.
And for people who don't know, Carl Schmidt is a Nazi jurist, one of the main like sort of ideologues that made it possible for you know the uh the dictatorship take place in Nazi Germany, and by the way, a huge influence on everybody from Curtis Yaravan to Peter Thiel.
And you know what Schmidt basically argued, Nick?
He argued in the Fuhrer principle that the Fuhrer, as the embodiment of Germany, right?
That he personally decided on a case by case basis, what was legal and wasn't legal, right?
Like it was all just based on what he felt in any given time.
And what you just laid out, you're exactly right, but I haven't thought about it in this capacity, which is if the president does something, it's not illegal.
Then if the president orders somebody to do something illegal, then ipso facto, it's not illegal.
Which is the entirety of administrative evil, right?
Which is I was following orders.
And so what you just brought up, it really has come to pass.
You know, the the Supreme Court ruled that way.
And in the, you know, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party have both bipartisanly given more power to the president.
We have created the foundation of a Fuhrer principle at this point.
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