I'm reading to you from a columnist of the New York Times describing what the second term of a Trump presidency would be, that the main targets would be American democracy and American constitutional order.
To hear a leftist speak of the constitutional order is precious.
That's the best adjective I can come up with.
So he will do it to protect himself and enrich himself and extend his personalized rule as far over the country as possible.
I'll tell you what really frightens them.
He will attack the deep state.
We have a corrupt government.
I have never said this.
I've been broadcasting 40 years.
One of the great sources of pride in my country that I have had is the relative lack of corruption.
But the last years have made it clear to me that the FBI and CIA, the whole intelligence community, the entire medical establishment, they're corrupt.
They lie and they're corrupt.
They're corrupt and they lie.
This is very, very sad for me to tell you.
I trust nothing that comes about any, any...
Controversial issue, obviously.
I mean, if the CDC says vitamin D is good for you, I don't reject it out of hand.
But I don't believe it automatically either.
Not if a big pharma can make money from it.
The American Medical Association, as I've told you so often, has announced that the sex of a child should not be listed on its birth certificate because we don't know if it's a boy or a girl.
Until that creature, that human being decides whether he or she is a boy, girl, or they.
The woman who wrote, you sent me a column by a woman.
Judith Butler.
Judith Butler.
So she, do you know?
She's a major figure, I know.
So I looked her up.
I always do this.
I want to know who I'm reading.
She goes as they.
Did you know that?
I'm not surprised.
Yes, her preferred pronoun is they.
Yeah, okay.
In practice, one of the things this would mean is that Trump would be empowered to use the Department of Justice to investigate his political enemies.
I wrote, was it my last column?
Yeah, I think it was my last column.
That the gulf between left and right is unbridgeable?
This is a perfect example.
Wait a minute.
Who is using the Department of Justice to investigate political enemies?
It's you.
It's your team.
It's the Democrats.
We have political prisoners for the first time in American history.
It's your Department of Justice.
Trump didn't do that.
When he was in office?
Or use the Internal Revenue Service to harass them?
Who?
Remember?
The IRS was used.
It was under Obama.
It goes that far back with the Tea Party.
Remember?
But a second Trump term wouldn't just be about the abuse of power, the erosion of checks and balances, and the elevation of assorted hacks and apparatchiks into positions of real authority.
It would also be about the concerted effort to make the federal government a vehicle for the upward distribution of wealth.
That's it.
If taxes are lowered on the rich, it's in order to make the rich richer.
Why would Trump care about that?
Why would anybody care about that?
Think Bezos cares what the tax rate is?
Think Gates cares what the tax rate is?
A hundred million dollars for Bezos could be removed from his bank account and he wouldn't know it.
Thank you.
His advisor, his financial advisor would have to tell him.
We should also expect a second Trump administration to resume the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
Somebody's lying, either the left is or the right is, about the Affordable Care Act.
You've got to admit, even the left would agree with that statement.
Either it's been terrific for most of its beneficiaries, or it's been awful for most of its beneficiaries.
If beneficiary is correct with the use of the term awful.
As well as to unravel much of the climate spending in the Inflation Reduction Act is possible.
Well, that's true.
Trump would do that, and that is reason alone to vote for him.
Biden wants something very different for the country.
His first goal to start...
Is to preserve and defend the American constitutional order.
Didn't the Supreme Court just tell him that he could not undo, he could not forgive student loans?
And didn't he say screw the Supreme Court?
Not in those words, obviously.
He preserves the constitutional order?
This is why there is so little hope in the country.
Well, there's so little hope for any bridging of the gap between left and right.
it.
Everything they believe, we believe the opposite.
And one of us is lying to ourselves as well as to others.
Are the Democrats or the Republicans the greater threat to the constitutional order?
Adam Schiff is running for Senate and he wants to pack the Supreme Court.
All those years that liberals and leftists ran the Supreme Court, did the Republicans, when they had the presidency, the two Bushes, and Trump, did they advocate packing the Supreme Court?
How did they live?
I was going to say, how do they live in such a make-believe world?
But that's the world of men menstruate.
I never believe people are basically good.
I know that life consists of battling your nature.
I was taught that in my yeshiva, my religious Jewish school, as a child, and it stayed with me all of my life.
But I never knew, I never...
He realized the ease with which people could lie to themselves on a mass basis.
Jamel Bowie, he personifies this.
He would not subvert American democracy to make himself a strong man.
That's exactly what he has done.
A group of prominent authors announced that they have withdrawn from this year's Penn World Voices Festival.
What does Penn stand for something?
I mean, it's the International Writers Network.
Over what they described as Penn America's inadequate response to the war and humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
This is from the New York Times.
In an open letter dated Wednesday, last Wednesday, that has drawn more than a dozen signatures.
By the way, that's pretty significant.
Why is that a lot of people?
Why is it worth noting?
A dozen signatures?
Don't they have a lot of members?
Anyway.
The Free Speech Organization hosting the event to do more to address civilian casualties and the deaths of journalists and writers in Gaza.
Authors who protested the Free Speech Organization's response to the war include Isabella Hamad, Michelle Alexander, Naomi Klein, Susan Mouad-Darajd, Hisham Matar, and Maza Mengisti.
Notice the predominance of women?
Yes, this is a big deal in the time in which we live.