Jerry Sexton warns Trump-aligned groups are drafting an executive order falsely accusing China of stealing the 2020 election to justify emergency powers—restricting voting machines and mail-in ballots ahead of midterms. Despite no DOJ or FBI evidence of Chinese interference, Trump’s history of weaponizing temporary emergency measures (Venezuela killings, tariffs) and DOJ corruption (e.g., Kash Patel’s alleged false Epstein testimony) signals a successful authoritarian playbook. Democrats’ weak response mirrors the Globetrotters vs. Generals mismatch, leaving democracy vulnerable unless mass protest and legal reforms dismantle these unchecked executive tools. [Automatically generated summary]
Welcome to the weekender edition of the Mutt Craig podcast.
I'm Jerry Jade Sexton.
Nick Houseman is with me.
Nick, this is one of those episodes where we put together the episode and then things just kept happening to the point where this is like a triple, quadruple stuffed Oreo weekender edition.
Yeah.
I mean, a puzzle isn't the right kind of description for this.
It's got too many pieces to figure out how to connect.
It's there's so much going on.
We had to completely reorder everything because, oh, by the way, head over to patreon.com slash my craigpodcast.
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Nick, right before we started recording a blockbuster report coming out of the Washington Post, that groups who are working in tandem with the Trump administration are working to craft an executive order to declare the 2020 election stolen by China, which would then allow Trump to enact emergency powers to control elections using the presidency.
It sounds like what he would be able to do at this point would outlaw voting machines, mail-in ballots.
This is the kind of thing we've been talking about this for a while.
We've expected the move to happen.
We've seen some traces and some shadows of it, but to have it laid out like this is certainly something.
Well, I had a moment of clarity, Jared.
And here's what it is.
The constant referencing of 2020 isn't an ego thing where he can't handle that he lost.
And he's stuck in dwelling on that.
I think this has always been the predicate to taking over the future elections.
And they must continue to hammer that.
And that's why they keep going back to it.
And they're going to, all I need is the announcement of an investigation.
All I need is Tulsi Gabber to show up in Georgia and make it look like there's something there.
And then that will be the predicate for doing all these things that they're reporting about.
So that makes more sense than anything else to me.
And that's why they want to hammer this.
And this is what we've been wondering what they're going to do to make the midterms not free and fair.
And I don't know.
You're going to have to be, we have to figure out how to stop this because, you know, I suspect that one way to do it is that you can once and for all sort of prove that whatever they're using about China or anywhere, any other country and foreign actors is simply false.
And we know this is false, but we can continue to make that clear.
So I think to start, I think it was an ego thing.
Like even going back to 2016, Donald Trump was saying that if he lost the election, the only way is if it would have been stolen.
I think it gets cooked up in his mind like that, which is the interesting way that authoritarianism works, which is you sort of have this idea and then it sort of germinates and it builds momentum and it builds power and sway.
And eventually, because all of the Republican Party believes or has to believe as, you know, as a shibboleth, they have to believe that this election was stolen.
All of a sudden, it starts turning gears, which include like all of these think tanks and institutes that again are burning the midnight oil trying to figure out how to destroy democracy in general.
They're like, well, I mean, if 2020 was actually stolen by a foreign power, then we might be able to invoke these emergency powers, right?
So I think the way that that sort of goes back and forth, it's actually incredible how the authoritarian imagination works.
It's almost like improv, only the improv becomes the ideology and the mechanics of the way that you're able to do this.
Because no one wakes up in the morning and is like, I want to steal an election because I'm evil.
They wake up and they're like, I need to save the country and save democracy.
Therefore, I will support this.
Right.
And I think that in that twisted sort of alchemy and Trump's brain is where this stuff gets cooked up.
Now, on to the next part of this, you know, Nick, it's my job to say it.
This is why you do not give the president of the United States of America all of these emergency powers, all of these executive actions.
Like this honestly is just blowback after years and decades of people advocating their responsibilities to hold the executive branch in check and just being like, ah, don't worry, nobody's ever going to misuse this.
Now you see why it arrives at this point.
Because at some point, you're going to have a Donald Trump who doesn't believe in democracy in general and has no problem whatsoever overtaking elections, which is why people like you and me and a few others that we actually trust in this fucking mess have been saying, if they can steal the election, they're going to steal the election.
And meanwhile, every mainstream person is like, you're giving Trump way too much power.
No, we're not giving him too much power.
The presidency has been given too much power and the Democrats have given him too much power.
The media has given him too much power.
And now you arrive at the logical extension of this.
And what you just said about whether or not he can do this and we have to stop it, the answer is there's nothing that can get passed right now.
Nothing.
There's nothing that can get passed before the November election.
There's not even a conversation to be had.
