You’re hearing a preview of the Weekender. Get the full episode, bonus shows, and access to our community by subscribing here: http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast.
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman dig into Trump’s latest authoritarian talk, from musing about skipping elections to floating Insurrection Act crackdowns. They break down reports of ICE ramp-ups in places like Maine, the expanding surveillance network tied to it, and why Democratic leaders keep blinking. Then it’s the Greenland talk, NATO fallout, and why chaos, outages, and “testing the fence” all feel like the point. They close with what they’re reading and watching, and a frank check-in on how to keep your bearings when the news cycle is a blender.
Welcome to the weekender edition of the Mutt Craig Podcast.
Jerry G.H. Sexton, I'm here with my friend Nick.
Nick, how you feeling?
Looking at the weekend, gazing into the future.
You got some rest, some relaxation, some fun.
Yeah, I've been off caffeine for a few days, sleeping better than ever, and I recommend it for everybody as you chug a Red Bull, I believe that is.
Yeah, you need it at the end of a week like this.
I hear you.
But I won't tell anybody what the weather will be like.
So they'll have to just sort of pretend that they don't know.
But it's going to be an enjoyable weekend.
All right.
Good for you.
I've got stuff on my plate that I'm not particularly looking forward to, but that is how this works, right?
Not every weekend is a winner.
Yes.
Some weekends are just sitting and stew.
I would love to sit and stew right now.
That would be fantastic.
Sit and stew would be fantastic.
Okay.
Count me in.
Count me in.
Let me sit and stew.
Sit and stew.
Sit in stew is very versus sit and stew.
I would sit in stew.
I would sit and stew whatever you got.
It all sounds great.
Well, what else you got?
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And Nick, we have way too much as always to talk about on a weekender.
We start with our lovely president of the United States of America, the man who is now just regularly falling asleep and wandering off in the middle of a press conference to look out a window.
The good news here is that the president of the United States of America, Donald Trump, has said that he is more than willing, unless Minneapolis calms down to use the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to take on the quote professional agitators and corrupt politicians and protect the patriots of ICE, and that he would, quote, quickly put an end to the travesty.
To go ahead and put a little bit of whipped cream on the top of that Sunday, Nick, in an interview with Reuters, the president was ruminating over how good his administration is and said, you know, usually whenever we have midterms, the president just won, he loses the midterms.
But they've been doing such a good job, quote, when you think of it, we shouldn't even have an election.
This is great.
All the way around, possibility of more dictatorial escalation.
How are you feeling?
I mean, you're talking about a Sunday.
Like, what flavor Sunday would that even be?
That is arsenic is what that is.
Okay, I would say turd, but either way, yeah, it's this is I'm not surprised, right?
This is what they've been saying all along about, you know, what they want to do with the Insurrection Act and how that ties into canceling elections, right?
This has been the whole thing.
They realize the writing on the wall.
There isn't any way I can see that they would be able to win any kind of midterm and control the house, at least the house, right?
Even if it was like, you know, historically what would happen anyway, we can't use that in these times.
But I think that this is what they're turning to.
And perhaps they were going to kind of time this to and coincide with perhaps a third term for Trump in 2028.
But I think that, yeah, they're turning their sights on the midterms now to try and maintain power.
So there's a bunch of things to go over here.
And we'll get to the Insurrection Act here in just a second.
By the way, here is Carolyn Levitt saying that, oh, Trump didn't even mean what he said.
My question is, President Trump has talked twice in recent days, once at the Kennedy Center and then to Reuters again last night about canceling the election.
Why is he talking about this?
I believe you're referring to the president's interview at Reuters last night.
I was in that interview.
It was a closed door interview.
Obviously, there was not audio or video.
The president was simply joking.
He was saying, we're doing such a great job.
We're doing everything the American people thought.
Maybe we should just keep rolling.
But he was speaking facetiously.
Maybe we should just keep rolling.
And, you know, Nick, it's one of those things where I've said often people keep asking me about the midterms.
Do I think the Democratic Party is going to do this?
Do I think they're going to win?
And I tell everybody, do not take for granted that these things are going to happen or that they will be free and fair or, you know, that they will seat everybody.
Like you can't even think about that.
I want to point out, it's not like this Congress is getting anything done for Donald Trump.
They did the big, beautiful bill, but otherwise it's been, you know, by fiat, by executive order, one after another.
The Democratic Party is presently constituted.
They can't even get up for like somebody being murdered in cold blood in front of the entire world.
They can't.
Matter of fact, let's roll this back, Nick.
They can't even get up for their own members being arrested and thrown around and being targeted and having law fair going after them.
They can't get up for their own constituents being thrown into concentration camps and shipped around the world.
Like there's nothing about this party that tells me that they would actually be an opposition party, even if they had control over the House and the Senate.
Right?
I mean, listen, it was promising for a second when they thought we had an act that would prevent him from going into Venezuela and controlling the country.
And guess what?
Two Republican senators out of the blue suddenly decided, I talked to the president.
He said, I'm not going to do that.
And that's enough for them.
Honestly, I think they sat down with the president and he showed them the pictures that he has.
Well, and the whole point is, it's just the fascistic dictatorial mindset.
They do not want to have elections.
And for some of them, you know, if you go into like Vladimir Putin's Russia, which is what a lot of this dictatorship is being patterned after, it's not like Putin is worried that the opposition party is going to give him a hard time.
He doesn't want to be embarrassed.
He doesn't want for the numbers to come in and reflect poorly on him.
So if they can get rid of elections, they're going to get rid of elections.
And I'm begging everybody, stop pretending like any of these guardrails still exist and stop expecting normality.
We're in a completely different time at this point.
Listen to what the motherfucker says.
He means it when he says he doesn't want elections.
And it's not like he doesn't have every institute and every think tank behind him trying to figure out how to keep from having elections.
Right.
It's not something that he continually talks about simply off the top of his head.
That's not how this works.
We also, you know, don't think he's going to make it to another election anyway, right?
Well, I don't know where he's at.
I know that he doesn't look well.
I don't know if he's going to make it to an election or not.
I don't have a clue, but he looks like shit.
He does.
And he's, you know, exhibiting all the signs of whatever you want to say that has happened to him, if it's a stroke or something anyway.
So, but, you know, this guy just seems to whatever, you know, contract he signed with whichever, whatever you want to call the guy with the red horns.
I don't know how he did it, but at the very least, he hangs on and he's poisoning this every day.
And I suppose every day that goes farther with these things being destroyed in our infrastructure of our government is a year worth of waiting to get it back, maybe after he's gone and somebody else comes in that maybe is a little bit more of a true patriot.
If you can get any of it back, I mean, like in order to get past this, there's going to have to be some sort of a major change, but I don't see anything right now that shows that that's going to happen.
People can't even take it seriously that the man says he doesn't want to have an election.
And Nick, this isn't the first time he said this.
This has been consistent.
And what's more, we're not going to have a major change.
And right now, you got Tim Waltz and every other Democrat who's like, well, we really need to, you know, take it easy in Minneapolis.
We're going to give him a reason to call out the Insurrection Act.
Nick, I don't know how to tell everybody this, but he's going to end up doing it in some way, shape, or form.
Like he's already the, the plan's already out there for them to go back into Los Angeles, the plans for them to go back into Chicago.
It's to go into all of these major cities and do this thing, like what we have been given here.
I've said this before in the past, what we've been given here is a gift.
Every time that Donald Trump runs his mouth and tells you what it is that he wants to do, you are being given a head start.
You know what's coming, you know what to prepare for and you need to take immediate action.
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