There's not even a debate to be had.
So that leaves it on us.
And this is why I keep telling people when I'm in organizing meetings, you have to be ready to get into the streets.
If they steal the election, if they do something like this executive action, you have to be ready for mass protest.
And if they can do it, they will do it.
And you as a person and you and your community need to be ready to be in the streets if they go ahead and pull the trigger on this.
Absolutely.
And there's, by the way, there's so much to talk about in what you just said.
The SAVE Act, that is one thing that they can do in a nefarious way to pass these laws and make it even harder on people who are women who are married to change their name, all sorts of things like that.
But, you know, you were talking about the subtext of authoritarian who would say, you know, they look at it.
You know, he's lied to himself so much.
It's like, I just have to save the country.
That's what I, that's what he wakes up saying.
But then there's got to be sub subtexts to that, which is for him, I must stay in power to stay out of prison.
You know, and that's what's so scary about all of this.
You know, the underlying motivation is either staying out of prison or bilking the country and ripping them off for more and more billions of dollars as he can, as many as he can.
And so, you know, all of the ways he's triggering these things is through emergency powers, right?
That have been granted and been passed through Congress because, you know, no one would ever really dare use them.
And in a typical scene in the White House, you know, that would be the thing wringing their hands while they're deciding, well, we can't invoke that.
That's supposed to be for a very specific thing.
And meanwhile, that's all he's been doing is using emergency powers to do all these things in terms of killing people extra judicially off of the coast of Venezuela.
Tariffs are all this way.
All this weird, supposedly temporary powers that are in times of emergency that don't exist that he's using.
And in this as well.
So it's really, really troubling.
We have to fix this.
We have to fix somehow some of these laws.
And again, you can't fix it before the election, but something about the way they're written and the way they've been structured to allow emergency powers for a president need to go away right away.
Needs to go away post-haste.
It never should put there in the first place.
And quite frankly, like, what are we hearing in any way, shape or form pushing back against this shit?
Have we heard any strategy against it?
Have we heard at all?
And by the way, I'm pretty plugged in to what you would refer to as the neoliberal NGO sector.
They're not working on this shit.
They're more focused.
There's more money.
There's more energy.
There's more time and labor being put towards deregulating and creating neo-Reaganism with the abundance folks.
There's way more money on that side of the aisle.
There's nothing in place right now where people are really going head to head.
If there is, I haven't heard about it and I haven't seen it.
And quite frankly, if the Democratic Party gave a shit about it, and we'll talk later about maybe why they don't give a shit about it, if they gave a shit about it, like right now, wouldn't they be howling at every microphone in Washington, D.C. right now?
Or if they're at home telling their local media or putting out videos or holding press conferences?
They're not, it's again, it's like watching the Harlem Globetrotters play the Washington Generals.
If this is true, and I don't see any reason why the Washington Post would print it because this isn't the business they're in.
They're certainly not a liberal rag.
Like, why in the world is nothing being done about this?
And you and I, who are on a podcast, are having to tell people about it and having to say, hey, here are the steps that you have to take to try and prevent this thing.
Like, why are we left on our own out in the cold here?
I have no idea.
You know, I mean, they're just bad at it, I guess.
And they're worried about how it'll appear and what they're polling, whatever all that bullshit is.
And it's like, you would look a lot better if you'd just come out and be much, much more forceful with your stance on this stuff.
I was also curious because the notion of what they're reporting in terms of what the executive powers are going to be rooted in is the China interference, right?
That's what they're focusing on is China.
And, you know, there's a reference to what they had discovered through the intelligence community from the 2020 election.
And guess what?
There really wasn't anything in there that they did other than the typical stuff about research that they could use to predict who's going to win in 2020.
But there really wasn't, and they analysis too, there really wasn't any huge benefit from Biden winning versus Trump.
You know what I mean?
Like they didn't necessarily see a huge difference either way in terms of how they're interacting with the United States.
So there really, there's no evidence at all from the intelligence community that shows that they had any kind of material influence or interference with the election.
So there's no way that they could then use this as the predicate to, you know, affecting the election from a federal, a local election from the federal level.
And they're going to do it because we have an unprecedented amount of corruption and control of the of the Department of Justice.
Department Justice Corruption00:00:47
You know, we've never seen this before across FBI and DOJ.
And, you know, even during Nixon's time, right, it took, I don't know, he had to fire, what, three people in the Department of Justice before Cox was fired, before Robert Bork decided to do it.
And then certainly the GOP forced Nixon to resign.
Like there's nobody like that anymore.
We have no guardrails at all.
And you have Kash Patel who goes in front of Congress and lies repeatedly about what was in the Epstein files.
And there's simply no oversight at all to this.
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